The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [134]
But a general rule was becoming more and more necessary. Radicals and abolitionists kept up demands for general emancipation. Some denounced Lincoln as “irresolute” and a “coward,” in the heated words of Chicago journalist Horace White. Radicals close to Lincoln defended him against these assaults. In June, in a speech in New York City, Owen Lovejoy assured the Emancipation League of Lincoln’s intentions. The president, he said, was riding in a carriage being pulled by “the Radical steed…. If he does not drive as fast as I would, he is on the same road.”8
More surprising than the continuing campaign by longtime advocates of emancipation was that moderate Republicans now expressed increasing impatience with the administration. Even those who professed “unbounded confidence” in Lincoln’s integrity wished he would “strike rebellion with a little more force.” Thomas J. Sizer, a moderate from Buffalo, New York, published a pamphlet noting that northerners themselves were being “emancipated”—from their “mental thralldom to slavery.” “The great phenomenon of the year,” the anti-abolitionist Boston Daily Advertiser remarked in August, “is the terrible intensity which this [emancipation] resolution has acquired. A year ago men might have faltered at the thought of proceeding to this extremity.” Now they were “in great measure prepared for it.” The reason, the paper added, was the “process of education which is going on with every day of the war.” But growing support for the idea of attacking slavery, expressed in newspapers, pamphlets, and letters to Republican congressmen and the president, did not translate into a clear policy. “The government seems to us,” wrote the abolitionist but generally pro-Lincoln Independent, “to be in the position of men who don’t know what to do.”9
Despite the gathering pressure for action against slavery, Lincoln hesitated. He feared that the northern public was not prepared for more radical steps. Lincoln valued the support of War Democrats like the New York investment banker August Belmont, who used his extensive connections in Europe to help forestall recognition of the Confederacy but urged Lincoln not to yield to “extremists” demanding emancipation. Lincoln also feared the repercussions of an emancipation edict on the army, knowing the opposition of the officer corps and perhaps mistaking their views for those of ordinary soldiers. Steeped in antebellum legal culture, he harbored doubts whether even under the war power, an emancipation edict would be constitutional. Lincoln told Carl Schurz that he feared he was too radical for Democrats and not radical enough for Republicans and would end up without political support.10
Lincoln worried that since most of the Confederacy lay outside the control of the Union army, a proclamation of emancipation would be seen as a sign of desperation. When a delegation of Quakers visited the White House on June 20, 1862, to express their “earnest desire that he might…free the slaves and thus save the nation from destruction,” Lincoln responded that he shared their belief “that slavery was wrong” and recalled that he had publicly anticipated its ultimate extinction. But “if a decree of emancipation” could abolish slavery, he added, “John Brown would have