The Radical and the Republican

The second chapter of The Radical and the Republican moves away from Frederick Douglass and focuses on the character of Abraham Lincoln. It tries to fuse together the ideas of Lincoln both as a politician and person, to show how his personal development and convictions both informed his political leanings and complicated his political desires. To this end, Oakes takes pains to show that while Lincoln was anti-slavery, he was far from perfect. He did not necessarily believe in the total social equality of blacks and whites, and he would have been willing to continue slavery if it meant preserving the Union, which he viewed as paramount. Still, he did recognize the inherent evil in the institution and attempted to curb its spreading in the United States, if he was content to allow for it to remain.

Furthermore, Oakes tries to show how Lincoln’s conservative tendencies were not just political nomenclature. He was a conservative character in that he was deliberate and ration in his approach, especially when he approached radical ideas. This calculated manner led many of his detractors on the far-left to believe that he was either indifferent or weak on progressive ideas, something of which Frederick Douglass leveled against Lincoln often during his early public career. However, Oakes doesn’t use his assessment and presentation of Lincoln in Chapter 2 to castigate his sloth, but rather to show how these traits made Lincoln an even more effective politician. Because he understood that he had to move slowly, he was able to do more over the course of time. He was able to build a greater coalition of support among not only his peers but the masses.

Rather than trying to appease his fiercest critics, Lincoln understood how liberal democracy worked in the real world and risked political failure at times by not following his conscience. Although it might have appeared that Lincoln was compromising his own principles, he was in fact working behind the scenes to bring about an even greater change to the political and social landscape of the country.

In addition to addressing the character of Lincoln, Chapter 2 also discusses many pivotal moments in 19th century American politics to better acclimate the reader to the political climate of the time. The major issue at hand for much of the first part of the 19th century was not whether or not slavery should be abolished in America, but whether or not it should be allowed to spread into the new territories that America had acquired through the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican-American War. As a substantial amount of this territory was in the “South,” it made sense to many Southern lawmakers in Congress that slavery would exist in these territories.

However, this troubled many Northern politicians because they believed that adding more slave states to the Union would give the South even more power in Congress than it already had. This was due primarily to the fact that representation in the House of Representatives was based upon population. The greater the population of a state, the more representatives it had, and thus the greater its voting power. Although slaves were not considered to be American citizens and were not allowed to vote, they did count towards the population of a state, thus inflating the populations of the Southern states. Because of this, an original compromise had been struck between the North and South in which each slave would count as 3/5 of a person—The Three-Fifth’s Compromise.

Northerners feared that if slavery continued, they would eventually lose power, especially since at this point in history, parties were very much divided along geographical lines. Democrats were primarily Southern, pro-slavery landed aristocrats, and Northerners were generally industrial Whigs and Republicans who either were ambivalent towards slavery or against it.