“I’ve had a great time with Lincoln,” Harold Holzer says. “I’ve managed to write all these books.” He has written, co-written or edited more than 50, most concerning Abraham Lincoln, the 16th US president who steered the union through the civil war, ended slavery in 1863 and was killed two years later. Holzer is a familiar face on television and has curated exhibitions and works for the stage. In 2008, George W Bush gave him the National Humanities Medal.
And yet Holzer is not a full-time historian. Once a Democratic operative, he was also a newspaper reporter and editor and an executive in public TV and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before he became director of Roosevelt House, a public policy institute at Hunter College in New York.
Now 75, he says he might soon find himself “doing Lincoln full-time”. Either way, his new book, Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration, seems sure to be followed by more.
For Holzer, the Lincoln bug bit “in grade school in the suburbs of New York City”, when he was “lucky enough to literally pull his name from a [presumably stovepipe] hat a fifth-grade teacher brought in filled with folded-up names of what I remember to be mostly dead, white males … Our assignment was to go to the library, pick out a book and write what was called a composition. So that was my first Lincoln writing.
“It was also the time of the civil war centennial. Added to that was a kind of conscience awakening, because President Kennedy intervened when the Civil War Centennial Commission was to meet in Charleston and the one Black member of the commission was told she would stay at a different hotel. And I didn’t know anything about [segregation in southern states]. I was 11. I loved Kennedy, I must say, but this was such a lesson, it was a reminder the civil war was about more than battles.”
As the former New York Times editor Howell Raines recently discussed in a book on how the defeated south rewrote history, the civil war has always been contested ground. But Holzer’s contribution has been larger than most, gems including Lincoln at Cooper Union, on the 1860 speech on slavery that made the presidency possible, and Lincoln and the Power of the Press.
His new book takes its title from the Gettysburg Address of 1863 but appears in a rather less admirable moment in US political history: the immediate wake of Donald Trump’s demand that Senate Republicans abandon their own immigration bill, so that he might campaign on fixing the so-called border crisis.
Holzer says: “I was supposed to do this book four years ago, but I did The Presidents vs the Press, which I thought might be timely because Trump was spending most of his time trashing the press.” He hopes his study of Lincoln and immigration will be timely too, reminding readers “of what a degree of openness there was during and before the civil war when it came to immigration. There were no walls. There were no borders. There was lots of resentment, but the federal government didn’t even have authority over immigration, because it isn’t in the constitution. Naturalisation, yes. Immigration, no.”
Lincoln was the first president from a Republican party founded on opposition to slavery and fueled by votes from a large group of immigrants: Germans arriving after the failed European revolutions of 1848, their liberal leanings alarming the Democratic party, then the bastion of slavery. Resentments swirled.
“Protestants were uncomfortable with Catholics, and particularly the Irish and German Catholics,” Holzer says. “The pope was [supposedly] going to be first in the loyalties of these so-called new Americans, and there was also the whole idea of undercutting labour costs which the Irish, once they were established, began to feel the free Black population was going to do in turn to them. There was always resentment about people arriving.”
Holzer surveys how Lincoln navigated the politics of immigration in Illinois, around his term in the US House in 1847-48, in his attempts to reach the Senate in the 1850s and in his time in the White House. It all echoes today.
“Lots of editorials that I cite are warnings about people being on the public dole and bringing low morals and violence into the United States. And the religious difference which I suppose was like the racial divide today …
“Lincoln was ambivalent about immigrants who voted for the Democrats, and he was enthusiastic about immigrants who voted for Republicans. It tended to be an Irish-German divide. But when push came to shove he said the right things, he did the right things, and then … [as president he] proposed legislation in 1863 that was revolutionary on immigration.
“He understood the working pool was empty, that so many men had been killed or wounded or taken sick that he needed not only replenishment of the troops but he needed people, as he said directly, to work in factories and mines.
“This was something even [the leftwing Vermont senator] Bernie Sanders wouldn’t think of today: paying for immigrants to come, paying for the voyages. It was a bridge too far for Congress, but then Lincoln set up the first federal immigration bureau to speed the passages, to fund what [the current Ohio Democratic senator] Sherrod Brown would call the dignity of work. And nobody knows this stuff, because understandably the focus is on slavery. Although Nikki Haley didn’t read that memo, clearly … ”
In December, in New Hampshire, the former South Carolina governor was asked what caused the civil war. Seeking to lead a Trumpist Republican party that Lincoln would not recognise, she failed to mention slavery.
Holzer is writing in a time of renewed focus on the injustices of US history, but his Lincoln has always been a man of his time. Characteristics and actions which do not sit well in modern eyes are not explained away or hidden.
Brought Forth on this Continent shows Lincoln’s view of immigration was a white man’s view. Language betrayed it, such as calling Mexicans “greasers”. Nor did he have much to offer Native Americans as lands were ripped away.
Holzer is “aware there are ironies and hypocrisies that abound. And I try every once in a while to remind myself and readers that for example, the welcoming spirit of progressive people in the Lincoln era … is happening at the same time Indigenous people are being removed and contained. Lincoln is all for containment. [He says so] in the same message [to Congress] in which he says immigrants are the ‘replenishing streams’ sent ‘by Providence’ … talking about how badly the Indians have behaved and how [his administration has been] successful in opening more reservations.
“And the Homestead Act – which is one of his great domestic achievements, although it’s mostly congressional, but Lincoln enforced it very enthusiastically – gave away free [Native] land not just to Americans and to foreign-born Americans, but to new immigrants.”
Elsewhere: “Americans who opposed immigration were perfectly fine, many of them, with the forced emigration of Africans. So all of this story, I think, has to be told within those at the very least ironic parts of history. And I tried to do that. But at the same time, Lincoln’s liberality in welcoming the foreign-born, I think hasn’t been acknowledged because there were other stories being told.”
In an election year, as stories are told on the campaign trail, Holzer will be on the road too. “My first talk of my little tour will be at the Union League Club of New York, which is a pretty big Republican organisation still,” he says, with a laugh.
Considering how Trump stokes and uses anti-immigrant feeling, recently claiming immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, Holzer looks back (using “high paraphrase”) to a speech Lincoln gave in Chicago in July 1858.
“He sees a German he knows well in the crowd … he says: ‘This is the day that we celebrate the founders and those who are descended from the founders. But even though all of you are not the blood of the blood of that generation, the Declaration [of Independence] says that you are like the blood of the blood of the founders. And that’s the electric cord that runs through the Declaration of Independence.’
“I love the phrase ‘electric cord’. How can you read that and not think Lincoln says naturalised Americans and refugees are the blood of our blood because they want liberty and they want to be here, as opposed to poisoning the blood of America?
“You can’t read that without seeing how these very American promises have been perverted and misunderstood. I don’t say ‘poisoning the blood’ in the book … I will say I don’t want to be political. But you cannot help but notice it.”
