Thurmond, Lott, and Lincoln

I want to apologize to all those who have been hurt by my insensitive remarks about the Beatles, Canadians, and the Tenth Amendment. They were mistakes of the head, not of the heart. To make amends, I pledge on my knees to vote only for liberal and socialist candidates in the future.

Which reminds me: Trent Lott has been taking quite a beating for his offhand compliment to Strom Thurmond at his 100th birthday celebration. No need to quote it; by now you can probably find it in Bartlett’s. Far be it from me to defend Lott, who has hurt more people with his groveling apologies than with his offense, but we could use a bit of perspective.

We are witnessing a mass display, so typical of Washington and the media, of moral equestrianism, or high horsemanship — an orgy of phony moral indignation.

Lott’s remarks have been squeezed to death in an effort to make them yield sinister meanings, specifically nostalgia for racial segregation. And Lott is vulnerable to this charge because, like Thurmond and many other Southern politicians, he was for some time a segregationist. But we could with equal ingenuity parse his salute as expressing a yearning for a past he remembers as peaceful and untroubled, even if others remember it otherwise. After all, a Thurmond presidency might have spared this country the Korean War, the appointment of liberals to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the rapid decline of constitutional government.

I think Lott is a pseudo-conservative, but in this case he has been the victim of a willfully malicious and ignorant interpretation of an innocuous comment and a consequent media storm, led not by liberals but by other pseudo-conservatives. The same treatment could be arbitrarily inflicted on anyone. By the same token, the media can, and do, spare their pet politicians similar treatment.

One of the themes of Lott’s tormentors is that he has disgraced “the party of Lincoln,” making it “the party of Thurmond.” In the words of the columnist Cal Thomas, “The party of Abraham Lincoln does not need the language of segregation.”

Not that we should expect any Republican to know this, but Lincoln was a segregationist. In this respect he went far beyond any position Thurmond or Lott ever took. He espoused, and worked for, an all-white America.

Lincoln opposed slavery, but he favored emancipation only if free blacks could be colonized outside the United States. Within the United States, he stoutly and eloquently opposed “political and social equality” for the Negro. He said it again and again, unequivocally. There is no need to twist his words, for they are supported by a long and undeniable record.

Lincoln’s defenders try to explain away his embarrassing words as mere “concessions” to the anti-Negro prejudice of his time. That is, Honest Abe was lying and pandering. He didn’t really mean it.

But this won’t do. It ignores his long advocacy of Negro removal. He spoke of the Negro as “the African,” and of Africa as “his native land.” Calling the Negro “African-American” would have seemed to Lincoln a contradiction in terms.

Many of Lincoln’s pro-colonization speeches have been lost, but his 1852 eulogy of Henry Clay ended with a passionate plea for colonization, which Clay had also espoused. Lincoln praised Clay’s leadership of the American Colonization Society as one of his greatest services to this country.

Nor was this a fleeting enthusiasm. As president, even in the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln worked to establish two colonies in the Caribbean for former slaves. In his 1862 state of the Union message, he pleaded with Congress to adopt a constitutional amendment to promote colonization. “I cannot make it better known than it already is,” he said, “that I strongly favor colonization.”

Yet his defenders do their best to ignore these facts. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Lincoln at Gettysburg, glorifying Lincoln as a champion of racial equality, Garry Wills makes not a single mention of colonization!

Lincoln had a dream: a united, all-white America. Had he prevailed, there would have been no need for Thurmond’s Dixiecrat Party in 1948, for the simple reason that there would have been no Negroes to segregate.

“If the party of Lincoln is serious about repudiating racists,” one wag has said, “it should repudiate Lincoln.”

Joseph Sobran