In the meantime, the war would go on for three more bloody years. For Abraham Lincoln, God had obviously willed the war to continue, as no side appeared to gain a conspicuous advantage. Although it was not possible yet to discern God’s plan for America, He must have a purpose in perpetuating the conflict. While waiting for God to decide, Union soldiers transformed Shiloh Chapel into a field hospital and ripped up the wooden floorboards to make coffins for their dead.
CHAPTER 11
BORN IN A DAY
FANNY BURDOCK RECALLED THE TIME she saw him. “We been picking in the field when my brother he point to the road then we seen Marse Abe coming all dusty and on foot.” President Lincoln himself was making his way down that hot Georgia road. Burdock and her brother ran to the fence where a water bucket rested. “We give him nice cool water from the dipper. Then he nodded and set off.”1
Abraham Lincoln never set foot in Georgia, but so powerful and personal were the memories of him among former slaves that his presence in their lives assumed a literal meaning. It is fashionable now among some historians to downplay Lincoln’s role as the “Great Emancipator.” The main story line is that slaves stole their own freedom, and the Emancipation Proclamation, effective on January 1, 1863, did not free any slave in practical terms. Both assertions are generally correct. Tens of thousands of slaves flooded into Union camps. Without a Union victory and a corresponding federal legal sanction, their liberation would have been short-lived. Lincoln’s proclamation placed the power of the U.S. Constitution (and by war’s end it became part of that document in the form of the Thirteenth Amendment) behind the slaves’ exodus and provided cover for thousands more who would leave bondage in the remaining two years of the war. Emancipation also hastened the Confederacy’s defeat by removing a large portion of its work force and by placing 150,000 freedmen under Union arms. Even if the document freed few slaves in actuality, it stands as an affirmation of the objectives for which Union forces fought to save their country. It brought the full faith of the U.S. government to secure the right of all Americans to be free.
Most northerners agreed that the war would somehow alter the institution of slavery, perhaps even end it. Few, however, believed that the federal government should intervene to formally abolish slavery. Concerns about racial strife, constitutional issues, the fear of thousands of freed blacks streaming north, and just plain racism accounted for these views. Lincoln balanced these views with pressure from more radical members of his own party. He hoped for the abolition of slavery, called it immoral, but believed he lacked the constitutional authority to abolish it where it existed. Saving the Union remained paramount in Lincoln’s thinking; that was the best chance for slavery’s demise.
The vast majority of federal soldiers entered the war assuming they were fighting to preserve the Union of their fathers and the freedoms—personal and national—it stood for. Few looked upon the conflict as a war against slavery. Abolitionists remained a small minority in the North. The sentiment toward slavery among the Union soldiers began to change once they ventured south. They witnessed slaves stealing their own freedom, streaming into Union lines, offering to work for their keep. The Federals benefited from “black dispatches”—news of Confederate troop strength and movements delivered by fugitive slaves. As soon as the war began, slaves knew “the Union was ‘IT’, and we were all ‘Yankees,’” one recalled. One slave in northern Virginia had a wife who washed and cooked for a group of Robert E. Lee’s officers. She signaled the direction of Confederate troop movements by moving colored garments up and down a clothesline, a color for each corps commander.2
Robert Smalls, an escaped slave, pirated the Confederate gunboat Planter out of Charleston Harbor at three in the morning in June 1862, with a crew of fellow freedmen and their wives and children. According to Union military authorities, the Planter “was the most valuable war vessel the Confederates had at Charleston.” An incoming tide slowed their progress, and daybreak found them beneath Rebel guns at Fort Sumter. Smalls, a veteran pilot, knew the signal for safe passage and slipped out of the harbor unmolested. Once outside of the range of Confederate guns, he hoisted a white flag and steamed for the federal blockade ship the Augusta. 3
Union soldiers also saw how much slaves aided the Confederate cause, repairing railroads, digging trenches, ferrying supplies, and working the plantations to feed the armies and enable white men to go off and fight. In October 1861, a Wisconsin soldier reported to a newspaper in his state, “The rebellion is abolitionizing the whole army.” Now that they had seen slavery, “men of all parties seem unanimous in the belief that to permanently establish the Union, is to first wipe [out] the institution” of slavery.4
This rising sentiment against slavery did not imply a more egalitarian attitude toward African Americans. As one Union soldier put it, “I have a good degree of sympathy for the slave, but I like the Negro the farther off the better.” These were military, not moral, calculations, though some soldiers saw the contradiction of fighting in the name of freedom while four million human beings remained in bondage.5
Lincoln’s thinking moved with the troops, though privately. During the early months of the war, he worked to keep the border states within the Union. Any step to legalize the informal acceptance of runaway slaves into Union lines risked losing the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri. Some Union officers obeyed the letter of the law and returned the runaway slaves to their masters. Others acted differently, such as Frémont in Missouri and General David Hunter on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. Lincoln dismissed Frémont and revoked Hunter’s edict. The president stated his position clearly in September 1861: “We didn’t go into the war to put down slavery, but to put the flag back, and to act differently at this moment, would, I have no doubt, not only weaken our cause but smack of bad faith.” Of Lincoln’s attitude, Radical Republican Benjamin Wade of Ohio sneered that it was all that could be expected “of one, born of ‘poor white trash’ and educated in a slave State.”6
In May 1862 Robert Smalls (1839–1915), a slave, hijacked the Confederate transport boat the Planter and sailed it through Charleston Harbor past Rebel batteries to Yankee lines, liberating himself to the bargain. Smalls became a Republican congressman from South Carolina after the war. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Lincoln correctly assessed the precarious nature of the border states and, more important, of northern public opinion on slavery. An editorial in Harper’s in August 1861 reflected the thinking of many northerners on the slavery issue. The writer believed “that negro slavery will come out of this war unscathed is impossible.” Slavery would fall because of the slaves who would take leave of their bondage at the first opportunity. Given this “natural” disintegration of slavery, “the hour of battle is not the time for the emancipation of four millions of slaves.” Such a proclamation would overlook loyal slaveholders and run the risk of “servile wars and wholesale massacres.” Better that slavery should dissipate gradually with the advance of Union armies.7
Congress nudged the “natural” process along by passing two confiscation acts in August 1861 and July 1862, which followed the letter of the Constitution by declaring slaves “contraband,” that is, property seized from rebellious citizens. The first act called for the seizure of all property in aid of rebellion—including slaves. The legislators made it clear that only those owners in defiance of the government stood to lose their slaves. The second, bolder act provided for the confiscation of all property of those in rebellion against the United States and the emancipation of their slaves.
