Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (best e reader for epub TXT) 📗

September 22nd 1862, warning the Confederate States that if they continued in rebellion, he would end slavery in the South on January 1st 1863 (the date on which the Emancipation Proclamation was issued). Therefore, if the slave states had rejoined the Union, Lincoln would have permitted them to keep their slaves. After issuing the Proclamation, Lincoln declared:

My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.52

Furthermore, Lincoln saw the Proclamation as a wartime measure to weaken the South, not as a step toward the abolition of involuntary servitude. If the slaves were freed, Lincoln believed that they would revolt against their masters and bolster the Union Army. Lincoln publicly announced that the Emancipation Proclamation was “sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity” (emphases added).

Moreover, the Emancipation Proclamation was rather limited in its scope, and had very little effect by itself. The Proclamation applied only in the Confederacy, and had no legal justification, as the Confederate states had already seceded. Even after the Proclamation, eight hundred thousand African-Americans were still enslaved in the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia, as well as in the North, with the blessings of the Great Emancipator. In essence, the Proclamation supported slavery after its issuance.

The Union Army forced emancipated African-Americans to enter into yearly labor contracts with their masters to avoid “vagrancy” and “idleness.” Once they were under contract, the blacks were not allowed to leave their respective plantations without permission. This system of forced free labor spread throughout the parts of the South that were dominated by the American Army, and lasted until the end of the Civil War.

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, therefore, achieved little in terms of African-American freedom. The federal government did not officially recognize emancipation until Congress enacted the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution on December 6th 1865. By that time, slavery had been abolished in Missouri, Maryland, Louisiana, and Arkansas; and Tennessee and Kentucky were both in the process of ending slavery.

Supreme Racism

The Union won the Civil War, and the slaves were emancipated, but African-Americans were far from equal to whites in the United States during the Reconstruction Era and beyond. The Southern state and local governments enacted Jim Crow laws, with the purpose of segregating blacks and whites, and institutionalizing the idea that African-Americans are morally and legally inferior to whites. Sadly, the United States Supreme Court supported Jim Crow through various troubling and openly racist decisions.

The Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which stated in part,

[t]hat all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other public places of public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color regardless of any previous condition of servitude.

This Act was passed pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states, in relevant part: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Furthermore, Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment grants Congress the power to enforce the Amendment by “appropriate legislation.” According to the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in the Civil Rights Case, decided in 1883, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional because it was not passed in reaction to discriminatory state legislation.53 The Court held that the Equal Protection Clause applies only to state action, not discrimination perpetrated by private businesses. Through this decision, the Court essentially condoned private discrimination, providing African-Americans with no recourse against racist state and local governments that forced white business owners to separate the races.

The case of Plessy v. Ferguson, decided in 1896, was an example of state action.54 In 1890, the State of Louisiana passed the “Separate Car Act,” a law requiring separate, but “equal” accommodations for African-Americans and whites on railway cars. Homer Plessy, who was only one-eighth black, but was classified as an African-American under Louisiana law, was convicted under the Act for sitting in a “white” railway car. Plessy challenged the law as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the Supreme Court disagreed, in a 7 to 1 decision.

According to the majority, Plessy’s argument falsely assumed that “the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority.”55 As far as the majority was concerned, Louisiana was permitted to pass such a law, so long as the separate accommodations were “equal.” The Supreme Court also stated that the Constitution does not protect against social differences between the races, declaring that “[i]f one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them on the same plane.”56

The lone dissenter, Justice John Marshall Harlan, wrote a passionate dissent in which he declared: “[T]here is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”57

Unfortunately, Justice Harlan’s opinion did not represent the prevailing view in this country until well after the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, decided in