Is “Being Offended” Over Confederate Symbols the New National Pastime?

by Al Benson Jr.

As my wife and I pulled into the parking lot of the grocery store where we do our shopping this morning I noticed a pickup truck parked in the lot with a Confederate Naval Jack on a pole, stuck in the back of the truck.  The flag had a yellow smiley face on it, and around the smiley face was written: “If this flag offends you then you have made my day.”

While I probably would not have said it quite that way, I can understand the sentiment of the flag owner. I might have said “If this flag offends you then you need a history lesson” or something to that effect, which would have been a true statement. As a Christian, I don’t intentionally set out to “offend” anyone, but I will, to the best of my ability, seek to tell the truth and if that offends someone, then that’s just the way it is. Speaking the truth in love still offends those who don’t want the truth or who don’t want others to have it.

I have watched this past couple weeks (not with wonder anymore; I’m long past that) as the “news” media, the politicians, and various other liars on the left have continued their unremitting purge of anything Southern or Confederate. They remain unabated in their endeavors at ethnic cleansing in the South, and quite frankly, they don’t give a tinker’s damn about who they “offend” in the South. Yet we in the South are supposed to weep and wail because we have “offended” them with our flags and symbols and because we refuse to cave in to their hackneyed rhetoric over what the War of Northern Aggression was really all about. They howl that it was about slavery and treason on the part of the South and they become easily “offended” when we won’t believe such drivel.

Our newly virtuous Congress (the Lord reward them according to their works) has now voted to ban Confederate flags at historical federal cemeteries in the South. According to a news article on http://www.al.com  “The low profile move came Tuesday evening after a brief debate on a measure funding the National Park Service, which maintains 14 national cemeteries, most of which contain graves of Civil War soldiers. The proposal by Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., added language to block the Park Service from allowing private groups to decorate the graves of Southern soldiers with Confederate flags in states that celebrate Confederate Memorial Day…” So, if you have a Confederate ancestor buried in one of these federal cemeteries, then he is not worthy to have a small flag placed on his grave like the federal dead close by. He is a second-class corpse. Anyone “offended” by that? If you aren’t, then maybe you should be. It bothers me and I have no Confederate ancestors that I am currently aware of. It’s the whole idea of it. Some war dead can be remembered, but you nasty Southern folk–you can’t remember your dead–they’re not fit to remember. After all, they carried Confederate flags! Congress has thus decreed it. All the bodies in these graveyards are equal but some are a tad more equal than others.

Remember, this is the same Congress that declared that, when the Republicans took over, they would repeal Obamacare. Aren’t you glad you didn’t hold your breath waiting for that little event to occur?

Being “offended” is a new “right” for some folks in this country. Those on the left have the new right to be perpetually offended at what and who they don’t like and they practice that “right” with vim and vigor. And the rest of us are supposed to react by removing whatever it is that “offends” the leftists today. Have any of you stopped to think about what this boils down to? Folks in the South are second-class citizens.

The left, both religious and political, hate your flags, your faith, and your symbols, and for that reason you are supposed to remove them from sight and memory posthaste. Honestly, doesn’t that tick you off just a wee bit? Or has your public school  “education” dumbed you down so much (as it was intended to) so that you don’t know or care about much of anything and think you are brilliant?

Thankfully, (though the media will never tell you) there are some folks in the South that care enough to resist this Stalinist purge against their flags, faith, and heritage. But why aren’t there more??? Where is that great “silent majority” in the South that ought to be up in arms against all this, up in arms about the fact that they are being discriminated against. Most of them must still be silent because I haven’t heard too much from them. After all, those reality shows really take up lots of time don’t they?

But, on the other hand, maybe some of them are starting to wake up and realize that they have been spat upon by those who are supposed to represent them. That truck I saw at the grocery store might just be a small part of that awakening. Let us hope, indeed, that the Southern giant begins to wake up and realize that he is being robbed of his heritage by those who were supposed to protect it for him. Congress–what a laugh!

For my part, I’d love to see 100 Confederate flags in parking lots all over this area–and if the perpetually offended are really offended, then maybe they do need a history lesson, though I doubt it would do much good.

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Media Manipulators–Lying Since the 1850s

By Al Benson Jr.

