Speaker 1: I often ask this when I lecture on Lincoln. I
Speaker 1: lecture on the Civil War. What if you go to
Speaker 1: do research on the Civil War? What's the name? What's
Speaker 1: the official name of the Civil And I got a
Speaker 1: lot of studs here in the audience. I want one
Speaker 1: of my past failed students who are in senior year.
Speaker 1: A Science of Happiness, Appreciating Condern Painting, dilemmas of modern Medica,
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, the artistic genius of
Speaker 1: michel Angelo, when intuition, American Psychology of Religion, One Day University.
Speaker 1: The most acclaimed and popular professors from top colleges. They're
Speaker 1: best lectures, fascinating conversations. Hi, I'm Richard Davies. Let's learn
Speaker 1: what's what's the name of the war? Yeah, I see,
Speaker 1: you're all good. You're all good. It's the War of
Speaker 1: the Rebellion if success. I'm Lou Majorum, Distinguished Professor of
Speaker 1: American Studies in History at Rutgers University. I lecture on
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln. What's fact and what's fiction? You're a rebel.
Speaker 1: When I gave a lecture on Lincoln in Atlanta, they
Speaker 1: all said, it's the War of Northern aggression. I said,
Speaker 1: absolutely right, absolutely right, make no mistake about it. What
Speaker 1: do we get wrong about him? Is there one thing
Speaker 1: above others that we make a big mistake when we
Speaker 1: think of Lincoln. Lincoln is is so complicated in so
Speaker 1: many ways, and of course he's politicized. So when you
Speaker 1: ask what do we get wrong about him? It depends
Speaker 1: on on on your point of view. Right, the biggest
Speaker 1: question has always been, of course, Lincoln and slavery, Lincoln
Speaker 1: and emancipation. The people who believe that he truly is
Speaker 1: the great emancipator who freed the slaves, and the people
Speaker 1: who cherry pick from other things that he said to
Speaker 1: indicate that he was a racist who didn't really care
Speaker 1: about slavery, who didn't free the slaves. So you start
Speaker 1: there air and you can move into all kinds of
Speaker 1: different questions because history is about interpretation. We we we
Speaker 1: try to know the facts the best that we can,
Speaker 1: but ultimately it's our job to turn facts into truths.
Speaker 1: And so the truths of Lincoln, Uh, you're gonna have
Speaker 1: different people disagreeing upon. Take, for example, the issue of
Speaker 1: Lincoln and slavery. Lincoln was always against slavery, he said
Speaker 1: I'm naturally anti slavery. I can't recall a place at
Speaker 1: a time when I did not think and feel so.
Speaker 1: But he wasn't always an abolitionist. He wasn't always committed
Speaker 1: to freeing the slaves. So the question then becomes when
Speaker 1: you ask what's fact and what's fiction? Well, was he
Speaker 1: against slavery? Was he not against slavery? Did he free
Speaker 1: the slaves? Did he not free the slaves? A lot
Speaker 1: depends on how you frame the question, the answer that
Speaker 1: one gets. He had a very different policy view on
Speaker 1: slavery when he started as president, then a couple of
Speaker 1: years later he's always against slavery, but he can't act
Speaker 1: against slavery when he becomes president, even if he wanted to.
Speaker 1: Slavery is a state institution protected by state laws. The
Speaker 1: federal government has no power of slavery, and if you're
Speaker 1: a Southern Unionist who owned slaves, you're still entitled to
Speaker 1: your property. He has two generals early in the war,
Speaker 1: General Hunter and General Fremont, who issue military orders freeing
Speaker 1: the slaves in their areas. And what does Lincoln do.
Speaker 1: He immediately revokes those orders, and people go apoplectic. Those
Speaker 1: on the left, I mean the anti slavery abolitionists crowd.
Speaker 1: Lincoln says, if there is a power to act against slavery,
Speaker 1: it is vested in me as commander in chief, and
Speaker 1: not in any of my generals. This is the thing
Speaker 1: about Lincoln. This is where people get so confused on
Speaker 1: the subject of Lincoln and slavery. Why couldn't the act
Speaker 1: against slavery He didn't have the power to do so.
Speaker 1: Lincoln time and again said that I cannot act against slavery.
