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By Root 1761 0

an immediate halt to these “abolition lectures.” While abolitionists remained a small minority, they were increasingly treated with respect, their meetings now covered extensively by mainstream Republican newspapers. Orestes Brownson, who called for emancipation as the only way to establish a “permanent Union of freedom,” spoke for many when he reconsidered his prewar sentiments. Abolitionists, he wrote, had been justly criticized for giving too little consideration to “political expediency,” but “we who have opposed them are, perhaps, even more chargeable with having made too little account in our political calculations of justice.”50

That winter, Wendell Phillips received almost 200 invitations to lecture on the war and emancipation. He may have been heard by as many as 50,000 people, and via publication in newspapers and pamphlets, his words reached many more. When he spoke at Cooper Institute, people lined up for hours and many had to be turned away. Even John Hay, who held the abolitionists as responsible as the “slavery propagandists” for bringing on the war, noted that listeners who had hissed Phillips a year earlier now applauded him, an example, Hay wrote, of “the progress of ideas in a revolution.” Again and again, Phillips hammered home his message: the war must not only destroy slavery but create a new nation that “knows neither black nor white,…[and] holds an equal sceptre over all.” Phillips criticized Lincoln’s reluctance to act against slavery and called on Congress to take the lead. In March 1862, for the first time in his life, Phillips lectured in Washington. Charles Sumner introduced him on the floor of the Senate, he spoke at the Capitol in the presence of Vice President Hamlin and many members of Congress, and had an interview with Lincoln. Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and other abolitionists also lectured to large audiences.51

As part of their campaign to influence public opinion, proponents of abolition defended the results of prior emancipations. They made a particular effort to refute the “prevailing notion,” as Harper’s Weekly put it, that emancipation in the British West Indies had been a “failure” because it had been followed by a sharp decline in sugar exports. They publicized William G. Sewell’s Ordeal of Free Labor in the British West Indies, a series of letters that originally appeared in the New York Times and was published in book form in 1861. Sewell blamed poor management by planters for post-emancipation economic problems and insisted that “freedom, when allowed fair play,” benefitted black and white alike. Freedpeople in the British Caribbean, John P. Hale of New Hampshire assured the Senate, had become “an industrious, contented and prosperous peasantry.” Advocates of emancipation also pointed to the South Carolina Sea Islands, where the 10,000 or so slaves who remained behind when their masters fled the approach of the Union navy appeared eager for education and understood that they must “work for a living.” After a visit to the islands to investigate prospects for resuming cotton production, John Murray Forbes proclaimed himself convinced that “the negro has the same selfish element in him which induces other men to labor.”52

“The rebellion,” Gideon Welles later recalled, “rapidly increased the anti-slavery sentiment everywhere, and politicians shaped their course accordingly.” Pressure for more dramatic action against slavery came not only from abolitionists and Radicals but also the Republican mainstream. Members of all wings of the party viewed Lincoln as too cautious and irresolute. The president, wrote James C. Conkling, the former chair of the Illinois Republican party, “does not seem disposed to assume any responsibility.” Even the attorney general, Edward Bates, feared the president “lacked will and purpose.”53

When Congress assembled in December 1861, journalists predicted a “stormy session” in which “the slave question” would occupy “the most prominent part in…discussion.” It was clear from the outset that sentiment about slavery had shifted. Three days