As the war widened, Lincoln had to preserve the Union politically.
His first task was to stop the hemorrhaging of states. After the last four states had seceded in April and May 1861, four slaveholding states still remained in the Union: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Missouri stayed loyal, though it was so plagued by pro-Confederate guerrillas and quarrels among its own unionists that Lincoln, in a moment of irritation, compared it to the tree stumps in the fields of his youth that were so deeply rooted that he could not dig them up or burn them out, but only plow around them. Delaware, small and isolated, would have to do whatever Maryland did, and Maryland had enough unionists and enough Union troops in regular transit that it, too, stayed loyal.
Kentucky was critical. If it seceded, the Union anaconda would have to swallow the Ohio River before it could begin on the Mississippi. “To lose Kentucky,” Lincoln wrote, “is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.” At the end of May 1861, Kentucky declared itself neutral. Lincoln, without conceding that a state had any power to do such a thing, bided his time. Confederate troops moved into the western end of the state in September, which allowed local unionists to depict them as aggressors. Thereafter, despite numerous battles and raids, the state was officially in the Union camp. Throughout, Lincoln took counsel from his old friend Joshua Speed, who was now living in Kentucky, and from his own sense, as a native son, of how important and how delicately balanced the state was.
Lincoln’s very sensitivity to Kentucky could be used against him, however. Benjamin Wade, a Republican senator from Ohio, disliked Lincoln for his caution, and believed that Lincoln’s Kentucky roots were the source of it: Lincoln, he said, was “poor white trash.” Vilification was one of the few race-blind enterprises in America: Lincoln could simultaneously be a degraded white man and a degraded black man.
Lincoln welcomed the support, so far as it was offered, of unionist Democrats. Most northern Democrats were incensed by the fall of Fort Sumter, none more so than Stephen Douglas. Lincoln’s longtime rival had wanted him to call up 200,000 militia in April 1861 instead of 75,000. A high-strung temperament and years of hard drinking had undermined Douglas’s health, however, and he died, at age forty-eight, in June. Lincoln ordered the White House to be draped in mourning for thirty days.
One southern Democrat shared Douglas’s unionist passion. Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a former tailor, was a self-made populist. Although he was proslavery, he was virulently anti-secession. His opinion of his fellow southerners as the nation came unglued was that they “ought to be hanged for all this.” Johnson had to flee his state when it seceded, but he would return as military governor.
Lincoln’s support among Democrats waxed and waned with the tide of battle and with their opportunities to find partisan advantage. Democrats looked for weapons to attack their Republican rivals in the Constitution (by defending habeas corpus) and in the gutter (by upholding racism). Lincoln, for his part, looked to the Democrats for occasional allies and for opportunities to sow confusion. When New York elected a Democratic governor, Horatio Seymour, in 1862, Lincoln reached out to him, suggesting that if he supported the war zealously he might be the next president. Was Lincoln offering Seymour a promise of future support, or the appearance of a promise, to lull him? Bait, or bait in a trap? Seymour responded cautiously. Soon enough, ordinary partisanship resumed, and the two leaders were fighting openly.
Lincoln’s main support in running his administration, and therefore in keeping the country together, was his own party, the Republicans. They commanded majorities in both houses of Congress throughout his administration (though Democrats made gains in the midterm elections of 1862, after it became clear that the war would not be won quickly). But dominance can be a temptation to disagree—there are so many of us, we can afford to fight among ourselves. Lincoln had to employ all his talents to keep Republicans in good spirits and away from each other’s throats.
One of his most magnanimous acts was to defend Simon Cameron after he was eased out of the cabinet as secretary of war. Lincoln made him minister to Russia in February 1862 as consolation. But in Cameron’s absence, a House committee investigating the War Department issued a damning report, detailing bad contracts that had been hastily issued in the first days of the war, and calling for Cameron to be censured. Lincoln wrote Congress saying that he and the rest of the cabinet were “at least equally responsible” for Cameron’s mismanagement: the times had required stopgap measures, and everyone in the administration had approved them. Cameron was overwhelmed with gratitude. “Very many men in your situation,” he wrote Lincoln from St. Petersburg, “would have permitted an innocent man to suffer.” And very many more men would have permitted an incapable one to take all the blame. Cameron would never forget Lincoln’s generosity, and Lincoln would be able to call on him later.
In December 1862 Lincoln had to frustrate a power play by his treasury secretary, Salmon P. Chase, and the Republican Senate caucus. After the disappointing midterm elections and the debacle of Fredericksburg, there was a powerful desire to find a scapegoat. Chase and his congressional friends settled on Secretary of State William Seward, whom they accused of running the administration himself, and of running it into the ground. When Seward learned of their charges, he wrote Lincoln offering to resign.
Lincoln did not want to be seen as Seward’s tool, and he did not want senators dictating his cabinet—especially not senators who were in cahoots with one of his own secretaries. He wrong-footed Chase by inviting a committee of unhappy senators to present their complaints about the administration to a meeting of the entire cabinet (minus Seward). When secretary after secretary assured the senators that Seward was no dark mastermind, and that all of them had the president’s ear, Chase buckled. Confronted by the unanimous testimony of his colleagues, he was not bold enough to be the only man in the room to criticize Seward.
After the meeting, Chase’s Senate allies scorned him for his failure to speak up. Why had he said one thing to them, and another in front of the full cabinet? One angry senator offered a pithy explanation: “He lied.” Chase, mortified, offered to resign himself. Lincoln then wrote to both Seward and Chase, asking them to stay at their posts (both, after all, were competent men). Seward agreed happily, Chase morosely. Lincoln kept the secretaries he wanted, kept a congressional faction at bay, and kept himself in charge. Sometimes a leader must manipulate men in secret; sometimes he must manipulate them openly, to show his mastery.
These intra-Republican fights were about more than personalities. The Republicans, like any major party, embraced different shades of opinion. In Lincoln’s cabinet, Caleb Smith (who would resign in December 1862 from ill health) and Edward Bates tended to favor moderate courses; so did the Blairs, despite their combative natures. Seward continued to take the moderate tone he had assumed before Lincoln’s inauguration. His moderation was the effect of his congenital optimism. Once the war began, he was convinced that the victory of the Union and the destruction of slavery were assured: Why push too hard at an open door? Chase and his congressional friends—Charles Sumner, Benjamin Wade—thought of themselves as Radicals, as did Stanton.
Lincoln mastered tendencies as well as men. He managed to place himself in the center of Republican opinion and to keep its factions, if not happy—there were almost always some Republicans who were unhappy about something—at least not rebellious. One newspaper described Lincoln’s maneuvers this way: “The art of riding two horses is not confined to the circus.”
As he worked to preserve the Union, Lincoln simultaneously advanced the Republican Party’s goals—in his terse summary to Alexander Stephens, “We think [slavery] is wrong, and ought to be restricted.”
On the question of slavery’s expansion, Lincoln had told his fellow Republicans that he was “inflexible.” He was in fact a bit flexible: he was willing to allow slavery in the New Mexico territory—the present state plus Arizona. But he opposed any deal that would give slavery a f
ree field in Central America or the Caribbean. The secession of the South and its congressmen, coupled with Republican dominance of the White House and Capitol Hill, put the territorial question to rest after forty years of contention: in May 1862 Congress formally ended slavery in all the territories.
Lincoln showed his belief in the wrongness of slavery in other ways. In December 1861 he called for diplomatic recognition of Liberia and Haiti. Liberia was a project of the American Colonization Society, and Haiti had been liberated in an eighteenth-century slave revolt, the largest in modern history. Diplomatic recognition of these countries was a symbolic statement about slavery, and even race; one Democratic newspaper worried about “strapping negro” ambassadors coming to Washington.
