Well, Lincoln’s birthday has come around again. In recent years it has been to a great extent effaced, being amalgamated with Washington’s as Presidents’ Day. But in my youth it was very much a grand occasion. This had been the case for a long time. In the introduction to his 1909 anthology on the topic, Lincoln’s Birthday (part of his “American Holidays” series), editor Robert Haven Schauffler typifies the regard in which Lincoln was held in his day: “In its inspirational value to youth Lincoln’s Birthday stands among the most important of our American holidays. Its celebration in school and home can not be made too impressive. ‘Rising as Lincoln did,’ writes Edward Deems, ‘from social obscurity through a youth of manual toil and poverty, steadily upward to the highest level of honor in the world, and all this as the fruit of earnest purpose, hard work, humane feeling and integrity of character, he is an example and an inspiration to youth unparalleled in history. At the same time he is the best specimen of the possibilities attainable by genius in our land and under our free institutions.’”
For decades before my birth, “Honest Abe,” rail-splitter, Saviour of the Union, emancipator of the Slaves, was an American hero second only to great Washington himself. His cultus was, indeed, almost a religion. Its shrines were many: the Lincoln Memorial, his birthplace and tomb, his homes in Washington, Indiana, and Illinois, and his murder site. The Lincoln Memorial Shrine, in Redlands, California, was built as a centre of devotion far from the sites of his actual life, and he is of course among the four immortals of Mount Rushmore. Most states of the Union have statues to him, and the Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee was founded in his honour. Lincoln would not get an official presidential library and museum until 2004, as part of the buildup to his bicentennial. The Military Order of the Loyal Legion was founded in April of 1865 in response to Lincoln’s death; it assisted with his funeral — and as the oldest hereditary organisation to emerge from the Civil War, it continues to work to preserve his legacy.
All of this adulation remained intact in my childhood. Indeed, it was exacerbated by three different events. One was the Centennial of the American Civil War. This five year long observance, while on the one hand featuring the Northern and Southern States’ commissions focusing on their respective predecessors having been in the right, also pointed out the near miraculous recovery of a united national spirit that endured in the half century afterwards. Lincoln’s role was of course examined from every possible perspective.
At the same time, some of the key events of the Civil Rights Movement were occurring. Not too surprisingly, as Civil Rights activists sought to dismantle Jim Crow, the spirit of Lincoln as Emancipator was ceaselessly invoked. One would have thought that his reputation could hardly have been higher — until John F. Kennedy was murdered in November of 1963. From that point on, parallels between the two assassinated chief executives were ceaselessly pointed out: one was elected in 1860, the other in 1960; both had vice presidents from the South who succeeded them named Johnson; both were shot in the head on a Friday; and on and on. Part of this, of course, was encouraged by and contributed to the building of a Kennedy cultus, which, however, would not last very long.
Now, to be sure, there was and is an alternate view of Lincoln. One of the features of the afore-mentioned centennial, as of the whole process of reconciliation that followed the Civil War, was the permission afforded vanquished and victors alike to honour their respective heroes. Thus, in the South arose the cultus of “The Lost Cause” — whose major military heroes, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were born in January within one day of each other (Lee on the 19th, Jackson on the 21st) — hence “Lee-Jackson Day” or “Confederate Heroes Day,” still kept in some quarters despite the orgy of anti-Confederate destruction which arose as one symptom of Wokery. Lee’s birthplace, home, and tomb remain shrines to the Lost Cause, as do the home, deathplace, and grave of Jackson — and the last residence of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. If the memory of the Glorious Union is retained by the Loyal Legion and The Sons and The Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War, that of the Lost Cause is upheld by the Military Order of the Stars and Bars, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It is interesting to note that the relations between these two sets of descendants are quite cordial, in keeping with the example set by their forebears in such events as the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion, which featured the survivors of Pickett’s charge race down the hill into the waiting arms of their equally aged former opponents.
