Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream by Lerone, Jr. Bennett ISBN: 0-87485-085-1 Publisher: Johnson Pub Co Pub. Date: February, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.09 (34 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Lincoln Died for Our Sins?
Comment: Once you've read this book, you will never look at Abraham Lincoln in the same way. Bennett writes a polemic here, but it is a well-researched and passionate effort. Although some of his conclusions are suspect, I respect the basic premise of this book, which is that Lincoln was a thorough going racist. Bennett proves that Lincoln's political mentor was Senator Henry Clay, a Kentucky slave owner. Lincoln exhibited racist speech using the pejorative for "Negro" up until the last days of his life. He consistently frequented "black face" comedy shows that denigrated blacks in stereotypical ways. Lincoln always supported fugitive slave laws in Illinois and nationally. The Lincoln described by Bennett completely missed the concept of full emancipation for all African Americans. His lukewarm Emancipation Proclamation was only an attempt to stave off the radical abolitionists who were pressing for full freedom for all Black Americans. Lincoln's Proclamation promised to emancipate blacks in areas currently in rebellion (in which Lincoln had no jurisdiction), and did not emancipate slaves in the areas that had not seceded or were militarily re-occupied. It was a halfway measure designed to obfuscate Lincoln's true agenda, i.e., gradual emancipation and/or deportation for colonization of the native born African American population. Bennett does a credible job showing that Lincoln's speeches, including the Gettysburg Address, were high sounding but did not include African Americans in the great American ideal of freedom for all. "All men are created equal" did not include blacks until Lincoln had been assassinated and was not able to obstruct the final version of the thirteenth amendment. Eye-opening commentary includes a discussion of how Lincoln pursued the War for two years with pro-slavery Democrat generals like McClellan, Halleck and Pope. Certainly Lincoln's incompetence was responsible for extending the War, causing loss of life for over 650,000 Americans North and South. After reading Bennett, Lincoln comes across as ambitious, indecisive, manipulative, misguided, decidedly racist and desperately craving some kind of long lasting historical legacy. Lincoln was slow coming to grips with the true nature of the War. Lincoln maintained all along that this War was being fought for Union, failing to ever grasp the eventual importance of the slave issue except to use blacks as a political pawn piece to win the war. Lincoln comes across as Machiavellian and insensitive when he finally issues the Emancipation Proclamation only as a military strategy to keep England and France out of the War. However, Bennett fails to address the impact of Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers after he had successfully maneuvered the South into firing on Sumter. Before his call for the 75,000, Virginia and North Carolina had not seceded and were not predisposed to go out. By his actions, he forced these states out and then proceeded to ineptly preside over a botched, bloody, protracted war that could have been averted by more clear headed, adroit diplomacy before the initial Battle of Manassas. Manassas led to Shiloh and, by then, the need to justify somehow the already horrific loss of life. Certainly, once the eleven states seceded, it was the effective end of American slavery because then the slaves could escape across international borders. A slave in Mississippi, once into Indiana, would have been free from pursuit, thus signaling the ultimate demise of the slave system. Lincoln's myopia regarding this key point precipitated not only the war deaths of so many Americans, but also set in motion the raw emotions and scapegoating that marked the brutal "reconstruction" of the South. The pursuit of the war and reconstruction only exascerbated racist feelings that whites felt toward blacks and necessitated the Civil Rights marches led by leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. almost a century after this sad period in American history. Americans today are still dealing with the issues that Lincoln did not deal with during his tenure as president. Bennett's demonization of southern leaders like Robert E. Lee show his lack of overall perspective as to why Southerners fought for their respective states. He doesn't acknowledge that in the South over 90% of the fighting men never owned slaves and were fighting for their families, homes and farms. The Union invader was fighting only for Union, not emancipation (if you listen closely to what Bennett's Lincoln was about). Abraham Lincoln was undoubtedly the deeply flawed, morally shallow politician as Bennett paints him, but Bennett interprets the results only as a twentieth century black militant. When you visit the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. after reading this book, you will read the Gettysburg Address in a different, less glorious light, and you will sincerely wonder why Lincoln merits such an exalted position on the National Mall. You will realize that the mythologized Lincoln did not die Christ-like for his country's sins. He was not the Man of the Age, but a man who was given the highest position in the American Pantheon because of his tragic death and the position power that he held during a catastrophic historical period (that he helped to make much worse). Another book on Lincoln that has been virtually banned for decades is Edgar Lee Masters' Lincoln The Man, which gives an equally withering testimonial to the man behind the myth, but from the perspective of a Copperhead. I'm giving Forced into Glory five stars for originality and the courage to write and publish it. This book is so "outside the box", it will probably be censured by the mainstream media. Many will speak negatively about it, but will not take the trouble to actually read it and give it a chance.
Rating: 2
Summary: A book with unsupported conclusions
Comment: James McPhereson's short comment tells the story ofthis book. "Revisionist" history has gotten a "bad rap" primarily because it is so often poorly done. New approaches to old historical issues are both valuable and healthy. But how can one take seriously an effort that is so lacking in good documentation and analysis?
In this case, Bennett seems to be acting out a personal agenda. I recall comments in Ken Burns' PBS documentary on the Civil War to the same effect: Lincoln does not deserve the title "Great Emancipator" because he did not free the slaves. But without him and his determination to save the Union, what would have been the fate of those slaves? The frequently overlooked reality is that Lincoln had no authority to emancipate slaves in territory where the Constitution was in effect; thus, the Emancipation Proclamation could have authority, if any, only in those areas under rebel control. One reader has drawn the conclusion that if the Union had been severed that the slaves could have escaped across what would then have been an international boundry. Of course slaves had been escaping the South and slavery for years through the Underground Railway. But to suggest that a southern slave, taken into Indiana would have thus gained freedom has not read the Supreme Court's 1857 decision in the Dred Scott case. On the other hand, if the Confederacy had won the war, international law and treaty rights would have governed the fate of a visiting slave, not Indiana state law.
Was Lincoln a racist and thus to be stripped of his mantle of greatness? Lincoln was, in his time, quite "liberal" on the issue, although he wasnot in strictest terms, an abolitionist. Certainly his stance might well be termed racist in 2000. But he was ahead of his time on the issue in the 1850s and 1860s. Those who seek to deprecate his actions freuently ignore his stand on the Kansas-Nebraska issue in the mid-1850s and the "House Divided" speech and the positions he took during the debates with Douglas. While he did look up to Henry Clay, a slaveholder, as his political model, it is qauite a leap to suggest that as proof that he was a racist.
One of the other reviews trouble me because it appears that some Americans take their understanding of the Civil War from narrow books such as Bennetts. There are many better and more objective books on the war and on Lincoln and emancipation. The reader should use some discretion: If an understanding of the Civil War era and Lincoln's part in it is to be achieved, I would suggest that Bennett is not going to be a fruitful source.
The second star is for the effort and not for the merits of the book. The reader would have been better served if the author had simply stated that the conclusions were based on his opinion rather than to try to shroud ill-considered analyses and special pleading in dubious references.
Rating: 1
Summary: Forced into Gory Lincoln Revisionism
Comment: Bennett's exercise in exasperation over Lincoln as the Great Emancipator displays his woeful ignorance about the principles and practices of American self-government. Lacking even a rudimentary grasp of how the ideas of human equality and the consent of the governed inform the constitutional operation of the American government, it's no wonder Bennett is unable to grasp Lincoln's political prudence.
For the definitive exposition of the Emancipation Proclamation, see Allen C. Guelzo's magisterial work, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery In America.
Bennett claims that Lincoln deliberately undermined his own emancipation proclamation by its selective application: "What Lincoln did--and it was so clever that we ought to stop calling him honest Abe--was to 'free' slaves in Confederate-held territory where he couldn't free them and to leave them in slavery in Union-held territory where he could have freed them." This argument implies that what Lincoln should have done regarding slavery concerned only military might, and not constitutional right. But Lincoln omitted the so-called "border slave states" of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware from the Emancipation Proclamation because they were not in rebellion against the federal government and therefore its citizens deserved the full protection of their constitutional rights.
The explicit exceptions Lincoln made of southern, slave-holding areas under Union-army control prior to January 1, 1863 (i.e., the counties constituting West Virginia and portions of Virginia and Louisiana) also fall under this category. When Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase argued for applying the Emancipation Proclamation to the exempted areas of Virginia and Louisiana, Lincoln replied he could only do so "without the argument of military necessity, and so, without any argument, except the one that I think the measure politically expedient, and morally right." He added, "Would I not give up all footing upon the constitution or law? Would I not thus be in the boundless field of absolutism?" Lincoln shows that a president, even acting as commander-in-chief, must exercise authority not as a dictator--benevolent or otherwise--but within the limits set forth by the Constitution. Lincoln wanted to rid the nation of slavery but not at the price of free government.
Bennett concludes, "There is thus nothing we can learn from Abraham Lincoln about race relations, except what not to say or do." By reading Forced Into Glory, one learns nothing from Lerone Bennett about the requirements of statesmanship within a constitutional republic. Lincoln's devotion to the Constitution and union took precedence over the immediate abolition of slavery, but in a way that set the nation back on course to ridding itself of slavery. Miss this, as Bennett does from cover to cover, and you misunderstand the Emancipation Proclamation and its connection to the Union war effort.
 |
Title: Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America by Lerone Jr. Bennett ISBN: 0140178228 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: July, 1993 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
 |
Title: Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson ISBN: 086543171X Publisher: Africa World Press Pub. Date: January, 1990 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
 |
Title: They Came Before Columbus by IVAN VAN SERTIMA ISBN: 0394402456 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 12 November, 1976 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
 |
Title: The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois ISBN: 0486280411 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 20 May, 1994 List Price(USD): $2.00 |
 |
Title: The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford Hayes to Woodrow Wilson by Rayford Whittingham Logan, Eric Foner ISBN: 0306807580 Publisher: DaCapo Press Pub. Date: April, 1997 List Price(USD): $18.50 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
