Rise to Greatness (41 page)

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Rarely had tension and torpor kept such close company in the capital. Compared with previous months, August seemed almost sleepy. Congress was gone; the armies were reorganizing. A heat wave settled over Washington like a sweat-soaked quilt: on the north porch of Gideon Welles’s house the thermometer registered 100 degrees on Friday, August 8. Two days later, a hint of breeze was worth a diary notation. John Dahlgren devised a bit of relief for the president at the navy yard. After showing Lincoln the latest innovations in rifled cannon and shells, he called for a yacht and took the presidential party for a ride on the Potomac to cool off in the evening air.

Yet underneath the apparent inactivity seethed a volcano. American history was coming to its greatest crisis, the moment when the nation would survive or expire. The Rebels were preparing to enter the border states; the European powers were preparing to throw their weight on the side of the rebellion; and Lincoln was preparing to expand the war into something much larger than he had imagined necessary. A second American Revolution, as the historian James McPherson has rightly put it, would test the unity of the North as it had never been tested before.

As long as this volcano rumbled unseen, Lincoln was forced to live an uncomfortable lie. His mind was made up in favor of emancipation, but he had to pretend otherwise until the moment was right for the announcement. Looking back on this period, the president’s secretaries described a leader oscillating between misery and anger as the public badgered him over his seeming fecklessness. Lincoln “grew sensitive and even irritable,” wrote Nicolay and Hay. “Could no one exercise patience but himself?… Why must they push him to the wall?” The long wait for a victory with which to frame the proclamation was perhaps the most delicate interval of his presidency, the aides wrote: “At no time were political questions so critical.” Lincoln “was compelled to keep up an appearance of indecision which only brought upon him a greater flood” of demands for an answer. “During no part of his Administration were his acts and words so persistently misconstrued”—acts and words designed only to “curb and restrain the impatience of zealots from either faction.”

No criticism landed more loudly than a letter published on August 20, by the editor of the
New-York Tribune,
Horace Greeley. Claiming to speak on behalf of twenty million Northerners, Greeley denounced Lincoln’s failure to take decisive action to free the slaves living within the Confederacy: “The Union cause has suffered and is now suffering immensely, from mistaken deference to Rebel Slavery,” Greeley boomed. Lincoln’s excessive concern for the opinions of “certain fossil politicians hailing from the border slave states” was “perilous and probably disastrous.” Worse, Lincoln was allowing his generals to ignore the Confiscation Act, and as a result, slaves who sought refuge with Federal forces were being turned away to be “butchered or reenslaved.” Was Lincoln prepared to bear the blame for this “through future History and at the bar of God?”

Greeley’s scathing attack filled two long, densely packed columns of type, with scarcely a word to suggest that Lincoln might face some difficulties. According to Greeley, the path ahead was clear: the president merely needed to stop disregarding his legal obligations. “The triumph of the Union is indispensable not only to the existence of our country, but to the well-being of mankind,” Greeley concluded; and addressing the president directly: “I entreat you to render a hearty and unequivocal obedience to the law of the land.”

Lincoln may have felt blindsided: only a week earlier, he had given Greeley’s second in command, Sidney Howard Gay, a personal interview at the White House. But it was not Greeley’s way to be moved by such favors. A mercurial, passionate man given to wild swings of judgment and mood, he divided the world’s questions into two categories, simple or hopeless, and nothing was gray but the newsprint. These qualities made for strong admirers and even stronger critics; Greeley was unquestionably among the most widely read writers in America.

Lincoln judged that he should respond somehow to Greeley’s charges. He could have brushed them away simply by announcing the administration’s decision to enlist and train the former slaves at Port Royal—not just as army laborers, but as armed soldiers ready to defend the cotton plantations under Federal control. This important step would have delighted the abolitionists, but at the moment they were not Lincoln’s most irksome constituency, so he preferred to keep silent about it. He instead used Greeley’s letter as a chance to appeal to Northern moderates, crafting a calculated reply designed to pave the way for his emancipation proclamation.

Playing off Greeley’s bluster, Lincoln struck a cautious and disciplined tone in his response. He explained that his original promise remained: “I would save the Union.” This polestar—which had such widespread, bipartisan support at the outset of the war—still guided his decisions, even as he moved closer to grasping the nettle of slavery. But some people, he wrote, wished to preserve only the old “Union as it was,” with slavery intact: “I do not agree with them.” Other people wished to save the Union only if in the process slavery was abolished. “I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery.” Realizing that readers might interpret this as a statement of moral ambivalence, Lincoln warned that nothing he was saying changed his “oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere would be free.” His policies, however, were designed to achieve the one goal that bound the North together through this unprecedented turmoil. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”

Left unsaid—but well known to his readers—was the fact that many statesmen before him had tried for decades to save the Union without freeing any slaves, and their failures had paved the road to rebellion. Lincoln, for his part, had tried earlier in the year to start the emancipation process by voluntary means; that, too, had failed. Now he had decided to free some three million slaves in order to save the Union, and he had little doubt that his proclamation, when it was enforced by the Union armies, would lead to freedom for all slaves. As before, though, he kept the decision and its implications secret.

On a personal level, the “impatient and dictatorial tone” of Greeley’s letter annoyed Lincoln. But the president had a deft answer for that, too. Instead of sending his reply directly to Greeley, to be published under a big headline in the
Tribune,
he sent it to another paper, the
National Intelligencer.
Greeley was forced to reprint it as day-old news.

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Another attempt to sugar the pill of emancipation for reluctant Northerners went down less smoothly. On August 14, Lincoln sat down at the White House with a delegation of leaders from Washington’s free black community to discuss the idea of moving members of their race to distant colonies. The topic had become a major issue among black residents thanks to that most familiar of devices: money. Twice that year, Congress had appropriated significant sums to get the colonization program moving. The fund now totaled $600,000, enough to attract a number of eager entrepreneurs. As one knowledgeable observer put it, the money was a “carcass over which the turkey buzzards are gathered together!”

Blacks in the capital were split over the idea of leaving America. Some were eager to say goodbye to a country where they were hated and exploited; others rejected the notion that they should have no place in a nation they had helped to build. The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, argued that blacks should not even consider the offensive proposal. His son Lewis, by contrast, found it quite appealing. The subject divided even Lincoln’s own house. While the president was examining competing colonization proposals, his head servant, William Slade, led an organization that sought to ban recruiters for the colonization schemes from entering the capital.

Liberia, the colony of former slaves in West Africa, was one possible destination. Lincoln, however, was more intrigued with a plan to settle American blacks in what is now Panama, in the supposedly coal-rich region of Chiriqui. The idea was to build a U.S. Navy fueling station where steamers could take on coal. Mining, storing, and loading the coal would keep the immigrants employed. They might also be able to plant cotton.

Eager to explore this prospect, the president sent an emissary to a group of prominent Washington blacks, asking them to choose a delegation to meet with him. Five men were chosen—all of them opposed to colonization. It was a formidable group. One member, John Cook, was educated at Oberlin College before taking over a school for black children founded by his father. Another, Benjamin McCoy, had founded a church and school. The chairman, Edward Thomas, was a messenger in the House of Representatives and a patron of the arts who had “the respect and confidence of every member of Congress.”

Lincoln apparently knew little about these men when he welcomed them to his office that afternoon. He asked: “Why should they leave the country?,” then answered his own question: “You and we are different races.” The antagonism created by this difference was real and deep, he continued. “Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people,” but “I cannot alter it if I would. It is a fact, about which we all think and feel alike, I and you.” America was so far from racial harmony that “on this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours.” Indeed, Lincoln went on, it was a mistake ever to bring captive Africans to North America, and now that mistake had led to the calamity of war: “our white men cutting one another’s throats … [over] the institution of Slavery and the colored race. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”

No record has been found to show how the delegates reacted to these words; apparently they sat stoically while Lincoln talked. He went on at length about the need for free and educated blacks like them to embrace colonization as a way of creating opportunity for the “systematically oppressed” former slaves. They could be like George Washington, he said, who endured hardship to make a future for his people. Then he turned to the advantages he saw in the proposed Chiriqui colony: fine harbors and “very rich coal mines,” which “will afford an opportunity for the inhabitants for immediate employment.” The rest, Lincoln assured them, would come through “self-reliance.”

History would vindicate Lincoln’s pessimism about the prospects for racial equality after the war was over. Still, his stubborn pursuit of what he once called his “colonization hobby” was a rare case of Lincoln indulging a fantasy. “I am so far behind the Sumner lighthouse,” he once admitted—meaning that he could not picture, as the Massachusetts abolitionist could, a future free of racial hatred and discrimination. Unable to see a sensible way forward, he wished the problem away on the implausible wings of a voluntary mass migration. Although he would eventually awaken from this strange (though widely shared) dream, for now he was still in the grip of it.

His visitors clearly were not. As the meeting adjourned, they gave a noncommittal promise to think about the president’s proposal. News of the session stirred a storm of protest from abolitionists. But criticism from those quarters was not necessarily a bad thing: Lincoln’s colonization hobby cost him little with the radicals who already scorned his efforts, and perhaps gained him some support from the all-important moderate center. Instead, African-Americans—the would-be George Washingtons who ultimately accepted the president’s challenge—paid the price for the ill-conceived Chiriqui scheme. Hundreds, if not thousands, eventually signed up for the colony. “Many of us have sold our furniture, have given up our little homes to go on the first voyage,” a group of them wrote when it became apparent a few months later that Honduras would not agree to have the colony planted next door. The fantasy of colonization fizzled, and their small savings were squandered for passage on a ship that never sailed.

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“Mrs. L … is not well,” Lincoln wrote on August 21. As a general matter, this was true more often than not, though the specifics of her malady on this particular day are unknown. Mary was perhaps tired after returning from a trip to New York and Boston, where she balanced shopping sprees with earnest efforts to raise donations for Washington’s military hospitals. She may also have been privately grieving the death of her favorite half-brother, Alexander Todd, who had died two days earlier of wounds received while fighting the Yankees at Baton Rouge. “Oh Little Aleck, why had you to die?” Mary moaned when she got the news. The first lady usually put on a stony face when talking with others about the Rebels in her family tree. “He made his choice long ago,” she once said coldly of Aleck. “He decided against my husband.” But there can be little doubt that this sensitive and emotional woman gave in to sorrow when she was alone with her memories.

Mary’s interest in spiritualism had deepened over the summer, and now she hosted a séance at the presidential cottage. Her dangerous attraction to flamboyantly shady characters had led her to a medium named Charles J. Colchester, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of an English aristocrat and called himself “Lord Colchester.” Spirits answered his summonses by making various noises in dark rooms, noises only he could translate.

Mary prevailed on her husband to attend Colchester’s séance, and Lincoln in turn invited his friend Noah Brooks, a young journalist who later worked as his secretary. By Brooks’s account, the circle sat rapt as the lights were doused. Soon, there were sounds of tapping and scratching that Colchester translated as messages from Willie. This may have been the night that Willie first fetched Aleck Todd to accompany him from the afterlife; Mary took special comfort from séances in which her son brought with him his exuberant red-haired uncle. Whatever transpired, it was enough to persuade Lincoln that Colchester was some sort of a fraud; he asked his science expert at the Smithsonian, Dr. Joseph Henry, to investigate.