The Black History of the White House Read online

  After calling the example of Liberia a “success” as an example of government-sponsored black expatriation, the president then lectured the group about the value of having blacks relocate closer to the United States in Central America. He did not, perhaps as a tactical measure to keep his options open, specifically tell the group about the Chiriqui plans that were under way. Referring to the region as a country (and denationalizing the group’s members whose birth country was the United States), he stated, “The country is a very excellent one for any people, and with great natural resources and advantages, and especially because of the similarity of climate with your native land—thus being suited to your physical condition,” and “there is evidence of very rich coal mines.”33

  On the sticky question of whether blacks would be well received, old Abe stated:

  The political affairs in Central America are not in quite as satisfactory condition as I wish. There are contending factions in that quarter; but it is true all the factions are agreed alike on the subject of colonization, and want it, and are more generous than we are here. To your colored race they have no objection. Besides, I would endeavor to have you made equals, and have the best assurance that you should be the equals of the best.34

  The U.S. president argued, illogically, that he could guarantee equality in a foreign nation over which he had no jurisdiction. Honest Abe was also not so honest on another point. He was wrong about “all factions” agreeing on the subject of black colonization; in fact, all factions, governments, and everyone else vehemently disagreed on Lincoln’s plot.

  Finally, Lincoln got to the real point of the meeting. He wanted the group (and like-minded blacks, if they could be found) to act as promoters and recruiters for his scheme. Stroking egos, he argued, “If intelligent colored men, such as are before me, would move in this matter, much might be accomplished. It is exceedingly important that we have men at the beginning capable of thinking as white men, and not those who have been systematically oppressed.”35 President Lincoln wanted the group to find one hundred “tolerably intelligent” men, women, and children as volunteers—although he quickly reduced the number to twenty-five—to start off the project.

  As emigration out of the United States had long been a strategy for some black activists, Lincoln’s plan resonated with segments of the black community. Unlike the racist rationale undergirding the motives and activities of the American Colonization Society, which sought to get rid of the race problem by getting rid of blacks, African American calls for expatriation were rooted in the ideas of self-determination, racial solidarity, and genuine democratic aspirations.

  In 1815, Paul Cuffee of Massachusetts, a free black with some Native American heritage, launched a back-to-Africa movement when he took thirty-eight free blacks to Sierra Leone, a country that had long been a destination for free blacks from England and, after the Revolutionary War, Canada.36 Even after slavery ended, black leaders such as Martin Delany and Bishop Henry McNeal Turner continued to call for blacks to move to Africa and in some cases did so themselves. Delany was active in national black politics and worked closely with Fredrick Douglass on his newspaper, North Star. By the early 1850s, however, Delany broke with Douglass and became a stirring proponent for black emigration to both Africa and South America.

  During the Civil War, however, Delany decided to stay in the United States to help the Union defeat the South. In 1865, he met with President Lincoln two months before his assassination to propose building a corps of black men who would help recruit Southern blacks to support Lincoln. After the war, frustrated with the attacks on Reconstruction, Delany again promoted emigration to Liberia.

  Active in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and a central figure in Washington, D.C.’s black community, Bishop Turner was appointed by President Lincoln as chaplain to black troops during the Civil War. He later moved to Georgia and ran for political office. After being illegally denied his seat, Bishop Turner grew frustrated with American racism and became a major speaker promoting black emigration to Africa as well as to Canada, where he died in 1915.37

  One of the strongest movements for black emigration to Africa emerged in Arkansas during the late nineteenth century. On March 10, 1892, about 600 African Americans in central Arkansas participated in an effort to move to Liberia.38 Thus, when President Lincoln made a pitch for black colonization, it fell on receptive ears in a large part of the black community. Rev. Henry Highland Garnet was one black leader who approved. A longtime proponent of black emigration, he called the president’s scheme “the most humane, and merciful movement which this or any other administration has proposed for the benefit of the enslaved,” somewhat missing the point that free rather than enslaved blacks were being targeted.39 Some took to calling the still undetermined destination “Linconia,” evoking the naming of Liberia’s capital “Monrovia” after President James Monroe.

  Returning to the 1862 meeting between Lincoln and the group of black leaders, it appears that some in the delegation mumbled a few “Yes, sirs,” and after Lincoln finished his monologue they replied by saying they would get back to him with a response. Reverend Thomas stated that they would consult with other black leaders around the nation to get their opinion on Lincoln’s proposal, but he felt optimistic. There is little evidence that Thomas or the other four had much influence over the opinion or politics of the black community. Two days after the meeting, on August 16, Thomas wrote Lincoln confidently, “We were entirely hostile to the movement until all the advantages were so ably brought to our view by you and we believe that our friends and colaborers [sic] for our race in those cities [Philadelphia, New York, and Boston] will when the subject is explained by us to them join heartily in sustaining such a movement.”40 Two days later, on August 18, Thomas proposed to Lincoln a national tour of black leaders who would promote his idea to other African Americans.41

  As it turned out, Thomas’s optimism was a bit premature. “Leading colored men” and blacks in general unambiguously and even angrily rejected Lincoln and Thomas’s overtures, just as they had for decades rejected the colonization plans of the American Colonization Society and others.

