US 2.0: Lincoln's Dilemma

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When it comes to the thorniest issues in our lives, all of us face a dilemma. If we can't get what we want, should we settle for what we can get? We've all heard aphorisms like, don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. They're designed to help us see That logically speaking, incremental progress toward a goal is better than no progress. But what happens if you think something is morally wrong but agree to change it only a little? Let's say, for example, you think killing animals is wrong and it's ethical to be a vegetarian. But you've always loved meat, and non-vegetarian food is an important part of your diet Culture and heritage. If you cut back on your meat eating to just a couple days a week, you might reduce your consumption of meat, but are you really taking an ethical stance against the killing of animals? Meat eaters may mock you for waffling on your convictions. Vegetarians won't see you as one of them. Or let's say you were living in an apartheid state. Like South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. You're a policymaker and you recognize a system of racial segregation is unjust. You decide to make life better for some victims. Perhaps you provide better sanitation or install streetlights in a poor neighborhood. Are you being virtuous or complicit? Could reforms that are merely window dressing extend an evil system by making it a little more tolerable. Over the past few weeks in our series Us 2.0, we've been exploring how we come to disagree with each other and psychological insights to reduce conflict. If you missed any of the stories in the series, I would strongly recommend you go back and listen to them. Today, we turn to the past. We revisit a painful moment in American history and explore how a man widely recognized as one of the most important leaders in world history grappled with whether something was better than nothing when it came to the most pressing moral question of his time. Our principles and our politics. This week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Liberty Mutual Insurance. Making smart decisions includes considering how to protect your car and home and how much you're paying to insure Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance to save you money. Because when you've worked hard for something, choosing insurance should be easy. Start your quote at libertymutual.com. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Principal, the perpetual pen tapper, the arbitrary fridge reorganizer, the holiday party planner that starts in May. Principal knows your star employees have their work quirks. Principal also knows how much those employees mean to your business. You need them. They need benefits. Work with Principal so they can help you help your team with a retirement and benefits plan that's right for them. Principal Life Insurance Company, Des Moines, Iowa.

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There was a time in the United States when disagreements became so untenable that they actually led to war. The country may well have splintered were it not for President Abraham Lincoln, who led the country through the Civil War and preserved the Union. Most Americans today think of Abraham Lincoln as a statesman, a visionary, even a saint. In Washington, D.C., where I live, the Lincoln Memorial presents a portrait of the president As a hero. But the journalist Steven Skibes suggests that we often forget the most important thing about Lincoln. He was, first and foremost, a politician. Now, given the reputation politicians have today, that can sound almost like an insult. But in his book, Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America, Steven Skibes suggests we all have much to learn from Lincoln. The way this politician dealt with adversaries, including people who were ostensibly on his own side, is deeply relevant to our own times. I should say this conversation is especially meaningful to me because Steve and I were colleagues for many years. Longtime listeners of Hidden Brain may recall the many conversations Steve and I had exploring social science research on NPR's Morning Edition. Steve and Skip, Welcome to Hidden Brain.

Delighted to be here. Good to talk with you again, Shankar.

I'm wondering if you can paint a picture for me of the young Lincoln, Steve. Uh, tell me where he grew up, where he was born, what his early childhood was like.

This is one of the most inspiring stories about him, or really about any American political leader, because Lincoln was born at a very low station in life. Not the lowest, we should emphasize, uh, but he was from a relatively poor family, or maybe we should say an ordinary family, in an era when most people were poor. In Kentucky. Um, his father was a farmer and 3 times lost his farm to disputes over the land titles, which were very common in Kentucky at that time. So it's the early 1800s, and 3 times this family without a lot of means has to move. And the final time, Thomas Lincoln takes his family, his wife, his son, his daughter, And says, I'm out of here. And they move more than 100 miles across the Ohio River to what was then a frontier area in my home state in southern Indiana. And so this young man had to spend a lot of his childhood clearing woods to make a new farm. He said he was 7 when his father handed him an ax and said, help me clear the trees. And Abraham Lincoln spent a great deal of time with that axe over the next 16 years or so of his life. His was a life of farm labor, of manual labor, and only sporadic formal education. He later estimated that he only had less than a year of formal education, a few weeks or a few months at a time when some itinerant schoolmaster would open a school for a little time in the area. Um, his mother died when Lincoln was less than 10. His father went away for a time and came back with a new wife, a stepmother for the Lincoln children, and also 3 new step-siblings. And so they all crammed into this very modest log cabin in a frontier area where Abraham was growing up.

You say that even though he was relatively unschooled, um, he did have an education of sorts when it came to his interactions with people. He was an observer of people from a very very young age, and he decided he was going to learn a lot from observing people. Tell me about that, Steve.

I have learned since a very young age that Lincoln's obsession with books, with reading, was central to his success. And it does seem clear that he read all the books that he could find in this frontier area. But the books were not that great. What was great was the people. And his stepmother leaves behind this memory of young Abraham Watching when grown-ups would come to their cabin, visitors from other farms, Abraham would sit there quietly listening to everything, listening to everything that was said. And then after the grown-ups went away, he would begin asking his parents questions because he wanted to understand everything that was said. And there are further instances of Lincoln constantly observing people, watching people, studying people, And thinking about their motives, thinking about what drove them, which is exactly the thing that you would need to know later on as a political leader.

As a young man, the future president moved to Illinois. An early encounter with a group of bullies reveals a lot about his methods and view of human nature.

There was a group of men from a nearby area called Clary's Grove. They were known as the Clary's Grove Boys, and they were basically the male members of a clan, 7 interconnected, intermarried families that had migrated out of the Appalachians. And they had a tendency to haze people, to beat up newcomers in the area. And Lincoln was such a guy, and he was very tall. Um, but the leader of this gang, Jack Armstrong was his name, challenged Lincoln to a wrestling match. There are many stories about this wrestling match. None of them is any more credible than any other, but it does appear that they faced each other, that there was a crowd, that people bet on the outcome, that Jack Armstrong was a great wrestler, but that Lincoln was larger. Um, and they had this match that went one of several ways depending on the various accounts, but Lincoln seems to have done well enough. to have earned the respect of these guys. Now, it was the early 1830s. Political parties were forming. One of them was the Democratic Party, the ancestor of the same Democratic Party we have today. The other was a party called the Whig Party, which has since gone away, but they were the opposition to the dominant Democrats. Lincoln was a Whig, or an early version of a Whig, and the bullies were Democrats. But Having earned their respect, he befriended them. They became close. They went around a lot. And when a short time later, Lincoln, still in his early 20s, but an ambitious young man, declared his candidacy for the state legislature, these guys supported him in his early campaigns, even though they were from different political parties.

He ended up in a situation where even when he lost that first election, he won almost all the local votes To go back to the wrestling match for a second, you tell the story in the book about how Lincoln was not just wrestling with his arms and his legs. He was also, in some ways, wrestling with his words. Set the stage for me.

Yeah, I love this. We should put a little asterisk on this in that it's hard to entirely credit any account of this wrestling match. But one of the accounts of the wrestling match seems to have Jack Armstrong saying, we're gonna wrestle no holds barred, which means anything goes. Anything. Gouge out somebody's eye. Anything you wanna do. Bite 'em. Anything. Trip 'em. Anything at all. Um, and Lincoln replies something to the effect of, I don't wanna do all this wooling and pulling. He seems to be saying, I want rules. I wanna wrestle according to a particular form of wrestling that was popular at the time. And this seems to have given him an advantage according to some accounts of the wrestling match, because Jack Armstrong was not disciplined enough to follow the rules and Lincoln was. One of the many accounts of this match is that Armstrong committed a foul and therefore was declared the loser because he committed a foul. But this is very characteristic of Lincoln and how he ran his life.

Yeah. So one of the things that struck me when I read that passage is that in any form of combat, it makes sense to have the battlefield, if you will, your battlefield rather than someone else's battlefield. And so if the other person's going to be uncomfortable with a bunch of rules, set up a battlefield with a lot of rules.

Yes, absolutely. And this is something I think Lincoln was good at. You can be rigorously fair. What is more fair than having an agreed-upon set of rules and still be thinking about your own advantage, your own self-interest, which is a thing that he thought about a lot?

