On April 14, 1876, the 11th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, a singular effort to honor the late president came to fruition. The morning after the terrible crime, one Charlotte Scott, a freedwoman formerly enslaved in Virginia, initiated it by pledging her first $5 saved in freedom to the erection of a monument to honor the statesman she revered as her people's “best friend on earth.” Among many contemporary efforts to honor Lincoln, this one alone was sustained, the monument's inscription reports, “with funds contributed solely by emancipated citizens of the United States.” The monument was placed in Washington, DC's Lincoln Park, and its unveiling drew a crowd of thousands and a select group of dignitaries, including members of Congress, U.S. Supreme Court Justices, Cabinet members, and President Ulysses S. Grant. There had been no doubt as to who would deliver the dedicatory address (Kendrick and Kendrick Reference Kendrick and Kendrick2008, 242; Peterson Reference Peterson1994, 56; Quarles Reference Quarles1962, 3–10).

The speech that Frederick Douglass delivered that day, I argue, stands as a masterpiece of moral and political oratory. It presents a penetrating reflection on the meaning of Lincoln for black and white Americans, it epitomizes Douglass's moral and political thought as a whole, and it encapsulates a subtle and plausible theory of racial and moral progress in America. It thus makes a major contribution to American political thought. Yet, it abounds in puzzling complexities. Douglass's Freedmen's Monument speech is a eulogy that does less and more than eulogize. It addresses its subject from conflicting perspectives, by turns praising Lincoln as “our friend and liberator” and disparaging him as “the white man's president,” racially biased and sluggish against slavery. It neglects clearly deteriorating conditions in racial justice late in the Reconstruction period; it celebrates a monument whose design Douglass reportedly disapproved; and yet, in his concluding assessment, it articulates and furthers a good work in the cause of justice for African Americans.

It comes as no surprise that commentators are sharply divided in assessing the speech's meaning and merit. For some, emphasizing Douglass's praise for Lincoln, the Freedmen's Monument speech signifies a statesmanlike appreciation of Lincoln's statesmanship (Goldstein Reference Goldstein1975; Morel Reference Morel and Hubbard2003; Storing Reference Storing, Frisch and Stevens1983). Others, focusing on Douglass's critical remarks, view the speech as an exposé of Lincoln's shortcomings and a corrective of his national sanctification (Bennett Reference Bennett1999, 35–36, 119). Still others account variously for the coexistence of praise and detraction in the speech (Blight Reference Blight2002, 84–85; Colaiaco Reference Colaiaco2006, 196; Kendrick and Kendrick Reference Kendrick and Kendrick2008, 245; Oakes Reference Oakes2007, 269–73; Quarles Reference Quarles1948, 277–78). Some, finally, render a sharply negative judgment, contending that Douglass's failure here to protest present conditions represents an abdication of racial responsibility and a departure from the righteous zeal of his abolitionist career (Foner 1975, 98–99; Stauffer Reference Stauffer2008, 307, 310).

In view of these interpretive difficulties, my primary purpose is expository. In this article, I explicate the Freedmen's Monument speech by a textual analysis, enhanced by a consideration of its relations to other pertinent speeches and writings by Douglass, to the end of clarifying its rhetorical, political, and philosophical design. I draw my organizing questions from Douglass's concluding claim that his speech does a good work for his race. What does he mean by this claim, and how does he justify it, given especially his deemphasis of resurgent racial injustice and his seemingly conflicted representation of Lincoln? Building on the strengths of alternative readings, I argue that the speech does reveal a coherent design on Douglass's part to advance the cause of racial justice in the United States. In his nuanced reflections on the meaning of Lincoln, Douglass pays tribute to Lincoln the historical figure and also fashions an image of Lincoln as a pedagogical device, whereby he issues carefully targeted appeals to the respective interests, virtues, and sympathies of black and white Americans. Instructing both groups to view their respective relations to Lincoln as symbolically representative of their relations to America and to each other, Douglass adumbrates a clear-sighted understanding of those relations and a hopeful but realistic assessment of how they can be ameliorated. Thus, my exposition begins with a concern for interpretive fidelity and extends into the realm of political theory proper. For when we consider how Douglass found reason to hope that the speech would succeed in its practical objectives, we find in the Freedmen's Monument speech the elements of a philosophically and psychologically sophisticated analysis of the prospects for racial progress in America.

I elaborate my argument as follows. The first three sections consider Douglass's “good work” claim first in its reflexive significance, focusing on how his speech highlights and attempts to cultivate African Americans’ virtues. The first section constructs a response to the critics’ charge that his speech actually does a bad work for his race by neglecting resurgent racial injustice. The second and third sections explore Douglass's complex, apparently ambivalent representation of the virtue of gratitude, functioning both to support African Americans’ claim to full citizenship in America and to sustain their internal morale in pressing that claim. The three sections following that shift the focus, developing Douglass's design to do a good work for African Americans by appealing to the virtues and interests of their white fellow citizens. The first of those three sections extends the analysis of Douglass's ambivalence, showing how he intends it also to promote moral reform among whites by fashioning Lincoln as an accessible, sympathetic model for them to emulate. The article's fifth section revisits and sharpens the charge that Douglass was excessively idealistic with respect to the prospects for racial reform. That section and the sixth also develop his theory of racial progress, implicit in his depiction of Lincoln in the Freedmen's Monument speech and further evident in his assessment of the trajectory of U.S. history in other major speeches and writings. In a concluding section, I summarize the speech's significance as a contribution to American political thought, and I reflect on it as an act of statesmanship in its own right. In that practical dimension, I find enduring significance in its seminal affirmation of the mainstream, protest-integrationist channel of African American thought. Conceiving of the national heritage and promise of America as represented by the career and character of Lincoln, Douglass in this speech renders a critical, unsentimental, and yet profoundly affirmative judgment of both. The Freedmen's Monument speech by this means suggests a rational, realist basis for the spirit of hopefulness that Douglass judged indispensable to his people's and his country's struggles for reform.

