Then I take it that you recognize Abraham Lincoln.
SOURCE: Forced Into Glory, Lerone Bennett, Jr., pp. 131-134
Since I said in a February 1968 article in Ebony magazine that the great emancipator was naked or, at least, was wearing borrowed clothes, Lincoln experts have circled the wagons. Surveying the post-sixties reevaluation -- "Much of the recent debate," Vorenberg said (24), "was set off by" by the Ebony article -- Professor Arthur Zilversmit said in a Chicago Sun-Times analysis (February 12,1980):
Bennett's article struck a nerve. He had not only called into question the reputation of a beloved hero, but he had challenged the American picture of our history as the story of measured progress toward liberal goals.Several historians and journalists argued with his version of the facts, but his charges could not be easily dismissed by other historians, several of whom began a comprehensive re-evaluation of Lincoln's racial views.
The latest reevaluation appears in the endnotes of David H. Donald's book, Lincoln. Summarizing the views of the leading members of the Lincoln establishment, Donald said correctly that it is an error to try to excuse Lincoln's racial views by saying that he grew up in a racist society and that everybody was a racist. He added, however, that Lincoln "fortunately escaped the more virulent strains of racism." What is the evidence for this? The evidence is that Lincoln didn't say hideous things about Blacks -- can anyone say anything more hideous than that a whole race of people is inferior and should be denied equal rights and deported because of its race? -- and that Lincoln's racist views were "nearly [my italics] always expressed tentatively." Donald cited approvingly Don E. Fehrenbacher's statement that Lincoln "conceded that the Negro might not be his equal, or he said that the Negro was not his equal in certain respects" (italics in original). [13]
This is a direct issue not between Lincoln and me but between the Lincoln establishment and Lincoln. Fehrenbacher says with Donald's approval that Lincoln conceded -- note that word -- that the Negro might not be his equal. Where did that word might come from? That's not what Lincoln said. "Certainly," Lincoln said, "the Negro is not our equal in color -- perhaps not in many other respects" (CW 2:520). Is certainly a tentative word? Lincoln didn't think so, for he used it repeatedly: "I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects -- certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment" (CW 3:16, italics added). On at least fourteen occasions between 1854 and 1860, Lincoln said unambiguously that he believed the Negro race was inferior to the White race. In Galesburg, he referred to "the inferior races" (CW 3:222). Who were "the inferior races?" African-Americans, he said, Mexicans, whom he called "mongrels" (CW 3:235), and probably all colored people.
In addition to all this, Lincoln said repeatedly that there was a physical difference between the Black and White races. What did he mean by the word physical? He meant bodily, corporeally, somatically, biologically, in accordance with the laws of nature. He meant that the difference was more than skin deep. He meant that the difference was immutable and was, he believed, going to last forever and would forever forbid Blacks and Whites living in equality. Forever, even probably forever, does not come within the bounds of tentativeness.
The Lincoln defenders are eminent, they are eloquent -- and they are wrong.
Lincoln did say -- repeatedly -- that the Negro race was physically inferior to the White race. He repeatedly poked fun at Blacks in "darky" jokes and habitually used the N-word.
Nor can we agree with the defense of Lincoln's tentative embrace of inequality. If Lincoln said on one occasion that the Negro -- that is to say, a whole race of people -- was not his equal biologically in some respects, he said on other occasions that the Negro race was not his equal in "many" respects. But what are we arguing about here? What is the difference between many and some and forever and probably forever? If, as the defenders concede, Lincoln said that the Negro, that is to say, the Negro race, was not his equal in certain respects or in any respect and should be denied equal rights because of its race, he was a racist and it is a waste of time to try to quantify the degree of racism or to argue over whether he was a biological, social, or empirical racist.
But we see what is involved here. The proponents of this argument would have us believe that Abraham Lincoln was a good racist. He was, God help us, a tentative racist. How, after the Third Reich and the First and Second American South and South Africa, can anyone say that? A man who condemns a whole race and excludes it from the basic rules of the social contract -- the right to vote and to sit on juries and attend schools -- is not a good racist, and if he were not Abraham Lincoln, we would say he is not a good man. If additionally such a man proposes concretely -- not vaguely or tentatively -- to ethnically cleanse a country by deporting a whole people because of its race, we would say he doesn't even share our sense of humanity.
Conor Cruise O'Brien makes an extremely perceptive comment, saying that the worst racists are the counting racists, the men and women who are always counting the reasons the oppressed group is inferior to the oppressing group (315). George Washington, who was a racist on other levels, was not, O'Brien says, a counting racist. Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were. They had, to appropriate the words he used about Jefferson, "the classical racist itch to identify characteristics [color, intellect, morality, aesthetics] that could be interpreted as indications of genetic inferiority (315)" and as reasons why Blacks should be oppressed.
Most of Lincoln's information on Blacks came from minstrel shows and stag sessions with the boys, and he never really got over the idea that the stock minstrel show figure -- loud, funny, dumb, loquacious -- was the typical Negro. The men who observed him every day and heard him talk publicly and privately said he had a low opinion of Blacks and that he poked fun at them and ridiculed them. Donald said that Lincoln "never described them [Blacks] as indolent or incapable of sustained work" (633), but Lamon, who was there and heard the words from Lincoln's mouth, said the sixteenth president "claimed that those who were incidentally liberated by the Federal arms were poor-spirited, lazy, and slothful" and "as docile in the service of the Rebellion as the mules that ploughed the fields or drew the baggage trains." It is no wonder, then, Lamon said, that "with such views honestly formed... that he longed to see them transported to Hayti, Central America, Africa, or anywhere, so that they might in no event, and in no way, participate in the government of his country" (345, italics added).
So much for the tentative school.
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).