M A R K S I S M

In “What Shall We Do With the Negro,” Paul D. Escott explores the efforts, or often the lack of effort, of northern and southern governments to confront and address the issue of race, and racial inequality.  Escott expends a great deal of effort to eschew what he sees as the tendency of historians to look at the Civil War era, and Lincoln in particular, through rose-tinted glasses, and attempts to “illuminate attitudes and policies affecting the future status of freed people” in both the North and the South.  Escott argues that any racial “progress” that occurred during the Civil War period (emancipation, for instance) occurred as a result of unanticipated events, namely the war itself, rather than the egalitarian vision of great leaders.  Both northern and southern governments took complex, roundabout routes to dealing with issues of racial equality, and even then they dealt with many other questions before addressing the future of African Americans.

Escott, like others, for Lincoln, emancipation was an unintended consequence of war.  Escott goes further than many though, spotlighting Lincoln’s negative view of African Americans, arguing that Lincoln would have preferred peace and union over an elevation of the status of blacks, and that his priorities in terms of racial equality were far different than those ascribed by popular culture to the “Great Emancipator.”  Even in 1865, when Oakes argues Lincoln had become more radically egalitarian as a result of the war, Escott argues that Lincoln’s expectations for the improvement of the status of free people was modest at best, and only came to the national agenda as a result of the events of the Civil War.

Escott’s ultimate goal seems to be to reconcile celebrations of the Civil War era, and put them more squarely in line with the low points of Jim Crow.  He feels that the pendulum has swung too far in favor of Lincoln, and towards a celebration of the racial progress of the mid-nineteenth century.  He argues that the real story of race in the Civil War-era—where changes in racial policies only occur as reactions to unanticipated events—properly highlights America’s racist past, and is “tragically consistent” with the Jim Crow era.  Escott’s title, a question asked by many Americans during the Civil War period, highlights the fact that many believed African Americans were never equals, and instead were a problem that whites were entitled to deal with as they saw fit.

Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass are arguably two of the most studied historical actors of the mid-nineteenth century, and in The Radical and the Republican James Oakes assesses their antislavery attitudes jointly, providing the reader a greater understanding of both men.  Oakes argues that though both men were marked by skepticism in the early 1850s—Lincoln of the effectiveness of radical abolitionism, Douglass of the depth of Lincoln’s commitment to antislavery—by the late 1850s the positions of the two men came closer together, as two of the most dominating figures championing the cause of antislavery, if still approaching the issue with different means.  While Oakes notes Douglass’s continued skepticism of Lincoln extending into the war years, he argues that the Civil War radicalized Lincoln’s approach to antislavery, and this in turn allowed Douglass to take a more practical, republican approach to antislavery politics.  Even as their actual views and positions edged closer together, “so long as they found it necessary to present themselves as the conservative politician and the radical reformer, the differences between them would seem greater than they actually were” (xx).  Ultimately, by the end of the war, Oakes argues that Lincoln and Douglass both shared a commitment to equal rights for African Americans, making Lincoln’s republicanism seem more radical, and Douglass’s radicalism seem more republican

Part of me questions Oakes assessment of Lincoln’s views on and approach to antislavery as becoming increasingly radicalized during the war years.  To me, he takes a more direct approach to emancipation during the war years not because he has become more radical, but because it was not until involved in a military conflict that the constitution permitted him to do so.  The war powers act, and military necessity abetted Lincoln’s “radicalism” during the Civil War, perhaps calling into question Oakes’s model of Lincoln and Douglass slowly coming around to one another’s position.

In Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race, George N. Fredrickson attempts to strike a scholarly balance in assessing Lincoln’s views on race and slavery.  Fredrickson opens this work with an extended historiographical assessment, focusing primarily on some of the more recent scholarship.  He notes that the historiography addressing Lincoln’s racial and anti-slavery views have essentially fallen into two camps: the hagiographic praise of Lincoln as the great emancipator, or one in which he is viewed solely as a dyed-in-the-wool white supremacist.  Fredrickson argues that Lincoln shouldn’t be forced into one of those two camps, and rather, that while Lincoln had long been committed to anti-slavery, he was a political pragmatist whose racial views changed over the course of his political career.

Fredrickson argues that in Lincoln’s “Illinois Years,” prior to 1860, Lincoln was committed to anti-slavery, but only within the bounds of constitutional, legal, and political constraints.  He also contends that Lincoln was “clearly” a white supremacist, though he argues that there can be degrees of racism.  Fredrickson states that Lincoln’s racism was based on conformity to the wider Illinois electorate, and thus he was a passive white supremacist, out of conformity and political expediency.

During the Civil War, however, Lincoln’s racial views changed.  While he was able to reconcile his respect for the constitution with his anti-slavery views by framing emancipation as a military necessity, increasing the Union’s manpower while destabilizing the southern economy.  As large numbers of blacks enlisted in the Union Army, however, Lincoln’s commitment to colonization waned.  Lincoln’s commitment to republican ideology would not allow for the enlistment of blacks in the military, but the denial of their rights as citizens.

By parsing out the evolution of Lincoln’s views on slavery and race separately, and by placing them in the context of the broader public opinion, Fredrickson successfully provides necessary nuance in the egalitarian vs. racist debate.

In Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North, Patrick Rael explores the ways that black northerners utilized the ideas of antebellum America generally to coordinate protest thought, and a conception of their own identity, as a way to argue for their own freedom and equality.  Black northerners both used, and contributed to the development of, antebellum notions of respectability, moral character, and middle class virtue, as a way of gaining greater respect within the community, and according to Rael, in an attempt to change the “public mind” about issues of race.  Rael’s scholarship contributes to a number of historiographical strands.  First, he seeks to blur the hard and fast distinctions drawn by other scholars (accommodation vs. resistance, for example), and argues instead that black northerners during the antebellum period wove their arguments through “the disparate strands of the ideological fabric surrounding them” (8).  He also objects to “culturalist” histories that highlight success stories among disadvantaged groups, arguing that these types of stories bely the difficulty of the lives of historical actors.  Rael seems to presage Walter Johnson’s argument about the use of agency by culturalist historians.  Finally, he objects to what he terms the black nationalist school of thought, that argues black embrace of moral uplift and elevation made them “co-opted dupes of a white middle class.”  Alternatively, Rael posits that ideas of moral uplift and bourgeois values belonged no more to whites than they did to blacks, and that, in fact, blacks themselves helped in the formation of those ideological frameworks.

In Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860, Joanne Pope Melish explores the way that racial attitudes became hardened in early national and antebellum New England with the passage of free womb laws and the subsequent obfuscation of the region’s prior relationship with slavery.  Melish notes that implicit in early anti-slavery thought was the notion that by removing slavery, people of color would be removed from their midst as well.  Attempts to minimize the significance of slavery in New England “further ‘racialized’ both black and white identity in New England.  Having largely disconnected people of color from their historical experience of oppressive enslavement in the New England states, whites could insist that the only way to account for the often impoverished condition of free people of color there was their innate inferiority” (3).  Melish argues that the character of both slavery and emancipation in the North resulted in the development of belief in “race” as an innate characteristic, fixed in the bodies of individuals.  Melish places New Englanders’ experience with gradual emancipation at the center of the story of the development of their ideas of race, their negative view of the capacities of people of color, and their antagonism of free blacks.