Abraham Lincoln

by Stephen B. Oates

  Let him be cautious. Frederick Douglass, for one, could not restrain his ecstasy that Lincoln had come around at last. “We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree,” he recorded in his journal. And his attitude toward Lincoln now underwent a total transformation. He assured his readers that “Abraham Lincoln will take no step backward. His word has gone out over the country and the world, giving joy and gladness to the friends of freedom and progress wherever these words are read, and he will stand by them and carry them out to the letter.” He told his friends in Great Britain that “the hopes of millions, long trodden down, now rise with every advancing hour.”

  The advanced Republicans were also delighted. “Hurrah for Old Abe and the proclamation,” Wade exulted. Stevens extolled Lincoln for his patriotism and said his Proclamation “contained precisely the principles which I had advocated.” “Thank God that I live to enjoy this day!” Sumner exclaimed in Boston. “Freedom is practically secured to all who find shelter within our lines, and the glorious flag of the Union, wherever it floats, becomes the flag of Freedom.” A few days later, Sumner announced that “the Emancipation Proclamation…is now the cornerstone of our national policy.”

  As it turned out, though, the preliminary Proclamation helped lead to a Republican disaster in the fall by-elections of 1862. Already northern Democrats were upset with Lincoln’s harsh war measures, especially his use of martial law and military arrests. But Negro emancipation was more than they could stand, and they stumped the northern states that fall, beating the drums of Negrophobia, warning of massive influxes of southern blacks into the North once emancipation came. Sullen, war weary, and racially aroused, northern voters dealt the Republicans a smashing blow, as the North’s five most populous states—all of which had gone for Lincoln in 1860—now returned Democratic majorities to Capitol Hill. While the Republicans narrowly retained control of Congress, the future looked bleak indeed for 1864.

  Republican analysts—and Lincoln himself—conceded that the preliminary Proclamation was a major factor in the Republican defeat. But Lincoln told a delegation from Kentucky that he would rather die than retract a single word in his Proclamation.

  In December, in the midst of rising racial protest against him, Lincoln asked Congress—and northern whites beyond—for their support in his moves against slavery. “The dogmas of the quiet past,” he reminded them, “are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall our selves, and then we shall save our country.

  “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history…. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation…. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom for the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.”

  That message provoked a fusillade of abuse from congressional Democrats, who blasted Lincoln’s projected Proclamation as blatantly unconstitutional and warned that any attempt to overthrow state institutions would be “a high crime”—that is, an impeachable offense. Lincoln’s “thunderbolt,” raged one Democrat, left them all “mute in amazement. Its suddenness, its utter contempt for the Constitution, its imperial pretension, the thorough upheaving of the whole social organization which it decreed, and the perspective of crime, and blood, and ruin, which it opened to the vision, filled every patriotic heart with astonishment, terror and indignation.”

  Said Frederick Douglass: “From the genuine abolition view, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent, but measuring him by the sentiment of his country—a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult—he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”

  As the New Year approached, conservative Republicans begged Lincoln to abandon his “reckless” emancipation scheme lest he shatter their demoralized party and wreck what remained of their country. At the same time, Sumner and Wade admonished Lincoln to stand firm, and he promised that he would. On New Year’s Day, 1863, he officially signed the final Emancipation Proclamation in the White House. His hand trembled badly, not because he was nervous, but because he had shaken hands all morning in a White House reception. He assured everyone present that he was never more certain of what he was doing. “If my name ever goes into history,” he said, “it will be for this act.”

  In the final Proclamation, Lincoln said nothing about colonization or compensation to slaveowners. He did temporarily exempt occupied Tennessee and certain occupied places in Louisiana and Virginia. But later, in reconstructing those states, he withdrew the exemptions and made emancipation a mandatory part of his reconstruction program. His Proclamation also excluded the loyal slave states because they were not in rebellion and he lacked the legal authority to uproot slavery there. He would, however, keep goading them to obliterate slavery themselves—and would later push a constitutional amendment that liberated their slaves as well. With the exception of the loyal border and certain occupied areas, the final Proclamation declared that as of this day, all slaves in the rebellious states were “forever free.” The document also asserted that black men—southern and northern alike—would now be enlisted in Union military forces.

  All in all, advanced and moderate Republicans were pleased. In fact, Sumner, Wade, Chandler, and their colleagues took a lot of credit for prodding Lincoln at last to act. Perhaps the President should not have exempted Tennessee and southern Louisiana, Horace Greeley said, “but let us not cavil.” Lincoln had now “played his grand part” in the destruction of slavery, said another Republican, and some thought how ironic it was that the Proclamation had now made Lincoln and all of them abolitionists.

  In Boston, abolitionist Wendell Phillips observed that to white Americans the Proclamation was a step in the progress of humanity, but to Negroes it was “the sunlight scattering the despair of centuries.” A Negro preacher named Henry M. Turner summed up what Lincoln’s decree meant to that whole generation of black Americans. “The time has come in the history of this nation,” Turner said, “when the downtrodden and abject black man can assert his rights, and feel his manhood…. The first day of January, 1863, is destined to form one of the most memorable epochs in the history of the world.”

  3: THE MAN OF OUR REDEMPTION

  Lincoln’s Proclamation was not “of minor importance,” as one historian maintained several years ago. On the contrary, it was the most revolutionary measure ever to come from an American President up to that time. This “momentous decree,” as Martin Luther King, Jr., later described it, was an unprecedented use of federal military power against a state institution. It was an unprecedented federal assault against the very foundation of the South’s ruling planter class and economic and social order. As Union armies punched into rebel territory, they would tear slavery out root and branch, automatically freeing all slaves in the areas and states they conquered. In this respect (as Lincoln said), the war brought on changes more fundamental and profound than either side had expected when the conflict began. Now slavery would perish as the Confederacy perished, would die by degrees with every Union advance, every Union victory.

  Moreover, word of the Proclamation hummed across the slave grapevine in the Confederacy; and as Union armies drew near, more slaves than ever abandoned rebel farms and plantations and (as one said) “demonstrated with their feet” their desire for freedom. In short, slaves like these did not sit back and wait for their liberty: they went out and got it for themselves.

  The Proclamation was not some anemic document that in effect freed no slaves. By November, 1864, the Philadelphia North American estimated that more than 1,300,000 Negroes had been liberated by Lincoln’s Proclamation or “the events of the war.” By war’s end, all three and a half million slaves in the defeated Confederacy could claim freedom under Lincoln’s Proclamation and the victorious Union flag.

  What is more, the Proclam
ation did something for Lincoln personally that has never been stressed enough. In truth, the story of emancipation could well be called the liberation of Abraham Lincoln. For in the process of granting freedom to the slaves, Lincoln also emancipated himself from his old dilemma. His Proclamation now brought the private and the public Lincoln together: now the public statesman could obliterate a wicked thing the private citizen had always hated, a thing that had long had “the power of making me miserable.” Now the public statesman could destroy what he regarded as “a cruel wrong” that had always besmirched America’s experiment in popular government, had always impeded her historic mission in the progress of human liberty in the world.

  The Proclamation also opened the army to black volunteers, and northern free Negroes and southern ex-slaves now enlisted as Union soldiers. As Lincoln said, “the colored population is the great available and yet unavailed of, force for restoring the Union.” And he now availed himself of that force. In occupied northern Alabama, a Union recruiter “of salty temper” put up a large poster with the legend: “ALL SLAVES WERE MADE FREEMEN BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. Come, then, able-bodied COLORED MEN, to the nearest United States Camp, and fight for the STARS AND STRIPES.” And fight they did. In all, some 186,000 Negro troops—most of them emancipated slaves—served in Union forces on every major battle front, helping to liberate their brothers and sisters in bondage and to save the American experiment. As Lincoln observed, the blacks added enormous and indispensable strength to the Union war machine. Without them, it is doubtful that he could have won the war.

  Unhappily, the blacks fought in segregated units under white officers, and until late in the war received less pay than whites did. In 1863 Lincoln told Frederick Douglass that he disliked the practice of unequal pay, but that the government had to make some concessions to white prejudices, noting that a great many northern whites opposed the use of black soldiers altogether. But he promised that they would eventually get equal pay—and they did. Moreover, Lincoln was proud of the performance of his black soldiers: he publicly praised them for fighting “with clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well poised bayonet” to save the Union, while certain whites strove “with malignant heart” to hinder it.

  As one historian has noted, the use of black troops had potent social and psychological overtones. A black soldier, dressed in Union blue and armed with a rifle and bayonet, posed a radically different picture from the obsequious “Sambo” image cultivated and cherished by southern whites. Fighting as soldiers not only gave black men a new sense of manhood, as the Reverend Turner had predicted, but undermined the whole nineteenth-century notion of innate Negro inferiority.

  With blacks now fighting in his armies, Lincoln abandoned colonization as a solution to racial adjustment in Dixie. His colonization schemes had all floundered, and in any case black people adamantly refused to participate in the President’s voluntary program. Across the North, free Negroes denounced Lincoln’s highly publicized colonization efforts—this was their country too!—and they petitioned him to deport slaveholders instead. And Lincoln seemed in sympathy with that. Later, as the war drew to a close, he told his Cabinet that he would like to frighten rebel leaders out of the country. He waved his arms as though he were shooing chickens.

  After he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln never again urged colonization in public—an eloquent silence, indicating that he had concluded that Dixie’s whites and liberated Negroes must somehow learn to live together. How, then, could Lerone Bennett and others maintain that Lincoln to the end of his life was a champion of colonization? That argument rests exclusively on the 1892 autobiography of Union political general Benjamin F. Butler. In it, Butler claimed that in April, 1865, Lincoln feared a race war in the South and still wanted to ship the blacks abroad. Not only is Butler a highly dubious witness, but there is not a scintilla of corroborative evidence to support his story, which one Lincoln scholar has recently exposed as “entirely a fantasy.” There is not a single other source that quotes the President, in public or in private, as stating that he still favored colonization.

