A combination of Union diplomacy and European great-power politics had produced this outcome. The United States was friendly to the Juarez government. When it was overthrown, the Lincoln administration called home the American minister and refused to recognize the French-installed provisional government. Lincoln also modified Union military strategy in order to show the flag in Texas as a warning to the French. After the capture of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Grant and Banks wanted to mount a campaign against Mobile. But for purposes of diplomacy, the government ordered Banks to move against Texas instead. The first Union effort in this direction, at Sabine Pass on the Texas-Louisiana border, turned into a fiasco in September 1863 when a single Confederate battery drove off the gunboats trying to protect an infantry landing. Banks did better in November, capturing Brownsville and making a token lodgement near the Mexican border for Napoleon to ponder.
Ponder it he did, for he wanted no trouble with the United States at a time when his intricate house of cards in European diplomacy seemed about to collapse. Part of Napoleon's purpose in setting Maximilian on the Mexican throne was to extract favors from Austria in the delicate but deadly game of diplomacy and war among the Continental powers as each sought to protect its flanks while trying to defend or gobble up
parts of Poland, Italy, and Denmark. Austria's alliance with Prussia in a war against Denmark by which Prussia gained Schleswig-Holstein cooled Napoleon's ardor for the Hapsburg connection. In early 1864 he scaled down the French commitment to Maximilian and spurned Confederate attempts to use Mexico as bait for French recognition. Napoleon's foreign ministry also shut down Confederate efforts to build a navy in France. The six ships contracted for by the South were sold instead to Peru, Prussia, and Denmark. But Bulloch went down fighting. Through legal legerdemain at which he had become expert, he eventually obtained transfer of one ironclad from Denmark to the Confederacy. Christened C.S.S. Stonewall, it crossed the Atlantic and arrived one month after Lee had surrendered at Appomattox. The Stonewall ultimately found its way into the Japanese navy.20
III
For the Lincoln administration, victories on the battlefield translated into political success at home as well as abroad in 1863. Several state elections occurred during the fall, of which the most important were the gubernatorial contests in Ohio and Pennsylvania. A year earlier the Republicans had suffered a setback in congressional elections. The issues in 1863 remained the same: the conduct of the war; emancipation; civil liberties; and conscription. On the war issue Republicans seemed in good shape, for Chickamauga only barely dimmed the luster of Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and other triumphs. Nevertheless Lincoln was nervous about the Ohio and Pennsylvania elections—indeed, he told Gideon Welles that "he had more anxiety in regard to [them] than he had in 1860 when he was chosen"—because the Democrats in both states had nominated copperheads for governor. The election of either would revive sagging Confederate morale and might depress the northern will to win.21
Clement Vallandigham conducted his campaign for the Ohio governorship from exile in Windsor, Canada. George W. Woodward remained in dignified silence on his bench as a state supreme court judge in Pennsylvania while the party ran his campaign for governor. But a
20. Frank L. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy (Chicago, 1931), 88–145, 438–42, 447–49, 527–49; Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, 333–43; Lynn M. Case and Warren F. Spencer, The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy (Philadelphia, 1970), 427–80.
21. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, I, 470.
Blue and Gray lie together in peace at the foot of Little Round Top
Library of Congress
Unwounded survivors of the original eighty-six men in Co. I of the 57th Massachusetts after six weeks of fighting from the Wilderness to Petersburg in 1864
U.S. Army Military History Institute
Port and rail facilities at City Point, Virginia, on the James River, Union supply base in the Petersburg campaign
Library of Congress
Sherman's soldiers tearing up the railroad in Atlanta before setting forth on their march to the sea
Library of Congress
Confederate soldiers captured at Gettysburg
U.S. Army Military History Institute
Andersonville prison, with Confederate guards along the fence in the background and the prisoners' sinks (latrines) in the foreground
Library of Congress
Ulysses S. Grant
Library of Congress
David G. Farragut
Library of Congress
William Tecumseh Sherman
Louis A. Warren Lincoln Library and Museum
Joseph E. Johnston
Louis A. Warren Lincoln Library and Museum
On deck of the U.S.S. Hartford, Admiral Farragut's flagship, with the wheel manned by John McFarland, who won a Congressional Medal of Honor for his helmsmanship in the battle of Mobile Bay
U.S. Naval Historical Center
Battery A, 2nd U.S. Colored Artillery, which fought at the battle of Nashville
Chicago Historical Society
Union trenches at Petersburg
Library of Congress
Confederate trenches at Petersburg, with chcvaux-de-frise (pointed stakes) and dead soldier, after the successful Union assault on April 2, 1865
U.S. Army Military History Institute
Confederate soldier killed in the Petersburg trenches
Library of Congress
An end of fighting: Confederate trenches at Petersburg after the Union assault on April 2, 1865
Minnesota Historical Society
The fruits of war: remains of a plantation house near Fredericksburg
Library of Congress
Richmond on April 4, 1865, as viewed from the Confederate Treasury building, with Yankee cavalry horses tied in the foreground as their owners finish putting out the fires set by departing rebels
U.S. Army Military History Institute
little investigative reporting by Republicans dug up information about his views on the war, which were similar to Vallandigham's. "Slavery was intended as a special blessing to the people of the United States," believed Woodward. "Secession is not disloyalty," he had written in 1860, for the election of Lincoln had destroyed the old Union of consent and comity. "I cannot in justice condemn the South for withdrawing. . . . I wish Pennsylvania could go with them." Although two of his sons fought in the Army of the Potomac, Woodward did not think reunion could be achieved by military victory. As a state judge, he wrote an opinion that the national conscription act was unconstitutional and inoperative in Pennsylvania. A prominent Democrat campaigning for Woodward declared that when elected he would unite with Governors Vallandigham of Ohio and Seymour of New York (representing together nearly half of the North's population) "in calling from the army troops from their respective States for the purpose of compelling the Administration to invite a convention of the States to adjust our difficulties."22
