Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

as military in the narrow sense, as may be inferred from Grant’s 
account of the advantages of a war of movement in North Carolina. 
It would, Grant wrote, “give us possession of many Negroes who 
are indirectly aiding the rebellion.”
61
 In practice, of course, the 
appearance of Union columns led the slaves to act no longer as 
mere “possessions,” but as Union scouts, auxiliaries, and recruits 
eager to see the Confederacy defeated. Th
 e Emancipation policy 
was always premised on the view that slaves would respond to it. So 
long as slaves were still unarmed in the face of mounted patrols and 
blood-hounds, there was little they could do, but once Union troops 
thrust into Confederate territory the black population became an 
invaluable ally, helping the Union at last to crush the stubborn 
rebellion. Th
  ere had been intimations of this in 1862 and 1863 but, 
partly because of excessive caution, the emancipation policy was not 
pursued with suffi
  cient vigor until the last six months of the war. 
62
 
From time to time Lincoln hankered for an aggressive military 
policy linked to emancipationism. As early as March 1863 he wrote 
to Governor Andrew Johnson of Tennessee warmly endorsing the 
idea of Johnson taking command of a “negro military force” since 
“[t]he colored population is the great available, yet unavailed of, 
force for the restoration of the union.” He was especially supportive 
of this since Johnson was the governor of a slave state, and “[him-
self ] a slaveholder.” Lincoln was convinced that “[t]he bare sight 
of fi fty thousand armed and drilled black soldiers on the banks of 
the Mississippi would end the rebellion at once.”
63
 Wendell Phillips 
had pointed out in an infl uential lecture that Toussaint Louverture 
had raised precisely such a drilled black force in Saint Domingue 
in the 1790s and trounced the Spanish and British.
64
 But, unlike 
Andrew Johnson, Toussaint was black and a former slave.
61  Quoted Archer Jones, “Jomini and the Strategy of the American Civil 
War: a Reinterpretation,” Military Aff airs, December 1970, pp. 127–31, p. 130.
62  See Steven Hahn, “Did We Miss the Greatest Rebellion in Modern 
History,” Th e Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, Cambridge, MA, 2009, 
pp. 55–114. See also James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: an Interpretation of the 
Old South, New York 1990, pp. 185–92. 
63  Letter to Gov. Johnson 26 March 1863, Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and 
Writings, pp. 694–5.
64 Mathew 
Clavin, 
Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: the 
Promise and the Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution, New York 2010, pp. 6–7.
44  an unfinished revolution

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Lincoln later returned to the idea of an unorthodox force that 
might get behind enemy lines. In August 1864, he invited Frederick 
Douglass, the black abolitionist, to visit him to discuss whether 
there might be some way of bringing the emancipation message 
to the mass of still enslaved blacks and of encouraging them to 
desert the plantations. He explained, “Th
  e slaves are not coming as 
rapidly and numerously to us as we had hoped.”
65
 Lincoln seems 
to have envisioned a small, highly mobile force, but it is not clear 
whether he intended that the commander be black, nor what rules 
of engagement the unit might have. Th
  e president was keen to avoid 
any hint or imputation of race war (the Proclamation’s injunction 
against violence toward slaveholders was prompted by this concern). 
Th
  e encounter with Douglass did not come to anything. Douglass 
thought a propagandist column would soon be overwhelmed. Th
 e 
65 Frederick 
Douglass, 
Life and Times of Frederick Douglas, quoted by James 
Oakes in Th e Radical and the Republican, New York 2007, p. 231. 
Frederick Douglass, 1852
introduction  45

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two men did not meet again for several months during which 
General Sherman’s capture of Atlanta and march to the sea at last 
brought the possibility of escape to masses of slaves on his route. 
Union successes also ensured Lincoln’s victory in the election of 
1864, something that had seemed—to Lincoln as well as his critics 
and opponents—very much in doubt in the summer of that year. 
THE ADDRESS OF THE INTERNATIONAL TO 
PRESIDENT LINCOLN 
It is at this point that we should consider the brief and mediated 
exchange between Marx and the US president. Th
  e two men were 
both averse to wordy rhetoric and conventional pieties, and yet both 
discovered an emancipatory potential in a bloody and often sordid 
Civil War. Lincoln did not indulge in fl owery language. When it 
came to justifying slave emancipation, Lincoln was bound by politi-
cal and constitutional considerations, the need to retain the loyalty 
of the border states, and the legal obligation to take only such 
actions as conformed to his war powers as president. So neither 
the Emancipation Proclamation nor the Gettysburg address avow 
an abolitionist objective, even if both had an implicit antislavery 
message for those willing to hear it.
Th
  e Radical Republicans liked the Emancipation Proclamation 
but saw it as incomplete. It left in bondage some 800,000 slaves 
owned by loyal masters—and, of course, those in rebel territory—
so the fi nal fate of slavery still remained to be decided. Radical 
Republicans debated diff erent options, and in January 1864 they 
introduced a Th
 irteenth Amendment that, if approved by the 
necessary majorities, would end slavery and override any peace 
negotiations or Supreme Court rulings that might salvage slavery’s 
considerable remnants.
66
Lincoln was aware that the Proclamation might be vulnerable, 
and this awareness may explain why he invited the artist Francis 
Carpenter to stay a few months at the White House and paint a 
66 Michael 
Vorenberg, 
Final Freedom: Th
  e Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, 
and the Th
 irteenth Amendment,
 
Cambridge 2001, 197–210. 
46  an unfinished revolution

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