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By Root 1673 0

emigrate voluntarily, and felt the United States needed all the workers it could find. “I am always for bringing men and States into this Union,” he once remarked, “never for taking any out.” Indeed, in 1861 Seward had begun to issue passports to black northerners stating that they were citizens of the United States, a repudiation of the Dred Scott decision and a different vision of the black future than colonization. Lincoln and Seward had become very close; as Seward’s secretary George E. Baker recalled soon after Lincoln’s death, they “never disagreed in but one subject—that was the colonization of the negroes.”65

Nonetheless, given Lincoln’s desire to work out a colonization treaty, Seward on September 30 addressed a circular to the governments of Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark—owners of colonial possessions in the Caribbean basin—offering to enter into agreements to colonize American blacks on their territory. The numerous requirements he listed for any treaty almost ensured rejection: homes must be ready on arrival; adequate compensation must be paid; schools and medical care must be available; the emigrants must enjoy all the rights of citizens. Few of the governments were interested. By the end of October 1862, Secretary of the Interior Smith was forced to admit that the administration now had “no settled policy” regarding colonization. But a month later, Lincoln was writing to Chase of his hope that a Chiriqui contract still could be arranged.66

If Lincoln anticipated that his embrace of colonization would reconcile his critics to emancipation, the elections of 1862 proved him wrong. As in any electoral campaign, numerous issues affected voters’ decisions, including infringements on civil liberties such as the suspension of habeas corpus, the economic impact in the Northwest of the suspension of commerce on the Mississippi River, and lack of military success. But Democrats spent much of their time denouncing Republicans as “Nigger Worshippers.” Lincoln, they charged, had unilaterally and unconstitutionally altered the war’s purpose. Emancipation would produce “scenes of lust and rapine” in the South and unleash “a swarthy inundation of negro laborers and paupers” on the North. Raising lurid racial fears paid electoral dividends. Democrats captured the governorships of New York and New Jersey, won control of the Illinois and Indiana legislatures, and gained thirty-four seats in the House of Representatives. Among those ousted from Congress was Lincoln’s ally George P. Fisher, in what was taken as a repudiation of the president’s compensated emancipation plan by Delaware voters.67

The results, however, had no effect on what a Washington newspaper called “the majestic march of events” that was “overwhelming” the carefully wrought policies of politicians and generals. Indeed, reflecting the contradictions inevitable at a moment of radical change, even as Lincoln pressed his colonization plan the administration moved toward recognizing blacks as free laborers and American citizens. Within military lines, officers were now treating all blacks as free under the Second Confiscation Act and paying them wages. In the Mississippi Valley, General Grant appointed John Eaton, a Dartmouth graduate and former superintendent of schools in Toledo, Ohio, to “take charge” of the escaped slaves who were congregating around army posts. Eaton enrolled thousands of them in schools in “contraband camps.” In Louisiana, Benjamin F. Butler established an “experiment of free labor,” with blacks working for wages for loyal planters. When Lincoln requested information about the system, Butler replied that he was convinced that black labor could be “as profitable in a state of freedom as in slavery.” The entire army, he added, now believed “that slavery is doomed.” Meanwhile, moves toward the use of black soldiers inevitably raised the question of their postwar status. As one newspaper noted, “It would hardly be treating the African like a man to use him as a soldier and then banish him.”68

Nowhere were the shifting crosscurrents