Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Lincoln disappointed some by failing to offer confidence-inspiring rhetoric. The following day an Illinoisan told him: “you ought to take a stronger stand. The nation expects you to. You are looked up to with confidence. Rouse the soul of the people.”303 Others praised Lincoln’s impromptu speech extravagantly. Whitelaw Reid called it “remarkable, alike for the courageous assumption of unpopular responsibility, and for the characteristic honesty with which he refrained from boastful promises and stirring declarations that the war should now soon be ended.” Reid could think of “no more striking scene” in “all the history of the Republic.” Rhetorically he asked: “Was ever the ruler of a great people, in a moment when his personal popularity was so flatteringly brought home to him by his people, known voluntarily to assume, without special necessity therefor, such popular odium as the President honestly sought to transfer from the Secretary [of War] to himself?”304 Reporters noted that the crowd “was delighted with the manly manner in which the President assumed the whole responsibility in the Stanton-McClellan imbroglio.”305 The Providence Journal lauded the president’s “straightforward manliness and homely common sense,” and Erastus Brooks, a partisan Democratic journalist, wrote that by such “frank confessions, which are often more generous to others than just to himself, the President draws friends around him, and makes many friends of those, who have been warm opponents of his policy, principles and his election.”306 Lincoln’s profound magnanimity would continue to win him respect and affection.

  27

  “The Hour Comes for Dealing with Slavery”

  Playing the Last Trump Card

  (January–July 1862)

  The failure of the Peninsular campaign was a defining moment in the war, for if McClellan had won, his triumph—combined with the many other successes of Union arms that spring, including the capture of New Orleans, Memphis, and Nashville—might well have ended the war with slavery virtually untouched. But in the wake of the Army of the Potomac’s significant defeat, Lincoln decided that the peculiar institution must no longer be treated gently. It was time, he thought, to deal with it head-on. As he told the artist Francis B. Carpenter in 1864, “It had got to be midsummer, 1862. 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! I now determined upon the adoption of the emancipation policy.”1 To New York attorney Edwards Pierrepont, Lincoln similarly explained: “It is my last trump card, Judge. If that don’t do, we must give up.”2 By playing it, he said he hoped to “win the trick.”3 To pave the way for an emancipation proclamation, Lincoln during the first half of 1862 carefully prepared the public mind with both words and deeds.

  Two Steps Forward: Proposal to Abolish Slavery in the Border States and in Washington

  Ever since the fall of Sumter, opponents of slavery had been urging emancipation on the president. Some based their appeals on moral grounds, but many others emphasized practical considerations, like the need to prevent European powers from intervening on behalf of the South. From his diplomatic post in Madrid, Carl Schurz wrote that by emancipating the slaves, Lincoln could best reduce the chances of foreign intervention. When Schurz visited the White House in early 1862, Lincoln expressed agreement: “I cannot imagine that any European power would dare to recognize and aid the Southern Confederacy if it becomes clear that the Confederacy stands for slavery and the Union for freedom.” But, the president added, he doubted that public opinion at home “was yet sufficiently prepared” for emancipation. He wanted “to unite, and keep united, all the forces of Northern society and of the Union element in the South, especially the Border States, in the war for the Union.” With good reason he feared that “the cry of ‘abolition war,’ ” which an open antislavery policy would elicit, would “tend to disunite those forces and thus weaken the Union cause.”4

  In January 1862, Lincoln voiced similar doubts to abolitionists Moncure Conway and William Henry Channing, who urged him to emancipate the slaves and compensate their masters. (Other abolitionists also supported compensating slaveholders.) “We grow in this direction daily,” the president told them, “and I am not without hope that some great thing is to be accomplished. When the hour comes for dealing with slavery, I trust I shall be willing to act, though it costs my life; and, gentlemen, lives will be lost.”5 But that hour had not yet arrived. Offering a variation of Shakespeare’s dictum that “ripeness is all,” he told other militant opponents of slavery that a “man watches his pear-tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap!”6

  Lincoln also fended off emancipationists by protesting that he did not cross rivers until reaching them. On January 28, 1862, the New York diarist George Templeton Strong recorded a presidential interview, leaving a valuable record of what Lincoln sounded like in conversation: “Wa-al, that reminds me of a party of Methodist parsons that was travelling in Illinois when I was a boy thar, and had a branch to cross that was pretty bad—ugly to cross, ye know, because the waters was up. And they got considerin’ and discussin’ how they should git across it, and they talked about it for two hours, and one on ’em thought they had ought to cross one way when they got there, and another [one of them suggested] another way, and they got quarrelin’ about it, till at last an old brother put in, and he says, says he, ‘Brethren, this here talk ain’t no use. I never cross a river until I come to it.’ ” (In that same interview, Lincoln exclaimed: “me and the Attorney-General’s very chicken-hearted!”)7

  On another occasion, Lincoln employed an equally homey story to make his point to an Ohioan who raised the topic of emancipation: “Well, you see, we’ve got to be mighty cautious how we manage the negro question. If we’re not, we shall be like the barber out in Illinois, who was shaving a fellow with a hatchet face and lantern jaws like mine. The barber stuck his finger in his customer’s mouth, to make his cheek stick out, but while shaving away he cut through the fellow’s cheek and cut off his own finger!”8

  Emancipationist pressure had grown intense after Lincoln overruled John C. Frémont’s proclamation liberating the slaves of disloyal Missourians. In November 1861, the president had responded by trying to get Delaware to accept his plan of gradual, compensated emancipation. That failed. In his annual message the following month, he had suggested to Congress in a rather backhanded way that it endorse a similar plan, coupled with voluntary colonization of the freedmen. That too produced no results, though the lawmakers throughout the winter and spring debated several bills dealing with the confiscation of Confederate property, including slaves.

  Some Radicals lost all patience. On March 6, 1862, the Rev. Dr. George B. Cheever exclaimed to a fellow abolitionist: “how black the prospect looks before us!” Cheever feared that “we are under a military pro-slavery despotism, and the President is at length taking the active command, in behalf of slavery and against freedom.”9 When Charles Sumner pressed Lincoln to endorse a gradual emancipation plan, the president replied that the Massachusetts senator was ahead of him “only a month or six weeks.”10 As it turned out, Sumner was three months in front of the president.

  At a cabinet meeting in early March, Lincoln proposed to send Congress a plan of gradual emancipation with financial grants to participating states. All approved save Stanton, who objected that Slave States would ignore such a proposal and that the scheme “commits the administration to the theory that this is not a nation, the very theory for which the secessionists are contending with force and arms.”11 Lincoln also showed the message to Sumner, who approved in general but persuaded the president to delete one sentence (“Should the people of the insurgent districts now reject the councils of treason, revive loyal state governments, and again send Senators and Representatives to Congress, they would, at once find themselves at pea
ce with no institution changed, and with their just influence in the councils of the nation fully re-established.”)12 In vain did Montgomery Blair urge Lincoln to include a colonization provision.

  Lincoln also read the message to Samuel Gridley Howe of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. On March 5, after a White House interview, Howe expressed puzzlement about the president’s hesitation to speak out boldly, for Lincoln obviously regarded slavery as “a great stumbling block in the way of human progress, and especially of this country. He feels that whoever has a hand in its removal will stand out before posterity as a benefactor of his race.” Rhetorically Howe asked: “Why in the world, then, does he not ‘speak out in meetin’ and relieve his mind?” Answering his own question, Howe said: “Simply because of his habit of procrastinating: he puts off and puts off the evil day of effort, and stands shivering with his hand on the string of the shower-bath.” But Howe was convinced that the president “has at last had a change of heart, and has set his face steadily Zionward.” In fact, Howe predicted that the emancipation message “will prove to be a bomb-shell. If he is not further demoralized by victories, he will be brought up to the scratch.”13

