II

By the beginning of 1862 the impetus of war had evolved three shifting and overlapping Republican factions on the slavery question. The most dynamic and clearcut faction were the radicals, who accepted the abolitionist argument that emancipation could be achieved by exercise of the belligerent power to confiscate enemy property. On the other wing of the party a smaller number of conservatives hoped for the ultimate demise of bondage but preferred to see this happen by the voluntary action of slave states coupled with colonization abroad of the freed slaves. In the middle were the moderates, led by Lincoln, who shared the radicals' moral aversion to slavery but feared the racial consequences of wholesale emancipation. Events during the first half of 1862 pushed moderates toward the radical position.

One sign of this development was the growing influence of abolitionists. "Never has there been a time when Abolitionists were as much respected, as at present," rejoiced one of them in December 1861. "It is hard to realize the wondrous change which has befallen us," mused

8. Like most political labels, "copperhead" was originally an epithet invented by opponents. Ohio Republicans seem to have used it as early as the fall of 1861 to liken antiwar Democrats to the venomous snake of that name By the fall of 1862 the term had gained wide usage and was often applied by Republicans to the whole Democratic party. By 1863 some Peace Democrats proudly accepted the label and began wearing badges bearing likenesses of the Goddess of Liberty from the copper penny to symbolize their opposition to Republican "tyranny." Albert Matthews, "Origin of Butternut and Copperhead," Proceedings of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts (1918), 205–37; Charles H. Coleman, "The Use of the Term 'Copperhead' during the Civil War," MVHR, 25 (1938), 263–64.

another.⁹ The most radical of them all, Wendell Phillips, lectured to packed houses all over the North in the winter and spring of 1862. In March he came to Washington—which he could scarcely have entered without danger to his life a year earlier—and spoke on three occasions to large audiences that included the president and many members of Congress. Phillips also had the rare privilege of a formal introduction on the floor of the Senate. "The Vice-President left his seat and greeted him with marked respect," wrote a reporter for the New York Tribune. "The attentions of Senators to the apostle of Abolition were of the most flattering character." Noting the change from the previous winter when mobs had attacked abolitionists as troublemakers who had provoked the South to secession, the Tribune observed: "It is not often that history presents such violent contrasts in such rapid succession. . . . The deference and respect now paid to him by men in the highest places of the nation, are tributes to the idea of which he, more than any other one man, is a popular exponent." Even the New York Times gave abolitionists its imprimatur in January 1862 by sending a reporter to the convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. "In years heretofore a great deal has been said and much fun has been made . . . of these gatherings," said the Times. "The facts that black and white met socially here, and that with equal freedom men and women addressed the conglomerate audience, have furnished themes for humorous reporters and facetious editors; but no such motives have drawn here the representatives of fifteen of the most widely circulated journals of the North. Peculiar circumstances have given to [abolitionist meetings] an importance that has hitherto not been theirs."¹⁰

These peculiar circumstances were the growing Republican conviction that the fate of the nation could not be separated from the fate of slavery. In an important House speech on January 14, 1862, radical leader George W. Julian of Indiana set the tone for Republican congressional policy. "When I say that this rebellion has its source and life in slavery, I only repeat a simple truism," declared Julian. The four million slaves "cannot be neutral. As laborers, if not as soldiers, they will be the allies of the rebels, or of the Union." By freeing them the North would convert their labor power from support of treason to support of

9. Principia, Dec. 21, 1861; Mary Grew to Wendell P. Garrison, Jan. 9, 1862, Garrison Family Papers, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester.

10. New York Tribune, March 15, 18, 1862; New York Times, Jan. 25, 1862.

Union and liberty. This would hasten the day of national triumph, but even if the nation should triumph without such action "the mere suppression of the rebellion will be an empty mockery of our sufferings and sacrifices, if slavery shall be spared to canker the heart of the nation anew, and repeat its diabolical deeds."¹¹

By midsummer 1862 all but the most conservative of Republicans had come to a similar conclusion. "You can form no conception of the change of opinion here as to the Negro question," wrote Senator John Sherman in August to his brother the general. "I am prepared for one to meet the broad issue of universal emancipation." A conservative Boston newspaper conceded that "the great phenomenon of the year is the terrible intensity which this [emancipation] resolution has acquired. A year ago men might have faltered at the thought of proceeding to this extremity, [but now] they are in great measure prepared for it."¹²

