Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.
This is what a responsible party does. Its members assess the magnitude of credible evidence of wrongdoing, the severity of the alleged conduct, and the moral and political cost of defending a scoundrel, and then put decency and good governance ahead of tribal loyalty. This is not a weakness; it affords them moral authority and reaffirms the trust that voters place in elected officials.
The Republicans time and again have shown that they would never do such a thing. They exonerated disgraced former president Donald Trump twice despite replete evidence of impeachable conduct. They did not demand he leave the race in 2016 after the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced; they supported him again in 2020 despite learning he had made payoffs to women with whom he allegedly had extramarital affairs and was accused of rape by E. Jean Carroll (Trump denies Carroll’s allegation). The same Republicans who dinged Neera Tanden, President Biden’s withdrawn nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, for spicy tweets excused four years of vile, racist, misogynistic language from the head of the party. And, despite his role in sparking a violent insurrection, Republicans still support him as the leader of their party.
And it is not just the former president who gets a pass. Not a single Senate Republican has called for discipline against Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) or Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) for pushing the Big Lie about a stolen election and seeking to overturn an election. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is not disciplined despite spreading Russian propaganda and the lie that insurrectionists at the Capitol were infiltrated by antifa. And don’t expect any Republican to demand Johnson’s resignation after his latest outrageous comments in a radio interview, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:
“I knew those were people who love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, so I wasn’t concerned,” Johnson said about the predominantly white crowd that marched to the U.S. Capitol to overturn a presidential election and triggered an assault that left five people dead, 140 police officers injured and windows smashed.“Now, had the tables been turned, and Joe — this is going to get me in trouble — had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa, I might have been a little concerned.”
The irony is that the GOP used to fancy itself as the party of personal responsibility and public rectitude. Now it is a party of professional victims, wallowing in the myth of anti-White racism, incensed when presented with the concept of implicit bias and ready to smear women of color nominated for key posts for the same conduct that Republicans tolerated from White men. (Perplexed that police groups could support a progressive woman of color such as Vanita Gupta, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas actually accused her defenders last week of coercing police organizations into giving enthusiastic endorsements, an allegation entirely without support, fiercely denounced by police groups and revealing of his own biases about police and civil rights leaders.)
It is not hard to see why the difference between the parties regarding their willingness to police their own has become so stark. Democrats embrace and rely upon multi-racial democracy, so they feel compelled to defend it. They think government can be a force for good; they therefore have an interest in throwing out the crooks, the louts and the serial liars.
Republicans have embraced voter suppression and White grievance-mongering, so they excuse — or even defend — racist or misogynistic outbursts. They have to convince White males that they are the true victims, so apologizing to the victims of their prejudice is out of the question. And governance? If see your job as performance art for right-wing media, you do not mind having clueless, lazy and dishonest people in charge of government.
Leave your state during a blackout and lie about your vacation plans? Sure, own the libs! Defend White supremacists who look like you but not peaceful Black protesters? Infuriate the media elites!
Sadly, we have only one major party that is fit to govern in a constitutional, multi-racial democracy that demands accountability and self-control from elected officials. The other party has deteriorated into a group of apologists for sexual violence, racism, insurrection and habitual lying. Worse, tens of millions of Americans are all too happy to go along with the latter because, well, own the libs!
Thirty years later, Bennett further damaged Lincoln’s stature with a six-hundred-page magnum opus, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream. Bennett told readers that his book was “a political study of the uses and abuses of biography and myth” and argued that “your
13. Horne, “Toward a Transnational Research Agenda,” 288–303.
14. Horne, “Toward a Transnational Research Agenda,” 293; Hogan, Lincoln, Inc.,154; Holzer, ed., Lincoln Anthology, 435–38; Barry Schwartz, “The Limits of Gratitude: Lincoln in African American Memory,” OAH Magazine of History, January 2009, 27–32; Eric J. Sundquist, ed., The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Jeffrey B. Perry, ed., The Hubert Harrison Reader (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Uni- versity Press, 2002), 130–36; John David Smith, “Black Images of Lincoln in the Age of Jim Crow,” Lincoln Lore, no. 1681 (March 1978), 1–4.
50 Lincoln in the Writings of Lerone Bennett, Jr.
identity, whatever your color, is based, at least in part, on what you think about Lincoln, the Civil War, and slavery.” And in Bennett’s view this in uence was vitally important “because Abraham Lincoln is not the light, because he is in fact hiding in the light, hiding our way.”15Forced into Glory not only attempted to discredit Lincoln; it indicted the entire American historical profession for portraying Lincoln as a Great Emancipator when he was actually an oppressor. Lincoln scholars had argued that the white supremacist statements Lincoln uttered and the colonization plans he pursued were to a degree attempts to cater to nineteenth-century voters, but Bennett maintained that Lincoln’s great speeches were words that hid his real agenda: to deport every black person out of the United States and thus create a less pluralistic country, one exclusively for white people.16 From Bennett’s standpoint Lincoln scholars were complicit in shrouding this truth from Americans and thus hindering racial progress. “The issue posed by all this is not the state of the soul of Abraham Lincoln but the state of the soul of the Republic,” Bennett declared, “which nds its deepest moral values in a White supremacist who opposed integration and wanted to deport all Blacks. One can say that the Republic has been unfortunately deluded by scholars who have systematically hidden the truth in one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of scholarship.”17 Bennett shared at least one characteristic with all of Lincoln’s enemies, past and present, in that he presented himself as an intellectual pioneer, an iconoclast, a debunker of myths devoted to the truth that had been suppressed by an allegedly nefarious Lincoln cult blind to the reality of its awed idol. Bennett’s numerous charges, despite the intense criticism of Lincoln that had circulated throughout the United States since 1858, made more plausible those libertarian and neo-Confederate accusations that the Civil War was not fought over slavery, which was not Lincoln’s real concern, but was instead waged, as both groups vociferously argued, to expand federal power over the states.
