Abraham Lincoln and White America by Brian R. Dirck (review)

In the ever-growing field of Lincoln studies, perhaps no topic has been more vigorously debated recently than Lincoln’s attitudes on slavery and race. Brian Dirck’s Abraham Lincoln and White America reorients the image of Lincoln as the “Great Emancipator” by probing beyond what Lincoln said and did about blacks to uncover his unspoken ideas and views about what it meant to be white at a time in which white supremacy permeated nineteenth-century American white culture. In doing so, Dirck draws on the so-called whiteness studies pioneered by scholars David Roediger, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Noel Ignatiev, and Nell Irvin Painter. He avoids the tendency to address the simplistic question “Was Lincoln a racist?” Rather, he poses a more difficult one: “How did Lincoln understand white Americans and whiteness?” (3). Dirck answers this question by tracking Lincoln’s recorded encounters with blacks and the ideas he expressed about slavery and race throughout his adult life.

Dirck argues that Lincoln’s views on whiteness were rooted in his humble frontier origins. Later generations have romanticized those origins in favor of the self-made “Rail-Splitter.” In reality, Lincoln’s contemporaries may have perceived him and his family as poor white trash, an epithet that entailed poverty; ignorance; shiftlessness and laziness; alcoholism; hereditary illegitimacy; and cultural oddities of dress, mannerisms, and style. Lincoln spent a good deal of his early years trying to flee his father’s lifestyle—an endless cycle of hardscrabble farming. His ambition to escape not just poverty, but white poverty, is reflected in the choices he made after he left his father’s home for New Salem and later Springfield. He did as much as he could to eschew the white-trash stereotype by pursuing respectable professions, such as the law and politics, expanding his reading habits, abandoning alcohol, avoiding slovenliness, and shedding his homespun clothes. The choices he made, even marrying into an aristocratic family, were colored by his internal fear of descending back into the pit of white trash.

Dirck clearly, and judiciously, argues the point that “race is not slavery” and that Lincoln’s antislavery attitudes do not necessarily translate into a more tolerant view of African Americans (19). Even after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln continued to attend blackface minstrel shows, tell jokes with distinct racial overtones, and offer approval—albeit covertly—of several colonization projects. Lincoln could detest the peculiar institution in which slaves were the victims of great injustice; but, at the same time, the ingrained cultural undercurrents of white supremacy would still operate on him, as they did on most of white nineteenth-century America. Lincoln was indeed a white man’s president, a product of the times in which he lived. “Whiteness,” Dirck concludes, “shaped him, transformed him, and in some ways severely proscribed what he would or could do in the name of American racial equality” (4).

Although Lincoln may not have fundamentally questioned the underpinnings of white supremacy along the lines of abolitionists and Radical Republicans, Dirck discovers a broad progression in Lincoln’s racial attitudes over the course of his encounters with nonwhites. Lincoln’s devotion to white racial fear management circumscribed his embrace of black freedom early in the war. But once Lincoln crossed the Rubicon of black emancipation, he gradually began to evolve beyond the cultural constraints of nineteenth-century white America. By 1864, a certain hardness characterized his opinions and judgments of white America. Dirck posits that the violent nature of the war and the battlefield valor and courage of black troops developed in Lincoln a tolerance for risk-taking and bolstered his resolve when confronting white hostility. He also suggests that by war’s end, Lincoln, a victorious commander-in-chief, might have finally shed his white-trash insecurities, thus providing him with a sense of self-confidence that steeled him against offending the sensibilities of more prominent and affluent whites. As the president developed a sense of sympathy...