Left unsaid—but well known to his readers—was the fact that many statesmen before him had tried for decades to save the Union without freeing any slaves, and their failures had paved the road to rebellion. Lincoln, for his part, had tried earlier in the year to start the emancipation process by voluntary means; that, too, had failed. Now he had decided to free some three million slaves in order to save the Union, and he had little doubt that his proclamation, when it was enforced by the Union armies, would lead to freedom for all slaves. As before, though, he kept the decision and its implications secret.
On a personal level, the “impatient and dictatorial tone” of Greeley’s letter annoyed Lincoln. But the president had a deft answer for that, too. Instead of sending his reply directly to Greeley, to be published under a big headline in the Tribune, he sent it to another paper, the National Intelligencer. Greeley was forced to reprint it as day-old news.
* * *
Another attempt to sugar the pill of emancipation for reluctant Northerners went down less smoothly. On August 14, Lincoln sat down at the White House with a delegation of leaders from Washington’s free black community to discuss the idea of moving members of their race to distant colonies. The topic had become a major issue among black residents thanks to that most familiar of devices: money. Twice that year, Congress had appropriated significant sums to get the colonization program moving. The fund now totaled $600,000, enough to attract a number of eager entrepreneurs. As one knowledgeable observer put it, the money was a “carcass over which the turkey buzzards are gathered together!”
Blacks in the capital were split over the idea of leaving America. Some were eager to say goodbye to a country where they were hated and exploited; others rejected the notion that they should have no place in a nation they had helped to build. The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, argued that blacks should not even consider the offensive proposal. His son Lewis, by contrast, found it quite appealing. The subject divided even Lincoln’s own house. While the president was examining competing colonization proposals, his head servant, William Slade, led an organization that sought to ban recruiters for the colonization schemes from entering the capital.
Liberia, the colony of former slaves in West Africa, was one possible destination. Lincoln, however, was more intrigued with a plan to settle American blacks in what is now Panama, in the supposedly coal-rich region of Chiriqui. The idea was to build a U.S. Navy fueling station where steamers could take on coal. Mining, storing, and loading the coal would keep the immigrants employed. They might also be able to plant cotton.
Eager to explore this prospect, the president sent an emissary to a group of prominent Washington blacks, asking them to choose a delegation to meet with him. Five men were chosen—all of them opposed to colonization. It was a formidable group. One member, John Cook, was educated at Oberlin College before taking over a school for black children founded by his father. Another, Benjamin McCoy, had founded a church and school. The chairman, Edward Thomas, was a messenger in the House of Representatives and a patron of the arts who had “the respect and confidence of every member of Congress.”
Lincoln apparently knew little about these men when he welcomed them to his office that afternoon. He asked: “Why should they leave the country?,” then answered his own question: “You and we are different races.” The antagonism created by this difference was real and deep, he continued. “Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people,” but “I cannot alter it if I would. It is a fact, about which we all think and feel alike, I and you.” America was so far from racial harmony that “on this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours.” Indeed, Lincoln went on, it was a mistake ever to bring captive Africans to North America, and now that mistake had led to the calamity of war: “our white men cutting one another’s throats … [over] the institution of Slavery and the colored race. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”
No record has been found to show how the delegates reacted to these words; apparently they sat stoically while Lincoln talked. He went on at length about the need for free and educated blacks like them to embrace colonization as a way of creating opportunity for the “systematically oppressed” former slaves. They could be like George Washington, he said, who endured hardship to make a future for his people. Then he turned to the advantages he saw in the proposed Chiriqui colony: fine harbors and “very rich coal mines,” which “will afford an opportunity for the inhabitants for immediate employment.” The rest, Lincoln assured them, would come through “self-reliance.”
History would vindicate Lincoln’s pessimism about the prospects for racial equality after the war was over. Still, his stubborn pursuit of what he once called his “colonization hobby” was a rare case of Lincoln indulging a fantasy. “I am so far behind the Sumner lighthouse,” he once admitted—meaning that he could not picture, as the Massachusetts abolitionist could, a future free of racial hatred and discrimination. Unable to see a sensible way forward, he wished the problem away on the implausible wings of a voluntary mass migration. Although he would eventually awaken from this strange (though widely shared) dream, for now he was still in the grip of it.
His visitors clearly were not. As the meeting adjourned, they gave a noncommittal promise to think about the president’s proposal. News of the session stirred a storm of protest from abolitionists. But criticism from those quarters was not necessarily a bad thing: Lincoln’s colonization hobby cost him little with the radicals who already scorned his efforts, and perhaps gained him some support from the all-important moderate center. Instead, African-Americans—the would-be George Washingtons who ultimately accepted the president’s challenge—paid the price for the ill-conceived Chiriqui scheme. Hundreds, if not thousands, eventually signed up for the colony. “Many of us have sold our furniture, have given up our little homes to go on the first voyage,” a group of them wrote when it became apparent a few months later that Honduras would not agree to have the colony planted next door. The fantasy of colonization fizzled, and their small savings were squandered for passage on a ship that never sailed.
