Note—It’s already Valentine’s Day and I have still not finished a post intended for Lincoln’s Birthday. It is one of those that just got away from me as I explored the topic. So I am breaking it up into sections and it will run for at least the next three days.
Although
buried in Christmas excitement and rising Coronavirus Omicron dread
the removal of an iconic monument to Emancipation was removed
from its prominent location in Boston by the city shocked many,
offended some, and caused waves of hypocritical hysteria
across the racist right wing media echo chamber. The statue depicting a standing
Abraham Lincoln and an unchained former slave was a copy of
one by sculptor Thomas Ball erected in Washington, D.C. and paid
for by mostly small donations from ex-slaves and Black
veterans of the Union Army.
After all, hadn’t Lincoln been rapturously embraced as the
Great Emancipator and a benevolent liberator new Freedmen after
the Civil War and for the next 150 years by Afro-Americans?
The
removal came in response to a petition originated by artist
Tory Bullock which 12,000 people signed and in the wake of
nation-wide demonstrations demanding the removal of Confederate monument
and memorials to other historical figures with troubling connections to
slavery and oppression including slave holding Founders like George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
But in Boston those sponsoring the removal campaign were at first
reluctant to say that they were targeting Lincoln. The problem, they said was the depiction of
the naked and kneeling former bondsman at his feet. They felt it was degrading and dehumanizing.
Sculptor
Ball had modeled the figure on Archer Alexander, the last man
captured under the Fugitive Slave Act. Lincoln’s outstretched arm seemed to beckon
the man to rise as if he was bestowing a gift. Although Black Freedmen and Army
Veterans had raised the money with small donations for the
Washington statue the process of designing and commissioning
the statue was controlled by the Western Sanitary Commission,
a division of the White led Civil War relief agency that
had raised funds for medical supplies and sponsored nurses for
the Union Army. Comprised of wealthy
liberals, many of the Unitarians, the Commission brought its own preconceived
notions to the design.
Veteran
abolitionist Frederick Douglass was a principal speaker at the monument’s
dedication in 1876. Although he lauded
the celebration and intent, he voiced even then his deep
reservations about the depiction of the Black man. In a letter about the occasion, he wrote:
Admirable as is
the monument by Mr. Ball in Lincoln park, it does not, as it seems to me, tell
the whole truth and perhaps no one monument could be made to tell the whole
truth of any subject which it might be designed to illustrate.
After
Douglass noting that the monument omitted mention of the role President
Ulysses S. Grant played in enfranchising former enslaved people he said
memorials should aspire to portray Black people in a new light:
The negro here,
though rising, is still on his knees and nude. What I want to see before I die
is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a
four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man.
After
the Boston copy was removed, a similar campaign was launched to remove the
original in the nation’s capital.
But the gaze quickly turned to Lincoln himself who was
called a racist based on his own words and for using slaves as mere
pawns in a war between White elites. Demands to remove Lincoln statues spread to
several college campus and monuments were vandalized in some
cities.
So,
who was the real Lincoln? Emancipator or
just another racist politician? A
bit of both and not totally either.
“He
was a man of his time and place” is the get-out-of-jail-free-card usually
laid down by apologists for Thomas Jefferson for his dismal personal performance
as a slave master and failing to live up to all the soaring rhetoric
in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Hell, I used it myself back when until accumulating
evidence could no longer be denied. Jefferson was at least a philosopher
capable of understanding the hypocrisy and contradictions of his lofty
ideals and his grubby reliance on chattel slavery to support
his lavish lifestyle. He could
not give up his books, fine wine, mountain top vistas, and
the sexual comfort of his house slave and dead wife’s half-sister
for the life of a yeoman farmer on the frontier walking behind his
own plow.
The excuse
might be more apt for Lincoln who was brought up in much more humble
circumstances than the Virginian and without any claims or expectations
of aristocracy. No one else ever ascended
to the Presidency from such hard scrabble roots. Lincoln was born into poverty in that famous log cabin in Kentucky and was raised on
the Indiana frontier primarily
in.
His father Peter, evidentially owned a slave for a while but
treated his son as a virtual bondman not only on
his own farm but leased out for hard labor to others. Young Abe bitterly resented
it and fled to Illinois as soon as he reached his majority and was no longer obliged to his father.
In 1831 he settled
in a New Salem, a squalid village with dim prospects. Most of his neighbors were pioneer types with Southern or border state. Illinois
was by then a free state but there were few Blacks in the neighborhood. Young Lincoln first earned his
living as a hired man and as a casual laborer doing chores like chopping firewood and splitting fence rails.
One opportunity he had was joining with a few friends to build a flatboat to take down the
Sangamon and Mississippi Rivers with a cargo of local goods including molasses, corn meal, and livestock to sell in New Orleans. There they would also break up the boat and
sell it for lumber. The trip famously changed his life he watched the harsh and abusive exploitation of slaves on the docks along the river. Even more
shocking was seeing the slave auctions in the city where families were broken up, young girls and women stripped to show off their sexual charms, and many of both sexes and all ages bore scars
from whippings. Lincoln was shaken to the core. If he had never given much thought to slavery
before his natural sympathy and instinctive urge to serve the underdog made him a life-long opponent of slavery.
But it did not then make him an abolitionist, nor did he ever
become one. Instead his reverence for the Constitution prevented him
from attacking. peculiar institution where it already existed and was protected. Instead, opposition to extending slavery into new territories and states became his steady cause. He held out hope that increasing commerce and farming innovations would gradually lead slave states to voluntarily
abandon the system in some distant
time.
A Black abolitionist would later compare this to “having sympathy for a beaten horse. He might be moved to constrain the abuser but could not imagine
attacking the system that encouraged the cruelty.”
Meanwhile back in New
Salem Lincoln went about doing everything he could to punch every ticket to personal advancement. He opened and operated his own store. Importantly he enlisted as a volunteer militia officer during the Black Hawk War. Although he saw no action he re-enlisted as
a private when his
short enlistment expired. The same year
he made his first run for office as a candidate for the state legislature. He lost that election but made
his name known and carried his home New Salem precinct by a whopping 277 of 300 votes. He served as local postmaster which put him in
direct contact with almost everyone and was later made county surveyor.
Relentlessly ambitious, Lincoln saved to buy books
like Blackstone’s Commentaries and Chitty’s Pleadings and read law on his own. He later said of his legal
education that “I studied with nobody.”
Tomorrow—The Illinois years
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