Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [264]
In fact, the president had developed his own policy for the increasing numbers of fugitive slaves who had come into Union lines. As members of Congress gathered on Capitol Hill for the opening of the winter session, he outlined his ideas in his annual message. He recognized, he wrote, that under the Confiscation Act, when Union armies secured territory where slaves had been used by their masters “for insurrectionary purposes,” the legal rights of the slaveholders were “forfeited”; slaves “thus liberated” had to be “provided for in some way.” He was hopeful that some of the loyal border states might soon “pass similar enactments.” If such actions were taken, Lincoln recommended that the Congress compensate the states for each freed slave.
Lincoln still believed that both classes of freed slaves should be colonized on a purely voluntary basis, “at some place, or places, in a climate congenial to them. It might be well to consider, too,—whether the free colored people already in the United States could not, so far as individuals may desire, be included in such colonization.”
So long as Lincoln remained hopeful that the Union could be restored before the conflict “degenerate[d] into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle,” he was unwilling, he said, to sanction “radical and extreme measures” regarding slavery. Despite this assertion, he closed his message with a graceful and irrefutable argument against the continuation of slavery in a democratic society, the very essence of which opened “the way to all,” granted “hope to all,” and advanced the “condition of all.” In this “just, and generous, and prosperous system,” he reasoned, “labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.” Then, reflecting upon the vicissitudes of his own experience, Lincoln added: “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” Clearly, this upward mobility, the possibility of self-realization so central to the idea of America, was closed to the slave unless and until he became a free man.
Abolitionists condemned Lincoln’s message. “Away with the unstatesmanlike scheme of Colonization, thrust so unfortunately into the face of the nation at this juncture!” the abolitionist Worthington G. Snethen wrote Chase. “Let the sword make a nation of four millions of black men free, and let them be free, as free as the white man.” Frederick Douglass was so outraged both by the idea of colonizing freed slaves, and by the president’s refusal to enlist blacks into the army, that he was close to losing all faith in Lincoln. The president did not understand that the black man was an American with no desire to live elsewhere; “his attachment to the place of his birth is stronger than iron.” Moreover, why such fearful concern about the destiny of the freed slave? “Give him wages for his work, and let hunger pinch him if he don’t work,” Douglass declared. “He is used to [work], and is not afraid of it. His hands are already hardened by toil, and he has no dreams of ever getting a living by any other means than by hard work.”
Since the beginning of the war, Douglass had avowed that nothing would terrify the South like the vision of thousands of former slaves wielding weapons on behalf of the Union Army. “One black regiment alone would be, in such a war, the full equal of two white ones. The very fact of color in this case would be more terrible than powder and balls.” Predicting that a “lenient war” would be “a lengthy war and therefore the worst kind of war,” Douglass contended that the survival of the nation