Status
Collection
Publication
Description
Explores how the differing experiences and viewpoints of two Presidents shaped slavery and race relations in America for more than a century. "The acclaimed biographer Fred Kaplan returns with a controversial exploration of how Abraham Lincoln's and John Quincy Adams' experiences with slavery and race shaped their differing viewpoints, providing perceptive insights into these two great presidents and a revealing perspective on race relations in modern America. Though the Emancipation Proclamation, limited as it was, ultimately defined his presidency, Lincoln was a man shaped by the values of the white America into which he was born. While he viewed slavery as a moral crime abhorrent to American principles, he disapproved of antislavery activists. Until the last year of his life, he advocated "voluntary deportation," concerned that free blacks in a white society would result in centuries of conflict. In 1861, he reluctantly took the nation to war to save it. While this devastating struggle would preserve the Union, it would also abolish slavery--creating the biracial democracy Lincoln feared. Years earlier, John Quincy Adams had become convinced that slavery would eventually destroy the Union. Only through civil war, sparked by a slave insurrection or secession, would slavery end and the Union be preserved. Deeply sympathetic to abolitionists and abolitionism, Adams believed that a multiracial America was inevitable. [This book], a frank look at Lincoln, "warts and all," including his limitations as a wartime leader, provides an in-depth portrait of how these two presidents came to see the issues of slavery and race, and how that understanding shaped their perspectives. Its supporting cast of characters is colorful, from the obscure to the famous: Dorcas Allen, Moses Parsons, Usher F. Linder, Elijah Lovejoy, William Channing, Wendell Phillips, Rufus King, Hannibal Hamlin, Andrew Johnson, Abigail Adams, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and Frederick Douglass, among scores of significant others. In a far-reaching historical narrative, Kaplan offers a nuanced appreciation of both these great men--Lincoln as an antislavery moralist who believed in an exclusively white America, and Adams as an antislavery activist who had no doubt that the United States would become a multiracial nation--and the events that have characterized race relations in America for more than a century, a legacy that continues to haunt us all."--Jacket.… (more)
User reviews
John Quincy Adams, on the other hand, had remarkably progressive opinions on the issues of slavery and (de)segregation. He was outspoken and passionate, and today would be considered an activist. Yet our textbooks and history lessons largely leave out Adams while putting Lincoln on a pedestal, simply because Lincoln happened to be president when the country was forced to decide between a united nation and slavery.
Fred Kaplan lays the truth out for us in this exceptionally researched book. The author's focus is not on the war itself, but on the people and politics leading up to and surrounding it. We see the nation and its people as they really were, absent the shiny polish and pedestals we tend to give our historical heroes.
Kaplan's writing is an intelligent narrative without the academic pretense. This is an in-depth but easy book to read.
Kaplan gives us a gift here by giving us the truth. We need to know and to acknowledge the truth of where we've been if we ever hope to create a better future.
*I received an advance copy from the publisher, via Amazon Vine, in exchange for my honest review.*
What inevitably emerges, however, are revisionist assessments of a fuller nature that draw attention to the flaws and failures of our heroes, their misguided thinking and injurious decisions. One only needs to consider the plethora of well-researched and well-reasoned alternative views on Columbus, Jefferson, Jackson, Grant, both Roosevelt's and others to accept the legitimacy of less adulatory perspectives on these significant personages. This is a legitimate function of historians and a necessary element of historiography.
It is appropriate to apply this fuller view to Lincoln's views on abolitionism and race relations in America. Lincoln is perhaps the most mythologized of the pantheon of America's heroes, not undeservedly so. The encomiums Lincoln has received are utterly due him. His determination to preserve the union, his boldness in emancipating the slaves, his views on reuniting the nation, and his adroitness in balancing sharply opposing policy demands from allies and foes are among his accomplishments we admire still today.
This excellent book -- Lincoln and the Abolitionists: John Quincy Adams, Slavery, and the Civil War -- casts a cogent light on aspects of Lincoln's thinking on race relations in America that in modern times we find not comforting. Using John Quincy Adams to contrast with Lincoln is an effective way to highlight the quite different views of the two leaders. Lincoln and Adams were both anti-slavery, but while Lincoln was morally opposed to slavery, he was decidedly not an abolitionist. In his brief Congressional service, Lincoln and Adams's views coincided in opposition to the Mexican War and on abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, but Lincoln was nowhere as activist as compared to Adams.
As his political ambitions matured, Lincoln adamantly opposed the spread of slavery beyond where it existed. He was greatly alarmed that the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Supreme Court's infamous Dred Scott decision would put at risk the containment of slavery. Lincoln held that slavery's westward expansion would imperil the perpetuation of the union. While stalwart on this position, Lincoln took great pains to distance himself from abolitionism. (It is probably underappreciated today how deeply unpopular in all sections was abolitionism, even among many who considered themselves anti-slavery.) He hoped that, left alone where it already existed, slavery would gradually extinguish, either through proactive compensation schemes or by its inevitable economic non viability. Lincoln was a constitutionalist who held that, even though slavery was antithetical with the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, it was constitutionally sanctioned.
Even though Lincoln famously said he would preserve slavery if it meant preserving the union, his handling of the four union slave states is instructive to apprehending his cautious and evolving views. He made no effort to eliminate slavery there, even exempting them from the edicts of the Emancipation Proclamation. His ham-handed overtures to elicit their interest in compensated emancipation were resoundingly rebuffed. His efforts foretold his growing awareness that the continued presence of slavery would be incompatible in a reunited union after the war.
Lincoln's moral distaste of slavery, and his determination that the nation should be free of it, should not be conflated to mean that he was not a racist. He frequently remarked on the social incompatibility of the races. Freedom from the bonds of slavery did not, in his view, imply political rights for blacks; only very late did he hint at the possibility of some limited access to the polls for black veterans or those of demonstrable intelligence. Lincoln adhered to the colonization movement, thinking that voluntary repatriation to Africa or Central America could achieve an all-white America. In 1862, he met with black leaders in the White House urging them to promote colonization; a proposal they found insulting. The 13th Amendment was necessary to constitutionally bar slavery, but this did not include civil rights for freedmen. (It is interesting to speculate how Lincoln would have dealt with the Radicals in his second term. One suspects he would not have wished to go as far as they did.)
Lincoln's views on the inequality of the races raise uneasy questions as we think about his legacy. When his overt racism is brought up in dinner party conversation, they response of others is often, "But, remember such was largely the prevailing sentiment of the era", as if this somehow mitigates its immorality. One must also remember that this unalloyed racism promoted the oppression of African-Americans for a century after the Civil War. And it lingers even to today. The present controversy about Civil War monuments honoring Confederate soldiers strongly suggests that many people are, at the least, indifferent to the fact that these honorees fought to sustain a morally heinous practice (and that the statues were plainly intended to reinforce the notion of that white supremacy is the norm in America.) The rejoinder that such public works are merely meant to honor soldierly courage and bravery begs the question. Would not those who hold this view be outraged to see memorials in German village squares or campuses to honor the "courageous and brave" soldiers who fought for Nazi Germany?