James Oakes Interview: Examining Abraham Lincoln's Commitment to Freedom

james oakes interview take one marker and all the ones that program would be the color chart got it i got you thank you by the 1840s the slave economy has driven largely by the cotton economy and the cotton economy has been the amount of cotton being grown in the southern states has been doubling every single decade since 1800 and going into 1850s the 1850s are going to be the largest single decade of growth for the cotton economy in the history of the south really and so it's enormously important it is it is it constitutes well over half of all the exports that the united states sends overseas and the slaveholders themselves are a disproportionately represented among the richest americans the value of slaves uh it by the 1850s is more than the value of all the railroads industries like produced uh in the united states so it's enormously significant it is by the 1850s the largest wealthiest slave society on earth it is quite possibly the largest wealthiest slave societies in the history of the world it is absolutely central to the slave system of the south that the slaves were movable property in legal terms commodities slaveholders wealth was based more on their ownership of slaves as property as assets than on the land that the slaves actually worked this and so we think of slavery as a labor system but it's important to understand that that it's a labor system in which the slaves are the property of their owners it's not like uh selling your labor power for wages uh it's it's you are the physically movable property of the owner of and and that changes everything and defines everything there is to know about the slave system slaves are bequeathed they are bought they are sold they are mortgaged you know if you want to buy more land you mortgage a slave if you have mortgages you are committing yourself to producing enough of a cash crop every year to pay off the mortgage if the cotton economy tanks which it does periodically you will be foreclosed by the mortgager and you will have your slaves seized and taken away and sold at public auction because because the slaves are an asset they are property and it's it's the property it's not only the property that makes the system what it is it's also what makes slavery controversial the central theme of all debates over slavery from the time of the revolution through the civil war is the legitimacy or illegitimacy of property rights in human beings capitalism and slavery is the way we tend to discuss this the issue of how slavery and capitalism how slavery is tied to the north or not tied to the north uh the the most important thing to know about the relationship between northern capitalism and southern slavery is that without the enormous growth of consumer demand for the products of slave labor the slave systems are almost impossible to imagine right it is beginning in the beginning in the 17th and 18th centuries when british consumers begin to develop a taste for sugar which promotes the development of the big sugar economies of the of the caribbean jamaica barbados in the 18th century haiti saint-domingue and in the in the middle of the 18th century england begins to industrialize its already well established textile industry established as mostly a woollens industry for example and they move logically into a cotton textile industry but but it's hard to get cotton that the largest producers of cotton in the 18th century are the islands in the caribbean once it is possible for southern plantations southern slave farms and plantations to produce cotton with in significant amounts which happens with the development of an increased of an improved gin ginning mechanism the the slave south is all of a sudden able to do what no other cotton producing area of the world could do which is feed this increasingly voracious demand for cotton coming from a rapidly industrializing england and then the north right but it's the demand that's driving the slave economy of the south it's not the south that's driving northern capitalism in that sense it's capitalism and the demands of capitalism that are driving the growth of the slave economy when the demand collapses the southern slave economy goes into a tailspin which it did several times before the civil war but one of the tests of the relationship between capitalism and slavery is that is what happens during the civil war right the the slave system collapses and the southern economy is dramatically transformed the northern economy does fine it wants cotton it doesn't care very much whether or not the cotton comes from slaves indentured servants wage laborers as long as it can get the cotton the engine is england and the north not the slave economy of the south that's the critical relationship i think lincoln says and we have every reason to believe him that he always hated slavery he grew up in a family that was anti-slavery that his parents attended an anti-slavery church and every every time the issue arose as a politician he took an anti-slavery position he supported the abolition of slavery in washington dc he supported restrictions on slavery in the western territories he he he believed that the fugitive slave law of 1850 should be rewritten to recognize to acknowledge the the due process rights of slaves so on on issue after issue his anti-slavery credentials are well established before he is anything we can reasonably call an anti-slavery politician that's partly because he was a whig and the whig party is a party that has a strong southern wing to it and therefore is committed like the democratic party to suppressing slavery in national politics but in the early 1850s the whig party collapses and the replacement for the whig party in the north is the anti-slavery republican party lincoln fits naturally with that party because he's always been anti-slavery so in that sense it's the disappearance of his beloved whig party that forces him into another party that is exclusively focused on anti-slavery because it's exclusively a northern party the issues that precipitate that dramatic transformation of the entire party system of the united states are are primarily slavery the compromise of 1850 provokes a backlash in the north because of the fugitive slave law in 1850 uh there are massive demonstrations in the north against uh the attempts to implement the fugitive slave law uh harriet beecher stowe writes her famous novel uh that inspires northerners to hate the law even more and to hate slavery even more the southerners are responding with every evidence of growing northern anti-slavery sentiment the southerners respond with increasingly aggressive demands for federal protection of slavery and the precipitating event for lincoln and for many northerners was the repeal of the missouri compromise in 1854 as part of the kansas nebraska act right stephen douglas the senator from illinois lincoln's nemesis in many ways adds the repeal of the missouri compromise which restricted slavery in the western territories to the kansas bill kansas statehood bill and provokes a ferocious reaction in the north and in the state of illinois douglas's home state lincoln takes the lead in the opposition to douglas in the opposition to the repeal of the missouri compromise which was really the repeal of the ban on slavery in the western territories and lincoln had semi retired from politics in 1849 after he leaves a congress after his one term in congress and focuses on his family his law career but he didn't leave politics entirely and it was really the the enactment of the kansas-nebraska bill with the repeal of the restriction on slavery and the territories that provoked the reaction across the north and lincoln is part of that reaction lincoln's re-entry into politics but it's not just a re-entry into politics it's a it's a transformed lincoln that enters politics because he is now for the first time in his life an anti-slavery politician that is he's not just a politician who when the issue arises opposes slavery he is now a politician who is whose major issue his defining issue is hostility to slavery to understand why repealing the missouri compromise was so provocative to northerners especially to people like lincoln and republicans anti-slavery northerners really you have to understand that anti-slavery politics was focused on restricting slavery's expansion that is everyone accepted that the constitution doesn't allow the federal government to congress to abolish slavery in a state so anti-slavery politics was focused on getting at slavery in other ways and the primary way of getting at slavery for anti-slavery politicians even for abolitionists was to strangle it right close it in prevent it from expanding on the assumption that slavery couldn't survive without expanding by repealing the missouri compromise by repealing the restriction on slavery in the western territories you have basically you have basically given slavery a new lease on life and instead of putting it on a course of ultimate extinction you've put it on a course of nationalization you've instead of making slavery strictly sectional you've you've begun to say it's going to be national and that that was such a violation of what anti-slavery politicians had hoped for from the revolution on uh that you it would be hard to imagine anything more provocative than reopening territories that had been closed to slavery to slavery and so it's important to understand what anti-slavery politics meant in the absence of a federal and in the absence of a constitution that would have allowed the federal government to simply abolish slavery it meant that the way slavery gets abolished the way slavery has always gotten abolished in the united states is one state at a time right vermont's constitution of 1777 is the first state to abolish slavery in that sense in the immediate aftermath of the revolution pennsylvania passed the first statute abolishing slavery in 1780 right then you get connecticut rhode island massachusetts eventually new york and new jersey you get a northwest ordinance the ordinance of 1787 that bans slavery from the northwest territories will eventually lead to five new states abolishing slavery on their own so the way you get slavery abolished is one state at a time and and coming out of the revolution when it looked like slavery was moribund that it was dying the assumption anti-slavery people had was that eventually slavery would become so weak in the southern states beginning with the southern states closest to the north the border states it would it would die there as