Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (103 page)

30
.
CWL
, V, 336–37; Francis B. Carpenter,
Six Months at the White House
(New York, 1866), 22.

31
. Garrison to Oliver Johnson, Sept. 9, 1862, Garrison Papers, Boston Public Library;
Liberator
, July 25, 1862;
Douglass' Monthly
, V (Aug. 1862), 694; William H. Hale,
Horace Greeley, Voice of the People
(Collier Books ed., New York, 1961), 268–69.

Hard words, these, but Lincoln could stand them better than the sticks and stones hurled by Democrats. The emergence of slavery as the most salient war issue in 1862 threatened to turn a large element of the Democrats into an antiwar party. This was no small matter. The Democrats had received 44 percent of the popular votes in the free states in 1860. If the votes of the border states are added, Lincoln was a minority president of the Union states. By 1862 some "War Democrats" were becoming Republicans, even radicals—General Butler and Secretary of War Stanton are outstanding examples. Other War Democrats such as McClellan remained in their party and supported the goal of Union through military victory, but opposed emancipation. In 1862 a third element began to emerge: the Peace Democrats, or copperheads, who would come to stand for reunion through negotiations rather than victory—an impossible dream, and therefore in Republican eyes tantamount to treason because it played into Confederate hands. Southerners pinned great hopes on the copperhead faction, which they considered "large & strong enough, if left to operate constitutionally, to paralyze the war & majority party."
³²

War and Peace Democrats would maintain a shifting, uneasy, and sometimes divided coalition, but on one issue they remained united: opposition to emancipation. On four crucial congressional roll-call votes concerning slavery in 1862—the war article prohibiting return of fugitives, emancipation in the District of Columbia, prohibition of slavery in the territories, and the confiscation act—96 percent of the Democrats were united in opposition, while 99 percent of the Republicans voted aye. Seldom if ever in American politics has an issue so polarized the major parties. Because of secession the Republicans had a huge majority in Congress and could easily pass these measures, but an anti-emancipation backlash could undo that majority in the fall elections. This explains Montgomery Blair's concern and Lincoln's caution.

As they had done in every election since the birth of the Republican party, northern Democrats exploited the race issue for all they thought it was worth in 1862. The Black Republican "party of fanaticism" intended to free "two or three million semi-savages" to "overrun the North

32
. William K. Scarborough, ed.,
The Diary of Edmund Ruffin
, Vol. II,
The Years of Hope April, 1862–June
, 1863 (Baton Rouge, 1976), 34.

and enter into competition with the white laboring masses" and mix with "their sons and daughters." "Shall the Working Classes be Equalized with Negroes?" screamed Democratic newspaper headlines.
³³
Ohio's soldiers, warned that state's congressman and Democratic leader Samuel S. Cox, would no longer fight for the Union "if the result shall be the flight and movement of the black race by millions northward." And Archbishop John Hughes added his admonition that "we Catholics, and a vast majority of our brave troops in the field, have not the slightest idea of carrying on a war that costs so much blood and treasure just to gratify a clique of Abolitionists."
³⁴

With this kind of rhetoric from their leaders, it was little wonder that some white workingmen took their prejudices into the streets. In a half-dozen or more cities, anti-black riots broke out during the summer of 1862. Some of the worst violence occurred in Cincinnati, where the replacement of striking Irish dockworkers by Negroes set off a wave of attacks on black neighborhoods. In Brooklyn a mob of Irish-Americans tried to burn down a tobacco factory where two dozen black women and children were working. The nightmare vision of blacks invading the North seemed to be coming true in southern Illinois, where the War Department transported several carloads of contrabands to help with the harvest. Despite the desperate need for hands to gather crops, riots forced the government to return most of the blacks to contraband camps south of the Ohio River.

Anti-black sentiments were not a Democratic monopoly. The antebellum Negro exclusion laws of several midwestern states had commanded the support of a good many Whigs. In 1862 about two-fifths of the Republican voters joined Democrats to reaffirm Illinois's exclusion law in a referendum. Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, architect of the confiscation act, conceded that "there is a very great aversion in the

33
. Resolution of the Pennsylvania Democratic convention, July 4, 1862, quoted in Williston Lofton, Jr., "Northern Labor and the Negro during the Civil War,"
Journal of Negro History
, 34 (1949), 254;
Columbus Crisis
and
Chicago Times
, quoted in V. Jacque Voegeli,
Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro during the Civil War
(Chicago, 1967), 6;
New York Day Book
quoted in Forrest G. Wood,
Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction
(Berkeley, 1968), 35.

34
.
CG
, 37 Cong., 2 Sess.,
Appendix
, 242–49; Hughes quoted in Foote,
Civil War
, I, 538. For another and similar pronouncement by Hughes, see Benjamin J. Blied,
Catholics and the Civil War
(Milwaukee, 1945), 44–45.

West—I know it to be so in my State—against having free negroes come among us. Our people want nothing to do with the negro."
³⁵
To placate this aversion, some Republicans maintained that it was
slavery
which forced blacks to flee North toward freedom; emancipation would keep this tropical race in the South by giving them freedom in a congenial clime. This thesis encountered considerable skepticism, however. To meet the racial fears that constituted the party's Achilles' heel, many Republicans turned to colonization.

This solution of the race problem was stated crudely but effectively by an Illinois soldier: "I am not in favor of freeing the negroes and leaving them to run free among us nether is Sutch the intention of Old Abe but we will Send them off and colonize them."
³⁶
Old Abe did indeed advocate colonization in 1862. From his experience in Illinois politics he had developed sensitive fingers for the pulse of public opinion on this issue. He believed that support for colonization was the best way to defuse much of the anti-emancipation sentiment that might otherwise sink the Republicans in the 1862 elections. This conviction underlay Lincoln's remarks to a group of black leaders in the District of Columbia whom he invited to the White House on August 14, 1862. Slavery was "the greatest wrong inflicted on any people," Lincoln told the delegation in words reported by a newspaper correspondent who was present. But even if slavery were abolished, racial differences and prejudices would remain. "Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence." Blacks had little chance to achieve equality in the United States. "There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain among us. . . . I do not mean to discuss this, but to propose it as a fact with which we have to deal. I cannot alter it if I would." This fact, said Lincoln, made it necessary for black people to emigrate to another land where they would have better opportunities. The president asked the black leaders to recruit volunteers for a government-financed pilot colonization project in Central America. If this worked, it could pave the way for the emigration of thousands more who might be freed by the war.
³⁷

Most black spokesmen in the North ridiculed Lincoln's proposal and

35
.
CG
, 37 Cong., 2 Sess., 1780.

36
. Wiley,
Billy Yank
, 112.

37
.
CWL
, V, 370—75, from
New York Tribune
, Aug. 15, 1861. The
Tribune's
reporter submitted this account as the "substance of the President's remarks."

denounced its author. "This is our country as much as it is yours," a Philadelphia Negro told the president, "and we will not leave it." Frederick Douglass accused Lincoln of "contempt for negroes" and "canting hypocrisy." The president's remarks, said Douglass, would encourage "ignorant and base" white men "to commit all kinds of violence and outrage upon the colored people." Abolitionists and many radical Republicans continued to oppose colonization as racist and inhumane. "How much better," wrote Salmon P. Chase, "would be a manly protest against prejudice against color!—and a wise effort to give free[d] men homes in America!"
³⁸

But conservatives chided their radical colleagues for ignoring the immutability of racial differences. Abolitionists "may prattle as they wish about the end of slavery being the end of strife," wrote one conservative, but "the great difficulty will then but begin! The question is the profound and awful one of race." Two-thirds of the Republicans in Congress became sufficiently convinced of the need to conciliate this sentiment that they voted for amendments to the District of Columbia emancipation bill and the confiscation act appropriating $600,000 for colonization. As a practical matter, said one Republican, colonization "is a damn humbug. But it will take with the people."
³⁹

The government managed to recruit several hundred prospective black emigrants. But colonization did turn out to be a damn humbug in practice. The Central American project collapsed in the face of opposition from Honduras and Nicaragua. In 1863 the U.S. government sponsored the settlement of 453 colonists on an island near Haiti, but this enterprise also foundered when starvation and smallpox decimated the colony. The administration finally sent a naval vessel to return the 368 survivors to the United States in 1864. This ended official efforts to colonize blacks. By then the accelerating momentum of war had carried most northerners beyond the postulates of 1862.

Lincoln's colonization activities in August 1862 represented one part of his indirect effort to prepare public opinion for emancipation. Although he had decided to withhold his proclamation until Union arms

38
.
New York Tribune
, Sept. 20, 1862;
Douglass' Monthly
, V (Sept. 1862), 707–8; David Donald, ed.,
Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase
(New York, 1954), 112.

39
.
Boston Post
, quoted in
Boston Commonwealth
, Oct. 18, 1862; Robert F. Durden,
James Shepherd Pike: Republicanism and the American Negro
, 1850–1882 (Durham, N.C., 1957), 37.

won a victory, he did drop hints of what might be coming. On August 22 he replied to Horace Greeley's emancipation editorial, "The Prayer of Twenty Millions," with an open letter to the editor. "My paramount object in the struggle
is
to save the Union, and is
not
either to save or to destroy slavery," wrote Lincoln in a masterpiece of concise expression. "If I could save the Union without 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."
⁴⁰
Here was something for all viewpoints: a reiteration that preservation of the Union remained the purpose of the war, but a hint that partial or even total emancipation might become necessary to accomplish that purpose.

The same intentional ambiguity characterized Lincoln's reply on September 13 to a group of clergymen who presented him a petition for freedom. The president agreed that "slavery is the root of the rebellion," that emancipation would "weaken the rebels by drawing off their laborers" and "would help us in Europe, and convince them that we are incited by something more than ambition." But in present circumstances, "when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel states . . . what
good
would a proclamation of emancipation from me do? . . . I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will necessarily see must be inoperative, like the Pope's bull against the comet!"
⁴¹
Here too was something for everybody: an assertion that emancipation was desirable though at present futile but perhaps imminent if the military situation took a turn for the better.