The
Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S.
Constitution abolished slavery and barred states from abridging the
equal civil and political rights of American citizens, including former
slaves. Abraham Lincoln’s native state of Kentucky was the only state
that refused to ratify all three amendments. The region of southern
Indiana, where Lincoln had lived from the age of seven to twenty-one
(1816–30), was among the most proslavery and anti-black areas in the
free states during those years. Its representative in Congress also
voted against the Thirteenth Amendment. So did the congressman from
central Illinois, where Lincoln had lived for three decades. Lincoln
himself had represented this district in the state legislature for eight
years and in the U.S. Congress for one term in the 1830s and 1840s. And
in 1842 he married a woman from a prominent Kentucky slaveholding
family.
One
might therefore expect that the cultural influences surrounding Lincoln
during the first half century of his life would shape his convictions
about slavery and race in the same mold that characterized most
politicians of his time and place. Instead, he was one of only two
representatives in the Illinois legislature who presented a public
“protest” against a resolution passed in 1837 by their colleagues that
condemned abolitionist doctrines of freedom and civil equality and
affirmed the right of property in slaves as “sacred to the slave-holding
states.”
Lincoln’s protest acknowledged that the Constitution did
indeed sanction slavery in those states but declared that nevertheless
“the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad
policy.”
In 1854 Lincoln made an even stronger protest, this time
in the form of eloquent speeches against the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s longtime political rival,
had rammed this law through a divided Congress. It repealed the earlier
ban on the expansion of slavery into territories carved out of the
Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36° 30′. Douglas’s actions opened
these territories to slavery and sparked the formation of the new
“anti-Nebraska” Republican Party, which would nominate Lincoln for
president six years later. Douglas had said that if the white people who
moved to Kansas wanted slavery there, they should be allowed to have
it. “This
indifference, but as I must think, covert
real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate,” said Lincoln
in 1854, “because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself” and also
“because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in
the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility,
to taunt us as hypocrites.”
When
he ran for the Senate in the famous contest against Douglas in 1858,
Lincoln declared: “I have always hated slavery I think as much as any
Abolitionist.” Six years later he said, with feeling: “If slavery is not
wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think,
and feel.” As Eric Foner makes clear in “The Fiery Trial: Abraham
Lincoln and American Slavery,” however, Lincoln was antislavery but not
an abolitionist. That is, he considered slavery a violation of the
natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness enunciated
in America’s founding charter (written by an antislavery slaveowner).
Like
Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln expected slavery eventually to die out in
America. Preventing its spread into the territories was the first step,
said Lincoln in 1858, toward putting it “in course of ultimate
extinction.” But unlike the abolitionists, Lincoln and most Republicans
in the 1850s did not call for the immediate abolition of slavery and the
granting of equal citizenship to freed slaves.
Having grown up in
Kentucky and the border regions of Indiana and Illinois, Lincoln also
felt a degree of empathy with the South that was not shared by
abolitionists of Yankee heritage. Although he hated slavery, he did not
hate slaveowners. “I think I have no prejudice against the Southern
people,” he said at Peoria, Illinois, in 1854. “When Southern people
tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery, than we;
I acknowledge the fact.” Lincoln also said he could “understand and
appreciate” how “very difficult” it would be “to get rid of” slavery “in
any satisfactory way. . . . If all earthly power were given me, I
should not know what to do” about the institution where it then existed.
“My
first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to
Liberia. But a moment’s reflection would convince me” that even if such a
project was feasible in the long run, “its sudden execution” was
impossible. “What then? Free them all, and keep them among us as
underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition?”
What
about the abolitionist proposal to “free them and make them politically
and socially our equals?” Lincoln confessed that “my own feelings will
not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the
great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with
justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question. . . . A universal
feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded.”
The abolitionist program of immediate freedom was therefore unrealistic.
“It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be
adopted; but for their tardiness in this, I will not undertake to judge
our brethren of the south.” Lincoln could not “blame them for not doing
what I should not know how to do myself.”
