The Fiery Trial (44 page)

The issue of equal treatment came before Lincoln in 1863 and 1864, pressed by the black soldiers, their families, and white allies. From the outset, Lincoln worried about how Confederates would deal with captured black soldiers. He received numerous pleas to order retaliation if the Confederacy mistreated black prisoners of war, including a letter from Francis G. Shaw, whose son Robert had died with dozens of his soldiers in the assault on Fort Wagner. Another arrived from Hannah Johnson, the daughter of a fugitive slave and mother of a soldier in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts:

Unbeknownst to Mrs. Johnson, on July 30, 1863, the day before she wrote, Lincoln had signed a military order condemning the enslavement of black soldiers as “a relapse into barbarism and a crime against the civilization of the age.” This was unusually emotional language for Lincoln. He went on to threaten to execute a Confederate prisoner for each captured Union soldier put to death, and to assign a southern prisoner of war to hard labor for each black soldier sold into slavery.
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The treatment of black troops provided the occasion for Lincoln’s first meeting with Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist and editor of a monthly periodical widely read in antislavery circles. On August 10, 1863, Douglass went to the White House to argue for equal pay and promotion opportunities and the protection of captured black soldiers. In the most recent issue of his magazine, Douglass had excoriated Lincoln for indifference to “the slaughter of blacks taken as captives.” At their meeting, Lincoln explained “his policy respecting the whole slavery question.” Regarding the pay issue, Lincoln remarked that blacks continued to be widely “despised” and that their enlistment remained highly controversial; unequal pay, he said, helped to “smooth the way,” and in time they would receive the same wages as white soldiers. He had been charged with being slow and vacillating, Lincoln added, but “I think it cannot be shown that when I have once taken a position, I have ever retreated from it.” As for retaliation for the mistreatment of black soldiers, despite his order of July 30, he viewed this as a “terrible remedy,” which would invite an ever-worsening spiral of retribution: “Once begun, I do not know where such a measure would stop.”
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In the event, neither Lincoln nor the army enforced the retaliation order. Even when Confederate troops under General Nathan B. Forrest massacred dozens of black soldiers who surrendered at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in April 1864, Lincoln warned publicly of retribution, but it did not come. In May 1863, however, Lincoln suspended prisoner-of-war exchanges, which had been carried on since the previous July according to a formal arrangement between the Union and Confederate governments, unless the Confederacy agreed to include captured black soldiers. Despite Democratic criticism of this policy and petitions from white soldiers in southern prison camps asking him to resume exchanges, Lincoln did not relent for the remainder of the conflict. Early in 1865, the Confederacy finally agreed to exchange black prisoners of war.
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In a public letter of 1864, Lincoln identified the need for black soldiers as a crucial catalyst for emancipation. Faced with the alternative of “either surrendering the Union,…or of laying strong hand upon the colored element,” he chose the latter course. A year after widespread recruiting began, he wrote, “We have the men; and we could not have had them” without emancipation. He came to value immensely black soldiers’ contributions to Union victory. Lincoln was drawn to logical, quantitative reasoning. When most Americans visited Niagara Falls, they were overwhelmed by the awesome grandeur of nature. When Lincoln traveled to the falls in 1848, his response was to try to calculate the power unleashed by the waters and how much solar energy was needed to cause evaporation. In 1864, he defended the employment of black troops as a matter of “physical force,” which could be “measured and estimated” exactly like “steam-power.” But beyond mere numbers, Lincoln’s sense of blacks’ relationship to the nation began to change. In May 1864, Lincoln recommended that Congress provide that the widows and children of black soldiers who fell in the war be “placed in law, the same as if their marriages were legal,” so that they could receive the same pensions as white soldiers. A law to this effect was soon enacted. One of Lincoln’s secretaries, William O. Stoddard, wrote that “arming the negroes” was creating a “new race of freemen, who will take care of the South and of themselves too” when the war ended. As we will see, Lincoln’s first, cautious embrace of black suffrage involved extending the right to vote to soldiers.
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In 1864, the reformer Robert Dale Owen wrote of how the war had produced events “which no human foresight could anticipate,” including rapid changes in whites’ “opinion of the negro.” Nothing, he added, “has tended so much to these results as the display of manhood in negro soldiers.” Racism, of course, still ran deep, as evidenced most dramatically by the New York City draft riots of July 1863, when black residents were “literally hunted down like wild beasts” and forced to take refuge in Central Park or New Jersey. But two months later, a Washington newspaper wrote of “the dissolving prejudices against the colored man,” attributing this development to the service of black soldiers. The widely publicized exploits of black troops helped to shatter long-standing images of docile or barbaric slaves. Even in New York, the presentation of colors to a black regiment a year after the riots drew a large, appreciative crowd to Union Square.
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Partly because of the value he placed on the contribution of black soldiers, Lincoln’s own racial views seemed to change. There were other reasons as well. Frederick Douglass left his meeting with Lincoln impressed, he later wrote, with the president’s “entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race,” his willingness to engage in discussion without ever “remind[ing] me of the…difference in color.” Lincoln may have recognized in Douglass a self-made man like himself; according to John Eaton, who supervised freedmen’s affairs for General Grant, the president remarked that considering his origins, Douglass was “one of the most meritorious men in America.”
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Douglass was only one of many accomplished African-Americans who met with Lincoln during the war, the first such encounters of Lincoln’s life. Before the war he had had almost no contact with prominent blacks. In November and December 1860, the hundreds of well-wishers, politicians, and office-seekers who visited him in Springfield after his election did not include a single black person. But Lincoln opened the White House to black guests as no president had before. In 1862, as we have seen, he discussed emancipation in the District of Columbia with Bishop Daniel E. Payne of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and colonization with Alexander Crummell (not to mention the black delegation he urged to leave the country). Subsequently, in addition to Douglass, Lincoln received the black abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Martin R. Delany (whom he called “this most extraordinary and intelligent black man”); black diplomats from Haiti and Liberia; a delegation of five African-Americans from North Carolina presenting a petition for the right to vote; a number of groups of black clergymen; five leaders of the African Civilization Society; and two emissaries from the free black community of New Orleans. In 1864 he allowed blacks onto the White House grounds to take part in marking a national day of “humiliation and prayer.” He had daily contact with Elizabeth Keckley, his wife’s seamstress and confidante and an educated former slave who headed the Contraband Relief Association that assisted needy blacks in Washington.
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Lincoln’s encounters with talented, politically active black men and women seemed to soften the prejudices with which he had grown up. To be sure, he never became a full-fledged racial egalitarian. In private, he continued to use words like “nigger” and “darky” and tell racially inflected stories. But not infrequently his humor used irony to undercut racism. One of his stories related how a Democratic orator in prewar Illinois had warned his audience that Republicans would extend political rights to blacks. Lincoln mimicked the speaker who related what would transpire: “Here comes forward a white man…. I will vote for [Stephen A.] Douglas. Next comes up a sleek pampered negro. Well Sambo, who do you vote for? I vote for Massa Lincoln…. What do you think of that?” Whereupon, Lincoln continued, a farmer shouted from the audience, “I think the darky showed a damd sight of more sense than the white man.” Another instance of employing humor to express impatience with overt expressions of racism came in Lincoln’s response to a telegram from Pennsylvania that bluntly stated, “Equal Rights & Justice to all white men in the United States forever—White men is in Class number one & black men is in Class number two & must be governed by white men forever.” Lincoln drafted a reply to be sent by one of his secretaries:

