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Can Soldiers Tell Us
Anything about Lincoln?
By Chandra M. Manning
In this
bicentennial year of Abraham Lincoln’s
birth, it is easy to feel a little overwhelmed by the
deluge of books, articles, and newspaper columns on the
sixteenth president, and to begin to wonder if there
could possibly be anything left to say. Yet for all of
what a later age might call “exposure”—for all that we
can find books on Lincoln’s friends, marriage, summer
home, speeches, and more besides—stubborn mysteries
persist. One of them is, how did a man who genuinely
hated slavery but who was also worried about the
legality and aftereffects of its sudden destruction,
become a President willing to wield federal power to
achieve the immediate destruction of slavery?
It is very easy, in trying
to answer that question, to get trapped into a tiresome
and uninspiring debate about whether Lincoln was a
near-mythic superhero, singlehandedly saving the nation
and ridding it of evil in a single bound, or a
hypocritical racist forced by circumstances beyond his
control to take actions that he would preferred not to
have taken, but at least cheered by the opportunity to
wield power, which pleased his tyrannical side. Neither
caricature really tells us very much about Lincoln, or
about emancipation. Yet if we widen our angle of inquiry
to look at Lincoln and emancipation in a broader frame
that also includes Union soldiers, we might see new
possibilities. It would be too much to claim that
soldiers convinced Lincoln to end slavery, but the war
in which both Lincoln and soldiers were swept up changed
all of them in similar and related ways.
In short, Union soldiers’
firsthand observations of slavery, interactions with
slaves, and experience of a war far more terrible than
they expected convinced them that the only way to win
the war and save the Union was to end slavery. The
length and ferocity of the war later convinced many of
them that the end of slavery had to be for principled
rather than simply utilitarian reasons, because the
whole nation, and not just the South, was implicated in
slavery. Lincoln’s own observations of slaves and freed
people in the nation’s capital, the changing attitudes
of Union soldiers, and the profound and pervasive loss
brought by a terrible war propelled Lincoln along a path
from sincere dislike of slavery and an abstract desire
for it to end someday to a willingness to use federal
power to emancipate immediately. His path also went from
a pragmatic stage to a principled one. One of his
greatest accomplishments as leader was to recognize that
soldiers and slaves had blazed that path, and then to
bring the nation as a whole along it, too.
That Abraham Lincoln hated
slavery is undeniable. As he put it, “if slavery is not
wrong, then nothing is wrong.”
He hated it for all sorts of reasons. He hated it
because it concentrated too much power and wealth in the
hands of too few people. He hated it because it violated
his basic belief in the right of every human being to
rise in the world. He hated it because it went against
the grain of his economic principles. He hated it
because it made a mockery of the nation’s Founders and
their ideals, and because it shamelessly elevated
self-interest into an accepted justification for
individual behavior. Above all, he hated it “because of
the monstrous injustice of slavery itself.”
Lincoln’s attitudes toward
race were more complicated. On numerous occasions before
the war, he insisted “very frankly that I am not in
favor of negro citizenship,” even though several states
did recognize African Americans as citizens.
His early support for ending slavery was accompanied by
the supposition that freed slaves would leave the
country, and as late as 1862 he had not entirely let go
of his preference for that outcome. The supposition was
based less on vicious antipathy toward people who looked
differently than he did than on a fatalistic presumption
that whites and blacks could not coexist harmoniously.
He stated pointblank, “there is a physical difference
between the two [races], which, in my judgment, will
probably forever forbid their living together upon the
footing of perfect equality, and . . . I . . . am in
favor of the race to which I belong having the superior
position.”
That presumption grew in
part from his doubts that white people could overcome
their own deep-seated prejudices. “A universal feeling,”
which he believed white prejudice to be, “whether well
or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded,” he
cautioned in 1858, and he made a similar point in 1862
when he told a delegation of black men who visited him
in the White House that “there is an unwillingness on
the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free
colored people to remain with us.”
But whatever its source, the result was that for most of
his life Lincoln saw whites and blacks as separate,
unequal, and bound to stay that way.
For white Northerners,
including Lincoln, slavery and race were two distinct
subjects, and therefore it was entirely possible to hate
slavery and believe in black inferiority at the same
time. Lincoln’s belief for most of his life in racial
inequality does not somehow invalidate his desire for
slavery to end. That belief did, however, prevent
Lincoln from advocating immediate emancipation for much
of his life, partly because he lacked a clear plan for
what should follow slavery in a land where he doubted
that whites and blacks could live as equals.
If Lincoln’s ideas about
race were complex, on the topic of the government of the
United States, his ideas were crystal clear. He
genuinely loved the principles stated in the Declaration
of Independence with a reverence that bordered on
religious devotion, and he regarded the Constitution and
the Union as the necessary safeguards for those
principles. In his view, the survival of the Union was
far more than a matter of political power or territorial
sovereignty. It mattered not just for Americans. It
mattered for all humanity. In his
First Message to Congress, Lincoln affirmed that the
war “embraces more than the fate of these United States.
It presents to the whole family of man, the question,
whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a
government of the people, by the same people—can, or
cannot” succeed. The Union had to survive in order to
prove that republican government, established by the
Founders on principles of liberty and equality and
administered though free and fair elections, could
survive. If the Union was destroyed, human beings
everywhere would be forced to draw the grim conclusion
that self-government based on ideals enunciated in the
Declaration of Independence could not work.
The view that Lincoln
articulated in the
Message was not unique to him, but rather was shared
by many Northerners, and was especially prevalent in the
ranks of the Union Army. From the very beginning,
soldiers like Indiana private W.D. Wildman insisted,
“the Union is not only the citadel of our liberty, but
the depository of the hopes of the human race.”
Nearly three years later in the darkest days of the war,
Corporal George Cadman continued to urge his wife to
remember that if he was hurt or killed, “it will be not
only for my Country and my Children but for Liberty all
over the World . . . for if Liberty should be crushed
here, what hope would there be for the cause of Human
progress anywhere else?”
Right from the very
beginning, some Americans recognized that if the Union
was supposed to stand for universal principles, then it
could not be separated from the issue of slavery. Most
such Americans were black. Just weeks after the fall of
Fort Sumter, a black newspaper in New York admonished,
“no adjustment of
the nation’s difficulty is possible until the claims of
the black man are first met and satisfied . . . If you
would restore the Union and maintain the government you
so fondly cherish, make way for liberty, universal and
complete.”
By the time those words made it into print, enslaved
black Southerners had already begun making their way
into Union Army camps; they knew full well that the fact
of their bondage had brought the two halves of the
nation to blows, and they further knew that their fate
and that of the Union were intertwined.
