McPherson's Review of Bennett from 8/27/00

Lincoln the Devil

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Lerone Bennett Jr. is not deceived by the tricks that fooled Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr.

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Related Link

• First Chapter: 'Forced Into Glory'

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By JAMES M. MCPHERSON

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FORCED INTO GLORY

Abraham Lincoln's White Dream.

By Lerone Bennett Jr.

652 pp. Chicago:

Johnson Publishing Company. $35.

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n 1863, the black activist Frederick Douglass visited the White House to discuss the treatment of black Union soldiers. ''I was never more quickly or more completely put at ease in the presence of a great man than in that of Abraham Lincoln,'' wrote Douglass, who praised the president's ''entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race.'' Lincoln was the first prominent white American ''who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.'' A century later, Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and began his ''I have a dream'' speech with the words: ''Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flame of withering injustice.''

Lerone Bennett Jr. will have none of it. Executive editor of Ebony and author of several books on African-American history, Bennett first attracted attention as a harsh critic of Lincoln in 1968, when he published an article in Ebony titled ''Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?'' His answer was a resounding Yes. Lincoln believed blacks inferior to whites, Bennett insisted; he supported segregation in the North, told darky jokes and used the N-word in public and private, reluctantly embraced Emancipation halfway through the Civil War only after Congress enacted it and slaves voted with their feet for freedom by escaping to Union lines, and persisted to the end of his life in the belief that ''deportation'' of blacks was the best solution to the race problems that would follow Emancipation.

Bennett's article provoked a great deal of controversy. Most Lincoln scholars considered it a tendentious work of scholarship, marred by selective evidence taken out of context, suppressive of contrary evidence, heedless of the cultural and political climate that constrained Lincoln's options and oblivious of Lincoln's capacity for growth, which enabled him to transcend the racist environment of his youth. Stung by these criticisms, Bennett bided his time and did additional research. In ''Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream,'' he has reasserted his principal arguments with extensive (though still selective) documentation in more than 600 pages of angry, relentless and repetitious prose.

This book must be taken seriously. Bennett gets some things right. Lincoln did share the racial prejudices of his time and place. He did support the idea of colonizing blacks abroad -- though, contrary to Bennett, he retreated from this notion after 1862 and moved toward a policy of assimilating the four million freed slaves as equal citizens. Lincoln did lag behind the abolitionists and the radical wing of his own party in supporting Emancipation and the enlistment of black soldiers.

But Bennett gets more wrong than he gets right. The book suffers from crucial flaws. Least important are the factual errors, for there are not many. But those that do occur make Lincoln look worse than he was. While a congressman from 1847 to 1849, Bennett asserts, Lincoln claimed to have voted 40 times against the Wilmot Proviso to ban slavery from the territories acquired from Mexico. In fact, Lincoln claimed to have voted 40 times for the Proviso (an exaggeration, but he did support it on every vote).

More significant are distortions in interpretation. After the Sioux uprising in Minnesota that killed hundreds of white settlers in 1862, Lincoln ''approved one of the largest mass executions in military history,'' the hanging of 38 Indians. True enough. But the military court had sentenced 303 Sioux to death. Despite great pressure, unmentioned by Bennett, to approve these verdicts, Lincoln pardoned or commuted the sentences of 265 defendants -- by far the largest act of executive clemency in American history.

Selective quotation also produces distortion by omission. Citing a letter Lincoln wrote to the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy in 1855, Bennett maintains that Lincoln ''did not openly oppose the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party,'' because in his district, as Lincoln explained, ''they are mostly my old political and personal friends.'' Bennett fails to note that in the rest of the letter Lincoln stated that he had already broken with these former Whig associates and anticipated the ''painful necessity of my taking an open stand against them. Of their principles I think little better than I do of those of the slavery extensionists. Indeed I do not perceive how any one professing to be sensitive to the wrongs of the negroes, can join in a league to degrade a class of white men.''

Bennett never acknowledges that Lincoln was ''sensitive to the wrongs of the Negroes.'' Abundant evidence of such sensitivity is conspicuously missing from the book. Also missing is any appreciation of Lincoln's stand against the expansion of slavery. Because the Constitution prohibited interference with slavery in states where it existed, Lincoln and other Republicans focused on the question of slavery in the territories, where they insisted that Congress had the constitutional power to ban it. In his famous House Divided speech of 1858, Lincoln said that Republicans intended to ''arrest the further spread'' of slavery and thus place the institution ''in course of ultimate extinction.''

No reader who accepts Bennett's ''unimpeachable fact'' that ''Lincoln supported the enslavement of the four million slaves'' will be able to understand why seven slave states seceded in response to Lincoln's election. Bennett quotes from a letter that Lincoln wrote in December 1860 to Alexander Stephens (who later became vice president of the Confederacy), whom Lincoln had known when they both served in Congress a dozen years earlier. ''Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would, directly, or indirectly, interfere with their slaves?'' Lincoln asked Stephens. ''There is no cause for such fears.'' So why did the South secede? Readers might have gotten part of the answer, and a different understanding of Lincoln, from a portion of this letter that Bennett did not quote: ''I suppose, however, this does not meet the case. You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub.''

It was indeed the rub, but we wouldn't know it from this book. The South seceded because a man who believed slavery was wrong and was pledged, in his own words, to its ''restriction'' and ''ultimate extinction'' had, for the first time, been elected president. The war that followed secession prompted Lincoln's decision in 1862 to issue an Emancipation Proclamation. Yet Bennett declares that Lincoln deserves no credit for freeing the slaves. The president was, he writes, a reluctant Emancipator who was ''forced into glory'' by escaping slaves, abolitionists and Congressional Republicans who passed the second Confiscation Act in July 1862, freeing the slaves of persons ''engaged in rebellion against the United States.'' This was the real Emancipation proclamation, insists Bennett. Lincoln's proclamation was a mere afterthought.

And because Lincoln's proclamation exempted the border slave states, as well as portions of the Confederacy already controlled by Northern troops (Tennessee and parts of Virginia and Louisiana), Lincoln freed slaves where he had no power to do so and left in bondage all those in areas where he did have power, Bennett asserts. Moreover, Lincoln's exemptions actually re-enslaved a half-million blacks freed by the Confiscation Act.

All parts of this interpretation are wrong, and the re-enslavement thesis is absurd. First of all, the Confiscation Act freed only the slaves of ''traitors'' whom a federal court determined, case by case, to have engaged in rebellion. As James G. Randall, the foremost expert on Civil War constitutional issues, wrote, ''It is hard to see by what process any particular slaves could have legally established that freedom which the second Confiscation Act 'declared.' ''Contrary to Bennett, no slave who had achieved freedom in areas exempted from Lincoln's proclamation was ''re-enslaved.''

The Emancipation Proclamation, moreover, was based on the president's war powers as commander in chief to seize enemy property (i.e. slaves) being used to wage war against the United States. Since Union-controlled exempted areas were not at war with the United States, Lincoln had no constitutional power over slavery in those areas.

Finally, the old canard that the Emancipation Proclamation freed not a single slave, repeated by Bennett, could not be more wrong. From Jan. 1, 1863, freedom would march southward with the Union Army, which became an army of liberation. Once the war was over, the proclamation would cease to have any legal force. That is why Lincoln endorsed a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery, and won re-election on that platform in 1864.

Bennett's Lincoln is not only a reluctant convert to Emancipation; he is also an unwavering opponent of equal citizenship for the freed slaves, beholden as he is to his ''dream'' of an all-white America. But in what turned out to be his last public speech, on April 11, 1865, Lincoln signaled that he would support the right to vote for freed slaves who were literate or had served in the Union armed forces. Bennett condemns this endorsement as an ''invidious distinction'' (because white voters would not face such requirements) of a piece with Lincoln's commitment to white supremacy. At least one listener to Lincoln's speech did not agree. ''That means nigger citizenship,'' muttered John Wilkes Booth. ''Now by God, I'll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.''

By then, Lincoln had long since abandoned his ''dream'' of colonizing blacks abroad, or what Bennett insists on calling ''deportation'' even though, as Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles noted in 1862, ''the President objected unequivocally to compulsion. Their emigration must be voluntary and without expense to themselves.'' Nor were Lincoln's motives as sinister as Bennett suggests. In 1862 the president told a black delegation, ''Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people.'' The legacy of that wrong in the form of discrimination, Lincoln feared, would long prevent them ''from being placed on an equality with the white race.'' If Lincoln still believed in 1865 that to get ahead, blacks would have to get out of the United States, he was no longer saying so. Bennett nevertheless insists that ''deportation'' was ''the only racial solution he ever had. . . . Racial cleansing became, 72 years before the Third Reich, 133 years before Bosnia, the official policy of the United States.'' Here we have Bennett's conclusion: Abraham Lincoln was no better than Adolf Hitler.

There is, of course, no doubt that Lincoln shared many of the racist convictions of his time. But while he was not a radical abolitionist, he did consider slavery morally wrong, and seized the opportunity presented by the war to move against it. Bennett fails to appreciate the acuity and empathy that enabled Lincoln to transcend his prejudices and to preside over the greatest social revolution in American history, the liberation of four million slaves.