“Lincoln’s Plan for Voluntary Segregation”
Researched by Shirley Jordan
In view of the
high-tension racial problems in our Nation currently threatening the peace and
security of our whole people, the Journal reviews Lincoln's plan of voluntary segregation.
The plan was presented by President Lincoln to the Congress of the United
States. The Civil War, Lincoln's death and the Reconstruction Years prevented
Congress from acting upon it. Let us look at it now in our times of trouble.
Let us see what Lincoln recommended be done about the racial problem in
America. Freeing of the slaves, to him, was a thing apart from the question of
segregation. It is time to know, in America, that Lincoln did not believe the
racial problem was solved by the freeing of the slaves, that, rather, it began
there.
“What I would most
desire would be the separation of the white and black races.”
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Lincoln not only spoke those words but he made every effort
to put them into action. If he had lived to finish his second term as
President, he very probably would have effected a separation of the two races.
He had a plan to accomplish it.
The truth is that the most skipped-over pages in the history
of our Nation are those pages written by Lincoln regarding the American racial
problem. Freeing the slaves was only a preliminary part of the whole Lincoln
segregation plan.
It might do the Nation—even unto the White House and the
Office of the Attorney General of the United States, much good to know about
Lincoln’s plan for segregation of the white and black races. Indeed, the
Supreme Court might gain new wisdom by a reading of Lincoln's words on the
entire subject of racial integration. Every American ought to search Lincoln’s
recommendations and words for any possible guidance in this hour when once
again, as it did one hundred years ago, the racial problem commands the
attention and emotions of all citizens, white or black.
Of Lincoln’s plan for voluntary segregation, it is hardly
necessary to point out that in large part it is lost to us forever. Yet it
remains the plan of segregation offered to America by the Emancipator himself.
Lincoln’s views on segregation were of such a nature that were he alive to
expound them today he would probably be arrested by the Federal authorities and
jailed or be held for a psychiatric hearing. Nevertheless, a review of his plan
now ought to give pause to the course each is following—the black of too much
racial awareness and the white that of not enough racial pride. Let both races
look to Lincoln.
Any review of Lincoln's actual recommendations regarding the
Negro race and its future should be made only with acknowledgement of his
personal feelings toward the Negro as a fellow human being. Lincoln was always
emotionally affected by the sight of slaves in chains and the memory of seeing
them “like so many trout on a line” was so terrible to him that he pledged
himself to the eventual eradication of slavery. The Negro race had his complete
compassion and he never spoke of its people, planned for them, thought of them,
without that spirit of compassion. Slavery, to him, was an evil thing in itself
but he hated it for another reason, too. Lincoln believed that America could
never really be a land of freedom as long as it held one man in slavery.
Lincoln's stand against slavery was not based on any idea
that he considered the Negro to be his equal either politically or socially but
rather it was based on his conviction that the Negro was his equal in his human
right to earn for himself the bread to sustain life. Lincoln saw no equality
between the white and black races on the political or social levels and he
opposed the principle of equality on such levels for the black man. His
opposition arose from his his view that the Negro and the Caucasian are
separated by nature and that their physical differences would keep them
separated forever, rightfully. This conviction, though, had no effect
whatsoever on his equally strong belief that the Negro was entitled to be free.
Lincoln personally befriended several Negroes. The year he
was elected to the Presidency, he took the time to concern himself with paying
the taxes of a colored barber of Springfield, Illinois, attending to the
details of the transaction for the man himself as he had done for him for
years. And Elizabeth Keckley, once a slave, was brought to live at the White
House to attend Mrs. Lincoln, at first as her seamstress and later as her
personal and trusted attendant.
When Lincoln freed the slaves he did more for one race of
people than has ever been achieved through political methods and there is no
question but that it gave him a great personal satisfaction to so free them.
However, it is a true record of history that he freed the slaves primarily
because he believed that to do so would help him save the Union. Lincoln would
have withheld the Emancipation Proclamation had he believed its enactment would
work against the preservation of the white man’s United States of America. No
man’s word has to be accepted on this truth except Lincoln’s. And this is what
he had to say about his freeing of the slaves:
“My paramount object
in this struggle IS to save the Union, and it is NOT either to save or to
destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing ANY slave, I would do
it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would
also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I
believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forebear, I forebear because I
do NOT believe it would help to save the Union.”
What did Lincoln intend, then, to do about the slave he had
freed to save the Union?
He answered that question in a detailed plan he submitted to
Congress and in the speeches he made to Congress and the Nation. It is a plan
of voluntary segregation.
Lincoln saw the future more clearly than most men and he was
probably no more clairvoyant about any matter in his remarkable life than he
was about the future national problems which would arise from the troubled
relationship of white and black races. He saw it coming, the terror and
dissension of today, and he tried to prevent it. He made every effort to plan a
solution which would not hurt. His proposal was tempered with kindness, and
offered in faith in his fellow men, both white and black. He wanted both races,
and the Nation, to face the issue head on and have done with it, peaceably. He
had no patience with those men who believed the colored issue could be “stilled
and subdued by pretending that it is an exceedingly simple thing and we ought
not to talk about it.”
“But where,” he asked, as he might today, “is the philosophy
or statesmanship which assumes that you can quiet that disturbing element in
our society which has disturbed us for more than half a century, which has been
the only serious danger that has threatened our institutions, I say, where is
the philosophy or the statesmanship based on the assumption that we are to quit
talking about it, and that the public mind is all at once to cease being
agitated by it?”
Lincoln’s attitude toward the Negro was very little different
than that of the average citizen of the South today. In his debates with
Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Democrat of Illinois, Lincoln made his views on the
subject absolutely clear and he reaffirmed them in his Message to Congress a
few years later. In 1858, two years before his election to the Presidency,
Lincoln said:
“I have no purpose to introduce political and social
equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference
between the two which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their
living upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a
necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in
favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never
said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there
is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural
rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as
the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects—certainly
not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right
to eat the bread without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns,
he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every man
living.”
That statement would seem to be clear enough in defining
Lincoln’s views toward the Negro but it was not enough to satisfy his comrade-in-debate,
Senator Douglas, who kept prodding him on the subject. Lincoln started the
Fourth Debate with Douglas with a voluntary foreword which used even stronger
words than before in his attempt to absolutely clarify his position on the
racial problem:
“While I was at the hotel today, an elderly gentleman called
upon me to know whether I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality
between the negroes and the white people. While I had not proposed to myself on
this occasion to say much on that subject, yet as the question was asked me I
thought I would occupy perhaps five minutes in saying something in regard to
it. 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.
“
Continued next week.
[1963-06-27 Topanga Journal:]
Lincoln was never content to see a problem half way through.
He constantly concerned himself with the future of the Negro and with the
problem America faced in regard to the trouble which it had brought upon itself
through slavery. He spoke on the subject in Ottawa:
“When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible
for the origin of slavery than we, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that
the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any
satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I will not blame
them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly
power were given me I should not know what to do, as to the existing
institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to
Liberia—to their own native land. But a moment's reflection would convince me
that whatever of hope (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long
run, its sudden execution is impossible. If they were all landed there in a
day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus
shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many
times ten days. What then? Free them all and keep them among us as underlings? Is
it quite certain that this betters their condition? I think I would not hold
one in slavery, at any rate; yet, the point is not clear enough to me to
denounce people upon. What next? Free them, and make them politically and
socially our equals? My own feelings would not admit of this; and if mine
would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.
Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question,
if, indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling whether well- or ill-founded
cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot, then, make them equals.”
That speech indicated the thought Lincoln was giving to the
racial problem in America. It showed his concern for the future of both races.
