The Crooked Path To Abolition: Abraham Lincoln And The Antislavery Constitution, by James Oakes

Given how many books there have been written about Abraham Lincoln (in the tens of thousands), this book is a worthy winner of the Lincoln Prize, which is an intensely competitive award given the popularity of writings about the 16th President of the United States. What this book does is it frames Lincoln’s apparent contradictions with regards to slavery and his native tendency to compromise with Lincoln’s belief in the antislavery constitution and in his sincere desire to achieve the best for the cause of freedom. It is all too easy to conflate the racial pessimism of Lincoln (pessimism it is easy to share in all generations, including our own) with a high degree of racism, and the author does well in parsing Lincoln’s prose to show that while Lincoln certainly pandered to racist audiences, which was necessary to win elective office–and probably still is in some fashion, regardless of whether one panders to anti-black or anti-white racists–his own views were considerably more complex and also far more privately held. By giving proper due to Lincoln as a subtle and complex politician and to the depth of meaning within the antislavery view of the constitution that was broadly held by a wide variety of Northerners including Lincoln as well as abolitionists, this book succeeds at painting a picture of the political thought of the North in the period leading up to and including the Civil War and its immediate aftermath.

This book is a relatively short one at just over 200 pages. It begins with a preface, after which the author discusses a brief history of the antislavery constitution, which sought to provide a consistent view of the Constitution that viewed all compromises with slavery as temporary and limited in nature (1). The author then discusses the emergence of antislavery constitutionalism in the aftermath of the debate over Missouri’s statehood, with the belief that freedom is the rule, and slavery the exception (2). This is followed by a discussion about the antislavery project and the way that antislavery politics, whether moderate or radical in nature, sought to limit the scope of slavery to slave states and divorce slavery from any involvement or support by Northerners, with regards to fugitive slaves or anything else (3). The author discusses the ancient faith of Lincoln insofar as it involved race and the antislavery constitution (4) and also discusses the idea of the forfeiture of rights that became an increasing part of the behavior of Lincoln’s administration with regards to compromises with the slavery in the event of rebellion (5). The final chapter of the book looks at the 13th Amendment–which formally ended slavery as an economic system in the United States (apart from prison labor)–and the origins of the goal to end slavery by constitutional amendment and its fulfillment at the end of the Civil War (6). The book then ends with acknowledgements, notes, and an index.

Although this book is short, it is an excellent book in large part because it looks closely at Lincoln’s own thought and behavior with the goal of demonstrating consistency in ideal despite apparent inconsistency in behavior to best serve that ideal of serving for the interests of freedom, while also placing Lincoln within a broader context of antislavery thought. Lincoln’s behavior before the Civil War and during it is consistent with an antislavery view of the U.S. Constitution, even if Lincoln did not explicitly formulate all of the aspects of those views. Fortunately, others did so, and provided a broad set of different interpretations of the Constitution from that of Calhoun, Taney, and others who ruled the United States for decades as part of the slave power, demonstrating how it is that a full-fledged antislavery view of the Constitution was able to be enforced through Lincoln’s war powers as president and through the passage of a series of laws and finally, constitutional amendments that turned an oppositional viewpoint of legal interpretation into the very law of the land, despite the widespread and pervasive presence of racism in the United States. While many would no doubt have wished for more progress to be made during and after the Civil War, what was achieved, given the circumstances, was impressive enough, and probably all that could have been done given the circumstances at hand.