To the left is the full text of President Lincoln's stay of execution regarding Nathaniel Gordon, issued on February 4th, 1862
The full transcription can also be accessed at: www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdfs/T-00182.pdf
The full transcription can also be accessed at: www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdfs/T-00182.pdf
President Lincoln’s actions against the institution of slavery progressed throughout his tenure, from accepting its legalization in states, to military emancipation, and ultimately abolition. This trajectory mirrors the commonly held public perception that the Civil War evolved in purpose from the preservation of the union to the emancipation of slaves. Historian James Oaks argues against the widely held belief that negative attitudes towards slavery escalated throughout the course of the war. He notes that from the very beginning of the Civil War “Republicans made it clear that they intended to pass a law freeing slaves” (Oaks 1). Was Lincoln, as one of the founding members of the Republican Party, a part of this group? Did he carry a hidden agenda against slavery and gradually unleash his plan as time went on and he expanded his bold use of presidential power? Throughout his presidency, Lincoln was increasingly willing to act on his personal views against the institution of slavery in the public realm.
On February 4th, 1862 President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation that granted a two week stay of execution for Nathaniel Gordon, a man sentenced to death by hanging “for being engaged in the Slave Trade” (Lincoln, 1862). In this document Lincoln stated that “in granting this respite, it becomes my painful duty to admonish the prisoner that, relinquishing all expectation of pardon by Human Authority, he refer himself alone to the mercy of the Common God and Father of all men.” Lincoln chose to withhold his pardoning power from Gordon, despite the fact that he was “notoriously soft-hearted in issuing pardons,” (Burlingame 3396) to make an example of his case (Burlingame 2681). Given the horrific nature of Gordon’s crimes, Lincoln felt that it was his “duty to refuse” (Lincoln, 1862), although he displayed tenderheartedness towards Gordon’s fate by invoking spiritual undertones of mercy in his message. Even though Lincoln did not issue the pardon to Gordon that many had expected, he chose to delay the execution by two weeks to allow Gordon to make “the necessary preparations for the awful change which await[ed] him” (Lincoln, 1862). Lincoln was a compassionate leader who deplored suffering, whether in the form of the slave trade or of a single man’s execution. He weighed Gordon’s abhorrent crimes in human trafficking against his own desire to treat him humanely and ultimately reconciled the two by granting a two week stay of execution. Lincoln’s refusal to pardon Gordon evidenced his increasing willingness to take political stands against the institution of slavery as the Civil War waged on.
Gordon “was probably the most successful and one of the worst of the individuals engaged in the [slave] trade…[he] had always eluded justice” (Harper’s 150). When Gordon was arrested he was found with eight hundred and ninety seven captives from as young as six months old aboard his ship, with the conditions so horrible that twenty-nine died in passage (Harper’s 150). Upon Gordon’s arrest and conviction as a slave trader, his lawyers unsuccessfully sought a pardon from President Lincoln. Lincoln stated that “I believe I am kindly enough in nature, and can be moved to pity and pardon the perpetrator of almost the worst crime that the mind of man can conceive… but any man, who… can rob Africa of her children to sell into interminable bondage, I never will pardon” (Lincoln, as quoted in Soodalter 1). Before Lincoln issued his February 4th proclamation granting Gordon’s stay of execution he was bombarded with letters and in-person requests to commute Gordon’s sentence to life. There was such public support for Gordon that thousands signed petitions and a rally was held on Wall Street (Burlingame 2681).
