Abraham Lincoln: Saint or Sinner?


Abraham Lincoln: Saint or Sinner?

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Abraham Lincoln is the most celebrated figure in American history.

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His assassination almost 150 years ago transformed him from a mere politician

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into America's national saint.

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It's the original martyrdom. It's Lincoln dying for the nation's sins.

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He dies in the moment of his triumph

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on Good Friday in a Christian country.

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I mean, God, who wrote that script?

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To most Americans, he's the president who saved the Union,

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an everyman from the Kentucky backwoods who rose from poverty to become president,

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living out the American dream.

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He's all that Americans think the nation should be,

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and so consequently we've become infatuated with him.

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To African Americans, Lincoln will always be the Great Emancipator,

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the man who freed the slaves,

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thereby placing equality alongside liberty as one of those truths

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that Americans hold as self-evident.

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And for almost all Americans, particularly those in the North,

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he's the leader who guided the nation through the trauma of the Civil War,

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perhaps the central event in the country's history.

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But today, as America marks the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's presidency,

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an historic battle is being waged for the reputation of America's 16th president.

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Everything everybody's told me about Abraham Lincoln is a lie.

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Everything I learned in school, everything I learned in church,

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everything I learned from newspapers,

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everything I learned from the radio, everything I've learned about Abraham Lincoln is a lie.

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This struggle has unearthed another Abraham Lincoln.

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This Lincoln is a politician rather than a statesman...

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So much of the literature on Lincoln is just complete hero worship.

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..a calculating pragmatist rather than a visionary...

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He is not the Great Emancipator

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if you look just a teeny bit under...

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under the surface.

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..and a war criminal rather than a war leader.

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Here is the man who waged war on, in his view, his own people.

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He is responsible for 650,000 deaths. Please.

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Lincoln's critics claim that he plunged the nation into an unnecessary war

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and that generations of historians have conspired to hide the fact that the Great Emancipator

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was in reality a racist who planned to deport the slaves out of America.

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For good reason, the people of the South have mourned...

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This reassessment of America's greatest hero

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is conjuring up the ghosts of America's troubled history...

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This war over culture and remembrance is even bigger

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than Confederate heritage. It's about America.

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..while at the same time, it's feeding into the divisions

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that are drawing modern Americans further apart.

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And we're not going to take it any more!

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This is the story of America's struggle

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to discover the real Abraham Lincoln.

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Abraham Lincoln's last moments were spent here in the Petersen House,

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a cheap boarding house opposite the Washington theatre

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where he'd been struck down by an assassin's bullet.

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There were people with Lincoln who say, "We cannot allow him to die in a theatre."

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He's placed diagonally on a small bed - he's so tall he can't fit lengthwise on the bed.

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And there he spends the next nine hours, his breathing ever more laboured.

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He was oozing brain matter on his pillow

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and whenever his wife was brought in,

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they would put a handkerchief over that part of the pillow

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so she wouldn't be too upset.

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Out of that house, he emerges as his body is carried

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in the spring rain the next morning

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to the hearse that takes him back to the White House.

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He leaves, not the person he was when he was carried inside,

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he is now a national treasure, a national saint,

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a secular saint and a religious saint in many ways.

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And that's why images almost overnight begin appearing,

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showing not only the assassination,

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not only his dying moments in the grandest possible exaggerated way,

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but literally images showing him rising into heaven,

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where he's often greeted by his great hero, George Washington.

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Here is the father and the saviour - it's almost like God and the Son.

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# Glory, glory, hallelujah

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# His God is

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# Marching on. #

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From the moment of his death,

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the real Abraham Lincoln has been obscured

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behind the almost religious cult that still surrounds him.

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The tragic nature of that death

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and its timing, at the very end of America's Civil War, created a myth

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that has placed Lincoln outside of history and almost beyond rational debate.

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You have to remember he dies right at this perfect moment.

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He's assassinated a few days after the surrender of Lee's army,

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after this horrifying bloodletting

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from which now the Republic that is nearly destroyed can now survive.

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I mean, you couldn't write a better script in some ways for the epic inside of us.

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Today, that epic story of Lincoln's life and death

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stands at the heart of American culture.

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His image is everywhere.

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It's on the five dollar bill,

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it's on the coins that you carry in your pocket, there's billboards.

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My 18-month-old daughter has a little stuffed Abraham Lincoln

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and she could say "Dadda" and "Momma"

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and not too much later she could say "Abe Lincoln".

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The homes Lincoln lived in have all been lovingly restored.

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There are literally hundreds of statues of him peppered across the nation

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and his hometown of Springfield, Illinois

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has become the centre of a national Lincoln tourist industry.

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Lincoln is a church, he's a religion.

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Lincoln is a million-dollar industry,

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a 100 million industry,

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and you get thousands of people all over this country who make their living

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pushing the Lincoln message.

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May I present to you the president of the United States, Mr Abraham Lincoln.

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Good afternoon, everyone. Oh, please, be seated.

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'There is a Lincoln industry in this country, no question about it,'

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and there are large numbers of people who make their living

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impersonating Lincoln.

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She said, "Well, thank you, honest Abe, for your response."

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'I think second only to Elvis impersonators, probably.

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'There aren't too many American presidents you could make a living dressing up as

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'but they go to events, they go to schools, they open shopping malls.

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'Lincoln is the only American president

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'memorialised at Disneyland,

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'so Lincoln is certainly part of our popular culture

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'in a way that very few other presidents are.'

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The aspect of the Lincoln myth which has always appealed most

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to generations of American biographers and filmmakers

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is the story of how the young Lincoln overcame the hardships of his upbringing.

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Lincoln grew up on the frontier. He was born in Kentucky

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at a time when that was really a frontier state.

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This was real backwoods territory - there were wild animals in the woods,

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there were very few neighbours except some members of his family.

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The transportation was extremely primitive and they basically were self-sufficient.

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He is, in a way, from nowhere.

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There were ten million other sons of dirt farmers who remained dirt farmers.

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This guy didn't.

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This is this consummate American story.

