[captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] good morning. ,ur next speaker is dr. Alan professor of the civil war era. He is the author of Abraham Lincoln, redeemer president. Lincoln and douglas, the debate that defined america. Gettysburg, the last invasion was a bestseller. Three of those four books earned the lincoln prize. They are worth your attention. His most recent publication is redeeming the great emancipator. It was the lectures for the w. E. B. Dubois. It considers what lincolns reputation as the great emancipator indicates about how americans have dealt with race over the many years since the end of the civil war. His argument is simple. Do not view lincoln is the great emancipator would signify that we as americans are slipping in our ability to see each other as fellow americans. Lincoln could be the glue that holds us together on race as well as other issues. The key to understanding lincoln is appreciating what lincoln did to reclaim the ideals of the american founding, especially the truth that all men are created he will. Confusion about what the founders met by that statement is bound to confuse us as well. To quote the professor, unless we can understand why lincoln remains the great emancipator, we will not only lose him, but show how we are losing each other. Is titled his remarks hating lincoln, or why so Many Americans think the great emancipator is no longer great or an emancipator. Please join me in welcoming him. [applause] dr. Guelzo thank you very much for that generous introduction. My thanks to my colleagues at the institute for the opportunity to speak to you today. Also to cspan for bringing the Television Cameras into broadcast these proceedings. Television is a wonderful medium. A woman came up to me the other day and said to me did nice eu one television . I replied, i dont know. You cant see out the other way. [laughter] im not sure who was blessed. Certainly mr. Lincoln would reply in that spirit the photography was trying to take his picture said to him just look natural. His response was thats what im trying to avoid. [applause] what a place to be, fords theater on this stage, so hallowed in memory and to look up at the box to which i must bow and knowledge and hope that the spirit that animated lincoln will animate all of us today. 20 years after the death of Abraham Lincoln, the massachusetts congressman reminiscing for alan thorndikes book, thought that lincolns name would be carried along the ages i is three great papers, the proclamation of emancipation, the gettysburg address, and his second inaugural address. It does not surprise us he had an admiration for the gettysburg address. It ranks with the noblest productions of antiquity, with the works of pericles and cicero. What does surprise us is how forgot it was the emancipation reclamation, if all the lincoln said and was should fail to carry his name and character to future ages, the emancipation of 4 million human beings by his single official act is a passport to all immortality the earth can give. There is no other individual act performed by any person on this continent that can be compared. The constitution was the work of bodies of men. The emancipation proclamation stands alone the responsibility on lincoln. The glory is chiefly thins. No one can say whether the declaration of independence or the constitution or the emancipation proclamation was the highest gift to the country and to mankind. He was not alone in his off of lincoln the emancipator. Evenly can spoke of it as a central act of his administration and the great event of the 19th century. He predicted to Charles Sumner that the name connected with this act will never be forgotten. As early as 1863, newspapers proclaimed lincoln the great emancipator who has begun the great work of destroying slavery and reconstructing our nationality on the broad and enduring basis of human equality. In the eyes of the world, he has become the great emancipator. His name is breathed with lessings by millions of cruelly wronged and outraged men and women. His name is known and loved in all the rice fields and cotton plantations of the south. To the black race he is a liberator in savior. He commenced the sympathy and admiration of the leading minds of the nation, the thoughtful, the lies, the benevolent, the patriotic. When he died, washington papers carried a fullpage image of him. By 1866, biographers were hailing lincoln as the great emancipator. Even in his lifetime, a strange metamorphosis was coming over the proclamation. Alongside his essay and the reminiscences, the old veteran abolitionist radical loftily suggested that lincoln was something less than a great emancipator. When he reluctantly issued the preliminary reclamation in 1862, he wished it distinctly understood that the deportation of the slaves was inseparably connected with the policy. Far from any noble motivations, lincoln was ans by the fear that enlistment would cease and congress would refuse the necessary supplies to carry on the war if he declined any longer to place it on a clearly defined antislavery basis. Even then, the proclamation as issued studiously excluded the slaves and large districts in which it would have an effective while in applied mainly to states and parts of states within the military occupation of the enemy where it was void. The proclamation was in effect a splendid popular delusion which lincoln deployed in the salvation of his country. Another way of twisting lincoln and emancipation was to insist that the great emancipator was indeed great, it also misunderstood in his intentions. The postwar generation of the new south had earnestly strive to make peace with lincoln and struggle to cope him in southern sugar as a man of southern birth and instinctive predilections. The proclamation was not about emancipating black americans slavery, but about slowly emancipating americans from black people through colonization. Not a great emancipator, await emancipator. I shall continue until is accomplished, aiken explains in the 1907 novel the klansmen. Lincoln goes on, my proclamation was linked this plan. Dixons attempt to seven eyes emancipation did not convince the seven agrarians of the 1930s. The complaint wasnt lincoln was misunderstood it, but the head promoted misunderstanding, using emancipation as a moral cloak for an industrial capitalist juggernaut which had attempted to crush the souths agrarian civilization. Lincoln was not a great emancipator, but a hate emancipator. The south, ill take my stand, was something intangible, incomprehensible in the realm of the spirit and that spirit more than secession or slavery was lincolns real target in the civil war. That must be invaded and destroyed. There commenced a second war of conquest, the conquest of the southern mind, calculated to remake every opinion to impose the northern way of life on the south and write error across the pages of southern history which were out of keeping. Increasingly, it has seemed the great emancipator cannot win for losing. On a political left, the most famous and most devastating soundbite ever uttered about the proclamation, it had all the moral grandeur. On the political right, lincoln earns as much contempt from latterday libertarians for whom lincoln is the great centralizer and the emancipation proclamation, is merely a propaganda ploy. Nothing is quite as remarkable as the collapse of his prestige among americans, who once idolized him. Between 1956 in 1999, black opinion of lincoln as a great president skidded from 48 to just 28 are in Julius Lester captured the shift as it was happening when he announced in 1968 that one of the bigger lies in america has given the world is that lincoln freed the slaves and the blacks should be grateful from because he was so generous. It is not true that lincoln did so out of the goodness of his heart or that we have to be grateful to him. The black school child grows up feeling half guilty for even aching about cussing out a white man because hed been taught it was a white man who gave us freedom. What is the catechism of black child learns . What did labor family can do . Lincoln freed the slaves. That point is driven home that youd still be down the plantation working from if mr. Lincoln hadnt done your great great grandmother of paper. That same year, and africanamerican editor published a denunciation of lincoln in every magazine, questioning why blacks should revere lincoln. Taught in his own childhood to regard lincoln as the deliverer and redeemer of the slaves, that it was aghast at finally reading lincolns remarks at the Lincoln Douglas debates. Lincoln said that i am not nor have i been in favor of bringing about the social and equality of the races. From that moment as bennett described it, that it could no longer regard lincoln as the greatest apostle of brotherhood in the United States of america. Instead, lincoln must be seen as the embodiment not of transcendence of the american tradition which is as we all know a racist tradition. Bennett speaks for a generation of middleclass africanamericans who do not understand why they should render homage to a white man who seems so far below the level of their own expectations. There is this perception that good old lincoln and a few others gave freedom to black people rights Eric Armstrong dunbar. The real story is black people and people like Frederick Douglass wrestled their freedom away. Even barack obama can read in 2005 that as an africanamerican, i cannot swallow whole the view of lincoln as the great emancipator. There are i think three reasons why lincoln has taken such different beatings at so many different hands. One is emancipation from the perspective of 150 years later seems so unremarkable. Even inevitable. Another is that few people apart from technical constitutional scholars understand today when a tremendous legal risk lincoln was taking and emancipation. The third reason has less to do with lincoln and more to do with us. More to do with the nature of modern culture, which is suspicious of celebrating any accomplishment from fear that celebration will obscure the horrors of the presentday oppression. Being far removed in time from the ground game of the civil war, the actual mechanisms and plugins proclamation and its numerous exemptions and, its use of military necessity as a justification, it is legalistic. The long delay between the outbreak of war and the proclamation itself, all of these seem inexplicable. Puzzled why these exemptions and the slowness of lincolns movement, the impulse seen is to discount the purity of his motives. And to look for more ignoble impulses in the proclamation. Recruiting blacks and soldiers, for instance. Pushed to the extreme, lincoln steams so tardy and unenthusiastic that the law is told entirely from his said and awarded instead spirits, the abolitionist. Ultimately, to the slaves themselves. In this self emancipation scenario, slaves seize on the opportunity provided by the outbreak of the civil war to run away and are forced lincoln to formulate policies which reflect the self emancipated reality. Slaves were not waiting for lincoln it. They would start the war themselves rather than simply waiting for either the lord or the yankees to give them freedom. In 1863 there was a civil war going on within the south. This is fantasy. There were no pressures on lincoln to emancipate anyone. The abolitionists were never worth factoring with. The radicals record of accomplishment is not suggesting they had a very clear ideas of what they were doing. Above all, we have no idea what numbers of fugitives or contrabands flood into union lines. Its strange to suggest they exercised any influence in the white north. Self emancipated slaves push the nation toward legal emancipation, they would have had to constitute at least a critical mass. Even if we grant the offense estimate that Hampton Roads in 1865 that 200,000 slaves had found refuge in the union armies, were still talking about us than 5 of the enslaved population of the confederacy. The presence of such contraband on northern soil actually generated serious racist reaction in the north. Any pressure the contrabands were exerting were liable to move in the opposite direction. There is also a legal catch lurking behind self emancipation thesis. It can