The Fiery Trial (37 page)

Some of the steps taken by these governors displayed an alarming sensitivity to local white opinion. In April 1862, Lincoln appointed Edward Stanly, a former Whig congressman, as North Carolina’s military governor (his rule extended only to a small area along the Atlantic seaboard). Stanly ordered the closing of schools for blacks that the army had established after capturing New Bern. Under the laws of North Carolina, he explained, it was illegal to teach blacks to read and write. In any event, the schools’ presence “would do harm to the Union cause.” Stanly also allowed owners to retrieve fugitives from army camps. He told Stanton that he had been “sent to restore the old order of things” in North Carolina and that this could not be done if local whites believed emancipation was in the offing. Large numbers of whites visited Stanly to congratulate him “upon the auspicious beginning of his administration.” But his actions created a furor in the North. “All the world,” noted the
New York Evening Post
, regarded the ban on education as among “the most abhorrent features of…slavery.”
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Early in June, Vincent Colyer, who had set up the schools as the army’s superintendent of the poor, traveled to Washington and, accompanied by Charles Sumner, called at the White House to complain about Stanly’s actions. Lincoln, Colyer later related, at first seemed annoyed to be asked to deal with the matter. “Do you take me for a School-Committeeman?” the president asked. Lincoln’s tone changed when told about the return of fugitive slaves. Stanly, he said, had misunderstood his instructions. “I have hated slavery from childhood,” Colyer recalled Lincoln remarking, and no “fugitive from a rebel, shall ever be returned to his master.” But Lincoln rejected calls to remove Stanly and viewed the controversy as a distraction from weightier matters. Horace Maynard, a member of Congress from East Tennessee, reported to Andrew Johnson that Lincoln “expresses himself gratified in the highest degree that you do not raise any ‘nigger’ issues to bother him.”
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Nonetheless, with emancipation sentiment rising, Lincoln redoubled his efforts to promote his plan for gradual, compensated abolition. On July 12, he invited to the White House over two dozen congressmen from the border states, Virginia, and Tennessee, and read to them from a carefully prepared manuscript. Had their states embraced his proposal when he announced it in March, he told them, somewhat hyperbolically, “the war would now be substantially ended.” Lincoln noted that regardless of the constitutional protections slavery enjoyed, the institution was eroding because of the war and would eventually be destroyed “by mere friction and abrasion.” How much better it would be to make “a
decision
at once to emancipate
gradually
,” thereby allowing for monetary compensation. Moreover, land for colonization could easily be obtained, and “the freed people will not be so reluctant to go.” Clearly, Lincoln was trying to make his plan as appealing as possible to the border states. Yet he also noted that by reversing General Hunter’s order in May, he had given “dissatisfaction, if not offence, to many whose support the country cannot afford to lose.” Moreover, “the pressure, in this direction, is still upon me, and is increasing.” He begged them to act, and quickly.
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That evening, when the delegation gathered to draft a response, a “stormy debate” ensued. Lincoln must have been sorely disappointed by the outcome. Eight members of Congress endorsed Lincoln’s plan and said they would advise their constituents to “consider” it. But the majority, Lincoln’s supporter George P. Fisher of Delaware remarked with “great disgust,” opposed “the liberation of a single slave.” Their report, written by John W. Crisfield of Maryland and signed by twenty-one congressmen, contained a scathing rejection of what they called the “radical change of our social system” Lincoln envisioned. The president’s proposal, Crisfield wrote, intruded on a matter that “exclusively belonged to our respective States.” The report lectured Lincoln on how to conduct himself: “Confine yourself to your constitutional authority; confine your subordinates within the same limits; conduct this war solely for the purpose of restoring the constitution to its legitimate authority.”
