What did Mr. Lincoln enjoy doing?

[Bill Richter]

Nice assumptions, Liz.

I cannot say more about Lincoln and "Uncle Tom's Cabin" except that he supposedly said to Harriet Beecher Stowe at the White House in 1862, "So this is the little lady who made this big war?" (Donald, "Lincoln," 542) So Lincoln obviously knew of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and it impact of the nation, indeed, the world. Not surprising in an educated man of hi time.

I agree that Lincoln might have been more interested in Hinton R. Helper's "Impending Crisis." But Helper was a white racist uninterested in black rights except that slavery allegedly made it harder for white farmers and shopkeepers to exist in the South. That has been challenged by historian Frank W. Owsley and his numerous students and followers of his "Plain Folk in the Old South," who find a thriving white middle class, despite slavery.

Lincoln actually sides with Helper in Lincoln's actual plan for ending slavery in 1912 (introduced in Congress in Dec 1862) and his willingness to allow slavery to exist in the South but not in the territories, pledged in 1861 inaugural. Lincoln wanted a free West, not a free South. But the South demanded its right to take slaves west under the concept of extraterritoriality from Art 4, Sect 2, Cl 3 of the US Constitution. And according to William J. Cooper, Jr., "The Critical Signpost on the Journey toward Secession," Journal of Southern History, 77 (Feb.2011), 3-16, and his "'We Have the War upon Us': The Onset of the Civil War, Nov 1860-Apr 1861" (2012), this was the single key issue upon which Lincoln and the South could not compromise.

Lincoln's lukewarm stand against slavery otherwise was evidenced in his introduction of several antislavery measures in the Illinois state legislature for "style," allowing them to lapse with little effort made on his part after their introduction. In reality Lincoln was a Henry Clay man in this as well as many other policies. Like Clay, he wanted to free blacks and get them out of the country and made many efforts to do this to Africa (Liberia), the Caribbean (Isle d' Vache in Haiti), Panama (called Lincolnia by the cynical press), and even in separate colonies in Southern Florida or West Texas.

All of this failed, in part through opposition to such plans by Frederick Douglass and the willingness of 180,000+ blacks to fight the Civil War as part of the Union Army, which ultimately guaranteed them a permanent place in America. Whether that place was to be first or second class has been the problem of modern America.

One wonders where Lincoln would have stood on this when he allegedly told Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens, a friend from Lincoln's congressional days when he was a fellow Whig politician, when Stephens asked him at Hampton Roads aboard the River Queen in 1865, you have freed the black people, now what are you going to do with them? Lincoln's answer: "Root hog or die." One place to find this reluctance of Lincoln to end slavery and then provide for the freed slaves is to read Lerone Bennett, Jr., "Forced into Glory." But he has been conveniently dismissed by Lincolnites as a "black radical."