Abraham Lincoln: Fact vs Fiction

A Science of Happiness, Appreciating Condern Painting, dilemmas of modern Medica, Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, the artistic genius of michel Angelo, when intuition, American Psychology of Religion, One Day University. The most acclaimed and popular professors from top colleges. They're best lectures, fascinating conversations. Hi, I'm Richard Davies. Let's learn what's what's the name of the war? Yeah, I see, you're all good. You're all good. It's the War of

the Rebellion if success. I'm Lou Majorum, Distinguished Professor of American Studies in History at Rutgers University. I lecture on Abraham Lincoln. What's fact and what's fiction? You're a rebel. When I gave a lecture on Lincoln in Atlanta, they all said, it's the War of Northern aggression. I said, absolutely right, absolutely right, make no mistake about it. What do we get wrong about him? Is there one thing above others that we make a big mistake when we

think of Lincoln. Lincoln is is so complicated in so many ways, and of course he's politicized. So when you ask what do we get wrong about him? It depends on on on your point of view. Right, the biggest question has always been, of course, Lincoln and slavery, Lincoln and emancipation. The people who believe that he truly is the great emancipator who freed the slaves, and the people who cherry pick from other things that he said to indicate that he was a racist who didn't really care

about slavery, who didn't free the slaves. So you start there air and you can move into all kinds of different questions because history is about interpretation. We we we try to know the facts the best that we can, but ultimately it's our job to turn facts into truths. And so the truths of Lincoln, Uh, you're gonna have different people disagreeing upon. Take, for example, the issue of Lincoln and slavery. Lincoln was always against slavery, he said

I'm naturally anti slavery. I can't recall a place at a time when I did not think and feel so. But he wasn't always an abolitionist. He wasn't always committed to freeing the slaves. So the question then becomes when you ask what's fact and what's fiction? Well, was he against slavery? Was he not against slavery? Did he free the slaves? Did he not free the slaves? A lot depends on how you frame the question, the answer that

one gets. He had a very different policy view on slavery when he started as president, then a couple of years later he's always against slavery, but he can't act against slavery when he becomes president, even if he wanted to. Slavery is a state institution protected by state laws. The federal government has no power of slavery, and if you're a Southern Unionist who owned slaves, you're still entitled to

your property. He has two generals early in the war, General Hunter and General Fremont, who issue military orders freeing the slaves in their areas. And what does Lincoln do. He immediately revokes those orders, and people go apoplectic. Those on the left, I mean the anti slavery abolitionists crowd. Lincoln says, if there is a power to act against slavery, it is vested in me as commander in chief, and not in any of my generals. This is the thing

about Lincoln. This is where people get so confused on the subject of Lincoln and slavery. Why couldn't the act against slavery He didn't have the power to do so. Lincoln time and again said that I cannot act against slavery. I will not act against slavery. He said it leading up to the Civil War to try and reassure those Southern states that they had nothing to worry about with him being elected president. They didn't believe that. In eleven

of them succeeded. But he does not cannot even if he wanted to abolish slavery at the beginning of the war. So the question then becomes, how do we get from March of eighteen sixty one, when he says I can't do anything against slavery to January one, eighteen sixty three, when he issues an emancipation proclamation freeing the slaves. That is the story of Lincoln and slavery. How radical was

the Emancipation Proclamation. Frederick Douglas, the great abolitionist, said the Emancipation Proclamation stood next to the Decoration of Independence as one of the two pole stars of liberty in America at the time. P but recognized it to be the most significant document since the Declaration. It has lost some of its luster over time. That's another subject, perhaps, and another story about reputation, about how the past gets viewed

through the prism of the present. But to think that in a nation that had embraced slavery, he issued a document that freed the majority of slaves is remarkable. What a lot of people don't understand about the document is it does something else that's even more radical. It authorizes the enlistment of black soldiers in the U. S. Army. Think about that, We're not only going to free the slaves, We're going to put guns in their hands and send

them back South to fight for the Union. So it was a one two punch that was profound, and at the moment seemed that it would shift the balance of the war. The question should be not what took them so long to do it, but how unbelievable it is that he did and he did it gradually, as was his want. So Lincoln takes these steps, and he does so under the doctrine of military necessity. And you can watch again, it's an intellectual problem, as much of his is.

