Abraham Lincoln at Two Hundred

Vernon Burton

The OAH Newsletter requested that I write a report of the Lincoln bicentennial. The bicentennial activities were so numerous and exciting that it would have required several issues of the OAH Newsletter to list them all. Instead, I will concentrate on the session at the 2009 OAH Annual Meeting with which the OAH Newsletter suggested I begin the essay. Amidst the abundance of books, articles, plays, and assorted activities dedicated to the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, people wanted even more. In response, the OAH Distinguished Lectureship Program has promoted lectures related to Lincoln. In addition to numerous O\AH lectures, the Abraham Lincoln Association in Springfield and the Lincoln Forum of Gettysburg sponsored programs as well. In further commemoration of the Lincoln bicentennial, the 2009 OAH Annual Meeting Program Committee approached the executive director of the Congressional Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Committee (ALBC), Eileen Mackevich, about assembling a panel for the OAH meeting in Seattle, “The Lincoln Legacy: Bicentennial Reflections.” The panel originally included cochair of the ALBC, Republican Congressman Ray LaHood (now Secretary of Transportation), and ALBC Commission member, Democratic Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., Eileen Mackevich, and myself. Because of Congressional duties, however, both congressmen had to withdraw. Senate historian Donald Ritchie stepped up to serve as chair, and ALBC member and OAH past president James O. Horton, joined the panel.

The 8:00 a.m. Saturday morning session drew a surprisingly large crowd, and the audience eagerly participated in a dynamic question and answer discussion. The conversation among the panelists and the audience revolved around the comparisons of the 1909 centennial of Lincoln’s birth, the 1959 sesquicentennial celebration, and the 2009 bicentennial. The panel itself focused on perceptions of Lincoln that would not have been asked fifty years ago.

Donald Ritchie began the panel and ably set the context. Among his comments, Ritchie noted that Edmund Wilson in his 1962 Patriotic Gore stated that the worst thing that happened to Lincoln was Carl Sandburg (to which I take exception). At the conclusion of the session, Ritchie provided a wonderful, concise summary of the discussions. He particularly liked the comparisons between 1959 and 2009, and the idea of education as a legacy of Lincoln, including land grant colleges as authorized by the Morrill Act, and especially civic engagement and educational opportunities for the military.

The next speaker, James O. Horton, placed Lincoln in a global context. Using Hawai’i, a sovereign nation at the time of the Civil War, Horton discussed what Lincoln meant to Hawai’ians. He was very popular in Hawai’i then. Lincoln did better in mock elections at Honolulu in 1860 and 1864 than he did in most of the United States. And he is popular today. On anniversaries of his birthday, people place leis on his statue at Ewa Beach. With an emphasis on Lincoln in a transnational setting, Horton looked at Lincoln’s correspondence with King Kamehameha IV and King Kamehameha V, which addressed each as “My good and great friend” and signed the letters as “Your good friend.” Surprising to many, a number of Hawai’ians served the Union cause in the army and navy, some serving in African American regiments (1).

In her presentation, Eileen Mackevich compared the public celebrations of 1959--the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s birthday and the beginnings of the Civil War centennial--and 2009. In 1959, during the cold war, both Dwight D. Eisenhower and Germany’s Willy Brandt spoke at Springfield, Illinois. Brandt said that Lincoln stood as the symbol for the continuous search for freedom and progress. Both men compared Lincoln’s policy of “containment” in preventing the spread of slavery with the Kennan Doctrine and its containment of communism. In 1959, the public commemorations generally focused on Lincoln’s dedication to the preservation of the Union. In this year’s bicentennial commemorations, the emphasis has been on self-emancipation and the end of slavery. In addition, Mackevich spoke about some of the activities sponsored by the ALBC, including an upcoming conference on the Morrill Act of 1862 and Lincoln’s views on education. She made an argument that education for veterans was a legacy of Lincoln and the Morrill Act. In arguing for civic engagement, Mackevich related the events of an ALBC meeting on the aircraft carrier the USS Lincoln, in Everett, Washington, with young sailors who looked to Lincoln as a model of military leadership.

My presentation focused primarily on two areas, Lincoln and nationalism in comparative perspective, and the changing views of Lincoln among African Americans from the centennial to the bicentennial. During celebrations of the first centennial, occurring during the nadir of American race relations, white historians basically wrote African Americans out of history. Issues of slavery and emancipation were basically ignored, while Lincoln was honored as the savior of the Union and celebrated for his “malice toward none.” The Lincoln Memorial, the legacy of the centennial, is an example of just how public memory ignored the struggle over emancipation. Now, during the bicentennial, the emphasis has shifted to race relations. I related some of the sentiments expressed in a session on my book, The Age of Lincoln, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History in Birmingham. In a dramatic shift, African American views of Lincoln have changed from that of the Great Emancipator to that of the white honky (2).

During the question and answer portion, many expressed interest in the changing views of Lincoln among African Americans. Some in the audience, including panelist Jim Horton, remembered when pictures of Lincoln were prominently displayed in the homes of African Americans. The shift in perception came about with the modern civil rights movement, correctly labeled the Second Reconstruction. In the civil rights era the “great man” theory of history was questioned; social history--from the bottom up--was de rigueur. The new historical emphasis tended to topple many political leaders, including Lincoln. In the public sphere, Stokely Carmichael attacked Lincoln as a racist, and Lerone Bennett, Jr., long time editor of Ebony, publicized the view in an important essay in 1969 and in his book, Forced into Glory (2000). With the civil rights movement, when historians’ interests shifted from slavery to race and racism, Lincoln’s more gradualist policy was seen as inadequate, so much so that Mark Neely found the Great Emancipator characterized as “the perfect embodiment of Northern racism” in the pathbreaking book North of Slavery by white scholar Leon Litwack in 1961 (3). The ambiguous relationship of African Americans to Lincoln and the Lincoln legacy was personally dramatized in Harvard literature professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s PBS documentary, Looking for Lincoln.

