Could the Real Abe Lincoln Please Stand Up?

Article by Charlie Thompson. Edited by Lizi Trendell. Additional Research by Jon Park.

Nobody cares whether President Chester A. Arthur was a closet racist or not. Even Washington and Jefferson are often given the charity of being “men of their time” when they failed to act upon their antislavery instincts and even when they supported, as Lincoln did, the enforced deportation of feed slaves to Africa. Not so with Abraham Lincoln. Well outside the stuffy vaults of history departments, Lincoln matters.

The image of “Honest Abe” is one of America’s most popular powerful symbols. The Lincoln strewn across the pages of American school textbooks redeems America for the sin of slavery. The inherited legacy of slavery and segregation still affects America today, but Lincoln, high on his pedestal in the Lincoln memorial in Washington, is a key to both freedom from guilt and claims to equality. This messiah, killed on Good Friday 1865, died for freedom itself, the freedom that Americans enjoy today.

This Lincoln, above all, emancipated four million slaves. He said “no” to the creation of a Slaveholders’ Republic when eleven Southern states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America. He was the President who invited the veteran civil rights leader Frederick Douglass to the White House in 1864 and, in Douglass’s own words, treated him like a man, and let him know of no difference between their skins.

But one doesn’t have to go far to find Lincoln’s detractors. From the recent BBC4 documentary to rabid comments on news articles, some see Lincoln as a symbol of everything wrong with America. Not only was Lincoln a devoted white supremacist, who did all he could to keep African Americans in chains of many forms, generations of historians have covered up Lincoln gross failings in order to deceive all Americans that America really is the land of milk and honey that the Lincoln-lovers venerate. The America Lincoln fought to preserve was lily-white to the point where he wanted to expel African Americans ‘back’ to Africa. He fought to preserve the Union, not emancipation. And celebrating Lincoln detracts from what African Americans did themselves to undermine slavery.

They certainty have a point. The Ku Klux Klan held rallies in the Lincoln Memorial because they claimed he believed in their racial dystopia. D.W. Griffith in the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation portrayed Lincoln as standing up (well, in the scene Lincoln was sitting down) to the radical egalitarian visions of Radical Republican Austin Stoneman, a thinly-veiled Radical Thaddeus Stevens. He supported, and even attempted, to ‘colonise’ freed slaves in Africa. He never proposed abolishing slavery, just stopping it from spreading to territories where it could compete with free white labour. In a debate with Stephen Douglas when campaigning for the Senate in 1858 he endorsed segregation, disenfranchisement and inequality. The Emancipation Proclamation, technically, did not free anyone.

Which of these is the ‘real’ Lincoln? The debate exists in academia too. James McPherson, in the Lincoln corner, and Ira Berlin, in the “Great Vacillator” corner, have traded blows in the pages of scholarly journals.

However, to go beyond the debate we have to strip ourselves of the presentism that infects the symbolism of Lincoln. Writing Lincoln into a teleological path to the free America of racial equality or a continual history of racial oppression does America, Civil Rights and history no favours. The best arguments against racism in America are to be found in the present, not the past. We should also strip ourselves of our twenty20 hindsight that tells us America won the Civil War in the first place.

There can be little doubt that Lincoln was opposed to slavery and wanted it abolished throughout the entire country. As President he signed legislation banning slavery in all territories and Washington, DC. Proslavery Americans had always opposed this because this would result in more free states, and therefore increase the threat of emancipation by a Congress dominated by free state politicians. This long-standing Lincoln Republican policy would not have abolished slavery instantly – but in the context of sectional conflict it was seen by Americans as a statement of whether a future America would have more or less slavery. Lincoln wanted less.

Lincoln did not campaign to abolish slavery in the South simply because he could not. The constitution – then even more than now an unassailable symbol – prevented him from doing so. This is why the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to slaves in slave states and parts of the Confederacy under the control of the Union. (This is why African Americans often celebrate Juneteenth from 19th June 1865 onwards: this is when the last slaves were freed by the Union under the auspices of the Emancipation Proclamation). The Emancipation Proclamation could only be legal under the War Powers clause of the constitution that could not apply in Union territory. For that, Lincoln needed a constitutional amendment, and he was instrumental is lobbying for a second vote when the House of Representatives could not muster the necessary majority.

This was just as vital for the abolition of slavery as the heroic actions of African Americans themselves were. The two are only mutually exclusive if one wants to make the American state pro or anti slavery during the Civil War for contemporary political advantage. I like to think of the relationship as mutual: African Americans undermined slavery where they could while the Union Army, as it marched forward, emancipated where the Confederacy was strongest. 

Probing deeper into Lincoln’s racial prejudice and desire for a black-free America is more of a problem for historians, and, with its rather Whiggish aspirations, not really of interest. Given that Lincoln was happy to abandon his colonisation scheme after it failed, that Frederick Douglass found him hospitable and that his opinions on racial equality curiously changed to reflect the region he was talking in during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, I believe that Lincoln was less constrained by race than his contemporaries but hadn’t the guts to say to. Just as Lincoln did not push for a principled complete abolition of slavery because of the context of the constitution, and he did not push for a principled war for abolition (as opposed to a war for abolition) in the face of public opposition, Lincoln did not take a principled statement that racism was wrong.

In this regard, it is probably fair to describe Lincoln as a sell-out and a vacillator, even if he did believe he was slowly shifting the centre ground away from slavery and putting it on a course of ultimate extinction. The idealists like William Lloyd Garrison (who despised the political context that Lincoln navigated within and burned copies of the Constitution), the countless churches, women and antislavery societies and fugitive slaves, all marshalled public opinion against slavery. Those in the business of making moral judgements about the past might not see the compromiser as the same moral crusader. Insofar as historians are still in the business of seeing history through the lives of Great Men, however, Lincoln was vital to the antislavery struggle, and, in his heart, less likely to have been tarnished by the racism of the era.

*****

Extract from the Emancipation

“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and 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.”

The Thirteenth Amendment, Ratified December 6th 1865

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation

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