Lincoln Part 36

The letter was couched in respectful language, and there was nothing insubordinate about it. McClellan had earlier requested the President's permission to present his general ideas about the conflict and Lincoln said he would welcome his "views as to [the] present state of Military affairs throughout the whole country." Nor was the Harrison's Landing letter an unreasonable or extreme doc.u.ment, as some of McClellan's detractors later claimed. McClellan even argued that, while avoiding general emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves, the federal government had a right to order, with appropriate compensation for owners, the manumission of "all the slaves within a particular state," such as Missouri or Maryland. But what it did make clear was McClellan's view that the war should continue to be waged between professional armies, with minimal disruption of civilian life.

That policy had been pursued for over a year and Lincoln was convinced that it had failed. He was ready to move on. He read the letter but made no comment on it except to thank the general for his opinions. Later he remarked that McClellan's advice on how to carry on the affairs of the nation made him think of "the man whose horse kicked up and stuck his foot through the stirrup. He said to the horse, 'If you are going to get on I will get off.'"

The President did not visit Harrison's Landing to learn how the war should be conducted; he went looking for the best way to end a costly and fruitless campaign. McClellan was mortified that Lincoln asked him for no account of the recent battles and was not interested in explanations of the army's failure. Not confiding his views to the general, the President merely asked him and each of his corps commanders to estimate the strength of the Union forces and the location and condition of the Confederates. He then made the telling inquiry: "If you desired, could you remove the army safely?" McClellan saw pretty clearly the direction of Lincoln's thinking, and he reported to his wife that the President seemed like "a man about to do something of which he was much ashamed." "I do not know to what extent he has profited by his visit," he reflected; "not much I fear, for he really seems quite incapable of rising to the height of the merits of the question and the magnitude of the crisis."

On July 11, two days after the President returned to Was.h.i.+ngton, he showed just how much he had learned; he named Henry W. Halleck "to command the whole land forces of the United States, as General-in-Chief." That appointment signaled a repudiation of McClellan, and of McClellan's view of the war. It was a decision Lincoln had been working through for many weeks. Clearly he had had in mind both a change in command and a change in strategy when he visited General Scott in June. Though he told reporters who cornered him on the way back from West Point that his conference "had nothing whatever to do with making or unmaking any General in the country," this was a little less than the whole truth.

The appointment of Pope had been an early signal that Lincoln was changing his military strategy. The President had confidence in this handsome, black-bearded new general who was the son of an old Illinois a.s.sociate and had been part of the presidential party on the inaugural trip to Was.h.i.+ngton. He liked his record. Pope had served well in the capture of Island No. 10 on the Mississippi River, and he had led a wing of Halleck's army in the campaign against Corinth. Doubtless he was pleased that Pope, unlike the generals closest to McClellan, was an ardent antislavery Republican. He was a protege of Secretary Chase and the son-in-law of a stalwart Republican representative from Ohio. Even more, Lincoln liked Pope's idea of warfare. Boastful and indiscreet, Pope made no secret of his scorn of Eastern generals, like McClellan, who he thought grossly overestimated the strength of the Confederates, and he ridiculed those who believed that strategy was more important than fighting.

Finding Pope knowledgeable and articulate, Lincoln was reluctant to let him leave Was.h.i.+ngton, and during the desperate Seven Days' battles informally made him his chief military adviser and aide. Day after day, Pope worked alongside the President in the War Department telegraph office, helping Lincoln interpret McClellan's frequent dispatches and making no secret of his belief that the general's retreat to the James River was a blunder. But Pope grew restive in this advisory role and wanted to take to the field. It was at his repeated urging that the President brought in Halleck, who had also been warmly recommended by General Scott.

Freed from his desk job, Pope took up his command and immediately made it clear that, unlike McClellan, he would not fight a soft war. He published a series of tactless orders informing his exhausted and dispirited Eastern soldiers that he came from the West, "where we have always seen the backs of our enemies," and promising that he would pay more attention to his lines of advance than to his lines of retreat. Pope ordered his soldiers so far as possible to live on the country they were pa.s.sing through, and he prescribed a stern loyalty oath for all "disloyal male citizens" behind Union lines, with heavy penalties for "evil-disposed persons." The words and the rhetoric were John Pope's-but before he issued his orders he submitted them to the President, who gave them his tacit approval.

As Pope took command, Lincoln's confidence began to return. Bustling and energetic, the new general rapidly whipped his troops into shape, and he projected a direct, overland advance against the Confederate capital-just the strategy that Lincoln had unsuccessfully urged McClellan to follow. Greatly encouraged, Lincoln by mid-August was so confident that he told Sumner the Union army would be in Richmond within two weeks.

III

Two days after Lincoln appointed Halleck general-in-chief, he made an equally significant s.h.i.+ft in his policy toward slavery. Characteristically he made no public announcement of either change, and in neither case did he make a clean break with the past. Just as he continued to support McClellan's campaign on the Peninsula while he was creating a new army under Pope, so on the domestic scene he worked hard for his old policies of gradualism and compensation even while he was moving toward general emanc.i.p.ation.

Committed to his inaugural pledge that the federal government would not interfere with slavery in the states where it already existed, Lincoln continued to urge the individual states, with financial support from the federal government, to adopt a plan of gradual, compensated emanc.i.p.ation. On July 12, just before Congress adjourned, the President summoned the representatives and senators from the border states to the White House and again pleaded with them to endorse his plan. Slavery in their states, he pointed out, would soon be extinguished by the "mere friction and abrasion" of the war. Apart from that, he reminded them, his hand might soon be forced, because antislavery sentiment throughout the North "is still upon me, and is increasing." As patriots and statesmen they should recommend his plan to the people of their states as the way to bring speedy relief from the war. "As you would perpetuate popular government for the best people in the world," he urged, "I beseech you that you do in no wise omit this."

"Oh, how I wish the border States would accept my proposition!" Lincoln exclaimed to Illinois Representatives Isaac N. Arnold and Owen Lovejoy the day after this meeting. "Then you, Lovejoy, and you, Arnold, and all of us, would not have lived in vain!" But, as he doubtless antic.i.p.ated, the border-state congressmen refused to follow his lead, and, with a few exceptions, joined in a long, legalistic reb.u.t.tal of Lincoln's appeal, questioning the logic of his arguments and the consistency of his policies. "Confine yourself to your const.i.tutional authority" was the gist of their message.

Even before Lincoln received their predictable response he was moving toward a new course of action. On July 13, riding in a carriage with Secretaries Seward and Welles to the funeral of Stanton's infant son, he informed these two conservative members of his cabinet that he "had about come to the conclusion that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued." Both Seward and Welles were startled, because hitherto the President had been emphatic in rejecting any proposal to have the national government interfere with slavery. Both said they needed more time to consider the idea. But the President urged them seriously to think about it, because "something must be done."

The idea of emanc.i.p.ation by presidential decree was, of course, not a new one. On the day that the news of the firing on Fort Sumter reached Was.h.i.+ngton, Sumner had gone to the White House to remind the President that emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves of a military opponent fell within his war powers, and repeatedly he urged Lincoln to act. Fremont's proclamation in August 1861, freeing the slaves of Missouri rebels, was another reminder of what the executive power might accomplish. In December of that year, in his final report as Secretary of War, Cameron had also proposed emanc.i.p.ation by decree. As recently as May, General David Hunter, in command of the Military Department of the South, announced that "slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible" and proclaimed that therefore persons held as slaves in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina were "forever free."

Though Secretary Chase insisted that it was "of the highest importance ... that this order be not revoked," Lincoln promptly declared Hunter's proclamation "altogether void"-as he had all previous moves toward emanc.i.p.ation by executive decree. "No commanding general shall do such a thing, upon my responsibility, without consulting me," he told Chase. But in revoking Hunter's order, a new tone appeared in Lincoln's language. For the first time he made it clear that he had no doubt of his const.i.tutional power to order emanc.i.p.ation. Whether he exercised that authority would depend on a decision that abolition had "become a necessity indispensable to the maintainance of the government." A little later he observed that he had no legal or const.i.tutional reservations about issuing an emanc.i.p.ation proclamation because, "as commander-in-chief of the army and navy, in time of war, I suppose I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy."

After overruling Hunter's proclamation, Lincoln began to think of emanc.i.p.ation as a question to be decided on grounds of policy rather than of principle, and he started to formulate his ideas for a proclamation of freedom. He probably talked over the idea with Stanton in May, and he may have discussed a very preliminary draft of such a proclamation with Vice President Hamlin as early as June 18. Later that month, in the cipher room of the War Department telegraph office, which the President frequented while anxiously awaiting dispatches from the army, he asked Major Thomas T. Eckert for some foolscap, because, he said, "he wanted to write something special." At the telegraph office, he remarked, he was able to work "more quietly and command his thoughts better than at the White House, where he was frequently interrupted." He then sat down at Eckert's desk, which faced onto Pennsylvania Avenue, and began to write. "He would look out of the window a while and then put his pen to paper," Eckert remembered, "but he did not write much at once. He would study between times and when he had made up his mind he would put down a line or two, and then sit quiet for a few minutes." That first day he filled less than a page, and as he left he asked Eckert to take charge of what he had written and not allow anyone to see it. Almost every day during the following weeks he asked for his papers and revised what he had written, adding only a few sentences at a time. Not until he had finished did he tell Eckert that he had been drafting a proclamation "giving freedom to the slaves in the South."

During June and July when Lincoln was drafting an emanc.i.p.ation order, he often played a kind of game with the numerous visitors who descended on him to urge him to free the slaves. The measures they advocated were precisely those that he was attempting to formulate in his doc.u.ment at the War Department. If he challenged their arguments, he was, in effect, testing his own. No doubt he enjoyed his little game, relis.h.i.+ng the use of his lawyer's skills to make the worst cause sound the best. No doubt, too, he was pleased to retain total flexibility, since these discussions committed him to nothing.

Thus to Sumner, who called at the White House twice on July 4 "to urge the reconsecration of the day by a decree of emanc.i.p.ation," the President said that a general order was "too big a lick," though Sumner believed he was "not disinclined" to issue a proclamation covering eastern Virginia. On reflection, though, Lincoln changed his mind about even that limited measure, because, as he told the senator, such a proclamation might cause Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland to secede. Besides, it would probably be mere brutum fulmen, unless he could enforce it.

IV

But by mid-July he was ready to show his hand. "Things had gone on from bad to worse, until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursuing," he explained later, "that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the game!" McClellan's defeats on the Peninsula contributed to his decision, as did the demoralization of the soldiers in the Army of the Potomac and the near-mutinous state of some of their officers. So, too, did the growing chorus of antislavery opinion in the North and the dwindling trickle of volunteers for the army-a flow that Governor Andrew of Ma.s.sachusetts bluntly told the President could not be increased so long as he persisted in fighting a war that would leave slavery intact.

Especially influential was the pa.s.sage 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 doc.u.ment showed that Lincoln was still trying to blend his earlier policy of gradual, compensated emanc.i.p.ation 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 partic.i.p.ating 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 const.i.tutional 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 emanc.i.p.ation proclamation might be "a measure of great danger," since it would unsettle the government's financial position. "Emanc.i.p.ation could be much better and more quietly accomplished," he believed, "by allowing Generals to organize and arm the slaves (thus avoiding depredation and ma.s.sacre 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 emanc.i.p.ation; 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 emanc.i.p.ation proclamation could not be enforced and that it would alienate the important border states. Reluctantly Lincoln put the doc.u.ment 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."

V

In the following weeks Lincoln repeatedly argued the issue of emanc.i.p.ation 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 emanc.i.p.ating negroes."

Lincoln's actions appeared to confirm Swett's prediction, for he stubbornly refused to commit his administration, even indirectly, to a policy of emanc.i.p.ation. 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 emanc.i.p.ated 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 publis.h.i.+ng 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 emanc.i.p.ation, 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 Emanc.i.p.ation 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 a.s.surance 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 inst.i.tution. 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 "princ.i.p.al"-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."

But he could not announce new views, nor act on his personal convictions yet. The draft of his emanc.i.p.ation proclamation lay locked in a drawer. Every now and then he took it out, and, as he recalled later, "added or changed a line, touching it up here and there, anxiously watching the progress of events." But he needed a victory.

VI