“His personal traits and public acts are better known to the American people than are those of any other man of his age. He was a mystery to no man who saw him and heard him. Though high in position, the humblest could approach him and feel at home in his presence. Though deep, he was transparent; though strong, he was gentle; though decided and pronounced in his convictions, he was tolerant towards those who differed from him and patient under reproaches. Even those who only knew him through his public utterances obtained a tolerably clear idea of his character and personality. The image of the man went out with his words, and those who read them knew him.”
Frederick Douglas
“one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great,
without ceasing to be good.”
Karl Marx
“Lincoln's significance lies in his not hesitating
before the most severe means, once they were found to be necessary, in
achieving a great historic aim posed by the development of a young nation.”
― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours:
In the January 2020 issue of The Critic, the politician,
historian and writer Alan Sked wrote an
article entitled Dishonest Abe. To eternal shame and damnation, Sked
was given a space in the Times Literary Supplement's (TLS) recent letters page
to again attack Abraham Lincoln. Sked is a right-winger. He was a founding member
of UKIP in 1993. He was formerly a member of the Anti-Federalist League and the
“Brugge Group”, which regarded the decision of Thatcher’s successor, John
Major, to sign up to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 as a betrayal of her legacy.
Sked is still a Conservative member.
Sked’s first paragraph in the Critic article sets the
tone for the diatribe. He writes:
“Today, Abraham Lincoln remains America’s most
popular president, and historians devote enormous efforts to ensuring that his
reputation survives unscathed. Yet during his presidency, he was hated by
millions, and in 1865, he was assassinated. Even before the Civil War, he was
loathed by perhaps a majority of his fellow countrymen, and in the presidential
election of 1860, 61 per cent of the electorate voted against him.”[1]
From its tone, it would appear that Sked would like
to assassinate Lincoln again. Regardless of how many people voted for or liked
him, Lincoln was hell-bent on saving the Union. Whether He wanted war or not
Lincoln was driven by the logic of the bloody civil war to resort to
revolutionary measures. As Niles Niemuth writes, “During the brutal struggle,
Lincoln expressed the revolutionary-democratic aspirations that inspired
hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight and sacrifice their lives for a
“new birth of freedom.”[2]
Sked further writes, “Rather than accept him as
president, the South seceded from the Union. The Founding Fathers had indicated
that secession was entirely legal. Lincoln should have taken the advice of the
Supreme Court, but rather than that, he manipulated an attack on Fort Sumter to
give him an excuse for war. Lincoln vetoed an attempted constitutional
compromise and got his way by illegally organising a military invasion of
Virginia. There, his troops were humiliated.”
This paragraph shows not only Sked’s revisionist
credentials but is a fabrication of historical events. When the Union commanding
officer, Major Robert Anderson of Kentucky, refused to turn the fort over to
the Confederacy, the South laid siege to the small federal detachment, refusing
to allow supplies. According to Tom Mackaman:
“That Fort Sumter should have been the trigger event
for all of this was itself the outcome of an unpredicted chain of events.
Located next to Charleston, the citadel of fire-eating, pro-slavery
secessionism, Sumter was part of a constellation of lightly guarded federal
bases and arsenals scattered across the South and the border states that had
become the focal point of preparations for war. In the period before the war,
secessionists concentrated on taking, by hook or crook, federal positions. This
was the great hope of the South. Its cash crop agriculture was bound to the
“workshop of the world,” British industrial capitalism. It did little
manufacturing and could produce little of its war material.[3]
Towards the end of his article, and I could be wrong Sked
makes the point that I believe no other historian has ever said. Aside from
saying that Lincoln had no liking for blacks, he writes :
“The Civil War was fought between two deeply racist
societies who differed only over the fate of slavery. After 12 years of
Reconstruction following his death, the North and South agreed on a racist
political system for the South, which by the end of the century became the
Solid South governed by Jim Crow laws. Blacks only began to experience equality
after the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Lincoln’s role in their long
journey to emancipation must be treated with great caution.[4]
It is difficult to find words that adequately express
the sense of revulsion produced by the fabrication of history. Leon Trotsky once
pointed out that lies about history are meant to conceal real social
contradictions.
Sked’s lies are indirectly refuted by Niemuth, who
points out, “ While not an open abolitionist, Lincoln’s political record before
the Civil War was outstanding, and he had come to be seen years before 1860 as
the leading spokesman of the antislavery forces in the United States. The
southern slavocracy certainly understood what it meant when he won the
presidency, responding to his rise to the White House with secession. To the
extent that any individual in history can be credited with playing a decisive
role in destroying slavery, it is undoubtedly Lincoln.
Perhaps we should leave the last word to the great
Frederick Douglas, who said of Lincoln:
“Few great public men have ever been the victims of
fiercer denunciation than Abraham Lincoln was during his administration. He was
often wounded in the house of his friends. Reproaches came thick and fast upon
him from within and from without and from opposite quarters. He was assailed by
Abolitionists; he was assailed by slave-holders; he was assailed by the men who
were for peace at any price; he was assailed by those who were for a more
vigorous prosecution of the war; he was assailed for not making the war an
abolition war; and he was bitterly assailed for making the war an abolition
war. But now behold the change: the judgment of the present hour is that taking
him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him,
considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the
beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted
for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.[5]
Note
In the past I would have sent a copy of this article
to the TLS as a form of reply to Sked’s letter in the recent TLS. But as the
TLS has never printed a letter or had an article from an orthodox Marxist I do
not see the point.
[1] thecritic.co.uk/issues/january-2020/dishonest-abe/
[2] Racial-communalist politics and
the second assassination of Abraham Lincoln
[3] 160 years since the attack on
Fort Sumter: The beginning of the American Civil War- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/13/pers-a13.html
[4] thecritic.co.uk/issues/january-2020/dishonest-abe/
[5] Delivered at the Unveiling of The
Freedmen’s Monument in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C. April 14, 1876