It did not take long for
much of the Union rank-and-file to draw the same
conclusion. As a group of Wisconsin soldiers put it,
“the fact that slavery is the
sole undeniable cause of this infamous rebellion, that
it is a war of, by, and for Slavery, is as plain as the
noon-day sun.”
For them, there was nothing complicated about the coming
of the war: Confederates seceded from the Union
in order to protect slavery from a President who opposed
its extension. Like it or not, that made the war about
slavery. And the more they saw slavery with their own
eyes, the more convinced they became.
Between August and December 1861 a striking pattern took
shape, as soldier after soldier began to insist that
since slavery had caused the war, only the destruction
of slavery could end the war. “You have no idea of the
changes that have taken place in the minds of the
soldiers in the last two months,” one enlisted man told
his neighbors back home in October 1861. Seeing the
South and slavery with their own eyes forced men who
cared little about slavery “to face this sum of all
evils, and cause of the war.” As a result, “men of all
parties seem unanimous in the belief that to permanently
establish the Union, is to first wipe [out] the
institution” of slavery.” In short, “The rebellion is
abolitionizing the whole army.”
Interactions with the
hundreds, and then thousands, of slaves who ran to Union
Army camps—the so-called “contrabands”—made many men in
blue even more sure. Sometimes the plight of the
contrabands simply touched the humanity within a
hard-bitten soldier. A Michigan officer had “always been
very bitter on the abolitionists,” but when 20
contrabands proved themselves willing to face a
treacherous river to get to freedom, he spent “more than
3 hours in water up to his waist” to help them get
across, and when asked about his actions merely shrugged
“he had to help them.”
Frank necessity also changed soldiers’ minds. They
needed former slaves. Contrabands were willing to labor
to keep camps running. Union troops did not know the
local terrain. Black Southerners did. Blacks coming into
Union lines also often knew what the enemy was up to.
Army records are full of officers’ reports about close
calls averted thanks to reports from “intelligent
contrabands.” Ordinary soldiers commented on the
phenomenon frequently, as well. A Wisconsin private
noted that a company in his regiment “was probably saved
from destruction while on picket two weeks ago, by a
slave giving them notice that they were to be attacked.”
“Our only friends here are the slaves,” the private
concluded, and any good soldier knew to look out for his
friends.
In sum, throughout the
rank-and-file, enlisted soldiers reasoned that only
elimination of the war’s cause would end the rebellion
and prevent its recurrence. Further, seeing the reality
of slavery impressed upon them how much crueler it was
than they imagined, and their own reliance on the aid of
local blacks taught them that their interests and the
ultimate success of their cause were closely allied with
the interests of the enslaved. For these reasons, many
in the Union Army championed the destruction of slavery
a full year ahead of the Emancipation Proclamation, well
before most civilians or political leaders did. And they
did not just do so in the privacy of their own minds or
in the camaraderie of camp. They wrote vociferous
letters—to families, neighbors, and friends, to local
newspapers, to their elected officials, to the
President—arguing forcefully that if the Union wanted to
win, it had no choice but to get rid of slavery.
Now for the obligatory
caveats. First the obvious one: at no point did the
entire Union Army agree on anything at all, let alone a
matter as weighty as emancipation. From beginning to
end, a vocal minority of Union soldiers objected to
emancipation. Second, calling for emancipation was not
the same as calling for racial equality. Especially in
the war’s early seasons, Union troops found it very easy
to oppose slavery and insist on black inferiority all at
the same time. A soldier named Adelbert Bly was quite
direct about it: “I have a great deal of sympathy for
the slave,” he told his sweetheart, “but I like
the Negro the further off the better.”
And third, Lincoln did not
move as fast as the men in the ranks did. He had a more
complex array of duties than they did, and chief among
those duties in 1861 was keeping the Border Slaves
states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri in
the Union. He knew that the surefire way to lose them
was to threaten slavery. When Union Army commanders like
John C. Frémont and
David Hunter made bold moves against slavery, the
President rescinded them. Lincoln also knew some
civilians bitterly opposed emancipation. Union soldiers
could try to preach the reluctance out of
anti-emancipation stay-at-homes, but Lincoln needed
political support too badly to risk alienating them.
Beyond the many political
demands on him, Lincoln personally had to think the
emancipation question through a little more carefully
than the soldiers calling for immediate action did. He
was no less anxious for slavery to die—at least in the
abstract—but how mattered to him more than it did
to soldiers, as did long-term questions about what
should happen—after slavery. His reservations meant that
where Union soldiers urged action, Lincoln maintained a
look-before-you-leap attitude. As late as 1862, he still
harbored reservations about whether black and white
could co-exist peacefully, as he made quite clear when
he summarily dismissed the delegation of black men who
visited the White House that August.
Lincoln was also a genuine devotee of legal
process, with equal emphasis on “legal” and “process,”
so he initially favored ending slavery through some sort
of gradual, compensated program. The end result was that
well into the second year of the war, Lincoln endeavored
to keep the focus of the war on what was for him the
less ambiguous question: the survival of the Union as
the world’s last, best hope for self-government and the
triumph of principles like human equality.
Yet Lincoln could not keep
the questions of Union and emancipation separate
indefinitely. The utter conviction that slavery was
wrong was a genuine constant in his life, and it did not
disappear even when it seemed to get buried by other
wartime problems. Events in 1862 helped to bring that
ingrained conviction closer to the surface. The war did
not go as planned, and that meant he would have to
consider new alternatives. Moreover, three groups of
people saw to it that even if he had wanted to duck the
slavery question, he could not. One consisted of
northern abolitionists, black and white, who comprised a
tiny minority of the northern population, but who kept
pressure on the slavery question high.
Another group was slaves
themselves who saw through, ignored, or were otherwise
undeterred by official pronouncements about a war for
Union but not slavery. They kept running to Union Army
camps, kept making themselves indispensable, and kept
the slavery question squarely in the face of officers,
who in turn kept writing to Washington for guidance on
what to do about slaves and slavery. Even if all that
Lincoln wanted to read was plain, unadorned war news on
the telegraph wires that he checked almost as
obsessively as modern-day Americans check their e-mail,
he could not escape the slavery question because runaway
slaves would not let him. Generals in the field were
constantly informing the President that they had acted
on news from an “intelligent contraband,” or asking how
to handle the clashes between local civilians and
runaway slaves.
By the summer of 1862, the
contraband phenomenon had literally hit home for
Lincoln. He spent much of that summer with his family in
a cottage on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home on the
outskirts of Washington, and commuted into the White
House each day. One of the routes he commonly took went
right past a contraband camp. His family’s cook at the
cottage,
Mary Dines, had herself passed through that camp.
