Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power

by Richard J. Carwardine

  Lincoln’s annual message to Congress in December 1861 thus trod cautiously and played to conservative sentiment in briefly discussing colonization as a means of expatriating freedmen “at some place, or places, in a climate congenial to them.” Yet it was not the document of a man insensitive to emancipationists’ promptings. He drew attention to his endorsement of the Confiscation Act of August 1861, by which some slaves had already been freed; he intimated that individual states might choose to adopt its principles; and he promised to consider any further emancipatory law that Congress might pass. Then he declared, in what would become a familiar formulation, that “all indispensable means must be employed” to secure the Union. True, he gave a reassurance that he would do all he could to prevent the conflict from degenerating “into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle,” and insisted that “we should not be in haste to determine that radical and extreme measures, which may reach the loyal as well as the disloyal, are indispensable.” But the implication was clear: if the Union’s survival depended on emancipation as a last resort, he would not rule it out. Significantly, Lincoln accompanied these remarks with the pregnant aside that he must keep “all questions . . . of vital military importance” in his own hands. Some months would elapse before Lincoln thoroughly sifted the arguments relating to the war powers of the president, but already there was a hint that military considerations might allow the commander-in-chief constitutionally to pursue emancipation.16

  Even so, the overall tone of the president’s address did nothing to shake the confidence of Democrats and conservative Republicans that there was an old Whig under Lincoln’s skin and that, in McClellan’s words, “the Presdt is perfectly honest & is really sound on the nigger question.” For the same reason, it did nothing to inspire the congressional group of Republican radicals slowly cohering around Wade, Trumbull, and Zachariah Chandler—Hay’s “Jacobins”—who thought Lincoln unequal to the nation’s crisis, denounced his cautious pragmatism as unprincipled drift, and despaired of his refusal to attack the rebels’ most vital of interests. In a meeting between Lincoln and his Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War on the last day of 1861 Wade told him: “Mr. President, you are murdering your country by inches in consequence of the inactivity of the military and the want of a distinct policy in regard to slavery.”17

  Lincoln’s oft-quoted remark that his policy was to have no policy might seem only to confirm Wade’s stern judgment, but the president’s words were as misleading as they were jocular. During the winter months of 1861–62 he continued his “southern strategy”: recognizing slavery’s constitutional protections, reassuring the border loyalists, and keeping the South divided. The radicals’ demands he judged an invitation to catastrophe, and their strategic ineptness could at times provoke even this most equable of presidents into bad temper. He shocked Edward Pierce, the young idealist responsible for the freedmen of the Sea Islands, with his irritable scorn for the “great itching to get negroes within our lines.” But, as his annual message implied, he needed to keep his options open. Radical demands for emancipation might be a dangerous irrelevance, but they might turn out to be simply premature. When, early in 1862, George Templeton Strong raised the issue of radical pressures, the president told the conservative lawyer a tale of itinerant Methodists in frontier Illinois who, as they journeyed, quarreled about how to get over an “ugly” river. Lincoln warmed to the “old brother” who said, “Brethren, this here talk ain’t no use. I never cross a river until I come to it.”18

  The story was apposite. No crossing over from the old Union to radical new terrain would be required if, as seemed increasingly plausible, the armies’ spring offensive brought a prompt collapse of the rebellion. Lincoln’s despair and frustration at the military inaction of early January had slowly lifted. McClellan returned to vigor. Stanton brought his own distinctive energy to the War Department. The president himself, earnestly digesting manuals of military strategy, ordered a general advance of all forces on February 22. By then, indeed, western armies under George H. Thomas (at the battle of Mill Springs) and Grant (taking Forts Henry and Donelson) had swept Confederate forces from Kentucky and much of Tennessee. It seemed reasonable to hope that the imminent operations of the Army of the Potomac, whether by Lincoln’s preferred option, a frontal assault on the rebel army at Manassas, or by McClellan’s alternative, an advance on Richmond from the east, would snuff the life out of the Confederacy and restore the Union as it was.

  Within the constitutional arrangements of the old Union, however, Lincoln saw a way of both reinforcing his “southern strategy” and yet also putting slavery into retreat. He urged with increasing vigor the merits of compensated emancipation, voluntarily entered into by the states, but funded by the federal government. He had suggested a prototype scheme to Delaware loyalists late in 1861; his preference was for a thirty-one-year process of gradual manumission, at a cost to the nation of $23,200 per annum.19 As the state with the smallest slave population, Delaware seemed the most favorable place to start, but to Lincoln’s great disappointment, his allies in the state legislature failed to win over a majority of the deeply suspicious representatives, and no bill was introduced. Undeterred, and perhaps influenced by reports of a weakening of pro-slavery and disunionist sentiment in the borderlands, he took a more dramatic, high-profile, and unprecedented initiative.

