Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [357]
Although the retaliatory order alleviated one major concern, Douglass feared that the lack of “fair play” in the handling of black enrollees would continue to hamper recruiting. Major Stearns suggested that Douglass should go to Washington and explain the situation to the president. Having never visited the nation’s capital, Douglass experienced an inexpressible “tumult of feeling” when he entered the White House. “I could not know what kind of a reception would be accorded me. I might be told to go home and mind my business…. Or I might be refused an interview altogether.”
Finding a large crowd in the hallway, Douglass expected to wait hours before gaining an audience with the president. Minutes after presenting his card, however, he was called into the office. “I was never more quickly or more completely put at ease in the presence of a great man than in that of Abraham Lincoln,” he later recalled. The president was seated in a chair when Douglass entered the room, “surrounded by a multitude of books and papers, his feet and legs were extended in front of his chair. On my approach he slowly drew his feet in from the different parts of the room into which they had strayed, and he began to rise.” As Lincoln extended his hand in greeting, Douglass hesitantly began to introduce himself. “I know who you are, Mr. Douglass,” Lincoln said. “Mr. Seward has told me all about you. Sit down. I am glad to see you.” Lincoln’s warmth put Douglass instantly at ease. Douglass later maintained that he had “never seen a more transparent countenance.” He could tell “at a glance the justice of the popular estimate of the President[’s] qualities expressed in the prefix ‘honest’ to the name of Abraham Lincoln.”
Douglass laid before the president the discriminatory measures that were frustrating his recruiting efforts. “Mr. Lincoln listened with earnest attention and with very apparent sympathy,” he recalled. “Upon my ceasing to speak [he] proceeded with an earnestness and fluency of which I had not suspected him.” Lincoln first recognized the indisputable justice of the demand for equal pay. When Congress passed the bill for black soldiers, he explained, it “seemed a necessary concession to smooth the way to their employment at all as soldiers,” but he promised that “in the end they shall have the same pay as white soldiers.” As for the absence of black officers, Lincoln assured Douglass that “he would sign any commission to colored soldiers whom his Secretary of War should commend to him.”
Douglass was particularly impressed by Lincoln’s justification for delaying the retaliatory order until the public mind was prepared for it. Had he acted earlier, Lincoln said, before the recent battles “in which negroes had distinguished themselves for bravery and general good conduct,” he was certain that “such was the state of public popular prejudice that an outcry would have been raised against the measure. It would be said—Ah! we thought it would come to this. White men were to be killed for negroes.” In fact, he confessed to grave misgivings that, “once begun, there was no telling where it would end; that if he could get hold of the Confederate soldiers who had been guilty [of killing black prisoners] he could easily retaliate, but the thought of hanging men for a crime perpetrated by others was revolting to his feelings.” While Douglass disagreed, believing the order essential, he respected the “humane spirit” that prompted Lincoln’s concerns.
Before they parted, Lincoln told Douglass that he had read a recent speech in which the fiery orator had lambasted “the tardy, hesitating and vacillating policy of the President of the United States.” Though he conceded that he might move with frustrating deliberation