uddenly the master politician stopped politicking—party politicking on the stump, that is. During the Civil War, Lincoln avoided the kind of pointed political argumentation that had previously been his forte. From his slasher-gaff attacks on opponents in the Illinois legislature through his anti-Polk diatribes in the US Congress to his brilliant debates with Stephen Douglas in the 1850s, he had proved himself a virtuoso party politician. During the war, however, his overt jousting with political opponents on the hustings ceased. As Mark E. Neely Jr. notes, a reason the Republicans fared poorly in the 1862 midterms was Lincoln’s failure that year to enter the political fray.1
Why did he not campaign as a Republican partisan? Actually, he did campaign, but he did so indirectly, through proclamations, public letters, and, especially, through his leadership of the increasingly antislavery war. To assault his political enemies head on through party-driven speeches would have damaged his goal of fostering cultural togetherness. In a time of national division, he saw, a president who vituperated political opponents could only deepen the rift. Paradoxically, as Lincoln adopted harsher tactics in the military field, his political activity was deliberately toned down as he looked to the project of restoring the nation to unity in the peace to follow.
As the war went on, his most vigorous efforts went toward restoring union on the basis of justice for African Americans. For his opponents, this notion of justice was totally unjust—it violated the rights of white Americans. This is why his presidency was the target of some of the nastiest political campaigning in American history. Starting in late 1862, and intensifying exponentially in the next two years, anti-Lincoln rhetoric surged among Northern Democrats, who branded him as a despotic defier of the Constitution who was a mere tool of Negro-loving abolitionists.
The racial theme was central to the Democratic argument. The Confiscation Acts, the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, the Emancipation Proclamation—these and other antislavery measures, in the eyes of Democrats, threatened to let loose an ignorant, inferior race that would mix with white Americans and lead to racial mongrelization and, ultimately, the destruction of the nation.
Lincoln, meanwhile, was moving in the opposite direction on race. Despite his occasional strategically conservative behavior, as in the weeks leading up to his bombshell announcement of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, he progressed steadily toward an enlightened view of race, stimulated by his personal encounters with African Americans and his genuine respect for the courage and heroism of black troops. At the end of the war, he became the first president to publicly advocate the vote for blacks.
How was he able to counter Democratic racism without confronting it directly? Here he relied largely on popular culture. In the face of an avalanche of racist literature published by Democrats, the Ohio journalist David Ross Locke, masquerading as the comically ill-spoken Copperhead Petroleum V. Nasby, impersonated Democratic attitudes with such satirical brilliance that he served as a one-person battering ram against racial prejudice. Commentators of the day credited Locke with contributing to the fall of slavery. Among them was President Lincoln, who admired Locke’s humorous Nasby papers so much that he remarked that he would gladly trade places with the Ohioan if he could learn to write like him.
Only by probing cultural racism and the reactions to it on the part of Locke and Lincoln do we understand the dynamics behind the 1864 election, which restored Lincoln to power and made possible the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, the first of several landmark steps toward civil rights in America. And only by probing Lincoln’s responses to the outstanding performance of African American troops and to his personal interchange with black people, especially Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany, do we see the complete falsity of the charges of innate racism that some have leveled at him over the years.
VARIETIES OF CIVIL WAR RACISM
Lincoln’s attitudes toward race must be measured against those of the surrounding culture. Only then can we responsibly come to a conclusion about this crucial topic.
