The immense pressures on Lincoln at this moment were captured in a cartoon, The Political Blondin, that appeared in Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun on September 1, 1864. In the cartoon, the president’s position on the tightrope is more precarious than ever. A glum-looking Lincoln pushes a wheelbarrow stuffed with the American flag (the nation). On his shoulders, he carries two worried-looking cabinet members, Secretary of War Stanton and Secretary of the Navy Welles (representing the uncertain Union military prospects in the summer of 1864). A third member, the departed Chase, has tumbled off Stanton’s shoulders. From the galleries, on opposite sides, are Union leaders, including Grant and Sherman, and Confederate ones, including Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. Also present is John Bull (Great Britain) and Napoleon III (France), foreign voices in the war. The cartoon’s caption tells us that the spectators are assailing Lincoln with contradictory advice to move “slower,” “faster,” “more North,” “more to the South.” The president looks down at a wounded soldier who pathetically waves a crutch at him.92
Those close to the president had serious doubts about the forthcoming election. “Everything is darkness and doubt and discouragement,” wrote John Nicolay on August 25. The election hopes were so poor, Nicolay wrote, that “weak-kneed d—d fools like Chas. Sumner are in the movement for a new candidate—to supplant the Tycoon.”93
Which gets us back to the letter to Charles Robinson that Lincoln chose not to send. Although he was in extreme political peril when he drafted the letter, his mind was mainly fixed on saving the nation, not on his own personal political fortunes. Instead of sending the political letter, he wrote a memorandum on August 23 to his cabinet stating that the chances of his reelection were slim, and he looked forward to working with his successor to help rescue the nation. He wrote:
This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.94
He sealed the note in an envelope that he had his cabinet members sign. It remained unopened until a week after he was reelected. He then explained to the cabinet that he had written it when he “seemed to have no friends.” He said he had known that any Democratic successor would not fight to end slavery.
As it turned out, Sherman’s capture of Atlanta in September, following fast on Farragut’s victory at Mobile Bay, reinvigorated Northern enthusiasm for the war. Soon positive news came from Grant and cavalry commander Philip Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley as well. The Democrats, meanwhile, hobbled themselves by nominating the War Democrat McClellan for the presidency and the Copperhead Pendleton as his running mate. John Nicolay now wrote, “We have encouraging news from all quarters,” and: “If things continue as favorable as they seem today we shall beat Little Mac very handsomely.”95 The prediction proved accurate. Momentously, on November 4, Lincoln was reelected, winning the popular vote convincingly and the electoral college overwhelmingly.
Looking back at Lincoln’s behavior in August 1864, when reelection seemed unlikely, we see his real character. He thought about the nation, not himself.
His selflessness came out vividly in meetings he had that month with John Eaton, an Ohio Republican who was serving in Louisiana as the commissioner of contraband there. Having just come from Toledo, where he had heard Frederick Douglass attack Lincoln for the alleged weakness of his retaliation policy against Confederate atrocities, Eaton went straight to the White House. He found Lincoln surprisingly unconcerned about his political enemies.
Over the next week, Eaton visited Lincoln several times at the president’s request. During one conversation, the two heard distant musket fire. The president went to the open window, stared into the distance, and then turned to Eaton. His eyes were filled with tears. He said, “This is the day when they shoot deserters. I am wondering whether I have used the pardoning power as much as I ought. I know some of our officers feel that I have used it with so much freedom as to demoralize the army and destroy the discipline.”96 The punishment of soldiers should take into account extenuating circumstances, he said. Every case must be judged on its own.
What especially struck Eaton during his visits was Lincoln’s earnest concern for the blacks who remained in slavery and were apparently uninformed about the Emancipation Proclamation. Eaton found that “the President’s grasp of the situation was astonishing, especially in view of the many and serious problems that lay upon his mind.” Lincoln, Eaton noted, manifested “in his talk with me the deepest interest in all the elements of the Negro character which had been revealed to our officers in the course of our association with the freedmen.”
