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for larger version       The Rockaway Irregular Recently, I came across an attack on Abraham Lincoln on the Internet. Lincoln, the poster wrote, was a racist who didn't care about freeing African- Americans or leading the country into Civil War for any high moral purpose. He was merely an instrument of the Northern ruling class and the racist white society that was America. It got me to thinking about what we were - and have become. There's no denying the truth in some of this poster's words. But can we judge a man like Lincoln, a man of an earlier era, by the mores of our time when he was born, raised and lived in a different one. In 1858, in the first Lincoln-Douglas debate, the future American president acknowledged what are today unseemly racial beliefs. In this, he was reflecting a common white point of view at the time. Indeed, what he knew of African- Americans came from exposure to individuals who were the products of slaveholding practices that deliberately kept them in ignorance. And yet, in that same debate, he also said this: ". . . there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness . . . . in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man." Despite his subscription to the racist views of his day, Lincoln still stood opposed to slavery which, of course, is why the South acted to secede when he was elected president in 1860. The Civil War had many causative factors and the country that would split apart in that great conflict was one that had been built on violence and injustice from the beginning. The mere arrival of European whites had produced a massive population disruption and obliteration of most of the native peoples. There was great cruelty in much of what happened on both sides and the importation of Africans as slaves was as cruel as any of those other events out of which this nation emerged. But peoples change if, sometimes, individuals don't and, over the centuries, slavery came to seem abhorrent to the Europeans who had first established it on a transatlantic basis. In America it died out relatively early in the North, though it took root and persisted in the South due, in part, to economic factors (southern plantation economics thrived on it whereas the small farms and manufacturing, the stuff of the northern economies, did not). The competition for the newer Western territories, wrested unjustly from the Indians, brought North and South into greater and greater conflict, even as the cruelties of slavery were being exposed day by day through the injustices of the fugitive slave laws, altering fundamentally the opinions and understanding of many Americans concerning slavery. What we are today is a function of what we were then and we might as well be clear about it - it wasn't all good. Indeed, few nations can claim to have been the inheritors of only what was right and just. But it's the power of today's ideals and commitment to what's right that makes it possible for us to look back with distaste at what we were then. Recently, a grandson of mine was telling me something he had learned in school about salamanders. It got me remembering my own boyhood and how older boys I knew had taught me to go out into the woods after a rainfall and collect the little orange creatures as they came up out of the soil. I used to love to do this and would gather them up by the handful and put them in coffee cans or cardboard boxes and take them home to keep them by my bedside, playing with them until I'd finally fall off to sleep. When I'd wake in the morning I'd invariably find them all dried up, mummified - dead. I didn't understand and would hurry out the very next time it rained to find some more. Hunting and collecting them was exciting. But they always died by the following day. No one told me they were dying because I was taking them out of the soil - that they needed the moisture of the wet earth to survive. I didn't understand. They were playthings, living beings yes, but just playthings for me. When my grandson told me what he had learned about salamanders, this long forgotten activity of my childhood came rushing back and I was suddenly ashamed. I found myself looking at him with tears in my eyes. Why had I killed so many creatures so carelessly like that? How could I have done such harm? I hadn't known, hadn't understood. I'd just been doing what the older boys had shown me. Silently I promised myself I wouldn't let this little five-year- old do the same thing, that I would teach him it was wrong. I began patiently explaining to him that salamanders were living creatures like we were and he looked at me strangely. Why was I telling him what he already knew, little David asked? Societies, like individuals, often grow up and see things differently than they once did. But something must teach them. Sometimes it's just the perspective and greater understanding that come with the years, seeing more than we did before. And sometimes it's what others have to tell us. Abraham Lincoln would rightly be called a racist in today's terms, but I suspect that, had he lived in our time, with exposure to that which we have been exposed, a man like him, who had opposed slavery even for those he wrongly deemed inferior to himself, wouldn't have been a racist at all. Of course, he's not our contemporary but our predecessor. But in this he was also our teacher. It was his example, his choices, his leadership that shape our way of seeing the world today. Condemning him for not having shared our every value is a mistake because the values we hold today directly descend from the work he and so many others did back then. He is our history, our childhood - our coming of age.
rockirreg@aol.com
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