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Lincoln, Abraham (1809–1865), sixteenth president of the United States. Abraham Lincoln is an ambiguous figure in history and literature, with much disagreement centered on his beliefs and actions regarding African Americans. Lincoln hated slavery but equivocated in public statements about racial equality. He considered his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation the most historic act of his presidency, but many critics interpret the order freeing Southern slaves during the Civil War as a military measure, not a humanitarian one. In a famous 1862 letter to the editor Horace Greeley, Lincoln explained that his “official duty” in the war was to “save the Union” but added that this stance signaled “no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.” Near the war's end, Lincoln vetoed a congressional bill to codify emancipation and insisted instead that the permanent end of slavery be written into the Constitution as the Thirteenth Amendment.
Assassination elevated Lincoln to national martyrdom, but his dual incarnations as “Savior of the Union” and “Great Emancipator” have coexisted uneasily. Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel The Clansman (filmed as D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation) portrayed Lincoln as an eager racist. Despite numerous tributes like Langston Hughes's poem “Lincoln Monument” (1927) and William E. Lilly's Set My People Free (1932), many African American writers have expressed ambivalence. Frederick Douglass knew Lincoln and believed him to be utterly without prejudice but in an 1876 speech declared Lincoln “pre-eminently the white man's President.” In 1922 W. E. B. Du Bois provoked angry letters from readers of the Crisis magazine with a critical paragraph calling Lincoln “a big, inconsistent, brave man.” Many civil rights leaders effectively used Lincoln as a political symbol, but criticisms continued from Malcolm X, Julius Lester, and more recently from Vincent Harding in There Is a River (1982). Lincoln remains a compelling presence, but the icon has proved even more ambiguous than the man.
Bibliography
- Arthur Zilversmit, ed., Lincoln on Black and White: A Documentary History, 1971.
- Stephen B. Oates, Abraham Lincoln: The Man behind the Myths, 1984
Scott A. Sandage
The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright © 2001, 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
