Confederate "Heritage" Month 2023, April 23: Lincoln's antislavery democratic heritage (*actual* heritage!)

David Reynolds did a long review essay of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (2021) by Clint Smith, a kind of reflective tourist’s journal of visiting historical sites in the US related to the history of slavery and Jim Crow. He calls attention to Clint’s skeptical view of Abraham Lincoln’s antislavery position:

Another [assertion by one of Smith’s interview subjects]—that Abraham Lincoln was reactionary, despite his reputation as the Great Emancipator—leads Smith to shoehorn into [one] chapter a highly qualified portrayal of America’s greatest president. Cherry-picking conservative moments in Lincoln’s career, Smith generalizes, “Lincoln did have acomplicated history with slavery and his stance on emancipation.” Actually there was nothing complicated about Lincoln’s view of slavery. He said that he had always hated it “as much as any Abolitionist,” and he worked fervently toward its extinction. But he was confronted by what were widely accepted as proslavery provisions in the Constitution, and he remained faithful to the democratic system of elections. Sometimes he leaned right on his political tightrope to win the votes of a racist electorate and, during the Civil War, to keep the border states in the Union.¹ [my emphasis]

And Reynolds goes on to discuss the political perspective that Lincoln derived from the country’s democratic traditions:

As for the Declaration of Independence, which Smith dismisses as a bundle of equivocations and contradictions, Lincoln in 1861 said he would rather be assassinated on the spot than surrender its egalitarian message, one that two years later he identified with America’s mission in the Gettysburg Address—a speech that was called repulsively pro-black by his conservative critics, such as a journalist who deemed the address “an insult” to the Gettysburg dead and to the nation’sfounders, who possessed “too much self-respect to declare thatnegroes were their equals.” Smith, despite his mixed assessment, at least recognizes Lincoln’s contribution by taking us back to basics: “As the war evolved, Lincoln was in charge of an army that was fighting to free four million Black people, while the other side fought to keep them enslaved.”

Sometimes, history really does come down to: Which Side Are You On?²

Success to the old-fashioned doctrine
That men are created all free
And down with the power of the despot
Wherever his stronghold may be

Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) is rightly criticized for his positions on slavery – he was a slaveowner himself - and his treatment of native peoples.

But an important part of the American democratic tradition was the movement known as Jacksonian democracy. The fact that the white nationalist supporters of Donald Trump persuaded him to adopt Jackson as his personal mascot is nothing short of bizarre when one considers the nature of Jacksonian democracy in its historical time. (Ronald Reagan also kept a portrait of Jackson in his Oval Office as President. But Reagan’s political schtick was that he was a former Democrat.)

The Democratic Party founded by Thomas Jefferson was first called the Democratic-Republican Party. A reminder that the Founders’ generation didn’t consider “republic” and “democracy” incompatible concepts, as the John Bircher types like to claim.

Jackson himself fought as a soldier in the Revolutionary War, so he can legitimately be considered a Founder himself. When the party divided into two major factions in the 1820s that Jackson’s faction began to use the term Democratic Party, which the party with all its transformations since then has retained as its name.

As Jackson biographer Sean Wilentz writes, the Republican Party of Lincoln picked up many of the democratic elements of the Jacksonian trend::

The significance of Lincoln’s convergence with certain anti-slavery elements of Jacksonian Democracy, and then with certain of Jackson’s political precedents, should not be exaggerated. Yet neither should the convergence be ignored. As the politics of American democracy altered in the 1840s and 1850s, to confront the long-suppressed crisis over slavery, so the terms of democratic politics broke apart and recombined in ways that defy any neat ideological or political genealogy. Just as the Republican Party of the 1850s absorbed certain elements of Jacksonianism, so Lincoln, whose Whiggery had always been more egalitarian than that of other Whigs, found himself absorbing some of them as well. And some of the Jacksonian spirit resided inside the Lincoln White House.³ [my emphasis]

But it’s worth noting that it was Jackson’s rival and predecessor as President, John Quincy Adams, who actively began to promote the antislavery cause in his career as a Congressman after his Presidency.

But Jackson’s greatest political enemy was John C. Calhoun, the patron saint of secession – I consider Calhoun to be the evil spirit of American history – and it was during the Nullification Crisis that Jackson as President faced down the Calhounite secessionists of South Carolina. Jackson’s 1932 “Proclamation Regarding Nullification” puts into words the notion of national patriotism as allegiance to the democratic republic based on the US Constitution. It was on this understanding of democracy and patriotism that the Union fought its successful war against slavery and secession.

History is complicated. Including (especially?) the history of freedom and democracy.

1. Reynolds, David (2022): In the Shadow of Slavery. New York Review of Books 02/24/2022 issue. <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/02/24/in-the-shadow-of-slavery-smith-reynolds/> (Accessed: 2023-11-03).

2. Lincoln and Liberty - 1860 Campaign Song. Major Kong YouTube channel 08/16/2008. (Accessed: 2023-16-04).

3. Wilentz, Sean (n/d): Abraham Lincoln and Jacksonian Democracy Gilder. Lehrman Instiute of American History. <https://ap.gilderlehrman.org/essays/abraham-lincoln-and-jacksonian-democracy> (Accesssed: 2023-20-03).