Historical revisionists in Hampton, Virginia are pressing to change the name of Jefferson Davis Middle School. It is a move from the usual playbook to erase Confederate history and associate negative stereotypes with everything Confederate. To epitomize the movement, you need look no futher than the photo caption of this AP/CNN article:

Vernita Dixon, 13, a student at Jefferson Davis Middle School, thinks the name of her school should be changed to Abraham Lincoln because "he freed the slaves."

Ah, such irony. Here we have CNN and the AP helping further the revisionist agenda, while ignoring the mistruths that are being taught to children like Vernita. The fact is that Lincoln didn't free a single slave with his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation that major media and text books give him credit for. Evidence shows that if Lincoln had his way, slavery would have lasted at least another 100 years.

To find such evidence, you need look no further than Ebony Magazine, who quotes the book Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream, by Lerone Bennett Jr.

In what some critics call a hoax and others call a deliberate ploy not to free African-Americans but to keep them in slavery, Lincoln deliberately drafted the document so it wouldn't free a single Negro immediately.

What Lincoln did--and it was so clever that we ought to stop calling him honest Abe--was to "free" slaves in Confederate-held territory where he couldn't free them and to leave them in slavery in Union-held territory where he could have freed them. [...]

A growing body of evidence suggests that the Emancipation Proclamation was a ploy designed not to emancipate the slaves but to keep as many slaves as possible in slavery until Lincoln could mobilize support for his conservative plan to free Blacks gradually and to ship them out of the country.

This is no mere theory; there is indisputable evidence on this point in documents and in the testimony of reliable witnesses, including Abraham Lincoln himself. The most telling testimony comes not from 20th century critics but from cronies and confidants who visited the White House and heard the words from Lincoln's mouth. There is, for example, the testimony of Judge David Davis, the three hundred-plus-pound Lincoln crony who visited the White House in 1862, some two months after Lincoln signed the Preliminary Proclamation, and found him working feverishly to subvert his announced plan in favor of his real plan. What was Lincoln's real plan? It was the only emancipation plan he ever had: gradual emancipation, the slower the better, with compensation to slaveowners and the deportation of the emancipated. His "whole soul," Davis said, "is absorbed in his plan of remunerative emancipation, and he thinks that if Congress don't fail him, that the problem is solved...."

What are we to understand by all this? We are to understand, among other things, that words, especially Lincoln's words, are deceiving and that Lincoln announced his first plan as a mask to cover his real plan and his real end. That at any rate is the testimony of another intimate Lincoln friend, Henry Clay Whitney. What was his real end? The Proclamation, Whitney said, was "not the end designed by him, but only the means to the end, the end being the deportation of the slaves and the payment for them to their masters--at least to those who were loyal."

Now, I don't mean to intentionally disparage Abraham Lincoln, but I cannot stand idly by and let the "holier-than-thou" attitude of historical revisionists go unchallenged.

So, you may be asking yourself just who really did free the slaves. Well, again, I'll look to the article in Ebony magazine.

To the extent that they were ever "freed," they were freed by the Thirteenth Amendment, which was authored and pressured into existence not by Lincoln but by the great emancipators nobody knows, the abolitionists and congressional leaders who created the climate and generated the pressure that goaded, prodded, drove, forced Lincoln into glory by associating him with a policy that he adamantly opposed for at least fifty-four of the fifty-six years of his life. The best witness once again is Abraham Lincoln who said shortly before his death that "he never would have done it, if he had not been compelled by necessity to do it, to maintain the union."