V   THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION AND THE THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT

A sharp contest still raged within the ranks of the abolitionists between those who supported the government in its war against rebellion and those who refused to support any government that was not thoroughly abolitionist. W. 0. Duvall, who belonged to the latter group, criticized Gerrit Smith for his support of the Union. “Of what use, for Heaven’s sake, has this government ever been to you or me?” asked Duvall. “It was never anything but a gigantic swindler and robber; and yet you argue that there is no sacrifice too great for its continuance.” Duvall also had some harsh words for the Garrisonians: “Edward Everett and Wendell Phillips sitting side by side! The Liberator puffing D. S. Dickinson’s blarney!! How has the fine gold become dim! Prophets become partisans! Truly, these are the days of small things.” Stephen S. Foster agreed with Duvall and said in January 1862: “There has never been an Administration so thoroughly devoted to slavery as the present. No other ever returned so many fugitive slaves, nor did so much to propitiate the Slave Power. Under these circumstances, is there any sufficient reason for us to … give our sanction and support to the Government?”1

Phillips and Garrison responded to these criticisms in well-publicized speeches at Cooper Union. In December 1861, Phillips insisted that only emancipation could end the irrepressible conflict and bind the Union together with hooks of steel. He continued: “People may say this is a strange language for me,—a Disunionist. Well, I was a Disunionist, sincerely, for twenty years. I did hate the Union, when the Union meant lies in the pulpit and mobs in the street, when Union meant making white men hypocrites and black men slaves. (Cheers) … But now, when I see what the Union must mean in order to last, when I see that you cannot have union without meaning justice, … why should I object to it? … Do you suppose I am not Yankee enough to buy union when I can have it at a fair price?” A month later Garrison came before a similar New York audience and reaffirmed all of his abolitionist principles. But he no longer wished to stand apart from the rest of the antislavery North. “What are all your paltry distinctions worth?” he asked. “You are not Abolitionists. Oh, no. You are only anti-slavery.” In the eyes of the South, however, there was no real difference. An antislavery man would be hanged in Charleston as soon as an abolitionist: “Why, the President of the United States … is an outlaw in nearly every slave State in this Union…. I think it is time, under these circumstances, that we should all hang together.” Garrison had been charged with inconsistency because he now supported the Union, and he replied, “Well, ladies and gentlemen, when I said I would not sustain the Constitution, because it was a ‘covenant with death, and an agreement with hell,’ I had no idea that I would live to see death and hell secede. (Prolonged applause and laughter) Hence it is that I am now with the Government to enable it to constitutionally stop the further ravages of death, and to extinguish the flames of hell forever. (Renewed applause)”2

Over the objections of Stephen S. Foster, Garrison steered a resolution through the annual convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in January affirming that “this Society regards the Government as wholly in the right, and the Secessionists wholly and atrociously in the wrong, on the issues presented.” Two weeks later Garrison submitted the same resolution to the annual meeting of the New York Anti-Slavery Society in Albany. Parker Pillsbury immediately jumped up and offered another set of resolutions denouncing the Lincoln administration’s failure to take effective action against slavery. If the war should end in some form of compromise with slavery, said Pillsbury, “the Abolitionists will have more to answer for than any other class of people.” The government had no intention “to interfere with the condition of a single slave in the land…. I do not wish this government prolonged another day in its present form.” In reply, Garrison pointed to several antislavery acts by the government: the Confiscation Act, Butler’s contraband policy, and Union protection of more than 8 thousand fugitive slaves on the South Carolina sea islands. The exchange became heated. Finally Aaron M. Powell stepped in to try to smooth things over, and suggested that both sets of resolutions—Garrison’s and Pillsbury’s—be adopted. This was done, and the convention adjourned in a spirit of apparent harmony, but beneath the surface the gulf between the Garrison and Pillsbury factions was wider than ever.3

The growing division between the two groups was revealed in their private correspondence. Most abolitionists, especially those in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, supported Garrison’s point of view. Pillsbury’s following was small, recruited mainly from rural New England and New York, and from some of the western states. Stephen S. Foster was Pillsbury’s most faithful ally. In private Foster shook his head sadly over Garrison’s course: “How lamentable it is that those who have stood for so many years with their feet firmly planted on the rock of truth should falter in this hour of our nation’s greatest peril, & … virtually make over our cause & themselves to the government.” Pillsbury said privately, “I dare not yet trust the interests of the Anti-Slavery cause in the hands of the present, any more than in any former, Presidential administration. Nor do I see how we can any more change our mottoes, and our glorious old battle cry, ‘No Union with Slaveholders,’ than we might have done at the election of General Taylor.”⁴

Supporters of Garrison considered Pillsbury slightly unbalanced. When slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia, Oliver Johnson asked: “Will not even the croakers now be willing to confess that our cause has made progress? … Will not our friend Pillsbury be able to discern a ray of light stealing over the dark picture that seems to be always hanging before his mind’s eye?” Pillsbury was evidently not cheered by emancipation in the nation’s capital. “P. P. is … not in a quite healthy state of mind,” commented Samuel May, Jr. “When he heard of the President’s signing the Bill for Abolition in the District of Columbia, he said he dreaded to give way to any rejoicing, for he had noticed that any good thing in the Government was quite sure to be followed by some extraordinary baseness!”5

Oliver Johnson feared that the abolitionists’ intramural squabbles would be revealed to public view at the annual convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society in May. He urged Garrison to prepare careful resolutions for the meeting with a mind to bridging the gap between the two wings of the Society. “You know just how far it will do for us to go in the direction that P. P. would lead us,” wrote Johnson, “and if you will put in proper shape the needed criticism of the government, not sparing censure where it is deserved, but showing proper discrimination, we shall have no difficulty in carrying with us the common sense of the Society.”⁶ Garrison prepared and introduced resolutions urging the government to adopt universal emancipation, criticizing Lincoln and Congress for their slowness, but nevertheless supporting the government in its efforts against rebellion. Stephen S. Foster offered another resolution affirming that although the government “from purely selfish motives” had “done many acts favorable to the freedom of the slaves, it has in no instance evinced a genuine regard for their rights as citizens.” Foster noted that the administration still enforced the fugitive slave law in the District of Columbia, and in other ways observed the proslavery compromises of the Constitution. Garrison’s resolutions were passed and Foster’s was laid on the table because of “lack of time” to discuss it.⁷

In the three weeks between the convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society and the meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society at the end of May, many other abolitionists began to have doubts about the wisdom of Garrison’s course. During these three weeks several events occurred which undermined the confidence and optimism prevailing earlier in the spring: Lincoln revoked General David Hunter’s military order proclaiming emancipation in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida; the administration continued to enforce the fugitive slave law in the District of Columbia; and the House narrowly defeated a confiscation bill emancipating all the slaves of rebels. At the New England meeting there was a great deal of oratory denouncing these actions, and Foster introduced resolutions affirming that abolitionists could give no more support to the Union than to the Confederate government. “Abraham Lincoln is as truly a slaveholder as Jefferson Davis,” said Foster. “He cannot even contemplate emancipation without colonization.” Many of the speakers supported Foster’s side of the argument, but Wendell Phillips, who had earlier in the meeting denounced Lincoln in the strongest terms, nevertheless could not agree that Lincoln was as bad as Jefferson Davis. Foster and Pillsbury were trying to create the impression that the Society had abandoned its principles by supporting the government, said Phillips. “No such body has proposed to support the Government as it is. It advises, not supports the Government.” Phillips declared that he had “supported it by trying to force it on to a better position.” This expressed the will of a majority of the delegates, and Foster’s resolutions were defeated by a vote of nearly two to one.8

The meeting left a bitter taste in the mouths of many abolitionists. “There was … some unpleasant feeling caused, by Pillsbury’s pretty openly charging, & Powell’s (& others) insinuating … that the Anti-Slavery Societies & their Committees had lowered their moral standard,” reported Samuel May, Jr., to a friend. May agreed completely with Garrison’s position: “We hold the Government, the parties, the churches,—as ever,—to their highest duty. But we hope not to part with our common sense.” This was precisely what May thought Pillsbury had done in suggesting that “the present administration is the worst one we have ever had” and that “Jeff. Davis would be preferable as a President to Abraham Lincoln.” “These and kindred positions,” concluded May, “seem to us to be really and truly characterized by fanaticism.”⁹ The truth was that Pillsbury and Foster were temperamentally incapable of supporting any government. They had been oppositionists and “come-outers” so long that their hostility to authority was ingrained, no matter what the authority stood for. Their inflexible opposition to the Union cause during the first year of the war brought into the open the growing schism in the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Even as the Society seemed to be splitting into two factions, however, there was on another plane a trend toward reconciliation of those abolitionists who had been bitterly opposed to each other since the schism of 1840. The war rendered academic all the old constitutional and methodological disputes among the various schools of abolitionism. James Redpath recognized this in November 1861, when he proclaimed that “the policies both of the Gerrit Smith and the Garrisonian school of abolitionists have been practically suspended. Events have so changed the position of affairs that their old-time policies are no longer applicable.” An old abolitionist who had broken with the Garrisonians in 1840 and had gone into the Liberty party, wrote to Garrison in February, 1862: “There never was any but an imaginary chasm between us, and the providential events of the last few months have bridged it all over.”10 Early in 1862 Garrison invited Gerrit Smith to attend the Garrisonian antislavery meetings of that year. Smith could not come, but he responded handsomely with praise of the Garrisonians and their work, an acknowledgment that there was no longer any reason for differences among abolitionists, and a check for $50 for the American Anti-Slavery Society.¹¹

An article by Frederick Douglass in his Monthly of March 1862, strikingly illustrated the progress of reconciliation among old abolitionist enemies. For years there had been bitterness between Douglass and Garrison, dating from the early 1850’s when Douglass had repudiated Garrisonian disunionism. But in 1862 Douglass was ready to bury their differences. “Every man who is ready to work for the overthrow of slavery, whether a voter or non-voter, a Garrisonian or a Gerrit Smith man, black or white, is both clansman and kinsman of ours,” he wrote. “Whatever political or personal differences, which have in other days divided and distracted us, a common object and a common emergency makes us for the time at least, forget those differences.” Douglass praised the work of Garrisonians during the war. “No class of men are doing more according to their numbers, to conduct this great war to the Emancipation of the slaves than Mr. Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society.”¹² Garrisonians responded heartily to Douglass’ magnificent gesture, and Douglass once again became a featured speaker at Garrisonian antislavery meetings.

Contrabands Coming into Camp in Consequence of the Emancipation Proclamation. A. R. Waud in Harper’s Weekly

There were many other examples of wartime cooperation among old abolitionist rivals. The American Anti-Slavery Society used George Cheever’s Church of the Puritans in New York for its business meetings, and a bond of friendship grew up between Garrisonians and members of Cheever’s Church Anti-Slavery Society. Garrisonians and John Brown men worked together in the Boston Emancipation League. It was Garrison who arranged Theodore Weld’s return to the antislavery lecture platform during the war, and brought Weld once again to meetings of the American Anti-Slavery Society.13

Some breaches, of course, were too wide and too personal to be healed even by the wartime emergency. The gulf between Garrison on the one hand, and Lewis Tappan and Joshua Leavitt on the other, had been too wide to be easily bridged. But on the whole, while a rift was developing within the American Anti-Slavery Society during the war, Garrisonians as a group were closing ranks with the rest of the abolitionist movement to fight a common battle against slavery and rebellion.

Most abolitionists were riding the crest of a wave of optimism in the early spring of 1862, but far back in their minds was a nagging doubt about the basis for this confident outlook. What if the rebellion should suddenly collapse? Would not the old devil of compromise enter into the peace settlement, leaving slavery essentially intact?

In February 1862, Union arms won a series of victories climaxed by the capture of Fort Donelson. The North was exultant; editors assured their readers that “the rebellion is crumbling” and “the end is approaching.”14 Higginson noted in his diary that “there is such a glare of victory that we only count the months or perhaps weeks until Richmond and New Orleans shall have submitted.” But he discerned danger in this development. “The less success on our part, the more likelihood of an emancipatory policy—& so the other way.” Charles Sumner stated privately that “these victories have a good side and a bad side. They will set us up in Europe, but I fear they will put back our ideas at home.” George Cheever was not happy with the turn of events, “for our victories, if continued, will just result in bringing back those States as slaveholding States again in the Union.”¹⁵

In April 1862, abolitionists put these fears out of mind while they rejoiced over the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, but three events in the second half of May brought back all their doubts and apprehensions stronger than ever. On April 25, General David Hunter, commander of the Union forces occupying the islands and coastline of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, had proclaimed martial law in the “Department of the South,” comprising all of these three states. On May 9, he issued a second order stating that “Slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible” and declaring all slaves in the three states “forever free.” The edict was published in northern newspapers on May 16. It was immediately acclaimed by abolitionists, who assumed that Lincoln had authorized it. “Has not the President used a very sharp knife, in Genl. Hunter’s hands, to cut the knot?” exclaimed Francis George Shaw joyfully.¹⁶

But Lincoln had not authorized Hunter’s action; he did not even know of the order until he read it in the newspapers. The conservative and Democratic press demanded that Lincoln rescind the order. Secretaries Chase and Stanton, on the other hand, assured President Lincoln that nine-tenths of the Republicans approved of Hunter’s proclamation, and urged him to let it stand. The president deferred to the wishes of conservatives and border state Unionists, however, and revoked Hunter’s order on May 19. Lincoln renewed his plea to the border states to take advantage of his offer of compensated emancipation, and hinted ominously that should they not do so he might find it necessary eventually to proclaim military emancipation.17

Abolitionists were deeply disappointed by Lincoln’s action. William Goodell wrote, “He has grieved and weakened his best friends. He has gladdened and strengthened his worst enemies—the worst enemies of the country.” “Shame and confusion to the President for his halting, shuffling, backward policy!” cried Garrison.¹⁸ Anna Dickinson, a rising young abolitionist orator, denounced the president as “not so far from … a slave-catcher after all,” and privately wrote that Lincoln was “an Ass … for the Slave Power to ride.”¹⁹

Some abolitionists, however, found grounds for hope in Lincoln’s reiteration of the offer of compensated emancipation and his implied warning of possible future military emancipation. Samuel May, Jr., observed that the president had “again sadly disappointed the Anti-Slavery portion of the country & the army,—which now has grown to be a very large portion,” by annulling Hunter’s proclamation. But May thought Lincoln sincere in his wish to abolish slavery through a program of voluntary, compensated emancipation: “Slow, timid, altogether too patient with & too trustful of the Slaveholders, as he is, I do think his appeal a very solemn one to those States.”²⁰

In the last week of May, the northern press was full of the shocking story that open season on fugitive slaves had been declared in Washington. Slave catchers from neighboring states were invading the District, seizing Negroes on the streets and claiming them as fugitives. One report told of a fugitive who ran up the steps of the Capitol with heavy chains on his legs in a frantic effort to escape his pursuers. “Is it possible that such a deed can be perpetrated by the Government and not be branded by the nation as a disgrace?” asked Theodore Tilton in the Independent. The New England Anti-Slavery Society angrily condemned the Lincoln administration for allowing the national capital to be turned into a slave pen.21

On May 26, the House of Representatives defeated by four votes a bill for the confiscation and emancipation of all slaves belonging to rebel masters. Five congressmen from Massachusetts voted against the bill, providing the narrow margin of defeat. The New England Anti-Slavery Society denounced the House for its “astounding infatuation” and “utter moral cowardice.” The Society passed a resolution urging Massachusetts voters to send the five recusant congressmen into a “dishonored retirement at the next election.” George Cheever was profoundly depressed by the defeat of this bill. “The first time, the very first time in all our history that the possibility of emancipation has been distinctly presented … it is decided in the negative—by the votes from Massachusetts!” he lamented. “Which now is the most guilty, the North or the South? And what reason has England to sympathize with the North rather than the South?”²²

The events of May plunged abolitionists from the pinnacle of confidence to the depths of despair. For more than two months following his interview with Lincoln in March, Wendell Phillips had praised the president’s virtues and predicted an early end to slavery. By June, however, Phillips’ patience was wearing dangerously thin. He began to doubt his policy of supporting the administration. “This cabinet fears opposition more than it values support,” he told Charles Sumner. “Let them feel that we can criticize & demand as well as the Border States & Conservative Side.” Phillips urged congressional Republicans to get tough and threaten to withhold supplies unless the administration adopted a more radical policy. “Lincoln is doing twice as much to-day to break this Union as Davis is,” he charged. “We are paying thousands of lives & millions of dollars as penalty for having a timid & ignorant President, all the more injurious because honest.”23 As the summer progressed and McClellan’s army mired itself in the mud flats of the Chickahominy, the pressure for emancipation mounted ever higher. On June 20, a delegation from the Society of Progressive Friends, a small liberal Quaker association dominated by Garrisonian abolitionists, presented to Lincoln a memorial urging emancipation under the war power. The memorial had been written by Garrison and was read to the president by Oliver Johnson. Lincoln replied politely to the delegation, agreeing with them that slavery was wrong, but questioning whether a proclamation of emancipation would have any effect in the South when he could not even enforce the Constitution there. Johnson replied briefly, conceding that “the Constitution cannot now be enforced at the South, but you do not on that account intermit the effort to enforce it, and the memorialists are solemnly convinced that the abolition of Slavery is indispensable to your success.” Lincoln made no promises, but intimated that he would take action against slavery when he thought, under God’s guidance, that such action would be helpful and effective.²⁴

In July, John Jay organized an emancipation meeting of prominent conservative New Yorkers at Cooper Union. “Our old Conservative solid men are ready for the most radical measures,” Jay informed Sumner, “& we can speak in their names in such a way as to give voice to the whole country and demand not for the blacks but for ourselves & for the Union as our only hope an emancipation policy.”²⁵ In the same month the Independent began publishing a series of widely quoted editorials by Beecher and Tilton militantly calling for the abolition of slavery.²⁶ Susan B. Anthony started on a whirlwind speaking tour through the smaller towns of upstate New York. In New Jersey, Angelina Grimké Weld published a petition entitled “A Declaration of War on Slavery” and circulated it herself in the Perth Amboy neighborhood, obtaining hundreds of signatures even in that Democratic stronghold.27 Throughout the North abolitionists and Republicans were engaging in similar activities, while the Republican press became increasingly bold in calling for emancipation.

“The great phenomenon of the year,” observed the conservative Republican Boston Advertiser in August 1862, “is the terrible intensity which this [emancipation] resolution has acquired. A year ago men might have faltered at the thought of proceeding to this extremity in any event. The majority do not now seek it, but, we say advisedly, they are in great measure prepared for it.” Senator John Sherman wrote from Ohio to his brother, General Sherman: “You can form no conception of the change of opinion here as to the Negro Question…. I am prepared for one to meet the broad issue of universal emancipation.” Oliver Johnson thought “the slowness and the stupidity of the President are very trying, but the constantly improving state of the public mind gives me hope, or at least keeps me from despair.”²⁸

Lincoln felt the pressure. On July 12 he summoned the congressmen and senators from the border slave states to the White House and pleaded with them to accept his offer of compensated emancipation. If they delayed much longer “the institution in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion.” When he repudiated General Hunter’s proclamation, Lincoln continued, “I gave dissatisfaction, if not offence, to many whose support the country can not afford to lose. And this is not the end of it. The pressure, in this direction is still upon me, and is increasing. By conceding what I now ask, you can relieve me.” The border state representatives thought it over for two days, and on July 14 a majority of them sent a reply rejecting Lincoln’s appeal. Eight days later the president submitted the first draft of an emancipation proclamation to his cabinet, but was persuaded by Seward to withhold it until Union arms won a victory.²⁹ Congress felt the pressure too, and on July 17 it passed the second Confiscation Act, declaring all slaves of rebel masters “forever free” as soon as they came within Union lines. But abolitionists no longer considered a confiscation act sufficient. In the first place the emancipation clause of the act was buried in the middle of several paragraphs of dry legal language. Secondly, the law freed only one, a dozen, or a hundred slaves at a time, as they came within Union lines. Abolitionists desired a bold and sweeping edict declaring all slaves immediately free and proclaiming to the world that the North was fighting for universal freedom. Finally, abolitionists realized that lengthy litigation would be necessary to determine whether each individual slaveowner had been engaged in rebellion under the terms of the law, and whether, therefore, his slaves were actually freed by the act. Maria Weston Chapman expressed the opinion of most abolitionists when she called the Confiscation Act “an Emancipation bill with clogs on.”30

Moreover, to the public eye it appeared that Lincoln had no intention of enforcing the act. Abolitionists pointed out that the law would remain a dead letter unless antislavery generals were appointed to important commands. Lincoln appointed few antislavery generals to important commands; instead on July 11 he named General Henry Halleck, who had tried to exclude fugitive slaves from his lines while in command of the Department of the West, as general in chief of the United States Army. After passage of the Confiscation Act, abolitionists hoped for a ringing proclamation from the president ordering his generals to put the law into effect.³¹ But nothing of the kind was forthcoming. The administration “is blind as a bat to its true line of policy,” cried Garrison in despair. “Stumbling, halting, prevaricating, irresolute, weak, besotted,” were the only words he could find to describe Lincoln’s course.³²

In a speech at Abington, Massachusetts, on August 1 Wendell Phillips released his pent-up frustration in a savage attack on the administration. “I do not believe in the government,” he said. “I do not believe this government has got either vigor or a purpose. It drifts with events.” Phillips dismissed Lincoln as “a first-rate second-rate man…. He has not uttered a word which gives even a twilight glimpse of any antislavery purpose. He may be honest,—nobody cares whether the tortoise is honest or not; he has neither insight, nor prevision, nor decision.” McClellan and his proslavery ideas were ruining the country. “I do not say that McClellan is a traitor,” declared Phillips, “but I say this, that if he had been a traitor from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, he could not have served the South better than he has done since he was commander-in-chief (applause); … and almost the same thing may be said of Mr. Lincoln.”33

The speech was denounced by the northern press. “WENDELL PHILLIPS SPOUTING FOUL TREASON,” screamed the New York Herald. One editor claimed that imprisonment of Phillips would be worth 100,000 men to the Union cause. The Philadelphia Press proclaimed that “Wendell Phillips is a traitor in his soul. He differs from Jefferson Davis in this only, that Davis has drawn the sword, while Phillips is effective without it.”³⁴ George Livermore, Massachusetts Republican, wrote to Sumner on August 10: “Cannot you have influence with some of Wendell Phillips’ friends and have him sent to a madhouse before he is arrested as a traitor? … If he is sane, the prison is too good for him; if crazy, have him gently treated but not suffered to go at large.” Most abolitionists sprang to Phillips’ defense. But some of them regretted the severity of the speech. “I disapprove & regret [the course] of W. Phillips,” wrote John Jay. “The President is to be sustained by us as far as possible, & we are not to throw away our influence over him & give him up to our opponents.”³⁵

Phillips came to his own defense in a letter to the New York Tribune. He denied that he was disloyal or that he was still a disunionist at heart. He fervently believed in the Union with freedom. “But government and the Union are one thing. This administration is quite another. Whether the administration will ever pilot us through our troubles, I have serious doubts: that it never will, unless it changes its present policy, I am quite certain.” Phillips believed that he must “educate, arouse, and mature a public opinion … by frankly and candidly criticizing [the administration’s] present policy…. Such criticism is always every thinking man’s duty. War excuses no man from this duty: least of all now, when a change of public sentiment to lead the administration to and support it in a new policy, is our only hope of saving the Union.” If he were in the Senate, said Phillips, he would refuse to vote the administration a dollar until it proclaimed emancipation. “My criticism is not, like that of The Boston Courier and its kindred, meant to paralyze the Administration, but to goad it to more activity and vigor.”36 Phillips’ letter seemed to achieve its desired effect. At any rate the Republican press ceased to assail him and resumed its demand for an emancipation policy—the same demand Phillips was making.

Sydney Gay was not having an easy time as managing editor of the Tribune in the summer of 1862. His boss, Greeley, was prone to sudden whims and was becoming increasingly impatient with Lincoln and talking of issuing some kind of public ultimatum for emancipation. Gay desired emancipation as much or more than Greeley, but wanted to keep the Tribune an administration paper and avoid extreme anti-Lincoln criticism. Letters from impatient Republicans denouncing Lincoln were coming into the Tribune every day, and on July 30 Gay sent a private note to the president, enclosing a typical letter. These letters evinced “a deep-seated anxiety on the part of the people,” Gay told Lincoln. “I do not publish them because I know they would exercise a most serious influence on the public mind. I cannot, however, justify it to myself that … [you should be] left in ignorance of that which so many thousands of people desire [you to] hear. Taking a middle course, therefore, I send you one letter as a specimen of all the rest.” The letter was from George Rathbun, a prominent Republican and former congressman from upstate New York, who charged that “the President … hangs back, hesitates, & leaves the country to drift…. The people are uneasy, anxious, and suspicious. They begin to fear … that we are trifled with, that there is not & never has been any serious determination to put down the rebels.”37

Upon reading these letters Lincoln immediately telegraphed Gay an invitation to the White House, asking that he bring Rathbun with him. Gay replied that a death in the family would prevent him from coming at once, but promised to come as soon as possible. When he had heard nothing from Gay for eight days, Lincoln telegraphed him again, asking imploringly “When will you come?”³⁸ Gay turned up in Washington the next day, without Rathbun, who had declined to come. Gay had a long and pleasant conversation with the president, and presented the argument for emancipation calmly and firmly. Lincoln regaled the editor with apt anecdotes, but made no promises. Gay left the interview with a favorable impression of the president; Lincoln later told a friend that he considered Gay “a truly good man & a wise man.”³⁹

Lincoln hoped the interview would mollify the Tribune and silence Greeley’s criticisms—he once said that having Greeley “firmly behind me will be as helpful to me as an army of one hundred thousand men”—but from this standpoint his meeting with Gay was a failure. Greeley was not in a mood to be mollified. On August 7 he wrote to Sumner: “Do you remember that old theological book containing this: ‘Chapter One—Hell; Chapter Two—Hell Continued.’ Well, that gives a hint of the way Old Abe ought to be talked to in this crisis.”⁴⁰ Gay tried unsuccessfully to calm his irate colleague. James R. Gilmore, a friend of both Lincoln and Greeley, reported the editor’s intractability to the president, who reluctantly authorized Gilmore to inform Greeley of the draft emancipation proclamation reposing in a White House desk drawer. Gilmore rushed back to New York, but arrived just hours too late; Greeley’s famous “Prayer of Twenty Millions,” demanding of the government an emancipation policy, had already gone to press.41

Wendell Phillips thought Greeley’s Prayer “superb, terrific. If I could rouse myself to envy anybody I could almost envy G. for the power to do it…. Just the man. Just the act.”⁴² Many abolitionists agreed with Phillips, although some, like Gay, probably regretted the timing of the “Prayer.” Lincoln took the unusual step of replying publicly to Greeley’s manifesto. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” wrote the president. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”⁴³

Abolitionist reaction to Lincoln’s reply was mixed. Edmund Quincy wrote that the president’s position was “what we had always believed that it must be.” Abolitionists had never expected Lincoln to interfere with slavery in the states except as a military necessity to preserve the Union. “A President of the United States, under an oath to support the Constitution, is not to be expected to act upon motives of mere morality and humanity,” wrote Quincy with perhaps a trace of irony. Abolitionists, however, believed that Lincoln had been too slow to recognize the military necessity that now urgently demanded an emancipation policy. “The President has tried ‘to save the Union without freeing any slave,’ and has failed; is it not time to see what effect ‘freeing some,’ if not ‘all,’ would have?”⁴⁴

Most abolitionists probably agreed with Quincy. Gay told Lincoln that “your letter to Mr. Greeley has infused new hope among us…. I think the general impression is that … you mean presently to announce that the destruction of Slavery is the price of our salvation. The loyal North longs to hear that word from you.” Phillips, however, did not agree. Lincoln “won’t be flattered,” thought Phillips; “he can only be frightened and bullied into the right policy.” Admitting that most Boston abolitionists concurred with Gay, Phillips nevertheless considered Lincoln’s reply to Greeley “the most disgraceful document that ever came from the head of a free people.” A Vermont abolitionist thought the reply proved that Lincoln regarded the slavery question as “one of mere policy.” “Was ever a more heartless policy announced? … With the President public policy is everything, humanity and justice nothing.”45 But the very nature of the presidency compelled Lincoln to proceed more cautiously than radicals desired. The multitude of conflicting pressures on the president and the crushing responsibilities of the war forced him to base his actions primarily on “public policy.”

In the early days of September a sense of despondency settled heavily upon the northern people. General Pope’s loss of the second Battle of Bull Run was a fearful blow. “The war is upon us like a dead weight,” wrote Robert Collyer, a Unitarian minister and abolitionist from Chicago. “Surely we cannot go much longer as we are—God help us.” Lincoln seemed to be further away from emancipation than ever. On September 13 he told a delegation of Chicago clergymen that an emancipation proclamation would do no more good than “the Pope’s bull against the comet.”⁴⁶ “I am growing more and more skeptical as to the ‘honesty’ of Lincoln,” wrote Garrison. “He is nothing better than a wet rag.” Frederick Douglass expressed his “ineffable disgust” with the president’s conduct. Gerrit Smith could only lament: “Our poor, guilty, wretched, wicked nation! Very faint is my hope that it will be restored.”⁴⁷

From depths of despondency the abolitionist mood was suddenly catapulted to heights of joy by Lincoln’s unexpected issuance of a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22. On September 17 McClellan had turned back Lee’s invasion of Maryland at Sharpsburg, and seizing upon this as the victory or which he had waited, the president issued his Proclamation five days later. On January 1, 1863, all slaves in rebellious states would be declared “forever free”; loyal slave states and any rebellious states which returned to the Union before that time would be exempt from the terms of the edict. Lincoln also promised to present to Congress in December a plan for the gradual, compensated abolition of slavery in loyal states.⁴⁸

“I have been in a bewilderment of joy ever since yesterday morning,” Theodore Tilton informed Garrison on the day after publication of the Proclamation. “I am half crazy with enthusiasm! I would like to have seen whether you laughed or cried on reading it: I did both.” Frederick Douglass happily declared, “We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree. Border State influence, and the influence of half-loyal men, have been exerted and have done their worst. The end of these two influences is implied in this proclamation.” Both Gerrit Smith and Moncure Conway cried, “God Bless Abraham Lincoln!” And Wendell Phillips echoed dryly, “How decent Abe grows.”49

A few abolitionists were disappointed by the conservative, conditional nature of the Proclamation. “How cold the President’s Proclamation is!” shivered Sallie Holley of Rochester. George Cheever denounced it as “nothing but a bribe to win back the slaveholding states to loyalty by giving and confirming to them the privilege of tyrannizing over millions of their fellow creatures in perpetual slavery.” Garrison’s first reaction upon reading the Proclamation was one of disappointment. He had hoped that an emancipation edict, when forthcoming, would be immediate and complete; instead Lincoln had confined it to rebellious states, given them one hundred days of grace, and coupled it with his favorite scheme of gradual, compensated emancipation. “The President can do nothing for freedom in a direct manner, but only by circumlocution and delay,” complained Garrison. “How prompt was his action against Frémont and Hunter!”⁵⁰

Nevertheless Garrison publicly rejoiced in the Proclamation as “an important step in the right direction, and an act of immense historic consequence.” Governor John Andrew declared, “It is a poor document, but a mighty act.” Samuel May, Jr., would not “stop to criticize now, & say this freedom ought (as indeed it ought) to have been made immediate, that it ought to have been proclaimed (as it ought) seventeen months ago…. I cannot stop to dwell on these. Joy, gratitude, thanksgiving, renewed hope and courage fill my soul.”51

The principal worry of abolitionists between September and January was whether Lincoln could withstand the strong conservative pressure for modification or revocation of the Proclamation. The Democratic press unleashed a savage attack on the edict, calling it unconstitutional, dictatorial, and ruinous. Democrats made opposition to emancipation one of their main issues in the 1862 congressional elections, appealing to northern race prejudice and to the white workingman’s fear of low-wage competition from free Negroes.⁵²

Abolitionists were distressed by Democratic electoral victories in several key states, but were encouraged by Lincoln’s removal of the conservative McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac on November 7. “The removal of McClellan lights up the whole horizon,” wrote Oliver Johnson. “From all that I can learn, the President is not contemplating any change of policy, so far as emancipation is concerned, in consequence of the result of the recent election. The removal of McClellan tends to show that … he is satisfied, at last, that all attempts to conciliate the proslavery Democracy are vain.”⁵³

But Lincoln’s annual message to Congress on December 1 dealt a sharp blow to abolitionist confidence. The president urged adoption of a constitutional amendment granting compensation to any state that undertook to abolish slavery by 1900. Slaves freed “by the chances of the war” would remain “forever free”; but all others would remain slaves until they were gradually emancipated by the respective states or individual owners.54

Abolitionists were astounded by this proposal. “We cannot refrain from expressing our astonishment at the folly and infatuation evinced in his plan for buying up Southern treason ‘in lots to suit purchasers,’ ” declared Garrison in the Liberator. Did this message mean that Lincoln had decided against issuing his emancipation proclamation on January 1 after all? The New York World and Herald gleefully said that it meant just that, and many abolitionists feared they were right. “If the President means to carry out his edict of freedom on the New Year,” asked Moncure Conway, editor of the newly established Boston Commonwealth, “what is all this stuff about gradual emancipation?”⁵⁵

As the decisive New Year’s Day drew near, abolitionists grew tense and anxious. They asked each other apprehensively whether Lincoln would remain true to his promise. They wrote to friends in Washington for information on the president’s intentions.⁵⁶ Oliver Johnson did not doubt that Lincoln would “fulfill the promise of Sept. 22, but I presume he will do it in such a cold, formal, uninspiring way, that we shall feel ourselves under a wet blanket…. ‘Old Abe’ seems utterly incapable of a really grand action.” Garrison observed on December 26 that “it seems to be the general conviction” that Lincoln would stand by his Proclamation, “though we shall not be greatly surprised if he substitute some other project for it. A man so manifestly without moral vision … cannot be safely relied upon in any emergency.” After a talk with Lincoln, Charles Sumner assured his abolitionist friends that “the Presdt. is firm. He says that he would not stop the Procltn. if he could, & he could not if he would.”⁵⁷

On New Year’s Day 1863, Boston’s Negro and white abolitionists crowded into Tremont Temple to celebrate the expected proclamation of freedom. The festivities began gaily enough, but as speech followed speech and no news of the Proclamation came over the telegraph wires, doubt began to gnaw at the hearts of the assembled crusaders. Perhaps Sumner had been misinformed; perhaps Lincoln would not issue the great edict of freedom after all! In the evening several speakers, climaxed by Frederick Douglass, tried to entertain and distract the audience while they waited for the Proclamation. But a general restlessness, a mood almost of despair, began to pervade the hall. Just as Douglass himself was about to succumb to despondency a messenger ran through the door shouting “It is coming! It is on the wires.” “A thrill shot through the crowd; the enthusiasm was intense,” wrote an eyewitness the next day. When the complete Proclamation was received, Charles Wesley Slack (a young white abolitionist who had led the fight in the Massachusetts legislature to abolish segregated schools) read it aloud to the crowd. As he finished, the cheers, applause, and yells erupted into pandemonium for several minutes. “The people seemed almost wild with delight,” wrote the eyewitness. “It is the dawning of a New Day!”58

All over the North, and in Union-occupied portions of the South, similar jubilee meetings took place. It was a day of joy and thanksgiving, the climax of the first phase of the abolitionist movement. In the first flush of enthusiasm, abolitionists lavished lofty praise on Lincoln and his Proclamation. “This is a great Era! A sublime period in History! The Proclamation is grand. The President has done nobly,” exclaimed the Reverend R. C. Waterston, a Massachusetts abolitionist and official of the Church Anti-Slavery Society. “Hurrah! Hosanna! Hallelujah! Laudamus! Nunc dimittis! Jubilate! Amen!” cried the usually restrained Maria Weston Chapman. Garrison hailed the Proclamation as “a great historic event, sublime in its magnitude, momentous and beneficent in its far-reaching consequences.”⁵⁹

As they studied the Proclamation more closely, however, abolitionists found one important shortcoming: it applied only to the Confederate states, and of these Tennessee and parts of Louisiana and Virginia were exempted “for the present.” The executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society accused Lincoln of being “derelict in his duty in exempting any part of the slave states, or any portion of the slave population.” Most abolitionists, however, were inclined to be lenient on this point; they noted that Lincoln had exempted certain portions of the Confederacy only “for the present,” and that slavery was doomed in the border states anyway. “I regret, of course, that the Act was not universal,” wrote Tilton. “But Providence means to supplement it de facto, by adding the omitted states in good time.”60

Some nonabolitionist critics laughed at the Proclamation as a brutum fulmen, a harmless threat. They pointed out that it “emancipated” only those slaves beyond the power of the federal government, and exempted those within Union lines. This was true, replied abolitionists, but the Proclamation constituted a promise of freedom to all slaves in nonexempt rebel states as soon as the Confederacy was conquered. Edmund Quincy admitted that actual physical emancipation could only be accomplished by the Union army as it advanced southward; but news of the Proclamation would “not only spread with immense rapidity over every portion of the South, but [would] … exercise everywhere a moral influence mightily efficacious for the freedmen, and against the slaveholder.” William Robinson observed dryly: “That old Declaration of July 4, 1776, remained a ridiculous brutum fulmen for seven years. No doubt many a mad wag among the Tories of that day had his jeer at it, comparing it to the Pope’s bull against the comet.”⁶¹

January 1, 1863, was the climax of the drive for emancipation. But the events of the next two years constituted an important anticlimax. There were still many obstacles to be overcome before the decision to abolish slavery was secure beyond recall. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, colonel of the first regiment of freed slaves enlisted in the Civil War, feared a reaction from the onsweeping revolution of emancipation. “Sometimes I feel anxious about the ultimate fate of these poor [Negro] people,” he confided to his journal a week after Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation. “After Hungary, one sees that the right may not triumph, & revolutions may go backward, & the habit of inhumanity in regard to them seems so deeply impressed upon our people, that it is hard to believe in the possibility of anything better. I dare not yet hope that the promise of the President’s proclamation will be kept.”62

Higginson had good reason for his fears. Since the summer of 1862 the antiemancipation “Copperhead” movement had grown alarmingly. Capitalizing on northern war-weariness, “Copper-headism” reached a peak of strength in the winter and spring of 1863 when the Army of the Potomac, decisively defeated at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, seemed mired in the incompetency of its generals. In order to counter the Copperhead movement, Republicans organized Union Leagues throughout the North in 1863. These societies were virtual adjuncts of the Republican party, and were formed to promote loyalty to the Republican war policy of emancipation and total victory over the South. Many abolitionists belonged to the Union Leagues, and John Jay helped organize Leagues in New York and other cities; he later served as president of the New York League. New York and Boston Republicans established the Loyal Publication Society and the New England Loyal Publication Society to print and distribute thousands of pamphlets, speeches, and editorials calling for loyalty, emancipation, and a vigorous war policy. Several abolitionist speeches were published by these societies.⁶³

The Union capture of Vicksburg and the victory at Gettysburg in July 1863, caused great rejoicing in the North and put a temporary damper on the Copperhead movement. But for abolitionists there was a somber side to Yankee success. Once again northern editors told their readers that the rebellion was on the verge of collapse. There was talk of a peace overture to the Confederacy, and abolitionists feared that the price of peace at this time would be compromise on the issue of slavery. “We are too victorious; I fear more from our victories than our defeats,” wrote Charles Sumner. “If the rebellion should suddenly collapse, Democrats, copperheads, and Seward would insist upon amnesty and the Union, and ‘no question asked about slavery.’ God save us from any such calamity!”64

Radicals and abolitionists asked each other apprehensively whether Lincoln would bow to conservative pressure and modify his Proclamation. The president relieved their anxiety in a public letter of August 26 to James Conkling of Springfield, Illinois. Echoing the war-power arguments of William Whiting, Lincoln affirmed that he possessed full constitutional power to declare military emancipation. He had done so, and he would not retract his action. He had promised freedom to the slaves, “and the promise being made, must be kept.”⁶⁵

Abolitionists praised the letter. “We thank the President for that declaration,” wrote William Goodell in the Principia. “We thank God, and take courage.”⁶⁶ Republican victories in the 1863 elections gave proponents of emancipation another injection of hope. Lincoln provided abolitionists with further cause for rejoicing in his annual message to Congress on December 8, 1863, when he firmly declared that “while I remain in my present position I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation; nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress.” Henry Wright wrote fervently, “God bless thee, Abraham Lincoln! With all my heart I bless thee, in the name of God & Humanity.”⁶⁷ Lincoln’s declaration was an important victory for abolition. The president had refused to succumb to the counter-emancipation pressures exerted during 1863, and had placed himself firmly and irrevocably on the side of freedom.

In the spring of 1863 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had organized the Women’s Loyal National League to promote loyalty and propagandize for emancipation. Abolitionists had been calling for a congressional emancipation act to reinforce Lincoln’s Proclamation, and the Women’s League decided that their main function would be to circulate petitions urging passage of such an act.68

The women hoped to obtain one million signatures to their petition by the end of the 1863-1864 congressional session. This was a lofty goal, far exceeding the number of signatures ever before secured for a single objective in America, but Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony went to work with great energy and optimism. Women abolitionists all over the North rallied to the cause. Senator Sumner cooperated gallantly with the ladies, sending out blank petitions under his frank. The League employed lecturing agents to travel through key areas giving speeches, circulating petitions, and establishing auxiliary societies. By the fall of 1863 the petition campaign was in full swing, but the women were plagued by a shortage of funds. Susan B. Anthony persuaded the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society to lend its resources to the petition campaign. The Society decided to send out an expanded corps of lecturers during the winter of 1863-1864 to supplement the work of the Women’s Loyal National League. One of the Society’s new lecturers was William Andrew Jackson, Jefferson Davis’s former slave and coachman.⁶⁹

Late in 1863 there was a growing conviction that the confiscation acts and the Emancipation Proclamation, although legitimate wartime measures, might become legally inoperative once peace was concluded. To be permanent, therefore, emancipation must be written into the Constitution. Realizing the force of this argument, abolitionists in December 1863, decided to press for a constitutional amendment to abolish and prohibit forever the institution of slavery in the United States. The request for a constitutional amendment was included in all petitions circulated by the antislavery societies after December 1863, and in all. petitions circulated by the Women’s Loyal National League after February 1864.70

By early 1864 2,000 men, women, and children were at work circulating petitions. In February Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton sent the first installment of petitions bearing 100 thousand signatures to Senator Sumner.⁷¹ On February 9 two tall Negroes, symbolizing the struggle for freedom, carried the huge bundles of petitions into the Senate and placed them on Sumner’s desk. The senator rose to speak. “This petition is signed by one hundred thousand men and women, who unite in this unparalleled manner to support its prayer,” he told the Senate. “They are from all parts of the country and every condition of life…. Here they are, a mighty army, one hundred thousand strong, without arms or banners, the advanced guard of a yet larger army.”⁷²

It was clear that the women would come nowhere near their goal of one million signatures. Such a goal was unrealistically high for the resources and womanpower of the League. By the time Congress adjourned in July 1864, the League had sent in petitions bearing nearly 400 thousand signatures. Even though they had not reached their goal of one million, this was an impressive achievement. No other petition for a single objective had ever received so many signatures. Senators Sumner and Henry Wilson assured the League that their petition campaign had been of great assistance in the struggle to secure congressional passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.⁷³

The Senate adopted the Thirteenth Amendment on April 8, 1864, but it failed to obtain the necessary two-thirds majority in the House, which the Republicans controlled by only a bare majority. Most Democrats voted against the Amendment, still hoping to preserve the framework of slavery. Lincoln’s victory in the election of 1864, however, convinced many Democrats that public opinion desired emancipation. Emancipationists had gained control of most of the border slave states and were rapidly extinguishing slavery therein. Enough Democrats changed their votes or abstained from voting in the lame duck session of Congress to enable the House to pass the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31, 1865.74 Ratification by the necessary three-fourths of the states was completed before the end of the year.

Abolitionist influence and prestige continued to climb in the last two years of the war. In January 1863, a friend of General Butler returned from a Wendell Phillips speech and wrote to the general that Phillips had praised Butler’s work in New Orleans. This was an important endorsement, for “Phillips, in these winter months, manufactures a vast amount of popular opinion. No man will speak oftener or to larger audiences in America for the next few months…. These masses in New England and New York and Ohio are reached by men like Phillips who have the public ear in Lyceum Halls.” A Philadelphia abolitionist reported that the antislavery office in that city “has become the resort of a class of men who have hitherto kept from Abolitionists, as dangerous & fanatical, and who now seem surprised to find that the abolitionists have but spoken the words of truth & soberness.” Officials of the Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Relief Association, including some of the city’s leading businessmen, frequently consulted with J. Miller McKim on freedmen’s affairs. They “almost sit at his feet and are eager for the information and experience which only an old Abolitionist can give.”⁷⁵

In the summer of 1863 James Redpath published a book of Phillips’ lectures and speeches. The first printing sold out in four days. The book went through four printings in six months.⁷⁶ When the United States acquired Alaska in 1867 the only English-language book in the territory’s only public library was a copy of Phillips’ speeches.77 In a review of the book the conservative Newbury port Herald (Massachusetts) tried to analyze the reasons for Phillips’ wartime popularity. “He was the foreteller of this day which we have lived to see,” stated the Herald. “Few heard him once; but now many will read him, for his ideas are the popular ones of the day, and he holds the ear of the nation, and his audience embraces continents. Garrison and Phillips have been among the most successful reformers the world has ever known.”⁷⁸

One of the more remarkable events of abolitionist history was the rise of young Anna Dickinson from obscurity to fame as an abolitionist orator second in demand only to Wendell Phillips. Anna Dickinson was born in 1842, eleven years after Garrison had launched the Liberator. She followed in the footsteps of her father, a zealous Quaker abolitionist of Philadelphia. In 1856, at the age of fourteen, Miss Dickinson penned her first contribution to the Liberator. In 1860 she pleasantly surprised the abolitionists by delivering an eloquent speech at a Philadelphia antislavery meeting.⁷⁹ In the spring of 1862 Garrison signed her on as a lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. She made a speaking tour of Rhode Island, and immediately created a sensation. Her rapid-fire manner of delivery, her simple, direct style, her withering sarcasm, and the novelty of a teen-ager attacking political leaders nearly three times her age left audiences gasping and cheering. “We are at a loss to conceive whence sprung this new champion in petticoats of an antislavery war,” wrote a correspondent of the Providence Press in April 1862, “but in sending her forth, her coadjutors have made a wise selection—for, with the tongue of a dozen women, she combines the boldness of forty men.” On April 20 she climaxed her whirlwind tour with a speech before 4,000 eager listeners in Boston’s Music Hall. It was a triumphant success. Afterwards Wendell Phillips told her that he had never been so “gratified and deeply moved by a speech.” Anna Dickinson soon acquired a reputation as the Joan of Arc of the abolitionist crusade. At the age of nineteen she suddenly blossomed forth as one of the most sensational public speakers of the day.80

In March and April 1863, important state elections were scheduled in New Hampshire and Connecticut. Democrats had hopes of recapturing these states and continuing the reaction against the Republicans begun in the 1862 fall elections. In New Hampshire the Democrats nominated a gubernatorial candidate who favored a compromise peace and opposed emancipation. The eyes of the nation were turned toward the Granite State, for a Republican defeat there would be interpreted as a popular rebuke of Lincoln’s emancipation policy. Both parties spent vast amounts of money in the campaign and brought in their best speakers.

The young secretary of the New Hampshire Republican state committee, Benjamin Prescott, had heard Anna Dickinson speak at an antislavery meeting the previous year, and in February 1863, he invited her to speak for the Republicans in the campaign. She accepted, and spoke about twenty times in towns throughout the state. At first the seasoned politicians ridiculed the idea of paying good cash to a twenty-year-old girl stump speaker. But her phenomenal success in the first towns where she spoke soon changed their minds. “We must have Miss Dickinson in our town if possible, for it may be the means of saving us,” wrote one local Republican leader late in the campaign. “A few of our Copperheads heard her at Moultonboro and they are completely shelled out…. Our people say they must have her, or we are ‘stuck in the mud.’ ” The Republicans triumphed narrowly in the election, and many of the state’s Republican newspapers gave Anna chief credit for the victory. If she had spoken in every town in the state, said one journal, the Republican margin would have been greater. The governor-elect praised her efforts. Though it is probable that federal patronage and the furloughing home of soldiers to vote had at least as much to do with the outcome as Anna Dickinson, her personal triumph and soaring fame were nevertheless very gratifying to abolitionists.81

The Connecticut election in April was equally important. The Democrats nominated an antiemancipation peace man for governor and prepared for an all-out effort to elect him. Anna Dickinson entered the campaign on March 25, with only two weeks to go before the election. The Democratic tide was running strongly when she began speaking. After her first speech in Hartford the Connecticut Republican state chairman joyfully wired Prescott: “MISS DICKINSON SPOKE TO A CROWDED HOUSE LAST NIGHT. SHE HAS NO EQUAL IN CONNECTICUT. PEOPLE WILD WITH ENTHUSIASM.”⁸² She spoke all over the state in the next two weeks, creating a sensation. She was so successful that the Republican committee selected her as the speaker for an election eve rally in Hartford, the most important speech of the campaign. The hall was packed three hours before she spoke. Nearly every sentence she uttered was cheered to the echo. One enthusiastic listener remarked the next day: “I am excited. I admit it, I am; it seems as if I was on fire, and everyone else that heard her are about as bad off…. [I] never heard anything that would begin to equal it.”⁸³ The Republican candidate won by 3,000 votes, and both parties gave Anna credit for turning the tide and leading the Republicans to victory. The Republican press was ecstatic in its praise. The state committee paid her $100 for every speech she made, plus $400 for the last speech at Hartford.⁸⁴

Fresh from her triumphs in New Hampshire and Connecticut, Anna Dickinson took New York by storm in early May. Five thousand people crowded into Cooper Union to hear her speak, and she gratified them with a rousing abolitionist address. “The audience at Cooper Union went crazy,” wrote a correspondent of a Connecticut newspaper. “Applause came often and in long-continued storms, hats were swung and handkerchiefs waved and at times the whole house was like a moving, tumultuous sea, flecked with white caps. Never have I seen in New York any speaker achieve such a triumph.”85

In December 1863, a group of more than one hundred Republican congressmen and senators invited Anna Dickinson to deliver an address in the House Chamber. She accepted, and came before an elite assemblage of Washington dignitaries on the evening of January 16, 1864.⁸⁶ President and Mrs. Lincoln were present and joined in a standing ovation accorded the speaker when she had finished. “We have heard wonderful stories of her power to win over seemingly the most confirmed old Hunkers,” reported the correspondent of the Boston Journal after listening to Anna Dickinson’s Washington address, “and can now realize their truth.” The Washington Chronicle declared, “Joan of Arc never was grander, and could not have been better, in her mail of battle, than was this Philadelphia maid in her statesmanlike demand that this war do not cease till slavery lies dead and buried.”⁸⁷

Abolitionists marveled at Anna Dickinson’s phenomenal success. She was not an original thinker; her speeches were little more than a hodgepodge of other people’s ideas. Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass owed their preeminence as orators partly to their original, creative minds; Anna Dickinson owed her success to a staccato-like delivery, a sarcastic wit, a youthful exuberance, the inevitable comparison with Joan of Arc, and the emotional fervor generated by the war itself. Yet her success was not transitory; she remained one of the most popular lecturers in the nation for a decade after the war. She was a valuable asset to the abolitionist movement for many years.

Abolitionist lecturers were drawing larger crowds than any other speakers in the winter of 1863-1864. In January the Independent noted that most lectures had been financial failures in New York during the season, but that the appearances of Phillips, Douglass, and Dickinson had drawn huge crowds and made large profits. Douglass reported in February that “I am, this winter, doing more with my voice than with my pen. I am heard with more than usual attention.” The Democratic Hartford Times remarked sourly after the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society that “it is deemed a sufficiently important matter, now, to telegraph all over the country the sayings and doings of these chronic fanatics and sworn enemies of the Union, though they and their treasonable opinions were held, four years ago, in silent abhorrence by the very men who now strive to be foremost in the race to do them reverence.”88

In February 1864, the New York Times, spokesman of middle-of-the-road Republicanism, paid an unwitting compliment to the abolitionists. “It is extraordinary how completely the idea of gradual emancipation has been dissipated from the public mind everywhere, by the progress of events,” commented the Times. “Before the rebellion, it was accounted the very extreme of Anti-Slavery fanaticism to believe in the possibility of immediate emancipation without social ruin…. Even when it had become a generally accepted fact that Slavery must come to an end, the idea still adhered that the emancipation must be gradual in order to be safe.” But the pressures of war changed all that, and “all these gradual methods are now hardly more thought of than if they had been obsolete a century.” The “very extreme of Anti-Slavery fanaticism” had become the accepted policy of the American nation, and as prophets of this policy abolitionists found themselves respected and influential for the first time in their lives. “All true reformers have been ridiculed & despised in their own day,” observed Lewis Tappan. “We are coming out of the slanderous valley sooner than most reformers have done, for we have lived to hear old opponents say ‘I was wrong.’ ”⁸⁹

Most abolitionists reacted with qualified jubilation to the Emancipation Proclamation and the subsequent events culminating in the Thirteenth Amendment. Emancipation was only the penultimate climax of their crusade for freedom and equality. Freedom had been achieved; but only an incomplete “paper” freedom. Emancipation had proceeded not from an overwhelming conviction on the part of the American people of its justice and humanity, but from “military necessity.” The massive job of aiding the transition of 4 million bondsmen to a new life of freedom, and of persuading white America to accept the Negro as an equal, still lay in the future. Abolitionists could not yet retire from the conflict; it was still too early to celebrate the final victory.

1 Duvall to Gerrit Smith, Dec. 15, 1861, Smith Papers, NYPL; Foster’s statement quoted in Liberator, Jan. 31, 1862.

2 Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures, and Letters, 1st Series (Boston, 1863), 440; William Lloyd Garrison, The Abolitionists, and Their Relation to the War (Pulpit and Rostrum, numbers 26 and 27, New York, 1862), 31, 28, 46. On December 13, 1861, Garrison removed the maxim, “The United States Constitution is a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell” from the head of the first page of the Liberator and replaced it with the command, “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land, to all the inhabitants thereof.”

3 Liberator, Jan. 31, 1862; N.A.S. Standard, Feb. 15, 1862. See also S. B. Anthony to E. C. Stanton, Feb. 9, 1862, Stanton Papers, LC.

4 S. S. Foster to George Thompson, Mar. 16, 1862, Foster Papers, AAS; Pillsbury to Elizabeth B. Chace, Mar. 24, 1862, in Lillie C. Wyman and Arthur C. Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace (2 vols., Boston, 1914), I, 229.

5 Oliver Johnson to Garrison, Apr. 18, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL; Samuel May, Jr., to E. B. Chace, Apr. 22, 1862, in Wyman and Wyman, Chace, I, 236.

6 Johnson to Garrison, Apr. 10, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL.

7 Liberator, May 16, 1862.

8 Liberator, June 6, 1862.

9 Samuel May, Jr., to Richard Webb, June 30, 1862, Samuel May, Jr. Papers, BPL.

10 The Pine and Palm, Nov. 23, 1861; Charles W. Denison to Garrison, Feb. 24, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL.

11 Gerrit Smith to Wendell P. Garrison, Jan. 16, 1862, Garrison Papers, RU; Gerrit Smith to Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Apr. 16, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL; Liberator, May 9, 1862.

12 Douglass’ Monthly, Mar. 1862.

13 Oliver Johnson to Samuel May, Jr., July 31, 1861, Johnson Papers, VHS; Frank Preston Stearns, The Life and Public Services of George Luther Stearns (Philadelphia, 1907), 274; Oliver Johnson and Theodore Tilton to Garrison, Sept. 25, 1862, Weld to Garrison, Oct. 8, 31, 1862, Johnson to Garrison, Apr. 9, 1863, Garrison Papers, BPL; Garrison to Weld, Apr. 6, 1863, Weld Papers, LC.

14 For examples of northern editorial assurances that the rebellion was crumbling, see the Springfield Republican, Feb. 2, 8, 27, 1862, and the New York Tribune, Feb. 5, 1862.

15 Higginson, Diary, entry of Feb. ?, 1862, Higginson to Louisa Higginson, Feb. 21, 1862, Higginson Papers, HU; Charles Sumner to S. H. Gay, Feb. 18, 1862, Gay Papers, CU; George Cheever to Elizabeth C. Washburn, Apr. 4, 1862, Cheever Papers, AAS.

16 Shaw to Garrison, May 16, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL.

17 T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals (Madison, Wise., 1941), 137-38; Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (9 vols., New Brunswick, N.J., 1955), V, 222-23.

18 Principia, May 22, 1862; Liberator, May 23, 1862.

19 Liberator, June 6, 1862; Anna Dickinson to Susan Dickinson, May 27, 1862, Dickinson Papers, LC.

20 May to Richard Webb, May 27, 1862, Samuel May, Jr., Papers, BPL; see also Independent, May 22, 1862.

21 Independent, May 29, 1862; Liberator, June 6, 1862.

22 Cong. Globe, 37 Cong., 2 Sess., 2,363; Liberator, June 6, 1862; Cheever to Elizabeth C. Washburn, June 3, 1862, Cheever Papers, AAS.

23 Phillips to Sumner, June 7, 29, 1862, Sumner Papers, HU.

24 Garrison to Helen Garrison, June 9, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL; New York Tribune, June 21, 1862; Basler, ed., Collected Works of Lincoln, V, 278-79.

25 Jay to Sumner, July 4, 16, 1862, Sumner Papers, HU; Jay to S. P. Chase, July 3, 1862, Chase Papers, LC.

26 Independent, July 10, 24, 31, Aug. 14, 1862.

27 Alma Lutz, Susan B. Anthony, Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian (Boston, 1959), 95-96; Catherine H. Birney, The Grimké Sisters: Sarah and Angelina Grimké, The First American Women Advocates of Abolition and Women’s Rights (Boston and New York, 1885), 285.

28 Boston Advertiser, Aug. 20, 1862; John Sherman to William T. Sherman, Aug. 24, 1862, in Rachel S. Thorndike, ed., The Sherman Letters, Correspondence between General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891 (London, 1894), 156-57; Oliver Johnson to Samuel May, Jr., July 25, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL.

29 Basler, ed., Collected Works of Lincoln, V, 317-19, 336-37.

30 U.S. Statutes at Large, XII, 589-92; M. W. Chapman to Anne G. Chapman, July 20, 1862, Weston Papers, BPL. For a discussion of the meaning of the Second Confiscation Act as it applied to slavery, see James G. Randall, Constitutional Problems under Lincoln (New York, 1926), 358-63.

31 Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals, 148-49; New York Tribune, Aug. 6, 13, 1862; N.A.S. Standard, July 26, 1862.

32 Liberator, July 25, 1862.

33 Excerpts of the speech were published in many northern newspapers. It is published in full in Phillips, Speeches, Lectures, and Letters, 1st Series, 448-63.

34 Press reaction to the speech was quoted in the Liberator, Aug. 15, 22, 1862; Philadelphia Press, Aug. 11, 1862.

35 Livermore to Sumner, Aug. 10, 1862, Jay to Sumner, Aug. 7, 1862, Sumner Papers, HU.

36 Phillips to the editor of the New York Tribune, Aug. 16, 1862, in the Tribune, Aug. 20.

37 Gay to Lincoln, July 30, 1862, Lincoln Papers, LC, copy also in Gay Papers, CU; George Rathbun to the editor of the New York Tribune, July 28, 1862, Gay Papers, CU.

38 Lincoln to Gay, Aug. 1, 9, in Basler, ed., Collected Works of Lincoln, V, 353, 364; Gay to Lincoln, Aug. 1, 1862, Lincoln Papers, LC.

39 Louis M. Starr, Bohemian Brigade: Civil War Newsmen in Action (New York, 1954), 126-27; Lincoln’s statement quoted in H. L. Stevens to Gay, Sept. 7, 1862, Gay Papers, CU.

40 William H. Hale, Horace Greeley, Voice of the People (Collier Books edition; New York, 1961), 268-69.

41 Starr, Bohemian Brigade, 127-28; James R. Gilmore, Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War (Boston, 1898), 76-84.

42 Phillips to Gay, Sept. 2, 1862, Gay Papers, CU.

43 Lincoln to Greeley, Aug. 22, 1862, published in New York Tribune, Aug. 25.

44 N.A.S. Standard, Aug. 30, 1862.

45 Gay to Lincoln, undated, but probably about Aug. 26, 1862, Lincoln Papers, LC; Phillips to Gay, Sept. 2, 1862, Gay Papers, CU; “J. S.” to Garrison, Sept. 1, 1862, in Liberator, Sept. 5.

46 John H. Holmes, The Life and Letters of Robert Collyer (2 vols., New York, 1917), I, 288; Basler, ed., Collected Works of Lincoln, V, 420.

47 Garrison to Oliver Johnson, Sept. 9, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL; Frederick Douglass to Gerrit Smith, Sept. 8, 1862, Smith Papers, SU; Smith to Garrison, Sept. 20, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL.

48 Basler, ed., Collected Works of Lincoln, V, 433-36.

49 Tilton to Garrison, Sept. 24, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL; Douglass’ Monthly, Oct. 1862; Gerrit Smith to Lincoln, Oct. 9, 1862, Lincoln Papers, LC; Conway in Commonwealth, Sept. 27, 1862; Phillips to Elizabeth Gay, Sept. 23, 1862, Gay Papers, CU.

50 Sallie Holley to A. K. Foster, Sept. 30, 1862, Foster Papers, Worcester Historical Society; George Cheever to Elizabeth C. Washburn, Sept. 29, 1862, Cheever Papers, AAS; Garrison to Fanny Garrison, Sept. 25, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL.

