The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [162]
The treatment of black troops provided the occasion for Lincoln’s first meeting with Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist and editor of a monthly periodical widely read in antislavery circles. On August 10, 1863, Douglass went to the White House to argue for equal pay and promotion opportunities and the protection of captured black soldiers. In the most recent issue of his magazine, Douglass had excoriated Lincoln for indifference to “the slaughter of blacks taken as captives.” At their meeting, Lincoln explained “his policy respecting the whole slavery question.” Regarding the pay issue, Lincoln remarked that blacks continued to be widely “despised” and that their enlistment remained highly controversial; unequal pay, he said, helped to “smooth the way,” and in time they would receive the same wages as white soldiers. He had been charged with being slow and vacillating, Lincoln added, but “I think it cannot be shown that when I have once taken a position, I have ever retreated from it.” As for retaliation for the mistreatment of black soldiers, despite his order of July 30, he viewed this as a “terrible remedy,” which would invite an ever-worsening spiral of retribution: “Once begun, I do not know where such a measure would stop.”14
In the event, neither Lincoln nor the army enforced the retaliation order. Even when Confederate troops under General Nathan B. Forrest massacred dozens of black soldiers who surrendered at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in April 1864, Lincoln warned publicly of retribution, but it did not come. In May 1863, however, Lincoln suspended prisoner-of-war exchanges, which had been carried on since the previous July according to a formal arrangement between the Union and Confederate governments, unless the Confederacy agreed to include captured black soldiers. Despite Democratic criticism of this policy and petitions from white soldiers in southern prison camps asking him to resume exchanges, Lincoln did not relent for the remainder of the conflict. Early in 1865, the Confederacy finally agreed to exchange black prisoners of war.15
In a public letter of 1864, Lincoln identified the need for black soldiers as a crucial catalyst for emancipation. Faced with the alternative of “either surrendering the Union,…or of laying strong hand upon the colored element,” he chose the latter course. A year after widespread recruiting began, he wrote, “We have the men; and we could not have had them” without emancipation. He came to value immensely black soldiers’ contributions to Union victory. Lincoln was drawn to logical, quantitative reasoning. When most Americans visited Niagara Falls, they were overwhelmed by the awesome grandeur of nature. When Lincoln traveled to the falls in 1848, his response was to try to calculate the power unleashed by the waters and how much solar energy was needed to cause evaporation. In 1864, he defended the employment of black troops as a matter of “physical force,” which could be “measured and estimated” exactly like “steam-power.” But beyond mere numbers, Lincoln’s sense of blacks’ relationship to the nation began to change. In May 1864, Lincoln recommended that Congress provide that the widows and children of black soldiers who fell in the war be “placed in law, the same as if their marriages were legal,” so that they could receive the same pensions as white soldiers. A law to this effect was soon enacted. One of Lincoln’s secretaries, William O. Stoddard, wrote that “arming the negroes” was creating a “new race of freemen, who will take care of the South and of themselves too” when the war ended. As we will see, Lincoln’s first, cautious embrace of black suffrage involved extending the right to vote to soldiers.16
In 1864, the reformer Robert Dale Owen wrote of how the war had produced events “which no human foresight could anticipate,” including rapid changes in whites’ “opinion of the