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He wanted books, he wanted something bigger, he wanted off of that farm.

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Now, that's the story of so many millions of Americans

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from the 19th into the 20th century,

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as we became industrialised, urbanised, and cosmopolitanised.

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This is deep, deep in our culture that we are a place where a person

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from a dirt farm with virtually no formal education

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can rise and attain the highest office in the land.

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At the age of 19, Lincoln left his father's farm

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and made his way to what was then the frontier state of Illinois.

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A young man without money or connections, the route Lincoln took

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out of poverty was to run for office as a member of the State Legislature.

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Politics was a mode of social advancement.

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Politics in the 1830s and '40s was a way for people of modest backgrounds like Lincoln

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to rise in the social scale.

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It was a way to make connections. It was a way to influence the world around you, of course,

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but at a time when there weren't that many professions open to people,

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politics was one that anybody could get ahead in if they had drive,

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if they had the right personality, the right ability to communicate their ideas.

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Politics transformed Lincoln's life.

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By the early 1850s, the young, poorly-educated frontiersmen was long gone.

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Lincoln had become a wealthy man.

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He'd held office four times, been a congressman in Washington DC,

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and between terms of office, he trained as a lawyer.

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And as Lincoln's horizons had spread...

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..so had those of his nation, as America's great drive westwards had begun.

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Most people had a sense of the American West that was essentially infinite -

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they didn't know where it ended. They knew there were deserts and great plains,

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they knew there were mountains,

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but it was the sheer vastness of that West

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that gave everybody a sense of limitlessness and future and hope.

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The annexation of Texas and war with Mexico in the 1840s

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had opened up the West,

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raising the possibility of the nation advancing all the way to the Pacific coast.

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There's this continental mentality, sometimes called manifest destiny,

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this idea that American expansion is just ordained by God, you know,

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that we will dominate this entire continent and that is the divine will,

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and that creates this kind of ebullient spirit of expansionism.

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But westward expansion brought to the fore

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the issue that had divided the country ever since Independence - slavery.

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By the middle of the 19th century, a fault line ran across America,

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dividing the slave-owning South from the free states in the North

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where the practice had ended.

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But year by year, the increasing value of Southern cotton

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and the thought of the even larger fortunes it could generate if slavery were to spread West

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slowly undermined the sense of union that bound the states together.

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Not only is slavery growing

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in the American South in the 1820s, '30s, and '40s in leaps and bounds -

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I mean, the American slave population doubled in 25 years

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between 1820 and the mid-1840s.

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By the 1850s, slavery became,

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slaves became the single greatest economic asset

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in the entire American economy.

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It was the engine of wealth for the American South, and frankly for a good deal of the American North,

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especially the banking system in New York and other cities.

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At that point, you had a nation growing in leaps and bounds,

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had a sense of its infinite boundlessness,

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but also a sense of great anxiety and great dread

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of what on earth are they going to do about this problem.

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The figure who was to do most to tip America into crisis

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was the man who was also to become Abraham Lincoln's political nemesis.

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Stephen A Douglas,

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a Democrat from Lincoln's home state of Illinois, introduced in 1854

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a clause that would allow slavery to spread

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into the new Western states of Kansas and Nebraska.

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To oppose this, a new political party was formed in the North,

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the Republicans,

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and Abraham Lincoln abandoned his legal career to join them.

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The Republican Party started

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under the premise that slavery should not be expanded.

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They weren't abolitionists per se, some of them were,

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but many of them were not abolitionists,

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they were anti-slavery men.

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And what that meant was that they expected slavery to die a natural death

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but in order to do that, in order for that to happen, slavery had to be contained.

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And so the idea was you don't let it expand into the Western Territories.

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This new coalition is a coalition of Northerners

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who are absolute believers

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in this idea of a free-labour American dream,

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of their right to go West and get themselves 20 acres of land somewhere,

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or 40 acres, or whatever they could get and not have to compete with the slave labour system.

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Lincoln's political life, Lincoln's political career in the 1850s

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was built on this question of stopping

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the expansion of slavery into the West,

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or what the Republicans called the free soil persuasion.

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The Republican Party, in which Abraham Lincoln fast became a leading light,

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regarded the expansion of slavery as a direct threat to their free soil ideology.

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But although the enemy of slavery, they were no friend of the slave.

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You could be anti-slavery AND anti-black.

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You could be anti-slavery and not want black people around.

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And much of the anti-slavery fervour

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was, "We don't want them around."

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Partly, it was,

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"We don't want them around because they're alien people, they're different,

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"they're inferior," et cetera, et cetera,

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but there was also, "We don't want them around

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"because they're not paid and they're very bad for wages."

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Difficult as it is to believe,

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many, many Northerners separated out

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the question of slavery from the question of race.

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In other words, there are many reasons to oppose slavery which have nothing to do with race.

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If slavery moves out into the Western Territories, whites are not going to want to go there.

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The slave owners will absorb all the good land. They don't want to compete with slave labour.

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They don't want blacks around. There are all these reasons why whites in the North will say,

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"I don't care about slavery in Mississippi, but I don't want it expanding into Kansas

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"where I or my son may move out there to get a farm, to get a job."

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Lincoln's own impoverished upbringing had demonstrated to him what happened

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when free white labour was set in competition against slavery.

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Lincoln's father moves from Kentucky,

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crosses the Ohio River into Indiana,

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in part because Kentucky is a slave state and Indiana is a free state,

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and slavery limits the potential of the white labour to enjoy the fruits of his labour.

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How could a small labourer compete in an agricultural market

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with a slaveholder who has a gang of slaves doing labour for no wage whatsoever?

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Lincoln understood the damage that slavery did from that perspective,

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and says so, talks about the fact that the Territories should exist

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for these free white men who need a chance to rise as well.

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From 1854 onwards, Abraham Lincoln campaigned against

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the expansion of slavery into the Western Territories,

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but the man who a decade later was to sweep away the whole slave system

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did not call for the abolition of slavery where it already existed in the South.

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So why was it that, when so many white Americans were mobilising to abolish slavery,

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the Great Emancipator appeared to stand on the sidelines?

