by H. W. Brands
But he had to do so constitutionally, which meant with the concurrence of the slave states. In early 1862, Lincoln resurrected the scheme he had proposed while in the House of Representatives for compensated emancipation. Then he had targeted the District of Columbia; now he aimed at the border states. The idea was to show a peaceful path to a post-slavery South, a path that might be trodden by the border states initially and the rebel states in time.
He moved gingerly. The initiative on emancipation, he said, would remain with the states, per the Constitution. But the federal government would provide money “to compensate for the inconveniences, public and private, produced by such change of system.” Lincoln conceded congressional prerogatives. “If the proposition contained in the resolution does not meet the approval of Congress and the country, there is the end,” he said. But he hoped Congress and the country would respond positively, and he explained why they should do so. “The federal government would find its highest interest in such a measure, as one of the most efficient means of self-preservation. The leaders of the existing insurrection entertain the hope that this government will ultimately be forced to acknowledge the independence of some part of the disaffected region, and that all the slave states north of such part will then say, ‘The Union for which we have struggled being already gone, we now choose to go with the Southern section.’ To deprive them of this hope substantially ends the rebellion, and the initiation of emancipation completely deprives them of it as to all the states initiating it.”
Lincoln made clear he was not expecting miracles. “The point is not that all the states tolerating slavery would very soon, if at all, initiate emancipation; but that while the offer is equally made to all, the more northern shall by such initiation make it certain to the more southern that in no event will the former ever join the latter in their proposed confederacy.” He stressed he was not proposing an overnight revolution. “I say ‘initiation’ because, in my judgment, gradual and not sudden emancipation is better for all. In the mere financial or pecuniary view any member of Congress with the census tables and Treasury reports before him can readily see for himself how very soon the current expenditures of this war would purchase, at fair valuation, all the slaves in any named state.” Another nod to the Constitution: “Such a proposition on the part of the general government sets up no claim of a right by federal authority to interfere with slavery within state limits, referring, as it does, the absolute control of the subject in each case to the state and its people immediately interested. It is proposed as a matter of perfectly free choice with them.”
But the choice wasn’t perfectly free. Lincoln for the first time hinted that if measures like the one he proposed were not adopted, more drastic consequences might follow. “The Union must be preserved, and hence all indispensable means must be employed,” he said. “War has been made and continues to be an indispensable means to this end.” The states in rebellion could end the war at once, simply by acknowledging the authority of the federal government. “If, however, resistance continues, the war must also continue; 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 toward ending the struggle must and will come.” Speaking to slaveholders, he added, “I hope it may be esteemed no offense to ask whether the pecuniary consideration tendered would not be of more value to the states and private persons concerned than are the institution and property in it in the present aspect of affairs.”
Lincoln didn’t expect a swift embrace of his proposal, and he didn’t get it. Congress endorsed his resolution as a statement of purpose but provided no money to fund it. Members weren’t eager to ask their constituents, many of whom cared little about slavery, to reward the slaveholders for having started the war. More than a few skeptics simply worried at the expense.
Answering the expense complaint, Lincoln elaborated on the arithmetic lesson he had given. “Have you noticed the facts that less than one half-day’s cost of this war would pay for all the slaves in Delaware, at four hundred dollars per head?” he inquired of one cost-counter. “That eighty-seven days cost of this war would pay for all in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri at the same price? Were those states to take the step, do you doubt that it would shorten the war more than eighty-seven days, and thus be an actual saving of expense.”
Legislators from the border states, whose support would be crucial to the success of any paid-emancipation scheme, were adamantly opposed. To them Lincoln made a personal plea. “Gentlemen,” he said, “after the adjournment of Congress, now very near, I shall have no opportunity of seeing you for several months. Believing that you of the border-states hold more power for good than any other equal number of members, I feel it a duty which I cannot justifiably waive, to make this appeal to you.” He reiterated that compensated emancipation, if only in the border states, could end the war. “Let the states which are in rebellion see, definitely and certainly, that, in no event, will the states you represent ever join their proposed confederacy, and they cannot much longer maintain the contest. But you cannot divest them of their hope to ultimately have you with them so long as you show a determination to perpetuate the institution within your own states. Beat them at elections, as you have overwhelmingly done, and, nothing daunted, they still claim you as their own. You and I know what the lever of their power is. Break that lever before their faces, and they can shake you no more forever.”
Lincoln appealed to the border-staters’ self-interest. “Can you, for your states, do better than to take the course I urge?” he asked. “Discarding punctilio and maxims adapted to more manageable times, and looking only to the unprecedentedly stern facts of our case, can you do better in any possible event?” The border states must face reality. “If the war continue long, as it must, if the object be not sooner attained, the institution in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion—by the mere incidents of the war. It will be gone, and you will have nothing valuable in lieu of it.”