When we come back, the defining struggle in Abraham Lincoln's life and his early encounters with those who disagreed with him. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. There's only one Ozempic. Hello, I'm Ozempic.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. From a very young age, Abraham Lincoln was an observer of people. He wasn't a psychologist, but he had a psychologist's eye for human nature. Very much like a scientist, when he encountered people whose views differed greatly from his own, his first response was not censure, but curiosity. After Lincoln was elected to the Illinois State Legislature, he met a man named Joshua Speed. The journalist Steve Inskeep says this ended up being a transformative relationship.

Lincoln moved to Springfield, Illinois, was broke, was looking for housing, and met a storekeeper named Joshua Speed. And Speed said, why don't you just stay with me? And they ended up living together in a kind of apartment, a room over the store, for the next 4 years. What was ironic about this friendship Is that while they were both from Kentucky, men who had migrated ultimately to Illinois from Kentucky, they had very, very different backgrounds. Because Lincoln had grown up in a poor family that was being kicked off one farm after another. Joshua Speed came from a slaveholding family. He grew up on a farm where his father had grown hemp and other crops. And by the time of the father's death, he owned more than 50 human beings who worked that farm and took care of people in the house and did everything that slaves were forced to do at that time. It seems that Speed had agreed, at least in the abstract, that slavery was wrong, but Lincoln ultimately felt that Speed was not very serious about doing anything about it.

Hmm.

This is really meaningful to me because we understand slavery as an obvious question of right and wrong. But people at the time had an immense variety of views about it. There were people who understood it was absolutely wrong. There were people who sincerely believed it was right and the way the world and the economy should be ordered. And there was a very large group of people in the middle, people a little like Joshua Speed, who would say slavery is wrong in the abstract, slavery is an evil, but we've inherited it. And then they would begin rationalizing in various ways why nothing really should be done about it.

You say that at one point, Lincoln and Speed took a riverboat trip together where they saw something that shocked Lincoln's conscience. What happened, Steve?

Yeah. Well, this is one of Lincoln's extended experiences with slavery. He traveled to Joshua Speed's farm in Kentucky. Where Joshua's father had recently died, but the enslaved laborers were still there, more than 50 of them. And Lincoln, he lived in this luxurious house, a luxury he'd rarely known. Again, this is a guy who doesn't even have his own place. He's like sharing a bed with somebody else, and he's living in this place with feather beds and a cast iron stove and servants, and Black people outside are being made to work. The farm. And then they start back. Lincoln and Joshua Speed are on this steamboat, and they see one of the darkest realities, one of the grimmest realities of slavery, which is that people would be separated from their families, sold off, and forced to go somewhere else. And for several days, on a very slow, low-water trip on this steamboat, Lincoln and Speed shared the deck. With a dozen men, by Lincoln's description, who were chained together and spent their days and nights like that. They had been peeled away from their families, from their wives and children and parents, and they had been chained together and sold because they were surplus goods, basically. Slavery was declining in Kentucky, and so the extra human beings had to be sold off somewhere else in a market economy. And they were being shipped to the Deep South, where the climate was harsher, where the labor was thought to be worse, and where they would probably die even sooner.

Do we know if Lincoln spent any time talking to these enslaved people directly?

Um, Lincoln left 2 letters describing his encounter with these men. He does not quote them exactly, But he seems to have talked with them or to have learned about them in some way, because he was particularly interested in one of them, a man who was a fiddler. He had a fiddle. He was playing a fiddle and leading the other men in song, which is a striking image to begin with because he's got a fetter on his wrist. He's got a chain on him, but he's still playing the fiddle. And Lincoln seems to have learned his story, that he had been sold off because of, quote, an overfondness for his wife. We have to interpret this a little bit, this remark. It would seem that this man was enslaved in Kentucky and offended his owner, his master, in some way. having to do with his wife. Maybe he was trying to spend time with his wife instead of laboring, for example. Maybe the master was more interested in this man's wife. We should put an asterisk on the word wife because it's, you know, questionable whether enslaved people were even allowed to legally marry. But in any case, he had a family. He offended his master in some way and was sold away from his entire family. and sent to hard labor that he had every reason to think was going to kill him. And that's incredibly cruel. And either by talking with him or by listening to him, Lincoln learned this man's story and couldn't get it out of his mind, wrote a long letter about it later to a woman he had met, a relative of his best friend Joshua Speed, who was living on that farm among enslaved people in Kentucky. Lincoln never directly says a word against slavery in the way of saying slavery is evil, but he almost journalistically describes the evils of the system that she is benefiting from. And he sends her this letter, and it's still on his mind 14 years later when he writes another letter referring to this incident as something that made him Miserable. So it does seem to have shocked his conscience and to have stayed with him even more than other incidents that he describes in more general terms of having encountered enslaved people.

