Forced Into Glory: Lincoln Revisionism

By Lucas E. Morel

Lerone Bennett, Jr. Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 2000); $35.00; 652 pp.

Lerone Bennett, Jr. published an article in the February 1968 issue of Ebony magazine that asked, “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?” He answered in the affirmative. Thirty-two years later, Ebony’s executive editor has expanded his six-page critique into a book more than 600-pages in length. As the new title suggests, Bennett argues that Lincoln was “forced into glory” against his personal and political wishes by “the real emancipators,” black and white abolitionists (among others), to whom Bennett dedicates his book. At the heart of his revisionist appraisal of Lincoln’s legacy is the claim that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave, nor was it Lincoln's intention to do so. If the “great emancipator” had his way, Bennett adds, he would have instigated “the racial cleansing of the United States of America.”

Where to begin? Never has so much been so wrong about so important a subject. The only way to misrepresent Lincoln more would be to misspell his name. Add to this Bennett’s denigration of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Booker T. Washington, Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, and conservatism generally, along with frequent references to Lincoln’s endorsement of “ethnic cleansing” and a “final solution” to the race problem, and his diatribe becomes almost impossible to take seriously. The wonder of it all is that Bennett consulted not only Lincoln’s own speeches and writings, but also a host of primary and secondary sources that should have cleared up much of his confusion about Lincoln’s approach to slavery under the Constitution. Here, more was not better. Bennett allows Lincoln’s rivals to second-guess Lincoln’s own explanations for what he was attempting to do as president of a republic during a rebellion. Bennett’s attempt to understand Lincoln’s principles and policies regarding American slavery falters on so many fronts that we will focus on the greatest misunderstandings, especially as they pertain to the American form and practice of self-government.

Although Frederick Douglass heads the list of “real emancipators” on his dedication page, Bennett quotes selectively from his “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln” (1876). To portray Douglass as a tepid supporter of Lincoln, Bennett violates his own admonition against “the fallacy of the isolated quote” by highlighting only criticisms of Lincoln by the famous abolitionist speaker. Douglass does say that Lincoln “was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.” But Bennett omits several passages that show Douglass’s more sober and deliberate assessment of Lincoln. Speaking as an escaped slave, Douglass remarks that under Lincoln’s “wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood.” Unlike Bennett, Douglass praises the Emancipation Proclamation as “the immortal paper, which, though, special in its language, was general in its principles and effect, making slavery forever impossible in the United States.”

Douglass goes on to conclude that if Lincoln “put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible.” Viewed from the abolitionist ranks, “Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”

It’s as if Douglass grows in his understanding of Lincoln’s statesmanship as the speech progresses. But Bennett sours from the very beginning, unable to appreciate with Douglass the great difficulty of Lincoln’s task and the nobility of what he ultimately accomplished.

Bennett also dedicates his book to a couple of “radical humanitarians,” John Brown and Wendell Phillips. (Bennett crosses abolitionist extraordinaire William Lloyd Garrison off his list because he became a Lincoln supporter during the 1864 election.) These so-called freedom-lovers sought to free Americans by preaching against the limitations of constitutional self-government and free elections. Bennett admits these and other abolitionists “inflame” public opinion and “create contempt” for the Constitution, but he applauds them for it because of the purity of their motives.

Upon finding several of Lincoln’s contemporaries complaining of his contempt for abolitionists, Bennett concludes that Lincoln did not, in today’s parlance, “feel the slaves’ pain.” A better indication of Lincoln’s personal feelings regarding the plight of American slaves, however, can be found in an 1855 letter he wrote to his best friend, Joshua F. Speed: “I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, and unrewarded toils; but I bite my lip and keep quiet.” Lincoln also reminded Speed, a Kentucky slaveholder who professed “the abstract wrong” of slavery, of the shackled slaves they saw onboard a steamboat they rode in 1841: “That sight was a continual torment to me.” Lincoln then explained that he and most Northerners “do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the constitution and the Union.” Lincoln’s refusal to join the abolitionist cause, therefore, derived not from callous indifference toward the slave but from principled devotion to the American regime -- a form of government that would extend its protection of freedom as far as the governed would allow. As he put it to his long-time friend, “I also acknowledge your rights and my obligations, under the constitution, in regard to your slaves.” Lincoln, in short, distinguished his personal sentiments from his political responsibility regarding a subject that had “the power of making me miserable.”