Proslavery Southern
whites did not reciprocate Lincoln’s expressions of empathy. To many of
them, especially the radical disunionists known as fire-eaters, the
divergence between “antislavery” and “abolitionist” was a distinction
without a difference. In their view, anyone who considered slavery a
monstrous injustice and spoke of placing it in the course of ultimate
extinction was as dangerous as those who demanded its immediate
extinction. When the “Black Republican” Lincoln was elected president in
1860, they led their states out of the Union to prevent the feared
extinction of their “peculiar institution.” This preemptive action put
in train a course of events that by 1864 brought about precisely what
they feared.
By that time the nation was facing, as imminent
realities, the same alternatives Lincoln had outlined as abstract
possibilities in his famous Peoria speech ten years earlier: 1) free all
the slaves and send them to Liberia (or elsewhere); 2) free them and
keep them as “underlings” in the United States; or 3) free them and make
them the political and social equals of white people (civil equality,
in modern terms). In 1864 Lincoln had a much more definite idea of “what
to do” and a great deal more “earthly power” to do it than in 1854. His
“brethren of the south” were now “rebels” whose war against the United
States had given him that power as commander in chief of an army of a
million men, one hundred thousand of them the former slaves of those
rebels.
Lincoln had tried a version of the first alternative (free
slaves and send them abroad), but few wanted to go, and now that they
were fighting so “gallantly in our ranks” their commander in chief no
longer wanted them to go. By 1864 Lincoln therefore rejected that
alternative and was looking beyond the second one of freeing them only
to “keep them among us as underlings.” In 1862 the president had
proposed gradual emancipation during which most black people would
indeed have remained as underlings for an indefinite period. But he was
now moving toward a belief in immediate abolition and equal rights for
all citizens. According to Foner, Lincoln “began during the last two
years of the war to imagine an interracial future for the United
States.”
When he was sworn in for his second term on March 4,
1865, writes Foner, “for the first time in American history companies of
black soldiers marched in the inaugural parade. According to one
estimate, half the audience that heard Lincoln’s address was black, as
were many of the visitors who paid their respects at the White House
reception that day.” For “Lincoln opened the White House to black guests
as no president had before.”
The central theme of “The Fiery
Trial” is Lincoln’s “capacity for growth” in his “views and policies
regarding slavery and race.” Foner does not doubt the sincerity of his
statement in 1858 that he had “always hated slavery.” By the time of
Lincoln’s death, however, “he occupied a very different position with
regard to slavery and the place of blacks in American society than
earlier in his life.” In 1837 Lincoln described slavery as an injustice;
by 1854 it was a monstrous injustice; in 1862 he told a delegation of
five black men he had invited to the White House that “your race are
suffering in my judgment the greatest wrong inflicted on any people.”
This was good abolitionist rhetoric. But Lincoln’s purpose at this
meeting in 1862 was to publicize his program for government assistance
to blacks who volunteered to emigrate.
Like his political heroes
Thomas Jefferson and Henry Clay, Lincoln could not yet in 1862 imagine a
future of interracial equity in the United States. “Even when you cease
to be slaves,” he told the five delegates, “you are yet far removed
from being placed on an equality with the white race.” Moreover, “there
is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for
you free colored people to remain with us. . . . I do not propose to
discuss this, but to present it as a fact with which we have to deal. I
cannot alter it if I would. . . . It is better for us both, therefore,
to be separated.”
Despite overtones of empathy with the plight of
blacks in a racist society, the condescension shown by these
presidential remarks provoked widespread condemnation by abolitionists
both black and white.
“Pray tell us, is our right to a home in
this country less than your own?” wrote one black man to the president.
“Are you an American? So are we.” Few blacks offered to emigrate, and a
pilot project supported by the Lincoln administration to colonize
several hundred black volunteers on a Haitian island was a failure. A
good many Republicans agreed with one of their number who branded
Lincoln’s “scheme” of colonization as “simply absurd” and “disgraceful
to the administration.”
Lincoln also came to see the “scheme” of
colonization as unjust and impractical, though perhaps not disgraceful
to his administration. As Foner points out, after the president issued
the Emancipation Proclamation and committed the government to the
recruitment of black soldiers, Lincoln “abandoned the idea of
colonization.” He could scarcely ask black men to fight for their
country and then tell them that they should leave it. “Black soldiers
played a crucial role not only in winning the Civil War but also in
defining its consequences,” writes Foner, by putting “the question of
postwar rights squarely on the national agenda.” Because of Lincoln’s
admiration for the courage of black soldiers and their contribution to
Union victories, his “racial views seemed to change” and his “sense of
blacks’ relationship to the nation also began to change.” Their military
service “implied a very different vision of their future place in
American society than plans for settling them overseas.”
