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5 1 Planting the Seed: Charles Sumner and John Quincy Adams Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts hurried to the White House as soon as he learned that the Confederates had fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861. There he urged President Lincoln to use his power as commander in chief of the armed forces under the Constitution to free the slaves in the rebellious states. As commander in chief he could, Sumner argued, use any means necessary to suppress the rebellion.Those means included a proclamation offering freedom to the enemy’s slaves.1 Sumner’s advice must have been startling to the new president. Lincoln’s law practice in Illinois had not prepared him to deal with questions arising under the international law of war.2 Barely a month earlier, Lincoln had publicly reaffirmed in his Inaugural Address that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly to interfere with the institutions of slavery in the States where it exists,” and that he believed he had no legal right to do so.3 In 1861, most American lawyers would have agreed with Lincoln that the Federal government had no constitutional power to alter or abolish slavery in the states where it already existed.4 At about the same time, an old friend and political ally of Lincoln’s from Illinois also started to urge the necessity of emancipation. Three years older than Lincoln, Orville Hickman Browning regarded himself as the president’s superior in both breeding and intelligence. An enthusiastic , if conservative, Republican activist, he had undertaken the task of keeping the president up-to-date on the political climate in his home state, as well as that of offering national policy advice to his supposedly unsophisticated friend. 6 Act of Justice Browning first hesitantly predicted that the war would have an impact on slavery at the end of a letter dated April 18. After reassuring the new president that “you are adequate to the emergency; [and] that you will meet it as it should be met,” he reported on the state of “public sentiment” in his region; then, in the closing paragraph, he made his prediction: “I think I have a clear perception of the ultimate destiny of the Cotton States. They have invited their doom. They can never be again what they have once been. God is entering into judgment with them. He is dealing with them, and will deal with the colored race there also.”5 In a letter drafted at the end of April, Browning spelled out the implications of his prophesy for the Lincoln administration. “The time is not yet, but it will come when it will be necessary for you to march an army into the South, and proclaim freedom to the slaves. When it does come, do it. Dont [sic] hesitate. You are fighting for national life—for your own individual life. God has raised you up for a great work. Go boldly forward in the course his providence points you. Do not look back—do not falter, or he may forsake you.”6 Browning and Lincoln were both lawyers and had practiced before the same courts in Illinois. It is therefore curious that, unlike Senator Sumner, Browning did not tell his friend what legal authority he thought the president had to proclaim freedom for the slaves. Browning would address this deficiency later in the year. Unlike Orville Browning, Senator Charles Sumner had already formed definite ideas about the president’s legal authority to free slaves as commander in chief of the army and navy. These the senator had absorbed from his political mentor, former president, and longtime congressman John Quincy Adams. Adams, in turn, had become familiar with the link between war and emancipation while serving as secretary of state for President James Monroe. At that time, one of the primary diplomatic issues facing the United States was the assertion of American claims for slaves freed by the British Royal Navy during the War of 1812. Most such claims arose from the operations of Royal Navy warships deployed in Chesapeake Bay in 1814 under the command of Admiral George Cockburn. The admiralty’s orders to Cockburn included explicit instructions on dealing with American slaves. Without inciting a slave insurrection, British forces operating in American waters were to offer sanctuary to refugees from slavery and were authorized to promise them freedom if they defected. British forces were specifically ordered not to forcibly re- [3.137.187.233] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 13...

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