Those Radicals were intensely disgruntled. “A more injudicious and unjust edict has not been issued since the war began,” Joseph Medill expostulated to Chase. The treasury secretary was equally upset, telling Horace Greeley: “I have not been so sorely tried by any thing here.” Adam Gurowski thought Hunter’s decree was “too noble, too great, for the tall Kentuckian. Henceforth every Northern man dying in the South is to be credited to Mr. Lincoln.” Lydia Maria Child warned that the nation “will have to pass through shameful stages of degenerance if we blindly and recklessly throw away the glorious opportunity for atonement which the Divine Ruler has placed within our reach.” Another Massachusetts abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, predicted that Lincoln’s act “will serve to increase the disgust and uneasiness felt in Europe at our shilly-shallying course, to abate the enthusiasm of the army and friends of freedom universally, and to inspire the rebels with fresh courage and determination.” To Garrison, the future seemed “pregnant with sorrow and disaster.” Radical clergy denounced the president’s “short-sighted” and “unreasonable” act “of overweening caution & timidity” as “an insult to the country,” a “disgrace to himself and to the government,” as well as a “crime against humanity and God.” Moncure Conway hyperbolically declared that Lincoln “cannot annul the order of Gen. Hunter without being pilloried in history as the man who reenslaved nearly a million human beings.” In the House of Representatives, Thaddeus Stevens declared that Lincoln “is as honest a man as there is in the world, but I believe him too easy and amiable, and to be misled by the malign influence of Kentucky counselors.” Privately, he expressed himself more harshly, telling a friend: “As to future hopes, they are poor as Lincoln is nobody.” A disappointed black abolitionist, who had been heartened by the president’s messages on confiscation and emancipation, denounced him for overruling Hunter with a “Pro-slavery Proclamation.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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