Showing posts with label Civil Unrest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Civil Unrest. Show all posts

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Lucy Ella Gonzales Parsons: A Force in the Fight for a Better World.

On March 7, 1942, fire engulfed the simple home of 91-year-old Lucy Gonzales Parsons at 3130 North Troy Street. It ended a life dedicated to liberating working women and men of the world from capitalism and racial oppression. 
Lucy Parsons, 1886.
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George Markstall, second husband of Lucy Parsons, blind anarchist whose first husband was hanged for his part in the Haymarket riot of 1886, died last night in Belmont Hospital of burns suffered in the same that took Mrs. Parsons' life Saturday. She was burned to death in the flat they occupied at 3130 North Troy Street. Markstall, 72 years old, tried unsuccessfully to save Mrs. Parsons from the burning building. Firemen Found him overcome in a bedroom. Mrs. Parsons, 91 years old, was found dead in the kitchen.
                                                            Source:  Chicago Tribune, Monday, March 09, 1942, pg 16.

A dynamic, militant, self-educated public speaker and writer, she became the first American negro woman to carry her crusade for socialism across the country and overseas. Lucy Ella Gonzales was born in Texas in 1851 (the year is questionable) of African-American, Mexican and Native-American ancestry and was born into slavery. The path she chose after emancipation led to conflict with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), hard work, painful personal losses, and many nights in jail. 
Albert Parsons
In Albert Parsons, a white man whose Waco Spectator fought the KKK and demanded social and political equality for Negroes, she found a handsome, committed soul mate. The white supremacy forces in Texas considered the couple dangerous and their marriage illegal, and soon drove them from the state.

Arriving In Chicago
Lucy and Albert reached Chicago, where they began a family and threw themselves into two new militant movements, one to build strong industrial unions and the other to agitate for socialism. Lucy concentrated on organizing working women, and Albert became a famous radical organizer and speaker, one of the few important union leaders in Chicago who was not an immigrant.

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The late labor history scholar Bill Adelman wrote what is the definitive story of Haymarket. A paragraph from his description indicates the significance of the event and the horrors that all involved endured:

"The next day, martial law was declared in Chicago and throughout the nation. Anti-labor governments around the world used the Chicago incident to crush local union movements. In Chicago, labor leaders were rounded up, houses were entered without search warrants, and union newspapers were closed down. Eventually, eight men, representing a cross-section of the labor movement, were selected to be tried. Among them were (Albert) Parsons and a young carpenter named Louis Lingg, who was accused of throwing the bomb. Lingg had witnesses to prove he was over a mile away at the time. The two-month-long trial ranks as one of the most notorious in American history. The Chicago Tribune even offered to pay money to the jury if it found the eight men guilty."

In 1886, the couple and their two children stepped onto Michigan Avenue to lead 80,000 working people in the world's first May Day parade and a demand for the eight-hour workday. A new international holiday was born as more than 100,000 marched in other U.S. cities. By then, Chicago's wealthy industrial and banking elite had targeted Albert and other radical figures for elimination — to decapitate the growing union movement. A protest rally called by Albert a few days after May Day became known as the Haymarket Riot when seven Chicago policemen died in a bomb blast. No evidence has ever been found pointing to those who made or detonated the bomb, but Parsons and seven immigrant union leaders were arrested. As the corporate media whipped up patriotic and law-and-order fervor, a rigged legal system rushed the eight to convictions and death sentences.

When Lucy led the campaign to win a new trial, one Chicago official called her "more dangerous than a thousand rioters." 

Albert Parsons was framed and tried for the Haymarket bombing, which is generally attributed to a police provocateur. Parsons wasn't even present at Haymarket but cared for the couple's two children while Lucy Parsons was organizing a meeting of garment workers. After the Haymarket legal conspiracy, Lucy led the campaign to free her husband. Parson was one of eight who were convicted and one of four hanged on November 11, 1887. 

When Albert and three other comrades were executed, and four others were sentenced to prison, the movement for industrial unions and the eight-hour day was beheaded. Lucy, far from discouraged, accelerated her actions. Though she had lost Albert — and two years later lost her young daughter to illness — Lucy continued her crusade against capitalism and war and exonerated "the Haymarket Martyrs." She led poor women into affluent neighborhoods "to confront the rich on their doorsteps," challenged politicians at public meetings, marched on picket lines, and continued to address and write political tracts for workers' groups far beyond Chicago.
Lucy Parsons
Though Lucy had justified direct action against those who used violence against workers, in 1905, she suggested a very different strategy. She was one of only two women delegates (the other was Mother Jones) among the 200 men at the founding convention of the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the only woman to speak. First, she advocated a measure close to her heart when she called women "the slaves of slaves" and urged IWW delegates to fight for equality and assess underpaid women's lower union fees.

In a longer speech, she called for nonviolence that would have broad meaning for the world's protest movements. She told delegates workers shouldn't "strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production." A year later, Mahatma Gandhi, speaking to fellow Indians at the Johannesburg Empire Theater, advocated nonviolence to fight colonialism. However, he was still 25 years away from leading fellow Indians in nonviolent marches against India's British rulers. 

She led many demonstrations of the unemployed, homeless and hungry, including a memorable 1915 Poor People's March of the Unemployed of over 15,000 people in Chicago on January 17, 1915, where "Solidarity Forever" was sung for the first time. WWI songwriter Ralph Chaplin had finished writing "Solidarity Forever" two days prior. Marchers demanded relief from hunger and high levels of unemployment.

The demonstration also persuaded the American Federation of Labor, the Jane Addams' Hull House, and the Socialist Party to participate in a subsequent massive demonstration on February 12, 1915.

Eventually, Lucy Parsons' principle traveled to the U.S. sit-down strikers of the 1930s, Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the antiwar movements that followed, and finally to today's Arab Spring and the Occupy movements.

Lucy was an unrelenting agitator, leading picket lines and speaking to workers' audiences in the United States before trade union meetings in England. In February 1941, poor and living on a pension for the blind, the Farm Equipment Workers Union asked Lucy Parsons to give an inspirational speech to its workers, and a few months later, she rode as the guest of honor on its May Day parade float. 
Lucy Parsons
For years, Lucy Parsons was harassed by the Chicago Police Department, who often arrested her on phony charges to prevent her from speaking at mass meetings. Following her death in a suspicious fire at her home, the police and FBI confiscated all her personal papers and writings. Federal and local lawmen arrived at the gutted Parsons home to make sure her legacy died with her. They poked through the wreckage, confiscated her vast library and personal writings, and never returned them. 

Lucy Parsons' determined effort to elevate and inspire the oppressed to take command remained alive among those who knew, heard, and loved her. But few today are aware of her insights, courage, and tenacity. Despite her fertile mind, writing and oratorical skills, and striking beauty, Lucy Parsons has not found a place in school texts, social studies curricula, or Hollywood movies. Yet she has earned a prominent place in the long fight for a better life for working people, women, people of color, her country, and her world.

Her fighting spirit and contributions to improving this world will not be forgotten via the exposed history.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

Saturday, August 26, 2023

Chicago's First Crime King, Irishman Michael Cassius McDonald. (1839-1907)

Though long-forgotten by many, latecomers like Capone, Torrio and Colosimo owe a debt of gratitude to Michael Cassius McDonald, the man who brought together criminals and elected officials, setting the stage for organized crime in Chicago. During a 50-year career in the underworld, journalists, gangsters, mayors, and even one President of the United States took orders from Chicago's original crime boss.

Michael Cassius McDonald arrived in Chicago just before the Civil War. A teenage runaway from Niagra Falls, New York, McDonald knew no one in Chicago. His childhood friend and fellow freight train jumper, Henry Marvin, died en route and was buried by McDonald without fanfare.
Michael Cassius McDonald


In the 1850s, Chicago became the nation's railroad hub, opening the city to a flood of eager young men with big ideas. For years, young men like Marshall Field, who opened a retail emporium in downtown Chicago, and George Pullman, creator of the eponymous sleeping and dining cars that made travel by train comfortable, later carried President Abraham Lincoln's body on a final journey from the White House to Springfield, Illinois, and Aaron Montgomery Ward, the founder of retail catalog sales, and an advocate for keeping Chicago's lakefront "open, clear and free" forever.

But when Mike McDonald rode the rails in the 1850s, passengers sat on hard wooden benches as they stared at an unchanging landscape through sooty windows.  With little to occupy bored passengers after consuming lunches brought from home, passengers eagerly welcomed the sight of boys called "candy butchers" who trudged through the aisles.  In exchange for a few pennies and free transportation to Chicago, runaways and orphans clad in ragged clothing peddled goods for the railroad. Sympathetic passengers, mistakenly believing that the boys received their fair share of profits, bought poor-quality goods from the candy butchers.  And Michael Cassius McDonald was the most successful candy butcher of his time.

An Enterprising Lad
Slight in stature, he peddled books and fruit to kind-hearted ladies. Male passengers, duped by his innocent appearance, took candy home only to discover when opened by a loved one, the boxes were half empty. Eager to increase his profits, McDonald expanded his business to include phony raffle tickets. Chicago crime writer Richard C. Lindberg credits McDonald with inventing the "prize package swindle." Lindberg explains that McDonald guaranteed a cash prize of up to $5 in every box of candy purchased. Most prizes amounted to a few cents, but once hooked by the possibility of a big prize, greedy passengers tried and tried again, leading McDonald to proclaim, "There is a sucker born every minute" long before film star W.C. Field uttered the famous phrase.

