Lincoln favored soft inducement. So did his secretary of state, William H. Seward. The powerful senator from New York had, two years before, sent angry tremors rippling through the South, warning that an “irrepressible conflict” loomed. At the Republican convention in Chicago in May 1860, he had been the front-runner. But he had seemed too confrontational to the office-hungry majority. This was their time to elect a president. The more moderate Lincoln seemed more electable, though Southern analysts could see little difference between “irrepressible conflict” and “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln’s most quotable phrase from his 1858 speech to the Illinois Republican Party. But there was a great deal of difference, and the delegates to the nominating convention knew that. Seward had had good things to say about some abolitionists, he actively opposed the Fugitive Slave Act, and he claimed that there was a “Higher Law than the Constitution.” Lincoln had never said anything positive about abolitionists, he favored enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, and he did not believe there was a law higher than the Constitution. Illinois spoke through Lincoln; New York, through Seward. The South had grounds on which to call Seward an abolitionist. Factual and fine distinctions, however, were not to the point. All Republicans were black abolitionists.
In May 1860, the Republicans, in their wood-constructed temporary convention hall, seemed to some Southerners to have nominated a Negro for vice president and a renegade Southerner for president of the United States. That’s how it looked to the editor of the Charleston Mercury and his fellow fire-eaters. Maine’s swarthy Hannibal Hamlin, the vice-presidential nominee, “is what we call a mulatto,” Robert Barnwell Rhett editorialized. “He has black blood in him.” And Lincoln? “A renegade Southerner . . . a native Kentuckian.” He was also suspiciously dark-skinned. Anyway, all Republicans were abolitionists, intent on de-purifying the race; their mission was to insult and degrade the South.
To the surprise of many, Secretary of State–designate Seward became conciliatory between the election and Lincoln’s inauguration in March 1861. He seemed no longer to believe in an “irrepressible conflict.” His mentor John Quincy Adams had advised him in 1844 that the Southern threat of disunion “should operate as a warning for preparation, but not as a provocation to retaliate.” But what to do about the fact that between the election and the inauguration, seven states, led by South Carolina, had seceded, and what to do about the siege of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor? Couldn’t some compromise be devised? Couldn’t something be worked out? After all, wasn’t secession being fueled by a small number of hotheads? And wasn’t there a great deal of pro-union feeling throughout the South? And couldn’t the issue of slavery expansion be finessed, since almost everyone detested abolition and abolitionists? Numbers of senators, with Seward’s encouragement, tried and failed. Lincoln also misunderstood the South. Its elite despised him and his secretary of state. To the South, Lincoln was a disloyal Kentuckian who fulfilled in caricature and life its projection of what a “Black Republican” should look like. At the same time, Southerners were baffled that a man born in Kentucky could not understand that any relationship between South and North would now have to be between independent equals.
An ameliorative Seward suggested revisions to the text of Lincoln’s inaugural address, toning down sternness and consequences. Lincoln accepted most, including his secretary of state’s major contribution, a new final paragraph that the president-elect revised into his memorable appeal to “the better angels of our nature.” His own fraternal claim to the seceding states that “we are not enemies but friends” expressed his heart and his strategy. For the South, though, there was no going back. Lincoln assumed there was. He had convinced himself that the war could be avoided or aborted. It seemed fairly simple to him and Seward: you keep your slaves where they are, and we will all keep the union as it has been. The issue is not slavery but union.
President James Buchanan, on March 6, 1861, escorted his successor from his hotel to the Capitol. They first went to the Senate chamber for the swearing in of the vice president, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, an antislavery moralist less critical of abolitionist activists than Lincoln. “Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Lincoln entered, arm in arm, the former pale, sad, nervous; the latter’s face slightly flushed, with compressed lips. For a few minutes, while the oath was administered,” they sat next to each other. “Mr. Buchanan sighed audibly,” the New York Times reporter noticed, “and frequently, but whether from reflection upon the failure of his Administration, I can’t say. Mr. Lincoln was grave and impassive as an Indian martyr.” On the Capitol portico, when the newly inaugurated president stepped to the lectern, the unfinished dome behind him topped by a crane, sharpshooters surveyed the crowd for potential assassins. His message was more velvet glove than iron fist. Exhausted and depressed, Buchanan dozed, perhaps too tired to notice that Lincoln said in substance much of what he himself had told Congress the previous December. Lincoln said it more cogently and eloquently.
The practical message was the same: Don’t attack us, and we won’t attack you, though you have taken possession of national property that doesn’t belong to you. For the time being, we will make no fuss about that, with the exception of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, which we want to resupply only with provisions, not with armaments. After all, you can’t expect us to let the men there go without food and water. Other than that, and that only if we cannot work out some better arrangement, we will not give you cause to act in self-defense. If you are the aggressor, that will be another matter. For the time being we won’t make a fuss about the property you have expropriated; we will not provoke you into military action; we will do our best to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act; and we will look to a better, more rational, more patriotic day when our differences will be resolved peacefully.
Lincoln got death threats from those who favored secession. Wendell Phillips, who had bodyguards and carried a gun, got death threats from those who favored union. Intent on offending almost everyone, North and South, Phillips proclaimed repeatedly that if slavery were the price for union, it was too high a price to pay. And Lincoln, it seemed to Phillips, loved union more than he hated slavery. That seemed the cardinal flaw in this wartime president. For much of 1861 and 1862, Lincoln’s policy appeared to most abolitionists to have little or nothing to do with ending slavery. And he seemed not to be prosecuting the war energetically or effectively. In fact, Phillips told his large audience at the Grove in Abingdon, Massachusetts, in August 1861, “I believe Mr. Lincoln is conducting this war, at present; with the purpose of saving slavery. That is his present line of policy, so far as trustworthy indications of any policy reach us.” Phillips had reason to think so. The president appeared unwilling to act on what Phillips believed he well knew: “All civil wars are necessarily political wars—they can hardly be anything else. Mr. Lincoln is intentionally waging a political war. He knows as well as we do at this moment, as well as every man this side of a lunatic hospital knows, that, if he wants to save lives and money, the way to end this war is to strike at slavery.” But did Lincoln really know this? And if he did, why did he not transform conviction into political and military action?
