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Abraham Lincoln is the most celebrated figure in American history. | 0:00:04 | 0:00:09 | |
His assassination almost 150 years ago transformed him from a mere politician | 0:00:09 | 0:00:15 | |
into America's national saint. | 0:00:15 | 0:00:17 | |
It's the original martyrdom. It's Lincoln dying for the nation's sins. | 0:00:17 | 0:00:21 | |
He dies in the moment of his triumph | 0:00:23 | 0:00:26 | |
on Good Friday in a Christian country. | 0:00:26 | 0:00:28 | |
I mean, God, who wrote that script? | 0:00:28 | 0:00:30 | |
To most Americans, he's the president who saved the Union, | 0:00:30 | 0:00:33 | |
an everyman from the Kentucky backwoods who rose from poverty to become president, | 0:00:33 | 0:00:38 | |
living out the American dream. | 0:00:38 | 0:00:40 | |
He's all that Americans think the nation should be, | 0:00:40 | 0:00:43 | |
and so consequently we've become infatuated with him. | 0:00:43 | 0:00:47 | |
To African Americans, Lincoln will always be the Great Emancipator, | 0:00:47 | 0:00:52 | |
the man who freed the slaves, | 0:00:52 | 0:00:53 | |
thereby placing equality alongside liberty as one of those truths | 0:00:53 | 0:00:57 | |
that Americans hold as self-evident. | 0:00:57 | 0:01:00 | |
And for almost all Americans, particularly those in the North, | 0:01:01 | 0:01:05 | |
he's the leader who guided the nation through the trauma of the Civil War, | 0:01:05 | 0:01:09 | |
perhaps the central event in the country's history. | 0:01:09 | 0:01:13 | |
But today, as America marks the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's presidency, | 0:01:13 | 0:01:18 | |
an historic battle is being waged for the reputation of America's 16th president. | 0:01:18 | 0:01:25 | |
Everything everybody's told me about Abraham Lincoln is a lie. | 0:01:25 | 0:01:30 | |
Everything I learned in school, everything I learned in church, | 0:01:30 | 0:01:33 | |
everything I learned from newspapers, | 0:01:33 | 0:01:36 | |
everything I learned from the radio, everything I've learned about Abraham Lincoln is a lie. | 0:01:36 | 0:01:41 | |
This struggle has unearthed another Abraham Lincoln. | 0:01:41 | 0:01:44 | |
This Lincoln is a politician rather than a statesman... | 0:01:44 | 0:01:47 | |
So much of the literature on Lincoln is just complete hero worship. | 0:01:47 | 0:01:51 | |
..a calculating pragmatist rather than a visionary... | 0:01:51 | 0:01:54 | |
He is not the Great Emancipator | 0:01:54 | 0:01:56 | |
if you look just a teeny bit under... | 0:01:56 | 0:02:01 | |
under the surface. | 0:02:01 | 0:02:02 | |
..and a war criminal rather than a war leader. | 0:02:02 | 0:02:05 | |
Here is the man who waged war on, in his view, his own people. | 0:02:05 | 0:02:09 | |
He is responsible for 650,000 deaths. Please. | 0:02:09 | 0:02:15 | |
Lincoln's critics claim that he plunged the nation into an unnecessary war | 0:02:15 | 0:02:21 | |
and that generations of historians have conspired to hide the fact that the Great Emancipator | 0:02:21 | 0:02:26 | |
was in reality a racist who planned to deport the slaves out of America. | 0:02:26 | 0:02:31 | |
For good reason, the people of the South have mourned... | 0:02:31 | 0:02:36 | |
This reassessment of America's greatest hero | 0:02:36 | 0:02:38 | |
is conjuring up the ghosts of America's troubled history... | 0:02:38 | 0:02:41 | |
This war over culture and remembrance is even bigger | 0:02:41 | 0:02:46 | |
than Confederate heritage. It's about America. | 0:02:46 | 0:02:49 | |
..while at the same time, it's feeding into the divisions | 0:02:49 | 0:02:52 | |
that are drawing modern Americans further apart. | 0:02:52 | 0:02:55 | |
And we're not going to take it any more! | 0:02:55 | 0:02:58 | |
This is the story of America's struggle | 0:02:58 | 0:03:01 | |
to discover the real Abraham Lincoln. | 0:03:01 | 0:03:05 | |
Abraham Lincoln's last moments were spent here in the Petersen House, | 0:03:19 | 0:03:24 | |
a cheap boarding house opposite the Washington theatre | 0:03:24 | 0:03:27 | |
where he'd been struck down by an assassin's bullet. | 0:03:27 | 0:03:30 | |
There were people with Lincoln who say, "We cannot allow him to die in a theatre." | 0:03:35 | 0:03:40 | |
He's placed diagonally on a small bed - he's so tall he can't fit lengthwise on the bed. | 0:03:44 | 0:03:49 | |
And there he spends the next nine hours, his breathing ever more laboured. | 0:03:52 | 0:03:57 | |
He was oozing brain matter on his pillow | 0:04:00 | 0:04:04 | |
and whenever his wife was brought in, | 0:04:04 | 0:04:07 | |
they would put a handkerchief over that part of the pillow | 0:04:07 | 0:04:10 | |
so she wouldn't be too upset. | 0:04:10 | 0:04:12 | |
Out of that house, he emerges as his body is carried | 0:04:13 | 0:04:18 | |
in the spring rain the next morning | 0:04:18 | 0:04:20 | |
to the hearse that takes him back to the White House. | 0:04:20 | 0:04:23 | |
He leaves, not the person he was when he was carried inside, | 0:04:23 | 0:04:27 | |
he is now a national treasure, a national saint, | 0:04:27 | 0:04:31 | |
a secular saint and a religious saint in many ways. | 0:04:31 | 0:04:34 | |
And that's why images almost overnight begin appearing, | 0:04:34 | 0:04:38 | |
showing not only the assassination, | 0:04:38 | 0:04:40 | |
not only his dying moments in the grandest possible exaggerated way, | 0:04:40 | 0:04:46 | |
but literally images showing him rising into heaven, | 0:04:46 | 0:04:49 | |
where he's often greeted by his great hero, George Washington. | 0:04:49 | 0:04:53 | |
Here is the father and the saviour - it's almost like God and the Son. | 0:04:53 | 0:04:57 | |
# Glory, glory, hallelujah | 0:04:57 | 0:05:01 | |
# His God is | 0:05:01 | 0:05:05 | |
# Marching on. # | 0:05:05 | 0:05:10 | |
From the moment of his death, | 0:05:10 | 0:05:11 | |
the real Abraham Lincoln has been obscured | 0:05:11 | 0:05:14 | |
behind the almost religious cult that still surrounds him. | 0:05:14 | 0:05:18 | |
The tragic nature of that death | 0:05:18 | 0:05:20 | |
and its timing, at the very end of America's Civil War, created a myth | 0:05:20 | 0:05:24 | |
that has placed Lincoln outside of history and almost beyond rational debate. | 0:05:24 | 0:05:28 | |
You have to remember he dies right at this perfect moment. | 0:05:29 | 0:05:34 | |
He's assassinated a few days after the surrender of Lee's army, | 0:05:34 | 0:05:38 | |
after this horrifying bloodletting | 0:05:38 | 0:05:42 | |
from which now the Republic that is nearly destroyed can now survive. | 0:05:42 | 0:05:48 | |
I mean, you couldn't write a better script in some ways for the epic inside of us. | 0:05:48 | 0:05:54 | |
Today, that epic story of Lincoln's life and death | 0:05:59 | 0:06:03 | |
stands at the heart of American culture. | 0:06:03 | 0:06:05 | |
His image is everywhere. | 0:06:05 | 0:06:08 | |
It's on the five dollar bill, | 0:06:08 | 0:06:11 | |
it's on the coins that you carry in your pocket, there's billboards. | 0:06:11 | 0:06:16 | |
My 18-month-old daughter has a little stuffed Abraham Lincoln | 0:06:16 | 0:06:20 | |
and she could say "Dadda" and "Momma" | 0:06:20 | 0:06:23 | |
and not too much later she could say "Abe Lincoln". | 0:06:23 | 0:06:26 | |
The homes Lincoln lived in have all been lovingly restored. | 0:06:27 | 0:06:31 | |
There are literally hundreds of statues of him peppered across the nation | 0:06:31 | 0:06:36 | |
and his hometown of Springfield, Illinois | 0:06:36 | 0:06:39 | |
has become the centre of a national Lincoln tourist industry. | 0:06:39 | 0:06:43 | |
Lincoln is a church, he's a religion. | 0:06:50 | 0:06:53 | |
Lincoln is a million-dollar industry, | 0:06:55 | 0:06:59 | |
a 100 million industry, | 0:06:59 | 0:07:01 | |
and you get thousands of people all over this country who make their living | 0:07:01 | 0:07:06 | |
pushing the Lincoln message. | 0:07:06 | 0:07:08 | |
