Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  An Ohioan accurately noted that the “people are not yet prepared for Hunter’s conclusion.” In time, public opinion would change, he predicted, for the “logic of the war is doing its work slowly but surely.”108 Henry Winter Davis considered Lincoln’s action “the best disposition that could be made” and hoped that Hunter would be cashiered.109 (Lincoln did not fire or censure Hunter, nor did he order him to dismiss his black soldiers.) The leading Republican paper in Rhode Island found Lincoln’s proclamation revoking Hunter’s order “admirable in letter and spirit,” and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper lauded the document as characteristically Lincolnian, “rugged, direct, simple and earnest. … pervaded by a spirit sympathetic and paternal.” Also paternal was the president’s statement to the Border State delegation, which resembled an appeal “a father might make to his children.” The editors were glad that Lincoln had apparently not allowed Seward “to make revisions, and bedizen honest, earnest thoughts with a tawdry rhetoric.”110 A prominent New York merchant, Alexander T. Stewart, urged Lincoln to continue “your policy of maintaining the Constitution. It is our only rock of safety. A grateful Country will in return give you its approval, and its encreased confidence and love.”111 The conservative New York Herald called Lincoln’s proclamation “opportune and admirable,” the “most important State paper issued since the outbreak of the rebellion.” The editors thought that it “gives another example of the unflinching conservativeness of Mr. Lincoln, while it widens and deepens, if possible, the impassable gulf between him and the baffled revolutionary nigger-worshipping radicals.”112

  Those Radicals were intensely disgruntled. “A more injudicious and unjust edict has not been issued since the war began,” Joseph Medill expostulated to Chase.113 The treasury secretary was equally upset, telling Horace Greeley: “I have not been so sorely tried by any thing here.”114 Adam Gurowski thought Hunter’s decree was “too noble, too great, for the tall Kentuckian. Henceforth every Northern man dying in the South is to be credited to Mr. Lincoln.”115 Lydia Maria Child warned that the nation “will have to pass through shameful stages of degenerance if we blindly and recklessly throw away the glorious opportunity for atonement which the Divine Ruler has placed within our reach.”116 Another Massachusetts abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, predicted that Lincoln’s act “will serve to increase the disgust and uneasiness felt in Europe at our shilly-shallying course, to abate the enthusiasm of the army and friends of freedom universally, and to inspire the rebels with fresh courage and determination.” To Garrison, the future seemed “pregnant with sorrow and disaster.”117 Radical clergy denounced the president’s “short-sighted” and “unreasonable” act “of overweening caution & timidity” as “an insult to the country,” a “disgrace to himself and to the government,” as well as a “crime against humanity and God.”118 Moncure Conway hyperbolically declared that Lincoln “cannot annul the order of Gen. Hunter without being pilloried in history as the man who reenslaved nearly a million human beings.”119 In the House of Representatives, Thaddeus Stevens declared that Lincoln “is as honest a man as there is in the world, but I believe him too easy and amiable, and to be misled by the malign influence of Kentucky counselors.”120 Privately, he expressed himself more harshly, telling a friend: “As to future hopes, they are poor as Lincoln is nobody.”121 A disappointed black abolitionist, who had been heartened by the president’s messages on confiscation and emancipation, denounced him for overruling Hunter with a “Pro-slavery Proclamation.”122

  Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew hinted that if the administration failed to support Hunter, the Bay State would not gladly provide troops for the army. In response to an appeal for reinforcements, Andrew told Secretary of War Stanton that “if the President will sustain General Hunter, recognize all men, even black men, as legally capable of that loyalty the blacks are waiting to manifest, and let them fight, with God and human nature on their side, the roads will swarm if need be with multitudes whom New England would pour out to obey your call.”123

  Not all Radicals condemned Lincoln’s decision. From South Carolina, Edward Lillie Pierce reluctantly criticized Hunter, whose antislavery zeal he shared. “I think there may be some irregularity, almost aberration in his mind,” Pierce told Chase. “This is not the first time since his arrival, where he has acted without premeditation or examination, and the next day recalled an order just issued. He has evidently brooded over the arming of negroes for some time, and seems to be carried away by it, and in his action, ignores all sources of information. … I confess to a want of confidence in his discretion and the regular action of his mind.”124 The New York Tribune, though disappointed, said: “Let no one be discouraged nor alienated because of this Presidential step.”125 The Independent pointed out that Lincoln was “very careful not to reject the principle” of emancipation as a military necessity.126 Samuel J. May, Jr., acknowledged that Hunter’s proclamation interfered with Lincoln’s offer of compensated emancipation and “would even seem to cast a doubt on the sincerity & honesty of it.”127 While deploring Lincoln’s action, the National Anti-Slavery Standard was “glad to observe that the language of the President encourages the hope that he will himself, ere long, exercise the power he denies to his subordinates, and proclaim liberty, not alone in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, but ‘throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof.’ ”128 Many Republicans shared that optimism, though some thought Lincoln’s warning a mere “sugar-coated pill” to placate Radicals.129

  Carl Schurz, who regretted the timing of Hunter’s proclamation, offered Lincoln solace: “I do not see how you could have acted otherwise, at least at the present moment; and I am especially glad that you have given no additional declaration of policy but reserved to yourself the use of your constitutional powers and prerogatives.” Schurz was fully persuaded that the president would eventually eliminate slavery, but he urged him in the meantime to make some gestures to placate the more skeptical Radicals.130

  The Sugar-Coated Pill: Placating Radicals

  Lincoln took that advice, pleasing Radicals by signing legislation to extend diplomatic recognition to Haiti and Liberia, by approving a treaty with Great Britain strictly enforcing the ban on the African slave trade, and by forbidding the military to return slaves reaching Union lines. In addition, he sanctioned General Butler’s stratagem of declaring slaves who entered his lines “contraband,” a policy which Winfield Scott referred to as “Butler’s fugitive slave law.”

  Repeatedly Lincoln insisted that bondsmen reaching Union lines would never be surrendered. In early March 1862, he assured New York Judge John W. Edmonds that “no slave freed by the advance of our army would be returned.”131 A few days later he approved an article of war prohibiting the military from returning runaways. In April, he declared to representatives of the Freedmen’s Association: “I am entirely satisfied that no slave who becomes for the time free within the American lines will ever be re-enslaved. Rather than have it so, I would give up and abdicate.”132 That month, D. W. Bartlett reported that Lincoln “has said a hundred times that not with his consent, not if he can hinder it, shall any slave ever be remanded to chains and servitude by the restoration of peace.”133 On July 1, Lincoln showed Orville H. Browning a paper he had drafted stating that while no slaves “necessarily taken and escaping during the war are ever to be returned to slavery,” on the other hand “[n]o inducements are to be held out to them to come into our lines for they come now faster than we can provide for them and are becoming an embarrassment to the government.”134 Two days later, Stanton informed General Butler that the president “is of the opinion that, under the law of Congress, they [runaway slaves] cannot be sent back to their masters; that, in common humanity, they must not be permitted to suffer for want of food, shelter or other necessaries of life; that, to this end, they should be provided for by the quartermaster and commissary departments, and that those who are capable of labor should be set to work and paid reasonable wages.”
135 When a leading Kentucky Unionist protested that federal troops refused to turn over his runaway slave, Lincoln offered to pay $500 out of his own pocket to settle the matter.

  Diplomatic recognition of Haiti and Liberia had long been resisted on the grounds that those nations might send blacks to represent them at Washington. Lincoln, however, did not object to that possibility. When James Redpath told him that President Fabre Nicolas Geffrard of Haiti was willing to appoint a white representative rather than a black one to Washington, Lincoln replied: “Well—you can tell Mr. Geffrard that I shan’t tear my shirt if he does send a negro here!”136 (The Haitian government appointed a black army colonel, Ernest Roumain, as its first minister to the United States.)

  Especially pleasing to Radicals was Lincoln’s decision in early 1862 to approve the execution of Nathaniel Gordon, the only American ever hanged for slave trading. When the prosecutor in the case, E. Delafield Smith, visited Washington to urge the president to uphold the death sentence, Lincoln said: “Mr. Smith, you do not know how hard it is to have a human being die when you know that a stroke of your pen may save him.”137 (Similarly, he told the governor of Missouri that he “could not bear to have the power to save a man[’]s life and not do it.”)138 The president was torn, explaining to Dr. Robert K. Stone, his family physician, that he did not want to execute slave traders “but that he did not wish to be announced as having pardoned them, lest it might be thought at Richmond that he feared the consequences of such action and then he might be compelled to hang fifty such men.”139

  To his Illinois friend, Congressman Henry P. H. Bromwell, Lincoln said: “you don’t know how they [Gordon’s supporters] followed and pressed to get him pardoned, or his sentence commuted.”140 The pressure had been intense indeed; thousands of New Yorkers signed petitions appealing for commutation of the sentence. The New York World reported that every “possible social, professional and other interested influence has been brought to bear upon Mr. Lincoln, and it is stated that never before has a President been so thoroughly and persistently approached for official interference as in this case. Every possible argument which the ingenuity of counsel, the regard of relatives, or the fear of mercantile accomplices could suggest, has been used.”141 On behalf of Gordon, funds were poured out, a rally took place on Wall Street, and congressmen and senators lobbied the president.

  Lincoln’s resolve may have been stiffened by Charles Sumner, who told him that Gordon must be executed in order to “deter slave traders,” to “give notice to the world of a change of policy,” and to demonstrate “that the Govt. can hang a man.”142 The New York World agreed: “A more deliberate, cold-blooded, nefarious, accursed, infernal crime it is not possible for a human being to commit. If we are to cheat the gallows of such guilt, we may as well at once abolish the gallows altogether.”143 A Massachusetts antislavery militant, John Murray Forbes, asked: “Is he [Gordon], like the rattlesnake in camp … to be released? The great want of the hour is to see one spy … hanged. … But if this wish of the nation must not be gratified, can we not at least hang one of the pirates who have sacrificed such hecatombs of Africans?”144

  Fearing that the president might commute the death sentence, U.S. Marshal Robert Murray hastened from New York to Washington, where he explained to the president “that mercy would be misapplied in this instance, and if extended, that it would only embolden the slave traders and give the government a character for timidity and incompetency.” Lincoln assured him “that no change in the sentence would be extended by him.” Gordon’s beautiful young wife also traveled to the capital, where she won the sympathy of Mary Lincoln. But it did her no good, for Lincoln would not allow the First Lady to raise the subject.

  Ultimately, the president refused to commute Gordon’s sentence, telling the prisoner’s intercessors that the “slave-trade will never be put down till our laws are executed, and the penalty of death has once been enforced upon the offenders.” The statute had been thought unenforceable.145

  When Gordon’s lawyer sent Lincoln a last-minute appeal for mercy, the president forwarded it and accompanying documents to Attorney General Bates, who advised that the chief executive “has no right to stop the course of law, except on grounds of excuse or mitigation found in the case itself—and not to arrest the execution of the statute merely because he thinks the law wrong or too severe.”146 Lincoln did allow a brief postponement of Gordon’s execution, but nothing more. He counseled the prisoner to relinquish “all expectation of pardon by Human Authority” and “refer himself alone to the mercy of the common God and Father of all men.”147

  In New York, George Templeton Strong applauded Gordon’s execution. “Served him right,” Strong wrote, “and our unprecedented execution of justice on a criminal of this particular class and at this particular time will do us good abroad, perhaps with the pharisaical shop-keepers and bagmen of England itself.” He hoped that the courts, acting on this precedent, would “promptly exterminate every man who imports niggers into this continent.” Strong admired the backbone Lincoln displayed in resisting appeals for clemency. “Immense efforts were made to get the man pardoned or his punishment commuted. Lincoln told me of them. … He deserves credit for his firmness. The Executive has no harder duty, ordinarily, than the denial of mercy and grace asked by wives and friends and philanthropes.”148 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper insisted that Gordon’s execution was necessary “to show to the friends of Freedom throughout the world that we are really entitled to their sympathies and support.”149

  A Massachusetts citizen who applauded the execution of “the wretched pirate” viewed it as part of the administration’s general campaign against slave trading. “Mr Lincoln, in selecting his district attorneys and marshals, had an eye to their capacities for arresting the foreign slave trade. Under the energetic and sagacious action of his officers, slave ships which, under former administrations, boldly entered our northern ports to fit out for their atrocious and inhuman voyages, are now suppressed. … He has made with England a most stringent treaty, to insure the suppression of the slave trade. … Without the professions of a philanthropist, Mr L. has evinced a noble and generous nature, and should rank with the honored names of Clarkson and Wilberforce.”150 A similar view was taken by the London Daily News, which speculated that “Gordon would have had a better chance had his life depended on the decision of some impulsive negro-phile, instead of being at the disposal of the severe, deliberative, but inflexible tenant of the White House, a man who, amidst the severest trials has never swerved a hair’s breadth from the policy which he professed when he was a candidate for office. Those who knew President Lincoln well said that he would not lose the precious opportunity to strike a blow at a system which costs hundreds of lives yearly and dooms the brave men of the two African squadrons to ruin their health on a pestilential coast.” The president’s refusal to alter the death sentence “is an index of the quality of Mr. Lincoln’s government, of its strength of principle, and the consistency of its policy, and it marks the end of a system.”151

  Many abolitionists applauded the president, though a protégé of Thaddeus Stevens wondered why Lincoln would hang Gordon and yet allow men like John C. Breckinridge and Beriah Magoffin to go unmolested. Similarly, the president’s old friend Erastus Wright asked: “If Lincoln directed Gordon hung Why should he treat with complacency those who are in fellowship and complicity, who are equally guilty?”152 In fact, Lincoln did pardon some slave traders. When, however, Massachusetts Congressman John B. Alley appealed to him on behalf of one who had served his prison sentence but had been unable to pay his fine, the president replied sternly: “I believe I am kindly enough in nature and can be moved to pity and to pardon the perpetrator of almost the worst crime that the mind of man can conceive or the arm of man can execute; but any man, who, for paltry gain and stimulated only by avarice, can rob Africa of her children to sell into interminable bondage, I never will pardon, and he may stay and rot in jail before he will ever get rel
ief from me.”153

  Lincoln’s contempt for slave traders applied to the domestic as well as foreign trade. In 1864, upon hearing that Confederate cavalry raider and slave dealer John Hunt Morgan had been killed, he told an army chaplain: “Well, I wouldn’t crow over anybody’s death, but I assure you that I take this as resignedly as I could take any dispensation of Providence. This Morgan was a nigger-driver. You Northern men don’t know anything about such low, mean, cowardly creatures.” He added that “Southern slaveholders despise them. But such a wretch has been used to carry on their rebellion.”154

  Those antislavery steps gratified some Radicals, including Charles Sumner, who was deeply impressed with Lincoln’s sincere commitment to the cause of freedom. In June, the Massachusetts senator told an abolitionist friend: “Could you have seen the President—as it was my privilege often—while he was considering the great questions on which he has already acted—the invitation to Emancipation in the [Border] States, Emancipation in the District of Columbia, and the acknowledgment of the independence of Hayti and Liberia—even your zeal would have been satisfied, for you would have felt the sincerity of his purpose to do what he could to carry forward the principles of the Declaration of Independence. His whole soul was occupied, especially by the first proposition, which was peculiarly his own. In familiar intercourse with him, I remember nothing more touching than the earnestness and completeness with which he embraced this idea. To his mind, it was just and beneficent, while it promised the sure end of Slavery.”155 Months earlier, Lincoln confided to Sumner “that he was now convinced that this [war] was a great movement of God to end slavery & that the man wd. be a fool who shd. stand in the way.”156 Despite their political and temperamental differences, Lincoln and the Massachusetts senator managed to get along fairly well, in part because—as Lincoln put it—“Sumner thinks he runs me.”157