Perhaps worst, he was a longtime supporter of the national movement to “colonize” American blacks in Africa or somewhere else outside the United States.
To modern ears that sounds morally repulsive; it is something of a test of historical imagination to think one’s way back into the situation in which an honorable person might support such a movement. One can avoid the test by saying that no honorable person would do that, but in doing so one would be throwing overboard quite a list of presumably worthy Americans, including not only Lincoln’s beau ideal Henry Clay but also Jefferson and Madison, multiple “eminent divines,” and several leading abolitionists. The great antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin ends with “a black’s dream of freedom in Africa.” Although the great majority of blacks rejected the colonizing project, some supported it, and their numbers grew after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and increasing white racist restriction and attack. Even the great opponent of colonization Frederick Douglass, according to William Freehling, wavered for one brief despairing moment in January 1861. The motives for black colonizationists were despair about a racist America and hope for a black republic elsewhere. Were those radically different from Lincoln’s motives? He did not know much about black life, but he did know white racism.
Lincoln had acquired his colonization convictions from his first political hero, Henry Clay; had spoken at colonization society meetings in Springfield; had defended colonization in his debates with Stephen Douglas; and as president would recommend it in his first two annual messages, endorse it in the preliminary (although not the final) emancipation proclamation, and go to some lengths actually to launch colonization projects—utterly futile as they would prove to be—near Haiti and in Panama.
In August 1862—significantly, after he had decided to issue the proclamation but before he had done so—he held a famous meeting in the White House with “a committee of colored men” to discuss the colonizing of American blacks in Central America. (Earlier it had been Liberia; later it would be an island in the Caribbean.) That five black men were invited to the White House by the president was altogether new, a crack in the racial caste system, but what Lincoln said once they got to the meeting did not do him credit. Lincoln’s patronizing effort to persuade these “intelligent” blacks is said to have been the “nadir” of his presidency. One appalling argument was that it would be “extremely selfish” on the part of free black Americans not to want to help their more unfortunate brothers by leaving this country to build a colony elsewhere. Another was his suggestion that the white race, like the black, “suffers” from the presence of the other. Frederick Douglass was particularly offended by his implication that the presence of blacks in the country was the cause of the war (“But for your race among us there could not be war”), which he said was like a horse thief pleading the existence of the horse as the apology for his theft. In addition to the obtuse touches in Lincoln’s presentation, as a multitude of commentators then and now have observed, the whole project was staggeringly impractical. In the first place, the overwhelming majority of blacks in this country did not want to embark on any such venture—to leave the country of their birth (as this group of five, as well as Frederick Douglass and many others soon told Lincoln). But in the second place, there was the sheer impossibility of the numbers.
In the several dubious efforts actually undertaken, the numbers were certainly small, measured against the natural increase each year of American blacks—not to mention the four million total. Lincoln, speaking to the five black visitors, indulged in a swift markdown of the number of families he sought for volunteers. One may be excused for remembering a joke he would tell on a later occasion. His April 1865 entrance into Richmond, with Confederate blockades of the river, kept being reduced to simpler transport: from the River Queen escorted by Admiral Porter’s grand flotilla, to the River Queen without one ship and then another, to the admiral’s barge pulled by a tug with a marine guard on board when the River Queen was blocked, to the barge without the tug but propelled by oarsmen, which barge then ran aground. Lincoln entered Richmond on foot. This devolution evoked from Lincoln a story about the applicant who came to him asking to be appointed an ambassador, and on being turned down asked to be appointed a postmaster, and on being turned down asked to be made a waiter, and finally, when that was rejected, said to Lincoln: Do you have an old pair of trousers I could have? We may turn this Lincoln story back against Lincoln’s own self-reducing in his asking for families to go to the colonization project in Central America:
The practical thing I want to ascertain is whether I can get a number of able-bodied men, with their wives and children, who are willing to go…Could I get a hundred tolerably intelligent men, with their wives and children…Can I have fifty? If I could have twenty-five able-bodied men, with a mixture of women and children…I think I could make a successful commencement.
Lincoln may be vulnerable both on moral and on practical grounds for his long support of colonization, and he certainly is vulnerable for some of the arguments he made to the five black leaders, but it is unfair as well as anachronistic to apply to him terms used for abominations of a later century, “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid.” Lincoln’s motive was not racial malice. The point was not the subordination or humiliation of a people but their rescue. Unlike some other advocates of colonization, he supported only a voluntary movement. The stated reason for it was the depth of what today we would call white racism, which indeed was a prime motive also for black nationalist supporters. Lincoln, speaking to the five black visitors, did give a thorough condemnation of the prevailing racial attitudes: “Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race.”
The colonization movement, certainly as Lincoln took part in it, was an antislavery movement, resisted by the fiercest defenders of slavery. We have the notes of one of his talks to the Springfield association, in which he gave a history of the efforts to end slavery, culminating in the colonization movement in the United States, with this overall theme: “All the while—conscience was at work.” Colonization, which is sometimes treated in modern anti-Lincoln polemics as though it were Lincoln’s own individual perversity, was in fact a movement supported by a distinguished list of American leaders.
Lincoln himself gave his explicit argument in his remarks to the five black leaders: white prejudice was so strong that blacks would never be accepted as equal, so a colony should be created in which they could be equal and free. But we may surely infer that his primary purpose was not to persuade blacks to leave but to persuade whites to accept emancipation. Colonization was an answer—symbolic at least—to the fears of whites about tides of freedmen overrunning the country and taking their jobs.
Much of Lincoln’s presidential effort on behalf of colonization came in the second half of 1862, as he was taking the steps that led to the Emancipation Proclamation. After it was issued one might think—by the logic of his argument to the five black leaders—that his activity in behalf of colonization would increase. But it didn’t. It stopped.
A scholarly examination looking not just at Lincoln’s rhetoric but at his actions and their timing concludes that Lincoln, “always the careful politician,” in his strategy would “propose colonization to sweeten the pill of emancipation for conservatives from the North and the border states…[A] clear picture emerges of Lincoln using the prospect of colonization to make emancipation more acceptable to conservatives and then abandoning all efforts at colonization once he made the determined step toward emancipation in the Final Emancipation Proclamation.”
There is an immense contrast between what he said to the five black visitors in August 1862 and what he would say, as we will see, to Springfield Unionists in August 1863: two radically different pictures of the American future.
Something different already started to appear in a significant passage in Lincoln’s 1
862 annual message to Congress, a month before the proclamation. This message, read to Congress on December 1, 1862, includes—as we have seen—an elaborate last full argument for gradual compensated emancipation, with a proposal for colonization. But having laid out that proposal, Lincoln then took the argument in quite another direction:
I cannot make it better known than it already is, that I strongly favor colonization. And yet I wish to say there is an objection urged against free colored persons remaining in the country, which is largely imaginary, if not sometimes malicious.
This sometimes malicious argument, now refuted by the president of the United States in an official document, is the argument that freed blacks would take white men’s jobs. Lincoln’s counterargument is accompanied by a sober warning about the seriousness of arguments made in these portentous times:
If there ever could be a proper time for mere catch arguments, that time surely is not now. In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and in eternity.
Emancipation was not going to increase the number of black laborers.
Is it true, then, that colored people can displace any more white labor, by being free, than by remaining slaves? If they stay in their old places they jostle no white laborers; if they leave their old places, they leave them open to white laborers. Logically, there is neither more nor less of it. Emancipation, even without deportation, would probably enhance the wages of white labor, and, very surely, would not reduce them…But is it dreaded that the freed people will swarm forth, and cover the whole land? Are they not already in the land? Will liberation make them any more numerous?
He is arguing now not for the separation of the races but for their shared life in this country.
SOME OF THEM SEEM WILLING TO FIGHT FOR YOU
THE FINAL Emancipation Proclamation included a harbinger of a wholly different conception: it invited black men into the Union armed services, which had to mean citizenship, their continuing presence, and a biracial America.
The recruiting and volunteering of black soldiers—free blacks, runaways, slaves, in the North, the South, the coast, Louisiana, the Mississippi Valley, finally even in Union slave state Kentucky—would be a tremendous story. “Despite the resistance of many whites,” historian Joseph Glatthaar writes, “the recruitment of blacks into military service proceeded at an almost breathless pace.”
By the end of the war there were 186,017 blacks in the U.S. armed services. The Bureau of Colored Troops “at one time had over 123,000 soldiers in uniform,” Glatthaar notes—“a force larger than the field armies that either Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant or Major General William T. Sherman directly oversaw at the height of their campaigns in 1864 and 1865.”
In 1863 black units fought bravely in battles at Port Hudson and Milliken’s Bend and Fort Wagner, but although acceptance grew and converts were made, the resistance in segments of the Northern public was still strong. In July the New York City riots, provoked by the Conscription Act passed in March, were fiercely and terribly antiblack. Copperheads, opponents of the war and of the draft, trumpeted their attack on a war that was no longer fought simply for “the Union as it was.”
Lincoln was given the opportunity to write a public letter in response to the prejudiced outcry against the Emancipation Proclamation and the recruitment of black soldiers when an old friend, James C. Conkling, invited him to speak to a large gathering in Springfield. He had been developing the device of the public letter; his letter to Horace Greeley in the fall of 1862, before the proclamation and preparing the public for it, had been a success, and the letter the following summer to a New York gathering about civil liberty had been another success. This letter to Conkling, dated August 26, 1863, would be the strongest of them all. It was written to be read aloud to a large gathering—in fact, Lincoln instructed Conkling to read it very slowly—but of course it was then to be read across the nation as it was published in the press.
After carefully explaining to these citizens who “maintain unconditional devotion to the Union” why the peace some thought possible wasn’t, he took up the burning central complaint: “But, to be plain, you are dissatisfied with me about the negro. Quite likely there is a difference of opinion between you and myself upon that subject. I certainly wish that all men could be free, while I suppose you do not.” He insisted, as he would throughout, that what he had done had not turned on this fundamental moral difference: “Yet I have neither adopted, nor proposed any measure, which is not consistent with even your view, provided you are for the Union.” He stated their difference about the proclamation: “You dislike the emancipation proclamation; and, perhaps, would have it retracted. You say it is unconstitutional—I think differently. I think the constitution invests its commander-in-chief, with the law of war, in time of war.”
And then he justified it, again, in the utterly practical terms that they all could share:
The war has certainly progressed as favorably for us, since the issue of the proclamation as before…some of the commanders of our armies in the field who have given us our most important successes, believe the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion; and that, at least one of those important successes, could not have been achieved when it was, but for the aid of black soldiers.
In the sentence about “the heaviest blow yet,” Lincoln was borrowing exactly the words that U. S. Grant had used in a letter he had written to Lincoln on August 23. Lincoln added this passage after he had mailed the text by sending a telegram to Conkling, telling him where to insert it.
He made clear that the commander holding this view of the positive effect of black soldiers did not do so from ideological presumption:
Among the commanders holding these views are some who have never had any affinity with what is called abolitionism, or with Republican party politics, but who hold them purely as military opinion.
Douglas Wilson, in his illuminating discussion in Lincoln’s Sword, notes that throughout this quite direct and forceful letter Lincoln makes repeated use of aggressive rhetorical questions:
I thought that in your struggle for the Union, to whatever extent the negroes should cease helping the enemy, to that extent it weakened the enemy in his resistance to you. Do you think differently?
And then in crucial sentences he put the moral choice plainly:
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.
The sentence “Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but no matter” was an inspired late editorial insertion. He had written the flat injunction: You won’t fight for Negroes—fight then for the Union. But adding that Negroes meanwhile fight for you—followed by the quiet shrug “but no matter”—was a brilliant stroke, shaming the reader with the sharp contrast and then seeming to take the edge off with the shrug.
I thought that whatever negroes can be got to do as soldiers, leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do, in saving the Union. Does it appear otherwise to you? But 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. And the promise being made, must be kept.
Promises are a problem to utilitarians and a chief argument for their opponents. We don’t mean by a promise that we will do what we engage to do only if it appears that doing so will work to an overall balance of greater happiness. Promises (like oaths) are a binding of the self that cuts through that. A utilitarian ethic faces the future and is in a sense impersonal: anyone looking at the probable good and evil future consequences of this deed should act so as to produce the greater happiness (or, more broadly, the greater good). But a promise or an oath, by contrast, creates a claim from the past, a bond from some earlier time that does not depend on we
ighing and measuring consequences. It is particular to these moral agents; I promised you. Lincoln had a sacred trust from the whole people; the emancipation and recruitment had created a bond that he in particular had to keep. The moral rigor of that promise to the black soldier would run all the way through the rest of his presidency: to betray it would be treachery, “a cruel and an astounding breach of faith” deserving the “curses of Heaven.”
That strong sentence “And the promise being made, must be kept” had been the last sentence of his draft. But he later decided to add a cautiously optimistic passage about the war. “The signs look better,” he said, and produced the memorable sentence about the opening of the Mississippi by the capture of Vicksburg in July—“The Father of Waters flows unvexed to the sea.” At the conclusion of a survey of hopeful signs, he summarized what victory would mean and then returned to a vivid picture of that soldier to whom the promise had been made:
Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost. And then, there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 38