Back in February 1860 Lincoln had made a prediction at Cooper Union that turned out to be surprisingly accurate: No matter how often or how sincerely Republicans promised not to interfere with slavery, southerners would not believe them. If they won the upcoming presidential election and the South tried to secede, Lincoln had warned, Republicans would quash the rebellion as quickly and as thoroughly as Virginia had crushed John Brown. He doubted if the South would heed such warnings, and indeed, the South did not. Refusing to accept the undisputed results of a legitimate presidential election, the cotton states began calling for secession as soon as the outcome of the November balloting became clear. South Carolina was the first to go, announcing its departure from the Union on December 20. Within six weeks Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas went the same way. In February 1861 delegates from the seceded states met in Montgomery, Alabama, drew up a constitution for the Confederate States of America, declared themselves an independent nation, and demanded that the United States surrender all the military fortifications within the South’s boundaries. Through it all Lincoln was under intense pressure to endorse a compromise. He had not yet been inaugurated as President, but everyone knew that there could be no sectional reconciliation without his approval. Some urged a restoration of the Missouri Compromise line; others argued for the principle of popular sovereignty. Various constitutional amendments were proposed to guarantee slavery’s security.
These proposals worried Frederick Douglass. Every previous crisis provoked by slavery had ended in a filthy compromise tilted toward the South. In 1820 the slaveholders got Missouri. In 1850 they got a despicable Fugitive Slave Law. With that tawdry record in mind, Douglass dismissed all the bellowing about secession and predicted in late 1860 that the South would never leave the Union. “The present alarm and perturbation will cease,” Douglass said in December; “the Southern fire-eaters will be appeased and will retrace their steps.” Even after the Confederacy was formed, he still suspected that the government “was ready for anything in the way of a compromise.” Months later, with the war already begun, Douglass worried that “we live in an atmosphere of compromise.” In September 1861—after the first battle at Bull Run, after Congress had passed the first law authorizing the confiscation of southern slaves—Douglass warned yet again that “we are, in the end, to be treated to another compromise.” The following spring he suspected that “Government compromise with the slaveholders” was “now likely.” The warnings slowed down, but they never stopped. As late as 1864 Douglass lent his support to a quixotic attempt to block Lincoln’s renomination, claiming that until a “sound Anti-Slavery man” was elected as President, “we shall be in danger of a slaveholding compromise.”1
Compromise was the most lethal epithet in the reformers’ lexicon. It is their refusal to compromise that makes reformers so attractive and so frustrating. They are the voices of principle in a sea of mealymouths, the self-appointed saints in a world filled with sinners. Frederick Douglass spent the Civil War years warning Americans against anything that compromised their highest principles, against any settlement that fell short of the complete abolition of slavery, the enlistment of black troops, and the guarantee of equal rights. It was the tallest order in the history of American reform, and it had to be carried out immediately. Nothing else would silence him. Anything less would be compromise.
Douglass was positioning himself. Just as Lincoln felt most comfortable playing the role of the aggrieved conservative, so Douglass preferred to present himself as the embattled patriot. He constructed this image as carefully as Lincoln, and no less sincerely. He was the American who remained true to his country even as his country snubbed his services and restricted his rights. He was the loyal citizen for whom the principle of human equality shaped his daily life, for it meant the difference between working and not being allowed to work, between voting and not being allowed to vote, between joining the armed services and not being allowed to fight for his country, between waking up a slave and going to bed a free man. How could he, how could any man or woman in America, be asked to compromise on such things? As a black man, as an escaped slave, he had far more reason to secede from America than did the South, yet it was the South that now made war upon the nation. And just as the loyalty of African Americans should be rewarded with full equality, so did the South’s treason deprive slavery of any further claim to protection from the federal government. Anything less, Douglass shouted, was compromise. So he spent much of the Civil War on the attack, criticizing racist generals and attacking unprincipled politicians.
Democracy doesn’t work without compromise. It is their willingness to compromise that makes politicians so indispensable and so untrustworthy. They build the coalitions that bring democracy to life by trimming their principles down to popular size. The best politicians know how to compromise just enough to arouse a constituency without forsaking basic ideals. No politician did this better than Abraham Lincoln. He maintained popular support for a terrible war by insisting that the only point of the war was the restoration of the Union. But he convinced a large number of Americans that in order to restore the Union, they had to abolish slavery. He would compromise wherever he could, wherever he had to, but never on the principle that slavery was wrong and ought to be treated as such.
As far back as 1850 Lincoln admitted to John Stuart, his first law partner, that “[t]he slavery question can’t be compromised.” After the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in 1854, he told William Herndon that the “day of compromise has passed.”2 By December 1860, with the clamor for compromise ringing through the North, Lincoln steeled himself against it. “Have none of it,” he warned Lyman Trumbull about proposals to revive that despised principle of popular sovereignty. “Stand firm. The tug has come, & better now, than any time hereafter.”3 He had no faith that the South would reciprocate, so why offer concessions that would only drag things out? In January 1861 he told the pastor of Springfield’s Second Presbyterian Church that compromise “is not the remedy, not the cure.” The southern leaders “don’t want it—won’t have it—no good can come of it.” The “system of compromise,” Lincoln said, “has no end.”4 He had said almost the same thing at Cooper Union nearly a year earlier.
“IN YOUR HANDS, NOT IN MINE”
For all his fears of compromise Frederick Douglass always maintained that because the Civil War was caused by slavery, it could only conclude in the abolition of slavery. This was fatalism more than faith. The “logic of events,” he would say, would inevitably force emancipation on an unwilling government. Lincoln might stand in the way. Congress might ring its hands over the legality of this and that. Generals might scurry to thwart the slaves who were running to Union lines. But in the end, Douglass believed, not Lincoln, not Congress, not even the Union army could escape the inescapable. Oddly enough, Lincoln believed something very similar. He wore his fatalism more comfortably and, being a politician, more discreetly than Douglass. But Lincoln did believe there was an irresistible logic to events, that a powerful historical tendency was not easily stopped. The abolition of slavery was just such a tendency. Set in motion by the reckless behavior of the slaveholders themselves, neither Lincoln nor anyone else could fully control the destruction of slavery. Sworn to uphold the Constitution, Lincoln was obliged to try as best he could to guide the course of abolition along channels that were legally sound and politically acceptable. But at a certain point not even the President could harness the swirl of events. In the end, Lincoln said, we cannot escape our history. He hoped the secession movement could be stopped, that the upper South states would not secede, and that the Union could be restored without bloodshed. But what he hoped might happen and what he suspected was going to happen may not have been the same. For no matter how much Lincoln desired a sectional reconciliation he would not compromise on the basic Republican principles that secessionists found so threatening.
Frederick Douglass grew suspicious and impatient with the calls for compromise from both Democrats and conservative Republicans. He felt “disgust and indignation at the spectacle” of northerners cowering before the threats of an arrogant slaveocracy. “All compromises now are but as new wine to old bottles, new cloth to old garments. To attempt them as a means of peace between freedom and slavery,” Douglass warned, “is as to attempt to reverse irreversible law.”5 For him, as for Lincoln, the “tug” had come, and it was best to meet it now than to put it off for another day. If there was a single “ray of hope” amid the cowardly calls for peace and reconciliation, Douglass wrote, it was Abraham Lincoln’s forthcoming inauguration on March 4. He was not sure if Lincoln was the compromising type, but he was certain that appeasement would violate Lincoln’s constitutional obligation to uphold the integrity of the Union. Moreover, the new President could hardly renege on the election year promises he and his party had only recently made. Douglass drew some solace from the “stately silence” that Lincoln had maintained in the months since his election. It suggested to Douglass that Lincoln was impervious to the enormous pressure on him to strike a deal. It was true that Lincoln had made no “immoderate promises to the cause of freedom,” that both he and his party had repeatedly vowed not to tamper with slavery where it already existed. But those promises were contingent upon the South’s remaining loyal to the Union. Secession changed everything. Republican promises were no longer binding. Slavery had destroyed the Union, and only the destruction of slavery could put the Union back together again. By inauguration day Douglass had regained some of his ingrained optimism.6
As Lincoln rose to take his oath of office on March 4, 1861, he had two points to make. The first was familiar and, on the surface, conciliatory. He repeated once again that he had neither the intention nor the inclination to interfere with slavery in the South. He had never wavered from this promise, Lincoln said, and would not do so now. If secession was prompted by the conviction that the Republicans would swiftly begin interfering with slavery, that conviction was groundless. There might be differences with the South over how the northern states should go about returning fugitive slaves, Lincoln admitted, but as long as Republicans accepted their constitutional obligation to return them, such differences could scarcely justify secession. No one had questioned any right expressly guaranteed in the Constitution, and no one intended to. Of course Lincoln had been saying these things for years, and he had long since concluded that they would do nothing to satisfy the southerners. Indeed, his hint that enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law might be returned to the states, many of which would go out of their way to obstruct it, struck southerners as a devilish threat not to abide by the Constitution. And as if to goad the secessionists still further, Lincoln reasserted the very thing he believed most rankled them. “One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought to be restricted. That,” he said with a touch of irony, “is the only substantial dispute.”7
Lincoln’s second point was not even superficially conciliatory. Secession was not merely unjustified, he declared; it was unconstitutional. No government could make provision for its own destruction; no contract could be abrogated at the whim of only one of its signatories. The Union was perpetual, it had existed even before the Constitution itself, and neither secession conventions nor inflammatory declarations could make things otherwise. As long as he was President and so long as he had the support of the northern people, Lincoln declared, he would assume that the southern states were still in the Union and were still subject to the authority of the government of the United States.
With those two points—that he had no intention of interfering with slavery but every intention of enforcing the law—Lincoln positioned himself where he most preferred to be, on the strategic defensive. He promised no aggression on his own part; he would only respond to the aggression of the South. He would do whatever it took to defend the Union, as he was constitutionally sworn to do. If the South chose to attack, the decision for war was entirely its own. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ it.”8
Lincoln’s words were so blunt, so unapologetic that his incoming secretary of state, William Seward, urged him to end on a more conciliatory note. Ironically, it is that final note that has come down through history as among Lincoln’s most eloquent perorations. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies,” Lincoln said. “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”9 But the coda could not undo the content. Lincoln’s speech was unstinting in its determination to suppress the slaveholders’ “insurrection.” It seemed to be aimed less at persuading the South to abandon secession than at persuading the North to resist it. When Lincoln reiterated that he would not touch slavery in the southern states, he was speaking, at least in part, to a northern electorate that had no taste for an abolition war. By positioning the North as the defender of the Union rather than as the invader of the South, Lincoln could not have believed he would persuade the secessionists, but he surely hoped to stiffen the North’s determination to uphold the Union at whatever cost.
Douglass was infuriated by the inaugural address, the peroration in particular. Sectional reconciliation was the last thing he hoped for. He remained convinced that the Constitution fully empowered the government to stamp out slavery wherever it existed. But Douglass seemed most annoyed by something else in the speech. Lincoln not only disclaimed any power to interfere with slavery, but also said he had no “inclination” to do so. Douglass took Lincoln’s disinclination as a moral impulse rather than a legal disclaimer. He thought Lincoln was asserting his indifference to slavery when in fact the President was simply stating that he had no inclination to overstep his constitutional authority. After all, moral indifference to slavery was precisely what Lincoln had taken the northern Democrats to task for during the 1850s. Douglass had hoped that secession would finally persuade Lincoln and the North that a Union destroyed by slavery could only be restored by slavery’s destruction. But on inauguration day Lincoln said no such thing. His election had not been enough to set abolition in motion. Nor, it seemed, was secession.
Lincoln the politician was positioning himself as the conservative defender of the nation’s founding principles. Douglass the reformer was reminding everyone that the greatest of all the founding principles was universal freedom. Lincoln put the “momentous” question of war and peace in the South’s hands. Douglass threw the question of freedom and slavery back into Lincoln’s hands. What would it take, he asked, to force the North to face the issue of emancipation? The answer was simple: war.
It began in the early morning hours of April 12, 1861, when southern rebels opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Lincoln immediately began issuing orders that, lacking any congressional sanction, were based entirely on the President’s authority as the commander in chief. Notwithstanding his reverence for legality and his temperamental conservatism, Lincoln had an expansive conception of his constitutional war powers. With Congress out of session Lincoln himself called up a vast army and authorized enormous military expenditures. The upper South responded quickly. Within six weeks Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina joined the Confederacy. The last embers of sectional reconciliation were extinguished.
