Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: The 273rd episode of the Atlas Society. Sorry, we rebranded. It's objectively speaking, as you can see from the set. I'm Jag. I'm CEO of the Atlas Society. I'm very excited for this special joint interview with returning guest professor Jonathan White. He's professor at the Christopher Newport University alongside fellow historian and co author Lucas Morell, professor at Washington and Lee University, to talk about their new book, Measuring the Man, the writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln. As you can see, lots of bookmarks and I enjoyed it greatly. So, Jonathan and Lucas, thank you for joining us.
[00:00:46] Speaker B: Thanks so much for having us.
[00:00:48] Speaker C: Yes, thank you.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: So could you both share a little bit about your scholarly journeys? Jonathan, your work spans Civil War history and African American perspectives.
How did you lead to collaborate on this project? Lucas, with your focus on Lincoln and political theory, what drew you to Douglass's writing specifically and how did this collaboration come together?
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Yeah, so I'll start. I. I've been thinking about Lincoln and writing about Lincoln and race for a number of years now. The last time I was on this program with you, we talked about my book, A House Built by Slaves.
And that is a history of black visitors to the Lincoln White House. And Lincoln and Douglass met three times. So Douglass was a major figure in that book. And as I began to think more about Lincoln and Douglass and all of the things that Douglass was saying about Lincoln throughout his career, I thought there should be a book that gathers all of this material together.
And so I called my friend Lucas, and we've known each other for probably, probably more than 20 years now. And Lucas was the perfect person to ask to collaborate with me on this book because on Twitter his handle is Lincoln Douglas. And I figure if there's anyone to work with on a book about Fred, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, it's the Lincoln Douglas guy.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: And you, Lucas?
[00:02:11] Speaker C: Yeah, well, I'm a scholar about Lincoln because I'm a scholar about the Founding. I think Lincoln is the greatest defender of the Founding. And so to understand the Founding's principles, I think we have no greater articulator of that than Abraham Lincoln. But to look at Lincoln, I have my students look at Lincoln's contemporaries. And a great, not just a fan, but also a fierce critic of Lincoln is Frederick Douglass. So you can't teach Lincoln, in my opinion, without teaching those who represent the abolitionist camp. And perhaps we'll talk later about why Lincoln was anti slavery but not abolitionist.
And to get to know the abolitionist camp, next to William Lloyd Garrison, I think Frederick Douglass is arguably the most famous of those. And so getting into this book is just getting into the stuff that I've been teaching for almost 30 years now.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: So you say that you thought it would be useful to have all of these writings compiled in one place.
Was there also a gap in scholarship that you were seeking to fill or a particular, particular text that inspired you and said, well, we really need to create a greater collection around this?
[00:03:27] Speaker B: So Lucas and I both teach a lot of Lincoln and a lot of Frederick Douglass. And my original conception for the book was actually to do a very thin book, something like maybe 40,000 words. Just hit the highlights, get a sense of Douglass's criticism of Lincoln, Douglass's praise of Lincoln, and how his views kind of changed over time.
And so Lucas and I started sort of collaborating and pulling together some of these famous editorials and speeches. And we also were going to include some information on how these two men interacted when they met.
And then last summer, we started to discover new documents that haven't been seen in 160 years.
And we found nine new letters, eight of which are in the book. And then we also found some new speeches and some new versions of speeches that haven't been seen or anthologized before.
And once we found this new material that I think is going to really change the way people think about the relationship with. Between these two men, we thought, okay, we can't do the thin book. We got to make it a little bit bigger. And so it expanded up to a little over 100,000 words. And we wanted to make it comprehensive. And so we think that because it brings in this new material and these new perspectives that people did not know Douglas held, it's going to fill a gap that historians just didn't even know existed.
[00:04:48] Speaker A: Well, was there anything particularly challenging about working with these 19th century texts? And, you know, both of you are deep scholars about both Lincoln and Douglass. Was there anything in these new texts that surprised you?
[00:05:06] Speaker C: Well, number one, and I'm sure John's gonna jump on as soon as I'm done sharing this little tidbit. But number one was we found certain opinions that Douglas sharing with a British audience that he was not sharing with his American audience.
I guess we'll go straight to the big reveal of the book. One of them is his opinion of Andrew Johnson just within days of Lincoln's assassination are not the opinions that Douglas and most of the country would later hold about Johnson. He was much more hopeful about Johnson as a Reconstruction president than Lincoln. And I'm going to let John say more about this discovery because he was the one who found it. And when he first shared it with me, I said, that doesn't sound like anything we've heard for my lifetime. In terms of opinions of Andrew Johnson, Frederick Douglass is no idiot. He's not naive. And yet within days of Lincoln's assassination, while he shares his great grief over the loss of his friend Abraham Lincoln, someone he counted as a friend, even though they only met briefly a few times, he shares in a letter that he knows is going to get published in a local British newspaper. He shares in a letter to a British abolitionist that he thinks Johnson's actually going to be a more effective president during reconstruction for black people, because he expects that unlike Lincoln, who is the, you know, with malice toward non charity for all guy. Great line. The only line we remember from the second inaugural.
Lincoln is going to go easy on the south, go easy on ex rebels, go easy on the guys who tried to destroy this country. Whereas Andrew Johnson has no love for the planter class and has said he was going to punish. Punish them, that that's what they deserve. He's gonna essentially rule them with a firm hand in the. In a way that Lincoln would not have. Because after all, Lincoln's own qualities that Douglass got to know were the kind of qualities that were good for keeping a country together, but not as good when it comes to being punitive as he at least intimated he would be once the war was over. So I'll let John provide a little more detail about that discovery.
[00:07:20] Speaker B: Yeah, we. We knew that Douglass had been corresponding with abolitionists in England for some time. So a little bit of backdrop after Douglass became free or escaped from slavery, I should say, he was not legally manumitted. And after he wrote his autobiography, he had to leave the United States because he could have been arrested as a fugitive slave. And so he went to the United Kingdom, and he spent a couple of years in England and traveling around Scotland and Ireland, and he met British abolitionists, and he corresponded with them for the rest of his life.
And some of the letters that Douglass sent to these British abolitionists appeared in the newspapers and had been discovered a generation or more ago by scholars who found them.
But now we live in a digital age where, you know, resources are available in a way that they haven't been before.
And so last summer, I had the thought of, I wonder if there are more letters that Douglas wrote to these British abolitionists that just haven't been found. So I went on to newspapers, dot com and other databases and began Searching for his name, and I would try different spellings, I would misspell his name, first and last name in various ways. And in the course of doing those searches, I was able to find these nine new letters. And it's the kind of thing that anyone with a computer could have found them. You just have to sometimes have the idea to go look for something.
[00:08:43] Speaker A: So we've intimated that Douglass's view of Lincoln famously evolved over time from being quite critical during the Civil War period to being very effusive in his admiration after his death.
Do any of these letters or the meetings that they describe in particular to his British audience shed light on some of those key turning points and how his views evolved over time?
[00:09:18] Speaker B: Yeah, they do. They, they were often written at important moments in the war where Douglass is reflecting on something that's just happened.
And so some of the new letters we found were From November of 1862, which is right after Lincoln issues his preliminary proclamation, Emancipation Proclamation, and then January of 1863, after the final Emancipation Proclamation.
And you see Douglass sort of wrestling with the meaning of these changes in the war. So In November of 1862, Douglass reflects on the irony that the Emancipation Proclamation is now coming around because there have been slow moving, pro slavery generals in command of the Union army. And so Douglas has been frustrated earlier in the war that there aren't more enthusiastic generals who are out there, you know, defeating the rebels.
And now Douglass recognizes if there had been those guys in command, we wouldn't have gotten emancipation.
In September of 1864, Douglass wrote a letter that again hasn't been seen for over 160 years.
And it's right after he met with Lincoln for the second time.
And there's just a little line in that letter that is so human where he describes having seen Lincoln, you know, in August of 64 after a year's time. And he says that Lincoln has aged five years in that one year period. And so you even just see Douglas thinking about Lincoln on a human level in some of this new correspondence.
[00:10:51] Speaker A: While Douglass's description of Lincoln's inaugural address in 1861 would seem to represent a low point in his estimation of the President, which he describes the address as quote, but little better than our worst fears and vastly below what we had fondly hoped it might be, it is a double tongued document capable of two constructions and conceals rather than declares a definite policy. What was the main thrust of his criticism at the time?
[00:11:24] Speaker C: Yeah, I'll begin an answer to that because he had more to say in criticism than in praise. Although there was a few elements of the speech that he praised, but most of it was critique number one.
He made the distinction between Lincoln as an anti slavery president, so called, and true abolitionism. Lincoln, remember in March, they're not at war yet. And so Lincoln as a peacetime president doesn't believe he has constitutional authority to touch slavery where it already exists. In fact, he begins the speech by saying what he believed personally and what the party, the Republican party. He's the first Republican president. We should remind ourselves they've only been in existence nationally for four years.
The Republican party only thinks that the federal government has power to restrict slavery from going into federal territory. It cannot, because it's a federal system, go into states where slavery already exists. And Douglass wants Lincoln to be a, you know, a rock ribbed abolitionist. He believes whether in time of war or in time of peace, the federal government does have authority to, as it were, treat slavery as an existential threat. That's not the word or phrase he used, but that's what he meant and argued, he said that Congress can ban slavery where it, wherever it exists because it, it is the greatest danger, the greatest threat to the Republic. Lincoln is on record, the Republican party is on record as not. They're not going to go there, especially in a time of peace. Remember, they're not at war until April. And so number one, he doesn't think that the Republicans are going to do everything that they should. And in fact, if the Southerners and the, you know, those who are joining the Confederacy were smart, they wouldn't, they would support Lincoln, they wouldn't attack the country, they wouldn't attack the federal government because the Republicans are pledged to support the existing institution of slavery by not touching it. And in fact, if slaves escape into free states, Lincoln has pledged that he is going to return them and, and Douglass calls them a slave hound, an excellent slave hound and, and the worst enemy of abolitionism. So Douglas goes after Lincoln hammer and tong for not being a true abolitionist because he's unwilling to use the federal government under the Constitution to attack the problem where it really lies. And that's where ever slavery lies. I don't know if John wants to add to that.
