American Literature 1 page paper (2)
H.Luke09
unit_3_article_for_paper.docxTo say of this impressive volume of essays that the sum is greater than the parts is not to disparage the parts. The book reexamines the foundational tension in American politics between commitments to racial hierarchy and liberal egalitarianism. A focus on how this tension manifested in the lives of three presidents noted for their articulation of racially universal principles, coupled with the (largely implicit) comparative perspective afforded by placing these three within a single frame, produces insight into the role of race in American political history precisely by developing a more fine-grained judgment on its meaning for Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson themselves.
Jefferson emerges as the most tortured of the three. As Annette Gordon-Reed emphasizes, the degree of anguish that Jefferson and his contemporary St. George Tucker felt over the presence of slavery varied along with their perception of the peril the institution posed to the new republic. Peter S. Onuf finds more consistency in Jefferson's antislavery commitments, but Jefferson insisted both that emancipation be voluntary on the part of slave owners and that it be accompanied by full expatriation of those emancipated. As the probability of these outcomes decreased, Jefferson turned to the "domestication" of slavery (p. 38). Benevolent mastery, half understood as a preparation for self-governance on the part of slaves (once safely transported to Africa), reconciled Jefferson to his own status as slave owner. Jefferson appears not to have noticed the contradiction, highlighted by Lucia Stanton, between the panoptic paternalism of his plantation management, as exercised at Monticello, and any genuine practice of self-government by his own slaves. Here as elsewhere, Jefferson's egalitarian principles seem constrained by a calculation of interest (his own, the nation's) as much as, perhaps more than, by racial ideology. Jefferson was "truly in agony," as Gordon-Reed says, only when the reconciliation of competing interests seemed unattainable (p. 30).
Like Jefferson, Lincoln long supported the voluntary colonization of blacks to Africa. Lincoln's "fervent and continuing belief in white supremacy," as Jean H. Baker puts it, could admit no other solution (p. 89). Yet Lincoln appears to have modified his commitment to white supremacy to fit the Declaration of Independence, rather than the other way around. As early as 1857, Lincoln was prepared to include black Americans within the terms of that document, even as he limited its political and social meaning. Baker argues convincingly that this willingness derived not only from the antislavery sentiments with which he was raised but also "from firsthand acquaintance" with slavery and with individual free blacks (p. 89). The trials of war, in any case, decisively crystallized Lincoln's turn away from colonization and toward a racially integrated republic, as Eric Foner demonstrates. Though cautious and limited in an endorsement of black citizenship, Lincoln acknowledged that black southerners, by fighting for the Union, had won the right to the franchise. Thus Lincoln, though "a product of his time ... was able to transcend it" (pp. 120-21). As David W. Blight shows, success, in this instance, had a thousand children, all seeking legitimacy for their more cramped moral visions.
Lincoln believed in racial inequality, then, but appears to have lacked that impulse to paternalism so marked in Jefferson. The same could hardly be said of Wilson. As with Jefferson, there is a mild tendency here to treat Wilson's paternalism as mitigating, rather than constituting, his racism. As John Milton Cooper Jr. notes, "Wilson and Jefferson seem a well-matched pair," perhaps in more ways than Cooper elaborates (p. 145). Wilson was not a vitriolic white supremacist (in an era that gave ample space for vitriol). His record was one of evasion and awkward silence. But the immense importance Wilson attached to restraint of "passion" makes it hard to interpret those silences (p. 153). Certainly, as Manning Marable documents, W. E. B. Du Bois came to believe he had misread the import of those silences, taking for sympathy what was merely cloaked racism. An unduly harsh judgment, perhaps, but Wilson, like Jefferson, sought to avoid rather than create tension and shied from confrontation with those busily segregating the federal government around him. Wilson is justly admired for his defense of the rights of small states and embrace of the principle of self-determination. But Erez Manela carefully details the limits of those principles: in theory applicable to all, in practice restricted to those who had achieved the requisite level of "civilization."
It is among the virtues of this volume that the reader cannot rest with this judgment, even of Wilson. Manela suggests Wilson, like Lincoln, found his racial presumptions tested by war and began "to voice a more forceful opposition" to overt racism (p. 202). In any case, the interplay between the essays in each section is as intellectually stimulating as the individual essays themselves. Taken together they suggest that Lincoln's great virtue lay in something deceptively simple, as Benjamin Quarles once concluded: treating human beings "as human beings" and not as objects of charity (p. 103).
MAREK STEEDMAN
University of Southern Mississippi
Steedman, Marek
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