President Lincoln's "Blind Memorandum"

[David Lockmiller]

The following is from the unabbreviated portion of the chapter 33 of the same book that may be found on the Knox College website. If anyone is interested, I can provide instructions once again, as I did a long time ago, on how to do research on this more extensive scholarly work of Professor Burlingame.

Four days earlier, Lincoln had explained his pessimism to Commissioner of Indian Affairs William P. Dole and a pair Wisconsin Republican leaders, Judge Joseph T. Mills and Alexander W. Randall. He assured them that “there is no program intended by the democratic party but that will result in the dismemberment of the Union.” When his visitors objected that George McClellan would probably be the Democratic nominee and he was “in favor of crushing out the rebellion,” Lincoln replied that the “slightest acquaintance with arithmetic will prove to any man that the rebel armies cannot be destroyed with democratic strategy. It would sacrifice all the white men of the north to do it. There are now between 1 & 200 thousand black men now in the service of the Union. These men will be disbanded, returned to slavery & we will have to fight two nations instead of one. I have tried it. You cannot concilliate the South when the mastery & control of millions of blacks makes them sure of ultimate success. You cannot concilliate the South, when you place yourself in such a position that they see they can achieve their independence. The war democrat depends upon conciliation. He must confine himself to that policy entirely. If he fights at all in such a war as this he must economise life & use all the means which God & nature puts in his power. Abandon all the posts now possessed by black men, surrender all these advantages to the enemy, & we would be compelled to abandon the war in 3 weeks. We have to hold territory. Where are the war democrats to do it? The field was open to them to have enlisted & put down this rebellion by force of arms, by concilliation, long before the present policy was inaugurated. There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson & Olustee to their masters to conciliate the South. I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends & enemies, come what will. My enemies say I am now carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition. It is & will be carried on so long as I am President for the sole purpose of restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done. Freedom has given us the control of 200,000 able bodied men, born & raised on southern soil. It will give us more yet. Just so much it has sub[t]racted from the strength of our enemies, & instead of alienating the south from us, there are evidences of a fraternal feeling growing up between our own & rebel soldiers. My enemies condemn my emancipation policy. Let them prove by the history of this war, that we can restore the Union without it.”


These remarks were recorded in the diary of Judge Mills, who had expected to find Lincoln little more than a joker. Instead, the president impressed him as “a man of deep convictions,” the “great guiding intellect of the age,” whose “Atlantian shoulders were fit to bear the weight of [the] mightiest monarchies.” Lincoln’s “transparent honesty, his republican simplicity, his gushing sympathy for those who offered their lives for their country, his utter forgetfulness of self in his concern for his country” made him seem to the judge “Heaven[’]s instrument to conduct his people thro[ugh] this red sea of blood to a Canaan of peace & freedom.”