In a front-paged post on My Left Wing and in his own blog The Field Negro, Field Negro wrote a piece titled Uncomfortable truths regarding Abraham Lincoln’s racial attitudes.
In it, he wrote:
Lincoln, like most of his peers and people of his time, was a racist.
Still, we love the man, and abstruse as it may seem, that love might be justified
This just about sums up the situation, although I wonder if Field Negro includes Africans and America’s slaves in the group to which he refers as “people of his [Lincoln’s] time”. I personally believe that he should do so if he doesn’t, because I am betting that a great number of the very people who were being conquered and enslaved eventually bought into the same idea. Most of the ones who did not go down fighting, anyway. People who get their asses absolutely. totally, overwhelmingly kicked tend to blame themselves in my experience, and that is precisely what happened to black Africa. In point of fact, that is what continues to happen to most of Africa, and we can only hope and pray that the evolutionary forces I sketch out below remain in action until Africa itself is freed of the constraints of institutional racism.
However, I think that Field Negro seriously underestimates Lincoln. He was indeed a “product of his time” as the meme usually runs, but he was a superior product of that time, and he grew enormously during his tragically short life.
Read on for my further thoughts on the matter if you are inclined to do so.
Lincoln was acting on observed truth as he was permitted to see it by his position in the culture, Field Negro.
As are we all. I myself consider my totally pan-racial life…as Field and many other readers know, I am a white man who plays primarily jazz and latin musics, both of which are largely the product of the African experience in the Americas…to be a product of the same set of forces as was Lincoln’s life, although a product that was eased and accelerated by the previous 150 years of change. I grew up in an almost totally white, totally segregated, totally “racist” system…white, northern, middle-class suburban America, post-WW II…and had I not been exposed to a plenitude of seriously superior African-American minds through my interest in music at a relatively young age, who knows? I might have bought into the prevalent attitudes of my culture and never wised up. The American media system was just barely cracking open racially in the late ’50s…Dinah Washington and Ray Charles, Little Richard and Nat King Cole, Jackie Robinson and Count Basie and Jim Brown…and if one did not look deeper into the reality of what was up, all of that could be easily written off as “Them people shore kin sing an’ dance, cain’t they? And RUN!!! Boy howdy!!!”
I was dumb lucky.
I heard Bird and Diz and Monk and Mingus and the rest of the beboppers at 14 and realized that there was more to be understood.
Much more. (There still is, truth be told.).
However, on the evidence of what Lincoln could see during his lifetime in 1800s America, the vast majority of black people were indeed inferior to Europeans on an intellectual level. He and the rest of the world…black, brown, beige and whatever other colors imaginable…had no real science to suggest otherwise to them, no theories of evolution or culture or psychology, only rumour, history, what they had been taught and what they observed personally.
They were dead wrong, but they had no idea…besides perhaps an emotionally-based unease among the more perceptive among them…how wrong they really were.
None at all.
At least there was none at all until the luckiest among them personally met black people whose gifts were such that they managed to transcend their position on the bottom of this ongoing shitpile that we laughingly call “civilization.” This was most certainly the case with Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, for whom Lincoln openly and publicly expressed the highest of respect.
As Douglass recalled, he first met Lincoln in August. Later he explained to a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia “how the president of the United States received a black man at the White House.”
To great applause, he explained that the White House messenger respectfully invited him into the president’s office. Lincoln rose and extended his hand as Douglass entered. “Mr. Douglass, I know you; I have read about you, and Mr. Seward [William Seward, the secretary of state] has told me about you.”
Douglass explained that Lincoln “put me at ease at once.”
Although Lincoln did not promise immediate action on the equal pay issue, he was clearly impressed with the service of African-American troops and seemed to agree that “ultimately they would receive the same [pay].”
Douglass left the meeting much impressed with the president, a man much like himself, sincere, self-educated and self-made. Lincoln, he believed, was worthy of “the prefix Honest” before the nickname Abe.
Lincoln’s respect for Douglass encouraged a clearer anti-slavery position. In his second inaugural address after his re-election in 1864, Lincoln linked the hardships of war to the sinfulness of slavery.
Perhaps, he speculated, the Almighty would continue to punish America “until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”
For Douglass, these words were further proof of “the solid gravity of [Lincoln’s] character.”
As a further sign of respect, Lincoln invited Douglass to the White House reception after the address, a gesture unprecedented in presidential history.
As the former slave entered the room, the president announced to his guests, “Here comes my friend Douglass.” Then, taking Douglass’ hand, he asked for a comment on the inaugural speech and added, “there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours.” Douglass complimented the speech, whereupon Lincoln thanked him.
Lincoln had dealt with other blacks during his time in the White House but never on such an equal footing as with Douglass. Both men were well aware of the significance of race for their time. Douglass was realistic in his understanding of Lincoln’s racial assumptions and never regarded him as a thoroughgoing racial egalitarian.
Still, long after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, Douglass remembered his finer qualities. In 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant unveiled the Freedmen’s Monument in Washington, dedicated to the memory of Abraham Lincoln. Douglass then delivered a speech gracious in its praise of the former president.
Although Lincoln “shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race,” Douglass explained to the interracial audience, his actions made him the man whose name was “near and dear to our hearts.”
Then speaking directly to the African-Americans in the audience, Douglass urged gratefulness for “the vast, high and preeminent services rendered to ourselves, to our race, to our country and to the whole world by Abraham Lincoln.”
This relationship between a former slave and a sitting president of the United States was unique indeed. Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, evidently understood the mutual respect that the two men shared. After Lincoln’s death, she presented Douglass with Lincoln’s favorite walking cane, saying her late husband would have wanted him to have it.
She also wrote, “I know of no one that would appreciate this more than Fred. Douglass.”
Her judgment was sound, for Douglass later wrote, “She sent it to me at Rochester, and I have it in my house to-day, and expect to keep it there as long as I live.”
It has been postulated by many that human evolution…and indeed evolution in general…proceeds in a sort quantum leap of manner. Things go on much as they have and then suddenly for no easily apparent reason the situation jumps to the next level.
Abraham Lincoln’s life came during one of those quantum leaps, as did Frederick Douglass’s. Barack Obama’s presidency is just a part of that continuing leap. I used the word “suddenly” above to describe this sort of change, and despite the seemingly long…long to us short-lived mortals, anyway…150+ years between Lincoln and Obama, in the time frame of the universe that period has only been to the universe as is a nanosecond to us.
So it goes.
Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
Yup.
He was right.
Bet on it.
I am.
Peace.
It’s what’s for dinner, if you wait long enough.
Bet on that as well. Peace, justice and the American way.
The real American way.
Watch.
Later…
AG
