Wilentz on Lincoln (6)

Sean Wilentz

Gates is mindful of Frederick Douglass's excoriating comments, delivered in 1876, that, owing in part to his pro-colonization views, Lincoln was "preeminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men." (Following Lincoln's assassination in 1865, Douglass had called Lincoln "emphatically the black man's president: the first to show any respect for their rights as men," but Gates, who quotes the speech as one of his epigraphs, elides this contradiction.) Gates thus gives Lincoln's critics their due, batting back and forth two primary sources that, he claims, might lend their case credence. In 1886 and again in 1892, General Benjamin Butler asserted that, in two meetings with Lincoln in 1865, he received a commission from the president to investigate the practicality of colonization. Earlier, beginning in 1868, Gideon Welles published a series of articles that stated Lincoln always linked emancipation and colonization. Ominously calling the sources deeply "troubling" if "problematic," Gates runs at length through the pro and cons.

Gates's inquiry quickly begins to look like a wild goose chase. Butler's claims are flawed by inaccuracies and logical inconsistencies. Almost any scholar in the field could have told Gates (as, he reports, David Herbert Donald actually did try to tell him) that Butler was, in Donald's words, "a thoroughly untrustworthy witness." More important, Butler's own account states that it was he, Butler, who initially raised the possibility of a colonization scheme in Panama. As usual, Lincoln said nothing too committal either way. He listened politely, and his visitor went away convinced that the president agreed with him. Finally Gates himself is forced to conclude that Butler either misremembered events or purposely tried "to press Lincoln into service for [his] own personal and political cause."

As for Welles, Gates merely infers his claim that Lincoln held fast to his pro-colonization views after 1862. Welles's actual articles are at best ambiguous about the concluding years of the war. Yet none of this rattles Gates, who concludes with the self-assured pronouncement that "I find it perfectly reasonable that a war-weary Abraham Lincoln" wondered about "the feasibility of colonizing the bulk of the former slaves" in 1865.

Even if Gates's assertion was based on facts and not on speculation, it would not be particularly important. After all, Lincoln took no public steps toward advancing colonization from January 1, 1863, until the day he died. The actual sources, meanwhile, do little to undermine John Hay's diary entry of July 1, 1864: "I am happy that the President has sloughed off that idea of colonization." (Gates attaches significance to a letter that Lincoln wrote in late November 1864, which in fact did nothing to revive colonization or to indicate Lincoln had the least interest in doing so.) What becomes clearer, although Gates does not explore the matter, is that in 1865 Lincoln had yet to arrive at a coherent vision of what to do after the war was won--that he was feeling his way as he always did, adapting principles to circumstances, figuring out the most feasible way to move the country ahead, but with less clarity than ever about what path to follow, now that slavery was doomed.





It is fitting that it is Frederick Douglass's criticisms of Lincoln that instigate Gates's strained discussion of colonization, for Douglass looms large throughout this book, and especially in Gates's final evaluation of Lincoln, which ends with a direct quotation from Douglass. More than fifty years ago, the easily caricatured but politically gifted Senator Everett Dirksen, Republican of Illinois (then still a member of the House), observed that the first task of any politician is "to get right with ... Lincoln." Today it sometimes appears that the first task of any American historian of the nineteenth century is to get right with Frederick Douglass. As an escaped slave turned abolitionist agitator, a scintillating orator, a fearless editor, a race man, an integrationist, a feminist (at least at Seneca Falls in 1848), and more, the admirable Douglass embodied, better than any American of his time, everything that today's academy feels is worthy of supreme honor. In scholarly writings, Douglass invariably gets cited positively. His words cast an aura of nobility that can shut down any dispute. Some historians still sanctify Abraham Lincoln, but for many, if not most, Frederick Douglass is now the era's true hero.

Douglass had an ambivalent view of Lincoln, which Gates discusses in some detail. Although he often praised Lincoln as "the greatest statesman that ever presided over the destinies of this Republic," Douglass also denounced his failure to embrace emancipation in 1861 (arguing that the Union would have swiftly crushed the South) as well as his efforts to encourage voluntary colonization. Gates observes that Douglass, in his ambivalence, contained what Gates calls "the duality in assessment that continues to manifest itself among black politicians and scholars," from the worshipful Booker T. Washington to the excoriating Malcolm X and Lerone Bennett Jr. "to the more nuanced yet strongly favorable assessment of Barack Obama."

