JANUARY 1, 1863
Lincoln had not slept at all. Early the next morning, New Year’s Day, he went to his office and wrote out the final Emancipation Proclamation. From there he sent it to the State Department to have an engrossed copy prepared for his signature. But when Secretary of State Seward hand-delivered the official proclamation later in the morning, it contained an error. It went back to the State Department to be corrected. The signing was delayed until after the annual New Year’s celebration hosted by the President and First Lady.
For the next three hours Lincoln stood shaking hands as guests streamed through the White House. Finally, at two o’clock in the afternoon, the festivities ended, and Lincoln went back upstairs, where the corrected copies awaited his signature. By then he was exhausted. Sitting at his desk, Lincoln picked up his pen, but his hand shook so badly he had to put it back down. He tried once more, but again the trembling forced him to stop. As Seward stood by watching, Lincoln explained that the tremor was caused by the hours he had spent shaking hands, not from any misgivings about signing the proclamation. Finally, holding the pen as tightly as possible and in a somewhat shaky script, he affixed his full signature, Abraham Lincoln, to the document. In cities and towns across the North men and women had gathered in wait to celebrate the news. By late afternoon the telegraph wires were buzzing with word that the President had at last signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had organized a Jubilee Concert at Boston’s Music Hall. The leading lights of New England civic and literary culture were in attendance. Decorating the walls were the coats of arms of the United States of America and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Boston Philharmonic opened the program, playing just long enough to bring the hall to silence. Josiah Quincy, Jr., took the podium to introduce a speech by Ralph Waldo Emerson. When Emerson finished, the orchestra played Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, followed by Mendelssohn’s Hymn of Praise—“most appropriate for the occasion,” the Boston Morning Journal reported, “illustrative of the darkness of the past, the dawning of the glorious future.” With the distinguished historian Francis Parkman looking on, Oliver Wendell Holmes rose to recite his “Army Hymn,” with two new stanzas he had written for the occasion.
We lift the starry flag on high,
That fills with light our stormy sky.
No more its flaming emblems wave
To bar from hope the trembling slave;
No more its radiant glories shine
To blast with woe a child of Thine.
The celebration concluded with more music: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah, and Rossini’s rousing William Tell Overture. An announcer interrupted the closing concert to let the audience know that the Emancipation Proclamation had indeed been issued by the President and would appear on the telegraph wires later that evening. The Music Hall erupted in “tumultuous applause” as the ladies and gentlemen gave nine cheers for Abraham Lincoln. “It is not often that a more brilliant assembly is seen,” the Morning Journal declared, “not often so great an occasion—never one more important—the celebration of a day which will hold a place in history forever.”1
Meanwhile, at the Tremont Temple nearby, the Union Progressive Association had organized a daylong celebration of its own. Some of the greatest names in American abolitionism were scheduled to speak before the largely black audience. William Lloyd Garrison was expected to appear, though he never showed up. But Wendell Phillips did. So did William Wells Brown, and so did Frederick Douglass. The morning session began with a speech by William C. Nell thanking the President for the proclamation and “alluding in a feeling manner to the attachment of the colored race to their home and native land.” Some speakers attributed emancipation to divine will; others promised that “when we get through with the enemies of the black man in Dixie,” they would carry the struggle against racial prejudice into the North. William Wells Brown read the text of the preliminary proclamation and later, in a speech of his own, defended the ability of the freed slaves “to take care of themselves.” The morning session closed with “three cheers for civil and religious liberty, three for the President of the United States, and three for the Army and Navy.” The afternoon session convened at two-thirty for another round of speeches, one of which was interrupted when a messenger entered the hall “with the intelligence that the President’s Proclamation was coming over the wires.” The announcement caused “considerable commotion” and shouts of “Glory to God! &c.” The evening session, the best attended of the three, was devoted to still more speakers professing their faith in the freed slaves, their willingness to work hard and their burning desire for education.2 Just before adjournment news of the final proclamation arrived. “The joyous enthusiasm manifested was beyond description.
Cheers were proposed for the President and for the proclamation, the whole audience rising to their feet and shouting at the tops of their voices, throwing up their hats and indicating their gratification in every conceivable manner. When the cheers had somewhat abated, the whole audience stood up and joined in singing the jubilee song ‘Blow ye the trumpet blow,’ and then followed a beautiful prayer of thanksgiving by the Rev. Mr. Waterston, which moved many to tears, and was frequently interrupted by shouts of ‘Amen,’ ‘Glory to God in the highest!’ ‘Hallelujah,’ &c.
After the meeting at the Tremont Temple, the Boston Evening Transcript reported, a large number “wended their way to the Twelfth Baptist Church, where they joined in prayer and singing, and partook of a repast which had been prepared.”3
They were in the same city, on the same day, celebrating the same event. Yet it was as if the Tremont Temple and the Music Hall occupied parallel universes, a mile away but a world apart. It wasn’t just the contrasting skin colors of the respective audiences. At the Music Hall they talked about history; at the Tremont Temple they talked about God’s will. One audience sat listening to a great orchestra, spectators to an important event. The other rose to its feet, shouting and singing glorious hymns, deeply engaged by the event being celebrated. Both groups gave thanks to the United States and cheered the President, but at the Tremont Temple the jubilation was leavened by lingering concerns: for an emancipation that, though begun, was far from complete; for the future prospects of the freed people; for the racial discrimination that persisted in the North even as slavery collapsed in the South. At the Music Hall Abraham Lincoln got nine cheers. The folks at the Tremont Temple gave him three, reserving three for civil and religious liberty and three more for the Union military. Frederick Douglass was at the Tremont Temple.
