Category: Politics

Charles Sumner: faking it?

May 22 is the anniversary of the attack on Sen. Charles Sumner (Massachusetts) on the Senate floor in 1856 by Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina.

Sumner was a popular and famous anti-slavery senator who made a speech to the Senate denouncing the pro-slavery people who were causing violence and bloodshed in the Kansas territory in an attempt to swing the territorial vote toward entering the union as a slave state. Seeing the recent Kansas-Nebraska Act (allowing the population of territories to vote whether they would come in free or slave) as the source of the problem, Sumner attacked the senators who had written it, Stephen Douglas and Andrew Butler. As was usual in the 19th century, Sumner attacked both men personally, and accused southerner Butler of taking a mistress “who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean, the harlot, Slavery.” He also made fun of Butler’s speech impediment.

Two days later, on May 22, 1856, Butler’s nephew Preston Brooks came up to Sumner at his desk on the Senate floor, told Sumner he had insulted his uncle and all of South Carolina, and proceeded to hit Sumner over and over on the head with a heavy gold-topped cane, until Sumner lost consciousness. Other senators who moved to help Sumner were held back by a gun-toting fellow senator from South Carolina, Laurence Keitt.

The attack on Sumner outraged the north and cheered the south. Many southerners sent Brooks a new cane to replace his old one, which may have been damaged during the assault. Sumner was out of action for three years recovering from his wounds. He seemed never to fully recover from them, and to this day writers will state that Sumner never recovered. Southerners at the time claimed Sumner was faking to get attention and publicity.

Ever since that day, historians have debated how serious his wounds actually were. Was Sumner nearly beaten to death? or was he faking it to get publicity for his cause?

An interesting–and logical–idea that has come up in recent years is that Sumner suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. While the physical wounds he received were not life-threatening, and did heal fairly quickly, Sumner’s lingering “weakness” and other symptoms were from PTSD. Whenever he entered the Senate chamber, he seemed worse. This would make sense–the scene of the assault would be overwhelmingly upsetting to him. His nightmares and headaches would be all-too familiar to a person today who is familiar with PTSD.

So Sumner was neither permanently physically wounded nor a faker. He was most likely a person suffering with PTSD, as would many thousands of men and women after him who lived through the events of the Civil War.

Nothing to fear but fearful politicians

I was watching a little of the PBS documentary on FDR last night and by chance I saw the part where they talked about his 1936 re-election campaign. In a speech Roosevelt took on what he called “big money,” the businesses that were not only keeping workers on starvation wages but, according to Roosevelt, trying to take over the government.

“No business which depends for existence by paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country,” he said; “big business and big money are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred.

“I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match; I would like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.”

It is sadly difficult to think of a politician who would make that speech today. Politicians today seem much more timid, very frightened of angering anyone who has any power. Having the commitment to our founding principles to acknowledge and to welcome the hatred of those who want to alter–or simply ignore–our Constitution for their own profit is rare today.

Today, on the contrary, we are often told that big money/big business is critically important to the growth and maintenance of democracy, and must be allowed to do whatever it wants. FDR had an answer to that, too:

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.”

FDR’s words are a reminder of how rarely you ever hear a major politician today 1) stating that the defense of our Constitution is her main priority; and 2) that s/he will cling to our founding principles no matter what opposition s/he faces; because 3) anyone who opposes our founding principles is no American, and therefore 4) those who oppose her/him can stuff it.

Actually, you will hear fringe nuts make these statements, but I’m talking about mainstream politicians.

Let’s remember FDR as our current presidential election campaigning goes on, and cast a vote for the person who comes closest to his courage and guts.

De Tocqueville on Red and Blue States

I was listening once again to Bill Cook’s fantastic lectures on De Tocqueville last night and he was on the section where De Tocqueville talks about political parties.

De Tocqueville describes two types of political party: great parties and small parties. Great parties, he says, overturn society, replacing one system of thought with another. Small parties agitate within society. So whereas great parties tear society apart and create a new society, small parties only degrade the existing society.

Great parties focus on ideas, the big picture, and the general effects of those ideas in practice. Small parties are petty, focused on individuals, immediate consequences, the here and now, and, above all, victory. Victory is more important than convictions, and when winning is job one, the small party will compromise its own values to win. The small party doesn’t really have a philosophy or faith in a set of values. It will adopt whatever policies allow for victory, and will scare voters by predicting that individuals from rival parties will cause immediate negative consequences for them.

