I was watching the PBS summer re-runs the other night and saw parts of a two-hour series called “Looking for Lincoln”. It got me so interested that I went onto the PBS web site today to view the show in its entirety. I’m a bit behind the curve here, as this series was first aired on Feb. 11, 2009, on the eve of Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday. So it took me a year and a half to find out about LFL and watch it. Better late than never!

The show didn’t initially influence my own opinion of Lincoln. For the past 3 years or so, I’ve made an effort to study the American Civil War, so I wasn’t surprised to hear that Lincoln was not an abolitionist and did not see African-Americans as human beings fully equal with Euro-Americans. I knew that Lincoln’s first concern in the crisis that lead up to the Civil War was to preserve the Union, and his long-running (but hardly unqualified) opposition to the institution of slavery was driven more by political pragmatism than humanistic enlightenment or religious idealism. I also knew that Lincoln wished to make the black man go away in America; Lincoln’s formula, until late in the Civil War, was to free the slaves but send them back to Africa. While President, Lincoln initiated various projects to start that process, supported by federal aid. But none of them were successful.

Looking for Lincoln is hosted by none other than Professor Henry Louis Gates. The show was finished and aired several months before Gates’ run-in with a white Cambridge police officer, when Gates responded uncooperatively while the officer was investigating a call regarding a possible break-in at Gates’ residence. The fact that the officer was white seemed to enter into Gates’ response. That incident gave me a somewhat negative impression of Professor Gates.

But since then, I’ve learned a bit more about him, and I must admit that his ratings have risen in my book. First off, his follow-up to the arrest incident was quite fair and admirable, i.e. meeting Sergeant Crowley at the White House with President Obama for a beer. He and Crowley then followed up with conciliatory statements, and Gates did some genealogy research on Crowley (with Crowley’s permission and DNA sample) to find that they actually share a common relative from Ireland (a fourth century warlord). Second, Gates has been on both sides of a variety of black-white issues. He has criticized the “Eurocentric” literary bias of academia and calls for greater appreciation of black literature and culture on its own terms. However, he also criticizes black calls for economic reparations for slavery, indicating that it was as much a black thing as a white thing (given that Europeans and Arabs bought slaves from black Africans who were in business to capture and sell other Africans to them). And he’s taken heat from other black intellectuals and leaders for this. To his credit.

Gates could have turned “Looking for Lincoln” into a Lincoln revisionist smear, and for much of the show that’s where he seems to be going. But then he gets personal, stating that perhaps he needed the old Lincoln-as-emancipator myth and felt a psychological loss to know that it was not true. In his conversations with various Lincoln historians, especially Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gates at certain points to be seeking therapeutic counseling. I give Gates much credit for his soul-searching and his refusal to entirely reject Lincoln and the historical myths behind him as agents of white supremacy (as certain black writers do, e.g. Lerone Bennett, who appears on LFL).

In the end, it appears that Gates found a Lincoln who, for a short time before his untimely death, had indeed come to accept black people as equals and full-fledged American citizens. Or came close, anyway. Just before he died in April 1865, Lincoln spoke of the need to give blacks the vote (at least those with education and military veterans) and public education. That probably incited John Wilkes Booth to shoot him a few days later. Lincoln, like the rest of America, was changed by the terrible experiences of the Civil War. He had interacted repeatedly with black leaders like William Douglas, and knew of the brave service given by black soldiers on the battlefields. The Lincoln who previously told racial jokes and engaged in slurs could not watch more than a half million people die and not learn some lessons from it.

In the end, Lincoln was almost what modern America wanted him to be. And Professor Gates would not let that slip past.

So if you haven’t seen it, I would highly recommend putting aside two hours to watch this show (you can pull it up for view on the PBS web site). And I take my hat off to “Skip Gates” for his honesty and ultimate open-mindedness to the real Abraham Lincoln. Both Gates and Lincoln leave me just a tiny bit more optimistic tonight as to the stature of the human race.