The "Racist" Lincoln

This is a tear-down, bring-down age we live in. And Abraham Lincoln has not been immune to attacks attempting to tarnish or destroy his standing as a great man and a great president. Two of the most recent ongoing attacks have painted him as a racist and as a homesexual. First, I will address the charge that he was a racist. The homosexuality will be the next in this march of the blogs.

The racist charge suffers from the same problem that much tear-down suffers from--viewing the past not through the prism of the past, but the prisim of the present. Historians call this "presentism" and it is an unhealthy disease. Those who accuse Lincoln of being a racist suffer from it.

Viewed in the context of the present, Lincoln could indeed be called a racist, indeed, a white supremecist. He said in his legendary debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 that he believed the white man should always be superior to the black. But in that day virtually every white man, North and South, believed that--or said he did. Anybody who was running for public office had to believe it, or at least say he did, or he could never be elected.

But Lincoln had a very mild case of racism for his day--a trumped-up case. Douglas had the hard case--the one most whites sincerely had. Douglas believed the black man a hopelessly inferior being, born to be ruled by whites, with no rights to equality at all. Lincoln, boldly for his time, argued the case for the black man having been born equal to any white in the right to earn, own, keep, and eat his own bread. He fought boldly to keep slavery from spreading into the territories, looking to its eventual extinction everywhere. And in 1865, before his assassination, he saw passed the constitutional amendment freeing blacks from slavery everywhere, North and South. And that was the first step to eventual true black equality.

Lincoln was only as racist as he had to be in his time to get anything done. I don't believe he believed, for a minute, in the inferiority of the black man. I think the real Lincoln was reflected in something Frederick Douglass, the great ex-slave, orator, and most famous black man of Lincoln's time, said of him. After Douglass first met Lincoln in 1863, he said of him that Lincoln "was the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color...."

That, in my view is the definition of a thoroughgoing non-racist. And I believe that is what Lincoln was in his heart of hearts.