When De Tocqueville was writing, in the 1830s and 1840s, there were no Republicans and Democrats as we know them; the two-party system was not yet in place in the U.S. But his description of great and small parties rings true today.

The party that says if Michael Dukakis is elected president, then Willie Horton will come to your house and kill you, is a small party. The party that wants you to focus on a gas tax holiday over the summer of 2008 while accomplishing nothing toward our long-term fuel problems, is a small party. The party that agitates against gay marriage while ignoring or generating the economic problems families face is a small party. The party that gives lip service to military personnel and their families while refusing to pay those personnel properly or support their families in any way if the on-duty family member dies in service, is a small party. The party that builds a wall to keep out immigrants while refusing to penalize businesses that hire illegal immigrants, and while refusing to stop using the services of illegal immigrants itself, is a small party.

As we vote this year for a president, and as we vote in other years for Congress members, governors, state legislators, and the many referenda that come up in our individual states, we should remember De Tocqueville’s definitions of parties, and make sure we cast our vote for the party that overturns some long-held ways of doing things in order to create more common good, rather than the party that merely asks us to hate someone else in our country.

The party that tells you that your good can only come about if someone else is punished is the small party, and does not deserve your vote. The party that tells you that the U.S. must continue to do what it has been doing because to change course is to lose, that change is humiliation, does not deserve your vote.

Keeping De Tocqueville in mind whenever you go to the polls will remind you that this nation was founded on big ideas and overturning society for the good, and that no harm can come of Americans thinking big.

The original truth v. myth

There’s a great opinion piece in the Times today about the state of the nation. You can read it for yourselves; the takeaway is that the president we need today is the president who can tell us that we’re not doing very well, that we are not living up to our founding principles, and that our current way of life is unsustainable.

Of course, that’s the president we always need.

We need that person to not only tell us how we are failing, but to offer a viable, principled plan for improvement that s/he will push through a reluctant Congress and withstand withering criticism for supporting.

I’ve carped in other posts about politicians’ inability or unwillingness to brook any criticism from “the people” (usually a few people pretending to speak for all people). Politicians should be leaders, taking on the tough job of forcing Americans to do the right thing. But they seem more and more to be followers, hoping the people will tell them what to do.

And there’s the even-worse-case scenario, in which major politicians, like the president, trample our founding principles to further their own personal goals.

The truth about America is that we are great when we live up to our founding principles of representative democracy focused on promoting and protecting natural rights. When we don’t do that, we are awful, because we were founded with a very idealistic mission, and so we fall from a great height when we let that down.

The myth about America is that whatever we do, we are living up to those principles, that it just naturally happens and that we are good no matter what we do because we are America. Representative democracy goes against human nature. Every generation, we have to re-learn the principles of justice and democracy we are founded on, and re-dedicate ourselves to fulfilling them. These principles can’t really be inherited. They have always to be adopted, over and over.

Our job as Americans right now is to do what our politicans won’t: demand that we adhere to our founding principles. We have to take the lead.

Lincoln rebuttal: who black people hate

I noticed on my blog stats page that someone had clicked into my series of posts on Lincoln and slavery from a site called “Stuff Black People Hate”, which is either the precursor or follower of the site “Stuff White People Love.” I clicked the link to the site and there, posted on March 27, 2008, was an article about how vile Lincoln was and why black Americans hate him.

It’s good to know that my series on Lincoln was timely.

The post quotes one of Lincoln’s 1858 Senate race speeches, in which he talks about how he will never let inferior Negroes mix with whites. Then, it quotes an 1865 speech in which Lincoln says he wishes that only those black Americans who served in the Union army could have the vote.

Both quotes are used to prove Lincoln’s racism in the most dishonest way. First, yes indeed, Lincoln was flailing during that Senate race, battling with his own racism. He wanted the grand ideal of equality for all, but was totally unequipped mentally to bring it about.

You could use that quote to lambast Lincoln’s racism–IF that was the end of the story. But, unlike most people then and now, Lincoln’s attitude toward race changed pretty radically over a pretty short period of time. Five years after that 1858 speech, he had fought hard to get Congress to pass the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing enslaved people in war zones permanently and setting the legal stage for abolition. Seven years after that 1858 speech, he convinced the Congress and the people to abolish slavery in the U.S., driving the Thirteenth Amendment through a skeptical Congress and nation.