well this eventually eventually those states would realize that slavery is not efficient not productive not conducive to the prosperity of the people that they would abolish they would eventually abolish slavery nobody was counting on a cotton economy that was going to it was going to revive the fortunes of slavery in the upper south by giving upper south slaveholders an outlet for their surplus slave population right they've closed off the atlantic slave trade and this the cotton economy is booming and the northern the northernmost slave states virginia kentucky and eventually the easternmost slave states begin to sell their surplus population to this booming cotton economy in alabama mississippi louisiana ultimately texas right so in that sense the cotton economy reverses what everyone accepted or believed or hoped was the trajectory of the united states right toward the abolition of slavery so state-by-state abolition is the goal of the anti-slavery movement and again even most abolitionists believed that that was the way it was going to happen politically as the northern economy turns out to be more dynamic more productive uh wealthier in per capita terms than the slave economy was the number of free states begins to outrun the number of slave states and the power of the slaveholders that they exercised in the federal government begins to be threatened right they lose the majorities there so the southern states lose their majorities in the house of representatives by 1820 and a majority of northern states are prepared to ban slavery entirely from the western territories all the way to the pacific by then uh and they know it the they they therefore have to cling to the senate and to hold on to the senate they need more slave states so the duel between the anti-slavery forces and the pro-slavery forces comes down to how many slave states versus how many free states are we going to have in this country right because everyone understands that the power the slaveholders exercise in the federal government is ultimately going to depend on the number of slave states in the federal government right so think about it this way in 1776 13 slave colonies declare their independence from great britain and become 13 slave states by 1850 the number of slave states has gone from 13 to 15 but the number of free states has gone from 0 to 15 right and from that point on every new state added to the union is going to tip the balance one way or another right and the balance continues to shift in favor of the north right that is california is admitted as as a free state oregon is admitted as a free state and by 1860 when abraham lincoln is elected president there are now 18 free states and 15 slave states the balance is shifting dramatically and it is threatening the power that the slaveholders have in the federal government so these two issues the expansion of slavery into the territories and the balance of power in the federal government are inseparable they are the same issue one of them is framed as the economic necessity of expansion the other is framed as the political necessity of the slave states to maintain their power in the federal government it is all but universally accepted that what you might call status conditions are created destroyed regulated by states what do i mean by status conditions marriage the laws of marriage are state laws indentured servitude is a state law the labor law is state law and slavery is a state law slavery is created or destroyed by states it is simply accepted that the federal government has no business regulating marriage regulating indentured servitude or regulating slavery in that sense in that sense the constitution presupposes that the federal government cannot abolish slavery in a state scholars call this the federal consensus it's federalism as it relates to slavery right that most wrangled anti-slavery folks like lincoln was the three-fifths clause this is one of the major compromises with slavery in the constitution coming into the constitutional convention at philadelphia in 1787 the southerners demanded that five-fifths of the slaves be counted for purposes of representation and taxation and direct taxation the northerners the anti-slavery northerners demanded that zero fifths be counted as uh for purposes of representation because slaves are not part of the political nation as it were and the compromise they worked out was three-fifths right so three-fifths of the slave population will count if you're an anti-slavery northerner that means you got the south got an extra three-fifths of its population counted they got more votes in the house of representatives and more votes in the electoral college right and and that wasn't so much an issue at the time but it became an issue around 1800 when jefferson was elected and his critics his opponents started saying you got elected thanks to the three-fifths clause right and lincoln objects to the three-fifths clause and says for example northerners southerners would say slavery is none of your business slavery is a southern institution and lincoln comes back and says but the three-fifths clause is a humiliating discrimination against the north so every new slave state that gets admitted to the union is a matter of urgent urgent consent concern for northerners it's it's a serious issue for us we have to be concerned with it right the second issue like that is the fugitive slave clause the the constitution gives slave holders the right to recapture their slaves in northern states in states where slavery has been abolished it says explicitly that a a state where slavery has been abolished does not have the power to emancipate a slave who has run away from a slave state this this becomes a source of of anxiety for northerners because they don't like the idea of southern slave catchers coming into their states and running through the streets capturing african-americans on their streets many of whom had been there for years decades built lives built families this is a source of enormous aggravation to northerners who might otherwise not have cared very much about slavery right so those two clauses the fugitive slave clause and the three fifth clause are the two that matter most uh in the constitution those are the two compromises if you will in with slavery and the constitution but of course anti-slavery anti-slavery folks like lincoln believed that those two or exceptions to a general rule of freedom in the constitution when we think about slavery and the constitution when we think about the conflict between slavery and freedom anti-slavery northerners would say why are you only focusing on the closes in the constitution that protects slavery what about the clauses in the constitution that protect freedom why don't they count in the balance why doesn't the fifth amendment which says that no person shall be deprived of liberty without due process of law why doesn't that count in the consideration of what the constitution has to say about slavery why doesn't the preamble with the guarantee of freedom and liberty uh to all as the as as the stated purpose of the creation of the government why doesn't that count right why doesn't the clause allowing the federal empowering the federal government to regulate the territories and with it the power to ban slavery from the territories does the constitution not give congress the power to ban slavery from the territories of course it does does the constitution not give congress the power to ban slavery from abolish slavery in washington dc of course it does does the constitution not give the federal government the power to ban the atlantic slave trade ban slave trading international slave trading from the united states of course it does there are all sorts of clauses in the constitution that are anti-slavery for anti-slavery northern people like lincoln and and in the balance between the compromises that were made with slavery and the overwhelming commitment to freedom people like lincoln and anti-slavery northerners concluded in the language of the time that freedom is the rule slavery the exception and the constitution for abraham lincoln as for all anti-slavery northerners the the constitution is in part the text and it's the structures it puts in place and the commitments to certain kinds of freedom that it puts in place but it's also a spirit right and the spirit of the constitution is reflected in the uh in the declaration of independence specifically in the in the famous opening lines of the declaration of independence that in which jefferson writes that all men are created equal they are equally entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness that's the spirit lincoln says at one point that uh the constitution is the frame and the declaration is the picture held by the frame right so the two work hand in hand right so so if that's the guiding spirit if the guiding spirit of the of the constitution is the principle of universal freedom then for him and for anti-slavery northerners uh the intentions of the founders were to put slavery on a course of ultimate extinction we sometimes think of the argument against slavery uh and the as as a kind of economistic abstract argument right that that free labor is economically superior to slave labor right it's as opposed to a moral argument but if you listen to the way lincoln made that economic argument he phrased it in biblical terms right in the right to the fruits of his labor the slave is the slave is is my equal and the equal of any living man right he says it about women and the right to the fruits of her labor the black woman is my equal and the equal of any living man right it applied to men and women it applied to blacks and whites the right to the fruits of your labor is is not simply an economic argument for the superiority of free labor it's a moral conviction right and it and it derives again from the principles expounded in the declaration of independence right the the third of the three rights it's the right to life the right to liberty and to the pursuit of happiness which included the right to the fruits of your labor it's very hard to say whether lincoln felt a personal stake in that the i should tell you that it's controversial among scholars whether lincoln actually ever said i was a slave because it came as a recollection many years after and right and in certain ways it's incompatible with his notion of of what free labor is all about that is he grew up he knew he was going to be freed when he was 21 years of age he knew that that's the way that the free labor system worked so i'm not entirely sure that what the personal experience was his his real personal experience was the experience of upward mobility which he believed slave slave systems thwarted right so he he said famously that uh the the normal expectation of of in a free labor system is that you start your life as a farm laborer you grow up on a farm you you you go to work for someone else you save enough to buy a farm of your own and eventually you will be sufficiently prosperous if you're hardworking and industrious and and do what you're supposed to do you will eventually end up hiring farm laborers of your own so that's what and and his experience was that as a young man uh still in his father's household he was sent to work for others and the fruits of his labor became his fathers and he was he remembered the first time someone paid him for his own labor and that it wasn't his own money right it's very interesting there's a very similar story that frederick douglass tells about having escaped from slavery arriving in in new england arriving in in uh at getting his first job and the first time he gets paid and realizing he was this was the fruits of his own labor finally being paid right so the experience of a slave coming into freedom and being paid and the experience of a young man in his father's household being paid and having to give it to his father is in that sense they're parallel kinds of stories except that the son knows that when he reaches the age of 21 he's on his own and the fruits of his labor will be his own if you're an anti-slavery politician like lincoln and you assume that the federal government cannot abolish slavery directly in a state but you are committed to ultimately destroying slavery or ultimately the ultimate death of slavery how do you do that right so anti-slavery politicians thought up various ways of putting slavery on what lincoln called a course of ultimate extinction how would they do that they would prevent slavery from expanding into the western territories which they believed slavery needed to do because it was backward and inefficient and it could only survive by constant expansion so cut off the expansion and you cut off its lifeblood make it difficult for slaveholders to recover their fugitive slaves in the northern states do not protect slavery on the high seas abolish slavery in washington d.c perhaps regulate the interstate slave trade certainly the coast-wise slave trade the slave trade that would ship slaves from charleston harbor to new orleans for example uh many anti-slavery people believed you could do that and if you could thwart if you could do all those things right and you watched as slavery gradually disappeared from the upper south states like delaware is a slave state in name only by by the 1850s the num the proportion of slaves in virginia in maryland in kentucky is declining where you know because the slaves are being siphoned off you're setting those states up for ultimately uh extinguishing saving because those are the states that need the constant expansion of slavery for slavery to remain viable in their states and so lincoln believes that if you don't allow a slaveholder in kentucky to sell off his surplus slaves to texas then the value of those slaves declines the value of slavery itself declines and eventually in those states as happened in the northern states those slaves those states would abolish slavery that's the ultimate extinction of slavery what did lincoln how long did lincoln think that would take he once he once said in passing that if slavery is abolished in the most peaceful most gradual way imaginable a hundred years down the line the last slave would finally pass away what does that mean he was we don't know for sure because he never explained what he meant and he didn't actually believe that slavery was going to be abolished in the most peaceful most gradual way but nevertheless there were other anti-slavery politicians who talked in similar terms who imagined for example if you if the federal government adopted all of these policies that were designed to put slavery on a course of ultimate extinction then 25 years down the line the last of the slave states would adopt a gradual abolition policy right and under those gradual abolition policies the last slaves born the day before the gradual abolition law was passed 25 years down the line lived to the age of 75 right that's 100 years right 25 years down the line the last gradual abolition law is passed the slaves born before then lived to 75 years 25 plus 75 is 100. that's probably what lincoln was thinking of course by then 99.999 percent of the slaves have been emancipated but the truth is that lincoln didn't believe that that was going to happen he believed there was going to be a crisis some kind of violence was going to be necessary to overcome this crisis but what that meant isn't clear abolitionism is a big wide movement and and it encompasses a lot of different folks most abolitionists would say they believed in the immediate abolition of slavery but what does that mean if you're william lloyd garrison and you believe the constitution is a hopelessly pro-slavery document it would mean that the federal government couldn't do anything it can't abolish slavery in the territories it can't abolish slavery in washington d.c it can't restrain the fugitive slave law because the constitution requires the federal government to protect slavery in all of those ways right so what looks like the most radical anti-slavery position is in some ways the position that has is the most stultifying politically at the other end of the abolitionist spectrum are abolitionist constitutionalists that's people who believe the constitution is not simply an anti-slavery document but an abolitionist document that is if if the preamble says that liberty is the goal of this government then this government has the right to do everything necessary to ensure the protection of liberty to ourselves and our posterity and could actually abolish slavery in a state that's a very small minority right most abolitionists when they talk about immediate abolition mean two things the slaveholders should immediately free their slaves and the states that are responsible for creating or destroying slavery should immediately abolish slavery on their own because they all accept they all accept that the federal government can't do it so there in that sense there's not that much difference between abolitionism as a political project and anti-slavery politics as a political project right there the differences are nuanced right there are the a more radical anti-slavery politician would say that the federal government could and should suppress the domestic slave trade which would have a quite steltifying effect on slavery that that uh there would be policies like that uh that you could go further on than lincoln was willing to go they might say that the that the fugitive slave law of 1850 shouldn't simply be revised but that it was unconstitutional because of its denial of due process rights lincoln wouldn't say that things like that so the differences between the more radical anti-slavery politicians and the mainstream anti-slavery politicians like lincoln tend to be at the margins of those specific policies not so much on fundamental questions of the morality of slavery or the like i would not call lincoln an abolitionist i was almost going to title a book i wrote call call almost an abolitionist right it is lincoln never called for the immediate abolition of slavery he never joined an abolitionist society he didn't focus on the cruelties and barbarism of slavery the way abolitionists did right he was suspicious of that kind of emotional appeal he preferred a kind of rational appeal based on the principles of the declaration rather than emotional appeals based on he didn't call slaveholder sinners for example he didn't he didn't use that kind of language uh he wasn't an immediate in that sense so he i i wouldn't call him an abolitionist in in those ways here and there he makes it clear that he's aware of and sensitive to the barbarism of slavery it just wasn't the kind of argument he preferred to make he once says that in his reaction to the dred scott decision for example he says that i understand that dred scott and his wife harriet had little children and what the dred scott decision does is send that woman and her children back into slavery and all the attendant horrors that women and children suffer under slavery right so he's aware the implications are that enslaved women are subjected to sexual abuse and and parents are separated from their children these are the kinds of emotional issues but very real issues that abolitionists often emphasized in their work didn't always emphasize it but but lincoln preferred not to emphasize those kinds of issues he preferred to emphasize the violation of the principles of fundamental human equality and as we he preferred to emphasize the way slavery thwarted economic progress and and inhibited uh the ability of individuals slaves and free people to rise up in the world and make a success of their lives on their own you know i find lincoln hard to get at psychologically what he is at his core uh i i can i can say that he was a politician first and foremost and that in his preference for focusing on something like the violation of the principle of fundamental human equality he was adopting an anti-slavery argument that had the broadest possible appeal among northern voters and i i i tend to think of it in those terms rather than was he insensitive to the cruelties of slavery because i don't think he was i think he's always thinking of the of the largest possible vote is always thinking of the coalition that you need to build and there are northerners who accept that the founders didn't like slavery and we should probably put slavery on a course of ultimate extinction but i'm not particularly concerned about the way black people are treated under slavery so and we know lincoln thought that that way uh that every once in a while he would say you know so so what you don't care about black people you can still fight to preserve the union for example and and and in the meantime we'll abolish slavery and so i i tend to think of it more in terms of his strategic sensibilities as a politician even though in his artistic tastes as someone engaged in american culture he had an affinity for kind of maudlin sentimental poetry you know romantic poets you know with their obsession with death for example and things like that but when he when he as a politician as a lawyer he was a supremely rational human being and he he parsed arguments in extraordinarily specific precise terms he used very precise language when he was saying things and it's important to sometimes if you read if you read what some of his statements too quickly you'll think he's saying something he's not actually saying you know because he knows exactly how how to get a point across and to imply things without actually committing himself to any particular position so in 1857 the supreme court issues a decision in the case of dred scott v sanford which declares that a slave who has been carried by his owner into a free state or into a free territory and nevertheless remains a slave if the slave is carried back to to a slave state in this case missouri this was a violation of the presumption in northern law that if you set foot on free soil you are free right so northern states had passed what they call sojourn laws what historians call soldier laws that say quite explicitly we know we have to return your fugitives when they escape but if you voluntarily carry a slave into a free state that slave is emancipated right the dred scott decision says no it's not no the slave is not emancipated the slave is is a slave as long as the master holds him as a slave so that's a an attack on a basic premise of the laws of the free states but more than that what what roger tony does in that decision is declare uh that that the most important policy that anti-slavery advocates endorse which is the ban on slavery in the territory is unconstitutional and it's unconstitutional on the grounds that slaves are a constitutionally protected species of property the property rights are singular all property is the same under the constitution it is all protected by the constitution right he says that the constitution expressly recognizes the right of property in slaves that that is an extreme provocation for anti-slavery northerners from the constitutional convention itself we know that anti-slavery northerners did not want the to have a constitution that recognized the right of property in slaves and the the denial of a right of property in slaves has been a centerpiece of anti-slavery thinking throughout the history of the united states so what tony is doing is overthrowing the most the single most important principle of anti-slavery politics which is that slaves are recognized in the constitution only as persons never as property this is this is for lincoln you know and for all anti-slavery northerners essentially a declaration that uh anti-slavery politics is illegitimate and specifically that the republican party that is formed and and did very well a few months earlier in the 1856 elections is essentially unconstitutional tony is trying to shut down anti-slavery politics which is something pro-slavery politicians had been trying to do since the 1820s to understand the reaction of people like lincoln and and anti-slavery politicians to the dred scott decision we have to get out of the constitutional mindset of the early 21st century right we assume if the supreme court issues a ruling that's it they are the people who determine what the constitution says and there's nothing any of us can do about it except perhaps wait till we can alter the composition of the supreme court but that's not the assumption that people in lincoln's day operated from they accepted the principle of legislative supremacy right they didn't think the supreme court was always and everywhere the final arbiter of what the constitution was and was not right so lincoln simply declares at one point that if he were in congress he would vote to overturn the dred scott decision specifically the dred scott decision in the dred scott decision roger tawny says the constitution does not allow the federal government to ban slavery from the western territories right lincoln says if i were in congress i would vote to ban slavery from the western territories and as a matter of fact as soon as the republicans get control of congress in december of 1861 in that very first republican-controlled congress they pass a law banning slavery from the western territories in explicit unapologetic defiance of the supreme court right because they're living in a constitutional culture that does not accept that what the supreme court says is what the constitution is right so one of the things it's important to understand is that the two major dissenting opinions in the dred scott decision by justices mclean and curtis actually reflect the views of the republican party which is the majority party in the north and if you think about it in those terms if you think about it in those terms in 1861 in the spring of 1861 when a republican president is inaugurated and republicans take control of congress this the ruling thinking about what the constitution is or is not is reflected in those two dissenting opinions by mclean and curtis that becomes the constitution as far as those now in control of the federal government are concerned the odd thing about the lincoln douglas debates given the context in which the the major split in the united states is between the north and the south between pro-slavery southerners and anti-slavery northerners what makes the lincoln douglas debates odd is that douglas is a northerner who is unwilling and unable to take an explicitly pro-slavery position so what is douglas's strategy in those debates he wants to shift the terms of debate away from slavery to race he wants this to be about about about the difference between people like lincoln who he says are racially egalitarians who believe that blacks and whites are equal and lincoln is trying to say no no no the issue isn't race the issue is slavery pure and simple right and and that in a sense is the tension in those in those seven debates right so the the very first debate douglas comes out swinging on at lincoln's claim in the aftermath of the dred scott decision that slaves were citizens of the united states the dred scott decision had said that slaves were not citizens and had never had been citizens that they had no rights the white man was bound to respect and lincoln had responded by attacking tony for saying that so douglas goes right at him not on the slavery issue but on whether or not blacks are citizens right and all through the debates he would be saying and all through his speeches outside the debates his argument is if lincoln and the republicans have their way black men will be able to marry your daughters you know blacks will serve on juries blacks will be able to vote blacks will be able to do this and that they'll come swarming out of the south up into your cities and towns and and the like they'll be competing with your you for for lower wages and the like so it's douglas's strategy is to make this an issue about racial equality and lincoln's strategy is always to say no it's not about racial equality it's about the right and the wrong of slavery itself and some of his most eloquent attacks on slavery come during those debates especially the latter parts of those debates when when he has when he has zeroed in on this singular issue of the right and wrong of slavery and and declared that that he will not argue this in terms of of the equality or inequality of blacks and whites he will only argue this on the right and wrong of slavery i don't have the exact quotation with me but but for me the most articulate uh statement of his anti-slave reviews comes toward the end when he says that this is this is the age-old struggle between uh tyrants and the people between kings who lorded over their subjects without regard to the rights of their subjects right it's the it's the right and wrong it's the divine right of kings versus democracy like that and and and and he goes through this litany in which [Applause] in which he he places the issue of slavery in the longer history of struggles for equality and justice against all forms of tyranny and and that those are the terms on which he wanted to discuss it it's in the aftermath of these debates that lincoln's shift on the question of racial equality becomes most evident right it's often said that lincoln grew on the issue of racial equality and one of the places you i think it's most clear that he was growing is is the way he begins to talk about race after having been subjected to this barrage of of racist demagoguery by stephen douglas in those debates he begins to denounce racial demagoguery itself he begins to attack people like stephen douglas for their constant relentless attacks on the humanity of black people saying that the goal of this strategy is to make northerners insensitive to the issue of slavery by making them believe that blacks are somehow less than human and he begins to denounce racial demagoguery in much more explicit terms after the 1858 debates with douglas it is in the 1850s debates especially at the opening of the charleston debate where lincoln uh gives his most notorious uh defense of certain forms of racial inequality right so uh if you think about about equality as racial equality as operating on different levels right there are at the level of natural rights of to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness lincoln believes in racial equality blacks and whites are equally entitled to freedom equally entitled to the fruits of their labor if you think of equality at a different level as the rights the privileges and immunities of citizenship lincoln isn't always there but in the 1850s he begins to suggest that that blacks and whites are equally entitled certainly to the rights of due process and he becomes more and more explicit about that over the course of the decade he's quite explicit about it in his inaugural address right but there's another level of racial equality at the level of various forms of state-based discrimination state and local discrimination but blacks could not vote blacks couldn't serve on juries blacks couldn't testify in courts blacks and whites couldn't marry and at that level lincoln lincoln never commits himself to that kind of racial equality and in fact explicitly in the douglas the debates with douglas explicitly disclaims any commitment to the equality of blacks and whites at that level at the various forms of state-based discrimination right and and it is his most should i say this is the most offensive defense of racial inequality that we see lincoln could say those things because he personally believed it and he could say those things because he believed strategically in the state of illinois in the 1850s if he said anything differently that would be the end of his political career so it's very difficult to say there are some indications that he had earlier in earlier speeches that he did recognize that this might not be something these forms of discrimination might not accord with justice but but it hardly matters in a democracy whether it does or does not accord with with justice because we well know that the vast majority of whites will not accept the uh living with blacks on us on a condition of complete equality so he's he's in a state that has a reputation as being one of the most racist states in the north he knows that and he is struggling to separate out the issue of racial equality from the issue of slavery and in order to do that in the course of doing that he he occasionally maybe even often descends into something like racial demagoguery that tossing racist nuggets to the peanut gallery to make it make it clear to people that in his opposition to slavery he is not advocating all the forms of racial equality that stephen douglas and the democrats are are jumping up and down about so although lincoln always hated slavery as much as any abolitionist he was not always as committed to racial equality he was not committed to racial equality at the beginning of his political career the way he was at the end of his political career in his earliest days as a politician in the state legislature of illinois he was perfectly willing to use a grotesque racial demagoguery in his speeches in his attacks on on on his opponents he once drafted a law that gratuitously excluded blacks black men from voting things like that and and although that kind of racial demagoguery diminishes over the course of his career it doesn't completely disappear until the 1850s until the latter half of the 1850s and my the way i think about this is is that you could say you could say that lincoln's commitment to slavery was in it lincoln's opposition to slavery you could say was inhibited by his racial prejudices but you could also say and i would say that his racial prejudices were dampened by his increasing commitment to anti-slavery and the more committed he became to the destruction of slavery which he does over the course of his career and particularly over the course of the war the more committed he became to racial equality lincoln's anti-slavery convictions and the convictions of the party on which he's elected are so well known that as soon as he is elected uh the southern states begin to secede from the union and uh one by one they do so and by the time he is elected hey excuse me by the time he is inaugurated as president the deep south states have seceded from the union the union has effectively collapsed it's hard to think of any president who assumed office facing such a catastrophic crisis as the crisis lincoln confronted upon his off uh taking taking office as president he is the only president whose entire term of office is consumed by war uh and so uh uh this the scale of the crisis he confronts is unprecedented and has never been matched since it's often said that the secession was a hysterical overreaction to a non-existent threat that lincoln was always saying he had no intention of interfering with slavery in the states where it existed but that's boilerplate among anti-slavery folks that is the constitution doesn't allow the federal government to abolish slavery in the state and they said so from the beginning of the nation's founding and they said so until the end of the civil war and it's important to understand that radical abolitionists said that you know conservative anti-slavery folks said that it was a consensus position and historians i shouldn't say and when you hear people quoting lincoln saying that it's important to understand what that meant at the time because the slaveholders in the south and the secessionists in the south uh heard him say that heard republicans say that and say so what that's not the problem the problem isn't that they're going to abolish slavery in the state the problem is they're going to surround us and do everything they can to undermine slavery indirectly even though they can't do it directly and that's as much a threat to us as that's an existential threat to us as if they were claiming to be able to abolish slavery outright of course they're not going to abolish slavery outright everybody knows they're not going to do that but but they're going to they're going to do it they're going to they're going to undermine slavery by am i hook or by crook by any means and so i don't think it was a hysterical overreaction on the part of them it turned out of course to be a spectacular miscalculation on their part but they understood quite clearly what lincoln and the republicans represented and they consider that not unreasonably to be an existential threat it is a mistake to separate lincoln's commitment to the union from lincoln's hostility to slavery because he believes that the union that the founders intended to create was a union without slavery a union which ultimately had no slavery in it so yes he was determined to preserve the union but he believed that the union was supposed to be an anti-slavery union and that at some point along the way that destiny of the united states to be a a union of universal freedom was thrown off course lincoln and the republicans came into war with a well-developed commitment to a set of policies that would put slavery on a course of ultimate extinction with or without a war they would have preferred to do that without a war that is they were they were committed as they had to be to fighting a war to preserve the union the constitution doesn't give the federal government the power to wage a war for the purpose of abolishing slavery it gives the federal government the power to wage a war for the purpose of preserving the union it's just that as it happened the union that the republicans and lincoln wanted to preserve was a union that ultimately would have no slavery in it so that once again i shouldn't say once again so that the union that they are determined to preserve is the union in which the fate of slavery has been determined and that that fate is ultimate extinction that is not to say that they came into the war that they prosecuted the war in order to destroy slavery it's that they came into the war with a certain understandings of what the federal government could and should do to undermine slavery and they came into the war with an understanding that slavery was the source of the rebellion and that there were certain things that they could do in to slavery in the context of a war that they would not have been able to do in the context of peace by the time lincoln is elected president the republicans and lincoln and anti-slavery constitutionalists broadly have developed two distinct scenarios for attacking slavery one in peacetime and one in wartime they accept uh the precedents that uh under the laws of war uh belligerents can attempt to defeat an enemy or suppress an insurrection by means of emancipating the enemy slaves that's what the british did during the war of independence they did it again in the war of 1812 and the united states signed at least three treaties that acknowledge the right of belligerence to emancipate slaves in wartime so they've accepted this as a precedent but they've gone further in the sense that in the 1830s anti-slavery theorists led by former president john quincy adams begin to argue that although the federal consensus does not allow the federal government to abolish slavery in a state in peace time in wartime the the war powers clause of the constitution does in fact give the federal government the power to free slaves as a means of suppressing an insurrection and from that point on that conviction that if you're going to leave the union you're going to be subjected to the full panoply of war powers that includes the right of belligerence to emancipate enemy slaves in an attempt to suppress an insurrection so they accept that they also have developed excuse me they've also developed what i call the forfeiture of rights doctrine right and in 1839 william j of the j family of a long-established abolitionist family argues legally that if the slave states carry out their threat to secede from the union the northern states uh would no longer be under any obligation to return their fugitive slaves they would forfeit their constitutional right to the return of their fugitive slaves so so these two ideas that you can emancipate enemy slaves in wartime and you will forfeit your claim to slaves who escape in in wartime or to the free states during war or to union territory during the war coming into the war republicans have developed these notions of what what the federal government can do in wartime that it could not do in peacetime but they also have still this peacetime agenda right that they're going to abolish slavery in washington dc they're going to abolish slavery in the western territories they're going to sign treaties with great britain to suppress the atlantic slave trade and they're going to inhibit the return of fugitive slaves according to their conception of what due process rights ought to be involved in that so there's these two pronged approaches to slavery the wartime approach and the peacetime approach that coming into the war republicans and lincoln already accept even though they do not prosecute a war and never prosecute a war for the purpose of destroying slavery it's just that they come into the war determined to use the powers they have to undermine slavery in an attempt to achieve the purpose of the war which is the restoration of the union it's important to understand that all through the 1850s the issue of fugitive slaves was boiling up in american politics we tend to think of secession as a as a response to the threat to close slavery off in the territories and it was but the fugitive slave issue was at least as important or let's say almost as important or certainly a second in importance to the to the territorial issue and lincoln responds to that threat during the secession crisis and in his inaugural just by saying you complain that you can't get your slaves back now what do you think is going to happen when you leave the union and we are under no longer any we are no longer under any obligation to return your fuse shoot you to slaves to you at all your fugitive slaves he says in his inaugural address if you secede from the union your fugitive slaves now only partially returned will not be returned at all he makes an explicit threat in his inaugural address that we will not return your fugitive slaves to you so long as you maintain secession whether he intended it as a