Coinciding with the October 17 opening of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center’s new exhibit, “Lincoln: The Constitution and the Civil War,” we interviewed historian Eric Foner about the 16th President’s legacy and meaning to contemporary audiences.  Foner, a widely published and respected professor of history at Columbia University, will be at the Freedom Center on October 16 to discuss Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction, his masterful account of the triumph and tragedy of post-Civil War America’s period of Reconstruction.

Foner, whose classroom lectures at Columbia are highly popular, spoke at length on several topics.

Lincoln — the Myth and the Reality

Foner takes the long view of President Abraham Lincoln, and he urges others to do the same. “It is always a mistake when considering Lincoln to take one moment, one speech or one letter and say ‘here’s the essential Lincoln,” Foner explained. “He grew and changed throughout his life and career and that’s the essence of his greatness.  That’s the Lincoln I see.  He grew into the role that history thrust upon him.”

The myths that have built up around Lincoln over many generations, Foner believes, obscure the fact that he was a character of many dimensions:  a politician, a self-taught lawyer, a bedrock Midwesterner with provincial views about race and equality, but also a figure of towering historical importance, whose clear-eyed focus on preserving the Union saved the fledgling United States experiment with representative democracy while also leading the way to the abolition of slavery.

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The nomination of Barack Obama as the Democratic Party’s candidate for President is without doubt a watershed event in American history. But its meaning varies according to one’s viewpoint, life experience and – most especially – where you happen to think America has been and where it is going in terms of its long struggle with race.

This is a pertinent issue for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. Our mission seeks to find relevance and application in the modern-day world of the lessons to be learned in the struggle for freedom and the abolition of slavery in pre-Civil War America. Of the many narratives linking that history to the present, one of the most important (and in some ways most controversial) is the lasting impact of slavery in contemporary society. And an essential and so far unanswered component of that discussion is the question of whether we are, as a nation, ever going to be willing to have a serious national conversation on race.

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