Abraham Lincoln a Racist?

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_lincoln_colonization

"McLEAN, Va. – Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has inspired Americans for generations, but consider his jarring remarks in 1862 to a audience of free blacks, urging them to leave the U.S. and settle in Central America.
"For the sake of your race, you should sacrifice something of your present comfort for the purpose of being as grand in that respect as the white people," Lincoln said, promoting his idea of colonization: resettling blacks in foreign countries on the belief that whites and blacks could not coexist in the same nation.
Lincoln went on to say that free blacks who envisioned a permanent life in the United States were being "selfish" and he promoted Central America as an ideal location "especially because of the similarity of climate with your native land — thus being suited to your physical condition."

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Posted By: Locknar





Well, he was a Republican.:cool:
 
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Puppycow said:
It was 1862 when he said that.
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Exactly.

The question reminds me of debates as to whether or not Shakespeare was anti-semitic (Merchant of Venice).

By today's standards, Lincoln would be considered racist. But he isn't alive today, so that's a silly thing to do. By the standards of the day, I would say he wasn't especially enlightened on his attitude toward race, but he certainly wasn't any worse than most people.

There's a great bit in Huckleberry Finn where Huck is considering the morality of helping his friend Jim escape (or so they both think). He considers it wrong to hurt innocent people (the Widow Douglas--Jim's owner), but he decides to go through with it anyway, even if it damns his soul to hell. This of course was written some 20 years after the Civil War, so it calls to mind the idea of applying different moral conventions at different times.
 
Lincoln was a man of his times. He wanted slavery to end, but he did not at any time in the 1860 (or before) campaign for it's abolition, as many of what we would today call the 'far left' at the time demanded. He was willing to leave slavery alone in the states that it currently existed in, but did want it prohibited from the new territories being opened and considered for statehood. His (and the Republicans platform) was that slavery would eventually become uneconomical and die out, giving the country time to figure out how to adjust to the newly free black man.

The South rejected this Republican strategy and the Civil War followed (and no, I am not interested in starting a 500-post thread on the cause of the Civil War, I believe there is a quite serviceable one in the History Forum).

Lincoln looked at many options, because he could see the problems of a nation with several million new black citizens that were feared and hated not only by Southern whites, but by most working-class whites in the North (see the New York draft riots of 1863 and who they targeted).

He tried to convince leaders in the 'border states' (Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, Kentucky) of a plan to 'sell' their slaves to the US Government, who would then emancipate them, hoping this would lead to the South accepting this idea (thus saving lives and money, as this would be cheaper than fighting a war). And he also looked at the colonization idea because of the difficulties he saw for blacks (and considering the history of American race relations 1865-circa 1965, he was rather prescient, IMHO).

Lincoln's greatness was when he realized that the slaveowners would not voluntary give up slavery and the free and newly-free blacks would not give up on America (for most of them had roots in this land longer than most whites), he faced the facts and made the difficult decisions; which is why his monument is still the one place I seek out when I am in Washington.

IMHO of course; YMMV.
 
Bruce Catton, trilogy, Mr Lincoln's Army, Glory Road, Stillness at Aptomattox.

First volume.

Discussion, serious discussion, in the Lincoln cabinet to buy the slaves off the Southern Plantations and ship them back to Africa. Didn't work out, in part due to the "North" not wishing to pay for that effort (it cost about 10-20X that to wage the Civil War ...) on material grounds (where you gonna raise that kind of money?) and on moral grounds to the tune of something like ...

"We shouldn't have to pay them to do something that isn't right in the first place."

Better idea to kill a half a million of each other, of course.

This is why politicians need to be treated with great wariness. They come up with some ideas that don't quite work out.
 
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Lincoln's ideas changed as the war went on.
Anyway, by 1860's standards Lincoln was a extreme liberal on race. I am getting tired of these fools who never take the era a historical figure was in before judging him.
 
dudalb said:
Lincoln's ideas changed as the war went on.
Anyway, by 1860's standards Lincoln was a extreme liberal on race. I am getting tired of these fools who never take the era a historical figure was in before judging him.
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Yes. And also people who take a quote or even a whole incident out of a person's life and build it into claiming things like being a racist. Those of you who have lives know that you have done and said many things in your lives and that they do not all add up to a single, unalterable persona. Thomas Jefferson argued "unalienable rights" but had slaves (who presumably were denied the right to liberty). A quotation or a snapshot in time is not the whole person. People have many dimensions.

Abraham Lincoln at one time argued that he would preserve the union if it meant freeing no slaves. Things changed. He changed with them. If you tried to judge his whole life based on the things he said in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, you'd get a totally skewed perspective on who he really was, the protean politician who tried to lead in a time of severe moral conflicts. Trying to peg him into a single stance is embarrassing more to the person doing the pegging than it is to who he is trying to peg.
 
applecorped said:
"McLEAN, Va. – Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has inspired Americans for generations, but consider his jarring remarks in 1862 to a audience of free blacks, urging them to leave the U.S. and settle in Central America.
"For the sake of your race, you should sacrifice something of your present comfort for the purpose of being as grand in that respect as the white people," Lincoln said, promoting his idea of colonization: resettling blacks in foreign countries on the belief that whites and blacks could not coexist in the same nation.
Lincoln went on to say that free blacks who envisioned a permanent life in the United States were being "selfish" and he promoted Central America as an ideal location "especially because of the similarity of climate with your native land — thus being suited to your physical condition."




Well, he was a Republican.:cool:
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I'm not a Republican and I don't share many views with them but I don't think they're objectively unintelligent people.

Anyways yes, Abe Lincoln was a pretty huge racist, it's very clear by the historical record that Abe's administration's least concern in the Civil War was the end to slavery. There are far more damning quotes for that matter, I'll spare everyone them but they are highly google-able.

I did want to post in here because this particular quote is very interesting. There were a lot of theories in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries about climates and their alleged weakening effect on people's mental and physical constitution. In the 18th century in fact there was a school of thought called degeneracy thesis held by intellectuals in Europe that the entire New World was inherently inferior in climate and landmass which is what made the Americans and the "uncivilized" people of the region that predated them.

I'm very surprised Lincoln espoused something akin to this theory. I had never read this particular quote before though I did hear him talk about mass relocating slaves.
 
Hutch said:
Lincoln was a man of his times. He wanted slavery to end, but he did not at any time in the 1860 (or before) campaign for it's abolition, as many of what we would today call the 'far left' at the time demanded. He was willing to leave slavery alone in the states that it currently existed in, but did want it prohibited from the new territories being opened and considered for statehood. His (and the Republicans platform) was that slavery would eventually become uneconomical and die out, giving the country time to figure out how to adjust to the newly free black man.

The South rejected this Republican strategy and the Civil War followed (and no, I am not interested in starting a 500-post thread on the cause of the Civil War, I believe there is a quite serviceable one in the History Forum).

Lincoln looked at many options, because he could see the problems of a nation with several million new black citizens that were feared and hated not only by Southern whites, but by most working-class whites in the North (see the New York draft riots of 1863 and who they targeted).
He tried to convince leaders in the 'border states' (Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, Kentucky) of a plan to 'sell' their slaves to the US Government, who would then emancipate them, hoping this would lead to the South accepting this idea (thus saving lives and money, as this would be cheaper than fighting a war). And he also looked at the colonization idea because of the difficulties he saw for blacks (and considering the history of American race relations 1865-circa 1965, he was rather prescient, IMHO).

Lincoln's greatness was when he realized that the slaveowners would not voluntary give up slavery and the free and newly-free blacks would not give up on America (for most of them had roots in this land longer than most whites), he faced the facts and made the difficult decisions; which is why his monument is still the one place I seek out when I am in Washington.

IMHO of course; YMMV.
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That's the way I'm reading it.
He's telling blacks, "Look, you might be free, but there's a damn good chance you're not going to be welcomed. Perhaps its best if you left."

Sounds correct to me. Does it sound morally correct? Nope. But that is a different issue. Acknowleding that there is hate in the world, and it might be in your best intrest if you left the area of hate...there's nothing morally wrong about that.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
Exactly.

The question reminds me of debates as to whether or not Shakespeare was anti-semitic (Merchant of Venice).