Most boys were tired of the grind, working long days for pennies and sleeping in dirty railroad yards a  night. But, now in his late teens, McDonald wasn't like most boys. He expanded his business. He learned to play cards from wealthy passengers, not afraid to gamble tidy sums of money. A keen observer of human behavior, McDonald watched their body language as they bluffed and wagered through intense poker games. S on, he exchanged his ragged clothes for the attire of a card sharp: a crisp suit, polished shoes and an ever-present cigar.  e continued to work days, but at night, he joined floating card games in The Sands, Chicago's vice district, going up against some of the best card sharps in the country.

Until the election of Mayor John Wentworth in 1857, Chicago officials unofficially tolerated The Sands, but within a few weeks of his first term, Mayor Wentworth declared war on The Sands. Literally, overnight, the mayor and his police force destroyed The Sands, burning to the ground or tearing down every shack, brothel and gambling parlor after issuing a 30-minute warning to occupants to get out.

But Mike McDonald was not discouraged. He correctly predicted that gambling, no longer contained in one Chicago neighborhood, would spread throughout the city, making finding gamblers harder for police. In fact, the police force was so inept that Mayor Wentworth fired the entire department until public pressure forced him to reverse his decision.

Discrimination against the Irish and Irish Americans prohibited McDonald from applying for many honest jobs; elected officials enacted legislation banning immigrants from holding city jobs. But McDonald's il gal business was flush with a customer base, including politicians, judges and city officials.

Gaming the System
McDonald operated Chicago's most successful floating faro game, a European card game popularized in America by Wyatt Earp and Mississippi Riverboat gamblers. Played with a unique deck of cards laid out on an elaborately decorated card table with hidden compartments to allow dealers to skim money, players had little chance of winning. Occasionally McDonald instructed his dealers to adjust the game in favor of influential business leaders but quipped, "Never give a sucker an even break" – another phrase later popularized by W. C. Fields. Games often ended in violence, but by this time, local cops could be called upon to remove the angry patron in exchange for a bonus from McDonald's men.

When President Abraham Lincoln called upon Illinois citizens to sign up for duty in the Union Army, McDonald did his best to aid the call to action. Though able-bodied, 22-year-old Mike McDonald did not enlist in The Irish Brigade. Instead, he organized groups of bounty jumpers. These men collected a $300 signing bonus called a bounty and then deserted the army as soon as possible with money in hand and returned to Chicago to enlist under an assumed name. McDonald pocketed 50% in exchange for a promise of immunity from a crime punishable by hanging. Government officials desperate to fill quotas looked the other way as McDonald signed up Chicago's drunken, derelict and destitute men. During the first two years of the Civil War, Illinois supplied more than 130,000 men to the Union army. McDonald's accumulated enough money to purchase a saloon and adjoining gambling parlor in a luxury Chicago hotel.

Perhaps it was ready access to an unlimited supply of alcohol that fueled McDonald's violent temper. On one occasion, he punched and kicked a 60-year-old woman who owned a roadhouse he frequented; he knocked down a man who tried to steal his handkerchief; he pummeled a man in a saloon, and when the poor fellow tried to defend himself against McDonald, the police hauled the man off to jail.

Chicago and Mike McDonald prospered as the nation suffered through the Civil War. Businessmen in tow to negotiate lucrative Union contracts, White southerners displaced by war and Confederate soldiers, and escapees from a prison camp on Chicago's south side provided a steady stream of gamblers at McDonald's gambling hall. Through his wealthy customers, McDonald learned of skyrocketing land values caused by the demand for new factories and housing for workers, and he invested heavily in real estate. By the war's end, McDonald owned several buildings, four gambling clubs and a liquor distributorship.

His notoriety attracted women of a specific type: young and flashy. Isabella or Belle Jewel met Michael McDonald when she danced in the chorus line at a popular theater where John Wilkes Booth performed Shakespeare. Smitten by Bell's beauty, McDonald quickly welcomed her into his circle of friends, introducing her as Mrs. McDonald, though they never married. They dined in the finest restaurants and lived in an exclusive neighborhood. Whether it was physical abuse at McDonald's hand or his habitual drunkenness that drove Belle to leave him after seven years, she did so with a flair for the unexpected. The former chorus girl, no longer the belle of the ball, joined a St. Louis convent, where she remained until she died in 1889.

Michael Cassius McDonald served jail time in 1869. He was arrested for allegedly stealing $30,000 from an assistant cashier of the Chicago Dock Company. The cashier had given the money to McDonald to finance his gambling operations. McDonald was unable to afford bail, and, consequentially, spent three months in prison prior to being acquitted at his trial. He never served prison time again.

The Great Chicago Fire
A few weeks after Belle's sudden departure from Chicago, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed most of Chicago and every personal possession, business and building McDonald owned. Chicago and Michael Cassius McDonald were ruined, but not for long.

Chicago began rebuilding almost immediately after the outgoing mayor honored hundreds of dead citizens by closing saloons for one week.

By the end of the year, McDonald married Mary Ann Noonan Goudy, a stunning 24-year-old divorcee and mother of two. She and her toddlers moved into the house McDonald had shared with Belle Jewel.

Thousands of laborers rushed to Chicago to build new houses for over 90,000 homeless citizens (Chicago Shelter Cottage Kits Built Immediately After the Fire). For months, skilled tradesmen arrived at a busy railway station in the heart of a red-light district where McDonald set up a shabby but conveniently located ga bling parlor. To outsmart competing gambling parlors in the area, McDonald hired well-dressed men to greet passengers as soon as they arrived. Yes, McDonald's men knew where to get a hot meal and, incidentally, an "honest" card game to pass the time while looking for employment.

McDonald's business drew the attention of Chicago's new mayor, Joseph Medill, co-owner of the Chicago Tribune; Mayor Medill tried to shut him down. Medill successfully lobbied the state legislature to increase penalties for owners of gambling parlors. He forced saloon owners to close on Sunday, the one day a week that laborers were free to enjoy a drink or two at their neighborhood tavern. He ordered his police superintendent to raid gambling parlors. When he was lax in carrying out his duties, Medill's newspaper published a list of known gambling parlors and their locations.

With the support of the liquor distributors association and the publisher of a competing newspaper, McDonald publicly opposed the mayor's edict to close saloons on Sunday. For a while, saloons remained open, but owners dimmed the lights, locked the front door and admitted patrons through a side or back door.

Well aware that the police superintendent knew his men took bribes from gambling parlors, including his own, McDonald threatened to expose him. As a compromise, McDonald and others under his protection received advance notice of impending raids. For the benefit of the public, police officers removed gambling equipment they stored for pickup by the owners the following day. On occasion, the police smashed furniture, but only well-worn or broken items chosen by the owner. McDonald posted bail if an employee or gambler was inexplicably arrested in the raids.

Mayor Medill continued to pressure McDonald's, but the gambling king emerged victorious. The police superintendent and his successor were fired. Mayor Medill fled to Europe to seek treatment for unnamed health issues. McDonald successfully fully offered his own candidate to replace Mayor Medill. With a new mayor in office, McDonald flourished. Upon McDonald's request, Mayor Harvey Colvin repealed the law that banned the sale of alcohol on Sundays. Recognizing McDonald's ability to get things done, Chicago's gambling community clambered for McDonald's support – the result, Chicago's original crime syndicate. Flush with payoffs from politicians who paid McDonald hush money in connection with their own shady businesses and funds contributed by small and big-time gamblers, McDonald opened the most notorious gambling house in America.

The Store
In September 1873, the beautifully crafted wooden doors of McDonald's 24/7 department store of gambling, popularly known as "The Store," swung open to reveal the luxurious interior of a multi-story brick building: fine carpets, thick velvet drapes and gleaming mirrors. A cigar store that sold the finest imported cigars and a saloon stocked with the best wines available occupied the ground level. On the second floor, a staff of impeccably dressed men stood behind oak gambling tables, ready to greet well-heeled players. The Palace European Hotel, little more than a fancy rooming house, welcomed out-of-town gamblers on the third floor. No longer happy to occupy the home of her husband's former lover, Mary and the kids lived together on the upper floor with McDonald as an occasional overnight guest.

McDonald extended credit to politicians who walked over from City Hall and U.S. Senator James G. Fair. A frequent visitor from Nevada, Fair made millions from co-ownership of the Comstock Lode, the richest silver mine in the United States, and from a partnership in a California railroad, Fair couldn’t resist paying a visit to The Store when he changed trains in Chicago on his way to work in Washington, D.C. Sir Charles Russell, a member of the British Parliament, played poker at The Store. McDonald treated with generosity wives who complained their husbands gambled away the family rent money, refunding their losses and vowing to ban them from The Store. He contributed to charities. When someone asked McDonald for a contribution of $2 to help defray the cost of burying a fallen police officer, he quipped, “Here’s $10, bury five of them.”

Despite McDonald’s dislike of policemen, he kept some on his payroll. He brandished a pistol at a large political gathering, but officers on duty kept their distance. Police escorted drunken voters to a polling place set up at McDonald’s business, where he offered naturalization papers and voter registration forms on the spot. During a drunken rage, he broke the nose of a stranger who commented on a newspaper article unfavorable to McDonald and his supporters. The man filed criminal charges, but the case never reached the court. McDonald assaulted a newspaperman and threatened to cut off his ear. When arrested for the attempted murder of a rival gambler, a police officer escorted him to jail in a special carriage and recommended to the judge McDonald be released on bail immediately. Of course, he was acquitted of all charges, and that evening, he held a banquet for judges, city officials and police officers.

For a time, members of the Chicago police force disregarded department orders to raid The Store. But occasionally, policemen showed up unannounced. One evening, a group of officers bounded into The Store and up the stairs to the family living quarters with a warrant to arrest McDonald. Mr. McDonald was not home then, but Mrs. McDonald was. She responded by firing two shots at the policemen. Charged with attempted murder, she was led to a penitentiary where she stayed just until her husband hired an expensive lawyer named Alfred Trude and bribed a judge who released Mary before reprimanding the policemen for their unlawful raid of the McDonald family home.

Like her husband, Mary enjoyed keeping company with minor celebrities who performed in Chicago’s many theaters. She quickly fell in love with Billy Arlington, an African-American banjo player who lived with his wife Julia on Chicago’s South Side. Mary showered Arlington with gifts and even brazenly introduced him to her husband at a dinner party. When Billy had to leave Chicago for a performance in San Francisco, Mrs. McDonald followed. By the time they reached Denver, Mary declared her undying love for Billy Arlington in a letter she mailed home to her husband. Undeterred, McDonald followed the couple to San Francisco, where he threatened Billy and Mrs. McDonald with a loaded pistol.

McDonald forgave his wife for her indiscretion. He promised his wife a new home away from The Store and sealed the deal when he moved his family to a limestone mansion on a wide boulevard lined with houses of prominent Chicagoans, including the mayor.

Mary promised to be faithful, and for a while, she was. Through her husband's generous contributions to a local Catholic Church, she met Father Joseph Moysant. While church workers completed the preparation of his living quarters at the church, Mary offered the priest a spare room, and often her own room, in the McDonald's spacious mansion. On one occasion, they took a secret trip out of town. They continued a clandestine affair undetected for two years until they decided to leave Chicago forever.

Like Belle Jewel, Mary left Chicago wearing a nun's habit, but she had no intention of joining a convent. The lovers took a train to New York, where they boarded a ship bound for Paris. This time, it took McDonald two months to track her down. Under the advice of his lawyer, Alfred Trude, the man who defended Mrs. McDonald against the attempted murder of a policeman, McDonald filed for a divorce. Shak n by his wife's latest infidelity, he lamented to a friend, "When you cannot trust your wife and your priest, whom can you trust?"

Though busy operating his gambling parlor, collecting protection money and distributing police bribes, McDonald ran some honest and not-quite-honest enterprises. He bought the Chicago Globe newspaper, rivaling former Mayor Medill’s newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. He commanded hustlers and pickpockets to stay clear of the area around the Columbian Exposition so as not to damage Chicago’s reputation while it hosted millions of fairgoers. At a private meeting in the White House, he persuaded President Chester Arthur to pardon a colleague convicted in a Ponzi scheme. 

He operated a racetrack. He invested in a quarry that sold limestone to city contractors at inflated prices. He hired a crew to paint city hall with a special liquid guaranteed to render the crumbling building waterproof and fireproof, billing the City of Chicago $180,000 for a job estimated at $30,000. The unique liquid turned out to be a worthless mixture of lime, lead and linseed oil.


He built the West Side Lake Street 'L' that connected the Loop, which began service on November 6, 1893. Regular passenger service began between Madison Street and Market Street to California Avenue. Over 50,000 passengers rode on the first day. The line was extended west to Homan Avenue on November 24, 1893, to Hamlin Avenue in January 1894, to 48th Avenue (now Cicero Avenue) in March 1894, and to 52nd Avenue (now Laramie Avenue) in April 1894. When the completed Loop opened on October 3, 1897, the Lake Street Elevated became the first line to utilize the entire quadrangle. So shrewd was Michael McDonald that he bribed city aldermen thousands of dollars to buy their votes—ensuring that one of the train stops was near one of his illegal racetracks on the West Side.

McDonald was a busy man, but still, a man who loved women. At age 56, he married a 21-year-old Jewish actress named Dora Feldman, who he remembered from the times she and his son played together as schoolmates. Like McDonald, Dora was divorced, and like his former wife, the new Mrs. McDonald was attracted to artistic types. For a few years, the couple was happy to host lavish dinner parties in the home McDonald purchased for Dora and to dine late at night in fine restaurants after the theater or opera. But McDonald was getting older and slowing down. While he spent his afternoons napping, Dora sneaked away to meet her teenage lover, Webster Guerin. Guerin couldn’t support himself by selling his paintings, so Dora set him up in a picture-framing business downtown. Whether or not McDonald suspected his wife of carrying on a long-term affair, he continued to love his wife, even to the point of converting to Judaism and not questioning how she spent his money.

When Dora suspected that Webster Guerin was seeing another woman, who, in fact, was his brother’s girlfriend, she became enraged. She threatened to kill the woman. She threatened to kill Guerin. On a cold February morning, Dora burst into her lover’s office and shot him dead in full view of witnesses. Though she admitted to the police she killed her lover, she told her husband that she killed the man because she was blackmailing her. McDonald paid for her defense, a team of prominent lawyers led by Alfred Trude, who defended his first wife against a charge of attempted murder.

The scandal took a toll on McDonald, and he did not live to see his wife acquitted of murder. Michael Cassius McDonald died with his former wife, Mary, at his side, and McDonald had $2 million in assets ($65M today).

Michael Cassius McDonald was interred at Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery on August 9, 1907, in Chicago, Illinois.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

Monday, June 26, 2023

Loathing President Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War Years.



Ninty-one years ago, Herbert Hoover, campaigning for re-election amid the Great Depression, took special care to associate himself with Abraham Lincoln, but then so did his opponent, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had remarked a few years earlier, "I think it is time for us Democrats to claim Lincoln as one of our own." Late in the campaign, both men came to speak in Springfield and paid ceremonial visits to Lincoln's tomb.   By the 1930s, "getting right with Lincoln" in this manner had become an almost universal custom among public figures. Not only Republicans and Democrats but also Communists, Socialists, Prohibitionists, business executives and labor leaders, black Americans and members of the Ku Klux Klan—all seemed to want him on their side.

Yet, a few voices of dissent could always be heard here and there. In 1932, an old Virginia gentleman named Lyon Gardiner Tyler, son of President John Tyler continued his long personal war upon the heroic image of Lincoln. "I think he was a bad man," Tyler wrote, "a man who forced the country into an unnecessary war and conducted it with great inhumanity." Tyler was the most prominent spokesman of his time for an anti-Lincoln tradition, attenuated but persistent, that had its sturdy roots in the years of the Civil War. Examining that tradition may illuminate Lincoln's place in the national consciousness—a place that is apparently secure but never precisely the same from one year to the next.

There were three principal sources of hostility to Lincoln during the Civil War: first, the enemy-that is, the people of the Confederacy and a sizable part of the population in the Southern Border states; second, the political opposition-that is, primarily the Democratic party in the North and the Border states, but including a good many conservative Whigs as well; third, the antislavery radicals, including elements both within and outside the Republican party. One might also designate as a fourth category the hostile critics watching and commenting on the war from Europe—most notably, a substantial portion of the English press.

The Southern image of Lincoln began as a mere sectional stereotype, and Southern hostility to his presidential candidacy was largely impersonal. Secession, although undertaken in response to the outcome of the election of 1860, had nothing to do with the particular qualities and qualifications of the man elected. It was the "Black Republican party" that Southerners hated and feared, whoever might happen to be the party's official leader. But when the secession crisis erupted into civil war, Southerners laid the blame squarely on Lincoln. In the years of bloody struggle and withering hope that followed, they came increasingly to view him as the principal author of all the woe that had descended upon them. Of course, Jefferson Davis simultaneously became a detested figure in the North, but with a significant difference. Davis, leading a rebellion, symbolized treason in the mold of Benedict Arnold. In Southern eyes, Lincoln's role was that of a military conqueror—a ruthless Attila bent upon destroying a superior civilization. In fact, the Confederate image of Abraham Lincoln in the 1860s resembles the American image of Adolf Hitler in the 1940s.

The Southern indictment of Lincoln usually began with the assertion that he had made war unavoidable by opposing sectional compromise and then forcing the issue at Fort Sumter. After the first major war battle at Bull Run in July 1861, the Richmond Enquirer blamed him for all the deaths on both sides. "Of these men, Abraham Lincoln is the murderer," it declared. "We charge their blood upon him ... May the Heavens, which have rebuked his madness thus far, still battle his demon designs."

Confederates called Lincoln a "tyrant," a "fiend," and a "monster" for making war on civilians through the blockade, for authorizing the destruction of private property, for setting the likes of Ben Butler and William T. Sherman upon the Southern population, for suppressing civil liberties, for cruelly refusing to exchange prisoners, and, most of all, for emancipation, which they viewed as an incitement of slaves to rebellion and wholesale murder. In speeches, sermons, and songs, in books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides, they also portrayed him as a simpleton, a buffoon, a drunkard, a libertine, a physical coward, and a pornographic storyteller.

