For much of his political career, Lincoln, like his political idol Henry Clay, was an advocate of colonization, based on his belief that “the great mass of white people” would refuse to extend equal rights to African Americans. This assumption and prediction, Lincoln believed, “whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded.”
Map of Ile la Vache or Island of Vache.
In 1862, the President met with a group of African Americans at the White House. No previous President had dreamed of inviting blacks to the White House. In what was perhaps the lowest point of his presidency, he seemed to blame blacks for the Civil War and predicted that they would have to migrate overseas. Lincoln said “your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people…but on this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours.”
Frederick Douglass condemned the President’s remarks. “No sincere wish to improve the condition of the oppressed has dictated” his words, Douglass wrote. “It expresses merely the desire to get rid of them, and reminds one of the politeness with which a man might try to bow out of his house some troublesome creditor or the witness of some old guilt.”
In that year, 450 African Americans were recruited to settle on the Island of Vache, off the coast of present-day Haiti. Small pox and mismanagement by a white government-appointed manager contributed to the colony’s failure. The transport ship dispatched by President Lincoln picked up only 368 survivors.
The Thirteenth Amendment
The Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves only in states still at war. As a wartime order, it could subsequently be reversed by presidential degree or congressional legislation. The permanent emancipation of all slaves therefore required a constitutional amendment.
In April 1864, the Senate passed the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery in the United States. Opposition from Democratic Representatives prevented the amendment from receiving the required two-thirds majority. If McClellan and the Democrats had won the election of 1864, as Lincoln and most Northerners expected in the summer, the amendment would almost certainly have been defeated and slave emancipation repudiated as a war aim. Only after Lincoln was reelected did Congress approve the amendment. Ratification by the states was completed in December 1865.
Total War
Initially, Lincoln and his generals anticipated a conventional war in which Union soldiers would respect civilians’ property. Convinced that there was residual Unionist support in the South, they expected to preserve the South’s economic base, including its factories and rail lines. As the war dragged on, the Civil War became history’s first total war. The Union sought the Confederacy’s complete defeat and unconditional surrender. To achieve success, Union officers, such as Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman believed that it was necessary to break the South’s will to fight. Sherman summed up the idea of total war in blunt terms: “We are not only fighting hostile armies,” he declared in 1864, “but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.”
A year earlier, a general order was issued that declared that military necessity “allows of all destruction of property” and “appropriation of whatever an enemy’s country affords necessary for the subsistence and safety of the Army.” This order allowed soldiers to destroy anything that might be of use to the Confederacy.
During the war, the Lincoln administration and Union military temporary shuttered several hundred newspapers and arrested several thousand individuals. Most of these people had evaded the draft, deserted, or traded with the enemy.
The 1864 Presidential Election
Distribution of electoral votes 1864.
The 1864 presidential election was one of the most critical in American history. At stake was whether the war would end in unconditional surrender or a negotiated settlement, which might result in the preservation of slavery as a legal institution. Even though hundreds of thousands of slaves deserted to Union lines during the war, it is not at all inconceivable that slavery could have survived if the President had not been committed to emancipation. During the American Revolution a third of Georgia’s slaves had been freed by the British, and tens of thousands of Virginia’s slaves had escaped bondage. Nevertheless, slavery survived the revolutionary upheavals in the South, and soon began to flourish and expand. Similarly, slavery was temporarily reinstituted by the French in St. Domingue and greatly expanded in Guadeloupe, Martinique and other colonies despite the Haitian Revolution and the French emancipation decree of 1794.
In August 1864, Lincoln expressed his view in moving words. Observing that over 130,000 blacks were fighting to preserve the Union, he said that they were motivated by the “strongest motive…the promise of freedom. There have been men who proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors. I would be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends and enemies, come what will.”
Deeply anxious about the election’s outcome, Republicans and pro-war Democrats formed the National Union Party, which re-nominated Lincoln and selected Andrew Johnson, a former Democratic Senator from Tennessee, for Vice President. Johnson replaced Lincoln’s first Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin, a former U.S. Senator from Maine.