Slavery itself was abolished in the District of Columbia, a goal Lincoln had discussed as long ago as 1837. In the summer of 1862 Congress passed a bill emancipating the District’s slaves immediately and compensating owners. Lincoln, who had long favored compensation, preferred gradual, not immediate, emancipation, and worried what effect the bill might have in the border states. But he signed it anyway.
The foreign slave trade had been illegal since 1808, and had been equated with piracy, a capital crime, since 1820. Yet, although America maintained an Atlantic naval squadron to seize slave ships, only one American had ever been convicted of the crime, and he had been given a light sentence and a fine (the latter pardoned by President Buchanan). In November 1861 Captain Nathaniel Gordon, a slaver from Portland, Maine, who had been captured off the Congo River with a shipload of almost nine hundred slaves bound for Cuba, was tried in New York City and sentenced to death. Lincoln gave him a two-week stay of execution to prepare his soul, but warned him to “relinquish . . . all expectation of pardon by Human Authority.” In February 1862 Gordon was hanged.
Lincoln continued to pursue the idea of colonization, which was, in his own mind, part of the solution to the problem of slavery. In his speech on the Dred Scott decision, he had compared blacks to the Jews of the Bible, destined for their own homeland; the land he had in mind as president was not Liberia but Central America. The Chiriqui coast on the Isthmus of Panama seemed to be a likely spot; it was supposed to have coal mines, and the isthmus was a busy trade route. The Blairs were enthusiastic supporters of colonization; they envisioned outposts of free blacks as vanguards of American influence in the Caribbean Basin. Lincoln and the Blairs contemplated a black-only version of the slave owners’ dream of southern expansion.
In August 1862 Lincoln asked to meet a delegation of free black men from Washington, DC, picked by their churches, to push his Central American scheme. While calling slavery “the greatest wrong inflicted on any people,” he said that free blacks could not hope to be treated as equals in America: “[I] present it as a fact with which we have to deal. I cannot alter it if I would.” So why shouldn’t they move elsewhere? He tried to inspire them by comparing the hardships of emigration to George Washington’s trials during the Revolution—“yet [Washington] was a happy man, because he was engaged in benefiting his race.” He ended with auctioneer’s patter. “Could I get a hundred tolerably intelligent men” to try it? “Can I have fifty? If I could find twenty five . . . ” Lincoln’s auditors, who had no desire to live anywhere but where they now did, said nothing critical to the president’s face, but none accepted his offer. (And just as well—Chiriqui’s coal proved to be too low-grade to be usable.) Colonization was, as it had always been, a nonstarter. Still, the meeting was noteworthy in one respect: it was the first time a president had received a delegation of blacks in the White House.
All these things might have been done by a peacetime president with firm convictions and a solid congressional majority. But Lincoln had to apply the principles of his party to the institution of slavery in wartime. What should be done with the slaves of rebels? With escaped slaves? What, if anything, should be done with the slaves of those who had remained loyal?
At the beginning of the war, Lincoln named John Frémont, the first Republican presidential candidate, commander of the Western Department with responsibility for Missouri. In August 1861 Frémont declared martial law in the state and freed all slaves belonging to Confederate sympathizers. Lincoln did not want generals making policy, and he particularly did not want them making policies that freed slaves while nearby Kentucky, a slave state, still hung in the balance. If Frémont needed the labor of rebels’ slaves, Lincoln wrote, “he can seize them and use them; but when the need is past, it is not for him to fix their permanent future condition. That must be settled according to laws made by law-makers, and not by military proclamation.” When Frémont became entangled in a charge of graft, Lincoln took the opportunity to reassign him.
But another general suggested a policy that Lincoln permitted. Benjamin Butler was a Democratic politician from Massachusetts; at the endless Democratic convention of 1860, he had voted consistently for Jefferson Davis for president. But after secession he stayed loyal to the Union. In the spring of 1861, as the commander of a Massachusetts regiment occupying Fort Monroe at the mouth of the James River, on the coast of Virginia, he found himself dealing with slaves who were fleeing from rebel lines. Their owners applied, under a flag of truce, to reclaim them as fugitives. Butler refused, calling them “contraband”—goods that could be seized in time of war—and asked for further directions from Washington. Lincoln, amused, nicknamed the policy “Butler’s fugitive slave law.” It was an inversion of the fugitive slave law that would have turned the Union Army into one vast underground railroad if universally applied. Lincoln let Butler’s action stand, but let other Union commanders decide the fate of runaways as they wished.
