all americans enjoy these rights. [applause] when i say all americans, i mean all americans. [applause] our immediate past is to remove the remnants of the barriers which stand between millions of our citizens and their birthright. there is no justifiable reason for discrimination because of ancestry or religion, or race, or color. [applause] ♪ >> next, anderson university prof. brian dirck look for abraham lincoln's life and

americans views on race and slavery both before and during the civil war. prof. dirck argues that prior to presidency, lincoln was __ very much a normal american. this class is a little over one hour. >> okay. to look at what we are dealing with this week, and really the rest of the semester __ we are dealing with the american slave system in roughly a 40 year time period, usually called the antebellum period. this is when the american slave system is in its heyday. this is when americans __ more americans are making more money off of african_americans than they ever have before. i have seen statistics from economist at study this. the amount of wealth that was

going to the con empire exceeded every other investment in america. tons of money is making __ being made off of the con empire. we see how americans got the cotton empire with the production of the gin. americans transform from a largely tobacco_based empire to a con_based empire. if there's one thing i want you to get out of this class it is that slavery is not just a southern history topic. it is in american history topic. scholars that study this topic see that slavery has its tentacles in the corner of everything in southern and northern society. new york bankers were in the cotton empire. when the war breaks out, many

people who sympathize with the confederacy are from the north. northerners have their money sunk into this enterprise. this is an american institution. this week in class, i want to look at the attitudes of white americans towards race and slavery during roughly this time.. then we will look at african_americans and what they thought. it is really not that hard to get at what the extremist thought about slavery __ abolitionists. men and women agreed that slavery need __ needed to go. they write things down, they were very loud about what they feel. we will talk about these people. they are pretty easy to get at.

at the other end, the proslavery extremists, these people __ pprimarily in the south __ believe that slavery is not only of necessary thing, but it is good. they actually think that god has sanctioned slavery. they are not that hard to get at either. they write things down and talk about their idea. the extremes on slavery, we will talk about them. what i want to get this week is the __ what you might call __ the mushy middle. the americans who are somewhere between those two extremes. americans who maybe have a problem with slavery, but they don't know what they think about black people, and don't know what to do with that. southerners __ slavery makes them nervous, but they don't know what they can do with it yet.

and people who are kind of in the middle whose racial attitudes, and slavery attitudes are harder to understand. they are the ones who really matter. in america, by and large, people are in the middle. if you look at any issue, even today. you have some people at one end, other people the other, and a bunch of people in the middle. they are the ones to count in many ways. i want to look at people who were in the middle, and focus on northerners. i could lecture you about population trends, and this group thinks this, and this group thinks that. but, i've always found that you can learn more if you look at maybe just one person, and get real deep into that one person. and see how all this stuff operates in that one person.

then, we can extrapolate out. here is this one middle ground northerner, sort of a typical northerner. then you can step out from that and make conclusions about everybody else. plus, i think you just tend to remember things better that way. if you can put a face on something, it works a little better. i will spend about 45 minutes playing this out, then i will open up for conversation. the person that i have chosen __ here is a surprise __ everybody is laughing. you had to know that lincoln was coming up sooner or later. abraham lincoln. you probably look at that and say, typical? that guy?

wasn't he the great emancipator? he is anything but typical. this is the next to last photograph taken of lincoln. that is kind of the image that we all have in our heads. that is an iconic american image. you could not ask for a more atypical american. that is mr. lincoln. i would not disagree with that. in his totality, abraham lincoln is far from typical. in his totality, i would agree, he was a great american. if you can, get that lincoln out of your heads for a minute. we will get back to him. how many of you have been to the lincoln memorial? it's huge.

there is like 5,000,000 tons of marble in front of you. try if you can go to shove him out of your head. the lincoln that i want to look at is the lincoln in the 1820's. that lincoln __ there are elements he look in his life and say __ there is an indication that he will be something more than typical. but there are also elements that are typical. he probably looks like a lot of other americans. what i want to get at today is __ the antebellum beliefs and thoughts about race and slavery and about how those things intertwine. it is interesting because that is not easy. it really isn't.

even today, it is kind of hard to get at what people really feel about some of these touchy subjects. then you go back to someone who is alive 200 years ago. you are all doing papers for me on various aspects of american slavery. dealing with primary sources. if you were going to go examine link in, what kind of primary sources do you think you have? but see if you __ let's see if you can guess. anybody? >> diary, letters. >> we would love to find a diary. letters are good. we have a ton of letters. there is a nine volume selection of all of the letters

he wrote. those letters number in the thousands. what else? he gave speeches all the time, yeah. we have literally hundreds of political speeches. we also have letters written to him. the library of congress has a collection of lincoln papers that runs in tons of microfilm. we have letters and speeches, i wish we had a diary. what else? laws that he signed off on as present,, but also as the politician. you have to figure that he signed off on a lot of laws.

i did the book on lincoln lawyer __ that's a good one. there was a project in illinois called the lincoln legal papers project. only illinois would have the money to do this because they love lincoln. they spent a decade going to every courthouse in illinois and pulling out every scrap of paper that had to do with lincoln's law practice. they found 90,000 documents. we have all that. what else? you are doing great. how about newspapers? they have things to say. how about people who knew lincoln? that is a big one. they are called the reminiscence. after he died __ he got shot by booths, i hope y'all know that

__ he became an american celebrity. everybody who knew him wanted to write down what they remembered about him. his neighbors, his law partner, his political cronies, his family. somebody even went into indiana and interviewed his stepmother. if you have walked lincoln's dog for him, you write a book about that. you think i'm kidding, i'm not joking. their stuff everywhere. that literature is literally hundreds of books and articles. my point here is this __ that man is the most well_documented life of probably any american that we have from this time.. if you put all that together,

you're talking about hundreds of thousands of primary source documents. your target up another huge literature of people remembering him. most americans do not have that. you know, after i die, i doubt 5 million people will write about me. my point is __ if you want to get at what a northerner thought about race and slavery, if you can get at it with him, who can you get at it with? there's more documentation on this guide them pretty much anyone else from this time period. that documentation does not solve everything. for example __ all __ i will use you __ a final politician and i am giving a speech __ this is a

cynical question __ am i speaking from the heart? maybe, maybe not. i do not mean to be cynical. any human being will stand up before an audience that you want something from, and even though you have integrity, you will probably tell them what they want to hear. how do you really know that the speeches reflect what he thinks and private? then, you have the reminiscences __ some man or woman __ and you come and asked him, what do you remember about lincoln. you are probably going to go, yet he was extraordinary in exceptional, i knew he would be president when he was three.

seriously. you get a lot of that stuff. in other words, you have a lot of documents. and they have their share of pitfalls. some people who look at lincoln, especially where race and slavery are concerned __ those are the sensitive topics __ where people tend to get defensive about reagan's legacy. after all, this is the great emancipator. a lot of people who want to preserve lincoln's legacy as a great american and point to these problems that we talked about. they say, you can't use that, that is inconvenient.

someone's reminiscences might not remember him at his best. people wwho love and admire lincoln will say, no we cannot use that stuff. he was a great man, let's stop the conversation. i think that is bad history, and a poor approach not just to lincoln, but to history. you are history majors. we may have to speculate. if you don't ask questions, then we cannot ask them about anybody. that's a question i __ the question i am posing. three things __ what did he think about slavery? what you think about black

people, and by extension, white supremacy? and the third one, what did he do to fight white supremacy in his lifetime? those are the three things i want to ask. i will tell you what __ how about a more accurate image. this, by the way, is the earliest known image of lincoln that we can authenticate. this is lincoln as a young professional lawyer in the late 1840's. i kind of like this picture. it is so anti_instinctive. when this was first discovered, at first, they do not think it was lincoln. for heaven sake, his hair is combed. when did that happen?

he looks cleaned up. i kiind of like that. you have a counter intuitive image of lincoln. he grew the beer during the 1850 election. this is what i'm talking about. let's take a look at his earlier life. how many of you have been to lincoln museum? the lincoln museum is awesome. go check it out. this was put together by the lincoln museum. they did a really impressive job with this. they called and scientific experts like csi types that do crime scene investigations __ they took photos of lincoln and extrapolated backwards, to figure out what he may look like as a child. this would be 12 or 13.

