"How can any one who abhors the oppression of Negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty--to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."
--Abraham Lincoln, letter to Joshua F. Speed (Aug. 24, 1855)
When a publicist first approached me about the Library of America's just published volume President Lincoln Assassinated!! The Firsthand Story of the Murder, Manhunt, Trial, and Mourning, a collection of more than 80 original documents -- newspaper stories, trial transcripts, eyewitness reports, speeches, etc.--compiled and edited by Harold Holzer, I suggested they also send a copy to a friend of mine, an acknowledged expert on the assassination who maintains a website on the subject.
They did, and a week or so later, I got an email from my friend expressing his disappointment in the book. There wasn't any new information in it, he said.
I suppose that is fair enough, and in retrospect I should have known my friend would be familiar with the primary source material collected in the book. But I'm not an assassination expert, or even a buff, and I found the volume edifying and sobering. I never knew Henrik Ibsen had written a bitter political poem ("Abraham Lincoln's Murder") which charged European powers with moral complicity as it lamented John Wilkes Booth's crime. Since it had never been published in its entirety, no one outside the few scholars who examined the manuscript at the Library of Congress has been able to read the complete text of Frederick Douglass' famous June 1, 1865, Address at Cooper Union, in which he predicted:
Hereafter when men think of slavery, they will think of murder, Hereafter when men think of slaveholders, they will think of assassins: Hereafter when men think of southern chivalry they will think of our starving prisoners at Andersonville, Hereafter when men think of southern honor, they will think of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Deny it who will, Doubt it who may--that hell black deed sprung from the very heart of the aristocratic class of the south.
That Douglass' words aren't necessarily comfortable to the modern Southerner doesn't make them less true.
We are 150 years removed from the end of the Civil War, from the murder of Abraham Lincoln, and there are still apologists for the Lost Cause, people who will contend, as Booth did in his diary, that the South was not fighting for "the continuance of slavery" but for some cause as "noble and far greater than those that urged" the Revolutionary fathers on. Because even though Booth argued slavery was "one of the greatest blessings (both for [slaves] and us), that God has ever bestowed upon a favored nation," it was an inadequate, base motivation. Whatever benefits Booth claimed accrued to slaves--"witness their elevation and enlightenment above their race elsewhere," he wrote--the peculiar institution was as aberrational in the "civilized" world of the 1860s as the death penalty is today.
What drives this sort of fabulation is the instinctive, self-evident truth that for the South's cause to be genuinely just, the war had to be about something more than continuing the economic advantages that derived from an enslaved labor force. Because we cannot bear to think of what William Burroughs called the "naked lunch on the end of every fork," we rationalize and romanticize, glaze over rough history with honeyed nostalgia. Within the past 10 years I've heard Abraham Lincoln dog-cussed by semi-professional Southerners. No doubt there are junior college instructors who think of him as a dictator. All of us eventually make for ourselves the Lincoln we think we need.
Americans know the famous words from the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address, the House Divided speech in Springfield, those phrases that trip from the tongues of social studies teachers and disgruntled self-styled patriots alike. Lincoln is not quite an American sphinx, for we have his papers filled with his words, but he is still a mystery. There are many Lincolns, and some are not exemplary.
Stare long and hard enough at Lincoln and you go blind or mad; Whitman noted that his face was "so awful ugly it became beautiful." We take for granted the greatness of the man in the photographs, the stern, apish and inevitably unsmiling Abe, admonishing us across time, his rugged silver gaze frozen in a gravity-lending daguerreotype.
Lincoln gazes at us with something we might interpret as expectation or quiet beseechment. There is sadness, resignation, the weariness of an honorable if pragmatic man unrelieved by dreams of heaven. Lincoln, unchurched and probably irreligious, knew he was going to die. He knew he was dust and it made him gloomy.
A photograph of Lincoln is essentially an arrangement in black and white, and the closer we look, the more clearly we see binary corpuscles in the apparently gray grain. As with all great men, we all choose, we all elect, our own Lincoln, be it the amiable, persistent cartoon or the Christ figure who died for the sins of his countrymen.
Lincoln may have been a saint, but he was no abolitionist, although he privately abhorred slavery. Or maybe he just understood the world was changing and the practice would soon become untenable. Lincoln was right to seek to hold the secessionist states to the Union by force, but the means by which he enforced his will was not sanctioned by the Constitution.
This is a Lincoln I admire, though at times it's difficult to reconcile faith in the rule of law or strict attention to principle with the ruthless pragmatism of Honest Abe. Lincoln made, perhaps, a principle of pragmatism, he developed it into a strain of Americanism.
This is not good enough, but it will have to do. Though there are theorists, crackpot and otherwise, who can conceive of alternative histories with sunny results. Lincoln the Outlaw saved us--an "almost chosen people"--and positioned America as the world's last best hope.
Lincoln is there for all of us; we take what we need, we leave--or ignore the rest. That is the way it is with great men; we can't look them square in the face or return their gaze directly. The only way to get at Lincoln is from the side, from the back, creeping up with palmed derringers.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 02/15/2015