Quote of the Day (Bruce Watson, on Juneteenth)

“The celebration has begun. Some shout and dance. Others fall to their knees and weep. A few freely enter former masters’ homes and put on their clothes. Song. Spirit. Jubilee. And the date goes down in history — June nineteenth, soon shortened to Juneteenth….

“For the rest of the [19^th] century, former slaves remembered. Each Juneteenth, they gathered to share stories, scripture, spirituals. Barbecue and baseball. And until Jim Crow laws arose, Juneteenth featured instructions on how to vote….

“Faced with myth and rising violence, Juneteenth laid low. Only in the 1940s did its embers stir.  Then came the Civil Rights Movement, too busy to celebrate. Finally, in the 1970s, Juneteenth came alive again.”— Editor and biographer Bruce Watson, “Juneteenth!”, American Heritage, June 2020

(The image accompanying this post shows Juneteenth--or, as it was called at this point, Emancipation Day--being celebrated in Richmond, Va., the capital of the former Confederacy.)

Photo of the Day: Juneteenth Carnival, Englewood

My hometown, Englewood, NJ, held its Juneteenth Carnival and Festival this past weekend, from June 13 to 16. (Juneteenth combines June and 19—or June 9, 1865, when the abolition of slavery was announced in the state of Texas. This is now the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States.) I took this particular photograph on Saturday in Depot Square, not far from where I live.  

Quote of the Day (Abraham Lincoln, on the Need to “Think Anew and Act Anew”)

“Is it doubted, then, that the plan I propose, if adopted, would shorten the war, and thus lessen its expenditure of money and of blood? Is it doubted that it would restore the national authority and national prosperity and perpetuate both indefinitely? Is it doubted that we here—Congress and Executive can secure its adoption? Will not the good people respond to a united and earnest appeal from us? Can we, can they, by any other means so certainly or so speedily assure these vital objects? We can succeed only by concert. It is not "Can any of us imagine better?" but "Can we all do better?" Object whatsoever is possible, still the question recurs, "Can we do better?" The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

“Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.”—Abraham Lincoln, Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862

A century and a half ago, seeking means of ending a civil war already costing the nation countless blood and treasure, Abraham Lincoln called for a constitutional amendment to the Constitution authorizing voluntary colonization of freedmen back to Africa and compensated emancipation for their slave masters. Despite eloquent passages such as the one included here that have been recalled by successive generations of his reunited countrymen, however, his proposal failed, leading him to rethink his options—setting the stage for the more extraordinary, revolutionary Thirteenth Amendment.

Steven Spielberg’s biopic, Lincoln, is bringing attention to an aspect of his Presidency eclipsed in attention by the better-known Emancipation Proclamation—the use of his office, in ways not always simon-pure, for the noblest of motives: the Thirteenth Amendment, which accomplished the most fervent dreams of abolitionists. But the President’s campaign would not have come to pass had a milder anti-slavery measure two years earlier worked better than he had hoped. For all its considerable excellence, the film does not allude to this earlier proposal.

The appearance of the Spielberg film, then, leads inevitably to the question: Why did the legislative magic of the winter of 1864-65 fail when tried two years before?

Let’s start with the second year-end message to Congress, from which I’ve quoted above. Lincoln concluded with the peroration above, which has become among his best-remembered words. (Among other things, it’s among the passages recited in that evergreen of Americana, Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait.) Each generation of Americans since then, facing another crisis, has found urgent meaning in his searing admonition to “think anew and to act anew.”

The passage is all the more striking because it contrasts with a far more prosaic earlier part of the message. The President began by reviewing events abroad as well as home (even the doings of the Post Office and the Agriculture Department).

But the message—to this reader, anyway—takes a decisive turn with a sentence that, in essence, stands as a rebuke to those who continue to believe that slavery did not cause the Civil War: “Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed; without slavery it could not continue.”

Lincoln’s message to Congress reads in tone so differently at various points because he was calling on three different aspects of his background to bring the war to a speedier conclusion and to rid the continent of slavery and its traces: logician, lawyer and legislator.

*Logician: Lincoln had become enamored of the principles of logic demonstrated by Euclid, and sought to apply these principles in public affairs. In an unusual section of this message to Congress, he even applied what might be considered an early instance of demographics, tracing the population growth of the American public to date and projecting out to 1920.  The great expanse of the West could accommodate such growth in the form of one nation, he told Congress, but not two, which would inevitably lead to “embarrassing and onerous trade regulations.” There was no true geographic cause for the rift, only differences over slavery that could be harmonized.

*Lawyer: Lincoln doubted that a simple act of Congress would be enough to rid the nation of slavery, and he feared that the Supreme Court, under Roger B. Taney, who had handed down the hated Dred Scott decision, would rule the Emancipation Proclamation as unconstitutional, even though he had undertaken it as part of the Presidential warmaking powers. He needed something more comprehensive—an amendment to the Constitution.

*Legislator: Through eight years in the Illinois state legislator, and another two in the U.S. Congress, Lincoln sought ways to defuse opposition to his ideas, even becoming friends in Congress with Alexander H. Stephens, a fellow Whig who later became Vice-President of the Confederacy. In the second message to Congress, he stroked the massive egos of many on Capitol Hill by noting: “Many of you have more experience than I, in the conduct of public affairs.” The modern role of the President as legislator-in-chief, put in practice on a grand scale first by Woodrow Wilson, had not yet come to pass, but already Lincoln was thinking of how he could get his ambitious policies enacted on Capitol Hill.

Lincoln’s proposal for compensation for slaveowners for manumission of their slaves, designed to end after 37 years, would have left the United States free of “the peculiar institution” by the turn of the century. An attempt to try this in Delaware, the most pro-Union of the border states (and, hence, the most likely border store to manumit slaves) had failed the year before, so the call for an amendment was a last-ditch try at this idea.

The proposal for colonization differed in certain ways from the compensation idea. The idea had long been

advocated by Lincoln’s political hero, Henry Clay, and the President had pushed the idea several times over the past year. But the strenuous opposition of Frederick Douglass and several other freedmen who met with him at the White House had made him increasingly less hopeful that he could secure the support of blacks for a movement that, he stressed, was completely voluntary. (The charge of racism in connection to Lincoln, a standard topic of revisionists, can be countered even here. To the delegation meeting with him at the White House three months before the message to Congress, Lincoln stressed, "Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people." His assessment of their situation--"On this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours"--proved, sadly, all too accurate for the next century.)

The message to Congress stressed that the likelihood of freedmen overwhelming the North in a great migration was minimal. Nevertheless, feelings on this point were so strong that colonization was pushed “as an answer to racist fears about what would happen after slavery,” wrote historian William Lee Miller in Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography (2002).


Lincoln eventually yielded on the issue of colonization, but in terms of the larger issue of eradicating slavery from the continent, the intransigence of the Confederacy and even loyal border states only emboldened him. The election of 1864 gave him a better hand. The 1862 message to Congress had arrived on Capitol Hill after the Democrats had taken the House of Representatives in midterm elections, but before two more years of fighting even harder than what had come before--and the eventual decisive turn in the war with Sherman's taking of Atlanta. By the end of 1864, then, not only had Lincoln been re-elected, but he had a working majority in Congress--one not only comprised of Republicans, but increasingly of those who, after so much fighting, felt that the war had to amount to something more than the status quo ante.  

Spielberg's Lincoln stresses the compromises needed to bring the Thirteenth Amendment to fruition. In truth, however, the Second Annual Message to Congress partook far more of this spirit. The message spoke of "mutual concessions," "compromise, " and the need to "harmonize" and "act together," and the proposals represented the President's attempt at a golden mean between extremes. 

The refusal of the border states to consider his proposal, however, taught him the same kind of lesson that months of grinding battle was only beginning to teach the North: At some point, if attempts to placate and find common ground failed, more complete measures needed to be taken. Now that his olive branch to opponents had been rejected, the President made common cause with the Radical Republicans. With his re-election assured, he now had the wind at his back--and, with his push for the Thirteenth Amendment, he could steer the United States to a second republic--quicker, more complete emancipation--that few could have envisioned in December 1862.