signal it certainly was a signal that is we know that we know that the slaves across the south were paying very close attention to the 1860 election that they understood the republicans to be an anti-slavery party and they understood lincoln to be an anti-slavery politician and they clearly believed many of them that if lincoln was elected president and if there was a war they could run to union lines and get their freedom and he would free them right it's sometimes described as a naive belief on their part but i think it was a belief based in in reality he is he is in fact threatening not to return fugitive slaves if the slave states secede from the union he does it at least twice before it before the war begins for people like lincoln for anti-slavery people coming out of the anti-slavery constitutional tradition the war powers clause of the constitution meant that when a slave ran to union lines or escaped to the north not only not only were the northerners no longer any up under any obligation to return the fugitive slaves but that the slaves became effectively contraband of war the federal government could legally confiscate those slaves as contraband of war and lincoln believed that under the war powers clause under his that his that his powers as commander-in-chief enabled him to emancipate confiscated slaves which he begins doing almost immediately after congress authorizes the legal confiscation of the slaves so they have these constitutional convictions we won't return your fugitive slaves to you we don't have to return your fugitive slaves and the issue arises very quickly in fortress monroe in virginia not too far from washington d.c when slaves near the fortress decide to test this proposition and a couple of them three of them arrive at fortress monroe where massachusetts general benjamin butler decides that uh under the laws of war the union is under no obligation to return them to the owner whose representative shows up the next day and demands their return and butler says well if you if you sign a loaf an oath of loyalty to the union uh i'll return them to you but disloyalty the price of disloyalty is that you don't get your slaves back which is standard anti-slavery constitutional theory it's what lincoln was threatening but he's not sure he's allowed to do that as a general he can't make policy so he writes to his superiors in washington says this is what i did can i am i allowed to do this lincoln calls a cabinet meeting and at the end of the cabinet meeting the secretary of war telegraphs general butler and says yeah you can do that that's approved right so the lincoln administration immediately approves the policy of not returning fugitive slaves to their owners but what's the status of these fugitive slaves are they emancipated well that's not clear you know congress has to be involved in that decision and congress won't be in session for a couple of months lincoln calls a special session of congress that to meet on july 4th 1861 lasts for about a month and at the end of that session congress passes a first confiscation act authorizing the permanent confiscation of slaves used in the uh in support of the rebellion two days later lincoln uh uh lincoln's secretary of war once again writes to benjamin butler and says uh these slaves are now emancipated right so the kind of there's a a legal process in which it's kind of a two-step process that's actually immediate even though it's two steps we have legally confiscated these slaves and the president has legally emancipated the slaves which are now confiscated property by the federal government so that's the the technical legal way in which it's done lincoln is using his powers as commander-in-chief to emancipate cons slaves who have been legally confiscated under the laws passed by congress this is the critical first step right it's it's not universal emancipation it's not abolition but it is the it is it is the critical first step on a path that will lead to the increasing radicalization of anti-slavery politics of policy until you get to the complete eradication of slavery by means of a constitutional amendment four years down the line right and you can watch as lincoln the republicans the northern public become radicalized by this war the longer it lasts the more they are determined to strike at the cause of the rebellion which anti-slavery northerners the majority of northerners come to believe or believe right from the start is called is slavery right slavery is the cause of this war if we want to end this war we need to destroy the cause of this war and they're saying this in the first year of the war right the question is how are they going to do it and the policies they adopt to to attack slavery as the cause of the rebellion are increasingly aggressive over the course of the war there are two ways to think about this you can say that they are cons they are pushing against the constraints the constitution imposes on them or you can say that they are empowered by the war and the war powers clause to take actions against slavery that they would not have been able to take had had uh their achievement of power in the federal government been been uh been peaceful had there been no war so they're feeling their way through these constitutional questions but at no point at no point do they actually violate that critical premise that the federal government can't abolish slavery in a state they're not going to cross that line but they're going to they're going to do everything else they can do under the constitution and as a peacetime measure and as a wartime document you know so i don't know whether i would say they are constrained by the constitution or whether they are actually empowered by war to do things that the constitution allows them to do that they couldn't do in peacetime the central premise of all anti-slavery constitutional thought is that the constitution does not recognize slaves as as property only as persons every reference to slaves in the constitution is as persons and that was not uh an embarrassing fail an embarrassment you know and they were so embarrassed by the fact that they recognized navy that they didn't use the word or something like that it was quite deliberate they the the slaves were not to be recognized as property uh uh under the constitution but they did recognize that they were property under the laws of the southern states right that's what made slavery slavery they were property right so the the laws of war allow belligerence to confiscate enemy property in time of war now they recognize that this gets kind of oddly complicated but also crucial right they cannot permanently confiscate real estate but they can permanently confiscate movable property personal estate right so this is going to be important during reconstruction because they can't permanently keep the land they've confiscated and they end up giving it back to their owners but they can permanently confiscate personal property and that's what they begin to do they take advantage of something they've always hated which is that the slaves are are legally property under the laws of the slave states and say well okay their property you said they were property we are now going to confiscate that property and as the owners of this confiscated property we are entitled to do what we want with this confiscated property we don't want to hold them as slaves therefore immediately upon confiscating them we will emancipate them so they they turned the argument about the slaves as property over and against the slaveholders you said they were property you said they were your movable property now we're going to take that property and confiscate it because that's what the laws of war allow us to do if you start from the assumption that you can step back all the way through human history because slavery goes back all the way to antiquity uh slaves as far as we can tell always ran away it was it was the basic way of getting out of slavery if you were a slave was to run away and they ran away in ancient greece then they went away in rome and they ran away in sicily in the middle ages where there was still slavery they ran away everywhere we know they were slavery slaves ran away but until there is such a thing as abolition uh running away is an individual act of resistance that has no political consequences when you see the world beginning to divide between polities where slavery is abolished and politics where it is still in existence which happens in the late 18th century in north america you begin to see slaves crossing from one polity that escaping from a polity that recognizes slavery to a polity that doesn't recognize slavery and then suddenly running away takes on a political significance that it didn't used to have right and we're going to see that in the war of independence in the war of 1812 in the seminole wars of the the two seminal wars slaves run from areas where they are legally enslaved to areas where slavery doesn't exist and the politicians are required to make a choice about what they're going to do this this is absolutely the issue that arises during the civil war from the earliest days of the war right northerners have all through the 1850s and going back decades but especially in the 1850s have made it clear that they don't like having to return fugitive slaves to their owners and given the theory that once the war once we're at war and once you've seceded we're no longer under any obligation to return your slaves then running away takes on even greater political significance so anti-slavery policy that the that that the anti-slavery policy that lincoln and the republicans develop presupposes that slaves will run away because they know slaves run away they've been running away and the running away has caused enormous problems uh uh in over the course of the 1850s they don't go into the war thinking what's what are the slaves going to do because they know what the slaves will do well they're pretty certain what the states will do and they begin to run to union line and the earliest anti-slavery policies in a sense all of anti-slavery policy until the abolition amendment is based on the assumption that slaves will free themselves by running to areas running to union lines where the constitution prevails over state law and where you are thereby presumptively free right so the the policy the policy presupposes the agency of the slaves the slaves have to run away for the anti-slavery policy to work right and they do they do in increasingly huge numbers and the the radicalization of anti-slavery policy is reflected in both the growing