Foner is
right on the mark here. Indeed, perhaps he could have emphasized even
more the timing as well as the importance of Lincoln’s praise for black
soldiers. In August 1863 the president wrote one of his forceful public
letters that served a purpose similar to a modern president’s prime-time
televised speech or news conference. This letter appeared in print just
one year after Lincoln’s colonization speech to blacks in the White
House, and a month after white antidraft rioters in New York City
lynched black men at almost the same moment black soldiers were dying in
the attack on Fort Wagner in South Carolina (dramatized in the movie
“Glory”). Figuratively looking those draft rioters in the eye, Lincoln
declared: “You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem
willing to fight for you.” When the war was won, Lincoln continued,
“there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue,
and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have
helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will
be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and
deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.”
A year later
that “great consummation” seemed more distant than ever, as military
stalemates on all fronts after enormous casualties that summer caused
Northern morale to plummet to its lowest point yet. Lincoln came under
intense pressure to retreat from the abolition of slavery as one of his
publicly stated prior conditions for negotiations to end the war. He
refused. To back away from the promise of freedom would be an egregious
breach of faith, declared Lincoln. “Could such treachery by any
possibility, escape the curses of Heaven?” More than a hundred thousand
black soldiers were then fighting for the Union.
Lincoln expressed
contempt for those who “have proposed to me to return to slavery
[these] black warriors.I should be damned in time & in eternity for
so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends
& enemies, come what will. . . . Why should they give their lives
for us, with full notice of our purpose to betray them?”
What
Lincoln and everyone else believed would come of this principled stand
was his defeat for reelection in 1864. Two years after he had told
African Americans that they should leave the country for the good of
both races, he now staked his career and reputation on defending the
freedom they had earned by fighting for their country. Northern
battlefield victories in the fall of 1864 turned around both the
military and political situations by 180 degrees. Instead of being
“badly beaten” at the polls in November, as he had expected in August,
Lincoln was decisively reelected. He then invoked his mandate and threw
all of the resources of his administration into a successful fight to
get the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress.
Two days after
Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox,
Lincoln gave a speech to an interracial crowd on the White House lawn.
In this address he looked toward the future problem of reconstructing
the war-torn South. At a time when black men could not vote even in most
Northern states, the president expressed his preference for
enfranchising literate blacks and all black Union military veterans in
the new South. “This was a remarkable statement,” Foner rightly asserts.
“No American president had publicly endorsed even limited black
suffrage.”
Lincoln’s secretary of the interior considered this
endorsement a critical step toward full and equal citizenship for all
blacks. So did John Wilkes Booth, who was in the crowd that heard
Lincoln’s words on April 11. “That means n***r citizenship,” uttered
Booth. “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he
will ever make.”
Three days later Booth fulfilled his dark oath.
Lincoln did not get the chance to continue the trajectory that had
propelled him from the gradualist and colonizationist limitations of his
antislavery convictions in earlier years toward the immediatist and
egalitarian policies he was approaching by 1865. “Lincoln had changed
enormously during the Civil War,” Foner concludes. Most strikingly, “he
had developed a deep sense of compassion for the slaves he had helped to
liberate, and a concern for their fate.”
The nation’s foremost
black leader, Frederick Douglass, recognized this compassion in a
memorial address he delivered in 1865. Lincoln was “emphatically, the
black man’s president,” said Douglass, “the first to show any respect
for their rights as men.” A decade later, however, in a speech at the
dedication of an emancipation monument in Washington, Douglass described
Lincoln as “preeminently the white man’s President.” To his largely
white audience on this occasion, Douglass declared that “you are the
children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children.”
Later in the same speech, Douglass brought together his Hegelian thesis
and antithesis in a final synthesis.
Whatever Lincoln’s flaws may
have been in the eyes of racial egalitarians, “in his heart of hearts he
loathed and hated slavery.” His firm wartime leadership saved the
nation and freed it “from the great crime of slavery. . . . The hour and
the man of our redemption had met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.”