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The generation from 1830 to 1860

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was perhaps one of the greatest generations of white people we've had in this country.

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They were very much like

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the Civil Rights generation of the 1960s and 1970s.

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They marched,

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they organised against slavery, they organised in the churches.

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They staged sit-ins, they refused to capture fugitive slaves,

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and they prepared the ground which made it possible...

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..for emancipation to triumph.

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Lincoln did absolutely nothing.

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Although never an abolitionist, Lincoln, a man who had been exposed

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to slavery since childhood, was opposed to the Southern slave system.

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Yet the Great Emancipator of the 1860s spent the 1850s

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convinced that the political system made abolition impossible.

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On the one hand, he always says, "This is a moral question ultimately."

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He's like an abolitionist in that he says,

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"I am morally opposed to slavery, that's the bottom line here."

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On the other hand, as a lawyer, as a politician, he says,

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"There's not much we can do about slavery, it's in the Constitution.

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"It's up to the Southern states to deal with it."

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He understands there is not much you can do about slavery within the political system.

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In America's federal system,

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it was the individual states and not the national government in Washington

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that had the power to determine the future of slavery.

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But in the party politics of the 1850s,

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opposing slavery, if only in principle,

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was potentially enough to destroy Lincoln's political career.

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In 1858, Lincoln stood for Congress against his old opponent Stephen Douglas.

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The campaign centred on a series of now-famous debates.

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In the city of Charleston, Douglas suggested that Lincoln's opposition

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to slavery meant that he was also in favour of racial equality.

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Lincoln responded with words that saved his career, but that haunt his reputation.

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He said, and I'm quoting him,

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that he did not believe that black people

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should have the right to vote.

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He did not believe that blacks

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should have the right to sit on juries.

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He didn't believe that black people should have the right to hold public office.

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He believed that there's a physical difference

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between the white race and the black race

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that will forever make it impossible for them to live together

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on a plain of equality.

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Lincoln is saying things about race and the inferiority of blacks

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that we don't want him to say.

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Now, of course, it's just crucial

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to contextualise those statements.

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I mean, he's being goaded into them by Stephen Douglas,

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who's a shrewd, savvy political veteran

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who knows that his strongest attack

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is to link Lincoln's anti-slavery to some notion of racial equality.

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He's saying that Lincoln is in favour of racial equality, and Lincoln obliges.

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He does that. He does it, I think, for political reasons

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and it doesn't look good to us today,

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but that's the nature of mid-19th century politics.

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He always made a distinction between the morality of slavery,

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which he believed was fundamentally wrong, and the question of racial equality.

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Today that's hard sometimes for us to understand, especially young people,

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who are growing up in a society where the assumption of equality is absolute.

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Of course we're equal, everybody's equal, or we say we are.

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But Lincoln made the distinction between the immorality of slavery,

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unequivocal about that...

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On the other hand, he was no proponent of racial equality.

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And we see that over and over quite publicly

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and quite forcefully that he does not believe in social equality.

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Despite reassuring the electorate,

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Lincoln was unable to defeat Douglas. But the debates made him famous

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and it was this fame that enabled him to seize

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the Republican candidacy for president in 1860.

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Lincoln won just 39% of the vote,

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almost all of his support coming from the North.

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But within weeks of his arrival in Washington,

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the Southern states began, one by one, to secede from the Union.

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They then formed a new nation -

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the Confederate States of America,

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led by the Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis.

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The accusation that has been raised against Abraham Lincoln is that on coming to office,

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he pushed the American people into a disastrous and avoidable conflict.

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There's a school of thought,

0:23:310:23:33

and it's still alive in a certain fringe of American scholarship,

0:23:330:23:37

that the real cause, or immediate cause, of the Civil War was Lincoln.

0:23:370:23:41

Now this argument is basically that Lincoln could have simply gently let

0:23:430:23:49

the South go, that he didn't need to force military action,

0:23:490:23:55

that he could have backed away and continued to compromise,

0:23:550:23:58

that Southerners were willing to compromise on this issue or that issue.

0:23:580:24:02

There is no evidence that the Confederate leadership, Jefferson Davis and his growing Cabinet,

0:24:020:24:07

were truly willing to compromise

0:24:070:24:10

on any part of the expansion of slavery issue or anything else.

0:24:100:24:14

Lincoln did not cause the Civil War.

0:24:160:24:18

What Lincoln did was create a situation where war was possible.

0:24:180:24:23

In other words, he was willing to risk war.

0:24:230:24:26

He put the onus on the Confederacy. They fired the first shot.

0:24:260:24:29

They weren't willing to compromise either.

0:24:290:24:32

While blame for the war might lie with both Lincoln and Jefferson Davis,

0:24:400:24:45

neither side in 1861 foresaw the calamity they were about to unleash.

0:24:450:24:50

No-one in the North or the South could have imagined the kind of war it would be.

0:24:540:24:59

The military leaders on both sides didn't quite understand

0:25:010:25:05

the significance of the technological changes.

0:25:050:25:09

Changes particularly in the technology of the rifle,

0:25:090:25:12

which made it a much more accurate long-distance weapon.

0:25:120:25:15

The war becomes a situation of long-range sharpshooting.

0:25:160:25:21

No-one would have imagined ironclad warfare

0:25:210:25:24

and the terrific combats of the navies.

0:25:240:25:27

The impact of the Industrial Revolution - we are talking about mass production of weaponry,

0:25:290:25:34

telegraph, railroads, bringing troops to the front.

0:25:340:25:37

Certainly no-one understood what kind of masses of armies would be required.

0:25:370:25:43

No-one would have comprehended black recruitment.

0:25:430:25:46

Nobody expected 620,000 deaths, thousands and thousands of injuries,

0:25:470:25:52

and utter destruction in many parts of the country.

0:25:520:25:54

So you might ask if Lincoln and Jefferson Davis had seen 1865,

0:25:540:26:01

would they have compromised in 1861?

