The press reports were vicious. Lincoln had spoken recently in Springfield and on June 15, 1856, a leading Democratic Party newspaper, the Illinois State Register, denounced his speech as “niggerism.” Lincoln had said nothing he had not said many times before. If anything the speech was already familiar to his listeners. Since the founding days of the Republic Congress had exercised the power to restrict slavery’s expansion, Lincoln argued, and Congress should continue to do so—for the simple reason that slavery was wrong. But the Democrats, led by Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, had no such moral qualms; they were content to allow the territories to decide for themselves whether or not to legalize slavery.
Lincoln’s claim that slavery should be restricted because slavery was wrong struck Democrats as a flagrant appeal to radicalism. It was black abolitionist propaganda, the Register cried, adding that Lincoln’s speech “has as dark a hue as that of Garrison or Fred Douglass.”1
Frederick Douglass. It was enough for the Register to print the name with no further identification. Everyone knew who he was: an escaped slave, an infamous abolitionist, easily the most prominent black man in the United States. It was not the last time Illinois Democrats would fasten that name around Lincoln’s neck.
Stephen Douglas did it all the time during his famous debates with Lincoln in 1858. In their second encounter, at Freeport in late August, Douglas the senator claimed that Douglass the abolitionist was one of Lincoln’s closest advisers. When the crowd hooted at this, the senator pressed his point further. He claimed that on a previous visit to Freeport he had seen Frederick Douglass himself seated in a “magnificent” carriage and accompanied by two white women, a mother and her daughter, all of them being driven by another white man.
“What of it?” someone in the crowd shouted.
“All I have to say of it is this,” Senator Douglas answered, “that if you, Black Republicans, think that the negro ought to be on a social equality with your wives and daughters, and ride in a carriage with your wife, whilst you drive the team, you have a perfect right to do so.” Senator Douglas then passed along a rumor to the effect that “one of Fred. Douglass’ kinsmen, another rich black negro, is now traveling in this part of the State making speeches for his friend Lincoln as the champion of black men.”2 For an accomplished race-baiter like Stephen Douglas, there was no more effective weapon than linking his opponent with the name of Frederick Douglass.
So he did it again, during the debate at Charleston, Illinois, on September 18. The senator said that in 1854, while canvassing the northern part of the state, “I found Lincoln’s ally, in the person of Fred. Douglass, THE NEGRO, preaching abolition doctrines, while Lincoln was discussing the same principles down here.” He cited a more recent speech “made by Fred. Douglass…in which he conjures all the friends of negro equality and negro citizenship to rally as one man around Abraham Lincoln, the perfect embodiment of their principles.”3
Anticipating the senator’s relentless race-baiting, Lincoln asked his listeners during a Chicago speech to “discard all this quibbling” about “this race and that race and the other race being inferior.” Senator Douglas could hardly let such a remark pass, so during the sixth debate, in Quincy, on October 13, he quoted it verbatim and then strung together the names of prominent abolitionists, asking rhetorically, “Did Lovejoy, or Lloyd Garrison, or Wendell Phillips, or Fred. Douglass, ever take higher abolition grounds than that?”4 To hear the senator talk, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were close friends and staunch allies.
It comes as something of a shock to see just how much vulgarity Stephen Douglas was prepared to inject into his exchanges with Abraham Lincoln. (It is almost as shocking to watch how far Lincoln was willing to descend in his unsuccessful efforts to capture the low ground from the distinguished senator.) Were these the Lincoln-Douglas debates? One of the great highlights of American political discourse? Needless to say, the debates had their better moments, especially when Lincoln moved up rather than down, ascending to some of his finest, most poetic denunciations of human slavery. When Lincoln proclaimed that every man, black or white, had an inalienable right to the fruits of his own labor, Douglas was driven to distraction. Lacking a decent reply, the senator instinctively resorted to racist invective and carefully worded hints about the relationship between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.