Those who manipulate the news, the spin masters, and those who shape news events to fit their own political agendas have been alive and well in this country at least since the 1850s, and probably before. These are the people who take news events and reshape them so that they say what they want them to say. For them truth is a by-word, to be pushed aside whenever it happens to get in the way of their pet agendas. They are journalistic Marxists—using the “news” they have created to justify the ends they promote.

One of the most famous (or infamous) of these was James Redpath. Early in his career he wrote anti-slavery articles under the pseudonym of “Berwick” and later worked as a reporter for Utopian Socialist Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. According to Wikipedia: “An early assignment at the Tribune involved compiling ‘Facts of Slavery,’ a regular series of articles gathered from Southern newspaper exchanges. Beginning in March 1854, he traveled in the South to examine slavery for himself, interviewing slaves and collecting material published in 1859 as The Roving Editor: or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States. The book’s production costs were covered by prominent antislavery philanthropist Gerrit Smith.” That was the Gerrit Smith of “Secret Six” fame, who got himself admitted to a sanitarium after the John Brown affair at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

According to dlib.nyu.edu “Redpath inaugurated a ‘Facts of Slavery’ column for the New York Tribune, curating slave trade information from the Southern press, and later went South to interview slaves so they could have a forum for relating their experiences in their own words. He later took jobs at Southern newspapers and surreptitiously sent reports back north in the guise of letters to relatives in Minnesota. They, in turn, under prior arrangement, forwarded the reports to editors.” He was later a war correspondent with Sherman’s army. If he was in Georgia with them I’ll bet he had a ball whitewashing what “Sherman’s bummers” did there.

By 1855 Redpath had showed up on the Kansas-Missouri border and was writing for a Free Soil newspaper, the Missouri Democrat, on the problems in “Bleeding Kansas.” For yet another three years he continued to stick his “news media” nose into the situation in Kansas. He had involvement in politics and he continued to write “dispatches” in which he tried to gain support in New England for Free State settlers in Kansas. In 1856 he interviewed terrorist  John Brown, supposedly just days after he and his gang had murdered five pro-slavery men at Pottawatomie Creek by hacking them to death with broadswords while their families were forced to stand by and watch the gruesome scene. Folks, I submit, this was 19^th century terrorism in living color! After that event Redpath became John Brown’s “most fervent publicist.”

Otto Scott, in his informative book The Secret Six: The Fool As Martyr said of Redpath “One of the magicians of confusion, expert at misdirecting attention, was the journalist James Redpath, who appeared in John Brown’s camp on the afternoon of May 29, 1856. How he found the camp remains a mystery. What he and John Brown discussed remains essentially unknown, except for a fable that Redpath wrote three years later, in a mendacious book about the scene. Here he described Brown as both a Cromwellian figure, all Biblical quotes and stern rules for clean living and high thinking and as chief of noble outlaws sequestered in the forest.” And so we see the “news media” of the 1850s hard at work, turning the terrorist into a saint for the dubious benefit of his Eastern readers.

You do have to wonder, along with Otto Scott, how Redpath located the terrorist camp, and Redpath never really tells. That would be giving out too much news that the public is not supposed to be aware of. However, Otto Scott made an interesting connection here, another one the “historians” don’t really want you to know about. He noted: “At the time Redpath met Brown in his camp, however, there could well have been more than journalistic curiosity involved. Redpath was a friend of the unscrupulous Jim Lane—the Free Soil leader who had escaped the treason dragnet cast out by the territorial government–…Brown, who Redpath and everyone else in the territory by now knew to be responsible for the Pottawatomie murders, was a man who seemed worth contacting, and Lane—according to Charles Robinson later—was in favor of using terror as a means of gaining power and property.” Anyone who has ever read any of the history of the Kansas-Missouri border problems and the “Civil War” in that area is familiar with Jim Lane. If you are not, then do a Google search on him. Lots of stuff out there on old “mad dog” Jim Lane!

However, Lane’s connection to “journalist” Redpath is never mentioned, but in looking at it as Scott has done you can begin to see the connection between terrorist Jim Lane and terrorist John Brown, and the conduit is news media pundit James Redpath.

And Scott has also noted something else the “historians” don’t comment much on. He said: “But it was clear that the murders in the Pottawatomie area had coincided with a series of organizing moves to drive Southern settlers out of Kansas, to destroy Southern settlements…The appearance of such deliberate and coordinated violence, however, could not have been possible, nor could it have proceeded, without a covering legend by Northern newspapermen, who shrouded its significance from the nation.”

So you can see that the “news media” today has a really checkered inheritance to live up to. They are still doing what the media back in the 1850s did—prevarication, waffling, obfuscation (I’m trying to find a nice way to say they were liars). Nothing has changed. But if you begin to get some faint glimmer of what they did back then you might begin to grasp what they are still doing today.

The Marxist President, the War Criminal, and Slave Reparations

By Al Benson Jr.

There was an article posted on www.thefederalistpapers.org  for April 19^th  about how our Marxist president wants to punish all Americans (at least all white Americans) for slavery. I have been watching over the years as various race-baiters have sought to find a way to scam more Americans out of what little money they may have left. The slavery reparations game is just one more Marxist “redistribute the wealth” campaign. Does anyone honestly think that any of the ordinary black folks in this country will ever see a thin dime of “reparations” money if they manage to pull this off? Hardly! The Je$$e Jacksons and Al Sharptons and their organizations will be the ones to benefit from this scam, not ordinary black folks, so let’s don’t try to kid anyone as to what this is really all about.

The Federalist Papers article was written by Russ Helper, and he noted: “Every decade or so, the radical left mentions paying reparations to African-Americans for pre-Civil War slavery. The idea is that even though slavery was abolished over 150 years ago, many in the black community are still suffering from its effects. But now a report has come to light that the President is seriously considering forcing all Americans to pay reparations to descendants of slaves.”

Now I have to admit, I’m not a real big fan of that idea. My family didn’t come here until the early 1880s, from England and Scotland, so they didn’t own any slaves before the War of Northern Aggression—but, then, I forgot. They were white, so they were automatically guilty of “racism” and therefore, I, who am white, should feel guilty over that (I don’t. Sorry!) and I should be willing to shell out big bucks for slaves my family never owned to someone who has never been a slave. That’s the way this game is played in case you hadn’t figured that out yet.

So now the next installment of the reparations game is in full swing. Charles Payne, who is black, and works for Fox News has predicted that we will soon see an apology for slavery from the Red (White) House, and also the possibility of “massive sums of money doled out in reparations for slavery.” He says “There’s going to be a major push to get cash, and I’m talking LOTS of cash.”

All the slaves are dead, as are all the slaveowners, so how will Obama justify trying to pilfer the wallets of present day Americans with his reparations scheme? Well, he’s checked that out, and Mr. Helper’s article noted: “He cites a special field order from Union General William Tecumseh Sherman in which he confiscated 400,000 acres of land along the Atlantic Coast for division into the 40 acre lots to house the tens of thousands of freed slave refugees who had joined his march. Sherman’s intentions are disputed, though many believe it was meant to be only a temporary fix for an immediate problem. According to Payne, that order will be seen as an unfulfilled promise by the federal government, and that it could very well be a driving force behind the push for reparations…On the surface, some people could make the argument that this is only just and the right thing to do, but is it really? The truth is that 90% of those living in the south prior to the Civil War never owned slaves. Why should any of their descendants be forced to pay for something their ancestors didn’t do?” Because they are white, that’s why.

The special field order under discussion here is Special Field Orders Number 15. According to Michael Fellman in his book Citizen Sherman, “Sherman then recalled that he had then sat down and drafted his Special Field Orders Number 15, which he issued after (Edwin) Stanton had edited them carefully. Other historians have stressed Stanton’s role in the authorship, as well as that of the Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War. Whatever their exact genesis, these orders were an extremely radical proposal for redistribution of land confiscated from slaveholders to the newly freed slaves…’abandoned’ plantations (from which the owners had fled on the approach of Union troops)  were to be distributed in plots of ‘not more than forty acres of tillable ground’ to black heads of families’.” Fellman continued: “Land confiscation as one means of displacing the Confederate leadership had been discussed widely during the war…The general too had, since 1862, threatened Southerners with dispossession, their land to be distributed to Northern white colonists.” And Sherman continued: “…it may be both politic and right that we should banish them and appropriate their lands to a more loyal and useful population…If they want eternal war, well and good; we will dispossess them and put our friends in their place…Many people with less pertinacity have been wiped out of national existence.”

