A journey toward Truth

I started writing this post because, on second thought, I regretted not having any kind words about Abraham Lincoln in my recent post remarking on the shared 200th birthday of Mr. Lincoln and Charles Darwin.

Lincoln is not a particular hero of mine. This has been true at least since I took Mrs. Gentile's history class back at Northeast High School in Philadelphia. She had us read Richard Hofstadter's American Political Tradition, which, among other things, demonstrated that Lincoln shared many of the racist views of his time. Later reading told me that many abolitionists and woman's rights advocates were deeply suspicious of him. Furthermore, I don't like the "great man" theory of history that always finds some dead white man to credit for important events and social changes.

Despite all that, Lincoln was a complicated and interesting person who did play a central role in ending slavery in the United States, and who paid with his life for this. A public radio program last Sunday noted that Frederick Douglass said that Lincoln was one of the few white men who treated him as a man, rather than a black man--even though Frederick Douglass knew many abolitionists. I had also read that Sojourner Truth thought highly of him.

So I started poking around for something else to say about Mr. Lincoln. One thing I found was a fascinating speech given by Douglass in 1876:

I have said that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race. Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation actual speechof his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.

Another thing I found was this collection of speeches and commentaries by Sojourner Truth at the Sojourner Truth.org home page. It does indeed carry an account of a meeting she had with Lincoln in October 1864.

But it also includes an account of the actual speech Truth gave to a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851.This account, by abolition journalist Marcus Robinson, is quite brief, and I'll include most of it below:

I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman's rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now. As for intellect, all I can say is, if a woman have a pint, and a man a quart -- why can't she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much, -- for we can't take more than our pint'll hold. The poor men seems to be all in confusion, and don't know what to do. Why children, if you have woman's rights, give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won't be so much trouble. I can't read, but I can hear. I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well, if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again. The Lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and the woman who bore him. Man, where was your part? But the women are coming up blessed be God and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.

If this sounds familiar, it should. A much more colorful version of this oration was published by white feminist and abolitionist Frances Dana Gage in 1863, 12 years after it happened. This famous Ain't I A Woman? speech was probably heavily fictionalized by Gage, according to historian Nell Irvin Painter. If nothing else, Painter points out, Truth--who was born and enslaved in New York State before that state abolished slavery--would not have spoken in the southern dialect that Gage put into her mouth.

Painter's Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol is available through the Oklahoma County Metropolitan Library System, or you can see a Google Books preview. It's not an easy book to read. Truth's early life was extremely difficult, and included sexual abuse by both white men and white women. From this difficult background, the slave Isabella reinvented herself as Sojourner Truth, a powerful public speaker and activist, although unable to read or write. Painter analyzes the difficulty of truly knowing anything about a woman who never was able to write her own story, but who was portrayed only by others, mostly white women activists.

I think that Painter says that ultimately, we can't know the truth about Truth, but it seems to me that it is more interesting and ultimately more inspiring to explore the nooks and crannies of complicated reality than to rely on the oversimplified myths that have been handed down to us about historical figures.