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Abraham Lincoln: the Great Emancipator?

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Abraham Lincoln: the Great Emancipator? 07 Foner 1226 7/12/04 12:02 pm Page 149 SARAH TRYPHENA PHILLIPS LECTURE Abraham Lincoln: The Great Emancipator? ERIC FONER Fellow of the Academy MORE WORDS HAVE BEEN WRITTEN about Abraham Lincoln than any figure in American history and perhaps any historical personage other than Jesus Christ. Every generation, it seems, reinvents Lincoln in its own image. Politicians from conservatives to communists, civil rights advo- cates to segregationists have claimed him as their own. Lincoln exerts a unique hold on Americans’ historical imagination, as an icon embodying core American ideals and myths—the self-made man, the frontier hero, the liberator of the slaves. Lincoln has been portrayed as a shrewd political operator driven by ambition and as the Great Emancipator, a moralist for whom emancipation was the logical conclusion of a lifetime hatred of slavery. More recently, the black scholar Lerone Bennett has given us Lincoln as a racist who actually defended and tried to protect slavery.1 The latest full-scale biography, by David Donald, takes as its motto Lincoln’s famous statement in an 1864 letter, ‘I claim not to have con- trolled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.’2 Here was a Lincoln for the Clinton era (although not in terms of private escapades), a president of no real vision, buffeted by events, constantly being pushed in one direction or another by outside forces. The newest book on Lincoln, by Professor Richard Carwardine, shows persuasively how Lincoln, despite his own religious scepticism, harnessed the language Read at the Academy 5 November 2003. 1 Lerone Bennett, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago, 2000). 2 David Donald, Lincoln (New York, 1995), p. 9. Proceedings of the British Academy, 125, 149–162. © The British Academy 2004. 07 Foner 1226 7/12/04 12:02 pm Page 150 150 Eric Foner and political power of evangelical Protestantism, rather like George W. Bush.3 There is no question that additional Lincolns will emerge in the future. I have never written a biography of Lincoln, which may be an advan- tage in assessing his career. For Lincoln, like all great historical figures, must be approached within his own historical context—in his case, an extremely complex and contentious context. Lincoln’s policies regarding slavery cannot be understood without probing the relationship between the man and his times. Bennett’s book—really a prosecutorial indictment of Lincoln—is entitled Forced Into Glory. It gives us a Lincoln pushed by others to initiate great acts. In a sense, this assessment is not all that different from Lincoln’s own comment, quoted above, about being con- trolled by events. But this argument works both ways. Not everybody is capable of being forced into glory. I doubt whether future historians will see Presidents Bill Clinton or George W. Bush as having achieved great- ness, no matter how hard they were pushed. The seed, the potential, the ability to rise to the occasion must be there as well as the outside pressure. In the case of Lincoln, it is important to understand both the attitudes toward slavery that he held for virtually his entire life, and the way he changed under the pressure of world-shattering events. Lincoln was a professional politician. From the age of twenty-one to his death he was either in office or running for office every day of his life with the exception of the period between 1849, when he retired from a rather unsuccessful term in Congress, and 1854, when he returned to politics as a result of the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which raised the prospect of the expansion of slavery into the nation’s trans-Mississippi heartland. In the 1830s and 1840s, Lincoln was a vaguely prominent Whig in Illinois, a member of the legislature and presidential elector. But had his career ended in the 1840s, no one today would be writing books—or even Master’s essays—about Lincoln. There was very little sign at that point of his potential for greatness. But during his legislative career Lincoln did articulate a position regarding slavery to which he would adhere for nearly the entirety of the rest of his career. This was in 1837, the year in which the abolitionist edi- tor Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered by a mob while defending his print- ing press in Alton, Illinois, not that far from Springfield, where Lincoln lived and served in the legislature. Illinois at this time was largely settled from the South. It was a pro-slavery state, even though slavery was barred 3 Richard Carwardine, Lincoln (London, 2003). 07 Foner 1226 7/12/04 12:02 pm Page 151 ABRAHAM LINCOLN: THE GREAT EMANCIPATOR? 