[00:13:57] Speaker A: Well, I wanted to move on because like you said before, we do have a lot of questions and I do promise to get to some of our audience questions as well. So given that we tend to think of Lincoln as one of the greatest presidential orators of all time, it was amusing to say the least to see Douglass describe his Oratory as follows. In 1862, quote, unusually garrulous, characteristically foggy, remarkably illogical and untimely in his utterances, often saying that which nobody wanted to hear and studiously leaving unsaid about the only things which the country and the times imperatively demand on him. Now, as a former presidential speechwriter myself, I'm curious to how Lincoln's ability as an orator was regarded at the time. Was this kind of an isolated opinion based maybe not just on the delivery, but on his Douglass dissatisfactions with his message? Or how, how. How was Lincoln viewed as a.
Was he a great communicator?
[00:15:08] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think Lincoln was a great communicator. And I think that that line from Douglas reflects Douglas's anger with the situation more than a reasoned assessment of Lincoln's abilities as a public speaker. The context is that for that is that Lincoln had called a group of black leaders to the White House and he then lectured them on why they should lead black people out of the country through a process known as colonization.
And the. The view that I adopt and that many people, many historians today adopt, is that on the colonization issue, Lincoln knew that he could not force or deport 4 million African Americans who would become free as a result of the Civil War.
He knew that colonization wouldn't be a feasible thing in the long run. But he also knew that white Northerners were concerned about what happens if you free 4 million people. Are they going to move to urban centers in the north and take away low wage jobs, unskilled jobs from Irish immigrants? And so Lincoln brought this black delegation into the White House and tries to persuade them, you should lead your people out of the country through voluntary, I should say, colonization.
But what Lincoln was really doing was he was. He was speaking to white Northerners. And this is in the moment right before Lincoln issues his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. And so what I think Lincoln was doing was he was preparing the white Northern electorate for emancipation's coming. But I don't want you to be as worried about it as you think you need to be. And he's setting up colonization as sort of something that can go along with emancipation, should it come.
Now, Douglas, of course, doesn't know that. Douglas doesn't know what Lincoln's doing behind the scenes or what he's thinking about. Douglass at that point doesn't know that Lincoln is planning to issue an Emancipation Proclamation, and he just is waiting for the right moment to do it. And so I think that assessment that Douglass has of Lincoln is one that comes from Anger and frustration because Douglas hated the idea of colonization, but not a true assessment of Lincoln's skill as an orator.
[00:17:23] Speaker A: Understandable. So Douglass and Lincoln met three times during the war. In particular, you include Douglass's letter to British abolitionists Russell and Mary Carpenter, which spoke of his pivotal meeting with Lincoln at the latter's request, at a time when Douglass had again been highly critical, and publicly so, of the president, in which he concluded, quote, I am nowadays taking a more practical view of things than formerly, and hence I shall be doing all I can to promote the election of Mr. Lincoln. End quote. So what do we know about that meeting, and how does Douglass's evaluation of it illustrate his evolving attitudes about both Lincoln and the practicalities of political change?
[00:18:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll take this one.
I've written a lot about this meeting in a house built by slaves and other things I've written.
So the first time Douglass and Lincoln met was in August of 1863, and Douglass showed up uninvited. He was angry at Lincoln about certain things, and Douglass went to confront him.
This meeting In August of 1864, Lincoln invites Douglas to come to the White House. And so this is a very big change.
And Douglass describes in this letter, at first, you know, he didn't really want to go, but he's glad he went, in hindsight. And Douglas shows up at the White House, and the two guys sit down and they talk politics for a while, and it's election season, after all.
And then Lincoln explains to him, he says, you know, Douglas, I hate slavery as much as you do and want to see it abolished altogether.
And Lincoln then explains the problem.
I'm going to lose reelection. Like, at that point, it looked really bad for the Republicans. It looked like Lincoln was going to lose. So he says, essentially, I'm going to lose in the election. And when a Democrat takes power next March, he's going to rescind the Emancipation Proclamation. And the problem is, Lincoln says, I've issued the Emancipation Proclamation, but the slaves are not running away into Union lines in as great of numbers as I had hoped they would.
And so Lincoln and Douglas then sit down together in Lincoln's office and figure out a plan, modeled after John Brown, to send bands of scouts into the Confederacy to try to persuade the slaves. Run away now while you still have the chance, because once a Democrat is in office, your chance for freedom will be gone.
And I believe that this moment really changes Douglas's way of thinking about Lincoln, because he sees here in this moment that Lincoln's heart really was in bringing liberty and freedom to as many people as possible.
Because freeing the slaves in this way had nothing to do with winning the war or saving the Union. It was not a military necessity. It was just a way of trying to make people free.
And I know that the version of the book we sent you is the advanced copy. And I'll tell you, I found an even fuller version of that letter that we were able to work in at the last moment to the final edition of Measuring the Man before the line, actually, that you read about him being more practical.
And so let me just show you what, what Douglas said in this letter that we were able to include in the final edition. There was a third party radical candidate running named John C. Fremont. And if Douglas could have his way, the most radical guy would be the one who would be the president.
But listen to what Douglas says.
Fremont the radical can get no votes and will, I think, be withdrawn from the canvas by his friends.
He is the fittest man but has the fewest supporters. And though one man in the right is a majority against the whole world wrong at the polls, numbers rule. A candidate without a party may be sublime, but he cannot be successful.
All of that, I believe, was excluded from the newspaper version of the letter that I originally found when we put it into the book. Then I found another newspaper that's not digitized, actually with the full version. And then that's when Douglas says, I am nowadays taking a more practical view of things than I did formerly. And so it shows that, you know, even though Douglas grows to appreciate Lincoln, he wishes he could get a radical, but he recognizes you got to vote for the candidate who can win.
And so he then says, I'll do everything I can to secure Lincoln's reelection.
[00:21:53] Speaker A: Interesting. Well, there was another such letter that included a surprise, at least for me, in which Douglass was arguing that both enslaved and free African Americans would benefit from a prolonged conflict, a prolonged war. What was his thinking at the time?
[00:22:12] Speaker C: Yeah, number one, Douglass, from the beginning and through the end of the war, is concerned about two things.
Complete emancipation. Not just prevent slavery from going into the territories, but get rid of it absolutely. Full bore, all caps, abolition.
And number two, freedom is enough isn't enough. We need to have our rights protected. And that means we need to be protected as equal American citizens. So full civil and political rights and especially the right to vote.
And so for Douglas, he thinks unless those two things are achieved, and I'm hoping I'm not putting too fine a point on this, Douglas thinks if it's just The Constitution as it was and the Union, the Union as it is, or the other way around, he thinks that is not a war that's worth our blood and treasure. This is a war that needs to produce complete abolition and it has to produce full, complete, total equality for black people. So for whether enslaved or free, blacks have to come out better after the war than before. And so he says on more than one occasion in one of the letters that you just mentioned, he says it's really a prolonged war, a protracted war. We don't want to rush into Reconstruction because if the war stops, the military rationale that Lincoln seized on to justify it under the Constitution to justify emancipation, that is no longer applicable. And so if you are still enslaved, you know, the, the, the laws protecting slavery in this, in the Southern states, they're still on the books. This is no 13th amendment yet. And so he thinks, why do we want that? Our situation, maybe for a few people it's, it has improved. But there's 3 to 4 million black people in the United States. They're all in the deep south or below the Mason Dixon line. And, and he, his rock ribbed concern for them is they have to get justice and justice means getting government protection for the things that they already possess as human beings. And a shorter war, even though in the abstract that sounds like a good thing. Because who wants war if it leaves blacks in their second grade second class citizenship? If you're free and if it leaves you enslaved, that's not a war that benefits blacks. So if the war goes long, more black men fight close to up to 200,000 actually serve in the Union military. And while they are defending the country, the sympathy of loyal whites is on their side and it will be easier and more likely that they will get justice. This war is brought to a quick close and all of a sudden concern for justice are out of the window and it's just about self interest.
[00:24:58] Speaker A: Fascinating.
All right, I'm going to get to audience questions after one more that I have been wanting to ask you. When Douglass was asked what should be done for the 4 million emancipated slaves, he responded, let us alone do nothing with us for us or by us as a particular class in the outlast cities. Draw my life video of Frederick Douglass we also highlighted and his impassioned rejection of socialism, which was being talked about and debated at the time. He rejected it as the quote, slavery of all to all. To modern ears, Douglass sounds like a proto libertarian or even an objectivist. So in your scholarship, did you Find other examples of Douglass arguing against this kind of more expansive welfare state.
[00:25:57] Speaker C: Yeah, I'll mention one quickly. And I hope you see the lesson for what would be opposition to the welfare state is that he was just a radical Lockey. And John Locke's second treatise of civil government guy. He believed that rights inherited in a human being because they were human, not on the basis of your sex, your religion, your race, you know, nation of origin, any of that. And so controversially, even for his time, he was against what was known at the time as race pride. In other words, a belief that the only way forward is if we identify ourselves, what, through what he called complexional institutions.
He said they ought to be repealed, repudiated, forever abolished, and instead, every right, privilege, and immunity now enjoyed by the white man, he said, ought to be as freely granted to the man of color. And so your point about let us alone do nothing with us, he said, we never asked that question of white people. Why do we have to ask it of blacks? It actually reinforces the myth of white supremacy and black inferiority. And so he. He would be someone who thought that the government should not protect any class per se. And in his day, the fundamental class was color. That there were government obtrusions into public policy by virtue of race. For example, you couldn't serve a black person, couldn't serve in the federal militia, the federal army, until the law was changed during the Civil War. It actually used the existing the militia act of 17, I don't know, 92, something like that.
It actually used the word white, that you had to be white. That had to be changed so that when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks could serve in the Union army. And so anything that's done by class, Douglass thought, undermined the fundamental principle of the country, and that was human equality. All human beings possess the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Just one more quote for you. He said that color should not be a criterion of rights. Color should not be the measure of anybody's constitutional rights.
[00:28:09] Speaker A: So against identity politics before it became a thing?
[00:28:14] Speaker C: Absolutely, absolutely. And I'd debate anybody on that point.
[00:28:17] Speaker A: Okay. All right. As promised, we're going to get to some audience questions here, and I'm going to start with the. The latest ones. Joker's Wild asks, what did Frederick Douglass think about Native Americans within the United States?
[00:28:34] Speaker B: That's a great question, and I don't know the answer to that. Lucas, can you speak to that? I don't know where he wrote about that.
[00:28:40] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a good question. I'M trying. I'm searching my mind for this because I, along with John, we teach Douglas. He. He spoke about so many things so many times.
I don't know that the, the Native American question came up very often.
[00:28:59] Speaker A: Well, that it kind of ties into this other question by Ilia Shin. Do you think there are still blind spots that need to be filled in by discovery of more letters or speeches? Do you think there's any chance of such discovery really changing our understanding? So, who knows? He may have had a whole letter on it, but it's lost to posterity.
[00:29:22] Speaker B: Yeah. And, you know, that's. I alluded to this earlier.
It's an incredible time to be alive for a number of reasons, but one of which, as a historian, is that so many resources are available that a generation ago you never could have looked through. So, you know, when I was in college 25 years ago, if I wanted to look at old newspapers, I had to go to the library and get microfilm and scroll through and just hope that I might find what I was looking for. Whereas now, within a matter of seconds, you can do a keyword search through millions of pages and you can find anything. Now, you always have to be careful when you do that because you have to recognize that if you're looking for something, you're going to find it. And so you may not be capturing the broader context. So it always is good when you're framing a research question to think about that more broadly. But we can find things that we never would have imagined. So in the summer of 2020, when there was the. The protesting going on around the country after the killing of George Floyd, there's a d. There's a Statue in Washington, D.C. of Abraham Lincoln. It's very controversial because it has Lincoln hovering over a slave who is rising up on his knees from his knees and breaking his chains.
Now, the statue is really important because it was paid for by freed people who, who wanted to show their gratitude for Lincoln, to Lincoln, for what he had done.
But it's controversial because of the pose. Now, Frederick Douglass delivered the address dedicating that statue in 1876.
And in the summer of 2020, there were protesters who wanted to tear it down because they didn't like the controversial pose of Lincoln and the slave.
And it led to a debate among a group of people that Lucas and I are a part of called the Abraham Lincoln Institute over. Should we, as an organization take a public stand on this, on this statue?
And in the course of the debate, I got into a text discussion with one of our colleagues, Scott Sandage over this question.
Scott said, well, Douglas didn't like the pose. And I said, well, the evidence of that is from 30 years later. So like, I don't know how credible it is.
And that got Scott going into Newspapers.com and discovering a letter that Douglas wrote in 1876 describing his feelings on the statue. And we included it in this book and we wrote about it for Smithsonian magazine and we got on all the major radio stations and newspapers around the country. I mean, it was a national headline, the discovery of a letter that Frederick Douglass had written. And so that's something that, you know, high school students can do today. I've read about high school students who go on newspapers.com and find new information about things that historians think they know well and change the way we view different aspects of the past. And so it's something to encourage your audience with that.
Anyone now, it's really democratized. Anyone now can go and find new material and change the way people think about a historical subject.
[00:32:36] Speaker A: Well, let's talk a little bit about that letter and what were his, because I thought he had very thoughtful criticisms and he also, I think, acknowledged the positives of the monument and the memorial, but he had suggestions on how it might have been improved.
[00:32:55] Speaker C: Well, I'll add John, of course, as he just said, he's written co. Written an article about it. But briefly, the. The. What he liked about the monument was that it was a snapshot of emancipation. It didn't intend to convey the whole story, especially in 1876. Right. Things have changed since emancipation.
It captured a particular moment, but he didn't like the posture. This is a time. Right. President Grant is concluding his presidency. This is leading up to the fateful Tilton Hayes Compromise of 1877, when the federal troops are going to be withdrawn from the south and the blacks are going to be left at the mercy of ex rebels, their former oppressors. And so Douglas is thinking about these former, you know, Confederate states one by one, coming under the control of ex rebels. And so at the time, under Grant, at least, the rights of blacks are being upheld and secured and protected against domestic terrorism.
And so what he wanted, as John intimated, is another statute that shows the black man erect, in other words, not the black man as a recently liberated slave, but as a free and equal citizen. So don't get rid of a statue, add a statue that tells a more complete picture. But for sure, at that moment, and in this newspaper, we discovered yet another kind of mini editorial of Frederick Douglass where he Praises both Lincoln for emancipation and Grant for if you will, equal citizenship, and puts kind of an exclamation point on what he believes are if you will. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna put it as crude as Douglas put it in his eulogy of 1876. I mean, it's a eulogy where he says that Lincoln shared the prejudices of whites. And he says that actually helped. We can talk about what. What. What's really going on. But that actually helped him keep the nation together, keep loyal citizens beholden to their Constitution.
And in using that sentiment, he helped them also come to a point to emancipate.
But he. He. He wanted Grant, or held up Grant and Lincoln as models for the loyal white majority in 1876 and for their policies. He did not want Lincoln to be seen simply as what he said back in June of 1861, 65 after Lincoln's assassination. He didn't want Lincoln to be emphatically the black man's president.
He was that. But if he was only the black man's president, whites would think, well, they've been emancipated. What's left for us to do? He's like, no, use Lincoln, use Grant as the model for what blacks are owed now. And what they are owed is no less and no more than what whites and any other American is owed. And that is the equal protection of the law. If you could sum up Douglas's public policy principle in one statement or phrase, it's equal protection under the law.
[00:35:57] Speaker A: All right, this is kind of a more foundational question that helps to provide context for what we're talking about. My modern Galt is saying he recalls, didn't Frederick Douglass originally want to abolish the Constitution, but changed his mind based on the Declaration of Independence?
