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Frederick Douglass and Lincoln
Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln were the two most prominent American public figures associated with the end of slavery during the American Civil War. Douglass, an escaped slave turned abolitionist orator, writer, and publisher, was at times one of Lincoln's sharpest critics and at other times one of his most prominent defenders. The two men met in person three times at the White House between 1863 and 1865, an unusual degree of access for a black American to a sitting president at that time. Historians and commentators differ over how to characterize the relationship as a whole-whether it is best understood as a friendship, a working political alliance, a mentor-critic dynamic, or some combination-and over how to reconcile Douglass's sharply contrasting public statements about Lincoln before and after the president's assassination. See frederick-douglass-lincoln-history for a fuller historical account.
Current state of knowledge
The basic chronology of the relationship is not disputed among historians. Douglass initially supported Lincoln's 1860 candidacy as the most antislavery of the major candidates, though he was unenthusiastic about the Republican Party's platform, which did not call for abolition. During the first two years of the war, Douglass published repeated criticism of Lincoln for what he regarded as excessive caution on emancipation and for the unequal treatment of black soldiers. Douglass's tone shifted after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on 1 January 1863, after which he became an active recruiter of black troops for the Union Army, including his own sons.
The two men met face to face three times. The first meeting, on 10 August 1863, was initiated by Douglass, who came to the White House-reportedly without a prior appointment-to press Lincoln on unequal pay and treatment for black soldiers and on retaliation for the Confederate mistreatment of captured black troops.1) The second meeting, in August 1864, was initiated by Lincoln, who sought Douglass's advice on contingency plans to help enslaved people reach Union lines should Lincoln lose his bid for re-election.2) The third meeting took place on the day of Lincoln's second inauguration, 4 March 1865. Douglass later wrote that he felt he had been received by Lincoln “as a man among men,” and credited the president with treating him with a degree of personal respect he had not generally received even from white abolitionists.3)
Douglass's retrospective public statements about Lincoln changed markedly over time. In a eulogy delivered shortly after the assassination in 1865, Douglass called Lincoln “emphatically the black man's president: the first to show any respect for their rights as men.”4) Eleven years later, delivering the keynote oration at the unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument in Washington, D.C., on 14 April 1876, Douglass described Lincoln instead as “preeminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men,” adding that Lincoln “was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model.”5) In the same speech, however, Douglass went on to argue that Lincoln's gradualism had been the most effective available strategy for ending slavery without losing the war, and he urged the freedmen in his audience to build monuments to Lincoln “of the most costly material.” Scholars disagree over how to weigh the 1865 and 1876 statements against each other; this disagreement is treated at greater length in frederick-douglass-lincoln-1865-1876-statements-debate.
Viewpoints
- Friendship and mutual respect: Holds that, whatever Douglass's earlier criticism, the relationship by 1863-65 had become a genuine personal friendship grounded in mutual respect, evidenced by Lincoln's informal manner with Douglass, by Mary Todd Lincoln's gift to Douglass of Lincoln's walking stick after the assassination, and by Douglass's own later recollections of being treated as an equal. See frederick-douglass-lincoln-friendship-viewpoint.
- Working political alliance, not friendship: Holds that “friendship” overstates an relationship that was, in substance, a pragmatic and unequal political alliance between a sitting president and an outside pressure-group leader whose access served each man's distinct political purposes. See frederick-douglass-lincoln-political-alliance-viewpoint.
- Douglass as Lincoln's conscience: Holds that Douglass's chief historical role was to publicly pressure Lincoln from outside government, and that this pressure was a necessary-though not sufficient-condition for Lincoln's eventual moves toward emancipation and black enlistment. See frederick-douglass-lincoln-conscience-viewpoint.
- Lincoln as constrained statesman: Holds that Lincoln's caution reflected a realistic assessment of what the Union's political coalition would bear, and that his sequencing-preserving the Union first, then moving against slavery-was the condition for emancipation succeeding at all rather than evidence of indifference to it. See frederick-douglass-lincoln-constrained-statesman-viewpoint.
- Continuity-of-critique view: Holds that Douglass's 1876 “white man's president” remarks were not a reversal but a continuation of the same abolitionist critique he had voiced throughout the war, and that the 1865 eulogy is the outlier statement, delivered amid the shock of assassination. See frederick-douglass-lincoln-continuity-critique-viewpoint.
- Reversal-and-disillusionment view: Holds that Douglass's assessment of Lincoln genuinely soured between 1865 and 1876, reflecting Douglass's broader disillusionment with the retreat of Reconstruction-era gains for black Americans, and that the 1876 speech should be read as Douglass's more considered final judgment. See frederick-douglass-lincoln-disillusionment-viewpoint.
Controversies
- The Freedmen's Monument (Emancipation Memorial) in Washington, D.C.'s Lincoln Park, dedicated in the 1876 speech in which Douglass called Lincoln “the white man's President,” has itself been the subject of recurring public dispute over its composition-depicting a kneeling formerly enslaved man before a standing Lincoln-including renewed calls for its removal during protests in 2020. See frederick-douglass-lincoln-freedmens-monument-controversy.