Wilentz on Lincoln (4)

Who Lincoln Was
And was not: the images and illusions of this momentous bicentennial year.
Sean Wilentz
Sean Wilentz

The basic connections between slavery and racism before the Civil War are straightforward. Essentially, the nation divided into three groups on the issues of slavery and race. Virtually all proslavery Americans believed absolutely in white supremacy, and thought that inferior blacks merited bondage. All Americans who believed in racial equality were adamantly anti-slavery. And most anti-slavery American whites believed, to one degree or another, that blacks were inferior. The first of these three groups, the pro-slavery forces, dominated the white South. The second group, the abolitionist radicals, represented a minority of whites in the North, and believed that slavery should be abolished immediately throughout the entire country. The third, by 1860, represented a majority of the white North, and it included a wide spectrum of views about race.

The most conservative of the nonabolitionist anti-slavery northerners were vicious racists who wanted to halt slavery's expansion in order to keep the western territories lily white. At the liberal end were those who believed that blacks, although inferior to whites, were human beings and should be emancipated. Unlike the abolitionists, these anti-slavery northerners, whatever their view of blacks, wanted to end slavery, but in accordance with what most Americans believed were the Constitution's protections for slavery where it already existed. As an important first step toward putting slavery on the defensive, they fought to prohibit slavery's expansion into the territories. Lincoln, after 1854, became a pre-eminent political leader of this broad anti-slavery group, with views on race that were decidedly at the more liberal end.

The colonization idea attracted some slaveholders in the upper South and, for a time, a few black activists in the North, as well as some non-abolitionist but anti-slavery white northerners. Again, there was a spectrum of opinion about race among the pro-colonizationists. Racist conservatives wanted to encourage colonization simply to rid the country of hateful sub-human blacks. Other supporters of colonization believed that, given the fierceness of white racial prejudice and the long chain of abuses under slavery, it would be better for whites and freedmen alike if they went their separate ways. (Some of these supporters also saw colonization as a means to prevent interracial sex and marriage, from which most white Americans publicly recoiled.) Lincoln, following his first great political hero, the Kentucky Whig slaveholder Henry Clay, held to the latter view, which as late as 1862 he supported as the best possible solution to the nation's racial torment. Anticolonizationists, meanwhile, included slaveholders and their allies, who wanted to keep black bondmen enslaved and in America, as well as white abolitionists who, along with the African Americans, slave and free, wanted to bring racial equality to America.

Gates dispenses his lessons respectably. For the most part, he places Lincoln correctly in these different groups and along these different measures, even though it requires conceding that Lincoln fell far short of our own conceptions of justice and humanity. Amid the current bicentennial emoting, it is refreshing to read an evaluation of Lincoln that refuses, as Gates writes, to "romanticize him as the first American president completely to transcend race and racism." Yet Gates presents also his own dramatic--and utterly unpersuasive--version of the fanciful "two Lincolns" script. Several basic facts of political and constitutional history elude him, as do certain nuances of political speech and political strategy. And on some crucial issues his analysis is very poor.

According to Gates, Lincoln's most "radical"--and therefore his most admirable--achievement was to overcome Jefferson's limitations and proclaim that blacks as well as whites should be included in the Declaration's "self-evident truth" that all men are created equal. Whatever he may have learned from Sally Hemings, Gates remarks suavely, Jefferson (although in principle anti-slavery) believed that blacks were sub-human, and he did not include them within his definition of men in 1776. Lincoln, by contrast, "most certainly and most impressively did"; and although this "rather radical" belief never led Lincoln to embrace full social and political equality between blacks and whites, it did propel him to the point where, at the end of his life, he declared his limited support for black suffrage--the first American president to do so.

A correction is immediately required regarding Thomas Jefferson. In 1785, Jefferson did advance in his Notes on the State of Virginia--as "a suspicion only," he added--"that the blacks ... are inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind," and he proceeded to explain why, in terms that today are hair-raising. There is a strong case to be made, on this account, that he did not have blacks in mind when he wrote the Declaration nine years earlier--although it is by no means as certain as Gates concludes. (Hopeful slaves and angry slaveholders of Lincoln's time took Jefferson at his word in the Declaration. So did Lincoln.) But as it happens, later in the Notes, Jefferson observed that slavery removed "in the minds of the people that [their] liberties are of the gift of God"--that slavery is a human usurpation of men's God-given natural rights to liberty. Gates ignores these significant observations. They suggest that although Jefferson thought blacks inferior to whites, he still considered them human beings. If so, Jefferson's thinking (though not his political action) ran closer to the "rather radical" Lincoln than Gates allows.

In any event, Jefferson, just before he left the presidency in 1809, had second thoughts about his earlier writing about black inferiority, and he hazarded ideas about slavery and race not unlike those that Gates praises in the mature Lincoln. Early in 1809, in a letter to Henri Gregoire, the French radical priest and abolitionist, Jefferson declared that he had offered his earlier views on blacks "with great hesitation," and that he had based them only on his limited personal observations, and that he wished to see their "complete refutation." Above all, Jefferson asserted, the "degree of [the blacks'] talent" ought never to become "a measure of their rights." Just because Isaac Newton was superior to others in intellect and understanding, Jefferson wrote, "he was not therefore lord of the person and property of others." Indeed, Jefferson told Gregoire that he hoped that one day blacks would be placed "on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family. " So Gates's claim that Jefferson "never stated ... in his writings" that blacks were human is simply false.





On other points, Gates takes Lincoln to task. He is inclined to endorse Frederick Douglass's assertions that Lincoln hated slavery chiefly as an economic system that degraded all labor and hurt poor whites, and that it was for the good of whites, not blacks, that he fought slavery as he did. Now, it is without question that what Foner has called the "free labor" argument against slavery did form a part of anti-slavery's principled core (just as it deeply informed the more radical abolitionists' arguments); and Lincoln certainly shared this view. But it is unfair to slight Lincoln's repeated affirmations that he also considered human bondage a moral abomination, and that blacks, as humans, had the same basic rights as whites to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is especially unfair of Gates to describe these broad rights to individual selfhood strictly as economic rights.

The unfairness becomes clearer by broadening the context to include such anti-slavery leaders as Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, the author of the famous Wilmot Proviso in 1846 that tried to restrict slavery's expansion (for which Congressman Lincoln voted and which Frederick Douglass applauded). In fighting slavery's spread, Wilmot said, he harbored no "morbid sympathy for the slave," but was trying to keep the West open for "free white laborers" and "a white man's country," and to stop any possibility that northern whites would be ruled by men who had been suckled by "some damn Negro wench." Lincoln, the native Kentuckian, occasionally used words such as "nigger" and "Cuffee" on the stump and in conversation, even after he was elected president, which would have made him a gross violator of later racial etiquette across the nation. But he did not assert the crude racism of those such as Wilmot, who insisted that they opposed slavery purely and simply in order to benefit the white man. (Wilmot, incidentally, later altered his views about slavery's cruelty to blacks.)





By concentrating on Lincoln's writings about race and slavery, Gates also misunderstands how much more besides race affected Lincoln's political approach to slavery. Apart from the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in 1865, Gates does not discuss the Constitution much, even though references to it abound in the Lincoln documents that he has selected, and even though constitutional issues were pivotal in Lincoln's thinking about both slavery and the Union. For Lincoln, to destroy slavery while destroying the Constitution would have been no victory at all, as it would demonstrate to the world that the American Revolution and republican government were follies or frauds--impervious to reform. Yet in accord with most anti-slavery men, Lincoln held that, like it or not, the Constitution tolerated and even protected slavery in the states where it already existed. How, then, could Americans abolish slavery under the terms of their own Constitution?

As of 1860, there was absolutely no possibility that Congress would pass, and that the states would ratify, a constitutional amendment banning slavery, which would have been the only peaceable and constitutional way for the federal government to outlaw bondage everywhere. Nor was there any possibility that the cotton states of the Deep South, or even the less slave-dependent states of the upper South, would abolish slavery on their own anytime soon. On that account, a minority of radical abolitionists, most conspicuously William Lloyd Garrison, concluded that the Constitution was morally bankrupt. But most of the anti-slavery forces, Lincoln among them, concluded that they would have to attack slavery where they believed the Constitution gave the federal government the power to do so, chiefly by barring slavery from the territories.

These anti-slavery advocates believed that, as an economic system, plantation slavery would have to expand or it would die. Halting its expansion thus amounted to a sentence of gradual death. (On this point, the slaveholders agreed.) Politically, the addition of new free states out of the vast territories added from the Mexican War, as well as the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase lands, would break the hammerlock that the South had long enjoyed in Washington over the slavery issue. This was what Lincoln meant when he spoke of putting slavery in the course of ultimate extinction--by containing it, as opposed to permitting slavery's expansion which, he said, would put the nation "on the high-road to a slave empire."





Some historians claim that Lincoln conceded that the choking off of slavery that he had in mind would take at least a hundred years to complete--a poor reflection on Lincoln's anti-slavery zeal. Gates accepts the claim, and writes, cuttingly, that "at that rate, some black people born in my birth year, 1950, would have been born slaves." Lincoln's actual remarks, delivered during his debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, were far less definitive, and more like throwaway lines than position statements. They hardly endorsed the concept of a gradual emancipation protracted over the century to come. But the important point is that, until the Civil War, and even through the war's opening months, most Americans thought of emancipation in terms of one form or another of gradual emancipation. That was how slavery had come to an end in parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, as well as in the northern United States. (New Jersey passed its emancipation law in 1804, yet in 1860 there were still a few slaves in the state, called "apprentices for life.")

Any proposal for gradual emancipation, in whatever form, in the United States was generally taken as a serious attack on slavery. And the slaveholders knew as much. To them, the principle of nonextension was a radical threat to slavery's survival. Thus, Lincoln's election as president in 1860, along with the election of a Republican majority in the House, was sufficient to convince the Deep South states that they ought immediately to secede from the Union.

Secession, which Lincoln called "the essence of anarchy," amounted to precisely the strike against the Constitution that was anathema to him and other anti-slavery non-abolitionists. And so Lincoln, during his first two years as president, repeatedly told his abolitionist critics that he was fighting to save the Union and not to "put down slavery" or "upset slavery"--that is, to abolish slavery in the rebel states where it already existed. But this did not mean that Lincoln (as Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists suspected) had suddenly abandoned his belief that the work on dismantling slavery ought to begin. It meant that he wanted to restore the Union as it existed in 1861--with a democratically elected federal government that was determined to commence the process of emancipation by banning slavery's expansion. When, by the spring of 1862, it became clear to Lincoln that such a restoration was no longer viable, he began looking into emancipation using his powers as commander-in-chief.





So it is impossible to understand the seriousness of Lincoln's anti-slavery politics before 1862 without paying close attention to his ideas, and to the ideas of others, about the Constitution. Yet Gates virtually ignores the Constitution, or he dismisses concerns about its integrity as underhanded evasions. This ahistorical judgment leads Gates to complain, a little obtusely, that Lincoln only occasionally and obliquely recognized slavery as the basic cause of the Civil War until he delivered his forceful Second Inaugural Address in 1865. In fact, between 1854 and 1865, virtually every speech Lincoln delivered, and every political letter that he wrote (including those that Gates reprints), made it clear, at some level, that slavery and its expansion lay at the heart of the sectional divide.