Lincoln spoke softly, but his words carried a warning his listeners couldn’t miss. “How much better for you, and for your people, to take the step which at once shortens the war and secures substantial compensation for that which is sure to be wholly lost in any other event. How much better to thus save the money which else we sink forever in the war. How much better to do it while we can, lest the war ere long render us pecuniarily unable to do it. How much better for you, as seller, and the nation, as buyer, to sell out and buy out that without which the war could never have been, than to sink both the thing to be sold and the price of it in cutting one another’s throats.”
Lincoln remarked that for more than a year he had resisted demands to strike directly at slavery. He couldn’t resist forever. “The pressure in this direction is still upon me, and is increasing.” There was yet time for men of vision to do the right thing. “You are patriots and statesmen; and, as such, I pray you, consider this proposition; and, at the least, commend it to the consideration of your states and people.” The fate of democracy was in their hands. “Our common country is in great peril, demanding the loftiest views and boldest action to bring it speedy relief. Once relieved, its form of government is saved to the world; its beloved history and cherished memories are vindicated; and its happy future fully assured and rendered inconceivably grand. To you, more than to any others, the privilege is given, to assure that happiness and swell that grandeur, and to link your own names therewith forever.”
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LEAVING THE BORDER MEN to ponder, Lincoln sent a draft bill to the Senate and House spelling out a program of compensated emancipation. Any state that accepted his offer would receive 6 percent bonds from the U.S. government in amount equal to the number of slaves in that state, according to the 1860 census, multiplied by a dollar figure per slave to be established by Congress—prob
ably around four hundred dollars. A state that adopted immediate emancipation would receive the full amount at once; a state that chose gradual emancipation would receive its bonds by installments. Should any state renege and reinstitute slavery, its bonds would be declared null and void.
Lincoln’s bill was received, read and printed. And then it was set aside to gather dust. Congress remained to be convinced.
Yet the effort wasn’t wholly in vain. The legislature approved and funded a program for compensated emancipation in the District of Columbia. The few thousand slaves freed as a result were small in number beside the millions on the plantations of the Deep South, but Lincoln was pleased at the symbolism. “I have never doubted the constitutional authority of Congress to abolish slavery in this District,” he declared on signing the measure. “And I have ever desired to see the national capital freed from the institution in some satisfactory way.” He recalled that he had proposed this very thing during his time in Congress many years earlier; now the deed was done.
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A STUMBLING BLOCK in the politics of emancipation, even among many abolitionists, had long been the question of what to do with the freed slaves. No example existed of a successful biracial republic, and most Americans found such an entity hard to imagine. Lincoln, with many others, supported colonization in Africa or perhaps Central America—anywhere outside the United States. He persuaded Congress to appropriate money to encourage colonization; the emancipation law for the District of Columbia granted one hundred dollars to each former slave who emigrated. Colonization wasn’t popular among blacks, who had little desire to leave the only country they had ever known. So Lincoln tried to change their minds. He summoned leaders of the free black community to the White House.
“Why should the people of your race be colonized?” he asked rhetorically. “Why should they leave this country?” His answer was straightforward. “You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated.”
Lincoln acknowledged the evil done to Americans of African descent. “Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people.” The wrong began with slavery, but it didn’t end there. “Even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. You are cut off from many of the advantages which the other race enjoy. The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Go where you are treated the best, and the ban is still upon you.”
Blacks weren’t the only ones who suffered. “I need not recount to you the effects upon white men growing out of the institution of slavery,” Lincoln said. “See our present condition—the country engaged in war!—our white men cutting one another’s throats, none knowing how far it will extend.” Blacks weren’t at fault for the war, yet they were deeply involved in its origin. “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.” Lincoln reiterated for emphasis, “Without the institution of slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence.”
“It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated,” he went on. “I know that there are free men among you who, even if they could better their condition, are not as much inclined to go out of the country as those who, being slaves, could obtain their freedom on this condition. I suppose one of the principal difficulties in the way of colonization is that the free colored man cannot see that his comfort would be advanced by it. You may believe you can live in Washington or elsewhere in the United States the remainder of your life as easily, perhaps more so, than you can in any foreign country, and hence you may come to the conclusion that you have nothing to do with the idea of going to a foreign country.”
Lincoln paused. “This is—I speak in no unkind sense—an extremely selfish view of the case,” he said. “You ought to do something to help those who are not so fortunate as yourselves.” Lincoln asserted that most whites wouldn’t support emancipation if they thought it meant having to live side by side with free blacks. By emigrating, therefore, black people already free would render emancipation easier. “You would open a wide door for many to be made free.” They meanwhile would increase colonization’s chances of success. “If we deal with those who are not free at the beginning, and whose intellects are clouded by slavery, we have very poor materials to start with. If intelligent colored men, such as are before me, would move in this matter, much might be accomplished.”