Publicly, Lincoln seemed resolute to let the sentence stand, and even refused to meet with Gordon’s wife (Soodalter 1). Behind closed doors however, Lincoln may have wrestled with the idea of pardoning Gordon. On January 24th he met with E. Delafield Smith, U.S. District Attorney in New York, who advised the president against interfering in the Gordon case (Lincoln Log). Similarly, Lincoln also corresponded with U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates several times on the matter. On February 4th Bates wrote a letter in response to Lincoln’s inquiry on the lawfulness of granting Gordon a stay of execution, which Bates upheld. Two weeks later, Bates wrote to Lincoln again after he reviewed papers that requested Gordon’s sentence to be commuted to life and stated that “I see nothing in the papers, as presented to me, to make it proper for you to interfere, to stop the course of the law” (Bates, Feb. 18th). The next day, just a mere two days before Gordon’s execution, Bates wrote the president again after he reviewed a letter written by Gordon’s lawyer who asked for the sentence to be commuted to life in prison because he claimed that there was no official record of the judgment. Again, Bates gave his opinion on the case when he wrote “I do not think that the President is justifiable in interposing his authority to arrest the execution of a statute merely because he thinks the law hard or too severe…I give my advice that you do decline to interpose any further, to arrest the course of law, in the case of Nathaniel Gordon” (Bates, Feb. 19th). While there is no surviving record of Lincoln and Bates’ conversations on the matter or of Lincoln’s correspondence to Bates, Bates’ letters suggest that the president may have considered commuting Gordon’s sentence to life in prison or possibly pardoning him altogether. Whatever the case, Lincoln ultimately decided to let the court take the life of a man who had taken the lives of so many before him through the slave trade.
Lincoln withstood the mounting pressure to commute Gordon’s sentence to life to take a public stand against slavery. Some argued that Gordon should not be executed because he would be the first person to be put to death under this law. To this argument Bates reasoned “someone must be the first” (Bates, Feb. 19th). Gordon would become both the first and the last American ever to be hanged for slave trading (Burlingame 2971). Due to the public fervor surrounding the case, Lincoln issued the two week extension of execution because it seemed “probable that the unsuccessful application made for the commutation of his sentence may have prevented the said Nathaniel Gordon from making the necessary preparation for the awful change which awaits him” (Lincoln, 1862). Lincoln did not feel that it was fair to execute Gordon on the original date decreed by the court due to the high hopes for a pardon, and thus extended the date of the execution. Although Lincoln’s multiple correspondences with Bates suggest that he may have wrestled with the morality of Gordon’s sentence, he ultimately decided to hold the slave trader to the full letter of the law, marking one of the gradual shifts towards Lincoln’s political intolerance of slavery.
Lincoln’s thoughts on slavery were complicated, and his willingness to act publicly against the institution increased over the passage of time. While Lincoln personally abhorred the trafficking of humans in the slave trade, at first he did not believe that the federal government had a right to interfere with states’ rights to slavery. In an 1845 letter to Williamson Durley, Lincoln wrote “I hold it to be a paramount duty of us in the free states… to let the slavery of the other states alone” (Lincoln, 1845). Throughout his political career Lincoln made many statements against the enslavement of the African race, although he made it quite clear that his ultimate goal was not the abolition of slavery but to preserve the Union at all costs. A few months before Gordon’s execution, Lincoln wrote a letter to Horace Greeley where he stated that “my paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it” (Lincoln, 1862). Although he personally detested the practice of slavery, he did not let his personal beliefs affect his political conduct.
By not commuting Gordon’s sentence to life in prison in February of 1862, Lincoln chose to take a stand against slavery. Gradually, Lincoln’s actions as president increasingly challenged the issue of slavery, most notably when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation later that same year. Historian Eric Foner contends that Lincoln’s issue of the Emancipation Proclamation “marked a drastic transformation in the nature of the Civil War and in Lincoln’s own approach to the problem of slavery” (1). While Lincoln was personally against the enslavement of human beings, his initial reaction against the practice was to push for gradual abolition, compensation for owners, and a recolonization effort in Africa. Foner argues that after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued Lincoln fully embraced an anti-slavery attitude and was more willing to put policies against the practice into action. In 1864 Lincoln wrote in a letter to Albert Hodges that “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong… And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling” (Lincoln, 1864). In this letter, he went on further to argue that he was ultimately “driven to the alternative of either surrendering the Union, and with it, the Constitution, or of laying strong hand upon the colored element.” In this letter to Hodges, Lincoln traced his own actions as president as proof that he had previously resisted emancipation efforts up until the point that he felt that it was a military necessity.
