Should we give Obama a break on this one?

Naaaaaaaaah!

In what was supposed to be a friendly profile piece, the A.P. quoted Illinois Senator Barack Obama with regard to Abraham Lincoln.

Of the 16th president, Obama said: "I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator... As a law professor and civil rights lawyer and as an African-American, I am fully aware of his limited views on race. Anyone who actually reads the Emancipation Proclamation knows it was more a military document than a clarion call for justice."

In short, Obama doesn't think that black people owe their freedom to Lincoln.

The most charitable thing I can say is that Senator Obama needs to quit learning his history from those lousy revisionist texts. The Illinois Democrat does demonstrate a partial knowledge of the facts, but is totally clueless regarding the meaning of those facts.

Obama does get two things right:

First: clearly Lincoln's first priority was saving the Union. Early on in the Civil War, he wrote: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."

Second: the Emancipation Proclamation was, indeed, a document created out of military expediency. The document specifically addressed itself only to slavery in those areas which were still separated from the Union. In the District of Columbia and the border states of West Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, slavery remained intact. Also, in any other area where nominal Union control had been restored, slavery also remained intact. Indeed, the only slaves who were actually freed by the Emancipation Proclamation were those in areas which were in a state of rebellion but in which the anarchy created by the war itself permitted them to walk away from their captivity.

So: Why should Lincoln be called the "Great Emancipator?"

1. The Emancipation Proclamation, limited as it was, changed the whole meaning of the war. Union troops who once saw themselves fighting only for the preservation of the Union, now saw themselves fighting for freedom. England, which previously had sided diplomatically with the Confederacy in what they saw as a political conflict, reversed course and sided with the north in the name of emancipation. In short, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation let the genie of freedom out of the bottle.

2. Lincoln himself changed. Despite his very pragmatic sentiments quoted above ("If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it...") Lincoln found himself becoming a champion of a new concept of freedom. This is illustrated most poignantly in his Gettysburg Address of 1863, in which he stated: "...this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

Lincoln wasn't talking about merely re-starting the republic as it was in 1860. He was re-defining the whole American concept of liberty, so that it would now include not merely national sovereignty and political rights for all white males, but a new concept of civil rights which would disregard economic class or racial caste.

Lincoln certainly did not understand his role in 1860 when he was elected. He may not have understood his role in 1862 when he published the Emancipation Proclamation. But by 1863, he knew what he needed to do. If he was going to save the Union, it would have to be an improved union; a union permanently free of the curse of slavery.

In short, Lincoln might not have first envisioned or finally completed the emancipation of the slaves, but he was the necessary ingredient without which slavery in America would not have ended for a long time to come. He was also the genius who oratorically gave America a new model of freedom with which slavery was incompatible.

Once upon a time, when every schoolchild was required to study and memorize the Gettysburg Address, we didn't have to debate points like this.

One other thing. If it wasn't for Lincoln, Barack Obama, half Kenyan and half African American, wouldn't even be here, let alone a senator.