Lincoln Part 34

Mary Lincoln's grief over Willie's death was even more devastating than her husband's. Having earlier lost Eddie in Springfield, she could not deal with this second death, and for three weeks she took to her bed, so desolated that she could not attend the funeral or look after Tad, who was slowly beginning to recover. For many months the mere mention of Willie's name sent her into paroxysms of weeping, and Lincoln had to employ a nurse to look after her. Never again did Mary Lincoln enter the bedroom where Willie died nor the downstairs Green Room, where his body had been embalmed. When she was finally able to emerge from her room, she went into such profound mourning dress that she was almost invisible under the layers of black veils and crepes.

For nearly a year all social activities at the White House were suspended. Mary Lincoln's mourning was so absolute that she forbade the weekly concerts the Marine Band usually played on the grounds. "When we are in sorrow," she announced, "quiet is very necessary to us." A few people took mean satisfaction in the Lincolns' tragedy. "I suppose Mrs. Lincoln will be providentially deterred from giving any more parties which scandalized so many good persons who did not get invitations," a Washington merchant wrote. David Davis, who disliked Mary Lincoln as much as he admired her husband, speculated: "It may be that this affliction may save his wife from further gossip, and may change her notions of life."

V

At about the time of Willie's death Lincoln's optimism about military affairs also began to vanish. There were still some successes to celebrate. In the West the Union victory at Pea Ridge, Arkansas (March 68), ended the threat of a Confederate invasion of Missouri. In the East, Ambrose E. Burnside, after capturing Roanoke Island, moved inland to New Berne, North Carolina, which could serve as a base for future operations. But elsewhere there was no progress. After the victories at Forts Henry and Donelson the armies in the Mississippi Valley seemed unable to advance. Receiving no dispatches from Grant for two weeks, Halleck a.s.sumed that his subordinate was demoralized by victory and removed him from command. Reports spread that Grant had gone back to his old habits, and in Washington he was now considered "little better than a common gambler and drunkard." Eventually Halleck learned that Grant had been in Nashville conferring with Buell about a joint advance and that a telegraph operator failed to transmit his dispatches. The controversy was important only in that it entailed further delay before the army pushed south.

Even less encouraging were the activities of the Army of the Potomac. The President's General War Order No. 1 finally forced McClellan to discuss his broad strategy with his commander-in-chief. The general was now convinced that a frontal a.s.sault on the Confederate army at Mana.s.sas, whose size he consistently overrated, could only lead to another disaster like Bull Run. The proper object of the Union army, he argued, was the capture of Richmond, and he developed an elaborate strategy for attacking the Confederate capital from the east, where the navy could protect his line of supplies. In Lincoln's view the campaign ought to be directed not against the Southern capital but at the Confederate army, and he favored a direct advance on Mana.s.sas.

That essential difference shaped the relationship between Lincoln and McClellan. Over the next few months the general did everything in his power to promote acceptance of his strategy, while the President dragged his feet. Self-absorbed and insensitive, McClellan seemed totally unaware that in a democratic society military commanders are subordinate to civilian authorities, and he felt no need to keep the President informed, much less to seek his advice. For his part, Lincoln, reluctant directly to interfere with military matters when he had no expertise, failed to make McClellan understand that when he made a suggestion he expected the general to follow it. This mutual distrust destroyed any chance for a successful campaign.

Four days after his General War Order No. 1, Lincoln, whose patience was growing thin, issued another order specifically directing the Army of the Potomac to advance and seize Mana.s.sas on or before February 22. Upon receiving it, McClellan wrote a twenty-two-page letter to Stanton, detailing his objections to a proposed frontal attack on the Confederates at Mana.s.sas and spelling out, for the first time, his plan to attack Richmond from the east. Unimpressed, Lincoln posed a series of questions to the general: Would McClellan's plan take longer and be more costly than an advance against Mana.s.sas? Would it more certainly be successful? Would it offer a sure means of retreat in case of disaster? McClellan respectfully repeated his arguments against an attack on Mana.s.sas. Urging his own plan, he pledged, "I will stake my life, my reputation on the result-more than that, I will stake upon it the success of our cause." Lincoln was not convinced, but he acquiesced.

During the next month as McClellan prepared his expedition Lincoln watched his movements skeptically. Several minor developments increased his doubts. For some time Confederate batteries on the Virginia sh.o.r.e had closed the lower Potomac to navigation and their presence was both an embarra.s.sment and a nuisance. The Army of the Potomac claimed it was unable to remove them. Then an enterprising young Union officer carried out an independent raid and discovered that there were hardly any fortifications on the Virginia side of the river. Even more embarra.s.sing was McClellan's failure to force the Confederates out of Harpers Ferry, where they controlled the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, a vital link between the national capital and the West. Planning to throw a force across the Potomac on a temporary bridge, McClellan had pontoon boats built and sent up the river. They proved to be six inches too wide for the locks on the Chesapeake and Ohio Ca.n.a.l and the whole project had to be abandoned. When General Randolph B. Marcy, McClellan's chief of staff and father-in-law, told Lincoln the news, he exploded: "Why in tarnation... couldn't the Gen[eral]. have known whether a boat would go through that lock, before he spent a million of dollars getting them there? I am no engineer; but it seems to me that if I wished to know whether a boat would go through a ... lock, common sense would teach me to go and measure it. I am almost despairing at these results.... The general impression is daily gaining ground that the Gen[eral]. does not intend to do anything."

Lincoln's irritability on this occasion was undoubtedly related to the excitement he and everybody else in the cabinet felt about a conflict about to take place in Hampton Roads, near Norfolk and Fort Monroe. The former USS Merrimack, now heavily armored and rechristened the CSS Virginia, steamed out of Norfolk harbor and, virtually immune to shot and sh.e.l.l from the wooden ships of the Union navy, rammed and sank the c.u.mberland, burned the Congress, and damaged the Minnesota and other vessels. If unchecked, the Confederate ironclad could break the blockade. There was panic in Washington. Stanton, always excitable, broke out in recriminations against Gideon Welles and the navy and predicted that the Merrimack would soon send a cannon shot into the cabinet room. Lincoln, too, was clearly troubled, but he tried to conceal his agitation by eagerly reading the dispatches and interrogating the navy officers who brought news of the engagement. That evening the Monitor, a Union ironclad of such unusual design that it looked like a cheese box on a raft, appeared at Hampton Roads, ready to give battle the next day. In the engagement on March 9 the Merrimack was badly damaged and forced back to Norfolk.

During this period of great excitement Lincoln had a confrontation with McClellan. After complaining about the Harpers Ferry fiasco, he expressed fears that if McClellan moved his army down the Potomac to attack Richmond from the east he would leave Washington exposed. "It had been represented to him," he said, that McClellan's move "was conceived with the traitorous intent of... giving over to the enemy the capital and the government, thus left defenceless." The President did not identify his source, but he had been talking with the fiercely anti-McClellan members of the Committee on the Conduct of the War. Furious, McClellan sprang up and told Lincoln he would permit no man to call him a traitor. Much agitated, Lincoln backed down from his accusation and, according to McClellan, "said that he merely repeated what others had said, and that he did not believe a word of it."

At the end of the conversation McClellan agreed to consult the division commanders of the Army of the Potomac on his plan. Eight of them, all younger generals who owed their promotion to McClellan, favored it, but the four senior men opposed. They then trooped over to the White House, where the President and the Secretary of War questioned them closely. Both Lincoln and Stanton were clearly troubled about the safety of the national capital, but in the end the President accepted the decision of the majority and authorized McClellan to go ahead. "We can do nothing else than accept their plan and discard all others," he told Stanton afterward. "We can't reject it and adopt another without a.s.suming all the responsibility in the case of the failure of the one we adopt."

