[lentulusgracchus]

[You, quoting Lerone Bennett] I have not criticized him for not rising to the level of the Kings and Mandelas of our time -- I have deplored the fact that he didn't rise to the level of the great Black and White leaders of his time.

No, that's not right. He is still implicitly judging Lincoln teleologically against a late-20th-century standard of race relations. If the abolitionist cause had not triumphed in the Civil War, what would be his basis of comparison? It's hard to see, because the antebellum Abolitionists (with a capital "a") point directly to their 20th-century counterparts. He's using Garrison, Douglass, Wendell and others as placeholders for Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Whitney Young.

[lentulusgracchus]

Erratum:
He's using Garrison, Douglass, Wendell [Phillips] and others as placeholders for Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Whitney Young.

Wendell Phillips was the Abolitionist. Philip Wendell was a character in James Michener's novel Centennial. I'm continually bedeviled by this juxtaposition.

[nolu chan]

Lincoln repeatedly expressed racist and White supremecist beliefs.

Bennett directly compares Lincoln to his contemporaries, especially outspoken abolitionists. For example:

SOURCE: Forced Into Glory, Lerone Bennett, Jr., pp. 131-134

No less censurable is the Everybody Was A Racist School, which says that everybody or almost everybody in the nineteenth century was a racist and that it is unnatural and, some say, racist to expect Lincoln to be anything else. Ignoring Whites like Zebina Eastman and Wendell Phillips, this school says Lincoln was a man of the nineteenth century and should be judged by nineteenth century standards, as if freedom is defined by dates, as if equality was invented by Thurgood Marshall, as if the N-word was invented by Mark Fuhrman. Ignoring White men like Trumbull who got elected without totally supporting slavery in the South and man-hunting in the North, they say, in so many words, that if Lincoln hadn't talked like a racist in the nineteenth century, we wouldn't have this warm, comforting integration symbol to worship in the twentieth.

This defense concedes the essential point and forces Lincoln de­fenders like Oates to defend Lincoln in words that indict him. Explaining and explaining away a Lincoln vote in the Illinois legisla­ture against Negro suffrage, Oates says that "public opinion was almost universally against political rights for black people, and young Lincoln, who had elected to work within the system, was not about to ruin his career by supporting Negro suffrage" (38).

The psychology is apt, and the description of Lincoln's oppor­tunism is devastatingly accurate. The only question is whether Oates is defending Lincoln or attacking him. For you can't say anything more derogatory about a man than that he had elected to work within a system that condemned four million people to slavery and made it a crime for a Black person to settle in his state.

It's remarkable that people who say Lincoln lied and pretended to be a racist to get elected don't realize that the apology is almost as bad as the acts. For it is not all clear that it is better to lie in order to get elected than to honestly confess racism. The defense, moreover, is clearly insufficient, since Lincoln said the same thing in Ohio when he was not running for office and in Washington after he had been elected president. And Strozier is correct when he says that "it would be naive to ignore the essential racism that informed Lincoln's thoughts wherever he spoke" (174).