|
|
|
Reviews
| Lincoln Emancipated: The President and the Politics of Race. Ed. Brian R. Dirck. Foreword by Allen C. Guelzo (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 189. Notes, index. Cloth, $32.)
|
|
Both editor and contributor for this volume, Brian R. Dirck nicely fulfills his intention to present different points of view. Individual contributors, not surprisingly, are not so eager to entertain different points of view as to establish their own. Whether dogmatic or open-minded, most of the authors gathered here know Lincoln and his times, and have important things to say on Lincoln, race, and emancipation. |
1
|
|
Allen Guelzo's foreword may convince readers that it is simply wrong to call Lincoln a racist. Many reached that conclusion a long time ago, but Guelzo always has something new to contribute: in this case, it is an analysis of what sort of criteria we should use for calling anyone a racist. Kenneth J. Winkle provides a sympathetic and accurate account of Lincoln's known views on race and slavery prior to his becoming President, "'Paradox Though It May Seem': Lincoln on Antislavery, Race, and Union, 1837–1860." Similarly penetrating, and forcing us to rethink several matters of interpretation, is an essay by the late Phillip Shaw Paludan, "Greeley, Colonization, and a 'Deputation of Negroes: Three Considerations on Lincoln and Race.'" Kevin R. C. Gutzman contributes valuable if not essential background in his "Abraham Lincoln, Jeffersonian: The Colonization Chimera." On the positive side, he reviews Thomas Jefferson's thoughts from Revolutionary times to his final years, which may be summarized as: slavery is bad and wrong, but African Americans could not safely be freed and incorporated into American Society, so someday, somehow, they should be gradually freed and deported. Such also was the view of Henry Clay, Lincoln's "beau ideal," and such was the view of Abraham Lincoln. So far, this is a fairly convincing performance. But unlike most historians who review Lincoln's presidency, Gutzman feels that Lincoln probably continued to think about colonization even after he stopped advocating it in public, and, had he lived, might very well have revived it. There is no evidence for this, but Gutzman has convinced himself that a possibility was a probability and almost therefore a fact! |
2
|
|
Things get a bit confusing in James N. Leiker, "The Difficulties of Understanding Abe: Lincoln's Reconciliation of Racial Inequality and Natural Rights." There is much fine scholarship in this essay, but also a tendency to read Lincoln's mind: "Lincoln clearly believed in black inferiority, but whether he attributed that inferiority to some innate deficiency in blacks or to their continued degradation by whites is difficult to say. Nor does the question seem ever to have occurred to him."(p. 77) He is also presumptuous, beginning his last paragraph: "This is not to say that Lincoln's racism should be excused or overlooked." "Judge not that ye be not judged," as someone once said. But the essay ends on a positive note, suggesting that Lincoln's ideas about "certain fundamental rights ... still hold valuable lessons for a nation that has grown more complicated and diverse ... "(p. 98) |
3
|
|
Brian S. Dirck's essay, "Abraham Lincoln, Emancipation, and the Supreme Court" covers in briefer space the subject so thoroughly examined in Allen C. Guelzo's Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York, 2004). More particularly, Dirck focuses on what the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had done to protect slavery, and was likely to do if Lincoln overstepped the Constitution. Michael Vorenberg contributes an essay, "Slavery Reparations in Theory and Practice: Lincoln's Approach." As the title suggests, Vorenberg takes a presentist approach to Lincoln's efforts at completing emancipation and reconstructing the United States. He notes that Lincoln stressed education as the greatest need of the recently freed, and observes that expanded educational opportunities are still needed for their descendents. But he adds that from Lincoln's time to our own, the education of the white majority has been at least equally important. |
4
|
|
Last, but certainly not least, is Dennis K. Bowman's "All Politics are Local: Emancipation in Missouri." Here the spotlight is no longer on Lincoln, but how in a single border state all the elements of the Civil War played out over four stormy years. Lincoln's task, mainly carried out by subordinates of varying ability, was to reconcile the many factions in the state in such a way as to keep it in the Union. Lincoln could, to a degree, influence events in Missouri, but Bowman makes it clear that events were chiefly controlled by the state's citizens. Missouri, like Delaware and Maryland, emancipated its slaves. At first, the legislature tried to follow Lincoln's suggestion, mainly urged in 1862, to institute gradual emancipation with compensation to the owners of slaves. As the party of abolition increased and the fortunes of the CSA declined, Missouri scrapped gradualism, wrote a new state constitution, provided for immediate emancipation, and ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. Bowman does not say, but we all know, that the triumph of abolition in Missouri and the preservation of free soil in Kansas did not end prejudice against black Americans. One recalls that Brown v. Board of Education (1954), though interpreted widely as affecting schools throughout the United States, was initially about ending segregation in Topeka, Kansas. |
5
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|