The President, still unconvinced, made his dissatisfaction plain by ordering the reorganization of the twelve divisions of the Army of the Potomac into four corps. This action, which for some time the Committee on the Conduct of the War had been urging, was a sensible one. The Army of the Potomac was now so vast that no one commander could give sufficient attention to each of the twelve separate divisions. McClellan himself had favored such a reorganization-though he wanted to wait until after a battle and appoint as corps commanders generals who had distinguished themselves in the field. Lincoln overruled him and named as corps leaders Generals E. V. Sumner, Irvin McDowell, Samuel P. Heintzelman, and Erasmus D. Keyes-the first three of whom had opposed McClellan's plan of campaign.

Further evidence of the President's doubts about his commanding general's strategy appeared in a general war order forbidding the Army of the Potomac to change its base of operations until McClellan and the four corps commanders declared Washington entirely secure.

Three days later the President clipped McClellan's wings even closer in a broad reorganization of the army command. After Stanton made a full report to the cabinet blaming McClellan for the "great ignorance, negligence and lack of order and subordination-and reckless extravagance" evident in the management of the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln and his advisers agreed it was too much to expect any man to be both general-in-chief of all the armies and commander of the huge Army of the Potomac when it was about to take to the field. The President relieved McClellan from his duties as general-in-chief. Henceforth he was simply to be commander of the Department of the Potomac. Lincoln's order consolidated the several armies in the Mississippi Valley under the command of General Halleck, who claimed most of the credit for Forts Henry and Donelson. In order to pacify the abolitionists and the disgruntled German element in Missouri, Fremont was given command of the new Mountain Department, where it was a.s.sumed he would try to liberate the Unionists of eastern Tennessee. Perhaps the most significant change was that all three department commanders were to "report severally and directly to the Secretary of War," who now took full charge of bringing order and efficiency to army administration.

Most people welcomed the reorganization. McClellan himself, though disgruntled that he had to learn of the reshuffling of commanders from the newspapers, accepted his demotion in good spirits and wrote Lincoln: "I shall work just as cheerfully as ever before, and ... no consideration of self will in any manner interfere with the discharge of my public duties."

Now at last the way was cleared for McClellan to begin his campaign, but one final episode further weakened the President's confidence in his commander. Hearing that the Confederates were pulling back from Mana.s.sas, the general led the entire Army of the Potomac, 112,000 strong, to see what was happening. The Confederates were indeed gone, and it was clear that they had numbered less than 50,000-about half of what McClellan had estimated. The Southern fortifications that had looked so formidable turned out to be mostly logs painted to resemble cannon. The whole country gave a giant horselaugh.

The Confederate withdrawal from the Mana.s.sas area forced McClellan to change his plan for transporting the Army of the Potomac down the Potomac and up the Rappahannock River to Urbanna, where it could make a quick dash of about fifty miles on Richmond. In their new position the Southern forces would be between him and the Confederate capital. Quickly revising his strategy, the general decided to go farther south to the peninsula between the York and James rivers, where Fort Monroe, guarding the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay, was still in Union hands. By April 1 part of the Army of the Potomac was on the peninsula. Lincoln continued to watch with anxiety and doubt. Months later he told Browning that he had always thought McClellan's strategy was a mistake and "that his opinion always had been that the great fight should have been at Mana.s.ses [sic]."

VI

Republicans who wanted Lincoln to remove McClellan also criticized the President for not attacking slavery, the cause of the war. In Congress these condemnations were usually indirect, as when Thaddeus Stevens, the powerful Pennsylvania Republican, without mentioning Lincoln by name, lamented that in this war there had been "no declaration of the great objects of Government, no glorious sound of universal liberty." But in private letters critics bluntly referred to the President's "imbecility" and to his folly in attempting to preserve slavery while engaged in a war against the slave power of the South. "A more ridiculous farce was never played," wrote one of Trumbull's correspondents. Francis W. Bird, one of the original organizers of the Republican party in Ma.s.sachusetts, felt that Lincoln had "gone to the rescue of slavery, which had almost committed suicide." "The key of the slave's chain is now kept in the White House," he scolded. Some of Lincoln's close political friends were equally direct. "Our nation is on the brink of ruin," Joseph Medill lamented. "Mr. Lincoln, for G.o.d's sake and your Country's sake rise to the realization ... that this is a Slave-holders rebellion." An Illinois man, enraged by Lincoln's course, predicted "that if a speedy change ... did not soon occur,... some Brutus would arise and love his country more than he did the President."

