by Larry Tagg
There were men, especially in the East, who would go farther; and men, especially in the West, who would not go so far. But Lincoln walked a middle path that allowed Republicans at both extremes to vote him into office. The Homeric clash of arms that ensued between the North and South was the setting for Lincoln’s struggle to balance his elected responsibility to do the will of a racist people with his moral responsibility to put the expression of that will—slavery—on the road to extinction. It was in the tension between these two seemingly irreconcilable ends that he demonstrated the consummate statesmanship, his mastery of the art of the possible, whose culminating act was the Emancipation Proclamation.
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Once Lincoln was safely in office it was inevitable that the schisms within the Republican Party over the race problem would appear. The national emergency over Sumter and the early-war danger to the capital submerged the differences until after Bull Run, but secretary John Hay’s diary entry of May 7, 1861, reveals that, only four weeks after the first cannon shot, some already expected the war “to result in the entire abolition of slavery,” and that Lincoln’s “daily correspondence was thickly interspersed by such suggestions.” Lincoln’s answer to this, as stated privately to Hay, was that the war’s purpose was not the revolutionary one of ending slavery but the conservative one of “proving that popular government is not an absurdity… . whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose,” and his July 4, 1861, Message to Congress reaffirmed that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists.” Only after Bull Run dispelled the notion of a quick end to the war did the emancipation debate in the North begin in earnest.
The first battle in this war of ideas came after Frémont’s September 1861 emancipation proclamation, which Lincoln rescinded to keep the loyalty of the Border State men, the Democrats, and the conservative generals. While the Democratic newspaper editors were soothed by Lincoln’s conservative response to Frémont, they still bared their teeth, warning that emancipation “would bring sure and irretrievable defeat from the day on which it was promulgated.” “Two-thirds of the army,” they said, “would refuse to march another step or serve another day in such a crusade.” The Democratic Pennsylvania Valley Spirit argued that the best way to “turn the world topsy turvey” would be to permit the abolitionists to “go on in their plan of turning loose 4,000,000 indolent negroes.” The Crisis quoted an officer in the Army of the Potomac who said “that if this war was to be converted into one of emancipation of the Negroes, there would be a general resignation of the officers, which would be virtually a disbandment of our Army.”
The Democrats’ blasts were merely cautionary, however. By mid-summer of 1862, Lincoln had not yet strayed from his stated intention to uphold “the Constitution as it is” and restore “the Union as it was.” Radicals still cursed the President in frustration. According to one, Lincoln had “gone to the rescue of slavery, which had almost committed suicide.” One Massachusetts Republican complained, “The key of the slave’s chain is now kept in the White House.” “There has never been an Administration so thoroughly devoted to slavery as the present,” fumed another; “no other ever returned so many fugitive slaves, nor did so much to propitiate the Slave Power.” Joseph Medill mailed the President a call to action: “Our nation is on the brink of ruin,” it warned. “Mr. Lincoln, for God’s sake and your Country’s sake rise to the realization … that this is a Slave-holders rebellion.”
Even as Lincoln’s policy remained “hands off slavery” as required by the Constitution, however, the problem of what to do with the slaves freed by the friction along the army’s front lines remained. Northerners feared that the trickle of slaves liberated by advancing Union soldiers might grow into a torrent, flooding the North with poor, illiterate, despised blacks. This went to the heart of the race problem as Northerners saw it: What do we do with the black people among us? They overwhelmingly agreed with Old Man Blair: “It is certainly the wish of every patriot that all within the limits of our Union should be homogeneous in race and of our own blood.” His heir, Frank Blair, Jr., insisted publicly, “The idea of liberating the slaves and allowing them to remain in the country is one that never will be tolerated.” The Crisis shook a warning finger at Lincoln: “Should the abolitionists … finally convert this war into one to abolish slavery, they must first find some place to put the freed negroes, as well as those who are now free amongst us, before entering upon such a doubtful and revolutionary experiment.”
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With this in mind, in an attempt to sweeten the pill of emancipation for the North, Lincoln early on embraced a solution—or, more properly, a fantasy— that already enjoyed wide acceptance among Northerners, a solution that went back through Henry Clay all the way to Thomas Jefferson: he would ship the blacks away. In October 1861, he asked Secretary of the Interior Caleb B. Smith to look into a proposal for colonizing blacks on the isthmus of Chiriqui, in present-day Panama, and in his December 1861 Message to Congress he announced the project publicly for the first time.
Colonization was only the first part of Lincoln’s two-part solution to the race problem. It made palatable the second part of the solution, which was that black slaves would be freed gradually, state by state, with compensation of $300 or so for each freed slave. On March 6, 1862, Lincoln sent to Congress a recommendation that money be set aside to compensate any state that, at some time, of its own free will, might wish to gradually emancipate its slaves. It left the prerogative with the states, precisely where the prerogative had been since the Revolution. But even this weak gesture, although applauded by the Republican press, provoked tirades from Border State men. It was unconstitutional, they said. Senator Willard Saulsbury of Delaware warned, “Adopt these measures … and the war upon which you have just entered, instead of being speedily closed, will not be closed in your day or mine, sir. It is folly to suppose that the people of this country … are going to allow you to interfere with their domestic institutions, and … to destroy their constitutional rights.” Kentucky congressman William H. Wadsworth was less fastidious: “I utterly spit at it and despise it,” he said. “Emancipation in the cotton States is simply an absurdity… . There is not enough power in the world to compel it to be done.”
Lincoln listened in the spring of 1862 as the Democratic press stirred for the first time since the previous summer. The Crisis prophesied a red dawn:
Victories or defeats amount to but little, if the war is to be converted into a war merely of freeing 4,000,000 of negroes, to be turned loose on the North. Do this, and it will take both armies united to protect the white people from their robberies, assassinations, house-burnings, and all other acts which a starving, revengeful, half-civilized race can conceive of in their madness.
Lincoln’s March 6 proposal also drew fire from the other extreme, abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, who thought that Lincoln had offered a stone where bread was needed. He called the proposal a “‘decoy duck’ or a ‘red herring,’” a “cowardly and criminal avoidance of the one great saving issue.” Count Gurowski saw it as a “trick” to save slavery by throwing its enemies “small crumbs.” Thaddeus Stevens derided it as “the most diluted milk-and-water-gruel proposition that was ever given to the American nation.” In the end, Lincoln’s proposal went for nothing. The Border States repudiated Lincoln’s offer, obstinately refusing to emancipate their slaves. Lincoln’s proposal proved only that the loyal slave states would cling to slavery just as tenaciously as the rebel ones.
Thus rebuffed, he passed the torch of anti-slavery to the Republicandominated 37th Congress. The Radicals on Capitol Hill acted swiftly and with a will, passing measures that now-departed Southern leaders had blocked for years: the prohibition of slavery in the territories (the signal issue of the 1860 election), a law for more effective suppression of the slave sea-trade, and recognition of the new black nations of Liberia an
d Haiti.
And Congress freed slaves—not gradually, but all 3,128 of them at once— in the only place it had jurisdiction, the District of Columbia. Sumner had chided, “Do you know who is at this moment the largest slave-holder in the United States? Abraham Lincoln, for he holds all the three thousand slaves of the District of Columbia, which is more than any other person in the country holds.” Lincoln gave credence to Sumner’s jibe by balking at signing the bill, according to a friend of the senator, who reported that “[Sumner’s] severest trial, during these days, was in, as he expressed it, ‘screwing Old Abe up to the sticking point.’ With considerable impatience [Sumner] broke out, ‘How slow this child of Freedom is being born!’” Orville Browning also mentioned Lincoln’s reluctance to sign the bill, writing in his diary on April 14, two days before Lincoln signed it:
He told me … that it should have been for gradual emancipation—that now families would at once be deprived of cooks, stable boys &c and they of their protectors without any provision for them. He further told me that he would not sign the bill before Wednesday—That old Gov Wickliffe [of Kentucky] had two family servants with him who were sickly, and who would not be benefited by freedom, and wanted time to remove them, but could not get them out of the City until Wednesday, and that the Gov had come frankly to him and asked for time.
While Lincoln was taking care of the Kentuckians, Congress was outemancipating the President, and it was obvious. John Hickman of Pennsylvania rose in the House to denounce “the refusal on the part of the President … to discharge … a plain duty” to weaken the enemy, and decried Lincoln’s “irresponsibility and imbecility” and his “lack of traits of character necessary to the discharge of grave responsibilities.” Count Gurowski grumbled into his diary,
Mr. Lincoln is forced out again from one of his pro-slavery entrenchments; he was obliged to yield, and to sign the hard-fought bill for emancipation in the District of Columbia; but how reluctantly, with what bad grace he signed it! Good boy; he wished not to strike his mammy [slavery]; and to think that the friends of humanity in Europe will credit this emancipation not where it is due, not to the noble pressure exercised by the high-minded Northern masses, but to this Kentucky ———.
At the same time, Lincoln could not ignore that waking giant, the Democratic press, which parried every blow against the status quo. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle was one that raged against the District of Columbia’s Emancipation Bill in a series of editorials, arguing that it angered the South at the same time that it hurt the freedmen themselves, and predicting its sorrowful effects on the “poor creatures,” saying, “Many an old ‘Aunty’ in Washington will, for the few remaining years of their lives regret, in their stupid way, the measure that only separated them from their children and friends, and transferred them from the care of their owners, upon whom they had a just claim, to the charity of the world.”
This was in mid-April of 1862. There was a new sensation in May. General David Hunter had begged Stanton for a front-line military command with the object of forcing Lincoln’s hand on emancipation. “Please let me have my own way on the subject of slavery,” he had pleaded. Stanton gave Hunter his wish. The Union army had won lodgments on a few islands off South Carolina, and Hunter had been put in command of the tiny beachhead with the grand title of the Department of the South, comprising South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. On May 9, Hunter bid to make his name immortal by decreeing, “The persons in these three States … heretofore held as slaves, are … declared forever free.”
Lincoln issued an order declaring Hunter’s decree “altogether void,” moving even more quickly than he had the previous September after Frémont’s emancipation proclamation. As before, Radicals cursed him: “Be sure that Lincoln is at heart with Slavery,” Gurowski wrote to Governor Andrew. Gurowski called the President “an unavoidable evil, an original sin,” and told his diary, “Of course Mr. Lincoln overrules General Hunter’s proclamation. It is too human, too noble, too great, for the tall Kentuckian.”A Springfield friend of Lincoln’s warned Senator Trumbull, “Our people feel disheartened, discouraged & disgraced and are ready to curse the administration and all that belongs to it … .” Greeley demanded from the pulpit of the Tribune that Lincoln get himself a policy and quit appeasing the Democrats, wailing, “We shuffle and trifle on, and let the Union go to ruin.” Wendell Phillips, at a Republican rally in Boston, drew applause when he cried, “President Lincoln with a senile lick-spittle haste runs before he is bidden to remove the Hunter proclamation. The president and the Cabinet are treasonable. The President and the Secretary of War should be impeached.”
This radical spasm was more persistent than after the Frémont affair, drawing its staying power from a growing sense that this time victory was near. In the coming months, Lincoln was pelted with abolitionist petitions, and there grew a long line of visitors to the White House arguing almost daily for emancipation. Abolitionist speakers such as Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and William Lloyd Garrison were criss-crossing the East, drawing record crowds and enjoying new admiration from mainstream journals like the New York Times. Governor Andrew of Massachusetts was one of many who wrote to Lincoln of a new problem: without emancipation, badly-needed new recruits were staying home. They “feel it a heavy draft on their patriotism,” he said, that they should be asked to fight without being allowed “to fire on the enemy’s magazine.”
