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103 3 A NEW NATIONAL TYPE The Great Imperialist, 1890–1918 in the midst of venezuela’s 1895 border dispute with england, confederate veteran William roane Aylett addressed former soldiers of the Army of northern virginia and Army of the Potomac in Washington, d.c., concerning Abraham lincoln and Jefferson davis. in his speech Aylett praised lincoln extravagantly and linked the reunion of former adversaries with Anglo-saxon racial expansionism. At first Aylett assured the assembled veterans that “none but Anglo-Americans could have made such a fight, and none but our kindred could have whipped us.” He then recalled that when lincoln died, he and his fellow confederate soldiers in lee’s army “felt that we had lost a friend.”1 The grief that followed lincoln’s assassination thirty years earlier united the two sections, “victors and vanquished . . . both bleeding and weeping brothers, needing each other’s sympathy and love . . . over the body of the dead president,” who would have prevented the racial “horrors of reconstruction” had he lived.2 Aylett thereafter shifted his focus overseas and spoke of the United states and Great Britain in explicitly racial terms, remarking that the recent war and its heroes would be looked upon with pride in “Anglo-saxon history” and that everyone present was part of the “great english race,” both “Puritan and cavalier,” all “representative of that Anglo-saxon race at the front in all great deeds.”3 Warming to his theme of Anglo-American world supremacy , Aylett advocated that “the nation rebuke . . . [anyone] that seeks to renew the animosities born of our civil war, or to stir up strife between england and America. . . . let the American eagle and the British lion stand together, and they can hurl defiance at a world in arms, and can command peace by the utterance of their united voices. Hate does not survive the tomb,” Aylett concluded, “but love comes from Heaven and is eternal.”4 104 Loathing LincoLn Hatred between the north and south, coupled with loathing for Abraham lincoln, nevertheless did survive the tomb, for from 1890 to 1918 hostility to lincoln not only survived, but in some respects it was strengthened and institutionalized, at least in the former slaveholding states. of course, as the speech by Aylett demonstrated, anyone who excoriated lincoln in the early part of the twentieth century was to some extent fighting a losing battle, swimming against the tide of current events. These were extraordinary decades for the United states: in 1898 a self-confident American nation expanded overseas in the spanish-American War, contributing to white male reconciliation between former civil War combatants; a broad civic nationalism was replaced by a narrow ethnic one based upon white supremacy; a multifaceted reform movement known as Progressivism that was pro-lincoln and pro–activist government emerged and reshaped American political discourse and ideals, even though Progressives rejected lincoln’s natural rights thinking; a celebration of the centennial of lincoln’s birth took place in 1909; a virginian, Progressive, and lincoln admirer, Woodrow Wilson, was elected to the presidency in 1912; a Great War broke out in europe in 1914, with the United states entering the conflict three years later; a white supremacist view of lincoln was broadcast to millions of Americans through the publication of Thomas dixon’s novels and the release of d. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (1915), both of which disseminated an outlook that if the president had not been assassinated , the supposed racial horrors of reconstruction would have never occurred; and a decades-long dream of winning the elective franchise for women appeared within reach.5 The combination of these events into such a compressed time span made it difficult, if not impossible, for lincoln’s adversaries to overcome a dominant national image of the president as the savior of the Union, First American, and Great emancipator. criticism of lincoln in this period, as in the years immediately following the civil War, still exhibited attacks on lincoln’s atheism and ignoble background and the conduct of his presidency during the war years, but something new was also emphasized. The new element was racially based opposition to American expansionism overseas. lincoln’s critics argued that lincoln had forced the south to remain in the Union, just as the United states was coercing former spanish colonies such as the Philippines to become American territories without their consent. Unsurprisingly, such a viewpoint was in some circles interpreted as criticism of the growing power of...

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