| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. By James Oakes. (New York: Norton, 2007. xxii, 328 pp. Cloth, $26.95, ISBN 978-0-393-06194-9. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 978-0-393-33065-6.)

Not long ago, historians of the Civil War era doubted postwar portrayals of Abraham Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. Relying on Lincoln's words and those of his Radical Republican and abolitionist critics, they described him as a reluctant advocate of freeing the slaves. He was, it seemed, a moderate racist who opposed equal rights for African Americans. Recently, a more positive assessment of Lincoln on those issues has emerged. James Oakes's interesting and provocative story of how Lincoln's antislavery and racial outlook converged with that of leading black abolitionist Frederick Douglass may be the apex of that revised assessment.

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