I’m still in the middle of the recent and excellent biography by Yale historian Davis Blight and the political infighting among abolitionists from that period reminds me so much of our own in recent times resisting this presidency.
The moderate abolitionists were asking Douglass and others to wait until public opinion shifted to their side. As Douglass points out in his response, given at an 1857 speech in upstate New York, there is no struggle without progress.
If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
He continues with the following lines that remind me of the modern media, GOP, and too many Democrats failing to resist this president and allowing this administration to be normalized. Douglass warns us against that too.
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
America cannot endure this presidency much longer. Our leadership must fight it head on rather than patiently hope it self destructs.
I remember when Obama was President, you positively cited Lincoln as pragmatic toward ending slavery when some were impatient with Obama for not doing everything we wanted on health care.
Lincoln was at his core an abolitionist though, albeit one who was able to mask his intentions to gain the position of power where he ultimately made a difference. His pragmatism still ended slavery! It did not result in some compromise where slavery still existed in some form. I do not see another path for him, nor did I see one for Obama at that time.
Douglass could be quite critical of Lincoln. We will always need the radicals to keep the pragmatists honest.
Another good quote I just stumbled upon that seems to be very prescient in rebuking the Trumpist definition of patriotism:
I highly recommend this book.
My read of Lincoln is that he was anti-slavery, but not abolitionist, the latter term by definition meaning absolute and immediate. I believe him when he says his goal as of the 1860 campaign was to restrict the practice to where it already existed.
You do not read his 1860 or 1858 candidacies wrong. The written record of his personal writing shows him opposing slavery “down to his bones” in letters as soon as he encounters an auction block in Missouri during one of his early travels in the 1830’s. A big reason he opposed the Mexican war was to oppose creating additional slave states.
In private, he endorsed total abolition and racial equality. In public, he endorsed opposing expansion and white supremacy, since those were the only ways to win an election in 1860.
I say both of these things since I think we have an obligation to defend Lincoln from presentist interpretations on the left that make him out to be a racist as well as the neo-confederate interpretation that couches his opposition to slavery as a mere pretense for imposing federal power on the states. He was neither of these things. Sometimes lying is prudent statecraft, and honest Abe was a master at it.
I also am arguing that we need radicals pushing for absolutes in order to make the change we seek mainstream. Gay marriage is a great example of the persistence of this strategy. Obama was in favor of it as early as 1998, but knew he’d lose in 2008 favoring it. Another is pushing for single payer rather than prematurely settling for a public option. The latter may indeed be where we end up, but we won’t get there without advocating the former.