Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  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.

  III

  Northern diplomats were disappointed by the initial skeptical response of many Englishmen to the Emancipation Proclamation. But as the real import of the edict sank in, and as Lincoln made clear on January 1 that he really meant it, British antislavery sentiment mobilized for the Union. Mass meetings took place throughout the kingdom. Confederate sympathizers were forced to lie low for a time. The effect of "this development of sentiment," noted Charles Francis Adams happily, "is to annihilate all agitation for recognition." Young Henry Adams, whose mood tended to swing from despair to euphoria, was thrilled by the outpouring of British pro-Union expressions. "The Emancipation Proclamation has done more for us here than all our former victories and all our diplomacy," wrote Henry with hyperbole to his brother Charles Francis, Jr., a cavalry captain in the Army of the Potomac. "If only you at home don't have disasters, we will give such a checkmate to the foreign hopes of the rebels as they never yet have had."51

  But the Union armies did have more disasters. The foreign hopes as well as domestic prospects of the rebels rose again during this northern winter of discontent.

  51. Ford, Cycle of Adams Letters, I, 243.

  19

  Three Rivers in Winter, 1862–1863

  I

  Although disappointed by McClellan's failure to thrash Lee at Antietam, Lincoln expected the Army of the Potomac to push after the rebels and fight them again while they were far from home. Lincoln visited the army in early October and urged McClellan to get moving before the Confederates could be reinforced and refitted. Upon returning to Washington, the president had Halleck send McClellan an order: "Cross the Potomac and give battle. . . . Your army must move now while the roads are good."1

  But McClellan as usual protested that he could not act until his supply wagons were full and his soldiers reorganized. Halleck threw up his hands in despair. He knew that the Army of Northern Virginia was in worse shape than the Army of the Potomac. "I am sick, tired, and disgusted" with McClellan's inactivity, wrote Halleck in October. "There is an immobility here that exceeds all that any man can conceive of. It requires the lever of Archimedes to move this inert mass." Republicans shared Halleck's impatience. "What devil is it that prevents the Potomac Army from advancing?" asked the editor of the Chicago Tribune on October 13. "What malign influence palsies our army and wastes these glorious days for fighting? If it is McClellan, does not the President see that he is a traitor?"2

  1. Halleck to McClellan, Oct. 6, 1862, O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 19, pt. 1, p. 72.

  2. Halleck to Hamilton R. Gamble, Oct. 30, 1862, ibid., Ser. III, Vol. 2, pp. 703–4; Joseph Medill to O. M. Hatch, Oct. 13, quoted in James V. Murfin, The Gleam of Bayonets (New York, 1965), 300.

  Lincoln too was becoming exasperated. But instead of removing McClellan he decided to try some fatherly advice. "You remember my speaking to you of what I called your over-cautiousness," Lincoln wrote the general on October 13. "Are you not over-cautious when you assume that you can not do what the enemy is constantly doing?" McClellan had argued that his men could not march twenty miles a day and fight without full stomachs and new shoes. Yet the rebels marched and fought with little food and no shoes. To wait for a full supply pipeline "ignores the question of time, which can not and must not be ignored." If McClellan crossed the Potomac quickly and got between the enemy and Richmond he could force Lee into the open for a fight to the finish. "We should not so operate as to merely drive him away. If we can not beat the enemy where he now is [west of Harper's Ferry], we never can. . . . If we never try, we shall never succeed."3

  But this appeal failed to move McClellan. When little happened for another two weeks except telegrams citing broken-down horses, Lincoln lost patience: "Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?" Such goading made McClellan waspish. "The good of the country," he wrote to his wife, "requires me to submit to all this from men whom I know to be my inferior! . . . There never was a truer epithet applied to a certain individual than that of the 'Gorilla.' "4 In truth, McClellan had again lost sight of reality. Considering himself the hero of Antietam, he believed he could dictate to the government. "I have insisted that Stanton shall be removed, & that Halleck shall give way to me as Comdr. in Chief," McClellan informed his wife. "The only safety for the country & for me is to get rid of the lot of them."5

  The Army of the Potomac finally began to cross its namesake river on October 26, but moved so slowly that Lee was able to interpose Longstreet's corps between Richmond and the bluecoats while Jackson remained in the Shenandoah Valley on McClellan's flank. For Lincoln this was the last straw; he was tired of trying to "bore with an auger too dull to take hold." On November 7 he replaced McClellan with Burnside.6

  3. CWL, V, 460–61.

  4. Lincoln to McClellan, Oct. 25, 1862, ibid., 474; McClellan to Ellen Marcy Mc Clellan, undated but probably Oct. 30, 1862, McClellan Papers, Library of Congress.

  5. McClellan to Ellen McClellan, Sept. 20, Oct. 31, 1862, McClellan Papers.

  To his private secretary Lincoln explained that when McClellan kept "delaying on little pretexts of wanting this and that I began to fear that he was playing false—that he did not want to hurt the enemy." If he let Lee block an advance toward Richmond "I determined to . . . remove him. He did so & I relieved him."7

  McClellan's farewell to the army was emotional. A few officers muttered darkly about "changing front on Washington" and "throwing the infernal scoundrels into the Potomac." Nothing came of this, however, and nothing in McClellan's tenure of command became him like his leaving of it. "Stand by General Burnside as you have stood by me, and all will be well," he told the men as they yelled their affection for the leader who had created them as an army. Among those who most regretted McClellan's removal was Burnside himself. Although he was one of the few Union generals in the East with marked successes to his credit—along the coast of North Carolina—Burnside considered himself unqualified to command the Army of the Potomac. This conviction would all too soon be confirmed.

  Burnside started well, however. Instead of continuing straight south, using the vulnerable railroad through Manassas as his sup
ply line, he moved the ponderous army of 110,000 men with unwonted speed to Falmouth, across the Rappahannock from Fredericksburg. From there he hoped to cross the river and drive toward Richmond, with his supply line secured by naval control of the rivers flowing into the Chesapeake Bay. The drawback to this strategy was the number of rivers the army would have to cross, beginning with the Rappahannock. By moving quickly, though, Burnside had gotten two advance corps to Falmouth on November 17, before Lee could shift troops to block a crossing. But the pontoons Burnside needed to bridge the river did not show up for more than a week—a delay caused by Burnside's unfortunate knack for issuing unclear instructions and Halleck's misunderstanding of where and when Burnside intended to cross the river. As a result, Lee had most of his 75,000 men dug in along the hills south of the Rappahannock by the time the pontoons arrived.

  Lee was willing to sit there all winter, but Burnside could not afford to do so. Lincoln and the public expected an offensive. After thinking

  6. Quotation from Foote, Civil War, I, 752. The order removing McClellan from command was dated November 5 but delivered on November 7; the order is in CWL, V, 485.

  7. Dennett, Lincoln/Hay, 218–19.

  it over and concluding that Lee would expect him to cross the river above or below Fredericksburg, Burnside decided that "the enemy will be more surprised by a crossing immediately in our front." Lee was surprised only by the folly of this move. He had Longstreet's corps posted along four miles of high ground overlooking Fredericksburg with a sweeping field of fire over the half-mile of open fields that attacking troops would have to cross. As one of Longstreet's artillery officers put it, "a chicken could not live on that field when we open on it."8 Hoping that the Federals would assault this position, Lee decided to offer just enough resistance to their river crossing to give Jackson's corps time to move upstream and connect with Longstreet to extend the Confederate line another three miles.