Decontextualizing history has become a disease and cancel culture has a bad case of it. Evidence of this is the woke left’s obsession with tearing down every statue that resembles a former slave owner irrespective of his role in history and renaming every building that is named after one.
The latest ‘colonizer’ to come under fire is Abraham Lincoln, the president who led our nation through its most epic moral, constitutional, and political battle, the Civil War. The president who ushered in a new era for African-Americans by ratifying the Emancipation Proclamation – the man who lost his life for standing up for what was morally right.
Amid the BLM uprisings and violent insurgencies in response to the murder of George Floyd, the Lincoln Memorial, among other national treasures on the mall in Washington, D.C., has been vandalized. Now, there are calls for the removal of statues of Lincoln echoing around the country.
At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, students have begun circulating a petition aimed at the removal of the Lincoln statue which stands on Bascom Hill.
Now The Boston Arts Commission has voted unanimously to remove a statue that depicts a freed slave kneeling at Abraham Lincoln’s feet. Known as the ‘Emancipation Memorial’, has been standing in a park near Boston Common since 1879. The monument was created to celebrate the emancipation of American slaves. The idea for the memorial and the funds for the original were raised by freed slaves. The Boston statue is a copy of the original which stands in Washington, D.C., an was erected in the city because the artist who designed it lived there.
Protesters set their sights on tearing down the original statue in Washington, which has been guarded by National Guard troops since last week.
Dan McLaughlin eloquents states:
It should not be necessary to defend the proposition that Lincoln, the Republicans, and the Union Army played a major role in ending slavery, but here we are. The very act of casting their role aside so blithely is a species of gaslighting. As is the case with most deliberately distorted history, there are elements of uncontroversial truth to Bouie’s narrative, yet its most sweeping claims are false — and the true parts are merely tools for advancing the falsehood.
…black Americans played a significant role in contributing to the abolitionist movement, the escalating sectional tensions that led to secession, the transformation of the Civil War in the North from a war for the Union to a war of liberation, and the Union’s victory.
All the abolitionist agitation in the world only mattered because the people with real political, military, cultural, and economic power in America — the federal government, Northern state governments, the military, the churches, the leaders of the economy, and ultimately, the voting public — eventually chose to side with the abolitionist movement.
And that is what the statues of Abraham Lincoln really stand for.
