Liberator or Racist—Considering Lincoln Part 1

 

                                  The Emancipation monument removed from Boston.

Note—It’s Lincoln’s Birthday, occasion for a three part inquiry. 

Although buried in Christmas excitement and rising Coronavirus Omicron dread the removal of an iconic monument to Emancipation in 2021 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 spoke at the dedication of the original Washington, D.C. version of the Emancipation memorial.

Veteran abolitionist Fredrick 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 campuses and monuments were vandalized in some cities.

A statue of Lincoln was toppled during the on-going Black Lives Matter protests that rocked Portland, Oregon for weeks in 2000.

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 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.  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 New Salem, a squalid village with dim prospects.  Most of his neighbors were pioneer types with Southern or border state roots.   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. 

Young Lincoln was mortified by the slave auctions in New Orleans when he floated a flat boat down the Mississippi to the city.  It profoundly effected him.

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 as 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 the 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.”

Lincoln built his reputation as an important local leader in his years in the near frontier settlement of New Salem, Illinois.  He rose from casual laborer, to store clerk and owner, to Post Master, militia officer, county surveyor, and political candidate.  Yet he had little direct contact with Black folks.

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 term 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