Was Abraham Lincoln a Slave Owner?

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Lincoln’s views on race and Black colonization are well known to virtually all historians who have studied Lincoln but are equally well hidden to the general public because of their impact on popularly held political narratives. To start off with consider the following quotes cited by historian Thomas DiLorenzo that are originally sourced from the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln:

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“What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races” (1)(2 p. 521)

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“I have no Purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races….I am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position” (1)(3 p. 16)

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“I’m am not, nor ever have I been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negros, nor qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people”  (1)

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In 1862 he met with a group of free Black men at the white house to try to get them to move to a colony in Liberia. He said during the course of the meeting “You and we are different races.  We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races…This physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both…and affords a reason at least why we should be separate.  It is better for us both, therefore, to separate.” (4 p. 354)(1) His attempt at promoting African real estate wasn’t particularly effective.

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Although uncomfortable for many to accept, these are indisputable facts that aren’t carefully selected to create a false impression.  Moreover, Lincoln’s views on race and colonization were highly consistent throughout his life. In his younger years he was head of the Illinois Colonization Society, he supported the Illinois Black Codes, and as president he allocated millions to Black colonization efforts (5). As documented in “Colonization after Emancipation” by Philip Magness and Sebastian Page, Lincoln worked consistently throughout his life to his dying day on this project of mass deportation.

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A newer historical question is whether Lincoln actually was a slave owner. Now it would not be unusual at all for wealthy or powerful people of this era to have had some connection to slavery even in the North, especially considering Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, came from a large slave holding family.  Yet the neo-conservative and progressive historical narratives are founded on this one man being an icon as opposed to a man of his own times.  Historian and author Kevin Johnson has dared to ask this question and search for answers using original source material and the answer appears to be yes.  He makes this case in his book, “The Lincoln’s in the White House”. (6)

 

Robert Smith Todd of Lexington Kentucky died fairly suddenly of Cholera during a world-wide epidemic on July 17, 1848. He was one of the richest men in the state and the largest slave owner and he died without a will leaving the estate to be referred to a board of commissioners for settlement. He had 13 surviving children from two marriages and four of those heirs, including Mary Todd Lincoln, lived around Springfield Illinois with the remaining nine being spread around Southern states (6). The litigation of the Todd estate would become that largest and most significant of Lincoln’s life and would take years yet mainstream history is virtually silent on it. All heirs had to agree on the disposition of each item for which any other heir had filed a petition which created hundreds of agreements that are currently known and there are probably many more that aren’t known. During this time women could not hold property on their own and, in the case of married women; the husband would control the property from the estate. As previously addressed, General Lee became a slave and plantation owner in this manner, Senator Douglas (Lincoln-Douglas debates) inherited a 2500 acre estate and a hundred slaves through his wife’s family, and so did Abraham Lincoln. This much is certain.

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What is harder to answer, however, is what happened next? It was a common practice in Illinois and through most states for slaves to be hired out from the slave owners, generally for domestic tasks (Johnson describes this practice as being as common as leasing a car is today) (6). The family possibly had servants in Springfield who may have been leased but, when they came to Washington, they had no slaves nor employed slaves as best as can be determined and they were the first residents of the White House who didn’t. Lincoln could have sold them to other heirs however there is no record of this happening. He could have emancipated some or all of them at some cost to himself which could have come out of the proceeds of the estate, and some of the heirs did this at least for specific slaves, but again there is no record of the Lincoln’s doing this. If he had done either of these things it would only add to the legend of the Great Emancipator yet this aspect of his life is missing from all accounts.

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Johnson has investigated the history of the Todd estate since 2009 seeking original documentation from government archives and found relatively little except evidence of a pattern of removal of relevant records, as he put it, “the absence of information had turned into information”. The discrepancies in the data confirmed that the Todd documents did at one time exist and that they had been correctly filed initially. The thefts indicated that batches of documents had disappeared together in the 1920’s with inquiries falling off and stopping around 1930. This led to a likely suspect who was the renown, or perhaps infamous, inter-denominational protestant clergyman and author, the Reverend William E. Barton.

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Barton was born in Illinois in 1861, graduated from Brea College in Kentucky in 1885 followed by Oberlin Theological Seminary in 1890 and dedicated that latter part of his life from 1920 to 1930 to writing several books on Abraham Lincoln that helped to cement his saint like legacy and put to rest lingering issues about his life and even his ancestors. He wrote The Soul of Abraham Lincoln (1920), The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln (1920), The Life of Abraham Lincoln (1925), The Great and Good Man (1927), The Women Lincoln Loved (1927), and, in the year of his own death, The Lincoln of the Biographers (1930) along with many articles and pamphlets on Lincoln and gave a large number of lectures and speeches. Prior to focusing on Lincoln, however, the reverend had an interesting career as a clergyman and religious author. Barton’s historical works on Lincoln generally didn’t follow a logical chronological or conceptual order, key points didn’t trace to verifiable primary sources, and often contradicted all surviving evidence.

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As a minister Barton moved readily between protestant denominations and moved frequently. Northern Protestants through his time continued to have little denominational loyalty while Protestants in the South retained strong denominational ties. The churches he led were significantly large but he never stayed long reportedly due to numerous adulterous affairs with prominent ladies in the congregations (6). Johnson quotes an account of his departure from his first pastoral assignment saying, “The entire community stood on the station platform to bid ‘good-by’ to the Bartons, who were leaving at midnight on the fast train.” During his time in the ministry he was a prolific writer producing tracts and pamphlets, creeds and covenants, hymnals, and moralistic essays.

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After moving away from ministry and becoming a Lincoln historian and apologist, he developed another career that being a collector and dealer in rare books, documents, and artifacts and these two paths would appear to be deeply connected.  Barton searched courthouses and libraries in multiple states including Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, California, and Washington and apparently found troves of documents that nobody had found previously nor were seen since and there were many highly motivated searchers in that time period.  Once he acquired something he would generally not allow others to access it. Of course, there is a real possibility that his collection contained forgeries possibly produced by Barton. In addition to Lincoln related material he also acquired collections of Walt Whitman documents and papers and artifacts from antiquity. From trading in collectables and antiquities he acquired a good deal of wealth that could not be explained by his salary as a clergyman and religious writer.  He acquired a summer estate on Sunset Lake in Foxboro, Massachusetts ( a prime real estate that’s now Barton State Park) which included a structure he built to house his collections that he referred to  as his “Wigwam”.  He even managed to buy whole collections amassed by other Lincoln collectors like John E. Burton and Osborn H. Oldroyd.  As to how he acquired this initially at least, he said in his autobiography “I determined not to be a purchaser of rare and expensive Lincoln books… I could not afford them.” There are questions about the authenticity of many of the documents including those that he referenced in his work that cannot be found and are not known to have ever been seen by anybody else. On one hand, they potentially never really existed or, alternatively, they could have been purposely destroyed or hidden to prevent others from analyzing them.   As a recognized expert in his time, however, his work, references, and collection all tended to be self-validating.

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After he died, his collection was transferred to the University of Chicago in 1932 and it took several boxcars to transfer them.  When Johnson went to access them he found that most had never even been inventoried. The same was true of the William Townsend collection given to the University of Kentucky in 1964.  Given the fairly intense interest that still surrounds this war that might seem surprising but around the 1930’s, it started to be assumed that all primary source information that could be discovered had been discovered and authors and researchers started relying nearly exclusively on second sources that became increasingly removed from the events and the time. The secondary sources were, in turn, largely unverified or unverifiable yet became the foundation of subsequent historical research and writing. This trove of primary documents had been largely or entirely ignored for nearly a hundred years.

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Within the Barton collection, Johnson found evidence verifying that Lincoln indeed did sell slaves he inherited from the Todd estate.  In another document from the Townsend collection there was a document with an inventory and appraisal for three slaves to be sold for $1,900, which would equate to about $64,000 in 2020 (6). In the records of his court cases we find that Lincoln frequently represented slave owners but never slaves and as president he pardoned several slave traders from northern states.  There is still a great deal of forgotten primary material left to research.

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Bibliography

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1. DiLorenzo, Thomas. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Cover-up Library and Museum. Lew Rockwell.com. [Online] August 9, 2014. https://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/08/thomas-dilorenzo/lincolns-racial-views/.

2. Basler, Roy P. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume II. New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 1953.

3. Basler, Roy P. Collected Works of Abraham Volume III. New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 1953.

4. Lincoln, Abraham. Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings Volume II 1859 - 1866. New York, New ?York : Library of Congress, 1989.

5. Magness, Phillip W and Page, Sebastian N. Colonization after Emancipation. Columbia Missouri : University of Missouri Press, 2011.

6. Johnson, Kevin Orlin. The Preacher who stole Lincoln's Past - by the Carload. Abbeville Institute. [Online] March 27, 2022. https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/the-preacher-who-stole-lincolns-past-by-the-carload/.