Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Lincoln’s annual message dealt with a series of other problems in a rather perfunctory fashion, making it one of his less memorable state papers. Before its publication, a justice of the New York State Supreme Court, fearing that it would be undignified and marred by “low commonplaces,” suggested that Seward should help write it.277 In fact, a portion of the message was evidently composed by Seward and inserted at the last moment. Its most noteworthy rhetoric appeared in a disquisition on free labor, a seeming non sequitur, resembling the speech he had given at the 1859 Wisconsin agricultural fair. In closing, Lincoln stressed the larger significance of the war, giving a foretaste of the address he would deliver at Gettysburg in 1863: “The struggle of today, is not altogether for today—it is for a vast future also. With a reliance on Providence, all the more firm and earnest, let us proceed in the great task which events have devolved upon us.”278

  While moderate Republicans hailed the message’s substance as “wise, patriotic, and conservative,” and its style as “plain, concise and straightforward,” others deplored its brevity and its failure to mention the Trent crisis or to deal more fully with the slavery issue, both of which loomed large in the public mind.279 Kansas Congressman Martin F. Conway noted with disappointment that the president “in his recent message to Congress, refers only incidentally to the subject [of slavery]; and indicates no policy whatever for dealing with the momentous question.”280 A Democratic journalist noted that the “whole country awaited his message with breathless suspense. But the whole country turns away from it, sick with disappointment. It is silent on the very topic of all others that the nation is most anxious to have settled.”281 The Cincinnati Commercial also regretted that the president “evaded the rugged issue, and leaves the everlasting slavery question still adrift.”282 The New York Evening Post remarked that the message contained nothing which “speaks to the popular heart; nothing in it seems up to the spirit of the times; no sententious utterances of great truths are there to stir the public mind in the midst of trial and calamities.”283 The Post’s editor, William Cullen Bryant, wrote that Lincoln’s “evident eagerness to dispose of the slavery question without provoking any violent conclusion is honorable to his feelings of humanity,” but “it will be felt universally that he does not meet either the necessities or the difficulties of the case with sufficient determination.”284 Charles Eliot Norton, a Massachusetts litterateur, complained that the message was “very poor in style, manner and thought,—very wanting in pith, and exhibiting a mournful deficiency of strong feeling and of wise forecast in the President. This ‘no policy’ system in regard to the conduct of the war and the treatment of the slavery question is extremely dangerous.”285

  Just before submitting the message to Congress, Lincoln told his cabinet why he soft-pedaled the slavery issue: “Gentlemen, you are not a unit on this question, and as it is a very important one, in fact the most important which has come before us since the war commenced, I will float on with the tide till you are more nearly united than at present. Perhaps we shall yet drift into the right position.”286 Just after Frémont’s dismissal, when a Western congressman asked if the administration would not be forced to issue an emancipation proclamation, Lincoln replied: “We are drifting in that direction.”287 According to an abolitionist, Lincoln admitted that he had “no policy” but rather “allowed matters to drift along pretty much as they pleased.”288 To a query about his overall policy, he said: “I have none. I pass my life in preventing the storm from blowing down the tent, and I drive in the pegs as fast as they are pulled up.”289 In January 1862, Democratic editor James Brooks of New York said the president “seems right, all right, and acts right, but he is not now a positive man. He drifts, and loves to drift.”290

  Lincoln evidently believed that the best way to boil a frog was to place it in a pot of water on a stove and then gradually heat it up. If the water temperature rose precipitously, the frog would leap out, but if it increased little by little, the frog would not notice the difference and would eventually be cooked. Abolitionist Francis G. Shaw shrewdly observed that “Lincoln is Providential; for if we had a more energetic man at the helm he would rouse all the pro-slavery forces in the country to violent activity, whereas now they are lulled by his slow and timid course, and will not fairly wake up till the current of events has carried them too far out to sea to steer for the port they intended to make, and supposed they were making.”291 Varying the image, Owen Lovejoy sensibly observed in November that “President Lincoln is advancing step by step just as the cautious swimmer wades into the stream before making a dive. President Lincoln will make a dive before long.”292

  Lincoln had been urged to ignore the vexed question of slavery by the venerable John J. Crittenden, author of the congressional resolution stating that the war was being fought solely to preserve the Union. When the president received contrary advice from George Bancroft, he told the prominent historian that emancipation was a subject “which does not escape my attention, and with which I must deal in all due caution, and with the best judgment I can bring to it.”293

  Such caution did not suit most Radicals. According to a Washington correspondent, the message “falls like a wet blanket upon the hopes of the ardent anti-slavery party, and is all but denounced by many Republicans as utterly below the occasion.”294 The “utterances of the White House are not statesmanlike in tone any more than elegant in expression,” sneered the National Anti-Slavery Standard. It dismissed the annual message as “the development of a hand-to-mouth policy” by a president who “drifts about with every day’s breeze, but ever with the traditionary instinct of all politicians, that slavery is still the guiding star of the ship of state.”295 Lucretia Mott called the message “rather tame” and denounced Lincoln’s “proslavery conservatism.”296 “I really blushed for my country when I read that message,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton remarked. She added that “all his messages have been of the most mamdypamby order.”297 Lydia Maria Child contemptuously asked, “What else could we expect from King Log?” She deplored the president’s “stagnant soul” and “wooden skull.”298

