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APPENDIX: A BRIEF, ADDITIONAL NOTE ON A VAST HISTORIOGRAPHY Historical treatments of Lincoln have followed two different paths described, not surprisingly, by race. At various times, both paths have included elements of realism and hagiography. For the first several decades after the Civil War, black scholars and writers tended to praise Lincoln and emphasize his role in emancipation . As racial discrimination gained ever more ground in American society, these writers sought to remind the public that Lincoln had been the Great Emancipator and that the destruction of slavery had been vital to national progress. Individuals such as Charles H. Hunter, W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and Benjamin Quarles contributed to this stream of interpretation. Merrill Peterson remarked that “Quarles was a careful historian, yet he could not escape the spell of the emancipation image.” Quarles’s most important book on Lincoln was Lincoln and the Negro, published in 1962. Later, as the civil rights movement gathered momentum, a number of black authors began to remind readers that previous victories had been flawed and incomplete and that much remained to be done. One of the earliest and strongest of these voices was Lerone Bennett Jr., who in 1968 published an article in Ebony magazine entitled “Was Lincoln a White Supremacist?” In that and other works, including Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, published in 2000, Bennett argued that Lincoln was part of America’s racist tradition and had abandoned the freedmen to Confederate rage. Vincent Harding also published an important and critical work, There Is a River (1981), which emphasized the contributions that slaves made to their own emancipation. Other black scholars, such as Barbara Jeanne Fields, have carried that argument further, urging a rethinking of the question, Who freed the slaves? White historians and writers have more uniformly praised Lincoln, but for changing reasons. After the failure of Reconstruction, Northern whites came to accept the white South’s view that efforts to change the South had been a terrible mistake and that black people ought not to have gained equal rights. In this mind-set, Lincoln’s concern for and conciliation of Southern whites received great praise as a wise and statesmanlike policy. His actions on slavery and race tended to be approved, for their limited character, or deemphasized. Books appearing in the 1920s and 1930s—such as The Tragic Era, by Claude Bowers; The Critical Year, by Howard K. Beale; or The Age of Hate, by George Fort Milton—exemplified this trend. They denounced mistakes in Reconstruction—the supposedly harsh punishment of white Southerners 248 Appendix and the supposed folly of enfranchising African Americans—and held Lincoln up as a model of wisdom and charity because of his concern for Southern whites. In the middle years of the twentieth century, scholarly writing added some criticism and realism to the prevailing favorable views of Lincoln. James G. Randall became the preeminent interpreter of Lincoln in the academy. Known widely for his revisionist thesis that “a blundering generation” had brought about the Civil War, Randall noted Lincoln’s lack of control over events, his great interest in colonization , and the limits of emancipation. He judged the “stock image” of the Great Emancipator a myth. When Richard Current finished the last volume of the deceased Randall’s biography, he took note of Lincoln’s appeals to Southern whites and his omission of substantial efforts to establish civil rights for the freedmen. Benjamin P. Thomas’s one-volume biography of Lincoln, published in 1952, also noted some contradictions between popular notions about the Civil War period and the historical record. In recent decades, some historians, such as David Donald, Herman Belz, and Allen Guelzo, have paid attention to the limitations in Lincoln’s policies and to events such as the Hampton Roads Conference. (Their work is noted and cited in chapter 7.) But others, such as John Cox and LaWanda Cox, Hans Trefousse, and Stephen Oates, have portrayed Lincoln as a crusading Radical Republican or a symbol for the civil rights movement. James McPherson’s important 1988 book, Battle Cry of Freedom, reinterpreted the “Second American Revolution” as a revolution for human freedom, led by Lincoln. Although McPherson has acknowledged (in a review in the New York Times, August 27, 2000) that “Lincoln did share the racial prejudices of his time and place,” much of his work contributes powerfully to the iconic image of Lincoln. He insists that Lincoln deserves the credit for emancipation and rejects those who...

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