Furious at Seward for what seemed a betrayal of his previous abolitionist sympathies, Phillips could not be sure whom to blame more, Seward or Lincoln. Conciliation seemed an evasion of moral responsibility and national destiny. “But you may also ask, if compromise be even a temporary relief, why not make it.” He enumerated the reasons why not. “Because it is wrong. 2d. Because it is suicidal. Secession, appeased by compromise, is only emboldened to secede again to-morrow, and thus get larger concessions. The cowardice that yields to threats invites them. 3d. Because it delays emancipation.” And, he warned the North, “compromise risks insurrection . . . the worst door at which freedom can enter. Let universal suffrage have free sway, and the ballot supersedes the bullet.”
But now that war had come, it should be welcomed, he argued. It should be embraced; it was a positive good because it would end a positive evil. “In my view,” he was to tell his audience at the Cooper Union in 1863, “the bloodiest war ever waged is infinitely better than the happiest slavery which ever fattened men into obedience. And yet I love peace. But it is real peace; not peace such as we have had; not peace that meant lynch-law in the Carolinas and mob law in New York; not peace that meant chains around Boston Court-House, a gag on the lips of statesmen, and the slave sobbing himself to sleep in curses. No more such peace for me; no peace that is not born of justice, and does not recognize the rights of every race and every man.” Lincoln and Seward, for almost two years of a war that they did not fully embrace and did not seem to want to fight, were a bitter disappointment to Phillips and most abolitionists.
In 1861, Phillips kept Seward clearly in his sights. It was widely assumed that the secretary of state dominated the president. At first Lincoln seemed almost a nonentity. Phillips, though, had not given up hope that he might prove better than he seemed, if only he had the capacity to deal with the administration’s two enemies, “Mr. Seward and the South.” The secretary of state’s “power is large. Already he has swept our Adams [Charles Francis, John Quincy’s son] into the vortex, making him offer to sacrifice the whole Republican platform, though, as events have turned, he has sacrificed only his own personal honor. Fifteen years ago, John Quincy Adams prophesied that the Union would not last twenty years. He little thought that disunion, when it came, would swallow his son’s honor in its gulf.”
Phillips hit both his major targets, Seward and South Carolina, squarely. The latter stupidly “fancies that there is more chance of saving slavery outside of the Union than inside.” The South could never defeat the North, Phillips told his audiences. The “Slave Power” was defined by “the prejudice of race, the omnipotence of money, and the almost irresistible power of aristocracy.” It was a feudal world without a middle class. How could it ever defeat the mighty engine of individual and economic initiative that defined the North? So, why not get on with it and fight the inevitable full-scale total war that would make the Union whole again and end slavery forever? Phillips’ attack on Seward’s efforts at compromise applied equally to Lincoln. Didn’t Lincoln share Seward’s views? The secretary of state says that the “first object of every human society is safety; I think the first duty of society is justice.” And could justice be obtained within a Union that contained slavery?
With the responsibility of governing in a crisis, Lincoln and Seward had decided that the government had no obligation to provide justice to slaves. They were property. The Constitution protected property. It did not protect slaves as human beings. The founding document provided a legal rather than a moral blueprint, and the Declaration’s claim that “all men are created equal” was not an absolute. For Lincoln and most white Americans, it depended on one’s definition of “equal.” Slaves were not. They had only a limited sanctuary under the Declaration’s umbrella. And the Constitution, the controlling document, was not about justice and equality. It was a legal contract. The North, at almost every level, had from the start little or no political will to inject morality into economics and politics. Antislavery moralists as different as Jefferson and John Adams could not envision any practical plan for abolishing slavery in any state in which it was a major factor—except for colonization, which remained an unimplemented fantasy. In New England, and over time in Pennsylvania and New York—where farms were small, free labor was dominant, and immigrants were expanding the working, consuming, and voting population; and where trade, small factories, skilled artisans, shipping, insurance, and banking created a diversified economy—slavery could be eliminated, as long as it cost the taxpayer nothing and the free black population was kept small, with as few rights as possible. The South was a different story.
Much as Lincoln and Seward were antislavery moralists, to make the war about slavery would be, they were convinced, to steer a ship already in dangerous waters directly onto the rocks. Their priority was union. After all, Lincoln had already asserted, repeatedly, that, in Illinois, free blacks were not equal to free whites. And justice for slaves was not a priority for the Lincoln administration; union was. Phillips would not, could not, make that distinction. The Union, with slavery, had no moral basis for continuing to exist. The divisive slavery issue could be resolved, he believed, by absorbing into the national body politic the four million slaves who were to be emancipated. Racism could be eliminated with the creation of an amalgamated race whose prototype was the mulatto. The commingling of bloodlines, especially in the South, had already made the distinction between black and white difficult to determine or sustain. Though not all white abolitionists had a post-racist vision, Phillips had. That vision was anathema to Lincoln. On the one hand, he detested slavery. On the other, like most of his fellow citizens, he wanted to continue to live in an all-white America. He could hardly imagine anything else.
In New York City, on a warm day in May 1863, two months before the Union victory at Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg, Wendell Phillips walked up to the same stage at the Cooper Union from which Lincoln, in 1860, had delivered a memorable address. Concluding the speech that had helped propel him to the Republican nomination, Lincoln had proclaimed, “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” But how was “right” to be defined? Lincoln and Phillips were on different pages. The influence of Henry Ward Beecher, the most prominent American clergyman, hovered in the background of both speeches. The Beecher family—from Edward Beecher, Elijah Lovejoy’s strong supporter in 1837; to Harriet Beecher, whose antislavery but pro-colonization novel had become a national best seller; to the dynamic Henry at his prominent pulpit in Brooklyn—had established itself as America’s first family of Northern antislavery intellectuals. In 1860, Lincoln had been scheduled to speak at Henry Ward Beecher’s Pilgrim Church in Brooklyn Heights. Since Beecher’s views were incompatible with those of moderate Republicans, influential New York Republicans, eager to promote Lincoln for the national ticket, had at the last minute changed the venue to the Cooper Union. By May 1863, New York had an even greater abolitionist cohort than ever: the war and the January 1, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation had changed the calculus for almost everyone.
