Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865

by James Oakes

  ABOLITION IN THE BORDER STATES

  An Irishman walks into a drugstore in Maine, where liquor can be sold only for medicinal purposes, and orders a shot of whiskey. The druggist sees that the man is clearly healthy and will sell him only soda. Well, asks the Irishman, can’t you “slip” a little of the stuff into my soda, “unbeknownst to yourself”? That’s what I’m doing, Lincoln told Wendell Phillips in early 1862. I have “put a good deal of Antislavery” into my policies, “unbeknown” to most people. A short while later Lincoln told the same joke to another abolitionist, Moncure Conway. Both Phillips and Conway had been critical of what they believed was Lincoln’s slow pace toward emancipation, and on both occasions Lincoln’s response was the same. I’m not as slow as you think; you’re just not noticing.37

  During the first year of his administration, Lincoln was discreet about his approach to slavery, but there was no mistaking the substance of his policies. Within days of General Benjamin Butler’s decision not to return fugitive slaves to their owners, Lincoln met with his cabinet and endorsed the general’s “contraband” policy. Lincoln not only signed the First Confiscation Act, his War Department implemented it more aggressively than the statute itself required. Lincoln had put the decidedly antislavery Salmon Chase in charge of the transition to freedom in both the Sea Islands and southern Louisiana, and Chase in turn had appointed committed abolitionists to oversee both processes. Lincoln had also made it clear to friends and visitors in private that he supported the antislavery policies of his fellow Republicans. Yet despite all of this, Lincoln remained almost completely silent in public. In his December 1861 message to Congress, he mentioned, just barely, that slaves were being “liberated” under the First Confiscation Act. But his most conspicuous public acts—the revocation of the edicts by Generals Frémont and Hunter—made him seem far more reluctant to attack slavery than his actual policies indicated. In fact Lincoln had embraced military emancipation from the earliest months of the war, and before the first year of the war was out, he began pressuring the Border States to abolish slavery on their own.

  In November of 1861, Lincoln quietly drafted two proposals for the abolition of slavery in Delaware, proposals he considered a model for the Border States generally. Both versions promised federal compensation to the state government in return for the gradual abolition of slavery. The versions differed chiefly in the timelines each proposed for the completion of abolition, though Lincoln indicated a preference for ten years. It was important to Lincoln and most Republicans that, however gradual the timeline, abolition must begin immediately. As soon as any state began abolishing slavery, Republicans believed, they began voting like free states. In Lincoln’s ideal world, this is how slavery would disappear: the states themselves would abolish it; the process would begin immediately; it would be completed in about a decade; and above all it would be peaceful. Lincoln added federal compensation to the mix not because he believed the slaveholders deserved to be paid for their property, but as an incentive to the states to get abolition under way and to speed it up. Under his proposals, the states, not the slaveholders, would be compensated. Moreover, the federal government would dole out the money to the states in proportion to the number of years it took to abolish slavery. The sooner slavery was abolished, the sooner the state would be compensated.38 It was an astonishing proposal. No president had ever so much as suggested federally funded incentives for abolition in the states. Almost all of his predecessors—like nearly all Democrats at the time—would have viewed Lincoln’s plan as unwarranted federal “interference” with slavery in the states, a blatant violation of the federal consensus.

  Lincoln never mentioned his proposal in public. He had drafted it in November, and through the early months of 1862 he maintained virtual silence on all matters related to slavery. Whatever his reasons for lying low, however, Lincoln’s failure to publicly acknowledge his own support for both military emancipation and state abolition was becoming counterproductive. The radicals who were closest to Lincoln—Owen Lovejoy and Charles Sumner, for example—repeatedly assured their fellow Republicans that Lincoln was sound on slavery. Carl Schurz, another Lincoln ally with strong ties to the radicals, warned the president in May of 1862 that he was not making his position clear to the most ardently antislavery Republican voters in the North. Having spoken with Lincoln at some length, Schurz wrote that he was “perfectly happy and contented, fully convinced that, in spite of appearances to the contrary, you were determined to use all your constitutional power to deliver this country of the great curse. But there are many who do not understand your policy as I do, or rather, there are probably few who do. The majority want to be confirmed in their faith from time to time.”39 By then Lincoln was coming to understand that his antislavery supporters needed clearer evidence of his stand.

  Democrats in the Delaware legislature denounced Lincoln’s proposal on all possible grounds: the federal government had no business taxing citizens to pay for such a thing; Lincoln was trampling the Constitution by interfering with slavery in a state; abolition was the entering wedge of racial equality. As soon as the Republicans freed the slaves, Democrats warned, they would give black men the vote, and they would vote for Republicans. The proposal died without even coming up for a vote in the state legislature.40

  Frustrated by Delaware’s angry rejection, and meanwhile under pressure to be more outspoken about his antislavery policies, Lincoln decided to go public. On March 6, 1862, he sent a special “Message to Congress” proposing a package of federal incentives that would encourage the Border States to abolish slavery on their own. Unlike the Delaware abolition proposals, the March 6 address was general rather than specific. Lincoln asked for a joint congressional resolution vowing federal cooperation “with any state which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery” and promising compensation—to the state rather than to individual masters—for any “inconveniences” caused by “such a change of system.”41