first question here __ i'll tell you what, let's dispose of the first question quickly. what did abraham lincoln think of slavery? the institution of slavery. abraham lincoln never had one kind wword to say that slavery. there's really no gray area here. anything that we heard him say is that he always hated the institution. during the civil war, he's told a group of visitors that came to the white house __ i hate slavery as much as any abolitionist, and i cannot remember a time that i did not feel like that. he would tell the truth. from his earliest days, as far as we can tell, he never

thought the institution was a good idea. with these perfectly lincoln quotes, saying things like __ is slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. then, he has this other great quote when he says __ all these people who argue that slavery is a great idea never volunteered to be one themselves. so, the first question is very simple. he hated slavery. where did that come from? it is hard to say. we think that one possible source comes back from this time.. abraham lincoln had a really bad relationship with his dad. his father was a poor an educator father, and did what many other fathers do when their son is growing up.

whenever abraham lincoln got a job in the neighborhood before the age of 21, his father made him give him the money. this is pretty much what any parent did. he deeply resented that. later on, during the civil war, he said something to a visitor in the white house. he said __ i know what it is like to be a slave from my upbringing, and the way my father treated me. if you want to psycho analyze lincoln __ he felt like his father treated him like a tyrant, kind of like a slave. the ideological foundation __ from his earliest days, abraham

lincoln greatly admired george washington, thomas jefferson, and the declaration of independence. it struck him that slavery was entirely opposed to the principles of the declaration of independence. how can we believe that all men are created equal and do this thing at the same time. there is no real question about slavery. that is actually not that complicated. he always hated institution. the other questions are much more complicated. what you think of black people? that matters, right? if you're going to talk about slavery, and you have to talk to african_americans. you would think this would not be that hard to answer. how many black people did he actually know? first of all, he was born in kentucky in 1809. one would think that he ran

across an african_american in kentucky. he probably did but we have no record of it. i was just talking of the gaps in the records. there is no reliable account of him encountering an african_american in kentucky. how much could he have really seen? quite a few black people are living in kentucky. it's no small thing. all modern_day greece shirts shows that these are formative years and probably had an influence on him. we just do not have the information. we just do not know. his father did not like slavery. thomas lincoln was not a fan of institution. we do know this.

and we know that as a child in kentucky, he and his parents attended at least two baptist churches in kentucky that were run by antislavery peaches. what do you do with that? first of all, he is only like six, what does he really understand. this is another point that i want to emphasize. slavery in race are intimately related, but they are also two different things. just because a person does not like slavery in this. does not mean that they believe in equal rights between black and white people. those are two different things. he could have gone to church and listen to an anti_slavery minister, but that same minister for all we know may not have liked black people very much and may have made racial jokes. it sounds weird, but it may be the case.

so, you need to be careful with what you conclude from that. some people say he went to antislavery churches, and therefore believe in racial inequality. no, there is no evidence for that. so, he left kentucky, and moved to indiana where he stayed until he was 21. we also have no reliable record of him running into a black person in indiana. that kind of makes a bit more sense because indiana was a free state. theoretically there were no slaves. and there were just a lot less by people living here. i would imagine that he probably as a teenager, or young man, probably ran into an african_american at some point here. the odds are. but we do not __ we do not have

any evidence on that. he did take a trip down the mississippi river to sell goods for the family in new orleans. we know for sure that he saw african_americans down there. his cousin was with him. his cousin later wrote in the 8080's that a saul a black man selling a slave into the slave market and he said, let's get away from here. yeah right. this guy was like 16 or 17 years old and he was artie think __ already thinking of being the great and that's __ emancipator? from what we could tell, we do not know much about what he thought about black people. in the absence of direct

primary source evidence, the only thing that we can conclude is that he grew up in the same culture that every other white kid grew up in. we have plenty of documentation for that. white kids in the north in the 1820's and 1830's are growing up in what can only be described as a white supremacist nature. i do not know how much have a an effect on him. i assume it had some. after all, he is living in a culture. i have no documentation that says otherwise. that is the important point. in the absence of reliable documentation to the contrary, i have to believe that that culture had an effect on him.

