Becoming Lincoln; His Changing Legacy from Savior of the Union to the Great Emancipator, 1865 - 1965.

Introduction

Since Abraham Lincoln’s death in 1865, writers have churned out a purported

15,000 works dedicated to the life and legacy of Lincoln. Historians, medical doctors,

and journalists alike have analyzed aspects of Lincoln’s life, from his sexuality to the

corn bread recipes of his youth. Through numerous works, authors attempt to reconcile

the ambiguity of the plainspoken man from the prairie, with the epic statesman and

commander-in-chief, martyred at the height of his political prowess. The subject of over

300 films and television shows, Lincoln’s is a familiar face in American popular media.

From blockbuster films to commercials, novels to cookbooks, the popular representations

of Lincoln ensure he remains culturally relevant and inimitable in the American pantheon

of heroes. Lincoln’s image routinely appears in American media and academic culture,

and it is onto this mythical figure that Americans project the nation’s perceived highest

values, hopes, virtues, ideals, and aspirations.

Lincoln’s veneration was not immediate, and during his lifetime, public opinion

never hinted that he would eventually be considered one of the central figures of

America’s national narrative. Yet, as the first president to be assassinated, a spontaneous

and seemingly universal grief manifested throughout the nation. In that outpouring of

grief, popular memorializations of the martyr-president began to appear in newspapers

Jackie Hogan, Lincoln, Inc: Selling the Sixteenth President in Contemporary America, (Lanham: Rowman

& Littlefield Publishers, 2011), 2, 7, 29.

and magazines that celebrated his role in saving the Union. Entire cities held

commemorations. There was a popular demand for Lincoln content and to fill in the gaps,

reminiscences from friends, family, and acquaintances were gathered and published to

satiate the public’s interest. Scholars, too, were entranced by Lincoln’s multifaceted and

towering American legacy. In the years, and then decades, following Lincoln’s death,

both popular and scholarly treatments of his life and legacy have contributed to and have

shaped his enduring image in American memory as the Savior of the Union, and, later, as

the Great Emancipator.

As noted by sociologist Robert Bellah, Lincoln is a central figure in America’s

civil religion – the nation’s collective “set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals.”

Lincoln

personifies the “nation’s perceived values, virtues, aspirations, fears, and fantasies” and

reifies “cherished conceptions of American national identity.”

Thus, Lincoln functions

as a form of national synecdoche and a veneration of Lincoln equates to a veneration of

the nation itself.

Lincoln’s image seems destined to fascinate generation after generation

of American scholars and non-scholars alike. The biological and biographical Lincoln,

the ‘middle of the road’ emancipator and controversial president, has, over time, been

subsumed by the dominant and near-universal American adoration of a mythic Lincoln:

the Savior of the Union, the Self-Made Man, the hailed Great Emancipator. Most

Americans of the twenty-first century are taught that Lincoln is the personification of the

nation at its best, an unimpeachable American hero who ended slavery in the United

States. Analyses of Lincoln’s less desirable traits, like the mistreatment of Native

Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts &

Sciences, 96, no. 1 (1967): 4.

Hogan, Lincoln, Inc., 2, 29.

Americans during his presidency, or his use of racial slurs, have neither penetrated nor

subverted the popular understanding of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

Shaped originally by print materials like magazines, newspapers, and books,

Lincoln’s popular image is now derived from, and molded by, additional forms of media

including film, television, and the internet. Collectively, media fuels a mass national

culture by connecting distant and diverse Americans through its speed and accessibility.

Media culture, as described by Douglass Kellner, influences the fabric of daily life,

dominates Americans’ leisure time, shapes political views, and “provides the materials

out of which people forge their very identities.”

As a national icon, Lincoln’s pervasive

presence in popular media serves as a reminder of American values. As a potent symbol,

Lincoln’s image brings forth feelings of civil equality, racial justice, and venerable

democracy. By invoking Lincoln in popular culture, one invokes not only his legacy, but

also his significance as a symbolic and idealized representation of American values and

virtues.

Yet, nations are discursive constructs. They are made, shaped, and “sustained in

part through the stories, images, landscapes, scenarios, historical events, national symbols

and rituals which give meaning to the nation.”

As Deanna Sellnow writes, cultural

groups share a collective rhetorical vision that provides meaning and order to their

Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Six Encounters with Lincoln, (New York: Viking, 2017), 127; Schwartz,

“Collective Memory and History,” 476.

Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics: Between the Modern and the

Postmodern. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1-2.

Hogan, Lincoln, Inc. 2.

Hogan, Lincoln, Inc., 153; Stuart Hall, “The Question of Cultural Identity,” Modernity and Its Futures,

(Cambridge: Polity, 1992), 293.

perspective and reality.

More so than race, religion, or geographical boundaries, Ernest

Renan notes that a nation is held together by its past and the shared heritage of its

citizens.

Best said by Benedict Anderson, nations are imagined communities.

Thus,

the stories a nation tells about itself reveal its self-perceived distinctive character. These

stories help citizens connect to, and feel part of, their national community.

The nation’s

less exemplary traits are omitted from the grand narrative. By ignoring the nation’s faults,

the stories told about the nation become, in part, myth. Myths, in the words of Renan, are

the spiritual soul of the nation, and it is upon these grand narratives of the past that

national identity builds.

The Lincoln myth, then, personifies American national identity.

By ignoring Lincoln’s faults, the nation ignores its own imperfections and the result is

Lincoln’s universal presence as the Great Emancipator, a symbol of the American nation

at its best.

In sum, the popular understanding of Lincoln derives from cherished

narratives and myths the nation tells about itself and its greatest president.

Lincoln’s enduring popularity stems, in part, from his continued relevance. The

challenges of Lincoln’s time (i.e. war and racial tension) connect to, and resonate with,

contemporary audiences. In the words of David Lowenthal, modern society is

“beleaguered by loss and change,” and “clings to remnants of stability” in the past to

provide the constancy the nation yearns for today. As a construct, the nation’s past is

revised continually by cultural institutions to format the times and needs of the present.

Deanna D. Sellnow The Rhetorical Power of Popular Culture: Considering Mediated Texts, (Los

Angeles: Sage, 2018), 12.

Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?,” text of a conference delivered a the Sorbonne March 11, 1882.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (New

York: Verso, 1983), 6-7, 28.

Hogan, Lincoln, Inc. 133, 153.

Renan, “What is a Nation?”

Hogan, Lincoln, Inc., 155.

Lincoln’s image is reshaped to support the perspectives and needs of society today. A

protean figure, Lincoln has at one time or another embodied white regional reunification,

the self-made individual, democracy, racial justice, and civil equality - as needed to fit

the time, theme, or mood of his invoker’s cause.

Today, Lincoln’s legacy as the Great Emancipator seems self-evident. His image

is synonymous with emancipation and racial justice, and the wide dissemination of his

image in popular media continually reinforces this favored understanding of Lincoln.

Yet, Lincoln’s legacy as the nation’s champion of racial equality was not always so. In

the century following Lincoln’s death, the nation memorialized his legacy as the Savior

of the Union. During the economic uncertainty of the Great Depression, Lincoln was

remembered for his perseverance in the face of adversity as the Self-Made Man. Even as

civil rights activists in the 1950s and 60s added a new category of characteristics to

Lincoln’s legacy as the Great Emancipator, the notion of the white Savior of the Union

persisted. How then — despite the prominence of his legacy as the Savior of the Union—

did Lincoln’s legacy transform so substantially as to represent a racial legacy the nation

previously ignored? How did Lincoln become the Great Emancipator? How did the

symbol of white racial unity become the symbol of racial equality during the civil rights

movement, and his memorial the site of the most powerful, but contentious, moments of

these events? As a symbol, Lincoln’s significance has been fashioned and refashioned in

response to changes in American values and beliefs, a process that continues. The

popular understanding of Lincoln’s legacy as the Great Emancipator is the result of a

David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1998), 6; Hogan, Lincoln, Inc. , 126, 129.

contentious history as Americans debated over the nature of the nation’s character, and

thus, Lincoln’s significance. In 1963, the malleable nature of Lincoln’s legacy reached a

national climax when it came to embody his current and enduring role as the nation’s

Great Emancipator.

I analyzed the transformation of Lincoln’s historical legacy from Savior of the

Union to the Great Emancipator. Popular representations of Lincoln between 1865 and

1965 illustrate the evolution of Lincoln’s legacy and the significance of his idealized

place in American memory. As Lincoln scholar Philip B. Kundhardt observes, Lincoln’s

legacy is “a jagged narrative filled with contention and revisionism.” Each successive

generation interprets Lincoln differently and as a result, his popular legacy shifts to

reflect the change. The last major cultural shift in the popular understanding of Lincoln

occurred during the civil rights movement, when after a span of 100 years, Lincoln’s

emancipatory legacy subsumed his earlier significance as the Savior of the Union.

This manuscript begins with an overview of Lincoln’s life to provide context for

the later mythicization of his legacy and his popular rebirth as the Great Emancipator. An

examination of the popular memorializations and the academic treatments of Lincoln in

the years immediately following his death, through the turn of the century, follows. In

this period, there was an unprecedented national outpouring of grief in reaction to

Lincoln’s assassination. Criticism of the late president all but vanished in the days

following his death. Early treatments of Lincoln by biographers mimicked the popular

perspective, as friends and family worked to enshrine Lincoln’s life and legacy in the best

Kundhardt, “Lincoln’s Contested Legacy.”

light. In Chapter Three, I provide a contextualization of the changes in academic and

popular representations of Lincoln in relation to America’s rapid cultural and industrial

growth between 1900 and 1945. As the nation made an effort to solidify Lincoln’s legacy

as the Savior of the Union, cultural events such as World War I, the Great Depression,

and World War II transformed the fabric of American society, and subsequently,

Lincoln’s image. In Chapter Four, I examine Lincoln’s popular rebirth as the Great

Emancipator during the civil rights movement from 1945 to 1965. In a post-war society,

black and white activists enacted a national racial reckoning that forced Americans to

embrace all aspects of Lincoln’s legacy. I conclude with a brief reflection on the status of

academic and popular portrayals of Lincoln in the twenty-first century.

Chapter 1 – Lincoln in Life

On the night of April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln entered into Ford’s Theatre as a

polarizing head of state and left as a victim of fatal violence. Throughout the course of

the Civil War, Lincoln had been an inflammatory public figure. Lincoln’s election itself

proved to be the inciting catalyst of four years of conflict. His decision to pursue

emancipation provoked intense controversy and public opinion of Lincoln’s wartime

leadership became increasingly critical. Despite a Union victory under his leadership,

uncertainties over Reconstruction, and emancipation (and their effect on the nation’s

future), overshadowed Lincoln’s political success. In the aftermath of his assassination,

though, there was a gradual recalibration of thought in favor of Lincoln’s memory. A

post-mortem idealization of Lincoln transformed him into a mythicized figure as, over

time, the embellishments gained precedence over fact. The myth of Lincoln won out over

the man, and his divisive actions in life were gradually forgotten in the face of popular

and academic representations of the “true-born king of men.” Thus, in order to trace the

evolution of Lincoln’s image as a sanctified American hero, an understanding of his

actions in life is necessary to inform the modern historical perspective of his legacy. In

short, Lincoln’s post-mortem transformation into a unifying American symbol obscures

the fact that his actions as president were highly controversial and that his political legacy

was far from assured at the time of his death.

Born in rural Kentucky on February 12, 1809, Lincoln grew up on the frontier of

the early republic. Farmers by profession, and jacks-of-all-trades by economic necessity,

the Lincoln family lived on a series of small farms in Kentucky and Indiana. Known for

his incredible physical strength, the teenage Abraham was an indispensable resource to

his father. Routinely hired out to earn income for the family, Lincoln lived with, and

worked for, his parents until he earned legal independence at the age of twenty-one. Later

in life, Lincoln described himself as someone who “used to be a slave.” Referencing the

perceived indentured servitude of his youth, this early appropriation of Lincoln’s labor

created the foundation for his later commitment as a politician to the idea that all people,

regardless of color, were entitled to the “natural rights to the fruits of their toil.”

Lincoln’s self-described narrative of his youth in Kentucky, and later Indiana, reveal

formative experiences that would later influence his presidential position on citizenship.

Once legally independent, Lincoln moved to New Salem, Illinois in 1831. To Lincoln’s

chagrin, his rural youth meant that he had little formal education to draw upon once he

arrived in New Salem. An autodidact, Lincoln worked to educate himself, and to distance

himself from the frontier poverty he had escaped.

Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 25, 27;

George M. Fredrickson, “A Man but Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality,” The Journal of

Southern History 41, no. 1 (1975): 40.

Roy P. Basler, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, (Rutgers University Press, 1953), Volume 4,

Autobiography Written for John L. Scripps; Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American

Slavery, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 36.

In New Salem, Lincoln’s political ambitions emerged. Initially, he worked a

series of odd jobs to make ends meet. Following a brief enlistment as a captain during the

Black Hawk War in 1832, Lincoln opened a dry goods store in partnership with William

F. Berry, a fellow militia member. The venture was short-lived, however, and Lincoln

abandoned the enterprise in severe debt by the end of 1833. Shortly after, Lincoln landed

the role of the city’s postmaster. He supplemented his income by working periodically as

a land surveyor for the county. These roles allowed him to gain an intimate familiarity

with both New Salem’s citizens and its topography. Well-liked in the small city, Lincoln

ran a failed campaign for the Illinois Legislature in 1832. Undeterred, he ran again in

1834 and won on his third bid in 1836. His focus on navigable river infrastructure made

him well-known among Illinois citizens, as did his successful efforts to relocate the state

capital from Vidalia to Springfield.

Throughout his time in the legislature, he studied to

be an attorney. In September of 1836, he received his law license. Looking for wider

political and professional opportunities, Lincoln moved to the state’s new capital,

Springfield, in March of 1837, already a known Whig in Illinois politics.

Once settled in Springfield, Lincoln entered into a series of strategic law

partnerships to bolster his political aspirations. The first was with John Todd Stuart, a

prominent Whig and local attorney. Lincoln and Stuart met during their service in the

Black Hawk War and it was Stuart who encouraged Lincoln’s law studies throughout

1835 and 1836. Lincoln ran for, and was reelected to, the state legislature in 1838 and

1840. Lincoln and Stuart maintained a lucrative partnership until Stuart’s election to

Abraham Lincoln, “First Political Announcement,” Sangamo Journal, New Salem, Illinois, March 9,

1832.

David Donald, Lincoln, (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 64.

Congress in late 1839 shifted the bulk of the practice to Lincoln alone. In 1841, Lincoln

entered into a new law partnership with Stephen T. Logan, the leading attorney in

Sangamon County. Logan chose Lincoln for his personable nature, remarkable memory,

and easy and conversational relationship with juries. Lincoln absorbed Logan’s command

of procedures and precedents, and grew to become a “lawyer’s lawyer, adept at

meticulous preparation and cogent argument.”

Under Logan’s tutelage, Lincoln

advanced to practice with increasing frequency before the Illinois Supreme Court and he

became one of the most successful lawyers in the state. Though highly successful in their

firm, Logan and Lincoln amicably dissolved their partnership in 1844. Several months

later, Lincoln entered into a third and lasting law partnership with William H. Herndon,

an inexperienced lawyer.

Now a veteran attorney, Lincoln focused his efforts on entering into the national

political scene. During the course of Lincoln’s professional relationship with Stuart, he

entered into a courtship with Mary Todd, Stuart’s cousin. The two wed in November of

1842. Educated and raised in a Whig family, Mary encouraged Lincoln’s political

ambitions and he pursued election to the House of Representatives in 1843. Lincoln lost

the bid and spent the next year campaigning on behalf of Whig presidential nominee,

Henry Clay. In 1846, Lincoln ran again for the House of Representatives and won.

Lincoln assumed his seat in Congress in 1847, one year into the hostilities of the

Mexican-American War. The war began in 1846 after the United States and Mexico

entered into armed conflict over America’s disputed annexation of Texas in 1845. On

Stephen Oates, With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln, (New York: Harper Perennial,

2011), 104.

Donald, Lincoln, 97 – 101.

December 22, 1847, the newly-elected Lincoln questioned President James Polk’s

repeated justification of the war’s origin, that blood was shed on legal American soil, by

asking “whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood our citizens was so shed,

was, or was not, our own soil.” This question, among seven others, came to be known as

the Spot Resolutions and earned Lincoln the derogatory nickname, “Spotty Lincoln,” for

his criticisms of the president during wartime.

However, the animus toward Lincoln

was brief, and the controversy surrounding his challenge to Polk’s wartime executive

authority came to naught, as the war ended five weeks later.

Nevertheless, the Mexican-American War was the impetus that set Lincoln on the

defining course of his political career - slavery. The war had raised questions about the

system of slavery in the United States and its expansion into new territories. As a member

of Congress, Lincoln became embroiled in intense debates over the Wilmot Proviso, a

proposal to prohibit the western expansion of slavery into newly obtained territories.

a Whig, Lincoln opposed slavery’s expansion and supported the proviso. The proposal

did not pass, but the long debate in Congress alarmed proponents of slavery who viewed

the proviso, and its Congressional supporters, as a threat to an economic future fed by

slavery, but also to the continuation of slavery in the areas where it already existed. To

alarmed Southerners, support of the proviso was an attack on the institution of slavery

and thus a threat to the South’s economy. Regional fissures, generally characterized as

the anti-expansionist North and the proslavery South, began to trump party divisions and

Abraham Lincoln, “Lincoln’s Spot Resolution, December 22, 1847; G. S. Borit, “Lincoln’s Opposition to

the Mexican War,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1908 – 1984), Vol. 67, No. 1, Abraham

Lincoln Issue (Feb., 1974): 79 – 80, 87; Louis Fisher, “The Mexican War and Lincoln’s ‘Spot

Resolutions,’” The Law Library of Congress 1, (August 18, 2009): 1.- 9.

Eric Foner, “The Wilmot Proviso Revisited,” The Journal of American History 56, no. 2 (1969): 262.

sectional unrest intensified. Some twelve years later, Lincoln’s early support of the

proviso would incite the South to pursue secession and disunion.

In 1849, Lincoln introduced his first piece of anti-slavery legislation. The bill was

designed to gradually end slavery in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. Lincoln’s bill

planned for the transition of slave children into ‘apprentices’ who would labor for their

owners for an indeterminate amount of time; would hold all slaves in bondage until freed

by their owners (who would receive federal compensation); would prohibit slave

movement in or out of the capital; and, would enforce the capture and return of fugitive

slaves.

Lincoln’s bill received a lukewarm reception; some Whigs praised his efforts to

take a public stand against slavery, while others dubbed Lincoln “the Slave-Hound of

Illinois” for his support of the Fugitive Slave Acts.

The effect of the bill was two-fold;

it introduced the fundamental themes of Lincoln’s later antislavery legislative efforts,

gradual abolition coupled with financial compensation to slave-owners, and further

aligned him with the nation’s antislavery forces in the eyes of the South. The remainder

of Lincoln’s term passed unremarkably. He voted along party lines and returned home in

May 1849 after the 30th session ended.

Following his time in Congress, Lincoln’s political career fell dormant. He

returned to Springfield and worked at his law office with Herndon. It was not until the

passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 that Lincoln resurrected his public presence

and cemented himself as an opponent of slavery’s westward expansion. Prior to 1854, the

Carl Lawrence Paulus “The Slaveholding Crisis: The Fear of Insurrection, the Wilmot Proviso, and the

Southern Turn Against American Exceptionalism,” Rice University; Dissertation, 2, 8 -9.

Abraham Lincoln, “Congressman Lincoln’s Draft of a Bill to Abolish Slavery in the District of

Colombia, January 1849,” U.S. Capitol.

Foner, The Fiery Trial, 57 -58.

Missouri Compromise of 1820 banned the addition of slave territories north of the 36°30′

latitude. With the statehoods of Kansas and Nebraska pending, Democratic Senator

Stephen A. Douglas proposed to repeal the congressional mandate in lieu of a popular

sovereignty plan.

During an 1854 speech in Peoria, Illinois, Lincoln condemned both Douglas’s

plan and the South’s claim that the federal government lacked the authority to prohibit

the extension of slavery. Lincoln denounced the South’s defense that slavery was a

“sacred right of self-government” and stated that he could not conceive of any “moral

right in the enslaving of one man by another.”

The entangled societal systems of slave

versus free damaged America’s efforts to establish the superiority of free republican

politics - and for Lincoln, it was of the utmost importance to excise this blight from the

nation’s reputation.

Lincoln described slavery as a “retrograde institution [that was]

undermining the principles of progress, and fatally violating the noblest political system

the world ever saw.” Lincoln did not call for abolition, but rather for a return to slavery’s

legal status as a system that existed out of necessity as positioned by the Founding

Fathers.

Circulated via print around the country, the Peoria speech identified Lincoln as

a prominent member of the newly-formed Republican Party, a coalition of anti-slavery

Whigs and Free Soil Democrats that gained prominence in the late 1850s.

Lincoln’s eloquent opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act gained him national

notoriety. His general popularity motivated the Republican State Convention to select

Lincoln as their candidate in the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign against Stephen. A

Abraham Lincoln, “Peoria Speech,” October 16, 1854.

Foner, The Fiery Trial, 91, 102.

Lincoln, “Peoria Speech.”

Douglas, the incumbent Democratic Senator. Speaking before his Republican colleagues,

Lincoln outlined his political platform that centered on the topic of slavery. Lincoln

predicted that a crisis awaited the nation as “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Neither the government nor the nation could endure being “permanently half slave and

half free,” and ultimately the nation would “become all one thing or all the other.”

fierce competition, Lincoln and Douglas traveled throughout Illinois engaging in a series

of seven debates over slavery’s expansion westward during the Fall of 1858.

In order not to alienate the entirety of the white Southern Democratic voting bloc,

Lincoln campaigned for a free-labor society to distance his campaign from the weighty

rhetoric of abolition or racial equality. In the first Lincoln-Douglas debate, Lincoln took

pains to clarify his opinion that blacks were entitled to certain natural rights, but not

political or social equality. Lincoln argued that “there is no reason in the world why the

negro is not entitled to the natural rights of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of

happiness.” Lincoln stated, however, that blacks, both slave and free, were systemically

inferior, and regardless of right or wrong, neither “[his] own feelings” nor the “great mass

of white people would admit blacks as equals to whites morally, politically, or

socially.”

Democrats vehemently rejected Lincoln’s expression of support for any type

of black advancement in society. Lincoln tempered his limited support of natural rights

for blacks by noting that a black man was “not my equal in many respects – certainly not

in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment.” Lincoln reiterated and

expanded on this point in his fourth debate against Douglas when he explicitly stated:

Abraham Lincoln, “House Divided Speech, June 16, 1858.”

Abraham Lincoln, “Peoria Speech, October 16, 1854”; Abraham Lincoln, “First Lincoln-Douglas

Debate: Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858.”

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 intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is

a physical difference between white and black races which I believe will for ever

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.

Lincoln’s distinction between rights and citizenship dates back to as early as 1847. A

surviving fragment of a tariff discussion evidenced Lincoln’s conviction that the fruits of

labor “belong to those whose labour has produced them.”

The fragment, when coupled

with the rhetoric of the fourth debate, highlights the paradox within Lincoln’s racial

ideology. To Lincoln, slavery violated the Declaration of Independence as all people,

regardless of race, were entitled to natural rights that included agency over the fruits of

their own labor. Lincoln, however, distinguished between natural rights and citizenship;

he did not believe natural rights automatically translated into the basic civil, political, or

social rights innate to white American citizenship.

Citizenship was a controlled status

and defined by the majority group in power. In short, Lincoln opposed slavery but

accepted white racial supremacy.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 provide

evidence of Lincoln’s commitment to natural rights, views that only strengthened

throughout his lifetime; he firmly carried the belief in constitutionally-guaranteed natural

laws into his presidency. The debates also illustrate that Lincoln’s political and racial

philosophies were influenced by the racial dictates of his time. Despite his understanding

Abraham Lincoln, “Fourth Debate: Charleston, Illinois,” September 18, 1858.

Basler, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol 2, 411 – 412.

Foner, The Fiery Trial, 110, 118, 123. Lincoln’s presidential efforts would lead to a definition of

American citizenship; of what rights and liberties it entailed and exactly who was eligible to be a citizen.

Fredrickson, “A Man but Not a Brother,” 52.

of natural rights, Lincoln continued to struggle with defining who was eligible for

citizenship.

Lincoln’s success in the debates gained him even greater national prominence as

an opponent of slavery. The Lincoln-Douglas debates sparked widespread interest over

the ongoing question of states’ rights and further inflamed the sectional conflict. Despite

being a free state, Illinois voters ultimately reelected Douglas to the Senate. Lincoln, now

a nationally-recognized speaker, campaigned on behalf of Republican candidates in other

states.

He accepted one such invitation to speak at the church of abolitionist, Henry

Ward Beecher, in Brooklyn, New York on February 27, 1860. The venue had to be

changed to the larger Cooper Institute to accommodate the crowd of 1,500 who gathered

to hear the rumored presidential aspirant speak. Lincoln spoke at length about slavery, its

constitutional legality, and the roots of sectional strife. Deftly researched, Lincoln

reflected on the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, and their

understanding of the question – “does the proper division of local from federal authority,

or anything in the Constitution, forbid our federal government to control as to slavery in

our federal territories?”

Slave-owning citizens felt it was their right to own slaves; the

Founding Fathers, after all, never explicitly outlawed slavery in the Constitution. Lincoln

countered that slavery was never “distinctly and expressly affirmed” as a right in the

Constitution. Lincoln’s persuasive conclusion was that the federal government possessed

the constitutional authority to control the expansion of slavery within the United States.

In an effort to placate agitated Southerners fearful of federal intervention into their

Gary Ecelbarger, “Before Cooper Union: Abraham Lincoln’s 1859 Cincinnati Speech and Its Impact on

His Nomination,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol 30, No. 1 (Winter 2009): 1-2.

Abraham Lincoln, “Cooper Union Address,” February 27, 1860.

property, Lincoln’s speech carefully illustrated that the current Republican view of

federal control over slavery mimicked that of the signers of the Constitution. In so doing,

Lincoln presented the Republican Party as the ideological heir of the Founding Fathers.

Lincoln’s use of logic over morality made him a less polarizing candidate than the more

outspoken abolitionists in the Republican Party.

Lincoln’s mastery of the nuances of constitutional authority and his eloquent, but

relentless, articulation of his argument resulted in political gains throughout the North.

Thus, when the Republican National Convention met in May of 1860 in Illinois to select

their presidential nominee, nationally-recognized Abraham Lincoln was a viable

candidate. Lincoln’s logical approach to slavery’s legality, and his extended campaign

tour of 1858 and 1859, made him well-known in Republican circles, earning him many

favors. His political absence from 1849 to 1854 also meant he had fewer political

enemies than more prominent candidates, like New York Senator William H. Seward.

After three ballots, and the calling in of his many campaign favors, Lincoln received the

nomination for president.

The Democratic Party, by contrast, lacked unity. After fifty-

seven ballots, the Democratic Convention could not reach a majority on any candidate.

The party fragmented into three Democratic factions, each nominating a presidential

candidate to run against Lincoln: John C. Breckinridge of the Southern Democratic Party;

John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party; and, Stephen A. Douglas of the Northern

Democratic Party.

Abraham Lincoln, “Cooper Union Address, February 27, 1860,”

Michael Burlingame. “Abraham Lincoln: Campaigns and Elections.” UVA Miller center.

https://millercenter.org/president/lincoln/campaigns-and-elections.

Lincoln’s stance on slavery was the central issue of interest during his campaign.

Although Lincoln tried to center his platform on Homestead Acts and a free-wage and

labor society, the focus of Democratic attacks against Lincoln was his support of “negro

equality.” Newspapers published articles with titles such as “White Men Read Read

Read!” warning that Lincoln was an “unscrupulous Abolitionist” intent on

“overwhelming the people of the South by placing the negro on an equality with the free

white voters.”

Southern papers declared the need to secede upon Lincoln’s election as

the federal government would “force amalgamation between [negroes] and the children

of the poor men of the South.” One Georgian warned that to remain in the Union meant

“in TEN years or less our CHILDREN will be the slaves of negroes.”

In political

cartoons, speeches, and newspapers, Democratic supporters emphasized the social stigma

of Lincoln’s supposed support of black equality.

The campaign against Lincoln turned crude and personal. Republicans and

Democrats throughout the country criticized Lincoln’s uncouth mannerisms, rural

origins, lack of education, and mocked his extraordinary six foot height. Lincoln’s reviled

status stemmed in part from his relatively unknown past. Between 1858 and 1860,

Lincoln drafted three autobiographies. The first, a mere 47 words long, named only the

place of his birth, his professions, and his time in politics. At just under 600 words, the

The Democratic Press, November 21, 1860.

M’Arthur Democrat, November 1, 1860; Richmond Enquirer, November 2, 1860; Alice Fahs

McPherson, Gary Gerstie. Liberty, Equality, and Power: A History of the American People, (Boston:

Thompson Wadsworth, 2008),444.

“An Heir to the Throne.” https://elections.harpweek.com/1860/cartoon-1860-

Medium.asp?UniqueID=6&Year=1860; “Chief of the Wigwam.”

https://elections.harpweek.com/1860/cartoon-1860-Medium.asp?UniqueID=10&Year=1860; “Monkey

Uncommon Up, Massa!” Lincoln’s Election, Punch Magazine, December 1, 1860.

http://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/34105

second autobiography described his family as undistinguished and himself as “literally

without education.” Regarding the brevity of this narrative, Lincoln said “there is not

much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me.” Leading up to the

presidential election in 1860, Lincoln wrote his longest autobiography, for John Scripps

of the Chicago Press and Tribune. The Scripps autobiography detailed with indifference

Lincoln’s rural upbringing on the frontier.

Following its publication, and in response to

a letter from a supporter, Lincoln notably said “it is great folly to attempt to make

anything out of me or my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence; and

that sentence you will find in Gray’s Elegy: ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’

That’s my life and that’s all you or anyone else can make of it.”

Lincoln’s rural

background, combined with his sparse role in politics, made him a political unknown. He

was neither a career politician nor a man of sophisticated upbringing. To the capital elites

in the Northeast, Lincoln lacked the strength or sophistication to save the nation’s

democracy. The South viewed him as an interloper in their affairs. Compounded with

rising fears over the impending hostilities of secession, Lincoln was the subject of

national scorn.

Lincoln supporters, however, were undeterred. Thousands of northern youths

banded together to support Lincoln, forming a paramilitary organization called the Wide

“Lincoln’s Autobiographies of 1858 -60,” Abraham Lincoln Online,

http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/autobiog.htm.

William H. Herndon, Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln, ed. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis,

(Knox College Lincoln Studies Center, 2006) 15.

Larry Tagg, The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln: How Lincoln Mastered his Enemies to Win the

Civil War, Free the Slaves, and Preserve the Union, “Chapter 6 – Lincoln’s Nomination, (Savas Beatie,

2012), para. 59 – 61, 63 – 64.

Awakes.

Six-foot-four tall supporters attended rallies and cookouts to split rails and

listen to prominent Republicans campaign on behalf of Old Honest Abe, “the

woodchopper of the west.”

On November 6, 1860, Lincoln received 180 electoral votes

compared to Douglas’s 12, Breckinridge’s 72, and Bell’s 39. Omitted from Southern

ballots, Lincoln won only 40 percent of the popular vote but strong support in the North

earned him the necessary electoral votes to win by a wide margin.

Lincoln’s greatest

strength as a candidate was his ‘middle of the road’ policy that made him palatable to the

spectrum of constituents in the Republican Party.

Upon his election in November 1860, Lincoln supporters rejoiced that the party of

freedom and liberty had won, while Democrats lamented the calamity that had befallen

the South.

However, praise for Lincoln was not universal among Republicans.

Lincoln’s tall and lanky frame earned him the derision of New York Republicans who

considered him to be “unshapely,” and “a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla.”

column in the Salem Advocate, a paper from Lincoln’s home territory in Illinois, stated

that “people now marvel how it came to pass that Mr. Lincoln should have been selected

as the representative man of any party. His weak, wishy-washy, namby-pamby efforts,

imbecile in matter, disgusting in manner, have made us the laughing stock of the world.”

Jon Grinspan. “Young Men for War”: The Wide Awakes and Lincoln’s 1860 Presidential Campaign.”

The Journal of American History, Vol. 96, No. 2, Abraham Lincoln at 200: History and Historiography

(Sept. 2009), 357- 359.

Michael Burlingame. “Abraham Lincoln: Campaigns and Elections.”

Alice Fahs McPherson, Gary Gerstie. Liberty, Equality, and Power: A History of the American People,

444.

Foner, The Fiery Trial, 144, 149.

“Let the People Rejoice: Lincoln Elected,” November 17, 1860; The Freeport Wide Awake. The Lansing

State Republican, November 7, 1860; Chicago Daily Tribune, November 7, 1860; Cedar Falls Gazette,

March 8, 1861; Daily Intelligencer, November 7, 1860; The Weekly Mississippian, November 7, 1860; The

Wabash Express, November 7, 1860.

Mark Bowden, “’Idiot,’ ‘Yahoo,’ ‘Original Gorilla’, The Atlantic. Accessed November 11, 2019.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/06/abraham-lincoln-is-an-idiot/309304/.

Already the subject of death threats, a disguised Lincoln snuck into Washington, D.C. for

the inauguration under the cover of night. The ignominious start earned him the rebuke of

the Northern press. One New York paper called for him to earn “the deepest disgrace that

the crushing indignation of a whole people can inflict,” while another morbidly suggested

“Mr. Lincoln may live a hundred years without having so good a chance to die.”

Lincoln’s election to the presidency was the catalyst for secession efforts. Even as

a politician who embraced limited racial progress, and one who repeatedly emphasized

black racial inferiority, Lincoln’s limited antislavery stance portended doom for the

Union. The slaveholding states expected Lincoln to pursue the ultimate extinction of

slavery and they reacted preemptively to remove themselves from his federal authority.

On December 24, South Carolina declared its secession from the Union due to the

“election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and

purposes are hostile to slavery.”

Mississippi followed on January 9, 1861, as their

“position [was] thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.”

By the time Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861, seven states had declared their

independence.

Lincoln was cognizant that apprehensions over slavery and his election

existed throughout the country. In his first inaugural address, he attempted to guarantee

the nation that he had no purpose, right, or inclination “to interfere with the institution of

E. Lawrence Abel, A Finger in Lincoln’s Brain: What Modern Science Reveals About Lincoln, His

Assassination, and Its Aftermath, (Praeger, 2015), 4; Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press:

The War for Public Opinion, (Simon & Schuster: New York, 2014), 286.

Paulus, “The Slaveholding Crisis,” ii.

Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induct and Justify the Secession of South Carolina form the

Federal Union.

A Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of

Mississippi from the Federal Union.

South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.

slavery in the States where it exist[ed].”

Yet, despite Lincoln’s insistence that he had no

intention to act against slavery, hostilities commenced within a month of his

inauguration.

Above all else, Lincoln sought to avoid armed conflict with the seceded states. He

deliberately closed his first inaugural address with a reminder: “[ it is] in your hands, my

dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, the momentous issue of civil war.”

tensions increased at the Union-held Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, Lincoln

debated the best course of action; he knew that to send in federal reinforcements would

provoke hostilities and thus make the Union the instigator of war. To evacuate the fort

would damage Lincoln’s presidency just as it began. Instead, Lincoln decided to resupply

the forts with necessary supplies, like food and water, rather than to provide

reinforcements or munitions. Lincoln would not escalate hostilities nor incur blame for

starting war. Instead, it would be the Confederacy’s decision whether or not to provoke

conflict. After a resupply ship was turned away, Confederate troops bombarded Fort

Sumter with artillery on April 12, 1861. The Civil War had begun.

Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the rebellion.

Through June and

July, Confederate and Union forces clashed five times in and around Virginia. Union

morale was high. Lincoln ordered Union commander, Brigadier General Irvin McDowell,

to plan an attack that would, if successful, open a path to the Confederate capital in

Richmond, Virginia, and end the war. On July 21, the armies engaged at Bull Run in

Abraham Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1861.

Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address.”

Pomeroy Weekly Telegraph, April 19, 1861; Muscatine Weekly Journal, April 19, 1861; Holmes County

Republican, April 18, 1861; Western Reserve Chronicle, April 17, 1861; The New York Herald, April 15,

1861.

Virginia. The Union line broke, however, and the Confederates claimed a substantial

victory. Already elected with low popular support, Lincoln needed to show steady and

decisive leadership in guiding the Union to victory. Stinging from the loss at Bull Run, he

replaced his Union commander with George B. McClellan.

McClellan showed terrific

promise for a decisive Union victory. Appointed head of the Army of the Potomac,

McClellan was popular with his troops, a brilliant organizer, and had every federal

resource and advantage at his disposal. However, despite his strengths, he was a poor

field commander. Slow to move, full of bravado, and wary of Confederate troop

numbers, McClellan’s army stagnated on the Potomac. Initially, McClellan enjoyed

Lincoln’s full confidence and the President deferred to McClellan’s expertise in military

affairs. However, as 1861 dragged on and McClellan remained at camp, Washington

D.C. grew impatient and Lincoln grew frustrated. McClellan’s superior attitude and

inaction made Lincoln appear useless as a leader, and newspapers took to satirizing the

Union’s, and thus Lincoln’s, inefficacy.

Lincoln’s popularity, and support of his administration and its policies, relied

upon the military success of the Union.

Opposition to the war increased following

Union military defeats. The largest opposition came from the Copperheads, a faction of

conservative Democrats. Strict constitutionalists, the Copperheads believed secession was

a legal right and felt the war would end immediately if only the Union would ratify an

Herman Hattaway, “Lincoln’s Presidential Example in Dealing with the Military,” Papers of the

Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 7 (1985), 21; The Alleghanian, July 25, 1861; Chicago Daily Tribune,

July 25, 1861.

Hattaway, “Lincoln’s Presidential Example,” 24 – 26; “Masterly Inactivity,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated

Newspaper, February 1, 1862. http://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/37689

Jennifer L. Weber, “Lincoln’s Critics: The Copperheads,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association,

Vol. 32, No. 1, 2011, 33.

amendment to protect slavery. In the early months of the war, opposition remained

relatively low. After the Union defeat at Bull Run, however, Copperheads began to

agitate against the war, rallying behind the mantra “The Union as it was and the

Constitution as it was.”

In response to the military defeat and the increasing antiwar

rhetoric at home, Lincoln’s administration began to censor the press. Dissident

newspaper editors were jailed and entire papers were shut down. Lincoln suspended the

writ of habeas corpus in 1861, and again in 1862 and 1863. Copperhead presses called

Lincoln a tyrant.

In response to the unfolding crisis, the official policy of Lincoln’s administration

was conciliation. Lincoln believed that secessionist sentiment in the South was lukewarm

at best, and was mainly led by plantation gentry rather than by popularly elected

officials.

As such, Lincoln ordered Union troops to respect the rights of southern

citizens. White southern property, including slaves, was not to be touched. Lincoln’s

primary goal was the preservation of the Union and a return to the antebellum status quo

once the Union suppressed the Confederate rebellion. Lincoln repeatedly emphasized that

the federal government did not have the authority, nor the desire, to seize the property of

Southerners.

By forbidding slavery’s expansion to theWest, Lincoln assumed the

institution would gradually move towards abolition, with states functioning as the

primary actors rather than the federal government. Lincoln’s proposed answer to the

slavery question, gradual abolition, compensation, and colonization, received a lukewarm

Weber, “Lincoln’s Critics,” 35; The New York Times, October 18, 1864.

Weber, “Lincoln’s Critics,” 34; Abraham Lincoln, “Order to Suspend Habeas Corpus,” April 27, 1861;

Michael Curtis Kent, “Lincoln, Vallandigham, and Anti-War Speech in the Civil War,” William and Mary

Bill of Rights Journal, Vol. 7, pp. 105 – 191: 117 – 119.

John C. Rodrigue, Lincoln and Reconstruction, (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), 15 – 16.

Rodrigue, Lincoln and Reconstruction, 8, 16.

response. Northern abolitionists wanted immediate emancipation. The border states had

not been enticed by Lincoln’s repeated offers to compensate owners for manumission.

Black Americans refused to emigrate out of the country of their birth. As his

administration’s conciliatory policies failed to bring an end to regional hostilities, Lincoln

(and thus, the Union) were forced to consider more direct strategies to forcibly subdue

the South. During the summer of 1862, the Lincoln administration abandoned their

conciliation stance in favor of a more pragmatic approach that included the confiscation

of Southerner’s property and the emancipation of the region’s slaves.

During the war’s second year, Lincoln entertained the radical idea of immediate,

federally-enforced emancipation.

The unproductive summer of 1862 strengthened his

resolve to cripple the South and to end the rebellion as quickly as possible. In a July 1862

letter, Lincoln affirmed that he would “not surrender th[e] game leaving any available

card unplayed.”

Assessment of public opinion, however, informed Lincoln’s actions.

Lincoln understood that “the great masses of this country care comparatively little about

the negro, and are anxious only for military successes.”

Attuned to Northern public

sentiment, Lincoln understood that strategic timing of an emancipation proclamation was

essential to its success. Lincoln needed to issue the proclamation after a major Union

victory so it would not appear defeatist or desperate. In September of 1862, just days

after the Union win at Antietam, Maryland, Lincoln announced his plan to emancipate

the region’s slaves. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation would take effect on January 1,

Mark Grimsley. The Hard Hand of War, (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2-3.

Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War, 4.

Basler, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume 5, page 343.

Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, ed.by Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher,

(Stanford University Press, 1996), 119.

1863 and “all persons held as slaves within any state or states” in Confederate-held

territory “shall then, thenceforward, and forever, be free.”

The nation saw the months of September and December 1862 give rise to terrific

battles that affected Lincoln’s popularity. Concerns over the bloodshed at Antietam were

rapidly overshadowed by the issuance of a preliminary emancipation proclamation

announced on September 22. The Chicago Daily Tribune declared that there was

“universal acquiescence and rejoicing,” The New York Tribune described it as “the

beginning of the new life of the nation.”

The New York Times said “the wisdom of the

step taken is unquestionable; its necessity is indisputable.”

The Daily Green Mountain

Freeman declared it “the greatest victory of the war.”

Democratic presses and

organizations, however, denounced the proclamation as an excuse for Lincoln to violate

the property rights of the South, and Copperheads gleefully touted that Lincoln’s true

cause had revealed at last; the war was not waged to protect the Constitution, but to

destroy slavery and to establish racial equality.

The disastrous battle of Fredericksburg

in December 1862, however, devastated Northern morale. Over the course of four days of

fighting, the Union suffered nearly 13,000 casualties, versus only 5,000 lost by the

Confederacy. An outraged North blamed Lincoln for the slaughter.

One northern lawyer

spoke on behalf of many when he stated that “all united in ascribing to the President the

honor of being the author of all our calamities. His imbecility, vacillation, meddling

Abraham Lincoln, “Annual Message to Congress – Concluding Remarks,” December 1, 1862; Abraham

Lincoln, “Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, 1862,” American Originals,

Chicago Daily Tribune, September 24, 1862; New York Tribune, September 24, 1862.

New York Times, September 24, 1862.

Daily Green Mountain Freeman, September 23, 1862.

Daily Democrat and News, September 23, 1862; The New York Herald, December 31, 1862.

The New York Herald, December 16, 1862; The New York Herald, December 17, 1862; Chicago

Tribune, December 17, 1862.

interference with everything, his frivolity and total incapacity of received or appreciated

advice make him the most incorrigible stumbling block that God ever afflicted any nation

with.”

Harper’s Weekly lamented that Northerners “have borne, silently and grimly,

imbecility, treachery, failure, privation, loss of friends and means, almost every suffering

which can afflict a brave people, but they cannot be expected to suffer that such

massacres as this at Fredericksburg shall be repeated.”

The public outcry was so

widespread that General Ambrose Burnside, Commander of the Army, published an

official apology for the debacle.

Criticisms of Lincoln’s wartime leadership intensified. The arguments of

Lincoln’s detractors gained traction as the financial and human cost of war continued to

mount through 1863 and 1864.

Anger by Northerners reached a boiling point in 1863

following the passage of the Enrollment Acts, the first federal conscription law. Riots

broke out in Toledo and Boston against the draft, and the violence turned deadly in New

York City. From July 13–15, infuriated, white, New Yorkers raged throughout the streets,

destroying property, and attacking black Americans in retaliation for the perceived

infringement of their rights. An estimated 1,200 people died and some 3,000 black

Americans were left homeless.

