Lincoln's Character
by Spencer Warren
Issue 126 - February 18, 2009

For once, PBS has placed taxpayer dollars to good use with its documentary “Looking for Lincoln,” broadcast on the eve of his 200th birthday. Except for the special programs that have been shown on C-Span since last year, the glorious U.S. television industry (including Fox) does not appear to have observed with any programming of its own this important event of commemoration in the life of our nation. Here is an invaluable opportunity to enrich the nation’s appreciation of our historic tradition – in the person of the man many consider our greatest leader – yet the leading organs of mass communication just don’t care.

Thus, “Looking for Lincoln” is especially welcome. Hosted by respected black historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the two-hour documentary covers most of the leading issues concerning the life and presidency of our sixteenth president through interviews with top historians, narration and visits to historical sites. Professor Gates and his guests give the viewer a nuanced, fair and complex picture, which helps us, in some degree, to get beyond the marble and the myth to the real man.

Yet as we study Lincoln, we find there is indeed a firm factual basis for his immense standing as our “secular saint” who is immortalized in monumental form in his vast temple on the mall, our “altar of democracy.” A poor rural farm boy, born inside a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor, he lost his mother at age eight and received only the equivalent of a first-grade education. He initially taught himself to write by carving words with a knife on a wooden shovel, and to read by studying the King James Bible. He taught himself, among other things, Euclidean geometry. This self-educated man, ridiculed as a rube with his tall, gangly form, high-pitched voice and down-home accent (he pronounced chair as “chaer”), grew to become a devotee of Shakespeare, Byron, Robert Burns and other poets, and the author of the most sublime words in the English language giving voice to the spirit of free government and the rights of the people. Still pursuing his self-education, he obtained a clerkship in a law office, was admitted to the bar, and rose to become a respected attorney in his home state of Illinois. Thus, even apart from his political career, Lincoln’s life exemplified the American ideal of self-improvement by one’s own industry, enterprise, character and imagination.

It also is quite clear that, unlike most politicians (such as his famous rival, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the “Little Giant”), Lincoln, though quite ambitious and shrewd, employed the politician’s art for higher principles, not just for the sake of winning office, power and riches. Gates interviews the black author and historian Lerone Bennett, Jr., whose Ebony article in 1968 and later book, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream (2000), excoriated Lincoln as a typical white racist of his time who cared not at all for the slaves and wanted them deported. Bennett, Malcolm X and the black power movement of the sixties rejected the reverence for Lincoln held by the overwhelming number of black people; to some extent they have had a lasting influence on perceptions. But Bennett, whose hatred of Lincoln seems unbounded, is quite wrong, as Gates adduces in interviews with distinguished historians like James Horton (who is black), David Blight, Allen Guelzo, Michael Burlingame and Doris Kearns Goodwin. There is no question Lincoln had hated slavery from his early years. Conservative by nature and a very close and devoted student of the Constitution, as well as politically shrewd and ambitious, Lincoln knew, in the racial and political climate of the period before 1861, that abolitionism never could win majority support. This was the classic, never-ending difference between the statesman and the idealist. With respect to the controversy over Lincoln’s views on (voluntary) colonization to the Caribbean or Africa, although Lincoln proposed it to a group of black ministers in the White House in 1862, he dropped it after they voiced their opposition; the evidence further suggests that he considered the idea primarily from concerns how freed black slaves could survive among a hostile white population

True, Lincoln certainly carried many of the prejudices of his age. Critics argue the only reason he fought expansion of slavery to the territories west of the Mississippi River, as permitted by the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, was to preserve these virgin lands for free white labor. His infamous statement in one of his 1858 debates for the Senate with the race-baiting and race-smearing Democrat Senator Douglas, made before a hostile audience in Charleston, Illinois, has been hung around his neck by the Bennetts and others who seek to discredit him as a fraud. Lincoln said: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; . . . there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever ( sic.) forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” He continued: “I . . . am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

But the historians in their discussions with Professor Gates recognize Lincoln here made a misjudgment in the heat of the campaign, and that, seen in full context, these words were not a true indicator of his beliefs. As the debates proceeded in the autumn of 1858, Lincoln made increasingly strong statements denouncing the immorality of slavery (“if slavery isn’t wrong, nothing is wrong”) and insisted that the Declaration of Independence’s affirmation that “all men are created equal” included blacks as well as whites – contrary to the infamous holding of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, and contrary as well as the endlessly repeated assertions of Senator Douglas. The Declaration was always the bedrock of Lincoln’s political faith. It should be further noted that before his 30th birthday, in 1837, as a member of the Illinois State Legislature, Lincoln was one of seven members to sign a public statement denouncing slavery. In the controversy that followed, four of the seven withdrew their signatures. Lincoln was one of the three who stood fast in his position.

