ABRAHAM LINCOLN: HISTORY’S FAVORITE RACIST.

Many regard good ol’ Honest Abe as a champion of race relations and someone who was far ahead of his time. He was our 5th President if your mom dropped you when you were little and is one of the most respected men ever to be in the White House. Further digging into the man he really was shows that he was a little too honest in his beliefs. In a debate with Stephen A. Douglas, a representative from Illinois, he said the following:

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything. (1)

There’s very little redeeming value in the above statement. The first sentence is about as clear cut as is can be, coming just short of him flat out stating, “I hate black people.” This was in 1858, a time period that was so racist “negro” was considered polite. Fortunately for us, we have access to the transcript of the debate allowing us to analyze this further. I relate this transcript to waves eroding a beach front that is the Abraham Lincoln we once revered. What is alarming to me about the above comment is that he opened with it, meaning that it wasn’t a curve ball question or “gotcha” journalism. It can also be logically concluded that he hadn’t planned on speaking about this subject. The couple sentences he said before the above statement spell this out clearly,

While I was at the hotel to—day, an elderly gentleman called upon me to know whether I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people. [Great Laughter.] While I had not proposed to myself on this occasion to say much on that subject, yet as the question was asked me I thought I would occupy perhaps five minutes in saying something in regard to it. (2)

Firstly, not only was that his opening statement, it was also his opening joke. It is very telling and upsetting that the mention of equality was met with “great laughter”. Secondly, the transcriber of the debate was so racist he separated the word “today”. Another distasteful statement rose it’s ugly head a couple sentences later when the subject switched to interracial marriage,

I will also add to the remarks I have made (for I am not going to enter at large upon this subject), that I have never had the least apprehension that I or my friends would marry negroes if there was no law to keep them from it, [laughter] (2)

Lincoln states that even if it was legal for whites and blacks to marry, he still couldn’t imagine doing it. That’s like when Leslie, a high school crush of mine, said to me after I asked her out, “I have a boyfriend, but even if I didn’t, I don’t think I would say yes.”

What I would like to discover is how we developed this skewed view of Abraham Lincoln in the first place. My theory is that people read the statements he made about opposing slavery then stopped reading further. Lincoln did say that slavery was wrong but a cornerstone for the Southern economy, therefore some kind of necessary evil in his eyes. Part of him being mislabeled as a race relations visionary was his Emancipation Proclamation, even though it did very little at the time of it’s relevance. Lincoln’s intentions were not to end slavery because it was wrong, even though he grew to believe that. It was because he believed that a country that is half free and half slaved couldn’t function properly.

However, my Grandmas words of discouragement rattle about my brain. Why tarnish the image Abe has in today's world? Simply put, because it is a pernicious belief that slavery ended in 1865 and then all was well again. This is tragically wrong and a failure to our school system, as I remember being taught this myself in my early education. The truth is that from 1865 to 1900 there were still slaves in the South and indentured servants in the North. From 1900-1975 is considered to be the era of segregation and discrimination. From then until now people have considered this to be an era of extreme progress, but I think that historians looking back on this time will do so with cringed faces and shaking heads at the illusion of racial progress Americans think they have made. This is in part because of skewed representations of history, such as Abe Lincoln and others, that water down the horrific treatment of black people in our country's early history. It seems like every 10 years the US government says slavery was 100 more years earlier than it actually was, which both steals the historical context for African Americans to dissent and is a sugarcoating of someone else's suffering.

The two sources I used (amongst others not cited) are below and as always feel free to research these people yourself to see what else you can learn! Till next time!


(1) Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858

(2) http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-lincoln-douglas-debates-4th-debate-part-i/