Abraham Lincoln (4 page)

Among blacks, meanwhile, an astonishing metamorphosis was taking place as far as Lincoln was concerned. Heretofore blacks had almost universally idolized him as one white leader who had cared for them. Heretofore they had almost always found inspiration and hope in the Lincoln story. In the South, they celebrated every January 1, Emancipation Day, with stemwinding oratory. One Negro leader recalled that while growing up in Chicago in the 1940s he read all six volumes of Sandburg's
Lincoln
. It “overwhelmed me,” he said—“the images of Lincoln's poverty, the agony of social change. In the days of reading those volumes, I walked through the cold park, thinking and pondering about the meaning of life. Sandburg's book absorbed me for weeks.” When the civil-rights struggles broke out in the 1950s and 1960s, black spokesmen like King found Lincoln a powerful ally. Established black scholars like Benjamin Quarles and John Hope Franklin, while admitting that Lincoln had once been ambivalent about Negro social and political rights, nevertheless admired the man and wrote sympathetically about his travail as President. They pointed out that Lincoln had always hated slavery, that his views
of blacks changed dramatically during the Civil War, and that his Emancipation Proclamation (as Quarles said) was “one of the most far-reaching pronouncements ever issued in the United States.”

But in the mid-sixties, with cries of “Black Power!” and “Black is beautiful” sweeping their ranks, a younger generation of Negroes wanted “none of that Emancipator shit.” They were furious at the glacial pace of desegregation, furious at the broken promises of white America, furious at all the racial violence in Dixie and the searing poverty in the northern ghettoes. Out of their disillusionment with America, out of their own quest for black identity and black pride, came a black fist that knocked Lincoln off his pedestal. In
Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama!
artist-activist Julius Lester caught the new mood when he asserted that “blacks have no reason to feel grateful to Abraham Lincoln. Rather, they should be angry with him.”

And angry they were. In a sensational 1968 article in
Ebony
magazine, Negro writer-historian Lerone Bennett, Jr., mounted an all-out attack against “the myth of the Great Emancipator.” Marshaling evidence as selectively as Dixon and Vardaman had done, Bennett offered up a racially repugnant Lincoln who never rose above the anti-black environments in which he was born and raised. Bennett's Lincoln is a rank opportunist who cackles at Negro dialect jokes. He is not opposed to slavery, Bennett asserts; he is opposed to the
extension
of slavery. But not because of any compassion for suffering Negroes. His sole concern is the welfare of white people. His speech at Charleston reveals his attitude about black social and political rights, and his vaunted eloquence of the 1850s is aimed at saving “the white man's charter of liberty,” which is what he calls the Declaration of Independence.

Bennett's Lincoln does grow during the Civil War, but he doesn't grow much. On every issue relating to the black man, he is “the very essence of the white supremacist with good intentions.” Indeed, he spends the first eighteen months of the conflict “in a desperate and rather pathetic attempt to save slavery,”
because that is where his heart is. Blacks to him are “unassimilable aliens,” and if he has an emancipation policy, Bennett contends, it is to drive them all out of the country.

When the pressures of the war force Lincoln to move against slavery, he issues a “cold, forbidding” decree “with all the grandeur of a real estate deed.” But the slaves, and subsequent generations of Negroes, have been duped. The Emancipation Proclamation, so celebrated in song and story, actually frees few if any bondsmen, since it applies only to rebellious states beyond Lincoln's authority.
^*
In fact, Bennett says, Lincoln may have issued this anemic document to outflank congressional “radicals” and forestall definitive emancipation. White supremacist that he is, Bennett's Lincoln announces a reconstruction policy that will put whites only in power in postwar Dixie. And to his dying day, he promotes colonization to solve “the Negro problem.”

So much for the “Massa Linkun” myth. “In the final analysis,” Bennett writes, “Lincoln must be seen as the embodiment, not the transcendence, of the American tradition, which is, as we all know, a racist tradition. In his inability to rise above that tradition, Lincoln, often called ‘the noblest of all Americans,' holds up a flawed mirror to the American soul.”

Delete “flawed,” and there is nothing in Bennett's remarks with which Dixon, Vardaman, or King's ranting correspondents would disagree. That angry blacks and white segregationists should embrace the same Lincoln myth is one of the great ironies of modern race relations.

By the 1970s and 1980s, Lincoln as honky had become the conventional wisdom among younger blacks, particularly in the academies, and among disillusioned whites too. The most impassioned debunking of the Great Emancipator came from the pen of Vincent Harding, a black historian who had marched with Martin Luther King, taught at Spelman College, and plunged
into the radical black-studies movement that had burst forth on college campuses. In 1981, Harding published
There Is a River
to rave notices from prominent black and white Americans. The “river” in the title is a metaphor for the black struggle for freedom, a self-liberating struggle in which blacks themselves had defined their freedom, fought and died for it, from the colonial era down to 1865 (a second volume will trace the struggle to the present).

For blacks, slave and free alike, God Himself was directing their long and continuous movement toward the Promised Land. Thus when the Civil War broke out, they saw it as the coming of Judgment Day. For them, Harding writes, “all the raucous, roaring guns of Charleston Harbor and Bull Run, of Antietam and Fort Pillow, of Shiloh and Murfreesboro and Richmond were the certain voice of God, announcing his judgment across the bloody stretches of the South, returning blood for blood to the black river.” In the North, blacks surged forward to volunteer in Union armies, because they equated the cause of the free states with the cause of freedom. In the South, the war broadened the river of struggle, intensified “the self-liberating black movement” that had long gone on, as slaves escaped to Union lines by the thousands, running “toward a new history, a new life, a new beginning…. Their God was moving and they moved with him.”

