Henry Louis Gates Jr. discusses his new book, Lincoln on Slavery and Race.

It’s not that Henry Louis Gates Jr. wanted to knock Abraham Lincoln off his pedestal; “I just wanted to dust him up a little bit,” said Aspen Institute trustee and acclaimed W.E.B. Du Bois professor of the Humanities and African American researcher at Harvard University. In his new book, Lincoln on Slavery and Race (Princeton University Press), Gates takes legions of Lincoln historians to task for “conflating opposition to slavery” with a support for the equality of the races. “Slavery violated Lincoln’s notion of natural rights,” Gates said. “Slavery eliminated the promise of America.” But that didn’t mean that Lincoln was sold on the idea that all white and black men were created equal.

So, was Lincoln a racist? “He was a recovering racist!” declared Gates as he explained Frederick Douglass’s crucial intellectual influence on the president. Gates also posited that Lincoln’s famous Emancipation Proclamation, which freed confederate slaves but not Northern slaves, was really a politically expedient move to win the Civil War by “discombobulating” the South while not jeopardizing the fragile Northern coalition, which included slave-holding Maryland and Kentucky. Still, by his last speech, Lincoln acknowledged that at least some blacks should have the right to vote (those who had fought for the North in the war and those of “exceptional intelligence”). “He’s better for being complex,” said Gates. “He’s infinitely more fascinating than the cardboard cut-out we grew up with.”

Gates said that Lincoln and President Barack Obama have a great deal in common: They share a love of language and are each natural conciliators. Asked how Lincoln would have reacted to Obama’s election, however, Gates was less sanguine: “Lincoln would have a heart attack and die again! He was just sneaking up on liking black people.”