0:26:010:26:03

The image of Lincoln that dominates the American consciousness today,

0:26:160:26:20

150 years after the Civil War, is Lincoln as the saviour of the Union.

0:26:200:26:25

Lincoln's role as commander-in-chief is less well remembered.

0:26:280:26:32

Yet hard as it is for some to accept,

0:26:320:26:34

Abraham Lincoln prosecuted the Civil War ferociously.

0:26:340:26:38

By 1862, 1863, Lincoln's authorising troops to live off the land,

0:26:410:26:46

to seize goods if needed for the maintenance of the army.

0:26:460:26:49

His tactics, especially the destruction of Southern cities,

0:26:510:26:54

are regarded by some as having been so aggressive that they constitute total war.

0:26:540:27:01

Lincoln did not invent total war.

0:27:010:27:03

He did invent maybe to some extent what they call the hard war.

0:27:030:27:07

This was the term they used in the Civil War, hard war,

0:27:070:27:10

in which the Union would no longer limit its activities

0:27:100:27:16

in order to appeal to the loyalty of Southern civilians.

0:27:160:27:19

Lincoln never thought that you should spare the hard hand of war to people

0:27:220:27:26

who had begun the war. He said, on several occasions, that,

0:27:260:27:31

"We will teach them the folly of starting a war," and he meant that.

0:27:310:27:36

For most Americans, the terrible cost of the Civil War

0:27:410:27:45

was the price the nation paid in order to save the Union.

0:27:450:27:48

But there is another America.

0:27:490:27:53

It's Veteran Memorial Day.

0:27:530:27:55

For good reason, the people of the South

0:27:550:27:59

have mourned on occasion,

0:27:590:28:03

for over 150 years, the loss of our countrymen, the death...

0:28:030:28:08

Amongst some in the Southern states of the former Confederacy,

0:28:080:28:11

the Civil War is remembered as a war of aggression and Abraham Lincoln as a war criminal.

0:28:110:28:17

The Bible promises...

0:28:170:28:19

'I'm Chuck McMichael.

0:28:190:28:21

'I am the great-great-grandson of John Henry Land,'

0:28:210:28:24

who, as a 15-year-old farm boy in Georgia,

0:28:240:28:29

joined Company H of the 54th Georgia Infantry.

0:28:290:28:31

'He fought in battles through Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina.'

0:28:310:28:37

Over the years, he probably thought by this time this would be forgotten.

0:28:370:28:43

It will not be forgotten.

0:28:430:28:44

'My name is Michael Givens.'

0:28:440:28:46

I'm a lieutenant commander-in-chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

0:28:460:28:50

We here today have proven that we take this sort of thing seriously.

0:28:500:28:55

We are not afraid or ashamed to stand up and be counted.

0:28:550:29:00

'This war was Mr Lincoln's war.

0:29:000:29:02

'When South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20th 1860,

0:29:020:29:07

'he did not ever recognise that.'

0:29:070:29:09

OK? But yet he would send 75,000 troops there

0:29:090:29:14

to kill people that HE said were his own fellow citizens.

0:29:140:29:20

Starts to sound like Milosevic.

0:29:200:29:22

Starts to sound like Stalin.

0:29:220:29:24

'Here's the man who waged war on, in his view, his own people.'

0:29:250:29:30

He was responsible for 650,000 deaths. Please.

0:29:300:29:36

'One of my ancestors, he was shot through the leg at Gettysburg'

0:29:380:29:43

and walked back to Virginia with a bullet wound in his leg.

0:29:430:29:48

And now to be told, "Oh, he was fighting for slavery and he was evil

0:29:480:29:52

"and a traitor who just wanted to overthrow the great Abraham Lincoln."

0:29:520:29:57

No, he was up there so that his mother and father

0:29:570:30:01

wouldn't be killed in Georgia

0:30:010:30:03

and their property destroyed, and his little brother have to go to war

0:30:030:30:08

and his sisters be raped.

0:30:080:30:10

# To arms, to arms

0:30:100:30:12

# In Dixie

0:30:120:30:14

# And raise the flag of Dixie

0:30:140:30:16

# Hurrah, hurrah for Dixie... #

0:30:160:30:19

'As far as how I see Lincoln,

0:30:190:30:22

'he ordered a bunch of strangers from up North to come down here

0:30:220:30:28

'to my family's home, kill my ancestors,

0:30:280:30:31

'burn down their property, and steal their goods.'

0:30:310:30:35

-# Away

-Away!

0:30:350:30:37

# Away down south in Dixie. #

0:30:370:30:39

He believed a whole class of Southern people

0:30:390:30:42

needed to be eliminated. We're talking genocide.

0:30:420:30:46

FINAL CHORDS OF SONG

0:30:460:30:49

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

0:30:490:30:51

The ferocity with which the Lincoln administration conducted war

0:30:590:31:04

was not restricted to the South.

0:31:040:31:07

Lincoln had gone to war to prevent slavery expanding into the West,

0:31:070:31:11

and defend the free soil ideology of his Republican Party.

0:31:110:31:15

But the soil and the land of the West could only be made free for white settlers

0:31:170:31:22

if first cleared of its original owners,

0:31:220:31:26

the Native Americans.

0:31:260:31:29

By the late 1850s, the Santee Sioux

0:31:320:31:35

had been pushed into a reservation in the state of Minnesota.

0:31:350:31:39

They had sold their tribal lands to the US government for 1.5 million,

0:31:390:31:44

a bill that Lincoln's administration had not paid.

0:31:440:31:48

In the late summer of 1862, at the height of the Civil War,

0:31:480:31:52

the rains failed and the Sioux's crops wilted in the fields.

0:31:520:31:57

The Sioux were literally starving.

0:31:590:32:01

They rise up against the reservation system,

0:32:030:32:07

they kill a number of white settlers,

0:32:070:32:10

it's a very, very violent encounter.

0:32:100:32:13

The federal government responds by sending General John Pope

0:32:130:32:18

to Minnesota to end the uprising.

0:32:180:32:22

General Pope is a general who, in the Civil War in the East, has turned the war into hard war.

0:32:220:32:27

He's a very tough cookie,

0:32:270:32:28

he talks about going to Minnesota to exterminate

0:32:280:32:33

the Sioux men, women, and children,

0:32:330:32:35

and when he gets there he puts the rebellion down brutally and quickly.

0:32:350:32:39

By the end of the rebellion, thousands of the Sioux were imprisoned by the Union Army.

0:32:400:32:45

General Pope convened a series of military trials

0:32:460:32:49

that condemned 303 of the Sioux men to death.

0:32:490:32:53

He then turned to Lincoln for approval.

0:32:530:32:56

Now, Lincoln, who doesn't like Indians very much anyway,

0:32:570:33:01

is prepared to give the Minnesotans a blood sacrifice of Sioux,

0:33:010:33:08

but because of outside foreign influence,

0:33:080:33:10

he doesn't want to be seen to hang 303 Sioux all at once,

0:33:100:33:15

because they've only had trials lasting about 10 to 15 minutes.

0:33:150:33:18

And so he decides he'll hang 39.

0:33:180:33:22

Lincoln as executioner.

0:33:250:33:28

This is an image of America's secular saint

0:33:280:33:31

that most Americans find deeply uncomfortable,

0:33:310:33:34

and Lincoln's role in the story of the Sioux uprising

0:33:340:33:37

has often been brushed under the historical carpet or explained away.

0:33:370:33:41

Now, his defenders say, "What a nice man, he didn't hang 303,

0:33:420:33:46

"he only hangs 39," despite the fact that they haven't had any fair trials.

0:33:460:33:51

I'm not defending Lincoln, but what is he supposed to do?

0:33:530:33:57

Is he supposed to eliminate all of the executions,

0:33:570:34:03

is he supposed to allow the Sioux that are deemed guilty of the uprising,

0:34:030:34:07

is he supposed to set them free?

0:34:070:34:10

I mean, he could do that, we would like him to do that, that would be political suicide.

0:34:100:34:15

The story unfortunately doesn't end with the hanging of the 39 Indians,

0:34:170:34:23

back in Minnesota about 60-odd Indians are left to rot and die in prison.

0:34:230:34:28

Over and above that, Lincoln decides to deport all the Indians,

0:34:310:34:35

the Sioux and Winnebagans, who are completely innocent, from Minnesota

0:34:350:34:40

and as a result of that, all the Sioux lands are opened up for settlement and speculation.

0:34:400:34:44

Members of Lincoln's Cabinet and members of his regime, of course,

0:34:440:34:49

are very happy to make themselves rich by speculating in Indian lands.

0:34:490:34:53

Meanwhile, the Sioux and Winnebago are sent to

0:34:570:35:00

Dakota Territory, but only arrive when it's too late to plant corn.

0:35:000:35:05

So they can't feed themselves. Of course, they again

0:35:050:35:09

are hit by starvation and disease.

0:35:090:35:11

The whole thing is a human disaster,

0:35:110:35:14

and the 39 hanged are the least of it,

0:35:140:35:18

and Lincoln is responsible.

0:35:180:35:20

1862, the year General Pope had decimated the Santee Sioux

0:35:240:35:29

was also the year in which Abraham Lincoln's great struggle to drive

0:35:290:35:33

the Confederacy back into the Union had ran into the sand.

0:35:330:35:38

Well, the first year or so of the war does not go very well for the North.

0:35:380:35:42

They lose most of the battles, particularly in the eastern theatre in Virginia.

0:35:420:35:47

But if you look at the Civil War a year or so after it begins,

0:35:470:35:52

if you looked at a map of the United States,

0:35:520:35:54

you would be amazed how little territory

0:35:540:35:56

had been recaptured from the Confederacy,

0:35:560:35:59

a few little places on the outskirts,

0:35:590:36:01

but the Union Army had made no progress in most of the Confederacy.

0:36:010:36:05

Unable to defeat the South, Lincoln began to think

0:36:090:36:12

the unthinkable and consider the act for which he is now most famous,

0:36:120:36:17

the Emancipation of the Slaves.

0:36:170:36:20

But as Lincoln slowly came to believe that slavery might be abolished,

0:36:200:36:24

he also came to envisage

0:36:240:36:26

the deportation or "colonisation" of the slaves out of America.

0:36:260:36:32

The essence of colonisation is a belief that

0:36:330:36:36

black people can't possibly be Americans

0:36:360:36:40

and share in American society.

0:36:400:36:42

That is their "patrie", their country, must be someplace else,

0:36:420:36:47

probably Africa but white Americans often would take any place just to get them out of here.

0:36:470:36:53

Organisations promoting colonisation had first emerged in the early 19th century.

0:36:560:37:02

By the 1840s, free black volunteers

0:37:020:37:04

were being shipped to the African colony of Liberia.

0:37:040:37:08

By the 1860s, numerous plans had been drafted to deport the slaves

0:37:090:37:14

to Haiti, the other Caribbean islands, or Central America.

0:37:140:37:18

For Abraham Lincoln, colonisation became the means by which he could

0:37:210:37:25

square the circle of his opposition to slavery

0:37:250:37:28

and his belief in white supremacy.

0:37:280:37:32

Of all the presidents and statesmen, he is the one who's obsessed by it.

0:37:320:37:36

In all his speeches practically about emancipation,

0:37:360:37:39

he talks about emancipation and deportation

0:37:390:37:43

in the same sentence, in the same breath.

0:37:430:37:47

Now, why is this?

0:37:470:37:50

Lincoln fears that there was

0:37:500:37:52

a population of four million blacks in the South and about a quarter of a million blacks in the North.

0:37:520:37:57

If you emancipate these people after years of subjugation,

0:37:570:38:03

the result would be race war.

0:38:030:38:06

You can't give them civil and political rights because they don't deserve it in Lincoln's opinion,

0:38:060:38:11

they are mentally and physically inferior.

0:38:110:38:14

Lincoln could not conceive of the United States as a biracial society.

