Lincoln (74 page)

Especially influential was the passage on July 17, 1862, by Congress, with virtually unanimous Republican support, of the Second Confiscation Act, a measure that defined the rebels as traitors and ordered the confiscation of their property, including the freeing of their slaves. Lincoln had serious doubts about many of the provisions of the Confiscation Act and drafted a message vetoing it, reminding Congress that “the severest justice may not always be the best policy.” Only after Senator Fessenden, working closely with the President, secured modification of some of the more stringent
provisions did Lincoln agree to sign the measure—and even then he took the unprecedented step of placing before Congress his statement of objections to the bill he had approved.

No part of the Second Confiscation Act troubled the President more than the section declaring that, after a period of sixty days, the slaves of rebels should be “forever free of their servitude, and not again held as slaves.” “It is startling to say that congress can free a slave within a state,” he remarked, for such a statement would directly contradict the Republican platform on which he and most of the congressmen of his party had been elected. “Congress has no power over slavery in the states,” he told Browning, “and so much of it as remains after the war is over ... must be left to the exclusive control of the states where it may exist.” If power over slavery within the states existed anywhere in the federal government, it was to be found in the war powers, which he believed could only be exercised by the President as commander-in-chief. But rather than confront Congress over the abstract issue, Lincoln decided to accept the bill—and to undercut the congressional initiative for emancipation by acting first.

His preliminary conversation with Seward and Welles on July 13 had been intended to prepare the way for such action, and a week later the President was ready to discuss emancipation with the full cabinet. On July 22 his advisers did not immediately realize that they were present at a historic occasion. The secretaries seemed more interested in discussing Pope’s orders to subsist his troops in hostile territory and schemes for colonizing African-Americans in Central America, and they had trouble focusing when the President read the first draft of his proposed proclamation. The curious structure and awkward phrasing of the document showed that Lincoln was still trying to blend his earlier policy of gradual, compensated emancipation with his new program for immediate abolition. It opened with an announcement that the Second Confiscation Act would go into effect in sixty days unless Southerners “cease participating in, aiding, countenancing, or abetting the existing rebellion.” The President then pledged to support pecuniary aid to any state—including the rebel states—that “may voluntarily adopt, gradual abolishment of slavery.” Only at the end did he, “as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States,” proclaim that “as a fit and necessary military measure”—not as a measure that was just or right—he would on January 1, 1863, declare “all persons held as slaves within any state ..., wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized,... forever ... free.”

At the outset of the meeting the President informed the cabinet that he had “resolved upon this step, and had not called them together to ask their advice, but to lay the subject-matter of a proclamation before them,” and the discussion that followed was necessarily rather desultory. Stanton and Bates staunchly urged “immediate promulgation” of the proclamation. Rather surprisingly, Chase was cool. He feared an emancipation proclamation might be “a measure of great danger,” since it would unsettle the government’s
financial position. “Emancipation could be much better and more quietly accomplished,” he believed, “by allowing Generals to organize and arm the slaves (thus avoiding depredation and massacre on the one hand, and support to the insurrection on the other).” Despite his reservations, he promised to give Lincoln’s proclamation his hearty support.

Postmaster General Blair, who came in late, deprecated the proposed policy “on the ground that it would cost the Administration the fall elections.” Secretary of the Interior Smith said nothing but was strongly opposed to emancipation; he was already thinking of resigning from a cabinet where he felt increasingly out of sympathy with the President. Seward, who had been thinking over the consequences of emancipation since his carriage ride with Lincoln and Welles, argued strongly against immediate promulgation of the proclamation. He feared it would “break up our relations with foreign nations and the production of cotton for sixty years.” Foreign nations might intervene in the American civil war in order to prevent the abolition of slavery for sake of the cotton their factories so badly needed. More persuasively he argued that issuing an emancipation proclamation at this particular moment, after the severe military reverses experienced by the Union armies, would “be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help.” “His idea,” Lincoln recalled later, “was that it would be considered our
last shriek,
on the retreat.”

With his advisers divided, Lincoln adjourned the cabinet meeting without reaching a decision on issuing the proclamation, though he later told one visitor that he expected to issue it the next day. But that night Seward’s ally, Thurlow Weed, came to the White House and again strongly argued that an emancipation proclamation could not be enforced and that it would alienate the important border states. Reluctantly Lincoln put the document aside. Shortly afterward, when Sumner on five successive days pressed the President to issue his proclamation, Lincoln responded, “We
mustn’t issue it
till after a victory.”

In the following weeks Lincoln repeatedly argued the issue of emancipation in his own mind. To help clarify his thinking, he summoned his old Illinois friend Leonard Swett to the White House and carefully reviewed with him all the arguments for and against an emancipation proclamation, reading some of the correspondence he had received on both sides of the question. “His manner did not indicate that he wished to impress his views
upon
his hearer,” Swett later recalled, “but rather to weigh and examine them for his own enlightenment
in the presence
of his hearer.” So neutral was the President’s presentation that Swett after the interview wrote confidently to his wife, “He will issue no proclamation emancipating negroes.”