The lowest baseline for cultural views of race during the Civil War was the Southern outlook. Slavery was racist at its core. Science, religion, history—the South invoked them all in defense of its peculiar institution. When combined with the region’s hostility to the allegedly “Puritan” North and the Constitution-defying Lincoln, Southern racism yielded a truly toxic combination captured in an anonymously published mock article called “Contents of a Secesh Journal.” The article pointedly coupled “Abe Lincoln” with “niggers,” “John Brown,” and “Puritan intolerance.” Here’s part of the parody:
Nigger, niggers more nigger, big nigger, little nigger, abolition, John Brown, Stonewall Jackson’s grave, nigger, black nigger, yeller nigger; C-o-n-s-t-i-t-u-t-i-o-n; . . . confiscation, and abomination; nigger, lots of nigger, cords of nigger; Puritan intolerance; abridgment of our sacred liberties; . . . God bless Jeff. Davis, d—d Abe Lincoln; nigger, no end to the nigger; more about Stonewall Jackson’s grave, Puritan intolerance and religious persecution; nigger, sleek, well-fed nigger slaves at the South, and poor starving white slaves at the North; despotism, anarchy and rain stare us in the face; down with the fratricidal Abolition Administration at Washington; nigger, nigger, n-i-g-g-e-r; and go on ad infinitum.2
The point of the parody was that the rampantly racist Confederacy associated Abe Lincoln, the Puritan North, and the legacy of John Brown with an unnatural, unconstitutional respect for black people; the Lincoln administration was a despotism designed to force this perverse view on slaveholders. The parody shattered the glossy veneer of honor and chivalry that coated the inhumanity of the Southern slave system. However, while the parody was accurate in spirit, rarely did Southerners express the truth so boldly. They wanted to put a positive spin on the treatment of blacks held in slavery, which they presented as a noble institution sanctioned by the Bible and confirmed by racial science. A typical euphemism was Alexander Stephens’s announcement of “the great physical, philosophical, and moral truth” that slavery held an innately inferior people in natural “subordination to the superior race.”3 The Virginia author Edward A. Pollard went so far as to say that “there is no such thing” as slavery in the South; rather there was “a system of African servitude” in which “the negro . . . has, by the law of the land, his personal rights recognized and protected, and his comfort and ‘right’ of ‘happiness’ consulted.” This benign institution, Pollard wrote, “elevates a savage, and rests on the solid basis of human improvement.”4
When blatant racism did appear in Southern publications, it was often delivered through humorous writings.
Take Charles Henry Smith, the most popular Southern humorist of the Civil War. A Georgia lawyer and Confederate officer, Smith, under the pseudonym Bill Arp, wrote a syndicated column that appeared in newspapers throughout the Civil War and well into Reconstruction. Like others, Arp traced the Civil War to the New England Puritans, but his take was distinctly pro-Southern. In his telling, “Old Pewrytan went off one day with sum ships and . . . bought up a lot of kaptured niggers from the Hottentotts, or sum other totts, and stole a few more on the kost of Afriky and brought em over” to the North. But “the cold winds and kodfish airs of New England didn’t agree with nigger, and so they begun to slide em down South as fast as possible.” But then Northerners “jind the church and bekum sanktifide about slavery,” and later on “they was a stealin from five to fifty [enslaved people] a day, and kuverin their karkasses over with nigger larseny, and a smuglin the konstitution into an abolishun mush.”5 Next, “Kolonel Federlist” attacked “Gen. States Rights,” and the war began. “Linkhorn” did his devilish best “to xtend the egis of freedum over all creashun—over things animate and inanimate—over bull bats and skreech owls, grub worms and grindstones, niggers and alligators.” His “proklamation,” Arp says, “hav entailed Afrika upon us so strong that you can aktually smell it,” and with the Thirteenth Amendment, “old Abe’s Kongress hav finaly and forever set all the niggers free.” But “What does it all amount to?” Arp boasts that he can buy “a chunk of a free nigger as eny other . . . I don’t keer a darn about his bein free, if I can subjergate him.”
Racism, while predictable coming from a Confederate author, was surprisingly common in the North as well. William Lloyd Garrison had said in 1829 that “the prejudices of the north are stronger than those of the south.”6 By the 1850s, those prejudices had diminished, largely due to the publication of powerful slave narratives and other antislavery writings, particularly Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that showed enslaved blacks to be oppressed human beings deserving of compassion. But racism persisted. In 1862, Orestes Brownson estimated that while three fourths of Northern voters were antislavery, at least as many were antiblack.7
Working-class whites sometimes aired resentment about risking their lives by fighting a “Negro war.” A Union soldier after Antietam wrote that his fellows “do not wish to think that they are fighting for Negroes, but to put down the Rebelion [sic]. We must first conquer & then it is time enough to talk about the dam’d niggers.” He explained, “I came out to fight for the restoration of the Union and to keep slavery as it is without going into the territories & not to free the niggers.”8 Such remarks about African Americans were common in the diaries and letters of Northern soldiers. The deadly New York City draft riots of July 1863 provided a violent outlet for Northern racism.
The riots, however, were more than an explosion of working-class prejudice. They reflected an increasing racist trend on the part of Democratic politicians in the North. The riots were fanned by Democrats who assailed Lincoln’s “tyrannical” act of drafting Americans merely to fight in his “abolition war.” New York’s Democratic governor, Horatio Seymour, and the ex-president Franklin Pierce provided encouragement to the riots through their denunciations of conscription, which they considered illegal. Abolitionists held Seymour in particular responsible for the violence, because he addressed the rioters as “my friends.” Frederick Douglass wrote, “Had Governor Seymour been loyal to his country, . . . he would have burned his tongue with a red hot iron sooner than allow it to call these thugs, thieves, and murderers his ‘friends.’”9 Also involved in the antidraft movement was Fernando Wood, the suave ex-mayor of New York who had gone so far as to propose that New York City secede from the Union like the South.