  On March 6, 1862, he sent a special message to Congress, recommending that the Senate and House adopt a joint resolution promising congressional financial support to “any state which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery.” Lincoln presented compensated emancipation as a means of shortening the war, not as an act of humanity to the slaves. If the loyal slave states would simply begin such a program, he argued, it would shatter the Confederacy’s hopes of the upper South’s defection—and this “substantially ends the rebellion.”20 There were financial considerations, too: the cost to the nation of compensating slaveholders would be modest compared with the spiraling expenditure on the war. Congress, he acknowledged, had no constitutional power to impose a compensatory scheme, but a commitment to practical assistance would help persuade the relevant state legislatures of the bona fides of the federal authorities.

  No president had previously attached his name to an emancipationist proposal. Partly to reassure the states in question, but partly to cajole them into action, Lincoln addressed representatives of Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri at the White House on March 10. They had already read in his special message that they would have a “perfectly free choice,” but they could not have missed an implicit threat, too. Lincoln had rehearsed the need to use “all indispensable means” to secure the Union, noting that war itself was one such means, “and it is impossible to foresee all the incidents, which may attend and all the ruin which may follow it. Such as may seem indispensable, or may obviously promise great efficiency towards ending the struggle, must and will come.” Confronted now by sharp and anxious questioners, Lincoln offered an emollient response, telling the border men “he had no designs beyond the action of the States on this particular subject. He should lament their refusal to accept . . . [the proposal], but he had no designs beyond their refusal to accept it.” The status quo, he implied, was barely sustainable. The presence of the Union army worked to destabilize and erode slavery, as slaves of loyal masters fled into the camps, and became the source of “continual irritation” between the military and civilian authorities, plaguing him with “conflicting and antagonistic complaints.” It was quite possible “in the present aspect of affairs” that, financially at least, slaveholders had more to lose from holding onto their slaves than by accepting compensation.21

  Congress moved to pass the joint resolution by large majorities, and on April 10 Lincoln gratefully approved it. Six days later he signed into law an act providing for immediate emancipation of the three thousand slaves in the District of Columbia, where he had no doubt about the constitutional power of Congress to act. If it was
not the bill he would himself have drafted, it met two of his principles: the compensation of slaveowners and federal appropriations in support of voluntary colonization. But it disappointed him that the first move toward “abolishment” in the border had been taken not by individual slave states, but by the federal government. He continued during the spring to appeal eloquently to border loyalists, invoking “the signs of the times,” their own self-interest, and their historic opportunity to do good. But despite his skillful avoidance of partisanship, moral reproach, or an argumentative tone, and his emphasis on the opportunity for securing change that would come “gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything,” his appeal went unanswered.22 The racial antipathies of poor white laborers and the deep conservatism of most border slaveowners outweighed the support of the more realistic planters, moderate yeomanry, and mountain folk, and the pockets of real antislaveryites.

  If most border loyalists were fearful or unmoved by Lincoln’s initiatives, the response of mainstream northern opinion ranged from approving to jubilant. Though Stevens and an abolitionist minority lambasted the president’s lack of ambition, it was more significant that Sumner, Chase, and other radicals, together with progressive religious groups, lauded what they correctly identified as a historic watershed. Equally important was the praise emanating from the political center of conservative Republicans and even moderate Democrats. Raymond’s New York Times, after initial doubts over the costs of Lincoln’s plan, lauded him for striking “the happy mean.” The warm response to emancipation in the District confirmed for Lincoln the continuing shifts in the tectonic plates of public opinion.23

  But the limits to what moderate Unionists would accept were clearly exposed by General David Hunter’s actions in the Department of the South, which encompassed Union footholds on the South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida coasts. Confronted by thousands of abandoned slaves, Hunter saw their military possibilities. In two successive orders he liberated those in Union hands and, on May 9, freed all slaves in the department, implausibly stating that slavery and martial law were incompatible. By declaring every slave free and encouraging the formation of a black regiment, Hunter exceeded Frémont’s actions in Missouri and opened himself up to an onslaught of conservative and moderate voices, including that of the New York Times. Reverdy Johnson of Maryland found the legal reasoning absurd, but worried even more about the order’s implicit invitation to slave insurrections and its likely effect on border Unionism. “This act has done us more harm than a loss of two battles,” one New Yorker told Lincoln, “and has made Kentucky & Maryland almost against us if not wholly.” Radicals were far more sanguine. Chase urged the president to let the order stand, and Schurz, though agreeing that it was rather premature and too “ostensibly proclaimed,” cautioned Lincoln against a response that would tie his hands at a time when attitudes were rapidly changing.24

  Lincoln, on friendly terms with Hunter, declared the order “altogether void,” but not before he had squared his intentions with his cabinet and leading congressmen. Though many radicals rebuked him for his hesitation and timidity, Lincoln revealingly avoided the torrent of outrage that had accompanied his previous year’s treatment of Frémont. In part, this was because of Hunter’s less tenable position in law and because of the signals Lincoln had emitted by his message of March 6. But it was also because a careful reading of Lincoln’s words, as Schurz explained, indicated another step in the evolution of the president’s thinking about his constitutional powers and opened the prospect of future radical action. The government had given no military commander the authority to make slaves free, Lincoln declared. But, significantly, he added that “whether it be competent for me, as Commander-in-Chief . . . , to declare the Slaves of any state or states, free, and whether at any time, in any case, it shall have become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the government, to exercise such supposed power” were “questions which, under my responsibility, I reserve to myself.”25 He did not categorically answer those questions, but by invoking, yet again, the notion of indispensable necessity he gave a clear signal of the way his mind was moving.

