What Did Frederick Douglass Really Think of Abraham Lincoln?
November 26, 2025
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The relationship between Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln stands as one of the most fascinating and complex partnerships in American history. For decades, historians have studied their interactions, finding in them lessons about leadership, patience, and the difficult art of political change. But recent discoveries of previously unknown letters and documents reveal a far more nuanced story than we knew before, one that challenges our understanding of both men and the tumultuous era in which they lived.
From Admiration to Harsh Criticism
Douglass first took notice of Lincoln in 1858, when the Illinois lawyer was debating Stephen Douglas for a U.S. Senate seat. The famous “House Divided” speech impressed Douglass deeply, and he quoted it favorably in his newspaper. Here was a white politician willing to declare that the nation could not remain half slave and half free. For an escaped slave who had built his life around the abolition cause, Lincoln’s bold rhetoric seemed promising.
That promise quickly soured. When Lincoln became president in 1861, Douglass discovered that the politician’s constitutional interpretation differed significantly from his own. Douglass believed that a proper reading of the Constitution would lead to anti-slavery outcomes. Lincoln viewed the Constitution as a compromise document, and he believed the president lacked authority to abolish slavery where it already existed. Even more troubling to Douglass, Lincoln pledged to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.
The condemnation that followed was scathing. Douglass called Lincoln “the South’s greatest slave hound” and “abolitionism’s worst enemy.” For the first year and a half of the Civil War, Douglass remained one of Lincoln’s harshest critics, frustrated by the president’s refusal to make emancipation an immediate war goal.
Understanding Lincoln’s Political Strategy
What changed Douglass’s mind was not rhetoric but relationship. Over the course of the war, the two men met three times, and these encounters gave Douglass a window into the political realities Lincoln faced. The president had to hold together a fragile coalition that included border states where slavery remained legal. Moving too quickly on emancipation risked losing Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware to the Confederacy, which would have made Union victory nearly impossible. Many Northern soldiers fought to preserve the Union, not to free slaves, and might have deserted if Lincoln had turned the war into an abolition crusade from the start.
Douglass came to understand that Lincoln’s heart was fully committed to black freedom, even if his hands were tied by political necessity. The Emancipation Proclamation, when it finally came in 1863, demonstrated this commitment. Douglass compared the Proclamation to the Declaration of Independence, noting that both documents were criticized for not immediately accomplishing their stated goals. Just as the Declaration did not free the colonies on July 4, 1776, the Proclamation did not free all enslaved people the day Lincoln signed it. Both required war and governmental power to make their promises real.
The British Letters: New Historical Discoveries
Recent discoveries have added remarkable depth to this story. Historians working with digital databases and London newspaper archives have uncovered letters Douglass sent to British abolitionists that had not been seen in over 150 years. These letters reveal that Douglass was far more candid with his British audience than with American readers. He shared strategic thinking and private opinions that he carefully avoided expressing at home.
The most stunning revelation concerns Andrew Johnson. In letters written just days after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, Douglass expressed hope that Johnson would actually be a more effective president for black Americans than Lincoln had been. This seems almost incomprehensible given what we now know about Johnson’s presidency and his active obstruction of Reconstruction.
Johnson, as military governor of Tennessee, had issued a proclamation ending slavery in that state. In October 1864, speaking to a black audience in Nashville, Johnson declared, “I will indeed be your Moses.” He spoke constantly about making “treason odious” and punishing the planter class. To Douglass, Johnson seemed to possess something Lincoln lacked: a personal hatred of Southern aristocrats that might translate into harsher treatment of former Confederates and better protection for freed slaves.
The Andrew Johnson Disappointment
In his letter to British abolitionist Julia Griffith Crofts, Douglass wrote that Lincoln’s “wonderful moderation,” “remarkable caution,” and “extreme amiability” had served the country well during the war. But those same qualities, Douglass believed, would make Lincoln too soft in dealing with the defeated South. Johnson, who had lived his entire life in a slave state, understood the slave power in ways Lincoln never could.
Within months, those hopes lay in ruins. Johnson moved quickly to pardon thousands of ex-Confederates, rushed former slave states back into the Union with only white men voting, and proved himself far more sympathetic to Southern whites than to freed blacks. After a disastrous meeting with Johnson in February 1866, Douglass understood his mistake. He declared publicly that anyone claiming Johnson was following in Lincoln’s footsteps “casts foul dishonor on the name of Abraham Lincoln.”
Douglass’s Final Judgment: “Swift, Zealous, Radical, and Determined”
This brief flirtation with hope for Johnson throws Douglass’s ultimate judgment of Lincoln into sharper relief. In his famous 1876 eulogy at the dedication of the Freedmen’s Memorial in Washington, Douglass offered what may be the most penetrating assessment of Lincoln ever delivered. From the perspective of a “true abolitionist,” Douglass admitted, Lincoln had been “slow, tardy, cold, and indifferent.” But viewed from the standpoint of a statesman, someone who had to consider the whole nation and all its competing interests, Lincoln had been “swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”
This was Douglass’s way of admitting he had been wrong. If Lincoln had made the war about abolition from the beginning, as Douglass had demanded, the Union would not have been preserved and slavery would not have been abolished. Prudence and patience, virtues Douglass had dismissed as weakness, had actually been essential to achieving the goal both men shared.
Douglass particularly admired what he called Lincoln’s “rail-splitting” approach to black voting rights. When Lincoln publicly called for voting rights only for educated black men and black veterans, some abolitionists criticized him for not demanding universal black male suffrage. But Douglass saw strategic wisdom in Lincoln’s limited proposal. Like splitting rails with a wedge, you start with the thin edge. Once it’s in, the thick edge follows. It was hard to argue that men who had fought for their country should be denied the vote, and once some black men could vote, the principle of universal black male suffrage would inevitably follow.
A Legacy of Advocacy and Remembrance
For the remaining three decades of his life, until his death in 1895, Douglass continued giving speeches honoring Lincoln. He invoked Lincoln’s name and legacy when advocating for equality, liberty, and voting rights. The formerly enslaved man who had once called Lincoln slavery’s greatest enemy came to see him as one of freedom’s greatest champions.
This evolution in Douglass’s thinking offers lessons that transcend the Civil War era. It contrasts the tension between moral urgency and political possibility, between demanding immediate justice and accepting incremental progress. Douglass never abandoned his principles, but he learned to appreciate the constraints leaders face when translating ideals into reality. In measuring Lincoln, Douglass ultimately revealed his own growth as a thinker about power, strategy, and the hard work of building a more just society.