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NEITHER COMPENSATED emancipation nor colonization answered the basic demand of the abolitionists. They wanted Lincoln to cut the Gordian knot and abolish slavery at once. Congress handed the president Alexander’s sword in the form of legislation permitting the confiscation of rebel property, including slaves. The first Confiscation Act, of August 1861, specified slaves in the actual service of the Confederate military; the second, of July 1862, broadened the permission to include all slaves of Confederate civilian and military officials.
Yet Lincoln still had reservations, which he expressed to the numerous individuals and groups who urged him to declare war on slavery. To a delegation of Quakers who came to the White House, Lincoln said he agreed with them that slavery was wrong. But proclaiming emancipation might do no good. “If a decree of emancipation could abolish slavery, John Brown would have done the work effectually,” he said. “Such a decree surely could not be more binding upon the South than the Constitution, and that cannot be enforced in that part of the country now. Would a proclamation of freedom be any more effective?”
The Quakers rejoined that it would have a positive moral effect. Lincoln allowed that it might, but it would create practical problems, of which he had too many as things stood. The Quakers persisted, saying they hoped God would guide him to issue a proclamation soon.
Lincoln acknowledged his need for divine guidance. He said he sometimes felt he might be an instrument in God’s hands for the accomplishment of a great work. He certainly was not unwilling to be that instrument. But he wasn’t sure God saw things the way the Quakers did.
To a group of Presbyterians, Lincoln declared that there was no difference between them and him on the immorality of slavery. “Had slavery no existence among us, and were the question asked, Shall we adopt such an institution?, we should agree as to the reply which should be made,” he said. He went on, “If there be any diversity in our views it is not as to whether we should receive slavery when free from it, but as to how we may best get rid of it already amongst us. Were an individual asked whether he would wish to have a wen on his neck, he could not hesitate as to the reply; but were it asked whether a man who has such a wen should at once be relieved of it by the application of the surgeon’s knife, there might be diversity of opinion; perhaps the man might bleed to death as the result of such an operation.”
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FREDERICK DOUGLASS GREW more infuriated with Lincoln by the month. It was bad enough that the president had tried to appease the South when secession was simply a matter of words, but now the slave masters were at open war with the Union, and still he refused to strike at the source of their power. Douglass took the occasion of the Fourth of July in 1862 to excoriate Lincoln for his failure to confront the central challenge of the war. “It is by what President Lincoln has done in reference to slavery since he assumed the reins of government that we are to know what he is likely to do, and deems best to do,” Douglass told his audience. “We all know how he
came into power. He was elected and inaugurated as the representative of the antislavery policy of the Republican party. He had laid down and maintained the doctrine that liberty and slavery were the great antagonistic political elements in this country. That the Union of these states could not long continue half free and half slave, that they must in the end be all free or all slave.” Lincoln at that time had made the right and honorable choice. “In the conflict between these two elements he arrayed himself on the side of freedom, and was elected with a view to the ascendancy of free principles.”
This made the current Lincoln harder to understand. “I do not hesitate to say that whatever may have been his intentions, the action of President Lincoln has been calculated in a marked and decided way to shield and protect slavery from the very blows which its horrible crimes have loudly and persistently invited,” Douglass said. The administration’s policy regarding the Union and slavery was woefully misguided. “That policy is simply and solely to reconstruct the Union on the old and corrupting basis of compromise, by which slavery shall retain all the power that it ever had, with the full assurance of gaining more, according to its future necessities.”
Nothing could be more fatuous or repugnant, Douglass said. “What does this policy of bringing back the Union imply? It implies, first of all, that the slave states will promptly and cordially, and without the presence of compulsory and extraneous force, cooperate with the free states under the very Constitution which they have openly repudiated and attempted to destroy.” And it would leave unaddressed the problem that had split the Union in the first place. “While slavery lasts at the South, it will remain hereafter as heretofore the great dominating interest, overtopping all others, and shaping the sentiments, and opinions of the people in accordance with itself. We are not to flatter ourselves that because slavery has brought great troubles upon the South by this war that therefore the people of the South will be stirred up against it. If we can bear with slavery after the calamities it has brought upon us, we may expect that the South will be no less patient. Indeed we may rationally expect that the South will be more devoted to slavery than ever. The blood and treasure poured out in its defense will tend to increase its sacredness in the eyes of Southern people, and if slavery comes out of this struggle, and is retaken under the forms of old compromises, the country will witness a greater amount of insolence and bluster in favor of the slave system, than was ever shown before in or out of Congress.”