CHAPTER ONE
Forced Into Glory
Abraham Lincoln's
White Dream
By LERONE BENNETT JR.
Johnson Publishing Company
Read the Review
Among other remarks he said "he knew his Proclamation would
not make a single Negro free beyond our military reach."
—Memoir of John A. Dahlgren
He then went into a prolonged course of remarks about the
Proclamation. He said it was not his intention in the beginning
to interfere with Slavery in the States; that he never would have
done it, if he had not been compelled by necessity to do it, to
maintain the Union ... that he had hesitated for some time, and
had resorted to this measure, only when driven to it by public
necessity ... that he had always himself been in favor of
emancipation, but not immediate emancipation, even by the
States. Many evils attending this appeared to him.
—Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens
Chapter One
The Most Famous Act In U.S.
History Never Happened
The presidential campaign of 1860 was over, and the victor
was stretching his legs and shaking off the cares of the
world in his temporary office in the state capitol in Springfield,
Illinois. Surrounded by the perks of power, at peace
with the world, the president-elect was regaling old acquaintances
with tall tales about his early days as a politician. One of the visitors
interrupted this monologue and remarked that it was a shame that
"the vexatious slavery matter" would be the first question of public
policy the new president would have to deal with in Washington.
The president-elect's eyes twinkled and he said he was reminded
of a story. According to eyewitness Henry Villard, President-elect
Abraham Lincoln "told the story of the Kentucky Justice of the
Peace whose first case was a criminal prosecution for the abuse of
slaves. Unable to find any precedent, he exclaimed angrily: `I will be
damned if I don't feel almost sorry for being elected when the niggers
is the first thing I have to attend to'" (29).
This story, shocking as it may sound to Lincoln admirers, was in
character. For the president-elect had never shown any undue sympathy
for Blacks, and none of his cronies was surprised to hear him
suggest that he shared the viewpoint of the reluctant and biased justice
of the peace. As for the N-word, everybody knew that old Abe
used it all the time, both in public and in private. (Since Lincoln supporters
are in a state of constant denial, I have not used elision in
reporting his use of the offensive word n—r.)
In one of the supreme ironies of history, the man who told this
story was forced by circumstances to attend to what he called "the
nigger question." And within five years he was enshrined in American
mythology as "the great emancipator" who freed Blacks with a
stroke of the pen out of the goodness of his heart.
Since that time, the mythology of "the great emancipator" has
become a part of the mental landscape of America. Generations of
schoolchildren have memorized its cadences. Poets, politicians, and
long-suffering Blacks have wept over its imagery and drama.
No other American story is so enduring.
No other American story is so comforting.
No other American story is so false.
Abraham Lincoln was not "the great emancipator."
The testimony of sixteen thousand books and monographs to the
contrary notwithstanding, Lincoln did not emancipate the slaves,
greatly or otherwise. As for the Emancipation Proclamation, it was
not a real emancipation proclamation at all, and did not liberate
African-American slaves. John F. Hume, the Missouri antislavery
leader who heard Lincoln speak in Alton and who looked him in the
eye in the White House, said the Proclamation "did not ... whatever
it may have otherwise accomplished at the time it was issued, liberate
a single slave" (138).
Sources favorable to Lincoln were even more emphatic. Lincoln
crony Henry Clay Whitney said the Proclamation was a mirage and
that Lincoln knew it was a mirage (133). Secretary of State William
Henry Seward, the No. 2 man in the administration, said the Proclamation
was an illusion in which "we show our sympathy with the
slaves by emancipating the slaves where we cannot reach them and
holding them in bondage where we can set them free" (Piatt, 150).
The same points have been made with abundant documentation
by twentieth-century scholars like Richard Hofstadter, who said
the Proclamation "did not in fact free any slaves" (169). Some of the
biggest names in the Lincoln establishment have said the same
thing. Roy P. Basler, the editor of the monumental Collected Works of
Abraham Lincoln, said the Proclamation was "itself only a promise
of freedom ..." (1935, 219-20). J. G. Randall, who has been called
"the greatest Lincoln scholar of all time," said the Proclamation
itself did not free a single slave (1957, 357). Horace White, the
Chicago Tribune correspondent who covered Lincoln in Illinois and
in Washington, said it is doubtful that the Proclamation "freed anybody
anywhere" (222).
There, then, the secret is out! The most famous act in American
political history never happened.
Sandburg wrote tens of thousands of words about it.
Lindsay wrote a poem about it.
Copland wrote a musical portrait about it.
King had a dream about it.
But the awkward fact is that Abraham Lincoln didn't do it. To paraphrase
what Robert McColley said about the abortive emancipating
initiative of Thomas Jefferson (125), never did man achieve more fame
for what he did not do and for what he never intended to do. The best
authority, Lincoln himself, told one of his top aides that he knew that
the Proclamation in and of itself would not "make a single Negro free
beyond our military reach" (Dahlgren 382), thereby proving two critical
and conclusive points. The first is that Lincoln himself knew that
his most famous act would not of itself free a single Negro. The second
and most damaging point is that "the great emancipator" did not
intend for it to free a single Negro, for he carefully, deliberately, studiously
excluded all Negroes within "our military reach."
In what some critics call a hoax and others call a deliberate ploy
not to free African-Americans but to keep them in slavery, Lincoln
deliberately drafted the document so it wouldn't free a single Negro
immediately.
What Lincoln did—and it was so clever that we ought to stop
calling him honest Abe—was to "free" slaves in Confederate-held
territory where he couldn't free them and to leave them in slavery
in Union-held territory where he could have freed them.