Lincoln's views on slavery were not, in fact, so far from those of his critics. He made no attempt to disguise his antislavery feeling; as he told a group of border-state representatives, he "thought it was wrong and should continue to think so." He agreed that slavery was "somehow" the cause of the war, and he did not think it could long survive the present conflict. In areas where he felt he was const.i.tutionally able to act, he took small but significant steps to dissociate himself from the proslavery stance of his predecessors. He willingly signed a law prohibiting slavery in all the national territories-even though the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision had declared such exclusion unconst.i.tutional. He welcomed a new treaty with Great Britain for the more effective suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. At the urging of Charles Sumner, he refused to commute the death penalty for Nathaniel Gordon, the first American slave trader convicted and hanged for partic.i.p.ating in the nefarious traffic.

But he was reluctant to adopt more sweeping policies. He was ready to use "all indispensable means" to preserve the Union, but he warned against hastily adopting "radical and extreme measures, which may reach the loyal as the disloyal." "In considering the policy to be adopted for suppressing the insurrection," he told Congress in December 1861, "I have been anxious and careful that the inevitable conflict for this purpose shall not degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle." Remembering his inaugural vow not to interfere with slavery in the states where it already existed and adhering to his theory that the seceded states were still part of the Union, he was not yet ready to strike at slavery in the Confederacy-especially since nothing he could do or say would have any practical effect there.

The constant barrage of criticism to which Lincoln was subjected had the wholesome result of forcing him to think through more systematically his position on slavery and emanc.i.p.ation. Up to this time he had not been called on to do much more than express his dislike for the peculiar inst.i.tution, his hope that in time it would die out, and his vague wish that Negroes should be colonized elsewhere. As Stephen A. Douglas repeatedly pointed out in their 1858 debates, he never explained how he expected to bring slavery into a course of ultimate extinction. Now he was obliged to come up with a positive policy. There was all the more urgency for him to act because Congress was pushing ahead with consideration of Trumbull's second confiscation bill, which would, in effect, emanc.i.p.ate the slaves of all rebels.

Doubting both the const.i.tutionality and the wisdom of proclaiming general emanc.i.p.ation, Lincoln felt obliged to deal with some immediate problems arising from slavery. One of these was what to do with the thousands of slaves who fled from their masters to seek freedom behind the lines of the Union armies. Since the Fugitive Slave Act was still in force, some Union commanders in the West, like Halleck, allowed slave masters to search their army camps and reclaim these fugitives. Unwilling to return the runaways, General Benjamin F. Butler, a Ma.s.sachusetts antislavery man, called them contraband of war, on the ground that they were, or could be, used by their masters to help build Confederate fortifications, and refused to send them back to slavery. His decision was immensely popular in the North, and for the rest of the war slaves were often referred to as "contrabands." Lincoln made no official comment on Butler's action, or on the decision of other commanders to exclude slave hunters from their camps, but he told Browning as early as July 1861 "that the government neither should, nor would send back to bondage such as came to our armies."

What to do with these fugitives was a puzzle. They should not be returned to their masters; they could not live in idleness near Union army camps; and they must not be turned loose on the negrophobic border states. The Northern states did not want them. In his search for a solution, Lincoln turned back, as he so often did in a crisis, to the ideas of Henry Clay, and he proposed in his annual message to colonize these runaway slaves "at some place, or places, in a climate congenial to them."

The idea was not a new one for Lincoln. He had endorsed colonization as early as 1852 in his eulogy on Clay and subsequently made speeches before meetings of the Illinois Colonization Society. During the debates with Douglas he more than once mentioned colonization, though he admitted it was an impractical solution of the race problem. More recently the Blair family, who for years had made colonization something of a hobby, had revived his interest in the subject. Frank Blair, as a representative from Missouri, had long favored emigration of the "sable race, bred in the pestilence of Africa," to Central America. With the outbreak of the war his father, Francis Preston Blair, Sr., alerted Lincoln that the time had come when "the deportation or extermination of the African race from among us" was inevitable. Montgomery Blair joined his father and brother in recommending colonization of freedmen as "absolutely indispensable to prevent unspeakable horrors," because blacks and whites could never live together in peace.

By the 1860s most colonizationists, who had earlier favored sending freedmen to Africa, endorsed setting up a colony of blacks under the protection of the United States somewhere in Central America or the Caribbean. Haiti, the Danish West Indies, Dutch Guiana, and British Honduras were among the sites considered possible, but a tract of land in New Granada (later Panama) on the Chiriqui Lagoon was the favorite of many. Here Ambrose W. Thompson, a Philadelphian who had made a fortune in shipbuilding, had acquired a claim to several hundred thousand acres of land located at what was likely to be the terminus of a projected railroad across the isthmus. The lagoon was supposed to be deep enough to serve as an American naval base; the land was especially suited for growing cotton; and it allegedly contained rich stores of coal, which Thompson promised to sell to the navy at half the usual price. It would, the Blairs urged, be the ideal location for a colony of American freedmen.

Lincoln thought the idea was worth looking into. He appointed Ninian W. Edwards, his wife's brother-in-law, to review the prospectus and other legal doc.u.ments submitted by the Chiriqui Improvement Company and learned that the claims of Thompson and the other entrepreneurs were fully verified. Because the project would involve the navy, he asked Secretary Welles's opinion, but that resolute New Englander, opposed to colonization in principle, refused to have anything to do with the scheme. Because money would be needed for the project, the President also asked for Chase's advice. Responding more tactfully than Welles, the Secretary of the Treasury responded that he was generally "much impressed by the prospects" but that he was too busy to give it his close attention. Lincoln then turned the project over to Secretary of the Interior Smith, who he knew was in favor of colonization, and gave it his conditional blessing.

What began as a project for resettling runaway slaves escalated into a more ambitious plan for abolishing slavery in some, or perhaps all, of the border states, where it was a source of constant embarra.s.sment to the Union government. Almost daily there was friction between local authorities sworn to uphold the state laws concerning slavery and military commanders reluctant to return fugitives to their masters. In addition, Lincoln knew that so long as these heavily populated and strategically located states maintained slavery there was a possibility that they might join the Confederacy. He was also aware the continued existence of slavery in the border states complicated foreign policy; so long as Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri remained slave states, European powers could not view the American conflict as one between freedom and slavery. Emanc.i.p.ation could thus strengthen the Union cause abroad, relieve friction between civil and military authorities in the upper South, and weaken the Confederacy.

During the winter of 18611862, despite all the other issues he had to deal with, Lincoln worked with exceptional finesse to disarm the likely critics of his plan. Aware that opposition both to compensated emanc.i.p.ation and to colonization was strongest in New England, he took great pains to keep Sumner, the most conspicuous spokesman of abolitionism in the Congress, on his side. Patiently he allowed Sumner to lecture him, sometimes two or three times a week, on his duty to act against slavery. In early December the President and the senator had a long conversation about the problems facing the new session of Congress and reviewed in great detail all issues relating to slavery. Sumner was delighted to discover that on all of them "we agreed, or agreed very nearly." As they parted, Lincoln said, "Well, Mr. Sumner, the only difference between you and me on this subject is a difference of a month or six weeks in time." "Mr. President," Sumner replied, "if that is the only difference between us, I will not say another word to you about it till the longest time you name has pa.s.sed by."

