Given the historic stature of Abraham Lincoln, as the emancipator responsible for striking the shackles from four million slaves, it's only natural that he should attract the attention of biographers of many a hue and description. Their efforts could possibly reflect a range from blind, mindless adulation to iconoclastic demystification, or even crude debunking. Familiar though he seems to us, he still remains an elusive and baffling figure, whether intentionally or not, of his own making. Although his main claim to fame is that of ending "the monstrous injustice" of slavery in the American Union, there are, surprisingly, attempts, however well-intentioned or ill-advised, to downsize his stature or achievements.
One need not necessarily question the motives of those involved, as Lincoln himself was a very complex man faced with seemingly insuperable difficulties. Even when President he had to deftly harmonise the opportunities, limitations and power of office. As we know only too well, scholars depending on selective use of empirical evidence-poorly researched-or imprudent use of tortured extrapolations derived from specious inferences can do untold disservice to the end-product of investigation. JG Randall (for two decades the leading academic authority on Lincoln), in stripping emancipation (Randall's phrase) of "its crust of misconception," sought to discredit the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln himself as emancipator.
According to Randall, Lincoln acted against slavery without enthusiasm, forced by political and military necessity to issue a "paper pronouncement" that set no slave free. Though recognising Lincoln's strong moral judgment against slavery, Randall portrayed Lincoln as more deeply committed to gradualism, compensation and colonisation than to emancipation itself. Now it's quite appropriate for historians to speculate about the psychological implications of Lincoln's speeches, state papers, and private papers, but the speculation ought to fairly represent the man revealed from the mass of empirical data, quite considerable in Lincoln's case. One fellow wrote that he preferred to think of Lincoln as a man of his time than a man too good for his time. Randall's views reverberated across college campuses.
Another authority, Richard N Currant, concurred with the view that political expediency had pushed President Lincoln into anti-slavery policy. Some claimed that there was less evidence of Lincoln as friend of black rights than Lincoln of emancipation. Quite plausibly, Lincoln's first priority was the destruction of slavery, an object that could have been jeopardised by open support for the rights of free blacks. Ironically, Lincoln was accused of wanting to make blacks socially and politically equal to whites. That was undoubtedly an oversimplification of his position, perhaps even deliberate distortion of his real position. Lincoln's racial attitudes have attracted closer scrutiny than his racial policy. For a time in the 1960s and 1970, particularly after Jerome Bennett charged in Ebony magazine that Lincoln was "a white supremacist," the Lincoln image seemed in danger of being transformed into a symbol of white America's injustice to black America.
In 1841, Lincoln observed chained slaves being sold down river and claimed that he recalled that 13 years later as "a continual torment to me." He was so upset that he is reported to have said, "If I ever get an opportunity to hit this thing, I'll hit it hard." He has been criticised for the legal language of the Emancipation Proclamation. The reason was simply to ensure that as a legal document the Negro's liberty could not be challenged thereafter in a court of law. Not a far-fetched assumption as in the famous Dred Scott case, one of the Supreme Court's reasons for denying his freedom was that "a Negro" was not entitled to citizenship at that time. The colonisation scheme of settling ex-slaves in Liberia and the Caribbean was seen as racist but Lincoln saw it as a postscript to emancipation as he could not then see how the social and political "amalgamation" would work. However, he never fully embraced the plan but simply paid lip service to it to assuage the fears of the whites.
It appears that the resettlement was voluntary and well-intended. Lincoln never tired of expressing forcefully that "if slavery (or human bondage) is not wrong and a moral evil (as he called it), then nothing else is." It's risky to take snippets of Lincoln's utterances and draw conclusions about his core beliefs and agenda. One has to be discerning and consider the evidence in its totality. Most could agree that he was an honest and consummate politician (not necessarily a contradiction there). He had a sense of history and was concerned with the judgments of posterity. He may have even been consumed in a quest for immortality. He seemed to follow a path, undeviatingly, where destiny led him.
Even before he became President, he warned a belligerent and recalcitrant south (southern slave states) that he does not expect the union to be dissolved. He expects "the divided house" to become "all one thing or all the other." He was well aware that he would incur intense antagonism from the north, which expected him to pursue a radical abolitionist agenda which he simply couldn't and the south which deemed him a danger to their "peculiar, prized institution"-slavery. Faced with the cauldron of fear, seething hate and possible secession (which he saw as the essence of anarchy), he threw down the gauntlet to fellow citizens, "In your hands and not in mine is the momentous issue of civil war." The rest was then history.
THOUGHTS
• Ironically, Lincoln was accused of wanting to make blacks socially and politically equal to whites.
• That was undoubtedly an oversimplification of his position, perhaps even deliberate distortion of his real position.