Frederick Douglass Helps Us to See the Nuanced View Black Folks Had of the Emancipator

Abraham Lincoln remains a beloved figure in the country’s story. He evolved in his sense of humanity during his presidency and yet was loathe to press his fellow whites in Congress and, more broadly, on the value of Africans in the United States. He instead asked Blacks to go to Africa, a request that insinuates that white people owned this country. This white ownership mentality prevails today.

Here’s an excerpt from Douglass’ speech at the unveiling of the Lincoln monument:

He was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country. In all his education and feeling he was an American of the Americans. He came into the Presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery. His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race. To protect, defend, and perpetuate slavery in the states where it existed Abraham Lincoln was not less ready than any other President to draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all the supposed guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states. He was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the Government.

(Douglass knew the President’s priorities. Lincoln had said, If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.)

Douglass was realistic, knowing that the United States of America is a country founded on white supremacy and genocide, so he said of Lincoln,

“Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”

The White ownership mentality prevails today, which accounts for the White rage that anyone, not just Black people, can spark when they challenge White ownership.

White ownership, when challenged, stirs responses like, “They should be grateful.”