Lincoln’s racial views evolved during the war from colonization to abolition.

Evidence

Douglass understood that Lincoln existed as both an “astute politician and a man of principle,” according to Christopher Bonner, a historian and the author of Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship. Bonner says that Douglass’s perspective is vital for understanding Lincoln. “We would do well to listen to Douglass,” he told me. “Douglass knew Lincoln, Douglass knew slavery, and Douglass knew the nineteenth-century United States, and so he is a great source for us to understand Lincoln’s complexity.” Douglass understood that Lincoln’s ideas about Black people changed over the course of the war. The president had been deeply moved by the valor of the Black men who’d helped save the Union and had been influenced by Black men such as Douglass, whom he held in high esteem. Though the first version of his Emancipation Proclamation advocated colonization, by the end of the Civil War, Lincoln had abandoned these efforts and advocated for the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 140

Categorization

• XREF: This evolution-from-colonization detail echoes the chapter’s broader argument that even Lincoln’s trajectory matters because of how origin stories date the founding of Black freedom.