The Fiery Trial (33 page)

Compared with later developments, Lincoln’s proposal to Delaware, which envisioned slavery surviving for thirty additional years, seems cautious indeed. Yet in November 1861, when no significant military action had yet taken place, it was a bold initiative. Never before had a president committed the federal government to promoting abolition. Moreover, in aiming not simply to free individual slaves but to abolish the institution, it advanced well beyond Butler’s contraband policy and the Confiscation Act. And, in Lincoln’s view, it was constitutionally unassailable since it relied on the action of state authorities and did not seize property without compensation. In effect, the plan made slaveholders partners in, rather than opponents of, emancipation, and offered a way of ending the institution without violence or social revolution.

Lincoln’s proposal for Delaware, which he soon extended to the entire border, should not be viewed simply as an attempt to outflank the Confederacy. It represented a continuation of prewar Republican plans to promote the demise of slavery in the border region. And when it came to the future status of the freed slaves, Lincoln also thought along prewar lines. When he presented his proposal to Fisher in November 1861, Lincoln did not mention colonization. But he told Orville H. Browning, who had been elected to the Senate from Illinois, that colonization “should be connected with it.” Lincoln was well aware that, as Joshua Speed had warned him from Kentucky, white public opinion in the border would never countenance “allowing negroes to be emancipated and remain among us.” “You might as well,” Speed commented, “attack the freedom of worship in the North or the right of a parent to teach his child to read, as to wage war in a slave state on such a principle.”
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Once Fisher prepared a bill, under whose terms slavery in Delaware would end in 1872 with apprenticeship until adulthood for slave children, debate began in the state’s newspapers. Opponents warned that emancipated slaves would demand citizenship rights and that the end of slavery would lead to “equality with the white man.” Fisher went to great lengths to fend off this charge, insisting that not equality but colonization, of blacks already free as well as emancipated slaves, would follow abolition. But by February 1862 it had become apparent that the bill could not pass, and it was never actually introduced in the legislature. Slavery survived in Delaware until December 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution (and the owners received no monetary compensation).
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The outcome in Delaware offered an early indication that Lincoln’s hope of border owners voluntarily surrendering their slaves was doomed to failure. It also demonstrated that proponents of emancipation needed to have a persuasive answer to the inevitable question of what would happen to slaves once freed. This brought to the fore, once again, the prospect of colonization.

For years, colonization had been one element of a strategy for promoting gradual abolition in the border states pressed by the Blair family and their followers and embraced, although without their fervor, by Lincoln. His cabinet included three strong advocates of the idea: Edward Bates, Montgomery Blair, and Caleb B. Smith. From the very beginning of his administration, Lincoln considered ways of laying the groundwork for colonization. In March 1861, a month before the outbreak of the war, Elisha Crosby, the new minister to Guatemala, departed for his post carrying secret instructions “conceived by old Francis P. Blair” and endorsed by Lincoln, to secure land for a colony of blacks “more or less under the protection of the U.S. Government.” Crosby found the presidents of Guatemala and Honduras unreceptive. One asked why the Lincoln administration did not settle blacks in its own western territory, “a question,” Crosby related, “which I must confess I found very difficult to answer.” On April 10, even as the crisis at Fort Sumter reached its climax, Lincoln found time to meet at the White House with Ambrose W. Thompson, who claimed to have acquired several hundred thousand acres of land in Chiriqui on the Isthmus of Panama, then part of New Granada (today’s Colombia). Thompson touted the region’s suitability for a naval station because of its fine harbor and rich coal deposits, which colonized blacks could mine.
