Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн

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It must be remembered that “abolitionism” and the “free soil” movement were not identical, and that, as aforementioned, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Free Soil Party as a white man’s party that was only concerned with ending slave labor’s competition with free white labor. Garrison, by the way, had written an editorial as early as 1829 criticizing the forced removal of Indians from the Southeast. In the 1850s many abolitionists and crusaders, like John Beeson and Wendell Phillips, spoke against Indian slavery and in favor of reform of the Indian service of the United States government.⁶² Frémont, while consistently favoring the anti-slavery point of view when talking about African chattel slavery, was ultimately a white man who ignored the rights of Indians as human beings and saw them as useful sources of labor to be exploited. His views on these matters were shared by many northerners, including the Abraham Lincoln of 1863 and after.

The path to emancipation of the Afro-American slaves was a rocky one, and who better to follow that road then the “great pathfinder,” John C. Frémont. But the trail was narrow with many false exits, and as luck and fate would have it, Lincoln and Frémont crossed and met on that trail several times. Most of these engagements were less than friendly, especially the emancipation edict controversy of 1861.