San Francisco’s education commissars willfully ignore the history of America’s greatest president. Here’s a reminder of what made him so.
San Francisco’s education commissars willfully ignore the history of America’s greatest president. Here’s a reminder of what made him so.
T he patience of historically literate Americans is being tried once again by another attempt to cancel Abraham Lincoln. On Tuesday, the San Francisco school board voted to rename 44 schools the names of which are associated with “dishonorable legacies.” Among these are Washington and Jefferson. But the inclusion of Lincoln involves a uniquely egregious bastardization of the historical record.
In addition to recycling accusations of anti-black racism that have been hurled at Lincoln both from the far left and the far right, the school board points to “the Civil War president’s treatment of American Indians, which included a mass hanging after an uprising,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. This is a reference to the Great Sioux Uprising of 1862, during which the Dakota tribe, who had been forced off their land in 1858, killed around 500 white settlers.
It’s true that Lincoln signed the death warrants of 38 Dakota men, who were then hanged. But this is not the whole story. The military court that initially tried the Native Americans sentenced 303 of them to die. The executions couldn’t proceed, however, without the president’s signature.
When Lincoln was telegrammed the list of those who were to be executed, he recoiled at the sheer number of names. He asked for “the full and complete record of these convictions” and sifted through them to discover “the more guilty and influential of the culprits.” Despite the unimaginable pressures Lincoln was under, he spent hours combing through the transcripts of these trials. He also heard the personal petitions of the convicted men’s family members, many of whom traveled all the way to Washington for an audience with him. In the end, he decided only 38 of the 303 were culpable. When Alexander Ramsay, then governor of Minnesota, suggested to Lincoln that he could win the state in the 1864 election by sanctioning a harsher response, Lincoln replied, “I could not afford to hang men for votes.”
So much for the idea that Lincoln deserves condemnation on those grounds. But the case for Lincoln’s anti-black racism is even weaker.
When we cast our minds back to the 1850s and examine the emerging anti-slavery coalition in the United States, we discover that this coalition was extremely fragile. Millions of low-wage subsistence workers who had immigrated during that decade from Europe, and others who preceded them, made up the bulk of popular opposition to slavery.
Their motives for doing so, however, were practical rather than altruistic. In fact, most of these agricultural workers hated slaves just as much as they hated slavery. They opposed the institution in the South because the existence of slavery undercut their own job prospects. Why would southern landowners pay them wages to work in the fields when they had free labor available? However, these voters were also horrified at the idea of unilateral emancipation. They feared that freed slaves would begin migrating to the North and West and undercut white laborers by agreeing to work for lower wages.
Leading this coalition was, as one might imagine, a bit of a nightmare. The only anti-slavery policy that could garner any broad-based electoral support was one that restricted slavery to the states in which it already existed without abolishing it outright. This was the policy that Abraham Lincoln pursued during the 1850s and for most of his presidency. His idea was to put a cordon around slavery and to keep adding free states to the Union until a constitutional amendment could be ratified that would enforce abolition across the entirety of the nation.
Those who criticize Lincoln for failing to publicly pursue abolition from his earliest days in public life prove nothing but their own ignorance of the political context in which he was operating. He took the only course of public action that had any chance of marrying principle and prudence in such a way that would bring liberty to birth as the fruit of their union.
Still, hysterical radicals and knuckle-dragging neo-Confederate skinheads occasionally join together in a chorus of supposedly damning Lincoln quotes that are supposed to shock the rest of us. But the only conclusion to be drawn from their propaganda is that a little learning is a dangerous thing.
“If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” Lincoln did indeed write these words in August 1862. But bear in mind that Lincoln thought of the Union itself as the best instrument for peaceful emancipation in the long term. Only later in the war did he come to believe that conquest was necessary to bring freedom.
Another of his lines often thrown back in Lincoln’s face is this one: If “there must be the position of superior and inferior,” he said, then “I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” This can detract from one’s estimation of Lincoln only if what he said next is left unquoted (which it often is): “I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.” As he declared in 1859: “I say that there is room enough for us all to be free, and that it not only does not wrong the white man that the negro should be free, but it positively wrongs the mass of the white men that the negro should be enslaved.” In fact, he had little patience for arguments over the supposed superiority of one race over another:
Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position. . . . Let us . . . unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.
One of the most persistent criticisms of Lincoln has to do with his support for the idea of expatriating African Americans back to Africa after they’d been freed. Two things must be said about this. First, at the time when Lincoln began his public career, almost every anti-slavery politician, including the most doctrinaire abolitionists (most of whom cared more about moral preening and purity than about governing in the interests of slaves), thought something like this would be necessary. Fears that a race war would break out immediately upon emancipation, while misguided, were very real. Thomas Jefferson expressed the majority view of anti-slavery Americans in the early 19th century when he wrote:
I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property, for it is so misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.
Second, it has to be stressed that Lincoln’s support for expatriation was not his mature view. He later abandoned the belief that freed black people in North America ought to be shipped back across the middle passage. He signed the legislation that extended diplomatic reciprocity to Haiti, the first black republic to have been established in the New World — and by a slave revolt, no less. Domestically, he went even further. Not only did Lincoln recant his former enthusiasm for the expatriation of black Americans, but, as Allen Guelzo notes in his book Redeeming the Great Emancipator, he even agitated for their suffrage in the last speech of his presidency:
Although as president he had no standing by which to dictate the voting laws of reconstructed Louisiana, the testimony of the black soldier in the Civil War was sufficient for him (in the last speech he gave, on the evening of April 11, 1865) to urge the extension of “the elective franchise . . . to the colored man,” especially “the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.” This does not strike people today as the upper limit of generosity. But it was as much as a president could recommend in 1865.
