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By Root 1597 0

March 1863, he did hold a meeting at the White House with a group of fourteen western chiefs. His remarks were patronizing and illogical. He informed them that the world is round, as if they were unaware of this fact; urged them to take up farming; and ignoring the carnage going on around him, advised them to become less warlike and adopt the peaceful ways of white people. The Cheyenne chief, Lean Bear, pointed out that whites were responsible for most of the violence in the West. While many Americans recognized the need for reform of the notoriously corrupt Office of Indian Affairs (Lincoln mentioned this in his annual messages of 1862 and 1863), the future status of Native Americans was not the focus of a large social movement that pressured the White House for a change in national policy. Perhaps most important, the free-labor vision of the West, implemented in wartime measures such as the Pacific Railroad and Homestead Acts, meant continuing encroachment on Indian land. In his messages to Congress, Lincoln spoke of the need to extinguish the “possessory rights of the Indians to large and valuable tracts of land” and to encourage the exploitation of the West’s land and mineral resources by whites, while providing for “the welfare of the Indian.” He did not acknowledge that these aims were mutually contradictory.32

But if Lincoln’s Indian policies are depressingly similar to those of virtually every nineteenth-century president, when it came to African-Americans, he began during the last two years of the war to imagine an interracial future for the United States.

II

THE SUMMER OF 1863 witnessed significant Union military victories. In the greatest battle ever fought on the North American continent, the Army of the Potomac turned back Robert E. Lee’s incursion into northern territory at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. On July 4, the same day that Lee’s final assault was repelled, Vicksburg, the last major Confederate outpost on the Mississippi River, fell to the forces of Ulysses S. Grant. Severing the eastern and western parts of the Confederacy and opening the entire Mississippi to Union naval and commercial vessels, the battle at Vicksburg was “the most important northern strategic victory of the war.” These successes contributed to growing support for the administration in the North and a widespread embrace of emancipation and the arming of black troops. At the same time, however, Democrats, emboldened by their electoral gains the previous year, continued their harsh criticism of the administration. During his presidency, Lincoln no longer gave long public speeches to disseminate his views. But he did issue widely reprinted public letters to explain his policies. These played a major role in wartime politics and in solidifying support for emancipation.33

In May 1863 a group of New York Democrats headed by the banker and railroad magnate Erastus Corning dispatched a letter to the president protesting the arrest and trial by military tribunal of former congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio. Convicted of violating an order of General Ambrose Burnside, who commanded the Department of the Ohio, which included Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, prohibiting the expression of “sympathy for the enemy,” Vallandigham was exiled to the Confederacy. His ordeal made him a rallying point for Lincoln’s critics. Vallandigham made his way to Canada, ensconced himself in a hotel just across from Detroit, and received a steady stream of visitors from the United States. In June, Ohio Democrats nominated him as their candidate for governor. Democrats, joined by some Republicans, also expressed unhappiness with other restrictions on civil liberties, such as the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, the holding of military trials where civilian courts were in operation, and the suppression of Democratic newspapers like the Chicago Times, temporarily closed by the overzealous Burnside around the time of Vallandigham’s nomination. Such policies, wrote Secretary of the Navy Welles in his diary, “disregard those great principles on which our government