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00:00Abraham Lincoln is the most celebrated figure in American history.
00:09His assassination almost 150 years ago transformed him from a mere politician into America's
00:16national saint.
00:18It's the original martyrdom.
00:19It's Lincoln dying for the nation's sins.
00:23He dies in the moment of his triumph on Good Friday in a Christian country.
00:28I mean, God, who wrote that script?
00:31To most Americans, he's the president who saved the Union, and every man from the Kentucky
00:35backwoods who rose from poverty to become president, living out the American dream.
00:40He's all that Americans think the nation should be.
00:44And so consequently, we've become infatuated with him.
00:48To African Americans, Lincoln will always be the great emancipator, the man who freed
00:53the slaves, thereby placing equality alongside liberty as one of those truths that Americans
00:58hold as self-evident.
01:02And for almost all Americans, particularly those in the North, he's the leader who guided
01:07the nation through the trauma of the Civil War, perhaps the central event in the country's
01:12history.
01:13But today, as America marks the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's presidency, an historic battle
01:20is being waged for the reputation of America's 16th presidency.
01:26Everything everybody's told me about Abraham Lincoln is a lie.
01:31Everything I learned in school, everything I learned in church, everything I learned
01:33from newspapers, everything I learned from the radio, everything I've learned about Abraham
01:40Lincoln is a lie.
01:42This struggle has unearthed another Abraham Lincoln.
01:45This Lincoln is a politician rather than a statesman.
01:48So much of the literature on Lincoln is just complete hero worship.
01:52A calculating pragmatist rather than a visionary.
01:55He is not the great emancipator if you look just a teeny bit under the surface.
02:03And a war criminal rather than a war leader.
02:05Here's a man who waged war on, in his view, his own people, was responsible for 650,000
02:12deaths.
02:14Please.
02:16Lincoln's critics claim that he plunged the nation into an unnecessary war and that generations
02:22of historians have conspired to hide the fact that the great emancipator was in reality
02:27a racist who planned to deport the slaves out of America.
02:32For good reason, the people of the South have mourned.
02:36This reassessment of America's greatest hero is conjuring up the ghosts of America's troubled
02:41history.
02:42War over culture and remembrance is even bigger than confederate heritage.
02:48It's about America.
02:50While at the same time, it's feeding into the divisions that are drawing modern Americans
02:55further apart.
02:56And we're not going to take it anymore.
02:59This is the story of America's struggle to discover the real Abraham Lincoln.
03:12Abraham Lincoln's last moments were spent here, in the Petersons House, a cheap boarding
03:25house opposite the Washington Theatre, where he'd been struck down by an assassin's bullet.
03:35There are people with Lincoln who say we cannot allow him to die in a theatre.
03:44He's placed diagonally on a small bed.
03:47He's so tall he can't fit lengthwise on the bed.
03:52And there he spends the next nine hours, his breathing ever more labored.
04:01He was oozing brain matter on his pillow, and whenever his wife was brought in, they
04:07would put a handkerchief over that part of the pillow so she wouldn't be too upset.
04:14Out of that house, he emerges as his body is carried in the spring rain the next morning
04:21to the hearse that takes him back to the White House.
04:24He leaves not the person he was when he was carried inside.
04:28He's now a national treasure, a national saint, a secular saint, and a religious saint
04:33in many ways.
04:35And that's why images, almost overnight, begin appearing, showing not only the assassination,
04:41not only his dying moments in the grandest possible exaggerated way, but literally, images
04:48showing him rising into heaven, where he's often greeted by his great hero, George Washington.
04:53Here is the father and the savior.
04:55It's almost like God and the Son.
05:10From the moment of his death, the real Abraham Lincoln has been obscured behind the almost
05:15religious cult that still surrounds him.
05:18The tragic nature of that death, and its timing at the very end of America's Civil War, created
05:23a myth that has placed Lincoln outside of history and almost beyond rational debate.
05:29You have to remember, he dies right at this perfect moment.
05:34He's assassinated a few days after the surrender of Lee's army, after this horrifying bloodletting
05:42from which now, you know, the republic that is nearly destroyed can now survive.
05:47I mean, you couldn't write a better script, in some ways, for the epic inside of us.
05:59Today, that epic story of Lincoln's life and death stands at the heart of American culture.
06:06His image is everywhere.
06:09It's on the $5 bill, it's on the coins that you carry in your pocket, there's billboards.
06:16My 18-month-old daughter has a little stuffed Abraham Lincoln, and, you know, she could
06:21say, Dada and Mama, and not too much longer later, she could say Abe Lincoln.
06:28The homes Lincoln lived in have all been lovingly restored.
06:33There are literally hundreds of statues of him, peppered across the nation, and his hometown
06:38of Springfield, Illinois, has become the centre of a national Lincoln tourist industry.
06:46Lincoln is a church, he's a religion.
06:56Lincoln is a million-dollar industry, a hundred-million-dollar industry, and you've got thousands of people,
07:03all over this country, who make their living pushing the Lincoln mess.