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After fighting began, the Blairs pressed the colonization initiative. The increasing numbers of “contrabands” who could neither be returned to their owners nor be brought to the North given prevailing prejudices there, increased their urgency. They hoped to use as guinea pigs the refugees at Fortress Monroe. “I am in favor of sending them straight to Hayti,” Montgomery Blair wrote to General Butler on June 8, 1861. “Suppose you sound some of the most intelligent, and see how they would like to go with their families to so congenial a clime.” Lincoln apparently agreed. On July 8, Browning, a longtime advocate of colonization, recorded in his diary that he and the president had discussed “the negro question” at the White House. Both agreed, Browning wrote, that the government should not send fugitives back to slavery and that at the end of the war they should be colonized. Around the same time, Blair approached Matías Romero, the Mexican chargé d’affaires in Washington, about establishing a black colony in the Yucatán. But given that Mexico had recently surrendered one-third of its territory to the United States, the prospect of further intrusions on its soil aroused insurmountable opposition.
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Chiriqui seemed to offer a more promising prospect. Lincoln, according to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, was “much taken” with Ambrose W. Thompson’s proposal and pressed Welles to look into the matter. The secretary responded that the navy had no interest in a coaling station in Chiriqui, that there was “fraud and cheat in the affair,” and that he doubted blacks desired to become coal miners. Undeterred, Lincoln turned the matter over to Secretary of the Interior Caleb B. Smith. In October 1861, he authorized Smith to agree to a contract for “coal and privileges” in Chiriqui, which, Smith hoped, would not only benefit the federal government but also help “to secure the removal of the negroes from this country.” Lincoln also asked Mary Lincoln’s brother-in-law Ninian Edwards and Francis P. Blair Sr. to look into the Chiriqui matter. Both reported positively. Edwards seemed mainly interested in saving the government money on coal. Blair waxed enthusiastic about Chiriqui as the “pivot” for an American empire in the Caribbean and a site for the “deportation” of the “African race,” thus “removing the element that convulses the whole system.” Soon after meeting with Congressman Fisher, Lincoln informed Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase that he was anxious to have the “Chiriqui coal contract…closed.” But in view of Welles’s opposition, the project was shelved. It would be revived in 1862.
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Any doubt that at this point colonization remained part of Lincoln’s plan for dealing with slavery and its aftermath was dispelled when Congress reassembled. In his annual message, sent to the lawmakers on December 3, 1861, Lincoln urged them to provide funds for the colonization of slaves freed under the Confiscation Act or whom the border states decided to emancipate, as well as blacks already free who might desire to emigrate. He asked them to consider acquiring new territory for the purpose. A Washington newspaper suggested that the proposed black colony be called Lincolnia. Lincoln also called for extending diplomatic recognition to Haiti and Liberia, partly, it is plausible to assume, to improve prospects for black emigration to these countries. (The
New York Herald
objected that such recognition would result in a “strapping negro” arriving in Washington as an ambassador.)
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Overall, commented the Washington correspondent of the
New York Times
, the message took “the ancient ground of Henry Clay in regard to slavery…combined with the plan of Frank P. Blair, Jr.” “No plan of emancipation,” the reporter added, “unless accompanied by a practical scheme for colonization, will ever meet the President’s assent.” Editorially, however, the
Times
viewed colonization as thoroughly impractical. The country, it insisted, could not afford to lose so much labor, and “perfectly harmonious relations” between the races could be established once slavery ended. But other voices of Republican moderation praised this part of the message. And colonization societies were overjoyed by the president’s embrace of their program.
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In the annual message, Lincoln approached the future of slavery cautiously. John J. Crittenden had urged him to say nothing at all about it: “It is a topic which has been the bane of our country, and it must be wise, therefore to shut off” discussion. Lincoln reiterated that the war’s “primary object” was to preserve the Union. He reminded the lawmakers that he had avoided “radical and extreme measures.” Nonetheless, the message contained a subtle expansion of his position regarding slavery and the war. It built on the Delaware plan to offer financial aid to any state that agreed to gradual emancipation. Payment would take place in a curious manner, as an offset against “direct taxes” owed to the federal government as if, the
Chicago Tribune
remarked, slaves could “be used as currency by the State.” The message also included the startling statement that slaves covered by the Confiscation Act had been “liberated”—a description that went beyond the letter of that ambiguous law. Lincoln mentioned the possibility of Congress passing a “new law” regarding slavery, perhaps inviting it to do so. And he included a passage celebrating the strength of border-state Unionism that inadvertently, perhaps, suggested that future policy need not be tailored to border sensibilities.