Senator Douglas, debating Lincoln on slavery, took the stand that the United
States was a government of the white people, by the white people, and for the
white people, and that it was so founded by white people as a white Christian
Nation. He aroused Lincoln's ire when he hinted that Lincoln believed otherwise
and was in favor of equality for the Negro.
Lincoln slapped Douglas down with these words: “We were
often—more than once, at least, in the course of Judge Douglas's speech last
night, reminded that this government was made for white men; that he believed it
was made for white men. Well, that is putting it into a shape in which no one
wants to deny it; but the Judge then goes into his passion for inferences that
are not warranted. I protest, now and forever, against the counterfeit logic
which presumes that because I did not want a negro woman for a slave, I do
necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I need not have her
for either, but as God made us separate, we can leave one another alone, and do
one another much good thereby. There are white men enough to marry all the
white women, and enough black men to marry all the black women; and in God's
name let them be so married.”
Lincoln at no time in his career claimed to have all the
answers to the racial problem and the records show that he literally groped his
way along the path of freedom for the slaves—and that the path he chose was
only a part of his whole plan for them, a plan which developed slowly in his
mind as he grew in proportion to the crisis.
That plan, as he finally presented it to Congress, was
worthy of him. It has never been given the attention it merits as the outstanding
recommendation of President Lincoln to the Congress and to the Nation.
Lincoln's plan for voluntary segregation was given by him to
Congress. He asked that Congress act to remove from the United States every
member of the black race who would voluntarily go under his plan. He requested
that Congress colonize the colored race in some place, or places, outside of
the United States. His decision that permanent segregation-colonization should
be undertaken by the United States Government probably arose primarily from his
long-held belief that the white man, in forcefully carrying the Negro from his
native land to live in chains had violated the teachings of the Bible. Lincoln
believed the white man should return the colored man to his native land.
He gave his strong views on this feeling when he made a
speech eulogizing Henry Clay, another American political leader of another time
who believed, like Lincoln, that the black man ought to be returned to his
native Africa.
“The American Colonization Society,” said Lincoln, “was
organized in 1816. Mr. Clay, though not its projector, was one of its earliest
members; and he died, as for the many preceding years he had been its President.
It was one of the most cherished objects of his direct care and consideration;
and the association of his name with it has probably been its very greatest
collateral support. He considered it no demerit in the society, that it tended
to relieve slaveholders from the troublesome presence of the free negroes; but
this was far from being its whole merit in his estimation.
“He says,” pointed out Lincoln, “‘There is a moral fitness
in the idea of returning to Africa her children, whose ancestors had been torn
from her by the ruthless hand of fraud and violence. Transplanted in a foreign
land, they will carry back to their native soil the rich fruits of religion,
civilization, law and liberty. May it not be one of the great designs of the
Ruler of the universe (whose ways are often inscrutable by short-sighted
mortals) thus to transform an original crime, into a signal blessing to that
most unfortunate portion of the globe?’”
Lincoln developed Clay's thought thusly with his own: “This
suggestion of the possible ultimate redemption of the African race and African
continent, was made twenty-five years ago. Each succeeding year has added
strength to the hope of its realization. May it indeed be realized! Pharaoh's
country was cursed with plagues, and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea for
striving to retain a captive people who had already served them, for four
hundred years. May like disasters never befall us! If as the friends of
colonization hope, the present and coming generations of our countrymen shall
by any means, succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery;
and, at the same time, in restoring a captive people to their long-lost
fatherland, with bright prospects for the future; and this, too, so gradually,
that neither races nor individuals shall have suffered by the change, it will
indeed be a glorious consummation. And if, to such a consummation, the efforts
of Mr. Clay shall have contributed, it will be what he most ardently wished,
and none of his labors will have been more valuable to his country and his
kind.”
Lincoln enlarged then on his idea of colonization: “I have said
that the separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation.
