The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [146]
On August 20, six days after Lincoln’s meeting with the black delegation at the White House, Horace Greeley published in the New York Tribune a long open letter addressed to the president, entitled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions” (more or less the population of the North). It touched on many issues, including Lincoln’s supposed deference to the “fossil politicians” of the border states. But essentially, it urged him to enforce the Second Confiscation Act, including its “emancipating provisions.” This was an odd request, since in late July Lincoln had in fact issued a proclamation giving Confederates sixty days to abandon the rebellion or face the confiscation of their property under that law, a time limit that still had a month to run. Lincoln could have simply replied that he was in the process of doing what Greeley demanded. He could have pointed out, as the Chicago Tribune did, that under the Second Confiscation Act slaves of rebels entering Union lines were legally “already free” and that “their title to freedom” did not depend on any action by the president. Instead, Lincoln chose to interpret Greeley’s letter as a call for immediate and total abolition. He replied with his most often-quoted public letter, which, in what Greeley must have considered an affront, Lincoln released to a rival newspaper, the Washington National Intelligencer:
I would save the Union. I would save it in the shortest way under the Constitution…. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union…. I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.53
Moderate Republicans hailed Lincoln’s response to Greeley’s “impertinent” letter as the “best enunciation” yet of slavery’s relationship to the war effort. Because of what he considered its indifference to the fate of slavery, Wendell Phillips called it, in a letter to the managing editor of the New York Tribune, abolitionist Sydney Howard Gay, “the most disgraceful document that ever came from the head of a free people.” But Gay himself congratulated Lincoln. The “general impression” in the North, Gay wrote, was that Lincoln would soon announce the “destruction of slavery” as necessary to save the Union.
Gay’s response was insightful. There is no question that winning the war and preserving the Union were uppermost in Lincoln’s mind, and that as far back as his law career he had always maintained a distinction between professional responsibilities and personal beliefs. Yet the response to Greeley should be understood not as a statement of principle from which Lincoln was determined never to depart so much as a way of preparing northern public opinion for a change in policy on which he had already decided. Certainly, it suggested that freeing all the slaves was now a real option, something that had not been the case a year or even six months earlier. But perhaps the most telling comment came from the Springfield Republican. The editors praised Lincoln’s position but pointed out that the very notion of “saving” the Union required rethinking: the prewar Union was gone forever.54
One indication of vast changes on the horizon was the administration’s movement in the summer of 1862 toward the use of black soldiers. The War Department’s call