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Photograph of Frederick Douglass, ca. 1880s. (The Gilder Lehrman Collection, GLC07926.02)
Allies for Emancipation?: Black Abolitionists and Abraham
Lincoln
by Manisha Sinha
Abraham Lincoln was not an original advocate of abolition.
In fact we know that his journey to what he called “the
central act of my administration, and the great event
of the nineteenth century” was a relatively slow,
though continuous, one. Emancipation was a complex process
that involved the actions of the slaves, the Union army,
Congress, and the president. Historians have argued over
the relative roles of the slaves and Lincoln in the coming
of emancipation. It is my purpose to shift the terms of
this debate by drawing attention to a third group of emancipators,
abolitionists, particularly black abolitionists, and Radical
Republicans.
African Americans had demanded freedom from bondage as
early as the American Revolution and in the thirty years
before the Civil War, a strong interracial movement had
called for the immediate abolition of slavery and black
rights. Lincoln himself came under enormous pressure from
abolitionists and radicals within his own party during
the first two years of the war to act against slavery.
But when it comes to the contemporary history of emancipation,
the influence of abolitionists has been somewhat undervalued.
Black and white abolitionists, as both supporters and
critics of the President, played a crucial part in leading
the movement for emancipation. Abolitionists enjoyed unprecedented
access to the White House during Lincoln’s presidency.
Lincoln’s famous ability to listen to all sides
of the story may not have served abolitionists well when
it came to border state slaveholders and northern conservatives,
but it did bode well for their own role as the staunchest
supporters of emancipation. Not only did black abolitionists
strenuously advocate the cause of the slave, they also
made the President give up on his long cherished plan
of colonizing free blacks outside the country and to contemplate
civil and political rights including suffrage for African
Americans. Abolitionist influence on Lincoln must be gauged
in terms of ideology and philosophy. In their view, the
Civil War was a revolutionary struggle against slavery,
not, as Lincoln argued early on, just a war for the Union,
but an abolition war, a position that he came to accept
in the last years of the war.
Lincoln, of course, was not an empty receptacle into which
others poured their views or a man who had no prior convictions
We know that Lincoln held at least two beliefs on slavery
and race on the eve of becoming the President of the United
States. He abhorred slavery as a moral and political blot
on the American republic even though he did not advocate
political equality for black people. Like most nineteenth
century Americans who revered the Union and Constitution,
Lincoln did not sympathize with the abolitionist goal
of immediate emancipation. But in viewing slavery as an
unmitigated evil, he already shared important ground with
abolitionists. Lincoln, a moderate, antislavery Republican,
was committed only to or the non-extension of slavery,
the lowest common denominator in antislavery politics,
with a rather nebulous hope in its “ultimate extinction.”
But it was a position that he adhered to with great tenacity.
Without these prior antislavery convictions, it is difficult
to imagine how Lincoln would have come to accept the logic
of emancipation during the Civil War.
Lincoln’s position on black rights on the eve of
the Civil War put him behind many abolitionists and Radical
Republicans and led him to flirt continuously with the
idea of colonization, but it put him far ahead of most
hardened racists in the North and South who would expunge
African Americans from the human family. Ironically, it
was Lincoln’s belief in a democratic America that
made him an opponent of slavery as well as a believer
in the colonization of African Americans because his ideal
republic would not accommodate inequality. It was precisely
in this area that black and white abolitionists would
exercise their greatest influence on him, pushing him
to come to grips with civil and political rights for African
Americans and the consequences of emancipation. African
American leaders, abolitionists, and radical Republicans,
who had long envisioned the establishment of an interracial
democracy in the United States, played an indispensable
role in pushing the President to accept the logical outcomes
of his own views on slavery and democracy: abolition,
black rights, and citizenship.
With the outbreak of the Civil War in April, 1861, abolitionists
and radical Republicans immediately urged Lincoln to use
his war powers to strike against slavery. They were doomed
to disappointment. Preoccupied with retaining the loyalty
of the border slave states and engendering northern unity
and support for the prosecution of the war, Lincoln insisted
that his primary goal was the reconstruction of the Union
and he gave short shrift to the abolitionist agenda. Lincoln’s
revocation of John Fremont’s and David Hunter’s
emancipation orders, the appearance of the President lagging
behind Congress, and what was perceived as his general
tardiness to move on the slavery question, aroused strong
criticism among abolitionists. The government’s
refusal to enlist black men in the Union Army further
dampened African American and abolitionist enthusiasm
for the war.
Other actions, which did not garner so much attention,
however, indicated that the President was not averse to
the idea of emancipation. He approved of General Benjamin
Butler’s policy of designating runaway slaves “contraband”
of war, the rescinding of the Dred Scott decision, he
signed the two Confiscation Acts that confiscated slaves
used for military purposes by the Confederacy and all
slaves of rebels, the acts abolishing slavery in the District
of Columbia and the federal territories, and proposed
plans for gradual, compensated emancipation for the border
states. Most African Americans were pleased with the initial
antislavery steps taken by the Republicans. Furthermore,
the Lincoln administration, pledged to enforce the suppression
of the African slave trade, hanged the first American
slave trader for participating in the illegal trade and
extended diplomatic recognition to the black republics
of Haiti and Liberia. African Americans hailed the news
of emancipation in the capital especially as a portent
of general emancipation.
By the summer of 1862, Lincoln decided to issue an emancipation
proclamation. It was not simply that he was wisely biding
his time and waiting for northern antislavery sentiment
to mature in order to move on emancipation. He himself
had to be convinced of the failure of his appeasement
of border state slaveholders and northern conservatives
and of the military necessity to free the slaves and enlist
black men. The emancipationist arguments of abolitionists
and radical Republicans, especially those who shared a
personal relationship with the President, like Senator
Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, made headway when border
state slaveholders proved to be completely obdurate regarding
the President’s proposals for gradual, compensated
emancipation and the war reached a stalemate amid heavy
Union losses. Abolitionists realized that Lincoln’s
presidency and the war presented them with a golden opportunity
to make their case for emancipation anew. During the Civil
War, the long-reviled abolition movement, gained new respectability
in the eyes of the northern public. Abolitionist leaders,
branded as disunionists and fanatics until the very eve
of the war, acquired public authority as influential proponents
of the policy of emancipation especially as the war dragged
on. They revived their earliest tactics and deluged Congress
with petitions as they had not done since the 1830s. The
crucial difference was that an antislavery party now controlled
Congress and their petitions were read with respect rather
than gagged as incendiary documents. Abolitionists, who
had been political outsiders as radical agitators throughout
the antebellum period, now walked the halls of power as
influential advocates for the slave, though a sizeable
minority advocated emigration outside the United States
in the 1850s.
Lincoln also became one of the first American presidents
to receive African Americans in the White House and the
first to solicit their opinion in matters affecting them.
African Americans had served as domestic workers in the
White House since the inception of the republic and the
Presidency but they had never before been consulted on
matters of state. (One exception was James Madison who
met with the black Quaker captain Paul Cuffe, whose ships
had been impounded during the 1812 war.) For black abolitionists,
as much as their white counterparts, a Republican presidency
meant having for the first time the political opportunity
to pressure the federal government to act on abolition.
Perhaps no other black abolitionist leader was more influential
in this regard than Frederick Douglass, who used his monthly
magazine and speeches to vent his views on abolition,
black rights, and military service. When Lincoln met Douglass,
he acknowledged having read his criticisms of Lincoln’s
slowness to act on emancipation. African Americans who
struggled to have their voices heard both within and outside
the abolition movement had gained the President’s
ear and Lincoln’s ability to meet with black people
without any condescension impressed them. It also enabled
him to listen to the opinions of black abolitionists on
some important occasions.
While black abolitionists formed one part of the chorus
of voices that pressured Lincoln to act on emancipation,
they were foremost in opposing his ideas on colonization.
The President had long recommended the colonizing of all
free blacks outside the country. Colonization was a project
that had been supported by the founding fathers like Jefferson,
Madison and prominent politicians such as Henry Clay,
Lincoln’s “beau ideal” of a statesman.
Lincoln’s support for colonization was not merely
a clever tactic to win support for emancipation, but a
long held belief predating the Civil War on how to solve
the country’s so called race problem. On the other
hand, black abolitionism had come of age in the 1820s
by opposing the American Colonization Society, which was
founded in 1816.
Well aware of abolitionist antipathy toward colonization,
Lincoln invited five African Americans, four of whom were
former slaves and none of whom were prominent in black
abolitionist circles, to persuade them to support his
plans for the colonization of black Americans in August
1862, just before issuing his preliminary proclamation.
