Hidden Black History: The near fatal mob beating of Abraham Lincoln

According to the University of Michigan, Abraham Lincoln wrote three autobiographies that still exist today. The longest was written in the 3rd person for the Chicago Press & Tribune.

In 1860, the pro-Lincoln Chicago Press merged with the pro-Lincoln Tribune. It became the Chicago Press & Tribune, now known simply as Chicago Tribune. The paper was rabidly pro-Lincoln and credited with playing a large role in getting him elected.

John L. Scripps was a lead staffer at the Chicago Press & Tribune and former editor of the Chicago Press. There is a surviving letter from Abraham Lincoln to Scripps dated 1858, thanking him for his flattering coverage.

In 1860, Scripps asked Lincoln for an autobiography to publish in the new Press & Tribune.

The Chicago Press & Tribune then published a 3rd person autobiography written by Abraham Lincoln himself. It contains a major detail that is shockingly absent from all modern accounts of Lincoln.

When he was nineteen, still residing in Indiana, he made his first trip upon a flatboat to New Orleans. He was a hired hand merely, and he and a son of the owner, without other assistance, made the trip. The nature of part of the “cargo-load,” as it was called, made it necessary for them to linger and trade along the sugar-coast; and one night they were attacked by seven negroes with intent to kill and rob them. They were hurt some in the mêlée, but succeeded in driving the negroes from the boat, and then “cut cable,” “weighed anchor,” and left.

17 Comments

    • Any theories on why the historical profession has bent over backward to pretend Lincoln abandoned his belief in colonization (i.e. kicking the blacks out)? Because he believed in it to the very end.

      • I don’t think Lincoln would have followed through with the removal of the freed slaves unless he could have worked out a political agreement with Whites in the South to bring them quickly back into the political fold but on mostly his terms, meaning economic exploitation. Lincoln would have needed the freed slaves to maintain political control over the Southern states. Ultimately I think his pragmatism in keeping control over the South over removing the Negro from the US would have caused the latter to be set aside. If his intent was to free the slaves but remove them he could have done so at any time by getting a compensated emancipation with removal law passed on the condition that it applied only in states that reapplied for admission or that rescinded their secession by a certain date. It certainly would have been cheaper than the War. Compensated emancipation was the way that slavery ended in the Western hemisphere everywhere except the US and Haiti. Alternatively he could have treated all the slaves that were “seized” in the South as the property of the US government and removed them without compensation. It would have been justified as a war measure. Compensated emancipation with removal could have been a winning strategy since a primary concern of Southerners was having a free Negro population living among them. But history is full of things that could have been. The simple fact of the matter is that commodity agriculture at that time required a large labor force and the economies of the US and South depended on the presence of the Negro in the South whether slave or free it didn’t matter. I have my doubts that the Irish or other European immigrants could have met the need especially since disease in the deep South would have killed many. Mechanization would not take place for nearly 100 years.

  1. The Negro never had it so good as under slavery. Shouldn’t Abe have gone to the Sheriff or Magistrate and complained and filed charges?

    Btw this incident was retconned in Ave Lincoln: Vampire Slayer into Abe saving a black boy from a bearing by a Slaver.

    Hollywood. Every. Fucking. Time.

  2. B-but muh Yankee abolishonists? B-but Lincoln loved kneegrowz??

    Lincoln grew up around free niggers and HATED niggers, free or slave. He was one of three US presidents, who, while serving in office, could still literally kick the shit out of someone in a streetfight (the other two being Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt).

    There is a reason you lost the war, Southerners. Your culture is weak and soft, while Northern culture is hard and ruthless.

    • Couldn’t have had anything to do with a population 4 or 5 times that of the South or the massive difference in resources that the North could bring to bear on the war, could it?

      Thanks for playing, asshole.

  3. Lincoln was known to be a good fighter, or rassler. At any rate the coloreds were the same then as now, regardless of how “oppressed” they supposedly were.

    • I know what I’d do with the proverbial time machine now.

      “See that tall fella over thar’ Boys? He called y’all niggers.”