Elizabeth Keckley, dressmaker and confidant to Mary
Lincoln, worked for the
Contraband Relief Association in Washington, and at
her urging, Mrs. Lincoln lobbied the President to
channel some war relief funds toward blankets and other
supplies for contrabands in Washington.
Simply put, contrabands gave Lincoln little choice but
to take them seriously, and to begin to treat slavery
less as an abstraction and more as a concrete reality
that needed addressing.
The third group was Union
soldiers. By 1862, the average soldier in blue was
genuinely fond of the President. As a Connecticut
soldier put it, Lincoln’s “popularity in the army is and
has been universal.”
Yet that fondness did not prevent impatience with the
dawdling federal government for failing to grasp what to
soldiers was the plain fact that winning the war meant
ending slavery. Frustrated with Lincoln’s caution, a
Wisconsin soldier spat, “Great God what a system! And
still, our Government handles slavery as tenderly as a
mother would her first born. When shall it be stricken
down as the deadly enemy of freedom, virtue and
mankind?”
Lincoln called soldiers “thinking bayonets”
and had genuine respect for their opinions. Lincoln
often stopped to speak to the enlisted men who guarded
him, which got him into the habit of taking soldiers’
ideas seriously. He brought that habit with him when he
went to visit troops in the field.
One such visit took place
in June 1862, when Lincoln went to see
General George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. We
remember that visit partly for the “Harrison’s Landing”
letter in which McClellan warned Lincoln that a
“declaration of radical views” on the slavery question
would “rapidly disband” the Army.
Had Lincoln not gone to visit the troops himself, he
might have taken McClellan’s letter at face value;
historians certainly have. But McClellan consistently
over-estimated the odds against any plan he opposed
personally, and he opposed emancipation.
In stark contrast to
McClellan, Union soldiers like Luther Furst were saying
things like, “The more I see of slavery the more I think
it should be abolished,” or, in the more poetic words of
Thomas Low, “As long as we ignore the fact (practically)
that Slavery is the basis of this struggle so long are
we simply heading down a vigorously growing plant that
will continually spring up and give new trouble at very
short intervals. We must emancipate.”
These men had tied together Union and emancipation, and
as that summer progressed, Lincoln did too.
For a time, Lincoln kept
that recognition to himself. When abolitionist newspaper
editor
Horace Greeley chastised him in the summer of 1862
for not taking a definite stand against slavery, Lincoln
replied with what looked like the same Union-first line
he had been employing all along. “My paramount object in
this struggle is to save the Union, and is not
either to save or to destroy slavery,” Lincoln told
Greeley. “If I could save the Union without freeing
any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by
freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I
could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I
would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the
colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save
the Union.”
What is really significant
about that letter is the linking of Union with
emancipation: Lincoln would act as he acted because he
saw the fates of slavery and the Union as somehow
linked. He sounded a similar note on September 13, 1862
when a delegation of ministers presented emancipation
petitions. Lincoln firmly told the ministers, “I view
the matter as a practical war measure, to be decided
upon according to the advantages or disadvantages it may
offer to the suppression of the rebellion.”
At the very time that he
wrote that letter to Greeley, at the very time he
answered the pro-emancipation ministers, Lincoln had
sitting in his desk a draft of what would become the
preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, a document that
declared “forever free” all slaves located in areas
still in rebellion against the Union as of January 1,
1863. The Proclamation did so by defining such a move as
military necessity, which is to say as a move necessary
for the life of the Union.
After the
Battle of Antietam in September, Lincoln issued the
Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and he
publicly credited “those who, upon the battle field, are
endeavoring to purchase with their blood and their lives
the future happiness and prosperity of this country,”
because their efforts made the
Proclamation possible.
From then on, emancipation was an official Union war
aim. Then Lincoln went back to the field to see
McClellan, to be sure, but also to see the regular
soldiers whose attitudes more closely aligned with his
own, men like Hervey Howe who admitted to his brother,
“I have seene [sic] fighting enough but if necessary
will stay my whole term of enlistment” in order to
achieve the “noble end” of the
Proclamation, which was “to let the oppressed go
free.”
Some soldiers were
impatient that it had taken the President so long to
finally move on the slavery question. Iowan Quincy
Campbell, remarked, “his proclamation would have been in
better time. . . if it had been made a year ago. But
better late than never.”
Still, by and large, Lincoln must have been gratified to
encounter men who shared the outlook of one Levi Hines,
who was so excited that even though he knew he would
have to fall in for drill before he could finish a
complete sentence in a letter to his parents, scribbled
down “The late proclamation of the President makes it a
war on Slavery and I am as ready to die fighting” before
dashing out of his tent. He later finished the thought
by writing “for the purpose of ending that hellish
curse of our country.”
For the rest of the year,
the practical links between Union and emancipation
remained prominent for Lincoln, in big ways and small.
The biggest was that he issued the final version of the
Proclamation on January 1, but other ways abounded. When
a Kentucky slaveholder wrote to complain that nearby
Union soldiers were harboring runaway slaves and to ask
Lincoln to intervene, Lincoln refused, because to return
escaped slaves to bondage would be to act against “the
life of the nation.”
That same idea comprised a main theme of Lincoln’s
December 1862 Message to Congress, in which
he asserted, “in
giving freedom to the slave, we assure
freedom to the free.” For the more hardheaded,
Lincoln underscored his practical belief that
emancipation “would shorten
the war."
Response to the Final Emancipation Proclamation was
mixed, as Lincoln knew it would be, but despite a few
notable exceptions, soldiers embraced Lincoln’s move as
exactly the medicine they had been prescribing for what
ailed the Union. Thanks to the “great
proclamation of President Lincoln Jan. 1st,”
a Vermont corporal explained to his parents, “Human
liberty is to be planted on a firmer basis than ever
before.”
To recap: Union and liberty
for all were linked in a utilitarian sense for Union
soldiers by the fall of 1861 and for Lincoln by the fall
of 1862. But the unrelenting ferocity of the war
insisted that a mere utilitarian linkage was not enough.
As early as the summer of 1862, a Kansas private had
wondered, “if all this untold
expense of blood and treasure, of toil and suffering, of
want and sacrifice, of grief and mourning is . . . to
result in no greater good than the restoration of the
Union as it was,” then the war would “result in no real
and lasting good.” Only “the rights of human nature and
universal human freedom” could justify the sacrifice.
For Lincoln, too, the scale of the war and the awful
ever presence of loss, seemed to demand more than
utilitarianism, more than pragmatism.
By the war’s midpoint, loss was simply everywhere for
Lincoln.
Day after day, the telegraph transmitted unrelenting
lists of lives cut short.
Lincoln was still grieving for the loss of his own young
son, Willie, who had died of disease the previous year.
