Our folly as a nation, though, is that we too often confuse myth with history, mistake our mythologized heroes for their real-life counterparts, regard the deified frontiersman as the actual frontiersman. As a consequence, we too often try to emulate our mythical forebears, to be as glorious, as powerful, as incapable of error, as incessantly right, as we have made them. As journalist Ronnie Dugger has reminded us, those who live by the lessons of mythology rather than the lessons of history—as Lyndon Johnson did in the Vietnam era—are apt to trap themselves in catastrophe.
This is not to say that myths have no function in our cultural life. On the contrary, if we Americans can accept our myths as inspiring tales rather than as authentic history, then surely myths can serve us as they have traditional myth-bound societies. Like fiction and poetry, they can give us insight into ourselves, help us understand the spiritual needs of our country, as we cope with the complex realities of our own time. In that event, the Lincoln of mythology—the Plain and Humble Man of the People who emerged from the toiling millions to guide us through our greatest national ordeal—can have profound spiritual meaning for us.
2: ARCH VILLAIN
From the flames of civil war rose a countermyth of Lincoln as villain—corrupt, depraved, and diabolical. This “anti-Lincoln tradition,” as historian Don E. Fehrenbacher has termed it, has never commanded a large following in the United States, but it has persisted. In 1932, at a time when most Americans—even members of the Ku Klux Klan—were trying to “get right with Lincoln,” a prominent old Virginian was still fighting a personal war against him, condemning the martyr President as a “bad man” who brought on “an unnecessary war and conducted it with great inhumanity.”
The countermyth of a wicked Lincoln had roots back in the Civil War, when the beleaguered President caught abuse from all sides. Northern Democrats castigated him as an abolitionist dictator, abolitionists as a dim-witted product of a slave state, and all manner of Republicans as an incompetent charlatan. In truth, Lincoln may have been one of the two or three most unpopular living Presidents in American history. Assassination, though, chastened his legion of critics and brought them swiftly into the ranks of the glorifiers. Historian and Democrat George Bancroft, who had damned Lincoln during the war, made “scholarly, ringing tributes” to him in the funeral services in New York City. And the intemperate New York Herald, which had once denigrated Lincoln as “the great ghoul at Washington,” now referred to him as “Mr. Lincoln” and claimed that historians a “hundred years hence” would still be astounded at his greatness.
The Lincoln-as-demon theme stuck harder and longer in embattled Dixie. After all, southerners had seceded from the Union to save their slave-based social order from Lincoln’s grasp. They hated the man. In rebel eyes, he was the black-hearted radical who had fomented the war. He was a Yankee Attila, a mobocrat, a lunatic, the biggest “ass” in the United States, the evil chief of the “Black Republican, free love, free Nigger” North out to drown the white man’s South in rivers of blood. When Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, the Confederate press pronounced him a “Fiend” who wanted to incite a race war in Dixie; Jefferson Davis considered the proclamation “the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man,” and rebels everywhere vowed to fight all the harder against the monster who had issued it. When Lincoln was assassinated, many southerners regretted the manner of his death, fretting that the Yankees would blame them for it and punish them cruelly. But many other southerners rejoiced at the news. “All honor to J. Wilkes Booth,” a Louisiana woman said, “who has rid the world of a tyrant and made himself famous for generations.” Exclaimed the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph: “From now until God’s judgment day, the minds of men will not cease to thrill at the killing of Abraham Lincoln.”
After the war, southerners who grieved bitterly over the Lost Cause continued to hate Lincoln for what he had done to them. For Elizabeth Avery Meriwether of Mississippi, the northern deification of Lincoln was more than she could stand. “Is it insanity or pure mendacity,” she cried, “to liken a man of this nature to the gentle and loving Nazarene?” Was Lincoln tenderhearted, she wanted to know, when his legions devastated the South, laid waste to Georgia, and drove thousands of women and children from their homes? “Did he once, during the four years of the cruel war, utter or write one kind word of the people on whom he had brought such unspeakable misery?” An ex-Confederate bureaucrat, after reading a northern biography of Lincoln, sneered that “the whole story of his career from beginning to end is so dreary, so wretched, so shabby, such a tissue of pitiful dodging and chicanery, so unrelieved by anything pure, noble, or dignified, that even to follow it as far as we have done, has well-nigh surpassed our limits of endurance.” For Charleston poet Paul Hamilton Hayne, Lincoln remained in 1871 a “gawky, coarse, not-over cleanly, whisky drinking, and whisky smelling Blackguard, elevated by grotesque Chance (nearly allied to Satan) to the position for which of all others, he was most unfit;—and whose memory has been idealized by the Yankee fancy, & Yankee arrogance, in a way that would be ludicrous, were it not disgusting, and calculated, finally, to belie the facts of History, and hand down to future times as Hero and Martyr, as commonplace a Vulgarian as ever patronized bad Tobacco and mistook blasphemy for wit.”
In 1909, with most southerners joining the North in celebrating the centennial of Lincoln’s birth, a Confederate veteran told a diehard band of ex-rebels in Richmond that the whole Lincoln story “amounts to a patent perversion of the truth, and a positive fraud on the public.” The historian-general of the Confederate Southern Memorial Association, one Mildred Lewis Rutherford, thought so too. In the 1920s, she led a crusade to get pro-Yankee histories out of southern schools and to tell southern kids the truth about Lincoln—namely, that he was a slaveowner, that he tried to starve American troops as a quartermaster during the Mexican War, and that he gave $100 for John Brown’s heinous raid against Harpers Ferry in Virginia. In 1959, after the Brown decision and the Montgomery bus boycott inaugurated the civil-rights movement in Dixie, the son of a rebel veteran launched a neo-Confederate attack against Lincoln, pummeling him as the country’s first dictator whose radical policies had annihilated the “civilized, beneficial, humane” arrangement wrongly known as “slavery.” “The real monument to the Great Emancipator is the maiming of the United States Constitution,” the man wrote, “and the imposition upon the nation of a Negro race problem that progressively grows.”
The countermyth, of course, was hardly confined to the southern states. In Lincoln: The Man (1931), Edgar Lee Masters, a Chicago lawyer and poet, portrayed Lincoln as an undersexed, “slick” and dastardly demagogue who could have avoided war, but instead crushed the South into submission, in the process obliterating state rights, destroying “the principles of free government,” and clearing the way for industrial monopolies and rampant corruption. More recently, a California political scientist served up a psychoanalytical study which revealed a “demonic” Lincoln driven by vengefulness, self-hatred, and a lust for power. Because the constitutional fathers had “preempted the field of glory,” Lincoln took revenge against them: he became the “very tyrant against whom Washington had warned in his Farewell Address, a tyrant who would preside over the destruction of the Constitution in order to gratify his own ambition.” He unleashed his “malignant passions” on the southern rebels, whom he forced to start the Civil War at Fort Sumter, and then became a virtual dictator. Worse still, in his posturing as God’s instrument to save the Union, the satanic Lincoln bequeathed a disastrous legacy to twentieth-century Americans: the ideological rationale for their efforts to save the world.
In part, the extravagance of such countermythology comes from the size of the god it seeks to destroy. Yet not all Lincoln critics have seized the countermyth to bring Lincoln down to size. Plenty of Lincoln scholars have questioned the man, exposed his shortcomings, without denying his essential idealism and humanity. But there is a class of gossipy iconoc
lasm that falls in between critical scholarship and the extremes of countermythology. A good example of that class is Gore Vidal, novelist, essayist, and talk-show personality, who recently announced in the Los Angeles Times that he had the angle on the “real” Lincoln. And it was not “the Sandburg-Mt. Rushmore Lincoln,” a “gloomy cuss, who speaks in iambic pentameter, a tear forever at the corner of his eye—the result, no doubt, of being followed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir which keeps humming ‘the Battle Hymn of the Republic.’” The real Lincoln, it turns out, was a shrewd and crafty politician. But he had a serious problem. Dredging up and embellishing one of Herndon’s raunchier tales, Vidal maintained that Lincoln caught syphilis in his youth and that this accounts for his fits of depression: he infected poor Mary, who later came down with paresis, and three of their children, who died prematurely. Such prattle tells us more about Vidal than about Lincoln, for there is not a shred of truth to it.*
3: WHITE CHIEF AND HONKY
There is another countermyth of Lincoln—one shared by many white southerners and certain black Americans of our time. This is the myth of Lincoln as bigot, as a lifelong white supremacist who championed segregation, opposed civil and political rights for black people, wanted them all thrown out of the country. This Lincoln is the great ancestor of racist James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, of Bull Connor of Birmingham, of the white citizens’ councils, of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
This Lincoln, growing out of post—Civil War Dixie, derived from the principle that a foe of Lincoln’s dimensions was best converted to a friend. Undertaking a highly selective examination of Lincoln’s antebellum utterances, many southerners happily concluded that he stood with them in matters of race. The leading proponent of this Lincoln was Thomas Dixon, Jr., the scion of an old North Carolina family, a spellbinding preacher and practicing novelist, as tall, gaunt, and dark as the rail splitter himself. In novels like The Clansman (1905) and The Southerner (1913), Dixon elevated Lincoln to a Christ-like hero, southern-style. What ennobled him was not his humanity or his faith in democracy. It was his belief in the purity of the white race. In Dixon’s hands, Lincoln is a fine southern gentleman who is certain that “this black thing”—the Negro—cannot possibly be a man because “no real man would grin and laugh and be a slave.” Like his southern brothers, Dixon’s Lincoln adamantly opposes amalgamation, which means Africanization, the supremacy of “the big nostrils, flat nose, massive jaw, protruding lips and kinky hair” over “the proudest intellect and the rarest beauty of any other race.” When the Civil War ends, Lincoln, “the Great Heart,” is determined to prevent racial catastrophe: he sets out to reconstruct his native South with kindness and understanding; he hopes to “heal the bitterness of the war and remove the negro race from physical contact with the white.” What a blow to the South, then, when Booth guns him down in Ford’s Theater. “The Angel of Death,” Dixon writes, now “called him to take the place he had won among earth’s immortals and left to us ‘the gentlest memory of our world.’”
During the Wilsonian era, a growing number of southerners embraced Dixon’s Lincoln as a true son of Dixie. Kentucky-born D. W. Griffith, the son of a Confederate cavalryman, popularized that Lincoln in his epic motion picture The Birth of a Nation. And Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, the dramatic “White Chief” who dressed in white, wore his dark hair to his shoulders, and mesmerized white Mississippians with his strident defense of segregation, informed the United States Senate that Lincoln was as racist as he. Vardaman quoted what this “wise and wondrous” man had said in Charleston, Illinois, in his 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas. “I will say then,” Vardaman sang out, reading from Lincoln’s speech, “that I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and blacks races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live…I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
Never mind that Lincoln had said this only after Douglas had persistently accused him of desiring Negro equality and intermarriage in white-supremacist Illinois. Never mind that in those same debates Lincoln had declared that the Negro was a man, that he was entitled to the same inalienable rights as whites, and that he was equal to anybody in his right to the fruits of his labor—all of which were radical remarks in the Illinois of 1858.
Disregarding all that (as Dixon did), Vardaman declared that it was “the hope of Lincoln that physical segregation of the races might be brought about for the good of both races.” For Lincoln understood, as Vardaman did, that the Negro had “never built a monument, created a civilization, or added one truth to the sum total of human intelligence,” that “equality at the ballot box means negro domination,” and that “for the good of all the races the white man must rule this Republic and he must rule it absolutely.”
In more recent times, the tradition of Lincoln as Negrophobe found near hysterical expression during the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, when Martin Luther King, Jr., shook the segregationist South to its foundations. Because King gave his lyrical “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, because he repeatedly quoted Lincoln and tried to convert President John F. Kennedy into a modern emancipator, enraged southern whites bombarded him with letters purporting to set King straight about “Abe.” Invariably they cited his speech at Charleston. See, they ranted at King, Lincoln hated niggers too. He too wanted segregation. He too believed only in the white race. A Georgia white who sent King a list of Lincoln quotations said “it should do you lots of good to read and reread this and thoroughly digest it. And, if you are as brilliant as YOU think, you will cease your agitation of the white people who are without a doubt reaching a point of disgust.” Another Lincoln quoter was more direct: “I don’t believe in lynchings, but before I start living together with niggers, before I sit next to them in movies, before I see intermarriages, before I send my children to school with blacks, before I am forced by the Supreme Court with its communistic decisions to socialize with you people, I’m getting my gun.”