DOUGLASS'S RHETORICAL MODERATION AND THE CLAIM TO CITIZENSHIP

“Fellow citizens,” Douglass begins the closing paragraph of the speech, “we have done a good work for our race to-day” [Blassingame and McKivigan Reference Blassingame and McKivigan1979–92, Frederick Douglass Papers (hereinafter FDP) 4.440]. Critics reject this claim, charging that Douglass squandered a rare opportunity, as he held the attention of the nation's leaders, to protest sharply and directly the ongoing reversal of the progressive accomplishments of the war and the earlier Reconstruction period. Thus, Douglass editor and biographer Philip S. Foner (The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (hereinafter LW) Reference Foner1950–75, vol. 4, 98-99) judges him culpably “silent on the crucial issues facing his people,” as he was “overwhelmed by the honor” accorded him on this occasion. John Stauffer complains similarly that in this speech, Douglass gloried in past victories and “totally ignored” his people's present plight. In this period, Stauffer (Reference Stauffer2008, 307, 310) asserts, “Douglass's own economic status blinded him to the conditions of the mass of blacks.”

Such reductive imputations concerning Douglass's material status and personal motivations are unwarranted. But given his exaggeration of postwar progress and his unusually conciliatory tone, the charge that he neglects present racial injustices in the Freedmen's Monument speech is credible on its face. Other critics, too, have perceived a pattern in which, for a time in the postwar period, Douglass downplayed the freedpeople's deplorable condition and thus betrayed the example of his own fiery abolitionist youth (Martin Reference Martin1984, 56, 73–74; McFeely Reference McFeely1991, 291–304; Walker Reference Walker1978, 217). In fact, his tone and rhetoric in the 1876 speech do differ markedly from those he deployed in his famous 1852 speech on the meaning of July Fourth, ranked among the greatest of all abolitionist speeches for its scathing exposure of American racial practice (e.g., Colaiaco Reference Colaiaco2006, 23). “‘I will not equivocate; I will not excuse,’” Douglass had then declared, invoking William Lloyd Garrison: “scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed” (FDP 2.369, 371). In sharp contrast, in the Freedmen's Monument speech he mentions the “spirit of slavery and barbarism” that ruled America's not-distant past, only to highlight the “glorious change which has come both to our white fellow-citizens and ourselves.” He plainly exaggerates the extent of that change, claiming that under Lincoln's rule blacks rose “to the heights of liberty and manhood” and that the “prejudice and proscription” that had long disfigured America were “rapidly fading away from the face of our whole country” (FDP 4.429, 434).Footnote ¹

What critics on this point miss or dismiss, however, is the fact that Douglass's silence on resurgent evils on this occasion reflects his deliberate design. He certainly harbored no complacency that racial justice was secure. Speaking to the Republican Party's national convention just two months after the Freedmen's Monument speech, he demanded: what do formal emancipation and enfranchisement amount to, if “after having been freed from the slaveholders’ lash [blacks are] to be subject to the slaveholder's shotgun? Oh, you freed us,” he continues, “I thank you for it . . . . You turned us loose . . . to the wrath of our infuriated masters” (FDP 4.441–42). Douglass makes clear throughout the Freedmen's Monument speech that he speaks primarily for “[us], the colored people” and that he does so to advance the rightful claims of “our race” (432, 430, and passim). Here, as always, the question for Douglass was not whether to contend against injustice but only by what means it was most prudent to do so.

At the outset of the speech, as he reflects on the occasion's significance, Douglass shows the reasoning behind the relative mildness of his tone. “First things are always interesting,” he observes, “and this is one of our first things. It is the first time that, in this form and manner, we have sought to do honor to an American great man.” The “first thing” here is not the first time that African Americans had publicly honored one of white America's political heroes; his own 1852 July Fourth oration, praising America's revolutionary fathers, might qualify for that distinction. The Freedmen's Monument dedication signifies the first time African Americans have honored a great American “in this form and manner”—the first time “in the presence and with the approval” of officers of the nation's highest governing institutions. Whereas they could previously speak only as a people officially excluded from the nation's public life, they could now, in 1876, speak as a class at long last formally recognized as full, equal U.S. citizens. The accession to citizenship is the crowning element of “the gratifying and glorious change” that elicits his congratulations, and he believed that this change must alter the manner in which African Americans represent themselves to the polity. As he would make still clearer in his speech on the Civil Rights Cases ruling a few years later, the manner of protest proper to citizens differs from that proper to those officially excluded from citizenship (FDP 5.110–23; cf. Storing Reference Storing, Frisch and Stevens1983, 224).Footnote ² Like that later speech, the Freedmen's Monument speech does not neglect or renounce protest, but instead presents a more measured mode of preparing and expressing it.

