CIVIL RIGHTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY

...He spoke out in favor of education for Negroes, hoping thereby that the way would be opened for the intelligent and responsible discharge of their duties as citizens...

...More than that, it is to misconceive and grotesquely to sentimentalize the nature of history...

...But the war was more than that...

...Some religious dissenters were persecuted, exiled, or even burned at the stake by those who could not accept heterodoxy...

...Thus, Lincoln had greatly changed his views about what to do about the Negro in the United States...

...They were to be free persons, fighting for their own country...

...And while there was racial conflict, it never, except in a few instances in the Seventeenth Century, achieved a level of desperation that threatened the position of the Europeans...

...they could take measures to protect their own future...

...Nothing can be more untrue...

...This is perhaps because powerful common denominators served to cushion the differences and reduce their divisive possibilities...

...They were denouncing the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Declaration of Rights as glittering generalities...

...Roger Williams' insistence on equal treatment of the Indians was the exception to the rule and was regarded by many as subversive to the structure of stable European society in the New World...

...no human being ever was, now is, or ever will be born free...

...In the generation before the Civil War, the drive to extend man's inalienable rights to all found expression in efforts to broaden the franchise, establish free public education, grant certain rights to women, and protect labor...

...invariably the decision was reached to make some sort of adjustment...

...The arguments, vigorously advanced by the pro-slavery leaders, that Negroes were subhuman and consequently not entitled to the rights enjoyed by human beings were not altogether successful...

...By 1865 his actions made it clear that he was willing to retract a good portion of what he had said a decade earlier...

...Thomas Cooper of South Carolina spoke for many defenders of slavery when he said, "We talk a great deal of nonsense about the rights of man...

...While the franchise was a major factor by which President Lincoln hoped the Negro would be brought into full participation in American life, there were others that he did not overlook...

...but his problem was settled for the European when he was given the permanent status of a slave who was not even supposed to enjoy the rights to which others were entitled...

...I have already said the contrary...

...Whites, Indians, and Negroes found few common experiences to mitigate their differences...

...As Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has said, "To reject the moral actuality of the Civil War is to foreclose the possibility of an adequate account of its causes...

...Jefferson said that all men were equal, but he said it in the context of a slave society...

...It is significant, therefore, that when he issued the final Proclamation he made no mention of colonization...

...The granting of legal freedom was not enough...

...Down to the outbreak of the Civil War, the question of rights, civil and otherwise, agitated the public mind and seriously divided the American people into rival camps...

...Racial differences were regarded by many as the distinction God had made between those he favored and those he did not...

...But such a view has little appreciation for the moral implications of slavery and freedom, of subjugation and independence...

...They were denying with increasing vehemence the principle of universal manhood suffrage...

...We say that man is born free, and equal to every other man...

...A generation before the Declaration of , Independence, a New Jersey tailor, John Woolman, insisted that all men were entitled to freedom and that "no man was mentally or morally competent to rule others independent of restraints...

...Perhaps it was that the war had forced him to the conclusion that under the Constitution and in view of the long-held traditions of equality among free men, it was absurd to hold to notions of inequality among free men simply because they were not all the same color...

...They were also made up of different racial groups—Caucasian, Negro, Indian...

...In 1835, James G. Birney, the Alabama slaveholder turned abolitionist, said, "It has now become absolutely necessary that slavery should cease in order that freedom may be preserved in any portion of our land...

...In this context there were no inalienable rights for them to enjoy...

...A few years later, Judge Samuel Sewall, in The Selling of Joseph, indicated his unwillingness to accept invidious distinctions among human beings...

...When one considers the nature and extent of the differences and the disruptive forces they could have generated, one marvels that the experiment was not ruined before it was safely launched...

...They have deplored the expenditure of lives and property in the fight to abolish slavery because, they have insisted, the end of slavery could have been achieved by peaceable means...

...In some communities, like Puritan Massachusetts, the decision was made reluctantly, while in some others like Dutch Protestant New York or Catholic Maryland, it was made with such ease and grace that the decision-makers seemed hardly to deserve the problems their decisions created...

...The John Calhouns, the Thomas Coopers, the James Hammonds, and the others who defended slavery did so with a dedication that convinced many that Birney was right...

...This was, indeed, too vehement for the Southern delegation at the Continental Congress, and, upon their insistence, it was stricken from the document before its final adoption...

...In it Thomas Jefferson arraigned the king for waging "cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither...