How could endless lists of other people’s dead sons not
affect him? Lincoln’s summer cottage at the Soldiers’
Home overlooked an ever-growing soldiers’ cemetery;
8,000 fresh graves confronted the President every day as
he left in the morning and came home in the evening.
In the face of all that terrible loss, he would need to
tie Union and emancipation together not merely in the
guarded, hedge-one’s-bets realm of practicality, but in
the riskier realm of principle.
The need to do so
crystallized in the summer of 1863, for Union soldiers
and for their Commander-in-Chief. On the 4th
of July,
Vicksburg, Mississippi fell to Union forces after a
long siege, finally delivering the Mississippi River
into Union hands. On that same day, General Robert E.
Lee’s
Army of Northern Virginia, which had recently
seemed unstoppable, began its retreat after the
Battle of Gettysburg, a Union victory that cost more
human life than any other single event in U.S. history.
Nobody interpreted these events as coincidence. To
Quincy Campbell, the “glorious Fourth,” a day made
sacred in 1776, was now “made doubly ‘glorious’” by
military events “too important to not be followed by
important results.” But the glory was not purely
celebratory. The high and horrible cost of Gettysburg
told Campbell and men like him that the July 4th
victories had been sent by God not so much to
congratulate smug Northerners as to remind them that
“the chastisements of the Almighty are not yet ended”
and would not end until “we ‘break every yoke’ and sweep
every vestige of the cursed institution [of slavery]
from our land.”
Much as Lincoln and Northerners wanted Gettysburg and
Vicksburg to be turning points, they heralded the onset
of another long and difficult period again characterized
chiefly by loss. After the battle of
Gettysburg, Lincoln badly
wanted Union
General George Meade to pursue and crush the
Army of Northern Virginia, and Meade’s failure to do
so devastated the President. That same month, deadly
riots protested the draft and terrorized African
Americans in New York and elsewhere, signaling pockets
of deep opposition to the military prosecution of the
war, and to emancipation. To top it all off,
Lincoln’s wife was injured in
a carriage accident that summer, and suffered a close
enough call that eldest son Robert was called home. When
Robert arrived at the White House, he found his father
with his head down on his desk, crying.
The paralyzing defeat of Union forces at
Chickamauga did little to cheer Lincoln up. No
wonder the adjective that people who saw Lincoln that
summer were most likely to use to describe him was
“careworn.”
Much was being asked of
Lincoln, and that summer, he began to answer. One year
after coldly dismissing a delegation of black men who
visited him at the White House, Lincoln invited
Frederick Douglass to the first of what would be
three visits, and he genuinely listened to Douglass’s
views on tying the course of the war more closely to the
goals of ending slavery and improving the lot of African
Americans. He also solicited Douglass’s help in
increasing the recruitment and deployment of black Union
soldiers, a policy that Lincoln had regarded warily when
it was first adopted in the summer of 1862.
Lincoln’s response to
anti-war and anti-emancipation critics began to change
subtly, too. In a letter intended for nationwide
dissemination, Lincoln frankly addressed those “who are
dissatisfied with me about the negro.” At first, the
President seemed to repeat the practicality theme.
Simply put, freeing slaves “helps us” and “hurts the
enemy.” But this time, Lincoln did not stop there. He
gently urged even vociferous opponents of emancipation
toward higher principles. Black soldiers were risking
their lives for the “great republic –for the principle
it lives by, and keeps alive—for man’s vast future” and
“if they stake their lives . . . they must be prompted
by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And
the promise being made, must be kept.”
Later that fall, Lincoln
would continue to draw Union and liberty together on
principled rather than merely practical grounds. After
walking past rows of fresh graves every day, he would be
heading North, to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to dedicate
a soldiers’ cemetery there. His
Gettysburg Address would open with reference to the
nation’s founding, a theme he often invoked, but this
time he particularly emphasized the United States’
origins as a “nation conceived in liberty and dedicated
to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Right away, the essence of the speech was not one of
mere necessity, but of transcendent idea. In the final
line of his
Address, Lincoln admonished listeners that ensuring
that “government of the people, by the people, and for
the people shall not perish from the earth” could be
achieved only through “a new birth of freedom.”
In light of the year’s events, that new birth of freedom
had to mean an end to slavery for Lincoln.
It certainly did for many
of the soldiers who had been foreshadowing Lincoln’s
words at Gettysburg in their own writings for months,
men like an Ohio soldier who had applauded the
Emancipation Proclamation specifically because it showed
that the President finally understood that “the Union
under the old construction” would never do, and that
only the birth of “a new one,
that knows nothing about slavery” could really lead to
success in the republican experiment begun by the
nation’s founders.
It would have been difficult for Lincoln not to
have had all the countless men like that soldier in
mind as he looked out over the newly dug graves at
Gettysburg. As the year 1863 drew to a close, Lincoln
again subtly nudged Union and emancipation closer
together when he told Congress that “under the sharp
discipline of civil war, the nation is beginning a new
life.”
Not everyone was convinced that Union and emancipation
were connected. The Democratic Party’s strategy
for beating Lincoln in the election of 1864 was to
portray Union and emancipation as separate, antithetical
goals. Spring and summer 1864 were filled with setbacks
and appalling casualty lists from places like the
Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor. Armies in the
West stalled in the campaign to take Atlanta. The summer
brought another draft, and prospective peace
negotiations with the Confederacy went nowhere.
Democratic strategists seized on emancipation as the
real stumbling block, combined it with war-weariness,
and built a campaign around charges that the Lincoln
Administration was postponing restoration of the Union
to promote racial mixing and to advance black rights at
the expense of whites. When the Democratic Convention
met in August, its platform proposed a negotiated end to
the war, and promised that states would retain all
rights enjoyed before the war: that included slavery.
That platform earned little
but scorn from the majority of Union soldiers, who
noticed that Lincoln’s actions insisted on the
connection between Union and emancipation. Democrats
“might as well try to catch fish with a naked hook,
scoffed one.
Meanwhile, concerned
that he might lose the election and that an
Administration guided by the Democratic Platform could
achieve neither Union nor emancipation, Lincoln again
summoned
Frederick Douglass and asked for help in
getting as many slaves into Union lines as possible,
where their freedom could be secured before a new
president took office. He was willing to retreat to
practical rather than principled rationales for
emancipation when necessary, for example to keep War
Democrats on his side.
But even when he doubted
his own chances of success, he maintained the connection
between Union and emancipation. His platform called for
full restoration of the Union, and for a constitutional
amendment abolishing slavery.
It was precisely that connection that won him the avid
support of men in the Union rank-and-file, because it
said to them that the President saw the war in the same
light that they did. As Quincy Campbell put it, Lincoln
stood out as a model of “Loyalty, Liberty, and Union,”
specifically because the President understood that in
order to prove that “this war is not a failure,
that Slavery must die.”
When it came time to vote, nearly 80% of the men in blue
cast their ballot for Lincoln, and Connecticut soldier
Henry Hart had no trouble explaining why. “It is not
reasonable to suppose that men will fight for, and vote
against, the same principles.”
Re-election granted Lincoln
the opportunity to deliver his strongest articulation of
the bond between Union and emancipation, the
Second
Inaugural Address. The terrible struggle of the war
had continued to strengthen that bond for Lincoln. When
he delivered the
Gettysburg Address in late 1863, he reminded
listeners that the survival of the Union mattered for
all people everywhere, and he implied that its survival
depended upon ending slavery. But as 1864 brought more
and more horror, Lincoln increasingly suspected that
polite hints were no longer enough. The hard truth,
Lincoln had come to believe, was that a just God would
not allow the Union to be saved until the sin of
slavery, in which a whole guilty nation was complicit,
had been atoned for by the whole nation.
At least some enlisted
Union troops had already drawn that identical
conclusion, and for much the same reason; the fury,
pain, and loss of the war made it inescapable. War was
horrible because slavery was horrible, and so war must
continue until those responsible for slavery repented.
It would be convenient to lay all responsibility at the
feet of white Southerners, but if doing so were
sufficient, than the war would have ended with the
Emancipation Proclamation. But instead the war got
worse, and forced men like Amos Hostetter to interpret
slavery as a shared national, not simply
southern, sin, for which the whole nation must repent.
“When I came into the
service myself and many others did not believe in
interfering with slavery but we have changed our
opinions,” Hostetter told his sister and brother-in-law.
“Any country that allows the curse of Slavery and
Amalgamation as this has done, should be cursed and I
believe in my soul that God allowed this war for the
very purpose of clearing out the evil and punishing us
as a nation for allowing it.”
When it looked like the war was finally approaching an
end, Ohio soldier John Moore felt sure that God had
delayed Union victory until Americans (not just
Southerners) came “to see that slavery is and has been a
national evil and God will not bless a nation who are
guilty of such gross evil.”
Lincoln had been inching
toward that conclusion since 1862, when he reflected
privately on the possibility that “God wills this
contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.”
By September, 1864, he was willing to try such ideas out
in personal correspondence.
In the
Second Inaugural Address, delivered March 1865, he
made the dependence of the Union’s survival on the
elimination and atonement for the sin of slavery fully
public, and absolutely central. “If we shall suppose
that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in
the providence of God, must needs come, but which . . .
He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North
and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by
whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any
departure from those divine attributes which the
believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?,” asked
Lincoln.
Like many of the men who
had survived its battlefields, Lincoln made sense of the
war by viewing every drop of blood “drawn with the
sword” as national penance for “every drop of blood
drawn with the lash.” Gone were protestations that his
sole purpose was to sustain the government. Gone were
the limited claims to “do no more than to restrict the
territorial enlargement” of slavery, with which Lincoln
admitted he had begun the war. Gone were shrewd
calculations of emancipation as a logistical tactic to
hasten victory. For a man who never lost sight of human
fallibility and who was almost always deeply suspicious
of certainty, Lincoln was, in his
Second
Inaugural certain of one thing: there could be no
Union, no “just and lasting peace, among ourselves and
with all nations,” without a more “fundamental and
astounding” eradication of slavery than anyone had
dreamed possible when the war began.
We are so used to the
Second
Inaugural that we can lose sight of how radical it
was to insist that North and South shared
responsibility for the sin of slavery, and so must share
in atonement for it. The insistence was not Lincoln’s
alone, but neither was it unanimous among Northerners.
To enlisted Union soldiers, the
Address echoed the convictions they had come to
during and because of the war, but their loved ones at
home did not necessarily share those convictions.
Disagreements with family members hurt because men
missed their families so much, and wanted to be
understood and appreciated by them. “I supose that the
reason [father] is tired of writing to me is that he
don’t like the way that I wrote to him” about Lincoln,
slavery, and the war, a Missouri private confided to his
brother. Before the war, he, like his father, had
opposed emancipation, but now he saw it as an absolute
necessity. He pretended not to care if his father “wants
to go to the devil,” but for his part, the soldier would
“as leave cut my throat and go to hell at once” as
return to his prewar views.
Wartime experiences
convinced most white Union troops that slavery must be
destroyed in order to win the war, and they believed
that the President’s views had evolved along a similar
trajectory, one not necessarily shared by loved ones at
home.
At first, Lincoln had seemed slower to make that
ideological journey, but he had made it, and for
reasons connected to the magnitude of the war. By the
time he delivered the
Second
Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln articulated a
vision of the war’s causes and purpose that resonated
deeply with soldiers’ own, and he also intimated that he
had arrived at that vision in much the same way soldiers
had: through uncertainty, hardship, and suffering, and
through confrontation with the enormity of slavery.
None of these points
diminishes Lincoln’s greatness or denies his leadership;
rather, these insights help explain Lincoln and his
leadership more satisfactorily than focus on a single
mythologized individual does. Moreover, they ground his
achievements squarely in qualities that I believe
Lincoln most valued in himself. He was a man who
genuinely had faith in the people, who truly believed in
the importance of public opinion, and who was proud of
what he saw as his ability to understand others. Lincoln
was able to read people, not in a manipulative or
opportunistic way, but with genuine respect for what
people thought, and with the ability to be guided by
their ideas, and then to harness them and channel them
toward noble ends. To either dismiss the importance of
Lincoln, or to set Lincoln up as a solitary figure
boldly striding forth guided solely by his own inner
lights is to impoverish our understanding of Lincoln’s
leadership, as well as our understanding of the war and
emancipation. Far better to see Lincoln in the company
of his fellow-travelers, the men of the Union Army, all
of them shaped profoundly by loss, and by the
devastating experiences of war.
End Notes
The Wisconsin Volunteer, Feb. 6, 1862,
Leavenworth, KS, p. 3, Kansas State Historical Society.
Newspaper of the 13th WI.
Lt. Charles Haydon, 2 Mich, journal, March 24, 1862,
near Fortress Monroe, in Stephen W. Sears, ed. For
Country Cause and Leader: The Civil War Journal of
Charles B. Haydon (NY: Ticknor & Fields,
1993), 212.
Pvt. “M” 1 WI, to the Times, March 23, 1862,
Nashville, TN, E.B. Quiner Correspondence of Wisconsin
Volunteers, Reel 1, Volume 2, p. 151, State Historical
Society of Wisconsin.
Lt.
P.V. Wise, 1 WI, to WI. State Journal, Jan. 20,
1862, Camp Wood, KY, E.B. Quiner Correspondence of
Wisconsin Volunteers, Reel 1, Volume 2, p. 139-140,
State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
Sgt. Luther Furst, Signal Corps, 39 PA, Diary, May 11,
1862, York river, VA, Luther Furst Diary, Harrisburg
Civil War Round Table Collection. USAMHI, Carlisle
Barracks; QM Sgt. Thomas Low, 23 Independent NY
Artillery, March 29, 1862, Washington, D.C., Special
Collections, Duke University.
Corporal Hervey Howe, 89 NY, to brother Judson, Oct. 2,
1862, near Antietam Creek, MD, Hervey Lane Howe Letters,
Bird Library, Syracuse University. It is even easier to
find approval and enthusiasm for the Proclamation in
other theaters of war, since men who had not just fought
in the Battle of Antietam had more leisure to write
about the Emancipation Proclamation. See (among many
others, “President Lincoln's Emancipation
Proclamation received: delivered on the 24th of last
month. Thank God, the word has at last been spoken.
Light begins to break through. Let the sons of earth
rejoice. Sing paeans to Liberty. Let tyranny die,”
(Cpl. Rufus Kinsley, 8 VT, in diary, Oct. 3, 1862, New
Orleans, LA, Rufus Kinsley Diary, Part I. Vermont
Historical Society); “my oppion of lincolns proclamation
is that it is the only means by wich the Traitors can
bee maid feal their injustis that they have been guilty
of disloyality and treason. . . The army as far as I
know likes his (lincolns) proclamation very well and
think that the plan will work so well that wee that are
a live yet will be at Home against June next,” ( Pvt.
Jacob Behm, 48 IL, to sister and brother-in-law, Oct. 1,
1862, Bethel, TN, Jacob Behm Correspondence, Civil
War Times Illustrated Collection, USAMHI, Carlisle
Barracks); and “My hopes are somewhat revived since Old
Abe has come out with his proclamation, I do now believe
the war will be over in six months and the government
restablished on truly republican principals the curse of
slavery has got to go by the board and no mistake. . . .
emancipation is becoming popular through out the whole
Union evry boddy knows that slavery was the cause of
this war and slavery stands in the way of putting down
this rebelion and now let us put it out of the way,”
(Sgt. John Boucher, 10 MO, to mother, Sept. 29, 1862
Benton Barracks, MO, Boucher Family Papers. Civil War
Miscellaneous Collection, 2nd Ser., USAMHI, Carlisle
Barracks). It is notable that after that trip to see
soldiers in the field, Lincoln got discernibly tougher
in his communications to and about McClellan. Compare
the gentle, cajoling tone of Lincoln’s telegrams to
McClellan on Aug. 29, 1862 (CW V, p. 399), Sept.
6, 1862 (CW V, p. 407), and Sept. 15, 1862 (CW
V, p. 426) with the much harsher tone of Lincoln’s
Oct. 13, 1862 letter to McClellan (CW V, 460-61).
Lt. JQA Campbell, 5 IA, in diary, Sept. 25, 1862, Iuka
Miss, in Mark Grimsley and Todd D. Miller (eds.),
The Union Must Stand: The Civil War Diary of John
Quincy Adams Campbell, Fifth Iowa Volunteer Infantry
(Knoxville: University of TN Press, 2000), 61. See also
Lt. Joseph Trego, 3 KS Cav, to wife, Sept. 30, 1862,
Helena, Ark., (Trego Collection Kansas State Historical
Society): “We are rejoiced to learn that Abraham has, at
last begun at the bottom of the difficulty to solve it.”
Pvt. Levi Hines, 11 VT to parents, Sept. 26,1
862 Ft. Lincoln, Washington, DC, Levi Hines Papers,
Schoff Civil War Collection, Clements Library,
University of Michigan.
Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863,
CW VII, p. 23.
Capt. Amos Hostetter, 34 IL, to sister and
brother-in-law, Jan. 29, 1863, Murfreesboro, TN,
Illinois State Historical Library. See also Ransom
Bedell, who agreed that “where our nation,” not just the
southern half of it, “has failed to act in putting the
abomination away from among them that God has allowed
war and carnage to operate,” (Pvt. Ransom Bedell, 39 IL,
to cousin Theoda, summer 1863, Ransom Bedell Papers,
Illinois State Historical Library). Similarly, a New
Hampshire private opined that the “durstructive war” had
been visited upon the whole nation for the sin of
slavery, and it would not end until Americans repented.
Then, and only then, “in God’s own good time He will
save our Country,” the private contended. See Pvt.
Roswell Holbrook, 14 NH, to cousin Malinda, Jan. 11,
1864, Washington, D.C., Roswell Holbrook Letters,
Vermont Historical Society.
Pvt. William Kesterson, formerly 7 MO Cav and 1 MO Cav,
now Invalid Corps (USA), to brother, Oct. 28, 1864,
hospital, Springfield, MO, William H. H. Kesterson
Letters, Missouri Historical Society.
Source:
SoldierStudies
|
Chandra
Manning teaches 19th century
U.S. History and co-directs the
Georgetown Workshop in 19th Century
U.S. History with her colleague Adam
Rothman. Her first book, What This
Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers,
Slavery, and the Civil War won the
Avery Craven Prize awarded by the
Organization of American Historians,
earned Honorable Mention for the
Lincoln Prize, the Jefferson Davis
Prize, and the Virginia Literary
Awards for Non-fiction, and was a
finalist for the Frederick Douglass
Prize. Currently, she is working on
a book about Civil War contraband
camps, freedpeople's post-Civil War
migration, and the struggle over the
meaning of citizenship in the 19th
century United States. She is also
busily brainwashing her two young
sons into Red Sox fans.
Ph.D. (2002)
Harvard University, History / M.Phil
(1995) University College, Galway,
Ireland, Irish history and
literature / B.A. summa cum laude
(1993) Mount Holyoke College,
History
—Explore.Georgetown |
 |
* * * * *
Civil War Letters—Union and Confederate Soldiers'
Letters /
Civil War Letters—A Confederate Soldier's Letter
Civil War Letters—Introducing the Letters
/
Civil War Letters—A Black Union Soldier's Letter
Lincoln, Race, and the American Presidency /
Chandra Manning: What This Cruel War Was Over Book
TV
Chandra
M. Manning on Soldiers and Slavery: Part 1 /
The Permanence of Racism (1992)
* * * * *
What the
troops really thought about slavery—15 April
2007—Glenn C. Altschuler—Manning's work supports the
prevailing view among historians that race trumped
class in the Confederacy. Although her analysis of
the role of religion is weak, she demonstrates that
nonslaveholding soldiers believed that the "peculiar
institution" protected white manhood, family,
property rights and a stable social structure with
blacks on the bottom. Issued in 1863, President
Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation unified
Rebel troops recently demoralized by bread riots at
home and a law which exempted from military service
an owner or overseer with 20 or more slaves. The
soldiers did break ranks, but only when in 1865 a
desperate Confederate Congress authorized the
enlistment of no more than 25 percent of black male
slaves between the ages of 18 and 45, with hints of
manumission. If slaves "are put in the army," Pvt.
