And yet the power of Greeley’s newspaper was impossible to ignore. Lincoln believed that emancipation would help the United States in Europe, but he could not shift America’s war aims without risking a backlash at home. The pressure from the Tribune and other newspapers—however aggravating—could help change American minds. Still, Lincoln recognized that public opinion moved glacially. Any move toward emancipation, the president later explained, would have to wait for the “great revolution in public sentiment” that was “slowly but surely progressing.” Lincoln compared his approach to watching a pear ripen on a tree. Pick it too soon and the fruit is spoiled. Wait patiently, on the other hand, and the pear would fall on its own.46
By the fall of 1861, Lincoln was coming under increasing pressure to pluck the pear. In August, General John C. Frémont, the president’s commander in Missouri, issued a proclamation to free slaves in the territory he controlled. There was a certain logic to letting military commanders do the emancipating in a local, piecemeal fashion. It would dodge the border-state pitfalls, allow the president to stay above the fray, and avoid publicly shifting the war aims to an antislavery crusade. Yet the order deeply troubled the ever-cautious Lincoln. For one, such a gradual approach would be far less likely than a bold proclamation to make an impact on European powers. Lincoln let his dissatisfaction be known, and Frémont’s wife, Jessie—daughter of the renowned Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton—eventually traveled to Washington to defend her husband. When she arrived in the capital, she sent the president a note asking when would be a good time to call. “Now, at once,” Lincoln wrote back.
In the White House, Frémont’s wife later recalled, the president did not even offer her a chair. She protested that Lincoln did not understand European opinion and complained that “we were on the eve of England, France and Spain recognizing the South.” The European powers, she added, “were anxious for a pretext to do so; England on account of her cotton interests, and France because the emperor dislikes us.” The president brusquely dismissed the pleas. “You are quite a female politician,” Lincoln said. The encounter, the president later explained to John Hay, “taxed me so violently with many things that I had to exercise all the awkward tact I have to avoid quarreling with her.” Lincoln ultimately countermanded Frémont’s order.47
Many abolitionists, however, agreed with Frémont and his wife. “No wonder Europe looks on the struggle with indifference,” one Delaware resident wrote to Lincoln. Billy Herndon once again questioned his law partner’s judgment. “What is Lincoln doing?” Herndon wrote to an Illinois acquaintance in the wake of the Frémont countermand. “Does he suppose he can crush—squelch out this huge rebellion by pop guns filled with rose water?” Lincoln tried to assure his former partner that he favored ultimate emancipation—if public opinion would help him get there. “I am moving slowly outward,” Lincoln explained, “as if pressing iron rings [were] riveted on me.” And yet, even after Lincoln’s assassination, Herndon was still insisting that Lincoln “never ran in advance of his age.”48
The president felt the timing was still not right. “We didn’t go into the war to put down slavery, but to put the flag back,” Lincoln told one acquaintance shortly after his Frémont decision. “This thunderbolt will keep.” Lincoln insisted that it was better to follow public opinion, rather than leading it. Radicals complained that Lincoln was squandering an opportunity. Charles Sumner grumbled that it was “vain to have the power of a god” and “not to use it godlike.” Lincoln simply counseled patience. “Wait,” he told Sumner. “Time is essential.”49
In London, Karl Marx was mystified by Lincoln’s “fainthearted” decision to revoke Frémont’s proclamation. Still, he considered such caution in character for the American president. “Lincoln,” Marx complained, “in accord with his lawyer’s tradition, has an aversion for all originality, clings anxiously to the letters of the Constitution, and fights shy of anything that could mislead the ‘loyal’ slaveholders of the border states.” The German radical also blamed Seward. Marx thought that the secretary of state wanted to eliminate Frémont as a political rival. Seward, Marx insisted, “has provided fresh proof that virtuosos of the tongue are dangerously insufficient statesmen. Read his state dispatches! What a revolting mixture of greatness of phrase and pettiness of mind, of postures of strength and acts of weakness!”50
Seward’s counsel, however, was not the only foreign-affairs advice that Lincoln was listening to in the early months of the war. Other members of Lincoln’s inner circle argued that the impact abroad of a proclamation would outweigh the domestic risks. Carl Schurz frequently dropped by the White House in the early days of Lincoln’s presidency, before he left for his post in Madrid. The two men would spend long evenings talking in the library. Schurz plinked at the piano keys as the sun slowly dropped below the horizon. On one occasion, Schurz suggested that a proclamation of emancipation would be the most effective weapon to prevent foreign intervention. Lincoln sat in silence for a moment, and then replied: “You may be right. Probably you are. I have been thinking so myself. I cannot imagine that any European power would dare to recognize and aid the Southern Confederacy if it becomes clear that the Confederacy stands for slavery and the Union for freedom.”51
Schurz had once met Marx when the latter was still a young revolutionary back in Cologne. Lincoln’s man in Spain considered Marx “intolerable.” His brusque demeanor irritated Schurz. “Everyone who contradicted him,” Schurz later recalled, “he treated with abject contempt; every argument that he did not like he answered either with biting scorn at the unfathomable ignorance that had prompted it, or with opprobrious aspersions upon the motives of him who had advanced it.” Schurz recalled the “cutting disdain” with which Marx pronounced the word “bourgeois.” The future communist railed wildly against his enemies. Schurz thought Marx probably alienated many potential acolytes.52