* * *
“Mrs. L … is not well,” Lincoln wrote on August 21. As a general matter, this was true more often than not, though the specifics of her malady on this particular day are unknown. Mary was perhaps tired after returning from a trip to New York and Boston, where she balanced shopping sprees with earnest efforts to raise donations for Washington’s military hospitals. She may also have been privately grieving the death of her favorite half-brother, Alexander Todd, who had died two days earlier of wounds received while fighting the Yankees at Baton Rouge. “Oh Little Aleck, why had you to die?” Mary moaned when she got the news. The first lady usually put on a stony face when talking with others about the Rebels in her family tree. “He made his choice long ago,” she once said coldly of Aleck. “He decided against my husband.” But there can be little doubt that this sensitive and emotional woman gave in to sorrow when she was alone with her memories.
Mary’s interest in spiritualism had deepened over the summer, and now she hosted a séance at the presidential cottage. Her dangerous attraction to flamboyantly shady characters had led her to a medium named Charles J. Colchester, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of an English aristocrat and called himself “Lord Colchester.” Spirits answered his summonses by making various noises in dark rooms, noises only he could translate.
Mary prevailed on her husband to attend Colchester’s séance, and Lincoln in turn invited his friend Noah Brooks, a young journalist who later worked as his secretary. By Brooks’s account, the circle sat rapt as the lights were doused. Soon, there were sounds of tapping and scratching that Colchester translated as messages from Willie. This may have been the night that Willie first fetched Aleck Todd to accompany him from the afterlife; Mary took special comfort from séances in which her son brought with him his exuberant red-hair
ed uncle. Whatever transpired, it was enough to persuade Lincoln that Colchester was some sort of a fraud; he asked his science expert at the Smithsonian, Dr. Joseph Henry, to investigate.
Dr. Henry invited Colchester to conduct another séance, at which the scientist deduced that the medium must be wearing a device under his clothes that produced noises when he tensed his muscles. But Noah Brooks wanted to be sure, and he subsequently went with a friend to yet another of Colchester’s sessions, where Brooks took his seat next to the spirit summoner. When the ghosts stirred up a ruckus of thumps and clanking, Brooks seized Colchester’s hand in the dark. Several things happened almost simultaneously: Brooks called for his friend to strike a match; something hard whacked the journalist over the head; and the match flared to reveal a bell in Colchester’s hand, poised over a small drum. Caught red-handed, the medium hinted that he had information with which to blackmail Mrs. Lincoln. Brooks, bleeding but delighted, threatened to have him arrested unless he left Washington immediately.
Even Colchester’s exposure was not enough to persuade Mary that her fleeting contacts with her lost boy were figments of imagination and deceit. She preferred to feel that Willie—and Eddie, and her brothers Sam and Aleck, and Rebecca Pomroy’s family, and the Stanton baby, and all the sons and husbands and fathers in rude graves at Manassas and Pea Ridge and Fort Donelson—were not entirely and forever gone. As she explained to Charles Sumner, she wished to believe that only “a very slight veil separates us from the loved and lost.” The deceptions of spiritualism might offend men like her husband and Dr. Henry and Noah Brooks, but “to me there is comfort in the thought that though unseen by us” the dear departed “are very near.”
* * *
A headline in New York said it baldly: “Mysterious Disappearance of the Rebels.” Stonewall Jackson and his army had vanished before John Pope’s eyes, and the anonymous reporter who wrote the accompanying story predicted that Jackson “may appear where he is least expected.” Sure enough, on August 26, Fitzhugh Lee’s cavalry led the way into Manassas Junction with Jackson’s hungry Rebels marching behind. The Confederate troops had enjoyed a brisk hike down the Shenandoah Valley from Thoroughfare Gap to Front Royal, screened from view by the Blue Ridge Mountains as they eased past Pope’s right flank. Now they moved quickly, plundering Union supply depots. Whooping and hollering, they filled wagons with captured food and ammunition, confiscated herds of horses and mules and beef cattle, and stuffed themselves and their knapsacks.
Like a man stung on the backside by a bee, Pope swung around angrily, not quite sure what had hurt him but determined to find and stomp it. As he wheeled, the Rebels in his front melted into the valley. Confused, Pope began retracing his steps toward Manassas, with enemy troops to his front, flank, and rear. Typically, however, he was brimming with confidence. Pope didn’t know what he didn’t know, nor did he much care.
The general’s confusion spread quickly to Washington, because Jackson’s men had cut the telegraph wires linking the army to the capital. Hoping for news of Pope’s army, Lincoln went that night to the telegraph room at the War Department. He was prepared to stay until morning if need be, but the room was distressingly quiet. “Do you hear any thing from Pope?” he wired to Ambrose Burnside after a long and fruitless wait. “What news from the front?” he cabled McClellan. “Is the railroad bridge over Bull Run destroyed?” he asked Colonel Herman Haupt, the man in charge of Union trains.
Though he heard almost nothing from nearby sources, Lincoln did receive two urgent telegrams from Minnesota, bringing word of a fresh problem: Sioux warriors had gone to war against white settlers. They struck like lightning from a clear sky, raiding hamlets and farms across the southwestern part of the young state.