  Though Lincoln’s effort to promote abolition in the Border States had long been a familiar feature of antislavery politics, the war enabled him to cloak that agenda with an urgency it could not have worn in peacetime. Abolition in the Border States was, he said, “an efficient means of self-preservation” for the federal government. If any seceded state returned to the Union and accepted the offer of compensation, the leaders of the “insurrection” would lose all hope of maintaining the Confederacy. “To deprive them of this hope,” Lincoln said, “substantially ends the rebellion.” Not that Lincoln expected any Confederate state to abandon the insurrection and initiate a gradual abolition. But what if “the more Northern” slave states—the Border States—would, “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?” That would surely demoralize the Confederacy and shorten the war, Lincoln argued, and thereby reduce the cost to taxpayers. Hence federally compensated abolition would prove a more “efficient” means of suppressing the rebellion.42

  Lincoln contended that his proposal did not violate the federal consensus because it “sets up no claim of a right, by federal authority, to interfere with slavery within state limits.” As was generally the case among Republicans, the president interpreted the word interfere narrowly; it meant “abolish.” The federal government could not abolish slavery in a state. No less predictably, Democrats and Border State congressmen drew the line of interference more widely, and emphatically, and Lincoln’s proposal went well beyond it. Border State representatives did not want to sell their slaves to the federal government, and northern Democrats did not think the government should ask taxpayers to buy them. The “people were not prepared,” one Illinois Democrat explained, “to enter upon the proposed work of purchasing the slaves of other people, and turning them loose in their midst.” For Democrats it was a matter of strictly limited powers. The Boston Post insisted that Congress had “no authority” to appropriate public funds for “the purchase and emancipati
on of slaves.” The Albany Argus denounced it as a step toward the development of a “consolidated government.” Border State officials insisted that the president’s proposal violated the constitutional consensus barring federal interference with slavery in the states. Charles A. Wickliffe of Kentucky wondered “what clause of the Constitution” gave Congress the power “to appropriate the treasure of the United States to buy negroes, or to set them free.” Opponents were also disturbed by the larger political purpose of the president’s proposal. Lincoln understood that for his plan to work, antislavery parties would have to emerge and triumph in the loyal slave states. His proposal was designed to promote that process. John Crittenden grasped this most clearly. Though Lincoln himself may not intend it, his proposal would “stir up an emancipation party in Missouri, in Maryland, and in Delaware,” not to mention Crittenden’s home state of Kentucky.43

  Republicans countered that Lincoln’s proposal did nothing unconstitutional since it left entirely to the states the decision to sell slaves to the federal government. Indeed, the Republicans professed astonishment that the constitutional issue should even be raised. All the president’s proposal says, Representative Abram B. Olin of New York declared, is that “if you gentlemen of the slave States are willing to get rid of slavery, the General Government will aid you to do it by giving you a compensation for any loss that you may sustain. . . . God knows, I would divide my last crust of bread to aid our southern friends to get rid of slavery.” Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania wondered what all the fuss was about. “I think,” he said of Lincoln’s message, “it is about the most diluted, milk and water gruel proposition that was ever given to the American nation.” Such skepticism was aimed at the efficacy rather than the legitimacy of Lincoln’s proposal. By early 1862 few Republicans believed that there was any meaningful sentiment against slavery to “stir up” in the Border States. Wherever there were “men whose interests are identified with slavery,” one Republican congressman explained, there was “no great diversity of opinion” on the subject. “I have never been able to discover a difference in views or feelings between a man from Maryland and a man from South Carolina or Alabama.” Skepticism notwithstanding, congressional Republicans overwhelmingly endorsed the president’s joint resolution. The House supported it by a vote of 89 to 31, with nearly every Republican favoring it and nearly everyone else opposed. The same thing happened in the Senate, where the vote was 32 to 20.44

  The Republican press was no less supportive. Henry J. Raymond, the reliably conservative editor of the New York Times, praised Lincoln’s proposal as a “master-piece of practical wisdom and sound policy.” The more radical—and influential—Horace Greeley was equally effusive, if only because Lincoln’s plan for Border State abolition seemed to have been modeled on the one Greeley had first proposed a year earlier, as Lincoln himself acknowledged: “you have advocated it from the first,” he wrote to Greeley, “so that I need to say little to you on the subject.” Greeley’s New York Tribune “never printed a State paper with more satisfaction.” The president’s message “constitutes of itself an epoch in the history of our country.” Yet there was skepticism in the Republican press, just as there was in Congress. The Springfield Republican approved of Lincoln’s proposal but doubted whether any of the Border States would immediately take the president up on his offer. Still, the editors noted that the proposal itself necessarily implies “that slavery is an evil and that the slave states have good reason to wish to be rid of it.” And however limited its immediate effects, surely “a standing offer from the general government” would have a beneficial “moral effect,” helping to promote the growth of “an emancipation party” in those states.”45

