Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (34 page)

SIX DAYS AFTER
meeting with the Black delegation, Lincoln gained an opportunity to emphatically declare his views on war, emancipation, and Black people. The nation’s most powerful editor, Horace Greeley, inserted an open letter to the president in his leading
New York Tribune
on August 20, 1862. Greeley had been as responsible for Lincoln’s election as anyone. He urged Lincoln to enforce the “emancipation provisions” of the Second Confiscation Act.
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“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” Lincoln replied in Greeley’s rival paper, Washington’s
National Intelligencer
. “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 that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.” In the
New York Tribune
, rising abolitionist Wendell Phillips hammered Lincoln’s
remarks as “the most disgraceful document that ever came from the head of a free people.”
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With the war looking like a never-ending highway, the midterm elections approaching, and runaways crippling Confederates faster than Union bullets, Lincoln gathered his cabinet on September 22, 1862. After laying his poker face on Americans for months, he finally showed his cards—cards William Lloyd Garrison never believed he had. Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. For slaveholding Union states and any rebel state wishing to return, Lincoln once again offered gradual, compensated emancipation and colonization. For those states remaining in rebellion on January 1, 1863, Lincoln proclaimed that “all persons held as slaves . . . shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
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“Thank God!” blared the
Pittsburgh Gazette
. “We shall cease to be hypocrites and pretenders,” proclaimed Ralph Waldo Emerson. William Lloyd Garrison enjoyed the sound of “forever free,” but little else. Lincoln, he fumed in private, could “do nothing for freedom in a direct manner, but only by circumlocution and delay.”
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In his Message to Congress on December 1, 1862, Lincoln laid out a more detailed plan for gradual, compensated emancipation and colonization. Any slave state could remain or return to the Union if it pledged loyalty and a willingness to abolish slavery at any time before January 1, 1900. The US government would compensate such states for freeing their human property, but if they decided to reintroduce or tolerate enslavement, they would have to repay the emancipation compensation. “Timely adoption” of gradual, compensated emancipation and colonization “would bring restoration,” Lincoln pleaded. The Confederate leaders largely rejected Lincoln’s proposals, emboldened by their stunning war victories in mid-December.
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Abraham Lincoln retired to his office on the afternoon of January 1, 1863. He read over the Emancipation Proclamation, “a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion,” as he termed it, that emancipated “all persons held as slaves” and allowed Black men to join the Union Army. As Lincoln read the final statement, his abolitionist treasury secretary, Salmon B. Chase, suggested that he add
some morality. Lincoln acquiesced, adding, “Upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.”

In the next two years, Lincoln made himself available to writers, artists, photographers, and sculptors who memorialized him for the historical record as the Great Emancipator. With his proclamation, Lincoln emancipated about 50,000 Black people in the Union-occupied Confederate areas that January. He kept enslaved the nearly half-million African people in border states, in order to maintain their owners’ loyalty. He also kept enslaved the roughly 300,000 African people in the newly exempted formerly Confederate areas, in order to establish their owners’ loyalty. More than 2 million African people on Confederate plantations remained enslaved because Lincoln had no power to free them. Democrats mocked Lincoln for “purposefully” making “the proclamation inoperative in all places where . . . the slaves [were] accessible,” and operative “only where he has notoriously no power to execute it,” as the
New York World
put it.

But enslaved Africans now had the power to emancipate themselves. By the end of 1863, 400,000 Black people had escaped their plantations and found Union lines, running toward the freedom guaranteed by the proclamation.
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SOME BLACK CHRISTIANS
had long prayed for a Great Emancipator, and they believed they had found him in Abraham Lincoln. Upper-crust Bostonians erupted in pandemonium when news of Lincoln’s signature reached the afternoon Grand Jubilee Concert at Music Hall on January 1, 1863. After the hat throwing, the handkerchief waving, the hugging, the shouting, the stomping, the crying, the smiling, and the kissing, the attendees began their own jubilee concert. “Three cheers for GARRISON!” someone roared. Six thousand eyes turned and searched out the fifty-seven-year-old editor who had prayed so many times for this day to come. He leaned over the balcony wall, waved, and beamed a smile that warmed New England.

Garrison praised the Emancipation Proclamation as a “turning point.” From that day forward, Garrison became a “tenacious Unionist,” as ardent a defender and deifier of Abraham Lincoln as any Republican. Whereas before he had slammed Lincoln for his sluggishness and indecision, Garrison now began to praise Lincoln’s “cautious” and “considerate” manner.
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Some people did not worship Lincoln that night, and were especially critical of the very same cautiousness that Garrison praised. The Black-owned San Francisco
Pacific Appeal
detested this “halfway measure,” insisting that “every bondsman” should have been emancipated, and “every chain . . . broken.”
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CHAPTER 18

Ready for Freedom?

