BONUS: Is Abraham Lincoln the Great Emancipator or Just Another Racist?

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:16

Hello, and welcome to this bonus episode of A History Recorded straight after our recently published episode, what is Emancipation? I'm joined now by my guest from that episode, Ben Parton, to discuss this a little bit more. Ben, thank you so much for sticking around.

Bennett Parten: 00:00:32

Yeah, of course. Happy to be here.

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:34

Yeah. We had such a great chat, and as always, it just feels far too brief.

And I'm sure there'll be many reasons to get you back on to discuss this further because emancipation is just such a. And Reconstruction and really everything related to it is such a huge topic.

One thing that doesn't really often get addressed, though, because it's not a very popular thing to ask is Abraham Lincoln. Was he a racist?

Bennett Parten: 00:01:02

Yeah, probably. I would imagine so. In fact, he says it.

as I've said in the show and: 1858

They get reprinted the text of these debates.

et up his presidential run in: 1860

He's someone who refuses to yield on slavery's expansion into the western territories, the territories of the Great Plains, and others. This was the key part of the Republican Party platform.

And he'll also refused to yield on his opposition to slavery on principle, believing that he believed that every, as he would tell Douglass, he believed it was the right of every man or woman to enjoy the fruits of his or her own labor. But in the debates, Douglass will basically bring up ideas about race.

He will make Lincoln answer for whether or not he believes in racial or social equality. And on every score, Lincoln will say no. He says that he does not believe that.

Also, too, in the early days of the Civil War, Lincoln is someone who believes in a program of colonization. He tries to come up with some scheme whereby the US could remove African Americans from the US to some other country.

He has ideas of relocating, colonizing them in South America.

And part of it is born from a racist assumption that white Americans and black Americans could not live together because an inferior race would dominate. Or, excuse me, a superior race would dominate an inferior race. Right. It would lead to all sorts of problems.

And in this plan, I think we can see Lincoln's own racial ideas and own sense of white supremacy shining through. But we also have to weigh this Lincoln with the Lincoln that will help the US Evolve over the course of the Civil War.

He will be someone who will take principal stances to see the war evolve into one that will end slavery. And by the end of his life, Lincoln will come out in support of black voting.

He'll be one of the first policymakers to do so and really throw his support behind it. And so we can absolutely see Lincoln as being a racist believing in white supremacy.

We can also see him as someone who evolved throughout the Civil War and who was killed at a point in his life where he had embraced what would have then been seen as fairly progressive notions. Right. At least in terms of black voting and that sort of thing. And so Lincoln is sort of enigmatic figure as far as this goes.

And I should say that you said it's not popular to see him as such, and that's absolutely true.

But there has been a long trend and pattern of historical writing and popular writing in American history, particularly by black authors, that sees Lincoln for who he was. Right. And sees Lincoln as someone who, rather than helping the country evolve, actually drug his feet when it came to abolition. Right.

So there is a kind of undercurrent or counter narrative to, I think, the dominant narrative seeing Lincoln as the great emancipator. And this counter narrative has lived in a variety of different forms, American history.

So, yeah, so there's different competing narratives out there on Lincoln, for sure.

Liam Heffernan: 00:04:57

Yeah. It kind of raises the importance of understanding history within the context of its time. Right.

Because, yeah, of course, we can look back on Lincoln now compared to today standards.

And of course, he's a racist by anyone's standards today, but 160 years ago, as you say, he was quite a progressive guy and for all his prejudices, still achieved an awful lot.

Bennett Parten: 00:05:22

For sure. For sure. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's, that's the kind of appropriate way to think about it. And we have to recognize Lincoln's own biography.

I mean, he is someone whose family came from Virginia. His. He was born in Kentucky, which was. Well, his ancestors came from Virginia. They migrated from Virginia to Kentucky. Lincoln was born in Kentucky.

His father was not a slave owner. And to escape the power of slave owner, plantation owners migrates into Indiana.

And then Lincoln will eventually migrate into southern Illinois, which is a place that was very close to Kentucky. Missouri had real connections to the Mississippi Valley, and it was filled by people who were not themselves slave owners.

Slavery is illegal in Illinois or people who were nonetheless connected to the slave economy in the south and who shared many of those same prejudices. And so that is Lincoln's upbringing, his background. His wife, Mary Todd, was a Kentuckian.

She came from a family of Kentucky slaveholders, and many of her brothers would actually fight in the Confederacy. And so Lincoln's own background. Right. I think, kind of sheds light on how complicated the environment was in the 19th century.

Liam Heffernan: 00:06:32

Yeah, of course. And it kind of brings me on to asking, you know, really what inspired you to start researching, you know, specifically Sherman's March and.

And the material in your book.