A more substantive indication of Douglass's broader design appears in another prefatory remark: “We stand today at the national center to perform something like a national act” (428). This “national act” is an act taken to memorialize one of the nation's greatest heroes, witnessed and endorsed by the nation's high public officials, and noticed by the nation at large. Above all, it is an integrative, nation-building act, memorializing and furthering Lincoln's work. This first nationally recognized act by African Americans to honor an American statesman was also their best opportunity to dedicate themselves formally to the nation to which they now held a positive legal claim and a realistic hope to belong. To present themselves on this high occasion as aggrieved outsiders would have been to devalue Lincoln's achievement, to confuse the monument's meaning, and to belie the assertive claim to citizenship that the occasion should validate. Viewed in this light, Douglass's downplaying of resurgent injustices again reflects his judgment that for this historic moment, African Americans must transcend opposition and present themselves in a manner fully commensurate with the dignified station they now assume. Mindful of the special power of “first things” to imprint themselves on the memory, they must see their monument's dedication as “an act which is to go into history.” They must take a long view, encompassing “the past, the present, and the future,” wherein the present moment, despite pressing frustrations, appears propitious. They must inscribe themselves into the history of the occasion as full, self-confident American citizens—full communicants in the national “church” (430; cf. Blight Reference Blight1989, 228). Footnote ³

To comprehend further the good work that Douglass claims for the monument and his speech, however, it is necessary to broaden this reading. By thus honoring Lincoln, he notes, “we have been doing highest honors to ourselves”—higher than any honor conferred by patriotic identification (FDP 4.440, emphasis added; cf. FDP 2.364; FDP 4.449). “We have been fastening ourselves to a name and fame imperishable and immortal,” transcending any merely national greatness or national memory. In this way, he continues, African Americans defend themselves from the “blighting slander” of soullessness (see Fredrickson Reference Fredrickson1971, 165–97). As the ultimate obstruction to full citizenship and national membership for African Americans is the color prejudice harbored by whites, so the fundamental validation of their claims is the fact of their full-souled humanity. Douglass's suggestions as to how the present act and speech vindicate his people's humanity begin with his discussion of the virtue of gratitude. His complex treatment in this speech of gratitude and its associated virtues is the subject of our next two sections.

GRATITUDE, BENEFICENCE, AND JUSTICE

A guiding insight into Douglass's 1876 remarks on gratitude appears in two other commemorations, one later and one earlier than his Lincoln speech. In an 1885 commemoration of West Indian and U.S. emancipation, he declared, “the duty of keeping in memory the great deeds of the past, and of transmitting the same from generation to generation, is implied in the mental and moral constitution of man” (FDP 5.201). On the placement of another monument, as he eulogized his fellow New York abolitionist Asa S. Wing in 1855, he observed more specifically: “It is not an alien sentiment which erects these monuments . . . . It is composed of two elements, pious gratitude on the one hand, and an earnest desire to perpetuate illustrious examples of ‘whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are of good report,’ and to make them the property of posterity” (FDP 3.109). These two elements hold places of primacy in Douglass's account of the good work accomplished on the dedication of the Freedmen's Monument.

First comes gratitude. “The sentiment that brings us here to-day,” he observes, “is one of the noblest that can stir and thrill the human heart. It has crowned . . . the high places of all civilized nations with the grandest and most enduring works of art, designed to illustrate the characters and perpetuate the memories of great public men. . . . It is the sentiment of gratitude,” essential to progressive, civilized humanity and to virtuous republican citizenship—“a sentiment which can never die while the Republic lives” (FDP 4.430). Central to the charge of soullessness is the claim “that the colored man . . . has no appreciation of benefits or benefactors” (440). The present act supplies an instant refutation. To demonstrate one's gratitude is, for Douglass, to confirm one's status as a morally rational, fully human being. To appreciate benefits is to apprehend what is good for oneself and like others. To appreciate benefactors, and thus to recognize one's debts and duties to others, is to apprehend what is morally good, or just. To honor one's debts and duties to others—to do justice to them—requires returning benefits for benefits received. Furthermore, to do justice to the best of us requires conferring on them the greatest benefits one can confer: granting them an earthly semblance of immortality by venerating their memory and perpetuating their philanthropic work (FDP 3.109–10; FDP 2.502; 1994, 900–8; Morel Reference Morel and Hubbard2003, 127–28; Myers Reference Myers2008, 49–57). This theme, too, he sounded in 1852. “Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude,” he told his Rochester audience, “prompt you . . . to hold [July the Fourth] in perpetual remembrance” (FDP 3.363).

The second element of the monument-building sentiment, the desire to perpetuate illustrious examples of virtue, is, according to Douglass, no less than gratitude “a distinguishing attribute of our Nature” (FDP 3.109), as it is no less essential to our capacities for philanthropy and justice. Viewed in its relation to this second element, justice appears as more and better than a dictate of reciprocity narrowly conceived. More than merely reactive, it is an active, prospective virtue, extending a broad human sympathy across generations, past to future, so that one also honors debts to beneficent forbears by emulating their philanthropic concern for posterity. In the Freedmen's Monument speech, this larger sentiment of philanthropic justice appears in Douglass's partly self-effacing suggestion that in the freedpeople's act of dedicating the monument, “the men of this generation may read, and those of after-coming generations may read, something of the exalted character and great works of Abraham Lincoln” (FDP 4.429–31).

