Abraham Lincoln didn’t free the slaves Slaves fought for their rights and freed themselves.
Stop giving that guy all the credit for signing the Emancipation Proclamation, especially since he ordered the biggest mass execution against indigenous people in history.
Trump is a convicted felon and should’ve been disqualified from the election.
Lincoln is the most pro-black president in history and it’s not close. His personal prejudice and treatment of Natives are irrelevant to the fact that emaciation being a war goal was his decision and wasn’t inevitable. It’s easy to see how a lesser president (like Johnson) would’ve made peace with an intact slaver society.
If you want to argue who the formally enslaved have to thank for their emancipation, I’d argue that the Confederates are the proximate cause. It was the slavers who started the rebellion that forced the issue. It was the slavers fighting for slavery that conjured fatal opposition that didn’t exist before.
I don’t want to minimize the struggle enslaved people faced. But only a tiny number of enslaved or formally enslaved people even participated in the war. They certainly didn’t rise up and overthrow slavery.