American Freedom" (W.w. Norton). he Is the Dewitt Clinton
Professor of History at Columbia University
By ERIC FONER
Each generation, it is said, reinvents history in its own
image. This is certainly true in the case of Abraham Lincoln.
Portraits of Lincoln have gone through innumerable
permutations, depending on the era in which historians were
writing. Lincoln has been depicted as a statesman who
merged politics and moral purpose by liberating 4 million
slaves and as a political pragmatist who opposed the
radicals within his party almost as much as secessionist
Southerners. Most recently, in David Donald's masterful
biography "Lincoln," he emerged as an indecisive leader with
few firm convictions, a man constantly buffeted by events,
rather reminiscent of Bill Clinton. Rarely, however, has a
scholar launched the full-scale assault on Lincoln's
reputation that Lerone Bennett offers in "Forced Into Glory."
Although not an academic historian--he has long worked
as an editor at Ebony magazine--Bennett produced three
pioneering and important works of African American history in
the 1960s. "Before the Mayflower" surveyed the black
experience in America from the first appearance of slaves in
colonial Virginia, "Black Power USA" challenged prevailing
interpretations of Reconstruction by stressing how blacks
achieved significant political power after the Civil War and
"Pioneers in Protest" offered portraits of key leaders in black
history. Popular history at its best, these books brought the
fruits of scholarly research to a broad audience at a time
when the civil rights revolution had created tremendous
interest in America's black past.
But it was his brief article, "Was Abe Lincoln a White
Supremacist?" which appeared in Ebony in 1968, that put
Bennett on the radar screen of academic history. Seeking to
dismantle the "mythology of the Great Emancipator," Bennett
argued that Lincoln "shared the racial prejudices of most of
his white contemporaries." He resolutely opposed black
suffrage and other expressions of racial equality and freed
few if any slaves with his famous proclamation. Far from
being a symbol of racial harmony or enlightened white
leadership, Bennett concluded, Lincoln embodied the
nation's "racist tradition."
Apart from Bennett's indignant tone, little in the Ebony
piece was actually new. Millions of readers had already
encountered Richard Hofstadter's brilliant portrait of Lincoln
in "The American Political Tradition," which belittled the
Emancipation Proclamation as lacking "moral grandeur" and
pointedly juxtaposed Lincoln's 1858 speech in Chicago
affirming the equality of man with his address the same year
in pro-slavery Southern Illinois in which he insisted that he
opposed "bringing about in any way the social and political
equality of the black and white races." In the early 1960s,
Malcolm X urged blacks to "take down the picture" of
Lincoln--that is, to place their trust in their own efforts to
secure racial justice rather than waiting for a new white
emancipator. In 1968, however, with so many national icons
tumbling from their pedestals and Black Power the new
rallying cry of the black movement, Bennett's article struck a
powerful chord. It also evoked a furious counterattack from
Lincoln scholars intent on defending Lincoln's credentials as
a racial egalitarian. Henceforth, no one writing about Lincoln
could ignore the subject of his racial outlook.
Now, three decades later, Bennett has produced a
full-scale elaboration of his argument that Lincoln was a
racist and a supporter, not a foe, of slavery. In brief, Bennett's
indictment runs as follows: As an Illinois legislator,
congressman and political leader before the Civil War,
Lincoln opposed the abolitionists, supported enforcement of
the fugitive slave law, favored removing all blacks from the
United States and explicitly endorsed the state's laws barring
blacks from voting, serving on juries, holding office and
intermarrying with whites. According to the reminiscences of
his contemporaries, he enjoyed minstrel shows and used
the word "nigger" in private conversation and sometimes in
speeches.