Eaton mentioned Frederick Douglass’s recent speech in which he criticized the president’s lenient proposal for Reconstruction and his failure to endorse suffrage for blacks. In response, Lincoln read Eaton a letter of March 13, 1864, in which he had encouraged Louisiana governor Michael Hahn to extend the vote to “some of the colored people . . . —as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help, in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom.”97 Coming from the cautious Lincoln, this was a ringing endorsement of the vote for blacks.
The president’s immediate concern, given the unlikelihood of his reelection, was spreading the news of emancipation to the millions of blacks still held in slavery. They must hear of their liberation and be urged to flee behind Union lines before the election. No Democratic successor would care about the matter, which therefore must be addressed soon. But how could the word be spread among the enslaved? Lincoln had thought deeply on the topic.
The person on his mind was John Brown. As Eaton recalled, Lincoln “alluded to John Brown’s raid,” which had been designed to disseminate freedom by infiltrating Southern plantations.98 Brown’s effort in 1859, the president told Eaton, had been ill timed—a point he had made in his Cooper Union speech, where he described Brown’s single-handed effort to liberate millions of enslaved people as quixotic because of the absence of ready communication between the blacks. Now he asked: What if such communication could be established? The war opened new options for creating a “grapevine telegraph,” Lincoln said. “The war [is] upon us,” he declared, and the North must be “considering every possible means by which the Negro could be secured in his freedom”—including a strategy like John Brown’s.99
HIS SOUL WAS MARCHING ON
By combining emancipation with hard war, Lincoln had already established a cultural atmosphere friendly to the memory of John Brown. Frederick Douglass considered the Emancipation Proclamation a John Brown document that made the Union’s military effort comparable to a large-scale John Brown’s raid. In a speech on the proclamation at Cooper Union, Frederick Douglass declared, “Good old JOHN BROWN [applause] was a madman two years ago, now the whole nation is as mad as he. [Applause.] Every honest soldier who marches into Virginia goes there to carry out the object that led JOHN BROWN to Harper’s Ferry. [Applause.]”100 At some of his recruitment rallies, Douglass led his black audience in singing “John Brown’s Body,” with its stirring words, “He’s gone to be a soldier in the Army of the Lord, . . . His soul is marching on.”101 Douglass inspired his listeners by mentioning two of Brown’s African American soldiers: “Remember Shields Green and [John Anthony] Copeland [Jr.], who followed noble John Brown, and fell as glorious martyrs.” While recruiting for what became the intrepid Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment, Douglass worked closely with the antislavery millionaire George Stearns, who had been one of John Brown’s Secret Six.102 As the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts marched through New York on its way south, crowds cheered as it lustily sang the John Brown song.
After his interview with John Eaton, Lincoln summoned Douglass to Washington. In a meeting on August 19 that left Douglass stunned, the president proposed that Douglass gather a force of blacks that would spread through the South and funnel enslaved people to freedom. Douglass listened with “the deepest interest and profoundest satisfaction” as Lincoln asked him to organize “a band of scouts, composed of colored men, whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown, to go into the rebel States, beyond the lines of our armies, and carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.”103 This was Brown’s Subterranean Pass Way on a grand scale. It solved the problem of noncommunication in Brown’s plan that Lincoln had mentioned at Cooper Union. It established a network of African American agents, under Douglass’s direction, throughout the South. Douglass eagerly accepted the assignment, which, as it turned out, was canceled after news of the Union victories came the next month.
The second part of Lincoln’s John Brown–like plan—creating an African American army of liberation—surfaced when the black doctor and reformer Martin R. Delany visited the White House the next February.
