President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman

by William Lee Miller

  Lincoln did not send the letter. Writing Tilton in October, Douglass said: “I have…feared that Mr. Lincoln would say something of the sort, but he has been perfectly silent on the point, and I think he will remain so.”*76

  IN LATER YEARS Douglass would scarcely mention this inside-politics discussion of the Robinson draft in public; another, much bigger item was on the agenda. Lincoln had an astonishing project to propose.

  Douglass described the background to Tilton: “The increasing opposition to the war, in the North, and the mad cry against it, because it was being made an abolition war, alarmed Mr. Lincoln, and made him apprehensive that a peace might be forced upon him which would leave still in slavery all who had not come within our lines.” Lincoln had told Eaton what he now said “in a regretful tone” to Douglass, that the slaves are not coming “so rapidly and so numerously to us” as he had hoped. Douglass replied that “the slaveholders knew how to keep such things from their slaves, and probably very few knew of his proclamation.”

  “Well,” Lincoln said, according to Douglass’s report, “I want you to set about devising some means of making them acquainted with it, and for bringing them into our lines.”

  The president of the United States was proposing to this private citizen, an ex-slave, the most extraordinary of all the features of this extraordinary meeting: that they collaborate in a kind of government-sponsored underground railroad that would get the word to slaves on plantations in the South and help them get behind Union lines.

  That Lincoln made this remarkable proposal underlines two facts: one, that he did indeed expect to be defeated; and, two, that he did indeed, even in prospective defeat, want to do all he could to bring people out of slavery.

  Douglass was impressed: “What he said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him.”

  Ten days later Douglass wrote Lincoln from Rochester saying he had conversed with “several trustworthy and Patriotic Colored men” about Lincoln’s proposal. “All…concur in the wisdom and benevolence of the Idea,” he wrote, and then made a distinction, “and some of them think it practicable.” Lincoln’s proposal was to appoint a general agent. Let him then employ twenty or twenty-five good men, “having the cause at heart,” empowered to visit the front nearest the most slaves, and in turn appoint sub-agents (paid “a sum not exceeding two dollars a day”) who know the territory and could conduct “squads of slaves” safely within loyal lines.

  The letter setting forth this astonishing program was dated August 29, which proved to be the beginning of the week in which the political world underwent a thorough reversal that would make this Douglass-Lincoln project moot.

  On the evening of August 19, the busy day he had met with Douglass, Lincoln rode back out to Soldiers’ Home and had a discussion with two Wisconsin politicians: Alexander W. Randall, who had handed him the Robinson letter, and a sometime judge named Joseph T. Mills. (William Dole, the commissioner of Indian affairs, joined the conversation late.) Mills wrote out such a thorough account of this meeting that the editors made an exception to their rule against such secondary accounts and included it in Lincoln’s Collected Works.*77

  Mills found Lincoln to be “not the pleasant joker I had expected” but an impressive mind. He managed to get down persisting Lincolnian affirmations:

  1. First, Lincoln would insist, as he had throughout, that saving the Union was his only purpose. “My enemies say I am now carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition. It is & will be carried on so long as I am President for the sole purpose of restoring the Union.”

  2. But, second, emancipation was essential to that objective: “No human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done.” “The slightest acquaintance with arithmetic will prove” the utterly practical necessity of employing emancipation, for the sole purpose of saving the Union. “Freedom has given us control of 200,000 able bodied men, born & raised on the southern soil. It will give us more yet. Just so much it has sub[t]racted from the strength of our enemies.” “Abandon all the posts now possessed by black men surrender all these advantages to the enemy, & we would be compelled to abandon the war in 3 weeks.”

  3. And, third, having proclaimed emancipation and recruited blacks into the army, Lincoln now had both a practical and a moral obligation—a categorical duty—to the black soldiers: “There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson & Olustee to their masters to conciliate the South. I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing.” Port Hudson, fought in Louisiana in May 1863, had been one of the earliest battles in which black soldiers had acquitted themselves bravely; Olustee in Florida in February 1864 had been a more recent one. “The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends & enemies, come what will.”

  Here is another example of the “chain of steel” moral resolve that runs through Lincoln’s career, setting the moral boundaries to his usual weighing and balancing of consequences: “Let grass grow where it may…this must not be allowed…come what will.”

  On the following Tuesday, August 23, in the aftermath of all these events, a remarkable episode occurred in the cabinet meeting. Lincoln asked each member to sign, without reading, the cover of a folded paper.*78 Inside the fold was a brief handwritten statement from Lincoln that began (as would be learned when it was opened some months later) with the statement that it now seemed “exceedingly probable” that he would not be reelected. “You think I don’t know I am going to be beaten,” he was reported to have said, “but I do and unless some great change takes place badly beaten.” The blind memorandum the cabinet had signed read in full:

  This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards. A. LINCOLN

  Remarkably, Lincoln, the conscientious Union supporter, was specifying his duty in defeat—to save as much of the Union for as long as he could. And he made his cabinet witness to his intention. He expected to lose.

