By the time that Stephens wrote, a great deal had happened and there were many reasons why Stephens might cherish the memory of a Lincoln who would have been kinder to the South than the Republicans who eventually took charge of Reconstruction. According to Oates, Lincoln wavered only once—during the dark days of August, —when he considered peace terms that did not include emancipation. With awakened resolution, he vowed to fight the war through to unconditional surrender and to stick with emancipation come what may.
Finally, even if Lincoln does not deserve the title Great Emancipator for his Proclamation, he is entitled to it for his skillful and determined effort in winning congressional ratification of the constitutional amendment that clearly and unequivocally ended slavery in the United States. Lincoln's attitude towards the future of the newly-freed blacks has been a perennial historical question. For many years the dominant school of Reconstruction historiography held that Radical Reconstruction was a grievous and tragic error; moreover, the Page [End Page 34] dominant assumption of that school was that Reconstruction under Lincoln would have been milder and much more protective of white Southern rights and sensibilities than was that administered by the Congress.
Under these circumstances, the contention that Reconstruction would have been milder under Lincoln depicts the President as unwilling to take the steps necessary to protect the freedom of the ex-slaves; once again, Lincoln was not on the side of those who wanted to further the cause of black rights. The issues of Reconstruction, particularly what to do with the former slaves, had appeared early in the Civil War.
One of the solutions promoted by Lincoln was the old idea of colonization, a plan in which blacks would be asked to leave the United States and to establish their own nation. Bennett and other revisionists have charged that Lincoln's continuing support for colonization is further evidence of his refusal to countenance full equality for blacks in this country. An important question for those who study Lincoln's views on race has been: Why did Lincoln support colonization, and did he ever abandon this proposal?
Some of those who defended Lincoln from the charges of racism conceded that although he had been a dedicated colonizationist, he abandoned that position as he evolved "From Intolerance to Moderation. Presumably those who feared that the freed slaves would flock to the North would be pacified by Page [End Page 35] a proposal to resettle blacks elsewhere. Shortly before issuing the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, therefore, Lincoln "made a great fuss about colonization—a ritual he went through every time he contemplated some new antislavery move.
Boritt, who has written a provocative study of Lincoln's ideas, also sees the President's colonization program as motivated in part by strategic interests. Yet, Boritt points out, Lincoln's support for colonization was inconsistent with his deep interest in and understanding of economics. It was clear to anyone who analyzed the question in any depth that the economic resources required to resettle any significant portion of the black population of the United States was simply staggering.
Why then did Lincoln support this impractical policy? Boritt draws on the psychological defense mechanism of avoidance as an explanation of Lincoln's behavior. Arguing that the President avoided analyzing the question because he saw no feasible alternative at the time, Boritt concludes, "One cannot escape the feeling that by , even as the colonization fever was cresting, Lincoln began to allow himself a glimpse of the fact that the idea of large scale immigration was not Fredrickson, whose account of Lincoln's racial views is generally revisionist, argues that Lincoln continued his support of colonization to the very end.
Fredrickson maintains that in April, , Lincoln told General Benjamin Butler that he still saw colonization as an important step for avoiding race war in the South. Once Lincoln rejected colonization he was still faced with the question of determining relationships that would prevail between the freedmen and their former masters. Would blacks have civil and political rights? Should blacks be awarded suffrage? In attempting to ascertain Lincoln's views on these issues, historians have been forced to interpret a small number of documents for clues to what Lincoln would have done had the assassin's bullet not struck him down shortly after the war ended.
Hans L. Trefousse has put Lincoln's Reconstruction policy in a new light by pointing out that the traditional picture of Lincoln as a conservative, struggling desperately to control a group of vindictive radicals from his own party, is simply wrong.
Trefousse argues that Lincoln's differences with the radicals were often merely matters of timing and that Lincoln was able to make good use of the radicals when creating an atmosphere in which his actions on slavery would be accepted.
