The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [127]
More important to the success of the initiative was the response in the border states. Four days after sending his message to Congress, Lincoln met with a delegation of border congressmen. Shortly afterward, John W. Crisfield of Maryland wrote a summary of Lincoln’s remarks. Lincoln, Crisfield recorded, stated that he was “constantly annoyed by conflicting and antagonistic complaints” about how to deal with the slaves who kept coming into Union lines. Were the border states to embrace his proposal, this “irritation” would be removed and the war shortened. Crisfield, himself a large slaveholder, replied that white Marylanders would be willing to give up slavery if provision were made so that “they could be rid of the race.” Asked what would happen if the border rejected his proposal, Lincoln replied that he had no further “designs” on slavery. The delegation asked Lincoln to state this publicly, to which he responded that he could not do so without getting into a “quarrel” with the Radicals. He “did not pretend to disguise his antislavery feeling,” Lincoln added, but he “recognized the rights of property which had grown out of it, and would respect those rights.”68
Shortly after the beginning of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass had written, “Our rulers do not yet know slaveholders.” Lincoln would quickly learn that he had considerably overestimated the willingness of the border states to embrace emancipation. Some border Unionists did support Lincoln’s plan, including George P. Fisher, his ally in promoting abolition in Delaware. The majority, however, rejected it. Kentucky seemed especially adamant. The legislature voted to disenfranchise any resident who “may advocate the doctrine of the abolition or emancipation of slavery” in the state. In Maryland, even officeholders appointed by Lincoln denounced anyone who supported the plan as an “abolitionist and not worthy of the confidence of any gentleman.” When Congress passed the resolution Lincoln had requested, border members voted against it with “almost perfect unanimity.” The border, wrote the New York Times, had proved “unequal to the occasion.”69
On one thing border Unionists agreed: emancipation, gradual or not, must be accompanied by the removal of the black population. On the day before Lincoln sent his message to Congress, Montgomery Blair urged him to include a provision for “colonizing the blacks.” Even though he had mentioned the idea in his annual message of the previous December, Lincoln did not do so. But his border supporters immediately linked the two ideas. Blair himself published a letter in a Baltimore newspaper claiming that Lincoln’s plan included “the separation of the races.” A meeting in Missouri to endorse the president offered its “hearty support” to “the gradual emancipation and colonization of the slaves.” Senator Willard Saulsbury of Delaware voted against the resolution, but noted that he would be happy to see slavery ended in his state if the government would “take the free negroes off our hands.”70
The Liberator charged Lincoln with bringing forth his gradual emancipation proposal to forestall more radical action by Congress.71 This hardly seems likely. Numerous antislavery measures were about to reach the floor, and there was no reason to believe that Congress would abandon them because of Lincoln’s initiative. In fact, less than a week after Congress approved the resolution offering financial aid to states that agreed to abolish slavery came passage of another historic measure, the abolition of slavery in Washington, D.C.
When Lincoln arrived as president in 1861, the District of Columbia, with Georgetown, had a population of 75,000, including 11,100 free blacks and a little under 3,200 slaves. The United States, Lot Morrill of Maine told the Senate, was the only “civilized nation” to tolerate slavery in its capital. Lincoln himself, it will be recalled, had advanced a plan