It’s poetic, almost irresistible in its symmetry and sentimentality: The inauguration of the first black president of the United States, falling three weeks before the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, slain for saving the Union and freeing the slaves.
But: What if Lincoln – Barack Obama’s hero and the one of the nation’s most beloved presidents – wasn’t exactly who we think he was? What if he didn’t believe blacks were equal to whites? What if he told racist jokes, or used the “n” word casually, or, during the Civil War, sent runaway slaves back to the South, where they would likely be killed? What if all of this was true?
One of the most common challenges of any Lincoln biography – and 60 books will have been published between last fall and Feb. 12, Lincoln’s birthday – is the attempt to add to the discussion. What more could there be to learn about a man who, since his assassination, has been the subject of 14,000 books, and is exceeded only by Jesus Christ as the most written-about person in Western culture?
As it turns out, a lot.
This is not to say that much of the Lincoln myth isn’t rooted in truth – just that the less appealing parts have been excised from the mainstream textbook narrative. He did grow up poor and unschooled. He did have a reputation for kindness and honesty; both remained lifelong, much-remarked-upon character traits. But according to an oral history written by Lincoln’s longtime law partner and friend William Herndon – who suffered public scorn for depicting the slain president as imperfect – Lincoln was also a self-absorbed striver who was willing to put his political ambition above all.
As Herndon said to Ward Hill Lemon, another unpopular Lincoln biographer, “If you and I had not told the exact truth about Lincoln, he would have been a myth within a hundred years.” Herdon died before Americans opted for the myth, which calcified into conventional wisdom.
The young Lincoln was a hard-working railsplitter who was good at manual labor but hated it. He had a deep affinity for animals and small children – though his eldest, Robert, said he spoke with his father all of “10 minutes” during their time at the White House. (Robert never got over his father’s neglect.) Lincoln was also the teetotaler president who, upon hearing that his most effective general, Ulysses S. Grant, was a drunk, said, “Then send him a case of whiskey. I wish I had a dozen like him.”
He was contradictory by nature: From childhood he read, as his stepmother Sarah put it, “all the books he could get his hands on” – but would quickly toss aside any title that bored him. He was such a procrastinator that he confessed he could not study for more than 11 minutes at a time. He grew up to be popular and well-loved but as a child was friendless.
Lincoln is known to have said only one fractional sentence about his childhood, calling it “the short and simple annals of the poor.” However, as described in Michael Burlingame’s comprehensive and minutely detailed new two-volume biography, “Abraham Lincoln: A Life,” Lincoln’s childhood was bleaker and more harrowing than most are aware.
His mother, Nancy – his only familial ally – died suddenly and painfully when he was 9, of a cow-borne disease called “milk sickness.” His barely literate father, Thomas, abused the young Abe physically and mentally, often whipping him for minor infractions and throwing away his beloved books. After Nancy’s death, Thomas abandoned his children to travel in search of a new wife, and when he returned with the kindly Sarah two months later, she was shocked to find Abraham and his sister barely clothed, swollen stomachs “leathery” with hunger. When a friend defaulted on a loan that a teenage Abraham had guaranteed, Thomas hired his son out as a day laborer, for a fee ranging from 10 cents to 31 cents a day.
That led Lincoln to remark, in 1856, “I used to be a slave.”
This exaggerated sentiment – both insulting to actual slaves and touching in its clumsy expression of sympathy and regard – exemplifies the crux of the new Lincoln scholarship. How do we reconcile what we know of Lincoln’s core decency with his support, as president, of the first version of the 13th Amendment (known as the Corwin Amendment), which would have legalized slavery forever and been un-amendable? How much of what Lincoln said against blacks was out of political necessity – to play to the middle in order to get elected, and then to save the Union – and how much of it did he truly believe? How could the same young lawyer, who represented a black woman who wanted to remain free, then argue on behalf of a Kentucky farmer who wanted his runaway slaves returned? How could a man who said, in a speech at Springfield on July 17, 1858: “What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races,” then become the first American president to regularly host blacks in the White House, and to seek the counsel of black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, whom he publicly called a friend?
It’s not simply that most of this history has been written by white men. There have been whites – admittedly few, but still – that have found the idol-worship of Lincoln childish and embarrassing. In 1922, H.L. Menken wrote an essay mocking the collective need to turn Lincoln into a “plaster saint” fit for installation at YMCAs nationwide. Like many who knew the president, Menken shrewdly assessed him as a master politician who was frightened of “nothing more than the suspicion that he was an abolitionist.” In 1962, literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote “there has undoubtedly been written about him more romantic and sentimental rubbish than about any other American figure . . . The cruellest thing to happen to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of [hagiographer] Carl Sandberg.”