0:38:140:38:20

Slavery should be ended but black people should be encouraged -

0:38:200:38:24

he said it should be voluntary - but they should be encouraged to leave the country.

0:38:240:38:29

In August 1862, Lincoln called a delegation of free black leaders

0:38:290:38:34

to the White House for a now-infamous meeting to discuss colonisation.

0:38:340:38:39

Lincoln tells that delegation, and has a recorder write it down

0:38:390:38:44

and publicise it in the press, that were it not for them,

0:38:440:38:47

this war would not be happening, he says that to them.

0:38:470:38:51

He says to them explicitly that the white and black races must be kept separate in America

0:38:510:38:57

and he even asked those handpicked five black leaders,

0:38:570:38:59

who really weren't very important leaders,

0:38:590:39:02

if they would themselves volunteer to lead a colonisation movement out of the country.

0:39:020:39:08

When I have students read that for the first time, black or white,

0:39:080:39:12

they are a bit stunned because it's so explicit.

0:39:120:39:15

Of course, it's fraught with irony too because at that very moment of

0:39:150:39:19

August 1862, he's already drafted the Emancipation Proclamation.

0:39:190:39:22

He hasn't issued it yet. He's already got it in a drawer.

0:39:220:39:25

So it's Lincoln kind of playing both sides of the street

0:39:250:39:28

cos he doesn't know how this is going to come out.

0:39:280:39:31

Was Lincoln serious about colonisation, or merely using it to appeal to white public opinion?

0:39:340:39:40

Were his plans evidence of his political genius or his racism?

0:39:400:39:45

Here, again, Lincoln's own words and speeches are used to condemn him.

0:39:450:39:50

It's the very presence, he says, of blacks makes white people suffer

0:39:500:39:54

and that the two races have to go their separate ways.

0:39:540:39:57

He's totally explicit about this when he's talking to the blacks

0:39:570:40:01

and he has also said the same many times before to whites.

0:40:010:40:04

It's not a rhetorical ploy, it's not a sop politically

0:40:040:40:08

to his opponents to keep them calm, he actually means it.

0:40:080:40:12

The two ideas of emancipation and colonisation

0:40:150:40:19

are absolutely indissolubly linked in Lincoln's mind.

0:40:190:40:24

If you like, colonisation/deportation

0:40:240:40:27

is the final solution to the Negro problem

0:40:270:40:30

as far as Abraham Lincoln is concerned.

0:40:300:40:32

Lincoln wanted to deport all black people.

0:40:370:40:39

That wasn't something that he said with two or three of his friends

0:40:390:40:44

in a back room.

0:40:440:40:46

He proposed and asked for the deportation of black Americans

0:40:460:40:51

in the State of the Union message

0:40:510:40:54

in December 1862.

0:40:540:40:57

He wanted to create a white state here.

0:40:590:41:02

Now, if Abraham Lincoln had had his way,

0:41:020:41:06

there'd be no Obama in the United States,

0:41:060:41:09

there'd be no Oprah Winfrey, there'd be no Tiger Woods.

0:41:090:41:13

If he had had his way,

0:41:130:41:15

there'd be no black people here at all.

0:41:150:41:20

The possibility of abolition and along with it the prospect of colonising the freed slaves

0:41:200:41:26

was forced onto the agenda in 1862 by the actions of the slaves themselves.

0:41:260:41:33

As the war had spread through the South, they had begun to escape

0:41:330:41:36

the fields and plantations, changing both the course and the meaning of the conflict.

0:41:360:41:43

The war, of course, begins as a white man's war.

0:41:430:41:47

It's a war to defend the union.

0:41:470:41:49

Lincoln states it's so, slaves simply don't believe that to be true.

0:41:490:41:55

They see the enemy of their enemy

0:41:550:41:59

entering the South and they believe the enemy of their enemy must be their friend.

0:41:590:42:04

They run away to Union encampments.

0:42:040:42:07

They offer their service, they offer information, they offer to do the dirty work of war.

0:42:070:42:13

As these thousands of former slaves gathered around the invading Union Army in the South,

0:42:130:42:17

Lincoln was losing control of events.

0:42:170:42:20

He had gone to war to defend the Union and stop the expansion of slavery

0:42:200:42:24

but now the Republican Party in Washington,

0:42:240:42:26

radicalised by the experience of war, began to push him

0:42:260:42:29

to transform the conflict into a struggle to end slavery everywhere.

0:42:290:42:34

Lincoln is under enormous pressure in 1862 to take more dramatic action against slavery.

0:42:340:42:41

Congress takes the lead, they abolish slavery in Washington DC,

0:42:410:42:45

they abolish slavery in the Territories.

0:42:450:42:47

They forbid the Army from returning fugitive slaves.

0:42:470:42:50

They pass laws to confiscate the property of Confederates, which includes their slaves.

0:42:500:42:57

Then there's public opinion in the North, abolitionists, others saying,

0:42:570:43:01

"The war is not going well, we've got to take more dramatic action."

0:43:010:43:05

And of course the action of slaves puts the question of slavery

0:43:050:43:09

on the national agenda in a direct way.

0:43:090:43:12

On 1st January 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

0:43:160:43:24

It began the process that would end slavery in America

0:43:240:43:28

and crucially, it did not call for the colonisation of freed slaves.

0:43:280:43:33

The importance was that it said, "We are on the side of Emancipation."

0:43:360:43:43

It said, "The Union is an anti-slavery Union."

0:43:430:43:48

Before the Emancipation Proclamation, the war was about Union,

0:43:480:43:53

and Lincoln said, "If I can restore the Union without freeing a single slave, I'll do it."

0:43:530:43:58

But he couldn't do it and the Emancipation Proclamation

0:43:580:44:03

became the symbolic turning point of the war.

0:44:030:44:07

It committed the whole war effort now, whether those generals

0:44:100:44:13

and colonels wanted to or not, to ending slavery as an aim of the war.

0:44:130:44:19

Four million slaves, the labour system of the South.

0:44:210:44:25

That is a radical move,

0:44:250:44:28

because once you do that, there's really no going back.