  Some Republican members of Congress were so angry that they were prepared to censure the administration. Senator William P. Fessenden noted that the message was “considered here a dry and tame affair” and contained “several ridiculous things,” but he condescendingly remarked, “we must make the best of our bargain.”299 He added that the well-meaning Lincoln was “sadly deficient in some qualities essential for a ruler in times like these” and had “lost all hold upon Congress, though no one doubts his personal integrity.”300 Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts found the document “very weak and in some parts … exceedingly flat.” He wished “that some Webster could put on record for immortality a true statement of the real character of this infamous rebellion, of the events transpiring here beneath the gaze of the world.” (Dawes discovered much to admire in the president even if his rhetoric might be deficient. After visiting the White House on December 4, he wrote his spouse: “Everybody likes Lincoln when they call on him. There is the simplicity of a child, the earnestness and sincerity which command the love of all who get near him.”)301

  The message disheartened many Midwesterners. A prominent attorney in Milwaukee declared that “people, in this section, have scarcely a remaining hope, that this Administration will ever awake [from] its deep lethargy to a vigorous prosecution of the war. The demon slavery, seems to have struck it with blindness.”302 In Illinois, Lincoln’s good friend James C. Conkling wrote that “I was highly disappointed and so was the country generally upon the complete non-committal policy of the President as indicated in his Message,” which lacked “that high toned sentiment which ought to have pervaded a Message at such a critical period as this. Instead of ignoring the subject [of slavery] and falling far below public opinion and expectation, it should have recommended a bold and decisive policy and should have elevated public sentiment and aroused the national enthusiasm.”303 A resident of ea
stern Illinois complained that he and his neighbors “were all on tiptoe in expectation of the President’s Message, but imagine our disappointment and mortification when it came. Such a Message! Not one single manly, bold, dignified position taken in it from beginning to end. No response to the popular feeling. No battle cry to the 500,000 gallant soldiers now in the field, but a tame, timid, time-serving, commonplace sort of an abortion of a Message, cold enough with one breath to freeze h-ll over.”304 On December 10, a physician who identified himself as “no Abolitionist” reported that many voters in Aurora, Illinois, were “surprised and disappointed at the President’s course,” for “the meekness of his Message disgusts the whole of us. The first man I met after leaving my house this morning, in a rage declared that if a speedy change in views and acts did not soon occur, he hoped some Brutus would arise and love his country more than he did the President.”305 If Lincoln persisted for three more months with his moderate policy regarding slavery, predicted a resident of Greene County, he would “become the most unpopular man in the nation.” No Illinois Republican, said he, “doubts the honesty and patriotism of Abe Lincoln, yet his persevering opposition to striking rebellion where a blow is most effectual, has utterly destroyed all confidence in his statesmanship.”306

  The proposal to colonize freedmen outraged many opponents of slavery, who protested that the message “is thoroughly tinged with that colorphobia which has so long prevailed in Illinois,” and condemned Lincoln for “so laboring under colorphobia, as to make emancipation dependent on colonization.”307 The country’s leading opponent of colonization, William Lloyd Garrison, called the president “a man of very small caliber” who would do better “at his old business of splitting rails than at the head of a government like ours, especially in such a crisis.” He characterized the message as “wishy-washy,” “very feeble and rambling, and ridiculous as a State paper,” “weak and commonplace to a pitiable degree,” and scorned Lincoln’s “stupidity” and “imbecility.” The colonization proposal, he said, was “absurd and preposterous” and suggested that “Lincoln may colonize himself if he choose, but it is an impertinent act, on his part, to propose the getting rid of those who are as good as himself.”308

  In New York, the Tribune spoke dismissively of the president’s “crazy scheme.”309 Even the conservative Herald declared that there “is no necessity for it.” The editor of that paper voiced a widely shared practical objection: “the labor of the negroes is needed in the cotton and sugar States. The labor of the white man cannot supply it; and it would be extreme folly to deprive the country of such an immense laboring population.”310

  Many blacks indignantly protested against colonization. The editor of the New York Anglo-African remarked that Lincoln’s message “does not contain one word of generous trust, generous cheer or cordially sympathy with the ‘great uprising’ of the nation,” and recommended ironically that “any surplus change Congress may have can be appropriated ‘with our consent’ to expatriate and settle elsewhere the surviving slaveholders.”311 In Boston, prominent blacks insisted that “when we wish to leave the United States we can find and pay for that territory which shall suit us best,” that “when we are ready to leave, we shall be able to pay our own expenses of travel,” that “we don’t want to go now,” and that “if anybody else wants us to go, they must compel us.”312 Frederick Douglass, who was “bewildered by the spectacle of moral blindness, infatuation and helpless imbecility which the Government of Lincoln presents,” denounced colonization and bitterly remarked that the president “shows himself to be about as destitute of any anti-slavery principle or feeling as did James Buchanan.”313

  (Yet a few months earlier Douglass had urged his fellow blacks to emigrate to Haiti, “this modern land of Canaan” where “our oppressors do not want us to go, and where our influence and example can still be of service to those whose tears will find their way to us by the waters of the Gulf washing all our shores. Let us be there to help beat back the filibustering invaders from the cotton States, who only await an opportunity to extinguish that island asylum of the deeply-wronged colored race.” In an 1853 speech, Douglass had spoken favorably of Caribbean islands and British Guiana as suitable locations for American blacks to resettle.)314

  Some other blacks supported colonization, including a group of newly freed slaves in Washington who memorialized Congress to provide for their settlement in Central America. Earlier, they had resisted colonization because it was privately managed, but they trusted the government to administer the program in their best interest.

  Dissenting more temperately than some of his fellow abolitionists, Gerrit Smith acknowledged that Lincoln “is more intellectual than nine-tenths of the politicians, and more honest than ninety-nine hundreds of them. I admit too, that he would have made a good President had he not been trained to worship the Constitution,” a “comparatively petty thing.” Still, Smith deemed the message “twattle and trash,” and urged that there be no more talk “of expelling our friends from the country.”315

  The Radical editors of the Chicago Tribune, however, came to the president’s defense, remarking that the “cautious language which Mr. Lincoln employs, does not hide from us, who know the deep moral convictions of the man, the purpose that he has in view.”316 A Radical senator emphatically defended the message, arguing that “nothing should be attempted that could not be maintained.”317 Both the New York Times and Tribune detected in the message full acceptance of the Confiscation Act, which the president had so reluctantly signed a few months earlier.

  In fact, Lincoln’s long-standing support of colonization was not rooted in “color-phobia” but in hard political realities. Southern states simply would not voluntarily emancipate slaves unless the freedmen left the country. A case in point was Kentucky. Senator Garrett Davis of that state assured the president that loyal men there “would not resist his gradual emancipation scheme if he would only conjoin with it his colonization plan.” (Lincoln cited this statement when explaining his support for colonization.)318 Wisconsin Senator James R. Doolittle similarly remarked that “every man, woman, and child who comes from these [Slave] States, tells me that it is utterly impossible for them to talk of emancipation within any slave State without connecting it with the idea of colonization.”319 Democratic Congressman Charles John Biddle of Pennsylvania told his colleagues that alarm about emancipation “would spread to every one of my constituents who loves his country and his race if the public mind was not lulled and put to sleep with the word ‘colonization.’ I say the word, not the thing; for no practicable and adequate scheme for it has ever been presented or devised. The word is sung to us as a sort of ‘lullaby.’ ”320

  Lincoln was singing that necessary tune. Another Representative from the Keystone State received a similar message from a Democratic constituent: “If you can only send the whole race out of the country, I think all loyal democrats would be willing to see slavery abolished at once, regardless of any other consideration. … If the black race is once removed, we will have repose—not sooner.”321 In New York, Democrats at a Tammany meeting declared that they were “opposed to emancipating negro slaves, unless on some plan of colonization.”322 A former resident of the South assured Senator John Sherman that it was essential “that colonization should be held out in order to win the nonslaveholding and especially the poor whites of the South, and these are the men who must uphold the United States rule in the slave states.” Ninety percent of them “when they once understand it will hail manumission and colonization as a God’s blessing. The slaveholders rule them by creating a horror of what the Negroes would do if freed among them, but with all this there is a strong though secret hatred of slavery.”323 Appalled by the discrimination that blacks faced in the Free States, a treasury official in St. Louis exclaimed that if emancipation were not accompanied by colonization, “God pity the poor Negro!” for many Northern states would follow the lead of Illinois and Indiana by forbidding blacks to settle within their bor
ders.

  Thousands of slaves in Virginia, South Carolina, and elsewhere were in the custody of the Union army, which did not wish to continue feeding and housing them. (Ben Butler, who ingeniously declared them “contraband of war,” called the flood of blacks streaming into Fort Monroe a “Disaster.”)324 Neither the North nor the Border States wanted them, and the public disapproved of allowing them to serve in the army; colonization therefore seemed the only viable option, especially since practical steps had already been taken to find sites abroad where freedmen might migrate.

  Before 1861, colonization had been supported by many Radicals, among them Salmon P. Chase. During the war, other Radicals promoted it, including James Red-path, whom Frederick Douglass described as “a sincere friend of the colored race.”325 The ultra-Radical Moncure D. Conway, who became a bitter critic of Lincoln, published an influential book in 1862, The Rejected Stone, which contained a letter to the president urging him to colonize Haiti as part of a general plan of emancipation.

  It is not entirely clear whether Lincoln really thought colonization feasible or desirable. Harriet Martineau speculated that he was insincere. His “absurd” and “impracticable” plan, she wrote, “is so wrong and foolish that we might safely assume that Mr. Lincoln proposed something that would not do, in order to throw upon others the responsibility of whatever will have to be done.”326 Indeed, he was covering his flank against attacks which would inevitably attend emancipation, and also trying to sugarcoat it to make it a less bitter pill for Conservatives to swallow. But he may also have harbored an unrealistic belief that colonization just might work. At least he wanted to be able to say that he had tried to implement it.