be called the shawshank illusion. In this example, it refers to the movie. The closing scene shows Morgan Freeman who has jumped the terms of his probation striding happily toward his prison inmate friend tim robbins who had escaped from jail in one of the more sensational version of cinematic jailbreak. The characters at the end are currently gloriously free on a beach in mexico. They are not. Whatever the illusion conjured up by the movie, they are simply fugitives. They can be arrested, extradited, reimprisoned at will. They cannot own property, they cannot enjoy civil standing. Fugitive slaves were likewise free only defect oh. That escape did not confer freedom. In law, they remain fugitives and wouldve done so until the end of their days without against reclamation. If the civil war had ended in some form of negotiated settlement, after the election of George Mcclellan for instance, it is difficult to believe that seven negotiators would not have demanded rendition of those fugitives. That was made to lincoln in august 1864. What was needed was a declaration of freedom legally terminating the slave status as chattels. That could come from only two sources. The legislatures of the slave states who preferred secession and war to emancipation or from the president of the United States acting under the umbrella of his war powers in a national emergency. The flake and felt any pressure or influence, it pushed in the opposite direction. From border state whites promising injunctions at peace talks, perhaps from a military coup. None of these things happened does not mean lincoln was not obliged to reckon with them. It means a strategy in emancipation was wiser than the surface. It those who are devoutly praying that presently can make of faith to move mountains reminded by the journalist of the little hills that beset and block off his way to the mountains or of the miserable rain that helped an blind and chill him every step he takes. That is the backdrop which our over familiarity causes us to miss. This is not falling off the horse. Let us not lapse into the notion that the slaves did nothing. Enthusiasm with which they greeted even the rumor of emancipation surpassed any jubilation Union Soldiers had ever seen. The subversive aid they offered the union army was valuable to the war effort. Those who had regarded the relation of master and slave is one of mutual affection had only to witness these unique and menstruations of rejoicing at our approach and the certain destruction of the slave owners to be convinced of the happiness and contentment claimed for those in servitude was a worthless fiction. Once the black soldiers began recruiting in 1863, lincoln remembered a mass meeting that commanders of the army have given us the most important successes believe the emancipation policy and the use of colored troops is the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion and at least one of those successes could not have been achieved when it was but for the eight a black soldiers. The fact that lincoln chose to use military necessity rather than an appeal to justice as his rationale for emancipation sounds like something less than morally uplifting. President s are not elected to do justice. They are elected to execute the law. Anything that felt to recognize military necessity had no application to the order states where no war had existed, it was baking to be destroyed in a federal court system whose head at that moment was the same chief justice who would authored dred scott versus samford. It cannot. Too often put slavery existed as a legal condition in the United States because of state in action. The constitution skirted any explicit mention of slavery in 1787, permitting the arrest and rendition of fugitives. It is difficult to appreciate the firewall that separated federal and straight authorities. It was very real to lincolns era. The federal government did hardly more than deliver the mail. It was real enough that slaveholders sheltered themselves legally behind that firewall and how that anything that looked like federal intervention in antislavery activists insisted the firewall proved that slavery was a local institution which had no call on National Authority for its preservation. The agency was the federal courts. At a time when courts had little to do besides policing the wall, patrolling its perimeters, that was the major source of the courts authority. Although roger tawney freed his own slaves, he was no front of the abolitionist. Nobody expects the Supreme Court will sustain the freedom of slaves under the proclamation. Particularly since chief Justice Tawney would read the proclamation filtered through the secession heart of a man whose body was in baltimore and who soul was in richmond. s assertion of war powers as a justification for the emancipation proclamation laid hold of powers that were beyond the states and the courts control. With those invocations of war powers set beside the general suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, lincoln was able to silence much of what the federal courts might have tried to do. That would last only until the war emergency was over. The appointment of a new chief justice to succeed tawney and the end of hostilities seven months later letdown the bars again. Within a year, the Supreme Court had begun drawing lines around executive and legislative authority. The primary intention of the Supreme Court might have been magnifying the office. The subsidiary result was to strike down executive issues on behalf of the free people. We have been wounded in the house of our friends declared Frederick Douglass. I look upon it as one more Shocking Development of that moral weakness in high places that has attended the conflict between the spirit of liberty and the spirit of slavery from the beginning it. The essence of the thing is a study purpose to degrade and stamp out the liberties of a race. It is the spirit of slavery and nothing else. The wonder is not wide lincoln did not do more for emancipation, he managed to do anything all. Even after exposing the constitution and the legal cords that bound lincoln, it is unlikely ther