The grandson of Africans who had been brought to America and enslaved here, Martin Delany was born a free black in Charles Town, Virginia, in 1812. As a child, he had moved with his family to Pennsylvania, where he received a strong education. He explored many subjects at Jefferson College, worked for black newspapers (including Frederick Douglass’s North Star), and briefly studied medicine at Harvard before leaving the school amid protests over his presence aired by white students. Thereafter, Delany doubled as a physician and an antislavery reformer. A well-built man of middle height whose eyes flashed with determination, he took pride in his extremely dark skin. A contemporary wrote, “His great boast is, that there lives none blacker than himself.”104 In the 1850s, he spearheaded an emigration movement that called for African Americans to relocate to a country where they would enjoy full rights: at different times he proposed Africa, Central America, and South America. Colonizationists in the Lincoln administration cited his 1852 book The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered. Delany, having moved to Canada in 1856, endorsed slave rebellions in the United States. He aided John Brown in the preparation for Harpers Ferry and wrote Blake, or the Huts of America (1859), about a black man who roamed through the South attempting to incite slave insurrections.
Insurrections were on his mind when he visited Lincoln on February 9, 1865. It turned out that they were on Lincoln’s mind, too. In his interview with the president, Delany pointed out that black troops were demoralized by the paucity of officers of color and by the condescension expressed by many white officers. Delany proposed that more blacks be commissioned as officers to lead an African American army through the South, liberating enslaved people along the way and enlisting them in the Union army. This ever-growing black force would strike terror in the Confederacy.
Lincoln was not just receptive to the idea; he told Delany that he had pondered a similar plan for more than two years. He declared, “This is the very thing I have been looking and hoping for; but nobody offered it. I have thought it over and over again. I have talked about it; I hoped and prayed for it; but till now it has never been proposed.”105 He exclaimed, “Won’t this be a grand thing? When I issued my Emancipation Proclamation, I had this thing in contemplation.” He said he had expected that word of the proclamation would spread and cause enslaved people to rise up against their masters. He had been disappointed that the uprising had not happened, he explained, which is why he found Delany’s proposal so appealing. Such a plan had been the dream of John Brown, who had never gotten the opportunity to advance southward into slave territory and raise a black army of liberation.
Delany accepted Lincoln’s offer to take on the leadership of the African American force. He became the first black major of infantry in the Union army. He organized a regiment in Charleston, South Carolina, that missed action only because it entered the war too late. (Delany took command of his troops on April 11, two days after Appomattox.)
The bonding between the president and these two militant African American leaders, Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany, puts to rest any doubts about Lincoln’s underlying radicalism on race. His meetings with them were in the spirit of John Brown, the man about whom Douglass said, “I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”106 If Lincoln at Cooper Union had criticized John Brown’s plan as unrealistic, the Civil War gave him the means of making such a plan workable. Fomenting slave resistance and forming an ever-expanding army of freedmen had been denied to John Brown but seemed plausible to Lincoln, who sought the leadership of two African Americans who had been close to Brown: Douglass, who had supported Brown for a dozen years before Harpers Ferry; and Delany, who had organized the convention in Chatham, Canada, where Brown had outlined his planned invasion of the South. Douglass sometimes wavered on Lincoln, especially early on, but there was one quality in the president that stood out for him: a genuine dedication to human equality. Douglass remarked, “In all my interviews with Mr. Lincoln I was impressed with his entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race. He was the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color, and I thought that all the more remarkable because he came from a State where there were black laws.”107
Delany felt the same way. He was impressed by Lincoln’s openness toward him. The president greeted Delany with “a generous grasp and shake of the hand” and placed himself “at ease, the better to give me a patient audience.” Lincoln’s respect for Delany came through in a note of introduction he sent to Edwin Stanton: “Do not fail to have an interview with this most extraordinary and intelligent black man. A. LINCOLN.”108
Douglass and Delany were hardly alone. Lincoln’s personal warmth to black people extended from ones he had known in Springfield, such as William Florville and William K. Donnegan, to ones he met in the White House years.
