Lincoln (62 page)

Lincoln frowned. “There is no doubt Little Mac has a permanent case of the slows. How many men has he got on the Antietam?”

“He began with close to ninety thousand. This morning the first estimate of casualties is fifteen thousand men …”

“My God!” Lincoln shut his eyes. “It is worse than Shiloh.”

“It is the bloodiest engagement of this war,” said Halleck, “or of any modern war. The rebels have sustained almost as many casualties, or so we have been told.”

“They have fewer men, fewer resources.” This had been Stanton’s line from the beginning.

“I had no idea,” said Lincoln, “of the cost.” There was silence, as the President appeared to daydream. Hay often wondered what the Ancient’s daydreams were like. Often, for no apparent reason, he would simply drift off and be no longer present in spirit; then he would return as suddenly as he had departed, all business again. This time, the business was numbers. “I keep trying to reckon the size of the rebel army. By now, McClellan has convinced himself—if not me—that they’ve got a million men, all set to go. He has said that Lee’s army on the Antietam is twice the size of his. I don’t believe it, particularly if General Halleck is right that the bulk of their army is still south of here, which I’m not all that sure of. I still remember those logs at Manassas, painted to look like cannon. I think we have it over them, in numbers, two, maybe three to one.”

“We get our reports from Mr. Pinkerton’s Secret Service,” said Stanton.

“Where does
he
get his numbers from?” asked Lincoln.

“Spies, observer balloons, deduction.” As Halleck proceeded to analyze Pinkerton’s reports favorably, Hay could see that Halleck had lost, yet again, the President’s attention. But the latest dispatch from the Army of the Potomac caused the Tycoon to sit up. “ ‘Lee’s army retreating into Virginia.’ ” Stanton read the original of the telegram. “ ‘Maryland is saved.’ ”

“That is well done,” said Lincoln. Halleck and Stanton exchanged a glance, which Hay caught. In their eyes, nothing that the Young Napoleon did could be done well, even when he had gained a victory. Nevertheless, the object of the exercise had been accomplished: Lee’s invasion of the Union was at an end. The Tycoon got to his feet. “Now that we’ve got the victory we’ve been waiting for, I can issue my proclamation of emancipation.”

FOR SOME
weeks, Hay had been arranging for a number of Negro leaders to meet with the President. The idea for the meeting had long been in Lincoln’s mind. He had known few colored people. He wanted to hear their views on a number of subjects. Now he sat at the head of the table in the President’s Office, staring as curiously at the well-dressed colored men as they stared, with equal curiosity, at him. Hay took notes.

The Tycoon began by confiding to them that he intended to issue his proclamation in the next few days. When he had explained its contents, the leader of the group, E. M. Thomas, said, “This means, sir, that slavery will still continue in the border-states of the Union?”

“That is right.”

“So,” said a large man, “you are really freeing the slaves in the Confederacy as a means of punishing their owners for secession.”

“Well, that is a part of it, yes. Actually, I have not the authority to abolish slavery in the Union. I can only do it in the rebel states as a wartime measure. Once the war is over, I expect slavery to be abolished as the result of an amendment to the Constitution, which I would be happy to initiate if I am in this chair.”

The large man chuckled. “Well, sir, a half-loaf is still nourishment for a starving man.”

Lincoln smiled, perfunctorily; and began, from habit, “Or as the Baptist preacher said …” He stopped himself. “Gentlemen, I want your advice, and I want your help. Congress has given me a sum of money toward the colonization of New Granada in Central America. The agricultural land is rich, there are coal mines, and it is empty. If you choose, it can be filled up with your people.”

Lincoln paused, as if he expected some sort of delighted response; but there was none. Hay noted that the black, the beige and the yellow faces were all equally stony. The Tycoon was, if nothing else, as sensitive as a perfect barometer to the human responses of others. He now sat back in his chair and began to speak, as if thinking aloud; a sign that he had already made his case to himself. “Why, you may ask, should the people of your race be colonized? Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration. Well, you and we are different races. We have between us broader differences than exist between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong, I need not discuss.” Lincoln paused. One of the Negro men seemed ready to open a discussion; but then he thought better of it.

The President continued. “This physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think. Your race suffers very greatly; many of them
by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.” Hay could see, once again, the Tycoon’s powerful logic begin to gather force; he could also see, from the faces in the room, that something other than Lincolnian logic was going to be needed. “If this is admitted, it affords a reason, at least, why we should be separated. You here are freemen, I suppose.”

“Yes, sir,” said E. M. Thomas. Hay wondered why, at this point, the President’s logic needed to ask a question whose answer he already knew.

“Perhaps you have long been free; perhaps all your lives. Nevertheless, your race is suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. But even when you cease to be slaves you are still a long way from being placed on an equality with the white race.” Lincoln turned his cloudy gaze on the large man, a minister from New York. “The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this broad continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours.”

Hay wondered what the fiery Negro leader Frederick Douglass would answer to that. So, perhaps, did the Ancient, who closed the argument. “Go where you are treated the best, and the ban is still upon you. I do not propose to discuss this, but to present it as a fact with which we have to deal. I cannot alter it if I wanted.” Hay wondered if Lincoln
would
want to alter it. Although Lincoln had a true hatred of slavery, as much for the brutal effect it had on the masters as on the enslaved, he was unshaken in his belief that the colored race was inferior to the white. Hay concurred; but Hay’s belief was not unshakable. He had long suspected that, given the same advantages as a white man, a Negro was probably every bit as capable. The fact that Lincoln had always found it difficult to accept any sort of natural equality between the races stemmed, Hay thought, from his own experience as a man born with no advantage of any kind, who had then gone to the top of the world. Lincoln had no great sympathy for those who felt that external circumstances had held them back.

Nicolay disagreed with Hay; he felt that this
had
been Lincoln’s view, but was no longer. The two secretaries often argued about the matter. Lincoln himself never cast the least ray of light on the subject. He wanted the Negroes freed, and he wanted them out of North America. He now proceeded to make his case to the jury, which was plainly hostile. He spoke of the evils done the white race by the institution of slavery: “See our present condition—the country engaged in war—our white men cutting one another’s throats—none knowing how far it will extend—and then consider what we know to be the truth. But for your race among us
there could not be war, although many men on either side do not care for you one way or the other. Nevertheless, I repeat, without the institution of slavery, and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.” Lincoln paused; eyes shut. He seemed to be staring at that wall of marble in his mind from which he read his finished texts.

The minister from New York said, “Mr. President, it is one thing to offer a new country a thousand miles away to men who have been slaves all their lives, and quite another thing to propose that people like us pull up stakes and leave our homes for the wilderness, no matter how rich in coal mines and farmland. After all, this is our country, too. Some of our families go back to the very beginning, so why on earth should we leave home to go and settle this wilderness Congress has given you?”

Plainly, Lincoln was taken aback by the minister’s directness. But he rose to the challenge. “Why else have I asked you here except, as I have said, that I need your help? I am quite aware that many of you have no desire to go. But if intelligent educated men such as yourselves don’t go, then how will the former slaves manage to organize themselves? How will they support themselves?”

E. M. Thomas took the President’s rhetorical question for a real one. “Well, Mr. President, for three centuries they have done a fine job of supporting themselves
and
their white masters, so I think we can assume that if they are not obliged to sustain a white population in luxury, they will be able to look after themselves nicely.”

Lincoln’s jaw set in a fashion that was rare with him; and the presage to the sort of storm that was all the more terrible because it was so seldom unleashed on those who had provoked it. “I do not mean to put this harshly,” he said with his usual mildness, “but I think there is some selfishness here. You ought to do something to help those less fortunate than you. It is exceedingly important that we have men at the beginning capable of thinking as white men and not those who have been systematically oppressed.” Hay noted that one of the beige faces smiled at the phrase “thinking as white men”; because he was more white than colored?