The previous Sunday, Henry Ward Beecher had set the stage for Phillips’ 1863 address. A consummate showman, Beecher, at the end of his baptismal ceremony before thousands of congregants, had “carried up into the pulpit a little girl about five years of age, of sweet face, light hair, and fair as a lily. Pausing a moment to conquer his emotion, he sent a shiver of horror through the congregation by saying, ‘This child was born a slave, and is just redeemed from slavery!’ It is impossible to describe the effect of this announcement,” the New York Times reported the next day. The astounded “spectators held their breath in amazement, and were then melted to tears.” The child appeared totally white, an exemplification of the irony Mark Twain later dramatized in Pudd’nhead Wilson, the story of a white-skinned black child and a white child, born on the same day in the same household, who were exchanged in the cradle, the black child brought up as white, the white child as black. Who could tell the difference?
The next week, the Cooper Union overflowing with antislavery moralists and abolitionist sympathizers, Phillips took the stage. Should Lincoln, should the Republican administration, Phillips asked, still continue to try to conciliate the South? Shouldn’t it clarify its mixed-message policy about how to deal with slaves who fled through the battle lines, mostly in the border states, to what they believed would be freedom? Were they contraband of war? Or should they be returned to their owners, if their owners were pro-Union? The president inched forward on this matter. To the disappointment of many, the Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, had freed slaves only in the states that had seceded. Congress and some Union officers were pressuring Lincoln to stop trying to mollify the border states.
In a dramatic gesture, Philips then led forward onto the stage, the Times reported, “the little white slave-girl baptised by Mr. BEECHER last Sunday.” The audience erupted into wild applause. “There is a party for whom I have conciliation and this is its representative. . . . In the veins that beat now in my right hand, run the best blood in Virginia of the white race and the better blood of the black race of the Old Dominion—[applause]—the united race to whom in its virtue belongs, in the future, a country by the toil and the labor of its ancestors redeemed from nature and given to civilization and the Nineteenth Century. [Applause.] For that class I have ever an open door of conciliation—the labor, the toil, the muscle, the virtue, the strength, the democracy of the Southern States. This blood represents them both.” The next day, the Times published a transcription of Phillips’ speech. Phillips hoped for the multiracial America of future centuries. An optimist and a revolutionary, he thought it would work out for the best. The conservative Lincoln, an heir to Calvinistic pessimism, with a darker view of human nature, worried that it would be a disaster.
WHAT TO do in 1861–1862? The president had an ongoing military disaster on his hands: the Union was suffering a series of defeats. Rectification, in the minds of those who worried that the war was being lost or at least unnecessarily extended, resided in three areas in which Lincoln appeared to be laggard: the tenure of his commanding general, George McClellan; the extent of the president’s power under the Constitution as a wartime commander in chief; and the shortage of manpower for the military, aggravated by Lincoln’s refusal to allow free blacks to enlist. No doubt the war was going badly for the North. An end date for a Union victory seemed to be receding into the indefinite future. Confederate armies and the Southern population were maintaining their will to fight to victory or the bitter end. Divided public and political opinion in the North made the national unity required to win the war worrisomely questionable.
During 1861 and 1862, the search for effective military leadership became a battleground of its own. There was the problem of General George McClellan. He seemed more committed to the parade ground than the battlefield. Constantly overestimating the size of the enemy army, he declined to fight without reinforcements, which he knew to be unavailable. And he was not in the least in sympathy with antislavery views of any sort, including Lincoln’s moderate antislavery moralism. His tolerance for slavery and antipathy toward Negroes had a nasty edge: “I confess to a prejudice in favor of my own race, and can’t learn to like the odor of either Billy goats or niggers.” To Lincoln, McClellan’s racism was as irrelevant as Usher Linder’s had been. A pro-slavery Democrat, the general disagreed with the administration’s refusal to conciliate the South over slavery expansion; he despised Lincoln, whom he thought an uncouth fool, “nothing more than a well-meaning baboon”; and as events developed, he was not averse to becoming president himself in the election of 1864. Many agreed with his conviction that he was more qualified than Lincoln to lead the nation. Like his commander in chief, McClellan recognized that the South’s fear of further limitation on the extension of slavery and of an antislavery president who would undermine slavery where it already existed had motivated secession. Unlike Lincoln, he favored conceding to the South slavery’s extension and moral legitimacy.
That he was not Lincoln’s first choice for commander of the Army of the Potomac did not lessen the reality that McClellan should not have been the choice at all. He was not a man eager to take battlefield initiatives, and this inclination expressed his political and ideological convictions as well as his personality. Usually a good judge of men, Lincoln misjudged McClellan, who was talented at organization but reluctant to do battle, a proponent of the superiority of defensive strategies. Vainglorious and cocksure, he had absolute faith in his superior judgment. Lincoln appears not to have fully vetted McClellan, his personality, his previous record, or his political values. Or perhaps Lincoln knew them well enough but felt he had no better alternative. Hindsight makes vivid McClellan’s unsuitability, but there was a lack of foresight. How could Lincoln have imagined that a pro-slavery commander would vigorously prosecute a war against the South? Apparently, McClellan’s pro-slavery views hardly mattered because Lincoln, anyway, had no intention of using the military to end slavery. The general and the president shared the view during the war’s first two years that the army should respect slaves as private property, to be returned to their owners whenever practical. Eventually Lincoln consented to treating them as contraband, though he was not keen on this, partly because he wanted a consistent policy, mostly because he wanted desperately to placate the border states.
Though McClellan’s self-confidence, organizational skills, and spit and polish dazzled some Northern elites, Wendell Phillips had no doubt that he was the wrong man for the job. His pro-slavery convictions were anathema. Lincoln’s commitment to McClellan made the president also seem the wrong man for the job. When Winfield Scott, the longtime general in chief, resigned in November 1861, Lincoln elevated McClellan. Scott had doubts, especially when McClellan opposed Scott’s grand strategy for defeating the Confederacy, his “Anaconda Plan,” which became the template for the Union’s eventual success, with a less credible plan of his own. Phillips, though, didn’t mince words in a speech he gave in New York and Boston in December 1861. His extreme language was directed at Lincoln as much as at Lincoln’s general:
McClellan is a traitor [though not literally]but I say this, that if he had been a traitor from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, he could not have served the South better than he has done. . . . He could not have carried on the war in more exact deference to the politics of that side of the Union. And almost the same thing may be said of Mr. Lincoln,—that if he had been a traitor, he could not have worked better to strengthen one side, and hazard the success of the other. . . . The war can only be ended by annihilating that oligarchy which formed and rules the South and makes the war,—by annihilating a state of society. No social state is really annihilated, except when it is replaced by another. Our present policy neither aims to annihilate that state of things we call “the South,” made up of pride, idleness, ignorance, barbarism, theft, and murder, nor to replace it with a substitute. Such an aimless war I call wasteful and murderous.
