II

On September 22, five days after the battle of Antietam, Lincoln called his cabinet into session. He had made a covenant with God, said the president, that if the army drove the enemy from Maryland he would issue his Emancipation Proclamation. "I think the time has come," he continued. "I wish it were a better time. I wish that we were in a better condition. The action of the army against the rebels has not been quite what I should have best liked." Nevertheless, Antietam was a victory and Lincoln intended to warn the rebel states that unless they returned to the Union by January 1 their slaves "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." The cabinet approved, though Montgomery Blair repeated his warning that this action might drive border-state elements to the South and give Democrats "a club . . . to beat the Administration" in the elections. Lincoln replied that he had exhausted every effort to bring the border states along. Now "we must make the forward movement" without them. "They [will] acquiesce, if not immediately, soon." As for the Democrats, "their clubs would be used against us take what course we might."²⁴

The Proclamation would apply only to states in rebellion on January 1. This produced some confusion, because the edict thus appeared to "liberate" only those slaves beyond Union authority while retaining in bondage all those within the government's reach. A few disappointed radicals and abolitionists looked upon it this way. So did tories and some liberals in England. The conservative British press affected both to abhor and to ridicule the measure: to abhor it because it might encourage

23. Adams to C. F. Adams, Jr., Oct. 17, 1862, in Ford, Cycle of Adams Letters, I, 192.

24. David Donald, ed., Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase (New York, 1954), 149–52; Howard K. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (New York, 1960), I, 142–45; John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York, 1890), VI, 158–63; the text of the Procla mation is in CWL, V, 433–36.

a servile rebellion that would eclipse the horrors of the 1857 Sepoy uprising in India; to ridicule it because of its hypocritical impotence. "Where he has no power Mr. Lincoln will set the negroes free; where he retains power he will consider them as slaves," declared the London Times. "This is more like a Chinaman beating his two swords together to frighten his enemy than like an earnest man pressing forward his cause."²⁵

But such remarks missed the point and misunderstood the president's prerogatives under the Constitution. Lincoln acted under his war powers to seize enemy resources; he had no constitutional power to act against slavery in areas loyal to the United States. The Proclamation would turn Union forces into armies of liberation after January 1—if they could win the war. And it also invited the slaves to help them win it. Most antislavery Americans and Britons recognized this. "We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree," wrote Frederick Douglass, while William Lloyd Garrison considered it "an act of immense historic consequence."²⁶ A British abolitionist pronounced September 22 "a memorable day in the annals of the great struggle for the freedom of an oppressed and despised race"; a radical London newspaper believed it "a gigantic stride in the paths of Christian and civilized progress."²⁷ Lincoln's own off-the-record analysis showed how much his conception of the war had changed since ten months earlier, when he had deprecated a "remorseless revolutionary struggle." After January 1, Lincoln told an official of the Interior Department, "the character of the war will be changed. It will be one of subjugation. . . . The [old] South is to be destroyed and replaced by new propositions and ideas."²⁸

Would the army fight for freedom? From an Indiana colonel came words that could have answered for most soldiers. Few of them were abolitionists, he wrote, but they nevertheless wanted "to destroy everything that in aught gives the rebels strength," including slavery, so "this army will sustain the emancipation proclamation and enforce it with

25. Times, Oct. 7, 1862.

26. Douglass' Monthly, Oct. 1862, p. 721; Liberator, Sept. 26, 1862.

27. Quoted in Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, II, 153, and Nevins, War, II, 270.

28. T. J. Barnett to Samuel L. M. Barlow, Sept. 25, 1862, Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library. These words were Barnett's paraphrase of Lincoln's comments, but the president's sentiments were "indicated plainly enough," according to Barnett.

the bayonet." A Democratic private in the Army of the Potomac whose previous letters had railed against abolitionists and blacks now expressed support for "putting away any institution if by so doing it will help put down the rebellion, for I hold that nothing should stand in the way of the Union—niggers, nor anything else." General-in-Chief Halleck explained his position to Grant: "The character of the war has very much changed within the last year. There is now no possible hope of reconciliation. . . . We must conquer the rebels or be conquered by them. . . . Every slave withdrawn from the enemy is the equivalent of a white man put hors de combat."²⁹

But would McClellan and officers of the Army of the Potomac go along with this? Much Republican opposition to McClellan stemmed from the belief that he would not. And indeed, the general's first response to the Proclamation indicated indecision. He considered it "infamous" and told his wife that he "could not make up my mind to fight for such an accursed doctrine as that of a servile insurrection." McClellan consulted Democratic friends in New York, who advised him "to submit to the Presdt's proclamation & quietly continue doing [your] duty as a soldier."³⁰ But some of McClellan's associates stirred up opposition to the new policy. Fitz-John Porter denounced this "absurd proclamation of a political coward." A staff officer confided to a colleague that Lee's army had not been "bagged" at Sharpsburg because "that is not the game. The object is that neither army shall get much advantage of the other; that both shall be kept in the field till they are exhausted, when we will make a compromise and save slavery." When word of this conversation reached Lincoln he cashiered the officer to "make an example" and put a stop to such "silly, treasonable expressions."³¹ Belatedly awakening to the danger of such loose talk among his officers, McClellan on October 7 issued a general order reminding them of the necessity for military subordination to civil authority. "The

29. Indiana colonel quoted in Nevins, War, II, 239; John H. Burrill to his parents, Jan. 1, 1863, Civil War Times Illustrated Collection, United States Military History Institute; O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 24, pt. 3, p. 157.

30. McClellan to Ellen McClellan, Sept. 25, Oct. 5, 1862, McClellan Papers, Library of Congress; McClellan to William H. Aspinwall, Sept. 26, 1862, Civil War Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

31. Porter to Manton Marble, Sept. 30, 1862, quoted in Nevins, War, II, 238–39; the case of the cashiered major can be followed in CWL, V, 442–43, 508–9, and in Nicolay and Hay, Lincoln, VI, 186–88.

remedy for political errors, if any are committed," concluded Mc-Clellan with an artful reference to the imminent elections, "is to be found only in the action of the people at the polls."³²

Democrats scarcely needed this hint. They had already made emancipation the main issue in their quest for control of Congress. The New York Democratic platform denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as "a proposal for the butchery of women and children, for scenes of lust and rapine, and of arson and murder." The party nominated for governor the suave, conservative veteran of thirty years in New York politics Horatio Seymour, who declared: "If it be true that slavery must be abolished to save this Union, then the people of the South should be allowed to withdraw themselves from the government which cannot give them the protection guaranteed by its terms."³³ Democrats in Ohio and Illinois took similar ground. Branding the Emancipation Proclamation "another advance in the Robespierrian highway of tyranny and anarchy," they asserted that if abolition was "the avowed purpose of the war, the South cannot be subdued and ought not to be subdued. . . . In the name of God, no more bloodshed to gratify a religious fanaticism." An Ohio Democrat amended the party's slogan to proclaim "the Constitution as it is, the Union as it was, and the Niggers where they are."³⁴

Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus to enforce the militia draft also hurt the Republicans. "A large majority," declared an Ohio editor, "can see no reason why they should be shot for the benefit of niggers and Abolitionists." If "the despot Lincoln" tried to ram abolition and conscription down the throats of white men, "he would meet with the fate he deserves: hung, shot, or burned."³⁵ The arrests of Democrats for antiwar activities and the indictment of forty-seven members of the Knights of the Golden Circle in Indiana probably backfired against Republicans by enabling Democrats to portray themselves as martyrs to civil liberty.

Subsuming all these issues was the war itself. "After a year and a half of trial," admitted one Republican, "and a pouring out of blood and treasure, and the maiming and death of thousands, we have made no

32. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 19, pt. 2, pp. 295–96.

33. Nevins, War, II, 302, 303.

34. Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (New York, 1942), 115; Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandighamand the Civil War (Lexington, Ky., 1970), 106, 107.

35. Gray, Hidden Civil War, 112.

sensible progress in putting down the rebellion. . . . The people are desirous of some change, they scarcely know what."³⁶ This remained true even after northern armies turned back Confederate invasions at Antietam, Perryville, and Corinth. None of these battles was a clear-cut Union victory; the failure to follow them with a blow to the retreating rebels produced a feeling of letdown. In October, enemy forces stood in a more favorable position than five months earlier: Bragg's army occupied Murfreesboro in central Tennessee only thirty miles from Nashville, and Lee's army remained only a few miles from Harper's Ferry. Jeb Stuart's cavalry had thumbed their noses at the Yankees again by riding around the entire Army of the Potomac (October 10–12), raiding as far north as Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and returning to their own lines with 1,200 horses while losing only two men. If anything seemed to underscore northern military futility, this was it.

Democrats scored significant gains in the 1862 elections: the governorship of New York, the governorship and a majority of the legislature in New Jersey, a legislative majority in Illinois and Indiana, and a net increase of thirty-four congressmen. Only the fortuitous circumstance that legislative and gubernatorial elections in Ohio and Pennsylvania were held in odd-numbered years and that the Republican governors of Illinois and Indiana had been elected in 1860 to four-year terms prevented the probable loss of these posts to the Democrats in 1862. Panicky Republicans interpreted the elections as "a great, sweeping revolution of public sentiment," "a most serious and severe reproof." Gleeful Democrats pronounced "Abolition Slaughtered."³⁷ Nearly all historians have agreed: the elections were "a near disaster for the Republicans"; "a great triumph for the Democrats"; "the verdict of the polls showed clearly that the people of the North were opposed to the Emancipation Proclamation."³⁸

But a closer look at the results challenges this conclusion. Republicans retained control of seventeen of the nineteen free-state governorships and sixteen of the legislatures. They elected several congressmen in

36. Ibid., 110.

37. Strong, Diary, 271; Carl Schurz to Lincoln, Nov. 20, 1861, in CWL, V, 511; Indianapolis State Sentinel, Oct. 5, 1861, quoted in V. Jacque Voegeli, Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro during the Civil War (Chicago, 1967), 64.

38. Peter J. Parish, The American Civil War (New York, 1975), 208–9; Joel H. Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860–1868 (New York, 1977), 144; William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors (New York, 1948), 165.

Missouri for the first time, made a net gain of five seats in the Senate, and retained a twenty-five-vote majority in the House after experiencing the smallest net loss of congressional seats in an off-year election in twenty years. It is true that the congressional delegations of the six lower-North states from New York to Illinois would have a Democratic majority for the next two years. But elsewhere the Republicans more than held their own. And the Democratic margins in most of those six states were exceedingly thin: 4,000 votes in Pennsylvania, 6,000 in Ohio, 10,000 each in New York and Indiana. These majorities could be explained, as Lincoln noted, by the absence of soldiers at the front, for scattered evidence already hinted at a large Republican edge among enlisted men, a hint that would be confirmed in future elections when absentee soldier voting was permitted.³⁹

Although disappointed by the elections, Lincoln and the Republicans did not allow it to influence their actions. Indeed, the pace of radicalism increased during the next few months. On November 7, Lincoln removed McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac. Although military factors prompted this action, it had important political overtones. In December the House decisively rejected a Democratic resolution branding emancipation "a high crime against the Constitution," and endorsed the Emancipation Proclamation by a party-line vote. Congress also passed an enabling act requiring the abolition of slavery as a condition of West Virginia's admission to statehood.⁴⁰

During December the Democratic press speculated that Lincoln, having been rebuked by the voters, would not issue the final Emancipation Proclamation. The president's message to Congress on December 1 fed this speculation. Lincoln again recommended his favorite plan for gradual, compensated emancipation in every state "wherein slavery now exists." Worried abolitionists asked each other: "If the President means to carry out his edict of freedom on the New Year, what is all this stuff about gradual emancipation?" But both the friends and enemies of freedom misunderstood Lincoln's admittedly ambiguous message. Some failed to notice his promise that all slaves freed "by the chances of war"—

39. The Tribune Almanac for 1863 (New York, 1863), 50–64; Lincoln to Carl Schurz, Nov. 10, 1862, in CWL, V, 494; Daniel Wallace Adams, "Illinois Soldiers and the Emancipation Proclamation," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 67 (1974), 408–10; Oscar O. Winther, "The Soldier Vote in the Election of 1864," New York History, 25 (1944), 440–58.

40. CG, 37 Cong., 3 Sess., 15, 52; U.S. Statutes at Large, XII, 633.

including his Proclamation—would remain forever free. The Proclamation was a war measure applicable only against states in rebellion; Lincoln's gradual emancipation proposal was a peace measure to abolish the institution everywhere by constitutional means. The president's peroration should have left no doubt of his position: "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. . . . The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. . . . The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. . . . In giving freedom to theslave, we assure freedom to the free. . . . We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."⁴¹

On New Year's Day Lincoln ended all speculation. The Proclamation he signed that day exempted the border states along with Tennessee and Union-controlled portions of Louisiana and Virginia. To meet the criticism that the preliminary Proclamation had invited slaves to revolt, the final edict enjoined them to "abstain from all violence." But in other respects this Proclamation went beyond the first one. Not only did it justify emancipation as an "act of justice" as well as a military necessity, but it also sanctioned the enlistment of black soldiers and sailors in Union forces.⁴²

Here was revolution in earnest. Armed blacks were truly the bete noire of southern nightmares. The idea of black soldiers did not, of course, spring full-blown from Lincoln's head at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. The notion had been around since the beginning of the war, when northern blacks in several cities had volunteered for the Union army. But on the principle that it was "a white man's war," the War Department had refused to accept them. Despite the service of black soldiers in the Revolution and the War of 1812, Negroes had been barred from state militias since 1792 and the regular army had never enrolled black soldiers. The prejudices of the old order died hard. Lincoln had squelched Secretary of War Cameron's reference to arming slaves in December 1861, and the administration refused at first to accept the organization of black regiments in Kansas, occupied Louisiana, and the South Carolina sea islands during the summer of 1862.

The Union navy, however, had taken men of all colors and conditions from the outset. Blacks at sea served mainly as firemen, coal heavers, cooks, and stewards. But as early as August 1861 a group of contrabands

41. Boston Commonwealth, Dec. 6, 1862; CWL, V, 529–37.

42. CWL, VI, 28–30.

served as a gun crew on the U.S.S. Minnesota. In May 1862 a South Carolina slave, Robert Smalls, commandeered a dispatch boat in Charleston harbor and ran it out to the blockading fleet. Smalls became a pilot in the U. S. navy.

Meanwhile black leaders, abolitionists, and radical Republicans continued to push for enlistment of black soldiers. This would not only help the North win the war, they said; it would also help free the slaves and earn equal rights for the whole race. Frederick Douglass made the point succinctly: "Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship."⁴³

Helping blacks to earn citizenship was not the main motive for a congressional mandate (in the militia act of July 17, 1862) to enroll Negroes in "any military or naval service for which they may be found competent." Rather, the need for labor battalions to free white soldiers for combat prompted this legislation. The Emancipation Proclamation envisaged a limited role for black soldiers "to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places" instead of to fight as front-line troops. But reality had a way of surpassing policy. Just as Lincoln, nine days before issuing the preliminary Proclamation, had told a delegation that such an edict would be like the Pope's bull against the comet, so on August 4, three weeks before the War Department authorized enlistment of contrabands as soldiers in occupied South Carolina, he told a delegation that "to arm the negroes would turn 50,000 bayonets against us that were for us."⁴⁴ But even as Lincoln uttered these words, a regiment of free Negroes was completing its organization in Louisiana and a regiment of free and contraband blacks was forming in Kansas. Two more Louisiana regiments along with the authorized South Carolina regiment quietly completed their organization during the fall. In October the Kansans saw action in a Missouri skirmish that left ten of them dead—the first black combat casualties of the war.

By the year's end the government was ready to acknowledge the existence of these regiments. It could hardly help but do so, for Massachusetts had gotten into the act. The colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers was the Bay State's Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whose pen was at least as mighty as his sword. After taking part of his regiment

43. Douglass' Monthly, Aug. 1863.

44. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 14, pp. 377–78; CWL, V, 357.

on a minor raid along a South Carolina river in January 1863, Higginson wrote an enthusiastic report to the War Department which, as intended, found its way into the newspapers. "Nobody knows anything about these men who has not seen them in battle," wrote Higginson. "No officer in this regiment now doubts that the key to the successful prosecution of the war lies in the unlimited employment of black troops." The New York Tribune commented that such reports were sure "to shake our inveterate Saxon prejudice against the capacity and courage of negro troops."⁴⁵ About the time of Higginson's raid, Governor Andrew of Massachusetts squeezed permission from the War Department to raise a black regiment. Commissioning prominent abolitionists as recruiters and officers, Andrew enlisted enough men from northern states for two regiments, the 54th and 55th Massachusetts, the first of which became the most famous black regiment of the war.

The recruitment of black soldiers did not produce an instantaneous change in northern racial attitudes. Indeed, to some degree it intensified the Democratic backlash against emancipation and exacerbated racial tensions in the army. The black regiments reflected the Jim Crow mores of the society that reluctantly accepted them: they were segregated, given less pay then white soldiers, commanded by white officers some of whom regarded their men as "niggers," and intended for use mainly as garrison and labor battalions. One of the first battles these black troops had to fight was for a chance to prove themselves in combat.

Even so, the organization of black regiments marked the transformation of a war to preserve the Union into a revolution to overthrow the old order. Lincoln's conversion from reluctance to enthusiasm about black soldiers signified the progress of this revolution. By March 1863 the president was writing to Andrew Johnson, military governor of Tennessee: "The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once. And who doubts that we can present that sight, if we but take hold in earnest?"⁴⁶

The southern response to emancipation and the enlistment of black troops was ferocious—at least on paper and, regrettably, sometimes in fact as well. Upon learning of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, General Beauregard called for "execution of abolition prisoners [i.e., captured Union soldiers] after 1st of January. . . . Let the execution

45. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 14, pp. 195–98; New York Tribune, Feb. 11, 1863.

46. Lincoln to Johnson, Mar. 26, 1863, CWL, VI, 149–50.

be with the garrote." Jefferson Davis's message to Congress on January 12, 1863, pronounced the Emancipation Proclamation "the most execrable measure in the history of guilty man." Davis promised to turn over captured Union officers to state governments for punishment as "criminals engaged in inciting servile insurrection." The punishment for this crime, of course, was death.⁴⁷

Sober second thoughts prevented the enforcement of such a policy. But the South did sometimes execute captured black soldiers and their officers. Even before official adoption of black enlistment by the Union government, southerners got wind of the premature efforts along this line in occupied Louisiana and South Carolina. From Confederate army headquarters on August 21, 1862, came a general order that such "crimes and outrages" required "retaliation" in the form of "execution as a felon" of any officer of black troops who was captured. When a rebel commando raid seized four blacks in Union uniforms on a South Carolina island in November, Secretary of War James A. Seddon and President Davis approved their "summary execution" as an "example" to discourage the arming of slaves.⁴⁸ A month later, on Christmas Eve, Davis issued a general order requiring all former slaves and their officers captured in arms to be delivered up to state officials for trial. On May 30, 1863, the Confederate Congress sanctioned this policy but stipulated that captured officers were to be tried and punished by military courts rather than by the states.⁴⁹

Though the South did not actually do this, considerable evidence indicates that captured officers were sometimes "dealt with red-handed on the field or immediately thereafter," as Secretary of War Seddon suggested to General Kirby Smith in 1863. Black prisoners of war were sometimes shot "while attempting to escape." A Confederate colonel whose regiment captured a squad of black soldiers in Louisiana reported that when some of them tried to escape, "I then ordered every one shot, and with my Six Shooter I assisted in the execution of the order." A North Carolina soldier wrote to his mother that after a skirmish with a black regiment "several [were] taken prisoner & afterwards either bayoneted or burnt. The men were perfectly exasperated at the idea of negroes opposed to them & rushed at them like so many devils."⁵⁰

47. Beauregard to W. Porcher Miles, Oct. 13, 1862, in O.R., Ser. II, Vol. 4, p. 916; Rowland, Davis, V, 409.

48. O.R., Ser. II, Vol. 4, pp. 857, 945–46, 954.

49. Ibid., Vol. 5, pp. 797, 940–41.

50. Seddon to Kirby Smith, Aug. 12, 1863, in O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 22, pt. 1, p. 965; Col. Frank Powers to Col. Jonathan L. Logan, Sept. 2, 1863, in Ira Berlin et al., ed., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, Series II, The Black Military Experience (Cambridge, 1982), 585; Thomas R. Roulhac to his mother, March 13, 1864, in Randall Clair Jimerson, "A People Divided: The Civil War Interpreted by Participants," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1977, p. 146.

Rumors and reports of several such massacres vexed Union authorities through the rest of the war and forced them more than once to threaten retaliation. This was one reason for the hesitation to use black troops in combat, where they ran a heightened risk of capture. The Confederate refusal to treat captured black soldiers as legitimate prisoners of war contributed to the eventual breakdown in prisoner of war exchanges that had tragic consequences for both sides.