He took the trouble to fashion a graphic image of the black soldier who helped the great consummation (silent tongue, clenched teeth, steady eye, well-poised bayonet) and in contrast summoned two sharply negative characteristics of the white men who tried to hinder it (malignant heart, deceitful speech). It was surely a different picture from the one he painted just a year earlier to the five black visitors.
Lincoln the continual self-improver underwent marked changes in moral outlook at several points in his life. One may compare the mediocre partisan speech he gave for the Whig presidential candidate Winfield Scott in 1852 with his first great speech, which he gave in the fall of 1854 at the state fair in Springfield and then in Peoria. And one may compare what he said to the five visitors in August 1862 with his letter to Conkling in August 1863—a major jump in moral imagination.
Biographers in later years would say that he “grew,” but his alteration was not like an acorn becoming an oak. It was like a human being making and remaking his understanding by deliberate and continual reflection. Lincoln had been educating himself all his life, and that very much included reeducation about the moral possibilities of American society. White prejudice, while strong, could be diminished by experience and by the growing appeal of the original egalitarian ideal. Insofar as colonization had been a ploy, a sop, a sugarcoating to emancipation, it had served its purpose; insofar as he had believed it to be a real possibility for the American future—he changed his mind.
HERE IS MY FRIEND DOUGLASS
WHILE HE WAS WORKING on his letter to Conkling, Lincoln had his first meeting with Frederick Douglass. His meetings with Douglass were, by Douglass’s repeated testimony, the meetings of equals—more so, Douglass would say, than he felt with any other leader.
Douglass’s appraisals of candidate Lincoln and President Lincoln’s policies would go up and down, but his testimony about his respectful personal treatment by President Lincoln, once they first met on August 10, 1863, would be strong and unwavering. Douglass, urged to see the president to object to mistreatments of black soldiers in the Union army, had expected to wait half a day to see the swamped president. Douglass’s own account helps to recapture some of the immense social distance imposed by the caste system of that time and place.
I need not say that at the time I undertook this mission it required much more nerve than a similar one would require now.[This was published in 1881.] The distance then between the black and the white American citizen was immeasurable. I was an ex-slave, identified with a despised race, and yet I was to meet the most exalted person in this great republic…I could not know what kind of a reception would be accorded me. I might be told to go home and mind my business…or I might be refused an interview altogether.
Douglass was not only not refused an interview, and not kept waiting half a day, but was summoned to see the president within moments of his arrival, leaving others who were waiting to see the president sputtering.
And then of the moment of meeting with the president himself, Douglass would write:
I entered the room with a moderate estimate of my own consequence, and yet there I was to talk with, and even to advise, the head man of a great nation…I was never more quickly or more completely put at ease in the presence of a great man than in that of Abraham Lincoln.
Commenting afterward on the meeting, Douglass would emphasize the personal respect Lincoln showed him, this treatment as an equal. “I have just come from President Lincoln. He treated me as a man; he did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the color of our skins!”
For Lincoln’s part, he would later say of Douglass himself that “considering the conditions from which Douglass rose, and the position to which he had attained, he was, in his [Lincoln’s] judgment, one of the most meritorious men in America.”
In the months after this meeting Douglass would be disappointed by Lincoln on some particulars, but the personal respect would remain.
Douglass wrote years later, “In all my interviews with Mr. Lincoln, I was impressed with his entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race. He was the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color, and I thought that all the more remarkable because he came from a state where there were black laws.”
Benjamin Quarles, the twentieth-century African American historian whose excellent book Lincoln and the Negro serves as a considerable corrective to some more recent treatments, surveys President Lincoln’s encounters with black persons. He formulated Lincoln’s manner:
He treated Negroes as they wanted to be treated—as human beings…Negro visitors to the White House were treated without false heartiness, but without any sign of disdain. Never condescending, Lincoln did not talk down to Negroes, nor did he spell out his thoughts in the one-syllable language of the first reader.
A speech that Frederick Douglass would give in the much different atmosphere of a later time—at the dedication of the freedmen’s monument in Lincoln Park in 1876—would be quoted repeatedly in assessments of Lincoln’s racial views in the twentieth century. Phrases from that 1876 speech, taken somewhat out of context, would be featured: “He was preeminently the white man’s president” and “We [blacks] are at best only his step-children.”
He would be quoted as having said that for Lincoln the black man was “only a stepbrother.” But there surely were some moments at least when for President Lincoln, the commander in chief who had called them into battle, the black man in a Union army uniform was a brother indeed. And whatever the degree of his fraternal fellow feeling may have been, he came to have, as he saw it, a potent obligation both to liberated slaves and to black soldiers in the Union army. Some of the strongest examples in Lincoln’s life of his invoking an ethic of unequivocal duty have to do with black Union soldiers.
