Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (34 page)

Lincoln was due for a cruel disappointment. The “Act for the Gradual Emancipation of slaves in the State of Delaware” passed the Delaware state senate, but only by
a 5–4 vote, but in the Delaware statehouse a straw poll showed that the bill would fail, and its backers withdrew it. Undeterred, on March 6, 1862, Lincoln proposed to Congress a general compensated emancipation scheme:

R
ESOLVED
that the United States ought to co-operate with any state which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery, giving to such state pecuniary aid, to be used by such state in its discretion, to compensate for the inconveniences public and private, produced by such change of system.
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But the Border State representatives in Congress were no more enthusiastic for Lincoln’s scheme than the Delaware legislature had been. Charles Wickliffe of Kentucky, a Unionist but also a slave owner, demanded to know in “what clause of the Constitution” Lincoln “finds the power in Congress to appropriate the treasure of the United States to buy negroes, or to set them free.”
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Then came the debacle on the Peninsula, and the rising mutterings from Harrison’s Landing that McClellan was contemplating some form of military intervention, which would surely kick emancipation over into who-knows-when land. On July 12, 1862, with renewed urgency, Lincoln called in the border states’ congressional delegations and warned them that he could not wait forever for them to act. “Our country is in great peril,” Lincoln argued, “demanding the loftiest views and boldest actions to bring it speedy relief.” If they did not take action on their own “to emancipate gradually,” then the “friction and abrasion” of war would do it for them. Referring to a biblical metaphor of cataclysm, he told them they must read “the signs of the times.”
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Lincoln himself was long past caution on this point. On July 13, Lincoln confided to the secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, that if the Southern states persisted in their rebellion, it would be “a necessity and a duty on our part to liberate their slaves,” and if that meant resorting to some sort of war powers for justification, he would do it. “We had about played our last card,” Lincoln decided, “and must change our tactics or lose the game.” A week later, on July 22, Lincoln read to an astounded cabinet a preliminary draft of an Emancipation Proclamation, which would free all the slaves in the rebel states.
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As with the compensated emancipation proposal, Lincoln’s Proclamation sounded like a good deal less than what the old-line abolitionists wanted. It provided only for the emancipation of slaves still inside Confederate-held territory, leaving untouched slaves in the border states and in areas of the South already occupied by Federal forces. If Lincoln really had the war powers Charles Sumner thought he had, then constitutionally they could apply only to the places where there was a war in progress; since the border states had never been at war with the federal government, no war powers could be asserted there, unless Lincoln wanted to see his Proclamation end up in Roger Taney’s lap. Since it had been Lincoln’s argument all along that secession from the Union was a legal impossibility, the reclaimed occupied districts were not at war, either. If Lincoln wanted his Proclamation to stick, he would have to zone off the border states and the occupied districts—and their slaves.

But the states of the Confederacy—“any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized” was how he insisted on describing them—were another matter. Having removed themselves from civil jurisdiction, the Confederate states were now under the jurisdiction of the president as commander in chief of the army and navy of the United States. Under the rubric of those powers, Lincoln was prepared to do what no president under any other circumstances could have done legally, and that was declare general emancipation of all the slaves, without exception, in all rebellious areas; the emancipated slaves were “permanently free, thenceforward, and forever.”

On the advice of his cabinet, Lincoln waited to publish the preliminary Proclamation until the Federal armies had won some significant victories, so that the Proclamation would not appear as a counsel of despair on Lincoln’s part. This delay frustrated abolitionist editors such as the
New York Tribune
’s Horace Greeley, and Greeley (who had evidently caught up a rumor that Lincoln had some sort of edict ready to hand) wrote his provocative “Prayer of Twenty Millions” in August as an expression of that frustration. Lincoln’s reply that the “paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union” has often been read as a refusal to consider outright emancipation. But given that the Proclamation was already, literally, sitting in a pigeonhole in his desk, the very fact that Lincoln would almost nonchalantly announce that “if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it” was actually a radical statement, bundled into the most diffident possible language. No president in the previous six decades, from Jefferson to Buchanan, would ever have dreamt of suggesting that he might consider “freeing all the slaves,” or any slave at all, under any circumstances.

