Abraham Lincoln (13 page)

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Lincoln's Proclamation was not “of minor importance,” as one historian maintained several years ago. On the contrary, it was the most revolutionary measure ever to come from an American President up to that time. This “momentous decree,” as Martin Luther King, Jr., later described it, was an unprecedented use of federal military power against a state institution. It was an unprecedented federal assault against the very foundation of the South's ruling planter class and economic and social order. As Union armies punched into rebel territory, they would tear slavery out root and branch, automatically freeing all slaves in the areas and states they conquered. In this respect (as Lincoln said), the war brought on changes more fundamental and profound than either side had expected when the conflict began. Now slavery would perish as the Confederacy perished, would die by degrees with every Union advance, every Union victory.

Moreover, word of the Proclamation hummed across the slave grapevine in the Confederacy; and as Union armies drew near, more slaves than ever abandoned rebel farms and plantations and (as one said) “demonstrated with their feet” their desire for freedom. In short, slaves like these did not sit back and wait for their liberty: they went out and got it for themselves.

The Proclamation was not some anemic document that in
effect freed no slaves. By November, 1864, the Philadelphia
North American
estimated that more than 1,300,000 Negroes had been liberated by Lincoln's Proclamation or “the events of the war.” By war's end, all three and a half million slaves in the defeated Confederacy could claim freedom under Lincoln's Proclamation and the victorious Union flag.

What is more, the Proclamation did something for Lincoln personally that has never been stressed enough. In truth, the story of emancipation could well be called the liberation of Abraham Lincoln. For in the process of granting freedom to the slaves, Lincoln also emancipated himself from his old dilemma. His Proclamation now brought the private and the public Lincoln together: now the public statesman could obliterate a wicked thing the private citizen had always hated, a thing that had long had “the power of making me miserable.” Now the public statesman could destroy what he regarded as “a cruel wrong” that had always besmirched America's experiment in popular government, had always impeded her historic mission in the progress of human liberty in the world.

The Proclamation also opened the army to black volunteers, and northern free Negroes and southern ex-slaves now enlisted as Union soldiers. As Lincoln said, “the colored population is the great
available
and yet unavailed of, force for restoring the Union.” And he now availed himself of that force. In occupied northern Alabama, a Union recruiter “of salty temper” put up a large poster with the legend: “
ALL SLAVES WERE MADE FREEMEN BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
. Come, then, able-bodied
COLORED MEN
, to the nearest United States Camp, and fight for the
STARS AND STRIPES
.” And fight they did. In all, some 186,000 Negro troops—most of them emancipated slaves—served in Union forces on every major battle front, helping to liberate their brothers and sisters in bondage and to save the American experiment. As Lincoln observed, the blacks added
enormous and indispensable strength to the Union war machine. Without them, it is doubtful that he could have won the war.

Unhappily, the blacks fought in segregated units under white officers, and until late in the war received less pay than whites did. In 1863 Lincoln told Frederick Douglass that he disliked the practice of unequal pay, but that the government had to make some concessions to white prejudices, noting that a great many northern whites opposed the use of black soldiers altogether. But he promised that they would eventually get equal pay—and they did. Moreover, Lincoln was proud of the performance of his black soldiers: he publicly praised them for fighting “with clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well poised bayonet” to save the Union, while certain whites strove “with malignant heart” to hinder it.

As one historian has noted, the use of black troops had potent social and psychological overtones. A black soldier, dressed in Union blue and armed with a rifle and bayonet, posed a radically different picture from the obsequious “Sambo” image cultivated and cherished by southern whites. Fighting as soldiers not only gave black men a new sense of manhood, as the Reverend Turner had predicted, but undermined the whole nineteenth-century notion of innate Negro inferiority.