  On March 6, Lincoln submitted the revised proposal in a special message to Congress suggesting that it resolve “that the United States ought to co-operate with any state which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery, giving to such state pecuniary aid, to be used by such state in it’s discretion, to compensate for the inconveniences, public and private, produced by such change of system.” (Abolishment was a term less likely to raise conservative hackles than abolition.) Lincoln justified the recommendation not as an act of moral righteousness but “as one of the most efficient means of self-preservation.” If Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky could be induced to abolish slavery on their own initiative, with federal help, then the Confederacy might well despair of winning the war: “The leaders of the existing insurrection entertain the hope that this government will ultimately be forced to acknowledge the independence of some part of the disaffected region, and that all the slave states North of such part will then say ‘the Union, for which we have struggled, being already gone, we now choose to go with the Southern section.’ To deprive them of this hope, substantially ends the rebellion; and the initiation of emancipation completely deprives them of it, as to all the states initiating it. The point is not that all the states tolerating slavery would very soon, if at all, initiate emancipation; but that, while the offer is equally made to all, the more Northern shall, by such initiation, make it certain to the more Southern, that in no event, will the former ever join the latter, in their proposed confederacy.”

  Although the federal government would have to pay a large sum to the states, Lincoln argued that the cost would be more than offset by the early termination of the war: “In the mere financial, or pecuniary view, any member of Congress, with the census-tables and Treasury-reports before him, can readily see for himself how very soon the current expenditures of this war would purchase, at fair valuation, all the slaves in any named State.” The plan, Lincoln argued, would be constitutional, for under its provisions the federal government “sets up no claim of a right, by federal authority, to interfere with slavery within state limits, referring, as it does, the absolute control of the subject, in each case, to the state and it’s people, immediately interested. It is proposed as a matter of perfectly free choice with them.” In conclusion, Lincoln hinted that if his plan were not adopted, the war might produce sudden rather than gradual emancipation. If Border State slaveowners wanted to avoid losing the money they had invested in slaves, they should support his plan: “In the annual message last December, I thought fit to say ‘The Union must be preserved; and hence all indispensable means must be employed.’ I said this, not hastily, but deliberately. War has been made, and continues to be, an indispensable means to this end. A practical re-acknowledgement of the national authority would render the war unnecessary, and it would at once cease. If, however, resistance continues, the war must also continue; and it is impossible to foresee all the incidents, which may attend and all the ruin which may follow it. Such [measures] as may seem indispensable, or may obviously promise great efficiency towards ending the struggle, must and will come.”14

  The idea was not new. In 1825, New York Senator Rufus King had proposed that funds generated by the sale of western lands be used to compensate states that abolished slavery, a suggestion which impressed Chief Justice John Marshall very favorably. Six years later, James Madison endorsed a plan to use public land funds to underwrite colonization.

  As Samuel G. Howe had predicted, the message landed in the Capitol “like a bomb-shell,” creating a sensation and taking both chambers by surprise. The text was passed from hand to hand by senators, on whom it had an electrifying impact. In the House, where it was read aloud, it generated profound interest and serious discussion.

  Some abolitionists and Radicals lauded the message. To Owen Lovejoy it proved that the president was “an anti-slavery man” who “hates human bondage.” The Illinois congressman supported the proposal even though it called for gradual rather than immediate emancipation. Lovejoy insisted that “slavery must perish,” but he stressed that he did “not mean that it must perish at once necessarily.” And though he believed “that the slaves can take care of themselves, and that they should be let alone,” he did not “mean to preclude the idea of colonization that is not compulsory.”15 Lydia Maria Child told Horace Greeley that the Radical press missed the “full import” of Lincoln’s message, which she thought “says plainly enough, [‘]If the rebels continue to resist, the U.S. govt. must and will resort to emancipation; and, gentlemen of the Border States, I ask you to reflect how much your slaves will be worth under those circumstances. Hadn’t you better accept of compensation from the U.S. before their market value is gone?’ ”16 Moncure D. Conway called Lincoln’s message “the insertion of a wedge so neatly as to do credit to the President’s knowledge of railsplitting.”17