Even Phillips recognized that traitor was too strong a word. But he had a steely, perceptive, and prophetic argument.
With two successes in minor skirmishes in West Virginia, the relatively unknown McClellan had seemed to Lincoln and Northern public opinion, rattled by defeat at Bull Run, a military savior. With Confederate forces in sight of Washington, McClellan’s organizational skills, it was thought, could provide the capital’s nervous establishment with a much-needed defense system. But by early 1862, the McClellan problem, including insubordination, needed to be solved. Lincoln procrastinated. Worried that removing McClellan from command would “send ripples of mutiny” through the army, he did not grasp sufficiently or soon enough that insubordination generally leads to more insubordination, failure to more failure. In November 1862, after more than a year had been mostly wasted, he removed McClellan from command. Over time and at great cost, Lincoln had discovered his mistake. McClellan’s failures eventually forced the president to do what he had tried hard to avoid. Few in the Union establishment had cared that McClellan’s war would keep slavery intact, protect Southern slave property, and persuade the Confederacy back into the union on modified pro-slavery terms. This was, of course, Lincoln’s initial policy also. Circumstances he could not control gradually forced him to change it. Confederate victories in 1861–1862 guaranteed that the war would be long, the casualties huge, the outcome uncertain, and the consequences, short of quick and total victory, damaging to the president and his party. That there seemed to Lincoln no better alternative to McClellan was partly because the cream of the U.S. military, almost all West Point graduates, were Southerners. The non-Southerners were mostly thin milk. The best officers changed their uniforms from blue to gray. That reality underlined Lincoln’s predicament regarding military leadership in March and April 1861.
It does not, though, dismiss larger issues about his judgment and vision. When he at first offered command of the Union armies to the Virginian Robert E. Lee, hoping that Lee would remain loyal to the Union, it clearly made no difference that Lee was a slaveholder and a representative of the Southern elite. “We are not enemies but friends.” Slavery was not the issue. Though Lee was not an enthusiastic secessionist, Lincoln should not have been surprised that he was more loyal to Virginia than to the Union. That was a given of the Southern state of mind, with some exceptions, few of them in the military. And as the Southern-inflected cream of the Union military committed itself to the Confederacy, it ought to have been clear to Lincoln that he might have a long war ahead of him, that McClellan was not an exemplary choice, that the war would require him to be creative with the Constitution in order to make full use of his war powers, and that slavery could not possibly remain a matter secondary to the conduct of the war. His every virtue and talent acknowledged, Lee was not about to give up his slaves. But until the South made clear that this was war to the death, Lincoln had no problem with that.
That Lincoln hoped to keep Virginia and Lee in the Union is understandable. But it was unrealistically wishful to think that Southern loyalties, even when split, would allow state-proud Southerners to side with Yankee foreigners. Lincoln’s, though, was not simply a naive mistake. It expressed his emotional and intellectual conviction. It was a combination of wishful thinking, unrealistic hope, and commitment to a white America. That pro-Union Southerners, with the exception of a fragile majority in the border states, would resolve their dual loyalty in favor of the Union was a delusion with a basis. After all, Lincoln could rationalize, he was still offering the South an all-white America. Why not stay in the Union? It seemed a reasonable expectation to a Kentucky-born resident of Central Illinois. And wasn’t Virginia a border state? Actually, Virginia’s statewide heart, despite its geographic location, was irrevocably Southern and pro-slavery. Lincoln should have known this. Rejecting Lincoln’s offer and renouncing his U.S. citizenship did not feel to Lee nearly as much like treason as fighting against the Confederacy would have felt.
While the Southerners’ view of Lincoln as a tyrant and the abolitionists’ view of him as an ameliorative laggard embody extremes, abolitionists such as Phillips were closer to the reality. Each side, of course, had an axe to grind. The Southern view of Lincoln, as the war began, had its basis in disappointment and anger: why will he not let us alone to go our own way? The basis of the abolitionists’ view was similar: Why will he not recognize that the South has forced on us the opportunity to end slavery? That requires total war, not conciliation. And if he will not grab the bull by the horns, we had rather dissolve the union and have for the first time a slave-free though smaller nation.
In August 1862, Phillips repeated his position and his view of the president: “I never did believe in the capacity of Lincoln, but I do believe in the pride of [Jefferson] Davis, in the vanity of the South, on the desperate determination of those fourteen States; and I believe in a sunny future, because God has driven them mad; and their madness is our safety. They will never consent to anything that the North can grant; and you must whip them, because, unless you do, they will grind you to powder.” Lincoln, Phillips correctly predicted, eventually would have no choice but to fight robustly. And to fight a total war against the South, Phillips believed, required enlisting free blacks in the Union army and encouraging enslaved blacks to undermine the Confederate war effort. McClellan, Phillips argued in August 1862, needed to be disposed of. “I do not believe,” he told his audience, “that in his heart [Lincoln] trusts McClellan a whit more than I do.” But “from fear of the Border States and Northern conservatism he keeps him at the head of the army.”
LINCOLN CONSTRAINED himself by his core strategy regarding the Confederacy and the border states. In 1861 and 1862, he thought he could persuade and cajole the South into peace. If that meant leaving slavery in place, he would accept it as the necessary price to pay. And it would be politically viable, if not advantageous. The Republican Party platform had demanded, not the end of slavery, but only nonextension, and many Northerners would have been willing to compromise even on that. But the Deep South, regardless of internal tensions, was irrevocably committed to independence, much as the Founding Fathers had been in 1776. They were the rebels and revolutionaries the Confederacy took as the model of and sanction for its own rebellion. That the Southern states could be cajoled or bribed back into the Union was obviously nonsense from the start. That the war could be won without black soldiers and emancipation seemed unlikely from early on, especially after the defeats at Bull Run, Manassas, Antietam, and Fredericksburg.
Lincoln’s strength was his determination to stay the course. He was, though, committed to an ineffective strategy for close to two years. It took him eighteen months to begin to accept that an end to the war would come only with the total defeat of the South. Months of war might have been saved if he had been more realistic about the South at the start. However difficult it would have been to do the necessary things in 1861, it may have been no more difficult than when he finally came around in 1863. At first, Lincoln, the prudent lawyer with a deep commitment to compromise, the letter of the law, and rational persuasion, was indeed, as Phillips and most abolitionists thought, the wrong man for the job: a well-intentioned but conflicted Midwesterner whose heart was in maintaining the status quo rather than in seizing the opportunity to eradicate slavery, which Phillips rightly believed to be the key to Union victory.
Lincoln’s commitment to do everything possible to keep the four pro-slavery border states—Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware— from joining the Confederacy was an essential part of his core strategy. It required him to make clear that he would not force them to end slavery. This approach, he assumed, would also neutralize those Northerners who opposed the war. If, by mid-1862, he had explained to the North that the quickest way to win the war, with the least cost in money and lives, was to deal a mortal blow to the Southern war effort by making all slaves legally free, would that not have undercut Northern racist opposition to emancipation, especially among antiwar Democrats? Without slave labor, he could have argued, the South could not support its armies in the field and its civilians at home. This would have made clear that it was exclusively a war to save the Union, emancipation a strategy, not an end. But to observers to Lincoln’s left, it seemed unmistakable that his conciliatory attempt to shore up the pro-Union forces in the border states would prolong, not shorten, the war. Worse, it was a misjudgment about how best to win. Each of the border states had its own internal civil war to fight, its pro-Union and pro-Confederacy contingents at odds. But even in Missouri, a state crucial in the history of contention over slavery, the pro-Union forces seemed to have the upper hand.
Was there ever a real danger that any of the four border states would become an asset to the Confederacy? None was a cotton state. At worst, they would be secondary battlegrounds, with neither side entirely victorious. At best and more likely, Union sentiment would dominate. Maryland and Delaware could never become significant Confederate assets, let alone Confederate states. Geography and demography were against that. In Kentucky, Union sentiment, even when it was also pro-slavery, was strong, and slavery as a social and economic institution had much less presence and importance than in the Deep South. Union military power and pro-Union sentiment would have kept three of the four border states in the Union even if Lincoln and Congress had abolished slavery there, especially if slave owners were compensated financially, as Lincoln proposed. Missouri was a different matter. It was indeed a battlefield. Geography partly favored its pro-Confederacy contingent—but only partly. And early on, Union military superiority made it clear that Missouri would not be joining the Confederacy.
Why, then, do so much to placate the pro-slavery element in the border states? It was not necessary, and it kept Lincoln from taking decisive action until 1863 to increase the manpower of the Union army and further destabilize Southern society by communicating to the slave population that their masters would not be their masters much longer. By early 1863, Lincoln, Phillips conceded, had begun to do what had to be done, but hesitantly and within narrow limits. He continued to advocate colonization and compensated emancipation, both of which had all along been nonstarters.
To the admonition of Horace Greeley, the influential editor of the Republican New-York Tribune, that it was now necessary to “fight slavery with liberty” and not fight “wolves with the devices of a sheep,” Lincoln answered, in August 1862, that his “paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.” Phillips had gotten Lincoln right. “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.” Though Lincoln had already written and discussed with his Cabinet in July 1862 a draft version of his “Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation,” issued in late September 1862, there is no reason to doubt that he sincerely meant every word he wrote to Greeley. It was not a clever attempt to prepare Northern opinion to accept the Emancipation Proclamation itself. It was one more effort on Lincoln’s part to bring the Southern states back into the Union fold.
The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation invited the seceding states to rejoin the Union, to restore, as Lincoln put it, “the constitutional relation between the United States, and each of the states” in which “that relation is, or may be suspended, or disturbed.” That relation included slavery. If the seceding states chose to return, the four million slaves in the South could remain slaves for the time being. The states would receive “pecuniary aid” from Congress, which they could choose to decline. The money would be offered only to states no longer “in rebellion against the United States, and which states, may [my italics] then have voluntarily adopted, or thereafter may [my italics] voluntarily adopt, immediate, or gradual abolishment of slavery . . . and that the effort to colonize persons of African descent, with their consent, upon this continent, or elsewhere . . . will be continued.” It would be used to pay compensation to slave owners and the costs of colonization. But no slave state had to become a free state immediately. “Thereafter” would do. “Gradual abolishment” required no starting or completion date. And the word may provided an escape hatch. If a state at issue did not pledge to abolish slavery immediately or had not pledged to abolish slavery at some time in the future, would it still be welcomed back into the Union? Would it be able to restore its representation in Congress and participate in national elections? And would a “slave” still count as three-fifths of a person in congressional and Electoral College representation? It seems so. Given the looseness of the language of Lincoln’s offer and the possibility of semi-compliance or evasion, slavery might continue to exist indefinitely.
Its terms, consistent with Lincoln’s lifelong approach to the slavery problem, were sincerely offered. If the South had accepted, there would have been no Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863. How would it have been possible for Lincoln, as honorable a man as we have ever had in national politics, to renounce his own offer? And there would have been no more casualties. It was a carrot-and-stick approach. Emancipation would not apply to any states that returned to the Union. It would apply only to states that “shall then be in rebellion.” In every state that gave up armed rebellion, and in all if they all should, slavery would remain intact. If all the seceding states returned, there would be no Emancipation Proclamation at all. In effect, in September 1862, Lincoln said to the Confederacy: Accept these comparatively easy terms. If not, then I will raise the stakes to the next level, encouraging slave rebellion by emancipating your slaves and enlisting free blacks into the Union military.
If the South had agreed to Lincoln’s offer, in September 1862 he would have been pledged to its consequences. It’s also likely that he would have lived to serve a full second term. If the Confederacy had accepted Lincoln’s proposal, it’s unlikely there would have been a Thirteenth, Fourteenth, or Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, at least within much if not all of the nineteenth century. The return of Southern congressmen to national government would have prevented that. Moderate Whig and then Republican policies would have been affirmed: no extension of slavery, but the continuation of slavery in the states in which it existed, with the expectation that, over time, with compensation, emancipation would occur, master by master, slave by slave, a variation on traditional individual manumissions. Racial incompatibility between whites and free blacks would be alleviated by gradual colonization. America might no longer have a race problem.
Paradoxically, abolitionists such as Phillips and Garrison welcomed the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation—but not because they liked the terms. On the contrary, to abolitionists they were abhorrent. But for the first time ever they committed the federal government to the elimination of slavery. A Republican victory in 1860 and Southern secession had made that possible. The war, therefore, was a blessing. Since slavery was a glitch in the machine of economic and moral progress, the nation had to be rebooted, slavery eliminated. Whether Lincoln desired to be its instrument or not, by the very fact of the position he was in, he had no choice, in Phillips’ view, but to play the role that the situation had forced on him. Every move the president made, whose purpose was to preserve the union intact, made emancipation, Phillips realized, an inevitable consequence of the war to save the union. Consequently, by late summer 1862, Phillips and Garrison had become partial Lincoln enthusiasts. The endgame of slavery was well under way—for it seemed a certainty to anyone who had felt the pulse of the Confederacy or who had listened to Southern voices that it would reject the terms of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation out of hand.
Would any or all of the four border states, in September 1862, have joined the Confederacy if Lincoln had issued not his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation but a version of the January 1863 Emancipation Proclamation—or, even better, a comprehensive version that included all slaves, not just those in the rebellious states? They had neither the means nor the will to do so. And by January 1863, it was even more unlikely. If Lincoln had explained to the North that the war had not been initiated to free the slaves, but that, in mid-1862, the quickest way to end it would be to deal a mortal blow to the Southern war effort by making all slaves legally free, would that not have undercut Northern racist opposition to emancipation, even among Democrats? In late summer 1862, when it was already clear that this would not be a short war, he could have argued that the South could not support its armies in the field and its civilians at home without slave labor. Indeed, as more and more slaves learned that they were legally free by federal law, many began to limit their contributions to the Confederate war effort. Those in close proximity to Union army lines liberated themselves. Those fit to serve the Union cause seized the opportunity. Congress, through legislation, had already encouraged this with two Confiscation Acts, one in the summer of 1861, another in the summer of 1862. They defined slaves (with an ironic twist to the long-standing claim that slaves were property) as property to be forfeited if used to support the rebellion or freed by criminal court proceedings if their owners were in rebellion.
Lincoln worried about the effect of the Confiscation Acts on his border state strategy. Though he signed them, he had neither his legal mind nor his moral heart in them. As a conservative lawyer, having begun to worry that the Supreme Court might uphold the Constitution’s protection of slavery, he wanted greater assurance of constitutional legality. He also wanted a legally tidier, more structurally comprehensive approach. And he did not want to scare the border states into alienation. Lincoln’s penchant for persuasion, prudence, and compromise exemplifies what in this instance was his executive weakness: his lifelong legislator’s and lawyer’s preference for the middle way. It had served him well and brought him to the presidency. It was sensible for him to fear bold action and its semi-dictatorial potential. But for almost two years he had failed to grasp that the Southern elite were now implacable enemies, that the die had been cast, that bold action was likely to be more in the nation’s interest than the slow, slogging alternatives. Also, misjudging the Southern resistance to what appeared rational and logical to him, he does not seem until very late to have realized that his plan for compensated emancipation could not succeed. In addition, compensated emancipation required colonization, never rational or practical for four million slaves. “Lincoln had long assumed,” incorrectly, “that his Kentucky birth, his Border state in-laws, and his long years among the Southerners who had migrated to Southern Indiana and Southern Illinois gave him a special insight into the mind of the Upper South.” Actually, he had little experience with the Southern elite, and little capability to understand its values and traditions. It took him two years to accept that the South was determined to fight until the bitter end even when it became increasingly certain that secession would result in what the South had gone to war to prevent.
LINCOLN USED his war powers authority in 1861 and 1862 to suspend habeas corpus (the right of a citizen who is under arrest to have a speedy judicial hearing) in cases of rebellion or invasion. He suspended it in the sensitive Baltimore-Washington area, inhabited by many and infiltrated by some Southern sympathizers, and he later suspended it in order to arrest individuals urging resistance to enlistment or inciting draft riots. The Constitution itself does not use the phrase “war powers,” though by the 1840s it had become shorthand for the commander in chief’s authority to suspend habeas corpus and use the military to repress rebellion, repel invasion, and act to maintain the peace and protect the security of the nation, subject to court challenge or congressional correction. For “the United States shall guarantee,” the federal Constitution states, “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic violence.” Certainly secession was “domestic violence.”
Why would Lincoln have used his war powers from the start of the war to suspend habeas corpus but not to emancipate slaves? If he had the power to do one, he had the power to do the other, and any weakening of the slave-based Southern economy would have helped the Union suppress rebellion and domestic violence. The rebellion and the war zone included the entire South. Arguably, it included the entire country. Lincoln’s notion of the limited relationship between his power as commander in chief in wartime and the Constitution was noticeably confined to the subject of slavery. There is every reason to believe that the Republican Congress would have been compliant. Lincoln worried, though, about the Supreme Court.
A brilliant logician and capable historian, Lincoln knew well enough the theory of presidential war powers and the historical record. The precedents originated in 1794 with President Washington’s suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion, the armed resistance by farmers in Western Pennsylvania to paying distilling taxes. Between 1807 and 1809, President Jefferson and a compliant Congress instituted a form of national martial law to enforce the Embargo Acts. Much of the country, especially New England, refused to obey the acts: how could a commercial, a trading, and a seafaring people keep food on the table if they could not sell or trade with foreign countries as close as Canada and the West Indies and as far away as Europe? Convinced that by depriving England and France of agricultural products he could force them to respect American maritime rights and the freedom of the seas, Jefferson had Congress pass Embargo Acts, which at their most extensive prevented trade between the United States and all foreign countries. England and France, though, had other sources of produce and lumber. The embargo devastated crucial segments of the American economy. Human nature and necessity asserted themselves. To keep food on the table, to remain economically viable, Americans evaded and broke the laws. By executive order, Jefferson exerted the full power of the federal government to enforce them. With time of the essence, he did not believe he needed court orders to seize property and arrest suspects. In effect, he suspended due process and other constitutional protections.
To what extent does the Constitution give a president the power to suspend its provisions when he believes peace and security are threatened by domestic violence or external attack? To a considerable extent, depending on the degree to which the president has convinced himself and can, sooner or later, persuade Congress, the Supreme Court, and the country that the situation in which and the degree to which he exercises his power justify the actions he takes. In 1861 and 1862, the answer seemed a no-brainer to those in the abolitionist tradition. The historical precedents were clear. The answer seemed obvious to many, from abolitionist sympathizers to moderate antislavery Republicans: once rebellion was a political and military fact, total emancipation, black Union soldiers, and Union victory were interlocked necessities.
When South Carolina initiated secession, how strong was the country’s memory of Jefferson’s use of the Constitution’s war powers? “Let me remind you,” Wendell Phillips told the North in December 1861, “that seventy years’ practice has incorporated it as a principle in our constitutional law, that what the necessity of the hour demands, and the continued assent of the people ratifies, is law. . . . I will cite an unquestionable precedent. It was a grave power, in 1807, in time of peace, when Congress abolished commerce; when, by the embargo of Jefferson, no ship could quit New York or Boston, and Congress set no limit to the prohibition. It annihilated commerce. New England asked, ‘Is it constitutional?’ The Supreme Court said, ‘Yes.’ New England sat down and starved. Her wharves were worthless, her ships rotted, her merchants beggared. She asked no compensation. The powers of Congress carried bankruptcy from New Haven to Portland; but the Supreme Court said, ‘It is legal,’ and New England bowed her head.” Lincoln may not have read Phillips’ speech, but he knew the history and the issue.
In addition, there had been throughout the 1840s debates in Congress about the war powers of the presidency. The national crisis that was at issue was slavery, as it was to be in 1861–1862. The incendiary events of the 1830s and ’40s had produced the lawlessness that Lincoln condemned in his Springfield Lyceum speech in 1838. Much of it had been generated by tension over slavery. Slave insurrections; anti-abolitionist riots; pro-slavery activities against free speech leading to the gag rule; the martyrdom of Elijah Lovejoy; the rise of an active abolitionist movement; the national debates in Congress and in the press in which tempers flared into verbal violence; the Wilmot Proviso (an attempt in Congress to prohibit slavery in the territory acquired from Mexico); the gradual undoing of the Missouri Compromise; the attempts by Presidents Jackson, Tyler, and Polk to extend slavery into new territories and states, climaxing with Polk’s spurious use of his power as commander in chief to initiate the pro-slavery Mexican War—the nation, as John Quincy Adams and others warned, was on the verge of civil war.
There would be a mass slave rebellion, Adams predicted. Southern states would then ask Washington to help suppress the insurrection. Massachusetts, though, would not allow its sons to die defending slavery. Or, in an alternative scenario, some Southern states would secede in defiance of the Constitution. Since the long-term cost of allowing the South to go its own way would be more than the cost of a civil war, the North would feel compelled to put down that rebellion. What would be the president’s powers if a slave insurrection rose to the level of a national crisis, or if the South attempted to secede? Adams and others had no doubt: the Constitution gave the president the power to suspend the Constitution selectively; the “war powers” provision had the elasticity to allow him as commander in chief to take whatever action he deemed necessary to end the rebellion, including immediate total emancipation.
But theory, Adams knew, could never determine action independent of a specific situation. Washington, Jefferson, and Polk had had theirs. Lincoln now had his. Disunion threatened the very existence of the nation. In the late 1830s and in the 1840s the implosion had seemed imminent. The Compromise of 1850 had defused the ticking time bomb. But by the late 1850s, the long-delayed explosion seemed about to occur. No one could prevent it. Though it was secession rather than a mass slave insurrection, the impetus was slavery. “The conflict is between Freedom and Slavery,” Adams had written in 1841 to William Seward, then governor of New York, who had asked for his advice. “No sophistry can disguise it. No browbeating can cowardize it. Slavery and Freedom are in the grapples of death.” Clearly, there was to be a civil war in America’s future. After his years of agonizing about how this had come about, “the conviction forced itself upon my mind,” Adams told Seward in 1844, “that it was all traceable to that fatal drop of Prussic acid in the Constitution of the U.S., the human chattel representation. . . . I wonder how it ever could have been consented to by such men as Benjamin Franklin and Roger Sherman.” It had led to pro-slavery dominating the Senate, the executive, and the Supreme Court, tainting “the authorities of the Nation. . . . The right of petition, trial by jury, freedom of the press, of speech and of the post-office have fallen and are falling in swift succession before it . . . and leagued with the rapacious passion of national aggrandizement sharpened by the whetstone of the land and stock jobber, it is even now lunging us into a desperate war for Slavery, the issue of which can be no other than the dissolution of the Union.”
Nothing had changed by 1861. The South “conspires,” Wendell Phillips told his New York and Boston audiences in December, “with the full intent so to mould this government as to keep it what it has been for thirty years, according to John Quincy Adams,—a plot for the extension and perpetuation of slavery.” Why was Lincoln holding back?
A constitutional loyalist, Adams had told Congress in April 1842 that he would not support active interference with slavery in the slave states. The Constitution forbade it. But if the slave states should “come to the free States, and say to them, you must help us to keep down our slaves, you must aid us in an insurrection and a civil war, then I say that with that call comes a full and plenary power to this House and to the Senate over the whole subject. It is a war power. I say it is a war power, and when your country is actually in war, whether it be a war of invasion or a war of insurrection [my italics], Congress has power to carry on the war, and must carry it on, according to the laws of war; and by the laws of war, an invaded country has all its laws and municipal institutions swept by the board, and martial law takes the place of them. This power in Congress has, perhaps, never been called into exercise under the present Constitution of the United States. But when the laws of war are in force, what, I ask, is one of those laws? It is this: that when a country is invaded, and two hostile armies are set in martial array, the commanders of both armies have power to emancipate all the slaves in the invaded territory.”
It is the Congress, Adams affirmed, not the president, that has the “plenary power” to declare war and legislate whatever aspects of the war are in its practical control. But once a war is in progress, the military power supersedes the civil. “I lay this down as the law of nations. I say that military authority takes, for the time, the place of all municipal institutions, and slavery among the rest.” And if such a situation arises, who has “the exclusive management of the subject”? The person who is “not only the President of the United States, but the Commander of the Army.” He “has power to order the universal emancipation of the slaves.”
That power is a double-edged sword, Adams, in 1848, told the venerable Albert Gallatin, Jefferson’s secretary of the treasury, who had been Adams’ colleague in negotiating the Treaty of Ghent almost thirty-five years before. It was a danger as well as an opportunity, he wrote to Gallatin. The president’s war powers, Adams well knew, could be used for aggression as well as self-defense. Both Adams and Gallatin were horrified at the illegality of the Mexican War. A president could initiate, as James Polk did, a preemptive or opportunistic war and, afterward, with the military die already cast, ask or decline to ask for congressional approval. The young Lincoln and the elderly Adams believed that Polk had misused his presidential powers, and had set a horrid precedent. He had created a war. “The most important conclusion from all this, in my mind,” Adams emphasized to Gallatin, “is the failure of that provision in the Constitution . . . that the power of declaring war, is given exclusively to Congress. It is now established as an irreversible precedent that the President of the US has but to declare that war exists, with any nation upon earth, by the act of that nation’s government, and the war is substantially declared.” It was to be an ongoing concern that the nation would find itself debating into the twenty-first century.
Theory aside, Lincoln had an insurrection on his hands. There was no possibility of misinterpretation. Secession was rebellion. At first it was in the hands of James Buchanan, who threw his up in despair. By April 1861, the newly elected president had not only secession to deal with, but also a military conflict. He hoped that the rebellious states might see the light of reason and reasonable compromise. The Confederacy, though, had no interest in negotiation.
Could Lincoln have had any real doubt about the scope of his war powers and the appropriateness, even desirability, of using them? From the start, he could have said to the Confederacy: “The Constitution does not give you the right to secede. You claim you have done that. We do not recognize that your claim is valid. You are not an independent nation. You have rebelled against the law of the land. If you challenge the law, do so in the courts and in Congress, through the processes set out in the Constitution. At the moment, you are not an independent nation. You are insurrectionists. You have stolen property that belongs not to you but to the entire American people. You have committed acts of theft and murder. I am asking Congress to pass a law that states that all property used to further such crimes is forfeited—that includes involuntary laborers whom you use to implement and sustain your criminal activities. In the meantime, since you are in armed rebellion, under my war powers as commander in chief, having taken an oath to uphold and preserve the union, I order the military to confiscate all property that helps the Confederacy sustain its unlawful activity. That includes all slaves. Confiscation means emancipation.”
Why, then, promulgate a Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation whose soft terms, if accepted, gave the Confederacy an almost indefinite extension of slavery? And why wait until January 1863 to do what many saw as inevitable? And then, why partial rather than total emancipation? And why hesitate so long to arrange for the enlistment of large numbers of Negro soldiers in the Union army? And why not, at least, on January 1, 1863, take the chance of saying that slavery anyplace in the United States undercuts the moral legitimacy of the Union war effort and declare total emancipation? At the Cooper Union in mid-January 1863, Wendell Phillips, representing antislavery’s impatience with partial emancipation, quoted Adams at length. The time, Phillips declared, had at last arrived when antislavery moralism had the legal authority to become antislavery activism. “Military necessity opens the door, but the moment Mr. LINCOLN enters it, there is but one duty under the Constitution, that is, to execute justice betwixt the master and the slave.” As Phillips understood, Lincoln, though his border state policy still held him back, had come very far from his approach in 1861–1862.
Another self-imposed concern still constrained him. In creating the Emancipation Proclamation, he had acted on his belief that the Constitution gave him the authority to emancipate slaves in the rebellious states. But, he asked, did it give him the power to emancipate slaves in the states that were not in rebellion? True, the Republican Congress would most likely be compliant, but would not, at some future date, the Supreme Court exercise its constitutional authority to review the legality of a total Emancipation Proclamation? And what if the Court declared it unconstitutional or even, accepting it as a war measure, ruled that at the end of the war former slaves should be returned to their status as property? And if he included emancipation in states that were not in rebellion, would it not be even more likely for the Court to rule that his war powers did not allow him to do so? There is reason to think, some have argued, that Lincoln took these considerations seriously. “Not even a war-powers proclamation,” one of our most distinguished historians of emancipation writes, “could trespass on the civil sovereignty of the law of slavery in the places where there was no war.” This is an unduly limited, unrealistic definition of “war”: it should be “war zone” or “theater of war,” which included the entire South, even the entire country, since every aspect of Southern and Northern life and society contributing to the Southern war effort came within the province of the president’s war powers. Anyway, what had Lincoln to fear from the Supreme Court? The only case challenging the president’s suspension of habeas corpus that might have come before the Roger Taney Court during the war, the Court declined to hear; the justices found a reason to deny the defendant’s appeal. In 1862, Lincoln filled three Supreme Court vacancies. In 1863, he added a tenth judge, and the next year, after Taney’s death, he appointed Samuel Chase, his antislavery secretary of the treasury.
Would a partial or even total emancipation act in the winter of 1861/1862 have been appealed to the Supreme Court? Who would have appealed it? Northern Democrats? Not likely. And would they have had standing? Inconceivable. Border state slave owners, who were not in rebellion and were still citizens of the United States? Possibly. Still, it would have been unlikely that the Court would accept the appeal. After all, most of the judges were already pro-Lincoln antislavery moralists, and, most important, they would have had the best interests of the Court strongly in mind. There was a war on. The Constitution gave the president immense power in such a circumstance. Lincoln could have been reasonably certain that the Court, whatever the views of individual members, would have, at a minimum, waited until the rebellion was put down, the war concluded. And what then? Put the horse back in the barn? Declare emancipation illegal? Return four million ex-slaves to slavery?
Lincoln may have been “nagged by the fear that the courts and lawyers just might, in the end,” as has been suggested, “decide that issuing proclamations of emancipation was not among” the war powers granted by the Constitution. He was, after all, a prudent lawyer, a brooding worrier, a constitutional conservative, and a peacemaker by temperament. His insistence on persuasion, prudence, and compromise rather than on taking risks exemplifies one of his great strengths. And it was sensible for him to fear radical action, especially its semi-dictatorial potential. But for two long years of war he had failed to grasp that the Southern elite was now an implacable enemy, and that boldness might be more in the nation’s interest than sluggish alternatives. Radical action meant two things: a defined policy, early on, to implement the enlistment of free blacks and self-liberated or army-liberated slaves into the military; and a comprehensive emancipation proclamation, freeing slaves everywhere rather than only in the states in rebellion.
There was, though, something more than constitutional scruples restraining Lincoln, influencing his judgment, motivating his emancipation proposals, and determining his lifelong commitment to colonization. He was, as he had always been, pessimistic about the practical difficulty, even the impossibility, of ever removing four million former slaves and half a million free blacks from the United States, though without any more promising alternative, he pushed it as far as reality allowed. Wendell Phillips had predicted, even advocated for, an alternative that Lincoln could not accept. Lincoln deeply feared a multiracial future in which whites would find it difficult, if not impossible, to co-exist with free blacks as equal citizens. It would be, he feared, a future in which a race war, both physical and psychological, would become a permanent feature of American life.