Even in that speech there were other passages that qualified those stark assertions and showed some appreciation of Lincoln’s actual political situation.*55 And Douglass showed more appreciation in earlier presentations. Michael Burlingame has unearthed two speeches that Douglass gave in 1865 that have been, in the recent atmosphere, neglected. One is a eulogy that Douglass delivered at Cooper Union on June 1, 1865, in which he included the assertion that Lincoln was “emphatically the black man’s president,” so that scholars and polemicists of the future are presented with the opportunity to use dueling Douglass quotations. Douglass said at Cooper Union that Lincoln was “the first [president] to show any respect for [blacks’] rights as men…He was the first American President who…rose above the prejudice of his time, and country.”
CIVILIZED WARFARE PERMITS NO DISTINCTION AS TO COLOR
DOUGLASS had come to talk to Lincoln about unequal treatment of black soldiers—they were paid at a lower rate than white soldiers, were more often assigned to fatigue duty than combat, and were rarely commissioned as officers. All were injustices that it would take time to correct, insofar as they were corrected. But the most serious problem was the treatment of black soldiers by Confederates after capture.
One practice was to reenslave or (in the case of those who had been free) to enslave them. But another widespread response was summary execution. Confederate secretary of war James Seddon said, as we have noted in Chapter 14: “We ought never to be inconvenienced by such prisoners…summary execution must therefore be inflicted on those taken.” The numbers are not known because the Confederate refusal to acknowledge them as legitimate prisoners of war meant that they did not keep adequate records.
Lincoln’s response was notable both for its severity (unusual in this most unretaliatory of public men) and for its explicit emphasis on the racial aspect. He had the War Department draft what was explicitly called an order of retaliation and signed it on July 30, 1863. Four times in this short document he specifically rejected any distinction among Union soldiers as to “color”:
1. Every governm
ent has the duty to protect its citizens “of whatever class, color, or condition.”
2. The laws of civilized warfare “permit no distinction as to color.”
3. “[T]o sell or enslave any captured person on account of his color…is a relapse into barbarism.” (The head of the Confederate Bureau of War had said, “The enlistment of our slaves is a barbarity”—so there were sharply contrasting convictions about what was barbaric.)
4. “[I]f the enemy shall sell or enslave anyone because of his color, the offense shall be punished by retaliation upon the enemy’s prisoners.”
The specific order for that retaliation was stark: “It is therefore ordered that for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed.”
It is to Lincoln’s credit that in the depth of his original righteous indignation he signed this order, and it is also to his credit that in the event—in the scrupulous care of his later reflection—he never carried it out.
In the next year, April 1864, there came a terrible test. President Lincoln described the “rumor” of this event in an insertion in the speech he gave at the Baltimore Sanitary Fair on April 18, 1864, six days after it had happened: “the massacre, by the rebel forces, at Fort Pillow, in the west end of Tennessee, on the Mississippi River, of some three hundred colored soldiers and their white officers who had just been overpowered by their assailants.”
Lincoln explicitly recognized a public anxiety about whether the government was doing its full duty to the black soldier. He fully acknowledged his own personal accountability, as the one who had initiated the use of black troops, now for their fate, “to the American people, to the Christian world, to history, and on my final account to God.” He specifically stated the principle that had to be applied: “Having determined to use the Negro as a soldier, there is no way but to give him all the protection given to any other soldiers.” He admitted, however, that it would be difficult to apply that principle, as events were to prove: “The difficulty is not in stating the principle, but in practically applying it.” He insisted that the government was doing, or trying to do, its part: “It is a mistake to suppose the government is indifferent to this matter, or is not doing the best it can in regard to it.” At the end of his remarks in Baltimore he said, twice, that if what was rumored had indeed happened at Fort Pillow, then “the retribution will surely come.” “It will be a matter of grave consideration” exactly what form it will take, but retribution must come.
But before one reached that point, one must be sure one knew what truly happened. As in the cases of young soldiers condemned to be executed, and of Southern women wishing to pass through the Union lines, and of Indians in Minnesota whom many white residents wanted to execute en masse, and in many other cases, Lincoln wanted to make sure the particular facts in the individual case were correct before he made a judgment. Going clear back to the days of the fury against the abolitionists, and of his Lyceum Address, he knew how “passion” could swamp “reason,” including the reason that patiently seeks out the facts. In Baltimore he said: “We do not to-day know that a colored soldier, or white officer commanding colored soldiers, has been massacred by the rebels when made a prisoner. We fear it, believe it, I may say, but we do not know it.” And to take severe action on the basis of rumor, before one knew what had happened, could lead to a radically wrong act indeed: “To take the life of one of their prisoners, on the assumption that they murder ours, might be too serious, too cruel a mistake.” It certainly would have been—and in the event, even when Fort Pillow was proved true, it was “too serious, too cruel” “to take the life of one of their prisoners.”
