Socialist Rose Strunsky dispels of the ‘Great Emancipator’ myth as well as a number of others in this excellent essay on Lincoln’s political positions and social place. One of the best early left works on Lincoln, both politically and perceptively. While admiring of Lincoln, she paints him as a representative of his class, and shows his many limitations, not least of which was his racism. It ran counter to much of the view of the left at the time and was harshly received in some socialist quarters, but was in keeping with comrade Strunsky’s radical anti-racism, considered ‘contrarian’ by the Socialist Right. A full-length Lincoln political biography soon followed and is deserving of spae on the bookshelf of all radical students of that period.

Rose Strunsky (1884-1963) was born in Russia, emigrating with her family emigrated as a child to San Francisco. There she attended Stanford University and, with her older sister, Anna, were militants of the Socialist Labor Party and then the Socialist Party. Joining with the Friends of Russian Freedom in San Francisco, which included Austin Lewis, Jack London, and William English walling, the Strunsky’s traveled to Russia and participated in the 1905 Revolutions there. Returning to the US and New York’s Greenwich Village Rose was active in revolutionary bohemian and intellectual circles as a writer and translator, including Tolstoy, Gorky, and Trotsky. She married Louis Lorwin in 1920 and together they traveled to Russia. She and her sister were comrades with Du Bois and founders of the NAACP, her interest in Black liberation lasting her life. She was also involved in the Women’s Peace Party and other pacifist and anti-militarist groups.

‘The Truth About Lincoln and the Negro’ by Rose Strunsky from New Review. Vol. 2 No. 5. May, 1914.

There would be little need of detaching the definite, almost Homeric attributes which have wound themselves around the name of Lincoln, were it not for the fact that to-day, with the rise of the New Nationalism, we are asked to use this mystic figure as the touchstone for the exigencies of our modern political life. That he should rise so quickly in the popular imagination to the colossal and fixed outlines of an epic hero is readily understood. The task of keeping this Republic going upon the basic principles of an equal economic opportunity for all (or rather, to state this shibboleth more accurately, upon the pioneer rights of the free access by each to the goods of nature), was truly accomplished by him. Moreover, the rush to take advantage of the new freedom to the use and formation of capital which the solution of the Civil War offered, left no time nor made it psychologically possible to maintain a picture of the hero with all the shadings and modifications of truth. Besides, herodom does not permit of modifications. And so to the popular mind the name of Lincoln is followed by the attribute, ‘The Great Liberator,” as the name of Zeus is followed by “the Wielder of the Thunderbolt.”

If we are really to apply the policies of Lincoln to the problems of to-day, then it is high time to place in truthful and critical order just what these policies were and what their significance. In this matter of emancipation of the Negroes, from slavery and his conception of what was to be their role in the social and political life of America, it is especially necessary that his true attitude be given, for on no phase of Lincoln’s career has there been so much fable and popular dictum accumulated as upon this. The picture of Lincoln looking out upon space with sad and loving eyes, his right hand outstretched presenting the Emancipation Proclamation, his left resting tenderly upon the head of a newly-freed and grateful slave kneeling at his feet, can no longer be satisfactory.

“A veil of melancholy” might indeed have rested on his face and his eyes be “sad and loving,” but his acts were hesitant, compromising and without any faith in the ultimate benefit of that Emancipation Proclamation which we have always pictured him as holding so gladly and firmly in that eager outstretched hand.

If we are really to come to an understanding of the needs of the Negro to-day, we have to come to an understanding of what Lincoln and the men of his time meant to do by the Negro in 1860. It must be remembered that war and politics raised the Negro to citizenship, North as well as South, that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments forced legislation in behalf of the Negro in the unfriendly West as did the Thirteenth in the South.

Lincoln was of the West, and his hesitancy to act in favor of the Negro, even after the exigencies of events demanded action, showed the strong and driving conviction of the West that there was little place for the Negro in their social philosophy or on their land.

That does not mean to say that Lincoln was not sincere in his opposition to the institution of slavery, but it means that he was not an abolitionist, nor that he had the same hopes and desires for the black race as he had for the white. Being against Negro slavery for the white man’s reason, he was not only ready to compromise with the institution itself, but was also ready to compromise with the principles that underlay it. Not only did he not want to disturb slavery in the states where that “institution” already existed, but he did not want the Negroes to live in freedom side by side with the whites in the new territories for which he was fighting. He could not conceive of the two races enjoying the same political and social privileges. His democracy was a white man’s democracy. It did not contain Negroes, as it did not contain slaves or laborers “fixed in that condition for life,” or large landlords or large capitalists. It was the democracy of the small white farmer.

He was remarkably unchanging in his point of view. From his first public utterance on the subject of slavery as a young man of twenty-eight, to his Emancipation Proclamation and his innumerable other statements concerning slavery and the Negro, he held to a consistent and fixed policy. He was firmly opposed to the extension of slavery—slavery was a wrong to the slave, but of more vital importance—it was a wrong to the white man. “If Judge Douglas does not like the Negro,” he said, “let him not bring him out into the new lands—let that remain for the white.”

Farther than this white man’s conviction against the economic and (being somewhat of a practical materialist) therefore moral value of slavery, he would not go.

In his first public utterance on the subject of slavery in 1837, he protested against certain pro-slavery resolutions which were passed by the Illinois legislature. Slavery, he declared, was founded on both injustice and bad policy, but, he carefully added, he considered the promulgation of abolition doctrines to tend rather to increase than to abate its evils. This negative anti-slavery statement is the keynote of his conviction. For a young statesman at the beginning of his career to fear the propaganda for the abolition of an evil which he considers both an injustice and a bad policy, showed an instinctive yielding to the aggressive slave-holder. The national exigency demanded a much more positive program, if the calamity of an internecine war was to be averted. Even Washington had a broader outlook upon the country’s problem, and his statement that his first wish was to see some plan adopted “by which slavery in this country may be averted,” showed a care for the future.

A decade later we find Lincoln in Congress, suggesting gradual and compensated emancipation for the District of Columbia. This was only meant to force an expression on the subject from the Federal Government, and could have no immediate bearing. But even this mild demand, the effect of which would have been felt in the nation’s attitude toward new territories, he considered too hostile to the slave owners, and a few months later he brought in a resolution in order “to conciliate divergent interests,” which provided for the extension of the Fugitive Slave Law to the same district.

When he emerged from that curious lapse in his life, when he withdrew from politics entirely, a time of inner struggle and development, which lasted from his return from Congress in 1843 to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, he still maintained the same intellectual position on these great questions. The years of crisis did change the nature of his being, which was peculiarly attuned to what the American politician calls harmony. A sad, futile humanism held him, which left him uncertain whether his personal bias against the subject race sprang from an inner hostility or the knowledge of the hostility of his fellow citizens.

A strong and active abolition movement, based on moral and intellectual grounds, was going on during these years, a movement which Lincoln saw close at hand, but which he never joined. Herndon, his law partner for twenty intimate years, was an ardent Abolitionist, in close touch with the leaders in New England. Herndon kept Garrison’s Emancipator, [The Liberator] which Lincoln read regularly, and was in constant communication with Parker and Channing.

Lincoln knew of these men and their work. He may have sympathized with them, but the movement never called him. While Herndon joined the Free Soil party and the New Liberty party, Lincoln remained an old line Whig, a Clay man, and canvassed the country for Taylor. It was Herndon who signed his name to the call for the Bloomington Convention of the Republican party in 1856, much to the horror of Mrs. Lincoln’s relatives and his own former law partners.

In the series of joint debates with Douglas in 1854 the question of slavery and the problem of the Negro in America was discussed from every angle, and it is easy enough to find Lincoln’s exact position. He had to define it very clearly before audiences that were critical and ready to vote against a man who could not hold within himself the balance of all the contradictory sentiments on this question.

In the very first debate in Ottawa, Illinois he said definitively:  “I agree with Judge Douglas. He [the Negro] is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”

This much-quoted statement, generally given to show the innate principles of freedom and justice which animated Lincoln, carries with it a fundamental contradiction, which he himself recognized. If social and political equality were forbidden the Negro, and the whites must remain socially and politically superior and dominant, as he believed, then even after emancipation another condition would arise scarcely better than slavery itself. In one of the Douglas debates, Lincoln asked what should be done with the slaves: “Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? I think I would not hold slavery at any rate, yet the point is not clear enough for me to denounce people upon.”

He surrendered still further to the anti-Negro arguments of “white domination,” and in his debate in Charleston, Illinois, defined what he meant by equality:

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarrry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

Over and over again he asserted that he did not want to interfere with the institution of slavery where it existed. He had “no legal right to do it and no inclination to.” He yielded to the institution of slavery, he said, as had the framers of the Constitution, with the hope that some day it would be ultimately extinct.

These statements might have been made for reasons of political expediency, were he not so insistent upon adding that, with the extinction of slavery, he did not want the condition of free whites and free blacks living together on the same land. “What I would most desire,” he said, “would be the separation of the white and black races.”

