A Different Angle on Lincoln

In making "Looking for Lincoln," Henry Louis Gates Jr. learned that the legacy of the 16th president is more complicated than the legend he always believed.

Lincoln has been cast in conflicting roles, such as emancipator and white supremacist, war criminal and savior of the Union, said Gates, who hosts the new two-hour PBS special Wednesday, the day before Lincoln's 200th birthday. "Rather than try to find one Lincoln that was authentic, I wanted to find all the Lincolns," he said.

Gates, a Harvard history professor and co-founder of TheRoot.com, owned by The Washington Post Co., also wrote and executive produced "Looking for Lincoln." He said the special took about a year to complete and included trips to Lincoln-related sites around the country as well as interviews with fellow historians and others, including former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Gates struggled to reconcile some of the less flattering aspects of the president's biography with what he calls the "cult of Abraham Lincoln" that exists in America. Lincoln used racist language, talked about differences between the races and for a time favored exporting blacks to places such as Liberia. Those discoveries angered Gates.

But in the documentary, Doris Kearns Goodwin, the historian who wrote the acclaimed book "Team of Rivals" about Lincoln's administration, tells Gates that Lincoln never would have wanted to be memorialized as a saint.

"I just realize that everybody needed Lincoln to serve a function, so they shaved off two of his dimensions and they made him one-dimensional," he said.

Gates hopes viewers gain a similar understanding of the nuances of Lincoln's character. "It turns out that I admire him even more . . . now that I have uncovered all his warts."

"Looking for Lincoln" airs Wednesday at 9 p.m. on PBS.

Marking His 200th

Among other new Lincoln programs airing this week and next:

"The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln" (Monday, 9 p.m., PBS), an episode of "American Experience," explains how actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth came to kill the president on April 14, 1865, at Ford's Theatre in the District. The episode also documents the search for the assassin.

"Stealing Lincoln's Body" (Feb. 16, 9 p.m., History) examines the drama surrounding his remains, from a weeks-long funeral procession to the day in 1901 when he was buried in his final resting place. Key to the story was a plot by several Chicago counterfeiters who planned to ransom the body in exchange for the release of one of their own.