Book Review - Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race

“Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race” is a book that written by George M. Fredrickson’s Du Bois. Fredrickson addresses Lincoln's thoughts about issues ranging from white supremacy to colonization and black military service. In his book, he says that Lincoln saw slavery equal to a cancer eating the nation’s life. However, at first Lincoln defended discriminatory racial laws. In the 1850s, his opponent Stephen A. Douglas regularly attacked him with this contradiction. Facing Douglas before a large audience at Charleston, Illinois, in 1858, Lincoln strongly swore his promise of loyalty to white supremacy. Yet in that speech, after paying his due to white racism, Lincoln suddenly changed his mind and repeated his strong belief that black people should had certain basic natural rights that could not be denied.

George M. Fredrickson was the Edgar E. Robinson Professor of U.S. History at Stanford University from 1984 until his retirement in 2002. He was a pioneer in the fields of comparative history and the history of racism and white supremacy. His books include “White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History” (1981), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize He wrote seven, and edited four other books of history.

Fredrickson describes Lincoln as a political moderate, modeling himself as his early Whig model Henry Clay. Fredrickson repeatedly quotes Lincoln himself to emphasize this truth. But the real record is more doubtful than this judgment. Lincoln actually broke with Clay in 1848 and then became a supporter of Zachary Taylor for the Whig nomination, rather than support Clay, the Whig presidential candidate. In the sectional rift demonstrated during the Mexican War, Lincoln permanently moved away from Clay’s compromise. In the meantime, his local vigorous opponent Stephen A. Douglas came to work closely with Clay in producing the Compromise of 1850. While the compromise was being debated, Clay called for public meetings to be held around the nation to generate support for his own and Douglas’s product. Lincoln did not participate in the meeting. Similar to other public statements made by Lincoln, his habitual adulation of Clay was done to attract the support of true fence sitters who never ceased to admire the Great Compromiser’s efforts to maintain sectional peace.

In the book, Fredrickson mentions that all modern historians who have written about Lincoln know the negative points of him: first of all, Lincoln’s supposed willingness on the eve of war to agree to a constitutional amendment promising to protect slavery permanently in the states where it already existed. Secondly, Lincoln’s constitutional conservatism used to keep the Northern war effort bound tightly to saving the Union as opposed to destroying slavery. Also, Lincoln’s