Will the real Lincoln please stand up

[Dufrdan]

Here are the opening paragraphs of a review of nine year old critique of Lincoln written by a leading black historian.  A google search of the title will result in several reviews, some like this one, many by Lincoln worshipers who accuse this author of libel.  I found a used copy for <$8 at Amazon and ordered it -- FWIW.

Dan

"Lincoln is theology, not historiology. He is a faith, he is a church, he is a religion, and he has his own priests and acolytes, most of whom have a vested interest in [him] and who are passionately opposed to anybody telling the truth about him."
~ Lerone Bennett, Jr.,
Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream, p. 114

The gigantic collection of myths, lies, and distortions that comprise The Legend of Abraham Lincoln is the ideological cornerstone of the American warfare/welfare state. It has been invoked for generations to make the argument that if the policies of the U.S. government are not "the will of God," then at least they are the will of "Father Abraham." Moreover, this legend – this false history of America – did not arise spontaneously. It was invented and nurtured by an intergenerational army of court historians who, as Murray Rothbard once said, are absolutely indispensable to any government empire. All states, said Rothbard, depend for their existence on a series of myths about their benevolence, heroism, greatness, or even divinity.

Since very few Americans have spent much time educating themselves about Lincoln and nineteenth-century American history (much of which has been falsified anyway), it is easy for members of what I call the Lincoln Cult to dismiss all literary criticisms of Lincoln as the work of "neo-Confederates," their code-word for "defenders of slavery" (as though anyone in America today would defend slavery), or "racist." Although they label themselves "Lincoln scholars," the last thing they want is honest scholarship when it comes to the subject of Lincoln and his war. They are, at best, cover-up artists and pandering court historians who feed at the government grant trough, "consuming" tax dollars to support their "research" and their overblown university positions.

But they've got a big problem (more than one, actually). The big problem is the publication of a 662-page book by the distinguished African-American author Lerone Bennett, Jr. entitled Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream. The book was originally published in 1999 and was recently released in paperback. Bennett was a longtime managing editor of Ebony magazine and, among other things, the author of a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., What Manner of Man. Although several "Civil War" publications have labeled yours truly as the preeminent Lincoln critic of our day, Forced into Glory is a much more powerful critique of Dishonest Abe than anything I have ever written. The Lincoln Cult, which would not dare to personally attack a serious African-American scholar like Bennett, has largely ignored the book instead.

When they are not ignoring the book and hoping that it (and the author) would just go away, they "have responded by recycling the traditional Lincoln apologies," writes Bennett. (Being a "Lincoln scholar" means taking some of Lincoln's unsavory words and deeds, such as his lifelong support for the policy of "colonization" or deportation of all black people in America, and dreaming up excuses for why he was supposedly "forced" into taking that position).

Bennett argues that "academics and [the] media had been hiding the truth for 135 years and that Lincoln was not the great emancipator or the small emancipator or the economy-sized emancipator." He presents chapter and verse of how the Emancipation Proclamation freed no one, since it only applied to "rebel territory," and specifically exempted all the slave-owning/Union-controlled border states and other areas that were occupied by the U.S. army at the time. He quotes James Randall, who has been called the "greatest Lincoln scholar of all time," as writing, "the Proclamation itself did not free a single slave." It was the Thirteenth Amendment that finally ended slavery, he correctly notes, and Lincoln was dragged into accepting it kicking and screaming all the way.

[marc]

Did he have help from Walter Williams and Thomas DiLorenzo?

Sounds like the work of someone who didn't look into the larger context.  For that, I would recommend David H Donald's biography, which explains how Lincoln invested all his political capital into emancipation once he finally determined to go with it full-scale, and how the proclamation, while not freeing slavves itself, made universal emancipation inevitable.

Or you could just look at Lincoln's own words about slavery tracing back to his earliest public statement.  he was long on the record as being opposed to slavery, even though he thought that nothing could be done about it constitutionally.

Unfortunately, the revisionists toss around words to make it look as if they are the only ones who have looked at the issue in depth while presenting shallow, shallow research and arguments.


btw, who is the "yours truly" who wrote this and modestly mentions that others have labeled him the preeminent Lincoln scholar of the day?  If it's DiLorenzo (and it sounds like him), that says volumes in itself. 

[Dufrdan]

My deepest apology, I did forget attribution.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo139.html
is diLorenzo's full reveiw.
Dan

[marc]

I thought so.  The man's a proven liar, as I've documented elsewhere on this board, who goes to extreme lengths to demonize Lincoln and be hailed as a hero to Lost Causers.  

Anyway, another review of the book, this one by Pulitzer winner James McPherson, can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/08/27/reviews/000827.27mcphert.html

Here are some excerpts:

n 1863, the black activist Frederick Douglass visited the White House to discuss the treatment of black Union soldiers. ''I was never more quickly or more completely put at ease in the presence of a great man than in that of Abraham Lincoln,'' wrote Douglass, who praised the president's ''entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race.'' Lincoln was the first prominent white American ''who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.'' A century later, Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and began his ''I have a dream'' speech with the words: ''Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flame of withering injustice.''

