Originally published on January 17, 2022 (Episode 242)
Introduction
In a eulogy to Abraham Lincoln delivered on June 1, 1865, Frederick Douglass posed the question “what was Lincoln to the colored people or they to him?” His answer was that Lincoln was “emphatically the black man’s President, the first to show any respect for the rights of a black man, or to acknowledge that he had any rights the white man ought to respect.”
Yet in his speech dedicating the Emancipation Memorial, in the center of what would become Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill, Douglass more famously proclaimed Lincoln to be
…preëminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country. In all his education and feeling he was an American of the Americans. He came into the Presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery. His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race. To protect, defend, and perpetuate slavery in the states where it existed Abraham Lincoln was not less ready than any other President to draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all the supposed guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states. He was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the Government. The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration.
Which Douglass argument is closer to a correct assessment of Lincoln? And how to deal with more recent arguments that Lincoln was an out and out white supremacist?
There are few better ways to discuss this issue than by discussing Michael Burlingame’s new book The Black Man’s President: Abraham Lincoln, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Equality. And there are few better people to discuss this issue with, since Burlingame is perhaps the foremost living authority on the sixteenth president.
About the Guest
Michael Burlingame is the Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield. He is the author of numerous books on Lincoln, including the monumental two-volume Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
For Further Investigation
Michael Burlingame, The Black Man’s President: Abraham Lincoln, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Equality (Pegasus Books, 2021)
—Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. (Hopkins Press, 2013)
—Abraham Lincoln: A Life, edited and abridged by Jonathan W. White (Hopkins Press, 2025)
Brian R. Dirck, Abraham Lincoln and White America (University Press of Kansas, 2015)
Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (W. W. Norton, 2010)
Frederick Douglass, “An Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln”, April 14, 1876—one of the great American speeches, Douglass operating at the height of his rhetorical and intellectual power; a eulogy, an argument in political philosophy, a call to action, and an attempt to claim history.
💬 Listen & Discuss
Lincoln has been described both as the “Black man’s president” and as the embodiment of a racially limited 19th-century worldview. Where do you place him? Share your reflections in the comments—and send this episode to a friend who loves history’s most complicated debates.