As their presidential nominee, the Democrats chose General George B. McClellan, who opposed the Emancipation Proclamation and who ran on a platform which condemned Lincoln for “four years of failure” and called for a negotiated end to the war.
Some Radical Republicans also opposed Lincoln’s reelection. Lincoln had asked Congress to seat representatives from three recently conquered Confederate states—Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee—and also announced that when 10 percent of the voters in the rebel states excluding high Confederate officials pledged loyalty to the Union including government actions concerning slavery they would be readmitted to the Union. Radicals denounced the “10 Percent Plan” as too lenient. Congress in July 1864 adopted a much more radical measure, the Wade-Davis Bill, which required rebel states to abolish slavery, repudiate the Confederate war debt, disfranchise Confederate leaders, and require fifty percent of the citizens to pledge loyalty to the Union. The radicals nominated General John C. Freemont for President, but he withdrew a month before the election.
Lincoln feared that Northern battlefield victories might be lost at the polls. During the summer of 1864, he confessed, “it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be reelected.” There seems little doubt that a McClellan victory would have resulted in an agreement to maintain slavery in the United States.
The capture of Atlanta, a major southern railroad and manufacturing center, in September, electrified Northern voters, who gave Lincoln a resounding victory. He received 55 percent of the popular vote to just 21 percent for McClellan.
History Through…
…Primary Sources
The Two Roads to Peace!
How shall we End the Rebellion—Shall we Coax it, or Crush it?
Every American citizen wants the Rebellion ended and Peace restored. Two plans have been proposed for doing it: one, by a Convention which met in Baltimore June 7; the other by a Convention which met in Chicago, August 30. Read and compare the two. Here they are:—
The Chicago (Democratic Party) Platform.
Resolved, That in the future, as in the past, we will adhere with unswerving fidelity to the Union, under the Constitution, as the only solid foundation of our strength, security, and happiness as a people, and as a framework of government equally conducive to the welfare and prosperity of all the States, both Northern and Southern.
Resolved, That this Convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, during which, under the pretense of military necessity or war power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, and public liberty and private right alike trodden down, and the material prosperity of the country essentially impaired, justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare, demand that IMMEDIATE EFFORTS BE MADE FOR A CESSATION OF HOSTILITIES, with a view to the ultimate Convention of all the States, or other peaceable means, to the end that at the earliest practicable moment peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States.
McClellan-Pendelton Democratic ticket.
Resolved, That the direct interference of the military authority of the United States in the recent elections in Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware, was a shameful violation of the Constitution, and the repetition of such acts in the approaching election will be held as revolutionary, and resisted with all the means and power under our control.
Resolved, That the aim and object of the Democratic party is to preserve the Federal Union and the rights of the States unimpaired; and they hereby declare that they consider the Administrative usurpation of extraordinary and dangerous powers not granted by the Constitution, the subversion of the civil by military law in States not in insurrection, the arbitrary military arrest, imprisonment, trial and sentence of American citizens in States where civil law exists in full force, the suppression of freedom of speech and of the press, the denial of the right of asylum, the open and avowed disregard of State rights, the employment of unusual test-oaths, and the interference with and denial of the right of the people to bear arms, as calculated to prevent a restoration of the Union, and the perpetuation of a government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed.
Resolved, That the shameful disregard of the Administration to its duty in respect to our fellow-citizens who now and long have been prisoners of war in a suffering condition, deserves the severest reprobation, on the score alike of of public interest and common humanity.
Resolved, That the sympathy of the Democratic party is heartily and earnestly extended to the soldiery of our army, who are and have been in the field under the flag of our country; and in the event of our attaining power, they will receive all the care and protections, regard and kindness that the brave soldiers of the Republic have so nobly earned.
The Baltimore (Republican Party) Platform.
Resolved, That it is the highest duty of every American citizen to maintain against all their enemies, the integrity of the Union, and the paramount authority of the Constitution and laws of the United States; and that, laying aside all differences of political opinions, we pledge ourselves as Union men, animated by a common sentiment, and aiming at a common object, to do everything in our power to aid the Government in quelling, BY FORCE OF ARMS, the rebellion now raging against its authority, and in bringing to the punishment due to their crimes the rebels and traitors arrayed against it.
Resolved, That we approve the determination of the Government of the United States, not to compromise with rebels, nor to offer any terms of peace except such as may be based upon an unconditional surrender of their hostility, and a return to their just allegiance to the Constitution and laws of the United States, and that we call upon the Government to maintain this position and to prosecute the war with the utmost possible vigor to the complete suppression of the rebellion, in full reliance upon the self-sacrifice, the patriotism, the heroic valor, and the undying devotion of the American people to their country and its free institutions.
Lincoln-Johnson ticket.
Resolved, That as slavery was the cause, and now constitutes the strength of this rebellion, and as it must be always and everywhere hostile to the principles of republican government, justice and the national safety demand its utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the Republic, and that while we uphold and maintain the acts and proclamations by which the Government, in its own defense, has aimed a death blow at this gigantic evil, we are in favor, furthermore, of such an amendment to the Constitution, to be made by the people in conformity with its provisions, as shall terminate and forever prohibit the existence of Slavery within the limits or the jurisdiction of the United States.
Resolved, That the thanks of the American people are due to the soldiers and sailors of the army and navy, who have periled their lives in defense of their country, and in vindication of the honor of its flag; that the nation owes to them some permanent recognition of their patriotism and valor, and ample and perment provision for those of their survivors who have received disabling and honorable wounds in the service of the county; and that the memories of those who have fallen in its defense shall be held in grateful and everlasting remembrance.
Resolved, That we approve and applaud the practical wisdom, the unselfish patriotism, and unswerving fidelity to the Constitution and the principles of American liberty, with which Abraham Lincoln has discharged, under circumstances of unparalleled difficulty, the great duties and responsibilities of the presidential office; that we approve and indorse [sic], as demanded by the emergency and essential to the preservation of the nation, and as within the Constitution, the measures and acts which he has adopted to defend the nation against its open and secret foes; that we approve especially the Proclamation of Emancipation, and the employment as Union soldiers of men heretofore held in slavery and that we have full confidence in his determination to carry these and all other constitutional measures essential to the salvation of the country into full and complete effect….
Resolved, That the Government owes to all men employed in its armies, without regard to distinctions of color, the full protection of the laws of war, and that any violation of these laws or the usages of civilized nations in the time of war by the rebels now in Resolved, That the foreign immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth and the development of resources and increase of power to this nation—the asylum of the oppressed of all nations—should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy.
Resolved, That we are in favor of the speedy construction of the Railroad to the Pacific….
Resolved, That we approve the position taken by the Government that the people of the United States can never regard with indifference the attempt of any European power to overthrow by force, or to supplant by fraud, the institutions of any republican government on the Western continent; and that they will view with extreme jealousy, as menacing to the peace and independence of their own country, the efforts of any such power to obtain new footholds for monarchical governments, sustained by a foreign military force, in near proximity to the United States.
AMERICANS! Here you have two plans for ending the Rebellion, restoring peace, and preserving the Union. They differ in every essential feature. They agree in scarcely anything. Here are some of their points of contrast:
The Chicago platform says not one word in condemnation of the Rebellion or of those who have wrapped the nation int he flames of civil war. The Baltimore platform brands the Rebellion as a gigantic crime, and demands the punishment of the rebels and traitors who have brought it on. With which do you agree?
The Chicago Platform proposes that the Rebellion be stopped by IMMEDIATE EFFORTS FOR A CESSATION OF HOSTILITIES on the part of the Government. The Baltimore Platform proposes to “quell it by FORCE of ARMS.” The first is Surrender—the last VICTORY! Which do you prefer?