0:44:280:44:32

If you start rounding up thousands of slaves to free them

0:44:320:44:36

and give them some kind of new status,

0:44:360:44:38

you surely cannot send them back to anything resembling slavery.

0:44:380:44:43

The modern reputation of Abraham Lincoln rests above all on his status as the Great Emancipator.

0:44:480:44:55

It's the story that the Lincoln industry and the academic establishment stand behind,

0:44:570:45:01

and it's what all Americans are taught at school.

0:45:010:45:05

Abraham Lincoln is one of the best presidents

0:45:050:45:08

this country has ever had because of what he did for the slaves.

0:45:080:45:12

He thought it was wrong and no person should own another person.

0:45:120:45:15

He just abolished slavery and all the wrongdoings of our country.

0:45:150:45:21

Does Lincoln deserve his reputation as the Great Emancipator

0:45:210:45:25

or was the Emancipation Proclamation as much an act of war

0:45:250:45:30

as an act of mercy, a desperate manoeuvre motivated in large part

0:45:300:45:35

by the failure of Lincoln to defeat the Confederate Armies?

0:45:350:45:39

It's a war measure, it's a military measure, that's how it is justified.

0:45:390:45:43

It's the only way it can be justified.

0:45:430:45:44

There is nothing in the Constitution that enables the President to decree the abolition of slavery,

0:45:440:45:49

what Lincoln rests an is his role as Commander-in-Chief of the Army.

0:45:490:45:54

Compare it to the Declaration of Independence,

0:45:540:45:57

which begins with this wonderful preamble about the rights of mankind.

0:45:570:46:00

There's nothing like that, this is a military order.

0:46:000:46:03

It contains no soaring rhetoric whatsoever, which Lincoln was capable of.

0:46:030:46:07

Only at the suggestion of Secretary of the Treasury Chase

0:46:070:46:10

does it end with a statement, "This is an act of justice as well as of military necessity."

0:46:100:46:17

Like the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation has become one of America's sacred texts

0:46:170:46:25

and it places Lincoln at the centre of the story.

0:46:250:46:28

But Emancipation was a process that Lincoln did not begin and was never able to control.

0:46:280:46:35

To be perfectly frank, we give him too much credit for it.

0:46:350:46:39

He caught up with the process of Emancipation

0:46:390:46:42

as much as he made the personal decision to free the slaves.

0:46:420:46:47

Emancipation comes about in 1862, and especially in 1863,

0:46:470:46:52

in the midst of this war out of the process of its escalation.

0:46:520:46:57

The Emancipation Proclamation not only freed enslaved Africans,

0:47:040:47:09

it also did something that the North and Lincoln himself had resisted since the start of the war -

0:47:090:47:14

it allowed the recruitment of black men into the Union Army.

0:47:140:47:19

Many Northerners didn't believe blacks would fight, they'd run away

0:47:190:47:22

when confronted or they'd massacre white people with their arms.

0:47:220:47:26

Nobody knew what would happen if you armed these slaves, there were so many racist preconceptions.

0:47:260:47:32

The service of black soldiers, the successes of black soldiers,

0:47:320:47:36

the dignity of black soldiers changes many Northerners' attitudes about race, about the black men.

0:47:360:47:42

It certainly had a powerful effect on Lincoln himself.

0:47:420:47:46

If you want to know why Lincoln's racial views changed

0:47:460:47:48

during the Civil War, a lot of it has to do with the black soldiers.

0:47:480:47:52

Lincoln comes to feel as many Northerners do,

0:47:520:47:54

that by fighting and dying for the Union, they have staked a claim to citizenship in the post-war world.

0:47:540:48:01

The greatness of Lincoln is his capacity for growth.

0:48:010:48:04

By the end of the Civil War, by the end of his life, Lincoln's views on race have changed significantly.

0:48:040:48:10

He has not become Martin Luther King Jr,

0:48:100:48:12

but he has come to recognise that the United States is going to be a biracial society.

0:48:120:48:18

In April 1865, the Confederate Armies finally surrendered.

0:48:240:48:30

The Civil War had consumed 620,000 lives.

0:48:320:48:37

The cities of the South lay in ruins

0:48:400:48:44

and slavery had been swept away.

0:48:440:48:47

And Lincoln, like his nation, was a man transformed.

0:48:490:48:53

In this very short period of time he's gone from believing

0:48:550:48:59

that he has no right to do anything with slavery, that slavery

0:48:590:49:03

should die a gradual, natural death,

0:49:030:49:06

that African Americans really are not

0:49:060:49:08

entitled to political rights, but at the end of the war he talks about

0:49:080:49:15

wanting to see certain segments of the African American population

0:49:150:49:20

get the right to vote.

0:49:200:49:22

So who was Abraham Lincoln in 1865?

0:49:220:49:26

Was he the Great Emancipator on the verge of awarding black people

0:49:260:49:30

some degree of equality, or still an inveterate white supremacist?

0:49:300:49:34

Was he the man who would save the Union

0:49:340:49:36

or a war criminal whose ruthless strategies had devastated his nation?

0:49:360:49:41

Was he America's saint or a man whose views captured all that was wrong with America in the 19th century?

0:49:410:49:49

The problem here is that people always want to be

0:49:490:49:51

all one or all the other.

0:49:510:49:52

We want our Abraham Lincolns and our Winston Churchills,

0:49:520:49:55

our Mahatma Gandhis, to be perfect in their principles.

0:49:550:50:00

The case of Abraham Lincoln, however, always has to be understood within the story

0:50:070:50:12

of a man who was a consummate, pragmatic,

0:50:120:50:17

genius of a politician.

0:50:170:50:19

But how far he'd have ever gone with civil or social equality is only speculation.

0:50:250:50:32

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln marked the beginning of a disastrous political process

0:51:200:51:25

that led America to reject the appeals for racial equality

0:51:250:51:28

that had emerged from the radicalism of the Civil War.

0:51:280:51:32

During the century between Emancipation in the 1860s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s,

0:51:340:51:41

African Americans were pushed into segregated lives defined by the so-called Jim Crow laws...