To appreciate this point is not to forget Douglass's claim that in erecting their monument to Lincoln, he and the freedpeople do a good work not only for Lincoln, for American posterity, and for humanity, but also “for our race” (FDP 4.440). The pedagogy of their and his action is both self-effacing, honoring the virtue of another, and cleverly self-magnifying—at once moral and interested. Reading by that action something of Lincoln's exalted character, the present and future generations to whom Douglass speaks would be moved to read something, too, of the human dignity of the people whose emancipation Lincoln ordered. The thoughtful reader of the monument's dedication and of Douglass's speech would see in the sentiments they displayed a uniquely meaningful reaffirmation of African Americans’ moral humanity and, in particular, of the enlarged sense of justice that confirmed their claim to equal and full citizenship.

This line of reasoning concerning African Americans’ virtue in this instance largely depends, however, on the premise that they in fact judge well, in judging Lincoln worthy of gratitude and veneration. Mindful of the specific occasion, one might think that Douglass's acceptance of this premise could be safely supposed. Yet, his discussion of it proves to be strikingly complicated.

Most obviously, it was Lincoln's “living and earnest sympathy” with the abolition cause, as effectuated in his authorship of that “immortal paper,” the Emancipation Proclamation, that moved African Americans gratefully to memorialize him and Douglass to commend him as “our friend and liberator.” In “his heart of hearts,” Douglass affirms, Lincoln “loathed and hated slavery.” For Douglass, the moral solidity of Lincoln's antislavery principles appeared first in the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation, albeit necessary as a war measure, entailed very large political risks and costs for its author. Lincoln in the months surrounding the Proclamation had been “most bitterly assailed for making the war an abolition war” (Douglass Reference Douglass1994, 793–94; FDP 4.437). Further confirmation came in 1864, when the president, fearing that a demoralized electorate would soon force a premature end to the war, summoned Douglass to the White House to discuss a covert scheme for liberating as many as possible in the meantime. “What [Lincoln] said on this day,” Douglass (Reference Douglass1994, 795–97) writes in his final autobiography, “showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him.”

Yet, Douglass is not content in 1876 simply to burnish Lincoln's image as the Great Emancipator. Ultimately honoring Lincoln's antislavery conviction and action, he nonetheless rehearses the old abolitionist complaints. To abolitionists, Lincoln had appeared “tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent”—morally indifferent, thus shamefully ready to subordinate antislavery principle to the lower interests of union and North–South comity (FDP 4.433, 436; cf. Bassler 2001, 652; FDP 4.12–13). This was the ground from which Douglass himself had fired a battery of polemical missiles at Lincoln in the early 1860s [e.g. LW 2.527; LW 3.256]. It is remarkable that he revisits it in the Freedmen's Monument speech.

On one reading, Douglass's apparent ambivalence regarding Lincoln, as indicated by the divergent perspectives he adopts during the speech, is in the final analysis merely provisional. His statement of the perspective yielded by the “genuine abolition ground,” which he proceeds to qualify as a “partial” perspective, signifies only the starting point from which he ascends in maturity to the “comprehensive” view of the “statesman,” in which Lincoln appears not as a reluctant, accidental liberator but as a heroic, determined reformer (Goldstein Reference Goldstein1975, 207–10; Oakes Reference Oakes2007, 269–73; Storing Reference Storing, Frisch and Stevens1983, 220–21). Persuasive to a degree, this reading further supports the suggestion that Douglass means to solidify African Americans’ claim to national citizenship by illuminating the moral humanity their monument displays to the nation. He does so here by highlighting African Americans’ steadfast appreciation and his own ultimate appreciation of the virtue of statesmanship as Lincoln exemplified it.

The statesman's view that Douglass attributes to Lincoln is informed by the virtue of justice. Justice, the virtue of rendering to all what is due them, requires the capacity and determination to transcend partiality. It is characteristic of the statesman's perspective, which is distinguished primarily by its comprehensiveness in contrast to the partiality—the partial sympathies, interests, and opinions—whereby other perspectives are narrowed and distorted. Moreover, in Douglass's account, the statesman's perspective and the virtue of justice comprehend the virtue of prudence. The latter virtue signifies the proper judgment of the particular circumstances within which justice is to be pursued. It is marked especially by a patient mindfulness of practical limits on the statesman's power to achieve justice's objects. That mindfulness of limitations can make the statesman's virtue appear lowered or adulterated in comparison to the principled purity of uncompromising reformers such as the abolitionists. In Douglass's final analysis, however, the virtue of “the honest and comprehensive statesman” subsumes and refines the virtue of the genuine abolitionist, in the former's principled determination “to do his whole duty” and his superior judgment of what that duty entails in given circumstances. In appreciating Lincoln's statesmanship, African Americans appreciated the principled justice of his convictions and also appreciated and emulated his prudence, so that even as he appeared reluctant, they took “a comprehensive view” and made “reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position” (FDP 4.437, 433). As Lincoln displayed the virtue of a statesman in his opinions and actions regarding slavery, Douglass implies, so African Americans display the same virtue in their opinions and actions regarding Lincoln.

