O mito de Lincoln

Henrique Raposo há muito que defende uma figura que não existe. Responsável por uma guerra para impedir a secessão dos Estados do Sul decidida pelos seus orgãos legislativos e que provocou cerca de 600 000 mortos (seria proporcionalmente equivalente a cerca de 3 a 4 milhões hoje) usando a escravatura como boa desculpa, e depois de ter sido imposta uma tarifa até 70% nas importações e que prejudicava especialmente o Sul agrícola que quase tudo o resto importava (da Europa) e era assim a forma de beneficiar o Norte mais industrial. Aqui deixou de ser a "A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny" com diria Pat Buchanan. Foi o seu momento Rubicão. De resto tinha sido antecipada pelos anti-federalistas.

Lincoln por ele próprio:

 * July 17, 1858: “What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races.”

 * Aug. 21, 1858:”I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races (…) I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.” And, “Free them [slaves] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this. We cannot, then, make them equals.”

 * Sept. 18, 1858:”I will to the very last stand by the law of this state, which forbids the marrying of white people with Negroes.”

 * In his First Inaugural Lincoln promised to invade any state that failed to collect “the duties and imposts,” and he kept his promise.

 * April 19, 1861: the reason Lincoln gave for his naval blockade of the Southern ports was that “the collection of the revenue cannot be effectually executed” in the states that had seceded.

 * Congress, July 22, 1861: that the purpose of the war was not “interfering with the rights or established institutions of those states” (i.e., slavery), but to preserve the Union “with the rights of the several states unimpaired.”

 * Aug. 22, 1862: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it”

Fonte: Let's put myths to rest

(via Wikipedia) Charles Dickens: "used his magazine, All the Year Round, to attack the new tariff. On December 28, 1861 Dickens published a lengthy article, believed to be written by Henry Morley,^[15] which blamed the American Civil War on the Morrill Tariff:

If it be not slavery, where lies the partition of the interests that has led at last to actual separation of the Southern from the Northern States? …Every year, for some years back, this or that Southern state had declared that it would submit to this extortion only while it had not the strength for resistance. With the election of Lincoln and an exclusive Northern party taking over the federal government, the time for withdrawal had arrived … The conflict is between semi-independent communities [in which] every feeling and interest [in the South] calls for political partition, and every pocket interest [in the North] calls for union … So the case stands, and under all the passion of the parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this, as of many other evils... [T]he quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel."