The Fiery Trial (39 page)

Numerous colonization schemes surfaced in 1862. From Brazil, ambassador James Watson Webb, who as the pro-colonization editor of the
New York Courier and Enquirer
had helped to whip up the city’s anti-abolition riot of 1834, proposed the creation of a joint stock company to settle black Americans along the Amazon River. The Danish chargé d’affaires in Washington asked the administration to encourage black emigration to St. Croix, whose sugar plantations had suffered from a “want of manual labor” since Denmark abolished slavery there in 1848.
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The Chiriqui project, which Lincoln had discussed in 1861 with Ambrose W. Thompson, who claimed to own land suitable for colonization in this province of Colombia, now came back to life. Thompson’s son, a captain in the Union army, sent Lincoln a long letter detailing the region’s attractions, including its soil, climate, coal mines, even the abundant “turtles and fish” in its harbors. In a more practical vein he predicted that an American colony there would exert “a preponderating influence in Central and South America.” In April 1862, Secretary of the Interior Caleb B. Smith recommended that the government advance $300,000 to Thompson to enable him to open the coal mines in Chiriqui. This, he wrote to the president, would begin “a great national scheme which may ultimately relieve the United States of the surplus colored population.” Lincoln seemed more enthusiastic about Smith’s report than any member of the cabinet. In June 1862, Lincoln appointed Reverend James Mitchell, the Indiana colonizationist he had met nine years earlier, commissioner of emigration in the Department of the Interior.
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As talk of colonization increased, so did black opposition. “No considerable number of colored people have manifested any wish to be colonized,” one Massachusetts newspaper observed. To Mitchell’s dismay, he found blacks who had obtained their freedom in 1861 and 1862 “to a great extent satisfied with their new liberties and franchises.” To counteract this reluctance to emigrate, Lincoln, for the first and only time, took the idea of colonization directly to black Americans. Early in July, he asked his emigration commissioner to gather a black delegation at the White House. Mitchell conveyed the invitation to an audience assembled at one of Washington’s black churches. The group adopted a resolution calling discussion of colonization “inexpedient, inauspicious, and impolitic.” But as it would be discourteous to refuse to meet with the president, a committee of five was appointed. On August 14, 1862, in Mitchell’s words, “in the goodness of his heart, for the first time in the history of the country,” an American president “received and addressed a number of colored men.”
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This was not, in fact, the first time Lincoln had met with prominent African-Americans. In April 1862 he had a forty-five-minute conversation with the black theologian Daniel A. Payne about the District of Columbia emancipation bill. That same month, he discussed colonization with two representatives of the government of Liberia, one of them the prominent pan-Africanist Alexander Crummell. A newspaper report that the two had urged Lincoln to support “compulsory transportation” inspired “severe comments” from black Americans, and Lincoln dashed off a letter to the two to repair the damage. “Neither you nor any one else,” he affirmed, “have ever advocated, in my presence, the compulsory deportation of freed slaves to Liberia or elsewhere.”
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What Lincoln said on August 14 to the black delegation made the meeting one of the most controversial moments of his entire career. “You and we are different races,” Lincoln told them. Because of white prejudice, “even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race…. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.” Lincoln offered a powerful indictment of slavery: “Your race are suffering in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people.” But he refused to issue a similar condemnation of racism, although he also declined to associate himself with it. Blacks, he said, could never “be placed on an equality with the white race” in the United States; whether this “is right or wrong I need not discuss” (a remarkable comment from one who had so vehemently condemned Stephen A. Douglas for moral agnosticism regarding slavery). Lincoln seemed to blame the black presence for the Civil War: “But for your race among us there could not be war.” He offered their removal as the remedy. Although not mentioning Chiriqui by name, he touted Central America as an area of fine harbors and “rich coal mines” where even a small band of colonists might succeed. Invoking the memory of George Washington and the “hardships” he had endured in the War of Independence, Lincoln urged blacks to “sacrifice something of your present comfort” by agreeing to emigrate. To refuse would be “extremely selfish.” Despite his powerful endorsement of colonization, Lincoln, unlike Bates, the Blairs, and many other border emancipationists, continued to insist that any such plan must be voluntary, in effect leaving the decision to blacks themselves. Nonetheless, as the Washington correspondent of the
New York Times
observed, Lincoln’s statement “committed him more strongly than ever to the colonization policy as the surest solution of negro complications.”
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A stenographer was present and Lincoln’s remarks quickly appeared in the nation’s newspapers, as he undoubtedly intended. Edward M. Thomas, the delegation’s spokesman, wrote to Lincoln that he found his remarks persuasive: “We were entirely hostile to the movement until all the advantages were so ably brought to our views by you.” But overall, the meeting had the same result as Lincoln’s conference a month earlier with the border congressmen: failure. The bulk of the antislavery public, along with many others, greeted the publication of Lincoln’s little speech with dismay. “The scheme is simply absurd,” wrote James Bowen, the police commissioner of New York City, “and is either a piece of charlatanism or the statesmanship of a backwoods lawyer, but disgraceful to the administration.” Secretary of the Treasury Chase found the encounter shocking. “How much better,” he remarked in his diary, “would be a manly protest against prejudice against color.” A. P. Smith, a black resident of New Jersey, wrote to the president: “Pray tell us, is our right to a home in this country less than your own, Mr. Lincoln?…Are you an American? So are we. Are you a patriot? So are we.” Blacks considered it a “perfect outrage” to hear that their presence was “the cause of all this bloodshed” and their desire to remain in “the land of their birth” a result of fear of “making sacrifices.”
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Most indignant of all was Frederick Douglass. His vision of a society that had transcended the determinism of race stood as the polar opposite of the “pride of race and blood” that Lincoln, he wrote, had revealed. “Mr. Lincoln,” Douglass complained, “assumes the language and arguments of an itinerant colonization lecturer, shows all his inconsistencies,…his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” Douglass pointed out that blacks had not caused the war; slavery had. The real task of a statesman was not to patronize blacks by deciding what was “best” for them, but to allow them to be free. Fourteen years later, when Douglass delivered his famous speech at the unveiling of a statue of Lincoln in Washington, the 1862 meeting still rankled. He could not forbear to mention the day when the president “strangely told us that we were the cause of the war…[and] were to leave the land in which we were born.”
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Commenting on the meeting with the black delegation, a London newspaper observed, “If ever a public man was aware of the weight of his own words…President Lincoln must have been so.” But Lincoln failed to consider that his remarks might reinforce racism and encourage racists to act on their beliefs. Northern blacks reported that since the publication of the president’s comments they had been “repeatedly insulted, and told that we must leave the country.” The summer of 1862 witnessed a series of violent outbreaks targeting blacks. Lincoln’s meeting with the black delegation, wrote the
Chicago Tribune
, “constitutes the wide and gloomy background of which the foreground is made up of the riots and disturbances which have disgraced within a short time past our Northern cities.” The “kindly” Lincoln, it went on, “does not mean all this, but the deduction is inevitable.”
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Heedless of this reaction, Lincoln pressed forward. A few days after the meeting, he discussed colonization at length with Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy of Kansas and accepted Pomeroy’s offer to organize black emigration parties to Central America. Previously, Pomeroy had opposed colonization—if anybody should be sent out of the country, he quipped, it was slaveholders, “a class whose absence shall be least felt.” Now, on August 26, 1862, Pomeroy issued a public address, “sanctioned by the President,” inviting 100 black families to accompany him to Chiriqui. Within a few days he had received more than enough applications. Indeed, Frederick Douglass wrote to Pomeroy that his two sons desired to be included, even though Douglass himself opposed the idea. On September 11, even as a pivotal military campaign in Maryland unfolded, Lincoln authorized Secretary Smith to sign an agreement with the Chiriqui company for the U.S. government to purchase land for the colonists and advance funds for the development of coal mines. The document envisioned the eventual dispatch of 10,000 emigrants. By October, Pomeroy claimed to have the names of more than 13,000 potential participants. Even if he exaggerated, it seems evident that some black Americans found the idea appealing. Most of the volunteers appear to have been northerners, not contrabands or newly emancipated slaves in the nation’s capital.
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Lincoln’s meeting with the black delegation and stepped-up promotion of colonization formed parts of an unusual sequence of events between his decision in July to shelve the emancipation edict and the issuance of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation two months later. During this period, the military situation showed little improvement and pressure for emancipation continued to mount. Even as Lincoln privately intimated that he was “pretty well cured of objections,” he made a series of widely reported statements that cast doubt on his willingness to issue such a proclamation. In retrospect, he appears to have been preparing the northern public for the coming announcement.

Throughout these two months, northern newspapers, Republican as well as Democratic, criticized the administration’s “want of decision and purpose.” Republican congressmen who returned home after adjournment found public opinion demanding “a vigorous prosecution of the war.” From Ohio, John Sherman wrote to his brother, General William T. Sherman, “You can form no conception of the change of opinion here as to the Negro Question…. I am prepared for one to meet the broad issue of universal emancipation.” Letters poured into the White House demanding action against slavery. “The rebellion cannot be crushed without a general emancipation of the slaves,” wrote Benjamin Bannan, an influential editor from Pennsylvania.
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The will of God now became a consideration in the debate, an odd situation for a man like Lincoln whose religious views were, to say the least, unorthodox. Northern ministers, including many who could hardly have been described as abolitionists before 1861, delivered sermons and dispatched petitions and delegations to the White House explaining the war as a divine chastisement for the sin of slavery and assuring Lincoln that God intended him to free the slaves. At one meeting with two representatives of “Chicago Christians of all denominations,” Lincoln gently ridiculed the idea that God’s purposes were self-evident. He pointed out that prelates on different sides of the question had been pressuring him, “equally certain that they represent the Divine will.” Confederates also believed that God was on their side. He wondered why God had revealed his wishes to the delegation but not to him, since he must make the decision, although he quickly added that he did not expect “a direct revelation.”

Lincoln then discussed the pros and cons of emancipation; he almost seemed to be arguing with himself. On the one hand, slavery was undoubtedly “the root of the rebellion.” Emancipation would “help us in Europe,” “help somewhat in the North,” and weaken the Confederacy. On the other hand, he still feared that the border states would “go over to the rebels.” Moreover, issuing a proclamation that could not be enforced would be seen by the “whole world” as a sign of weakness, “like the Pope’s bull against the comet.” Lincoln seemed put off by the ministers’ statement that emancipation would give the North a principle around which to rally. “We already have an important principle,” he declared, “the fact that constitutional government is at stake.”
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On August 20, six days after Lincoln’s meeting with the black delegation at the White House, Horace Greeley published in the
New York Tribune
a long open letter addressed to the president, entitled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions” (more or less the population of the North). It touched on many issues, including Lincoln’s supposed deference to the “fossil politicians” of the border states. But essentially, it urged him to enforce the Second Confiscation Act, including its “emancipating provisions.” This was an odd request, since in late July Lincoln had in fact issued a proclamation giving Confederates sixty days to abandon the rebellion or face the confiscation of their property under that law, a time limit that still had a month to run. Lincoln could have simply replied that he was in the process of doing what Greeley demanded. He could have pointed out, as the
Chicago Tribune
did, that under the Second Confiscation Act slaves of rebels entering Union lines were legally “already free” and that “their title to freedom” did not depend on any action by the president. Instead, Lincoln chose to interpret Greeley’s letter as a call for immediate and total abolition. He replied with his most often-quoted public letter, which, in what Greeley must have considered an affront, Lincoln released to a rival newspaper, the Washington
National Intelligencer
: