Edward Rothstein interviews Charles McGrath about Lincoln
Q. Americans hear about Lincoln from the time they start school - or even before. In your recent reading, what have you learned about him that you didn’t know before?
A. When reading about Lincoln, the surprise I get isn’t at learning something about him I didn’t know before — there’s too much of that for it to be much of a surprise — but at learning to pay attention to him in a different way. An example: for a while, about 40 years ago, as part of a culture-wide attempt to demythologize heroes, Lincoln the Great Emancipator became Lincoln the Grudging Racist.
The citations in his speeches and writings throughout his career were plain enough: he was not an abolitionist; he had doubts about the complete equality of the races; and he thought a willing emigration of freed American blacks the best plan for dealing with the race issue — at least until he learned differently, in part from his meetings with freed blacks and Frederick Douglass.
These quotations eclipsed others in which he made it clear that while he could not be sure about some kinds of equality, he could be clear about the kind that mattered: the equality invoked in the opening of the Declaration of Independence. This was the equality of natural rights, an equality that was as a priori as anything about humanity could be. And if the rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness were universally granted, it also meant that all are promised the right to the fruits of their own labor, and that slavery, in its very essence, is a violation. ...
Read entire article at NYT
A. When reading about Lincoln, the surprise I get isn’t at learning something about him I didn’t know before — there’s too much of that for it to be much of a surprise — but at learning to pay attention to him in a different way. An example: for a while, about 40 years ago, as part of a culture-wide attempt to demythologize heroes, Lincoln the Great Emancipator became Lincoln the Grudging Racist.
The citations in his speeches and writings throughout his career were plain enough: he was not an abolitionist; he had doubts about the complete equality of the races; and he thought a willing emigration of freed American blacks the best plan for dealing with the race issue — at least until he learned differently, in part from his meetings with freed blacks and Frederick Douglass.
These quotations eclipsed others in which he made it clear that while he could not be sure about some kinds of equality, he could be clear about the kind that mattered: the equality invoked in the opening of the Declaration of Independence. This was the equality of natural rights, an equality that was as a priori as anything about humanity could be. And if the rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness were universally granted, it also meant that all are promised the right to the fruits of their own labor, and that slavery, in its very essence, is a violation. ...