Un beau problème pour les historiens qui doivent déterminer quel poids accordé à l'histoire orale... Il n'y a pas de preuves formelles des comportements de Lincoln, mais il importait peu que ce soit vrai ou pas, il fallait simplement s'assurer que les esclaves le croit.
Selon des récits émanant de plusieurs sources, Abraham Lincoln aurait visité plusieurs plantations de différentes régions pour échanger avec des esclaves. Certains prétendent que le célèbre président républicain les aurait informés qu'ils seraient bientôt libres.
"Of course, these stories about Lincoln were told within a specific historical context. The people interviewing the former slaves were employees of the federal government, and most of them were white. Many were members of groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which valorized the Lost Cause. Some were even descendants of folks who owned the very people they were interviewing. Survivors of slavery had every reason to believe their white interviewers would present their stories in a way that bolstered white supremacy. And telling a quaint story about Abraham Lincoln was a clever (and relatively safe) way to push back against that.
Using Lincoln was especially powerful at a time when many Americans had co-opted Lincoln as an icon of white supremacy. The 1915 blockbuster film The Birth of a Nation, in addition to denouncing emancipation and venerating the Klan, depicted Lincoln as an enemy of the radical abolitionists and suggested that, had he lived, he would have supported immediate reunion with the South at the expense of black civil rights."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/former-slaves-stories-abraham-lincoln/552917/
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