On September 17, the battle at Antietam gave Lincoln all he needed in the form of a victory, and on September 22, 1862, Lincoln released the text of the Proclamation with the warning that unless Southern resistance ceased before January 1, the terms of the Proclamation would automatically go into effect on that date.
The Confederates did little more than rain curses on Lincoln’s head, and on January 1, 1863, the Proclamation became official.

No one found the wait for emancipation more unbearable than the people who longed to be free. “How long! How long! O Lord God of Sabaoth!” Frederick Douglass exclaimed in 1847. Not long, if the outbreak of the war seemed to mean anything. When a Union naval flotilla steamed into South Carolina’s Port Royal Sound in November, 1861, the slaves on the Sea Islands in the sound thought they knew exactly what the rumble of the Federal naval guns meant. “Son, dat ain’t no t’under,” whispered one slave boy’s mother, “dat Yankee come to gib you Freedom.”
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When the preliminary Proclamation was released in September 1862, Frederick Douglass greeted it with a yelp of jubilation: “Ye millions of free and loyal men who have earnestly sought to free your bleeding country from the dreadful ravages of revolution and anarchy, lift up now your voices with joy and thanksgiving for with freedom to the slave will come peace and safety to your country.”

When Lincoln finally signed the Proclamation in midafternoon on January 1, it touched off wild celebrations of rejoicing. In Philadelphia, where a 100-gun salute broke the night’s stillness “in honor of the President’s Proclamation,” Mother Bethel Church “was crowded to overflowing, at least one-fourth of the congregation being whites, who seemed to take a deep interest in the exercises. … until a few minutes of twelve o’clock, when the whole congregation knelt in silent prayer to welcome in the new-born day of liberty.” In Boston’s Tremont Temple, the citadel of the free Massachusetts black community, Douglass, Charles Lenox Redmond, William Wells Brown, and John S. Rock spoke in celebration of the Proclamation. “In the evening when the Proclamation came to hand,” it was read aloud to the audience “who received it with uproarious applause, shouting, tossing up their hats, rapping on the floor with their canes, and singing ‘Blow ye the trumpet, blow.’”
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Thirty years before, white Bostonians “deemed it a duty that they owed to God” to harass abolitionists, but now
“things was a-workin.”
When the news came over the wires that the Proclamation had indeed been signed, “the joyous enthusiasm manifested was beyond description. Cheers were proposed for the president and for the Proclamation, the whole audience rising to their feet and shouting at the tops of their voices, throwing up their hats and indicating the gratification in every conceivable manner.” Douglass wrote, “The fourth of July was great, but the first of January, when we consider it in all its relations and bearings is incomparably greater. The one respect to the mere political birth to a nation, the last concerns the national life
and character, and is to determine whether that life and character shall be radiantly glorious with all high and noble virtues, or infamously blackened, forevermore, with all the hell-darkened crimes and horrors which attach to Slavery.”
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If the Proclamation answered one question—
What shall we do about slavery?
—the answer only opened the door to another:
What shall be done with the freed slaves?
“How shall we deal with four millions of liberated blacks?” asked William Grosvenor in the
New Englander
. “Rightly considered, it is the most awful problem that any nation ever undertook to solve.” Frederick Douglass hoped that the war would show white Americans how “the fate of the Republic and that of the slave” were tied together “in the same bundle.”
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But neither Lincoln nor the federal government seemed to give Douglass much hope that emancipation would do more than leave the freed slave in a sort of civic limbo—no longer a slave, but now… what? A citizen? The political equal of every white citizen? But what exactly was a citizen? The Constitution offered only vague hints about whether citizenship was a privilege bestowed and defined by the individual states or by the United States as a whole.

