Wilentz on Lincoln (5)

Who Lincoln Was
And was not: the images and illusions of this momentous bicentennial year.
Sean Wilentz

As for black military service, Gates's neglect of Congress once again hurts his analysis. The Militia Act of 1862, approved by Lincoln in July, was a major advance, as many abolitionists recognized at the time. Lincoln's shifts on black recruitment, meanwhile, were part of a prolonged and deeply political process--not some imaginary sea change. As early as September 1861, Lincoln approved Secretary Welles's authorization to recruit black sailors--a minor and uncontroversial step at the time, but an indication that Lincoln did not think that blacks were incompetent in combat. Then, in April and May 1862, when Congress began debating the legislation that moved toward enlisting blacks in the army, Secretary of War Stanton (who was quicker than Lincoln to favor recruiting black soldiers, and then more vehement about it) quietly encouraged the Union military in South Carolina to start arming blacks--a move that was inconceivable without Lincoln's approval.

The general in command in South Carolina was David Hunter (whom Lincoln had long known and liked, dating back to Hunter's service in Kansas before the war, which had begun during the "Bleeding Kansas" struggles of 1856). Hunter raised the black troops and also issued an order, without formal authorization from his civilian superiors, emancipating the slaves on the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Lincoln may well have tacitly supported or even quietly initiated Hunter's emancipation order, as a ploy to see how far emancipation could now be pushed. (Lincoln had curtly ended the freelance emancipation effort by General John C. Fremont in Missouri in 1861, which he thought had reached the point of insubordination and political recklessness.) Hunter apparently did not believe that he was violating the administration's wishes. ("I believe he rejoiced in my action," Hunter said of Lincoln, though politics barred the president from openly admitting as much.) But Hunter also seized slaves from captured plantations and dragooned them into military service; and he unnecessarily offended white soldiers, as well as two Kentucky congressmen. One Union officer who later commanded black troops said that Hunter's recruiting tactics were "valuable as an example of how not to do it."

When the northern press reacted with immediate and nearly universal hostility to Hunter's emancipation order, Lincoln denied that he had any foreknowledge of it and publicly rescinded it--but he did not rebuke Hunter, privately or publicly, and he did not disband his black troops, let alone relieve him of his command, as he had done with Fremont. Hard at work formulating the Emancipation Proclamation and concerned about its prospects, Lincoln then staged his own tactical--that is to say, political--retreat during the summer of 1862 by refusing to use the full authority granted him by Congress's Second Confiscation Act, which liberated the slaves of rebels, and by stating repeatedly that he would not approve a general order to arm blacks "unless some new and more pressing emergency arises." On August 10, after Stanton refused to recognize and to pay his black troops, a disheartened General Hunter reported to the Secretary of War that he was disbanding all but one company of his black volunteers.

What happened next required no "subtle coup" by Charles Sumner, the abolitionists, George Livermore, or anyone else. At the end of August, Stanton authorized Brigadier General Rufus Saxton, an abolitionist in Beaufort, South Carolina, to pick up where Hunter had left off and recruit up to five thousand black volunteers. Lieutenant Charles Francis Adams Jr.--the grandson of John Quincy Adams and the son of the anti-slavery stalwart Charles Francis Adams--reflected on the affair: "Why could not fanatics be silent and let Providence work for awhile?" That is, Adams believed that had Hunter displayed more political sense, he might not have lost the confidence of Stanton and Lincoln. But whether Hunter had truly lost the administration's confidence or was simply a pawn in a game that Lincoln was playing soon became a moot point. On September 13, 1862, Lincoln met the black ministers from Chicago and, in line with the public impression he had been giving since the summer, remarked that he had grave doubts about enlisting black soldiers as well as about ordering emancipation. Yet, before the month was over, blacks were being recruited into the Union Army, albeit on a limited basis, under General Saxton--by direct order of the War Department, and with no objection from President Lincoln.

In Louisiana and in Kansas, other Union generals began enlisting black troops in August--efforts that Lincoln did not explicitly authorize, but also did nothing to stop. The esteemed historian Benjamin Quarles called them "trial balloons." In late October, Lincoln met with Colonel Daniel Ullmann, an erstwhile New York lawyer and politician, who proposed that Lincoln enlist black troops. Lincoln asked Ullmann whether he was willing to command black soldiers. The New Yorker replied that he was, and he went on to gain authorization to organize a brigade of black soldiers; and he led two black regiments which fought in the Union's initial defeat at Port Hudson. But by then Ullmann was acting under the provisions of the Emancipation Proclamation which, in its final version, included (almost in passing) a stipulation about black recruitment omitted in the preliminary draft. Various pressures, not least Stanton's insistence and the successes, in South Carolina and elsewhere, in raising credible black units, made possible the adoption of a policy that Lincoln had been gently experimenting with well before he issued his preliminary edict of emancipation.

Gates simply fails to understand what historians have long known was transpiring beneath Lincoln's political artifice. He takes Lincoln's words at face value when it suits his own arguments--such as his remarks to the Chicago ministers in September 1862 about black military incompetence--but he is unable to see Lincoln for what his finest biographers have shown he was: a shrewd leader who could give misleading and even false impressions when he wanted to do so, and made no public commitments until the moment was ripe. So it was with the Emancipation Proclamation, which (on the advice of Seward) Lincoln delayed releasing until after the outcome of the battle of Antietam on September 17, which gave the Union cause more credibility.

And so it was with recruitment of blacks, a policy that Congress advanced and that Lincoln encouraged with stealth and indirection as early as the spring of 1862--always keeping himself immune from political blame in case of failure, waiting until the "trial balloons" had proved successful and public opinion had matured before enunciating the policy in public. He then announced the change in the least conspicuous way imaginable, stating near the close of the legalistic Emancipation Proclamation that "such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places...." This is how politics actually works in Washington, and always has worked. Gates does not comprehend it. This failure yields even stranger results when Gates offers his own account of why Lincoln reversed course on black recruitment--results so strange, and even potentially damaging, that they demand closer examination.




VI.

Gates's story of the great Abraham Lincoln and the unknown George Livermore--a story that, in Gates's telling, has been long neglected by an indifferent posterity--is interesting for several reasons. If true, it is a striking revisionist explanation of one of Lincoln's most fateful wartime decisions. It is one of the bolder claims ever made on behalf of the dubious "two Lincolns" conversion story. It feeds the deep yearning of scholars (and not just scholars) to establish at every turn the agency of ordinary, neglected Americans in shaping momentous events--influence from the bottom up that decades and even centuries of elite, great-man history have supposedly suppressed. And this particular story, or rather the continuing story about the story, also shows how a prominent professor's outlandish claims may quickly attain the semblance of truth.

In an admiring notice of Lincoln on Race & Slavery in The New York Review of Books, Garry Wills relates the most fallacious version of the story, which he picked up in part from the book's headnotes, as if it were commonly accepted knowledge among American historians. "Lincoln changed his mind on the usefulness of blacks in the army," Wills writes confidently, "when he was given [in August 1862] a book by George Livermore that established that Washington had usefully employed black troops during the Revolution." Since Wills has been authorized as a distinguished expert on Abraham Lincoln, and since his remarks appear in an authoritative place, a bogus account of crucial historical events thus gains authority of its own. It may only be a matter of time before popular histories start telling the stirring tale of how an abolitionist's little book, inspired by a black writer, changed Lincoln's mind about recruiting black soldiers, which in turn transformed Lincoln's views about blacks in general. George Livermore may become one of American history's unjustly unsung heroes. The only trouble, of course, is that the story is a counterfeit.