he leaves indiana with his family to illinois, he is 21. that picture on the left is a romanticized picture of linkoln. haven't you seen the stuff all your life? the frontier, romantic link in. the rags to riches story. i will not argue with that. here's the thing. if you had been a typical white person walking through the woods of indiana, and you ran across this raw bone kid. lincoln was well over 6 feet. his close do not quite fit. his hair was not combed. he probably wasn't wearing shoes. he's working in manual labor. you would not look at that guy and think, cool, there goes the

future president. white trash. on the right is a drawing from about the same time period of a stereotypical version of what a backwoods hillbilly look like living on the american frontier. i juxtapose those two images because lincoln __ a guy with no money and no education __ he is scared to death of being perceived like that. why wouldn't he be? he wanted to make something out of himself, and yet, the instinctive reaction of a culture that things in racial terms would look at this young man and they would not think norman rockwell, they would see that stereotype.

there's already this white trash story about the guy. that is race just like how black is race. you cannot understand one without understanding the other. the way whiteness is uunderstood is that there are people who have whiteness but are still quote trash. what is trash? you can see a game on his belt is a big drugi __ jug __ i can guarantee that there is not water in the. there was a stereotype that they are all alcoholics. there is a stereotype that white hash is lazy. white trash is ignorant.

there are all of these ugly racial stereotypes attached to the very stereotype the abraham lincoln grows up in. one important factor as to how he grows up is __ he runs away from the as fast as he can. he does not want to be that. if you made a clipboard that said __ how not to be white trash __ that would be lincoln's life. lincoln's hard work effort is legendary. very famously, this guy education self. white trash drinks too much __ he did not have a diary. he did not sit down and say, i

will not be white trash. you can see in the choices that he made, he did not want to fit into that stereotype. that has a lot to do with the choices that he made in his life. on top of everything else, he did not become a farmer. he went into law. he married a respectable, rich lady. his take on those white stereotypes is to get out of that. what does he do at this stage

he would run into african americans. let me give you a few examples here. this is probably the black person that he knew the best. this is a picture of william forville. we're not quite sure how to use both his name. he is also known as billy the barber. billy the barber was from haiti. he traveled the springfield at around the same time that lincoln move that. the best scholarship that we have on this says they seem to have met around 1831 or 1832. lincoln is not a lawyer yet. by all accounts, they become good friends. billy runs the barbershop in town. lincoln goes to the barbershop frequently. you know lincoln, he loves to

tell stories and jokes. where else would he hang out? he hangs out at billy's barbershop. more than that, he is a good friend of billy. in fact, when billy becomes a lawyer, he does legal work for billy. records are sketchy, but that legal work may have been pro bono. billy cut a deal with this guy in town __ this rich guy. the deal was this __ the rich guy says, billy, i will give you the title to some lots in springfield if you give me a lifetime of free haircuts. he cut a deal with billy. then, the guy dies. he lost the deeds to the lots. he goes to lincoln and says, can you help me figure this out? lincoln digs the paperwork up. it's no small thing.

he have to really work to find the paperwork to get billy's land rights reinstated. lincoln has a close regard for this man. billy knows the lincoln children very well. during the war, billy writes a letter saying __ after lincoln died, billy walked in the funeral. there is another black man named robert johnson. if you saw the movie, abraham lincoln vampire hunter __ i'm sorry to bring it up. believe it or not, robert johnson is a character in that movie. robert johnson was a black man who worked as his valet. i do not have a picture. he worked as a servant for the lincoln family.

he went to washington, d.c. to be lincoln's personal valet. he had a falling out with the white house staff. lincoln went out of his way to get him a job as a messenger in the treasury department. johnson died of smallpox and lincoln paid for the funeral expenses. there were various african women who worked as domestics in the lincoln white house. they seem to have gotten along very well with lincoln. mary kept firing them. the point is, he knew some black people, not a lot. you know that 90,000 document cash of letters. there is a little handful of black people.

he knows a few. it is worth 20 out that every black person who could be taught to. johnson was dead, of course. billy gave some interviews. they all formally said that he was a kind man, did not seem to have any racial prejudice, and i like him. there was no black person that knew him and said, he is a bigot. his other chosen profession was a politician. this goes back to the part that we are talking about a while ago. he is running for office as a state legislator in 1858 against stephen douglas. he is very outspoken in his antislavery views. he becomes a one issue

politician. all he talks about in the 1850's was the danger of slavery. he is running primarily against stephen douglas. stephen douglas was to be perfectly blunt __ and unabashed, enthusiastic race baiting white supremacist. i'm not being mean. i'm being accurate. stephen douglas knew that the way to beat him in that election was to tar him in a brush of racial equality in front of a lily white audience. time and again he would stand up in front of his audiences and say __ tthat guy once racial equality. he would save time and again. you read it today and say, oh

my god. douglas was saying that lincoln wanted black men to go around and rape white women. it is sickening. douglas would openly demonize black people. black people unable to function in normal society. douglas was at that extreme. what about lincoln? lincoln never did that. he never demonized by people. you never see him in a speech say, black people are dangerous or stupid. he does none of that. in numerous speeches, he makes

the point that the fundamental difference between me and douglas is that i think black people are human beings and he does not.he stands up in front of an audience in 1850 eight and says -- i think that the declaration of independence applies to black people. they should have the right to earn the bread that they got from the sweat of their own faces. he does not demonize black people. he says that they are people just like everyone else. on the other hand, there is always another hand, right? he stands up and that famous series of debate and he says, no i don't. there is a famous back -- passage which he says he is not in favor of the quality insofar as there has to be a difference

i want the whites to be on top. he is being blasted by people who don't like him. i want to open this up for conversation in a few minutes. i want to lay it out there. he does tell these white people that he is not for wage -- racial equality. he does kind of make black people into the other. he does it primarily with humor. we know that he loved to tell jokes. terms of them. to be blunt, some of them are jokes that if you told today they would be considered racist. i will not tell any, they are not very funny, they are annoying and somewhat like to

dismiss this by saying that those are people remembering that after the fact on several occasions they were quite bigoted. i'm not excusing it, i am just saying that that is what he does. shucks, those black people aren't they funny that way. he rarely used the n-word. but he did on three or four occasions. douglas used it three or four times a day, it seems like. very much better than his opponent. we also know that he and mary liked to attend blackface minstrel shows. i want to open it up for conversation in a few minutes.

i am displaying it out right now. that is what we get as far as his attitude. an individual relationships? pretty good. but there are places where you will wince. i wish he had not stood up in front of all those people in said they did not want racial equality. still, again, i believe that during his presidency, like a lot of other white americans during the civil war, he changed, you know? there is evidence that towards the end of his presidency he was beginning to fight white supremacy. prior to 1860, probably you would not have. he would say to white voters -- look, you can get rid of

slavery, but you don't have give up anything. he does not get in their faces and say that you have to change your racist ways. he never does that. instead, he says there is room for everybody. this guy is a politician. it's a perfectly reasonable strategy. tell them they do not have to give something up. let's be honest here. but before the civil war, he would not get in people's faces and say your white bigotry is a bad thing. but during the war he changes, and towards the end of the war the last year of his life really, he begins to get up in people's faces and starts to say, we can do this anymore. we have got to start changing the way we look at these things. one wonders if he had not been

shot, where he would have gone with that. guys, do you see how messy it is? pretty darn messy, isn't it? beware of anybody who ever tries to tell you anything about history and begins with the words "it's simple." because it ain't ever simple. never, ever, ever. what do you think of lincoln? do you think -- i'll tell you what. the question that gets asked all the time, was lincoln a racist? is that even a good question? anybody want to grab a microphone and respond here, guys? chris? do you guys think lincoln is a racist? yeah? >> the other day we talked about how you can't look at the situation we're talking about

now and know what transpired afterwards. >> yeah. >> at this time there is no martin luther king, there is no march on washington. he is -- i do not want to say the first person to think about this, but one of the first. so, he has no idea how things are going to go. he is fighting against the system basically. so he does not have the types of views we have right now. because of that, who knows exactly where his thought process was? he could be definitely i hate this institution of slavery, which we talked about is true, but at the same time i do not exactly want my daughter to be -- i do not want her to date a black person. >> exactly. that's a good point. >> to say he was racist, he very well could be. to say he was to completely demonize them and run them into the ground, that would be incorrect, i think. >> you raised a couple of good points there.

