The News & Observer, Raleigh NC, Jan. 15, 2005 - Letter to the Editor
To compare, as a Dec. 21 People's Forum letter-writer did, the racial views of Abraham Lincoln in 1858 with those of Cornelia Phillips Spencer in the Reconstruction era (1865-75) is to compare historical apples and oranges.
Between 1858 and Reconstruction, a great Civil War had been fought, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers had been killed, Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation and included black soldiers in the Union Army, and the Constitution had been amended three times with regard to former slaves. By the time of his death, the Lincoln of 1858 was no more.
And Lincoln wasn't the only white American whose racial views had changed. Samuel Phillips, Cornelia's brother, as federal attorney in Raleigh prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan so vigorously that President Grant appointed him solicitor general. And he wasn't alone. An entire political party (the Republicans!) acted as if they believed in racial equality.
Mrs. Spencer was not in good company. And today, Chancellor James Moeser is to be commended for his recent decision regarding the Bell Award.
Joe Herzenberg
Chapel Hill
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