Among them was the aged abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth. Intent on meeting Lincoln before she died, Truth journeyed in October 1864 from her home in Michigan to Washington, where she met with the president on the twenty-ninth. When interviewed later about the visit, she reported that as she entered the White House she saw the tall Lincoln in the midst of a group of visitors, two of them black women. His behavior astonished her. She commented, “He showed as much kindness to the colored persons as to the whites,—if there was any difference, more.”109 Her meeting with the president was emotional. She told him, “You are the best President who has ever taken the seat.” Addressing her as “Auntie Truth,” Lincoln showed her the Bible that the black delegation from Baltimore had given him. She found the Bible “beautiful beyond description” and noted the extraordinary fact that black people had given it to the head of “the government [that] once sanctioned laws that would not permit its people to learn enough to enable them to read this Book.” The president signed her autograph book: “For Auntie Sojourner Truth, October 29, 1864. A. Lincoln.” All told, Truth recalled, “I never was treated by any one with more kindness and cordiality than was shown me by that great and good man, Abraham Lincoln.”
Lesser-known African Americans were touched by Lincoln’s openness to them as well. Mary Lincoln’s dressmaker and companion Lizzy Keckly, whom Lincoln called “Madam Elizabeth,” always felt Lincoln’s warmth.110 Rebecca Pomroy, the black nurse brought into the White House after Willie Lincoln’s death, likewise enjoyed a relationship of mutual respect with the president. Pomroy once invited the president for a visit to the Washington hospital where she worked and introduced him to the staff, including the black cooks and servants. He spoke to them kindly. The incident infuriated Pomroy’s white colleagues, who berated her for doing “such a mean, contemptible trick as to introduce those d—niggers to the President.” Pomroy later asked Lincoln if he had been hurt when she introduced him to the blacks. “Hurt? No, indeed!” he exclaimed. “It did my soul good. I’m glad to do them honor.”111
Among the many African Americans who had little or no personal contact with Lincoln, he attained mythic stature. Witness the African American response to the Emancipation Proclamation. While all historians recognize the importance of the proclamation, it has been slighted in some circles because of its morally neutral tone, its partial application (to the rebel states alone), and its apparent belatedness, as it came after several previous military and legal steps toward emancipation.
True enough. But we must not forget the enormously exuberant response to Lincoln’s proclamation. As the news of it spread, Lincoln became a demigod among black people. The artist Francis Carpenter recalled, “By the Act of Emancipation, Mr. Lincoln built for himself the first place in the affections of the African race on this continent. The love and reverence manifested for his name and person on all occasions during the last two years of his life, by this down-trodden people, were always remarkable, and sometimes of a thrilling character.”112 Carpenter told of South Carolina freedmen whose term for God was “Massa Linkum.” A black preacher asserted to his listeners, “Massa Linkum, he ebrywhar. He know ebryting . . . He walk de earf like de Lord!”
The combination of interracial respect and black-centered militancy that Lincoln displayed in his dealings with Douglas and Delany suggests that there was validity in proslavery comparisons between Lincoln and John Brown, one of the least racist white people in American history. The Copperhead Charles Chauncey Burr later wrote, “The administration of Abraham Lincoln was a John Brown raid on the grandest scale, and it was no more. That is the place it will occupy in history.” From Burr’s perspective, the spectacle was nightmarish. Union soldiers had made cities “hideous as hell by singing ‘John Brown’s souls is marching on!’ Words that also surged “from the brazen throats of negro-worshipping mobs.” The war, Burr wrote, had unleashed “the insane gibberish and fantastic dance of negroes, of both white and black complexion, making night and day hideous with infernal delight.”113
Despite Burr’s wildly racist distortions, his comments made the accurate point that Lincoln had ended up leading a war for the liberation of blacks, using tactics John Brown would have approved of.
There were, however, important differences between the two versions of antislavery war. John Brown followed a higher law in the name of human justice, starting with the emancipation of America’s four million enslaved people. Because Brown knew that many Americans interpreted the Constitution as proslavery, he wrote an explicitly antislavery document—his “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States”—as the foundation for the new society he envisaged.114 He also wrote a new version of the Declaration of Independence that overtly affirmed equality for all, with specific emphasis on the marginalized and oppressed. Confronted with a government whose proslavery laws and court rulings he called “wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments,” he took individual action to circumvent that government.115 He infiltrated the South with a small band of armed followers in order to trigger events that would lead to emancipation. His actions were deemed treasonous, and he and six followers were hanged.