Forced into Glory elaborated in much greater depth and more strident rhetoric Bennett’s central contention that the Emancipation Proclama- tion freed no slaves. The proclamation “enslaved and/or continued the enslavement of a half-million slaves, more slaves than it ever freed. Let’s rephrase it and put it another way: On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln reenslaved and/or condemned to extended slavery more Blacks than
15. Lerone Bennett Jr., Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (2000; rpt., Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 2007), preface, 42.
16. I heard historian Gerard J. Prokopowicz make this point, or one very close to it, in a talk given in Richmond, Virginia, in 2009.
17. Bennett, Forced into Glory, 84; see 123–27 for more of Bennett’s criticism of historians.
John M. Barr 51
he ever freed.”18 In Bennett’s view Lincoln never wanted to end slavery. Instead, it was the abolitionists who pressured Lincoln to rid the na- tion of slavery, Congress through its Con scation Acts (bills Lincoln signed into law), the slaves who ran away from the farms and planta- tions during the con ict, and those who played a role in passing the Thirteenth Amendment who truly deserved acclaim for abolition.
The idea that Lincoln was forced by events to emancipate the slaves was hardly original. Carter Woodson had made the same point decades earlier.19 Nor was it shocking that a politician in a democracy might be in uenced by public opinion to enact a policy he long favored. Indeed, in 1864 Lincoln said as much in a letter to Albert Hodges of Kentucky: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”20 What made Bennett’s claim extraordinary was not simply that Lincoln was coerced into freeing the slaves but that he was an actual hindrance to their emancipation. His argument was, to an extent, in opposition to previous African American critics of the president. Although men such as Archibald Grimké, Hubert Harrison, and W. E. B. Du Bois had expressed decidedly negative opinions about Lincoln, their stance did not necessarily constitute loathing insofar as they had also called Lincoln “great,” America’s “greatest president,” and “perhaps the greatest gure of the nineteenth century.”21 Ben- nett, however, sharply disagreed with such characterizations. In his view the United States would have been better served had Lincoln not been president: “Lincoln was at best an incidental, accidental rider of a liberating wave that probably would have crested sooner—and higher—without him.”22 He cited philosopher Sidney Hook’s argu- ment in The Hero in History that throughout history there are two types of men: “The eventful man in history is any man whose actions in u- ence subsequent developments along a different course than would have been followed if these actions had not been taken.” In contrast, “the event-making man is an eventful man whose actions are the con- sequence of outstanding capacities of intelligence, will, and character
18. Ibid., 13.
19. Schwartz, “Limits of Gratitude,”27.
20. , Abraham Lincoln to Albert G. Hodges, April 4, 1864, Roy P. Basler, et al., eds.,
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 7:282.
21. Archibald Grimké, “Abraham Lincoln and the Fruitage of His Proclamation,”American Missionary 63, no. 2 (February 1909): 51–53; Hubert Harrison, “Lincoln and Liberty—Fact versus Fiction,” Negro World, March 5, 1921, 8; W. E. B. Du Bois quoted in Holzer, ed., Lincoln Anthology, 436.
22. Bennett, Forced into Glory, 44.
52 Lincoln in the Writings of Lerone Bennett, Jr.
rather than accidents of position.”23 Bennett made it very clear that he believed Lincoln was the former, “the bene ciary of events that he neither shapes and, in Lincoln’s case, opposed.”24
According to Bennett, if Lincoln did not actually believe in freeing the slaves, or only did so because he had to, then what the president truly advocated was white supremacy coupled with the colonization of black Americans outside the United States. Here Bennett made his most controversial claims about Lincoln (and really about the country that venerated him). He maintained that Lincoln as much as anyone else in nineteenth-century America did not subscribe to the idea of a multiracial nation. Indeed, if his colonization policies had been ful lled, America would have remained racially exclusive: “For if Lincoln had been a strong and effective leader, there would be no Blacks here, not even the Blacks who say he was the strongest and best U.S. president. . . . At the same time,” Bennett asserted, “if Lincoln had succeeded there would be no Broadway, no musical comedy, no American music, no Grammy and Rock ’n’ Roll, no Beatles or Ger- shwin or Copland or Fred Astaire, no American athletics to speak of, no Jim Brown or Michael Jordan or Dr. J., a thin White gruel of pale religion and food, and a Constitution and a democracy lacking the ballast of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments and the singing summons of Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., Earl War- ren, and Bill Clinton, an America, in short, without color, rhythm, and soul—Australia with a Mississippi River.”25 Like Lincoln’s neo- Confederate opponents, Bennett thought Lincoln’s presidency was theturning point in American history, not because he succeeded in win- ning the war or freed the slaves or centralized power in Washington, D.C., but because his white supremacist policies failed.
From Bennett’s standpoint Lincoln was an indecisive leader morally indifferent to slavery and oppression. Lincoln was “the archetype of the sensitive, suffering, ineffectual, fence gure—in America, in the Third Reich, in Algeria, in South Africa—who is born on a fence and lives and dies on a fence, unable to accept or reject the political evil that de nes him objectively.” Unlike those critics who saw Lincoln as Hitlerian in his expansion of executive power and his war crimes, Bennett claimed that Lincoln was a compromiser, a racist like those Germans who stood idly by while the Nazis carried out the Holocaust. “Lincoln was in and of himself, and in his objective being, an oppressor,” a conservative,
23. Hook, The Hero in History (1943; reprt., New York: Cosimo Classic, 2008), 154. 24. Bennett, Forced into Glory, 43.
25. Ibid., 51. For more on Bennett’s view of Lincoln’s racism, see 197.
John M. Barr 53
when “to be a conservative at a time of extreme oppression, as in South Africa, as in the Third Reich, as in the Slave South, at a time when to be moderate is to be culpable, and to be a conservative is to be an ac- complice, is to be a different kind of person.” Historians who defended Lincoln (or even tried to make his policies explicable), it followed, were no better than intellectuals in Nazi Germany who joined the Nazi Party and became apologists for Hitler’s regime. Bennett held that “with rare exceptions, you can’t believe what any major Lincoln scholar tells you about Abraham Lincoln and race.”26
But what about the Confederacy? Many of Lincoln’s enemies then and more recently have maintained that the Confederacy was a “mor- ally sound” cause—the words are those of Emory University philoso- pher Donald Livingston—and that it would have hastened the end of slavery if it had won the war.27 Bennett, by contrast, had no patience with that argument. A little more than midway through Forced into Glory, Bennett observed that “few modern scholars notice the similari- ties between the Third Reich and the Confederacy, and almost no one arraigns it or its leaders for crimes against humanity.”28 Elsewhere Ben- nett implied that Confederate president Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee, and other high-ranking Confederates were war criminals who should have been severely punished after the war. Nonetheless, Bennett associated Lincoln with the Confederacy’s views, attributing Lincoln’s failure to answer Alexander Stephens’s “Cornerstone” Speech, despite being encouraged to speak out against it, inasmuch as “he was ghting for the old Union, for the Constitution as it was, with its slave clauses,
26. Ibid., 67, 76, 131–37, 481–82, 115.
27. In a 2002 symposium on “The war Between the States” held in the pages of the Journal of Libertarian Studies (posted on the Mises Institute website, www.mises .org), Livingston claimed “that the 1860 attempt to dismember the Union by peaceful secession was morally sound, and that the North’s invasion to prevent secession and to create a consolidated American state was morally unsound.” Livingston and his intel- lectual compatriots, among them Thomas DiLorenzo, have argued that southern seces- sion was constitutionally and morally justi ed; that secession would have aided rather than hindered the antislavery cause because northerners would not have been required to return fugitive slaves to the South; that because slavery was economically inef cient market forces would have caused it to wither away peacefully and thus the war was un- necessary; that secession—and the Confederacy itself—was of a piece with the American tradition of limited government and that the Union victory had centralized power in Washington, D.C. As a result, the Confederacy’s cause was “morally sound” and Lincoln’s was not. See also Joseph R. Stromberg, “The War for Southern Independence: A Radical Libertarian Perspective,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 31–53, http:// mises.org/journals/jls/3_1/3_1_3.pdf (accessed August 28, 2010).
28. Bennett, Forced into Glory, 342. For more on Bennett’s indictment of the Confed- eracy, see page 406.
54 Lincoln in the Writings of Lerone Bennett, Jr.
for South Carolina as it was, with mint juleps, cotton, and slaves, and for Illinois as it was, with Black Laws and a constitution barring Black settlers.”29 In fact, Lincoln rarely reacted publicly to anything said by Confederate of cials. It was part of his overall strategy of avoiding any form of recognition of a regime he considered illegitimate.
Bennett’s true heroes were Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull and abolitionists such as Wendell Phillips: “Trumbull is virtually unknown to White Americans who have worked night and day for more than 140 years to perpetuate the memory of a White separatist who wanted to deport all African Americans and who provides, moreover, the greatest example in all history of the wisdom of standing idly by in a great national crisis like slavery or apartheid or the Third Reich.” Bennett maintained that for most of his political career, Lincoln had not been in the forefront of the movement for racial justice. Here Bennett was particularly hard on scholars who defended Lincoln by claiming that everybody in the nineteenth century was a white supremacist. He cited Phillips, among others, as a prominent example of whites from that era who were, unlike Lincoln, racial egalitarians. Bennett believed it was no defense to say that Lincoln pandered to contem- porary racist sentiment to get elected. “For a man who race-baits in order to get elected and who supports man-hunting, woman-hunting, and children-hunting because of his ambition has nothing to say to us,” Bennett thundered, “no matter how many historians sing his praises.” From Bennett’s standpoint “most major Lincoln scholars— comfortable, conservative, cautious White males—make themselves academic accomplices of the oppression and the slavery Lincoln sup- ported.”30 In his defense of Trumbull and Phillips, Bennett made an important point in emphasizing that there were white people who did speak up and try to end slavery and that Lincoln was not initially one of slavery’s more vocal opponents. But few modern, pro-Lincoln scholars have ever claimed otherwise, and it was a serious omission not to point out the extent to which Lincoln, Trumbull, and Phillips were all part of the same broad movement in the United States to end slavery and make freedom national.31
29. Ibid., 343.
30. Ibid., 25, 136–37.
31. For recent works on Lincoln’s place in the broader antislavery movement and the
Republican Party more speci cally, see Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012). Of course, these books were not available to Bennett when he wrote Forced into Glory. Still, if Lincoln was the politician who held the views Bennett claimed, it is dif cult to see why he was not a member of the Democratic Party rather than a Republican.