Gates's own assessment, in line with what he takes to have been Douglass's analysis, tries to embrace all of these views and add some touches of his own, criticizing Lincoln beyond what the historical evidence discloses, but also praising him. Yet even in his praise of Lincoln, Gates oddly scuttles politics. He cites an essay written in 1922 by W.E.B. Du Bois, who decried Lincoln's "shifty political methods," which called Lincoln a monumental historical figure because "he was big enough to be inconsistent--cruel, merciful; peace-loving, a fighter; despising Negroes and letting them fight and vote; protecting slavery and freeing slaves." To Gates, this translates into prizing Lincoln because "he wrestled with his often contradictory feelings," and "faced and confronted his own prejudices, and, to a remarkable extent, overcame them." (What a fine guest on Oprah Lincoln would have been!) By combining different African American perspectives on Lincoln, no matter how mutually exclusive; by quoting friends and putative authorities, black and white, all the way from Harvard to The New Yorker; and by ending on a positive bicentennial note, Gates does his best to get right with Douglass. He is ready for his gig on PBS. Nobody's wrong if everybody's right.

There is one pro-Lincoln passage from Douglass's speech of 1876, though, that gives Gates a little trouble, because it defends the political side of Lincoln that Gates thoroughly condemns. "Had [Lincoln] put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union," Douglass conceded, "he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined." However much, during the war, Douglass may have quietly appreciated Lincoln's statesmanship--by which he meant Lincoln's political skill--he came to appreciate it more years later. It is this crucial core of Lincoln, the political leader, that Gates, the literary critic, cannot fathom.



VII.

Another book by another literary historian is all about Lincoln and Douglass. Even before its publication, John Stauffer's Giants began to exert its influence, as Gates relied on Stauffer's interpretations of Lincoln at various points in his own book. Stauffer's stated objective is to juxtapose the lives of two "giants," two great men who "stood at the forefront of a major shift in cultural history"--the shift that extended freedom and equality to blacks as well as whites. Yet even though he intends the book as in part a monument to Lincoln, he winds up maligning as well as misunderstanding Lincoln's anti-slavery politics. Somehow Lincoln keeps eluding his admirers.

Stauffer writes about the Civil War era in ways that are at once up-to-the-minute and old-fashioned. In accord with the latest trends in the field of American Studies, he fixes on the emotional content of politics, with particular interest in friendships between black men and white men. His first book, The Black Hearts of Men, which served as a springboard for Giants, examined the connections and the activities of four uncompromising abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and John Brown, who were brought together in the tiny and short-lived Radical Abolition Party in 1855. Stauffer was fascinated by their empathetic radicalism about race, which led one of the four, Gerrit Smith, who was also one of the richest men in the country, to declare that he would "make myself a colored man."

A century before Norman Mailer's "white negro," there arose at the radical fringes of the anti-slavery movement, as Stauffer discovered, a highly racialized sense of righteousness in the name of eliminating racial hierarchy. (Stauffer summarized his quartet's central belief, again in keeping with current humanistic usage, as the constructed "performative" self of an outsider: "The true spiritual heart was a black heart that shared a humanity with all people and lacked the airs of superiority of a white heart.") One member of Stauffer's group, the physician and literary critic James McCune Smith, who was the most highly educated black man in the country, called their sacred pursuits a form of "Bible Politics," which Stauffer describes as the belief that "the government of God and earthly states should be one and the same." The Radical Abolitionists, in short, undertook a millennial flight from politics. This is completely recognizable to anyone familiar with the radical fringes of the late-1960s New Left, with its renunciation of "white skin privilege." Stauffer prefers to see it as a kind of failed transcendence.

