President Lincoln was clearly and openly on the record that all men everywhere should be free.
And unlike Phillips he had to consider what the American people would accept.
"Measuring by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical and determined."
--Frederick Douglass
Walt
Yet one more pathetic selective quote from after Lincoln was dead.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Frederick Douglass said:
Illogical and unfair as Mr. Lincoln's statements are, they are nevertheless quite in keeping with his whole course from the beginning of his administration up to this day, and confirm the painful conviction that though elected as an anti-slavery man by Republican and Abolition voters, Mr. Lincoln is quite a genuine representative of American prejudice and Negro hatred and far more concerned for the preservation of slavery, and the favor of the Border States, than for any sentiment of magnanimity or principle of justice and humanity"
The Life and Writing of Frederick Douglass,
edited by Philip S. Foner, 4 Vols, New York, 1955, vol 3, page 268
Frederick Douglass said:
With the single exception of the question of slavery extension, Mr. Lincoln proposes no measure which can bring him into antagonistic collision with the traffickers in human flesh, either in the States or in the District of Columbia .... Slavery will be as safe, and safer, in the Union under such a President, than it can be under any President of a Southern Confederacy"
The Life and Writing of Frederick Douglass,
edited by Philip S. Foner, 4 Vols, New York, 1955, vol 2, page 527
Frederick Douglass charged Clay, and by implication, Lincoln with "the most revolting blasphemy," saying "You would charge upon God the repsonsibility of your own crimes, and would seek a solace from the pangs of a guilty conscience by sacrilegiously assuming that in robbing Africa of her children, you acted in obedience of the great purposed, and were but fulfilling the decress of the most high God" (FD 1:289)
Lincoln never met a Black law he didn't like. Referring to the Illinois Exclusion law, Douglass expressed his outrage for an act which "cooly" proposed to "sell the bodies and souls of the blacks to increase the intelligence and refinement of the whites [and] to rob every black stranger who ventures among them to increase their literary fund."
Douglass's indictment of Lincoln: "The treatment of our poor black soldiers -- the refusal to pay them anything like equal compensation, though it was promised them when they enlisted; the refusal to insist upon the exchange of colored prisoners when colored prisoners have been slaughtered in cold blood, although the President has repeatedly promised thus to protect the lives of his colored soldiers -- have worn my patience threadbare. The President has virtually laid down this as the rule of his statesmen: Do evil by choice, right from necessity" (FD 3:404, 406-7)
Frederick Douglass attacked Lincoln's logic and his racism, saying that "a horse thief pleading that the existence of the horse is the apology for his theft or a highway man contending that the money in the traveler's pocket is the sole first cause of his robbery are about as much entitled to respect as is the President's reasoning at this point."
"Mr. Lincoln takes care in urging his colonization scheme to furnish a weapon to all the ignorant and base, who need only the countenance of men in authority to comment all kinds of violence and outrage upon the colored people of the country." (FD 3:267)
Frederick Douglass told Charles Sumner: "If slavery is really dead in the District of Columbia ... to you, more than to any other American statesman, belongs the honor of this great triumph of Justice, Liberty, and Sound Policy" (FD 3:233-4)
On July 4, 1862, Douglass said: "our weak, faltering and incompetent rulers in the Cabinet ... and our rebel worshipping Generals in the field" were "incomparably more dangerous to the country than dead traitors like former President James Buchanan..." (FD 3:250)
August 1862, "...ABRAHAM LINCOLN is no more fit for the place he holds than was JAMES BUCHANAN, and that the latter was no more the miserable tool of traitors and rebels than the former is allowing himself to be."
Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man. He was preeminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of the white people of this country."
"With the single exception of the question of slavery extension, Mr. Lincoln proposes no measure which can bring him into antagonistic collision with the traffikers in human flesh, either in the States or in the District of Columbia .... slavery will be as safe, and safer, in the Union under such a President than it can be under any President of a Southern Confederacy" (FD 2:527)
Lincoln was "scrupulous to the very letter of the law in favor of slavery, and a perfect latitudinarian as to the discharge of his duties under a law favoring freedom."
In a January 25, 1865 speech, Douglass said that the system of forced labor inaugurated in Louisiana by General Banks, with Lincoln's approval, "practically enslaves the Negro, and makes the Proclamation of 1863 a mockery and delusion."