Joseph Maides told his mother, "they will be on the
same footing with white men."
Northern
troops, Manning emphasizes, grew more likely to
support emancipation the longer they remained in the
field. Some believed that secession undermined the
electoral process. Others that it would take "the
eternal overthrow of slavery" to win the war. As
they traveled through the South and observed human
bondage at close range, many soldiers were appalled,
especially by the sexual abuse of slave women. The
performance of black troops helped as well: They
"whipped the rebels handsomely" in Florida, Pvt.
Orra Bailey noted, "fighting like tigers" and
"striking horror into the enemy." With their
consciousness raised, Union soldiers voted
overwhelmingly to re-elect Lincoln in 1864.
Manning's most
controversial—and least convincing—claim is that
"many" Union troops embraced racial equality and
civil rights. . . . Manning makes an admirable
effort to quantify soldiers' sentiments. Before
concluding that one position dominated, she
stipulated that it had to outnumber dissenting views
by at least three to one. This method works
relatively well for measuring support for the
Emancipation Proclamation, though, of course, it
cannot capture the attitudes of soldiers who said
nothing about the measure in letters and diaries.
But it's much more difficult to count proponents of
"radical stances on racial equality." And so,
perhaps inevitably, Manning makes more subjective
judgments, delivered with the adjectives "some,"
"many" and "most."
Even if she's
right, and Union troops were willing to work with
blacks "to change laws, build schools, and lay
foundations for a more equitable society," their
commitment was shallow at best. By her own account
it ebbed and flowed between 1863 and 1865. And after
they laid down their arms, the soldiers returned
home to oppose black suffrage and integrated
schools. For many of them, it seems, emancipation
was not a prelude to equality.— BaltimoreSun
* * * * *
What
This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and
the Civil War, by Chandra Manning (New York:
Knopf, 2007).—Reviewed
by Kevin M. Levin—Manning
surveys the archival records of 657 Union and
477 Confederate soldiers, along with regimental
newspapers, to tell the story of how slavery and
race influenced the men who volunteered and
fought through the Civil War. She surveys
soldiers from all theaters, native-born and
immigrant Union enlisted men, non-slaveholding
and slaveholding Confederate soldiers, and
United States Colored Troops. For those
familiar with the relevant historiography, many
of Manning’s interpretive points will sound
familiar. In 1997 James McPherson published
With Cause and Comrades (Oxford University
Press), which provided one of the most
sophisticated accounts of how slavery and race
shaped the political and ideological outlooks of
soldiers in both armies. Manning adds to the
debate by analyzing these views over time, in
hopes of uncovering the often-subtle ways in
which soldiers’ statements about slavery
evolved.
Perhaps one of
the most interesting claims made in this book is
Manning’s contention that Union soldiers advocated
for emancipation as early as the second half of
1861, ahead of civilians, political leaders, and
officers, and a full year before the Emancipation
Proclamation. “Enlisted soldiers came to the
conclusion that winning the war would require the
destruction of slavery,” writes Manning, “partly
because soldiers’ personal observations of the South
led many to decide that slavery blighted everything
it touched” (47). Her claim that soldiers’
reactions to the horrors of slavery became useful to
the Union war effort compliments research by Ira
Berlin, who also maintains that interaction between
slaves and soldiers steered the Lincoln
administration towards emancipation. Such a
bottom-up analysis places Civil War soldiers at the
very center of the events that led Abraham Lincoln
to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in September
1862. Most Northerners had little direct contact
with slavery before the war, apart from various
printed sources, so whom and what Union troops saw
in the South dramatically shaped their thinking. . .
.
While the
notion that Union soldiers did in fact pay careful
attention to the issues of slavery, race, and
emancipation is an important corrective to our
tendency to see Civil War soldiers as apolitical,
Manning’s conclusions about Confederate soldiers are
also important. By placing slavery at the center of
her analysis of Confederate soldiers, she challenges
readers to rethink assumptions about how slavery
figured into the lives of most white southerners.
While other issues certainly animated Confederates
at different times, Manning argues that the issues
of race and slavery served to focus the army. She
examines how even non-slaveholding Confederates were
motivated to fight by the belief that abolition
would erase the privileges of white manhood,
endanger their families, and destroy the very fabric
of Southern society. Internal fissures may have
threatened the unity of the Confederacy, but these
problems never trumped the importance of defending
the “peculiar institution.” Regardless of status,
white southerners held to the belief that the
survival of slavery guaranteed their respective
place in the political/social hierarchy. Most
important, they feared that defeat would likely lead
to race wars and miscegenation.— AmbroseBierce
* * * * *
Why They
Fought—Civil War Soldiers and Slavery—Randall M.
Miller—Confederate soldiers, [Chandra] Manning
insists, were bound together by the shared belief in
the dangers of abolition, which powerfully united
Confederate soldiers and motivated them to fight,
even when they shared little else (31). Defending
slavery was at the root of the Confederacy's reason
to exist and the common soldier's commitment to the
cause. Even as onerous conscription policies,
inflation, and impressment of farmers' produce and
livestock eroded popular support for the Confederate
war effort and led to many desertions, the common
soldiers' fears of the consequences of defeat and
the freeing of slaves kept them from quitting
altogether. The chants about a rich man's war and a
poor man's fight notwithstanding, white
nonslaveholding southerners stood up for slavery.
To their mind,
the Union advance heralded their world turning
upside down, much like Haiti, with rape and pillage
following emancipation. When they fought to protect
their hearth and home, it was not because Union
armies were invading in a literal sense though that
came to be as the war progressed but because Union
armies invaded white privilege and racial hierarchy
with the threat of abolition and all its attendant
evils. For them, God demanded their defense of what
they believed was a divinely sanctified way of life.
