Abraham Lincoln: Anti-White Negrophile?

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Anti-white partisans frequently unmoor history from facts, transforming it into a “narrative,” a fiction to serve their ideological objectives. One such narrative enlists the canonical figure of Abraham Lincoln to advance the racial agenda of the ruling class. The effort is not limited to Jewish media bosses like Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner ^[2], but extends to government and academia as well.

In contrast to Spielberg’s and academia’s misrepresentations of Lincoln as an anti-white saint, American Renaissance portrayed a much different President in a cover story published two decades ago:

The Abraham Lincoln of history is vastly different from “the great emancipator” whose racial views have been increasingly shrouded in myth. . . .

Throughout his presidency Lincoln tried to implement the plan outlined by Jefferson: gradual emancipation, compensation to slaveholders, colonization of freed blacks, and the promotion of white immigration to take the place of black labor. It is only by means of the most willful disregard for the historical evidence that Lincoln can be construed as a champion of racial equality. “Abraham Lincoln and the Problem of Slavery ^[3]” (May 1991)

This summary accords well with the facts.

In The Dispossessed Majority ^[4] (3rd rev. ed., 1981), pro-white author and Instauration magazine ^[5] founder and editor Wilmot Robertson described Lincoln as a “nonbeliever in the genetic equality of Negroes firmly committed to the separation of the two races and a strong supporter of the Illinois law which made marriage between whites and Negroes a crime.” A long footnote cites further statements and evidence to this effect, including observations by WASP segregationist and Delta Airlines CEO Carleton Putnam from his book Race and Reality (1967).

In recent years libertarian economist Thomas J. DiLorenzo has gained notoriety for writing books (The Real Lincoln, Lincoln Unmasked) and articles (“Claremont’s Court Historians” ^[6]) exposing numerous falsehoods propagated about President Lincoln.

The Southern Poverty Law Center ^[7], a Jewish censorship outfit, has attacked DiLorenzo ^[8] for his historical observations. Evidently the SPLC views his work as a threat to prevailing falsifications about Lincoln.

The irony is that DiLorenzo’s intent is to condemn Lincoln as much for his pro-whiteness as for his wartime violations of Constitutional liberties.

Unfortunately, DiLorenzo’s strident polemicism often backfires.

For example, most of his civil liberties arguments against Lincoln apply with equal force to Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy. Both governments responded to the exigencies of war in similar ways.

Again, DiLorenzo selectively quotes from Lincoln’s 1862 address on emigration to black leaders at the White House (see related reprint of the talk), and presents the following outrageous “paraphrase” of Lincoln’s position: “What an offer: Most of you will probably die, but you can be comforted in the fact that in say, fifty years, your descendants will outnumber the few of you who survive.” (“The GOP’s Liberian Connection ^[9],” July 10, 2003)

Such distortion rises to the level of misrepresentation, casting doubt upon the soundness of DiLorenzo’s work in this area.

As far back as 1919, black academic Charles H. Wesley ^[10] soberly and succinctly analyzed “Lincoln’s Plan for Colonizing the Emancipated Negroes ^[11]” in the Journal of Negro History 4 (January 1919): 7–21. Lincoln, he observed, is viewed

not only [as] the Great Emancipator but the Great Lover of the Negro and promoter of his welfare. He is thought of, popularly, always, as the champion of the races’s equality. . . . Yet, although Lincoln believed in the destruction of slavery, he desired the complete separation of whites and blacks.

Recently authors Phillip W. Magness and Sebastion N. Page examined extensive archival materials, “long-forgotten records scattered across three continents, many of them untouched since the Civil War,” to reveal, contrary to the claims of the mythologists, that Lincoln’s efforts to resettle blacks persisted until the end. See Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement ^[12] (University of Missouri Press, 2011).

It is unclear why Jews and academics commonly lie about Lincoln the way they do. They could easily use their media and academic presses to destroy his reputation, as DiLorenzo attempts to do from a libertarian perspective, or Negro Lerone Bennett from a black one (Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream ^[13]).

The anti-white crowd has plenty of authentic “heroes” to venerate, from bloody black murderers like Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, to whites such as John Brown, Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (R.-Penn.), and Sen. Charles Sumner (R.-Mass.)—terrorists, extremist abolitionists, Radical Republicans, and others.

The recent post-election commentary and orgiastic hymns of praise to Django Unchained demonstrate that such people truly do get off on racial murder and violence against whites.

Some Inconvenient Facts

Nearly all of the 10 million or so blacks transported to the New World between 1550 and 1850 were settled on large plantations south of the US in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, particularly Brazil.

The US imported the fewest number of slaves, around 500,000—5% of the total if the overall figure of Africans removed to the Western Hemisphere was 10 million, or 3.3% if a high-end estimate of 15 million is used.

Furthermore, Jews were major players in both slavery and segregation, making them racially culpable and deserving of punishment and atonement. It is preposterous to claim that only whites were involved in slavery and discrimination. Jews were central figures and prime movers in both slavery and segregation. (“Jews and Slavery: Three Books by the Nation of Islam ^[14],” August 24, 2012) They are in no position to lecture us.

According to University of Georgia Civil War historian Emory Thomas, “the great majority of antebellum Southerners did not own slaves.”

The Nation of Islam’s researchers noted that in the US as a whole, roughly 7% of white Americans owned slaves, while 93% did not.

In the South, Jews were twice as likely to own slaves as the average white Southerner.

And these figures overlook completely the millions of white Americans whose ancestors came from countries that never had slavery.

Crass anti-white and anti-American biases motivate most academic, journalistic, and governmental invocations of slavery used to castigate white Americans and demand present-day legal discrimination, concessions, and “reparations” from them.

Slavery a Dying Institution

Chattel slavery in America had run its course by 1860. Even had it survived for a few more decades, it was on the way out.

It was a “necessary evil” even to the Southerners of the founding generation, and only obliquely defensible by intellectuals such as John C. Calhoun and the moderate leaders of the Confederacy (“states’ rights,” “nullification”).

Slavery, which by 1860 was no longer politically viable in America, was reprehensible on moral grounds and biologically and socially disastrous from a racial point of view.

Emory Thomas described changes in attitudes in the South to illustrate the internal trend there.

In 1863 a serious movement among Southern churches and church leaders began agitating for the reform of slavery. As the war continued, the reform impulse grew, resulting in state legislation liberalizing slavery laws.

Academic Bell Wiley argued in 1938 that Confederate slavery was a “dying institution” that ultimately would have been “reformed to death” by its friends. (Southern Negroes, 1861–1865, p. 172)

In March 1865 the Confederate Congress authorized President Jefferson Davis to enlist 300,000 slave-soldiers into the army. To provide an idea of scale, 850,000 white men served in the Confederate armed forces.

Desperate for foreign assistance, late that same month President Davis offered, in the name of the Confederacy, to emancipate all Southern slaves in exchange for diplomatic recognition and aid. But by then no European power was willing to recognize a moribund South.

As Thomas emphasized, when forced to choose between slavery, “the chief object of the war,” and independence, the South opted for independence. Ultimately, the Confederacy itself was willing to let slavery perish in order to preserve an independent Southern nation.

In recent decades, white racialists as radical as National Alliance founder William L. Pierce and as moderate as the separatists of Orania, South Africa, have shared a conviction that the importation of African laborers and slaves into white societies was disastrous for our people.

William Pierce, a native Southerner and great-great-grandson of the wartime governor of Alabama and Attorney General of the Confederacy, was harsh in his condemnation of the practice.

He praised the “racially healthy colonialism” of “North America outside the South.” Northerners “formed all-white communities of farmers, craftsmen, and tradesmen, as they had in Europe.”

Only where the land and the climate were suitable for large-scale, plantation-style agriculture—that is, in the South—were Blacks brought into North America. Elsewhere, until the middle of the 19th century the entire influx was not only European, but Northern European. But for the efforts of the agribusiness entrepreneurs in the South, North America, from the Canadian arctic to the Gulf of Mexico, would have become simply a racial extension of the Northern European heartland, in sharp contrast to the situation in Latin America. Who We Are ^[15] (Hillsboro, W. Va.: National Vanguard Books, 2012, p. 268); orig. pub. 1978–1982 in serial form.

