Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (42 page)

Lincoln expected no dramatic change to follow from his final proclamation. Indeed, events suggested he was right about its likeness to an ineffectual papal bull, for the Union cause suffered further buffeting through the winter and spring of 1863. The proclamation, by signaling that the war had become an antislavery crusade, stirred disaffection within sections of the army and further energized political dissent, both amongst opposition Democrats and within the most conservative elements of the Union coalition. Pro-Confederate forces, particularly in the Midwest, grew bolder. The border remained unsettled. When the planned spring offensive eventually got under way in April, high hopes quickly fizzled. Samuel du Pont’s ambitious naval expedition against Charleston flattered to deceive. On the Mississippi, despite Grant’s maneuvers, the enemy continued to control the seemingly impregnable batteries at Vicksburg, the last strong link between the eastern and western sections of the Confederacy. In eastern Tennessee, William S. Rosecrans remained immobilized by the narrowness of his own strategic vision. Then, in early May, events in the eastern theater once more turned disappointment into the profoundest despair as the Army of the Potomac, now under Joe Hooker’s command, succumbed to a further crushing defeat at Chancellorsville. During the first six months of 1863, with his administration berated as indecisive and incompetent, Lincoln had little to show for his emancipation policy.

In this anti-Copperhead print, a Lincoln-like figure wields a scythe which threatens writhing snakes. To the left, free blacks labor fruitfully under sunny skies. To the right, plantation slaves fear the overseer’s whip, while a fugitive is pursued by bloodhounds. The implicit message is clear: antiwar Democrats act as the agents of Confederate slaveholders.

The Emancipation Proclamation opened the floodgates to antiadministration satires designed to play on Democrats’ racial fears and antipathies. The Copperhead Adalbert Johann Volck portrays a satanic Lincoln composing the Emancipation Proclamation beneath pictures depicting a sainted John Brown and race war in San Domingo. The president, seated at a table with cloven feet, tramples the Constitution and dips his pen in a diabolical inkwell. A liquor decanter provides fortification. In a striking cartoon of 1864, a black man’s feet incongruously protrude from under a Phrygian cap decorated with stars, an eagle, and an olive branch from the seal of the United States.

The mood changed radically in the early days of July, with dramatic news from both eastern and western fronts. On Independence Day, Lincoln’s face, now ravaged by exhaustion and strain, lit up with rare joy at the news of George Meade’s triumph in Pennsylvania, a bloody three-day encounter at Gettysburg which had forced Lee to turn tail; within days he learned of Grant’s even more stunning and tactically brilliant success in securing the decisive fall of Vicksburg. Though expectations of imminent final victory would soon be cruelly dashed, early July marked a military and psychological sea change in the Union. Lincoln would increasingly describe his Emancipation Proclamation as an irreversible order, making explicit what previously he had merely implied: black freedom had become an objective of the war. “I think I shall not retract or repudiate” the Emancipation Proclamation, he told Stephen Hurlbut in late July. “Those who shall have tasted actual freedom I believe can never be slaves, or quasi slaves again.” Nathaniel P. Banks, commander of the Department of the Gulf, received a similar message in August. “For my own part,” Lincoln wrote, “I think I shall not, . . . as executive, ever return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress.” Later that month, in a statement calculated for its public impact, he announced that “the promise [of freedom] being made must be kept.” And in September, delighted by military advances in Tennessee, he told Governor Andrew Johnson to get emancipation written into a new state constitution.
⁷⁶

Lincoln’s determination took memorable form in his address at the dedication of the new national cemetery at Gettysburg in November. In declaring “a new birth of freedom” to be the goal of war, he chose not to allude specifically to slavery and the black race. But, lest there be any doubt, he told Congress plainly a few weeks later, “while I remain in my present position I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation; nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress.” He took pains to reassert those precise words in the following year’s message, in December 1864, and pointedly added, “If the people should, by whatever mode or means, make it an Executive duty to re-enslave such persons, another, and not I, must be their instrument to perform it.”
⁷⁷

Lincoln sat at Alexander Gardner’s Washington studio for this classic portrait just eleven days before delivering his Gettysburg address on November 19, 1863.