Other discussion from the audience involved many high school teachers, along with a number of college professors, who wanted ideas about how they could incorporate Lincoln into courses or teach separate courses for the bicentennial year on Lincoln. Many believed that the OAH should help them do this. The OAH Magazine of History, which is a valuable resource for history teachers, devoted a series of issues to Lincoln, and the Journal of American History would publish an interesting volume on Lincoln during the bicentennial (4).

This year has seen an amazing amount of Lincoln activities. A number of universities are sponsoring courses on Lincoln and most states established commissions devoted to Lincoln programs. Even with the economic downturn and withdrawal of previously allocated monies, creative initiatives found ways to produce meaningful commemorations and educational programs focused on the Lincoln bicentennial.

Driving the commemoration is the ALBC, established on February 25, 2000, by Congress. The mission of the ALBC is to commemorate the bicentennial birthday of Abraham Lincoln, emphasizing the contribution of his thoughts as ideals to America and the world, and as a catalyst for strengthening freedom, democracy, and equal opportunity for all. Elaine Mackevich was hired as executive director on September 10, 2006, and brought a vision of public engagement to the ALBC. Senator Dick Durbin, Congressman Ray LaHood (who, upon becoming Secretary of Transportation, had to step down), and Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, cochair the commission which has inspired and worked with various groups and programs. In April 2007, the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission Foundation, originally a four-member foundation chaired by Jack Kemp, was established to build a public-private partnership to give full support to the national and global commemorations of Lincoln’s bicentennial. The foundation, a 501(c)(3) of the ALBC, has as its mission to continue to advance understanding and appreciation of Lincoln as a world figure for the advancement of civil and human rights. The foundation is also responsible for the ALBC’s main legacy, a Lincoln Web site (and other programs and partnerships) it will affect over time. The Web site <http://www.abrahamlincoln200.org> represents Lincoln in the democratic spirit of free inquiry. The Web site is planned to be interactive and hopefully will one day even include a virtual tour of the bicentennial’s legacy, the Lincoln monument and other commemorative markers. Among a host of amazing activities, the ALBC has promoted and sponsored historical conferences, a book, worked with the OAH on the OAH Magazine of History, and has conducted a series of town hall meetings focused on race in several major cities.

Thus Lincoln’s legacy continues to reverberate in strange and interesting ways. The election of President Barack Obama has piqued interest in Lincoln. Indeed, most presidents have at some level identified with Lincoln, including President George W. Bush. But Obama, who like Lincoln came to Illinois as a young man, and like Lincoln garnered most of his political experience in the Illinois legislature, has made clear his admiration and identification with our sixteenth president.

Given so much wonderful hoopla, do we now have Lincoln myopia? Or has there been too much Lincoln? Are the general public and historians ready to let Lincoln rest for a while? Lincoln is already the most written about American, and globally is behind only Jesus and Shakespeare. If the number of books I have been asked to review in the last two years on Lincoln is any indication, Shakespeare should be worried about his second place standing by the conclusion of the Lincoln bicentennial. Thus, as I am often asked, is all the attention and effort warranted? To answer that question I will rephrase one of President Bill Clinton’s more infamous lines. Rather than worrying what the meaning of “is” is, historians are interested in what the meaning of “us” is. Lincoln is about us and who we are. In the April 13 edition of Newsweek, editor Jon Meacham argued that Americans “value individual freedom and free (or largely free) enterprise ….The foundational documents are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (5).” Without acknowledging it, Meacham was explaining why Americans will always be interested in Lincoln.

As we conclude the Lincoln bicentennial, we are about to enter the sesquicentennial anniversary in 2010 of the Civil War and the major commemorations which will undoubtedly take place. At stake during the Civil War was the very existence of the United States. The bloodiest war in our history, it posed what clearly became persistent themes in American history: the character of the nation and the fate of African Americans. Consequently, scholars have been vitally interested in the Civil War, searching out clues therein for the identity of America. And yet, if the identity of America is in the Civil War, the meaning of America--what we become, and how we do things--is found in Reconstruction. While we have never had a public commemoration of Reconstruction, if we truly want to honor Lincoln’s legacy, we need to commemorate it as well, as that all too brief experiment in interracial democracy of the South. Now, as two hundred ago, Lincoln’s words ring true: “Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way.”

Endnotes

1. For more detail, see Jim Horton’s article at <http://hnn.us/articles/64503.html>.

2. For more details on my presentation, see my Web site at <www.Ageoflincoln.com>.

3. Mark E. Neely, Jr. “The Lincoln Theme Since Randall’s Call: The Promises and Perils of Professionalism,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, vol. 1, issue 1, 1979, p. 69.

4. “Abraham Lincoln at 200: History and Historiography,” The Journal of American History, vol. 96:2 (September, 2009).

5. “The Decline and Fall of Christian America,” or “The End of Christian America,” Newsweek, April 13, 2009. p. 34-37.

An officer of the Congressional National Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission Foundation, Orville Vernon Burton is the Burroughs Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture at Costal Carolina University and is executive director of the College of Charleston’s Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World. He was the founding director of the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (ICHASS) at the University of Illinois, where he is emeritus University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar and professor of history, African American studies, and sociology.