The President's Daughter (56 page)

The whole love story got turned into political claptrap by Jefferson's enemies. The private lives of public men are always more vulnerable, as I have learned, but it is unfair to confuse the political man with the private one. And the fact is, I love Jefferson.

I adore him because he was then, and is now and forever, the most illuminated intellect in our history. He may (or may not) have begat some dark-skinned descendants, but in the process he begat (if you'll pardon the comparison) all of us. All honor to him, I say, who, in the pressure of a war for natural independence, had the nerve, the coolness, the foresight, to take what was merely a revolutionary document and turn it into the vehicle of abstract Truth, applicable to all men and all times. And he knew what he was doing. He knew we were struggling for something more than independence, just as I know now we are struggling for something more than the Union. I remember thinking even as a young boy that Thomas Jefferson and his signers had consummated the greatest promise to all the people of the world with that Declaration. And I am anxious, guilt-ridden, tormented that this Union should continue in accordance with his original idea. I have made war for his idea. I have killed seventy-nine thousand American boys for his idea. I will free slaves for it—even his own. And I will destroy the South for it, even Virginia, because he is the begetter, the progenitor of our national ideal. Americans have no pedigree without it.

There are some, and necessarily some black, who are blood descendants of those original ancestors, the signers, but most of us, in this year of 1864, are common immigrants: Swedes, Germans, Irish, Italian, Polish, who can't look back and trace our connection with the idea by any blood—except what we spill. We can't even speak English, half of us; we are a fugitive, alien, imported population. Only the
idea
makes us feel American—only when we look back at that old Declaration and discover the old man Jefferson saying, “We hold these truths”—then, only then, can we feel our connection to the father of all moral principle in us, and by this, blood of his blood, flesh of his flesh, children of his Declaration. That is the electric cord that links us all together.

Now, this was what I tried to explain to the delegation of black leaders on that Saturday, September 16th, 1862, at 4:00
P.M
., in a secret meeting in the Oval Office, when I laid out my plan for transporting all Negroes out of the country (with their permission) and back to Africa or some country in South America where I felt they would be happier.

I was frank, mind you, to the point of brutality. I said I was not, nor had been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. I had said the same thing in the debates, and had been repeating it for as long as I have been President. I was not, nor ever had been, in favor of making them voters or justices, of gratifying them to hold office nor (getting back to Jefferson) of allowing them to intermarry with white people.

There were half a dozen of them in the Oval Office. Big, impressive, many-hued men of substance—one, as black as my retriever Lucy; another, whiter than me. I told them that I believed there was a physical difference between the two races which would forever forbid us living together on terms of political and social equality in the same place. And insomuch as we couldn't live together, we must separate.

“Whether it is right or wrong,” I said, “I need not discuss, but your race suffers very greatly, many of you, by living amongst us, while ours suffers from your presence. There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, to let you free colored people remain with us. I do not propose to discuss this, but to propose it as one fact with which we have to deal. I cannot alter it.”

The reaction to this “interview” was summed up in the following manner by my black co-citizens themselves.

“In physical composition, you, Mr. President, may differ somewhat from the Negro,” he said (he was the blackest), “and also from the majority of white men; you may even, as you indicate, feel the difference on your part to be
very disadvantageous
to you; but does it follow that therefore that you should be removed to a foreign country?”

“Pray is our right to a home in this country less than your own, Mr. Lincoln?” said another, rather brown-skinned man. “Are you an American? So are we. Was your father one? And your father's father? Are you a patriot? So are we. Then wouldn't you spurn as absurd, meddlesome, and misguided propositions for your colonization in a foreign country? Give me one good reason why we, why anybody, should swelter digging coal in Central America—if there be any. Coal land is the best you know of to begin an enterprise?”

“Moreover, Mr. President,” said another, who was distinctly yellow, “when we wish to leave the United States we can find and pay for that territory which suits us best. And when we are ready to leave, we shall be able to pay our own expenses of travel. And when we are ready to leave, we shall let you know. The fact is, we don't want to go now, and if anybody else wants us to go, they must compel us.”

“I know that we are inferior to you in some things, President Lincoln,” said a most distinguished and elegant clergyman, “virtually inferior. We walk about among you like dwarfs among giants. [Laughter.] Our heads are scarcely seen above the great sea of humanity. The Germans are superior to us; the French are superior to us; the Yankees are superior to us. [Laughter.] This thought of inferiority is an old dodge. If you read the history of the Norman Conquest, the Anglo-Saxon himself was looked upon as inferior by his Norman master and might be found in the highways and byways of Old England laboring in a field with a brass collar on his neck and the name of the master marked on it.
You
were down then! [Laughter.] We are down now. I'm glad you are up, Mister President. I only want to be up also!”

“This nation has wronged us, Mister President, sir,” said the fifth, the whitest of them all, “and for
this
reason many hate us. The Spanish proverb is
‘O esde que te erre nunca bien te guise'
—'Since I have wronged you, I can never like you.' ... When a man wrongs another, he not only hates the other man himself, but tries to make all others hate him.

“We rejoice that we are colored Americans, but deny that we are a ‘different race of people,' as God has made of one blood all nations that dwell on the face of the earth, and has hence no respect of men in regard to color. . . .

This is our country by birth. . . . This is our native country; we have as strong attachment naturally to our native hills, valleys, plains, luxuriant forests, flowing streams, mighty rivers, and lofty mountains, as any other people. ... This is the country of our choice, being our fathers' country. We love this land, and have contributed our share to its prosperity and wealth. . . .

