Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [304]
On August 14, Lincoln invited a delegation of freed slaves to a conference at the White House, hoping to inspire their cooperation in educating fellow blacks on the benefits of colonization. “You and we are different races,” he began. “We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races.” Lincoln acknowledged that with slavery, the black race had endured “the greatest wrong inflicted on any people.” Still, he continued, “when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. You are cut off from many of the advantages which the other race enjoy. The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours.” Meanwhile, the evil consequences of slavery upon the white race were manifest in a calamitous civil war that found them “cutting one another’s throats.” Far “better for us both, therefore, to be separated,” Lincoln reasoned, informing the delegates that “a sum of money had been appropriated by Congress, and placed at his disposition” to aid in establishing a colony somewhere in Central America. He needed a contingent of intelligent, educated blacks, such as the men present, to promote the opportunity among their own people.
A discussion followed and the meeting came to a close. “We were entirely hostile to the movement until all the advantages were so ably brought to our views by you,” the delegation chief wrote Lincoln two days later, promising to consult with prominent blacks in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston who he hoped would “join heartily in Sustaining Such a movement.” His hope was misplaced. The black leaders responded swiftly with widespread antipathy to the proposal. As the Liberator eloquently argued, the nation’s 4 million slaves “are as much the natives of the country as any of their oppressors. Here they were born; here, by every consideration of justice and humanity, they are entitled to live; and here it is for them to die in the course of nature.” One might “as well attempt to roll back Niagara to its source, or to cast the Allegheny mountains into the sea, as to think of driving or enticing them out of the country.” How pathetic, the Liberator noted, that the president of a country “sufficiently capacious to contain the present population of the globe,” a nation that “proudly boasts of being the refuge of the oppressed of all nations,” should consider exiling “the entire colored population…to a distant shore.”
Reports of Lincoln’s dialogue with the black delegation provoked Frederick Douglass to his most caustic assault yet on the president. While acknowledging that this was the first time blacks had been invited for a hearing at the White House, he accused Lincoln of making “ridiculous” comments showing a “pride of race and blood” and a “contempt for negroes.” The president “ought to know,” Douglass argued, “that negro hatred and prejudice of color are neither original nor invincible vices, but merely the offshoots of that root of all crimes and evils—slavery. If the colored people instead of having been stolen and forcibly brought to the United States had come as free immigrants, like the German and the Irish, never thought of as suitable objects of property, they never would have become the objects of aversion and bitter persecution.”
Lincoln’s remarkable empathy had singularly failed him in this initial approach to the impending consequences of emancipation. Though he had tried to put himself in the place of blacks and suggest what he thought was best