"Armies of scholars,
meticulously investigating every aspect of [Lincoln’s] life, have failed to find
a single act of racial bigotry on his part."
~ Doris Kearns-Goodwin,
Team
of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham
Lincoln, p.
207.
"I will say then that 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 . . . . I as much as any man am
in favor of the superior position assigned to the white race."
~ Abraham Lincoln, First
Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Ottawa, Illinois, Sept. 18, 1858, in The
Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln vol.3, pp. 145-146.
Steven Spielberg’s new
movie, Lincoln, is said to be based on several chapters of the book
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns-Goodwin, who was a consultant to
Spielberg. The main theme of the movie is how clever, manipulative, conniving,
scheming, lying, and underhanded Lincoln supposedly was in using his "political
skills" to get the Thirteenth Amendment that legally ended slavery through the
U.S. House of Representatives in the last months of his life. This entire story
is what Lerone Bennett, Jr. the longtime executive editor of Ebony
magazine and author of Forced
into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, calls a "pleasant fiction."
It never happened.
It never happened according
to the foremost authority on Lincoln among mainstream Lincoln scholars, Harvard
University Professor David H. Donald, the recipient of several Pulitzer prizes
for his historical writings, including a biography of Lincoln. David Donald is
the preeminent Lincoln scholar of our time who began writing award-winning books
on the subject in the early 1960s. On page 545 of his magnus opus,
Lincoln, Donald notes that Lincoln did discuss the Thirteenth Amendment
with two members of Congress – James M. Ashley of Ohio and James S. Rollins of
Missouri. But if he used "means of persuading congressmen to vote for the
Thirteeth Amendment," the theme of the Spielberg movie, "his actions are not
recorded. Conclusions about the President’s role rested on gossip . .
."
Moreover, there is not a
shred of evidence that even one Democratic member of Congress changed his vote
on the Thirteenth Amendment (which had previously been defeated) because of
Lincoln’s actions. Donald documents that Lincoln was told that some New Jersey
Democrats could possibly be persuaded to vote for the amendment "if he could
persuade [Senator] Charles Sumner to drop a bill to regulate the Camden &
Amboy [New Jersey] Railroad, but he declined to intervene" (emphasis
added). "One New Jersey Democrat," writes David Donald, "well known as a
lobbyist for the Camden & Amboy, who had voted against the amendment in
July, did abstain in the final vote, but it cannot be proved that Lincoln
influenced his change" (emphasis added). Thus, according to the foremost
authority on Lincoln, there is no evidence at all that Lincoln influenced even a
single vote in the U.S. House of Representatives, in complete contradiction of
the writings of the confessed plagiarist Doris Kearns-Goodwin and Steven
Spielberg’s movie (See my review of Goodwin’s book, entitled "A Plagiarist’s
Contribution to Lincoln Idolatry").
Lincoln’s First
Thirteenth Amendment Gambit
There is no evidence that
Lincoln provided any significant assistance in the passage of the Thirteenth
Amendment in the House of Representatives in 1865, but there is evidence
of his effectiveness in getting an earlier Thirteenth Amendment through the
House and the Senate in 1861. This proposed amendment was known as
the "Corwin Amendment," named after Ohio Republican Congressman Thomas Corwin.
It had passed both the Republican-controlled House and the Republican-dominated
U.S. Senate on March 2, 1861, two days before Lincoln’s inauguration, and was
sent to the states for ratification by Lincoln himself.
The Corwin Amendment would
have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with
Southern slavery. It read as follows:
"No amendment shall be made
to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to
abolish or interfere, within any State,, with the domestic institutions thereof,
including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said
State."
"Person held to service" is
how the Constitutional Convention referred to slaves, and "domestic
institutions" referred to slavery. Lincoln announced to the world that he
endorsed the Corwin Amendment in his first inaugural address:
"I understand a proposed
amendment to the Constitution – which amendment, however, I have not seen – has
passed Congress to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere
with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to
service . . . . [H]olding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law,
I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable" (emphasis
added).
Believing that slavery was
already constitutional, Lincoln had "no objection" to enshrining it explicitly
in the text of the U.S. Constitution on the day that he took office. He then
sent a letter to the governor of each state transmitting the approved amendment
for what he hoped would be ratification and noting that his predecessor,
President James Buchanan, had also endorsed it.
Lincoln played a much
larger role in getting this first Thirteenth Amendment through Congress than
merely endorsing it in his first inaugural address and in his letter to the
governors. Even Doris Kearns-Goodwin knows this! On page 296 of Team of
Rivals she explained how it was Lincoln who, after being elected but before
the inauguration, instructed New York Senator William Seward, who would become
his secretary of state, to get the amendment through the U.S. Senate. He also
instructed Seward to get a federal law passed that would repeal the personal
liberty laws in some of the Northern states that were used by those states to
nullify the federal Fugitive Slave Act, which Lincoln strongly supported. (The
Fugitive Slave Act forced Northerners to hunt down runaway slaves and return
them to their owners).
As Goodwin writes: "He
[Lincoln] instructed Seward to introduce these proposals in the Senate Committee
of Thirteen without indicating they issued from Springfield [Illinois]. The
first resolved that ‘the Constitution should never be altered so as to authorize
Congress to abolish or interfere with slavery in the states.’" The second
proposal was that "All state personal liberty laws in opposition to the Fugitive
Slave Law be repealed."
So, go and see Spielberg’s
Lincoln movie if you must, but keep in mind that it is just another left-wing
Hollywood fantasy.
November 30,
2012
Copyright © 2012
by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted,
provided full credit is given.
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