This Day in Presidential History (Lincoln Fends Off Critics)

December 31, 1861— As the first year of his administration drew to a close, President Abraham Lincoln sought to ease the concerns of a small group of meddlesome but highly influential Congressmen that the direction of the effort to crush the Confederacy needed to be changed quickly. Seldom has the Clausewitz dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means been demonstrated so much as in Lincoln’s attempt to maintain unity between the nation’s representatives and its armed forces, as well as among the states.

The postwar public deification of Lincoln should not blind us to the fact that, well into his administration, he had neither a master plan to win the Civil War nor the extensive military experience that provided instant credibility for George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower on national-security issues. His was, inescapably, a reactive Presidency: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me,” Lincoln wrote in a letter in April 1864.

The subject of this letter was the measures Lincoln had adopted to advance the Union effort. His observation that “indispensable necessity” had guided him throughout, despite seeming policy changes, can be seen nowhere more vividly than with the slavery issue.

As much as he had felt a bone-deep hatred for "the peculiar institution" since a trip down the Mississippi to Louisiana in the early 1830s, Lincoln felt that he had to tread cautiously in stamping it out, and not only because that action would break a campaign promise only to limit its spread,  not to interfere where it curently operated. Use of slaves to crush the Confederacy by force might only lead border states such as Kentucky and Missouri to throw in their lot with their secessionist sisters farther south. The President preferred colonization and/or compensation emancipation for slaveholders. The failure of these proposals, along with reverses in the eastern theater of the war, led him to conclude later in 1862 that necessity required “military emancipation.”

But Lincoln had not reached this point when he and his Cabinet met with the Joint Select Committee on the Conduct of the War on the last day of 1861. Only appointed by the House and Senate less than two weeks before, the Republican majority on this group were already giving the President severe agita, and much more would come from them by war’s end. While well-meaning and capable of performing useful investigations (on such matters as military supply abuses, the Fort Pillow massacre, and Union troop deaths in Confederate prisons), they were also already driving the President crazy with their preference for state militias over West Point-trained soldiers, as well as their relentless urging to take Richmond, never mind the preparedness of Union troops for doing so.

Now in their sights was the Army of the Potomac’s new commander, General George B. McClellan. “Little Mac” had long put off any move toward invading Virginia, claiming that the less than two months he had had since being appointed commander was hardly enough time to train, provision, and organize his 100,000 troops. But discussions with other military commanders led the committee to believe that the general could have moved far sooner. This added to their initial grievances against him: his Democratic leanings and his stand against interfering in any way with slavery.

Even McClellan’s latest claim to Lincoln--that he was in bed with typhoid--cut the general little slack with the group. Senator Benjamin Wade from Ohio, the committee chairman whose lack of diplomacy led a reporter to call him "grim as a bear in ill health," got right to the point: “Mr. President, you are murdering your country by inches in consequence of the inactivity of the military and the want of a distinct policy in regard to slavery.”

This put Lincoln in a bind. He did not want to undercut the man he had chosen to succeed General Winfield Scott as America’s leading soldier. At the same time, unlike Confederate President Jefferson Davis—not only a West Point graduate, but also a hero of the Mexican-American War and Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce—Lincoln had no sterling military credentials. Not only had he made himself conspicuous by opposing the conflict that started Davis’ upward trajectory, but he liked to joke about the limits of his own service record—three months in the Illinois militia in the Black Hawk War of 1832.


And so, the President chose, when he wasn't cheerleading the war effort, to bring the committee's Republicans and his balky general closer together. On New Year’s Day, Lincoln wrote McClellan to put aside his "uneasiness" about the joint committee's "doings": "You may be entirely relieved . . . The gentlemen of the Committee were with me an hour and a half last night; and I found them in a perfectly good mood. As their investigation brings them acquainted with facts, they are rapidly coming to think of the whole case as all sensible men woud."

Had Lincoln lived in the 21st century, it’s unlikely that this letter, however well-intentioned, would have done him any good. Just imagine this, a scenario repeated, with only slight variations, in recent years: lack of progress in the war leads the Democrats to regain control of Congress. When Lincoln removes McClellan from command, the Senate investigates. McClellan, called to testify, produces the President’s letter. “Honest Abe” ends up looking like a spinmeister, The Great Dissembler rather than the Great Railsplitter.