It's any other kind of problem. Okay, how do we get from it's illegal down constitutional free to slaves too? I have the legal, constitutional right to do so. And the answer is as a as a necessary means of war, as a way to promote the military effort. Now, the slaves themselves are not all quite impassive in all of this. Right, the enslaved runaway delivered themselves to Union lines and also forced Lincoln to consider this. He says in July, the

pressure upon me in this direction is great, Lincoln. I so, you know. So it's not just that Lincoln acts. Lincoln reacts. The famous line of Lincoln's that I cannot claim to have controlled events, but I have been controlled by them. How did Lincoln's views about the slaves change over the years of his presidency. Well, if you think about the problem of race in America, race and the question of race continues to bedevil the nation in a variety of

different ways. Now, if you think back to the nineteenth century, what are we going to do with these free blacks? That literally was the question that was asked. If the slaves are freed, what are we going to do with them? The question is not always posed that way, but it has to be posed that way because that's the way

in which they thought about the problem. For them, the problem with slavery was not only yeah, slavery is wrong, it's immoral, it's illegal, it's unconstitution We should abolish the slaves. But then there's a second question. Four million formally enslaved persons now free, what are we gonna do? And a lot of that is to understand the racialist ideology of the day, which varies in terms of where you want

to go on the spectrum of quote unquote racism. You know, there's actually a paternalistic, benevolent racism and it goes like this. And this isn't to justify it. But if we're gonna be historians, we have to think the way in which the nineteenth century thought and not necessarily impose some of

our own ideas upon them. Well, if you thought slavery was such a total institution of barbaric, horrible damage, institution that deprived individuals of any idea of humanity, then any theory of personality means you have one of two types coming out of it. Either the enslaved are made to be so docile and childlike and infantilize that they can possibly function for themselves and take on the responsibilities of adulthood.

Or they have been made so savage, so barbarous that the result is going to be bloodshed, that they're going to exact revenge on their former masters. So what do we do? And here's a classic example of Lincoln changing his mind. Lincoln, like many Americans, believed they can't live peaceably side by side with whites, so they believed in colonization. You know we're gonna do. We're going to get them

voluntarily to emigrate out of the country. And Lincoln supported this. Indeed, he was a sucker for every colonization scheme that came his way because he believed that this was a solution to what we might call the race problem in America. African Americans didn't want that. Black said, no, we're Americans. We don't want to go to Liberia. That's one of the first countries founded as a colony for former blacks

in America. We want to stay. And over time Lincoln comes to understand that that's right, that that not only should slavery be ended, but we must find the way for the black citizens of America to obtain their full rights as citizens within this country. He goes so far as to not only abandoned colonization, but in the very last speech that he gives on April eleventh, eighteen sixty five, he endorses black suffrage. We're talking about the evolution of

Abraham Lincoln as president and commander in chief. So in that last speech, among other things, he says that he supports black suffrage for educated blacks and those who served. Think about that. Shockingly, the right to vote today is still contested. Think about what it meant to give the vote to black men in eighteen sixty but Lincoln was prepared to do so. This is a man who eleven years earlier didn't even know they deserve political and social equality.

John Wokes Booth is among the crowd who hears Lincoln deliver that speech, and he turns to his co conspirator, Louis Pale, and he says, that's the last speech he'll ever give. And we don't often think of Lincoln as a martyr to civil rights, but to the stent that while the conspiracy was in motion, it's that speech and the endorsement of black suffrage that immediately led Booth three

days later to assassinate Lincoln. That's important to remember. So we have this man, Abraham Lincoln, who starts out, I'm not so sure about whites and blacks being equal, certainly not certain that blacks should live in this country, against slavery, but not willing really to act against slavery. Doesn't have the power to do it. And where do we end up. We end up with this man who not only frees the slaves, but he believes that you have to give black men the right to vote so that they could

be full citizens of the nation. That's greatness. There's a lovely moment in your lecture when you talk about Lincoln growing a beard. It's fabulous story. It's one of the many great Lincoln stories. He he grows it in response to a letter that he gets after he was elected. Around the time of his election, what did he do

he grew here? He seems to do so in response to a letter that he gets from an eleven year old girl named Grace Biddell Grace writes them a letter in October eighteen sixty and says, I've got four brothers, and part of them will vote for you anyway. If you will let your whiskers grow and I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you, you would look a great deal better. For your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers, and they would tease their husbands to vote for you, and then

you would be president. My father is going to vote for you, and if I was a man, I would vote for you too. But I will try and get everyone to vote for you that I can. Remarkable letter from an eleven year old girl, and it's just beautiful. Of course, it captures some other fundamental truth about Lincoln. And that's how weird looking he was for the times. He was awkward. He was downright ugly, and he knew it. He's constantly making references to his appearance. Anyone who ever

saw Lincoln jotted something down about how he looks. What Whitman, the great poet, was working in Armory Hospital, he used to see Lincoln coming and going. He writes a letter to his mother where he says, I see the president every day. He is like a who'sier Michaelangelo? So awful, ugly, he's almost beautiful. So and now here you have this eleven year old girl also saying, you know, I think

you look better with a beard. What's remarkable because Lincoln responds, and he responds as if she's a constituent, and he he says, thank you for your consideration, and indeed he goes ahead and grows the beard. I also argue in my lecture that the beard is in effect also his war beard. It's grown between his election and his inauguration. He's preparing for the cataclysmic conflict that seems to be

coming on the horizon. Did he, above most other men of his time feel deeply about the importance of preserving the Union? Right from the get go, preserving the Union was everything to Lincoln. Time and again he talked about the Union. He in fact creates in some ways the cult of Union. In his inaugural address, he talks about the perpetuity of the Union. He countered every chance he could the argument being made by the secessionists that it's

the states that had ultimate authority. No, no, no, no, Lincoln said, the federal government, the Union that's what had ultimate authority, and that no one had a right to leave the union. You could do all kinds of things. If you're unhappy with the election of the president, you can wait four years and vote amount of office. You can try and organize a constitutional convention to change the frame of government. There are many things that you could do.