Lincoln continued to address the slavery issue within his view of constitutional limits and political realities. In November 1861, he drew up a plan for compensated emancipation for a Delaware legislator to introduce in that state. In March 1862, Congress endorsed Lincoln’s plan for national compensated emancipation, though it did not provide any funding; and in July 1862, the president drafted a bill for Congress that included funding for national comp
ensated emancipation. No slave state legislature stepped forward to consider compensated emancipation. Lincoln hesitated to act further: “The general government sets up no claim of a right, by federal authority, to interfere with slavery within state limits.” He also feared that uncompensated emancipation would face a severe test in a Supreme Court still presided over by Roger B. Taney.8
Lincoln took the British example of West Indian emancipation in 1833 as a model. There, emancipation occurred gradually with compensation and the grudging support of the islands’ white leadership. Lincoln did not view the compensation offered to planters as a federal giveaway but rather as seed money to ease the transition to a wage-labor system. The states most likely to accede to this plan—Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky, where the institution was weakest—did not express interest in any form of compensated emancipation. Delaware’s refusal came as a particular blow. Lincoln correctly surmised the reason. As a resident of the state explained, white citizens “look upon slavery as a curse; [they] also look upon freedom possessed by a negro, except in a very few cases, as a greater curse.” Congress did pass a compensated emancipation bill in the one jurisdiction the federal government controlled—Washington, D.C. Lincoln signed it on April 16, 1862.9
By the time of the Second Confiscation Act, however, slaves increasingly took the war into their own hands and simply left their owners. Northern religious groups, most famously the American Missionary Association, were already sending teachers and supplies to the temporary villages and camps that sprouted wherever the Union army settled. The fact of freedom preceded the law of emancipation. And saving the Union still trumped the liberation of four million slaves.
General George B. McClellan conceived of himself as the blue-eyed salvation of the Union. His men loved him as they would love no other commander throughout the war, despite a fatal flaw: he did not like to fight. Or maybe because of that flaw. There is no gainsaying his brilliance in taking a broken army after the Bull Run disaster in July 1861 and drilling it into an effective fighting force. As much as his men loved him, McClellan loved them back. With all that love, sending them to battle proved too much.
By March 1862, Union forces appeared poised to deliver a knockout blow to the Confederacy. The Rebels had not won an important engagement since Bull Run in July 1861. The federal armies in the West had racked up impressive victories. It remained for McClellan’s 130,000-man army to move in the East against Confederate General Joseph Johnston. Destroy Johnston’s army, capture Richmond, end the rebellion.
On April 4, McClellan and his Army of the Potomac began their march up the peninsula formed by the York and James rivers. Their objective was Richmond. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, so confident that the demise of the Confederacy was imminent, closed his department’s recruiting offices. Standing between McClellan and Richmond were fifteen thousand Confederate troops protected in part by “Quaker guns”—logs painted black to resemble cannon. The sight of these “weapons” spooked McClellan into believing a much more substantial Confederate force lurked somewhere in the vicinity, so he proceeded cautiously, as if a Rebel regiment hid behind every tree between the coast and Richmond. In a month’s time, he had made it only as far as Williamsburg, all the time pleading for more troops to confront an impossibly huge Confederate war machine.