So it would appear that Comrade Obama and his socialist cadre plan to use this approach as their excuse to gouge the American public for reparations money. However, is this claim really legitimate?  Fellman noted on page 169 of his book that: “After the war, Sherman would claim that he intended his Special Field Orderss Number 15 only as an emergency war measure, and he did not protest when Andrew Johnson revoked it in 1866. So if Andrew Johnson revoked it that means it no longer had any binding authority after his revocation. Of course Obama and his minions have not bothered to mention Johnson’s revocation—at least not that I’ve read about and you can bet the farm that if the “news” media is aware of it they are not about to mention it either.

This whole scenario aptly illustrates why I call those people Yankee/Marxists. The Northern political and military industrial complex had a decided Marxist bent to it even that early.

In The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx, writing at the behest of the League of the Just  (Illuminati) listed ten points that Communists should employ in their seizure of various countries. Number One was: “Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.” Number Four was: “Confiscation of the property of all émigrés and rebels.” So, basically what Sherman sought to do in confiscating thousands of acres and redistributing them to ex-slaves was an exercise in pure Marxism—but that wouldn’t bother Comrade Obama. That’d be right up his alley, just the like the reparations scam will be right up his alley—redistribution of the wealth is another Marxist tenet and you can bet the wealth always gets “redistributed” to their friends, their corporate fascist buddies.

I don’t know if he will try to push something like this through Congress, although many of them wouldn’t be averse to it, or if he will try to do it through yet another “executive order.” The gutless wonders in Congress, in both parties, would probably love to give him this, but there is an election coming up next year, farce though it is and some of these turkeys do want to get voted back in so they can keep feeding at the trough. But keep your eyes open either way. This Marxist scheme needs to be resisted.

Black History, Lincoln, and Passed Over Truth

by Al Benson Jr.

Well, this month black history is supposed to be celebrated and memorialized. So is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Ironic that the two come together in the same month. I notice that during black history month the activities of Martin Luther King are recalled and celebrated, but little is ever said about the accomplishments of people like Booker T. Washington or George Washington Carver. This is in error, unless the real agenda for this month is to promote the civil rights movement instead of showcasing the accomplishments of blacks that really accomplished something worthwhile as Washington and Carver did.

And then there is Lincoln’s birthday. Mr. Lincoln has been promoted as the one who freed the slaves (which he didn’t) and anyone who has read the normal “history” books in the last hundred years will be led to champion him as the “great emancipator” (which he wasn’t). He is portrayed as a great friend to black people (which he wasn’t). He is portrayed is one who believed in and promoted the equality of the blacks to whites (which he didn’t). To find out where Lincoln stood on that issue you need to check out the Lincoln Douglas Debates–the first complete unexpurgated text–published by Harper Perennial in 1993. Particularly you want to check out pages 61, 63, 189, 283, and 284.

Even after you have done that you will run across people who will blithely inform you that, when he died, Lincoln’s view of blacks had “matured” and that he didn’t feel that way anymore. Horse feathers! Lincoln’s view of blacks changed little and, again, contrary to what some will tell you he had not given up on the idea of deporting the freed slaves to some other country or countries that would have them. Interestingly enough, one of the promoters of the Emancipation Proclamation was Robert Dale Owen, well-known socialist and free thinker. Donnie Kennedy and I noted this in Lincoln’s Marxists on page 41. We stated: “…Owen’s personal letter to Lincoln was very influential in Lincoln’s issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation.” You might wonder why a socialist was interested in pursuing emancipation and let me tell you, it wasn’t for the benefit of the black folks.

Donnie Kennedy, in his book Myths of American Slavery observed that: “Not only did Lincoln hold to the belief of Negro inferiority, he was also a proponent of removing the African-American population from America once they were freed…Lincoln as the archenemy of slavery, promoter of equality, and friend of oppressed African-Americans is one of the most pervasive myths in modern America.” Of course, since the winners get to write the “history” books, inconvenient facts that get in the way of the agenda need to be shoved down the “memory hole” where, hopefully, no one will bother trying to pull them out. Another book you might want to check out along these lines is How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited From Slavery. It was written by three reporters from a newspaper in Connecticut, who, when digging into this subject in their own area, found a lot of information they hadn’t expected to find.

