The Black History of the White House (22 page)

Lincoln fumed and immediately rescinded the order.
⁴⁸
His action would accelerate the ongoing battle between the White House and radical Republicans over how far to go toward ending slavery both for political purposes and to win the war.

The president continued to have trouble with his officers getting ahead of him on the issue of emancipation. Another field officer also sought to use the freeing of slaves as a tactic of war. On May 9, 1862, General David Hunter issued General Order 11, which freed all slaves in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. The order stated:

The three States of Georgia, Florida and South Carolina, comprising the military department of the south, having deliberately declared themselves no longer under the protection of the United States of America, and having taken up arms against the said United States, it becomes a military necessity to declare them under martial law. This was accordingly done on the 25th day of April, 1862. Slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible; the persons in these three States—Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina—heretofore held as slaves, are therefore declared forever free.
⁴⁹

When Lincoln again chastised the general and rescinded the order, Congress responded with a second Confiscation Act. The new bill, passed on July 16, 1862, stated in no uncertain terms that Confederate slave owners who did not surrender within sixty days would have the black people they enslaved permanently freed. The Act excluded those enslaved in the border states of Missouri, Delaware, Tennessee, and Maryland and even, as a result of pressure from Lincoln, sanctioned the return of these states' fugitives from slavery. It also included a provision for voluntary black expatriation. In any case, Lincoln did little to enforce either the first or second Confiscation Acts. And since they were Acts of Congress, they had relatively weak legal standing and could easily be overturned by a more conservative group of legislators.

All of these maneuvers were a prelude to the main event. By July 1862, Lincoln had come to realize that the war could not be won without ending slavery (or at least declaring it abolished). Earlier, on June 19, Congress passed the Territorial Emancipation Act. With Lincoln's signature, the Act abolished slavery in all territories seeking statehood under federal control. This action did
not
free any African Americans in any of the existing states but took a first step by refuting the
Dred Scott
decision's conclusion that the federal government could not regulate slavery in the territories. Congress and the president, at that point, still vacillated on a direct attack on states' rights.

But the real giant step that remained was to issue an order declaring slavery over and done throughout the land. Ultimately, this would not be the Emancipation Proclamation, despite its symbolic power, even though it was the Proclamation that irreversibly pushed the nation to full abolition. Pressure for emancipation was building. On September 7, a mass rally was held in Chicago calling for immediate emancipation
of all those enslaved. In an August 19, 1862, editorial, Horace Greeley, editor of the
New York Tribune
, demanded that Lincoln issue an order abolishing slavery immediately and totally. Lincoln's well-known and widely quoted response to Greeley sent chills through the abolition movement. Although Lincoln had already discussed with his cabinet the decision to issue an emancipation proclamation and had decided that he would free black people, he wrote deceptively in a letter to Greeley on August 22, 1862:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. 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. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.
⁵⁰

On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation that included a line stating that the “effort to colonize persons of African descent . . . will be continued.” He gave the forces of the South one hundred days to surrender—with the disturbing provision that they could keep the black people they enslaved—or he would sign the Proclamation on January 1, 1863. They did not.

And so, on the first day of 1863, President Lincoln put his non-shaky signature on the paper that read in part:

All persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever, free.

The Proclamation had many shortcomings. It did not free those who were enslaved and already in states in the Union, those who were in Union-held territory in the Confederacy, or those in the border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, or Missouri. Other areas in West Virginia and Louisiana were also excluded. Additionally, the Proclamation was a presidential order—rather than an Act of Congress or an amendment to the Constitution—that gave it questionable long-term legal standing.

It is also important, however, to acknowledge what it did do. First and foremost, it changed the nature of the war. Political and military leaders from the North and South who were not already there had to come to grips with the reality that liberation of all enslaved blacks—abolition—had become a goal of the war. Few had started off with that assumption. Most Southern leaders had voiced opposition to the Republican Party's plan to stop the expansion of slavery and its probable intent to perhaps in some distant future initiate policies for the institution's gradual abolition. Second, for both free and enslaved blacks, the Proclamation was a powerful organizing and mobilizing tool. For those still in slavery, it inspired tens of thousands to drop their plows and leave the plantation. Legally robust or not, the Proclamation was read as overthrowing the
Dred Scott
decision and the Fugitive Slave Act. Nevertheless, the significance and symbolism of the Emancipation Proclamation has remained the most controversial of all of Lincoln's decisions. It is clear that Lincoln changed and that his antislavery views—long-standing and well documented, though not necessarily based on a commitment to racial equality—evolved into a position of irrevocable abolitionism whether he wished it or not. In the end, he steered the nation to a place that no prior president had dared to go, and the consequences transformed the nation from a legally racist slaveocracy into a new social order.

