A friend recently sent me an article from Newsmax magazine by Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen entitled “Abraham Lincoln, On His 200th Birthday: What Would He Say to Us Today.” There are almost no historical facts in the article, as is typical of “Lincoln scholarship.” Instead, nearly every point is made by referencing a “story” (without documenation of where the story came from), quoting one of Dishonest Abe’s own political speeches, and proclaiming over and over what a kindhearted angel he supposedly was. The article proudly boasts that Lincoln now sits upon his “throne” that is “modeled after Grecian temples.”
The biggest piece of misinformation in the article is the authors’ boast that “Lincoln was the first president to invite and socially greet a delegation of African-Americans into the White House.” Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard told me this is not true when I mentioned this meeting to him last year in an interview – there had already been such a meeting. But Gingrich and Forstchen misinform their readers by not explaining the purpose of the meeting. The purpose was to urge/entice these free black men to lead by example and deport themselves to Liberia (See Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, vol. 2, 1859-1865, pp. 353-357). Lincoln did not believe that a multi-racial society was either possible or desirable in America. “You and I are different races,” Lincoln told the free black men in 1862. “This physical difference,” he said, “is a great disadvantage to us both,” and “affords a reason at least why we should be separated . . . . It is better for us both, therefore, to be separate.” He then urged the men to leave America for Liberia. They wisely turned him down.
Gingrich and Forstchen mention this meeting to give their readers the false impression that Lincoln was racially enlightened. The reality is that he was as much a white supremacist as any man of his time, and proved it with his lifelong fetish for “colonization” or deportation of all black people from the U.S. (He was one of the “managers” of the “Illinois Colonization Society” that used state tax dollars to deport free blacks out of the state).
