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It has always been one of the ironies of the era of the Civil War and the end of slavery in the United States that the man who played the role of Great Emancipator of the slaves was so hugely mistrusted and so energetically vilified by the party of abolition. Abraham Lincoln, whatever his larger reputation as the liberator of more than three million black slaves in the Emancipation Proclamation, has never entirely shaken off the reputation of being something of a half-heart about it. [excerpt] Disciplines History | United States History This article is available at The Cupola: Scholarship at Gettysburg College: http://cupola.gettysburg.edu/histfac/1 5. "FIENDS...FACING ZIONWARDS": ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S RELUCTANT EMBRACE OF THE ABOLITIONISTS It has always been one of the ironies of the era of the Civil War and the end of slavery in the United States that the man who played the role of Great Emancipator of the slaves was so hugely mistrusted and so energetically vilified by the party of abolition. Abraham Lincoln, whatever his larger reputation as the liberator of more than three million black slaves in the Emancipation Proclamation, has never entirely shaken off the reputation of being something of a half-heart about it. "There is a counterlegend of Lincoln," acknowledged Stephen B. Oates, "one shared ironically enough by many white Southerners and certain black Americans of our time" who are convinced that Lincoln never intended to abolish slavery, "was a bigot...a white racist who championed segregation, opposed civil and political rights for black people" and "wanted them all thrown out of the country." And a great deal of that reputation is still linked to the denunciations of Lincoln issued by virtually all of those who occupied the abolitionist vanguard, whether they be (as in Frederick Douglass's taxonomy) Garrisonians, Tappanites, Free Soilers, or even old Liberty Party men. It has been a large part of the task of Lincoln biographers ever since to deplore that image of Lincoln as the sort of extremist rhetoric that abolitionism was pretty generally renowned for; or to insist that Lincoln may have had elements of racism in him but gradually effaced them as he moved on his "journey" to emancipation; or to suggest that Lincoln was all along an abolitionist but dragged his feet over emancipation out of pragmatic political considerations. Josiah Gilbert Holland, whose Life of Abraham Lincoln was the first full-dress Lincoln biography in 1866, ridiculed the way in which "Mr. Lincoln has been assailed...for being too slow" to emancipate the 5-FIENDS...FACING ZIONWARDS 134 slaves." Holland believed that Lincoln certainly "saw the time of emancipation coming," but he "felt himself still withheld from meddling with slavery by any sweeping measure" until 1862 because of his respect for the Constitution and his unwillingness to precipitate the border slave states into secession. Isaac Arnold, a one-time Democrat but strong anti-slavery ally of Lincoln's in the Civil War Congress, upped the ante of justification by insisting that "Lincoln in his younger days dreamed of being an emancipator" and "had always wished to emancipate the negroes," but 'wished the change to 'come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything.'" And even much more recently, Michael Burlingame sees Lincoln's "core" value as "a deep hatred of slavery" and believes that "Lincoln was hardly a reluctant emancipator." David Donald re-assuringly observes that "Lincoln's views on slavery were not, in fact, so far from those of his critics"; the only reason why he did not join those critics earlier as an abolitionist activist was "because he had so little personal knowledge of slavery." LaWanda Cox, Lincoln's most vigorous academic justifier, writes that there is actually "something breathtaking in his advance from prewar advocacy of restricting slavery's spread to foremost responsibility for slavery's total, immediate, uncompensated destruction by constitutional amendment." It is only because "the constraints under which Lincoln felt he must labor were not always recognized by antislavery men," that Lincoln, then and now, has been charged with "irresolute policy and wavering commitment." Still, not even the most vigorous apologists for Lincoln can entirely escape the sense of distance, no matter how varying they estimate its distance, between the Emancipator and the abolitionists. Indeed, they underestimate it, for the differences the abolitionists saw between themselves and Lincoln were not illusory or mere matters of timing and policy. They involved 5-FIENDS...FACING ZIONWARDS 135 not only the aggrievement of the righteous, but also the irritation of Lincoln himself; and not only quarrels over timetable and voting rights, but unbridgeable cultural issues. And only when those differences are allowed their full play can we begin to recognize how deeply Lincoln's place in the story of slavery's end upsets some of the most recent, broad theoretical constructions of the anti-slavery movement, and how much it questions the moral and political assumptions of American reform, which have always drawn strength from the abolitionist example, rather than Lincoln’s, ever since. That the abolitionists disliked Lincoln almost unanimously cannot be in much doubt. They themselves said it too often, beginning as early as the mid-1850s, when Illinois abolitionists looked at Lincoln with a measure of suspicion as a recruit to the anti-slavery cause. Chicago newspaper editor Charles H. Ray told Elihu Washburne in December, 1855, that Lincoln would probably be a highly unreliable ally of the new Republican party. "I must confess I am afraid of 'Abe'" because "he is Southern by birth, Southern in his associations and southern, if I mistake not, in his sympathies." Besides, "his wife" -Mary Todd Lincoln -"is a Todd, of a pro-slavery family, and so are all his kin." And the suspicions only became deeper from the moment he stepped into the national spotlight as the Republican candidate for the presidency in 1860. Charles Grandison Finney, the New School revivalist and president of the nation's abolitionist hotbed, Oberlin College, scored Lincoln in the first issue of the Oberlin Evangelist to appear after the nominating convention: The Republican Convention at Chicago have put in nomination for President 5-FIENDS...FACING ZIONWARDS 136 Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, a gentleman who became widely known a year and a half ago by his political footrace against S.A. Douglas for the place of United States Senate from their state. In that campaign he won laurels on the score of his intellectual ability and forensic powers; but if our recollection is not at fault, his ground on the score of humanity towards the oppressed race was too low. In the eyes of black abolitionist Hezekiah Ford Douglass, Lincoln was no significant improvement on Stephen A. Douglas during the famous Lincoln-Douglas senatorial campaign in 1858; and Lincoln's stature suffered no improvement for Douglass during the 1860 presidential campaign. "We have four parties in this country that have marshalled themselves on the highway of American politics, asking for the votes of the American people," Douglass wrote, but "so far as the principles of freedom and the hopes of the black man are concerned, all these parties are barren and unfruitful; neither of them seeks to lift the negro out of his fetters, and rescue this day from odium and disgrace." Lincoln, in particular, was no different from any of the opposition. I do not believe in the anti-slavery of Abraham Lincoln, because he is on the side of this Slave Power of which I am speaking, that has possession of the Federal Government. ...Now, two years ago, I went through the State of Illinois for the purpose of getting signers to a petition, asking the Legislature to repeal the 'Testimony Law,' so as to permit colored men to testify against white men. I went to prominent Republicans, and among others, to Abraham Lincoln and Lyman Trumbull, and neither of them dared to sign that petition, to give me the right to 5-FIENDS...FACING ZIONWARDS 137 testify in a court of justice! ...If we sent out children to school, Abraham Lincoln would lick them out, in the name of Republicanism and anti-slavery! Lincoln's election in November, 1860, did little to mollify abolitionist criticism, much less to give them joy at the prospect of a publicly anti-slavery president in the White House. Lincoln's unwillingness to use the outbreak of the Civil War in the spring of 1861 a pretext for immediate abolition convinced William Lloyd Garrison that Lincoln was "unwittingly helping to prolong the war, and to render the result more and more doubtful! If he is 6 feet 4 inches high, he is only a dwarf in mind!" Garrison had never really believed that Lincoln's Republicans "had an issue with the South," and Lincoln himself did nothing once elected to convince him otherwise. Lincoln's first annual message to Congress in December, 1861, nettled Garrison for its promises to restrain the scope of the war from becoming a "violent and remorseless, revolutionary struggle." Remorseless revolutionary conflict was exactly what Garrison was praying for as a means toward destroying slavery. "What a wishy-washy message from the President!" Garrison exclaimed, "He has evidently not a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins; and he seems incapable of uttering a humane or generous sentiment respecting the enslaved millions in our land." Frederick Douglass, who had parted fellowship with Garrison over the issue of noninvolvement in politics, hoped for better than Garrison did from Lincoln, but only seemed to get more disappointments. Lincoln's presidential inaugural, with its promises not to interfere with Southern slavery if the southern states attempted no violent withdrawal from the Union, left Douglass with "no very hopeful impression" of Lincoln; if anything Lincoln had only confirmed Douglas
