Setting the Record Straight: Lincoln's Wisdom on the Politics of Race

A minor scholar, an economist by the name of Thomas DiLorenzo, has been on an anti-Lincoln Jihad throughout the year 2002. His book, "The Real Lincoln," has led otherwise sound writers, like Paul Craig Roberts, to declare the Great Emancipator, "worse than [ the Cambodian mastermind of genocide] Pol Pot." Since Dr. Keyes and the Declaration Foundation take Lincoln to be a model of Declarationist Statesmanship, it behooves us to deal with the calumnies of Professor DiLorenzo, and we have done so throughout the year.

Today, I'd like to excerpt a section from our book, "America's Declaration Principles in Thought and Action," dealing with the charge made by DiLorenzo and many before him, mostly leftists, but also libertarians, that Lincoln showed himself a racist in the famous "Peoria Speech" of 1854. It is found in Chapter 8 of our book, which may be purchased online at www.declaration.net

As we read the Peoria speech today, one element jars our sensibilities: Lincoln does not take a stand for full political and social equality of the races. Some of the abolitionists of his day, especially the Quakers and other religious abolitionists, did. The 1854 laws of Maine set up in almost all respects what we would recognize today as equal civil rights, including jury duty and voting rights. But Maine was almost alone. Illinois' laws did not allow blacks to vote or serve on juries, and Illinois was typical of the free states.

In Peoria, Lincoln said this: "Let it not be said that I am contending for the establishment of political and social equality between the whites and blacks. I have already said the contrary." Was this statesmanlike too, or was it either weak or unwise, or even unjust?

We think Lincoln's position in the Peoria speech can be vindicated, and that it can be reconciled with his support for expanded civil rights towards the end of the Civil War, if two things are kept in mind. First, as Lincoln himself said in 1859, "In this country, public opinion is everything." Second, that the knowledge of the statesman is prudence, or practical wisdom, which consists in knowing how to move towards moral goals by practicable steps, not in "the immoderate pursuit of moral perfection" which, in political life, "will more often lead to misery and terror than to justice and happiness," as Thomas G. West puts it in his book on the founding.

To take the first point first, is it not self-evident that in a republic, where the citizens are governed by their consent, their opinion will be the court of last resort, the final arbiter of all disputes? That does not mean that those opinions will never change, or that it will not be the duty of a good man and especially of a statesman to mold them for the better. But a public man will ignore them at his peril. Lincoln turns this weapon back on Douglas in the Peoria speech, when he tells him that he will never be able to suppress the voice of the people crying out that slavery is unjust: "...the great mass of mankind...consider slavery a great moral wrong; and their feeling against it, is not evanescent, but eternal. It lies at the very foundation of their sense of justice; and it cannot be trifled with-It is a great and durable element of popular action, and I think, no statesman can safely disregard it."

Sir Francis Bacon wrote long ago that, "Nature, to be mastered, must be obeyed." The saying is equally true of the nature of the physical body and of the body politic. Public opinion, the soul of the political body, was ailing in the days after the Nebraska Bill, and Douglas was prescribing as medicine what Lincoln thought poison. That the patient should also take up a regimen of vigorous exercise after his recovery was not and should not have been the first thing on the doctor's list.

Lincoln never said that political equality between the races was wrong; the most complete expression of his early views on the matter came in the 1858 debates with Douglas, and he clothed them entirely in the language of feeling: "...[I said years ago[1] that] my own feelings would not admit a social and political equality between the black and white races, and that even if my own feelings would admit of it, I still knew that the public sentiment of the country would not, and that such a thing was an utter impossibility, or substantially that." And again, in the same debate, "I agree with Judge Douglas that he [the Negro] is not my equal in many respects, certainly not in color- perhaps not in intellectual and moral endowments; but in the right to eat the bread without the leave of any body else which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man."

It must be remembered that the young Lincoln had said in 1838 that our passions, our feelings, were to be the enemy of our freedom in the future, and that reason, "cold sober reason," would be the friend of the principles of the Declaration. Only one feeling, an almost religious reverence for the founding ideals, would buttress that reason. It should also be pointed out that Lincoln said that he knew only that the feelings of his fellow citizens would not admit of equality. He was certain that there was an inequality of "color." He did not say that he was certain of the infinitely more important inequality of "intellectual and moral endowments." These he said, might be unequal... "perhaps."

