IV EMANCIPATION AND PUBLIC OPINION: 1861-1862

DISSATISFIED with the progress of the antislavery cause, Gerrit Smith and Henry Cheever wanted to hold a national convention of abolitionists in Washington or Philadelphia on September 24 to publicize the demand for emancipation. All branches of the abolitionist movement would be represented at the proposed convention. Cheever consulted Garrison, who threw cold water on the project. “Such a Convention, called by the parties and persons suggested by you, ‘pronounced abolitionists,’ would be more likely to excite popular prejudice at this crisis, and thus to damage a movement for the abolition of slavery under the war power, than to do good,” argued Garrison. As long as the government was fighting a deadly battle with the slave power, “it seems to us the part of wisdom to avoid conspicuity as radical abolitionists in convention assembled, and to merge ourselves, as far as we can without a compromise of principle, in the onward sweeping current of Northern sentiment.” Garrison hinted mysteriously at the emergence of a new antislavery organization in Boston, composed of abolitionists and antislavery Republicans alike, whose purpose would be to promote emancipation by means of newspaper articles, lectures, and petitions.1

Garrison was referring to a group of prominent Massachusetts abolitionists, including himself, Phillips, Frank Sanborn, George Stearns, William Henry Channing, Edmund Quincy, and Frank Bird, who were invited by Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe to meet at his Boston office on September 5 to discuss ways and means of channeling public opinion toward emancipation. A second meeting took place on September 10.² These gatherings became the subject of considerable hush-hush comment among abolitionists. Lydia Maria Child informed Whittier that “the warmest of the Republicans, and the most unprejudiced of the Abolitionists, are laying their heads together, with no more publicity than is necessary, to influence popular opinion, through the press, and help on the turning-tide in the right direction.” Stearns told J. Miller McKim about the group, warning him to keep the information quiet, for “we do not as yet wish the movement to be made public.”3

At the second meeting in Howe’s office an executive committee was appointed to formulate plans of action. The committee decided that their primary objective should be to educate the public to understand “much better than it now does, the magnitude of the war in which the country is involved, and the bearing of slavery upon its continuance and final issue.” They planned to solicit emancipation articles and editorials from prominent abolitionists to be sent out on printed slips to small-town newspapers all over the North. The articles would be anonymous “so that the truths they present may have their due weight, without prejudice.” The group tentatively called itself the Boston Emancipation League, and decided to work under cover for the time being because of the prevailing popular prejudice against abolitionists.⁴

The decision of the Emancipation League to inaugurate a propaganda campaign was partly spurred by Lincoln’s revocation of Frémont’s Missouri proclamation. A large section of the northern press which had welcomed Frémont’s order when it appeared now followed Lincoln and condemned Frémont for having gone too far. Emancipationist feeling in the North was fickle and ill-formed at best; a massive program of popular education would be necessary to create a public opinion that would eventually compel the abolition of slavery.⁵

The opening gun in this battle of words was fired by Charles Sumner in his address to the Massachusetts state Republican convention in Worcester on October 1. Sumner was on terms of friendship with most of the founders of the Emancipation League and was well aware of their activities. In his October 1 speech he declared that “Slavery is our Catiline…. It is often said that the war will make an end of slavery. This is probable; but it is surer still that the overthrow of slavery will make an end of the war. It is not necessary even … to carry the war into Africa; it will be enough if we carry Africa into the war.” James Freeman Clarke, a member of the executive committee of the Emancipation League and a delegate to the convention, introduced resolutions from the floor affirming that Massachusetts would “welcome any act under the war power which should declare all slaves within the lines of our armies free … compensating all loyal owners.” A majority of delegates probably favored such a statement, but fearing that it might be interpreted as a rebuke to Lincoln for his recent modification of Frémont’s order, the convention tabled Clarke’s resolution.6

Sumner’s abolitionist friends praised his speech, while Boston conservatives glowered and growled.⁷ “Mr. Sumner’s speech has created a great sensation,” reported a Boston friend of the senator. “The elements of Hunkerism have boiled over. Yet he is hardly in advance of the times more than six months.”⁸ The New York Tribune published the speech in its weekly edition, assuring it a potential reading audience of nearly a million persons. The Emancipation League sent copies of the speech to editors of northern newspapers, to every clergyman and country storekeeper in Massachusetts, and to every member of the Massachusetts legislature.⁹

Abolitionist strategy during October and November 1861, was to remain in the background of the growing emancipation movement, letting others less burdened with the odium of a lifetime of devotion to freedom take the lead. “I have discouraged any distinct antislavery movement by the old abolitionists in New York,” reported John Jay in October, “from the belief that such action would rather retard than advance the conversion of the Democratic masses.” Lewis Tappan tried to imitate Boston’s example and form an Emancipation League in New York, but Jay and other leading Republicans defeated the attempt. “Abolition will come as a military necessity as our army advances,” argued Jay, and “its advocacy at this moment by those who have always opposed [slavery] on moral grounds is calculated rather to divide the North.”10

Jay was in touch with leading “War Democrats” in New York, trying quietly to persuade them to come out for emancipation as a military necessity. Maria Weston Chapman was also a firm advocate of this approach. “Start the thing by others & then fall in, is our best plan,” she wrote. “I have been long in correspondence with leading N.Y. Merchants—Our friend John Jay is doing the same work with the Butler & Dickinson people,—the fire is lighting at every corner.” In November this method began to pay off. Daniel S. Dickinson, Colonel John Cochrane, George Bancroft, Benjamin Hallett—all of them prominent Democrats or conservatives before the war—began to deliver emancipation speeches. Cochrane and Secretary of War Simon Cameron made several joint appearances in the Northeast, calling for emancipation and the arming of Negro soldiers as a military necessity. The New York Tribune was delighted with these developments. “We now see men like Daniel S. Dickinson and Gerrit Smith,” said the Tribune, “who have heretofore stood at the antipodes of this controversy, and classes like Hard-Shell Democrats and Garrisonian Abolitionists, who have represented the most antagonistic opinions in regard to it, taking substantially the same view of the part which Slavery ought to play in this sanguinary drama.”¹¹

On November 27, Sumner spoke for emancipation before a huge audience in New York’s Cooper Union. Sitting on the platform next to prominent Republicans were Oliver Johnson, George Cheever, Octavius B. Frothingham, Dexter Fairbanks, William Goodell, Edgar Ketchum, Henry B. Stanton, Theodore Tilton, and Edward Gilbert, all of them veteran abolitionists. Commented Goodell afterwards: “To ourselves and a remnant of our old associates, on the platform and in the meeting, who remembered the scenes of [anti-abolitionist] mob violence in this city, … the contrast was most striking and cheering. To any of our Radical friends in the country who may be surprised at seeing the names of Oliver Johnson, William Goodell, &c. on the list of Vice-Presidents of a meeting invited by a Young Men’s Republican Association, we may say that our own surprise is equal to theirs. Let them not however infer that we have backslidden from our Radical Abolition faith. The speech and the responses show that our fellow citizens, not ourselves, are changing.”12

With the growing popularity of emancipation and the consequent increase in the prestige of abolitionists, the founders of the Emancipation League decided to bring their organization into the open. They held a formal inauguration meeting in Boston on December 16, with Samuel Gridley Howe in the chair. George S. Boutwell, onetime Democratic governor of Massachusetts and now a Republican, gave the main address, flanked on the platform by the elite of Massachusetts abolitionism and Republicanism. “The Emancipation League is now in full blast,” screamed the hostile Boston Herald, “the furnace is heated ten times hotter than ever, and the whole pack of Anti-Slavery, Abolition devils are at work to make Bedlam appear lovely and inviting.”¹³ The League ignored such outbursts and formally elected its officers on January 27, 1862, choosing Samuel Sewall, one of the original abolitionists, as president. The executive committee was dominated by abolitionists, and George L. Stearns served as treasurer. The League recruited a fairly large dues-paying membership among Massachusetts abolitionists and Republicans, but a large part of the organization’s funds were contributed by the wealthy Stearns. During the first year of its existence, the League sponsored nine lectures and six free-discussion sessions, published and circulated nearly 100,000 pamphlets, and supplied scores of northern newspapers with emancipation editorials and articles. During 1862 Stearns kept one clerk busy full time sending out documents, pamphlets, and speeches. In August 1862, a weekly newspaper, the Boston Commonwealth, was founded under the auspices of the League.¹⁴

In the winter and spring of 1861-62 the number of emancipation organizations and lecture associations proliferated rapidly. William Goodell and J. Walden, publisher of Goodell’s Principia, organized a “National Emancipation Association” in New York City on November 6, 1861. The Association served as a clearing-house for emancipation petitions sent to the president and Congress during the 1861-1862 congressional session. In Boston, Charles W. Slack, chairman of Theodore Parker’s old Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society, organized a course of emancipation lectures. Susan B. Anthony arranged a similar lecture series in Rochester, which featured several prominent abolitionist speakers. New York City abolitionists formed an Emancipation League, similar to the Boston organization, in June 1862 and sponsored a course of popular lectures.15

One of the most effective emancipation organizations was formed in the national capital. In November 1861, a group of young antislavery officeholders decided to organize a lecture association to bring outstanding antislavery speakers to Washington. One of these young men later told the following story: “About nine o’clock there was a knock at the door and it was opened to admit a venerable man with long flowing white hair and a beard like Raphael’s Saint Jerome, a quick, nervous manner, a glowing pink face and vivacious and merry blue eyes. He paused, leaned against the door, and said, ‘Gentlemen, I saw an advertisement summoning young men to come here to consult to-night, and here I am!” The “young” patriarch was John Pierpont, seventy-six years old and a battle-scarred veteran of the abolitionist crusade, who now held a job in the Treasury Department. The younger antislavery clerks were so charmed by Pierpont’s enthusiasm that “without much discussion, or even consideration, we elected this ‘young man’ to be our president, organizing as the Washington Lecture Association.”¹⁶

The Association sponsored a course of more than twenty lectures in the hall of the Smithsonian Institution during the winter. Some of the foremost abolitionists and Republicans in the nation were featured in the series. The lectures were an overwhelming success. Lincoln attended several of them, and leading members of Congress were in the audience at every lecture.17 Pierpont marveled that the series had “been more entirely and triumphantly successful, than the most sanguine of us dared to hope.” It did his heart good “to hear the emphatic applause with which the radicalisms of the lectures are received—the more radical the more rapturous—and this in Washington, where nothing of the kind has ever been attempted before.”¹⁸ Kentucky’s proslavery Senator Garrett Davis was greatly disturbed by the popularity of the lectures. “The utterances they have dared to put forth in this city have desecrated the Smithsonian Institution,” he fumed, and continued, “What will you do with these monsters? I will tell you what I would do with them and with the horrible monster Greeley, as they come sneaking around here, like hungry wolves, after the destruction of Slavery. If I had the power, I would take them and the worst Seceshers and hang them in pairs.”¹⁹

William Goodell wrote in December 1861: “Never has there been a time when Abolitionists were as much respected, as at present. Never has there been a time in which their strongest and most radical utterances … were as readily received by the people, as at present…. Announce the presence of a competent abolition lecturer and the house is crammed.”²⁰

What had happened in the space of a few short months to change the abolitionists from a set of despised fanatics to a group of reformers whose advice was eagerly sought and listened to? The answer lies, partially at least, in the swelling tide of emancipationist opinion in the North. The hard, inescapable necessities of war were pushing the North, slowly and reluctantly, to the extremist position of the abolitionists. Victor Hugo once said that “There is no greater power on earth than an idea whose time has come.” By December 1861, the powerful idea of universal freedom was taking deep root in America. As lifelong champions of this idea, abolitionists began to reap the benefits of its growing popularity. For thirty years they had been crying in the wilderness, telling the people that slavery was destroying the moral and political fabric of the nation. The mass of the people paid little attention except to denounce the abolitionists as troublesome fanatics. When the Union broke apart and war erupted, many persons began to regard the abolitionists in a new light. They no longer appeared as zealous crackpots, but as prophets who had tried to save their country before it was too late.21

The evidence of the new-found popularity, prestige, and influence of abolitionists in 1861-1862 is overwhelming. In the last two months of 1861, Frederick Douglass and several other abolitionist speakers were welcomed enthusiastically when they spoke in Syracuse, a city that had mobbed them ten months before. A nonpartisan literary journal in New York observed that “one of our most ably edited and uniformly well written journals is the New York Anti-Slavery Standard. Before the great rebellion, the Standard was a tabooed paper, except in exclusively ‘abolition’ circles; but now the Standard may be read and quoted by anybody without loss of character or business.”²² When Wendell Phillips spoke in New York on December 19, the street in front of Cooper Union was filled with a crowd an hour before the doors opened. The audience packed every corner of the hall and nearly a thousand people were turned away for lack of room. The listeners applauded Phillips’ most radical utterances, and afterwards voted unanimously to invite Garrison to speak.²³

The newborn prominence and prestige of abolitionists was graphically portrayed by a correspondent of the New York Times (a paper hostile to abolitionism) who reported the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in January 1862. The Times reporter wrote: “In years heretofore a great deal has been said and much fun has been made of the promiscuous and somewhat peculiar features of these gatherings. The facts that black and white met socially here, and that with equal freedom men and women addressed the conglomerate audience, have furnished themes for humorous reporters and facetious editors; but no such motive has drawn here the representatives of fifteen of the most widely circulated journals of the North.” Abolitionist meetings were now notable political events. “Peculiar circumstances have given to this, the oldest Anti-Slavery Society in the country, and to similar organizations elsewhere, an importance which hitherto has not been theirs, and which justifies the most wide circulation of their sayings, doings, prophecies and lamentations.”24

A small group of Republican congressmen invited George Cheever to preach an antislavery sermon in the House of Representatives on Sunday, January 12. Cheever accepted, and his sermon produced such a powerful effect that forty-three congressmen and senators invited him to preach another one on January 26.²⁵ These two sermons and Cheever’s lecture at the Smithsonian Institution were the talk of Washington for several days. A private in a regiment stationed near the capital heard Cheever’s first sermon and wrote to him afterwards: “Previous to this war, I hated the name of an abolitionist. But within the last nine months I have seen enough of the beauties of slavery to turn me right about. And I agree with you that the salvation of the country depends on the adoption by the government of a sweeping emancipation policy.” Another Washington observer wrote:

“I have rarely seen an audience more completely magnetized by a speaker than the crowded assembly in the Smithsonian were, last Friday, by Cheever. Almost every sentence elicited applause, and several times the heartiest cheers broke forth irrepressibly. Yesterday, also, he preached to an assembly of two thousand and upwards in the Hall of Representatives, thrilling his auditors with his trumpet calls to action…. And when, at the close, the Hutchinsons sang the plaintive Prayer of the Fugitive Slave, and the vast multitude burst out in one tumultuous acclamation, it was startling to think of the utter transformation wrought by one year’s tremendous experience.”26

More than twenty years later a Republican congressman still remembered Cheever’s sermons as “the most terrific arraignment of slavery I ever listened to.” Invitations to speak showered upon Cheever from all over the Northeast, and he accepted as many of them as he could, including a request to address a joint session of the Pennsylvania legislature.²⁷

Other abolitionists who lectured in Washington during the winter made almost as great an impression as Cheever. Gerrit Smith spoke in the capital on March 1, and remarked afterwards: “A great change has taken place in that City. The most radical Abolitionist is now applauded by a Washington audience for his most radical utterances.” William Goodell was encouraged by his reception in the capital. “In and out of Congress … radical views, in Washington City, … are on the advance. To this improved condition of things, the lectures in the Smithsonian Institute, this season, have greatly contributed.”²⁸ Goodell, Moncure Conway, and William Henry Channing had personal interviews with Lincoln while they were in the capital. Conway was impressed by Lincoln, probably because the president complimented his book, The Rejected Stone. Lincoln was “astonished to learn that its author was really a native of Virginia.”29

The greatest triumph for the abolitionists was Wendell Phillips’ visit to Washington in March. “A year ago Wendell Phillips would have been sacrificed to the Devil of Slavery anywhere on Pennsylvania Avenue,” wrote the Washington correspondent of the New York Tribune, but “To-day he was introduced by Mr. Sumner on to the floor of the Senate. The Vice-President left his seat and greeted him with marked respect. The attentions of Senators to the apostle of Abolition were of the most flattering character.” Phillips lectured three times to enthusiastic audiences at the Smithsonian Institution; he was guest of honor at a dinner party given by Speaker of the House Galusha Grow; and he had a private interview with Lincoln, from which he emerged with a more favorable impression of the president than he had previously held. The New York Tribune drew a significant moral from Phillips’ welcome in the capital. It had been little more than a year since he was mobbed in Boston for expressing the same sentiments he now uttered in Washington. “Both then and now he is a representative man,” observed the Tribune editorially, “and the fierce anger that then sought his death, and the deference and respect now paid to him by men in the highest places of the nation, are tributes to the idea of which he, more than any other one man, is a popular exponent. It is not often that history presents such violent contrasts in such rapid succession.”³⁰

Phillips had been lecturing in the Northeast most of the winter, and when he left Washington he headed west for a brief tour. In Cincinnati he was greeted by rock- and egg-throwing toughs from Kentucky. It was the first and last occurrence of antiabolitionist mob violence during the war. It helped rather than harmed Phillips. Editors throughout the North denounced the Kentucky rioters, and lecture invitations poured in on Phillips at a redoubled rate. He wrote to a Boston friend, “You have no idea how the disturbance has stirred the West. I draw immense houses, and could stay here two months, talking every night.” The New York Tribune estimated that during the winter and spring of 1861-1862 no less than 5 million people heard or read Phillips’ antislavery discourses.31

In 1862, Charles A. Dana neared the completion of fifteen years as managing editor of the New York Tribune, but he was finding it increasingly difficult to get along with Greeley and in March 1862, Dana resigned. His successor was Sydney Howard Gay, the mild-mannered, intellectual, hard-working Garrisonian abolitionist who had been a member of the Tribune staff since 1857. Before that he had edited the Anti-Slavery Standard for fourteen years. Greeley had been impressed by the quality of Gay’s work on the Standard and had personally offered him a position with the Tribune. Life on the Tribune staff was not always easy for a Garrisonian abolitionist from 1857 to 1861. Greeley was no abolitionist; he was erratic in his devotion to the antislavery cause. Dana, Gay, and other members of the editorial corps worked hard to keep the paper consistently antislavery in spite of Greeley’s deviations. When war came in 1861 the Tribune did not immediately call for emancipation. Not until after Bull Run did Greeley begin to hint cautiously at abolition, and it was not until the late months of 1861 that the Tribune became known as a consistent and thoroughgoing champion of emancipation.³²

In his five years with the Tribune, Gay had proved himself the most valuable member of the editorial staff and he was a natural choice to succeed Dana. Abolitionists were delighted with the news that one of their own had become managing editor of America’s most powerful newspaper at a time of America’s greatest crisis. Oliver Johnson, a personal friend of both Greeley and Gay, told Garrison that Gay’s accession was “a most important change, and one that will improve the tone of the paper. This inter nos.”33

As managing editor, Gay soon showed himself a more efficient administrator and harder worker than his predecessor. He was in the office from noon until 3 a.m., six days a week. He wrote editorials, supervised the makeup of the paper, and directed the far-flung corps of Tribune war correspondents. As the war progressed, Greeley spent more and more time on his voluminous private correspondence, his lecture tours, and his political activities in Washington and New York. Gay took on a growing amount of responsibility for the paper. Greeley determined the general editorial policy and usually wrote the leading editorial each day when he was in town, but Gay superintended the day-to-day policy of the Tribune and gradually acquired a greater power over editorial strategy than even Dana had exercised. Gay soon earned a reputation of excellence among his fellow journalists. Edward Dicey of the London Spectator, one of the best foreign correspondents in the United States during the war, considered the Tribune under Gay’s management “better printed, more thoughtfully written, and more carefully got up than any of its contemporaries.” And Charles Congdon, the brilliant, acid-tongued editorial writer for the Tribune and a good friend of Dana’s, paid Gay a supreme compliment: “You must know that the Tribune in my opinion never was a better paper. It is due to you to say this.”³⁴

A second journalistic event of great importance for abolitionists in 1861-1862 was the change in editorship of the New York Independent, the largest and most influential political-religious weekly newspaper in the country. The Independent had been founded in 1848 as a Congregational antislavery journal by Henry C. Bowen, New York silk merchant and son-in-law of Lewis Tappan. For thirteen years it was edited by three Congregational clergymen: Leonard Bacon, Joseph Thompson, and Richard S. Storrs. During this period the Independent pursued a conservative antislavery course, attacking slaveholders and abolitionists with about the same spirit. In 1861 the three clergymen editors hesitated, vacillated, and refused to declare openly for an emancipation policy. Meanwhile the war had forced Bowen’s silk business into bankruptcy, and to save the Independent he turned it over temporarily to Tappan in December 1861 without consulting the three editors. The three clergymen resigned, and Tappan persuaded Henry Ward Beecher to become the new editor-in-chief of the Independent. 35

Abolitionists rejoiced at the change. Beecher did not quite measure up to radical antislavery standards, but he was an improvement over his predecessors; abolitionists also knew that Beecher’s editorship would be little more than nominal. The real source of the Independent’s editorial policy after December 1861, was Theodore Tilton, the brilliant young abolitionist who had been on the Independent staff since 1856. With his busy schedule, Beecher scarcely had time to write more than one editorial a week. Tilton took over most of the editorial work, and in less than a year his journalistic genius and Beecher’s name more than doubled the Independent’s circulation, bringing it to the amazing total (for a religious journal) of 70 thousand. In the spring of 1863, Beecher resigned and went to England on a lecture tour to win British support for the Union cause. Tilton became editor-in-chief of the Independent. Under his editorship it became less a religious journal and more a radical, crusading political weekly. Tilton frequently consulted his friends Garrison and Oliver Johnson about editorial policy, and for all practical purposes the powerful Independent became an abolitionist organ.³⁶

The increasing influence of abolitionists was reflected in the exasperation of their opponents. A writer in the conservative Boston Courier denounced Phillips as a treasonable fanatic: “It will not do to represent this torch of incendiarism as a person of no influence or consideration, for the contrary is notoriously the fact…. There is not at this moment in Massachusetts a person of more wide influence over the general heart and mind than he is. As a public lecturer, he is by far the most popular man in the State.” After Phillips had lectured in Washington, Kentucky’s Senator Garrett Davis lamented that the abolitionists “have such skillful and dexterous and able and unscrupulous leaders here that they can cajole the simple, moderate, conservative, constitutional Republicans to their extreme measures.” Davis thought Phillips should be “manacled and confined at Fort Warren or Fort Hamilton.” Acidulous old James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald demanded that “the Government send these ranters to Fort Lafayette a while, to be seasoned, and then string them up with the rebels, like dried haddock, at the end of the war. Thus the country will be saved, and his Satanic Majesty be enabled to settle his accounts with Phillips very speedily.”37

Abolitionists themselves never ceased to marvel at their new-found popularity. “It is hard to realize the wondrous change which has befallen us abolitionists,” wrote Mary Grew early in 1862. “After thirty years of persecution … abolitionists read with wonder, in prominent journals of this city [Philadelphia], … respectful tributes to men whose names had hitherto been used as a cry wherewith to rally a mob; and see with joy their own arguments and phraseology adopted by those journals.”³⁸ Another Philadelphian was amazed that she could now make a profit on an abolitionist lecture instead of losing money: “To think that the day has come to supply our Treasury instead of emptying it on such an occasion. What next?” Phillips noted that “Lyceums which could not formerly endure an Abolitionist on any topic, now invite them, stipulating that they shall talk on slavery.” Henry Ward Beecher thought it “a great day that we have lived to see, when Mr. Garrison is petted, and patted, and invited, and praised by Governors, and judges, and expectants of political preferment. What is the world coming to?”39

What indeed? Abolitionists had never known the exhilaration of such power and prestige. Their speakers were in great demand all over the North. Their ranks contained some of the most popular and effective platform lecturers in the country. One of their number was managing editor of the most powerful newspaper in the nation; another was the editor of the largest political-religious weekly journal in the world. Abolitionism was no longer at a discount; abolitionists no longer went begging for listeners. Men who had felt obliged to work under cover to promote emancipation in October 1861, were wined and dined in the nation’s capital five months later. Abolitionism had arrived.

There were some abolitionists, however, who wondered whether their newfound popularity had been purchased too dearly. One fact greatly disturbed them: this growing northern zeal for emancipation was not based upon concern for the rights of the Negro as a person, but upon the argument of “military necessity” to save the Union. There was no question of Charles Sumner’s genuine compassion for the slave, but he refused to express that compassion in his early wartime emancipation arguments. “You will observe that I propose no crusade for abolition, … making it a war of abolition instead of a war for preservation of the Union,” he wrote on November 3, 1861. He argued instead that the Union could be saved only by striking at slavery. “In short, abolition is not to be the object of the war, but simply one of its agencies.” A week later Sumner told John Jay that emancipation “is to be presented strictly as a measure of military necessity, and the argument is to be thus supported rather than on grounds of philanthropy.”40

Some abolitionists strongly questioned these tactics. “This doctrine of the abolition of slavery at last, as ‘a military necessity,’ is the rock on which we are in more danger of splitting than perhaps any other,” cried Parker Pillsbury. “It is, to me, the most God-insulting doctrine ever proclaimed.” The pleas of military necessity reminded Pillsbury of the deathbed conversion of a sinner. Emancipation would be worth very little, he thought, unless it proceeded from a conviction of justice and right. Lydia Maria Child was also discouraged by the military necessity argument: “This entire absence of a moral sense on the subject, has disheartened me more than anything else. Even should they be emancipated, merely as a ‘war necessity,’ everything must go wrong, if there is no heart or conscience on the subject…. It is evident that a great moral work still needs to be done.”⁴¹