The villain of this story, of course, is Abraham Lincoln. He had not seen the visions of black people, Harding writes, “had not yet rightly measured ‘the judgments of the Lord,' the movements of Providence.” Like Bennett's Lincoln, Harding's is a dedicated white supremacist afflicted with tunnel vision. His obsession with saving the white Union “at all costs” blinds him to the spiritual and revolutionary nature of the conflict. He cares nothing for black people. For two years he will not let them serve in his armies, will not adopt an emancipation policy, lest that offend his “tender allies” in the “loyal” slave border. But the slaves could not care less. They swarm into Union lines in relentlessly increasing num
bers, until Lincoln's armies find themselves “in the midst of a surging movement of black people” who in effect are “freeing themselves from slavery.”

But then a harried Lincoln steps in and steals all their glory. Mainly to justify the use of the South's black “property” in his military forces, he issues an “ambiguous,” restricted Emancipation Proclamation, which from “a certain legal view” sets free no slaves at all. Alas, though, the proclamation symbolizes all that blacks have “so deeply longed to experience,” and it sends “a storm of long pent-up emotions surging through the churches and meeting halls.”

Their rapture is understandable, Harding writes, “but like all ecstatic experiences, it carried its own enigmatic penalties.” In his view, the Emancipation Proclamation was one of the worst things that ever happened to black people in this country. For the joy with which Civil War Negroes greeted the proclamation produced the myth of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. It was an ugly irony. “While the concrete historical realities of the time testified to the costly, daring, courageous activities of hundreds of thousands of black people breaking loose from slavery and setting themselves free, the myth gave the credit for this freedom to a white Republican president” who never saw beyond the limitations of his own race, class, and time. “Yet thanks to the mythology of blacks and whites alike, it was the independent, radical action of the black movement toward freedom which was diminished, and the coerced, ambiguous role of a white deliverer which gained pre-eminence.” For the development of black struggle and black radicalism, Harding says, the consequences of this myth were many and profound.

To emancipate today's Afro-Americans from the shackles of that myth, Harding has created an alternative myth, writing in a musical style that radiates the voice of soul. Here is how his message might be summarized:
Far from being the passive recipients of freedom, as white history has so long described them, our heroic, blood-stained forebears were gaining it for themselves dur
ing the Civil War. Yes, we were winning our own freedom, were forging a black radical consensus that could have liberated us from dependence on the white-man's Union. We didn't need Lincoln, didn't need the racist North, didn't need any white man. Had Lincoln not usurped our movement, misdirecting our river into waters he could control, we might have been freer, more independent, more radical and revolutionary, from then until now. Certainly this would not have been the country it became. For the sake of our liberation today, let us recapture what Lincoln took away from us in the Civil War. Let us carry on where our forefathers left off in the blood-red baptism of fire, and let us designate them, not Lincoln, as the instrument of our deliverance
.

This is a potent myth, born of deep spiritual and psychological needs in black America that command our attention. Indeed, Harding is the black counterpart of Whitman and Sandburg. In Harding's mythic vision, Lincoln was not the poet hero of democracy. The true poet heroes were the immortal black masses who flung off their chains and seized their own freedom. A black radical and ideologue, Harding is offering today's Negro Americans his idea of a usable past, a way to feel as one with their slave forebears. “The river of black struggle is people,” Harding writes, “but it is also the hope, the movement, the transformative power that humans create and that creates them, us, and makes them, us, new persons. So we black people are the river; the river is us. The river is in us, created by us, flowing out of us, surrounding us, re-creating us and this entire nation.”

This vividly illustrates what critic Northrop Frye said of myth—that it is “the imitation of actions near or at the conceivable limits of desire.” Yet it is a great pity, I think, that in order to build up his Civil War ancestors for the benefit of modern blacks, Harding felt obliged to tear down, not just the myth of the Great Emancipator, but the actual Lincoln of history.

But, some will say, are blacks not as entitled to their notions of Lincoln as white America is to the Man of the People? And is the Lincoln of Harding's
River
not preferable to the idea of the
saintly Emancipator, which obscures the heroic role that blacks played in their own liberation?

That may be so, but the myth of the Great Emancipator and the Man of the People does not defile the historical Lincoln. Harding's portrait, like Bennett's, reduces him to a racist caricature, stripping him of any complexity, any idealism, and any humanity. And this is all the more regrettable because Harding, a historian, really does believe that his glory-stealing white supremacist is the real Lincoln, and many blacks and whites are certain to take this as historical gospel.

For the country at large, though, the scoundrelly Lincoln is in no danger of replacing Sandburg's icon of democracy, for that Lincoln still holds first place in the pantheon of American immortals. It is Sandburg's Lincoln who is quoted in the White House and in Congress, that Lincoln who is produced on national television, that Lincoln who is held up as the unattainable standard for anybody who undertakes a modern biography. Again, that Lincoln has such staying power because he is a larger-than-life mirror of ourselves, a god we have created in our idealized image of democratic man. As long as we believe in America, we will have towering Father Abraham as our greatest mythical hero. And as long as he is that hero, he will remain a powerful presence to be reckoned with.