The point is DuBois': We should be careful not to paint humanity or particular humans as all good or all evil. I have always been struck by Lincoln's gnosticism. I've always admired his Second Inaugural. What troubles me lately is Lincoln's willingness to dissemble, to foster inconsistent understanding of himself in the eyes of others. Was he racist? Did he maintain white supremacy because he believed it or merely to get elected in Illinois? "Must a government, of necessity," Lincoln asked, "be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?" That he wanted to hold the union together is true, but that singular goal does not mean he was never inconsistent about slavery, race, war, &c. As George Frederickson writes in his book, Big Enough to be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race:
Before 1864, he had been a cautious, somewhat reluctant emancipator - certainly no advocate of an immediate, uncompensated emancipation without a link to colonization, which was the abolitionist's dream. But the fulfillment of that dream was what he ended up presiding over. Lincoln was thus able to realize his longstanding hope of extinguishing slavery and thereby earned and deserved the title of Great Emancipator.Some things remain a mystery. Some people are big enough to be inconsistent.
But a troubling question remains. Did Lincoln, as some historians have contended, go beyond abolition without colonization to endorse civil and political eqaulity for blacks? . . . . [Such] is a question that is difficult to resolve because of the paucity of evidence directly bearing on it and because of the fact that Lincoln's thinking about race may have been in flux at the time of his assassination.
2 comments:
Well, the article on the Root doesn't seem to suggest a contradiction, because I think you can be a racist (which seems like a broadly applicable term) and not be in favor of slavery. I wouldn't quite call it a nuanced position but certainly a believable one.
I think everyone's inconsistent, though Lincoln was certainly great enough to get away with it.
You're right, it's possible to be racist and against slavery. You're also right that we're all contradictions. I don't know what it means to get away with it, but Lincoln seems to only if you discount Mr. Booth. Historically, he does seem to get away with it at times, but I tend to think we need to study the South's anti-Lincoln position (and Du Bois' critique) more than we do, Mr. Booth notwithstanding. See http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jala/4/fehrenbacher.html
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