The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [141]
With the cabinet divided, and perhaps still uncertain himself, Lincoln decided to put his emancipation order aside. Nonetheless, news of the proceedings, if not the actual result, quickly found its way into the press. A correspondent for the New York Evening Post reported that the cabinet had agreed on “total abolition” in the Confederate states “or I am grossly misinformed.” Over the next few weeks, other newspapers related that Lincoln had decided on emancipation but had delayed his announcement because of the “determined opposition” of Seward and Blair.34
Despite shelving his emancipation edict, Lincoln did issue the proposed orders allowing military commanders to seize or destroy private property (although not “in wantonness or malice”) as well as the warning to the South of the coming implementation of the Second Confiscation Act. Meanwhile, Major General John Pope, newly appointed to command the Army of Virginia, issued his own orders directing his soldiers as far as possible to live off the land, punish civilians for guerrilla activity in their communities, and deport disloyal men from occupied areas to the Confederacy. When McClellan complained to General in Chief Henry Halleck about these departures from “civilized” warfare, Halleck responded that he could not revoke the orders as he understood they had been seen and approved by the president. Pope, however, had little time to implement his policy. After his defeat at Second Bull Run at the end of August, he was transferred to the West. Not until 1864, under the far more capable Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, would the “hard war” really come into its own.35
Nonetheless, the character of the war had clearly changed, and emancipation was part of the transformation. Despite having postponed his edict, Lincoln expressed increasing exasperation with southerners who professed loyalty to the Union but demanded that he not interfere with slavery. When a prominent citizen of New Orleans complained about the actions of General John W. Phelps, who, it will be recalled, was encouraging slaves to flee to Union lines, Lincoln fired back: “What would you do in my position?…Would you give up the contest, leaving any available means unapplied?” On July 31, he sent a similar letter to August Belmont. “Broken eggs cannot be mended,” Lincoln wrote, and if Louisiana wanted to prevent slavery from being destroyed, it must quickly resume its place in the Union. The government, he added, “cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing.”36
II
LINCOLN’S SHIFT to a policy of general emancipation in the Confederate South did not automatically imply the abandonment of his previous plan for the border states, where his proposed proclamation would not apply. This, according to his secretary John Hay, remained “the object nearest the President’s heart.” Indeed, both his commitment to the border plan and his impending new policy for the Confederate South heightened Lincoln’s long-standing interest in the colonization of the freed slaves. The border states remained adamantly opposed to any increase in their free black population. According to the New York Tribune’s Washington correspondent, Lincoln frequently quoted the comment by Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky that his state’s Unionists “would not resist his gradual emancipation scheme if he would only conjoin it with his colonization plan.” Moreover, fear in the North that liberated slaves would flock into the region and become “roaming, vicious vagabonds” constituted, according to the Chicago Tribune, the greatest obstacle to support for general emancipation. Thus, with his border proposal still pending and emancipation in the offing, if not yet announced, Lincoln redoubled his efforts to promote colonization. This does not mean that he acted insincerely or purely for political reasons. His public support for colonization was by