I have no right to say all the members of the Republican party are in favor of
this, nor to say that as a party they are in favor of it. There is nothing in
their platform directly on the subject. But I can say a very large proportion
of its members are for it, and that the chief plank in their platform—opposition
to the spread of slavery—is most favorable to the separation.
“Such separation, if ever effected at all, must be effected
by colonization; and no political party, as such, is now doing anything
directly for colonization. Party operations at present only favor or retard
colonization incidentally. The enterprise is a difficult one; but ‘where there
is a will there is a way,’ and what colonization needs most is a hearty will.
Will springs from the two elements of moral and self-interest. Let us be
brought to believe it is morally right, and at the same time, favorable to, or
at least, not against, our interest, to transfer the African to his native
clime, and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be. The
children of Israel, to such numbers as to include four hundred thousand
fighting men, went out of Egyptian bondage in a body.”
Then Lincoln made his first official recommendation that
America segregate the black race from the white in this Nation in his Annual
Message to Congress, December 3, 1861.
“Under and by virtue of the act of Congress entitled ‘An Act
to confiscate property used for insurrectionary purposes,’ approved August 6,
1861, the legal claims of certain persons to the labor and service of certain
other persons have become forfeited; and numbers of the latter, thus liberated,
are already dependent on the United States, according to some mode of
valuation, in lieu, pro tanto, of direct taxes, or upon some other plan to be
agreed on with such States respectively; that such persons, on such acceptance
by the general government, be at once deemed free; and that, in any event,
steps be taken for colonizing both classes, (or the one first mentioned, if the
other shall not be brought into existence) at some place, or places, in a
climate congenial to them. It might be well to consider, too, whether the free
colored people already in the United States could not, so far as individuals
may desire, be included in such colonization.”’
Having offered the idea of colonization in the Message,
Lincoln detailed it a little more in this writing although he did not give the
actual plan to Congress until later.
He further suggested in this Message: “To carry out the plan
of colonization may involve the acquiring of Territory, and also the
appropriation of money beyond that to be expended in the territorial
acquisition. Having practiced the acquisition of territory for nearly sixty
years, the question of constitutional power to do so is no longer an open one
with us. The power was questioned at first by Mr. Jefferson, who, however, in
the purchase of Louisiana, yielded his scruples on the plea of great expediency.
If it be said that the only legitimate object of acquiring territory is to
furnish homes for white men, this measure effects that object; for the
emigration of colored men leaves additional room for white men remaining or coming
here.”
This was merely Lincoln’s opening suggestion to Congress that
it consider segregation of the races and effect it by passing legislation
permitting colonization outside the United States. It was a feeling out
process, both of the Congress, the people, and even himself for he had not yet
fully advanced in his own mind an actual and practical plan for colonization. A
year later, however, in another Message to Congress, Lincoln presented his plan
for voluntary segregation—colonization—to the Congress.
Lincoln prefaced his proposed legislation on colonization
with this explanation to the Congress and the people:
“Applications have been made to me by many free Americans of
African descent to favor their emigration, with a view to such colonization as
was contemplated in recent acts of Congress. Other parties, at home and abroad,
some from interested motives, others upon patriotic considerations, and still
others influenced by philanthropic sentiments have suggested similar measures;
while, on the other hand, several of the Spanish-American republics have
protested against the sending of such colonies for their respective
territories. Under these circumstances, I have declined to move any such colony
to any state, without obtaining the consent of its government, with an
agreement on its part to receive and protect such emigrants in all the rights
of freemen; and I have, at the same time, offered to the several states
situated within the tropics, or having colonies there, to negotiate with them,
subject to the advice and consent of the Senate, to favor the voluntary
emigration of persons of that class to their respective territories, upon
conditions, which shall be equal, just and humane. Liberia and Hayti are, as
yet, the only countries to which colonists of African descent from here, could
go with certainty of being received and adopted as citizens, and I regret to
say such persons, contemplating colonization do not seem so willing to migrate
to those countries, as to some others, nor so willing as I think their interest
demands. I believe, however, opinion among them, in this respect, is improving;
and that, ere long, there will be an augmented, and considerable migration to
both these countries, from the United States.