For the most part Oates follows Trefousse's views on the relationship between the President and congressional leaders, going so far as to avoid using the term "radicals.
Chase's role, Oates comes close to the older view of the relationship between Lincoln and the radicals. Oates charges that Lincoln's reconstruction plan of December, , was praised by virtually all congressional Republicans, including Sumner, but that Chase objected to it apparently for purely political motives. Further, Oates maintains that most biographers have misinterpreted the Second Inaugural Address.
Although the President did promise "charity for all" he did not mean that he intended to be gentle with the South: "Still preoccupied with the war as a grim purgation which would cleanse and regenerate his country, Lincoln endorsed a fairly tough policy toward the conquered South. An important document employed by several of those who defend Lincoln from the charges of racism is a letter to General James Wadsworth, said to have been written by Lincoln early in The letter not only discusses reconstruction but also goes much further than the President's public remarks up to that time.
Page [End Page 39] In the letter Lincoln apparently endorsed Negro suffrage: "I cannot see, if universal amnesty is granted, how, under the circumstances, I can avoid exacting in return universal suffrage, or, at least, suffrage on the basis of intelligence and military service. Although the original of the letter has never been found, the editors of Lincoln's Collected Works lent it apparent authenticity by including it in their publication.
As the editors' footnote makes clear, however, the source of the letter is suspect. It was found in the New York Tribune , which, in turn, claims to have copied it from a periodical called the Southern Advocate.
The editors note that "no other reference has been found to the original letter to Wadsworth. I can see no reason why we should assume that any part of the letter is authentic—it doesn't sound like Lincoln, and the ideas expressed Page [End Page 40] in it are not consonant with what we know about Lincoln's thoughts at the time he supposedly wrote the letter. Although Johnson established the dubious nature of most of the Wadsworth letter, those who defended Lincoln's record on race have been able to argue that other evidence substantiates the President's generous views on Negro rights.
As the eminent constitutional historian Harold Hyman has put it, "Professor Johnson has wasted his efforts to sunder the links that bind Lincoln to the egalitarians of a century past, the chain still holds. Lincoln not only suggested in a private letter to Governor Michael Hahn that some Negroes be given the vote, he repeated the recommendation in his public address; and he further suggested that blacks be provided with public schools.
In that final address Lincoln expressed ideas that were not limited to Louisiana, and Hyman contends that Lincoln was moving further along the lines of giving full rights to the freedmen. Although Hyman concedes that it is impossible to say how far Lincoln would have gone, the friends of black rights "shared confidence that Lincoln would keep moving in the happy direction he had already taken. The contention that Lincoln's policies for Louisiana indicate that he was moving rapidly to a revolutionary policy of reconstructing the South on the basis of black suffrage is the thesis of an exciting new study by Peyton McCrary.
McCrary moves beyond a Page [End Page 41] defense of Lincoln from the attacks of revisionists to a new assertion: Lincoln was the revolutionary leader of a revolution in the making. McCrary starts with the assumption that virtually all historians share: Lincoln was a realist.
Professor McCrary then goes on to argue that "a radical approach to reconstruction was more realistic than Banks' moderate policy The evidence that McCrary cites are Lincoln's approval of the Freedmen's Bureau legislation and his last speech, which hint that he might soon announce a new policy. Lincoln's decision to undermine the radicals in Louisiana by calling for elections before a constitutional convention was not, McCrary argues, evidence of Lincoln's conservatism but rather it was evidence that he had been badly misled by General Nathaniel P.
At last, Lincoln recognized that Louisiana was headed in the wrong direction; he "came to recognize the fragile quality of the Hahn regime's electoral support and became more comfortable with the prospect of Negro suffrage. As a pragmatic politician, if not as a man with a commitment to social justice for the freedmen, Lincoln could hardly have escaped the conclusion that at the end of the war there was nowhere to go but to the left.