In any case, one could hardly expect the inheritors of the Lost Cause to view Lincoln in the same heroic light as those of the Glorious Union. Some years ago, reading a copy of the Southern Partisan Magazine, I came across an article entitled “The Dark Side of Abraham Lincoln.” It encapsulated Southern dislike of Lincoln. Of course, to be honest, in order to prosecute the war and preserve the Union, he ordered a great many unpleasant things: suspension of habeas corpus; imposition of the then unconstitutional income tax; and very thorough-going censorship. Sometimes the latter was unintentionally funny, as when Lincoln ordered The New York Freeman’s Journal shut down and its editor, Catholic convert James McMaster imprisoned, because the latter had accused Lincoln of being an enemy of free speech. So this too is a view of Lincoln to be considered.
There is another viewpoint — that of those he emancipated from slavery, and their descendants. February is Black History Month because of Lincoln’s birthday and Frederick Douglass’, which follows on February 14. In February 1926, Carter Godwin Woodson — the only son of slaves to receive a PhD., launched “Negro History Week,” the precursor of Black History Month, which encompassed both days. As might be suspected, Douglass, the fiery slave-turned abolitionist, was a powerful symbol for a black population still labouring under Jim Crow (not surprisingly, his last house too is a shrine of sorts to his admirers). Having known and worked with Lincoln during the Civil War, his remarks at the dedication of the Emancipation Monument in Washington on April 14, 1876 are significant, in terms of trying to gauge Lincoln. Calling him “the White Man’s President,” Douglas went on to castigate him: “He had been ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the humanity of the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people. Lincoln was neither our man or our model.” But then he declared: “Can any colored man, or any white man friendly to the freedom of all men, ever forget the night which followed the first day of January 1863, when the world was to see if Abraham Lincoln would prove to be as good as his word?” He then added, “Though Mr. Lincoln shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro, it is hardly necessary to say that in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery….”
What we may take from all three views of Lincoln is that national unity was more important for him than any other consideration; how one reacts to that, of course, depends upon which mythos one accepts. But there can be no doubt of his dedication to that single goal. Forty-one days before his murder in 1865, he gave his second inaugural address, which spelled out his views of the defeated States: “With malice toward none, with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” For Lincoln, binding up those wounds meant a speedy reintegration of the defeated Southern States into the Union, without recrimination, and without further punishment to a broken foe.
The bullet at Ford’s Theatre ended that approach, however; Andrew Johnson was unable to force the Radical Republicans to adhere to Lincoln’s programme of reconciliation. The result, first, was the imposition of Reconstruction, which subjected the South to a military regime under which most Southern whites had no civil rights, while often illiterate blacks acted as figureheads in State and local government for the loathed carpetbaggers. It was in this hate-filled atmosphere that the Ku-Klux-Klan arose. In the mid-1870s, however, Republicans in Washington realised that white Southern votes were need, and State by State, Reconstruction was ended. In a gentleman’s agreement, the white Southern leadership agreed that black civil rights would be retained, even as those of the white were restored.
But starting in the 1890s, when the generation that had made the deal passed from power, the Southern leaders who were raised under Reconstruction decided to get their own back. The result was the gradual imposition of Jim Crow laws, effectively removing blacks from public life, and pushing them effectively into second-class citizenship. On the one hand, this forced the blacks to create a whole network of businesses and institutions. Although these would serve as the springboard of the later Civil Rights Movement, they unhappily collapsed in its wake, alongside the black family. It is worth noting that Confederate Generals Nathan Bedford Forrest and Beauregard had worked and spoken manfully on behalf of racial reconciliation and equality after the war — with the ironic result in the last decade of both men having their statues torn down, and the former being summarily ejected from his tomb. Thus, the poison of that period continues its evil work to the present.
Certainly, there is much else one can say about Lincoln. As a Catholic who has lived most of his life in California, I am grateful for his returning the California Missions to the Church. The seances in the White House under his watch sparked a great deal of interest. His son, Robert Todd Lincoln, would be present not only at his father’s assassination but those of Presidents Garfield and McKinley. Coming to the conclusion that he was some sort of presidential jinx, he became something of a recluse in his later years. But these and many other thoughts aside, what strikes me about Lincoln is that — regardless of one’s opinion about him, good or bad — his death was the second worst thing that happened to the South after its defeat, and the worst that happened to black Americans. Had he not been killed, there would have been no Reconstruction and so no Jim Crow — and our country would be a far better place.