In 1865, his musings on allowing only intelligent or veteran black Americans to vote can be viewed as racist–unless you know something about American history. At that point, no black Americans could vote. The Fifteenth Amendment would not come into existence until 1870. So Lincoln is saying that even though black Americans are not yet allowed to vote, those who served their country in war should be allowed to.

Having pushed through the EP and the Thirteenth Amendment in just two years, Lincoln was likely waiting to include the right to vote for black Americans until his Reconstruction plan began.

So once again I’m gravely unconvinced by the same old misinformed and tired arguments against Lincoln. Yes, he began as a racist. But he didn’t end that way. To insist on slandering him is only to insist on spreading the myth that American freedom and principles mean nothing. They only mean nothing when we ignore them.

If black—and white—Americans want to hate someone, how about Bing Crosby? I saw “Holiday Inn” on TV the other night. In it, Crosby runs an inn open only on holidays. For Lincoln’s birthday, the inn was set up like a plantation, with all the whites in black face, including Bing, who sang a song in “negro dialect” while his blonde girlfriend, with her hair sticking straight up in her role as “pickaninny”, rolled her eyes and also sang about “ol fadder Abraham” (after complaining, while her blackface was put on, that she had thought she was going to get to look pretty).  This was in 1942.  It was perhaps the most revolting thing I’ve ever seen on television, or anywhere else. Sometimes the 20th century looks worse than the 19th.

Lincoln: Hero, not villain; truth, not myth

Here we are at the last post of my Truth v. Myth series on Lincoln and slavery.

 

With the Emancipation Proclamation, and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, Abraham Lincoln finally abolished slavery in the United States. By which I mean to say, slavery was finally abolished, someone finally acted to end it, and Lincoln finally lived up to his principles. “Finally” seems harsh to apply to someone whose actions and convictions changed so radically in just four years (1858 to 1862). “[Viewed] from the abolition ground, [Lincoln was] tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent… Measuring him by the sentiment of his country… he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined,” said Frederick Douglass. Abolishing slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation “is the central act of my administration, and the great event of the nineteenth century,” Lincoln said. [Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, 250, 186]

 

So how can it be that Lincoln is called a proslavery racist so often today? Lincoln was, of course, slowly but surely tarnished by education in this country after the Civil War, when he slipped from hero to villain as southern Confederate sympathizers rewrote his motives and actions to make him a fool. Texas and Florida are two of the largest textbook markets in America, and their textbook committees made sure the “right” information was published in their American history books throughout the 20th century.

 

And as the dream of true equality seemed to slide farther and farther away from black Americans during Jim Crow, Lincoln’s deeds and promises did seem hollow. By the 1960s, when the horrors of violence inflicted on black civil rights protesters and leaders had been witnessed by the entire nation, a few key black scholars and leaders rejected all white efforts on behalf of race equality as empty, including Lincoln and his Emancipation Proclamation. Lerone Bennett’s work, naming Lincoln as “a reactionary white supremacist” was particularly damaging.

 

But this kind of treatment of Lincoln was just an early symptom of Americans losing faith in America. “The withdrawal from Lincoln by African-Americans has moved in step with the emergence of a profound nihilism in the minds of many Americans who see no meaning in American freedom and no hope for real racial progress,” Allen Guelzo says, and I think he is right. [Ibid. 248] I also agree with him when he says that “It would be special pleading to claim that Lincoln was in the end the most perfect friend black Americans have ever had. But it would also be the cheapest and most ignorant of skepticism to deny that he was the most significant.” [Ibid. 11]

 

Myth: The Civil War was not fought over slavery.

 

Truth:  It was, and deliberately so.

 

Damage done when we believe in a myth: Guelzo has it cold: when we believe the absolute worst of myths, we see—and are part of—“the emergence of a profound nihilism in the minds of many Americans who see no meaning in American freedom and no hope for real racial progress”. There is meaning in the Civil War when it comes to racial progress, and if there was hope that was realized in 1863—in the middle of a nightmare war, after 203 years of entrenched slavery—then there is hope today.

“If I could save the union without freeing any slaves…” – The victory of the Emancipation Proclamation

This post is part 3 of our series on Lincoln, racism, and slavery. Here we conclude our study of the Emancipation Proclamation.

