By William D. Green. (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2018.xii, 498 pp. $34.95.)
Minnesota is a land not only of 10,000 lakes but also of 10,000 racial paradoxes. Despite the state’s much-celebrated history of liberalism, from the prohibition of slavery at Minnesota’s origins and the extension of suffrage to African American men soon after the Civil War to the emergence of Hubert Humphrey as a standard-bearer of desegregation in the civil rights era, the state is also home to some of the most egregious racial disparities in the nation (the “achievement gap,” the homeownership gap, health disparities, rates of incarceration).
In The Children of Lincoln, William D. Green effectively uses his skills as an historian to help us explore the genealogy of these paradoxes. In his microstudy of the North Star State, he offers a lens through which to consider the larger panorama of American racial history. Green, the author of two other book-length investigations of nineteenth-century Minnesota history, is a painstaking researcher. Trained as a lawyer, he is a passionate pursuer of evidence— letters, speeches, newspaper articles, court proceedings, government documents, and more—and he is a careful reader of other scholars’ arguments. He is also a wonderful writer, able to tell a story with appropriate flair but also with an eye on his key question: How did white advocates of abolitionism turn their backs on African Americans once emancipation had been achieved? How did they conclude, as one said: “We have done our part?”
He selects four individuals who, while sharing a commitment to ending slavery, came from quite different positions: a politician, a soldier, a church leader, and a suffragist. They also followed different paths in their way toward refocusing on issues other than equal rights. Green never trivializes their initial commitments nor the sacrifices they made, but, in tracing their individual journeys, he reveals the shallowness of their understanding of racism. While Green is careful to avoid anachronistic formulations, this reader was struck by how his subjects’ belief in equality did not extend to an advocacy of equity. That is, once the shackles of enslavement had been removed, African Americans, in their eyes, should have been able to stand on their own feet.
This is a very important mirror that Green holds up to us, a mirror in which we—inhabitants of the “post–civil rights” era— can see our reflections mingle with those of our antecedents from the post emancipation, post-Reconstruction era. As we look, we can hear from one direction the discourse that bewails the “rat and rodent-infested mess” of Baltimore (to use President Donald J. Trump’s words) and the immigrants who become “public charges,” and from other directions, perhaps closer to home, the discourse that assures us that “we have done enough” for those people. The Children of Lincoln challenges us to look in that mirror and see ourselves as history has made us and to ask ourselves what we will choose to do. Green is such a skillful historian that he is careful to not ask these questions himself but to leave their posing—and their answering—to his readers and reviewers.
Peter Rachleff
East Side Freedom Library
See William Green’s presentation at East Side Freedom Library last year as part of the History Revealed series co-sponsored by the Ramsey County Historical Society.