With blacks now fighting in his armies, Lincoln abandoned colonization as a solution to racial adjustment in Dixie. His colonization schemes had all floundered, and in any case black people adamantly refused to participate in the President's voluntary program. Across the North, free Negroes denounced Lincoln's highly publicized colonization efforts—this was their country too!—and they petitioned him to deport slaveholders instead. And Lincoln seemed in sympathy with that. Later, as the war drew to a close, he told his Cabinet that he would like to frighten rebel leaders out of the country. He waved his arms as though he were shooing chickens.

After he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln never again urged colonization in public—an eloquent silence, indicat
ing that he had concluded that Dixie's whites and liberated Negroes must somehow learn to live together. How, then, could Lerone Bennett and others maintain that Lincoln to the end of his life was a champion of colonization? That argument rests exclusively on the 1892 autobiography of Union political general Benjamin F. Butler. In it, Butler claimed that in April, 1865, Lincoln feared a race war in the South and still wanted to ship the blacks abroad. Not only is Butler a highly dubious witness, but there is not a scintilla of corroborative evidence to support his story, which one Lincoln scholar has recently exposed as “entirely a fantasy.” There is not a single other source that quotes the President, in public or in private, as stating that he still favored colonization.

In any case, such a stance would have been glaringly inconsistent with Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which called for a new birth of freedom in America for blacks and whites alike (here, in fact, is the eloquent defense of liberty that critics have found lacking in the Proclamation itself). And a colonization stance would have been inconsistent, too, with Lincoln's appreciation of the indispensable role his black soldiers played in subduing the rebellion. No man of Lincoln's honesty and sense of fair play would enlist 186,000 black troops to save the Union and then advocate throwing them out of the country. He simply did not advocate that.

Still, he needed some device during the war, some program that would pacify white northerners and convince them that southern freedmen would not flock into their communities, but would remain in the South instead. What Lincoln worked out was a refugee system, installed by his adjutant general in occupied Dixie, which utilized blacks there in a variety of military and civilian pursuits. Then Republican propaganda went to work selling northern whites on the system and the Emancipation Proclamation:
See, liberated Negroes will not invade the North, but will stay in Dixie as free wage earners, learning to help themselves and our Union cause
.

Even so, emancipation remained the most explosive and unpopular act of Lincoln's presidency. By mid-1863, thousands of Democrats were in open revolt against his administration, denouncing Lincoln as an abolitionist dictator who had surrendered to radicalism. In the Midwest, dissident Democrats launched a peace movement to throw “the shrieking abolitionist faction” out of office and negotiate a peace with the Confederacy that would somehow restore the Union with slavery unmolested. There were large antiwar rallies against Lincoln's war for slave liberation. Race and draft riots flared in several northern cities.

With all the public unrest behind the lines, conservative Republicans beseeched Lincoln to abandon emancipation and rescue his country “from the brink of ruin.” But Lincoln seemed intractable. He had made up his mind to smash the slave society of the rebel South and eliminate the moral wrong of Negro bondage, and no amount of public discontent, he indicated, was going to change his mind. He had deemed his Proclamation “an act of justice” and contended in any case that blacks who had tasted freedom would never consent to be slaves again. “To use a coarse, but an expressive figure,” he wrote an aggravated Democrat, “broken eggs cannot be mended. I have issued the Proclamation, and I cannot retract it.”

On Capitol Hill, the advanced Republicans were overjoyed. “He is stubborn as a mule when he gets his back up,” Chandler said of Lincoln, “
& it is up
now on the Proclamation.” “His mind acts slowly,” said Owen Lovejoy, “but when he moves, it is
forward
.”

He wavered once—in August, 1864, a time of unrelenting gloom for Lincoln, when his popularity had sunk to an all-time low and it seemed he could not be reelected. He confessed that maybe the country would no longer sustain a war for slave emancipation, that maybe he shouldn't pull the nation down a road it did not want to travel. On August 24 he decided to offer Jefferson Davis peace terms that excluded emancipation as a condition, vaguely suggesting that slavery would be adjusted later “by peaceful
means.” But the next day Lincoln changed his mind. With awakened resolution, he vowed to fight the war through to unconditional surrender and to stick by emancipation come what may. He had made his promise of freedom to the slaves, and he meant to keep it as long as he was in office.

When he won the election of 1864, Lincoln interpreted it as a popular mandate for him and his emancipation policy. But in reality the election provided no clear referendum on slavery, since Republican campaigners had played down emancipation and concentrated on the folly of the Democrats in running General George McClellan on a peace plank in the midst of civil war. Nevertheless, Lincoln used his reelection to promote a constitutional amendment that would guarantee the freedom of all slaves, those in the loyal border states as well as those in the rebel South. Even before issuing his Proclamation, Lincoln had worried that it might be nullified in the courts or thrown out by a later Congress or a subsequent administration. Consequently he wanted a constitutional amendment that would safeguard his Proclamation and prevent emancipation from ever being overturned.

Back in December, 1862, Lincoln himself had called on Congress to adopt an emancipation amendment, and advanced Republicans had introduced one in the Senate and guided it through, reminding their colleagues that nobody could deny that all the death and destruction of the war stemmed from slavery and that it was their duty to support this amendment. In April, 1864, the Senate adopted it by a vote of thirty-eight to six, but it failed to muster the required two-thirds majority in the House.

After that Lincoln had insisted that the Republican platform endorse the measure. And now, over the winter of 1864 and 1865, he put tremendous pressure on the House to approve the amendment, using all his powers of persuasion and patronage to get it through. He buttonholed conservative Republicans and opposition Democrats and exhorted them to support the amendment. He singled out “sinners” among the Democrats who were “on praying ground,” and informed them that they had a lot better chance for the federal jobs they desired if they voted for the
measure. Soon two Democrats swung over in favor of it. In the House debates, meanwhile, Republican James Ashley quoted Lincoln himself that “
if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong
,” and Thaddeus Stevens, still tall and imposing at seventy-two, asserted that he had never hesitated, even when threatened with violence, “to stand here and denounce this infamous institution.” With the outcome much in doubt, Lincoln and congressional Republicans participated in secret negotiations never made public—negotiations that allegedly involved patronage, a New Jersey railroad monopoly, and the release of rebels related to congressional Democrats—to bring wavering opponents into line. “The greatest measure of the nineteenth century,” Stevens claimed, “was passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America.”

On January 31, 1865, the House adopted the present Thirteenth Amendment by just three votes more than the required two-thirds majority. At once a storm of cheers broke over House Republicans, who danced around, embraced one another, and waved their hats and canes. “It seemed to me I had been born into a new life,” recalled one advanced Republican, “and that the world was overflowing with beauty and joy.”

Lincoln, too, pronounced the amendment “a great moral victory” and “a King's cure” for the evils of slavery. When ratified by the states, the amendment would end human bondage everywhere in America.
^*
Lincoln pointed across the Potomac. “If the people over the river had behaved themselves, I could not have done what I have.”

Lincoln conceded, though, that he had not controlled the events of the war, but that events had controlled him instead, that God had controlled him. He thought about this a good deal, especially at night when he couldn't sleep, trying to understand the meaning of the war, to understand why it had begun and grown into such a massive revolutionary struggle, consuming hundreds of thousands of lives (the final casualties would come to
620,000 on both sides). By his second inaugural, he had reached an apocalyptic conclusion about the nature of the war—had come to see it as divine punishment for the “great offense” of slavery, as a terrible retribution God had visited on a guilty people, in North as well as South. Lincoln's vision was close to that of old John Brown, who had prophesied on the day he was hanged, on that balmy December day back in 1859, that the crime of slavery could not be purged from this guilty land except by blood. Lincoln's vision was close to that of the deeply religious slaves, to the self-liberating forebears of historian Vincent Harding, who saw the hand of God in this terrible war and the inexorable approach of Judgment Day. Now, in his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln too contended that God perhaps had willed this “mighty scourge of War” on the United States, “until all the wealth piled by the bondman'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 from the sword.”