Given this mood, antislavery bills poured into the congressional hopper like leaves dropping from trees in autumn. Referred to committees, they met a friendly reception. A unique combination of history and geography had given New England-born radicals extraordinary power in Congress, especially the Senate. New England and the upper tier of states west of the Hudson settled by Yankee emigrants had been the birthplace of abolitionism and free soil politics. From these regions had come to Washington the earliest and most radical Republicans. Eleven of the twelve New England senators chaired committees, and men born in New England but now representing other states held five of the eleven remaining chairmanships. Five of the ten most prominent radicals in the House, including the speaker and the chairman of the ways and means committee (Galusha Grow and Thaddeus Stevens, both of Pennsylvania) had been born and raised in New England. Little wonder, then, that seven emancipation or confiscation bills were favorably reported out of congressional committees by mid-January and became law during the next six months.¹³

Some of these laws fulfilled longstanding free-soil goals: prohibition

11. CG, 37 Cong., 2 Sess., 327–32.

12. John Sherman to William T. Sherman, Aug. 24, 1862, in Rachel S. Thorndike, ed., The Sherman Letters: Correspondence between General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891 (London, 1894), 156–57; Boston Advertiser, Aug. 20, 1862.

13. Leonard P. Curry, Blueprint for Modern America: Nonmilitary Legislation of the First Civil War Congress (Nashville, 1968), esp. chaps. 1–4; Allan G. Bogue, The Earnest Men: Republicans of the Civil War Senate (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981), esp. chaps. 1–6.

of slavery in the territories; ratification of a new treaty with Britain for more effective suppression of the slave trade; and abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. But while these would have been heralded as great antislavery achievements in peacetime, they scarcely touched the real war issues concerning slavery in 1862. More important was a new article of war passed on March 13 forbidding army officers to return fugitive slaves to their masters. This grappled with the question first raised by Benjamin Butler's "contraband" policy in 1861. Union conquests along the south Atlantic coast and in the lower Mississippi Valley had brought large numbers of slaves into proximity to the Yankees. Many of them escaped their owners and sought refuge—and freedom—in Union camps.

Sometimes their welcome was less than friendly. While northern soldiers had no love for slavery, most of them had no love for slaves either. They fought for Union and against treason; only a minority in 1862 felt any interest in fighting for black freedom. Rare was the soldier who shared the sentiments of a Wisconsin private: "I have no heart in this war if the slaves cannot be free." More common was the conviction of a New York soldier that "we must first conquer & then its time enough to talk about the dam'd niggers." While some Yanks treated contrabands with a degree of equity or benevolence, the more typical response was indifference, contempt, or cruelty. Soon after Union forces captured Port Royal, South Carolina, in November 1861, a private described an incident there that made him "ashamed of America": "About 8–10 soldiers from the New York 47th chased some Negro women but they escaped, so they took a Negro girl about 7–9 years old, and raped her." From Virginia a Connecticut soldier wrote that some men of his regiment had taken "two niger wenches . . . turned them upon their heads, & put tobacco, chips, sticks, lighted cigars & sand into their behinds."¹⁴ Even when Billy Yank welcomed the contrabands, he often did so from utilitarian rather than humanitarian motives. "Officers & men are having an easy time," wrote a Maine soldier from occupied Louisiana in 1862. "We have Negroes to do all fatigue work, cooking and washing clothes."¹⁵

Before March 1862, Union commanders had no legislative guidelines for dealing with contrabands. Some officers followed Butler's precedent

14. Wiley, Billy Yank, 40, 44, 114.

15. Bell I. Wiley, "The Boys of 1861," in William C. Davis, ed., Shadows of the Storm, Vol. I of The Image of War: 1861–1865 (Garden City, N.Y., 1981), 127.

of sheltering them and turning away white men who claimed to be their owners. The Treasury Department sent agents to the conquered South Carolina sea islands to supervise contraband labor in completing the harvest of cotton for sale to New England mills. Abolitionists organized freedmen's aid societies which sent teachers and labor superintendents to these islands to launch a well-publicized experiment in free labor and black education. But in other areas, commanding officers refused to admit slaves to Union camps and returned them to owners. In his Western Department, General Halleck ordered contrabands excluded from Union lines on grounds of military security. Though many of Halleck's field commanders honored this order in the breach, its existence produced an outcry from radicals who insisted that the army had no business enforcing the fugitive slave law. Thus Congress enacted the new article of war prohibiting, under penalty of court-martial, the return of fugitives from army camps even to masters who claimed to be loyal.

