Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  On December 25 and 26, the cabinet discussed at length Seward’s draft, though not Lincoln’s. Edward Bates recorded that everyone understood “the magnitude of the subject, and believed that upon our decision depended the dearest interest, probably the existance, of the nation.” The attorney general, waiving the question of legal right, “urged the necessity of the case; that to go to war with England now, is to abandon all hope of suppressing the rebellion, as we have not the possession of the land nor any support of the people of the South. The maratime superiority of Britain would sweep us from all the Southern waters! our trade would be utterly ruined and our treasury bankrupt.” There was, Bates noted in his diary, “great reluctance on the part of some of the members of the cabinet—and even the President himself—to acknowledge these obvious truths.” Evidently, Cameron, Welles, and Smith balked. Opponents of surrendering the prisoners feared “the displeasure of our own people—lest they should accuse us of timidly truckling to the power of England.”245 Chase said, “It is gall and wormwood to me. Rather than consent to the liberation of these men, I would sacrifice everything I possess.” But even the treasury secretary agreed to their release, explaining that as long as “the matter hangs in uncertainty, the public mind will remain disquieted, our commerce will suffer serious harm, our action against the rebels must be greatly hindered, and the restoration of our prosperity … must be delayed.”246

  Charles Sumner attended the Christmas meeting and read aloud letters from John Bright and Richard Cobden, eminent members of Parliament and fast friends of the Union. They both urged conciliation. (Lincoln so admired Bright that he hung a photograph of the Liberal leader in his office.) Most importantly, a freshly arrived dispatch from the French foreign minister, Edouard Thouvenel, was read; in moderate tones, it denied the legitimacy of Wilkes’s action and supported the British position. Along with it came a message from William Dayton, U.S. minister to France, reporting that no European power accepted America’s argument. Thus arbitration did not seem feasible. These documents persuaded hawkish opponents of Seward’s proposal that European opinion would favor Britain; thus, they helped produce a unanimous cabinet vote to surrender Mason and Slidell.

  After the session adjourned, Lincoln said: “Governor Seward, you will go on, of course, preparing your answer, which, as I understand, will state the reasons why they ought to be given up. Now I have a mind to try my hand at stating the reasons why they ought not to be given up. We will compare the points on each side.” The next day, after making several changes, the cabinet endorsed Seward’s dispatch, though some members expressed regret at the release of Mason and Slidell. The document was submitted to Lord Lyons on December 27. It was a clever, face-saving argument, designed to mollify the British government without offending the American public. Seward read it to several members of Congress, who agreed that Mason and Slidell must be released.

  When the secretary of state asked Lincoln why he had not submitted a paper justifying retention of the Confederate diplomats, he replied: “I found I could not make an argument that would satisfy my own mind, and that proved to me your ground was the right one.”247 (In fact, Seward’s dispatch contained serious logical and legal weaknesses.) Lincoln may have also feared both a gunpowder shortage, if Britain maintained its embargo of saltpeter, and a bombardment of American ports by ironclads invulnerable to America’s antiquated shore batteries.

  The Palmerston government waived the demand for reparations and an apology, viewing the release of Mason and Slidell as a gesture sufficiently conciliatory to end the crisis. Lincoln called that surrender “a pretty bitter pill to swallow” but told an army officer that “I contented myself with believing that England’s triumph in the matter would be short-lived, and that after ending our war successfully we would be so powerful that we could call her to account for all the embarrassments she had inflicted upon us.” The surrender made Lincoln feel “a good deal like the sick man in Illinois who was told he probably hadn’t many days longer to live, and he ought to make his peace with any enemies he might have. He said the man he hated worst of all was a fellow named Brown, in the next village, and he guessed he had better begin on him. So Brown was sent for, and when he came the sick man began to say, in a voice as meek as Moses’s, that he wanted to die at peace with all his fellow-creatures, and he hoped he and Brown could now shake hands and bury all their enmity. The scene was becoming altogether too pathetic for Brown, who had to get out his handkerchief and wipe the gathering tears from his eyes. It wasn’t long before he melted, and gave his hand to his neighbor, and they had a regular love-feast of forgiveness. After a parting that would have softened the heart of a grindstone, Brown had about reached the room door, when the sick man rose up on his elbow and called out to him: ‘But, see here, Brown; if I should happen to get well, mind that old grudge stands.’ ”248

