Lincoln, race, and emancipation

Southern Illinoisan, May 5, 2015

 “Great men make history,” the historian C.L.R. James wrote in 1938, “but only such history as it is possible for them to make.” The sesquicentennial of the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln provides an opportunity to reflect on the processes of history and the role played by great men (as well as great women).

The Civil War culminated in the largest expropriation of property in history before the Russian Revolution with the emancipation of four million slaves in the southern and border states. But when the war began in 1861, few people in the North or South anticipated it would turn into a war of abolition. As abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, the war was begun “in the interests of slavery on both sides. The South was fighting to take slavery out of the Union, and the North fighting to keep it in the Union.”

What transformed the nature of the war was the interplay between persistent pressure from abolitionists, both black and white; the actions of the slaves themselves; and Lincoln’s personal capacity for moral and intellectual growth.

Lincoln held a deep, lifelong hatred for slavery (“as much as any abolitionist,” he once said). But he also believed the institution was protected by the Constitution and thus could not be legally abolished where it existed. His goal, and the goal of the newly-formed Republican Party, was to stop the expansion of slavery, believing without the ability to grow it would eventually die of natural causes.

But like most white, antislavery northerners, Lincoln was a white supremacist, doubting whether the races could co-exist in freedom. Thus for most of his life, Lincoln supported colonization—the idea that slaves should be freed and then transported to live somewhere outside the country.

Even as president, Lincoln continued to pursue various colonization schemes, but his views were undergoing a profound reevaluation as he faced the thorny realities of trying to fight a total war without fundamentally touching slavery. At every step of the way, abolitionists pressed Lincoln to view the war in larger terms. Lincoln, the consummate politician, insisted on pragmatism, but in the revolutionary forces unleashed by the war the boundaries of political realism were being wildly revised.

Amidst this dynamic situation, the actions of the slaves themselves proved vital. Whenever the Northern army moved into a region of the South, slaves in the surrounding area walked off their plantations and flocked to Union lines. Despite Northern protestations that this was not a war of abolition, the slaves saw it as such and, in their actions, turned it into one. Ultimately, around one-half million slaves—about twenty percent of the total slave population—walked off the job in what W.E.B. DuBois termed “the general strike.”

This general strike of the slaves transformed Northern strategy. By August 1862, as the president considered issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, in DuBois’ words, “Lincoln faced the truth, front forward; and that truth was not simply that Negroes ought to be free; it was that thousands of them were already free, and that either the power which slaves put into the hands of the South was to be taken from it, or the North could not win the war.”

As Lincoln confronted the changing nature of the war, his own views on race were also rapidly evolving. The self-emancipation of the slaves, as well as the courage shown by the more than 200,000 black soldiers who served in the Union army, tested his white supremacist ideas, while his reflections on the evils of slavery undermined the notion of America as a righteous nation.

By the time of his second inaugural address in March 1865, Lincoln pondered whether the war was God’s retribution for the country’s participation in the evils of slavery. “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash 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.’”

The slaves’ actions had transformed the nature of the war, and Lincoln had followed their lead. Six weeks after giving this speech, the great man was dead, the historical possibilities foreclosed, the revolution left half-finished.