This is from the Lincoln Institute and it is biased. And when posted amid the following, it is hard to call it a serious source
- Unlike Mr. Lincoln, who sometimes chafed under his economic obligations to his father until he was emancipated at age 21, Douglass emancipated himself. He gave himself the surname "Douglass" after escaping from slavery.
- Like Mr. Lincoln, Douglass operated somewhat above his "birth" class but nevertheless acted as a representative of that class with whom he was somewhat out of touch.
- Like Mr. Lincoln, Douglass was tall, but he carried himself with a more regal and dignified bearing.
- Like Mr. Lincoln, he was proud of his physical strength and his erstwhile physical labors.
- Like Mr. Lincoln, he was frequently disappointed in the pursuit of office.
- Like Mr. Lincoln, Douglas understood the nature of northern racism. Douglass never wanted to be confined a particular role which white Northerners might want him to occupy. He wasn't content to a token Black. He believed in integration and he lived his beliefs frequently with great courage.
- Like Mr. Lincoln, Douglass had strong early experiences with the church, but his chagrin with the refusal of white churches to denounce slavery led to his detachment from his Methodist roots.
- Like Mr. Lincoln, he understood that the North was far from blameless on issues of race and slavery. In one early speech, Douglass said: "Prejudice against color is stronger north than south; it hangs around my neck like a heavy weight."3
- Like Mr. Lincoln, he had impoverished childhood with considerable trauma and little formal education.
- Unlike Mr. Lincoln who avoided most references to his childhood, Douglass made his childhood experiences with slavery the centerpiece of his speaking and writing.
- Like Mr. Lincoln, Douglass had a high opinion of his own abilities — which he tended to deprecate in public comments.
- Like Mr. Lincoln, he was an accomplished mimic — but unlike Mr. Lincoln, most of his mimicry was used in speeches rather than story-telling.
- Unlike Mr. Lincoln, Douglass encouraged his sons to join the Union Army — he was a leading proponent of the use of black soldiers. Douglass did, however, petition Mr. Lincoln to discharge a sick son from service. And, the Lincolns' eldest son Robert did join the Union Army in January 1865.
- Unlike Abraham Lincoln, for whom male friendships were easiest, female friendships (with intellectually stimulating and strong women) were easiest for Frederick Douglass. Unlike the famously jealous Mary Todd Lincoln, Douglass's wife appears to have been very tolerant of her husband's female friends — especially considering that some women came to live with them for months or years. Douglass worked frequently and closely with representatives of the women's suffrage movement.
Show what's wrong rather than making assertions about bias. You'll forgive me if I reject your judgment on what is or is not a serious source.
Douglass' flirtation with Fremont wasn't due to a lack of support for Lincoln specifically but rather a conviction that it was best for his movement.
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Faced with the possibility of a Democratic victory, Douglass convinced himself that the Republicans had to nominate someone with a sturdier antislavery backbone. Notwithstanding the faith he had recently expressed in Lincoln's unwavering commitment to emancipation, Douglass now professed to fear 'a slaveholding compromise' that would end the war before the war ended slavery.
To prevent that from happening he joined forces with those hoping to replace Abraham Lincoln as the Republican Party's presidential nominee." [James Oakes,
The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics, p. 226]
"Douglass had to know from the start how quixotic the effort to remove Lincoln was. But even if he took the move seriously, there was something different about 1864: He was engaging in a struggle for power
within the Republican Party. He renewed his criticism of Lincoln in January, when the effort to replace him first got under way. But after Lincoln had secured the Republican nomination and--even more important--after the Democrats had nominated George B. McClellan as their presidential candidate in late August,
Douglass made it clear that he strongly favored Lincoln's reelection. This was a far cry from 1860, when Douglass had withdrawn his support for Lincoln and voted instead for a radical third party candidate. For all the venom he spilled on Lincoln in the first six months of 1864, Douglass was now maneuvering within the Republican Party, something he had never done before." [Ibid. p. 228]
"Once again Douglass was impressed by Lincoln's sincerity and lack of pretension,. More important, he realized that all his ideas about reconstructing the defeated South would not mean much if the war ended with millions of blacks still enslaved. Douglass had already expressed concerns that the Emancipation Proclamation might not have freed all the slaves by the time the war ended. But once he saw how disturbed Lincoln was by the prospect of slavery's survival, Douglass's long-standing suspicions of the President's commitment to emancipation vanished. He saw in Lincoln 'a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him.' Only weeks earlier Douglass had denounced Lincoln as a man who did evil by choice and right by necessity. But he came away from his second meeting persuaded that Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation out of deep moral convictions, not 'merely as a necessity.'
"The second meeting changed forever the way Frederick Douglass viewed Abraham Lincoln, beginning with his position on the upcoming presidential election. In some measure, Douglass's revised sentiments had nothing to do with Lincoln. His Democratic opponent, McClellan, was committed to a military victory and the restoration of the Union, but he was not committed to emancipation. Worse still was the Democratic platform calling for immediate negotiations with the Confederacy with no stipulation that the South repudiate slavery as a precondition to truce. Here was the very nightmare that, Douglass now knew, he shared with Abraham Lincoln.
"At about the same time the Democrats nominated McClellan, William Lloyd Garrison provided Douglass with an occasion to explain his views on Lincoln. Somehow Garrison had gotten his hands on the letter to an English correspondent that Douglass had written the previous June; he published excerpts from the letter as part of his own never-ending campaign to impugn the character of Douglass the apostate. Duly embarrassed, Douglass was compelled to explain himself. He wrote that letter a long time ago, he said. It was 'flung off in haste.' It was not intended for publication. In any case, the circumstances had changed. Since he wrote that letter three months earlier, the Democrats had nominated McClellan to run against Lincoln on a peace platform. He admitted that his earlier remarks were borne of a desire to spur the nomination of the most ardent antislavery man possible. 'That possibility is now no longer conceivable,' Douglass wrote. A victory for McClellan and the Democrats 'would be the heaviest calamity of these years of war and blood.' Accordingly 'all hesitation ought to cease, and every man who wishes well to the slave and to the country should at once rally with all the warmth and earnestness of his nature to the support of Abraham Lincoln.'
"Beneath Douglass's embarrassment lay genuine conviction. He now knew, from firsthand knowledge, that Lincoln was resisting pressure to reach a slaveholding compromise and that the pressure was coming not merely from the Democrats but from Lincoln's fellow Republicans. ... Lincoln had to win this election, Douglass insisted, not simply to squelch the Democrats but to strengthen his hand against the appeasers in his own ranks." [Ibid., pp. 232-234]
As I said, the story isn't as simplistic as you would like it to be.
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