Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
Chase presented the diametrically opposed prediction, which maintained that if Lincoln vetoed the bill, it “will be an end of him.” The Republican majority in Congress would break ranks with the administration, and Lincoln would be openly castigated on the floor. Worried that he, too, might be tainted by a presidential veto, Chase told his friends to spread word that he had not been consulted, “nor so far as he knew [had] a single member of his cabinet” been involved. While he would willingly answer for his actions as treasury secretary, Chase refused to take the blame “for other people’s blunders or errors of policy.”
Rumors that Lincoln would veto the bill proved incorrect. The next morning, Browning found the president working in his library. He “looked weary, care-worn and troubled,” Browning noted, “and there was a cadence of deep sadness in his voice.” The president had made his decision, which he knew would distress his friend. Still, before signing the bill that would become known as the Second Confiscation Act, Lincoln listed his objections in writing and obtained a revised bill that made it more likely to pass constitutional muster.
As was customary on the last day of the session, the president traveled to the Capitol, stationing himself in the vice president’s office, where he signed the spate of bills rushed through in the final days of the term. It had been an extraordinarily productive session. Relieved of Southern opposition, the Republican majority was able to pass three historic bills that had been stalled for years: the Homestead Act, which promised 160 acres of free public land largely in the West to settlers who agreed to reside on the property for five years or more; the Morrill Act, providing public lands to states for the establishment of land-grant colleges; and the Pacific Railroad Act, which made the construction of a transcontinental railroad possible. The 37th Congress also laid the economic foundation for the Union war effort with the Legal Tender bill, which created a paper money known as “greenbacks.” A comprehensive tax bill was also enacted, establishing the Internal Revenue Bureau in the Department of the Treasury and levying a federal income tax for the first time in American history.
At that time, the far-reaching impact of this epoch-making home front legislation was overshadowed by the continuing slavery controversy, which preoccupied both sides of the aisle. Referring to the endless hours the Republican stalwarts spent rehashing the issue, Seward jokingly told foreign diplomats over dinner that “he had lately begun to realize the value of a Cromwell,” and sometimes longed for “a Coup d’etat for our Congress.” As the summer progressed, his level of frustration with Congress grew. “I ask Congress to authorize a draft,” he complained to Frances. “They fall into altercation about letting slaves fight and work. Every day is a day lost, and every day lost is a hazard to the whole country. What if I should say, that I concede all they want about negroes?…One party has gained another partisan; the country has lost one advocate.”
Within the cabinet as well as on Capitol Hill, the rancor over slavery infected every discourse. The debates had grown “so bitter,” according to Seward, that personal and even official relationships among members were ruptured, leading to “a prolonged discontinuance of Cabinet meetings.” Though Tuesdays and Fridays were still designated for sessions, each secretary remained in his department unless a messenger arrived to confirm that a meeting would be held. Seward recalled that when these general discussions were still taking place, Lincoln had listened intently but had not taken “an active part in them.” For Lincoln, the problem of slavery was not an abstract issue. While he concurred with the most passionate abolitionists that slavery was “a moral, a social and a political wrong,” as president, he could not ignore the constitutional protection of the institution where it already existed.
The devastating reverses on the Peninsula, which made it clear that extraordinary means were necessary to save the Union, gave Lincoln an opening to deal more directly with slavery. Daily reports from the battle-fields illuminated the innumerable uses to which slaves were put by the Confederacy. They dug trenches and built fortifications for the army. They were brought into camps to serve as teamsters, cooks, and hospital attendants, so that soldiers were freed to fight in the fields. They labored on the home front, tilling fields, raising crops, and picking cotton, so their masters could go to war without fearing that their families would go hungry. If the rebels were divested of their slaves, who would then be free to join the Union forces, the North could gain a decided advantage. Seen in this light, emancipation could be considered a military necessity, a legitimate exercise of the president’s constitutional war powers. The border states had refused his idea of compensated emancipation as a voluntary first step, insisting that any such action should be initiated in the slave states. A historic decision was taking shape in Lincoln’s mind.
