"NEGRO" TROOPS EMANCIPATED BY PRESIDENT LINCOLN DECIDED THE CIVIL WAR

Americans are not taught the true history of the United States for political reasons which conflict with reality. Historian George Bancroft wrote in June, 1865 immediately after President Lincoln was murdered by confederates, " The measure by which Abraham Lincoln takes his place, not in American history only, but in universal history, is his Proclamation of January 1, 1863, emancipating all slaves within the insurgent states. It was indeed a military necessity, and it decided the result of the war. It took from the public enemy one or two million bondmen and placed between one and two hundred thousand brave and gallant troops in arms on the side of the Union. A great deal has been said in time past of the wonderful results of the toil of the enslaved Negro in the creation of wealth by the culture of cotton; and now it is in part to the aid of the Negro in freedom that the country owes its success in its movement of regeneration-that the world of mankind owes the continuance of the United States as the example of a Republic. The death of President Lincoln sets the seal to that Proclamation, which must be maintained. It is the only rod that can safely carry off the thunderbolt. He came to it perhaps reluctantly; he was brought to adopt it, as it were, against his will, but compelled by inevitable necessity. He disclaimed all praise for the act, saying reverently, after it had succeeded, "The nation's condition God alone can claim." And what a futurity it opened before the country when its institutions became homogenous! From all civilized world the nations will send hosts to share the wealth and glory of this people. It will receive all good ideas from abroad; and its great principles of personal equality and freedom: freedom of conscience and mind, freedom of speech and action, freedom of government through ever renewed common consent, will undulate through the world like rays of light and heat from the sun. With one wing touching the waters of the Atlantic and the other the Pacific, it will grow into a greatness of which the past has no parallel and there can be no spot in Europe or in Asia so remote or so secluded as to shut out its influence. He was one of the mass of the people; he represented them, because he was one of them; and the mass of the people, the class that lives and thrives by self-imposed labor, felt that the work, which was to be done was a work of their own: The assertion of equality against the pride of oligarchy, of free labor against the lordship over slaves, of the great industrial people against all the expiring aristocracies of which any remnants had tided down from the Middle Ages. As he went along through his difficult journey, sounding his way, he held fast by the hand of the people, he committed faults, but the people were resolutely generous, magnanimous, and forgiving; and he in his turn was willing to take instructions from their wisdom." In my opinion, the American voters have been duped by what President Lincoln called "Money Power" and he feared that corporations would use their money power to use the government to inflame race hatred and divide the country. We have our first corporate presidency and corporate rule over the people in a modern day attempt to economically enslave all Americans. It will be a tough term of office for the poor and minority but we have overcome enslavement of African Americans and Indian massacres and now, because of the Republican Doctrine of corporate rule, the American people are fast becoming the laughingstock of the world under rule of oligarchs. I miss President Obama, he was the champion of the people, and he withstood the institutional racism of Republican controlled Congress for our sakes. No people or government are immune from the rule of oligarchs, on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation we have been exploited by corporations and racist border-whites. The federal and state government is complicit in the massive Indian land claims on Indian reservations across the United States for the economic benefit of corporations. The visions of spiritual leaders call the current situation a contest between good and evil. Which side wins this war?Bob Juneau Sr.