John M. Barr 55
Notwithstanding Lincoln’s private and public advocacy of limited suffrage for African Americans, Bennett claimed that the president re- mained to his dying day an unapologetic racist who wanted America cleansed of all African Americans.32 Yet Bennett acknowledged one mo- ment when the president came tantalizingly close to embracing racial equality. He quoted approvingly the section of the Second Inaugural Address in which Lincoln resolved that if the war lasts “until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fty years of unre- quited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’”33 Bennett characterized these lines as the “one electric moment” in the speech.34 But “from this great [rhetorical height, Lincoln descended to the valley” of racist policies by stating on April 11, 1865, the last speech of his life, that he preferred that the franchise be “conferred on the very intelligent [Black men], and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.”35 From that day forward, Booth planned to assassinate Lincoln, in the hopes of reviving the Con- federacy’s fortunes, for uttering the very words Bennett argued proved Lincoln was a racist: Lincoln “believed until his death the Negro was the Other, the Inferior, the Subhuman, who had to be—Lincoln said it was a necessity—subordinated, enslaved, quarantined to protect the sexual, social, political, and economic interests of Whites. Everything he did in his last one hundred days, everything he said, even the speeches his defenders are always praising, was based on this racist idea, which de ned his life, his politics, and his Gettysburgs.”36
Forced into Glory struck a nerve in the Lincoln community and among the public at large. The former director of the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana, historian Gerald J. Prokopowicz, wrote in one review that Forced into Glory was “easily the most controversial Lincoln-related publication of this generation” and said that although it quoted Lincoln
32. Lincoln, in addition to publicly suggesting limited suffrage for African Americans in April 1865, had a year earlier privately suggested the same to Governor Michael Hahn of Louisiana. See David Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 487–88, for this account. One wonders why, if Abraham Lincoln wanted to cleanse the United States of all African Americans, he would be pondering, in both private and public, limited suffrage?
33. Abraham Lincoln, quoted in Bennett, Forced into Glory, 617.
34. Ibid.
35. Abraham Lincoln, quoted in ibid., 618. Emphasis added by Bennett. In the next
paragraph Bennett stated that “if the franchise had been con ned to ‘very intelligent Whites’ this nation [the United States] would have perished from the earth long ago.”
36. Ibid., 624.
56 Lincoln in the Writings of Lerone Bennett, Jr.
selectively and oversimpli ed the political context in which Lincoln operated, it was a book with which all Americans “will need to come to terms.”37 Michael Lind, author of What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America’s Greatest President, said Bennett’s book contained “irrefutable” scholarship.38 Yet two of America’s most reputable schol- ars, Eric Foner and James M. McPherson, felt compelled to respond, to refute the irrefutable, in reviews published in the Los Angeles Times andNew York Times, respectively. Foner thought Bennett’s “book deserves attention” because it “presents compelling evidence of how histori- ans have consistently soft-pedaled Lincoln’s racial views.” Despite the volume’s merits Foner labeled Bennett’s assertion that Lincoln was a supporter of slavery and an oppressor “totally unfounded” and said “Bennett is guilty of the same kind of one-dimensional reading of Lin- coln’s career as the historians he criticizes.”39 McPherson agreed thatForced into Glory “must be taken seriously,” but while acknowledging that “Lincoln did share the racial prejudices of his time and place” and advocated “the idea of colonizing blacks abroad,” McPherson conclud- ed that “Bennett gets more wrong than he gets right,” especially in his “distortions in interpretation” and “distortion by omission.” McPher- son made the obvious and unanswerable point that if Lincoln was not hostile to slavery, as Bennett maintained, then it was impossible “to understand why seven slave states seceded in response to Lincoln’s election.” Finally, Bennett’s idea that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclama- tion “freed not a single slave” is one that McPherson stated “could not be more wrong”: “From Jan. 1, 1863, freedom would march southward with the Union Army, which became an army of liberation.”40
As for Lincoln’s allegedly undying wish to colonize African Ameri- cans beyond the North American continent, when Bennett claimed that “Lincoln believed that deporting Blacks and creating an all-White
37. Gerald J. Prokopowicz, “Rethinking Lincoln: Lerone Bennett’s White Dream,”Lincoln Lore, no. 1864 (Spring 2001), 2–3.
38. Michael Lind, What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America’s Greatest President (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 15.
39. Eric Foner, review of Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, by Lerone Bennett Jr., Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 9, 2000. Bennett’s book was reviewed by these preeminent scholars (not to mention the director of the Lincoln Museum) in two of the nation’s most reputable newspapers, thus disproving Thomas DiLorenzo’s claim on page 186 of Lincoln Unmasked that Bennett’s book was “studiously ignored” by what he labeled “the Lincoln cult.” In 2008 DiLorenzo continued to assert that Ben- nett’s book had been “largely ignored.” On this point, see the last paragraph of this essay and its corresponding footnote.
40. James M. McPherson, “Lincoln the Devil,” New York Times Book Review, August 27, 2000.
John M. Barr 57
country was a moral imperative,” he ignored available scholarship that contradicted his thesis.41 Although he was correct that for much of his career Lincoln—along with many other Americans—wanted to colonize blacks outside the United States, a result that certainly would have meant a less racially pluralistic future for the country, Bennett was incorrect to use the term ethnic cleansing, a twentieth-century phrase denoting murder or the forced removal of populations from their homes. Lincoln’s colonization plans were to have been volun- tary, an important distinction that seems to have escaped Bennett’s attention. As for the idea that Lincoln tenaciously held on to his wish for colonization, Bennett based his case on the testimony of General Benjamin Butler, who claimed that in a meeting with Lincoln in the spring of 1865, the president told him he feared “a race war” could ensue once the military hostilities ended. Butler asserted that Lincoln wanted him to examine the practicality of removing African Ameri- cans from the United States, but Butler answered that colonization was not feasible. Bennett acknowledged that Butler’s story has “been questioned by some scholars,” but he did not let his reader know that historian Mark Neely Jr. damaged, perhaps irreparably, Butler’s account of this incident as early as 1979.42 Neely’s article in Civil War History did not even appear in Bennett’s notes or bibliography. In- stead, Bennett quoted scholars who agreed with him, but he did not adequately alert his readers that there were others, such as Neely, who had challenged and perhaps discredited Butler’s story.43 Possibly the omission was because the information did not t Bennett’s precon- ceived notions about Lincoln’s supposed pathological racism and because it would have destroyed one of the book’s chief arguments, that Lincoln was a racist who never changed his views about African Americans. Regrettably, this was a characteristic that many of Lin- coln’s critics shared, which was a tendency to claim the president was a racist when in fact the evidence for such a charge remains to a certain degree ambiguous, especially considering that Lincoln was the leader of a broad-based social movement that was not only attempting to end slavery but also struggling mightily to widen notions of American citizenship to include African Americans. To be sure, Lincoln was in
41. Bennett, Forced into Glory, 229; Mark E. Neely Jr., “Abraham Lincoln and Black Colonization: Benjamin Butler’s Spurious Testimony,” Civil War History 25 (1979): 77–83. 42. Bennett, Forced into Glory, 616; Neely, “Abraham Lincoln and Black Colonization,”
77–83.
43. Bennett, Forced into Glory, 616–17. To be sure, Bennett did say that historians had
attempted to discredit Butler’s account of his meeting with Lincoln. The point being emphasized here is that he did not include the speci cs of Neely’s important article.
58 Lincoln in the Writings of Lerone Bennett, Jr.
some ways a typical nineteenth-century American who shared many of the racial assumptions of the age, but he fought hard to transcend them, which was a far cry from those Confederates and Copperheads who strenuously resisted Lincoln’s and the Republicans’ efforts.44 In fact, it would not be too much of an exaggeration, considering that it was Lincoln’s recommendation in April 1865 of limited suffrage for male African Americans that prompted Booth to assassinate him, to say that Lincoln was a white American who, whatever his motives, tried to do and did some good things for black people in the United States and was killed because of it.
Still, early in the twenty- rst century some excellent work was pub- lished on Lincoln and colonization that possibly vindicated Bennett’s point about Lincoln holding on to the idea of colonization but at the same time discredited the idea that there was some type of “Lincoln cult” among professional historians. In 2008 Phillip Magness pub- lished a partial rebuttal to Mark Neely’s 1979 Civil War History article.45Magness’s carefully worded and measured judgment in that piece was that “suf cient evidence exists to merit additional consideration of Lincoln’s colonization views later in life, and tends to caution against the conclusiveness that many scholars have previously attached to the view that Lincoln fully abandoned this position. The Butler anecdote remains an imperfect example, yet some of its more plausible details may indicate that Lincoln retained an interest in colonization, even if limited, as late as 1865.”46 Although the evidence remains incon- clusive, if not insubstantial, and certainty about Lincoln’s views on colonization in 1865 may forever elude historians, Bennett may have been partially correct. But despite the claims of Bennett and indeed all Lincoln foes that a so-called Lincoln cult ignored or suppressed un- pleasant truths about the president, Magness’s important and critical article was published in the agship journal of Lincoln studies—theJournal of the Abraham Lincoln Association.47
44. Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 49.
45. Philip W. Magness, “Benjamin Butler’s Colonization Testimony Reevaluated,”Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 29 (Winter 2008): 1–28; Philip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page, Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011); Eric Foner, “Lincoln and Colonization,” in Eric Foner, ed., Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World(New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 135–66. For a nuanced view on the subject of Lincoln’s racism, see James Oakes, “Natural Rights, Citizenship Rights, States’ Rights, and Black Rights: Another Look at Lincoln and Race,” in Foner, ed., Our Lincoln, 109–34.
46. Magness, “Benjamin Butler’s Colonization Testimony,” 28.
47. Bennett spoke quite critically of Lincoln at the Sixth Annual Lincoln Forum in
John M. Barr 59
Bennett omitted additional relevant information in Forced into Glory. He asserted that Lincoln was a hindrance to slavery’s immediate abo- lition but never speci cally named the politician who was electable on a national scale in nineteenth-century America who would have hastened slavery’s demise faster and more fully than Lincoln. If Lin- coln had been the despicable gure Bennett portrayed, or an actual hindrance to emancipation, then it is hard to ascertain how the anti- slavery Republican Party that nominated him for the presidency did not see it. Bennett also failed to inform the reader that the primary reason Lyman Trumbull became a senator in the mid-1850s was be- cause of Abraham Lincoln. At a time when senators were chosen by state legislatures, Lincoln was not able to win enough votes in the Illinois legislature to secure the senatorial seat, so he told his support- ers that Trumbull would be a suitable replacement because, although Trumbull was a Democrat, he opposed the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that allowed the expansion of slavery into those territories. Lincoln’s support for Trumbull was hardly the action of an unprincipled politi- cian or one who cared not at all if slavery existed. In fact, by telling his backers to support Trumbull, Lincoln engaged in a principled antislavery act, unfortunately one absent from Bennett’s narrative of Lincoln’s career. Nor did Bennett reveal that during the Lincoln- Douglas debates, Senator Douglas repeatedly linked Trumbull with Lincoln (both of whom had switched their political allegiances and joined forces in the antislavery Republican Party) by claiming that they had conspired “to abolitionize the old Whig party and the old Democratic party.”48 In other words, Douglas drew no distinction be- tween Lincoln and Trumbull but saw both men’s antislavery stances as equally villainous. In addition, Trumbull had made statements about
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 17, 2001. I was in attendance at this speech, and it is my recollection that although members of the forum were not pleased with the substance of Bennett’s talk and the historians in attendance challenged his ideas, he was given a respectful—some people thought too respectful given the charges he leveled against Lincoln—hearing that day. That Bennett spoke at the Lincoln Forum at all, as did M. E. Bradford at a different conference on Lincoln in the 1980s, also held in Gettysburg, demonstrated that the charge of a Lincoln cult is at the very least suspect. Cults do not invite critics to their meetings; scholars, however, do. Bennett’s remarks to the Lincoln Forum at Gettysburg were excerpted in Forced into Glory, 627–35. See also Allen C. Guelzo, review of Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement by Philip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page, Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 34, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 78–87.
48. Rodney O. Davis and Douglas L. Wilson, eds., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Gales- burg, IL: Knox College Lincoln Studies Center; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 11–12.
60 Lincoln in the Writings of Lerone Bennett, Jr.
African Americans that were perhaps as offensive, if not more so, to Bennett’s moral sense as Lincoln’s words at Charleston. In 1858, to cite one example, Trumbull told a Chicago audience that “I want to have nothing to do either with the free negro or the slave negro. We, the Republican party, are the white man’s party. [Great applause.] . . . I would be glad to see this country relieved of them.” On the oor of Congress in 1859, Trumbull had said, “When we say that all men are created equal, we do not mean that every man in organized society has the same rights. We do not tolerate that in Illinois. I know there is a distinction between these two races because the Almighty himself has marked it upon their very faces; and, in my judgment, man can- not, by legislation or otherwise, produce a perfect equality between these two races, so that they will happily live together.”49 Finally, in citing philosopher Sidney Hook, Bennett argued that Lincoln was not a heroic man worthy of imitation. Perhaps true, except that Hook deeply admired Lincoln. In a lecture delivered in India that was con- ceivably available to Bennett as the editor of Ebony magazine, Hook called the abolitionists Bennett admired “fanatics of virtue . . . God’s angry men, . . . who think they have a mandate from on high to impose virtue upon others at any cost” and “are usually blind to the virtues of any other way than their own.” In the same address Hook favorably compared Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi: “Lincoln is unique among the statesmen not only of the United States but of the entire world in that he represents a fusion of idealism and intelligence.”50
Bennett’s lapses were unfortunate but all too characteristic of the scholarship, such as it is, of many Lincoln critics. When confronted by an honest examination of their contentions, they refuse to allow that they might be wrong, that their work is riddled with selective use of the historical record, and that as a result, their contentions are perhaps not as original or worthy of consideration as they believe. Instead, in a form of inoculation against historians who they anticipate will con- demn their frequently unsubstantiated arguments, Lincoln’s current detractors unceasingly attack their opponents as either dishonest or under the sway of some wicked Lincoln cult. The truth is, however, that the historical profession in the United States, notwithstanding all its numerous shortcomings and despite being likened to Hitler apologists for Nazism by Lerone Bennett Jr., is far more considerate and diligent
49. Lyman Trumbull quoted in Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Balti- more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1:526, 525.
50. Sydney Hook, “Lincoln and Gandhi,” n.d., Sidney Hook Collection, box 34, folder 35, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University.
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in examining Lincoln’s aws and the claims of his enemies than his rivals are in willing to concede Lincoln’s virtues and achievements.
The overall effect of Bennett’s work has been signi cant, although perhaps not in the way that many have believed. African American his- torian Gerald Horne has described Bennett’s popularity among blacks as “stratospheric,” and Lincoln biographer Allen Guelzo thoughtForced into Glory symbolized “one of the most dramatic transforma- tions in American historical self-understanding in the past century, and that is the slow, almost unnoticed withdrawal of African Ameri- cans from what was once the great consensus of blacks’ admiration for Abraham Lincoln.”51 That consensus had always been somewhat fragile and contested, but Guelzo was right that there were signi cant political consequences to Bennett’s (and neo-Confederate) loathing of Abraham Lincoln. From 1858 onward, Lincoln’s critics, especially that small minority of abolitionists and those who fashioned them- selves their intellectual descendants, shared with twenty- rst-century Americans a disdain for the slow, untidy compromises endemic to democratic politics and all too characteristic of politicians. This was not an attitude that Abraham Lincoln shared. He gloried in democratic politics. It is here, in the president’s enlightened, prudential approach to emancipation—a constitutional approach that favored concrete results over pure motives as the criterion for successful policy—that one will nd an important reason why some people loathe Abraham Lincoln.52 Contempt for Lincoln, historically speaking, has often co- incided with contempt for sluggish, messy democratic government and the awed politicians who embrace it. Sadly, the work of the president’s critics in the post–Cold War era contributed to Americans’ cynical discontent with the political system Lincoln fought a war to preserve so “that all should have an equal chance.”53
It was impossible to claim, furthermore, that Bennett’s work re- mained as shocking as it had been in the 1960s, or that it was necessarily
51. Gerald Horne, letter to the editor, Journal of American History 96, no. 3 (December 2009); Allen C. Guelzo, “How Abe Lincoln Lost the Black Vote: Lincoln and Emanci- pation in the African American Mind,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 25 (Winter 2004), 19.
