Lincoln may have drafted an actual emancipation proclamation and read it to his cabinet, but he sincerely believed that, unless he avoided any appearance of advocating equal rights for the soon to be freed blacks, he would lose so much white support by his action in favor of emancipation that his administration, and with it the Union, would fall.
After Lincoln’s cold lecture, Salmon P. Chase spoke for many disappointed abolitionists when he recorded his disillusionment in his diary: “How much better would be a manly protest against prejudice against color!” Excluding profreedom whites—and even long-suffering blacks themselves—from the discussion, Lincoln had directly appealed for support for emancipation to the prejudiced instincts of his larger white constituency in the North.
Lincoln understood that the great majority of his Northern constituency were not willing to live side by side with former slaves and definitely unwilling to grant them equal rights. The free states of the North were not only free of slaves but almost completely free of African Americans. Not only Illinois but a majority of the Northern states had enacted laws that restricted the rights of free Negroes. Differences in social status between whites and blacks were generally considered legitimate—the normal way of life in the North, just as it was in the South.
Lincoln meant for his White House performance at the meeting with the Deputation of Free Negroes to remind Northern whites that he was no friend of black people—that he would not act to secure the potential amalgamation of millions of slaves into white society in the North. Nor did he see the Emancipation Proclamation as an immediate proclamation of equal rights for blacks in the South or in the North. Lincoln tried to persuade the American public that his present and future actions in the days to come would be aimed solely at securing victory in the war and restoration of the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation, after all, had been framed “as a fit and necessary military measure” intended to do just that—and nothing more.
A stain on Lincoln’s record as a liberator? Perhaps. But with fall congressional elections looming, Union sentiment in the North fading in the wake of military defeats, border states now on record as hostile to freedom for their slaves, and the press maddeningly divided on all of the above, Lincoln believed he had no choice. The bitter pill of prejudice, along with the impractical and inhumane concept of colonization, was his continuing choice of emetic for a body politic he believed needed purging in preparation for the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation. That is why, sensing military victory, Lincoln made sure his harsh speech against equal rights for Negroes in the United States did not just leak but poured. There is no question that he wanted this message publicized: he had invited journalists to the White House to record his every word in order to guarantee its wide circulation. He was not disappointed then, even if the episode may disappoint us now.
But victory on the battlefield remained elusive. The following week, with the military situation still murky, Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune struck a counterblow for freedom, putting the administration on the defensive and testing Lincoln’s public relations skills further. In an editorial entitled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions,” Greeley charged that the president had been “strangely and disastrously remiss” on the slavery issue and “unduly influenced” by “fossil politicians” from the border states. Greeley bluntly warned that “all attempts to put down the Rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause,” slavery, “were preposterous and futile.”
In his famous reply, Lincoln subsumed his long-expressed opposition to slavery to his more urgent goal of reunion—or so he wanted it to appear. As he put it:
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.
Lincoln intended to issue the emancipation document exclusively as a military order, to diminish the size of the anticipated backlash from Northern Democrats and border-state loyalists as well as the antifreedom legislators in Congress who had rejected earlier emancipation initiatives. There were reasons for Lincoln to be guardedly hopeful about the success of his public relations strategy. Union general John Pope was in the midst of a major offensive in Virginia, and Lincoln imagined a decisive victory might occur soon so he could finally unsheathe the proclamation.
Union and Confederate armies met at Antietam Creek on Wednesday, September 17, 1862. Federal forces claimed victory when the Confederate army retreated back into Virginia. Lincoln finally had his military victory. Quickly, the president went to work crafting a final proclamation, using the weekend after Antietam to refine his document. On Monday, September 22, he called the cabinet back into session. While Lincoln conceded the continued risk of placing “in greater jeopardy the patriotic element in the border states,” he insisted that there was no turning back. As Gideon Welles remembered, “His mind was fixed. . . . [H]e had made a vow, a covenant, that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of Divine will.” Now, Lincoln concluded, “God had decided this question in favor of the slaves.”
In his Annual Message to Congress on December 1, 1862, Lincoln continued his efforts to calm the fears of his Northern white audience by emphasizing his impractical commitment to voluntary colonization. As if speaking beyond Congress to white America, he insisted:
I cannot make it better known than it already is, that I strongly favor colonization. . . . Reduce the supply of black labor, by colonizing the black laborer out of the country, and, by precisely so much, you increase the demand for, and wages of, white labor. . . . But why should emancipation south, send the free people north? People, of any color, seldom run, unless there be something to run from. Heretofore colored people, to some extent, have fled north from bondage; and now, perhaps, from both bondage and destitution. But if gradual emancipation and deportation be adopted, they will have neither to flee from.
Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Continuing his program to treat the proclamation as a necessity of war, the document was couched in his “dry as dust” legal style rather than the commanding emotional rhetoric that we associate with the Gettysburg Address and his other memorable speeches.
For months, Lincoln had waited. By means of a sometimes baffling web of public relations feints, he had made it seem like freedom had finally fallen into the nation’s lap thanks to military victory. After a summer-long onslaught of statements that variously confused, dismayed, or heartened Americans of all political persuasions, official silence and selected revelations had emerged as Abraham Lincoln’s chief weapons in presenting his decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.
With the formal issuance of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln and his more aggressive generals encouraged the “newly freed slaves” to join the Union armies, first as support personnel and later as actual combatants. With these first steps, Lincoln moved the nation forward to achieve his moral objective of abolishing slavery in the United States and his military objective of obtaining a significant new resource (former African American slaves) to fight for the Union. By the end of the war, there were 166 regiments of black troops enlisted in the Union armies. Records show that they suffered higher casualty rates than their white counterparts.
Throughout the first years of his presidency, Lincoln had maintained distance from the abolitionist wing of the party. During this period, the leaders of the abolitionist movement mounted withering criticisms of his failure to act directly to abolish slavery. In the end, of course, Lincoln made his peace with the abolitionists—and them with him—and ultimately he became the nation’s leading abolitioni
st. But not quickly, and not without much criticism from their leaders.
The rapprochement took time. Frederick Douglass had only reluctantly supported the Republican ticket in 1860. Like Lincoln, however, Douglass was a political realist. If he could not have immediate change, he certainly was not averse to slow change. Legislative abolition of slavery in Washington, DC, which Lincoln signed into law in 1862, followed by announcement of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation later that year helped heal the breach between the president and the civil rights advocate. “It is true that the President lays down his propositions with many qualifications, some of which to my thinking, are unnecessary, unjust and wholly unwise,” Douglass declared in an 1862 speech in Rochester, but a “blind man can see where the President’s heart is.”
An overjoyed Frederick Douglass exulted at the end of that historic American summer that this “slow, but we hope sure” president had, “while the loyal heart was near breaking with despair, proclaimed and declared . . . Thenceforward and forever free.” “Read the proclamation,” he urged his abolitionist subscribers, “for it is the most important of any to which the President of the United States has ever signed his name.”
After January 1, 1863, the two men met several times in the White House. At Lincoln’s request, Douglass worked on a plan to recruit African Americans for the Union army. Such service, Lincoln believed, would help defeat the Confederacy and ensure that his Emancipation Proclamation would succeed in ending slavery and charting a path for African Americans to join the free labor force in the future. Not quite satisfied, Douglass tried to win equal pay for African American soldiers (a reform Lincoln initially resisted as stubbornly as he had resisted abolition—arguing that the white majority was not ready for such parity).
Later, when Lincoln began to fear that he would lose his quest for a second term and that his Democratic opponent would take office and take action to countermand emancipation, he turned again to Douglass, enlisting him in a plan to spread word of their emancipation to as many newly freed slaves as possible. Here was proof that Lincoln genuinely wanted enslaved people out of bondage and at last part of the free labor force questing for self-improvement. Douglass replied with a detailed memorandum suggesting that the administration set up a mini-army of “twenty or twenty five good men, having the cause at heart.” These sessions convinced Douglass that Lincoln was sincere, a genuine antislavery man after all. Their plan, of course, never had to be implemented. Lincoln won a second term in November 1864, and enforcement of the proclamation continued uninterrupted wherever Union soldiers marched in the South.
The success of the Union armies in the last months of 1864 encouraged Lincoln in his new effort to secure passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment would validate and secure the notable moral achievement of abolishing slavery throughout the United States for all time. Lincoln dedicated himself to the effort, believing this would be an important step to fulfill his dream of an American society released from the moral, political, and economic burden of slavery.
For all his early reluctance, Lincoln was now in the forefront of the struggle to secure the permanent abolition of slavery in the United States. Largely through Lincoln’s efforts, public opinion now tilted in favor of the abolition of slavery. But it was clearly not in favor of equal rights for African Americans in the North as well as the South. And Lincoln chose not to add his voice to support abolitionist efforts to provide equal rights to the newly freed slaves. Ever the believer that public opinion was the ultimate driver of political progress, Lincoln did not challenge directly the supremacist views of the majority of white Americans. Rather, he emphasized that “in giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.” African Americans were to escape bondage and enter the promised land; their liberation would ensure that a free America would long endure.
