Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Other blacks followed Douglass’s lead. On September 24, the publisher of the Anglo-African told his readers that “we may have thought that Mr. Lincoln has not done what we think he could have done for the overthrow of oppression in our land; but that is not the question now. The great and overshadowing inquiry is, do you want to see the many noble acts which have been passed during Mr. Lincoln’s administration repealed, and slavery fastened again upon Maryland, Louisiana, Tennessee, Virginia, and portions of States now free? This is the only question now, and if you are a friend of liberty you will give your influence and cast your vote for Abraham Lincoln, who, under God, is the only hope of the oppressed.”18 John Rock, who would soon become the first black attorney to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, told a convention of the National Association of Colored Citizens and Their Friends that there were only two parties: the “one headed by Lincoln is for Freedom and the Republic; and the other, by McClellan, is for Despotism and Slavery.” The delegates applauded this statement loud and long.19

  Even before the party nominating conventions, some blacks had called for Lincoln’s reelection. On January 1, 1864, at a mass meeting of San Francisco blacks, a resolution was adopted endorsing the president for a second term. Commenting on that document, a black newspaper praised Lincoln as the only president who “has stood up in defiance of the slave-power, and dared officially to maintain the doctrine, by his official actions, that we are citizens, though of African descent—that the army and navy shall protect and defend such citizens in common with all others—that provision ought to be made for the education of freedmen.”20 A black resident of Brooklyn declared that Lincoln’s actions had to be understood politically, for he had a racist constituency: “I feel that much of the failure of Mr. Lincoln to do [his] duty is owing to the failure of the people of the land whose agent he is. Do we complain that Mr. Lincoln and the government do not recognize the manhood of the negro? Let us find the cause of that in the people at home. Just so long as citizens of New York exclude respectable colored persons from railway cars on the streets; just so long as the people of the city exclude the colored children from the ward schools, and force the colored children from several wards together, on the ground of color merely; just so long as even in some of the churches of the city there are negro pews—just so long as there is evidence that the people themselves do not recognize the manhood of the black man of this country.”21 “As a negro, I am for the man whose party and policy have given us a free capital, a confiscation law, and a proclamation of freedom, as against the man who, with honest enough intentions, expects to drive out the devils by Beelzebub,” said the Rev. Mr. J. Sella Martin of Boston.22

  In Baltimore, a number of free blacks raised money for an expensive Bible that they presented to Lincoln on September 7. It was, they explained, “a testimonial of their appreciation of your humane conduct towards the people of our race. … Towards you, sir, our hearts will ever be warm with gratitude. … The loyal colored people of this country everywhere will remember you at the Throne of Divine Grace.” Lincoln replied that “it has always been a sentiment with me that all mankind should be free. So far as able, within my sphere, I have always acted as I believed to be right and just; and I have done all I could for the good of mankind generally. In letters and documents sent from this office I have expressed myself better than I now can. In regard to this Great Book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good the Saviour gave to the world was communicated through this book. But for it we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man’s welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found portrayed in it.”23

  The following month Lincoln showed this volume to Sojourner Truth, the abolitionist preacher and famous rescuer of many of her fellow blacks from slavery. When she complimented him as “the best President” ever, he replied: “I expect you have reference to my having emancipated the slaves in my proclamation.” He modestly cited several predecessors, including Washington, who he said “were all just as good, and would have done just as he had done if the time had come. If the people over the river [pointing across the Potomac] had behaved themselves, I could not have done what I have; but they did not, and I was compelled to do these things.” She later said: “I never was treated by any one with more kindness and cordiality than was shown me by that great and good man.”24