As
James Oakes notes in his astute and polished study “The Radical and the
Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of
Antislavery Politics,” Douglass’s speech in 1876 “mimicked his own
shifting perspective” on Lincoln over the previous two decades.
Born
a slave on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Douglass escaped to the North and
freedom in 1838 and soon emerged as one of the nation’s leading
abolitionists. During the Civil War he spoke out eloquently and
repeatedly to urge expansion of this war for union into a war for black
freedom. Because Lincoln seemed to move too slowly and reluctantly in
that direction, Douglass berated him as a proslavery wolf in antislavery
sheep’s clothing. “Abraham Lincoln is no more fit for the place he
holds than was James Buchanan,” declared an angry Douglass in July 1862,
“and the latter was no more the miserable tool of traitors than the
former is allowing himself to be.” Lincoln had “steadily refused to
proclaim, as he had the constitutional and moral right to proclaim,
complete emancipation to all the slaves of rebels. . . . The country is
destined to become sick of . . . Lincoln, and the sooner the better.”
In
Douglass’s Hegelian dialectic attitude toward Lincoln, this was the
time of his most outspoken opposition. He could not know that at the
very moment he was condemning the president as no better than the
proslavery Buchanan, Lincoln had decided to issue an emancipation
proclamation that would accomplish most of what Douglass demanded.
When
Lincoln did precisely that, two months later, Douglass was ecstatic.
“We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree,” he
announced.
But in Douglass’s view, Lincoln backslid after issuing
the Proclamation. Just as the president had seemed too slow in 1862 to
embrace emancipation, he now seemed similarly tardy in 1864 to embrace
equal rights for freed slaves. For a time Douglass even supported
efforts to replace Lincoln with a more radical Republican candidate for
president in the election of 1864. In the end, however, when the only
alternative to Lincoln was the Democratic nominee, George B. McClellan,
whose election might jeopardize the antislavery gains of the previous
two years, Douglass came out for Lincoln. “When there was any shadow of a
hope that a man of more anti-slavery conviction and policy could be
elected,” he wrote, “I was not for Mr. Lincoln.” But with the prospect
of “the (miscalled) Democratic party . . . clearly before us, all
hesitation ought to cease, and every man who wishes well to the slave
and to the country should at once rally with all the warmth and
earnestness of his nature to the support of Abraham Lincoln.”
James
Oakes believes that Lincoln possessed as much “anti-slavery conviction”
as Douglass himself. The difference between the two men was one of
position and tactics, not conviction. Douglass was a radical reformer
whose mission was to proclaim principles and to demand that the people
and their leaders live up to those principles. Lincoln was a politician,
a practitioner of the art of the possible, a pragmatist who subscribed
to the same principles but recognized that they could only be achieved
in gradual step-by-step fashion through compromise and negotiation, in
pace with progressive changes in public opinion and political realities.
Oakes portrays a symbiosis between the radical Douglass and the
Republican Lincoln: “It is important to democracy that reformers like
Frederick Douglass could say what needed to be said, but it is
indispensable to democracy that politicians like Abraham Lincoln could
do only what the law and the people allowed them to do.”
Looking
back in 1876, Douglass acknowledged that while from the standpoint of
the abolitionists “Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent,”
he was considerably to the left of the political center on the slavery
issue. “Measure him by the sentiment of his country,” a “sentiment he
was bound as a statesman to consult,” and Lincoln “was swift, zealous,
radical, and determined.” Oakes carries this point a step further.
Lincoln the politician was a master of misdirection, of appearing to
appease conservatives while manipulating them toward acceptance of
radical policies.
Douglass and many other contemporaries failed to
appreciate or even to understand Lincoln’s political legerdemain. Many
historians have similarly failed. But Oakes both understands and
appreciates it, and he analyzes with more clarity and precision than
anyone else what he describes as the “typically backhanded way” in which
Lincoln handled slavery, a tactic that “obscured the radicalism of his
move.”
Some examples. In August 1861 General John C. Frémont,
commander of Union forces in the border slave state of Missouri, issued
an edict freeing the slaves of all Confederate activists in the state.