07:08May I present to you the President of the United States, Mr. Abraham Lincoln.
07:14Well, good afternoon, everyone.
07:16There is a Lincoln industry in this country, no question about it, and there are large
07:20numbers of people who make their living impersonating or dressing up as Lincoln.
07:25She said, well, thank you, honest Abe, for your response.
07:28I think second only to Elvis impersonators, probably.
07:32There aren't too many American presidents you can make a living dressing up as, but
07:35they go to events, they go to schools, they open shopping malls.
07:41Lincoln is the only American president memorialized at Disneyland.
07:47So Lincoln is certainly part of our popular culture in a way that very few other presidents
07:53are.
07:57The aspect of the Lincoln myth that has always appealed most to generations of American biographers
08:02and filmmakers is the story of how the young Lincoln overcame the hardships of his upbringing.
08:11Well, Lincoln grew up on the frontier.
08:14He was born in Kentucky at a time when that was really a frontier state.
08:20This was real backwoods territory.
08:22There were wild animals in the woods.
08:24There were very few neighbors except some members of his family.
08:27The transportation was extremely primitive.
08:30They basically were self-sufficient.
08:31He is, in a way, from nowhere.
08:36There were 10 million other sons of dirt farmers who remained dirt farmers, and this guy didn't.
08:48This is this consummate American story.
08:52He wanted books.
08:53He wanted something bigger.
08:54He wanted off of that farm.
08:56Now that's the story of so many millions of Americans from the 19th into the 20th century
09:01as we became industrialized, urbanized, and cosmopolitanized.
09:17This is deep, deep in our culture that we are a place where a person from a dirt farm
09:23with virtually no formal education can rise and attain the highest office in the land.
09:32At the age of 19, Lincoln left his father's farm and made his way to what was then the
09:48frontier state of Illinois.
09:50A young man without money or connections, the route Lincoln took out of poverty was
09:55to run for office as a member of the state legislature.
09:59This was a mode of social advancement.
10:02Politics in the 1830s and 40s was a way for people of modest backgrounds like Lincoln
10:07to rise in the social scale.
10:09It was a way to make connections.
10:11It was a way to influence the world around you, of course.
10:14But at a time when there weren't that many professions open to people, politics was one
10:21that anybody could get ahead in if they had drive, if they had the right personality,
10:26the right ability to communicate their ideas.
10:30Politics transformed Lincoln's life.
10:32By the early 1850s, the young, poorly educated frontiersman was long gone.
10:37Lincoln had become a wealthy man.
10:39He'd held office four times, been a congressman in Washington, D.C., and between terms of
10:44office he'd trained as a lawyer.
10:52And as Lincoln's horizons had spread, so had those of his nation, as America's great
10:59drive westwards had begun.
11:02Most people had a sense of the American West that was essentially infinite.
11:06They didn't really even know where it ended.
11:08They knew there were deserts out there, they knew there were great plains out there, they
11:11knew there were mountains.
11:13But it was the sheer vastness of that West that gave everybody a sense of limitlessness
11:20and future and hope.
11:25The annexation of Texas and war with Mexico in the 1840s had opened up the West, raising
11:32the possibility of the nation advancing all the way to the Pacific coast.
11:38There's this continental mentality, sometimes called manifest destiny, this idea that American
11:43expansion is just ordained by God, you know, that we will dominate this entire continent
11:49and that is the divine will, and that creates this kind of a bullion spirit of expansionism.
11:59But westward expansion brought to the fore the issue that had divided the country ever
12:04since independence, slavery.
12:09By the middle of the 19th century, a fault line ran across America, dividing the slave-owning
12:14south from the free states in the north where the practice had ended.
12:22But year by year, the increasing value of southern cotton and the thought of the even
12:27larger fortunes it could generate if slavery were to spread west, slowly undermined the
12:32sense of union that bound the states together.
12:37Not only is slavery growing in the American south in the 1820s, 30s and 40s, in leaps
12:43and bounds, I mean the American slave population doubled in 25 years between 1820 and the mid-1840s.
12:52By the 1850s, slavery became, slaves became, the single greatest economic asset in the
12:59entire American economy. It was the engine of wealth for the American south and frankly
13:05for a good deal of the American north, especially the banking system in New York and other cities.
13:11At that point, you had a nation growing in leaps and bounds, has a sense of its infinite
13:17boundlessness but also a sense of great anxiety and great dread of what on earth are they
13:24going to do about this problem.
13:28The figure who was to do most to tip America into crisis was the man who was also to become
13:33Abraham Lincoln's political nemesis, Stephen A. Douglas. A Democrat from Lincoln's home
13:39state of Illinois introduced in 1854 a clause that would allow slavery to spread into the
13:45new western states of Kansas and Nebraska. To oppose this, a new political party was
13:52formed in the north, the Republicans, and Abraham Lincoln abandoned his legal career
13:58to join them.
