The Black Man's President: Abraham Lincoln, African Americans, & the Pursuit of Racial Equality

In a little-noted eulogy delivered after Lincoln's assassination, Frederick Douglass called the president "emphatically the black man's president," the "first to show any respect for their rights as men." Douglass pointed not just to Lincoln's official acts and utterances, like the Emancipation Proclamation or the Second Inaugural Address, but also to the president's own personal experiences with Black people.



But Lincoln's description as "emphatically the black man's president" rests on mor...