Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the End of Slavery

Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass played outsized roles in the great drama that was America’s Civil War. Because of their stature, they have attracted the attention of an extraordinary number of scholars, including some of the best historians of nineteenth-century America. David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln (1995) and William S. McFeely’s Frederick Douglass (1991), just two enduring biographies in a long list of excellent studies, should be sufficient to intimidate anyone but the most confident writers from taking on the lives of either of these figures. Undeterred by the breadth and depth of the scholarship covering Lincoln and Douglass, historian James Oakes has claimed not one but both men as the subjects for his book The Radical and the Republican.

Readers familiar with Oakes’s past work should not be surprised with his scholarly ambition. Oakes challenged conventional wisdom about the world of southern slaveholders with his first book, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (1982). His second book, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (1990), was equally impressive in its exploration of the complex relationship between slavery and freedom in a capitalist economy. Both books marked Oakes as a scholar able to offer something fresh about familiar subjects, a talent he again brings to bear on the lives of Lincoln and Douglass.

Oakes’s purpose here is not to write a dual biography, nor is it to argue that these two men were unique in their views. Rather, he has produced an exploration of how the two men of different backgrounds, public roles, and philosophies came to appreciate the power and purpose in each other’s antislavery ideas. In accomplishing this end, Oakes covers much familiar ground, but in doing so he gives readers a concise study of the intellectual development of Lincoln and Douglass, one that contains the kind of broader insights about the nature of nineteenth-century reform and anti-slavery politics that an author could only produce by juxtaposing the lives of these two extraordinary individuals.

Oakes’s great success is to be able to tell the story of how these two men grew into friends despite their very real differences in beliefs, style, and tactics. More than a mutual tolerance of or an accommodation with each other’s personal views developed over time. Rather, what Oakes shows is that both men were sufficiently wise, thoughtful, and observant to evolve and grow intellectually closer to one another as they both tried to make sense of how they should and could end slavery within the context of the Civil War. Lincoln had farther to go before he could even approach Douglass’s views about the connections between racial prejudice and the slavery debate. However, Lincoln had less ground to travel to meet Douglass on the point of emancipation, given the politician’s long hatred of the institution. Douglass in the meantime came to understand the importance of the complex politics involved in accomplishing anything worthwhile in a society with pluralistic views.

On the surface, Lincoln and Douglass were obviously men of very different temperament. As Oakes points out, Douglass was a man who “had the blustery, oversize persona of a nineteenth-century Romantic.” Deep-voiced, animated, passionate, he seduced his listeners with his appearance and his “verbal pyrotechnics.” Lincoln, on the other hand, “was the cautious grandchild of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.” Not much to look at, “his voice high-pitched” but audible to a crowd, he used his skill as a lawyer to reason with his listeners. His rhetorical flourishes consisted of recounting down-home stories combined with “self-deprecating humor” (p. 90).

These unique styles shaped how the two men argued similar points, because even during the 1850s they shared some common ground. Just imagine Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech of 1858. The future president paraphrased words recorded in Matthew’s gospel to make the point...