So, as this month progresses, look for heart-rending tales of Lincoln’s great love and concern for the slaves and look for more heart-rending stories about Martin Luther King’s heroic struggle against black oppression in the South, but don’t hold your breath waiting for any mention of Booker T. Washington or other blacks that have contributed to society. That’s not what black history month is really all about. Much of it is about pushing a “civil rights” agenda that is so overloaded with Marxism that it almost topples. There are those out there using the blacks as cannon fodder in their own revolution, and Lincoln did the same thing. The socialists and Marxists had an abiding interest in the War of Northern Aggression and they have an abiding interest in the so-called civil rights movement today. You have to wonder who pays the tab for all these protesters that show up at different demonstrations around the country because they sure don’t pay their own way.

Lincoln’s birthday is a great day for propagandists to get out there and spread even more of the prevarications they’ve been spreading for around 150 years now. They have to keep on running with the falsehoods. They can’t allow the next generation to get anything near the truth about Lincoln, the slavery questions, civil rights, or anything along those lines. Once they lose the propaganda edge their house of cards starts to tilt seriously–an event we can all seriously pray for.

The Real Coup Was in 1861

By Al Benson Jr.

According to an article on http://www.theblaze.com for June 7th Rush Limbugh has stated that Barack Obama and his administration are leading a “coup d’ etat’ to take over the United States. Limbaugh said this on his radio show on Friday, June 7th. Limbaugh noted the recently-discovered National Security Agency domestic surveillance (spying) programs being carried on against millions of Americans, all in the name of “fighting terrorism.” Of course the supposed “terrorists” that this Marxist administration are fighting are those patriotic Americans that oppose its Marxist agenda. After all, doesn’t opposing any form of Marxism automatically qualify you as a “terrorist?” According to this administration it does.

I can somewhat agree with Limbaugh’s rationale except that his timing is off by 150 years. The real (and ongoing coup) took place in 1861, during the early days of the Lincoln administration. All Obama is trying to do is to mop up the residual resistance that still lingers, and this is what his puppet-masters put him in office for.

Professor Thomas DiLorenzo, in a recent article on http://www.lewrockwell.com  on 6/3 noted that: “He (Lincoln) illegally suspended Habeas Corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political critics without due process; shut down over 300 opposition newspapers; committed treason by invading the Southern states (Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution defines treason as ‘only levying war upon the states’ or ‘giving aid and comfort to their enemies’ which is, of course exactly what Lincoln did). He enforced military conscription with the murder of hundreds of New York City draft protesters in 1863 and with the mass execution of deserters from his army;…confiscated firearms and issued an arrest warrant for the Chief Justice (Roger Taney) when the jurist issued an opinion that only Congress could legally suspend Habeas Corpus…” Lincoln’s coup basically changed the form of government to one where Washington decided everything and the State governments became little more than vassals to an all powerful national government. They kept the forms but ate out the real substance and that was enough to fool most people.

Sounds as if Obama has been taking lessons from “Honest Abe.” No wonder they call him “Honest Abama.” After this coup, Lincoln was duly accorded the position of deity by the Republican Party and both parties have continued to promote that falsehood until this day. The point here is that, no matter what Obama is now doing, Lincoln already did it, in some form or other, and since he got by with it and it has now been legitimized in the “history” books, you have to consider that Abraham Lincoln’s coup was successful. It has never been repudiated or reversed. Indeed, it has been affirmed. Indeed, with their wholehearted Lincoln worship, Limbaugh and many other patriotic types have routinely affirmed it and continue to do do.

In the early 1900s Lincoln’s “the federal government should control it all” attitude was picked up by groups like the Council on Foreign Relations, which, since its inception, has labored to make darn sure the federal government controlled it all and that they controlled the federal government.

If you want to do a little research sometime, check out how many CFR members have been in most presidential cabinets since Woodrow Wilson, or how many have been in the armed forces, or the media, or the “educational” field. Their numbers will shock you. These are the One World government boys, the ones that put Obama in office and handed him his agenda (which really is not all that much different than Lincoln’s was).
I can sympathize with Limbaugh’s opposition to what Obama is doing. Honest folks should oppose it, but because most of them do not know or understand accurate history what they end up doing is opposing what Obama is now doing while endorsing the same policies when Lincoln practiced them.

James 1:8 in the New Testament states that: “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.” That’s a lot of our problem today—it’s bad if Obama does it but just fine if Lincoln did it. The coup actually took place 150 years ago—and we don’t know the difference. May God help us!

The Lincoln/Corwin “keep your slaves” Amendment

by Al Benson Jr.