Speaker 1: I will not act against slavery. He said it leading
Speaker 1: up to the Civil War to try and reassure those
Speaker 1: Southern states that they had nothing to worry about with
Speaker 1: him being elected president. They didn't believe that. In eleven
Speaker 1: of them succeeded. But he does not cannot even if
Speaker 1: he wanted to abolish slavery at the beginning of the war.
Speaker 1: So the question then becomes, how do we get from
Speaker 1: March of eighteen sixty one, when he says I can't
Speaker 1: do anything against slavery to January one, eighteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: when he issues an emancipation proclamation freeing the slaves. That
Speaker 1: is the story of Lincoln and slavery. How radical was
Speaker 1: the Emancipation Proclamation. Frederick Douglas, the great abolitionist, said the
Speaker 1: Emancipation Proclamation stood next to the Decoration of Independence as
Speaker 1: one of the two pole stars of liberty in America
Speaker 1: at the time. P but recognized it to be the
Speaker 1: most significant document since the Declaration. It has lost some
Speaker 1: of its luster over time. That's another subject, perhaps, and
Speaker 1: another story about reputation, about how the past gets viewed
Speaker 1: through the prism of the present. But to think that
Speaker 1: in a nation that had embraced slavery, he issued a
Speaker 1: document that freed the majority of slaves is remarkable. What
Speaker 1: a lot of people don't understand about the document is
Speaker 1: it does something else that's even more radical. It authorizes
Speaker 1: the enlistment of black soldiers in the U. S. Army.
Speaker 1: Think about that, We're not only going to free the slaves,
Speaker 1: We're going to put guns in their hands and send
Speaker 1: them back South to fight for the Union. So it
Speaker 1: was a one two punch that was profound, and at
Speaker 1: the moment seemed that it would shift the balance of
Speaker 1: the war. The question should be not what took them
Speaker 1: so long to do it, but how unbelievable it is
Speaker 1: that he did and he did it gradually, as was
Speaker 1: his want. So Lincoln takes these steps, and he does
Speaker 1: so under the doctrine of military necessity. And you can
Speaker 1: watch again, it's an intellectual problem, as much of his is.
Speaker 1: It's any other kind of problem. Okay, how do we
Speaker 1: get from it's illegal down constitutional free to slaves too?
Speaker 1: I have the legal, constitutional right to do so. And
Speaker 1: the answer is as a as a necessary means of war,
Speaker 1: as a way to promote the military effort. Now, the
Speaker 1: slaves themselves are not all quite impassive in all of this. Right,
Speaker 1: the enslaved runaway delivered themselves to Union lines and also
Speaker 1: forced Lincoln to consider this. He says in July, the
Speaker 1: pressure upon me in this direction is great, Lincoln. I so,
Speaker 1: you know. So it's not just that Lincoln acts. Lincoln reacts.
Speaker 1: The famous line of Lincoln's that I cannot claim to
Speaker 1: have controlled events, but I have been controlled by them.
Speaker 1: How did Lincoln's views about the slaves change over the
Speaker 1: years of his presidency. Well, if you think about the
Speaker 1: problem of race in America, race and the question of
Speaker 1: race continues to bedevil the nation in a variety of
Speaker 1: different ways. Now, if you think back to the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: what are we going to do with these free blacks?
Speaker 1: That literally was the question that was asked. If the
Speaker 1: slaves are freed, what are we going to do with them?
Speaker 1: The question is not always posed that way, but it
Speaker 1: has to be posed that way because that's the way
Speaker 1: in which they thought about the problem. For them, the
Speaker 1: problem with slavery was not only yeah, slavery is wrong,
Speaker 1: it's immoral, it's illegal, it's unconstitution We should abolish the slaves.
Speaker 1: But then there's a second question. Four million formally enslaved
Speaker 1: persons now free, what are we gonna do? And a
Speaker 1: lot of that is to understand the racialist ideology of
Speaker 1: the day, which varies in terms of where you want
Speaker 1: to go on the spectrum of quote unquote racism. You know,
Speaker 1: there's actually a paternalistic, benevolent racism and it goes like this.
