Abraham Lincoln (11 page)

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Nowhere was the struggle more evident than in the nagging problem of slavery. How Lincoln approached that problem—and what he did about it—is one of the most written about and least understood facets of his presidency. As we examine this dramatic and complicated story, recall that what guided Lincoln in the matter of emancipation was his commitment, not just to the Union, but to what it represented and symbolized. Here, as in all war-related issues, Lincoln's devotion to the war's central idea—to preserving a system that guaranteed to all the right of self-government—dictated his course of action.

At the outset of the conflict, Lincoln strove to be consistent with everything he and his party had said about slavery: his purpose was to save the old Union as it was and not to uproot bondage in the South. He intended to crush the rebellion with his armies and restore the national authority in Dixie with slavery intact. Then Lincoln and his party would resume and implement their policy of slave containment, putting bondage once again on the road to extinction.

There were other reasons for Lincoln's hands-off policy about slavery in the South. Four slave states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—remained in the Union. Should he try to free the slaves, Lincoln feared it would drive the crucial border into the Confederacy, which would have been a calamity for the Union. A rebel Maryland would create an impossible situation for Washington, D.C. And a Confederate Missouri and Kentucky would give the insurrectionists potential bases from which to
invade Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. As a popular witticism went, “Lincoln would like to have God on his side, but he must have Kentucky.” So Lincoln rejected emancipation in part to appease the loyal border.

He was also waging a bipartisan war effort, with northern Democrats and Republicans alike enlisting in his armies to save the Union and its experiment in popular government. Lincoln encouraged this because he insisted that the North must be united if it was to win the war. An emancipation policy, he feared, would alienate northern Democrats, ignite a racial powder keg in the northern states, and possibly cause a civil war in the rear. Then the Union cause really would be lost.

But in little more than a year the pressures and problems of civil war caused Lincoln to change his mind, caused him to abandon his hands-off policy and strike at slavery in the rebel states, thus making emancipation a Union war objective. There was no single reason why he did so—certainly the reason was not political expediency. On the contrary, the pressures operating on Lincoln were varied and complex.

First, from the summer of 1861 on, several Republican senators—chief among them Charles Summer of Massachusetts, Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, and Zachariah Chandler of Michigan—met frequently with Lincoln and implored him to alter his slave policy. Perhaps no other group prodded and pushed the President so much as they.

Sumner was a tall, elegant bachelor, with rich brown hair, a massive forehead, blue eyes, and a rather sad smile. He had traveled widely in England, where his friends included some of the most eminent political and literary figures. A humorless, erudite Bostonian, educated at Harvard, Sumner had a fondness for tailored coats, checkered trousers, and English gaiters. He was so conscious of manners, said a contemporary, “that he never allowed himself, even in the privacy of his own chamber, to fall into a position which he would not take in his chair in the Senate.” He spoke out with great courage against racial inequality. Back in
1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina had beaten him almost to death in the Senate chamber for his “Crime Against Kansas” speech, and Sumner still carried physical and psychological scars from that attack. The senator now served as one of Lincoln's chief foreign policy advisers, often accompanied him on his carriage rides, and became the President's warm personal friend and a close companion of his wife.

Zachariah Chandler was a Detroit businessman who had amassed a fortune in real estate and dry goods. Profane, hard-drinking, and eternally grim, Chandler had been one of the founders of the national Republican party and had served on the Republican National Committee in 1856 and 1860. Elected to the Senate in 1857, he had plunged into the acrimonious debates over slavery on the frontier, exhorting his colleagues not to surrender another inch of territory to slaveholders. When southerners threatened to murder Republicans, brandishing pistols and bowie knives in the Senate itself, Chandler took up calisthenics and improved his marksmanship in case he had to fight. Once civil war commenced, he demanded that the government suppress the “armed traitors” of the South with all-out warfare.

