[Today Abraham Lincoln is widely revered, while many Americans,
including historians, consider the militant abolitionist John Brown
mad. Yet, according to two authors of new books on Lincoln and Brown,
their chosen paths eventually seemed to converge.]
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THE ‘BLOOD DRAWN BY THE LASH’ AND THE CRIMES OF THIS GUILTY LAND
 
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Eric Foner
December 17, 2020
The London Review of Books
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_ Today Abraham Lincoln is widely revered, while many Americans,
including historians, consider the militant abolitionist John Brown
mad. Yet, according to two authors of new books on Lincoln and Brown,
their chosen paths eventually seemed to converge. _

President Abraham Lincoln, termed the “emancipator.” Yet it was
abolitionist John Brown’s strategy that brought slavery to an end.,
Matthew Brady

 

_Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times 
by  David S. Reynolds
[[link removed]].
Penguin, 1066 pp., £33.69, September, 978 1 59420 604 7_

_The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and the
Struggle for American Freedom 
by  H.W. Brands
[[link removed]].
Doubleday, 445 pp., £24, October, 978 0 385 54400 9_

Abraham Lincoln​ , memorialized as a child of the frontier,
self-made man and liberator of the slaves, has been the subject of
more than 16,000 books, according to David S. Reynolds’s new
biography, _Abe_. That’s around two a week, on average, since the
end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be
found in the historical literature, including the moralist who hated
slavery, the pragmatic politician driven solely by ambition, the
tyrant who ran roughshod over the Constitution, and the indecisive
leader buffeted by events he could not control. Conservatives,
communists, Civil Rights activists and segregationists have claimed
him as their own. _Esquire_ magazine once ran a list of ‘rules
every man should know’. Rule 115: ‘There is nothing that can be
marketed that cannot be marketed better using the likeness of Honest
Abe Lincoln.’

It seems safe to assume that even the most diligent researcher will
not be able to discover significant new material about Lincoln – a
diary, say, or previously unknown speeches and letters. Instead the
biographer must take an original interpretative approach. And, against
all odds, Reynolds, who teaches at the City University of New York,
manages to say new and important things about Lincoln in his elegantly
written book. Rather than a conventional account of Lincoln’s
life, _Abe_ is a ‘cultural biography’. The familiar trajectory
of Lincoln’s career is here, from his youth in Kentucky and Indiana
to his emergence as a national figure forced to preside over a
cataclysmic war and its ‘astounding’ (Lincoln’s word) result:
the emancipation of four million slaves. But Reynolds is more
interested in the way Lincoln’s character and political outlook
reflected ‘the roiling cultural currents’ of the nation in which
he lived.

Lincoln’s America, Reynolds says, was suffused with sensationalism,
violence, raw humor, and spectacles high and low. On the streets of
New York, theatregoers attending performances of Shakespeare rubbed
shoulders with the audiences for blackface minstrel shows. 

Nearby, P.T. Barnum’s American Museum featured General Tom Thumb
(an adult less than three feet tall) alongside such frauds as the
‘Feejee Mermaid’. Lincoln felt at home with both elite and popular
culture. Reynolds believes that his success as a politician stemmed
from his engagement with the diverse cultural phenomena around him.
For Reynolds, Lincoln really was ‘Abe’, the everyman depicted in
his campaign literature.

To situate Lincoln in his cultural context, Reynolds takes the reader
down numerous narrative byways. A discussion of Lincoln’s taste in
music, including the erotic ballad ‘I won’t be a nun’ and,
improbably, ‘Dixie’, a paean to the Old South, leads to a long
examination of 19th-century popular song. When, after the death of
their 11-year-old son Willie, Lincoln and his wife Mary arrange for
seances in the White House, we learn about the popularity of
spiritualism. Mention of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ leads to a discussion
of the emotional intensity of mid-century writing and what Reynolds
calls the ‘opportunistic sensationalism’ of reformers who dwelled
on the degradation of drinkers and the physical abuse of slaves, an
approach Lincoln rejected as counter-productive.

The relevance of these excursions is sometimes open to question.
Political cartoonists sometimes depicted Lincoln in the guise of
Charles Blondin, a tightrope walker famous for crossing Niagara Falls
on a high wire, navigating a dangerous course without leaning too far
to the left or right. Reynolds describes Lincoln as a ‘political
Blondin’, who chose an ideologically balanced ‘Blondin-like’
Cabinet and sought a ‘Blondin-like balance in the military’ by
appointing both Democrats and Republicans to command troops. The
repeated invocation of Blondin is certainly original, and Lincoln did
mention him in an 1862 meeting with an abolitionist delegation, but
Reynolds’s claim that Lincoln ‘identified strongly’ with the
celebrated daredevil is a bit of a stretch.