He saw no way of bestowing citizenship on the Negro. “So far as I know, the Judge [Douglas] has never asked me the question before. He shall have no occasion to ever ask it again, for I tell him very frankly that I am not in favor of Negro citizenship.”

Again, referring to the Dred Scott decision, he said: “My opinion is that the different States have the power to make a Negro a citizen under the Constitution of the United States, if they choose. The Dred Scott decision decides that they have not that power. If the State of Illinois had that power, I should be opposed to the exercise of it. That is all I have to say about it.”

If he was unwilling to bestow political equality, that principle taught from infancy to every American, it goes without saying that he was against the social equality of the Negro, for here the American is innately unfriendly to the race. In the Charleston debate he said:

“I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I can just let her alone. I am now in my fiftieth year, and I certainly have never had a black woman for either a slave or a wife. So it seems to me quite possible to get along without making either slaves or wives of negroes. I will add to this that I have never seen, to my knowledge, a man, woman or child who was in favor of producing a perfect equality, social and political, between negroes and white men…I will also add to the remarks I have made that I have never had the least apprehension that I or my friends would marry negroes if there was no law to keep them from it; but as Judge Douglas and his friends seem to be in great apprehension that they might, if there were no law to keep them from it, I give him the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last stand by the law of this State, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes.”

It is clear that slavery to Lincoln and to the Republicans was not a problem to be viewed from the angle of the Negro, as it was to the Abolitionists, but from that of the free white small farming class, which composed a majority of the nation. And so from this point of view he announced openly to the people that he was not then, and never was, in favor of the unconditional repeal of the Fugitive Slave law, that he did not stand pledged against the admission of any more slave states into the Union, nor to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia; that all he was impliedly if not expressly pledged to was the right and duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in all the United States Territories.

“I do not wish to be misunderstood upon the subject of slavery in this country,” he said. “I suppose it may long exist and perhaps the best way for it to come to an end peaceably is for it to exist for a length of time.”

After his election and before his inauguration, the Congress of the United States had passed a far different Thirteenth Amendment from the one passed five years later and heralded as “that great and sublime event” which lifted a race from bondage. In this former proposed Thirteenth Amendment it was resolved that no constitutional amendment should be made in the future “which authorized or gave to Congress the power to abolish or interfere within any State with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.” On assuming office, Lincoln not only did not protest against it, but approved of it in his inaugural address of March 4th. Only the immediate secession of South Carolina prevented the amendment from being ratified by the States. Had the South not seceded then, there is little doubt that with Lincoln’s influence it would have received the necessary two-thirds majority.

When the war commenced it became evident that the institution of slavery would be endangered by it. The Northern armies marching through the South confiscated slaves along with other property. In fact, the Negroes themselves came swarming into the army for protection and freedom. Each military commander, as he advanced into the enemy’s territory, had the power of emancipation. It was this very exigency of the war which Lincoln fought hard to prevent for almost two years. He had no faith in the cries of the Abolitionists for the peremptory wiping out of the institution. He never heeded nor respected their cries, deeming them a small sect of visionaries, without influence, scorned and laughed at by the people. “That abolition-sneak,” Mrs. Lincoln once said of Seward—a tell-tale phrase. While Boston voted for Lincoln, it mobbed Wendell Philips on its streets. The East was not as earnestly anti-slavery as the West. Commerce and manufacture did not conflict with slavery as did farming; in fact, except for the question of the tariff, they profited by it. The East was won away from the South, not because of slavery, but because she became tied by canals and railroads to the West, where the real slavery conflict took place. And in the West “abolition” and “antislavery” had two different meanings.

So convinced was Lincoln that the country was not for abolition that he did not heed the abolition demands of the border states themselves, although usually so careful to conciliate them. He offended the radicals in Missouri by revoking General Fremont’s emancipation proclamation, and by continually supporting the conservative faction in that state, to such an extent that they were irreconcilable to the very end, refusing absolutely to give him their votes at the time of his renomination for President.