In sum, in his discussion of gratitude and its accompanying virtues appears another vital element of the “good work for our race” that Douglass claims for the monument and his speech. By exhibiting the fundamental political virtue of justice, Douglass and those he represents display an essential qualification for full and equal shares in governing a great nation. As Herbert J. Storing (Reference Storing, Frisch and Stevens1983, 227) aptly commented, “the Freedmen's Monument stood for . . . blacks’ praise of Lincoln, but also for their title to praise him”—and therefore to pass formal and informal judgments on all other elected officials in the United States. Douglass's discussion of the virtues they hereby exhibit thus signifies an elegant, memorably elevated brief for African American voting rights—the crucial security, in his judgment, for all their other rights (cf. FDP 4.62–69; LW 2.520; LW 3.420; LW 4.298; FDP 4.201).

GRATITUDE AND AMBIVALENCE: LINCOLN AS SAVIOR AND STEPFATHER

Douglass's treatment of the virtue of gratitude and his expressed ambivalence regarding Lincoln in the Freedmen's Monument speech are both more complicated than our discussion to this point has recognized. In the preceding section, we considered Douglass's discussion of gratitude as a representation of African Americans’ virtue, supporting their claim to full citizenship. Now we examine that same discussion with reference to how Douglass's account of African Americans’ gratitude aims to strengthen their claim by elevating the morale that sustains it. In this connection, we see first how Douglass's concern to present Lincoln as a proper object of their gratitude carries him beyond the normal boundaries of praise for statesmen, to the height of exaltation and even sanctification of the late president. Next, however, we see how his stated reservations about Lincoln are more serious and persisting than the transitory judgment suggested previously. I argue that these expressions of ambivalence do reflect Douglass's settled, serious intention, but they do not necessarily signify his lowered view of Lincoln himself. Rather, they reflect his concerns about the pedagogical effects of his representation of Lincoln. For reasons to be explained, Douglass judged it at once advantageous and dangerous to the morale of his people to represent Lincoln as a proper object of their most profound gratitude.

“AN AMERICAN OF THE AMERICANS”: BLACK AMBIVALENCE AND WHITE EMULATION

The preceding sections focus on Douglass's design to showcase and to cultivate African Americans’ virtue. Yet, he never believed that demonstrations of virtue would suffice in themselves to move white Americans to acknowledge their black compatriots as civil and political equals. This section extends our discussion of Douglass's studied ambivalence toward Lincoln, now considering how that ambivalence is designed to appeal to whites to reform their own racial sentiments.

Such an appeal to whites is a clear implication of Douglass's exaltation of Lincoln. As noted previously, by magnifying the greatness and authority of the nation's founders in his earlier July Fourth oration, Douglass draws challenging, shaming attention to the failings and the duties of successor generations of whites. In the Freedmen's Monument speech, less confrontationally, he draws similar attention to whites’ duty to complete the work that their great, fallen president had commenced. His rhetorical strategy on this point applies a maxim familiar to students of Machiavelli. “The nature of men,” the Florentine realist observes, “is to be obligated as much by benefits they give as by benefits they receive” (Mansfield Reference Mansfield1985, 44). To exalt the beneficence of the nation's greatest public representatives, Douglass implies, is to oblige the nation to continue and perfect their beneficent work. Pursuant to his insight into the monument-building sentiment (FDP 3.109), he certainly aims in this speech to perpetuate Lincoln's example by presenting him as an object of emulation for white Americans. Disclaiming “arrogance” in blacks’ memorializing of Lincoln's “illustrious name,” Douglass suggests to his white audience, “to you it especially belongs to sound his praises, to preserve and perpetuate his memory. . . . Instead of supplanting you at this altar we would exhort you to build high his monuments” (FDP 4.432). Surely he envisions their only truly fitting monument as the completion of Lincoln's work in constructing a regime of racial justice.

This exhortation to white America, with all its implications, is central to the “good work for our race” that Douglass claims in closing. Here, again, he uses the memory of Lincoln as a mediating agency, this time to mediate African Americans’ relation to white Americans. By “fastening ourselves to a name and fame imperishable and immortal” (FDP 4.440), he implies, he and his people can cultivate whites’ reverence for Lincoln as a means of reforming whites’ attitudes toward blacks. Of course, whether and how whites might be brought to emulate Lincoln in the crucial respect were very difficult questions. The “fastening ourselves” to Lincoln to which Douglass refers required great delicacy on blacks’ part. In demonstrating their gratitude, they needed to take care not to “supplant” whites at the “altar” of Lincoln worship (432). In this respect, too, Douglass's stated reservations serve his purpose. In his concession of whites’ preeminence in honoring Lincoln, we can see not only his call for whites to do their preeminent part in the work remaining, but also his strategy for moving whites to be responsive to this call.