Here was a measure with large potential for breaking down slavery in the Union as well as the Confederate slave states. This circumstance gave added force to Lincoln's first step in the direction of an emancipation policy. As a gradualist who hoped to end slavery without social dislocation and with the voluntary cooperation of slaveowners, Lincoln in 1862 thought he saw an opening in the mounting pressures against the institution. Border-state unionists could scarcely fail to recognize the portent of these pressures, he reasoned. Therefore they might respond positively to an offer of federal compensation for voluntary emancipation of their slaves. On March 6, Lincoln asked Congress to pass a resolution offering "pecuniary aid" to "any state which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery." This was not merely a humanitarian measure, said the president; it was a means of shortening the war, for if the border states became free the Confederacy would no longer be sustained by the hope of winning their allegiance. To those who might deplore the cost of compensation, Lincoln pointed out that three months of war expenditures would buy all the slaves in the four border states. To slaveholders the president uttered a thinly veiled warning: if they refused this offer "it is impossible to foresee all the incidents which may attend and all the ruin which may follow" a continuation of the war.¹⁶

Congress adopted Lincoln's resolution on April 10. All Republicans supported it; 85 percent of the Democrats and border-state unionists voted against it. The latter's opposition was a discouraging sign. Lincoln

16. CWL, V, 144–46.

had already held one unsuccessful meeting with border-state congressmen, on March 10, when they questioned the constitutionality of his proposal, bristled at its hint of federal coercion, and deplored the potential race problem that would emerge with a large free black population.¹⁷

In the months following this meeting the scale of the war and of emancipation sentiment increased. Congress moved toward passage of an act confiscating Confederate property. Tens of thousands more contrabands came under Union army control. On May 9, General David Hunter, commander of Union forces occupying the islands off the South Carolina and Georgia coast, issued a sweeping declaration of martial law abolishing slavery in all three states constituting his "Department of the South" (South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida). Hunter, like Frémont and Cameron before him, had taken this action without informing Lincoln, who first learned of it from the newspapers. "No commanding general shall do such a thing, on my responsibility, without consulting me," Lincoln told Treasury Secretary Chase, who had urged approval of Hunter's edict. Lincoln revoked it and rebuked the general. While conservatives applauded this action, they should have noticed the antislavery sting in the tail of Lincoln's revocation. The substance of Hunter's order might "become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the government," hinted the president, but this was a decision which "I reserve to myself." Lincoln then appealed to border-state unionists to reconsider his offer of compensated, gradual emancipation. The changes produced by such a plan "would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything. Will you not embrace it? . . . You can not if you would, be blind to the signs of the times."¹⁸

Lincoln's estimate of the border-state representatives' vision was too generous. In May 1862 these men shared the northern expectation of imminent military victory. If McClellan could capture Richmond the rebellion might be ended with slavery still intact. The Seven Days' should

17. Memorandum of the meeting written by Representative John W. Crisfield of Maryland, printed in Charles M. Segal, ed., Conversations with Lincoln (New York, 1961), 164–68.

18. CWL, V, 219, 222–23. By gradual emancipation Lincoln had in mind the example after the Revolution of northern states that had provided for the future emancipation of slaves when they reached a certain age. He had also suggested to a Delaware senator the setting of a date (for example, 1882) by which the institution of slavery would be legally terminated. Lincoln to James A. McDougal, March 14, 1862 (ibid., 160).

have destroyed this hope. The new measures of recruitment and mobilization undertaken in response to McClellan's defeat indicated a turn toward total war in which preservation of "the Union as it was" became an impossible dream—but still most border-state politicians remained blind to the signs.