Lerone Bennett's article of was the product of the times. American blacks and members of the New Left were convinced Page [End Page 42] that American society was deeply flawed and that it was the product of a corrupt heritage. Moreover, the radicals of the s were impatient with history; they saw the past as a dead weight that could only limit action in the present—and action was what they wanted. Our golden age lay in the future, not the past.
The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, the new Constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they had brought there with them. They walked off from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely ….
It was made obsolete within a half hour of the time when it was spoken. Hemingway claimed that all modern American novels are the offspring of Huckleberry Finn.
It is no greater exaggeration to say that all modern political prose descends from the Gettysburg Address …. Lincoln not only read aloud, to think his way into sounds, but also wrote as a way of ordering his thought … He loved the study of grammar, which some think the most arid of subjects.
Some claimed to remember his gift for spelling, a view that our manuscripts disprove. Spelling as he had to learn it separate from etymology is more arbitrary than logical. It was the logical side of language—the principles of order as these reflect patterns of thought or the external world—that appealed to him. He was also, Herndon tells us, laboriously precise in his choice of words.
He would have agreed with Mark Twain that the difference between the right word and the nearly right one is that between lightning and a lightning bug. He said, debating Douglas, that his foe confused a similarity of words with a similarity of things—as one might equate a horse chestnut with a chestnut horse.
Despite the suggestive images of birth, testing, and rebirth, the speech is surprisingly bare of ornament. The language itself is made strenuous, its musculature easily traced, so that even the grammar becomes a form of rhetoric. This linking up by explicit repetition amounts to a kind of hook-and-eye method for joining the parts of his address. The rhetorical devices are almost invisible, since they use no figurative language.
I highlight them typographically here. Each of the paragraphs printed separately here is bound to the preceding and the following by some resumptive element. Only the first and last paragraphs do not because they cannot have this two-way connection to their setting. But Lincoln makes them perform analogous work.
The compactness of the themes is emphasized by this reliance on a few words in different contexts. A similar linking process is performed, almost subliminally, by the repeated pinning of statements to this field, these dead, who died here , for that kind of nation.
Lincoln forged a new lean language to humanize and redeem the first modern war. Lincoln did not argue law or history, as Daniel Webster had. He made history. He came not to present a theory but to impose a symbol, one tested in experience and appealing to national values, expressing emotional urgency in calm abstractions.
He came to change the world, to effect an intellectual revolution. No other words could have done it. The miracle is that these words did. In his brief time before the crowd at Gettysburg he wove a spell that has not yet been broken—he called up a new nation out of the blood and trauma. The results of this were seen almost at once.
Rather, like Webster, he was saying that America was a people accepting as its great assignment what was addressed in the Declaration. Thus Abraham Lincoln changed the way people thought about the Constitution …. The Gettysburg Address has become an authoritative expression of the American spirit—as authoritative as the Declaration itself, and perhaps even more influential, since it determines how we read the Declaration.
For most people now, the Declaration means what Lincoln told us it means, as he did to correct the Constitution without overthrowing it … By accepting the Gettysburg Address, and its concept of a single people dedicated to a proposition, we have been changed. Because of it, we live in a different America. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. In the summer of , General Robert E. Lee pushed northward into Pennsylvania.
The Union army met him at Gettysburg, and from July 1 to July 3, the bloodiest battle of the war ensued. By the time it was over, the Confederates were in retreat, and the battlefield was strewn with more than 50, dead and wounded. Four months later, thousands gathered at Gettysburg to witness the dedication of a new cemetery.
On the program was the standard assortment of music, remarks, and prayers. But what transpired that day was more extraordinary than anyone could have anticipated. I do not like this arrangement. I do not wish to so go that by the slightest accident we fail entirely, and, at the best, the whole to be a mere breathless running of the gauntlet ….
Stockton, D. Edward Everett. Hymn composed by B. Baugher, D. Gene Griessman. Product Details. Resources and Downloads. Get a FREE ebook by joining our mailing list today! By clicking 'Sign me up' I acknowledge that I have read and agree to the privacy policy and terms of use.
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