  Free blacks saw their future as citizens of the United States and nowhere else. In Philadelphia, in an immediate response, the Statistical Association of the Colored People of Philadelphia met on August 15 and sent a letter to Reverend Thomas condemning Lincoln’s presentation and his proposal. Statistical Association President Isaiah C. Wears wrote, “To be asked, after so many years of oppression and wrong have been inflicted in a land and by a people who have been so largely enriched by the black man’s toil, to pull up stakes in a civilized and barbarous nation, simple to gratify an unnatural wicked prejudice emanating from slavery, is unreasonable and anti-Christian in the extreme.”42 Addressing Lincoln’s assertion that African Americans were the cause of the war, Wears lashed out at the president, stating, “But it is not the Negro that is the cause of the war; it is the unwillingness on the part of the American people to do the race simple justice.”43

  Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass’s response to news of the meeting was hostile and dismissive. He wrote that Lincoln’s proposal regarding free blacks “expresses merely the desire to get rid of them and reminds one of the politeness with which a man might try to bow out of his house some troublesome creditor or the witness of some old guilt.”44 He further wrote that “the President of the United States seems to possess an ever increasing passion for making himself appear silly and ridiculous, if nothing worse,” and that his remarks were “unusually garrulous, characteristically foggy, remarkably illogical and untimely.”45

  Lincoln moved forward despite opposition from African Americans, radical Republicans, Democrats, Southerners, and even the American Colonization Society, even after the Chiriqui plan fell apart when Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, and Costa Rica all refused to take part in it. On December 31, 1862, the day before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln approved a contract to send 5,000
volunteer black men, women, and children to an island off the coast of Haiti known as the Île à Vache. The project became a total catastrophe. More than 400 people left the United States on April 6, 1863, and quickly discovered that little preparation had been made for their arrival. After nearly a year of deprivations, illness, death, and little production, the surviving members of the expedition, about 365 people, were brought back to the United States, arriving in Virginia on March 20, 1864. Lincoln’s dream of convincing blacks to permanently leave the United States was never heard of again after the incident.46

  For African Americans, and ultimately the White House, the goal of the Civil War was nothing short of black people’s liberation through the illegalization of slavery. For tactical, political, and arguably for personal reasons, Lincoln hesitated, retreated, and then moved forward in pursuit of that goal. His sense of reluctance and caution was demonstrated in his reaction to four key incidents that preceded the Emancipation Proclamation: the Confiscation Act of 1861, the Fremont Declaration, General Order 11, and the Confiscation Act of 1862.

  Consistently more radical than the moderate Lincoln, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the first Confiscation Act on August 6, 1861. The Act gave the federal government authority to seize property—including blacks that were enslaved and could be claimed as property—from those in rebellion against the Union, unless they surrendered or ceased such activity within sixty days of the Act’s passage. There were several weaknesses to the Act, however, including Lincoln’s disinclination to sign and enforce it, the fact that it only applied to those enslaved in territories controlled by the Union, and, most important, the reality that it did not free any of the enslaved—it only “confiscated” them. Wary of frightening the border (and slaveholding) states of Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky, Lincoln opposed the Act and signed it very reluctantly.

  As hesitant as Lincoln was about the first Confiscation Act, he was absolutely horrified when on August 31, less than a month later, General John C. Fremont issued an order to free black people enslaved by whites who were in revolt against the Union. The commander of Union forces in Missouri, General Fremont issued his own proclamation, as a war measure, that stated:

  I do hereby extend, and declare established, martial law throughout the State of Missouri. . . . All persons who shall be taken with arms in their hands within these lines shall be tried by court-martial, and, if found guilty, will be shot. The property, real and personal, of all persons in the State of Missouri who shall take up arms against the United States, and who shall be directly proven to have taken an active part with their enemies in the field, is declared to be confiscated to the public use; and their slaves, if any they have, are hereby declared free.47

  Lincoln fumed and immediately rescinded the order.48 His action would accelerate the ongoing battle between the White House and radical Republicans over how far to go toward ending slavery both for political purposes and to win the war.

