Because the Harpers Ferry episode remained a heated and unresolved topic, Lincoln continued to refer to it on the eastern speaking tour that followed Cooper Union. He distanced himself from Brown again at New Haven, Connecticut, calling charges that mainstream Republicans supported Brown’s raid “inexcusable.” Lincoln distanced himself from Brown yet again in his remarks at Bloomington, Illinois, a month later, in April. Clearly, when they began their quest to capture the White House in 1860, mainstream Republicans regarded John Brown not as a martyr but as an albatross. That Brown’s ultra-abolitionist position remained unacceptable to mainstream Republicans even in New England became apparent around the same time as Lincoln was seeking support in New England. Years earlier he had given a pro–Zachary Taylor campaign speech at Boston’s famous Tremont Temple, where he was well received as a strange-looking but amusing and effective orator. When African American abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass prepared to visit the same temple to make a speech defending John Brown, an angry crowd refused to let him appear.
Lincoln and other mainstream Republican politicians continued to maintain a clear nonabolitionist position throughout the 1860 campaign. They were focused primarily on overcoming the dominant influence of Southern politicians in Washington. By contrast, William Lloyd Garrison, longtime publisher of the Liberator, the leading abolitionist newspaper, and Frederick Douglass, the leading African American abolitionist and publisher of Douglass’ Monthly, were not deterred by the John Brown debacle from their continuing efforts to persuade public opinion to support the immediate abolition of slavery and equal rights for African Americans. Throughout this period, Lincoln and other mainstream Republican politicians had little, if any, direct contact with the leaders of the abolition movement. Lincoln focused on gaining broad national support for his party and his candidacy and continued to distance himself from the claim that he supported John Brown’s violent actions. He did not seek direct support from abolitionist leaders. He believed open abolitionist support would be far from helpful in his campaign for the presidency in 1860.
While abolitionist leaders maintained their efforts to secure freedom and equal rights for all African Americans, the majority of the nation’s white voters in the North were still not convinced. They clearly separated slavery, in their minds, into three separate issues: the political issue of preventing the extension of the Southern economic system to the territories, the constitutional issue of abolishing slavery in the Southern states, and the social issue of equality for African Americans. Although many were prepared to address the political issue, they were not prepared to address the constitutional and social issues. Those still seemed extremist ideas.
Lincoln became the choice of the majority of Republican voters in 1860 because he was sworn to eliminate Southern political control of the levers of power in Washington by preventing the extension of slavery to the western territories. Most Northern voters did not expect Lincoln to support the abolitionist efforts of William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Beecher Stowe to abolish slavery throughout the United States and provide equal rights for all African Americans. Indeed, in 1860 Lincoln himself did not expect to do so, either.
In the 1860 presidential race, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas faced each other again. This time they did so without the active participation of Lincoln himself, who, true to the tradition of the day, did no direct campaigning after his nomination. Surrogates took up his cause and, wherever possible, muffled antislavery zealotry. Republican supporters were careful to portray Lincoln almost apolitically, in campaign biographies and newspaper profiles alike, promoting him not as an advocate for freedom for the slaves but as a model American who had admirably risen from poverty and obscurity through hard work, labor that included strenuous jobs like rail splitting and flatboating. Pro-Lincoln political cartoons of the day often showed him wearing a frontiersman’s shirt and toting an ax, which in the “Railsplitter’s” hands became a symbol of American opportunity. But anti-Lincoln political cartoons just as determinedly portrayed him as an outright abolitionist, depicting him, in one crude example, trying to hide a symbolic African American beneath a pile of log rails of the candidate’s own making—the veritable and literal “nigger in the woodpile.”
Currier & Ives’s 1860 anti-Lincoln print “The Nigger” in the Woodpile was cruelly casual about its use of an offensive but all too common racial slur and equally racist in its minstrel-like depiction of the trapped African American. Most of all, however, the cartoon was meant to brand Lincoln a secret antislavery radical attempting to conceal his ardent abolitionism behind a frontiersman’s facade of handmade log rails.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
As viewers of the cartoon surely understood, the metaphor was not only about concealment, but about competition. Who deserved to be part of the American Dream of economic opportunity? That was the question that Abraham Lincoln and all Americans were about to confront; not just in the fury of debate, but in the crucible of war.
Once Lincoln had won the 1860 contest, Frederick Douglass seemed filled with anger. “If Mr. Lincoln were really an Abolitionist President, which he is not,” Douglass complained in December 1860, “if he were a friend to the Abolitionist movement, instead of being, as he is, its most powerful enemy, the dissolution of the Union might be the only effective mode of perpetuating slavery in the Southern States.” In Douglass’s words, “Mr. Lincoln proposes no measure which can bring him into antagonistic collision with the traffickers in human flesh.” Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, in which the new president pledged to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act if it kept Southern states in the Union, struck Douglass as “weak,” “revolting,” and “horrible.”