So at this point, Lincoln is close friends with Joshua Speed. He has lived with Joshua Speed, shared Joshua Speed's bed. He's also spent time at the Speed plantation. and in some ways enjoyed the benefits of the luxury of the plantation. But he also feels like he has serious disagreements with Joshua Speed on the question of slavery. And then they have this boat ride together where Lincoln sees firsthand the evils of slavery. Does he renounce his friendship with Joshua Speed at this point?

Lincoln did not do what many people would have us do today with someone we encounter who holds an obviously wrong belief. He did not ostracize Speed. He did not break off his friendship with Speed. He didn't stop talking to Speed. He kept up that relationship while making it clear that they differed on this very important issue on slavery. They remained close friends. In 1855, Lincoln wrote a letter in which he talked about their disagreement on slavery. And again, Speed had agreed in general that slavery was bad, but Lincoln thought that he was not politically serious in his positions about doing anything about it. But Lincoln then goes on to say, but if for this we must differ, differ we must. And he signs the letter, your friend forever. I find this really powerful. And, uh, controversial in a way, in a modern sense, because why is he not casting aside this person who has this terrible background, uh, and seems not to have fully corrected his beliefs? Why is he not casting this guy aside? But it seems to me that Lincoln, as a human being generally, and also as an ambitious politician, understood that speed had power. in this republic, that Speed had influence, that he was someone to keep close, that Lincoln had personal affection for and saw personal value in, and maybe also saw political value in. And ultimately, he did get political value out of this guy in his antislavery cause, even though they didn't have exactly the same view of slavery.

So when Lincoln doesn't cast Speed aside, as you say, at one level, at a moral level, it feels repugnant that he basically stays friends with this person. At another level, he's a pragmatist and he's basically saying, this person might come in useful to me in the future. We might do business together. We might be able to help each other in the future. You say that one of the things that characterized Lincoln from the start was his ability to know both what he cared about but also what he didn't care about and to be able to prioritize them and say, I'm willing to give ground on a lot of different issues without necessarily changing my own beliefs. Can you talk about this idea, Steve?

Yeah, I mean, that's totally true. Lincoln was a lawyer, although he was self-educated. You could become a lawyer without going to law school, and he passed an examination by a judge, became a lawyer. The record of things that Lincoln actually did in court is not that reliable, but it is at least said that Lincoln in a trial would concede a lot of points that he considered to be irrelevant while holding onto the one point that he knew would be decisive in the case. Creating the impression that he was almost a very weak or incompetent lawyer until he won the case. Now, again, it's hard to reconstruct his actual trial record, but this seems to be the way that he approached life. He would think about what was important and let go of the other things. I'm thinking of another thing, Shankar, that is reflected in this discussion of Joshua Speed.

Mm-hmm.

Lincoln had a particular idea of humanity. of human beings, that we were all shaped by our circumstances. Uh, he understood the power of the way that people had been brought up, the circumstances that they had, and also their instinctive need to follow their own self-interests. Um, and that made him a little less judgmental of individual human beings, even when he knew they were wrong about a moral issue. He has a speech in which he's talking to a free state audience. So this is at least notionally an anti-slavery audience in Illinois. And he says, if the slave owners of the South were situated as we are, they would think and act as we do. And if we in the North were situated as the slave owners are, We would think and act as they do. This is a really powerful confession because he is saying at a really basic level, we're not morally superior to those guys, even though I believe we are taking the morally right position. He is saying we need to be humble. He is saying we need to recognize that they grew up in a particular system, they inherited a particular system, and they're following their interests, which are wrong and which must be ended somehow, someday. But there is no reason to assume that we are superior to them or to take a superior attitude about them as human beings. That is really, really different than a lot of us have been educated to think about politics, particularly when it comes to issues around morality or Issues around race.

Hmm. Back in the day, Steve, when you and I were exploring social science research on Morning Edition, we often talked about an idea called the fundamental attribution error, which is an idea in psychology, which is that when we see people whose behavior differs from us, we often assume that this must be something intrinsic to the person. Someone cuts you off in traffic and you say, this person is not just a terrible driver, but probably a terrible human being.