  (Similarly, when Anglo-American relations once again grew tense in the spring of 1863, Lincoln remarked to hotheads who wanted to confront the British: “we must have no war with England now; we can’t afford it. We’ll have to bear and bear and bear; she may even kick us, if she wants to, and we won’t resent it, till we get rid of the job we already have on hand. Then it will be our turn to see about the kicking!”)249

  At a dinner party shortly after the crisis ended, Lincoln indicated that (in Sumner’s paraphrase) he “covets kindly relations with all the world, especially with England.”250 Early in the crisis, he had assured a member of Canada’s cabinet, Alexander T. Galt, that the United States would not attack her. On December 5, the president told Galt that he “had implicit faith in the steady conduct of the American people even under the trying circumstances of the war, and though the existence of large armies had in other countries placed successful generals in positions of arbitrary power, he did not fear this result, but believed the people would quietly resume their peaceful avocations and submit to the rule of the government.” Lincoln went on to pledge “himself as a man of honor, that neither he nor his cabinet entertained the slightest aggressive designs upon Canada, nor had any desire to disturb the rights of Great Britain on this continent.”251

  Most Americans and Britons felt relief that war had been averted, at least for the time being. To Bostonians, the surrender of Mason and Slidell “was taken a good deal as a man swallows an emetic—not because he loves it, but because it is the best way of ridding himself of an unpleasant matter.”252 Not everyone was so stoic. Like Lincoln, many of his constituents harbored a grudge and looked forward to an opportunity for revenge. His good friend, Joseph Gillespie, took it badly; writing from Illinois, he noted that the “[p]eople are almost frantic with rage[.] We feel disgraced dishonored & outraged. … This blunder as I regard it of succumbing to England has ruined the Administration beyond redemption and if the war is not pushed on with becoming energy the cause of the Country and the Union is likewise gone.”253 “We have eaten our peck of dirt—and all at once!” exclaimed Henry Winter Davis in disgust.254 In a similar vein, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper remarked: “If we are compelled to eat dirt, let us improve the disgusting process to our profit.”255 An Illinois congressman reported from Washington that things “look very blue here. The humiliation of this country by the conduct of the Cabinet in giving up Slidell & Mason is almost too much to bear.”256

  But Lincoln was not blue. On New Year’s Day, as he presided over a White House reception, he was reportedly “in his happiest mood.”257 As he shook innumerable hands, he showed no signs of weariness and seemed to be having a good time. Some observers, however, thought “the weight of the nation’s cares makes him a sadder, silenter looking man” than he was back in Illinois, and that that he looked “perceptibly older than he did less than a year ago.”258

  The outcome of the Trent affair bitterly disappointed the Confederates. The French consul in Richmond reported that the “release of Messrs. Slidell and Mason has greatly upset the South. The government of the Confederate States was hoping for a war between Engla
nd and the United States, and, as a consequence, the raising of the blockade.”259 Slidell later told Louis Napoleon he regretted his release “because if we had not been given up, it would have caused a war with England, which would have been of short duration, and whatever might have happened to myself, the result must have been advantageous to our cause.”260 There is reason to think that the seizure of Mason and Slidell was a setup by the Confederates, designed to precipitate hostilities between the North and Great Britain.

