By Marie Pfeifer
I was always under the impression the Civil War was about abolition.
Yet difficult as it may be for some of us to believe, in the early years of the Civil War President Abraham Lincoln insisted the issue was preserving the Union.
Richard Schwartz gave a riveting presentation of Lincoln’s dilemma in a Feb. 24 talk at the North Jersey Civil War Round Table meeting in Morristown.
Every president faces difficult decisions. Lincoln struggled with two of the toughest ones: The decision to fight after the Rebel seizure of Fort Sumter in April 1861 and the decision to emancipate slaves in January 1863.
Schwartz, a history teacher who serves as Whippany Park’s Social Studies department coordinator and coordinator of the Hanover Park Regional High School District’s program for non-tenured teachers, presented an energetic, fact-based, philosophical presentation of Lincoln’s dilemma.
In 1862, Horace Greeley published in the New York Tribune “Prayer of Twenty Millions,” demanding that Lincoln enforce the newly-enacted Confiscation Act of 1862 making it illegal for Union commanders to allow slaveholders to recover runaway slaves who made it to Union lines.
Schwartz tells us, in part, of Lincoln’s famous response: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery…What I do about slavery, and the colored race I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would save the Union.”
Further indication of his inner struggle is the fact that while he wrote these words to Greeley he had already approached his Cabinet with his idea of an emancipation proclamation; Lincoln had been cautioned against it until a better time arrived.
A better time did arrive in September 1862, after what historians considered the bloodiest day in American history. The Union was narrowly victorious at Antietam Creek in Maryland. Lincoln advised his Cabinet that he had previously made a promise to himself and his Maker that as soon as the Rebel army was driven out he should issue a Proclamation of Emancipation.
“His decision turned the war in the Union’s favor,” Schwartz said. “It stripped the Rebel army and private citizens of Southern wealth. It transformed the Union Army into an army of liberation and the Confederates even more into an army fighting to hold human beings in chains, even though most Confederate soldiers owned no slaves.”
It also opened the way to the recruitment of African-American soldiers. Even though Lincoln had called slavery the greatest wrong inflicted on any people, Schwartz referred to the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 and said Lincoln “repeatedly denied wanting to make voters or jurors of black people. In his first inaugural address he denied any plan to free slaves in the slave states.”
Lincoln was conflicted not only about freeing black slaves, but allowing black slaves to enlist in the militia. In 1862 he signed into law the Militia Act permitting the enlistment of black soldiers. But he introduced separate pay scales for white and black troops.
We can’t help wonder why African Americans would want to fight for a country that had denied their freedom and their human rights. Yet 180,000 African Americans did sign on.
Schwartz cited a book by Joseph Glathaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers. “Black soldiers hoped for their own liberation and that of their loved ones and of their fellow African Americans,” he said.
Serving the Union might possibly lead to citizenship. History tells us that white officers found black soldiers quite competent. This was just the beginning of blacks’ struggle to gain equality.
After Lincoln was re-elected in 1864, he got the Thirteenth Amendment through the House of Representatives early in 1865 by wheeling and dealing. This, despite the fact that earlier on he did not advocate the social or political equality of whites and blacks.
Schwartz has not been able to account for the change in Lincoln’s thinking about blacks, so all we can do is speculate. Perhaps if he had been able to write his memoirs we would know the answer.
Schwartz, a Morristown resident, twice has been named Whippany Park’s teacher of the year. He has received teaching honors from the Newark Star Ledger and the College of New Jersey. In 2004, he received the Mildred Barry Garvin Prize from the New Jersey Historical Commission for distinguished achievement in the teaching of African-American history. He was honored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars of New Jersey in 2005 for his teaching of citizenship.
His love of history inspired his book, “The Prairie’s on Fire: Lincoln Debates Douglas, 1858.” It features the seven debates across Illinois, chronicling the political coming of age of Lincoln. It can be purchased at Amazon.com.