TOWARD EMANCIPATION
Lincoln’s pace was set by military affairs, but it accelerated in 1862. Beginning in the winter of 1861–62, a succession of Union victories in the West secured the loyalty of both Kentucky and Missouri, enabling the President to go public with his campaign to pressure the border states into adopting emancipation on their own. The Republican-controlled Congress came back into session and quickly sent him a raft of antislavery bills, all of which he signed into law. By late spring military affairs had intruded again, but this time it was Union failure in the East that spurred Lincoln. After one last effort to prod the border states into action he decided by mid-July to issue an emancipation proclamation. The proclamation itself was one of several orders which together shifted the Union military toward a policy of “hard war” against the Confederacy. As if to emphasize its military rationale, Lincoln withheld publication of the proclamation until a Union victory made emancipation look like a demonstration of northern strength rather than an act of northern desperation. This was something Frederick Douglass understood early on; the fate of emancipation hinged on the fortunes of the Union army.
Douglass kept up his criticism after the New Year, denouncing the “imbecility” of Lincoln’s letter to Frémont and wondering why the President seemed “ashamed to tell the world what he is fighting against.”4 But he began to understand that most of the pressure on Lincoln was coming from proslavery Democrats who had, by early 1862, regained their momentum and were roundly condemning the increasingly radical drift of the war. From then on Douglass fell into a pattern of tempering his own misgivings about Lincoln whenever he realized that the Democrats, not the abolitionists, were the real alternative to the Republicans.
As the likelihood of emancipation grew, Democrats began to demand an answer to the question, “What shall be done with the slaves?” But Douglass shrewdly observed that the increasing prominence of the question “implies at least the presence of danger to the slave system.”5Then, too, Douglass was buoyed by a very real shift of public opinion in favor of abolition. “Tongues that used to bless Slavery now curse it,” he declared in February 1862; those who once praised the patriotism of slaveholders “are but now having the scales torn from their eyes by slaveholding treason and rebellion.”6 It would be impossible, he predicted, for the President, his cabinet, or the army to withstand for long “the mighty current of events, or the surging billows of the popular will.”7
But Douglass feared military defeat more than he feared the Democrats. In the first half of 1862 Douglass’s writings suddenly exploded with detailed commentary on the movement of troops, and his volatile mood now rose and fell with the fortunes of war. As he and other Americans beheld the spectacle of a seemingly paralyzed Union army, Douglass’s anger gave way to a sober concern for the fate of his country. In these months he wrote more movingly than ever of his deep attachment to “our great Republic—for such it truly is.” He spoke with pride of the fact that African Americans were the most reliably loyal group in the country, that “there are no black rebels” anywhere in the United States. “I am an American citizen,” Douglass told a Boston audience one February evening. “In birth, in sentiment, in ideas, in hopes, in aspirations, and responsibilities, I am an American citizen.” Moreover, “I am such by choice” as well as by lineage. Years earlier Douglass had been offered citizenship in England but instead returned to his “mission” in the United States. “I have never regretted that decision,” he continued, “and tonight, I allow no man to exceed me in the desire for the safety and welfare of this country.” In truth Douglass wanted to remain in England, but his family called him home. Nevertheless, nothing he was now saying was different from what he had said in the past. But his tone had changed. He was more somber, almost frightened. “God forbid,” Douglass said, “that when the smoke and thunder of this slaveholding war shall have rolled from the troubled face of our country it shall be said that the harvest is past, the summer is ended and we are not saved.”8
“WE MUST FREE THE SLAVES OR BE OURSELVES SUBDUED”
As Douglass worried for his country, Lincoln was losing patience—with his generals and with the border states. Early in 1862 the Delaware legislature rejected his proposal for voluntary, compensated emancipation. In March Lincoln turned up the pressure by sending Congress a proposed resolution for federal compensation to the owners of slaves in any state whose legislature enacted an emancipation statute. He justified this as a military measure designed to deprive the Confederacy of any hopes of enticing more slave states to leave the Union. Yet he stepped up the pressure on the border states only after the military pressure on those states had eased considerably. Union general George Thomas had kicked invading Confederate troops out of Kentucky. Ulysses Grant had taken control of Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee, foreshadowing the North’s military domination of the West. The Confederates had been swept from much of Missouri and defeated at Pea Ridge, Arkansas. And naval commander David Farragut had launched a spectacular flotilla up the Mississippi River from the South to give the Union control of New Orleans.
Military necessity was Lincoln’s rationale for pressuring the border states, but his motives were more complicated than his rationale. He hoped that if he dangled the carrot of compensation in public, the border states would feel more pressure to accept his proposal. But just in case they needed more goosing, Lincoln added a not so veiled threat to his March message to Congress. He reminded the border states of his pledge to use “all indispensable means” to end the war and that as long as the war continued, “it is impossible to foresee all of the incidents, which may attend and all the ruin which may follow it.”9 The message was clear enough. If the border states did not accept this offer of compensated emancipation, the “incidents” of war could leave them without slaves and without compensation either. Only a dunce could miss Lincoln’s point.
But miss it, or at least disregard it, the border states did. When his proposal elicited no comment from border state congressmen, Lincoln called them to the White House. He told them honestly that he had always hated slavery and wished to see it abolished, but he justified his proposal on military grounds. By abolishing slavery on their own, the border states would dash one of the Confederacy’s fondest hopes and thereby speed the collapse of the rebellion. To the President’s face the legislators were as respectful as they could bring themselves to be, but when they got back to Capitol Hill their tongues loosened up as one after another they denounced Lincoln’s proposal as an unwarranted and unconstitutional interference with slavery in the states. Lincoln was startled by the border state reaction, but he should have known better. His proposal did, after all, have the aroma of radicalism about it. “[F]or the first time in two generations,” a Republican newspaper explained, “we have the recommendation from the presidential chair of the abolition of slavery and of measures by Congress to invite and assist it.”10 Over the vociferous objections of the border state representatives both houses of Congress passed the President’s resolution and Lincoln signed it a week later.
By the spring of 1862 public opinion had shifted far enough for the Republicans in Congress to make several dramatic moves of their own. They passed a law prohibiting Union officers from turning back slaves who ran away to Union lines. In brazen defiance of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, Congress expressly prohibited the expansion of slavery into federal territories. The lawmakers also ratified Lincoln’s treaty with Britain for the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade and then followed it up by passing vigorous enforcement legislation. Most dramatically, Congress abolished slavery in the District of Columbia. The bill had almost everything that Lincoln preferred: Emancipation was not gradual, but the masters were to be compensated. It did not allow the people of Washington or their representatives to vote on it themselves, as he would have liked. Nevertheless, he signed the bill and sent it back to Congress with a message stating that “I have ever desired to see the national capital freed from the institution in some satisfactory way.”11 For the first time in American history the federal government used its power to abolish slavery. Frederick Douglass could scarcely believe what was happening. “I trust I am not dreaming,” he wrote.12
But Lincoln, careful and deliberate where Douglass was quick and impulsive, was not yet prepared to make emancipation an explicit aim of the war. Douglass’s suspicions were aroused when Lincoln rebuked yet another Union general who had overstepped his authority by declaring the emancipation of the slaves on the coastal islands of Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida. The general, David Hunter, issued his edict on May 9; Lincoln repudiated it ten days later in a very public proclamation. Nobody in the government had had advance knowledge that Hunter would issue such a proclamation, Lincoln said, and so Hunter could have had no authorization to issue it. Indeed, military commanders had no business making such decisions. Then Lincoln slipped in another one of his backhanded revelations. “I reserve to myself,” he said, any decision “to declare the Slaves of any state or states, free.” Back in December Lincoln had taken it upon himself to declare confiscated slaves liberated. Now he was going much further by suggesting that as commander in chief he could declare all the slaves in the seceded states free if he deemed it “a necessity indispensable to the maintainance of the government.”
As he had with General Frémont, Lincoln repudiated General Hunter because he objected not to emancipation but to generals making policy decisions that properly belonged to civilian authorities. As if the hint of his own inclinations were not broad enough, the President used the proclamation revoking Hunter’s order to take another jab at the border states. He quoted his own resolution of the previous March urging Congress to compensate any state that voluntarily emancipated its slaves. He pointed out that both houses of Congress had passed the resolution by large majorities. Emancipation was coming, Lincoln hinted. “You can not if you would, be blind to the signs of the times,” he said. He invited the border states to take advantage of the opportunity presented them by taking the lead in one of the greatest deeds of human history. “May the vast future not have to lament that you have neglected it.” A diligent reader finishing Lincoln’s words might have found it odd that a proclamation ostensibly designed to overturn General Hunter’s emancipation order had devoted the bulk of its space to calling upon the border states to join him in the march of human history by emancipating their own slaves and to declaring the President’s authority to free the slaves in the rebel states whenever “military necessity” required it.13
Military necessity presented itself in June 1862. Following the Union’s disastrous defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run the previous summer, Lincoln had installed George B. McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac and, for a period, commander of all Union armies. McClellan devoted the fall and winter to whipping his army into shape, and he was good at it. But as the winter months passed, his great flaw as a general became increasingly apparent: He could build a well-disciplined army, but he was unwilling to use it. Frederick Douglass captured the problem nicely. They had got up a huge army on the Potomac, he said, but it “has remained idle through the summer, waiting for autumn—idle through the Winter, waiting for Spring, and which will probably remain idle through the Spring, waiting for good roads.”14 By the spring of 1862 Lincoln had all but ordered McClellan to move against the Confederate armies defending Richmond, Virginia. The result was the Peninsula campaign, McClellan’s cumbersome plan to capture the Confederate capital. Though his forces vastly outnumbered those of the enemy, McClellan was paralyzed by the aggressiveness of the Confederates. By the end of June the Peninsula campaign was over. McClellan withdrew his army south to the James River and then sat there and did nothing other than blame Lincoln and the politicians for his own failure.
At that point, early July 1862, the stars fell into alignment. The reluctance of the border states to emancipate their slaves converged with McClellan’s reluctance to fight. With rumors swirling that McClellan was part of a military plot to march on Washington and overthrow the government, Lincoln decided to go see the general himself on July 7 at Harrison’s Landing. There McClellan handed the President an astonishing letter detailing his objections to the drift toward emancipation and hinting at his own willingness to be appointed “Commander in Chief” of the Army. At last Lincoln realized that McClellan’s unwillingness to fight was driven as much by politics as psychology. He also realized that if voluntary emancipation in the border states were to happen, it would have to start happening immediately. On July 12, a few days after returning from Harrison’s Landing, Lincoln called the border state congressmen to a second meeting. This time the President warned them in the bluntest possible terms that if they hesitated any longer, emancipation would be forced on them by “the incidents of war.” He told them that he had revoked General Hunter’s proclamation not because he objected to military emancipation but because it was a decision only the President could make. He also made it clear that in revoking Frémont’s and Hunter’s orders, he had deeply upset many loyal citizens whose support the Union could not afford to lose. The representatives took their leave and, two days later, informed the President that they had voted more than two to one against his proposal. Lincoln must have seen their rejection coming, for he had already made a decision of his own.
Attorney General Edwin Stanton’s son had died, and Lincoln was riding to the funeral with Gideon Welles, his secretary of the navy, and William Seward, the secretary of state. Lincoln was still aching from the death a few months before of his own son Willie, and the grief he now shared with Stanton drew the two men close to each other. In the carriage Lincoln told Welles and Seward that he had decided to issue a proclamation of emancipation as a military necessity. He had “about come to the conclusion,” Lincoln said, “that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.” It was July 13, 1862, the day after his unproductive session with the border states and less than a week after his meeting with McClellan. The army had failed to strike the “vigorous blows” needed to put down secession, so it was time for his administration to “set the army an example, and strike at the heart of the rebellion.” He had hoped that the border states would take the lead on the measure, but at that point any further efforts would “be useless.” Then he repeated something he had been saying for over a year. “Slavery was doomed,” he said, and it was the slaveholders who made it so.15
A few days later Congress made its own move. Republican moderates, disgusted by McClellan’s failure, joined with the radicals to pass the Second Confiscation Act on July 17. Unlike the first one, which was restricted to slaves employed in support of the Confederacy, the new law authorized the confiscation of slaves of any master who was actually in rebellion—but with the crippling proviso that the master’s treason be proven in a court of law. Knowing that Lincoln was jealous of his war powers as commander in chief, Congress stipulated that the law could go into effect only with a presidential proclamation. But Lincoln planned more than that, not simply a confiscation proclamation but an emancipation proclamation. It was the last of a series of proclamations that he brought to his cabinet in July, all of them aimed at shifting to a policy of hard war against the Confederacy. When he revealed it to the entire cabinet on July 22, Lincoln said that although he was interested in their advice, he had no intention of reversing himself. At the suggestion of the secretary of state, Lincoln withheld the publication of the Emancipation Proclamation until the North had a decisive military victory under its belt. To release it so soon after the disaster of the Peninsula campaign would make emancipation look like an act of desperation. Lincoln agreed, and the wait began.
WAITING FOR ANTIETAM
For two months, from July 22 to September 22, Lincoln sat on the Emancipation Proclamation, waiting for a military victory. A second defeat at Bull Run only prolonged the agony. Lincoln did not know how much time he would have before the victory he was waiting for, but he used his time strategically—almost deviously—to prepare public opinion for what was coming. He began to drop hints of his decision, something he almost never did. At the same time, knowing that the proclamation would be seen as a radically new direction for the war, Lincoln tried to position it ahead of time as a conservative gesture. Frederick Douglass was thrown off the scent by Lincoln’s calculated distractions, so much so that he chose that moment, August 1862, to unleash one of his most vitriolic denunciations of the President.
Douglass was already upset by Lincoln’s recent order revoking General Hunter’s emancipation edict in South Carolina. Once again Douglass put the goal of emancipation above the threat of a military usurpation of civilian authority. The President, he complained, had “repeatedly interfered with, and arrested the antislavery policy of some of his most earnest and reliable generals.” But wasn’t this part of a larger pattern? Since the day he took office every move Lincoln made, Douglass said, “has been calculated in a marked and decided way to shield and protect slavery.” Had Lincoln not put aside his constitutional authority, not to mention his moral duty, to emancipate the slaves? Had he not ignored the enforcement provision of the Second Confiscation Act by refusing to issue an emancipation proclamation? When Douglass published this in August 1862, he had no idea that Lincoln was waiting for the military victory that would give added force to his impending proclamation.16 His frustration must have been unbearable; along with every other careful observer of politics and war, Douglass sensed how close the government was to proclaiming emancipation. Why had it not done so already? What was Lincoln waiting for?
Horace Greeley felt the same way. The influential editor of the New York Tribune was, like Douglass, on the edge of his seat waiting for the announcement that never came, though Lincoln had tried to tip him off. Unaware of the impending proclamation, Greeley published his call for emancipation in a melodramatic “prayer of twenty millions” on August 19. Lincoln’s reply of August 22 was a masterpiece of indirect revelation. His primary goal was what it had always been, the President said: “I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution.” If he could do this most quickly without emancipating any slaves, that was what he would do. If he needed to emancipate some slaves and not others, he would do that. But if he concluded that restoring the Union required him to free all the slaves, Lincoln wrote, he would not hesitate to free all the slaves.17 As in his proclamation reversing General Hunter’s order a few months before, Lincoln’s letter to Greeley opened the possibility of a broad emancipation by cloaking it in a respectable commitment to the preservation of the Union. Lincoln was not dissembling. He wanted people to read the forthcoming proclamation as a conservative gesture, the latest move in a policy whose primary purpose remained the reestablishment of the Union. That was precisely how Frederick Douglass read it: as evidence that Lincoln cared a great deal about the restoration of the Union and very little about the abolition of slavery.
By then Douglass’s suspicions about Lincoln had recently been refreshed. As the prospect of emancipation became clearer, there were renewed calls for free blacks to leave the United States, all of which aroused Douglass’s furious indignation. As in the 1850s, Douglass waged his war on two different fronts. The first battle, against emigrationism, was actually a continuation of the dispute among black leaders that peaked in 1859 and 1860 and continued into the earliest months of the Civil War. The racist backlash of the 1850s had prompted a handful of black leaders to step up their campaign for emigration to someplace where African Americans would be freed from humiliating discrimination and the blighting prejudice of whites. But the war itself raised the hopes of American blacks and so dampened much of whatever enthusiasm there had been for emigration. It did not discourage James Redpath, a white Briton, who persisted in his campaign to encourage black Americans to migrate to the Caribbean. With funding from the Haitian government Redpath opened an office in Boston in late 1860 to drum up support for black emigration to the island nation. Because Redpath had been one of John Brown’s most devoted followers, Frederick Douglass was less skeptical than usual about his proposal for an émigré colony in Haiti. But within months Douglass’s skepticism revived. “We are Americans,” he insisted, and we “shall rise or fall with Americans.” As he had a decade earlier, he rejected the proposition that whites and blacks could not live together as equals. There was no such thing, Douglass wrote, “as a natural and unconquerable repugnance between the varieties of men.” The barriers of “race,” he noted, were “arbitrary and artificial,” and as such they could be overcome by “interest and enlightenment.”18 The Haitian experiment turned into a debacle. Of the two thousand or so blacks who actually emigrated, only a few hundred remained a couple of years later. Most of the others had either died of tropical diseases and malnutrition or returned home to the United States in desperation.
One of Douglass’s complaints was that the emigrationists gave aid and comfort to white racists who, as the prospect of emancipation rose, were reviving the idea of colonization. By late 1861 it was beginning to dawn on many northerners that large numbers of slaves might be freed by the war. In December Lincoln urged Congress to consider the establishment of colonies, preferably in Central America, as potential homes for emancipated slaves. Within months the lawmakers appropriated some six hundred thousand dollars to finance the voluntary colonization of those freed by the various incidents of war, including the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. The closer Lincoln got to proclaiming emancipation, the more aggressively he pursued his colonization scheme. By dropping hints of a forthcoming emancipation in the form of proposals for colonization, he was doing something peculiar, not to say unseemly. He was appealing to northern racism to smooth the way for emancipation.
On August 14 the Interior Department’s commissioner of emigration, the Reverend James Mitchell, escorted a delegation of five African Americans, most of them local preachers, to the White House, where Lincoln treated them to a bizarre lecture on race relations in America and the benefits of colonization. He began with broad rhetorical questions. “[S]hould the people of your race be colonized, and where?” Indeed, “why should they leave this country?” He did not expect his guests to answer. Rather, he came prepared to address the questions all by himself. The “physical difference” between blacks and whites was a “great disadvantage to us both,” Lincoln said, “as I think your race suffer greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word,” the President said, “we suffer on each side.” Blacks suffered, Lincoln said, not merely by their atrocious enslavement but by the refusal of whites anywhere in America to treat even the most accomplished blacks as their equals. Whether this was right or wrong was not the issue, Lincoln said; it was enough that all parties acknowledge it as a fact.19
It was easy enough to see how blacks suffered from the presence of whites. But what could Lincoln have possibly meant by saying that whites suffered by the presence of blacks? The answer was the terrible war that slavery had brought to America. “[W]ithout the institution of Slavery,” Lincoln explained, “and the colored race as a basis” there would be no war.20 This was an outrageous thing to say. For years, in the face of Democratic race-baiting, Lincoln had insisted that slavery and race were two different matters. Now he was trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, racism was a powerful force independent of slavery, so that emancipation would not free blacks from the crippling effects of discrimination. On the other hand, Lincoln declared that “race” was the basis of slavery, and he conflated the two with a sophomoric syllogism: Whites are at each other’s throats over slavery; slaves are black; therefore, whites suffer from the presence of blacks. It sounded as though Lincoln were blaming the Civil War on blacks.
The remainder of Lincoln’s remarks went into the details of emigration to Central America, which he thought a more practical destination than Liberia. He ended with an almost pathetic request. There was, he knew, great resistance to colonization among free blacks. But without leadership from the best and brightest of American blacks the less educated slaves would never seek their freedom in Central America. Therefore, the cause of emancipation would be greatly enhanced if a mere one hundred, even fifty, perhaps only twenty-five educated black families set the example by emigrating first. Whites in turn would see this, and their hostility to abolition would melt away. Thus colonization prompted by a small but prominent group of free blacks would do great service to the cause of humanity.
Was Lincoln serious? He had always supported colonization, and in August 1862, when he knew that emancipation was coming, his moment of truth had arrived. If he expected the freed slaves to leave the United States, he had to have someplace for them to go, and he had to make emigration seem desirable. But from the beginning there had always been something fantastically improbable about colonization, never more so than on the day Lincoln met the black delegation. By 1862 there were more than four million African Americans in the United States. No colony anywhere on earth was prepared to absorb even a fraction of that number. It would cost a fortune to set up such a colony and transport millions of American blacks. But such problems paled beside the greatest obstacle of all: Blacks did not want to go. Some colonizationists were prepared to force blacks to leave, but not Lincoln. He always insisted that emigration was to be voluntary. Lincoln was weeks, maybe days from proclaiming emancipation, and he had no place to colonize the freed slaves, they didn’t want to go, and he had no intention of forcing them. What could he possibly have been thinking?
Maybe Lincoln was deluding himself. Colonization often did that to its supporters, especially if they were sincere, and there was no reason to doubt Lincoln’s sincerity. Still, there was something contrived about his meeting with the black delegates, as if it had been staged for public consumption. There was virtually no dialogue between the President and his visitors; Lincoln simply lectured them with what sounded like prepared remarks. Also, there was a reporter in the room taking stenographic notes of everything the President said. Lincoln made sure that his high-handed remarks would appear verbatim in the national press the very next day. In short, it was not a meeting, it was a performance. Lincoln was using his handpicked delegates, none of them important black leaders, in an effort to make emancipation more palatable to white racists. The whole world could see that Lincoln was prepared to tell blacks right to their faces that the nation would be better off if they went somewhere else. As in the 1850s, Lincoln carefully avoided claiming that he personally believed blacks were inferior to whites; he even said that because of slavery, blacks were suffering the greatest wrong that could be inflicted on any people. But he was once again using racism strategically. It was a low point in his presidency.
Frederick Douglass was stunned when he read reports of the meeting. The President’s remarks, he said, were “characteristically foggy, remarkably illogical and untimely.” They exposed Lincoln’s “pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” Worse, Lincoln’s published words gave license to all the “ignorant and base” racists “to commit all kinds of violence and outrage upon the colored people of the country.” In words saturated with sarcasm Douglass went on to expose the fallacious reasoning behind Lincoln’s utterances. Anyone with “an ounce of brain in his head” knew that in other parts of the Americas blacks and whites were perfectly capable of living together peacefully and as equals. To blame the Civil War on the presence of blacks was like the horse thief blaming the horse for his crime. Racism and slavery were indeed linked, Douglass reasoned. But Lincoln ought to know “that Negro hatred and prejudice of color are…merely the offshoots of that root of all crimes and evils—slavery.” He dismissed the “arrogant and malignant nonsense” that posited a “natural” repugnance between blacks and whites.21
Because he had always equated the struggle for racial equality with the struggle against slavery, Douglass read Lincoln’s deference to white prejudice as evidence of an abiding indifference to slavery. Though he had been elected as an antislavery President by antislavery voters, Douglass argued, Lincoln’s actual record in office revealed that he was instead “a genuine representative of American prejudice and Negro hatred.” To Douglass, therefore, Lincoln’s most recent capitulation to prejudice could only reflect a lack of commitment to emancipation. “This address of his leaves us less ground to hope for anti-slavery action at his hands than any of his previous utterances.” Lincoln’s support for colonization proved to Douglass that Lincoln was not a true antislavery man.
Douglass’s logic made perfect sense, but it was not Lincoln’s logic. To Douglass colonization presupposed racism, the spirit of slavery. But to Lincoln colonization presupposed emancipation. His meeting with black leaders was prompted not by his resistance to emancipation but by the fact that he had already decided to proclaim it. The black delegation could not have known that, and neither could Douglass. Instead he saw all the evidence piling up against emancipation. Voluntary emancipation in the border states was a fool’s errand, he thought. The letter to Horace Greeley was a public profession of Lincoln’s indifference to slavery. By August 1862 it all added up to the conclusion, erroneous but understandable under the circumstances, that Abraham Lincoln would never issue an emancipation proclamation.
THE PROCLAMATION
Lincoln was scheming, Douglass was fuming, and all the while Robert E. Lee was making plans. He would invade the North in a bold attempt to win the war in the East before the Confederacy was defeated in the West. Lee had sent McClellan’s vast Union forces into retreat. Weeks later Confederate hopes were raised by a second dramatic southern victory at Bull Run. Seizing the moment, Lee turned his mighty Army of Northern Virginia toward Pennsylvania. He was hoping to unhinge Union morale by bringing the war onto Yankee soil. But his great plan was cut short on September 17, when he met the Union’s Army of the Potomac at Sharpsburg, Maryland, beside Antietam Creek. It was a brutal battle. But despite several blunders that prolonged the fighting and increased the casualties, and despite the Confederate escape across the Potomac, Antietam was a strategic defeat for Lee. The South’s attempt to invade the North was turned back, and the Union had a clear military victory on its hands. It was time for Lincoln to let the world know.
Five days later, on September 22, he released the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. It gave the southern states one hundred days, until January 1, 1863, to lay down their arms. If they did not, the United States government would “thenceforward” consider every slave in the rebellious South to be free. Africans had been enslaved in North America for more than two and a half centuries. Now, a mere eighteen months after promising never to interfere with slavery in the southern states, Lincoln committed all the military and financial might of the United States to the emancipation of millions of African Americans. And it would be an emancipation of the most revolutionary kind. It would be imposed by force as the Union army marched through the South. It would be immediate rather than gradual. The freed slaves would not be required to emigrate. And the slaveholders would get nothing, not one cent, in compensation. Abolitionists thought it was about time, but in the larger span of American history Lincoln had moved with remarkable speed toward a remarkably radical conclusion.
Frederick Douglass was beside himself. “Abraham Lincoln,” he exclaimed, “in his own peculiar, cautious, forbearing and hesitating way, slow, but we hope sure, has, while the loyal heart was near breaking with despair, proclaimed and declared” that as of the following January 1 the slaves in the rebellious South “Shall be Thenceforward and Forever Free.” Emancipation once proclaimed was irreversible, Douglass argued. “Abraham Lincoln may be slow, Abraham Lincoln may desire peace…, but Abraham Lincoln is not the man to reconsider, retract and contradict words and purposes solemnly proclaimed over his official signature.”22 If Douglass still chastised Lincoln for moving too slowly, this was a minor quibble now. At long last Lincoln had declared his intention to do what Douglass had for months been calling on him to do: invoke the war powers of the chief executive to emancipate the slaves on grounds of military necessity.
Emancipation as a military necessity was an idea associated chiefly with radicals and abolitionists. Nearly all northern Democrats denied the existence of any constitutional power to emancipate slaves. For a long time so did most Republicans, and those who did not dispute the President’s power to emancipate usually disputed its prudence. Even within Lincoln’s cabinet there were objections to the proclamation. Seward thought there was no need for it since slavery’s death became inevitable on the day Lincoln was inaugurated. It was already dying, he argued, so why issue a proclamation that would only alienate the Europeans? Chase thought it would be more effective for Union commanders to issue individual emancipation proclamations while in the field, where they could back them up with military might. Why issue a general proclamation that depended on future military success? Most of Lincoln’s generals opposed emancipation as well. Fearing that large numbers of escaping slaves running to Union army lines would interfere with the war effort, the generals argued against emancipation on strictly military grounds. But Lincoln had a more capacious sense of what counted as military necessity, one that looked beyond the immediate convenience of Union commanders. So he sided with the radicals, having long since concluded that as commander in chief the President had the power to free slaves. The big difference, but the only difference, was that unlike Charles Sumner and Frederick Douglass, Lincoln refused to use his power until it was very clearly a military necessity and until the public was prepared to accept it as such.
Even so, Lincoln fully expected the proclamation to provoke a political backlash, especially among northern Democrats. Republican setbacks in the fall elections proved him right. Democrats campaigned heavily against Lincoln’s turn to the “radical fanaticism” of emancipation, as well as his recent suspension of habeas corpus. But Lincoln sensed that his opponents could score points on emancipation chiefly because of his failure to win the war. In July and August Lincoln issued calls for six hundred thousand more troops under the new military draft policy. He began firing generals who believed in a limited war that did not disturb southern property: Don Carlos Buell went two weeks before the elections, George McClellan shortly thereafter. And when he released the final proclamation on January 1, 1863, Lincoln added a provision allowing the enlistment of blacks in the Union army for the first time in more than half a century. Lincoln had turned to emancipation hoping to accelerate a Union victory, but he also hoped that military success would make it easier for people to accept emancipation.
But not even strict military necessity could be severed from the moral conviction of slavery’s evil. The eloquent message Lincoln sent to Congress in December 1862 revealed how in his mind military and the moral rationales collapsed into one another. “The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation,” the President said. “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.” To that end Lincoln proposed a series of constitutional amendments that would resolve the legal uncertainties still hovering over military emancipation. They would guarantee the freedom of those slaves emancipated by “the chances of war.” They would offer federal bonds to yet again entice the border states to free their slaves, gradually and voluntarily. To reach loyal masters in those parts of seceded states already under Union control and thus excluded from the proclamation, Lincoln proposed compensation for their emancipated slaves. Finally, he proposed federal funding for a scheme of voluntary colonization. The war powers allowed Lincoln to emancipate slaves only in those parts of the Union in rebellion against the government. The amendments he now proposed were designed to secure the freedom of every slave in the United States. It was a nice plan, but it was not very practical, and Congress would not go along with it.
Treasury Secretary Chase had warned Lincoln that Republican lawmakers were in no mood to compensate any slaveholders since by then everyone knew that slavery was on its deathbed everywhere in the Union. Lincoln knew this reasoning well; he had been warning the border states about it for months. But for him the relative conservatism of compensated emancipation took some of the radical sting out of an unavoidably revolutionary process. And he knew that the Constitution gave neither the President nor the Congress the authority to free slaves in any parts of the country that were loyal to the Union. No one could really be sure that “the chances of war” would fully undermine slavery in the border states. Indeed, until the end of the war Lincoln was not sure that emancipation was secure even in those parts of the South covered by the proclamation. After all, the British had offered freedom to escaping slaves during the American Revolution, and thousands of slaves had taken them up on the offer. But the British had lost the war, and so slavery had survived. What if the South won this war? Lincoln’s innately cautious disposition, especially his meticulous concern with legal technicalities, made him less certain than most of his fellow Republicans about the ultimate fate of slavery.
Lincoln was not the only skeptic. At the time and ever since critics of the proclamation dismissed it as a paper tiger. They likened it to a papal bull against the comet. It was an empty decree, they said; it freed no one because it applied only to those areas that were not under Union control. This was always an odd criticism. No one understood better than Lincoln that the proclamation’s reach depended on how effectively the Union army could enforce it. Frederick Douglass was particularly lucid on this point. All proclamations, all laws, all judicial decrees emanating from the government are “paper orders,” he wrote, “and would remain such were they not backed up by force.” By ordering the Union army to begin practicing “hard” war, by instituting a military draft, by enlisting black troops, and by ordering his generals to emancipate the slaves as they swept through the South, Lincoln was doing everything possible to ensure that the Union used its military might to enforce his proclamation. Indeed, emancipation itself increased the Union’s firepower by making the arrival of the army more immediately destructive. That was the whole point. To make sure it worked this way, Lincoln assigned several military officers to enforce military emancipation in tandem with Union invasions. Lincoln transformed the Union troops into an army of liberation.
Frederick Douglass argued that once the final proclamation was issued all that was necessary for emancipation to take effect was for the Union to win. If anything, Douglass seemed more confident of a Union victory than Lincoln, and for that reason his first response to the Emancipation Proclamation was to insist that it would ensure the ultimate abolition of slavery. Republican setbacks in the November elections led to some speculation that Lincoln might not release the final proclamation on January 1. Douglass was not worried. He wished Lincoln had issued the proclamation sooner, he did not approve of the hundred-day delay, but he correctly judged that having made the decision, Abraham Lincoln was not the type of man to reverse himself. He knew in his bones that the proclamation was a death sentence for slavery, but he did not know—nobody could—precisely how the sentence would be carried out or how long it would take.
So it was with a mixture of exhilaration and uncertainty that Frederick Douglass went to Boston, to the Tremont Temple, to celebrate the release of the proclamation on New Year’s Day 1863. He thanked God for letting him live to see that day, he said, “the beginning of the end of slavery.” A generation earlier the descendants of the Puritans had “deemed it a duty” to break up abolitionist meetings. Only a year before, Douglass reminded his listeners, in the very same Tremont Temple, abolitionists were mobbed and beaten by crowds who still demanded silence on the matter of slavery. Now look, he said. With freedom for the slave came freedom for all; the right to speak freely and assemble peaceably was now possible, now that slavery’s end was near. He echoed Jefferson. “Error cannot safely be tolerated unless truth is free to combat it,” Douglass declared, “and the only antidote for error is freedom, free speech and a free press.” Across the country people were finding out “that the blacks were Americans, and that the color of a man’s skin does not disqualify him from being a citizen of the United States.”23 Even so, Douglass warned, this was but a “rosy dawning.” A long day’s work lay ahead, beginning with raising a black army. On this too Lincoln would need some prodding.
BLACK TROOPS
Almost immediately after the firing on Fort Sumter blacks across the North began offering themselves as soldiers in state militias and the Union army, only to find their enlistments blocked by law and prejudice. As northern blacks discussed the issue among themselves, they began to argue that the North was impeding its own war effort by not taking advantage of black soldiers. They watched in frustration as slaves running for freedom to Union lines, having been encouraged to do so by some Union commanders, were turned back by others. Black troops quickly became part of Douglass’s argument for emancipation as a military necessity. Don’t just free the slaves, he said. Put them in uniforms and give them guns. Transform the slaves from a bulwark of secession into agents of freedom. Do that, and the slaveholders’ rebellion would be crushed all the more quickly. Yet even after the North’s humiliating defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run, despite calls for ever-larger numbers of volunteers, Union policy followed northern public opinion in adamant opposition to the enlistment of blacks. Douglass considered this madness. “The national edifice is on fire! Every man who can carry a bucket of water, or remove a brick, is wanted,” he declared. And yet the policy makers of the Union remained “determined that the flames shall only be extinguished by Indo-Caucasian hands.” But it was northern voters, as much as northern politicians, who objected to the use of black troops. As one northern soldier put it, “We don’t want to fight side by side with the nigger. We think we are a too superior race for that.” For Douglass this was the kind of “stupid prejudice” that ruled the hour.24
Many whites feared that plantation slaves, reared to servility and dependence, were simply not ready to perform as self-disciplined troops. “Negroes—plantation negroes, at least—will never make soldiers in one generation,” wrote a white missionary from South Carolina.25To many northerners, among them Abraham Lincoln, it was hard to believe that men raised in fear and trembling could exhibit the courage and self-confidence necessary for good soldiering. However misguided this argument was, it was not the same as the racist assertion that innately inferior blacks could never make good soldiers. The racists held out no hope for the future. But those who feared that plantation slaves might not make good soldiers were increasingly happy to be proved wrong.
Lincoln was afraid, he said in September 1862, that if blacks were armed, “in a few weeks the arms would be in the hands of the rebels.” He was also restrained by his concern to hold on to whites in the border states. To “arm the negroes,” he said at one point, “would turn 50,000 bayonets from the loyal Border States against us that were for us.”26 But even as he said these things, Lincoln was beginning to change his mind. Both remarks were made in those critical months between his first drafting of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and his release of the final document on January 1, 1863. By then more and more northerners were warming to the idea of black soldiers. Union military reverses and war-weariness had led to a troubling decline in white enlistments. Then, too, emancipation itself changed the logic of the situation. As northern voters grew comfortable with the prospect of black freedom, it made more sense to enlist blacks in a war for their own emancipation. Congress reflected this shift in public opinion. During the summer of 1862 the lawmakers included a clause in the Second Confiscation Act authorizing Lincoln to enlist as many black soldiers as he deemed necessary to put down the southern rebellion. At the same time Congress repealed the discriminatory provision of the 1792 Militia Act that had barred blacks from serving in the army.
By the end of the year Lincoln had changed his mind as well. Shortly before he issued the final proclamation, he instructed the War Department to begin recruiting black soldiers. When he issued the final proclamation he publicly authorized the enlistment of blacks. Within months Lincoln had become a full-throated convert to the cause of black enlistment. In a March 26, 1863, letter to Governor Andrew Johnson of Tennessee Lincoln wrote that the “colored population is the great available and yet unavailed of, force for restoring the Union.” The same number he had only recently used to indicate his suspicion of black troops now entered Lincoln’s writing as an expression of his newfound enthusiasm. “The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers upon the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once,” he wrote.27
Lincoln had good reason to change his mind. By early 1863 favorable reports of the performance of black troops began filtering back to Washington and into the northern press. The President read them with growing enthusiasm. And having converted to the cause, Lincoln became convinced that there was a psychological as well as a purely military advantage to enlisting blacks in the Union army. “It is important to the enemy that such a force shall not take shape, and grow, and thrive, in the South,” he explained to General David Hunter, “and in precisely the same proportion, it is important to us that it shall.”28 Frederick Douglass had been saying the same thing since the war began.
Not surprisingly, Douglass threw himself wholeheartedly into the campaign to promote the enlistment of blacks as soon as the proclamation took effect. Throughout the first half of 1863 Douglass traveled the North, telling black audiences that it was their moral obligation to fight for the Union. Even the discrimination black soldiers suffered in the army—lower pay, condescending white officers, little prospect of promotion to the officer corps, relegation to menial tasks and garrison duty—did not dissuade Douglass from urging blacks to fight. “Young men of Philadelphia, you are without excuse,” Douglass said in one speech. “The hour has arrived, and your place is in the Union army.”29 He acknowledged the discrimination, he protested against it, but for Douglass this did not justify anyone’s refusal to enlist. The destruction of slavery was too great a cause.
But although northern public opinion was shifting, it was not nearly as enthusiastic about black troops as were Douglass and the President. This was particularly true of whites in the army, soldiers and officers alike. Notwithstanding favorable initial reports, black troops had not yet participated in any serious battles. Then, beginning in late spring of 1863, black soldiers proved themselves in three widely reported engagements. At Port Hudson in southern Louisiana, on May 27, two regiments made up of free blacks from New Orleans and freed slaves from nearby plantations marched heroically into the face of Confederate artillery fire in an effort to dislodge the enemy fortification. The attack itself failed but the behavior of the troops impressed everyone who witnessed it. Official reports claimed that the battle at Port Hudson should lay to rest any lingering doubts about whether blacks could fight effectively. Less than two weeks later there were similar reports of courageous black troops who drove back a Confederate bayonet charge at Milliken’s Bend on the Mississippi River north of Vicksburg. The assistant secretary of war, Charles Dana, wrote that “the bravery of the blacks in the battle of Milliken’s Bend completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of negro troops.”30 Most impressive of all was the July 18 assault on Fort Wagner, at the entrance to Charleston Harbor, by the Fifty-fourth Regiment, a unit recruited primarily from free blacks in Massachusetts. In the face of murderous Confederate fire the black soldiers advanced relentlessly on the fort. A huge proportion of the regiment fell in the battle, and when white troops failed to come to their aid, the Fifty-fourth was forced to retreat. But the extraordinary heroism of the soldiers’ behavior resounded throughout the North. Lincoln’s enthusiasm was vindicated.
But by then Douglass was having his doubts. The problem was not only discrimination, though Douglass strongly protested against it. More specifically, he was upset by Lincoln’s failure to respond aggressively to the South’s refusal to treat captured black soldiers as prisoners of war. Instead the Confederacy defined them as insurrectionists, the punishment for whom was execution or enslavement. But more worrisome than the official policy, which southern officials enforced irregularly and with some reluctance, was the violent behavior of southern troops in the field. There were reports of several brutal massacres of black soldiers by Confederate troops. Douglass wanted Lincoln to respond in kind. “For every black prisoner slain in cold blood, Mr. Jefferson Davis should be made to understand that one rebel officer shall suffer death,” Douglass wrote. Although he complained vehemently about Lincoln’s refusal to address the issue—“What has he said?” Douglass demanded. “Not one word”—his tone was notably less harsh than it had been a year earlier.31 After all, by the summer of 1863 Lincoln had already committed himself to emancipation and had become an enthusiastic supporter of black enlistment. And so, at the urging of his friend George Stearns, Douglass “was induced to go to Washington and lay the complaints of my people” directly before the President.32 Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were about to meet for the first time.