Yep. I probably said that the other day, but go on.

Go on. But what we miss, of course, is that the other person who's speeding or cutting us off might be late for something, might be heading to a hospital. We don't understand the context and the situation that's driving their behavior. As I read your book on Lincoln, it occurred to me that in a different life, Lincoln might well have been a social psychologist because he truly understood That the context and the environment makes a huge difference in the way we behave, the way we think.

Yeah, I think that that's a great insight and a great connection. We should be careful here because someone listening might think we're trying to justify or rationalize a belief in slavery. Slavery is wrong, to state the obvious. But what Lincoln understood was that people came to their wrong beliefs honestly. Or thought they were being honest about them. And this is and was a powerful insight when you're thinking about how to try to persuade people to do something better than that which they've been doing.

So in the 1840s, Lincoln gets elected to Congress and he proposes a law that would end slavery, but end slavery very gradually. And it has to do with Children born to Black parents starting in the year 1850. What does he propose?

Lincoln involved himself for the first time in a substantive way in the anti-slavery debate at a moment when it was becoming the central issue facing the country. And when Congress met in what's called a lame duck session, end of 1848, beginning of 1849, Lincoln, during his single term in Congress, was there. Several people proposed to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, the nation's capital, where slavery was practiced, where slavery was legal. And, uh, anti-slavery forces felt that while the Constitution, as it was then understood, protected slavery in a lot of places, made it impossible to ban slavery in a lot of places, that the federal government had authority over the District of Columbia. And here the federal government had the power to act, and they wanted to act. to ban slavery there. Pro-slavery forces in Congress didn't want any part of this, to state the obvious. They slapped down a couple of bills in various ways that were raised in the House of Representatives. But then Lincoln came up with one, and he thought, if I propose a bill that abolishes slavery in a very, very gradual way, I may be able to gain the support of some more conservative prominent citizens of Washington, D.C. He even went with this proposal to the mayor of Washington, D.C., who had come from a slaveholding family, but had personally freed his own enslaved labor. So this is a guy who might be at least a little bit sympathetic to the idea. And Lincoln's notion was, if we just pass this, however modest, However pathetically small this step is, it may cause a very rapid change in the composition of the District of Columbia. People may just decide they're going to free their laborers because they see the writing on the wall.

And what was the proposal exactly, Steve?

The actual text of the proposal did not free anyone who would then be enslaved in the District of Columbia in 1849. But it said that From 1850 onward, any children born to enslaved people would then be free, um, and they would grow up in freedom. This was what was called gradual abolition. We can look at it and see the obvious problems with it. Someone born in 1849 into slavery would remain in slavery, and if they lived into their 50s, it'd get to be 1900. And they would still be enslaved under this theory. But I think that Lincoln understood that if you get started with the process, it probably is going to go a lot faster, which turned out to be characteristic of later years when he enacted antislavery proposals that became real.

So the proposal ended up going nowhere, but I think it's sort of instructive and revealing because I think Lincoln's philosophy was, If I'm trying to walk 100 steps, it's worth walking 10, even if I can't walk the other 90.

Yes, absolutely. And he would insist, you know, I still believe in the 100 steps. I'm not compromising my basic moral beliefs in the 100 steps by taking the 10 that I can get away with now. I see in that fundamental pragmatism, a recognition of reality that you could hold on to your highest moral beliefs and then get what you can now. Understanding that democracy is a really long argument. It never ends. And so you win as much as you can now. Then you have another election and see how much you can win next time.

In 1860, Lincoln was elected president. The Civil War broke out shortly afterwards. It pitted slave-owning states in the American South against free states in the North. But this immediately produced a fresh dilemma for the new president. Was there a way to keep some slaveholding states, like his own native Kentucky, on his side? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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PNC Bank National Association member FDIC. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In his book, Differ We Must, the NPR journalist Steve Inskeep explores the life The book explores a number of disagreements Lincoln had with various interlocutors over the course of his life. Shortly after Lincoln assumed the presidency, the Civil War broke out. The new president had to figure out what to do with states like his own native Kentucky. The state was amenable to staying with Lincoln and on the Union side of the war. But it was also a slaveholding state. And some of the president's advisers urged him to cast it aside.

Lincoln was trying to build a majority always. As a politician, as a political leader, that's what you want. You want a majority to win an election. When the South, or when some Southern states began to try to leave the Union, leading to the Civil War, it became an election of another kind. Lincoln needed to keep a majority of the country behind the federal government, no matter what else happened. And that meant that he wanted to keep the loyalty of some slave states where slavery was practiced, but the state had remained up to then loyal to the Union. And you see in the first year or more of the war, multiple occasions where Lincoln stops subordinates from taking actions against slavery, the obvious cause of the war, Because he doesn't want to lose the support of slave owners who are still loyal to the, to the Union. Um, and that is the implicit and sometimes explicit reason behind a lot of things that he did in the first year of the war.

So in 1863, he issues a proclamation that is taught in history classes all over the United States and in many other parts of the world as well. For our overseas listeners, what happened in 1863, Steve?

In 1863, January 1st, 1863, Lincoln issued the final draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, which was a statement that all those people enslaved by rebels in rebel-held areas were thenceforth and forever free. This declared freedom for several million people at the stroke of a pen. Now, anybody who gets into the details of this finds fascinating things about it. It did not free every enslaved person in the United States. It applied only to rebel-held areas because Lincoln was not ready to test the loyalty of those slave-owning areas that had remained loyal to the Union. Not ready yet. It technically did not free a single enslaved person on January 1st, 1863, because it only applied to places where federal troops did not control But, and this is a fair criticism, it's kind of crazy when you look in the exact wording. There are specific areas of the state of Tennessee that are in the Emancipation Proclamation and specific areas that are out of the Emancipation Proclamation because the state was partly but not entirely under federal control. It's kind of wild.

Yeah.

However, it was pretty obvious where this was going, that federal troops were going to advance, that millions of people would be free. And Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from slavery himself to become a great writer and orator against slavery, understood what this proclamation meant, that it was a death knell for slavery as a whole, because he knew this partial emancipation would become a total emancipation, that once the enslaved people had been freed in the Deep South, that they would also be free in the more loyal parts of the Union in the Upper South.

Now, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and many of us today see it as a moral proclamation, which of course it was. But it also had a canny political aspect to it, which had to do with the service of Black men in the army and in prosecuting the Civil War. What happened, Steve?

Yeah. Lincoln considered the freeing of a man from Southern slavery as a double advantage, meaning— this is just math— you're taking away one laborer from the enemy, and you are likely adding this man as a soldier to the Union Army. It was a game of numbers. It was a game of building your majority, an election of another kind. The Union was on the way to winning the war fundamentally because they had greater resources. They had more money and they had a bigger army. They had more people. And Lincoln was adding to that majority by adding close to a couple hundred thousand Black soldiers ultimately to the Union Army, adding to the manpower advantage even as he was subtracting from the manpower of the other side.

So it's hard in some ways to say, was this purely a moral act or was this purely a political act? At some level, it was both.

Oh, it was absolutely both a political and moral act. Lincoln was acting on his moral belief, as he put it, that all men should be free. But he framed it at the time as a practical measure that responded to necessity. He even defended it to racist white voters by saying, maybe you don't like Black people, maybe you don't believe in equality, whatever, but this equality is good for you because it's producing soldiers for the Union and undermining the enemy cause. He absolutely framed it in those terms, but he clearly was matching that practical necessity with his moral beliefs.

We talked a second ago about Frederick Douglass, widely regarded today as one of the most famous abolitionists in the 19th century, a real moral force, a great writer. When Douglass was writing about Lincoln, they were ostensibly on the same side. They were both against slavery. They both wanted slavery to be done away with. But you say that for many years, Douglass was extremely critical of Lincoln. He criticized Lincoln for vacillating, for being slow, for being tardy, for moving too slowly on what was a profoundly important and moral question. Paint me a picture of Douglass's criticisms of Lincoln.