first of all, isn't there a very dicey question about how far you and i go in applying our values? that's not an easy question to answer, guys. there were a lot of things i don't know about abraham lincoln, but there are things i do know. he did not know barack obama would be president. we live in an age when a black man is president. that was un-freaking-thinkable in that time period. that is science fiction. do we take our values and extrapolate them back to the 1850's and say you do not believe us, therefore you are a bigot? i don't want to do that. on the other hand i am not comfortable myself with the moral relativism of saying i am going to cut them all slack back then, because that was the context of their times. guys, it's not even a slavery question.

it may not even be a history question. it's a philosophical question. are there universal principles of right and wrong? do we hold people accountable if they don't make the grade? what you guys think? anybody? libby? chris? >> i think it is really hard to put a right or wrong on lincoln's views because he was a politician and he wanted to get elected. it probably would have been hard to say that i think under the declaration of independence everyone in this country should be equal. i do not think in the context of the antebellum period he would have gotten a lot of voters. >> he would not have gotten elected dogcatcher, frankly, yeah, yeah. >> it's really hard to put a right or wrong on that. i respect that he wanted to make a change, so he needed to get

his foot in the door. and he wanted to see where it would take him. >> that is the perspective of a couple of scholars i know of. very good scholars, by the way. they say, look. they say, he's a politician. he wants to get elected. exactly what you said. if he said, this is how i feel he would just have to go home. on the other hand -- and i am not necessarily arguing with you -- there is this though. what you are saying to a certain extent, he says one thing and thinks another. which is acceptable, but we've got his private letters. we got his public speeches. i've got to tell you, guys there's not much difference between them. if i go and look at what he's saying privately, he seems to be extraordinarily consistent. so, when i look at his political speeches, yeah, i do take into account his audiences. i think you should, too. that's a good point to make. he believes what he is saying. what he is riding in private and saying in public are generally speaking kind of the same thing. this is another one of those theoretical philosophical questions. what do we tolerate in our politicians?

here is where i will put in the plug for the lincoln movie. have you seen that? i like the movie. one of the things i like, that question gets addressed. what you see is abraham lincoln negotiating the difficult byways of democracy joined to get something done. he goes back and forth, back and forth. it's never a straight line. he has a beautiful conversation with thaddeus stevens where he says, if you have a compass and it shows you true north, the right thing to do, but it does not tell me anything about swamps between here and where i

need to go. if i'm a politician and i know what is right and i can see what is right and i try to get there and do not pay attention to how i get there, i will never get there. there's no easy answers. but this is why lincoln is worth bothering with. these are questions we are asking ourselves now. these are questions we are asking about the current congress, the current president. how much slack do we give our politicians to say something they do not completely agree with? how do we even know? it's a great point. eric. >> talking about moral relativism and things like that, universal truth coming usually from the bible. my question is, where is his faith at? looking back, it's very clear that slavery is wrong. it sounds like he is in the middle, playing both sides. >> the question about lincoln's faith is a good one. and a very difficult one to answer. there has been a lot written

about that. i think he believed in god certainly. he did not attend an organized church. he and mary did own a pew at the presbyterian church in springfield, but there is no evidence he hardly ever attended. when he was a young man, about your age, he seemed to be a religious skeptic. i would not say in atheist exactly, but there were rumors back then that he was at least agnostic. when he was running for state legislature, he was running against a guy who accused him of being an atheist. he had to issue a public handbill saying -- which tells you something right there. if you got to say that, then maybe there's something to it. you know what i am saying?

he does quote the bible. with approval. i do not think his religious beliefs were all that intense. it's interesting you brought this up. when you look at serious antislavery extremists like william lloyd garrison, charles grandison finney, other abolitionists, they all tend to have a very powerful religious foundation in what they say and do. lincoln doesn't really. during the civil war, he becomes much more religious, and in fact, his second inaugural is shot through with religious imagery. yet, you go back and look at his

speeches and you're looking for where his moral compass is. i think the bible does play a role here. i personally think after reading all this stuff, i think it is more of his moral underpinning from kind of the declaration of independence and enlightened principles of individual freedom and liberty and equality. i'm not saying he was not christian, because i think he was. but in a quiet, low-key way. looking at the bible and slavery specifically, lincoln does not often talk about that.