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Lincoln still believed that the border states held the key to abolition nationwide. Four years later Isaac N. Arnold recalled Lincoln remarking to him and Owen Lovejoy on the day after the July 12 meeting that if the border would only accept his proposal, then “the labor of your life, Lovejoy, would be crowned with success—you would live to see the end of slavery.” On July 14, Lincoln sent to Congress the draft of a bill pledging to provide compensation in the form of federal bonds to any state that adopted a plan of abolition. One new feature was that Lincoln now considered the possibility that a state might later decide to “reintroduce” slavery, in which case the bonds would become “null and void.” Republican leaders were not impressed. Some, wrote a reporter for the
New York Tribune
, thought the proposal “ridiculous,” and Congress took no action on it before adjourning.
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If the border states rejected Lincoln’s offer, one participant in the July 12 meeting told a northern journalist, the president would “irresistibly be swept into the vortex of the revolution.” The military situation heightened the pressure for a new departure. By early July, it had become apparent that McClellan’s Virginia campaign launched the previous spring had failed. The impact was traumatic. “A profound gloom…settled upon the public mind,” declared the
New York Times
, “in regard to the conduct and prospects of the…war.” Lincoln’s friend Richard Yates, now the governor of Illinois, issued a public letter calling for a more vigorous effort to save the Union: “The crisis of the war and our national existence is upon us. The time has come for the adoption of more decisive measures.” John Sherman, the moderate from Ohio, told the Senate that while he respected “the rights of the southern people,” it had become imperative to confiscate the slaves and other property of “the disloyal” and mobilize the full power of the nation to “enter into the war in earnest.” It was in the context of a broad shift in thinking about how the war should be conducted that Congress broke the long logjam on the use of black troops and the confiscation of Confederate property, and Lincoln made the decision for emancipation.
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With manpower needs now extending into the indefinite future, Congress in July moved forward on the contentious issue of raising black soldiers, which Radicals had advocated, to no effect, since the session began. As adjournment neared, it began debate on a bill amending the Militia Act of 1795 to authorize the president to receive blacks for “constructing intrenchments, or performing camp service or any other labor, or any military or naval service for which they may be found competent.” If owned by supporters of the Confederacy, black men who enlisted along with their immediate families (identified as the mother, wife, and children) would become free. This was a remarkable acknowledgment that slaves
had
families, even though no state accorded them legal recognition. While opening the door to black recruits serving in combat, the bill envisioned them mainly as military laborers, freeing white troops for combat. Hence it set their pay at ten dollars per month minus a three-dollar clothing ration, six dollars less than that of white soldiers. Representatives of the border states, where the measure offered an immediate path to freedom for many male slaves and their families, objected vociferously. Willard Saulsbury of Delaware called the bill “the most magnificent scheme of emancipation yet proposed.” White soldiers, he warned, would never “fight side by side with negroes.”
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But moderate Republicans lined up behind the proposal. The war, declared Senator William P. Fessenden, must be fought on “different principles.” Fessenden’s long speech in favor of admitting blacks into military service marked a crucial turning point. It “amazed the Radical Republicans,” reported one northern journalist, noting that Fessenden, “a crabbed conservative,” was among the Senate’s most influential members: “When
he
moves, it signifies that the whole glacier has started.” Lincoln signed the Militia Act on July 17. But for it to go into effect, a presidential order was needed.
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On July 11 and 12, 1862, after months of ideological deadlock, Congress also approved and sent to the president the Second Confiscation Act. The importance of this law, Congressman Isaac N. Arnold of Illinois would later write, “has not been fully appreciated.” This resulted, in part, from the fact that it consisted of contradictory elements, drawn from divergent proposals of the previous few months. Early sections of the measure provided for fines, imprisonment, and possible death sentences, as well as the loss of slaves, for anyone convicted of assisting the rebellion, and for the immediate seizure and sale of the property of high-ranking Confederate officials. The bill also authorized the president to warn all supporters of the Confederacy to abandon the rebellion or face the confiscation and sale by federal courts of their property. The ninth section declared “forever free of their servitude” all rebel-owned slaves who escaped to Union lines or lived in Confederate territory subsequently occupied by Union troops. The bill also forbade the army from returning fugitives to disloyal owners, and allowed Lincoln to employ blacks in any way he deemed “necessary and proper for the suppression of this rebellion.” Finally, it asked the president to provide for the colonization “in some tropical country” of liberated slaves willing to emigrate.
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In some ways the most striking feature of the Second Confiscation Act was its sharp distinction between the confiscation of other property and the emancipation of slaves. For most property it established a cumbersome judicial process that helps to explain why little land was actually seized and sold under its provisions. Yet the section freeing rebel-owned slaves who came within Union lines did not require court proceedings: it was self-enforcing. Slaves would become free, wrote the
Springfield Republican
, “as fast as the armies penetrate the Southern section.” Henceforth, the newspaper added, “every victory is a victory of emancipation.” To be sure, the number of slaves freed by the act would depend on how much Confederate territory the Union army succeeded in occupying. But to their critics, it seemed that Republicans were bent on the emancipation of “almost the entire slave population” of the United States.
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For all its ambiguities, the Second Confiscation Act embodied a major shift in national policy. Orville H. Browning, the Senate’s leading Republican critic of the bill, badgered Lincoln to veto it. The moment had arrived, he said, to decide whether the president “was to control the abolitionists and radicals, or whether they were to control him.” Lincoln responded that he wished Congress had not legislated on confiscation at all. But given that nearly all Republicans, unlike Browning, had voted for the bill, Lincoln was reluctant to disapprove it. Instead, he adopted an unusual course of action. Lincoln drafted a veto message outlining his objections. It criticized not only the permanent confiscation of the property of rebels but also the lack of any provision for determining whether runaway slaves belonged to Confederate or Unionist owners. Then, after asking Congress, which was about to adjourn, to remain in session an extra day, he met with a few members, including the influential Fessenden, and asked them to secure a resolution stating that the forfeiture of real estate would not extend beyond the life of the owner, as the Constitution required. Congress passed the resolution and then adjourned. On July 17, the same day that he approved the Militia Act, Lincoln signed the Second Confiscation Act, but also dispatched his draft veto message.
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Many members of Congress found Lincoln’s demand for a resolution and his decision to send a veto message without actually vetoing the bill “inexpressibly provoking.” The House refused to print extra copies of Lincoln’s message, the usual courtesy, and the Senate refused to print it at all. Nonetheless, once Lincoln signed the bill, all slaves of rebels who came within Union lines automatically became free. By the time Congress adjourned, Charles Sumner declared, the president and Congress agreed on two things: “The blacks are to be employed [in the military], and the slaves are to be freed.” Lincoln, wrote
Harper’s Weekly
, “has represented the average feeling of the people. Now as that feeling changes, we may expect a change of conduct on the part of the Administration.” And, in fact, a few days before he signed the Second Confiscation Act, Lincoln had embarked on a new approach to slavery and emancipation.
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When Lincoln decided to issue a proclamation of emancipation remains unknown. According to Hamlin family lore, he read a draft of such a document to his vice president as early as mid-June 1862 (an unlikely story, given that when Lincoln finally made his decision public that fall, Hamlin seemed surprised). Owen Lovejoy also claimed to have been told about it in advance. On July 1, 1862, on the other hand, Orville H. Browning recorded in his diary that Lincoln had read to him a draft paper about how to conduct the war “in its relations to slavery.” Rather than containing any new departures, this document reiterated existing policy. No fugitives who escaped during the war were to be returned to slavery; no blacks would be armed; and Congress had “no power over slavery in the states.” According to Browning, Lincoln even stated that whatever remained of slavery once the war ended would “be left to the exclusive control of the states where it may exist.” Three days later, as noted earlier, Lincoln rebuffed Charles Sumner’s plea for the “reconsecration” of Independence Day “by a decree of emancipation.”
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