As president, Bennett continues, Lincoln initially allowed
the four slave states that remained within the Union during
the Civil War--Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri--to
dictate his policy toward slavery. Bennett says that Lincoln
refused to free and arm the slaves because of his ingrained
racism. Credit for emancipation should go not to Lincoln but
to abolitionists such as Wendell Phillips and to Radical
Republicans in Congress, who in 1862 pushed through the
Second Confiscation Act, freeing slaves of owners who
supported the Confederacy. The Emancipation Proclamation,
Bennett insists, did not free a single slave because it applied
only to areas outside Union control. In fact, Lincoln designed
it to "save as much of slavery as he could." To the end of his
life, in Bennett's view, Lincoln was a devoted proponent of
white supremacy.
* * *
Repetitious, full of irrelevant detours and relentlessly
polemical, "Forced Into Glory" is not likely to convince many
readers who do not already believe that Lincoln was an
inveterate racist. But the book deserves attention, for it
contains insights into Lincoln's era and the ways historians
have treated the 16th president. Bennett offers a valuable
discussion of the notorious Black Laws of pre-Civil War
Illinois, which not only denied blacks basic civil and political
rights but also required any black entering the state to post a
bond of $1,000. He highlights little-known acts of Congress
that paved the way for emancipation--not only the
Confiscation Act of 1862 but also the earlier revision of the
military code that forbade soldiers to return fugitive slaves to
bondage and a later measure that freed the families of black
men who enlisted in the Union army, effectively destroying
slavery in the loyal border states where the Emancipation
Proclamation did not apply.
Most important, perhaps, Bennett presents compelling
evidence of how historians have consistently soft-pedaled
Lincoln's racial views. Previous scholars, he rightly points
out, downplay or ignore Lincoln's commitment to colonizing
blacks outside the country, a position he inherited from his
political hero, Henry Clay, and advocated publicly for almost
his entire political career. This was no passing fancy: Lincoln
mentioned the idea in numerous prewar speeches, two State
of the Union addresses, several cabinet meetings and in a
notorious meeting with black leaders at the White House, at
which he urged them to encourage their people to emigrate.
Lincoln was hardly the era's only colonizationist--virtually
every major political leader of the early republic, including
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Andrew Jackson and
John Marshall, supported the idea. Their ideal America was a
white republic. But historians have found Lincoln's embrace
of colonization embarrassing and have emphasized--through
what Bennett calls the "fallacy of the isolated
quotation"--Lincoln's condemnations of slavery while ignoring
his support of colonization.
Writers on the Civil War era are almost certain to quote
Lincoln's allusion to the "monstrous injustice" of slavery in
his Peoria speech of 1854 but not the passage in the same
speech asserting that he would prefer to send the slaves,
once freed, "to Liberia--to their own native land" (a term he
used even though some blacks' ancestors had been in North
America longer than Lincoln's). They cite his message to
Congress in December 1862 with its eloquent passage
about the "fiery trial" through which the nation was passing
but rarely note that, in the same speech, Lincoln not only
affirmed "I strongly support colonization" but for the first time
used the ominous word "deportation."
If, on colonization, Bennett scores some powerful points
against existing Lincoln scholarship, his argument as a
whole seems overwrought. Bennett is the kind of critic who
cannot take yes for an answer. Thanks, in part, to his 1968
article, few historians today refer to Lincoln as a racial
egalitarian and discussions of the Emancipation
Proclamation almost always emphasize its limitations as
well as its broad impact. It would be hard to find a book
published in the last 20 years that portrays Lincoln freeing all
the slaves with a stroke of his pen. Nor are Radical
Republicans and abolitionists, as Bennett claims, still viewed
as fanatics and zealots bent on punishing the white South.
Today's historical works are more likely to emphasize the
idealism of Wendell Phillips, Thaddeus Stevens and
Frederick Douglass, much as Bennett does in this book.
Historians today are far more sensitive to issues of race than
when Bennett first wrote about it. And judging from textbooks,
even today's schoolchildren imbibe a far more nuanced view
of Lincoln than the one that Bennett is attacking.
