56. Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream - Lerone Bennett, Jr.

With such a fascinating and "charged" title, this must be a great book ... right? Not entirely ...
Bennett makes the argument that Lincoln is not "the great emancipator" as many have made him out to be. Rather, "history - the movement and orchestration of the dominant forces of the age - freed the slaves." Many of the premises of this book, I'd heard before: the Emancipation Proclamation didn't really free the slaves because the act "did not itself free a single negro," and it "carefully, deliberately, studiously excluded all Negroes within 'our military reach'" ... and of course, the Confederate States were not within the Union's "military reach" during the Civil War.
Although the book is very well-researched, and Bennett cites a lot of seemingly reputable sources, his own commentary gets a bit distracting. For example, he continuously argues that Lincoln was a racist, in part because of his use of the word "n----r." Although that is of course a horrible and hateful word, I think it's important to note the context. It's a lot worse now than it was back in the mid-1800's. If, according to the United States Constitution, a black person was only considered 3/5 of a person ... are they really going to have ground to argue against the use of the n-word? (who knew that the three-fifths compromise was still in the Constitution, even though it's been superseded - Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3. What a reminder.) Anyway, if Bennett made that point once, or even twice over the course of the 600-page book, that'd be fine - but he seemed to bring it up at least five times in each chapter.
Additionally, Bennett makes a compelling argument that Lincoln wanted blacks to return to Africa rather than staying in America. This would be a fine point to make in support of his argument ... though I do think that a president saying that in the 21st or even the 20th century would be a lot different than a president saying that in the 19th century. But then Bennett distracts from his point with phrases like this: "If Lincoln had had his way, there would be no Blacks in America. None. Harlem would be a white way, the South Sides would be pale sides and there would be a deafening silence and holes the size of the Grand Canyon where Bojangles and Louis and Duke and Martin Luther King and Michael Jordan and Toni Morrison would be."
An interesting premise behind this book, but 1) the author's rants were distracting, and 2) it was waaaay too long! If you're going to read it, check out the table of contents and just pick the chapters that you think will interest you the most :)