On a “what if” radio program sixty years ago, I heard the newly inaugurated President Lincoln persuade Robert E. Lee that his loyalty to the United States Army should outweigh his allegiance to the state of Virginia. In short order, Lee quells the rebellion; in 1868 he is elected to succeed Lincoln, and they all live happily ever after. But what about the slaves, I wondered? 

Profiles in Courage, for which Sen. John Kennedy received the 1957 Pulitzer Prize, revisited the aftermath of the Civil War. On his telling, Andrew Johnson, tactless as he was, intended to execute Lincoln’s policy of reconciliation. He was frustrated by the radicals, whom Kennedy describes as “frenzied” and “fanatical,” and who engineered his impeachment. Edward Ross, the senator whose vote kept Johnson in office, is one of Kennedy’s heroes. He upheld constitutional justice despite his opposition to the administration’s policies. Kennedy waves away allegations that Ross’s vote was bought, allegations taken seriously by historians. He mentions only in passing that emancipation of the slaves was one legacy of the war. This fits a pattern in Profiles in Courage. John Quincy Adams gains Kennedy’s praise for abandoning the Federalist party in his youth. His decades-long opposition to slavery is relegated to an afterthought. Regional reconciliation, not black freedom, is the central issue in Kennedy’s account of nineteenth-century American heroes.

My other childhood reading reinforced the message. The moral landscape of the Civil War was dominated by the great compromise at Appomattox: Grant magnanimous in victory, Lee dignified in defeat. Above that tableau, the soaring words of the martyred president ring out: “to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace.”

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