[00:36:15] Speaker B: Yeah. So Douglass originally, as an abolitionist, was a Garrisonian.
And William Lloyd Garrison's view was the Constitution is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. And from Garrison's perspective, the Constitution should be burned. And he, in fact, did publicly burn it on July 4, 1854, to show his disdain for the Constitution. And so Douglass as. As a very early abolitionist, came under Garrison's wing and adhered to Garrison's views. But Douglass began to read a number of libertarian thinkers. He read Lysander Spooner, he read Garrett Smith, and he began to change his views of the Constitution. And the first time you really see these, I think, in a. In a public format, is his very famous speech, what to the slave is the Fourth of July, which he delivered on July 5, 1852 in Rochester.
And in that speech, Douglass calls the Constitution a glorious liberty document.
And the problem as he sees it, is that the Constitution has been misinterpreted by generations of presidents. If you just got an anti slavery president, they would do it right, but we've had people doing it wrong.
[00:37:31] Speaker A: All right, last question here from Alan Turner. Out of curiosity, when studying old letters and texts, is it difficult or easy to authenticate these documents?
[00:37:44] Speaker B: Do you want me to take that, Lucas?
[00:37:46] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
[00:37:48] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. A lot of times it has to do with where you find the document.
So if you find something at the National Archives or the Library of Congress, there's a very good chance it's going to be authentic, especially if it's been there for a long time.
If you find something in an online auction, you know, it depends it. It's often real, but if it's. If it claims to be the newly discovered, you know, letter from Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglass, it's probably not. And so a lot of times you have to look at it and sort of evaluate what it's doing, what its provenance is.
With these letters in the British newspapers, they were so radical that the readers of the British newspapers had their doubts about whether or not they were authentic.
And I actually found an editorial where an editor of one of these British newspapers said, essentially, we recognize that some of our readers don't think these are authentic, but here's why we think they're real. Now, Lucas mentioned that when I first found one of these letters and I called him, I said, lucas, you won't believe what I found. Like, listen to this. And I read it to him over the phone. And Lucas, like the British readers, had his doubts about its authenticity because it was so different from what we expected someone like Frederick Douglass to say.
So what we did was then we went to the Frederick Douglass papers at the Library of Congress, which are actually a mess. The letters are all on microfilm, and they've been broken up. So you'll find half of one letter on one reel and the other half on another reel. And you've got to kind of figure out first how the letters fit together.
But once we were able to piece together the letters from the microfilm, we were able to find the receipts.
So we found these British abolitionists writing to Douglas saying, I got your letter of this date and I gave it to the editor of the Leeds Mercury or the London Inquirer, and he published an extract of it. And so finding that evidence Confirmed for us. These letters are absolutely 100% authentic.
[00:39:57] Speaker A: Wow. I had no idea that there was so much sleuthing, kind of a detective story that goes into not just finding, but also making sure that.
Because, you know, famously, he who controls the past controls the present. And so. Or he who controls. Well, anyway, you know what I'm talking about. But being able to. You could see how somebody might want to.
Who prefers a particular narrative, want to insert a kind of document that would set the record straight, or purport to set the record straight when it wouldn't necessarily be authentic. So, you know, in reading this book and also getting a better understanding of Douglass's nuanced thought and his evolving perspective, not just on Lincoln, but. But on how to affect political change, I'm just wondering if what are the lessons for us today in our own polarized political climate that how did Douglass's measuring of leaders. How can that help us have a more thoughtful evaluation of our political political figures today?
[00:41:19] Speaker C: Yeah, one thing I would say is. And a lot of people have made the comparison between our polarized times and the most polarized times in American history, and that was the decade of the 1850s, the antebellum period leading up to the Civil War. I don't think things are that bad. So that's the good news. The bad news is we are undergoing a kind of identity crisis today where, you know, we're. We're. We're contesting. What does it mean to be American?
Does it, you know, should. You know, is this a country that requires borders? Who gets to vote, who gets to have a driver's license? These sorts of things.
What the Supreme Court just a week ago was debating what to do about the Voting Rights act and should we continue to have these things called majority, minority voting districts that protect discrete. So, you know, the court calls them discrete and insular minorities on the basis of race.
So we're still trying to figure out, is it American to pay attention to these subgroups, these categories of Americans, whether it's race, whether it's sex, you name it. And I think with Douglas, at least, the confidence or the hope that he had in measuring Lincoln, and he wasn't the only one. He was kind of speaking for all of black America, saying, we're watching you. We're not just taking what we're getting or pointing out what we're not getting. We're weighing, considering sifting what it is you're saying and what it is you're doing.
[00:42:40] Speaker A: And.
[00:42:40] Speaker C: And black Americans have been doing it as long as there's been an America. And the good news is, at least for Douglas, I believe his hope was that he and Lincoln believed in the same Declaration of Independence. The way they read that was the way that most Americans, which is to say loyal Americans, read that that equality meant equality. But it takes time to make that a reality as a matter of law and as a matter of social mores. And so for. For us today, I think what we can learn from Douglas, at least one thing is Douglas, in order to go forward, I like to say he points us to the past.
Are there things in the past that are not good? Yes, one of them rhymes with knavery.
