Thread by @BrooksDSimpson

As for #AbrahamLincoln on slavery, race, and the Constitution: it's not really complicated, but it is complex. It also changes over time.

He believed that slavery was immoral. He was very explicit about that. He believed it violated the principles of the American founding. Those positions never changed.

At a time when many people shied away from the issue of slavery's morality, Lincoln did not. Period.

He also believed that the Framers/Founders were antislavery, and that the Declaration of Independence, the founding, and the Constitution pointed toward eventual abolition.

But he believed the Constitution constrained what could be done when it came to slavery.

He accepted, however reluctantly, the notion that the Constitution offered protection to slavery where it was (including the authority to recover fugitives).

But when it came to slavery's expansion, he argued that the Constitution allowed slavery's opponents to stop its spread.

This is why he criticized the Dred Scott decision. True, Kansas-Nebraska infuriated him, but the Court's ruling in Scott threatened to undermine any constitutional authority to contain slavery.

This would change once the Civil War was under way, as Lincoln came to see in the president's war powers the authority to strike against slavery, although he was very careful to define the limits of that authority.

Military necessity allowed him to strike at slavery in certain places under certain conditions.

Thus he pushed for state-initiated abolition (Louisiana, Maryland, Tennessee, Missouri).

Finally he pushed for a constitutional amendment -- the 13th.

Those people who point to Lincoln's support of the original 13th Amendment -- the Corwin Amendment -- as evidence that he wasn't opposed to slavery misunderstand Lincoln's notions of the potential and limits of constitutional power.

In Lincoln's mind, all that amendment really did was to make explicit his own understanding of slavery's constitutionality and the proper way for abolition to come about in times of peace.

The war freed Lincoln to strike at slavery ... carefully and through the process.

What #AbrahamLincoln failed to explore in depth were Lincoln's racial views and what he thought should be done.

Lincoln believed Black people were human beings, and in that sense were equal to other human beings. They should enjoy the protection of the law.

He did not believe that in other ways Black people were equal to white people. If there was a superior race, he believed, it was the white race, even as he questioned the racial justifications for slavery.

That's where he was in the 1850s.

He openly admitted that he did not quite know how to go about ending slavery in the 1850s. He did not issue a moral indictment of slaveholders and their supporters. His targets were Democrats, especially northern Democrats (and Roger B. Taney).

He latched on to the policy embraced by his hero, Henry Clay, on how to address the knot of ending slavery with concerns about emancipation. Colonization is the shorthand description we use for that policy, but it was a bit more than that.

It's noteworthy that six years before he spoke about a house divided in the Illinois State House, he delivered a eulogy of Clay, complete with an endorsement of colonization.

In Lincoln's view, his approach to colonization followed constitutional norms.

Ending slavery would be a gradual process. Slaveholders would be compensated for their lost property (which recognizes the legal status of slaves as property).

Free and freed Blacks would then be allowed to leave the United States and settle elsewhere. This action would be by choice. The US would help establish these areas for resettlement.

But it was a vision of a white (or, at least whiter) American republic.

Lincoln understood racism and racial prejudice even as he harbored some of those beliefs in the 1850s. He believed that white racism would make emancipation hard for freed Blacks.

That he chose not to target white racism is regrettable. Blacks weren't the problem. Whites were.

That Lincoln offered several statements about his racial beliefs in the 1850s was due in large part to the attacks of Stephen Douglas and others, who accused Lincoln of advocating black equality and interracial social relations across the board.

The context does not excuse what Lincoln said, and those words have been quoted time and again (usually selectively) to argue that Lincoln was a racist and a white supremacist. Fair enough. They were his words, after all.

But they don't mean that Lincoln wasn't against slavery.

What those words remind us is that white Americans (not just white southerners) responded to white supremacy because most of them believed it. That Lincoln attacked slavery on moral grounds was daring enough in a state where many people (including Lincoln) came from slave states.

Call it playing the race card. Northern Democrats excelled at it. They used it because they saw the political benefit in playing it.

Lincoln remained wedded to gradual compensated emancipation with voluntary resettlement as his preferred approach to ending slavery during the early years of his presidency. Some of the most soaring rhetoric in his first two annual messages was in support of that approach.

That biographers, historians, and others often quote those passages out of context is an interesting case of historical practice.

Lincoln made his approach part of DC emancipation. That was his greatest success with the policy.

But the real problem with his policy--perhaps his most important policy initiative and the one to which he devoted the most support--is that there were no takers.

Not from slaveholders. Not from the freed Blacks. Not from free Blacks.

People who say Lincoln should have bought the slaves miss the point: he needed sellers. Even in 1865, he considered compensated emancipation, just months before Appomattox.

Lincoln's plan of colonization was his single biggest policy failure during the war.

But it also seems that as Lincoln met more Black people, he had cause to reassess his prejudices.

Maybe what he perceived as innate inferiority was simply a lack of access and opportunity. Blacks should be afforded the same right to rise Lincoln advocated for whites.

After all, Frederick Douglass was a standing refutation of the notion of black inferiority.

So were the black regiments who fought and bled in 1863.

So were the free Blacks of New Orleans, who could hold their own any time, anywhere, with anyone.

Surely those people were as capable of exercising suffrage as anyone else, and few had done as much to deserve it.

And so Lincoln moved. Slowly. Carefully. Often covertly.

But he moved in the direction of freedom and equality.

Could he have done more? Sure. He was so focused on winning the war that he gave little time to thinking about what freedom should mean, and what equality would look like.

But he was willing to risk much to achieve that end.

The 2012 movie Lincoln makes much of the importance of the Thirteenth Amendment's passage through Congress with Lincoln's support. He needed that before the war ended and the military necessity argument collapsed. True.

But Lincoln showed real courage in 1864 when he stood fast behind emancipation against pressure from Republicans who argued that Democrats were using that to claim that the Civil War was a war fought for the black man, not the white man.

Lincoln had been rather blunt about those issues in 1863 in public letters.

c-span.org/video/?310863-…

Now, in an election year, with the military situation looking grim, Lincoln rejected any notion that he should seek peace and reunion by abandoning his commitment to emancipation ... although he strongly suspected that Confederate leadership would not accept that offer.

That may have been Lincoln's greatest moment. That's a moment worthy of more attention (I am taking my own hint).

So let's understand Lincoln's views as usually fluid, responding to changing contexts, with a few fixed principles.

Most importantly, let's understand Lincoln as he would have understood himself, not as we need to understand him for our own purposes. Lincoln's a man, not a mirror, let alone a funny house mirror.

Let's be honest about Honest Abe.