  Many months later, Lincoln told a visitor “how he had pushed the prompt surrender of Mason and Slidell as an act of justice toward England, realizing that in the light of international law the Trent affair might justly have given ground for reprisal. Seward would have temporized, and so risked a most unwelcome complication with England.”261 As he had done in the spring, Lincoln cooled off the fiery Seward and helped keep relations with Great Britain relatively cordial. Sumner, who told Gideon Welles “that Seward was ignorant of international law and lacked common sense,” also helped counteract the secretary of state’s impulsiveness and contributed significantly to defusing the crisis.262

  Tentatively Addressing Slavery

  At the conclusion of the Trent affair, Sumner twitted Lincoln about his reluctance to liberate the slaves. If he had publicly announced an emancipation plan, the United States would have enjoyed far more support in Europe, the senator claimed, and the Trent crisis “would have come and gone and would have given you no anxiety.”263 In fact, the president had been working on a scheme to free slaves in Delaware, which would, he hoped, serve as a model for other Border States. In December, Lincoln indicated to George Bancroft that he thought “slavery has received a mortal wound, that the harpoon has struck the whale to the heart.”264 With a mere 1,798 bondsmen (8% of the total 1860 population), Delaware would undergo less economic and social upheaval than any other Slave State if it adopted emancipation. (In 1847, the Whig-dominated legislature had come within a single vote of abolishing slavery gradually.)

  On November 4, Lincoln consulted with Delaware Congressman George P. Fisher, a member of the so-called People’s Party, the main opposition to the Democrats in the First State. Fisher agreed to draft an emancipation bill that would be submitted after Lincoln had revised it. When the president suggested that for each slave, owners would receive $300, Fisher held out for $500; Lincoln agreed. The president also met with Fisher’s party colleague, Benjamin Burton, the largest slaveholder in Delaware. Lincoln asked Burton if the legislature, then in session, could be induced to free the slaves in case Congress provided compensation to be determined by local appraisers. “I am satisfied that this is the cheapest and most humane way of ending the war,” the president said. “Delaware is the smallest and has the fewest slaves of any State in the Union. If I can get this plan started in Delaware I have no fear but that all the other border states will accept it.”265

  Burton thought his fellow slaveowners would go along with such a scheme. Working with Fisher and a Delaware state legislator, the president drafted two bills, each providing for total abolition in the First State by 1893. Slave children born following the passage of one of the proposed laws, along with all slaves more than 35 years of age, would be immediately emancipated. Others would gain their freedom upon their thirty-fifth birthday. To compensate slaveholders, the federal government would provide the state with $719,200 in bonds, which could be paid out in small increments until 1893 or in larger sums until 1872.

  As Lincoln explained to Orville H. Browning, “it would require only about one third of what was necessary to support the war for one year.” The president was, Browning noted, “very hopeful of ultimate success,” and predicted to David Davis “that if Congress will pass a law authorizing the issue of bonds for the payment of the emancipated Negroes in the border states, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri will all accept the terms.”266 In order to carry out the scheme, Congress had to appropriate the necessary funds and the Delaware Legislature had to accept the offer.

  On December 3, Lincoln submitted to the newly reconvened Congress his annual message which did not mention the Delaware plan directly, but it did address the matter of compensated emancipation in a roundabout way. Noting that under the provisions of the recent Confiscation Act, some slaves had become semi-free, he said they must now be cared for. (Less than a month earlier, many slaves had been liberated when the Union joint army–navy expedition captured Port Royal, South Carolina, and a number of nearby coastal islands. When the local whites fled, 10,000 bondsmen suddenly found themselves without masters.) Conceivably, other slaves might also be freed by state legislatures. Such states, he recommended, should be compensated with tax breaks or some other means. (Here was a veiled hint at the Delaware plan, but so heavily veiled that some criticized its obscurity. Others understood its true intent, which was to encourage the legislatures of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware to adopt emancipation.) As it was, slaves who had been taken from their Confederate owners by virtue of the Confiscation Act existed in a legal limbo as virtual wards of the government; Lincoln recommended that such people “be at once deemed free.” Then they, and any bondsmen who might in the future be liberated by state action, should be voluntarily colonized “at some place, or places, in a climate congenial to them.” Free blacks would be encouraged to follow suit. Implementing that plan might require the purchase of territory “and also the appropriation of money beyond that to be expended in the territorial acquisition.” In a nod toward the prevalent white racial prejudice, he argued that if “it be said that the only legitimate object of acquiring territory is to furnish homes for white men, this measure effects that object; for the emigration of colored men leaves additional room for white men remaining or coming here.” (This sentence created a sensation among the congressmen when it was read to them.) He asked rhetorically if some kind of emancipation was not “an absolute necessity … without which the government itself cannot be perpetuated?”