In January 1862, James R. Gilmore and Robert J. Walker launched a new emancipation journal called the Continental Monthly. Neither of these men was an abolitionist: Gilmore was a New York businessman and cotton trader; Walker was a former governor of Kansas territory and a friend of Lincoln. Gilmore selected Charles G. Leland as editor of his new journal. In the first two issues of the Monthly, Leland and Gilmore frankly stated their indifference to the moral issue of slavery. “This is not now a question of the right to hold slaves, or the wrong of so doing,” declared Leland. “All of that old abolition jargon went out and died with the present aspect of the war. So far as nine-tenths of the North ever cared, or do now care, slaves might have hoed away down in Dixie” forever, if their masters had not rebelled and sought to destroy the Union. Leland continued: “Now let every friend of the Union boldly assume that, so far as the settlement of this question is concerned, he does not care one straw for the Negro. Men have tried for thirty years to appeal to humanity without success, for the Negro, and now let us try some other expedient. Let us regard him not as a man and a brother, but as ‘a miserable nigger,’ if you please, and a nuisance. But whatever he be, if the effect of owning such creatures is to make the owner an intolerable fellow, seditious and insolent, it becomes pretty clear that such ownership should be put an end to.”42

Gilmore, Leland, and Walker coined the word “emancipationist” to distinguish themselves from the abolitionists and their disreputable humanitarian motives. Abolitionists were shocked and saddened by the attitude of these “emancipationists.” Charles K. Whipple, Garrison’s editorial assistant on the Liberator, admired the energy of the men who were backing the Continental Monthly, but “it is unspeakably saddening to see … men so intelligent and sagacious in worldly wisdom … deliberately repudiating a higher motive and adopting a lower one.” No doubt they would gain more support for emancipation by adopting this course, “for it is a sad fact that most Northerners are afflicted by intense colorphobia.” But they could not remain indifferent to human rights with impunity. “It is God’s law that injustice shall not prosper,” proclaimed Whipple. “Why not have done with oppression? Why not choose justice, and adhere to its dictates?”⁴³

A young abolitionist in the army reported to Garrison that many of his fellow soldiers had become “emancipationists” only because they wanted to end the war and go home. They still disliked the Negro as much as ever: “Though these men wish to abolish slavery, it is not from any motive outside of their own selfishness; and is there not a possibility that at some not very distant day, these old rank prejudices, that are now lulled to sleep by selfish motives, may again possess these men and work evil?” Frederick Douglass felt the same fear and expressed it in a speech at Cooper Union: “Much as I value the present apparent hostility to Slavery at the North, I plainly see that it is less the outgrowth of high and intelligent moral conviction against Slavery, as such, than because of the trouble its friends have brought upon the country. I would have Slavery hated for that and more. A man that hates Slavery for what it does to the white man, stands ready to embrace it the moment its injuries are confined to the black man, and he ceases to feel those injuries in his own person.”44

Nearly every abolitionist shared this fear that the North might discard the Negro as soon as he ceased to be a “military necessity,” but in the rush of events and hard work during 1861 and 1862 there was little time to stop and brood about the problem. In the fall and winter abolitionists spent a great deal of time circulating emancipation petitions. Garrison wrote the most widely circulated petition, which urged Congress to decree “the total abolition of slavery throughout the country” under the war power, giving fair compensation to loyal masters “as a conciliatory measure, and to facilitate an amicable adjustment of difficulties.” Abolitionists had been traditionally hostile to the idea of compensation and there was some opposition to the inclusion of compensation to loyal owners in Garrison’s petition, but most abolitionists waived their theoretical objections in this case and signed the petition. For those who refused, William Goodell’s National Emancipation Association circulated a petition that did not call for compensation.⁴⁵

Abolitionists worked to obtain signatures to these petitions with a will and energy unknown since the great petition campaigns of 1836 to 1844. They found many people eager to sign. One abolitionist who obtained twenty-five signatures wrote that “not four of these men would have signed this petition previous to the bombardment of Sumpter [sic].”⁴⁶ Memorials bearing thousands of signatures began piling up on congressional desks. In January, the Washington correspondent of the New York Tribune reported (with some exaggeration) that “the petitions for universal emancipation to the present Congress have been more numerous and respectably signed than were those presented to the Parliament which abolished West Indian Slavery, at its opening.”47

Lincoln’s annual message to Congress on December 3, 1861, threw a dash of cold water on abolitionist hopes. His only reference to emancipation was a recommendation that the United States acquire territory in which to colonize slaves freed by the Confiscation Act of August 6. Otherwise he reiterated earlier assurances that he had no intention of interfering with the domestic institutions of the South. We should be “anxious and careful,” said the president, that the war did not “degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle.”⁴⁸

Abolitionists were appalled. A revolutionary struggle for freedom was precisely what they wanted. Gerrit Smith publicly assailed the message as “twattle and trash” and complained that Lincoln was “bound hand and foot by that Pro-Slavery regard for the Constitution in which he was educated.”⁴⁹ In the Liberator Garrison characterized the message as “feeble and rambling,” and complained privately: “What a wishy-washy message from the President! … He has evidently not a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins…. If there be not soon an ‘irrepressible conflict’ in the Republican ranks, in regard to his course of policy, I shall almost despair of the country. A curse on that Southern ‘loyalty’ which is retained only by allowing it to control the policy of the Administration!” Garrison concluded sorrowfully that Lincoln was “a man of very small calibre, and had better be at his old business of splitting rails than at the head of a government like ours, especially in such a crisis.”⁵⁰

Some abolitionists found consolation in the belief that Congress and public opinion were in advance of the president. “Foolishly as the President acts,” observed Oliver Johnson, “there is much in the aspect of things at Washington and in the state of public opinion to encourage us.”51 Abolitionist confidence in Congress was not misplaced. In an implied repudiation of Lincoln’s annual message, the House on December 4 refused to reaffirm the Crittenden resolution. The next day, Senator Trumbull introduced a far-reaching confiscation bill and Thaddeus Stevens offered a resolution urging emancipation under the war power. Owen Love joy introduced a bill making it a penal offense “for any officer or private of the Army or Navy to capture or return, or aid in the capture or return, of fugitive slaves.” Emancipation petitions continued to pour in on Congress. On one day alone, January 6, 1862, ten such petitions bearing thousands of signatures were presented in the Senate. A week later no less than seven different bills dealing with emancipation and confiscation of rebel property were reported out of congressional committees.⁵²

As Congress laboriously debated a variety of emancipation proposals, the mood of abolitionists fluctuated between hope and despair. “Never, since I became an Abolitionist, have I seen such hopeful times as these … never a time when the minds & hearts of the people were so receptive of light touching Slavery,” wrote Samuel May, Jr., on November 26. Less than two months later, however, Lydia Maria Child confessed that “My courage flags a little, and hope grows faint. The people head in the right direction; but we are unfortunate in the men we have placed in power. Lincoln is narrow-minded, short-sighted, and obstinate…. Gerrit Smith writes me that his friends Thaddeus Stevens and Gen. Frémont almost despair of the ship of state.”⁵³

The anti-slavery cause began to brighten a bit as the spring of 1862 approached. The New York Tribune stepped up its demands for emancipation. “It is time for us to cease this idle babble about the constitutional guaranties for a vicious system of society which the Constitution nowhere mentions by name,” thundered Sydney Gay in the Tribune of February 5. He continued, “It is time for us to consider how much longer we can afford to follow the modern device of holding slavery sacred above all other things…. As our armies go forward let them find only two classes in the revolted States—Union men and rebels, let their color be what it may.”54 In early March the leading Republicans and abolitionists of New York City organized a huge emancipation rally at Cooper Union—a rally which attracted national attention.⁵⁵

Lincoln could hardly ignore the buildup of emancipation pressure. On March 6, he sent a message to Congress recommending passage of a joint resolution offering federal compensation to any state “which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery.”⁵⁶ It was Lincoln’s first specific recommendation on the subject of slavery and it touched off a great deal of discussion. Abolitionist reaction to the president’s message was generally favorable, with some exceptions. Moncure Conway likened the proposal to “the insertion of a wedge so neatly as to do credit to the President’s knowledge of rail-splitting,” but he disliked the word “gradual”; emancipation was “one of the Commander-in-Chief’s guns; and to make it gradual would be like firing off a gun a little at a time.” Maria Weston Chapman was also sorry for the word “gradual” in the message, but supposed it “to be only a make-weight, like the word compensation: a couple of sops thrown to two heads of slaveholders. Meanwhile, events are compelling immediatism.” Wendell Phillips welcomed the message as “one more sign of promise…. If the President has not entered Canaan, he has turned his face Zionward.”⁵⁷

There were some dissenting voices, however. “Multitudes of petitions from all the free states signed by tens of thousands of estimable citizens, are before Congress, asking for the immediate abolition of slavery,” declared Garrison, and he then asked, “Are these to be satisfied by proposing such a will-of-the-wisp as a substitute?” Privately, Garrison expressed fear that “the President’s message will prove ‘a decoy duck’ or ‘a red herring,’ so as to postpone that decisive action by Congress which we are desirous of seeing.” And George Cheever wrote: “How pitiable the attitude of President Lincoln, beseeching rebel States to do what God, justice, humanity and our Constitution require him to do.”58 Congress passed Lincoln’s resolution on April 10, but a majority of border-state representatives refused to consider any plan of voluntary emancipation.

Congress enacted several antislavery measures in the spring of 1862. On March 10, the Senate passed (the House had previously acted) a new article of war prohibiting army officers from returning fugitive slaves. On April 16, President Lincoln signed into law a measure for compensated emancipation of all slaves in the District of Columbia. In June, Congress prohibited slavery in all the territories of the United States. Legislation was also enacted providing for the more effectual suppression of the African slave trade and for the education of colored children in the District of Columbia.⁵⁹ Abolitionists were pleased by passage of these measures, especially by emancipation in the District of Columbia. “Well, it is something to get slavery abolished in ten miles square, after thirty years of arguing, remonstrating, and petitioning,” wrote Lydia Maria Child. “The effect it will produce is of more importance than the act itself. I am inclined to think that ‘old Abe’ means about right, only he has a hide-bound soul.” Garrison considered abolition of slavery in the capital “an event of far-reaching importance.” Congressman George W. Julian thought Garrison right “in regarding abolition here as a great triumph. We are gaining ground. The current is setting in the right direction.” Samuel May, Jr., observed that “Our govt, moves very cautiously, very slowly, and their steps are not strides. But it does seem to me that all these steps are forward—none backward.” The Anti-Slavery Standard regarded emancipation in the District of Columbia as “the Beginning of the End of Slavery.”60

During the spring of 1862, abolitionists bubbled over with optimism. “I trust I am not dreaming but the events taking place seem like a dream,” wrote Frederick Douglass happily. Theodore Tilton joyfully observed that “the cause is striding forward with seven-league boots. If you do not hurry and grow old,” he jokingly told Garrison, “you may see Slavery abolished before you have a gray hair on the top of your head!” Mary Grew was delighted by the progress of the antislavery cause, but she knew that politicians had not suddenly become saints: “such things are not expected by sane reformers. It is enough to elicit our deep thanksgiving that, by events over which the govt, has or has not control; from motives pure, selfish, or commingled, the abolition of slavery is at hand.” And Wendell Phillips declared on May 6 that slavery was doomed to utter extinction. “Abraham Lincoln may not wish it; he cannot prevent it; the nation may not will it, but the nation can never prevent it,” said Phillips, and continued, “I do not care what men want or wish; the negro is the pebble in the cog-wheel, and the machine cannot go on until you get him out…. Abraham Lincoln simply rules; John C. Frémont governs.”⁶¹

1 Henry Cheever to Gerrit Smith, Aug. 20, Sept. 13, 1861, Smith Papers, SU; Garrison to Henry Cheever, Sept. 9, 1861, Cheever Papers, AAS.

2 Frank B. Sanborn, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe: Philanthropist (New York, 1891), 284; Laura E. Richards, Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe: The Servant of Humanity (Boston, 1909), 499-500; Frank P. Stearns, The Life and Public Services of George Luther Stearns (Philadelphia, 1907), 256-57.

3 L. M. Child to Whittier, Sept. 10, 1861, Child-Whittier Correspondence, LC; Stearns to J. M. McKim, Oct. 1, 1861, McKim Papers, Cornell.

4 Stearns to McKim, Oct. 1, 1861, McKim Papers, Cornell; James M. Stone to Gerrit Smith, Oct. 10, 1861, Smith Papers, SU.

5 L. M. Child to Whittier, Sept. 22, 1861, Child-Whittier Correspondence, LC; Principia, Oct. 26, 1861; N.A.S. Standard, Nov. 2, 1861; Independent, Nov. 7, 1861; New York Times, Dec. 5, 1861.

6 Boston Advertiser, Oct. 2, 1861. Sumner’s speech is printed in his Works, VI, 1-29.

7 There are about a dozen letters from abolitionists praising Sumner’s speech, in the Sumner Papers, HU.

8 James W. Stone to S. P. Chase, Oct. 5, 1861, Chase Papers, LC.

9 James M. Stone to Sumner, Dec. 18, 1861, Sumner Papers, HU.

10 John Jay to Sumner, Oct. 16, Nov. 8, 1861, Henry Hartt to Sumner, Oct. 18, 1861, Sumner Papers, HU; Lewis Tappan, Journal, entry of Sept. 12, 1861, Tappan Papers, LC; Principia, Oct. 26, 1861.

11 M. W. Chapman to J. M. McKim, Oct. ?, 1861, Garrison Papers, BPL; New York Times, Nov. 14, 1861; New York Tribune, Nov. 12, 14, 20, 1861. Cochrane was Gerrit Smith’s nephew.

12 Principia, Dec. 7, 1861.

13 Liberator, Dec. 20, 27, 1861; Boston Herald, quoted by Liberator, Dec. 27, 1861.

14 Stearns, Stearns, 258-59; Boston Commonwealth, Jan. 24, May 29, 1863; George Stearns to Frank Sanborn, Apr. 30, 1862, Sanborn Papers, Concord Public Library. The membership book of the Emancipation League is in the Rare Book Department, BPL.

15 Principia, Nov. 9, 30, 1861, June 12, 26, 1862; Stearns, Stearns, 260-61; Ida H. Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (3 vols., Indianapolis, 1898-1908), I, 217; S. B. Anthony to George Cheever, Mar. 6, 1862, Parker Pillsbury to Cheever, Mar. 11, 1862, Cheever Papers, AAS; S. B. Anthony to Theodore Tilton, Mar. ?, 1862, Apr. 14, 1862, Anthony Papers, NYHS; New York Tribune, June 13, 1862.

16 Wm. A. Croffut, An American Procession, 1855-1914 (Boston, 1930), 56-57. See also Abe C. Ravitz, “John Pierpont: Portrait of a Nineteenth Century Reformer,” Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1955, 301-02; and W. A. Croffut to George Cheever, Nov. 25, 1861, Cheever Papers, AAS.

17 Croffut, American Procession, 57-74; Ravitz, “Pierpont,” 305; T. W. Higginson to Louisa Higginson, Dec. 7, 1861, Higginson Papers, HU; New York Tribune, Jan. 15, 1862; Independent, Jan. 16, 1862; W. A. Croffut to George Cheever, Mar. 5, 1862, Cheever Papers, AAS.

18 Pierpont to Wm. Cullen Bryant, Jan. 12, 1862, Pierpont Papers, PML.

19 New York Tribune, Jan. 25, 1862.

20 Principia, Dec. 21, 1861.

21 Richard Hofstadter has perceptively analyzed the role of the radical reformer in a time of crisis in his “Wendell Phillips: The Patrician as Agitator,” in The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York, Vintage Books, 1958), 139.

22 Douglass’ Monthly, Dec. 1861; New York Courier, quoted in N.A.S. Standard, Nov. 16, 1861.

23 New York Tribune, Dec. 20, 1861; N.A.S. Standard, Dec. 28, 1861; Oliver Johnson to Garrison, Dec. 20, 31, 1861, Theodore Tilton to Garrison, Jan. 1, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL.

24 New York Times, Jan. 25, 1862.

25 Committee of twelve Republican congressmen to Cheever, Jan. 9, 1862, Committee of forty-three Republican congressmen and senators to Cheever, Jan. 14, 1862, Cheever Papers, AAS.

26 John B. Geyser to Cheever, Jan. 15, 1862, Cheever Papers, AAS; O. B. Frothingham, Memoir of William Henry Channing (Boston, 1886), 323-24. A captain in the Sickles Brigade, stationed in Charles County, Maryland, wrote in a private letter December 15, 1861, that “the more our officers and soldiers see of the institution of slavery the more they detest it. Five months ago, ninety out of every hundred of the Sickles Brigade would have been delighted to mob an abolitionist—now they want to abolish slavery, root and branch.” Quoted in the Anglo-African, Dec. 28, 1861.

27 George Julian, Political Recollections, 1840 to 1872 (Chicago, 1884), 370; Committee of twenty-one members of the Pennsylvania legislature to Cheever, Jan. 17, 1862, Gordon S. Berry (clerk of the Pennsylvania legislature) to Cheever, Jan. 25, 1862, Cheever Papers, AAS.

28 Gerrit Smith to Richard Webb, Mar. 15, 1862, Smith to Garrison, Mar. 17, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL; Principia, Apr. 10, 17, 1862.

29 Moncure Conway to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jan. 22, 1862, Conway to Ellen Conway, Mar. 17, 1862, Conway Papers, CU.

30 New York Tribune, Mar. 15, 18, 19, 1862. The Washington correspondent of the Boston Journal reported that “the matchless oratory of Wendell Phillips has taken the town by storm.” The correspondent of the Springfield Republican stated that Phillips had “uttered the most ultra sentiments without the slightest interruption or censure. This is in itself almost a miracle, and will be set down as an ‘event’ when the history of these times comes to be written…. Phillips was a real lion while here…. It was the complete triumph of free speech on slave soil.” Quoted in the N.A.S. Standard, Mar. 29, 1862.

31 Liberator, Mar. 21, Apr. 11, 25, 1862; New York Tribune, Apr. 4, 1862.

32 Louis M. Starr, The Bohemian Brigade: Civil War Newsmen in Action (New York, 1954), 18-19, 98-99; Horace Greeley to S. H. Gay, Aug. 18, 1861, Gay to Wendell Phillips, Oct. 28, 1861, Parker Pillsbury to Gay, Nov. 21, 1861, J. G. Whittier to Gay, Nov. 14, 1861, Gay Papers, CU.

33 Oliver Johnson to Garrison, Mar. 31, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL. See also Pillsbury to Gay, Apr. 2, 1862, Gay Papers, CU; and O. Johnson to J. M. McKim, Dec. 29, 1862, McKim Papers, NYPL.

34 Starr, Bohemian Brigade, 98-99, 116-24, 133-34; Elizabeth N. Gay to Sarah M. Gay, Apr. 1, 12, 1862, Gay Papers, CU; S. H. Gay to Garrison, Nov. 1, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL. The quoted tributes to Gay from Dicey and Congdon are in Starr, Bohemian Brigade, 133-34. James R. Gilmore, a friend of Greeley and Gay, wrote in his memoirs that Gay “had more influence with [Greeley] than any other person.” Gilmore asserted that “from the resignation of Charles A. Dana, early in 1862, until the close of the war, Mr. Gay controlled the course of the Tribune, and in all that time he did what no other man—except Mr. Dana—ever did or could do,—he held Mr. Greeley’s great powers to the steady support of the Union.” James R. Gilmore, Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War (Boston, 1898), 81, 94.

35 Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines (3 vols., New York and Cambridge, 1930-38), II, 367-71; Louis Filler, “Liberalism, Anti-Slavery, and the Founders of the Independent,” New England Quarterly, XXVII (Sept. 1954), 291-306; Edward Gilbert to George Cheever, Nov. 27, 1860, Cheever Papers, AAS; Lewis Tappan, Journal, 1861, entry of Dec. 7, 1861; Tappan, “Resumé of my Life,” 1861, Tappan Papers, LC; Independent, Dec. 19, 1861. Tappan relinquished the proprietorship of the Independent to Bowen after the latter had gotten his business back on its feet in the early months of 1862.

36 Mott, American Magazines, II, 371-73; N.A.S. Standard, Dec. 21, 1861, Feb. 1, 1862; S. B. Anthony to Tilton, Mar. ?, 1862, Anthony Papers, NYHS; Oliver Johnson to Garrison, May 28, July 25, 1862, Tilton to Garrison, May 27, June 11, 1863, Garrison Papers, BPL; Garrison to Tilton, June 5, 1863, Garrison Papers, NYHS; Frederick Douglass to Tilton, Oct. 21, 1862, Douglass Papers, Misc. MS, NYHS; Tilton to Douglass, Apr. 30, Oct. 22, 1862, Douglass Papers, Anacostia; Amasa Walker to Tilton, July 22, 1864, Tilton Papers, NYHS. On Jan. 1, 1863, the Independent claimed twice the circulation of any other weekly religious newspaper in the world.

37 The statements of the Courier, Davis, and Bennett were quoted in the Liberator, Feb. 7, May 9, 16, 1862.

38 Mary Grew to Wendell P. Garrison, Jan. 9, 1862, Garrison Papers, RU; Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (Phila., 1862), 10.

39 Sarah Pugh to Elizabeth N. Gay, Apr. 6, 1862, Gay Papers, CU; Liberator, Jan. 31, Mar. 21, 1862.

40 Sumner to R. Schleiden, Nov. 3, 1861, Sumner to John Jay, Nov. 10, 1861, quoted in Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner (4 vols., Boston, 1877-94), IV, 49. In 1864 Jay told Sumner that “my own view of the most expedient manner of proceeding against slavery in all its phases, has been as you are aware from the commencement of the war, so far at least as the old abolitionists are concerned, in favour of grounding our action on military necessity, & the national safety, & leaving the moral argument which we have used for the last thirty years to be monopolized for the present by the new converts to abolition by whom they can be wielded with the masses with ten-fold effect.” Jay to Sumner, Mar. 8, 1864, Sumner Papers, HU.

41 Pillsbury’s statement was quoted by the N.A.S. Standard, Nov. 23, 1861; for Mrs. Child, see Liberator, Jan. 17, 1862, and L. M. Child to Gerrit Smith, Jan. 7, 1862, Smith Papers, SU.

42 Gilmore, Personal Recollections, 39-56, 66-70; Continental Monthly, I (Jan. 1862), 97-98, and (Feb. 1862), 113-17.

43 Liberator, Feb. 14, 1862.

44 Jacob Allen to Garrison, Oct. 23, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL; Speech of Frederick Douglass at Cooper Union, Feb. 6, 1863, published in the New York Tribune, Feb. 7.

45 Liberator, Sept. 27, 1861; M. W. Chapman to J. M. McKim, Oct. 7, 1861, Garrison Papers, BPL; Principia, Nov. 16, Dec. 28, 1861.

46 Principia, Dec. 28, 1861.

47 New York Tribune, quoted in Principia, Jan. 30, 1862. See also Principia, Jan. 23, 1862; N.A.S. Standard, Dec. 21, 1861, Jan. 11, 1862; Liberator, Feb. 21, May 9, July 4, 1862; S. B. Anthony to Matilda J. Gage, Feb. 27, 1862, Gage Papers, Radcliffe Women’s Archives; Samuel May, Jr. to J. M. McKim, Oct. 9, 1861, McKim Papers, Cornell; Samuel May, Jr., Day Book, entries of Mar. 6, 11, 1862, May Papers, BPL.

48 Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (9 vols., New Brunswick, N.J., 1955), V, 48-49.

49 Gerrit Smith to Thaddeus Stevens, Dec. 6, 1861 (published letter, Peterboro, 1861); Gerrit Smith to George Thompson, Jan. 25, 1862 (published letter, Peterboro, 1862).

50 Liberator, Dec. 6, 1861; Garrison to Oliver Johnson, Dec. 6, 1861, Garrison Papers, BPL.

51 Johnson to Garrison, Dec. 5, 1861, Garrison Papers, BPL.

52 Cong. Globe, 37 Cong., 2 Sess., 6, 15-16, 18-19, 33-34, 57-60, 185, 327-32, 334, 497. Republican Congressman George Julian kept the abolitionists well informed on the progress of the antislavery cause in Congress during the 1861-62 session. See the dozens of letters exchanged between Julian and leading abolitionists in the Giddings-Julian Correspondence (LC), Gerrit Smith Papers (SU), Cheever Papers (AAS), and Garrison Papers (BPL).

53 May to Richard Webb, Nov. 26, 1861, Samuel May, Jr., Papers BPL; L. M. Child to Whittier, Jan. 21, 1862, Child-Whittier Correspondence, LC.

54 New York Tribune, Feb. 5, 1862; J. M. McKim to S. H. Gay, Feb. 8, 1862, Gay Papers, CU.

55 Liberator, Mar. 7, 14, 1862.

56 Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, V, 144-46.

57 Moncure Conway to Ellen Conway, Mar. 8, 1862, Conway Papers, CU; Conway, Golden Hour, 52; M. W. Chapman to Mary Estlin, Mar. 18, 1862, Estlin Papers, BPL; Phillips’ speech published in Liberator, Mar. 14, 1862.

58 Liberator, Mar. 14, 1862; Garrison to Oliver Johnson, Mar. 18, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL; George Cheever to Charles Sumner, Mar. 22, 1862, Sumner Papers, HU.

59 Cong. Globe, 37 Cong., 2 Sess., 1,446-51, 1,526, 1,629-31, 1,640-49, 2,041-64; U.S. Statutes at Large, XII, 354, 376-78; Wendell P. Garrison and Francis J. Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison (4 vols., Boston, 1885-89), IV, 49-50.

60 L. M. Child to Robert Wallcutt, Apr. 20, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL; Garrison to Julian, Apr. 13, 1862, Giddings-Julian Correspondence, LC; Julian to Garrison, Apr. 16, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL; Samuel May, Jr., to Samuel J. May, Apr. 14, 1862, S. J. May Papers, BPL; N.A.S. Standard, Apr. 26, 1862.

61 Douglass to Sumner, Apr. 7, 1862, Sumner Papers, HU; Tilton to Garrison, Apr. 3, 1862, Mary Grew to Helen Garrison, June 20, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL; Phillips’ speech published in Liberator, May 16, 1862.