New serving his second term as Senator from Ohio, Benjamin Franklin Wade was short and thick-chested, with iron-gray hair, sunken black eyes, and a square and beardless face. He was blunt and irascible, known as “Bluff Ben” for his readiness to duel with slaveowners, and he told more ribald jokes than any other man in the Senate. Yet he also had a charitable side: once when he spotted a destitute neighbor robbing his corncrib, Wade moved out of sight in order not to humiliate the man. Once the war began, he was determined that Congress should have an equal voice with Lincoln in shaping Union war policies. According to a foreign diplomat, Wade was “perhaps the most energetic personality in the entire Congress.” “That queer, rough, but intelligent-looking man,” said one Washington observer, “is old Senator Wade of Ohio, who doesn't care a pinch of snuff whether people like what he says or not.” Wade hated slavery as Sumner and
Chandler did, and promised southern secessionists that “the first blast of civil war is the death warrant of your institution.”

But, like most whites of his generation, Wade was prejudiced against blacks: he complained about their “odor,” growled about all the “Nigger” cooks in Washington, and insisted that he had eaten food “cooked by Niggers until I can smell and taste the Nigger…all over.” Like most Republicans, he thought the best solution to America's race problem was to ship all Negroes back to Africa.

As far as the Republican party was concerned, the three Senators belonged to a loose faction inaccurately categorized as “radicals,” a misnomer that has persisted through the years. These “more advanced Republicans,” as the Detroit
Post and Tribune
called them, were really progressive, nineteenth-century liberals who felt a powerful kinship with English liberals like John Bright and Richard Cobden. What advanced Republicans wanted was to reform the American system—to bring their nation into line with the Declaration's premise—by ridding it of slavery and the South's ruling planter class. But, while the advanced Republicans supported other social reforms, spoke out forthrightly against the crime and anachronism of slavery, and refused to compromise with the “Slave Power,” they desired no radical break with American ideals and liberal institutions. Moreover, they were often at odds with one another on such issues as currency, the tariff, and precisely what rights black people should exercise in American white society.

Before secession, the advanced Republicans had endorsed the party's hands-off policy about slavery in the South: they all agreed that Congress had no constitutional authority to menace slavery as a state institution; all agreed, too, that the federal government could only abolish slavery in the national capital and outlaw it in the national territories, thus confining the institution to the South where they hoped it would perish, as Lincoln did. But civil war had removed their constitutional scruples about slavery in the southern states, thereby bringing about the first significant differ
ence between them and the more “moderate” and “conservative” members of the party. While the latter insisted that the Union must be restored with slavery undamaged, the advanced Republicans argued that the national government could now remove the peculiar institution by the war power, and they wanted the President to do it in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief.

This was what Sumner, Wade, and Chandler came to talk about with Lincoln. They respected the President, had applauded his nomination, campaigned indefatigably in his behalf, and cheered his firm stand at Fort Sumter. Now they urged him to destroy slavery as a war measure, pointing out that this would maim and cripple the Confederacy and hasten an end to the rebellion. Sumner flatly asserted that slavery and the rebellion were “mated” and would stand or fall together.

Second, they reminded Lincoln that slavery had caused the war, was the reason the southern states had seceded, and was now the cornerstone of the Confederacy. It was absurd, the senators contended, to fight a war without removing the thing that had brought it about. Should the South return to the Union with slavery intact, as Lincoln desired, southerners would just start another war over slavery, whenever they thought it threatened again, so that the current struggle would have accomplished nothing. If Lincoln really wanted to save the Union, he must tear slavery out root and branch and smash the South's planter class—that mischievous class the senators thought had masterminded secession and fomented war.

Sumner, as a major Lincoln adviser on foreign affairs, also linked emancipation to foreign policy. There was a strong possibility that Britain would recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation—something that could be disastrous for the Union. As a member of the family of nations, the Confederacy could form alliances and seek mediation and perhaps armed intervention in the American conflict. But, Sumner argued, if Lincoln made the destruction of slavery a Union war aim, Britain would balk at recognition and intervention. Why so? Because she was proud of her antislavery
tradition, Sumner said, and would refrain from helping the South protect human bondage from Lincoln's armies. And whatever powerful Britain did the rest of Europe was sure to follow.

Also, as Sumner kept reminding everyone, emancipation would break the chains of several million oppressed human beings and right America at last with her own ideals. Lincoln and the Republican party could no longer wait for time to remove slavery. The President must do it by the war power. The rebellion, monstrous and terrible though it was, had given him the opportunity to do it.

The abolitionists belabored that point too. They wrote Lincoln, petitioned him, addressed him from the stump and in their newspapers, descended on the White House one after another—right-minded men and women, black people and white, who battled slavery in Dixie and racial discrimination in the North, come now to convert the President himself. Foremost in that effort was Frederick Douglass, the most eminent Negro of his generation, a handsome, eloquent man who had escaped slavery in Maryland and become a self-made man like Lincoln, raising himself to prominence as an editor and reformer. From the outset, Douglass saw the end of slavery in this war, and he mounted a one-man crusade to win Lincoln to that idea. In his newspaper and on the platform, Douglass thundered at the man in the White House, playing on his personal feelings about slavery, rehearsing the same arguments that Sumner and his colleagues were giving Lincoln in person. You fight the rebels with only one hand, Douglass said. The mission of this war is the destruction of bondage as well as the salvation of the Union. “The very stomach of this rebellion is the negro in the condition of a slave. Arrest that hoe in the hands in the negro, and you smite rebellion in the very seat of its life,” he said. “The Negro is the key of the situation—the pivot upon which the whole rebellion turns,” he said. “Teach the rebels and traitors that the price they are to pay for the attempt to abolish this Government must be the abolition of slavery,” he said. “Hence forth let the war
cry be down with treason, and down with slavery, the cause of treason.”

The pressure on Lincoln to strike at slavery was unrelenting. In between abolitionist delegations came Sumner and his stern colleagues again, with Vice-President Hannibal Hamlin and Congressman Owen Lovejoy, also advanced Republicans, often with them. As the war progressed, they raised still another argument for emancipation, an argument Douglass and members of Lincoln's own Cabinet were also making. In 1862, his armies suffered from manpower shortages on every front. Thanks to repeated Union military failures and to a growing war weariness across the North, volunteering had fallen off sharply; and Union generals bombarded Washington with shrill complaints, insisting that they faced an overwhelming southern foe and must have reinforcements before they could win battles or even fight. While Union commanders often exaggerated rebel strength, Union forces did need reinforcements to carry out a successful offensive war. As Sumner reminded Lincoln, the slaves were an untapped reservoir of strength. “You need more men,” Sumner said, “not only at the North, but at the South. You need the slaves.” If Lincoln freed them, he could recruit black men into his armed forces, thus helping to solve his manpower woes.

On that score, the slaves themselves were contributing to the pressures on Lincoln to emancipate them. Far from being passive recipients of freedom, as Vincent Harding has rightly reminded us, the slaves
were
engaged in self-liberation, abandoning rebel farms and plantations and escaping to Union lines by the thousands. This in turn created a tangled legal problem that bedeviled the Lincoln administration. What was the status of such “contraband of war,” as Union General Benjamin F. Butler designated them? Were they still slaves? Were they free? Were they somewhere in between? The administration tended to follow a look-the-other-way policy, allowing field commanders to solve the contraband problem any way they wished. Some officers sent the fugitives back to the Confederacy, others turned them over to
refugee camps, where benevolent organizations attempted to care for them. But with more and more slaves streaming into Union lines, Sumner, several of Lincoln's Cabinet members, Douglass, and many others urged him to grant them freedom and enlist the able-bodied men in the army. “Let the slaves and free colored people be called into service and formed into a liberating army,” Douglass exhorted the President, “to march into the South and raise the banner of Emancipation among the slaves.”