The Fiery Trial (38 page)

On July 7, Lincoln traveled to Harrison’s Landing on the James River to confer with General McClellan, commander of the Union’s main eastern army. McClellan presented him with a letter insisting that the war must be conducted “upon the highest principles known to Christian Civilization.” Violation of civilian property rights and the “forcible abolition of slavery,” he insisted, were beneath the dignity of civilized armies. But the visit seems to have led Lincoln to the opposite conclusion from what McClellan intended. He departed convinced that the war could not possibly be won in this manner, and that what would come to be called “hard war”—war not simply of army against army but of society against society—had become necessary. This meant abandoning previous efforts to shield southern civilians from the consequences of secession.
²⁷

Lincoln returned to Washington on July 10, as Congress completed work on the Second Confiscation Act, with its emancipation provisions. Two days later, Lincoln met with the border-state delegation to press his plan for gradual abolition. The following day, July 13, while sharing a carriage with Secretaries Welles and Seward en route to the funeral of Stanton’s infant son, Lincoln for the first time broached the subject of emancipation by presidential proclamation. Welles later recollected that Lincoln “dwelt earnestly on the gravity” of the subject, saying that “it was a military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union.” Two factors, Welles believed, were uppermost in Lincoln’s mind: lack of military success, which had convinced him that the nation could no longer pursue a “forbearing policy” toward Confederates, and the failure of his border initiative. Lincoln had “concluded that emancipation in rebel areas must precede that in the border, not the other way around.” In a letter to his wife that day, Welles wondered why he had been chosen to hear the momentous announcement. “I scarcely know what to make of it,” he wrote.
²⁸

On July 21, 1862, four days after he signed the Second Confiscation Act and the Militia Act, Lincoln informed the cabinet that he had resolved on decisive new measures. He presented the drafts of four new orders. The first gave field commanders the authority to live off the land in hostile territory (that is, to appropriate civilian property). The others authorized the use of blacks as military laborers; required the army to keep records of confiscated property, including slaves, so loyal owners could receive compensation; and envisioned “the colonization of negroes in some tropical territory.” The first three, which essentially executed provisions of the confiscation and militia acts, received the cabinet’s unanimous approval. The colonization proposal garnered little support and was, for the moment, dropped. The cabinet also discussed another request from General Hunter to enlist black soldiers. Cabinet members were favorably disposed, but Lincoln “expressed himself as averse to arming negroes.”
²⁹

The next day, July 22, the discussion continued. Lincoln had prepared a new draft order, which he read to the cabinet. It consisted of three sentences. The first, citing the Second Confiscation Act, warned Confederates to cease the rebellion within sixty days or face the confiscation of their property, including slaves. The second reaffirmed Lincoln’s support for compensated, gradual emancipation. The third, invoking his authority as commander in chief, declared that on January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any state or states” still under Confederate control “shall then, thenceforward, and forever, be free.”
³⁰

Presented without fanfare and appearing almost an afterthought, this final sentence constituted the initial version of the Emancipation Proclamation. It went well beyond anything Congress or Lincoln had previously envisioned. Apart from the act freeing a few slaves in the territories, previous steps toward emancipation had carefully distinguished between loyal and Confederate owners. They kept up, one northern newspaper complained, “the confounded distinction between the slaves of one class of people and those of another,” making emancipation a punishment for rebellion and permitting slaveowning “as a
reward
for devotion to the government.”
³¹
Moreover, the Second Confiscation Act, despite its potential for future emancipation, did not apply to the vast majority of slaves until they came within Union control. Now, Lincoln audaciously proposed to extend wartime emancipation to all the slaves in most of the places where the institution existed. Abolition would be immediate and without compensation. Whether the owner was loyal to the Union or a rebel would make no difference.

