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Abraham Lincoln's Abolishing Slavery

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Abraham Lincoln is to abolishing slavery as lemons are to lemonade. President Lincoln’s memorial is great in size and stature; a grand marble building lined with pillars and a large open airway with a perfect view of the righteous president relaxing in a Romanesque platform just shy of twenty feet tall. The memorial echoes the touch of a Greek architect, and the air about Lincoln has a striking similarity to the memorial of the Greek god Zeus. While Lincoln looks to be in touch with the world’s ancient past, his work is associated with something not so long ago: freeing America’s slaves. Many myths surround the Civil War. One of them which Abraham Lincoln himself saved all of the slaves in one fell swoop and became the everyday American Hero who stands for what he believes in. However, the truth is that while on paper the slaves of the confederacy were free, they were physically chained. It took a force of more than 2 million soldiers, a civil war and an already …show more content…

The South felt threatened by Frederick Douglas and his anti-slavery ways and the president was a bystander in the beginning of the war. Frederick Douglas believed that all men were created equal, yet the South only saw black and white. Textbook history classes don’t want students to see the Civil War as a bloody fight to keep slavery but a cold war to end it. “The notion that opportunity might be unequal in America, that not everyone has “the power to rise in the world,” is anathema to textbook authors, and many teachers as well” (Loewen, Handicapped by History). Abraham Lincoln, sadly, may have felt this way when he stated that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists” (Green, Socialist Worker: Who Freed The

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