he does on occasion suggest that the bible and slavery are antithetical. but really, guys, most of the time when he is writing and talking about slavery being wrong, he is talking about it on a broad, moral level. he did this great thing one time when he says, we have all of these free black people in this country. and they did. they had hundreds of thousands of black people in the north and the south. how could they be free if they were once slaves? their masters freed them. masters do not free cows and chickens. it was that kind of reasoning. it also fits in with being a lawyer. he is a lawyer who makes legal briefs. there is a nice little scrap of paper that he never published in which he had a lawyer's brief against racism. he said, if person a can enslave

person be because person b is black and person a is white, then who is to say that if person c comes along and says person a, your color of skin is inferior, that they can't enslave them? logical reasoning. if you are going to enslave someone for their skin color then the first person that is whiter than you can enslave you. lincoln is unusual that he even thinks that way. most people don't even question the stuff. he never says that in public. he would really offend a lot of people. you guys, this is how i see higher education, man. i am not going to sit here and indoctrinate you guys. i've got definite opinions about it. i've written them down, if you want to look them up. i want you guys to make your own minds up. how do you guys feel about it? yeah? >> i actually had a question for you. >> ok. >> as far as the extremist

abolitionists, were there people who called for racial equality? because i am reading in a different class a book about elizabeth cady stanton, and she asked for suffrage for women which it was said was more than abolitionists had done for african-americans. that was like a shock thing for her. i know they were not at the point of asking for voting. but were people at that point? to me, lincoln doesn't seem all the way in the extreme. >> he's not. that's a great question. i would put lincoln is somewhere in the middle. i would. maybe a little bit more toward the abolitionists end. the other question is a good one. scholars who study abolitionists -- you guys are grown up. i was always taught the abolitionists were the good guys. they were. i do admire frederick douglass. i think he is one of the great americans.

and william lloyd garrison. that said, scholars who study the abolitionists argue that even relatively few of the abolitionists were calling for total racial equality. even william lloyd garrison would stop short of black and white marriage. when frederick douglass married a white woman after his first wife dies, he massively alienates other abolitionists by doing that. the sexual taboo was one that almost nobody would cross. whereas, nowadays, it is a fairly common thing. i don't think anybody gets that worked up about it. elizabeth cady stanton had a really interesting case. she believed in a level of social equality, certainly political equality between black and white people. that was kind of a long and sad

story. i do not know if you guys have gotten into the post-war period yet. there was going to be an amendment to the constitution to give both black people and women the vote. a congressman went to frederick douglass and said, we are prepared to give black people the votes, but if you insist on attaching women to this, no one is going to pass this. i think elizabeth cady stanton never forgave him for that. she was really upset. she then goes out and campaigns to get the women's issues attached back to the amendment. she says, well, if you are going to give those black people they vote -- it's very ugly. relatively few abolitionists of this time would fit our definition of complete racial equality. theodore parker would. william lloyd garrison probably would. you get to mainstream abolitionists, you would find some who believed in political equality but not social

equality. give black people to vote, but i'm not going to invite them to my parties. that kind of stuff. you get people who believed in giving black people legal equality, but they might be more reluctant to give them the vote. or they might think we will give people to vote after 50 years when they are educated up to it. there are a fair number of americans who believe in colonization, including lincoln. abraham lincoln believed in the idea that if you are going to free black people -- for him it was voluntary. it was voluntary. he believed racism was so toxic he would have a race war and nobody would win if you try to put black and white people together. he was arguing for opening up a place in africa or madagascar for refugees from slavery.

that is how he saw it. he saw this as refugees from slavery that could volunteer to leave if they wanted to. there are other abolitionists that talked about forced deportation. that is a great question. there is no simple answer. we don't even know how many abolitionists there were. it is shades of gray. it really is. >> some abolitionists believed slavery would die out on its own. going off of what lydia said, do you think some abolitionists were even abraham lincoln himself thought after emancipating the slaves that sort of the racism would fizzle out on its own? >> that is a great question. that is an awesome question. it really is. let me reintroduce the division between race and slavery. as far as slavery during the time before he freed the slaves, abraham lincoln firmly believed if things were left alone, slavery would die off on its own.

