Volume 38, Number 9 · May 16, 1991
The White World of Frederick Douglass
By David Brion Davis
Frederick Douglass
by William S. McFeely
Norton, 465 pp., $24.95
If Abraham Lincoln ultimately transcended the racism that infected most of his white countrymen, he could never forget the virulence, omnipresence, and political usefulness of the disease. When Lincoln, a Republican moderate, spoke out in 1856 against the geographic extension of slavery, Illinois Democrats accused him of 'the most ultra abolitionism' and the Illinois State Register claimed that 'his niggerism has as dark a hue as that of [William Lloyd] Garrison or Fred Douglass.'[1] Two years later, during his great debates with Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln found himself more closely tied to Frederick Douglass, the most celebrated black leader in America—and to the bugaboo of 'racial amalgamation.'
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