Sunny Hostin, a descendant of slave owners who appears to have an issue with white Americans, routinely spouts nonsense on ABC's "The View."
She managed this week to outdo herself, claiming on the show's Veterans Day episode that President Abraham Lincoln wasn't responsible for freeing the slaves.
'Not even Abe Lincoln is safe.'
Early in the episode, Sara Haines joined Whoopi Goldberg and her other co-hosts in shoehorning racial grievances into their conversation about America's veterans and past conflicts, claiming that "so many people of color fought those wars to come back to not having those rights."
Hostin said in response that during the Civil War — a war in which upwards of 750,000 soldiers, including roughly 360,000 Union soldiers, perished — the "enslaved left and joined the Union Army because they wanted to fight for this country and for their freedom. People often say that Abraham Lincoln emancipated the slaves. The slaves basically emancipated themselves because they wanted freedom, and they fought for their freedom."
Hostin's revisionist history was met with applause from the audience.
Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, declaring that "all persons held as slaves" within the Confederate states that were still at war with the Union were "thenceforward, and forever free," and that "the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom."
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The National Archives notes that while the proclamation did not result in the immediate or universal end of American slavery, it certainly got the ball rolling, confirming slaves' "insistence that the war for the Union must become a war for freedom" and permitting the acceptance of blacks into the Union Army and Navy thereby "enabling the liberated to become liberators."
Two years later, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed by white members of Congress and ratified by white state legislators, formally abolishing slavery throughout the nation.
Goldberg conceded that "you have to give it to Abe because he busted his butt to get this done."
Evidently unwilling to join Goldberg in crediting the assassinated president with a moral and historic victory, Hostin complained in reply, "He wanted the ... enslaved to go back to Africa."
While Hostin tonally framed the relocation stratagem as something nefarious, the late president's ideas about providing the liberated slaves with their own country were beneficent in nature.
"I should not know what to do as to the existing institution [of slavery]," he said in a 1854 speech in Peoria, Illinois. "My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land."
Prior to issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln supported legislation that made money available "to aid in the colonization and settlement of such free persons of African descent now residing in said District, including those to be liberated by this act, as may desire to emigrate to the Republic of Haiti or Liberia, or such other country beyond the limits of the United States as the President may determine."
Lincoln also raised the possibility of having freed slaves relocate to Texas.
Critics have laid into Hostin over her suggestion that slaves willed themselves out of slavery.
"Not even Abe Lincoln is safe from Sunny Hostin's hatred of white people," tweeted MRC NewsBusters.
Conservative author Derek Hunter wrote, "If slaved basically freed themselves, why'd they wait so long? Weird."
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[H/T Blaze Media]
