Lincoln expected no dramatic change to follow from his final proclamation. Indeed, events suggested he was right about its likeness to an ineffectual papal bull, for the Union cause suffered further buffeting through the winter and spring of 1863. The proclamation, by signaling that the war had become an antislavery crusade, stirred disaffection within sections of the army and further energized political dissent, both amongst opposition Democrats and within the most conservative elements of the Union coalition. Pro-Confederate forces, particularly in the Midwest, grew bolder. The border remained unsettled. When the planned spring offensive eventually got under way in April, high hopes quickly fizzled. Samuel du Pont’s ambitious naval expedition against Charleston flattered to deceive. On the Mississippi, despite Grant’s maneuvers, the enemy continued to control the seemingly impregnable batteries at Vicksburg, the last strong link between the eastern and western sections of the Confederacy. In eastern Tennessee, William S. Rosecrans remained immobilized by the narrowness of his own strategic vision. Then, in early May, events in the eastern theater once more turned disappointment into the profoundest despair as the Army of the Potomac, now under Joe Hooker’s command, succumbed to a further crushing defeat at Chancellorsville. During the first six months of 1863, with his administration berated as indecisive and incompetent, Lincoln had little to show for his emancipation policy.
In this anti-Copperhead print, a Lincoln-like figure wields a scythe which threatens writhing snakes. To the left, free blacks labor fruitfully under sunny skies. To the right, plantation slaves fear the overseer’s whip, while a fugitive is pursued by bloodhounds. The implicit message is clear: antiwar Democrats act as the agents of Confederate slaveholders.
The Emancipation Proclamation opened the floodgates to antiadministration satires designed to play on Democrats’ racial fears and antipathies. The Copperhead Adalbert Johann Volck portrays a satanic Lincoln composing the Emancipation Proclamation beneath pictures depicting a sainted John Brown and race war in San Domingo. The president, seated at a table with cloven feet, tramples the Constitution and dips his pen in a diabolical inkwell. A liquor decanter provides fortification. In a striking cartoon of 1864, a black man’s feet incongruously protrude from under a Phrygian cap decorated with stars, an eagle, and an olive branch from the seal of the United States.
The mood changed radically in the early days of July, with dramatic news from both eastern and western fronts. On Independence Day, Lincoln’s face, now ravaged by exhaustion and strain, lit up with rare joy at the news of George Meade’s triumph in Pennsylvania, a bloody three-day encounter at Gettysburg which had forced Lee to turn tail; within days he learned of Grant’s even more stunning and tactically brilliant success in securing the decisive fall of Vicksburg. Though expectations of imminent final victory would soon be cruelly dashed, early July marked a military and psychological sea change in the Union. Lincoln would increasingly describe his Emancipation Proclamation as an irreversible order, making explicit what previously he had merely implied: black freedom had become an objective of the war. “I think I shall not retract or repudiate” the Emancipation Proclamation, he told Stephen Hurlbut in late July. “Those who shall have tasted actual freedom I believe can never be slaves, or quasi slaves again.” Nathaniel P. Banks, commander of the Department of the Gulf, received a similar message in August. “For my own part,” Lincoln wrote, “I think I shall not, . . . as executive, ever return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress.” Later that month, in a statement calculated for its public impact, he announced that “the promise [of freedom] being made must be kept.” And in September, delighted by military advances in Tennessee, he told Governor Andrew Johnson to get emancipation written into a new state constitution.76
Lincoln’s determination took memorable form in his address at the dedication of the new national cemetery at Gettysburg in November. In declaring “a new birth of freedom” to be the goal of war, he chose not to allude specifically to slavery and the black race. But, lest there be any doubt, he told Congress plainly a few weeks later, “while I remain in my present position I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation; nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress.” He took pains to reassert those precise words in the following year’s message, in December 1864, and pointedly added, “If the people should, by whatever mode or means, make it an Executive duty to re-enslave such persons, another, and not I, must be their instrument to perform it.”77
Lincoln sat at Alexander Gardner’s Washington studio for this classic portrait just eleven days before delivering his Gettysburg address on November 19, 1863.
