Lincoln and Equal Rights: A Reply

LINCOLN AND EQUAL RIGHTS: A Reply Ludtvell H. Johnson In a recent number of Civû War History,1 Professor Harold M. Hyman takes issue with some remarks I made in the course of an article that questioned the authenticity of a letter allegedly written by Abraham Lincoln to Major General James S. Wadsworth. The letter represents the President as advocating civil and political equality for Negroes as a condition of reconstruction.2 Among other things, I said that Lincoln was "anything but an equalitarian" on the race question, that he was a "consummate pragmatist" rather than a "Moses with commandments," and that there was little point in quoting Lincoln on behalf of the current civil rights movement.3 These were the opinions that apparently led Professor Hyman to write his interesting article. In stating his case for Lincoln's march toward equal rights, Professor Hyman observes that the circumstances of civil war led the Republicans to move steadily toward a more Uberai attitude on racial matters. Lincoln not only "went along," but sometimes led in this drift toward racial justice. The President's "major characteristic was educability. ... In the ascent of his ideas on race and reconstruction from 1861 to 1865, a tendency toward egalitarianism reveals itself." Lincoln was indeed on occasion a "Moses with commandments." I have, therefore, wasted my "talents and energy in a fruitless scholarly overkill." Despite my "efforts to sunder the links that bind Lincoln to the egalitarians of a century past, the chain still holds."4 Professor Hyman then reviews the familiar evidence as to what Lincoln did and said, and what his contemporaries thought he meant or would have done. In trying to prove his case, he puts considerable emphasis on Lincoln's last public address (April 11, 1865). On that occasion the President said that he wished that the Unionist govern1 Harold M. Hyman, "Lincoln and Equal Rights for Negroes: The Irrelevancy of the 'Wadsworth Letter,'" Civil War History, XII (1966), 258-266. 2LudweU H. Johnson, "Lincoln and Equal Rights: The Authenticity of the Wadsworth Letter," Journal of Southern History, XXXII (1966), 83-87. * Ibid., 85, 87. 4 Hyman, "Lincoln and Equal Rights," 259-260, 266. 66 ment of Louisiana had given the vote to Negroes who were "very intelligent" or who were Union soldiers, and he commented approvingly that the Louisiana constitution gave "the benefit of public schools equally to black and white."5 By expounding on the text of the speech Professor Hyman tries to show that by the end of his life Lincoln had moved quite a distance leftward along the equalitarian scale. He also resorts to some exceedingly attenuated reasoning in an attempt to depict the President as even more liberal than he seemed in his April 11 address. According to Hyman, Salmon P. Chase, after reading that speech, wrote Lincoln that while at one time he would have accepted limited Negro suffrage, he was now in favor of universal suffrage. Whitelaw Reid, Professor Hyman continues, stated that Lincoln received Chase's letter on the evening of April 13, and on the next morning the President (Hyman quoting Reid and supplying the bracketed material ) " 'showed it to a leading member of the Cabinet [Stanton, probably]; and it was so well known as to have been . . . talked of among Administration leaders at Washington that at the Cabinet meeting that day . . . Mr. Lincoln's expressions in favor of the liberality toward negro citizens . . . were fuller and more emphatic than in . . . [Chase's letter to him].'"6 To recapitulate the sequence of events as postulated by Professor Hyman: on April 11 Lincoln spoke in favor of limited Negro suffrage for Louisiana; on the evening of the thirteenth he received Chase's letter advocating universal suffrage; in the Cabinet meeting of the fourteenth, Lincoln took a position that was "fuller and more emphatic" than Chase's. Thus we are invited to believe that within three days Lincoln moved from limited Negro suffrage to somewhere beyond universal suffrage. This certainly would have struck the Cabinet as a startling and sudden change by the President. One naturally turns to Gideon Welles's diary, only to find in the three-page account of that meeting no...