Lincoln as Abolitionist (4)

Those Lincoln quotations may seem a strange way to start off a series of posts on "Lincoln as Abolitionist." But it requires some effort for people today to picture the terms of the debate and the general context in which they took place.

It's certainly not the case that no one had views that more closely resembled today's democratic notions on race. On the contrary. African-American abolitionists like Frederick Douglass certainly didn't view themselves as part of any inferior race, and explicitly called for legal equality for blacks. And there were many white abolitionists, such as Wendell Phillips or William Lloyd Garrison, who held such views, or something close to them.

These questions about Lincoln's attitudes toward blacks come from several sources these days, some more legitimate than others. One is that a critical style of writing history has become more acceptable today than it was in, say, the 1950s. Historians and their readers are just more willing today to look at national heroes, "warts and all," as the saying goes.

Another source of such critical views includes an emphasis on issues of race, made possible and made a priority by the civil rights movement. A variant of this is various "ethnocentric" approaches to history. Historians writing in this broad vein have done great service in de-mystifying the writing of the "antebellum" period of American history.

And some of the less historically rigorous offerings in the "ethnocentric" approaches have encouraged a kind of ahistorical cynicism, which plays to some extent into the most noxious form of the illegitimate versions of 19th-century American history, the neo-Confederate version.

It's lately been a fad in that particular gutter of American society and thought, where pseudohistory is the only kind one is likely to encounter, to try to demonize Lincoln in particular. The Southern Poverty Law Center provides a very readable summary of this trend: Reconstructing Lincoln. And if anyone has the stomach for it - or some Pepto-Bismol handy - you can check out some of this drivel at the neo-Confederate Web site LewRockwell.com in the "King Lincoln Archive".