‘As any biographer of Douglass knows, there was not a Frederick Douglass,” wrote Henry Louis Gates. “There were many Douglasses. And that, for him, was his ultimate claim on being fully and equally and complexly human.” After all, Douglass was, at varying times (and sometimes at the same time) a defender of black identity and a critic of 19th-century versions of identity politics; the preacher of the “self-made man” and one who demanded that government serve the interests of justice; a denouncer of the Constitution (before the 13th Amendment) for not eliminating slavery and an admirer of it (also before the 13th Amendment) as “a glorious liberty document.”
Nowhere was this mixture of hope and exasperation more on display than in Douglass’s opinion of Abraham Lincoln. The most famous comment on Lincoln by an African American was the speech Douglass delivered at the unveiling of Thomas Ball’s Freedmen’s Memorial in Washington on April 14, 1876. Lincoln, he declared, “is doubly dear to us, and his memory will be precious forever.” But Douglass also drew the first important shadow of Afro-pessimism over Lincoln, coolly reminding the crowd of, according to a contemporary press account, “over a hundred thousand persons” that African Americans “are at best only his step-children . . . by force of circumstances and necessity.” From there, one draws a long line to Lerone Bennett Jr. and Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project and the conclusion that Lincoln was merely a garden-variety white supremacist who backed emancipation only if it helped save the Union.
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