Getting Right With Abe

America will never come right until it gets right with Lincoln. He was not a saint who saved the Union and freed the slaves. He was a pathologically ambitious man who stumbled into the bloodiest war in American history, freed the slaves in the most destructive possible way, and cost the lives of many Northerners by his bad military decisions. He did not save the Union but turned America into an empire with an unappealable central authority, with crony capitalism installed as its predominant feature of government.


Now I don’t mind if you like Lincoln and are happy with what he did and regard his deviousness as great statesman. But let’s cut out the sainthood bit which distorts our understanding of our national history with false righteousness.


Britain and France have had civil wars and revolutions. People still have sympathy with one side or another, but they don’t claim that they are basking in righteousness from the cause they favour. Only in the U.S. do we have the appeal to sainthood for one side. History is more complicated than that.


Kevin Orlin Johnson has done good work in bringing Lincoln into realistic focus. His book The Lincolns in the White House: Slanders, Scandals, and Lincoln’s Slave Trading Revealed provided us with all sorts of information that we did not know, some of it rather seamy. Lincoln did indeed sell slaves inherited from his wife’s family.

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Johnson’s latest, Nance, a Girl of Color and Her Lawyer Abraham Lincoln, gives us a lot more context for Lincoln. (Pangaeus Press.) Supposedly slavery was not legal in the Illinois of Lincoln’s time. But no free black person could stay in the State for more than 30 days without punishment. Lincoln never objected to this. In fact, there were a great many African slaves labouring in Illinois. It was simple to move slaves to Illinois, pay a dollar to a public official, and put African Americans under indenture for up to 99 years. The general attitude of many Illinois whites was brutal and exploitive toward black people.

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Johnson’s book is centered around the moving case of Nance, an African American who was born free. Her parents were indentured but no indenture was ever established for her. She was raised and sheltered by a white family from Kentucky, learned reading and math, was treated with affection, and became a major manager in the master’s business.


Bad people tried to seize her on an imaginary indenture. Her young lawyer Abe Lincoln bungled the case and she lost her freedom. His senior partner, Southern-born John Todd Stuart, saved her on appeal.


Johnson writes a story in which known facts, which are few, are enhanced by the imagination of a historian and fine writer who is immersed in the time and place about which he writes. Lincoln’s Springfield, Illinois, was a much uglier place than the ideal America that we are shown in book and film fantasies.