by H. W. Brands
Lincoln must come to see what the rest of the world saw so clearly. “Recognize the fact, for it is the great fact, and never more palpable than at the present moment, that the only choice left to this nation, is abolition or destruction. You must abolish slavery or abandon the Union. It is plain that there can never be any union between the North and the South while the South values slavery more than nationality. A union of interest is essential to a union of ideas, and without this union of ideas, the outward form of the union will be but as a rope of sand.”
The president said that the Union came first, that he must suppress the rebellion before he could reach slavery. This stood things on their head, Douglass retorted. “It is far more true to say that we cannot reach the rebellion until we have suppressed slavery. For slavery is the life of the rebellion. Let the loyal army but inscribe upon its banner Emancipation and Protection to all who will rally under it, and no power could prevent a stampede from slavery, such as the world has not witnessed since the Hebrews crossed the Red Sea. I am convinced that this rebellion and slavery are twin monsters, and that they must fall or flourish together, and that all attempts at upholding one while putting down the other, will be followed by continued trains of darkening calamities.”
The president must come to a decision. “This slavery-begotten and slavery-sustained and slavery-animated war has now cost this nation more than a hundred thousand lives, and more than five hundred millions of treasure,” Douglass reminded Lincoln. “The question is, shall this stupendous and most outrageous war be finally and forever ended? Or shall it be merely suspended for a time, and again revived with increased and aggravated fury in the future?” The choice was stark. “By urging upon the nation the necessity and duty of putting an end to slavery, you put an end to the war, and put an end to the cause of the war, and make any repetition of it impossible. But just take back the pet monster again into the bosom of the nation, proclaim an amnesty to the slaveholders, let them have their slaves, and command your services in helping to catch and hold them, and so sure as like causes will ever produce like effects, you will hand down to your children here, and hereafter, born and to be born all the horrors through which you are now passing.”
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HORACE GREELEY’S AUDIENCE WAS larger than that of Frederick Douglass. The New York Tribune was the most popular paper in the nation’s most populous city, and it gave Greeley the nation’s largest platform for registering his dismay at Lincoln’s failure to challenge slavery directly. “Dear sir,” he wrote in an open letter in August 1862, “I do not intrude to tell you—for you must know already—that a great proportion of those who triumphed in your election, and of all who desire the unqualified suppression of the rebellion now devastating our country, are sorely disappointed and deeply pained by the policy you seem to be pursuing with regard to the slaves of rebels. I write only to set succinctly and unmistakably before you what we require, what we think we have a right to expect, and of what we complain.”
The president must “EXECUTE THE LAWS,” Greeley stressed. These included the most recent confiscation law. “We think you are strangely and disastrously remiss in the discharge of your official and imperative duty with regard to the emancipating provisions of the new Confiscation Act. Those provisions were designed to fight slavery with liberty. They prescribe that men loyal to the Union, and willing to shed their blood in her behalf, shall no longer be held, with the nation’s consent, in bondage to persistent, malignant traitors, who for twenty years have been plotting and for sixteen months have been fighting to divide and destroy our country. Why these traitors should be treated with tenderness by you, to the prejudice of the dearest rights of loyal men, we cannot conceive.”
Another group did almost as much damage. “We think you are unduly influenced by the counsels, the representations, the menaces, of certain fossil politicians hailing from the border slave states,” Greeley said. These planters and their lackeys did not represent the people of those states generally, and they abetted the Confederacy. By tiptoeing around them, Lincoln damaged the Union cause. “Whatever strengthens or fortifies slavery in the border states strengthens also treason,” Greeley said.