Many causes, including prominently the religious conviction that all men are brothers, conspired to change public opinion in the United States towards the end of the Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation, by altering the legal status of slaves and by encouraging them to flee their masters and seek refuge in the Union armies, had some effect. But the greatest source of the change was probably the testimony given in blood by the black soldiers who had served the Union. The number enlisted was reported by the President to Congress in January of 1864 to be over 100,000,[2] and Lincoln and many others thought that without their services, the war could not have been won. To a complaining Northern politician, James C. Conkling, who objected to fighting to "free negroes," Lincoln penned these memorable words: "...[when peace comes] it will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost. And then, there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it."

When a man will not fight to preserve his people and his principles, we call him a slave; when a slave does fight, we see in him a man. In antiquity, slaves who risked their lives to save their masters were often manumitted. They had proved their manhood. Lincoln wrote Conkling in the same letter, "If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive--even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept."

It cannot, alas, be said that the promise was perfectly kept. It would take a century more after the abolition of slavery for a new exercise of Declaration statesmanship to establish political equality without regard to race in this country. But the start was made in the time of Lincoln's stewardship.

Let us be blunt; if Lincoln had taken the full position of equal social and political rights, he would not have been electable to any statewide office in Illinois, neither in 1854, when he was a candidate for U.S. Senate and nearly won the nomination, nor in 1858, when he and Douglas had their memorable debates. He would not have become president in 1860, nor would any member of his party who took such a stand. He accomplished the good that he could, always insisting on the fundamental principle that in the fullness of time would yield such results. To achieve this good, he had to rekindle a reverence for the Declaration. Let us look briefly at how he did that in the Peoria speech.

Word, words, words. "Mere words" men say, and yet it is by the power of words that we take common counsel and learn to govern ourselves. We are free because we are made in the image of the all-wise God, and we have a bit of His light in our minds, and by that bit we strive to live according to His laws, the "laws of nature, and of nature's God." Of Divine things, St. Paul writes, "But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear of him without a preacher?"

Lincoln preached in Peoria. He preached the political religion he had declared must be preached years ago in Springfield. Douglas and the doctrine of popular sovereignty were "giving up the OLD faith... " Human equality and popular sovereignty were "as opposite as God and mammon..." Three times he calls the proposition that all men are created equal, the "ancient faith." Of the Nebraska Bill he says, "It hath no relish of salvation in it." He calls the Founders, "our revolutionary fathers," and "the fathers of the republic," stirring memories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He compares slavery to the fateful disobedience of Adam. He says: "Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us re-purify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution."

Lincoln was like a great preacher in more than his scriptural language and his vision that America was founded on the Declaration as a kind of covenant or original creed, the "ancient faith." He endeavored to emulate the charity of great preaching, too, as when he admitted that "the Southern people" were "just what we would be in their situation," and when he said that "I surely will not blame them..." He stressed that Thomas Jefferson, the 'father Abraham' of the American covenant was "a Virginian by birth...a slaveholder..." He opened his speech by announcing that he did not "propose to question the patriotism, or to assail the motives of any man, or class of men...He. added that he wished "to be no less than national in all the positions" he would take. When he had suggested that "...a gradual emancipation might be adopted..." He immediately added, "but for their tardiness in this I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the south." Thus, to political faith, he added political charity.

The climax of the speech actually occurs about three-fourths in; after that point Lincoln anticipates some of the points he expects Douglas to make in his final hour's response. The paragraph begins with "Our republican robe is soiled..." It ends with these words of salvation and hope, which we quote in full:

Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south--let all Americans--let all lovers of liberty everywhere--join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make and keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.

In the Lyceum speech, Lincoln had concluded by urging the statesmen of his day to take the materials supplied by reason and mold them into intelligence, morality, and reverence for the law. "Upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest, as the rock of its basis; and as truly as has been said of the only greater institution, 'the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." At Peoria, he took his own advice, and became such a statesman.

[1]In fact, it was in the Peoria speech. The text there runs, "whether this [feeling against equality] accords with justice and sound judgement, is not the sole question, if indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded. We can not, then, make them equals."

[2] By the end of the war, over 200,000 blacks had served in the Union armed forces, and 37,000 had died serving their country.

A minor scholar, an economist by the name of Thomas DiLorenzo

Now isn't that interesting. It seems our good friend Richard is making his argument against 'the Real Lincoln' by attacking DiLorenzo's personal scholarly credentials. This claim is very peculiar as it reveal as much about its author as it does about the person he's attacking. Let's compare these two individual's scholarly credentials:

Dr. Thomas J. DiLorenzo -
Professor of Economics, Loyola College (Maryland)
Amazon.com identifies him as the author of at least 11 published books.
An academic journal database search has multiple hits for DiLorenzo as a published author.

Dr. Richard Ferrier -
Tutor, Thomas Aquinas College (California)
Amazon.com identifies him as the author of ZERO published books. His college's website identifies him as the co-author of a forthcoming "e-textbook" that is available for download off the internet.
An academic journal database search identifies Ferrier as the author of ZERO published journal articles out of several hundred listings searched.

And in the unlikely event that rdf is still out there watching...sorry Dick, but you'd be advised to look in the mirror first the next time you wish to call somebody else a "minor scholar." Other than that, have a nice day!

The American Colonization Society was founded in 1816. Among its founders were Francis Scott Key, Henry Clay, Bushrod Washington, John Randolph of Roanoake, Richard Bland Lee, Daniel Webster, William Crawford, and Richard Rush, son of Benjamin Rush. Presidents Madison and Monroe were also supporters, and sought government assistance for the project of colonizing freed slaves in Africa. Thomas Jefferson is also on record as supporting the idea. Indeed, Jefferson's efforts at resettlement were a major inspiration to the Society. John Marshall was another supporter. Andrew Jackson was listed as an officer without his consent. In later years it had some support from Black abolitionists like Martin Delaney.

The ACS was part of that early anti-slavery sentiment in Virginia, Maryland and Kentucky, as well as in Northern states, that we've been told died after a more militant abolitionism took root in the North. Seen from the perspective of its day it was one of the few channels for promoting emancipation and manumission voluntarily by slaveholders themselves. The refusal of the states to treat free blacks as equals, and the opposition of many people to emancipation if freed Blacks remained in the country led many humanitarian minds to support the ACS. Opposition to the ACS, at least in its early days, was more likely to come from staunch supporters of slavery than from abolitionists.

So in saying that Lincoln supported the Illinois Colonization Society, you're saying that he was of one mind with more enlightened political luminaries of the day. In retrospect the idea of removing freed slaves from the country their labor had helped to build up looks monstrous. Was it worse than slavery itself? Was largely voluntary resettlement worse than the slave trade or the crimes involved in the maintenance of slavery? Was it worse to resettle slaves in a free country or to separate them from their families and sell them down the river? Was resettlement of freed slaves worse than the dispossession and removal of Indian tribes going on at the same time? Was it much worse than the forcible resettlement of English convicts and paupers in Australia?

We rightly reject such ideas of "resettlement" or "population exchange" today. There is much cruelty and injustice hidden behind such euphemisms. In retrospect, it's clear that colonization or resettlement was an alternative to integration, but we shouldn't single out the ACS as a particularly evil organization in the context of its day, when integration and racial equality were not considered options.

Your politically correct attacks on Lincoln are of a piece with attacks on Washington and Jefferson for having been slaveholders. Dismantling the "Lincoln myth" won't be any prelude to a glorification of secessionist or Confederate leaders. It's just another step in the trashing of the American past.

Members of the ACS included Robert Lee and John Breckenridge.

Ahh, but they haven't been held up as the end all be all to the holy cause of the union and its no quarter war against the South just to end said practice are they? So it was common to be a member of the ACS. What of it? Face it, your hero could have cared less about the slaves and the falsehoods presented in the above article to paint him as some type of saint are getting tiresome. He was a big government thug and could care less about the Constitution. The exact thing that conservatives today are supposed to rally against. Except with abe we have to make an exception. We have to forget everything that is historically correct about the man, everything that would disgust a conservative if it were anyone else, and just remember his worthless political speeches

Face it, your hero could have cared less about the slaves and the falsehoods presented in the above article to paint him as some type of saint are getting tiresome.

On the contrary, you may not agree with his ideas on colonization but Lincoln was against the institution of slavery, unlike your southron heroes, and said so on many occasions. The same cannot be said of the holy Davis and the sainted Lee. I've pointed this out before but considering the treatment shown towards free blacks down south prior to the war, and given that their welcome up North wasn't very warm either, and in light of what the south tried to pull off after the war with their Black Codes, was Lincoln doing them any harm suggesting that they might be better of carving a new life for themselves overseas? Someplace where they could run their own lives and their own societies free in a way that southern whites would never voluntarily allow? In retrospect we are a better country for having an integrated society, but I would not have wanted to go through what blacks went through in the 100 years following the war.

