Elijah P. Lovejoy, editor of a religious newspaper at Alton, whose
antislavery editorials enraged the proslavery mob, which murdered him
and threw his press and type into the Mississippi River. In this case,
as in many others, the blood of a martyr was the seed of the faith.
The mob that murdered Elijah P. Lovejoy did more to crystallize public
opinion and stimulate the movement than all the arguments and appeals
uttered up to that date.
After his bold action in the Legislature Lincoln was recognized as the
antislavery leader in the central part of Illinois, but was frequently
the object of criticism because of his conservative views. He argued,
then, as he did twenty-five years later, that the Constitution of the
United States was sacred, and as long as it existed must be obeyed. It
recognized the right to hold slaves in certain States, and therefore
that right could not be denied until the Constitution was appropriately
amended. The friends of freedom were at liberty to denounce the great
wrong, but they must proceed legally in securing its removal. This
position was taken by Lincoln when he was only twenty-eight years
old, and he held it until the abolition of slavery became a military
necessity. At the same time he was patiently and confidently trying to
educate public sentiment and lead the abolition movement in the right
direction.
Lincoln's second opportunity to place himself formally on record
occurred when he was a member of the House of Representatives, where
the controversy had been carried long before, and had been revived and
vitalized by the treaty with Mexico at the close of the war of 1848,
which added to the United States a territory as large as half of Europe.
The slave-holders immediately demanded it for their own, but in the
previous Congress the Whig and antislavery Democrats had succeeded in
attaching to an appropriation bill an amendment known as the Wilmot
Proviso, which prohibited the extension of slavery into the territory
recently acquired. This had been followed up by the adoption of similar
provisions wherever the Whigs could get an opportunity to attach them
to other legislation. Lincoln used to say that during his two years in
Congress he voted for the Wilmot Proviso in one form or another more
than fifty times.
Upon his arrival in Washington his horror of the slavery system and the
impressions received during his voyages to New Orleans were revived by
witnessing the proceedings and the distress in the slave-markets of the
national capital, and he determined to devote his best efforts to a
removal of that scandal and reproach. Fifteen years later, in one of his
speeches during the debate with Douglas, he described the slave-shambles
of Washington, and said, "In view from the windows of the Capitol a
sort of negro livery stable where droves of negroes were collected,
temporarily kept, and finally taken to Southern markets, precisely like
droves of horses, has been openly maintained for more than fifty years."
He believed that Congress had power under the Constitution to regulate
all affairs in the Territories and the District of Columbia, and, after
consulting with several of the leading citizens of Washington, he
introduced a bill for the gradual abolition of slavery in the District
of Columbia. The first two sections prohibit the introduction of slaves
within the limits of the District or the selling of them out of it,
exception being made to the servants of officials of the government
from the slave-holding States. The third section provides for the
apprenticeship and gradual emancipation of children born of slave
mothers after January 1, 1850. The fourth provides full compensation for
all slaves voluntarily made free by their owners. The fifth recognizes
the fugitive-slave law, and the sixth submits the proposition to a
popular vote, and provides that it shall not go into force until
ratified by a majority of the voters of the District.
This bill met with more violent opposition from other parts of the
country than from the slave-holders who were directly affected.
The people of the South feared that it might serve as a precedent
for similar actions in other parts of the country and stimulate
the antislavery sentiment of the North. On the other hand, the
abolitionists, with that unreasonable spirit which usually governs men
of radical views, condemned the measure as a compromise with wrong, and
declared that they would never permit money from the public treasury
to be expended for the purchase of human beings. No action was taken
in Congress. The bill was referred to the appropriate committee and
was stuffed into a pigeonhole, where it was never disturbed; but it
is a remarkable coincidence that less than fifteen years later it was
Lincoln's privilege to approve an act of Congress for the abolition of
slavery in the District of Columbia.
It is interesting to watch the development of Lincoln's views on the
slavery question, as revealed by his public utterances and private
letters during the great struggle between 1850 and 1860, until the
people of the republic named him as umpire to decide the greatest
question that ever engaged the moral and intellectual attention of a
people. Here and there appear curious phrases, startling predictions,
vivid epigrams, and unanswerable arguments. For example, in 1855 he
declared that "the autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown
and proclaim free republicans sooner than will our American masters
voluntarily give up their slaves." A reference to the dates will show
that Alexander II., by imperial decree, emancipated the serfs of Russia
almost upon the same day, at the same hour, that the Southern States
began the greatest war of modern times to protect and extend the
institution of slavery.
At Rochester, in the summer of 1859, Mr. Seward furnished the Republican
party a watch-cry when he called it "the irrepressible conflict," but
two years before and repeatedly after Lincoln uttered the same idea in
almost the same phrase. In three Presidential campaigns, in two contests
for the Senate, and in almost every local political contest after 1840
slavery was the principal theme of his speeches, until the Douglas
debate of 1858 caused him to be recognized as the most powerful advocate
and defender of antislavery doctrines.
Senator Douglas found great amusement in accusing Lincoln of a desire
to establish social equality between the whites and the blacks, and in
his speeches seldom failed to evoke a roar of laughter by declaring that
"Abe Lincoln" and other abolitionists "wanted to marry niggers." Lincoln
paid no attention to this vulgar joke until he saw that it was becoming
serious, and that many people actually believed that the abolitionists
were proposing to do what Douglas had said. He attempted to remove this
impression by a serious discussion of the doctrine of equality, and in
one of his speeches declared, "I protest against the counterfeit logic
which concludes that because I do not want a black woman for a slave
I must necessarily want her for a wife." In another speech he said,
"I shall never marry a negress, but I have no objection to any one
else doing so. If a white man wants to marry a negro woman, let him do
it,--if the negro woman can stand it."
[Illustration: ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN 1864
From a photograph in the War Department Collection]
At another time he said, "If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the
road, any man would say I might seize the nearest stick and kill it;
but if I found that snake in bed with my children, that would be
another question. I might hurt the children more than the snake, and
it might bite them. Much more, it I found it in bed with my neighbor's
children, and I had bound myself by a solemn compact not to meddle with
his children under any circumstances, it would become me to let that
particular mode of getting rid of that gentleman alone. But if there was
a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was
proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I
take it that no man would question how I ought to decide."
In his Cooper Union speech may be found his strongest argument. "If
slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it
are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away. If it is
right, we cannot justly object to its nationality,--its universality.
If it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension,--its
enlargement. All they ask we could readily grant, if we thought slavery
right; all we ask they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong.
Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise
fact upon which depends the whole controversy.... Wrong as we think
slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because
that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in
the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to
spread into the national Territories, and to overrun us here in the
free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by
our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of
those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied
and belabored, contrivances such as groping for some middle ground
between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should
be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of 'don't
care,' on a question about which all true men do care; such as Union
appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to disunionists; reversing
the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to
repentance; such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay
what Washington said, and undo what Washington did. Neither let us be
slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened
from it by menaces of destruction to the government nor of dungeons to
ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith
let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."
In a letter dated July 28, 1859, he wrote, "There is another thing
our friends are doing which gives me some uneasiness.... Douglas's
popular sovereignty, accepted by the public mind as a just principle,
nationalizes slavery, and revives the African slave-trade inevitably.
Taking slaves into new Territories, and buying slaves in Africa, are
identical things, identical rights or identical wrongs, and the argument
which establishes one will establish the other. Try a thousand years for
a sound reason why Congress shall not hinder the people of Kansas from
having slaves, and when you have found it, it will be an equally good
one why Congress should not hinder the people of Georgia from importing
slaves from Africa."
While he was campaigning in Ohio, in 1859, occurred the John Brown
episode at Harper's Ferry, which created intense excitement throughout
the entire country and particularly in the South, where it was
interpreted as an organized attempt of the abolitionists to arouse an
insurrection among the slaves. In his speeches Lincoln did much to
allay public sentiment in Illinois, for he construed the attack upon
Harper's Ferry with his habitual common sense. He argued that it was not
a slave insurrection, but an attempt to organize one in which the slaves
refused to participate, and he compared it with many attempts related
in history to assassinate kings and emperors. "An enthusiast broods
over the oppression of a people until he fancies himself commissioned by
heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little
else than his own execution. Orsini's attempt on Louis Napoleon and John
Brown's attempt at Harper's Ferry were, in their philosophy, precisely
the same. The eagerness to cast blame on Old England in one case and
on New England in the other does not disprove the sameness of the two
things."
It was not long after the inauguration that President Lincoln was
compelled to treat the slavery problem in a practical manner. To him
it ceased to be a question of morals and became an actual, perplexing
problem continually appearing in every direction and in various forms.
The first movement of troops dislodged from the plantations of their
owners a multitude of slaves, who found their way to the camps of the
Union army and were employed as servants, teamsters, and often as
guides. The Northern soldier took a sympathetic interest in the escaped
slave, and as fast as he advanced into slave territory the greater that
sympathy became. A Virginia planter looking for a fugitive slave in a
Union camp was a familiar object of ridicule and derision, and he seldom
found any satisfaction.
One day the representative of Colonel Mallory, a Virginia planter, came
into the Union lines at Fortress Monroe and demanded three field-hands
who, he asserted, were at that time in the camp. General B. F. Butler,
who was in command, replied that, as Virginia claimed to be a foreign
country, the fugitive-slave law could not possibly be in operation
there, and declined to surrender the negroes unless the owner would take
the oath of allegiance to the United States. A newspaper correspondent,
in reporting this incident, took the ground that, as the Confederate
commanders were using negroes as laborers upon fortifications, under
international law they were clearly contraband of war. A new word was
coined. From that moment, and until the struggle was over, escaped
negroes were known as "contrabands," and public opinion in the North
decided that they were subject to release or confiscation by military
right and usage. General Butler always assumed the credit of formulating
that doctrine, and insisted that the correspondent had adopted a
suggestion overheard at the mess-table; but, however it originated,
it had more influence upon the solution of the problem than volumes
of argument might have had. When it became known among the negroes in
Virginia that the Union troops would not send them back to slavery,
the plantations were deserted and the Northern camps were crowded with
men, women, and children of all ages, who had to be clothed and fed.
General Butler relieved the embarrassment by sending the able-bodied men
to work upon the fortifications, by utilizing the women as cooks and
laundresses, and by permitting his officers to employ them as servants.
After a time the exodus spread to Washington, and the slaves in that
city began to find their way across the Potomac into the military camps,
which caused a great deal of dissatisfaction and seemed to have an
unfavorable effect upon the political action of Maryland, West Virginia,
Kentucky, and Missouri; so that President Lincoln was appealed to from
all sides to order the execution of the fugitive-slave law in States
which he was trying to keep in the Union. He believed that public
sentiment was growing and would ultimately furnish a solution. He quoted
the Methodist presiding elder, riding about his circuit at the time
of the spring freshets, whose young companion showed great anxiety as
to how they should cross Fox River, then very much swollen. The elder
replied that he had made it the rule of his life never to cross Fox
River until he came to it.
With the same philosophical spirit, Lincoln made the negro question
"a local issue," to be treated by each commander and the police of
each place as circumstances suggested, and, under his instructions,
the commandant at Washington issued an order that "fugitive slaves
will under no pretext whatever be permitted to reside, or be in any
way harbored, in the quarters and camps of the troops serving in this
department." This served to satisfy the complaints of the Maryland
planters and the slave-holders of the District of Columbia until
Congress passed the confiscation act, which forfeited the property
rights of disloyal owners. That was the first step towards emancipation.
President Lincoln's plan to invest military commanders with practical
authority to solve the negro problem according to their individual
judgment soon got him into trouble, especially with his Secretary of
War, for the latter, in his report to Congress, without the knowledge of
the President and without consulting him, explained the policy of the
government as follows:
"If it shall be found that the men who have been held by the rebels as
slaves are capable of bearing arms and performing efficient military
service, it is right, and may become the duty, of the government to arm
and equip them, and employ their services against the rebels, under
proper military regulation, discipline, and command."
The report did not reach the public; it was suppressed and modified
before being printed in the newspapers; but that paragraph made Mr.
Cameron's resignation necessary. As amended, the report contained
a simple declaration that fugitive and abandoned slaves, being an
important factor in the military situation, would not be returned to
disloyal masters, but would be employed so far as possible in the
services of the Union army, and withheld from the enemy until Congress
should make some permanent disposition of them.
Lincoln was severely criticised by the antislavery newspapers of the
North. But he did not lose his patience, and in his message to Congress
declared his intention to keep the integrity of the Union prominent "as
the primary object of the contest on our part, leaving all questions
which are not of vital military importance to the more deliberate
action of the Legislature." But while he was writing these guarded and
ambiguous phrases he had already decided to propose a plan of voluntary
abolition for the District of Columbia similar to that he had offered
in Congress thirteen years before. It was a measure of expediency and
delay. He evidently had no expectation that such a proposition would
be adopted. He undoubtedly realized that it was impossible; but his
political sagacity and knowledge of human nature taught him that the
public, to use a homely but significant expression which was familiar to
his childhood, "must have something to chaw on," and further illustrated
his point by reminding a caller how easily an angry dog might be
diverted by throwing him a bone.
