Question

Did Lincoln really help free the slaves? does he deserve his reputation as the Great Emancipator?

Answer 1

yes lincon did help free the slaves it was he work with the emancipation order is what helped freed black people from slavery. he was a very soft spoken man that carried the world on his shoulders and if it was not for that order we would probable still have slaves

Answer 2

Yes he did, in three ways. The first is through his Emancipation Proclamation, in which he freed all slaves in areas then under military control of Union forces, which eventually included the entire Confederacy. Second, he won the Civil War, which was not a foregone conclusion at all -- it required nerves of steel, among other things -- and which tremendously strengthened the influence of the Republican Party, which after the war pushed through the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments that abolished slavery and established the citizenship of black Americans. Third, he chose as his commanding general Ulysses Grant, who, first, won the war for him, and, second, who by the stature he gained thereby became President, where over two terms he solidified Lincoln's achievements, and did not hesitate to use the military force of the Union to coerce Southern submission to the liberty of slaves.

There are certainly many other factors that contributed, but Lincoln and Grant between them deserve great credit for being the focal points and leaders at the critical times.

Answer 3

thank you both for the answers! they are both really good. Carl_Pham, I agree the credit should be for both Lincoln was a big leader but Grant was one of the best if not the best military leaders...

Answer 4

Grant wasn't a particularly good military tactician. Lee was widely and rightly considered his superior. But he was a good leader of men. He was direct, humble, and disciplined. You could count on him, and his enemies learned he could not easily be dissuaded from his course, no matter how unpleasant. That served him well after the war, when no course of action seemed both honorable and straightforward. We forget how very painful the healing of the wound was -- it was very much like a married couple attempting to reconstruct their marriage after one, or both, had cheated. Grant's steadfastness heartened his friends and dismayed his enemies, and it was probably that that won the day in the years just after the war.

Or won it for a little while, perhaps. After Grant, like Lincoln, died young, there was an absence of similarly steady and principled Northern leadership. As a consequence, Reconstruction failed, a racist South was reborn, and the promise of genuine equality for blacks was put off for another century. (To be fair, Northern politicians were far more concerned with the massive influx of European immigrants to Norrthern cities than with what was going on with blacks in the South, and practically speaking, this was the correct order of priorities.)