During 1864 and the final months of his presidency, Lincoln consistently acted in this spirit. When, in the summer, he came under pressure to respond to what some deemed peace overtures, he classified “the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery” as nonnegotiable. (Only once, in the darkest days of late August 1864, believing his electoral defeat inescapable, did he contemplate an offer of peace without emancipation.) Earlier, he had insisted on writing into his party’s election platform a pledge of support for an emancipation amendment to the Con-stitution. Fearing that his proclamation, by deriving its authority from military need, might lack legal force after the war and be overturned by a hostile judiciary or Congress, he saw in a Thirteenth Amendment the only means of guaranteeing that African-Americans be “forever free.” Once reelected, he used patronage and every legitimate lever to secure its passage through the lame-duck Congress that had previously failed to endorse it. As the process of state ratification began, he took pride in the lead his own state of Illinois had taken in approving a measure which freed all slaves, not just those in the rebellious areas covered by his proclamation. On this “King’s cure for all the evils,” he told an impromptu gathering of supporters, “he could not but congratulate all present, himself, the country and the whole world upon this great moral victory.”78
Strong practical reasons stiffened Lincoln’s resolve to stand by his emancipation policy. To renege on a carefully calculated proclamation would be to confirm the charge of irresolution. It would send out the wrong signal to the European powers, whose continuing attempts at mediation were usefully undermined by Lincoln’s recasting of the conflict as a struggle over the future of slavery itself. Most of all, it was incompatible with the Union’s growing dependence on black troops. Lincoln had first followed up his final proclamation by encouraging commanders to use African-Americans not for combat but in garrison duties, “leaving the white forces now necessary at those places, to be employed elsewhere”; but he shortly came to share many commanders’ enthusiasm for raising and arming black regiments. “The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once,” he reflected to Andrew Johnson, and during the spring campaigns of 1863 he followed these words with action. After Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas’s exploratory visit to the West in April, the War Department established a special bureau for organizing “colored troops.” Soon the courage and capability of frontline black recruits—notably in Louisiana and at Fort Wagner, in South Carolina—underscored the wisdom of Lincoln’s new policy.79
The better the policy worked, the less likely it was that emancipation would be reversed, for, said Lincoln, “negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do any thing for us, if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom.” To abandon them would be “a cruel and an astounding breach of faith.” Democrats and conservatives in the border states and Midwest might want the proclamation retracted, seeing it as an obstacle to peace and an inhibitor of white recruitment. But Lincoln knew, as he told Grant in August, that black enlistments were becoming indispensable, “a resource which, if vigorously applied now, wil
l soon close the contest. It works doubly, weakening the enemy and strengthening us.” A year later Lincoln estimated that some 150,000 black seamen, soldiers, and laborers served the Union. “My enemies condemn my emancipation policy,” he noted. “But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done.” By the end of the conflict, nearly 190,000 blacks had directly supported the Union’s military effort.80
A similar utilitarian concern marked Lincoln’s encouragement of emancipationists in the loyal slave states, where his proclamation did not apply. The weaker slavery became in the borderlands, the more forlorn the Confederates’ hopes. Turning “slave soil to free,” as Lincoln said in support of the admission of West Virginia as a free state, “is a certain, and irrevocable encroachment upon the cause of the rebellion.” Specifically, Lincoln developed pressure for compensated emancipation across the border region by endorsing the payment of bounties to loyal owners whose slaves enlisted. In Kentucky, where army officers frequently clashed with uncooperative owners, white Unionists remained chronically deaf to the appeal of voluntary emancipation, despite the stark evidence of a crumbling institution as thousands of slaves sought the sanctuary of the Union lines. It was a different tale in Missouri, where the poisonous factionalism between radical and conservative Unionists, which left Lincoln friendless, nonetheless resolved itself into an effective movement for statewide emancipation during 1864 and early 1865. More satisfactory still was the abolition of slavery in Maryland, where Lincoln had consistently nurtured the cause. “It needs not to be a secret,” he told a state leader ahead of elections for a state constitutional convention, “that I wish success to emancipation in Maryland. It would aid much to end the rebellion.” When voters narrowly ratified the emergent free state constitution in October 1864, Lincoln joined ecstatic free blacks in celebrating what he called “a big thing.”81
Intellectual conviction sustained Lincoln’s utilitarianism. Persisting in his duty of seeking the divine purpose, and sure that emancipation was God’s will, he saw nothing in events to show he was wrong. Disasters, as at Fredericksburg, might mean that “the Almighty is against us,” but they did not signal God’s disapproval of an emancipationist course. By the spring of 1864 the nation was well down the road to extinguishing slavery, but this was not what, three years earlier, “either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it.” It seemed increasingly clear that “God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that . . . the North as well as . . . the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong.” In similar vein he told the English abolitionist Eliza Gurney, “The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance. . . . [W]e must work earnestly in the best light He gives us, trusting that so working still conduces to the great ends He ordains. Surely He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion.”82
