Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [421]
Yet he forthrightly faced the likelihood of defeat and resolved to do his utmost in the remaining months both to win the war on the North’s terms and to bring as many slaves as possible into Union lines before newly elected Democratic leaders could shut the door forever. In the third week of August, Lincoln asked all cabinet members to sign—without having read—a memorandum committing the administration to devote all its powers and energies to help bring the war to a successful conclusion. The presumption was that no Democrat would be able to resist the immense pressure for an immediate compromise peace. Slavery would thus be allowed to remain in the South, and even independence might be sanctioned.
“This morning, as for some days past,” the blind memo began, “it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”
In these same weeks, Colonel John Eaton recalled, Lincoln “was considering every possible means by which the Negro could be secured in his freedom.” He knew that Eaton had come into contact with thousands of slaves who had escaped as the Union troops advanced. Tens of thousands more remained in the South. Lincoln asked Eaton if he thought Frederick Douglass “could be induced to come to see him” and discuss how these slaves could be brought into freedom. Eaton was aware that Douglass had recently criticized the president vehemently, denouncing the administration’s insufficient retaliatory measures against the Confederacy for its blatant refusal to treat captured black soldiers as prisoners of war. He also knew, however, that Douglass respected Lincoln and was certain that he would lend his hand.
Douglass met with the president on August 19. In an open conversation that Douglass later recounted, Lincoln candidly acknowledged his fear that the “mad cry” for peace might bring a premature end to the war, “which would leave still in slavery all who had not come within our lines.” He had thought the publication of his Emancipation Proclamation would stimulate an exodus from the South, but, he lamented, “the slaves are not coming so rapidly and so numerously to us as I had hoped.” Douglass suggested that “the slaveholders knew how to keep such things from their slaves, and probably very few knew of his proclamation.” Hearing this, Lincoln proposed that the federal government might underwrite an organized “band of scouts, composed of colored men, whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown, to go into the rebel states, beyond the lines of our Armies, and carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.” Douglass promised to confer with leaders in the black community on the possibility of such a plan.
There was yet another subject Lincoln wanted to discuss with Douglass. Three days earlier, Wisconsin’s former governor Alexander Randall had hand-delivered a heartfelt letter from Charles Robinson, the editor of a Democratic paper in Wisconsin. “I am a War Democrat,” Robinson began. “I have sustained your Administration…. It was alleged that because I and my friends sustained the Emancipation measure, we had become abolitionized. We replied that we regarded the freeing of the negroes as sound war policy, in that the depriving the South of its laborers weakened the strength of the Rebellion. That was a good argument, and was accepted by a great many men who would have listened to no other. It was solid ground on which we could stand, and still maintain our position as Democrats.” Now the Niagara Falls declaration that “no steps can be taken towards peace, from any quarter, unless accompanied with an abandonment of slavery,” left him with “no ground to stand upon.” He was not writing “for the purpose of finding fault