  Wendell Phillips, who seldom praised Lincoln, also likened the message to “a wedge—a very small wedge, but it is a wedge for all that.” Varying the image, he declared that Lincoln “had opened the door of emancipation a foot, and he (Mr. Phillips) with a coach and six, and Wm. Lloyd Garrison for a driver, would drive right through.”18 More emphatically, Phillips told Conway: “Thank God for Old Abe! He hasn’t got to Caanan yet but he has set his face Zionward.”19 On March 18, at the president’s request, Phillips visited the White House, where Lincoln said that for three months he had labored on his address to Congress “all by himself, [with] no conference with his cabinet.” Though the abolitionist spellbinder praised that document, Lincoln evidently did not believe that his guest “valued the message quite enough” and told a story about an Irish toper in the legally-dry state of Maine. Thirsty for alcohol, this son of Erin requested a glass of soda, asking his host: “Couldn’t ye put a drop of the crathur in it unbeknown to meself?” Just so, said Lincoln, “I’ve put a good deal of Anti Slavery in it unbeknown to themselves.” This was evidently a reference to the Border State congressmen and senators, for he went on to inform Phillips that he had instructed them “not to talk to him about slavery. They loved it & meant it should last—he hated it & meant it should die.” The president added that “if only men over 50 voted we could abolish slavery. When men are soon to face their God they are Antislavery—it is the young who support the system—unfortunately they rule too much.” Although the Bostonian was frustrated because Lincoln talked “so fast & constantly” during their one-hour interview that “it was hard to get a word in edgewise,” nevertheless Phillips “felt rather encouraged,” and reported that the president “is better than his Congress fellows.” Still, though Lincoln seemed a “perfectly honest” magistrate “trying to do what he thought his duty,” Phillips condescendingly deemed him “a man of very slow mind.”20

  William Lloyd Garrison did not share Phillips’s enthusiasm, fearing the message “will
prove a ‘decoy duck’ or ‘a red herring,’ so as to postpone that decisive action by Congress which we are SO desirous of seeing.” Noting that thousands of petitions calling for immediate emancipation were flooding Congress, Garrison asked: “Are these to be satisfied by proposing such a will-of-the-wisp as a substitute?” Lincoln, he charged, “is at war with common sense, sound reason, the teachings of history, the instincts and aspirations of human nature, [and] the laws of political economy.”21 Wisconsin Congressman John F. Potter thought the message “does not amount to much,” and remarked: “one swallow don’t make a summer.”22 Maria Weston Chapman regretted the word “gradual” in Lincoln’s message, but she charitably regarded it as “a make-weight, like the word compensation: a couple of sops thrown to the heads of slaveholders. Meanwhile, events are compelling immediatism.”23

  Most Radical Republicans, however, agreed with the New York Tribune, which praised “the message of freedom” as “the day-star of a new national dawn” and “one of those few great scriptures that live in history and mark an epoch in the lives of nations and of races.” It was, said the editors, “the most important document ever issued from the White House.” Enthusiastically, they predicted that March 6 “will yet be celebrated as a day which initiated the Nation’s deliverance from the most stupendous wrong, curse and shame of the Nineteenth Century.” The president’s “admirable and comprehensive” suggestions would “conduce to National integrity and internal peace.”24 Similarly, Charles Sumner thought “it must take its place among the great events of history,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that it “marks the happiest day in the political year.”25 To a critic of Lincoln’s plan, George William Curtis replied: “I have rather more faith in the President’s common-sense and practical wisdom.” Deeming Lincoln “very wise,” Curtis said that his “policy has been to hold the border states. He has held them. Now he makes his next move, and invites emancipation. I think he has the instinct of a statesman: the knowledge of how much is practicable without recoil. From the first he has steadily advanced—and there has been no protest against anything he has said or done. It is easy to say he has done nothing,—until you compare March 6 ’61 & ’62.”26