Musings on Lincoln as the Anti-Racialist

President Abraham Lincoln as the Idealist Anti-Slavery President?

American History Textbooks usually state that the North (i.e. the Union) fought in the American Civil War to preserve the United States as a single entity.  Textbooks dismiss the possibility of the Civil War being fought to abolish slavery.  After all, there is plenty of evidence that is the case.  For example, did you know that FOUR states in the Union were slavery states when the Civil War began? (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri.)  Or consider the famous quote from President Lincoln to an influential editor of a pro-Union and pro-white supremacist paper in New York City: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. “  President Lincoln’s ideas about resettlement of blacks to Africa further strengthen the narrative of a President fighting the Civil War to preserve the Union and NOT because he cared for blacks or even to abolish slavery.

However, we ignore at our peril the idealistic side of President Lincoln.  People who declare President Lincoln as a person morally indifferent to slavery and not sympathetic to eliminating slavery ignore the historical evidence.  President Lincoln rejected all compromise attempts to preserve the Union between his election in November 1860 and his inauguration in March 1861, because to do so is to ignore the Republican Party platform that called for the abolition of slavery. From his Gettysburg Address in November 1863, he ends his address with a call that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”  Whose freedom did he refer?  Black freedom, of course.

Most powerfully, President Lincoln referred to abolition of slavery in his Second Inaugural Address In March 1865, one of the more criminally ignored masterpieces ever. 

Consider this quote from the Second Inaugural Address:  If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued throughout his appointed time, 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 offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him?”

And then consider this quote: Fondly we hope-fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.  Yet, if God wills that it continues until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the last shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “ The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Stew over that quote for a minute.  Yes, Lincoln considered Slavery as a SIN, a sin that deserved to be punished by however God deemed it to be appropriate: the bloodiest war in American history with over 600,000 deaths and many more casualties.

And lest we think of him as a President as all talk and no action, President Lincoln desegregated the White House staff in 1863, a year when the outcome of the Civil War was by no means certain and his reelection in 1864 in doubt.

So why do the preponderance of American textbooks gloss over Abraham Lincoln, the idealist and the anti-racialist?  That is a question to be covered in my next blog post…