Black Suffrage: Lincoln's Last Goal by Paul D. Escott (review)

Reviewed by: Black Suffrage: Lincoln's Last Goal by Paul D. Escott William E. Hardy (bio) Black Suffrage: Lincoln's Last Goal.

By Paul D. Escott. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022.

Pp. 288. $39.50 cloth) Paul Escott's Black Suffrage begins with the last days of the American Civil War and President Abraham Lincoln's transformative vision encapsulated in his final public speech. Far from being a great egalitarian, the "great emancipator" lagged behind the Republican Congress, African Americans, his own military officials, and even public opinion in taking action against slavery.

However, in the last months of the war, Lincoln, influenced largely by his wartime contacts with Black leaders and the support Black soldiers gave to the Union cause, looked to build a better society, "a more perfect union." In an April 11, 1865, address to a group of happy serenaders assembled in front of the White House, Lincoln began with a defense of his December 1863 plan for reconstruction that centered on reconciliation with southern whites. But then he boldly announced his support for Black voting rights. Though he qualified his endorsement of Black suffrage, limiting it to literate freedmen and Black soldiers, Lincoln's public declaration signaled his hope that both reconciliation and Black suffrage "would produce a new Union of broader freedom and greater justice" (p.

9). Black Suffrage is, in many respects, a continuation of Escott's recent work on the ways in which Lincoln and the Republican Party grappled with the issue of equality amid engrained attitudes of racism in the North during the war. Escott eschews the tendency to highlight either the achievements of emancipation or concentrate on the politics of Republican Reconstruction from December 1865 forward.

Rather, his focus is on what the war did not settle—would African Americans gain full equality under the law and the ballot? Escott, who has conducted an extensive examination of northern Republican and Democratic newspapers, as well as speeches and letters of prominent leaders, provides a thorough analysis of Northern attitudes on Black rights between Confederate surrender and the return of Congress in [End Page 79] December 1865. These last eight and half months of 1865 marked a pivotal point in which a vigorous national debate over Lincoln's last goal—extending the right to vote to Black men—ensued.

Adopting a chronological approach with themes for each chapter, Escott moves through 1865 addressing the ways in which public discussion and debate on Black suffrage unfolded in the North. With Congress not in session and initial uncertainty as to President Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction policies, that void was filled by Republican and Democratic editors and politicians, white abolitionists, and Black leaders who waged a fierce contest to shape that debate. Pro-suffrage Republicans grasped the importance of keeping the revolution of progress going and argued Black suffrage was a necessary defense against unrepentant Confederates.

Democrats, echoing their antebellum partisan playbook, countered with racist, white supremacist bile and predictions of social degradation, as well as calls for renewed friendship with white southerners while ignoring the facts of what was occurring in the South. Escott concludes that Black suffrage failed in 1865 because of widespread racism in the North; the Democrats' devotion to white supremacy; an ambiguous and deceptive President Johnson; the steadfast refusal of some prominent Republicans; limited power of Black northerners; war-weariness; and a desire to reconcile and restore the defeated South to its place within the American political community. That said, Escott argues that enormous progress was achieved in the Civil War era given that slavery, racism, and white supremacy were deeply entwined in the daily lives of Americans.

The Republican Party became increasingly more egalitarian in its ideas, adopting emancipation and subsequently Black suffrage to secure Union victory. But it was necessity, rather than idealism, that made this progress possible. At a time in which white supremacy has returned to mainstream politics, Black Suffrage reminds us of the fact that white supremacy has long been a part of the nation's fabric and that our racial past is prologue. [End Page 80] William E.

Hardy WILLIAM E. HARDY is associate professor of history and the Lincoln Scholar at Lincoln Memorial...