Gates does not disclose what sources he has consulted about Livermore, but as near as I can tell the story originated in some passing remarks that appeared in Livermore's obituary, written by Sumner, in the Boston Daily Advertiser on September 2, 1865. None of the major modern scholarly biographers of Lincoln, from Benjamin Thomas to David Herbert Donald, relate the story, or even mention Livermore. (Burlingame's massive biography makes one trivial reference to Livermore and his book.) A version of the story does appear in a study of Lincoln, published in 2004, by Geoffrey Perrett, a prolific writer of historical biography. Like Gates, Perrett offers no supporting evidence.

And yet one of the headnotes in Gates's book reports categorically that Livermore's writing "persuaded" Lincoln "by the late summer of 1862" about the views of the all-important Founding Fathers concerning black troops--again an impossibility, given that Charles Sumner only sent Livermore's recently published book to Lincoln on November 8. (This misdated account is the one that Garry Wills repeats.) Sumner did, to be sure, write to his friend and constituent Livermore, in late December 1862, to assure him that his study "interested President Lincoln much," and he added the claim that Lincoln had consulted it while composing the final Emancipation Proclamation. Sumner also claimed that he had sent Lincoln a second gift of the book on Christmas morning after the president told him he had mislaid his copy. (The letters may be viewed online in the Library of Congress's collection of Lincoln's manuscript correspondence.)

But there is nothing whatever in these letters to show that Livermore's writing had any decisive effect on Lincoln's thinking. Lincoln's thoughts turned quietly to the possibility of black recruitment long before Sumner sent Livermore's book to the White House; and by the time Lincoln received the book, the Union had been enlisting black soldiers on a limited basis for months. Nor have I ever read of a single instance when Sumner--whom Lincoln liked, probably best among the radical Republicans, but whom he also regarded as an ally who required careful handling--outfoxed the president on anything. The idea that Sumner pulled off a clever "coup" on so grave and sensitive matter as black enlistment in the Union Army, and that he did so without the knowledge, let alone the involvement, of Secretary of War Stanton, with whom Lincoln was in constant contact, is something between implausible and ludicrous. In any event, there is no evidence for it either in the Sumner-Livermore correspondence that appears in the Lincoln papers at the Library of Congress, or in any of the other Lincoln primary sources on the subject. I seriously doubt that convincing sources are buried away elsewhere. If they are, Gates needs to bring them forward, as he should have in his book.

Another part of the story that Gates tells does appear to be true, or at least half-true. Just how important, in Gates's view, was Livermore's book? "Lincoln supposedly even gave Livermore the pen that he used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation," Gates records in support of his story, as if Lincoln made a special effort to recognize Livermore's contribution--though Gates then concedes that "the list of claimants to that singular honor is no doubt a long one." (Once more, the later headnote, curiously, is more emphatic, stating flatly that "Lincoln felt so indebted to Livermore that he gave him the pen he had used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.") In fact, the journalist Benjamin Perley Poore (who was present at the event and reported on it for the Boston Evening Journal) wrote that Lincoln "carefully" put away the pen--"a steel pen with a wooden handle, the end of which had been gnawed by Mr. Lincoln--a habit that he had when composing anything that required thought"--so that Lincoln could give it to Sumner, "who had promised it to his friend George Livermore, of Cambridge, the author of an interesting work on slavery."

Benjamin Quarles, in his classic work, Lincoln and the Negro, which was published in 1962 and which Gates does not cite, confirmed that Livermore actually did end up with the pen (which now resides across the Charles River from Harvard in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society). But Quarles's account about how it all happened demolishes what is left of the "little known" story that Gates thinks is so "important," as well as the claim in Gates's book that Lincoln felt "indebted" to Livermore and acknowledged that debt. Quarles recreates the scene immediately after the proclamation's signing:

Seward reached for the document to take it to the State Department for the great seal. Lincoln let nobody take the pen; he had promised to save it for George Livermore of Boston, a friend of Charles Sumner. For several weeks Sumner had plagued Lincoln about the pen. Sumner had been bedeviled in turn by Livermore: "I do so much desire to have that freeing instrument come to Massachusetts," he wrote on Christmas Day, "that I would do almost anything to get it."

Sumner hardly needed vigorous prodding. He remembered, as he informed Livermore two days later, that shortly after the District of Columbia Emancipation Act had been signed, he had gone to the White House and asked for the pen Lincoln had used. Lincoln had reached to his desk and taken up a handful of pens, saying, "It was one of these. Which will you take? You are welcome to all."

This time Sumner was not to be denied. Lincoln signed the Proclamation on a Thursday afternoon; that Saturday's newspapers announced that Sumner had the pen. Two days later, on Monday, January 5, Livermore received it in the mails. Wrote he to Sumner before the sun had set: "No trophy from a battlefield, no sword red with blood, no service of plate with an inscription ... would ever have been to me half as acceptable as this instrument."

Quarles did not tell quite the whole story, for Livermore wanted as many mementos as he could lay his hands on. ("What becomes of the manuscript of the Proclamation? Is that preserved?" he wrote to Sumner. "That would be still better than the pen--if it could be had after the printer had published it.") And when Sumner forwarded Livermore's request for the pen to Lincoln, he did mention that Livermore was "the author of the Historic Research on slavery in the early days of our Government." But Quarles's account conforms with everything else that we know about Lincoln and Sumner, about their personal as well as political relations.

It is entirely possible that Lincoln found Livermore's book appealing, and even useful. But there is nothing in the historical record to show that what Perley Poore called Livermore's "interesting work on slavery" in any way "persuaded" Lincoln about black enlistment. And, until and unless Gates provides solid documentation overturning Quarles's account, there is nothing at all behind the claim that Lincoln felt "indebted to Livermore." There is instead, by Quarles's telling, the faintly comical story of an enthusiastic abolitionist souvenir-hunter, a proud son of the Bay State, bedeviling his friend Senator Sumner; and of Sumner continuing the constituent service that he had begun with the gift to the president of a copy of Livermore's pamphlet, by plaguing Lincoln about the pen. Finally the president, who appears to have been indifferent about which pen signed what, handed over the prize.





Gates's credulity about historical sources also mars his treatment of Lincoln and colonization. The Emancipation Proclamation in effect stated that a Union victory would mean the immediate end of slavery nationwide--although only the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment by Congress (for which Lincoln pushed before his murder) and its ratification by the states extirpated the Constitution's toleration of slavery once and for all. But as soon as the war for the Union became a war to eliminate bondage, Lincoln had to face up squarely to the question that he had long tried to dodge: What would a post-slavery America look like? Almost instinctively, he clung to the idea of voluntary colonization as ineluctable. In the same message to Congress on December 1, 1862, in which he announced the Emancipation Proclamation, he reasserted his firm support for colonization, and called for a constitutional amendment that, among other things, would permit Congress to fund directly the voluntary colonization of free blacks.

Never again would Lincoln publicly advocate colonization. He did, as Gates writes, approve a contract with a private citizen, at the very end of 1862, to transport a few hundred blacks to an island off the coast of Haiti. (The only colonization project actually undertaken by the Lincoln administration, the venture proved a fiasco.) Lincoln also met with some pro-colonizationists in the spring of 1863. But by the end of 1863, at the very latest, colonization was off the administration's agenda. Indeed, even in his message to Congress in 1862, as Gates's headnotes observe, he began to back off from the scheme, assuring white wage-earners that even if blacks did not emigrate their own wages would not fall, and chastising those who favored colonization out of racial hatred. And yet there have always been writers as well as historians among those who dislike Lincoln--including that great Civil War expert Gore Vidal--who insist that Lincoln never really abandoned his desire for colonization. Since Lincoln never explicitly renounced colonization, these critics say, there is no justification for believing that he ever really did so.