When Lincoln spoke in 1858 about a house divided against itself not being able to stand, he was not talking about divisions over state rights, or internal improvements, or the tariff. Lincoln's First Inaugural Address in 1861--in passages that Gates actually cites in his introduction and includes in his edited documents--not only defined the difference between North and South as a conflict over slavery's expansion; it also described the difference as an essentially moral struggle in which "one section of our country believes slavery is right ... while the other believes it is wrong." Was there any doubt that Dixie's secession, which triggered the war, did not chiefly concern slavery, and southern fears for slavery's future under Lincoln and the Republicans? One had only to read the official address that justified South Carolina's secession, which referred directly to "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery."

Lincoln did not, to be sure, go on, in his First Inaugural Address, to describe why he thought human bondage was cruel and intolerable, as he would in brief but powerful detail under the vastly different political circumstances of his second inauguration after four years of war. For sound political and constitutional reasons, Lincoln kept the suppression of the secessionist rebellion front and center throughout the fighting; and he framed the struggle in those terms, at least through 1862. But even before the first shot was fired, Lincoln certainly recognized that slavery was, as Gates puts it, "the origin of the war."

In effect, Gates--and he is not alone--holds that the radical abolitionist view of slavery and its immediate and total eradication is the only one worthy of respect, let alone serious consideration. He denigrates not just Lincoln but the core of the Republican Party's platform of 1860--that the containment of slavery would begin slavery's destruction--when he writes, more than a little contemptuously, that Lincoln "could live with slavery if he had to." This may express a noble morality, but it is bad history: it fundamentally distorts what Lincoln and the anti-slavery political movement actually believed, and how Lincoln and that movement--which eventually sparked secession and freed the slaves--actually evolved.



Ironically, this neglect of the political and constitutional context leads Gates, the trained literary scholar, to misunderstand how the political leader, Lincoln, used words. Lincoln's secretaries John G. Nicolay and John Hay once observed that "to measure right [Lincoln's] utterance as a whole" the surrounding "conditions ... must continually be kept in mind," but Gates does not heed the warning. Consider a conspicuous example. In the late summer of 1862, amid a pressure campaign by the radicals, the eccentric but influential left-wing Republican editor Horace Greeley criticized Lincoln for not pursuing emancipation more aggressively. Lincoln was happy to reply that he was determined to save the Union whether it would mean freeing all the slaves or freeing none of the slaves. Standing up to the importuning left wing of the Republican Party was a surefire way for Lincoln to shore up his support among moderate and conservative northerners--parsing his words carefully in order to sound cautious and responsible without in any way contradicting the constitutionalist anti-slavery views that he had proclaimed when running for president.

It was all the better--indeed, it was imperative--to do so because, unbeknownst to Greeley and his allies, Lincoln had begun drafting the Emancipation Proclamation more than a month earlier. He would sign and release to the public the preliminary version of the document only a few weeks later, when he thought the time was ripe--undercutting the radicals completely, while inevitably stirring up trouble among northern moderates and conservatives. Lincoln's reply to Greeley was not, as Gates says it was, a white moderate's declaration of his cautious and even callous determination to ignore the slavery issue in order to advance the Union cause. It was an example of Lincoln shrewdly and successfully manipulating Greeley to suit his immediate political end, which was to calm conservative fears prior to issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. Gates's headnote covering Lincoln's reply to Greeley does appreciate better the president's deeper political strategy--but also sneers at it as "a transparent attempt to disarm conservative political rivals" which heightened black leaders' distrust of Lincoln. Once again, the realities of politics--and the political realities that Lincoln faced--are trumped by an abstract moralism.




V.

This brings us again to the "two Lincolns" story. Gates's confusion about words and politics also lies behind his own variation of this myth. Lincoln, he writes, experienced a "great sea change" in his thinking about the war during the summer of 1862. Until then, supposedly, Lincoln refused to acknowledge that slavery had caused the war, and was adamant about not recruiting blacks into the army. Only after the war went badly for the Union in 1861 and 1862, Gates claims, did Lincoln conclude, in despair, that the emancipation of the slaves in the rebel states and the recruitment of black troops were acute military necessities. Yet even as he prepared to sign the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, Gates observes, Lincoln told a delegation of two anti-slavery ministers from Chicago not only that an edict of emancipation would be useless "as we are now situated," but also that he feared black soldiers lacked competence and would be overrun by the rebel forces.

Why, then, did Lincoln change his mind about recruiting blacks, including ex-slaves? Gates, the literary critic and rare-book lover, finds the key to the riddle in a literary text. Specifically, Gates proclaims that Lincoln came to his senses after reading a brief book called An Historical Research Respecting the Opinions of the Founders of the Republic on Negroes as Slaves, as Citizens and Soldiers, written by one George Livermore--a Cambridge, Massachusetts abolitionist, merchant, bibliophile, and collector of Americana--about the Founding Fathers' admiration of black soldiers during the American Revolution. One of the headnotes in Gates's book is more emphatic, stating that Livermore's writing had "persuaded" Lincoln by the late summer of 1862 about the Founding Fathers' views--a chronological impossibility at the very least, since Livermore's book was not even published until October 1862, and Lincoln did not receive a copy of it until November. Anyway, that book turns out to have been influenced by an earlier volume written by the black abolitionist William C. Nell. It was, Gates writes, "quite cleverly" presented to President Lincoln--in what Gates calls "an important, and little noted, subtle coup"--by Senator Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts radical Republican, and a friend of Livermore. In Gates's telling, the scales then fell from the president's eyes, and Lincoln changed his policies. Thereafter black soldiers fought so valiantly that Lincoln completely repudiated his earlier doubts, and became the black troops' greatest champion--a change that eventually pushed the president into contemplating limited black suffrage once the war was over.

Gates's account of Lincoln's conversion experience makes greater allowance than some historians and critics do for the military exigencies of the war. But it also amounts to a variation of the old populist story: instead of arguing that runaway slaves prompted the Emancipation Proclamation, Gates says that Lincoln's opposition to black recruitment changed with Sumner's "coup" of giving the president a book influenced by a black abolitionist writer, and that thereafter the intrepid black troops began changing his mind about blacks in general. The problem is that most of what Gates says about the decision-making behind emancipation and black recruitment is either dubious or inaccurate, and much of it is preposterous, and some of it runs afoul of basic scholarly standards.

One weakness of Gates's introduction is its almost complete neglect of Congress (apart from the Sumner-Livermore episode), and Congress's major and continuing impact both on Lincoln and the entire process of emancipation. (Through the spring of 1862, Congress passed several pieces of important emancipation legislation which Lincoln duly approved, including the abolition of slavery in the nation's territories and compensated emancipation in the District of Columbia.) Gates also misconstrues the chronology of Lincoln's thinking about emancipation and the effects of the changing military situation--matters his own documents could have helped clarify. Although the project failed, Lincoln first proposed a plan for compensated emancipation in the state of Delaware by the end of 1861--well before the military defeats of the spring and summer of 1862.

The summer of 1862 had barely begun when Lincoln read his initial draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to Secretary of State Seward and Secretary of the Navy Welles; and less than ten days later he discussed his draft at a meeting of the full cabinet. Certainly the Union reversals in the Seven Days' Battles during the last week of June had some bearing on Lincoln's decision to move ahead--but not, as Gates suggests, the continuing Union defeats that culminated in the second battle of Bull Run, which was not fought until the end of August. More important, Lincoln's thinking had more to do with the Union's securing greater political and military control in Kentucky beginning in the winter of 1861-1862. Lincoln had long feared that any premature move toward emancipation would cause Kentucky and other border states to secede, greatly complicating the Union's titanic military challenge. And even though Kentucky, like Delaware, rejected Lincoln's proposal--delivered in March 1862, and included in Gates's documents--for a general and gradual emancipation plan for the border states, a great constraint on Lincoln had been alleviated. Opportunities opened by Union military success, and not simply (as Gates reports) the harsh lessons of failure, affected the politics that led to the Emancipation Proclamation.