Thoughts on the Vexed Question of Race

Kevin Levin has posted one of his usual thought-provoking and insightful pieces over at Civil War Memory, on the difficulties of distinguishing between, and teaching students about, racism and slavery in Lincoln's America.

I'd enthusiastically second everything Kevin wrote: it is very, very difficult to get at the complex weave of views on race during the Civil War era. Nothing is simple here. Take for example the man whom Kevin quotes at length, Colonel James Montgomery (the man pictured above; doesn't look much like the actor in Glory, huh? As much as I love that film, I really think it's portrayal of Montgomery was flawed, in multiple ways). One would think that Montgomery, a fiery jayhawking abolitionist from Kansas, an early and enthusiastic supporter of the use of black troops, and a one-time commander of the famed 54th Masachusetts, would be found on the more enlightened side of racial matters. Maybe he was--sometimes. But then, on other occasions, he apparently was not, as the quote Kevin posted makes abundantly clear.

I actually wrote an article on Montgomery for Kansas History, in which I struggled to understand this guy. How could a man seem so racially enlightened one moment, and so unbelievably callous and boorish the next? I concluded in the article that, by the time Montgomery said those derogatory things about black soldiers, he had lost his way--he had lost the sense of personal and moral certainty that drove his actions in Kansas. When he blasted black soldiers and demeaned them, he was ill, bitter at having been passed over for promotion, and looking at the quiet and rather shabby dusk of what had once seemed a promising (if controversial) career.

I write this not to make excuses for Montgomery, but rather to point out that, when we assess the racial views of Montgomery and others of that era, we would do well to remember that there was a complex psychological dimension that bears our attention as well. White people projected parts of themselves onto their portrayals of black people, and those parts could be admirable, despicable, insecure, manipulative--the whole panoply of human emotions. And what further complicates matters is the fact that whites of the time were often contradictory: they could project these things all at once, or at different times in their lives, depending upon the circumstances.

In other words, Montgomery probably was, at some points in his life, a white man whom we would call admirable and enlightened in his views of black people; and at other points, he was repulsively bigoted and callous. And for an unstable personality like Montgomery, those things could exist all at the same time.

I write about this at some length because right now I'm dealing with many of these same questions while writing a book about Lincoln and race. No, Lincoln was not unstable, really; nor was he contradictory on a scale like Montgomery. But the same sort of personal dynamic was very much in play; when Lincoln wrote and spoke about black people, he did so within multiple contexts and in very complex ways. The landscape of Lincoln's views on race, I've found so far in my research, was a lot more complicated than maybe we've previously thought.