Seeing that we have arrived at February, the birth month of the “great emancipator” we will, no doubt, be treated for much of this month to the same type of propaganda from the media that our kids are fed in public schools. They will dutifully inform us that Lincoln “freed” the slaves (he freed no one). This is the man, they will tell us, who supposedly had a fond spot in his heart for all black folks (actually he was a flaming racialist) yet black people continue to revere his name today as though he were Moses leading them through the Red Sea. Actually Lincoln did lead them, and the rest of us through the “Red” sea. Most just don’t have the sense to realize that yet.

In the War of Northern Aggression Lincoln’s primary goal was to preserve the Union, a Union that, in his mind, had existed even before the states, in fact, had always existed. And it was a Union in which the individual states had no real say in what they did, except as allowed by the central government in Washington. In other words, in Lincoln’s “Union” the states were totally free to do whatever Washington required them to do.

Mr. Lincoln didn’t care a flip one way or the other whether slavery flourished or not. As proof of this, witness his support for the Corwin Amendment. “What’s the Corwin Amendment” you ask? You mean you never read about that in your public school “history” books? Wonder how that happened. But then, I guess it’s just one of those little facts the public educators and their collaborators in government and the publishing industry felt you would be better off not knowing about. After all, if you don’t know, then you can’t ask any embarrassing questions can you?

The Corwin Amendment was introduced into Congress in March of 1861. Its sponsor was Ohio Representative Thomas Corwin. That’s right, folks, this man came from Ohio, not Georgia or Alabama. Some reports have stated that Corwin introduced this amendment to prevent the “Civil War.” It was presented to the Congress in the form of House (Joint) Resolution No. 80. The entire idea of the Corwin Amendment was to prohibit Congress from trying to ban slavery in whatever states there were that still permitted it. The Corwin Amendment would have stopped Congress from “abolishing or interfering with the ‘domestic institutions’ including ‘persons held to labor or service’ ( a reference to slavery).” Interestingly enough, a parallel resolution to the one in the House was introduced into the Senate by William H. Seward of New York, (not Georgia, but New York). In fact, Wikipedia informs us: “However the newly formed Confederate States of America was totally committed to independence, and so it ignored the proposed Corwin Amendment.” That’s interesting. Our so-called “historians” (and I use that term rather loosely here) have continued to inform us over the past decades that the Southern states fled the Union solely so they could keep their slaves. No other reasons need apply!

If that had really been the case, here was a golden opportunity for them to keep their slaves and to get back into the Union so they could vote to do so. Yet they passed it up. You don’t just suppose they might have had other reasons for secession than slavery do you? The “court historians” would never admit to that fact no matter what.

In February of 1861 the House approved the resolution by a vote of 133-65 and in early March the Senate approved it by a vote of 24-12. The seven Southern states that had already seceded from the Union at that point did not bother to try to vote on the issue, leading to the inescapable conclusion that, for them, slavery was not the real or the only issue. Had it been the only real and sole issue, no doubt they could have petitioned Washington to get back into the Union so they could have voted to keep their slaves.

Also worth noting is the fact that the “great emancipator” did not oppose the Corwin Amendment. He said, in his first inaugural address: “(H)olding such a provision to now be implied Constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.” In other words, a Constitutional amendment that made slavery for life the rule of law didn’t bother Mr. Lincoln one iota.

According to http://www.indopedia.org  “A young Henry Adams observed that the measure narrowly passed through both houses due to the lobbying efforts of Abraham Lincoln, the President-Elect.”

So it seems that Mr. Lincoln lobbied to get this pro-slavery amendment passed through both houses of Congress. Something else your “history” books didn’t bother to tell you about? After all, that fact wouldn’t fit the image of Lincoln the “great emancipator” that people in government and public schools wanted to present to the “great unwashed” (and under-educated) masses–so just leave it out! So it would appear that Mr. Lincoln was not, after all, the great emancipator we have been told he was. And his Emancipation Proclamation, which was really only a war and propaganda measure, freed no one. The slaves were not freed until the 13th Amendment was enacted in late 1865, after Mr. Lincoln has passed on to his eternal fate.

Maybe it behooves us all to start asking questions about those public school “history” books we were all brought up with–you know–really embarrassing questions–the kind they don’t want asked. Somebody needs to do it. Why not now?