52. Guelzo, “How Abe Lincoln Lost the Black Vote,” 21; Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon and Schus- ter, 2004), 5–11. For a view different from Guelzo’s characterization of Lincoln as an Enlightenment politician, see Stewart Winger, Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); Sean Wilentz, “Who Lincoln Was,” New Republic, July 15, 2009, 24–47.
53. Speech in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Basler, Collected Works, 4: 240.
62 Lincoln in the Writings of Lerone Bennett, Jr.
representative of black opinion, when one considered the comments of other African Americans who admired Lincoln. Thomas Sowell, an in uential conservative economist with libertarian leanings at the Hoover Institution, reviewed Guelzo’s book Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 2005, sad that such a volume was even needed. The book was important, and here the economist conceded the increasing in uence of Lincoln’s detractors, “because of the completely unrealistic view of the world—past and present—that prevails, not only among the ignorant but among the intelligentsia as well.” Writing as if he had Lincoln’s more recent adversaries in mind, Sowell declared that “since the 1960s, it has been fashionable in some quarters to take cheap shots at Lincoln, asking such questions as ‘Why didn’t he free all the slaves?’ ‘Why did he wait so long?’ ‘How come the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t just come right out and say that slavery was wrong?” Sowell failed to acknowledge that such questions have been asked of Lincoln since the 1860s, but he correctly noted that the “people who indulge in this kind of self-righteous carping act as if Lincoln was someone who could do whatever he damn well pleased, without regard to the law, the Congress, or the Supreme Court.” Sowell explained that when Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, he had to do so with the Supreme Court in mind, a Supreme Court “still headed by Chief Justice Roger Taney,” who in the Dred Scott case had argued that black people in the United States “had no rights which the white man needed to respect.” It was precisely for this reason that the proclamation was issued in language that was dry and uninspiring, for it was a military and legal document issued by the commander in chief during war, which meant it had to apply to those “slaves in territory controlled by enemy forces.” Finally, Lincoln’s issuance of the proclamation took political courage because there was “no big political support in the North for freeing slaves.” Many northerners opposed it, fearing that it would strengthen the resolve of secessionists. The country should be grateful to have had a leader like Lincoln in such “turbulent times,” but unfortunately there were detractors who, in Sowell’s judgment, “reduce other times—including our own—to cartoon-like simplicities that allow us to indulge in cheap self-righteousness when judging those who carry heavy responsibilities.”54
Also in 2005, an African American politician of a more liberal persua- sion, Barack Obama from Illinois, published an essay in Time magazine
54. Sowell, “Trashing Our History: Lincoln,” Townhall.com, August 11, 2005, http:// townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2005/08/11/trashing_our_history_lincoln/ page/full (accessed October 13, 2009).
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honoring Lincoln’s strengths while recognizing his limitations. Obama encapsulated why Lincoln’s story continued to move Americans, yet, at the same time, the future president of the United States unwit- tingly gave voice to Bennett’s in uence, if not additional elements of previous anti-Lincoln thought. Lincoln’s rise from poor obscurity and his strength in the face of tragic loss were reminders “of a larger fundamental element of American life—the enduring belief that we can constantly remake ourselves to t our larger dreams.” Neverthe- less, “as a law professor and civil rights lawyer and as an African American,” Obama could not “swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.” He was cognizant of Lincoln’s “limited views on race” and saw the Emancipation Proclamation as “more a military document than a clarion call for justice.” Obama’s comments here were somewhat equivocal: most Americans admired Lincoln’s rise from poverty, and the Illinois senator’s praise for the Emancipation Proclamation was somewhat tepid. Nevertheless, echoing the voice of W. E. B. Du Bois, Obama thought it was “precisely those imperfec- tions” that made Lincoln “so compelling”: “For when the time came to confront the greatest moral challenge this nation has ever faced, this all too human man did not pass the challenge on to future generations.”55Senator Obama launched his presidential candidacy, moreover, from Lincoln’s hometown of Spring eld, Illinois, in 2007, and as president he has been complimentary of Lincoln, averring at the 2009 Abraham Lincoln Association Banquet in Spring eld that “it’s fair to say that the Presidency of this singular gure who we celebrate in so many ways made my own story possible.”56 President Obama’s embrace of Lincoln signaled an important post–Cold War shift in anti-Lincoln sentiment: namely, that a politically in uential dissatisfaction with the sixteenth president emanating from the left wing of the political spectrum, a dissatisfaction that emerged only in the twentieth century from the unful lled egalitarian promises of the Civil War and Reconstruction, was on the decline, if not dead altogether.57
55. Barack Obama, “What I See in Lincoln’s Eyes,” Time, July 4, 2005, 74.
56. Barack Obama, “Remarks at the Abraham Lincoln Association Annual Banquet,” Spring eld, IL, February 12, 2009, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb .edu/ws/index.php?pid=85778&st=Abraham+Lincoln&st1=#axzz1QnUAbIUe (ac- cessed July 1, 2011).