Lincoln’s reaction to Frémont had been correct: the law had to be settled by lawmakers, in Congress, in the states, and by himself as president. In the first fifteen months of the war, Congress passed two laws aimed at slavery in the Confederacy. In the summer of 1861, the Confiscation Act declared any property used for Confederate military purposes—including slaves—forfeit; any slaves who had been laboring for the rebel army who were captured by Union troops, or who fled to Union lines, would automatically be freed. In the summer of 1862, a second Confiscation Act freed any rebel-owned slaves who fell into Union hands, whether they had been employed for military purposes or not—in effect, legalizing Butler’s contraband policy.
Lincoln meanwhile tried to induce the loyal border states to abolish slavery within their own borders. Almost half a million slaves lived in Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware (3.5 million lived in the Confederacy). Lincoln wanted the border states to free their own slaves—for a price.
Some of the founders had wondered how much it might cost to free all of America’s slaves. In 1819, when there were 1.5 million slaves in the country, James Madison calculated that it would cost $600 million to free and deport them; five years later, Thomas Jefferson estimated that it would cost $900 million. But these had been the speculations of old men (Jefferson had already told Edward Coles that emancipation was the task of the young). Now the pressure of war made the question of compensated emancipation urgent.
Lincoln believed it was wrong to hold men as property, yet under the existing evil of slavery they were indeed held that way. Their owners, he felt, should be recompensed for lost assets. Offering money would also, obviously, make slaveholders more willing to act. In March 1862 Lincoln asked Congress to offer compensation for any border states that would undertake emancipation. In July he appealed to a delegation of border-state politicians to endorse such a process. Slavery, he told them, was doomed “by mere friction and abrasion” if the war continued. How much better to end it now, and get paid in the bargain. Ending slavery in the border states would also deprive the Confederacy of all hope of ever peeling them off from the Union. Lincoln made a separate appeal to Delaware, as a small and easy test case, offering to pay $719,200 over thirty-one years to liberate its 1,800 slaves by 1893.
Lincoln found no takers. As a Kentuckian, he sympa
thized with the border states, but he also projected too much of himself onto them. He had come to hate slavery; surely, he thought, they would, too. But the time was not yet.
But Lincoln had another plan in mind. On July 22, 1862, he broached it with his cabinet, reading the draft of a proclamation. It endorsed both the second Confiscation Act and Lincoln’s plans for compensation, but added a new idea: as of the coming New Year, all slaves in the Confederacy would be declared free. When the cabinet recovered from its surprise, most of the secretaries approved the plan. But Seward argued that it would look desperate unless it were issued after a victory. The Peninsula Campaign had just ground to a halt. Perhaps John Pope could give the Union better news.
While waiting for better news, Lincoln was attacked by Horace Greeley in an August 20 editorial in the New York Tribune, entitled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions” (approximately the population of the loyal Union, minus the border states). “The Union cause has suffered,” wrote Greeley, “from mistaken deference to Rebel Slavery.” Slavery was the root of the conflict, Lincoln should dig it up. Greeley urged him to enforce the second Confiscation Act zealously.
Lincoln answered with a letter, printed by Greeley, which appeared to dismiss his concerns. “My paramount object,” Lincoln wrote, was “to save the Union, and . . . not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” A hasty reader might have focused on Lincoln’s first hypothetical—saving the Union without freeing any slaves. But the third hypothetical—saving it by freeing some—was what he actually intended with his yet-unissued proclamation. He used his reply to Greeley to slip the thought into the public’s mind.
Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln Page 23