God then had so ordered events that Lincoln felt increasingly justified in giving play to his emancipationist instincts. “I am naturally anti-slavery,” he told Hodges and other Kentuckians, but he had never allowed his “primary abstract judgment on the moral question” to overrule his constitutional obligations. In the earlier part of his presidency he had not completely smothered his antislavery inclinations: with a nuance often missed, he noted that he had “done no official act in mere deference” to these feelings; the executive office conferred no “unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment.”83 But his scope for constitutional action against slavery had gradually broadened. Publicly reverting to the moral, Scripture-laced language that he had used before becoming president, Lincoln wrote down his thoughts for a delegation of Baptists, in May 1864: “To read in the Bible, as the word of God himself, that ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,’ and to preach therefrom that, ‘In the sweat of other mans faces shalt thou eat bread,’ to my mind can scarcely be reconciled with honest sincerity.” And when “professedly holy men of the South” reinterpreted the Golden Rule (“As ye would all men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them”) by asking “the christian world to aid them in doing to a whole race of men, as they would have no man do unto themselves,” they engaged in far greater hypocrisy and insult to God “than did Satan when he tempted the Saviour with the Kingdoms of the earth.”84
In alluding to slavery as an abuse of labor, Lincoln can be read as promoting the wartime development of the Republicans’ free-labor philosophy. The historian Heather Cox Richardson has shown how, once in national office, the party pursued measures which effectively equated Unionism with dynamic capitalist growth and the opening of economic opportunity for ordinary American farmers, workers, and small manfacturers of modest wealth. This was a program to which Lincoln himself was ready to lend his weight: like other Republicans, he believed that in the United States there was nothing to fix “the free hired laborer . . . to that condition for life,” that individual energy and industry in a fluid society gave realistic hope of self-advancement, and that there was a harmony of interests between labor, as the sole creator of wealth, and capital.85
The Republican economic program had a hard moral core. Its proponents, Lincoln intimated, would surely be less vulnerable than the champions of slavery when held to account on the day of judgment. “When brought to my final reckoning, may I have to answer for robbing no man of his goods; yet more tolerable even this, than for robbing one of himself, and all that was his.” There is little in Lincoln’s recorded words to suggest that he believed in an afterlife, no matter how often he brooded about death, or how much he wanted to share the common belief in a reunion with loved ones beyond the grave. More powerful in Lincoln’s thought than a celestial day of reckoning was the terrestrial judgment of history. As the historian Robert V. Bruce has shrewdly argued, Lincoln found consolation in the idea that mortals would survive not in “Heaven” but in “memory.” His awareness of living during momentous times and his sense of moral duty to future generations—“through time and in eternity”—acquired an extra edge after he had issued his preliminary emancipation order. “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history,” he wrote in December 1862. “We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. . . . The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”86
Lincoln learned from his many religious visitors that his emancipationist reading of God’s will, of Scripture, and of historical duty had secured for him what he described as “the effective and almost unanamous support” of “the good christian people of the country.” It is hard to say precisely how valuable those religious voices were in stiffening Lincoln’s intellectual resolve, but they clearly brought real comfort. During the dark days of 1862, when Noyes Miner told him that “Christian people all over the country are praying for you as they never prayed for a mortal man before,” Lincoln’s reply evinced more than simple politeness: “This is an encouraging thought to me. If I were not sustained by the prayers of God’s people I could not endure this constant pressure. I should give up hoping for success.”87
Lincoln’s resolving to make emancipation a nonnegotiable war aim had implications for how he would approach southern reconstruction and the restoration of loyal governments. This was a sharply contested issue and one which he knew would exercise the Thirty-eighth Congress when it convened in December 1863, for by then Grant’s relief of Chattanooga in October had been added to the military successes of the summer and had misleadingly opened up the prospect of the enemy’s prompt collapse. Opposition Democrats included those for whom restoration and reconciliation demanded little more than a simple—but entirely unrealistic—amnesty for all and a return to the prewar Union, with slavery and the southern way of life intact. More significant were the conflicting pressures Lincoln faced from the ideological poles of his own party. Conservative Republicans wanted an end to slavery, but otherwise sought a generous political se
ttlement for southern whites, especially former Whigs and small farmers; encouraged by Montgomery Blair, some countenanced deportation to resolve the volatile issue of postwar race relations. In contrast, an increasingly assertive group of radicals wanted to see a fundamental reordering of southern life before the rebels returned. Through secession and war, they argued, the Confederate states had constitutionally disintegrated. Congress, gatekeeper to the Union by virtue of its power over its own membership, had jurisdiction over the rebel South, and should ensure that emancipation was the stepping-stone to equal civic and political rights for blacks. Some, including Sumner, even favored the landless enjoying a color-blind redistribution of rebel property.
Lincoln had from the outset addressed the issue of restoration. He offered no single plan, since that might become a straitjacket. The issues were too sensitive and the local experience too varied for that. But he did develop a broad approach to reconstruction, shaped by his own temperamental preference and constitutional conviction, and by military and political need. The law and the Constitution would be his guide to action, not vindictiveness or hatred. The West Virginia experience showed that reaching out to, not repelling, the Confederacy’s Unionist elements was the intelligent priority. These loyalists, Lincoln believed in the early stages of the conflict, constituted a huge southern reservoir of support waiting to be channeled. They should not be blamed for the actions of the misguided minority of individuals who had overturned republican government and declared independence. In legal fact there had been no secession: the states inhabited by the rebels remained under the jurisdiction of the federal authorities and the Constitution. That document gave the president, as commander-in-chief, control of wartime reconstruction policy. He was obliged to nurture local initiatives toward restoring self-government. Bottom-up republicanism and self-reconstruction by local Unionists would secure an early end to the rebellion. A lasting peace would have to be built not through revolutionary shocks but by means of moderate, constitutionally nourished, gradual change. In this way, Lincoln judged, he had the best hope of maintaining the Union political consensus essential to victory.
Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power Page 33