51 Liberator, Sept. 26, 1862; John Andrew to Albert G. Browne, Sept. 23, 1862, in Henry G. Pearson, The Life of John A. Andrew (2 vols., Boston, 1904), II, 51; May to Richard Webb, Sept. 23, 1862, Samuel May, Jr., Papers, BPL.

52 William G. Cochrane, “Freedom without Equality: A Study of Northern Opinion and the Negro Issue, 1861-1870,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1957, 46-49. See also New York World, Sept. 24, 1862; and John Jay to S. P. Chase, Sept. 27, 1862, Chase Papers, LC.

53 Johnson to Garrison, Nov. 10, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL.

54 Basler, ed., Collected Works of Lincoln, V, 529-37.

55 Liberator, Dec. 5, 1862; Commonwealth, Dec. 6, 1862.

56 Gerrit Smith to Garrison, Dec. 13, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL; William Goodell to Sumner, Dec. 24, 1862, S. E. Sewall to Sumner, Dec. 28, 1862, Sumner Papers, HU; N.A.S. Standard, Dec. 27, 1862; Principia, Jan. 1, 1863.

57 Johnson to Garrison, Dec. 27, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL; Liberator, Dec. 26, 1862; Charles Sumner to S. G. Howe, Dec. 28, 1862, Sumner-Howe Correspondence, HU.

58 Liberator, Jan. 9, 16, 1863; N.A.S. Standard, Jan. 10, 1863; eyewitness account quoted from R. C. Waterston to Charles Sumner, Jan. 2, 1863, Sumner Papers, HU.

59 Waterston to Sumner, Jan. 2, 1863, Sumner Papers, HU; M. W. Chapman to A. H. Gibbons, Jan. 5, 1863, in Sarah H. Emerson, Life of Abby Hopper Gibbons (2 vols., New York, 1896-97), I, 384; Liberator, Jan. 2, 1863.

60 Liberator, Jan. 16, 1863; Tilton to Garrison, Jan. 9, 1863, Garrison Papers, BPL. See also Principia, Jan. 8, 1863; J. F. Clarke to N. A. Staples, Jan. 1, 1863, Clarke Papers, HU; Lewis Tappan to Sumner, Jan. 9, 1863, Sumner Papers, HU; and N.A.S. Standard, Jan. 10, 1863.

61 Quincy in N.A.S. Standard, Jan. 10, 1863; Robinson in Springfield Republican, Jan. 3, 1863.

62 Higginson, Journal, entry of Jan. 8, 1863, Higginson Papers, HU.

63 John Jay to Charles Sumner, Mar. 18, 1863, Sumner Papers, HU; Jay to S. P. Chase, Sept. 13, Oct. 6, 1863, Chase Papers, LC; Frank Freidel, “The Loyal Publication Society: A Pro-Union Propaganda Agency,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXVI (1939), 191-210; George W. Smith, “Broadsides for Freedom; Civil War Propaganda in New England,” New England Quarterly, XXI (Sept. 1948), 291-312.

64 Sumner to John Bright, July 21, 1863, in E. L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner (4 vols., Boston, 1877-94), IV, 143. See also Sumner to E. L. Pierce, July 29, 1863, ibid., 142; George Cheever to Elizabeth C. Washburn, July 7, Aug. 5, 1863, Cheever Papers, AAS; Cheever to S. P. Chase, Aug. 7, 1863, Chase Papers, LC.

65 Basler, ed., Works of Lincoln, VI, 406-10.

66 Principia, Sept. 10, 1863.

67 Basler, ed., Works of Lincoln, VII, 51; Henry Wright to Lincoln, Dec. 16, 1863, Lincoln Papers, LC.

68 N.A.S. Standard, May 23, 30, June 6, 1863; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, et al., History of Woman Suffrage (6 vols., New York, 1881-1922), II, 50-78.

69 Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 109-10; Lillie B. C. Wyman and Arthur Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace (2 vols., Boston, 1914), I, 223-24; Ida Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (3 vols., Indianapolis, 1898-1908), I, 232-34; E. C. Stanton to Fanny Garrison, May 25, 1863, Garrison Papers, BPL; Mattie Griffith to Mary Estlin, July 27, 1863, copy in Weston Papers, BPL; S. B. Anthony to E. C. Stanton, Oct. 10, 1863, Gerrit Smith to E. C. Stanton, Oct. 23, 1863, Stanton Papers, LC; Giles Stebbins to Gerrit Smith, Oct. 6, 1863, Mar. 22, 1864, Smith Papers, SU; Commonwealth, Oct. 2, 30, 1863; Liberator, Oct. 2, 16, Nov. 13, Dec. 11, 25, 1863, Jan. 1, 8, Mar. 4, June 3, 1864; N.A.S. Standard, Oct. 31, Nov. 21, Dec. 5, 1863, Apr. 9, 1864.

70 Samuel May, Jr., to Garrison, Dec. 28, 1863, Garrison Papers, BPL; Liberator, Jan. 15, 1864; S. B. Anthony to Charles Sumner, Mar. 1, 1864, Sumner Papers, HU.

71 Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, II, 78-87; S. B. Anthony and E. C. Stanton to Sumner, Feb. 4, 1864, Sumner Papers, HU.

72 Cong. Globe, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., 536.

73 Liberator, Mar. 11, 1864; Independent, Apr. 7, 1864; New York Tribune, May 17, 1864; N.A.S. Standard, May 28, June 4, 1864; Harper, Anthony, I, 238.

74 Cong. Globe, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., 1,490, 2,995, 2 Sess., 531.

75 J. O. A. Griffin to Butler, Jan. 18, 1863, in Jesse A. Marshall, ed., Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War (5 vols., Norwood, Mass., 1917), II, 580; Abby Kimber to R. D. Webb, Feb. 22, 1863, Garrison Papers, BPL.

76 Liberator, July 24, 1863; Frank Sanborn to Moncure Conway, Sept. 16, 1863, Conway Papers, CU. In 1863 the enterprising James Redpath formed a publishing company and printed several antislavery books to help promote the cause of emancipation. Books published by him included Phillips’ lectures; William Wells Brown’s The Black Man; a biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture; Augustin Cochin’s Results of Emancipation and Results of Slavery; and Louisa May Alcott’s first book, Hospital Sketches. See Madeleine B. Sterne, Imprints on History: Book Publishers and American Frontiers (Bloomington, Ind., 1956), 76-83.

77 N.A.S. Standard, Feb. 8, 1868.

78 Newbury port Herald, quoted in Liberator, Dec. 4, 1863.

79 Giraud Chester, Embattled Maiden: The Life of Anna Dickinson (New York, 1951), 10-25; Philadelphia Press, Oct. 27, 1860; N.A.S. Standard, Nov. 2, 1860; J. Miller McKim to Samuel May, Jr., Nov. 22, 1860, Garrison to Helen Garrison, Oct. 29, 1861, Garrison Papers, BPL.

80 Chester, Embattled Maiden, 32-38; Anna Dickinson to Garrison, Mar. 16, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL; Garrison to Anna Dickinson, Mar. 22, 27, 30, Apr. 3, 1862, Charles W. Slack to Anna Dickinson, May 14, 1862, Dickinson Papers, LC; the statement by the Providence Press was quoted in the Liberator, Apr. 18, 1862; other press comment quoted in the same issue; Wendell Phillips’ remark is quoted in Anna Dickinson to Susan Dickinson, Apr. 28, 1862, Dickinson Papers, LC.

81 Chester, Embattled Maiden, 45-49; Prescott to Anna Dickinson, Jan. 2, 28, 29, Feb. 1, 10, 11, 12, 15, 25, 26, 27, 1863, Dickinson Papers, LC. Clippings of press comment in the Dickinson Papers, LC. The statement by the local Republican leader was quoted in Chester, Embattled Maiden, 48.

82 Chester, Embattled Maiden, 52.

83 ibid., 58.

84 ibid., 49-59, is an excellent account of Miss Dickinson’s part in the Connecticut campaign. See also the press clippings in the Dickinson Papers, LC.

85 Chester, Embattled Maiden, 60-63; Liberator, May 8, 1863; N.A.S. Standard, May 9, 16, 1863. The statement by the Connecticut newspaper correspondent is quoted in Chester, Embattled Maiden, 61.

86 Susan Dickinson to Anna Dickinson, Dec. 23, 1863, Whitelaw Reid to Anna Dickinson, Dec. 16, 1863, Dickinson to Reid, Jan. 7, 1864, Dickinson Papers, LC.

87 Boston Journal, quoted in Liberator, Feb. 19, 1864; Washington Chronicle, Jan. 18, 1864.

88 Independent, Jan. 21, 1864; Douglass to anonymous, Feb. 17, 1864, in Philip Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (4 vols., New York, 1950-55), III, 40; Hartford Times, quoted in Liberator, Feb. 26, 1864.

89 New York Times, Feb. 25, 1864; Lewis Tappan to Gerrit Smith, Oct. 3, 1864, Smith Papers, SU.