The hatred of Lincoln sometimes crystallized into threats against his life. For instance, soon after the firing on Fort Sumter, he received from Mississippi a newspaper clipping in which a reward of $100,000 was offered for his "miserable traitorous head." Spontaneous rejoicing at his death, though perhaps more the exception than the rule in the Confederacy, was widespread. To a Georgia woman overcome with bewilderment and grief at Lee's surrender, the assassination came as "one sweet drop among so much that is painful." A Texas newspaper declared, "The world is happily rid of a monster that disgraced the form of humanity."

Such intensity of feeling was by no means confined to the rebellious South. The Civil War divided Northern and Border State Democrats into three factions: those who supported both the war and the Lincoln administration, thereby in effect changing their political allegiance; those who supported the war but opposed the administration, thus playing the classic role of "loyal opposition"; and those who opposed both the war and the administration, in some cases to the verge of treason. The latter two groups became the war and peace wings of the wartime Democratic party. Far apart in their basic attitudes toward the conflict itself, they could nevertheless agree in denouncing Lincoln for misuse of presidential power and subversion of the Constitution. They charged the administration with repressing civil liberties, with subverting the rights and powers of the states, and with transforming a war for defense of the Union into a revolutionary struggle for abolition and racial equality.

It was the progress toward emancipation that most infuriated Democratic and other conservative leaders. In their view, the same puritanical spirit of New England abolitionism that had disrupted the Union was dictating administration policy. On January 1, 1863, the day of the final Emancipation Proclamation, Benjamin R. Curtis, former Supreme Court justice, said Lincoln had been terrified and entirely subdued by the antislavery radicals. "He is shattered, dazed and utterly foolish," Curtis wrote. "It would not surprise me if he were to destroy himself." In 1864, the old Jacksonian, Amos Kendall, published a series of letters attacking the President. "Our federal Union," he declared, "is in more danger this day from Abraham Lincoln and the unprincipled and fanatical faction to whom he has surrendered himself, soul and body, than from all other causes combined."

Of course, the rankest abuse came from the copperheads, among whom none was more inventive in his vituperation than a Wisconsin editor, Marcus M. Pomeroy. Lincoln, he wrote, was "but the fungus from the corrupt womb of bigotry and fanaticism"—indeed a "worse tyrant and more inhuman butcher than has existed since the days of Nero." As the election of 1864 approached, Pomeroy editorialized: "The man who votes for Lincoln now is a traitor and murderer... And if he is elected to misgovern for another four years, we trust some bold hand will pierce his heart with dagger point for the public good." 

Among the antislavery radicals, in contrast, Lincoln seemed the embodiment of timorous, vacillating conservatism—too inhibited by constitutional qualms, too solicitous about Border State feeling, too obliging to Democrats, especially in the appointment of generals, and much too cautious in his approach to emancipation. One must distinguish, of course, between the outright abolitionists and the radical free soilers who made up the left wing of the Republican party. However, once the war had begun, the two elements tended to merge because both were vehemently emancipationist. Yet within both groups, there was considerable difference of opinion about the man in the White House. For instance, after much early abuse of Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison came around to urging the President'President'sion and re-election in 1864. Still, his fellow abolitionist Wendell Phillips refused to do likewise and gave his support instead to the abortive candidacy of John C. Fremont. Similarly, Charles Sumner, though often critical of Lincoln, maintained a delicate balance between friendship and opposition, whereas his senatorial colleague Benjamin F. Wade labeled the President a fool, led the radical attacks upon him in Congress, opposed his renomination, and regarded his assassination as a political blessing.

Lincoln's apparent conservatism on the slavery issue drew strong criticism from radicals as early as the fall of 1861. His revocation of Fremont's edict proclaiming emancipation in Missouri provoked a storm of recrimination that was renewed in May 1862 when he revoked a similar order issued by General David Hunter for South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. In a letter to another senator, Wade sneered that nothing better could be expected from a man of Southern antecedents and "poor white trash" at that. Frederick Douglass, the leading black abolitionist, declared in his monthly Magazine that Lincoln had become the "miserable tool of traitors and rebels" and had shown himself to be "a genuine representative of American prejudice and negro hatred."

The Emancipation Proclamation won some antislavery radicals to Lincoln's side. Many others regarded him as such a poor excuse for a president that he ought to be replaced. His bitterest radical critic was the Maryland congressman Henry Winter Davis, co-author of the Wade-Davis manifesto, which charged the President Presidentuing "personal ambition" and exercising "dictatorial usurpation" while at the same time promoting "anarchy." When Lincoln was re-elected, Davis wrote to Admiral Samuel F. DuPont, "We must for four years more rely on the forcing process of Congress to wring from that old fool what can be gotten for the nation." In voting for Lincoln, he said the people had subordinated "disgust to the necessities of a crisis."

Radical hostility to Lincoln cut closest to the bone because so much of it came from the inner circles of his own party and even from his cabinet in the person of Salmon P. Chase, whose file of incoming letters is a storehouse of unreproved attacks on the President. The fierceness of such infighting is perhaps less surprising than the vehemence and malice with which Lincoln was criticized by much of the British press. The articulate portion of the British public became emotionally involved in the American Civil War for both material and symbolic reasons. The war had a disruptive effect upon the British economy, geared as it was to cotton manufacture. But Britons also recognized the struggle from its beginning as a test of the viability of democracy, that new social force which the English ruling class feared, which the United States represented before the world, and which Lincoln in background and style virtually caricatured.

Several conservative publications hastened to draw a lesson from the ordeal of the United States. "It is only by calamities so startling as this," said the Quarterly Review, "that men can be warned of the dangers with which democracy is surrounded." The principal British complaints against Lincoln were that he persisted unreasonably in waging a futile war of reconquest and that, in the process, he was fastening a dictatorship on the United States—all the while making bad jokes as he proceeded along his sanguinary course. With the election of 1864 approaching, the London Evening Standard called him a "foul-tongued and ribald punster" who was also the "most despicable tyrant of modern days." At about the same time, the Leeds Intelligencer denounced him as "that concentrated quintessence of evil, that Nero in the most shrunken ... form of idolatry, that flatulent and indecent jester." The language of the London Times was scarcely more restrained. Condemning the Emancipation Proclamation as an effort to incite murderous slave uprisings, it suggested that Lincoln might ultimately be classed "among that catalog of monsters, the wholesale assassins and butchers of their kind."

The Times viewed Lincoln's re-election in November 1864 as "an avowed step towards the foundation of a military despotism." The United States, it said, had "entered on that transition stage, so well known to the students of history, through which Republics pass on their way from democracy to tyranny." Yet, less than half a year later, the same newspaper told its readers, "Abraham Lincoln was as little of a tyrant as any man who ever lived." [24] What had intervened, of course, was Appomattox and the assassination.

One of the great Lincoln mysteries is the relationship between the man's martyrdom and his historical stature. Few would agree with the judgment once tossed out by Harry Elmer Barnes that Booth's shot made all the difference between a hero and a "discredited politician." But few would deny that the timing and manner of his death transformed the Lincoln image. The first sign of that transformation was the enormous outpouring of grief from the American people. It astonished men in public life and chastened some of them. Even Wendell Phillips concluded, just a few days after the assassination, "Lincoln had won such loving trust from the people that it was impossible to argue anything against him."

The apotheosis of Lincoln thus began as soon as he died. Savior of the Union, the liberator of a race, struck down on Good Friday in "the most impious murder done since Calvary," he was readily assimilated into the universal myths of the fallen hero and the dying god. Many of his critics at home and abroad hastened to revise their estimates of his worth and scramble, as it were, aboard the funeral train. There was Tom Taylor's famous recantation in Punch, for instance, and there was George Bancroft, who had earlier called the President "ignorant" and "incompetent," now delivering the principal funeral oration in New York City.

Republicans, radical and otherwise, soon learned what an asset they had in the dead Lincoln, and before long they had turned February 12 into a day for celebrating party loyalty. Northern Democrats, for the most part, acquiesced in and frequently participated in the enshrining of Lincoln. For example, Samuel S. Cox of Ohio had little good to say about the President during the war, but writing twenty years afterwards he called Lincoln "the peer of the purest and greatest men of whom history leaves a record."

Cox and other Democrats could identify with Lincoln by stressing his conservatism and his leniency toward the defeated Confederacy, thus dissociating him from the alleged excesses of Radical Reconstruction. Many Southerners came to terms with the Lincoln image along this same route. Even Jefferson Davis, while continuing to hold Lincoln responsible for starting the war, concluded that his death had been a great misfortune for the South.[30] Southerners could also take comfort from some of Lincoln's remarks about race that seemed compatible with the developing post-Reconstruction system of segregation. And for progressive advocates of a "New South," such as the Georgia newspaper editor Henry W. Grady, an appreciation of Lincoln was part of the sectional reconciliation their aspirations required.

But for Southerners who bitterly regretted the failure of the Confederacy and looked back with painful nostalgia to their lost antebellum world, Lincoln remained a villain, one whom the poet Paul Hamilton Hayne was still described in 1871 as a "gawky, coarse, not over-cleanly, whisky-drinking, and whisky-smelling blackguard." Southerners devoted to the Lost Cause were the principal bearers of the anti-Lincoln tradition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They found themselves losing ground, even in their own section, increasingly regarded as a cranky remnant of the past. Yet their case against Lincoln grew stronger, or so it seemed to them, as additional evidence emerged with the passing years.

To the end of the nineteenth century and beyond, knowledge about Lincoln was continually enriched by a flow of biographies and reminiscences from men who had known him with varying degrees of intimacy. Although the tone of this often dubious material was overwhelmingly laudatory, the personal revelations of some writers, notably William H. Herndon and Ward H. Lamon, provided welcome ammunition for the dwindling but resolute corps of Lincoln haters. Eagerly they seized upon assertions that Lincoln, among other things, had mocked Christianity, sold liquor in his grocery, told off-color stories, treated women with disrespect, admitted to Herndon that his mother was probably illegitimate, and suggested that a finger and thumb were as good as a handkerchief.

The anti-Lincoln tradition seems to have reached a low ebb during the decade from the grand centennial celebration of 1909 to the close of the First World War. Still, then it made a comeback in the 1920s, a time when Lincoln studies, in general, were entering their most brilliant era. One feature of the revival was a crusade to get pro-Northern history books out of Southern schools. Supporting that cause, the United Confederate Veterans in 1922 unanimously adopted a report which declared that the Civil War "was deliberately and personally conceived and its inauguration made by Abraham Lincoln." Immediately, there were angry responses from the G.A.R. and the Dames of the Loyal Legion.

The leader of the school-book crusade was Mildred Lewis Rutherford, historian-general of the Confederated Southern Memorial Association, who maintained that Southern children must be told the truth about Abraham Lincoln. Among the "truths" she purveyed in a series of pamphlets were these: that Lincoln was a slaveholder; that as a quartermaster in the Mexican War, he tried to starve American soldiers; that he contributed $100 to the support of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry; and that Ulysses S. Grant, as commanding general of the Army, in 1867 imposed a forty-five-year censorship on all important newspapers, prohibiting any abuse of Lincoln. 

By this time, however, the more learned and distinguished Lyon Gardiner Tyler had placed himself at the head of the anti-Lincoln cult. Retiring in 1918 from the presidency of the College of William and Mary, he established Tyler's Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine. He edited it until his death on, of all days, February 12, 1935. Rare was the issue of the Magazine that did not contain some kind of attack upon what he regarded as an absurd and infamous myth. Tyler's Lincoln was ugly to look at, vulgar in his tastes, and filthy in his language. Often linked in honor with George Washington, he should instead be compared to George III, except that the latter, said Tyler, was a "kinder man." Tyler did not allow consistency to hamper his denunciations. On the one hand, Lincoln was the weakest, most vacillating, most incompetent President in history—one who took four years to win a war that should have been won in two. On the other hand, Lincoln was a mighty, satanic force in history, who, by his "blind will" alone, demolished the old Union, shattered the Constitution, and destroyed one million lives and twenty billion dollars worth of property. 

Meanwhile, Lincoln's biography in the 1920s, still dominated by gifted amateurs like Carl Sandburg and Albert J. Beveridge, was being turned into professional channels. Two signals of the change were the conversion of the Abraham Lincoln Association into a research center and the publication of James G. Randall's first book, Constitutional Problems under Lincoln. Professionalization had the critical effect of drawing Lincoln's studies into the mainstream of American historiography so that interpretation of Lincoln became virtually inseparable from the interpretation of the Civil War.

Just then, as it happened, the theme of "revisionism" was about to become a major element in Civil War scholarship. To the revisionists, the war was an avoidable conflict—a tragedy brought on by the agitation of extremists and the blundering of politicians. Abolitionists and other antislavery radicals were the prime villains of the piece. At the same time, the heroes were those compromisers like Stephen A. Douglas and John J. Crittenden, who struggled valiantly to hold the Union together. The interpretation was plainly anti-Republican and thus, to a certain extent, anti-Lincoln. One can see its influence in a tendency toward the harsher judgment of Lincoln's antebellum career, first by Beveridge and later by historians like Richard Hofstadter, Donald W. Riddle, and Reinhard H. Luthin.

An especially pungent expression of revisionism, one that also reflected the "debunking" vogue of the 1920s, was the poet Edgar Lee Masters' experiment in character assassination, Lincoln the Man. Masters' Lincoln, a cold-hearted, under-sexed, intellectually lazy, cunning, devious, calculating, sophistical, unscrupulous, demagogic politician, forced the war treacherously and illegally upon the South, waged it cruelly, and in the process, "crushed the principles of free government." The book has, with good reason, been called a "copperhead biography."

Yet most revisionists, despite of their anti-Republican perspective, were remarkably tender in their treatment of Lincoln. Indeed, one of the leading revisionists, James G. Randall, was also one of the great Lincoln biographers and an admiring one. Randall managed this straddle by positioning Lincoln relatively close to the Douglas Democrats and as far as possible from the abolitionists and radical Republicans. Randall's well-known article, "The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln," is devoted almost entirely to the abuse of Lincoln by the wartime radicals. Thus revisionism, which obviously had much in common with the views expressed by Samuel S. Cox and other Northern Democrats during the Civil War, nevertheless tended, like Cox in the postwar period, to come to terms with the heroic image of Lincoln.

Soon, however, a more aggressive challenge to that image did come from another quarter—that is, from what amounted to a revival of the radical wing of the anti-Lincoln tradition. The Old Left, including Socialists and Communists, had assimilated Lincoln to its ideals and aspirations. But the New Left and the black power militants of the 1960s found little in him to admire. Compared with Wendell Phillips or Charles Sumner, he seemed unheroic, opportunistic, and uninspired by deep moral commitment. Instead of the "Great Emancipator," suggested I. F. Stone, he might better be called the "Great Equivocator." This "tragically flawed figure," said Lerone Bennett, Jr., a senior editor of Ebony magazine, "shared the racial prejudices of most of his white contemporaries." On every issue related to blacks, he was "the very essence of the white supremacist with good intentions." He came to emancipation reluctantly, under radical pressure, and, indeed, according to some cynics, may have "issued the Proclamation to forestall more forcible action by Congress." That is, his real intention may have been to prevent effective emancipation.

In their use of evidence to support such judgments, radical writers were biased, selective, and often uncritical. Furthermore, they generally paid little attention to the limits of circumstance within which Lincoln had to work and the variety of considerations claiming his attention—such as the plain fact that proclaiming emancipation would have been a waste of time without military victory. But then, the radicals of the 1960s were interested less in scholarly fairness than in making history serve the social causes to which they had committed themselves. And there was nothing new or corrupt in that point of view. The past is not an exclusive preserve of historians. It may legitimately be used to inspire social action. Lincoln himself did so, and Jefferson, too, with spectacular success in the Declaration of Independence. The ethical problem arises when social polemics masquerade as historical scholarship, and that was sometimes the case in New Left evaluations of Lincoln.

Meanwhile, the Southern version of the anti-Lincoln tradition continued to flourish. One finds expressions of it in private correspondence as well as in speeches and publications. For example, in the 1920s, Hamilton J. Eckenrode of the University of Virginia wrote to Albert J. Beveridge, calling Lincoln "an unscrupulous politician of overmastering ambition" with "utter want of principle" and "indescribable hypocrisy." As for emancipation, "the chief result of the liberation of the negro race has been the political paralysis of half the country and the general weakening of the nation."

In 1937, Charles W. Ramsdell, a native Texan teaching at the University of Texas, presented the classic statement of the already familiar thesis that Lincoln deliberately "maneuvered the Confederates into firing the first shot" at Fort Sumter so that they would receive the blame for starting a war that he wanted. A book-length reiteration of the thesis in more intemperate language was published four years later by an Alabama attorney, John S. Tilley.

In 1947, a few dozen Southerners who had gathered in Statuary Hall of the National Capitol to celebrate the birthday of Jefferson Davis found themselves listening to what a Time correspondent called "a historical Pickett's charge." It was delivered by the guest speaker, "sallow, hawk-nosed Dr. Charles S. Tansill, Texas-born history professor at ... Georgetown University." Characterizing Lincoln as a "do-nothing" soldier, "invincible in peace and invisible in war," Tansill accused him of precipitating hostilities by tricking the Confederates into their attack on Sumter. The most prominent person in the audience, Representative John Rankin of Mississippi, left discreetly as soon as possible, muttering that the professor had gone "too far" and that it was time to "draw the mantle of charity over all that."

In 1959, soon after Brown v. Board of Education had inaugurated the "Second Reconstruction," there appeared a book comparing Lincoln and Jefferson Davis written by Russell Hoover Quynn, the son of a Confederate veteran from Maryland. Quynn was almost apoplectic in his hatred for Lincoln, whom he called the country's first "dictator," and in his determination to defend that "civilized, beneficial, humane" arrangement that was mislabeled "slavery." "The real monument to the Great Emancipator," he wrote, "is the maiming of the United States Constitution ... and the imposition upon the nation of a Negro race problem that progressively grows."

More recently, the neo-Confederate attack on Lincoln has been carried forward by Ludwell H. Johnson of the College of William and Mary, principally in a series of articles. Echoing and elaborating on one of Lyon Gardiner Tyler's favorite arguments, Johnson maintains that the great mystery of the Civil War is not why the South lost, but rather, why the North, with its "enormous material and numerical superiority," took so long to win. His answer is the inferiority of Northern leadership from the presidency down and the profound political composition of Northern society. According to Johnson, Lincoln was essentially a politician and little more, a man for whom "political imperatives were moral imperatives," even when that meant blinking at corruption and incompetence. Lincoln's primary aim, says Johnson, was a political one—to make the Republican party "a permanent majority in the nation"—and this political purpose impeded and tainted the conduct of the war.

