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By Root 1618 0

The Chicago delegates denounced all such “schemes” as “directly calculated to increase pro-slavery prejudice.” A second convention in Alton in 1856 and a public meeting of Springfield blacks in February 1858 expressed similar views. “We believe,” the Springfield gathering declared, “that the operations of the Colonization Society are calculated to excite prejudices against us, and they impel ignorant or ill disposed persons to take measures for our expulsion from the land of our nativity…. We claim the right of citizenship in this, the country of our birth…. We are not African.” Another black convention in Chicago in August 1858 decisively defeated a resolution proposed by H. Ford Douglas favoring emigration to some locale “on this continent.” It is likely that Lincoln was aware of these gatherings, which were reported in the Republican press, but there is no record of a comment from him about them. They did not alter his public commitment to colonization.79

Shortly after Lincoln’s election as president in 1860, a New Orleans newspaper castigated him as a “thorough radical abolitionist.” As evidence, it cited a speech Lincoln had supposedly delivered in Cincinnati during the 1840s, when the local black community presented a silver pitcher to Salmon P. Chase to honor his legal work on behalf of fugitive slaves. The following month, William C. Smedes, a member of the Mississippi legislature, mentioned this report in a letter justifying secession to Henry J. Raymond, the editor of the New York Times. Raymond forwarded the letter to Lincoln, who replied by describing Smedes as a “mad-man.” “I was never in a meeting of negroes in my life,” Lincoln insisted. This was a revealing comment. Unlike Chase and other white abolitionists and Radical Republicans, Lincoln had no real contact with politically active free blacks before the Civil War.80

James McCune Smith, the black abolitionist, wrote in despair in 1860 of the pervasiveness of both prejudice and sheer ignorance among white Americans. “Our white countrymen do not know us,” he observed; “they are strangers to our characters, ignorant of our capacity, oblivious to our history.”81 Here is where Lincoln’s lack of involvement in the abolitionist movement affected his point of view. The experience of interracial cooperation was crucial both in persuading white opponents of slavery to abandon the idea of colonization and in enabling them to outgrow racism by being exposed to and working with talented black counterparts. Despite his deep hatred of slavery, Lincoln did not share this experience. Only during the Civil War would he come into contact with black Americans of political experience and wide-ranging accomplishment. Partly as a result, his outlook regarding the place of blacks in American society would finally begin to change.

5

“The Only Substantial Difference”: Secession and Civil War

BY 1859, as a result of his debates with Douglas, Lincoln had become a prominent figure in the national Republican party. Out-of-state Republicans eagerly sought his political advice as their thoughts turned to the upcoming presidential election. The “great problem,” Schuyler Colfax wrote from Indiana, was how to consolidate into a “victorious phalanx” a party that encompassed “all shades and gradations of opinion from the Conservative, who almost fears to defend his principles for fear of imperiling peace, to the bold radical, who strikes stalwart blows, regardless of policy or popularity.” Lincoln had a solution. The key to success lay in setting aside what he considered peripheral questions and concentrating on the lowest common denominator of Republican opinion—opposition to the “spread and nationalization of slavery.”1

In his letters and speeches of 1859 and early 1860 Lincoln succeeded in positioning himself as a viable candidate for his party’s nomination. So effectively did he do this that George White, a Massachusetts lawyer, described him as a “cunning, sly, crafty designing man,” whose public record “seems to have been made up for the express purpose of being a successful