“Our strife pertains to ourselves—to the passing generation
of men; and it can, without convulsion, be hushed forever with the passing of
one generation. In this view I recommend the adoption of the following
resolution and articles amendatory to the Constitution of the United States.”
The Lincoln segregation plan held three main Articles.
Article I provided for the abolition of slavery in all of
the States by 1900 AD, with the States to be compensated therefore.
Article II provided for the compensation for freed slaves of
loyal slave owners whose slaves were freed by the chance of war.
Article III provided: “Congress may appropriate money, and
otherwise provide for colonizing free colored persons, with their own consent,
at any place or places without the United States.”
Lincoln spoke of Article III: “The third article relates to
the future of the freed people. It does not oblige, but merely authorizes,
Congress to aid in Colonization of such as may consent. This ought not to be
regarded as objectionable, on the one hand, or the other, in so much as it
comes to nothing, unless by the mutual consent of the people to be deported,
and the American voters, through their representatives in Congress.”
It did “come to nothing” and the racial issue in America was
not “hushed forever” in one generation, as Lincoln planned that it should be.
Yet there were efforts made to carry out his voluntary segregation proposals.
There were instances of attempted colonization under Lincoln's kind hand but
they were not successful due largely to misrepresentation of the existing
conditions in the country receiving the former American slaves. Lincoln, upon
learning of the misrepresentation, had the colonists returned to the United States
at government expense. However, of those who migrated to Liberia it can be
truthfully said they obtained a freedom they would never have known in any
other nation. Their descendants are now among the very prosperous and happy
citizens of the Republic of Liberia, important to their own race and to their
own native land.
The South, in resisting forced integration, and the
decisions of the Supreme Court today, is not at all in violation of the
American system of government. The South, in fact, may not only defy the
Supreme Court legally but it can appeal the interpretation of Constitutional
law by the Supreme Court to the legislative branch of the government, and thus
to the people. The “decisions” of the Court can be changed in several ways, all
those ways legal and American, under the Constitution itself. Lincoln would
have recognized and upheld the right of the South to so appeal, whether he
believed their way or not. Lincoln was but one of our great American leaders
who dared to defy the dictates of the Supreme Court on national policy at those
times when the Court seemed to take upon itself the duties of making laws rather
than interpreting the Constitution.
Lincoln was the greatest fighter of all against the
liberty-killing theory that any one of the three branches of the American
government should be allowed to dictate a ruling against which the American
people could not appeal.
Indeed, Lincoln became renowned nationally when he debated
Douglas on the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court. His words on the Court
and the Negro ought to give us a clear guiding today and ought to inspire some
of our spiritless political leaders today to bravely express their true views
without a palsy of fear or hope for favor.
Lincoln believed, and said, that a decision of the Supreme
Court, like any branch of government, can be rendered on a political basis and
he believed, in particular, that the Dred Scott decision was not only political
but a conspiracy between the Court, the President and Senator Douglas.
He tore into the matter without hesitation, believing that
the Supreme Court, just as the other branches of the American government, was
answerable to the will of the people and that its decisions, while usually
unopposed, were subject to resistance through legal means if so voted by the
States themselves—this being accomplished through new legislation or an
amendment to the Constitution. He said:
“This man (Douglas) sticks to a decision which forbids the
people of a Territory from excluding slavery (the Dred Scott decision) and he
does so, not because he says it is right in itself—he does not give any opinion
on that—but because it has been decided
by the court, he is, and you are, bound to take it in your political action
as law, not that he judges at all of
its merits, but because a decision by the court is to him a ‘Thus saith the
Lord.’ He places it on that ground alone; and you will bear in mind that thus
committing himself unreservedly to this decision commits him to the next one just as firmly as to this. He did not
commit himself on account of the merit of the decision, but it is a ‘Thus saith
the Lord.’ The next decision as much as this, will be a ‘Thus saith the Lord.’
