The Fiery Trial (41 page)

Despite sharing the Blair family’s enthusiasm about establishing an American empire in the Western Hemisphere, Seward had long harbored “grave doubts” about colonization, which is probably why Lincoln had previously circumvented him in pursuing the idea. Seward did not believe that any significant number of blacks would emigrate voluntarily, and felt the United States needed all the workers it could find. “I am always for bringing men and States
into
this Union,” he once remarked, “never for taking any
out
.” Indeed, in 1861 Seward had begun to issue passports to black northerners stating that they were citizens of the United States, a repudiation of the
Dred Scott
decision and a different vision of the black future than colonization. Lincoln and Seward had become very close; as Seward’s secretary George E. Baker recalled soon after Lincoln’s death, they “never disagreed in but one subject—that was the colonization of the negroes.”
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Nonetheless, given Lincoln’s desire to work out a colonization treaty, Seward on September 30 addressed a circular to the governments of Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark—owners of colonial possessions in the Caribbean basin—offering to enter into agreements to colonize American blacks on their territory. The numerous requirements he listed for any treaty almost ensured rejection: homes must be ready on arrival; adequate compensation must be paid; schools and medical care must be available; the emigrants must enjoy all the rights of citizens. Few of the governments were interested. By the end of October 1862, Secretary of the Interior Smith was forced to admit that the administration now had “no settled policy” regarding colonization. But a month later, Lincoln was writing to Chase of his hope that a Chiriqui contract still could be arranged.
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If Lincoln anticipated that his embrace of colonization would reconcile his critics to emancipation, the elections of 1862 proved him wrong. As in any electoral campaign, numerous issues affected voters’ decisions, including infringements on civil liberties such as the suspension of habeas corpus, the economic impact in the Northwest of the suspension of commerce on the Mississippi River, and lack of military success. But Democrats spent much of their time denouncing Republicans as “Nigger Worshippers.” Lincoln, they charged, had unilaterally and unconstitutionally altered the war’s purpose. Emancipation would produce “scenes of lust and rapine” in the South and unleash “a swarthy inundation of negro laborers and paupers” on the North. Raising lurid racial fears paid electoral dividends. Democrats captured the governorships of New York and New Jersey, won control of the Illinois and Indiana legislatures, and gained thirty-four seats in the House of Representatives. Among those ousted from Congress was Lincoln’s ally George P. Fisher, in what was taken as a repudiation of the president’s compensated emancipation plan by Delaware voters.
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The results, however, had no effect on what a Washington newspaper called “the majestic march of events” that was “overwhelming” the carefully wrought policies of politicians and generals. Indeed, reflecting the contradictions inevitable at a moment of radical change, even as Lincoln pressed his colonization plan the administration moved toward recognizing blacks as free laborers and American citizens. Within military lines, officers were now treating all blacks as free under the Second Confiscation Act and paying them wages. In the Mississippi Valley, General Grant appointed John Eaton, a Dartmouth graduate and former superintendent of schools in Toledo, Ohio, to “take charge” of the escaped slaves who were congregating around army posts. Eaton enrolled thousands of them in schools in “contraband camps.” In Louisiana, Benjamin F. Butler established an “experiment of free labor,” with blacks working for wages for loyal planters. When Lincoln requested information about the system, Butler replied that he was convinced that black labor could be “as profitable in a state of freedom as in slavery.” The entire army, he added, now believed “that slavery is doomed.” Meanwhile, moves toward the use of black soldiers inevitably raised the question of their postwar status. As one newspaper noted, “It would hardly be treating the African like a man to use him as a soldier and then banish him.”
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Nowhere were the shifting crosscurrents of policy more evident than in the course of Attorney General Edward Bates. More than once, Bates had advocated compulsory deportation of emancipated slaves. Yet in November 1862, he issued an opinion affirming the citizenship of free black persons born in the United States. Bates had asked the advice of the distinguished jurist and political philosopher Francis Lieber, who responded that there was “not even a shadow of a doubt” that American citizenship included blacks. Bates agreed. The
Dred Scott
decision, he boldly declared, had “no authority” outside the specific circumstances of that case. Bates added that citizenship did not imply either equality before the law or political rights (women and children, after all, were citizens). Nonetheless, Salmon P. Chase, who had requested Bates’s ruling, immediately dispatched it to Louisiana, where free black activists had been demanding civil and political rights. The opinion, a striking change in public policy, was published early in December. “It properly precedes and ushers in,” wrote Greeley’s
Tribune
, “that other great act which is to come from the president on the 1st of January.”
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The electoral setback did not affect Lincoln’s outlook. His old friend David Davis visited the White House at the end of November 1862. He found Lincoln’s “whole soul…absorbed in his plan for remunerative emancipation.” Lincoln, Davis reported, remained certain that if Congress authorized the issuance of compensation bonds, the border states would take steps to abolish slavery and “the problem is solved.” Lincoln’s annual message to Congress, which reconvened on December 1, reflected this conviction. This was, to say the least, a curious document. It said almost nothing about the progress of the war, but included an elegiac reverie on the land itself, how it endured while “passing generations of men” and their ephemeral disputes came and went. Half its pages, a Democratic member of Congress complained, were “devoted to the negro.”
⁷⁰
But Lincoln did not discuss the impending proclamation. Instead, he devoted most of this section to reiterating his commitment to compensated emancipation and colonization. He asked for constitutional amendments authorizing Congress to appropriate funds for colonization, authorize payment to states that provided for emancipation by the year 1900 (with provision for repayment if they reintroduced slavery), and compensate loyal owners of slaves who gained freedom as a result of the war. This plan, he said, offered a “compromise” between advocates of abolition with the freed-people remaining “with us,” and those who favored gradual abolition and their “removal.” It would enable freed slaves to avoid the “vagrant destitution” that would likely follow “immediate emancipation.”

“I cannot make it better known than it already is,” Lincoln declared, “that I strongly favor colonization.” Three times, he used the ominous word “deportation,” although he also spoke of his administration’s continuing efforts to sign treaties for the “voluntary emigration” of blacks. He gently chided them for not being willing to leave the country, adding that he hoped a “considerable migration” would eventually take place. Colonization, he maintained, would benefit whites: “Labor is like any other commodity on the market…. Reduce the supply of black labor by colonizing the black laborer…and…you increase the demand for and the wages of white labor.” But at the same time, Lincoln directly addressed the racial fears stirred up in the fall political campaign, offering an extended argument as to why, if freed slaves remained in the United States, they would pose no threat to the white majority. He referred obliquely to exclusion laws such as that of Illinois: “In any event, cannot the north decide for itself whether to receive them?”

The December message contained a last offer to the border and Confederate states of a different path to abolition than immediate emancipation. Lincoln’s scheme would have had the government issue interest-bearing bonds to be presented to slaveowners, with the principal due when slavery ended in their state. He offered elaborate calculations of costs, benefits, and population trends to prove that despite the economic value of slave property—over three billion dollars, an enormous sum—the growth of the white population through natural increase and immigration would make the burden of taxation to pay off the bonds less and less onerous as time went on. Lincoln was betting that the white population would grow faster than the black, an outcome that colonization would ensure. The adoption of his proposals, he said, would “end the struggle now, and save the Union forever.”

Lincoln closed the message with a stirring peroration:

These words, proclaimed the
Continental Monthly
, should be “committed to memory and constantly recalled by every man.” A century and a half later, they remain among the most eloquent ever composed by an American president. Lincoln implored Americans to embrace the end of slavery—not, however, through the impending Emancipation Proclamation, which he failed to mention, but via his thirty-seven-year plan of compensated abolition. The message to Congress revealed Lincoln’s thinking at a crucial moment of transition. He clung to a proposal he had been promoting for a year with no success, yet pleaded with Americans to abandon the “dogmas” of the past. He again endorsed colonization, yet referred to prospective emigrants as “free Americans of African descent” rather than alien members of some other nationality, and argued that the nation had nothing to fear if former slaves remained in the United States.
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Many observers found the message puzzling and disappointing. “What becomes of the president’s [Preliminary Emancipation] proclamation of the 22nd of last September?” wondered Orestes Brownson. Some Republicans “gently laughed” at Lincoln’s “astounding scheme.” “I could hardly credit my ears,” wrote Colonel James A. Garfield, who heard the reading of the message while visiting Washington. Chase had urged Lincoln, to no avail, not to suggest constitutional amendments that could never be adopted. As Chase anticipated, the proposals went nowhere.
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For Lincoln, December 1862 was among the most trying months of the entire war. Between December 11 and 15, Union forces suffered a disastrous defeat at Fredericksburg, Virginia. This precipitated a full-fledged political crisis, with cabinet members scheming against one another and a congressional delegation demanding the ouster of Secretary of State Seward, whom many Republicans blamed for the administration’s failures.

Lincoln weathered the crisis. He assured members of Congress that he would not retreat from his pledge to issue the proclamation on January 1. But the weeks leading up to the new year witnessed an unseemly scramble for exemptions. In the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln had alluded to the possibility that parts of a state could escape its impact. He offered a precise guideline as to how to do so: a congressional election would have to be held in which a majority of “qualified voters” took part. Lincoln saw this as a way of encouraging white southern Unionism. He urged military commanders in the occupied South to schedule elections before January 1 and to remind local residents that by participating they could “avoid the unsatisfactory prospect before them”—that is, the freeing of their slaves.
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At Lincoln’s urging, Louisiana’s military governor, George F. Shepley, organized an election in December in and around New Orleans in order, as he impolitically put it, to enable residents to avail themselves of “the benefits” of exemption from emancipation. The turnout of 7,700 amounted to 60 percent of the vote cast in 1860. Military Governor Andrew Johnson called elections for late December in parts of Tennessee, but Confederate raids made holding them impossible. Nonetheless, Johnson and other Tennessee Unionists “urgently” requested Lincoln to exempt the entire state from the proclamation. Joseph Segar, whom Congress had earlier seated to represent eastern Virginia, pressed Lincoln to exempt that region. Lincoln seemed anxious to comply. On December 31, he wired General John A. Dix that time was “nearly up” but he had received no word of an election. Dix replied that one had just been held in Norfolk.
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Western Virginia took a different route to exemption. Early in the war, as previously related, Unionists there had created the Restored Government of Virginia, which Congress and Lincoln recognized as the state’s legitimate regime. Early in 1862, the legislature called for the creation of a separate state of West Virginia, whose population of 378,000 included about 18,500 slaves and 2,800 free blacks. In June, the U.S. Senate approved the idea, so long as West Virginia provided for the emancipation of the children of slaves born after July 4, 1863. In December 1862, the resolution passed the House. Lincoln then had to decide whether to sign it.
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