 

The EP is short and legalistic and has been criticized for lacking moral rhetorical flourishes, but this is deliberate. It is a canny legal document designed to outmaneuver Taney and the courts. In its short lines, the EP gives its legal rationale for freeing certain enslaved people, a schedule for doing so, a definition of who is freed, and their new legal condition. In its short lines, Lincoln overrode centuries of power located in state slave codes, property ownership laws, and civil court rulings and procedures. Lincoln offers no monetary compensation. And, at last, he drops all mention of shipping freed black Americans to Africa. [Ibid. 120] There would be no more colonization, compensation, or caviling. Slavery would no longer be a part of the southern United States. If the Confederate states returned to the Union, it would be without slaves.

 

So we see the reason Lincoln did not extend the terms of the EP to the Border states, or the western territories. (This is what he is lacerated for, for only freeing slaves in Confederate states at war.) First, the Border states were not at war with the U.S. but a part of it; Lincoln could not use his war powers on them when they were not in a state of war with the U.S. The same applies to the west, which was not at war with the U.S.

 

And Lincoln did not apply the EP to the North, to the Union, to the United States as it stood in 1862, because slavery had already been outlawed in all the states then remaining in the Union. We’ll come back to this later, though; Lincoln would.

 

In the months before Lincoln published his proclamation, Horace Greeley, of the New York Tribune, wrote an editorial letter on August 20, 1862 blasting the president for not abolishing slavery already. No one outside Lincoln’s cabinet knew he had the EP written and waiting. Lincoln’s response is famous, or infamous, to us now. It is the letter in which he said that if he could save the Union by freeing all the slaves, he would, and it he could save it by freeing none, he would, and if he could do it by freeing some and leaving others, he would do that.

 

We take that as the basest kind of position. This is the quote most people use to show how racist and pro-slavery Lincoln was. They are wrong. Let’s look at the whole letter.

 

Lincoln starts by saying that his main aim in the war is to preserve the Union. He sees a few options when it comes to saving the Union. He might be able to do it by freeing all the slaves. If that was the best option, he would take it. He might, though, be able to save the Union without freeing any slaves. If so, he would take that option. Or, he might be able to save the Union by freeing some slaves.

 

You, by now, should see that he is hinting very broadly at his Proclamation, which did just that: it freed some enslaved people and left others (in the border states) enslaved. (For the reasons we have already described—under war powers, he could only free slaves in territory at war with the U.S. without Taney and the courts striking the measure down.)

 

We still shudder at Lincoln calmly talking about not freeing anyone. But people at the time saw what was really shocking: Lincoln was saying that ending slavery was on the table. For the first time in the history of the United States, a president was saying he would outlaw slavery. This had never been on the table before.

 

It would be like an American president today saying, “If I can bring peace to the Middle East without using nuclear weapons, I won’t use them. If I have to launch a few nuclear strikes to bring peace, I’ll do that.” We would say, wait a minute—when did nuclear weapons come into this question? No one has ever talked about nuclear war in the Middle East before, but now the President is saying it’s on the table.

 

So with Lincoln’s statement that suddenly abolition was on the table. No longer could anyone in the U.S. or the Confederacy believe that slavery was protected and would not be abolished. Lincoln was telling the nation that he was thinking about abolishing it—that he would abolish it, if that would win the war. To Americans at the time, it didn’t matter that it might be partial abolition. Any move toward abolition coming from Washington was unheard of, and again, certainly no president had ever moved to abolish slavery at all, anywhere, ever.

 

Lincoln underlined this new attitude by adding, “I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.” This was a pretty clear message—or warning—to the nation and the Confederacy that slavery was not going to make it out of the war intact. Lincoln was just waiting for the moment to make a move that would be effective and lawful. As Lincoln said himself after his letter appeared, his intention was to make clear that “he would proclaim freedom to the slave just as soon as he felt assured he could do it effectively…” [my italics; Ibid., 135-36]

 

Lincoln put the Proclamation out to the nation right before the November 1862 Congressional elections. This was dangerous. People might have voted all Republicans out of Congress because of the Republican president’s Proclamation. The Congress might have come under Democratic control, and those Democrats would have fought the Proclamation. But it had always been Lincoln’s wish to give the people a chance to vote on any emancipation order he issued. And 31 Republicans did lose their seats in Congress, as voting for Republicans fell 16 percent from 1860 [Ibid. 167] But the Republicans maintained their majorities in the House and Senate, and Lincoln pressed them to support the Proclamation. He knew that the Proclamation would not only free enslaved people, but galvanize the North. Once the Proclamation took effect… “the character of the war will be changed. It will be one of subjugation and extermination [of slavery],” Lincoln told T. J. Barnett.

 

He was right. After January 1, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, emancipation was “wedged into the war’s equation as a sine qua non of victory.” And Lincoln added that he intended to shape a follow-up policy that would be “more radical than ever.” [Ibid. 156, 228]

 

What was this radical move? To pass an Amendment to the Constitution outlawing slavery. Lincoln knew his Emancipation Proclamation would hold up during the war, and that those freed by it would remain free after the war. But what about enslaved people in the Border states, who were not freed by it? What about slavery in the west, or even in the North, unlikely as that may have seemed? Slavery was still technically possible in those areas. And Lincoln couldn’t be president forever. Once he was out of office, a new president could re-affirm slavery.

 

Lincoln could not accept this kind of risk. He began to push the new Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery in the United States. It seemed like a good sign when Lincoln’s legal nemesis Chief Justice Roger Taney died in October 1864. The vote on the Thirteenth Amendment came on January 31, 1865, and, as we know, it passed.

 

Next time: the final Lincoln post

Bad history: John McCain as Holden Caulfield

There are blog carnivals out there where people collect good posts from many different blogs. One of those that we follow is the Carnival of Bad History. We ran across a shocking example of bad history in the New York Times last night.

In “When the Times Make the Man,” the idea is put forward that John McCain is not an elderly and ever-more neocon hardliner but rather a 1950s rebel: “Robert Timberg reports that when Mr. McCain recalls his youth he “describes himself as a rebel without a cause, a James Dean type, though it’s just as easy to imagine him as Holden Caulfield.” And he cultivated the part, “clad in blue jeans, motorcycle boots and his overcoat, and smoking a cigarette that dangled from his lips,” as Paul Alexander writes in his book “Man of the People: The Life of John McCain.”

This is illustrated by a 1956 photo of McCain at his sister’s wedding, smiling ear to ear as he proudly stands at attention in his full-dress Navy uniform.

Now, we can’t make any claims about the accuracy of this take on Sen. McCain. Perhaps he was really a James Dean rebel–in the Navy.  Perhaps you, unlike us, feel it is “easy” to picture McCain as Holden Caulfield. But we can doubt that accuracy based on the terrible history in the rest of the article.

The author claims that people born in the 1930s, and thus in their teens and 20s in the 1950s, experienced none of the “tumult” that people who were the same age in the 1960s experienced: “They typically came of age in the 1950s, when consensus reigned, and with it conformism. Young Americans were collectively disengaged from politics and distrustful of ideology. They were the “silent generation,” content to be guided by their elders: Eisenhower, the avuncular white-haired president who had been the hero of World War II, and the Wise Men who formulated the strategies of the cold war.  In this climate the young were more likely to serve than to lead. The Korean War, which raged from 1950 to 1953, claimed nearly as many American casualties as Vietnam, and yet, despite the universal draft, there was scarcely a protest from those waiting to be called. At home, civil rights was emerging as a great cause, but it did not attract many young activists until the 1960s.”

Why Americans put up with this common type of bad history–that the 1950s were a happy, quiet, conformity time–is beyond us. It is hard to think of a decade more gripped by terror than the 1950s. WWII was over, but danger was everywhere–China had been overtaken by Communists, “forcing” the U.S. to go to war in Korea, and Vietnam was also being prepped as an arena for war. And Europe itself was not safe, with half of it in the grips of the Soviet Union.  Would we have to go back to war against the USSR? Would it be atomic war?

Everywhere Americans looked, the spectre of atomic war loomed large. The government seemed resigned to its likelihood, and made scores of informational films to help people deal with the prospect.

On top of this, there was conflict with millions of American women, who were being forced out of their factory jobs to give the places back to men. Even women who had been working before WWII started were forced out. These women did not disappear back into happy domesticity. They seethed just under and above the surface, and were eventually described so well by Betty Friedan.

On top of this, the civil rights movement’s successful challenge to school segregation set off terrifying and disgusting violence that Americans watched on their TVs. Race war seemed as likely as atomic war.

So this was not a decade of mindless conformity and contentment. Americans were scared out of their minds by Communists, atomic war, the fundamental upheaval of desegregation, and Soviet domination. There’s a reason why the military-industrial complex was founded in the 1950s. People clung to the popular propaganda of contented bland conformity in an attempt to calm their fears of apocalypse. But the reality was that their whole way of life seemed up for grabs.

