Mike B)
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His latest proclamation, which is drafted in the same style, the manifesto abolishing slavery, is the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to the tearing tip (I think it should read "up" MB) of the old American Constitution.
Nothing is simpler than to show that Lincoln's principal political actions contain much that is aesthetically. repulsive, logically inadequate, farcical in form and politically, contradictory, as is done by, the English Pindars of slavery, The Times, The Saturday Review and tutti quanti. But Lincoln's place in the history of the United States and of mankind will, nevertheless, be next to that of Washington!
Nowadays, when the insignificant struts about melodramatically on this side of the Atlantic, is it of no significance at all that the significant is clothed in everyday dress in the new world?
Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian, who worked his way tip from stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance-an average person of good will, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organisation, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!
Hegel once observed that comedy is in act superior to tragedy and humourous reasoning superior to grandiloquent reasoning.[Lectures on Aesthetics] Although Lincoln does riot possess the grandiloquence of historical action, as an average man of the people he has its humour. When (foes he issue the proclamation declaring that from January 1, 1863, slavery in the. Confederacy shall be abolished At the very moment when the Confederacy as an independent state decided on peace negotiations- at its Richmond Congress. At the very, moment when the slave-owners of the border states believed that the invasion of Kentucky by the armies of the South had made 'the peculiar institution'] just as safe as was their domination over their compatriot, President Abraham Lincoln in Washington.
full: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1862/10/12.htm
Mike B)
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