As in his downplaying of persisting injustices, Douglass's rhetoric on this point seems to emulate Lincoln's own in its relatively muted, ingratiating manner of preparing a moral challenge (cf. Basler Reference Basler2001, 133–34). Here, the preparation consists in his attempt to strengthen the moral sympathy that attached loyalist whites to Lincoln. He does this in part by appealing to their own sense of gratitude: “to you he was a great and glorious friend and benefactor,” for “Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country”—the preeminent, indispensable security for their own rights. His concession of preeminence contributes importantly to the same end. To designate Lincoln, rightfully but prematurely, as “emphatically the black man's president,” as he did in 1865, might be to place his larger objective at risk. So, when he remarks in the Freedmen's Monument speech that “Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model,” being in his interests, associations, habits of thought, and prejudices, “a white man,” Douglass distances Lincoln from blacks and draws him closer to many whites. He endeavors both to inject a measure of critical reserve into blacks’ reverence for Lincoln and to strengthen the white sympathy for Lincoln that he would cultivate as the seed of broader sympathies. He comes close to acknowledging this rhetorical strategy when he observes, later in the speech, that Lincoln's “unfriendly feeling” toward blacks “may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them” (FDP 4.432, 431, 436).

Whites would feel moved to emulate Lincoln, Douglass suggests, by their sympathetic identification with him. They would uphold Lincoln as their “model” so far as they recognized him as their “man,” or as representative of them. The railsplitting president was representative of the common mass of loyal white Americans in various respects. Lincoln “was born and reared among the lowly . . . a son of toil himself . . . linked in brotherly sympathy with the sons of toil in every loyal part of the Republic.” He was a “plebian,” governed by a “strong common sense, sharpened in the school of adversity.” He represented the aspirations, along with the proud faith in their country's promise, characteristic of that class. He had risen as a self-made “man of work” to the pinnacle of American achievement by “the manly and heroic qualities” he had cultivated in his varied labors (FDP 4.436–38; cf. FDP 5.566; Blight Reference Blight2002, 84–85). Finally, Douglass asserts again, Lincoln was “an American of the Americans” also in the debased sense; he represented most whites in carrying into adulthood the racial prejudice he had acquired in his upbringing. Emphasizing this point, Kendrick and Kendrick (Reference Kendrick and Kendrick2008, 245) suggest that Douglass hereby instructed whites that if Lincoln could do justice to blacks despite the racial “blindness” that he shared with many of them, “they could do the same.” Following W.E.B. Du Bois,Footnote ⁶ they thus explain Douglass's choice to highlight Lincoln's racial prejudice. However, in neglecting Douglass's focus on the positive aspects of Lincoln's background, they overlook his rhetorical prudence in addressing whites and, more important, his appeal to those elements in white America's moral and political culture from which racially just sentiments could organically emerge. Douglass's point is that Lincoln grew to hold a principled hatred of slavery both despite and because of his representative origins (FDP 4.436–38).

By characterizing Lincoln's representative status as he does, Douglass tactfully indicates the full measure of what honoring their great president entails for white Americans. Lincoln's sympathetic identification with America's “sons of toil” moved him and should move them to sympathize with those formerly enslaved, and his democratic faith in an America wherein the lowborn can rise to society's heights should foster similar fellow feelings for African Americans in their own strivings.

HOPEFULNESS JUSTIFIED: DOUGLASS'S MORALIZED INTEREST THEORY

It is difficult to say just how optimistic Douglass was that such remembrances of Lincoln's democratic greatness, amid his and others’ neoabolitionist attempts to perpetuate the memory of the moral principles at stake in the Civil War, would prove successful in the postwar decades in moving whites to reform their racial prejudices and the nation's racial practices. His rhetoric in this period features exuberant and even apocalyptic assessments of the war's morally reformative effects, alongside chastened predictions that the bigotry of whites in general and of furious neo-Confederates in particular would endure for generations (cf. FDP 4.266–67, 361, with FDP 3.545, 600; LW 3.291–92).

This difficulty notwithstanding, one can say with confidence that Douglass throughout his long career remained consistently hopeful for the ultimate triumph of racial justice in America, and that such hopefulness was to him more than a morale-building expression of faith. He maintained to the end that white Americans’ color prejudices, however formidable for the time being, were neither natural nor permanent. “The colored people and all other men,” he affirmed in an 1870 letter decrying racial exclusion in New York City, “will bye and bye be treated according to their character rather than their color” (LW 4.230; cf. LW 2.235; LW 4.477; FDP 5.206). He thus predicts the realization of what Martin Luther King, Jr., under the aspect of the Lincoln Memorial nearly ninety-three years later, would immortalize as the African American dream. This long-term confidence about race in America reflects a still more general hopefulness characteristic of Douglass's political thought as a whole. The cornerstones of that hopefulness are the convictions that “truth is mighty and will prevail,” as he declared in 1855 on the abolition of school segregation in Boston (LW 5.357, emphasis original), and that the universe is subject to eternal, “self-executing” or naturally sanctioned laws of moral government (FDP 4.504; FDP 5.11; Douglass Reference Douglass1994, 936). In his affirmation of a morally ordered cosmos, Douglass again prefigures King (with both apparently drawing on Douglass's fellow abolitionist Theodore Parker), for whom “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” (Washington Reference Washington1986, 277; Parker Reference Parker1853, 84–85).

Douglass insisted that his expectation of the triumph of racial justice in America rests on a foundation of rational argument, independent of a faith in divine providence. What are the rational grounds of his hopefulness? To consider this question is to see how the Freedmen's Monument speech opens into and illuminates Douglass's broader political philosophy. His answer, I suggest, appears in a psychologically subtle, empirically attentive theory of racial and moral progress in the U.S., epitomized in this speech and further elaborated in his analysis of U.S. history. To clarify this theory in its essentials, I begin by considering how Douglass develops it as he incorporates and overcomes a challenging objection.