It’s certainly true that Lincoln could theoretically have exploited the wave of anti-slavery sentiment abroad in America in the 1850s and ridden it to power without a thought for the plight of African Americans. This tends to be the position held by neo-Confederate “historians,” who argue that Lincoln used the rhetoric of emancipation to conceal his true ends, which allegedly had to do with tariffs and sectionalism and the like.
Once again, however, this possibility is foreclosed by the historical record. Lincoln’s hatred of slavery is well documented, even in his private correspondence. He had nothing to gain politically by writing in an 1855 letter to his friend, Joshua Speed:
Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it, “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
Lincoln also confided in Speed that the sight of slaves “shackled together . . . was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border.”
Do the events surrounding the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation suggest that our 16th president was a white supremacist? Most people are disappointed when they read the document for the first time. The language is prosaic, lawyerly, and devoid of the soaring rhetoric we might expect from an artifact so closely associated in the minds of many with the cause of freedom. But there’s a reason why this was necessary. The only constitutional grounds on which the chief executive of the Article II branch could lawfully emancipate the slaves were those of military necessity. The powers of the presidency are at their most expansive when the holder of the office is acting in his capacity as commander in chief. Had Lincoln introduced a rationale separate from military strategy into the text of the document, he would have imperiled the constitutionality of emancipation in the first place. He would have cleared the way for legal and legislative challenges to the document itself that it may not have survived. It’s also instructive that Lincoln pressed for the adoption of the Emancipation Proclamation in all the states of the Union after it had served its initial military purpose — hardly the course of action that a leader concerned exclusively with conquest would have bothered to take.
With regard to the Emancipation Proclamation, however, it’s once again Lincoln’s private actions that reveal the true character of the man. One often hears it said that in drafting the document Lincoln was bowing to external political pressure. On the contrary, no such pressure existed to any politically significant degree. In fact, when Lincoln announced his intention to emancipate the slaves to his cabinet, they were shocked. As Guelzo recounts:
Once the Rebel army invaded Maryland, he explained to his assembled cabinet secretaries on September 22, 1862, “I determined, as soon as it should be driven out of Maryland, to issue a Proclamation of Emancipation.” And he had done so on the strength of a “promise” he had “made to myself, and — (hesitating a little) — to my Maker. The rebel army is now driven out, and I am going to fulfil that promise.”
Lincoln’s conviction on the question of slavery, which he demonstrated to his cabinet, shines through even the smallest details of the historical record. As the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin explained in an interview for CBS’s Sunday Morning show:
Abraham Lincoln was worried because that morning he had shaken hundreds of hands, so when he went to sign his name [on the Emancipation Proclamation], his own hand was numb and shaking. He put down the pen. He said, “If ever my soul were in an act, it is in this act, but if I sign with a shaking hand, posterity will say, ‘he hesitated.’” So, he waited and waited, and look at that hand. It is a very bold and clear hand.
Of course it is. Lincoln’s steady opposition to slavery had been “bold and clear” for his entire life. He wouldn’t let even his own penmanship suggest anything to the contrary.
The last word on Lincoln’s bona fides on the question of race should, I think, go to the African Americans who lived during the time of his administration. Frederick Douglass was initially unimpressed by Lincoln’s ascent to the presidency. He thought much the same of him as Lincoln’s detractors do today: cynical, callous, and unconcerned with the plight of blacks. His first personal meeting with the president forced him to reassess. Guelzo quotes John Eaton recounting what Douglas told him after the meeting had concluded:
“I have just come from President Lincoln,” he said, making no attempt to suppress his excitement. “He treated me as a man; he did not let me feel for a moment that there was a difference in the color of our skins! The President is a most remarkable man. I am satisfied now that he is doing all that circumstances will permit him to do.”
Remembering the election campaign of 1860, John McCline, who had been a slave in Louisiana at the time, said that “there was much excitement and political talk” among the slaves “over the possible election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States.” They were certain that “if Lincoln was elected . . . he was against slavery and would use every means in his power to crush it.” As far as we can tell from the historical record, most African Americans were disconsolate when Lincoln was murdered. “Our Moses had been slain,” wrote Elijah Marrs, “and we knew not what the future had in store for us.” The comparison of Lincoln to Moses appears more than once in the writings of African Americans who lived to see the end of the Civil War.
No doubt such testimonies would make today’s San Francisco school board very uncomfortable — if the school board members were aware of them. Would they dismiss Mr. Marrs as just an unfortunate victim of a “white-savior complex”?
Progressives are quick to champion the lived experience of people of color and to argue that this experience should weigh heavily on the scales of public policy. Aren’t we duty-bound to treat the lived experience of slaves with equal respect, long dead though they may be? Elijah Marrs had suffered the brutality and indignity of slavery. But because of Lincoln’s actions, he counted himself a slave no longer, but instead a child of Israel for whom the seas, after centuries of bondage, had parted at last. Do his experiences and those of his African-American contemporaries count for nothing in the eyes of the San Francisco school board?
The November election dealt Democrats the best hand they’ve had in years. They have unified control of government in Washington and are faced with a Republican opposition internally riven as it tries to fend off an insurgency by tinfoil-hat-adorned conspiracy theorists. Democrats are, it seems, doing their best to squander this hand with overreach on many fronts. In San Francisco, the education commissars are taking the name of the greatest American off a school they won’t even open so that children can enter its doors and learn. Politically, not to mention morally, they should not be surprised to reap what they’ve sown.