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. Ot
her 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
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