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By Root 1839 0

instructed Secretary of the Interior Smith to enforce federal laws to this effect, which, despite increased enforcement by the Buchanan administration, had essentially remained dead letters under his predecessors. In February 1862, ignoring numerous pleas for clemency, including one from the Republican governor of New York, Lincoln refused to intervene to prevent the execution of Captain Nathaniel Gordon, an illicit slave trader whose ship carrying nearly 900 slaves had been captured off the coast of West Africa by a U.S. naval vessel. A week after Lincoln’s election, a New York jury had convicted Gordon of international slave trading, a crime legally equivalent to piracy and punishable by death. Gordon became the first and only American to be hanged as a slave trader. (President Buchanan had pardoned the only man previously sentenced to death in 1857.) Meanwhile, Secretary of State Seward negotiated a new treaty with Britain to strengthen enforcement of the ban. It provided for American participation in the international courts that tried slave traders, in which the United States had previously refused to take part. And for the first time, it allowed the British navy to stop and search ships flying the American flag, a practice traditionally resented by Americans—half a century earlier it had helped to bring on the War of 1812. These actions sent a strong antislavery message. The hanging of Gordon, wrote the Weekly Anglo-African, offered “the most solid indication of character” Lincoln had yet displayed.61

Lincoln and Congress also reached agreement about the status of slaves who escaped to Union lines. The Washington correspondents of both the New York and Chicago Tribunes reported in January 1862 Lincoln’s view that the government had no obligation to return fugitive slaves and that in any event public opinion would not allow it to do so. Nonetheless, the problem cried out for a consistent official policy. It could not be solved, Harper’s Weekly noted, “by the whim of this General, and the prejudice of that. There can not be thousands, and presently millions of people who have no recognized status, hanging around and within the lines of the army.” Some commanders refused to return fugitive slaves; others still sent them back to their owners. Major General Henry Halleck, who had replaced Frémont in Missouri, explained that the Fugitive Slave Act remained on the books and it was up to Congress, not the army, to change the law.62

In February 1862, Francis P. Blair Jr. reported from the House Committee on Military Affairs a new article of war that forbade army and navy officers from returning fugitive slaves under threat of court-martial. It received congressional approval, with virtually unanimous support from Republicans, and Lincoln signed it on March 13, 1862. The session’s first significant antislavery measure, the new article of war established for the first time a uniform policy regarding runaways and fundamentally altered the army’s relationship to slavery. In effect, it superceded the Fugitive Slave Act, even though that law would not be repealed until 1864. It made no distinction between fugitives from loyal and disloyal owners, or between those who escaped in Union and Confederate states. It did not explicitly free any slaves. But enacted just as the army was expanding its presence in the Mississippi Valley, it made Union lines a safe haven for fugitives. Since it did not offer compensation to the owners of fugitives sheltered by the army, it underscored how respect for the property right in slaves was declining. Henceforth, said Trumbull, an army officer must treat a fugitive slave not as property but “as a person,” exactly like “other persons whom he may meet in the country.”63

V

PREOCCUPIED WITH military matters and the long illness of his young son Willie, who died on February 20, 1862, Lincoln nonetheless pressed ahead with the idea of compensated emancipation in the border states. At the end of November 1861, Lincoln had told Charles Sumner that “in a month or six weeks we should all be together” on the