Now, the author posits that the 1950s were quiet rest time for America. But then he inevitably contradicts himself: “Mr. McCain seems to combine the two strains of the decade in which he grew up; he is skeptical toward the very expectations he stoically fulfills.”

How can skepticsm toward conservative social goals be the hallmark of a decade completely engulfed by unthinking conformity? The author also states that “he approached his Vietnam service much as 1950s men approached the Korean War, less with a sense of patriotism than of fatalism — the same fatalism that young people felt back then when many thought the cold war might end in apocalypse but quietly went about their lives.”

We’re afraid you simply cannot mention fear of atomic apocalypse in the 1950s if you have already set out a thesis stating that the 1950s were a time of quiet conservatism where people followed their political leaders calmly as sheep. You also cannot say both that young men went to Korea without protest and that they were fatalistic about going to Korea, not when you have posited that the lack of protest came from total acceptance of the government’s orders.

This is all bad history. The 1960s happened because of the 1950s, not in spite of the 1950s. It was the fear that kids in the 1950s grew up with that led them to abandon the society that fueled that fear. They felt they could no longer deal with the fear, and that, unlike their parents, they would not try to live normal lives in the presence of that fear.

Pushing this kind of bad history only damages America, by telling us that a chunk of our historical experience simply didn’t happen. To call the 1950s a happy, contented, conformist time is to deny the horrific responsibility we must take for creating and using and threatening to use atomic weapons, to deny the real anguish of black Americans, and the real response of white Americans (for good and for ill) to that segregated reality. It is to say that women were happy at home as housewives, that children took to “duck and cover” films with unruffled aplomb, and that we are not still dealing with the consequences of creating a military-industrial complex that is increasingly subbing in for democratic government in the United States today.

It was Eisenhower, the “avuncular white-haired president” who led the young of the 1950s to the brainwashers, according to this article, who named the military-industrial complex, fought its power, and warned Americans in his last address against it. He knew what the 1950s were; why don’t we?

Truth v. Myth: President Lincoln, Slavery, and Racism

One of the most damaging myths about American history is that Abraham Lincoln was a terrible president. That he was a racist who loved slavery, and worked hard to keep the Civil War from ending it. That Abraham Lincoln was a pro-slavery weasel whom black Americans should scorn and whose memory we should all trample in the dust.

I will stamp out this malevolent myth about Lincoln in a series of posts. To help me, I will lean heavily on the great historian David Potter, and his invaluable book The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861, and just about drown in the fantastic, should-be-required-reading-for-all-Americans Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, by Allen Guelzo.

To get to the truth about Lincoln, we have to go back to his statements and personal thoughts about slavery when he was on the road campaigning in Illinois to win the 1858 senate race against Stephen Douglas.

When Lincoln and Douglas spoke to the people, and debated each other, slavery was a major topic. Douglas had a typical “moderate” position on slavery: since black people were not the equal of white people, black people had to be kept in check somehow. Slavery took that too far; there was no need to enslave black people. But when it came to figuring out exactly what else to do to keep them in line, Douglas had no real ideas. He was willing to grant black people their freedom as a gift, rather than a real right, but he was in no hurry to do so, since there didn’t seem to be a clear way to keep black people in order once they were free. Douglas firmly stated that black Americans were not equal to white, and that black people ought to be treated with the charity one gives to inferior beings. “To a man who, as Lincoln observed, had ‘no very vivid impression that the Negro is a human,’ slavery did not appear either as a great moral issue or as an agonizing dilemma. The most important thing about it was to avoid a violent national quarrel about it…” [Potter, 340-341, 342].

Lincoln knew slavery was wrong. He knew that the reason the Founders didn’t put the word “slavery” into the Constitution was because they were ashamed of it and hoped that slavery would die, or, as Lincoln put it, they “intended and expected the ultimate extinction” of slavery. Lincoln believed black people were the equals of white people. “Let us discard all this quibbling about [this] race and that race and the other race being inferior… Let us discard all these things and unite as one people throughout this land until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.” (Ibid., 342-3] Lincoln also believed slavery could not be allowed to spread, and that containing it would indeed set it on a course to die.

