this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
1751 points (97.5% liked)

Confidently Incorrect

4040 readers
1 users here now

When people are way too smug about their wrong answer.

Posting guidelines.

All posts in this community have come from elsewhere, it is not original content, the poster in this community is not OP. The person who posts in this community isn’t necessarily endorsing whatever the post is talking about and they are not looking to argue with you about the content in the post.

You are welcome to discuss and debate any topic but arguments are not welcome here. I consider debate/discussions to be civil; people with different opinions participating in respectful conversations. It becomes an argument as soon as someone becomes aggressive, nasty, insulting or just plain unpleasant. Report argumentative comments, then ignore them.

There is currently no rule about how recent a post needs to be because the community is about the comeback part, not the topic.

Rules:

• Be civil and remember the human.

• No trolling, insults or name calling. Swearing in general is fine, but not to insult someone.

• No bigotry of any kind, including homophobia, transphobia, sexism and racism.

• You are welcome to discuss and debate any topic but arguments are not welcome here. I consider debate/discussions to be civil; people with different opinions participating in respectful conversations. It becomes an argument as soon as someone becomes aggressive, nasty, insulting or just plain unpleasant. Report argumentative comments, then ignore them.

• Try not to get too political. A lot of these posts will involve politics, but this isn’t the place for political arguments.

• Participate in good faith - don’t be aggressive and don’t argue for arguements sake.

• Mark NSFW posts if they contain nudity.

• Satire is allowed but please start the post title with [satire] so other users can filter it out if they’d like.

Please report comments that break site or community rules to the mods. If you break the rules you’ll receive one warning before being banned from this community.

This community follows the rules of the lemmy.world instance and the lemmy.org code of conduct. I’ve summarised them here:

  1. Be civil, remember the human.
  2. No insulting or harassing other members. That includes name calling.
  3. Respect differences of opinion. Civil discussion/debate is fine, arguing is not. Criticise ideas, not people.
  4. Keep unrequested/unstructured critique to a minimum.
  5. Remember we have all chosen to be here voluntarily. Respect the spent time and effort people have spent creating posts in order to share something they find amusing with you.
  6. Swearing in general is fine, swearing to insult another commenter isn’t.
  7. No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia or any other type of bigotry.
  8. No incitement of violence or promotion of violent ideologies.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] paddirn 7 points 1 year ago

He was definitely against slavery and that quote was in response to somebody else who had called him out for not freeing the slaves right away (https://www.loc.gov/resource/mal.4233400/?st=text). He actually wrote that line having already written up a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation, so he knew he was going to be freeing the slaves when he wrote that.

I'm not a historian, but I think he may have been trying to obfuscate what he was doing, like he didn't want to come right out and say that's what he was doing. I think if at the time people in the North thought that the war was being fought over slavery and only slavery, they maybe wouldn't have supported it and maybe would have wanted the North to back down. Even if Northerners didn't use slavery themselves, it's not like there wasn't still racism all over, they wouldn't have been as willing to sacrifice their sons to free black slaves. Again, not a historian, but that's what I'm assuming was why he penned that.