Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (38 page)

Lincoln caught most members of his cabinet off-balance. Their responses served only to underline the cabinet’s essential lack of harmony. Uncharacteristically, the conservative Bates concurred, while the radical Chase said he would prefer to see emancipation pursued untrumpeted, by local commanders empowered “to organize and arm the slaves.” Less surprisingly, Stanton was warmly in favor, while Blair—fearing the electoral consequences—was opposed. Only Seward, who knew what was coming and had had time to reflect, made Lincoln pause for thought by urging that he postpone the proclamation until after a military victory. Following “our repeated reverses,” he feared that immediate action might be viewed not as a great act of humanity to “Ethiopia” but “as the last measure of an exhausted government, . . . our last
shriek,
on the retreat.”
³³

Francis B. Carpenter’s painting
The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation,
completed in the summer of 1864, circulated widely after the war in Alexander Ritchie’s lithograph. The staunchest supporters of Lincoln’s action, Chase and Stanton, are to his right, the least sympathetic—Bates and Blair—on his far left.

Lincoln hesitated and adjourned the meeting. He was sure that Union opinion was ready for a proclamation of freedom, but saw, too, that immediate action might only intensify public depression. He put his draft away, expecting only a short delay. But instead of the necessary battlefield victory, the summer produced only nervousness followed by further humiliating defeat. After the collapse of the Peninsula campaign, and to McClellan’s fury, Lincoln had given Halleck overall command of the army and placed all the Union forces in northern Virginia under the self-confident John Pope. A staunchly antislavery Republican, Pope pleased the president with his plans for an aggressive war and direct advance on Richmond, but confidence turned to renewed anguish with the second battle of Bull Run in the final days of August. Pope’s miscalculations, McClellan’s jealous reluctance to help, and even hints of treachery amongst some of the officers of the Army of the Potomac together engineered a shattering Union retreat on August 30. Lincoln, though shocked by McClellan’s conduct and aware that many were angrily calling for the general’s head, stunned his disbelieving cabinet and the public by removing Pope and consolidating the Virginia forces under McClellan, whom he judged best able to reorganize defenses. When John Hay told him about the strength of public hostility toward the general, Lincoln replied, “He has acted badly in this matter, but we must use what tools we have.”
³⁴
And when Lee invaded Maryland in early September, the president reluctantly followed Halleck’s advice and returned McClellan to permanent command.

Conditions during the two months after the cabinet discussion of July 22 were, then, scarcely propitious for issuing a proclamation. Indeed, one suggested reading is that they propelled Lincoln into reconsidering his emancipation policy, with the real prospect that he would back away from a war on slavery.
³⁵
The evidence is inconclusive. Certainly he discussed the pros and cons of a proclamation with visitors and friends, giving the appearance of keeping an open mind. But Nicolay and Hay, better placed than most to judge, plausibly attributed his growing irritability and “overstrung nerves” at this time to his having to be less frank than he wanted about a decision taken and from which he had no intention of retreating.

In a celebrated response to a querulous Horace Greeley, Lincoln showed his capacity for a brilliant layering of meaning. On August 19, the New York editor had accused him in the
Tribune
’s columns of disdain for twenty million freedom-loving Unionists and of pampering the border states. Conceivably, Greeley had guessed at the president’s intentions and was trying to smoke him out. If so, Lincoln managed an even more skillful response. In a public letter, pointedly placed in Forney’s loyal
Washington Chronicle,
not the
Tribune,
the president declared, “My paramount object in this struggle
is
to save the Union, and is
not
either to save or to destroy slavery.” Here was a repudiation of abolition as the war’s purpose. But then, in a balancing statement, he reassured emancipationists that he had the power to engage in its destruction and would not hesitate to do so if need demanded: “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 it.” His closing remarks also gave a signal: “I have here stated my purpose according to my view of
official
duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed
personal
wish that all men every where could be free.”
³⁶

Cleverly, Lincoln had managed to reassure radicals that he was preparing for a dramatic step and conservatives that he had no such intention. Sydney H. Gay of the
Tribune
happily reported a general impression that “you mean presently to announce that the destruction of Slavery is the price of our salvation.” Yet Thurlow Weed was sure the “ultras” had taken a knock: “They were getting the Administration into a false position. But it is all right now.” And Orville Browning, now withdrawn into his conservative shell, told the president that he had “reassured the country.”
³⁷

Lincoln produced a similarly layered response to the interdenominational delegation of Chicago churchmen who put the emancipationist case to him on September 13. There was more than a hint of irritation and of devil’s advocacy in his inquiry: “What
good
would a proclamation of emancipation from me do . . . ? I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope’s bull against the comet! Would
my word
free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel States?” But, he reassured them, he had no constitutional objections, “for, as commander-in-chief . . . , in time of war, I suppose I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy.” He had raised his objections to indicate the difficulties which he felt—with evident impatience—that they had failed to appreciate. Still, closing the hour-long interview, he reassured them that he had “not decided against a proclamation of liberty to the slaves, but [held] the matter under advisement.” The subject was “on my mind, by day and night, more than any other. Whatever shall appear to be God’s will, I will do.”
³⁸

Greeley and the Chicago Christians were just part of a much larger bombardment. Throughout mid- and late summer letters and memorials poured into the White House, beseeching Lincoln to enforce the Confiscation Acts, issue a proclamation of general emancipation, set up recruiting offices for blacks in every camp, and conduct the war “in earnest and with the utmost vigor.” A Unionist congressman rushed back from Kentucky to Washington to demand that, since “public opinion was undergoing such a change in regard to the rebellion,” Lincoln should “seize all the able bodied negro men belonging to the rebels.”
³⁹
A torrent of church resolutions repeated the call for immediate and universal emancipation. “Property in man, always morally unjust, has become nationally dangerous,” warned Robert Dale Owen.
⁴⁰

There is no good reason to believe that Lincoln seriously intended backing away from what he had decided on July 22. The arguments used then grew stronger with the passing weeks: crushing the Confederacy seemed even more remote; with the flow of recruits drying up only new inspiration would fill the quotas; the foreign powers appeared closer to recognizing southern independence; and Lincoln could see support for a proclamation burgeoning, even in the border states. He may have placed his final decision in the hands of God, as he told the Chicago deputation, but he looked for that providential sign on the battlefield, not from private revelation. A military success remained the key to action. As McClellan chased the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee, the president later told his advisers, “he had made a vow, a covenant, that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of the Divine will, and that it was his duty to move forward in the cause of emancipation.”
⁴¹

The battle of Antietam on September 17 was no great Union triumph, but it was enough of a success to drive Lee out of Maryland and let Lincoln act. On Monday, September 22, he convened a special cabinet meeting. In excellent humor, he declared that “his mind was fixed, his decision made” and that he needed no advice “about the main matter—for that I have determined for myself.” He would keep “the promise to myself, and”—Chase spotted a hesitation here—“to my Maker.” After reading out a revised version of his proclamation, he invited suggestions concerning drafting and minor matters. Discussion, Welles noted, proved “long, earnest, and, on the general principle involved, harmonious.” Only Blair had serious reservations, worrying about the impact on border Unionists and the army, and about the reenergizing of the Democrats. But Lincoln, though nervous over how the public would respond, judged that inaction was an even greater danger.
⁴²

Lincoln was capable of jeweled oratory, but the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, as published in the morning newspapers of September 23, shared the dry, legalistic prose of his July draft, as well as its constitutional reasoning. He declared that all people held as slaves in those parts of the Union still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free,” but he took no rhetorical advantage of the coincidence that the period of grace was exactly one hundred days. This was no declaration of universal freedom—which, of course, he believed he lacked the power to proclaim—and no statement of natural rights. He would, however, ask Congress to offer financial aid to all slave states which adopted schemes of emancipation and were not in rebellion on New Year’s Day. And, in an addition to his July draft, he said he would continue to support a favored enterprise, the voluntary colonization of African-Americans abroad.
⁴³

Just twelve days earlier Lincoln had authorized the signing of a contract between the federal government and the Chiriqui Improvement Company, a group of speculators who had convinced him that mining the coal deposits in this province of Panama would comfortably sustain a colony of African-Americans. And within a few weeks Lincoln would show equal interest in the proposal of a deceitful adventurer, Bernard Kock, to establish a settlement of five thousand blacks on a Haitian island, Île-à-Vache. At the same time Lincoln tried to sell the idea to African-Americans. In August he called a small group of blacks, mainly ex-slaves, to the White House to set out the merits of voluntary emigration to Central America: blacks would escape white prejudice and enjoy the prospect of an equality that eluded them in the United States.
⁴⁴
But the larger audience of blacks for whom the message was intended remained generally unconvinced and hostile, and each project was flawed, to be eventually abandoned. Lincoln’s enthusiasm for colonization was real enough—it clouded his judgment when dealing with slippery promoters—but there was a large element of stage management in all his public dealings and statements related to black emigration. He had an eye on white opinion, as well as black. Colonization was the sugar around the pill of emancipation.

The immediate public reaction to his proclamation encouraged Lincoln to think that he had timed it more or less right. He probably allowed himself a wry smile at the rapturous praise of Theodore Tilton, James Miller McKim, Gerrit Smith, and a host of other abolitionists who had previously been more sparing in their favor: “God bless you for the word you have spoken! All good men upon the earth will glorify you, and all the angels in Heaven will hold jubilee.” Protestant churches congratulated him for an act of righteousness. Much centrist opinion was equally encouraging. Republican gatherings, some state legislatures, and seventeen governors meeting at Altoona, Pennsylvania, warmly endorsed “a great & imperative War measure essential to the salvation of the Union.” The conservative Republican senator Ira Harris reported, “I was startled when I first saw it. But it did not take me long to get reconciled to it. And now I find, every day, that men vastly more conservative than I have ever been are giving in their adhesion to the doctrine of the proclamation. . . . It is one upon which we can all stand and fight and win and save the Country.”
⁴⁵

It was not all sweetness and light. Governors of the four loyal slave states, as well as New Jersey, withheld their endorsement. Unionists in the upper Confederacy saw an act of treachery. Browning and several other leading conservative Republicans were unconvinced. European opinion proved at best mixed, with progressives regretting a less-than-universal freedom and conservatives appalled at an apparent incitement to servile insurrection. In many cases, abolitionists’ initial rapture gave way to a chafing at the proclamation’s perceived moral compromises, including the possibility of slavery’s survival in areas which the advance of Union armies would otherwise have made free. Most significant of all, a battalion of Democratic editors launched a tirade against a doubly perfidious administration, dangerous both in its despotic recasting of the objects of war and in its invitation to racial revolution: Lincoln, shedding the pretense of moderation, had emerged in his true colors as the fanatical Puritan meddler.