In July 1862 the 37th Congress climaxed its second session with passage of two laws that signaled the turn toward a harsher war policy. The first was the militia act under which the government subsequently called for a draft of nine-month men. This bill also empowered the president to enroll "persons of African descent" for "any war service for which they may be found competent"—including service as soldiers, a step that would horrify conservatives and that the adminstration was not yet prepared to take. But the law gave the government revolutionary leverage. As even moderate Republican senators observed, "the time has arrived when . . . military authorities should be compelled to use all the physical force of this country to put down the rebellion." The war must be fought on "different principles"; the time for "white kid-glove warfare" was past.¹⁹

This theme was underlined by the confiscation act of July 1862 which punished "traitors" by confiscating their property, including slaves who "shall be deemed captives of war and shall be forever free." But the law was so confusing and poorly drawn that a good lawyer probably could have "driven through it with a two horse team." The confusion resulted mainly from the dual character of the Civil War as a domestic insurrection and as a war. The confiscation act seized the property of rebels as a punishment for treason but also freed their slaves as "captives of war." Chairman Lyman Trumbull of the Senate Judiciary Committee saw no inconsistency in this. "We may treat them as traitors," he said, "and we may treat them as enemies, and we have the right of both, belligerent and sovereign."²⁰ But the law's provisions for enforcing the sovereign right were vague, consisting of in rem proceedings by district courts that were of course not functioning in the rebellious states. Yet the confiscation act was important as a symbol of what the war was becoming—a war to overturn the southern social order as a means of reconstructing the Union.

19. U.S. Statutes at Large, XII, 597; Senators John Sherman and William Pitt Fessenden quoted in Bogue, Earnest Men, 162.

20. U.S. Statutes at Large, XII, 589–92; New York Herald, July 18, 1862; Trumbull quoted in Bogue, Earnest Men, 220.

The agency for accomplishing this was the executive working through the enforcing power of the army. July 1862 brought a significant hardening of attitude in both army and executive. John Pope arrived from the West to take command of the newly designated Army of Virginia, formed from the divisions of Banks, Frémont, and McDowell that had chased Stonewall Jackson so futilely in the Shenandoah Valley. Irked by this promotion of a junior general over his head, Frémont offered his resignation, which Lincoln gratefully accepted. Although the radical Republicans thereby lost one of their favorite commanders, they soon discovered in Pope a kindred spirit. One of his first acts in Virginia was a series of general orders authorizing his officers to seize rebel property without compensation, to shoot captured guerrillas who had fired on Union troops, to expel from occupied territory any civilians who refused to take the oath of allegiance, and to treat them as spies if they returned.

Southerners erupted in anger toward Pope, whom they execrated with a fury felt toward no other Yankee "vandal" except Butler and, later, Sherman. Robert E. Lee declared that this "miscreant Pope" must be "suppressed." Jefferson Davis threatened retaliation on Union prisoners if captured guerrillas were executed. Pope's orders were undoubtedly ill-advised, but not groundless. Southern civilians behind Union lines did form partisan bands to pick off Yankee stragglers, teamsters, and other rear-area personnel. Captured papers of Confederate Colonel John D. Imboden, commander of the First Partisan Rangers in Virginia, included orders "to wage the most active war against our brutal invaders . . . to hang about their camps and shoot down every sentinel, picket, courier, and wagon driver we can find."²¹

Although Pope did not shoot any guerrillas or expel any civilians, his policy concerning southern property was carried out, in Virginia as in other theaters, by privates as well as officers, with or without orders. Large portions of the South were becoming a wasteland. Much of this was the inevitable destruction of war, as both armies cut down trees and tore up fences for firewood, wrecked bridges and culverts and railroads or cannibalized whatever structures they could find to rebuild wrecked bridges and railroads, or seized crops, livestock, and poultry for food. Soldiers have pillaged civilian property since the beginning of time. But by midsummer 1862 some of the destruction of southern property had acquired a purposeful, even an ideological dimension. More and more Union soldiers were writing that it was time to take off the "kid gloves"

21. Nevins, War, II, 155–56.

in dealing with "traitors." "The iron gauntlet," wrote one officer, "must be used more than the silken glove to crush this serpent." It seemed only logical to destroy the property of men who were doing their best to destroy the Union—to "spoil the Egyptians," as Yankee soldiers put it. "This thing of guarding rebel property when the owner is in the field fighting us is played out," wrote the chaplain of an Ohio regiment. "That is the sentiment of every private soldier in the army."²² It was a sentiment sanctioned from the top. In July, Lincoln called Halleck to Washington to become general in chief. One of Halleck's first orders to Grant, now commander of occupation forces in western Tennessee and Mississippi, was to "take up all active [rebel] sympathizers, and either hold them as prisoners or put them beyond our lines. Handle that class without gloves, and take their property for public use. . . . It is time that they should begin to feel the presence of the war."²³

