superior socially, but argues that blacks should have equal rights.
28 Richard Current, The Lincoln Nobody Knows (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1980 [1958]), 216.
29 Richard H. Sewell, A House Divided (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1988), 74-75.
30 American Adventures and American History quote from Lincoln’s letter to
Albert Hodges, April 4, 1864. See Herbert Aptheker, And Why Not Every
Man? (New York: International, 1961), 249, for the entire text.
31 See, for example, Jehuti El-Mali Amen-Ra, Shattering the Myth of the
Man Who Freed the Slaves (Silver Spring, MD: Fourth Dynasty Publishing,
1990), 21. Amen-Ra, an “Afrikan” nationalist from Baltimore, edits Lincoln’s
letter just as textbook authors do, to discredit him.
32 Proposed by the border states, this compromise would have reversed Dred
Scott and restored the Missouri Compromise line while guaranteeing slavery
forever south of it. Lincoln could not abide the latter idea and instructed
Republican congressmen not to support it. Without Republican support, it
narrowly failed in both houses. Several new textbooks do provide Lincoln’s
opposition to the Crittenden Compromise.
33 V. J. Voegeli, Free but Not Equal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1967), 62-63, 128-50.
34 Pageant provides a blowup of the last half of the last sentence, which
therefore can be made out, with difficulty.
35 Later that year he would establish Thanksgiving Day, to identify another set
of Founding Fathers with the United States.
36 Lest this analysis makes Lincoln appear too ethnocentric, note that some
Europeans, including Tocqueville, and many Americans in the nineteenth
century believed that the United States indeed exemplified the future. See
Abbott Gleason, “Republic of Humbug,” American Quarterly 44, no. 1
(3/1992): 1-20; and G. D. Lillibridge, Beacon of Freedom (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1955).
37 Quoted in M. Hirsh Goldberg, The Book of Lies (New York: Morrow,
1990), 79-80.
38 Intellectuals still debate its implications for our present age. See, inter alia,