Paul LePage, the somewhat erratic Governor of Maine, said the following this week:
I will just say this: John Lewis ought to look at history, LePage said during his weekly appearance on the George Hale and Ric Tyler Show, on Bangor-based radio station WVOM. It was Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves, it was Rutherford B. Hayes and Ulysses S. Grant who fought against Jim Crow laws. A simple thank you would suffice.
Ummm, no.
Historians will tell you that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation didn't actually free a single slave - it applied ONLY to slaves in the Confederate states that were still at war with the North, and those states didn't recognize Lincoln's authority to do anything. Slaves in the border states that stayed loyal to the Union were not freed by the Proclamation. So who did he free?
Grant signed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which the southern states pretty much ignored. Hayes gained the Presidency in 1877 through a compromise in which he promised to remove Northern troops from the Southern states - and that's when the Jim Crow laws began to flourish, and it took until the 1960's for them to be successfully challenged by people like John Lewis.
The only thing LePage got right was that all three were Presidents... |
