The Fiery Trial (45 page)

Thus ended the only colonization project actually undertaken by the Lincoln administration. The
Chicago Tribune
entitled an editorial on the debacle “The End of Colonization.” The disaster convinced Secretary Usher to abandon the entire policy. As he explained to Lincoln, despite “the great importance which has hitherto been attached to the separation of the races,” colonization was dead. He viewed its demise philosophically: “Time and experience, which have already taught us much wisdom, and produced so many consequent changes, will, in the end, solve this problem for us also.” The Senate launched an investigation, and Congress froze its previous appropriation for colonization. On July 1, 1864, John Hay noted in his diary, “I am glad that the President has sloughed off the idea of colonization. I have always thought it a hideous and barbarous humbug.” (The last sentence was not accurate, as Hay, whose opinions generally reflected Lincoln’s, had strongly favored the idea in 1862.)
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By 1864, although Lincoln still saw voluntary emigration as a kind of safety valve for individual blacks dissatisfied with their condition in the United States, he no longer envisioned large-scale colonization. In a message to the ambassador to the Netherlands that coyly absolved Lincoln of responsibility for his previous advocacy of the idea, Secretary of State Seward explained why: “The American people have advanced to a new position in regard to slavery and the African race since the President, in obedience to their prevailing wishes, accepted the policy of colonization. Now, not only their free labor but their military service also is appreciated and accepted.” When Congress that spring debated the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, almost everyone supporting the proposal assumed that the emancipated slaves would remain in the United States. A few, such as Congressman John Broomall of Pennsylvania, still predicted that blacks would eventually depart voluntarily for a “promised land” in the tropics. This, however, would be “the work of ages.”
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As Seward’s letter indicated, Republicans were increasingly convinced of the need for black labor in the postwar South. Fears of a national labor shortage led Congress to pass the Act to Encourage Immigration, which Lincoln signed on July 4, 1864, allowing employers to bring workers from abroad under short-term contracts. (The act, the
New York Times
assured wary readers, contemplated Europeans, not “Chinese, Hindoos or Turks.”) Black labor was essential to what a writer in the
Continental Monthly
called “the vital and momentous question of cotton production.” If the cultivation of cotton, by far the nation’s leading prewar export, did not resume, economic disaster would follow. Of course, another reason for the shift in policy was that blacks showed no interest in emigration. The president of the American Colonization Society lamented early in 1864 that many Americans, black and white alike, believed that as a result of the war, “the condition of the negro will be so much modified…that the separation of the two races…will be no longer necessary; and that whites and negroes will come to be regarded as equals.”
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To be sure, equality remained a distant dream. The idea of a white America did not die with the Civil War, nor did blacks’ own emigration efforts. But colonization as an official policy was dead. Frederick Douglass offered the most fitting obituary. In a reply to a public letter by Postmaster General Montgomery Blair promoting the idea, Douglass dismantled one by one the arguments for colonization. Neither racism nor race conflict were immutable, and there was no such thing as a people being naturally fitted for a particular climate. More profoundly, the idea of colonization allowed whites to avoid thinking about the aftermath of slavery. It was an “opiate” for a “troubled conscience,” Douglass wrote, which deflected attention from the necessity of confronting the consequences of emancipation.
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The continuing evolution of Lincoln’s attitudes regarding blacks stands in stark contrast to the lack of change when it came to Native Americans. Lincoln’s paternal grandfather, Abraham, after whom he was named, had been killed by an Indian while working on his Kentucky farm, an event witnessed by the seven-year-old Thomas Lincoln. Not surprisingly, this traumatic incident became part of family lore, “impressed upon my mind and memory,” Lincoln later wrote. He mentioned it in the autobiographical sketches he produced for the 1860 campaign. But unlike many frontiersmen and military officers, Lincoln was never an Indian hater. He did not share the outlook, for example, of General John Pope, who wrote in August 1862 when he was dispatched to put down a Santee Sioux uprising in Minnesota, “It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so,” or of the state’s governor, Alexander Ramsey, who urged Lincoln to approve the execution of all 300 Indians condemned to death by courts-martial in the aftermath of that conflict. Lincoln carefully reviewed the trial records and commuted the sentences of all but thirty-eight. (Nevertheless, this still constituted the largest official execution in American history.) Lincoln subsequently signed a bill for the removal of the Sioux and Winnebago (who had nothing to do with the uprising) from their lands in Minnesota. Overall, not surprisingly, Lincoln devoted little attention to Indian policy during his presidency. He allowed army commanders free rein when it came to campaigns against Indians in the West, with the predictable result that the Civil War witnessed events like the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, where soldiers under the command of Colonel John Chivington attacked a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, killing perhaps 400 men, women, and children.
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Lincoln may not have had any special animus toward Indians but he shared the widespread conviction that they lacked civilization and constituted an obstacle to the economic development of the West. The influences that operated to change his views regarding blacks had no counterpart when it came to Native Americans. Blacks came to be identified with the fate of the Union, but key Indian tribes like the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek sided with the Confederacy, making them enemies of the nation’s survival. Indeed, Indian claims to independent sovereignty, while guaranteed by treaty, increasingly seemed at odds with the unified nation-state that emerged from the war. Although some 5,000 Indian soldiers fought for the Union on the western frontier, their numbers were too small to raise the issue of postwar citizenship. Lincoln had virtually no contact with Native Americans either before or during his presidency. He spoke in 1862 with the Cherokee leader John Ross, but nothing came of the encounter. In March 1863, he did hold a meeting at the White House with a group of fourteen western chiefs. His remarks were patronizing and illogical. He informed them that the world is round, as if they were unaware of this fact; urged them to take up farming; and ignoring the carnage going on around him, advised them to become less warlike and adopt the peaceful ways of white people. The Cheyenne chief, Lean Bear, pointed out that whites were responsible for most of the violence in the West. While many Americans recognized the need for reform of the notoriously corrupt Office of Indian Affairs (Lincoln mentioned this in his annual messages of 1862 and 1863), the future status of Native Americans was not the focus of a large social movement that pressured the White House for a change in national policy. Perhaps most important, the free-labor vision of the West, implemented in wartime measures such as the Pacific Railroad and Homestead Acts, meant continuing encroachment on Indian land. In his messages to Congress, Lincoln spoke of the need to extinguish the “possessory rights of the Indians to large and valuable tracts of land” and to encourage the exploitation of the West’s land and mineral resources by whites, while providing for “the welfare of the Indian.” He did not acknowledge that these aims were mutually contradictory.
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But if Lincoln’s Indian policies are depressingly similar to those of virtually every nineteenth-century president, when it came to African-Americans, he began during the last two years of the war to imagine an interracial future for the United States.

II

T
HE SUMMER OF
1863 witnessed significant Union military victories. In the greatest battle ever fought on the North American continent, the Army of the Potomac turned back Robert E. Lee’s incursion into northern territory at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. On July 4, the same day that Lee’s final assault was repelled, Vicksburg, the last major Confederate outpost on the Mississippi River, fell to the forces of Ulysses S. Grant. Severing the eastern and western parts of the Confederacy and opening the entire Mississippi to Union naval and commercial vessels, the battle at Vicksburg was “the most important northern strategic victory of the war.” These successes contributed to growing support for the administration in the North and a widespread embrace of emancipation and the arming of black troops. At the same time, however, Democrats, emboldened by their electoral gains the previous year, continued their harsh criticism of the administration. During his presidency, Lincoln no longer gave long public speeches to disseminate his views. But he did issue widely reprinted public letters to explain his policies. These played a major role in wartime politics and in solidifying support for emancipation.