By today's standards, Lincoln would be considered racist. But he isn't alive today, so that's a silly thing to do. By the standards of the day, I would say he wasn't especially enlightened on his attitude toward race, but he certainly wasn't any worse than most people.

There's a great bit in Huckleberry Finn where Huck is considering the morality of helping his friend Jim escape (or so they both think). He considers it wrong to hurt innocent people (the Widow Douglas--Jim's owner), but he decides to go through with it anyway, even if it damns his soul to hell. This of course was written some 20 years after the Civil War, so it calls to mind the idea of applying different moral conventions at different times.
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Lincoln left the world the better off for having been here, and that includes the condition of former Africans, the freeing of whom was why he created the Republican party.
 
Beerina said:
Lincoln left the world the better off for having been here, and that includes the condition of former Africans, the freeing of whom was why he created the Republican party.
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I agree with all that, but it contradicts nothing I said (that you quoted).

There was an abolitionist movement (that Lincoln wasn't a part of) that had as much to do with events going forward to end slavery. So again, Lincoln's views on race weren't especially enlightened (there were people alive during Lincoln's liftetime with views on race very similar to consensus views of today), but he was no worse than most.

And I'd agree he was one of our better presidents, though that's a difficult thing to judge. He rose to the presidency at a unique point in history--unlike anything any other president has had to deal with. At any rate, that's not the topic here. As I said, I think the topic question is a silly thing to ask. It's attempting to use contemporary mores to evaluate someone who lived in a different time.

The Huck Finn thing I mentioned before sort of plays with that same notion. For Huck to do what most post-1880 readers would consider to be the right thing (help Jim), he had to do what he'd been brainwashed into believing was very wrong (depriving an innocent person of her "property"), and that he might be damned for it. (And there was the added twist later when Tom Sawyer joined in the plot knowing that Jim was already a free man, so it was all play-acting for him.) Was Huck racist? Again, it's a silly question--or a question that seeks to over-simplify things and ignore the historical context.
 
Thanks to JoeTheJuggler for your intellect. It is very true that there were people alive in that day, a good deal of them even, who had views on race acceptable by today's standards. There were even people who held these views during the era of our country's revolution, those Enlightenment thinkers, albeit a smaller group and suffering the cognitive dissonance of the era that comes with being a minority viewpoint in a position of near aristocracy. Educated, but naive and privileged, out of touch. And indeed, I would add that it is no excuse what people were common to accept in those days if the argument is simply whether Lincoln was a racist or not. There are some--many, in fact-- who believe Lincoln was not a racist even slightly and that he was ahead of his time in a world where literally everyone was racist. Virtually none of that is true.

For that matter, if the argument is that he was not or was never as much a racist as the people his administration was fighting politically and by proxy militarily, that position too falls flat on its face in recognizance of the clear historical record. Lincoln was not shy to express his views. He was very privy to speak quite frankly on matters of racial inferiority and other status-quo prejudiced and now scientifically disproved theories, and indeed on his support for slavery in confederate states:

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.

Abraham Lincoln
Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858 (The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, pp. 145-146.
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"No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give Congress the power to abolish or interfere within any state with the domestic institutions thereof, including that a person's held to labor or service by laws of said State."

Abraham Lincoln
March of 1861
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dudalb said:
Lincoln's ideas changed as the war went on.
Anyway, by 1860's standards Lincoln was a extreme liberal on race. I am getting tired of these fools who never take the era a historical figure was in before judging him.
Click to expand...

In the early 1860s he was still supportive of slavery. I am not judging the man without taking into consideration extenuating circumstance such as era. But if I were it would certainly follow logically in my response to the argument I am rebutting, which is most assuredly failing to consider era and context. Considering era and circumstance in this regard is not totally necessary in any and every argument in the first place, let alone in rebuttal to an argument that doesn't require era and circumstance.
 
cbn620 said:
For that matter, if the argument is that he was not or was never as much a racist as the people his administration was fighting politically and by proxy militarily,
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If that were my argument, I would have said so.

My argument is that it's a silly question to ask whether or not Lincoln was racist by today's standards.

His views on race (which, as has been pointed out doubtlessly changed throughout his life) weren't as enlightened as those of some of his contemporaries, but were no worse than those of most people of his time.
 
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