Midwestern Democrats howled in protest. “This is another step in the nigger business, and another advance in the Robespierrian highway of tyranny and anarchy,” declared an Ohio editor.339 Some Wisconsin newspapers called for Lincoln’s impeachment. Others urged sterner measures. A leading Iowa Democrat confided to his diary that Lincoln was a tyrant whose power could be checked only “by revolution or private assassination.”340 Another Iowan, Dennis A. Mahoney, editor of the Dubuque Herald, wrote: “The people who submit to the insolent fanaticism which dictated this last act, are and deserve to be enslaved to the class which Abraham Lincoln self-sufficiently declares free. If they possessed a tithe of the spirit which animated Rome when Cataline was expelled from its walls … they would hurl him into the Potomac.”341 Murat Halstead reported that “there are persons who would feel that it was doing God’s service to kill him [Lincoln], if it were not feared that Hamlin is a bigger fool than he is.”342
When John Hay tried to speak to the president about such hostile commentators, Lincoln cut him off, saying that “he had studied that matter so long that he knew more about it than they did.”343 Some critics, like George Francis Train, irritated Lincoln. As that eccentric millionaire went about the country denouncing abolitionists and calling the Proclamation “the cleverest trick of the season,” Lincoln remarked that Train “reminded him of the Irishman’s description of Soda water. ‘It was a tumbler of piss with a fart in it.’ ”344
The passage in the Proclamation that seemed to encourage slave revolts led the New York Express to ask: “Can it be that President Lincoln calculates such a contingency as a servile insurrection consequent upon his emancipation proclamation?”345 The Louisville Democrat termed Lincoln “an imbecile” and an “encourager of insurrection, lust, arson, and murder.”346 Jefferson Davis indignantly declared to the Confederate Congress: “We may well leave it to the instincts of common humanity to pass judgment on a measure by which millions of human beings of an inferior race, peaceful and contented laborers in their sphere … are encouraged to a general assassination of their masters.”347 A member of that Congress introduced a resolution condemning the Proclamation as “a gross violation of the usages of civilized warfare, an outrage on the rights of private property, and an invitation to an atrocious servile war.” He recommended “that it should be held up to the execration of mankind and counteracted by severe retaliatory measures.” Other Confederate legislators urged that the war be conducted under the black flag, with no prisoners taken. Many Confederate soldiers shared that view. In Kentucky, the president’s words were reportedly “translated as designing a rising of the slaves in order to destroy their masters.”348 The Richmond Enquirer condemned “Lincoln’s proclamation ordaining servile insurrection in the Confederate States,” called its author a “fiend,” and exclaimed: “let the civilized world fling its scorpion lash upon him!”349 In North Carolina, the Raleigh Standard termed the Proclamation “one of the most monstrously wicked documents that ever emanated from human authority.”350
English papers echoed their Southern counterparts, deriding the Proclamation as a call for servile war leading to “horrible massacres of white women and children, to be followed by the extermination of the black race in the South.” The London Times asked if Lincoln would not “be classed among that catalogue of monsters, the wholesale assassins and butchers of their kind?” The president resembled “a Chinaman beating his two swords together to frighten his enemies.” The “Thunderer” sneeringly remarked: “Where he has no power Mr. Lincoln will set the negroes free; where he retains power he will consider them as slaves.”351 The organ of Prime Minister Palmerston rejoiced that the “disgraceful” Proclamation “is deservedly reprobated” in England “as one of the bloodiest manifestoes that ever issued from a civilized government.”352 Even liberal papers, which might be expected to sympathize with the Proclamation, denounced it as harshly as moderate and conservative journals did.