Consider that bastion of purity - Ohio. In 1829 almost half the blacks in Cincinnati were forcibly deported. Around 1841 white rioters fired cannons into black neighborhoods. Free blacks had to post a $500 bond to live in the state, still couln't testify in court or attand public schools.

Oregon had this provision in it's Constitution:

"No free Negro, or mulatto, not residing in this state at the time of adoption of this constitution, shall ever come, reside, or be within this state, or hold any real estate, or make any contract, or maintain any suit therein; and the legislative assembly shall provide by penal laws for the removal by public officers of all such free negroes who shall bring them into the state, or employ or harbor them therein.

In 1814 the Illinois legislature authorized the use of slaves in the salt mine. Free blacks migrating to Illinois after 1829 had to post a $1000 bond to prevent their being a "charge to the county", and Illinois in 1848 changed it's Constitution to prohibit the entrance of blacks. The "Black Law" of 1853 provided for the arrest of blacks staying more than 10 days in the state, along with a $50 fine, and their sale into indentured service (slavery) if they did not pay the fine. The law also prohibited the intermarriage of whites and blacks. Illinois has a database of slave records at "Illinois State Archives: Servitude and Emancipation Records"

The 1862 Revised Code of Indiana outlawed immigration of negroes and mulattos into the state, prevented blacks from entering contractual obligations, fined anyone employing a black $500, forbade interracial marriage, and prevented blacks from testifying in court against whites.

It wasn't just a southern thing.

ROTF - please don't confuse anyone with facts!

Well, I guess out of fairness we gotta give Richard credit for his "e-textbook" on the Declaration foundation site. For only $15 you can download your own copy today, or, even better, for twice that ammount they'll run a copy off the printer, drive down to the copy shop, and spiral bind it for you! Evidently self publishing Lincoln-worship rants on the Declaration site for free wasn't bringing in any income.

But not to worry, they've got something to compete with DiLorenzo's book now, courtesy of the Hewlitt-Packard printing press and the Kinkos Bindary.

Silly Bear. Robert E. Lee has been presented as the "end all be all to the holy cause" of the South. Take Lee as some kind of spotless hero, and you can't attack Lincoln for having agreed with him at some point about colonization.

And this "Lincoln: Saint or Demon" thinking is shallow and stale. Lincoln clearly did care about slavery -- in large part because he cared about freedom, but also because he wasn't deaf to the injustice done to the slaves. He wasn't a 21st century egalitarian or welfare state coddler, but he was fully aware of the evil of slavery.

Nor is it the case that Lincoln was a "big government thug." He supported protective tariffs, federal currency, and public support for railroad construction. So did many Americans of his generation and the next. That's hardly a recipe for tyranny or leviathan. If you look at things honestly, you are probably in favor of more big government, whether at the state or federal level than Lincoln was. Most Americans today certainly are. When it came down to it, the Confederate government was as well.

Nor is conservative respect for Lincoln some "exception." We also respect Washington, though he advocated the replacement of the loose Articles of Confederation with the Constitution, which increased the powers of the federal government. Joe Sobran and others have expressed a preference for the Articles of Confederation over the Constitution, but it's not clear that retaining the Articles would really have made us freer, happier or more secure. Indeed, it's also doubtful that the success of the Confederacy would have left most of us freer than we are now, though mythology makes many think so.

He supported protective tariffs, federal currency, and public support for railroad construction. So did many Americans of his generation and the next. That's hardly a recipe for tyranny or leviathan.

I would have to disagree. Ideas have consequences that are often unseen or transparent in their simplest of forms. As a perfect example, one need only look at the horrific conclusions of David Hume to see the problems of his seemingly benign predecessor John Locke, who is often very appealing to conservatives on first glimpse.

Years after the fact, that which is built upon earlier precedents can emerge as a beast of untold size and horror. In those respects, Lincoln's actions were a recipe for what we have today.

If we can design taxes for the purpose of giving unfair advantages to a certain few at the expense of the rest, what is to stop us from simply allocating policy to advantage acertain few? If we can appropriate interventionary funding to the advantage of a certain economic entity over its competitors, what is to stop wider scale economic management and intervention by the government later? It may sound like a slippery slope because it is, but more so the policies such as those favored by The Lincoln allowed a foot in the door, which was incrementally pried open over the century that followed.

