Publisher's Weekly Review
In this elegantly written and thoroughly researched book, Kaplan (John Quincy Adams: American Visionary), professor emeritus of English at Queens College, relates how two presidents, Abraham Lincoln and John Quincy Adams, thought about and dealt with slavery and race. Lincoln believed that African-Americans should emigrate to Africa or another homeland. Adams, meanwhile, was an ardent abolitionist who foresaw the eventual rise of a multicultural America. Kaplan contrasts their views and discusses the people and events that shaped their intellectual, political, and moral development. Among these figures is Dorcas Allen, an enslaved woman who killed her two children and whose trial ignited Adams's passion against the peculiar institution, which reached its apotheosis in the famous Amistad trial of 1841. The murder of the impassioned antislavery preacher Elijah Lovejoy in 1837 in Alton, Ill., was influential in forming Lincoln's opinions about African-Americans, slavery, and the law. The procolonization ideas of Sen. Henry Clay, Thomas Jefferson's dour views on black intellectual capacity, and Frederick Douglass's opposition to colonization also come under consideration. Kaplan presents a more complex Lincoln who "presided over the creation of a new reality that neither he nor anyone could fully embrace, or embrace in a way that would eliminate racial conflict." Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt Inc. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Americans remember Abraham Lincoln as a warrior against slavery and a martyr to the cause of its extermination, but as Kaplan (John Quincy Adams, 2014) shows in his new book, Lincoln's decision to emancipate the slaves came after a long struggle with the South's slaveholding elite and his own evolving beliefs. Kaplan has published acclaimed biographies of both Lincoln and John Quincy Adams, and his knowledge of both frees him to tell their intertwining stories with clarity and concision. While Lincoln was a conciliator, Adams was a truth-teller, and after serving as secretary of state and president, Adams, who died serving in Congress, was unafraid to speak out against slavery. Early in the nineteenth century, Adams already believed that slavery would be ended only through a civil war, but Lincoln believed abolitionism would destroy the union and set off a hundred years or more of volatile racism. Only when Lincoln concluded that freeing the slaves would wreck the Southern economy and free black men to join the Union army did he change his mind. Kaplan does not build up one man at the expense of the other but shows how both helped liberate our country from a horrifying institution.--Gwinn, Mary Ann Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BOOKS ABOUT ABRAHAM LINCOLN often tell us as much about the authors and their times as about their subject. Although Lincoln died a century and a half ago, we see him as our contemporary. As the Great Emancipator, who freed slaves with a stroke of his pen, Lincoln enables readers to congratulate themselves about society's progress toward racial justice. When optimism about race relations wanes, so does adulation of Lincoln. Fred Kaplan, who insists that even Lincoln could never bring himself to embrace racial equality, concludes his new book with references to Ferguson, white nationalism and the rise of the alt-right. The author of several well-regarded biographies, including one of Lincoln, Kaplan is at his best with his brief portraits of a diverse cast of characters. Some, like Lincoln's political idol, Henry Clay, and the abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips, are widely known. Others, including the black abolitionist H. Ford Douglas and Usher Linder, a pro-slavery Illinois lawyer whom Lincoln befriended, will be unfamiliar even to specialists in Civil War history. These vignettes succeed in highlighting the wide array of responses to the slavery issue in Lincoln's America. However, "Lincoln and the Abolitionists" never quite gels. As the bifurcated title and subtitle suggest, it lacks a clear focus. In addition, there are numerous historical errors, some trivial (the Northwest Ordinance was adopted in 1787, not 1795) but many egregious. Instead of giving African-Americans the right to vote in 1821, as Kaplan states, New York in fact disfranchised nearly all of them. It is astonishing to read that Tennessee, one of the 11 states of the Confederacy, "never left the Union" or that the Compromise of 1850 (rather than the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854) repealed the Missouri Compromise, a milestone on the road to civil war. Along with Lincoln, the book's other key figure is John Quincy Adams. Beginning in 1830, after serving a term as president, Adams was elected several times to the House of Representatives, where he led the fight against the "gag rule," which barred discussion of abolitionist petitions. Kaplan is mostly interested in Adams in order to contrast him, an "antislavery activist," with Lincoln, an "antislavery moralist" - someone who spoke against slavery but failed to take action against it. Adams believed in the citizenship of free blacks; Lincoln did not. Lincoln "put all his hopes" for ending slavery in the American Colonization Society, which advocated encouraging or requiring free blacks and emancipated slaves to emigrate to Africa, while Adams considered colonization impractical