There is nothing that can divert or turn him away from this decision. It is
nothing that I point out to him that his great prototype, General Jackson, did
not believe in the binding force of decisions. It is nothing to him that
Jefferson did not so believe.”
Lincoln’s attack on the “Thus saith the Lord” attitude of
his opponent, continued: “I have asked him again to point out to me the reason
for his first adherence to the Dred Scott decision as it is. I have turned his
attention to the fact that General Jackson differed with him in regard to the
political obligation of a Supreme Court decision. I have asked his attention to
the fact that Jefferson differed with him in regard to the political obligation
of a Supreme Court decision. Jefferson said that ‘Judges are as honest as other
men, and not more so.’ And he said,
substantially, that whenever a free people should give up in absolute
submission to any department of government, retaining for themselves no appeal
from it, their liberties were gone. I have asked his attention to the fact
that the Cincinnati platform, upon which he says he stands, disregards a
time-honored decision of the Supreme Court, in denying the power of Congress to
establish a National Bank. I have asked his attention to the fact that he himself
was one of the most active instruments at one time in breaking down the Supreme
Court of the State of Illinois because it had made a decision distasteful to
him—a struggle ending the remarkable circumstance of his sitting down as one of
the new Judges who was to overslaugh that decision getting his title of Judge
in that way.”
Lincoln finished with this: “So far in this controversy I
can get no answer at all from Judge Douglas upon these subjects. Not one can I
get from him, except that he swells himself up and says, ‘All of us who stand
by the decision of the Supreme Court are the friends of the Constitution; all
you fellows that question it in any way are the enemies of the Constitution.’”
Lincoln's concern over the increasing tendency of the
Supreme Court to set national “policy” rather than to interpret the laws of the
land was so deep that he warned the Nation on this grave threat to the American
system of a tri-branch government in his First Inaugural.
Lincoln prefaced his strong words of warning on the Supreme
Court with an acknowledgement that the decisions of the Court are “binding... upon
the parties to a suit,” though even then with a chance of it being “over-ruled”
in other ways. But on the influence of the Court decisions on policy of the
nation, he gave this warning:
“At the same time,
the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital
questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions
of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between
parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own
rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the
hands of that eminent tribunal.”
Concluded next week.
[1963-07-04 Topanga Journal:]
No doubt Lincoln heard from many “bleeding hearts” when he
talked about colonizing the Negroes outside the United states and no doubt
there are today many “bleeding hearts” who prefer to let Lincoln’s segregation
plan stay right where it has been since the Emancipator died, in the dusty
files of history. But is anything Lincoln proposed to this Nation unworthy of
our solemn attention? Is Lincoln to be paid homage only when he stands as the
Man Who Freed the Slaves? What about the Lincoln who believed, and said to
Congress, that he believed the Negroes would be a happier people restored to
their own land, or to another land, where they would not be “underlings'' of
the white race?
Do we just pretend Lincoln did not so believe and thus
discard his help in this crisis which threatens us with a racial war? Or do we,
black and white alike, go to sit at Lincoln’s feet and seek his benign guidance
through the undying medium of his written word to us?
Is voluntary colonization of a people, Lincoln’s idea, an
impossibility in this day? Is it a cruel thing to contemplate? Is it degrading?
The answer rises before us, independent, proud—Israel. Land
of displaced persons, founded under the benevolent hand of the United States,
among others. It can be done, as Lincoln said: “Where there is a will, there is
a way,” and a people shall build a nation.
It would not be easy, assuming first that enough American
Negroes would accept Lincoln’s wisdom and go forth under American sponsorship to
found their own nation. But neither was it easy for the white American to found
his own nation, under persecution, and without the aid of any government, in
fact to the contrary. There were no “bleeding hearts” at all for our white
founding fathers who left an unfriendly land to pioneer a hostile land.
