Was Abraham Lincoln a Racist?

Each generation, it is said, reinvents history in its own image. This is certainly true in the case of Abraham Lincoln. Portraits of Lincoln have gone through innumerable permutations, depending on the era in which historians were writing. Lincoln has been depicted as a statesman who merged politics and moral purpose by liberating 4 million slaves and as a political pragmatist who opposed the radicals within his party almost as much as secessionist Southerners. Most recently, in David Donald's masterful biography "Lincoln," he emerged as an indecisive leader with few firm convictions, a man constantly buffeted by events, rather reminiscent of Bill Clinton. Rarely, however, has a scholar launched the full-scale assault on Lincoln's reputation that Lerone Bennett offers in "Forced Into Glory."

Although not an academic historian--he has long worked as an editor at Ebony magazine--Bennett produced three pioneering and important works of African American history in the 1960s. "Before the Mayflower" surveyed the black experience in America from the first appearance of slaves in colonial Virginia, "Black Power USA" challenged prevailing interpretations of Reconstruction by stressing how blacks achieved significant political power after the Civil War and "Pioneers in Protest" offered portraits of key leaders in black history. Popular history at its best, these books brought the fruits of scholarly research to a broad audience at a time when the civil rights revolution had created tremendous interest in America's black past.

But it was his brief article, "Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?" which appeared in Ebony in 1968, that put Bennett on the radar screen of academic history. Seeking to dismantle the "mythology of the Great Emancipator," Bennett argued that Lincoln "shared the racial prejudices of most of his white contemporaries." He resolutely opposed black suffrage and other expressions of racial equality and freed few if any slaves with his famous proclamation. Far from being a symbol of racial harmony or enlightened white leadership, Bennett concluded, Lincoln embodied the nation's "racist tradition."