“For more than forty years”: This quote and those that follow are from Dean’s letter in Gilbert Dean to Abraham Lincoln, February 18, 1862, AL Papers.
“Captain Nathaniel Gordon is under sentence”: Edward Dicey, Spectator of America (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), p. 59.
“[Y]ou have amongst you”: CW, 2:264.
“If it is a sacred right”: CW, 2:267.
“prolongs the time”: Edward Bates to Abraham Lincoln, February 19, 1862, AL Papers.
“whereas, it has seemed to me probable”: Stay of Execution, CW, 5:128–29.
The authorities moved the execution: Dicey, Spectator, pp. 59–60.
“It is a subject of gratulation”: CW, 5:46–47.
“It was held in a rented room”: Howard, American Slavers, p. 63.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN. IN GIVING FREEDOM TO THE SLAVE, WE ASSURE FREEDOM TO THE FREE
That conviction ran so deep that even the Anti-Slavery Society: “We fully and unanimously recognize the sovereignty of each State, to legislate exclusively on the subject of the slavery which is tolerated within its limits; we concede that Congress, under the present national compact, has no right to interfere with any of the slave States, in relation to this momentous subject: But we maintain that Congress has a right, and is solemnly bound, to suppress the domestic slave trade between the several States, and to abolish slavery in those portions of our territory which the Constitution has placed under its exclusive jurisdiction.” American Anti-Slavery Society, “Declaration of Sentiments” (1833), in Louis Ruchames, ed., The Abolitionists: A Collection of Their Writings (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963), p. 78.
the cabinet members all affirmed it: Secretary Welles, expressing his surprise when Lincoln mentioned his proclamation in mid-July, wrote, “Every member of the Cabinet…including the President, considered it a local, domestic question appertaining to the states respectively.” Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 1:71.
“a drop of the creature”: Phillips in his letter to his wife, Ann, probably botched Lincoln’s story; he was not a man well attuned to Lincoln’s humorous style. He had Lincoln saying the antislavery ingredient was “unbeknownst” to Congress, but of course the point of the story is that the recipient of the drink really wants, without being able to admit it, the secret dollop, and that was Lincoln wanting the unadmitted antislavery feature in the message. Lincoln used this anecdote on other occasions to illustrate other points. In Memoirs of William T. Sherman, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton & Co., 1887), 2:320, Lincoln tells it to suggest that Jefferson Davis be allowed to escape, unbeknownst to Lincoln; in Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, 2 vols. (New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1886), 2:533, it is an Irishman who has taken the pledge, and the point is allowing Governor Smith of Virginia and a few others to leave the country, unbeknownst to Lincoln; and in the memoirs of an abolitionist, Autobiography: Memories and Experiences of Moncure Daniel Conway, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), 1:345–46, a “thirsty soul in Maine” is the subject and the point is similar to that told by Wendell Phillips—some antislavery action slipped into policy, unbeknownst to the policy makers.
“You say you will not fight to free negroes”: Lincoln’s great letter to Conkling and the people in Springfield has the date August 26, 1863, and is found in CW, 6:406–10.
“Here is the first indication”: Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 102.
There was a bit of history: On May 26, 1836, the House of Representatives was voting on a set of resolutions dealing with a recent pesky influx of petitions against slavery in the District. The first resolution was simply the axiomatic statement, taken for granted by everybody, even including the new abolitionists, that the Constitution did not allow Congress to interfere with slavery in the states. It was expected that House members would routinely vote aye. But when the clerk called the roll, the very first to vote, a crotchety and balding seventy-year-old sitting in the front row, began arguing (to shouts of “Order! Order!”) that if allowed five minutes he could prove the resolution “false and utterly untrue.” John Quincy Adams was not allowed to make his point on that occasion, but he did so later in connection with a discussion of the Seminole War: “From the instant you slave-holding states become the theater of war…the war powers of Congress extend to the interference with slavery in every way it can be interfered with.” Five years later, in 1841, a much troubled congressman expressed “his astonishment and horror at what had fallen from the gentleman from Massachusetts,” as he understood it, that a servile war would mean the end of the Constitution. Not at all, explained Adams—he had pointed out how the Constitution could then be preserved by using its war power for universal emancipation. This explanation did not end the congressman’s astonishment and horror.
Adams’s shocking claim had found this horrifying power, in wartime, in Congress, because Congress declared war, raised armies, appropriated funds, and passed laws. But Lincoln had claimed to act, in the emergency of 1861, as executive and commander in chief, on the basis of his war power. And with the migration of the war power to the presidency came that astonishing power that Adams had shocked Congress with: as a war measure, out of military necessity, to free slaves.
In his old age Adams had as a young follower in Massachusetts, Charles Sumner. On April 12, 1861, learning that the president would hold and provision Fort Sumter, Senator Charles Sumner called on the new president and told him what he had learned from John Quincy Adams: “Then the war power will be in motion, and with it great consequences.” When the Confederates attacked and reduced the fort, Sumner told Lincoln: “Under the war power the right had come to him to emancipate the slaves.” David Donald, Charles Sumner (New York: Da Capo Press, 1920); part 1, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, p. 17, and part 2, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man, p. 388. Sumner telling Lincoln what he had learned from Adams is the very last line in the earlier book.
“Bishop Fowler in his noted lecture”: William E. Barton, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925), 2:390. Ward had recently sent Lincoln, an admirer, a copy of his new collection.
Chase in his diary: Salmon P. Chase, Inside Lincoln’s Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase, ed. David Herbert Donald (New York: Longmans, Green, 1954), p. 149.
“hesitating a little”: This presidential hesitation appears in parentheses in Chase’s diary entry. Ibid., p. 150.
“perhaps the greatest document”: Don E. Fehrenbacher, quoted in Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), p. 105.
“Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation constituted”: Ibid., p. 141.
“Freeing the slaves and saving the Union”: Phillip S. Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1994), p. xv.
“recognizes”: Chase, Inside, p. 151.
“He [Lincoln] will appeal to the black blood of the African”: London Times, October 7, 1982, quoted in John Hope Franklin, The Emancipation Proclamation (New York: Doubleday, 1963), p. 73.
“Few Confederate editors”: Ibid.
“Wherever Negroes were”: Ibid., p. 93.
“However deficient in majesty or grandeur”: Ira Berlin et al., Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 49–50.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN. THE PROMPT VINDICATION OF HIS HONOR
The materials for Doctor Wright’s case are found in Dr. D. M. Wright (Citizen) file #MM-631, Entry 15, Court Martial Case Files, Record Group 153, Records of the Judge Advocate General (Army), in the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. Almost all of the material in this chapter comes from that file; it includes the record of his trial, the transcript of his own fateful address in self-defense; the materials submitted in his defense—the letters from fellow ci
tizens; Judge Advocate General Holt’s summary of the case and his recommendation; and President Lincoln’s handwritten decision.
President Lincoln himself had been present: Chester D. Bradley, “President Lincoln’s Campaign Against the Merrimac,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 51 (Spring 1958), p. 77; William E. Baringer, “On Enemy Soil: President Lincoln’s Norfolk Campaign,” Abraham Lincoln Quarterly 7 (March 1952), pp. 8–10.
“human beings of an inferior race”: Jefferson Davis’s response to the Emancipation Proclamation can be found in, among many other sources, Harper’s Weekly, January 31, 1863. Davis’s clause about the execrable massacre that the proclamation would bring forth is sometimes misquoted.
“definitely stood a step above no law”: Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 166.
“Trials by military commission were all recorded”: Ibid., p. 162.
“their quantity was limited enough”: Ibid., p. 166.
“But when Lincoln defied Holt’s advice”: Ibid.
“his excellency A. Lincoln”: Lemuel J. Bowden to Abraham Lincoln, July 31, 1863, AL Papers. Wright’s other lawyer, L. H. Chandler, addressed a letter to Lincoln the following day, also held in the Library of Congress collection.
The petitions that poured into the White House: The petitions from the citizens of Norfolk, and an accompanying letter from Wright’s lawyers, are dated, respectively, October 17 and 21, 1863, AL Papers.
a plea she would later write: The letter from Wright’s wife, “Mrs. P.M. Wright to Mrs. Stone,” is dated October 19, 1863, AL Papers.
proposed another “alienist,” one John P. Gray: CW, 6:437–38.
“[B]eing satisfied that no proper question remained open”: Lincoln’s approval of Wright’s sentence is in CW, 6:505, and OR, ser. 2, vol. 6, p. 360.
“It would be useless”: Lincoln’s note declining to see “Mrs. Dr. Wright” is in CW, 6:522.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN. AND THE PROMISE BEING MADE, MUST BE KEPT
Some slaves did work: William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 90–91.
Jamaica had ten blacks for every one white: Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), p. 100.
“A geographical line has been drawn”: “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” December 24, 1860, AP.
“chosen their leader”: Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), p. 48.
“[M]ost slaves learned”: Ira Berlin et al., Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 11.
“The moment the Union army moved into slave territory”: W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (Philadelphia: Albert Saifer, 1935), pp. 62–63.
Racism led to some horror stories: Bruce Catton quotes a white woman working with refugees as saying, “The barbarities from our soldiers are unparalleled.” Catton, Never Call Retreat (1965; repr. New York: Pocket Books, 1967), pp. 116–17.
It is reported: DuBois, Reconstruction, p. 60.
“passing quickly through”: Butler wrote to Governor Hicks:
I have understood…that some apprehensions were entertained of an insurrection of the negro population of this neighborhood. I am anxious to convince all classes of persons that the forces under my command are not here in any way to interfere with, or countenance any interference with, the laws of the State. I am therefore ready to co-operate with your excellency in suppressing, most promptly and effectively, any insurrection against the laws of Maryland. I beg, therefore, that you announce publicly that any portion of the forces under my command is at your excellency’s disposal to act immediately for the preservation and quietness of the peace of this community.
OR, ser. 1, vol. 2, pp. 589–90, 593.
Butler corrected an “ill-advised designation” of men under his command. In insistent italics he said: “They are not Northern troops; they are part of the whole militia of the United States, obeying the call of the President.” OR, ser. 1, vol. 2, p. 590.
“It has been represented”: OR, ser. 2, vol. 1, p. 778.
slavery and martial law: Hunter’s claim that martial law and slavery are incompatible has sometimes provoked amused dismissal by historians, but perhaps it was not as far-fetched as it sounds. In Hunter’s view it reflected the theory that had been developed in abolitionist circles: that slavery could exist only by specific positive local(“municipal”) enactments and ceased to exist whenever and wherever those enactments did not apply—as in waters beyond state jurisdictions, as in the territories, and now as under U.S. martial law supplanting the laws of Carolina and Georgia. That American abolitionist theory reflected a ruling by an English judge, Lord Mansfield, in a famous case in 1772, Somerset v. Stewart, “that slavery is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law.”
By this theory abolitionists had, while recognizing perforce the claims of states under the American federal system, squeezed the legitimacy of slavery down to its smallest application. They took Southerners’ continual claim that slavery was strictly a state matter and applied it back against them: slavery was strictly a state matter. Under the universal moral order that the American Constitution reflected, all human beings were by nature free; slavery could exist only where states made specific positive law enacting it, and it became illegitimate immediately outside the jurisdiction of that “municipal” law. Slaves—property in Kentucky under state law—abruptly become men when they escaped into Ohio. Or revolted on shipboard on the high seas. Or were taken into a federal territory. (Hence the Dred Scott decision was invalid.) Abolitionists had employed this theory, in the decades before the war, to shrink slavery’s legal base and challenge it on all sides—to the horror, to be sure, of its defenders. Now here was a general applying that theory under Union army occupation: the “municipal” law of South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina now no longer applied, under the martial law of the army of the United States, and therefore all “slaves” abruptly reverted to their natural status, which was freedom.
“I reply that no regiment”: Edward A. Miller, Jr., Lincoln’s Abolitionist General: The Biography of David Hunter (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), p. 106.
A Kentucky colleague: Ibid.
“altogether void”: Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 74.
“Lincoln repudiated”: Miller, Abolitionist General, p. 102.
“a mass of data”: Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (1962; repr. New York: Da Capo Press, 1991), p. 22.
But in another case, embarrassing to his admirers: Ibid., pp. 22–24.
“I never was in a meeting”: Ibid., p. 15.
“a black’s dream of freedom”: William W. Freehling, “Absurd Issues: Colonization as a Test Case,” in The Reintegration of American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 146.
Even the great opponent: Ibid., p. 147.
“nadir”: Freehling, South vs. South, pp. 108, 109.
sheer impossibility of the numbers: At an earlier stage of the colonization movement, the famous Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier, a committed “immediatist” abolitionist, produced this sardonic calculation of colonization’s success:
Let facts speak. The Colonization Society was organized in 1817. It has two hundred and eighteen auxiliary societies. The legislatures of fourteen states have recommended it. Contributions have poured into its treasury from every quarter of the United States. Addresses in its favor have been heard from all our pulpits. It has been in operation sixteen years. During this period nearly
one million human beings have died in slavery, and the number of slaves have increased more than half a million, or in round numbers, 550,000.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 59