What you can't do is leave. Lincoln articulates this critical legal constitutional doctrine of the illegality of secession. That's what he's spending his time doing. Is, of course a lawyer. He's done a tremendous amount of research. He argues that secession is an ingenious saphis m. Those are his words. He says, it is the essence of anarchy. You cannot have a government in which there's a constitutional right to secession. Lincoln said, nonsense. The compact theory of government does not

mean states take precedence over the federal government. Cannot be done. The nation exists before the state. And there are many parts of Lincoln's greatness. Part of course, of his greatness is his ability to argue and sustain an argument for the nation the union in predominance over the state, and his defense of the union. His articulation of that is one of the great contributions to our history. That's the meeting of the Gettysburg Address four score and seven years ago.

Our fathers came forth to create a new nation. That word nation. The address is a little over two words. He uses the word nation five times. That's what Lincoln believed in, right, those mystic chords of memory that he spoke about, and that's what he defended, and that's ultimately what he preserved. His refusal to allow the Union to

be lost is what kept this country together. Do you think that without Lincoln the United States would have split apart and remained split in a much more fundamental way than it is today. Counter Factuals and hypotheticals are always difficult for historians to answer. Are generally we try to

avoid answering them because you just can never know. But I think there's a strong likelihood, with out Lincoln's leadership, his determination, his skills, and a lot of luck, that indeed the strength of states rights, the strength of secession may very well have led to the fracturing and breaking up of this nation into into two nations or more. It's worth noting that those questions are still alive right there.

You know, the state of California today is threatening to succeed in California is one of the world's largest economies. Are questions of states rights haven't gone away? Although I do think the commonplaces to say this. Before the Civil War, the United States was plural. After the Civil War, it's singular. Lincoln was one of the driving forces to help make that. So you said that the greatest thing about Abraham Lincoln may well have been that he changed his mind. Why

is that so important? You know? I tend to try not to talk about as it matters when I lecture about the past. But I think we need only look around at the state of politics today on all sides of the political spectrum. This is a nonpartisan comment about the rigidity, about the ways in which positions become ossified, about the ways in which it seems that discourse is limited and people refuse to move in any direction. For me, it makes my admiration of Lincoln all the greater. How

did this man born in poverty, self educated? How did he come to represent this ability and this willingness to think through things and to change his mind over time? I'll give you two diametrically opposed quotes from Lincoln to show you how he changed his mind during the war.

August Lincoln told delegates from Indiana, who offered to raise two black regiments, quote, the nation couldnt afford to lose Kentucky at this crisis, and to arm the Negroes would turn fifty thousand bayonets from the loyal border states against US that were for US. August two. Not doing it. Here we go January one, weeks after. The colored population is the great available and yet unavailable force for restoring

the Union. The bare site of fifty thousand armed and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi would end the rebellion at once. And who doubts that we could present that site if we but take hold of it in earnest? Is that wonderful? I think ultimately that's the measure of a great political leader, change over time. It is a remarkable phenomenon to study and to witness.

And I'm not alone in doing that, you know, I often in my lecture quote W. E. B. Du Bois, the great African American IT or historian activists, founder the Double A CP. The boys thought a lot about Lincoln at the time of the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, and one of the things that he said about him, he said, I love him not because he was perfect, but because he wasn't, and yet he triumphed. That's the thing about Lincoln. We could see all the ways in

which he wasn't perfect. We could see all the ways in which he was a bundle of contradictions. We can see all the ways in which he struggled in his own time. But in the end he triumphed, and because of his triumph, this nation continues. What do you hope

that audiences will take away from this lecture? My deepest hope for what audiences will take away from this lecture is to understand that all of us today can still become some better version of ourselves, because I think the genius of Lincoln is that he was always becoming, He was always changing. He didn't start out as Abraham Lincoln. He became Abraham Lincoln. And what that means is any of us can also become the thing that we most

hope we want to be. So in that sense, to see Lincoln, yes, it's to understand the past, is to understand a seminal figure without whom this nation would be fundamentally different. But the best of history also allows us to understand something about ourselves. I'm Richard Davis. Thanks for listening. Sign up on our website one day you dot com to become a member and access over six hundred full length video lectures for the world's finest professorsh