“Without the military help of the black freedman, the war against the South could not have been won.”

—  Abraham Lincoln

As quoted in Freedom's Unfinished Revolution: An Inquiry Into the Civil War https://books.google.com/books?id=8-dtOwigLNIC&pg=PA8&dq=freedman, by William Friedheim and Ronald Jackson.
Posthumous attributions

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Abraham Lincoln 618
16th President of the United States 1809–1865

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