On the morning of 11 April, Lincoln met privately with General Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts. The subject of the meeting went unreported for nearly 20 years. That morning Lincoln admitted that he was ‘troubled about the negroes’ after emancipation. According to Butler, he worried that the 150,000 blacks of the Union army would fight their former masters if denied an equal place in Southern society. Lincoln’s instinct was to ‘export them all to some fertile country with a good climate, which they could have to themselves’. Butler had the perfect plan. Why not send 50,000 black troops to dig a canal across the Panamanian isthmus? Butler would lead the mission, and Congress could provide money to relocate the soldiers and their families in ‘a United States colony … which will hold its own against all comers, and be contented and happy’. America would have its highway between the oceans, and blacks would have a permanent home where they might enjoy freedom without white recrimination. ‘There is meat in that suggestion, General,’ Lincoln supposedly told Butler.
Butler’s story used to be widely accepted. These days, virtually every historian dismisses it. Lincoln’s staunchest defenders insist that he never seriously entertained removing blacks, that his public statements about colonisation in the 1850s and early 1860s were a diversionary tactic intended to persuade a prejudiced public to accept emancipation. More critical historians concede Lincoln’s enthusiasm for colonisation schemes, but argue that his views advanced in the war’s last years, and that his belated endorsement of limited black suffrage demonstrates how much he had ‘grown’ in the White House. Eric Foner has become the leading exponent of the second point of view, and The Fiery Trial is a sustained argument for Lincoln’s growth into greatness. Foner consigns Butler’s claims to an endnote and assures us that ‘most historians doubt the reliability of Butler’s recollection.’
As the United States enters its long commemoration of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial, Lincoln’s interest in black removal presents an awkward problem. The standard story of his achievement is as clear as it is reassuring: he freed the slaves, enabling the republic to escape from its founding sin and renewing the promise that ‘all men are created equal.’ When he died, racist Southerners prevented black citizenship with a sweeping system of segregation that endured for a century. In The Fiery Trial, Lincoln moves, haltingly but inexorably, towards a glimpse of black citizenship that is occluded by an assassin’s bullet. But Butler’s renegade recollection is not the only reason to resist the pull of this narrative. What if Lincoln himself was an advocate of the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine? What if the vision of black belonging forged by radical abolitionists was fatally undermined by Northern enthusiasm for black removal?