  4. Arthur Jones, another Illinois politician, in some ways has nothing on Lincoln:

    “While I was at the hotel to-day, an elderly gentleman called upon me to know whether I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the [black] and white people. [Great Laughter.] While I had not proposed to myself on this occasion to say much on that subject, yet as the question was asked me I thought I would occupy perhaps five minutes in saying something in regard to it. I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]-that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of [blacks], nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race…”
    –Abraham Lincoln, 4th Lincoln-Douglas debate, Charleston, Illinois, 9/18/1858, transcript courtesy of the National Park Service

  5. The “Confederate Catechism” records that Lincoln passed counterfeit currency in his younger days and was cruel to animals, sewing hogs eyes shut to cross them across rivers.

  6. James Mitchell, Commissioner of Emigration, in an interview with the St. Louis Globe Democrat in an interview dated August 26, 1894, said that Lincoln confided in him, “I have never thought so much on any subject and arrived at a conclusion so definite as I have in this case, and in after years found myself wrong… it would be much better to separate the races than to have scenes as those witnessed in New York the other day.” The scenes Lincoln was referring to were the draft riots that started on July 13, 1863.

    Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, in an article contained in The Galaxy, Vol. 24, Issue 4, October, 1877, stated, “Emancipation had constituted no part of the policy of the President at the time of his inauguration, and when finally decreed he connected with it, as an essential and indispensable part of his policy a plan of deportation of the colored population.”

    General Benjamin Butler, in his Autobiography, Part 2, page 903, recalled Lincoln saying to him, “But what shall we do with the Negroes after they are free? I can hardly believe that the North and South can live in peace, unless we can get rid of the Negroes.”

    One month prior to issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln, in his annual address to Congress, on December 1, 1862, declared, “Several of the Spanish American Republics have protested the sending of such colonies to their respective territories… Liberia and Haiti are, as yet, the only countries to which colonists of African descent from here could go with certainty of being received and adopted as citizens… I cannot make it better known than it already is, that I strongly favor colonization.”

    Following the battle of Sharpsburg (Antietam), Lincoln felt secure enough to issue an ultimatum regarding emancipation. It was both a threat, and, I’m sure, in his mind, a form of conciliation. In September of 1862, Lincoln put forth a tentative Emancipation Proclamation, and gave the Southern States ninety days to peacefully return to the Union before putting it into effect. The Southern States, being unwilling to resume their places in the Union, obviously felt that there was more at stake than merely the loss of the system of slave labor. The proclamation was officially declared on January 1, 1863. In a letter to General McClernand on January 8, 1863, Lincoln wrote “After the commencement of hostilities, I struggled nearly a year and a half to get along without touching the institution and when finally I conditionally determined to touch it, I gave a hundred days fair notice of my purpose, to all the States and the people, with in which time they could have turned it wholly aside, by simply again becoming good citizens of the United States. They chose to disregard it, and I made the peremptory proclamation on what appeared to me to be a military necessity.” In an attempt to explain the numerous exemptions contained in the proclamation, on September 2, 1863, Lincoln wrote to Chief Justice Salmon Chase, “The original proclamation has no constitutional or legal justification, except as a military measure. The exemptions were made because the military necessity did not apply to the exempted localities. Nor does that necessity apply to them any more now than it did then.”

    Lincoln did, at various times, suggest compensated emancipation and extending the time frame for ending slavery in the United States to 1888. He couldn’t get Congress to appropriate the money for compensation or colonization. I’m certainly no fan of Lincoln, but it would appear that he understood, and did try to do something about, the Negro problem. It’s interesting to note that 1888 was the year that the last two countries in the Western Hemisphere outlawed slavery, Cuba and Brazil. While the United States Navy was blockading the Southern coastline, ships registered in Northern states were bringing slaves to Cuba. In 1864, Robert Schufeldt, U.S. Consul to Cuba, was lamenting, “However humiliating may be the confession… nine tenths of the vessels engaged in the slave trade are American (Northern).” This would continue to be the case until 1888.

  7. The Emancipation Proclamation was a wartime document that freed not a single slave in the border slave states or in DC. The document was an attempt to boost northern moral awash in the unprecedented carnage of the war and to stir up negro rebellion behind enemy lines.

  8. The black race is the same today, as then. look at the prisons, black live murdered in Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore. I am not doing that.

  9. There are details of forbidden history that have been suppressed by the tyrannical forces of social marxism. As one example, a diary of one of the Union soldiers who caught JW Booth says they decapitated his body and kicked his head around in a field the evening he was slain.

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