“[W]e here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
As we commemorate another anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, it is impossible not to hear in one’s mind these ringing words, offered a few months after the July 1863 battle. Unsurprisingly, historians have devoted a great deal of ink to President Lincoln’s place in history with respect to the Emancipation Proclamation and to the Civil War. What has passed less noticed is that immigration, not just slavery, was extraordinarily divisive in the decades leading up to the Civil War, and that President Lincoln’s own evolving vision on the subject proved percipient.
On behalf of the Federal Bar Council Quarterly, I recently interviewed preeminent Lincoln historian Harold Holzer to find out, through the lens of history, how he perceived President Lincoln’s handling of this contentious issue. Holzer speaks with authority, having been justly garlanded with laurels, from the prestigious Gilder-Lehrman Lincoln Prize to the chair of the Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, from authoring an essay on President Lincoln for the official program at the 2013 inauguration of President Barack Obama, to being awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush, to being appointed by President William J. Clinton to co-chair the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. Earlier this year, Holzer published “Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration,” a new addition to the dozens of other landmark books on President Lincoln and the Civil War, and hundreds of articles, he has authored.
Holzer shared his personal history, “as a grandson of four immigrants,” and that the only grandparent that he was privileged to know was a grandmother. Upon her arrival on these shores, she had worked long hours in a garment factory. She read “only Hebrew and Yiddish,” but “loved America so much” and her “desire to be an American was so strong,” Holzer recounted, that, notwithstanding her minimal English-literacy skills and inability to read the subway signage, “she used to come to see me by memorizing the subway stops, and counted subway stops on her hand.” Though she passed in 1965, “I can still taste her blintzes in my head; cheese blintzes, and, yes, potato,” Holzer reminisced. His grandmother’s industry, determination, and love for her new country found echoes in Lincoln’s journey.
Holzer set the scene: in the three decades leading up to the Civil War, ten million foreign-born nationals had settled in the new-born nation, triggering movements seeking to restrict entry, and to foment against those already present, creating what Holzer called “ethnic politics that were incendiary.” Riots were rampant in the 1840s and 1850s, from church-burning in Irish areas of Philadelphia to the New York City draft riots where Irish arrivals lynched Black New Yorkers. Anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic sentiment abounded. Holzer described eerie reverberations in the twentieth century too, not least, for example, when the St. Louis, seeking to make port in 1939 with its cargo of Jewish refugees, was turned back to Europe.
Holzer recounted that despite “all the years I had studied Lincoln,” there were a few things he recently learned that had surprised him. One that he found distressing was that President Lincoln initially “had flirted with” anti-Catholic nativists, rather than denouncing them, in order “to swell the anti-slavery ranks.” The most surprising thing that he learned on the positive side, Holzer said, was that President Lincoln eventually favored immigration so greatly that he proposed to encourage it by having the federal government pay trans-Atlantic passage costs; Congress balked. Even so, on July 4, 1864, President Lincoln signed into law “an Act to Encourage Immigration,” which Holzer asserted was the first federal legislation to do just that.
I was intrigued that Holzer traced some of this evolution to President Lincoln’s experiences in New York. In 1860, when President Lincoln had arrived in New York to deliver his Cooper Union address, he visited a largely-Irish orphanage and workhouse, the Five Points House of Industry, in New York City’s “most notorious slum.” After “relat[ing] his own childhood deprivations,” he urged the orphans to the wide reading and diligence he had himself practiced. In 1863, he received what Holzer described as an inspiring letter from those same immigrant boys. The letter reminded Lincoln of his words – that “the way was open to every boy present, if honest, industrious, and persevering, to the attainment of a high and honorable position” – adding that since he himself had gone on to win “the highest honors in the gift of a free people,” his own life-story proved that he had spoken true.
Holzer described a second memorable episode, that occurred a week after the attack on Fort Sumter, when 100,000 people rallied in Union Square Park in New York City to pledge support “to the traduced Sumter flag.” Along with “the Roosevelts and the Rennselaers,” Holzer shared, came “the Germans and the Irish,” pledging loyalty “in tones of thunder,” crying “we are now American citizens” and “second to none in patriotism.” Immigrants swelled the ranks of the Union army; as Holzer put it, the Civil War “could not have been fought without the immigrant soldiers who . . . by the tens of thousands died, that a nation might live.” Holzer described how Lincoln came to realize the extraordinary love for America infusing these new fellow citizens, and even if they sometimes failed to support his party, he fought for their rights.
His remarkable vision encompassing immigrants in the promise of liberty was evident, points out Holzer, as early as Lincoln’s 1858 campaign in Illinois. Speaking to new and first-generation German immigrants in his audience, he acknowledged that, if they sought to “trace their connection [to the Founding] by blood, they find they have none,” but if they were to look to the Declaration of Independence, they would find “that all men are created equal,” which key moral value “evidences their relation to those men” as though “they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration.” President Lincoln added that there is an “electric cord . . . that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together…as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men.” That cord is the American idea, and an embrace of the U.S. Constitution and laws.
Holzer’s immigrant grandmother, like my own immigrant grandparents, had much in common with President Lincoln’s immigrant audience a hundred years previously. Blood of the same blood, born to shore like flotsam on the same succoring tide, pledged to the same flag, the same promise, the same ideals. They would have well understood each other, I think.