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.

Writers

If I didn't have a tin ear I would be playing a banjo all the time. But alas, when it comes to pitch, I am equipped as U. S. Grant was. We have none. He said he could recognize only two tunes--"Yankee Doodle" and everything else. I am a bit better off than that, but not by much. When I start singing in the car, Kathleen turns up the radio.

So I try to make my music with words. And when I write history I try to write an entirely factual narrative--as factual as the sources permit--but make it read like fiction. Don't ask me how that is done. I have no idea. It is with writing a good narrative as Somerset Maugham said it was with writing a novel. There are three basic rules to writing a novel, Maugham said. Only three. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.

I know great writing when I read it. And my favorite three writers down the years have been Shakespeare, the greatest in the English language, Ambrose Bierce the maddeningly clever 19th century satirist, and Abraham Lincoln, whose picture we all carry around with us in our wallets and purses on our $5 bills. Shakespeare in my book of greats is the greatest who ever put quill to paper. I have no idea how he could be so greatly eloquent and poetic so all the time--in nearly every line of every play.

As for Bierce, how can anybody resist his Devil's Dictionary and its wild definitions? Who else would think to define alone as "being in bad company," or noise as "the chief product of civilization," or a clarinet as "an instrument of torture played by a person with cotton in his ears," or an accordian as "an instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin."
(Which reminds me of what Oscar Wilde said about bagpipes: "Thank God they don't smell.")

As for Lincoln, no president has ever written better than that self-taught hick from the sticks. I cry whenever I read, "We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angles of our nature."

Or these words by that great man who was himself touched by those better angels: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan -- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."

And on and on. And to think those guys wrote it all themselves, without ghost writers, speech writers, or research assistants.