Dissolution of the Union followed Lincoln’s election, and Douglass spent the next two years urging Lincoln to abolish slavery in order to win the war. Douglass repeatedly assailed Lincoln in his abolitionist newspaper, Douglass’ Monthly, criticizing him for failing to understand that slavery was the root cause of secession and rebellion and that its destruction was essential to the country’s salvation. But much as Lincoln detested slavery, it took him more than a year in office to find a way to use presidential power to effect abolition. As he later explained it, “I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling.”
Six. FOREVER FREE
LINCOLN THE EMANCIPATOR
LINCOLN’S DETERMINATION to guarantee the future of the American experiment—the “cause” that lay behind his willingness to fight the Civil War—did not significantly change during the course of the conflict. Instead, the war steeled his commitment, even when it seemed that the Confederacy might actually win its “freedom” from the Union.
When the war started, Lincoln assumed that preventing the extension of slavery to the western territories would be enough to ensure the extension of the Northern middle-class society to all the states admitted to the Union in the future. He expected that slavery would continue to exist in the Southern states in the immediate future, even if he hoped it would ultimately disappear. Lincoln remained resistant to the abolitionist cause of granting equal rights to African Americans in the North or the South, but he did hope to move toward eventual freedom for Southern slaves through a policy of compensation for slave owners and voluntary colonization for former slaves. In one proposal aimed at bringing about the ultimate extinction of slavery, he suggested providing cash to slaveholders who would free their slaves. But Lincoln did not expect the freed slaves to move north. He continued to envision Northern society as the home of free white men. Indeed, in 1860, 99 percent of the population of the Northern states was white, and the great majority were firmly opposed to equal rights for Negroes or increasing the African American population in their midst.
The evidence suggests that Lincoln sincerely hoped during the first years of the war that the freed slaves would join with free African Americans from the North to form colonies outside the United States in Cen
tral America, the Caribbean, or Africa. But conditions on the ground during the war made Lincoln’s compensation and colonization policies increasingly irrelevant. The idea that the war would be over in a short time was shattered by the failure of the Union armies to win decisive victories in 1861 and 1862. In battle after battle, Confederate troops did more than hold their own. If the idea of abolishing slavery did not seem a viable option before the war broke out, it eventually evolved into a potential tool for winning the war and saving the Union.
Lincoln’s most aggressive generals and Republican majorities in the Congress eventually became open to new ideas to weaken the Southern war effort when slaves began to free themselves by crossing over to Union army lines.
The first important initiative in this direction was taken early in the fighting. On May 23, 1861, little more than a month into the Civil War, three young black slaves, pressed into service by the Confederate armed forces, rowed across the James River in Virginia and asked for asylum on the Union side. The next morning they were summoned before General Benjamin Butler, who commanded the Union army headquartered in Fort Monroe, Virginia. A savvy attorney in peacetime, Butler had been lately reading up on his military law. While the Compromise of 1850 required returning “fugitive slaves” to their Confederate owners, Butler also knew that a commander had a right to seize “enemy property” that was being used for hostile purposes.
Butler decided not to return the three fugitives to their Confederate owners. They would be regarded, he declared, as “contraband of war”—or, as the thousands of refugees who followed came to be known, “contrabands.” Within a week more than forty-five fugitive slaves were in Fort Monroe, with more arriving every day. Many were put to work as laborers in support of the Union army. Butler reported the influx to Lincoln, and within days it became a running story in the Northern press. Weeks after the first fugitives arrived at Fort Monroe, slaves were reported flocking to the Union lines, almost everywhere Union lines existed. When Lincoln and his cabinet met to address Butler’s decision, they decided to do and say nothing. At first, the administration gave little guidance to the generals in the field. Without direction from Washington, some followed Butler’s example. By contrast, commanding General George B. McClellan—a Democrat—adopted the opposite policy.
The debate was decided soon enough. In August 1861, facing a war that seemed to have no immediate end in sight, Congress passed and Lincoln signed a law authorizing the seizure of all property, including slaves, being used in aid of the rebellion. On July 16, 1862, Congress passed a second Confiscation Act that went further, authorizing the confiscation of all property belonging to rebels and freeing all slaves held by disloyal citizens. Like the first confiscation law, however, the new legislation relied on the courts for enforcement. The federal judicial system in the South was by then all but nonexistent.
Lincoln contemplated vetoing this second Confiscation Act as going too far. But his most aggressive generals weighed in, arguing that freed slaves would provide a positive resource for the Union armies, or, at the very least, a drain on home-front slave labor in the Confederacy. Eventually, Lincoln concluded that he should not only sign but implement the law. Ever the effective politician, he overcame the constitutional protection of slavery by asserting that it was now a matter of military necessity to deploy his power as commander in chief of the Union armies to free the slaves owned by the supporters of the rebellion.
