Lincoln's Civil War Brilliance

“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.”

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).

<>Thomas Jefferson

Lincoln and most Republicans in the 1850s did not call for the immediate abolition of slavery

Lincoln also said he could “understand and appreciate” how “very difficult” it would be “to get rid of” slavery “in any satisfactory way….

“What then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition?”

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.

divergence between “antislavery” and “abolitionist” was a distinction without a difference

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”

now that they were fighting so “gallantly in our ranks” their commander in chief no longer wanted them to go.

"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"

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.”

Because of Lincoln’s admiration for the courage of black soldiers and their contribution to Union victories, his “racial views seemed to change”

nstead of being “badly beaten” at the polls in November, as he had expected in August, Lincoln was decisively reelected.

“This was a remarkable statement,” Foner rightly asserts. “No American president had publicly endorsed even limited black suffrage.”

Lincoln was “emphatically, the black man’s president,” said Douglass, “the first to show any respect for their rights as men.”

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.”

Douglass’s speech in 1876 “mimicked his own shifting perspective” on Lincoln over the previous two decades.

Because Lincoln seemed to move too slowly and reluctantly in that direction, Douglass berated him as a proslavery wolf in antislavery sheep’s clothing.

For a time Douglass even supported efforts to replace Lincoln with a more radical Republican candidate for president in the election of 1864

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,

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.”

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.” … [yet] The cause of the Union united the North; in 1862 the issue of emancipation still deeply divided it.

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,

Lincoln’s statements expressing opposition to social and political equality, Oakes maintains, were in fact part of his antislavery strategy. Lincoln “wanted questions about race moved off the table,”

Lincoln “was once again using racism strategically” to “make emancipation more palatable to white racists,”

After issuing the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Lincoln stopped using racism as a strategic diversion.

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.