As time went on, however, Lincoln grew more audacious in his political action, or in the case of Nathaniel Gordon, inaction to pardon a convicted slave trader. Refusing to pardon Nathaniel Gordon was just the tip of the iceberg in Lincoln’s moral and political stance against slavery. Even though he had interfered with the courts and wielded his pardoning power many times before, in this particular case he felt that he should not interfere with the administration of justice, although he did alter the sentence when he granted the two week stay of execution. Though Lincoln’s compromise did not please all of his supporters, he acted on behalf of his conscience; he maintained Gordon’s execution and punishment as a slave trader yet allotted time for him to come to terms with his fate. Lincoln struggled with the decision to let Gordon hang for his crimes, but his decision moved him closer towards his true beliefs against the system of slavery and paved the way for such measures as the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment.
Works Cited
Bates, Edward. Edward Bates to Abraham Lincoln, February 4th, 1862. Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. Transcribed and Annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College. Galesburg, Illinois. Web. 23 June 2016.
---. Edward Bates to Abraham Lincoln, February 18th, 1862. Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. Transcribed and Annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College. Galesburg, Illinois. Web. 23 June 2016.
---. Edward Bates to Abraham Lincoln, February 19th, 1862. Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. Transcribed and Annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College. Galesburg, Illinois. Web. 23 June 2016.
Burlingame, Michael. Abraham Lincoln: A Life. Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 2008. Web. 23 June 2016.
Foner, Eric. “The Emancipation of Abe Lincoln.” New York Times. 31 December 2012. Web. 17 July 2016.
Lincoln, Abraham. Abraham Lincoln to Albert G. Hodges. April 4, 1864. Washington, D.C. in Roy P. Basler, ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (8 vols., New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 7:281-283.
---. Abraham Lincoln to Williamson Durley. Springfield, Illinois. October 3, 1845 in Roy P. Basler, ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. (8 vols., New Brunwick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953). 1:347-348.
---. “Proclamation, February 4th, 1862.” Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. Transcribed and Annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College. Galesburg, Illinois. Web. 23 June 2016.
---. Letter to Horace Greeley. 22 August 1862. Letter to Horace Greeley. Abraham Lincoln Online, n.d. Web. 10 July 2016.
“Lincoln and the Execution of a Slave Trader, 1862.” Harper’s Weekly, Vol. VI. 8 March 1862. Web. 23 June 2016.
The Lincoln Log: A Daily Chronology of the Life of Abraham Lincoln. Web. 23 June 2016.
Oaks, James. “Forever Free.” The New York Times/Disunion. 7 January 2013. 17 July 2016.
Soodalter, Ron. “The Limits of Lincoln’s Mercy.” The New York Times/Disunion. 23 February 2012. Web. 23 June 2016.
On February 4th, 1862 President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation that granted a two week stay of execution for Nathaniel Gordon, a man sentenced to death by hanging “for being engaged in the Slave Trade” (Lincoln, 1862). In this document Lincoln stated that “in granting this respite, it becomes my painful duty to admonish the prisoner that, relinquishing all expectation of pardon by Human Authority, he refer himself alone to the mercy of the Common God and Father of all men.” Lincoln chose to withhold his pardoning power from Gordon, despite the fact that he was “notoriously soft-hearted in issuing pardons,” (Burlingame 3396) to make an example of his case (Burlingame 2681). Given the horrific nature of Gordon’s crimes, Lincoln felt that it was his “duty to refuse” (Lincoln, 1862), although he displayed tenderheartedness towards Gordon’s fate by invoking spiritual undertones of mercy in his message. Even though Lincoln did not issue the pardon to Gordon that many had expected, he chose to delay the execution by two weeks to allow Gordon to make “the necessary preparations for the awful change which await[ed] him” (Lincoln, 1862). Lincoln was a compassionate leader who deplored suffering, whether in the form of the slave trade or of a single man’s execution. He weighed Gordon’s abhorrent crimes in human trafficking against his own desire to treat him humanely and ultimately reconciled the two by granting a two week stay of execution. Lincoln’s refusal to pardon Gordon evidenced his increasing willingness to take political stands against the institution of slavery as the Civil War waged on.
