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By Root 1726 0

on the glories of the Anglo-Saxon “race” and its supposed love of liberty. He did not express contempt for free blacks, or refer to them as a vicious and degraded group, descriptions ubiquitous among Democrats and hardly unknown among Republicans. In his 1852 eulogy for Henry Clay he spoke of the “troublesome presence of the free negroes.” But later in the same paragraph, when he identified a “dangerous presence” in the United States, Lincoln referred not to free blacks, but to slavery itself. Lincoln justified discrimination on the basis not of innate racial inferiority but the will of the (white) majority in a political democracy. When speaking of black capacity his remarks were usually cautious and tentative. In his Springfield speech of July 1858, he said, “Certainly, the negro is not our equal in color—perhaps not in many other respects.” Even in the debate at Charleston, when he said the two races could never coexist in the same country on the basis of equality, the reason he advanced was “physical,” not moral or intellectual, difference.58

Lincoln’s personal dealings with blacks did not reveal prejudice. Springfield when Lincoln lived there was a small city (its population had not reached 10,000) with a tiny black population (171 persons in 1850). Nonetheless, Lincoln could not have been unaware of the black presence. In the 1850s, more than twenty black men, women, and children lived within three blocks of his house. He and his wife employed at least four free black women to work as domestic servants at one time or another. Lincoln befriended and gave free legal assistance to William Florville, the city’s most prosperous black resident, known as “Billy the Barber.” In 1857, Lincoln and Herndon paid a fine incurred by John Shelby, a free black resident of Springfield who had been jailed in New Orleans while working on a Mississippi River steamboat, securing his release. W. J. Davis, a former slave who lived in Bloomington, Illinois, and claimed during the Civil War to have been “personally acquainted” with Lincoln since the mid-1850s, described him as “a kind-hearted, sociable kind of man.”59

In 1860, the black community of Illinois numbered fewer than 8,000 in a population of over 1.7 million. How Lincoln in his heart of hearts viewed black people probably mattered less to this tiny group than his refusal to take a principled stand against racial inequality. He may not have fully embraced racism, but he did not condemn it. The most he would say, as at Peoria, was that in a democratic society, a “universal” prejudice could not be “safely disregarded,” regardless of whether it accorded with “justice and sound judgment.” This was an oddly agnostic position for a politician who repeatedly emphasized that the fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans lay in the former’s refusal to address the morality of slavery.

In at least some of his responses to the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln seemed to endorse the idea of free black citizenship. But, at a time when nearly all the rights of citizens derived from the states, Lincoln was not among the Illinois Republicans who spoke out against his state’s oppressive Black Laws, nor did he assist the members of the legislature who tried to have them modified. The black abolitionist H. Ford Douglas, a Virginia-born slave who escaped from bondage and moved to Chicago, claimed that in 1858 he asked both Lincoln and Trumbull to sign a petition for repeal of the Black Laws, whose provisions, Douglas observed, “would disgrace any Barbary State.” Both, Douglas related, refused. Lincoln had not thought through how free blacks could enjoy the opportunity to rise if denied physical mobility, access to education, testifying in court, and serving on juries—essential attributes of free society. Was there really a difference, asked Henry L. Dawes, a prominent Massachusetts Republican, between discriminatory laws like those of Illinois and the idea that “the negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect”?60

Abolitionists saw the fights against slavery and racism as