Lincoln (70 page)

During the winter of 1861–1862, despite all the other issues he had to deal with, Lincoln worked with exceptional finesse to disarm the likely critics of his plan. Aware that opposition both to compensated emancipation and to colonization was strongest in New England, he took great pains to keep Sumner, the most conspicuous spokesman of abolitionism in the Congress, on his side. Patiently he allowed Sumner to lecture him, sometimes two or three times a week, on his duty to act against slavery. In early December the President and the senator had a long conversation about the problems facing the new session of Congress and reviewed in great detail all issues relating to slavery. Sumner was delighted to discover that on all of them “we agreed, or agreed very nearly.” As they parted, Lincoln said, “Well, Mr. Sumner, the only difference between you and me on this subject is a difference of a month or six weeks in time.” “Mr. President,” Sumner replied, “if that is the only difference between us, I will not say another word to you about it till the longest time you name has passed by.”

A fortnight later Lincoln further involved Sumner in his plans. Since November the President had been working with George P. Fisher and Nathaniel B. Smithers to draft a bill for gradual emancipation in Delaware, where the number of slaves was inconsequential. Lincoln prepared two slightly different proposals, both of which promised federal funds to pay Delaware to emancipate its slaves. Under both plans emancipation would begin immediately. One looked to total emancipation by 1867, the other by 1893. Lincoln preferred the second version, which would require the nation to pay the state $23,200 per year for thirty-one years. The President’s proposals were printed and distributed to members of the Delaware legislature but, as Fisher reported, “due to perceived opposition” they were never introduced as bills. Though the Delaware emancipation scheme proved abortive it was significant in that Sumner did not oppose it. Representing an abolitionist constituency that for three decades had insisted on immediate, uncompensated emancipation, Sumner was persuaded to go along with Lincoln’s plan. “Never should any question of money be allowed to interfere with human freedom,” he concluded.

With equal adroitness Lincoln enlisted Chase’s backing for his plan. Like the President, Chase was a colonizationist. During the debates on the Compromise of 1850, he declared unequivocally that the black and white races could not live together “except under the constraint of force, such as that of slavery,” and he looked forward “to the separation of the races” because the
two were “adapted to different latitudes and countries.” At the same time, he was a staunch advocate of equal rights for Negroes, and of all the members of the cabinet he was most clearly aligned with the antislavery element in the North. His voice, like Sumner’s, would help still any clamor against gradual, compensated emancipation. Well aware of the Secretary’s vanity, Lincoln consulted with him frequently when planning for emancipation, and he allowed Chase to draft a long, wordy message to Congress on the subject—which he quietly filed away unused.

The President did not turn to Chase simply as a matter of policy. The two men, complete strangers at the beginning of the administration, had developed an effective working relationship. Lincoln was impressed by the efficiency of Chase’s Treasury Department and trusted the Secretary’s judgment on financial questions. As he told John Hay a little later, he “generally delegated to Mr. C. exclusive control of those matters falling within the purview of his dept.” In fact, the President knew a good deal about governmental finance and took an active role in helping Chase promote a national banking act, but he found it politic at times to claim total ignorance of such matters. “Money,” he exclaimed to a group of New York financiers who wanted a change in banking legislation, “I don’t know anything about ‘money.’” For his part, Chase came to have a kind of grudging affection for the man who had appointed him, and, though he frequently differed with the President’s policies and deplored his style of management, he kept reassuring himself in his diary that Lincoln was, after all, honest and well meaning.

To cement the loyalty of Chase and Sumner, Lincoln deliberately excluded Seward from all discussion of his emancipation project. The Secretary of State and Sumner were rivals for control of foreign relations, and Chase and Seward nearly always took opposing positions in the cabinet.