willingness of of increasing numbers of union officers and soldiers to to accept slaves who are running to their lines you know and and the the the determination of policymakers to make sure that union soldiers and union officers do not return slaves to their owners and that's a that's one of the ways in which you see the increasing radicalization of anti-slavery policy the policies and this and the statutes that get passed banning the union army and the union navy from in any way participating in the return of fugitive slaves you see that happening over the course of the war the numbers of slaves coming into union lines increases as the numbers of union troops enter the south and enter deeper and deeper into the south where the the slaves are concentrated but eventually you see a policy uh shift towards the aggressive recruitment of slaves off of the plantations so it's no longer just slaves have to run to union lines we can actually now after the emancipation proclamation go on to plantations and say come on you know you want to be free especially the men come and join the union army and you'll be emancipated because that is now the policy of the union army and each step of the way lincoln becomes increasingly aware of the leverage it gives him to promote the policy that has been anti-slavery policies since the late 18th century the more slaves he can encourage to come to union lines the more slaves who voluntarily come to union lines the weaker slavery becomes in those states that he is trying to get to abolish slavery right it's a commonplace that uh lincoln is inhibited in his anti-slavery policy by his desire to keep the border states from leaving the problem with that argument is that the border states have always been the first line of attack for anti-slavery people those are the states that you want to abolish slavery first right so there's 15 slave states get the four or five border states to abolish slavery first then you're down to 10 or 11 slave states and then you keep going right so early in the war in late 1861 lincoln begins to draft proposals for the abolition of slavery in the border states right so these this long-standing anti-slavery policy of using the federal government to encourage the abolition of slavery in the states lincoln is adopting that policy in the border states that he supposedly that are supposedly inhibiting his anti-slavery convictions when in fact what he's doing is beginning without quite realizing it beginning to follow a kind of two-pronged approach right to uh to attacking slavery and achieving the goal of putting slavery on a course of ultimate extinction by getting the number of slave states to abolish slavery right so you start in late 1860 by late 1861 they are already emancipating slaves who come to union lines and in late 1861 lincoln begins to rev up the pressure on the border states to abolish slavery on their own we'll give you all sorts of incentives we'll give you 300 for every slave who is emancipated by if you abolish slavery on your own we'll subsidize the voluntary colonization of slaves who want to leave the union and stuff like that we'll do everything we can by early 1862 these two policies begin to interact with one another and lincoln begins to see that the escape of slaves to union lines gives him a lever to pressure the border states to begin to abolish slavery and he starts saying to them look this is going to happen you know and you can either do it this way legally or or you can succumb to the friction and abrasion of war which means that the slaves will eventually be emancipated by some other mechanism so there are these two policies there's the peacetime policy of using the federal government to encourage the slave states beginning with the border states to abolish slavery on their own and then there is this wartime policy of encouraging the slaves to emancipate themselves by running to union lines where they will be confiscated and free and over the course of the first year of the war lincoln begins these two policies begin to merge and lincoln begins to use one policy before the emancipation of slaves under the laws of war to pressure the slave states to adopt a second policy which is gradual abolition uh by the states themselves and and that's that policy that merger of those two policies reaches its peak with the emancipation proclamation and the uh and the enlistment of black troops the anti-slavery policy that lincoln adopts presupposed that slaves would run to union lines and the policy doesn't work without slaves taking action uh for themselves by running to union lines and uh expecting to be freed in so doing so their agency is central to the process of emancipation that that takes place over the course of the civil war whether i mean they're they're influencing one another i i don't think lincoln had to be coerced into thinking that uh we should emancipate slaves who run to union lines i don't think the slaves had to be had to be taught to run for their freedom uh to union lines but the two things had to be operating at once for this policy to work for slavery to be undermined right so so i i think i i think that's it's why i'm reluctant to call lincoln the great emancipator as though he simply freed all the slaves with the stroke of his pen and i am also reluctant to say that the slaves freed themselves all by themselves because it took both it took it took up if if if if it all it took was war to get slavery abolished uh slavery would have been abolished during the war of independence right it it's not enough you know wars throughout human history are the opposite of emancipatory war is the single most uh important source of slaves when you go to war against somebody else you enslave their populations you don't free them right so it's it's not an automatic thing that because there's a war the slaves can free themselves there has to be on the other side a policy of accepting the runaways and emancipating them and the two have to work in tandem and and it doesn't work if either half of that isn't in place and we know we know that the uh uh lincoln and the republicans went into the war assuming slaves would run to union lines expecting them to run and vowing not to return them if they do runs for about 10 years of his life from 1852 to 1862 lincoln repeatedly endorsed a policy of voluntary colonization and primarily as a mechanism for encouraging the slave states to abolish slavery on their own that is if you abolish slavery on your own we will subsidize the voluntary uh the voluntary colonization of those who are emancipated to some colony outside the united states right so he's not he's not saying we need to rid ourselves of the pestilential presence of free blacks which is what colonizationists in the southern states and especially the upper south were saying he's saying that colonization is part of a larger anti-slavery project that's designed to encourage the states to abolish slavery on their own if this is one of the incentives you need to do that we will give you that incentive we will subsidize the voluntary the voluntary colonization of slaves to some place outside the united states the statements he makes on colonization are oddly ambiguous that is he endorses it he says it was it would be the best thing uh but he also says it's highly impractical it it's inconceivable that we would ever be able to uh find enough ships find enough money find a place where four million uh uh american slaves could be uh could be shipped off to so he doesn't seem to think it's a realistic policy it appears to be primarily an incentive for the states to abolish slavery on their own which is the policy that he wants to pursue by various means um once lincoln commits himself through the emancipation proclamation to universal emancipation that all the slaves in all of the seceded states will be emancipated by this war he now has that lever the lever has become so powerful so huge that he no longer needs to use colonization as an incentive he's got a he's got a stick instead of a carrot he's got a very big stick called uh we're gonna free all the slaves as soon as the union army gets into your state right and i don't have to offer your uh this this policy that my party doesn't like anyway that that anti-slavery people don't like by and large so he he drops it as soon as he issues the emancipation problem he drops it as as part of his uh as part of his agenda to get the states to abolish slavery and so the result of this is is that uh at the end of the war of the four million slaves who are emancipated by the war the number who are colonized by the united states government outside the united states is zero so the emancipation proclamation is in some ways the the best evidence of the radicalization of anti-slavery policy its significance is both very real in terms of policy but it's also significant symbolically i do think for example that this is the moment at which war becomes revolution that is it is now the policy of the federal government to destroy slavery completely not simply emancipate slaves who run to union lines in an effort to undermine the rebellion but we are now going to destroy slavery itself or at least try to destroy slavery itself and that has practical consequences of two big practical consequences uh the proclamation lifts what had been a ban on enticement that is up until the emancipation proclamation the policy of the federal government was any slave who voluntarily comes into union lines or refuses to leave with the master when the union arrives which is what happened in south carolina the the union troops take uh uh occupy the islands of the coast of south carolina the masters run away but the slaves don't right so that's voluntarily coming into union line they are not allowed to go on to plantations and entice slaves away right until the emancipation proclamation at which point the ban on enticement is lifted and you begin to see union officers systematically encouraged as a matter of policy to go on to union on to plantations and encourage slaves to leave in particular encourage slaves to join the union army which is the second big practical policy change made by the emancipation proclamation it doesn't simply say all slaves of uh in in rebellious areas are emancipated if they come to union lines and we encourage them it also says that we will now enlist slaves into the union army for purposes of armed service right that is this is a real revolutionary transformation this is this is taking slaves allowing slaves bringing slaves off the plantations arming them putting them in union putting them in union