In the face of declining Northern enlistments, black

Americans answered the call to Union arms. Black enlistments further inflamed racial

Weber, “Lincoln’s Critics,” 35 – 36.

Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (John Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 2008), 448;

Harper’s Weekly, December 27, 1862.

Weber, “Lincoln’s Critics,” 34.

The Sun, July 11, 1863; The New York Herald, July 14, 1863; Albon P. Man, Jr. “Labor Competition and

the New York Draft Riots of 1863,” The Journal of Negro History, 36, no. 4 (Oct., 1951): 375 – 376.

prejudices, and seemed to legitimize Copperhead criticisms that the true purpose of war

had been abolition.

Civilians wanted Lincoln to settle the war at any cost.

In March 1864, Lincoln

appointed the popular “Unconditional Surrender” Ulysses S. Grant as head of the Union

army. Grant’s appointment thrilled Union supporters and many felt the war would end

quickly under his leadership.

The boost to morale, however, quickly extinguished after

64,000 Union soldiers perished under Grant during a six-week campaign that resulted in

no gains nor tactical advantage for the Union and only mired the army in sieges along

Confederate frontlines. Union supporters grew despondent and renamed the general,

‘Grant the Butcher.’

The summer of 1864 was the nadir of Northern support for the war

and Lincoln’s popularity. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, lamented in a

letter to Lincoln: “our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country…longs for peace,

shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of

new rivers of human blood.”

Critics called Lincoln the ‘widow’ or ‘orphan maker.’

The public lost trust in Lincoln and was disillusioned over the purpose of the war. New

York Times editor and chair of the Republican Party, Henry J. Raymond, advised Lincoln

that many Union supporters felt “we are not to have peace in any event under this

Weber, “Lincoln’s Critics,” 35 – 37.

Weber, “Lincoln’s Critics,” 46.

Cleveland Morning Leader, March 9, 1864; Chicago Daily Tribune, March 6, 1864; Daily National

Republican, March 10, 1864; Cleveland Morning Leader, March 11, 1864.

The Shasta Courier, October 8, 1864; Rutland Weekly Herald, August 18, 1864; The Weekly Pioneer and

Democrat, August 26, 1864; Evening Star, June 6, 1864.

Horace Greeley, “Horace Greely to Abraham Lincoln,” July 7, 1864,

https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/letter-to-abraham-lincoln/.

Weber, “Lincoln’s Critics,” 40; The Highland Weekly News, January 15, 1863; Dayton Daily Empire,

September 30, 1864; Holmes County Farmer, October 27, 1864; New Oregon Plaindealer, October 28,

1864.

administration until slavery is abandoned.”

Lincoln’s refusal to compromise with

Confederate President Jefferson Davis led to the public perception that Lincoln was

prolonging the war by obstructing peace.

Lincoln’s chances for reelection in 1864 appeared to be nonexistent. When the

Democratic National Convention convened in Chicago in August 1864 to select their

candidate, even Lincoln felt that a Democratic win was all but assured. Harper’s Weekly,

a bastion for Republican support, listed all the names that had been applied to Lincoln in

the months leading up to the election: Filthy Story Teller, Despot, Perjurer, Thief, Tyrant,

Buffon, Fiend, Usurper, Butcher, Monster.

Yet, within 48 hours of the Convention’s

close, General William T. Sherman captured the city of Atlanta, Georgia. The unexpected

success revitalized Union support overnight and public opinion was reenergized in favor

of the war.

The success buoyed Lincoln’s image and his reelection campaign rallied

behind the slogan: “don’t change horses in the middle of a stream.”

Lincoln earned a landslide win with 212 Electoral votes and 55 percent of the

popular vote.

Women, free blacks, and Confederate citizens were ineligible to vote,

though for very different reasons. Therefore, the recorded win was not representative of

his true popularity among American citizens. Lincoln’s success at the polls relied upon

the spoils system and the infusion of pro-Union sentiment provided by Sherman’s capture

Francis Brown, Raymond of the Times (New York: W.E. Norton, 1951), 259 – 260, as quoted in Jennifer

L. Weber, “Lincoln’s Critics,” 42 – 43.

Burlingame, “Abraham Lincoln: Campaigns and Elections”; Harper’s Weekly, September 24, 1864.

The Evening Telegraph, September 3, 1864; Daily National Republican, September 3, 1864; Chicago

Tribune, September 3, 1864; The Daily Gate City, September 3, 1864; The New York Herald, September 3,

1864; Weber, “Lincoln’s Critics,”45.

Burglingame, “Abraham Lincoln: Campaigns and Elections,” Miller Center; The Pittsburgh Post,

September 25, 1863; “President Lincoln and the National Union League,” Evening Star, June 9, 1864.

Chicago Daily Tribune, November 4, 1864.

of Atlanta. Despite a clear electoral triumph with 212 votes, little more than half of white

male Americans in the Union supported Lincoln. The Republican Party also lacked

enthusiasm for the reelection. Ohio Representative, Lewis D. Campbell, stated “nothing

but the undying attachment of our people to the Union has saved us from terrible disaster.

Mr. Lincoln’s popularity has nothing to do with it.”

Maryland Republican, Henry

Winter Davis, called Lincoln’s win “the subordination of disgust to the necessities of a

crisis.”

Even the South viewed the reelection with bemused disinterest. The Richmond

Daily Dispatch reported the day after Lincoln’s win that the Yankees willingly continued

to live in civil slavery by reelecting a vulgar tyrant, but that the “the surrender which the

Yankees made on yesterday of their liberties to the Jack Pudding, Abraham Lincoln, is in

its way the most remarkable event of which history makes mention.” The Daily Dispatch

closed by stating that the Yankees were a “profligate and degenerate race,” but that its

voting habits made it “if not the greatest, [it] is, at least, the most interesting of all

nations.”

Lincoln’s reelection garnered little enthusiasm.

On April 9, 1865, Lincoln received news of Confederate General, Robert E.

Lee’s, surrender. Reporting on the events at Appomattox, Union papers expressed their

readers’ celebratory sentiments, while Southern papers chronicled the lamentations of

their readers’ humiliation and revulsion at the thought of forcible reintegration into a

society that allowed any advancement in black equality.

Abolitionists despaired that

Lincoln’s ‘middle of the road’ emancipation policy would ensure the continued

Larry Tagg, The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln, “Chapter 32 – The War at the End of the War,”

para. 4.

William C. Harris, Lincoln’s Last Months, (Harvard University Press, 2004), 41.

The Daily Dispatch, November 9, 1864.

“Surrender of Lee’s Army,” Quad City Times, April 10, 1865; The New York Times, April 10, 1865;

Martha Hodes, Mourning Lincoln, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 17 – 38.

disenfranchisement of black Americans. Lincoln’s intimation of black suffrage for Union

veterans at an impromptu speech given late on April 11, 1865, disgusted Copperheads.

Conflicting domestic fears over the country’s future overshadowed Lincoln’s wartime

success. Four days later, on the night of April 14, John Wilkes Booth fatally shot

Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre. Present at his bedside, Secretary of War, Edwin

Stanton, remarked “now he belongs to the ages.”

An inflammatory figure to the end, Lincoln’s shocking assassination nevertheless

jarred the public. As news of the assassination spread, the guilt that citizens felt over their

ambivalence towards Lincoln during his last months in office fueled an unprecedented

public expression of grief.

The polarization about Lincoln faded amidst a swell of post-

mortem adulations. At the close of the war, both the North and South began to recraft

Lincoln’s image. The North embraced Lincoln as a benevolent martyr whose purity of

soul and greatness overrode any perceived shortcomings associated with his wartime

leadership. Some Southerners viewed Lincoln’s death as “glorious news,” but the idea

that the South had murdered its best hope circulated widely.

As the nation confronted

the formidable challenge of reunification, Lincoln became a symbol emblematic of love

of country and sacrifice. Transformed in American memory, Lincoln’s emancipatory

legacy became contested in the era of Reconstruction as the nation capitulated to the

pressures of white regional reunification.

“The Nation’s Bereavement,” The New York Times, April 17, 1865; Carolyn Lawton Harrell, When the

Bells Tolled for Lincoln: Southern Reaction to the Assassination, (Mercer University Press, 1997), ix.

Pryor, Six Encounters with Lincoln, 142; Carolyn Lawton Harrell, When the Bells Tolled for Lincoln, 33

– 34; “Our Domestic Correspondence,” letter from H. O. Waggner, Chicago, April 16, 1865, New York

Anglo-African, published Apr. 26, 1865, as quoted in Martha Hodes’ Mourning Lincoln, 139.

Chapter 2 - The Making of a Martyr

The era of Reconstruction dawned over a fractured nation. By the end of the

nineteenth century, the polarities of American politics had transformed the cultural fabric

of the United States. The Civil War exceeded all predictions: in length, cost, and social

significance. A controversial president, Lincoln’s assassination permanently elevated his

stature. Transformed into a symbol of American identity, Lincoln’s memory took on

significant cultural and political ramifications indicative of how the nation remembered

the purpose of the war, and its goals for its future. The fractious period of Reconstruction

exacerbated regional hostilities and inaugurated a period of white-on-black violence

throughout the South. References to Lincoln’s emancipatory legacy grew scarce for the

remainder of the nineteenth century, and his prominence was renamed for his dedication

to securing North-South reconciliation. In order to transcend the lingering tensions

between North and South, the United States embraced Lincoln’s legacy as the Savior of

the Union. The failure of Reconstruction to prevent a return to legalized racial

discrimination was reflected in Lincoln’s image. Sanitized of polarizing racial policies,

Lincoln became a symbol for white national unity.

Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era, 14 – 15; Davis S. Kaufer & Shawn J. Parry-

Giles, “Refined vs. Middling Styles in the Lincoln Reminiscence: Comparing the Rhetoric of Formality and

Familiarity,” Rhetoric Review (Vol 33, No. 4), 345.

Reconstruction did not begin with Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on

April 9, 1865, but rather it began five days later, with Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

Although reelected, Lincoln remained an unpopular and polarizing head of state

following the war’s end. Despite widespread criticisms of his wartime leadership, most

citizens expected the president to continue to lead and maintain the balance between

national extremes of political thought. As news of the war’s end spread throughout the

country, near-concurrent reporting of Lincoln’s death served to deflate the growing

excitement. The president’s unexpected removal from office meant that Reconstruction

policies passed from Lincoln’s moderate hands into those of the Republicans. Leading

Republicans faced the challenge of creating policies that not only reunified North and

South, but also incorporated liberated black Americans into society. Radical Republicans

embarked on a civil rights campaign of sweeping proportions. Landmark legislation

guaranteed federal protection to all citizens regardless of race for the first time in the

nation’s history. Lacking Lincoln’s sense of moderation and public opinion, however, the

Republicans underestimated pushback by Southern Democrats. As Democrats returned to

office, they rolled back Republican gains in order to pursue sectional reconciliation

instead of racial justice. Lincoln’s death threw Reconstruction into a contested political

landscape.

On April 15, 1865, Andrew Johnson succeeded Abraham Lincoln as president. A

Democrat from Tennessee, Johnson remained staunchly pro-Union during the Civil War.

Johnson fiercely stated throughout 1864 that “treason must be made odious, and traitors

must be punished and impoverished.”

100

In the same year, Johnson styled himself a

100

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, (Harper: New York, 1988), 177.

‘Moses-like’ figure who would guide the blacks to freedom and equality. Radical

Republicans looked forward to Johnson’s leadership, and what they hoped would be

decisive and far-reaching change resulting from his Reconstruction policies. However,

Republican hopes dissolved as it became apparent that Johnson was a dogmatic

proponent of limited government and an inveterate racist. Contrary to Republican

expectations, Johnson proposed a lenient Reconstruction plan. Vast swaths of

Southerners received full pardons, and the constitutional conventions ordered by Johnson

excluded blacks from attendance. These all-white bodies drafted new constitutions that

incorporated a series of laws designed to curtail black labor opportunity, commonly

called Black Codes. Black Codes contractually bound black laborers to work for

specified periods on white farms. Laborers that ‘broke’ their contracts lost wages, and

unemployed blacks were subject to arrest and consignment to forced labor. White

Southerners did not accept the realities of emancipation and instead attempted to return to

a form of paternalism, “clothe[d] with the force of law,” that would forcibly “restore all

of slavery but its name.”

101

Early in 1866, Congress took steps to modify the Reconstruction policies of

Lincoln’s successor. The proposed legislation, The Civil Rights Bill of 1866,

acknowledged that all persons born in the United States were citizens with “full and equal

benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property.” Passed with

substantial majorities in both Houses of Congress, Johnson surprisingly vetoed the bill.

The veto was overridden by Congress, the bill passed, and the federal government

101

Eric Foner and Olivia Mahoney, America's Reconstruction: People and Politics after the Civil War

(LSU Press, 1997), 75; Foner, Reconstruction, 200.

assumed for the first time, a responsibility to guarantee all Americans’ civil rights.

102

short order, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment in June of 1866 and guaranteed

all citizens equality before the law. Now openly in conflict with Johnson, Republicans

swept the 1866 congressional elections. In March of 1867, following a second override of

Johnson’s veto, Congress implemented the Reconstruction Act and placed the South

under military control. The Act stipulated the rebellious Southern states draft new

constitutions that permitted black elections to office and guaranteed black suffrage. The

period of Congressional Reconstruction created the nation’s first biracial democratic

government. Among the achievements of black representatives was the passage of the

Fifteenth Amendment in early 1869, guaranteeing black men’s suffrage.

Six years after Lincoln emancipated the slaves, the federal government

guaranteed black Americans the right to vote regardless of race. With the amendment’s

ratification, many felt the work of Reconstruction was complete with “four million

human beings,” delivered from “the auction-block to the ballot box.”

103

White

Southerners, however, fiercely opposed Reconstruction. From 1868 to 1871, white-on-

black violence was rampant throughout the South. White supremacy organizations, most

notably the Ku Klux Klan, engaged in a reign of terror designed to prevent blacks from

voting in local elections. Using threats, violence, and murder, Southern Democrats

reclaimed their governments from Republican rule. The commitment to Reconstruction

by Northerners, however, waned as liberal Republicans imbibed the racist rhetoric of

newly-empowered Southern Democrats. Despite the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which

102

Foner and Mahoney, America’s Reconstruction, 11, 78 – 79.

103

Foner and Mahoney, America’s Reconstruction, 80 – 83. 90.

outlawed racial discrimination in places of public accommodation, white support for

black enfranchisement and mobility eroded throughout the 1870s. With the 1876

presidential election looming, amid mounting fears over another civil war over

emancipation, the federal government abandoned its support for Reconstruction policies.

The military occupation of the South was ended. Southerners redrafted their state

constitutions “disenthralled from a government which had been foisted upon them.”

104

The fundamental civil gains of Reconstruction were undone as the new constitutions

removed the earlier protections extended to blacks in the postwar society. By the 1890s,

Democrats reversed or circumvented most laws of Reconstruction. Blacks were

disenfranchised, segregated, and politically disempowered.

105

The federal government

tacitly stood by during the unraveling of Reconstruction, and ultimately legalized racial

segregation with the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson. Southern

stereotypes of black ineptitude and inferiority, seemingly validated by scientists and

historians, received widespread dissemination throughout the United States. By the end

of the nineteenth century, white Americans accepted Jim Crow and Southern justification

of the racial status quo.

106

The intensity of white Southern opposition to Reconstruction illustrates the

dramatic socio-political tensions during and following Lincoln’s presidency. Though

politically reintegrated into the United States, the South still held itself apart culturally.

The ‘Lost Cause’ movement began to gain a foothold in Southern thought. First advanced

104

Gabriel J. Chin, “The Voting Rights Act of 1867,” North Carolina Law Review, Vol 82. 1584.

105

Chin, “Voting Rights Act of 1867,” 1582.

106

Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction, (Vintage, 2013),

216.

by Edward Pollard in his eponymous 1866 work, the Lost Cause referred to a

romanticization of the ‘Old South’ by Southerners, in which slavery was downplayed as a

major tenet of society. The nostalgic reimagining of the antebellum South painted the

region in the best possible light and as the idea gained widespread traction, slavery as a

main construct of Civil War lost ground in the national memory. White Americans

increasingly shaped their memory of the war around the theme of reunification. The

pressures of reunification had subsumed the legacy of emancipation.

107

Lincoln’s legacy, too, reflected the shift. The federal emphasis on reunification

recast Lincoln as ‘Savior of the Union’ rather than as the ‘Great Emancipator.’ Lincoln’s

role in effecting a racial revolution was downplayed as the prewar racial hierarchy

regained a foothold in American thought. Newspapers, memorials, and sermons about

Lincoln focused on the theme of reunification and the polarizing elements of

emancipation largely disappeared from the popular conception of Lincoln. Writers, too,

shied away from Lincoln’s emancipatory legacy and focused instead on aspects of his

early life or his journey from prairie boy to masterful statesman. For the remainder of the

1800s, the popular image of Lincoln supported and legitimized a return to antebellum

customs and the racial status quo.

From the moment news of Lincoln’s assassination began to circulate, there was a

rapid reshuffling of public opinion with regard to his actions as president and his legacy.

Only weeks prior, the nation heard Lincoln call for “malice toward none” in his Second

Inaugural Address. Now, the nation grappled with emotional extremes of vengefulness,

107

Foner and Mahoney, America’s Reconstruction, 124; Foner, Forever Free, 216 – 217.

sorrow, grief, and exultation in the aftermath of his murder. The incongruence of

Lincoln’s death at the zenith of his political success stunned the country, and public

reaction to the news reflected the widespread unrest and confusion of a victorious nation

suddenly “drowned in sorrow.”

108

Responses to Lincoln’s death took many forms. Most

commonly, reactions appeared in newspapers and editorials, but also in anthologies,

reminisces, and tributes. Entire cities hosted ceremonial commemorations and speakers

eulogized Lincoln’s legacy. Artists captured the sorrowful nature of Lincoln’s death in

paintings and sculpture, while poets and musicians enshrined his legacy in lyrical prose.

Lincoln’s veneration as an American martyr was not immediate, but the initial frenzy of

universal grief and national mourning laid the foundation for Lincoln’s popular

veneration by the end of the century. In downplaying the nation’s unpopular opinion of

him in his final months, and by limiting his inflammatory association to slavery and

emancipation, the early tributary memorializations of Lincoln sanitized his nineteenth

century image.

109

With some individuals receiving near concurrent reports of the war’s end and the

assassination, accurate news of the effects of Lincoln’s death on national affairs was in

demand. Northern newspapers reported the “complete details of the great calamity,” and

lamented the untimely “cold-blooded assassination” at the “very moment when [Lincoln]

was closing the rebellion which had drenched the land in blood and tears.”

110

Though

108

“The Murder of President Lincoln,” The New York Times, April 16, 1865; “Our Great Loss,” The New

York Times, April 17, 1865.

109

Daily Davenport Democrat, April 15, 1865; The Wheeling Daily Register, April 17, 1865; Chicago

Tribune, April 17, 1865; The New York Herald, April 18, 1865; The New York Times, April 20, 1865; Abott

A. Abott. "The Assassination and Death of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America, at

Washington, on the 14th of April, 1865.”

110

“Complete Details of the Great Calamity,” The Chicago Tribune, April 17, 1865; “The Murder of

President Lincoln,” The New York Times, April 16, 1865.

some parts of the South reveled in the “glorious news” of the assassination, others

considered it an abhorrent, inhuman crime that dealt “the heaviest blow which ha[d] ever

fallen upon the people of the South.”

111

The intensity of the public’s reaction to the

assassination, both North and South, illustrates the deep anxieties of the fragile new

Union.

112

After newspapers confirmed Lincoln’s death, their focus shifted to coverage of

Lincoln’s elaborate and circuitous funeral procession to Springfield, Illinois. Daily

business ground to a halt as thousands of people lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the

train bearing Lincoln’s body.

113

“Never was King or Emperor honored with such

obsequies as those with which our Republic has laid to rest its greatest hero,” described

Harper’s Weekly.

114

Newspaper illustrations depicted the thronged streets and black

drapery of the cities that hosted the funeral procession.

115

The people of Washington

observed funeral rites for Lincoln on April 19 and cities across the nation held their own

vigils in solidarity, expressing the magnitude of the nation’s loss.

116

On April 22, 1865,

the city of New Orleans, alone, held a public demonstration to honor Lincoln’s role as the

111

Demopolis Herald, April 19, 1865; The Richmond Whig, April 17, 1865.

112

“The Effect of President Lincoln’s Death on National Affairs,” The New York Times, April 17th, 1865;

“Our Great Loss,” The New York Times, April 16, 1865; Harold Holzer, “What the Newspapers Said when

Lincoln was Killed,” Smithsonian, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-newspapers-said-

when-lincoln-was-killed-180954325/.

113

“The Rites in Honor of the Dead President The General Mourning,” The New York Times, April 20,

1865; Ralph G. Newman, “”In This Sad World of Ours, Sorrow Comes to All,’ A Timetable for the

Lincoln Funeral Train,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1908 – 1984), Vol 58, No. 1

(Spring 1965), pp. 5 – 20: 5 – 6.

114

“President Lincoln’s Funeral,” Harper’s Weekly, May 6, 1865.

115

Frank Leslie. "President Lincoln's Funeral Procession in New York City - Frank Leslie's Illustrated

Newspaper Drawing.” Remembering Lincoln. Web. Accessed June 23, 2019.

https://rememberinglincoln.fords.org/node/1114

116

“The Nation’s Loss, A Sermon Upon the Death of Abraham Lincoln,’ preached at Paducah, Kentucky,

April 19th, 1865, Edward C. Slater. D.D.. Charles Sumner, Citizens, Boston. A Memorial of Abraham

Lincoln, Late President of the United States. Boston: City Council, 1865.

https://www.loc.gov/item/12011018/

Great Emancipator. Speaking on behalf of his community, a local minister said that

“millions of hearts are wrung with grief for [Lincoln’s] loss,” and that “all mankind will

mourn the death of the universal philanthropist.” The only solace from the irreparable

loss, said another speaker, was that Lincoln ascended to “the highest culmination of

human destiny” and thus returned “to the bosom of God.”