When Lincoln moved to Washington to take up the presidency, William H. Johnson, a black resident of Springfield who had been working as his valet, accompanied him. Lincoln arranged for him to be placed on the Treasury Department payroll, describing him as a “colored boy” even though Johnson was a grown man. When Johnson died in 1864, Lincoln arranged for him to be buried at Arlington Cemetery, paid for a tombstone with Johnson’s name on it, and chose a one-word inscription: “Citizen.”
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Lincoln also abandoned the idea of colonization. When the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, the black abolitionist H. Ford Douglas predicted that the progress of the war would “educate Mr. Lincoln out of his idea of the deportation of the Negro.” The change Douglas predicted did come, but gradually. After January 1, 1863, Lincoln made no further public statements about colonization, perhaps realizing that such statements had failed both to persuade blacks to emigrate or to reconcile his critics in the northern and border states to emancipation. But later that month, after meeting with an official of the Pennsylvania Colonization Society, Lincoln directed the Interior Department to advance money to a black minister who wanted to establish a settlement in Liberia. In February, Lincoln told Congressman William P. Cutler of Ohio that he was still “troubled to know what we should do with these people—Negroes—after peace came.” Cutler replied that he thought the plantations would continue to need their labor.
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Throughout the spring of 1863, John P. Usher, a proponent of colonization who had succeeded Caleb B. Smith as secretary of the Interior, continued to promote various schemes. In April, he met with John Hodge, a representative of the British Honduras Company, “comprising…some of the leading banker capitalists, and merchants of London” and owner of “valuable lands” in desperate need of labor. Hodge hoped the administration would help him transport 50,000 black indentured laborers to that colony or even “a much larger number.” Lincoln gave Hodge permission to visit contraband camps in Virginia “to ascertain their willingness to emigrate.” But Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton refused to allow Hodge’s visit, since the army was now recruiting able-bodied men for military service. “The mission failed,” reported the
New York Times
, “and the gentleman went home.”
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“The recent action of the War Department,” Usher commented, “prevents the further emigration from the U.S. of persons of African descent for the present.” If James Mitchell, the emigration commissioner, is to be believed (a rather large if), as late as August 1863 Lincoln remained committed to colonization. The president, Mitchell later claimed, alluded to the draft riots one month earlier: “It would be far better to separate the races than to have such scenes as those in New York the other day, where negroes were hanged to lamp posts.” Nonetheless, placing black men in the army suggested a very different future for them than colonization.
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The fiasco at Île à Vache also contributed to the demise of colonization. Early in 1863, Secretary of State Seward convinced Lincoln to delay the implementation of the colonization contract he had signed with Bernard Kock on the eve of issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. In March, Kock transferred the agreement to two Wall Street brokers, Paul S. Forbes and Charles K. Tuckerman, whom he had convinced that Île à Vache, off Haiti, was the perfect place to grow Sea Island cotton. Later that month, Tuckerman met with Lincoln and persuaded him to approve a new contract with himself and Forbes for the transportation of 500 blacks to the island, even without approval from the Haitian government. Tuckerman then appointed Kock to oversee the project.
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On April 17, 1863, Kock and more than 450 men, women, and children embarked from Fortress Monroe in Virginia. Reports soon began to filter back of destitution and unrest among the colonists. It turned out that Kock had declared himself “governor,” taken the emigrants’ money, and issued scrip printed by himself. When they disembarked, the settlers found three dilapidated sheds; funds that were supposed to have been used to build housing had instead been spent on “handcuffs and leg-chains and the construction of stocks for their punishment.” The irate colonists soon drove Kock from the island. Dozens of emigrants perished, and others left for the mainland of Haiti. In July 1863, at a meeting with John Eaton, Lincoln spoke at length of the “failure” of colonization and his distress over the suffering on Île à Vache. In February 1864, Lincoln ordered the War Department to send a ship to bring the survivors home.
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