Review

Fred Kaplan. Lincoln and the Abolitionists: John Quincy Adams, Slavery, and the Civil War. New York: HarperCollins, 2017. Pp. xvi, 395.

 
There is an old saw that says you can sell anything as long as it has Abraham Lincoln’s name on it. Fred Kaplan’s Lincoln and the Abolitionists: John Quincy Adams, Slavery, and the Civil War seems designed to test that proposition.

According to the dust jacket, Mr. Kaplan is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at City University of New York. He is not a historian, but he has written well-received biographies of Abraham Lincoln (2008) and John Quincy Adams (2014). This perhaps explains his book’s disjointed title, which appears to announce two separate subjects. It may also help explain, but does not excuse, the book’s peculiar content.

Kaplan has discovered what he thinks no one else knew—that Lincoln was not an abolitionist and therefore not the hero we have made him out to be, “the perfect president who freed the slaves and saved the Union” (ix). He was, rather, a racist and colonizationist who “detested abolitionism” as much as he hated slavery (xi, 182). He also labored under the “willful self-delusion” that “slavery would not be the rock against which the nation split,” and therefore foolishly discounted southern moves toward secession, misjudged the measures necessary to win the ensuing war, unpardonably stalled the use of black troops, made no serious provision for reconstruction, and fecklessly promoted a running mate whom he should have foreseen would become president and undo all the country’s hard-won wartime progress against racism (x).

If Lincoln does not deserve our adulation, Kaplan has found someone who does, someone whose abolitionism and racial egalitarianism were, unlike Lincoln’s, pure and undefiled. John Quincy Adams was an “antislavery activist”—not, like Lincoln, a mere “antislavery moralist” who denounced the institution to soothe his own conscience and then systematically avoided doing anything about it. Utterly free of prejudice, “Adams envisioned a multiracial America as inevitable,” while Lincoln found it unthinkable (x). Our national tragedy, says Kaplan, is that we have chosen with Lincoln and not Adams, purging slavery only under duress while leaving intact the racism that undergirded it. The purifying war against both slavery and prejudice that Adams predicted and welcomed is still being fought, and has yet to be won.

The moral aim of Kaplan’s book is to expose how deep and intractable American white racism has been, a point at times forcefully made. But in his eagerness to elevate Adams and deprecate Lincoln, Kaplan manages to seriously misrepresent both. Outfitting Adams for abolitionist sainthood requires some airbrushing of detail. It requires smudging over his previous exertions as secretary of state and president to uphold slaveholders’ rights and expand national slaveholding territory, and explaining away his sometimes contemptuous disparagements of nonwhites and foreigners and his visceral revulsion at the thought of racial mixing. It also requires overdrawing the contrast between Lincoln’s bigoted Illinois and Adams’s Massachusetts, where “public opinion defended free speech and personal security”—welcome news, no doubt, to the abolitionists who were mobbed there (58).

The misreadings of Lincoln are of more consequence. Kaplan paints him as a self-serving politician who hated abolition as much as he hated slavery, and who “never believed” that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were meant to apply to blacks (74). Branding Lincoln as a racist and therefore no true antislavery man, Kaplan refuses to recognize the crucial distinction that Lincoln himself stressed over and over again: the difference between principles (such as that “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong”) and mere prejudices, or, in Lincoln’s word, “feelings.” Lincoln never denied the existence and indeed the importance of feelings, including his own racial prejudices; but neither did he ever propound an equivalence between them and root convictions. In Lincoln’s formulation, feelings, right or wrong, were to be recognized and dealt with as present realities; principles were to be affirmed and cherished, never relinquished, and pursued as far as circumstances allowed. It is only by confounding the two that one could insist, as Kaplan does over and over, that Lincoln was just as much a white racial supremacist as an antislavery man.

