Oakes' book
The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (2007) was a co-winner of the 2008
Lincoln Prize. The prize jury highlighted the book's use of a new comparative framework for understanding the careers of
Abraham Lincoln and
Frederick Douglass, and their respective views of race. It also noted that Oakes had succeeded in writing a scholarly work that was accessible to the general public.
David Brion Davis, writing in
The New York Review of Books, identified the basic theme of
Freedom National as the view that Lincoln's Republican Party had been an antislavery party both before and during the war, one that viewed defining humans as
chattel as both a violation of the "freedom principle" embodied in natural and international law and a violation of the
U.S. Constitution, which, in the
Fugitive Slave Clause, referred to slaves as "Person[s] held to Service or Labour". In
Freedom National (page xxiii), Oakes wrote, "Like most historians I always believed that the purpose of the war shifted 'from Union to emancipation. But, in fact, although "Republicans did not believe that the Constitution allowed them to wage a war for any 'purpose' other than the restoration of the Union, ... from the very beginning they insisted that slavery was the cause of the rebellion and emancipation an appropriate and ultimately indispensable means of suppressing it."
Eric Foner called the work "the best account ever written of the complex historical process known as emancipation". ==Works==