  In any case, such a stance would have been glaringly inconsistent with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which called for a new birth of freedom in America for blacks and whites alike (here, in fact, is the eloquent defense of liberty that critics have found lacking in the Proclamation itself). And a colonization stance would have been inconsistent, too, with Lincoln’s appreciation of the indispensable role his black soldiers played in subduing the rebellion. No man of Lincoln’s honesty and sense of fair play would enlist 186,000 black troops to save the Union and then advocate throwing them out of the country. He simply did not advocate that.

  Still, he needed some device during the war, some program that would pacify white northerners and convince them that southern freedmen would not flock into their communities, but would remain in the South instead. What Lincoln worked out was a refugee system, installed by his adjutant general in occupied Dixie, which utilized blacks there in a variety of military and civilian pursuits. Then Republican propaganda went to work selling northern whites on the system and the Emancipation Proclamation: See, liberated Negroes will not invade the North, but will stay in Dixie as free wage earners, learning to help themselves and our Union cause.

  Even so, emancipation remained the most explosive and unpopular act of Lincoln’s presidency. By mid-1863, thousands of Democrats were in open revolt against his administration, denouncing Lincoln as an abolitionist dictator who had surrendered to radicalism. In the Midwest, dissident Democrats launched a peace movement to throw “the shrieking abolitionist faction” out of office and negotiate a peace with the Confederacy that would somehow restore the Union with slavery unmolested. There were large antiwar rallies against Lincoln’s war for slave liberation. Race and draft riots flared in several northern cities.

  With all the public unrest behind the lines, conservative Republicans beseeched Lincoln to abandon emancipation and rescue his country “from the brink of ruin.” But Lincoln seemed intractable. He had made up his mind to smash the slave society of the rebel South and eliminate the moral wrong of Negro bondage, and no amount of public discontent, he indicated, was going to change his mind. He had deemed his Proclamation “an act of justice” and contended in any case that blacks who had tasted freedom would never consent to be slaves again. “To use a coarse, but an expressive figure,” he wrote an aggravated Democrat, “broken eggs cannot be mended. I have issued the Proclamation, and I cannot retract it.”

  On Capitol Hill, the advanced Republicans were overjoyed. “He is stubborn as a mule when he gets his back up,” Chandler said of Lincoln, “& it is up now on the Proclamation.” “His mind acts slowly,” said Owen Lovejoy, “but when he moves, it is forward.”

  He wavered once—in August, 1864, a time of unrelenting gloom for Lincoln, when his popularity had sunk to an all-time low and it seemed he could not be reelected. He confessed that maybe the country would no longer sustain a war for slave emancipation, that maybe he shouldn’t pull the nation down a road it did not want to travel. On August 24 he decided to offer Jefferson Davis peace terms that excluded emancipation as a condition, vaguely suggesting that slavery would be adjusted later “by peaceful means.” But the next day Lincoln changed his mind. With awakened resolution, he vowed to fight the war through to unconditional surrender and to stick by emancipation come what may. He had made his promise of freedom to the slaves, and he meant to keep it as long as he was in office.

  When he won the election of 1864, Lincoln interpreted it as a popular mandate for him and his emancipation policy. But in reality the election provided no clear referendum on slavery, since Republican campaigners had played down emancipation and concentrated on the folly of the Democrats in running General George McClellan on a peace plank in the midst of civil war. Nevertheless, Lincoln used his reelection to promote a constitutional amendment that would guarantee the freedom of all slaves, those in the loyal bor
der states as well as those in the rebel South. Even before issuing his Proclamation, Lincoln had worried that it might be nullified in the courts or thrown out by a later Congress or a subsequent administration. Consequently he wanted a constitutional amendment that would safeguard his Proclamation and prevent emancipation from ever being overturned.

  Back in December, 1862, Lincoln himself had called on Congress to adopt an emancipation amendment, and advanced Republicans had introduced one in the Senate and guided it through, reminding their colleagues that nobody could deny that all the death and destruction of the war stemmed from slavery and that it was their duty to support this amendment. In April, 1864, the Senate adopted it by a vote of thirty-eight to six, but it failed to muster the required two-thirds majority in the House.

  After that Lincoln had insisted that the Republican platform endorse the measure. And now, over the winter of 1864 and 1865, he put tremendous pressure on the House to approve the amendment, using all his powers of persuasion and patronage to get it through. He buttonholed conservative Republicans and opposition Democrats and exhorted them to support the amendment. He singled out “sinners” among the Democrats who were “on praying ground,” and informed them that they had a lot better chance for the federal jobs they desired if they voted for the measure. Soon two Democrats swung over in favor of it. In the House debates, meanwhile, Republican James Ashley quoted Lincoln himself that “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” and Thaddeus Stevens, still tall and imposing at seventy-two, asserted that he had never hesitated, even when threatened with violence, “to stand here and denounce this infamous institution.” With the outcome much in doubt, Lincoln and congressional Republicans participated in secret negotiations never made public—negotiations that allegedly involved patronage, a New Jersey railroad monopoly, and the release of rebels related to congressional Democrats—to bring wavering opponents into line. “The greatest measure of the nineteenth century,” Stevens claimed, “was passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America.”