Simply put, Lincoln’s hesitation to emancipate slaves during the Civil War derived from his recognition that the American experiment in self-government was in danger. “We already have an important principle to rally and unite the people in the fact that constitutional government is at stake,” he wrote. “This is a fundamental idea, going down about as deep as any thing.” Lincoln was at pains to figure out how to preserve a constitutional regime from the physical force of rebellious southerners as well as the rhetorical force of rebellious abolitionist: the former were unwilling to obey a duly elected Republican administration, while the latter were unwilling to support a constitutional union of freemen and slaveholders. To act simply according to an abstract truth about the natural equality of human beings -- by proclaiming the natural injustice of slavery -- without acting as well in accordance with the coeval truth that government can act legitimately only by the consent of the governed would be to subvert the very form of government and law-abiding habits that make for a free society.

The Constitution vests limited powers in the three branches of the national government. This was always Lincoln's understanding, and one he reiterated at the outset of his First Inaugural Address as it pertained to slavery in the South. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists,” he said. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so.” The Constitution restricted what Lincoln as president could do about “the peculiar institution,” and as the most deliberate and settled will of the American people, the Constitution stood as the political lodestar for Lincoln.

Upon what authority, then, did he proclaim freedom to slaves in the South almost two years later? As the final Emancipation Proclamation states it: “by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion.” The nation had moved from peace to war since his inauguration, which legitimated his war-making authority; in addition, Lincoln judged that the uneven progress of the war now called for eliminating the support that slavery gave to the southern war effort.

In his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln emphasized that his war aim had not changed: “hereafter, as heretofore, the war will be prosecuted for the object of practically restoring the constitutional relation between the United States, and each of the states, and the people thereof, in which states that relation is, or may be, suspended, or disturbed.” Thus, he wanted the nation to understand his war-time emancipation proclamation not as a mere exercise of will or force on behalf of a moral objective but as a military measure in accord with his constitutional oath to uphold the laws in all the states.

Lincoln gave the clearest statement of his intention as president and commander-in-chief regarding slavery and the war effort in response to a public letter by New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” Lincoln wrote. “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.” Of course, he led the nation through all three scenarios by the time of his second inauguration, at which point the 13th Amendment had been approved by Congress and was on the way to state ratification by year’s end.

Lincoln’s devotion to the constitutional union took precedence over the abolition of slavery, but in a way that set the nation back on course to ridding itself of slavery. Miss this, as Bennett does from cover to cover, and you misunderstand the Emancipation Proclamation and its connection to the Union war effort.

This priority reflected Lincoln’s concern for finding legitimate ways to put down the rebellion without losing the allegiance of unionist southerners, some of whom included slave-owners who had a constitutional right to own slaves that Lincoln as president was sworn to uphold. As William C. Harris shows in With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union (1997), “war-time reconstruction was designed to initiate the restoration of civil self-government in the South.” Harris reminds us that Lincoln’s expressed war aim was to quash he rebellion without “depriving Unionists of their constitutional rights” or “making it more difficult for them to cooperate in the restoration of loyal governments in the South.” Lincoln’s apparent hesitation to free slaves simply cannot be understood without a clear understanding of his constitutional obligations, which Bennett summarily overlooks.

Bennett also claims that Lincoln deliberately undermined the Emancipation Proclamation by its selective application: “What Lincoln did — and it was so clever that we ought to stop calling him honest Abe — was to ‘free’ slaves in Confederate-held territory where he couldn’t free them and to leave them in slavery in Union-held territory where he could have freed them.” This argument implies that what Lincoln should have done regarding slavery concerned only military might, and not constitutional right. But Lincoln omitted the so-called “border slave states” of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware from the Emancipation Proclamation because they were not in rebellion against the federal government and therefore its citizens deserved the full protection of their constitutional rights.

