The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [114]
Military emancipation—liberating slaves as a means of weakening a foe in wartime—was hardly a new idea. As early as the seventeenth century, Spain had used it as a weapon against other slaveholding powers in the New World. The British had done so during the War of Independence. In the Second Seminole War, the U.S. Army itself had offered freedom to black Seminoles, most of them fugitive slaves from Florida, who surrendered to its forces. Nonetheless, Frémont’s proclamation, issued at the very moment that the Kentucky legislature was considering throwing in its lot with the Union, raised a furor throughout the border. Lincoln’s old friend Joshua Speed, now a prosperous Kentucky slaveholder, had opposed Lincoln’s election but in 1861 helped to rally his state’s Unionists. Speed warned the president that Frémont’s order would inspire border slaves to “assert their freedom” and would “crush out every vestige of a union party” in Kentucky. Freeing the slaves of Confederates would destroy Unionists’ hold on their own slaves: “You cannot declare my neighbor’s negroes free—without affecting mine.” After all, Speed pointed out, slaves differed from every other kind of property: “It is the only property in the world that has locomotion with mind to control it.” Other Kentucky Unionists also pleaded with the president, including Robert Anderson, the former commander of Fort Sumter, who warned that unless the order were immediately reversed, “Kentucky will be lost to the Union.”23
Lincoln, who was born in Kentucky, who married a Kentuckian, and who had lived among migrants from Kentucky in Illinois, paid a great deal of attention to opinion in that state. (Critics accused him of being “president of Kentucky.”) Even before receiving Speed’s letter, Lincoln, “in a spirit of caution and not of censure,” asked Frémont to modify his order. Lincoln wanted him to seek presidential approval before executing Confederates (otherwise the enemy would “very certainly shoot our best man in their hands in retaliation”) and to modify the provisions relating to property, including slaves, to conform to the Confiscation Act. If he did not, “our rather fair prospect for Kentucky” would be ruined. Frémont, a man of considerable stubbornness, refused. If the president wanted the order modified, he replied, he should do it himself. Frémont dispatched his wife, Jessie, the daughter of former senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, to plead his case. Lincoln received her coolly. When she made the point that emancipation would win the support of Great Britain, which otherwise might recognize the Confederacy, he called her, according to her later account, “quite a female politician.” The next day, Lincoln directed Frémont to modify his proclamation in the ways he had earlier requested. Six weeks later, Lincoln removed Frémont from his command.24
Lincoln must have been surprised by the enthusiasm Frémont’s proclamation aroused. To Radicals, it represented a telling blow against slavery; to others, a justified punishment of rebels and a legitimate means of weakening the Confederate war effort. Senator William P. Fessenden of Maine, a moderate Republican, noted its “electric effect” on public opinion in “all parts of the country.” “It is wonderful to see the general approval of the act,” James Bowen, the police commissioner of New York City, wrote. “I have not yet seen the man democrat or republican who doubts its wisdom.” In the Northwest, Senator James W. Grimes of Iowa reported, “everybody of every sect, party, sex, and color approves it.” Orestes Brownson, the philosopher and educator who had strongly opposed abolitionism before the war, now wrote that Frémont had forced the government to confront the question of slavery, which “everybody knows…is at the heart of the whole controversy.” Perhaps, he added, in a sentiment that Lincoln