The Chicago Platform brands the war in which thousands and tens of thousands of our sons have shed their blood, and millions of treasure have been expended,—in which our Soldiers have won imperishable renown by their gallant devotion to the flag of their country—in which more victories have been achieved than were ever achieved before by any nation—in which the rebels have been stripped of three-fourths of the territory they held at the start—in which one after another of their strong places have been captured, and one after another of their armies have been destroyed, and which is just about to end in a final and glorious triumph of the old Flag and Constitution,—this war the Chicago platform brands as a FAILURE, and demands that it be abandoned and stopped! The Baltimore platform demands that it be “prosecuted with the utmost vigor to the complete suppression of the Rebellion.” With which do you agree?
The Chicago Platform says not a syllable against the rebellion, but denounces, with intense bitterness and venom, everything the Government has done to put it down. The Baltimore platform applauds and upholds the Government in its efforts to subdue the rebels, and promises continued support in this endeavor. Which is the most patriotic?
The Chicago Platform has no thanks or honors, nothing but “sympathy,” for the gallant soldiers and sailors who have suffered and died in upholding the honor of the Stars and Stripes, and promises them only “care and protection” in the event of their attaining power. The Baltimore Platform demands for them at the hands of the American people the highest thanks and honors which a grateful nation can bestow. Which is the best and the truest praise?
The Chicago Platform denounced our own Government on account of the sufferings of our prisoners in rebel hands; but it has not a word of censure for the rebels themselves, who inflict these sufferings and who persist in continuing the war which has brought them on.
The Chicago Platform has not a word to say against slavery, which has caused the war, and which is to be the cornerstone of the new Confederacy the rebellion seeks to establish. The Baltimore Platform brands it as a curse to the country, and calls for its complete extirpation from the soil of the Republic, at the hands of the people, through an amendment of the Constitution. Whichi s the wisest and best for the country?
Fellow Citizens! These are plain and practical issues: Study them well. These are plain and practical questions: Answer them wisely! This is not a party contest. Political distinctions have nothing to do with it. It is a contest for the life of the Nation! If we surrender to the rebellion, the Union is gone forever. If we fight the rebels a little longer it is safe forever. If we give them to understand in November next, the only Road to Peace lies through the Victory of the National arms, the contest is over! THE ELECTION OF LINCOLN AND JOHNSON IS HE DEATH-KNELL OF THE REBELLION!!
Grant Takes Command
In March 1864, Lincoln gave Ulysses S. Grant command of all Union armies. Vowing to end the war within a year, Grant launched three major offenses. General Philip H. Sheridan’s task was to lay waste to farm land in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, a mission he completed by October. Meanwhile, General William Tecumseh Sherman advanced southeastward from Chattanooga and seized Atlanta, a major southern rail center, while Grant himself pursued Lee’s army and sought to capture Richmond, the Confederate capital.
“Dictator” siege mortar on the U.S. Military Railroad.
Grant started his offensive with 118,000 men. By early June, half of his men were casualties. But Lee’s army had been reduced by a third to 40,000 men. In a month of fighting in northern and eastern Virginia, Grant lost almost 40,000 men, leading Peace Democrats to call him a “butcher.” But Confederate losses were also heavy—and southern troops could not be replaced. At the Battle of the Wilderness, in northern Virginia, Lee’s army suffered 11,000 casualties; at Spotsylvania Court House, Lee lost another 10,000 men. After suffering terrible casualties at Cold Harbor—12,000 men killed or wounded—Grant advanced to Petersburg, a rail center south of Richmond, and began a nine-month siege of the city.