  Most, but not all, Radicals and abolitionists fell into line. With his “well-known extravagance,” Parker Pillsbury, who felt a call to expose Lincoln’s “hypocrisy and cruelty,” insisted that “I do not believe the slaves, or free colored people, have a worse enemy on earth, than Lincoln.” Even more hyperbolically, he declared that “Egypt had its ten Plagues. For us, God seems to have massed them in one—a ten Pharaoh-power Plague in Lincoln.” Pillsbury scolded Theodore Tilton for making “apologies for this Administration!”25 Elizabeth Cady Stanton called the president “Dishonest Abe,” deplored “the incapacity and rottenness” of his administration, and pledged that if he “is reelected I shall immediately leave the country for the Fijee Islands.”26 She disagreed with her cousin Gerrit Smith, who counseled fellow abolitionists to support the president’s reelection. In August, Smith wrote: “Though it may be at the expense of passing by our favorite candidate, we should nevertheless all feel ourselves urged by the strongest possible motives to cast our votes … to defeat the compromising or sham Peace Candidate.”27 Two months later, he urged Stanton to reconsider and expressed regret that “neither you nor Wendell Phillips can favor Lincoln’s re-election. I am spending a great deal for the election of Lincoln. I see safety in his election.”28 She rejected his advice: “We need leaders to galvanize the virtue and patriotism of the nation into life and concentrate thought and action in the right directions.” Among her criticisms of the president, she cited his failure to liberate all the slaves and to do anything about atrocities committed against black troops. Her husband, Henry B. Stanton, voted for Lincoln but did not campaign for him. (Years later, she regretted having opposed Lincoln: “I see now the wisdom of his course, leading public opinion slowly but surely up to the final blow for freedom. … My conscience pricks me now when I recall how I worked and prayed in 1864 for the defeat of Lincoln’s re-election, and now I perceive what a grave misfortune it was that he was not left to reconstruct the South according to what would surely have been a better and wiser plan than that [which was] pushed through by the Radicals with whom I then stood.”)29

  Moncure Conway, residing in England, continued his attacks on Lincoln, arguing that the president should be denied reelection because a black sergeant, William Walker, had been executed for inciting mutiny. (In fact, Walker’s death sentence had been carried out illegally, before his case was submitted to the president for review. If the army had followed proper procedures, it is unlikely that Walker would have been shot.) Conway termed the “imbecile President” a “murderer,” an “irredeemable Kentuckian,” and “an impossible American” who suffered from “an utter lack of culture” and was “brutally ignorant of history and of his own age.”30 William Lloyd Garrison, also a target of Conway’s scathing invective, warned an English correspondent that Conway did not represent most American abolitionists: “Impulsive, eccentric, reckless, highly imaginative and ambitious at the same time for ‘radical’ distinction, his flaming zeal is not always according to knowledge; and his wisdom is too apt to ‘magnify molehills into mountains’ and ‘to give an inch the importance of a mile.’ ”31 British abolitionists could scarcely believe that their American counterparts would do anything that might help McClellan’s chances.

  Elizur Wright had little use for Lincoln, who was, he said, “fighting for the exclusive privilege of white men under a Constitution made for all men .… I cannot see the use of protracting this agony by reelecting Lincoln.” The president, in Wright’s view, was neither honest nor loyal.32 Wendell Phillips, who supported Frémont for president, wrote privately: “I would cut off my right hand before doi
ng any thing to aid A. L.’s election—I wholly distrust his fitness to settle this thing—indeed his purpose.”33 In October at Boston, he publicly denounced the president’s “halting, half-way course, neither hot nor cold, wanting to save the North without hurting the South.” It was dictated not “from want of brains, but want of purpose, of willingness to strike home. … [O]bserve how tender the President has been towards the South, how unduly and dangerously reluctant he has been to approach the negro or use his aid. Vigorous, despotic, decisive everywhere else, he halts, hesitates, delays to hurt the South or help the negro.” Phillips defiantly proclaimed, “I mean to agitate till I bayonet him and his party into justice.”34 (“We must bully the Govt!” he exclaimed to Maria Weston Chapman.)35 At New York’s Cooper Institute, he thundered against the administration’s lack of “vigor,” “will,” “purpose,” and “loyalty in the highest sense of the word.” Moreover, Phillips argued, Lincoln was a tyrant who trampled on the liberties of the people and was planning to steal the election: “if President Lincoln is inaugurated for the next time on the votes of Louisiana, Tennessee, or Arkansas, every citizen is bound to resist him.”36

