The racial bells toll in America By Anis Haffar [E-mail: gateinstitute@yahoo.com] The historic essence of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama One great episode in America’s racial history was the Civil War of the 1860s. Another is poised to be Obama’s victory as the 44th president of the United States in 2008. Were he even to lose the presidency itself, the nation would still have evolved in meaningful ways. In his book, Abraham Lincoln, The War Years, 1861 – 1864, Carl Sandburg (a Lincoln biographer) observed: “America whither? [was] the question, with headache and heartache in several million homes, as Lincoln began his winding journey to Washington” at the start of 1861 as President-elect. Earlier in 1856, the Republican party had organized to oppose the extension of slavery. In the state of Illinois, Lincoln was so prominent that the party’s state machinery chose him for the vice-presidency. Come May 1860, the Republican convention then nominated him for the presidency itself. A key issue in that presidential campaign was slavery and its imminent abolition. The willpower of the abolitionist movement and rising slave revolts had begun to diffuse the dreams of the prosperous slave barons to continue that profitable trade. The rich plantation owners, too, feared that the era of free slave labour had come to an end. In other words, they might have to serve as their own “field niggers” - plant and pick cotton and tobacco by themselves; and be their own “house niggers” - cook, wash, and clean after themselves. The reality of that impending finale dogged the minds of the slave kingpins and beneficiaries alike. Squeezed into a corner, seven slave states - Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina – hardened their defiance, and resisted the day of reckoning. First, as deterrents, they whipped, mutilated, stabbed, shot, or openly hanged fugitive slaves and abolitionists smuggling slaves into freedom. Additionally, they flouted the constitutional law that prohibited the delivery of naked slave cargoes from Africa’s Gulf of Guinea. [The slave shipments were branded by the traders as follows (from Eric Williams’s book Capitalism & Slavery): “An Angolan Negro was a proverb for worthlessness; Coromantines [from] the Gold Coast were good workers but too rebellious; Mandingoes (Senegal) were too prone to theft; the Eboes (Nigeria) were timid and despondent; the Pawpaws or Whydahs (Dahomey) were the most docile and best-disposed.”] The decisive face-off came on February 13, 1861, the day the U.S. Congress was to declare and certify Lincoln the President-elect. The unfolding drama suggested the opening of a Pandora’s Box of clashes, and dog fights which “might cause the gutters to run with blood”. As precautions against possible bloodbaths, armed guards were hinged at vantage points, and sharp shooters pitched on rooftops. Order and safety were to prevail before the electoral vote for President. Lincoln, having received the majority of the votes, was duly elected that day as the 16th President of the United States for four years, commencing March 4, 1861. The President-elect himself was not at the February 13th meeting. He had set out on a special train from Springfield, Ohio. Days before arriving in Washington, bad news reached him in New York state, February 18, that “down in Montgomery, Alabama, amid thundering cannon and cheers from an immense crowd, Jefferson Davis took his oath of office as President of the Confederate States of America”. That event foreshadowed a gruesome milestone in America’s history. As if he saw the future, Lincoln addressed the Hall of Assembly of the New York capitol: “It is true that while I hold myself without mock modesty, the humblest of all individuals that have ever been elevated to the Presidency, I have a more difficult task to perform than any one of them.” Thus, even before Lincoln took office, providence had shoved that full burden of racial history into his lap. He assured an audience in New Jersey: “The man does not live who is more devoted to peace than I am. None who would do more to preserve it. But it may be necessary to put the foot down firmly.” Wherever he stopped on that famous trip to the White House, there were agitation and panic. In Philadelphia, bridges were at risk of “explosions and fires”, and tongues raged with threats, “This hireling Lincoln shall never, never be President.”