Speaker 1: And this isn't to justify it. But if we're gonna
Speaker 1: be historians, we have to think the way in which
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century thought and not necessarily impose some of
Speaker 1: our own ideas upon them. Well, if you thought slavery
Speaker 1: was such a total institution of barbaric, horrible damage, institution
Speaker 1: that deprived individuals of any idea of humanity, then any
Speaker 1: theory of personality means you have one of two types
Speaker 1: coming out of it. Either the enslaved are made to
Speaker 1: be so docile and childlike and infantilize that they can
Speaker 1: possibly function for themselves and take on the responsibilities of adulthood.
Speaker 1: Or they have been made so savage, so barbarous that
Speaker 1: the result is going to be bloodshed, that they're going
Speaker 1: to exact revenge on their former masters. So what do
Speaker 1: we do? And here's a classic example of Lincoln changing
Speaker 1: his mind. Lincoln, like many Americans, believed they can't live
Speaker 1: peaceably side by side with whites, so they believed in colonization.
Speaker 1: You know we're gonna do. We're going to get them
Speaker 1: voluntarily to emigrate out of the country. And Lincoln supported this. Indeed,
Speaker 1: he was a sucker for every colonization scheme that came
Speaker 1: his way because he believed that this was a solution
Speaker 1: to what we might call the race problem in America.
Speaker 1: African Americans didn't want that. Black said, no, we're Americans.
Speaker 1: We don't want to go to Liberia. That's one of
Speaker 1: the first countries founded as a colony for former blacks
Speaker 1: in America. We want to stay. And over time Lincoln
Speaker 1: comes to understand that that's right, that that not only
Speaker 1: should slavery be ended, but we must find the way
Speaker 1: for the black citizens of America to obtain their full
Speaker 1: rights as citizens within this country. He goes so far
Speaker 1: as to not only abandoned colonization, but in the very
Speaker 1: last speech that he gives on April eleventh, eighteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: he endorses black suffrage. We're talking about the evolution of
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln as president and commander in chief. So in
Speaker 1: that last speech, among other things, he says that he
Speaker 1: supports black suffrage for educated blacks and those who served.
Speaker 1: Think about that. Shockingly, the right to vote today is
Speaker 1: still contested. Think about what it meant to give the
Speaker 1: vote to black men in eighteen sixty but Lincoln was
Speaker 1: prepared to do so. This is a man who eleven
Speaker 1: years earlier didn't even know they deserve political and social equality.
Speaker 1: John Wokes Booth is among the crowd who hears Lincoln
Speaker 1: deliver that speech, and he turns to his co conspirator,
Speaker 1: Louis Pale, and he says, that's the last speech he'll
Speaker 1: ever give. And we don't often think of Lincoln as
Speaker 1: a martyr to civil rights, but to the stent that
Speaker 1: while the conspiracy was in motion, it's that speech and
Speaker 1: the endorsement of black suffrage that immediately led Booth three
Speaker 1: days later to assassinate Lincoln. That's important to remember. So
Speaker 1: we have this man, Abraham Lincoln, who starts out, I'm
Speaker 1: not so sure about whites and blacks being equal, certainly
Speaker 1: not certain that blacks should live in this country, against slavery,
Speaker 1: but not willing really to act against slavery. Doesn't have
Speaker 1: the power to do it. And where do we end up.
Speaker 1: We end up with this man who not only frees
Speaker 1: the slaves, but he believes that you have to give
Speaker 1: black men the right to vote so that they could
Speaker 1: be full citizens of the nation. That's greatness. There's a
Speaker 1: lovely moment in your lecture when you talk about Lincoln
Speaker 1: growing a beard. It's fabulous story. It's one of the
Speaker 1: many great Lincoln stories. He he grows it in response
Speaker 1: to a letter that he gets after he was elected.
Speaker 1: Around the time of his election, what did he do
Speaker 1: he grew here? He seems to do so in response
Speaker 1: to a letter that he gets from an eleven year
Speaker 1: old girl named Grace Biddell Grace writes them a letter
Speaker 1: in October eighteen sixty and says, I've got four brothers,
Speaker 1: and part of them will vote for you anyway. If
Speaker 1: you will let your whiskers grow and I will try
Speaker 1: and get the rest of them to vote for you,
Speaker 1: you would look a great deal better. For your face
Speaker 1: is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers, and they
Speaker 1: would tease their husbands to vote for you, and then
Speaker 1: you would be president. My father is going to vote
Speaker 1: for you, and if I was a man, I would
Speaker 1: vote for you too. But I will try and get
Speaker 1: everyone to vote for you that I can. Remarkable letter
Speaker 1: from an eleven year old girl, and it's just beautiful.
Speaker 1: Of course, it captures some other fundamental truth about Lincoln.
Speaker 1: And that's how weird looking he was for the times.
Speaker 1: He was awkward. He was downright ugly, and he knew it.
Speaker 1: He's constantly making references to his appearance. Anyone who ever
Speaker 1: saw Lincoln jotted something down about how he looks. What Whitman,
Speaker 1: the great poet, was working in Armory Hospital, he used
Speaker 1: to see Lincoln coming and going. He writes a letter
Speaker 1: to his mother where he says, I see the president
Speaker 1: every day. He is like a who'sier Michaelangelo? So awful, ugly,
Speaker 1: he's almost beautiful. So and now here you have this
Speaker 1: eleven year old girl also saying, you know, I think
Speaker 1: you look better with a beard. What's remarkable because Lincoln responds,
Speaker 1: and he responds as if she's a constituent, and he
Speaker 1: he says, thank you for your consideration, and indeed he
Speaker 1: goes ahead and grows the beard. I also argue in
Speaker 1: my lecture that the beard is in effect also his
Speaker 1: war beard. It's grown between his election and his inauguration.
Speaker 1: He's preparing for the cataclysmic conflict that seems to be
Speaker 1: coming on the horizon. Did he, above most other men
Speaker 1: of his time feel deeply about the importance of preserving
Speaker 1: the Union? Right from the get go, preserving the Union
Speaker 1: was everything to Lincoln. Time and again he talked about
Speaker 1: the Union. He in fact creates in some ways the
Speaker 1: cult of Union. In his inaugural address, he talks about
Speaker 1: the perpetuity of the Union. He countered every chance he
Speaker 1: could the argument being made by the secessionists that it's
Speaker 1: the states that had ultimate authority. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: Lincoln said, the federal government, the Union that's what had
Speaker 1: ultimate authority, and that no one had a right to
Speaker 1: leave the union. You could do all kinds of things.
Speaker 1: If you're unhappy with the election of the president, you
Speaker 1: can wait four years and vote amount of office. You
Speaker 1: can try and organize a constitutional convention to change the
Speaker 1: frame of government. There are many things that you could do.
Speaker 1: What you can't do is leave. Lincoln articulates this critical
Speaker 1: legal constitutional doctrine of the illegality of secession. That's what
Speaker 1: he's spending his time doing. Is, of course a lawyer.
Speaker 1: He's done a tremendous amount of research. He argues that
Speaker 1: secession is an ingenious saphis m. Those are his words.
Speaker 1: He says, it is the essence of anarchy. You cannot
Speaker 1: have a government in which there's a constitutional right to secession.
Speaker 1: Lincoln said, nonsense. The compact theory of government does not
Speaker 1: mean states take precedence over the federal government. Cannot be done.
Speaker 1: The nation exists before the state. And there are many
Speaker 1: parts of Lincoln's greatness. Part of course, of his greatness
Speaker 1: is his ability to argue and sustain an argument for
Speaker 1: the nation the union in predominance over the state, and
Speaker 1: his defense of the union. His articulation of that is
Speaker 1: one of the great contributions to our history. That's the
Speaker 1: meeting of the Gettysburg Address four score and seven years ago.
Speaker 1: Our fathers came forth to create a new nation. That
Speaker 1: word nation. The address is a little over two words.
Speaker 1: He uses the word nation five times. That's what Lincoln
Speaker 1: believed in, right, those mystic chords of memory that he
Speaker 1: spoke about, and that's what he defended, and that's ultimately
Speaker 1: what he preserved. His refusal to allow the Union to
Speaker 1: be lost is what kept this country together. Do you
Speaker 1: think that without Lincoln the United States would have split
Speaker 1: apart and remained split in a much more fundamental way
Speaker 1: than it is today. Counter Factuals and hypotheticals are always
Speaker 1: difficult for historians to answer. Are generally we try to
Speaker 1: avoid answering them because you just can never know. But
Speaker 1: I think there's a strong likelihood, with out Lincoln's leadership,
Speaker 1: his determination, his skills, and a lot of luck, that
Speaker 1: indeed the strength of states rights, the strength of secession
Speaker 1: may very well have led to the fracturing and breaking
Speaker 1: up of this nation into into two nations or more.
