Essential Questions
Lincoln and Douglass initially had extremely opposing political views on emancipation and the abolition of slavery. Douglass emerged as a radical abolitionist in the 1840's who had escaped slavery and knew first hand the experience of bondage. Lincoln emerged as an extension of Henry Clay's legacy of anti-slavery containment policies of the 1840's. As James Oakes states in his biography "The Radical and the Republican", Douglass, who had been a strong supporter of William Lloyd Garrison's "moral persuasion" theories and the absence of political activism to forward the cause of abolition, moved towards a more conservative political position which accepted the Constitution as an instrument of change. Garrison viewed the Constitution as a pro-slavery document which needed to be rejected. When Douglass met Gerrit Smith from the Liberty Party in the late 1840's, he began to shift his approach to viewing the Constitution as an anti-slavery document whose literal text implied the idea of equality and the immoral interpretations of Southerners needed to be challenged through political avenues. Lincoln, on the other hand, who initially supported gradual emancipation with "colonization" and supported the "containment" of slavery in federal territories without interference of the existing institution in the South, moved towards active emancipation with the Confiscation Acts and later the Emancipation Proclamation which would embrace a racially diverse society on a national level based on equality within the framework of the democratic process. Although his personal views were strongly against slavery, his public rhetoric helped maintain the Union through this process of change.
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