2008 Lincoln Prize Winner James Oakes for The Radical and the Republican:
Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery
Politics
Lincoln Prize Acceptance Speech
When I found out about this award I think I understood a little better what Frederick Douglass
must have felt like whenever he left one of his meetings with Lincoln: How could I not be flattered? I’m
certainly gratified. And immensely thankful—first for my brilliant and beautiful wife and son, who
remind me every day of the things that matter most in this life. Thankful for my friends who are here
tonight; because over the years I’ve grown to appreciate the importance of having people who actually
believe you. To my colleagues at the CUNY Graduate Center—especially David Nasaw who rescued me
and Bill Kelly for being as proud of me as I am of him. For Steve Forman, my editor at Norton, who
seems never to have doubted that one day I would finally write a book for him. To the galaxy of
remarkable teachers at Berkeley in the 1970s—Winthrop Jordan, Charlie Sellers, Larry Levine, Leon
Litwack, and Kenneth Stampp--who introduced this star-struck youngster to the study of slavery and the
Civil War. And to the generous community of Lincoln scholars who in the past year have welcomed me
into their midst. Needless to say, I am grateful as well to the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg
College, to its irreplaceable shepherd—Gabor Boritt—and to the unprecedented commitment of the two
men whose remarkable generosity sustains this award and so much more, Richard Gilder and Lewis
Lehrman. Allow me also to congratulate the two authors who are sharing the honors with me--Elizabeth
Brown Pryor, for her exquisitely balanced and beautifully executed portrait of Robert E. Lee, and
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Chandra Manning for her exhaustively researched and definitive examination of Civil War soldiers and
slavery. And for deeming my book worthy of recognition alongside two such distinguished studies, let
me at last thank the prize committee itself.
One of the things that makes this award so gratifying is that I did not come to my book as a
seasoned Lincoln scholar. I came to Lincoln through the back door of slavery studies—by way of
Frederick Douglass. In fact it was Douglass I was trying to figure out. I’d read his autobiographies and
his most important speeches, but I’d always had trouble making sense of him. Compared to the thousands
of books on Lincoln there are only about a dozen important studies of Frederick Douglass—some of them
quite good. But even after reading them I still had trouble grasping Douglass’s premises, his political
philosophy, the way he formulated his antislavery argument, and how it all developed and changed over
time. When I set out to write the book, Douglass was the question mark, the blank slate. Not Lincoln.
I had some questions about Lincoln, of course, but for the most part I approached him with a
bundle of assumptions. That’s inevitable for anyone like myself who had already read Boritt and Guelzo
and Carwardine and Wilson. I was long ago trained up on David Donald and Richard Current and Don
Fehrenbacher. Ken Stampp supervised my dissertation; I couldn’t possibly have come to Lincoln blind.
Quite the opposite. From the start I never really thought there would be all that much for me to say about
Lincoln, at least not in the book I was writing.
I still felt that way, mostly, when I finished my book. If there’s anything novel or interesting in
what I have to say about either of these two men, I thought, it’s in what I have to say about Frederick
Douglass, not Abraham Lincoln. For example, historians are well aware that Lincoln changed over time,
that he came relatively late to antislavery politics, that he grew in the presidency, and he is all but
uniformly praised for those shifts. But students of Douglass have tended to dislike, and therefore to
discount, the changes he went through. They don’t like it that Douglass changed his mind about the
Constitution, that he came to see it as an anti-slavery document rather than a proslavery compact “made
in Hell.” One recent historian has gone so far as to claim that Douglass changed his mind about the
Constitution because his friend Gerrit Smith paid him off. It’s as though the remarkable intellectual
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struggle Douglass went through isn’t worth serious consideration. Similarly, many historians eagerly
quote the Douglass who spoke harshly of Lincoln but then condescend to the Douglass who later changed
his mind and spoke of Lincoln in warmer tones. Once again the depth and sincerity of Douglass’s
transformation is discounted. Worse, it misses the broader trajectory of Douglass’s career—his decadeslong effort to balance his role as a reformer with his increasing political engagement.
If it is right to praise Lincoln for the changes he went through—as I believe it is—it is no less
proper to admire the increasing subtlety and sophistication of Douglass’s speeches and writings. His
1876 keynote address at the unveiling of the Emancipation monument in Washington, D.C. is a brilliant
example. This was the speech Douglass opened with a famously shocking reference to Lincoln as “the
white man’s president,” but which ended up praising Lincoln as a great statesman whose commitment to
emancipation was swift, radical, zealous and determined. Indeed it was so evenhanded, yet ultimately
complimentary to Lincoln, that a distinguished historian once dismissed it as the worst speech Douglass
ever delivered. But to me it was a bravura performance, one of the best brief analyses of Lincoln ever
uttered, in part because Douglass so deftly balanced the competing perspectives of radical abolitionists,
African Americans, and elected officials—in full awareness of the strengths and limitations of each
perspective. That speech reveals to us a Douglass who had come to understand the relationship between
reformers and elected officials with a clarity and sensitivity that often eludes even our finest historians.
