This paper reviews George Frederickson's Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race (Harvard University Press, 2008). It examines Lincoln's racial attitudes in the context of nineteenth-century white American opinion, tracing his evolution from cautious constitutional opposition to slavery's expansion through the pragmatic decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and, finally, to his tentative embrace of limited Black suffrage near the war's end. The review also addresses Lincoln's colonization proposals, the political pressures of the border states, and the debate over whether his antislavery record reflects deep moral conviction, shrewd political calculation, or both.
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The paper demonstrates effective use of comparative contextualization: rather than evaluating Lincoln in isolation, it repeatedly measures his positions against those of political rivals and contemporaries. This technique allows the writer to make qualified claims about Lincoln's "milder" racism without either excusing it or overstating it, which is the hallmark of nuanced historical argument.
The review opens by situating Lincoln's racial attitudes within broader nineteenth-century white American opinion, then moves through his constitutional constraints, his colonization proposals, and his political calculations regarding the border states. It reaches its climax with the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment, and closes by assessing the overall consistency — or productive inconsistency — of Lincoln's record. Each paragraph advances a single stage of this chronological and analytical arc.
Like almost all white Americans in the nineteenth century, Lincoln held prejudicial or racist views about Black people and was reluctant to extend full citizenship and political rights to them. His native state of Illinois had a constitutional provision that barred Black people from settling there at all, as did Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, and other Northern and Western states. Only a few New England states actually granted nonwhites equal citizenship and voting rights before the Civil War. Whites could — and did — oppose the expansion of slavery in the Western territories and even slavery itself, while still not being particularly favorable to Black equality.
Nevertheless, compared to his contemporary opponents — Senator Stephen Douglas, Andrew Johnson, and Jefferson Davis — who spoke openly of their contempt for Black people, their support for slavery, and their belief in Black inferiority, Lincoln's racism was of a milder variety. Unlike Davis, who owned over 500 slaves, or Douglas, whose wife owned 150 slaves in Mississippi, Lincoln had never been a slaveholder and never made any public or private statement sympathizing with slavery. Just the opposite: he stated that he would never want to be a slave or a master, since the core of his political and social philosophy was that every person had the natural right to rise as far and as fast as their talents permitted. As he put it in 1861, all people should "have an equal chance" in life, even though he did not accept full equality and citizenship rights for Black Americans (Frederickson 87).
At the time of his election in 1860, Lincoln argued that slavery was immoral, but also that the Constitution protected it where it already existed. This was a matter of states' rights and state law, though it did not prevent the federal government from restricting slavery's expansion into the Western territories. He was "genuinely antislavery, but in a way that did not provide the basis for any action that would violate rather strict construction of the Constitution" (Frederickson 84). In the election of 1860, he had won as a purely sectional candidate who had not even appeared on the ballot in ten Southern states and had received not a single vote in them.
His main goal when the war began was not to abolish slavery but to preserve the Union as a model for democracy in the world. If the South chose to resort to violence and revolution because its favored candidates had lost the election, then democracy itself would be undermined. Yet as he wrote in 1864, "I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," and he was perfectly consistent in these views throughout his adult life. Even so, he moved to abolish slavery only as a war measure in 1863 because he believed it was essential to save the Union, concluding that in order to win the war he had to lay "a strong hand on the colored element" (Frederickson 86). Only near the very end of the Civil War — not long before his assassination — was he prepared to consider full citizenship and voting rights for Black Americans. That idea enraged John Wilkes Booth when he heard Lincoln suggest in a speech that some Black men who had fought for the Union might be allowed to vote. In a very real sense, Lincoln lost his life merely for mentioning the possibility of limited Black suffrage, a prospect that evoked a murderous response from open racists and Confederates like Booth.
Lincoln had come a long way from 1861, but so had the rest of the country, at least outside the Confederate states. Throughout his life, Lincoln had believed that the Declaration of Independence and its affirmation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness applied to all human beings, even though it did not "mandate the civil and political equality of blacks." He argued that slavery was a "partial and temporary" deviation from those rights — one that the Founders had hoped would gradually become extinct (Frederickson 87). It had not become extinct, of course. Slavery had expanded and become more profitable during the great cotton boom of the nineteenth century, and the number of enslaved people grew from roughly 500,000 in 1775 to over four million by 1860.
From the start of the Civil War, abolitionist generals like David Hunter and John Frémont took it upon themselves to free all enslaved people within their jurisdictions, only to have Lincoln countermand these orders. From the president's viewpoint, any premature or sudden attempt to abolish slavery would alienate the border slave states of Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. He wrote that "I think to lose Kentucky is nearly to lose the whole game" (Frederickson 91).
As a calculating, pragmatic, and careful political strategist, Lincoln was well aware that a Northern victory was by no means guaranteed in 1862. He also feared that the Civil War could easily "degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle" once slavery was abolished, and perhaps even into a racial war of extermination that no one could control (Frederickson 92). The New York City draft riots of 1863 — in which hundreds of Black people were lynched by white mobs and order was restored only by federal troops — seemed to be a harbinger of just how remorseless and brutal such a conflict could become. This was why Lincoln's first emancipation plan in 1861–62 favored gradual emancipation over a "hard war" or revolutionary struggle. He offered $500 for every enslaved person in the border states, who would then be colonized abroad "at some place or places in a climate congenial to them" (Frederickson 93).
The idea of freeing enslaved people and resettling them in Africa already had a long history. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had believed that all Black Americans should eventually be removed from the United States and settled in Africa, and they even helped found Liberia in West Africa as a new home for freed people. Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison had adamantly rejected colonization as a solution to slavery in the United States and called instead for immediate equal citizenship and voting rights for Black Americans.
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