  Incredibly, Phillips denounced Lincoln for extraditing Don Jose Augustin Arguelles, a Cuban official accused of illegally selling 141 Africans into slavery. With the profits from that crime, Arguelles moved to the United States, which had no extradition treaty with Spain. Nonetheless, when the Cuban authorities asked that he be turned over, the Lincoln administration complied, justifying its action by citing the Constitution, international comity, and an 1842 treaty with Great Britain regarding attempts to shut down the international slave trade. This action represented, in the view of Phillips (and, ironically, many defenders of slavery), a case of kidnapping and a gross miscarriage of justice. (Seward remarked: “So far as depends on me, … Spanish slave-dealers who have no immunity in Havana, will find none in New York.”)37

  Phillips’s anti-Lincoln stance alienated many of his fellow antislavery militants. Garrison said of the Boston speech: “We cannot allow it to pass without expressing our regret to perceive what seems to us a set purpose—prima facie—to represent Mr. Lincoln in the worst possible light, to attribute to him the worst possible motives, to hold him up as an imbecile and a despot, and to damage his chance of re-election to the utmost extent.”38 Though Oliver Johnson acknowledged that Lincoln “is not the man I wish he were,” he was “very bitter towards Phillips” and thought the Brahmin orator’s “glasses get smoky sometimes.” Johnson deplored the way abolitionists “have wasted their power in foolish, factious and abortive ways, so that they will not have their due influence over Lincoln during his last term.”39 J. Miller McKim bemoaned Phillips’ “recklessness of assertion” and likened such “destructives” as Stephen S. Foster, James Redpath, and Parker Pillsbury to Jacobins.40 Harriet Martineau thought Phillips a demagogue; Maria Weston Chapman disagreed, believing that Phillips was “merely weakly mistaken, & used by demagogues.”41 Samuel May, Jr., bluntly told Phillips that “no man is infallible” and that “your turn to be wrong has come now.”42 Lincoln, May believed, was “greatly to be preferred to John C. Fremont on Anti-Slavery grounds.” In some allies of Phillips, May detected an “uneasy spirit of jealousy.”43 Theodore Tilton insisted that he “could do nothing but denounce the whole Cleveland movement, even though in so doing, I had to pierce the bosom of my dear friend Wendell Phillips.”44 Commenting on a Frémont rally at Cooper Union in late June, Tilton called it a “complete and disastrous Copperhead display” and noted that “genuine anti-slavery men who have joined this company are in great sorrow & confusion.”45 Some Radicals could not believe that Phillips was making common cause with John Cochrane, Frémont’s running mate. “If Phillips drank, I could account for it,” said one, but since he did not, “the coalition surpasses my comprehension.”46

  In addition to Garrison, Johnson, May, and Tilton, Phillips’s quondam allies who disagreed with his stand included Henry Ward Beecher, Lydia Maria Child, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, J. Miller McKim, Maria Weston Chapman, Josephine Griffing, Mary Grew, Sarah Pugh, Henry C. Wright, Giles Stebbins, Andrew T. Foss, Gerrit Smith, Marius R. Robinson, Calvin Fairbank, Sallie Holley, Caroline Weston, Anne Weston, and Elizabeth Buffum Chace. Congressman William D. Kelley of Pennsylvania spoke for many of them when he said “Abraham Lincoln is the wisest radical of us all.”47 A Connecticut legislator who shared Kelley’s view of Lincoln confessed that he had at times thought the president “was too slow, too cautious: too lenient &c, but on reflection I am led to regard him rather [as] discreet and possessed of a full share of foresight.”48 Wendell Phillips’s namesake, Wendell Garrison, son of William Lloyd Garrison, regretted that Pillsbury, Foster, and Phillips were inclined “to distrust everybody, to endeavor by every ingenious device to find evidence that the government is the enemy of the black man & every officer under it unworthy to be trusted.” He disapproved of their “[c]austic criticism, snap judgments, & wholesale asseveration,” as well as their tendency to have “only eyes for the shadows of the night & do not see the flood of daylight which is driving the blackness away.”49