Douglass is, um, the largest character in this book other than Lincoln himself, and similar to Lincoln in that he was both idealistic and pragmatic. Douglass's beliefs, to state the obvious, were absolutely against slavery, which had imprisoned him in his early years until he escaped it. He began, however, to differ with other abolitionists in how to achieve this. There was a strain of abolitionism, and Douglass's early patrons were among them, who believed that the Constitution allowed slavery, and this so polluted the Constitution and the American political system that the proper thing to do was to ostracize it, to have nothing to do with it, to refuse even to vote, much less to hold political office, simply to stand off to the side and denounce the immorality of what was going on. Douglass came to another belief, as did other abolitionists over time, that we had a political system and that it could be used to redress grievances, and that it was worth using that political system to, um, strike blows against slavery where possible. And as the Civil War began, Douglass was both a supporter of Lincoln and possibly the most eloquent and powerful critic of Lincoln.

Hmm.

He wanted Lincoln to turn the war for the Union into an explicit war for the destruction of slavery. He then was critical of Lincoln again because Black soldiers were enlisted in the army on less than equal terms. They weren't even getting equal pay. And he was very frank about his criticism, but he was a kind of member of the loyal opposition, if you will. He understood the broad strategic value of Lincoln and his approach But also marked down for the world what Lincoln should have done according to Frederick Douglass.

You mentioned an occasion where Frederick Douglass visited Abraham Lincoln in the White House. And at this point, Lincoln is mostly familiar with Douglass from his writings, which have often been very critical of Lincoln. Now, I can easily see a president saying, I only want to talk with people who say nice things about me. There are many leaders in the world today who will only talk to people who say nice things about them. But Lincoln invited Douglass into the White House, and they had a very productive conversation. What happened, Steve?

Yeah, it's really amazing that Douglass got in at all, because Lincoln could have just turned him aside. But I think Lincoln understood the strategic value of this guy, who had become a recruiter of Black soldiers for the Union, and was now mad because the Black soldiers were not getting equal treatment. And within a couple of minutes, by Douglass's account, Lincoln sent someone out into this crowded anteroom of dozens of people who wanted to see the president and said, send in Mr. Douglass. And it's clear from Douglass's account of the meeting, at least, that Lincoln was aware of Douglass's criticism, referred to Douglass's criticism, and answered Douglass's criticism. He said, well, I think actually you may be right about some things. It can be said that I was slow to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, for example. But I don't agree with your criticism that I'm vacillating, that I'm a waffler, that I go back and forth. I don't think that charge can be sustained. Once I take a position, I stick with it. And Douglass found that powerful and took it as an affirmation that on slavery, Lincoln was only gonna move one way.

Hmm.

He believed in the 100 steps. Maybe he could only take 10 steps today, maybe he's only going to take 3 more steps tomorrow, but he was only going to keep moving in one direction.

I mean, it's so striking, Steve, that when we think about the disagreements we have with others, we often focus on the issues. We focus on, you know, you believe X and I believe Y, and that's why we're in conflict with one another. But at some level, these conflicts are also interpersonal conflicts. They're also conflicts about, I don't like you, or, I believe that you don't like me. And in some ways, opening a conversation, being in conversation with someone, even when you're disagreeing with them, takes some of the rancor out of the disagreement. You might still disagree on the issues, but it becomes easier now to say, are there some issues on which we can march together?

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a great insight. And Douglass's account of this meeting with Lincoln offers some support for that. Douglass, in his— he left several accounts of the meeting, one of which was a letter right afterwards. So it's fairly credible. Douglass reports not only the substance of what Lincoln explains, but also Lincoln's demeanor, that he has a, quote, transparent countenance, that he just seems real and genuine. And, uh, doesn't seem uncomfortable with talking with a Black man, which Douglass takes note of in his letter. Lincoln shows by his demeanor as much as his words that he respects Douglass as a human being. And Douglass appreciates that. And Douglass comes away thinking in years afterward, I think Lincoln was kind to me in part because he could relate to me. We both had come up in, uh, in very poor circumstances.

Hmm.

I think this is generous on Douglass's part because Lincoln grew up a free man, whatever his poverty and other difficulty, which was very real. And Douglass grew up enslaved, which is clearly worse. But Douglass was willing to say, we both grew up in a hard way, and we related to each other on that basic human level. And that, he seems to say, made it possible for us to collaborate And deal with each other honestly, even when we disagreed.

I'm wondering, Steve, when you think about the role that Lincoln played and the very nuanced portrait that you're painting of someone, in some ways, who accomplished a great deal, but from our perspective, perhaps didn't do it quickly enough or soon enough or in the way we might have chosen to do it, what lessons do you think Lincoln offers us today?