Some administration supporters also objected to that section of the Proclamation. Charles A. Dana confided to Seward that it “jars on me like a wrong tone in music. … This is the only ‘bad egg’ I see in ‘that pudding’—& I fear may go far to make it less palatable than it deserves to be.”353 Thaddeus Stevens, however, rejoiced to think that slaves might be “incited to insurrection and give the rebels a taste of real civil war.”354
The army had a mixed reaction to the Proclamation. Some officers and men disapproved emphatically. General Fitz John Porter called the document “absurd” and, alluding to Lincoln’s remarks to Chicago clergymen on September 13, ridiculed him as “a political coward, who has not the manliness to sustain opinions expressed but a few days before—and can unblushingly see published side by side, his proclamation and his reasons for not issuing it. What a ruler for us to admire!”355 McClellan had intended to submit a letter to the president protesting against the Emancipation Proclamation “and saying that the Army would never sustain” it but decided not to do so when General William F. Smith warned that McClellan “would neither sustain himself with the army nor the country and that it would only array him in opposition” to the government “and result in disaster to him.”356 Smith’s advice was seconded by Generals John Cochrane, Jacob D. Cox, and Ambrose E. Burnside. So instead of carrying out his original intention, McClellan belatedly issued a general order coolly hinting that the administration should be voted out of office. It counseled against criticism of the Proclamation and stated that the “remedy for political errors, if any are committed, is to be found only in the action of the people at the polls.”357 But most of the army supported the Proclamation. A partisan Democrat, who as a medical commissioner visited the Peninsula, reported that “with very few exceptions the whole army is in favor of the most stringent prosecution of the war, using every means in our power to stifle the rebellion, and it regards emancipation as one of our most potent weapons.”358
Conservative Republicans like Richard W. Thompson thought the Proclamation unfair to loyal slaveholders in the Confederacy. In response to this objection, Lincoln told Thompson bluntly that “there were no loyal slave owners in the South” and “avowed his resolution to follow the course dictated by his own conscience.” Thompson recalled that the president assured him with “the utmost composure” that “I would be wiser after awhile.”359
Public response to emancipation did not encourage Lincoln. On September 28, he told his vice-president that “while I hope something from the proclamation, my expectations are not as sanguine as are those of some friends. The time for its effect southward has not come; but northward the effect should be instantaneous. It is six days old, and while commendation in newspapers and by distinguished individuals is all that a vain man could wish, the stocks have declined, and troops come forward more slowly than ever. This, looked soberly in the face, is not very satisfactory. We have fewer troops in the field at the end of six days than we had at the beginning—the attrition among the old outnumbering the addition by the new. The North responds to the proclamation sufficiently in breath; but breath alone kills no rebels.”360 Many more Rebels would have to be killed before emancipation could become a reality.
29
“I Am Not a Bold Man, But I Have the
Knack of Sticking to My Promises!”
The Emancipation Proclamation
(September–December 1862)
Although Lincoln’s announcement that he would issue an Emancipation Proclamation seemed to do more harm than good in the short run, he refused to back down. His deep commitment to black freedom led him to stand by his decision despite intense pressure.