But the Northern arms were long unsuccessful. He could not restore the Union on the old basis, because, to quote his own phrase, “the longer the basket that holds the eggs is being shaken, the more eggs will break.” Not being able to reconcile this more conservative element, which called for the “Union as it was and the Constitution as it is,” he had to comply with the more radical elements of the North who were supporting him with their arms and votes. But this he did very tentatively and shrewdly. He issued a preliminary emancipation on September 22, 1862, which was meant not as a blessing to the Negro, but as a warning to the Southerner in rebellion that his slaves would be confiscated if he did not render allegiance to the government. He gave them a hundred days in which to lay down their arms. Had the Southerners been less bent upon victory, they could have returned to the Union with the institution of slavery intact. Seeing that the Northern armies were ruthlessly abolishing the institution, he began working out several plans by which this forced abolition would be made more bearable to the expropriated slaveholder. His plan, on the one hand, was to urge Congress and the states that emancipation be gradual and compensated, and on the other that the Negroes be exported or colonized as soon as freed. He did not believe that freedom would benefit the Negro if left unprotected upon the hands of his embittered master. He was opposed to bestowing the suffrage upon the Negro, perhaps because he understood that the suffrage without the economic power to sustain that equality which it promises was worthless. But he did not propose to give him the means of becoming economically free,—a thing which even Russia attempted, by the distribution of some of the land taken from the landlords among the twenty-three million liberated serfs. His solution of the problem was the separation of the races.

The history of his acts from this time on is a history of his activity in the direction of gradual and compensated emancipation, and incessant minor attempts at colonization. He understood that Colonization on a large scale was an impossibility, but he was sorely worried over the status of the Negro after freedom should have been accomplished, and he hoped by some successful example to set a precedent for colonization that would be followed. His great concern, however, lay in averting “the indispensable necessity for military emancipation and arming of the blacks” by “appeals to the Border States for compensated emancipation.” The border states refused to adopt his resolution, which was that “the United States ought to co-operate with any State which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery, giving to such State pecuniary aid, to be used by such State in its discretion to compensate for the inconvenience, public and private, produced by such change of system.” Congress laid the resolution on the table, while the border state representatives themselves refused to make any such resolution before their own legislatures.

“How much better for you and for your people to take the step which at once shortens the war and secures substantial compensation for that which is sure to be wholly lost in any other event! How much better to thus save the money which else we sink forever in the war! How much better to do it while we can, lest the war ere long render us pecuniarily unable to do it! How much better for you as seller, and the nation as buyer, to sell out and buy out that without which the war could never have been, than to sink both the thing to be sold and the price of it in cutting one another’s throats? I do not speak of emancipation at once, but of a decision at once to emancipate gradually. Room in South America for colonization can be obtained cheaply and in abundance, and encouragement for one another, the freed people will not be so reluctant to go.”

He wrote a personal letter to a Republican from Delaware, arguing against the plea of expensiveness which his plan of gradual emancipation with compensation would entail. He gave the price of the slaves and the cost of one day’s war, and showed that it was three times the cost of all the slaves in Delaware. He computed the cost of the slaves in Delaware, Maryland, the District of Columbia and Kentucky at $400 each and showed that by eliminating eighty-seven days of war their cost would be covered. He had even worked out the manner in which this sum was to be paid to the states if they would initiate this plan.

In his special message to Congress of December, 1863, he proposed a Constitutional amendment which would give universal freedom, but this freedom should be gradual, covering a period of thirty-seven years up to January 1, 1900, and the slaves were to be paid for by the Government.

The Republican Congress was hostile to his suggestion that Northern money be used in compensating Southern slaveholders. Their interest lay not in doing justice to the slaveholders or to the Negro, but in maintaining their own power, which they could do very well by emancipating the slave and enfranchising him, and preventing him by the legislation of the Western states from emigrating to their lands. The Democrats, with reactionary blindness, refused to see the trend of the times, and strongly opposed the measures on the ancient premise that they interfered dangerously with the domestic institutions of the states. Lincoln’s request from the House for $180,000,000 to be used for compensating, loyal slaveholders and an appropriation of $20,000,000 for colonizing freed Negroes came in so late in the session that it was not considered.

While urging compensation he was at the same time devising plans for the colonization of the freed Negro. Apart from asking Congress for appropriations, he appealed to the Negro himself. As early as August, 1862, he called a deputation of colored men to him and urged them to colonize in Central America:

“Your race is suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. You are cut off from many of the advantages which the other race enjoys. The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this broad continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Go where you are treated the best, and the ban is still upon you. I do not propose to discuss this, but to present it as a fact with which we have to deal. I cannot alter it if I would. It is a fact about which we all think and feel alike, I and you. We look to our condition. Owing to the existence of the two races on this continent, I need not recount to you the effects upon white men, growing out of the institution of slavery The practical thing I want to ascertain is, whether I can get a number of able-bodied men, with a mixture of women and children, who are willing to, go when I present evidence of encouragement and protection. Could I get a hundred tolerably intelligent men, with their wives and children, and able to ‘cut their own fodder’ so to speak? If I could find twenty-five able-bodied men, with a mixture of women and children,—good things in the family relation, I think,—I could make a successful commencement. I want you to let me know whether this can be done or not. This is the practical part of my wish to see you.”

The colored deputation answered, politely enough, that it would consider his proposition, but refused to take kindly to it, and it was learned in the end that Central America, where he was to send them, did not want them. Later he obtained some sums of money from Congress, and an island was bought in the West Indies, Ile D’Vache. Several hundred Negroes were collected and put upon this unknown corner of the world. It turned out to be a poisonous, malarial country, “covered with reptiles, and a ship had to be sent to bring back the few survivors. Nevertheless, he kept on with his experiments, even going so far as to discuss with a Mr. Bradley, a Vermont contractor, the proposition of removing the whole colored population into Texas, there to establish a republic of their own. Toward the end of the war, after the Thirteenth Amendment giving Constitutional freedom to all the Negroes had been passed, he called in General Butler and discussed with him a plan of exporting the Negro soldiers to some foreign land, to Liberia, South America or Demerara.

“General Butler,” he said, “I am troubled about the Negroes. We are soon to have peace. We have got some one hundred and odd thousand Negroes who have been trained in arms. When peace shall come I fear lest these colored men shall organize themselves in the South, especially in the States where the Negroes are in preponderance in numbers, into guerilla parties, and we shall have down there a warfare between the white and the Negroes. Would it not be possible to export them to some place, say Liberia or South America, and organize them into communities to support themselves? Now, General, I wish you would examine the practicability of such exportation.”

Butler thought that if Lincoln did not mean to enact the horrors of the middle-passage, but give the Negro all the air-space that the law provided, he could not possibly gather ships enough to export them all from the country, for allowance had to be made for increase of families while on board the boats. But he proposed another plan for which Lincoln showed great interest. “If I understand you, Mr. President,” General Butler went on, “your theory is this: That the Negro soldiers we have enlisted will not return to the peaceful pursuits of laboring men, but will become a class of guerillas and criminals. Now, while I do not see, under the Constitution, even with all the aid of Congress, how you can export a class of people who are citizens against their will, yet the Commander-in-Chief can dispose of soldiers quite arbitrarily…I know of a concession of the United States of Colombia for a tract of thirty miles wide across the Isthmus of Panama for opening a ship canal. The enlistments of the Negroes have all of them from two to three years to run. Why not send them all down there to dig the canal?”

The death of Lincoln coming soon after this interview prevented the development of the plan.

Far from being discouraged by his failure to receive a response from Congress on the question of compensation, he planned a still greater request two months before the end of the war. This was that Congress empower the President to pay $400,000,000 to the respective slave states in proportion to their slave population in 1860.

His cabinet unanimously vetoed the document. Folding it up with a sigh, he put it away, but not without a secret hope that he would be able to use it in the near future. Tentatively and as a private suggestion, he wrote to the Governor of Louisiana that perhaps it were well to admit some of the colored people “for an elective franchise, as, for instance, the very intelligent and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help in some trying time to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom.”

Slowly his demands grew with the needs of the time. In the Amnesty Proclamation he promised that the National Executive would not object “if the States would recognize and declare their permanent freedom and provide for their education, which may yet be consistent as a temporary arrangement with their present condition as a laboring, landless and homeless class.”

That was his solution, if the Negro had to remain side by side with his former master,—education and a qualified franchise. He had little hope that it would be accorded in the right spirit, he had little hope that the Negro would be ever permitted to rise out of his condition as a “laboring, landless and homeless class.” If only some strange land would hold him!

New Review was a New York-based, explicitly Marxist, sometimes weekly/sometimes monthly theoretical journal begun in 1913 and was an important vehicle for left discussion in the period before World War One. In the world of the Socialist Party, it included Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Herman Simpson, Louis Boudin, William English Walling, Moses Oppenheimer, Walter Lippmann, William Bohn, Frank Bohn, John Spargo, Austin Lewis, WEB DuBois, Maurice Blumlein, Anton Pannekoek, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Isaac Hourwich as editors and contributors. Louis Fraina played an increasing role from 1914 on, leading the journal in a leftward direction as New Review addressed many of the leading international questions facing Marxists. The journal folded in June, 1916 for financial reasons. Its issues are a formidable archive of pre-war US Marxist and Socialist discussion.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/newreview/1914/v2n05-may-1914.pdf