FORCED INTO GLORY: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream
By Lerone Bennett Jr.
Johnson, 652 pages, $35
Lerone Bennett Jr. writes about Abraham Lincoln in “Forced Into Glory” with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
Lincoln, according to Bennett, was a racist, a white supremacist, “a wily and determined foe of equal rights and Black liberation,” a political opportunist, a naif, “one of the major supporters of slavery in the United States for at least fifty-four of his fifty-six years,” a proponent of ethnic cleansing and a man “who had an Oedipal problem bigger than the Washington Monument.”
Bennett argues–in italics, as he often does–“The Emancipation Proclamation itself was . . . the high point of a brilliant campaign in favor of slavery not freedom.” He contends that Lincoln’s highly praised speeches and phrasemaking were simply “pretty words” that had no relation to reality. He writes that “the fundamental problem of the Gettysburg Address is that Abraham Lincoln didn’t mean a word he said.”
Bennett, the executive editor of Ebony magazine and author of the classic 1961 history of blacks, “Before the Mayflower,” believes that Lincoln has been treated as a secular saint by generations of white historians who turn a blind eye to his shortcomings, particularly on the subject of race. In page after relentless page, Bennett pounds away at his thesis that Lincoln doesn’t deserve the title Great Emancipator, that he should be shunned, rather than praised, by blacks and any other lovers of freedom.
It is true that, over the past 135 years, some authors, among the thousands who have written books about Lincoln, have idealized him. This was particularly prevalent in the decades immediately after his assassination. But for more than half a century, historians have worked hard at developing a well-rounded, nuanced sense of the man behind the myths.
It isn’t always a pretty picture. Lincoln, like many of the people of his time, used the “N” word at times. Like many whites, he was not in favor of giving free blacks the vote or permitting them to sit on juries. (Of course, like other native-born Americans, he didn’t think Irishmen, Italians or Albanians should have those rights either.) He proposed, as part of the answer to the nation’s racial problems, that blacks be given financial help to leave the U.S. and settle in a colony of their own in Africa or Latin America. (As Lincoln explained many times, he thought this would be best for blacks because of the antipathy that many whites, Northern and Southern, held toward them.)
Bennett slams Lincoln repeatedly for this colonization scheme, stating over and over that the president wanted to “deport” blacks–i.e., that he wanted to throw them out of the country. But that’s unfair to Lincoln, and it’s indicative of Bennett’s tendency to overstatement and overkill. The term “deportation” was used in mid-19th Century America for the colonization scheme. In today’s usage, to deport someone, such as a mobster, means to forcibly send that person away from the country. A century and a half ago, however, it didn’t have that sense of compulsion.
In fact, in his official documents and his private conversations, Lincoln talked of the effort to colonize blacks only “with their consent.” Indeed, in a scene that Bennett himself quotes from a Cabinet member’s diary, Lincoln refused to go along with a proposal for forced deportation: “The President objected unequivocally to compulsion. Their emigration must be voluntary and without expense to themselves.”
Bennett dismisses Lincoln’s objections, though, just as he dismisses the efforts of historians to try to figure out how Lincoln’s less-than-praiseworthy words and actions fit with his words and actions on behalf of justice, freedom and equality. Those historians, white and black, have endeavored and continue to endeavor to understand Lincoln in the context of his times, in the context of the monumental issues of his times and in the context of his growth as a human being.
In 1984, John Hope Franklin, the eminent black historian, wrote in the essay “Lincoln’s Evolving View of Freedom” that Lincoln “hated slavery. He always had, and he always would.” Yet Lincoln was also a politician who, throughout his career, had to find his way through a dense interlocking thicket of issues that leant themselves to no simple answers and often required compromise. “One must live with the fact that Lincoln was a politician of consummate skill who was unwilling to fight and lose for a small principle when he could possibly win and put into effect a larger principle,” Franklin wrote.
Bennett, however, isn’t interested in such nuances. For more than 600 pages, he hammers away at Lincoln, taking the most sinister reading of anything remotely negative he can find about the Civil War president and rejecting out of hand anything that could be considered positive.
This is a book filled with rancor and blind to the goodness that millions of Americans, black and white, have found in Lincoln. A better title might have been: “With Malice Toward One.”
