Lincoln And The Abolitionists: John Quincy Adams, Slavery, And The Civil War, by Fred Kaplan

There is a popular contemporary anachronistic view of history that believes that there is no just or decent people in the time of the 19th century who were hostile to abolitionists or were not abolitionists themselves. This particular view struggles when it comes to dealing justly with Abraham Lincoln. The author is clearly sympathetic with the abolitionists, and finds it striking that Lincoln and John Quincy Adams had such a similar political program and even similar voting records when they could be compared but that Lincoln mentioned Adams little in his public or private writings. Both Lincoln and Adams were serious thinkers and worthwhile and honorable American statesmen, though the author does tease out some of the distinctions in the two men and their rhetorical approach (Adams more classical, Lincoln more homespun and colloquial), and the author goes back and forth in this book in showing the crosscurrents of the first two thirds of the 19th century (and the last third of the 18th century) that influenced the two so strongly and so differently. This was deeply of interest to me personally as well, given my own background and its own influence on me.

As far as a book is concerned, this volume is almost 350 pages long and amounts to almost a double political biography of Lincoln and John Quincy Adams, making it fairly short given the ambitious aim of the author to discuss the complexities of antislavery thinking by focusing on the two antislavery presidents. After a preface the author discusses the varying ways that slavery served as a continual torment to both Lincoln and Adams (1). This is followed by their different thoughts and opinions on the first antislavery martyr (falsely called the first American martyr by the author) in Elijah Lovejoy, a bit of a rabble rouser with strongly anti-Catholic opinions (2), whom Lincoln viewed as too incendiary but Adams viewed as an ally. This is followed by another comparison between Lincoln and Adams concerning the difficult year of 1837 (3), where Lincoln made his debut as a serious political speaker with his Lyceum speech. After that the author looks at the conflicts related to territorial expansion and the politics of slavery (4), and the way that people who claimed to be strict constructionists were often less strict when it came to their own interests. The next two chapters deal with the distant goal of the abolition of slavery pursued by most antislavery figures (5) as well as the lure of colonization (6) to those who did not want to encourage or deal with America as a multiracial society. The author also discusses the distinction in the views towards the Constitution that were held by Lincoln and Adams as well as many abolitionists who had a negative view of the compromises involved (7). The author then turns at this point to mostly discuss Lincoln, with a discussion of Lincoln as a smoothing, polite, ameliorative president by temperament (8), his preference for soft inducement to freedom (9), and the ironies of Lincoln and the ultimate gradualists (10), where slavery ended but where racial equality remained elusive and race remains a problem to the present day. The book ends with acknowledgements, notes, and an index.

In reading this book, I found a great deal of eloquence, if not always understanding, being turned to the way that Lincoln has proven to be so appealing to me personally. Lincoln as a politician sought to build and maintain winning political coalitions, and this required maintaining a spirit of comity, in not working to alienate anyone who could be won over as an ally. Adams, once he was denied re-election and decided to re-enter Congress as a representative of his part of Massachusetts, had no higher political ambitions and an area that respected him and his family’s generations of service and tolerated his strong antislavery views. Both people acted reasonably based on their goals and also their own backgrounds, Lincoln being an antislavery Border South moderate and Adams being a less politically skilled New England moral purist. The book also pays plenty of attention to more obscure people in the historical record that show the interplay between Lincoln and Adams. In our own time, a great deal of our own political crisis comes from the lack of comity between people who view themselves as just political activists who are in reality often hypocritical extremists, not unlike many slaveowners or abolitionists, for that matter. The book’s subject matter, despite its look at the past, therefore retains its relevance to the present-day. We cannot have peace in an imperfect world unless we are polite and generous to people whose behavior we consider immoral, and those who insist on proclaiming their moral purity make themselves an enemy to the peace of society as a whole, something that this author really doesn’t wrestle with fully enough.