By early 1861, Marx was also beginning to repel his bosses at the Tribune. They had already significantly scaled back his contributions when the war erupted. Jenny Marx recalled that “Old Europe with its petty, old-fashioned pigmy struggles ceased to interest America.” The salary cut was particularly painful for the Marxes because their daughters had entered their teenage years, and were more conscious than before of the deprivation. “For me personally,” Marx wrote his uncle, “the American events are, of course, rather harmful, as for the time being the transatlantic readers have eyes and ears only for their own story.” The qualms of the Tribune editors, however, went beyond simply self-absorption. Greeley thought Marx had wandered far off the reservation. He tried to have the philosopher fired. Dana agreed that Marx’s dispatches sometimes displayed “too German a tone.” Yet he refused to let him go. Finally, however, Dana relented—before being forced out himself by Greeley. Engels later referred to Greeley in letters to his partner as an “old jackass.”53
Marx was devastated by his dismissal from the Tribune. His family was already impoverished, even when he had a job. “I’m now stone-broke,” he had complained to Engels as the Civil War loomed. “As you see,” he wrote Engels, “I am as tormented as Job, though not as god-fearing.” His health was also failing. Marx signed some letters “Your Hemorrhoidarius,” and adhered to a diet of lemonade and castor oil. Jenny was stricken with a bout of smallpox that left her face covered in ugly purple scars. As the family’s fortunes worsened, she told her husband that she wished she were dead. “I really cannot blame her,” Marx told Engels, “for the humiliations, torments and alarums that one has to go through in such a situation are indeed indescribable.”
Marx desperately tried to raise cash. He reported that his wife had to drag “everything that was not actually nailed down” to the pawnbroker’s. To Engels, he lamented his increasingly dire straits. “If only I knew how to start some sort of business!” the scourge of the bourgeoisie wrote in the summer of 1862. “All theory, dear friend, is gray, and only business green. Unfortunately, I have come to realize this too late.”54
A Thunderbolt in a Clear Sky
Lincoln, too, began looking for new ways to influence the European public. For months his diplomats had been urging the administration to expand the scope of the war. Lincoln’s man in Belgium wrote Seward shortly after the fall of Fort Sumter demanding that the White House begin “an antislavery crusade” that would appeal to British workers. “You must bear in mind,” he added, “that any popular sympathy we have now here or in England is solely on the ground that the war we are entered upon is supposed to be for the extinction of slavery.” From Spain, Schurz complained that even journalists “who in their papers work for us to the best of their ability” were “secretly troubled with serious scruples” about the limited Union war aims. He argued that Washington’s foreign policy should establish “a stronger foothold in the popular heart.” Schurz urged the Lincoln administration to put the war “upon a higher moral basis and thereby give us the control of public opinion in Europe.… Every step done by the government toward the abolition of slavery is, as to our standing in Europe, equal to a victory in the field.”
Charles Sumner, the chair of the Senate committee on foreign relations, relentlessly hectored the president on the slavery issue. From the first days of the war, Sumner urged Lincoln to use his war powers to abolish slavery. The senator’s entreaties tried Lincoln’s formidable patience. “Mr. Sumner, I will not issue a proclamation freeing the slaves now,” the exasperated president finally declared. Sumner stormed out of the room, slamming the door as he left.56
Now Lincoln was beginning to see the wisdom of a more radical approach. As the blockade raised transatlantic tensions, the president assured Sumner that they were not so far apart after all. “Well, Mr. Sumner,” Lincoln told him in November 1861, “the only difference between you and me on this subject is a difference of a month or six weeks in time.” In the wake of the Trent affair, the president redoubled his efforts to win hearts and minds in Europe. In January, Sumner brought a delegation to visit Lincoln, some of whom urged the president to begin a program of compensated emancipation. Lincoln said he thought the idea had merit. Still, he felt that any such measure remained premature. “Perhaps we may be better able to do something in that direction after a while than we are now,” the president told his visitors.57
Lincoln’s men were offering him conflicting advice. The potential effects of a proclamation of emancipation remained uncertain—even in Europe. On the one hand, such a move could help win the sympathies of workers in France and Britain. Yet it could also spook the Continent’s aristocratic decision makers, who feared the disorder of a slave revolt. Britons warily recalled the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and 1858, when sepoys working for the British East India Company had rebelled, assassinating imperial officers and sometimes murdering their families. Some of Lincoln’s aides insisted that a conservative approach would actually most impress the European powers. Lincoln was sensitive to the qualms of the conservatives, even if he ultimately rejected their advice. While Lincoln reassured radicals like Sumner that he shared their goals, he also insisted that he did not want the war to “degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle.”58
