http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/04/1220723/-Abolitionist-Frederick-Douglass-Lincoln-s-thorn-and-partner-speaking-on-the-fifth-of-July-1852?detail=email
great follow up to last post.
We do too much "heroification" in America, according to James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (one of his several books that ought to be on everybody's shelf). Like me, he thinks the word hero has been cheapened, ending up more often a description for football quarterbacks who throw perfect last-minute passes than for, say, the passerby who risks her own life to pull a child from a flooding river.
Heroification describes what textbooks, too many teachers, and the likes of Lynne Cheney have done to historical figures such as the deeply racist Woodrow Wilson and a multitude of other notable Americans. The process of heroification not only turns the notorious into role models while many people who actually deserve the praise they get are turned into one-dimensional stereotypes without flaws. As if we couldn't stand to see our heroes as human beings who don't always get things right, who, in fact, sometimes behave deplorably and hypocritically.
Despite his flaws, my number one personal hero is—and has been since I was introduced at age 14 to his autobiography—Frederick Douglass, the runaway slave whose persistent eloquence was one of the leading factors persuading Abraham Lincoln to bring black soldiers into the Union Army. Without those 180,000 men who ultimately fought, quite literally, for freedom, it is uncertain that the Union would have survived.
But Douglass was deeply unhappy with Lincoln in 1860, labeling him “an excellent slave hound” because of Honest Abe's support for the Fugitive Slave Act that required authorities in non-slave states to turn over runaways to their owners, or rather, most usually to bounty hunters. Once taken, the runaways were returned whence they came or often sold "down river," where a short life of overwork in the coastal cane fields or elsewhere awaited them.
Lincoln's Inaugural address sparked a ferocious critique from Douglass, who repeated the "slave hound" accusation. He was disgusted that the president had spent several paragraphs of that address argumentatively defending the practice of returning slaves, even repeating the Constitution's “shall be delivered up” phrase in regard to the human property the South had enshrined as their right for being part of the Union in the first place.
In Douglass' view, the effect of Lincoln's trying to hang onto slave states to save the Union by turning over runaways was tantamount to killing them since a captured runaway's life was usually very short. Lincoln was, Douglass said with that slave-hound label, no different than the dogs sent to sniff out and corner a runaway until the master came to collect him. Pretty strong stuff to characterize the guy who would become known as The Great Emancipator.
if this is to be believed Lincoln was not the man we read about in history books it would also explain why the right wing still embraces him and refers to itself as the party of Lincoln. also does this give a different insight into republicans as to why they have engaged in this heroification for those who are less than honorable, to present a more favorable picture of those before them, if that's so then why did they get worse in their treatment and rhetoric another case of them hating and not knowing why they rewrite to pretty up their past and drop elephant dung bombs on their future, party of stupider?