...In early America no serious conflicts involving the fundamental rights of its citizens reached the critical stage, and a wonderfully heterogeneous society was permitted to develop without significant challenge...

...As one observer has said, "They had struck down the petition of right, challenged the supremacy of the Federal government, and devised an ingenious theory of concurrent majority which would have reduced public policies to the moral standards of whatever section possessed the lowest cultural level in the nation...

...As early as 1842 he had told a Cincinnati audience, "Slavery and oppression must cease, or American liberty must perish...

...But it was in the struggle against slavery that the sense of injustice made its greatest manifestation...

...They were made up of different religions—Anglican, Puritan, Quaker, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, Jewish...

...Long before it was over, President Lincoln had come to regard the Civil War as more than a struggle to save the Union...

...The silence of the final draft of the Declaration of Independence on the matter of slavery and the slave trade increased the difficulty of later Americans who sought precedence for their insistence on the universal application of the rights of man...

...but these differences were handled in such a way as not to threaten the foundations of the New World enterprise...

...nor can we be consoled by sentimental theories about the need-lessness of the Civil War into regarding our own struggles against evil as equally needless...

...For some English colonists the matter was not quite so simple...

...The Civil War was not worth its cost," one historian has said...

...Perhaps the most fateful of all decisions that the Seventeenth Century settlers made was the one to permit a pluralistic society to develop...

...Having taken the bold step of emancipation, President Lincoln began to think seriously about what should be done for Negroes to secure their rights and protect them in the exercise of those rights...

...In making this point clear, President Lincoln underscored the importance of civil rights, and his position contributed to the nation's preoccupation with the problem in succeeding years...

...that all legal distinctions between individuals of the same community, founded in any such circumstances as color, origin, and the like, are hostile to the genius of our institutions, and incompatible with the true history of American liberty...

...In a letter to a friend he said, "I cannot see, if universal amnesty is granted, how, under the circumstances, I can avoid exacting in return universal suffrage, or, at least suffrage on the basis of in-telligency and military service...

...If the Civil War was anything at all, it was a struggle to abolish slavery and broaden the concept of civil rights...

...In August, 1862, he had told the New York editor, Horace Greeley, that his primary purpose was to save the Union...

...Without this extension, not even legal freedom would be secure...

...As they sought to make adjustments to each other's cultural, religious, and racial differences, new problems arose that created ill-feeling and misunderstanding...

...President Lincoln first regarded the Civil War as a war to save the Union, to put down the rebellion of those who insisted that they had a right to secede because they disapproved of the policies of the Federal government...

...It is to his credit that Abraham Lincoln had begun to point the way during the months before the surrender at Appomattox...

...There was some feeling of hostility among the national groups, but it was not great enough to prevent them from working together for a common purpose...

...as the nation's guardian of these people who have so heroically vindicated their manhood on the battlefield, where, in assisting to save the life of the Republic, they have demonstrated in blood their right to the ballot, which is but the human protection of the flag they have so fearlessly defended...

...The British and Germans and Scandinavians were all European with significant contacts with each other that went back for generations...

...In the process of struggling through the question of civil rights and in the process of growing into a nation of many races, many social groupings, and many critical political experimentations, civil rights became even more urgent in the years that followed the Civil War...

...In January, 1864, he began to formulate his views about the extension of civil rights to Negroes...

...Long before Thomas Jefferson spoke of certain inalienable rights that the people possessed, conditions and developments in the colonial period pointed up the continuing involvement of the people with problems generally associated with civil rights...

...He is the author of a number of books, including "From Slavery to Freedom," "A History of American Negroes," and "Militant South...

...He hoped that the various states would take steps "by which the two races could gradually live themselves out of their old relation to each other, and both come out better prepared for the new...

...At the same time he indicated that Negroes would be received into the armed services and, omitting all mention of colonization, the President indicated that Negroes would enjoy a status that went beyond mere liberation...

...In Peoria, Illinois, in 1854 he had said, "Let it not be said that I am contending for the establishment of political and social equality between the whites and blacks...

...and if he could do so without emancipating a single slave, he would do it...

...For Indians were regarded by most Europeans as their natural enemy, to be fought, driven back, even annihilated if they stood in the way of European progress...

...It was in this spirit that the abolitionists launched their all-out attack, against slavery...

...Down to the end of 1862 the President had urged the colonization of Negroes in some other part of the world and had even mentioned it in the Preliminary Proclamation of September 22, 1862...