A demonstration of how far Lincoln’s reputation had evolved within the abolitionist community arrived on the president’s desk in July 1864 in the form of a handsome commemorative gift from no less a freedom icon than William Lloyd Garrison, the longtime editor of the leading abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator. The gift was, as the presenter proudly described it, “an admirable painting” entitled Watch Night—or, Waiting for the Hour. It showed, Garrison wrote, “a group of negro men, women and children waiting . . . for the midnight hour of December 31, 1862 to pass, and the introduction of that new year which was to make them forever free.” As Garrison proudly said, “It was my advice that it was presented to you as the most fitting person in the world to receive it.”
Lincoln failed to acknowledge the gift with his usual sensitivity. Perhaps Lincoln’s reluctance to adopt the mantle of abolitionist helps explain why it took six months for him to offer thanks for the antislavery picture Garrison had sent him. Was its subject too toxic for him still? We cannot know for sure, but a few months later Lincoln welcomed to the White House the African American abolitionist crusader and one-woman Underground Railroad, Sojourner Truth. Even then, when the “Moses” of her people tried thanking Lincoln for his help in ending slavery, the president inhospitably replied, “I’m not an abolitionist; I wouldn’t free the slaves if I could save the Union in any other way. I’m obliged to do it.”
The president finally responded to the painting after Garrison wrote him again to ask if the gift was ever received. Only then did the embarrassed president dispatch the sole letter he ever wrote to the living symbol of a movement he had not embraced until late in his life. “When I received the spirited and admirable painting ‘Waiting for the Hour,’” he now apologized, “I directed my Secretary not to acknowledge its arrival at once, preferring to make my personal acknowledgment of the thoughtful kindness of the donors; and waiting for some leisure hour, I have committed the discourtesy of not replying at all. I hope you will believe that my thanks though late, are most cordial, and I request that you will convey them to those associated with you in this flattering and generous gift.”
By then Lincoln had in turn extended to his onetime abolitionist adversaries the most important gift of all: a congressional resolution, passed just days before he wrote to Garrison, sending to the states a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery everywhere in the nation. At last, abolition was to be a reality. Demonstrating beyond question that his heart was in the task, Lincoln signed the resolution and marked it “approved”—even though presidential endorsements were not required for constitutional amendments. Lincoln probably did not even mind when the Senate passed another resolution chiding the president for signing the document.
For Lincoln, such minor condemnation was a small price to pay. By then he knew that the abolition of slavery was a transcendent moment that history would remember—and the man who had been so reluctant to embrace the cause for so long wanted his name on it for all to see for all time to come. Lincoln had finally become the abolitionist in chief.
Today, the imposing heroic statues that ring the public gardens alongside Boston Common pay tribute to the abolitionist pioneers who braved scorn and sometimes violence to demand an immediate end to slavery in America. Sculptures of Charles Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and William Ellery Channing hold pride of place there. Just a few blocks away, at Park Plaza, Boston placed Thomas Ball’s Emancipation Memorial, a replica of the statue of Lincoln Frederick Douglass had dedicated a year earlier in Washington. That day, another abolitionist hero, John Greenleaf Whittier, offered a poem to consecrate the unveiling and cement Lincoln’s reputation for all time as an abolition hero worthy of celebration in the city that had nurtured the movement for so long:
O symbol of God’s will on earth
As it is done above!
Bear witness to the cost and worth
Of justice and love.
Emancipation, a politically audacious 1865 lithograph by J. L. Magee of Philadelphia, shows Lincoln using his Emancipation Proclamation to usher in “freedom
to all, both black and white!”—as well as “education to all classes.” Note the background scenes contrasting a slave whipping to school attendance. The print all but illustrated Lincoln’s famous 1862 vow that “in giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.”
STERN COLLECTION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Frederick Douglass wrote that in all his meetings with Lincoln, “I was impressed with his entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race. He was the first great man that I talked to in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color, and I thought that all the more remarkable because he came from a State where there were black laws” that restricted the rights of “free” African Americans. Douglass concluded that the Southern-born Lincoln seemed devoid of racial prejudice precisely because he had spent his early days in poverty, yearning for advancement, even as Douglass, born a slave, yearned for liberty and advancement. “I account partially for his kindness to me,” Douglass explained, “because of the similarity with which I had fought my way up, we both starting at the lowest round of the ladder.”
Well before Lincoln became an abolitionist, he had preached that the common goal of giving Americans the opportunity to work their way up “the ladder” applied to black as well as white men. Douglass said in an 1876 speech, “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”
A Just and Generous Nation Page 14
