Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (37 page)

Congress moved to pass the joint resolution by large majorities, and on April 10 Lincoln gratefully approved it. Six days later he signed into law an act providing for immediate emancipation of the three thousand slaves in the District of Columbia, where he had no doubt about the constitutional power of Congress to act. If it was not the bill he would himself have drafted, it met two of his principles: the compensation of slaveowners and federal appropriations in support of voluntary colonization. But it disappointed him that the first move toward “abolishment” in the border had been taken not by individual slave states, but by the federal government. He continued during the spring to appeal eloquently to border loyalists, invoking “the signs of the times,” their own self-interest, and their historic opportunity to do good. But despite his skillful avoidance of partisanship, moral reproach, or an argumentative tone, and his emphasis on the opportunity for securing change that would come “gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything,” his appeal went unanswered.
²²
The racial antipathies of poor white laborers and the deep conservatism of most border slaveowners outweighed the support of the more realistic planters, moderate yeomanry, and mountain folk, and the pockets of real antislaveryites.

If most border loyalists were fearful or unmoved by Lincoln’s initiatives, the response of mainstream northern opinion ranged from approving to jubilant. Though Stevens and an abolitionist minority lambasted the president’s lack of ambition, it was more significant that Sumner, Chase, and other radicals, together with progressive religious groups, lauded what they correctly identified as a historic watershed. Equally important was the praise emanating from the political center of conservative Republicans and even moderate Democrats. Raymond’s
New York Times,
after initial doubts over the costs of Lincoln’s plan, lauded him for striking “the happy mean.” The warm response to emancipation in the District confirmed for Lincoln the continuing shifts in the tectonic plates of public opinion.
²³

But the limits to what moderate Unionists would accept were clearly exposed by General David Hunter’s actions in the Department of the South, which encompassed Union footholds on the South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida coasts. Confronted by thousands of abandoned slaves, Hunter saw their military possibilities. In two successive orders he liberated those in Union hands and, on May 9, freed all slaves in the department, implausibly stating that slavery and martial law were incompatible. By declaring every slave free and encouraging the formation of a black regiment, Hunter exceeded Frémont’s actions in Missouri and opened himself up to an onslaught of conservative and moderate voices, including that of the
New York Times.
Reverdy Johnson of Maryland found the legal reasoning absurd, but worried even more about the order’s implicit invitation to slave insurrections and its likely effect on border Unionism. “This act has done us more harm than a loss of two battles,” one New Yorker told Lincoln, “and has made Kentucky & Maryland almost against us if not wholly.” Radicals were far more sanguine. Chase urged the president to let the order stand, and Schurz, though agreeing that it was rather premature and too “ostensibly proclaimed,” cautioned Lincoln against a response that would tie his hands at a time when attitudes were rapidly changing.
²⁴

Lincoln, on friendly terms with Hunter, declared the order “altogether void,” but not before he had squared his intentions with his cabinet and leading congressmen. Though many radicals rebuked him for his hesitation and timidity, Lincoln revealingly avoided the torrent of outrage that had accompanied his previous year’s treatment of Frémont. In part, this was because of Hunter’s less tenable position in law and because of the signals Lincoln had emitted by his message of March 6. But it was also because a careful reading of Lincoln’s words, as Schurz explained, indicated another step in the evolution of the president’s thinking about his constitutional powers and opened the prospect of future radical action. The government had given no military commander the authority to make slaves free, Lincoln declared. But, significantly, he added that “whether it be competent for me, as Commander-in-Chief . . . , to declare the Slaves of any state or states, free, and whether at any time, in any case, it shall have become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the government, to exercise such supposed power” were “questions which, under my responsibility, I reserve to myself.”
²⁵
He did not categorically answer those questions, but by invoking, yet again, the notion of indispensable necessity he gave a clear signal of the way his mind was moving.

Precisely when Lincoln accepted the legitimacy and need for a presidential Emancipation Proclamation is impossible to say. The best evidence suggests that he was tussling with the issues from late May and had come close to a final decision by the end of June. By then his scheme of compensated emancipation was stalled: the Confederacy was not to be mortally wounded by the self-sacrifice of loyal border slaveholders. Some more profound weapon was needed to reverse the trend of a war which, since the victories of early 1862, had brought the Union only meager returns. Apart from Grant’s bloody western success in the equal slaughter at Shiloh (which consolidated the Union’s position and opened up the prospect of splintering the Confederacy down the line of the Mississippi) and David G. Farragut’s seizure of New Orleans, there was little to cheer. Rather, the chief story was Lincoln’s strained, even distrustful, relations with a hesitant McClellan, whose Peninsula strategy revealed itself to be a sluggish progress toward Richmond during May and June, and—after the ugly, hard engagements in the Seven Days’ Battles—an unforced retreat in early July back down the Peninsula to Harrison’s Landing on the James River. Many had doubted the general’s fidelity to the cause; Lincoln had questioned only his energy and temperament for battlefield engagement. Either way, the outcome was galling military failure.

That failure brought grief but no great surprise to Lincoln, now physically racked by the burden of worry and responsibility. He had never felt real confidence in the Peninsula strategy, and even before its humiliating anticlimax he expected that new measures of warfare would be needed. Building on the broad reading of federal war powers earlier proffered by John Quincy Adams and embracing the argument recently developed by William Whiting, a solicitor in the War Department, Lincoln had concluded (as he had not when revoking Frémont’s proclamation nine months earlier) that, as commander-in-chief, he had the right to free the enemy’s slaves for military purposes. Equally, he had reached the view that the measure was politic, that the time had arrived to treat emancipation as one of those “indispensable necessities” for national salvation to which he had so regularly referred. When he visited McClellan at Harrison’s Landing, the commander handed Lincoln a confidential letter setting out his “general views” on the rebellion and urging that Union policy should not be to “war upon population; but against armed forces and political organizations”; there should be no confiscation of property or “forcible abolition of slavery.” It was the approach to war that for fourteen months had failed to deliver victory. Indeed, final victory now appeared depressingly remote. Lincoln pointedly refrained from any response, save cool silence, and so gave eloquent indication of what he had in mind.
²⁶

The failure of the Peninsula campaign sent shock waves through the northern public, on whose response Lincoln would hang the timing of any emancipation initiative. Events in Virginia had rammed home with grievous ferocity what the grim battles of the early spring had already taught the more discerning: that this could no longer be treated as a short war. In prospect were enormous financial sacrifices, new danger of European intervention to restore cotton supplies, further demands for volunteers, and the possibility of conscription. From editors and political leaders Lincoln learned that military events had achieved what the clamor of radical Republicans had signally failed to do: secure unusual political convergence around a policy of military emancipation, since slavery was now increasingly regarded as “the lever power of the rebellion.” It was time to take the kid gloves off and target the home front that nourished the Confederates’ battlefield prowess. Border loyalists joined New England radicals and Protestant reformers in insisting that a proclamation of freedom would infuse the Union cause with “new life and vigor.” “Do not believe half traitors who will tell you that others will rebel in these Border States in consequence of such an act,” one West Virginian officeholder told Lincoln. “On the contrary men all beg for this policy! . . . The useful, producing, industrious virtuous classes will Stand-by you in all this. Only be true to them.”
²⁷

Increasingly confident that Union public opinion had shifted into a new alignment and that border-state hostility to military emancipation could be contained, Lincoln prepared to act. He needed to keep the initiative, for Congress was itself discussing confiscation with the confidence that came from sensing a new public mood. This was but the latest in a sequence of congressional antislavery measures introduced through the spring and early summer. An article of war prohibiting the military from returning fugitives to their masters, a law prohibiting slavery in the territories, the ratification of a treaty with Britain to strengthen measures against the slave trade: these were the legislative expressions of the convergence of moderate and even conservative Republicans around the free-soil program of the radical New Englanders who ran most of the committees. Almost all Republicans now rallied behind a proposed Second Confiscation Act which would free the slaves of all rebels, not just those who took up arms against the Union, and would give the president power to admit them into military service. Lincoln took an acute interest in these debates, concerned to ensure that vindictiveness did not crush out constitutional process. His interventions—and threatened veto—angered some of the radicals, but he secured important changes. On July 17 he signed the bill, ignoring the warnings of some conservatives and border loyalists against approving a measure which signaled a war of subjugation and threatened to fragment the Union coalitions. He still had residual doubts, chiefly over the stipulation that the slaves of traitors should be “forever free”: Did not forfeiture that extended “beyond the lives of guilty parties” fall foul of the Constitution? But he withheld his veto, on the understanding that Congress would address his concerns.
²⁸

That Lincoln had crossed a watershed emerged subtly but clearly in his meeting with border-state representatives at the White House on July 12. He again pressed the arguments he had used in March, urging them to think again about gradual, compensated emancipation. “Unprecedentedly stern facts” made the position of loyal slaveholders highly precarious—by implication, far more precarious than four months earlier, when the spring offensive had appeared to promise a speedy restoration of the old Union, leaving slavery undisturbed. He stressed two practical considerations. The first related to the tens of thousands of fugitives crossing into Union camps, including slaves from the loyal border. By the congressional article of war of March 13, the threat of court-martial hung over the heads of officers returning any slaves, even those of owners who claimed to be Unionists. Lincoln knew from his own mail the outrage of loyalist masters who had suffered loss at the hands of scrupulous military emancipators.
²⁹
This is what informed his warning: “If the war continue long, as it must, if the object be not sooner attained, the institution in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion—by the mere incidents of the war. It will be gone, and you will have nothing valuable in lieu of it. Much of its value is gone already.”

Second, Lincoln noted his obligation to maintain broad unity amongst loyalists—“none too strong” even when united—at a time of a revolution in public mood. He had, he noted, repudiated Hunter’s proclamation and believed he had done right, but in so doing he had given “dissatisfaction, if not offence, to many whose support the country can not afford to lose.”
³⁰
Equally significant, antislavery pressure continued to grow, and—he implied—he would have to heed it. Lincoln could not have made it much clearer that, in sustaining a new public consensus which yoked moral abolitionism and utilitarian emancipation, he would abandon the border-state strategy that had shaped his policy during the first year of the war.

Whichever course these border men had chosen to pursue—and the majority stubbornly declined to act—Lincoln would undoubtedly have continued with his new plan of action. Before the congressmen had time to reply, he had told two of the more conservative members of his cabinet, Seward and Welles, of his evolving ideas. Welles recorded how, as they shared a carriage on Sunday, July 13, Lincoln had “earnestly” discussed the matter, saying that he “had about come to the conclusion that it was a military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union, that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.” As field hands and military laborers, slaves gave the Confederates formidable strength. “Extraordinary measures”—emancipation by proclamation—had become the
indispensable means
“to preserve the national existence.”
³¹

Lincoln told his full cabinet of his intentions nine days later, on July 22. He had assembled them not “to ask their advice, but to lay the subject-matter of a proclamation before them.” He read out a draft, most of which offered no surprises: it gave formal warning of the intended seizure of rebels’ property under the Second Confiscation Act, and it repeated his support for compensated, gradual emancipation when voluntarily adopted by any state. The final sentence contained the bombshell. As commander-in-chief, he ordered—“as a fit and necessary military measure” for restoring the Union—that on January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized, . . . shall then, thenceforward, and forever, be free.”
³²