Gordon “was probably the most successful and one of the worst of the individuals engaged in the [slave] trade…[he] had always eluded justice” (Harper’s 150). When Gordon was arrested he was found with eight hundred and ninety seven captives from as young as six months old aboard his ship, with the conditions so horrible that twenty-nine died in passage (Harper’s 150). Upon Gordon’s arrest and conviction as a slave trader, his lawyers unsuccessfully sought a pardon from President Lincoln. Lincoln stated that “I believe I am kindly enough in nature, and can be moved to pity and pardon the perpetrator of almost the worst crime that the mind of man can conceive… but any man, who… can rob Africa of her children to sell into interminable bondage, I never will pardon” (Lincoln, as quoted in Soodalter 1). Before Lincoln issued his February 4th proclamation granting Gordon’s stay of execution he was bombarded with letters and in-person requests to commute Gordon’s sentence to life. There was such public support for Gordon that thousands signed petitions and a rally was held on Wall Street (Burlingame 2681).
Publicly, Lincoln seemed resolute to let the sentence stand, and even refused to meet with Gordon’s wife (Soodalter 1). Behind closed doors however, Lincoln may have wrestled with the idea of pardoning Gordon. On January 24th he met with E. Delafield Smith, U.S. District Attorney in New York, who advised the president against interfering in the Gordon case (Lincoln Log). Similarly, Lincoln also corresponded with U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates several times on the matter. On February 4th Bates wrote a letter in response to Lincoln’s inquiry on the lawfulness of granting Gordon a stay of execution, which Bates upheld. Two weeks later, Bates wrote to Lincoln again after he reviewed papers that requested Gordon’s sentence to be commuted to life and stated that “I see nothing in the papers, as presented to me, to make it proper for you to interfere, to stop the course of the law” (Bates, Feb. 18th). The next day, just a mere two days before Gordon’s execution, Bates wrote the president again after he reviewed a letter written by Gordon’s lawyer who asked for the sentence to be commuted to life in prison because he claimed that there was no official record of the judgment. Again, Bates gave his opinion on the case when he wrote “I do not think that the President is justifiable in interposing his authority to arrest the execution of a statute merely because he thinks the law hard or too severe…I give my advice that you do decline to interpose any further, to arrest the course of law, in the case of Nathaniel Gordon” (Bates, Feb. 19th). While there is no surviving record of Lincoln and Bates’ conversations on the matter or of Lincoln’s correspondence to Bates, Bates’ letters suggest that the president may have considered commuting Gordon’s sentence to life in prison or possibly pardoning him altogether. Whatever the case, Lincoln ultimately decided to let the court take the life of a man who had taken the lives of so many before him through the slave trade.
Lincoln withstood the mounting pressure to commute Gordon’s sentence to life to take a public stand against slavery. Some argued that Gordon should not be executed because he would be the first person to be put to death under this law. To this argument Bates reasoned “someone must be the first” (Bates, Feb. 19th). Gordon would become both the first and the last American ever to be hanged for slave trading (Burlingame 2971). Due to the public fervor surrounding the case, Lincoln issued the two week extension of execution because it seemed “probable that the unsuccessful application made for the commutation of his sentence may have prevented the said Nathaniel Gordon from making the necessary preparation for the awful change which awaits him” (Lincoln, 1862). Lincoln did not feel that it was fair to execute Gordon on the original date decreed by the court due to the high hopes for a pardon, and thus extended the date of the execution. Although Lincoln’s multiple correspondences with Bates suggest that he may have wrestled with the morality of Gordon’s sentence, he ultimately decided to hold the slave trader to the full letter of the law, marking one of the gradual shifts towards Lincoln’s political intolerance of slavery.
Lincoln’s thoughts on slavery were complicated, and his willingness to act publicly against the institution increased over the passage of time. While Lincoln personally abhorred the trafficking of humans in the slave trade, at first he did not believe that the federal government had a right to interfere with states’ rights to slavery. In an 1845 letter to Williamson Durley, Lincoln wrote “I hold it to be a paramount duty of us in the free states… to let the slavery of the other states alone” (Lincoln, 1845). Throughout his political career Lincoln made many statements against the enslavement of the African race, although he made it quite clear that his ultimate goal was not the abolition of slavery but to preserve the Union at all costs. A few months before Gordon’s execution, Lincoln wrote a letter to Horace Greeley where he stated that “my paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it” (Lincoln, 1862). Although he personally detested the practice of slavery, he did not let his personal beliefs affect his political conduct.
