Fred Lee Hord - Knowing Him by Heart: African Americans on Abraham Lincoln

THE KNOX COLLEGE LINCOLN STUDIES CENTER SERIES

Series Editors

Rodney O. Davis and Douglas L. Wilson

Editorial Board

Michael Burlingame

Richard Carwardine

Edna Greene Medford

James Oakes

Matthew Pinsker

Gerald J. Prokopowicz

John R. Sellers

Jennifer L. Weber

A list of books in this series appears at the end of this book.

Knowing Him by Heart

KNOWING HIM
BY HEART

African Americans on Abraham Lincoln

Edited by
FRED LEE HORD
and
MATTHEW D. NORMAN

Published by
the Knox College Lincoln Studies Center
and the
University of Illinois Press
Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield

2023 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hord, Fred L., editor. | Norman, Matthew D., editor.

Title: Knowing him by heart: African Americans on Abraham Lincoln / edited by Fred Lee Hord and Matthew D. Norman.

Other titles: African Americans on Abraham Lincoln

Description: Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2022. | Series: The Knox College Lincoln studies center series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022016204 (print) | LCCN 2022016205 (ebook) | ISBN 9780252044687 (cloth) | ISBN 9780252053702 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH : Lincoln, Abraham, 18091865Relations with
African Americans. | Lincoln, Abraham, 18091865Influence. |
African AmericansAttitudesHistory. | American literature
African American authors. | PresidentsUnited StatesBiographyAnecdotes.

Classification: LCC E 457.2 . K 585 2022 (print) | LCC E 457.2 (ebook) | DDC 973.7092 [ B ]dc23/eng/20220513

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016204

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016205

We are very grateful for the kind and generous support that we have received during the long life of this project. We thank the staff at the University of Illinois Press for their hard work and assistance. We appreciate the series editors, Douglas Wilson and the late Rodney Davis, for their early encouragement, steadfast support, and for generously sharing their files at the Lincoln Studies Center. We appreciate the support of Knox College, Northern Illinois University, and the University of Cincinnati: Provosts Kai Campbell and Michael Schneider of Knox College; NIU Provost and current President Lisa Freeman; and Krista Sigler, chair of the History Department at UC Blue Ash College. We appreciate the assistance of Joel Ward; and all the work-study students at Northern Illinois University and Knox College. Librarians from many institutions have been of invaluable assistance, particularly Jeff Douglas of the Henry M. Seymour Library at Knox College, the interlibrary loan staff at the University of Cincinnati Libraries, and a special thanks to Laurie Sauer, reference librarian extraordinaire at Seymour Library and compiler of the index.

This book is dedicated to our families, especially Heather Norman, Terry Lee Hord, and the Hord and White children and grandchildren.

AANB: Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. 2nd ed. 12 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

ANB: John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds. American National Biography. 24 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Collected Works: Roy P. Basler, ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. 9 vols. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 19531955.

DANB: Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, eds. Dictionary of American Negro Biography. New York: Norton, 1982.

Lincoln Papers: Lincoln, Abraham. Abraham Lincoln Papers. Series 14, spanning the years 17741948. Manuscript/mixed material. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/collections/abraham-lincoln-papers/.

Knowing Him by Heart

INTRODUCTION

Langston Hughes, celebrated African American poet in the Harlem Renaissance and beyond, began to compose poetry when he was attending Lincoln Central School in Lincoln, Illinois. Later, as a student at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania during the mid-1920s, the new Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, served as the inspiration for a poem in which he proposed to go see Old Abe/Sitting in the marble and moonlight. Although Daniel Chester Frenchs sculpture of Lincoln would remain Quiet for a million, million years, Hughes could still hear Lincolns voice forever/Against the/Timeless walls/Of time. As the words chiseled above Frenchs sculpture assert, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever in both Henry Bacons Greek temple and in the hearts of the people. Hughess Lincoln Monument: Washington attests to the deeply profound symbolic significance of Abraham Lincoln. He continues to speak and has a special place in the hearts of Black people long after his death. While Hughes does not reveal what Lincoln said to him, this anthology provides an opportunity to see Lincoln reflected in the voices of African Americans. Whether they actually saw him and heard him or he only resided in their hearts and minds, these voices, like the voice Hughes heard at the Lincoln Memorial, reverberate and reveal a different type of monument to the sixteenth president.

In his seminal book, Lincoln and the Negro, Benjamin Quarles suggested that Lincoln became Lincoln because of the Negro, and he quoted a revealing statement from Frederick Douglass regarding the primacy of Lincolns place in the consciousness of African Americans that serves as a central theme of this anthology: We all know Lincoln by heart. The documents in this collection enable readers to interrogate Quarless conclusion and Douglasss statement, as these sources provide an opportunity to view the scaffolding of a monument to Lincoln that has been constructed from words rather than marble or bronze. Beginning in the late 1850s, when African Americans first took serious notice of Lincoln, to the 1920s when Lincoln helped inspire Langston Hughes, to the most recent example of President Barack Obama, the architecture of this monument is fluid, complex, and wide-ranging. Far from being a monolith, the voices collected here offer a variety of African American responses to Lincoln. Assembling these voices has been a task of excavation, for while some of the contributors will be familiar, others may not. Recovering forgotten voices and including them with the better-known serves to demonstrate not only the breadth and depth of feelings on Lincoln but also provides a unique opportunity to examine the critical role that African Americans have played in shaping Lincolns place in our collective memory. A work that spans one hundred and fifty years and contains a diverse array of contributions further facilitates an exploration of how perceptions of Lincoln remained consistent or shifted as time passed, circumstances changed, and analyses proliferated, and to understand why.

While African Americans initially viewed Lincoln with skepticism and were quite critical of his views on racial equality and his willingness to prioritize the preservation of the Union over the abolition of slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation elevated him to a special place in many of their hearts. The words that comprise this edifice suggest that Lincolns status as a venerated symbol has weighed heavily on both the hearts and minds of African Americans as they struggled with the various meanings and consequences of emancipation. Some voices uncritically praised Father Abraham as their savior and were willing to overlook the limitations of the Emancipation Proclamation, yet others were more circumspect. This persistent ambivalence indicates an intricately evolving historical tension between apprehending Lincoln by heart and by head. In speeches, essays, books, editorials, sermons, poems, and other forms of expression, African American commentaries on Lincoln reflect a variety of hopes, fears, aspirations, frustrations, memories, and assessments. Whether they viewed him as the heroic Great Emancipator, a reluctant emancipator, an anti-Black racist, vacillating, or just big enough to be inconsistent, African Americans have grappled with Lincolns legacy and expressed a complex, nonlinear array of thoughts and feelings about him. Black responses to Lincoln reveal, in part, incongruity between a sense of African American agency in securing their freedom and the image of Lincoln as a messiah who bestowed emancipation as a gift to passive, but grateful recipients. As the Civil War receded into history and memory, faltering progress toward full equality and a growing sense of self-determination affected how many African Americans understood and assessed Lincoln.