The Fiery Trial (34 page)

IV

A
PART FROM
the capture in February of Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee by Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant, the winter of 1861–62 witnessed little significant military action. But public discussion of slavery intensified. In part, this resulted from frustration at the lack of military progress, in part from renewed agitation by the abolitionists. Lincoln’s secretary John Hay ridiculed the “little handful of earnest impracticables” clamoring for a policy of emancipation. But their efforts began to have an impact in the North. By early 1862, petitions with thousands of signatures calling for action against slavery began piling up in Washington. “Rousing anti-slavery meetings” took place at the Smithsonian Institution. Lincoln himself sat on the podium during Horace Greeley’s talk there on January 3, to the dismay of one Democratic congressman, who demanded an immediate halt to these “abolition lectures.” While abolitionists remained a small minority, they were increasingly treated with respect, their meetings now covered extensively by mainstream Republican newspapers. Orestes Brownson, who called for emancipation as the only way to establish a “permanent Union of freedom,” spoke for many when he reconsidered his prewar sentiments. Abolitionists, he wrote, had been justly criticized for giving too little consideration to “political expediency,” but “we who have opposed them are, perhaps, even more chargeable with having made too little account in our political calculations of justice.”
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That winter, Wendell Phillips received almost 200 invitations to lecture on the war and emancipation. He may have been heard by as many as 50,000 people, and via publication in newspapers and pamphlets, his words reached many more. When he spoke at Cooper Institute, people lined up for hours and many had to be turned away. Even John Hay, who held the abolitionists as responsible as the “slavery propagandists” for bringing on the war, noted that listeners who had hissed Phillips a year earlier now applauded him, an example, Hay wrote, of “the progress of ideas in a revolution.” Again and again, Phillips hammered home his message: the war must not only destroy slavery but create a new nation that “knows neither black nor white,…[and] holds an equal sceptre over all.” Phillips criticized Lincoln’s reluctance to act against slavery and called on Congress to take the lead. In March 1862, for the first time in his life, Phillips lectured in Washington. Charles Sumner introduced him on the floor of the Senate, he spoke at the Capitol in the presence of Vice President Hamlin and many members of Congress, and had an interview with Lincoln. Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and other abolitionists also lectured to large audiences.
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As part of their campaign to influence public opinion, proponents of abolition defended the results of prior emancipations. They made a particular effort to refute the “prevailing notion,” as
Harper’s Weekly
put it, that emancipation in the British West Indies had been a “failure” because it had been followed by a sharp decline in sugar exports. They publicized William G. Sewell’s
Ordeal of Free Labor in the British West Indies
, a series of letters that originally appeared in the
New York Times
and was published in book form in 1861. Sewell blamed poor management by planters for post-emancipation economic problems and insisted that “freedom, when allowed fair play,” benefitted black and white alike. Freedpeople in the British Caribbean, John P. Hale of New Hampshire assured the Senate, had become “an industrious, contented and prosperous peasantry.” Advocates of emancipation also pointed to the South Carolina Sea Islands, where the 10,000 or so slaves who remained behind when their masters fled the approach of the Union navy appeared eager for education and understood that they must “work for a living.” After a visit to the islands to investigate prospects for resuming cotton production, John Murray Forbes proclaimed himself convinced that “the negro has the same selfish element in him which induces other men to labor.”
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“The rebellion,” Gideon Welles later recalled, “rapidly increased the anti-slavery sentiment everywhere, and politicians shaped their course accordingly.” Pressure for more dramatic action against slavery came not only from abolitionists and Radicals but also the Republican mainstream. Members of all wings of the party viewed Lincoln as too cautious and irresolute. The president, wrote James C. Conkling, the former chair of the Illinois Republican party, “does not seem disposed to assume any responsibility.” Even the attorney general, Edward Bates, feared the president “lacked
will
and
purpose
.”
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When Congress assembled in December 1861, journalists predicted a “stormy session” in which “the slave question” would occupy “the most prominent part in…discussion.” It was clear from the outset that sentiment about slavery had shifted. Three days into the session, the House killed a motion to reaffirm the Crittenden-Johnson resolution of the previous July, which had disavowed the idea that interference with slavery was a “purpose” of the war. Radicals launched a campaign for vigorous action. Anyone who doubted that slavery was “the very
sole
cause of the war,” wrote Horace White, the Washington correspondent of the
Chicago Tribune
, was a “lunatic.” Martin F. Conway of Kansas offered a penetrating critique of the legal “fiction” under which the administration continued to operate. Lincoln’s insistence that the seceded states remained in the Union, he declared, “binds us to slavery.” Unless this understanding of the conflict changed, Union victory would restore the “slave power” to its former domination.
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In the early days of the session, Radicals introduced numerous measures dealing directly or indirectly with slavery. Thomas Eliot of Massachusetts presented a resolution urging Lincoln, under the war power, to emancipate the slaves in areas under rebellion. John P. Hale called for abolishing the current Supreme Court and replacing it with another one. Owen Lovejoy advocated enlisting black men in the Union army. Proposals circulated for abolition in the nation’s capital, repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, and the confiscation and emancipation of the slaves of Confederates. Lyman Trumbull, who introduced a confiscation bill early in December, received numerous letters of support. “I honestly believe,” declared a writer from Cairo at the southern tip of Illinois, “that the people are far ahead of the leaders today in their readiness to take the proper steps to put down this rebellion.” Throughout December debate continued. The
New York Herald
urged members to devote themselves to war measures “instead of wasting their precious time, by day and night, upon fruitless discussions upon the negro.”
⁵⁵

One contentious issue concerned the status of fugitive slaves who sought refuge in the nation’s capital. Following complaints about conditions in the city jail, where marshal Ward Hill Lamon had incarcerated some sixty escaped slaves to await return to their masters, Secretary of State Seward, stating that he acted on instructions from Lincoln, reminded civil and military authorities in the District that runaways should not be arrested merely “upon presumption arising from color.” Those who had been employed by Confederate forces, he pointed out, were entitled to protection under the Confiscation Act. An embarrassing power struggle followed. After the Senate launched an investigation, Lamon ordered that no senator should be allowed access to the jail without his permission. The lawmakers responded with a unanimous vote declaring the marshal “in contempt of its rightful authority.” When senators asked Lamon to justify his policy toward runaways, Lincoln, who may have feared the situation was needlessly complicating the administration’s relationship with Maryland, where many fugitives originated, drafted for the marshal an evasive response stating that he acted “upon an old and uniform custom here.” (The District’s laws required free blacks to carry certificates of freedom or face arrest, and slaves to have the permission of their owners when away from home.) The situation led to considerable resentment in Congress. Senator James W. Grimes, who had been refused permission by the jailor to enter the premises, called Lamon a “foreign satrap, who has been brought here from the State of Illinois and fastened upon the seventy thousand people of this District.”
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The consideration of antislavery measures continued throughout the winter and spring of 1862. These prolonged and widely reported debates, eagerly listened to by black and white visitors in the galleries, helped to educate the northern public about the relationship of slavery to the rebellion. Democrats, including staunch supporters of the war effort, were appalled by the tenor of Republican sentiment. “The conservative men of the country must make themselves felt in Congress and without a moment’s delay,” wrote General John A. Dix, one of the numerous Democrats Lincoln had appointed to key military positions. Border-state Unionists, too, expressed increasing alarm at the Republicans’ overtly antislavery tone. Congress, they insisted, had no more power to interfere with slavery “than with the common school system, or any other local institution.” Talk of abolition, declared Augustus W. Bradford, the Unionist governor of Maryland, amounted to “treason.”
⁵⁷

The debates also exposed fissures within the Republican majority. Moderate Republicans—the majority of the party—deplored what they considered Radical “fanaticism.” William P. Fessenden of Maine spoke with annoyance of the “gentlemen on this floor” who seemed to think “that they are the representatives of all righteousness.” What was clear, however, as Senator Timothy O. Howe of Wisconsin advised his nephew, a colonel in the Union army, was that change had become the order of the day: “Don’t hitch yourself to any measure. Don’t anchor yourself to any policy. Don’t tie up to any platform. The very foundations of the government are cracking…. No mere policy or platform can outlast this storm.”
⁵⁸