151 from Illinois by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and by the state constitution. The Illinois legislature passed a resolution condemning the abolitionists and affirming ‘our deep regard and affection’ for southern slaveholders. This received unanimous approval in the Illinois Senate, and passed by 77–6 in the House of Representatives. One of the six was Abraham Lincoln. The vote could hardly have served any political pur- pose or ambition. Six weeks later, Lincoln and Dan Stone, an emigrant from Vermont and later a successful lawyer, issued a ‘protest’—really an explanation for their vote. ‘They believe,’ the two wrote, ‘that the institu- tion of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase rather than to abate its evil.’ They added that under the Constitution, Congress did not possess the power to interfere with slavery in the states where it existed.4 This was hardly a ringing condemnation of slavery. But in the context of Illinois in 1837, it was a fairly courageous statement. More impor- tantly, the ‘protest’ enunciated a position to which Lincoln would adhere for many years, until the middle of the Civil War in fact. Slavery was wrong and unwise, but the abolitionists only made things worse. Lincoln was not and never became an abolitionist—an advocate of the immediate abolition of slavery. What, then, was he? Lincoln did not elaborate his views on slavery until the 1850s, when he returned to public life as a major spokesman for the newly created Republican party, committed to halting the westward expansion of slavery. In that decade, he expanded enormously on that little ‘protest’. Why was slavery founded on injustice and bad policy? At the core of Lincoln’s critique was a vision of northern society as a place of opportunity for what he and many others called the ‘free laborer’. North and South to Lincoln and other Republicans represented distinct societies, based on two different systems of labour. Lincoln read carefully the writings of proslavery writers like George Fitzhugh and John C. Calhoun, who argued that slaves were in fact better off than free workers. Northern labour, they insisted, was more exploited than the slave. Slaves could not become unemployed, were cared for in old age, and guaranteed subsis- tence. It was better, they argued, to be the slave of a single master than of the impersonal capitalist marketplace, at the mercy of the winds of economic change. 4 Roy P.Basler (ed.), The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, 1953–5), 1, 75–6. 07 Foner 1226 7/12/04 12:02 pm Page 152 152 Eric Foner Lincoln insisted that this was a complete misreading of Northern society. In the North, he said, ‘There is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer.’5 Northern society offered workers incentives and opportunities to better their conditions, as Lincoln himself had moved from a humble origin on a small farm in Kentucky to a position of some wealth. His life, he said, exemplified the prospects southern society failed to provide to the labourer. Rather than viewing the slave primarily as the victim of a moral wrong, Lincoln saw him as a labourer deprived of the fruits of his labour. Slavery was ultimately a form of theft—stealing the labour of one person and appropriating it for another. And African-Americans, he insisted, were entitled to the fruits of their labour: ‘I want every man to have the chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he can better his condition.’6 The slave should have the same opportunity to move forward in life ostensibly enjoyed by northern free labour. In some speeches, Lincoln explicitly declared that women should enjoy this right as well as men. Lincoln was frequently charged by Democrats with sup- porting ‘Negro equality’. He firmly denied the charge, as we will see. But he referred to a black woman to illustrate the kind of equality in which he did believe: ‘In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hand without ask- ing the leave of anyone else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.’7 That is the grounding of the notion of equality for Lincoln—the natural right to the fruits of one’s labour. It is a vision not bounded by either race or gender. She has that right as well as he. Essentially, Lincoln argued that the natural rights outlined in the Declaration of Independence applied to all mankind—life; liberty (thus slavery is wrong); and the pursuit of happiness, which is impossible without enjoying the fruits of one’s labour. When Thomas Jefferson substituted the pursuit of happiness for property in the famous Lockean trilogy—life, lib- erty, and property (estate, actually)—he created an open-ended sense of entitlement and striving which has inspired Americans ever since.
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