The recruiting of blacks was proceeding too slowly for Lincoln’s taste. In May 1863, he complained to a delegation urging the appointment of Frémont to command an army of 10,000 black men that “the policy of the government, so far as he controlled it, was fixed, it was that [the] government should avail itself of any means to obtain the aid of emancipated slaves,” but acknowledged that he “was only under embarrassment how to carry the policy out.” He “confessed to a partial failure in the endeavors which had been made to recruit colored soldiers both North and South,” and inquired of the delegation how he should proceed: “You ask a suitable command for General Fremont. Now he is the second [ranking] officer of the army. … He would expect a department. I cannot dismiss him from that position to offer him an inferior position. You place me in the position of the English Lord who, when told by his paternal relative to take a wife, replied, ‘whose wife shall I take, father?’ ” He wanted black troops to occupy the region around Vicksburg and said he “had explained the matter to various officers of high rank, but have always found on these occasions I ran afoul of somebody’s dignity. I would like anybody who can to undertake the matter. I believe Gen. Fremont peculiarly adapted to this special work. I would like to have him do it.” He pledged that if the committee could raise 10,000 troops (they had claimed they could recruit 60,000 within two months), he would put Frémont in charge of them.345 The journalist D. W. Bartlett paraphrased what Lincoln had been saying to various men throughout the spring: “I have made up my mind to give the black man every possible encouragement to fight for us. I will do him justice, and I will dismiss any officer who will not carry out my policy. If the people dislike this policy they will say so at the next presidential election—but so long as I am president the government shall deal fairly with this unfortunate race.”346
Eventually, Johnson, Banks, Grant, Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, and Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas did “take hold in earnest,” and by war’s end over 180,000 black soldiers and approximately 20,000 black sailors served in the war, constituting about 9 percent of the total Union armed forces.
Lincoln endorsed the use of black troops partly because public resistance was waning rapidly after McClellan’s defeat on the Peninsula. In addition, the president may have been moved by the history of black soldiers in the War of 1812 and the American Revolutionary War. In the former, 500 of them played a key role in Andrew Jackson’s victory at the battle of New Orleans; in the latter, approximately 5,000 took up arms to help the colonists gain independence. In February, Frederick Douglass asked an audience at Cooper Institute: “The negro fought the British under Jackson. Why not fight the rebels under Hooker?”347 Lincoln agreed that they should.
Free at Last: Emancipation Officially Declared
As New Year’s Day 1863 approached, supporters and opponents of emancipation lobbied the president. Among them was the Rev. Dr. Byron Sunderland, who told him: “We are full of faith and prayer that you will make a clean sweep for the Right.” With an expression half-sad and half-shrewd, Lincoln replied: “Doctor, it’s very hard sometimes to know what is right! You pray often and honestly, but so do those people across the lines. They pray and all their preachers pray devoutly. You and I do not think them justified in praying for their objects, but they pray earnestly, no doubt! If you and I had our own way, doctor, we would settle this war without bloodshed, but Providence permits blood to be shed. It’s hard to tell what Providence wants of us. Sometimes we, ourselves, are more humane than the Divine Mercy seems to us to be.”348 The previous year, Lincoln had impressed Orville H. Browning with a similar observation. One Sunday afternoon in the White House library, as Lincoln was reading the Bible and Browning was perusing some other volume, the Illinois senator predicted that the North would not win unless it attacked slavery: “This is the great curse of our land, and we must make an effort to remove it before we can hope to receive the help of the Almighty.” “Browning,” the president replied, “suppose God is against us in our view on the subject of slavery in this country, and our method of dealing with it?”
Browning was “very much struck by this answer,” which seemed to indicate that Lincoln “was thinking deeply of what a higher power than man sought to bring about by the great events then transpiring.” Browning recalled that this answer “caused me to reflect that perhaps he had thought more deeply upon this subject than I had.”349 (In 1865, Lincoln would return to this theme in his second inaugural address.)
On New Year’s Eve, 1862, Lincoln made a similar point to a trio of abolitionist clergy who had called at the White House to present a memorial urging him to carry out God’s will by extending the Proclamation to apply to the whole country. He replied that while he opposed slavery wholeheartedly, he admitted that he had doubts about the Almighty’s stance: “I am not so certain that God’s views and feelings in respect to it are the same as mine. If his feelings were like mine, how could he have permitted it to remain so long? I am obliged to believe that God may not, after all, look upon it in the same light as I do.” Lincoln added that just because a proclamation declared slaves free did not in fact make them free. “In one of our western courts,” he remarked, “there had been an attempt made to show that a calf had five legs—the way the point was to be established was by calling the tail a leg, but the decision of the judge was that calling the tail a leg, did not make it a leg, and the calf had but four legs after all.”350 As he ushered the ministers out, he good-naturedly teased them, saying “this is the first time I ever had the honor of receiving a delegation from the Almighty.” One of the visitors, William Goodell, expressed admiration for the president’s “frankness and earnestness” and his willingness “to allow and to appreciate frankness and earnestness in others.”351
On January 1, 1863, after Lincoln spent a sleepless night, his wife, who (according to her eldest son) “was very much opposed to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation,” inquired “in her sharp way, ‘Well, what do you intend doing?’ ” He replied: “I am a man under orders, I cannot do otherwise.”352
When Lincoln viewed the engrossed copy of the Proclamation that the State Department had prepared, he noticed a technical error in the wording of the closing subscription and ordered that it be corrected. While that task was being carried out, he presided over the traditional New Year’s reception at the White House. According to Noah Brooks, the “press was tremendous, and the jam most excessive; all persons, high or low, civil, uncivil, or otherwise, were obliged to fall into an immense line of surging, crowding sovereigns [i.e., citizens], who were all forcing their way along the stately portico of the White House to the main entrance.”353
After three hours, Lincoln returned to his office, exhausted from shaking hundreds of hands. When he began to sign the corrected copy of the Proclamation, his hand trembled. “I could not for a moment, control my arm,” he later recalled. “I paused, and a superstitious feeling came over me which made me hesitate.” Had he made a mistake? he wondered.354 But swiftly regaining his composure, he told Seward and his son Frederick: “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper.” He added that “I have been receiving calls, and shaking hands since nine o’clock this morning, till my arm is stiff and numb.” He feared that if his signature appeared shaky, some people would think he had reservations. So, with renewed firmness, he said: “any way, it is going to be done!” Slowly and carefully he wrote out his full name in a bold, clear hand. Smiling, he looked up and observed softly: “That will do.”355
Lincoln gave the pen he used to sign the document to Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, a longtime champion of freedom, who passed it along to George R. Livermore, author of An Historical Research Respecting the Opinions of the Founders of the Republic on Negroes as Slaves, as Citizens and as Soldiers. In early November 1862, Sumner had forwarded a copy of that recently published work to the White House. It “much interested President Lincoln,” Sumner recalled. The “President e
xpressed a desire to consult it while he was preparing the final Proclamation of emancipation; and as his own copy was mislaid, he requested me to lend him mine.”356 On Christmas, the senator complied.
The president had been nettled by Sumner’s brusque manner and impatient rhetoric, but, as Carl Schurz observed, though “it required all his fortitude to bear Sumner’s intractable insistence, Lincoln did not at all deprecate Sumner’s public agitation for an immediate emancipation policy, even though it did reflect upon the course of the administration.” To the contrary, “he rather welcomed everything that would prepare the public mind for the approaching development.”357 Sumner’s counterpart in the House, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, often denounced the president, but in effect, the two men worked in tandem. As Alexander K. McClure put it, “Stevens was ever clearing the underbrush and preparing the soil, while Lincoln followed to sow the seeds that were to ripen in a regenerated Union.”358
Often portrayed as antagonists, Lincoln and the Radicals were actually united in their desire for emancipation and for a vigorous prosecution of the war. They differed only in temperament and in tactics. Lincoln was no reluctant emancipator; he welcomed the liberation of slaves as enthusiastically as any abolitionist. In discussing the Emancipation Proclamation with Joshua Speed, he said: “I believe that in this measure my fondest hopes will be realized.”359 Constitutional and political constraints had forced him to delay issuing the document; if he had acted solely on his own convictions and inclinations, emancipation would have come about much sooner. Lincoln was not forced by political considerations to issue the Proclamation; on the contrary, such considerations (along with his respect for the Constitution) compelled him to postpone doing what he had long wanted to see done.
Radicals rejoiced. “Now, hurrah for Old Abe and the proclamation,” exulted Ben Wade.360 Thaddeus Stevens told his constituents that the Proclamation “contained precisely the principles which I had advocated.”361 William Lloyd Garrison saluted the promulgation of the document as “a great historic event, sublime in its magnitude, momentous and beneficent in its far-reaching consequences.”362 Similarly, the budding intellectual historian Moses Coit Tyler thought the date of January 1, 1863 “the greatest one for America and perhaps for the human family since July 4, 1776.”363 The Chicago Tribune, which regarded the war as God’s way of punishing a slaveholding country, praised Lincoln for sparing the people nine of the ten plagues visited upon the Egyptians for keeping the Jews in bondage. (The one plague that had already been visited upon Americans was the slaying of many first-born.) The abolitionist Samuel May, Jr., gave Lincoln credit for raising the moral sensibility of the North “up to the level of his Proclamation,” although “a large minority are still below it.” He “declared that Lincoln, not the abolitionists, had brought about whatever antislavery sentiment existed in the North.”364 Exclaimed Maria Weston Chapman: “Hurrah! Hosanna! Hallelujah! Laudamus! Nunc dimittis! Jubilate! Amen!”365 Theodore Tilton proposed “Three cheers for God!” The Proclamation, though “not all one could wish,” was still “too much not to be thankful for. It makes the remainder of slavery too valueless and precarious to be worth keeping.” Optimistically, Tilton predicted that the “millennium is on the way” and declared that Lincoln’s action, “faulty as it is, & long delayed, redeems the failing fortunes of his Administration.” Disappointed that not all Slave States were covered by the Proclamation, Tilton anticipated that “Providence means to supplement it de facto, by adding the omitted states in due time.”366
Blacks were especially jubilant. At mass rallies in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and elsewhere in the North, speakers as well as cannon salvos hailed the Proclamation. Henry Highland Garnet told a vast crowd of blacks that Lincoln was “the man of our choice and hope” and that the Proclamation was “one of the greatest acts in all of history,” an act that should be celebrated annually like the Fourth of July.367 When the news reached the capital of Massachusetts, thousands of blacks exulted passionately. “I never saw enthusiasm before,” Frederick Douglass reported. “I never saw joy before. Men, women, young and old, were up; hats and bonnets were in the air, and we gave three cheers for Abraham Lincoln.” Shouts of “Glory, Hallelujah!” “Old John Brown,” “Marching On,” and “Blow Ye the Trumpet, Blow” filled the air. Douglass deemed the issuance of the Proclamation “a mighty event for the bondman” and “a still mightier event for the nation at large, and mighty as it is for both, the slave and the nation, it is still mightier when viewed in its relation to the cause of truth and justice throughout the world.”368 It was, Douglass told an audience at Cooper Union in March 1863, “the greatest event in our nation’s history.”369 Another black abolitionist, H. Ford Douglas, wrote that “Abraham Lincoln has crossed the Rubicon and by one simple act of Justice to the slave links his memory with immortality.”370 In Philadelphia, a white abolitionist reported to Lincoln that the “Black people all trust you. They beleive that you desire to do them Justice.”371 When Sojourner Truth, the black woman renowned for helping many slaves escape from bondage, expressed her gratitude to Lincoln for being the only president who ever did anything for her people, he modestly replied: “And the only one who ever had such opportunity. Had our friends in the South behaved themselves, I could have done nothing whatever.”372
Some Radicals regretted that Lincoln exempted all of Tennessee as well as parts of Louisiana and Virginia. “He might have stricken the shackles at once from the limbs of several hundreds of thousands of slaves, and thereby given to those left in bondage to Rebels an earnest that our failure to reach and liberate them resulted from want of power rather than will,” observed the New York Tribune.373 The president had received strong protests from the Volunteer State, whose people (so it was alleged) were loyal but had been prevented from holding elections by the warfare raging in their midst.
A few abolitionists who had been disappointed by the Preliminary Proclamation underwent a change of heart as Emancipation Day drew near. Lydia Maria Child said apropos of Lincoln’s delay: “it would not be fair to blame the President for moving so slowly. The people were not prepared to sustain him in any such measure; they had become too generally demoralized by long subservience to the Slave Power.”374 (Similarly, Theodore Parker in 1856 had acknowledged that officeholders must be more circumspect than reformers: “I think that the anti-slavery party has not always quite done justice to the political men. See why. It is easy for Mr. Garrison and Mr. Phillips or me to say all of our thought. I am responsible to nobody, and nobody to me. But it is not easy for Mr. Sumner, Mr. Seward, and Mr. Chase to say all of their thought; because they have a position to maintain, and they must keep that position.”)375
Opinion in the Border States was, as Lincoln predicted, hostile. The Catholic archbishop of Baltimore indignantly exclaimed: “While our brethren are slaughtered in hecatombs, Abraham Lincoln coolly issues his Emancipation Proclamation, letting loose from three to four millions of half civilized Africans to murder their Masters and Mistresses! And all that under the pretense of philanthropy!! Puritan hypocrisy never exhibited itself in a more horrible and detestable attitude.”376
Many Democrats in the Free States also objected strenuously. The issuance of the Proclamation, said the Cincinnati Enquirer, was “as much a usurpation and revolution in the Government” as would be Lincoln’s assumption of “the Imperial crown” and his declaration that he was “Dictator of America.” It was “a complete overthrow of the Constitution he swore to protect and defend.”377 Other Democratic papers in the Midwest deemed it “a wicked, atrocious and revolting deed,” as “impudent and insulting to God as to man, for it declares those ‘equal’ whom God created unequal.”378 In New York, a leading Catholic journal protested that the Proclamation would transform the conflict: “It is no longer to be a war between white men; it is the St. Domingo massacres inaugurated on our soil, under the sanction, approval and encouragement of the Government.”379 The Journal of Commerce noted that by freeing the sl
aves of loyal masters without compensation in Union-occupied Florida, Lincoln “has done a great injustice, for which there is no excuse.”380
Florida was not the only state where slaves would become free on January 1, whether or not their masters were loyal. The exemption of areas under federal control (where 800,000 slaves lived) caused some to scoff that the “Proclamation is a dead letter upon the face of it. It don’t free a negro where a negro is to be freed, but enslaves, or re-enslaves all, where the negro could be freed.”381 But in fact the Proclamation freed tens of thousands of slaves in Union-occupied Florida, Arkansas, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia on New Year’s Day. And hundreds of thousands more would be freed as federal armies penetrated ever deeper into the Confederacy.
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