The Fiery Trial (32 page)

Lincoln must have been surprised by the enthusiasm Frémont’s proclamation aroused. To Radicals, it represented a telling blow against slavery; to others, a justified punishment of rebels and a legitimate means of weakening the Confederate war effort. Senator William P. Fessenden of Maine, a moderate Republican, noted its “electric effect” on public opinion in “all parts of the country.” “It is wonderful to see the general approval of the act,” James Bowen, the police commissioner of New York City, wrote. “I have not yet seen the man democrat or republican who doubts its wisdom.” In the Northwest, Senator James W. Grimes of Iowa reported, “everybody of every sect, party, sex, and color approves it.” Orestes Brownson, the philosopher and educator who had strongly opposed abolitionism before the war, now wrote that Frémont had forced the government to confront the question of slavery, which “everybody knows…is at the heart of the whole controversy.” Perhaps, he added, in a sentiment that Lincoln himself would later echo, “all-wise Providence” had brought about the war because of the country’s long indifference to “the cry of the enslaved.”
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Frémont’s order and its modification inspired more letters to Lincoln than any other event of his presidency. Many Democrats, including those who had initially welcomed the proclamation, applauded Lincoln’s action. So did the
New York Times
, although it had to admit that Frémont’s action was “in harmony with public sentiment throughout the North.” Lincoln’s correspondence bore this out. Charles Reed, who had served as a Whig legislator alongside Lincoln in the 1830s, informed the president that his instructions to Frémont had “produced the deepest sadness and consternation among all parties and classes” and “put a decided check upon men’s volunteering for the war.” Many writers presented cogent arguments against Lincoln’s action. “No wonder Europe looks on the struggle with indifference,” read a letter from Delaware, “while we fight the slave interest…and sustain slavery.”
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No one knows which letters Lincoln actually read—his secretaries screened his voluminous correspondence and passed along only a small sampling. But one that he probably saw since it came from John L. Scripps, his 1860 campaign biographer who had recently been appointed postmaster of Chicago, must have arrested his attention:

Years earlier, in his Lyceum speech, Lincoln had warned of the emergence of a tyrant who would seek to outdo the achievements of the founders by emancipating the slaves. Yet Lincoln had always wanted to make his mark on history. How better to do so than by completing the founders’ work by placing slavery on the road to extinction?

Whatever thoughts he may have harbored along such lines, in September 1861 Lincoln had more immediate concerns: the war effort, Kentucky, and civilian control of the military. Among the letters praising Frémont, one arrived from Lincoln’s conservative friend Orville H. Browning. Twenty-five years earlier, Browning had written the Illinois legislative resolutions affirming owners’ “sacred” right to their slave property, from which Lincoln had dissented. Now he wrote from his home in Quincy, Illinois, that Frèmont’s proclamation had “the unqualified approval of every true friend of the Government…. I do not know of an exception.” The administration, he charged, had shown “too much tenderness toward traitors and rebels.” Lincoln took the time to draft a long response justifying his decision. Browning’s letter, he wrote, “astonished me.” Congress, Lincoln pointed out, had determined the limits of action against slavery in the Confiscation Act. A general could seize property, including slaves, used for military purposes, but it was up to Congress to “fix their permanent future condition” (something the Confiscation Act had failed to do). To allow a general—or a president—to go beyond the law and “make permanent rules of property by proclamation” would turn the government into a “dictatorship.” Moreover, in a more practical vein, he had reason to believe that Frémont’s order would irrevocably alienate Kentucky. “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game,” Lincoln wrote. “Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us.” But, he insisted, he had not acted “
because
of Kentucky.” The “liberation of slaves” was a “political” question, and he would not allow generals to make political decisions.
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Lincoln’s letter to Browning offered the most elaborate explanation of his thinking on the war’s relationship to slavery in the late summer of 1861. Later, his outlook would change. He would end up doing what the letter indicated he could not do—abolish property in slaves “by proclamation” in the absence of legislative authority. All this proves is that five months into the Civil War, Lincoln, like the vast majority of his countrymen, had not yet arrived at a coherent policy regarding how to deal with slavery.

The controversy over Frémont’s order opened the floodgates of public discussion of slavery. As William O. Stoddard, one of Lincoln’s three secretaries, wrote in a New York newspaper, it reconfigured northern politics, dividing it “as by a saber cut,
permanently
, into the new shape of ‘conservatives’ and ‘radicals.’” For the moment, Stoddard added, the conservatives, led by Lincoln, had things “their own way.” Yet, he noted, the distinction was less rigid than heated rhetoric sometimes suggested. “For the most part,” the two groups sought “the same ends but by different means.”
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Nonetheless, this difference was significant. Radicals and abolitionists, many of whom had refrained during the summer from direct criticism of the administration, condemned Lincoln’s modification of Frémont’s order. “Where is the war power now?” wondered the
Weekly Anglo-African
. Some comments included disdainful remarks of a kind that would resurface again and again during Lincoln’s presidency. Benjamin F. Wade wrote of Lincoln’s “imbecility and perverseness,” claiming he had done “more injury to the cause of the Union…than [General Irvin] McDowell did by retreating at Bull Run.” Lincoln’s action, Wade added, “could only come of one born of ‘poor white trash’ and educated in a slave state.”
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For months, abolitionists had insisted that the war could not be won without emancipation. Now they embarked on a campaign to persuade the administration and the northern public. A group in Boston formed the Emancipation League to present the case for abolition in terms that would attract the widest support. “I have been advocating of late,” wrote the abolitionist editor Charles G. Leland, “emancipation for the sake of the Union—and of free white labor,” not the slaves. On October 1, Charles Sumner, who to the surprise of many constituents had said nothing about slavery during the special session of Congress, called for emancipation in a speech at the Republican state convention in Massachusetts.

Even in Massachusetts, however, most Republicans had no desire to break with the president. The moderate Republican press denounced Sumner’s speech, and the delegates rejected a resolution that advocated freeing all slaves within Union lines, with compensation for loyal owners. Yet Sumner also received many letters of support, not all of them from Radicals. Even Montgomery Blair praised his remarks: “Your speech is noble, beautiful, classical, sensible. I would have timed it differently, but I will take it now.” In any event, the debate had become public, and it would not go away. In October, his former congressional colleague Richard W. Thompson reported to Lincoln from Indiana that “public sentiment” had reached a “peculiar” condition, marked by “a very free examination and discussion of the policy of the administration.” No president, he added, had “ever been subjected to a severer or more searching scrutiny.” People of all parties strongly supported the war effort, but they demanded “vigorous policy—decided and prompt action” against the South. Ironically, Thompson observed, Lincoln’s strongest support came from his former opponents, while “Republicans, thus far, complain the most.”
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III

L
INCOLN WAS
unquestionably thinking seriously about slavery in the fall of 1861. In November, George Bancroft, the noted historian and former member of James K. Polk’s cabinet, conveyed to Lincoln his conviction that “Divine Providence” had brought on the war as a way to “root out social slavery.” Lincoln replied that the matter “does not escape my attention.” He promised to deal with it “in all due caution, and with the best judgment I can bring to it.”
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In fact, Lincoln had already settled on tiny Delaware as the place where emancipation could be launched with the greatest prospect of success. The state’s population in 1860 included 90,500 white persons (only 587 of them slaveowners), 19,800 free blacks, and just under 1,800 slaves. Even this last figure was something of an exaggeration, as Delaware had created a legal category of half-freedom whereby slaves whose owners agreed to manumit them served a term as indentured servants before being liberated. Alone among the slave states, Delaware had barred the sale of slaves outside its borders, resulting in a decline in the value of its human property since excess labor could not be shipped farther south. Abolition, Senator James A. Bayard had told the Senate several months earlier, would have no effect on his state’s prosperity. Delaware, moreover, had a significant Quaker population and, in the northern part of the state, a long antislavery tradition. In 1847, a bill for gradual emancipation had failed in the legislature by one vote. On the other hand, the state had also enacted harsh black codes. Free blacks could not vote, testify in court, or send their children to public schools, and the law presumed all black persons to be slaves unless they could demonstrate their free status. The main obstacle to abolition in the state, according to Bayard, was fear it would lead to “the equality of races.”
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Early in November 1861, Lincoln met at the White House with George P. Fisher, Delaware’s lone member of the House of Representatives, and Benjamin Burton, whose twenty-eight slaves made him the state’s largest slaveholder. Both were strong Unionists. Lincoln pressed them to initiate a process of gradual, compensated emancipation, which the federal government would finance. Once Delaware acted, other border states would follow, shattering the Confederacy’s hope of weaning them from the Union and leading to the end of the war in the “cheapest and most humane” manner. Their state, the two men told Lincoln, would be delighted to rid itself of slavery in this manner, whereupon Lincoln drafted two bills that could be introduced in the Delaware legislature. One abolished slavery in five yearly stages, culminating in 1867, with slave children to serve apprenticeships until adulthood. The second bill immediately freed slaves above the age of thirty-five but extended the process of emancipation for the remainder all the way to 1893. Both bills required the federal government to compensate owners with about $400 per slave, and both barred the sale of soon-to-be-emancipated slaves out of state. In keeping with his long-established preference for gradual emancipation, Lincoln noted, “on reflection, I like No. 2 the better.”
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The idea of compensated emancipation had a long lineage. Even though abolitionists had attacked such plans for surrendering the “great fundamental principle that man cannot hold property in man,” the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment distinctly required “just compensation” if the federal government appropriated private property. In one form or another compensated emancipation had been implemented in the British West Indies and most of Latin America. Even as Americans debated the question, the Netherlands early in 1862 adopted a plan for compensated emancipation in its Caribbean colonies. Lincoln had included compensation in his 1849 proposal for abolition in the District of Columbia. All these plans shared an essential characteristic—recognition of the local laws that defined slaves as property.
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During the 1850s, the “learned blacksmith” and veteran reformer Elihu Burritt had organized a Compensated Emancipation Convention in Cleveland. Unlike most such proposals, Burritt’s plan would provide money not only to owners, but, in smaller amounts, to emancipated slaves as well. Burritt lectured widely on the scheme in the northern and border states, including twice in Springfield, where he conferred with William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner. (There is no record of Lincoln having met Burritt or attending his lectures.)
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In August 1861, with the war now under way, Daniel R. Goodloe, an abolitionist from North Carolina who was working in Washington, D.C., as a reporter for the
New York Times
, published a pamphlet urging the federal government to propose compensated emancipation to the loyal border states. The editor of the
Times
, Henry J. Raymond, published and distributed it without charge. To counter white concerns about the creation of a large free black population, Goodloe predicted that the emancipated slaves would voluntarily migrate to the Deep South, which would become their “Eldorado.” It is not known if Lincoln saw this pamphlet, but he later appointed Goodloe to chair the commission that allocated compensation to slaveowners after Congress abolished slavery in the District of Columbia.
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