Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  The blacks of Washington who had signed up for Chiriqui protested against the suspension. Unable to see the president, they left a statement for him: “Many of us acting upon your promise to send us so soon as one hundred families were ready, have sold our furniture, have given up our little homes, to go in the first voyage; and now, when more than five times that number have made preparations to leave, we find that there is uncertainty and delay, which is greatly embarrassing to us, and reducing our scanty means until fears are being created that those means being exhausted, poverty in a still worse form than has yet met us, may be our winter prospect.” When a delegation presented this document at the White House, a secretary assured them that Lincoln “was as anxious as he ever was for their departure; that he had placed everything in the hands of Senator Pomeroy of Kansas; and that he could not now see the deputation of colored men, but that he would do so in the course of a few days.”200 But the president did not meet with them later.

  In late October, the New York Journal of Commerce recommended that, in light of the opposition of Latin American nations to serve as colonization sites, the black volunteers who had signed up for Chiriqui be sent to Liberia instead. When shown this editorial, Lincoln replied: “I am perfectly willing that these colored people should be sent to Liberia, provided they are willing to go: but there’s the rub. I cannot coerce them, if they prefer some other locality. Central America was designated because they showed a willingness to go there. But I would just as soon, and a little rather, send them to Liberia. But where are the people who wish to go there?”201 When Attorney General Bates recommended that the blacks be expelled, Lincoln “objected unequivocally to compulsion” insisting that their “emigration must be voluntary and without expense to themselves.”202

  Lincoln considered yet another colonization scheme, this one suggested by the eccentric former Congressman Eli Thayer of Massachusetts, a militant opponent of slavery who in the 1850s had played a vital role in the struggle to keep Kansas free. In the summer of 1862, Thayer proposed to lead 10,000 black short-term troops to Florida, defeat the enemy there, then have those soldiers discharged and take possession of property confiscated for nonpayment of taxes. Thayer pledged that if his plan were accepted, he could bring Florida back into the Union as a free state within a few months. In January 1863, Lincoln observed that the plan “had received the earnest and cordial attention of himself and cabinet, and that while recent military events had forced the postponement of this enterprise for the time by demanding the entire attention and power of the government elsewhere, yet he trusted the delay was but for a few days.”203 The New York Tribune endorsed colonization in either Florida or West Texas. But nothing came of this scheme.

  Colonization in Haiti: Cow Island

  Something did come of a plan to colonize freed slaves in Haiti, however. Haitian authorities encouraged immigration from the United States. To expedite matters, James Redpath, a radical abolitionist and devotee of John Brown, was appointed “general agent of emigration to Haiti from the state and province of North America.” In 1861, he persuaded over a thousand American blacks to settle in that Caribbean nation. Frederick Douglass’s newspaper praised Redpath’s efforts. Helping Redpath were several black recruiting agents, including Douglass’s assistant editor, William J. Watkins, the novelist William Wells Brown, Henry Highland Garnet, James Theodore Holly, Richard J. Hinton, and H. Ford Douglas. In October 1862, one Bernard Kock submitted to Lincoln a proposal to colonize a 25-square-mile island off the Haitian coast called Ile à Vache (Cow Island), which was virtually deserted. Although Attorney General Bates considered Kock “an arrant humbug” and a “Charleston adventurer,” on New Year’s Eve the president approved a contract offering him $250,000 to take 5,000 American blacks to the island, which he claimed he had leased from the Haitian government.

  Preoccupied with other matters on that memorable day, Lincoln failed to note the contract’s flaws. Kock offered no reliable security to guarantee that he would fulfill his end of the bargain, nor did he provide evidence that the Haitian government had approved his scheme. Moreover, no one in the administration knew much about the self-styled “governor of Cow Island.” When Kock approached the secretary of state to affix the great seal of the United States to the contract, the skeptical Seward kept it in his possession, effectively scuttling the plan. In April 1863, the contract was canceled. The Cow Island project might have died aborning if Lincoln had not been so enthusiastic about it. The success of the Haitian Emigration Bureau in persuading American blacks to emigrate may have influenced his thinking, though by late 1862 Redpath’s enterprise was foundering. The project was kept alive by New York capitalists, including Paul S. Forbes and Charles K. Tuckerman, who had advanced Kock money to prepare the expedition. At the president’s request, Seward drafted a contract for Forbes and Tuckerman which allowed them to carry out the provisions of the original agreement with Kock, though it stipulated that the Haitian government must approve and support the plan.

  Tuckerman received brusque treatment when he suggested to Lincoln “that all the preliminaries having been satisfactorily arranged, the easiest way to settle the matter would be for him to affix his signature to the document before him.”

  “O, I know that,” the president responded, “and it would be ‘very easy’ for me to open that window and shout down Pennsylvania Avenue, only I don’t mean to do it—just now.”

  Tuckerman recalled that Lincoln “was irritated, and justly irritated, by certain difficulties which had been thrown in his way … by opponents of the [colonization] scheme.”

  Tuckerman proposed that the president might want more time to consider the matter. “No,” Lincoln replied, “you’ve had trouble enough about it, and so have I.” After perusing the document attentively, he said: “I guess it’s all right,” and signed it.204

  The contract called for Tuckerman and Forbes to convey 500 American blacks to Cow Island at $50 per person. There the freedmen were to be given houses, land, education, and medical care, all supervised by Kock. A ship took 453 volunteers to that desolate spot, where nothing had been provided for them and where disease and poisonous insects killed off many. The demoralized survivors, badly mistreated by Kock, longed to return to the United States. After an investigation revealed their plight, Kock was dismissed. In February 1864, Lincoln dispatched a transport to bring back the 368 remaining emigrants, who were in wretched condition. Months later, Congress repealed the laws appropriating money for colonization. When it was determined that Tuckerman and Forbes had failed to carry out the provisions of the contract, they received no money, despite urgent appeals.

  Lincoln was partly to blame for this fiasco, for his administration had been careless in negotiating the contract, then remiss in providing supervision to assure that its terms were implemented properly. He certainly did not honor his pledge to the black delegation in August 1862: “I shall, if I get a sufficient number of you engaged, have provision made that you shall not be wronged.” The president’s failure to examine closely the Cow Island contract stands in sharp contrast to the scrutiny he gave the Chiriqui contract a few months earlier.

  Complicating the president’s life in the summer of 1862 was a new patronage scramble created by the internal revenue law, which was to go into operation on September 1. The statute established for the first time in American history an income tax, which necessitated the appointment of a tax assessor and a collector for each congressional district. Candidates for these posts helped swell the flood of visitors to the White House, and the presidential desk groaned under enormous batches of recommendations. In late July, after spending half an hour with one caller, Lincoln said to the others waiting in the anteroom: “I want to make a little speech. You all want to see me on business. It is a matter of no importance to me whether I spend my time with half a dozen or with the whole of you, but it is of importance to you. Therefore when you come in, please don’t stay long.” He recommended that each take no more than two minute
s.205 The new places were, Lincoln told Chase, “fiercely contested.”206

  The Greeley Letter: Responding to Emancipationist Pressure

  For months prior to the battle of Antietam, pressure had been building for Lincoln to issue an emancipation edict. Abolitionists were growing ever more critical. “How terribly he will be pilloried in history like Pharaoh!” exclaimed Henry T. Cheever, while Elizur Wright asked impatiently: “Is our own people’s President, after repressing the generals [like Frémont and Hunter], going to delay striking the vital blow himself?”207 On Independence Day, Frederick Douglass thundered that an “administration without a policy is confessedly an administration without brains. … we have a right to hold Abraham Lincoln sternly responsible for any disaster or failure attending the suppression of this rebellion. … Lincoln and his cabinet … have fought the rebels with the Olive branch. The people must teach them to fight them with the sword.”208

  More vituperatively, Wendell Phillips charged that “Mr. Lincoln is conducting this war, at present, with the purpose of saving slavery.” The president, “a first-rate second rate man,” has “no mind whatever,” the fiery Brahmin orator told an audience on August 1. He “may be honest,—nobody cares whether the tortoise is honest or not; he has neither insight, nor prevision, nor decision.” As long as such a tortoise headed the government, it was “digging a pit with one hand and filling it with the other.” Phillips sneered, “I never did believe in the capacity of Abraham Lincoln. … I asked the lawyers of Illinois, who had practiced law with Mr. Lincoln for twenty years, ‘Is he a man of decision, is he a man who can say no?’ They all said: ‘If you had gone to the Illinois bar, and selected the man least capable of saying no, it would have been Abraham Lincoln. He has no stiffness in him.’ ” Phillips’s speech implied a hope that Confederates would bombard Washington, kill Lincoln, and thus make Hamlin president.209 From the White House, William O. Stoddard wrote that Phillips “is no longer the apostle of the great reform … but seems voluntarily to take his true place as a mere vulgar agitator and sensation spouter.” Lincoln was probably referring to Phillips when he described a “well-known abolitionist and orator” as “a thistle” and exclaimed: “I don’t see why God lets him live!”210

  Adam Gurowski characterized Lincoln as a man with “a rather slow intellect, with slow powers of perception.” The president, he said, “has no experience of men and events, and no knowledge of the past. … Slavery is his mammy, and he will not destroy her.”211 Henry Ward Beecher lamented that Northerners “have been made irresolute, indecisive and weak by the President’s attempt to unite impossibilities; to make war and keep the peace; to strike hard and not hurt; to invade sovereign States and not meddle with their sovereignty; to put down rebellion without touching its cause.”212 The president had no “spark of genius,” “element of leadership,” or “particle of heroic enthusiasm,” Beecher charged.213 William Lloyd Garrison fumed that the “[s]tumbling, halting, prevaricating, irresolute, weak, besotted” president “is blind as a bat” to the administration’s “true line of policy.”214 A disgusted New Yorker told Gerrit Smith that if “our revolutionary fathers were to look down on such a miserable, emasculated set of so-called leaders as we now have, and should fail to spit upon them, it w[oul]d only be from simple inability.”215 Beriah Green, known as “abolition’s ax,” called Lincoln “the presiding bloodhound of the nation.”216

  Congress was also growing restive. “Mr. Lincoln desires God to liberate them [the slaves], without compromising him in any way! and if He will do it Himself, Mr. Lincoln will cheerfully submit to it!” exclaimed Senator James Harlan of Iowa sarcastically.217 Congressman Frederick Pike of Maine predicted in August that unless Lincoln “follows along after public sentiment more rapidly than he seems disposed to do there will be howling before the snow flies. He exhibits immense deference to the opinions of Kentucky.”218 Summing up the mood of Radicals, Thaddeus Stevens disgustedly noted on August 10, “we are just as far from the true course as ever. Unless the people speak in their primary assemblies, no good will come, and there seems little chance of that. A change of Cabinet is our only hope; but I do not hope for that.”219

  Sydney Howard Gay, managing editor of Horace Greeley’s Tribune, received a complaint from a fellow New Yorker, who said the “people are uneasy, anxious, and suspicious” and that “there is not & never has been any serious determination to put down the rebels.”220 When Gay forwarded this missive to the White House, Lincoln invited him to visit Washington. There Gay asked several questions that Lincoln refused to answer either officially or semiofficially but indirectly replied by saying to each one: “I shouldn’t wonder.” Gay recounted this interview to a friend, who reported that the editor “returned to New York feeling like a mariner who has made an observation in some sunny interval between long days of clouds and storms.”221 After their conversation, the president described Gay as “a truly good man, and a wise one”; in turn, Gay became “quite enamored of the President, & convinced that although slowish, he is perfectly sure.”222