IN LATE APRIL
1863, Willie Garrison, the editor’s second-oldest son, brought home an acquaintance: German immigrant Henry Villard, one of the war’s most talented young journalists. Villard had just come from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, where he had observed the war’s first emancipated people and the first regiments of Black troops. Villard shared with the Garrisons his racist observations of the “half-heathenish blacks” in coastal South Carolina. As he did so, he condemned the Blacks’ “savage superstitions” and described their “fetish worship” in ways that showed he did not understand their African religions or the ways in which they were remolding Christianity to suit their cultures. Villard derisively called their Gullah language “jargon” and looked down on them for not comprehending “our English.” Using the same line of thinking, the Sea Island Blacks could have called Villard’s language “jargon” and his religion “savage” and looked down on him for not comprehending their “Gullah” or their gods. Nevertheless, Villard’s observations confirmed what Garrison had long believed, that “nothing else could be expected, indeed, from creatures who had been purposely kept in the conditions of brutes,” as Villard said.
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For years, northern racists had agreed, almost religiously, that enslaved Africans were like brutes. They disagreed, among themselves, about the capacity of Black people for freedom, independence, and civilization. This racist northern debate—segregationists adamant about Black brutes’ incapacity, assimilationists like Garrison and Villard adamant about Black brutes’ capacity—became the primary
conversation in the wake of emancipation. Hardly anyone in a position of authority—whether in the economic elite, the political elite, the cultural elite, or the intellectual elite—brought antiracist ideas of equal Black people into this conversation.
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During his Boston stay, Villard accompanied the Garrisons about thirteen miles south to watch the drilling exercises of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. In January 1863, Lincoln had asked the Massachusetts governor to organize a Black regiment. “Men of Color, to Arms!” became the rallying point for Black male leaders. By fighting in the army, Black men were made to believe that they could earn their right to citizenship—as if Black men had to—or could—earn their rights. Black male leaders spoke endlessly of soldiers vindicating Black manhood, which itself rested on the racist assumption that there was something truly lacking in Black manhood that could only be ameliorated by killing or being killed by Confederates. At the same time, some White Unionists posed having to fight “shoulder to shoulder, with this seething, sooty negro,” as a threat to their superior manhood, as New York City’s Democratic congressman James Brooks complained. It was a nasty convergence of racist and sexist ideas on the part of both Black and White men. By the war’s end, almost 200,000 Black men had served in the war. They had been killed by the thousands and had killed thousands of Confederates. So much death as the weak Black male stereotype lived on.
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When Indiana’s governor commended Black troops for bringing back their equipment when White troops did not, the Indianapolis
State Sentinel
registered an all-out effort to “disparage the white soldiers and elevate the negro soldiers.” White soldiers never reported to Black officers, they faced more combat, were rarely enslaved or killed when captured, and were paid more money. Still, the accusation of Black favoritism was unending.

Racist ideas were easy to revise, especially as the demands of discriminators changed. Democrats changed their racist ideas to properly attack Black soldiers. While before the war they had justified slavery by stressing Black male physical superiority, during the war they promoted White soldiers and stressed White male physical superiority.
While before the war they had justified slavery by deeming Blacks naturally docile and well equipped to take orders, during the war they stressed that Blacks were uncontrollable brutes, arguing against the Republicans, who said that naturally docile Blacks made great soldiers. Republicans often credited superb Black performances on the battlefield to their superb submissiveness and to their excellent White commanders. Both sides used the same language, the same racist ideas at different points, to make their case, reinforcing the language and ideas with plausible examples on the battlefield.
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After the Union’s excitement over winning at Gettysburg in early July 1863, and the success at Vicksburg, which divided the Confederacy into two, depressing war news came from South Carolina. On July 18, 1863, almost half of the Black 54th Massachusetts had been killed, captured, or wounded while leading the failed assault on Fort Wagner. The beachhead fortification defended the southern approach to the citadel of the South, Charleston. Six hundred tired and hungry Blacks had sprinted in a twilight of bullets and shells toward “maddened” Confederates and engaged in ferocious hand-to-hand combat. The stories of this battle shot through the North almost as quickly as the Confederacy murdered the captured. The
New York Tribune
accurately predicted that the battle would be the decisive turning point in the northern debate over Blacks’ capacity to fight. As it turned out, the battle was decisive in more ways than one.
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Catholic publicist Orestes A. Brownson had been one of many powerful Americans advocating emancipation as a war measure and colonization as a postwar measure, and he had advised Lincoln accordingly in 1862. After Fort Wagner, Brownson had to admit that the “negro, having shed his blood in defense of the country, has the right to regard it as his country. And hence deportation or forced colonization is henceforth out of the question.”
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President Lincoln still held out hope for colonization early in 1863. He advanced money to a Black minister establishing a settlement in Liberia, and he complained to an Ohio congressman that he did not “know what we should do with these people—Negroes—after peace came.” War demands for able-bodied soldiers, and the postwar
demands for able-bodied and loyal southern labor and voters, had begun to shift public opinion away from colonization. The debacle of the Lincoln administration’s colonization schemes sealed the movement’s fate. By July 1863, Lincoln was speaking about the “failure” of colonization. In 1864, Congress froze its appropriation for colonization, and Lincoln abandoned it as a potential postwar policy. The
Chicago Tribune
confidently declared “The End of Colonization.” But it was not the end of racism. The Lincoln administration’s progression of racism meant confining these loyal Black voters and laborers to the South, away from the northern and western free White soil.
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The reconstruction of the Union seemed to be on everyone’s mind, including abolitionists. In late January 1864, Garrison challenged an anti-Lincoln resolution at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society meeting. Garrison’s longtime friend Wendell Phillips, primed to take the helm of abolitionism from his old friend and mentor, labeled Lincoln “a half-converted, honest Western Whig, trying to be an abolitionist.” As Garrison stared down emancipation, Phillips looked past emancipation at the reconstruction of the United States. Back in December 1863, Lincoln had announced his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, which offered restoration of rights (except slaveholding) to all Confederates taking the loyalty oath. When loyalty levels reached 10 percent, states could establish governments that restricted civil rights for Black residents, Lincoln had proposed. But this proposal “frees the slave and ignores the negro,” Phillips snapped. The sizable free biracial community of New Orleans snapped, too, demanding voting rights. These biracial activists separated “their struggle from that of the Negroes,” said an observer. “In their eyes, they were nearer to the white man; they were more advanced than the slave in all respects.” Overtures to Louisiana Whites failed, and biracial activists had no choice but to swallow their racist pride and ally with emancipated Blacks by the end of 1864.
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