Recognizing that the war had created a fluid and unpredictable situation, Lincoln tried to keep track of public opinion. He read newspapers and some of the letters that poured into the White House, and inquired about popular sentiment from the innumerable individuals and delegations who waited on him. He resented Radical attacks on his policies, at one point referring to “the Jacobinism in Congress.” But he also did what he could to avoid a split in the party. He used patronage to try to solidify the new and still-fragile Republican coalition, adhering to the motto “justice for all.” Recognizing the importance of winning antislavery opinion abroad to the Union cause, Lincoln appointed veteran Radicals and abolitionists to diplomatic positions. Zebina Eastman, the most prominent Illinois abolitionist, Lincoln told Secretary of State Seward, was “just the man to reach the sympathies of the English people.” Seward named Eastman the U.S. consul at Bristol. Radical Republican appointments included Joshua R. Giddings as consul general in Canada, William Slade as consul at Nice, and ambassadors Charles Francis Adams in Britain, Carl Schurz in Spain, Cassius M. Clay in Russia, George G. Fogg in Switzerland, and Anson Burlingame in China.
⁵⁹

Lincoln appears to have used his conversations with the stream of visitors who came to the White House to hear various points of view without committing himself. Regardless of their position on the political spectrum, most came away persuaded that Lincoln was on their side. George Bancroft reported that Lincoln told him during a conversation in early December 1861 that slavery had already “received a mortal wound.” In January, the abolitionist Moncure D. Conway called on Lincoln along with W. H. Channing, the chaplain of the Senate, to promote compensated emancipation. Four years later, he recalled Lincoln saying that “when the hour comes for dealing with slavery, I trust I shall be willing to act.” But by the same token, the banker and railroad entrepreneur Henry D. Bacon, a far more conservative man than Conway, reported after a conversation with the president, “Lincoln thinks just as I do about the disposition of the slaves of the rebels.” Sometimes, as a member of one delegation that pressed him for action against slavery related, Lincoln simply “told us a lot of stories.” One of his favorites concerned a group of travelers in Illinois who debated for hours how to cross a distant river until one declared, “I never cross a river until I come to it.”
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Despite heated criticisms of the administration (Frederick Douglass’s lead editorial for January 1862 bore the title “The Slave Power Still Omnipotent at Washington”), important parts of the abolitionist press recognized Lincoln as “drifting” toward further action against slavery. One sign was the administration’s reinvigoration of efforts to suppress the illegal slave trade from Africa. On assuming office, Lincoln instructed Secretary of the Interior Smith to enforce federal laws to this effect, which, despite increased enforcement by the Buchanan administration, had essentially remained dead letters under his predecessors. In February 1862, ignoring numerous pleas for clemency, including one from the Republican governor of New York, Lincoln refused to intervene to prevent the execution of Captain Nathaniel Gordon, an illicit slave trader whose ship carrying nearly 900 slaves had been captured off the coast of West Africa by a U.S. naval vessel. A week after Lincoln’s election, a New York jury had convicted Gordon of international slave trading, a crime legally equivalent to piracy and punishable by death. Gordon became the first and only American to be hanged as a slave trader. (President Buchanan had pardoned the only man previously sentenced to death in 1857.) Meanwhile, Secretary of State Seward negotiated a new treaty with Britain to strengthen enforcement of the ban. It provided for American participation in the international courts that tried slave traders, in which the United States had previously refused to take part. And for the first time, it allowed the British navy to stop and search ships flying the American flag, a practice traditionally resented by Americans—half a century earlier it had helped to bring on the War of 1812. These actions sent a strong antislavery message. The hanging of Gordon, wrote the
Weekly Anglo-African
, offered “the most solid indication of character” Lincoln had yet displayed.
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