Both Woodward and Vallandigham had been nominated before the Union triumphs at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. These battles undercut their theme of the war's failure. Though neither candidate changed his personal views, the party recognized that excessive antiwar statements would alienate War Democrats whose votes were necessary for victory. It came hard for War Democrats to swallow Vallandigham, but Woodward proved more digestible. He published a statement condemning the rebellion. And on election eve the party achieved a coup by persuading McClellan (who resided in neighboring New Jersey) to write a letter stating that if he could vote in Pennsylvania he would "give to Judge Woodward my voice and my vote."23
Because of Republican advantages on the war question, however, Democrats concentrated mainly on such tried and true issues as emancipation. In Ohio the party portrayed the contest as an " 'irrepressible conflict' between white and black laborers. . . . Let every vote count in favor of the white man, and against the Abolition hordes, who would place negro children in your schools, negro jurors in you
r jury boxes,
22. Arnold Shankman, "For the Union as It Was and the Constitution as It Is: A Copperhead Views the Civil War," in James I. Robertson, Jr., and Richard M. McMurry, eds., Rank and File: Civil War Essays in Honor of Bell Irvin Wiley (San Rafael, Cal., 1976), 97–98, 104.
23. Arnold M. Shankman, The Pennsylvania Antiwar Movement, 1861–1865 (Cranbury, N.J., 1980), 133, 139.
and negro votes in your ballot boxes!" Party orators lampooned the portly Republican gubernatorial candidate John Brough as a "fat Knight of the corps d'Afrique." Similar though less strident outcries against "political and social equality" also typified the Pennsylvania campaign.24
But anti-abolitionism and racism seemed to have lost potency as Democratic shibboleths. Two almost simultaneous events in July 1863 were largely responsible for this phenomenon. The first was the New York draft riot, which shocked many northerners into a backlash against the consequences of virulent racism. The second was a minor battle in the campaign against Charleston. At dusk on July 18 two Union brigades assaulted Fort Wagner, a Confederate earthwork defending the entrance to Charleston harbor. Leading the attack was the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. This was not unusual in itself: Bay State regiments fought in the hottest part of many battles, and the combat casualties of Massachusetts were among the highest for Union states. But the 54th was the North's showcase black regiment. Its colonel and lieutenant colonel were sons of prominent abolitionist families. More was riding on the 54th's first big action than the capture of a fort, important as that might be. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw had implored his brigade commander to give the regiment a chance to prove its mettle. The general responded by assigning Shaw to lead the frontal assault across a narrow spit of sand against this strong earthwork. The result was predictable; the rebels drove back the attacking brigades and inflicted heavy losses.
The 54th took the largest casualties, losing nearly half of its men including Colonel Shaw with a bullet through his heart. Black soldiers gained Wagner's parapet and held it for an hour in the flame-stabbed darkness before falling back. The achievements and losses of this elite black regiment, much publicized by the abolitionist press, wrought a change in northern perceptions of black soldiers. "Through the cannon smoke of that dark night," declared the Atlantic Monthly, "the manhood of the colored race shines before many eyes that would not see." The New York Tribune believed that this battle "made Fort Wagner such a name to the colored race as Bunker Hill had been for ninety years to the white Yankees." When a Confederate officer reportedly replied
24. Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (Lexington, Ky., 1970), 245, 243; Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (New York, 1964 [1942]), 150; Shankman, Pennsylvania Antiwar Movement, 103–4.
to a request for the return of Shaw's body with the words "we have buried him with his niggers," Shaw's father quelled a northern effort to recover his son's body with these words: "We hold that a soldier's most appropriate burial-place is on the field where he has fallen."25
This apotheosis of Shaw and his men took place just after Democratic rioters in New York had lynched black people and burned the Colored Orphan Asylum. Few Republican newspapers failed to point the moral: black men who fought for the Union deserved more respect than white men who fought against it. Lincoln expressed this theme in a public letter of August 26 addressed to Democrats. "You are dissatisfied with me about the negro," wrote the president. But "some of the commanders of our armies in the field who have given us our most important successes, believe the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion."26 "You say you will not fight to free negroes," continued Lincoln. "Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union. I issued the proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union." When this war was won, concluded the president, "there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it."27
Lincoln's letter set the tone for Republicans in the 1863 campaign. Many of them had previously felt defensive about emancipation; now they could put Democrats on the defensive. Opposition to emancipation became opposition to northern victory. Linking abolition and Union, Republicans managed to blunt the edge of Democratic racism in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York (where legislative elections were held in 1863). The party carried two-thirds of the legislative districts in New
25. Atlantic Monthly, quoted in Lawrence Lader, The Bold Brahmins (New York, 1961), 290; New York Tribune, Sept. 8, 1865; Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment: History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry 1863–1865 (Boston, 1894), 102–3.
