It was 243 years to the month since the first of their ancestors had arrived on these shores—before Lincoln’s family, long before most of the white people insisting that this was not their country. The Union had entered the war not to end slavery but to keep the South from splitting off, yet Black men wanted to fight to restore the Union and liberate their people. And now Lincoln was blaming them for the war, and urging them to persuade the Black population to leave their native land.
