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February 2, 2021 Elizabeth R Varon THE WASHINGTON POST – In his illuminating and accessible new book, James Oakes, an acclaimed historian of emancipation, offers us a “third Lincoln”: Neither the mythic Great Emancipator nor a flawed reluctant emancipator, but instead a committed proponent of antislavery constitutionalism. Lincoln, Oakes argues in The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution, consistently upheld the “federal consensus” on slavery: that Congress could not abolish slavery in any state but also could not interfere with a state’s choice to emancipate enslaved people. Within these constitutional boundaries, Lincoln pursued, before and during the Civil War, the goal of abolition by individual states. He intended that pressure from the federal government would move the Southern states to enact their own gradual emancipation policies, as individual Northern states had done after the American Revolution. ....
Frederick Douglass The question at the center of the book is whether the Constitution should be viewed as a pro-slavery or anti-slavery document. And the reviewer, the historian Gordon S. Wood, never mentions Frederick Douglass. Good Lord. If there was one central takeaway from David Blight’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” (2018), it’s that Douglass embraced the Constitution as a weapon with which to fight slavery, breaking with William Lloyd Garrison, who thought the Constitution was irredeemable. Curious, I decided to dig a little deeper. And I found a review in The Washington Post by Elizabeth R. Varon of the University of Virginia. It turns out that Oakes not only mentions Douglass, but is a scholar of his views about the Constitution. Varon writes: ....