Orville Vernon Burton - Lincolns Unfinished Work: The New Birth of Freedom from Generation to Generation

LINCOLNS
UNFINISHED
WORK

CONFLICTING WORLDS

New Dimensions of the American Civil War

T. MICHAEL PARRISH, SERIES EDITOR

The New Birth of Freedom
from Generation to Generation

LINCOLNS
UNFINISHED
WORK

Edited by
Orville Vernon Burton and
Peter Eisenstadt

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BATON ROUGE

Published with the assistance of the Michael H. and Ayan Rubin Fund

Published by Louisiana State University Press

lsupress.org

Copyright 2022 by Louisiana State University Press

All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations used in articles or reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any format or by any means without written permission of Louisiana State University Press.

First printing

Designer: Barbara Neely Bourgoyne

Typeface: Minion Pro

Printer: Sheridan Books

Jacket photograph of the March on Washington is from the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8071-7676-4 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8071-7815-7 (pdf) ISBN 978-0-8071-7814-0 (epub)

Contents

ORVILLE VERNON BURTON and PETER EISENSTADT

RICHARD CARWARDINE

ERIC FONER

LAWRENCE T. McDONNELL

J. WILLIAM HARRIS

GREGORY P. DOWNS

ADRIENNE PETTY and MARK SCHULTZ

JAMES W. LOEWEN

STEPHEN KANTROWITZ

RHONDDA ROBINSON THOMAS

RANDALL J. STEPHENS

PETER EISENSTADT

JERALD PODAIR

JOSHUA CASMIR CATALANO and BRIANA L. POCRATSKY

GAVIN WRIGHT

ORVILLE VERNON BURTON and PETER EISENSTADT

AYALA EMMETT

LINCOLNS
UNFINISHED
WORK

Introduction

ORVILLE VERNON BURTON and PETER EISENSTADT

During the last years of his presidency, Abraham Lincoln often spoke of the unfinished work ahead. At Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in November 1863, there to dedicate a cemetery to the Union dead, he told his listeners that the burial ground had already been hallowed by those who had given the last full measure of devotion on the battlefield. Their work was finished. But, Lincoln said, it was for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have so nobly advanced. He said much the same thing a year and a half later in the closing words of his second inaugural address: With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.

What was this unfinished work? Was it ever Lincolns alone? How has it been interpreted and passed down from Lincolns time to ours? How do we understand and respond to the still-unfinished work of democratic inclusion domestically in the United States and globally in our contemporary world? It was long the ambition of Vernon Burton, author of The Age of Lincoln, to assemble a conference of scholars to discuss the sixteenth presidents unfinished work in its broadest scope.

This volume includes fifteen of the conference papers. These essays use the idea of Lincolns unfinished work as a jumping-off point. All of them explore aspects of the unfinished work of democracy, particularly the unfinished work of overcoming the legacy of slavery and white supremacy.

The first section, titled The Unfinished Work of Lincoln in Civil War, Reconstruction, and Post-Reconstruction America, opens with Richard Carwardines Humor and Statesmanship: The Instructive Case of Abraham Lincoln. It is the sole essay that is primarily about the president himself. Lincoln, as all of his contemporaries noted, was a funny man, a jokester, a punster, and a great teller of tales. His sharp wit could, depending on the occasion, be dry, broad, ribald, or acerbic. His humor could serve many purposes: self-deprecation, clever defenses of his positions or mocking attacks on those of his opponents without mean-spirited invective, or relating stories that, like those of Aesop, ended with a twist and a sharp moral. For Carwardine, Lincolns sense of humor formed a part of his capacity for wise political leadership and was an expression of his essential humanity, sense of proportion, and understanding of human foibles. As Carwardine notes, Lincolns penchant for humor often led critics to accuse him of vulgarity and lapses of taste in his storytelling, but it was for him a way of establishing his enduring political persona as a man of both high seriousness and relatable commonness. And, perhaps, it was a way to find the human comedy of reconciliation, the overcoming of obstacles, and happy endings amid lifes tragedies, with their hard, unappeasable finalities. In wartime America, he knew how to laugh, and he knew how to cry; there have been few politicians as effective as conveying both emotions to their publics.

Eric Foner, in The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, opened the conference with one of the keynotes. In the paper drawn from that address, he argues that perhaps the most tangible legacies of that era are the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution, the so-called Reconstruction amendments, all adopted between 1865 and 1870. In his opinion, the scope of the amendments constituted a constitutional revolution that created a fundamentally new document. But as Foner notes, quoting US Army officer Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who commanded African American troops, Revolutions may go backward. Reconstruction was certainly an example of a revolution that reversed direction. The egalitarian potential of the Civil War amendments, both in political practice and by decisions of the US Supreme Court, was whittled away to a shard.

But revolutions can reverse their polarities more than once, and Foner argues the fact that [Reconstruction] happened at all laid the foundation for another generation a century later to try to bring to fruition the concept of a country that had progressed beyond the tyranny of race. He reminds us that no historian believes that any important document possesses one single intent or meaning and that the nature of constitutional interpretationwhatever some legal scholars might say about unambiguous original meanings of constitutional textsis by its very nature unfixed and unfinished. Foner suggests that the full power of the Reconstruction amendments, such as the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, has yet to be realized and that, because the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy are always contested, our understanding of the Reconstruction amendments will forever be a work in progress.

Lawrence T. McDonnell, in Lincoln, Du Boiss General Strike, and the Making of the American Working Class, expands on the argument of W. E. B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America, 18601880, which claims that the final collapse of the Confederacy was in large part a consequence of a general strike by enslaved persons. McDonnell argues that this assertion needs to be studied in conjunction with the mass desertion of Confederate soldiers in the final months of the war, that the role ordinary white Southerners played in wrecking the slaveocracy shows the need to study the politics of the battlefield and the home front as an objectively unified revolutionary process, and that this was the greatest biracial working-class uprising in American history. One reason this has been overlooked, he believes, is that the job of soldiering has often not been viewed as a species of work. In many instances, and certainly in the circumstances of the Civil War, this martial labor took place in a uniquely dangerous, unfree, and unpleasant workplace. Lincoln, at Gettysburg and elsewhere, certainly considered war work as part of the countrys unfinished work. Viewed in this way, the Civil War, McDonnell states, becomes part of a longer struggle over the meaning of work in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction South and in the Gilded Age labor struggles in the North.