Was Lincoln a Douche?

On Presidents’ Day it is customary to laud Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of These United States, as the greatest of all American leaders. The man saved the Union, ended slavery, told good jokes, had nice legs - what’s not to like? Historians in a recent poll affirmed their profession’s usual ranking of Lincoln as the Number One guy, well ahead of the current incumbent (No. 14) and his predecessor (No. 45). Old Abe of course has his critics, and not just among unreconstructed neo-Confederates. President Lincoln’s policy toward Native Americans - a combination of military repression and malign neglect - proved so destructive that Congress temporarily took over the conduct of Indian Affairs after Appomattox. Closer to our own time, Bobby Wilson, a member of the 1491s, assessed Lincoln’s relationship with his own Dakota nation in a short, pointed video, “Lincoln Was a Douche.” Reviewing the president's record, I kind of have to agree.

A few years ago, the organizer of a podcast called Lincoln Log asked me to offer my scholarly assessment of Number Sixteen on his show. In his invitation the podcaster asked me how Lincoln had affected my life personally, which suggested that the show’s attitude toward Mr. Rail-Splitter was not merely reverential but theological. In my reply, which I offer below, I effectively declined the invitation:     

 

“My recent scholarship endeavors to place Indigenous Americans at the center of their own stories, and to move white policy-makers toward the background…My views on Abraham Lincoln are shaped by the impact on Native Americans' lives of policies for which Lincoln, as president, bore ultimate if not always proximate responsibility.

Navajo prisoners at Bosque Redondo (Wikimedia Commons)

"The years of Lincoln's presidency were ghastly ones for tens of thousands of American Indians. Your listeners are probably familiar with the story of the Dakota Sioux* rebellion of 1862 and the 38 men Lincoln hanged for insurrection; they are probably less familiar with the hundreds of Minnesota Ho-Chunks deported after the Sioux War (even though they had nothing to do with it), and with John Pope's deadly punitive campaign against the Lakota[s]...who also had nothing to do with the Dakota rising. Lincoln was less directly responsible for the California and Arizona militias' war of extermination against the Apaches, the Colorado militia's infamous attack on the Cheyenne encampment at Sand Creek, and Kit Carson's forced removal of the Navajos to Bosque Redondo, where 4,000 people died in four years. All of these military actions occurred, however, in the course of a...war with the Confederacy which Lincoln was determined to prosecute to unconditional victory, and all occurred in regions where Lincoln or his subordinates feared that Native American warriors might become recruits or catspaws of the CSA. (Not without some justification: the Five Civilized Tribes of Indian Territory did become formal allies of the Confederacy in 1861.) I have found little to no evidence that President Lincoln intended his Western commanders to fight a frontier war with kid gloves on.

"It is worth noting that the intense, nearly genocidal character of the Indian Wars of 1862-65 generated growing criticism from white Americans. At the end of the Civil War Congress endeavored to wrest control of Indian policy away from the Executive Branch, setting up its own peace commission and initiating its own peace treaties with the Plains nations. A few years later President Ulysses Grant, taking back a leading role in Indian policy-making, called his new approach the "Peace Policy," to distinguish it from the more bellicose actions of his immediate predecessors - including Lincoln. Perhaps if he had survived his fatal trip to the theater Lincoln would have embraced a similar policy a few years earlier, but I haven't found much support for this counterfactual speculation.

"…In an interview or conversation about 'Lincoln and the Indians,' I would emphasize the experiences of Native Americans, and while I could certainly try to explain the actions of President Lincoln and his subordinates, I would not be inclined to excuse or justify them. This approach to the subject may be too pitiless for your audience. If not, I would be glad to talk with you further about taking part in an episode of your podcast.”

 

I didn’t appear on the Lincoln Log. 

I rather like Lincoln as a person, and think he did some remarkable things as president, but the responsibilities of a modern historian - to tell the truth about the past - differ considerably from those of a hagiographer or professional moralizer.

 

* I would not use this term today, as many people find it offensive.

Social Welfare as Common Sense

My cherie and I spent part of a recent drive in Florida reading and discussing Thomas Paine’s 1797 pamphlet “Agrarian Justice,” a document both of its time and surprisingly prescient. AJ’s central premise and proposals grew from Paine’s reflections on natural rights throughout the course of his career. Briefly: private property was responsible for all that was best and worst in “civilized” countries. Property rights encouraged cultivation and increased productivity, such that agrarian countries could support ten times as many people as hunter-gatherer societies of equivalent territory. On the other hand, property produced a grotesque level of inequality, such that the most “degraded” people in the world lived cheek-by-jowl with the richest. Paine’s solution to the latter problem was not to eliminate property rights and agrarian civilization altogether, but to assert that all people had a property right that governments must secure to them: their collective ownership of land’s pre-improvement value, together with an equivalent fraction of the value of personal property. (He guesstimated that each fraction was about ten percent.) He grounded these rights in the assumption that land before improvement was the common property of all, and that part of the value of personalty came from “society,” which provided the labor markets, intellectual capital, and other structures that facilitated creation of that property. Governments - he addressed himself to his fellow revolutionaries in France and his former countrymen in England - should detach these fractions from property owners by way of a tax, and return it to all citizens by way of cash payments. Paine proposed an inheritance tax as least intrusive, since dead men needed little money and their children would eventually get part of the exaction transferred back to them. As for the payments themselves, AJ proposed giving every man and woman 15 pounds (the equivalent of about $3000 today) when they reached the age of 21, a “social dividend” that would help them set up an independent household and farm; in addition, every person over the age of 50, and every disabled person below that age, would receive L10 annually for their support. It is worth noting that Paine calculated the average adult life expectancy at 51 years, and the number of younger disabled people as fairly small. Nonetheless, his proposals are viewed today (by the American Social Security Administration, inter alia) as one of the intellectual foundations of social insurance, a feature of most modern nation-states.

Citizen Paine expected the rich and powerful to oppose his tax on legacies rather than his payouts to the young and old. Two centuries of subsequent experience with the kind of social insurance program proposed in “Agrarian Justice” suggests the elite would actually oppose pensions and social dividends more than the supporting taxes. Their sticking point was and is Paine’s characterization of these payments as rights. In the Anglo-American world, at least, the upper classes have long been nervous about rights language, which might give the lower orders ideas above their station, and preferred to think instead of charity. Charity affirms the status and power of the giver and the humility and dependence of the recipient. The highborn sometimes even think of employment as a charitable enterprise: in the eighteenth century English gentleman so characterized their hiring of craftsmen and servants, and in our own time the American Republican Party, appanage of the plutocratic order, has proposed replacing Labor Day with “Job Creators’ Day,” to celebrate the generosity of management toward the plebeians. In an aside, Paine noted that the personal wealth of employers often came from their underpaying of their workers. He was, perhaps, insufficiently cynical, insofar as he could not see that the owner class preferred not to pay their workers at all, unless they could see those workers grovel for their pittance. Nor do I think he could have predicted that such attitudes would persist for over 225 years, and likely for another 225 after that.