Take their property. Here was abolition in action. As one of Grant's subordinates explained, "the policy is to be terrible on the enemy. I am using Negroes all the time for my work as teamsters, and have 1,000 employed." Emancipation was a means to victory, not yet an end in itself. Grant informed his family that his only desire was "to put down the rebellion. I have no hobby of my own with regard to the Negro, either to effect his freedom or to continue his bondage. . . . I am using them as teamsters, hospital attendants, company cooks and so forth, thus saving soldiers to carry the musket. I don't know what is to become of these poor people in the end, but it weakens the enemy to take them from them."²⁴

One prominent northerner who deplored this new turn in the war was McClellan. When Lincoln came down to Harrison's Landing on July 8 to see for himself the condition of McClellan's army, the general handed him a memorandum on the proper conduct of the war. "It should not be a war looking to the subjugation of the [southern] people," McClellan instructed the president. "Neither confiscation of property . . . [n]or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment. . . . It should not be a war upon population, but against armed forces. . . . Military power should not be allowed to interfere with the relations of servitude. . . . A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present armies."²⁵

22. Bruce Catton, Grant Moves South (Boston, 1960), 294, 296.

23. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 17, pt. 1, p. 150.

24. Grenville Dodge and Grant quoted in Catton, Grant Moves South, 294, 297.

25. George B. McClellan, McClellan's Own Story (New York, 1887), 487–89.

Lincoln read these words in McClellan's presence without comment. But the president's thoughts can be reconstructed. Three or four months earlier he would have agreed with McClellan. But now he had become convinced of the necessity for "forcible abolition of slavery" and had begun to draft a proclamation of emancipation. To a southern unionist and a northern Democrat who several days later made the same points as McClellan, the president replied with asperity that the war could no longer be fought "with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water. . . . This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing. Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt." The demand by border-state slaveowners "that the government shall not strike its open enemies, lest they be struck by accident" had become "the paralysis—the dead palsy—of the government in this whole struggle."²⁶

In this mood Lincoln called border-state congressmen to the White House on July 12. Once more he urged favorable action on his plan for compensated emancipation. "The unprecedentedly stern facts of our case," said the president, could no longer be ignored. In revoking General Hunter's emancipation edict two months earlier "I gave dissatisfaction, if not offense, to many whose support the country cannot afford to lose. And this is not the end of it. The pressure, in this direction, is still upon me, and is increasing." If the border states did not make "a decision at once to emancipate gradually . . . the institution in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion—by the mere incidents of the war . . . and you will have nothing valuable in lieu of it." But even this blunt warning fell on mostly deaf ears. Two-thirds of the border-state representatives signed a manifesto rejecting Lincoln's proposal because it would produce too "radical [a] change in our social system"; it was "interference" by the government with a state matter; it would cost too much (a curious objection from men whose states would benefit from a tax that would fall mainly on the free states); and finally, instead of shortening the conflict by depriving the Confederacy of hope for border-state support, it would lengthen the war and jeopardize victory by driving many unionist slaveholders into rebellion.²⁷

This response caused Lincoln to give up trying to conciliate conservatives.

26. Lincoln to Cuthbert Bullitt, July 28, 1862, Lincoln to August Belmont, July 31, 1862, in CWL, V, 344–46, 350–51.

27. CWL, V, 317–19, for Lincoln's address; New York Tribune, July 19, 1862, for border-state replies.

From then on the president tilted toward the radical position, though this would not become publicly apparent for more than two months. On July 13, the day he received the border-state manifesto, Lincoln privately told Seward and Welles of his intention to issue an emancipation proclamation. As Welles recorded the conversation, Lincoln said that this question had "occupied his mind and thoughts day and night" for several weeks. He had decided that emancipation was "a military necessity, absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union. We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued. The slaves were undeniably an element of strength to those who had their service, and we must decide whether that element should be with us or against us." Lincoln brushed aside the argument of unconstitutionality. This was a war, and as commander in chief he could order seizure of enemy slaves just as surely as he could order destruction of enemy railroads. "The rebels . . . could not at the same time throw off the Constitution and invoke its aid. Having made war on the Government, they were subject to the incidents and calamities of war." The border states "would do nothing" on their own; indeed, perhaps it was not fair to ask them to give up slavery while the rebels retained it. Therefore "the blow must fall first and foremost on [the rebels]. . . . Decisive and extensive measures must be adopted. . . . We wanted the army to strike more vigorous blows. The Administration must set an example, and strike at the heart of the rebellion."²⁸