For them, Manning writes, black slavery was vital to
the protection of their families, interests, and
very identities as men, and they relied on it to
prevent race war (39). Thus, Manning concludes that
slavery, [f]ar from splintering Confederates along
class lines, provided the cement that held
Confederates together even under almost trying
circumstances (6). The Union's resort to using black
troops further hardened white southerners' in the
conviction of a diabolical abolitionist North bent
on the complete destruction of southern society and
Christian order. Simply put, whites of all classes
feared a loss of mastery should slavery end.— CivilWarBookReview
* * *
* *
Moochers
Against Welfare—Paul Krugman—February 16,
2012—Cornell University’s Suzanne Mettler points out
that many beneficiaries of government programs seem
confused about their own place in the system. She
tells us that 44 percent of Social Security
recipients, 43 percent of those receiving
unemployment benefits, and 40 percent of those on
Medicare say that they “have not used a government
program.”
Presumably,
then, voters imagine that pledges to slash
government spending mean cutting programs for the
idle poor, not things they themselves count on. And
this is a confusion politicians deliberately
encourage. For example, when Mr. Romney responded to
the new Obama budget, he condemned Mr. Obama for not
taking on entitlement spending—and, in the very next
breath, attacked him for cutting Medicare. The
truth, of course, is that the vast bulk of
entitlement spending goes to the elderly, the
disabled, and working families, so any significant
cuts would have to fall largely on people who
believe that they don’t use any government program.
The message I
take from all this is that pundits who describe
America as a fundamentally conservative country are
wrong. Yes, voters sent some severe conservatives to
Washington. But those voters would be both shocked
and angry if such politicians actually imposed their
small-government agenda.— NYTimes
* *
* * *
Racism, Wealth and IQ—I.Q. is a measure of wealth. The children of
gangsters and war criminals (i.e., national politicians,
corporate executives, race-favored Americans, Europeans,
and others from outposts of Pan-Whiteness, e.g., Israel,
Australia, New Zealand) will have higher I.Q. because
they have been brought up in material comfort, physical
security, and they have experienced the best educational
systems in existence. There is no genetic basis for
this, but there is certainly a racist one. Since the
days of Columbus, Pan-Whiteness has used technology
(primarily explosives) and piracy (now called finance)
to steal world resources, and enslave and exterminate
"colored" people. "High" I.Q. is merely a developmental
indicator of race-based physical plundering by their
elders and ancestors in the children of the Race
Warriors of the White Supremacy Crusade. The religious
core of capitalism is white supremacy, which is why the
nations mentioned are bonded so tightly, and why the
U.S. Government will often pursue policies vis-a-vis
Israel that logically seem to be at odds with "U.S.
interests" (e.g., the pursuit, with U.S. casualties, of
war with Iraq and Iran, not just for oil but in Israel's
interest). It may be objectively true that a particular
policy (e.g., bankrolling Israel's theft of
Palestine—"settlements"—backing Israel's stonewalling
and aggression (e.g., Lebanon) and blocking U.N. and
international efforts to settle the Palestinian issue)
seems more to Israel's benefit than to "us." But, when
viewed through the emotive religious-mythical lens of
white supremacy, the apparent inconsistency dissolves.
Counterpunch
* * *
* *
* *
* * *
|
The Fiery Trial
Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
By Eric Foner
A mixture of visionary
progressivism and repugnant racism, Abraham Lincoln's
attitude toward slavery is the most troubling aspect of his
public life, one that gets a probing assessment in this
study. Columbia historian and Bancroft Prize winner Foner
(Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men) traces the
complexities of Lincoln's evolving ideas about slavery and
African-Americans: while he detested slavery, he also
publicly rejected political and social equality for blacks,
dragged his feet (critics charged) on emancipating slaves
and accepting black recruits into the Union army, and
floated schemes for colonizing freedmen overseas almost to
war's end. Foner situates this record within a lucid,
nuanced discussion of the era's turbulent racial politics;
in his account Lincoln is a canny operator, cautiously
navigating the racist attitudes of Northern whites,
prodded--and sometimes willing to be prodded--by
abolitionists and racial egalitarians pressing faster
reforms. |
 |
But as Foner tells it, Lincoln also embodies a
society-wide transformation in consciousness, as the war's
upheavals and the dynamic new roles played by
African-Americans made previously unthinkable claims of
freedom and equality seem inevitable. Lincoln is no paragon
in Foner's searching portrait, but something more
essential--a politician with an open mind and a restless
conscience. 16 pages of illus., 3 maps.—Publishers
Weekly
* * * * *
 |
Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake.
|
She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost
* * * * *
|
What This Cruel War Was Over
Soldiers Slavery and the Civil
War
By Chandra Manning
For this impressively researched
Civil War social history, Georgetown
assistant history professor Manning
visited more than two dozen states
to comb though archives and
libraries for primary source
material, mostly diaries and letters
of men who fought on both sides in
the Civil War, along with more than
100 regimental newspapers. The
result is an engagingly written,
convincingly argued social history
with a point—that those who did the
fighting in the Union and
Confederate armies "plainly
identified slavery as the root of
the Civil War." Manning backs up her
contention with hundreds of
first-person testimonies written at
the time, rather than
often-unreliable after-the-fact
memoirs. While most Civil War
narratives lean heavily on officers,
Easterners and men who fought in
Virginia, Manning casts a much
broader net. She includes
immigrants, African-Americans and
western fighters, in order, she
says, "to approximate cross sections
of the actual Union and Confederate
ranks." |
 |
Based on the author's dissertation, the book is
free of academese and appeals to a general
audience, though Manning's harsh
condemnation of white Southerners'
feelings about slavery and her
unstinting praise of Union soldiers'
"commitment to emancipation" take a
step beyond scholarly objectivity.—Publishers
Weekly
* *
* * *
 |
Lincoln on Race and Slavery
Edited By Henry Louis Gates and
Donald Yacovone
Generations of Americans have
debated the meaning of Abraham
Lincoln's views on race and slavery.
He issued the Emancipation
Proclamation and supported a
constitutional amendment to outlaw
slavery, yet he also harbored grave
doubts about the intellectual
capacity of African Americans,
publicly used the n-word until at
least 1862, and favored permanent
racial segregation. In this book—the
first complete collection of
Lincoln's important writings on both
race and slavery—readers
can explore these contradictions
through Lincoln's own words.
Acclaimed Harvard scholar and
documentary filmmaker Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., presents the full range
of Lincoln's views, gathered from
his private letters, speeches,
official documents, and even race
jokes, arranged chronologically from
the late 1830s to the 1860s. |
Complete with definitive texts, rich historical
notes, and an original introduction by Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., this book charts the progress of a war
within Lincoln himself. We witness his struggles
with conflicting aims and ideas—a hatred of slavery
and a belief in the political equality of all men,
but also anti-black prejudices and a determination
to preserve the Union even at the cost of preserving
slavery. We also watch the evolution of his
racial views, especially in reaction to the heroic
fighting of black Union troops.
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
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1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
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