The party of Lincoln? Yeah, that was racist too
The Republican catchphrase has a problem
In his continuing (and perhaps increasingly desperate) bid to win over black voters, Donald Trump — and many other Republicans — have been framing the Republican party as “the party of Abraham Lincoln” in recent weeks.
It’s ironic that Trump is now repeating the same talking point that anti-Trump Republicans have used for months to distance Trump’s bigotry from the apparently anti-racist GOP. “This is the party of Lincoln,” House Speaker Paul Ryan told CNN in May.
“Our party was founded to defeat slavery. Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, signed the Emancipation Proclamation,” proclaimed Ted Cruz, in his less-than, non-endorsement of Trump at the RNC. It’s become a rallying cry for a party desperate to claim black voters and reclaim moderate voters.
As a thumbnail indicator, the phrase “party of Lincoln” in The New York Times spiked to an all-time high in 2016. (The previous spike was in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was the Republican nominee.)
But what if the original Party of Lincoln was not at all, in fact, the Party of Lincoln — at least in the way many Americans would recognize?
Despite going down in history as the president who emancipated slaves from bondage, Lincoln — and his party — were not “staunch” advocates of black freedom and civil rights. But don’t tell that to Trump and anti-Trump Republicans of 2016 vying for black voters.
Nor to the Democrats of 1858 vying for white voters. With only two years experience as a congressman and the backing of the just four-year-old Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln was vying for the Senate seat held by arguably the most powerful member of the nation’s most powerful political party. Lincoln and U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas agreed to a series of debates in the lead up to the 1858 midterm elections.
“If you desire negro citizenship,” Douglas said at the first debate, “then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican Party.” The forged “Black Republican Party” meant negatively what the forged “Party of Lincoln” means positively today. “I am not nor ever have been in favor…of making [black people] voters or jurors,” or politicians or marriage partners, Lincoln shot back at the fourth debate. The “white and black races” will never live “together on terms of social and political equality…and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior positions assigned to the white race.”
Lincoln’s close Illinois associate, U.S. Senator Lyman Trumbull, put it even more plainly in a speech in Chicago on August 7, 1858. “We, the Republican party, are the white man’s party. We are for free white men.”
Democrats almost certainly knew Trumbull was right. The origins of the antislavery GOP were nearly as white — or anti-black — as the Democratic Party. In 1846, Congressman David Wilmot tried to bar slavery in the southwestern territories obtained from the Mexican-American War. What Wilmot named the “White Man’s Proviso” did not materialize. But if there was a single organizing principle of Wilmot’s Republican Party in 1854, then it was opposing the expansion of slavery, authorized that year by the Kansas-Nebraska Act; it was keeping enslaved and free black people off of free white soil in the West and North. As for those in the GOP who were advocating interracial free soil, historians today identify them as the “Radical Republicans.” But these radicals hardly controlled the Party of Lincoln.
It’s true, of course, that the circumstances of the prolonged Civil War in the summer of 1861 changed then President Lincoln and his party’s racial stance (more than Lincoln’s antislavery stance changed the circumstances). The Republican-led Congress and a hesitating Lincoln allowed Union generals to confiscate runaways as “contraband.” And in his First Annual Message to Congress on December 3, 1861, Lincoln requested funding for compensating emancipators, and for driving freed blacks off of America’s free white soil and back to Africa — both to ensure the Civil War did “not degenerate” into a “remorseless revolutionary struggle.” Furious, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison wrote that Lincoln did not have “a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins.”
On August 20, 1862, Lincoln responded to those demanding an abolitionist president. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do that,” Lincoln wrote. “What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.” What he did about a month later — announcing the coming Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 — he did because he believed it helped save the Union. And Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction in December 1863 — which allowed rebel states to rejoin the Union even if their laws restricted blacks’ rights — was all about rebuilding the saved Union. Lincoln did not mind that his reconstruction plan “frees the slave and ignores the negro,” as civil rights activist Wendell Phillips criticized. But before his 1865 death, Lincoln started to realize that ignoring the Negro would not reconstruct Union.
Lincoln and his party ended up not being an enemy of black freedom and citizenship. Unlike his presidential predecessors, Lincoln kept these options in his political hand. Lincoln played emancipation to save the union, and seemed ready to play citizenship to reconstruct the Union. Therein lies the progressive greatness of Lincoln and his party in the 1860s.
But only a willful twist of historical reality can make the Party of Lincoln progressively concerned about black lives in 1860s. After Lincoln’s death, his close associate Senator Trumbull led his free white soilers into a coalition with the “Radical Republicans” to pass the famed equal rights acts and constitutional amendments over the next five years. But even Senator Trumbull advanced these measures in the hopes of assuring party loyalty, and to keep oppressed southern blacks away from free white northern and western soil.
Lincoln and his party — save the radicals — did not advocate black freedom and citizenship like they advocated free white soil. In fact, Lincoln was neither for black lives nor against black lives. White lives and the life of the Union is what mattered to Lincoln and his party.
So yes, Republicans are “the party of Lincoln” — in all the flawed, conflicted, racist roots of the party’s actual creation story. The Party of Lincoln remains the grand old party of racist white men.
Ibram X. Kendi, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of African American history at the University of Florida. His second book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, was recently released by Nation Books and recently featured in The Washington Post’s summer reading list. His writing has appeared in Salon, The Huffington Post, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other venues. Follow him on Twitter @DrIbram.