117

Due to the timing of Lincoln’s death on Good Friday, popular responses likened

his death to that of Jesus Christ. Biblical allusion cast Lincoln as a Christ-like figure, a

martyr who sacrificed his life so his people could live. Popular artistic depictions

illustrated Lincoln ascending to heaven in the embrace of angels. An idealized deathbed

scene, published in 1865, depicted an expiring Lincoln, surrounded by beleaguered

officials, beneath three angels descending from heaven to collect his soul. Another

lithograph from 1865 depicted an ascendant Lincoln, embraced by George Washington as

he descends with laurel in hand, to guide Lincoln to heaven.

118

In addition to the strong

religious symbolism, secular depictions of Lincoln’s death were abundant also. The

painting, “Lincoln Borne by Loving Hands,” captured the hushed anxiety and dark

foreboding of America’s shattered victory in the only artistic representation of the

assassination by a surviving witness. The engravings of Currier and Ives famously

captured the moments of John Wilkes Booth’s attack and Lincoln’s deathbed scene.

119

117

J.S. Whitaker. "Louisiana's Tribute to the Memory of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States:

public demonstration in the city of New Orleans, April 22, 1865.” Speech of Major General N. P. Banks.

Remembering Lincoln. Web. Accessed June 24, 2019. https://rememberinglincoln.fords.org/node/1192

118

“Abraham Lincoln,” Harper’s Weekly, April 29, 1965; “Our Great Affliction,” Chicago Tribune, April

17, 1865; See D. T. Wiest’s In Memory of Abraham Lincoln: The Reward of the Just (1865), Max

Rosenthal’s The Lass Moments of Abraham Lincoln, Philadelphia, 1865, and J. A. Arthur’s Washington &

Lincoln (Apotheosis) (1865),

119

Carl Bersch, “Lincoln Borne by Loving Hands,” 1865; “The Assassination of President Lincoln,

Published by Currier and Ives, 1865; “Death of President Lincoln,” Published by Currier and Ives.

Enterprising individuals produced mourning pins, armbands, and eulogies for public use.

These portable totems memorialized Lincoln as “true in life, true in death!” as the

country’s “best son,” “the late lamented,” “a martyred patriot,” and as the man that “set

the millions free.”

120

Poetic tributes to Lincoln appeared throughout the remaining

months of 1865.

121

Of the published elegies, no voice better captured the mood of the people than

that of poet Walt Whitman. Whitman, like many, found Lincoln to be a peculiar

individual when he burst onto the national scene in 1858. Lincoln’s humility and lack of

pretension, however, made a lasting impression on Whitman. Over time, Lincoln came to

embody Whitman’s ideal president - a “heroic, shrewd, fully-inform’d, healthy-bodied,

middle-aged, bear-faced American blacksmith or boatman” from the West. As Lincoln

rose to the unique challenges of his presidency, Whitman implicitly trusted Lincoln’s

“supernatural tact” and “Idiomatic Western genius.” The two men never met, but

Whitman’s poetic style took on echoes of Lincoln’s speeches. Kindred spirits, both men

shared a commitment to the preservation of the Union, an appreciation for the common

man, and a shared passion for democratic ideals. Whitman considered Lincoln’s death a

personal tragedy, but also saw it as the concluding, redemptive sacrifice in the

120

Lincoln, Mourning Ribbon., 1865. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/scsm000750/; Mourning Bade,

True in Life, True in Death! 1865. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/scsm000747/; Mourning Bade of

Colored Satin with Portrait of Lincoln., T. Stevens, Coventry, n.d. Photograph.

https://www.loc.gov/item/scsm000482/; Mourning Badge., n.d. Photograph.

https://www.loc.gov/item/scsm000730/; Examples of sheet music include: M. Keller, Inscribed to the

Memory of Abraham Lincoln, The Champion of Universal Liberty, Boston, 1865,

https://www.loc.gov/item/scsm000095/. George Root, Farewell Father, Friend, and Guardian, Root and

Cady, Chicago, 1865, https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200000445/ . Septimus Winner and Alice Hawthorne.

A Nation Mourns her Martyr’d Son. W. Auner Song Publisher, Philadelphia, 1865,

https://www.loc.gov/item/scsm000510/.

121

See Phoebe Cary’s “On Lincoln’s Death,” “A Dirge,” Harper’s Weekly, April 29, 1865; “A Nation’s

Grief,” Harper’s Weekly, April 29, 1965; “Funeral Ode,” Harper’s Weekly, May 6, 1865; Walt Whitman,

“O Captain! My Captain!,” http://www.loc.gov/teachers/lyrical/poems/my_captain.html.

metaphorical epic poem of the nation’s narrative. In tribute, Whitman wrote four poems:

“O Captain! My Captain!,” “Lilacs,” “Hush’d be the Camps To-day,” and “This Dust was

Once the Man.” Of these, “O Captain! My Captain!” alone entered into the nation’s

popular culture to earn lasting immortality. Of the poetic tributes dedicated to Lincoln in

the wake of his death, Whitman’s was, and remains, the most quoted and admired.

122

On the anniversary of Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, 1866, at the request of

both houses of Congress, Washington D.C. hosted a federal eulogy for Lincoln to express

the nation’s grief. Senators and representatives gathered in the Capitol to hear George

Bancroft honor the “martyr president of the United States.” Labeled as “altogether

American,” Bancroft narrated Lincoln’s seemingly inevitable transformation from a

disadvantaged “child of the west” to “America’s choice” as president. Bancroft described

Lincoln as “inexorable,” “self-sacrificing,” “gentle,” “great,” and “honorable.”

Emphasizing Lincoln’s love of country above all else, Bancroft concluded that Lincoln’s

lasting contribution to the nation was the moral unity he bestowed on America by making

it a land of free labor.

123

More permanent memorials to Lincoln’s memory began to appear as early as

1867, when Nebraska renamed its capital in Lincoln’s honor. On the third anniversary of

Lincoln’s death, Washington D.C. erected the first monument to his memory. By the end

of the century, New York, Illinois, and Washington D.C. had dedicated five more statues

122

Clarence A. Brown, “Walt Whitman and Lincoln,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1908

– 1984), 47 no. 2 (Summer, 1954): 176; Walt Whitman, Prose Works 1892, Ed. Floyd Stovall. ( New York:

New York UP, 1963–1964). 2:535; Walt Whitman, The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6

vols. (New York: New York UP, 1961–1977), (1:83).

123

George Bancroft. "In Memoriam of Abraham Lincoln, the Martyr President of the United States". L.

Towers. Remembering Lincoln. Web. Accessed June 24, 2019.

https://rememberinglincoln.fords.org/node/813

to Lincoln. Of the seven reliefs and monuments erected prior to 1900, only one alluded to

emancipation in any way. Dedicated in Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C. in 1876, the

Emancipation Memorial depicted Lincoln in the process of freeing a shackled slave

kneeling at his feet. Present at the dedication ceremony, abolitionist Frederick Douglass

called the statue demeaning and criticized the symbolism of a kneeling slave.

124

Despite

the lukewarm reception, the statue was nonetheless the first public memorial in the

United States to venerate Lincoln’s role in the Emancipation Proclamation over his

sacrifice or love of country.

In 1874, the Lincoln Memorial Association completed construction of Lincoln’s

tomb in Springfield, Illinois. Some 25,000 people attended the ceremonial dedication and

an outpouring of tributes to the “glorious old Martyr-President” appeared throughout the

nation’s newspapers. Among the speakers present were President Ulysses S. Grant and

General William T. Sherman, who described Lincoln’s inexorable love of country and

their great affection for their previous Commander-in-Chief. Numerous newspapers

printed letters from leading citizens that expressed their regret for not being able to attend

the ceremony.

125

The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer of West Virginia reported, “statues

will crumble, monuments will vanish, and wreaths will wither, but a Nation’s heart will

enshrine in living remembrance the talismanic name of Abraham Lincoln.”

126

The

124

Scott A. Sandage, “A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln Memorial, The Civil Rights Movement, and

the Politics of Memory, 1939 – 1963,” The Journal of American History, 80 no. 1, 139; Freeman Murray,

Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation, (Murray Brothers,

Washington D.C., 1916), 27 – 28.

125

“The Martyr’s Crown,” The Chicago Daily News, October 16, 1874; “The Lincoln Monument,” Mineral

Point Tribune, October 29, 1874; “Lincoln,” The Indiana State Sentinel, October 20, 1874; Ottumwa

Weekly Courier, October 22, 1874.

126

Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, October 16, 1874.

Bellows Falls Times described the nation’s joy at being able to “provide a suitable place

for the remains of the wisest and purest of men known to its national history.”

127

The memory of Lincoln returned to the forefront of popular thought with the

assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881. Bereavement iconography pictured

Garfield alongside Lincoln in tributary lithographs.

128

“Again our nation mourns,”

decried one Illinois author.

129

Multiple papers across the nation printed “worthier men

than Abraham Lincoln and James A. Garfield this country has never seen in high station,

and each was taken early in the height of fame and in the prime of manhood.”

130

Others

intoned that just as the government had survived Lincoln’s death, so too it would survive

again.

131

Throughout the remainder of the century, tributes to Lincoln appeared in

newsprint on the anniversaries of his birth and death. Articles chronicled his descendants’

successes and woes, and sporadic tributes praised various aspects of Lincoln’s

character.

132

The twenty-fifth anniversary of his death gave way to a resurgence of

popular expressions of grief. Editorials and letters reiterated the “chill of terror” on that

“black day” when the “defender of humanity” fell. Cities and churches across the nation

127

Bellows Falls Times, October 30, 1874; The Grange Advance, October 21, 1874.

128

Lincoln and Garfield, 1884. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2009632235/; Littleton View Co.

The Martyrs – Lincoln and Garfield. United States, 1884. [Littleton, N.H.: Littleton View Co., 1898]

Photograph, https://www.loc.gov/item/2007680364/; August Hageboeck, Artist, Two Grand

Representative. American Characters, Our Martyred Presidents., ca. 1881. Photograph.

https://www.loc.gov/item/2003690614/.

129

O.H. Oldroyd, Lincoln and Garfield. Springfield, Illinois, 1881. Pdf.

https://www.loc.gov/item/scsm000499/.

130

Richmond Daily Palladium, September 20, 1881; Sacramento Daily Record-Union, September 20,

1881; New-York Tribune, September 20, 1881; Daily Globe, September 20, 1881.

131

Evening Star, September 20, 1881; Daily Globe, September 20, 1881; Wheeling Register, September 20,

1881.

132

“Laughed at Himself,” Daily Independent, April 9, 1890; “Lincoln’s Oratory,” The Rock Island Argus,

February 12, 1889; “Lincoln’s Jugendliebe,“ Der Deutsche Correspondent, June 7, 1890; “Foreign News,”

The Pacific Commercial Advertiser, December 31, 1881; “Abraham Lincoln,” Capital City Courier,

February 18, 1888; “The Martyr President,” The Columbus Journal, February 8, 1888.

hosted memorial services in commemoration of the fateful day that “robbed the nation of

its head.”

133

Reminisces, biographies, and sketches appeared with regularity, and sermons and

speeches with Lincoln as the subject were well attended and news worthy.

134

American

products like Dr. Bicknell’s Syrup for Indigestion, Marble Hall Clothing’s Tailoring and

Furnishings, and Lincoln Pure White Lead paint, commercially-appropriated Lincoln’s

image to lend an aura of reliability and credence to each brand.

135

By the end of the

century, Lincoln had become a popular cultural brand, emblematic of trust, integrity, and

justice. In short, popular representations of Lincoln varied in form and substance, but

were largely uniform in their depiction of the slain president. He was a figure to be

“generally celebrated.”

136

Tributes and newspapers depicted Lincoln as the Savior of the

Union, the ultimate statesman and patriot whose magnanimous attitude and eminent

virtue made him a man among men. A prairie-born underdog, he embodied the American

belief in opportunity.

137

Lincoln was an individual to learn from, an exemplar model for

youths and adults alike, for his honesty, courage, and humility. Lincoln’s critics were

cautious, fearing public outrage if they were perceived as lambasting the increasingly-

133

“Death was Victor,” Evening Journal, March 6, 1890; Evening Capital Journal, April 14, 1890;

“Twenty-Five Years,” The Daily Republican, April 14, 1890; “Twenty-Five Years Old,” Pittsburg

Dispatch, April 14, 1890; “Belongs to the Ages,” The Morning Call, April 15, 1890; “News in Brief,”

Daily Tobacco Leaf-Chronicle, April 16, 1890; “The Loyal League,” Deseret Evening News, April 16,

1890.

134

The San Francisco Call, November 10, 1895, page 22; “Log Cabin to White House,” The Morning

Times, February 9, 1896; “Local News,” The Daily Sentinel, September 4, 1900.

135

Dr. Bicknell’s Syrup, Photograph. The Huntington, Accessed June 24, 2019,

https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p16003coll6/id/4949/; Advertising label for Lincoln Pure White

Lead Paint, ca. 1866. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/92506765/; Marble Hall Clothing. Includes

Portrait of Lincoln. Baltimore Maryland United States, Wander Printer, Photograph,

https://www.loc.gov/item/scsm000461/.

136

“To Be Generally Celebrated,” Kansas City Journal, February 12, 1899.

137

. Fire Department of Philadelphia Mourning Announcement. Philadelphia Fire Department, Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania, 1865. https://www.loc.gov/resource/lprbscsm.scsm0698/; “Log Cabin to White House,” The

Morning Times, February 9, 1896.

venerated martyr-president. Previously discussed faults disappeared amid the popular

outpouring of grief following his death. Critics abandoned censure and instead embraced

Lincoln nostalgia.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, academia was a field in flux. From

colonial times forward, universities had been associated with specific religious

denominations and the curriculum was constrained by conservative edicts. Universities

tended to be small, church-based organizations that primarily offered programs in law,

medicine, or literature. In the late nineteenth century, there was a progressive rise in

research-based education. Updated curricula increased the rigor and professionalism of

American degrees. Lincoln’s death, however, occurred at the beginning of the Academy’s

transformation. Thus, the first generation of Lincoln scholars were not formally trained as

historians, but were a mix of men of good standing, stature, and erudition.

138

These

authors were comprised primarily of men who knew Lincoln in life — fellow politicians

and lawyers, some college graduates — who had a desire to properly memorialize and

commemorate the ‘real’ Lincoln. Tone and rhetoric, rather than educational credentials,

determined the educational merit of the work. The works they published ranged from

researched biographies to collections of reminiscences and magazine articles. The

Lincoln of biographical research echoed the Lincoln of popular media. Best said by

Lincoln scholar, Merrill D. Peterson, the “eulogistic tone of the apotheosis colored the

early biographies of Abraham Lincoln. The atmosphere was favorable to the generation

138

David B. Potts, “American Colleges in the Nineteenth Century: From Localism to Denominationalism,”

History of Education Quarterly,11, no. 4 (Winter, 1971), pp. 363-380; Kaufer and Parry-Giles, “Refined

vs. Middling Styles,” 345.

of myths, pious falsehoods, and wayward traditions.”

139

With the modernization of

universities still in its infancy, the first Lincoln scholars were not writing for the

academic community, but for the public at-large. There was a demand for Lincoln

content, but content that was expressly favorable to Lincoln’s memory. Lincoln’s critics

sharply curtailed criticisms after the assassination had launched his memory to new

heights of popular veneration. Insulated by the violent nature of his death, disparaging

comments toward Lincoln were no longer palatable to the society that had so recently

lambasted him themselves. Under such conditions, the first educational works embodied

the generally positive public opinion of Lincoln.

Some associates of Lincoln felt the need to immortalize his legacy as soon as

possible. Joseph H. Barrett for example, an Ohio Republican appointed by Lincoln to

serve as Commissioner of Pensions, authored one of the first biographies of Lincoln

while he was still in office. Barrett published an updated edition in 1865 that included

“scenes attendant upon his tragic and lamented demise.” Barrett dedicated the book to the

“great and good President,” who “after witnessing the triumph of his labors, fell martyr to

the cause he had so firmly upheld through the darkest hours… No name will be more

sacred in our country’s annals, or more perpetual in the memory of the world, than that of

Abraham Lincoln.” In the over 800-page book, Barrett explored Lincoln’s early life,

political career, and presidential policies in three comprehensive parts. Pulling from

political writings, state papers, and speeches, Barrett’s biography was factual and well-

researched, but lacked analysis or interpretation of Lincoln himself.

140

139

Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, 66.

140

Joseph H. Barrett, Life of Abraham Lincoln: Presenting His Early History, Political Career, and

Speeches In and Out of Congress; Also a General View of His Policy as President of the United States;

Following suit, Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times, authored the

new “definitive life” of Lincoln, also published in 1865. Raymond worked tirelessly to

capture the eulogistic emotion of the apotheosis. However exhaustive in scope, neither

Barrett nor Raymond fully addressed the elusive aspect of Lincoln’s personal character

that made him so singular and extraordinary. The public wanted insights into Lincoln the

man, not Lincoln the politician. Painter Francis B. Carpenter attempted to answer the call.

Carpenter spent months in the White House studying Lincoln at work on state matters,

and more intimately when dealing with his family at home. Carpenter published his

personal reminisces throughout the summer of 1865 in the New York Independent. The

articles were combined and the resulting Six Months at the White House with Abraham

Lincoln detailed Lincoln’s humor, his use of anecdotes, and a “deep undercurrent of

sadness, if not melancholy” he embodied. Well received, Carpenter helped sate what

Merrill D. Peterson described as a “public craving for an intimate hero, one who was

loved as well as venerated.”

141

Josiah Holland’s Life of Abraham Lincoln was among the most well received and

popular early biographies. A respected journalist, Holland was the editor of a prominent

Republican newspaper, the Springfield Republican, and led the city’s eulogy held in

honor of the martyred president. Unique to the initial flood of biographers, Holland never

with His Messages, Proclamations, Letters, etc., and A History of the Eventful Administration, and of the

Scenes Attendant Upon His Tragic and Lamented Demise, Moore, Wilstach & Baldwin, New York, 1865.

iv. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, 66 – 67.

141

Allen Thorndike Rice, Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time. (New

York: The North American Review Publishing Company), 1888; Joseph H. Barrett, Life of Abraham

Lincoln, (New York: Moore, Wilstach, & Bandwin), 1865; Henry J. Raymond, The Life and Public

Services of Abraham Lincoln, 1865

Francis B. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House with Abraham, (New York, 1866), 50 – 52, 114 –

115, 81; Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, 66 – 68.

met Lincoln, but he did travel to Illinois to speak with individuals who knew Lincoln

before his presidency. Holland’s research allowed for a more nuanced analysis of Lincoln

the man. Published in 1866, Holland’s depiction of a refined, self-made, and thoroughly

devout Christian Lincoln sold over 100,000 copies. A devoted Christian himself, Holland

exaggerated Lincoln’s piety, but the book was the first to holistically balance Lincoln the

politician with the inner life of Lincoln the man. Though the popular reception to the

work was favorable, Holland’s contemporaries derided him for his preoccupation with

eulogizing Lincoln.

142

Isaac N. Arnold, an anti-slavery Republican congressman, rounded out the

immediate flood of post-assassination biographies. Arnold was a fierce supporter of

Lincoln, and a close personal friend; they met as lawyers on the Illinois circuit in 1837.

Published in 1866, Arnold’s Abraham Lincoln and the Overthrow of Slavery placed

Lincoln as the one true hero of the long American conflict with slavery. Despite his deep

familiarity with the subject matter, Arnold omitted evidence that conflicted with his

portrayal of Lincoln as an inveterate abolitionist. Arnold ignored Lincoln’s support of the

Fugitive Slave Act, his own repeated denial of being an abolitionist, and the limitations of

the Emancipation Proclamation to free rebels’ slaves only in certain Confederate states.

Heavy on general history and lacking substantial research into Lincoln’s inner feelings on

slavery, Arnold’s twenty-plus year relationship with Lincoln nonetheless provided

anecdotal material not known to his Washington D.C. contemporaries. As a member of

Lincoln’s administration, Arnold had unique and intimate first-hand knowledge of

142

Allen C. Guelzo, “Holland’s Informants: The Construction of Josiah Holland’s Life of Abraham

Lincoln,’’ Civil War Era Studies, 2002, 1 – 2.

Lincoln’s policies, his growth as a politician, his use of patronage, and the history of

emancipatory legislation.

143

By the end of the 1860s, the prominent and accessible works

in the growing literary field of Lincolnia presented a relatively uniform treatment of

Lincoln as infallible, folksy, devout, and beloved.

144

Lincoln’s Illinois contemporaries also saw the fiscal opportunity, and demand, for

an intimate cradle-to-grave biography, and several close associates began the task of

writing the definitive record of Lincoln’s life. William. H. Herndon, Lincoln’s

Springfield law partner, began collecting Lincoln’s papers and amassed an expansive oral

history of memories and anecdotes from old friends, acquaintances, and relatives.

Tracking down information on Lincoln’s early life in Kentucky and Indiana proved

laborious. Insolvent, Herndon sold part of his research materials. The purchaser, Ward

Hill Lamon, former personal bodyguard to Lincoln, hired Chauncey Black to ghostwrite

The Life of Abraham Lincoln: From his Birth to his Inauguration as President. Upon its

publication, readers disputed the book’s authorship and the veracity of its claims about

Lincoln’s private life, religion, and love affairs. Black’s inclusion of Lincoln’s erratic

Christian beliefs, rumors of his illegitimacy, and his purported romance with Ann

Rutledge (his alleged first love from New Salem) outraged the Lincoln family. The

biography was a commercial failure and sold only 1,900 copies.

145

In rebuttal, Robert

143

James A. Rawley, “Isaac Newton Arnold, Lincoln’s Friend and Biographer,” Journal of the Abraham

Lincoln Association, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter, 1998), 39 – 40, 50-53.

144

Josiah Holland, Life of Abraham Lincoln, (Boston, 1866); Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, 68;

Hogan, Lincoln, Inc., 4.

145

Albert V. House, Jr., Ward H. Lamon and Chauncey F. Black, “The Trials of a Ghost-Writer of Lincoln

Biography: Chauncey F. Black’s Authorship of Lamon’s Lincoln,” Journal of Illinois State Historical

Society (1908 – 1984), Vol. 31 No. 3 (Sep., 1938): 263 – 265.

Todd charged Lincoln’s personal secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, to write a more

suitable biography of his father’s life.