He soon followed this up by proposing to Delaware a scheme for the
purchase by the government of the seventeen hundred and ninety-eight
slaves shown by the census of 1860 to be still held in that State, at
the rate of four hundred dollars per capita. A majority of the Lower
House of the Legislature of Delaware accepted the idea, but the Senate
rejected it and the subject was dropped. But Lincoln did not allow the
minds of his antislavery critics to rest. He kept them busy discussing
new propositions, and on March 6, 1862, sent a special message to the
two Houses of Congress recommending the gradual abolishment of slavery
by furnishing to the several States from the public treasury sufficient
funds "to compensate for the inconveniences, public and private,
produced by such change of system." By this proposition he avoided the
objections to the general government interfering with the domestic
affairs of the States, and left the people of each State to arrange for
emancipation in their own way. "It is proposed as a matter of perfectly
free choice with them," he said in his message, and again called
attention to the probable effects of the war upon the slave situation.
The representatives of the border States in Congress took no heed of
the warning, but the Northern papers devoted a great deal of space to
a discussion of the proposition, and Lincoln's purpose of giving them
something to talk about was accomplished. The most serious objection was
based upon the enormous expenses. As early as 1839 Henry Clay estimated
the value of the slaves at one billion two hundred and fifty million
dollars, and upon the same basis of calculation it must have exceeded
two billion dollars in 1860; but Lincoln answered that one-half day's
cost of the war would pay for all the slaves in Delaware at four hundred
dollars a head, and that eighty-seven days' cost would pay for all the
slaves in the border States.
He called together the Congressional delegates from the border States
and made an earnest effort to convince them of the expediency of his
plan. The House of Representatives adopted it by a two-thirds vote,
although few of the members from Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri voted
with the affirmative. A month later the resolution was concurred in by
the Senate, and what Thaddeus Stevens, the radical leader of the House,
described as "the most diluted milk-and-water-gruel proposition ever
given to the American people" became a law.
It is not necessary to say that the Legislatures of the border States
never had an opportunity to take advantage of the proposition; history
moved too fast for them. But Lincoln at once began a systematic campaign
in Congress to secure legislation for the purchase of all the slaves
belonging to loyal owners in the District of Columbia, and that became a
law on April 16, 1862.
Public opinion was being rapidly educated; the Republican majority in
Congress was pledged to the doctrine of emancipation; the slave-holders
in the border States were being led gradually to realize the inevitable,
and if they had been wise they would promptly have accepted the
generosity of the President's proposition and thus have escaped the
enormous pecuniary losses which they suffered by the Emancipation
Proclamation a little later.
Before Congress adjourned, laws were passed which materially altered the
situation. The army was prohibited from surrendering fugitive slaves;
the confiscation act was greatly enlarged; all slaves actually employed
in military service by the Confederacy were declared free; the President
was authorized to enlist negro regiments for the war; the Missouri
Compromise was restored; slavery was forbidden in all Territories of the
United States; appropriations were made for carrying into effect the
treaty with Great Britain to suppress the slave-trade; the independence
and sovereignty of Hayti and Liberia, two black republics, were formally
recognized, and two nations of negroes, with negro Presidents, negro
officials, and negro ambassadors, were admitted on an equality into the
sisterhood of civilized nations. Any one who would have predicted such
legislation a year previous would have been considered insane, even six
months previous it would have been declared impossible.
The next sensation was an emancipation proclamation issued by General
David Hunter, who commanded the Department of the South, which declared
free all persons held as slaves in the States of Georgia, Florida, and
South Carolina. Lincoln promptly vetoed Hunter's order and declared
it unauthorized and void, saying that he reserved to himself, "as
Commander-in-Chief of the army and navy, to declare the slaves of
any State or States free" when "it shall have become a necessity
indispensable to the maintenance of the government."
This announcement should have satisfied the North and have been a
sufficient warning to the South, because as we read it now we can see
Lincoln's purposes between the lines.
The President could not permit the Congressional delegations from
the border States to return to their constituents without one more
admonition and one more appeal to their patriotism and their sense of
justice and wisdom. He called them to the White House and read to them a
carefully prepared argument in support of his plan to sell their slaves
to the government. Two-thirds of them united in an explanation of their
reasons for rejecting the scheme on account of its impracticability, and
the remainder promised to submit it to their constituents. The reception
of this last appeal convinced Lincoln that he could do nothing by moral
suasion, and he immediately determined to try the use of force.