13:59The Republican Party started under the premise that slavery should not be expanded. They
14:05weren't abolitionists per se, some of them were, but many of them were not abolitionists,
14:10they were anti-slavery men. And what that meant was that they expected slavery to die
14:17a natural death. But in order to do that, in order for that to happen, slavery had to
14:22be contained. And so the idea was you don't let it expand into the western territories.
14:30This new coalition is a coalition of northerners who are absolute believers in this idea of
14:38a free labor American dream, of their right to go west and get themselves 20 acres of
14:43land somewhere, or 40 acres, or whatever they could get and not have to compete with the
14:48slave labor system. Lincoln's political life, Lincoln's political career in the 1850s was
14:55built on this question of stopping the expansion of slavery into the west, or what the Republicans
15:02called the free soil persuasion.
15:07The Republican Party, in which Abraham Lincoln first became a leading light, regarded the
15:12expansion of slavery as a direct threat to their free soil ideology. But although the
15:17enemy of slavery, they were no friend of the slave.
15:21You could be anti-slavery and anti-black. You could be anti-slavery and not want black
15:27people around. And much of the anti-slavery fervor was, we don't want them around. Partly
15:37it was, we don't want them around because they're alien people, they're different, they're
15:42inferior, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But there was also, we don't want them around
15:48because they're not paid and they're very bad for wages.
16:00Difficult as it is to believe, many, many northerners separated out the question of
16:05slavery from the question of race. In other words, there are many reasons to oppose slavery
16:10which have nothing to do with race. If slavery moves out into the western territories, whites
16:17are not going to want to go there. The slave owners will absorb all the good land. They
16:21don't want to compete with slave labor. They don't want blacks around. There are all these
16:25reasons why whites in the north will say, we, I don't care about slavery in Mississippi,
16:30but I don't want it expanding into Kansas where I or my son may move out there to get
16:36a farm, to get a job.
16:43Lincoln's own impoverished upbringing had demonstrated to him what happened when free
16:47white labor was set in competition against slavery.
16:55Lincoln's father moves from Kentucky, right, crosses the Ohio River into Indiana, in part
17:01because Kentucky is a slave state and Indiana is a free state. And slavery limits the potential
17:09of the white laborer to enjoy the fruits of his labor. I mean, how could a small laborer
17:14compete in an agricultural market with a slaveholder who has a gang of slaves doing labor for no
17:21wage whatsoever?
17:25Lincoln understood the damage that slavery did from that perspective and says so, talks
17:32about the fact that the territories should exist for these free white men who need a
17:38chance to rise as well.
17:45From 1854 onwards, Abraham Lincoln campaigned against the expansion of slavery into the
17:50western territories. But the man who a decade later was to sweep away the whole slave system
17:57did not call for the abolition of slavery where it already existed in the south.
18:05So why was it that when so many white Americans were mobilizing to abolish slavery, the great
18:12emancipator appeared to stand on the sidelines?
18:20The generation from 1830 to 1860 was perhaps one of the greatest generations of white people
18:29we've had in this country. They were very much like the civil rights generation of the
18:361960s and 1970s. They marched, they organized against slavery, they organized in the churches,
18:44they staged sit-ins, they refused to capture fugitive slaves, and they prepared the ground
18:57which made it possible for emancipation to triumph. Lincoln did absolutely nothing.
19:05Although never an abolitionist, Lincoln, a man who had been exposed to slavery since
19:12childhood, was opposed to the southern slave system. Yet the great emancipator of the 1860s
19:20spent the 1850s convinced that the political system made abolition impossible.
19:27On the one hand, he always says this is a moral question ultimately. He's like an abolitionist
19:33in that he says, I am morally opposed to slavery. That's the bottom line here. On the
19:37other hand, as a lawyer, as a politician, he says there's not much we can do about slavery.
19:42It's in the Constitution. It's up to the southern states to deal with it. He understands there
19:47is not much you can do about slavery within the political system.
19:56In America's federal system, it was the individual states and not the national government in
20:01Washington that had the power to determine the future of slavery. But in the party politics
20:06of the 1850s, opposing slavery, if only in principle, was potentially enough to destroy
20:12Lincoln's political career. In 1858, Lincoln stood for Congress against
20:18his old opponent, Stephen Douglas. The campaign centered on a series of now-famous debates.
20:25In the city of Charleston, Douglas suggested that Lincoln's opposition to slavery meant
20:30that he was also in favor of racial equality. Lincoln responded with words that saved his
20:38career but that haunt his reputation. He said, and I'm quoting him, that he did
20:45not believe that black people should have the right to vote. He did not believe that
20:51blacks should have the right to sit on juries. He didn't believe that black people should
20:55have the right to hold public office. He believed that there's a physical difference
21:01between the white race and the black race that will forever make it impossible for them
21:09to live together on a plane of equality. Lincoln is saying things about race and the
21:17inferiority of blacks that we don't want him to say. Now, of course, it's just crucial
21:25to contextualize those statements. I mean, he's being goaded into them by Stephen Douglas,
21:33who's a shrewd, savvy political veteran who knows that his strongest attack is to link
21:41Lincoln's anti-slavery to some notion of racial equality. He's saying that Lincoln is in favor
21:49of racial equality, and Lincoln obliges. He does that. He does it, I think, for political
21:54reasons, and it doesn't look good to us today, but that's the nature of mid-19th century
22:02politics. He always made a distinction between the morality
22:08of slavery, which he believed was fundamentally wrong, and the question of racial equality.
22:15Today that's hard sometimes for us to understand, especially young people who are growing up
22:18in a society where the assumption of equality is absolute. Of course we're equal. Everybody's
22:22equal, or we say we are. But Lincoln made the distinction between the immorality of
22:28slavery, unequivocal about that. On the other hand, he was no proponent of racial equality,
22:35and we see that over and over, quite publicly and quite forcefully, that he does not believe
22:40in social equality. Despite reassuring the electorate, Lincoln
22:46was unable to defeat Douglass, but the debates made him famous, and it was this fame that
22:52enabled him to seize the Republican candidacy for president in 1860.
22:57Lincoln won just 39 percent of the vote, almost all of his support coming from the North,
23:02but within weeks of his arrival in Washington, the southern states began one by one to secede
23:08from the Union. They then formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America.
23:16Led by the Mississippi Senator, Jefferson Davis.
23:22The accusation that has been raised against Abraham Lincoln is that on coming to office,
23:27he pushed the American people into a disastrous and avoidable conflict.
23:32There's a school of thought, and it's still alive in a certain fringe of American scholarship,
23:37that the real cause, or immediate cause at least, of the Civil War was Lincoln himself.
23:43This argument is basically that Lincoln could have simply, gently, let the South go. That
23:51he didn't need to force military action. That he could have backed away and continued to
23:58compromise. That southerners were willing to compromise on this issue or that issue.
24:03There's no evidence that the Confederate leadership, Jefferson Davis and his growing cabinet, were
24:07truly willing to compromise on any part of the expansion of slavery issue or on anything
24:13else.
24:17Lincoln did not cause the Civil War. What Lincoln did was create a situation where war
24:22was possible. In other words, he was willing to risk war. He put the onus on the Confederacy.
24:29They fired the first shot. They weren't willing to compromise either.
24:38While blame for the war might lie with both Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, neither side
24:46in 1861 foresaw the calamity they were about to unleash.
24:55No one in the North or the South could have imagined the kind of war it would be.
25:01The military leaders on both sides didn't quite understand the significance of the technological
25:07changes. Changes particularly in the technology of the rifle, which made it a much more accurate
25:13long-distance weapon. The war becomes a situation of long-range sharpshooting.
25:21No one would have imagined ironclad warfare and the terrific combat of the navies.
25:29The impact of the Industrial Revolution we're talking about. Mass production of weaponry,
25:34telegraph, railroads, bringing troops to the front.
25:38Certainly no one understood what kind of masses of armies would be required. No one would
25:44have comprehended black recruitment.
25:48Nobody expected 620,000 deaths, thousands and thousands of injuries, and utter destruction
25:54in many parts of the country. So, you know, you might ask, if Lincoln and Jefferson Davis
25:58had seen 1865, would they have compromised in 1861?
26:17The image of Lincoln that dominates the American consciousness today, 150 years after the Civil
26:22War, is Lincoln as the savior of the Union.
26:28Lincoln's role as commander-in-chief is less well-remembered, yet hard as it is for some
26:33to accept. Abraham Lincoln prosecuted the Civil War ferociously.
26:42By 1862-63, Lincoln's authorizing troops to live off the land, to seize goods if needed
26:48for the maintenance of the army.
26:52His tactics, especially the destruction of southern cities, are regarded by some as having
26:57been so aggressive that they constitute total war.
27:02Lincoln did not invent total war. He did invent, maybe, to some extent, what they call the
27:06hard war. This was the term they used in the Civil War. Hard war, in which the Union would
27:13no longer limit its activities in order to appeal to the loyalty of southern civilians.
27:21Lincoln never thought that you should spare the hard hand of war to people who had begun
27:27the war. He said, on several occasions, that we will teach them the folly of starting a
27:34war. And he meant that.
27:39For most Americans, the terrible cost of the Civil War was the price the nation paid in
27:47order to save the Union. But there is another America.
28:09Among some in the southern states of the former Confederacy, the Civil War is remembered as
28:13a war of aggression, and Abraham Lincoln as a war criminal.
28:20I'm Chubb McMichael. I'm the great-great-grandson of John Henry Land, who, as a 15-year-old
28:27farm boy in Georgia, joined Company H of the 54th Georgia Infantry. He fought in battles
28:33through Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina.
28:38Many of the years probably thought by this time this would be forgotten. It will not
28:44be forgotten.