But it is recent work by black intellectuals that is reviving the debate and moving it forward. One of our preeminent African-American scholars, Henry Louis Gates Jr., explores this dichotomy in his new book, “Lincoln on Race & Slavery,” and his new documentary, “Looking for Lincoln,” which airs on PBS Feb. 12. In the latter, Gates talks to black writer and editor Lerone Bennett Jr. who, in February 1968, wrote an article for Ebony magazine called “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?”
(The answer, as agreed upon by most historians: Yes, but it’s complicated.)
Bennett’s piece caused outrage among white intellectuals; the New York Times Magazine quickly published a rebuttal, entitled “Was Lincoln Just a Honkie?”
In his documentary, Gates interviews Bennett, who had grown up worshipping Lincoln. Then Bennett learned that Lincoln didn’t think blacks should have the right to vote, or be allowed to sit on juries, or to testify in court, or to fight in the Union army, or to remain in America. (Through much of his presidency, Lincoln advocated colonization – deporting all blacks to Haiti and Liberia.)
Bennett’s initial reaction: “This can’t be true! This is my man Abraham Lincoln!”
As with much about Lincoln’s views on race and slavery, it is true, and it isn’t. According to all those who knew Lincoln, he was always opposed to slavery. He thought it was morally wrong. During his famous debates with Stephen Douglas – who supported slavery – Lincoln was careful to claim that whites were superior to blacks. Yet in his speech at Cooper Union in New York – credited with winning him the presidency – Lincoln spoke out against slavery, uttering the oft-cited phrase, “Let us have faith that might makes right.”
Once president, Lincoln sought to preserve the Union above all. In a letter to New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, the president wrote: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”
Today, it is rarely asked if Lincoln should have put the issue of freedom for slaves above the preservation of the Union – though it was, often, during the Civil War.
In his documentary, Gates speaks with white and black historians, all of whom acknowledge that Lincoln held racist views and advocated racist solutions. In 1858, when discussing colonization, Lincoln said of black Americans, “What’s next? Make them our political and social equals?” For most historians – Gates included – what ameliorates these truths about Lincoln is that he ruthlessly and relentlessly applied his rigorous intellect to slavery and the Civil War. The argument that Lincoln was a product of his times can be interpreted as a convenient excuse – these were the same times that saw the rise of white abolitionists. Yet, as Gates concludes in his documentary, it is unlikely that any man other than Abraham Lincoln, precisely because of his cautious, moderate approach, would have been a better president.
At his core, Lincoln was a deeply rational man. Initially opposed to allowing blacks to serve in the Union army – he had “no confidence” in them as soldiers – he changed his mind upon several realities. The North was losing. England and France were on the verge of intervening on behalf of the Confederacy. Recruiting black soldiers would deplete the South’s army and ravage their economy. He would later come to call them his “black warriors.” His views were moving ever forward. As president, he offered to personally pay the $500 fee to a slaveowner who wanted his runaway sent back.
He came to have no public tolerance for the argument that blacks were inferior to whites, and could unleash the acid side of his temperament when necessary – though, as always, his arguments were based on logic, not emotion. As he said in a letter to recalcitrant Union soldiers, “I thought that whatever negroes can be got to do as soldiers, leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do, in saving the Union. Does it appear otherwise to you? . . . If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest of motives – freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.”
Lincoln also told the famous white abolitionist Wendell Phillips that he had ordered all members of Congress and the Senate not to talk to him about slavery in the border states; according to Phillips, “They loved it & meant it should last – he hated it & meant it should die.”
Lincoln’s assassination, four days after his second inaugural, made him the first martyred American president. Whites and blacks both needed Lincoln’s death to be larger than his assassination itself, and it could not be so without surgically removing his racist failings and enshrining him as a more perfect president. It’s telling that the first monument to Lincoln was funded by former slaves with meager funds, and that this sculpture, “The Freedman’s Monument,” depicts a black man, before the president, on his hands and knees. The apotheosis of black American conflict over who Lincoln was and what he should mean came in the 1960s: Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Malcolm X said it was time to “tear down your shrines to Lincoln; he represents empty promises.”
Some 40 years earlier, one black man grappled with both views, and, like Lincoln, employed continual critical thought in search of the basic human truth. In 1922, black activist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of Lincoln: “I revere him the more because up out of his contradictions and inconsistencies he fought his way to the pinnacles of earth and his fight was within as well as without. I care more for Lincoln’s great toe than for the whole body of the perfect George Washington, who ‘never told a lie’ and never did anything else interesting.”