EMANCIPATION BEGUN
When the war began, the absorbing issue at the North was the maintenance
of the Union. The supreme, uniting purpose was the restoration of the
national authority. Slavery had fallen into the background. But it soon
began to come again to the front. Two tendencies existed at the North;
one, to seek the restoration of the old state of things unchanged; the
other, to seize the opportunity of war to put an end to slavery.
The pressure of events raised special questions which must be met. As
soon as Northern armies were on Southern soil, slaves began to take
refuge in the camps, and their masters, loyal in fact or in profession,
followed with a demand for their return. Law seemed on the master's
side; but the use of the army, engaged in such a war, to send slaves
back to bondage, was most repugnant. At first some commanders took one
course, some another. General Butler, a volunteer from Massachusetts,
hit on a happy solution; he declared that slaves, being available to the
enemy for hostile purposes, were like arms, gunpowder, etc., "contraband
of war," and could not be reclaimed. The stroke was welcomed with cheers
and laughter; and "contraband" became a catchword. Congress, in March,
1862, forbade the army and navy to return fugitives.
General Fremont was in command in Missouri. He was ardent and
uncompromising, and in August, 1861, he issued a drastic proclamation,
declaring the State under martial law, threatening death to all taken
with arms in their hands, and giving freedom to the slaves of all
rebels. The President remonstrated by letter against this too heroic
surgery, and when Fremont declined to modify his order, used his
authority to cancel it. The public reception of the incident marked and
heightened the growing division of sentiment; the conservatives and
especially the border State men, were alarmed and indignant at Fremont's
action, while he became at once a favorite of the strong anti-slavery
men.
This divergence among his own supporters added another to the
complications which beset Lincoln and taxed him to the utmost. He had
extraordinary tact and shrewdness in managing men, and in dealing with
tangled situations. He showed this power toward his Cabinet officers,
who included the most various material,--Seward, accomplished,
resourceful, somewhat superficial, but thoroughly loyal to his chief
after he knew him, managing the foreign relations with admirable skill,
and somewhat conservative in his views; Chase, very able as a financier
and jurist, but intensely ambitious of the Presidency, regarded as a
radical as to slavery; Stanton, a great war minister but of harsh and
intractable temper. These men and their colleagues Lincoln handled so
skilfully as to get the best each had to contribute, and keep them and
the political elements they represented in working harmony. No less
successfully did he deal with Congress, guiding it to a great extent,
but acquiescing in occasional defeats and disappointments so patiently
that he disarmed hostility. He kept in closest touch with the common
people; he was accessible to every one, listened to each man's
grievance, remonstrance, or advice; and acquired an instinctive
knowledge of what was in the hearts and minds of the millions.
In his own conduct, his guiding principle was fidelity to his official
duty as he read it in the Constitution and the laws. He felt the
specific, supreme task laid upon him to be the restoration and
maintenance of the Union. And to succeed in that, he knew he must
rightly interpret and enforce the general sentiment and desire of the
loyal people. If he let them become so divided as to no longer act
together, the cause was lost. And to follow any personal opinion or
conviction of his own, in disregard of his official duty, or in defiance
of the popular will, was to betray his trust.
It was under these conditions that Lincoln dealt with slavery. No man
more than he detested the institution, or desired its removal. But he
felt that he had no right to touch it, except as empowered by the
Constitution and the laws, or as guided by the supreme necessity of
saving the nation's life. Beyond that he had no authority. Beyond that,
his position toward slavery must be like that of a President toward, for
example, a system of religion which he believed to be false and
injurious. Be he intensely orthodox, believing infidelity to be the road
to hell,--yet he must not as President, put a straw across the path of
the free-thinker. Be he as heretical as Thomas Jefferson, he must not
as President, any more than did Jefferson, lay a finger on the churches.
Just so did Lincoln feel himself restricted as to slavery,--he could not
touch it, except as the civil laws brought it within his province, or
unless as supreme military commander the laws and necessities of war
brought it within his authority.
Congress soon proceeded to discuss questions about slavery. Sumner, the
foremost leader of the radicals, proposed resolutions, in February,
1862, declaring that the seceded States had by their acts extinguished
their State organizations and relapsed into a territorial condition,
subject only to Congress; and that slavery within them, existing only by
a local authority now defunct, was thus abolished. Congress would take
no such ground as that. But, as within its proper sphere, it abolished
slavery in the District of Columbia, in April, 1862, giving
compensation to owners at a maximum rate of $300 for each slave. And in
the following June, it abolished slavery in all the national
territories,--thus giving full force to the cardinal doctrine of the
Republican party up to the war. But the war had inevitably brought a
more radical issue to the front,--the question of slavery in the States.
