Content area
Full Text
There are traditional approaches by which students can learn about the issues of slavery and Black troops in the Civil War or the personages of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Pitfalls can occur, however, if we do not delve deeper into specific actions, primary sources, and rhetoric, such as our "revisionist" tendency to condemn Lincoln as "not really freeing any slaves" with the Emancipation Proclamation. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass was Lincoln's outspoken critic until the Emancipation Proclamation, but then understood that Lincoln's efforts were calculated and prudent within the political and social context of the times.
Another pitfall would be to assume that these two men were friends in common cause all along. In reality, Douglass and Lincoln met only three times, with the first meeting on August 10, 1863, more than 28 months into the Civil War and eight months after the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet, they developed parallel and complementary goals and strategies to end slavery, to enable Black men to serve in the Union army, and to protect Black servicemen's rights and lives. At their second meeting a year later, on August 25, 1864, Lincoln asked Douglass to undertake covert efforts to free slaves if Lincoln lost reelection. Their third and final meeting was as friends, at the reception after Lincoln's second inauguration, on March 4, 1865, just six weeks before Lincoln's assassination.
Before the Emancipation Proclamation and before these two great men met, their relationship was a remote one: Lincoln campaigned for office or made presidential policy statements while Douglass at times critiqued both with biting rhetoric. Meanwhile, Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas falsely insinuated that the two men were intimate friends, co-conspirators against slavery, and in favor of racial mixing. Lincoln's positions against slavery and for equality grew as his understanding of these issues grew. In the words of Henry Louis Gates, "We can do Lincoln no greater service than to walk that path with him, and we can do him no greater disservice than to whitewash it, seeking to give ourselves an odd form of comfort by pretending that he was even one whit less complicated than he actually was."1 When evaluating Lincoln's moral growth in all its complexity, we must view that growth in relation to Frederick Douglass's moral appeals to...