Lincoln and Douglass: the president and the abolitionist

Who were Lincoln and Douglass?

Abraham Lincoln was born on 12 February 1809 in a log cabin in Kentucky and grew up in Indiana and Illinois with less than a year of formal schooling. He became a lawyer, a one-term congressman and, from 1854, a leader of the new Republican Party against the spread of slavery. Elected the sixteenth President in 1860, he led the Union through the Civil War, issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863 and pushed the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress in January 1865. He was shot on 14 April 1865 and died the next morning.

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, in February 1818. He secretly learned to read as a boy in Baltimore, escaped by train and boat on 3 September 1838, and became the most famous Black abolitionist speaker in America. His Narrative (1845) was a bestseller. He published the newspaper The North Star from 1847, and during the war recruited Black soldiers, including two of his own sons, for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. He later served as US Marshal for the District of Columbia and minister to Haiti, and died in Washington on 20 February 1895.

Lincoln and Douglass at a glance

Before they met: Douglass the critic

For two years Douglass attacked Lincoln in print. He condemned the First Inaugural of March 1861 for promising not to interfere with slavery where it existed and to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. In August 1862 Lincoln met a delegation of free Black men in the White House and urged them to support colonisation abroad; Douglass denounced the president's words in his monthly paper that September. He welcomed the Emancipation Proclamation of 1 January 1863, but called for Black men to fight, and for the government to treat them as soldiers in full.

The first meeting: 10 August 1863

After the 54th Massachusetts lost heavily in the assault on Fort Wagner in July 1863, Douglass stopped recruiting and went to Washington. Senator Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas took him to the White House. By his own account in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), he was nervous, and Lincoln put him at ease at once.

He made three demands:

1. Equal pay. Black privates received $10 a month, with $3 deducted for clothing, against $13 for white privates.
2. Protection. The Confederacy threatened to enslave or execute captured Black soldiers and their white officers. Lincoln had issued an order of retaliation on 30 July 1863; Douglass wanted it enforced.
3. Promotion. Black soldiers who earned it should become officers.

Lincoln, as Douglass recalled, answered that unequal pay had been a necessary step to make Black enlistment acceptable to white opinion and would eventually change; that retaliation was terrible and hard to carry out once begun; and that he would sign any commission for a Black soldier that the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, recommended. Douglass left unsatisfied on the details but impressed by the man. Stanton then promised him an army commission, which never arrived. Congress equalised pay in June 1864.

This meeting is the setting of the Yuga debate Should Black soldiers be paid and protected the same as white soldiers, now?.

The second meeting: 19 August 1864

A year later Lincoln invited Douglass. The war was going badly, Lincoln expected to lose the November election, and many Northerners wanted peace talks. Lincoln feared that a negotiated peace would leave millions in slavery, because the Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure that only freed people who reached Union control.

He asked Douglass to devise a way to spread word of the Proclamation and bring as many enslaved people as possible into Union lines while there was still time. Douglass wrote out a plan, sent to Lincoln on 29 August 1864, for a band of agents, paid by the government, to go into the South. The fall of Atlanta on 2 September changed the war and the election, and the plan was never carried out. Douglass later wrote that the meeting showed him a deeper moral conviction against slavery in Lincoln than he had seen before.

The third meeting: 4 March 1865

On the evening of the Second Inauguration, Douglass went to the public reception at the White House. Police at the door tried to turn him away because he was Black. He got word to Lincoln, was let in, and the President greeted him in front of the crowd as his friend. According to Douglass, Lincoln said he had seen him in the crowd that day and asked what he thought of the address, saying no man's opinion mattered more to him. Douglass told him it was a sacred effort.

Six weeks later Lincoln was dead. Mary Todd Lincoln afterwards sent Douglass one of her husband's walking sticks; it is still at Douglass's house, Cedar Hill, in Washington.

Where they agreed and where they differed

Agreed: both believed slavery was a moral wrong, both rose from poverty through reading and speaking, both revered the Declaration of Independence, and both came to see the war as a struggle over slavery. Lincoln wrote in a letter to Albert Hodges on 4 April 1864:

Differed: on speed, and on race. In the Charleston debate of 18 September 1858, Lincoln said he did not favour social and political equality of the races. He supported colonisation into 1862. Douglass demanded freedom, citizenship and the vote at once. Lincoln moved: in his last public speech, on 11 April 1865, he said he would prefer the vote for very intelligent Black men and those who had served as soldiers. That was less than Douglass wanted, and more than any president had said.

Douglass's final judgement came in his speech at the unveiling of the Freedmen's Memorial in Washington on 14 April 1876. He told his audience that Lincoln had been above all the white man's president, devoted to the welfare of white people, and that Black Americans were at best his stepchildren; and also that, measured by the feeling of his country and the task he faced, Lincoln had been swift, zealous, radical and determined. Read the whole speech before quoting either half.

Questions to ask Lincoln and Douglass

1. Douglass: what did you expect Lincoln to be like in August 1863, and what surprised you?
2. Douglass: why did you keep recruiting Black soldiers when they were paid less?
3. Douglass: why did you call Lincoln the white man's president in 1876, and still praise him?
4. Lincoln: why did you accept unequal pay for Black soldiers at first?
5. Lincoln: why did you ask Douglass for a plan in August 1864?
6. Lincoln: how did your views on colonisation and Black voting change between 1862 and 1865?
7. Both: what did the war prove about Black soldiers and citizenship?

You can hear both men answer by voice on Yuga: Lincoln and Douglass are AI recreations built from their writings and the historical record. They can be wrong, and our record of the meetings comes almost entirely from Douglass's own later accounts. Cite Life and Times and Lincoln's papers, not the app. See also questions to ask Abraham Lincoln and questions to ask Frederick Douglass.

Which one for your project?

Choose Douglass for a project on slavery told by someone who escaped it, literacy and freedom, protest and persuasion, or Black soldiers in the Civil War. Choose Lincoln for a project on leadership in war, the Emancipation Proclamation, or how a politician's views change. Choose both for the clearest single case study in how a movement and a government push each other, using the three meetings as your timeline. The Black History Month figures list suggests related figures, and the Yuga debate on equal pay in 1863 works as a class role-play.