We have the right to have applied to ourselves those rights named in the Declaration of Independence.... When our country is struggling for life, and one million freemen are believed to be scarcely sufficient to meet the foe, we are called upon by the President of the United States to leave this land.... But at this crisis, we feel disposed to refuse the offers of the President since the call of our suffering country is too loud and imperative to be unheeded....

In conclusion, we would say that, in our belief, the speech of the President has only served the cause of our enemies, who wish to insult and mob us, as we have, since its publication, been repeatedly insulted, and told that we must leave the country. Hence we conclude that the policy of the President toward the colored people of this country
is a mistaken policy.”

They wouldn't accept colonization. I didn't tell them my motives for deportation were simple: I would not endanger the perpetuity of this Union.
I would not blot out the great, inalienable rights of white men for all the Negroes that ever existed.

But what I finally said to these black men in the Oval Office, that afternoon, was the following: “Gentlemen, let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race —as being inferior. Let us unite as one people throughout this land until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal. Whether or not the black man is equal to the white man in mental or moral endowments, in the right to eat bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of every living man in another country. That is the issue that will continue in this country when everyone in this room is dead, gone, and silent.”

That was the only thing we agreed upon. No matter that my Secretary of the Navy insisted that any deportation of the Negro population would take forty years and the entire treasury of the United States. Deportation was a dead issue anyway. We had neither the ships nor the guns to compel these men before me to move. And obviously they weren't going to move unless they were compelled. I realize, as my hero Jefferson never did, that these men—who were never going to pass for white — considered their birth in the United States as an American passport. Moreover, they would tolerate no transition between emancipation and citizenship. If slaves weren't citizens, then freedmen were.

Secretary of the Navy Welles and Postmaster Blair finally came to my rescue and ushered them out. I sat there for a long time, alone. Despite the best efforts of the worst men in America, I was stuck, God help me, with Jefferson's idea, and a struggle between right and wrong. I realized that whatever Jefferson had done to make it impossible for me to think of myself as anything except American, he had done it to them too. I thereby conceived the embryo of my Proclamation, on which I didn't consult any Negroes at all. And knowing mankind as I did, I was not optimistic about the outcome. I had always been poorly endowed with the faculty of hope. I had always felt some hindrance or deficiency in that theater; my sentiments had always lacked the sun, even in the height of summer ... and my sentiments now were those of singular sadness and depression.

If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves, I would do it; and if I could save the Union by freeing all the slaves, I would do that; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would do that also. But first I needed a victory. Any victory. I made a covenant with God. I would emancipate every God damned slave in the United States of America for victory in Maryland.

I the undersigned, Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States, age fifty-four, six feet, four inches tall, born in a log cabin in the backwoods of Kentucky, lawyer, politician, Black Republican, husband to Mary Todd Lincoln, of South Carolina, father of four sons (one deceased), leader and temporary (I hope) dictator of the people of the United States, in the greatest crisis and most tragic interlude in their history, do hereby acknowledge and describe my state of mind on the date of my proclamation the 23rd of September 1862
A.D
. to be effective in one hundred days, if the Confederate South doesn't come round, by the first of January 1863.

When I issued the Proclamation of Emancipation which transformed the war in a way I had vowed I would never permit, by turning it from a military response to insurrection to an armed revolutionary struggle, sanctioned by none other than Karl Marx, according to a German journalist who told me he said, “The revolution of 1776 freed the bourgeoisie and the revolution of 1861 freed the working class, “ I was miraculously serene for a man committing political suicide. But I knew I had to be free, to be my own man, unencumbered from all the political forces closing in on me because it was my name and my name only on that Proclamation. It was my place in history, my belief that the majority of the people of the United States would never tolerate slavery after this war, that was at stake. People were disgusted by slavery. The army would fight with a fierceness and dedication that would resist all pressures for a settlement only for its suppression. I had only to carve out the groundwork and invoke the considerate judgment of mankind. This illegal seizure of property called emancipation would also give the right to the black man of self defense even
though I begged them to abjure violence. But, if race war came, it came. I had no more compunction about using black men as U.S. soldiers either. The paper I held before me had taken on a life of its own. The power that seemed to emanate from it almost frightened me. It was only a piece of paper, and unenforceable in most of the country, and probably unconstitutional to boot, yet it glimmered back a holy writ, a moral justification for the terrible bloodletting I had unleashed on my country, a power greater than any I could find in the Constitution, a power equal to Jefferson's idea. I would, with a stroke of a steel pen, free four million human beings. I tried to get my mind around that. With one stroke now, I thought, with no compunction, in theory today, in actuality tomorrow … I would drop the word ‘forever” before ‘free,” because who could promise anything, let alone freedom, forever? That might stump even the Almighty. One thing was sure: I would have to fight this war to the bitter end for what I was doing. These were not the cool compromises of the Constitution, but the passion and fervor of the Declaration. Around me was silence, an awed silence so great that I heard even the scratch of the pen. I looked around at my war cabinet, Chase, Stanton, Blair, all good men. My eyes teared—one fell in the margin. A comma, a footnote, nobody saw it. . . . God Almighty, I begged, stand by me. Then I exhaled.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

The motion of my blood no longer keeps time with the tumult of the world.

Thomas Jefferson

“Now, everybody. Don't move. Please.”

The disembodied hand removed the cover from the camera lens. The magnesium lamp flashed in our faces like a shellburst, and the room filled with an acrid smell that mingled with the sweet scent of the fir tree we had put up at Christmas. We had decided to have our picture taken in celebration not only of the day, the first of January 1863, but of the fact that all my men, even Raphael and Maurice, were home from the war, and after one hundred days Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had become the law of the land.