The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [136]
Early in June, Vincent Colyer, who had set up the schools as the army’s superintendent of the poor, traveled to Washington and, accompanied by Charles Sumner, called at the White House to complain about Stanly’s actions. Lincoln, Colyer later related, at first seemed annoyed to be asked to deal with the matter. “Do you take me for a School-Committeeman?” the president asked. Lincoln’s tone changed when told about the return of fugitive slaves. Stanly, he said, had misunderstood his instructions. “I have hated slavery from childhood,” Colyer recalled Lincoln remarking, and no “fugitive from a rebel, shall ever be returned to his master.” But Lincoln rejected calls to remove Stanly and viewed the controversy as a distraction from weightier matters. Horace Maynard, a member of Congress from East Tennessee, reported to Andrew Johnson that Lincoln “expresses himself gratified in the highest degree that you do not raise any ‘nigger’ issues to bother him.”15
Nonetheless, with emancipation sentiment rising, Lincoln redoubled his efforts to promote his plan for gradual, compensated abolition. On July 12, he invited to the White House over two dozen congressmen from the border states, Virginia, and Tennessee, and read to them from a carefully prepared manuscript. Had their states embraced his proposal when he announced it in March, he told them, somewhat hyperbolically, “the war would now be substantially ended.” Lincoln noted that regardless of the constitutional protections slavery enjoyed, the institution was eroding because of the war and would eventually be destroyed “by mere friction and abrasion.” How much better it would be to make “a decision at once to emancipate gradually,” thereby allowing for monetary compensation. Moreover, land for colonization could easily be obtained, and “the freed people will not be so reluctant to go.” Clearly, Lincoln was trying to make his plan as appealing as possible to the border states. Yet he also noted that by reversing General Hunter’s order in May, he had given “dissatisfaction, if not offence, to many whose support the country cannot afford to lose.” Moreover, “the pressure, in this direction, is still upon me, and is increasing.” He begged them to act, and quickly.16
That evening, when the delegation gathered to draft a response, a “stormy debate” ensued. Lincoln must have been sorely disappointed by the outcome. Eight members of Congress endorsed Lincoln’s plan and said they would advise their constituents to “consider” it. But the majority, Lincoln’s supporter George P. Fisher of Delaware remarked with “great disgust,” opposed “the liberation of a single slave.” Their report, written by John W. Crisfield of Maryland and signed by twenty-one congressmen, contained a scathing rejection of what they called the “radical change of our social system” Lincoln envisioned. The president’s proposal, Crisfield wrote, intruded on a matter that “exclusively belonged to our respective States.” The report lectured Lincoln on how to conduct himself: “Confine yourself to your constitutional authority; confine your subordinates within the same limits; conduct this war solely for the purpose of restoring the constitution to its legitimate authority.”17
Lincoln still believed that the border states held the key to abolition nationwide. Four years later Isaac N. Arnold recalled Lincoln remarking to him and Owen Lovejoy on the day after the July 12 meeting that if the border would only accept his proposal, then “the labor of your life, Lovejoy, would be crowned with success—you would live to see the end of slavery.” On July 14, Lincoln sent to Congress the draft of a bill pledging to provide compensation in the form of federal bonds to any state that adopted a plan of abolition. One new feature was that Lincoln now considered the possibility that a state might later decide to “reintroduce” slavery, in which case the bonds would