146

Published in 1890, the monumental ten-volume work was a hagiography that

extolled Lincoln’s virtues with emphasis on his sagacity, Christian morality, charity, and

devotion to the United States. In the preface, Nicolay and Hay contend that it was “the

almost unbroken testimony… [that Lincoln] was incomparably the greatest man of his

time.”

147

An exhaustive effort, they endeavored to write a true, unbiased narrative of

Lincoln’s life. Robert Todd, however, stymied their efforts. As owner of the research

materials made available to Nicolay and Hay, Todd maintained complete control over the

content of the biography. As such, the authors omitted elements distasteful to the family,

like Lincoln’s private life prior to his marriage, and the enduring rumors about Ann

Rutledge. The resulting product was a sanitized contribution to the growing literature on

Lincoln. Nicolay and Hay noted that the timing of Lincoln’s death, at the height of a

stunning victory and the zenith of his political acumen, enveloped Lincoln’s memory in a

“halo of radiant success [that] dazzled the eyes even of his most hostile critics.”

148

A longtime associate and close friend of Lincoln, Herndon rededicated himself to

drafting what he viewed to be a true and unfiltered biography of the inner life of the slain

president. Believing that the public had a right to know the necessary truths, Herndon

decided to ignore “prevailing standards of biography” and provide a full treatment of

146

Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, 66 – 67.

147

John Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, (New York Century Co., 1890), Volume 1: ix

– xi.

148

Nicolay and Hay sealed their source papers until 1947. Lincoln scholars in the early 20th century did not

have the benefit of these recourses until the late 1940s. Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History,

Volume 10: 341; William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln, ed. Douglas L. Wilson and

Rodney O. Davis, (Lincoln Studies Center, 2006), xvi.

Lincoln’s personal and private life prior to his presidency. Co-authored by Jesse W.

Weik, Herndon’s 1889 biography remains massively influential and a rich source of

anecdotal materials that detail Lincoln’s mannerisms, foibles, and idiosyncrasies.

Unafraid to discuss Lincoln’s negative traits, Herndon elucidated Lincoln’s cold,

analytical mind, cunning ambition, irreligious beliefs, suicidal behavior, persistent

melancholy, and most notably, his loveless marriage to Mary Todd.

149

Though Lamon

and Black’s biography was the first to include Ann Rutledge in Lincoln’s early life,

Herndon reintroduced the subject and expanded upon Ann’s importance and lasting

influence in Lincoln’s life. Arguing that Lincoln never loved another woman after Ann,

Herndon’s biography incensed Mary and Robert Todd Lincoln. The Lincolns withdrew

their support of the book and it languished in contemporary denigration. The success of

the Nicolay and Hay biography, over the heavily anecdotal work of Herndon, illustrates

that twenty-four years after Lincoln’s death, his image as an American hero was deeply

ingrained in the public memory.

150

Controversy over Lincoln’s legacy was not confined to Herndon’s atypical

treatment of the slain president’s inner life. Soon after Lincoln’s death, a debate over his

legacy emerged among the post-assassination biographers; should Lincoln be

remembered for his ‘official’ legacy as an epic and sophisticated statesman, removed

from the everyday man, or should his humble, self-made, and democratic origins define

his memory? Biographers like Herndon embraced the familiarity of the latter approach,

149

Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln, xvi – xvii, 348. Mary Todd Lincoln and William H. Herndon

shared a hostile relationship. Historians J.G. Randall and John Y. Simon contend Herndon intentionally

misreported Lincoln’s relationship to Ann Rutledge in response to a previous slight from Mary. A more

detailed analysis of Lincoln and Herndon’s relationship can be found in John Y. Simon’s “Abraham

Lincoln and Ann Rutledge.” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 11 (1990), p. 13 – 33.

150

Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln, 353-356.

while writers like Allen Thorndike Rice followed the former. Whereas previous

biographers like Lamon, Herndon, and Wilkes sought to make Lincoln more accessible,

albeit from a subjective viewpoint, scholars like Rice preferred Lincoln rendered in

formal prose. In contrast to Herndon, Rice felt that distinguished men of stature and

education should steward Lincoln’s official memory. In 1866, Rice published his

Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time. Rice felt that the

inner life of Lincoln, his youth and life prior to the presidency, were irrelevant and

mundane areas of study. The focus of Lincoln literature, according to Rice, should be on

his time in office, his administration, and his masterful statesmanship. As such, Rice

included anecdotes only from Lincoln’s political contemporaries during his time in

Washington, D.C. Rice’s work received favorable public praise. Contrasted with the poor

reception of Lamon, Herndon, and Wilkes’ treatments of Lincoln, demonstrates the

American preference for a refined collective memory of Lincoln.

151

Published in 1896, Ida Tarbell’s The Early Life of Abraham Lincoln was the last

significant contribution to nineteenth century Lincolnia. A pioneer in the field of

investigative journalism, Tarbell made a name for herself in Paris as an astute researcher

and biographer. Personally sought out by the publisher of McClure’s Magazine, Tarbell

joined the staff as a freelance reporter. Following the success of her series focused on

Napoleon Bonaparte, McClure tasked Tarbell with authoring a twenty-part series on

Abraham Lincoln to compete with Nicolay and Hay’s work, which was then published in

installments in the competitor Century Magazine. Despite a rebuke of professional

encroachment by Nicolay and Hay, Tarbell’s investigative prowess yielded incomparable

151

Kaufer and Parry-Giles, “Refined vs. Middling Styles,” 344 – 346, 357 – 358.

fruit. Researching the history of the Lincoln family, Tarbell rescued the Lincoln name

from the “short and simple annals of the poor.”

152

Following extensive research of the

Kentucky civic archives, Tarbell found the 1806 marriage certificate for Lincoln’s

parents, and permanently ended the longstanding insinuation that Lincoln was of

illegitimate birth. Tarbell’s research into Lincoln’s father, Thomas, further rehabilitated

the Lincoln family name. Tarbell contended that Lincoln’s childhood home suffered the

scarcity common to pioneer life on the frontier, but illustrated that Lincoln’s father was a

man of good standing and credit in Kentucky.

153

Though Tarbell’s contemporaries

considered her scholarship to add little academic contribution to the historiography of the

time, her sharp research skills silenced critics who contended that Lincoln was the

illegitimate child of an indolent backwoodsman.

Pertinent to Tarbell’s successful representation of Lincoln as a heroic westerner

was the format of her biography. Published in the cheap monthly, McClure’s Magazine

for ten cents an issue, Tarbell’s work was far more affordable and accessible than the

works of Nicolay and Hay that appeared in the more expensive Century Magazine, or its

final ten-volume publication. It was estimated that between 1893 and 1899, ten-cent

magazine readership increased from 250,000 to over 750,000. With its wide accessibility,

the cheap monthly inaugurated a mass culture as one of the first forms of national media.

Hence, by the end of the nineteenth century, the culturally-dominant public image of

152

In Lincoln’s campaign biography, he described his early life by way of quoting Gray’s elegy, “the short

and simple annals of the poor.”; Donald, Lincoln, 19.

153

Ida Tarbell, The Early Life of Lincoln, ed. Paul M. Angle, (A. S. Barnes and Co., Inc., 1974), vi;

Tarbell, The Early Life of Lincoln, 30 – 31, 42 – 43.

Lincoln was a blend of the epic, heroic statesman described by Nicolay and Hay, and the

humble, accessible Lincoln of folklore.

154

Popular and academic representations of Lincoln in the nineteenth century were

largely reinforcing of one another and propagated the same embellished image of

Lincoln. The early biographies contributed to, in the words of historian Joshua Zeitz, the

“Lincoln know[n] today—the sage father figure, the military genius, the greatest

American orator.”

155

Due to the lengthy research and collection process, twenty-five

years passed before the publication of Nicolay, Hay, and Herndon’s works. In the long

interim since his death, the public’s popular memory of Lincoln perceived him as a

beloved American hero with few faults.

156

It was these favorable recollections and

reminiscences that early Lincoln biographers (excluding Herndon) drew upon to create

their narratives of Lincoln as both man and politician. Mutually reinforcing, the public

did not want negative depictions of Lincoln that painted him in any light unbefitting of

the martyr-president. The negative reception of both Lamon and Herndon’s critical

depictions of a faulty, informal Lincoln, represented a wholesale rejection by a public

that had spent three decades imagining a venerable and respected American patriot.

Lincoln’s acumen as a cunning politician was ignored, as was any disreputable mention

of impiety or ambition. Polarizing references to slavery and race, too, were abandoned in

favor of national and sectional reunion. Lincoln’s anecdotal humor, rural upbringing, and

folksy charisma were emphasized, as was his love of country and magnanimity.

154

Melvyn Stokes, “D.W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln,” Presidents in the Movies: American History and

Politics on Screen, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan) 2011,” 46; Cornelius Reiger, The Era of the

Muckrakers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1932) 13-14, 17, 21; Hogan, Lincoln, Inc., 4.

155

Joshua M. Zeitz, Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln’s Image. 2014, 265

– 266.

156

Hogan, Lincoln, Inc., 4.

The resulting Lincoln persona, presented in both popular and academic treatments of the

time, delineated a real life example of cherished national myths of the self-made man,

opportunity, and unity.

Chapter 3 – Preserving a Paradox

At the start of the twentieth century, the nation would attempt to solidify

Lincoln’s reputation in American memory. On the centennial of Lincoln’s birth,

committees, citizens, and governments planned an elaborate series of celebrations

designed to memorialize Lincoln permanently as the Savior of the Union.

157

Yet, while

the nation made an effort to commemorate Lincoln’s legacy and to literally set it in stone,

the country experienced substantial socio-political change. Between 1900 and 1945, the

United States had engaged in two world wars and had suffered through a decade-long

economic depression. During that time, Lincoln served as a framing device for a rapidly

evolving society that was looking to the past for guidance in times of successive crises.

158

Lincoln’s memory provided reassurances during a period defined by prolonged social

transformation. In reaction to substantial cultural and political change, Lincoln’s legacy

was pulled in contrary directions, as the nation attempted to solidify Lincoln’s legacy as

the Preserver of the Union even as intervening cultural events continued to redefine

Lincoln’s place in the nation’s memory.

Chief among the factors influencing Lincoln’s legacy in the twentieth century was

the continuing era of Jim Crow. With the unraveling of Reconstruction, advances in race

relations were dismantled and society returned to a semblance of the antebellum racial

157

Philip J. Kowalski, “From Memory to Memorial: Representative Men in the Sculpture of Daniel Chester

French,” Journal of American Studies, 41 (2007), 60 – 61.

158

Schwartz, “Memory as a Cultural System,” 908.

status quo. Jim Crow laws were established in the late 1800s, and the system of racial

discrimination remained firmly entrenched in the early 1900s. Popular forms of media

supported and legitimized black racial stereotypes. The advent of film and radio ensured

widespread circulation of negative portrayals of blacks in a newly forming mass

American culture. The visual power of the Jim Crow era combined racial imagery of

criminal, childlike blacks with the nostalgia of the antebellum South and the Lost Cause.

The potent result was a widely circulated and accepted justification of black racial

inferiority.

159

Popularly, Reconstruction was viewed as the nadir of American democracy. In

accepting the widespread racialized imagery of Jim Crow, white Americans were able to

embrace a white-based interpretation of the Civil War. Now remembered as the Savior of

the Union, Lincoln was memorialized for his efforts to save white national unity rather

than black emancipation. With visual aides circulating Lost Cause ideology and academic

and scientific evidence supporting ideas of black inferiority, white Americans celebrated

a composite version of Lincoln devoid of explicitly racial politics. Removed of polarizing

racial allusions, Lincoln was celebrated by a white American public that embraced the

racial bigotry of Jim Crow.

160

In quick succession, however, World War I, the Great Depression, and World

War II transformed the cultural fabric of the United States, and with it, Lincoln’s

meaning as a national symbol. The First World War resulted in America’s emergence as

a world power, and thus, Lincoln became a symbol on the international stage. However,

159

Eric Foner and Joshua Brown, Forever Free, 214 – 216.

160

John Smith, J. Vincent Lowery, and Eric Foner, The Dunning School, 5-6; Eric Foner, Forever Free,

216 – 217; Jerrold Packard, American Nightmare, (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 2002), 160 – 161.

America’s elevation as a world power complicated Lincoln’s image. Americans debated

whether Lincoln should represent the sophistication and refinement of diplomacy or

portray national traits of humility and agrarian democracy. Despite the differences in

interpretation between the epic or folk style of Lincoln, he nonetheless personified

national unity throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s.

Beginning in October of 1929, severe economic depression gripped the United

States. Lasting until 1939, unprecedented rates of unemployment, social unrest, and

personal hardship defined the period. During the Great Depression, Americans looked to

figures from the past to derive strength and inspiration. Lincoln, as a popular symbol,

featured prominently in the rhetoric of politicians aiming to inspire Americans during the

economic hardship. In radio addresses and in speeches, Depression-era presidents

implored the people to follow “Lincoln’s way” and forge ahead in the face of

adversity.

161

Gradually, the image of Lincoln as the ‘self-made man’ gained traction in

popular thought. By the end of the Depression, Lincoln was remembered both for his role

in saving the Union and for his pioneer youth, self-reliance, and spectacular rise from

poverty to the presidency.

162

World War II, however, had the most substantial impact on reshaping the national

memory of Lincoln. As the atrocities of the Nazi regime came to light, the war was recast

in morally simplistic terms; the United States and its allies fought to defend liberty,

whereas Germany and the Axis powers fought to impose tyranny. Lincoln’s image

161

Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, (Knopf, 2017), 433.

162

Kathleen Logothetis Thompson, “Looking for the American Dream: Lincoln Statues in the Great

Depression,” February 10, 2015, Civil Discourse, http://www.civildiscourse-

historyblog.com/blog/2015/2/6/lookingfortheamericandream.

underwent a rebirth as he symbolized the Great Emancipator of peoples everywhere in

wartime propaganda. In contrast, segregation and Jim Crow persisted in America. As the

United States’ global power expanded during and after the war, the tensions between

Lincoln’s domestic image as the Savior of the Union conflicted with the international

projection of Lincoln as both emancipator and defender of democracy.

At the start of the 20th century, the state of Lincoln historiography had evolved

little since its inception in 1865. Stymying scholarly advance in the field was Lincoln’s

surviving son, Robert Todd. Described as a “jealous guardian of his father’s papers,”

Todd denied scholars access to the materials and only permitted brief and intermittent use

of his father’s papers when he deemed the researcher worthy, such as Nicolay and Hay,

and to a lesser extent, Ida Tarbell. After a lifetime of close stewardship, he bequeathed

the collection to the Library of Congress on the condition the papers remained sealed

until twenty-one years following his death.

163

Constraining the historical field, too, was the emergence of the Dunning School of

historiographical thought at the start of the twentieth century. Columbia University

professor, William Archibald Dunning, pioneered the professionalization of

Reconstruction as a field worthy of academic research. Dunning mentored a new

Southern school of historians around the central premise that “the Civil War had been a

tragic misunderstanding and that Reconstruction had been a scurrilous punishment foisted

upon helpless white Southerners by arrogant Yankees who exploited African Americans

by giving them citizenship rights.”

164

Prior to the emergence of the Dunning school,

163

Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, 258 – 259. Robert Todd died July 26, 1926.

164

John David Smith, The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction, 2.

histories of the Civil War and Reconstruction were heavily partisan and laden with

sectional feelings rather than truth or fact. Northern intellectuals dominated the field and

praised Republican efforts for saving the Union while condemning Southern

Confederates as traitors. Dunning’s unabashedly pro-Southern conception of history was

eagerly embraced by Southern academics. Dunning reconceived Reconstruction, in the

words of historian David Levering Lewis, as a “tragic decade of federal intervention and

Negro misrule.”

165

Supporting Dunning’s findings were the leading German-inspired

intellectuals of the time. Ethnocentric European scientific studies in the late 1800s used

qualitative metrics to objectively classify Africans as an inferior race. Scientific

Darwinism seemed to confirm that white superiority was biological and even to non-

racists of the time, “black inferiority was a self-spoken fact.”

166

Unsurprisingly, the Dunning interpretation of Reconstruction, as the lowest and

darkest part of American democracy, found a receptive audience in turn-of-the-century

white America, and Dunning’s theory flourished in academia and heavily influenced

public thought. Dunning-supported stereotypes of black incompetence and corruption

dominated popular depictions of Reconstruction, most famously in The Birth of a Nation

and Gone with the Wind. Massively influential, Dunning and his students led a growing

national condemnation of Reconstruction Republicans. The subsequent impact on

Lincoln’s legacy was the nearly complete erasure of emancipation as a war-time goal.

Dunningites believed Radical Republicans acted against Lincoln’s Reconstruction plans

165

David Levering Lewis, W.E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868 – 1919 (New York: Henry Holt,

1993), 384 as quoted in John David Smith, The Dunning School, 1.

166

Smith, The Dunning School, 5-6, 11, 23. The German-led model of Darwinian science gained

prominence in the 1880s and continued into the 1900s. The scientific idea persisted in Germany until the

end of World War II in 1945.

for a quick and merciful restoration of the Union. In so doing, Republicans violated

Lincoln’s memory and intentionally dismantled acceptable Southern governments

enacted under President Johnson’s Reconstruction Act. In sum, the Dunning School

provided a historical justification for Lincoln’s ascendancy as the Savior of the Union

and the suppression of his emancipationist legacy. Throughout the first half of the

twentieth century, the Dunning School of thought influenced historians, academics, and

the general public’s memories and knowledge of the war, Lincoln’s legacy, and the

proper place of blacks in American society.

167

With the Dunning School’s insulation of

Lincoln’s memory from larger considerations of race or Reconstruction, Lincoln scholars

continued to compete amongst themselves to draft the definitive biography of Lincoln’s

life; a work that not only chronicled his journey from the prairie to the White House, but

also explored his extraordinary moral qualities.

In 1922, Herndon’s former writing partner, Jesse W. Weik, decided that Herndon

had fallen short of the task of presenting the authentic Lincoln in his 1889 biography.

Weik, uniquely situated due to his extensive previous Lincoln research, published his

own biography, The Real Lincoln: A Portrait, that more fully illustrated Lincoln’s human

side. Weik focused on the lesser described aspects of Lincoln’s private life, such as his

activities as a lawyer, a neighbor, a husband, and a Springfield citizen. Rife with analyses

of Lincoln’s cheap court fees and the social functions of a relatively affluent Springfield

denizen, Weik’s work received more favorable praise than his previous contribution.

More anecdote than analysis, critics said The Real Lincoln “offered no interpretation of

167

Smith, The Dunning School, 2; Harry Kincaid, “Victims of Circumstance: An Interpretation of

Changing Attitudes Toward Republican Policy Makers and Reconstruction,” The Journal of American

History, Vol 57, No. 1 (June 1970), 49, 59.

[Lincoln’s life], but that Weik had made a “genuine advance over Herndon’s Lincoln,”

and provided episodic support to the modern canon of Lincolnia.

168

In early academic interpretations of Lincoln’s life, researchers struggled to

incorporate the blend of factual support, characterization, and analysis required to make a

substantive Lincoln biography. Early works like Nicolay and Hay, Holland, or Allen,

ultimately abandoned a measure of critical inquiry into their subject in order to portray

Lincoln in a positive light befitting a sanctified, national hero. The epitome of effusive

prose culminated in Carl Sandburg’s The Prairie Years, an imaginative narrative of

Lincoln’s early life. A poet, Sandburg was not a trained historian, and the notable lack of

footnotes or sources throughout his work underscores the fact that the work was a balance

of tradition, contemporary research, and imagination. Vivid prose and poetic

interpretation blended to invoke what felt like the authentic Lincoln in his formative

years on the frontier. Sandburg’s portrayal of a folksy, rural, American echoed the

western pioneer described first by Ida Tarbell in the 1890s. Sandburg followed this first

two-volume contribution with a four-volume sequel, The War Years. Illustrative and

descriptive, Sandburg’s six-volume biography traced Lincoln’s origins prior to his

conception and continued until his body was laid to rest in Springfield, Illinois.

Academically, Sandburg made a limited contribution to the scholarly field, but he

unquestionably revitalized public interest in Lincoln and simultaneously opened new

corridors of academic inquiry. Sandburg’s poetic language and unrestrained descriptions

168

Randall T. Shepard, “Jesse W. Weik: The Young Indiana Lawyer Who Made Herndon’s Lincoln

Possible,” Indiana Magazine of History, 105 no. 4, 382; Glenn Tucker, “Lincoln’s Jesse W. Weik,” Lincoln

Herald, 77 no. 1 (1975) 11, citing Outlook February 27, 1924.

of Lincoln’s close friendship to Joshua Speed as ‘soft,’ ‘lavender,’ and like ‘May violets,’

laid the foundation for a future line of scholarly research into Lincoln’s sexuality.

169

In the continuing absence of the Robert Todd papers, collectors worked diligently

to recover lost materials to provide new, fuller editions of Lincoln’s writings. Paul

Angle’s 1930 New Letters and Papers introduced 430 original items to the catalogue of

Lincolnia, most notably Lincoln’s eulogy for President Zachary Taylor. In the search for

content, Angle engaged in a quasi-rivalry with Emmanuel Hertz. Hertz’s 1931 two-

volume Abraham Lincoln: A New Portrait asserted in its preface to be a “complete and

authentic appraisal of Lincoln, the man” in light of newly discovered papers (Hertz

claimed 3,500 documents) that he was editing and printing for the first time. Adamant in

his conclusion that Lincoln set the “bar for all succeeding presidents,” Hertz was

unrestrained in his praise for the “super-politician” who was “God’s anointed

messenger.”

170

Unique to Hertz’s interpretation of Lincoln’s papers was the intimation

that Lincoln only pretended to be pro-slavery in life, and that the ruse was designed to

ensure that a united North supported the Emancipation Proclamation. Angle condemned

Hertz’s work for being indiscriminate, fraudulent, and unproven – a contention supported

by modern scholar, Merrill Peterson, who noted that Hertz’s claim to 3,500 previously

hidden documents was not only absurd, but utterly false.

171

Other early collectors

contributed invaluable editions of Lincoln’s papers, but the premier researcher and

collector of Lincolnia in the 1920s and 1930s was Oliver R. Barrett. An Illinois native

169

Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, (Harcourt, 1939); Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln:

The Prairie Years, (Harcourt, 1926), Volume 1: 264 – 266.

170

Emanuel Hertz, Abraham Lincoln: A New Portrait. 4, 475 – 476.