Bennett, however, is after larger game. Lincoln, for him,
stands as a symbol of core American myths and values, "the
key," as he writes, "to the American personality." By
demythologizing Lincoln, he hopes to demonstrate the
centrality of racism in all of American culture--today, as in the
19th century. Thus, Bennett is not content to show that
Lincoln held racist views. Racism, Bennett insists, was
Lincoln's most deeply held belief, "the center and
circumference of his being." The Great Emancipator, he
asserts, was, in reality, "one of the major supporters of
slavery in the United States" and "in and of himself, and in his
objective being, an oppressor." These statements are totally
unfounded.
Prosecutorial briefs rarely make for satisfying history.
Bennett is guilty of the same kind of one-dimensional reading
of Lincoln's career as are the historians he criticizes. If they
downplay Lincoln's racism and emphasize instead his
anti-slavery and egalitarian rhetoric (that is, his statement that
the "equality of man" is the "central idea" of the American
nation, his soaring language accusing Stephen A. Douglas of
"blowing out the moral lights around us" for refusing to
oppose the expansion of slavery), Bennett dismisses such
statements as meaningless rhetoric--"this was not an
argument about rights and realities; it was an argument
about words."
Which was the real Lincoln, the racist or the opponent of
slavery? The unavoidable answer is both. Bennett cannot
accept that it was possible in 19th century America to share
the racial prejudices of the time and yet simultaneously
believe that slavery was a crime that ought to be abolished.
Nor is Bennett convincing in his account of Lincoln's policies
toward slavery during the Civil War or in his belittling of the
Emancipation Proclamation as a meaningless "ploy"
designed to perpetuate slavery as long as possible. The
Proclamation may not have freed many slaves on the day it
was issued, but it marked a turning point in the war and in
Lincoln's own policy. It ignored colonization and, for the first
time, authorized the large-scale enlistment of black soldiers
in the Union army. In making the destruction of slavery a
Union objective, it transformed a war of armies into a conflict
of societies and ensured that Northern victory would produce
a social revolution within the South.
Contemporaries fully understood the Proclamation's
significance--among them the slaves, free blacks and white
abolitionists who celebrated its issuance on Jan. 1, 1863. So
did Karl Marx, observing American events from London. "Up
to now," Marx wrote, "we have witnessed only the first act of
the Civil War--the constitutional waging of war. The second
act, the revolutionary waging of war, is at hand."
Once the proclamation had been issued, Lincoln
embraced the role of Emancipator and refused demands that
he abandon or modify it. (Were he to do so, he told one
visitor, "I should be damned in time and eternity.") He had
been reluctant to employ black soldiers but came to believe
them critical to the Union's eventual victory. To secure
emancipation against a future national retreat, he insisted
that any supporter of the Confederacy seeking a pardon from
the federal government pledge to support the abolition of
slavery. In 1864 while the war still raged, he sought to bring
Louisiana back into the Union under a new constitution that
outlawed slavery and worked tirelessly to secure the
passage of the 13th Amendment, abolishing the institution
throughout the country.
* * *
By the end of the war, Lincoln, for the first time, called
publicly for limited black suffrage in the postwar South. These
developments--striking examples of his capacity for growth
that characterized the last two years of Lincoln's life--are
strongly emphasized in LaWanda Cox's 1981 work "Lincoln
and Black Freedom," a brief for the defense in the case of
Lincoln, race and slavery. But Bennett says nothing about
them, except to criticize Lincoln for not enfranchising all black
men and, indeed, ignores Cox's book.
Lincoln was not an abolitionist or Radical Republican, a
point Bennett reiterates innumerable times. He did not favor
immediate abolition before the war and held racist views
typical of his time. But he was also a man of deep convictions
when it came to slavery, and during the Civil War he
displayed a remarkable capacity for moral and political
growth. If America ever hopes to resolve its racial dilemmas,
we need to repudiate the worst of Lincoln, while embracing
the best.
- - -
Eric Foner Is, Most Recently, the Author of "The Story of
American Freedom" (W.w. Norton). he Is the Dewitt Clinton
Professor of History at Columbia University