During 1864 and the final months of his presidency, Lincoln consistently acted in this spirit. When, in the summer, he came under pressure to respond to what some deemed peace overtures, he classified “the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery” as nonnegotiable. (Only once, in the darkest days of late August 1864, believing his electoral defeat inescapable, did he contemplate an offer of peace without emancipation.) Earlier, he had insisted on writing into his party’s election platform a pledge of support for an emancipation amendment to the Con-stitution. Fearing that his proclamation, by deriving its authority from military need, might lack legal force after the war and be overturned by a hostile judiciary or Congress, he saw in a Thirteenth Amendment the only means of guaranteeing that African-Americans be “forever free.” Once reelected, he used patronage and every legitimate lever to secure its passage through the lame-duck Congress that had previously failed to endorse it. As the process of state ratification began, he took pride in the lead his own state of Illinois had taken in approving a measure which freed all slaves, not just those in the rebellious areas covered by his proclamation. On this “King’s cure for all the evils,” he told an impromptu gathering of supporters, “he could not but congratulate all present, himself, the country and the whole world upon this great moral victory.”
⁷⁸

Strong practical reasons stiffened Lincoln’s resolve to stand by his emancipation policy. To renege on a carefully calculated proclamation would be to confirm the charge of irresolution. It would send out the wrong signal to the European powers, whose continuing attempts at mediation were usefully undermined by Lincoln’s recasting of the conflict as a struggle over the future of slavery itself. Most of all, it was incompatible with the Union’s growing dependence on black troops. Lincoln had first followed up his final proclamation by encouraging commanders to use African-Americans not for combat but in garrison duties, “leaving the white forces now necessary at those places, to be employed elsewhere”; but he shortly came to share many commanders’ enthusiasm for raising and arming black regiments. “The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once,” he reflected to Andrew Johnson, and during the spring campaigns of 1863 he followed these words with action. After Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas’s exploratory visit to the West in April, the War Department established a special bureau for organizing “colored troops.” Soon the courage and capability of frontline black recruits—notably in Louisiana and at Fort Wagner, in South Carolina—underscored the wisdom of Lincoln’s new policy.
⁷⁹

The better the policy worked, the less likely it was that emancipation would be reversed, for, said Lincoln, “negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do any thing for us, if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom.” To abandon them would be “a cruel and an astounding breach of faith.” Democrats and conservatives in the border states and Midwest might want the proclamation retracted, seeing it as an obstacle to peace and an inhibitor of white recruitment. But Lincoln knew, as he told Grant in August, that black enlistments were becoming indispensable, “a resource which, if vigorously applied now, will soon close the contest. It works doubly, weakening the enemy and strengthening us.” A year later Lincoln estimated that some 150,000 black seamen, soldiers, and laborers served the Union. “My enemies condemn my emancipation policy,” he noted. “But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done.” By the end of the conflict, nearly 190,000 blacks had directly supported the Union’s military effort.
⁸⁰

A similar utilitarian concern marked Lincoln’s encouragement of emancipationists in the loyal slave states, where his proclamation did not apply. The weaker slavery became in the borderlands, the more forlorn the Confederates’ hopes. Turning “slave soil to free,” as Lincoln said in support of the admission of West Virginia as a free state, “is a certain, and irrevocable encroachment upon the cause of the rebellion.” Specifically, Lincoln developed pressure for compensated emancipation across the border region by endorsing the payment of bounties to loyal owners whose slaves enlisted. In Kentucky, where army officers frequently clashed with uncooperative owners, white Unionists remained chronically deaf to the appeal of voluntary emancipation, despite the stark evidence of a crumbling institution as thousands of slaves sought the sanctuary of the Union lines. It was a different tale in Missouri, where the poisonous factionalism between radical and conservative Unionists, which left Lincoln friendless, nonetheless resolved itself into an effective movement for statewide emancipation during 1864 and early 1865. More satisfactory still was the abolition of slavery in Maryland, where Lincoln had consistently nurtured the cause. “It needs not to be a secret,” he told a state leader ahead of elections for a state constitutional convention, “that I wish success to emancipation in Maryland. It would aid much to end the rebellion.” When voters narrowly ratified the emergent free state constitution in October 1864, Lincoln joined ecstatic free blacks in celebrating what he called “a big thing.”
⁸¹