Lincoln, Abraham

By: Paul Finkelman, Vickey Kalambakal

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Lincoln, Abraham

Sex:  Male

Born:  Hardin County, Kentucky, United States, Log cabin
12 February 1809

Died:  Washington, District of Columbia, United States
15 April 1865

Activity/Profession:  U.S. President

(b. 12 February 1809; d. 15 April 1865),
sixteenth president of the United States.

Abraham Lincoln, self-made and self-educated, remains one of America's best-loved presidents. He rose from obscurity and poverty through his own efforts to become president. His election in 1860 as the first president dedicated to ending the spread of slavery to new states led to the secession of seven slave states. His refusal to allow the Union to fall apart led to civil war and to the secession of four more states. During the war Lincoln presided over a revolution in American race relations that ended slavery; allowed for black political and military participation in the affairs of the nation; and, after his assassination, resulted in blacks' gaining full rights as American citizens.

Abraham Lincoln, photographed by Alexander Gardner. On 5 February 1865, Lincoln sat for a series of portraits at Gardner's studio. While Gardner was processing this image, the glass negative cracked, and he destroyed it after making just one print. When Lincoln was assassinated on 15 April 1865, this photograph seemed to have been prescient: the crack in the plate was near the spot on his forehead where Booth's bullet struck.

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, NY

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Early Years

Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Kentucky, the son of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, both of whom were illiterate. In 1816 the family moved to Indiana; two years later his mother died. A year later, in December 1819, Thomas Lincoln married Sarah Bush Johnston, who was literate. Lincoln was never close to his father but maintained a loving relationship with his stepmother, who encouraged his intellectual curiosity and made sure he learned to read and write. Lincoln spent only a few months in school, but Sarah Lincoln, neighbors, and relatives helped him learn reading and arithmetic and loaned him books.

In 1828 the nineteen-year-old Lincoln, by this time well over six feet tall and enormously strong, was hired to ride a flatboat loaded with food south to New Orleans, where the goods would be sold. On this and a subsequent trip three years later, Lincoln encountered plantations and the excitement of a large city—and he also saw African Americans, slavery, and slave markets for the first time. Lincoln would later claim that from this moment on he hated slavery.

Politics and Law—and the Issue of Slavery

After the family moved to Illinois during the winter of 1830, Lincoln left his father's home for good. He settled in New Salem, Illinois, where he worked as a store clerk, postmaster, and surveyor. In 1832 he served in the militia during the Black Hawk War and was elected captain by his fellow soldiers. Later that year he ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature; in 1834, however, he won a seat, and he was reelected in 1836, 1838, and 1840. During this period Lincoln had begun to study law, and in 1836 he was admitted to the bar. He soon became a leader of the Whigs in the state legislature. He left the legislature in 1841 to pursue a legal career and in 1842 married Mary Todd, who came from a wealthy and politically powerful Kentucky family.

The first clear indication of Lincoln's attitude toward slavery occurred in 1837, when at age twenty-eight he was among the few members of the Illinois legislature to vote against a resolution declaring the right to own slaves “sacred to the slaveholding States.” Not only did Lincoln vote against this resolution, he also joined another legislator in asserting slavery to be “founded on both injustice and bad policy.” Significantly, Lincoln framed this protest in constitutional and legal terms. While this did not put Lincoln on the cutting edge of antislavery efforts—he also asserted that “the promulgation of abolitionist doctrines tends to increase rather than to abate its [slavery's] evils”—for a young Illinois politician this was a radical stance.

In the next decade, as a lawyer Lincoln was involved with slavery in at least seventeen cases, mostly representing whites. It is hard to characterize his practice as being either proslavery or antislavery; the best characterization may be that he was an attorney accepting clients. Thus between 1838 and 1847, when he left for Washington to serve a single term in Congress, Lincoln represented slave owners, opponents of slavery, and free blacks. In 1841, for example, Lincoln won the case of Bailey v. Cromwell before the Illinois Supreme Court. Here the court, relying on its own precedents, accepted Lincoln's arguments that a young black woman, who had been an indentured servant, could not be held as a slave in the state and that at age twenty-one she had the legal right to claim her freedom. On the other hand, in 1847 he unsuccessfully represented a Kentucky slave owner, Robert Mateson, in a suit to recover five slaves he claimed were fugitives. Some scholars have argued that Lincoln agreed to represent Mateson before he fully understood the facts of the case and that his arguments were uncharacteristically weak, suggesting that his heart was not in the case. The court ruled that the mother and her four children were not fugitives but had been brought into the state by their master and were thus free. Lincoln would never again represent a slave owner in any case.

In 1846 Lincoln won a seat in Congress, serving from 1847 to 1849. While there, he opposed the MexicanAmerican War. He challenged the Polk administration's claim that the war had been started by Mexico, and on 22 December 1847 he introduced the “spot resolutions,” demanding that the administration reveal the spot on American soil where U.S. soldiers had died at the hands of Mexicans. (The implication was that the war had begun when American soldiers illegally crossed into Mexico and were killed there.) On a number of occasions Lincoln voted for the Wilmot Proviso to ban slavery in the territories acquired from Mexico. He also proposed a bill for compensated emancipation in the nation's capital, although it never went to the floor for a vote. Lincoln did not seek reelection in 1848, since the Whig Party had agreed to a rotation of officeholders. He was disappointed when the successful Whig candidate for the presidency, Zachary Taylor, did not appoint him to any patronage position.

At this point Lincoln retired from politics and returned to Illinois, to Springfield, where he developed a highly successful and lucrative legal practice with a new partner, William Herndon. After he returned from Washington, Lincoln's practice changed in many respects, including his slavery caseload. He no longer defended the interests of masters in fugitive slave cases; rather, the firm of Lincoln and Herndon took a more active role in defending fugitive slaves and free blacks. Between 1849 and 1860 the firm represented free blacks at least nine times and fugitive slaves at least twice; at no point did either man represent slave owners in any case involving slavery.

During this period Lincoln also had one steady black client: William Florville, a barber who had acquired much real estate and was well known in Bloomington, Illinois, as “Billy the Barber.” Lincoln represented Florville at least four times before being elected president. This relationship was significant because Lincoln here represented a hard-working, upwardly mobile midwesterner—not unlike himself, except that Florville was black. The relationship did not turn Lincoln into a racial egalitarian or even an abolitionist; Lincoln still harbored doubts about black equality and favored colonization of blacks somewhere outside the United States. His contracts with Florville and other African Americans, however, probably altered his views about blacks. He knew, from first-hand experience, that some blacks, like Florville, were equal to whites.

Stephen A. Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1854 the Democratic senator from Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas, introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed that portion of the Missouri Compromise which had banned slavery from most of the western territories. To Lincoln this was a betrayal of the fundamental principles of American political culture. It raised his “ire,” as he put it, more than anything else ever had. He now became active in politics again, winning a seat in the state legislature and unsuccessfully seeking a seat in the U.S. Senate. He also gave scores of speeches attacking Douglas, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and slavery. In an important speech in Peoria, Illinois, in 1854 he called slavery a “monstrous injustice,” which undermined republican principles and betrayed the Declaration of Independence.

In 1856 he helped organize the new Republican Party in his state, and in 1858 he ran for the Senate as a Republican, against Douglas. Although Lincoln lost this race, his performance in a series of public debates with Douglass gained Lincoln the national attention that would make him a viable presidential candidate in 1860. In the debates Douglas inaccurately portrayed Lincoln and the Republicans as radical abolitionists. Containing slavery and not allowing it to spread were the major issues animating the new party, but the Republicans would not move against slavery in the states where it legally existed. In the eyes of true abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, the party was accommodating and far too timid in its approach to slavery.

On another level, however, in his debates with Douglas, Lincoln showed an understanding of race and a desire for racial fairness that few other American politicians had. When Douglas tried to play the “race card” in the debates, Lincoln defended the fundamental rights of blacks, even though he knew that such a stance was unpopular with many Illinois voters. Lincoln asserted that

"there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence—the right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas that he is not my equal in many respects, certainly not in color—perhaps not in intellectual and moral endowments; but in the right to eat the bread without leave of anybody else which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man."

(Basler, vol. 3, p. 249)

Lincoln emerged as the most effective critic of the Kansas-Nebraksa Act, the proslavery Democratic Party, and the Dred Scott decision. In 1860 this earned him the Republican presidential nomination. During the campaign Lincoln attempted to reassure the South that he had no interest in touching slavery where it existed. But he was also firm that he would oppose the spread of slavery to the territories or the admission of any new slave states.

Presidency and Civil War

In a four-way race Lincoln won a plurality of the popular vote and an overwhelming majority of the electoral vote, carrying all the free states except New Jersey, which he split with Stephen A. Douglas, the candidate of the regular Democratic Party. Immediately after his election a number of southern states took steps to leave the Union. South Carolina declared its secession in December 1860; by the time Lincoln was inaugurated, six other states from the Deep South—Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas—had joined South Carolina to form the Confederate States of America. At his inauguration Lincoln urged these states to return to the Union, reminding them that he had no power and no inclination to interfere with slavery where it existed. The very nature of this reminder, however, underscored that Lincoln did have the power and the inclination to interfere with slavery in the territories.

When Lincoln refused to evacuate Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, Confederate forces bombarded the fort, and the Civil War began. When it did, four more slave states—Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas—left the Union. As the war raged, abolitionists and politicians urged Lincoln to allow African Americans to enlist in the army. He refused, assuming that white soldiers would refuse to fight alongside blacks. Lincoln also faced opposition to black enlistment from many military leaders, who insisted that blacks would not make good soldiers. In addition, Lincoln refused to take any steps to end slavery, fearing that if he did so, the four loyal slave states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—would secede. When a group of ministers urged him to free the slaves, saying he would then have God on his side, Lincoln allegedly responded: “I would like to have God on my side, but I need Kentucky.”

Despite his public position, Lincoln quickly understood that the war was about slavery and that victory for the Union would destroy slavery. He urged members of Congress from the loyal slave states to push for a gradual end to slavery in their states. He signed legislation ending slavery in the territories and the District of Columbia. In the summer of 1862 Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation but decided to hold off on announcing his plans until after the Union army had won a substantial victory. Otherwise, he feared that Emancipation would be seen as move of desperation. In a letter to the New York Tribune that summer he claimed that his goal was to preserve the Union and that he would do this whether he had to free all the slaves, some of the slaves, or no slaves at all. But at the time he wrote this letter he had already written the proclamation and was moving to free as many slaves as he could. That summer he also received a delegation of African American leaders at the White House—a historic first—and discussed with them the idea of colonization, perhaps to a Central American location. The suggestion was met with scorn by influential men such as Frederick Douglass and others writing editorials. At the time, no one knew that Lincoln had already decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation when the moment was right.

Whether Lincoln truly supported colonization is unclear. The bill to end slavery in the District of Columbia provided money for the transportation of those former slaves who wanted to leave, but none did, and the administration never pushed them to do so. As with so much else in his career, Lincoln may have been taking a conservative position on black expatriation to prepare the nation for Emancipation. In September he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and on 1 January 1863 he issued the proclamation itself. The war for the Union was now a war for freedom.

Frederick Douglass and Lincoln

In 1860 Frederick Douglass voted for Lincoln, as did almost all blacks who could and did vote. Black abolitionist supporters of William Lloyd Garrison did not vote, but Douglass had long ago abandoned the Garrisonians, who refused to participate in politics. Lincoln was far from perfect in Douglass's eyes: he said some racist things, he did not support black suffrage, and he was no abolitionist. But he was the first serious presidential candidate to challenge slavery and to campaign against its spread. During the early part of the war blacks condemned Lincoln for not moving fast enough on Emancipation and black enlistment. But it was also clear that victory for the Union would either destroy slavery or cripple it. Most blacks understood this.

Frederick Douglass first met with Lincoln in August 1863; he went to urge the president to recruit more black troops for the Union army and to offer them equal pay and promotion along the same lines as that of white soldiers. Lincoln promised parity eventually, but not in the immediate future. African American soldiers were being accepted into the army, but they were being paid as laborers, not as soldiers. Even though Lincoln did not agree with Douglass on all points, Douglass was impressed with Lincoln's integrity and his sincerity.

In December 1863 Douglass spoke at the thirtieth anniversary meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, where he excoriated the Democratic Party for its proslavery position. He said the party “is for war for slavery; it is for peace for slavery; it is for habeas corpus for slavery; it is against the habeas corpus for slavery.” He referred to the Republicans, Unionists, and Loyalists as “our friends,” even while expressing his annoyance that they had not embraced the abolitionist cause from the beginning of the war. He then noted that before the war began he could not travel to Washington, for fear of being kidnapped. But now he could—and he told his fellow abolitionists of his trip to Washington, and of his meeting in August with the president:

"I have been to Washington to see the President; and as you were not there, perhaps you may like to know how the President of the United States received a black man at the White House. I will tell you how he received me—just as you have seen one gentleman receive another!; with a hand and a voice well-balanced between kind cordiality and respectful reserve. I will tell you I felt big there. Let me tell you how I got to know him; because everybody can't get to him. … When I went in, the President was sitting in his usual position, I was told, with his feet in different parts of the room, taking it easy. … As I came in and approached him the President began to rise, and he continued to rise until he stood over me; and he reached out his hand and said, “Mr. Douglass, I know you; I have read about you, and Mr. Seward has told me about you.”"

(Blassingame et al., eds., series 1, vol. 3, p. 606) Douglass told this audience of abolitionists that Lincoln was “an honest man” and that he had “never met with a man, who, on the first blush, impressed me more entirely with his sincerity, with his devotion to his country, and with his determination to save it at all hazards.” When he left the president, Douglass averred:

"I came to the conclusion that Abraham Lincoln will not go down to posterity as Abraham the Great, or as Abraham the Wise, or as Abraham the Eloquent, although he is all three, wise, great, and eloquent, he will go down to posterity, if the country is saved, as Honest Abraham."

