The First American Civil War Ended on This Day

Contemporary conventional wisdom almost always reduces history to the least common denominator, and binary views always erase critical context.

In an earlier post today on Facebook, I mentioned the Civil War ended 157 years ago today, on June 2, 1865 and it spurred another discussion of why there was a war in the first place.

Of course, it is conventional wisdom that the North and Lincoln are cast as avenging angels, while the South and Jefferson Davis are cast as Satan incarnate.

But those two views of a complicated situation are simplistic.

People are unaware of the existence of the Congressionally funded American Cocolonization Society (1816 to 1964) which prompted and paid for blacks to be relocated to Liberia or the "Back to Africa" movement spearheaded by Marcus Garvey, a prominent black businessman and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

People are generally unaware of what Abraham Lincoln wrote to Horace Greeley in August of 1862:

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the union without freeing any slaves I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."

Pardon the pun, but viewed in context, the issues leading up to the Civil War were not completely black and white.

It reminded me of something I added to the discussion back in 2015 (all quotes are from the linked History dot com article):

How many of your history teachers taught you about the Great Emancipator’s plan to ship the freed slaves off to colonies in Africa?

Very few, I would assume. None of mine did.

Colonization was a popular answer to the issue of what to do with freed slaves.

l know that some people in the GOP tout that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, and he was, but he did not believe that freed slaves could coexist with whites:

“Nearly a decade later, even as he edited the draft of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in August of 1862, Lincoln hosted a delegation of freed slaves at the White House in the hopes of getting their support on a plan for colonization in Central America. Given the “differences” between the two races and the hostile attitudes of whites towards blacks, Lincoln argued, it would be “better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”

As I stated, few people know that the Great Emancipator, President Abraham Lincoln was also the Great Colonizer:

“On that same day, December 31, 1862, Lincoln connected his name to a document that many of his adherents and later apologists would gladly forget: a contract with Bernard Kock, an ambitious and unscrupulous venturer, to use federal funds to remove some five thousand black men, women, and children from the United States to a small island off the coast of Haiti. It was Lincoln’s last effort at colonizing blacks outside the United States, executed only one day before he was to sign a proclamation putting into effect his first official effort at permanently freeing slaves in the country.”

Historians have deduced that Lincoln was ever the pragmatic politician:

“An examination of Lincoln’s efforts, and not just his rhetoric, in favor of colonizing blacks outside the United States suggests that Lincoln was as much motivated by political concerns as by his personal views toward blacks. His strategy was to propose colonization to sweeten the pill of emancipation for conservatives from the North and the border states, the slave states that did not secede during the Civil War; at the same time, he used political manipulation to prevent radicals from thwarting the colonization program and thus jeopardizing his ultimate goal of making emancipation an acceptable war aim to the Union cause. Lincoln, always a careful politician, admitted nothing of political motives behind his advocacy of colonization, so we are left only with his actions and the opinions of his contemporaries to lend insight into his true intentions. Yet even with such limited evidence, a clear picture emerges of Lincoln using the prospect of black colonization to make emancipation more acceptable to conservatives and then abandoning all efforts at colonization once he made the determined step toward emancipation in the Final Emancipation Proclamation.”

I don’t write this to demean Lincoln, only to illustrate to the hysterical, shrieking, banshees who are out for blood that even their heroes have a complicated backstory.