MORALIZED INTEREST IN PRACTICE

Returning, with this larger argument in mind, to the Freedmen's Monument speech, we can now see in its characterization of Lincoln an exemplary illustration of Douglass's theory of moralized interest. As Douglass here presents it, Lincoln's moral growth can also be described in terms he employed in his Dred Scott speech, as an evolution from “white reasons” to “black reasons”—or, more precisely, as an enlightened recognition of the black reasons within the white reasons (LW 3.391)—for opposing slavery. Perhaps acknowledging that Lincoln's antislavery conviction was present from the beginning, Douglass yet contends that well into his presidency, that conviction was badly adulterated by his devotion to “the welfare of the white people” (FDP 4.431). Yet, pursuant to “the stern logic of great events,” as the war progressed, Lincoln grew clearer in the awareness that whites’ interest in a secure constitutional Union encompassed also blacks’ interest in a more perfect, racially just Union. Taking “a comprehensive view” of his character and achievements, Douglass praises Lincoln (contrary to the old abolitionist view) for his “fidelity to Union and liberty” (433, 440, author's emphasis). Because Lincoln matured in the understanding that the war to secure the interest in Union could be waged successfully only as a war to secure the moral end of liberation, Douglass finally judges his rule not only “beneficent,” but also genuinely “wise” (434).

In this way, Douglass hopes that his cultivation of the nation's memory of Lincoln will move white Americans to emulate him in overcoming or disabling their color prejudices—putting them in the course of their ultimate extinction. Originating in interests similar to those that initially moved Lincoln, loyalist whites’ feelings for their martyred leader could aid in developing those interests into the moral sentiments against slavery and racial supremacy whose ongoing growth within Lincoln himself was cut short by the assassin's bullet (FDP 4.79, 112). Furthermore, as he looked beyond Lincoln to the character and history of white America for evidence supporting his moralized interest idea, Douglass found solid grounds for his long-term hopefulness, although prospects for the near to intermediate term were decidedly more mixed.

First and foremost, in Douglass's argument, the notion of moralized interest compellingly explains the actual downfall of chattel slavery. Slavery posed manifold, metastasizing dangers to northern whites’ interests, the most affecting of which appeared in its assaults on the freedom of speech. “Nothing . . . did half so much to arouse the hatred of the North against the infernal institution,” he recalled in 1871, as the South's “absolute denial” of this freedom at all points touching slavery (LW 4.245; cf. LW 2.386). That hatred—heightened by slaveholders’ attempt to dissolve the Union—supplied sufficient cause for war for northerners yet unmoved by abolition itself. Once joined in earnest, the war itself supplied the most powerful impetus of all for moral reform. “The Rebellion has been a rapid educator,” Douglass observed in early 1864. “Congress was the first to respond,” liberating fugitive slaves of rebel masters. “Then came very temperate talk about confiscation, which soon came to be pretty radical talk. Then came propositions for Border-State, gradual, compensated, colonized Emancipation. Then came the threat of a proclamation, and then came the proclamation” (LW 3.402).

All this occurred, in Douglass's analysis, again pursuant to what he calls in the Freedmen's Monument speech the “stern logic of great events”—ultimately, pursuant to the natural moral laws governing the universe (FDP 4.434; cf. LW 3.158–59, 170–73; FDP 4.230, 273–74). Although properly moral motives became widespread among northern whites only as outgrowths of felt dangers to their rights and core interests, Douglass yet attributed their emergence to a necessary chain of events. Slavery's institutional imperatives required that it eventually had to threaten northern whites, in response to the threat posed by the intensifying abolition movement in the North. The latter movement in turn arose “in the nature of things”—in the natural moral sense informed by the Declaration of Independence and in the natural love of liberty of slavery's primary victims. The implication was that no settlement short of abolition could ever be final or even long lived (FDP 4.434; LW 2.334–37, 354–59, 363–66, 409–11). Conversely, as slavery necessarily destabilized the Union, abolition stabilized it. With the Proclamation and the Union victory in hand, Douglass could confidently proclaim, “that old Union . . . we shall never see again” (LW 3.395; cf. FDP 4.76). The nation's material and moral investment in abolition was too large for it ever to permit chattel slavery's revival.

Douglass hoped and expected that a similar fate would come to the more broadly and deeply entrenched regime of white supremacy in America. To this end, he argued, the crucial object was to secure the right to vote, which would operate as the necessary and ultimately sufficient means for securing all rights of African Americans (1994, 816–19, 833–34; LW 2.520; LW 3.420; LW 4.158, 167, 298; FDP 4.119, 201). Here, again, we see the notion of moralized interest at work. Universal suffrage would lead to full integration, Douglass expected, by dispelling the prejudices that prevented it. It would dispel those prejudices primarily via the interests of white politicians, whose need for blacks’ votes would compel them to demonstrate concern for blacks’ rights and interests (LW 3.420; LW 5.212; FDP 4.165, 205; Myers Reference Myers2008, 129–37). Over time, the regular soliciting of blacks’ votes in the most broadly public of forums, however grudging and narrowly interested initially, would have, by the force of habituation, an enduring pedagogical effect on white candidates and electorates. After 1965, when the Voting Rights Act finally provided serious federal enforcement of African American suffrage, this expectation was substantially vindicated, as a dramatic upsurge in black voting power coincided with remarkable changes in American public opinion on race (Sniderman and Piazza Reference Sniderman and Piazza1993; Thernstrom and Thernstrom Reference Thernstrom and Thernstrom1997, 286–312, 462–92; Thernstrom Reference Thernstrom2009).

