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.Trefousse,“Lincoln and Race Relations,” in Charles M.Hubbard, ed., Lincoln and His Contemporaries (Macon, Ga., 1999), 87–99.For documentary collections, see Trefousse, Lincoln’s Decision for Emancipation (Philadelphia, 1975); Arthur Zilversmit, Lincoln on Black and White (Malabar, Fla., 1983); Brooks Simpson, Think Anew, Act Anew: Abraham Lincoln on Slavery, Freedom, and Union (Wheeling, Ill., 1998); Michael Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War: Selected Writings and Speeches (New York, 2000).Some new light might be shed on Lincoln’s feelings about race when Thomas P.Lowry and Beverly Lowry complete their examination of Lincoln’s pardons.There304T h e L i n c o l n E n i g m amight be a slight suggestion that in cases of rape, the president was harsher on blacks than on other people.Lincoln’s pardons for the Sioux after the 1862 Minnesota uprising might be looked at in this context as well.Conversely, further examination is needed for his 1864 meeting with Frederick Douglass at a time when it appeared that the president would not be relected.Deeply worried about blacks remaining in slavery in a victorious Confederacy, Lincoln appeared to advocate greater slave resistance and their escape to the North.Though white racists tend to hate Lincoln, some, from the early twentieth century to the present, have claimed him as the champion of white supremacy who wished to deport blacks from the United States.Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman (New York, 1905), which grew into D.W.Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, epitomized this orientation.Ironically, a like view, though never entirely absent from the black community, came to be increasingly adopted from the 1960s forward as part of the Civil Rights movement.Words of love that, for example, as Ralph Ellison wrote, seemed to be written less and less.In his posthumously published Juneteenth (New York, 1999), a black jazzman turned preacher thinks dreamily before the Lincoln Memorial: Now I understand: That look, that’s us! It’s not in the features but in what that look, those eyes, have to say about what it means to be a man who tries to live and struggle against all the troubles of the world with but the naked heart and mind, and who finds them more necessary than all the power of wealth of great armies.Yes, that look and what put it there made him one of us.It wasn’t in.his skin-tone that they tried to ease him into, but in that look in his eyes and his struggle against the things which put it there and sad-dened his features.It’s in that, in being the kind of man he made himself to be that he’s one of us.“Ain’t that him, Revern? Ain’t that Father Abraham?”.And too full to speak, he smiled; and in silent confirmation he was nod-ding his head, thinking.Yes, with all I know about him and his contradictions, yes.And with all I know about men and the world, yes.And with all I know about white men and politicians of all colors and guises, yes.And with all I know about the things you had to do to be yourself—yes!Long before Ellison’s book at last saw light, the pictures of Lincoln that used to be in black homes, that spoke of kinship and the promise of freedom, started to come down.As Negro History Week became Black History Month, it was forgotten that Carter Woodson, who started it all, timed it to tie black history to the birthdays of both Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.The clearest expression of a hostile African-American view came from Lerone Bennett, Jr.: “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?” Ebony (Feb.1968): 35–42.The article declared that Lincoln “is not the light.he is in fact standing in the light, hiding our way.” Thirty-two years later Bennett enlarged his quest into a 650-page sensation-alist magnum opus: Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago, 2000).The book argued that racism was “the center and circumference” of Lincoln’s“being,” and that he was “one of the major supporters of slavery in the United States, a champion of ‘ethnic cleansing.’” The Great Emancipator transformed into the Racist-F o r F u r t h e r R e a d i n g305in-Chief.Of course black resentment of white expectations of gratitude for an emancipation that a century and more later still did not bring full equality is understandable.Some may also find it heartening to see African Americans standing confidently, independent of the white Emancipator images.But as history, Forced Into Glory brings to mind Lincoln’s comment about “a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse.” Basler, et al., eds., Collected Works of Lincoln, 3:16.If Bennett distorts history, he also partakes of larger trends in American culture.For a penetrating look at the changing picture of Lincoln, see Merrill D.Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York, 1994).Black disengagement from Lincoln was part of the drive for autonomy, a desire to stand on one’s own feet.And it defined those feet in terms of color, just as much the United States did.One might see more here, an African-American effort to point to a less than democratic past and to act as the conscience of the nation.In any event, black disengagement paralleled the country’s disen-chantment, indeed that of no small part of the world, with “great men.” After all, many of the twentieth century’s most influential leaders turned out to be monsters like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and lesser men of that ilk.Though few tried to picture Lincoln in those terms, the monsters also took their toll on the reputations of decent leaders.American democracy grew both more sophisticated and more jaded.Lincoln pictures came down from white homes, too.Of course Lincoln is a symbol as well [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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