It is quite extraordinary that in this year of the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth, we should witness the inauguration of a president perfectly evocative of Lincoln's central role in American history. Recognized as the most influential American ever by a panel of experts gathered by Atlantic Magazine, Lincoln freed the slaves, and in so doing saved the American union and American democracy. As the first black man elected U.S. president, Barack Obama represents not only the culmination of the cause to which Lincoln called the nation, and which he made his own, but also at long last the redemption of that cause from the tragedy of its callous abandonment by a craven North in the electoral Compromise of 1877.
Mr.Obama consciously paired his candidacy with Lincoln's, making a virtue of the inevitable comparison. Both are from Illinois; both began their presidential campaigns with dim prospects of success. Both manifest keen intellects and eloquent oratory. Mr. Obama took his oath of office on the same Christian Bible used by Lincoln. Most obvious and most profound, both bring race to the forefront of American consciousness. Lincoln hated slavery. As presidential historian Jay Winik reminded readers in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, Lincoln was clear on this point. In the fifth debate with Stephen Douglas, on Oct. 7, 1858, he said: "I believe that slavery is wrong, and in a policy springing from that belief that looks to the prevention of the enlargement of that wrong, and that looks at some time to there being an end of that wrong." He wrote to Albert G. Hodges on April 4, 1864: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." He confirmed his notion of slavery early, on a trip down the Mississippi river with two companions. Lord Charnwood, Lincoln's British biographer, quoted Lincoln's friend John Hanks as averring, "I can say, knowing it, that it was on this trip that he formed his opinion of slavery. It ran its iron into him then and there, May 1831. I have heard him say so often."
But Lincoln deferred taking overt steps against slavery at the beginning of the Civil War because he hoped to hold eight slave-holding states in the Union. Four left anyway, after the battle at Fort Sumter in April 1861. Lincoln worked hard to keep the other four loyal, going so far as to offer them a plan of gradual, compensated emancipation. But when, on July 13, 1862, representatives of the four rejected that proposal, Lincoln told two of his Cabinet, William Seward and Gideon Welles, of his intention to issue an emancipation proclamation, and on July 22, he told his whole Cabinet.
At Gettysburg in November 1863, Lincoln called the nation to recognize and undo the flaw of slavery, protected by the Constitution and engraved in national history. The nation must have a "new birth of freedom," he insisted, by returning to the principle to which the nation had first been dedicated, "that all men are created equal." Only in that way would government "of the people, by the people and for the people" not perish from the Earth.
Often lost in the teaching of American history is the fact that the victory won in the Civil War turned to ashes in the face of the campaign of murder waged by the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia and other paramilitary organizations that, with the tacit approval of the various state governments, terrorized blacks in the decade after the war. In Congress's resolution of the disputed 1876 presidential election, Northern leaders of the federal government, for the price of the presidency itself, turned back to the Southern states the fate of the vulnerable and mostly powerless former slaves, the Northerners retreating to the safety and comfort of their booming economy in their own segregated cities and towns. A concerted campaign to bring social justice to the South, and to America, would be delayed nearly another 100 years, until the nation finally was ready.
America's historical amnesia on the true history of slavery and civil rights is now ended, repudiated by the civil rights revolution and symbolized, in this Lincoln bicentennial year, in the election of Mr. Obama.
Steve Haycox is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Steve Haycox
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