Lincoln would be tormented throughout the summer by the hard riddle of freedom. As he turned the great issue over and over in his mind, he often revealed his perplexity to visitors, as on June 20, when a group of Quakers came to his office and urged a proclamation. “If a decree of emancipation could abolish slavery,” he told them, “John Brown would have done the work effectually.” He then grew thoughtful, saying he was “deeply sensible of his need of Divine assistance,” and wondered if “perhaps he might be an instrument in God’s hands of accomplishing a great work.” In the end, however, he turned them away, saying, “Perhaps … God’s way of accomplishing the end [of slavery] … may be different from [yours].”
In the next two weeks, McClellan’s failure on the Peninsula withered the hope of ending the war quickly and of reuniting the nation as it had been. In the first days of July, as Lincoln sat for hours in the War Office and listened to the telegraph key tapping out its chronicle of disaster from McClellan, he wrote out the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation on pieces of foolscap. He still resisted the thought of issuing it, however. On the Fourth of July, Charles Sumner twice called on Lincoln to issue an emancipation decree, encouraging him to “make the day more sacred and historic than ever.” Lincoln refused, telling Sumner it was “too big a lick,” explaining, “I would do it if I were not afraid that half the officers would fling down their arms and three more States [Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri] would rise.”
A week later, on July 12, Lincoln invited the congressmen from the Border States to the White House and made a last, passionate appeal for gradual emancipation, with compensation, followed by colonization. He had made a similar argument to these same men before, in a short address he had added to his May 19 revocation of General Hunter’s order. In both messages, he reasoned that the Border States’ embrace of emancipation would shorten the war by dashing Southern hopes that they would someday unite with the Confederacy, and that “friction and abrasion” caused by the war and political pressure in Congress would free the slaves anyway, without the generous terms he now offered. “The change [gradual emancipation] contemplates would come gently as the dews of Heaven, not rending or wrecking anything,” he pleaded.
Again the Border State men refused to budge. These were property rights, after all. Their written reply to Lincoln’s proposition was all business: they dismissed it as “nothing less than deportation from the country of sixteen hundred million dollars’ worth of producing labor, and the substitution in its place of an interest-bearing debt of the same amount.”
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Perhaps
when he looked into the Border State men’s faces that day, Lincoln saw the fierce glint of their intransigence and sensed the futility of his conservative appeal. Because overnight—in his disappointment over their backwardness, in his despair over the failure of the Peninsula Campaign, and under heavy pressure from Radical Republicans—his conservatism yielded to a new, revolutionary purpose. It was the very next morning, in his buggy ride with Seward and Welles, that he told them of his conclusion that the emancipation proclamation was a “military necessity” and that “we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.”
Lincoln waited, however, before committing himself to such extreme steps. First he had to confront the Radical clique at work in the Capitol, who were ready that same week to seize direction of the war by passing a new, harsher Confiscation Act, a bill which they had introduced on the first day of the congressional session in December and which they had pushed, vehemently and almost continuously, for eight months. Now, in mid-July, it had become clear that the Radicals had the votes to pass the bill, which would declare “forever free” the slaves of rebels fighting the Union and would enlist them as soldiers in the Union army. It was well known that Lincoln opposed the bill on the grounds that it was unconstitutional, since it freed slaves in states where slavery was legal. If slaves were to be freed by force in those states, Lincoln maintained, it must be by the “war powers” which only he, as Commander-in- Chief, possessed.
When the Radicals rammed the bill through despite his objections, Lincoln responded by signing the bill on the last day of Congress with one embellishment: he attached his veto message to the signed bill, to become part of the record as a signal that he did not intend to enforce it. The bill, his act implied, was a dead letter. Lincoln’s veto message was read in the crowded chambers “amid the sneers and laughter of the abolitionists.”