But the. The good news is the past also holds the key to the future. And the best things in the past are the things that both Douglass and Lincoln found in. In the Declaration of Independence. Human equality, individual rights, government by consent of the governed. These are things that there is a consensus about, and I think there's a consensus about that today. If we do not have consensus about that, that is a problem, because you can't have a nation. If we're divided in terms of what the nation stands for, what's the meaning of America? What is the purpose of government? How do we interpret our Constitution?
What constitutes a right, and how should it be secured? And so one of the lessons of leadership is being able to articulate that message to. To a divided country and invite them, as King said one time, and I think he stole this from Douglas, all we ask is that you be true to what you said on paper. And so Douglass drew the nation's attention to paper, Lincoln drew the nation's attention to paper. And the two most important paper documents are our Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
[00:44:32] Speaker A: Well, speaking of paper, one important paper was the. Is the Wall Street Journal. And the two of you penned a really marvelous op ed earlier this year in which you posit a similarity between Juneteenth and Independence Day, arguing that, quote, both celebrate a commitment to liberty whose fruition took time. End quote. So how did Douglass's perspective on the Emancipation Declaration reflect both urgency and realism about power and the limits of the document?
[00:45:10] Speaker B: I'm going to let Lucas go first on this one.
[00:45:12] Speaker C: Oh, great.
So he can offer a correction.
The, The. The radical, Douglas, he never lost his radicalism. He never lost his commitment and devotion to principle. That was always there.
And only occasionally, as Jonathan pointed out earlier, did he let it slip. And again, in a letter, rather than a speech or editorial, he let it slip that he's more. He's all about reform these days and not revolution.
He thought that blacks would get their justice better under the existing regime, the existing government, than to try something else. Everything else was worse.
So you need the radical because he's the one that points you to principle, but you also need the realist, because without the realist, you don't get things done. And, and you need, you need a party to get things done. You can claim you're above the fray and an independent, but you can't marshal majorities that way. Both men were, you know, masters.
You know, they set the gold standard for political oratory in a government based on the consent of the governed. You may have all the right principles in the world and be right as rain and true on all subjects, but if you can't persuade your neighbor that you're right and that government should do X, Y or Z, you don't amount to a whole, whole lot. And so the role of prudence, I think, was something that Douglas discovered over time, not really at the outset or for a long time, because he didn't have to run for office, Lincoln did. And to run for office, you don't get to choose your voters, and you have to take voters where they are. And so real leadership there is figuring out, how can I marshal as much consent for just outcomes? And so you got to build a bridge between where people are and where you want them to go. You can't just say, hey, come over and join me on this island, because I know all, I know I have all truth. You got to start with where they are. And at the time in the 1850s, we were an incredibly racist nation, both north and south of the Mason Dixon line.
Lincoln didn't have a choice. He had to appeal to a very self interested and pervasively bigoted population. He had to show them it was in their interest to do the right thing. And the good news was he could point back to a document that said these are the right things. And that takes time and it takes political skills. Well, we'll see what Jonathan does with.
[00:47:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll just add a little bit to that.
You know, a lot of critics today say, well, the Emancipation Proclamation didn't do anything. It didn't accomplish anything. And I talk to audiences all over the country and people will tell me, well, Lincoln didn't really free the slaves because the proclamation freed people over whom he had no control. And it. So it frees the slaves in the Confederacy in areas of rebellion, and it doesn't free the people who are within Union lines.
And so all the Time, I will talk to audiences who say the Proclamation didn't do a thing.
And Douglas actually grappled with that shortly after the Proclamation was issued. And he. He did it by comparing the Proclamation to the Declaration of Independence, by saying, look, on July 4, 1860, or, sorry, 1776, the colonies did not become free. It took a war to achieve that independence. In the same way, he says, the Emancipation Proclamation, sure, it's not going to make anyone free right in the moment Lincoln signs it, but as the armies move forward, as what he calls the Proclamation being made, iron, lead, and fire, as the Proclamation becomes a reality and moves forward with the army, freedom goes with it. And so for. For Douglas, he's trying to get Americans to recognize that you can't always expect, or you shouldn't expect, instantaneous results, but something that starts as a piece of paper, whether it's the Declaration of Independence or the Emancipation Proclamation, once it becomes real, becomes iron, lead, and fire, it will bring about change for society.
And in another document, Douglass actually speculated and said that he thought the day would come when January 1, which was the day Lincoln issued the proclamation, he said January 1 would eclipse July 4 as America's independence Day. And, of course, that hasn't happened, but it. It does give a real sense of just how important Douglass immediately recognized the Proclamation to be. And I think a lot of critics today could. Would do well to go back and see the way that Douglass thought about this issue in 1860.
[00:49:59] Speaker A: All right, we've got nine minutes left. Let's see if we can get to at least a few of my remaining questions. So in Douglass's speech after Lincoln's assassination, we find a powerful message about resilience and continued determination and hope in the face of immeasurable loss, and one that bears particular relevance today. He declared, quote, though Abraham Lincoln dies, the Republic lives.
Though that great and good man is struck down by the hand of an assassin, yet I know that the nation is saved and liberty established forever. Then this quote, it is not inconsistent with this tearful occasion to discover, through the blinding mists that rise from this yawning gulf, the beautiful bow of promise spanning the gloom and giving hope to all that was just, I thought, the most remarkable quote in the book. So expand, if you will, on link on Douglass's reaction to Lincoln's assassination and his message to the country at the time.