26. This was a reference to Grant, who had written to Lincoln on August 23 that "by arming the negro we have added a powerful ally. . . . This, with the emancipation of the negro, is the heaviest blow yet given the Confederacy. . . . They will make good soldiers and taking them from the enemy weakens him in the same proportion they strengthen us." Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.
27. CWL, VI, 401–10.
York. In Ohio it buried Vallandigham under a victory margin of 100,000 votes, winning an unprecedented 61 percent of the ballots. Especially gratifying to Republicans was their 94 percent share of the absentee soldier vote. Efforts to persuade soldiers to "vote as they shot" paid off in a big way. Significantly, in an opinion written by none other than George Woodward, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had ruled a year earlier that soldiers could not vote outside their home districts. Since only a few thousand Pennsylvania soldiers could be furloughed home for the election, their votes contributed only a small part of the Repub-lians' 15,000-vote victory (51.5 percent) over Woodward.
Republicans additionally scored significant gains in state and local elections elsewhere. They interpreted these results as signs of a transformation of public opinion toward emancipation. The Republican newspaper in Lincoln's hometown of Springfield commented that if a referendum had been held on the Emancipation Proclamation a year earlier, "there is little doubt that the voice of a majority would have been against it. And yet not a year has passed before it is approved by an overwhelming majority." A New York Republican observed that "the change of opinion on this slavery question . . . is a great and historic fact. . . . Who could have predicted . . . this great and blessed revolution? . . . God pardon our blindness of three years ago." The Emancipation Proclamation had been "followed by dark and doubtful days," admitted Lincoln in his annual message to Congress on December 8, 1863. But now "the crisis which threatened the friends of the Union is past."28 If Lincoln's optimism proved premature, it nevertheless mirrored the despair that threatened to undermine the southern will to continue fighting.
28. Illinois State Journal, Dec. 1, 1863, quoted in V. Jacque Voegeli, Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro during the Civil War (Chicago, 1967), 131; Strong, Diary, 408; CWL, VII, 49–50.
23
When This Cruel War Is Over
I
Unhappily for Jefferson Davis, elections for the Confederate Congress took place in the fall of 1863 when southern morale was at low ebb. The Davis administration suffered a more severe rebuke from voters than the Lincoln administration had sustained the previous year in a similar situation. The difference resulted not only from the greater calamity to Confederate arms but also from the different political structures in North and South.
Formal political parties did not exist in the Confederacy. This state of affairs arose from two main causes: the erosion of the two-party system in the 1850s and the perceived need for a united front during the emergencies of secession and war. Although the Whig party had experienced a brief reincarnation as the Constitutional Union party in 1860, it seemed to disa
ppear again in the crisis of 1861. Below the surface of southern politics Whiggery persisted in the form of memory and sentiment, but the most assiduous researchers employing the tools of roll-call analysis have been unable to identify party organizations or significant partisan patterns of voting in the Confederate Congress from 1861 through 1863.1
1. Thomas B. Alexander, "Persistent Whiggery in the Confederate South, 1860–1877," JSH, 27 (1961), 305–10; Richard E. Beringer, "The Unconscious 'Spirit of Party' in the Confederate Congress," CWH, 18 (1972), 312–16; Thomas B. Alexander and Richard E. Beringer, The Anatomy of the Confederate Congress (Nashville, 1972), 35–57.
Southerners considered this circumstance a source of strength. The president pro tem of the first Congress congratulated its members that "the spirit of party has never shown itself for an instant in your deliberations."2 But in fact, as historians now recognize, the absence of parties was actually a source of weakness. In the North the two-party system disciplined and channeled political activity. The Republican party became the means for mobilizing war resources, raising taxes, creating a new financial system, initiating emancipation, and enacting conscription. Democrats opposed most of these measures; the existence of this well-defined opposition caused Republicans to close ranks when the chips were down. Because measures were supported or opposed by parties, voters could identify those responsible for them and register their approval or disapproval at the polls by voting a party ticket. Both parties, of course, used their well-oiled machinery to rally voters to their side. In the Confederacy, by contrast, the Davis administration had no such means to mobilize support. No parties meant no institutionalized discipline over congressmen or governors. Davis could not invoke party loyalty and patronage in behalf of his policies, as Lincoln could. Opposition to the Davis administration became personal or factional and therefore difficult to deal with.
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