171

Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, 260.

himself, Barrett’s exhaustive search yielded the original and only surviving letter from

Lincoln to Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, during the Civil War.

172

The state of the Lincoln historiography categorically shifted with the treatment

offered by J.G. Randall, first in his essay, “Has the Lincoln Theme been Exhausted?” and

later in his four-volume biography, Lincoln, The President. Systematic in his analysis of

sources, Randall condemned the vast field of Lincoln literature as superficial, uncritical,

and amateur. Randall contended in his 1936 essay that Lincoln remained woefully

understudied and his papers largely unedited. Randall felt that no proper biography of

Lincoln yet existed and he dedicated himself to the task. Randall worked tirelessly to

rectify the “misleading” and “uncritical writings” that comprised Lincoln literature until

1945. A trained historian of the revisionist school of Civil War historiography, Randall

endeavored to clear the field of the academic debris that littered serious Lincoln

scholarship. Most notably, Randall took specific issue with the research of William

Herndon. Randall exhibited a clear disregard for the burgeoning psychological field and

dismissed large swaths of Herndon’s anecdotal work on the grounds of excessive

psychoanalysis and conjecture on Herndon’s part.

173

The second volume of the series offered a full condemnation of Herndon’s

previous treatment of Ann Rutledge, Lincoln’s purported first love in New Salem,

Illinois. In a supplementary appendix entitled “Sifting the Ann Rutledge Evidence,”

Randall dismantled Herndon’s argument with exacting precision. Dismissing the

172

. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, 260 – 262.

173

J. G. Randall, “Has the Lincoln Theme Been Exhausted?,” The American Historical Review, 41 no. 2

(1936); J. G. Randall, Lincoln, The President, (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1945), Volume 1: vii – x;

Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, 256 – 260, 302.

reminisces that formed the bedrock of Herndon’s biography, Randall interpreted

Herndon’s inclusion of the Ann Rutledge story as an intentional attack on Mary Todd

Lincoln. Believing Herndon to be personally motivated to denigrate Mary’s image,

Randall did his best to excise Ann from scholarly discourse. Ann’s dismissal from

Lincoln historiography, however, had the harmful effect of suppressing serious

discussion of the documented depressive episode Lincoln experienced in the weeks after

Ann’s death. By removing Ann from scholarly discussions, Randall downplayed the

fragility of Lincoln’s mental health in 1833. Ironically, Randall’s condemnation of

Herndon’s lack of professionalism, and Randall’s general dismissal of the Lincoln

historiography, halted serious academic research into Lincoln’s personal life. Few

scholars wished to encroach on Randall’s command of the subject matter and earn his

professional ire. Nonetheless, Randall’s biography irrevocably changed the substance and

scholarly rigor of Lincoln literature. Randall’s meticulous use of sources ushered in a

new standard of critical analysis.

174

With Jim Crow enforcing white cultural and legal supremacy, Lincoln’s

emancipatory legacy was all but forgotten in the early 1900s. In radio plays and films, in

annual celebrations and speeches, Lincoln was remembered by white Americans for his

defense of the Union. As early as 1887, people, cities, and organizations began to gather

on significant dates of Lincoln’s life to commemorate his legacy. The annual celebration

of ‘Lincoln Day’ included dinners, public gatherings, folk festivals, printed tributes in

news materials, Republican Party campaigning, and fund raising. By the early 1900s,

174

Randall, Lincoln, The President, Volume 2: 321 – 342; John Y. Simon, “Abraham Lincoln and Ann

Rutledge,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, no. 11 (1990): 15; Joshua Wolf Shenk, Lincoln’s

Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, (Houghton Mifflin

Company, 2005), 234; Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, 298 – 304.

Lincoln Day was primarily a political holiday for the Republican Party. Comprised of

white-only events, blacks were barred from attending. Competing interpretations of

Lincoln, the white savior versus the black emancipator, contributed to the increasingly

racialized politics of memory. As black and white society grew further apart,

interpretations of Lincoln’s legacy and memories of the war’s purpose grew

incompatible. Segregation, rather than inclusion, became the theme of Lincoln Day

celebrations. Excluded from mainstream Lincoln Day events, black Americans celebrated

the Great Emancipator in their segregated neighborhoods, churches, and businesses.

175

In 1909, cities, communities, and committees across the globe participated in a

celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. Nationally, it was the largest

tribute to an American in the country’s history. New York City dedicated $25,000 for the

event, and Chicago spent $40,000 “to outdo the efforts of any [other] city in the United

States as an example of patriotism.” Lincoln’s adopted home of Springfield, Illinois,

hosted one of the grandest celebrations in honor of its favorite son. In the zeitgeist of

commemoration, the Lincoln penny was minted and Washington D.C. politicians formed

a committee to create a befitting monument to Lincoln in the nation’s capital. The

Lincoln Centennial Association, later renamed the Abraham Lincoln Association, hosted

the Springfield celebration in the State Arsenal. A lavish event, some 750 men attended

the black-tie affair. Attendance was for whites only; local black citizens celebrated

separately at a church across town. Just six months prior, terrorized black residents of

175

“Lincoln Day Dinner,” The Saint Paul Globe, February 12, 1900; “Lincoln’s Birthday,” Deseret

Evening News, February 12, 1900; “Abraham Lincoln, the Nation’s Greatest Hero,” Chicago Eagle,

February 11, 1905; The Plymouth Tribune, February 9, 1905; Bismarck Daily Tribune, February 12, 1910;

“Abraham Lincoln,” Daily Capital Journal, February 12, 1910; The Nonpartisan Leader, February 7, 1921;

“Out of the Wilderness: A Folk Festival of the New Salem Years of Lincoln,” New Salem State Park,

https://www.loc.gov/item/98509559/.

Springfield had taken refuge in the Arsenal as a violent race riot took hold in Lincoln’s

hometown. A white mob of 2,000 men and boys plundered black property, setting fire to

business and homes. After two days of violence, six people were dead. White attendees at

the Lincoln gala, however, were unperturbed by the irony. In segregated celebrations

throughout the country, white Americans celebrated the legacy of Abraham Lincoln.

176

The 1900s inaugurated a categorical shift in American mass media with the

innovation of cinema. By 1913, the character of Lincoln had appeared in seven films, and

pictorial representations of Lincoln quickly grew to become the primary medium through

which audiences would encounter and interpret him. Predominantly depicted as

democratic, kind, and merciful, films portrayed Lincoln as the devoted father-like figure

of the nation.

177

The most important of the early Lincoln biopics was D. W. Griffith’s The

Birth of a Nation (1915). Based on the novel, The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon, The

Birth of a Nation chronicled the war, Lincoln’s death, and Reconstruction from the

perspective of two families, one pro-Union in the North and the other pro-Confederacy in

the South.

Lincoln featured prominently in the film as the ‘Great Heart’ whose singular goal

was to defend the inviolability of the Union. Despite the strong Southern bias in the film,

Griffith featured Lincoln favorably and in concert with Lost Cause thematic elements.

176

Philip B. Kundhardt, “Lincoln’s Contested Legacy,” Smithsonian; Roberta Senechal de la Roche, In

Lincoln’s Shadow: The 1908 Race Riot in Springfield, Illinois, (Southern Illinois University Press, 1990)

xii – xiii, 1; “Black at Lincoln Banquet?” Chicago Tribune, February 11, 1909; Darold Leigh Henson,

“Lincoln at 100 at Lincoln: The Abraham Lincoln Centennial Celebration (1909) in his First Namesake

Town,” http://findinglincolnillinois.com/bicentennial/LincolnIL1909Celebration-5.pdf.

177

The Reprieve (1908), Abraham Lincoln’s Clemency (2010), One Flag at Last (1911), The Seventh Son

(1912), When Lincoln Was President (1913), The Songbird of the North (1913), and The Toll of War

(1913); Stokes, “D.W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln,” 47; Barry Schwartz, “Iconography and Collective

Memory,’ Lincoln’s Image in the American Mind,” The Sociological Quarterly, 32 no. 3 (1991): 302.

The villain of the film was not Lincoln, but the Radical Republicans who seized power in

the wake of his death. White actors in black-face portrayed blacks as sexually violent,

unintelligent, crude, and criminal. In its closing scenes, the film romantically portrayed

the Ku Klux Klan as a noble organization that defended the honor of the South from

black barbarism. Both Northern and Southern audiences cheered for the Klan’s victory.

The film, though controversial at the time of its release, was a popular success.

Northerners and Southerners alike enjoyed it for its portrayal of both regions as victims

of the schemes of Radical Republicans. The film portrayed a sense of white-national

unity that had been lacking in popular thought since the Civil War began.

178

By 1930, an

estimated fifty million individuals had seen the film and its catastrophic portrayal of

Reconstruction only validated existing historical beliefs: Lincoln was a benevolent white

hero, blacks were inferior, and Reconstruction was a wholesale disaster.

179

As Lincoln’s historical renown continued to rise in the nation’s memory, the

country moved forward with its official commemoration of Lincoln’s legacy. The first

monument dedicated to Lincoln was in his home town of Springfield, Illinois, in October

of 1874. Designed as both memorial and final resting place, the Lincoln Tomb enjoyed a

brief period of acclaim before its poor construction caused it to fall into a state of ruin.

Thus, during the Lincoln Centennial celebration, Congress announced its decision to

create a centralized, national monument befitting of the gravitas and solemnity of

Lincoln’s memory. The Lincoln Memorial Commission assembled in 1911 to make a

178

D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915); David K. Fremon, The Jim Crow Laws and Racism in

United States History, Enslow Publishers, Inc., 2015, 27 – 28.

179

Stokes, “D. W. Griffith Abraham Lincoln,”,” 50 – 51; Conrad Pitcher, “D. W. Griffith’s Controversial

Film, ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” OAH Magazine of History, Vol 13, No. 3, The Progressive Era (Spring,

1999), pp. 50 – 55: 51.

“recommendation upon the location, plan, and design for a memorial in the city of

Washington, District of Columbia, to the memory of Abraham Lincoln.”

180

After a series

of failed proposals, including a 72-mile memorial road connecting Washington, D.C. to

Gettysburg, the committee settled on the site and design of the Lincoln Memorial as it is

known today.

181

After deliberation, a remote and isolated site on the edge of the National Mall was

selected for the memorial’s location. Lincoln’s private secretary, John Hay, described the

theme of the memorial best: “Lincoln was of the immortals. You must not approach too

close to the immortals. His monument should stand alone, remote from the common

habitations of man, apart from the business and turmoil of the city; isolated,

distinguished, and serene.”

182

In 1912, the commission selected architect Henry Bacon to

design the memorial. Following Hay’s directive, Bacon chose the memorial’s Potomac

Park location for both its relative isolation and the uninterrupted line of sight. With no

other memorials or features of importance, the memorial would have no visual

competition and could better feature its “object of reverence and honor.”

183

The site also

had the advantage of its proximity to Robert E. Lee’s family home in Arlington, located

just across the Potomac. The location tied together North and South by uniting the two

great heroes of the civil conflict. Bacon designed the memorial as a massive colonnaded

Greek Doric temple. It was situated on a rectangular base of thirteen ascending steps to

180

Nancy Hill, “The Transformation of the Lincoln Tomb,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association,

Vol. 27, No. 1 (Winter, 2006), 39, 42; Report of the Lincoln Memorial Commission, 7.

181

Brian J. Snee, “Saving the Emancipator,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 2015),

141.

182

Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (University of Chicago Press,

2000), 284 – 285.

183

Lincoln Memorial Commission Report, 11, 38.

symbolize the thirteen original states. Thirty-six columns, emblematic of the thirty-six

states of the Union at the time of Lincoln’s death, created the memorial’s perimeter.

184

The site’s isolated geographical location emphasized the gravitas of the spirit honored

within; in the fashion of classic Grecian temples, a larger than life figure of the subject

was placed within to ensure its separation from the mortal world.

185

Joining Grecian

principals of tribute, Lincoln was publically memorialized as an American demigod.

186

The most important feature of the memorial was the statue of Lincoln. Located in

the center of the temple, “and by virtue of its imposing position in the place of honor, the

gentleness, power, and intelligence of the man, expressed as far as possible by the

sculptor’s art, will predominate.”

187

The commission chose sculptor Daniel Chester

French for the task. French’s statue dominated the interior of the temple and intimated

Lincoln’s larger-than-life place in American history. French intentionally replicated the

iconography of an earlier Lincoln statue in his own design. The reference was to

Augustus Saint-Gauden’s 1887 Lincoln, an acclaimed statue in Chicago that depicted

Lincoln in the act of delivering the Gettysburg Address. By paralleling Saint-Gauden,

French fortified Lincoln’s legacy as a master statesman and orator dedicated to fixing the

fissures of disunion.

188

By design, the memorial referenced portions of two of Lincoln’s speeches that

illustrated his commitment to preserving the Union: the Gettysburg Address and his

Second Inaugural address. Coupled with the epithet inscribed above his head, “In this

184

Snee, “Saving the Emancipator,” 142; Lincoln Memorial Commission Report, 27.

185

Strokes, 53; Sandage, “A Marble House Divided,” 140 – 141.

186

Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, 264.

187

Lincoln Memorial Commission Report, 13.

188

Kowalski, “From Memory to Memorial,” 59 – 60.

temple as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union the memory of

Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever,” the rhetoric carved into the memorial’s walls

supported a depiction of Lincoln as a “symbol of the union of the United States, which he

stated as his paramount object to save.”

189

The purpose of the memorial was to

commemorate a specific aspect of Lincoln’s legacy that was national, not racial unity.

190

In the early twentieth century, the country still celebrated the political and economic

reunification of North and South.

191

Thus, the building site of the memorial, its design,

the statue, and inscriptions worked in concert to explicitly commemorate Lincoln as the

Savior of the Union in the collective memory of the nation.

On May 30, 1922, a crowd gathered on the edge of the Potomac River to dedicate

the memorial to Lincoln’s towering national memory. Both white and black speakers

attended the dedication in the name of national unity. Unsurprisingly, black speakers at

the memorial’s dedication offered conflicting commentary on what Lincoln’s image

represented in the twentieth century. President Warren G. Harding distanced Lincoln’s

actions from racial equality by assuring the gathered attendees that Lincoln “would have

been the last man in the republic to resort to arms to effect abolition. Emancipation was a

means to the great end – maintained union and nationality.” Robert Russa Moton, a

speaker from the Tuskegee Institute, acknowledged that Lincoln’s primary effort was to

save the Union, but argued that despite Lincoln’s priorities, he was still the individual to

emancipate the enslaved. Throughout Harding and Moton’s speeches, military ushers

quietly relocated black attendees to the back of the crowd. The segregated seating of a

189

Lincoln Memorial Commission Report, 13.

190

Snee, “Saving the Emancipator,” 142.

191

The decision to create a national monument to Lincoln was part of his Centennial celebration.

Lincoln celebration illustrated the tension between America’s egalitarian and racist

ideals.

192

America’s elevation to global influence following World War I elevated Lincoln’s

importance as a national symbol, but competing interpretations of Lincoln’s legacy

complicated how he could be venerated. Beginning in the late 1880s with Lincoln

scholars Allen Thorndike Rice and William H. Herndon, a competition emerged between

two distinct styles of Lincoln memorialization: the formal, sophisticated statesman (epic)

versus the informal, modest underdog (folk). While the debate had previously been

confined to Lincoln scholars, it became an issue of national importance once America

had an image to project internationally. In 1915, the United States and Great Britain

observed the centennial anniversary of peace between the two nations. To commemorate

their friendship, the American Peace Centenary Committee decided to send a replica of a

bronze statue of Lincoln to London. War efforts, however, delayed the project and it was

not until 1917 that the statue arrived in London.

193

Upon its reveal, supporters of the epic image of Lincoln criticized George Gray

Barnard’s folk statue. One particularly harsh critic lambasted the statue for its portrayal

of “the President in the worst possible way, exaggerating his every defect in body and

dress. The Savior of the Union was revealed as a common clodhopper, a lanky, stooped-

over man ridiculously dressed.”

194

Instead of Bernard’s folk statue, citizens suggested

that a copy of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ 1887 Lincoln statue be selected for its stately

192

“Lincoln Memorial is Dedicated to People,” The New York Age, June 10, 1922; Schwartz, “Collective

Memory and History,” 477; Sandage, “A Marble House Divided,” 138.

193

Schwartz, “Iconography and Collective Memory,” 300 – 305.

194

Schwartz, “Iconography and Collective Memory,” 303 – 306.

pose and dignified demeanor. The statue controversy embodied, in microcosm, the

nation’s rapid social and cultural revolution. Could the Jeffersonian ideal of agrarian

democracy, viewed as a modest and humble institution, be reconciled with the high

culture associated with global influence? Torn between its agrarian past and its global

future, Lincoln’s physical representation in 1917-1918 embodied a national debate over

the character of American democracy. A rural, rough Lincoln indicated national

weakness in this new age defined by power, while a strong Lincoln, one who embodied

class and competence, grew away from the long tradition of modest democracy.

195

Out of respect, England erected both statues despite lingering American criticism

that Bernard’s statue was inferior to that of Saint-Gaudens’. Two years later, a British

play entitled Abraham Lincoln opened in New York to immense popularity.

Contemporary critics positively noted that the “actor who portrays Lincoln often stands

as though he had studied the Barnard statue for every wrinkle of his coat.” Wildly

popular, the depiction of the Barnard-based Lincoln — rough, inelegant, and common —

illustrates that Americans were selective of their self-portrayal abroad. The dualism of

Lincoln’s depictions echoed the nation’s larger duality politically; domestically, America

was a democracy for the common person, while abroad it was a dignified institution

capable of global stewardship.

196

195

Stokes, “D. W. Griffith,” 50 – 51; Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, 195 -196; Schwartz,

“Iconography and Collective Memory,” 301, 308; Evening Star, May 13, 1917; “Recommends Solution of

Pending Disputation,” Evening Star, October 21, 1917; “Notes and Activities in the Art World,” The Sun,

November 4, 1917; “A Matter of Choice,” Burlington Weekly Free Press, November 8, 1917; “Barnard

Under Fire,” Harrisburg Telegraph, November 1, 1917.

196

Schwartz, “Iconography and Collective Memory,” 306, 314 – 317; “At the Shrine,” The Sun, November

16, 1919; “Lincoln as an English Writer Sees Him,” New-York Tribune, December 7, 1919; “Mr.

Drinkwater’s Lincoln,” The Washington Herald, April 3, 1919.

Popular films in the 1930s continued to propagate the same sanitized image of

Lincoln removed from racial allusions. Sectional reconciliation, rather than emancipation,

themed not only Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation, but also his 1930, Abraham Lincoln.

The concluding shot of the film fades from the blistery wood cabin of Lincoln’s youth to

the splendor of the Lincoln Memorial. Backlit by a radiant halo, Lincoln appears as an

American god. John Ford’s, Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), and John Cromwell’s, Abe

Lincoln in Illinois (1940, also a play and a radio production), depicts a predestined and

righteous Lincoln who was courageous, morally sure, and the “epitome of human

decency.” As Iwan M. Morgan observed, it was not the historical Lincoln that mattered,

but the “mystique and reverence surrounding him” that made him an “emblem of the

whole American experience.”

197

Lincoln’s integrity, decency, and devotion to America

permeated Frank Capra’s, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), as a young politician

sought refuge at the Lincoln Memorial to refortify his spirit against the entrenched

corruption of Washington, D.C.

Slavery’s centrality disappeared not only from popular representations of

Lincoln’s life, but also from portrayals of the Civil War. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with

the Wind, a coming-of-age narrative of a Southern woman enduring the struggles of both

Civil War and Reconstruction in Atlanta, Georgia, was published to immediate acclaim in

1936. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Mitchell’s novel reportedly sold 50,000 copies in a

single day and was turned into a major feature film in 1939. Its popularity as both a novel

and a film, made it one of, if not the most, popular representations of the Civil War

197

Iwan W. Morgan, “Introduction,” Presidents in the Movies: American History and Politics on Screen,

11, 13 – 33; Stokes, “D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln,” 33 – 35.

available to the public in the 1930s. Lincoln, however, was scarcely mentioned. In 1,072

pages, Lincoln’s name appeared only fourteen times.

198

The focus of the book, rather,

was an exploration of antebellum Southern society and the region’s tenacity during

Reconstruction. The heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, embodied the romanticism of Lost Cause

ideology. A glamorous Southern belle, Scarlett’s struggle to preserve her family’s

plantation in the face of Reconstruction policies resonated with Southerners who longed

for the splendor and gallantry of the Old South. The highest-earning film to that point,

Gone with the Wind’s massive popularity circulated stereotypes about blacks nationwide

and provided another visual justification of the racial status quo.

199

Part of Gone with the Wind’s success was the escape it provided to Americans

caught between the lingering anxieties of the Great Depression and the intensifying

hostilities in Europe. During the prolonged period of economic unease, Americans looked

to the past for guidance and motivation.

200

As best advanced by Frederick Jackson

Turner, the frontier was a central force in shaping the American character.

201

As New

Englanders steeped in the Puritan work ethic of self-reliance began to move west in

search of new opportunities, their beliefs in individualism and hard work spread outward.

The spirit of the pioneer exemplified fortitude in times of uncertainty to achieve

individual success.

202

Thus, during the Great Depression, Americans increasingly began

198

The Times-News, October 6, 1936.

199

Darden Asbury Pyron, “Gone with the Wind and the Southern Cultural Awakening,” The Virginia

Quarterly Review, 62 , no. 4, Autumn 1986. 566 – 569, 587.

200

Kathleen Logothetis Thompson, “Looking for the American Dream: Lincoln Statues in the Great

Depression,” February 10, 2015, Civil Discourse, http://www.civildiscourse-

historyblog.com/blog/2015/2/6/lookingfortheamericandream.

201

Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, (Holt, New York: 1962), 2 – 3.

202

Turner, The Frontier, 78; Ning Kang, “Puritanism and its Impact upon American Values,” Review of

European Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2, (December 2009), 148 – 151.

to hail the tenacity of the pioneer, or the self-made man.

203

Lincoln, once a pioneer youth

himself, came to embody the spirit of the frontier. Lincoln, through his own enterprise,

had elevated himself from the poverty of the frontier to the White House.

204

Lincoln

became a Depression-era symbol of triumph in the face of adversity.

205

President Franklin D. Roosevelt further intertwined Lincoln’s legacy with the

American way of life. In 1929, Roosevelt wrote in an open letter that it was time for “us

Democrats to claim Lincoln as one of our own.”

206

Elected to the presidential office in

1933, Roosevelt used every opportunity to align himself with Lincoln. Strong parallels

existed between the economic strife and social unrest of Lincoln’s day with the massive

unemployment and uncertainty of 1930s America. The rampant economic want created

by the Depression was likened to slavery, and metaphors about American bondage to the

economy abounded.

207

Parallels were drawn between the millions of slaves in the 1850s

and the millions of unemployed in the 1930s. President Roosevelt’s implementation of

New Deal policies revitalized the American economy and was viewed as a second

Emancipation Proclamation, one that freed the individual from economic submission.

Lincoln’s image graced posters for New Deal initiatives and some described Lincoln as

the New Dealer of his day.

208

By the end of the depression era, the social upheavals of the

203

Kathleen Logothetis Thompson, “Looking for the American Dream.”

204

Dwight T. PItchaithley “Abraham Lincoln’s Birthplace Cabin: The Making of an American Icon,” in

Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape by Paul Shackel, 2001, 252.

205

Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life, 433.

206

Richard N. Current, “The Lincoln Presidents,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 1, (Winter,

1979), 26.

207

Barry Schwartz, “Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II,” American

Sociological Review, 61 no. 5 (1996): 908.

208

William Allen White, “We are Coming Together Father Abraham, Congressional Record, February 13,

1940 as quoted in Schwartz, “Collective Memory and History,” 484; Federal Theatre Project, U.S.,

Sponsor. Big tent theatre - now playing - Abraham Lincoln, the great commoner. Illinois, 1936. [Illinois:

Federal Art Project] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/98509674/. Harry Herzog. Artist, E. P Conkle,

1920s and 30s had redefined Lincoln’s memory to be one of self-reliance and state

activism.

209

Marian Anderson capitalized on and reinforced the burgeoning thread of

emancipatory imagery with her 1939 Lincoln Memorial Concert. A black American

contralto, Anderson was an internationally-celebrated musician. While planning a tour in

the United States, Anderson requested permission to perform in Constitution Hall in

Washington D.C. The venue’s owners, the Daughters of the American Revolution

(D.A.R.), denied Anderson’s request due to the color of her skin. When first lady Eleanor

Roosevelt resigned from the D.A.R. out of protest, the prejudice that Anderson

experienced received national attention. Perceiving the opportunity to illustrate the

“illegitimacy of racial prejudice,” Anderson used her stardom to draw national attention

to the enduring racial bigotry of America.

210

The national conversation over race moved

from Constitution Hall, a bastion of American identity, to the steps of the Lincoln

Memorial, the new site of the open-air concert. Anderson played to an integrated

audience of 75,000, far exceeding the seating capacity of Constitution Hall. The visual

power of the event was without precedent. Millions read in newspapers, or saw on

newsreels, the striking imagery of Anderson singing in the foreground of the nation’s

shrine to Lincoln. Anderson’s powerful voice linked Abraham Lincoln’s image in the

public mind to that of black racial equality.

211

Anderson’s performance laid the

and Sponsor Federal Theatre Project; "Prologue to glory" by E.P. Conkle / herzog. New York, None. [Nyc:

wpa federal art project, between 1936 and 1939] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/95505497/.

209

Schwartz, “Memory as a Cultural System,” 908; Schwartz, “Collective Memory and History,” 484.

210

Raymond Arsenault, The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert

that Awakened America, (Bloomsbury Press: New York, 2009), 2-3, 148, 159-160.

211

Sandage, “A Marble House Divided,” 143 – 146; Kunhardt III, “Lincoln’s Contested Legacy”;

Arsenault, The Sound of Freedom, 2, 164.

foundation for the reemergence of Lincoln’s emancipation persona in the 1940s and,

more importantly, began the practice of using the memorial as a site to illustrate ongoing

racial inequality in America.

212

In the coming decades, the Lincoln Memorial came to be

the site where black Americans “demanded that the nation live up to Lincoln’s ideal.”

213

Anderson used the power of the myth of Lincoln - as the personification of American

ideals – to “highlight the hypocrisy of segregation and discrimination in front of the

memorial” to the man who had emancipated the slaves over seventy-five years before.

214

The rising forces of fascism in Europe would continue to solidify Lincoln’s

legacy as an emancipator. On the eve of war in 1940, an estimated one-third of American

citizens (44 million) had been born in the late nineteenth century, a time when Lincoln

was popular in print media and fresh in the memories of those who had survived Civil

War.

215

Barry Schwartz, the preeminent scholar of Lincoln’s changing image during

World War II, states that it was this generation of inveterate Lincoln worshippers (most

Civil War survivors had died by this time and with them largely went animosities towards

Lincoln) that comprised large portions of the nation’s population.

216

For this generation’s

parents, Lincoln had defined a nation’s war effort. Sharing this same form of memory as

a cultural and social frame of reference, the symbolism associated with Lincoln naturally

helped frame, articulate, and legitimize the nation’s World War II experience.

217

212

Snee, “Saving the Emancipator,”143.

213

Keith R. Eberly, “’To Thee We Sing’: Racial Politics and the Lincoln Memorial,” OAH Magazine of

History, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2009), 55.

214

Eberly, “To Thee We Sing,” 55.

215

Barry Schwartz, “Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II,” American

Sociological Review, 61 no. 5 (1996): 908; Schwartz, “Collective Memory and History,” 484; William

Allen White, “We are Coming Together Father Abraham, Congressional Record, February 13, 1940 as

quoted in Schwartz.

216

Schwartz, “Memory as a Cultural System,” 912.

217

Schwartz, “Memory as a Cultural System,” 921; Kunhardt III, “Lincoln’s Contested Legacy,”

Lincoln’s likeness appeared on federal advertisements for enlistments and war bonds,

while his birthday marked the start of rationing campaigns to “inspire the preservation of

Liberty” and the determination to “do [their] duty for God and Country.” Throughout

World War II, Lincoln’s image was a force of national encouragement. As a cultural

icon, Lincoln legitimized the purpose of the war, inspired citizens, and provided an image

of support during an extended period of personal and national sacrifice. Lincoln appeared

in wartime posters, newspapers, and magazines. Through quotation and imagery,

propaganda prints connected Civil War rhetoric and symbolism to the fight against Hitler.

From images of Lincoln standing beside President Roosevelt and saying “You have a

greater task than I had. Slavery must be removed from the whole earth,” to Honest Abe

shredding a Nazi flag with an ax, Lincoln appeared in American popular media as

motivation for the public to defend democracy abroad. In sum, Lincoln’s popular image

functioned as a morally-imbued ideal against which war-weary Americans could see their

own hardships in perspective.

218

By 1945, the popular Lincoln of public memory had become a substantially

different figure than the one martyred in 1865. Adults in the first half-century had grown

up in a society that, for the most part, still held the values and beliefs of agrarian

America. After two world wars interspersed with a ten-year long economic depression,

Lincoln had become a multidimensional figure. It was, however, during World War II

that Lincoln’s popular image was reformed, yet again, to fit new national values and

218

Roanoke Rapids Herald, February 4, 1943; Evening Star, July 4, 1942; The Wilmington Morning Star,

March 29, 1944, p. 5; “That We Here Highly Resolve That These Dead Shall Not Have Died in Vain,” a

poster by War Production Board, 1942-1943, National Archives; U.S. Office of War Information, Let

Freedom Ring, 1944. Poster. The Abraham Lincoln Museum, Harrogate, Tennessee; Schwartz, “Memory

as a Cultural System,” 915 – 916.

mores. As the atrocities of the Nazi Regime’s genocide against the European Jewish

population came to light in the United States, there was an uncomfortable dissonance

between America’s mobilization in the war as defender of democracy and the great

American dilemma of ongoing racial inequality at home. Barry Schwartz observes that it

was during this time that the general population began to tentatively embrace Lincoln’s

little-venerated legacy as the Great Emancipator rather than the Savior of the Union or

the Self-Made Man.

219

Schwartz, “Collective Memory,” 486; Schwartz, “History, Commemoration, and Belief,” 188 – 189;

Iwan M. Morgan, Presidents in the Movies, 11; “Freedom for Religion,” Evening Star, February 11, 1940;

“Among the Stamp Collectors,” Evening Star, 10, 1943; “If Gen. George Washington and President

Abraham Lincoln Were Living Today…” The Midland Journal, February 12, 1943; “Congress Hails Big

Three Stand,“ The Wilmington Morning Star, February 13, 1945.

Chapter 4 – The Duality of Democracy

In the late 1940s, the American people had tentatively reconnected Lincoln’s

image to emancipation in popular thought. As a central figure in the American national

narrative, and with his clear ties to emancipation during the Civil War, civil rights

activists perceived the power of Lincoln’s image as a vehicle to illustrate the hypocrisy of

racial inequality and segregation in the United States. During the civil rights movement,

activists capitalized on the burgeoning strain of Lincoln’s emancipatory legacy and

continually reinforced Lincoln’s image as the Great Emancipator. A potent American

symbol, the appropriation of Lincoln’s image to support the civil rights movement made

his legacy, personified at the Lincoln Memorial, resonate powerfully among black and

white Americans alike.

220

After decades of commemorating a specific representation of

Lincoln as the Savior of the Union, the activism of black and white Americans for racial

equality forced the nation to confront all aspects of Lincoln’s legacy.

As observed by Scott Sandage, “tactically, the modern civil rights movement

came of age on Easter Sunday 1939” with Marian Anderson’s “political use of Lincoln’s

memory.”

221

Beginning in 1939, and extending through the “classical” phase of the civil

rights movements, “blacks strategically appropriated Lincoln’s memory and [the Lincoln

Memorial] as political weapons,” and in the process changed forever “the public meaning

220

Patrick Washburn, “The ‘Pittsburgh Courier’s’ Double V Campaign in 1942,” August 1981, Annual

Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism; Schwartz, “Collective Memory and History,” 469,

484 - 486.

221

Sandage, “A Marble House Divided,” 136.

of the hero and shrine.”

222

In the prelude to the civil rights movement, Lincoln was a

compelling national symbol that appealed to white Americans. Activists capitalized on

Lincoln’s mass appeal and used the site of his national veneration to demand that the

country live up to his emancipatory legacy.

223

In 1965, civil rights activist, Bayard

Rustin, described the “classical phase of the civil rights movement” as consisting of three

parts. The classical began in 1954 with the landmark Brown v. Board of Education

Supreme Court decision, extended through a period defined by highly visible public

protests, and culminated with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting

Rights Act of 1965. It was during the classical phase of the civil rights movement that

activists transformed Lincoln’s image and aligned his popular legacy with themes of civil

equality and racial justice.

224

When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he invited all “persons of

suitable condition,” regardless of race to serve in the Union military.

225

Yet, some eighty

years later, segregation still permeated the nation’s armed forces.

226

Though allowed to

enlist, black service personnel were routinely assigned to non-combat roles and often

received harsh punishments (such as dishonorable discharge) for minor infractions that

excluded them from qualifying for veterans’ benefits.

227

Black soldiers became

222

Sandage, “A Marble House Divided,” 136; Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, (Princeton University

Press, 2000), 187.

223

Eberly, “To Thee We Sing,” 56.

224

Jacquelyn Hall Dowd, “The Long Civil Rights Movement,” The Best American Essays 2007 (Palgrave

Macmillan, New York), 1234.

225

Abraham Lincoln, “The Emancipation Proclamation,” January 1, 1863.

226

James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government, (Oxford

University Press, 2011), 223 – 231.

227

Sparrow, Warfare State, 223 – 231.

disillusioned over the dissonance between the proclaimed war aims and the reality of

segregation and racial disparity in the American military.

In order to meet the dual demands of warfare, resources and labor, there was an

unprecedented mobilization of American citizens during World War II. Women and

black Americans entered into professional spheres previously barred to them. Black

Americans served not only in the nation’s military, but also worked in domestic wartime

industries earning unprecedented wages and professional mobility. White racial attitudes

mellowed as the need for national unity superseded racial inequality with white

Americans more receptive than ever to black claims to citizenship. During the period of

increased racial unity, the Double V Campaign gained prominence. Created in 1942 by

the Pittsburgh Courier, the largest black-owned newspaper in the country, the Double V

Campaign called national attention to the fact that blacks lacked equality at home even

though they fought to achieve it for others abroad. Supported by black and white citizens

alike, the campaign gained widespread support and endorsements from prominent

entertainers like Marian Anderson and Humphrey Bogart.

228

Once the external threat to the United States ended with Allied victory, thousands

of white males returned home to rejoin the American workforce. The public veneration of

the American soldier redefined the hierarchy of citizenship. Idolized as “citizen-soldiers,”

white veterans received preferential treatment, along with generous benefits, upon their

return. Viewed with the utmost respect for their ardent patriotism and “virulent

masculinity,” businesses were quick to rehire white veterans over women or blacks.

229

228

Washburn, “The ‘Pittsburgh Courier’s’ Double V Campaign in 1942.”

229

Sparrow, Warfare State, 14.

Black Americans lost the tentative gains they had made during the war years. The Double

V campaign quietly lost white support and black Americans were expected to return to

their pre-war position in society, one that still enforced the racial segregation of Jim

Crow. Complicating the post-war era was the general ambivalence that society felt

towards black veterans. Despite the general veneration of the returning soldier, black

veterans had limited access to the rights and benefits bestowed upon their white

counterparts. Black veterans began to agitate for full citizenship and the movement

gained national momentum.

230

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lincoln’s image appeared in print materials that

renounced segregation.

231

President Harry Truman legitimized the use of Lincoln’s image

in that respect when he spoke before the National Association for the Advancement of

Colored People (NAACP) at its annual convention on June 29, 1947. Standing on the

steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Truman declared that the nation had reached a turning

point in its race relations and that the country must learn from the mistakes of Europe’s

racial and ethnic prejudice. Truman said that race-based discrimination had no justifiable

reason to exist, and that the nation “must not tolerate such limitations on the freedom of

any of our people and on their enjoyment of basic rights which every citizen in a truly

democratic society must possess.” Just over a year later, President Truman issued

Executive Order 9981 to end racial discrimination in the United States military. President

Truman’s public renunciation of segregation on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial

230

Washburn, “The ‘Pittsburgh Courier’s’ Double V Campaign in 1942.”

231

“Gift of God,” Evening Star, February 8, 1948; “Proclaim Negro History Week,” Jackson Advocate,

January 28, 1950; Evening Star, February 10, 1952, p. 12; Evening Star, February 11, 1952; Arizona Sun,

February 6, 1953; “To Be, or Not to Be?” The New Tribune, August 12, 1956.

reinforced Marian Anderson’s politicization of the site as a form of critique against a

segregated white society.

232

Black veterans took advantage of their limited service benefits and entered into

the nation’s collegiate system. The increased black student presence also meant an

increased interest in black history, which culminated in the professionalization of black

studies in the 1940s. The proto-black studies field emerged in 1926 with the founding of

The Journal of Negro History (JNH), the first professional journal dedicated to the study

of black history. The brainchild of the early black history movement, Carter G. Woodson

dedicated his life’s work to its establishment. Among his many accomplishments was the

implementation of Negro History Week, a cultural and educational week designed to

promote black interest in black history. Through the reach of the JNH and its parent

organization, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Woodson

revolutionized the field of American historiography by “extending the discipline to

various non-professionally groups of trained scholars.” Historians, school teachers,

ministers, and business professionals contributed to the field. By adapting to the rapid

cultural changes created by the Great Depression and the World Wars, Woodson fostered

an engaging field of black research that laid the foundation for the professionalization of

black studies as a field of scholarly research. The advancements gained by civil rights

232

"The Transformation of the Racial Views of Harry Truman." The Journal of Blacks in Higher

Education, no. 26 (1999): 28-30. doi:10.2307/2999133; Harry S. Truman, Address Before the NAACP,

June 29, 1947. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/harrystrumannaacp.htm

activists, and the dismantling of Jim Crow, allowed black students to enter into levels of

academia previously barred to them.

233

With the professionalization of black studies emerging as a respectable field and

black veterans receiving government benefits to attend college, the first generation of

black scholars emerged. At the same time, white veterans were entering universities en

masse. An analysis of Ph.D conferral rates awarded by year provides evidence of the

changing academic landscape that, quite literally, set the stage for Lincoln’s popular

rebirth as the Great Emancipator. Between 1943 and 1946, 3,460 men earned their

doctoral degrees in the United States. In 1947 – 1948, 3,989 men earned their doctorates

and another 10,331 by the end of 1950.

234

As freshly minted black historians entered into

the professional field, subjects like Reconstruction underwent substantial change as new

voices entered into the national historical dialogue alongside those of existing scholars.

One of the leading black scholars in the post-war period was W. E. B. Du Bois,

the first black American to earn a doctorate degree. An early civil rights leader, Du Bois

created the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, on the

anniversary of Lincoln’s birthday in 1909, to combat racism in the United States. John

Hope Franklin was a black historian whose controversial work, Reconstruction After the

Civil War, critically debunked the popular Dunning myths of negative black stereotypes.

Benjamin Quarles’s, Lincoln and the Negro, illustrated Lincoln’s imperfect journey that

led him to pass the Emancipation Proclamation. Alongside Marian Anderson, the voices

233

Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, “Marking Black History Practical and Popular: Carter G. Woodson, the Proto

Black Studies Movement, and the Struggle for Black Liberation,” The Western Journal of Black Studies,

28, no. 2, 2004: 372 – 374.

234

U.S. Department of Education, 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait, (National

Center for Education Statistics, 1993), 83

of black scholars helped to forge Lincoln’s emancipator legacy within popular American

thought.

The influx of historians, both black and white, also meant a divergence in the

study of Lincoln. As the Dunning School lost its foothold in academic thought, the

Consensus School emerged. Advanced by John Higham, Consensus historiography

emphasized the unity of American values and the continuity of those values in the

country’s national character. As Consensus historians sought to eliminate conflict,

Lincoln featured prominently as the uncontroversial Savior of the Union. Despite the

increased presence of black voices in both the popular and academic spheres,

interpretations of Lincoln formed along parallel paths as the earlier, white-based

categories of Lincoln’s legacy endured alongside the burgeoning popular understanding

of Lincoln, the emancipator.

Prior to 1945, Lincoln scholars largely grappled with portraying Lincoln’s life in

biography. Scholars would nitpick each other’s work over the significance of Lincoln’s

legacy, or the specifics of his early love life. With more historians entering the field, they

carved out niche areas of expertise. Instead of attempting to create a new definitive

biography of Lincoln, Lincoln literature transitioned into a field of monography.

235

Continuing a shift away from the voluminous studies, a younger generation of scholars

adopted the form of essays to readdress basic Lincoln themes that were obfuscated by

235

Examples of monography include: Robert S. Harper’s Lincoln and the Press (1951), T. Harry William’s

Lincoln and His Generals (1952), Albert A. Woldman’s Lincoln and the Russians (1952), Harlan Hoyt

Horner’s Lincoln and Greeley (1953), Robert Bruce’s Lincoln and the Tools of War (1956), Norton

Garfinkle’s Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (1959), Benjamin Quarles’s Lincoln and the Negro

(1962), William W. Betts’s Lincoln and the Poets (1965), T. Harry Williams’s Lincoln and the Radicals

(1965), Gideon Welles’s Lincoln and Seward (1969), David Plowden’s Lincoln and His America, 1809 –

1865 (1970), Edgar De Witt Jones’s Lincoln and the Preachers (1970), and Christopher Dell’s Lincoln and

the War Democrats (1975).

layers of conflicting scholarly treatment. Among the most famous of Lincoln essays was

David Donald’s “Getting Right with Lincoln.” Donald detailed how and why modern

political parties appropriated Lincoln in order to earn “Lincoln’s endorsement” during

election seasons. Republicans were the nominal heirs to the Lincoln brand while

Democrats were its ideological titleholders. “Despite [Republican efforts] to reclaim

him,” Donald wrote, “Lincoln was by now everybody’s grandfather.” Lincoln’s name

was continually associated with varying parties and causes seeking legitimacy. At any

one time, Lincoln “was a Communist, a vegetarian, a socialist, a prohibitionist, a

greenbacker, and a proponent of Union Now.” Most famously, Donald predicted that

Lincoln’s “continuing vogue [was] his essential ambiguity. He can be cited on all sides of

all questions.” Lincoln’s malleability made him the perfect political brand. Any political

agent could find a way to key their cause to Lincoln’s legacy.

236

During the first stage of the classical phase, the Lincoln Memorial served both to

celebrate black civil gains in society, but also to illustrate the imperfect reality of black

freedom. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court declared segregation in public schools

unconstitutional during the watershed civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education; on

the third anniversary of the decision, over 30,000 demonstrators assembled on the steps

of the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate the event and pray “in the presence of the

memory of Abraham Lincoln and of the God and father of our people.”

237

Led by some

of the nation’s leading black clergyman and civil rights leaders, The Prayer Pilgrimage to

Washington for Freedom celebrated the landmark ruling, but also drew attention to the

236

David Donald, “Getting Right With Lincoln,” The Atlantic, 1956,

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/95nov/lincoln/lincrite.htm.

237

Sandage, “A Marble House Divided,” 154.

ongoing struggle for human rights. During the three-hour demonstration, clergyman

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke before a national audience for the first time. Although the

organizers hoped for some 50,000 protestors to attend the gathering, the Prayer

Pilgrimage was the largest organized demonstration thus far in the civil rights movement.

The protest received substantial coverage in newspapers and circulated the linked rhetoric

of civil rights, inequality, and Abraham Lincoln. A successful event, the Prayer

Pilgrimage continued the practice of using the Lincoln Memorial as a site of civil protest

and Lincoln himself as a powerful symbol to draw national attention to issue of race.

238

Lincoln’s image, name, and legacy as the Great Emancipator appeared in newspapers

throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s with increasing frequency.

239

Not all Americans embraced the popular refashioning of Lincoln’s legacy in the

nation’s memory. During the zenith of the civil rights movement, the Republican Party

made a concerted effort to reclaim Lincoln as the founder of the party. The ideology of

the Party, however, had changed substantially since the days of Lincoln. Throughout the

1950s, grassroots conservatives worked to revive the Republican Party and to end the

dominance of the Democratic Party that had begun with President Franklin D. Roosevelt

and his New Deal policies. The newly-organized Republican Party, or the new American

Right, “rejected liberal visions and instead championed individual economic freedom and

238

“Prayer Pilgrimage,” The Detroit Tribune, May 26, 1957, p. 6; “Local Civic Leaders to March for

Freedom,” The Detroit Tribune, May 18, 1957, p.1; “Secure Lincoln Memorial for Prayer Pilgramage,” The

Detroit Tribune, May 4, 1957; Sandage, “A Marble House Divided,”153.