Over the next two weeks, the joint committee grew increasingly outspoken about the President's trust in his commander. Indiana's George Julian was stunned to find that the President and his Cabinet had no information on any of McClellan's plans, and that "Mr. Lincoln himself did not think he had any right to know, but that, as he was not a military man, it was his duty to defer to General McClellan."

Even at the time, Lincoln’s trust in his general didn’t sit well with several people, not just the Joint Committee. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase made it plain even during the meeting that he agreed with the Congressmen and Senators.

More influential was Attorney-General Edward Bates. He, like Chase and Secretary of State William H. Seward, had battled Lincoln for the Republican nomination as President, but, with instincts more conservative than Chase’s, could not be written off as a radical abolitionist.

In his diary, Bates confided his dismay over what he had just witnessed: "The Prest. is an excellent man, and in the main wise; but he lacks will and purpose, and I greatly fear he, has not the power to command." In dealing one on one with the President,  however, he was far more diplomatic, able to couch his tough love in legal arguments that Lincoln would find compelling.

It would not do for Lincoln to defer so often to McClellan, Bates claimed. The Constitution had explicitly vested in him power as Commander in Chief. Thus, Lincoln should "organize a Staff of his own, and assume to be in fact, what he is in law."

Lincoln was motivated enough by Bates' claims that he took out a book on military strategy from the Library of Congress. He became increasingly wedded to the idea of simultaneous attacks by Northern forces to prevent Confederate troop movements. While he continued to find the committee bothersome, they had shaken him enough that, from this point on, he challenged "Little Mac" more often to take the fight to the enemy.

As for the Joint Committee: They should be given due credit for recognizing early that McClellan was unsuited for his job and that emancipation was not only moral thing to do, but a weapon to destroy the Confederacy. But their thinking on other matters was terribly flawed. Their military favorites were leaders such as John Pope, Ambrose Burnside and Joseph Hooker--commanders hardly better than McClellan.

Their thinking about Lincoln was as myopic as it was cruel. After his assassination, several members were delighted that the President's successor, their former Democratic colleague, Andrew Johnson, would be far more vengeful against the South. By the end of Johnson's term, as he opposed one Reconstruction measure after another, Wade and company would have abundant reason to understand how wrong they had been about Lincoln, who, for all his seeming slowness, had embraced emancipation while eventually finding the commander who would put his strategy for dismembering the Confederacy into action.

This Day in Revolutionary War History (Alexander Hamilton Calls for Emancipating Black Soldiers)

March 14, 1779—A marginalized product of a slaveholding society, Col. Alexander Hamilton, wrote to the new president of the Continental Congress, John Jay, enthusiastically backing a proposal for freeing black slaves who fought in the Continental Army.

The idea had been pushed by Hamilton’s friend John Laurens. Hamilton’s fellow aide-de-camp to George Washington was in a real position to influence the future American republic’s attitude toward slavery—his father, the outgoing President of the Continental Congress, was also a major slaveholder in South Carolina. Now young Laurens—who matched Hamilton in his impetuosity and vehement abolitionism—was returning to his native state, hoping for congressional approval to raise two to four black battalions.

It might surprise some to discover that the man that Ron Chernow, in his epic biography Alexander Hamilton, called a “capitalist prophet” came so strongly to oppose slavery. Maybe the views of the future Secretary of the Treasury were aroused so strongly because in his way, he was as much an outcast as the slaves.

In his biography The Young Hamilton, James Thomas Flexner explored at great length the role of illegitimacy in spurring Hamilton’s quest for glory. Another spur—not too far removed from that—was the persistent rumor that Hamilton was a mulatto or quadroon.

No documentary evidence exists to support the latter notion. But the fact so many children in Hamilton’s West Indies were the products of miscegenation lent a credence to the rumor that the fiercely ambitious young man may have decided it was time to stop—by striking at the institution itself.

Moreover, the teenage Hamilton’s attitudes were crucially affected by his work in the St. Croix trading firm of Beekman and Cruger, where he not only saw for himself the pitiful physical condition of slaves, but also heard stories from sailors about the slaves’ harrowing transatlantic crossing.

