Abraham Lincoln Read online

  The pressure on Lincoln to strike at slavery was unrelenting. In between abolitionist delegations came Sumner and his stern colleagues again, with Vice-President Hannibal Hamlin and Congressman Owen Lovejoy, also advanced Republicans, often with them. As the war progressed, they raised still another argument for emancipation, an argument Douglass and members of Lincoln’s own Cabinet were also making. In 1862, his armies suffered from manpower shortages on every front. Thanks to repeated Union military failures and to a growing war weariness across the North, volunteering had fallen off sharply; and Union generals bombarded Washington with shrill complaints, insisting that they faced an overwhelming southern foe and must have reinforcements before they could win battles or even fight. While Union commanders often exaggerated rebel strength, Union forces did need reinforcements to carry out a successful offensive war. As Sumner reminded Lincoln, the slaves were an untapped reservoir of strength. “You need more men,” Sumner said, “not only at the North, but at the South. You need the slaves.” If Lincoln freed them, he could recruit black men into his armed forces, thus helping to solve his manpower woes.

  On that score, the slaves themselves were contributing to the pressures on Lincoln to emancipate them. Far from being passive recipients of freedom, as Vincent Harding has rightly reminded us, the slaves were engaged in self-liberation, abandoning rebel farms and plantations and escaping to Union lines by the thousands. This in turn created a tangled legal problem that bedeviled the Lincoln administration. What was the status of such “contraband of war,” as Union General Benjamin F. Butler designated them? Were they still slaves? Were they free? Were they somewhere in between? The administration tended to follow a look-the-other-way policy, allowing field commanders to solve the contraband problem any way they wished. Some officers sent the fugitives back to the Confederacy, others turned them over to refugee camps, where benevolent organizations attempted to care for them. But with more and more slaves streaming into Union lines, Sumner, several of Lincoln’s Cabinet members, Douglass, and many others urged him to grant them freedom and enlist the able-bodied men in the army. “Let the slaves and free colored people be called into service and formed into a liberating army,” Douglass exhorted the President, “to march into the South and raise the banner of Emancipation among the slaves.”

  At first, Lincoln rejected a presidential move against slavery. “I think Sumner and the rest of you would upset our applecart altogether if you had your way,” he told some advanced Republicans one day. “We didn’t go into the war to put down slavery, but to put the flag back; and to act differently at this moment would, I have no doubt, not only weaken our cause, but smack of bad faith…. This thunderbolt will keep.”

  In short, as President he was accountable to the entire country, or what remained of it in the North and West, and the vast majority of whites there remained adamantly opposed to emancipation.

  Still, Lincoln was sympathetic to the entire range of arguments Sumner and his associates rehearsed for him. Personally, Lincoln hated slavery as much as they did, and many of their points had already occurred to him. On certain days he could be seen like them in the lecture hall of the Smithsonian Institution, listening quietly and intently as antislavery orators damned slavery for the evil that it was. Under the combined and incessant demands that he act, Lincoln began wavering in his hands-off policy about slavery; as early as November and December, 1861, he began searching about for some compromise—something short of a sweeping emancipation decree, which he still regarded as “too big a lick.” Again he seemed caught in an impossible dilemma: how to remove the cause of the war, keep Britain out of the conflict, solve the refugee problem, cripple the Confederacy, and suppress the rebellion, and yet retain the allegiance of northern Democrats and the critical border.

  In March, 1862, he proposed a plan to Congress he thought might work: a gradual, compensated emancipation program to commence in the loyal border states. According to Lincoln’s plan, the border states would gradually abolish slavery themselves over the next thirty years, and the federal government would compensate slaveowners for their loss. The whole program was to be voluntary; the states would adopt their own emancipation laws without federal coercion. This was consistent with Lincoln’s old hope that when slavery was no longer workable southerners would get rid of it themselves. That moment had arrived.

  At the same time, the federal government would sponsor a colonization program, which was also to be entirely voluntary. Lincoln was not going to make Negroes leave America anymore than he was going to coerce the states into liberating them. The idea of forcing people out of the country violated his very conception of what it was about.

  Lincoln had good reason to attach colonization to his federal-state emancipation plan. Without a promise of colonization, he understood only too well, most northern whites would never accept emancipation, even if it was carried out by the states. From now on, every time he contemplated some new antislavery move, he made a great fuss about colonization: he embarked on a resettlement project in central America and another in Haiti, and he held an interview about colonization with Washington’s black leaders, an interview he published in the press. In part, the ritual of colonization was designed to calm white racial fears.

  If his gradual, state-guided plan was adopted, Lincoln contended that a presidential decree—federally enforced emancipation—would never be necessary. Abolition would begin on the local level in the loyal border and then be extended into the rebel states as they were conquered. Thus by a slow and salubrious process would the cause of the rebellion be removed and the future of the American experiment guaranteed.

  On Capitol Hill, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania belittled Lincoln’s scheme as “diluted milk-and-water gruel.” But Sumner and other advanced Republicans, noting that Lincoln’s was the first emancipation proposal ever offered by an American President, acclaimed it as an excellent step. On April 10, 1862, the Republican-controlled Congress endorsed Lincoln’s plan.* But the border-state representatives, for whom it was intended, rejected the scheme emphatically. “I utterly spit at it and despise it,” said one Kentucky congressman. “Emancipation in the cotton States is simply an absurdity…. There is not enough power in the world to compel it to be done.”

  As Lincoln promoted his gradual, compensated scheme, advanced Republicans on Capitol Hill launched a furious antislavery attack of their own. By now, they had won over many Republican moderates to forge a new congressional majority on the slavery issue. As the war raged into its second year, moderate Republicans came to agree with their advanced colleagues that it was senseless to pretend that the Union could be restored without removing the cause of the rebellion.

  In the House, the leader of the advanced Republican offensive was sixty-nine-year-old Thaddeus Stevens, who controlled the nation’s purse strings as chairman of the powerful Committee on Ways and Means. Stevens was a grim, sardonic bachelor with a cutting wit (“I now yield to Mr. B.,” he once said, “who will make a few feeble remarks”) and a fondness for gambling that took him almost nightly to Washington’s casinos. To the delight of his colleagues, he indulged in witticisms so indecorous that they had to be deleted from the Congressional Globe. A wealthy ironmaster with a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, as one biographer described him, he had contributed generously to charities and causes, crusaded for public schools in Pennsylvania, and defended fugitive slaves there. Afflicted with a club foot, Stevens spoke of bondage “in terms of shackled limbs and a longing for freedom to dance.” He lived with his mulatto housekeeper, Lydia Smith, and there is strong evidence that they were lovers. Anti-miscegenation laws made marriage impossible, and their liaison not only generated malicious gossip but probably kept Stevens from becoming what he most wanted to be—a United States senator. He liked to quote the Bible that “He hath made of one blood all nations of men,” yet he never championed complete equality for blacks—“not equality in all things,” he once asserted, “simply before the laws, nothing el
se.” Serving a fourth term as congressman, this bitter, intimidating, high-minded man ruled the Civil War House and was “the master-spirit,” said Republican journalist Alexander McClure, “of every aggressive movement in Congress to overthrow the rebellion and slavery.”

  Over howling Democratic opposition, Stevens, Sumner, and their Republican cohorts rammed a procession of antislavery measures through Congress. One forbade the return of fugitive slaves to the rebels; another abolished slavery in Washington, D.C., and compensated owners for their loss; still another outlawed human bondage in all federal territories, thus reversing the hated Dred Scott decision. Lincoln signed all these bills into law, and joined with Congress in recognizing the black republics of Haiti and Liberia, a move that would facilitate colonization efforts in those lands.

  The flood of antislavery legislation delighted Frederick Douglass. “I trust I am not dreaming,” he wrote Sumner, “but the events taking place seem like a dream.” But he was grievously disappointed in Lincoln’s colonization moves, which he did not fully understand. Hurt and perplexed by them, Douglass damned the President for “his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” And he warned that the Union cause “would never prosper till the war assumed an antislavery attitude, and the Negro was enlisted on the loyal side.”

  Lincoln meanwhile had run into trouble with his gradual, state-guided emancipation plan. He couldn’t even persuade Delaware, with its small and relatively harmless slave population, to adopt it. In desperation, Lincoln on three different occasions—in the spring and summer of 1862—pleaded with border-state congressmen to endorse his program. In their third meeting, held in the White House on July 12, Lincoln warned the border representatives that it was impossible now to restore the Union with slavery preserved. Slavery was doomed. They could not be blind to the signs, blind to the fact that his plan was the only alternative to a more drastic move against slavery, one that would cause tremendous destruction in the South. Please, he said, commend my gradual plan to your people.

  But most of the border men turned him down. They thought his plan would cost too much, would only whip the flames of rebellion, would cause dangerous discontent in their own states. Their intransigence was a sober lesson to Lincoln. It was proof indeed that slaveowners—even loyal slaveowners—were too tied up in the slave system ever to free their own Negroes and voluntarily transform their way of life. If abolition must come, it must begin in the rebel South and then be extended into the loyal border later on. Which meant that the President must eradicate slavery himself. He could no longer avoid the responsibility. By mid-July, 1862, the pressures of the war had forced him to abandon his hands-off policy and lay a “strong hand on the colored element.”

