Lincoln×Jr.

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on THE TRIAL: Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., on On a decision history scrutinizes — and how they would defend it now.
2. 00:11
   Abraham Lincolnshare moment

   I once told a fellow who wanted immediate abolition that I'd gladly save the Union without freeing any slave if I could manage it. He didn't much care for that answer. Neither did posterity, I expect.
3. 00:23
   Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

   I read that letter, Mr. Lincoln. August of 1862, to Horace Greeley. You wrote your paramount object was to save the Union, not to save or destroy slavery. Those words troubled many then. They trouble many now.
4. 00:37
   Abraham Lincolnshare moment

   They troubled me, too, if I'm being honest. But I was speaking as the President, not as Abraham Lincoln the man. As a man, I always hated slavery. As President, I had an oath.
5. 00:47
   Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

   There is tension in that distinction, sir. The office and the man. I faced it myself in Birmingham, when my own people asked why I negotiated with men who turned dogs on children. But there comes a moment when the moral demand and the political possibility must meet.
6. 01:04
   Abraham Lincolnshare moment

   The meeting was the Proclamation. January first, sixty-three. But I couldn't issue it until I had some military success to stand on, or it would have looked like a desperate shriek from a drowning administration.
7. 01:15
   Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

   Antietam.
8. 01:16
   Abraham Lincolnshare moment

   Antietam. A drawn battle at best, twenty-three thousand casualties, but Lee withdrew. That was enough. Five days later I issued the preliminary proclamation.
9. 01:26
   Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

   But even then, Mr. Lincoln, you exempted the border states. You exempted parts of Louisiana, parts of Virginia. The Proclamation freed only the slaves in areas still in rebellion. That is to say, areas where you had no power to enforce it.
10. 01:41
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I freed them where I had the constitutional authority to do so, under war powers. I was Commander in Chief confronting an insurrection. I could seize enemy property — and the Confederacy had made human beings into property. Where I had no such authority, in loyal states, I could not act by executive decree without shredding the Constitution I'd sworn to preserve.
11. 02:03
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    So you used the master's tools. You justified emancipation not as a moral imperative but as a military necessity. You treated liberation as a tactic.
12. 02:12
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I treated liberation as achievable. Frederick Douglass understood this. He criticized me, too, called me slow and hesitating, but he also said I was the first American President who was in any sense made by colored people. He knew I was moving as fast as the country would let me without breaking apart entirely.
13. 02:30
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    And yet Mr. Douglass also said that you were preeminently the white man's president. Entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. That you were ready to sacrifice the rights of colored people when necessary. Those are his words.
14. 02:43
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    He said that in his first draft, yes. But he also said I was the first to show respect to a colored man in the White House. He came to see me three times during the war. We talked plainly. He pushed me. I listened.
15. 02:55
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Listening is not the same as acting, sir. In 1862, you invited free Black leaders to the White House and urged them to support colonization. To leave the country. You told them that suffering existed on both sides because of race, and perhaps it was better for us to be separated.
16. 03:11
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    That was a mistake. One of several I made. I thought colonization might ease white fears, might make emancipation more palatable. I was wrong. The colored ministers who met with me that day told me so, politely but firmly. And I abandoned the idea.
17. 03:27
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    But you entertained it at all. That is what history struggles with. You spoke of equality in one breath and colonization in the next. You said you had no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and Black races. You said there was a physical difference that would forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.
18. 03:50
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I said that in the debates with Douglas, in fifty-eight. I said it to get elected in a state where most white people would not vote for a man who advocated full equality. I was wrong to say it. But I also said slavery was a monstrous injustice. That a house divided against itself cannot stand. I said those things too.
19. 04:07
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    So you compromised your stated convictions to win power, believing you could do more good inside the office than outside it. I understand that arithmetic, Mr. Lincoln. I have been accused of the same calculation.
20. 04:19
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    You were called too moderate. Too willing to negotiate. I recall that.
21. 04:23
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Too patient. Too cautious. Malcolm made no secret of his view that my methods were insufficient. That I asked the oppressed to wait while their oppressors deliberated. But I believed in the discipline of nonviolence because I believed it could transform the soul of the nation. Not just laws, but hearts.
22. 04:42
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I used coercion. War. Six hundred thousand dead. You used moral suasion.
23. 04:47
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    I used both. We marched, and we filled the jails, and we made the country see what it was doing to its own people. Selma was not persuasion alone. It was confrontation. We forced the crisis. But yes, I believed the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
24. 05:05
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I believed that too, in my way. But I also believed the arc needed some pulling. You don't get to justice by wishing. You get there by strategy and, when necessary, by compulsion.
25. 05:15
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Then let me ask you directly, Mr. Lincoln. If you could have preserved the Union and left slavery intact, would you have done it?
26. 05:22
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    That's the question I answered in the Greeley letter. And the answer is I would have done whatever preserved the Union, because without the Union there was no possibility of ending slavery anywhere. A fragmented continent with a permanent slave empire in the South? That would have been catastrophe for millions more people than even the war cost.
27. 05:42
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    But that makes the freedom of four million souls contingent. Instrumental. It makes their liberation a byproduct of a different goal.
28. 05:49
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    It makes their liberation possible. Dr. King, you know as well as I do that politics is the art of the possible. I could not have been elected on an abolitionist platform. I could not have kept the border states with immediate emancipation. I could not have maintained the army if half the soldiers thought they were dying to free people they despised. So I moved when I could, as far as I could. And in the end, I moved far.
29. 06:16
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    You did. The Thirteenth Amendment. You pushed it through Congress in the final months of the war. You used every tool at your disposal, including patronage and pressure. I admire that.
30. 06:27
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I had to. The Proclamation was a war measure. It could have been overturned by courts or a future Congress. Only a constitutional amendment could end slavery permanently. So yes, I twisted arms. I made promises. I did what was necessary.
31. 06:42
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    And yet even that amendment did not guarantee equality. It ended chattel slavery, but it permitted involuntary servitude as punishment for crime. That loophole became a trapdoor. We saw it in the convict leasing system, in chain gangs. We see it still in mass incarceration.
32. 07:00
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I did not live to see Reconstruction betrayed. I did not live to see Jim Crow. I wish I had. I might have fought differently had I known what would follow.
33. 07:09
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Or perhaps you would have faced the same obstacles. The same need to move incrementally. The same accusation that you were not going fast enough or far enough. History does not repeat, Mr. Lincoln, but it does instruct.
34. 07:23
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    What would you have me answer for, then? For moving too slowly? For speaking the language of my time? For prioritizing Union over abolition?
35. 07:30
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    I would have you answer for whether the compromises you made were necessary, or whether they simply reflected the limits of your own imagination. Whether you led the country toward justice or merely followed where the country was willing to go.
36. 07:43
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Both, I think. I followed when I had to. I led when I could. I was not a perfect man, and I did not lead a perfect nation to a perfect outcome. But I did lead a nation that was tearing itself apart toward a new birth of freedom. That phrase is in the Gettysburg Address, you know. New birth of freedom. Not restoration. Birth.
37. 08:02
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    I know it well. I stood on those same grounds a century later and said we had come to cash a check, a promissory note that had been returned marked insufficient funds. That check was written, in part, by you. But the account was not yet full.
38. 08:17
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    No. It was not. And it still isn't, I expect.
39. 08:19
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Then perhaps the question is not whether you did enough, Mr. Lincoln, but whether any of us ever do. Whether the work of justice is ever complete, or whether each generation must take it up anew.
40. 08:30
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I think the latter. I think every generation has to decide what it will tolerate and what it will not. What it will compromise on and what it will hold sacred. I made my choices. I stand by them. But I do not pretend they were easy, or that they satisfied everyone, or that they should be the end of the conversation.
41. 08:48
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Only the beginning.
42. 08:49
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Only the beginning. And if I am to be judged, let it be by what I made possible, not by what I left undone. Though I suppose history will judge both.
43. 08:58
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    It already has, sir. And it is still deciding.