  Precisely when Lincoln accepted the legitimacy and need for a presidential Emancipation Proclamation is impossible to say. The best evidence suggests that he was tussling with the issues from late May and had come close to a final decision by the end of June. By then his scheme of compensated emancipation was stalled: the Confederacy was not to be mortally wounded by the self-sacrifice of loyal border slaveholders. Some more profound weapon was needed to reverse the trend of a war which, since the victories of early 1862, had brought the Union only meager returns. Apart from Grant’s bloody western success in the equal slaughter at Shiloh (which consolidated the Union’s position and opened up the prospect of splintering the Confederacy down the line of the Mississippi) and David G. Farragut’s seizure of New Orleans, there was little to cheer. Rather, the chief story was Lincoln’s strained, even distrustful, relations with a hesitant McClellan, whose Peninsula strategy revealed itself to be a sluggish progress toward Richmond during May and June, and—after the ugly, hard engagements in the Seven Days’ Battles—an unforced retreat in early July back down the Peninsula to Harrison’s Landing on the James River. Many had doubted the general’s fidelity to the cause; Lincoln had questioned only his energy and temperament for battlefield engagement. Either way, the outcome was galling military failure.

  That failure brought grief but no great surprise to Lincoln, now physically racked by the burden of worry and responsibility. He had never felt real confidence in the Peninsula strategy, and even before its humiliating anticlimax he expected that new measures of warfare would be needed. Building on the broad reading of federal war powers earlier proffered by John Quincy Adams and embracing the argument recently developed by William Whiting, a solicitor in the War Department, Lincoln had concluded (as he had not when revoking Frémont’s proclamation nine months earlier) that, as commander-in-chief, he had the right to free the enemy’s slaves for military purposes. Equally, he had reached the view that the measure was politic, that the time had arrived to treat emancipation as one of those “indispensable necessities” for national salvation to which he had so regularly referred. When he visited McClellan at Harrison’s Landing, the commander handed Lincoln a confidential letter setting out his “general views” on the rebellion and urging that Union policy should not be to “war upon population; but against armed forces and political organizations”; there should be no confiscation of property or “forcible abolition of slavery.” It was the approach to war that for fourteen months had failed to deliver victory. Indeed, final victory now appeared depressingly remote. Lincoln pointedly refrained from any response, save cool silence, and so gave eloquent indication of what he had in mind.26

  The failure of the Peninsula campaign sent shock waves through the northern public, on whose response Lincoln would hang the timing of any emancipation initiative. Events in Virginia had rammed home with grievous ferocity what the grim battles of the early spring had already taught the more discerning: that this could no longer be treated as a short war. In prospect were enormous financial sacrifices, new danger of European intervention to restore cotton supplies, further demands for volunteers, and the possibility of conscription. From editors and political leaders Lincoln learned that military events had achieved what the clamor of radical Republicans had signally failed to do: secure unusual political convergence around a policy of military emancipation, since slavery was now increasingly regarded as “the lever power of the rebellion.” It was time to take the kid gloves off and target the home front that nourished the Confederates’ battlefield prowess. Border loyalists joined New England radicals and Protestant reformers in insisting that a proclamation of freedom would infuse the Union cause with “new life and vigor.” “Do not believe half traitors who will tell you that others will rebel in these Border States in consequence of such an act,” one West Virginian officeholder told Lincoln. “On th
e contrary men all beg for this policy! . . . The useful, producing, industrious virtuous classes will Stand-by you in all this. Only be true to them.”27

  Increasingly confident that Union public opinion had shifted into a new alignment and that border-state hostility to military emancipation could be contained, Lincoln prepared to act. He needed to keep the initiative, for Congress was itself discussing confiscation with the confidence that came from sensing a new public mood. This was but the latest in a sequence of congressional antislavery measures introduced through the spring and early summer. An article of war prohibiting the military from returning fugitives to their masters, a law prohibiting slavery in the territories, the ratification of a treaty with Britain to strengthen measures against the slave trade: these were the legislative expressions of the convergence of moderate and even conservative Republicans around the free-soil program of the radical New Englanders who ran most of the committees. Almost all Republicans now rallied behind a proposed Second Confiscation Act which would free the slaves of all rebels, not just those who took up arms against the Union, and would give the president power to admit them into military service. Lincoln took an acute interest in these debates, concerned to ensure that vindictiveness did not crush out constitutional process. His interventions—and threatened veto—angered some of the radicals, but he secured important changes. On July 17 he signed the bill, ignoring the warnings of some conservatives and border loyalists against approving a measure which signaled a war of subjugation and threatened to fragment the Union coalitions. He still had residual doubts, chiefly over the stipulation that the slaves of traitors should be “forever free”: Did not forfeiture that extended “beyond the lives of guilty parties” fall foul of the Constitution? But he withheld his veto, on the understanding that Congress would address his concerns.28