Although Lincoln shared Brown’s goals, he thought Brown’s strategy was lawless. Lincoln worked within the political system and the laws. As for the Constitution, he tried to respect it. Before the war, he argued persuasively that it was antislavery in spirit. When the war came, he resorted to methods such as suspending habeas corpus that he believed were among the war powers assigned to him as president during periods of rebellion or invasion.
As the war progressed, Lincoln came to realize that the Constitution must be changed in order to ensure the permanency of freedom. To make this happen, he came to adopt some of John Brown’s methods, which by 1864 struck him as desirable and defensible. Under Lincoln’s direction, they were not the extralegal strategies of an inspired individual; instead, they were the actions of a popularly elected government. Like Brown, Lincoln wanted to appoint African Americans as leaders of the emancipation effort. The reason Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany did not get the chance to carry out their assigned roles in that effort was that the Union military, including its strong African American contingent, defeated the Confederacy first.
John Brown’s raid was a vigilante effort, motivated by the higher law that deepened the national divide. Lincoln, in contrast, directed a Constitution-backed war that never lost sight of restoring the entire nation and putting it on a just basis.
Justice came, at long last, with the three war amendments. Through brilliant finagling on the part of Lincoln and congressional Republicans, the Thirteenth Amendment, which the Senate had approved the previous year, passed the House on January 31, 1865. Nine days later, Lincoln quietly backed Martin Delany’s emancipation plan. That the president put this plan into action even after Congress had passed the amendment reflected his John Brown–like eagerness to make emancipation arrive as quickly as possible. But Delany’s plan was rendered moot by Lee’s surrender to Grant on April 9. By the end of 1865, the required number of states had ratified the amendment, which abolished slavery. Within the next five years came the Fourteenth Amendment, affirming birthright citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave black males the vote (women would wait another half century for it).
Lincoln’s long-term goal of citizenship for black people, therefore, came to fruition. Frederick Douglass had sometimes doubted the president’s position on the issue and had actually in the spring of 1864 backed the Radical Republican candidate, John Frémont. But he regained faith in Lincoln when he visited the White House in August and when, the following April, the president called publicly for limited suffrage for African Americans.
Douglass and Delany would both pay moving homage to Lincoln after his death. Douglass called Lincoln “unsurpassed by any for his interest in the white man” but at the same time “emphatically the black man’s President: the first to show any respect to their rights as men. He was the first of the long line [of presidents] to show any respect to the rights of the black man, or to acknowledge that he had any rights the white man ought to respect.”116
Major Martin Delany, for his part, would make a public plea for a national monument to be erected in Lincoln’s honor. Delany’s monument was never built, but it was an astonishing idea. Instead of depicting Lincoln, it would have projected African Americans’ reverence for the president. Delany envisioned a statue of “Ethiopia stretching forth her hands unto God.” Delany said the monument could be built if four million black Americans each contributed a penny. He specified details of the statue. An African woman, draped in flowing robes, would kneel next to an urn, with one leg bent up before her and her face looking heavenward. Sculptured tears would fall down her face into the urn. The “distinct tear-drops,” Delany instructed, “shall be so arranged as they represent the figures of 4,000,000 (four million), which shall be emblematical not only of the number of contributors to the monument, but the number of those who shed tears of sorrow for the great and good deliverer of their race from bondage in the United States.”117
Delany left no doubt as to the distinct racial character of the proposed monument. He wrote, “This figure is neither to be Grecian, Caucasian, nor Anglo-Saxon, Mongolian nor Indian, but African—very African—an ideal representative genius of the race, as Europa, Britannia, America, or the Goddess of Liberty, is to the European race.”
Lincoln, however, ultimately reached a position where he was beyond any ethnic or national category, except an inclusive American one.
During his presidency, he built his own monuments—majestic oratorical ones—to people of all races and nationalities: the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. Those landmark speeches enshrined him in world memory.