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In May 1863 a group of New York Democrats headed by the banker and railroad magnate Erastus Corning dispatched a letter to the president protesting the arrest and trial by military tribunal of former congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio. Convicted of violating an order of General Ambrose Burnside, who commanded the Department of the Ohio, which included Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, prohibiting the expression of “sympathy for the enemy,” Vallandigham was exiled to the Confederacy. His ordeal made him a rallying point for Lincoln’s critics. Vallandigham made his way to Canada, ensconced himself in a hotel just across from Detroit, and received a steady stream of visitors from the United States. In June, Ohio Democrats nominated him as their candidate for governor. Democrats, joined by some Republicans, also expressed unhappiness with other restrictions on civil liberties, such as the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, the holding of military trials where civilian courts were in operation, and the suppression of Democratic newspapers like the
Chicago Times
, temporarily closed by the overzealous Burnside around the time of Vallandigham’s nomination. Such policies, wrote Secretary of the Navy Welles in his diary, “disregard those great principles on which our government and institutions rest.”
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Welles was certain that Lincoln regretted what had been done, and indeed, the president ordered Secretary of War Stanton to allow the
Chicago Times
to resume publication. But on June 11, 1863, Lincoln sent to the
New York Tribune
a reply to the Corning protest, strongly defending his limitation of civil liberties. He accused Vallandigham of giving speeches that actively discouraged enlistment and promoted desertion, which was why, Lincoln claimed, he came under military jurisdiction. In an oft-quoted sentence, he asked, “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert?” But Lincoln went well beyond this one case. He condemned persons guilty of disloyalty, among whom he identified individuals who actively aided the Confederacy as well as those who dared to raise the issue of freedom of speech or who did not avow support for the war effort. Not only the outright critic, but the man who “talks ambiguously” in support of the Union or “stands by and says nothing” assisted the enemy. Two weeks later, Lincoln addressed a similar letter to another group who condemned violations of “free thought, free speech, and a free press.” “Your attitude,” Lincoln responded, “encourages desertion, resistance to the draft, and the like.”
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Lincoln was no dictator. Elections took place as scheduled throughout the war, and the Democratic press continued to criticize the administration in the harshest terms. But neither did he possess a modern sensitivity to the importance of civil liberties. He believed that actions that in normal times would violate the Constitution became legal in wartime, emancipation itself being a salient example. His stance reflected how the war, which created a newly empowered nation-state with an unprecedented impact on Americans’ everyday lives, also inspired an upsurge of patriotism and a new identification of democracy and liberty with national authority. “One nation—one government—one universal freedom” would be the war’s result, declared a writer in the
Continental Monthly
. This frame of mind flowed easily into the equation of dissent with treason and of patriotism with unquestioning support for government policies. Republicans harped on these themes in political campaigns. One 1863 pamphlet, entitled
Unconditional Loyalty
, declared that in times of crisis, the “first and most sacred duty of loyal citizens” was “to rally round the president—without question or dispute.” Given his own intense nationalism, it is not surprising that Lincoln seemed to share this outlook. Of course, by 1863, support for the nation and the president also meant support for emancipation. “If we are not now abolitionists, in the old sense,” the political essayist Sidney George Fisher wrote in his diary in October 1863, “we are emancipationists and wish to see slavery destroyed since it has attempted to destroy the nation.”
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Lincoln designed his public letters to influence public opinion, not just respond to a few individuals. He had already done this in his reply to Horace Greeley in 1862 and would do so again in August 1863, when he sent a letter to James C. Conkling declining an invitation to speak at the Illinois Republican Convention. Lincoln crafted the language with care and instructed Conkling to “read it slowly.” He was mortified when a copy appeared in a number of newspapers “botched up.” The Conkling letter offered a sharp rebuke to those “dissatisfied with me about the negro” and a long defense of the Emancipation Proclamation and black military service. Borrowing language from a letter he had recently received from General Grant, Lincoln called these policies “the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion.” He directly challenged criticism of the proclamation’s legality: slaves were property, he wrote, and “the law of war” enabled a commander in chief to seize property “when needed.” He celebrated the patriotism of black soldiers, contrasting it with the disloyalty of his white critics: