Questions About John Brown

[Thomas Thorne]

Very interesting Lloyd Lewis article suffers from the usual defects of "the Getting right with Lincoln" syndrome that assumes Lincoln shared the views of whoever was admiring him at the moment.

Whatever our views of what we think Lincoln would have done on reconstruction, I find it incredible that Abraham Lincoln,whose earliest political hero was Henry Clay, would have abandoned Clay's American System, whose tenets Lincoln and the Republican party did so much to carry out during the war. He was too shrewd to abandon constituencies who followed him for his then advanced views on race in the hope that people whom he had waged war upon would support him.

The T Harry Williams speculation supplied by Bill is interesting. We can only wonder if Lincoln contemplated pulling off what FDR achieved:the simultaneous support of both Blacks and Southern whites,

Tom