I was reading a preview for “The Abolitionists” which is premiering tomorrow evening on PBS when I was surprised to read the claims that:
Lincoln supported colonization plans to ship willing slaves back to Africa and that Lincoln also once floated a peace treaty offer to the Confederates that would allow them to keep slaves until 1900 if they surrendered.
Is there any historical evidence that these claims are true?
Yes, it’s pretty much on the money. It wasn’t just Lincoln. Very few white people of the time thought that black people were equal to white people. The abolitionist argument was generally that black people shouldn’t be enslaved even though they were inferior.
And most white Americans didn’t think blacks would be able to assimilate as American citizens if freed. That was one of the arguments slave owners used in defense of slavery: if you ended slavery, what would you do with all those free black afterwards? The most common abolitionist solution was to free black slaves and send them “back” to Africa (ignoring the fact that virtually all slaves had never lived in Africa).
Politically, Lincoln’s top priority was restoring the Union. He certainly was willing to discuss compromises on the slavery issue in order to achieve that goal.
I’m sure some one will be along shortly with the exact quote. Lincoln said roughly ‘If I have to end slavery to preserve the Union, I will do it. If I can preserve the Union without freeing a single slave, I will do that.’
I’ve also read (I’m pretty sure it was on this message board) that Lincoln was convinced slavery was a dying institution which would last eighty years at most even if he took no action.
I certainly knew that Lincoln was what most would agree today as racist and that preserving the Union was his number one goal. I did not know however - as a matter of fact - that he officially offered a peace treaty that allowed slavery until 1900.
Yep, that’s true. You have to remember Lincoln did not want to free the slaves because he thought they were equal men just like whites. Like many abolitionists, he thought blacks were inferior but that they did not deserve slavery.
At one point Lincoln supported the American Colonization Society, which strongly advocated transporting freed slaves back to Africa.
Also, during the Lincoln-Douglas debates Lincoln stated that he would gladly ship all of the slaves back to Liberia, but that this was not practical as they would all die of starvation within ten days if they were brought there all at once.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, Volume 3, is on google books for free if you want to read exactly what Lincoln said for yourself. Start at page 101 or thereabouts.
At times Lincoln also objected to plans to ship slaves back to Africa, but his objections were only along practical lines, saying basically the same thing that he did during the debates, that it had to be done properly so that it would not create a larger disaster that resulted in many deaths. If a practical way could be found, he was all for it.
There were a lot of peace offerings floated around. I’ve heard of offers like this that came up but I’ve never heard of one directly attributed to Lincoln as originating it. If no one else comes up with a cite I’ll poke around and see if I can find out anything else.
Letter to Horace Greeley, August 22 1862
“Lincoln also once floated a peace treaty offer to the Confederates that would allow them to keep slaves until 1900 if they surrendered”
This one I don’t recall having heard.
There was a proposal to financially compensate slave owners for emancipated slaves (not as part of Eman. Proclamation) , a plan sold on the comparison of the cost of continuing to prosecute the war versus the ‘buy out’ cost.
Remember that he was always personally anti-slavery, which is why the South decided his election meant it was time to secede. But for a long time he felt he had no executive power over slavery. He was careful to distinguish between the two, and doubted it was proper to allow his strong personal feelings to overrule what he (and many other people) saw as a Constitutional prerogative, albeit a wrongheaded one.
This distinction might seem quaint today, but it was very real back then.
He never really changed that view, and legally it was the right one. The debates over the value fo the Emancipation Proclamation are kinda silly, because most people don’t understand the complex hairs he was trying to delicately split. Over slavery, the instritution, he had no power. But everyone generally agreed that he could strike at the rebel’s infrastructure, property, and society - which he then did. And freeing slaves, as many as possible and practical, was a huge step in demolishing all three.
Lincoln was personally anti-slavery, but he did promise that the South could keep their slaves if that would keep them in the Union. What he wasn’t willing to compromise on was the expansion of slavery into the western territories. In reality, the folks in the South really didn’t give two hoots if someone in a far away state had slaves or not, but what really mattered was how these new states would vote. With Lincoln’s election, this meant that the western territories were destined to become free states, which would shift power in Washington to the North side and would allow the North to destroy the southern agricultural way of life in the long run. The South wasn’t willing to let the North slowly strange it to death, so Lincoln’s concession to allow them to keep their slaves wasn’t enough, and they seceded.
This is also why the South said they were seceding so that they could keep their slaves even though Lincoln had already promised them that they could keep their slaves even if they didn’t secede.
Slavery was a state issue and not a federal issue (one of the state’s rights that the South now claims was the issue). Lincoln had no authority as to the slave question, so could not issue his proclamation to affect any of the states; but he could use his plenary war powers to abolish slavery in those states which continue to rebel.
I don’t know the details of that offer. I suspect that it was during the summer of 1862, when Lincoln was trying to persuade the border states to adopt gradual, compensated emancipation and was willing to extend the same offer to the Confederate states.
I do know that once he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln never wavered in that “then, thenceforward, and forever” meant what it said. He never afterward entertained any peace or reconstruction plan that entailed slavery for the states in which the Proclamation applied.
I think that you are right. For some reason that date of 1900 makes me think of Delaware and it was what got them on board for a gradual emancipation proposal. We couldn’t exactly demand that the southern states give up slavery while allowing it in the border states.
Further, the future date would mean no (or very little) compensation was needed at all. We would have had 35 plus years to make the transition.
A major issue that people seem to neglect was that the dis-unionists of the south didn’t literally think that Lincoln and the north wanted to take away their slaves right then and there. Their issue was that slavery was going to be restricted or outright kept out of the territories and that the slaveholding south would continue to be marginalized as the country expanded.
Cite?
http://www.dailypaul.com/100173/abe-lincoln-racist-the-lincoln-douglas-debates-1858
[QUOTE=Lincoln]
I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.
[/QUOTE]
"This might have been a strategy speech used to gain voters, as Douglas had accused Lincoln of favoring negroes too much as well"
It’s also important to remember that Lincoln’s views changed, as people’s views are wont to do. He was pretty consistently against slavery his whole adult life, but he definitely started out as an advocate of colonization (that the freed slaves should go live in Liberia or someplace). Colonization was briefly mentioned in the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of 1862, but by the time the Emancipation Proclamation was made a few months later, mention of colonization had been dropped, and Lincoln seems to have abandoned any support for it on practical as well as moral grounds.
By the end of his life he had come around on the idea of voting rights for at least some of the freed slaves. From his last speech:
Note the mention of blacks who had been soldiers. That blacks had fought for the Union, and fought bravely and well, was a huge moral argument in favor of not just abolition but the possibility of racial equality. After Lincoln’s death, the ideal of racial equality–not just the end of slavery–was explicitly made part of the Constitution in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments–and then, with the end of Reconstruction, betrayed until the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th Century.
Well, all anyone can do is judge a man’s opinion based on his words. Maybe George Wallace in 1963 secretly liked integration but was tailoring his words and actions to get elected. If Lincoln said it, he has to live with it until we have a mind reading device.
So, by the end of his life, he agreed that black soldiers and other “intelligent” blacks should be able to vote. That’s the counter-argument to Lincoln’s underlying racism? If I ran for office and argued the same, would you consider me a good candidate because 7 years earlier I thought that no blacks should vote and I was showing progress?