May I present to you the president of the United States, Mr Abraham Lincoln. | 0:07:08 | 0:07:13 | |
Good afternoon, everyone. Oh, please, be seated. | 0:07:13 | 0:07:16 | |
'There is a Lincoln industry in this country, no question about it,' | 0:07:16 | 0:07:19 | |
and there are large numbers of people who make their living | 0:07:19 | 0:07:22 | |
impersonating Lincoln. | 0:07:22 | 0:07:24 | |
She said, "Well, thank you, honest Abe, for your response." | 0:07:24 | 0:07:27 | |
'I think second only to Elvis impersonators, probably. | 0:07:27 | 0:07:31 | |
'There aren't too many American presidents you could make a living dressing up as | 0:07:31 | 0:07:35 | |
'but they go to events, they go to schools, they open shopping malls. | 0:07:35 | 0:07:39 | |
'Lincoln is the only American president | 0:07:40 | 0:07:44 | |
'memorialised at Disneyland, | 0:07:44 | 0:07:47 | |
'so Lincoln is certainly part of our popular culture | 0:07:47 | 0:07:50 | |
'in a way that very few other presidents are.' | 0:07:50 | 0:07:53 | |
The aspect of the Lincoln myth which has always appealed most | 0:07:57 | 0:08:00 | |
to generations of American biographers and filmmakers | 0:08:00 | 0:08:04 | |
is the story of how the young Lincoln overcame the hardships of his upbringing. | 0:08:04 | 0:08:09 | |
Lincoln grew up on the frontier. He was born in Kentucky | 0:08:12 | 0:08:16 | |
at a time when that was really a frontier state. | 0:08:16 | 0:08:19 | |
This was real backwoods territory - there were wild animals in the woods, | 0:08:19 | 0:08:23 | |
there were very few neighbours except some members of his family. | 0:08:23 | 0:08:26 | |
The transportation was extremely primitive and they basically were self-sufficient. | 0:08:26 | 0:08:31 | |
He is, in a way, from nowhere. | 0:08:34 | 0:08:35 | |
There were ten million other sons of dirt farmers who remained dirt farmers. | 0:08:35 | 0:08:40 | |
This guy didn't. | 0:08:40 | 0:08:42 | |
This is this consummate American story. | 0:08:47 | 0:08:51 | |
He wanted books, he wanted something bigger, he wanted off of that farm. | 0:08:51 | 0:08:55 | |
Now, that's the story of so many millions of Americans | 0:08:55 | 0:08:58 | |
from the 19th into the 20th century, | 0:08:58 | 0:09:00 | |
as we became industrialised, urbanised, and cosmopolitanised. | 0:09:00 | 0:09:04 | |
This is deep, deep in our culture that we are a place where a person | 0:09:16 | 0:09:21 | |
from a dirt farm with virtually no formal education | 0:09:21 | 0:09:25 | |
can rise and attain the highest office in the land. | 0:09:25 | 0:09:29 | |
At the age of 19, Lincoln left his father's farm | 0:09:42 | 0:09:45 | |
and made his way to what was then the frontier state of Illinois. | 0:09:45 | 0:09:49 | |
A young man without money or connections, the route Lincoln took | 0:09:49 | 0:09:54 | |
out of poverty was to run for office as a member of the State Legislature. | 0:09:54 | 0:09:59 | |
Politics was a mode of social advancement. | 0:09:59 | 0:10:01 | |
Politics in the 1830s and '40s was a way for people of modest backgrounds like Lincoln | 0:10:01 | 0:10:07 | |
to rise in the social scale. | 0:10:07 | 0:10:09 | |
It was a way to make connections. It was a way to influence the world around you, of course, | 0:10:09 | 0:10:13 | |
but at a time when there weren't that many professions open to people, | 0:10:13 | 0:10:19 | |
politics was one that anybody could get ahead in if they had drive, | 0:10:19 | 0:10:23 | |
if they had the right personality, the right ability to communicate their ideas. | 0:10:23 | 0:10:28 | |
Politics transformed Lincoln's life. | 0:10:28 | 0:10:31 | |
By the early 1850s, the young, poorly-educated frontiersmen was long gone. | 0:10:31 | 0:10:37 | |
Lincoln had become a wealthy man. | 0:10:37 | 0:10:39 | |
He'd held office four times, been a congressman in Washington DC, | 0:10:39 | 0:10:43 | |
and between terms of office, he trained as a lawyer. | 0:10:43 | 0:10:46 | |
And as Lincoln's horizons had spread... | 0:10:52 | 0:10:54 | |
..so had those of his nation, as America's great drive westwards had begun. | 0:10:57 | 0:11:01 | |
Most people had a sense of the American West that was essentially infinite - | 0:11:01 | 0:11:06 | |
they didn't know where it ended. They knew there were deserts and great plains, | 0:11:06 | 0:11:10 | |
they knew there were mountains, | 0:11:10 | 0:11:12 | |
but it was the sheer vastness of that West | 0:11:12 | 0:11:15 | |
that gave everybody a sense of limitlessness and future and hope. | 0:11:15 | 0:11:21 | |
The annexation of Texas and war with Mexico in the 1840s | 0:11:25 | 0:11:30 | |
had opened up the West, | 0:11:30 | 0:11:32 | |
raising the possibility of the nation advancing all the way to the Pacific coast. | 0:11:32 | 0:11:37 | |
There's this continental mentality, sometimes called manifest destiny, | 0:11:37 | 0:11:42 | |
this idea that American expansion is just ordained by God, you know, | 0:11:42 | 0:11:46 | |
that we will dominate this entire continent and that is the divine will, | 0:11:46 | 0:11:51 | |
and that creates this kind of ebullient spirit of expansionism. | 0:11:51 | 0:11:54 | |
But westward expansion brought to the fore | 0:11:59 | 0:12:02 | |
the issue that had divided the country ever since Independence - slavery. | 0:12:02 | 0:12:07 | |
By the middle of the 19th century, a fault line ran across America, | 0:12:09 | 0:12:12 | |
dividing the slave-owning South from the free states in the North | 0:12:12 | 0:12:16 | |
where the practice had ended. | 0:12:16 | 0:12:18 | |
But year by year, the increasing value of Southern cotton | 0:12:22 | 0:12:25 | |
and the thought of the even larger fortunes it could generate if slavery were to spread West | 0:12:25 | 0:12:31 | |
slowly undermined the sense of union that bound the states together. | 0:12:31 | 0:12:35 | |
Not only is slavery growing | 0:12:36 | 0:12:38 | |
in the American South in the 1820s, '30s, and '40s in leaps and bounds - | 0:12:38 | 0:12:43 | |
I mean, the American slave population doubled in 25 years | 0:12:43 | 0:12:47 | |
between 1820 and the mid-1840s. | 0:12:47 | 0:12:52 | |
By the 1850s, slavery became, | 0:12:52 | 0:12:54 | |
slaves became the single greatest economic asset | 0:12:54 | 0:12:59 | |
in the entire American economy. | 0:12:59 | 0:13:02 | |
It was the engine of wealth for the American South, and frankly for a good deal of the American North, | 0:13:02 | 0:13:07 | |
especially the banking system in New York and other cities. | 0:13:07 | 0:13:10 | |
At that point, you had a nation growing in leaps and bounds, | 0:13:10 | 0:13:15 | |
had a sense of its infinite boundlessness, | 0:13:15 | 0:13:19 | |
but also a sense of great anxiety and great dread | 0:13:19 | 0:13:23 | |
of what on earth are they going to do about this problem. | 0:13:23 | 0:13:26 | |
The figure who was to do most to tip America into crisis | 0:13:27 | 0:13:31 | |
was the man who was also to become Abraham Lincoln's political nemesis. | 0:13:31 | 0:13:35 | |
Stephen A Douglas, | 0:13:35 | 0:13:37 | |
a Democrat from Lincoln's home state of Illinois, introduced in 1854 | 0:13:37 | 0:13:42 | |
a clause that would allow slavery to spread | 0:13:42 | 0:13:44 | |
into the new Western states of Kansas and Nebraska. | 0:13:44 | 0:13:49 | |
To oppose this, a new political party was formed in the North, | 0:13:49 | 0:13:53 | |
the Republicans, | 0:13:53 | 0:13:55 | |
and Abraham Lincoln abandoned his legal career to join them. | 0:13:55 | 0:13:58 | |
The Republican Party started | 0:13:58 | 0:14:00 | |
under the premise that slavery should not be expanded. | 0:14:00 | 0:14:04 | |
They weren't abolitionists per se, some of them were, | 0:14:04 | 0:14:08 | |
but many of them were not abolitionists, | 0:14:08 | 0:14:10 | |
they were anti-slavery men. | 0:14:10 | 0:14:12 | |
And what that meant was that they expected slavery to die a natural death | 0:14:12 | 0:14:18 | |
but in order to do that, in order for that to happen, slavery had to be contained. | 0:14:18 | 0:14:23 | |
And so the idea was you don't let it expand into the Western Territories. | 0:14:23 | 0:14:28 | |
This new coalition is a coalition of Northerners | 0:14:31 | 0:14:35 | |
who are absolute believers | 0:14:35 | 0:14:37 | |
in this idea of a free-labour American dream, | 0:14:37 | 0:14:40 | |
of their right to go West and get themselves 20 acres of land somewhere, | 0:14:40 | 0:14:44 | |
or 40 acres, or whatever they could get and not have to compete with the slave labour system. | 0:14:44 | 0:14:49 | |
Lincoln's political life, Lincoln's political career in the 1850s | 0:14:50 | 0:14:55 | |
was built on this question of stopping | 0:14:55 | 0:14:58 | |
the expansion of slavery into the West, | 0:14:58 | 0:15:01 | |
or what the Republicans called the free soil persuasion. | 0:15:01 | 0:15:05 | |
The Republican Party, in which Abraham Lincoln fast became a leading light, | 0:15:06 | 0:15:11 | |
regarded the expansion of slavery as a direct threat to their free soil ideology. | 0:15:11 | 0:15:16 | |
But although the enemy of slavery, they were no friend of the slave. | 0:15:16 | 0:15:20 | |
You could be anti-slavery AND anti-black. | 0:15:20 | 0:15:24 | |
You could be anti-slavery and not want black people around. | 0:15:24 | 0:15:29 | |
And much of the anti-slavery fervour | 0:15:29 | 0:15:32 | |
was, "We don't want them around." | 0:15:32 | 0:15:36 | |
Partly, it was, | 0:15:36 | 0:15:37 | |
"We don't want them around because they're alien people, they're different, | 0:15:37 | 0:15:41 | |
"they're inferior," et cetera, et cetera, | 0:15:41 | 0:15:45 | |
but there was also, "We don't want them around | 0:15:45 | 0:15:48 | |
"because they're not paid and they're very bad for wages." | 0:15:48 | 0:15:53 | |
Difficult as it is to believe, | 0:15:59 | 0:16:01 | |
many, many Northerners separated out | 0:16:01 | 0:16:04 | |
the question of slavery from the question of race. | 0:16:04 | 0:16:06 | |
In other words, there are many reasons to oppose slavery which have nothing to do with race. | 0:16:06 | 0:16:11 | |
If slavery moves out into the Western Territories, whites are not going to want to go there. | 0:16:13 | 0:16:18 | |
The slave owners will absorb all the good land. They don't want to compete with slave labour. | 0:16:18 | 0:16:23 | |
They don't want blacks around. There are all these reasons why whites in the North will say, | 0:16:23 | 0:16:28 | |
"I don't care about slavery in Mississippi, but I don't want it expanding into Kansas | 0:16:28 | 0:16:33 | |
"where I or my son may move out there to get a farm, to get a job." | 0:16:33 | 0:16:37 | |
Lincoln's own impoverished upbringing had demonstrated to him what happened | 0:16:42 | 0:16:46 | |
when free white labour was set in competition against slavery. | 0:16:46 | 0:16:51 | |
Lincoln's father moves from Kentucky, | 0:16:54 | 0:16:57 | |
crosses the Ohio River into Indiana, | 0:16:57 | 0:17:00 | |
in part because Kentucky is a slave state and Indiana is a free state, | 0:17:00 | 0:17:06 | |
and slavery limits the potential of the white labour to enjoy the fruits of his labour. | 0:17:06 | 0:17:11 | |
How could a small labourer compete in an agricultural market | 0:17:11 | 0:17:17 | |
with a slaveholder who has a gang of slaves doing labour for no wage whatsoever? | 0:17:17 | 0:17:23 | |
Lincoln understood the damage that slavery did from that perspective, | 0:17:25 | 0:17:30 | |
and says so, talks about the fact that the Territories should exist | 0:17:30 | 0:17:34 | |
for these free white men who need a chance to rise as well. | 0:17:34 | 0:17:40 | |
From 1854 onwards, Abraham Lincoln campaigned against | 0:17:45 | 0:17:49 | |
the expansion of slavery into the Western Territories, | 0:17:49 | 0:17:52 | |
but the man who a decade later was to sweep away the whole slave system | 0:17:52 | 0:17:56 | |
did not call for the abolition of slavery where it already existed in the South. | 0:17:56 | 0:18:01 | |
So why was it that, when so many white Americans were mobilising to abolish slavery, | 0:18:04 | 0:18:11 | |
the Great Emancipator appeared to stand on the sidelines? | 0:18:11 | 0:18:15 | |
The generation from 1830 to 1860 | 0:18:20 | 0:18:26 | |
was perhaps one of the greatest generations of white people we've had in this country. | 0:18:26 | 0:18:31 | |
They were very much like | 0:18:31 | 0:18:34 | |
the Civil Rights generation of the 1960s and 1970s. | 0:18:34 | 0:18:39 | |
They marched, | 0:18:40 | 0:18:42 | |
they organised against slavery, they organised in the churches. | 0:18:42 | 0:18:46 | |
They staged sit-ins, they refused to capture fugitive slaves, | 0:18:46 | 0:18:53 | |
and they prepared the ground which made it possible... | 0:18:53 | 0:18:58 | |
..for emancipation to triumph. | 0:19:00 | 0:19:02 | |
Lincoln did absolutely nothing. | 0:19:03 | 0:19:06 | |
Although never an abolitionist, Lincoln, a man who had been exposed | 0:19:07 | 0:19:11 | |
to slavery since childhood, was opposed to the Southern slave system. | 0:19:11 | 0:19:17 | |
Yet the Great Emancipator of the 1860s spent the 1850s | 0:19:17 | 0:19:21 | |
convinced that the political system made abolition impossible. | 0:19:21 | 0:19:25 | |
On the one hand, he always says, "This is a moral question ultimately." | 0:19:27 | 0:19:31 | |
He's like an abolitionist in that he says, | 0:19:31 | 0:19:33 | |
"I am morally opposed to slavery, that's the bottom line here." | 0:19:33 | 0:19:37 | |
On the other hand, as a lawyer, as a politician, he says, | 0:19:37 | 0:19:39 | |
"There's not much we can do about slavery, it's in the Constitution. | 0:19:39 | 0:19:43 | |
"It's up to the Southern states to deal with it." | 0:19:43 | 0:19:46 | |
He understands there is not much you can do about slavery within the political system. | 0:19:46 | 0:19:51 | |
In America's federal system, | 0:19:56 | 0:19:58 | |
it was the individual states and not the national government in Washington | 0:19:58 | 0:20:02 | |
that had the power to determine the future of slavery. | 0:20:02 | 0:20:05 | |
But in the party politics of the 1850s, | 0:20:05 | 0:20:07 | |
opposing slavery, if only in principle, | 0:20:07 | 0:20:10 | |
was potentially enough to destroy Lincoln's political career. | 0:20:10 | 0:20:14 | |
In 1858, Lincoln stood for Congress against his old opponent Stephen Douglas. | 0:20:14 | 0:20:20 | |
The campaign centred on a series of now-famous debates. | 0:20:20 | 0:20:24 | |
In the city of Charleston, Douglas suggested that Lincoln's opposition | 0:20:24 | 0:20:28 | |
to slavery meant that he was also in favour of racial equality. | 0:20:28 | 0:20:33 | |
Lincoln responded with words that saved his career, but that haunt his reputation. | 0:20:35 | 0:20:41 | |
He said, and I'm quoting him, | 0:20:43 | 0:20:44 | |
that he did not believe that black people | 0:20:44 | 0:20:47 | |
should have the right to vote. | 0:20:47 | 0:20:49 | |
He did not believe that blacks | 0:20:49 | 0:20:51 | |
should have the right to sit on juries. | 0:20:51 | 0:20:53 | |
He didn't believe that black people should have the right to hold public office. | 0:20:53 | 0:20:58 | |
He believed that there's a physical difference | 0:20:58 | 0:21:02 | |
between the white race and the black race | 0:21:02 | 0:21:05 | |
that will forever make it impossible for them to live together | 0:21:05 | 0:21:10 | |
on a plain of equality. | 0:21:10 | 0:21:13 | |
Lincoln is saying things about race and the inferiority of blacks | 0:21:13 | 0:21:19 | |
that we don't want him to say. | 0:21:19 | 0:21:21 | |
Now, of course, it's just crucial | 0:21:21 | 0:21:25 | |
to contextualise those statements. | 0:21:25 | 0:21:28 | |
I mean, he's being goaded into them by Stephen Douglas, | 0:21:28 | 0:21:33 | |
who's a shrewd, savvy political veteran | 0:21:33 | 0:21:37 | |
who knows that his strongest attack | 0:21:37 | 0:21:40 | |