28:45My name is Michael Givens. I'm the Lieutenant Commander-in-Chief of the Sons of Confederate
28:48Veterans.
28:49We are here today have proven that we take this sort of thing seriously. We are not afraid
28:57or ashamed to stand up and be counted.
29:01This war was Mr. Lincoln's war. When South Carolina seceded from the Union on December
29:0520, 1860, he did not ever recognize that, okay? But yet he would send 75,000 troops
29:13there to kill people that he said were his own fellow citizens. It starts to sound like
29:21Milosevic. It starts to sound like Stalin.
29:26Here's a man who waged war on, in his view, his own people. He was responsible for 650,000
29:34deaths. Please.
29:39One of my ancestors, he was shot through the leg at Gettysburg and walked back to Virginia
29:46with a bullet wound in his leg. And now to be told, oh, he was fighting for slavery and
29:52he was evil and a traitor who just wanted to overthrow the great Abraham Lincoln. No.
29:58He was up there so that his mother and father wouldn't be killed in Georgia and their property
30:04destroyed and his little brother have to go to war and his sisters be raped.
30:19As far as how I see Lincoln, he ordered a bunch of strangers from up north to come down
30:27here to my family's home, kill my ancestors, burn down their property and steal their goods.
30:39He believed a whole class of southern people needed to be eliminated. We're talking genocide.
30:57The ferocity with which the Lincoln administration conducted war was not restricted to the south.
31:07Lincoln had gone to war to prevent slavery expanding into the west and defend the free
31:12soil ideology of his Republican Party. But the soil and the land of the west could only
31:20be made free for white settlers if first cleared of its original owners, the Native Americans.
31:33By the late 1850s, the Santee Sioux had been pushed into a reservation in the state of
31:39Minnesota. They had sold their tribal lands to the U.S. government for $1.5 million, a
31:45bill that Lincoln's administration had not paid. In the late summer of 1862, at the height
31:51of the Civil War, the rains failed and the Sioux's crops wilted in the fields.
31:59The Sioux were literally starving. They rise up against the reservation system. They kill
32:08a number of white settlers. It's a very, very violent encounter and the federal government
32:15responds by sending General John Pope to Minnesota to end the uprising.
32:22General Pope is a general who, in the Civil War in the east, has turned the war into a
32:26hard war. He's a very tough cookie. He talks about going to Minnesota to exterminate the
32:34Sioux men, women and children. And when he gets there, he puts the rebellion down brutally
32:39and quickly.
32:40By the end of the rebellion, thousands of the Sioux were imprisoned by the Union Army.
32:47General Pope convened a series of military trials that condemned 303 of the Sioux men
32:52to death. He then turned to Lincoln for approval.
32:56Now, Lincoln, who doesn't like India very much anyway, is prepared to give the Minnesotans
33:04a blood sacrifice of Sioux, but because of outside foreign influence, he doesn't want
33:11to be seen to hang 303 Sioux all at once, because they've only had trials lasting about
33:1710 to 15 minutes. And so he decides he'll hang 39.
33:26Lincoln as executioner. This is an image of America's secular saint that most Americans
33:32find deeply uncomfortable. And Lincoln's role in the story of the Sioux uprising has
33:37often been brushed under the historical carpet or explained away.
33:41Now, his defenders say, what a nice man, he didn't hang 303, he only hanged 39, despite
33:48the fact that they hadn't had any fair trials.
33:54Not defending Lincoln, I mean, what is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to eliminate
34:00all of the executions? Is he supposed to allow the Sioux that are deemed guilty of
34:08the uprising, is he supposed to send them free? I mean, he could do that, we would like
34:12him to do that. That would be political suicide.
34:18The story, unfortunately, doesn't end with the hanging of the 39 Indians. Back in Minnesota,
34:25about 60-odd Indians are left to rot and die in prison.
34:32Over above that, Lincoln decides to deport all the Indians, Sioux and Winnebagans, who
34:37are completely innocent, from Minnesota. And as a result of that, all the Sioux lands are
34:42opened up for settlement and speculation. And members of Lincoln's cabinet and members
34:47of his regime, of course, are very happy to make themselves rich by speculating in Indian
34:53lands.
34:55Meanwhile, the Sioux and Winnebago are sent to Dakota Territory, but only arrive there
35:03when it's too late to plant corn, so they can't feed themselves. And of course, they
35:08again are hit by starvation and disease. The whole thing's a human disaster. And the 39
35:16hanged are the least of it. And Lincoln's responsible.
35:241862, the year General Pope had decimated the Santee Sioux, was also the year in which
35:31Abraham Lincoln's great struggle to drive the Confederacy back into the Union had ran
35:37to the sand.
35:39Well the first year or so of the war does not go very well for the North. They lose
35:44most of the battles, particularly in the Eastern Theater, in Virginia. But if you look at the
35:49Civil War a year or so after it begins, if you looked at a map of the United States,
35:54you would be amazed how little territory had been recaptured from the Confederacy. A few
35:59little places on the outskirts, but the Union army had made no progress in most of the Confederacy.
