For the second time since early October, vandals in Chicago have defaced a statue of Abraham Lincoln.
Last month, it was the statue of President Lincoln in the park that bears his name. This time, it was a statue of young Lincoln in the city’s Edgewater neighborhood. In both cases the vandals used paint, with graffiti calling the 16th president a “colonizer.”
Details aside, the attack on Lincoln’s effigy is hardly a surprise. Once anti-American leftists succeeded in attacking and pulling down Confederate statues and battle flags, other symbols of the nation’s past had to follow as night follows day.
For the war against Southern symbols was never a war solely against the South or the Confederacy. It was always a war against the nation’s past and its founding white Christian settlers and their descendants. Thus, the attack on Lincoln was not only predictable but also logical.
The Latest Vandalism
This time, the vandals attacked on Thanksgiving Day, the Chicago Tribune reported, writing the words “colonizer” and “land back” on the statue of young Abe.
“The vandals also reportedly wrote ‘Dakota 38’ in apparent reference to 38 Dakota Sioux who were executed on Lincoln’s order following the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, also known as the Sioux Uprising,” the newspaper continued:
This was the second time a Lincoln statue had been vandalized in Chicago recently. A statue of the former president was also defaced with a similar message in Lincoln Park in October.
The writings on the ground were removed, and the statue was expected to be cleaned up Monday, Chicago Park District spokeswoman Michele Lemons wrote in an email to the Tribune. The Park District filed a police report about the incident.…
The latest controversy references the Sioux Uprising of 1862, when, after the Sioux were forced off their land and suffered starvation, they attacked and killed hundreds of settlers…. A military commission sentenced 303 Dakota fighters to death. Lincoln authorized the hanging of 38 of the men in Minnesota in the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
Thanksgiving was appropriate; Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving Day in 1864.
In October, vandals gave the Rail Splitter the same treatment.
“Red paint was poured over the statue and ‘Dethrone the Colonizers,’ ‘Land Back!’ and ‘Avenge the Dakota 38’ were spray-painted at its base,” the city’s Sun-Times reported.
An “anonymous group” claimed credit, and “said they wanted to memorialize Indigenous Peoples Day by calling attention to the public execution of 38 Dakota men during the U.S.-Dakota war of 1862,” the newspaper reported. “Lincoln signed the order of execution. The anonymous group refers to itself as ‘resistors of colonial violence.’”
Aside from smashing the Sioux Uprising, Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act that pushed the nation west with the Transcontinental Railroad — and Indians out of the way and onto reservations.
Inevitable Attack
The predictable hate-Lincoln vandalism will likely continue. Anti-American, anti-Christian leftists know they are winning control over the narrative of American history.
That attack began decades ago, starting with the Confederate battle flag.
Two years ago, Mississippi became the last state to remove the flag from its place of honor, largely thanks to the overdose death of George Floyd while in police custody and the ensuing arson and plunder of American cities.
Leftists vandalized and destroyed Confederate statues across the nation. Most notably, they and their totalitarian enablers wrecked and removed the magnificent statue of Robert E. Lee that adorned Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, one of the most significant pieces of public art in the country. Down, too, came Jeb Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, and Matthew Fontaine Maury.
But the South and its heroes weren’t the only victims of the wanton destruction. Soon, the Floyd-Was-Murdered Hoax became an excuse to vandalize statues of Junipero Serra and Christopher Columbus nationwide.
Even in England, leftists attacked. Colston, Churchill, and others were targets.
No one should have thought Lincoln would escape because he crushed the Confederacy and “freed the slaves,” as the grade-school history goes.
Left unremarked upon in the latest anti-American attack were Lincoln’s views on blacks and 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,” he wrote to abolitionist Horace Greeley in 1862, “and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”
Lincoln supported the Corwin Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would have protected the states’ “domestic institutions,” meaning slavery. He also backed the repatriation of slaves to Africa or their removal to Belize or the Île à Vache, an isle off the coast of Haiti.
In 1858, during his fourth debate with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln clearly said he did not believe whites and blacks could live together in harmony.
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people,” Lincoln said:
And I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.
Lincoln’s statues still stand. But give it time. Leftists are rewriting and distorting history. Like Serra and Columbus, some day Lincoln might join Marse Robert and his lieutenants.