Backlash: Electoral Reverses
The Proclamation, which some commentators dismissed as a ploy to strengthen the Republicans politically, instead contributed to the party’s severe losses in the fall of 1862. As Montgomery Blair had warned, the document became a club that the Democrats wielded effectively in the election campaigns that October. In Ohio, they captured fourteen House seats to the Rep
ublicans’ five, and in Indiana, they won seven of the eleven House seats and gained a majority of the state legislature. The parties divided the Pennsylvania House seats evenly. David Davis called the results “disastrous in the extreme” and remarked that the Emancipation Proclamation “has not worked the wonder that was anticipated.”1 Another of Lincoln’s Illinois friends, W. W. Orme, bemoaned the “terrible reverses,” which were, he thought, “as bad, indeed and worse, than a battle lost.”2 Maine Senator William P. Fessenden ascribed the setbacks to the “folly of the President” and called the result “disgraceful [in] every way.”3 Another Pine State lawmaker, Congressman Frederick Pike, believed that if Lincoln “would leave off story telling long enough to look after the war & drive the drunken generals out of the army & cashier those who wish for the success of the rebels … we might hope for a successful prosecution of the campaign.”4 In Minnesota, the ill-humored General John Pope also blamed the setback on Lincoln, who “seems striving to conciliate the enemies by driving off & discouraging the friends of the Administration.”5
During the fall electoral contests, Democrats relentlessly employed their customary appeal to what the New York Tribune aptly called “that cruel and ungenerous prejudice against color which still remains to disgrace our civilization and to impeach our Christianity.”6 Their race-baiting was especially virulent in Ohio and Indiana. The Cincinnati Commercial justly complained that “the prejudice of race has been inflamed, and used by the Democratic party with an energy and ingenuity perfectly infernal.”7 Democratic editors warned Ohio workingmen that they would “have to leave Ohio and labor where niggers could not come” and urged them to vote Democratic if they did “not desire their place occupied by negroes.”8 Playing on voters’ dread that freed slaves would swarm across the Ohio River, Democrats adopted as their slogan: “The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was, and the negroes where they are.” Former Ohio Governor William Allen told his neighbors in Chillicothe that “[e]very white laboring man in the North who does not want to be swapped off for a free nigger should vote the Democratic ticket.” If the slaves were freed, he predicted, hundreds of thousands of them, “with their hands reeking in the blood of murdered women and children,” would “cross over into our state” looking for work.9 Another Buckeye Democrat, Congressman Samuel S. “Sunset” Cox, advised opponents to heed an Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not degrade the white race by such intermixtures as emancipation will bring.”10 An unsuccessful Republican congressional candidate in Ohio explained his defeat to Chase: “I had thought until this year the cry of ‘nigger’ & ‘abolitionism’ were played out, but they never had as much power & effect in this part of the State as at the recent election. Many who had heretofore acted with us voted the straight democratic ticket.”11 Samuel Medary, editor of The Crisis in Columbus, spoke for many Ohio Democrats when he rejoiced that a “[f]ree press and a white man’s government is fully established by this vote.”12
On October 16, Nicolay reported from the White House that “[w]e are all blue here today on account of the election news.”13 The results astounded Lincoln, who had not anticipated such a severe drubbing. But his spirits quickly recovered, and a few days later he told a caller who asked why he seemed so upbeat: “there is no use in being blue. The elections have not gone to suit me, but I have felt a good deal better since I saw a regiment polled to ascertain the sentiments of the soldiers. Eight hundred out of a thousand voted to sustain my policy. And so it is with most of the troops. … Then too about the military situation. Things drag too much to suit me. I have tried my best to crowd matters. But we shall hear of something good ere long. Things look very well in comparison with the aspect two months ago, and this fall and winter I believe will make them look a great deal better than they do now.”14 On October 27, Lincoln met with John A. Jones, who reported that he “looks well & cheerful.”15
But the November results plunged Lincoln back into despair. The Democrats won the governorships of New York and New Jersey and captured a majority of legislative seats in both the latter state and Illinois. The most significant result was the triumph of New York gubernatorial candidate Horatio Seymour by 11,000 votes. It was widely regarded as a repudiation of “Old Lincompoop.”16 The race issue also loomed large in that contest. A leading Democratic newspaper in the Empire State declared that a vote for Seymour “is a vote to protect our white laborers against the association and competition of Southern negroes.”17 More important still in causing Republican losses was the lack of military success. George Templeton Strong estimated that two-thirds of Seymour’s supporters “meant to say by their votes, ‘Messrs. Lincoln, Seward, Stanton & Co., you have done your work badly, so far. You are humbugs. My business is stopped, I have got taxes to pay, my wife’s third cousin was killed on the Chickahominy, and the war is no nearer an end than it was a year ago. I am disgusted with you and your party and shall vote for the governor or the congressman you disapprove, just to spite you.’ ”18 When asked how he felt after the Democrats’ victory in New York, Lincoln replied: “Somewhat like that boy in Kentucky, who stubbed his toe while running to see his sweetheart. The boy said he was too big to cry, and far too badly hurt to laugh.”19 He told Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson: “I confess that I am grieved at the results of these elections. This intelligence will go to Europe; it will be construed there as a condemnation of the war; it will go into the land of the rebellion, and will encourage the leading rebels and nerve the arms of the rebel soldiers fighting our men in the field. It is true, many of those men elected profess to be war Democrats; but the resolutions of their conventions, the tone of their leading presses, and their general action will be construed everywhere against the cause of our country.”20
Lincoln had good reason to lament the disastrous result in Illinois. Democrats elected their state ticket by 14,000 votes; their congressional candidates won nine of the fourteen seats; and they secured control of the legislature with a margin of 13 to 12 in the senate and 54 to 32 in the House, thus ensuring that Orville H. Browning would be ousted from the U.S. senate. (Some thought it would make little difference politically, for Lincoln’s longtime friend allegedly planned to establish a conservative third party in opposition to the administration.) Most painful for Lincoln was the defeat of his dear friend Leonard Swett in a congressional race against John Todd Stuart. Swett’s law partner feared that the Democratic victory in the Eighth Congressional District “will palsy the arm of the President.”21 A War Department order issued in September, resettling newly liberated slaves in Illinois, proved to be a blunder which became the most significant campaign issue and helped swell the Democrats’ vote. In a terse postmortem, Swett told a friend that the “Proclamation hurt rather than helped us. Negroes from the south were taken into our state. Fifty or more went to Livingston. This did great harm.”22 Lyman Trumbull reported that many Illinois Republicans “believed that their sons & relations were being sacrificed to the incompetency, indisposition or treason of a great many Democratic generals” and therefore “were unwilling to sustain an administration which allowed this.”23
In June, Lincoln had derived some solace from the defeat of a proposed new Illinois constitution that would have severely crippled the war effort. He also rejoiced at the November results in Missouri, where emancipationists gained a majority of the state’s congressional seats. He was particularly glad that General Frank Blair was reelected, saying on November 5 “that it was the only good news he had heard for many days.” The gains in Missouri, he added, “consoled him for the loss of his own [state]” and “more than compensated him for all defeats elsewhere.”24 Providing further comfort was news that Republicans had kept control of the U.S. House (101–77), even though Democrats gained a net of thirty-four seats, mostly from the Lower North. With some justice, Democrats howled that the administration had packed Congress by having military forces interfere in elections in Kentucky and other Border States.
Lincoln had been warned that backlash against the Ema
ncipation Proclamation would hurt the Republicans at the polls, but that did not deter him from announcing it a scant three weeks before the crucial elections in Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. Later he told a Radical delegation that “many good men, some earnest Republicans and some from very far North, were opposed to the issuing of that proclamation, holding it unwise and of doubtful legality.”25 Looking back on that risk in 1864, he said: “I hoped for greater gain than loss; but of this, I was not entirely confident.”26 To the Rev. Dr. John McClintock, an ultra-Radical, he recalled his anxiety about the timing of the announcement: “When I issued that Proclamation, I was in great doubt about it myself. I did not think that the people had been quite educated up to it, and I feared its effects upon the Border States, yet I think it was right; I knew it would help our cause in Europe, and I trusted in God and did it.” He added that “Providence is stronger than either you or I.”27
Lincoln’s fear was justified. In late October, a Kentucky Unionist reported that the “proclamation damaged us very much.”28 The president told Congressman George W. Julian that the “proclamation was to stir the country; but it has done about as much harm as good.”29 On November 6, Theodore Tilton reported that the president “has spoken to at least six persons, lamenting the issue of his Proclamation, and calling it the great mistake of his life.”30 One of those persons was Wendell Phillips. When asked about this alleged remark to Phillips, Lincoln did not deny that he had made it and implied that “he had put himself into a minority with the people, and he well knew that it was impossible for him to carry on a great war against the feelings of the majority of the people.”31
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2 Page 75
