The Fiery Trial (35 page)

Lincoln and Congress also reached agreement about the status of slaves who escaped to Union lines. The Washington correspondents of both the New York and Chicago
Tribune
s reported in January 1862 Lincoln’s view that the government had no obligation to return fugitive slaves and that in any event public opinion would not allow it to do so. Nonetheless, the problem cried out for a consistent official policy. It could not be solved,
Harper’s Weekly
noted, “by the whim of this General, and the prejudice of that. There can not be thousands, and presently millions of people who have no recognized status, hanging around and within the lines of the army.” Some commanders refused to return fugitive slaves; others still sent them back to their owners. Major General Henry Halleck, who had replaced Frémont in Missouri, explained that the Fugitive Slave Act remained on the books and it was up to Congress, not the army, to change the law.
⁶²

In February 1862, Francis P. Blair Jr. reported from the House Committee on Military Affairs a new article of war that forbade army and navy officers from returning fugitive slaves under threat of court-martial. It received congressional approval, with virtually unanimous support from Republicans, and Lincoln signed it on March 13, 1862. The session’s first significant antislavery measure, the new article of war established for the first time a uniform policy regarding runaways and fundamentally altered the army’s relationship to slavery. In effect, it superceded the Fugitive Slave Act, even though that law would not be repealed until 1864. It made no distinction between fugitives from loyal and disloyal owners, or between those who escaped in Union and Confederate states. It did not explicitly free any slaves. But enacted just as the army was expanding its presence in the Mississippi Valley, it made Union lines a safe haven for fugitives. Since it did not offer compensation to the owners of fugitives sheltered by the army, it underscored how respect for the property right in slaves was declining. Henceforth, said Trumbull, an army officer must treat a fugitive slave not as property but “as a person,” exactly like “other persons whom he may meet in the country.”
⁶³

V

P
REOCCUPIED WITH
military matters and the long illness of his young son Willie, who died on February 20, 1862, Lincoln nonetheless pressed ahead with the idea of compensated emancipation in the border states. At the end of November 1861, Lincoln had told Charles Sumner that “in a month or six weeks we should all be together” on the question of slavery. A month later, Sumner reported Lincoln alerting him to expect an “early message” proposing that the federal government purchase the slaves of the loyal border states. On March 6, Lincoln sent the promised message to Congress.

Lincoln asked Congress to adopt a joint resolution pledging to provide financial compensation to any state that enacted a plan for the “gradual abolishment of slavery.” Such a measure, he argued, would help to preserve the Union, since Confederates continued to expect the border states to join them. “To deprive them of this hope,” which the adoption of a plan of emancipation would accomplish, “substantially ends the rebellion.” Lincoln made clear his preference for “gradual, and not sudden emancipation.” He reiterated that the federal government had no right to “interfere with slavery within state limits,” and that the border states had complete “free choice” whether to accept or reject his idea. Yet he also included a not-too-veiled warning: so long as the war continued, no one could foresee the consequences.
⁶⁴

Determined to keep leading Radicals on his side, Lincoln called Sumner to the White House and read the message aloud before sending it to Congress. To everyone else, the announcement came as a complete surprise, as “unexpected,” Wendell Phillips said, “as a thunderbolt in a clear sky.” If Lincoln had “not entered Canaan,” Phillips told one audience, “he has turned his face Zionward.” Other abolitionists were even more enthusiastic. On the day Lincoln dispatched his message to Congress, a New York meeting sponsored by the Emancipation League greeted word of his action with “transports of joy.” “We could hardly believe the news,” declared the
Weekly Anglo-African
. “Who could have prophesized this three months ago?”
⁶⁵