Among blacks, meanwhile, an astonishing metamorphosis was taking place as far as Lincoln was concerned. Heretofore blacks had almost universally idolized him as one white leader who had cared for them. Heretofore they had almost always found inspiration and hope in the Lincoln story. In the South, they celebrated every January 1, Emancipation Day, with stemwinding oratory. One Negro leader recalled that while growing up in Chicago in the 1940s he read all six volumes of Sandburg’s Lincoln. It “overwhelmed me,” he said—“the images of Lincoln’s poverty, the agony of social change. In the days of reading those volumes, I walked through the cold park, thinking and pondering about the meaning of life. Sandburg’s book absorbed me for weeks.” When the civil-rights struggles broke out in the 1950s and 1960s, black spokesmen like King found Lincoln a powerful ally. Established black scholars like Benjamin Quarles and John Hope Franklin, while admitting that Lincoln had once been ambivalent about Negro social and political rights, nevertheless admired the man and wrote sympathetically about his travail as President. They pointed out that Lincoln had always hated slavery, that his views of blacks changed dramatically during the Civil War, and that his Emancipation Proclamation (as Quarles said) was “one of the most far-reaching pronouncements ever issued in the United States.”
But in the mid-sixties, with cries of “Black Power!” and “Black is beautiful” sweeping their ranks, a younger generation of Negroes wanted “none of that Emancipator shit.” They were furious at the glacial pace of desegregation, furious at the broken promises of white America, furious at all the racial violence in Dixie and the sea
ring poverty in the northern ghettoes. Out of their disillusionment with America, out of their own quest for black identity and black pride, came a black fist that knocked Lincoln off his pedestal. In Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! artist-activist Julius Lester caught the new mood when he asserted that “blacks have no reason to feel grateful to Abraham Lincoln. Rather, they should be angry with him.”
And angry they were. In a sensational 1968 article in Ebony magazine, Negro writer-historian Lerone Bennett, Jr., mounted an all-out attack against “the myth of the Great Emancipator.” Marshaling evidence as selectively as Dixon and Vardaman had done, Bennett offered up a racially repugnant Lincoln who never rose above the anti-black environments in which he was born and raised. Bennett’s Lincoln is a rank opportunist who cackles at Negro dialect jokes. He is not opposed to slavery, Bennett asserts; he is opposed to the extension of slavery. But not because of any compassion for suffering Negroes. His sole concern is the welfare of white people. His speech at Charleston reveals his attitude about black social and political rights, and his vaunted eloquence of the 1850s is aimed at saving “the white man’s charter of liberty,” which is what he calls the Declaration of Independence.
Bennett’s Lincoln does grow during the Civil War, but he doesn’t grow much. On every issue relating to the black man, he is “the very essence of the white supremacist with good intentions.” Indeed, he spends the first eighteen months of the conflict “in a desperate and rather pathetic attempt to save slavery,” because that is where his heart is. Blacks to him are “unassimilable aliens,” and if he has an emancipation policy, Bennett contends, it is to drive them all out of the country.
When the pressures of the war force Lincoln to move against slavery, he issues a “cold, forbidding” decree “with all the grandeur of a real estate deed.” But the slaves, and subsequent generations of Negroes, have been duped. The Emancipation Proclamation, so celebrated in song and story, actually frees few if any bondsmen, since it applies only to rebellious states beyond Lincoln’s authority.* In fact, Bennett says, Lincoln may have issued this anemic document to outflank congressional “radicals” and forestall definitive emancipation. White supremacist that he is, Bennett’s Lincoln announces a reconstruction policy that will put whites only in power in postwar Dixie. And to his dying day, he promotes colonization to solve “the Negro problem.”
Abraham Lincoln Page 3