and unethical. Adams insisted that in a war the president could invoke his power as commander-in-chief to abolish slavery; Lincoln moved toward emancipation only slowly and reluctantly, and when he did issue the Emancipation Proclamation, he exempted about threequarters of a million slaves in parts of the Confederacy and in the four border slave states that remained in the Union. Lincoln's reluctance to act decisively against slavery, Kaplan argues, reflected both personal qualities - "compromise and gradualism were in his blood" - and a strong devotion to the Constitution, despite its provisions protecting slavery. But the deepest reason for his hesitation was racism: Lincoln believed that America "was and always should be a white man's country." Kaplan is correct to direct attention to Lincoln's strong advocacy of colonization during the 1850s and the first two years of the Civil War, something many admirers play down or ignore. But as a full portrait of Lincoln's views on slavery and race, the account is, to say the least, one-dimensional. Kaplan's treatment of Lincoln's relationship with abolitionists, who demanded an immediate end to slavery, is a case in point. Lincoln was not an abolitionist and never claimed to be one. But it is untenable to write, as Kaplan does, that Lincoln "detested" abolitionists and "wanted nothing to do" with them. Lincoln considered himself part of an antislavery movement that also included abolitionists. He understood that without their effort to change public opinion, his own more moderate antislavery politics, which focused on preventing slavery from expanding, not its abolition, would be impossible. In 1856, Republicans in northern Illinois nominated Owen Lovejoy to run for Congress. The brother of the antislavery editor Elijah P Lovejoy, who had been murdered by a mob in 1837, Owen Lovejoy was himself an outspoken abolitionist. A group of conservative Republicans, including close friends of Lincoln's, proposed to put forward an independent candidate. Lincoln instructed them not to do so, not simply because he believed in party unity, but because of the "great enthusiasm for Lovejoy" that his supporters would "carry into the contest." To use a modern idiom, Lincoln understood that abolitionists were part of the Republican Party's base. And despite sharp criticisms of Lincoln, most supported his election in 1860. As Manisha Sinha notes in her recent history of abolitionism, Wendell Phillips greeted his victory by exulting, "for the first time in our history, the slave has chosen a president." All this is absent from "Lincoln and the Abolitionists." When it comes to the fraught question of Lincoln's views on race, Kaplan again oversimplifies a complex situation. He rightly notes that Lincoln's embrace of colonization reflected pessimism that blacks could ever enjoy equality in the United States. Kaplan quotes Lincoln's disavowal, in his 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas, of black suffrage, jury service and other rights. But he dismisses as unimportant Lincoln's insistence in the same debates that blacks were entitled to the inalienable natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence - rights that Douglas insisted applied only to whites. Lincoln undoubtedly shared many of the prejudices of his era. During his career, however, he actually said very little about race. Unlike many contemporaries, he did not give orations on the glories of the white race. Unlike Clay and other colonizationists, he never berated free blacks as a dangerous, criminallyminded class. Lincoln was the first president to meet with blacks in the White House. The point is not that Lincoln was a modern egalitarian, but that unlike incorrigible racists such as his successor Andrew Johnson, he was capable of growth. As the war progressed, Lincoln's racial outlook evolved. By the end of his life he was advocating suffrage for educated blacks and black soldiers - this at a time when only six Northern states allowed any African-Americans to vote. Not surprisingly, Kaplan ends on a pessimistic note. When he died, Lincoln "knew that his beloved country had entered into a century and more of racial misery." (How Kaplan knows that Lincoln "knew" this remains unexplained.) The effort during postwar Reconstruction to secure civil and political equality for the former slaves, Kaplan insists, was doomed from the start. Had Lincoln lived, it would have made no difference. Racism, the outgrowth "of tribalism, of identity politics, of us against them, in every area of human life," is too deeply ingrained in American society, indeed in human nature. Kaplan, in other words, employs racism as a deus ex machina - something that exists outside of history but that can be invoked as the ultimate explanation for historical events. Yet if racism is constant and immutable, how did millions of Northerners come to embrace emancipation and the laws and constitutional amendments of Reconstruction? A better approach is to see racism as part of history. Racism, like anything else, rises and falls over time. And sometimes people change. Abraham Lincoln wets not an abolitionist and never claimed to be one. ERIC FONER is the author of "The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery," winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history. His most recent book is "Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History. Essays From The Nation."