At the same time that Grant was pursuing Lee’s army, Sherman, with a force of 100,000 men, marched toward Atlanta from Chattanooga, and captured the rail center on September 2, 1864. After leaving Atlanta in flames, Sherman’s men marched across Georgia toward Savannah. In order to break the South’s will to fight, Sherman had his men destroy railroad tracks, loot houses, and burn factories. Sherman seized Savannah December 21, and then drove northward, capturing Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina, then heading through North Carolina to Virginia. Sherman summed up the goal of his military maneuvers in grim terms: “We cannot change the hearts of those people, but we can make war so terrible…[and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”
A Stillness at Appomattox
Lee’s Surrender at the Appomottox Court House.
By April 1865, Grant’s army had cut off Lee’s supply lines, forcing Confederate forces to evacuate Petersburg and Richmond. Lee and his men retreated westward, but Grant’s troops overtook him about a hundred miles west of Richmond. Recognizing that further resistance would be futile, Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. The aristocratic Lee wore a full-dress uniform, with a ceremonial sash and sword, while Grant wore a private’s coat.
The next day, in a final message to his troops, Robert E. Lee acknowledged that he was “compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.” Three-quarters of the Confederate white male population of military age had fought in the war, but by 1865, the North had four times as many troops as the Confederacy. At the time he surrendered, Lee’s entire army had shrunk to just 35,000 men, compared to Grant’s total of 113,000. Lee’s decision to surrender, however, probably helped to prevent large-scale guerrilla warfare.
The President is Murdered
At noon on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Major General Robert Anderson raised the U.S. flag over Fort Sumter. It was the same flag that he had surrendered four years before.
That evening, a few minutes after 10 o’clock, John Wilkes Booth, a young actor and Confederate sympathizer who had spied for Richmond and been part of a plot to kidnap Lincoln, entered the presidential box at Ford’s Theater in Washington and shot the President in the back of the head. Booth then leaped to the stage, but he caught a spur in a flag draped in front of the box. He fell and broke his leg. As he fled the theater he is said to have cried out: “Sic semper tyrannis”—thus always to tyrants, the motto of the State of Virginia.
Depiction of the Lincoln assassination.
Simultaneously, a Booth accomplice, Lewis Paine, brutally attacked Secretary of State William Seward at his home with a knife. Seward survived because Paine’s knife was deflected by a metal collar he wore from a severe accident. Seward slowly recovered from his wounds and continued to serve as Secretary of State under Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson.
Lincoln was carried unconscious to a neighboring house. He was pronounced dead at 7:22 a.m., April 15. A few minutes later, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton stepped outside and announced to the assembled crowd, “he belongs to the ages.”
Following the shooting, Booth fled to Maryland on horseback. A friend then helped him escape to Virginia. On April 26, two weeks after he had shot Lincoln, the Army and Secret Service tracked Booth down and trapped him in a barn near Port Royal, Virginia. When Booth refused to surrender, his pursuers set the barn on fire. Booth was found dead, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Lincoln’s assassination was part of a larger plot to murder other government officials, including Vice President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of State William H. Seward, and General Ulysses S. Grant. Only Lincoln was killed. Following the assassination, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton ordered War Department agents to apprehend the conspirators. Despite wild rumors of involvement by top Confederate officials, the actual conspirators included, apart from Booth, an ex-Confederate soldier, a carriage maker, and a druggist’s clerk. Eight individuals were arrested. A military commission found all of them guilty. Four were hanged. Of the remaining four, one died in prison in 1867 and three others received presidential pardons in 1869.
Many Northerners blamed the Confederate leadership for the President’s death. Anger and a thirst for vengeance against “traitors” were surely widespread. This makes it all the more remarkable that the North’s victory was not followed by a massive and bloody extermination of Confederate leaders and their Northern sympathizers.
The War’s Costs
As a result of the Civil War, the South lost a fourth of its white male population of military age, a third of its livestock, half of its farm machinery, and $2.5 billion worth of human property. Factories and railroads had been destroyed, and such cities as Atlanta, Charleston, Columbia, and Richmond had been largely burned to the ground. In South Carolina, the value of property plunged from $400 million in 1860, ranking it third in the nation, to $50 million in 1865.