Bennett and other critics also complain that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, did not include slaves held in the border states, or slaves living in rebel areas that had been occupied by Union forces. Again, they completely ignore the context: that Lincoln believed the emancipation could only hold up against a court challenge (like Dred Scott) if it was a war-measure to further the government’s ability to defeat the enemy and suppress the rebellion. Since the slaves who were unaffected by the proclamation were no longer or had never been under rebel authority, they could not be reached by this presidential exercise. Yet Lincoln before the proclamation promoted ideas for the Federal government to obtain emancipation in the border states by compensation to the slaveowners. He oversaw abolition in the District of Columbia. And he announced the emancipation in September 1862, knowing it could provoke desertions by Union soldiers (it did not) and be used against his party by northern Democrats in the 1862 autumn Congressional and state elections (which it was). Likewise, before the 1864 presidential election, Lincoln backed General Grant’s rejection of Lee’s prisoner exchange offer because Lee stipulated it would not include black Union soldiers (whose enlistment Lincoln enthusiastically endorsed). Despite the ensuing controversy in the North, Lincoln again stood firm, and won re-election (including about 78 percent of the vote of Union soldiers, sailors and marines). The Chicago high school students visited in class by Professor Gates discuss these issues with all the nuance, balance and understanding of true scholars (“If Lincoln were a radical he’d never have been President,” one student observes). Their learning and understanding of history is not matched by the hysterical Lerone Bennett, Jr. Nor is it matched by Bennett’s partners, ironically from the nationalist right, i.e. Patrick Buchanan and libertarian Professor Thomas DiLorenzo.

Among other controversies examined by Professor Gates with his experts are Lincoln’s suspension of habeus corpus and suppression of newspapers considered aiding the rebellion. They also discuss the mixed but positive view of Lincoln by the leading black figure of the era, former slave Frederick Douglass, as well as the dim view of Lincoln expressed recently at a convention of Sons of the Confederacy.

Above all else, however, is Lincoln’s character. A very kindly man (he issued pardons for countless numbers of soldiers condemned to death for desertion), he suffered through a very bad marriage and the deaths of two of his young children, one in the White House. He was able to ignore or forgive the many personal insults he faced as the perceived uncouth Westerner, not least from his first top commander, General McClellan. Often he used his famed dry sense of humor for self-deprecation. Gates goes into detail on Lincoln’s depression, which included thoughts of suicide following the death of his true love, Ann Rutledge, in 1835. He and his experts discuss how Lincoln’s difficult marriage and depression may well have strengthened his character for the awesome, unprecedented ordeal he had to overcome in order to save our country.

Throughout this ordeal, in which more men died than in all our other wars combined (the number would be six million today, if we take the same percentage of the population), Lincoln held to his initial decision for war, knowing he could end the appalling suffering by reversing his decision and negotiating peace. The unimaginable weight he bore is etched for all time in the photographs made during the war of his rapidly aging face. But he had the moral clarity and strength to persevere, telling Congress, in his annual message dated December 6, 1864, that because the issue dividing the two sides was unbridgeable, it “can only be tried by war and decided by victory.” Thus, he had the resolve to employ ever stronger means to win absolute victory, such as by agreeing to General Sherman’s ruthless (and risky) march through Georgia to the sea in the autumn of 1864, which proved to break the back of Southern resistance. (Sherman’s conquest of Atlanta on September 3, 1864 had turned what Lincoln and most others saw as his own sure defeat into his triumphant re-election as President. With Lincoln, Sherman and Grant stand as the saviors of our country – Grant’s statue today stands below the Capitol facing the mall, Sherman’s, much less known, stands behind the Treasury at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. In New York, Grant’s Tomb is one of the city’s greatest buildings and Sherman’s large equestrian statue, gilded in gold, stands at Grand Army Plaza at Fifth Avenue and 59 th Street.)

Echoing Lincoln’s resolve almost eight decades later, facing a comparable crisis, Churchill in 1940 told his people that civilization would be lost, “unless we conquer, as conquer we must, as conquer we shall.” And on December 8, 1941 President Roosevelt told Congress as it declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbor, that “the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.”

Yet when Lincoln had led the Union to victory, he promised charity, and no malice, toward the defeated foe. Likewise, Churchill and Roosevelt, and their successors, offered a constructive hand to their defeated foes, once the reforms had been imposed and accepted to make sure their aggression never would be repeated. These three champions of democracy possessed the wisdom and strength to be unforgiving in battle, and forgiving after victory. It is a rare quality in leaders, most of whom seem to be too warlike or, nowadays, too pacific. One leader who matched Lincoln, Churchill and Roosevelt in this respect was Ronald Reagan.

Lincoln’s martyrdom will always make it quite difficult to see him fully as a living person. But, again, the facts of his life and his presidency give support to the legend of this extraordinary man. Throughout the war, Lincoln’s views on race evolved in the direction of color-blind equality of political rights. One observer at his last Cabinet meeting the morning of his assassination, Radical journalist Whitelaw Reid, noted in a July 1865 article, that Lincoln’s “expressions in favor of the liberality toward negro citizens” in the Reconstruction were “fuller and more emphatic than” at any earlier time. Another such observer, House Speaker Schuyler Colfax, recalled that Lincoln had spoken “with great impressiveness of his determination to secure liberty and justice to all, with full protection for the humblest. . . . ”

Earlier, in his final public speech, made from the White House to a crowd outdoors on April 11, 1865, only days after Lee’s surrender, Lincoln praised the Reconstruction government of Louisiana for “giving the benefit of public schools equally to black and white.” He endorsed voting rights for the freed male slaves who were “very intelligent,” and for “those who serve our cause as soldiers.” (Remember that no women possessed the right to vote at this time.) One listener in the audience that day was outraged. “That means nigger citizenship,” said John Wilkes Booth. “Now, by God, I will put him through. That will be the last speech he will ever make.” Thus, Abraham Lincoln gave his life for his country at the moment of his triumph. This at least should inspire some humility in his most vociferous critics.

Spencer Warren is ConservativeBattleline’s media critic.