Steve S. in San Francisco writes to report on an NPR interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin about her book, Team of Rivals, which I critiqued on LRC two weeks ago:
“I was astounded at her ability to rationalize the obvious racism in Lincoln. She had the audacity to explain Lincoln’s idea of wanting to deport all the blacks back to Africa as humanitarian. She actually said to the interviewer that Lincoln recognized that the rampant racism in America would never let the Negro advance. He thought it would be merciful to send them back to Africa where they could, n a sense, get a fair shake.”
“But . . . to imply that he was doing them a favor is like someone saying that Hitler was doing the Jews a favor by exterminating them . . .”
This is not an exaggeration. When Lincoln pleaded with a group of free black men to set an example and return to Africa, he noted that thousands of American blacks had in fact been “colonized” back to Africa in the previous several decades, but most of them perished. He assured the men sitting in front of him, though, that although most of them would probably die of disease or starvation, enough of them would probably survive so that their descendants would inevitably outnumber them. The men wisely ignored his suggestion. They would not have agreed with Doris Kearns Goodwin’s NPR “spin.”
By the way, this is what it means to be a “Lincoln scholar”: to dream up lies and distortions that can plausibly rationalize his acts of tyranny, racism, mass murder, etc.
7:20 am on December 14, 2005