McClellan had made it clear that he was not the general to strike this sort of vigorous blow. After giving the president his memorandum on noninterference with slavery, McClellan followed it with a letter to Stanton warning that "the nation will support no other policy. . . . For none other will our armies continue to fight." This was too much for Stanton and Chase. They joined a growing chorus of Republicans who were urging Lincoln to remove McClellan from command.²⁹ But Lincoln demurred. He may have known that McClellan was privately denouncing the administration as fools and villains for failing to sustain his Peninsula campaign. The general's Democratic partisans were broadcasting such sentiments loudly. Lincoln also knew that prominent New

28. Gideon Welles, "The History of Emancipation," The Galaxy, 14 (Dec. 1872), 842–43.

29. McClellan to Stanton, July 8, 1862, in McClellan's Own Story, 478; Richard B. Irwin, "The Administration in the Peninsular Campaign," Battles and Leaders, II, 438.

York Democrats including copperhead Fernando Wood had visited McClellan at Harrison's Landing to court him as the party's next presidential nominee. But Lincoln also recognized that soldiers in the Army of the Potomac revered McClellan as the leader who had molded them into a proud army. The enlisted men did not subscribe to Republican criticisms of McClellan, and many of their officers did not share the Republican vision of an antislavery war. Because of this, Lincoln believed that he could not remove McClellan from command without risking demoralization in the army and a lethal Democratic backlash on the homefront.

This threat of a Democratic fire in the rear helped delay announcement of an emancipation policy. On July 22 Lincoln informed the cabinet of his intention to issue a proclamation of freedom, and invited comment. Only Montgomery Blair dissented, on the ground that such an edict would cost the Republicans control of Congress in the fall elections. Secretary of State Seward approved the proclamation but counseled its postponement "until you can give it to the country supported by military success." Otherwise the world might view it "as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help . . . our last shriek, on the retreat." The wisdom of this suggestion "struck me with very great force," said the president later. He put his proclamation in a drawer to wait for a victory.³⁰

It would prove to be a long wait. Meanwhile the polarization of opinion on the slavery issue reached new extremes. On the left, abolitionists and radicals grew abusive of a president who remained publicly uncommitted to emancipation. Lincoln was "nothing better than a wet rag," wrote William Lloyd Garrison, and his war policies were "stumbling, halting, prevaricating, irresolute." Frederick Douglass believed that Lincoln was "allowing himself to be . . . the miserable tool of traitors and rebels." In a letter to Charles Sumner on August 7, Horace Greeley asked: "Do you remember that old theological book containing this: 'Chapter One—Hell; Chapter Two—Hell Continued.' Well, that gives a hint of the way Old Abe ought to be talked to in this crisis." Greeley proceeded to give Lincoln hell in the columns of the New York Tribune.³¹

30. CWL, V, 336–37; Francis B. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House (New York, 1866), 22.

31. Garrison to Oliver Johnson, Sept. 9, 1862, Garrison Papers, Boston Public Library; Liberator, July 25, 1862; Douglass' Monthly, V (Aug. 1862), 694; William H. Hale, Horace Greeley, Voice of the People (Collier Books ed., New York, 1961), 268–69.

Hard words, these, but Lincoln could stand them better than the sticks and stones hurled by Democrats. The emergence of slavery as the most salient war issue in 1862 threatened to turn a large element of the Democrats into an antiwar party. This was no small matter. The Democrats had received 44 percent of the popular votes in the free states in 1860. If the votes of the border states are added, Lincoln was a minority president of the Union states. By 1862 some "War Democrats" were becoming Republicans, even radicals—General Butler and Secretary of War Stanton are outstanding examples. Other War Democrats such as McClellan remained in their party and supported the goal of Union through military victory, but opposed emancipation. In 1862 a third element began to emerge: the Peace Democrats, or copperheads, who would come to stand for reunion through negotiations rather than victory—an impossible dream, and therefore in Republican eyes tantamount to treason because it played into Confederate hands. Southerners pinned great hopes on the copperhead faction, which they considered "large & strong enough, if left to operate constitutionally, to paralyze the war & majority party."³²

War and Peace Democrats would maintain a shifting, uneasy, and sometimes divided coalition, but on one issue they remained united: opposition to emancipation. On four crucial congressional roll-call votes concerning slavery in 1862—the war article prohibiting return of fugitives, emancipation in the District of Columbia, prohibition of slavery in the territories, and the confiscation act—96 percent of the Democrats were united in opposition, while 99 percent of the Republicans voted aye. Seldom if ever in American politics has an issue so polarized the major parties. Because of secession the Republicans had a huge majority in Congress and could easily pass these measures, but an anti-emancipation backlash could undo that majority in the fall elections. This explains Montgomery Blair's concern and Lincoln's caution.

