The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [115]
Frémont’s order and its modification inspired more letters to Lincoln than any other event of his presidency. Many Democrats, including those who had initially welcomed the proclamation, applauded Lincoln’s action. So did the New York Times, although it had to admit that Frémont’s action was “in harmony with public sentiment throughout the North.” Lincoln’s correspondence bore this out. Charles Reed, who had served as a Whig legislator alongside Lincoln in the 1830s, informed the president that his instructions to Frémont had “produced the deepest sadness and consternation among all parties and classes” and “put a decided check upon men’s volunteering for the war.” Many writers presented cogent arguments against Lincoln’s action. “No wonder Europe looks on the struggle with indifference,” read a letter from Delaware, “while we fight the slave interest…and sustain slavery.”26
No one knows which letters Lincoln actually read—his secretaries screened his voluminous correspondence and passed along only a small sampling. But one that he probably saw since it came from John L. Scripps, his 1860 campaign biographer who had recently been appointed postmaster of Chicago, must have arrested his attention:
“This nation cannot endure part slave and part free.”…To you sir has been accorded a higher privilege than was ever before vouchsafed to man. The success of free institutions rests with you. The destiny not alone of four millions of enslaved men and women, but of the great American people…is committed to your keeping. You must either make yourself the great central figure of our American history for all time to come, or your name will go down to posterity as one who…proved himself unequal to the grand trust.27
Years earlier, in his Lyceum speech, Lincoln had warned of the emergence of a tyrant who would seek to outdo the achievements of the founders by emancipating the slaves. Yet Lincoln had always wanted to make his mark on history. How better to do so than by completing the founders’ work by placing slavery on the road to extinction?
Whatever thoughts he may have harbored along such lines, in September 1861 Lincoln had more immediate concerns: the war effort, Kentucky, and civilian control of the military. Among the letters praising Frémont, one arrived from Lincoln’s conservative friend Orville H. Browning. Twenty-five years earlier, Browning had written the Illinois legislative resolutions affirming owners’ “sacred” right to their slave property, from which Lincoln had dissented. Now he wrote from his home in Quincy, Illinois, that Frèmont’s proclamation had “the unqualified approval of every true friend of the Government…. I do not know of an exception.” The administration, he charged, had shown “too much tenderness toward traitors and rebels.” Lincoln took the time to draft a long response justifying his decision. Browning’s letter, he wrote, “astonished me.” Congress, Lincoln pointed out, had determined the limits of action against slavery in the Confiscation Act. A general could seize property, including slaves, used for military purposes, but it was up to Congress to “fix their permanent future condition” (something the Confiscation Act had failed to do). To allow a general—or a president—to go beyond the law and “make permanent rules of property by proclamation” would turn the government into a “dictatorship.” Moreover, in a more practical vein, he had reason to believe that Frémont’s order would irrevocably alienate Kentucky. “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game,” Lincoln wrote. “Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us.” But, he insisted, he had not acted “because of Kentucky.” The “liberation of slaves” was a “political” question, and he would not allow generals to make political decisions.28
Lincoln’s letter to Browning offered the most elaborate