Sometimes the senator just made things up. He almost certainly had not seen Frederick Douglass in Freeport, much less riding in a carriage with two white women. Moreover, Lincoln was not an abolitionist. He and Douglass had never met. Lincoln surely knew who Frederick Douglass was, and by the fall of 1858 Frederick Douglass knew who Abraham Lincoln was, but the same would be true of anybody who read the newspapers. It would be reasonable, then, to dismiss the Illinois senator’s strenuous efforts to connect Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglass as one more bit of racist pandering.
But Stephen Douglas was a smart man and an uncommonly shrewd politician. He knew what he was doing, and some of the things he said were not made up. Frederick Douglass had been in Chicago in 1854, “preaching abolition doctrines,” although Lincoln was not preaching the same things downstate. And Douglass had given a speech in 1858 praising Lincoln, though not for his abolitionism, as the senator said, but for upholding the best principles of the Republican Party. Indeed, the senator’s demagogic references to Frederick Douglass would have fallen flat if it were not at least plausible that the famed abolitionist was a close ally of Abraham Lincoln’s. It was plausible because by the mid-1850s Lincoln the lifelong politician was rapidly becoming one of the nation’s leading proponents of antislavery politics. Meanwhile Frederick Douglass, the lifelong abolitionist, had a few years earlier become a convert to antislavery politics. The politician and the abolitionist were converging, and with good reason. They stood together on the same side of an immense historical struggle, pitting those who hated slavery against those who did not. Stephen Douglas did not hate slavery, and he fought ferociously against those who did. From his perspective the differences between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were trivial, and he trusted his constituents to agree. Many of the senator’s listeners in 1858 therefore had no trouble believing that there was some connection between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Not because it was true, but because it might as well have been true.
The senator did have a point. What difference was there, he wondered, between a politician whose platform was based on his hatred of slavery and a radical reformer who devoted himself to slavery’s abolition? One hundred and fifty years later it takes some work to grasp the distinction between antislavery politics and radical reform.
Abraham Lincoln understood the distinction, and so did Frederick Douglass. Although he never mentioned Douglass by name, from the time of his earliest public expressions of opposition to slavery Lincoln was sharply critical of the abolitionist movement to which Douglass faithfully belonged. He was still making the point when he ran for President in 1860, repeatedly insisting that he was not an abolitionist. For that very reason Douglass maintained a skeptical distance from Lincoln in 1860. Douglass had hopes for the Republican Party, but he didn’t fully trust Lincoln. And it stayed that way for several years. Douglass was alternately elated and unsparing about Lincoln’s presidency. It took eighteen months for Abraham Lincoln to proclaim emancipation—too much time, in Frederick Douglass’s view. But it took a long time for Frederick Douglass to appreciate the constraints that American democracy placed on antislavery politicians. During those years Douglass had a lot of rough things to say about Lincoln.
Douglass’s criticism gradually subsided. He eventually came to think of Lincoln as both a good friend and a great man. For that to happen both of them had to change. Everyone knows that as the war years passed Abraham Lincoln grew in wisdom and judgment. More than that, Lincoln was radicalized by the war. He eventually took the radical position on emancipation, the radical position on black troops, and in the end he moved toward a radical position on equal rights. Lincoln overthrew his lifelong conviction that the Constitution protected slavery in the southern states when he found, tucked away in the war powers of the presidency, a legal justification for emancipation. He then committed himself to the enlistment of black soldiers, overturning a long-standing prohibition on black troops in the U.S. Army and, not coincidentally, turning the southern world upside down. Lincoln even began to awaken from his lifelong insensitivity to racial injustice. He abandoned all talk of colonizing blacks somewhere outside the United States, and late in his presidency he was urging politicians in Louisiana to consider allowing black men to vote. These were radical moves or, at the very least, moves in a radical direction. To a committed abolitionist like Frederick Douglass, the President’s radical turn made Lincoln an increasingly appealing figure.
Douglass changed as well. As Lincoln was becoming a radical, Douglass was becoming a Republican. Long before the Civil War he had come to appreciate that militancy alone was not enough to bring about social change, that all his fiery speeches and ferocious editorials would amount to empty bellowing until they were translated into concrete policies by politicians with their hands on the levers of power. He also came to appreciate that in a democratic system politicians answered to a wider constituency than his narrow circle of abolitionist radicals. In the end Douglass realized how much skill, even genius it had taken for a politician like Lincoln to maneuver the northern electorate toward the same radical conclusions he himself had reached. In short, Douglass had come to appreciate the power of mainstream politics.