Despite what everybody, or almost everybody says, January 1,
1863, was not African-American Emancipation Day. Nor, as Randall
and other have said, was it a Day of Jubilee for the slaves, except in
certain military venues and Northern cities far removed from the
hurt and humiliation of Slave Row. To tell the truth, there has never
been a day in the United States of America when all the slaves could
join hands and say together, "Free at last!" One of the many reasons
why a national apology for slavery is an imperative necessity is that
there has never been a day of closure for the slaves or the slaveholders—or
the sons and daughters of the slaves and slaveholders. The
real day of deliverance, December 18, 1865, the day and date nobody
remembers, the day the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, was so
formal and was hedged about with so many levels of technicality,
that it came and went like the oxygen of the air, giving life without
giving notice.
It is in the precise sense scandalous that Americans, Black and
White, are so totally misinformed on this subject. Professors, museum
curators, media prophets say almost without exception that
slavery in America was ended by a presidential edict. And "other
writers of what is claimed to be history, almost without number,
speak of the President's announcement as if it caused the bulwarks
of slavery to fall down very much as the walls of Jericho are said to
have done, at one blast, overwhelming the whole institution and
setting every bond man free" (136). Nothing has changed in America
since John Hume wrote those words in 1905. Despite computers,
despite the Internet, despite the proliferation of books and pamphlets,
almost all Blacks and Whites, including a not inconsiderable
number of Ph.D.'s, believe that slavery in America ceased on the
day and hour that Abraham Lincoln signed a document that dissolves,
like a mirage, the closer one comes to it.
The confusion on this issue is monumental as we are reminded
every year when schoolchildren and scholars in Memphis, New
Orleans, Louisville, St. Louis, Norfolk, Baltimore and other cities
celebrate a January 1 emancipation that specifically excluded Memphis,
New Orleans, and Norfolk and didn't even apply to the Border
States of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware. To add
to the confusion, millions have created annual celebrations based
on the idea that their ancestors were "freed" on January 1, 1863, but
were not informed until months later by mean generals and officials.
If pressed, all or almost all scholars will concede that the Proclamation
didn't free the slaves on January 1, 1863, but this information
is disseminated, if it is disseminated at all, in footnotes or asides,
and there is a tendency, even among the best scholars, to defend or
even praise the Proclamation that didn't free anybody.
Will someone say that this was an accident or an oversight? But
how can anyone fail to see that it required art, forethought, and
design to draft a document that freed everybody when in fact it
freed nobody? And how explain the fact that the same accident happened
twice? For when Lincoln warned rebels in September that he
would sign an emancipation in one hundred days if they didn't lay
down their arms, he carefully and precisely said that he would free
all slaves "within any state, or designated part of a state" in rebellion
(CW 5:434, italics added).
This language we shall return to this—was not in the tentative
document he read to his cabinet on July 22, 1862. That document said
unambiguously that he intended to free "all persons held as slaves
within any state or states" in rebellion (CW 5:337, italics added). This
means that he decided some time between July 22 and September 22
to play a little game. It means that he knew in September what he
intended to do in January. It means that he was planning in September
to keep in slavery the slaves he promised to free in January.
A growing body of evidence suggests that the Emancipation
Proclamation was a ploy designed not to emancipate the slaves but
to keep as many slaves as possible in slavery until Lincoln could
mobilize support for his conservative plan to free Blacks gradually
and to ship them out of the country. What Lincoln was trying to do,
then, from our standpoint, was to outmaneuver the real emancipators
and to contain the emancipation tide, which had reached such a dangerous
intensity that it threatened his ability to govern and to run the
war machinery.
This is no mere theory; there is indisputable evidence on this point
in documents and in the testimony of reliable witnesses, including
Lincoln himself. The most telling testimony comes not from twentieth-century
critics but from cronies and confidants who visited the
White House and heard the words from Lincoln's mouth. There is,
for example, the testimony of Judge David Davis, the three hundred-plus-pound
Lincoln crony who visited the White House in 1862,
some two months after Lincoln signed the Preliminary Proclamation,
and found him working feverishly to subvert his announced plan in
favor of his real plan. What was Lincoln's real plan? It was the only
emancipation plan he ever had: gradual emancipation, the slower
the better, with compensation to slaveowners and the deportation of
the emancipated. His "whole soul," Davis said, "is absorbed in his
plan [my italics] of remunerative emancipation, and he thinks that if
Congress don't fail him, that the problem is solved...."
Wait a minute! What's going on here? What plan of remunerative
emancipation? Two months ago, Abraham Lincoln announced to
the whole world that he was going to free the slaves of rebels with a
stroke of the pen on January 1. He didn't say anything then about
Congress not letting him down.
What are we to understand by all this? We are to understand,
among other things, that words, especially Lincoln's words, are deceiving
and that Lincoln announced his first plan as a mask to cover
his real plan and his real end. That at any rate is the testimony of
another intimate Lincoln friend, Henry Clay Whitney. What was his
real end? The Proclamation, Whitney said, was "not the end designed
by him, but only the means to the end, the end being the
deportation of the slaves and the payment for them to their masters—at
least to those who were loyal" (323, italics in original).
There is corroboration on this point from, of all people, Abraham
Lincoln, who asked Congress in his second State of the Union Message
to approve not the Emancipation Proclamation but an entirely
different plan, the real plan he had confided to Judge Davis, a plan
that contradicted the Proclamation and called for, among other
things, the deportation—his word—of Blacks and the racial cleansing
of the United States of America (CW 5:518-37).
(Continues...)
(C) 1999 Lerone Bennett Jr. All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-87485-085-1
