1620 by Peter W. Wood

Author:Peter W. Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

JANUARY 1863

IN HER LEAD ESSAY for the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones calls out Abraham Lincoln as a racist. Her evidence for this charge is an August 14, 1862, White House meeting between Lincoln and five black leaders in which Lincoln “informed his guests that he had gotten Congress to appropriate funds to ship black people, once freed, to another country.” Lincoln said, as Hannah-Jones quotes him: “Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration. You and we are different races. … Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.”1 He seems to call for treating whites and blacks in dramatically different ways, to the disadvantage of blacks. Lincoln did not propose deporting any European Americans back to the continent of their ancestral origins. The phrase “ours suffer from your presence” certainly sounds both insulting and racist.

But there is more to the story. The questions that hang over a lot of studies of Lincoln is whether he always meant what he said, or whether he sometimes said things out of political calculation. In this chapter I explain why Hannah-Jones’s account of that White House meeting is wrong, and more broadly, why Lincoln was not a racist. But we will have to give fair-minded hearings to both sides – something that Hannah-Jones herself declined to do. I will not say that her view is eyewash from beginning to end. There are historians who basically agree with her. But the weight of evidence is against them – and her.

ENDING SLAVERY

On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It announced that the slaves in the states held by the Confederacy “shall be then, thenceforth, and forever free.” This promised freedom to about four million people held in bondage in the Confederate states. But for the promise to be realized, Union troops would have to win many battles and vanquish the Confederacy. Actual emancipation awaited those victories.

Moreover, the Emancipation Proclamation left slavery intact in four slave states that had not joined the Confederacy: Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, and Delaware. Tennessee had been part of the Confederacy but was under Union control, so it too was exempted. Maryland, Missouri, and Tennessee abolished slavery during the war; Kentucky and Delaware waited until after the war concluded in 1865.

The final abolition of legal slavery in the United States came with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, on December 6, 1865. That amendment, promoted by Lincoln, had been passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and by the House on January 31, 1865.

Lincoln had decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation six months before he actually issued it. He delayed its release pending a significant Union military victory, which finally came at the Battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862. A few days later, on September 22, he released a preliminary version of the Proclamation.

Lincoln had been campaigning against slavery since October 1854. Initially, he focused on stopping the spread of slavery in the territories.

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