239

The Detroit Tribune, January 10, 1959; The Detroit Tribune, February 14, 1959; Jackson Advocate,

February 21, 1959; The Catholic Times, February 12, 1960; Romnul American, February 13, 1960; The

Petal Paper, November 9, 1960; The Detroit Tribune, April 15, 1961; Arizona Sun, July 10, 1958; The

Detroit Tribune, February 12, 1955.

a staunch social conservatism.”

240

Due to the blend of conservatism and anti-liberalism,

the Republican Party appealed to middle-class suburban families who were

predominantly white. Racially conservative, the Republican Party resisted civil rights

efforts to claim Lincoln as a symbol of racial equality, and instead tried to reclaim

Lincoln as a Republican figure emblematic of conservative American values and the

racial status quo.

241

In June of 1961, civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr., petitioned President

John. F. Kennedy to issue a Second Emancipation Proclamation on the anniversary of

Lincoln’s original one. Intentionally publicizing the plea, King made the proposal during

a news conference, framing the second proclamation as an extension of Lincoln’s

unfinished work and as a reminder that Lincoln had once warned the country that it could

not exist half-slave and half-free. So too, King implored, should the Kennedy

administration recognize that America could not continue to exist half-segregated and

half-free.

242

Like Lincoln, Kennedy was more receptive to black claims of citizenship than any

recent president before him. Kennedy hosted Martin Luther King Jr. at the White House

in 1961 to discuss King’s proposed second emancipation proclamation. Kennedy’s

support for the civil rights movement, limited as it was, cemented the popular perception

that the Kennedy administration was a friend to the civil rights cause. Although Kennedy

240

Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, (Princeton University Press,

2001), 12.

241

Tasha Philpot, Race, Republicans, and the Return of the Party of Lincoln, (University of Michigan

Press, 2007), 2, 37, 41.

242

Samuel Momodu, “Second Emancipation Proclamation,” Blackpast, https://www.blackpast.org/african-

american-history/second-emancipation-proclamation-1962/.

was supportive of the efforts of civil rights activists, federal backing of the movement

was slow to follow. In 1963, tired of federal inaction, civil rights leaders decided to plan

a massive protest to exert pressure on the Kennedy administration to enact substantive

civil rights legislation to end segregation in the United States. Mass protests in

Washington, D.C., or the threat of them, had proven successful before. In 1941, civil

rights leader, A. Philip Randolph, organized a demonstration in the nation’s capital to

exert pressure on President Roosevelt to desegregate the nation’s defense-related

industries. Randolph called for 100,000 marchers to demonstrate at the Lincoln Memorial

to “shake up white America.”

243

Days before the march was to occur, Roosevelt partially

ceded to the activists’ demand. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 which prohibited

racial discrimination in the hiring policies of the federally-contracted plants. The success

of the 1941 march influenced the planning of the 1963 protest.

The planners of the second March on Washington selected Washington D.C. for

the national media attention the demonstration would likely draw. A mass peaceful

protest calling for full racial equality would be visually and symbolically more potent if it

occurred in the heart of the nation’s capital. 1963 was the centennial of Lincoln’s signing

of the Emancipation Proclamation and civil rights activists across the nation planned to

celebrate one hundred years of freedom from slavery. The celebrations, however,

reminded activists that true equality had not yet been achieved. Despite Kennedy’s

promise to pursue civil rights legislation as part of his presidency, racial discrimination

still limited the professional and social mobility of blacks.

244

Inspired by King’s call for a

243

A. Philip Randolph, "Call to Negro America to March on Washington for Jobs and Equal Participation

in National Defense," Black Worker 14 (May 1941).

244

Shumaker, "Untold Stories from America's National Parks,” 123.

second Emancipation Proclamation and the centennial of the original proclamation,

protest planners decided to use the Lincoln Memorial as the site of the demonstration.

The Lincoln Memorial as a site of black protest had become a “standardized civil

rights protest ritual” throughout the 1940s and 1950s.

245

NAACP Director, Walter White,

noted that an event at the Lincoln Memorial “would double the news value” of a

protest.

246

As a “coveted cultural symbol of the American way of Life,” Lincoln’s legacy,

embodied by the memorial, provided a “cultural language” for civil rights activists to

speak and connect to white Americans and garner their support for full racial equality.

247

Repeated protests reinforced the memorial as “the stronghold of racial justice” and, over

time, refashioned the popular understanding of both Lincoln and his national shrine.

248

1963, in celebration of both Lincoln’s signing of the proclamation and to illustrate the

unfulfilled aspects of Lincoln’s legacy, protest leaders planned for the March on

Washington for Jobs and Freedom to finish at the Lincoln Memorial. Over 200,000

integrated demonstrators gathered on the steps of the memorial on August 28, 1963.

The central element of the Lincoln Memorial program were the speeches by

prominent civil rights leaders. Among the most noted were the “Big Six” – leaders of

national civil rights organizations: A. Philip Randolph, the Director of the March and

President of the Negro American Labor Council; John R. Lewis, Director of the Student

Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Whitney Young, Director of the National Urban

League; James L. Farmer Jr., Director of the Congress of Racial Equality; Roy Wilkins,

245

Sandage, “A Marble House Divided,” 152.

246

Eberly, “To Thee We Sing,” 55.

247

Shumaker, "Untold Stories from America's National Parks,” 120; Sandage, “A Marble House Divided,”

136, 145 – 147.

248

Sandage, “A Marble House Divided,” 147; Shumaker, “The Lincoln Memorial,” 120.

Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and,

Martin Luther King Jr., President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Throughout the long afternoon, speakers detailed their hopes, dreams, and calls for action

in the nation’s struggle to achieve racial equality. With so many speakers, however, the

attention of the assembled crowd began to wane as the program dragged on. By the time

the last speaker, Martin Luther King Jr., moved toward the podium, the major news

stations that had been covering the event returned to regularly-scheduled programming.

King, a southern-style preacher, reenergized the crowd with his impassioned rhetoric.

More so than any other speaker in the program, King connected Lincoln and his legacy to

the movement by framing his speech around Lincoln’s famed Gettysburg Address:

Five score years ago, a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand

today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, this momentous decree came as a

great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the

flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night

of their captivity. But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One

hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of

segregation and the chains of discrimination.

249

In impassioned oratory, King framed the fight for racial equality as the fulfillment of

Lincoln’s legacy rather than a repudiation of it.

250

Ending with the stirring rhetoric of his

dream for the future, the image of King imploring the nation to live up to its ideals, with

Lincoln brooding over his shoulder in the background, became immortalized in American

memory. At the time, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom protest at the

Lincoln Memorial was the largest peaceful demonstration in America’s history. The

event received widespread news circulation in the United States. Photographs of the

crowd gathered before the towering presence of Lincoln splashed across the front pages

249

Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have A Dream,” August 28, 1963.

250

Sandage, “A Marble House Divided,” 157.

of newspapers nationwide. The news repeated sound clips of King’s speech. In newsreels

and in print, by word of mouth and by ear, Lincoln’s legacy as the Great Emancipator and

the personification of racial justice was solidified in the eyes and memory of the

American public.

251

The visual power of the March was immense and King’s phenomenal speech was

described as historic.

252

The March not only challenged the nation’s racial perceptions,

but also refashioned the significance of the memorial in the public’s memory. The New

York Herald Tribune described how the March forced the nation to look at the memorial

in a new light and created a new feeling in American towards civil rights and Lincoln: “a

feeling for country. Tens of thousands of these petitioning Negroes had never been to

Washington before, and probably would never come again. Now here they were. And this

was their Washington ... and that great marble memorial was their own memorial to the

man who had emancipated them.”

253

By 1963, civil rights activists had succeeded in refashioning Lincoln’s popular

legacy in American memory. Through repeated efforts, the Lincoln Memorial was no

longer symbolic of Lincoln the Savior of the Union but dedicated to Lincoln the

Emancipator.

254

As a sought-after cultural symbol of American identity, Lincoln’s

presence in the background of the protests at the memorial, and gradually the national

discourse over civil rights, legitimized the movement by framing the ongoing inequality

251

The Washington Post, August 29, 1963; The New York Times, August 19, 1963; The Afro-American,

August 22, 1963; Chicago Tribune, August 29, 1963; The Herald Examiner, August 29, 1963; Universal

International Newsreel, C-Span, https://www.c-span.org/video/?10928-1/1963-march-washington.

252

Jackson Advocate, September 7, 1963.

253

New York Herald Tribune, August 29, 1963.

254

Shumaker, "Untold Stories from America's National Parks,” 137.

black Americans experienced as un-American.

255

By connecting racial equality to

Lincoln as the fulfillment of his legacy, activists framed opposition to the movement as

opposition to the legacy of the Founding Fathers and thus, a repudiation of Lincoln’s

ideals. Lincoln was “the face of history that had [yet] to be completed.”

256

Following the March on Washington, Kennedy hosted the protest’s leaders at the

White House. Only weeks before, Kennedy had finally lent definitive support to the

movement by labeling racial inequality as the principal moral issue facing the nation.

During the televised address, Kennedy invoked the spirit of Lincoln by reminding the

nation “one hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves,

yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free.”

257

Kennedy closed with a promise to

enact substantive civil rights legislation. Civil rights leaders were thrilled with the

address, and King immediately wrote Kennedy to express his elation. Their joy was cut

short. Just three months after the March on Washington, Kennedy became the second

presidential casualty in the nation’s racial reckoning. He was assassinated on November

22, 1963, in Dallas Texas. The second martyr-president, Kennedy’s funeral rites closely

echoed Lincoln’s; the president’s remains were taken to the same room and displayed on

the same catafalque used during Lincoln’s funeral. A highly publicized event, the

parallels between Lincoln and Kennedy’s deaths were immortalized by the intense

national coverage of the funeral. As the sorrowful procession wound its way through the

streets of the capitol to Arlington Cemetery, it passed by the Lincoln Memorial, and the

solemnity of Lincoln’s own tragic end framed that of Kennedy’s in the American mind.

255

Shumaker, "Untold Stories from America's National Parks,” 120.

256

Shumaker, "Untold Stories from America's National Parks,” 137.

257

John F. Kennedy, “Address on Civil Rights,” June 11, 1963.

Just as the government had passed civil rights legislation in the aftermath of

Lincoln’s death, so too did Kennedy’s successor. On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B.

Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the same White House room where

Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. One hundred years after Lincoln

emancipated the slaves, the federal government outlawed racial discrimination and

segregation in public accommodations and guaranteed federal support to end

discrimination in voting processes and public housing. The final phase of the classical

civil rights movement was complete. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, on the 158th

anniversary of Lincoln’s birthday, during the annual Lincoln Memorial Ceremony,

President Johnson stated that “it ha[d] taken more than century for [the United States] as

a nation to assert the ideal that Lincoln had barely formulated.” Johnson concluded that

Lincoln lifted the “baleful burden of racism from the American soul,” and it was time for

the nation to learn from Lincoln’s lesson and to embrace his teachings as an equally

liberated nation.

258

Lincoln’s transformation into the nation’s patron saint of racial justice

was complete. Lincoln’s popular legacy was refashioned and he came to occupy a unique

symbolic space in the nation’s memory as his white-based legacy of preserving the Union

was subsumed by his legacy as the Great Emancipator, champion of civil rights.

258

Lyndon B. Johnson, “President’s Address,” February 12, 1967.

Epilogue

The American fascination with Lincoln is seemingly endless. “If one were to read

one Lincoln book a day, it would take the diligent reader over forty-one years to cover

the 15,000 books of Lincoln literature that exist today.”

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Lincoln’s prominence in the

popular and academic cultures of the United States stems from his power as a central

myth in the grand narrative of American identity. Successive generations of Americans

have, and will, project onto Lincoln’s image their hopes, values, and fears. As the

concerns of each generation change, so too will Lincoln’s purpose, meaning, and

significance in American memory. In the words of Jackie Hogan, “each age finds in

Lincoln what it needs: inspiration, hope, and an idealized reflection of itself.”

260

The

Lincoln myth remains fluid and subject to change in the nation’s collective memory.

The concept of ‘collective memory’ was first advanced by sociologist Maurice

Halbwachs, who theorized that “memory resides not only in the minds of individuals but

also in the very fabric of society.”

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Space, language, imagery, and material objects all

reflect the collective memory of a people, and thus, memory is continually revised as

changes occur to the culture of a group. Following Halbwachs’s perspective, changes to

representations of Lincoln, then, reflect changes in the nation’s collective memory

259

Hogan, Lincoln, Inc., 29.

260

Hogan, Lincoln, Inc., 9.

261

Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francise J. Ditter Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New

York: Harper Colophone, 1980).

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itself.

262

As a prominent symbol of American identity, Lincoln’s legacy will continually

undergo revision. After all, Lincoln successively embodied white national unity as the

Savior of the Union, the American pioneer spirit as the Self-Made Man, and then racial

justice as the Great Emancipator - all in the span of forty years. It was not through new

facts that Lincoln’s historical legacy changed from savior to emancipator, but as a

parallel for evolving national values and beliefs. As the nation’s sense of identity

changed, so too did Lincoln’s significance as a cultural symbol and as a central figure in

the nation’s grand narrative.

With the passage of the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, Lincoln’s

emancipatory legacy was fulfilled. Following his centrality as a visual symbol during the

civil rights movement, Lincoln transitioned into the national background. With the

splintering of the civil rights movement, the increased militancy of black activists, and

the mobilization of America’s military to Vietnam, the nation placed less focus on

historical figures of the past. Americans no longer felt bound to worship heroes as

preceding generations had; they could recognize greatness without emulating or

venerating it to extremes. The zenith of Lincoln’s potency as a cultural symbol ended.

Now, Americans reflexively remember the president, but without the intensity and

showmanship exhibited in the early twentieth century.

263

Having transitioned into a

262

Hogan, Lincoln, Inc., 73.

263

Schwartz, Post-Heroic Era, 2; “Epilogue,” in U.S. Report on the Joint Committee on Arrangements on

the Commemoration Ceremony in Observance of the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of Abraham Lincoln,

1809 – 1865. (Washington DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1959), xii – xiii.

https://archive.org/details/abrahamlincolnco00unit; “Address of Carl Sandburg Before a Joint Session of

Congress, February 12, 1959. The University of Southern Mississippi. Accessed July 8, 2019,

http://www.lib.usm.edu/spcol/exhibitions/item_of_the_month/iotm_oct_2012.html; “Text of Carl

Sandburg’s Address,” Romnul American, February 12, 1960; United States Lincoln Sesquicentennial

Commissions. Manuscript/Mixed Materials. https://www.loc.gov/item/mm81043588/?loclr=bloglaw.

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frame of reference for American society, Lincoln helped citizens put current events and

tragedies into perspective, but he no longer actively shapes national events. Although

relevant, Lincoln now stands in the background of American life. By the end of the

1960s, Lincoln’s image was inextricably tied to racial progress and civil liberty, but he

transitioned from an active to a passive presence in popular America.

264

Lincoln, however, remains a ubiquitous figure in American culture. Whether

through advertisements, merchandise, or currency, Americans encounter Lincoln’s

likeness almost on an daily basis. Lincoln’s pervasive presence in modern America

continues the cultural tradition of veneration that originated in the aftermath of his

assassination. Starting in 1865, Americans disseminated Lincoln’s image as part of the

nation’s mourning process and, gradually, Lincoln became a type of American brand,

emblematic of national values and identity. It is, however, the very ubiquity of Lincoln’s

image — born out of a genuine appreciation for his legacy — that diminishes his potency

as a symbol of American identity. As Roger Chartier observes, hallowed images lose

their venerability from overuse. In other words, once a representation is overpublicized, it

becomes common and loses its previous impenetrability.

265

Since his death, the

government, historians, and ordinary citizens, alike, have invoked Lincoln’s legacy for

myriad reasons. The wide circulation of his image in newspapers, memorializations,

books, and films brought a commonality to Lincoln’s legacy that diminished the earlier

veneration that pervaded his memory in the nineteenth century and again in the 1960s.

264

Dion DiMucci. Abraham, Martin, and John. Dion. 1968, recording.

265

Roger Chartier, “A Desacralized King,” The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, (Duke

University Press, 1991), 111 – 135.

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Once common, Lincoln’s memory was prone to what Barry Schwartz describes as

“benign ridicule.”

266

Lincoln’s popular image became the subject of humor, and cartoons,

newspapers, and magazines increasingly used Lincoln as a way to make fun of “authority

figures and tradition.”

267

When Lincoln’s image was accepted for its political and social

humor, it passed into absurdity. One of the earliest examples of the ‘fantastical Lincoln’

was a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone that featured Lincoln as a ghost lamenting the

tragedy of the Civil War.

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Within the decade, he would appear as an aphorism-spouting

alien who joined the protagonists of Star Trek to defeat the forces of evil. The trope of the

fantastical Lincoln has become increasingly popular since its inception; Lincoln has

appeared for bizarre effect in numerous works of fiction, television programs, and

films.

269

Though Lincoln’s image has been sensationalized, he is still predominantly

invoked as the Great Emancipator. This dichotomy is best embodied by two American

films, both released in 2012, that depict Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. The first film,

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, was a fantastical action-horror film that portrayed

Lincoln as a vampire hunter who defended slaves against the voracious appetites of their

vampire-slaveowners. The second film, Lincoln, was a critically-acclaimed drama that

emphasized Lincoln’s commitment to ending slavery and achieving racial equality. The

266

Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era, 158 – 159.

267

Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era, 158 – 159.

268

“Back There,” The Twilight Zone, January 13, 1961; “The Savage Curtain,” Star Trek: The Original

Series, March 7, 1969.

269

The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence (1975), The Lincoln Conspiracy (1977), Police Squad! (1980 –

1989), The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987), Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), Red Dwarf (1991),

Coneheads (1993), National Lampoon’s Senior Trip (1994), The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer (1998),

Futurama (1999 – 2013), Bedazzled (2000), National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007), Cloudy with a

Chance of Meatballs (2009), Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009), Adventure Time (2010

– 2018), Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies (2012), Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), FDR: American

Badass! (2012), and The Lego Movie (2014) among numerous others.

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sensational depiction of Lincoln as an axe-swinging vampire hunter did well at the box

office despite its much more serious competition.

270

The prominent cultural depictions of

Lincoln in 2012 illustrate the dichotomy that still exists in his modern day image;

American society venerates Lincoln’s memory as the Great Emancipator with gravitas

and solemnity, while simultaneously and without conflict, sensationalizes his image for

fantastical and comedic effect.

As popular images of Lincoln become increasingly bizarre, however, academic

representations of his life grow ever more sophisticated as scholars advance insightful

depictions into his life and actions. Since the 1990s, there has been an explosion in

Lincoln-based research that analyzes the popular myth of the folksy, humble

emancipator.

271

Despite these discerning works that tackle the obfuscating layers of myth

that surround Lincoln’s legacy in collective memory, none seem to successfully

contradict the enduring impermeability of the popular American myth of Lincoln.

272

Perhaps because Lincoln is, and for so long has been, an idealized benchmark of national

identity that Americans ignore the insights made by scholars into the ‘real Lincoln.’ In

life, Lincoln was raised on the pioneer, folksy in manner, and the author of the

270

Snee, “Saving the Emancipator,” 144.

271

Examples include: Michael Burlingame’s The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (1994), Merrill D.

Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (1994) Dan Abrams and Davis Fisher, Lincoln’s Last Trial: The

Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency (2018), Charles R. McKirdy, Lincoln Apostate: The

Matson Slave Case (2011), Joshua Wolf Shenk, Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a

President and Fueled His Greatness (2005), Charles B. Strozier, Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The

Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed, (Columbia University Press, 2016), Doris

Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, (Simon & Schuster, 2005,

Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press, (Simon and Schuster, 2014), Eric Foner, The Fiery

Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), Our Lincoln: New

Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, (W.W. Norton, 2008), Jackie Hogan, Lincoln, Inc: Selling the

Sixteenth President in Contemporary America, (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011), John McKee

Barr, Loathing Lincoln: An American Tradition from the Civil War to the Present, (Louisiana State

University Press, 2014), Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Six Encounters with Lincoln, (Viking, 2017).

272

Iwan W. Morgan, Presidents in the Movies, 34; Eric Foner, “The Civil War in ‘Postracial America,” The

Nation, October 10, 2011, 25.

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Emancipation Proclamation. He was also an ambitious politician, melancholic, and

steeped in the racial prejudices of his day. The mythicized Lincoln, the merciful patriot

and dedicated abolitionist, however, seems destined to fascinate generation after

generation of Americans.

Jackie Hogan suggests that part of Lincoln’s cultural staying power is the relief he

provides white Americans by alleviating lingering guilt over the racial sins of the past

and ongoing racial inequality in the United States.

273

Though America perceives itself as

being a post-racial society, social movements like Black Lives Matters evidence

remaining strains of social inequity in the United States. Thus, Hogan perceives Lincoln’s

enduring centrality in the American narrative as the Great Emancipator as a way for

white Americans to distance themselves from the ongoing effects of racial inequality.

Lincoln, then, serves the very real purpose of providing stability to a national narrative

that still fractures under the strain of the imperfect actualization of democratic ideals. As

such, Lincoln manifests often in popular media as either the solemn emancipator or the

fantastical patriot as neither representations threaten weakening national myths of unity

and equality.

America avoids Lincoln’s less ideal qualities because the nation does not want to

face its own less than exemplary traits. As a national synecdoche, a less than perfect

Lincoln equates to a less than perfect America. It seems likely that as long as the great

American dilemma, the enduring “inconsistency between the nation’s ideals and the

reality of racial equality,” continues, Lincoln’s image will remain open to

273

Hogan, Lincoln, Inc., 154.

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interpretation.

274

As long as the issues of Lincoln’s day, war and racial tensions continue,

Lincoln and his legacy will remain relevant in the minds of the American people.

275

274

Morgan, Presidents in the Movies, 11.

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Hogan, Lincoln, Inc,. 154 – 155.

Becoming Lincoln; His Changing Legacy from Savior of the Union to the Great Emancipator, 1865 - 1965.

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