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Reactions to Lincoln’s annual message underscored divisions among Republicans over the relationship of slavery to the war as well as their bases of unity. Moderate and conservative Republicans praised the president’s sagacity. A policy of general emancipation would destroy the “unanimity of public sentiment” essential for prosecution of the war, the
New York Times
declared, and lead to border secession and the disbandment of half the army. Not surprisingly, abolitionists and Radicals found the message “sorely disappointing.” Lincoln “has evidently not a drop of antislavery blood in his veins,” William Lloyd Garrison commented. “I shudder at the possibility of the war terminating without the utter extinction of slavery.” Lyman Trumbull received numerous letters from constituents complaining about the absence of a “battle cry” in the message. “It would seem that Mr. Lincoln had his face
Southward
when he wrote this
thing
,” one observed. “If this struggle ends with slavery still in existence, the Battle of Liberty has been only half fought.”
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Radicals were further dismayed by what Charles H. Ray of the
Chicago Tribune
called a “horrible
fiasco
” regarding the annual report of Secretary of War Simon Cameron. This related to the extremely delicate issue of enlisting blacks in the Union army. Black men had served in the navy before the war, but had been barred from the militia by a federal statute dating back to 1792, and from the regular army by tradition even though no law required it. Throughout 1861, northern free blacks offered their services, only to be turned away. So did runaway slaves. Early in the war, Henry Jarvis, who escaped to Fortress Monroe, offered to enlist. General Butler, Jarvis later recalled, “said
it wasn’t a black man’s war
. I told him it
would
be a black man’s war before they got through.” Disgusted, Jarvis emigrated to Africa. He returned two years later and, federal policy having changed, enlisted in the Union army. In fact, the Confederacy raised black soldiers before the Union did. New Orleans had a long tradition of free black militia service, dating back to the period of French rule. Early in 1862, officials there began to enroll black soldiers into the First Native Guards to help defend the city. (When federal forces captured New Orleans, these soldiers proclaimed their allegiance to the Union, saying they had been coerced into serving the Confederacy.)
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Lincoln said nothing when Secretary Welles in September 1861 authorized the navy to begin enrolling blacks at its lowest rank, “boy.” But in October, when Cameron allowed General T. W. Sherman to utilize the “services” of blacks in any capacity he saw fit in the expedition to the South Carolina Sea Islands, Lincoln added a sentence that this did not include “a general arming of them for military service.” Lincoln left intact the rest of Cameron’s language, which seemed to imply that if necessary, some blacks could be armed. But Lincoln feared reaction in the border states and the army itself to a policy of welcoming black recruits. Undeterred, Cameron included in his annual message a recommendation for freeing the slaves and enlisting blacks in the army. Lincoln ordered Cameron to remove the offending passage, and government censors tried to block publication of the original draft. Both versions of the report from the Secretary of War appeared in the press, to Lincoln’s considerable annoyance. In January 1862, Lincoln replaced Cameron with Edwin M. Stanton, a far more capable secretary of war.
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Clearly, no consensus about dealing with slavery as yet existed within the Republican party. Justin S. Morrill, a moderate Republican member of the House from Vermont, illustrated how constitutional scruples and doubts about blacks’ readiness for freedom counterbalanced the widespread desire for action against slavery. “I hope and pray,” he wrote, “that the institution of slavery may receive its deathblow in this great struggle, and I believe it will.” But Congress should “make haste slowly.” Morrill approved acting against the slaves of rebels, but the idea of freeing those of “loyal men,” even with monetary compensation, struck him as “a wild and utterly impracticable scheme,” far beyond the lawmakers’ constitutional authority. Moreover, loose talk about emancipation might arouse “the passions of these poor degraded Africans,” with consequences no one could foresee. Nevertheless, as the correspondent of the
New York Times
in the capital noted, even moderates who praised the president favored “a very radical treatment of the disease” (slavery). This, he added, “cannot fail to influence the policy of the administration.”
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