Big Enough To Be Inconsistent

Review by Alexander Soltero

For myself, Jefferson is my Lincoln, therefore I know what it is like to focus on one person in history and really analyze them to the point of exhaustion. In fact what Fredrickson seems to write about is something that I also see in Jefferson, the ambiguous nature that seemed to overshadow all of his greatest achievements. But anyway this review is on a book about Lincoln and not one on Jefferson. In his Big Enough to Be Inconsistent, Civil War writer George Frederickson seems to defend an idea that Lincoln's views on slavery and race that seeks a "middle ground" between the obsessed who see the president as a pro-civil liberties advocate and those who hate Lincoln that see him as a hypocritical racist. Frederickson argues that Lincoln's views on both the institution of slavery and racial inequality changed over time, and that their fluidity suggests a position that's much more complex and ambiguous than either of the two groups allow. Like most of us, Lincoln's position on race wasn't entirely consistent. Also, Lincoln's ambivalence is complicated by the fact that he was a politician, and sometimes said things for public consumption that were more expedient than genuinely believed. Again a trait he shared with Thomas Jefferson whom is not necessarily mentioned in this novel but that I feel deserves his own place within this topic. This holds true if in fact we evaluate the topic more so than just the book as a text. Because in fact what is a review if not simply our own opinion blended with some interesting portions of the novel. One thing is certain. Lincoln was never ambivalent in his moral opposition to slavery. But the racist assumptions he absorbed from his virulently black hating home state of Illinois clustered to form views in the pre-war Lincoln that Frederickson doesn't hesitate to characterize as white supremacist, albeit a "relatively passive or reactive" sort (p. 84). This of course is something that I found most interesting simply because like the rest of us I grew up believing that Lincoln was the farthest thing from racist and let alone a white supremacist. Therefore yes, I was upset when I read that statement and had it not been for the fact that it was assigned reading I may have discontinued the novel in its totality. However I kept reading and began to learn other things such as the fact that the war experience began to change Lincoln's views. Gradually recognizing the value of using enslaved blacks against the Confederacy, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation primarily as a war effort. Yet even though he issued it as a war effort I still recognized that he knew the momentous effect his Emancipation would have on the nation as a whole and therefore am quick to disagree with Fredrickson and state that even though the Emancipation was a political document, it was one that Lincoln felt at his own heart. Sadly as I read on I learned that even after the Emancipation, Lincoln was reluctant to use blacks as soldiers, believing that they were fit only as laborers. But by August 1863, after witnessing the bravery and skill of "colored troops," Lincoln had changed his mind. This change also seems to have reconciled Lincoln to the possibility that free blacks had a place in American society, because he also dropped his insistence on colonization But Lincoln didn't reverse the conviction, born of his Constitutional conservatism, that civil liberties for blacks had to be determined by the states, not the federal government. Right up to the end of his life, then, the tension between his moral convictions and his political principles endured. Frederickson makes his case for a "middle ground" between Lincoln-veneration and Lincoln-hatred. It would've been good had Frederickson reflected more on the curious tension between Lincoln's fidelity to the Constitution and his moral aversion to slavery. Is it appropriate, for example, that constitutionalism trumps immediate response to glaring moral wrongs? This in fact is something that we can observe in just about any politician but in fact it is in those that have most affected our lives that we really only care about. So even though Fredrickson does expose a side of Lincoln that perhaps not many of us was aware, he also defends the fact that the ultimate reality of it all was that Lincoln did in fact accomplish an enormous amount in the realm of slavery and it’s abolishment. Overall I am glad that I received the chance to read this novel and would recommend any serious historian to read it.