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  • 2017-08-16 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Abraham Lincoln Express Opposition to Racial Equality? (en)
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  • In the aftermath of violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 (and in the context of a wider debate over the removal of Confederate statues), a particular quote spread on Facebook and Twitter, appearing to indicate Abraham Lincoln's opposition to racial equality. On 14 August, the remarks formed part of a Dallas Morning News column by former Texas State Senator Jerry Patterson, who wrote: The quote as presented by Patterson, and in several Facebook and Twitter posts, is authentic. Lincoln did make those remarks on 18 September 1858. They came at the beginning of his opening speech at the fourth of seven famous debates with Stephen Douglas, during Lincoln's unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. Lincoln had been under attack from Democrats who accused him of supporting racial equality, and his comments were a defense against those allegations. There is no official transcript of those debates, and the accounts published at the time in two Illinois newspapers — the Republican Chicago Press and Tribune and the Democratic Chicago Times — often diverged along partisan lines, according to Rodney Davis and Douglas Wilson's annotated Lincoln-Douglas Debates (page vii.) Nonetheless, here are the most relevant remarks, as reported in the pro-Lincoln Chicago Press and Tribune on 21 September 1858. You can read that day's report in full here. Despite the frequent spinning of the speeches by both newspapers, there appears to be consensus on Lincoln's Charleston remarks regarding racial equality. The Chicago Times report, reprinted in Harold Holzer's 1993 Lincoln-Douglas Debates, does not significantly vary from that published by the Press and Tribune: Of course, this excerpt from one speech does not represent the totality of Lincoln's views on race and racial equality, but the remarks were far from a complete outlier, and Lincoln's views were more complex and uncomfortable than the prevalent modern impression of him as the racially-enlightened Great Emancipator. We spoke to Columbia University historian Eric Foner, author of several books on Lincoln, including The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. There's no question that: one, before the Civil War, Lincoln hated slavery. He always did, Foner told us: During the Civil War, Foner says, Lincoln's views evolved radically as he was exposed to black people such as Frederick Douglass, who were far more talented than he had assumed, and as the efforts of freed slaves in the Union army earned them, in Lincoln's view, the right to citizenship. Just before his death, Lincoln gave a speech in which he mentioned the possibility of giving black Union soldiers and wealthy black elites the right to vote, in direct contradiction to his 1858 remarks. And yet, Foner told us, for a long time Lincoln's plan for black people in the United States largely consisted of arranging for them to the leave the country and set up colonies elsewhere. Foner also warned against overemphasizing the importance of ethnicity to Lincoln by isolating specific racist remarks he made: Whereas abolition was a central aspect of Lincoln’s moral compass, the Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates wrote in 2009, racial equality was not: Gates concluded: (en)
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