Lincoln revealed his preliminary thinking to Seward and Welles in the early hours of Sunday, July 13, as they rode together in the president’s carriage to the funeral of Stanton’s infant son. The journey to Oak Hill Cemetery, where Stanton’s child was to be buried, must have evoked painful memories of Willie, whose body remained there in the private vault awaiting final interment in Springfield. Despite such personal torment, the country’s peril demanded Lincoln’s complete concentration. During the journey, Welles recorded in his diary, the president informed them that he was considering “emancipating the slaves by proclamation in case the Rebels did not cease to persist in their war.” He said that he had “dwelt earnestly on the gravity, importance, and delicacy” of the subject and had “come to the conclusion that it was a military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union, that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.” Thus, the constitutional protection of slavery could and would be overridden by the constitutionally sanctioned war powers of the president.
This was, Welles clearly recognized, “a new departure for the President, for until this time, in all our previous interviews…he had been prompt and emphatic in denouncing any interference by the General Government with the subject.” The normally talkative Seward said merely that the “subject involved consequences so vast and momentous that he should wish to bestow on it mature reflection before giving a decisive answer,” though he was inclined to think it “justifiable.”
So the matter rested until Monday morning, July 21, when messengers were dispatched across Washington with notices of a special cabinet meeting to be held at 10 a.m. “It has been so long since any consultation has been held that it struck me as a novelty,” Chase wrote in his diary. Earlier that day, Chase had shared breakfast in his home with Count Gurowski, whose acute frustration with Lincoln’s hesitancy regarding emancipation had been evident for many months. In Gurowski’s mind, Seward was the primary obstacle to progress, while Chase represented the best hope for spurring Lincoln forward. An inveterate gossip, Gurowski related to Chase the story of Seward’s comments on Cromwell and the Congress, which, he claimed, had been received with marked disapproval by the diplomats in attendance.
When the cabinet convened, all members save the postmaster general were in attendance. Montgomery Blair was in Maryland, where he had recently built an elegant country estate, Falkland, in Silver Spring near his parents’ estate. For this special meeting, the cabinet was summoned to the second-floor library rather than the president’s official office. There, surrounded by the curved bookshelves that Mary had recently filled with splendidly bound sets of Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott’s novels, the president began with an admission that he was “profoundly concerned at the present aspect of affairs, and had determined to take some definitive steps in respect to military action and slavery.” The members listened as Lincoln read several orders he was contemplating. One would authorize Union generals in Confederate territory to appropriate any property necessary to sustain themselves in the field; another would sanction the payment of wages to blacks brought into the army’s employ. Taken together, these orders signaled a more vigorous prosecution of the war. When the discussion moved to address the possible arming of those blacks in the army’s employ, Stanton and Chase were in favor. Lincoln, Chase recorded, was “not prepared to decide the question.”
When the preliminary discussions had run long, the president scheduled another cabinet session the following day, July 22, to reveal his primary purpose in calling the meeting. This second session was likely held in Lincoln’s office, as depicted in Francis Carpenter’s famous painting,
First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation.
There, surrounded by evidence of the ever-expanding war, with battlefield maps everywhere—rolled in standing racks, placed in folios on the floor, and reclining up against the walls—the conversation from the previous day continued.
The desultory talk abruptly ended when Lincoln took the floor and announced he had called them together in order to read the preliminary draft of an emancipation proclamation. He understood the “differences in the Cabinet on the slavery question” and welcomed their suggestions after they heard what he had to say; but he wanted them to know that he “had resolved upon this step, and had not called them together to ask their advice.” Then, removing two foolscap sheets from his pocket and adjusting his glasses on his nose, he began to read what amounted to a legal brief for emancipation based on the chief executive’s powers as commander in chief.
