The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [193]
As July gave way to August, northern morale sank to its lowest level of the war. Calls for Lincoln to step down in favor of another candidate proliferated. “Lincoln’s election is beyond any possible hope,” his old Illinois friend Leonard Swett wrote to his wife. Pressure on Lincoln to modify his position on peace negotiations mounted. On August 16, 1864, two Republican leaders from Wisconsin, former governor Alexander Randall and Judge Joseph T. Mills, visited the White House and delivered a letter from the prowar Democrat Charles D. Robinson complaining that Lincoln’s declaration that there could be no peace without abolition “puts the whole war question on a new basis, and takes us War Democrats clear off our feet, leaving us no ground to stand on.”36
These developments forced Lincoln to clarify his own thinking on the relationship of emancipation to the war effort. He drafted a sharp reply to Robinson, outlining the moral and practical reasons why he could not go back on the proclamation. He linked abolition directly to the recruitment of black soldiers:
I am sure you will not, on due reflection, say that the promise being made, must be broken at the first opportunity…. As a matter of morals, could such treachery…escape the curses of Heaven, or of any good man? As a matter of policy, to announce such a purpose, would ruin the Union cause itself. All recruiting of colored men would instantly cease, and all colored men now in our service, would instantly desert us. And rightfully too. Why should they give their lives for us, with full notice of our purpose to betray them?…[Without them] we can not longer maintain the contest.
Yet at the end of this letter, Lincoln added, “If Jefferson Davis wishes…to know what I would do if he were to offer peace and re-union, saying nothing about slavery, let him try me.”37 This seems to have been an attempt to shift the burden of prolonging the war to Davis, rather than truly opening the door to a retreat from emancipation. When Lincoln showed the draft to Randall and Mills on August 19, he made clear his exasperation with those urging him to change course. The war was for the Union, Lincoln said, but “no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done.” Were he to return black soldiers to slavery, “I should be damned in time and eternity.”38
That same day, Lincoln also read the draft letter to Frederick Douglass, whom he had invited to the White House. Douglass urged Lincoln not to send it. He objected strongly to the final sentence, warning that it “would be given a broader meaning than you intend to convey” and be taken as “a complete surrender of your antislavery policy.” Lincoln’s main purpose in initiating this meeting, however, was to seek Douglass’s advice on how to increase the number of blacks who, in the event that he lost the election, could not be returned to bondage. Slaves, Lincoln said, were not coming into Union lines as quickly as he hoped. He asked Douglass to devise a plan to send black “scouts” behind Confederate lines to spread news of the Emancipation Proclamation and encourage slaves to escape—a kind of official institutionalization of the prewar Underground Railroad. A few days after their meeting, Douglass forwarded to Lincoln a proposal for putting into effect the president’s remarkable idea, although nothing came of it as the military and political situation shortly turned more favorable. Soon after their meeting, Douglass wrote that on this occasion, Lincoln “showed a deeper