The Zealot and the Emancipator

by H. W. Brands

  Officials of Lincoln’s administration and certain of his allies in Congress employed methods of persuasion common to the era, sometimes with Lincoln’s knowledge, typically with his tacit approval. Offices were promised; reciprocal support was pledged for unrelated measures; quite possibly money exchanged hands. Whether the inducements swayed votes was difficult to know; in the murky dawn of the Gilded Age, lawmakers often expected to be rewarded for doing what they had intended to do anyway.

  The final vote was close, but positive. Celebrants again swept to the White House, where Lincoln was finally getting the hang of responding. The moment, he said, called for congratulation to the country and the whole world. But the work was not yet finished. “There is a task yet before us—to go forward and consummate by the votes of the states that which Congress so nobly began yesterday.” Loud applause. Lincoln reported that his own state, Illinois, had ratified the amendment that very day. More applause. He claimed some credit for himself in having issued the Emancipation Proclamation. More applause. “But that proclamation falls far short of what the amendment will be when fully consummated.” Lincoln acknowledged the questions that had been raised about the proclamation. Some people doubted its legal validity; others had said it didn’t go far enough. Those questions were now moot. “This amendment is a king’s cure for all the evils. It winds the whole thing up.” Tremendous applause.

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  THERE REMAINED the matter of the war. The Confederates were in dire straits but weren’t quite defeated. Their principal problem was manpower, for where Northern numbers allowed Grant to replace each soldier lost, the slimmer Southern population left Lee to watch his ranks dwindle. In desperation Confederate leaders considered a measure unthinkable to most only months before: making soldiers of their slaves. As Lee explained to Andrew Hunter, a Virginia friend and legislator—and the prosecutor of John Brown—Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was having precisely the military effect its advocates had forecast. It augmented the Union army even as it deprived the South of essential labor. The situation would get worse if the South continued to rely on white soldiers alone. “Should the war continue under existing circumstances, the enemy may in course of time penetrate our country and get access to a large part of our negro population. It is his avowed policy to convert the able-bodied men among them into soldiers, and to emancipate all.” The South faced a stark choice. “We must decide whether slavery shall be extinguished by our enemies and the slaves be used against us, or use them ourselves at the risk of the effects which may be produced upon our social institutions.” Lee preferred the latter. “My own opinion is that we should employ them without delay. I believe that with proper regulations they can be made efficient soldiers. They possess the physical qualifications in an eminent degree. Long habits of obedience and subordination, coupled with the moral influence which in our country the white man possesses over the black, furnish an excellent foundation for that discipline which is the best guaranty of military efficiency.”

  Lee acknowledged that the slaves must be offered an incentive to fight for the South; they needed to have an interest in the outcome. “Such an interest we can give our negroes by giving immediate freedom to all who enlist, and freedom at the end of the war to the families of those who discharge their duties faithfully (whether they survive or not), together with the privilege of residing at the South. To this might be added a bounty for faithful service.” Immediate freedom for enlistees was essential. “We should not expect slaves to fight for prospective freedom when they can secure it at once by going to the enemy, in whose service they will incur no greater risk than in ours.” Eventual freedom for all slaves would be the logical, and acceptable, consequence. “The best means of securing the efficiency and fidelity of this auxiliary force would be to accompany the measure with a well-digested plan of gradual and general emancipation. As that will be the result of the continuance of the war, and will certainly occur if the enemy succeed, it seems most advisable to adopt it at once, and thereby obtain all the benefits that will accrue to our cause.”

  Lee’s proposal was an abomination to others among the Confederate leaders. “I think that the proposition to make soldiers of our slaves is the most pernicious idea that has been suggested since the war began,” declared Howell Cobb, a former governor of Georgia and currently a Confederate general. “It is to me a source of deep mortification and regret to see the name of that good and great man and soldier, General R. E. Lee, given as authority for such a policy. My first hour of despondency will be the one in which such a policy shall be adopted. You cannot make soldiers of slaves, nor slaves of soldiers. The moment you resort to negro soldiers your white soldiers will be lost to you; and one secret of the favor with which the proposition has been received in portions of the Army is the hope that when negroes go into the Army they will be permitted to retire. It is simply a proposition to fight the balance of the war with negro troops. You can’t keep white and black troops together, and you can’t trust negroes by themselves.” Cobb allowed that slaves might be manual laborers in support of the army. “Use all the negroes you can get, for all the purposes for which you need them, but don’t arm them. The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”

  The Confederate congress split the difference. In March 1865 it passed a law allowing the enlistment of slaves in the Confederate military, to serve in “whatever capacity” the Confederate president directed. That is, the black soldiers could be armed. But the measure was silent on emancipation. “Nothing in this act shall be construed to authorize a change in the relation which the said slaves shall bear toward their owners, except by consent of the owners and of the states in which they may reside,” it declared.