Lincoln seemed to have gauged the state of public opinion precisely. All the major New York newspapers, including the radical
Tribune
, Democratic
World
, anti-abolitionist
Herald
, and ever-cautious
Journal of Commerce
, applauded his plan. The
Tribune
’s correspondent in the capital called the message “perhaps the most important document ever addressed to Congress.” Conservatives saw the message as a counter to “the drift of abolition schemes” in Congress. They praised Lincoln for envisioning gradual, not immediate, emancipation, and for acknowledging the states’ exclusive power to determine slavery’s future. Many northern Democrats, to be sure, criticized his plan as unwarranted by the Constitution. But for the moment, Lincoln had “given the Republican party a
policy
,” presenting “ground where all might stand, the conservative and the radical,” declared Owen Lovejoy. Lovejoy and other Radicals remained determined to press for further action against slavery. But Lincoln’s proposed resolution quickly won congressional approval, with virtually every Republican voting in favor (but not Thaddeus Stevens, who abstained, thinking the plan far too weak). Overshadowed by later events, Lincoln’s March 6 message marked an important milestone on the road to abolition. While Lincoln had privately been promoting border emancipation since the previous November and had asked Congress to provide funds for this purpose in his annual message of December, he now publicly made the eventual end of slavery a national goal, and claimed a new national authority to promote it.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly
explained why it considered Lincoln’s message important enough to publish in full, rather than providing only a summary, its usual practice with public documents: gradual emancipation had become “the policy of the nation.”
⁶⁶

Lincoln moved to drum up support for his proposal when he met with Wendell Phillips at the White House late in March. The meeting lasted an hour, with Lincoln doing most of the talking. He seemed to feel that Phillips did not appreciate “quite enough” the March 6 message. According to Phillips, Lincoln affirmed his hatred of slavery and that he “
meant it should die
.” Lincoln assured the abolitionist that runaways would not be returned: “The Negro who has once touched the hem of the government’s garment shall never again be a slave.” The words sound more like Phillips than Lincoln, but the sentiment was the president’s.
⁶⁷

More important to the success of the initiative was the response in the border states. Four days after sending his message to Congress, Lincoln met with a delegation of border congressmen. Shortly afterward, John W. Crisfield of Maryland wrote a summary of Lincoln’s remarks. Lincoln, Crisfield recorded, stated that he was “constantly annoyed by conflicting and antagonistic complaints” about how to deal with the slaves who kept coming into Union lines. Were the border states to embrace his proposal, this “irritation” would be removed and the war shortened. Crisfield, himself a large slaveholder, replied that white Marylanders would be willing to give up slavery if provision were made so that “they could be rid of the race.” Asked what would happen if the border rejected his proposal, Lincoln replied that he had no further “designs” on slavery. The delegation asked Lincoln to state this publicly, to which he responded that he could not do so without getting into a “quarrel” with the Radicals. He “did not pretend to disguise his antislavery feeling,” Lincoln added, but he “recognized the rights of property which had grown out of it, and would respect those rights.”
⁶⁸

Shortly after the beginning of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass had written, “Our rulers do not yet know slaveholders.” Lincoln would quickly learn that he had considerably overestimated the willingness of the border states to embrace emancipation. Some border Unionists did support Lincoln’s plan, including George P. Fisher, his ally in promoting abolition in Delaware. The majority, however, rejected it. Kentucky seemed especially adamant. The legislature voted to disenfranchise any resident who “may advocate the doctrine of the abolition or emancipation of slavery” in the state. In Maryland, even officeholders appointed by Lincoln denounced anyone who supported the plan as an “abolitionist and not worthy of the confidence of any gentleman.” When Congress passed the resolution Lincoln had requested, border members voted against it with “almost perfect unanimity.” The border, wrote the
New York Times
, had proved “unequal to the occasion.”
⁶⁹

On one thing border Unionists agreed: emancipation, gradual or not, must be accompanied by the removal of the black population. On the day before Lincoln sent his message to Congress, Montgomery Blair urged him to include a provision for “colonizing the blacks.” Even though he had mentioned the idea in his annual message of the previous December, Lincoln did not do so. But his border supporters immediately linked the two ideas. Blair himself published a letter in a Baltimore newspaper claiming that Lincoln’s plan included “the separation of the races.” A meeting in Missouri to endorse the president offered its “hearty support” to “the gradual emancipation and colonization of the slaves.” Senator Willard Saulsbury of Delaware voted against the resolution, but noted that he would be happy to see slavery ended in his state if the government would “take the free negroes off our hands.”
⁷⁰

The
Liberator
charged Lincoln with bringing forth his gradual emancipation proposal to forestall more radical action by Congress.
⁷¹
This hardly seems likely. Numerous antislavery measures were about to reach the floor, and there was no reason to believe that Congress would abandon them because of Lincoln’s initiative. In fact, less than a week after Congress approved the resolution offering financial aid to states that agreed to abolish slavery came passage of another historic measure, the abolition of slavery in Washington, D.C.

When Lincoln arrived as president in 1861, the District of Columbia, with Georgetown, had a population of 75,000, including 11,100 free blacks and a little under 3,200 slaves. The United States, Lot Morrill of Maine told the Senate, was the only “civilized nation” to tolerate slavery in its capital. Lincoln himself, it will be recalled, had advanced a plan for abolition in the District during his term in Congress. At the opening of the December 1861 session, Henry Wilson of Massachusetts introduced an emancipation bill, which came before Congress the following March. It received final approval on April 11, but not before spirited debate over its method and consequences. Taking the two houses together, every northern Republican voted for the bill, and all but five northern Democrats against. Most representatives of the border states strenuously opposed it, charging that it would drive Unionist southerners to embrace the Confederacy, lower the wages of white workers, and produce “a war of extermination between the two races.” Blacks, they insisted, had only one understanding of freedom, “freedom from labor,” and would become “lazy, indolent, thievish vagabonds,” in the words of Garrett Davis of Kentucky.
⁷²

To avert this supposed fate, Davis proposed an amendment for the compulsory colonization outside the United States of all persons freed under the act. This touched off a debate on colonization that revealed sharp disagreement between Radical and moderate Republicans. Orville H. Browning, probably the most conservative Republican senator, said that compulsory deportation might become necessary. Many moderates believed, as Senator John Sherman of Ohio declared, that given the strength of prevailing prejudice, emancipation would grant blacks a freedom “stripped of everything but the name.” Colonization, Sherman believed, should be voluntary, but every antislavery bill should include a provision making it possible for blacks who so desired to “seek freedom elsewhere.” Most Radicals agreed with James Harlan, who told the Senate, “I am disposed to leave them where they are.” Davis’s compulsory colonization amendment failed, as, initially, did a substitute offered by James R. Doolittle to provide $100,000 to promote voluntary black emigration. Later, some Radicals changed their votes for fear Lincoln would veto the measure without it, and Doolittle’s proposal became part of the bill. “My amendment
saved
and
carried through
” the abolition of slavery in the nation’s capital, Doolittle claimed.
⁷³

Lincoln exerted little direct influence on the deliberations. “I do not talk to members of congress on the subject,” he wrote, “except when they ask me.” He feared, however, that immediate abolition in the District would arouse opposition to his border policy. Privately, he expressed the hope that one or more border states might move toward gradual emancipation before Congress acted. If this did not happen in a “reasonable time,” he preferred that the bill have “three main features—gradual—compensation—and vote of the people” (like his 1849 draft legislation and, in part, his 1837 legislative “protest”). But Congress disregarded Lincoln’s preferences. The measure did provide for compensation to loyal owners, up to a maximum of $300 per slave (well below their market value, critics charged). But emancipation was immediate, not gradual, and the law made no provision for a popular vote on the subject.

For a few days, Lincoln hesitated. “I really sympathize with him,” Congressman John W. Crisfield of Maryland wrote to his wife. “He is surrounded [by] immense difficulties.” Crisfield claimed after a meeting at the White House that while Lincoln “greatly” objected to some of the bill’s features, he felt a veto would do more harm than good. He hoped Maryland would understand. Lincoln feared that immediate abolition might result in chaos. He told Browning that he had qualms about disrupting the lives of white families and about whether blacks could truly make their way in freedom. According to Browning’s account, Lincoln remarked, “Now families would at once be deprived of cooks, stable boys, etc., and [slaves] of their protectors without any provision for them.” On April 16, Lincoln finally signed the D.C. emancipation measure into law, informing Congress of his gratification that “the two principles of compensation, and colonization, are both recognized, and practically applied.” “Only the damnedest of ‘damned abolitionists’ dreamed of such a thing a year ago,” wrote the New York diarist George Templeton Strong on hearing the news.
⁷⁴