It is also undeniable that Lincoln's views provoked his assassination. His last public speech, on April 11, 1865, three days before he was assassinated, focused on the postwar issue of reconstructing the nation and on the Louisiana constitution that had been submitted to Congress for approval. Lincoln also addressed the issue of black voting rights, setting himself up for criticism from the left for his racist statement about which blacks he preferred to give the franchise. In those remarks, referring to the proposed Louisiana constitution, Lincoln stated, “It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.”
⁵¹

According to historian James McPherson, the speech indicated that Lincoln and more radical Republicans in Congress were coming closer to a consensus on how to address this concern, but without doubt some, if not all, African American men were going to become the nation's newest group of voters. At the end of that speech, Lincoln hinted at the direction he was headed in extending rights to blacks, saying, “In the present ‘situation' as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act, when satisfied that action will be proper.”
⁵²
While scholar Lerone Bennett Jr. interprets that remark to be part of Lincoln's evasive language when it came to the rights of African Americans, there was at least one member of the crowd listening that day who believed he had a clear understanding of what the president meant.

John Wilkes Booth, central plotter of a conspiracy to violently bring down the Lincoln administration, was present and is reported to have muttered, “That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I'll put him through. That is the last speech he
will ever make.”
⁵³
And it was. Three days later, Booth, a virulent racist, shot Lincoln in the back of the head at Ford's Theater during the performance of “Our American Cousin.”

African Americans and Lincoln's White House

Let your motto be Resistance! Resistance! RESISTANCE! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance.
⁵⁴
—Henry Highland Garnet

Under Lincoln's command, political access to the White House had been extended to the black community for the first time in U.S. history. Among the best-known black leaders who met with Lincoln at the White House were Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, but many lesser-known activists and ordinary African Americans met with him there as well. The significance of these encounters cannot be overstated.

While there is little evidence that black input was the sole determinant in strategic decisions that were made by Lincoln (and presidents that followed him, particularly those in need of black popular support), black views were part of a shifting matrix of considerations in policy construction. While sometimes that meant doing the exact opposite of what African Americans saw as in their interests, the multiracial space that Lincoln opened would be a critical new element in the ongoing struggle for black freedom and equality.

As early as 1829, the emergence of a radical black voice in national public discourse began to appear. September of that year saw the publication of
Walker's Appeal
.
⁵⁵
The seventy-six-page pamphlet advocated that blacks revolt against their white enslavers and called for nothing short of full liberation and equality for African Americans, enslaved and free.
⁵⁶
The pamphlet also argued against colonization:

Let no man of us budge one step, and let slave-holders come to beat us from our country. America is more our country, than it is the whites—we have enriched it with our
blood and tears
. The greatest riches in all America have arisen from our blood and tears: —and will they drive us from our property and homes, which we have earned with our
blood?
⁵⁷

A bounty was put on Walker's head: $10,000 if he were brought in alive, $1,000 if dead. He was found dead at his home nearly one year later in June 1830.

The National Negro Convention movement, which brought together black leaders from around the nation, was another vehicle for challenging the dominant political and racial discourses of the mid to late nineteenth century and for projecting a progressive black perspective in pre–Civil War politics. However, it would be articulate and determined individuals such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell, Rev. Bishop Turner, and Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, among others, who would most effectively raise the stakes and agitate the conscience of the nation on the issues of justice, rights for blacks, and the moral atrocity of permitting whites to enslave people of color.

Douglass in particular was a powerful and relentless movement organizer, orator, and writer whose singular voice never yielded to the racist perspectives of the times, whether they were held by hard-core conservatives or sympathetic liberals. Born into slavery in Maryland in 1818, he escaped to the North when he was twenty years old and quickly became a galvanizing force of resistance to the slaveholding South and its Northern allies. His speeches against slavery and for justice for black Americans were riveting and drew massive crowds. Douglass was able to
win supporters across lines of race, class, and gender, from the very poor and marginalized to European kings and queens and American presidents. His visits to the White House were historic, and nearly all were turning points in the relations between African Americans and the U.S. presidency.

By the time of his iconic 1852 Fourth of July speech he was already the most famous black activist in the nation. He had written a best seller in 1845,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
, and traveled to Europe to speak on behalf of the rights of African Americans. He played a pivotal role at the 1848 Seneca Falls convention where the American feminist movement was born, and he was the publisher of
North Star
, one of the most important antislavery publications in the country.

On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, Douglass spoke before the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society to a crowd of 500 to 600 people in Corinthian Hall. In that speech he articulated the meaning for blacks of the nation's celebration of its independence from England seventy-six years earlier. It was as magnificent a presentation on the morality and politics of race as has ever been delivered in the United States. In that seminal speech, reflecting the collective sentiments of all African Americans, he raises the question, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” His answer is devastating.