The explicit exceptions Lincoln made of southern, slave-holding areas under Union-army control prior to January 1, 1863 (i.e., the counties constituting West Virginia and portions of Virginia and Louisiana) also fall under this category. When Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase argued for applying the Emancipation Proclamation to the exempted areas of Virginia and Louisiana, Lincoln replied he could only do so “without the argument of military necessity, and so, without any argument, except the one that I think the measure politically expedient, and morally right.” He added, “Would I not give up all footing upon the constitution or law? Would I not thus be in the boundless field of absolutism?”

Lincoln shows that a president, even acting as commander-in-chief, must exercise authority not as a dictator — benevolent or otherwise — but within the limits set forth by the Constitution. Lincoln wanted to rid the nation of slavery, but not at the price of free government.

As for the claim that the Emancipation Proclamation was a dead letter to slaves behind Confederate lines, Lincoln committed “the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof,” to “recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.” Slaves escaping from their rebellious masters would no longer be viewed as fugitives from justice but receive legal protection of their freedom by the national government. For Bennett, this amounts to an empty promise because the slaves were free only on paper and not in practice. But what alternative was there for slaves behind enemy lines?

As Lincoln himself admitted only nine days before his preliminary proclamation: “Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel states?” He therefore waited for a Union victory as a sign that as commander-in-chief he could back ink on paper with swords on the battlefield. (For the definitive exposition of the Emancipation Proclamation, see George Anastaplo's chapter on it in Abraham Lincoln: A Constitutional Biography [1999].)

Bennett chides Lincoln for promoting gradual, compensated emancipation and the colonization of freedmen as the means of achieving his dream of a “lily-white America.” In this context, the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, announced 100 days before its implementation on January 1, 1863, was merely a ruse, Bennett asserts, to delay emancipation until Lincoln could persuade Congress to “deport” all blacks from the United States. To be sure, Lincoln favored gradual emancipation as well as colonization of blacks, but not because he was a white supremacist. Although he recognized the manifest injustice of slavery, he also believed that emancipation was always at best only half the battle. As Anastaplo observes, one then had to devise a way for former masters and former slaves to live with each other as free men.

On this question, Lincoln was neither sanguine nor alone in the recognition that slavery’s demise “was piled high with difficulty.” That most famous foreign observer of the American republic, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote in Democracy in America (1835) that “it is impossible to foresee a time when blacks and whites will come to mingle and derive the same benefits from society.” Moreover, American slavery had so poisoned each race’s view of the other that if blacks continued to concentrate in the South, “sooner or later in the southern states white and blacks must come to blows.” This conclusion of a disinterested commentator on the American regime makes Lincoln’s support of colonization less a reflection of racism than a sober consideration of the social and political reality of his day.

Tocqueville noted, “In antiquity the most difficult thing was to change the law; in the modern world the hard thing is to alter mores, and our difficulty begins where theirs ended.” If American mores were such that American democracy could not avoid this coming clash of erstwhile enemies, former white masters versus former black slaves, then Lincoln along with Henry Clay and other colonizationists may not have been the most optimistic republicans. But they could hardly be faulted for attempting to prevent a regional race war that might tear the entire nation and its experiment in self-government into pieces. Bennett makes no allowance for sensible and learned men like Lincoln to believe that American blacks and whites en masse simply would not live peaceably with each other at the close of an oppressive history. The racial divide still present in America today confirms the difficulty Lincoln, Tocqueville, and others anticipated when former slave owners and former slaves, and their descendants, continued to reside in the same territory.

Bennett’s exercise in exasperation over Lincoln as the Great Emancipator displays his woeful ignorance about the principles and practices of American self- government. Lacking even a rudimentary grasp of how the ideas of human equality and the consent of the governed inform the constitutional operation of the American government, it’s no wonder Bennett is unable to grasp Lincoln’s political prudence. Bennett concludes, “There is thus nothing we can learn from Abraham Lincoln about race relations, except what not to say or do.” By reading Forced Into Glory, one learns nothing from Lerone Bennett about the requirements of statesmanship within a constitutional democracy. With Lincoln as his tutor instead of his target, you would think he might have learned something.

Adjunct Fellow Lucas E. Morel is Assistant Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University and author of Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion's Role in American Self-Government (Lexington Books, 2000).

Subscribe to the Claremont Institute's Precepts to receive the latest news and information about national politics and other topics via e-mail.

All pages copyright © 2000 The Claremont Institute