Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [239]
Meanwhile, the events of the war itself began to reshape the old order in ways few realized. At Fort Monroe, at the tip of the peninsula in Virginia, a bold decision by General Benjamin Butler proved a harbinger of things to come. One night, three fugitive slaves arrived at the fort after escaping from the Confederate battery that their master had ordered them to help build. When an agent of their owner demanded their return, Butler refused. The rebels were using slaves in the field to support their troops, Butler argued. The slaves were therefore contraband of war, and the federal government was no longer obliged to surrender them to their masters.
Coming from Butler, a conservative Democrat from Massachusetts who had run for governor on the Breckinridge ticket in 1860, the decision delighted Republican stalwarts who had previously objected to Butler’s high position. Butler himself would soon be equally delighted by Lincoln’s magnanimity in making him a brigadier general. “I will accept the commission,” Butler gratefully told Lincoln, but “there is one thing I must say to you, as we don’t know each other: That as a Democrat I opposed your election, and did all I could for your opponent; but I shall do no political act, and loyally support your administration as long as I hold your commission; and when I find any act that I cannot support I shall bring the commission back at once, and return it to you.”
Lincoln replied, “That is frank, that is fair. But I want to add one thing: When you see me doing anything that for the good of the country ought not to be done, come and tell me so, and why you think so, and then perhaps you won’t have any chance to resign your commission.” Had Butler known Lincoln, he would have been less astonished. The president commissioned officers with the same eye toward coalition building that he displayed in constructing his cabinet.
Butler’s order was approved by both Lincoln and Cameron, and eventually, the Congress passed a confiscation law ending the rights of masters over fugitive slaves utilized to support the Confederate troops. Even conservative Monty Blair applauded Butler. “You were right when you declared secession niggers contraband of war,” he told his fellow Democrat. “The Secessionists have used them to do all their fortifying.”
Blair’s approval of Butler’s measure as an act of war did not mean that he advocated emancipation. On the contrary, he advised Butler to “improve the code by restricting its operations to working people, leaving the Secessionists to take care of the non working classes.” The Union should provide safe harbor only to the “pick of the lot,” the strong-bodied slaves who were helping the rebels in the field. Women and children and other “unproductive laborers” should be left for their Southern masters to house and feed.
Lincoln, as usual, was slowly formulating his own position on the slavery question. He told Blair that Butler’s action raised “a very important subject…one requiring some thought in view of the numbers of negroes we were likely to have on hand in virtue of this new doctrine.” Indeed, in the weeks that followed, hundreds of courageous slaves worked their way into Union lines. The situation worried Lincoln; at this juncture, he still favored compensated emancipation and voluntary colonization, allowing blacks who wished to do so to return to their original homeland in Africa. Most important, he knew that any hint of total, direct emancipation would alienate the border states,