Lincoln, In dealing with the other person, put himself in their shoes, understood where they were coming from or tried to anyway. He assumed that other people acted fundamentally out of self-interest, and he tried to appeal to their interests as human beings and tried to explain why, for example, opposing slavery was in their interest, or that slavery, the spread of slavery before the Civil War, was against the interest of the ordinary white voter. He thought about the other person. He didn't necessarily judge the other person. And this is, I think, a really powerful, powerful insight. Lincoln, I believe, is more radical than he is sometimes today given credit for. He did not blame slavery on the individual slaveholder, who he felt was just a human being acting incorrectly, but acting in his interests as he saw them. He blamed the system. He attacked slavery as a system. This is a word that some of us are now afraid of. We were afraid of talking about systemic problems, systemic racism. Lincoln was all about criticizing a system that had grown up over time and that needed someday, somehow to end. This was Lincoln's insight. He was not there to proclaim his moral superiority to anybody. He was there to try to reason through and understand what was wrong in society and address it.

It's also striking to me, Steve, that Lincoln doesn't seem to have been in the business of scoring moral victories. He was in the business of scoring political victories.

Yes.

But in so doing, he actually did accomplish a tremendous moral victory.

Yes. He tried to align people's interests with his idea of moral sense, his idea of what was, what was right. Late in his life, he said in a letter, uh, slavery is wrong. I've always believed this. I can't recall a time when I did not so think and did not so believe. Um, this did not make him unusual in the 19th century. Millions of people understood that slavery was wrong. Even people who practiced slavery would sometimes say slavery is wrong, but we've inherited it and here it is. The The power of Lincoln was not in being so morally right that he understood that slavery was wrong. We can't even find in his life some revelation, some moment of revelation when he understood the wrongness of it. He seems always to have understood that, and that just made him normal. The power of Lincoln was figuring out something to do about it, taking part in a great movement that ultimately did address slavery and Albeit through a war, ended it.

Steve Inskeep is the host of NPR's Morning Edition. He's the author of Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America. Steve, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden I'm glad to have this conversation.

Thank you.

Today's conversation is the final episode in our series, Us 2.0. You can find any of the episodes you missed in this podcast feed or at hiddenbrain.org. If these episodes have given you food for thought, we'd love for you to share them with other people. If you've used them as a way to engage with someone whose views are different from your own, we'd love to hear how that conversation went. You can reach us at ideas@hiddenbrain.org. That email address again is ideas@hiddenbrain.org. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. We end today's show with a story from our sister podcast, My Unsung Hero. It's brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. Veesh Bari has mild cerebral palsy. Because of the disease, she occasionally trips and falls. One day in 2017, she was in Washington, D.C. for an important meeting. Little did she know she was about to meet her unsung heroes, Kevin and Mary. That morning in June, it was bright and beautiful. I felt very confident in what I was wearing. I was walking along L Street toward my meeting, and without warning, I fell. I fell badly. I fell on my face. My glasses cut into my eyelid. My cheeks were torn up. I was bleeding. All I wanted to do was jump up and grab my glasses and avoid any further embarrassment. I heard a voice from the man I had noticed earlier standing in a garage. I thought he was a garage attendant. He ran over to me and picked me off the sidewalk, and he walked me— rushed me, actually— into a building and down an office hallway. And I heard him yelling, Mary, Mary, come! It's an emergency! And he Ratched me into a bathroom, and Mary appeared. And Mary was the building concierge. Mary took over, and Kevin ran for a first aid kit. And Mary just automatically, even though I had left a trail of blood, she took over washing me, washing my face, washing my hair, trying to get the blood off my clothes, soothing me. I was babbling. I was so embarrassed. But more than that, I was deeply demoralized that this had happened to me yet again, and at what an awful moment. I needed to be somewhere very important, and yet here I was, a mess. What would have happened had they not picked me off the sidewalk? And here she was, trying to Bandaged me to make me look somewhat presentable. Between the two of them, Kevin and Mary, they put me together and encouraged me that it was going to be all right. Vij Berry of Clinton, New York. In the end, Vij made it to her meeting. thanks to the kindness of Mary and Kevin. Today's My Unsung Hero story was brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. You can find more of these stories on the My Unsung Hero podcast or at myunsunghero.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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