“I do not,” said Lincoln, “ask for much. Could I have a hundred tolerably intelligent men with their wives and children, and able to ‘cut their own fodder,’ so to speak? Can I have fifty? If I could find twenty-five able-bodied men, with a mixture of women and children—good things in the family relation, I think—I could make a successful commencement. I want you to let me know whether this can be done or not. This is the practical part of my wish to see you.”

E. M. Thomas was courtly. “We appreciate this opportunity to meet what our slave-brothers call Uncle Linkum …”

Lincoln laughed. “I am told that at the South, every other colored boy baby born since 1861 is called Abe.”

“You’ve been told the truth,” said Thomas. “And it is not only in the South that our sons are being called Abraham. You have been chosen to do the work of the Lord in some way that is strange to me, when I look at you like this—a man so worn down by Fate.”

Hay looked at Lincoln, who had become suddenly very still; absorbed in the writing on the marble wall? Then Lincoln got to his feet, as did the others. He was genial. “Take your full time about this,” he said, as he shook Thomas’s hand. “There is no hurry at all, I’m sorry to say. But we must be prepared.”

When the last of the colored men had left the room, Lincoln said to Hay, as a convenient surrogate for himself, “Why would any colored man want to live in this country, where there is so much hatred of him?”

“Perhaps they think that that will change, once slavery’s gone.”

Lincoln shook his head. “There are passions too deep for even a millennium to efface.”

But Chase disagreed and, most courteously, on Monday, at a meeting in the White House, he registered his objection to the colonization scheme: “Except, perhaps, as a means of our obtaining a foothold in Central America.” Lincoln had, as courteously, noted their difference of opinion. But the President’s mind was now made up; and he had called together all the great officers of state to tell them that he would now release the Emancipation Proclamation. Of those present, only Blair made any demur. He thought that the effect would be bad in the border-states and in the army. He reminded everyone, yet again, that there would be a congressional election in two months’ time.

The President was now on his feet, towering over the seated Cabinet ministers and assorted political chieftains. “You know, when the rebel army was at Frederick, I determined, as soon as it should be driven out of Maryland, and Pennsylvania was no longer in danger of invasion, that I would issue a proclamation of Emancipation. Naturally, I wish that we were in a better condition. The action of the army against the rebels has not been quite what I should have liked best.”

Chase and Stanton exchanged a look. Only that morning, Stanton had told Chase how McClellan’s inability to move in time had allowed Lee to retire to Virginia, virtually victorious in what had been, the Confederates now declared, no more than a punitive raid on the enemy’s territory.

Lincoln seemed to divine how opposed the room was to a proclamation,
which he was not, he had said, about to alter. “I know that many others might, in this matter, as in others, do better than I can.” Lincoln looked at Chase; and smiled. Chase dropped his eyes, modestly. “And if I were satisfied that the public confidence was more fully possessed by any one of them than by me, and knew of any Constitutional way in which he could be put in my place, he should have it. I would gladly yield it to him.” Chase glanced at Seward, who sat across from him, in full angular and aquiline profile. What a crafty little man! Chase thought. In effect, he was the president; but how he exerted his influence over Lincoln was a mystery yet to be pierced.

Lincoln suddenly made a startling admission. “I am quite aware that I have not so much the confidence of the people as I had sometime since. On the other hand, I do not know that, all things considered, any other person has more.” Again the gray eyes rested, almost quizzically, on Chase, who felt the blood rise in his neck. “In any event, there is no way in which I can have any other man put where I am. I am here. I must do the best I can, and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take.”

“With that, the President read us the proclamation.” Chase was at the window of his office, watching not without a simple pleasure the autumnal rains wet the passers-by as well as, more ominously, the ambulance-carriages of the Sanitary Commission, which had formed a cortege along Pennsylvania Avenue, bearing to hospital the wounded from Antietam. The losses were greater than suspected. The Union was now bemoaning the loss of blood as well as of money.