Lincoln and the Immigrant (Concise Lincoln Library) - Softcover

INTRODUCTION
 
“Another Lincoln book?” asked the gentleman sitting next to me on the train from Springfield to Chicago. “Can anything really new be said about the guy?” Having just left the Abraham Lincoln Library and Presidential Museum, I was certainly prepared to tell him yes, most definitely. But, his point was well taken. As early as 1934, the legendary Lincoln scholar James G. Randall, in a well-known article, asked, “Has the Lincoln theme been exhausted?” He noted the many then unexplored fields of unedited works, the topics and themes that had not yet been examined, and concluded optimistically that despite a list of some three thousand works at that time, great progress was still possible in the field of Lincoln studies. Others who followed were not as sanguine. In an essay written in 1960 during the centennial celebration of Lincoln’s election, one scholar said wryly, “We know more about Lincoln’s day-by-day activity than he knew; we know more about his family and ancestors than he knew. Some of our scholars know more about the details of his life than they know of their own.”1 Despite this acerbic view, Lincoln remained as mysterious as ever, and the paths to new interpretations remained potentially open.
 
If that attitude was present more than half a century ago, then what about now? For just as the Illinois countryside passed by our Amtrak window, a tower was being constructed outside the foyer of the new Ford’s Theatre Center for Education and Leadership in Washington, DC. Arising from the floor, it ascended to thirty-four feet, more than three stories high, and was built of sixty-eight hun­dred aluminum facsimile books. The tower symbolically represented some sixteen thousand titles and counting, more than five times what existed when Randall wrote his essay. This was the work of many lifetimes, all devoted to a single life, that of Abraham Lincoln, the humble rail-splitter from the town I had just visited. Almost six thousand biographies alone have been written of Lincoln, compared with half that number of George Washington. Were one to read all of those Lincoln books, it could easily take a lifetime as well. And yet there was not one book in the tower on the simple subject that I had been researching in Springfield: the relationship of Abraham Lincoln to the immigrant. This would seem to verify the center’s belief that its tower “symbolized that the last word about this great man will never be written.”2 It was with pleasure, and with a smile, that I turned to my traveling companion and responded, “Why, yes indeed, something new can be said about Abraham Lincoln.”
 
At one time the Library of Congress estimated that a book on Abraham Lincoln was published every five and a half days. Since the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, celebrated in 2009, that rate likely increased. Even so, there has not yet been a book-length study de­voted to Lincoln and the immigrant. Scores of volumes have been published on Lincoln’s philosophy about race, with but a few scholars acknowledging the connection to Lincoln’s very serious and significant thoughts about the immigrant and ethnicity. However, Lincoln spent a considerable amount of time pondering the future and place of immi­grants in American society, and studying his thoughts on this subject can inform and edify us on his views on slavery and freedom as well.
 
Little of what he said about immigrants has ever made it into the history books, including those books specifically about Abraham Lincoln. However, there is most assuredly a connection between Lincoln’s views on slavery and his long-held beliefs about immigration, and we can gain some valuable and revealing insights by examining the sixteenth president’s views on the immigrant in American society.3
 
Abraham Lincoln and immigration? Absolutely. Lincoln lived in an era when immigration was as controversial as it is today. During the twenty years before the Civil War, more than four million immigrants, mostly from Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia, en­tered the United States. Additionally, many migrated across the newly defined Mexican border. Processing procedures at such ports as New York’s Castle Garden were inconsistent and inhumane. As millions of Catholics arrived, it struck fear in many American Protestants. Con­sequently, in the 1850s nativist anti-Catholicism cropped up around the country in popular literature featuring stereotypes and support­ing the politics of the anti-immigrant Know Nothing, or American, Party. While they were not serious contenders for national political power, many Know Nothing governors, mayors, and congressmen built their careers on opposing immigration.
 
From an early age, however, Lincoln developed awareness and a tolerance for different peoples and their cultures. While no doubt a product of his time, Lincoln nevertheless refused to let his environ­ment blind him to the strengths of diversity, and throughout his legal and political career he retained an affinity for immigrants, especially the Germans, Irish, Jews, and Scandinavians. His travels at a young age down the Mississippi River to the port of New Orleans exposed him to the sights, sounds, and tastes of a world he hitherto only could have dreamed about. More important, however, it established a foundation for his beliefs and a sympathy that he retained for the rest of his life when it came to the foreign-born, as well as the enslaved.
 
It recently has been discovered that during his less-than-successful single term in the US House of Representatives, Lincoln joined many other Americans in making a contribution of $10 ($500 in today’s money) to the Irish Relief Fund during the Great Famine. Perhaps this was because Lincoln’s first teacher at Riney’s School in Hodgen­ville, Hardin County, Kentucky, had been of Irish descent. Master Zachariah Riney was described as “a man of excellent character, deep piety and fair education. He had been reared a Catholic, but made no attempt to proselyte . . . and the great President always mentioned him in terms of grateful respect.” Whether Riney left a lasting impression on him or not, Lincoln was always interested in Irish culture. He knew and recited Robert Emmet’s “Speech from the Dock,” especially the closing words: “Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance, asperse them. . . . When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.” Lincoln’s favorite ballad was a poem by Helen Selina, Lady Dufferin, titled “The Lament of the Irish Emigrant,” set to music.4
 
While many of Lincoln’s quips are famous, he often resorted to Irish analogies, sometimes caustic and perhaps a bit insulting, to make his point. Lincoln’s first recorded jibe about a poor Irishman comes from one of his congressional speeches on the need for sensible internal improvements, when he described the plight of a man with new boots: “‘I shall niver git ’em on,’ says Patrick ‘till I wear ’em a day or two, and stretch ’em a little.’” Late in the war, one contemporary observer of Lincoln recalled a cabinet meeting when “something was said about hunting up ‘Jeff Davis,’ and Mr. Lincoln said he hoped ‘he would be like Paddy’s flea,’ when they got their fingers on him he would not be there.” This comment is quite consistent with Lincoln’s desire to avoid show trials or punitive commissions....