As the spring of 1862 wore on, the president a told a group of clergymen inquiring about emancipation, "I can assure you that the subject is on my mind, by day and night, more than any other." Sumner was keeping it that way. At every opportunity Sumner, often with Thaddeus Stevens and fellow Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson, kept pressing the reluctant president. However, Lincoln said in April, "Well, Mr. Sumner, the only difference between you and me on this subject is a difference of a month or six weeks in time." At the end of May, Lincoln predicted that an emancipation measure might come within two months. Lincoln still felt the essential risk of action in the face of a nation that he sincerely believed was not ready to support emancipation. If several of the border states responded to emancipation by joining the Confederacy, if the morale of Union soldiers plummeted, the Union might be lost forever.29
Lincoln prided himself on his finely calibrated sense of where the public was, and he was seldom wrong once the war commenced. Midterm elections were in a few months, and Lincoln's reelection was only two years away. What would emancipation do to the rise of the first party to oppose slavery's extension? Moving ahead of public opinion could mean a very deep cut in their turnout, spelling disaster when coupled with his administration's ongoing military defeats. Lincoln told Sumner during this summer that a freedom decree would mean "half the officers would fling down their arms and three more States would rise." As he told a delegation from Congress when they pressed him, "This thunderbolt will keep."30
Many factors affected Lincoln's consideration of emancipation. His legal justification would have to be military necessity. Another concern was the nagging question of diplomatic necessity. After suffering defeat after defeat, he realized something had to change, that the path to victory he had sworn to follow was failing—and that failure would allow Britain and France to at last weigh in on the side of the South. He would later tell the painter Francis Carpenter, "Things had gone on from bad to worse, until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the game. I now determined upon the adoption of the emancipation policy . . ."31But Lincoln did not want to play his hand just yet.
Clearly, something powerful was stirring in the frustrated president. On June 19, Lincoln happily signed a measure ending forever slavery in all western territories, thus bringing to an effective close his long-ago debate with Stephen Douglas. A week later, with the Seven Days' battles beginning, a delegation of progressive friends visited with a request that slavery be ended. He answered, very uncharacteristically, that sometimes he thought that he "might be an instrument in God's hands of accomplishing a great work."32
As June progressed, Lincoln was handling two sensitive issues that tended to reinforce one another. Behind the scenes, even as he was progressing with an early draft of the proposed Emancipation Proclamation, he had to deal with the failure of General McClellan's much vaunted and painfully slow Peninsula advance on Richmond. In the seven pitched battles within sight of the church steeples of the rebel capital, the newly appointed Confederate general Robert E. Lee had confused and then thoroughly demoralized McClellan's much larger army. Despite coming so close to an overwhelming victory, McClellan felt forced to withdraw his army from the Peninsula campaign, and the efforts of the previous six months came to nothing.
Douglass was to give an oration on the Fourth of July in Himrods, New York. Upon arriving particularly early that morning, he could hardly believe he was in the right place. After stepping off the train, he surveyed his surroundings and took in about six cottages on a hillside, all painted white and about equal distance apart. In addition to the railroad station, there was a church and a grocery, and the economy of this backwoods village could evidently support two taverns. If this was not inauspicious enough, Douglass quickly realized that there was no one here to greet him and provide assurance that he had not gotten off at the wrong train stop.
Considering his limited options, he started off toward the small cluster of buildings. It did not take long for a resident to hail Douglass down and to apologize that in the town's haste to prepare for the celebration, they had forgotten the task of meeting their speaker. The friendly Himrods native took Douglass to the residence of his hosts, the Ayers family, where he could prepare for his address. As the morning went on, Douglass started to see the sleepy place come to life. American flags were unfurled everywhere, old men in military uniforms started drilling, pretty women in pink dresses looked on, and a band whose enthusiasm exceeded their talent struggled with some patriotic ditties. Now, every train that came into the station conveyed huge crowds of people, as did wagons from all directions. In a matter of hours, this hillside had gone from being empty to having two thousand people waiting for him to speak.33
Surrounded by pine trees and under a spotless blue sky, Douglass began his talk. Ten years before, he had given his famous Fourth of July speech in American history in Corinthian Hall in Rochester. On a day when Americans celebrate the liberty that unites them, Douglass had then used the occasion as a poignant protest for what separated his people from that vision:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless . . . 34
Ten years later, much had changed. Now he declared, "We are torn and rent asunder, we are desolated by large and powerful armies of our own kith and kin." Race was almost beside the point, as he deemed southerners his wayward American kin. He called the American Revolution a struggle "which your fathers, and my fathers began eighty-six years ago."
