CHAPTER XXV

LINCOLN AND EMANCIPATION

THE 22d of February was the day that the President had set for an advance of the army but it was evident to both the Administration and the country that the Army of the Potomac would not be ready to move then. Nor could anybody find from McClellan when he would move. The muttering of the country began again. Committee after committee waited on the President. He did his best to assure them that he was doing all he could. He pointed out to them how time and patience, as well as men and money, were needed in war, and he argued that, above all, he must not be interfered with. It was at this time that he used his striking illustration of Blondin. Some gentlemen from the West called at the White House one day, excited and troubled about some of the commissions or omissions of the Administration. The President heard them patiently, and then replied:" Gentlemen, suppose all the property you were worth was in gold and you had put it in the hands of Blondin, to carry across the Niagara river on a rope. Would you shake the cable or keep shouting at him, ' Blondin, stand up a little straighter-Blondin, stoop a little more-go a little faster-lean a little more to the north-lean a little more to the south?' No, you would hold your breath as well as your tongue, and keep your hands off until he was safe over. The Government is carrying an enormous weight. Untold treasures are in their hands; they are doing the very best they can. Don't badger them. Keep silence, and we will get you safe across."

One of the most insistent of the many bodies which beset him was the Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, appointed the December before. Aggressive and patriotic, these gentlemen were determined the army should move. But it was not until March that they became convinced that anything would be done. One day early in that month, Senator Chandler, of Michigan, a member of the committee, met George W. Julian. He was in high glee. "Old Abe is mad," he said to Julian, "and the war will now go on."

Whether it would or not remained to be seen but it was soon evident to everybody that the President was going to make another effort to have it go on for on March 8 he issued General War Orders Nos. II and III, the first dividing the Army of the Potomac into four army corps and the second directing that the move against Richmond by the way of the Chesapeake bay should begin as early as the 18th of March and that the general-in-chief should be responsible for its moving as early as that day. In this order Lincoln made the important stipulation that General McClellan should make no change of base without leaving in and about Washington a force sufficient to guarantee its safety.

When Lincoln issued the above orders which were finally to drive McClellan from his quarters around Washington, the war against the South had been going on for nearly a year. In that time the North had succeeded in gathering and equipping an army of about 630,000 men, but this army had not so far materially changed the line of hostilities between the North and South, save in the West, where Kentucky and Northern Missouri had been cleared of most of the Confederates. A navy had been collected but beyond establishing a partial blockade of the ports of the Confederacy it had done little. The ineffectiveness of the great effort the North had made was charged naturally to the inefficiency of

the Administration. Mr. Lincoln was ignorant and weak, men said, else he would have found generals who would have won victories. A large part of the North, the anti-slavery element, bitterly denounced him, because he had taken no action as yet in regard to slavery. They would have him employ the slaves in the armies, free those which escaped.

Lincoln understood clearly how strong a weapon against the South the arming and emancipating of the slaves might be, but he did not want to use it. Throughout his entire political life he had disclaimed any desire to meddle with slavery in the States where the Constitution recognized it. He had undertaken the war not to free men but to preserve the Union. Moreover he feared that the least interference with slavery would drive from him those States lying between the North and South, which believed in the institution and yet were for the Union.

Already they had given him much substantial aid. He hoped to win them entirely to the North. Emancipation would surely make that hope vain. It was largely because he wished to keep their support that when as had happened twice already in his year of service, prominent subordinates had attempted to help the Northern cause by measures affecting slavery, he had promptly annulled their orders.

Yet now for many weeks he had been coming to the conclusion that he must do something with this weapon. He must do it to throw confusion into the South, with whom so far the military advantage lay, to win sympathy from Europe, which, exasperated by the suffering which the failure to get cotton caused the people, was threatening to recognize the Southern Confederacy as an independent nation, above all to disarm the enemy in his rear-the dissatisfied faction of his own supporters who were beginning to threaten that if he did not free and arm the slaves he could

get his hands on, they would stop the arms and money they were sending him to carry on the war.

All through the fall of 1861 he was examining this weapon of emancipation, much as a man in a desperate situation might a dagger which he did not want to unsheath, but feared he might be forced to. He was seeking a way to use it, if the time came when he must, that would accomplish all the ends he had in view and still would not drive the Border States from the Union. The plan upon which he finally settled was a simple and just, though impracticable one-he would ask Congress to set aside money gradually to buy and free the negroes in those States that could be persuaded to give up the institution of slavery. Having freed the slaves, he proposed that Congress should colonize them in territory bought for the purpose.

According to Charles Sumner, Mr. Lincoln had this plan of compensated emancipation well developed by December 1, 1861. The Senator reached Washington on that day, and went in the evening to call on the President. Together they talked over the annual message, which was to be sent to Congress on the 3d. Mr. Sumner was disappointed that it said nothing about emancipation. He had been speaking in Massachusetts on "Emancipation our Best Weapon," and he ardently desired that the President use the weapon. The President explained the plan he had developed, and Mr. Sumner urged that it be presented at once. Mr. Lincoln declined to agree to this, but as he rose to say good-by to his visitor, he remarked:

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," said Mr. Sumner, "if that is the only difference between us, I will not say another word to you about it till the long-set time you name has passed by."

"Nor should I have done so." continues Sumner in telling

the story," but about a fortnight after, when I was with him, he introduced the subject himself, asked my opinion on some details of his plan, and told me where it labored his mind. At that time he had the hope that some one of the Border States, Delaware, perhaps, if nothing better could be got, might be brought to make a proposition which could be made use of as the initiation to hitch the whole thing to. * He was in correspondence with some persons at a distance with this view, but he did not consult a person in Washington, excepting Mr. Chase and Mr. Blair, and myself. Seward knew nothing about it."

Sumner could not keep still, after this, about the plan. Almost every time he saw Lincoln he put in a word. Thus, when the Trent affair was up, he took occasion to read the President a little lecture:

"Now, Mr. President," he said, "if you had done your duty earlier in the slavery matter, you would not have this trouble on you. Now you have no friends, or the country has none, because it has no policy upon slavery. The country has no friends in Europe, excepting isolated persons. England is not a friend. France is not. But if you had commenced your policy about slavery, this thing could and would have come and gone and would have given you no anxiety.

66

Every time I saw him I spoke to him about it, and I saw him every two or three days. One day I said to him, I remember, 'I want you to make Congress a New Year's present of your plan. But he had some reason still for delay. He was in correspondence with Kentucky, there was a Mr. Speed in Kentucky to whom he was writing; he read me one of his letters once, and he thought he should hear from there how people would be affected by such a plan.' At one

*The conversation between Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Sumner here reported is taken from an unpublished manuscript courteously put at my disposal by the Rev. Edward Everett Hale. Mr. Hale visited Washington in April, 1862, and called on Mr. Sumner, who entertained him with the history of the President's Message on Compensated Emancipation. He made the full notes of the story, which are here published.