Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  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.

  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 a
nd 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 th
e 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