The third strain in Hamilton’s thinking stemmed from a characteristic that he shared with the most important father figure in his life, George Washington: a realism born from fighting a difficult war. The daily struggles of provisioning an army without the benefit of sound currency or a strong central government had already impressed itself upon Washington’s aide. But now, he saw, the British were using slavery as a dagger aimed at the heart of the revolution.

Back in 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, had given notice of Britain’s line of attack by promising freedom for any slave or indentured servant who fought for the crown. The impact was much like Abraham Lincoln’s similar but more famous “emancipation proclamation” in the Civil War: slaves escaped plantations in droves, depriving the southern economy of a crucial source of labor where slaveholding masters were waging war in defense of “freedom.”

By the time Hamilton wrote his letter in 1779, the British were bringing that war home in a far more devastating way to the South. Gen. Henry Clinton had decided to cut off the Southern colonies. In short order, the British took Savannah and Augusta, and South Carolina was coming within their sights.

Given all of this, Hamilton’s letter to Jay supports Laurens’ position with the same argument that President Lincoln would use for emancipation during the Civil War: the doctrine of military necessity. “I hardly see how a sufficient force can be collected without it; and the enemy’s operations there are growing infinitely serious and formidable.”

Lest Jay miss the point, Hamilton struck harder with it a few sentences later: “If we do not make use of them, the enemy will…and the best way to counteract the temptations they will hold out will be to offer them ourselves.” Hamilton was even prepared to use the slaves’ condition as an argument for their potential: their ingrained “habit of subordination” would make them ideal soldiers.

But Hamilton could not help traces of humane thinking creep into his analysis. He strenuously objected to the idea that they would be “too stupid to make soldiers,” and he argued that such thinking “makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience.”

One of those people who would disseminate such notions was Hamilton’s future rival in political philosophy, Thomas Jefferson. In Notes on the State of Virginia, the Sage of Monticello reeled off a whole slew of pseudoscientific notions, down to the quality of their skins, arguing for their basic inequality with whites, concluding with:

“Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.

Southern attitudes toward slavery turned out to be closer to Jefferson’s than Hamilton’s. Laurens’ proposal not only could not overcome their opposition to a full battalion on their home soil (though Washington, coming around to the Hamilton-Laurens notion, eventually brought 5,000 slaves in his army, who, provided much of the so-called "ditch-digging" duties that made it easy for Washington to assign soldiers as needed).

Within 15 years, however, a couple of developments made it more unlikely that it would never happen without resort to arms.

First, Southern abolitionism lost its most effective advocate when Laurens himself died in 1782, in a senseless skirmish fought after Yorktown, when American victory had been essentially secured.

Second, 15 years to the day Hamilton wrote his letter to Jay, Eli Whitney received a patent for his cotton gin. Before, Southern planters would be lucky to wrest a pound of cotton a day from their crop; now, they could harvest 50 times that amount. The invention revived a Southern economy that had been battered by the war and still, in many cases, hadn’t recovered.

Yet Hamilton’s opposition did not go for naught. If Laurens was no longer around to push abolitionism on the Southern front, Hamilton could do so in his home state of New York. In the mid-1780s, he and Jay helped found the New-York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves. In 1799, the state passed legislation freeing slaves gradually. By July 4, 1827, slavery finally ended in the Empire State.

That fact should not be allowed to just sit there. Remember that, when Hamilton came to New York as a King’s College (later Columbia University) student in the 1770s, more than three thousand slaves lived in New York City and more than 15,000 throughout the colony.

Here’s another way to put those numbers in perspective: next to Charleston, New York was the largest slaveholding city in British North America. Yet 50 years later, while slavery had become far more entrenched in the South, its moral legitimacy had eroded in the Empire State—in no small measure attributable to Hamilton.

Perhaps more tellingly, Hamilton’s doctrine of military necessity came to be practiced not only by Lincoln (another young man revolted by the practice of slavery) but by Robert E. Lee. In January 1865, Robert E. Lee had adopted Hamilton’s position for the South in the Civil War. Two months after Lee’s letter, in its final desperate days, the Confederate Congress authorized Jefferson Davis to recruit slaves as soldiers, with the permission of their owners.

Too little, too late, of course--as John Laurens and his great and good friend, Colonel Hamilton, could have told them.