Getting Right with Lincoln . . . and Black Freedom

Abstract

1956, David Herbert Donald encouraged historians to with Abraham Lincoln by understanding how the memory of the sixteenth president had become a vessel for competing political ideologies. Donald described how, despite Lincoln's Republican roots, Democrats eventually recognized the political value of his image and set out to raid the Republican closet and steal the stovepipe hat. Although party politics dominated Lincoln's own lifetime, his legacy transcended those traditional divides. After his death, Radicals hailed Lincoln as the harbinger of democratic revolution in the South, black suffrage, and even women's rights. Decades later, imperialists insisted that he would favor annexation of the Philippines and war in Cuba. He was simultaneously a supporter and critic of populism and labor unions. Conservatives were convinced that, had he lived, he would fight the introduction of the income tax, while isolationists advanced his disapproval of the League of Nations and the World Court. It seemed that Lincoln was anything to everyone, which caused Donald to lament that his legacy risked becoming devoid of any real meaning.1 As Donald attempted to get right with Lincoln, the rest of the country struggled to get right with the end of legalized segregation. The Supreme Court's rejection of separate but equal schools and public accommodations two years earlier helped pave the way for local desegregation victories, first in Birmingham, and then in Little Rock. The post-Brown atmosphere crackled with the embers of a slow-burning movement that would soon engulf the entire country. Recognizing parallels between the 1960s and the 1860s, Donald believed Lincoln continued to resonate for mid-twentieth-century Americans faced with another crisis of national unity. In our age of anxiety, Donald wrote