Reynolds’s Lincoln is not simply a sponge who absorbs what’s going
on around him in the culture. _Abe_ devotes far more attention than
most biographies to Lincoln’s formative years on the frontier, where
he learned to trust his own judgment. Unlike most frontiersmen, he did
not hunt, gamble, drink or use tobacco. At a time of intense religious
revivalism, Lincoln never joined a church and even expressed
admiration for Tom Paine’s Deist tract _The Age of Reason_. Lincoln
didn’t share the prevailing hatred of Native Americans and despite
his physical presence (he was 6_’_4_”_) tried to avoid the brutal
altercations that marked the region’s rough-and-tumble male culture.
At an early point in his career Lincoln even suggested that
property-owning women should enjoy the right to vote. Despite
Reynolds’s subtitle, ‘Abraham Lincoln in His Times’, the Lincoln
of _Abe_ sometimes seems like a woke inhabitant of our own era:
‘environmentally conscious’, forward-looking with regard to
gender, kind to animals and sympathetic towards ‘ethnic others’.

Reynolds sees 19th-century America as a country that lacked coherence,
where individualism was rampant and established institutions weak. The
resulting ‘formlessness’, he argues, gave Lincoln a desire for
structure in both his own life and the larger world. As a
counterweight to the centrifugal forces around him, he revered the
national Union, represented by the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution, documents that his speeches brilliantly enlisted in the
cause of anti-slavery. As a party leader in Illinois, Lincoln
understood the need to maintain peace among the various Republican
factions – radicals and conservatives, nativists and immigrants,
former Democrats and former Whigs. Union was as essential to the party
as to the nation. In his personal life, Lincoln sought to enlist
reason against his tendency towards intense emotion and occasional
depression.

Politically, Reynolds writes, Lincoln ‘stuck close to the centre’,
seeking a middle ground between abolitionists, whose intemperate
attacks on individual slaveowners seemed to him to endanger the Union,
and Northerners indifferent to the evil of the South’s ‘peculiar
institution’. Because of his reverence for the Union, Lincoln called
for Northern acquiescence in measures he privately abhorred, notably
the draconian Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, since the Constitution
established the right of owners to have runaways captured and
returned. His idol was Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, known as the
Great Compromiser. Clay died in 1852, and Lincoln must have realized
that his fifty-year effort to rid his state of slavery had
accomplished nothing. But well into the Civil War, Lincoln clung to
Clay’s plan for abolition: gradual emancipation, monetary
compensation to the owners, and ‘colonization’ – that is,
encouraging freed slaves to leave the United States for Africa or the
Caribbean.

What does all this tell us about what Reynolds calls the ‘hotly
contested’ subject of Lincoln’s racial attitudes? A little over
twenty years ago, Lerone Bennett Jr, an African American historian,
published _Forced into Glory_, which drew on Lincoln’s prewar
statements opposing civil and political rights for Blacks (his comment
on female suffrage was limited to whites), and his advocacy of
colonizing freed slaves, to depict him as an inveterate racist. The
book had the drawbacks of any prosecutor’s brief, but it forced
historians and the general public to confront aspects of Lincoln’s
career that had mostly been swept under the rug. Outraged members of
what one scholar has called the ‘Lincoln-Industrial Complex’
rushed to defend the Great Emancipator.

Insisting on ‘the complete falsity of the charges of innate
racism’, Reynolds joins the defence. He insists that in interactions
with individual African Americans, Lincoln did not display signs of
prejudice. To mitigate the fact that Lincoln, like many of his white
contemporaries, enjoyed blackface minstrel shows, Reynolds advances
the not entirely convincing argument that these racist performances
communicated a ‘cloaked progressiveness’, because their white
performers made up as Blacks sometimes assumed, for comic effect,
positions of power. Reynolds makes clear that no one with political
ambitions could ignore the deeply ingrained racism of Illinois. The
state’s notorious Black Laws denied Blacks basic rights, and racist
language suffused politics. In the 1858 debates during the campaign
for one of Illinois’s seats in the Senate, Lincoln’s antagonist,
Senator Stephen A. Douglas, freely used the word ‘nigger’ and
accused Lincoln and the ‘Black Republicans’ of wanting freed
slaves to move to Illinois, take the jobs of whites, and marry white
women. Warned that Douglas’s assault was weakening his party’s
electoral chances, Lincoln denied that he believed in ‘Negro
equality’. But unlike Douglas, Reynolds points out, he did not waver
from the conviction that the inalienable rights in the Declaration of
Independence – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness –
applied to all persons, regardless of race. These are valid points.
Nonetheless, it is fair to say that unlike the abolitionists, who
demanded not only an immediate end to slavery but full citizenship
rights for Blacks, Lincoln found it impossible to imagine the United
States as a biracial society of equals.

