Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  The president’s message contained a stern ultimatum. As one journalist noted, “Mr. Lincoln has at last determined to tender peaceable and friendly emancipation to the slaveholders if they will have it, and forcible emancipation if they will not.” This reporter thought that “Mr. Lincoln has determined to shake off the Kentucky nightmare and be himself again” now that the Border States seemed unlikely to secede. Many believed that the president “has been reserving this shot for the contingency which had now been brought about and that it was his intention from the beginning, after securing so much ground, to put his views of the incompatibility of slavery and freedom into practical operation.”27 The Chicago Tribune’s editors calculated that “the Free States are unanimous in adhering to the emancipation idea” and that “the President has struck the key-note with which full twenty millions of people will accord.”28 In Massachusetts, the Springfield Republican called the message “a coup d’etat, in fact, displaying much sagacity in its inception, significant in its aim and purpose, and likely to be most important in its effects.”29 An antislavery militant in Connecticut, Elihu Burritt, wrote Lincoln that the “whole civilized world is honoring you with its sincere homage, as the first of all the list of American Presidents that ever had the moral courage to propose a plan for the extinction of Slavery, so just, generous and noble as to be hailed with admiration in both hemispheres. No earthly potentate ought to aspire to a higher glory than that which this magnanimous overture will forever attach to your name.”30

  Moderates joined the chorus of praise. Joseph Holt of Kentucky regarded the proposal as “a means of soothing & reassuring the slave states. It is the first explicit declaration by a republican President that this question belongs wholly to the people of the slave states.”31 It “completely squelches the accusation, trumped up for partisan purposes, that the Administration is in favor of emancipation by radical means, and regardless of Constitutional obligations,” declared the Cincinnati Commercial.32

  The New York World predicted that Lincoln’s message “will attach to our cause in Europe an immense party, and help sustain the efforts of our friends in preventing an intervention in our affairs.”33 (In fact the message was believed “to be aimed at foreign opinion,” according to Henry W. Bellows.)34 The Providence Journal speculated that the document “will attract more attention in Europe and win for Mr. Lincoln’s administration more commendation than any or all the deeds it has done before.”35 In applauding the message, an Ohioan argued that the “time has past for compromise, aggressive measures must be adopted, but mild in character, towards the sacred institution.”36

  As Owen Lovejoy observed, the message “presented ground where all might stand, the conservative and radical.”37 The conservative Boston Courier, which rarely spoke well of the administration, hailed the message’s “practical benefit toward the great object of restoring the Union.”38 The New York Herald thought it “so simple, so just, so profound and comprehensive that we may pronounce it as reaching the final solution and settlement of the most perplexing difficulty in our political system.” It was, said the editors, the “heaviest blow which the rebellion has as yet received.”39 Maryland ex-Governor Thomas H. Hicks, a slaveholder, thanked Lincoln for his proposal and lauded its moderation: “The option being left with the States, the offer to provide compensation, when we may be ready to act, is all that any can reasonably ask.” Hicks looked on the message as a blow “aimed as much at the ultraists of the North as at the Southern fanatics,” and predicted that the “patriotic and Union-loving citizens here and everywhere will stand by you as long as you continue to be conservative.”40 Similarly, the Baltimore American remarked that the message dealt “a shrewd blow” to both the abolitionists and “the Cotton Oligarchy.”41 Inside the White House, William O. Stoddard wrote that it “disabled the fanatics by one well directed blow.”42 An Ohioan describing himself as “no abolitionist” exclaimed to Senator John Sherman: “Hurrah for Old Abe! I hope you will pass his Resolution, with a will, and get rid of the nigger & save the Constitution.”43

  The message’s style drew mixed reviews. In Cambridge, Charles Eliot Norton called it “an immense move forward in the right direction” but asked rhetorically: “could anything be more feebly put, or more inefficiently written? His style is worse than ever; and though a bad style is not always a mark of bad thought,—it is at least a proof that thought is not as clear as it ought to be.”44 The National Anti-Slavery Standard agreed that the message was “very obscurely written.”45 Less unfavorable was Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, which deemed it “sturdy, clumsy, inelegant and characteristic, having none of the sophomoric touches of Mr. Seward” and lacking “the lowest level of platitude by Edward Bates.”46

  Some critics raised practical economic questions. The Cincinnati Commercial asked: “Will the people consent to be taxed to the extent required to indemnify the owners of slaves? If they are willing, are they able? Shall the tax be general, or restricted to the free States?”47 In southern Pennsylvania, where deep-seated Negrophobia prevailed, especially among working men, many Republicans balked at the prospect of higher taxes to free slaves. Indiana Republicans suffered reverses because voters objected to “taxing the people hundreds of millions to pay for negroes to be turned loose to work North at 10 cts a day.”48 An attorney in Peoria snorted: “If any states think they would be better off by setting their niggers free let them do it. … When our forefathers in the North saw fit to liberate their slaves, they did it without asking or dreaming of asking any compensation. Why should we now voluntarily offer them a reward for doing the same thing?”49 Congressional opponents demagogically taunted the administration, saying in effect: “You are exceedingly anxious to take away the property of the Southern people and to tax us in order that emancipation may be effective, but we hear nothing from you about protecting the poor white men and women of the free states.”50

  When the New York Times called the plan too expensive, Lincoln asked editor Henry J. Raymond if he had considered “that less than one half-day’s cost of this war would pay for all the slaves in Delaware, at four hundred dollars per head?—that eighty-seven days cost of this war would pay for all in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri at the same price? Were those states to take the step, do you doubt that it would shorten the war more than eighty-seven days, and thus be an actual saving of expense.”51 Raymond, who was serving in the state legislature at Albany and had not written the editorial mentioned by Lincoln, instructed his newspaper to change its stance. To Lincoln he praised the message as “a masterpiece of practical wisdom and sound policy. It is marked by that plain, self-vindicating common-sense which, with the people, overbears, as it ought, all the abstract speculations of mere theorists and confounds all the schemes of selfish intriguers,—and which, you will permit me to say, has preeminently characterized every act of your Administration. It furnishes a solid, practical, constitutional basis for the treatment of this great question, and suggests the only feasible mode I have yet seen of dealing with a problem infinitely more difficult than the suppression of the rebellion.”52

  Complying with Raymond’s directive, the Times hailed Lincoln’s message as one whose “words will echo round the globe. They will recover us the respect once felt for us in the Old World. In dealing with this vexed subject we think he has hit the happy mean upon which all parties in the North and all loyalists in the South can unite.”53 In England, the Liverpool Post similarly predicted that the message “will have an incalculable effect in Europe, and that effect will be most favorable to the Northern cause,” while the London Star and Dial declared that it would secure for Lincoln “the warmest sympathy and admiration of the civilized world.”54

  Congress’s response, however, disappointed Lincoln. The leading Radical in the House, Thaddeus Stevens, called the message “about the most diluted, milk-and-water gruel proposition that was ever given to the American nation.”55 (Though Lincoln’s friend William M. Dickson
also considered the message a “milk & water” document and “a very tame thing,” he conceded that it was a “good beginning in the right direction,” which might “be a warning and in this respect it may be significant.”)56 On March 9, the president complained to Missouri’s Frank Blair that “[s]ince I sent in my message, about the usual amount of calling by the Border State congressmen has taken place; and although they have all been very friendly not one of them has yet said a word to me about it.” Kentucky Senator Garrett Davis “has been here three times since; but although he has been very cordial he has never yet opened his mouth on the subject.” When Lincoln requested that Blair invite his fellow Border State legislators to the White House for “a frank and direct talk,” the congressman objected “that it might be well to wait until the army did something further.”

  Lincoln disagreed. “That is just the reason why I do not wish to wait,” he rejoined. “If we should have successes, they may feel and say, the rebellion is crushed and it matters not whether we do anything about this matter. I want them to consider it and interest themselves in it as an auxiliary means for putting down the rebels. I want to tell them that if they will take hold and do this, the war will cease—there will be no further need of keeping standing armies among them, and that they will get rid of all the troubles incident thereto.”57

  Blair promptly urged Maryland Congressman John W. Crisfield to round up Border State lawmakers for a White House meeting. On March 10, Crisfield and a few members of Congress from Missouri and Kentucky gathered at the Executive Mansion, where Lincoln (according to Crisfield) “disclaimed any intent to injure the interests or wound the sensibilities of the slave States.” On the contrary, the president said that “his purpose was to protect the one and respect the other, that we were engaged in a terrible, wasting and tedious war; immense armies were in the field, and must continue in the field as long as the war lasts; that these armies must, of necessity, be brought into contact with slaves in the States we represented, and in other States as they advanced; that slaves would come to the camps, and continual irritation was kept up; that he was constantly annoyed by conflicting and antagonistic complaints; on the one side a certain class complained if the slave was not protected by the army; persons were frequently found, who, participating in these views, acted in a way unfriendly to the slaveholder; on the other hand slaveholders complained that their rights were interfered with, their slaves induced to abscond and [were] protected within the [Union] lines. These complaints were numerous, loud and deep; were a serious annoyance to him and embarrassing to the progress of the war; that it kept alive a spirit hostile to the government in the States we represented; strengthened the hopes of the Confederates that at some day the border States would unite with them, and thus tend to prolong the war, and he was of the opinion, if this resolution should be adopted by Congress and accepted by our States, these causes of irritation and these hopes would be removed, and more would be accomplished towards shortening the war than could be hoped from the greatest victory achieved by Union armies; that he made this proposition in good faith, and desired it to be accepted, if at all, voluntarily and in the same patriotic spirit in which it was made; that emancipation was a subject exclusively under the control of the States, and must be adopted or rejected by each for itself, that he did not claim nor had this government any right to coerce them for that purpose; that such was no part of his purpose in making this proposition, and he wished it to be clearly understood that he did not expect us there to be prepared to give him answer, but he hoped we would take the subject into serious consideration, confer with one another, and then take such course as we felt our duty and the interest of our constituents required of us.”

  When a Missouri congressman complained that the New York Tribune had interpreted Lincoln’s proposal “to mean that we must accept gradual emancipation according to the plan suggested, or get something worse,” the president replied that “he must not be expected to quarrel with the New York Tribune before the right time; he hoped never to have to do it.” To Crisfield, who asked what would happen if the Border States rejected the plan, Lincoln said “that he had no designs beyond the action of the States on this particular subject. He should lament their refusal to accept it, but he had no designs beyond their refusal of it.” Crisfield added that his constituents felt the administration was coercing them indirectly. Lincoln replied that as long as he remained in office “Maryland had nothing to fear, either for her institutions or her interests, on the points referred to.” The congressman asked permission to make this pledge public, but Lincoln demurred, saying “it would force me into a quarrel before the proper time.”

  To constitutional objections raised by Charles Wickliffe of Kentucky, whom Lincoln described as a “secessionist,” he said: “I have considered that, and the proposition now submitted does not encounter any constitutional difficulty. It proposes simply to co-operate with any State, by giving such State pecuniary aid and he thought that the resolution, as proposed by him, would be considered rather as the expression of a sentiment than as involving any constitutional question.”

  Queried about his own attitude toward slavery, Lincoln “said he did not pretend to disguise his anti-slavery feeling; that he thought it was wrong, and should continue to think so; but that was not the question we had to deal with now. Slavery existed, and that, too, as well by the act of the North as of the South, and in any scheme to get rid of it the North as well as the South was morally bound to do its full and equal share. He thought the institution wrong, and ought never to have existed, but yet he recognized the rights of property which had grown out of it, and would respect those rights as fully as similar rights in any other property; that property can exist and does legally exist. He thought such a law wrong, but the rights of property resulting must be respected; he would get rid of the odious law, not by violating the right, but by encouraging the proposition [made on March 6] and offering inducements to give it up.”58

  Lincoln also appealed to other members of Congress, including California Senator James A. McDougall, who objected to the program’s expense. The president replied with an argument like the one he had made to Henry J. Raymond. To illustrate the practicality of his plan, he suggested a possible example of how it might be financed: “Suppose, for instance, a State devises and adopts a system by which the institution absolutely ceases therein by a named day—say January 1st 1882. Then, let the sum to be paid to such State by the United States, be ascertained by taking from the Census of 1860 the number of slaves within the state, and multiplying that number by four hundred,—the United States to pay such sum to the state in twenty equal annual instalments, in six per cent: bonds of the United States. The sum thus given, as to time and manner, I think would not be half as onerous, as would be an equal sum raised now, for the indefinite prosecution of the war.”59

  Lincoln was somewhat pessimistic about his plan’s chances for success. As he explained to Carl Schurz, he “was not altogether without hope” that it would be accepted by at least some of the Border States. If they all rejected it, then “theirs was the responsibility.”60

  As Lincoln feared, the Border State delegations found his arguments unpersuasive. They balked at the meager sum to be paid for slaves, raised constitutional objections, predicted that a race war would ensue, and warned that Lincoln’s scheme would cause taxes to skyrocket. They also protested that their economies would be ruined and that, if adopted, the plan would make life harder for Unionists in Virginia and Tennessee. (A Missouri Unionist regretted that Lincoln, whom he regarded as “a good & honest man,” had become “a monomaniac” on the slavery issue.)61 On March 11, D. W. Bartlett, after observing the congressional debates in which these objections were made, remarked that it “is certainly astonishing with what tenacity the border state men cling” to slavery. Prophetically, he speculated that the “whole scheme will prove a failure, for no border state unless it be Delaware will accept the offer.”62 John W. Forney found their opposition
“inexplicable,” for they failed to “see that, while the ultra Republicans swallowed the President’s theory with reluctance, the sentiment which actuated it was a sentiment of devoted attachment” to the Border State men.63 The Louisville Journal warned that Border State intransigence would drive Lincoln into the arms of the Radicals.

  On March 12, the Border State delegations held a caucus at which they angrily rejected emancipation, “whether coated with sugar or gunpowder.”64 The efforts of George Fisher of Delaware, Horace Maynard of Tennessee, Samuel L. Casey of Kentucky, and John W. Noell of Missouri proved unavailing. With evident disgust, Fisher reported that most of the caucus members opposed the liberation of any slaves whatsoever. The proslavery spokesmen were more deeply committed, more earnest, more energetic, and more determined than Fisher and his few allies. (Simultaneously, a Kentucky lawmaker moved to suspend the rules of the state legislature in order to propose that any advocate of emancipation in the commonwealth, or any sympathizer with abolition, be “disfranchised for life.” The motion to suspend, supported by forty-eight legislators and opposed by twenty-nine, failed because it did not quite win the necessary two-thirds vote.)65 Congress nevertheless passed Lincoln’s resolution by wide margins: 88 to 31 in the House, 32 to 10 in the senate.