Yet, if Douglass's analysis was prescient in the long view concerning the power of the vote to move whites to moralize their interests and dispel their prejudices, his theory yielded at best mixed expectations in the nearer term. The obvious, formidable difficulty concerned how to move white voters to support black suffrage. To address this difficulty, Douglass persistently invoked the interests of erstwhile allies and even of adversaries. Appealing to a national interest in establishing Union-friendly governments in ex-rebel states, he appealed also to the partisan interests of Republicans in holding their congressional majority. “Let us not remember our enemies and disenfranchise our friends,” he insisted in April 1865 (FDP 4.79, also 63–67, 73). In later years, he reminded white southerners of their vital interest in a contented, productive black laboring class, and in response to the Civil Rights Cases ruling, he warned the nation of the danger of a “black Ireland”—an alienated, aggrieved underclass feeling itself neither protected nor obligated by the nation's laws (FDP 5.424–25, 117–18).

As Douglass's reading of U.S. history through the war illustrates, to maximize their effect, such appeals must target the deepest, most abiding national interests and must do so at moments of true national crisis, when those interests are most gravely imperiled. Accordingly, after the conclusion of the military conflict, he labored to extend the spirit of emancipation by invoking an enlarged conception of the national mission and a glorified memory of the crisis through which the nation had passed. Amid a controversy over Chinese immigration in 1869, he declared that the mission of the U.S. was to become “the [most] perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen” (FDP 4.253; also LW 3.396–97). To spread the passion for this national mission, he urged fellow loyalists to remember with fear, pride, and reverence their countrymen's unparalleled sacrifices for a great cause. On “Decoration Day” in 1878, he reproved a spreading sentiment to “forget and forgive,” which, “noble and generous” as it might seem, was in fact morally vicious. “There was a right side and a wrong side in the late war.” The war must be remembered as “a war of ideas”—a war “between a government based upon the broadest and grandest declaration of human rights the world ever heard or read, and another pretended government, based upon an open, bold, and shocking denial of all rights, except the right of the strongest” (FDP 4.490–91; also FDP 5.41–52, 389–90, 545).

Douglass began that speech, delivered in Union Square in New York City, by raising his hand in salute, to great applause, to a nearby statue of Abraham Lincoln (editor's note, FDP 4.480–81). However, as Lincoln himself might have advised him and as his own argument implied, he had comparatively slight reason to expect that his attempts to reignite the morally revolutionary wartime spirit would soon succeed. The memory of a great crisis cannot be as powerful as the crisis itself; it must inevitably fade over time. “Republics have proverbially short memories,” he worried in April 1865, still hoping that Lincoln's martyrdom might hold the loyal nation to its purpose (FDP 4.76–77). “Time is a silent but powerful element,” he observed a few years later, expecting that ex-rebels’ belligerence must subside. “Human wrath, however carefully nursed, must cool.” But this observation applied to northerners as well as to southerners, and to passions for reform as well as to those for reaction. On Independence Day in 1875, he warned an audience of black Washingtonians, “So sure as the stars shine in the heavens . . . so sure will the white people North and South abandon their quarrel and become friends.” He continued, “the question for us is: in what position will this stupendous reconciliation leave the colored people?. . . Has justice so deep a hold upon the nation . . . that the rushing together of these mighty waves will not disturb its foundations?. . . The signs of the times are not all in our favor” (FDP 4.239, 417).

In short, echoing fears harbored by Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson, Douglass feared that what occurred after the American Revolution would likely recur after the Civil War (Basler Reference Basler2001, 83–84; Yarbrough Reference Yarbrough2006, 129). The revolutionary passion would fade; the zeal for equal liberty would lapse into the pursuance of lower, narrower interests; and the hope for timely progress toward racial justice would dissipate. This lowering of near-term expectations is again suggested by his larger argument. Lasting moral reforms grow out of the convergence of powerful interests amid great national crises—out of exceptional and short-lived circumstances. Due to the huge investments made in them, gains made during a crisis itself are likely to become matters of moral conviction and therefore to endure. However, attempts to extend the crisis and thus to expand the gains by “bloody shirt” appeals to historical memory are likely to be of limited effect. The victory over slavery was likely to be real, permanent, and, in the near term, limited. The nation's governing majorities would come to regard slavery in its antebellum form as morally repellent and intolerable. Yet, to move them likewise to reject slavery's semblances and vestiges would require another crisis, met by another display of statesmanship by racial reformers. Douglass could hardly predict with any specificity such a turn of events. Still, it accords with his argument that when the next great crisis, effecting another convergence of racial interests, did come in the form of another great war—this one against a foreign power that surpassed even the slaveholders in the virulence of its racism, and one whose aftermath engaged the U.S. in a global contest for alliances with the world's peoples of color (Dudziak Reference Dudziak2000)—an irrepressible agitation for freedom and justice would again seize the opportunity, producing reforms in law and popular sentiment that appear to be profound and enduring.