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  THIS LAST—and unavailing—gasp of the Confederacy shortly followed Lincoln’s first words of his second term. They were few but carefully chosen. “At this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first,” he explained to the audience on the muddy Capitol grounds. “Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all.”

  Lincoln considered that earlier inauguration. “Four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war, seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.”

  He reflected on the cause of the war. “One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.”

  The course of the war had surprised both sides. “Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for
an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.”

  Lincoln referred to God more freely these days, perhaps because the weight of the war had become too much for him to bear alone. But he did so modestly, appreciating that appeals to the Almighty weren’t a monopoly of either side in the conflict. “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God,” he said. “And each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”

  He quoted the evangelist Matthew: “Woe unto the world because of offenses, for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” In his own voice he said, “If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?”

  He was approaching his end. “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ ”

  It was a sobering thought: that there might be much more blood to shed. He closed on a more promising note. “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

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  FREDERICK DOUGLASS ATTENDED Lincoln’s inauguration, and while he recognized how far the country had come since the first inauguration, he sensed some unnerving similarities between the two moments. “There was murder in the air then, and there was murder in the air now,” Douglass wrote. “His first inauguration arrested the fall of the republic, and the second was to restore it to enduring foundations. At the time of the second inauguration the rebellion was apparently vigorous, defiant, and formidable, but in reality, weak, dejected, and desperate. It had reached that verge of madness when it had called upon the negro for help to fight against the freedom which he so longed to find, for the bondage he would escape—against Lincoln the emancipator, for Davis the enslaver. But desperation discards logic as well as law, and the South was desperate.” Grant was at the gates of Richmond, and Sherman had reached the sea. The days of the Confederacy were numbered. “This condition of things made the air at Washington dark and lowering. The friends of the Confederate cause here were neither few nor insignificant. They were among the rich and influential. A wink or a nod from such men might unchain the hand of violence and set order and law at defiance. To those who saw beneath the surface it was clearly perceived that there was danger abroad, and as the procession passed down Pennsylvania Avenue I for one felt an instinctive apprehension that at any moment a shot from some assassin in the crowd might end the glittering pageant and throw the country into the depths of anarchy.”

  Douglass suppressed his grim thoughts for the moment. Lincoln had won; the Union was being secured; slavery’s days were numbered. He joined the throng gathered to witness the new beginning. “Reaching the Capitol, I took my place in the crowd where I could see the presidential procession as it came upon the east portico, and where I could hear and see all that took place.” Little of celebration infused the moment. “The whole proceeding was wonderfully quiet, earnest, and solemn. From the oath as administered by Chief Justice Chase”—Salmon Chase had succeeded Roger Taney, who had died the previous autumn after twenty-eight years in office—“to the brief but weighty address delivered by Mr. Lincoln, there was a leaden stillness about the crowd. The address sounded more like a sermon than like a state paper. In the fewest words possible he referred to the condition of the country four years before on his first accession to the presidency, to the causes of the war, and the reasons on both sides for which it had been waged.”

  Douglass deemed the words well suited to the occasion. “They struck me at the time, and have seemed to me ever since, to contain more vital substance than I have ever seen compressed in a space so narrow.” Yet this judgment wasn’t universally shared. “When I clapped my hands in gladness and thanksgiving at their utterance, I saw in the faces of many about me expressions of widely different emotion.” Already the course of reconstruction was being contested; by no means did all of Lincoln’s listeners take pleasure in his call for reconciliation.

  On that day Douglass encountered the new vice president, who intensified his foreboding. “I was standing in the crowd by the side of Mrs. Thomas J. Dorsey, when Mr. Lincoln”—who had seen Douglass in the audience—“touched Mr. Johnson and pointed me out to him. The first expression which came to his face, and which I think was the true index of his heart, was one of bitter contempt and aversion. Seeing that I observed him, he tried to assume a more friendly appearance, but it was too late; it is useless to close the door when all within has been seen. His first glance was the frown of the man; the second was the bland and sickly smile of the demagogue. I turned to Mrs. Dorsey”—the wife of a prominent black man of Philadelphia—“and said, ‘Whatever Andrew Johnson may be, he certainly is no friend of our race.’ ”

  Douglass remained in the capital through the evening. “The usual reception was given at the executive mansion, and though no colored persons had ever ventured to present themselves on such occasions, it seemed, now that freedom had become the law of the republic, and colored men were on the battlefield mingling their blood with that of white men in one common effort to save the country, that it was not too great an assumption for a colored man to offer his congratulations to the President with those of other citizens. I decided to go.” He tried to get other black men to go with him, but all begged off, not wishing to share the embarrassment they felt sure Douglass would experience. “It was finally arranged that Mrs. Dorsey should bear me company, so together we joined in the grand procession of citizens from all parts of the country, and moved slowly towards the executive mansion. I had for some time looked upon myself as a man, but now in this multitude of the elite of the land, I felt myself a man among men.”

  His pride took a blow when he reached the door. “Two policemen stationed there took me rudely by the arm and ordered me to stand back, for their directions were to admit no persons of my color.” Douglass instantly objected. “I told the officers I was quite sure there must be some mistake, for no such order could have emanated from President Lincoln; and that if he knew I was at the door he would desire my admission.” The officers, not wishing a scene, escorted him in. But instead of taking him to the main reception room, they hustled him toward a side exit. As soon as he realized what was afoot, Douglass stopped and stood his ground. “You have deceived me,” he declared. “I shall not go out of this building till I see President Lincoln.” Just then a white man Douglass knew passed by on the way in. Douglass got his attention. “Be so kind as to say to Mr. Lincoln that Frederick Douglass is detained by officers at the door,” he said. Shortly there came back orders that Douglass and his friend were to be admitted. “Mrs. Dorsey and I walked into the spacious East Room, amid a scene of elegance such as in this country I had never before witnessed. Like a mountain pine high above all others, Mr. Lincoln stood, in his grand simplicity and home-like b
eauty. Recognizing me, even before I reached him, he exclaimed, so that all around could hear him, ‘Here comes my friend Douglass.’ ”

  Lincoln drew Douglass aside. “I am glad to see you,” he said. “I saw you in the crowd today, listening to my inaugural address. How did you like it?”

  “Mr. Lincoln, I must not detain you with my poor opinion, when there are thousands waiting to shake hands with you,” Douglass replied.

  “No, no, you must stop a little, Douglass. There is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours. I want to know what you think of it.”

  “Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort,” Douglass said.

  “I am glad you liked it,” Lincoln said.

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  IF FREDERICK DOUGLASS HEARD an echo of John Brown in Lincoln’s second inaugural address, he didn’t mention it. But as one who had known Brown well, Douglass—then or later—must have reflected that Lincoln’s suggestion that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword” sounded chillingly like Brown’s final prediction that “the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”

  John Wilkes Booth hadn’t known Brown, although he had made a point of attending his execution. Nor did he know Abraham Lincoln, though he watched and listened at Lincoln’s second inauguration. Booth had come to his own conclusion about blood and guilt, and he intended to act on it, in a way not unlike Brown’s. “John Brown was a man inspired, the grandest character of the century!” he had said then. He now cast himself in a similar role. Booth’s identification with the South had intensified since Harpers Ferry. As the secession crisis unfolded in the weeks after Lincoln’s first election, Booth composed a dramatic soliloquy supporting the South. “I will fight with all my heart and soul, even if there’s not a man to back me, for equal rights and justice to the South,” he vowed. Those who disagreed should not be let to live. “Such men I call traitors, and treason should be stamped to death and not allowed to stalk abroad in any land. So deep is my hatred for such men that I could wish I had them in my grasp and I the power to crush. I’d grind them into dust!” Booth valued the small part he had played against treason. “I saw John Brown hung, and I blessed the justice of my country’s laws. I may say I helped to hang John Brown, and while I live, I shall think with joy upon the day when I saw the sun go down upon one traitor less within our land.”