...And no one could erase the fact that the proposed anti-slavery passages of the Declaration had been ruled out altogether...

...A Quaker emancipation society in North Carolina said in 1830 that the Negro "is entitled to the same measure of justice with the white man, and that neither his skin, nor any other material consequence attending him can afford a reasonable pretext for his oppression...

...Nor could they hope to acquire them by becoming civilized or even Christianized...

...Later, in 1693, a Quaker named George Keith published An Exhortation and Caution to Friends Concerning Buying or Keeping of Negroes...

...We cannot therefore be relieved from the duty of moral judgment on issues so appalling and inescapable as those involved in human slavery...

...For the next hundred years it was to remain—and still remains—a central theme in the history of the United States...

...When John Locke wrote into his Constitutions of Carolina that the status of slaves would not be changed by their becoming Christians, that seemed to settle the question of the rights of Negroes...

...The arrival of each new group involved facing the question of how to solve the differences between the new group and the old...

...The Birneys, the William Lloyd Garrisons, the Frederick Douglasses, and the others who fought slavery were committed to the view that slavery weakened the nation and subverted the liberties and rights of all men...

...Even so, the implications of the Declaration, however vague and indirect, were so powerful that defenders of slavery found it necessary to deny the self-evident truths which it expounded and to debate the abolitionists on the question of just what the Declaration meant in regard to a free society in Nineteenth Century America...

...Many contemporaries sought to deny this, as, indeed, many so-called revisionist historians have attempted to do within the past generation...

...Perhaps it was the exigencies of war...

...Thus, the English colonies were made up of people of different national origins—English, but also Dutch, French, Spanish, German, Scandinavian...

...Perhaps it was because he remembered his own words uttered twenty years before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, when he said, "We feel...

...There seemed, moreover, to be a latent ethical consideration that impelled some who subscribed to the view of racial inequality to take the view that slaves should, nevertheless, be treated as human beings...

...In the Seventeenth Century there were no interminable debates regarding segregation in education or housing or about the denial of the right to vote...

...The Negro, too, was different...

...But the attacks they made on each other were never quite fatal, and there was always room in the West for one to practice his own religion or even to start a new one if he were so inclined...

...But certain decisions that the early settlers in this country made brought in their wake certain problems that, in nature, were not unlike those that press themselves with increasing urgency on the citizens of the United States today...

...They had none...

...The truly "vehement philippic against Negro slavery," as John Adams called it, was an early draft of the Declaration of Independence...

...The Quakers and Puritans and Anglicans were all English, with a common background of tradition and law...

...Even before John Locke wrote on the subject, Roger Williams was among those who were troubled by the distinctions being made between those who enjoyed all the rights of the community and those who did not...

...While the Civil War settled the question of human slavery, it did not settle the question of the manner in which the inalienable rights of 1776 were to be updated for the enjoyment of all in 1865...

...It appears as though they are bent only on daring Almighty God to do his best—they chain and handcuff us . . . and drive us around the country like brutes and go into the house of the God of Justice to return thanks for having aided them in their infernal cruelties inflicted upon us...

...National rivalries tended to create in the New World the strife and confusion that was all too characteristic of the Old...

...But this did not reflect his own personal views of the institution of slavery...

...Although always anti-slavery, he had not always subscribed to equal rights for Negroes...

...In March, 1864, he took the first step in this direction by suggesting to the new governor of Louisiana, Michael Hahn, "whether some of the colored people may not be let in the elective franchise as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks...

...When he reached the decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation as a "military necessity," he added that it was "an act of justice...

...Once slavery was firmly entrenched in the United States, the denial of the right of freedom and other rights because of race and other reasons troubled a good many Americans...

...In his Appeal in Four Articles, written about the same time, David Walker, a free Negro, wrote: "Can anything be a greater mockery of religion than the way it is conducted by the Americans...

...In his last public address, on April 11, 1865, Lincoln repeated his desire that the franchise would be conferred on intelligent Negoes "and on those who serve our cause as soldiers...

...The religious groups could be apprehensive about one another with some justification, and JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN, chairman of the history department at Brooklyn College, has taught at Harvard, the University of Wisconsin, Cornell, the University of California, and is visiting professor at the University of Cambridge, England, this year...

...I think I am clear and decided as to what course I shall pursue...

...It must be followed by the extension of all rights to which all men are entitled...

...Indians, therefore, remained outside the pale, outside the problem of assimilation and adjustment...