Last month we celebrated Black History Month. Also, February 12
marked the end of the year-long celebration of the bicentennial of Abraham
Lincoln’s birth. It is not by coincidence that Lincoln’s Birthday
falls within Black History Month.
Since President Ford’s proclamation in1976, every February
has been proclaimed Black History Month. The Month evolved from
Black History Week that had been first promoted in 1926 by the
eminent scholar, Dr. Carter G. Woodson (Berea College, 1903;
Harvard Ph.D., 1912), founder in 1915 of the Association for the
Study of Negro Life and History (now known as the Association for
the Study of African American Life and History) and in 1916 of
the Journal of Negro History. Dr. Woodson chose
the second week of February to build on two days already
celebrated by the African-American community: Lincoln’s birthday
on February 12 and Frederick Douglass’s on February 14. (Douglass
chose February 14 as his birthday because his mother called him
her “little valentine.”)
Many people have heard or read some things about Lincoln
that have tarnished his image in their eyes. Maybe you, too, have
heard or read that he was not an Abolitionist; that he fought the
war to preserve the Union, not to free the slaves; that his
Emancipation Proclamation was of very limited value since it
applied only to slaves behind Union lines; that he entertained
the idea of colonizing Africa with freed slaves; and that he was
racist on the issue of social equality between the races. May I
encourage you to take a fresh look? We may avail ourselves of a
pair of volumes exploring the moral decision-making of Lincoln by
University of Virginia Professor William Lee Miller: his 2002
Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography (2002), from his
youth to his First Inaugural Address, and his 2008 President
Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman. I will proceed
chronologically and briefly.
March 3, 1837 — As a state
legislator, Lincoln made his first antislavery speech.
1849 — During his sole term
in Congress, Lincoln sponsored a bill, with a fellow congressman,
to emancipate slaves in the District of Columbia, the one
jurisdiction in which Congress could constitutionally do
so.
Early 1854 — Lincoln read in
the papers of a bill sponsored by Illinois Senator Stephen A.
Douglas that became the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Allowing slavery to
expand beyond its historical borders stirred Lincoln to the depth
of his being. He later said that it “aroused” him. Lincoln
utilized all the library resources available to him in
Springfield, Illinois, to study the congressional debates and the
history of slavery in the United States since 1776. This was not
an academic exercise. He, a private citizen, prepared to do
battle against Douglas, the best-known Democrat in the country.
Lincoln dismissed the fact that Douglas, in achieving Senate
passage of the bill on March 4 by 37-14, had beaten down the
arguments of the likes of Senators Seward, Chase and
Sumner.
October 1854 — Douglas had
no interest in giving Lincoln any notoriety by debating him.
Instead, Lincoln trailed Douglas. When Douglas was scheduled to
speak, Lincoln would be in the audience, taking notes. After
Douglas finished, Lincoln would announce that he would give his
own speech, either later that day or the next. And so it was —
in his now famous speeches in Springfield on October 4 and Peoria
on October 10, 1854. Sometimes he spoke without Douglas present:
as in Urbana on October 24 and Chicago on October 27. Lincoln
focused exclusively on the issue of slavery in new states,
ignoring the wedge issues of the day: infrastructure (then called
“internal improvements”), immigration (then called nativism), or
drugs (temperance).
February to June 1856
— In February, at the
same time that the Republican Party was organizing on a national
level in meetings in Pittsburgh, Lincoln was the only person not
a newspaper editor to an organizational meeting of the Republican
Party of Illinois in Decatur. In May, he attended the first state
convention in Bloomington. In June, Lincoln’s name was placed in
nomination for vice president at the first national Republican
Convention in Philadelphia. The core plank was the prohibition of
slavery in the territories.
July to October 1858 — When
Lincoln was the Republican nominee for the Senate in 1858, he
continued to engage in informal debates with Douglas: Chicago on
July 10, and Bloomington and Springfield on July 17. Then began
the formal Lincoln-Douglas Debates from August through October of
1858 in seven Illinois towns.
1859 — Lincoln spoke on
behalf of the Republican Party in Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, New
Jersey, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
February 27, 1860 — Lincoln
delivered his address to a full hall at Cooper Union in New York
City. The address was printed in its entirety in a number of
newspapers and distributed as a pamphlet. He delivered similar
addresses throughout New England.
In 175 speeches in six years, Lincoln argued from first
principles — the first principles of morality and the first
principles of the founding of the United States. He argued that
slavery was morally wrong (“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is
wrong”), slavery dehumanized (a word he used) blacks, and the
Declaration of Independence states the moral foundation of the
country (“all men are created equal”). Lincoln argued that the
Founders had only tolerated slavery: they had prohibited slavery
in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (the law governing what are
now Midwest states); they had prohibited the export of slaves in
1794, the import of slaves into Mississippi Territory in 1798,
the trading of slaves by Americans between foreign countries in
1800, and the import of slaves into the U.S. on the first day in
1808 allowed by the Constitution.
November 1860 to February 1861 —
With states seceding one after another, before he had even
been inaugurated, a number of people sought to soften the impact
of Republican Lincoln’s presidency. Lincoln, however, was
unyielding; there would be no geographical expansion of slavery
on his watch. He would not compromise on the core issue of the
Republican Party.
February 21, 1862 — Lincoln
allowed Nathaniel Gordon, a captain of a slaver, to be hanged. He
was the first in U.S. history.
March 6, 1862 — In his
annual message to Congress, Lincoln was the first president to
propose emancipation.
August 22, 1862 — In a
letter to Horace Greeley that was widely published, Lincoln wrote
that if he could save the Union without freeing a slave, he
would. But he also wrote that he wished that “all men every where
could be free” and “If I could save [the Union] by freeing all
the slaves I would do it.”
September 22, 1862 — Lincoln
announced that he would issue the Emancipation Proclamation on
January 1, 1863, effective in all areas then in rebellion. Slaves
so emancipated would remain forever free and those who escaped
into Union territory would be emancipated as well.
January 1, 1863 — Despite
criticism and losses in the 1862 congressional elections, Lincoln
issued the Emancipation Proclamation. From this point on, the
Union Army served as an army of liberation. Moreover, the
Emancipation Proclamation included a provision for receiving
freedmen into the Union forces. By war’s end, some 200,000 — 10%
of all the forces — would serve.
August 10, 1863 — Lincoln
met with Frederick Douglass for the first time. In a eulogy,
Douglass delivered at Cooper Union on June 1, 1865, Douglass said
Lincoln was “emphatically the black man’s president.”
December 8, 1863 — Lincoln
issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction. But he
exempted persons who treated blacks, or whites in charge of them,
“otherwise than lawfully as prisoners of war.” He did this
because Confederates were executing black Union soldiers and
sailors and their white officers.
August 19, 1864 — In a
second meeting with Frederick Douglass — one initiated by
Lincoln – Lincoln waved off a (white) governor so he could have a
long talk with his “friend Frederick Douglass.” In the context of
the upcoming elections, Lincoln sought Douglass’s advice on an
issue and, fearful that he would lose the 1864 election and that
a Democratic President would end the war, Lincoln asked Douglass
to work to bring slaves into the Union lines.
January 1, 1865 — The
proposed 13th Amendment to ban slavery passed the Senate. (On
March 4, 1861, the Senate had passed a proposed 13th Amendment to
protect slavery.) Four million people,
one-third of the population of the South, had been
enslaved.
March 4, 1865 — Lincoln
delivered his Second Inaugural, portions of which Frederick
Douglass could recite from memory.
Of course, Lincoln did not act alone. Politically, while
1.3 million had voted for the first national Republican ticket
headed by Frémont in 1856, an additional half million voted for
Republican Lincoln in 1860. In 1864, despite the burden of a war
that had lasted three and one-half years, the Lincoln/Johnson
ticket for the National Union Party received the support of an
additional 400,000 votes (2.2 million in total). Militarily, on
the morning Lincoln delivered his First Inaugural, March 4, 1861,
the U.S. armed forces consisted of 17,000 men. By the war’s
conclusion, two million men had served on the Union side. Of
these, 360,000 had died (110,000 were killed in
action) and 275,200 had been wounded but survived their
wounds.
While Lincoln did not act alone, he did act. Can we imagine
our country’s history without him? Dr. Woodson rightly chose the
week of Lincoln’s birth and that of his friend Frederick Douglass
in which to celebrate Black History Week.
