Re: Lincoln biographer Michael Burlingame to speak in Fort W
This past Monday, at the Ides of March, I took the day off so as to have lunch at the downtown library while Dr Michael Burlingame conducted a talk about his 1994 book titled "The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln". I brought along a copy of Volume II of his magnum opus "Abraham Lincoln; A Life", so as to get him to inscribe it, just as heinscribed Volume I for me last year at Springfield. The funny thing was that at Springfield, when I approached Dr Burlingame between sessions of the colloquium, he agreed to sign my book if he could borrow it as a prop - since he didn't bring a copy with him, and there wasn't one available; and here in Fort Wayne, history repeated itself! (at the evening lecture, he did indeed have both volumes at the lecturn, as the ACPL had the books in their collection)
During the lunch hour talk, he made some compelling points about how Lincoln progressed from being a fairly low-road, rabble-rousing political hack in his 20's and 30's, into a largely obscure 5 year period of political non-involvement, and then his re-mergence onto the political scene as a matured figure on the road toward becoming a genuine statesman. Burlingame effectively argues that Lincoln went through what we might term a "mid-life crisis" and successfully emerged as a much more mature, self-assured and magnanamous human being.
In his evening talk, he touched those same themes again, and went on to illuminate several other interesting aspects of our greatest president's life and times. Shelby and I bustled in just as the introductions were beginning, and we spotted Jon Youse and made our way toward him. Meanwhile - and unbeknownst to me at the time - Shelby was quite taken aback by the spectacle of a guy sitting in the audience with a firearm in plain view. I remember seeing a guy with a Civil War-era blue coat with a double row of brass buttons, but I missed that the same fellow had a rifle propped on his knee. Shelby tipped me off as we were leaving, and it was indeed a jarring sight.
In the lecture, Dr Burlingame went out of his way to disagree with Fredrick Douglass's 1876 statement that "Lincoln was preeminently the white man's president" and that "we blacks are at best his step children". Burlingame takes pains to point out that Douglass was much more supportive in the 1860's, when the president was still alive. This was part of larger point he was making, regarding Lincoln's assassination as a direct consequence of the president's publicly stated view that black Americans (especially those that served in the Union armed services) should be free to vote - since that was specifically what pushed JW Booth over the edge (when he was in the crowd that heard that speech).
I get his larger point, but I think Burlingame is altogether unfair to Frederick Douglass, as he reduces his 1876 "preeminently a white man's president" remark all the way down to stick figures. Consider:
(from Giants, by John Stauffer, page 306) (at the dedication of the Freedmen’s Monument)
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| Quote: “Truth compels me to admit — even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory –that Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model…He was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of the white man” and he “shared toward the colored race the prejudices common to his countrymen”. Douglas then addressed the white dignitaries in the stands before him. “You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children”.
No doubt many of the white dignitaries considered Douglass insolent and his speech in bad taste. But those who had followed his career would have recognized his penchant for suddenly reversing course and surprising his audience, a technique he had gleaned long ago from The Columbian Orator. He employed it now. By prioritizing the Union over the plight of blacks, Lincoln succeeded “in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict,” Douglass acknowledged. “Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union,” he would have alienated large numbers of people and “rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr Lincoln seemed tardy,cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined” | |
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Lerone Bennett wrote a book about Lincoln called Forced into Glory, in which he tries to make the claim that Lincoln was a racist and a reluctant emancipator; a political trimmer who was simply “forced into glory” by circumstance. The book was copy-righted in 1999, and if you read almost any of the leading Lincoln biographers — or see them on C-SPAN or wherever — they STILL bring up Bennett’s book so as to disagree with it, as did Michael Burlingame. Indeed, he was almost surprisingly derisive and dismissive of Bennett's book, plainly stating that he read one chapter and put it aside, because it was so insuperably "wrong-headed"*. And then he had to write a review about it, so he HAD to read it, and (he told us) he therefore titled his review "Forced into reading Forced Into Glory".
But I think Bennett’s book is very akin to standing 8 feet from the Statue of Liberty; close enough to see imperfections and corrosion and so on, but still and undeniably next to an obect of immense grace and grandeur. If I was teaching a course, I’d make all my students read that book, plus any of the standard Lincoln biographies, if only to highlight one key source of Lincoln’s greateness — that he was always seeking and striving and extending and learning and adapting; he always went forward, and never backslid.
Lincoln’s constituency was almost always white and male — whether it was a judge, or a jury, or a state legislative or congressional district electorate, or a statewide electorate, or a state legislature, or the voters of the nation. Despite the apotheosis that some would push onto Lincoln, he was far from perfect — but hindsight (at least!) tells us he was exceptionally well-suited to make the moral case against the abomination of slavery and racism — even as he himself was never done learning.
Let me say that Burlingame's 2,000 page book is altogether fair-minded and full and frank about the man's unceasing moral development. Indeed, he spends many unvarnished pages exploring the president's wrong-headed (not to say irrational) and repeated and passionate advocacy of colonization of Americans of African descent to Central America, and Liberia, including flatly fraudulant swindles (Chiriqui) that many trusted people (including SecNav Welles, SecState Seward, and Rep Browning and others) repeatedly warned him away from. I suppose this makes sense. The mission of a 20 minute talk as aopposed to a 2000 page tome is radically different; nuance and distinction have to thumb for a ride home.
But aside from that - it is always pleasing to see and hear world class scholars and thinkers, whether at the library or IPFW or the University of Saint Francis. After the event, there was a reception, but it being a school niight, Shelby and I bid goodnight to Jon, and rolled for home.
So my question is - Jon - what did you think of it?
*at the lunch time talk, in fact, I mentioned the John Stauffer book Giants, which Dr B also dismissed as "wrong-headed" and not worth reading! He has
pronounced tastes when it comes to whether a book is any good!