Kaplan sustains this judgment of equivalence by tendentiously misreading the record. He offers guilt by association in dwelling on Lincoln’s longtime relationship with racists like Illinois politician Usher Linder, and he upbraids Lincoln not only for what he did but for what he did not: for his silence about the Amistad trial (225–26), or for “probably” not inviting an abolitionist to a political gathering at his home in 1847 (182). In 1837, says Kaplan, Lincoln co-authored a resolution (actually a protest) in the Illinois legislature reproving slavery, “though abolitionism, the authors concluded, was as great an evil as slavery” (12; also 46). What the protest actually said was that “the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils.”[1] There is a considerable difference between censuring something as inefficacious or even counterproductive and branding it as evil—a distinction which the protest clearly made, and which Kaplan elides.

Kaplan paints Lincoln and his Republican party as wanting to arrest slavery’s expansion: full stop. They had no plan or real desire to eradicate slavery, only to keep it (and black people) away from themselves. Their refusal to go further, to outline an actual roadmap to slavery’s “ultimate extinction,” amounted in practice, he says, to a commitment to its perpetuation: “For all practical purposes, the pro-slavery racist and the antislavery moralist ended up in the same place” (224–25). Again Kaplan misses what was obvious to everyone at the time about the slavery extension issue, and indeed what gave it its weight: that it was important not only for itself but for what it signified and foretold as a fulcrum and a lever and an omen for the future. One might as well claim, in today’s politics, that the aim of the “pro-life” movement is to shift the definition of late-term abortion, or that the end goal of gun control advocates is to tighten loopholes on private sales. These are mileposts, not destinations. They mark, and facilitate, progress along the way. For Lincoln, stopping slavery’s spread was not the end but a beginning.

As a politician and then as a war president, Lincoln had a shrewd sense of how shifts and evolutions in circumstances, including public opinion, were constantly reworking the political and military landscape and thus reshaping the array of options at hand. He had a strong intuitive feel for historical change. Kaplan has none. His pictures are fixed and static, not moving; his analysis is entirely abstracted from realities on the ground. For him what was true in 1861 was true in 1864, and vice versa. And so he calls shame on Lincoln for bending his wartime policy to considerations of feasibility, or what Kaplan calls “expediency.”

In particular, says Kaplan, Lincoln should have done the right thing and turned the war for Union into an abolitionist crusade right from the beginning. He was willing to use executive power to suspend habeas corpus, so why not to free the slaves? All he had to do was invoke his war powers and announce that freeing and arming slaves was necessary to win the war. (John Quincy Adams, Kaplan is sure, would have done it.) This argument, being true, would have “undercut Northern racist opposition to emancipation, especially among antiwar Democrats,” and unified the Northern public behind the war effort (290). Since, as triumphantly foreseen by the abolitionists, freeing and arming Southern blacks did prove essential in the end, there was no excuse for not doing it earlier. At very least, Lincoln should have used his 1863 Proclamation to “declare total emancipation” everywhere, not just in rebel areas (303).

That Lincoln by mid-war was able to implement a partial emancipation policy without losing the border states proves, in Kaplan’s view, that his fears of losing them had been groundless all along, and his efforts to prevent such losses were “counterproductive” (xiv) and “not necessary” (291). Kentucky and Maryland, not being cotton states, would never have fit in the Confederacy anyway, so Lincoln’s early maneuverings and concessions to keep them from seceding were needless. Never mind for Kaplan the large pro-Confederate or merely conditional Unionist element in both states, the challenge of mounting operations into Tennessee and beyond if Kentucky was not first secured, or the tenuousness of the Union hold on Washington, D.C., if Maryland was not pacified.

One could extend this logic. Union armies were going to have to take Atlanta eventually, so why wait until 1864? Kaplan knows nothing of the military side of the war; but that does not stop him from passing judgment. He heaps censure on Lincoln for ever entrusting McClellan with command (not saying who would have done better) and holds him blamable as overall commander for a failed strategy in the East—taking no notice of Union successes in the West or along the Confederate coast, for which Lincoln might be judged equally responsible. These critiques of Lincoln’s strategic failings come from a writer who thinks that Bull Run and Manassas were two separate places, and that Antietam was a Union defeat (290).

The book lacks anything like a coherent structure. Kaplan addresses events not in the order of their occurrence but at the seemingly random moments when they cross his mind. The text is less a narrative than a meandering series of meditative musings, whose profundity apparently outweighs any mundane concern about chronological sequence or about making sense. Readers are dragged crabwise through a maze of digressions, sidetracks, and flashbacks.

Along the way they learn some amazing things. John Quincy Adams began denouncing the gag rule in 1832, three years before it was introduced (3). Lincoln leaned toward Jackson’s Democratic party before 1825, when it did not exist (17). Henry Clay ran as a Whig in 1832, two years before the party was christened (18). Ninian Edwards was an Illinois senator in 1837, when he’d been dead four years (43). “It was Rufus King who in 1795 had provided the language of the Northwest Ordinance, mandating that the states formed from the Northwest Territory eventually be slave free” (117). In 1820 Adams thought it “unlikely” that his Florida treaty, which the Senate had unanimously ratified two days after he signed it in 1819, “would be approved” (122). The Missouri Compromise drew a line between freedom and slavery at the “36th parallel” (124–25). Already in 1820 the Whig Party was “soon to be born” (129). James Smithson’s bequest to the United States was “intended” for a museum (149). In 1848 Martin Van Buren “understood that economic downturns usually deprive a president of a second term,” something that so far had happened only to him (228). Lewis Cass that year was “the pro-slavery Democratic candidate” (228). Abolitionist H. Ford Douglas “had, ironically, the same surname as two famous opponents of slavery, Stephen A. Douglas and Frederick Douglass” (244).

In 1860, Lincoln’s three presidential opponents “together got almost 3,000,000 votes. Together, the two Democrats—Douglas and John C. Breckinridge—had more than enough to have defeated Lincoln if the Democrats had been united.” No, they did not. Combine the Douglas and Breckinridge votes, and throw in those of Constitutional Unionist John Bell as well, and it adds to about 60% of the popular vote. But Lincoln still would have won, with an absolute majority of popular votes—more than the other three combined—in fifteen states that between them disposed of 169 of the total of 303 electoral votes. That’s how the system worked—and, in case Kaplan hasn’t noticed, still does (253).

Kaplan opines that Buchanan’s disastrous presidency “proved a blessing” for the Whigs—who by then had all but ceased to exist. “Between 1855 and 1857”—that is, before he was president—“Buchanan handled badly the implementation of the Kansas-Nebraska Act” and other matters. “Like Lincoln, Buchanan was an antislavery moralist” who, again “like Lincoln, opposed civil rights for free Negroes” and “with the Dred Scott decision happily in place,” supported the slaveholders’ right to take their property anywhere (267).

It goes on. Lincoln’s inaugural was on March 6, 1861 (277). James C. Conkling, to whom Lincoln addressed a famous letter in 1863, was “a pro-slavery Northerner disgusted with the Emancipation Proclamation” (319). Lincoln worried whether he could count on Tennessee’s vote in the 1864 presidential election, since “Tennessee had never left the Union” (321–23). The Compromise of 1850, not the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, “revoked the Missouri Compromise and allowed slavery where it had not been allowed before” (324; also 194–96).

This onetime professor of English cannot tell a simple story straight. He starts off misusing “immigrate” for “emigrate”—a schoolboy mistake—thrice in his first three pages (x–xi). His early tale of John Quincy Adams’s involvement in a slave sale controversy in Washington is so wretchedly told as not to make sense. Further on he quotes a passage of fiery defiance from a South Carolina nullifier and puts it in Adams’s mouth, an attribution that is not only wrong but, given the language, absurd on its face (22–23).

Some of these errors (of which the above is but a sampling) are small; others are huge. All bespeak a writer who is far out of his depth. Good historians write from within their understanding of a subject: they know much more than they say. Kaplan knows much less.

Bubbling up from a vast well of confusion and ignorance, Kaplan’s sanctimonious prating about what Lincoln should have known and should have done is at first grating and in the end insufferable. Page after page, Kaplan descants with pompous authority on matters which he transparently knows nothing about. Lincoln and the Abolitionists exhibits little learning and less insight, but a great deal of authorial self-regard. There are many fine Lincoln books out there, worth buying and worth reading. Don’t waste your time on this one.

1. Roy P. Basler et al., eds., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press for the Abraham Lincoln Association, 1953–55), 1:75.