Advertisement

The Leader pp 81-110 | Cite as

Lincoln and the Crisis of the 1850s

Thoughts on the Group Self
  • Charles B. Strozier
Chapter

Abstract

Psychohistory has long struggled to find ways of bridging individual and group experience. It has been a field painfully focused on biography, which is interesting but, in the minds of most historians, ultimately trivial. The individual case may or may not illuminate the whole. The idiosyncracy of personal experience can never be factored out. The leading journal in the discipline of history, the American Historical Review, for example, refuses to publish biographical articles except in unusual circumstances, and then only when the connection between the individual figure’s life and larger historical events is made explicit.

Keywords

Collect Work Slave Trade Republican Party Compulsive Sexual Activity Conspiracy Theory 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. 1.
    John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Woman in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, (1975); 1-29Google Scholar
  2. Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Random House, 1967) and House From the War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973)Google Scholar
  3. Fred Weinstein, The Dynamics of Nazism: Leadership, Ideology and the Holocaust (New York: Academic Press, 1980).Google Scholar
  4. 2.
    Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953), II, 320.Google Scholar
  5. 3.
    Ibid., 501.Google Scholar
  6. 4.
    Ibid., 255.Google Scholar
  7. 5.
    Ibid., 492.Google Scholar
  8. 6.
    Ibid., 482.Google Scholar
  9. 7.
    Ibid., 349-52.Google Scholar
  10. 8.
    Ibid., 266.Google Scholar
  11. 9.
    Ibid., 273.Google Scholar
  12. 10.
    Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 35.Google Scholar
  13. 11.
    Collected Works, II, 437-42.Google Scholar
  14. 12.
    Gabor Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1978)Google Scholar
  15. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 45; Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, pp. 30-38.Google Scholar
  16. 13.
    The issue of Lincoln and race has been hotly debated since Lerone Bennett, “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?” Ebony 23 (1968), 35–38, 40, 42. Herbert Mitgang replied to Bennett quickly and self-assuredly, “Was Lincoln Just a Honkie?” New York Times Magazine (February 11, 1968), 34-35, 100-107. In fact, quite a lot of scholarship preceeded Bennett’s 1968 article. See, for exampleGoogle Scholar
  17. Edward Magdol, “Owen Lovejoy’s Role in the Campaign of 1858,” Journal of the Illinois Historical Society, 59 (1959), 403–16; Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (1962); andGoogle Scholar
  18. Arvarh E. Strickland, ‘The Illinois Background of Lincoln’s Attitude Toward Slavery and the Negro,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 55 (1963), 474–94. See alsoGoogle Scholar
  19. Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); andGoogle Scholar
  20. Martin Duberman, ed., The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965). Since 1968 a number of important works have appeared on this issue. The best general study is Foner, Free Soil; a careful analysis is George W. Fredrickson, “A Man But Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality,” The Journal of Southern History 41 (1975). CompareGoogle Scholar
  21. Stephen B. Oates, Lincoln’s Journey to Emancipation: Our Fiery Trial (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979). The historiographical story is nicely summarized in Arthur Zilversmith’s presentation of the topic of Lincoln and race, February 12, 1980, Abraham Lincoln Colloquium, State Historical Library, Springfield, Illinois that will appear in the forthcoming Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association, vol. II.Google Scholar
  22. 14.
    Collected Works, III, 145-46; see also II, 405-498.Google Scholar
  23. 15.
    Kenneth Stampp, The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 128.Google Scholar
  24. 16.
    Collected Works, II, 256.Google Scholar
  25. 17.
    Ibid., 520.Google Scholar
  26. 18.
    Ibid., 405-6.Google Scholar
  27. 19.
    Frederick Douglass, “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, Delivered at the Unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., April 14, 1876,” The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 8 volumes, ed. Eric Fonet (New York: International Publishers, 1955), 4, 312. CompareGoogle Scholar
  28. Christopher Breiseth, “Lincoln and Frederick Douglass: Another Debate,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 68 (1975), 9–26.Google Scholar
  29. 20.
    Collected Works, II, 255.Google Scholar
  30. 21.
    Ibid., 255-56.Google Scholar
  31. 22.
    Ibid., 132.Google Scholar
  32. 23.
    Ibid., 298-99; Earl Schenck Miers, ed., Lincoln Day By Day: A Chronology, 1809–1865, 3 vols., (Washington: Lincoln Sequicentennial Commission, 1960), II, 114.Google Scholar
  33. 24.
    Frederickson, “A Man But Not a Brother,” p. 50, makes this point, repeating, without credit, Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1959), p. 61.Google Scholar
  34. 25.
    Collected Works, II, 461-62.Google Scholar
  35. 26.
    Illinois State Register, June 19, 1858, p. 2.Google Scholar
  36. 27.
    Collected Works, II, 20-22.Google Scholar
  37. 28.
    For example, ibid., III, 20.Google Scholar
  38. 29.
    Ibid., 404.Google Scholar
  39. 30.
    Ibid., IV, 263.Google Scholar
  40. 31.
    Almost all commentators on Lincoln and on the 1850s agree with the observation. Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), p. 80, noted that there is “no evidence of any organized movement in 1858 to push slavery into the free states, or of any disposition among members of the Supreme Court to attempt such folly.” (For a complete discussion of the Dred Scott case, seeGoogle Scholar
  41. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).Google Scholar
  42. James G. Randall, Lincoln the President: Springfield to Gettysburg, 2 volumes (Gloucester, Mass.: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1945), 1, 108, termed Lincoln’s conspiracy theory “quite fanciful and nonexistent.”Google Scholar
  43. Allen Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln, 2 volumes (New York: Scribner’s, 1950), I, 362, called Lincoln’s theory a “partisan analysis” which “in the eyes of posterity, was pitched on a disappointingly low plane.” And in the view ofGoogle Scholar
  44. David Donald, Liberty and Union (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1978), p. 71, ‘These utterances in the house divided speech reveal more about the state of Lincoln’s mind and the receptivity of the Northern audiences that cheered his speeches than they do about historical reality.” There has been one major dissenter to this interpretationGoogle Scholar
  45. Harry Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1959), pp. 81, 277-78. Jaffa, however, marshalls evidence regarding only the Dred Scott decision. Lincoln’s theory went well beyond that. Jaffa’s interpretation has been echoed byGoogle Scholar
  46. George W. Frederickson, “A Man but Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality.” The Journal of Southern History, 41 (1975), p. 45, “It is important to recognize that the years after 1854 not only saw an effort to extend and nationalize slavery but also provided the occasion for a torrent of racist propoganda.” In support of this assertion, Frederickson footnotes his own Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), pp. 44-164; andGoogle Scholar
  47. Eugene H. Berwanger, The Frontier Against Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), pp. 123–37. These sources, however, support only Frederickson’s notion that there was a “torrent of racist propoganda.” His idea that there was an effort to nationalize slavery remains unproven. Oddly enoughGoogle Scholar
  48. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1966), passes over Lincoln and the 1850s.Google Scholar
  49. 32.
    Frederick Douglass, “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln” 4, 318.Google Scholar
  50. 33.
    Collected Works, III, 9.Google Scholar
  51. 34.
    Ibid., 16, 29, 145-46, 221-22, 248-49, 299-300.Google Scholar
  52. 35.
    See Christopher Breiseth, “Lincoln, Douglas and Springfield,” The Public and Private Lincoln: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Cullom Davis et al (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), pp. 101–20.Google Scholar
  53. 36.
    David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher. (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 246. See alsoGoogle Scholar
  54. Kenneth M. Stampp, An Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 156–57.Google Scholar
  55. 37.
    Lawrence J. Friedman, “Antebellum American Abolitionism and the Problem of Violent Means,” The Psychohistory Review, 9 (1980), 26–32.Google Scholar
  56. 38.
    Bruce Catton, This Hallowed Ground (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955), p. 23.Google Scholar
  57. 39.
    Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1962), X, 153–230.Google Scholar
  58. 40.
    Ibid., II, 21-47.Google Scholar
  59. 41.
    Stampp, An Imperiled Union, pp. 242-43.Google Scholar
  60. 42.
    George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All!! or Slaves without Masters, ed. C. Vann Woodward (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1852), p. 252.Google Scholar
  61. 43.
    Ibid., 11.Google Scholar
  62. 44.
    Collected Works, II, 73.Google Scholar
  63. 45.
    Ibid., 91.Google Scholar
  64. 46.
    Lawrence J. Friedman, “Garrisonism, Abolitionism, and the Boston Clique: A Psychosocial Inquiry,” The Psychohistory Review, 7 (1978), 6–19.PubMedGoogle Scholar
  65. 47.
    Fitzhugh, Cannibals All!!; see also Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South or the Failure of Free Institutions (New York: Burt Franklin, 1854).Google Scholar
  66. 48.
    Arnold Goldberg, ed., The Psychology of the Self: A Casebook, Written with the Collaboration of Heinz Kohut (New York: International University Press, 1978), p. 282.Google Scholar
  67. 49.
    Steven M. Stowe, “The ‘Touchiness’ of the Gentleman Planter: The Sense of Esteem and Continuity in the Antebellum South,” The Psychohistory Review 8 (1979), 6–15.PubMedGoogle Scholar
  68. 50.
    Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness, p. 14.Google Scholar
  69. 51.
    Admissions records of the Jacksonville State Hospital, 1852–1860, Illinois State Archives.Google Scholar
  70. 52.
    Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: Collier Books, 1966 [1852]), p. 104.Google Scholar
  71. 53.
    Even Mary Lincoln despised the Irish and leaned toward the Know-Nothings. See Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner, Eds., Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New York, Knopf, 1972), p. 46. Compare Lincoln’s own views, Collected Works, II, 323.Google Scholar
  72. 54.
    Potter, The Impending Crisis, p. 252.Google Scholar
  73. 55.
    Approximately forty percent of the patients clearly indicated to the staff of the hospital when admitted that they had been born abroad. However, for those whose place of origin is listed as an eastern state—a sizable number—many could well have been born abroad but lived in the East long enough to establish residency before moving to Illinois. I suspect for example, that many Irish immigrants named Massachusetts or New York as their place of origin.Google Scholar
  74. 56.
    Potter, The Impending Crisis, p. 254. Note David Bryon Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969).Google Scholar
  75. 57.
    Heinz Kohut, “Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage,” in The Search for the Self: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut 1950–1978, ed. Paul H. Orenstein, 2 vols., (New York: International Universities Press, 1978), 2, 615-58. See alsoGoogle Scholar
  76. Charles B. Strozier, “Heinz Kohut and the Historical Imagination,” Advances in Self Psychology, ed. Arnold Goldberg (New York: International Universities Press, 1980), 397–406.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 1985

Authors and Affiliations

  • Charles B. Strozier

There are no affiliations available

Personalised recommendations

Cite chapter

Buy options