The reaction among black abolitionists was swift and hostile.
Strong black opposition to colonization did not deter
Lincoln from experimenting with questionable plans to
colonize African Americans in Chiriqui in Panama, Liberia,
and Haiti. The failure of the Lincoln administration’s
many colonization schemes, African American non-compliance
and abolitionist pressure forced the President to give
up on colonization as a viable option for freed people.
Lincoln’s eventual abandonment of colonization after
he had decided to free the slaves was a triumph of abolitionism,
particularly black abolitionism. Black abolitionists had
played no small part in uncoupling colonization from emancipation
in his mind.
On January 1, 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation
Proclamation he had come to abolitionist ground. For abolitionists,
the President would become permanently identified with
the moment of liberation, living on as an icon of black
freedom in African American celebrations of emancipation
in years to come. By this time, Lincoln came to share
the abolitionist and African American view of the Civil
War as a providential, apocalyptic event that would not
only end slavery but redeem the American republic and
its founding principles. The abolitionist insistence on
tying the cause of the slave with that of American democracy
influenced Lincoln’s overall conception of the war.
He would immortalize this understanding of the war in
the Gettysburg Address as the second American Revolution,
as representing a “new birth of freedom” in
the republic. The abolitionist interpretation of the war
gave meaning and purpose to it in a way that simply a
war for the Union never could. Lincoln eloquently gave
words to the abolitionist view of the Civil War in his
Second Inaugural Address.
Even more than emancipation, it was in regard to black
rights and citizenship that Lincoln “grew”
during the war. The contributions of African American
soldiers to Union victory made him amenable to the idea
of black citizenship. The exigencies of the war and shortage
of manpower as the conflict dragged on led the Lincoln
administration to recruit African Americans, including
slaves, and grant freedom to those who served and their
families. Abolitionists like Massachusetts’ Governor
John Andrews and the wealthy George L. Stearns, a proponent
of black military service, hired prominent African American
abolitionists like Douglass, William Wells Brown, Charles
Lenox Remond, John Mercer Langston, Henry Highland Garnet
and Martin Delany as recruiting agents. By the end of
the war, nearly 200,000 black Americans had served in
the Union Army and Navy. Despite initial inequalities
in pay and rank, abolitionists supported recruitment of
black soldiers. Protests over racial inequalities in the
Union Army prepared African Americans and abolitionists
for the long fight for equality and citizenship rights.
Black heroism at the battles of Fort Wagner, Milliken’s
Bend and Port Hudson impressed both the President and
the northern public. Indeed Lincoln adopted nearly all
the abolitionist arguments on the value and significance
of black military service. When peace arrives he wrote,
“there will be some black men who can remember that,
with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye,
and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind onto
this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be
some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant
heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder
it.”
Lincoln soon came to sympathize with the idea that one
could not possibly deny citizenship rights to black soldiers
who had fought on behalf of the Union. According to the
precepts of republicanism, in which Lincoln, abolitionists
and the soldiers themselves were well versed, one deserved
the rights of citizenship after performing the duties
of citizenship. As early as November, 1863 New Orleans’
politically active free blacks asked the military Governor
for the right to vote. Lincoln received their two representatives,
Jean Baptiste Roudanez and Arnold Bertonneau, and their
visit must have made some impression on the President.
Soon after, Lincoln penned his famous letter to Louisiana’s
Governor Michael Hahn, suggesting that “the very
intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly
in our ranks” be given the franchise.
By the time of his death, Lincoln’s views on slavery
and racial equality had evolved greatly. Abolitionists,
African Americans and Radical Republicans challenged him
to abandon colonization and accept both abolition and
black rights. Their ideas on interracial democracy and
equal citizenship, largely forgotten in the history of
emancipation, forced both the President and the nation
to accept the consequences of abolition and helped set
the agenda for Reconstruction. Precisely because Lincoln
had come around to the idea of immediate, uncompensated
abolition and black rights during the war, his historical
legacy would be inextricably bound with the African American
struggle for freedom and with the movement to abolish
slavery.
Manisha Sinha is Associate Professor of Afro-American
Studies and History at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst. She is the author of The Counterrevolution
of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South
Carolina (2000) and co-editor of African
American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the African
Slave Trade to the Twenty First Century Two Volumes
(2004) and Contested Democracy: Freedom,
Race and Power in American History (2007).
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