Bennett Parten: 00:06:44

Yeah, well, part of it is that I grew up in Georgia. I grew up outside of Athens, Georgia, Northeast Georgia. And the Civil War is the Sherman's March is the central moment in Georgia's history.

And I grew up taking long drives from northern Georgia down here to the coast in Savannah, where I live now. Which essentially took you along the path of Sherman's March. This is a history that I've known for a long time, just growing up here in Georgia.

But I was really inspired to begin working on this project because I read a really wonderful work of fiction, the historical fiction writer E.L. doctorow. He wrote a book called the March, which is a fictional account of Sherman's March.

I should say Doctorow is one of America's great historical fiction writers. He's probably best known for the book Ragtime, which is a great book about America or specifically New York at the turn of the 20th century.

But in this book, on the March, he wrote with a wide range of characters. And one of the characters he included was a freed woman who dropped everything, ran to the army, and then followed Sherman's army to the coast.

And I knew as a Georgian, as a historian, that she was not a singular character. She had to be a composite character. There were likely many hundreds, if not thousands of Wilma Jones's just like her or folks just like her. Right.

That made this journey.

And so the book really began from the calculation of how can we tell the story of folks like Wilma Jones from a historical perspective and not just from a perspective of historical fiction the way doctor did it. And so I was really inspired by that book and by that question, first and foremost.

Liam Heffernan: 00:08:28

Yeah. And as someone who studied film academically, my immediate reference always goes back to Hollywood.

And I do wonder about how, you know, films like Gone with the Wind, how they kind of really distort our understanding of these events and glorify certain parts of it to an extent. And does that make it really hard for People like you to sort of, like, try and, you know, present the truth?

Bennett Parten: 00:08:57

Yeah, I think so. And I think more than anything, I mean, Gone with the Wind was such a sensation. And, you know, it's about Atlanta. It's about Georgia.

Margaret Mitchell was in Atlanta. You know, I think that has basically frozen place a certain image in people's minds.

And while other historical narratives have been changing, other books on the Civil War.

Liam Heffernan: 00:09:20

Right.

Bennett Parten: 00:09:20

Have been written that change our perspective on so many things. For this particular episode, I think because of the power of Gone with the Wind, it had kind of kept it frozen in time.

And so part of the things that I want to do in this book was to try to offer a newer story, a story that was more fit for the 21st century and that tried to overturn some of the narratives and images that movies like, well, Gone with the Wind basically have seared into place. But that is certainly, like I said, how Sherwin's march is often remembered.

On the one hand, it is celebrated as this moment of extraordinary triumph on the part of the U.S. army of People like Sherman being unrelenting in his desire to punish the South.

Then, on the flip side, it's been seen as a moment, really of grievance. Right. Of white Southerners being aggrieved by the intensity and unrelenting nature of this march.

And so these two reinforcing ideas has really kept the march, or at least our focus on the march being one as a purely military event.

And so one of the things that I wanted to do was show its real social implications and show how for enslaved people, this was a really important emancipation event and a true liberation event of enormous scale.

Liam Heffernan: 00:10:41

Yeah. And it's a great book. And anyone listening that does want to read up more about that, you should go check out the link and buy it now.

I can't stress that enough, and I'm really interested to know what's next and what else you're working on at the moment.

Bennett Parten: 00:10:55

Yeah, sure. So I am working on a biography of William Sherman himself, of the Civil War. General, this is going to be a project.

I'm not sure how many of your listeners are Americans versus Brits, but Sherman is one of the great American military heroes. He has a penchant for brief but also unsparing words about the nature of war. When the U.S.

army built its tanks in World War II, they called them Shermans because the, you know, sort of the tenacity that Sherman had. His military beliefs seemed to mesh very well with the purpose and the use of World War II era tanks, right.

And see someone who has always lived in American history as being really an icon of America's martial spirit.

And so what this biography does, though, is takes Sherman's war career being his war career in the Civil War and puts it on balance with his career after the Civil War when he actually goes west.

He goes west and becomes one of the men most responsible for what he would say is achieving manifest destiny, conquering the west, but which we now see as waging war against Native Americans.

And so Sherman has this second phase of his career that is really essential in understanding the history of American expansion all the way past the Rockies to the west coast in the latter half of the 19th century. And so what this biography does is it takes the Civil War general. It basically merges him with the post war figure that he becomes.

Liam Heffernan: 00:12:51

I can't wait to read more about that. And we'll have to have to try and get you back on the podcast when you're ready to publish so that we can talk more about that. Sounds fascinating.

But Ben, thank you so much for joining me for this one. And to anyone that stumbled upon this and hasn't yet heard the full episode, do go check that out in the feed right now.

It's just a couple below this. And as always, if you like what you hear, do rate and review the show and you can support us as well. All the links to do that are in the show notes.

So from me, thank you so much for listening. Thank you again to Benny Parton for joining me and goodbye.