We have to forget everything that is historically correct about the man, everything that would disgust a conservative if it were anyone else, and just remember his worthless political speeches

Your assessment is absolutely correct. It is no longer about Abe Lincoln the man and what he did or did not do. It is about The Lincoln, a diefied concept of political idolatry for those who flock around him.

Some defenders of The Lincoln deny this situation's existence, and individually that is entirely possible. But evidence exists that it is there, the strongest piece being the radical inability of certain idolaters to concede any form of human or political flaw whatsoever in their item of worship, The Lincoln.

Some who practice this idolatry adamantly deny it in words, but not in their actions. Take Walt for example. Just look at the extreme efforts he exerts to deny or excuse even the simplest of flaws on the part of The Lincoln, some of them so extreme that even his associates back away. He simply cannot concede the constitutional error of suspending habeas corpus, or that of ignoring a federal court decision denying him the suspension privilege he exerted. Nor can he concede that any wrong of any fashion was committed against innocent southerners by yankee armies. Instead he denies the rapes and murders ever happened by pushing a history that leaves them out, and when presented with indisputable evidence to the contrary, he ignores it or belittles and downplays it because he cannot fathom the alternative - having to admit that The Lincoln and his general Sherman were thoroughly flawed and sinful human beings capable of perpetrating a wrong.

Walt is the extreme case, but this passage from the kinkos pamphlet by Ferrier shows the same tendencies. The human person of Abraham Lincoln indisputably subscribed to and publicly espoused racist beliefs. Any individual who recognizes that Abe Lincoln was a flawed and worldly human being has no problem recognizing this, accepting it as so, and moving on. The Lincoln's idolaters cannot do that though as, again, it would require they concede a flaw which they simply cannot do, be it large or ever so slight. Instead they perpetrate the fraud of arguing at length that when The Lincoln made racist statements, he was really not making racist statements or at least not believing them. In doing so they rely upon lines of rationalization so extreme and so intense that they preserve The Lincoln's infallability in their own minds. The rest of us see it for what it is - that linguistic process that Lincoln himself once described as reaching a horse chestnut out of a chestnut horse.

Call it claremonster worship under the Abratollah Jaffa, the cult of Harry, whatever it may be - the idolatrous worship of a false diety known as The Lincoln exists among certain members of conservative circles and, in its presence, detracts from the greater good to be gained out of conservatism by attempting to reorient us around what is at its core a falsehood, an idolatrous lie.

What is slavery, but a way of "giving unfair advantages to a certain few at the expense of" others -- and a way a good deal more savage than any protective tariff could be. That "foot" was already in the "door," and Lincoln's generation did much to get it out. To extract the profits of uncompensated labor and to use the resources of others to protect that compelled labor source dwarfs anything the Republican party ever did.

Every system of law, government, ownership, reward, or taxation will benefit some groups more than others. We are all on a "slippery slope" to unfair favor or tyranny or chaos and always have been. It was certainly true that the suppressed classes of the Old Republic saw unfair favor and tyranny exercised over their own lives. And it has been true since. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. But tariffs and trade duties are a question for political debate and discussion. When all those concerned are given a say in determining tariff levels and they exercise their voice effectively, tariffs are not in themselves acts of tyranny, and it's foolish to think them such.

On balance, though, Lincoln's influence brought greater liberty. Whether Lincoln's tariff policies were for the best is open to debate, but if you ignore or discount the connection felt at the time -- using tariffs to promote a free labor, industrial economy rather than an agrarian, slave, neo-colonial economy -- you don't do justice to Lincoln's generation and the alternatives they faced. Lincoln's policies may not have been the best choice, but Calhoun's marriage of free trade, slavery, and minority rule certainly deserved -- and deserves -- repudiation and condemnation.

And today, those who have expressed concern about globalization and the developing "New World Order" would perhaps agree that free trade does not necessarily bring freedom, nor protectionism inevitably result in tyranny.

What is slavery, but a way of "giving unfair advantages to a certain few at the expense of" others

You tell me if that is your interest. But my question to you was not about slavery but the implications of the government action practiced by The Lincoln that you listed. Therefore as far as I am concerned, your attempt to throw the slavery red herring into the particulars of this discussion, not to mention your tu quoque equivocation by way of this issue, is little more than a diversionary tactic to assist you in avoiding the response I made to your earlier comment.

Now, returning to the discussion, you made the statement that certain aspects of The Lincoln's politics were not a recipe for big government tyranny. I challenged that assertion of yours and provided my reasons, which you then avoided. Do you care to address them now, and if so, please state your response.

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