Radicals like Douglass rejoiced, but conservatives and border-state
Unionists threatened to turn against the Union war effort if Frémont’s
decree was sustained. Lincoln ordered Frémont to modify his edict to
conform to legislation enacted a few weeks earlier that “confiscated”
(but did not specifically free) only those slaves who had actually
worked on Confederate fortifications or on any other military projects.
Radicals denounced Lincoln’s action, especially the distinction between
confiscation and emancipation. But Lincoln’s main concern was to retain
the loyalty of the border slave states. “Without them,” as Oakes
recognizes, “the North would probably have lost the war and the slaves
would have lost their only real chance for freedom.” Three months later,
in his annual message to Congress (which we today call the State of the
Union Address), Lincoln “let slip, as if in passing, one of the most
important announcements of the war” when he casually referred to the
slaves, now numbering in the thousands, who had been confiscated by
coming into Union lines as having been “thus liberated.” From then on,
confiscation meant freedom; Lincoln accomplished this momentous step so
subtly that nobody complained or even seemed to notice.
By May
1862 the Union government had gained military and political control of
the border states. Lincoln urged them to consider voluntary and
compensated emancipation of their slaves (they ultimately rejected his
appeal). In that month another of Lincoln’s generals, David Hunter,
issued an order abolishing slavery not only along the South Atlantic
coast where Union forces had secured a foothold but also in the entire
states of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida—90 percent of which were
under Confederate control.
Lincoln knew nothing of this order
until he read it in the newspapers. He promptly rescinded it, stating
privately that “no commanding general shall do such a thing, upon
my responsibility,
without consulting me.” Publicly, however, he phrased it differently in
his revocation of Hunter’s order: “Whether it be competent for me, as
Commander-in-Chief . . . to declare the slaves of any state or states,
free” and whether at any time “it shall have become a necessity
indispensable to the maintenance of the government, to exercise such
power, are questions which, under my responsibility, I reserve to myself
” and not to commanders in the field. One does not have to read between
the lines to discern the hint of possible future action—it is in the
lines themselves.
As Oakes comments, any diligent reader of
Lincoln’s words “might have found it odd that a proclamation ostensibly
designed to overturn General Hunter’s emancipation order” contained a
paragraph “declaring the President’s authority to free the slaves in the
rebel states whenever ‘military necessity’ required it.”
The
military-necessity argument took on added urgency in the summer of 1862
as Confederate counteroffensives in Virginia and Tennessee reversed
earlier Union gains. Slaves constituted the majority of the
Confederacy’s labor force. They sustained the South’s war economy and
the logistics of Confederate armies. A strike against slavery would be a
blow against the Confederacy’s ability to wage war.
Such a strike
would have to be justified politically in the North not on abolitionist
but on military grounds. The cause of the Union united the North; in
1862 the issue of emancipation still deeply divided it. In August 1862
the influential New York Tribune published a signed editorial by Horace
Greeley urging Lincoln to proclaim emancipation. The president had
already decided to issue an emancipation proclamation but was waiting
for a propitious moment to announce it. Greeley’s editorial gave him an
opportunity to respond with what Oakes describes as “a masterpiece of
indirect revelation.” “My paramount object” in this war “
is to
save the Union,” wrote Lincoln in a public letter to Greeley, “and is
not either to save or destroy slavery.” If “I could save the Union
without freeing
any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing
all the
slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and
leaving others alone I would also do that.” Here was something for both
radicals and conservatives—another hint that emancipation might be
coming, but an assertion that if so, it would happen only because it was
necessary to save the Union. Lincoln had again cloaked a radical
measure in conservative garb. Many people then and since missed the
point, including Douglass, who saw it only “as evidence that Lincoln
cared a great deal about the restoration of the Union and very little
about the abolition of slavery.”
Lincoln’s racial attitudes were
also a target of Douglass’s criticism until 1864. On this subject, Oakes
offers some original and incisive insights. The main charge of racism
against Lincoln focuses on his statements during the debates with
Stephen A. Douglas in 1858. Lincoln rejected Douglas’s accusation that
he favored racial equality—a volatile issue in Illinois that threatened
Lincoln’s political career if the charge stuck. Goaded by Douglas’s
repeated playing of the race card, Lincoln declared in one of the
debates that “I am not, nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in
any way the social and political equality of the races.”
It would
be easy, comments Oakes, “to string such quotations together and show
up Lincoln as a run-of-the-mill white supremacist.” But in private,
Lincoln was much less racist than most other whites of his time. He was
“disgusted by the race-baiting of the Douglas Democrats,” and he “made
the humanity of blacks central to his antislavery argument.” In a speech
at Chicago in 1858, Lincoln pleaded: “Let us discard all this quibbling
about . . . this race and that race and the other race being inferior,
and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position,” and instead
“once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”
Lincoln’s
statements expressing opposition to social and political equality,
Oakes maintains, were in fact part of his antislavery strategy. Extreme
racism was at the core of the proslavery argument: If the slaves were
freed, they would aspire to equality with whites; therefore slavery was
the only bulwark of white supremacy and racial purity.
Lincoln “wanted questions about race moved off the table,” writes Oakes, and “the strategy he chose was to
agree with
the Democrats” in opposition to social equality. Lincoln understood
that most Americans—including most Northerners—believed in white
supremacy, “and in a democratic society such deeply held prejudices
cannot be easily disregarded.” Thus the most effective way to convert
whites to an antislavery position, Lincoln believed, was to separate the
issue of bondage from that of race.
The same strategy of taking
race off the table elicited Lincoln’s proposals for colonization of
freed slaves in 1862. Frederick Douglass was outraged by the president’s
statement to the delegation of black men who came to the White House in
August—that because whites did not like the presence of black people
among them, “it is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”
Douglass publicly rebuked Lincoln for his “pride of race and blood, his
contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.”
But again
Douglass missed the point, according to Oakes. Lincoln was painfully
aware that his forthcoming emancipation proclamation would provoke a
racist backlash. By signaling the possibility of colonizing some freed
slaves elsewhere, Lincoln hoped to defuse part of that backlash. Some
Republicans understood the strategy. “I believe practically
[colonization] is a damn humbug,” said one, “but it will take with the
people.” Lincoln’s remarks to the black delegation were a staged
performance. The president had invited a stenographer from the New York
Tribune to report his words. Lincoln “was once again using racism
strategically” to “make emancipation more palatable to white racists,”
writes Oakes, who admires Lincoln’s skill but acknowledges that this
time he may have overdone the tactic. “It was a low point in his
presidency.”
After issuing the Emancipation Proclamation on
January 1, 1863, Lincoln stopped using racism as a strategic diversion.
By March 1863 he strongly endorsed the recruitment of black soldiers to
fight for the Union, and in response to prodding by Douglass and other
abolitionists he supported the successful passage of legislation to
equalize the pay of black and white soldiers. Lincoln’s refusal to back
away from his insistence on the abolition of slavery as a precondition
for peace negotiations in 1864 convinced Douglass that the president was
the black man’s genuine friend. Lincoln twice invited Douglass to the
White House for private consultations on racial policies and also
invited him to tea at the Lincolns’ summer cottage. Douglass discovered
at these meetings “a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had
ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him.” Douglass also
found that Lincoln in person had none of that “pride of race” he had
earlier accused him of possessing. “In his company I was never in any
way reminded of my humble origin, or my unpopular color,” wrote
Douglass. The president received him “just as you have seen one
gentleman receive another.” Lincoln was “one of the very few Americans,
who could entertain a negro and converse with him without in anywise
reminding him of the unpopularity of his color.”
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Douglass outlived
Lincoln by thirty years. In the latter half of that period the nation
receded from its Reconstruction promise of racial justice, and Southern
blacks were forced into second-class citizenship. As this trajectory
spiraled downward, the Civil War president looked better and better in
retrospect. If Lincoln were alive today, Douglass said in 1893, “did his
firm hand now hold the helm of state . . . did his wisdom now shape and
control the destiny of this otherwise great republic,” the national
government would not be making the “weak and helpless” claim that “there
is no power under the United States Constitution to protect the lives
and liberties” of Southern blacks “from barbarous, inhuman and lawless
violence.”
Seventy years later, Martin Luther King Jr. stood in
front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and described his dream that
one day the nation would live up to the ideals of Douglass and Lincoln.
Excerpted from “The War That Forged A Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters”
by James M. McPherson. Published by Oxford University Press. Copyright
© 2015 by James M. McPherson. Reprinted with permission of the
publisher. All rights reserved.