Lincoln’s cabinet seems to have been stunned by this announcement. Chase, the most radical member, remained silent. He admitted shortly after the meeting that the plan went “beyond anything I have recommended.” But he worried that state courts would not recognize the freedom of those liberated by such a proclamation, and feared the proposal would lead to “depredation and massacre.” He preferred incremental emancipation by local commanders as the army occupied southern territory. Stanton, who had favored emancipation for months, supported the immediate promulgation of the document. Montgomery Blair expressed opposition, fearing that emancipation would cost Republicans votes in the fall elections. Welles said nothing. Lincoln’s plan, he later wrote, was “fraught with consequences, immediate and remote, such as human foresight could not penetrate.” It would bring about “a revolution of the social, civil, and industrial habits and condition of society in all the slave states.”
³²

Perhaps most surprising was Secretary of State Seward’s reaction. On the day before Lincoln presented his draft proclamation to the cabinet, Seward had written to James Watson Webb, the ambassador to Brazil, stating bluntly, “Slavery is the cause of this civil war.” For months, American diplomats had been recommending that emancipation be made an explicit war aim in order to forestall foreign recognition of the Confederacy or some kind of international mediation proposal. Britain, the leading world power, which had abolished slavery in its own empire in the 1830s, would be far less likely to assist the Confederacy if the issue were changed from the South’s right to self-determination to the future of slavery. Given the international situation and his long career of antislavery politics, Seward would have been expected to offer enthusiastic support to Lincoln’s proposal. But Seward had long believed that the war had doomed slavery, making government action unnecessary. Now, he argued that the announcement of an emancipation policy would actually make foreign interference more likely, since Britain would fear a permanent disruption of its cotton supply. Moreover, issuing the proclamation immediately, as Lincoln intended, would seem an act of desperation. It would be far better to wait for a military victory. That evening, Lincoln met with Seward’s political alter ego, the Albany editor and “wizard of the lobby” Thurlow Weed, who warned that the proposed proclamation would produce serious “disaffection” in the border states and could not be enforced in the Confederacy.
³³

With the cabinet divided, and perhaps still uncertain himself, Lincoln decided to put his emancipation order aside. Nonetheless, news of the proceedings, if not the actual result, quickly found its way into the press. A correspondent for the
New York Evening Post
reported that the cabinet had agreed on “total abolition” in the Confederate states “or I am grossly misinformed.” Over the next few weeks, other newspapers related that Lincoln had decided on emancipation but had delayed his announcement because of the “determined opposition” of Seward and Blair.
³⁴

Despite shelving his emancipation edict, Lincoln did issue the proposed orders allowing military commanders to seize or destroy private property (although not “in wantonness or malice”) as well as the warning to the South of the coming implementation of the Second Confiscation Act. Meanwhile, Major General John Pope, newly appointed to command the Army of Virginia, issued his own orders directing his soldiers as far as possible to live off the land, punish civilians for guerrilla activity in their communities, and deport disloyal men from occupied areas to the Confederacy. When McClellan complained to General in Chief Henry Halleck about these departures from “civilized” warfare, Halleck responded that he could not revoke the orders as he understood they had been seen and approved by the president. Pope, however, had little time to implement his policy. After his defeat at Second Bull Run at the end of August, he was transferred to the West. Not until 1864, under the far more capable Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, would the “hard war” really come into its own.
³⁵

Nonetheless, the character of the war had clearly changed, and emancipation was part of the transformation. Despite having postponed his edict, Lincoln expressed increasing exasperation with southerners who professed loyalty to the Union but demanded that he not interfere with slavery. When a prominent citizen of New Orleans complained about the actions of General John W. Phelps, who, it will be recalled, was encouraging slaves to flee to Union lines, Lincoln fired back: “What would you do in my position?…Would you give up the contest, leaving any available means unapplied?” On July 31, he sent a similar letter to August Belmont. “Broken eggs cannot be mended,” Lincoln wrote, and if Louisiana wanted to prevent slavery from being destroyed, it must quickly resume its place in the Union. The government, he added, “cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing.”
³⁶