A writer who chooses his words with care, Reynolds struggles to find
the right ones for Lincoln’s racial views. At one point he refers to
his subject’s ‘hidebound’ outlook. He writes that Lincoln
‘associated himself’ with colonization, a weak way of describing
his service on the Board of Managers of the Illinois Colonisation
Society and his numerous speeches and presidential messages promoting
the policy. At a notorious 1862 meeting with a group of free African
Americans, Lincoln urged his listeners to encourage emigration among
their people. Reynolds sees this encounter, which outraged most Black
leaders and seems to have inspired racial violence in the North, as a
calculated performance to prepare conservative whites for the coming
announcement of emancipation.

Once he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January, 1863,
Lincoln’s racial views underwent rapid evolution. Unfortunately,
while devoting a chapter to a careful analysis of Lincoln’s two
greatest speeches, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural,
Reynolds says relatively little about the Proclamation, although that
pivotal document offers compelling evidence of the changes in
Lincoln’s thinking. In it, Lincoln abandoned his long-held plan for
gradual emancipation in favor of immediate freedom for more than three
million slaves (about 750,000 were not covered, mostly because they
lived in states that had not seceded) and dropped the idea of
colonization, urging Blacks to ‘go to work for reasonable wages’
in the United States. For the first time, he authorized the enrollment
of African Americans in the Union army. Lincoln doubtless understood
that military service would lead to demands for equal citizenship
after the war. He never became egalitarian in a modern sense, but in
the last two years of his life, spurred by the crucial role of Black
soldiers in the ongoing conflict, his thinking changed dramatically.
In his final speech, in 1865, he publicly advocated the right to vote
for educated Blacks and those who had served in the army. By then he
had moved well beyond his culture: at the time only a tiny number of
Black men enjoyed the right to vote.

In​ _The Zealot and the Emancipator_, H.W. Brands has written a
dual biography of Lincoln and the abolitionist John Brown, who in 1859
led a band of 22 men to seize the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry,
Virginia, in the hope of sparking a slave insurrection. The divergent
paths chosen by Brown and Lincoln illuminate a problem as old as
civilization itself – what is a person’s moral responsibility in
the face of glaring injustice?

Lincoln and Brown never met. Both came from humble origins, but in
many ways they could not have been more different. Lincoln thrived in
the world of 19th-century American capitalism, rising through
ambition, hard work and continual self-improvement to solid
middle-class status, while Brown, who failed at numerous ventures and
more than once experienced bankruptcy, seemed to sink beneath the
economy’s turbulent waters. Where Lincoln the rationalist declared
that man could not know the will of God, Brown ‘knew’ that he had
been chosen for a divine mission to overthrow slavery. Lincoln
condemned mob violence and insisted that respect for the rule of law
must become the nation’s ‘political religion’. Brown, like many
abolitionists, believed in a ‘higher law’ that legitimized
resistance to unjust man-made statutes.

As with Lincoln, the historical literature contains many John Browns
– freedom fighter, terrorist, Civil Rights pioneer and madman. For
an earlier generation of historians, who saw the Civil War as needless
carnage brought on by irresponsible fanatics, Brown was Exhibit A. But
African American radicals have long hailed Brown as a rare white
person willing to sacrifice himself for the cause of racial justice.
Stokely Carmichael, who popularized the idea of ‘Black Power’ in
the 1960s, identified Brown and the Radical Republican leader Thaddeus
Stevens as the only white figures in American history worthy of
admiration. Lately, with the destruction of slavery occupying a
central place in accounts of the era’s history, Brown has come to be
widely admired. Fifteen years ago, Reynolds published an adulatory
biography, whose hyperbolic subtitle describes Brown as the man who
‘killed slavery, sparked the Civil War and seeded Civil Rights’.
Brown was recently the subject of a TV series, _The Good Lord
Bird_, starring Ethan Hawke. Brands writes that his students in
Austin, Texas, ‘can’t get enough of John Brown’.

