Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

If the Proclamation answered one question—What shall we do about slavery?—the answer only opened the door to another: What shall be done with the freed slaves? “How shall we deal with four millions of liberated blacks?” asked William Grosvenor in the New Englander. “Rightly considered, it is the most awful problem that any nation ever undertook to solve.” Frederick Douglass hoped that the war would show white Americans how “the fate of the Republic and that of the slave” were tied together “in the same bundle.”89 But neither Lincoln nor the federal government seemed to give Douglass much hope that emancipation would do more than leave the freed slave in a sort of civic limbo—no longer a slave, but now… what? A citizen? The political equal of every white citizen? But what exactly was a citizen? The Constitution offered only vague hints about whether citizenship was a privilege bestowed and defined by the individual states or by the United States as a whole.

Lincoln, still hoping to evade a punishing white backlash against emancipation, at first hoped that he could dodge the question by promoting several schemes for colonizing emancipated blacks elsewhere—in effect, suggesting that they find political equality someplace other than the United States. Colonization had been one of the pet solutions of the Whigs for slavery ever since the days of Henry Clay, and in August 1862 Lincoln the ex-Whig tried to persuade a delegation of free black leaders led by Edward M. Thomas that it would be all for the best if African Americans could find a new life for themselves in Liberia, Central America, or the Caribbean, rather than trying to raise themselves to political equality in white America. Few black leaders saw any reason why they should have to abandon the only country they had known. Frederick Douglass was outraged when he heard of Lincoln’s plans for colonization. “Mr. Lincoln assumes the language and arguments of an itinerant Colonization lecturer,” Douglass stormed on the pages of his newest publication, Douglass’ Monthly, in September 1862, “showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” A mass meeting of free blacks in Philadelphia denounced the colonization plans: “Shall we sacrifice this, leave our homes, forsake our birthplace, and flee to a strange land to appease the anger and prejudice of the traitors now in arms against the Government?”90

Nevertheless, Lincoln persisted. Congress appropriated funds, and a developer, Bernard Kock, was contracted to organize a freedmen’s colony on Î le-à-Vaches, an island off the southern coast of Haiti, in 1863. Kock was only ever able to recruit fewer than 500 volunteers for the project, and he mishandled so many aspects of the settlement that in March 1864 Lincoln finally ended support for the colony and evacuated all the colonists. Lincoln’s “distress” over the “mistakes” of the Î le-à-Vaches project was “as keen as it was sincere,” wrote Chaplain John Eaton, who was in charge of the “contraband camps” the army was setting up across the South for newly freed slaves. “The spectacle of the President of the United States, conducting the affairs of the Nation in the midst of civil war,” worrying over the fate of the hapless colonists he had dispatched there “was a spectacle that has stayed with me all my life.”91

So, in the end, it came back to Lincoln to persuade a nation whose basic racial theories were usually little more than variations on bigotry that they were going to have to accept black people, free as well as newly freed, as their political and social brethren. In August 1863, when Frederick Douglass came to the White House to meet Lincoln for the first time, he was sure that he would still meet a president who was “preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.” Douglass came away with a view of Lincoln very different from what he had expected. Lincoln 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, or the difference of color.”92

Nor did Lincoln mean to allow others to remind Douglass of the issue of color, and Lincoln was soon implementing a series of measures that would at last bring African Americans closer to the mainstream of American life. The first of these measures came in the form of an economic experiment. When the Federal navy seized the islands in the Port Royal Sound in the fall of 1861, the navy expected only to use the islands as a coaling station for the blockade of the Carolina coast. Slave owners on the islands fled from the Northern occupation, leaving their plantations, and in many cases their slaves, behind. Since the slaves could now be deemed “contraband,” Treasury officials at Port Royal began putting the slaves to work harvesting the cotton on the abandoned plantations. Then, with the backing of anti-slavery societies in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, a small army of “Gideonites” descended upon Port Royal with evangelical fire in their hearts and schoolbooks in their hands to preach, to teach, to heal, and to divide up the old plantations into farm plots for the newly free slaves to manage as their own property. The results were extremely gratifying—one of the new cotton-planting operations easily cleared $80,000 in one year—and they demonstrated that free black people had the full capacity to compete equally with white people in the free-labor society of the North, without requiring subsidies or preferment.93

The second measure was military. At the beginning of the war, thousands of free blacks had volunteered to serve in the Union army. “The prejudiced white men North or South never will respect us until they are forced to do it by deed of our own,” declared the Weekly Anglo-African, and Frederick Douglass urged the readers of Douglass’ Monthly to put “the keen