So I ended up admiring the intellectual honesty and seriousness of purpose Douglass demonstrated in his
effort to come to terms with the way politics works in a democratic society. In any case it was all new to
me, and I think for readers.
But what might surprise readers is not what surprised me. I knew all along that I would have to
figure Douglass out, and as intellectually exciting as that process turned out to be, it was Lincoln who
surprised me the most. Remember: I didn’t have too many assumptions about Douglass so there wasn’t
much for me to clear away. I had a lot of half-thought-out assumptions about Lincoln, and ended up
discarding many of them.
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For a very long time I thought that the great historian Richard Hofstadter had gotten things just
about right: That Lincoln’s argument against slavery was narrowly economic rather than broadly moral,
that his commitment to emancipation was slow in coming and grudging in execution, that his hatred of
slavery was muted by his disdain for blacks. What I discovered in writing the book was a man for whom
the right to the bread we earn from the sweat of our brows was an irreducibly moral rather than a crassly
economic proposition, that it was grounded firmly in the principle of fundamental human equality, that
Lincoln’s commitment to emancipation was longstanding and, when it mattered most, unwavering.
Rather than a man whose racial prejudices held back his hatred of slavery, I found someone who
repeatedly deferred to conventional racial prejudices but who also struggled to revive antislavery politics
by disentangling them from the sordid politics of race. Here Lincoln was tapping into a broad vein of
popular sentiment in the North. Chandra Manning’s book demonstrates that many Union soldiers went
into the war hating slavery about as much as they detested African Americans. Lincoln understood, as
few politicians did, that the success of antislavery politics therefore depended on distinguishing the issue
of slavery from the issue of racial equality.
Yet as Frederick Douglass was quick to point out, slavery and racism were so thoroughly
intertwined that they were, as a practical matter, inseparable. For Lincoln this meant that he could not
make an antislavery argument without also making an anti-racist argument. On several occasions during
his debates with Stephen Douglass, for example, Lincoln said that blacks and whites were equally entitled
to the fruits of their labor. It was a simple enough statement, clearly reflecting Lincoln’s commitment to
what Eric Foner calls “free labor ideology.” But if you think about it, the statement actually contained
two distinct propositions--the first was the unremarkable assertion of a right to the fruits of one’s labor;
the second was the much more controversial claim that blacks and whites were equally entitled to that
right. Whenever Lincoln said that, he sent Stephen Douglas off on another demagogic rampage. And it
wasn’t because Senator Douglas disputed Lincoln’s first proposition about the rights of free labor. What
he objected to was Lincoln’s claim that blacks were no less entitled to the fruits of their labor than were
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whites. I realized that the defense of free labor, although central to Lincoln’s politics, was not enough.
Free labor ideology worked as an antislavery argument only if it was an anti-racist argument as well.
I’ve often wondered how Lincoln managed impart such noble resonance to his commonplace
defense of free labor. Some of it has to do with his vaguely biblical turn of phrase: all those references to
the bread we earn by the sweat of our brows. But I suspect we are also moved by the egalitarianism of
Lincoln’s phrasing, never more so than in his uncompromising claim that in her right to the bread she
earns from the sweat of her brow, a black woman is my equal, and Judge Douglas’s equal, and the equal
of every living man. I’ve stared down that phrase for years, and I’m still astonished by it. And by the
fact that no matter how many times Judge Douglas called him on it, Lincoln never backed away from his
egalitarian version of free labor ideology. Not once. All of which is to say that I ended up discovering in
Lincoln what Frederick Douglass ended up discovering. It just took me a lot longer.
That said, I freely confess that I did not set out to write a book that makes arresting new claims
about either Frederick Douglass or Abraham Lincoln. I was frankly more interested in the causes of the
Civil War. I knew from my previous research that the slaveholders went into the war to protect their right
to what was called “property in man.” They were not shy about saying this; secessionists rarely pretended
that it was anything other than the threat to slavery that sent them fleeing from the Union. But it had
never occurred to me that they might actually have been right about Lincoln, that his election really did
pose a threat to slavery. The slaveholders had every reason to loathe if not fear the abolitionists, but
didn’t they see the vast gulf between Lincoln and the radicals?
That was the question hovering in back of my mind when I embarked on the project. I
understood that there were two broad lines of antislavery sentiment in the North—radical abolitionism
and political antislavery—but I did not understand the relationship between them. Tracking the
converging trajectories of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass was my way of getting at the
relationship between Republican Party politics and radical antislavery, and with it to the northern origins
of the Civil War.
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I quickly discovered a bottomless mud-pit of evidence, murky enough to lead historians to see the
relationship between Lincoln and the radicals in very different ways. For some scholars the radicals were
Lincoln’s “vanguard,” his indispensable allies, the people who cleared the path for Lincoln’s victory over
slavery and helped him move in the direction of racial equality. But other scholars emphasize Lincoln’s
impatience with the radicals, with their sanctimonious posturing, their disdain for constitutional restraints,
and their cavalier disregard of public opinion. Chose your evidence carefully, I realized, and you can
prove either of those very different cases. So I tried to move beyond the documentary stalemate by
shifting the discussion in a different direction, one that has less to do with the particular positions Lincoln
and the radicals took than with the distinctive roles that reformers and politicians play in a democratic
society.