  Meanwhile, on the day before that cabinet meeting, the Republican (or now, National Union) committee had met with fear and trembling in New York. According to the letter that the chairman, Henry Raymond, would write to Lincoln, Lincoln’s “staunchest friends in every state” had said that “the tide is setting strongly against us.” Congressman E. B. Washburne wrote that “were an election to be held now in Illinios we should be beaten. Mr. Cameron writes that Pennsylvania is against us. Governor Morton writes that nothing but the most strenuous efforts can carry Indiana. This state [New York]…would go 50,000 against us tomorrow.” Raymond wrote in his long summary to Lincoln: “Nothing but the most resolute and decided action…can save the country from falling into hostile hands.” One of the two great causes is “the fear…that we are not to have peace…under this administration until slavery is abandoned.” The suspicion is “widely diffused that we can have peace with Union if we would.”

  These widespread illusions, said the top Republican leadership through Raymond’s letter, could not be dispelled by reason or denunciation—a bold act was necessary. And they had a bold act to propose: Lincoln should appoint a commission to make a peace offer to Jefferson Davis, on the sole condition of “acknowledging the supremacy of the Constitution—all other questions to be settled in a convention of the people.” The point was what was left out: no requirement as to slavery.

  The committee, “in obvious depression and panic,” then came to Washington three days later to promote its view, and Raymond would meet with Lincoln. The president in the meantime had drafted a letter that is the core evidence that he might have been tempted by their proposal. The letter was addressed to Raymond and, seeming to accept their proposal, told
Raymond himself to carry it out. This “experimental” letter of August 24, as Nicolay and Hay call it, “thereafter slept undisturbed, in the envelope in which he placed it, for nearly a quarter of a century.”

  When however the long sleep of that letter was at last disturbed, some less inclined to give Lincoln the benefit of every doubt than were his two secretaries have wondered whether just for a moment, on August 24, when he drafted that letter, he allowed himself to consider the ploy Raymond and the committee proposed. One of the drawbacks of being not only president but also a monument among presidents is that every scribble you ever made on any scrap of paper that survives is not only kept and printed but seriously examined.

  Lincoln’s draft addressed to Raymond—written on August 24, 1864—said, “You will propose [to Jefferson Davis]…that upon the restoration of the Union and national authority, the war shall cease at once, all remaining questions to be left for adjustment by peaceful modes.” The large “remaining question,” of course, would be slavery.

  Did Lincoln seriously entertain the possibility of doing this? As Raymond’s letter had said, Jefferson Davis would certainly have turned down the proposal, and his doing so would have demonstrated to the bewitched and self-deceived public that it was not Lincoln’s insistence on abandoning slavery that kept the war going but Davis’s insistence on disunion. The Raymond committee’s proposal would thus have been only a device to educate the public. Accepting it would not have meant abandoning emancipation, a proponent of Raymond’s plan might say, but only floating the possibility in order to expose the real resistance to peace—the rebels’ insistence on separation—and thus win the election. It would have been a piece of mild chicanery with that political object.

  But if Lincoln thought about it on the twenty-fourth, he did not do it on the twenty-fifth.

  On Thursday morning, August 25, Gideon Welles called on the president at about eleven o’clock and, in a way one cannot imagine happening in later administrations, floated right in: “I went in as usual unannounced, the waiter throwing open the door as I approached.” Welles had blundered into an enormously important meeting, although he did not know it. “I found Messrs. Seward, Fessenden, and Stanton with Raymond, Chairman of the Executive National Committee in consultation with the President.”

  “The President,” wrote the bemused Welles in his diary, “was making some statement as to a document of his” and kept on talking “as if there had been no addition to the company, and as if I had been expected and belonged there.” We may surely infer that this was the draft that the president had written the day before, authorizing Raymond to try peace talks with Davis, and that this was the meeting with Raymond to discuss it.

  “It was easy to perceive that Seward, Stanton, and Raymond were disconcerted by my appearance,” Welles wrote. Fessenden, Chase’s replacement as secretary of the treasury, got up and whispered in the president’s ear. Someone politely asked Welles a question about naval matters—his home field—and after answering, Welles got the point and left the room and let them make their important decisions without him.

  A memorandum by John Nicolay recorded what happened in that meeting. “The President and the stronger half of the cabinet, Seward, Stanton, and Fessenden, held a consultation with him [Raymond] and showed him that they had thoroughly considered and discussed the proposition of his letter of the twenty-second.” And rejected it. After hearing their reasons, Raymond “readily concurred” that to send such a commission to Richmond “would be worse than losing the presidential contest—it would be ignominiously surrendering it in advance.” The new birth of freedom had come to be so integral to the preservation of the Union that even suggesting abandoning emancipation would be surrendering.

  Perhaps Lincoln’s August 24 draft authorizing Raymond’s project had been merely “experimental,” as Nicolay and Hay say it was, “to facilitate examination and discussion of the question,” and he never really intended to go forward with it. But if he did for the moment entertain the possibility—under the immense pressure of impending defeat and immense frustration with the popular illusion that his insistence on emancipation stood in the way of peace, and in response to an intervention he had to take seriously after all, by the committee of his party—then between the time he wrote the draft on August 24 and the eleven o’clock meeting on August 25, he saw that even hinting at setting aside emancipation as a political ploy would have been a catastrophic betrayal.

  Whether or not Lincoln had been truly tempted, the fact is that he took no overt public action. He did not send the letter to Raymond; he did not authorize the commission to Richmond; he did not mail the letter to Robinson saying “Let him [Davis] try me.” He did not take any public action that would indicate that he was willing to let go of emancipation as a requirement for peace.

  In the long after years of Lincoln’s legend, a distinguished professor at a great university, when he reached this point in the Lincoln story, would (so it is reported) apply to Lincoln himself the famous pronouncement of Lincoln’s youthful hero Henry Clay, “I had rather be Right than be President.” Lincoln himself would have been unlikely to use such a formulation. He believed that it was hugely important—not for reasons of ego or personal vindication but for the nation’s good—that he be reelected, and the verdict of future wisdom would agree with him. The defeat of Lincoln in 1864 would have been catastrophic. Moreover, Clay’s pronouncement has a touch of moral bragging that was not characteristic of Lincoln.*79 Although Lincoln on a number of occasions, including this one, would reach boundary-line firmness, he was a man for moral reasoning, not for moral posturing. About old Henry Clay: it is not clear that when he made his famous pronouncement, he really had the choice. Lincoln did have something like the choice. He was already a sitting president. He was facing an election that he seemed likely to lose but still might win. His party committee proposed a high-stakes gamble designed to keep him (and them) in office. Lincoln judged it to be morally repulsive and practically ineffective and said no.

  Of course he did not make any self-praising public drama out of it. He did not announce that some advisers had proposed this popular course, but he had rejected it because it would be wrong. But he did decide it would be wrong.

  NEW OCCASIONS TEACH NEW DUTIES

  LINCOLN HAD proclaimed emancipation as a military necessity and therefore as his duty under his oath to preserve the Union. He had included in that proclamation the recruitment of black soldiers, an action of immense significance: it guaranteed a United States that could not be defined by race. Slaves poured into Union army camps. Freed slaves and free blacks volunteered for and were recruited into the Union armed services in numbers that reached 186,017 in the army and 10,000 in the navy. Having at first been reluctant to arm blacks, Lincoln now not only acquiesced in their arming but took initiatives to recruit black men into the Union army.

  The Emancipation Proclamation would transform the war: already just two weeks after it was issued Lincoln could describe the rebel effort to the workingmen of Manchester, England, as “the attempt to overthrow this government, which was built upon the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis of human slavery.” The following November he could say at Gettysburg that the “honored dead” had given “the last full measure of devotion” in order not only to defend the old freedom but also that there be “a new birth of freedom.”

  These developments would reorder Lincoln’s duties yet again. He now had acquired a giant obligation to the “whole family of man,” to whom he had presented the American war as a contest between slavery and human rights, and to the American people as the occasion for that new birth. Ending slavery was of course a great desideratum not only for its primary victims but for all citizens and for the nation’s moral meaning.

  But Lincoln also now had acquired much more stringent duties to some specific human beings: to the already liberated slaves, to preserve their liberty; to those still in slavery,
to bring them into the promised freedom; and above all to the black men who “with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet” would help mankind on to the “great consummation.” It bespoke the intensity of his felt obligation to those black warriors that he took the trouble to prod his imagination to produce that image. These were human beings who had acted in response to deeds he had done and words he had spoken. The resounding echo of the proclamation he had issued had encouraged the “contrabands” to flee their masters and swarm into Union army camps; the soldiers had joined the Union army as volunteers or as recruits in response ultimately to his initiatives as commander in chief. He had made promises: “And the promise being made, must be kept.”

  Lincoln had made statements of his duty to the free slaves and to the black Union soldiers that were as strict as anything he wrote about his duty to the Union or about any other obligation whatever.

  It is true that Lincoln justified emancipation throughout in utterly practical terms. But those strictly practical justifications were nestled in a surrounding moral justification that would keep breaking through.