38 pages • 1 hour read
James OakesThe Radical and the Republican
James OakesNonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “My Friend Douglass”
Having spent the majority of the book discussing the ways in which Lincoln and Douglass publicly disagreed with each other over the way in which the issue of slavery should be handled by the federal government, Chapter 6 brings the two leaders face to face. With the issue of slavery settled, the freedoms afforded to Lincoln have become a bit broader, as he no longer needs to appear one way or another for the state of his constituents. Moreover, with Lincoln now firmly in his corner, Douglass can act less as a reformer and more of an ally to the president, especially in his bid for re-election in 1864.
Oakes highlights how Lincoln and Douglass turn out to realize that they have much more in common than their public positions would initially show, and Oakes’s portrayal of their meetings expressed the mutual respect the two men did have and further develop toward each other.
Apart from detailing the three meetings that Lincoln and Douglass engaged in, Chapter 6 also discusses the challenges faced by Lincoln in his bid to win re-election in 1864 and the fear that should he lose, it would risk the North concluding a compromise peace with the South that would jeopardize all that Lincoln and Douglass had striven to achieve. Thus, in an effort to carry Northern Democrats, Lincoln split his ticket, electing Andrew Johnson to be his running mate—a decision that would have huge consequences for the country following Lincoln’s assassination.
Chapter 6 closes with Lincoln’s assassination at the hands of John Wilkes Booth and begins to touch on the effects of this event, which is handled in greater detail in Chapter 7.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Had Lincoln Lived…”
Following the death of Lincoln, along with both its social and political repercussions, Chapter 7 covers the decade following the end of the Civil War and tries to neatly wrap up the figure of Frederick Douglass that is known to modern popular history.
Oakes spends a great deal of time showing the differences in the way in which Andrew Johnson handled Douglass, and how Johnson’s ineffectual policies and opposition to certain reforms allowed for the South to slowly roll back the freedoms won by African-Americans under the presidency of Lincoln. Chapter 7 also briefly touches on the effects of Reconstruction on the South, and the subsequent political landscape in America from 1865 until the 1884, when America elected its first Democratic president since the Civil War.
Apart from dealing with the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, Chapter 7 also shows how, in many ways, Douglass, once an avowed radical, had come to the middle of the road of American politics. He almost took up the mantle of Lincoln, who, for Douglass, was a “bludgeon, [a] sledgehammer” (288) in the continued pursuit of racial equality and opportunity in America. In many ways, Oakes goes to show that our modern understanding of Lincoln more so as champion and emancipator as opposed to calculated and careful politician comes from Douglass’s later writings and speeches, where he calls on Lincoln as a way to showcase the best of what American democracy is capable of.
Chapters 6-7 Analysis
The final two chapters serve as a coda to what has come before. With the bulk of the work being about the approaches of Lincoln and Douglass towards slavery, with slavery’s end, The Radical and the Republican settles into how the two men, no longer at odds with each other over this central issue, became friendly. Having come to understand all that Lincoln had fought against, Douglass seems to have developed a profound admiration, almost love, for Lincoln both as a person and as a statesman. With the death of Lincoln and the end of slavery, there is not much left to be said, given the way Oakes has organized the book. However, he continues to show how, after Lincoln’s death, Douglass continues on to fight for the principles of equality and full-citizenship for African-Americans, a task made all the more difficult by the ascent of Andrew Johnson into the White House.
The last two chapters also show how, in his later years, Douglass moves much closer to Lincoln in terms of public position. No longer content to be the far left radical, Douglass now wishes to fully include himself in American politics, and he must moderate to be able to do the work he wants to do from the inside. It is this new profound perspective and growth that Oakes uses to close the book, as though both literally and symbolically, Douglass has gone from the brash and brazen young outsider to the established and wise insider in American politics, truly proving in many ways that he is more than the equal of any white American statesman.
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