Not surprisingly, the effort ended badly--in violence and in insanity. Gerrit Smith, the party's mainstay, temporarily lost his mind after authorities identified him as one of the chief conspirators supporting his fellow "colored man" John Brown, after Brown's suicidal raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. Once he had partially recovered, Smith decided that blacks truly were inferior to whites, and he endorsed colonization. One might easily conclude that Smith was drawn to extreme doctrines, noble and ignoble. Stauffer prefers psychology, speculating that Smith's racist turn was his way "to exorcise his feelings of guilt" over the deaths of innocents at Harpers Ferry--and that thereby, tragically, Smith "lost his black heart."

Stauffer's sympathy for performative cross-racial self-fashioning as a strategy to destroy slavery and racial injustice is in tune with what is known as "whiteness studies" among cultural historians and critics. This approach construes race as the primary identity of consequence in American politics, and it construes "whiteness" as something tantamount to original sin. It also conflates politics with culture and psychology, which is yet another way to sound deeply political while evading politics and political history. More traditional, though, are Stauffer's sympathies for the purity and the boldness of the radicals, in contrast to the moral flaccidity and the corruption of the world around them, including mainstream party politics. Those sympathies reappear in Giants and dominate its interpretations of Douglass and Lincoln.





The idea of pairing the two men has been much in the air over the last few years. The thesis of Lincoln and Douglass: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union, by the writers and amateur historians Paul Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick, which appeared in 2007, is pretty much summed up by its unwieldy subtitle. Lincoln, the white supremacist who hated slavery, began the Civil War aiming simply to save the Union, whereas Douglass, one of the only blacks Lincoln respected, held fast to his uncompromising abolitionism. Yet the two formed a mutual understanding between 1863 and 1865, as Douglass's fiery speeches and writings helped to persuade Lincoln that the war could not be won without emancipation and the enlistment of black soldiers.

With far greater subtlety and historical understanding, James Oakes's The Radical and the Republican, which also appeared in 2007, traces how two very different men, following fundamentally different sets of political imperatives, eventually converged. One of the finest current scholars of the Civil War era, Oakes understands perfectly well that, however Lincoln viewed blacks, he had long hated slavery--with as much conviction, Oakes claims, as the radical ex-slave Douglass. Their differences had to do with their respective political positions. Douglass, the radical reformer, had no formal power, and could agitate as he pleased to proclaim his principles and persuade others. Lincoln had enormous power and enjoyed its possession, and accepted the mottled responsibilities of the presidency. Those duties, in his understanding, necessitated pragmatic compromise and negotiation in step with public opinion, as well as adherence to his official oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. "It is important to democracy that reformers like Frederick Douglass could say what needed to be said," Oakes wisely observes, "but it is indispensible to democracy that politicians like Abraham Lincoln could do only what the law and the people allowed them to do." And, he might have added, it was indispensible for the nation, and above all the slaves, that Lincoln performed as president as well as he did.

Stauffer approaches Douglass and Lincoln, and defines his task, very differently. The ex-slave and the politician, he asserts, were oddly similar, despite the racial difference. Both were self-made men in the nineteenth-century American mold. Douglass escaped the vicious world of bondage and rose, through self-education and hard work, to become one of the greatest American orators and intellectuals of his time or any other. Lincoln escaped the vicious world of white rural poverty and rose, through selfeducation and hard work, to become one of the greatest American orators and intellectuals of his time or any other. As young men, they read many of the same books. Both turned to humor to overcome despair.

To be sure, Stauffer claims, Douglass "brilliantly exposed Lincoln's limitations as a champion of freedom." And this is really the book's central argument: that once the sectional crisis began, Douglass, the fearless and uncompromising social revolutionary, by turns denounced and encouraged the anti-slavery conservative Republican Lincoln--and Lincoln finally saw the light. Stauffer also notes that the two men were able to put aside their political differences and become friends who "genuinely liked and admired each other." Douglass and Lincoln only met on three occasions, the last time fleetingly at a crowded East Room reception at the White House after Lincoln's second inauguration. There is abundant evidence, from 1863 through 1865, that they truly held each other in high mutual esteem; and Lincoln, during their second meeting as well as in the East Room, referred to Douglass as "my friend." This is enough to persuade Stauffer that he has located another rare but singularly important interracial friendship in antebellum America.