His draft proclamation set January 1, 1863, little more than five months away, as the date on which all slaves within states still in rebellion against the Union would be declared free, “thenceforward, and forever.” It required no cumbersome enforcement proceedings. Though it did not cover the roughly 425,000 slaves in the loyal border states—where, without the use of his war powers, no constitutional authority justified his action—the proclamation was shocking in scope. In a single stroke, it superseded legislation on slavery and property rights that had guided policy in eleven states for nearly three quarters of a century. Three and a half million blacks who had lived enslaved for generations were promised freedom. It was a daring move, Welles later said, “fraught with consequences, immediate and remote, such as human foresight could not penetrate.”
The cabinet listened in silence. With the exception of Seward and Welles, to whom the president had intimated his intentions the previous week, the members were startled by the boldness of Lincoln’s proclamation. Only Stanton and, surprisingly, Bates declared themselves in favor of “its immediate promulgation.” Stanton instantly grasped the military value of the proclamation. Having spent more time than any of his colleagues contemplating the logistical problems facing the army, he understood the tremendous advantage to be gained if the massive workforce of slaves could be transferred from the Confederacy to the Union. Equally important, he had developed a passionate belief in the justice of emancipation.
Bates, as one of the more conservative members of the cabinet, surprised his colleagues with his enthusiastic approval of the proclamation. He had previously registered disapproval of the more limited emancipation measures attempted by the military and had expressed grave misgivings about the confiscation legislation. His sudden support of this far more radical step can be traced, in part, to the terrible division that slavery and the war had wrought upon his family.
In a scenario common to many border-state homes torn by divided loyalties, the Bates brothers had joined opposing sides in the war. Twenty-eight-year-old Fleming Bates had enlisted in the Confederate Army and was serving under Major General Sterling Price. Fleming faced the prospect of going into battle against any of four brothers. His older brother Julian, a surgeon, had been made a colonel in the Missouri militia. His younger brother Coalter was with the Army of the Potomac and would fight at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. Another brother, Richard, was clerking for his father but would soon join the Union navy; while the family’s youngest son, Charles Woodson, was a cadet at West Point. For Bates, who valued his family above all else, nothing could be more heartbreaking than the possibility of his sons facing one another on the battlefield. He had long favored gradual emancipation, but if the president’s proclamation could bring the war to a speedier conclusion, he would give it his “very decided approval.”
Bates based his approval, however, on the condition that the freed slaves would be deported to someplace in Central America or Africa. Unlike Lincoln, who insisted that any emigration must be voluntary, Bates believed it should be mandatory. Bates “was fully convinced,” Welles later recalled, “that the two races could not live and thrive in social proximity.” He believed that assimilation was impossible without amalgamation, and that amalgamation would inevitably bring “degradation and demoralization to the white race.” Although he conceded that “among our colored people who have been long free, there are many who are intelligent and well advanced in arts and knowledge,” he could not imagine former slaves, “fresh from the plantations of the South, where they have been long degraded by the total abolition of the family relation, shrouded in artificial darkness, and studiously kept in ignorance,” living on an equal footing with whites. Far better for everyone, he argued, if the government established treaties granting aid to foreign governments willing to accept and settle freed slaves. He was hopeful that such treaties would “provide for the just and humane treatment of the emigrants—e.g. ensuring an honest livelihood by their own industry…and guaranteeing to them ‘their liberty, property and the religion which they profess.’”
Gideon Welles remained silent after Lincoln presented his proclamation. He later admitted that the prospect of emancipation involved such unpredictable results, “carrying with it a revolution of the social, civil, and industrial habits and condition of society in all the slave States,” that he was oppressed by the “solemnity and weight” of the decision. He feared that, far from shortening the war, emancipation would generate an “energy of desperation on the part of the slave-owners” and “intensify the struggle.” Yet, while he privately questioned the “extreme exercise of war powers” involved, Welles held his tongue and later loyally supported Lincoln.