uniforms and then turning around and shooting at their former masters this is rebellion this is revolution this is this is using emancipation to overthrow the system of slavery itself and it's truly revolutionary and that that is the policy that the emancipation proclamation implements like the artificial distinction between uh motivated to preserve the union and motivated by your hostility to slavery military necessity is something that uh justifies emancipation for people who don't like slavery that is there are northerners democratic democrats who support a war for the preservation of the union but think the argument that military necessity requires emancipation military necessity requires the enlistment of black troops that's bogus they reject the notion that military necessity requires these anti-slavery policies right if you are committed to anti-slavery if you don't like slavery if you think slavery should be abolished then your conception of what is military militarily necessary is going to be shaped by those convictions right so it's hard to separate out what what is driven by purely military necessity versus what how how your determination of what military necessity is is shaped by your anti-slavery convictions so again it's artificial there is no legal justification for emancipation other than military necessity the constitution doesn't allow it so that's always going to be the primary justification for it but how much you're willing to use emancipation justify military emancipation as a military necessity is going to be determined by your convictions about slavery the emancipation proclamation throws the union army open to the enlistment of black troops but since most of those troops are going to come from the southern states and states are normally the vehicles through which individuals enter an army the southern states aren't going to do it so the federal government has to be the recruitment agent for slaves and and to do that they establish uh shortly shortly after the emancipation proclamation in early 1863 they established the united states colored troops right and they begin to they begin to enlist blacks into the union army often in states like kentucky and maryland that are formally excluded from the emancipation proclamation from the emancipation provisions of the proclamation this is something else this is another aspect of the emancipation proclamation that we need to talk about that is the emancipation proclamation emancipates slaves in areas that are in rebellion and it opens up the union army to slaves and black people everywhere that is the the military provision of the emancipation proclamation is not limited to states in rebellion and in by this by the spring and early summer of 1863 the union army is actively recruiting blacks in states that are technically exempt from the emancipation provisions of the emancipation proclamation so it's a mistake to say that the proclamation left alone slavery in the states where the union had the power to uh to attack slavery it does attack slavery in those states in particular in those states actually a disproportionate number of the slaves who eventually joined the union army and are guaranteed their freedom by doing so come from those border states of kentucky maryland because that's the only way they're going to get their freedom because the laws of war don't allow the federal government to emancipate slaves technically in states that are loyal because it's disloyalty that's determining the stretch the reach of emancipation policy so it's another way in which emancipation policy is radicalized by the extension of recruitment into the us army into the states that have the slave states that have not left the union and that's what they begin to do in the spring and summer of 1863 black troops begin to engage in battles and people are watching very carefully what their performance is and in a series of of engagements in the summer of 1863 they proved themselves in battle to the delight of lincoln and fellow his fellow republicans who and and to the discredit of the anti-war movement which at the same time is manifesting itself in a series of anti-draft riots the most notorious of which happens in new york in the summer of 1863 at the same time that black troops are proving themselves on the battlefield and this is this this conjunction of these two phenomena of black troops proving their loyalty to the union and that they're willing to fight and die to preserve the union while northern anti-war whites are rampaging through the streets killing black people rather than join the union army this disjunction seriously discredits the anti-war movement and lincoln takes full advantage of that that fact he knows he knows he senses northern public opinion on this has shifted and he goes public in in unusual ways ways that were unusual for him in ways that discredit discredit those who are opposed to the war who are encouraging people to resist the draft for example and things like that so black troops have an important effect a major effect on the politics of emancipation at this critical moment in the history of the war and remember also in july of 1863 at the same time is when the union turns back robert e lee's invasion of the north at gettysburg and the union achieves this major victory in the liberation of vicksburg mississippi right so the union is doing better than ever and the black troops are proving themselves and then come these anti-war riots right and again uh uh the conjunction of these events seriously discredits the anti-war movement in the north and that's the end that's the end of the draft riots the new york riot is so disgraceful and so it's it's it's so terrible so disgraceful that uh and it was actually suppressed by union troops who are marched from gettysburg where they have just defeated uh robert e lee to new york to suppress the draft riots so so uh uh black black troops proving themselves at this absolutely crucial moment in the summer of 1863 is a major major turning point in the history of the war and the history of emancipation i think but there's more to it than that that that the actual number of union troops who are of black union troops increases over the course of 1863 and 1864 until by 1864 they are a substantial proportion of the union army right and it's and it becomes for people like lincoln as for general grant you know they are by the end of 1864 at this critical another critical turning point in the war indispensable to the northern war effort so they are militarily indispensable just as they have been already politically indispensable to to the war effort i think the the relationship itself is an indication of the trajectories of these two very important men and you don't have to make that interesting by exaggerating the influence that douglas might have had we're trying to make it as though he's more influential i think what what what what the the biographies the trajectories of abraham lincoln from a politician who is not an anti-slavery politician to a politician who is an anti-slavery politician and the trajectory of frederick douglass from an abolitionist who rejects politics comes out of the garrisonian wing of the and gradually comes to accept politics as uh the way in which slavery needs to be attacked it represents the convergence of two men who come from very different places but end up in the same place that is committed to the idea that if you're going to abolish slavery it has to be done politically right you have to build a coalition that's going to do it and and uh a kind of re-convergence happens again during the civil war when they meet for for the first time and meet three times where frederick douglass is initially saying why aren't you being more aggressive why aren't you being more aggressive and lincoln is steadily pursuing this policy and becoming increasingly aggressive so that by the end of the war once again there's a convergence on the the indispensability of the complete and utter destruction of slavery so that over the course of their three meetings douglas becomes much more pers increasingly persuaded of lincoln's increasing commitment to the destruction of slavery and they end in something that looks like to me like real friendship real mutual admiration for one another um and it's hard it's just hard not to romanticize that it's just it's it's a really interesting development on the on the part of these two people where they're calling each other friends and their and their the admiration is real and and you know and and it's based on something quite substantial it's based on this twice convergence towards politics and towards a wartime destruction of slavery i think the first time he meets lincoln in the summer of 1862 when he's pushing lincoln to issue the emancipation and he goes there because he has things to say and because he wants to criticize him why aren't you letting black troops in why aren't you right you know and is impressed by lincoln's honesty and right and something like that the second time he goes is when lincoln calls him to the white house in the summer of 1863 when lincoln four when lincoln thinks he's going to lose the election and he needs douglas to help him with this policy of undermining slavery from within before he loses the election so that it's so far but the third time douglas goes voluntarily without any thing to complain about and and as you uh you didn't say it and he is barred he listens he goes to the second inaugural dress he hears that extraordinary second inaugural address and and he decides he wants to go say hello to lincoln at the inaugural celebration that evening he's not allowed in and lincoln finds out that he's been held at the door and says let him in he comes in and he just ex in front of the world says here's my friend frederick douglass i want to know what you thought of my my uh second inaugural address no one i don't no one's opinion means more to me than yours and douglas says it was a sacred effort which it sort of was

Channel: Life Stories

Views: 17,764

Keywords: Kunhardt Film Foundation, Apple TV Plus, Lincoln's Dilemma, Emancipation, Abolition, United States History, James Oakes, James Oakes Interview, james oakes slavery and freedom, james oakes historian, james oakes cuny, Abraham Lincoln's Commitment to Freedom, Lincoln's Commitment to Freedom, Commitment to Freedom, freedom, commitment, abraham lincoln, lincoln, civil war, battle of gettysburg, abraham lincoln biography, Abraham lincoln video

Id: oNcKkcLIM1U

Length: 108min 52sec (6532 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 11 2022