The two sides of Abraham Lincoln
The following article, by black socialist CLR James (writing as GF Eckstein), was first published in the US Trotskyist paper Militant, on 14 Feburary 1949. One part of the 1948 election platform of the Socialist Workers Party [US] read as follows: “In 1860 William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. John Brown and Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens, personified the forces which waged merciless war against the slaveowners’ attempt to perpetuate their ‘outmoded system, halt the expansion of our economy and destroy the liberties of our people.” But in 1948 the Republican...