[00:51:09] Speaker B: Yeah, so that was a speech that Douglass gave in Rochester, New York, and this is a moment where the nation is shocked by the assassination of the President. I mean, nobody saw it coming and just a few days later, they. Earlier, they had been celebrating the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Courthouse. And so to. To go from the celebration to the. Just the anguish and the grief of the assassination was just so jarring for Americans. And they. They needed to figure out how to make sense of it.
And so where do they look? They go to their communities. They go to their county courthouses, their town squares, and they look to their leaders. They look to their preachers, to their political leaders, to the community leaders. And in Rochester, New York, Frederick Douglass is one of those leaders. And so he gives two impromptu speeches.
And we've got them both in the book, the one that you quoted from and then the other we actually are anthologizing for the first time.
And you can see how he's trying to help his community make sense of what has happened and also to find hope. So the talk of the bow of promise is an allusion to Noah in the book of Genesis, where that God promised with a rainbow not to ever destroy the earth again through a flood.
And so I think Douglass was trying to get his audience to recognize that even in this moment of great anguish, we still can find hope. The nation does still survive.
But at the same time, Douglass is also urging his audience to be very careful about reuniting with the Confederates.
And as. As we've talked about already, you know, Douglass always has his eyes on the prize of black freedom and black and freedom, full equality for all Americans. And so he's worried about, you know, if we have what he calls a hasty restoration, meaning if we force reunion too quickly, we might lose everything that we've gained. And so in pointing Americans towards a hopeful future, he's urging them to be now cautious and not reunite with those who, he said, you know, spawned the spirit of John Wilkes Booth, the Confederate traitors who.
Who impelled Booth to do what he had done.
[00:53:36] Speaker A: So if Douglass were alive today, if you care to speculate or maybe offer your own reflections on how he might measure America's progress towards the ideals that both he and Abraham Lincoln shared, well.
[00:53:56] Speaker C: I'll take a quick try at that.
I think he would say that we have progressed mightily since, you know, he. Since the turn of the century. He died in February of 1895. So there's a lot of water under the bridge there.
And so the fact that women have the right to vote now, it's something we take for granted. But Douglas was an early adopter, early encourager of, and caught a little flack when the 15th Amendment was being debated and ultimately passed and ratified, and it only guaranteed black males, you know, included them in the fold of the franchise and caught flack from Elizabeth Cady Stanton for not being more universal in it. He was always universal in his belief that, as he put it, you know, all. All rights for all or for none. And in principle, he thought women had no less a. A right to the boat than men did, that they should be voters. So the fact that that happened has happened since Douglas's demise. He would say, I mean, grief. That's half the population. Right. Once they reach adulthood. So he think there are. He would point to and marvel at very palpable signs of progress.
What he would be chagrined at is that we're. That, you know, we have never talked more about race than, than we do now. How is it that we're still talking about race? That would be a severe bummer for, for Douglas.
And if he was alive, he would use the word bummer.
He would be disappointed that even as we have progressed in so many ways towards equal protection of the law, we still are grappling with the legacy or the aftermath of racial slavery and racial segregation. We haven't been able to completely shuck or jettison the, the shadow that that has cast over us. And unfortunately, right now, I mean, he would. He wouldn't be able to be a. A neutral arbiter. He would have to take a side. He would have to decide whether he thought this was a moment that we had to take some partial or temporary measures with regards to making concessions to, to identity or whether we should put all our eggs in the equality basket. I would debate anyone that Douglas would do the latter. That he would say that anything that we do that makes an exception of any category of Americans in law or policy actually leads us backwards, not forwards in terms of political progress.
[00:56:35] Speaker B: I'll just very quickly add, I think Douglas would be disappointed that his vision of the Constitution has been essentially forgotten. Forgotten. Most people today who look at the Constitution just kind of accept the idea that it was a pro slavery document. And he did not have that view. And his view is almost entirely forgotten or ignored today.
And Douglass was a major advocate for free speech. And Douglas understood, as someone who is in the minority, as an abolitionist, that you needed free speech protections to protect the, the rights of unpopular speakers.
And I think Douglas would be chagrined by some of the restrictions that we've seen on free speech in recent years.
[00:57:20] Speaker C: Yeah, he called that. I have to add this because that's a great point that John just brought up he he emphasized the right of the hearer and that's something that we forget that that the the reason why you want to protect speech is because of persuasion. You speak not just event but to actually change minds. You make an appeal to public opinion and that means you have to allow the opinion to be heard. And so many people don't want to other people to be heard. They get to determine what is hate speech, etc. And he was emphatic about protecting the right of the hearer. The right of the hearer and de platforming and cancel culture are anathema to that.
[00:57:58] Speaker A: Well, we can learn so much from Douglas and Lincoln today about free speech, about tolerance and about balancing both the ideals and the practical limits of enacting them.
So again can't recommended enough Measuring the Man the writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln. Lucas Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:58:29] Speaker C: It's been a pleasure.
[00:58:30] Speaker B: Thanks for having me again.
[00:58:31] Speaker A: All right. And thanks to the audience for your great questions. I hope you will join me next week. I'm still going to be home. I know, it's amazing.
I'm going to be talking to 2020 Libertarian vice presidential candidate Spike Cohen about how ordinary citizens can push back against government overreach and protect their family from unjust state actions. So we'll see you then.