Several Democrats launched public battles against “Puritan” Northerners and the “abolition administration.” Speeches by Samuel S. Cox and Clement Vallandigham were laced with insults about African Americans and their abolitionist supporters. Cox, in his address “Puritanism and Politics,” lambasted the typical antislavery New Englander, who “makes the negro part of himself” and “holds him to be his equal.”10 Denouncing “the Constitution-breaking, law-defying, negro-loving Phariseeism” of antislavery Republicans, Cox added that he saw little difference between “the republicanism that sustains emancipation proclamations and the real old genuine Congo Abolitionism. [Cheers]. They are two separate links of the same Bologna made out of the same canine original. [Great and continued applause and laughter].”
Copperheads—the nickname (referring to the poisonous snake) that Republicans applied to Northern Peace Democrats—became organized and prolific. Many, including Vallandigham, joined an organization devoted to advancing Southern views. Formed in 1854 as the Knights of the Golden Circle (referring to an envisioned “circle” of slave states, to include Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies), the group was later renamed the Order of American Knights and then the Sons of Liberty. Although concentrated in the South, the group had branches in Northern states. Joseph Holt, Lincoln’s judge advocate general of the army, investigated the organization and reported in 1864 that it had at least half a million members in the Union states, mainly Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky, Michigan, and New York.11 The group did what it could to stop the war and bring back the Union as it was, including the restoration of Southern slavery.
Though secret, the group publicized its views widely. According to Holt’s report, through a network of agents it “circulated throughout the country a great quantity of treasonable publications, as a means of extending its power and influence, as well as of giving encouragement to the disloyal and inciting them to treason.” Pro-Southern publications, tailored to the popular audience, streamed from the Copperhead press. The nation was seized, in the words of a Democratic New York paper, by “the rage for pamphlets.”12
These publications were a kind of shotgun blast at the Lincoln administration. The pellets fired represented different popular genres, including the religious tract, the trial pamphlet, the history book, the city-mysteries story, the faux-biblical poem, and allegedly scientific ethnology. The common theme was that the Constitution-breaking, tyrannical Lincoln was waging an abolition war in order to elevate the African race to an abnormal position of equality or superiority to whites.
Among tracts, the most popular was The Lincoln Catechism: Wherein the Eccentricities & Beauties of Despotism Are Fully Set Forth: A Guide to the Presidential Election of 1864. This racist pamphlet had Lincoln’s supporters pledging their loyalty to him in dialogues such as: By whom has the Constitution been made obsolete?
By Abraham Africanus the First . . . [so] that he can make himself and his people the equal of negroes.13
What is a President?
A general agent for negroes. [. . .]
What are the Ten Commandments?
Thou shalt have no other God but the negro.
Is amalgamation the true doctrine of negro equality as taught by Mr. Lincoln in his debates with Mr. Douglas?
It is.