Speaker 1: It's worth noting that those questions are still alive right there.
Speaker 1: You know, the state of California today is threatening to
Speaker 1: succeed in California is one of the world's largest economies.
Speaker 1: Are questions of states rights haven't gone away? Although I
Speaker 1: do think the commonplaces to say this. Before the Civil War,
Speaker 1: the United States was plural. After the Civil War, it's singular.
Speaker 1: Lincoln was one of the driving forces to help make that.
Speaker 1: So you said that the greatest thing about Abraham Lincoln
Speaker 1: may well have been that he changed his mind. Why
Speaker 1: is that so important? You know? I tend to try
Speaker 1: not to talk about as it matters when I lecture
Speaker 1: about the past. But I think we need only look
Speaker 1: around at the state of politics today on all sides
Speaker 1: of the political spectrum. This is a nonpartisan comment about
Speaker 1: the rigidity, about the ways in which positions become ossified,
Speaker 1: about the ways in which it seems that discourse is
Speaker 1: limited and people refuse to move in any direction. For me,
Speaker 1: it makes my admiration of Lincoln all the greater. How
Speaker 1: did this man born in poverty, self educated? How did
Speaker 1: he come to represent this ability and this willingness to
Speaker 1: think through things and to change his mind over time?
Speaker 1: I'll give you two diametrically opposed quotes from Lincoln to
Speaker 1: show you how he changed his mind during the war.
Speaker 1: August Lincoln told delegates from Indiana, who offered to raise
Speaker 1: two black regiments, quote, the nation couldnt afford to lose
Speaker 1: Kentucky at this crisis, and to arm the Negroes would
Speaker 1: turn fifty thousand bayonets from the loyal border states against
Speaker 1: US that were for US. August two. Not doing it.
Speaker 1: Here we go January one, weeks after. The colored population
Speaker 1: is the great available and yet unavailable force for restoring
Speaker 1: the Union. The bare site of fifty thousand armed and
Speaker 1: drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi would
Speaker 1: end the rebellion at once. And who doubts that we
Speaker 1: could present that site if we but take hold of
Speaker 1: it in earnest? Is that wonderful? I think ultimately that's
Speaker 1: the measure of a great political leader, change over time.
Speaker 1: It is a remarkable phenomenon to study and to witness.
Speaker 1: And I'm not alone in doing that, you know, I
Speaker 1: often in my lecture quote W. E. B. Du Bois,
Speaker 1: the great African American IT or historian activists, founder the
Speaker 1: Double A CP. The boys thought a lot about Lincoln
Speaker 1: at the time of the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial,
Speaker 1: and one of the things that he said about him,
Speaker 1: he said, I love him not because he was perfect,
Speaker 1: but because he wasn't, and yet he triumphed. That's the
Speaker 1: thing about Lincoln. We could see all the ways in
Speaker 1: which he wasn't perfect. We could see all the ways
Speaker 1: in which he was a bundle of contradictions. We can
Speaker 1: see all the ways in which he struggled in his
Speaker 1: own time. But in the end he triumphed, and because
Speaker 1: of his triumph, this nation continues. What do you hope
Speaker 1: that audiences will take away from this lecture? My deepest
Speaker 1: hope for what audiences will take away from this lecture
Speaker 1: is to understand that all of us today can still
Speaker 1: become some better version of ourselves, because I think the
Speaker 1: genius of Lincoln is that he was always becoming, He
Speaker 1: was always changing. He didn't start out as Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 1: He became Abraham Lincoln. And what that means is any
Speaker 1: of us can also become the thing that we most
Speaker 1: hope we want to be. So in that sense, to
Speaker 1: see Lincoln, yes, it's to understand the past, is to
Speaker 1: understand a seminal figure without whom this nation would be
Speaker 1: fundamentally different. But the best of history also allows us
Speaker 1: to understand something about ourselves. I'm Richard Davis. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Sign up on our website one day you dot com
Speaker 1: to become a member and access over six hundred full
Speaker 1: length video lectures for the world's finest professorsh