  It was thus no wonder that in late August, Parker Pillsbury lamented to Phillips: “I came up from Boston last night, sick at heart. Almost every abolitionist I see now, swears by Lincoln, & denounces your course.”50 A month later, Elizabeth Cady Stanton similarly bemoaned the loss of support for a radical alternative to Lincoln. “[O]ne by one our giants are being swept down with the current,” she complained to Susan B. Anthony.51

  Victory in the Field

  The Democrats’ nomination of McClellan and adoption of a peace plank were not the only developments reviving Lincoln’s chances. Less than a week after the Chicago Convention, Sherman captured Atlanta. Lincoln was not entirely surprised, for a short while earlier he had “said the public did not properly estimate our military prospects, results of which would change the present current.” He added that he “relied upon this confidently.”52 More specifically, he predicted that Sherman would take Atlanta and that Farragut would capture Mobile. George Templeton Strong reflected the public mood when he wrote in his diary on September 3: “Glorious news this morning—Atlanta taken at last!!!” It was, Strong said, “(coming at this political crisis) the greatest event of the war.”53 Nicolay predicted that the “Atlanta victory alone ought to win the Presidential contest for us.”54 To his fiancée he explained on September 11 that the “political situation has not been as hopeful for six months past as it is just now. There is a perfect revolution in feeling. Three weeks ago, our friends everywhere were despondent, almost to the point of giving up the contest in despair. Now they are hopeful, jubilant, hard at work and confident of success.”55

  Sherman’s triumph gave the lie to Democratic allegations that the war was a failure. So, too, did Admiral Farragut’s defeat of the Confederate ironclad Tennessee and his capture of Mobile Bay in August. (A year earlier Lincoln had told Welles that he “thought there had not been, take it all in all, so good an appointment in either branch of the service as Farragut.” According to Welles, “no man surpasses Farragut” in Lincoln’s estimation.)56 From upstate New York, former Congressman Charles B. Sedgwick, who had earlier been “in a despairing mood about Lincoln,” reported that the “old enthusiasm is reviving” because “Atlanta and Mobile have lifted us out of the slough of despond.”57 Later in September, General Philip Sheridan trounced Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley, further discrediting the Democrats’ charge of failure. After Union forces crushed Early at the battles of Winchester and Fisher’s Hill, George William Curtis remarked that “Sheridan has opened Lincoln’s campaign with such enthusiasm among the people as I never saw.”58 On September 23, as word of the general’s victories arrived, Lincoln was immensely cheered and told such funny stories that listeners laughed till they were sore. He complimented the general: “This Sheridan is a little Irishman, but he is a big fighter.”59 Musing on Sheridan’s accomplishments, Lincoln told a repor
ter: “General Grant does seem to be able to pick out the right man for the right place and at the right time. He is like that trip-hammer I saw the other day .… always certain in his movements, and always the same.”60

  Grant further boosted Northern morale with a widely-published letter stating that “all we want now to insure an early restoration of the Union is a determined unity of sentiment [in the] North. The rebels have now in their ranks their last man. … A man lost by them can not be replaced. They have robbed the cradle and the grave equally to get their present force. Besides what they lose in frequent skirmishes and battles they are now loosing from desertions and other causes at least one regiment per day. With this drain upon them the end is visible if we will but be true to ourselves. Their only hope now is in a divided North.” Confederates “are exceedingly anxious to hold out until after the Presidential election. They have many hopes from its effects. They hope [for] a counter revolution. They hope [for] the election of the peace candidate.”61

  Lincoln proclaimed Sunday, September 11, a day of thanksgiving for the good news from Atlanta and Mobile Bay. When the Rev. Dr. Joseph P. Thompson commended his action, he replied: “I would be glad to give you such a proclamation every Sunday for a few weeks to come.” Thompson asked whether the capture of Atlanta or the Democrats’ blunder at Chicago had most improved his prospects for reelection. “I guess it was the victory,” he said, “at any rate I’d rather have that repeated.”62