Lincoln’s views on slavery
Sir, – In his review of several books about Abraham Lincoln (May 29), Ari
Kelman was selective in sources, steering clear of evidence that portrays
Lincoln as he really was. It is similar to what US historians have done for
more than a century. In the process, the real Lincoln has been concealed.
Let’s look just at Lincoln’s thoughts on race and slavery. Discussing the
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, he said: “[When slave owners] remind us of their
constitutional rights [to own slaves], I acknowledge them, not grudgingly
but fully and fairly; and I would give them any legislation for the claiming
of their fugitives”.
In debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858 at Ottawa, Illinois, Lincoln said: “I
have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white
and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in
my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the
footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that
there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the
race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said
anything to the contrary”.
Lincoln repeated these beliefs several times. In his First Inaugural Address
in 1861, he said he had no “purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere
with the institution of slavery, in the States where it exists. I believe I
have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so”. Instead,
Lincoln dedicated most of the speech to denying that States could legally
secede from the Union by arguing that the Union was older than the
Constitution.
Lincoln’s “solution” for black people in the United States was to send them
back to Africa. He toyed with several plans to do that, which prompted
William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist, to denounce him: “President
Lincoln may colonize himself if he choose, but it is an impertinent act, on
his part, to propose the getting rid of those who are as good as himself”.
The Emancipation Proclamation was confessed by Lincoln himself to be a
political move during the war to keep England and other European countries
from recognizing the Confederacy as a separate country. The Proclamation did
not apply to States that were loyal to the Union, where it would have meant
that slaves would actually be freed, but to the states of the Confederacy
where Lincoln had no control over the matter. Lincoln’s own Secretary of
State, William Seward, mocked the Emancipation Proclamation by saying, “We
show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach
them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free”.
Lincoln’s preoccupation was with preventing the dissolution of the Union, not
freeing the slaves. In a letter to Horace Greeley, he said that if some
slaves could be freed to save the Union, he would do that, and if the Union
could be saved by not freeing any slaves, he would do that.
KEARNEY SMITH
225 Sweetwater Road, Green Mountain, North Carolina 28740.
Kafka and the inexpressible
Sir, – “He followed Mendele when he compared Jews to hunchbacks (‘Jewish
Slavery and Emancipation’), though he also echoed Kafka’s allegory of Jewish
deformity, ‘Report to an Academy’”, writes David Aberbach of Isaiah Berlin
(Commentary, June 5). It is difficult to tell from this whether the
description of Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” as an “allegory of Jewish
deformity” is Berlin’s or Aberbach’s. Whoever said it, it is a travesty of
Kafka’s story, one of the greatest – one of the funniest and saddest – he
ever wrote. It resonates with every reader, gentile or Jew, because, like
Melville in “Bartleby”, Kafka has here found a way of expressing the
inexpressible, our sense that our very language is not our own but learnt,
imitated “from others”, and that this is only a sign of our condition, so
different from that of animals. To identify this as a peculiarly Jewish
malaise is to tame and distance a work that touches everyone, while to talk
of “Jewish deformity” is, today, surely, merely an embarrassment.
GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI
60 Prince Edward’s Road, Lewes.
Sir, – David Aberbach states that Isaiah Berlin never had a bar mitzvah.
Michael Ignatieff, in what Professor Aberbach calls “his superb biography”,
refers to the smart synagogue where he had his bar mitzvah. Whom are we to
believe? In the light of Sir Isaiah’s Jewish background – the family
observed the main religious festivals although they also ate bacon – and in
the absence of firm evidence, I am inclined to believe Ignatieff.
MICHAEL GOLDMAN
1 Lyndale Close, Blackheath, London SE3.
Austen editions
Sir, – I did indeed agree to withdraw as editor of the Cambridge edition of
Persuasion, because of my concern that comprehensive and mutually agreed
editorial principles appropriate to an author of Jane Austen’s stature had
not been hammered out (see Janet Todd’s letter, June 5). As I had already
been working on the edition for two years, I decided to turn the material
into a book, A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s
“Persuasion”, reviewed recently in the TLS (May 22).
Most of the volume editors rose valiantly to the challenge, but in my review
of Later Manuscripts, edited by Janet Todd and Linda Bree (April 24), I
pointed out inconsistencies resulting from that lack. I praised other
aspects of their edition, such as the survey of critical reception, the
family context, the annotations, and the editors’ arguments about
attributing the poems, the prayers and the play of Sir Charles Grandison to
Jane Austen.