  On July 13, the day after his last talk with the border men, Lincoln took a carriage ride with a couple of his Cabinet secretaries. His conversation, when recounted in full, reveals a tougher Lincoln than the middle-of-the-road President of Sandburg’s myth-building biography. Lincoln said he was convinced that the war could no longer be won through forbearance toward southern rebels, that it was “a duty on our part to liberate the slaves.” The time had come to take a bold new path and hurl Union armies at “the heart of the rebellion,” using the military to destroy the very institution that caused and now sustained the insurrection. Southerners could not throw off the Constitution and at the same time invoke it to protect slavery. They had started the war and must now face its consequences.

  He had given this a lot of grave and painful thought, he said, and had concluded that a presidential declaration of emancipation was the last alternative, that it was “a military necessity absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union.” Because the slaves were a tremendous source of strength for the rebellion, Lincoln must invite them to desert and “come to us and uniting with us they must be made free from rebel authority and rebel masters.” His interview with the border men yesterday, he said, “had forced him slowly but he believed correctly to this conclusion.”

  On July 22, 1862, Lincoln summoned his Cabinet members and read them a draft of a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Come January 1, 1863, in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces in time of war, Lincoln would free all the slaves everywhere in the rebel states. He would thus make it a Union objective to annihilate slavery as an institution in the Confederate South.

  Contrary to what many historians have said, Lincoln’s projected Proclamation went further than anything Congress had done. True, Congress had just enacted (and Lincoln had just signed) the second confiscation act, which provided for the seizure and liberation of all slaves of people who supported or participated in the rebellion. Still, most slaves would be freed only after protracted case-by-case litigation in the federal courts. Another section of the act did liberate certain categories of slaves without court action, but the bill exempted loyal slaveowners in the rebel South, allowing them to keep their slaves and other property. Far short of a genuine emancipation measure, the act was about as far as Congress could go in attacking slavery, for most Republicans still acknowledged that Congress had no constitutional authority to remove bondage as a state institution. Only the President with his war powers—or a constitutional amendment—could do that. Nevertheless, the measure seemed a clear invitation for the President to exercise his constitutional powers and abolish slavery in the rebellious states. And Stevens, Sumner, and others repeatedly told Lincoln that most congressional Republicans now favored this.

  In contrast to the confiscation act, Lincoln’s Proclamation was a sweeping blow against slavery as an institution in the rebel states, a blow that would free all slaves there—those of secessionists and loyalists alike. Thus Lincoln would handle emancipation himself (as congressional Republicans wanted him to do), avoid judicial red tape, and use the military to vanquish the cornerstone of the Confederacy. Again, he justified this as a military necessity to save the Union—and with it America’s experiment in popular government.

  But William H. Seward and other Cabinet secretaries dissuaded Lincoln from issuing his Proclamation in July. Seward argued that the Union had won no clear military victories, particularly in the showcase eastern theater. As a consequence, Europe would misconstrue the Proclamation as “our last shriek on the retreat,” as a wild and reckless attempt to compensate for Union military ineptitude by provoking a slave insurrection behind rebel lines. If Lincoln must give an emancipation order, Seward warned, he must wait until the Union won a military victory.

  Lincoln finally agreed to wait, but he was not happy about it: the way George B. McClellan and his other generals had been fighting in the eastern theater, Lincoln had no idea when he would ever have a victory.

  While he waited, he published his famous “open” letter to Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, a letter that has been persistently misunderstood and misrepresented. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union,” Lincoln told Greeley (and the nation beyond), “and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.” He noted in closing, “I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.”

  As I tried to explain in With Malice Toward None, Lincoln had little choice but to speak of slavery strictly in terms of preserving the Union: they were the only terms the white public was likely to accept. In truth, his letter to Greeley was a calculated statement, part of several efforts on Lincoln’s part to prepare northern whites for the Proclamation he intended to foist on them. You see, he was suggesting, I am keeping my personal hatred of slavery out of this. If I free some or all the slaves (and for the first time in public he claimed t
he authority to free them), I do so only to save our Union, our cause, our cherished experiment in popular government.

  One of the great ironies of the war was that George McClellan presented Lincoln with the military triumph he needed to issue his Proclamation. A Democrat who sympathized with southern slavery and opposed wartime emancipation with a passion, McClellan outfought Robert E. Lee at Antietam Creek in September, 1862, forcing the rebel army to leave the battlefield. Thereupon Lincoln promulgated his preliminary Proclamation, with its warning that if the rebellion did not cease by January 1, 1863, the executive branch, including the army and the navy, would destroy slavery in the rebel states. Lincoln had no illusions that the rebels would now throw down their arms and rush back to the Union before the ninety-day deadline. But at least it would signal the white North that he was proceeding with extreme caution in this inflammable area.