“THE HARPOON HAS STRUCK THE WHALE TO THE HEART”
The government’s assault on slavery commenced almost immediately. Little more than a month after Fort Sumter, Lincoln’s secretary of war, Simon Cameron, signed off on a policy declaring runaway slaves contraband of war. On July 4 Lincoln sent Congress a recommendation, drafted by his treasury secretary, that it pass a confiscation act giving congressional sanction to the contraband policy. Congress readily complied. The Senate Judiciary Committee reported a bill on July 15, and after several amendments and revisions both houses of Congress passed the first Confiscation Act in early August 1861. Lincoln signed it four days later. While the contraband and confiscation policies were taking shape, Lincoln ordered the federal government to begin the aggressive suppression of the illegal Atlantic slave trade. By the end of the year federal prosecutors had seized half a dozen ships and brought several smugglers to trial. In the fall Lincoln began pressuring the border states to enact emancipation statutes on their own. By December, only eight months after the war had begun, Lincoln told the historian George Bancroft that “slavery has received a mortal wound…the harpoon has struck the whale to the heart.”10 As Douglass predicted, war changed everything, even before the first significant battle was fought.
On Thursday night, May 23, three black field hands showed up at the Union encampment at Fortress Monroe in northern Virginia. The slaves were owned by Colonel Charles Mallory, the commander in charge of Confederate forces in the area. Union commanders and soldiers had only to look across to enemy lines and see slaves at work building Confederate fortifications. The three slaves were about to be shipped out of the area, away from their wives and children, “for the purpose of aiding secession forces” farther South. Union General Benjamin Butler had only just arrived, but already he saw that he could use the labor of such “able bodied” men himself. On Saturday he wrote to his commanders in Washington, D.C., explaining the problem. If he returned the slaves, the Confederates would immediately put them back to work building their batteries. The enemy could never have built its fortifications so quickly had it not been using slave labor, Butler noted. “As a military question it would seem to be a measure of necessity to deprive their masters of their services,” Butler wrote to the secretary of war three days later.
“How can this be done?” he asked. It was a lawyer’s question; Butler wanted to know how it could be done legally. He had already put the slaves to work on Union fortifications and sent Colonel Mallory a receipt for his slave property. The slaves, Butler suggested, should be designated “contraband of war” and, like all such property, be returned to its owner once peace was restored. Virginia commanders were already complaining. One Major Cary showed up at Butler’s headquarters demanding to know if the Union general intended to abide by his “constitutional obligations to deliver up fugitives under the fugitive slave act.” Butler must have enjoyed telling him that the Fugitive Slave Act did not apply to foreign countries, “which Virginia claimed to be.” Secession, it seems, had stripped the South of its constitutional right to claim fugitive slaves. This, Butler told Major Cary, was “one of the infelicities” of the position Virginia had put itself in.11
The secretary of war approved of Butler’s decision. Two months later Congress backed the decision up with a Confiscation Act, the first of two, that effectively nullified all those Republican promises to return fugitive slaves to their rightful owners. The theory behind the new law was that runaway slaves could be confiscated or held as contraband only if they had been used in the Confederate war effort. In practice there was no way to know how most fugitive slaves had been used or would be used if they were sent back to their masters. This made it difficult to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law in any consistent way. Slaveholders from the border states were soon complaining that military commanders were holding their runaways as contraband. The “incidents of war,” as Lincoln liked to call them, were rapidly turning the Fugitive Slave Act into a dead letter. So much for Republican pledges never to interfere with slavery in the southern states.
In late July Union forces suffered a humiliating defeat in the first major engagement of the war, beside a stream called Bull Run, at Manassas Junction, not far from Washington, D.C. Up to then Republican congressmen were reluctant to toss aside their constitutional misgivings about confiscating slaves. Only a week before Bull Run the Senate Judiciary Committee had sent a confiscation bill to the floor, where it was destined for some rough treatment. But military defeat transformed the bill’s fate. Republicans concluded that suppressing the southern rebellion would be a more difficult undertaking than most northerners had thought. Within a few weeks of the disaster at Manassas Congress passed the first Confiscation Act. Democrats denounced the law as revolutionary and, more seriously, as unconstitutional and illegal. It was not six months since Lincoln’s inauguration, and already Republicans were using the war to justify unprecedented attacks on southern slavery.
But the attacks were limited, both legally and practically. There was, to begin with, the problem of the army. The administration could accept the principle of treating runaways as contraband, and Congress could legalize the confiscation of slaves, but it was up to the Union army to physically accept fugitives, and in 1861 the Union officer corps was divided on the matter. General George McClellan, commander of the Union armies, ordered his officers to turn away the fugitives. General Henry W. Halleck went out of his way to enforce his own similar order. Both generals objected to anything that smacked of antislavery radicalism. Indeed, so strong were the proslavery sentiments of some Union officers that Lincoln believed a general mutiny would spread through the army if he openly embraced a policy of emancipation. Still, General Benjamin Butler accepted runaways gladly, and there were others. To outsiders like Frederick Douglass it looked as if the Union had no consistent policy on fugitive slaves, and in a sense he was right. A struggle between the military and civilian authorities was compounded by a struggle between proslavery and antislavery forces within the army. Until these were resolved, the government’s policy appeared to be more inconsistent than it actually was. Beginning in late 1861, however, Lincoln and Congress stepped in to clarify matters in favor of runaway slaves. In December Lincoln ordered McClellan to stop Union troops from turning away slaves who had escaped to Washington, D.C., and to arrest any masters who tried to recapture fugitives in the nation’s capital. A few months later Congress forbade the Union army from returning fugitives anywhere. By early 1862 the proslavery generals had lost their battle.
Even so, there were legal problems with both the contraband and confiscation policies. General Butler had invoked the law of nations to justify holding slaves as contraband; the authors of the Confiscation Act relied on the law of the seas. But neither international law nor admiralty law was relevant to the suppression of a domestic rebellion. Lincoln had qualms about the dubious legality of both policies, but he had an additional concern about the Confiscation Act. He was not sure Congress had the constitutional authority to enact it. The contraband policy had emerged from within the military and been approved by the secretary of war; its legitimacy therefore derived from the war powers of the President. Lincoln believed that the Constitution gave the President, as commander in chief in a time of war, powers he did not have in peacetime. But no such authority resided in the legislative branch, Lincoln thought. Indeed, he and the Republicans had been claiming for years that under the Constitution, Congress had no right to interfere with slavery in the states. Congress could confiscate slaves, but it could not emancipate them.
The reason General Butler sent Colonel Mallory a receipt for his three fugitives was that slaves confiscated by the Union were still, strictly speaking, slaves. Contraband property was supposed to be held only for the duration of the war, after which it would be returned to its rightful owner. Congress remained bound by the constitutional restriction against bills of attainder, which prohibited the permanent confiscation of property without due process. Even Republicans sympathetic to emancipation—Joshua Giddings and Orville Hickman Browning, for example—understood that there was nothing in the Constitution allowing Congress to free the confiscated slaves.12 The question of congressional authority was not quickly resolved. As late as 1864, long after he had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln refused to sign the Wade-Davis bill because it contained a clause emancipating the slaves in the rebel states. “That is the point on which I doubt the authority of Congress to act,” Lincoln told Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan. Moreover, the President added, “I do not see how any of us now can deny and contradict all we have always said, the Congress has no constitutional power over slavery in the states.”13 He thought it was dangerous, both legally and politically, for Congress to claim a power that he and his fellow Republicans had long denied.
But the war powers of the executive were, in Lincoln’s mind, sufficient to free the slaves. “I conceive that I may in an emergency do things on military grounds which cannot be done constitutionally by Congress.” Once someone was freed it would be virtually impossible to reenslave him, Lincoln thought, even if a presidential emancipation technically expired with the war. It is unclear how early he adopted this position. It was Congressman John Quincy Adams who, a generation earlier, had first suggested that in theory the war powers of the commander in chief could emancipate slaves. This gave the argument a respectable Whig pedigree that must have impressed Lincoln. Also, from the earliest days of the war Senator Charles Sumner, who fancied himself Adams’s successor, pressed Lincoln to use his war powers in just that way. The first indication that Lincoln accepted this view of his war powers may have come in a typically backhanded way that obscured the radicalism of his move.14
“TO LOSE KENTUCKY IS TO LOSE THE WHOLE GAME”
In September 1861 Lincoln overruled General John C. Frémont’s proclamation granting freedom to slaves in Missouri. Frémont was already well known for his expeditions in the West when Lincoln, partly in deference to Frémont’s politically influential relatives, installed him as the military commander of the entire western theater. The President stationed him in St. Louis with orders to keep a lid on the volatile situation in Missouri, one of the four border states that Lincoln was desperately trying to keep in the Union. This was an assignment that required both military and political skills, neither of which Frémont possessed in any measurable degree. His heavy-handed policies and arrogant demeanor alienated Missouri’s Unionists, while the secessionists went on a rampage throughout much of the state. Unable to defeat the disloyal element by rallying those loyal to the Union, Frémont resorted to high-handed declarations of martial law. He established military tribunals and empowered them to execute those deemed traitors, and he had very broad notions of who counted as a traitor. On August 30 he went even further by announcing not only that the property of all traitors would be confiscated but that their slaves would be freed.
Frémont had created a legal and political nightmare. The Constitution allows the government to suspend habeas corpus in a national emergency, but this was a dangerous power to be exercised by Congress and the President, not by rogue generals. Nor was there anything in either the contraband policy or the Confiscation Act that had authorized outright emancipation. In other words, Frémont’s proclamation was illegal. Lincoln acted quickly to undo the damage. He warned the general not to execute anyone without the President’s explicit approval and told him to rewrite his proclamation to conform to the Confiscation Act: It could apply only to those engaged in open rebellion, and their slaves could be confiscated but not emancipated. Astonishingly, Frémont announced that he would disregard Lincoln’s suggestions unless the President explicitly ordered him to act. “I very cheerfully do,” Lincoln wrote him back. At issue was not only the legality of emancipation but the principle of civil versus military authority. As Lincoln pointed out, Frémont was behaving like a military dictator, as though he could do “anything he pleases.” Yet his proclamation was “purely political,” Lincoln snapped; it had no military justification at all.15 Thus by September 1861 Lincoln seemed to accept the distinction between a “purely political” and therefore illegitimate emancipation and a military justification, which implicitly carried more weight.
At least as worrisome as its illegality was the political fallout from Frémont’s reckless behavior. If the proclamation was allowed to stand, there was a good chance that the four border slave states that had remained in the Union would flip sides and join the Confederacy. Missouri was one of them, but the biggest concern was Kentucky. As one Unionist warned in a telegram to the White House, “[t]here is not a day to lose in disavowing emancipation or Kentucky is gone over the mill dam.” Lincoln knew this. To lose Kentucky would be a disaster—probably a fatal disaster—for the Union cause. “Kentucky gone,” Lincoln said, “we cannot hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland.” If that happened, we “would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capitol.”16 With a stroke of his irresponsible pen Frémont had put the entire Union effort—and with it the fate of emancipation—at serious risk.
Lincoln had every reason to fear the loss of the border states. With Maryland out of the Union the nation’s capital would have been completely encircled by Confederate states. Baltimore’s crucial industrial facilities, in particular its indispensable rail yards, would have been put to work in the service of the Confederacy rather than the Union. The loss of Missouri would have opened a third front in the trans-Mississippi West; St. Louis would have given the Confederacy the armor plate works that supplied the Union navy with the “Pook’s turtles” that allowed the North to dominate the inland waterways. With Kentucky gone the military border would have shifted hundreds of miles to the north all the way to the Ohio River, making the job of conquering the western Confederacy immeasurably harder, probably impossible. The two hundred thousand border state whites who eventually joined the Union army might well have fought instead for the Confederacy. So great a transfer of manpower would have crippled the Union’s military strategy of laying siege to successive Confederate strongholds, Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, Atlanta, and Petersburg. Those sieges were among the most important Union victories of the Civil War, but they required the Union to maintain far more troops in the field than did the Confederates. So did the flanking maneuvers demanded by the invention of rifles. Faced with the loss of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, the Union could not have pursued its most consistently successful strategies for winning the war. For all these reasons, it is difficult to dispute the judgment of the scholar who has explored this issue more thoroughly than anyone else: Lincoln was right to be concerned about the border states. Without them the North would probably have lost the Civil War, and the slaves would have lost their only real chance for freedom.17
Far from inhibiting emancipation, Lincoln actually paved the way for it by carefully securing the loyalty of the border states. By late 1861, as it became clear that Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland would remain loyal, Lincoln began pressuring them to emancipate their slaves on their own. Abolition by state legislatures was still the only legally certain route to emancipation. Everyone knew that as soon as the first slaveholder sued his way to the Supreme Court, the chief justice—Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision—would instantly declare that contraband and confiscated slaves could not be freed by any power of the federal government, congressional or executive. The same fate would have awaited Frémont’s attempt to free slaves by martial law had Lincoln himself not blocked it first. The most legally secure way to free the slaves, Lincoln understood, was for state legislatures to do it, just as the northern states had done after the Revolution. With most of the slave states out of the Union, the only place to try legislative emancipation was in the four border states. Delaware, with the fewest slaves, seemed the likeliest place to start. In November 1861 Lincoln drafted two versions of a voluntary emancipation statute and circulated it privately to see how much support it had within the Delaware legislature. Congress had no right to interfere with slavery in any state, but there was nothing to stop it from enticing the states with a colonization plan along with appropriations to compensate them for the slaves they chose to free on their own.
In December Lincoln urged Congress to set up such a scheme. The federal government would purchase slaves from any state that sold them voluntarily, whereupon the government, as rightful owner, would free the slaves it had purchased. This, Lincoln indicated, could leave the government with large numbers of dependent freed people on its hands. To accommodate them, Lincoln suggested that Congress appropriate funds for the purchase of colonies where freed people might go if they so chose. With these proposals Lincoln revealed his ideal version of emancipation: It would be gradual; it would be enacted voluntarily by the vote of the state legislatures; the owners of freed slaves would be compensated. Congress would meanwhile appropriate funds to encourage the voluntary colonization of the freed people “so far as individuals may desire.” It was classic Lincoln, employing conservative means to radical ends.18
In the course of spelling out his proposal to Congress in December Lincoln let slip, as if in passing, one of the most important announcements of the war: that the slaves confiscated by the Union were “thus liberated.” Liberated how? And by whom? The Confiscation Act made no provision for the liberation of slaves confiscated from rebel masters. When Lincoln ordered Frémont to revise his proclamation to conform to the Confiscation Act, he meant that Frémont could confiscate but not emancipate slaves. Hence the significance of Lincoln’s surreptitious announcement in his first annual message to Congress. By early December 1861 Lincoln had already decided that confiscated slaves were effectively liberated, presumably by the war powers of the commander in chief but also by the practical, political, and moral impossibility of returning them to their rebel masters. This was no slip of Lincoln’s tongue. He had deliberately bundled the confiscated slaves with those transferred by the states and subsequently freed by the federal government, suggesting to Congress that steps be taken to help colonize “both classes” of recently emancipated blacks. The following month Lincoln told Senator James H. Lane of Kansas that the government had no right to return confiscated slaves to their masters and that even if it did have such a right, “the people would not permit us to exercise it.” He was still more emphatic on July 1. “No Negroes necessarily taken and escaping during the war are ever to be returned to slavery,” Lincoln told Orville Browning. By what authority the slaves were freed Lincoln did not say, though he still insisted the Congress had “no power” over slavery in the states.19
There is not much doubt about Lincoln’s trajectory at the end of 1861. He had begun by then to pressure the border states, where his war powers could not reach, to emancipate the slaves on their own. He steadily intensified that pressure during the first half of 1862. As for the seceded states, he had approved the contraband policy, signed the Confiscation Act, and clarified the legal status of slaves thus taken by declaring them “liberated.” Nine months in office were enough to justify the greatest fear the secessionists had about Lincoln: His promises to the South meant nothing. He would not enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. He would interfere with slavery in the southern states. He would even emancipate slaves seized from southern masters. Eventually Lincoln would use the tremendous economic and political power of the federal government to promote the abolition of slavery everywhere, guided only by his avowed hatred of slavery. In fact it was more complicated than that.
If anything guided Lincoln, it was the demands of war. But his response to those demands reflected his hatred of slavery. The war precipitated the contraband policy, got the Confiscation Act through Congress, and was making the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter. Emancipating slaves from the seceded states, for so long disavowed, was becoming a “military necessity.” By the end of 1861 slavery had been dealt a mortal wound, just as Lincoln said, just as he had predicted. But Lincoln obscured every one of his moves by smothering them with legal qualms, revealing them in backhanded ways, and slipping them virtually unnoticed into his public messages. He was doing what he could to make it look as if the wound to slavery were self-inflicted.
Anyone hunting for clues to Lincoln’s thinking would have found scattered through his first annual message to Congress in December still more hints about his personal inclinations on matters of race and slavery. He suggested opening diplomatic relations with Haiti and Liberia, and he actively pressed for the suppression of the illegal Atlantic slave trade. Though these were matters peripheral to emancipation, they tell us something about the President’s state of mind in late 1861.
In the 1790s, after the freed people of Haiti had declared their independence from France, the administration of President John Adams had initiated the process of establishing diplomatic relations with the new Caribbean nation. But Thomas Jefferson, immediately upon taking office as President in 1801, gratuitously insulted the Haitian representatives who had already arrived in Washington. Jefferson quickly scuttled all efforts to grant their country diplomatic recognition and instead began scheming with Napoleon to reestablish slavery and French dominion on the island. Every succeeding administration had followed Jefferson’s lead in denying formal diplomatic recognition to Haiti. The same thing happened to Liberia, the African nation established by expatriate American blacks. In February 1862 Frederick Douglass cited the refusal to recognize Haiti and Liberia as evidence that the U.S. government was unduly influenced by the slaveholders. But two months before Douglass spoke, Lincoln had given public notice that the sixty-year diplomatic snub was about to end. Early in his first annual message to Congress, in December 1861, the President said, in a disarmingly perplexed tone, that he was “unable to discern” any good reason for continuing the long-standing American policy of denying diplomatic recognition to the two black republics.20 He therefore urged Congress to appropriate the funds necessary to maintain a chargé d’affaires in each nation. The following April the Senate obligingly passed an authorization bill, the House concurred two weeks later, and by mid-July Lincoln had appointed the first U.S. diplomatic representative to Haiti. He had made it clear that he would have no objections if Haiti returned the favor by sending a black diplomat to Washington, and in February 1863 Ernest Roumain arrived in the nation’s capital and initiated a period of friendly relations between Haiti and the United States.
