The heavy sarcasm from Lincoln the rising politician assumed that his audience knew that the transatlantic slave trade was a moral abomination—and he tried to bring them to see the parallel wickedness in extending the slave trade to new territories.
So now the politician who had made those arguments was president of the United States and had before him a real live transatlantic slave trader.
There were petitions, arguments, and pleas for mercy of the sort to which Lincoln was usually quite responsive. All anyone was asking for at this point was commutation of the death sentence to life imprisonment.
Lincoln cast his decision in the plainest moral terms: “I have felt it to be my duty to refuse.”
He refused any mitigation of the death penalty for this blatant captain and owner of a slave trader.
No mercy this time.
Well, almost no mercy.
He did make one little concession. He knew that Gordon never imagined that he actually would be executed. And there was that word “reprieve” in the Constitution. He asked Attorney General Bates whether he could grant a “respite of his sentence without relieving him altogether of the death penalty.” Bates answered yes. That power to grant a “reprieve” does not “annul” the sentence; it only “prolongs the time.” So three days before the scheduled hanging Lincoln issued a formal “stay of execution” full of whereases, one of which was: “whereas, it has seemed to me probable that the unsuccessful application made for the commutation of his sentence may have prevented the said Nathaniel Gordon from making the necessary preparation for the awful change that awaits him,” now, therefore, I President Lincoln, grant him a respite until February 21.
The “said Nathaniel Gordon” was given an extra two weeks, to prepare for the awful change that awaited him.
But still Gordon and his lawyers were not ready to make preparation for that awful change. Gordon’s energetic counsel tried the Supreme Court, tried again at the circuit court with another technical argument, tried again to persuade President Lincoln by bringing not only Gordon’s wife but also his mother and Rhoda White and the petition now from eleven thousand New Yorkers. The governor of New York made yet another last-minute appeal to Lincoln, and attorney Gilbert Dean, trying everything, now argued: Don’t desecrate the period of Washington’s birthday with a hanging! Dean wrote: “Do not, I beseech you allow…the eve of the preparation for solemnizing the Anniversary of the 22 February to be marred by the creaking of the gallows—or saddened by the report of the dying groans and struggles of a human being sacrificed to appease the spasmodic virtue of men.”
On February 20 a protest rally was held at the Merchant’s Exchange, and an armed guard of eighty U.S. marshals surrounded the gallows at the Tombs, the city prison. The next day someone, perhaps his wife, smuggled Gordon some strychnine, which he secreted in a crack in a bench, but he succeeded only in making himself ill and accelerating his punishment. The authorities moved the execution from two o’clock up to noon. He was then placed “beneath the fatal beam” and hanged, the only slave trader ever executed under American law.
In granting the two weeks’ respite, Lincoln had said that “it becomes my painful duty to admonish the prisoner that, relinquishing all expectation of pardon by human authority, he refer himself alone to the common God and Father of all men.”
Surely it is significant that Lincoln, in stating his refusal to do anything more, referred to the common God of all men. In this case justice for the 897 Africans crammed into the slave deck of the Erie, and for the perhaps 500 Africans on the last voyage of the Juliet, and for the hundreds or perhaps thousands of Africans whom Gordon brought in chains across the Atlantic on the Camargo and how many other vessels, and for all the other damage that the nefarious trade did to the common life, outweighed the claim of even a limited mercy to this man.
LINCOLN WOULD MAKE two huge moral decisions about Americans in the slave trade: about a particular individual in the Gordon case, weighing mercy against this man’s participation in this “inhuman traffic” and about state policy, weighing American naval principles and national pride against the only effective way to stop that traffic.
This second hard choice presented itself because the British Royal Navy had become the only effective suppressor of the slave trade on the seas. Throughout those long years since 1808, during which the American slave trade persisted even though it was illegal, the American effort to suppress the trade had been hampered by an unwillingness of its enforcers to cooperate fully with the British. Great Britain, having once been the most extensive national participant in the transatlantic slave trade, had outlawed the trade in 1807, had ended slavery itself in 1833, and with the world’s greatest navy had become the prime world enforcer of international efforts to suppress the trade. But although other nations cooperated with the Royal Navy in its role as constable of the seas, the idea of British ships stopping and boarding ships flying an American flag gave Americans heartburn; it represented a staggering violation of tender American feelings going back to 1812 and before, feelings that would be reaffirmed in the Trent affair. The Americans had signed a treaty of cooperation, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, but it definitely did not give the British the right to stop and search American ships. So, ironically, flying an American flag became a certain protection for a slave ship, because it meant that the ship was vulnerable only to the thinly spread and rather halfhearted American patrol and could not be boarded by the effective enforcer, the Royal Navy. It will be remembered that when the Mohican approached the Erie, what Gordon did was to run up the American flag.
Even the execution of Nathaniel Gordon was not quite enough to frighten American citizens out of participation in the immensely lucrative transatlantic slave trade. That Gordon had been caught, they believed, was a fluke; that official attitudes had suddenly lined up so that he was executed was another fluke. None of the other men arrested on the Erie was executed; nor was anyone else. So if you had a ship and connections in the Congo, you could continue to make trips—because after the war started, you were not going to be caught.
At the outset of the Lincoln administration, scattered federal efforts to suppress the slave trade were consolidated under the secretary of the interior and his new assistant, George C. Whiting. In his first annual message President Lincoln said of the African slave trade: “It is a subject of gratulation that the efforts which have been made for the suppression of this inhuman traffic have been recently attended with unusual success.” Whiting and Interior Secretary Smith reported to Lincoln in their first account the capture of five slavers.
But Lincoln’s “gratulation” was premature. Although his administration certainly had a stronger desire than any previous one to stop that inhuman traffic, it soon had fewer ships to do it with. The war would require all the ships in the U.S. Navy, including those from the African Squadron and the Cuban patrol. These vessels had been patrolling to catch slavers; now they would be patrolling to catch rebel blockade runners and bringing naval support to operations of the U.S. Army in a war at home. The San Jacinto, before Captain Wilkes took his colorful initiative with the Trent, had been patrolling African waters; Admiral Foote, before he served at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the Powhatan affair, had been a commander in the African fleet. That had been back under Democratic administrations. Gordon himself had been caught, after all, by a warship, the Mohican, assigned to the African Squadron under the Buchanan administration. For all its general softness on slavery, that administration had at last in 1859 put together an African Squadron of eight ships and a Cuban patrol of four steamers to catch slavers. And so, ironically, there finally came this one little moment, 1860–61, when the American slave patrol did have some success; and now it was going to be interrupted by the first antislavery administration to come into office. Those five slavers whom the Lincoln administration had “gratulated” itself for catching were caught by a squad put in place by the Buchanan administration, and the necessities of war would mean that sq
uad would now be broken up.
So Lincoln, just a few months after the Trent affair, faced an exacting test of his priorities: Would he, to suppress the slave trade, allow the Royal Navy to stop and board American ships? Spain, Portugal, and Brazil had granted the British navy the right to search and seize suspected slavers. Would only ships flying the American flag be exempt? Lincoln made the choice: he would indeed allow the British navy to search and seize American ships suspected of being slavers.
Lincoln quietly had Seward begin negotiations with Lord Lyons; they quietly agreed upon a treaty; Lincoln quietly asked the Senate (with the withdrawal of Southerners, now overwhelmingly Republican) to ratify the Seward-Lyons Treaty. It quietly ratified it, in executive session, behind closed doors. On July 11, 1862, Lincoln signed “a treaty between the United States and Great Britain for the suppression of the slave trade.”
Giving the Royal Navy permission to seize and search ships flying the American flag was painful; but allowing the African slave trade to be carried on by those ships was worse. Lincoln could not allow the American flag to provide the one national identity that would protect a slaver against the one effective enforcer.
In a sop to national pride, the treaty’s grant was reciprocal: each country’s navy had the “right of visitation” on suspected slavers from the other. But the U.S. Navy, otherwise engaged, was in no position to do any visiting, and even if it had been, there were no longer British slavers to visit. The whole point was that the British navy would catch American slavers. Ships found to have evidence of slave trading were to be taken to special courts, with a British judge and an American judge, in Sierra Leone, the Cape of Good Hope, and New York.
The experience at the New York court was typical. “It was held in a rented room in the Union Building in New York, certainly one of the most modest courts on the North American continent. Judge Truman Smith had no clerk, and his furnishings were limited to a carpet, one table, a washstand, one lounge, a secretary, six chairs, and three volumes of the United States Statutes at Large. Yet this humble establishment was more than equal to the demands placed upon it, for not one case ever came before Judge Smith’s court.” Nor did any case come to any of the designated courts in other parts of the world.
American participation in the moral abomination of the transatlantic slave trade was really stopped not in Thomas Jefferson’s administration in 1808, as intended by the Founders, but in 1862 during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In Giving Freedom to the Slave, We Assure Freedom to the Free
MY STATION AND ITS DUTIES
WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN became president of the United States, as we have seen, his moral situation was radically redefined. He was no longer a private citizen advocating a position; he was now an oath-bound public servant with prescribed duties. He had sworn by a solemn oath “registered in Heaven” to “preserve, protect, and defend” the U.S. Constitution. “The Constitution” meant also, to him, the nation and its government. “I did understand,” he would write, looking back after three years’ service, “that my oath to preserve the Constitution…imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government—that nation—of which the Constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the Constitution?”*45 Lincoln had as his solemn obligation the preservation of the United States of America.
Moreover, this duty was for him real and immediate. Whereas for other presidents most of the time the sworn obligation to preserve the Union is a latent premise, for Lincoln it was an inescapable daily imperative: the union he had sworn to preserve was in mortal peril.
In his understanding, a victory by the rebels would not be merely some graceful severing of ties, the erring sisters curtsying and gently departing, while the Union, slightly diminished but otherwise unharmed, would go waltzing on as before. A rebel victory would be instead “the surrender of the existence of the government.” When one looks through Lincoln’s presidential utterances about the effect of a successful slave state rebellion, one is impressed to find, as we have seen in Chapter 7, how many different terms he used, and how stark, how dire, they are.
And that newly acquired overriding duty recast his purpose with respect to slavery. Lincoln brought to the nation’s highest office these two vigorously expressed moral convictions: a devotion to the American Union as the republican example to the world and a condemnation of American slavery as a “monstrous injustice” that violated that republican example. But now he had taken a solemn oath that placed him under formal obligation only to the first of these, not to the second. He had no parallel official duty—no “perfect” duty—to attack the evil of slavery. On the contrary, the Constitution he had sworn to uphold contained euphemistic recognitions of slavery and protections for it, and the Union he had sworn to defend had slavery as a legally recognized institution in fifteen states, eight of which, at the time he was inaugurated, had not seceded.
He was now the executive of that Union, enjoined to “take care” that the laws be faithfully executed. In his inaugural address Lincoln went so far as to read the constitutional provision about returning fugitive slaves (persons “held to service or labor”) and to note that it is “as plainly written in the Constitution as any other” and that “all members of Congress swear to support the whole Constitution.” And he had said that “all the protections which…can be given, will be cheerfully given to all the states…as cheerfully to one section as to another.”
It had been almost universally believed that the Constitution that Lincoln had sworn to uphold left the matter of slavery entirely to the states—indeed left most matters to the states—but that slavery was the peculiarly sensitive point. That conviction ran so deep that even the Anti-Slavery Society in its founding document acknowledged it; the Republican Party platform recognized it; the cabinet members all affirmed it; and Lincoln in his inaugural reiterated it, compounding the obligation with an inaugural pledge. He quoted himself as having said, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
Gradual, compensated emancipation, voluntarily undertaken by the border states themselves, was a way Lincoln could start right away acting against the monstrous injustice of slavery without violating his pledge not to interfere with it in the states and while honoring his duty to preserve the Union—actually, he argued, while serving that overarching duty.
Such gradual emancipation would not be coercive federal interference or a moralistic imposition on the slave states, but would come “gently as the dews of heaven,” with no reproaches, no one acting the Pharisee. Lincoln’s persistent (but futile) efforts to persuade the border states to accept such a program, gradually to buy out the slaveholders, have a pleading quality. It is not true that Lincoln’s efforts against slavery were postponed through the first year and a half of his presidency until the Emancipation Proclamation; actually, he started early. As early as November 1861 he proposed a scheme for compensated emancipation in Delaware; he presented the first national proposal for a voluntary gradual buyout of slaves to Congress on March 6, 1862, and he met with border state representatives to try to persuade them to accept it in March and in July 1862; and in his annual message in December 1862, even after the preliminary emancipation proclamation by the commander in chief in September, he made one last thorough and earnest appeal to the states to adopt compensated emancipation.
When Lincoln showed the abolitionist Wendell Phillips the message that he had sent to Congress on March 6—the first time any American president had proposed emancipating slaves—he told Phillips a story about an Irishman, under the restriction of Maine’s prohibition law, who ordered a lemonade but hinted that he would not mind if “a drop of the creature” could be put into it “unbeknownst to me self.” Lincoln “hated [slavery] and meant it should die” but had included that ingredie
nt in the message “unbeknownst” to himself.
Lincoln needed to slip the brandy of emancipation into the lemonade of Union-saving for reasons both of his formal moral and legal obligation and of political reality.
Three groups understood from the start the tie between freeing slaves and saving the Union—the slaveholders who rebelled against it, the antislavery forces in the North who kept up the pressure for it, and the slaves who took it for granted by fleeing to Union lines. But the key to the politics Lincoln had to pursue was the huge group that did not make that link—indeed that rejected it and opposed it.
The body of opinion that supported the Union but did not support emancipation was very large, and essential to victory, not only in Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland but also across the North. This was the body of opinion for which he would write a great public letter after the Emancipation Proclamation, his letter to James Conkling, read to an audience in Springfield: “You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union.” Efforts at freeing slaves, taking account of this crucial body of opinion, would have to be made with a justification other than simply that slavery was wrong. These people did not think it was wrong.
BUT THE PRESIDENT made clear from start to finish that preserving the Union was mandatory, and that he would use whatever means were required to do it. In his first annual message, on December 3, 1861, he said, “The Union must be preserved; and hence all indispensable means must be employed.” In his March 6 message to Congress proposing gradual emancipation, he quoted that statement and then added a certain note of warning: “If…resistance continues, the war must also continue; and it is impossible to foresee all the incidents, which may attend.” On April 25, 1862, General David Hunter, commanding the Union army’s Department of the South, issued a declaration of martial law for his department, and then on May 9 declared that slavery and martial law were incompatible, and that “the persons…hitherto held as slaves” were now free. Lincoln countermanded the emancipation order but went on—in his proclamation issued May 19,1862—to make a statement that went beyond anything he needed to have said, not being at all required by the business at hand:
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