Word: douglass
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Despite the immense racial gulf separating them, Lincoln and Douglass had a lot in common. They were the two pre-eminent self-made men of their era. Lincoln was born dirt poor, had less than a year of formal schooling and became one of the nation's greatest Presidents. Douglass spent the first 20 years of his life as a slave, had no formal schooling--in fact, his masters forbade him to read or write--and became one of the nation's greatest writers and activists. Though nine years younger, Douglass overshadowed Lincoln as a public figure during...
Lincoln and Douglass also shared many common interests. They loved music and literature and educated themselves (Douglass on the sly while a slave) by reading the same books: Aesop's Fables, the Bible, Shakespeare and especially The Columbian Orator, a popular anthology of speeches for boys. They were athletic, strong and tall: Douglass was about 6 ft., Lincoln 6 ft. 4 in., when the average height for men was 5 ft. 7 in. They refrained from alcohol and tobacco at a time when many politicians "squirted their tobacco juice upon the carpet" and drank on the job. They were ambitious...
...true that Douglass was a radical; he demanded an immediate end to slavery, equal rights for all men and women, and the redistribution of land so that no one would be rich and no one poor. Such measures, he argued, would fulfill the "principles in the Declaration of Independence" and "prepare the earth for a millennium of righteousness and peace." Lincoln was a moderate; he concluded (as did most Americans) that the Constitution defended slavery in states where it already existed. But, like Douglass, he emphasized that the Declaration was the centerpiece of government. It was the "apple of gold...
When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, however, they had very different strategies for winning it. Douglass repeatedly urged Lincoln to free the slaves and recruit black soldiers. Douglass wanted to prevent the Confederacy from using slaves to grow the food that fed its army. "The negro is the stomach of the rebellion," he wrote. "Every slave who escapes from the Rebel States is a loss to the Rebellion and a gain to the Loyal Cause." He also understood that the quickest way for blacks to gain equal rights was to become Union soldiers...
...preservation of the Union. He feared that if he freed the slaves and ordered black soldiers to kill whites, he would alienate northern conservatives and lose the border slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri. And if the border states were lost, he believed, all was lost. Douglass had no sympathy for this reasoning. The slaveholders of the border states, he said, "have been the mill-stone about the neck of the Government, and their so-called loyalty" prevented the Union from using all its resources. He knew that 4 million slaves, plus another half million free blacks, amounted...