Brian Kilmeade, “The President and the Freedom Fighter:
Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Their Battle to Save America’s Soul,” Random House (Large Print), 2021, 336
pp.
In The President and the Freedom Fighter,
Brian Kilmeade tells the little-known story of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick
Douglass as they moved from strong disagreement to friendship, and in the
process changed the entire course of history.
Abraham Lincoln was White, born impoverished on
a frontier farm. Frederick Douglass was Black, a child of slavery who had
risked his life escaping to freedom in the North. Neither man had a formal
education, and neither had had an easy path to influence. No one would have expected
them to become friends—or to transform the country.
Lincoln’s problem: he knew it was time for
slavery to go, but how fast could the country change without being torn apart?
And would it be possible to get rid of slavery while keeping America’s
Constitution intact and the Union of States intact? Douglass said no that the
Constitution was irredeemably corrupted by slavery—and he wanted Lincoln to
move quickly. Sharing little more than the conviction that slavery was wrong,
the two men’s paths eventually converged.
My Notes:
Pg. 74f:
Douglass felt the Constitution was so flawed that it could only be
replaced and reinvented. Though it did
not explicitly condone slavery, article 1, section 2 of the constitution
distinguished “free Persons” from “other Persons.” These “other persons” were assigned a value
for purposes of congressional apportionment of three-fifths that of “free
persons.” Others felt the constitution
was an aspirational document, a working instrument that could be improved, its
flaws fixed. Later, by 1850, Douglass agreed
with this latter interpretation.
Pg. 76: The
Fugitive Slave Act was one of the five laws that made up the Compromise of
1850. One of the laws abolished the slave trade, (though not slavery itself) in
Washington D.C. Another defined Texas’s
disputed western and northern boundaries.
Other acts established territorial governments in Utah and New Mexico,
freshly acquired in the Mexican War along with California, and permitted
California to join the Union as a free state.
Both sides won something it seemed.
But the fifth law, The Fugitive Slave Act, proved incendiary.
Pg. 80: Harriet
Beecher Stowe published “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in 1852. It sold more rapidly than any book in the
nation’s history, three hundred thousand copies in 1852 alone, the next decade
would see two million copies printed.
Pg. 84: The 1854
Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed a three-decades-old agreement, spelled out in
the Missouri Compromise, that established latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes as the
northern boundary for slavery in territories and new states. That boundary was
now eliminated and replaced with the principle of ‘popular sovereignty.’ Now
residents would vote on permitting or prohibiting slavery in the upper half of
the Louisiana Purchase, now the Nebraska and Kansas territories. Southerners rejoiced because new slave states
could be established where once they could not, potentially adding more
congressional representation to what was called the ‘slave power.’
Pg. 99f: Dred Scott: Dred Scott v.
Sandford case of 1857
centered on Dred and Harriet Scott and their children, Eliza and Lizzie. The
Scotts claimed that they should be granted their freedom because Dred had lived
in Illinois and
the Wisconsin Territory for four years, where slavery was illegal, and laws
in those jurisdictions said that slaveholders gave up their rights to slaves if
they stayed for an extended period.
The Supreme
Court decided 7–2 against Scott, finding that neither he nor any other
person of African ancestry could claim citizenship in the United States, and
therefore Scott could not bring suit.
Moreover, Scott's temporary residence outside Missouri did
not bring about his emancipation under the Missouri Compromise, as the court ruled this Compromise to have been
unconstitutional, as it would "improperly deprive Scott's owner of his
legal property".
While Chief
Justice Roger B. Taney further
angered abolitionists because the decision asserted that the ‘negro African
race’ was ‘of an inferior and subordinate class.’ ‘Blacks’, wrote Taney, ‘had no rights
which the white man was bound to respect.’
This aroused public outrage, deepened sectional tensions between the
northern and southern states, and hastened the eventual explosion of their
differences into the American Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation
Proclamation in 1863, and
the post-Civil War Reconstruction
Amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments—nullified
the Dred Scott decision.
Pg. 163: At the order of Jefferson Davis, Fort Sumter
was bombarded on April 12, 1861. The
North had certain large advantages. Its
population numbered more than twenty million, compared to nine million in the
South, where more than a third were enslaved people. The Union’s industrial capacity was vastly
greater, too, with roughly 90 percent of the nation’s factories and double the
railroad lines.
Pg. 201ff:
Lincoln summoned an August 14, 1862, meeting at the White House that
included five Black guests, none a well-known abolitionist or a man of national
stature. The meeting was
unprecedented. No president had ever
summoned a ‘Deputation of Negroes,’ as Lincoln called it, to talk about a
matter of national interest (Douglass was not invited). After greeting them, Lincoln began to talk
about the relocation of people of African descent to other countries. He went on to say, ‘You and we are different
races…I think your race will suffer greatly, many of them by living among us,
while ours suffers from your presence. Lincoln
wanted a vanguard of African American volunteers, prominent men and their
families, to pack up and leave. He
hoped their departure would launch an exodus.
“I want to know whether this can be done.’ His words were met by a stunned silence.
Pg. 205f: In
August 1862 Lincoln responded to an editorial by Horace Greeley: “My paramount object in this struggle is to
save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. 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.”
Pg. 220: The
Emancipation Proclamation, following the September 1862 Battle of Antietam,
produced a valuable shift in attitudes abroad.
Great Britain, France, and other European countries previously wavered
on whether to recognize the Confederate States of America. Lincoln’s proclamation cleared the air. Lincoln’s
proclamation showed the president no longer regarded the war as a battle to
restore the Union to what it had been.
His goal was to reconstitute the nation based upon human liberty, making
explicit what was implied in the Declaration of Independence.
Pg. 317:
President Andrew Johnson’s term was consumed by a legislative war with
Congress, which, despite the president’s opposition, managed to pass the
Fourteenth Amendment in 1866, guaranteeing ‘equal protection’ of ‘life,
liberty, or property’ for all citizens.
The 1868 attempt to impeach Johnson failed by one vote.
Pg. 329f: Fredrick Douglass in the early 1890s stated that the negro, and especially the plantation negro,…is worse off, in many respects, than when he was a slave.’ Douglass would die a year before the Supreme Court made this inequality official. In 1896 the Plessy v. Ferguson established the doctrine of ‘separate but equal,’ upholding recent ‘Jim Crow’ laws that, in many southern states, disenfranchised Black voters and permitted racial segregation in public places. It wasn’t until 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education that this policy was reversed
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