is to link Lincoln's anti-slavery to some notion of racial equality. | 0:21:40 | 0:21:46 | |
He's saying that Lincoln is in favour of racial equality, and Lincoln obliges. | 0:21:46 | 0:21:50 | |
He does that. He does it, I think, for political reasons | 0:21:50 | 0:21:55 | |
and it doesn't look good to us today, | 0:21:55 | 0:21:58 | |
but that's the nature of mid-19th century politics. | 0:21:58 | 0:22:03 | |
He always made a distinction between the morality of slavery, | 0:22:03 | 0:22:08 | |
which he believed was fundamentally wrong, and the question of racial equality. | 0:22:08 | 0:22:13 | |
Today that's hard sometimes for us to understand, especially young people, | 0:22:13 | 0:22:17 | |
who are growing up in a society where the assumption of equality is absolute. | 0:22:17 | 0:22:21 | |
Of course we're equal, everybody's equal, or we say we are. | 0:22:21 | 0:22:24 | |
But Lincoln made the distinction between the immorality of slavery, | 0:22:24 | 0:22:28 | |
unequivocal about that... | 0:22:28 | 0:22:30 | |
On the other hand, he was no proponent of racial equality. | 0:22:30 | 0:22:34 | |
And we see that over and over quite publicly | 0:22:34 | 0:22:38 | |
and quite forcefully that he does not believe in social equality. | 0:22:38 | 0:22:43 | |
Despite reassuring the electorate, | 0:22:43 | 0:22:45 | |
Lincoln was unable to defeat Douglas. But the debates made him famous | 0:22:45 | 0:22:50 | |
and it was this fame that enabled him to seize | 0:22:50 | 0:22:53 | |
the Republican candidacy for president in 1860. | 0:22:53 | 0:22:56 | |
Lincoln won just 39% of the vote, | 0:22:56 | 0:22:59 | |
almost all of his support coming from the North. | 0:22:59 | 0:23:02 | |
But within weeks of his arrival in Washington, | 0:23:02 | 0:23:05 | |
the Southern states began, one by one, to secede from the Union. | 0:23:05 | 0:23:10 | |
They then formed a new nation - | 0:23:10 | 0:23:13 | |
the Confederate States of America, | 0:23:13 | 0:23:16 | |
led by the Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis. | 0:23:16 | 0:23:19 | |
The accusation that has been raised against Abraham Lincoln is that on coming to office, | 0:23:22 | 0:23:27 | |
he pushed the American people into a disastrous and avoidable conflict. | 0:23:27 | 0:23:31 | |
There's a school of thought, | 0:23:31 | 0:23:33 | |
and it's still alive in a certain fringe of American scholarship, | 0:23:33 | 0:23:37 | |
that the real cause, or immediate cause, of the Civil War was Lincoln. | 0:23:37 | 0:23:41 | |
Now this argument is basically that Lincoln could have simply gently let | 0:23:43 | 0:23:49 | |
the South go, that he didn't need to force military action, | 0:23:49 | 0:23:55 | |
that he could have backed away and continued to compromise, | 0:23:55 | 0:23:58 | |
that Southerners were willing to compromise on this issue or that issue. | 0:23:58 | 0:24:02 | |
There is no evidence that the Confederate leadership, Jefferson Davis and his growing Cabinet, | 0:24:02 | 0:24:07 | |
were truly willing to compromise | 0:24:07 | 0:24:10 | |
on any part of the expansion of slavery issue or anything else. | 0:24:10 | 0:24:14 | |
Lincoln did not cause the Civil War. | 0:24:16 | 0:24:18 | |
What Lincoln did was create a situation where war was possible. | 0:24:18 | 0:24:23 | |
In other words, he was willing to risk war. | 0:24:23 | 0:24:26 | |
He put the onus on the Confederacy. They fired the first shot. | 0:24:26 | 0:24:29 | |
They weren't willing to compromise either. | 0:24:29 | 0:24:32 | |
While blame for the war might lie with both Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, | 0:24:40 | 0:24:45 | |
neither side in 1861 foresaw the calamity they were about to unleash. | 0:24:45 | 0:24:50 | |
No-one in the North or the South could have imagined the kind of war it would be. | 0:24:54 | 0:24:59 | |
The military leaders on both sides didn't quite understand | 0:25:01 | 0:25:05 | |
the significance of the technological changes. | 0:25:05 | 0:25:09 | |
Changes particularly in the technology of the rifle, | 0:25:09 | 0:25:12 | |
which made it a much more accurate long-distance weapon. | 0:25:12 | 0:25:15 | |
The war becomes a situation of long-range sharpshooting. | 0:25:16 | 0:25:21 | |
No-one would have imagined ironclad warfare | 0:25:21 | 0:25:24 | |
and the terrific combats of the navies. | 0:25:24 | 0:25:27 | |
The impact of the Industrial Revolution - we are talking about mass production of weaponry, | 0:25:29 | 0:25:34 | |
telegraph, railroads, bringing troops to the front. | 0:25:34 | 0:25:37 | |
Certainly no-one understood what kind of masses of armies would be required. | 0:25:37 | 0:25:43 | |
No-one would have comprehended black recruitment. | 0:25:43 | 0:25:46 | |
Nobody expected 620,000 deaths, thousands and thousands of injuries, | 0:25:47 | 0:25:52 | |
and utter destruction in many parts of the country. | 0:25:52 | 0:25:54 | |
So you might ask if Lincoln and Jefferson Davis had seen 1865, | 0:25:54 | 0:26:01 | |
would they have compromised in 1861? | 0:26:01 | 0:26:03 | |
The image of Lincoln that dominates the American consciousness today, | 0:26:16 | 0:26:20 | |
150 years after the Civil War, is Lincoln as the saviour of the Union. | 0:26:20 | 0:26:25 | |
Lincoln's role as commander-in-chief is less well remembered. | 0:26:28 | 0:26:32 | |
Yet hard as it is for some to accept, | 0:26:32 | 0:26:34 | |
Abraham Lincoln prosecuted the Civil War ferociously. | 0:26:34 | 0:26:38 | |
By 1862, 1863, Lincoln's authorising troops to live off the land, | 0:26:41 | 0:26:46 | |
to seize goods if needed for the maintenance of the army. | 0:26:46 | 0:26:49 | |
His tactics, especially the destruction of Southern cities, | 0:26:51 | 0:26:54 | |
are regarded by some as having been so aggressive that they constitute total war. | 0:26:54 | 0:27:01 | |
Lincoln did not invent total war. | 0:27:01 | 0:27:03 | |
He did invent maybe to some extent what they call the hard war. | 0:27:03 | 0:27:07 | |
This was the term they used in the Civil War, hard war, | 0:27:07 | 0:27:10 | |
in which the Union would no longer limit its activities | 0:27:10 | 0:27:16 | |
in order to appeal to the loyalty of Southern civilians. | 0:27:16 | 0:27:19 | |
Lincoln never thought that you should spare the hard hand of war to people | 0:27:22 | 0:27:26 | |
who had begun the war. He said, on several occasions, that, | 0:27:26 | 0:27:31 | |
"We will teach them the folly of starting a war," and he meant that. | 0:27:31 | 0:27:36 | |
For most Americans, the terrible cost of the Civil War | 0:27:41 | 0:27:45 | |
was the price the nation paid in order to save the Union. | 0:27:45 | 0:27:48 | |
But there is another America. | 0:27:49 | 0:27:53 | |
It's Veteran Memorial Day. | 0:27:53 | 0:27:55 | |
For good reason, the people of the South | 0:27:55 | 0:27:59 | |
have mourned on occasion, | 0:27:59 | 0:28:03 | |
for over 150 years, the loss of our countrymen, the death... | 0:28:03 | 0:28:08 | |
Amongst some in the Southern states of the former Confederacy, | 0:28:08 | 0:28:11 | |
the Civil War is remembered as a war of aggression and Abraham Lincoln as a war criminal. | 0:28:11 | 0:28:17 | |
The Bible promises... | 0:28:17 | 0:28:19 | |
'I'm Chuck McMichael. | 0:28:19 | 0:28:21 | |
'I am the great-great-grandson of John Henry Land,' | 0:28:21 | 0:28:24 | |
who, as a 15-year-old farm boy in Georgia, | 0:28:24 | 0:28:29 | |
joined Company H of the 54th Georgia Infantry. | 0:28:29 | 0:28:31 | |
'He fought in battles through Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina.' | 0:28:31 | 0:28:37 | |
Over the years, he probably thought by this time this would be forgotten. | 0:28:37 | 0:28:43 | |
It will not be forgotten. | 0:28:43 | 0:28:44 | |
'My name is Michael Givens.' | 0:28:44 | 0:28:46 | |
I'm a lieutenant commander-in-chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. | 0:28:46 | 0:28:50 | |
We here today have proven that we take this sort of thing seriously. | 0:28:50 | 0:28:55 | |
We are not afraid or ashamed to stand up and be counted. | 0:28:55 | 0:29:00 | |
'This war was Mr Lincoln's war. | 0:29:00 | 0:29:02 | |
'When South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20th 1860, | 0:29:02 | 0:29:07 | |
'he did not ever recognise that.' | 0:29:07 | 0:29:09 | |
OK? But yet he would send 75,000 troops there | 0:29:09 | 0:29:14 | |
to kill people that HE said were his own fellow citizens. | 0:29:14 | 0:29:20 | |
Starts to sound like Milosevic. | 0:29:20 | 0:29:22 | |
Starts to sound like Stalin. | 0:29:22 | 0:29:24 | |
'Here's the man who waged war on, in his view, his own people.' | 0:29:25 | 0:29:30 | |
He was responsible for 650,000 deaths. Please. | 0:29:30 | 0:29:36 | |
'One of my ancestors, he was shot through the leg at Gettysburg' | 0:29:38 | 0:29:43 | |
and walked back to Virginia with a bullet wound in his leg. | 0:29:43 | 0:29:48 | |
And now to be told, "Oh, he was fighting for slavery and he was evil | 0:29:48 | 0:29:52 | |
"and a traitor who just wanted to overthrow the great Abraham Lincoln." | 0:29:52 | 0:29:57 | |
No, he was up there so that his mother and father | 0:29:57 | 0:30:01 | |
wouldn't be killed in Georgia | 0:30:01 | 0:30:03 | |
and their property destroyed, and his little brother have to go to war | 0:30:03 | 0:30:08 | |
and his sisters be raped. | 0:30:08 | 0:30:10 | |
# To arms, to arms | 0:30:10 | 0:30:12 | |
# In Dixie | 0:30:12 | 0:30:14 | |
# And raise the flag of Dixie | 0:30:14 | 0:30:16 | |
# Hurrah, hurrah for Dixie... # | 0:30:16 | 0:30:19 | |
'As far as how I see Lincoln, | 0:30:19 | 0:30:22 | |
'he ordered a bunch of strangers from up North to come down here | 0:30:22 | 0:30:28 | |
'to my family's home, kill my ancestors, | 0:30:28 | 0:30:31 | |
'burn down their property, and steal their goods.' | 0:30:31 | 0:30:35 | |
-# Away -Away! | 0:30:35 | 0:30:37 | |
# Away down south in Dixie. # | 0:30:37 | 0:30:39 | |
He believed a whole class of Southern people | 0:30:39 | 0:30:42 | |
needed to be eliminated. We're talking genocide. | 0:30:42 | 0:30:46 | |
FINAL CHORDS OF SONG | 0:30:46 | 0:30:49 | |
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE | 0:30:49 | 0:30:51 | |
The ferocity with which the Lincoln administration conducted war | 0:30:59 | 0:31:04 | |
was not restricted to the South. | 0:31:04 | 0:31:07 | |
Lincoln had gone to war to prevent slavery expanding into the West, | 0:31:07 | 0:31:11 | |
and defend the free soil ideology of his Republican Party. | 0:31:11 | 0:31:15 | |
But the soil and the land of the West could only be made free for white settlers | 0:31:17 | 0:31:22 | |
if first cleared of its original owners, | 0:31:22 | 0:31:26 | |
the Native Americans. | 0:31:26 | 0:31:29 | |
By the late 1850s, the Santee Sioux | 0:31:32 | 0:31:35 | |
had been pushed into a reservation in the state of Minnesota. | 0:31:35 | 0:31:39 | |
They had sold their tribal lands to the US government for 1.5 million, | 0:31:39 | 0:31:44 | |
a bill that Lincoln's administration had not paid. | 0:31:44 | 0:31:48 | |
In the late summer of 1862, at the height of the Civil War, | 0:31:48 | 0:31:52 | |
the rains failed and the Sioux's crops wilted in the fields. | 0:31:52 | 0:31:57 | |
The Sioux were literally starving. | 0:31:59 | 0:32:01 | |
They rise up against the reservation system, | 0:32:03 | 0:32:07 | |
they kill a number of white settlers, | 0:32:07 | 0:32:10 | |
it's a very, very violent encounter. | 0:32:10 | 0:32:13 | |
The federal government responds by sending General John Pope | 0:32:13 | 0:32:18 | |
to Minnesota to end the uprising. | 0:32:18 | 0:32:22 | |
General Pope is a general who, in the Civil War in the East, has turned the war into hard war. | 0:32:22 | 0:32:27 | |
He's a very tough cookie, | 0:32:27 | 0:32:28 | |
he talks about going to Minnesota to exterminate | 0:32:28 | 0:32:33 | |
the Sioux men, women, and children, | 0:32:33 | 0:32:35 | |
and when he gets there he puts the rebellion down brutally and quickly. | 0:32:35 | 0:32:39 | |
By the end of the rebellion, thousands of the Sioux were imprisoned by the Union Army. | 0:32:40 | 0:32:45 | |
General Pope convened a series of military trials | 0:32:46 | 0:32:49 | |
that condemned 303 of the Sioux men to death. | 0:32:49 | 0:32:53 | |
He then turned to Lincoln for approval. | 0:32:53 | 0:32:56 | |
Now, Lincoln, who doesn't like Indians very much anyway, | 0:32:57 | 0:33:01 | |
is prepared to give the Minnesotans a blood sacrifice of Sioux, | 0:33:01 | 0:33:08 | |
but because of outside foreign influence, | 0:33:08 | 0:33:10 | |
he doesn't want to be seen to hang 303 Sioux all at once, | 0:33:10 | 0:33:15 | |
because they've only had trials lasting about 10 to 15 minutes. | 0:33:15 | 0:33:18 | |
And so he decides he'll hang 39. | 0:33:18 | 0:33:22 | |
Lincoln as executioner. | 0:33:25 | 0:33:28 | |
This is an image of America's secular saint | 0:33:28 | 0:33:31 | |
that most Americans find deeply uncomfortable, | 0:33:31 | 0:33:34 | |
and Lincoln's role in the story of the Sioux uprising | 0:33:34 | 0:33:37 | |
has often been brushed under the historical carpet or explained away. | 0:33:37 | 0:33:41 | |
Now, his defenders say, "What a nice man, he didn't hang 303, | 0:33:42 | 0:33:46 | |
"he only hangs 39," despite the fact that they haven't had any fair trials. | 0:33:46 | 0:33:51 | |
I'm not defending Lincoln, but what is he supposed to do? | 0:33:53 | 0:33:57 | |
Is he supposed to eliminate all of the executions, | 0:33:57 | 0:34:03 | |
is he supposed to allow the Sioux that are deemed guilty of the uprising, | 0:34:03 | 0:34:07 | |
is he supposed to set them free? | 0:34:07 | 0:34:10 | |
I mean, he could do that, we would like him to do that, that would be political suicide. | 0:34:10 | 0:34:15 | |
The story unfortunately doesn't end with the hanging of the 39 Indians, | 0:34:17 | 0:34:23 | |
back in Minnesota about 60-odd Indians are left to rot and die in prison. | 0:34:23 | 0:34:28 | |
Over and above that, Lincoln decides to deport all the Indians, | 0:34:31 | 0:34:35 | |
the Sioux and Winnebagans, who are completely innocent, from Minnesota | 0:34:35 | 0:34:40 | |
and as a result of that, all the Sioux lands are opened up for settlement and speculation. | 0:34:40 | 0:34:44 | |
Members of Lincoln's Cabinet and members of his regime, of course, | 0:34:44 | 0:34:49 | |
are very happy to make themselves rich by speculating in Indian lands. | 0:34:49 | 0:34:53 | |
Meanwhile, the Sioux and Winnebago are sent to | 0:34:57 | 0:35:00 | |
Dakota Territory, but only arrive when it's too late to plant corn. | 0:35:00 | 0:35:05 | |
So they can't feed themselves. Of course, they again | 0:35:05 | 0:35:09 | |
are hit by starvation and disease. | 0:35:09 | 0:35:11 | |
The whole thing is a human disaster, | 0:35:11 | 0:35:14 | |
and the 39 hanged are the least of it, | 0:35:14 | 0:35:18 | |
and Lincoln is responsible. | 0:35:18 | 0:35:20 | |
1862, the year General Pope had decimated the Santee Sioux | 0:35:24 | 0:35:29 | |
was also the year in which Abraham Lincoln's great struggle to drive | 0:35:29 | 0:35:33 | |
the Confederacy back into the Union had ran into the sand. | 0:35:33 | 0:35:38 | |
Well, the first year or so of the war does not go very well for the North. | 0:35:38 | 0:35:42 | |
They lose most of the battles, particularly in the eastern theatre in Virginia. | 0:35:42 | 0:35:47 | |
But if you look at the Civil War a year or so after it begins, | 0:35:47 | 0:35:52 | |
if you looked at a map of the United States, | 0:35:52 | 0:35:54 | |
you would be amazed how little territory | 0:35:54 | 0:35:56 | |
had been recaptured from the Confederacy, | 0:35:56 | 0:35:59 | |
a few little places on the outskirts, | 0:35:59 | 0:36:01 | |
but the Union Army had made no progress in most of the Confederacy. | 0:36:01 | 0:36:05 | |
