At the behest of our Beltway betters, we Americans tend to lionize some of our leaders no matter their actual merit, based largely on myth. Certainly, one of the most canonized of our politicians is our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln, whose presidency was one of the worst (if not the worst) for individual liberties. Joseph Sobran touches on this in his recent column for Chronicles magazine:Though Lincoln was largely right about slavery, he was wrong about secession—a separate question, as most Northerners once understood. During his war, millions of Northerners who opposed slavery also recognized the right of a sovereign state to secede from the Union. This led Lincoln to crack down on dissent, closing down hundreds of newspapers (many permanently) and having a few thousand war critics arrested. His excellent biographer David Herbert Donald calls his presidency the worst period for individual liberties in American history.
Lincoln's hagiographers typically point to the extremes of the times in justifying Lincoln's behavior, as though the Constitution were no more than a guide for times of relative peace and prosperity, rather than a binding document that limits the scope of federal government. (Some of these same people hypocritically express outrage when a politician they don't approve of does the same to less of a degree; witness the opprobrium visited upon Pres. Obama's predecessor.) Nowadays, even to bring any of this up is to flirt with charges of racism, just as mentioning any of Martin Luther King Jr.'s obvious, well-documented shortcomings (plagiarism, his predilection for prostitutes in spite of being married and a minister) will earn one the same descriptive. Indeed, Lincoln was hardly a friend to "Africans" (as he called the slaves):
Lincoln, we should also remember, was a passionate segregationist, a fact Krannawitter barely touches on, though it might interest our new President to know that the Great Emancipator’s preferred solution was to abolish slavery and to remove all “free colored persons” from the United States. In 1862 he proposed an amendment that would authorize Congress to pay for this huge project. “I cannot make it better known than it already is,” he wrote in his State of the Union Message to Congress, “that I strongly favor colonization.” Nor was this a sudden enthusiasm; he had been arguing for it since the early 1850’s. As President, Lincoln did in fact create colonies for black freedmen in Haiti and what is now Panama, giving up on the cause only when these fizzled out. Very few blacks were attracted to such schemes; the United States was the only homeland most blacks had ever known, and it was naive—indeed, utopian—to think they could easily leave it and adapt to Africa.
So why does this matter now? I speak here as a white Southern male: the rest of the country HATES us to this day. I have run into this time and again; the legacy of the Civil War is still with us (and it's most evident in those who are the first to cry, "The war is over!" in one breath and then trot out the usual stereotypes about Southern Americans in the next). Fine; so be it. The legacy of slavery is still very much with us all; one need only note that there is never any significant change in white-black race relations in this country, as the dance between heirs of racism and heirs of victimhood continues apace.
That is also true, although always hushed in favor of the brutality of slavery, of the extermination of Native Americans. This legacy is still very much with us, too, but it is quiet, indeed. Like it or not, we mostly live on stolen land, on crushed lives. Yet the line to make recompense—to, er, give the land back—would be a very short one, indeed. One wonders why there has still been no (ultimately empty) apology from Congress, as with the slavery apology from last year? Or the 1848 assault on Mexico (along with a promise to, what, give the proposed "Reconquista" back to Mexico? How many liberals in the Southwest would be ready to give up their homes so Mexico could reclaim that land? Again, I'm guessing that's a short line.
I read an interesting book a few years back—a survivalist, small-press-run book titled Civil War 2 by Thomas Chittum. Chittum's simple point was this: Multi-ethnic empires, such as ours, cannot last. They break up from within, as old wounds never heal, new identity group pressures emerge, on and on. The opening line of the book always stuck with me: "America was born in blood, bathed in blood, and will die in blood." I believe it's true. Because for all our fine language and furious efforts to dress up our intentions as something noble, they are, at the end of the day, about protecting our own, no matter how it came to be our own.
The simple fact of the matter is that human nature is tribal. We identify with our own. Oh, we mouth platitudes about reaching out across the lines of race and culture, about integrating our social places, etc. But what about our neighborhoods? Ever hear of well-heeled liberal whites moving into poor black neighborhoods in order to extend the arms of brotherhood, or do the realities of poverty, crime and poor school districts magically prevent that from happening?
I am pointing no fingers at anyone here that I don't also point at myself. I am that evil, too. I pray to the Holy God of heaven that He will continue to change me, to make me the lover of all humans as He commands. I can't do it on my own, I know for certain. My heart is too dark, too stained with sin. I fear the others. Hell, I hate the others. And I fear and hate myself, all the same.
Who can change me? Who can overcome the evil man that I am? It took a crucifixion to get there, and worse, a great chalice of righteous wrath—God's wrath—poured out on the Lamb's soul. The Beloved had to pay what I will always be far too poor to pay. For this, for the ways He continues to love me thusly by working my salvation outward from within me, and for reasons that to this day exceed my feeble attempts to name them, I love Him and glorify Him this morning.