Anti-Slavery ≠ Anti-White

It is an error to assume that anti-slavery beliefs or abolitionism, their most extreme proponents excepted, were equivalent to today’s virulent anti-white hatred and Negrophilia.

As Wilmot Robertson noted,

The slavery question began to divide Americans from the very moment of their independence. The best minds of the day—Franklin, Patrick Henry, Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison—were opposed to slavery but unwilling to come to grips with it because of the greater urgency of unifying the young republic. Opposition to slavery, it should be noted, did not necessarily signify a belief in equality. (p. 216)

Slavery was much less prominent during the formation of the republic than it was by 1860. The South from the Appalachians to the Mississippi had not been settled, much less transformed into an extensive plantation economy. Most of it was wilderness. Between 1787 and 1860 the native black population also grew tremendously through natural increase.

Emory Thomas wrote that moderate abolitionists, despite their desire to do away with the legal ownership of human beings, did not accept black-white racial equality.

The Nation of Islam noted that “white abolitionists who earnestly wanted an end to slavery had no intention of granting the Black man full social, economic, or political citizenship. They decried the horrors of that cruelest of institutions, but most [emphasis added] fundamentally believed in the rightness of white mastery over all affairs of the nation.” (The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Vol. 2: How Jews Gained Control of the Black American Economy ^[14] [2010], p. 28)

Only a handful of Northern states, mostly in New England, gave Negro men (but not women) the right to vote on the same terms as whites, and in late 1865 white voters in Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Minnesota defeated Negro suffrage proposals by large margins.

Indeed, many of the founders and leaders of the American Colonization Society, whose objective was repatriation, were abolitionists.

Unionism

It is difficult to understand how Southern secession could be regarded as illegal or unconstitutional.

The United States itself seceded—violently—from Great Britain and established first a confederation, and then a federation, of independent states that retained their sovereignty. Only narrowly circumscribed powers were ceded to the federal government.

The original republic was precisely the opposite of today’s centralized regime in which states are little more than administrative units of a unitary colossus, retaining only slight vestiges of their former independence.

That being said, the Unionist position was not entirely without merit.

Legalism aside, where does the principle of secessionism lead when practiced by white Europeans?

Without being bounded in some principled way, does it not ultimately result in endless factionalism and fragmentation? Logic and historical experience reveal this to be the case within both political nationalism and religious sectarianism.

It is ironic that the Confederate Constitution, which was essentially the US Constitution as amended and construed by Southerners, established a “permanent” union, thus denying the logic of its own origin. The North’s contention was that the original Constitution itself had created a permanent union.

The schismatic impulse was further demonstrated in 1861, when, following Virginia’s secession from the Union, the western counties of that state held their own convention and seceded from Virginia. By popular referendum they created the new state of West Virginia.

It is in light of such facts that Lincoln’s public statement to Horace Greeley should be evaluated:

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. . . . If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save Slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy Slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about Slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union. “A Letter from President Lincoln ^[16],” April 22, 1862

I would add that Adolf Hitler strenuously opposed secessionist movements within Germany prior to seizing power. His “most dangerous opponent as an orator” was Otto Ballerstedt, right-wing head of the separatist Bavarian League. In Hitler’s view, Germany needed more territory, not less: “Better to have a greater Germany under the Bolsheviks than a Southern German State dependent upon the Czechs and French!”

Four months after writing his letter to Greeley, Lincoln met with the first black delegation ever to visit the White House in an effort to enlist Negro support for resettlement.

He made the following observation to his guests:

I need not recount to you the effects upon white men, growing out of the institution of Slavery. I believe in its general evil effects on the white race. [Benjamin Franklin had made exactly the same argument a century before.] See our present condition—the country engaged in war!—our white men cutting one another’s throats, none knowing how far it will extend; and then consider what we know to be the truth. But for your race among us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other. Nevertheless, I repeat, without the institution of Slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.

Given the extreme reluctance of most blacks to emigrate, and the increasing headwinds Lincoln faced within his own party and Administration on the issue, I found his realistic determination impressive:

The practical thing I want to ascertain is whether I can get a number of able-bodied men, with their wives and children, who are willing to go. Could I get a hundred tolerably intelligent men, with their wives and children? Can I have fifty? If I could find twenty-five able-bodied men, with a mixture of women and children, I think I could make a successful commencement.

