Lincoln was no exception. “This is essentially a People’s contest,” he had told Congress. “On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life….” But in answer to Horace Greeley’s “Prayer of Twenty Million,” in which the Tribune editor castigated the “preposterous and futile” idea of trying to put down a rebellion without extirpating the evil of slavery that caused it, the President wrote, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union….” Lincoln could hardly have stated his priorities more clearly, but what had happened to the priority of liberation—of elevating the condition of all men?
The imperatives of war did not allow the extended debate, philosophizing, legislating, compromising, adjusting inevitable in a pluralistic system of checks and balances. Decisions had to be made. Abolitionist pressure was mounting as the war lagged. European opinion—especially English liberal opinion—was waiting for Lincoln to take leadership against slavery. Senate and House might act if he did not; as early as August 1861 Congress had legislated for the emancipation of slaves who were used in arms or labor against the North, and within a year after that had acted to liberate slaves belonging to rebels or traitors. By midsummer 1862 the President had decided on some form of general emancipation. On July 22 Lincoln informed his Cabinet of his decision, adding that he had made up his mind on the main point but would hear suggestions as to details. As usual, the Cabinet was divided, but the President had to agree with the view that the emancipation proclamation must be issued only after a victory; otherwise it would seem an act of weakness and desperation—in Seward’s words, “the last shriek on our retreat….”
But where was the victory? Although a bitter disappointment to Lincoln, Antietam was enough of a victory to permit public announcement of his emancipation intention; thus the blood shed in that battle acquired some meaning. Late in September the President summoned his Cabinet. After reading a few pages from the humorist Artemus Ward, to the non-amusement of Seward and Chase, Lincoln said he would now announce the proclamation. The Cabinet divided again. Bates, dreading any move toward black equality, held that forced colonization should accompany emancipation. Seward privately feared that the proclamation might incite a slave rebellion in the South and alienate moderate opinion in the North, but he supported the President. Blair was still concerned about its possible impact on Union supporters in the border states. Chase approved the idea as a moral necessity, Welles as a military one. Next day the President published his decree, warning that in one hundred days—on January 1, 1863—all slaves in any states or area still in rebellion would be declared free.
“We shout with joy,” Frederick Douglass said, “that we live to record this righteous decree.” Other abolitionists were pleased, though wary; they would maintain pressure on the President. Moderate and conservative Republicans were apprehensive, most Democrats hostile, and Confederate spokesmen enraged and yet pleased to be vindicated in their warnings about the Republicans’ satanic intentions.
The “hundred days” proved the most harrowing in Lincoln’s life, and perhaps in the Union’s. Even as McClellan boasted of his “victory” at Antietam, the President was searching for a general who could fight, amid rumors of disaffection within the Union armies toward the Commander in Chief in the White House. There were more delays, stalemates, and reversals in western operations. The fall congressional elections went against the President. Republican senators were holding long and heated caucuses in which they criticized the President, denounced the moderates and incompetents around him, and discussed ways of gaining greater control of the war. Even worse, the Cabinet was split several ways, and, worst of all, factions within the Administration were tying in with congressional blocs. These centrifugal forces threatened to break the government apart. Then, in mid-December, came the frightful news of the slaughter at Fredericksburg, where Lee shattered Burnside’s army—almost 1,300 Union soldiers killed, another 10,000 wounded.
Fredericksburg precipitated a government crisis. Caucusing senators asked that the Cabinet be reorganized; they criticized Seward so sharply for his moderate attitude toward slavery and his alleged influence on Lincoln that the Secretary of State felt obliged to tender his resignation. At a meeting with Lincoln the senators demanded a more active role for a reorganized Cabinet, and especially for their friend Chase. Lincoln quietly heard them out, asked them to return the following evening, and called a cabinet meeting for the next day. In an open discussion Lincoln gained the agreement of all—including Chase—to his claim that the Cabinet had seldom disagreed on basic issues. When the senators arrived that evening, they found Lincoln there with his Cabinet save for Seward. After reasserting that his cabinet members were fundamentally in harmony, the President called on the members to vouch again for this position. Cornered, Chase now contradicted the statements he had made to the senators on the Hill. The Senate delegation was left in disarray, Seward in vindication, Chase in humiliation.
Shortly, Chase returned to the White House. He had prepared his resignation, he told the President.
“Where is it?” asked Lincoln. Chase produced a letter but seemed reluctant to part with it.
“Let me have it,” said the President, reaching out and snatching it. He was exultant. Now he had both Seward’s and Chase’s tenders. He would accept neither resignation. He had the balance he wanted. “I can ride now,” he said to a friend. “I’ve got a pumpkin in each end of my bag.”
It was a small triumph amid the gloom of December. Lincoln suddenly seemed drawn and aged. He spent hours waiting for news of battles, other hours in reflection, reassessing the course of the war. “The dogmas of the quiet past,” he told Congress in his annual message, “are inadequate to the stormy present.…As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
On New Year’s Eve, the night before the Emancipation Proclamation was to be signed, Lincoln “tossed in fitful sleep, dreaming of corpses on a distant battlefield in Tennessee, of guns flashing in the night, of silent troops lying exhausted in the rain, of crowds reading casualty returns at Willard’s Hotel.” Next day, after the President had greeted a long procession of guests, his arm seemed almost paralyzed, and his fingers trembled so that he had to take a firm grip on the gold pen. “If my name ever goes into history,” he said to the cabinet members and officials gathered around him, “it will be for this act.” It was not an impressive-looking document, with its detailed exemptions and its admonition to slaves to refrain from unnecessary violence. But five words stood out in the order: after January l, 1863, slaves in rebelling states and areas shall be “THEN, THENCE-FORTH, AND FOREVER FREE.”
A black preacher raced down Pennsylvania Avenue to read the proclamation to a crowd of blacks. They shouted, clapped, sang. Later, blacks and whites gathered in front of the White House and called for the President to appear. When he came to the window and bowed to them, ecstatic cheering broke out, and one black exclaimed that if he would only “come out of that palace, they would hug him to death.”
1863. Somewhere around a campfire a Union troop was singing:
Oh, we’ll rally ’round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom;
We will rally from the hill-side, we’ll gather from the plain,
Shouti
ng the battle cry of freedom…
We will welcome to our numbers the loyal, true, and brave.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom,
And although they may be poor not a man shall be a slave,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
Somewhere in the South soldiers were singing, to the same tune:
We’ll meet the Yankee hosts, boys,
With fearless hearts and true,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom,
And we’ll show the dastard minions
What Southern pluck can do,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
Somewhere the 1st Arkansas (Negro) Regiment heard the President’s proclamation.
See, there above the center, where the flag is waving bright,
We are going out of slavery; we’re bound for freedom’s light;
We mean to show Jeff Davis how the Africcans can fight,
As we go marching on!
Notes
PROLOGUE
[Pownall’s map]:T. Pownall, A Topographical Description of the Dominions of the United States of America (1776). