Defending Lincoln

There have been headlines this past week about a new book which documents Lincoln’s efforts in support of recolonizing black Americans to Liberia. The undercurrent seems to me to be trashing our American hero by pointing out that the great Emancipator partook in the great sin of all time, racism.  Clearly, the release of the book was timed to shock just in time for Lincoln’s birthday. I vigorously object.

I am not sure if the book’s real focus is to tear down Lincoln or whether the media spin-meisters have simply been out in force to grab more readers. Whatever the case, it cannot diminish Lincoln the man, the president or his accomplishments. As I have said before, I’m not historian but the idea of recolonizing black people to Liberia was definitely an option discussed by many in the 1800’s. One must put on the eyeglasses of history, however.  Until someone proves otherwise, I’m going to view this as having been a compassionate idea, in its time. I’m going to assume that the supporters of recolonization to Liberia believed this would be most beneficial to blacks who became free in America. Give them their own country where they can flourish on their own. Granted, supporters of this likely presumed that blacks and whites in American would never be able to get along anyhow. We now identify such thinking as racist but I contend if it were racist, they did not know it was so at the time. Therefore, it is grossly unfair to pluck out of history scenarios which to the modern observer’s eye and ear seem retroactively racist.

As I myself have tried to communicate through my book, what seems to have been is not necessarily so. Lincoln twice defended slave owners in court. Yet, a closer look at the situations very strongly tends to show he was not a supporter of slavery.  Lincoln never supported slavery. I do not know of any claim by anyone, that he ever believed in the morality of the institution of slavery.

Does Thomas Jefferson’s ownership of slaves take away his actual contribution to his country? Was Robert E. Lee less of an admirable figure because he graduated from West Point but chose not to break his devotion to Virginia when the Civil War came? A more recent example: Should we regard Franklin Roosevelt as a disgraceful racist because he ordered the detention of Japanese Americans? And in our present day: Is the Pope a diminished moral leader because as a youth Germany conscripted him into the Nazi Youth?  These facts of history are indeed ironic. But let’s not jump on the runaway media train to trash anyone immediatel*y when he hear of something our modern sensibilities cannot tolerate. Let’s not be so gullible or gossip-oriented to believe a headline as true. Like the elementary school teachers used to say, “put on your thinking caps.” Read, think and discuss more to gain a human, historical understanding of what happened before.  Great figures in history were human beings. They didn’t have all the right answers. They made mistakes, grew and pursued goals which later turned out to be great milestones of human advancement. I still admire Lincoln. I scold those who try to unseat Lincoln’s greatness.

    Today the country honors an American great, Martin Luther King. There will be speeches replayed, memories discussed, national praises and some lamenting about civil rights work yet to be done. Martin Luther King left us something much greater than the memory of his work. The template of his work was: Reason. He applied reason to a devastating, social wrong that persisted for hundreds of years. I’m no MLK scholar but the thrust of his cause was that black Americans are people, American people who are entitled to human dignity and fair opportunities in the endeavors of life, work, housing, family, education. Why? Not because he had a lot of people behind him, a political force that gained the power to impress its ideology on others. No. Rather it was the jurisprudential rightness of what he sought to do, which overarches his civil rights contributions. 

    King is much greater than a hero of the civil rights movement. He transcended it by making his philosophical reasoning the bulwark of his campaign to transform our society. America soared in its ingenious design for a free populace that would hold the power strings – instead of kings, oligarchs and monarchs. Even our original sin of maintaining slavery only blights that advancement slightly. Never in the history of the world and its many peoples had self-governance reached such heights. Yet MLK set in motion a powerful state psychoanalysis equivalent to the Allies beating back the wrong of Germany’s twisted ideologies.  He had the fortitude to press his cause in the face of incredible opposition. He joins the likes of Moses, Lincoln, Ghandi, the early Christians and Pope Benedict XVI, who continues to press dialogue with Islamic leaders on the concept reason’s coexistence with religion.

    In spite of our founders’ amazing brilliance in producing the Constitution, they also acquiesced to slavery. How a people of such high reason could endorse slavery for hundreds of years we simply cannot now fathom. But, our historical failing was not alone. The Greeks who gave birth to democracy also savagely fought each for almost thirty years in the year Pelopennesian War from 431-404 B.C. The Roman Empire’s magnificent achievements in architecture, road building and military strategy also feasted on human slaughter in the coliseum. The society that produced Shakespeare also ruled the seas and colonized an enormous numbers of people, including us. The society which spawned Germany’s exquisite achievements in music and philosophy also fostered the rise of the Third Reich and its colossal aftermath of destruction.  

    Martin Luther King’s most important legacy is not as a civil rights leader but as a thinker. The enduring imprint of Dr. King is that he articulated unwaveringly the philosophical rightness, the reasoned goodness, the jurisprudence of civil rights. Our lesson is to again take up the torch and recognize that we may suffer from the blindness mankind has suffered in the past. Examine our society  with a fresh look and apply cold reason to correct our wrongs.

    Writing is more vivid for the reader when the writer inserts certain kinds of details. Any way a writer can get in nuggets of information from any of the five human senses, it makes the written work more alive. In historical fiction, other data bits mined from real history flesh out a novel or story. Searching for the right detail and inserting an appropriate sensation into a piece of writing can be enjoyable, edifying and frustrating. 

    When the reader hears the tink of a tea cup as a character sets it back down on its saucer, it helps us subtly feel his reaction to something that’s been said. Visual description helps the reader see things through a character’s eyes. When a ski jumper sees whooshing streaks of horizontal colors with a whistled sailing down to the snow, the reader has a brief sense of being the jumper. In one of my scenes in Lawyer Lincoln In Transit to Freedom An historical nonfiction novel, I used two senses to help deepen the focus of a scene and convey a sense of impatience. Lincoln is visiting a former law partner, worried and seeking advice about defending abolitionists and refusing representation to a slave master. While the two lawyers are combing through some legal texts together, I referenced the gentlemanly scent of burning tobacco in the background and the delicate ticking of a brass, mantel clock. Taste and touch are challenging to express. I have not used taste much other than sentences like a bitter taste coursed through him. My touch sensations generally tend to be a mix of visual and sensory: he put his hand to his temple and rubbed it, or, he pounded the podium with his fist. 

    Other ways of creating verisimilitude for historical fiction is to find and use the material related to artifacts of the era, clothing, furniture and customs of the time and place. In the opening scene of my book, in 1837, one character is holding a rolled up newspaper and looks menacing. I suggested, through Lincoln’s thought, that the man might be concealing an “an iron lid lifter” from a stove, a knife or one of those “new pocket pistols” inside. It took me hours of hunting on the internet, for photos and blogs and articles to discover what things people used in the early 1800’s that might fit into a rolled up newspaper. I also came across a delicious factoid, that Lincoln and his law partner sometimes used a buffalo robe for warmth while riding the judicial circuit in Illinois. I had to place that robe across a chair when the scary would-be client comes calling in chapter one. In another one of my scenes, I try to blend Lincoln’s character and vernacular into a memory of Mary Todd, who Lincoln views as different from the typical, unapproachable porcelain and lace women that attended parties.  

    It was extremely helpful to me as a writer to visit a number of Lincoln sites in Illinois. The Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield is outstanding. A recreation of Lincoln’s one-room boyhood home that patrons walk through really helped to experience the feeling of Lincoln’s simplicity and what the world of books must have meant to him. In New Salem, walking through the outdoor village staffed with period actors, telling about their daily lives was like cranking up the old cartoon Peabody Way-Back time machine. I visited Lincoln and Herdon’s law office and the Illinois Supreme Court, housed in the Illinois Old State Office building. I cannot underestimate the value of standing in those places, seeing what Lincoln saw, in the environments he lived in. It helped me immensely in crafting Lincoln onto the page. I don’t know how the historical fiction writers do it, who write about Medieval or ancient times—except to think they must be getting in some awfully, cool travel.