That Lincoln's postwar plan which would have solved the
racial problem in America was acceptable to the South was evident by the
comments upon Lincoln by Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States
of America who, upon hearing of Lincoln’s death, mourned the loss of the man,
not personally, but as a savior of the torn Nation.
Jefferson Davis described his own feelings regarding Lincoln
when he first heard that the Union President had been assassinated. It was a scene
which took place only hours before Davis was captured by Union soldiers and the
cause of the Confederacy was lost and he himself was held on suspicion of being
a conspirator in the murder of Abraham Lincoln.
“We arrived,” said Davis, “at Charlotte on April 18, 1865,
and I there received at the moment of dismounting, a telegram from General
Breckenbridge announcing on information received from General Sherman, that
President Lincoln had been assassinated. An influential citizen of the town,
who had come to welcome me, was standing near me, and, after remarking to him
in a low voice that I had received sad intelligence, I handed the telegram to
him. Some troopers encamped in the vicinity had collected to see me; they
called to the gentleman who had the dispatch in his hand to read it, no doubt
supposing it to be Army news. He complied with their request, and a few, only
taking in the fact, but not appreciating the evil it portended, cheered, as was
most natural at news of the fall of one they considered their most powerful
foe. The man who invented the story of my having read the dispatch with
exultation, had free scope of his imagination, as he was not present, and had
no chance to know whereof he bore witness, even if there had been any
foundation of truth for his fiction.
“For any enemy so relentless in the war for our subjugation,
we could not be expected to mourn; yet, in view of its political consequences,
it could not be regarded otherwise than as a great misfortune to the South. He
had power over the Northern people, and was without personal malignity toward
the people of the South; his successor was without power in the North, and the
embodiment of me malignity toward the Southern people, perhaps the more so
because he had betrayed and deserted them in their hour of need.
“But while these matters were progressing (the terms of
surrender) Lincoln had been assassinated, and a vindictive policy had been
substituted for his, which avowedly was to procure a speedy surrender of the
Army upon any terms. His evident wish was to stop the further shedding of
blood; that of his successor’s, like Sherman's, was to extract all which it was
possible to obtain. From the memoranda of the interview between Lincoln and
Sherman it is clearly to be inferred that, but for the untimely death of
Lincoln, the agreement between Generals Sherman end Johnston would have been ratified;
the wounds inflicted on civil liberty by the ‘reconstruction’ measures might
not have left their shameful scars on the United States.”
The North and the South, black and white, might well give
pause to their struggle to study in all Christian dignity the idea of voluntary
segregation or the founding of a new nation, as men have done before, in order
to make a people happier in a new life than they profess to be in the one they
now endure. If this Nation has failed the Negro, then, as did the forefathers
of the white Americans, let them go forth and build their own land.
The American Negroes who know that in America they have the
same opportunities to live and let live as white Americans, who have fought for
this Nation, who love their Country, who cherish its liberties and do not want
to see them destroyed by the Negro race, ought to prevail upon those among
themselves who are becoming the instruments of the enemy of Constitutional government
in America. Let them speak out. Let them be heard for they can help save this
Nation from a racial war.
Let everyone who respects Lincoln remember that he did not,
nor did any other honorable man, earn that respect by a Supreme Court ruling
that he should be respected; he did not gain respect by issuing an “ultimatum”
demanding it; he did not obtain it in a “sit-down strike”; and he did not have
it forced upon the people by an armed Army escort.
All Americans are less free today than they were when the
Negro began his attacks upon the right of white Americans to live in freedom,
too. They would trade hallowed American liberties for an illusion.
This Nation, under God, has endured every crisis. It shall
endure under this crisis. It may be the shadow of Abraham Lincoln casts even
longer and farther and more protectingly than ever America dreamed.
God willing.
