Mr. Lincoln’s final emancipation proclamation excited them to a still higher frenzy.  The Confederate Senate talked of raising the black flag; Jefferson Davis’s message stigmatized it as “the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man”; and a joint resolution of the Confederate Congress prescribed that white officers of negro Union soldiers “shall, if captured, be put to death, or be otherwise punished at the discretion of the court.”  The general orders of some subordinate Confederate commanders repeated or rivaled such denunciations and threats.

Fortunately, the records of the war are not stained with either excesses by the colored troops or even a single instance of such proclaimed barbarity upon white Union officers; and the visitation of vengeance upon negro soldiers is confined, so far as known, to the single instance of the massacre at Fort Pillow.  In that deplorable affair, the Confederate commander reported, by telegraph, that in thirty minutes he stormed a fort manned by seven hundred, and captured the entire garrison killing five hundred and taking one hundred prisoners while he sustained a loss of only twenty killed and sixty wounded.  It is unnecessary to explain that the bulk of the slain were colored soldiers.  Making due allowance for the heat of battle, history can considerately veil closer scrutiny into the realities wrapped in the exaggerated boast of such a victory.

The Fort Pillow incident, which occurred in the spring of 1864, brought upon President Lincoln the very serious question of enforcing an order of retaliation which had been issued on July 30, 1863, as an answer to the Confederate joint resolution of May 1.  Mr. Lincoln’s freedom from every trace of passion was as conspicuous in this as in all his official acts.  In a little address at Baltimore, while referring to the rumor of the massacre which had just been received, Mr. Lincoln said: 

“We do not to-day know that a colored soldier, or white officer commanding colored soldiers, has been massacred by the rebels when made a prisoner.  We fear it, believe it, I may say, but we do not know it.  To take the life of one of their prisoners on the assumption that they murder ours, when it is short of certainty that they do murder ours, might be too serious, too cruel, a mistake.”

When more authentic information arrived, the matter was very earnestly debated by the assembled cabinet; but the discussion only served to bring out in stronger light the inherent dangers of either course.  In this nice balancing of weighty reasons, two influences decided the course of the government against retaliation.  One was that General Grant was about to begin his memorable campaign against Richmond, and that it would be most impolitic to preface a great battle by the tragic spectacle of a military punishment, however justifiable.  The second was the tender-hearted humanity of the ever merciful President.  Frederick Douglass has related the answer Mr. Lincoln made to him in a conversation nearly a year earlier: