I actually really like that quote. It’s a great Take That to racist. Using their own flawed logic against them. Lincoln probably was a racist by our standard, in the same way his knowledge of origin of life would be completely wrong. But Douglas himself stated that no other man has treated him with as much dignity. It seems he was very good at treating people as people.
“Servants” is also correct. The persons at issue were enslaved servants. The fact that they were enslaved doesn’t obliterate their occupation.
Another fact to bear in mind about Lincoln is that by April of 1865, the month he was assassinated, he was publicly raising the idea of letting certain educated blacks vote. Now, here again, it is easy to say, with our 21st-century viewpoint, that requiring blacks to be educated before they can vote, but not whites, is fundamentally racist.
Here again, it is important to look at the historical context. In April of 1865, the Dred Scott decision by the SCOTUS was still in force, and it declared that blacks were so inferior to whites that they had “no rights which a white man is bound to respect.” The court had essentially said that even blacks that were five or ten generations born in America could never be American citizens.
So once again, we have Lincoln settling for what he CAN accomplish, realizing that politics is the art of the possible. If he can get the ultra-racist whites to accept that educated blacks can vote, it is a start.
By the way, one of the people listening to this speech in April 1865 was John Wilkes Booth, who then said: “He’s talking about nigger suffrage. I’m going to take him out!”
So in fact, Lincoln was quite literally a martyr to the cause of black voting rights. Remember that.
Everyone in the past was racist and misogynistic. Future people will think the same of us.
I don’t know if wondering if white and black people can get along is racist, though. It’s still an open question without a lot of encouraging results. Check again in another hundred years maybe.
We are, after all, talking about people who lived in an era when genetics, heredity, and nature and measurement of intelligence and other things were basically unknown to everyone. “The Origin of Species” was published about a year before Lincoln was elected President; the concept of genetics did not really exist in any sensible form.
To people in 1861, “equality” was not conceptually the same as it is to use today. Today, the general assumption about human worth is that all people are inherently worthy on both a moral and, with regards to some differences, scientific level. People are not different according to race, ethnicity or whatever; they are born the same, and such differences as may exist in their physical or mental capabilities are random chance disconnected from race. Equality is the default assumption, always, until an individual does something to merit otherwise, such as commit a crime.
To an American in 1860, equality as a social concept was primarily a legal concept. “Equality” meant that a person should be treated the same in terms of laws and rules. When a person advocated for equality between blacks and whites, what he or she was saying was that they should be (insofar as that person was comfortable with the idea) LEGALLY the same. The idea that blacks and whites must, therefore, be equal in terms of a measure of genetic or physiological worth would have been incomprehensible to a person of the time, because they had no comprehension of the science needed to understand such things. It would have been like you trying to explain to us that all people are the same in terms of their ability to control the Force, and that people’s inherent equality of Force control was the most important thing about social justice, except none of us had ever seen Star Wars and had no goddamned idea what you were talking about.
A white person in America in 1860 might never have encountered a black person who could demonstrate higher education and intelligence, those things being actively denied to them; it’s why Frederick Douglass has such a momentous impact on white people, because he was so obviously, stunningly intelligent. People then had no particular reason to think everyone was naturally equal. There was no scientific basis for thinking that. But the idea of LEGAL equality was, to a lot of Americans, a complete trump card; as the Lincoln quote shows, that some men could look different or be smarter was irrelevant as to whether the law should treat them the same.
Of course, abolitionism had lots of different angles - it was a very strongly religious movement, for one.
Also the idea of returning blacks to Africa wasn’t all that radical. This was the idea behind the founding of the state of Liberia. Probably the strongest argument against it was on practical grounds. There was simply no feasible way to export 4.4 million blacks anywhere even if everyone agreed it was a good idea.
Lincoln would have known that it was unfeasible, merely because of the resources involved in moving 4.4 million people on ships and settling them on another continent. Or else someone on his staff or the navy could have crunched the numbers for him. Which convinces me more than ever that he was not one bit serious about it. What it DID accomplish was:
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It allowed him to be the first President to invite black leaders to the White House for consultation on public policy. The importance of this move is lost on us today, but it was an Earth-shifting proposition in 1862. The sight of educated black men making intelligent comments to the President must really have rocked the socks off some people.
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It put out the message that colonization was an option (even though it really wasn’t) a few weeks before the Emancipation Proclamation, thus easing a lot of white fears.
Well played Mr. Lincoln!
Lincoln saw the immorality of slavery and knew that it had to end. He also knew that slavery would destroy this country if it did not end. Tough situation to be in and I doubt anyone was going to handle it any better. Hindsight is reputed to be 20/20, but apparently after 150 years people’s vision blurs.
*One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.*
I teach university-level American history, and I can tell you that basically every scholarly history work about slavery produced in the past 30 years or so is pretty clear that racial prejudice was widespread and often virulent in the North. And this scholarly understanding has filtered down to the popular books and the textbooks. For example, the textbook i used last semester, which is one of the most popular college-level textbooks in the country, makes very clear that most Northerners were not abolitionists, and that most also had very little interest in ideas of racial equality. The book also talks about the way that whites in many Northern towns and cities conducted campaigns of violence and intimidation against blacks and against white abolitionists.
In fact, one of the key tasks of history textbooks and good history teachers is to make clear to the students that the issue of slavery and the Civil War is NOT a simplistic dichotomy of Southern racists versus Northern abolitionists. David Wilmot, a Pennsylvania Democrat who proposed in 1846 that slavery be banned in any territory taken from Mexico in the US-Mexican War, made clear that he wasn’t doing this for the good of the slaves, or even to end Southern slavery, but because he wanted to preserve the available land in the United States for free white labor. All of this is part of any decent course in American history, and any decent book on the subject of slavery.
On the subject of the OP’s question, one of the most influential scholarly works on this issue is an article by the well-known historian George M. Fredrickson, which appeared in the Journal of Southern History, vol. 41, no. 1 (February 1975), and was entitled “A Man but Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality.” If you have JSTOR access, you can view the article [here](A Man but Not a Brother:
Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality), and someone has also uploaded a copy to Scribd.
The title of the article refers to Fredrickson’s argument about Lincoln’s racial ideology. Unlike the abolitionists, whose literature often referred to the slaves as “A man and a brother,” Lincoln’s views held that blacks, as “men,” deserved the same legal and Constitutional rights as everyone else, but that they could also be denied certain privileges of citizenship, and that whites should not (and could not) be compelled to treat blacks as full social and political equals.
Lincolns saw blacks as rational human beings deserving of the rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence, and established in the Constitution, and he also didn’t have much time for arguments about innate racial inferiority, but he didn’t advocate full social and political equality, and he also understood (as others have pointed out) that even if he did believe such things, racial equality would be impossible in a society like the United States. He believed that blacks should exercise their rights and freedoms in their own nation, although he recognized the practical impossibility of deporting over 4 million people.