0:51:410:51:48

..and lynching.

0:51:500:51:51

But throughout that century in the darkness,

0:51:530:51:56

African Americans attempted to use the memory of Lincoln,

0:51:560:52:00

white America's secular saint, to appeal for justice.

0:52:000:52:05

African Americans understood how important Lincoln's memory

0:52:070:52:10

was to the nation and they were hoping that they could tap into that memory.

0:52:100:52:16

They're reminding white Americans that the promise has not been fulfilled,

0:52:170:52:22

that they have to step up

0:52:220:52:24

and honour the obligation that Lincoln had started,

0:52:240:52:28

because these rights that African Americans had been promised had not been granted.

0:52:280:52:34

Five score years ago, a great American

0:52:340:52:38

in whose symbolic shadow we stand today

0:52:380:52:42

signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

0:52:420:52:46

'Exactly a century after the Emancipation Proclamation,

0:52:470:52:50

'the Lincoln Memorial, America's temple to the cult of Lincoln,

0:52:500:52:54

'became the stage on which African Americans came together

0:52:540:52:57

'to demand the nation finally fulfil the promise of freedom that Lincoln had made in 1863.'

0:52:570:53:03

But 100 years later,

0:53:030:53:06

the Negro still is not free.

0:53:060:53:11

100 years later...

0:53:120:53:14

The part of that speech that everyone always hears,

0:53:140:53:18

and it's even used in commercials in the United States,

0:53:180:53:21

is only the dream part, "I have a dream, little black children, white children joining hands."

0:53:210:53:27

In a sense, we've come to our nation's capital to cash a cheque.

0:53:270:53:32

'What we almost never replay is the first three or four pages of that speech.'

0:53:320:53:38

..wrote the magnificent words

0:53:380:53:39

of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

0:53:390:53:43

They were signing a promissory note...

0:53:450:53:48

'King begins the speech by using the metaphor'

0:53:480:53:52

of what he called the promissory note.

0:53:520:53:55

It is obvious today

0:53:550:53:58

that America has defaulted on this promissory note

0:53:580:54:02

insofar as her citizens of colour are concerned.

0:54:020:54:07

'That's Martin Luther King on the 100th anniversary of Emancipation

0:54:070:54:11

'standing in the Lincoln Memorial and saying to the world',

0:54:110:54:14

"The United States wrote a bad cheque in 1863, it bounced."

0:54:140:54:20

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.

0:54:200:54:25

We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds

0:54:250:54:29

in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation...

0:54:290:54:32

'So here in 1963,'

0:54:320:54:35

a chance, you might say, to reboot, to go back to 1863

0:54:350:54:41

and build on the promises of the Civil War and the promises of the Emancipation Proclamation,

0:54:410:54:49

and to try to do away with all the ugliness,

0:54:490:54:53

all the white supremacy, and re-establish democracy.

0:54:530:54:58

Half a century after the civil rights struggle,

0:55:030:55:05

Abraham Lincoln has become perhaps the only historical figure

0:55:050:55:09

sacred to both black and white Americans.

0:55:090:55:13

Although he remains shrouded in myth and exaggeration,

0:55:130:55:16

and although uncomfortable questions have been asked about

0:55:160:55:20

who he really was and what he really thought, Lincoln's story, his rise from poverty,

0:55:200:55:25

his battle against slavery, and his struggle with his own racism has made his memory a potent political force.

0:55:250:55:32

It was here in Springfield where North,

0:55:320:55:34

South, East, and West come together that I was reminded

0:55:340:55:38

of the essential decency of the American people.

0:55:380:55:42

'In his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama, a candidate whose very presence in the race threatened to

0:55:420:55:47

'divide America, consciously linked himself to Lincoln.'

0:55:470:55:51

..State capital where Lincoln once called on a House divided,

0:55:510:55:56

I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for President

0:55:560:56:03

of the United States of America.

0:56:030:56:05

'Obama very much played on Lincoln's image.

0:56:050:56:09

'He mimicked Lincoln's trip'

0:56:090:56:12

on the train from Philadelphia to Washington DC.

0:56:120:56:15

'He swore in on his inauguration on the very OUP Bible that Lincoln had used 100 some odd years earlier.'

0:56:150:56:23

I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear...

0:56:230:56:26

He has cloaked himself, his candidacy, indeed his Presidency,

0:56:280:56:32

in the Lincoln myth.

0:56:320:56:34

As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours,

0:56:340:56:39

"We are not enemies but friends.

0:56:390:56:42

"Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection."

0:56:420:56:48

The Lincoln that Obama adopted most was Lincoln the healer.

0:56:480:56:52

It's the Lincoln through whom we can all somehow come together.

0:56:520:56:58

Our stories are singular but our destiny is shared.

0:56:580:57:01

'Not Lincoln the ruthless war maker, not Lincoln even the Emancipator,

0:57:010:57:05

'it's Lincoln the healer.

0:57:050:57:09

'That's the Lincoln that Obama most tried to use.'

0:57:090:57:12

That the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms

0:57:120:57:16

or the scale of our wealth but from the enduring power of

0:57:160:57:19

our ideals, democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

0:57:190:57:25

I think we all look at Lincoln from a perspective of

0:57:290:57:32

what we see America as, and what we think America should be.

0:57:320:57:38

And those of us who see America as this perfect place, always right,

0:57:420:57:46

did everything right from the very beginning,

0:57:460:57:50

need a Lincoln who is larger than life, who is a Herculean figure who did Herculean things.

0:57:500:57:58

But I think we as a nation need to understand that we can

0:58:000:58:05

honour Lincoln and be truthful.

0:58:050:58:08

He was a human being who made mistakes, who had prejudices,

0:58:080:58:14

who had his own agenda - that does not diminish his greatness.

0:58:140:58:19

I think it makes him even greater because it shows that with all his prejudices,

0:58:190:58:24

with all the baggage that he brings to the Presidency and to Emancipation,

0:58:240:58:29

he still did the right thing in the end.

0:58:290:58:32

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