Historians who instinctively admire reformers like Douglass for refusing to compromise their
principles are often apt to distrust Lincoln for his slippery political shrewdness. Pious blowhards can be
hard to take, but nobody likes a trimmer. For aficionados of political sagacity, however, there’s no one
quite as impressive as Abraham Lincoln. Which side of this divide you come down on—sanctimony
versus sagacity-- has a lot to do with what you think of compromise.
Watching Lincoln and Douglass maneuver around one another made me realize that there are two
kinds of compromise. There is strategic compromise aimed at building a winning political coalition.
Almost always this means accepting a platform that does not live up to your highest principles. “Any
plan which is brought forward as a standard for a party to rally round,” John Stuart Mill explained, “must
be of the nature of a compromise.” But this, Mill added, is not the same thing as compromising your
principles. Reformers, he said, should “tell the truth when it is the truth that their private opinion goes
further than their public demands.” They enter into coalitions not because they’ve abandoned their ideals,
“but because they think they are doing more good by uniting their efforts with those of others to attain a
nearer object, and one more immediately practicable.” I would go further: You can’t have democracy
without compromise. The kind of compromise Mill was talking about is part of the ethical commitment
we make to political democracy. Reformers would undermine their moral authority if they compromised
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their ideals, Mill explained, but they would achieve nothing if they simply rejected the strategic
compromises that make democracy successful.
This is what Frederick Douglass learned about politics, and what I learned from Lincoln and
Douglass both: That there is a principle of compromise that does not require a compromise of principle.
The savviest of politicians and the most astute reformers have always understood this. Lincoln was
flexible about how and by what means emancipation would be achieved, but he never deviated from his
conviction that slavery must ultimately be abolished. This is why Frederick Douglass concluded—again
in that 1876 speech—that the most important thing about Lincoln was that “in his heart of hearts he
always loathed and hated slavery.” But Douglass proves the point just as well. His embrace of the
Republican Party was part of his larger embrace of democracy itself, but it did nothing to diminish his
own uncompromising commitment to racial equality.
I suppose there are “lessons” to be drawn from all of this, but I have never been the kind of
historian who can comfortably apply the lessons of the past directly to the problems of the present. Still, I
won’t pretend that the observations I’ve just made--about reformers and politicians, about compromise
and democracy--have no immediate relevance. And as it happens the very issue I struggled with in my
book has recently made its way into the news.
Back in January of this year there was a minor political dustup over some remarks made by
Senator Hilary Clinton to the effect that it took a president, Lyndon Johnson, to bring Martin Luther
King’s dream to fruition. She was referring to the pressure that Johnson famously brought to bear on a
Congress that was otherwise reluctant to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, subsequently, the Voting
Rights Act of 1965. Was she, critics asked, discounting the role of civil rights activists in the passage of
those landmark laws? Increasingly intemperate charges flew back and forth until, on January 18, Bill
Moyers took to the airwaves and restored an element of moderation to the debate.
Moyers had been a young presidential aide in the White House and he recalled the meetings he
had attended with President Johnson, Dr. King and other leaders of the civil rights movement. Massive
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resistance to desegregation had erupted among whites in many parts of the South, and Johnson was afraid
that further civil rights protests would stiffen congressional resistance as well. He tried to persuade King
to back down, but as Moyers recalled it,
King said his people had already waited too long. He talked about the murders
and lynchings, the churches set on fire, children brutalized, the law defied, men and
women humiliated, their lives exhausted, their hearts broken. LBJ listened, as intently as
I ever saw him listen. He listened, and then he put his hand on Martin Luther King's
shoulder, and said, in effect: "OK. You go out there Dr. King and keep doing what you're
doing, and make it possible for me to do the right thing." Lyndon Johnson was no racist
but he had not been a civil rights hero, either. Now, as president, he came down on the
side of civil disobedience, believing it might quicken America's conscience until the cry
for justice became irresistible, enabling him to turn Congress. So King marched and
Johnson maneuvered and Congress folded.
Moyers recalled standing on the floor of Congress when the landmark legislation was passed and,
as he put it, “morality and politics converged.” Convergence. That’s the point I was trying to make in
my own book by recounting the story of “how Lincoln and Douglass converged at the most dramatic
moment in American history.”
The vitality of our democracy has always depended on activists who keep politicians alert to
pressing issues they might just as soon avoid. At their best, reformers are the conscience of the nation—
and Frederick Douglass was among the very best. But reformers need politicians who can build the
coalitions and in doing so make the compromises without which they could not govern, at least not in a
democracy. At their best, politicians make us a more perfect Union—and Abraham Lincoln was among
the very best.
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