“We are having the Fort Pillow affair thoroughly investigated,” he said in Baltimore on April 18. By May 3 the investigation had reached a conclusion, and the president wrote to the cabinet:
It is now quite certain that a large number of our colored soldiers, and their white officers, were, by the rebel forces, massacred after they had surrendered, at the recent capture of Fort Pillow…I will thank you to prepare, and give me in writing your opinion as to what course, the government should take.
What to do? In the two cabinet meetings at which the response to Fort Pillow was discussed—an ethics seminar in the highest reaches of American government—three members of the cabinet (Bates, Montgomery Blair, and the new appointee who was briefly secretary of the interior following Caleb Smith) were, in spite of that order of the president’s the previous year, against any use of hostages for retaliation. There should be punishment only for the specific perpetrators of the terrible deeds.
Four members of the cabinet—Seward, Chase, Stanton, and Welles—were for selecting hostages from among Confederate prisoners of war. And apparently the president, also, believed that more was needed than the impotent outlawing of the specific individuals who perpetrated the massacre.
Chief among those perpetrators was the brilliant but notorious Nathan Bedford Forrest, an outstanding Confederate general who in his earlier life had been a slave trader and who in his future life would be a founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Forrest had explicitly said that “I regard captured negroes as I do other property, and not as captured soldiers,” and that “no quarter” would be shown black troops. He is reported to have called out, riding among the wounded and the dead, that he knew some of them: “They’ve been in my nigger yard in Memphis.” Other Confederate officers were reported to have shouted, “Kill the niggers.” But the testimony about Fort Pillow also stated that some Confederate officers and men tried to stop the massacre. Carl Sandburg quotes one Confederate officer shouting this unlikely warning: “Boys, I will have you arrested if you don’t stop killing them boys.”
On December 8, 1863, before Fort Pillow, Lincoln had issued the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, in which he had made one exception to the generous offer that was grounded in deeds rather than official positions. The amnesty did not extend to “all who engaged in any way in treating colored persons or white persons, in charge of such, otherwise than lawfully as prisoners of war.”
On May 17 Lincoln drafted a letter to Secretary of War Stanton asking him to notify the insurgents, through channels, that the government had proof of the “massacre” (the word he used) “after [the soldiers of the United States] had ceased resistance, and asked quarter.” He went on to say that the government had set apart by name a number of “insurgent” officers, held as prisoners of war, equivalent to the number of Union soldiers massacred at Fort Pillow. If the insurgents would give assurance, he wrote, “as nearly perfect as the case admits” by July 1 “that there shall be no similar massacre” and that no officer or soldier of the United States, “whether white or colored” (he specifically said), “shall be treated other than according to the laws of war,” then the Confederate set-asides would be returned to the regular conditions of prisoners of war. The implied threat, of course, was that if there were another Fort Pillow, if black soldiers in the Union army were again slaughtered, enslaved, or otherwise mistreated, maybe even if the Confederates gave no assurance by July 1—then something else might happen.
Before he explained this implied threat, he specifically said (a continual Lincolnian doctrine) that governments should not act for “revenge” and that “blood cannot restore blood”—which is to say, presumably, that these hostages (all officers) were not to be executed for backward-looking reasons, in revenge by blood for Fort Pillow. But they were to be set aside, by name, and in the exact number of those killed at Fort Pillow. One might say that Lincoln was trying to devise a policy of what would in the next century be called deterrence—a way to stop an action by an opponent by an implicit threat.
But suppose the Confederate government gave no assurance by July 1? Worse—suppose there were indeed another Fort Pillow? What then? Would one in the moment of truth execute those hostages? Presumably in thinking this through to the moment of truth, Lincoln saw the difficulties, both moral and practical, for any such d
eed. These Confederate officers selected by name from one’s prisoners of war were, in relation to Fort Pillow, innocent. If you answer that officers in the Confederate armed forces were not “innocent” in the law of war, as civilians are, one would have to say, still, that their noninnocence pertains only to their participation in an objective force that may justly and of necessity be resisted; when they are captured, and become prisoners of war, they are no longer part of that objective force and are protected by the law of war from having their lives used as pawns. Hostage killing is not something we should do. Gideon Welles said such a policy would be “barbarous.” And here, as so often happens in life but particularly in war, the moral intersected with the practical: Could one imagine that if the Union executed Confederate prisoners of war the Confederacy would not reciprocate?
And that would set in motion a vicious and unending bloody circle of retaliation. To Attorney General Bates, it would be a compact for mutual slaughter, a cartel of blood and murder.
The Union threats of retaliation for the treatment of black soldiers may have had some effect. James McPherson writes that when Confederates put captured black soldiers to work on fortifications under enemy fire, Union generals put an equal number of captured Confederates to work under enemy fire—and the practice stopped. That “retaliation” had a kind of moral equilibrium that worked.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 39
