Abraham Lincoln

by William Eleroy Curtis

Accordingly, on September 22, 1862, after the battle of Antietam, he called his Cabinet together and announced his intention to issue a proclamation of emancipation. "I have gotten you together to hear what I have written down," he said. "I do not want your advice about the main matter, because I have determined that myself. This I say without intending anything but respect for all of you. I alone must bear the responsibility for taking the course which I feel I ought to take."

The preliminary proclamation was issued, and in his annual message to Congress on December 1, 1862, Lincoln recommended the passage of a joint resolution proposing a constitutional amendment providing compensation for every State which would abolish slavery before the year 1900, another guaranteeing freedom to all slaves that had been released by the chances of war, and a third authorizing Congress to provide a plan of colonization for them. His idea was to send them either to Africa, to the West Indies, or to Central America, and he encouraged several extensive plans of colonization, which, however, were not carried into practical operation. In this connection it is interesting to recall the reminiscences of General Butler, who says that shortly before the assassination the President sent for him and said,—

"'General Butler, I am troubled about the negroes. We are soon to have peace. We have got some one hundred and odd thousand negroes who have been trained to arms. When peace shall come I fear lest these colored men shall organize themselves in the South, especially in the States where the negroes are in preponderance in numbers, into guerilla parties, and we shall have down there a warfare between the whites and the negroes. In the course of the reconstruction of the government it will become a question of how the negro is to be disposed of. Would it not be possible to export them to some place, say Liberia or South America, and organize them into communities to support themselves?'

"General Butler replied, 'We have large quantities of clothing to clothe them, and arms and everything necessary for them, even to spades and shovels, mules, and wagons. Our war has shown that an army organization is the very best for digging up the soil and making intrenchments. Witness the very many miles of intrenchments that our soldiers have dug out. I know of a concession of the United States of Colombia for a tract of thirty miles wide across the Isthmus of Panama for opening a ship canal. The enlistments of the negroes have all of them from two or three years to run. Why not send them all down there to dig the canal? They will withstand the climate, and the work can be done with less cost to the United States in that way than in any other. If you choose, I will take command of the expedition. We will take our arms with us, and I need not suggest to you that we will need nobody sent down to guard us from the interference of any nation. We will proceed to cultivate the land and supply ourselves with all the fresh food that can be raised in the tropics, which will be all that will be needed, and your stores of provisions and supplies of clothing will furnish all the rest. Shall I work out the details of such an expedition for you, Mr. President?'

"He reflected for some time, and then said, 'There is meat in that suggestion, General Butler; there is meat in that suggestion. Go and talk to Seward and see what foreign complications there will be about it.'

"But that evening Secretary Seward, in his drive before dinner, was thrown from his carriage and severely injured, his jaw being broken, and he was confined to his bed until the assassination of Lincoln and the attempted murder of himself by one of the confederates of Booth, so that the subject could never be again mentioned to Mr. Lincoln."

The final proclamation was issued on January 1, 1863. On the afternoon of December 31, after the Cabinet meeting was over Lincoln rewrote the document with great care, embodying in it several suggestions which had been made by his Cabinet, but rigidly adhering to the spirit of the original. In his judgment, the time had now come for adopting this extreme measure, and "upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God."

The morning of New Year's day was occupied by the official reception, and the President was kept busy until about three o'clock in the afternoon, when he went to the Executive Chamber, took the manuscript from a drawer in his desk, wrote his name, and closed a controversy that had raged for half a century. He carefully laid away the pen he had used for Mr. Sumner, who had promised to obtain it for George Livermore, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, an old abolitionist and the author of a work on slavery which had greatly interested Lincoln. It was a steel pen with an ordinary wooden handle, such as is used by school-children and can be bought for a penny at any stationery store. The end of the holder showed the marks of Lincoln's teeth, for he had a habit of putting his pen-holder into his mouth whenever he was puzzled in composition.

Lincoln's own commentary and explanation of the step which led to this edict of freedom was written little more than a year later, to a friend, and should be carefully studied before forming a judgment upon the reasons for and the consequences of that act:

"I am naturally antislavery," he said. "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel, and yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power. I understood, too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery. I had publicly declared this many times, and in many ways. And I aver that, to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery. I did understand, however, that my oath to preserve the Constitution to the best of my ability imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government, that nation, of which that Constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation and yet preserve the Constitution? By general law, life and limb must be protected, yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures otherwise unconstitutional might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this ground, and now avow it. I could not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had even tried to preserve the Constitution if, to save slavery or any minor matter, I should permit the wreck of government, country, and Constitution all together. When, early in the war, General Frémont attempted military emancipation, I forbade it, because I did not then think it an indispensable necessity. When, a little later, General Cameron, then Secretary of War, suggested the arming of the blacks, I objected, because I did not yet think it an indispensable necessity. When, still later, General Hunter attempted military emancipation, I again forbade it, because I did not yet think the indispensable necessity had come. When in March and May and July, 1862, I made earnest and successive appeals to the border States to favor compensated emancipation, I believed the indispensable necessity for military emancipation and arming the blacks would come unless averted by that measure. They declined the proposition, and I was, in my best judgment, driven to the alternative of either surrendering the Union, and with it the Constitution, or of laying strong hand upon the colored element. I chose the latter."