Unable to defeat the South, Lincoln began to think | 0:36:09 | 0:36:12 | |
the unthinkable and consider the act for which he is now most famous, | 0:36:12 | 0:36:17 | |
the Emancipation of the Slaves. | 0:36:17 | 0:36:20 | |
But as Lincoln slowly came to believe that slavery might be abolished, | 0:36:20 | 0:36:24 | |
he also came to envisage | 0:36:24 | 0:36:26 | |
the deportation or "colonisation" of the slaves out of America. | 0:36:26 | 0:36:32 | |
The essence of colonisation is a belief that | 0:36:33 | 0:36:36 | |
black people can't possibly be Americans | 0:36:36 | 0:36:40 | |
and share in American society. | 0:36:40 | 0:36:42 | |
That is their "patrie", their country, must be someplace else, | 0:36:42 | 0:36:47 | |
probably Africa but white Americans often would take any place just to get them out of here. | 0:36:47 | 0:36:53 | |
Organisations promoting colonisation had first emerged in the early 19th century. | 0:36:56 | 0:37:02 | |
By the 1840s, free black volunteers | 0:37:02 | 0:37:04 | |
were being shipped to the African colony of Liberia. | 0:37:04 | 0:37:08 | |
By the 1860s, numerous plans had been drafted to deport the slaves | 0:37:09 | 0:37:14 | |
to Haiti, the other Caribbean islands, or Central America. | 0:37:14 | 0:37:18 | |
For Abraham Lincoln, colonisation became the means by which he could | 0:37:21 | 0:37:25 | |
square the circle of his opposition to slavery | 0:37:25 | 0:37:28 | |
and his belief in white supremacy. | 0:37:28 | 0:37:32 | |
Of all the presidents and statesmen, he is the one who's obsessed by it. | 0:37:32 | 0:37:36 | |
In all his speeches practically about emancipation, | 0:37:36 | 0:37:39 | |
he talks about emancipation and deportation | 0:37:39 | 0:37:43 | |
in the same sentence, in the same breath. | 0:37:43 | 0:37:47 | |
Now, why is this? | 0:37:47 | 0:37:50 | |
Lincoln fears that there was | 0:37:50 | 0:37:52 | |
a population of four million blacks in the South and about a quarter of a million blacks in the North. | 0:37:52 | 0:37:57 | |
If you emancipate these people after years of subjugation, | 0:37:57 | 0:38:03 | |
the result would be race war. | 0:38:03 | 0:38:06 | |
You can't give them civil and political rights because they don't deserve it in Lincoln's opinion, | 0:38:06 | 0:38:11 | |
they are mentally and physically inferior. | 0:38:11 | 0:38:14 | |
Lincoln could not conceive of the United States as a biracial society. | 0:38:14 | 0:38:20 | |
Slavery should be ended but black people should be encouraged - | 0:38:20 | 0:38:24 | |
he said it should be voluntary - but they should be encouraged to leave the country. | 0:38:24 | 0:38:29 | |
In August 1862, Lincoln called a delegation of free black leaders | 0:38:29 | 0:38:34 | |
to the White House for a now-infamous meeting to discuss colonisation. | 0:38:34 | 0:38:39 | |
Lincoln tells that delegation, and has a recorder write it down | 0:38:39 | 0:38:44 | |
and publicise it in the press, that were it not for them, | 0:38:44 | 0:38:47 | |
this war would not be happening, he says that to them. | 0:38:47 | 0:38:51 | |
He says to them explicitly that the white and black races must be kept separate in America | 0:38:51 | 0:38:57 | |
and he even asked those handpicked five black leaders, | 0:38:57 | 0:38:59 | |
who really weren't very important leaders, | 0:38:59 | 0:39:02 | |
if they would themselves volunteer to lead a colonisation movement out of the country. | 0:39:02 | 0:39:08 | |
When I have students read that for the first time, black or white, | 0:39:08 | 0:39:12 | |
they are a bit stunned because it's so explicit. | 0:39:12 | 0:39:15 | |
Of course, it's fraught with irony too because at that very moment of | 0:39:15 | 0:39:19 | |
August 1862, he's already drafted the Emancipation Proclamation. | 0:39:19 | 0:39:22 | |
He hasn't issued it yet. He's already got it in a drawer. | 0:39:22 | 0:39:25 | |
So it's Lincoln kind of playing both sides of the street | 0:39:25 | 0:39:28 | |
cos he doesn't know how this is going to come out. | 0:39:28 | 0:39:31 | |
Was Lincoln serious about colonisation, or merely using it to appeal to white public opinion? | 0:39:34 | 0:39:40 | |
Were his plans evidence of his political genius or his racism? | 0:39:40 | 0:39:45 | |
Here, again, Lincoln's own words and speeches are used to condemn him. | 0:39:45 | 0:39:50 | |
It's the very presence, he says, of blacks makes white people suffer | 0:39:50 | 0:39:54 | |
and that the two races have to go their separate ways. | 0:39:54 | 0:39:57 | |
He's totally explicit about this when he's talking to the blacks | 0:39:57 | 0:40:01 | |
and he has also said the same many times before to whites. | 0:40:01 | 0:40:04 | |
It's not a rhetorical ploy, it's not a sop politically | 0:40:04 | 0:40:08 | |
to his opponents to keep them calm, he actually means it. | 0:40:08 | 0:40:12 | |
The two ideas of emancipation and colonisation | 0:40:15 | 0:40:19 | |
are absolutely indissolubly linked in Lincoln's mind. | 0:40:19 | 0:40:24 | |
If you like, colonisation/deportation | 0:40:24 | 0:40:27 | |
is the final solution to the Negro problem | 0:40:27 | 0:40:30 | |
as far as Abraham Lincoln is concerned. | 0:40:30 | 0:40:32 | |
Lincoln wanted to deport all black people. | 0:40:37 | 0:40:39 | |
That wasn't something that he said with two or three of his friends | 0:40:39 | 0:40:44 | |
in a back room. | 0:40:44 | 0:40:46 | |
He proposed and asked for the deportation of black Americans | 0:40:46 | 0:40:51 | |
in the State of the Union message | 0:40:51 | 0:40:54 | |
in December 1862. | 0:40:54 | 0:40:57 | |
He wanted to create a white state here. | 0:40:59 | 0:41:02 | |
Now, if Abraham Lincoln had had his way, | 0:41:02 | 0:41:06 | |
there'd be no Obama in the United States, | 0:41:06 | 0:41:09 | |
there'd be no Oprah Winfrey, there'd be no Tiger Woods. | 0:41:09 | 0:41:13 | |
If he had had his way, | 0:41:13 | 0:41:15 | |
there'd be no black people here at all. | 0:41:15 | 0:41:20 | |
The possibility of abolition and along with it the prospect of colonising the freed slaves | 0:41:20 | 0:41:26 | |
was forced onto the agenda in 1862 by the actions of the slaves themselves. | 0:41:26 | 0:41:33 | |
As the war had spread through the South, they had begun to escape | 0:41:33 | 0:41:36 | |
the fields and plantations, changing both the course and the meaning of the conflict. | 0:41:36 | 0:41:43 | |
The war, of course, begins as a white man's war. | 0:41:43 | 0:41:47 | |
It's a war to defend the union. | 0:41:47 | 0:41:49 | |
Lincoln states it's so, slaves simply don't believe that to be true. | 0:41:49 | 0:41:55 | |
They see the enemy of their enemy | 0:41:55 | 0:41:59 | |
entering the South and they believe the enemy of their enemy must be their friend. | 0:41:59 | 0:42:04 | |
They run away to Union encampments. | 0:42:04 | 0:42:07 | |
They offer their service, they offer information, they offer to do the dirty work of war. | 0:42:07 | 0:42:13 | |
As these thousands of former slaves gathered around the invading Union Army in the South, | 0:42:13 | 0:42:17 | |
Lincoln was losing control of events. | 0:42:17 | 0:42:20 | |
He had gone to war to defend the Union and stop the expansion of slavery | 0:42:20 | 0:42:24 | |
but now the Republican Party in Washington, | 0:42:24 | 0:42:26 | |
radicalised by the experience of war, began to push him | 0:42:26 | 0:42:29 | |
to transform the conflict into a struggle to end slavery everywhere. | 0:42:29 | 0:42:34 | |
Lincoln is under enormous pressure in 1862 to take more dramatic action against slavery. | 0:42:34 | 0:42:41 | |
Congress takes the lead, they abolish slavery in Washington DC, | 0:42:41 | 0:42:45 | |
they abolish slavery in the Territories. | 0:42:45 | 0:42:47 | |
They forbid the Army from returning fugitive slaves. | 0:42:47 | 0:42:50 | |
They pass laws to confiscate the property of Confederates, which includes their slaves. | 0:42:50 | 0:42:57 | |
Then there's public opinion in the North, abolitionists, others saying, | 0:42:57 | 0:43:01 | |
"The war is not going well, we've got to take more dramatic action." | 0:43:01 | 0:43:05 | |
And of course the action of slaves puts the question of slavery | 0:43:05 | 0:43:09 | |
on the national agenda in a direct way. | 0:43:09 | 0:43:12 | |
On 1st January 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. | 0:43:16 | 0:43:24 | |
It began the process that would end slavery in America | 0:43:24 | 0:43:28 | |
and crucially, it did not call for the colonisation of freed slaves. | 0:43:28 | 0:43:33 | |
The importance was that it said, "We are on the side of Emancipation." | 0:43:36 | 0:43:43 | |
It said, "The Union is an anti-slavery Union." | 0:43:43 | 0:43:48 | |
Before the Emancipation Proclamation, the war was about Union, | 0:43:48 | 0:43:53 | |
and Lincoln said, "If I can restore the Union without freeing a single slave, I'll do it." | 0:43:53 | 0:43:58 | |
But he couldn't do it and the Emancipation Proclamation | 0:43:58 | 0:44:03 | |
became the symbolic turning point of the war. | 0:44:03 | 0:44:07 | |
It committed the whole war effort now, whether those generals | 0:44:10 | 0:44:13 | |
and colonels wanted to or not, to ending slavery as an aim of the war. | 0:44:13 | 0:44:19 | |
Four million slaves, the labour system of the South. | 0:44:21 | 0:44:25 | |
That is a radical move, | 0:44:25 | 0:44:28 | |
because once you do that, there's really no going back. | 0:44:28 | 0:44:32 | |
If you start rounding up thousands of slaves to free them | 0:44:32 | 0:44:36 | |
and give them some kind of new status, | 0:44:36 | 0:44:38 | |
you surely cannot send them back to anything resembling slavery. | 0:44:38 | 0:44:43 | |
The modern reputation of Abraham Lincoln rests above all on his status as the Great Emancipator. | 0:44:48 | 0:44:55 | |
It's the story that the Lincoln industry and the academic establishment stand behind, | 0:44:57 | 0:45:01 | |
and it's what all Americans are taught at school. | 0:45:01 | 0:45:05 | |
Abraham Lincoln is one of the best presidents | 0:45:05 | 0:45:08 | |
this country has ever had because of what he did for the slaves. | 0:45:08 | 0:45:12 | |
He thought it was wrong and no person should own another person. | 0:45:12 | 0:45:15 | |
He just abolished slavery and all the wrongdoings of our country. | 0:45:15 | 0:45:21 | |
Does Lincoln deserve his reputation as the Great Emancipator | 0:45:21 | 0:45:25 | |
or was the Emancipation Proclamation as much an act of war | 0:45:25 | 0:45:30 | |
as an act of mercy, a desperate manoeuvre motivated in large part | 0:45:30 | 0:45:35 | |
by the failure of Lincoln to defeat the Confederate Armies? | 0:45:35 | 0:45:39 | |
It's a war measure, it's a military measure, that's how it is justified. | 0:45:39 | 0:45:43 | |
It's the only way it can be justified. | 0:45:43 | 0:45:44 | |
There is nothing in the Constitution that enables the President to decree the abolition of slavery, | 0:45:44 | 0:45:49 | |
what Lincoln rests an is his role as Commander-in-Chief of the Army. | 0:45:49 | 0:45:54 | |
Compare it to the Declaration of Independence, | 0:45:54 | 0:45:57 | |
which begins with this wonderful preamble about the rights of mankind. | 0:45:57 | 0:46:00 | |
There's nothing like that, this is a military order. | 0:46:00 | 0:46:03 | |
It contains no soaring rhetoric whatsoever, which Lincoln was capable of. | 0:46:03 | 0:46:07 | |
Only at the suggestion of Secretary of the Treasury Chase | 0:46:07 | 0:46:10 | |
does it end with a statement, "This is an act of justice as well as of military necessity." | 0:46:10 | 0:46:17 | |
Like the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation has become one of America's sacred texts | 0:46:17 | 0:46:25 | |
and it places Lincoln at the centre of the story. | 0:46:25 | 0:46:28 | |
But Emancipation was a process that Lincoln did not begin and was never able to control. | 0:46:28 | 0:46:35 | |
To be perfectly frank, we give him too much credit for it. | 0:46:35 | 0:46:39 | |
He caught up with the process of Emancipation | 0:46:39 | 0:46:42 | |
as much as he made the personal decision to free the slaves. | 0:46:42 | 0:46:47 | |
Emancipation comes about in 1862, and especially in 1863, | 0:46:47 | 0:46:52 | |
in the midst of this war out of the process of its escalation. | 0:46:52 | 0:46:57 | |
The Emancipation Proclamation not only freed enslaved Africans, | 0:47:04 | 0:47:09 | |
it also did something that the North and Lincoln himself had resisted since the start of the war - | 0:47:09 | 0:47:14 | |
it allowed the recruitment of black men into the Union Army. | 0:47:14 | 0:47:19 | |
Many Northerners didn't believe blacks would fight, they'd run away | 0:47:19 | 0:47:22 | |
when confronted or they'd massacre white people with their arms. | 0:47:22 | 0:47:26 | |
Nobody knew what would happen if you armed these slaves, there were so many racist preconceptions. | 0:47:26 | 0:47:32 | |
The service of black soldiers, the successes of black soldiers, | 0:47:32 | 0:47:36 | |
the dignity of black soldiers changes many Northerners' attitudes about race, about the black men. | 0:47:36 | 0:47:42 | |
It certainly had a powerful effect on Lincoln himself. | 0:47:42 | 0:47:46 | |
If you want to know why Lincoln's racial views changed | 0:47:46 | 0:47:48 | |
during the Civil War, a lot of it has to do with the black soldiers. | 0:47:48 | 0:47:52 | |
Lincoln comes to feel as many Northerners do, | 0:47:52 | 0:47:54 | |
that by fighting and dying for the Union, they have staked a claim to citizenship in the post-war world. | 0:47:54 | 0:48:01 | |
The greatness of Lincoln is his capacity for growth. | 0:48:01 | 0:48:04 | |
By the end of the Civil War, by the end of his life, Lincoln's views on race have changed significantly. | 0:48:04 | 0:48:10 | |
He has not become Martin Luther King Jr, | 0:48:10 | 0:48:12 | |
but he has come to recognise that the United States is going to be a biracial society. | 0:48:12 | 0:48:18 | |
In April 1865, the Confederate Armies finally surrendered. | 0:48:24 | 0:48:30 | |
The Civil War had consumed 620,000 lives. | 0:48:32 | 0:48:37 | |
The cities of the South lay in ruins | 0:48:40 | 0:48:44 | |
and slavery had been swept away. | 0:48:44 | 0:48:47 | |
And Lincoln, like his nation, was a man transformed. | 0:48:49 | 0:48:53 | |
In this very short period of time he's gone from believing | 0:48:55 | 0:48:59 | |
that he has no right to do anything with slavery, that slavery | 0:48:59 | 0:49:03 | |
should die a gradual, natural death, | 0:49:03 | 0:49:06 | |
that African Americans really are not | 0:49:06 | 0:49:08 | |
entitled to political rights, but at the end of the war he talks about | 0:49:08 | 0:49:15 | |
wanting to see certain segments of the African American population | 0:49:15 | 0:49:20 | |
get the right to vote. | 0:49:20 | 0:49:22 | |
So who was Abraham Lincoln in 1865? | 0:49:22 | 0:49:26 | |
Was he the Great Emancipator on the verge of awarding black people | 0:49:26 | 0:49:30 | |
some degree of equality, or still an inveterate white supremacist? | 0:49:30 | 0:49:34 | |
Was he the man who would save the Union | 0:49:34 | 0:49:36 | |
or a war criminal whose ruthless strategies had devastated his nation? | 0:49:36 | 0:49:41 | |
Was he America's saint or a man whose views captured all that was wrong with America in the 19th century? | 0:49:41 | 0:49:49 | |
The problem here is that people always want to be | 0:49:49 | 0:49:51 | |
all one or all the other. | 0:49:51 | 0:49:52 | |
We want our Abraham Lincolns and our Winston Churchills, | 0:49:52 | 0:49:55 | |
our Mahatma Gandhis, to be perfect in their principles. | 0:49:55 | 0:50:00 | |
The case of Abraham Lincoln, however, always has to be understood within the story | 0:50:07 | 0:50:12 | |
of a man who was a consummate, pragmatic, | 0:50:12 | 0:50:17 | |
genius of a politician. | 0:50:17 | 0:50:19 | |
But how far he'd have ever gone with civil or social equality is only speculation. | 0:50:25 | 0:50:32 | |
The assassination of Abraham Lincoln marked the beginning of a disastrous political process | 0:51:20 | 0:51:25 | |
that led America to reject the appeals for racial equality | 0:51:25 | 0:51:28 | |
that had emerged from the radicalism of the Civil War. | 0:51:28 | 0:51:32 | |
During the century between Emancipation in the 1860s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, | 0:51:34 | 0:51:41 | |
African Americans were pushed into segregated lives defined by the so-called Jim Crow laws... | 0:51:41 | 0:51:48 | |
..and lynching. | 0:51:50 | 0:51:51 | |
But throughout that century in the darkness, | 0:51:53 | 0:51:56 | |
African Americans attempted to use the memory of Lincoln, | 0:51:56 | 0:52:00 | |
white America's secular saint, to appeal for justice. | 0:52:00 | 0:52:05 | |
African Americans understood how important Lincoln's memory | 0:52:07 | 0:52:10 | |
was to the nation and they were hoping that they could tap into that memory. | 0:52:10 | 0:52:16 | |
They're reminding white Americans that the promise has not been fulfilled, | 0:52:17 | 0:52:22 | |
that they have to step up | 0:52:22 | 0:52:24 | |
and honour the obligation that Lincoln had started, | 0:52:24 | 0:52:28 | |
because these rights that African Americans had been promised had not been granted. | 0:52:28 | 0:52:34 | |
Five score years ago, a great American | 0:52:34 | 0:52:38 | |
in whose symbolic shadow we stand today | 0:52:38 | 0:52:42 | |
signed the Emancipation Proclamation. | 0:52:42 | 0:52:46 | |
'Exactly a century after the Emancipation Proclamation, | 0:52:47 | 0:52:50 | |
'the Lincoln Memorial, America's temple to the cult of Lincoln, | 0:52:50 | 0:52:54 | |
'became the stage on which African Americans came together | 0:52:54 | 0:52:57 | |
'to demand the nation finally fulfil the promise of freedom that Lincoln had made in 1863.' | 0:52:57 | 0:53:03 | |
But 100 years later, | 0:53:03 | 0:53:06 | |
the Negro still is not free. | 0:53:06 | 0:53:11 | |
100 years later... | 0:53:12 | 0:53:14 | |
The part of that speech that everyone always hears, | 0:53:14 | 0:53:18 | |
and it's even used in commercials in the United States, | 0:53:18 | 0:53:21 | |
is only the dream part, "I have a dream, little black children, white children joining hands." | 0:53:21 | 0:53:27 | |
In a sense, we've come to our nation's capital to cash a cheque. | 0:53:27 | 0:53:32 | |
'What we almost never replay is the first three or four pages of that speech.' | 0:53:32 | 0:53:38 | |
..wrote the magnificent words | 0:53:38 | 0:53:39 | |
of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. | 0:53:39 | 0:53:43 | |
They were signing a promissory note... | 0:53:45 | 0:53:48 | |
'King begins the speech by using the metaphor' | 0:53:48 | 0:53:52 | |
of what he called the promissory note. | 0:53:52 | 0:53:55 | |
It is obvious today | 0:53:55 | 0:53:58 | |
that America has defaulted on this promissory note | 0:53:58 | 0:54:02 | |
insofar as her citizens of colour are concerned. | 0:54:02 | 0:54:07 | |
'That's Martin Luther King on the 100th anniversary of Emancipation | 0:54:07 | 0:54:11 | |
'standing in the Lincoln Memorial and saying to the world', | 0:54:11 | 0:54:14 | |
"The United States wrote a bad cheque in 1863, it bounced." | 0:54:14 | 0:54:20 | |
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. | 0:54:20 | 0:54:25 | |
We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds | 0:54:25 | 0:54:29 | |
in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation... | 0:54:29 | 0:54:32 | |
'So here in 1963,' | 0:54:32 | 0:54:35 | |
a chance, you might say, to reboot, to go back to 1863 | 0:54:35 | 0:54:41 | |
and build on the promises of the Civil War and the promises of the Emancipation Proclamation, | 0:54:41 | 0:54:49 | |
and to try to do away with all the ugliness, | 0:54:49 | 0:54:53 | |
all the white supremacy, and re-establish democracy. | 0:54:53 | 0:54:58 | |
Half a century after the civil rights struggle, | 0:55:03 | 0:55:05 | |
Abraham Lincoln has become perhaps the only historical figure | 0:55:05 | 0:55:09 | |
sacred to both black and white Americans. | 0:55:09 | 0:55:13 | |
Although he remains shrouded in myth and exaggeration, | 0:55:13 | 0:55:16 | |
and although uncomfortable questions have been asked about | 0:55:16 | 0:55:20 | |
who he really was and what he really thought, Lincoln's story, his rise from poverty, | 0:55:20 | 0:55:25 | |
his battle against slavery, and his struggle with his own racism has made his memory a potent political force. | 0:55:25 | 0:55:32 | |
It was here in Springfield where North, | 0:55:32 | 0:55:34 | |
South, East, and West come together that I was reminded | 0:55:34 | 0:55:38 | |
of the essential decency of the American people. | 0:55:38 | 0:55:42 | |
'In his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama, a candidate whose very presence in the race threatened to | 0:55:42 | 0:55:47 | |
'divide America, consciously linked himself to Lincoln.' | 0:55:47 | 0:55:51 | |
..State capital where Lincoln once called on a House divided, | 0:55:51 | 0:55:56 | |
I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for President | 0:55:56 | 0:56:03 | |
of the United States of America. | 0:56:03 | 0:56:05 | |
'Obama very much played on Lincoln's image. | 0:56:05 | 0:56:09 | |
'He mimicked Lincoln's trip' | 0:56:09 | 0:56:12 | |
on the train from Philadelphia to Washington DC. | 0:56:12 | 0:56:15 | |
'He swore in on his inauguration on the very OUP Bible that Lincoln had used 100 some odd years earlier.' | 0:56:15 | 0:56:23 | |
I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear... | 0:56:23 | 0:56:26 | |
He has cloaked himself, his candidacy, indeed his Presidency, | 0:56:28 | 0:56:32 | |
in the Lincoln myth. | 0:56:32 | 0:56:34 | |
As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, | 0:56:34 | 0:56:39 | |
"We are not enemies but friends. | 0:56:39 | 0:56:42 | |
"Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection." | 0:56:42 | 0:56:48 | |
The Lincoln that Obama adopted most was Lincoln the healer. | 0:56:48 | 0:56:52 | |
It's the Lincoln through whom we can all somehow come together. | 0:56:52 | 0:56:58 | |
Our stories are singular but our destiny is shared. | 0:56:58 | 0:57:01 | |
'Not Lincoln the ruthless war maker, not Lincoln even the Emancipator, | 0:57:01 | 0:57:05 | |
'it's Lincoln the healer. | 0:57:05 | 0:57:09 | |
'That's the Lincoln that Obama most tried to use.' | 0:57:09 | 0:57:12 | |
That the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms | 0:57:12 | 0:57:16 | |
or the scale of our wealth but from the enduring power of | 0:57:16 | 0:57:19 | |
our ideals, democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope. | 0:57:19 | 0:57:25 | |
I think we all look at Lincoln from a perspective of | 0:57:29 | 0:57:32 | |
what we see America as, and what we think America should be. | 0:57:32 | 0:57:38 | |
And those of us who see America as this perfect place, always right, | 0:57:42 | 0:57:46 | |
did everything right from the very beginning, | 0:57:46 | 0:57:50 | |
need a Lincoln who is larger than life, who is a Herculean figure who did Herculean things. | 0:57:50 | 0:57:58 | |
But I think we as a nation need to understand that we can | 0:58:00 | 0:58:05 | |
honour Lincoln and be truthful. | 0:58:05 | 0:58:08 | |
He was a human being who made mistakes, who had prejudices, | 0:58:08 | 0:58:14 | |
who had his own agenda - that does not diminish his greatness. | 0:58:14 | 0:58:19 | |
I think it makes him even greater because it shows that with all his prejudices, | 0:58:19 | 0:58:24 | |
with all the baggage that he brings to the Presidency and to Emancipation, | 0:58:24 | 0:58:29 | |
he still did the right thing in the end. | 0:58:29 | 0:58:32 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:49 | 0:58:52 | |
E-mail [email protected] | 0:58:52 | 0:58:55 |