A Topic Best Avoided
Nicholas Guyatt
- The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner
Norton, 426 pp, £21.00, February 2011, ISBN 978 0 393 06618 0
On the evening of 11 April 1865, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a crowd in Washington about black suffrage. The Civil War had been over for a week. Lincoln had already walked the streets of Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, taking in the devastation at first hand. ‘The only people who showed themselves were negroes,’ the radical senator Charles Sumner noted. The president had been thinking about what would happen after the war since 1862, when his generals began to seize swathes of Confederate territory, but had stubbornly resisted the idea that emancipated slaves would have to be given the vote to consolidate their freedom. Perhaps what he saw in Richmond changed his mind: the eerie absence of the city’s white inhabitants confirmed what Sumner saw as ‘the utter impossibility of any organisation which is not founded on the votes of negroes’. When Lincoln spoke from the White House balcony a week later, he was characteristically cautious. He didn’t advocate universal suffrage for blacks and suggested that the vote might only be ‘conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers’. For some in the audience, this was more than enough. ‘That means nigger citizenship,’ John Wilkes Booth told his companions. Three nights later, he followed the president to Ford’s Theatre and shot him in the head.
[*] Colonisation after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement (Missouri, 192 pp., £31.50, February, 978 0 8262 1909 1).
Letters
Vol. 34 No. 1 · 5 January 2012
From Clifton Hawkins
Nicholas Guyatt asserts that in his first days in office, Lincoln ‘sent the states a draft constitutional amendment guaranteeing the status of slavery where it already existed’ (LRB, 1 December 2011). Presidents, however, have no official role in the matter of constitutional amendments, which are sent to the states for ratification if they win a two-thirds majority in both Houses of Congress. Any proposed amendment is just that, proposed rather than a draft; three-quarters of the states must ratify the amendment in exactly the form in which Congress submitted it. Lincoln did support the proposed amendment, somewhat tepidly and reluctantly, but he did not originate or write it, or submit it to anyone. Congress had sent the amendment to the states for ratification before Lincoln became president.
Guyatt says ‘the Midwest became the cradle’ of the new Republican Party. However, the Republicans failed to carry Illinois and Ohio in 1856, while they swept New England and carried New York. Lincoln lost the 1858 senatorial contest in Illinois. Indiana, Illinois and Ohio were notorious ‘Copperhead’ states, where Confederate sympathies were widespread, especially in the southern portions. The Republicans never had secure control of them until, briefly, after the Civil War. One week after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the legislature of his own state of Illinois denounced it as ‘a gigantic usurpation’ that would result in ‘a total subversion of the Federal Union’ and incite ‘servile insurrection … a means of warfare, the inhumanity and diabolism of which are without example in civilised warfare’. New England remained the rock-ribbed Republican area.
Nor were Indiana and Illinois ‘the heartland of free labour’. Eric Foner, in the book under review, reminds us that the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banned only the importation of slaves, and did not free those already in the territory. Ninian Edwards, the appointed governor of Illinois Territory from 1809 to 1818, ‘advertised for sale 22 slaves’ along with livestock. The importation, buying and selling of black ‘servants’ remained legal into the 1840s, at which time hundreds of legally defined slaves (in addition to ‘indentures’) still resided in Illinois. Lincoln himself tried to return a black woman and four of her children into slavery in 1847, despite the fact that they had migrated to Illinois with the full consent of their owner, and had resided in freedom for at least two years. The Great Emancipator also prosecuted for damages the abolitionists who supposedly ‘enticed’ those slaves to ‘escape’, i.e. remain in Illinois as free persons.
It is true that John Wilkes Booth, on hearing Lincoln’s advocacy of very limited black suffrage, said ‘this means nigger citizenship,’ and that three days later he assassinated Lincoln. But the implication that Lincoln died a martyr to black enfranchisement is a stretch. Lincoln made his statement in the course of defending the white supremacist Louisiana constitution from its radical critics. Booth had for months plotted to kidnap or kill Lincoln; there is no reason to suspect that he would have abandoned his goal had Lincoln remained silent that night.
Clifton Hawkins
Berkeley, California
