Two Ways

 by David Bell in The New York Review of Books 9/23/21

There are two very different ways of holding the country to account for its failings. One is essentially an internal critique: to judge America by its own professed standards, distinguishing between its admirable founding principles and its frequently deplorable historical record. For all his thundering denunciations of American conduct, Douglass still rhapsodized over the “great principles” of the Declaration of Independence. “I do not despair of this country,” he concluded.

But there is also a radical critique that calls the founding principles themselves irredeemably tainted and argues that from the very first they were formulated to promote exclusion and oppression. The 1619 Project gestured strongly in this direction when it suggested that the thirteen colonies revolted against Great Britain in large part to preserve American slavery from British moves toward abolition. From the radical point of view, Lincoln’s treatment of Native Americans and certain statements he made about African-Americans confirm his fundamental allegiance to deep structures of exclusion and oppression, even though he ended slavery and promoted citizenship rights for African-Americans.

The radical critiques, like the internal ones, have a long history. As Sean Wilentz recently noted in these pages, it was in 1964 that Malcolm X charged Lincoln with “mak[ing] the race problem in this country worse than any man in history.” Historians have frequently drawn attention to Lincoln’s statement in the first Lincoln-Douglas debate of 1858:

I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality…. I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.

The question, as always, comes down to which pieces of evidence we choose to emphasize, and how to interpret them. Did Lincoln’s statement reflect deeply held white supremacist convictions, or was it a rhetorical move, made to mollify a racist audience and to set up his argument that African-Americans should in fact enjoy all the rights promised by the Declaration of Independence? How much did his views change during his presidency? And how do we place this and other similar statements in the balance against Lincoln’s long-standing opposition to slavery and his actions as president? (Debates have taken place as well over how much culpability he deserves for the Dakota executions.)