Closer to Lincoln’s heart was the suppression of the illegal Atlantic slave trade. Ever since the importation of slaves had been banned in 1808 the U.S. government had, in Frederick Douglass’s words, “winked at the accursed slave trade.”21 Shortly after Lincoln took office, the government stopped winking. Within weeks of his inauguration the new President ordered his secretary of the interior, Caleb Smith, to assume a centralized responsibility for the prosecution of those who smuggled African slaves into the country. Smith understood how deeply Lincoln detested slave traders, and he quickly assembled a crackerjack team of lawyers and investigators. In August Smith’s men organized a seminar in New York to train federal marshals and prosecutors throughout the Northeast in the legal mechanisms for the suppression of the slave trade. Before the year was out, they had succeeded in capturing five ships, freed hundreds of slaves, sent them to their freedom in Liberia, and begun prosecuting a number of smugglers. One of them, Nathaniel P. Gordon of Portland, Maine, was sentenced to death after his ship, the Erie, had been captured with 893 slaves off the coast of Africa. The death penalty had never been used against a slave trader, and Gordon’s case drew howls of sympathy from many quarters. But Lincoln resisted the pressure and refused to commute the death sentence. Gordon was hanged on February 21, 1862.22
A few weeks after Gordon’s execution, undeterred by the criticism, Lincoln ordered his secretary of state, William Seward, to open negotiations with the British for a treaty to jointly suppress the Atlantic slave trade. Frederick Douglass had recently complained that for twenty-five years the United States had refused “to unite in a treaty by which slave-traders could not shelter their hell-black traffic under their respective flags.”23 But Lincoln was anxious for such a treaty. The British were delighted, negotiations proceeded swiftly, and on April 10 the President sent a slave trade treaty to Congress. By a unanimous voice vote the Senate ratified the treaty two weeks later. Within minutes of the vote an ecstatic Senator Charles Sumner carried the ratification personally to Seward’s office, and the secretary, nearly as thrilled, sent it quickly on to Lincoln. This time the public reaction was overwhelmingly favorable, so much so that two months later Congress had no hesitation in passing enforcement legislation recommended by Lincoln. With these new prosecutorial powers at its disposal the administration redoubled its efforts, and within eighteen months Lincoln proudly reported to Congress that “so far as American ports and American citizens are concerned, that inhuman and odious traffic has been brought to an end.”24
“NO GOOD SHALL COME TO THE NEGRO FROM THIS WAR”
From the day the new President was inaugurated Frederick Douglass worried that Lincoln would cave in to proslavery pressure, which was far more powerful than abolitionism, even in the North, by announcing a new sectional compromise. To some degree he was misled by the care Lincoln took to position himself as a conservative, and to some degree Douglass was performing his own role as the uncompromising reformer. Overall, Douglass’s criticism of Lincoln had more to do with the way they positioned themselves than with the positions they took. Whatever his reasons, Douglass went out of his way to notice Lincoln’s penchant for conservative means but studiously disregarded nearly all his radical moves. Even at the end of 1861, after the mortal wound to slavery had already been struck, there was still a long way to go. To an instinctive reformer like Douglass this was no time to ease up on the criticism.
In truth most of Lincoln’s moves toward emancipation were made quietly, sometimes invisibly. Lincoln had silently accepted the contraband policy. He had grumbled about the Confiscation Act before signing it. His draft emancipation statutes for Delaware circulated behind the scenes; Douglass could not have known about them. So unobtrusively had Lincoln slipped his decision to free the confiscated slaves into his first annual message to Congress that Douglass missed it along with everybody else. By contrast Douglass could not help noticing Lincoln’s very public repudiation of Frémont and his equally public concern for the loyalty of the border states. By the end of the 1861 Douglass had begun to argue that Lincoln, far from being an antislavery President, was actually determined to thwart the destruction of slavery. Such, at least, was the stance he took. And it was probably just as sincere as Lincoln’s continued disavowal of any intention to interfere with slavery in the states.
After the disappointment of the inaugural address Fort Sumter briefly raised Douglass’s spirits. He threw himself into the propaganda war, declaring his desire to see the South beaten and humiliated before the wrath of an inflamed North. He had a clear, simple theme: The war was nothing more than the extension of slavery’s violence into the free states. The depravity and arrogance that slavery bred into the southern ruling class had now spilled beyond the South and was threatening, actually threatening, to drag the free people of the North down into slavery along with southern blacks. Ironically, Douglass’s militant rhetoric placed him more squarely in the mainstream than ever before. In the spring of 1861 bloodthirsty words were hemorrhaging from all quarters, above and below the Mason-Dixon line. But Douglass had an agenda that most northerners did not. His aim was the destruction of slavery, not the mere restoration of the Union. Slavery was the source of the bloodshed, he argued, and bloodshed would be necessary to bring it down. When whites warned that emancipation would unleash the “wholesale murder” of blacks, for example, Douglass didn’t flinch at the prospect. Such a slaughter would be a terrible but necessary precursor to the freedom of the slave.
Douglass had a favorite metaphor. Slavery, he said several times in 1861, was “the stomach of this rebellion.” Slave labor fed the rebel armies, clothed the rebel troops, funded the rebel war. “Strike here,” Douglass insisted, “cut off the connection between the fighting master and the working slave, and you at once put an end to this rebellion.” 25 This was abolition as a military necessity, and eventually northerners accepted it. But not right away. In the spring of 1861 most people agreed that slavery had caused the war, but few could see how abolishing slavery would end it. Most Yankees reasoned that a cause and a cure were two different things. You might as well tell a smoker that his lung cancer would go away if he just stopped using cigarettes. Once again Douglass was baffled that northerners accepted his premises but not his conclusions.
By June 1861 Douglass’s impatience was already showing. Even many radical Republicans agreed that the constitutional ban on bills of attainder restricted Congress’s power to emancipate slaves. But Douglass airily dismissed the “supposed constitutional objections” to abolition. There were those who worried “that the Constitution does not allow the exercise of such power,” Douglass said. “As if this were a time to talk of constitutional power!” It was perfectly all right to suppress the South for trampling the Constitution, but if the Constitution stood in the way of abolition, then the Constitution be damned. Douglass felt the same way about public opinion; he invoked or rejected it as it suited his immediate purposes. At first he warned that public opinion would turn violently against Lincoln and the Republicans if they abandoned their principles for the sake of yet another sectional compromise. But when Republicans warned of a political backlash if they moved too swiftly against slavery, Douglass denounced them for their pusillanimous subservience to public opinion. Politicians had an obligation to lead, he said, and in the case of slavery they had nothing to worry about. “The people will follow in any just and necessary path,” Douglass insisted, “and do so joyfully.”26 But the politicians knew better.
By the summer of 1862 Lincoln would be proclaiming his constitutional power to emancipate slaves and struggling to bring public opinion along with him. But Douglass was there a year earlier, and he was impatient with every move that fell short of complete abolition. He gave a passing nod to General Butler’s policy of holding fugitive slaves as contraband of war. It was only “a temporary arrangement,” Douglass grumbled, “carefully left open to the most sudden reversal.” It freed no one. What about the first Confiscation Act? A “tame and worthless statute,” in Douglass’s view.27 He did not notice Lincoln’s year-end announcement that slaves seized under the Confiscation Act were “thus liberated.” Nor was he impressed by Lincoln’s proposal that Congress compensate the states if they abolished slavery on their own. By the ordinary standards of American politics, Lincoln’s moves had been radical and astonishing, but to Douglass they were slow at best and suspect at worst.
As for Lincoln’s delicate maneuvering to keep the border states in the Union, Douglass thought it was a criminal waste of time. Slaveholders were slaveholders, Douglass insisted; whether in Kentucky or in Mississippi, they were not to be reasoned with. There was some truth in this; Lincoln did overestimate the antislavery sentiments of border state Unionists. Even so, this was Douglass at his most myopic. He reasoned that because Kentuckians defended slavery, they had no moral claim to the solicitude of the government. He thereby confused the moral worth of the border states’ position with the strategic soundness of Lincoln’s. The President himself was reasoning the other way around: Because the government could not survive the loss of the border states, he had no choice but to step warily around Kentucky’s concern for slavery. There is no doubt that Lincoln nourished a naive faith in the willingness of the border states to accept what was coming and, with a little financial nudge from Congress, abolish slavery on their own. In fact Lincoln had too much faith in southern Unionists in general. But Douglass had a naive streak of his own. He professed to believe that slavery would come tumbling down in the border states if Lincoln merely proclaimed its destruction, that the end of slavery in Kentucky would topple dominoes across the rest of the South, leading to the complete collapse of the Confederacy. In a way Lincoln and Douglass shared flip sides of the same delusion. Lincoln hoped that if the border states abolished slavery on their own, the Confederacy would throw up its hands in defeat. Douglass hoped the same thing would happen if the federal government declared slavery abolished in the border states.
Its hard to tell whether Douglass believed this or not. In different circumstances he knew perfectly well that the slaves could not simply walk off their plantations and bring slavery to an end on their own. He had spent ten years warning John Brown that it would never happen. He told Lincoln the same thing in the summer of 1864: The slaveholders had plenty of ways to keep slaves from hearing about the Emancipation Proclamation and still more ways of preventing them from attempting to claim their freedom. Nevertheless, inspired by his vision of a spontaneous emancipation rolling forth from Kentucky, Douglass hurled some of his sourest invective at the Lincoln administration’s successful attempt to keep the border states from leaving the Union.
The government, Douglass declared in late August, “has resolved that no good shall come to the Negro from this war.” By late summer he was complaining about the meager accomplishments of the administration. Republicans, he argued, were paralyzed by long years of northern subservience to the Slave Power and to the racist tradition that denied African Americans any rights beyond those of a beast of burden. In Douglass’s mind, Frémont was the hero of the hour. He discounted as frivolous pretexts the stated reasons for Frémont’s subsequent dismissal. He did not indicate the slightest misgiving about generals making important public policy decisions on their own. Frémont’s proclamation “strikes the rebellion at its source,” Douglass declared.28 The general had fused the cause of the war to its remedy, slavery to emancipation. Nothing else mattered. He was unimpressed by the growing numbers of Union troops who, disregarding their orders, continued accepting fugitive slaves into their camps while thwarting their masters’ attempts to recover them. Instead Douglass took scornful notice of every military commander who turned away fugitive slaves, as the army had always done. “We are catching slaves instead of arming them,” he said.29
By December Douglass had announced that the loyal people of the North were “disgusted with the tenderness with which the Administration treats the cause of the war.” He urged Congress to wrest control of the war from the President, something it was not prepared to do. That left Douglass at the start of 1862 more dejected than ever. The “friends of freedom, the Union, and the Constitution, have been most basely betrayed, deceived and swindled.” Elected on the basis of its hostility to slavery, the government had in fact shown itself to be “destitute of any anti-slavery principle or feeling….” But the tide of history was against the Republicans, Douglass believed. Sooner or later emancipation would be forced upon them, just as it would be forced upon the slaveholders. With a peculiarly Lincolnian turn of phrase Douglass expressed his continued belief “that slavery is to receive its death wound from the present rebellion.”30 On this, at least, Lincoln and Douglass were agreed.
The closer Lincoln drew to the radical conclusion that emancipation was essential to the suppression of the southern rebellion, the more frustrated Douglass seemed to become. At times he seemed to disagree with Lincoln on matters over which they were in complete agreement. Both men had concluded by late 1861 that the destruction of slavery was inevitable, but rather than embrace Lincoln’s reasoning Douglass assailed it. Their positions were not identical, but they were clearly too close for comfort.
DOUGLASS’S LOGIC, LINCOLN’S NECESSITY
In early February 1862 two of Lincoln’s sons, Willie and Tad, became very sick. They had probably contracted typhoid fever from the White House’s polluted water supply. Tad was ill for several weeks but eventually recovered. Willie, Lincoln’s favorite, did not. As the boy’s condition worsened, Lincoln was thrown into despair. He sat by Willie’s bedside night after night until, on February 20, the ten-year-old boy died. Elizabeth Keckley had just laid Willie’s body out on his bed when Lincoln came into the room. “I never saw a man so bowed down with grief,” she remembered. Lifting the sheet that covered the body, Lincoln looked into his son’s face. “My poor boy,” he said, “he was too good for this earth.” Then he buried his own face in his hands as his body convulsed from sobbing. Lincoln was distraught; for months he periodically shut himself alone in his office and broke down. He began having long talks with Phineas D. Gurley, a Presbyterian clergyman, and Mary Todd Lincoln believed that her husband’s grief over Willie’s death turned Lincoln toward religion for the first time in his adult life. Nevertheless, Willie’s death reinforced Lincoln’s powerful streak of fatalism. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,” he quoted from Shakespeare, “Rough-hew them how we will.”31
Frederick Douglass had a fatalistic streak of his own. He believed that slavery’s destruction was inevitable no matter how cleverly mere mortals sought to prevent it. “I wait and work,” he concluded somewhat dejectedly, “relying more upon the stern logic of events than upon any disposition of the Federal army toward slavery.” Timid politicians and racist generals notwithstanding, he observed, “one thing is certain—slavery is a doomed institution.” It was not the Republicans but the slaveholders who, “in their madness,” have “invited armed abolition to march to the deliverance of the slave.” It was not loyal northerners but southern traitors who had “accelerated” slavery’s decline “and precipitated its disastrous doom.”32
Douglass called it the “inexorable logic of events” for Lincoln it was the logic of necessity. But it meant nearly the same thing: Slavery was doomed by the slaveholders themselves, the conclusion unavoidable. Yet Douglass was frustrated by this element of Lincoln’s thought. “Nothing short of dire necessity,” he complained, would force the government “to act wisely.”33 Precisely. Lincoln would strike directly at slavery as soon as its military necessity was clear to himself and to the American people. He had revoked Frémont’s order because it was “not within the range of military law, or necessity.”34 In his more reflective moments Douglass accepted this. “Governments act from necessity,” he admitted toward the end of 1861. “They move only as they are moved upon.—Our government is no exception to this rule. It cannot determine what shall be the character of events.”35 For Douglass necessity would ultimately force Lincoln to adopt an emancipation policy. For Lincoln “military necessity” would make emancipation legitimate to northerners who would accept it under no other circumstances.
If Lincoln came early to the conclusion that emancipation was inevitable, he was willing to wait until public opinion caught up with him. He said so as early as September 1861. Douglass and the Radical Republicans, led by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, were fuming about Lincoln’s rebuke to Frémont. “It would do no good to go ahead any faster than the country would follow,” Lincoln said in response. “I think Sumner and the rest of you would upset our applecart altogether if you had your way. We’ll fetch ’em,” Lincoln promised, “just give us a little time.
We didn’t go into the war to put down slavery, but to put the flag back, and to act differently at this moment, would, I have no doubt, not only weaken our cause but smack of bad faith; for I never should have had votes enough to send me here if the people had supposed I should try to use my power to upset slavery. Why, the first thing you’d see, would be a mutiny in the army. No, we must wait until every other means have been exhausted. This thunderbolt will keep.36
Lincoln made it clear that he questioned neither the wisdom nor the desirability of emancipation, only its timing. “The only difference between you and me” on the matter of emancipation, Lincoln told Sumner in late 1861, was “a month or six weeks in time.”37
In the same month that Lincoln stressed the issue of timing to Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass came as close as he ever did to appreciating its importance in the government’s move toward emancipation. As he often did, Douglass invoked the impersonal logic of events that was driving both the North and the South “to extremities not dreamed of at the beginning of the war.” Once again he insisted that the abolition of slavery was “the natural consequence of the war, whether our Government or Generals would have it so or not.” Nevertheless, he conceded that the government’s reluctance to “strike the blow at present may be necessary to make it all the more powerful, effectual and successful when it is struck.”38 That pretty much summed up Lincoln’s position.
Douglass had embraced antislavery politics, but he still lived in the world of reform, still moved in the circle of reformers. As much as he admired Senator Charles Sumner, the dean of congressional radicals, Douglass did not even associate with the Radical Republicans. He was still a reformer at heart. He was impatient with restraints—political restraints but legal and constitutional ones as well. His impulse was to nudge, to provoke, to condemn all halfway measures. Douglass could savor victories only briefly before his instinctive sense of mission returned, for there was always more to be done. He was relentless. He was inconsistent. But he had a reformer’s gifts as well: polemical brilliance and a ferocious critical bite. When Douglass moved into antislavery politics, he brought the sensibilities of a reformer with him. He expected nothing from slaveholders and Democrats. Republicans he held to a higher standard, but it was a reformer’s standard that almost no politician could meet. For nearly two years after the Civil War began there was nothing Abraham Lincoln could do to satisfy Frederick Douglass.
Lincoln was a politician, not a reformer, an elected official rather than a freestanding critic. And he was the President of the United States, not a senator from Massachusetts. Lincoln and Douglass could have agreed down to the last jot and tittle—on racial equality, on the Constitution, on colonization—and still, Lincoln would have been restrained by his oath of office and the will of the people in ways that Douglass was not. “We reason as though Mr. Lincoln wielded a dictatorial, unrestricted power at the White House,” Eugène Pelletan told his fellow radicals. “But Mr. Lincoln simply presides over a republic where popular opinion rules, and he is surrounded by divers opinions on the question of slavery.”39 It is important to democracy that reformers like Frederick Douglass could say what needed to be said, but it is indispensable to democracy that politicians like Abraham Lincoln could do only what the law and the people allowed them to do.
By early 1862 there was no disagreement between Lincoln and Douglass over whether slavery should be abolished. The issue was how. For all his talk of violent slave insurrection—and he talked a lot about it after Harpers Ferry—Douglass actually endorsed all paths to emancipation. He was a flexible dogmatist. The goal mattered much more than the means of achieving it. Twenty years earlier, when his own freedom was at stake, Douglass had backed a proposal by his English friends to purchase his liberty from the man who still technically owned him, thus making it possible for Douglass to return safely to America. Righteous abolitionists cried foul, but Douglass cared more about securing freedom than securing freedom in the purest way. In this sense he was somewhat more pragmatic than the President. Lincoln believed that some ways of abolishing slavery were better than others, that some were downright unlawful, and still others—remorseless insurrection in particular—were terrible and should be avoided. For Douglass the crime of slavery was so great that any means of overthrowing it were justified. By contrast, Lincoln was “conservative as to means,” his friend Joseph Gillespie explained, but “radical he was so far as ends were concerned.”40
To some extent it suited Lincoln’s purposes to have radicals like Douglass attacking him. It made the President appear more conservative than he actually was, but it also exposed his genuine preference for conservative approaches to emancipation. He pressed for emancipation, but he recoiled at some of the ways radicals wanted to get there. Even as he invoked his war powers to free confiscated slaves, he remained “anxious and careful” not to let the Civil War “degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle.”41 In time Lincoln would launch an aggressive war on slavery, but not until he and the northern people accepted emancipation as a military necessity. Even then Lincoln had no desire to cast himself as a revolutionary hero. When he made his move, he was careful to insist that it was the unavoidable consequence of the slaveholders’ own recklessness. “The powder in this bombshell will keep dry,” Lincoln said of abolition in September 1861, “and when the fuse is lit, I intend to have them touch it off themselves.”42 Regardless of who lit the fuse, the bomb went off in 1862.