It would have been easy enough to acknowledge editorial and critical
predecessors. As teachers, we require students to name the sources of their
ideas. As academics, we strive to do the same. This protocol is a matter of
courtesy, it aids further inquiry, and it demonstrates the originality on
which our reputations and our careers depend. I fail to understand why it
should be different for scholarly editors.
JOCELYN HARRIS
28 City Road, Dunedin 9010, New Zealand.
‘Detroit Free Press’
Sir, – Michael Greenberg’s assertion in his Freelance column (June 5) that the
Detroit Free Press has stopped “publishing a daily printed edition” except
on Sunday and must be sought out online is not quite accurate. The Free
Press still issues a daily edition Sunday through Saturday but it’s usually
available only at news-stands or stores that carry the paper. The exceptions
are the Thursday, Friday and Sunday editions, which are still home delivered
(these apparently are their days of highest circulation). The paper is also
available online every day in a facsimile version. The delivery and online
options are available only to subscribers. It adds up to a rather innovative
approach to staving off, albeit temporarily, the paper’s inevitable demise.
RICHARD C. WALLS
481 E. Lewiston, Ferndale, Michigan 48220.
Biografiends
Sir, – John Shakespeare (Commentary, April 3) gave a well-documented account
of Philip Larkin’s insistence that he himself fully control his own profile
for the reading public. He told Shakespeare that he wanted “to sound more
guarded, more complex, more like a person who could possibly write a good
poem”. This attempt on the part of a poet to present a public persona
reminded me of Thomas Hardy, who apparently dictated the “biography” that
was written by his second wife. More recently, Seamus Heaney seems to have
adopted a similar strategy. He has presented a portrait of his life through
a series of interviews given to Dennis O’Driscoll which the latter collected
under the title Stepping Stones. O’Driscoll makes it clear that it is
an autobiographical account, the details and the wordings of which were
chosen by the poet himself.
Larkin did not write his autobiography, and during his lifetime he kept his
personal and private life strictly secret, believing that a poet must be
judged only by his poetry and nothing else. When Anthony Thwaite published
the commemorative volume Larkin at Sixty, Larkin was dismayed to find that
contrary to his “impression that it was going to be literary criticism”, he
found his friends and acquaintances “recalling the number of times I puked
down the stairs at Oxford and reciting the worst of my limericks”.
Unfortunately, “biografiends”, whom he had kept at bay during his lifetime,
came out in full force after his death.
A. BANERJEE
53 Mayfield Close, Walton-on-Thames.
‘Granta’
Sir, – J. C. (NB, June 5) claims that “Granta’s weakness lies in its failure
to cultivate a home team of original talent”. Granta has never copied the
New Yorker model of keeping a team of writers on retainers. It has always
published extracts from unpublished novels. In addition to Paul Auster and
the other writers mentioned, the Fiction issue (106) also has a
fifty-four-page interview with Mavis Gallant, by Jhumpa Lahiri, from Paris.
It is really the backbone of the issue, longer by far than any of the
extracts; an extraordinarily interesting conversation about Gallant’s life
and writing.
Granta has always had a quality of the unexpected. That will not change,
however many editors we have.
SIGRID RAUSING
Granta, 12 Addison Avenue, London W11.
The Hitler plot
Sir, – Permit me to add a detail to Tim Kirk’s review of Philipp von
Boeselager’s book Valkyrie: The plot to kill Hitler (In Brief, May 29). The
conspirators had planned that von Boeselager would march with his cavalry
unit from the Eastern Front to Berlin to support their efforts there. He
successfully detached his unit from the front and rode westwards towards
Berlin when, halfway there, the news reached him that the plot had failed.
He turned his troops around and managed to re-integrate them in their former
position without raising suspicions at headquarters.
What should be remembered is that not one of his soldiers afterwards went to
the Gestapo to reveal his commander’s intentions. Not all Wehrmacht soldiers
were fanatical Nazis.
UDO WEISS
Hauptstrasse 78, Heidelberg.
Aberdeen
Sir, – Donald Wintersgill (Letters, June 5) says that when he asked an
Aberdeen taxi driver if granite was still used there, he was told “Aye. It
comes frae China”.
When my wife and I were there in 1995, we asked our taxi driver (perhaps the
same one?) the same question, and he said “now it comes frae Portugal”. Yes,
taxi drivers do seem to know everything.
STEPHEN RECKERT
Janelas Verdes 17–4, Lisbon.
