The Crooked Path to Abolition by James Oakes
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The Crooked Path to Abolition:
Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution
By James Oakes
WW Norton, 2021
Any book about Abraham Lincoln and slavery that isn’t willing to stoop to hagiography must instead start with qualifications. At the beginning of his new book The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution, Civil War historian James Oakes lays out the standard spread of qualifications about Lincoln:
He never called for the immediate emancipation of the slaves, the way most abolitionists did. He never denounced slaveholders as sinners and never endorsed the civil or political equality of Blacks and whites. He never claimed, as some abolitionists did, that the Constitution empowered Congress to abolish slavery in the states, nor did he agree with other abolitionists that the Constitution was a proslavery document. He never opened his home to fugitive slaves on the underground railroad. He endorsed the voluntary colonization of free Blacks long after most abolitionists had repudiated colonization outright. He never joined an abolitionist society, but he did join the Springfield branch of the American Colonization Society.
The list goes on. Lincoln never joined or spoke at an abolitionist society; he never openly defied the Fugitive Slave Act; he never attacked the Fugitive Slave Act as unconstitutional. Although the thought of slavery ate away at Lincoln, his public stance on it evolved in ways that his later hagiographers find halting and unhelpful. But a decade before he issued his Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1861, he was clear enough on the subject: “When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government - that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal;’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.”
The “ancient faith” he’s referring to there is of course the Constitution, and as Oakes makes clear to his readers, that ancient faith was much-contested in the days of Lincoln’s intellectual development. “Even abolitionists agreed that the federal government could not abolish slavery in a state, but it could suppress slavery in Washington, DC, ban slavery from the western territories, and deny admission of new slaves into the Union,” he writes. “Such policies were made possible by the antislavery Constitution - the one Lincoln believed was created by the founders.”
In 1839 the famous abolitionist Henry Stanton, addressing the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York City, painted a picture of remorseless, incremental triumph for the abolitionist cause: although the federal government couldn’t reach into states to change their laws, it could even so strangle slavery outside of those states and guarantee its eventual extinction - and it was possible for ardent abolitionists like Stanton to see such glints of hope as emanating from the “antislavery constitution” mentioned in Oakes’s book.
But Oakes points out, the broader picture of slavery in the 1840s hardly hinted at this eventual triumph. The Supreme Court in 1841 had ruled that Congress couldn’t regulate the interstate slave trade, and in 1850, as Oakes puts it, “Congress passed a draconian fugitive slave law that increased federal power to capture escaped slaves in free states.” The North had attempted to pre-emptively ban the exportation of slavery to territories seized from Meixco, and the attempt had failed. In 1854 the Missouri Compromise had been repealed, opening the door, it seemed, to the growth of slavery in yet more states - and the bloc of Southern states in Congress was so large and so unified that the passing of an abolition amendment was “all but inconceivable.”
In this way “the increasingly radical drift” of Lincoln’s policy inclinations - a drift that culminated in the Emancipation Proclamation - increasingly came into conflict with even his own long-held beliefs about the nature of federal government. In charting Lincoln’s struggle with that conflict - as much an inner, personal quest as a matter of canny workaday politics - Oakes packs an absolutely enormous amount of research and contemplation into barely 200 pages. He’s never willing to exonerate Lincoln, and that makes The Crooked Path to Abolition unfailingly challenging reading. Much longer books have been written about the broiling constitutional issues on everybody’s lips in the 1850s, but as Oakes notes, comparatively little popular history work has been done on antislavery constitutionalism (he cites a 1977 study by William Wiecek as a groundbreaking work on the subject). This brief book works as a powerful corrective to that neglect; it’s a fascinating way to look at Lincoln the thinker.
—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The National. He writes regularly for The Vineyard Gazette, the Daily Star and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.