A fortnight later Lincoln further involved Sumner in his plans. Since November the President had been working with George P. Fisher and Nathaniel B. Smithers to draft a bill for gradual emanc.i.p.ation in Delaware, where the number of slaves was inconsequential. Lincoln prepared two slightly different proposals, both of which promised federal funds to pay Delaware to emanc.i.p.ate its slaves. Under both plans emanc.i.p.ation would begin immediately. One looked to total emanc.i.p.ation by 1867, the other by 1893. Lincoln preferred the second version, which would require the nation to pay the state $23,200 per year for thirty-one years. The President's proposals were printed and distributed to members of the Delaware legislature but, as Fisher reported, "due to perceived opposition" they were never introduced as bills. Though the Delaware emanc.i.p.ation scheme proved abortive it was significant in that Sumner did not oppose it. Representing an abolitionist const.i.tuency that for three decades had insisted on immediate, uncompensated emanc.i.p.ation, Sumner was persuaded to go along with Lincoln's plan. "Never should any question of money be allowed to interfere with human freedom," he concluded.

With equal adroitness Lincoln enlisted Chase's backing for his plan. Like the President, Chase was a colonizationist. During the debates on the Compromise of 1850, he declared unequivocally that the black and white races could not live together "except under the constraint of force, such as that of slavery," and he looked forward "to the separation of the races" because the two were "adapted to different lat.i.tudes and countries." At the same time, he was a staunch advocate of equal rights for Negroes, and of all the members of the cabinet he was most clearly aligned with the antislavery element in the North. His voice, like Sumner's, would help still any clamor against gradual, compensated emanc.i.p.ation. Well aware of the Secretary's vanity, Lincoln consulted with him frequently when planning for emanc.i.p.ation, and he allowed Chase to draft a long, wordy message to Congress on the subject-which he quietly filed away unused.

The President did not turn to Chase simply as a matter of policy. The two men, complete strangers at the beginning of the administration, had developed an effective working relationship. Lincoln was impressed by the efficiency of Chase's Treasury Department and trusted the Secretary's judgment on financial questions. As he told John Hay a little later, he "generally delegated to Mr. C. exclusive control of those matters falling within the purview of his dept." In fact, the President knew a good deal about governmental finance and took an active role in helping Chase promote a national banking act, but he found it politic at times to claim total ignorance of such matters. "Money," he exclaimed to a group of New York financiers who wanted a change in banking legislation, "I don't know anything about 'money.'" For his part, Chase came to have a kind of grudging affection for the man who had appointed him, and, though he frequently differed with the President's policies and deplored his style of management, he kept rea.s.suring himself in his diary that Lincoln was, after all, honest and well meaning.

To cement the loyalty of Chase and Sumner, Lincoln deliberately excluded Seward from all discussion of his emanc.i.p.ation project. The Secretary of State and Sumner were rivals for control of foreign relations, and Chase and Seward nearly always took opposing positions in the cabinet.

The Trent affair delayed Lincoln's introduction of his emanc.i.p.ation plan, and then Willie's death caused a further postponement, but by spring he was finally ready with a short message on the "abolishment" of slavery, the first such proposal ever submitted to Congress by an American President. Early in the morning on March 6, Sumner received an urgent summons to the White House. "I want to read you my message," Lincoln told him when he reached the White House. "I want to know how you like it. I am going to send it in today." First Lincoln read the ma.n.u.script aloud; then Sumner went over it himself. He had some reservations about some of the language-especially the word "abolishment"-but concluded that Lincoln's style was "so clearly... aboriginal, autochthonous" that it would not bear verbal emendation. Delighted with its contents, Sumner could hardly bear to part with the ma.n.u.script, and he read it over and over again until Lincoln was obliged to say: "There, now, you've read it enough, run away. I must send it in to-day."

In the message the President urged Congress to adopt a joint resolution declaring "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 it's discretion, to compensate for the inconveniences public and private, produced by such change of system." Such a declaration, he held, was strictly const.i.tutional because it made no claim of federal authority to interfere with slavery within state limits but allowed each state "perfectly free choice" to accept or reject the proposed offer. He argued for his resolution not on the basis of morality or justice but on the ground that it would remove any temptation for the border states to join the "proposed confederacy." To congressmen from those states he added the warning that as the war continued it would be "impossible to foresee all the incidents, which may attend and all the ruin which may follow it."