II

L
INCOLN’S SHIFT
to a policy of general emancipation in the Confederate South did not automatically imply the abandonment of his previous plan for the border states, where his proposed proclamation would not apply. This, according to his secretary John Hay, remained “the object nearest the President’s heart.” Indeed, both his commitment to the border plan and his impending new policy for the Confederate South heightened Lincoln’s long-standing interest in the colonization of the freed slaves. The border states remained adamantly opposed to any increase in their free black population. According to the
New York Tribune
’s Washington correspondent, Lincoln frequently quoted the comment by Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky that his state’s Unionists “would not resist his gradual emancipation scheme if he would only conjoin it with his colonization plan.” Moreover, fear in the North that liberated slaves would flock into the region and become “roaming, vicious vagabonds” constituted, according to the
Chicago Tribune
, the greatest obstacle to support for general emancipation. Thus, with his border proposal still pending and emancipation in the offing, if not yet announced, Lincoln redoubled his efforts to promote colonization. This does not mean that he acted insincerely or purely for political reasons. His public support for colonization was by now a decade old. And he had yet to give serious thought to the future place of emancipated slaves in American society. Nor had most other Republicans.
³⁷

During the spring and early summer of 1862, as Congress pressed ahead with antislavery legislation, colonization played an important part in its debates. There was far more discussion of where freed slaves would reside than what rights they would enjoy. The desire to demonstrate the practicality of colonization led its advocates to strange mathematical calculations. Robert Patterson, the treasurer of the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, purported to demonstrate that “deporting
females
alone” when they “arrive at the child bearing age” would make the black population “disappear” entirely sometime in the early twentieth century. (Patterson acknowledged the “inhumanity” of his idea and the disadvantages of leaving the South with “an enormous disproportion of male slaves,” but still hoped Congress would consider it.) In the Senate, James R. Doolittle presented elaborate tables showing that if 150,000 were colonized each year, the “last remnants of the slave population” would be gone by 1907.
³⁸

Both the law providing for abolition in the District of Columbia and the Second Confiscation Act included provisions for the colonization of those willing to emigrate. During 1862, Congress appropriated a total of $600,000 to aid in the transportation overseas of African-Americans. With unanimous Republican support, it also approved Lincoln’s request to establish diplomatic relations with Haiti and Liberia. On July 12, the day he met with the delegation of border congressmen, Lincoln appointed a consul general for Haiti. Radicals hailed the step for recognizing the black republic as an equal member of the “family of nations.” But many members of Congress were motivated in part by the hope of facilitating colonization.
³⁹

In Congress, colonization was most strongly promoted by border Unionists and moderate Republicans from the Northwest. Lyman Trumbull, who included a colonization provision in the original version of the Second Confiscation Act, explained candidly, “There is a very great aversion in the West…against having free negroes come among us. Our people want nothing to do with the negro.” Numerous constituents, including the prominent Illinois Republican James C. Conkling, wrote to Trumbull praising his stance as a way of counteracting Democrats’ “constant hue and cry of negro worshipers etc.” Radical Republicans, most of whom had long defended the rights of northern free blacks, tended to oppose colonization. “The idea of removing the whole colored population from this country is one of the most absurd ideas that ever entered into the head of man or woman,” declared John P. Hale, the Radical senator from New Hampshire. But many Radicals went along to placate the president, the border states, and western Republicans.
⁴⁰

Some Republicans in Congress spoke of blacks as “natural-born citizens,” who, while not entitled to political or social equality, “shall be equal to the white race in their right to themselves and the enjoyment of the proceeds of their own labor” (Lincoln’s own position in the 1850s). Even those who opposed colonization, however, generally maintained that because of a preference for a warm climate, family ties, or some other reason, blacks who became free would remain in the South. Although Lincoln appears to have had little direct influence on congressional deliberations, proponents of colonization invoked the president’s name. The
New York Times
declared that Lincoln and Frank Blair were in perfect accord “on the entire subject.”
⁴¹