he argued slavery is incompatible with democracy and free enterprise. the north was growing much faster than the south. more people in the north. he said time is on the slave-owners' side. eventually they will have to figure it out. he just thought some unprincipled people like stephen douglas, who he could not stand by the way, were trying to prolong slavery past the point it should have been dealt with

for their own personal political reasons. as far as race is concerned, that is a hard one. i don't see much evidence prior to 1860 that lincoln was thinking in terms of an eventual multiracial society. during the war, towards the end of the war, that is when you start to see him thinking we may finally come to a point where black and white people can live together in peace. that was like after his reelection, the last year or so. it is a great question. he honestly thought if you just

let white southerners alone, and if they would just be rational they would figure this out. he always said i have no problem with white southerners. he said i'm not mad at them. i was born in kentucky, i am a southern. he says in a speech in peoria, in illinois, i would not know how to fix this if i had my own slaves. i'm not pointing a finger at those people and smacking them around. the abolitionists would. garrison and the extremists like

you were going to burn in hell. lincoln never did that. he said if we can let reasonable people reason together, we will find an answer. that is a glass half full answer. lincoln does have a vision of a proslavery future. glass half empty is how many people have to stay in bondage before that hazy future gets realized. these are questions you can answer for yourself. you can go both ways there. yeah. >> i just think it is interesting that he looked at george washington and thomas jefferson. we talked a lot about washington and jefferson and they are kind of the heroes of america, the founding fathers and all of that, but they owned slaves. thomas jefferson at home owned slaves and he wrote the declaration of independence. >> go figure. >> i think it is a compartmentalization thing just a little bit. also back to if we think lincoln was a racist, i think today racist is defined differently than then.

i think he would not have seen himself as a racist in that time. you were talking about people seeing black people as demons and stuff. when you compare him to that, i would not say he is a racist. but today him saying he does not want equal rights between white and black people, people kind of say that is a little bit racist. >> if you told some of these jokes in 2014, oh, my god. whenever i get asked if lincoln was a racist, my answer is usually it is a bad question. that is too simple. it is way too black and white. i know, that is bad. but really, guys. it is too binary, either or. life does not work that way generally. your point is well taken. in his context, i would want him around more than stephen douglas. douglass was so embarrassing about this. he got censored by the u.s. congress one-time for using

racially offensive language in the 1850's. you have to go some to do that. in that context, absolutely. it would be interesting to see how he would react. he is one of barack obama's heroes. he really is. it would be interesting to see how lincoln would react to that, the first black president citing abraham lincoln every chance he gets. i kind of get the feeling lincoln would be cool with it, but that is just my personal feeling. i like the guy. i am not married to the guy. you know what i am saying? i have students who say the last person on earth i will ever write a person on in your class is abraham lincoln. come on.

i am not that bad. i very much admire the man. i kind of agree with you. i think he would be more on the enlightened side today. he is a human being. he has his faults. if we don't look those square in the eye, we will never do good history. we are just doing myth. thank you for this. i appreciate it. have a good day. we are done. thanks, guys. >> traveling to u.s. cities to learn about the history of early life, this weekend we partnered with comcast. >> i wrote these books for the wheeling family. there are two volumes. the reason i thought it was important to collect these histories was that wheeling transformed into an industrial city in the later part of the 20th century.

it is kind of uncommon in west virginia in that it drew a lot of part from europe in terms of jobs in the desert opportunity and i thought it was important to record their stories to get the memories of the immigrant generations in the ethnic neighborhoods they formed. and most people tend to focus on the frontier and civil war history. those are important, but of equal importance in my mind is this industry and the immigration that wheeling had to. it starts as an outpost on the frontier. that river was the western expanse of the united states and 1770's.

the first project funded by the federal government for road production was the national road that asked tended from cumberland maryland to wheeling, virginia. when it comes to wheeling it will give this community, which at that time is about 50, the real spurt that it needs to grow. over the next 25 years the population will almost triple. >> watch all of those events today, at 2 p.m. eastern, on c-span3. >> tuesday night, president obama delivers his state of the union address. live coverage begins at 8 p.m. eastern, including the gpm response