36:09Unable to defeat the South, Lincoln began to think the unthinkable and consider the
36:14act for which he is now most famous, the emancipation of the slaves. But as Lincoln
36:21slowly came to believe that slavery might be abolished, he also came to envisage the
36:26deportation or colonization of the slaves out of America.
36:33The essence of colonization is a belief that black people can't possibly be Americans and
36:40share in American society. That is their patrie, their country, must be someplace else.
36:48Probably Africa, but white Americans often would take any place just to get them out
36:53of here.
36:57Organizations promoting colonization had first emerged in the early 19th century. By the
37:021840s, free black volunteers were being shipped to the African colony of Liberia. And by the
37:101860s, numerous plans had been drafted to deport the slaves to Haiti, the other Caribbean
37:16islands or Central America.
37:22For Abraham Lincoln, colonization became the means by which he could square the circle
37:26of his opposition to slavery and his belief in white supremacy.
37:31Of all the presidents and statesmen, he is the one who is obsessed by it. In all his
37:37speeches practically about emancipation, he talks about emancipation and deportation
37:44in the same sentence, in the same breath.
37:47Now, why is this? Lincoln fears that with a population of four million blacks in the
37:54South and about a quarter of a million blacks in the North, if you emancipate these people
38:01after years of subjugation, the result will be race war. You can't give them civil and
38:08political rights because they don't deserve it, in Lincoln's opinion. They're inferior.
38:12They're mentally and physically inferior.
38:15Lincoln could not conceive of the United States as a biracial society. Slavery should be ended,
38:22but black people should be encouraged, he said it should be voluntary, but they should
38:26be encouraged to leave the country.
38:30In August 1862, Lincoln called a delegation of three black leaders to the White House
38:35for a now infamous meeting to discuss colonisation.
38:40Lincoln tells that delegation and has a recorder write it down and publicise it in the press
38:47that were it not for them, this war wouldn't be happening. He says that to them. He says
38:52to them explicitly that the white and black races must be kept separate in America and
38:57he even asked those handpicked five black leaders who really weren't very important
39:02leaders if they would themselves volunteer to lead a colonisation movement out of the
39:07country. When I have students read that for the first time, black or white, they are a
39:13bit stunned because it's so explicit. Of course it's fraught with irony too because at that
39:18very moment of August 1862, he's already drafted the Emancipation Proclamation. He hasn't issued
39:23it yet. He's already got it in a drawer. So it's Lincoln kind of playing both sides
39:28of the street because he doesn't know how this is going to come out.
39:34Was Lincoln serious about colonisation or merely using it to appeal to white public
39:39opinion? Were his plans evidence of his political genius or his racism? Here again Lincoln's
39:46own words and speeches are used to condemn him.
39:50The very presence, he says, of blacks makes white people suffer and that the two races
39:56have to go their separate ways. He's totally explicit about this when he's talking to the
40:00blacks and he has also said the same many times before to whites. It's not a rhetorical
40:06ploy. It's not assault politically to his opponents to keep them calm. He actually means
40:11it. The two ideas of emancipation and colonisation are absolutely indissolubly linked in Lincoln's
40:23mind. If you like, colonisation, deportation is the final solution to the Negro problem
40:31as far as Abraham Lincoln is concerned.
40:37Lincoln wanted to deport all black people. That wasn't something that he said to two
40:41or three of his friends in the back room. He proposed and asked for the deportation
40:50of black Americans in the State of the Union message in December 1862. And he wanted to
41:00create a white state here. Now if Abraham Lincoln had had his way, there'd be no Obama
41:07in the United States. There'd be no Oprah Winfrey. There'd be no Tiger Woods. If he'd
41:14had his way, there'd be no black people here at all. The possibility of abolition and along
41:23with it the prospect of colonising the freed slaves was forced onto the agenda in 1862
41:29by the actions of the slaves themselves. As the war had spread through the south, they
41:35had begun to escape the fields and plantations, changing both the course and the meaning
41:42of the conflict. The war of course begins as a white man's war. It's a war to defend
41:49the Union. Lincoln states it so. Slaves simply don't believe that to be true. They see the
41:57enemy of their enemy entering the south and they believe the enemy of their enemy must
42:03be their friend. They run away to Union encampments. They offer their service. They offer information.
42:10They offer to do the dirty work of war. As these thousands of former slaves gathered
42:15around the invading Union army in the south, Lincoln was losing control of events. He had
42:20gone to war to defend the Union and stop the expansion of slavery. But now the Republican
42:25Party in Washington, radicalised by the experience of war, began to push him to transform the
42:31conflict into a struggle to end slavery everywhere.
42:36Lincoln is under enormous pressure in 1862 to take more dramatic action against slavery.
