&host=rt.com&uri=/usa/news/letters-between-liberators-lincoln-and-aleksandr-ii/&via=(none)&ua=CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html))
Letters between liberators: Lincoln and Aleksandr II
Published: 08 May, 2009, 19:08
Abraham Lincoln and Aleksandr II
TAGS: Russia, Human rights, USA
Two 19th century figures were separated by continents, but brought together by a common belief in liberty.
The 16th US President Abraham Lincoln and Russian Tsar Alexander II faced similar challenges and shared triumphs. From half a world away the two leaders kept in touch, expressing their passions and policies for a better future of Russia and the United States.
“It was mainly a correspondence between ministers,” says Aleksandr Petrov, a Senior fellow at the Institute of World History in Moscow. He adds that the naval ministries of both countries were trying to find a way to strengthen economic cooperation, military solutions, and to make the world a safer place.
“Aleksander II really believed in a free world…he just abolished serfdom, and two years later Lincoln made his famous speech,” says Petrov.
The Gettysburg address is probably now one of the most famous speeches in history:
“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth
on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing
whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so
dedicated, can long endure.”
The Civil war was a long hard battle fought to keep a nation together, but to also ensure all men were free, and could have basic rights to learn to read and write. John W. Fields remembers his thirst for knowledge as a slave in this excerpt from a letter written in 1880:
"In most of us colored folks was the great desire to [be] able to read and write. We took advantage of every opportunity to educate ourselves. The greater part of the plantation owners were very harsh if we were caught trying to learn or write. It was the law that if a white man was caught trying to educate a negro slave, he was liable to prosecution”
Serfs in Russia were also not educated, but some, like Praskovia Kovalyova-Zhemchugova were an exception. She was a Russian serf actress and opera singer, talented and beautiful. Her master Count Nikolai Sheremetev fell in love with her, and their affair was kept secret for years. In 1798, Sheremetev emancipated his beloved serf after marrying her…It was a brave and uncommon marriage that took place 63 years before Aleksandr II would abolish serfdom.
Aleksandr’s Manifesto was one of the most important legislative acts in Russian history, just as Lincoln’s abolition of slavery would be in the United States. For some the parallels are no coincidence…Petrov says, ”Russia sent naval ships to the US to help Lincoln keep his country together. Russia stepped forward and helped the Union…not the confederate army, not France, and not Great Britain, but it was Russia which really helped Abraham Lincoln save the Union.”
Lincoln and the Tsar both vowed to liberate and did …and both were tragically assassinated. President Lincoln was shot in the head during a theater performance in 1865, and Aleksandr II was killed in 1881 when his carriage was bombed in St.Petersburg.
Today the two remain towering figures of history and are enshrined, one at the Lincoln memorial in Washington DC which reads ”The protector of the union,” and the other a statue in Moscow outside of Christ the Savior Cathedral titled ”The liberator.”
Anissa Naouai, RT
08.05.2009, 14:38
6 comments
Lavrov gives Russian Foreign Policy 101 lessonSpeaking in Washington, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke on a laundry list of issues in international politics, which Moscow considers very important for its interests. |
08.05.2009, 20:11
ROAR: Russian Opinion and Analytics Review, May 8This Friday ROAR presents two different angles of the EU’s actions in the post-Soviet era, and a report from Washington on the hidden aspects of the Taliban problem. |
This is a story that Americans should learn and learn again. First, only Russia, led by Tsar Aleksandr II, supported the United States in the War of the Rebellion from 1861 to 1865. Second, the Russian Navy kept the British and French fleets from intervening on behalf of the insurrectionist Confederacy after the 1862 Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg) in Maryland. Because of Russia's timely help, President Lincoln was able to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863. General Grant finally overcome General Lee at Appomattox, but this only possible with Russia's help. Third, and least well known but equally as important, President Lincoln and Tsar Aleksandr II fought rapacious moneylenders from the United States, England, France, and other nations who sought to enslave the might American and Russian peoples with chains of debt. President Lincoln fought them off with the issuance of Greenbacks, the creation of money backed by labor and the full faith and credit of the American people through their own sovereign government, in contrast to present Federal Reserve notes that are created out thin air by a cartel of private banks. Tsar Aleksandr II fought these moneylenders by refusing to create a central bank in Russia. I express my unconditional, heartfelt gratitude to the Russian people for helping the United States from being severed in twain, half-slave and half-free, and, on this great day in history, for making such prodigious sacrifices to vanquish the Fascist war machine in the Great Patriotic War. Peter J. of Minneapolis
It may come as no surprise that the people of the South see things a bit differently. Lincoln did not start the war in order to end slavery. He did it to drag the seceded states back into the Union, like an abusive husband who beats his wife to keep her from leaving him. And he was ultimately willing to let more than 620,000 Americans die in the fighting to accomplish that, not to mention the subjugation and economic devastation of a whole region of the country. Naturally he wouldn't want to go down in history as the President who presided over the breakup of the union. And he would surely understand the political and economic consequences to the North if the South were allowed to become independent, when the South was no longer a captive market for protected Northern manufactured goods and no longer the primary source of federal income through tariffs. Slavery was certainly one of the major issues of the time, but true humanitarian abolitionists were few even in the North. Some of the Confederate States would have remained in the Union, but were pushed over the edge into secession in outrage at Lincoln's unconstitutional call for troops to go invade their already seceded neighbors. Washington could have been a Union island surrounded by Confederate territory, if not for Lincoln's cannons trained on Maryland's capitol city to keep their legislators in line. As for the involvement of the Tsar, I applaud his humanitarianism in freeing the serfs. But it is natural that he would favor the Union over the Confederacy. One could easily see that he would not want to see the example of a successful division of a large country, considering the empire he and all his predecessors were keeping together. Still today Russia, a large and powerful country, chafes at secessionist movements along its edges rather than setting them free, and maintains a hegemony among some of its neighbors, former constituents of the old Soviet Union. And they're not the only ones. Consider Turkey's steadfast rule over the Kurds, or France's over the Basques, etc., etc. And let's not forget that the U.S. was founded on secession from Great Britain. But as far as Lincoln was concerned, secession was no longer an inalienable right of a free people under duress from their own government; all must submit to his authority.