Thought-provoking article: "What 'Lincoln' misses and another Civil War film gets right"....

[Bucky]

87. Oh good heavens.

He used the N-word and told racist jokes.

In the 19th century. So did lots of folks. So did LBJ, whose commitment to Civil Rights no sane person can doubt. Private behavior, however coarse by modern standards, is still not the same as public policy, which is entirely what Spielberg's Lincoln movie was about.

He once said African-Americans were inferior to whites.

Once? Hardly "once." He said it a number of times and in a number of ways. That has nothing at all to do with his clear moral stand against slavery. Although he pointed out the institution was bad for whites, consistently his arguments against slavery were always framed as unjust for black Americans.

For the record, he quite talking about racial superiority by the early 1860s. What he said in 1858 running for the Senate (when he made his most famous "not the equal of a white man" statement) was considerably different than what he said while president.

Lincoln evolved on the question. His evolution on slavery and racial relations are quite well documented by a number of historians. Whoever argues against the idea that Lincoln's views and policies changed over time is a fool and holds no weight in a serious historical discussion. After 1863, his rhetoric is quite frankly egalitarian on race issues, if still usually circumspect and politic. But then, the whole point of the movie is to show he was a politician.

He proposed ending slavery by shipping willing slaves back to Africa.

This is another thing he vaguely mentioned as a possibility early in his national career, but which he never proposed as a policy nor lobbied for as a private citizen. It was common, if ultimately ignorant, proposed solution by abolitionists who were put upon with the question: but what are we then going to do with all those people?

There were a few very limited attempts to establish a freedmen colony in the Caribbean Basin during the war. Most ended among corruption by colony managers and horrendous humanitarian nightmares in the actual colonization sites. These were only feeler missions, never a large policy of deportation. In the end, Lincoln did nothing to allay his entirely accurate fears of racial inharmony and he de facto treated freedmen like American citizens--which they were confirmed to be by law with the 14th Amendment.

Meet Abraham Lincoln, "The Great Emancipator" who "freed" the slaves.

If you remove those "quoties," you're a lot closer to the truth than the sarcastic and un-nuanced picture painted with those quotation marks. When it comes to personal enlightenment, no, Abraham was not exactly Albert Schweizer. But on an imaginary scale of 1 to 10, with Schweizer at a 10 and, say, Lester Maddox at a 1, Lincoln judged by his politics lands on the high end of the scale, despite growing up in an age when the average white American was probably south of the 3 tickmark.

Attacking Lincoln for not being enlightened by 21st century norms is a bit like insulting Orville and Wilbur because they couldn't keep it up for very long. Maybe their wives get to complain, but you* just need to shut up and admire them for their progress.


=======================

*[font size="1"]I don't mean YOU you. I mean the guy who wrote the article as well as whoever agrees with these shallow critiques. So maybe I do mean you after all.[/font]