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a
tad racist?
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and distinguished
essayist (Random Walks). His editorials appear
regularly in PJ
Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The
Trials of an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press
Canada) was launched at the National Archives in Ottawa
in September, 2012. A CD of his original songs, Partial
to Cain, appeared in 2019. His latest book, Profoundly
Superficial: Observations on a Net Zero Culture,
is now available.
Though
many do not like to admit the unpleasant truth, it
is known that Lincoln supported what was called “colonization,”
aka deportation, the returning of freed slaves to
places far from America’s shores like Haiti,
Panama, Honduras, and Liberia, the latter purchased
by the American Colonization Society, of which Lincoln
was for a time a manager, for the express purpose
of offloading American Blacks.
Lincoln
was indeed an unabashed proponent not only of “colonization”
but also of the Free Soil Party. As history professor
and Director of the War and Society Program Kyle Longley
writes, “While not embracing abolition [but]
instead ‘free soil’ (which called for
preventing the expansion of slavery into new territories
[to preserve white uniformity]), Lincoln also supported
Whig leaders including [his mentor] Henry Clay, in
calling for the resettlement of freed slaves in Africa.”
In later years, he appears to have bethought himself,
Longley argues. Longley’s dissertation adheres
to many of the authentic facts about Lincoln, but
it is plainly an intemperate and unmediated panegyric
for Lincoln, which in context renders it also somewhat
dubious.
Phillip
Magness and Sebastian Page’s Colonization
after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black
Resettlement tells a complicated but necessary
story. Historians and journalists now praise Lincoln’s
famous Jan. 1, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation for
tamping down the colonization movement, changing the
legal status of millions of slaves, and focusing the
war effort on the abolition of slavery. The problem
is that the Proclamation saw the light approximately
two years after hostilities had begun and applied
only to the rebellious territories where Lincoln had
no authority, while the North was exempt, and many
states were granted immunity. It was largely a symbolic
and wholly cynical gesture to garner support for the
Union cause, but it did not free a single slave. The
colonization movement held its ground.
In an
Aug. 14, 1862, conference at the White House with
a group of freed slaves, true to his anti-black sentiments,
Lincoln exhibited what today we would call unashamed
racism, claiming, among other such fricatives, that
“on this broad continent not a single man of
your race is made the equal of a single man of ours.”
AI tells
us that Lincoln “treated black voters to the
White House with respect and dignity,” which,
as we note, is simply not true. Caveat lector.
Elsewhere,
Lincoln states, “A separation of the races
is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation,
but as an immediate separation is impossible, the
next best thing is to keep them apart.”
As the
New York World put it, “He has proclaimed
emancipation only where he has notoriously no power
to execute it.” Indeed, for the first approximately
two years of the war, the abolition of slavery was
not the epochal issue, neither for the North nor the
South. Lincoln was no abolitionist.
Earlier,
as president-elect, Lincoln had supported a proposal
that “no amendment shall be made to the Constitution,
which will authorize or give to Congress the power
to abolish, or interfere within any State, with the
domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons
held to labor or service by the laws of said State.”
Which is to say, slavery. This was called the Corwin
Amendment, about which Lincoln declared: “Holding
such a provision to now implied Constitutional law,
I have no objection to its being made express and
irrevocable.” Only the War scuttled the amendment.
Is there
any indication, then, as Christopher Shelley claims
in The True Blue Federalist, that “Lincoln’s
proximity to blacks helped to free him from his prejudice,
and helped him to see blacks as something like full-fledged
Americans”? Would Lincoln have said, as did
Barack Obama with regard to same-sex marriage, that
his views were “constantly evolving”?
I have not seen any truly convincing evidence of Shelley’s
thesis in Lincoln’s voluminous papers.
Many have
claimed that Frederick Douglass, the celebrated black
orator of the epoch, had earned Lincoln’s respect
and caused the president to soften and alter his views
concerning Blacks. There is some truth to this assertion,
but the relationship between the two men remained
complicated. Douglass, who was, like Obama, half black/half
white, had a foot in both communities, was lessoned
in part by his slave-owner mistress, and bore the
looks with its Caucasian flair that would endear him
to whites. A commanding and persuasive oratorical
voice didn’t hurt either.
“Douglass
had been disarmed to an extent by his host’s
unpretentiousness and received a political education
of a kind,” wrote Lincoln-enthusiast, Yale historian
David Blight in his 2018 biography Frederick Douglass:
Prophet of Freedom, about the first meeting between
the two men. “Lincoln too had perhaps learned
something of how a Black leader felt about the war
. . . and the inhumanities they endured to fight it.
The president might also have sensed for future reference
how this brilliant radical pragmatist sitting with
him that morning might be useful to the nation’s
survival.” In any event, a mutual relationship
does seem to have been established.
In a speech
shortly after Lincoln’s assassination, Douglass
said. “Whosoever else have cause to mourn the
loss of Abraham Lincoln, to the Colored people of
the Country his death is an unspeakable calamity.”
Yet, on the 11th anniversary of Lincoln’s death
in 1876, Douglass delivered a speech at the dedication
of the Freedmen’s Monument in Washington. Douglass
reminded his audience of his disagreements with Lincoln
over colonization, the treatment of black troops during
the Civil War, and the president’s distressing
Reconstruction plan. “He was ready and willing
at any time during the first years of his administration
to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity
in the colored people to promote the welfare of the
white people of this country,” Douglass pronounced.
However, as noted, Lincoln may have bethought himself
afterward. The issue remains ambiguous.
As time
went by, Douglass confided to having acquired a certain
degree of appreciation of Lincoln’s pragmatism
and political savvy. Had Lincoln survived, the president
may well have regretted his earlier lack of empathy
and concern. This must be admitted as a possibility,
but it cannot be confirmed as a datum. Lincoln remains
perhaps the most enigmatic of American presidents,
and his unblemished good faith cannot be assumed.
The general tenor of his actions and declarations
prompts a degree of skepticism or should even among
his partisans.
There is no doubt, then, that Lincoln felt, over
much of his life and presidency, that there was
too much Africa in America, that he suffered what
today is called “black fatigue.” But
he also realized that such an admission would not
help him win the war. And as noted, many believe
that his relationship with Douglass may have caused
him to dramatically, or at least partially, change
his heart and mind. As I have argued, this is a
hopeful assumption, but not an indisputable fact.
Lincoln’s
final speech from the White House on April 11, 1865,
offers limited support for black suffrage, focusing
on “the very intelligent or those who serve
our cause as soldiers,” who may deserve the
franchise. We might posit, as a veiled reference,
that Douglass was obviously among the “very
intelligent.” What the future might have been
was ended by John Wilkes Booth three days later. The
evidence for Lincoln’s new direction is tantalizing
but incomplete. It is both encouraging and adroit,
both morally and politically, but his papers, so far
as we can tell, do not explicitly warrant a sea-change
in Lincoln’s sensibility.
The evidence
for the reversal of Lincoln’s earlier ways seems
predicated more on the omission of problematic expressions
than on the commission of assuring convictions. In
other words, the evidence is encouraging but not definitive.
All we can do at this point is take a more or less
educated guess and hope that Charles Dickens’
Third Ghost remains an NPC.
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