Lincoln, still hoping to evade a punishing white backlash against emancipation, at first hoped that he could dodge the question by promoting several schemes for colonizing emancipated blacks elsewhere—in effect, suggesting that they find political equality someplace other than the United States. Colonization had been one of the pet solutions of the Whigs for slavery ever since the days of Henry Clay, and in August 1862 Lincoln the ex-Whig tried to persuade a delegation of free black leaders led by Edward M. Thomas that it would be all for the best if African Americans could find a new life for themselves in Liberia, Central America, or the Caribbean, rather than trying to raise themselves to political equality in white America. Few black leaders saw any reason why they should have to abandon the only country they had known. Frederick Douglass was outraged when he heard of Lincoln’s plans for colonization. “Mr. Lincoln assumes the language and arguments of an itinerant Colonization lecturer,” Douglass stormed on the pages of his newest publication,
Douglass’ Monthly
, in September 1862, “showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” A mass meeting of free blacks in Philadelphia denounced the colonization plans: “Shall we sacrifice this, leave our homes, forsake our birthplace, and flee to a strange land to appease the anger and prejudice of the traitors now in arms against the Government?”
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Nevertheless, Lincoln persisted. Congress appropriated funds, and a developer, Bernard Kock, was contracted to organize a freedmen’s colony on Î le-à-Vaches, an island off the southern coast of Haiti, in 1863. Kock was only ever able to recruit fewer than 500 volunteers for the project, and he mishandled so many aspects of the settlement that in March 1864 Lincoln finally ended support for the colony and evacuated all the colonists. Lincoln’s “distress” over the “mistakes” of the Î le-à-Vaches project was “as keen as it was sincere,” wrote Chaplain John Eaton, who was in charge of the “contraband camps” the army was setting up across the South for newly freed slaves. “The spectacle of the President of the United States, conducting the affairs of the Nation in the midst of civil war,” worrying over the fate of the hapless colonists he had dispatched there “was a spectacle that has stayed with me all my life.”
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So, in the end, it came back to Lincoln to persuade a nation whose basic racial theories were usually little more than variations on bigotry that they were going to have to accept black people, free as well as newly freed, as their political and social brethren. In August 1863, when Frederick Douglass came to the White House to meet Lincoln for the first time, he was sure that he would still meet a president who was “preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.” Douglass came away with a view of Lincoln very different from what he had expected. Lincoln was “the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, or the difference of color.”
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Nor did Lincoln mean to allow others to remind Douglass of the issue of color, and Lincoln was soon implementing a series of measures that would at last bring African Americans closer to the mainstream of American life. The first of these measures came in the form of an economic experiment. When the Federal navy seized the islands in the Port Royal Sound in the fall of 1861, the navy expected only to use the islands as a coaling station for the blockade of the Carolina coast. Slave owners on the islands fled from the Northern occupation, leaving their plantations, and in many cases their slaves, behind. Since the slaves could now be deemed “contraband,” Treasury officials at Port Royal began putting the slaves to work harvesting the cotton on the abandoned plantations. Then, with the backing of anti-slavery societies in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, a small army of “Gideonites” descended upon Port Royal with evangelical fire in their hearts and schoolbooks in their hands to preach, to teach, to heal, and to divide up the old plantations into farm plots for the newly free slaves to manage as their own property. The results were extremely
gratifying—one of the new cotton-planting operations easily cleared $80,000 in one year—and they demonstrated that free black people had the full capacity to compete equally with white people in the free-labor society of the North, without requiring subsidies or preferment.
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The second measure was military. At the beginning of the war, thousands of free blacks had volunteered to serve in the Union army. “The prejudiced white men North or South never will respect us until they are forced to do it by deed of our own,” declared the
Weekly Anglo-African
, and Frederick Douglass urged the readers of
Douglass’ Monthly
to put “the keen knife of liberty” to “the throat of slavery” and “deal a death-blow to the monster evil of the nineteenth century”: