Getting Right with Lincoln . . . and Black Freedom

In 1956, David Herbert Donald encouraged historians to “get right” with Abraham Lincoln by understanding how the memory of the sixteenth president had become a vessel for competing political ideologies. Donald described how, despite Lincoln’s Republican roots, Democrats eventually recognized the political value of his image and set out to “raid the Republican closet and steal the stovepipe hat.” Although party politics dominated Lincoln’s own lifetime, his legacy transcended those traditional divides. After his death, Radicals hailed Lincoln as the harbinger of democratic revolution in the South, black suffrage, and even women’s rights. Decades later, imperialists insisted that he would favor annexation of the Philippines and war in Cuba. He was simultaneously a supporter and critic of populism and labor unions. Conservatives were convinced that, had he lived, he would fight the introduction of the income tax, while isolationists advanced his disapproval of the League of Nations and the World Court. It seemed that Lincoln was anything to everyone, which caused Donald to lament that his legacy risked becoming devoid of any real meaning.¹

As Donald attempted to get right with Lincoln, the rest of the country struggled to get right with the end of legalized segregation. The Supreme Court’s rejection of “separate but equal” schools and public accommodations two years earlier helped pave the way for local desegregation victories, first in Birmingham, and then in Little Rock. The post-Brown atmosphere crackled with the embers of a slow-burning movement that would soon engulf the entire country. Recognizing parallels between the 1960s and the 1860s, Donald believed Lincoln continued to resonate for mid-twentieth-century Americans faced with another crisis of national unity. “In our age of anxiety,” Donald wrote at the close of his essay, “it is pertinent to remember that our most enduring political symbolism derives from Lincoln, whose one dogma was the absence of dogma.” Donald hoped that Lincoln’s “essential ambiguity,” his ability to rest astride divisive issues like slavery, emancipation, and reconstruction without falling into the political abyss of absolutism and demagoguery that awaited below, would help cooler heads prevail in the heated era of desegregation. In the end, Donald argued in favor of the very thing that seemed to imperil Lincoln’s historical meaning as a healing balm for the perennial problem of race relations in America.²

The two new volumes under review represent historians’ continued efforts to get right with Lincoln, slavery, and civil rights in America. In Lincoln Emancipated: The President and the Politics of Race, editor Brian R. Dirck brings together a variety of essays dedicated to freeing the historical Lincoln from his entombment in the graveyard of American race politics that most of the authors (save one) feel has unjustly vilified the president as a racist and political opportunist. Moving beyond hagiography, the essays in Lincoln Emancipated also argue against a new tradition of polemical writing that posits Lincoln as an unprincipled hypocrite, at best, or a tyrannical, white supremacist demagogue, at worst (see, for example, Lerone Bennett, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream [2000]; Thomas DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War [2003], and Lincoln Unmasked: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe [2006]). By recovering the middle ground between histories of Lincoln-as-Christ-figure and Lincoln the Anti-Christ, these essays seek to redress the extreme interpretations of Lincoln’s politics and his historical memory.

Gabor Boritt and Scott Hancock’s collection of essays on slavery, emancipation, and freedom across the nineteenth century represents some of the best work published on these subjects from such esteemed scholars as Ira Berlin, John Hope Franklin, Loren Schweninger, and Eric Foner. The anthology takes as its core theme African-American agency, particularly the agency of slaves and freedpeople in...