Was Lincoln just another honkie?

From our overstocked archives

Sam Smith, Capital East  Gazette, 1968 - Lerone Bennett, in last month's Ebony, has made a frontal assault on one of America's most cherished legends. In an article called "Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?" Bennett says: "The Mythology of the Great Emancipator has become a part of the mental landscape of America. No other American story is so enduring. No other American story is so comforting. No other American story is so false. " In truth, says Ebony's senior editor, Lincoln's racial attitudes were not what we have been taught.

Bennett's argument is forceful and convincing. He cites Lincoln's debates with Douglas in which the Civil War president stated: "I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. " And while Bennett admits that Lincoln progressed from this point, he points to his doubts about his own Emancipation Proclamation and his interest in black emmigration as the solution to the race problem as evidence that this man, whose allegedly keen sense of racial justice is drummed into every American school child, never made a substantial break with the racist society in which he lived.

Bennett quotes Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist editor and former slave as he spoke in 1876 at the unveiling of a Lincoln statue: "Truth is proper and beautiful as all times and in all places, and it is never more proper and beautiful in any case than when speaking of a great public man whose example is likely to be commended for honor and imitation long after his departure to the solemn shades, the silent continent of eternity. It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man. He was pre- eminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of the white man. . . "

Bennett's article has caused a minor flurry of comment in the press.  Notably, the New York Times Magazine felt compelled to deliver a rather stuffy defense of Lincoln the day before his birthday.  Said author Seymour Mitgang, "Lincoln was white — but hardly what could be called then or now, by reasonable persons, a white supremacist. In his time, the overriding historic issue was freedom, not racism; liberation of the slaves, not amalgamation of the races; the rights of citizenship that would follow freedom, not what all people of goodwill insist is essential at this Lincoln's Birthday — full economic opportunity to insure equality in every respect, full civil rights in the law and of the heart. "

Mitgang does not challenge Bennett's facts so much as he challenges the weight put upon them. He seeks rationalizations for the myth rather than attempting to bring rationality to the myth. In Mitgang's view, Lincoln's weaknesses — by today's standards — are mitigated by the time and the world in which he lived.

But what Mitgang ignores is that Lincoln is no ordinary historical figure. He is the hero of perhaps the greatest of American legends.  From Democratic president to Republican ward-heeler, from student to professor, from pre-school to Medicare, we evoke his name as we attempt to symbolize what America is or should be. 

His smoky eloquence — so incongruous beside the lingua franca of the public men who cite him — still probes deep inside the national soul. It is not mere happenstance that a brooding likeness of the man at the end of Washington's Mall has drawn in recent months the greatest of peace demonstrations to protest a war and the most powerful of presidents to defend it.

But a man who has caused a legend of such power becomes lost in the myth. It's a particularly sad fate for Lincoln, for he was not much of a myth-lover. His wit and perception repeatedly popped romantic balloons. But we hold to the legend because it warms us.  We do not wish to admit to our children or ourselves how inadequate even our finest hours have been.

Yet what will be the hurt, if we let a bit of truth seep into the Lincoln legend? Should we and our children not be as aware that Lincoln thought saving the Union more important than freeing the slaves as we are that he wrote a beautiful speech on the back of an envelope? Or that when he did emancipate the slaves, he retained serious doubts as to the wisdom of his course? Or that , in part as a result of the legend that sprung from this man, black Americans fell into an emancipation mentality for nearly one hundred years which caused them to wait patiently and futilely for the white man to free them further?

The myth of Lincoln has served the white American well, but .it has not helped the black. Our history inevitably has had a white bias and it is encouraging to find a few historians , such as Bennett, demanding a fairer shake for the black American in our re-creation of the past. To force men to live with false myths is as discriminatory as making them eat some place else.

This does not mean that we should write Lincoln off as just another honkie. But we do need the sort of perspective that Bennett suggests: "Lincoln must be seen as the embodiment, not the transcendence, of the American tradition, which is, as we all know, a racist tradition. In his inability to rise' above that tradition, Lincoln, often called the ‘noblest of all Americans, ‘ holds up a flawed mirror to the American soul. And one honors him today, not by gazing fixedly at a flawed image, not by hiding warts and excrescences, but by seeing oneself in the reflected ambivalences of a life which calls us to transcendence, not imitation. "