All Men are Created Equal

This nation was founded on the premise that ” All men are created equal”, but in the mid nineteenth century the United States was the largest slave holding country in the world. It was a fact that embarrassed the founding fathers and Americans that liked to boast of their republic as a “beacon of hope.”Slavery began to disappear from the northern states but slave owners grew more prosperous south of the Mason Dixon line. With slaves laboring on the southern plantation and filling their master’s coffers, slaves were too valuable to be expendable. In 1854 Lincoln said, “The monstrous injustice of slavery deprives our republican example of it’s just influence in the world-enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.”

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The lock on the government by slave owners and sympathizers were broken by Lincoln’s election in 1960. He won on the pledge to allow no expansion of slavery. He thought this restriction would start slavery on a down hill spiral to destruction. The southern owners of slaves thought otherwise. They decided to pull away from the Union and declare the south a separate country. When Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter after Lincoln’s inauguration, they set in motion the Civil War which ended four years later at great loss of life on the Union and Confederate side. The Confederacy and slavery were now extinct. The Union originally did not set out to abolish slavery in the south. Their aim was to restore the slave states to the Union.

16 months into the war Lincoln said,”My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is neither to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save the Union by freeing all the slaves, I would do it.” The purpose of saying this was to prepare public opinion for the emancipation he had already decided to issue. To make good on this the Union would have to win the war.

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In 1863, Lincoln declared a provision for recruiting freed slaves into the armed forces. They fought for the Union and freedom. At the end of the war, President Lincoln said, “without these men we could no longer have maintained the contest. Their contribution was essential to victory.” It was for the United States to look to the future but on April 14, 1865 President Abraham Lincoln and his wife were at the theatre watching the play, Our American Cousin, when John Wilkes Booth walked up behind him and shot the president dead.

http://socyberty.com/history/rosa-parks-legacy/

http://socyberty.com/history/the-my-lai-massacre/

http://socyberty.com/history/henry-ford-and-the-model-t/