Carl Sandburg and Lincoln

[Liz Rosenthal]

Rob:

First of all, I'm glad to see you back. I could be wrong, but you seem to have disappeared for a couple of weeks and I've missed your insight.

On the issue of Sandberg and Reconstruction, my knowledge is limited, except for one thing I took note of when reading the one-volume, abridged version of Sandberg's six Lincoln volumes. I recall Sandberg writing about Lincoln's April 11, 1865 speech concerning Reconstruction in Louisiana in such a way as to totally lose sight of the importance of the speech. Sandberg seemed to suggest that it was silly of Lincoln to bring this up when he did because people were expecting something very different. He described people in the crowd as kind of looking at each other in puzzlement as if to say, "What's he talking about? What does this have to do with the price of bread in Lower Slobovia?" (Of course, I'm paraphrasing here.) I was kind of disappointed in Sandberg's apparent cluelessness. Maybe his one-volume work was just badly edited; maybe he expressed things more thoughtfully in the original. But I got the feeling that history was not really his thing. That is, Abraham Lincoln was, but not history.

It occurs to me with hindsight that Sandberg was likely just expressing (unwittingly or not) the majority white viewpoint of the time that the condition of the African-American in the Jim Crow South was not of particular concern. I got that feeling later when I read the Benjamin P. Thomas bio of Lincoln when Thomas pretty much skirted over the importance of the plight of the freedmen to Lincoln's thinking. And I again had a similar feeling when I read Lincoln's Herndon, by David Herbert Donald, and Donald belittled Herndon's passion for opposing the Kansas-Nebraska Act as if the North (and Herndon, and by extension, Lincoln) was in a tizzy over nothing. Donald even remarked that Herndon somehow didn't realize the misguided folly of Northerners questioning the "way of life of the South." Since this was 1948, and the modern civil rights movement hadn't quite sprung forth yet, Donald's unoriginal and disappointing view on the issue was, in a way, understandable. He was just going with the flow.