by Larry Tagg
President Lincoln’s cold reception to McClellan’s exquisitely wrought manifesto was the subject of the general’s letter to his wife the following day. It reeked of the old and now stale disdain for the President: “I do not know to what extent he has profited by his visit—not much I fear, for he really seems quite incapable of rising to the height of the merits of the question & the magnitude of the crisis.” For the next few weeks, McClellan’s letters were full of venom for Lincoln and the politicians in the capital, for “the stupidity & wickedness at Washington which have done their best to sacrifice as noble an Army as every marched to battle.” “I have lost all regard & respect for the majority of the Administration,” he wrote, “& doubt the propriety of my brave men’s blood being spilled to further the designs of such a set of heartless villains.”
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Lincoln, meanwhile, had concluded that he needed better military advice. On July 11 he sent for General Henry Halleck to come to Washington to take the post of General-in-Chief of all the armies, the position he himself had filled since McClellan’s demotion exactly four months earlier. He also combined McDowell, Banks, and Frémont into one army, named it the Army of Virginia, and put in under the command of another import from the West, General John Pope. The new scheme was Lincoln’s first indication that he had thought better of trying his hand at playing general, and had broken his bad habit of dividing military command among promiscuous combinations of booted councils and braided panels. Naming Halleck to McClellan’s old post as General-in-Chief, however, tore completely Lincoln’s already-shredded relationship with McClellan, who wrote to his wife:
[The President and I] never conversed on the subject [of Halleck’s appointment]—I was never informed of his views or intentions, & even now have not been officially informed of the appt. I only know it through the newspapers. In all these things the Presdt & those around him have acted so as to make the matter as offensive as possible—he has not shown the slightest gentlemanly or friendly feeling & I cannot regard him as in any respect my friend—I am confident that he would relieve me tomorrow if he dared do so. His cowardice alone prevents it. I can never regard him with other feelings than those of thorough contempt—for his mind, heart & morality.
Lincoln’s four months as acting General-in-Chief had crippled his relationship with McClellan and many of the officers of his main army in the Eastern Theater, and plunged the country into desolation deeper than after Bull Run a year before. But the most far-reaching result of the failed Peninsula campaign was Lincoln’s realization that the rebellious states would not be subdued by a “kid glove” war. The illusion that Union feeling was still strong in the South was finally shattered; the fantasy that the regime of a few Southern firebrands could be collapsed by one sharp blow was dashed. The Seven Days’ Battles destroyed once and for all the notion that the war would be settled by anything short of conquest. From now on, Lincoln saw, the conflict must be a “hard war.”
And the war must be revolutionary. It could no longer be fought to restore the nation as it had been before the firing on Fort Sumter. It could no longer be fought to bring the states back into their old relations. That, Lincoln now saw clearly, was impossible. Instead, the war’s purpose must be to destroy the sin that had brought on the war. Slavery itself must not—could not—survive. As Lincoln told the story later, “Things had gone on from bad to worse, until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the game!”
On July 13, less than one week after his meeting at Harrison’s Landing in Virginia with McClellan, Lincoln pulled up to Gideon Welles’ door in his carriage and invited his naval secretary to accompany him and Seward to the funeral of Stanton’s infant son. As the carriage started to roll away, Lincoln spoke of emancipation. He had given it much thought, he told Seward and Welles. “We must free the slaves,” he said emphatically, “or be ourselves subdued.”
Nine days later, on July 22, 1862, Lincoln laid his draft for the Emancipation Proclamation in front of the Cabinet.
“The Overdue Bill”
Part Three
Lincoln’s Proclamation
“A Monstrous Usurpation, a Criminal Wrong,
and an Act of National Suicide.”
Chapter 22
Lincoln, Race, and the North
“He is a first-rate second-rate man.”
Abraham Lincoln was not harkening to the voice of the people when he sat down to draft the Emancipation Proclamation. Just the opposite, in fact—to propose emancipation, Lincoln would have to ignore the overwhelming weight of Northern prejudice against black people and a widespread complacency about slavery. To lift blacks into equality under the law, Lincoln would have to assert a kind of moral leadership not seen since the Revolution.
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Free black men were just as unwanted in the North as in the South, and prejudice in the North was just as violent, if not more so. In 1832, Alexis de Tocqueville had remarked on it. “The prejudice of race,” he wrote, “appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.” According to de Tocqueville,
in those parts of the Union in which Negroes are no longer slaves they have in no wise drawn nearer to the whites… . Thus the Negro is free, but he can share neither the rights, nor the pleasures, nor the labor, nor the afflictions, nor the tomb of him whose equal he has been declared to be … Among the Americans of the South, Nature sometimes reasserts her rights and restores a transient equality between the blacks and whites… . Thus it is in the United States that the prejudice which repels the Negroes seems to increase in proportion as they are emancipated… . In the South, where slavery still exists, less trouble is taken to keep the negro apart: they sometimes share the labors and the pleasures of the white men; people are prepared to mix with them to some extent; legislation is more harsh against them, but customs are more tolerant and gentle.
Lydia Child, a Bostonian writing at the same time as de Tocqueville, told her New England readers that even though slavery did not exist among them, “the very spirit of the hateful and mischievous thing is here in all its strength… . Our prejudice against colored people is even more inveterate than in the South. The planter is often attached to his negroes, and lavishes caresses and kind words upon them, as he would a favorite hound; but our cold-hearted ignoble prejudice admits of no exception—no intermission.”
In the three decades between de Tocqueville and Lincoln, life only got meaner for the black man in the North. Prejudice hardened as the Revolutionary belief in equality faded. In 1859, Alexander Stephens of Georgia could say, “In my judgment there are more thinking men at the North now who look upon our system of slavery as right—socially, morally, and politically— than there were even at the South thirty years ago.’’ Everywhere in the free states, blacks were made painfully and constantly aware that they lived in a society made for the white man and dedicated to keeping the black man in his place. Blacks were “free” only in the strictest legal sense. They were still shackled by prejudice, custom, and law in every area of their lives. So pitiful was their daily existence that Northerners saw it as proof of their inferiority. British-born diarist Fanny Kemble, living in Philadelphia, wrote that blacks in the North, while “not slaves indeed … are pariahs; debarred from all fellowships save with their own despised race—scorned by the lowest white ruffians in your streets, not tolerated as companions even by the foreign menials in your kitchen. They are certainly free but they are also degraded, rejected, the offscum and offscourings of the very dregs of your society; they are free from the chain, the whip, the enforced task and unpaid toil of slavery; but they are not less under a ban.” As Susan B. Anthony put it, “While the cruel slave-driver lacerates the black man’s mortal body, we, of the North, flay the spirit.”
When L
incoln was elected, four million black slaves lived in the slave states. At the same time, fewer than 250,000 blacks lived in the free states, where they made up only about 1% of the population. Of those quarter million, fewer than 15,000 lived in New England, the only states where they were allowed to vote on the same terms as white men. They rarely dared vote, however. Even in forward-thinking New England, blacks were men apart, living in small communities of jumbled shacks, gathering several generations under one roof for safety, discouraged from taking any positions but bootblacks, waiters, barbers, servants, cooks, laborers, porters, and chimney sweeps. Their existence was grim even in Boston, the Puritan cradle of the abolition movement, where one black man reported, “the position of the people … is far from an enviable one… . While colored men have many rights, they have few privileges.”
More than one-half the Northern black population lived in the mid-Atlantic states. There, in the state of New York, black men were prohibited from voting by a requirement that they prove they owned $250 in property before they could cast a ballot. This was not an antique law—it was reaffirmed in 1860, the same year New York voted for Lincoln for President. Black people were ghosts in New York City. British correspondent Edward Dicey wrote, “At the hotels, and in wealthy private houses, the servants are frequently black, but in the streets there are few Negroes visible. Here, as elsewhere, they form a race apart, never walking in company with white persons, except as servants.” Writing in 1862, Dicey sketched the miserable plight of Northern blacks: “I never by any chance, in the Free States, saw a colored man dining at a public table, or occupying any position, however humble, in which he was placed in authority over white persons… . I hardly ever remember seeing a black employed as shopman, or placed in any post of responsibility.” New York’s Henry Ward Beecher protested that blacks there were “almost without education, … cannot even ride in the cars of our city railroads, … are snuffed at in the house of God, or tolerated with ill-disguised disgust.” They were “crowded down, down, down, through the most menial callings to the bottom of society. We heap upon them moral obloquy more atrocious than that which the master heaps upon the slave.” A black New Yorker noted that there, blacks had become the “objects of … marked abuse and insult. From many of the grocery corners, stones, potatoes, and pieces of coal would often be hurled, by idle young loafers, standing about.”
In Philadelphia—where 25,000 free blacks lived, more than in any other city—it was the same. A black journal asked, “What have the colored people done that they should be thus treated? Even here, in the city of Philadelphia, in many places, it is almost impossible for a respectable colored person to walk the streets without being insulted by a set of blackguards and cowards.” When Frederick Douglass visited Philadelphia in 1862, he remarked, “Colored persons, no matter how well dressed or well behaved, ladies and gentlemen, rich or poor, are not permitted to ride on any of the many railways through that Christian city… . The whole aspect of city usage at this point is mean, contemptible and barbarous.”
The further west a black man went, the harsher he found it. With a large population of people of Southern origin, and with a fluid social structure where a black man would be more apt to challenge whites for jobs, the Northwest—especially the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—nurtured intense racial prejudice. In Ohio, there was a color test: anyone with a “visible admixture of Negro blood” could not vote. Dicey related a conversation with an Ohioan who said, “There is but one thing, sir, that we want here, and that is to get rid of the niggers.”
If they left Ohio, blacks could not go to Indiana or Lincoln’s Illinois. Those states barred black immigrants by law. George Julian of Indiana noted, “Our people hate the Negro with a perfect if not supreme hatred.” In Illinois, no black person from another state could remain for more than ten days; beyond ten days he or she was subject to arrest, confinement in jail, a $50 fine, and removal from the state. As late as June of 1862, citizens there voted overwhelmingly to keep the exclusion clause; in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, the exclusion clause was approved twelve hundred to two hundred. Several Western states prohibited blacks from testifying in cases in which white men were involved. When one black Illinoisan in 1860 circulated a petition against the “Testimony Law” barring black witnesses, Abraham Lincoln would not sign it, prompting the man to charge, “if we [blacks] sent our children to school, Abraham Lincoln would kick them out, in the name of Republicanism and anti-slavery.”
There was no distinct statement in the Constitution about who could be an American citizen, but according to the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, blacks not only could not be citizens, they were “so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” A black person could not hold a government job, even as a mail carrier, a rule the new Republican congress upheld in 1861. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle summed up the feeling of much of the North: “There are laws which govern the actions of men stronger than any upon the statute book. It is not within the power of the law-maker to place negroes on terms of equality with white men. The never-varying edict of God has set a barrier between them, and only at the cost of the degradation of both races and the final annihilation of both, can this barrier be bridged over.”
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Prejudice against blacks found its most violent expression among Democrats, whose party had been dominated by slave-owners since Jefferson, but racial prejudice was strong also among Republicans. From the beginning, free-soilers had been opposed to the extension of slavery, not out of love for the black man, but because they wanted an all-white West. David Wilmot, who gave his name to the historic free-soil Wilmot Proviso of the 1840s, described it as the “White Man’s Proviso,” insisting, “I plead the cause and rights of the free white man.” By barring slavery in the new lands in the West he intended to save it for “the sons of toil, of my own race and own color.” Most Republicans saw the great issue of stopping the spread of slavery the same way as Wilmot, and advertised the Republican Party, especially in the West, as “the real white man’s party.” Horace Greeley, the editor of the arch-Republican New York Tribune, went on record as saying that black people would always occupy an inferior social position. William Seward saw black men as a “foreign and feeble” element of the population, and he predicted that they would eventually die out in the Northern states. “They are God’s poor,” he said, “they always have been and always will be everywhere.” Frank Blair, Jr., leader of the Missouri Republican Party, announced that the party’s object there was “Missouri for white men and white men for Missouri.” Even Senator Ben Wade, Washington’s most energetic champion of blacks’ rights, complained about their “odor,” grumbled about all the “nigger” cooks in the capital, and swore that he had eaten food “cooked by Niggers until I can smell and taste the Nigger … all over.”
The most dyed-in-the-wool Republican journals, while they championed the black man’s cause in the abstract, despised him in the flesh. The Tribune published its opinion that, “As a class, the Blacks are indolent, improvident, servile, and licentious.” The free-soil journal National Era stated ruefully, “It is the real evil of the negro race that they are so fit for slavery as they are.” Even those radical Republicans who felt that the Republican mission extended to destroying slavery where it existed recoiled at the idea of raising the black man to their own level. “It [does not] necessarily follow,” wrote the Republican editor of the Chicago Evening Journal, “that we should fellowship with the Negroes because our policy shakes off their shackles.”
Many black leaders disdained the Republican Party for its racism at its heart. In an Independence Day speech at an anti-slavery meeting in 1860, Frederick Douglass painted Democrats and Republicans with the same brush: “So far as the principles of freedom and the hopes of the black man are concerned,” he charged, “all these parties are barren and unfruitful; neither of them seeks to lift the Negro out of his fetters and rescue this day from odium and disgrace.
Take Abraham Lincoln. I want to know if any man can tell me the difference between the antislavery of Abraham Lincoln and the antislavery of [slave owner] Henry Clay? … No party, it seems to me, is entitled to the sympathy of antislavery men, unless that party is willing to extend to the black man all the rights of a citizen.”
Lincoln was the Republican nominee, of course, largely because his heart beat in time with his party’s. Certainly he was anchored in his belief that, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” but he also knew that “a universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded,” and in his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, although he never pandered to the racism of his audiences, he was careful to show solidarity with the mainstream prejudices of his fellow Republicans. When Douglas baited him on his “Black Republican” views, Lincoln countered,
I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,—I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.
Lincoln made exactly the same speech, almost word for word, two more times before he became President. The Republican New York Times summed up his position on “the Negro question” just after his election: “He declares his opposition to negro suffrage, and to everything looking towards placing negroes upon a footing of political and social equality with the whites;—but he asserts for them a perfect equality of civil and personal rights under the constitution.”