Compare this to the experience of the Pilgrims. The Mayflower arrived at Plymouth in November 1620, at the very onset of winter, carrying 102 passengers, 45 of whom (44%) perished in the first few months. By November 1621, one year later, 53 Pilgrims—including just four adult women—remained alive to celebrate the First Thanksgiving.

Assessment

Gushing idolatry (or, for that matter, fierce racialist attacks) motivated by a contention that Lincoln was an anti-white Negrophile do not align with the facts. The idea that the President was some sort of demon in any other way also seems hard to swallow.

This does not mean that he is above criticism.

For example, although such critiques do not resonate with me, people might resent or dislike Lincoln from a Southern partisan point of view, or due to an overall rejection of the “Enlightenment,” modernity, or the American experiment, or for some other reason.

Facts are facts; people’s normative responses to a given set of facts may vary greatly.

I cannot say for certain, but I suspect that Lincoln, like too many Southerners, was philo-Semitic—a black mark against him to be sure.

By that time the Jews were gravitating to the centers of political and economic power in the United States, though their influence was nothing like what it would later become. It was Lincoln who, with unseemly alacrity, countermanded General Ulysses S. Grant’s order to exclude predatory Jews from his war zone.

One of Lincoln’s major shortcomings was his insistence that emigration be noncompulsory at government expense (of course, he did advocate suasion and positive incentives). Attorney General Edward Bates insisted upon compulsory deportation, and was therefore on much firmer ground. The Negro, Bates said, would never leave voluntarily. The correctness of Bates’ assessment seems undeniable.

Abraham Lincoln’s attempts to colonize freed blacks during the Civil War failed for a variety of reasons, including the unwillingness of foreign countries to accept black settlers, lack of enthusiasm for repatriation among American blacks, and subversion of his policies by radical members of his own cabinet.

Moreover, the actual number of proposed repatriates during his Administration was not numerically large, especially in terms of the overall size of the black population. (Phillip W. Magness, “Colonization by the Numbers” ^[17])

Nevertheless, Lincoln worked to the best of his ability within the limits of the possible in the midst of one of the greatest wars this country has ever waged. He lived in an era of rapid social change and intellectual ferment throughout the Western world, when the malign nihilism that had reared its head during the French Revolution was finally birthing modern socialism, Communism, philo-Semitism, and anti-white racism.

In retrospect, the Leftist revolutions of 1848, early feminism, Radical Republicanism, Reconstruction, and similar movements were signs of the deterioration of Western civilization. Politically, the prevailing climate of ideas worked against Lincoln’s desire for black-white separation. His views actually ran contrary to the general trend, yet his convictions and behavior did not change because of it.

To illustrate, Radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner rejected colonization as “unjust” and an affront to “equal rights”:

It is vain to say that this is a white man’s country. It is the country of man. Whoever disowns any member of the human family as brother disowns God as father, and thus becomes impious as well as inhuman. If anyone is to be sent away, let it be the guilty [white Southerners] and not the innocent [blacks].

But that was not Abraham Lincoln’s position. As black scholar Charles Wesley, who personally opposed colonization as “impracticable” and a “great injustice,” judiciously summarized in 1919,

From the earliest period of his public life it is easily discernable that Abraham Lincoln was an ardent believer and supporter of the colonization idea. It was his plan not only to emancipate the Negro, but to colonize him in some foreign land. His views were presented not only to interested men of the white race, but to persons of color as well.

The reason, according to Lincoln, was that “The separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation.”

Further Reading

Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page, “Lincoln and Colonization: Navigating the Evidence ^[18],” History News Network

http://philmagness.com/ ^[19] Website of Phillip W. Magness, co-author of Colonization After Emancipation (2011), with further documents and articles on the subject.

Emory M. Thomas, The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience ^[20] (1971)

Charles H. Wesley, “Lincoln’s Plan for Colonizing the Emancipated Negroes ^[11],” Journal of Negro History 4 (January 1919): 7–21. Recommended.