The
Trent
affair delayed Lincoln’s introduction of his emancipation plan, and then Willie’s death caused a further postponement, but by spring he was finally ready with a short message on the “abolishment” of slavery, the first such proposal ever submitted to Congress by an American President. Early in the morning on March 6, Sumner received an urgent summons to the White House. “I want to read you my message,” Lincoln told him when he reached the White House. “I want to know how you like it. I am going to send it in today.” First Lincoln read the manuscript aloud; then Sumner went over it himself. He had some reservations about some of the language—especially the word “abolishment”—but concluded that Lincoln’s style was “so clearly... aboriginal, autochthonous” that it would not bear verbal emendation. Delighted with its contents, Sumner could hardly bear to part with the manuscript, and he read it over and over again until Lincoln was obliged to say: “There, now, you’ve read it enough, run away. I must send it in to-day.”

In the message the President urged Congress to adopt a joint resolution declaring “that the United States ought to co-operate with any state which
may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery, giving to such state pecuniary aid, to be used by such state in it’s discretion, to compensate for the inconveniences public and private, produced by such change of system.” Such a declaration, he held, was strictly constitutional because it made no claim of federal authority to interfere with slavery within state limits but allowed each state “perfectly free choice” to accept or reject the proposed offer. He argued for his resolution not on the basis of morality or justice but on the ground that it would remove any temptation for the border states to join the “proposed confederacy.” To congressmen from those states he added the warning that as the war continued it would be “impossible to foresee all the incidents, which may attend and all the ruin which may follow it.”

Lincoln’s careful preparation led to an overwhelmingly positive reception of his proposal. How could anybody object to a proposal endorsed by the Blairs, by Sumner, and by Chase? The San Francisco
Daily Alta California
pretty well summarized press opinion by calling the message “just the right thing, at the right time, and in the right place.” In New York the
Evening Bulletin,
the
Herald,
the
World,
and the
Evening Post
all endorsed Lincoln’s plan. “This Message constitutes of itself an epoch in the history of our country,” rejoiced the
New York Tribune,
often so critical of Lincoln. “It is the day-star of a new National dawn.” The next day the
Tribune
added, “We thank God that Abraham Lincoln is President of the United States, and the whole country, we cannot doubt, will be thankful that we have at such a time so wise a ruler.”

Lincoln followed press reactions to his proposal closely. When the
New York Times,
usually a faithful supporter of his administration, complained in an early edition about the cost of compensated emancipation, the President promptly straightened out the editor, Henry J. Raymond. Less than one-half of a day’s cost of the war would pay for emancipating all the slaves in Delaware, he pointed out; and the cost of eighty-seven days of the conflict would free the slaves in all the border states plus the District of Columbia. Raymond, who had been out of the office, had already corrected his newspaper’s slant and published several articles commending the message “as a master-piece of practical wisdom and sound policy.”

But border-state congressmen said nothing. Lincoln sent for Montgomery Blair, who had made brave promises about the extent of emancipation sentiment in the upper South. Blair suggested that the congressmen were waiting for the army to win a victory. “That is just the reason why I do not wish to wait,” Lincoln told him impatiently. “If we do have success, they may feel... it matters not whether we do anything about the matter.”

The next day Blair brought the border-state representatives to receive the same message. Disclaiming “any intent to injure the interests or wound the sensibilities of the Slave States,” Lincoln reminded them that failure to solve the problem of slaves who fled to Union lines “strengthened the hopes of the Confederates that at some day the Border States would unite with them” and thus prolonged the war. Stressing that his plan was voluntary and that it
recognized “that Emancipation was a subject exclusively under the control of the States,” he urged them to give it serious consideration. The congressmen haggled with him. Was his plan constitutional? Would Congress appropriate the money needed to put it in effect? Was this a first step toward a general emancipation? Would emancipation be followed by colonization of the freedmen? Lincoln tried to assuage their fears but salvaged nothing from the meeting except John J. Crittenden’s assurance that all the congressmen believed the President was “solely moved by a high patriotism and sincere devotion to the happiness and glory of his Country.”

Congressional debates on Lincoln’s resolution were brief. Several representatives from the border states thought it was unconstitutional. At the other extreme John Hickman, an abolitionist representative from Pennsylvania, sneered that the message was an attempt on the part of the President to compensate for his failure “to meet the just expectation of the party which elected him to the office he holds.” A few abolitionists outside of Congress saw in Lincoln’s plan a design to save slavery. “Every concession made by the President to the enemies of slavery has only one aim,” growled Gurowski; “it is to mollify their urgent demands by throwing to them small crumbs, as one tries to mollify a boisterous and hungry dog.” But such dissents were few, and Congress adopted the resolution by overwhelming majorities.

Then, disappointingly, nothing happened. Because none of the border states agreed to accept the plan Congress had endorsed in general terms, there was no need for any further legislation. The only concrete result of the entire effort was a bill for compensated emancipation in the District of Columbia. It met some of Lincoln’s specifications as a blueprint for freedom in that it provided for paying up to $300 to masters for every slave emancipated and appropriated $100,000 for colonizing “such of the slaves as desired to emigrate.” But this was not the measure Lincoln really wanted. Emancipation imposed on the federal district was very different from abolition voluntarily adopted by the border slave states. “If some one or more of the border-states would move fast, I should greatly prefer it,” he explained to Horace Greeley. But none did so, and he signed the District of Columbia bill on April 16.

Lincoln’s military plans bore equally meager results. After McClellan’s demotion the President and the Secretary of War, neither of whom had any significant military experience, found themselves swamped by administrative detail as they tried to direct huge armies spread over half a continent. Yielding finally to suggestions from both Chase and Bates, Lincoln decided he needed his own military adviser, and he called on the sixty-four-year-old veteran Ethan Allen Hitchcock. The grandson of the Revolutionary hero Ethan Allen, Hitchcock had become a soldier mainly because family tradition demanded it, and, more interested in Swedenborg than in strategy, he retired from active duty in 1855 to devote his time to religious and philosophical investigations. Summoned to Washington in March, he learned from
Stanton that the President wanted his assistance. The next day Lincoln told him of the pressures to remove “the traitor McClellan”—as his enemies called him—and explained that as President he was “the depository of the power of the government and had no military knowledge.” In his sickbed, recovering from two hemorrhages, the general thought he was asked to take McClellan’s place as commander of the Army of the Potomac, but he did not perhaps get the message exactly right. The old general was reluctant. He wanted no post, and he recognized that neither Lincoln nor Stanton knew what they would like him to do. Unwillingly he accepted a staff appointment in the War Department, where his advice was of little use to either the President or the Secretary of War.

Left to manage on their own, Lincoln and Stanton received little encouraging news from any front. In the West at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River the Confederates came close to routing Grant’s army in the battle of Shiloh (April 6–7). The timely arrival of Buell’s forces helped to save the day. In the end, Shiloh was a great Union victory, but the 13,000 Federal casualties marked this as the bloodiest engagement yet in the war. Halleck blamed Grant for the losses, and there was strong sentiment to have him removed. Lincoln overruled the objections with the quiet comment “I can’t spare this man; he fights.” But with Grant’s reputation under a shadow, Halleck now took personal command of the heavily depleted Western army and began a slow and cumbersome march toward Corinth, Mississippi.

In the East progress was no more rapid. Frémont said that he could not move until his newly established Mountain Department received reinforcements and more supplies. The President had little to give him because McClellan was taking most of the Army of the Potomac down the Potomac to use in his Peninsula campaign, in which neither Lincoln nor Stanton had much faith. Stanton circulated reports of McClellan’s disloyalty—only to declare sanctimoniously that of course he did not believe these imputations on the general. Lincoln said he had no reason to doubt McClellan’s fidelity, yet he told Browning that he was “not fully satisfied with his conduct of the war—that he was not sufficiently energetic and aggressive.” Offering a shrewd thumbnail character sketch, the President judged that McClellan “had the capacity to make arrangements properly for a great conflict, but as the hour for action approached he became nervous and oppressed with the responsibility and hesitated to meet the crisis.”