Lincoln and the war that never ended

Yesterday flags stood at half mast to mark the 150th anniversary of the death of Abraham Lincoln. It was, to borrow the man’s own phrase, altogether fitting and proper that we should do this in recognition of our greatest president and his tragic end.

I’m one of those Lincoln admirers who takes his death as hard as if it had happened in my lifetime. The years have only made him a grander figure, a Shakespearean protagonist gone too soon. It does not help that he was replaced by the execrable Andrew Johnson. We are accustomed to thinking of Lincoln’s assassination as the sorrowful abbreviation of his own story—of his own attempt to bring to fruition his great speeches promising a new birth of freedom and charity for all.

But this year, with renewed civil-rights activism emerging around the issue of police killings of African Americans, I found myself thinking more and more about Lincoln’s assassin. John Wilkes Booth was, unsurprisingly, a violent white supremacist and a partisan of the Southern cause. Yet his killing of the president has rarely been labeled as what it was: an act of political terror. It was a signal moment in the war that followed the war—the hideous and ignoble battle to halt and, where possible, reverse the actual and potential gains to racial equality promised in the Civil War itself.