As they had done in every election since the birth of the Republican party, northern Democrats exploited the race issue for all they thought it was worth in 1862. The Black Republican "party of fanaticism" intended to free "two or three million semi-savages" to "overrun the North

32. William K. Scarborough, ed., The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, Vol. II, The Years of Hope April, 1862–June, 1863 (Baton Rouge, 1976), 34.

and enter into competition with the white laboring masses" and mix with "their sons and daughters." "Shall the Working Classes be Equalized with Negroes?" screamed Democratic newspaper headlines.³³ Ohio's soldiers, warned that state's congressman and Democratic leader Samuel S. Cox, would no longer fight for the Union "if the result shall be the flight and movement of the black race by millions northward." And Archbishop John Hughes added his admonition that "we Catholics, and a vast majority of our brave troops in the field, have not the slightest idea of carrying on a war that costs so much blood and treasure just to gratify a clique of Abolitionists."³⁴

With this kind of rhetoric from their leaders, it was little wonder that some white workingmen took their prejudices into the streets. In a half-dozen or more cities, anti-black riots broke out during the summer of 1862. Some of the worst violence occurred in Cincinnati, where the replacement of striking Irish dockworkers by Negroes set off a wave of attacks on black neighborhoods. In Brooklyn a mob of Irish-Americans tried to burn down a tobacco factory where two dozen black women and children were working. The nightmare vision of blacks invading the North seemed to be coming true in southern Illinois, where the War Department transported several carloads of contrabands to help with the harvest. Despite the desperate need for hands to gather crops, riots forced the government to return most of the blacks to contraband camps south of the Ohio River.

Anti-black sentiments were not a Democratic monopoly. The antebellum Negro exclusion laws of several midwestern states had commanded the support of a good many Whigs. In 1862 about two-fifths of the Republican voters joined Democrats to reaffirm Illinois's exclusion law in a referendum. Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, architect of the confiscation act, conceded that "there is a very great aversion in the

33. Resolution of the Pennsylvania Democratic convention, July 4, 1862, quoted in Williston Lofton, Jr., "Northern Labor and the Negro during the Civil War," Journal of Negro History, 34 (1949), 254; Columbus Crisis and Chicago Times, quoted in V. Jacque Voegeli, Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro during the Civil War (Chicago, 1967), 6; New York Day Book quoted in Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Berkeley, 1968), 35.

34. CG, 37 Cong., 2 Sess., Appendix, 242–49; Hughes quoted in Foote, Civil War, I, 538. For another and similar pronouncement by Hughes, see Benjamin J. Blied, Catholics and the Civil War (Milwaukee, 1945), 44–45.

West—I know it to be so in my State—against having free negroes come among us. Our people want nothing to do with the negro."³⁵ To placate this aversion, some Republicans maintained that it was slavery which forced blacks to flee North toward freedom; emancipation would keep this tropical race in the South by giving them freedom in a congenial clime. This thesis encountered considerable skepticism, however. To meet the racial fears that constituted the party's Achilles' heel, many Republicans turned to colonization.

This solution of the race problem was stated crudely but effectively by an Illinois soldier: "I am not in favor of freeing the negroes and leaving them to run free among us nether is Sutch the intention of Old Abe but we will Send them off and colonize them."³⁶ Old Abe did indeed advocate colonization in 1862. From his experience in Illinois politics he had developed sensitive fingers for the pulse of public opinion on this issue. He believed that support for colonization was the best way to defuse much of the anti-emancipation sentiment that might otherwise sink the Republicans in the 1862 elections. This conviction underlay Lincoln's remarks to a group of black leaders in the District of Columbia whom he invited to the White House on August 14, 1862. Slavery was "the greatest wrong inflicted on any people," Lincoln told the delegation in words reported by a newspaper correspondent who was present. But even if slavery were abolished, racial differences and prejudices would remain. "Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence." Blacks had little chance to achieve equality in the United States. "There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain among us. . . . I do not mean to discuss this, but to propose it as a fact with which we have to deal. I cannot alter it if I would." This fact, said Lincoln, made it necessary for black people to emigrate to another land where they would have better opportunities. The president asked the black leaders to recruit volunteers for a government-financed pilot colonization project in Central America. If this worked, it could pave the way for the emigration of thousands more who might be freed by the war.³⁷