42:42Congress takes the lead. They abolish slavery in Washington, D.C. They abolish slavery in
42:46the territories. They forbid the army from returning fugitive slaves. They pass laws
42:52to confiscate the property of Confederates, which includes their slaves. Then there's
42:58public opinion in the north. Abolitionists, others are saying, look, the war is not going
43:02well. We've got to take more dramatic action. And, of course, the action of slaves puts
43:08the question of slavery on the national agenda in a direct way.
43:13On the 1st of January, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. It began
43:21the process that would end slavery in America, and, crucially, it did not call for the colonisation
43:28of freed slaves.
43:33The importance was that it said, we are on the side of emancipation. It said, the Union
43:42is an anti-slavery union. Before the Emancipation Proclamation, the Union was an anti-slavery
43:50union. Before the Emancipation Proclamation, the war was about union. And Lincoln said,
43:57if I can restore the union without freeing a single slave, I'll do it. But he couldn't
44:02do it. And the Emancipation Proclamation became the symbolic turning point of the war.
44:12It committed the whole war effort now, whether those generals and colonels wanted to or not,
44:18to remove the war. Four million slaves, the labour system of the South, that is a radical
44:27move because once you do that, there's really no going back. If you start rounding up thousands
44:34of slaves to free them and give them some kind of new status, you surely cannot send
44:41them back to anything resembling slavery.
44:48The modern reputation of Abraham Lincoln rests, above all, on his status as the great emancipator.
44:58It's the story that the Lincoln industry and the academic establishment stand behind. And
45:03it's what all Americans are taught at school.
45:06Abraham Lincoln is one of the best presidents this country has ever had because of what
45:10he did for the slaves.
45:12He thought it was wrong and no person should own another person.
45:15He was very important to me because he just abolished slavery and all the wrongdoings
45:19of our country.
45:21But does Lincoln deserve his reputation as the great emancipator? Or was the Emancipation
45:27Proclamation as much an act of war as an act of mercy? A desperate manoeuvre motivated
45:34in large part by the failure of Lincoln to defeat the Confederate armies.
45:40It's a war measure. It's a military measure. That's how it's justified. That's the only
45:43way it can be justified. There is nothing in the Constitution that enables the president
45:47to just decree the abolition of slavery. What Lincoln rests on is his role as commander
45:52in chief of the army.
45:54You know, compare it to the Declaration of Independence, which begins with this wonderful
45:58preamble about the rights of mankind. There's nothing like that. This is a military order.
46:03It contains no soaring rhetoric whatsoever, which Lincoln was capable of. Only at the
46:08suggestion of Secretary of the Treasury Chase does it end with a statement, this is an act
46:14of justice, as well as of military necessity.
46:18Like the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation has become one of
46:23America's sacred texts, and it places Lincoln at the centre of the story. But emancipation
46:30was a process that Lincoln did not begin, and was never able to control.
46:35To be perfectly frank, we give him too much credit for it. He caught up with the process
46:41of emancipation as much as he made the personal decision to free the slaves. Emancipation
46:48comes about in 1862, and especially in 1863, in the midst of this war, out of the process
46:56of its escalation.
46:57The Emancipation Proclamation not only freed enslaved Africans, it also did something that
47:10the North, and Lincoln himself, had resisted since the start of the war. It allowed the
47:15recruitment of black men into the Union Army.
47:20Many Northerners didn't believe blacks would fight. They'd run away when confronted. Or
47:24they'd massacre white people with their arms. Nobody knew what would happen if you armed
47:28these slaves. There were so many racist preconceptions.
47:33The service of black soldiers, the successes of black soldiers, the dignity of black soldiers,
47:38changes many Northerners' attitudes about race, about the black man. It certainly had
47:44a powerful effect on Lincoln himself. You want to know why Lincoln's racial views changed
47:49during the Civil War? A lot of it has to do with the black soldiers. Lincoln comes to
47:53feel, as many Northerners do, that by fighting and dying for the Union, they have staked
47:58a claim to citizenship in the post-war world.
48:02The greatness of Lincoln is his capacity for growth. By the end of the Civil War, by the
48:06end of his life, Lincoln's views on race have changed significantly. He has not become Martin
48:11Luther King, Jr., but he has come to recognize that the United States is going to be a biracial
48:17society.
48:25In April 1865, the Confederate armies finally surrendered. The Civil War had consumed 620,000
48:37lives. The cities of the South lay in ruins, and slavery had been swept away.
48:48And Lincoln, like his nation, was a man transformed.
48:55In this very short period of time, he's gone from believing that he has no right to do
49:01anything with slavery, that slavery should die a gradual, natural death, that African
49:07Americans really are not entitled to political rights, but at the end of the war, he talks
49:14about wanting to see certain segments of the African American population get the right
49:21to vote.
49:23So who was Abraham Lincoln in 1865? Was he the great emancipator, on the verge of awarding
49:29black people some degree of equality, or still an inveterate white supremacist? Was he the
49:34man who would save the Union, or a war criminal whose ruthless strategies had devastated his
49:40nation? Was he America's saint, or a man whose views captured all that was wrong with America
49:47in the 19th century?
49:49The problem here is that people always wanted to be all one or all the other. We want our
49:53Abraham Lincolns and our Winston Churchills and our Mahatma Ghandis, you know, to be perfect
49:59in their principles.
50:05The case of Abraham Lincoln, however, always has to be understood within the story of a
50:13man who was a consummate, pragmatic genius of a politician. But how far he'd have ever
50:26gone with civil or social equality is only speculation.
50:34The case of Abraham Lincoln, however, always has to be understood within the story of
51:05a man who was a consummate, pragmatic genius of a politician.
51:20The assassination of Abraham Lincoln marked the beginning of a disastrous political process
51:25that led America to reject the appeals for racial equality that had emerged from the
51:30radicalism of the Civil War. During the century between emancipation in the 1860s and the
51:39civil rights movement of the 1960s, African-Americans were pushed into segregated lives defined
51:46by the so-called Jim Crow laws and lynching. But throughout that century in the darkness,
51:53African-Americans attempted to use the memory of Lincoln, white America's secular saint,
52:03to appeal for justice.
52:08African-Americans understood how important Lincoln's memory was to the nation, and they
52:12were hoping that they could tap into that memory. They're reminding white Americans
52:19that the promise has not been fulfilled, that they have to step up and honor the obligation
52:27that Lincoln had started, because these rights that African-Americans had been promised had
52:33not been granted.
52:35Five score years ago, a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed
52:43the Emancipation Proclamation.
52:48Nearly a century after the Emancipation Proclamation, the Lincoln Memorial, America's temple to
52:53the cult of Lincoln, became the stage on which African-Americans came together to demand
52:58the nation finally fulfill the promise of freedom that Lincoln had made in 1863.
53:05One hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later.
53:15The part of that speech that everyone always hears, the part of that speech that is always
53:18replayed and it's even used in commercials in the United States, is only the dream part.
53:23I have a dream today. Little black children, little white children joining hands.
53:27In a sense, we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check.
53:32What we almost never replay is the first three or four pages of that speech.
53:37...wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
53:44They were signing a promissory note.
53:48King begins the speech by using the metaphor of what he called the promissory note.
53:55It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens
54:05of color are concerned.
54:07Now that's Martin Luther King on the 100th anniversary of emancipation standing in the
54:11Lincoln Memorial and saying to the world, the United States wrote a bad check in 1863.
54:18It bounced.
54:20But we refuse to believe that the Bank of Justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe
54:27that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.
54:33So here in 1963, a chance, you might say, to reboot, to go back to 1863 and build on
54:43the promises of the Civil War and the promises of the Emancipation Proclamation and to try
54:49to do away with all the ugliness, all the white supremacy and re-establish democracy.
55:03Half a century after the civil rights struggle, Abraham Lincoln has become perhaps the only
55:08historical figure sacred to both black and white Americans.
55:14Although he remains shrouded in myth and exaggeration, and although uncomfortable questions have
55:19been asked about who he really was and what he really thought, Lincoln's story, his rise
55:24from poverty, his battle against slavery and his struggle with his own racism has made
55:29his memory a potent political force.
55:32It was here in Springfield where North, South, East and West come together that I was reminded
55:39of the essential decency of the American people.
55:42In his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama, a candidate whose very presence in
55:47the race threatened to divide America, consciously linked himself to Lincoln.
55:57I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for President of the United States of America.
56:06Obama very much played on Lincoln's image.
56:10He mimicked Lincoln's trip on the train from Philadelphia to Washington DC.
56:15He swore in his inauguration on the very OUP Bible that Lincoln had used 100 some odd
56:22years earlier.
56:23I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear.
56:28He's cloaked himself, his candidacy, indeed his presidency, in the Lincoln myth.
56:35As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, we are not enemies, but friends.
56:42Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.
56:48The Lincoln that Obama adopted most was Lincoln the Healer.
56:53It's the Lincoln through whom we can all somehow come together.
56:58Our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared.
57:01Not Lincoln the ruthless war maker, not Lincoln even the emancipator.
57:07It's Lincoln the Healer.
57:09It's the Lincoln that Obama most tried to use.
57:13That the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale
57:17of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals, democracy, liberty, opportunity
57:24and unyielding hope.
57:30I think we all look at Lincoln from the perspective of what we see America as and what we think
57:37America should be.
57:42And those of us who see America as this perfect place, always right, did everything right
57:48from the very beginning, need a Lincoln who is larger than life, who is a Herculean figure,
57:56who did Herculean things.
58:01I think we as a nation need to understand that we can honor Lincoln and be truthful.
58:09He was a human being who made mistakes, who had prejudices, who had his own agenda.
58:17That does not diminish his greatness.
58:20I think it makes him even greater because it shows that with all his prejudices, with
58:24all the baggage that he brings to the presidency and to emancipation, he still did the right
58:31thing in the end.