  Other Radicals dogged Lincoln’s heels. On July 4, when Charles Sumner urged that Independence Day be reconsecrated by issuing an emancipation decree, the president said it was “too big a lick,” arguing that “half the army would lay down its arms, if emancipation were declared,” and that “three more States would rise”—Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland.223 The following month, when Sumner once more lobbied him on behalf of emancipation, Lincoln counseled patience: “Wait; time is essential.”224

  Helping Sumner apply pressure were Thaddeus Stevens and Henry Wilson. Those three lawmakers, Lincoln complained to Missouri Senator John B. Henderson, “simply haunt me with their importunities for a Proclamation of Emancipation. Wherever I go and whatever way I turn, they are on my trail; and still in my heart, I have the deep conviction that the hour has not yet come.” One day when he spied those three Radicals approaching the White House, he told Henderson that he was reminded of a schoolmate of his who had trouble reading aloud the Biblical description of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace. For mispronouncing their names, the lad received a blow from his teacher. After his tears finally stopped, he was dismayed to be called upon again to read a passage where those men reappeared. When he wailed aloud, the instructor asked what was wrong. “Look there,” he said pointing to the verses he was to read, “there come them same damned fellows again.”225

  When another importunate Radical senator demanded that the slaves be freed, Lincoln asked: “will Kentucky stand that?”

  “Damn Kentucky!” came the reply.

  “Then damn you!” exclaimed the president, who seldom resorted to profanity.226

  The assertiveness of some Quakers also aroused Lincoln’s ire. On June 20, he addressed a delegation of Progressive Friends who presented him a memorial calling for emancipation. He was relieved, he said, “to be assured that the deputation were not applicants for office, for his chief trouble was from that class of persons. The next most troublesome subject was Slavery.” He concurred with them in thinking “that Slavery was wrong, but in regard to the ways and means of its removal, his views probably differed from theirs.” Their memorial seemed to imply that if he did not promptly issue an emancipation proclamation, he would be violating the spirit of his 1858 “House Divided” speech. Lincoln resented the suggestion that he had betrayed his earlier stance. According to Pennsylvania Congressman William D. Kelley, who observed this exchange, the president “sought to repel this covert imputation upon his integrity and veracity” and “replied with an asperity of manner of which I had not deemed him capable.” Lincoln said that the quotation they cited was taken out of context. (“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave & half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”) The delegation should have included “anothe
r sentence, in which he indicated his views as to the effect upon Slavery itself of the resistance to its extension. The sentiments contained in that passage were deliberately uttered, and he held them now. If a decree of emancipation could abolish Slavery, John Brown would have done the work effectually. Such a decree surely could not be more binding upon the South than the Constitution, and that cannot be enforced in that part of the country now. Would a proclamation of freedom be any more effective?” Lincoln added “that he felt the magnitude of the task before him, and hoped to be rightly directed in the very trying circumstances by which he was surrounded.”

  When a member of the delegation expressed “sympathy for him in all his embarrassments, and an earnest desire that he might, under divine guidance, be led to free the slaves and thus save the nation from destruction,” Lincoln replied “that he was deeply sensible of his need of Divine assistance. He had sometime thought that perhaps he might be an instrument in God’s hands of accomplishing a great work and he certainly was not unwilling to be. Perhaps, however, God’s way of accomplishing the end which the memorialists have in view may be different from theirs. It would be his earnest endeavor, with a firm reliance upon the Divine arm, and seeking light from above, to do his duty in the place to which he had been called.”227

  Lincoln also lost patience with an antislavery delegation from Connecticut, headed by the state’s governor, William A. Buckingham. The president “said abruptly and as if irritated by the subject: ‘Governor, I suppose what your people want is more nigger.’ ” Buckingham was surprised both by Lincoln’s unwonted impatience and by his language. Lincoln quickly changed his tone and earnestly remarked “that if anybody supposed he was not interested in this subject, deeply interested, intensely anxious about it, it was a great mistake.”228