But then, like many Americans at the time, Lincoln ran into problems. Like the Founders, he believed that the existence of the United States was crucial to the quotient of good in the world. Lincoln believed he was obligated to live with slavery on this basis, waiting for it to die on its own. He also didn’t know how black people could be integrated into white American society. He did not believe black and white people could live peacefully together, not after hundreds of years of slavery had driven them so far apart. Lincoln felt that black people would never be given their full rights as Americans. He knew that there was no point in “[freeing black Americans] and [keeping] them among us as underlings.” Therefore, he decided the only solution was to send all the black people in America back to Africa, “their own native land.” This despite the fact that America was their own native land.

So Lincoln aspired to high ideals, and knew intellectually that black and white people were equal, but in his daily life and habits he was he was not ready to end slavery or begin the work of racial integration in the United States. And when he was addressing racist audiences during his senate campaign, he ramped up the racism in his own comments, assuring people he would never want to see blacks living equally with whites, and that the U.S. was a nation by and for whites alone.

What makes this man admirable? The fact that he grew increasingly irritated with his own inconsistency, and that he changed. In 1858, he believed that black people were equal to white people, but when it came down to visualizing a truly mixed and equal society, he just couldn’t see it, and didn’t want to risk trying it for fear of civil war. He believed what he said when he told his audiences that black and white people shared a common humanity. But nothing in his life in America had prepared him to live in a truly just, racially equal society.

Unlike Douglas, and most other Americans, however, Lincoln couldn’t rest with this attitude. He struggled with it. In his private papers, he wrote this: “If A can prove… that he may, of right, enslave B.—why may not B snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A? –You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly? –You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.”

As Potter points out, “Here, clearly, Lincoln saw blacks and white together, caught indiscriminately in the web of injustice which society often weaves. …it was only random chance which had made him free and made [blacks] slave.” [Ibid., 352-3]

So Lincoln was conflicted between an ideal and reality. The ideal—all people are equal, and brothers and sisters. The reality—he was uncomfortable living that out with actual black people. This is hardly surprising. Think of your own lofty ideals and how you fall short in living them out. Americans believe in justice and democracy, yet very few have done much to stop the imprisonments of Americans and others at Guantanamo Bay, the torture carried out by our soldiers, or the crimes committed in America’s name by private contractors in Iraq. Many Americans who know that racial profiling is wrong, and who would yell if it were applied to them, still can’t quite bring themselves to condemn it when it is applied to others, particularly olive-skinned men wearing turbans at the airport.  We all fall short of living out our ideals.

So do we hand Lincoln a big prize for falling short of his ideals? No. And if he had stopped there, he would not be the great man that he was and the American hero that he is. But he didn’t stop there. What makes Lincoln admirable at this point is what he did next: he kept thinking about his inconsistency, and he changed his position. He started out racist and changed. He started out wishy-washy on slavery and he changed.

We all start out with prejudices; that is part of growing up in any human society. If we live out our lives with those prejudices, we are not admirable. But if we can come to realize that prejudice is unjust, we can change, and become better people, and that is admirable. Lincoln was still racist in 1858. But he was not racist by 1861. That profound change is what makes Lincoln someone we can respect  and, more to the point, emulate.

Slavery mattered to Lincoln. His own inconsistency on race mattered to him. Having to talk publicly in political debates about slavery and race, and hearing himself waffle on both, forced Lincoln to resolve his ambiguity. Potter sums this up so well:

“The difference between Lincoln and Douglas… was that Douglas did not believe that slavery really mattered very much, because he did not believe that Negroes had enough human affinity with him to make it necessary to concern himself with them. Lincoln, on the contrary, believed that slavery mattered, because he recognized a human affinity with blacks which made their plight a necessary matter of concern to him. This does not mean that his position was logically consistent or that he was free of prejudice. …In a very real sense his position was ambiguous. …And, one must add, an ambiguous position is by definition one in which opposing values conflict with one another. It is hard to believe that, in Lincoln’s case, the conflicting values were really of equal force. …By a static analysis, Lincoln was a mild opponent of slavery and a moderate defender of racial discrimination. By a dynamic analysis, he held a concept of humanity which impelled him inexorably in the direction of freedom and equality.” (my italics) [Ibid., 354]

Lincoln had conflicting values, like most of us. Unlike most of us, he came pretty quickly to see that this was completely unacceptable, and he acted decisively to end slavery and to successfully integrate the United States after the war. That was in 1862, when he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation.

Next post: The Emancipation Proclamation WAS the end of slavery in the U.S.