  The president continued to have trouble with his officers getting ahead of him on the issue of emancipation. Another field officer also sought to use the freeing of slaves as a tactic of war. On May 9, 1862, General David Hunter issued General Order 11, which freed all slaves in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. The order stated:

  The three States of Georgia, Florida and South Carolina, comprising the military department of the south, having deliberately declared themselves no longer under the protection of the United States of America, and having taken up arms against the said United States, it becomes a military necessity to declare them under martial law. This was accordingly done on the 25th day of April, 1862. Slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible; the persons in these three States—Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina—heretofore held as slaves, are therefore declared forever free.49

  When Lincoln again chastised the general and rescinded the order, Congress responded with a second Confiscation Act. The new bill, passed on July 16, 1862, stated in no uncertain terms that Confederate slave owners who did not surrender within sixty days would have the black people they enslaved permanently freed. The Act excluded those enslaved in the border states of Missouri, Delaware, Tennessee, and Maryland and even, as a result of pressure from Lincoln, sanctioned the return of these states’ fugitives from slavery. It also included a provision for voluntary black expatriation. In any case, Lincoln did little to enforce either the first or second Confiscation Acts. And since they were Acts of Congress, they had relatively weak legal standing and could easily be overturned by a more conservative group of legislators.

  All of these maneuvers were a prelude to the main event. By July 1862, Lincoln had come to realize that the war could not be won without ending slavery (or at least declaring it abolished). Earlier, on June 19, Congress passed the Territorial Emancipation Act. With Lincoln’s signature, the Act abolished slavery in all territories seeking statehood under federal control. This action did not free any African Americans in any of the existing states but took a first step by refuting the Dred Scott decision’s conclusion that the federal government could not regulate slavery in the territories. Congress and the president, at that point, still vacillated on a direct attack on states’ rights.

  But the real giant step that remained was to issue an order declaring slavery over and done throughout the land. Ultimately, this would not be the Emancipation Proclamation, despite its symbolic power, even though it was the Proclamation that irreversibly pushed the nation to full abolition. Pressure for emancipation was building. On September 7, a mass rally was held in Chicago calling for immediate emancipation of all those enslaved. In an August 19, 1862, editorial, Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, demanded that Lincoln issue an order abolishing slavery immediately and totally. Lincoln’s well-known and widely quoted response to Greeley sent chills through the abolition movement. Although Lincoln had already discussed with his cabinet the decision to issue an emancipation proclamation and had decided that he would free black people, he wrote deceptively in a letter to Greeley on August 22, 1862:

  My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.50

  On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation that included a line stating that the “effort to colonize persons of African descent . . . will be continued.” He gave the forces of the South one hundred days to surrender—with the disturbing provision that they could keep the black people they enslaved—or he would sign the Proclamation on January 1, 1863. They did not.

  And so, on the first day of 1863, President Lincoln put his non-shaky signature on the paper that read in part:

  All persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever, free.

  The Proclamation had many shortcomings. It did not free those who were enslaved and already in states in the Union, those who were in Union-held territory in the Confederacy, or those in the border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, or Missouri. Other areas in West Virginia and Louisiana were also excluded. Additionally, the Proclamation was a presidential order—rather than an Act of Congress or an amendment to the Constitution—that gave it questionable long-term legal standing.

  It is also important, however, to acknowledge what it did do. First and foremost, it changed the nature of the war. Political and military leaders from the North and South who were not already there had to come to grips with the reality that liberation of all enslaved blacks—abolition—had become a goal of the war. Few had started off with that assumption. Most Southern leaders had voiced opposition to the Republic
an Party’s plan to stop the expansion of slavery and its probable intent to perhaps in some distant future initiate policies for the institution’s gradual abolition. Second, for both free and enslaved blacks, the Proclamation was a powerful organizing and mobilizing tool. For those still in slavery, it inspired tens of thousands to drop their plows and leave the plantation. Legally robust or not, the Proclamation was read as overthrowing the Dred Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Act. Nevertheless, the significance and symbolism of the Emancipation Proclamation has remained the most controversial of all of Lincoln’s decisions. It is clear that Lincoln changed and that his antislavery views—long-standing and well documented, though not necessarily based on a commitment to racial equality—evolved into a position of irrevocable abolitionism whether he wished it or not. In the end, he steered the nation to a place that no prior president had dared to go, and the consequences transformed the nation from a legally racist slaveocracy into a new social order.

  It is also undeniable that Lincoln’s views provoked his assassination. His last public speech, on April 11, 1865, three days before he was assassinated, focused on the postwar issue of reconstructing the nation and on the Louisiana constitution that had been submitted to Congress for approval. Lincoln also addressed the issue of black voting rights, setting himself up for criticism from the left for his racist statement about which blacks he preferred to give the franchise. In those remarks, referring to the proposed Louisiana constitution, Lincoln stated, “It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.”51

  According to historian James McPherson, the speech indicated that Lincoln and more radical Republicans in Congress were coming closer to a consensus on how to address this concern, but without doubt some, if not all, African American men were going to become the nation’s newest group of voters. At the end of that speech, Lincoln hinted at the direction he was headed in extending rights to blacks, saying, “In the present ‘situation’ as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act, when satisfied that action will be proper.”52 While scholar Lerone Bennett Jr. interprets that remark to be part of Lincoln’s evasive language when it came to the rights of African Americans, there was at least one member of the crowd listening that day who believed he had a clear understanding of what the president meant.