I
If Robert E. Lee was unhappy with the escape of McClellan's army from destruction in the Seven Days', the southern people did not share his discontent. "The fatal blow has been dealt this 'grand army' of the North," wrote a Richmond diarist. "Lee has turned the tide, and I shall not be surprised if we have a long career of successes." Lee became the hero of the hour. No more was heard of the King of Spades or Evacuating Lee. The Richmond Whig proclaimed that the quiet Virginian had "amazed and confounded his detractors by the brilliancy of his genius . . . his energy and daring. He has established his reputation forever, and has entitled himself to the lasting gratitude of his country."1
These commentators, of course, could not foresee the profound irony of Lee's achievement. If McClellan's campaign had succeeded, the war might have ended. The Union probably would have been restored with minimal destruction in the South. Slavery would have survived in only slightly modified form, at least for a time. By defeating McClellan, Lee assured a prolongation of the war until it destroyed slavery, the Old South, and nearly everything the Confederacy was fighting for.
After the Seven Days', Union policy took a decisive turn toward total war. Northern morale initially plunged downward as far as southern
1. Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Miers), 88-89; Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography, 4 vols. (New York, 1934–35), II 244–45
morale ascended skyward. "The feeling of despondency here is very great," wrote a prominent Democrat from New York, while a Republican diarist recorded "the darkest day we have seen since Bull Run. . . . Things look disastrous. . . . I find it hard to maintain my lively faith in the triumph of the nation and the law." Although equally depressed, Lincoln did not falter. "I expect to maintain this contest," he informed state governors, "until successful, or till I die, or am conquered . . . or Congress or the country forsakes me."2
Lincoln now recognized that the cessation of recruiting in April had been a mistake. But he feared that if he issued a new appeal for recruits in the wake of the Seven Days', "a general panic and stampede would follow." Seward solved this dilemma with a clever tactic. He hastened to New York and conferred with northern governors. They agreed to issue an address (written by Seward) to the president urging him to call on the states for new volunteers to "follow up" the "recent successes of the Federal arms" and "speedily crush the rebellion." Seward backdated this document to June 28 in order to avoid the appearance of a panicked response to McClellan's retreat. In pretended compliance with the governors' appeal, Lincoln on July 2 called for 300,000 new volunteers to bring the war "to a speedy and satisfactory conclusion."3
Once again recruiting committees in the North geared up their machinery. Governors called on men to join up to fight for "the old flag, for our country, Union, and Liberty." James S. Gibbons, a Quaker abolitionist with "a reasonable leaning toward wrath in cases of emergency," wrote a popular recruiting poem that was set to music by Stephen Foster, Luther O. Emerson, and others, "We are Coming, Father Abraham, Three Hundred Thousand More." But the three hundred thousand came forward with painful slowness. The parades and rallies of 1862 were a pale imitation of the stirring demonstrations of 1861. The lengthening casualty lists had taught people that war was not a glorious game. Although the North had mobilized only a third of its potential military manpower, a booming war economy and the busy summer season on farms had left few young men at loose ends and ready to volunteer. Moreover, the new recruits, like those already in the army, had to enlist for three years. Governors informed the War Department
2. Samuel L. M. Barlow to Henry D. Bacon, July 15, 1862, Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library; Strong, Diary, 234, 236, 239, 241; CWL, V, 292.
3. CWL, V, 292–97. The War Department established state quotas for these 300,000 volunteers apportioned on the basis of population.
that they could easily raise enough short-term men to fill their quotas, but getting three-year recruits would be difficult.
