Lincoln on Race & Slavery

Lincoln on Race & Slavery

He was the Great Emancipator. Yet he enjoyed minstrel shows and “darky” jokes, used the “n-word” well into his presidency, harbored doubts about Negroes’ intellectual capacity, and favored permanent racial segregation and even the colonization of freed slaves to Africa, the Caribbean or South America. In Lincoln on Race & Slavery, renowned Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has assembled a complete collection of Abraham Lincoln’s writings on race and slavery, exposing a complex tangle of principles and prejudices that influenced the evolution of Lincoln’s thinking on the great questions that would define him forever.

Lincoln’s writings reveal that he long regarded slavery, race and colonization as separate issues. He detested slavery, and was alarmed when the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 threatened to extend slavery into new territories, and the 1857 Dred Scott decision threatened to extend it nationwide. Yet even as he asserted the immorality of slavery and the “equality” of all men in his Springfield, Illinois speech of 1857, he also referred to the “natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races,” and argued that the separation of the races, ideally through colonization, was the “only perfect preventative” to their amalgamation.

And despite his antipathy toward slavery, Lincoln stated categorically in his famous “House Divided” speech of 1858 that he had no intention of interfering with slavery in the Southern states, a position he reaffirmed in his first inaugural address. For Lincoln, preserving the Union was paramount: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that,” Lincoln wrote in 1862.

Yet as the necessities of war forced Lincoln toward emancipation and the recruitment of blacks into the army, the stage was set for what Gates calls a “sea change” in Lincoln’s attitude toward the “concept of the Negro,” brought about in large part by the valor and heroism of black soldiers in combat.

Lincoln on Race & Slavery includes excerpts from private letters, speeches, and official documents arranged chronologically from the late 1830s to the 1860s, an appendix of Lincoln’s race jokes, and a brilliant, provocative introduction by Gates. The result is an unvarnished look at an American icon whose fundamental sense of fairness and justice, politician’s instinct for compromise, and willingness to reexamine his own prejudices ultimately enabled him to save the Union he loved while establishing once and for all that Union’s fundamental commitment to the liberty of all men.

Hardcover: 416 pages

Publisher: Princeton University Press ( February 10, 2009 )

Item #: 65-3661

ISBN: 9780691142340

Product Dimensions: 6.0 x 9.0 x 0.0 inches

Product Weight: 26.0 ounces