Kirkus Review
A fresh look at John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, abolitionism, and other related American history.The great 19th-century champion of black equality was not Lincoln, writes Kaplan (Emeritus, English/Queens Coll.; John Quincy Adams: American Visionary, 2014, etc.), who has authored biographies of both of his principal figures. In this insightful, often disturbing dual biography, he makes a convincing case that Adams, working decades before Lincoln, was the real hero. The ex-president returned to Washington as a member of the House of Representatives in 1830. He never liked slavery, but it was not a priority during his presidency. In 1836, enraged by anti-slavery petitions, Southern representatives passed the legendary "gag rule" that forbade their discussion. Galvanized to action, Adams fought, eventually successfully, to overturn it, thereby becoming abolition's leading spokesman until his death. Kaplan emphasizes that, unlike all other great men who disapproved of slavery (from Jefferson to Lincoln), Adams never qualified his opposition with racist rhetoric. A consummate politician, Lincoln could not offend Illinois voters who overwhelmingly considered blacks subhuman and loathed abolitionists. Lincoln publicly agreed, but his private writings give little comfort. He opposed slavery on humanitarian grounds, but, unlike Adams, "Lincoln would not go the next stepfrom antislavery moralism to antislavery activism." As the Civil War raged, Lincoln fended off abolitionists, aware that most Northerners continued to despise them. The Emancipation Proclamation, a feeble step, was, as he feared, widely unpopular, but it was also the beginning of the end of the practice of slavery. This is accepted history, but readers accustomed to the worshipful History Channel view will squirm to learn that Lincoln never believed that blacks could live among whites as equals. Adams believed, and Kaplan drives this home in a fine portrait of a great man far ahead of his time. An eye-opening biography from a trusted source on the topic. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Kaplan (English, Queens Coll.; Graduate Ctr., CUNY; Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer) compares how Presidents John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) and Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) viewed race, slavery, party politics, and the sanctity of the Union. He casts Adams as a true abolitionist and Lincoln as a reluctant one. After long digressions into the histories of the Adams and Lincoln families, and lengthy context on Whig interests both men shared, Kaplan suggests Adams developed a steely resolve in supporting abolition, a resolve Lincoln lacked. He also maintains that Adams could imagine a multicultural society after emancipation while Lincoln balked at such, distrusting abolitionists for their excesses and arguing for the colonization of African Americans as an end to slavery. Kaplan speculates how a more forceful abolitionist stance by Lincoln could have led to more successes in the Civil War, ending slavery earlier, and softening racism. Ultimately, he concludes that Lincoln's failure to be decisive doomed Reconstruction. VERDICT While not all readers will agree with the author's insights, his arguments about Adams's foresight into slavery's violent end will find many takers. Kaplan effectively demonstrates how moral courage must be the true measure of leadership.-Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