  Lest his modest remarks be construed as rank abolitionism, Lincoln emphasized that he would treat the slavery issue cautiously: “In considering the policy to be adopted for suppressing the insurrection, I have been anxious and careful that the inevitable conflict for this purpose shall not degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle.” This was probably an allusion to slave insurrections, which some Northerners thought should be encouraged. (In December, Lincoln told George Bancroft that he was “turning in his thoughts the question of his duty in the event of a slave insurrection.”267 In 1863, when a few Union commanders expressed a willingness to aid slave uprisings, Lincoln reportedly “refused on the ground that a servile insurrection would give a pretext for foreign intervention.”)268 “I have, therefore, in every case, thought it proper to keep the integrity of the Union prominent as the primary object of the contest on our part, leaving all questions which are not of vital military importance to the more deliberate action of the legislature.” But, he hinted, emancipation might become necessary in time, for the “Union must be preserved, and hence, all indispensable means must be employed.” To soften that sentence of iron, he immediately added: “We should not be in haste to determine that radical and extreme measures, which may reach the loyal as well as the disloyal, are indispensable.”269

  Lincoln may also have been alluding to proposals recommending what later generations would call “ethnic cleansing.” In late June, he told Worthington G. Snethen, a Baltimore abolitionist who urged him to emancipate the slaves: “I should like to put down the rebellion, without disturbing any of the institutions, laws or customs of the States.” Snethen maintained that Southern resistance would never cease as long as slavery existed: “You must drive slavery and slaveholders into the Gulf, and people the waste with a new people.”270 In January 1862, a Democratic congressman who spoke with the president at length reported that “he will stand up and not succumb to the abolitionists in their mad causes—he says he will stand firm.”271

  The Delaware
plan fizzled when the legislature, which was evenly divided between Democrats and representatives of the People’s Party, refused by a one-vote margin to endorse it. In addition, the lawmakers passed a resolution asserting that when “the people of Delaware desire to abolish slavery within her borders, they will do so in their own way, having due regard to strict equity,” and “that any interference from without, and all suggestions of saving expense to the people, or others of like character, are improper to be made to an honorable people such as we represent, and are hereby repelled.”272

  Behind the state’s action lay what its Democratic Senator James A. Bayard called “the antagonism of race.” It was, said Bayard, “the principle of equality which the white man rejects where the negro exists in large numbers.”273 The state’s other senator, Willard Saulsbury, a bad-tempered sympathizer with secession, echoed that sentiment, arguing that the country “shall be the white man’s home; and not only the white man’s home, but the white man shall govern, and the nigger never shall be his equal.”274 Other opponents of emancipation warned that Lincoln’s plan was but “the first step; if it shall succeed, others will follow tending to elevate the negro to an equality with the white man or rather to degrade the white man by obliterating the distinction between races.” If the remaining slaves of Delaware were to join the large ranks of free blacks in the state, soon the blacks “might equal the white population and cause a massacre.”275 (In 1860, there were 21,627 blacks and 90,589 whites in the state.) Even Republican Congressman Fisher appealed to racial prejudice while championing Lincoln’s plan: “the Almighty intended this Union as the home of the white race, created for them, not for the negro.” All patriots should consider “how the separation of the two distinct races, which can never, and ought never, to dwell together upon terms of political and social equality, can be effected with the least jarring to the harmony and happiness of our country.”276