Lincoln Forum - Part V - Was Lincoln a Racist?

I suppose it is probably impossible to have any lengthy discussion about Abraham Lincoln without the question of whether Lincoln was a racist coming up. Harold Holzer
talked about this during the panel discussion on the last day of the forum. He talked about a
conversation that he had with the African-American scholar, Henry Louis Gates on Lincoln's
last public speech.

In that speech Lincoln said that now that the war was over, black veterans as
well as other intelligent or well educated blacks should be given the vote. Gates felt this was no different from the approach taken on black voting in many southern states up until the civil rights movement of the 1960's - little more than a subterfuge to keep the majority of blacks from voting. As Holzer reminded us, in the audience that night in 1865 was John Wilkes Booth who had a very different reaction - telling Louis Paine, "That's the last speech he'll ever make." Tragically Booth was right.

The point that Harold Holzer was making is that we have to look at people in the context of the times in which they lived. I have written previously how I believe that since slavery today is simply unthinkable there is a tendency not to give adequate credit to those who worked to end it. In that regard I am reminded of a statement attributed to the British historian, C.V. Wedgewood who supposedly said something like, "History is lived forward, but written backwards so we know the ending without knowing what it was like to know only the beginning."

Trying then to look at Lincoln and others like him from knowing only the beginning means that for them slavery was not a concept, but a brutal reality. And it is important to remember that this is slavery not imposed upon the victims of conquest, but rather slavery based upon race, specifically based upon beliefs of racial inferiority. For someone like Lincoln, believing in the core values of equality found in the Declaration, the first issue is ending slavery because there can be no significant progress on any other significant issue of race until it is ended.

Whether Lincoln's racist type comments in the 1850's and 1860's were part of some strategy to first end slavery or really represented his beliefs then , beliefs that changed over time is probably impossible to say. But I think it is clear that Lincoln at the very least believed that blacks were equal to others in terms of their right to freedom and to earn their own living. Ideas that were certainly not the norm in the United States in the middle of the 19th century. Perhaps if we try to look at history going forward rather than just backward, we can be fairer to those who lived then while at the same time recognizing where they may have fallen short.

This is the last post on the Lincoln Forum and on the Civil War for a while. One final thing that I forgot to write about when I wrote about Brian Lamb of CSPAN was something he said during his talk Tuesday morning. Brian grew up in Indiana and he said that 15, he knew little or nothing about Lincoln especially the fact that he had lived in Indiana for a number of years. In fact, the schools Lamb attended never visited any of the Lincoln historic sites in the state. Maybe New Jersey isn't the only state with a less than stellar record of knowing its own history!