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of political principles, and admit that my life has been a mistake.” But that is what he did. “Today,” Phillips proclaimed, “abolitionist is merged in citizen, in American.” The war would sweep away slavery and for the first time create a unified nation with a common nationality based on free-labor ideals. Phillips, too, referred to John Quincy Adams’s prophecy: “When the South cannonaded Fort Sumter, the bones of Adams stirred in his coffin…. That hour has come to us.” He even declared that he had “always believed in the sincerity of Abraham Lincoln,” which must have surprised listeners familiar with his previous orations.66

Frederick Douglass, too, experienced a remarkable change of heart. The course of events in the late 1850s, he had written in August 1860, filled him with “doubt and gloom.” Lincoln’s election failed to dissipate his sense of “hopelessness.” During the secession crisis, Douglass modified his long-standing opposition to black emigration. In January 1861, he accepted an invitation to visit Haiti from James Redpath, the white abolitionist who headed the Haitian Emigration Bureau. But at the last minute, after the firing on Sumter, Douglass postponed the trip. For the first time, his monthly magazine appeared bedecked with an engraving of the American flag and a cap of liberty and alongside them the slogan “Freedom for All, or Chains for All.” The Civil War, Douglass wrote, portended “a tremendous revolution in…the possible future of the colored race of the United States.” “This is no time,” he added, “for us to leave the country.” Instead, he would remain and fight for emancipation: “Fire must be met with water, darkness with light, and war for the destruction of liberty must be met with war for the destruction of slavery.”67

In its issue after the war began, the black-owned Weekly Anglo-African also carried an image of the American flag on its editorial page, with the words “Emancipation or Extermination” superimposed on it. “Out of this strife,” it predicted, “will come freedom, although the methods are not yet clearly apparent.” Moreover, it added prophetically, “the millions ‘bowed and bound’ in slavery” should not be viewed as “impassive observers” of the strife. The administration might deem it “a white man’s war,” but the slaves “have a clear and decided idea of what they want—Liberty.” They, too, the paper predicted, would play a role in the outcome of the Civil War.68

As for Lincoln, he believed that because secession was illegal, the states remained in the Union with all their constitutional rights intact. “Some of our northerners,” he remarked after receiving the letters from Browning and Doolittle, “seem bewildered and dazzled by the excitement of the hour. Doolittle seems inclined to think that the war is to result in the entire abolition of slavery.” Such an idea did seem far-fetched in the spring of 1861. Yet, Lincoln’s refusal to compromise his core antislavery commitment had helped to produce the war in the first place. Not long after the conflict began, the National Anti-Slavery Standard predicted that as Union armies advanced into the South, the question of slavery “will rapidly turn from abstract into the concrete.”69 Far sooner than he anticipated, Lincoln would have to make policy decisions about the South’s peculiar institution, and how to place it on the road to ultimate extinction.

6

“I Must Have Kentucky”: The Border Strategy

I

ON MARCH 11, 1861, a week after Lincoln’s inauguration and a month before the Civil War began, a canoe arrived at Fort Sumter carrying a “negro boy” who had heard that the new president intended to free the slaves. The commanding officer ordered him immediately turned over to the authorities in Charleston. The following day, four slaves appeared at Fort Pickens in Florida, “entertaining the idea,” according to Lieutenant Adam Slemmer, “that we were placed here to protect them and grant them their freedom.” Determined to “teach them the contrary,” Slemmer ordered the men delivered to the marshal at Pensacola (like Charleston, part of the Confederate