Lincoln’s actions appeared to confirm Swett’s prediction, for he stubbornly refused to commit his administration, even indirectly, to a policy of
emancipation. On the vexed question of enlisting African-Americans in the Union armies, strongly advocated by abolitionists as a matter of principle and supported by many Northern governors as an expedient way of filling their military quotas, he remained resolutely negative. Though willing “in common humanity” to insist that African-Americans who fled to the lines of the Union armies must not “suffer for want of food, shelter, or other necessaries of life,” he was not ready to enroll them in the army. He was not sure that the freedmen would fight, and he feared that guns placed in their hands would promptly fall into the hands of the Confederates. Besides, he told Browning, arming the blacks “would produce dangerous and fatal dissatisfactions in our army, and do more injury than good.” Though Sumner repeatedly pressed him on this issue, arguing that by enlisting black soldiers “the rear-guard of the rebellion [would] be changed into the advance guard of the Union,” Lincoln continued to resist, saying “that half the Army would lay down their arms and three other States would join the rebellion.” So strongly did he feel on this matter that when a delegation of Western politicians insistently urged him to accept Negro regiments, Lincoln grew impatient and finally exclaimed: “Gentlemen, you have my decision. I have made my mind up deliberately and mean to adhere to it.... if the people are dissatisfied, I will resign and let Mr. Hamlin try it.”

But at the same time, Lincoln began preparing public opinion for a proclamation of freedom if one was to be issued. Because one of the chief objections to emancipation was the widespread belief that whites and blacks could never live together harmoniously, he revived his long-cherished idea of colonizing free blacks outside the United States. On August 14 he summoned a delegation of African-American leaders to the White House in order to discuss future relations between blacks and whites. “You and we are different races,” he reminded them. “We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races.” Nowhere in America were blacks treated as equals of whites. “It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated,” he concluded, and he urged these blacks to take the lead by accepting government aid and forming a colony in Central America. If he could find a hundred—or even fifty, or twenty-five—“able-bodied men, with a mixture of women and children,” he could make a successful beginning of the colonization project. Earnestly he besought the leaders before him to consider his plan, not as “pertaining to yourselves merely, nor for your race, and ours, for the present time, but as one of the things, if successfully managed, for the good of mankind.”

Lincoln’s proposal was promptly and emphatically rejected by most black spokesmen. The words of the President, declared the editor of the
Pacific Appeal,
an influential black newspaper, made it “evident that he, his cabinet, and most of the people, care but little for justice to the negro. If necessary,
he
is to be crushed between the upper and nether millstone—the
pride
and
prejudice
of the North and South.” Nor did it win support from white antislavery leaders. “How much better would be a manly protest against
prejudice against color!—and a wise effort to give freemen homes in America!” Chase wrote in his diary. Abolitionist critics of the President’s shortsighted racial views failed to note that this was the first occasion in American history when a President received a delegation of African-Americans in the White House. They also did not realize that some influential African-American leaders, like the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, who understood that Lincoln’s purpose was to save
“our emancipated brethren from being returned to their former condition of slavery,”
supported his initiative as “the most humane, and merciful movement which this or any other administration has proposed for the benefit of the enslaved.”

Lincoln’s critics, white or black, also did not understand that the President’s plea for colonization—heartfelt and genuine as it was—was also a shrewd political move, a bit of careful preparation for an eventual emancipation proclamation. No doubt he expected his proposal to be rejected. But he knew that a plan for the voluntary removal of blacks from the country would make emancipation more palatable to the border states and also relieve Northerners of a fear that they would be inundated by a migration of free Negroes from the South.

Shortly afterward Lincoln took a further step to prepare public opinion by publishing a reply to an intemperate editorial by Horace Greeley in the
New York Tribune,
called “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” To Greeley’s complaint that he was “strangely and disastrously remiss” in not proclaiming emancipation, as required by the Second Confiscation Act, and the editor’s charge that it was “preposterous and futile” to try to put down the rebellion without eradicating slavery, Lincoln replied: “My paramount object in this struggle
is
to save the Union, and is
not
either to save or to destroy slavery. 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; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do
not
believe it would help to save the Union.”

Written at a time when the draft of the Emancipation Proclamation had already been completed, Lincoln’s letter to Greeley later seemed puzzling, if not deceptive. But the President did not intend it to be so. He was giving assurance to the large majority of the Northern people who did not want to see the war transformed into a crusade for abolition—and at the same time he was alerting antislavery men that he was contemplating further moves against the peculiar institution. In Lincoln’s mind there was no necessary disjunction between a war for the Union and a war to end slavery. Like most Republicans, he had long held the belief that if slavery could be contained it would inevitably die; a war that kept the slave states within the Union would, therefore, bring about the ultimate extinction of slavery. For this reason, saving the Union was his “paramount object.” But readers aware
that Lincoln always chose his words carefully should have recognized that “paramount” meant “foremost” or “principal”—not “sole.”

Widely published in Northern newspapers, Lincoln’s letter to Greeley received universal approval. “It [will] clear the atmosphere, and gives ground to stand on,” Thurlow Weed judged. “The triumphant manner in which you have so modestly and so clearly set forth the justification of your fixed purposes,” George Ashmun told the President, “dispels all doubts of the expediency and wisdom of your course.” “It is the best enunciation of the best platform we have had since the Chicago Convention adjourned,” wrote Senator Timothy O. Howe of Wisconsin. “Whatever is honest and earnest in the Nation will march to that music.” Almost unnoted in the chorus of praise were the phrases in Lincoln’s letter reaffirming his “oft-expressed
personal
wish that all men every where could be free” and promising that he would “adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.”