In an article comparing the Union and Confederate presidents, Johnson finds Davis "clearly superior" to Lincoln as a war leader. He was more dignified, decisive, and willing to accept responsibility. He made wiser appointments, had a better strategic sense, maintained a stronger cabinet, handled his generals with greater skill, was more effective as a legislative manager, and kept his military policies free from the contamination of politics. Indeed, according to Johnson, Davis was one of the most remarkable Americans of all time and has been denied his rightful place in history because he happened to be on the losing side. "Nothing succeeds like success," Johnson observes more than once. The comparison between Lincoln and Davis would have turned out quite differently if the South had won its independence, he argues. "Suppose the French had not come to the rescue of the Patriots, and the British had crushed the American bid for independence? What would be George Washington's reputation?" The answer is that, in those circumstances, Washington would have been fortunate to come out with a reputation as high as that of Robert E. Lee (for Lee, rather than Davis, is obviously the Civil War analog of Washington). Johnson never even confronts the interesting question of why defeat should have had a disastrous effect on Davis's historical stature as a political leader but not on Lee's stature as a military leader.
Furthermore, Johnson's whole argument proves to be ultimately self-destructive. Suppose we accept all of his assertions at face value. In that case, the greatest mystery of the Civil War is this: How could Jefferson Davis and his associates have been so stupid as to get involved in a war that, according to Johnson, they had not the slightest chance of winning—not even against an enemy that was governed and commanded, according to Johnson, with pitiful incompetence?

Even fiercer than Johnson in his hostility to Lincoln is M. E. Bradford, a Texas-born, Vanderbilt-trained professor of English at the University of Dallas. Bradford's views reflect not only his Southern background but also his intellectual conservatism in the tradition of Russell Kirk, Eric Voegelin, and Willmoore Kendall. The Lincoln portrayed by Bradford in a series of articles is a demagogue, a "country hustler," a "self-made Caesar"—cold and calculating in his ambition, dishonest in his rhetoric, and unscrupulous in his use of power—a man who precipitated Civil War waged it inhumanely, spurned efforts to end it by negotiation, put political considerations ahead of the lives and welfare of his soldiers, and secured his own re-election by illegitimate military force.

Unlike Johnson, whose depreciation of Lincoln's abilities and achievements has the effect of reducing his historical significance, Bradford sees a figure of towering influence who catastrophically changed the course of American history. Bradford's Lincoln was the prime agent of a "gnostic" revolution that imposed the reform imperatives of New England Puritanism upon American politics, thereby destroying the old Union of sovereign states and setting the nation on the road to totalitarianism. Lincoln, in short, is America's Cromwell. He created the imperial presidency and converted the national government into a "juggernaut," all the while "wrapping up his policy in the idiom of Holy Scripture, concealing within the Trojan Horse of his gasconade and moral superiority an agenda that would never have been approved if presented in any other form." Bradford frequently gets tipsy from his own rhetoric in this way, and tender concern for historical accuracy never impedes his rush to judgment. But in the intensity of his conviction, he is a worthy heir and custodian of the anti-Lincoln tradition.

In the late twentieth century, it has become increasingly difficult to separate the tradition of more casual and impersonal criticism of Lincoln from the mainstream of Lincoln scholarship. Of course, the very extravagance of the Lincoln legend invites attack from trained historians and professional iconoclasts like Gore Vidal. Not without admiration for Lincoln, the consummate politician, Vidal recently trained his guns upon what he calls "the Sandburg-Mt. Rushmore Lincoln ... a solemn gloomy cuss, who speaks only in iambic pentameter, a tear forever at the corner of his eye—the result, no doubt, of being followed around by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir which keeps humming 'the Battle Hymn of the Republic.'" In his presentation of the "real" Lincoln, Vidal then repeats and embroiders one of Herndon's sleazier quasi-recollections. Lincoln, it seems, caught syphilis as a young man and later infected his wife, who eventually succumbed to paresis, but not before infecting three of their children, each of whom died prematurely as a consequence—and all of which may explain why he frequently fell into fits of melancholy. So much for Gore the Myth-slayer.

A modern interpretation of Lincoln has been profoundly affected by the practice of history as a discipline and by the progress of history as a human experience. The expanding professionalization of Lincoln's studies has produced greater variety and sophistication in the assessment of his character, motives, conduct, and influence. Most notably, at present, the exploration of Lincoln's inner life is being revolutionized by the application of insights and analytic techniques drawn from other disciplines, especially psychology and literary criticism. The emerging portrait is a composite of scholarship revealing a mixture of faults and virtues, mistakes and achievements. It has become a less coherent and less heroic portrait, perhaps more meaningful in our unheroic, troubled age.

Although the overall effect remains favorable to Lincoln, some of the new scholarly writing does lend intellectual support to the anti-Lincoln persuasion, usually without also pledging emotional allegiance. For example, a recent article in Civil War History finds that Lincoln, in lifting the suppression of the Chicago Times, was governed entirely by political considerations and displayed no concern about freedom of the press. Another essay in the same journal argues that in the presidential campaign of 1860, Lincoln would have been vulnerable to an attack upon his vaunted honesty and that such an attack, if the Democrats had only been clever enough to organize it, might very well have cost him the election. Still, another case in point is George B. Forgie's psychohistorical study, Patricide in the House Divided, wherein it is maintained that Lincoln unconsciously willed and promoted the crisis of the Union as his only escape from the psychological dilemma of revering the founding fathers while at the same time resenting their historic pre-emption of the pathways to renown. Similarly, Dwight G. Anderson presents a "demonic" Lincoln who, "by acting on his motive of revenge against constitutional fathers for having preempted the field of glory," became the "very tyrant against whom Washington had warned in his Farewell Address, a tyrant who would preside over the destruction of the Constitution in order to gratify his own ambition."

Forgie and Anderson have both followed the lead of Edmund Wilson but with a significant difference. Wilson, some sixty years ago, first suggested that Lincoln, when he discussed the danger of dictatorship in his Lyceum speech, was projecting himself into the role of the "towering genius" whose craving for distinction might one day pose a mortal threat to the political system erected by the founding fathers. Forgie, in a variant version, maintains that Lincoln suppressed any such subversive thoughts and cast Stephen A. Douglas as the destructive genius, with himself as the prospective savior of the nation. By thus inventing a villain and summoning up an illusive danger, he set the stage for the disruption of the Union.

Anderson, adhering more closely to the Wilson theory, portrays Lincoln as a man hounded by anxieties about death and, therefore, hungry for the immortality of historical renown but embittered by the failure of his congressional career. This Lincoln, driven by ambition, self-hatred, and a desire for revenge, determines to assume the role of revolutionary leader and tyrant. "Denied the opportunity of 'building up,'" says Anderson, "this ambitious genius 'would set boldly to the task of pulling down.'" Lincoln's "malignant passions" were unleashed in the Fort Sumter crisis when he maneuvered the South into striking the first blow. Quickly arrogating to himself "virtually dictatorial powers as president," he also began to erect a civil religion with himself as God's appointed instrument for saving the Union. In this manner, he provided the ideological rationale whereby the United States in the twentieth century would make its disastrous attempt to become a lawgiver to the entire world.

This dark vision of Lincoln, which seems to qualify Anderson (and Forgie, too, perhaps) for membership in the anti-Lincoln tradition, is probably not so much a product of historical research as it is a by-product of recent history and a reflection of the gnawing uneasiness with which Americans currently view themselves and their past. More often than not, the great events and major trends of our own era have tended to make Lincoln less satisfactory as a national hero. The civil rights revolution underscored the poverty of his thought about the problem of race and the inadequacy of his plans for the aftermath of emancipation. The Viet Nam War and the Watergate affair dramatized the growth and menace of the so-called imperial presidency, which could be traced directly to his extraordinary use of executive power. The modern drift toward social pluralism, with its emphasis upon minority rights and its sanction of organized protest, bears little relation to the coercive majoritarianism with which he met the threat of secession. And the apocalyptic meaning of total war in our time casts a shadow of doubt across his willingness to accept war and wage it totally as an alternative to acquiescence in disunion. Furthermore, Lincoln's reputation has become more vulnerable as a result of what C. Vann Woodward calls "the fall of the American Adam"—that is, the substitution of a sense of guilt about the nation's past for an earlier sense of virtue and pride. Lincoln is still widely regarded as the representative American of his time and perhaps of all time. But the America that he represents is now often portrayed as a dark, odious country stained with cruelty, injustice, racism, and imperialist greed.

Yet, in spite of all adverse influences, Lincoln retains the admiration of most Americans and his place of pre-eminence in the national pantheon. Perhaps a kind of historical inertia holds him there now; perhaps the twenty-first century will view him much differently. But in the polls, he still ranks first. One recent presidential poll merits special attention. Of 41 historians, 39 labeled him "great," one called him a "near great," none classified him as "average" or "below average," but one branded him a "failure." Thus the anti-Lincoln tradition persists in lonely splendor, and the study of that tradition does tell us something, though far from everything, about Lincoln's unique hold upon the memory and imagination of his countrymen. In a word, he matters. He has never settled quietly into his historical niche. For anyone trying to understand America's past or shape its future, he is a force to be reckoned with—an ineluctable presence. In the words of an Englishwoman, Barbara Ward, "he is one of the very few of the world's leaders who stay alive."

By Don E. Fehrenbacher
Edited by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

Sunday, June 25, 2023

Abraham Lincoln and the Recruitment of Negro Soldiers.


In historical writing and analysis, PRESENTISM introduces present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Presentism is a form of cultural bias that creates a distorted understanding of the subject matter. Reading modern notions of morality into the past is committing the error of presentism. Historical accounts are written by people and can be slanted, so I try my hardest to present fact-based and well-researched articles.

Facts don't require one's approval or acceptance.

I present [PG-13] articles without regard to race, color, political party, or religious beliefs, including Atheism, national origin, citizenship status, gender, LGBTQ+ status, disability, military status, or educational level. What I present are facts — NOT Alternative Facts — about the subject. You won't find articles or readers' comments that spread rumors, lies, hateful statements, and people instigating arguments or fights.

FOR HISTORICAL CLARITY
When I write about the INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, I follow this historical terminology:
  • The use of old commonly used terms, disrespectful today, i.e., REDMAN or REDMEN, SAVAGES, and HALF-BREED are explained in this article.
Writing about AFRICAN-AMERICAN history, I follow these race terms:
  • "NEGRO" was the term used until the mid-1960s.
  • "BLACK" started being used in the mid-1960s.
  • "AFRICAN-AMERICAN" [Afro-American] began usage in the late 1980s.

— PLEASE PRACTICE HISTORICISM 
THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PAST IN ITS OWN CONTEXT.
 


For all the volumes written about Abraham Lincoln and the eloquent words spoken by Lincoln himself—for all the polls that mark him as a great man, a national, even international, hero—the Civil War President remains something of an enigma. Our continuation of the "Lincoln and" tradition today suggests our preoccupation with his views on significant issues. Given a corollary (proposition) interest in the topic of race in American history, it is not surprising that Lincoln's place in that central theme remains a subject of debate. The revolutionary developments of the post-World War II period in the area of what is broadly termed "civil rights" have led to a reevaluation of Lincoln—from the great emancipator to the reluctant emancipator to the white supremacist, or Lincoln as just another "whitey."
A one-of-a-kind ferrotype (tintype) photograph of President-elect Abraham Lincoln.



Historians, ordinarily a judicious lot, are as involved in the reevaluation as those with more obvious ideological interests. But historians should have a greater appreciation of context. Hence, to wrench Lincoln from context, from the backdrop of his times, from the exigencies of policy, the fortunes of war, and the historical record is not a path calculated for arrival at something approximating historical truth. In our relativistic age, it is too much to expect fidelity to the record; perhaps Lincoln should remain more symbol than historical reality. The record may be discomfiting; it often is.

Abraham Lincoln was born into a political culture that was profoundly racist (to use a somewhat anachronistic term). For centuries, Europeans, whether living on the continent, in the United States, or elsewhere, had deemed the Africans a race apart, one that was in no guise the equal of the Europeans. It was a combination of that racism with economic considerations that made the enslavement of Africans fundamentally different from the slavery of other places and at other times. Practically speaking, nothing in Lincoln's formative years would lead us to expect him to be other than a man of his culture.

The laws of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois—in common with those of other political jurisdictions within the United States—held the African to be less than a citizen, less than a person.

Yet Lincoln imbibed other influences—the idea of political democracy (however limited), the concept of social mobility (however restricted), and the idea of economic improvement (however problematical). Lincoln believed the words of the Declaration of Independence; he thought that a person should not be constrained by circumstances of birth, and he embraced the Whig notions of economic growth. As an individual, he was, from all reports, singularly free from bigotry—against individuals and groups.

As much as any public man of his day, he advocated the most expansive sharing of the American dream. His re-entry into national politics in the wake of the exacerbated sectional conflict of the 1850s was predicated upon the ideas that slavery was evil and that, in certain instances, racial bigotry was unworthy of a great nation. That his political fortunes, and those of his party, were tied to the geographical restriction of slavery set him and his party apart from his political opponents. He could have been seen as radical in 1858 or 1860 (and 1948 or 1960).

The threat to slavery perceived by Lincoln's election in 1860 precipitated a train of events that culminated in the civil war. That war, whatever else it may have been, or whatever else we may wish it had been, was a titanic military struggle fraught with profound political and social consequences. Lincoln, as he remarked in his Second Inaugural Address, did not anticipate, nor did other Americans anticipate, those consequences any more than they anticipated the full horrors of that terrible conflict. Lincoln expected a relatively short war once the apparently overwhelming resources of the Union could be brought to bear against the Confederacy. Thus, the ancient prejudices of his country might have survived the war intact had the war ended with a Union victory in the first year or so. But that was not the case. Lincoln necessarily had to accept and then defend policies that arose from circumstances that forced a reconsideration of the place of Africans in the United States.

The American political and military establishment decreed in 1861 that white men would fight the war. Lincoln concurred. The Congress enacted in July 1861 that the war would be fought for the Union—not for conquest or the abolition of slavery. Lincoln concurred. When his generals and Cabinet officials moved beyond the President's plan, Lincoln overruled them. When Negro leaders asked that regiments of Negro soldiers be enrolled under the flag of freedom, Lincoln and his advisors refused. In stations high and low, many northerners seemed to fear a rebellion of slaves more than they feared a rebellion of slaveowners. Had northern arms prevailed in 1861 or early 1862, slavery might have remained status quo ante bellum.

The political attack on slavery was embodied in a series of laws termed the Confiscation Acts. Under the provisions of those laws, Lincoln could have enrolled Negro men as laborers and support elements for the armies in the field. Lincoln chose instead not to invoke those aspects of the Acts. A primary reason was his concern for the border states, especially Kentucky. Lincoln believed that wholesale emancipation or the enlistment of Negro soldiers would cause Kentucky, and probably Missouri and Maryland, to become even greater obstacles to the Union cause—to say nothing of antagonism elsewhere in the North. In the case of Kentucky, he was correct. Holding that state in the Union necessitated either overwhelming military force or some deference to the wishes of its white population. Lincoln's policy reflected a combination of both. Eventually, more Negro men entered the Army from Kentucky than from any other state except Louisiana. And the reaction of the white population in Kentucky was as hostile as had been predicted. But by 1863, the adverse reaction in Kentucky was considerably less consequential than in 1861 or 1862. 

For practical political reasons, Lincoln did not openly lead the movement toward the enlistment of Negroes. Before 1863, long before he expressed enthusiasm for the idea, he allowed others to take the first steps; he remained silent, overruled them, or caused them to be overruled. He was always sensitive to political considerations and his office's prerequisites and powers. Timing, the right moment, was critical—and Lincoln always deemed himself a better judge of the moment than those who advised him, formally or informally.

On September 25, 1861, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles allowed the recruitment of Negroes into the Navy, but only with the rank of "boy" and at a compensation of no more than $10.00 per month. The step caused little comment, perhaps because "boys" on ships were not expected to shoot Rebels or to function as part of the military establishment. 

Simon Cameron, Secretary of War, was less subtle. On October 14, 1861, he authorized Brigadier General Thomas W. Sherman to hire Negro fugitives for service in South Carolina, although he disclaimed any intent to arm them as soldiers. Lincoln seemed amenable to the idea of Negroes as "auxiliaries." But the plan failed because General Sherman apparently neither wished to use Negroes nor wanted to offend the sensibilities of white South Carolinians unduly. In December, Cameron took a more direct step. In his annual report, he openly advocated the employment of slaves as soldiers. More importantly, he allowed the report to be copied and distributed before giving it to Lincoln. The President disavowed the offensive portions of the report and ordered them deleted from his annual message to Congress. Because of that misstep and because he was a general embarrassment to the administration, Cameron was removed from the Cabinet and named minister to Russia. 

During the first half of 1862, Congress moved towards bringing Negroes into the Army—March, rendition of slaves by military forbidden; April, abolition of slavery in D.C.; July, Second Confiscation Act and Militia Act. In April and May, the new Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, encouraged (at least implicitly) the arming of Negroes in South Carolina. The situation there caused a great stir because the general in command, David Hunter, proved to be politically inept and hence a political liability. He managed to offend many officers and men in the white regiments and two congressmen of a border state, Kentucky. When those congressmen demanded explanations of what was transpiring in South Carolina, Stanton retreated into his bureaucratic defenses. Still, he did ask General Hunter for a report, which he forwarded to Congress. Hunter's report was entertaining to some Republicans (referring to "fugitive rebels") and to the border state congressmen—insulting.

During the summer of 1862, Lincoln evinced no inclination to support Hunter, to implement the provisions of the Second Confiscation Act liberating the slaves of Rebels, or to employ Negroes other than as laborers. He stated his views to the Cabinet in late July, and on August 6, he told a delegation of "Western gentlemen" that he would not arm Negroes "unless some new and more pressing emergency arises." He said such would turn "50,000 bayonets" in the border states against the Union. Steps short of actually arming Negroes would be continued—upon this, he and his critics did not differ. And in the same context, on August 22, he wrote his famous reply to Horace Greeley's "Prayer of Twenty Million": as President, he would save the Union; all else would be subordinate to that goal.

On August 10, the disheartened (if not chastened) General Hunter reported to Stanton that he was disbanding his regiment of South Carolina volunteers. But as the curtain fell on Hunter, Stanton on August 25, authorized Brigadier General Rufus Saxton at Beaufort, South Carolina, to "arm, uniform, equip, and receive into the service of the United States such number of volunteers of African descent as you may deem expedient, not exceeding 5,000." Why the reversal? Why had Stanton authorized Saxton to do what had been denied, Hunter? A comment by Lieutenant Charles Francis Adams, Jr., may be pertinent.
Regarding Hunter, "Why could not fanatics be silent and let Providence work for a while?" (And if not Providence, at least the President.) In short, had Hunter managed to be more politic concerning his fellow officers and the Congress, had he been able to restrain his rhetorical flourishes, he may not have run afoul of the critics of his policy, to say nothing of the President. The fact was, Negroes were now to be brought into the service, not by a general acting more or less on his own authority, but by order of the War Department— and the President.

In other corners of the conflict, namely Louisiana and Kansas, other generals enlisted Negroes. In New Orleans, for example, Benjamin F. Butler had negated earlier enlisting efforts but now, encouraged by Secretary of the Treasury Chase (and Mrs. Butler), called for free Negroes to enter the service. By mid-fall, three such regiments were formed in Louisiana. On August 5, 1862, the redoubtable abolitionist James H. Lane in Kansas wired Stanton that he was raising black and white units, and was there any objection? Stanton wrote Lane on August 22 and again on September 23 that such action was without the authority of President Lane and never received authorization. Still, he continued enrolling Negro soldiers in the Union. Benjamin Quarles has termed such enrollments "trial balloons," which Lincoln allowed to float when no one of consequence tried to pop. 

Of course, Lincoln discussed another matter with his Cabinet in the summer of 1862—namely, emancipation. In his "preliminary" proclamation of September 22, 1862, Lincoln did not mention Negro soldiers. In October, however, he presumably talked to one Daniel Ullmann of New York, who urged that very course. After hearing Ullmann's argument, Lincoln asked: "Would you be willing to command Negro soldiers?" Although stunned by the question, Ullmann replied in the affirmative. Given the late summer and early fall events in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Kansas, Lincoln seemed to be evolving a plan—perhaps Ullmann would pilot another of those trial balloons.

The Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, called for the enrollment of Negroes in the Union Army and Navy. It was contained in an almost offhand passage—entirely in keeping with Lincoln's tendency to hint, approach indirectly, and finally, defend the stated policy. Yet the proclamation was fundamental. It was a war message, a political document. The government of the United States, through the Office of the President, was now unequivocally on the side of emancipation and of bringing Negro men into the Army of the Republic.

Over the next several months, the new policy was put into effect. Ullmann appointed a brigadier general of volunteers and was explicitly charged with raising four regiments of volunteers in Louisiana (where he found public opinion far from supportive). Colonel James Montgomery of Kansas was authorized to raise a Negro regiment in South Carolina, and the governors of Massachusetts and Rhode Island were given similar authorization. Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, in fact, raised most of his Negro troops from the southern states. 

The primary organizing effort was placed in the hands of Lorenzo Thomas, adjutant general of the Army. His order of March 25 from Secretary Stanton was to proceed to the Mississippi Valley to enlist Negro troops and find white officers and enlisted men who would take commissions in Negro regiments. Thomas was an effective recruiter, stressing that he spoke with the full authority of the President, the Secretary of War, and the General-in-Chief. Henry W. Halleck (notorious for his General Order No. 3 in 1861) had fallen in line with administration policy and was now telling other Mississippi Valley officers to do the same. Of particular interest was the reaction of Ulysses S. Grant, who, early in the war, had no more sympathy for emancipation than did many other regulars. Yet Grant was undoubtedly a man to follow orders from Washington. Indeed, he had already made provision for organizing "contrabands" into a workforce. According to John Eaton, Jr., in charge of the contrabands, Grant believed that if the occasion arose, the fugitives could carry rifles instead of hoes, rakes, and shovels.

Halleck's advice to Grant, in a friendly, somewhat patronizing letter, was a compelling statement of administration policy. "From my position here, where I can survey the whole field, perhaps I may be better able to understand the tone of public opinion and the intentions of the Government." Grant then assured Halleck (and later the President) that he would support the policy even to the extent of ordering subordinate officers to actively " remove prejudice" against Negroes. Thomas's mission, after all, went beyond recruiting Negro men into the ranks. As Dudley Cornish has stated: "Rather was his task that of initiating Union policy on a grand scale, of breaking down white opposition to the use of Negro soldiers, of educating Union troops in the valley on this one subject, of starting the work of the organization," and then leaving others to finish the work of recruiting and training. Lincoln approved of Thomas's work, telling Stanton that Thomas was "one of the best (if not the best) instruments for this service." Perhaps Lincoln had been right after all. It was best to bring the general public along, then put the task in the hands of the professional soldiers who, without ideological biases, placed great stock in order, system, and hierarchy. The road to favor with the administration was not in embarrassing the President but inefficiently following his policy once that policy was clearly enunciated.

On Independence Day, 1863, Vicksburg surrendered; the "Father of Waters" again flowed "unvexed to the sea." Thanks were given to not only the Great Northwest but also New England, and the "Sunny South, too, in more colors than one."

In early August, Lincoln wrote to Grant, congratulating him upon his magnificent military achievement but also noting: "Gen. Thomas has gone again to the Mississippi Valley, with the view of raising colored troops. I have no reason to doubt that you are doing what you reasonably can on the same subject. I believe it is a resource that will soon close this contest if vigorously applied now. It works doubly, weakening the enemy and strengthening us. We were not fully ripe for it until the river was opened." On August 26, Lincoln wrote to a political friend in Illinois that some of his field commanders "who have given us our most important successes believe the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion; and that, at least one of those important successes, could not have been achieved when it was, but for the aid of Negro soldiers." He could have recited the practical, some might say cynical, reasons given for bringing Negroes into the Army—saving the lives of white soldiers. Yet, said Lincoln, "Negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made must be kept." One day peace would come. "And then, there will be some Negro men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.

The force of the effort for recruiting Negroes lay in the deep South and in the Northeast. Lincoln still had no wish to press the issue in the border states. And his caution was well founded, although he did authorize (through Stanton) recruiting in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri.

Kentuckians were particularly resentful. When Ambrose Burnside suggested in June 1863 that the administration disavow any intention to conscript free Negroes in Kentucky, Lincoln concurred that the effort would cost more than it would gain. In January 1864, however, the War Department established a recruiting post in Paducah. Kentucky Governor Thomas E. Bramlette traveled to Washington and protested directly to Lincoln. The President explained that he had come to his policy of emancipation and arming Negroes after prudent delay—early in the war, it was not an "indispensable necessity." He changed his mind when he knew he had to choose between "surrendering the Union, and with it, the Constitution, or laying strong hand upon the colored element." He had not been certain at that time that he had made the right decision, but after a year's experience, he was convinced of it. "We have the men [130,000], and we could not have had them without the measure. And now let any Union man who complains of the measure test himself by writing down in one line that he is for subduing the rebellion by force of arms; and in the next, that he is for taking these hundred and thirty thousand men from the Union side, and placing them where they would be but for the measure he condemns. If he can not face his case so stated, it is only because he can not face the truth." That letter contained Lincoln's memorable line, "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." Lincoln meant for the letter to be circulated among the white population of Kentucky. Although his correspondents expressed satisfaction with it, Kentuckians, in general, resented recruitment of Negroes more intensely than did people of any other state. But Lincoln knew, and he made the point repeatedly from mid-1863 to the end of the war; without the Negro soldiers, there would be no Union.

Frederick Douglass said so well in 1876:
His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he needed the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without those primary and essential conditions to success his efforts would have been utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. From the genuine abolition view, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent, but measuring him by the sentiment of his country—a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult—he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined

The enlistment of Negroes into the Union Army was part of Lincoln's evolving policy on slavery and race, a policy charged with political, social, and psychological overtones. The Negro man as a soldier—with rifle and bayonet—was a different figure from the slave. His presence, while a military necessity, was also a potent blow to the idea of the innate inferiority of the Africans, a view not peculiar to the South. Those who urged the enlistment of Negroes realized its implications. Some political figures saw it as a necessity, calculated to outrage the South. Negro leaders saw it from a different perspective. Not only would the enlistment of Negroes serve a military purpose, but most assuredly, it would also enhance the sense of manhood among Negro men, a sense deliberately blunted by public policy throughout the nation. Thus, while Douglass remarked on the "tardiness" of the President who "loved Rome more than he did Caesar," he insisted that emancipation and manhood, in the most profound sense, were indispensable steps toward participation in American society.

Lincoln acted as he did from necessity. His almost mystical devotion to the Union and his personal compassion for the dispossessed of the world combined into policy. Events moved him in the sense that circumstances determined the time for action. During the Civil War, a fundamental truth emerged: Negro people understood the meaning of the war and contributed to the great goal of freedom. Yet Negroes were also objects; to defeat the white South, the white North needed Negro men. Lincoln was their emancipator, their savior when he spoke as the cautious, prudent political leader and when he eloquently spoke of the magnificent contribution that Negro soldiers made to the Union. The war brought the time, and Lincoln—"preeminently the white man's President"—became the Negro man's hero.

By John T. Hubbell
Edited by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.