Under the name of a confiscation act, Congress passed a law, July 17,
1862, which declared freedom to all slaves of convicted rebels; to
slaves of rebels escaping within the army lines, or captured, or
deserted by their masters; and to all slaves of rebels found in places
captured and occupied by the Union army. This came near to making the
abolition of slavery follow exactly the progress of the Union arms. But,
leaving untouched the slave property of loyalists, it spared the
institution as a system.
Lincoln, in many ways a man of the people by his convictions and
sympathies, in other aspects towered in solitude. He was almost unique
in that he could fight--fight if need were to the death,--with no spark
of hatred in his heart. In the midst of war he was a devoted
peace-lover. To an old friend, though a political opponent, Congressman
D. W. Voorhees, of Indiana, who called on him at the White House, he
said with a pathetic look of anxious pain: "Voorhees, doesn't it seem
strange that I should be here--I, a man who couldn't cut a chicken's
head off,--with blood running all around me?" While he was overseeing
campaigns, selecting and rejecting generals, learning the business of a
commander, keeping touch with all the great matters of administration,
besieged by office-seekers, importuned by people in all manner of
private troubles,--he found intervals in which to devise ways out of the
horrid business of war, ways that might lead both to peace and freedom.
The key of the situation he thought lay largely with the border
States,--Maryland, Missouri and Kentucky,--all of them formally in the
Union, but their population divided, sending recruits to both armies,
and with hopes in the Confederacy that they might be entirely won over.
If they could be bound faster to the Union, if at the same time they
could be helped to make themselves free States,--then might the Union
cause be mightily helped, and at the same time the work of emancipation
be begun. Aiming at this result, Lincoln sent a message to Congress,
March 6, 1862, proposing this resolution: "That the United States ought
to co-operate with any State which may adopt gradual abolishment of
slavery, giving to such State pecuniary aid, to be used by such State,
in its discretion, to compensate for the inconveniences, public and
private, produced by such change of system." He urged this with special
reference to its application in the border States; and, inviting the
Congressional members of these States in a body to the White House, he
pleaded with them earnestly to support the resolution, and apply the
plan. They listened, but were non-committal. Congress received the plan
coolly. The Radicals were little in the humor of compensating
slaveholders, and the Conservatives apprehended a progressive attack on
slavery. But the President's influence triumphed; the resolution passed
in mid-April; and the nation pledged itself to assist compensated
emancipation in any State that would adopt it.
Nothing came of it. The border States did not move. Three months later,
July 12, their delegations were again invited to the White House. The
situation was at the gravest; McClellan's army had been baffled in the
desperate seven-days' fight; factions at the North were growing hot.
Lincoln pleaded reasonably, movingly, that they would bring decisive
help to the national cause, by committing their States to emancipation,
with help from the nation, gradually if they pleased, with colonization
if they desired--peace, union, freedom, all lay that way! Two days they
took to make answer, and then of the twenty-nine members only nine were
favorable; the rest with one accord began to make excuse,--and that hope
failed.
Events were forcing on the question of slavery. In the previous May,
General David Hunter, in South Carolina, finding himself with 10,000
fugitives in his camps, whom the laws forbade him to return to their
masters and did not permit him to hold as slaves, met the difficulty by
a proclamation, declaring that the martial law of the United States was
incompatible with slavery, and the slaves in his military
district--South Carolina, Georgia and Florida,--were set free. Again the
President overruled his subordinate, but in the proclamation he
distinctly said that the question of emancipation as a military
necessity belonged to himself as commander-in-chief. It was a note of
warning. Twenty years before, John Quincy Adams had written,--and the
words came from a conservative statesman of the highest standing: "I say
that the military authority takes for the time the place of all
municipal institutions, and slavery among the rest"; and had elaborated
and reiterated the doctrine that in case of war slavery might be
abolished by the commander. These statements had lately been recalled;
the action of Fremont and Hunter had given life to the idea; and Lincoln
now intimated that he might yet assume this authority.
Party divisions had soon reappeared at the North. The Democrats were not
harmonious; a part called themselves "War Democrats," and a part were
ready to let the South go, or went as near that as they prudently could;
now one and now the other faction controlled the party according to time
and locality. The Republicans were more united, yet among them was a
cleavage between conservatives and radicals; the one taking for their
watchword, "the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was"; the
other eager to see the war turned against slavery; and both claiming the
President, and jealously watching any leaning on his part toward their
rivals.
There was developing at the North a profound sentiment for attacking
slavery. The war was protracted beyond all early expectation; it was
costly, bitter, woeful. What was to be at last the recompense for all
this blood and tears? Was there, if victory came at last, to be with it
no advance, nothing but the old Union, half slave and half free? For
nothing better than this were sons, fathers, brothers, husbands to be
sacrificed? Was the nation crossing a Red Sea of anguish only to emerge
into the old bondage? Rather, let us fight at once for union and for
liberty!
Those who voiced this cry could not always see the difficulties that
beset the President. Many of them failed to realize that at heart he was
as true to freedom as they. Even Lowell, in the later _Biglow Papers_,
which pleaded with deeper pathos and power than before for freedom--even
he could write of "hoisting your captain's heart up with a derrick."
Wendell Phillips on one occasion, impatient of Lincoln's attitude toward
the fugitive slave law, called him "the slave-hound from Illinois."
Beecher,--who did great service, especially by his speeches in
England,--wrote in the _Independent_ a series of articles, to spur the
President to more pronounced action. Some one gave the articles to
Lincoln; he sat down and read them all, then rose to his feet
exclaiming, "Am I a dog?"
All this time the conservatives were no less urgent that the President
must make no move against slavery. Among their spokesmen was General
McClellan. On him rested the chief hope of the North for military
success during the year following the disaster of Bull Run. He was an
admirable organizer and a good theoretical strategist; his care for his
men won their affection; and sometimes in the field he struck heavy and
effective blows. But he was always prone to overrate the enemy's
resources and underrate his own; he was slow to follow up a success; and
he lacked the bulldog grip by which Grant won. Right on the heels of his
failure in the seven-days' fight in the Peninsula, he wrote a letter to
the President, from Harrison's Landing, July 7, 1862, lecturing him
severely as to the errors he must avoid. Nothing must be done or said
looking to confiscation, forcible abolition, or territorial organization
of the States. "Until the principles governing the future conduct of our
struggle shall be made known and approved, the effort to obtain
requisite forces will be almost hopeless. A declaration of radical
views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our armies."
This letter was given to the public, and on this platform McClellan
began to loom up as an opposition candidate for the Presidency.
So Lincoln was buffeted on the right hand and on the left. In this
summer of 1862, Greeley wrote in the _Tribune_, August 20, an open
letter to the President, upbraiding him for his slackness against
slavery. Lincoln replied, August 22, in a letter which startled many of
his friends, and to this day bewilders those who do not understand the
man himself or the position in which he stood. He wrote: "I would save
the Union, I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution....
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not
either to save or to destroy slavery. 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." In fact, the last was the
course which he eventually took.
This letter stated with full sincerity Lincoln's basal principle. It was
not necessary to add that the purpose was growing within him to save the
Union by freeing the slaves in the seceded States. The very growth of
that purpose made it necessary for him to freshly bind to himself the
conservatives whose only care was for the Union and not for
emancipation. Nothing could serve this purpose better than the
declaration in this letter to Greeley. In Lincoln, sincerity and
shrewdness were thoroughly blended.
At a later day he told the artist Frank Carpenter, when he was to paint
"The Signing of the Emancipation Proclamation": "It had got to be
mid-summer, 1862. Things had gone on from bad to worse, until I felt
that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan we had been
pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and must change our
tactics or lose the game. I now determined upon the adoption of the
emancipation policy; and without consultation with, or the knowledge of,
the Cabinet, I prepared the original draft of the proclamation, and
after much anxious thought, called a Cabinet meeting upon the
subject.... I said to the Cabinet that I had resolved upon this step,
and had not called them together to ask their advice, but to lay the
subject-matter of a proclamation before them, suggestions as to which
would be in order after they had heard it read." This proclamation--the
first sketch--set forth that at the next meeting of Congress, four
months later, the President designs to again recommend a practical
measure for tendering pecuniary aid to any State then recognizing the
authority of the United States, which should have adopted, or should
thereafter adopt, gradual abolishment of slavery; that the object of
this is to promote the restoration of constitutional relations between
the general government and all the States; and finally, as
commander-in-chief, the President declares that from the first of
January next all slaves in States still rejecting the national authority
shall then and forever be free.
The Cabinet were amazed--and divided. Only Stanton and Bates were for
immediate promulgation. Chase thought it would be better to leave the
matter to district commanders, but would support the proclamation as
better than inaction. Blair opposed it as likely to be unpopular and
lose the Fall election. All this Lincoln had weighed beforehand. But now
came a suggestion from Seward, that the immediate time was inopportune,
because just after military reverses (McClellan's Peninsula defeat) it
would seem like a desperate cry for help,--"our last shriek on the
retreat," as Lincoln phrased it. His judgment welcomed this as a wise
suggestion, and he put the draft of the proclamation aside and waited
for victory. Among the elements which entered into his decisions was a
subtle instinct as to when and how far he could command the support of
the various elements on whom success depended. His rare capacity as a
listener, and his keen sagacity, enabled him to divine that the hour was
at hand when a decisive move against slavery would attract more support
than it would repel. Seward's suggestion gave the final shape to his
purpose.
This happened July 22, 1862; and when the President made his calm reply
to Greeley's onslaught a month later, the unsigned proclamation lay in
his desk, and he was still waiting for a victory before he issued it.