Lincoln noted sarcastically that if he increased McClellan’s force by an additional three hundred thousand men, the Confederate army would suddenly triple in size in the general’s estimate. He implored his general: “I think it is the precise time for you to strike a blow. By delay the enemy will relatively gain upon you—that is, he will gain faster, by fortifications and reinforcements, than you can by reinforcements alone.” McClellan continued to stall. In the meantime, Jefferson Davis ordered the first draft in American history. McClellan continued to move ponderously up the peninsula toward Richmond like Hannibal’s elephants crossing the Alps. Spring rains turned the roads to mud, sometimes up to soldiers’ knees, and sank heavy artillery. While McClellan waded, Confederate General Joseph Johnston’s army grew to ninety thousand men.10
Walker Freeman, a private in Johnston’s army, sat in a downpour outside of Richmond waiting orders to move on fortified Union positions. His brother had been killed at Bull Run. Walker took up the cause for his family. He wanted to end the war as badly as any soldier on the other side. Destroy McClellan’s army and he would go home in peace, a citizen of a new nation. He would get that chance. Two corps of McClellan’s troops had crept to within five miles of the Confederate capital. President Davis decided that was close enough and ordered Johnston, who was as reluctant as McClellan to engage his enemy, to attack before federal forces had an opportunity to consolidate.
The Confederate assault at Seven Pines might have had greater success had not the mud and swollen rivers upset plans for a coordinated attack. Private Freeman and his colleagues had to wade through seventeen hundred yards of muck to reach Union defenders protected by log breastworks and artillery. Two bullets struck his right leg and he fell into the mire, where he stuck until hoisted out by retreating comrades. Union forces blunted the Confederate assault, but McClellan’s advance was checked. Freeman’s brigade of two thousand men suffered 50 percent casualties. Overall, the Confederates lost six thousand men at Seven Pines, the Union, five thousand men.11
Joseph Johnston received a severe wound at Seven Pines, and President Davis turned over the Army of Northern Virginia to his military adviser, Robert E. Lee. McClellan’s troops prepared for an all-out assault on the Confederate capital, confident that the new Rebel commander was “too cautious and weak under grave responsibility—personally brave and energetic … yet … wanting in moral firmness when pressed by heavy responsibility and … likely to be timid and irresolute in action.” McClellan painted a more accurate portrait of himself than of his opponent.12
Robert E. Lee kept three books on his writing desk: his Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and Meditations by the Stoic Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. He had marked these lines from the Stoic: “Erase fancy, curb impulse, quench desire, let sovereign reason have the mastery.” Compensating for his profligate father, the tarnished Revolutionary War hero Light Horse Harry Lee, the son valued order and duty. A brilliant engineer who had blazed Winfield Scott’s path to Mexico City in the Mexican War, he had opposed secession, yet turned down command of Union forces for a lesser role in the new Confederate States of America. His fealty to his native state of Virginia superseded his loyalty to the Union.13
Lee cited duty to both state and family as the main reasons for his decision. Yet other members of the Lee family, citing those same responsibilities, sided with the Union. Lee was not a tragic figure any more than the Confederacy was a tragic attempt at sovereignty. Tragedy requires unmerited suffering. What we have in Robert E. Lee, and in the Confederacy, was a series of bad decisions, some startlingly impulsive, given Lee’s embrace of reason, that led to predictable but not tragic destruction. We also have in Lee a bold, sometimes brilliant commander who seemed at once to relish and abhor combat and its consequences. His exterior reserve masked a gambler’s soul. In the end, Lee would prove an enigma. The poet Stephen Vincent Benét captured him well:
A figure lost to flesh and blood and bones,
Frozen into a legend out of life,
A blank-verse statue—…
For here was someone who lived all his life
In the most fierce and open light of the sun …
And kept his heart a secret to the end
From all the picklocks of biographers.14
The secession crisis found Lee in Texas. He wept when the Texas convention voted to leave the Union. He vowed to protect federal property from Lone Star partisans. Like Lincoln, Lee believed that secession invited “anarchy.” Though he had little use for the Lincoln administration, he hoped Virginia would remain in the Union. When he left Texas for his native state, an officer called out to him, “Colonel, do you intend to go South or remain North?” Le
e’s reply reflected his internal conflict: “I shall never bear arms against the United States—but it may be necessary for me to carry a musket in defence of my native State, Virginia.” After he arrived in the Old Dominion, Lee’s confusion continued: “While I wish to do what is right, I am unwilling to do what is not, either at the bidding of the South or the North.”15
Stopping off in Washington, Lee accepted President Lincoln’s promotion to the rank of full colonel of the 1st Regiment of Cavalry. When the president inquired after Lee’s loyalty, fellow Virginian General Winfield Scott replied, “He is true as steel, sir, true as steel!” Lincoln would offer Lee command of the Union army.16
The firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s troop call-up pushed Lee to a decision. In an emotional interview with Scott, Lee offered to sit out the conflict, which the older soldier dismissed outright. Lee then stated his intention to resign, to which Scott replied, “Lee, you have made the greatest mistake of your life.” The two men grasped hands tightly, both “too full of feeling to find utterance for one word.” The interview was over, and so was Colonel Lee’s career in the U.S. Army. After the war, Lee claimed the situation presented him with no option but to go with Virginia. Yet roughly 40 percent of the Virginia-born officers in the Union army, including Scott, remained with the Federals. For these soldiers, their oath of allegiance to their country took precedence over their place of birth.17
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