Lincoln and Brown both hated slavery but that conviction by itself did
not tell a person how to take action against it. When the Fugitive
Slave Act became law, Brown formed the League of Gileadites, a mostly
Black group pledged to armed resistance. Later, he spirited a group of
Missouri slaves to freedom in Canada. Lincoln, by contrast, insisted
that no matter how reprehensible, the law must be obeyed. When the
Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 opened territories in the
Trans-Mississippi West to the expansion of slavery, Brown armed
himself and headed there with several of his sons to take part in the
local civil war over slavery known as ‘Bleeding Kansas’. During
this preview of the national conflict they murdered five pro-slavery
settlers. Lincoln joined the new Republican party and committed
himself to seeking legislation that barred slavery’s expansion.

A skilled narrative writer, Brands offers a vivid account of the raid
on Harper’s Ferry and its aftermath. In military terms, the event
was a disaster. No slaves rose up to join Brown (in fact there
weren’t very many in the mountains of what is now West Virginia,
where the arsenal was located, far from the plantation belt). After
commandeering weaponry, Brown abandoned his plan to retreat into the
Alleghenies and fight a guerrilla war against the slave system.
Instead, he and his men remained in place and were quickly overwhelmed
by local militia and a contingent of Marines led by Robert E. Lee. But
Brown’s demeanour at his trial for treason, where he cited the Bible
as his inspiration, and his subsequent execution, made him a martyr in
the eyes of many Northerners. He had made the gallows ‘as glorious
as the cross’, Ralph Waldo Emerson exclaimed. Lincoln, the lawyer
and constitutionalist, saw the raid as a setback for the anti-slavery
cause and strove to dissociate the Republican party from Brown’s
action. Among those who witnessed Brown’s hanging was the actor John
Wilkes Booth, later Lincoln’s assassin. He called Brown ‘a man
inspired, the greatest character of the century’, and resolved to
outdo him.

Lincoln and Brown differed not only on strategy but on underlying
principles. Unlike Lincoln, Brown saw the struggles against slavery
and racism as interconnected. He was determined to live an anti-racist
life. Richard Henry Dana Jr (the author of _Two Years before the
Mast_) was astonished when visiting Brown’s farm in upstate New York
to find Black guests seated at the dinner table. Brown introduced them
not by their first names but as ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’. It was obvious
to Dana that they had not been spoken to that way very often in their
lives. Brown was inspired by the example of black abolitionists, many
of whom he knew well, and by slave rebels such as Nat Turner. His
armed band was interracial, although Brands tells us little about the
motives and goals of the five black men who fought at Harper’s
Ferry. Brands observes that one of the reasons Lincoln promoted
colonization, despite recognizing the near impossibility of
transporting millions of men, women and children out of the country,
was that history offered no example of ‘a successful biracial
republic’. Brown, however, thought the United States could become
just that.

Both Brands and Reynolds conclude their books by noting that the paths
chosen by Lincoln and Brown eventually seemed to converge. In 1864,
convinced he would not win re-election because of Northern war
weariness, Lincoln proposed that the Black abolitionist Frederick
Douglass raise a force of soldiers who would move into the South,
spread word of the Emancipation Proclamation, and encourage slaves to
seek freedom behind Union lines. The idea bore a striking resemblance
to Brown’s original plan at Harper’s Ferry.

Today, Lincoln is widely revered, while many Americans, including some
historians, consider Brown mad. Yet it was Brown’s strategy that
brought slavery to an end. In a note written shortly before his death,
Brown wrote: ‘The crimes of this guilty land will not be purged away
but with blood.’ And Lincoln, the centrist politician, ended up
presiding over slaughter on a scale neither he nor Brown could
possibly have imagined. At his Second Inaugural, in March 1865,
Lincoln embraced Brown’s penetrating insight that slavery was
already a system of violence and so could not be eradicated
peacefully. Echoing Brown, Lincoln explained the Civil War’s
staggering death toll as divine retribution for two and a half
centuries of ‘blood drawn by the lash’. He was reminding his
listeners that violence in America did not begin when John Brown
unsheathed his sword; it was embedded in slave society from the
outset. And in the end, as Brands concludes, ‘Union arms, not Union
arguments, overthrew slavery.’

[_Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at
Columbia University._]

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