The middle-of-the-road policy of compensated emancipation offered one potential solution. Early on the morning of March 6, 1862, Lincoln sent his secretaries to fetch Sumner and ask him to come to the White House. The senator dressed hurriedly and made his way to the Executive Mansion. The president showed Sumner the draft of a proposal that would compensate border states if they used the funds to help plantation owners free their slaves. “I want you to read my message,” Lincoln said. “I want to know how you like it.” Lincoln read Sumner the document and then handed it over to the senator. Sumner later complained about Lincoln’s “aboriginal, autochthonous” language. He disliked Lincoln’s use of the word “abolishment,” for example. Still, Sumner was heartened by the message. Lincoln eventually took back his draft. “There, now,” he told Sumner, “you’ve read it enough, run away. I must send it in today.” Notably, Lincoln apparently did not consult his own secretary of state on the plan.59
Newspapers across the country lauded Lincoln’s message as a blow to the North’s enemies in Europe. The New York Tribune cheered the scheme, calling it “perhaps the most important document ever addressed to Congress.” The president wrote to Horace Greeley in March thanking him for his support. Lincoln was eager to see his program passed, he told the editor, “but you have advocated it from the first, so that I need say little to you on the subject.” Abolitionists were elated. The radical Wendell Phillips praised Lincoln’s decision as “a thunderbolt in a clear sky.”60
Yet even as Lincoln moved steadily toward emancipation, he continued to rein in rogue subordinates. In early May, General David Hunter followed Frémont’s lead and freed the slaves in the Department of the South. Treasury secretary Chase, a strong advocate of the piecemeal approach, argued that the order would help change minds overseas. Carl Schurz also supported Hunter. Lincoln, however, again countermanded the order. If abolition became a “necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the government,” the president insisted, it was a policy that “I reserve to myself, and which I can not feel justified in leaving to the decision of commanders in the field.” Lincoln took the opportunity to once again push for compensated emancipation. “You can not if you would, be blind to the signs of the times,” the president argued. “The change it contemplates would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything. Will you not embrace it?”61
Despite the flap with Hunter, reactions to Lincoln’s proposal generally encouraged the president’s team. John Hay was relieved that Americans were finally beginning to consider slavery a question “to be discussed and settled coolly”—not a hobbyhorse “to ride into place and power upon.” An issue that was once the province of “passion and prejudice” had matured into “a thing to be discussed and decided in the light of reason and common sense,” Hay observed. On the Hill, Charles Sumner reassured radicals that the president was sincerely committed to promulgating “the principles of the Declaration of Independence.” Still, Lincoln could not seem to get much traction on his initiative from legislators. In June the president sent his compensated emancipation proposal to Congress. The body adjourned without taking it up.62
The president made one final effort to woo border-state representatives. On July 12 he invited them to the White House. Lincoln insisted that the war would have virtually ended if they had voted for his proposal. “How much better for you, as seller, and the nation as buyer, to sell out, and buy out, that without which the war could never have been, than to sink both the thing to be sold, and the price of it, in cutting one another’s throats,” the president said. Lincoln, noting Hunter’s recent proclamation, argued that public agitation for abolition was actually intensifying. “The pressure, in this direction, is still upon me, and is increasing,” he said. Ultimately, however, the border-state representatives concluded that Lincoln’s plan would be too
expensive. Nothing came of the president’s proposal.63
Finally, on July 13, Lincoln resolved to take even more drastic measures. In a carriage on the way to the funeral of the son of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the president told Seward and Naval Secretary Gideon Welles that he was considering issuing a more ambitious proclamation. Lincoln said it was the first time he had mentioned the matter to anyone. As the carriage rolled through the streets of Georgetown, the president explained that he considered it a “military necessity” that “we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.” Seward said he needed more time to mull over the “vast and momentous” proposal. But Lincoln kept returning to the issue. Before the men parted ways, Lincoln told Seward and Welles to give the matter “special and deliberate attention.”64
The dramatic new policy proposal had important implications for foreign affairs. “By framing a proclamation rather than allowing events to take their course, [Lincoln] could appeal specifically to the antislavery feeling of foreign nations,” notes the scholar Hans Trefousse. Still, European opinion remained immensely diverse; courting it was maddeningly complex. If the timing was wrong, the strategy had the potential to backfire spectacularly, stoking British fears of disorder and ultimately damaging the Union cause.65
News of Lincoln’s change of heart seems to have slowly filtered through the White House. On July 20, John Hay wrote to a friend insisting that Lincoln would not preserve the peculiar institution for long. For a year, Hay wrote, the president had acted as “the bulwark of the institution he abhors.” Next time Lincoln mentions the subject, the president’s secretary predicted, “it will be with no uncertain sound.” Two days later, Lincoln alerted the full cabinet to his decision. The president gathered his inner circle in the oval-shaped library of the White House residence. Lincoln read the men his proclamation, which he had copied out onto two oversize sheets of paper.66
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