Background Essay: Was Lincoln a White Supremacist?

Perhaps because ours is an especially diverse and relatively young country, Americans have always looked to our unique and dramatic history to give us a common sense of national identity and a shared set of icons. Our high esteem for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other heroes of the American Revolution, for instance, generally transcends contemporary political differences and unites us as heirs to their democratic vision. Similarly, for many Americans, Abraham Lincoln has long represented wise and humane leadership in our time of greatest adversity and division, martyred for having ended America’s original sin of slavery.

It was therefore highly controversial when in 1968 prominent African American historian Lerone Bennett, Jr. published an article in Ebony magazine asking “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?”, a highly critical examination of Lincoln’s well-documented but little known racism, and his advocacy of a “colonization” policy in which blacks would be resettled to Africa or the Caribbean rather than admit them as equals into American society. That article, along with subsequent works by Bennett on the same subject, are classic examples of what has come to be termed “revisionist” history—i.e. deliberate challenges to standard historical narratives, often written by, about, or from the perspective of previously overlooked, unheard, or actively suppressed demographics.

The reception of revisionist histories like Bennett’s has been mixed and highly emotional. On one hand, critics charge that such accounts “rewrite history” with an ideological axe to grind rather than observing the traditional historian’s aim of factual objectivity. In fact, Bennett’s claims of Lincoln’s racism are based in Lincoln’s own undisputed statements. In addressing a delegation of black ministers in 1862, for example, Lincoln observed that “not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours.” Nevertheless, many historians object to Bennett’s critique as an oversimplifying exaggeration which gives Lincoln insufficient credit for his evolving perspective on race, and makes little allowance for the extremely complex racial attitudes of his era more generally.

Ultimately, what may be most important is not deducing exactly what was going on in Lincoln’s head and heart on the subject of race, but rather how we choose to remember and interpret his actions, not the least of which was the Emancipation Proclamation. “Remembering is always about some degree of forgetting,” notes historian David Blight. “The task is to keep reminding ourselves what is worth remembering.” Our definition of what is “worth remembering” has changed over time. Today, we have perhaps moved past the need for either simplistically mythologized heroes or simplistically demonized villains, and are most inspired by more nuanced historical figures who, in all their complexity, seem that much more like ourselves.