Lerone Bennett Jr. will have none of it. Executive editor of Ebony and author of several books on African-American history, Bennett first attracted attention as a harsh critic of Lincoln in 1968, when he published an article in Ebony titled ''Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?'' His answer was a resounding Yes. Lincoln believed blacks inferior to whites, Bennett insisted; he supported segregation in the North, told darky jokes and used the N-word in public and private, reluctantly embraced Emancipation halfway through the Civil War only after Congress enacted it and slaves voted with their feet for freedom by escaping to Union lines, and persisted to the end of his life in the belief that ''deportation'' of blacks was the best solution to the race problems that would follow Emancipation.

Bennett's article provoked a great deal of controversy. Most Lincoln scholars considered it a tendentious work of scholarship, marred by selective evidence taken out of context, suppressive of contrary evidence, heedless of the cultural and political climate that constrained Lincoln's options and oblivious of Lincoln's capacity for growth, which enabled him to transcend the racist environment of his youth. Stung by these criticisms, Bennett bided his time and did additional research. In ''Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream,'' he has reasserted his principal arguments with extensive (though still selective) documentation in more than 600 pages of angry, relentless and repetitious prose.

This book must be taken seriously. Bennett gets some things right. Lincoln did share the racial prejudices of his time and place. He did support the idea of colonizing blacks abroad -- though, contrary to Bennett, he retreated from this notion after 1862 and moved toward a policy of assimilating the four million freed slaves as equal citizens. Lincoln did lag behind the abolitionists and the radical wing of his own party in supporting Emancipation and the enlistment of black soldiers.

But Bennett gets more wrong than he gets right. The book suffers from crucial flaws....


Selective quotation also produces distortion by omission. Citing a letter Lincoln wrote to the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy in 1855, Bennett maintains that Lincoln ''did not openly oppose the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party,'' because in his district, as Lincoln explained, ''they are mostly my old political and personal friends.'' Bennett fails to note that in the rest of the letter Lincoln stated that he had already broken with these former Whig associates and anticipated the ''painful necessity of my taking an open stand against them. Of their principles I think little better than I do of those of the slavery extensionists. Indeed I do not perceive how any one professing to be sensitive to the wrongs of the negroes, can join in a league to degrade a class of white men.''

Bennett never acknowledges that Lincoln was ''sensitive to the wrongs of the Negroes.'' Abundant evidence of such sensitivity is conspicuously missing from the book. Also missing is any appreciation of Lincoln's stand against the expansion of slavery. Because the Constitution prohibited interference with slavery in states where it existed, Lincoln and other Republicans focused on the question of slavery in the territories, where they insisted that Congress had the constitutional power to ban it. In his famous House Divided speech of 1858, Lincoln said that Republicans intended to ''arrest the further spread'' of slavery and thus place the institution ''in course of ultimate extinction.''

No reader who accepts Bennett's ''unimpeachable fact'' that ''Lincoln supported the enslavement of the four million slaves'' will be able to understand why seven slave states seceded in response to Lincoln's election. Bennett quotes from a letter that Lincoln wrote in December 1860 to Alexander Stephens (who later became vice president of the Confederacy), whom Lincoln had known when they both served in Congress a dozen years earlier. ''Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would, directly, or indirectly, interfere with their slaves?'' Lincoln asked Stephens. ''There is no cause for such fears.'' So why did the South secede? Readers might have gotten part of the answer, and a different understanding of Lincoln, from a portion of this letter that Bennett did not quote: ''I suppose, however, this does not meet the case. You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub.''

It was indeed the rub, but we wouldn't know it from this book. The South seceded because a man who believed slavery was wrong and was pledged, in his own words, to its ''restriction'' and ''ultimate extinction'' had, for the first time, been elected president. The war that followed secession prompted Lincoln's decision in 1862 to issue an Emancipation Proclamation. Yet Bennett declares that Lincoln deserves no credit for freeing the slaves. ....


The Emancipation Proclamation, moreover, was based on the president's war powers as commander in chief to seize enemy property (i.e. slaves) being used to wage war against the United States. Since Union-controlled exempted areas were not at war with the United States, Lincoln had no constitutional power over slavery in those areas.

Finally, the old canard that the Emancipation Proclamation freed not a single slave, repeated by Bennett, could not be more wrong. From Jan. 1, 1863, freedom would march southward with the Union Army, which became an army of liberation. Once the war was over, the proclamation would cease to have any legal force. That is why Lincoln endorsed a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery, and won re-election on that platform in 1864.

Bennett's Lincoln is not only a reluctant convert to Emancipation; he is also an unwavering opponent of equal citizenship for the freed slaves, beholden as he is to his ''dream'' of an all-white America. But in what turned out to be his last public speech, on April 11, 1865, Lincoln signaled that he would support the right to vote for freed slaves who were literate or had served in the Union armed forces. Bennett condemns this endorsement as an ''invidious distinction'' (because white voters would not face such requirements) of a piece with Lincoln's commitment to white supremacy. At least one listener to Lincoln's speech did not agree. ''That means n****r citizenship,'' muttered John Wilkes Booth. ''Now by God, I'll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.''


There is, of course, no doubt that Lincoln shared many of the racist convictions of his time. But while he was not a radical abolitionist, he did consider slavery morally wrong, and seized the opportunity presented by the war to move against it. Bennett fails to appreciate the acuity and empathy that enabled Lincoln to transcend his prejudices and to preside over the greatest social revolution in American history, the liberation of four million slaves.

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If you follow the link, McPherson has much more to say.