The racial bells toll in America
By Anis Haffar [E-mail: gateinstitute@yahoo.com]

The historic essence of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama

One great episode in America’s racial history was the Civil War of the 1860s. Another is poised to be Obama’s victory as the 44th president of the United States in 2008. Were he even to lose the presidency itself, the nation would still have evolved in meaningful ways.

In his book, Abraham Lincoln, The War Years, 1861 – 1864, Carl Sandburg (a Lincoln biographer) observed: “America whither? [was] the question, with headache and heartache in several million homes, as Lincoln began his winding journey to Washington” at the start of 1861 as President-elect.

Earlier in 1856, the Republican party had organized to oppose the extension of slavery. In the state of Illinois, Lincoln was so prominent that the party’s state machinery chose him for the vice-presidency. Come May 1860, the Republican convention then nominated him for the presidency itself. A key issue in that presidential campaign was slavery and its imminent abolition.

The willpower of the abolitionist movement and rising slave revolts had begun to diffuse the dreams of the prosperous slave barons to continue that profitable trade. The rich plantation owners, too, feared that the era of free slave labour had come to an end. In other words, they might have to serve as their own “field niggers” - plant and pick cotton and tobacco by themselves; and be their own “house niggers” - cook, wash, and clean after themselves.

The reality of that impending finale dogged the minds of the slave kingpins and beneficiaries alike. Squeezed into a corner, seven slave states - Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina – hardened their defiance, and resisted the day of reckoning.

First, as deterrents, they whipped, mutilated, stabbed, shot, or openly hanged fugitive slaves and abolitionists smuggling slaves into freedom. Additionally, they flouted the constitutional law that prohibited the delivery of naked slave cargoes from Africa’s Gulf of Guinea.

[The slave shipments were branded by the traders as follows (from Eric Williams’s book Capitalism & Slavery): “An Angolan Negro was a proverb for worthlessness; Coromantines [from] the Gold Coast were good workers but too rebellious; Mandingoes (Senegal) were too prone to theft; the Eboes (Nigeria) were timid and despondent; the Pawpaws or Whydahs (Dahomey) were the most docile and best-disposed.”]

The decisive face-off came on February 13, 1861, the day the U.S. Congress was to declare and certify Lincoln the President-elect. The unfolding drama suggested the opening of a Pandora’s Box of clashes, and dog fights which “might cause the gutters to run with blood”.

As precautions against possible bloodbaths, armed guards were hinged at vantage points, and sharp shooters pitched on rooftops. Order and safety were to prevail before the electoral vote for President.

Lincoln, having received the majority of the votes, was duly elected that day as the 16th President of the United States for four years, commencing March 4, 1861.

The President-elect himself was not at the February 13th meeting. He had set out on a special train from Springfield, Ohio. Days before arriving in Washington, bad news reached him in New York state, February 18, that “down in Montgomery, Alabama, amid thundering cannon and cheers from an immense crowd, Jefferson Davis took his oath of office as President of the Confederate States of America”.

That event foreshadowed a gruesome milestone in America’s history. As if he saw the future, Lincoln addressed the Hall of Assembly of the New York capitol: “It is true that while I hold myself without mock modesty, the humblest of all individuals that have ever been elevated to the Presidency, I have a more difficult task to perform than any one of them.”

Thus, even before Lincoln took office, providence had shoved that full burden of racial history into his lap. He assured an audience in New Jersey: “The man does not live who is more devoted to peace than I am. None who would do more to preserve it. But it may be necessary to put the foot down firmly.”

Wherever he stopped on that famous trip to the White House, there were agitation and panic. In Philadelphia, bridges were at risk of “explosions and fires”, and tongues raged with threats, “This hireling Lincoln shall never, never be President.”

Never to be president?

	Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln’s nemesis, Jefferson Davis, (a fellow Kentuckian) led 11 Confederate states with a population of 9 million (including an estimated 4 million slaves). The North had 23 states with 22 million people. Despite the disparity between the combatants, so determined were the Confederates that the litmus test in the selection of Davis’s vice was a person man enough to “promise to strike the first blow”.

Skipping the cumbersome states rights and constitutional arguments for the impending war, Lincoln wisely chose bold, emotional overtones to ruffle the South: “You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve and defend it.”

With the die so visibly cast, Lincoln braced America to cross its tallest racial hurdle yet. America’s brutal civil war (which claimed about 850,000 lives) attempted to douse the racial inferno in the quest for a more perfect union.

Close relations were the first to suffer in that looming brawl. The family of Lincoln’s own wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, was severed into two factions: a brother and sister were for the Union. Her three other brothers had joined the Confederates, and three sisters were the wives of Confederate officers. It was disastrous. In one memorable instance, Lincoln broke down into tears, and buried his face in his handkerchief. “I will make no apology [for] my weakness,” he wept.

A notable irony during the war was captured by Winston S. Churchill in The Great Democracies: “Most of the slaves, who might have been expected to prove an embarrassment to the South, on the contrary proved a solid help, tending the plantations in the absence of their masters, raising the crops which fed the armies, working on the roads and building fortifications, thus releasing a large number of whites for service in the field.”

After Lincoln’s death, the defeated south, still rebellious, remembered the ill-famed northern opportunists (known as “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags”), and blamed the Republicans as the party of Negro rule. For the next fifty years, they’d would vote almost to a man for the Democratic party.

The rest of that era showcased the vain promises to the Negro, and the bloody struggles that ensued: the Ku Klux Klan; lynching of Negroes; Black Power movements of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure), the Black Panthers; Angela Davis; and the civil rights marches led by Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr . These aspects of America’s history offered ironic insights for posterity.

“Barack Obama, The Democratic Primaries, 2007 – 2008” was a subject with many possibilities. Some historians have already sharpened their minds and laptops and written aspects of it. With the first ever African-American to be nominated by a major political party, “America Whither?” is the question lingering on the lips and minds of Americans, and the world at large. It’s difficult to remember a more audacious hope.

Thus, before Obama had won the U.S. presidency, that dreadful race question stared Americans full in the face. The suspense was in the hunt for a riveted climax, and with it the resolve that America had, at last, finished with its malignant race issue. The word “historic” is already tagged to media analysis of the ascendancy of Obama, the U.S. Senator from Lincoln’s own state of Illinois.

The 93-year-old “dean of the American historians”, John Hope Franklin, was quoted that the Obama campaign “is the most radical, far-reaching, significant (undertaking) by any individual or group in our history”. His successes, so far, struck “at the very heart of national ideology on race and the political patterns” of America’s history; and, of course, the geo-politics of the wider world.

The enthusiasm of America’s new generation – the youth, the educated, especially the white youth – suggested that the country had turned a brave corner, and arrived. The vision in this vibrant, new script seemed to follow, One, the stuff of which mythology was made; and Two, Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr’s dream of measuring a man by the content in his character, and not by skin cover or the tails of a father’s shadow.
[To be continued with Part 2]