After recounting the growing role of slavery's power in the nation's history, Douglass moved on to the present. His evaluation of this administration was a taunt: "An Administration without a policy, is confessedly an administration without brains." Tellingly, Douglass listed Lincoln's rejection of the black man as a soldier in this war as his most salient mistake, and his second mistake was not issuing some kind of proclamation rendering all slaves free. In fact, it seemed Lincoln's abiding goal was to reconstruct the Union "on the old and corrupting basis of compromise." If Lincoln continued to pursue only one goal on a national basis, this Fourth of July would very soon be "a day of mourning instead of a day of transcendent joy and gladness."35
Despite the trio of positive signs from the spring, Lincoln still had not redefined the war's purpose. Furthermore, General McClellan's grand plans to capture Richmond had ended in seven days of battle marked by indecision on his part and the bold assertion of the Confederacy's new military leader, Robert E. Lee. As the discouraged federal army headed back to Washington, changes were in store for the beleaguered administration, some evident, like the demotion of McClellan, and some hidden. After the subsequent defeat of General John Pope in the second battle at Manassas, Lincoln made a hesitant, and surprising, move. On a carriage ride to a funeral, Lincoln had startled Secretary of State William Seward and Navy Secretary Gideon Welles by sharing his rumination that he was seriously considering sending a warning to the Confederacy—a presidential proclamation declaring their slaves free.
On July 22, he shocked the full cabinet by stating his intention and then proceeded to read a preliminary version of the decree. None of his cabinet members responded with enthusiasm, even the abolitionist and treasury secretary Salmon P. Chase was lukewarm. Seward, in his languid way, offered the shrewd observation that the president should only issue such an emancipation order upon some future Union victory, otherwise the world would look upon the proclamation "as the last shriek on the retreat."36The president agreed, putting the revolutionary measure in his desk, awaiting events.
August 14, 1862, was the first time a delegation of black men met with the president of the United
States. Lincoln knew it was an important meeting and invited a reporter from the New York Tribune to make a full transcription. Reverend James Mitchell, an Indiana activist for colonization for fifteen years whom Lincoln had appointed commissioner of emigration within the Interior Department, was responsible for selecting these five black visitors— none were well-known black abolitionists. Mitchell had recently authored a pamphlet entitled Letter on the Relation of the White and African Races in the United States, Showing the Necessity of the Colonization of the Latter that described present troubles and future calamities if the two races were to share the same land. The document reflected the author's near-obsession with sex and racial purity, as Mitchell deplored "this repulsive admixture of blood" and "possible admixture of inferior blood."37
The "Deputation of Negroes," headed by District of Columbia's black leader Edward M. Thomas, was there more as a backdrop for Lincoln's remarks than for a conversation. Lincoln was not interested in their ideas or an exchange of dialogue. He was advancing an idea to their brethren around the country and meanwhile reassuring white people of his sincerity on colonization. It was the chief executive's chance to lay out a case to African-Americans for their voluntary exodus of the country. Lincoln did not mince words. He moved hastily through pleasantries as they sat down and stated that Congress had appropriated a large sum for their resettlement and that he favored this idea. Why should they leave this country? In answering this first question, Lincoln stated, "You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races." This fact was "a great disadvantage to us both." Kindly, Lincoln admitted that blacks had had to "suffer very greatly." And whites, how had they suffered? The answer was simple, " . . . ours suffer from your presence." If this was conceded, "it affords a reason at least why we should be separated. You here are freemen I suppose."
One of them replied, "Yes sir."
The president added that their people were suffering "in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people." He accurately described the daunting prospects they all faced. Go where they will in the United States and "the ban is still upon you." Lincoln then described the evil effects of slavery, not upon blacks but upon the white race. The most pressing was the war itself, "our white men cutting one another's throats, none knowing how far it will extend . . . " The five men listened as Lincoln added, "But for your race among us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other . . . It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated."
The problem of colonization, as he saw it, was that free blacks, such as the men before him, were too comfortable to contemplate leaving for a foreign land. They might believe that upon winning freedom, social and financial advancement in this country was possible, but Lincoln emphatically said that was not the case. Lincoln reasoned that only the sacrifice of "intelligent colored men, such as are before me," by packing up and leaving, could convince whites to allow full emancipation to move forward. By staying, free blacks were in effect holding their enslaved brethren hostage. If they would free themselves of their attachment to America, they could go to Liberia, for example. Then he offered a home a little closer than Africa. What about Central America? It was hot enough, "thus being suited to your physical condition."
Thinking he had made a fair offer, Lincoln wanted to know how many people around the country they thought would be interested in making this readjustment. Could the president count on "a hundred tolerably intelligent men, with their wives and children, to 'cut their own fodder,' " and if not, then perhaps fifty? Even twenty-five men would "make a successful commencement."
Thomas told the president that the group "would hold a consultation and in a short time give an answer."
Lincoln responded, "Take your full time—no hurry at all."38
Douglass was furious when he read the transcript. At his most generous, he called Lincoln "silly and ridiculous." But the depths of Douglass's hurt and acrimony were better captured when he wrote that Lincoln acted as an "itinerant Colonization lecturer, showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for negroes and his caning hypocrisy."
Lincoln was using his bully pulpit to advance arguments that Douglass had been fighting hard against for two decades. Douglass thought the message to his people boiled down to, "I don't like you, you must clear out of the country." Douglass reiterated that the cause of this increasingly horrific war was not black people but the institution of subjugation that was trapping them. Douglass reviled ideas that he should abandon dreams of peace and opportunity for his family in America.39
Yet Douglass's writing in the Monthly after Lincoln's crude effort to highlight colonization was frankly more about his overall disillusionment with this president than about countering these specific arguments. After all, these colonization hopes of Lincoln were common, even among vehement abolitionists. To be antislavery was not always to be abolitionist, and to be an abolitionist did not always mean that, having freed black people, one wanted them staying around. Twelve years before, Salmon Chase, an early supporter of emancipation, wrote to Douglass that he had "always looked forward to the separation of the races," suggesting South America as a promising destination for them. Like so many of slavery's detractors, Chase simply did not think anything should have brought these two races together. This was one of Lincoln's essential points, and he was using this theme of colonization as a means to justify the release of his proclamation.40
In October, Douglass engaged in a public exchange of letters with Lincoln's postmaster general, Montgomery Blair, who, like his chief, felt the war should somehow move along the separation of the races. He tried to explain that American culture, with all of its flaws, was still the place, with its familiar customs, that felt like home. With pain apparent, Douglass pleaded, "But why, oh why! may not men of different races inhabit in peace and happiness this vast and wealthy country?"41He thought no idea hurt his people more than the one making "Africa, not America, their home. It is that wolfish idea that elbows us off the sidewalk, and denies us the rights of citizenship." Douglass battled this resettlement idea during the Civil War— even supposed allies had to be made to understand what connected black and white and bonded them together in this country was more than just slavery. Douglass tried to make them see that the bond was freedom and equality.42
The racism inherent in the Lincoln administration's colonization reasoning was consistent with the racism of the president's hesitant actions over the past year and a half. The Tribune report of this meeting left no doubt in Douglass that Lincoln was "quite a genuine representative of American prejudice and negro hatred and far more concerned for the preservation of slavery, and the favor of the Border Slave States, than for any sentiment of magnanimity or principle of justice and humanity." Most damning was how this caused Douglass to appraise Lincoln as a man. Reading the president's words, Douglass felt, "The genuine spark of humanity is missing in it, no sincere wish to improve the condition of the oppressed has dictated it."43To Douglass, Lincoln did not seem to be a public figure he would ever be able to trust or think of as an ally. Just ten days before his meeting with the black men, Lincoln said no to another delegation of "western gentlemen" who offered to raise two regiments of black soldiers to represent Indiana, adding that the Union could still use the men as common laborers. On the twenty-fifth, Secretary of War Stanton somewhat mitigated that refusal, authorizing the acceptance into service of some five thousand black soldiers in the Deep South to act as guards.
On August 25th, the hugely popular New York Tribune published a letter from the president. Lincoln was hastily responding to editor Horace Gree-ley's recent article "The Prayer of Twenty Millions," in which he had called for emancipation and chastised Lincoln for not enforcing the Confiscation Act with more vigor. Lincoln wrote,
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is 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. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever . . . 44
His formulation of what he could and would do is classic Lincoln rhetoric, appearing straightforward, clear. But it was highly discouraging to those waiting for a document to free the slaves, those unaware that the Emancipation Proclamation was waiting in his desk, written and already discussed in cabinet session. The real truth behind the letter is there, almost in a code not easily broken, hidden in a logically ordered yet tangled thicket of words that serve ably the goal of misdirection. Nothing as written is strictly untrue, but anyone taking it at face value would have been totally misled as to what the future held for emancipation. The key words were " . . . and I shall do more whenever . . . " That "whenever" was fast approaching, but Lincoln felt no need to say so.
For Douglass, reading these words in the Tribune, seemingly relegating the moral issue to whatever course was most expedient for the Union, was dispiriting. Yet, he found something very promising in the last two lines of Lincoln's letter to Greeley and, by extension, to the public: "I shall adopt new views as fast as they shall appear to be true views. I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free."45 Lincoln drew a distinction between his understanding of the constitutional powers of a president and the ideals he held. By Lincoln's explicit affirmation, an openness to new views meant for Douglass that there was still hope that they could somehow move Lincoln.
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