Most black spokesmen in the North ridiculed Lincoln's proposal and

35. CG, 37 Cong., 2 Sess., 1780.

36. Wiley, Billy Yank, 112.

37. CWL, V, 370—75, from New York Tribune, Aug. 15, 1861. The Tribune's reporter submitted this account as the "substance of the President's remarks."

denounced its author. "This is our country as much as it is yours," a Philadelphia Negro told the president, "and we will not leave it." Frederick Douglass accused Lincoln of "contempt for negroes" and "canting hypocrisy." The president's remarks, said Douglass, would encourage "ignorant and base" white men "to commit all kinds of violence and outrage upon the colored people." Abolitionists and many radical Republicans continued to oppose colonization as racist and inhumane. "How much better," wrote Salmon P. Chase, "would be a manly protest against prejudice against color!—and a wise effort to give free[d] men homes in America!"³⁸

But conservatives chided their radical colleagues for ignoring the immutability of racial differences. Abolitionists "may prattle as they wish about the end of slavery being the end of strife," wrote one conservative, but "the great difficulty will then but begin! The question is the profound and awful one of race." Two-thirds of the Republicans in Congress became sufficiently convinced of the need to conciliate this sentiment that they voted for amendments to the District of Columbia emancipation bill and the confiscation act appropriating $600,000 for colonization. As a practical matter, said one Republican, colonization "is a damn humbug. But it will take with the people."³⁹

The government managed to recruit several hundred prospective black emigrants. But colonization did turn out to be a damn humbug in practice. The Central American project collapsed in the face of opposition from Honduras and Nicaragua. In 1863 the U.S. government sponsored the settlement of 453 colonists on an island near Haiti, but this enterprise also foundered when starvation and smallpox decimated the colony. The administration finally sent a naval vessel to return the 368 survivors to the United States in 1864. This ended official efforts to colonize blacks. By then the accelerating momentum of war had carried most northerners beyond the postulates of 1862.

Lincoln's colonization activities in August 1862 represented one part of his indirect effort to prepare public opinion for emancipation. Although he had decided to withhold his proclamation until Union arms

38. New York Tribune, Sept. 20, 1862; Douglass' Monthly, V (Sept. 1862), 707–8; David Donald, ed., Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase (New York, 1954), 112.

39. Boston Post, quoted in Boston Commonwealth, Oct. 18, 1862; Robert F. Durden, James Shepherd Pike: Republicanism and the American Negro, 1850–1882 (Durham, N.C., 1957), 37.

won a victory, he did drop hints of what might be coming. On August 22 he replied to Horace Greeley's emancipation editorial, "The Prayer of Twenty Millions," with an open letter to the editor. "My paramount object in the struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery," wrote Lincoln in a masterpiece of concise expression. "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; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that."⁴⁰ Here was something for all viewpoints: a reiteration that preservation of the Union remained the purpose of the war, but a hint that partial or even total emancipation might become necessary to accomplish that purpose.

The same intentional ambiguity characterized Lincoln's reply on September 13 to a group of clergymen who presented him a petition for freedom. The president agreed that "slavery is the root of the rebellion," that emancipation would "weaken the rebels by drawing off their laborers" and "would help us in Europe, and convince them that we are incited by something more than ambition." But in present circumstances, "when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel states . . . what good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do? . . . I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will necessarily see must be inoperative, like the Pope's bull against the comet!"⁴¹ Here too was something for everybody: an assertion that emancipation was desirable though at present futile but perhaps imminent if the military situation took a turn for the better.

Military matters preoccupied Lincoln as he uttered these words. For two months, events in both the western and eastern theaters had been deteriorating to the point where by mid-September three southern armies were on the march northward in a bold bid for victory. But within the next few weeks the Confederate tide receded southward again without prevailing, thus ending the chance for European recognition and giving Lincoln the victory he needed to issue the emancipation proclamation.

40. CWL, V, 388–89.

41. Ibid., 419–21.