Big Enough to Be Inconsistent Book Review

¶ … Big Enough to Be Inconsistent

Book Review of George Frederickson, Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race. Harvard University Press, 2008.

Like almost all whites in the 19th Century, Lincoln held prejudicial or racist views about blacks, and was reluctant to extend full citizenship and political rights to them. His native state of Illinois had a constitutional provision that barred blacks from settling there at all, as did Indiana, Iowa, Kansas and other Northern and Western states. Only a few New England states actually granted nonwhites equal citizenship and voting rights before the Civil War. Whites could -- and did -- oppose the expansion of slavery in the Western territories and even slavery itself, while still not being particularly favorable to black equality. Nevertheless, compared to his contemporary opponents like Senator Stephen Douglas, Andrew Johnson and Jefferson Davis, who spoke openly of their contempt for blacks, support for slavery and belief in black inferiority, Lincoln's racism was of a milder variety. Unlike Davis, who owned over 500 slaves, or Douglas, whose wife owned 150 slaves in Mississippi, Lincoln had never been a slave owner and never made any public or private statement sympathizing with slavery. Just the opposite, he stated that he would never want to be a slave or a master, since the core of his political and social philosophy was that every person had the natural right to rise as far and as fast as their talents permitted. As he put it in 1861, all people should "have an equal chance" in life, even though he did not accept full equality and citizenship rights for blacks (Frederickson 87).

At the time of his election in 1860, Lincoln argued that slavery was immoral, but also that the Constitution protected it where it already existed. This was a matter of states right and state law, but it did not prevent the federal government from preventing its expansion in the Western territories. He was "genuinely antislavery, but in a way that did not provide the basis for any action that would violate rather strict construction of the Constitution" (Frederickson 84). In the election of 1860, he had won as a purely sectional candidate who had not even been on the ballot in ten Southern states and had received not a single vote in there. His main goal when the war began was not to abolish slavery but preserve the Union as a model for democracy in the world. If the South chose to resort to violence and revolution because its favored candidates had lost the election, then democracy itself would be undermined. Yet as he wrote in 1864, "I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," and he was perfectly consistent in these views throughout his adult life. Even so, he had only moved to abolish slavery as a war measure in 1863 because he thought this was essential to save the Union, and concluded that in order to win the war he had to lay "a strong hand on the colored element" (Frederickson 86). Only at the very end of the Civil War, not long before his assassination, was he prepared to consider the idea of full citizenship and voting rights for blacks, an idea that enraged John Wilkes Booth when he heard Lincoln mention in a speech that some blacks who fought for the Union might be allowed to vote. In a very real sense, then, Lincoln lost life merely for mentioning the possibility that some blacks might be allowed to vote, which evoked a murderous response from open racists and Confederates like Booth.

Lincoln had come a long way from 1861, but so had the rest of the country, at least outside the Confederate states. All of his life, Lincoln had believed that the Declaration of Independence and its affirmation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness applied to all human beings, even though it did not "mandate the civil and political equality of blacks." Even then, he argued that slavery was on a "partial and temporary" deviation from these rights, one that the Founders had hoped would gradually become extinct (Frederickson 87). It had not become extinct, of course, but had expanded and become more profitable in the great cotton boom of the 19th Century and the number of slaves grew from 500,000 in 1775 to over four million by 1860. From the start of the Civil War, abolitionist generals like David Hunter and John Fremont took it upon themselves to free all slaves in the jurisdiction, only to have these orders countermanded by Lincoln. From the president's viewpoint, any premature or sudden attempt to abolish slavery would alienate the border slave states like Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri, and he wrote that "I think to lose Kentucky is nearly to lose the whole game" (Frederickson 91).

As a calculating, pragmatic and careful political strategist, Lincoln was well aware that a Northern victory was by no means guaranteed in 1862. He also feared that the Civil War could easily "degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle" once slavery was abolished, and perhaps even into a racial war of extermination that no one could control (Frederickson 92). In New York City, the draft riots of 1863 in which hundreds of blacks were lynched by white mobs that were only suppressed by federal troops seemed to be a harbinger of just how remorseless and brutal the war might become. This was why Lincoln's first emancipation plan in 1861-62 was to avoid a 'hard war' or revolutionary struggle in favor of gradual emancipation of slavery. He offered $500 for every slave in the Border States, who would then bee colonized abroad "at some place or places in a climate congenial to them" (Frederickson, p. 93). This idea of freeing the slaves and returning them to Africa already had a long history. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison believed that all blacks should eventually be removed from the United States and settled back in Africa, and even founded Liberia in West Africa as a new home for freed slaves. Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison had adamantly rejected this as a solution to slavery in the United States, and called for equal citizenship and voting rights for blacks.

Historians have disagreed over whether Lincoln took the colonization idea seriously, or if he simply used it as a political ploy to win support for emancipation. As late as 1864, though, he was still supporting colonization experiments in Africa, the West Indies and Central America, and wrestling with the worry that blacks and whites could not coexist peacefully in the United States, and that blacks would never really achieve equal rights (Frederickson 111). In any case, the representatives of the Border States absolutely rejected his plan for gradual, compensated emancipation while free blacks and abolitionists demanded immediate emancipation without indemnities of any kind to the slaveholders and without colonization. In 1862, Lincoln decided that the Union could not win the war without freeing and arming the slaves, and also decided that the concerns of the abolitionists and other loyal supporters of the Union war effort had to be met. Therefore, he issued his Emancipation Proclamation that abolished slavery in every part of the country that was still in rebellion as of January 1, 1863. Once fully committed to this course, Lincoln never looked back and would not withdraw the Proclamation even to curry favor with the voters in the 1864 elections. Indeed, he said that had he done so he would have "deserved to be damned in time and eternity" (Frederickson 123). In 1865, as the war was coming to an end, he also pushed Congress to ratify the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery everywhere and for all time in the United States, and far from damning Lincoln, history has generally judged him to be the greatest American president.