In response the government adopted an ingenious carrot and stick approach. The carrot was bounties. The War Department authorized payment in advance of $25 of the traditional $100 bounty normally paid in full upon honorable discharge. In addition, some states or cities offered bounties to three-year recruits. Intended as a compensation for the economic sacrifice made by a volunteer and his family, these initially modest bounties were the forerunner of what later became a mercenary bidding contest for warm bodies to fill district quotas. The stick was a militia law enacted by Congress on July 17, 1862. This law defined the militia as comprising all able-bodied men between ages eighteen and forty-five and empowered the president to call state militia into federal service for a period of up to nine months. Since the militia in several states had fallen into a comatose condition, a key provision of the act authorized the president to "make all necessary rules and regulations . . . to provide for enrolling the militia and otherwise putting this act into execution."4 Here was a potential for an enormous expansion of federal power at the expense of the states. The government did not hesitate to use this power to reach across state boundaries and institute a quasi-draft. On August 4 the War Department imposed on the states a levy of 300,000 nine-month militia in addition to the 300,000 three-year volunteers called for a month earlier.5Moreover, any deficiency in meeting quotas under the earlier call must be made up by levying an equivalent number of additional nine-month men. And if the states did not mobilize these militia, the War Department would step in and do it for them. Secretary of War Stanton softened the blow of this big stick, however, with a regulation stipulating that every three-year volunteer enlisted above quota would be counted as four men against the nine-month militia quota.
Although of dubious legality and confusing arithmetic, this regulation achieved its purpose. With the help of several postponed deadlines, most states enrolled a sufficient combination of three-year and nine-month recruits to avoid a draft of nine-month men. Before the end of 1862 this procedure had produced 421,000 three-year volunteers and 88,000 militiamen, which according to Stanton's arithmetic exceeded the combined
4. U.S. Statutes at Large, XII, 597.
5. Men employed in several occupations vital to the war effort were exempted from militia service.
quotas by 45 percent. Most of the volunteers were recruited by the time-honored method of organizing new regiments with their complement each of thirty-odd officers' commissions as political plums. Some of these new regiments became crack units by 1863, but in the process they had to go through the same high-casualty trial-and-error experiences as their 1861 predecessors.
In several states a militia draft became necessary to fill the quotas. This draft met violent resistance in some areas, especially Irish Catholic neighborhoods in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, Butternut districts in Ohio and Indiana, and German Catholic townships in Wisconsin. Mobs murdered two enrollment officers in Indiana and wounded a commissioner in Wisconsin. The army had to send troops into all four states to keep order and carry out the draft. On September 24, Lincoln issued a proclamation suspending the writ of habeas corpus and subjecting to martial law "all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting militia drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice affording aid and comfort to the rebels." The War Department took off the gloves to enforce this decree. Stanton created a network of provost marshals who arrested and imprisoned without trial several hundred draft resisters and antiwar activists, including five newspaper editors, three judges, and several minor political leaders.6
Most of the men arrested were Democrats. This did not signify a determination by the Republican administration to get rid of its political adversaries—as Democrats charged. Rather it reflected the reality that virtually all those who denounced and resisted the militia draft were Democrats. They represented the most conservative wing of the party on such issues as emancipation, the draft, and the financial legislation passed by the Republican Congress in 1862. Opposition to these measures was strongest among Irish and German Catholics and among Butternuts of the southern Midwest whose wealth and income were significantly below the northern median. These groups rioted against the draft while carrying banners proclaiming "The Constitution As It Is, The Union As It Was" and "We won't fight to free the nigger."7
Such slogans offer a key to understanding both the motives of antidraft
6. CWL, V, 436–37; Robert E. Sterling, "Civil War Draft Resistance in the Middle West," Ph.D. dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1974, chaps. 3–4.
7. Sterling, "Draft Resistance in the Middle West," 96–97. This study contains valuable data correlating draft resistance with political, ethnocultural, geographic, and economic variables. See especially 129, 248, and 535.
resisters and the Republican response to them. The "copperhead" faction of the northern Democratic party opposed the transformation of the Civil War into a total war—a war to destroy the old South instead of to restore the old Union.8 In Republican eyes, opposition to Republican war aims became opposition to the war itself. Opponents therefore became abettors of the rebellion and liable to military arrest. Most such arrests in 1861 had occurred in border states where pro-Confederate sentiment was rife. In 1862, many of the men arrested were northern Democrats whose disaffection from the war had been sparked by Republican adoption that year of emancipation as a war policy.