V
In the following weeks Lincoln repeatedly argued the issue of emancipation in his own mind. To help clarify his thinking, he summoned his old Illinois friend Leonard Swett to the White House and carefully reviewed with him all the arguments for and against an emancipation proclamation, reading some of the correspondence he had received on both sides of the question. “His manner did not indicate that he wished to impress his views upon his hearer,” Swett later recalled, “but rather to weigh and examine them for his own enlightenment in the presence of his hearer.” So neutral was the President’s presentation that Swett after the interview wrote confidently to his wife, “He will issue no proclamation emancipating negroes.”
Lincoln’s actions appeared to confirm Swett’s prediction, for he stubbornly refused to commit his administration, even indirectly, to a policy of emancipation. On the vexed question of enlisting African-Americans in the Union armies, strongly advocated by abolitionists as a matter of principle and supported by many Northern governors as an expedient way of filling their military quotas, he remained resolutely negative. Though willing “in common humanity” to insist that African-Americans who fled to the lines of the Union armies must not “suffer for want of food, shelter, or other necessaries of life,” he was not ready to enroll them in the army. He was not sure that the freedmen would fight, and he feared that guns placed in their hands would promptly fall into the hands of the Confederates. Besides, he told Browning, arming the blacks “would produce dangerous and fatal dissatisfactions in our army, and do more injury than good.” Though Sumner repeatedly pressed him on this issue, arguing that by enlisting black soldiers “the rear-guard of the rebellion [would] be changed into the advance guard of the Union,” Lincoln continued to resist, saying “that half the Army would lay down their arms and three other States would join the rebellion.” So strongly did he feel on this matter that when a delegation of Western politicians insistently urged him to accept Negro regiments, Lincoln grew impatient and finally exclaimed: “Gentlemen, you have my decision. I have made my mind up deliberately and mean to adhere to it.... if the people are dissatisfied, I will resign and let Mr. Hamlin try it.”
But at the same time, Lincoln began preparing public opinion for a proclamation of freedom if one was to be issued. Because one of the chief objections to emancipation was the widespread belief that whites and blacks could never live together harmoniously, he revived his long-cherished idea of colonizing free blacks outside the United States. On August 14 he summoned a delegation of African-American leaders to the White House in order to discuss future relations between blacks and whites. “You and we are different races,” he reminded them. “We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races.” Nowhere in America were blacks treated as equals of whites. “It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated,” he concluded, and he urged these blacks to take the lead by accepting government aid and forming a colony in Central America. If he could find a hundred—or even fifty, or twenty-five—“able-bodied men, with a mixture of women and children,” he could make a successful beginning of the colonization project. Earnestly he besought the leaders before him to consider his plan, not as “pertaining to yourselves merely, nor for your race, and ours, for the present time, but as one of the things, if successfully managed, for the good of mankind.”
Lincoln’s proposal was promptly and emphatically rejected by most black spokesmen. The words of the President, declared the editor of the Pacific Appeal, an influential black newspaper, made it “evident that he, his cabinet, and most of the people, care but little for justice to the negro. If necessary, he is to be crushed between the upper and nether millstone—the pride and prejudice of the North and South.” Nor did it win support from white antislavery leaders. “How much better would be a manly protest against prejudice against color!—and a wise effort to give freemen homes in America!” Chase wrote in his diary. Abolitionist critics of the President’s shortsighted racial views failed to note that this was the first occasion in American history when a President received a delegation of African-Americans in the White House. They also did not realize that some influential African-American leaders, like the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, who understood that Lincoln’s purpose was to save “our emancipated brethren from being returned to their former condition of slavery,” supported his initiative as “the most humane, and merciful movement which this or any other administration has proposed for the benefit of the enslaved.”
Lincoln’s critics, white or black, also did not understand that the President’s plea for colonization—heartfelt and genuine as it was—was also a shrewd political move, a bit of careful preparation for an eventual emancipation proclamation. No doubt he expected his proposal to be rejected. But he knew that a plan for the voluntary removal of blacks from the country would make emancipation more palatable to the border states and also relieve Northerners of a fear that they would be inundated by a migration of free Negroes from the South.
Shortly afterward Lincoln took a further step to prepare public opinion by publishing a reply to an intemperate editorial by Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune, called “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” To Greeley’s complaint that he was “strangely and disastrously remiss” in not proclaiming emancipation, as required by the Second Confiscation Act, and the editor’s charge that it was “preposterous and futile” to try to put down the rebellion without eradicating slavery, Lincoln replied: “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.”
Written at a time when the draft of the Emancipation Proclamation had already been completed, Lincoln’s letter to Greeley later seemed puzzling, if not deceptive. But the President did not intend it to be so. He was giving assurance to the large majority of the Northern people who did not want to see the war transformed into a crusade for abolition—and at the same time he was alerting antislavery men that he was contemplating further moves against the peculiar institution. In Lincoln’s mind there was no necessary disjunction between a war for the Union and a war to end slavery. Like most Republicans, he had long held the belief that if slavery could be contained it would inevitably die; a war that kept the slave states within the Union would, therefore, bring about the ultimate extinction of slavery. For this reason, saving the Union was his “paramount object.” But readers aware that Lincoln always chose his words carefully should have recognized that “paramount” meant “foremost” or “principal”—not “sole.”
Widely published in Northern newspapers, Lincoln’s letter to Greeley received universal approval. “It [will] clear the atmosphere, and gives ground to stand on,” Thurlow Weed judged. “The triumphant manner in which you have so modestly and so clearly set forth the justification of your fixed purposes,” George Ashmun told the President, “dispels all doubts of the expediency and wisdom of your course.” “It is the best enunciation of the best platform we have had since the Chicago Convention adjourned,” wrote Senator Timothy O. Howe of Wisconsin. “Whatever is honest and earnest in the Nation will march to that music.” Almost unnoted in the chorus of praise were the phrases in Lincoln’s letter reaffirming his “oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free” and promising that he would “adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.”
But he could not announce new views, nor act on his personal convictions yet. The draft of his emancipation proclamation lay locked in a drawer. Every now and then he took it out, and, as he recalled later, “added or changed a line, touching it up here and there, anxiously watching the progress of ev
ents.” But he needed a victory.
VI
Victory did not come. Throughout July, McClellan’s huge army sweltered on the Peninsula, its commander unable to take the offensive and unwilling to withdraw. The general was furious that Halleck, and not he, had been named general-in-chief, and he spent much of his time brooding over the insult that Lincoln and Stanton had inflicted on him. He had learned of Halleck’s appointment from the newspapers. He complained that Lincoln had “acted so as to make the matter as offensive as possible—he has not shown the slightest gentlemanly or friendly feeling and I cannot regard him as in any respect my friend.” “I am confident that he would relieve me tomorrow if he dared do so,” he told his wife. “His cowardice alone prevents it.”
For his pan, Lincoln had concluded that McClellan never would fight. “If by magic he could reinforce McClelland [sic] with 100,000 men to-day,” he remarked to Browning, “he would be in an ecstacy over it, thank him for it, and tell him that he would go to Richmond tomorrow, but that when tomorrow came he would telegraph that he had certain information that the enemy had 400,000 men, and that he could not advance without reinforcements.”
The President informed Halleck, now in command of all the armies, that he could keep McClellan at the head of the Army of the Potomac or remove him as he pleased. He promptly got an unwelcome insight into the character of his new general-in-chief. Halleck had arrived in Washington with a reputation as a broadly informed student of the art of war and an experienced commander of armies that had won victories from the Confederates in the West. But the general, who was called “Old Brains” because he had been a professor at West Point, had more experience with theories of warfare than with realities of military politics. When it dawned upon him that Lincoln, Stanton, and some other members of the cabinet sought to have him take the blame for removing McClellan, he shied away. “They want me to do what they are afraid to attempt,” he wrote his wife. Even after Lincoln sent him down to the James to inspect the army himself, Halleck seemed incapable of exercising the authority the President had vested in him. Repeatedly Halleck urged, begged, cajoled, and ordered McClellan to move his army from the Peninsula back to the vicinity of Washington, where he would be in a position to reinforce Pope’s advancing army. Always slow, McClellan had no interest in assisting his archrival and dragged his feet, while Halleck wrung his hands. “I am almost broken down,” the general-in-chief complained; “I can’t get General McClellan to do what I wish.”
With McClellan apparently immovable on the Peninsula, the hope for Union victory rested with John Pope’s Army of Virginia, now advancing south of Manassas. Lincoln closely watched Pope’s progress. He was not discouraged when “Stonewall” Jackson checked his advance at Cedar Mountain on August 9, but he again urged McClellan to speed his departure from the James in order to be able to reinforce Pope. Even after Lee, rightly judging that McClellan’s army no longer posed a threat to Richmond, dispatched General James Longstreet’s corps to assist Jackson and threw the strength of the full Army of Northern Virginia on Pope’s forces in the second battle of Bull Run, the President remained optimistic. During the first two days of the fighting (August 28–29) he spent most of his time in the telegraph office of the War Department and closely monitored the dispatches from the front. On August 30 he was relaxed enough to attend an informal supper at Stanton’s house, presided over by the Secretary’s “pretty wife as white and cold and motionless as marble, whose rare smiles seemed to pain her.” Stanton assured the President “that nothing but foul play could lose us this battle,” and after dinner at the War Department, Halleck also exuded quiet confidence. Lincoln retired, expecting to receive news of victory in the morning. His new plan for a hard, decisive war against the Confederacy was about to succeed.