57. Allen C. Guelzo, “Hardly: The Democratic Nominee Is No Latter-Day Lincoln,”National Review, September 29, 2008, 22; Alan Maass, “Lincoln at 200,” Counterpunch, February 13, 2009, www.counterpunch.org/2009/02/13/lincoln-at-200/ (accessed Sep- tember 24, 2012); Robin Blackburn, “Lincoln and Marx: The Transatlantic Convergence of Two Revolutionaries.” Jacobin 7–8 (Summer 2012): 48–51. Counterpunch is a website with a radical leftist orientation, while Robin Blackburn edited the New Left Review, and
64 Lincoln in the Writings of Lerone Bennett, Jr.
Still, by the turn of the century, Lerone Bennett’s arguments ap- peared to be accepted into standard accounts or at the very least recognized as important enough to be taken into consideration in any assessment of Abraham Lincoln. In fact, one could even detect his in uence in popular culture. A 2004 counterfactual documentary called C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, operated on the premise that the Confederates had won the Civil War and perpetrated one of Bennett’s main contentions: Lincoln was portrayed as a weak, vacil- lating president, a president relatively unconcerned about slavery and whose most signi cant act, the Emancipation Proclamation, the narrator of the lm claimed, “did not free a single slave.”58 Of course, such a depiction pales in comparison to the one seen by the American public in the Steven Spielberg 2012 biopic Lincoln, but that does not mean Bennett’s work does not remain signi cant.
Indeed, it is dif cult to say whether Bennett’s in uence has been felt primarily inside or outside the black community. Certainly, his arguments have carried weight there, but the drop in Lincoln’s stand- ing with African Americans has also been caused by other factors, including the overall loss of prestige among all political leaders in the post-Watergate and post-Vietnam era.59 Most important, if President Obama, the most prominent African American politician in U.S., if not world, history nds in Abraham Lincoln a positive, useful im- age, the most signi cant impact of Bennett’s work may reside outside the black community. The illiberal, unintended effect of Bennett’s writing—especially considering his comparison of the Confederacy to the Third Reich—was to give succor to Lincoln’s conservative and
his piece connecting Lincoln and Marx was published in Jacobin magazine, a left-wing quarterly. See also Robin Blackburn, An Un nished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (London: Verso, 2011), 1–100. Or consider Corey Robin’s assessment of Lincoln’s status on the left. Robin is a left-wing political theorist and author of The Reactionary Mind, a critical analysis of conservative thought: “My sense is that he’s [Lincoln] fairly widely respected on the left. I know there’s Lerone Bennett’s work, which probably in uenced a subset of black nationalist thinkers and activists, and still does to some degree. But I think the dominant position is ambivalently positive, acknowledging his limitations but aware of his achievements. [Eric] Foner’s book sort of stands in for the mainstream view of the left, I think.” Corey Robin, e-mail message to author, October 6, 2011; Foner, Fiery Trial.
58. Film narrator quoted in Gary Gallagher, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hol- lywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 104.
59. Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
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libertarian opponents, individuals sympathetic to the claims of the Richmond protestors, who asserted that Lincoln was the father of big government, a warmongering imperialist, a liar, and probably a racist and that a nefarious, professional Lincoln cult suppressed such unpalatable truths. These contemptuous portrayals have contributed to an atmosphere of public distrust in the United States, a vague sense that in the 1860s Lincoln and Union had been wrong and the South right and that the nation’s existence was somehow morally dubious.60Such an outlook contributed to a deep cynicism toward the nation’s government and made effective governance, at least at the federal level, less likely if not impossible to achieve.61 Those who believed freedom, equality, and federal power were inimical to each other embraced such an outcome and their aversion to Lincoln intensi ed with the inauguration of the nation’s rst black President in 2009, coincidentally the two-hundredth anniversary of Lincoln’s birthday. Bennett’s critique also received greater attention but was used by the president’s conservative and libertarian enemies to advance their decidedly negative portrait. Indeed, in 2008 Lincoln critic Thomas J. DiLorenzo claimed that Bennett’s “Forced into Glory is a much more powerful critique of Dishonest Abe than anything I have ever written. The Lincoln Cult, which would not dare to personally attack a serious African-American scholar like Bennett, has largely ignored the book instead.” More recently, Kentucky senator Rand Paul, a Republican with decidedly libertarian leanings and presidential aspirations, and one who has made it clear he is “not an enemy of Lincoln,” has calledForced into Glory “a great book.”62 For Lerone Bennett, whose writings indicated a belief that freedom and equality were inextricably linked and necessitated a strong federal government, and that because of a lack of consistent national commitment to racial equality there had never been a true Emancipation Proclamation in the United States, such a result must have been bittersweet indeed.
60. I owe the libertarian writer Timothy Sandefur a debt for this insight.
61. Donald T. Critchlow and Nancy MacLean, Debating the American Conservative Movement, 1945 to the Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Little eld, 2009), 170.
62. Thomas DiLorenzo, “An African-American Icon Speaks Truth to the Lincoln Cult,” www.lewrockwell.com, January 12, 2008 (accessed March 13, 2012). See Walsh, “Rand Paul Completely Mangles Lincoln,” Salon.com, Salon Media Group, July 11, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/07/11/rand_paul_completely_mangles_lincoln/ (accessed August 6, 2013), for more on how Bennett’s writings have seeped their way into Senator Paul’s thinking about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.
John M. Barr