By not commuting Gordon’s sentence to life in prison in February of 1862, Lincoln chose to take a stand against slavery. Gradually, Lincoln’s actions as president increasingly challenged the issue of slavery, most notably when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation later that same year. Historian Eric Foner contends that Lincoln’s issue of the Emancipation Proclamation “marked a drastic transformation in the nature of the Civil War and in Lincoln’s own approach to the problem of slavery” (1). While Lincoln was personally against the enslavement of human beings, his initial reaction against the practice was to push for gradual abolition, compensation for owners, and a recolonization effort in Africa. Foner argues that after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued Lincoln fully embraced an anti-slavery attitude and was more willing to put policies against the practice into action. In 1864 Lincoln wrote in a letter to Albert Hodges that “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong… And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling” (Lincoln, 1864). In this letter, he went on further to argue that he was ultimately “driven to the alternative of either surrendering the Union, and with it, the Constitution, or of laying strong hand upon the colored element.” In this letter to Hodges, Lincoln traced his own actions as president as proof that he had previously resisted emancipation efforts up until the point that he felt that it was a military necessity.
As time went on, however, Lincoln grew more audacious in his political action, or in the case of Nathaniel Gordon, inaction to pardon a convicted slave trader. Refusing to pardon Nathaniel Gordon was just the tip of the iceberg in Lincoln’s moral and political stance against slavery. Even though he had interfered with the courts and wielded his pardoning power many times before, in this particular case he felt that he should not interfere with the administration of justice, although he did alter the sentence when he granted the two week stay of execution. Though Lincoln’s compromise did not please all of his supporters, he acted on behalf of his conscience; he maintained Gordon’s execution and punishment as a slave trader yet allotted time for him to come to terms with his fate. Lincoln struggled with the decision to let Gordon hang for his crimes, but his decision moved him closer towards his true beliefs against the system of slavery and paved the way for such measures as the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment.
Works Cited
Bates, Edward. Edward Bates to Abraham Lincoln, February 4th, 1862. Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. Transcribed and Annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College. Galesburg, Illinois. Web. 23 June 2016.
---. Edward Bates to Abraham Lincoln, February 18th, 1862. Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. Transcribed and Annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College. Galesburg, Illinois. Web. 23 June 2016.
---. Edward Bates to Abraham Lincoln, February 19th, 1862. Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. Transcribed and Annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College. Galesburg, Illinois. Web. 23 June 2016.
Burlingame, Michael. Abraham Lincoln: A Life. Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 2008. Web. 23 June 2016.
Foner, Eric. “The Emancipation of Abe Lincoln.” New York Times. 31 December 2012. Web. 17 July 2016.
Lincoln, Abraham. Abraham Lincoln to Albert G. Hodges. April 4, 1864. Washington, D.C. in Roy P. Basler, ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (8 vols., New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 7:281-283.
---. Abraham Lincoln to Williamson Durley. Springfield, Illinois. October 3, 1845 in Roy P. Basler, ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. (8 vols., New Brunwick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953). 1:347-348.
---. “Proclamation, February 4th, 1862.” Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. Transcribed and Annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College. Galesburg, Illinois. Web. 23 June 2016.
---. Letter to Horace Greeley. 22 August 1862. Letter to Horace Greeley. Abraham Lincoln Online, n.d. Web. 10 July 2016.
“Lincoln and the Execution of a Slave Trader, 1862.” Harper’s Weekly, Vol. VI. 8 March 1862. Web. 23 June 2016.
The Lincoln Log: A Daily Chronology of the Life of Abraham Lincoln. Web. 23 June 2016.
Oaks, James. “Forever Free.” The New York Times/Disunion. 7 January 2013. 17 July 2016.
Soodalter, Ron. “The Limits of Lincoln’s Mercy.” The New York Times/Disunion. 23 February 2012. Web. 23 June 2016.