(Blassingame et al., eds., p. 608)

Although Douglass praised Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, which made the eradication of slavery a part of the war, he continued to voice criticism of other policies. When he met with Lincoln in 1864, Douglass was asked his opinion, advice, and help on immediate issues facing the president and the country; in 1864 he enthusiastically campaigned for Lincoln's reelection. In a speech in Rochester, New York, on 13 November 1864, he called Lincoln's victory “an endorsement, full and complete, of all the leading measures inaugurated by the present Administration, looking to the final extirpation of slavery from our land.” Douglass noted the mutual respect in which both men held each other in The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass; Lincoln called Douglass “one of the most meritorious men in America.” When Douglass, an invited guest, was stopped by guards at the White House at the party to celebrate Lincoln's second inauguration, Lincoln greeted him with the words, “Here comes my friend Douglass.”

Lincoln had made the Thirteenth Amendment, which would abolish slavery, a part of the Republican platform in 1864; it was passed by Congress early in 1865. In April, Lincoln visited Richmond, Virginia, to view the ravages of war in what had been the capital city of the Confederacy. In his last speech he argued for black suffrage. Within a few days, and after many Union victories, the Confederate states surrendered.

Lincoln in Death: “Honest Abraham”—and a Friend

Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth on 14 April 1865 and died early the next day. The assassination, the first of an American president, plunged the nation into abject mourning. Frederick Douglass spoke at an impromptu gathering at Rochester's city hall when he heard the news. Calling Lincoln a “great and good man,” he “mourned for our noble President.” Once a critic of Lincoln, Douglass had by this time become an admirer.

At the time of his death Lincoln was a hero and friend to millions of African Americans. Other black leaders, like Douglass, had come to admire, respect, and even love Lincoln. They did not always agree with him. But they had also seen a remarkable change in a man who had once thought that blacks were inferior to whites and died believing that they should have the right to vote and that some, like Douglass, were his friends. In 1866 Douglass recalled that it was his “privilege” to know Lincoln. He praised Lincoln's courage, recalling that “not only did he invite a black man to his house, but also invited him to the Soldiers' Home to take tea with him.”

In 1876 Douglass spoke at the dedication of the Freedom Monument in Washington, D.C., on the eleventh anniversary of Lincoln's assassination. There Douglass reminded his audience that Lincoln was not initially a great friend of blacks. “He was preeminently a white man's President,” Douglass noted, and was prepared to defend slavery in the South, just as he was prepared to prevent its spread into the territories. Douglass called blacks the “step-children” of Lincoln. Nevertheless, he declared, “the name of Abraham Lincoln was near and dear to our hearts in the darkest and most perilous hours of the Republic.” Blacks had always had high hopes for Lincoln, Douglass observed. Although “our faith in him was often taxed and strained to the uttermost,” he declared, “it never failed.”

Despite Lincoln's slowness to act and his failure to embrace blacks, Douglass remarked that African Americans took “a comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln” and were able “to make reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position.” Douglass and other blacks understood that “the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.” Thus, in the end, it was “under his wise and beneficent rule, and by measures approved and vigorously pressed by him, we saw … prejudice and proscription … rapidly fading from the face of our whole country.”

Douglass's 1876 speech suggests the complexity of Lincoln in his own lifetime and in the memory of blacks after he died. A product of Kentucky, southern Indiana, and southern Illinois, he came to adulthood in a world in which blacks were without legal rights and in which most whites considered them inferior. Until late in his life he publicly argued that free blacks could never comfortably live in the nation, but he never took any serious steps to support this view. When elected president, he promised to protect slavery where it existed, because the Constitution required him to do so. But at the same time he vowed to end the spread of slavery, and he hoped, as he said in his “House Divided” speech in 1858, to put it “in the course of ultimate extinction.” As a wartime president, he moved cautiously against slavery until the moment arrived when he could be more forceful, and then he moved against it with speed and vigor. Throughout his career he was against political equality for blacks, but at the end of his life he argued for black suffrage.

Most of all, as Douglass and others witnessed, he overcame the racism of the world he grew up in, and the racist social conventions of his time, to treat blacks as equals—inviting them into his home, having tea with them, and greeting them as “my friend.” In return, blacks like Douglass understood that Lincoln, for all his faults, was ultimately their friend.

See also Abolitionism; American Anti-Slavery Society; Civil War; Civil War, Participation and Recruitment of Black Troops in; Colonization; Confederate States of America; Democratic Party; Douglas, Stephen A.; Douglass, Frederick; Dred Scott Case; Election of 1860; Emancipation; Emancipation Proclamation; Garrison, William Lloyd; Garrisonian Abolitionists; Kansas-Nebraska Act; Laws and Legislation; Life and Times of Frederick Douglass; Lincoln, Mary Todd; Mexican-American War; Polk, James K.; Proslavery Thought; Republican Party; Slavery; Slavery and the U.S. Constitution; Thirteenth Amendment; Union Army, African Americans in; Whig Party; and Wilmot Proviso.

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