  “BY MERE FRICTION AND ABRASION”

  Curiously, most observers—whether skeptical, critical, or enthusiastic—ignored one of the crucial elements of Lincoln’s March 6, 1862, message: its unambiguous threat that if the Border States did not quickly adopt abolition on their own, slavery would be destroyed anyway, and the loyal slave states would end up without slavery and without compensation. In his earlier December message, Lincoln had said that if necessary he was prepared to use “all indispensable means” to suppress the rebellion, implying a more aggressive attack on slavery, though he hoped that would not be necessary. The March 6 message was more forthright. Lincoln reiterated his readiness to use “all indispensable means” to suppress the rebellion, but now he was talking directly to the Border States and warning that if the rebellion continued, “it is impossible to foresee all the incidents, which may attend and all the ruin which may follow it.” Lincoln was using the threat of military emancipation in the seceded states to promote the abolition of slavery in the Border States.46

  It was radical abolitionists who most appreciated the militant undertone of Lincoln’s March 6 address. Not all of them, to be sure. After years of denouncing the Constitution as hopelessly proslavery, William Lloyd Garrison had recently discovered its tremendous antislavery potential and now dismissed Lincoln for failing to invoke his constitutional war powers to declare universal emancipation everywhere, even in the states with which the Union was not at war. But readers of Garrison’s paper, The Liberator, were more discerning. Take another look at the message, Lucius Holmes advised Garrison. “Is it not stated that there is to be no yielding to rebels? Is it not more than intimated,” he asked, “that, if they persist in their rebellion, the most efficient course—Emancipation—may be resorted to?” Wendell Phillips read Lincoln’s message the same way—as a threat. He praised the president for telling the Border States, “Gentlemen, if you do not take this, we will take your negroes anyhow.”47

  Over the next few months, as Lincoln’s frustration with the Border States mounted, his threats became bolder. In his May 19 proclamation revoking General David Hunter’s abolition edict, Lincoln devoted most his time to warning the Border States to accept compensation in return for abolition before it was too late. “You can not if you would, be blind to the signs of the times,” he said. The end of slavery was coming. God has given you the opportunity to do more good “by one effort” than has ever been possible “in all past time.” “May the vast future not have to lament that you have neglected it.”48

  Still the Border States resisted, and in early summer Lincoln invited their congressmen and senators to the White House, where he made one last pitch for support. The timing—July 12, 1862—was scarcely accidental. On that day the Senate adopted the final version of the Second Confiscation Act, establishing universal emancipation as federal policy in the seceded states and reaffirming the ban on military enforcement of the fugitive slave clause, no matter what state the fugitives escaped from. The Border State congressmen knew this when they arrived at the White House and heard the president tell them, apparently with a straight face, that if they had only taken up his proposal of the previous March, the rebellion would be over by now. The Confederacy’s greatest hope was that the shared interests of all slave states would ultimately bring the Border States into the southern nation. The slavery interest is “the lever of their power,” Lincoln argued, urging his guests to “[b]reak that lever before their faces.” With the Second Confiscation Act clearly in mind, Lincoln warned the congressmen that the only alternative to gradual, compensated abolition was immediate and uncompensated military emancipation. “The incidents of the war can not be avoided,” he said, slavery “in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion—by the mere incidents of war. It will be gone, and you will have nothing valuable in lieu of it.” Take the money and run, Lincoln told the Border State representatives, before the money is wasted “in cutting one another’s throats.”49

  David Strother, a Virginia unionist, was stunned by Lincoln’s remarks. Strother had nothing but contempt for the slaveholders who had pushed for secession; he had enlisted in the Union army at the beginning of the war. Yet he was “shocked” by the “tone” the president had taken with the Border State representatives. Lincoln seemed to
be caving in to the abolitionists. His message, Strother complained, “supposes that slavery is the cause of the war and proposes that slavery be abolished in the Border States because a certain party thinks so and will not support the war unless this cause is abolished.” In Strother’s mind, the cause of the war was not slavery but “party spirit.”50 But slavery and party spirit were complementary rather than competing explanations. A proslavery “party” had led the South out of the Union after the electoral victory of an antislavery “party.” It is possible to read Lincoln’s remarks as a capitulation to the abolitionists, but it’s also possible to read them as a legitimate appeal to his party’s base, not to mention a reflection of Lincoln’s antislavery convictions.

  Although they were separate policies, gradual abolition in the loyal slave states and military emancipation in the seceded states became linked in Republican minds by early 1862. When the war started, Republicans believed that abolition would begin in the Border States, where they supposed slavery was the weakest, and would eventually spread southward into the cotton belt. That was one of the things Lincoln assumed when he argued that the destruction of slavery in the Border States would demolish the hopes of the Confederates and set in motion the ultimate extinction of slavery everywhere. Even gradual abolition, if begun immediately, would destroy “the slavery interest” of the Border States. Their representatives in Congress, speaking and voting with the free states, would join the “cordon of freedom” surrounding the South, hastening slavery’s destruction everywhere.