But at about eight in the evening he came to Hay’s room with the news he had just received: “Well, John, we are whipped again, I am afraid.” Pope had been defeated and forced back to Centreville, where he reported he would “be able to hold his men.” “I don’t like that expression,” Lincoln said, doubtless recalling dozens of similar messages he had received from McClellan. “I don’t like to hear him admit that his men need ‘holding.’” Though the news was all bad, Lincoln was not in despair and hoped to resume the offensive. “We must hurt this enemy before it gets away,” he kept saying; “we must whip these people now.”
By the next morning he had absorbed the full extent of Pope’s defeat. Once again, Confederate troops threatened Washington. Once again, every hospital bed in the capital was filled with the wounded, and the streets of the city were crowded with stragglers and deserters. Though the Union soldiers, who had fought bravely, were less demoralized than after the first battle of Bull Run, their commanders were more so. Pope denounced McClellan for failing to reinforce him and urged courts-martial for Generals Fitz-John Porter and William B. Franklin. While the generals bickered, the army, in disarray, retreated to the outskirts of the capital.
Exhausted from long hours spent in the telegraph office attempting to learn the news and trying to speed reinforcements to Pope’s army, Lincoln fell into a deep depression. Once again, his plans had all failed. The strenuous, aggressive war that, in theory, should have resulted in the defeat of Lee’s army and the capture of the Confederate capital had aborted. With its failure disappeared Lincoln’s opportunity to issue a proclamation abolishing slavery, the cause of the war. Nothing that Lincoln did, it seemed, could speed Union victory. Again, the President returned to his bleak, fatalistic philosophy. “I am almost ready to say... that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet,” he wrote in an informal memorandum to himself. After all, God could “have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest,” yet He allowed the war to begin. “And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.” “In the present civil war,” Lincoln echoed his old doctrine of necessity, “it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.” Consequently, as he explained to an English Quaker a few weeks later, he had to believe “that He permits [the war] for some wise purpose of his own, mysterious and unknown to us.”
With great reluctance the President abandoned the idea of waging an aggressive war against the Confederacy and returned to a defensive posture. With this reversal of policy he looked again to the indispensable man, McClellan. By this time Lincoln harbored no illusions about the general; he thought McClellan was the “chief alarmist and grand marplot of the Army,” ridiculed his “weak, whiney, vague, and incorrect despatches,” and considered his failure to reinforce Pope unpardonable. Yet he knew that McClellan was a superb organizer and an efficient engineer. And—what was equally important—he recognized that nothing but the reinstatement of McClellan would restore the shattered morale of the Army of the Potomac. “I must have McClellan to reorganize the army and bring it out of chaos,” he concluded, adding, “McClellan has the army with him.” Without consulting any of his advisers, and merely informing Halleck of his decision, the President asked McClellan to take command of the troops that were falling back into Washington and to defend the capital. “Mad as a March hare” over what he considered repeated snubs, McClellan accepted the assignment with reluctance and only after he had “a pretty plain talk” with Lincoln and Halleck about his new responsibilities. “I only consent to take it for my country’s sake and with the humble hope that God has called me to it,” he explained to his wife.
Lincoln moved without consulting his advisers because he was aware that nearly all the members of his cabinet shared his reservations about McClellan. Hearing rumors that McClellan might be recalled to command, Stanton in great excitement told Welles that he “could not and would not submit to a continuance of this state of things.” When reminded that the President alone had the final say in selecting a general, he said “he knew of no particular obligations he was under to the President who had called him to a difficult position and impose
d upon him labors and responsibilities which no man could carry, and which were greatly increased by fastening upon him a commander who was constantly striving to embarrass him in his administration of the [War] Department.” Together with Chase, Stanton drew up a written protest, charging that McClellan was an incompetent and probably a traitor, and he tried to get other members of the cabinet to sign it. Smith agreed to do so. In the hope of getting as many cabinet signatures as possible, Stanton and Chase permitted Bates to tone down the protest to read that it was “not safe to entrust to Major General McClellan the command of any of the armies of the United States,” and the Attorney General then signed. But Welles refused to join the others. He agreed that McClellan’s “removal from command was demanded by public sentiment and the best interest of the country,” but he thought the remonstrance “discourteous and disrespectful to the President.”
Already “wrung by the bitterest anguish” over the recent defeat, Lincoln was distraught when he received the memorial, and he told the cabinet that at times “he felt almost ready to hang himself.” He respected the “earnest sincerity” of his cabinet advisers who denounced the reinstatement of McClellan and in face of their unanimous opposition (Seward was absent and Blair was silent) declared he would “gladly resign his place; but he could not see who could do the work wanted as well as McClellan.” “We must use what tools we have,” he explained.
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