This was no sudden epiphany on Douglass’s part. The arc of his entire biography propelled him toward the center of things. He began his life as a slave, an outsider by definition, someone with no political standing anywhere in the United States. Having escaped to New England, Douglass was free to enter public life, but he did so by joining a faction of radical abolitionists that condemned all political agitation against slavery. By the late 1840s Douglass had begun to glimpse the radical potential of electoral politics, but he remained contemptuous of the major parties and their leaders. In 1860 he came very close to endorsing the Republican candidate for President, only to back away. But by 1864, having met Lincoln and seen what he could do, Douglass abandoned his long-standing disdain for the compromises that were, and are, a necessary part of any genuinely democratic politics.
Here, then, is the story I want to tell: how Lincoln and Douglass converged at the most dramatic moment in American history. The story commands our attention in part because the two extraordinary personalities are fascinating on their own terms. But there is more to it than that. Lincoln and Douglass, seen together, reveal what can happen in American democracy when progressive reformers and savvy politicians make common cause.
Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass are among the people I most admire in all of nineteenth-century American history. It frustrates me that it took so long for them to come together. So I’ve brought them together in this book, standing them side by side, so as to measure them in each other’s light and see them from each other’s perspective. Here are two men whose historical reputations rest chiefly on their mutual hatred of slavery. Why did it take so long for them to appreciate each other? What kept them apart, and what eventually drew them together? There are long and complicated answers to these questions, and they take up most of this book.
But there’s a short answer as well. Lincoln was a politician and Douglass was a reformer, and the difference, as either of them might have said, was at some point irreconcilable. As a politician Lincoln liked to position himself as the conservative, moved by forces greater than any one man. As a reformer Douglass preferred to position himself on America’s left flank; he would hold fast to the moral high ground no matter how great the forces arrayed against him. Lincoln’s shrewdness as a politician could obscure the bedrock principles from which he never deviated. But just as often Douglass’s high-mindedness obscured the political calculation that went into the construction and reconstruction of his antislavery arguments. So long as both men stood on their respective perches, so long as they found it necessary to present themselves as the conservative politician and the radical reformer, the differences between them would seem greater than they actually were.
Historians are impressed by the skill with which Lincoln manufactured his image as the voice of moderation amid screeching extremes. We should be no less impressed by the skill with which Douglass constructed the image of the aggrieved citizen, unjustly excluded from equal participation in the republican experiment, first as a slave and then as a black man. Beneath all of Douglass’s seeming dogmatism rested a perfectly reasonable question: Why should he or anyone else have to settle for something less than equal rights? That was Lincoln’s question too, and if it made Douglass’s radicalism more reasonable, it made Lincoln’s pragmatism more radical. They were never as far apart as they seemed.
Ironically, northern Democrats were the first to suspect that what Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass had in common was far more threatening than what divided them. In 1864, as Lincoln was running for reelection, Democrats revived the issue of the President’s connection to Frederick Douglass, an issue they had first broached in Illinois nearly a decade earlier. Only this time the Democrats had solid evidence. In December 1863 Douglass had given a speech detailing a meeting he had with Lincoln at the White House a few months before. When Douglass’s speech was published, the Democrats gobbled up the juiciest quotes and regurgitated them in a pamphlet entitled Miscegenation Indorsed by the Republican Party. The Democrats were especially delighted by Douglass’s boast that President Lincoln had received him “just as you have seen one gentleman receives another!”5 Republican strategists reacted in panic to the Democrats’ race-baiting and asked Douglass not to campaign publicly for Lincoln’s reelection.
Lincoln did not panic. At the very moment that Democrats were savaging the President for having met with a notorious black abolitionist, Lincoln invited Douglass back to the White House for a second meeting. Douglass had been impressed by Lincoln at their first encounter. After leaving the White House the second time, Douglass seemed smitten; he never repeated his harshest criticism against Abraham Lincoln. And he never left the Republican Party.