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What Is Abraham Lincoln The Man Behind The Myth

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Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myth

Abraham Lincoln is by far our most revered president in the history of the United States. He had a strong moral vision of where his country must go to preserve and enlarge the rights of all her people, but he was also a good man with a strong sense of character and a great discipline in the art of law; and he sought to continue the great and mighty legacy of the Constitution. He believed that the Founding Fathers had drawn up the Constitution without the mention of slavery because they felt that it would later die of a natural death. He would soon learn that that would not be the case. Lincoln's greatness can be seen from the very beginning of his presidency, even from the Great Debates …show more content…

When Lincoln spoke to Congress in December of 1864, he enhanced the idea of freedom for all by saying, "In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom for the free…" He was fully aware that the Civil War would change the course of the future of the United States of America, and that his choices during the war would tip the scale towards continued democracy, or the death of it. He strongly believed that if the Confederacy were to win the war, and the American experiment in democracy were to fail, that the ‘beacon of hope for oppressed humanity the world over would be destroyed.' Lincoln understood that bondage of the African race was inherently wrong, "a vast moral evil," one that he could not help but hate, but that it was indeed protected by the Constitution and in several national and state laws. In fact, Lincoln held no ethnic prejudices. Before the Civil War commenced, Lincoln was a strong advocate of the colonization of the blacks back in Africa after they were freed, not because he himself was racist, but because he was afraid that the white Americans were simply too discriminate to live peacefully along blacks. In the creating of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln was careful to ensure that the four slave states that had stayed in the Union – Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri – would not be offended and so join the Confederacy. Instead, he freed slaves only in the states that had rebelled, which

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