Lincoln’s change in political tactics was based on military realities that he could not ignore. At the beginning of the war, there had been little substantial support in the North for the immediate abolition of slavery. Moreover, Lincoln had worried that any action he might take on slavery might cause the border slave states still on the Union side to secede and support the Southern proslavery cause. By the end of 1862, that fear had amounted to nothing, and it had also become clear to most Americans—North and South—that the war would not end quickly. It was also clear that Southern slaves could become a substantial asset in support of the Northern armies. Then and only then did Lincoln decide to emancipate all the slaves “owned” by Southerners in the Confederacy and, following the advice of his generals, encourage them to use the freed slaves to support the Union armies in the field. With one stroke of the pen, President Lincoln used his power as commander in chief of American forces to declare more than 80 percent of all the slaves in the United States “then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy faced an entirely different set of challenges. The Confederacy could not ignore the weakening of the Southern economy and its military effort, as an increasing number of slave owners refused to provide slaves to labor in support of the Confederate armies, while an increasing number of slaves continued to emancipate themselves and offer support to the Union armies.
The idea of emancipation entered the Confederate discussion as a military option, too. One farsighted Confederate general, Patrick Cleburne of the Army of Tennessee, went so far as to write to Jefferson Davis in December 1863: “We are waging war with the enemy in the field and an insurrection in the rear.” He went on to assert that the Confederate cause could not be sustained without the support of its slaves (who constituted more than 40 percent of the Southern population). He urged Davis to do what he had to do to earn the slaves’ loyalty for the Confederacy. This, he argued, could be accomplished only by recognizing the slaves’ own political desires and objectives in the war. “We must bind him to our cause by no doubtful bonds and the only bond sufficient is the hope of freedom. . . . It would be preposterous to expect him to fight against it with any degree of enthusiasm. When we make soldiers of them we must make free men of them beyond all questions.”
Needless to say, Jefferson Davis was not responsive to Cleburne’s advice, at least at that point in the conflict. There was no way that a war waged to preserve a permanent slave society was ready to adopt a Confederate Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
Facing the beginning of the end of his doomed fight for independence in December 1864, Jefferson Davis did belatedly suggest that slaves should be offered freedom as an incentive to fight in the Confederate army. But by then it was too late—either to act on the suggestion or for such an action to make a difference in the outcome of the war.
Davis may have missed his opportunity to make history, but Abraham Lincoln did not. Nonetheless, Lincoln’s leadership in securing emancipation has been viewed through sharply different lenses by different observers at different points in time. That it was immediately viewed as historic and momentous—and to some, outrageous—cannot be denied. The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was regarded in its own time with so much trepidation and outright fear that it provoked a Wall Street panic, Union troop desertion, bellicose foreign condemnation, vast racial unease, and severe political rebuke from voters at the polls later in 1862. After the war Lincoln was so celebrated for and closely identified with the achievement of emancipation that many Americans dubbed him “the Great Emancipator.” But that term is now considered by some historians as politically incorrect, and Lincoln’s reputation as an antislavery leader has been called repeatedly into question. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation is viewed by some scholars not as a revolutionary positive step but as delayed, insufficient, and insincere. No wonder revisionists have been debating Lincoln’s intentions, with particular emphasis on the fact that African Americans did not achieve their true “emancipation” until the era of the civil rights movement a century after Lincoln’s death.
Lincoln’s overriding commitment was to establish once and for all that the American government “of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” He did not waver in the belief that slavery was a moral and economic blight that undermined the essential American promise of government by and for its people. But he did not yet believe that immediate and total abolition of slavery should be presented as a principal object of the war. As Lincoln famously said in a letter to Horace Greele
y on August 22, 1862: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.” He went on to explain, “I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.”
Modern historians who apply twenty-first-century mores to a nineteenth-century man are not the only ones who have made it difficult to see Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation within the context of its own time. Lincoln himself is responsible for much of the confusion. He so complicated the announcement of his proclamation with continuing public arguments for compensation and colonization that it is little wonder the public had trouble then—and has continued to have problems ever since—in discerning his true motivations.
Interregnum is the archaic word that is most often applied to the four-month secession winter that separated Lincoln’s November 1860 election from his March 1861 inauguration, one of the most perilous periods in American history. But the Union endured a second equally dangerous interregnum just a year later, between July 12, 1862, the day Lincoln first revealed to a small circle of intimates his plan to emancipate slaves owned by rebel slaveholders in the South, and his announcement of the plan to the public two months later, on September 22.
To fully understand the emancipation interregnum requires us to examine not only Lincoln’s own growing sense of destiny but also his specific public relations strategy.
Lincoln believed that public policy could be successful only if it was in tune with the popular mood. He had emphasized this “central idea” in a speech to fellow Republicans in Chicago in 1856 when he said “our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much.” Lincoln returned to this central idea in the initial Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858 when he said, “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”
A Just and Generous Nation Page 12