Let's get one thing straight

I was happy as anyone to see Mr. Obama become president, however, the political cartoons that depict Abraham Lincoln as being happy about it are bogus.

Lincoln didn't believe Blacks and Whites were equal. He didn't think Blacks should be enslaved and treated badly as they were (he was a sympathetic man) but, believing there was no way a freed Black race could live within the White man's society, he was seeking to send Blacks somewhere. To Liberia, possibly Central America.

Frederick Douglass baulked at the idea of leaving America. Of Lincoln, Douglass said:

Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.

He was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country. In all his education and feeling he was an American of the Americans. He came into the Presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery. His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race. To protect, defend, and perpetuate slavery in the states where it existed Abraham Lincoln was not less ready than any other President to draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all the supposed guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states. He was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the Government. The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration. Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow-citizens, a pre-eminence in this worship at once full and supreme. First, midst, and last, you and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.


So Mr. Lincoln would not be saying "Yes!" and doing that hand gesture of success as one cartoon depicted. If anything, on January 20, 2009, he would more likely be rolling over in his grave.