Lincoln’s Dilemma: Blair, Sumner, and the Republican Struggle over Racism and Equality in the Civil War Era by Paul D. Escott (review)

This new book by Paul D. Escott, one of the most distinguished current historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction, examines the context and evolution of Abraham Lincoln’s racial attitudes and policies through a novel, interesting lens. By focusing on the racial attitudes of Lincoln’s friends Charles Sumner and Montgomery Blair and on those of his eventual assassin John Wilkes Booth, the author is able to convey the range and complexity of the racist attitudes of white northerners during the Civil War era, showing how Lincoln had to struggle to overcome those attitudes.

Sumner, one of the Civil War–era Republican Party’s most progressive voices on racial and other issues, pushed Lincoln to embrace a vigorous policy of emancipation and civil rights for African Americans. By the end of the war, through Lincoln’s strenuous efforts in support of the Thirteenth Amendment, Lincoln ended up more or less where Sumner and other Radical Republicans wanted him to be on these issues, but the president’s pace in getting there had often frustrated and infuriated them. The author sensibly argues that Lincoln, and the northern public that he represented and whose support for the war effort he depended on, had to take gradual steps to get there as a matter of practical and political necessity.

Blair, a scion of a very politically influential family and a member of Lincoln’s cabinet for nearly all of his first presidential term, represented a much more conservative faction of the Republican Party than did Sumner. Although Blair was an outspoken opponent of slavery, he openly advocated antiblack views and called for continuing separation of the races, ideally through some form of colonization that would remove free blacks from the country. As Escott correctly argues, for much of the war Lincoln’s attitudes and policies on these issues were much closer—if not identical—to those of Blair. The transformative nature of the war itself pushed Lincoln (and other white northerners) partially down the road toward Sumner’s progressive views, but the racist attitudes of the time were so powerful that this process was halting and difficult.

The frequent, horrifying violence motivated by racism in this era, which Escott also draws attention to and which ultimately claimed Lincoln’s life and defeated the Republican Party’s efforts to protect African American civil rights in the Reconstruction era, was a vivid indication of this deep-seated current in nineteenth-century (and beyond) American society and politics. Escott compellingly argues that Lincoln himself may have underestimated the power of American racism in his somewhat optimistic plans for a lenient postwar Reconstruction policy, which Escott thinks was doomed to fail given the determined bitterness of racist resistance to change in the postwar South and the limited commitment, or even outright hostility, of many white northerners to racial equality.

Escott’s well-reasoned book is a worthy addition to the sizable literature on Lincoln and race. Drawing on mostly synthetic research, he provides a valuable context for and somewhat original take on our greatest president’s evolving racial views and policies. It is yet another fine book by a superb historian.