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symbiotically related. Racism, as Frederick Douglass put it, constituted “the greatest of all obstacles in the way of the anti-slavery cause,” and he accused Republicans of betraying their own moral beliefs when they stood “opposed to Negro equality, to Negro advancement, to Negro suffrage, to Negro citizenship.” Lincoln, by contrast, saw the question of “Negro equality” as a false one, an attempt to “divert the public mind from the real issue—the extension or non-extension of slavery.” “Negro equality! Fudge!” Lincoln wrote in notes for a speech in 1858. “How long…shall there continue knaves to vend, and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagoguism as this?”61

In an undated fragment written in the 1850s, Lincoln mused on the logical absurdity of proslavery arguments:

If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B.—why not may B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally that he may enslave A? You say A. is white, And B. is black…. Take care. By this rule, you are to be the slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.62

The same problem, he continued, existed if the right to enslave another were grounded in superior intelligence, or simply in self-interest. But Lincoln failed to acknowledge that precisely the same argument could be made against laws, like those of Illinois, in which the white majority imposed all sorts of disabilities on the free black population.

Lincoln challenged prevailing prejudices when it came to blacks’ enjoyment of natural rights, but he would go no further. As was typical of Lincoln in the 1850s, his position occupied the middle ground of Republican opinion. In the context of the North as a whole, Lincoln’s views on race fell far short of abolitionist egalitarianism, but differed substantially from the virulent and gratuitous racism of the Democrats, not to mention Chief Justice Taney’s ruling in the case of Dred Scott. At this point in his career, Lincoln had not yet given serious thought to the role blacks might play in a post-slavery America. He distinguished between an entitlement to natural rights, which he always claimed for blacks, and membership in the American nation. “What I would most desire,” he explained at Springfield in 1858, “would be the separation of the white and black races”—that is, the colonization of blacks outside the United States.63

V

BY THE LATE 1850S, the American Colonization Society seemed moribund. The New York Herald called its annual convention an “old fogy affair.” In 1859, out of a black population, slave and free, of well over four million, the Society sent around 300 persons to Liberia. “Can anything be more ridiculous,” the Herald asked, “than keeping up such a society as this?”64 Yet at this very moment the idea of colonization experienced a revival within the Republican party. As in the days of Henry Clay, support for the idea centered in the border slave states and the lower Northwest.

The most avid Republican promoters of colonization were the Blair family: the venerable Francis P. Blair, once a close adviser to President Andrew Jackson and editor of the Washington Globe, the Democratic party’s organ in the nation’s capital, and his sons Francis Jr. (Frank) and Montgomery. As an editor and member of Jackson’s unofficial “kitchen cabinet,” the elder Blair had exerted enormous political influence in the 1830s and 1840s. Having joined the Republican party, he expected to do so again, as did his sons. The Blairs were self-important, indomitable, and, as critics of slavery living in slave states, courageous. In 1856, Frank Blair won election to Congress from St. Louis as an antislavery Democrat but soon switched parties, becoming the first Republican representative from a slave state. Two years later he began to manumit slaves he had inherited from his mother. Montgomery represented Dred Scott before the Supreme Court and his fellow Marylander Chief Justice Taney. The Blairs saw themselves as the vanguard of a movement that would rid the Upper South, and eventually the nation, of slavery and the black presence.