Lincoln's careful preparation led to an overwhelmingly positive reception of his proposal. How could anybody object to a proposal endorsed by the Blairs, by Sumner, and by Chase? The San Francisco Daily Alta California pretty well summarized press opinion by calling the message "just the right thing, at the right time, and in the right place." In New York the Evening Bulletin, the Herald, the World, and the Evening Post all endorsed Lincoln's plan. "This Message const.i.tutes of itself an epoch in the history of our country," rejoiced the New York Tribune, often so critical of Lincoln. "It is the day-star of a new National dawn." The next day the Tribune added, "We thank G.o.d that Abraham Lincoln is President of the United States, and the whole country, we cannot doubt, will be thankful that we have at such a time so wise a ruler."

Lincoln followed press reactions to his proposal closely. When the New York Times, usually a faithful supporter of his administration, complained in an early edition about the cost of compensated emanc.i.p.ation, the President promptly straightened out the editor, Henry J. Raymond. Less than one-half of a day's cost of the war would pay for emanc.i.p.ating all the slaves in Delaware, he pointed out; and the cost of eighty-seven days of the conflict would free the slaves in all the border states plus the District of Columbia. Raymond, who had been out of the office, had already corrected his newspaper's slant and published several articles commending the message "as a master-piece of practical wisdom and sound policy."

But border-state congressmen said nothing. Lincoln sent for Montgomery Blair, who had made brave promises about the extent of emanc.i.p.ation sentiment in the upper South. Blair suggested that the congressmen were waiting for the army to win a victory. "That is just the reason why I do not wish to wait," Lincoln told him impatiently. "If we do have success, they may feel... it matters not whether we do anything about the matter."

The next day Blair brought the border-state representatives to receive the same message. Disclaiming "any intent to injure the interests or wound the sensibilities of the Slave States," Lincoln reminded them that failure to solve the problem of slaves who fled to Union lines "strengthened the hopes of the Confederates that at some day the Border States would unite with them" and thus prolonged the war. Stressing that his plan was voluntary and that it recognized "that Emanc.i.p.ation was a subject exclusively under the control of the States," he urged them to give it serious consideration. The congressmen haggled with him. Was his plan const.i.tutional? Would Congress appropriate the money needed to put it in effect? Was this a first step toward a general emanc.i.p.ation? Would emanc.i.p.ation be followed by colonization of the freedmen? Lincoln tried to a.s.suage their fears but salvaged nothing from the meeting except John J. Crittenden's a.s.surance that all the congressmen believed the President was "solely moved by a high patriotism and sincere devotion to the happiness and glory of his Country."

Congressional debates on Lincoln's resolution were brief. Several representatives from the border states thought it was unconst.i.tutional. At the other extreme John Hickman, an abolitionist representative from Pennsylvania, sneered that the message was an attempt on the part of the President to compensate for his failure "to meet the just expectation of the party which elected him to the office he holds." A few abolitionists outside of Congress saw in Lincoln's plan a design to save slavery. "Every concession made by the President to the enemies of slavery has only one aim," growled Gurowski; "it is to mollify their urgent demands by throwing to them small crumbs, as one tries to mollify a boisterous and hungry dog." But such dissents were few, and Congress adopted the resolution by overwhelming majorities.

Then, disappointingly, nothing happened. Because none of the border states agreed to accept the plan Congress had endorsed in general terms, there was no need for any further legislation. The only concrete result of the entire effort was a bill for compensated emanc.i.p.ation in the District of Columbia. It met some of Lincoln's specifications as a blueprint for freedom in that it provided for paying up to $300 to masters for every slave emanc.i.p.ated and appropriated $100,000 for colonizing "such of the slaves as desired to emigrate." But this was not the measure Lincoln really wanted. Emanc.i.p.ation imposed on the federal district was very different from abolition voluntarily adopted by the border slave states. "If some one or more of the border-states would move fast, I should greatly prefer it," he explained to Horace Greeley. But none did so, and he signed the District of Columbia bill on April 16.