These bloody events had been some time coming, with roots that were sadly familiar. People who had once followed abundant game across unmarked prairies were now reduced to paltry lands and routinely cheated by U.S. agents. A week earlier, four hungry young Sioux had dared one another to take some chicken eggs belonging to a white farmer. Their taunts and challenges escalated until the young men had murdered an entire family of five settlers.
Sioux elders faced a decision: hand over the young braves to be punished, or follow their example and make the whites bleed. It wasn’t an easy choice, for they knew resistance was futile. More whites would come; they always did. But if the Sioux were ever to fight, now was the ideal moment: as one chieftain put it, “All the white soldiers are in the south fighting other white soldiers.” Thorns of grievance and honor spurred Chief Little Crow to war. The next morning, Sioux fighters raided a trading post near New Ulm on the Minnesota River; over the next few days, warriors tortured and killed several dozen men, women, and children, and then slaughtered twenty-four soldiers from the undermanned garrison at Fort Ridgely. On August 23, the settlers of New Ulm waged a day-long battle, holding off a Sioux army in house-to-house fighting. Thirty-four whites and an unknown number of Indians died, while a third of the little town was destroyed.
As the state militia stumbled to respond, Governor Alexander Ramsey appealed to the War Department for help. Could Stanton postpone Minnesota’s deadline for delivering its quota of fresh troops for Southern battlefields and send a force of army regulars to Minnesota’s rescue? Stanton was leery. He immediately suspected that Confederate agents were stirring up the Indians, and he was reluctant to give an inch to the enemy’s designs. Ramsey tried a direct appeal to the president. “The Indian outbreak has come upon us suddenly. Half the population of the State are fugitives,” he wired late on August 26. “No one not here can conceive the panic.” As it happened, Nicolay was in Minnesota, having just arrived to investigate mistreatment of the Native Americans. He echoed Ramsey’s assessment, warning Lincoln that, “a wild panic prevails in nearly one-half of the state.”
Lincoln was a practical man; to him, pressing problems demanded workable solutions. A crisis was no time for stickling over rules. Now, while he canvassed for news of Pope’s predicament, the president briskly sorted out the conflict between the frightened governor and the War Department. He could not give Minnesota a formal extension on its recruiting deadlines—that would set a terrible precedent; soon, every state would ask for one. But of course the deadline no longer applied. “Attend to the Indians,” he advised Ramsey. “If the draft can not proceed, of course it will not proceed. Necessity knows no law.”
* * *
Around nightfall on that same August 26, George McClellan stepped onto the wharf at Alexandria. Word of Jackson’s raid at Manassas had just arrived. The general wasn’t surprised to hear it, nor was he exactly disappointed. “I have a strong idea that Pope will be thrashed during the coming week,” he had predicted before leaving the peninsula, and “very badly whipped he will be & ought to be—such a villain as he is ought to bring defeat upon any cause that employs him.” Still smoldering during his last days at Berkeley plantation, McClellan had wondered how God allowed “the dolts in Wash[ington] … to live, much less to occupy the positions they do.” But in Pope’s troubles he saw fresh hope, for the dolts had grown fearful about their dangerous plan to move his army. After Halleck cabled him on August 21, pleading urgently for him to make haste, McClellan exulted to his wife: “I believe I have triumphed!!” Once again, the nation was calling him to the rescue.
He could not be the hero, though, unless John Pope was made the goat. Accordingly, when McClellan returned to Alexandria, he bubbled with plans for saving Washington but was notably lethargic when asked to send reinforcements to Pope. His first day back from the peninsula, he received orders from Halleck to put Franklin’s corps on the road to Manassas. Little Mac answered that he couldn’t comply; he had no artillery, and none of his cavalry had arrived. Instead, he peppered the general in chief with advice for protecting the capital. After a year spent poring over maps of Virginia, McClellan knew every fort and trench and road and village between Washington and the Rappahannock. But Halleck—whose short month in Washington
had been eaten up with recruiting squabbles, the mess in the West, McClellan’s foot-dragging, and Pope’s peril—was in no mood just then for Little Mac’s counsel, and eventually he snapped. “From your knowledge of the whole country about here, you can best act,” he cabled. “I have no time for details.”
That night, McClellan went to Washington, where he met with the already overfatigued Halleck until three A.M. After Little Mac’s departure, Halleck dropped into bed believing that Franklin’s corps would move to Pope’s aid within hours, but another hot day dragged past while the Army of the Potomac sat still. Soon the sound of guns booming in the west let Washington know that Pope had stumbled into Jackson. Even now, McClellan found new reasons to decline to send troops. Better to concentrate around Washington and hold the capital, he advised the general in chief repeatedly. Halleck tried hectoring: at three thirty P.M. on August 28, he cabled McClellan, “Not a moment must be lost in pushing as large a force as possible toward Manassas.” Four hours later he tried again: “There must be no further delay in moving Franklin’s corps toward Manassas. They must go tomorrow morning, ready or not ready.”
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