Conservative Democrats also publicized their argument through history books, most notably Edward A. Pollard’s A Southern History of the War. A Virginia journalist and historian, Pollard, the editor of the Richmond Examiner, is most famous for coining a famous Confederate moniker in the title of his 1866 book The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War. In the spring of 1863, Pollard brought out the first volume of his Southern History, which described the war’s first year and its historical backgrounds. In 1864 came his book on the second year of the war. The book in its different editions was among the most-ballyhooed publications of the time. Democratic newspaper ads in the North blared, “Read the Other Side!,” “BUY AND READ! A Thrilling Narrative.” “MOST IMPORTANT WORK ON THE WAR!”14
Joseph Holt included Pollard’s book on his list of “treasonous” publications. Doubtless, the book seemed threatening because Pollard was a skillful writer and, as it then seemed, a solid historian. He lent ostensible substance to the popular idea that the seventeenth-century Puritan-Cavalier conflict lay behind the Civil War. “There could be no congeniality,” he wrote, “between the Puritan exiles who established themselves upon the cold and rugged and cheerless soil of New England, and the Cavaliers who sought the brighter climate of the South, and drank in the baronial halls in Virginia confusion to round heads and regicides.”15 From the seventeenth century onward, he argued, Southerners possessed qualities associated with the Cavaliers: chivalry, refinement, hospitality, and a love of adventure. These qualities shone in the South’s lifestyle and its gallant Civil War generals. Slavery placed a naturally inferior race under the compassionate care of Southern masters. In stark contrast, the descendants of the Puritans, Pollard argued, were heartless, intrusively moralistic persecutors. Intolerant Northerners, spearheaded by the fanatic John Brown, seized power when the Black Republican Lincoln won an unfair election in which he did not receive a majority of the popular vote. The South then fell victim to despotism, persecution, and bloody war. Lincoln, in Pollard’s rendering, was a dictatorial, fanatical jester whose uncouth appearance and vulgar character were aptly captured in the epithet “the Illinois Ape.”16
For readers who preferred timely articles to history books, there was the Copperhead essay collection The Washington Despotism Dissected. This volume, which quickly went through five printings, included an article on Lincoln’s “military despotism,” which “made the liberty of the white man only of secondary importance to that of the negro”; another against emancipation, which would “flood the labor markets of the North with black competitors against the interests of the white industrial classes”; a third assailed Lincoln’s enlistment of black troops, called here “a fiendish expedient with which to make war upon the defenseless women and children of the South”; and a piece titled “Grounds of Impeachment of the President.”17
Trial pamphlets, which had a long history of popularity in America, were represented by Trial of Abraham Lincoln by the Great Statesmen of the Republic. The premise of the pamphlet was that “the present unworthy successor of Washington, the Abolition President, Abraham Lincoln, had become a convert to spiritualism, and that he had recently held a conversation in the White House with the departed spirits of certain great men of the Revolution.”18 At the trial, the Spirit of the Constitution charges Lincoln with “treasonable intent, purposes, and designs” for having opposed secession, suspended habeas corpus, violated freedom of the press, issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and committing other “crimes.” The witnesses against Lincoln include the spirits of Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Hancock, Patrick Henry, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and others. At the end of the trial, there arises a “grand phantasmagory” of victims of the Civil War: soldiers with their brains oozing out or their limbs torn off, orphans longing for their fathers, and widows crying for their slain husbands. The Spirit of the Constitution finds Lincoln guilty as charged.
The Metropolitan Record, a Catholic newspaper that was the official organ of Archbishop John Hughes of New York, published both The Washington Despotism Dissected and Trial of Abraham Lincoln. The newspaper’s ceaseless campaign against Lincoln’s emancipation policy raises the thorny issue of American Catholicism and slavery. With few exceptions, such as Orestes Brownson and Archbishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati, American Catholics either condoned slavery or remained silent about it. This attitude was predictable in the South; the Catholic archbishop of Baltimore typically excoriated the “horrible and detestable” Emancipation Proclamation, which, he insisted, was “letting loose from three to four millions of half civilized Africans to murder their Masters and Mistresses!”19
But we should note that Northern Catholics, by and large, shared this attitude. The Metropolitan Record warned that the “disgraceful” Emancipation Proclamation, by liberating many blacks and admitting them into the military, changed the whole character of the war, which “is no longer to be a war between white men; it is St. Domingo massacres inaugurated on our own soil under the sanction, approval, and encouragement of the Government of the United States.” Lincoln, the paper asserted, had opened the way for “an ordeal of carnage and fiendish outrage” that “will hardly be surpassed in the history of ancient or modern warfare.”20
The fact that the Metropolitan Record represented Archbishop Hughes made its anti-Lincoln stance especially complicated. Hughes, although opposed to emancipation, supported the Union and was a sometime adviser to the president.21 In late 1862 and early 1863, he served as an envoy to France and the Vatican. As Carl Sandburg notes, “the Archbishop became one the President’s personal agents with full powers to set forth the Union cause in Europe.”22 Lincoln asked Hughes for recommendations of Catholic priests to administer to wounded and dying soldiers in military hospitals. Reportedly, the president even wrote the Pope, hinting that he should consider appointing the archbishop as America’s first cardinal.23
Despite Hughes’s connections with Lincoln, his organ, the Metropolitan Record, challenged the president’s emancipationist goals, as did other Catholic periodicals. Not only was the Record the publisher of Trial of Abraham Lincoln and Washington Despotism, but it promoted other anti-Lincoln works as well. It hailed Alexander del Mar’s Abraham Africanus I, as “one of the most extraordinary and mirth provoking squibs we remember to have seen,” claiming that “it can hardly be delivered fast enough for the demand of book sellers and agents.