Greeley demanded decisive action. “It is the duty of a government so wantonly, wickedly assailed by rebellion as ours has been to oppose force to force in a defiant, dauntless spirit. It cannot afford to temporize with traitors nor with semi-traitors. It must not bribe them to behave themselves, nor make them fair promises in the hope of disarming their causeless hostility.” Lincoln should have dealt with slavery from the start. “Had you, sir, in your inaugural address, unmistakably given notice that in case the rebellion already commenced were persisted in, and your efforts to preserve the Union and enforce the laws should be resisted by armed force, you would recognize no loyal person as rightfully held in slavery by a traitor, we believe the rebellion would therein have received a staggering if not fatal blow.” Most Southerners at that time were Unionists at heart, Greeley contended. But they needed support from the president of the Union. Instead they got hesitation and bumbling. The secessionists took courage, the Unionists warning. “Every coward in the South soon became a traitor from fear, for loyalty was perilous, while treason seemed comparatively safe.”
Yet it wasn’t too late. The president should now say what he hadn’t said at the start: that slaves held by rebels were no longer slaves at all. The Confiscation Act gave him the authority; he simply had to use it.
The cause of the country demanded no less. “On the face of this wide earth, Mr. President, there is not one disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union cause who does not feel that all attempts to put down the rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause are preposterous and futile—that the rebellion, if crushed out tomorrow, would be renewed within a year if slavery were left in full vigor—that army officers who remain to this day devoted to slavery can at best be but half-way loyal to the Union—and that every hour of deference to slavery is an hour of added and deepened peril to the Union.”
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LINCOLN OWED GREELEY thanks for sabotaging Seward at the Chicago convention, and he recognized the reach of the Tribune. He also understood Greeley’s generous self-regard. And so even as he gave the editor an exclusive story, in the form of a written response, he twitted Greeley’s pomposity. “I have just read yours of the 19th addressed to myself through the New-York Tribune,” he wrote in a letter for publication. “If there be in it any statements, or assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them. If there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here, argue against them. If there be perceptible in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.”
Lincoln turned to the central issue. “As to the policy I ‘seem to be pursuing,’ as you say, I have not meant to leave anyone in doubt. I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored, the nearer the Union will be the Union as it was. Broken eggs can never be mended, and the longer the breaking proceeds, the more will be broken.” Reconsidering, Lincoln backtracked and crossed out the last sentence. This would be read as a state paper; he didn’t want to sound colloquial.
Greeley had linked slavery to the struggle for the Union. Lincoln tried to disentangle the questions. “If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.”
Realizing his letter would be excerpted, Lincoln put the matter more succinctly. “If I could save the Union withou
t 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.” He reemphasized his priorities. “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 I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.”
Yet Lincoln didn’t want Greeley’s readers to think him an agnostic on slavery. “I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty,” he closed. “I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.”
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LINCOLN’S RESPONSE GAVE the abolitionists nothing. Sixteen months into the war, the president seemed no closer to striking at the root of the conflict. A delegation of clergymen from Chicago delivered a memorial, or petition, imploring him to change course. Lincoln read their paper and listened to their arguments. He assured them he had thought the slavery question over very carefully for many months. Yet he could find no easy solution. “I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the divine will,” he said. “I am sure that either the one or the other class is mistaken in that belief, and perhaps in some respects both. I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me, for, unless I am more deceived in myself than I often am, it is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter. And if I can learn what it is I will do it.”
He smiled sadly. “These are not, however, the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation. I must study the plain physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible and learn what appears to be wise and right. The subject is difficult, and good men do not agree. For instance, the other day four gentlemen of standing and intelligence from New York called, as a delegation, on business connected with the war, but before leaving, two of them earnestly beset me to proclaim general emancipation, upon which the other two at once attacked them! You know, also, that the last session of Congress had a decided majority of antislavery men, yet they could not unite on this policy. And the same is true of the religious people. Why, the rebel soldiers are praying with a great deal more earnestness, I fear, than our own troops, and expecting God to favor their side, for one of our soldiers who had been taken prisoner told Senator Wilson a few days since that he met with nothing so discouraging as the evident sincerity of those he was among in their prayers.”
But Lincoln’s visitors, having coming all the way to Washington, deserved more than this. “We will talk over the merits of the case,” he said. “What good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do, especially as we are now situated? I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope’s bull against the comet! Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel states? Is there a single court, or magistrate, or individual that would be influenced by it there? And what reason is there to think it would have any greater effect upon the slaves than the late law of Congress, which I approved, and which offers protection and freedom to the slaves of rebel masters who come within our lines? Yet I cannot learn that that law has caused a single slave to come over to us. And suppose they could be induced by a proclamation of freedom from me to throw themselves upon us—what should we do with them? How can we feed and care for such a multitude?”
He asked his visitors to think carefully about the course they advocated. “Tell me, if you please, what possible result of good would follow the issuing of such a proclamation as you desire? Understand, I raise no objections against it on legal or constitutional grounds, for as commander-in-chief of the army and navy in time of war, I suppose I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy. Nor do I urge objections of a moral nature in view of possible consequences of insurrection and massacre at the South.” Lincoln let his visitors mull these consequences for a moment. He resumed: “I view the matter as a practical war measure, to be decided upon according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion.”
Lincoln’s guests said again that the rebellion was about slavery and that until he challenged slavery he’d never defeat it. They emphasized the moral effect in Europe of an emancipation proclamation. Such a proclamation would energize the North and weaken the South.
Lincoln listened patiently. “I admit that slavery is the root of the rebellion, or at least its sine qua non,” he said. “The ambition of politicians may have instigated them to act, but they would have been impotent without slavery as their instrument. I will also concede that emancipation would help us in Europe, and convince them that we are incited by something more than ambition.” Britain had close commercial ties to the South, yet it was adamantly opposed to slavery. Emancipation would all but guarantee that the British—and the French, who were following Britain’s lead on the American conflict—would not back the Confederacy against the Union. Lincoln continued, “I grant further that it would help somewhat at the North, though not so much, I fear, as you and those you represent imagine. Still, some additional strength would be added in that way to the war. And then unquestionably it would weaken the rebels by drawing off their laborers, which is of great importance.”
Yet he couldn’t get past the problems. “I am not so sure we could do much with the blacks. If we were to arm them, I fear that in a few weeks the arms would be in the hands of the rebels; and indeed thus far we have not had arms enough to equip our white troops. I will mention another thing, though it meet only your scorn and contempt: There are fifty thousand bayonets in the Union armies from the border slave states. It would be a serious matter if, in consequence of a proclamation such as you desire, they should go over to the rebels.”
He refused to yield the moral ground to his visitors. “Let me say one thing more: I think you should admit that we already have an important principle to rally and unite the people in the fact that constitutional government is at stake. This is a fundamental idea, going down about as deep as anything.”
But he didn’t want to leave them bereft. “Do not misunderstand me because I have mentioned these objections,” he concluded. “They indicate the difficulties that have thus far prevented my action in some such way as you desire. I have not decided against a proclamation of liberty to the slaves, but hold the matter under advisement. And I can assure you that the subject is on my mind, by day and night, more than any other. Whatever shall appear to be God’s will I will do.”
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LINCOLN’S REFERENCE to God wasn’t simply for the benefit of the visiting clergy. He had never been conspicuously religious, but as the casualties mounted, he couldn’t help wondering if Providence had ordained America’s struggle. “The will of God prevails,” he mused in a note to himself. “In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. An
d having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.”
47
WITHOUT TELLING Frederick Douglass, Horace Greeley or the visiting clerics, Lincoln prepared for the moment when his policy might change. The hectic pace of the war had transformed the White House from a quiet residence to a cockpit of command, with staff and messengers coming and going constantly. To escape the frenzy, Lincoln took refuge in the telegraph office of the war department, a short distance away. One morning in the summer of 1862 he asked Major Thomas Eckert, whose desk he commandeered, for writing paper. “I procured some foolscap and handed it to him,” Eckert recalled. “He then sat down and began to write.” Eckert watched discreetly. “He would look out of the window a while and then put his pen to paper, but he did not write much at once. He would study between times and when he had made up his mind he would put down a line or two, and then sit quiet for a few minutes.”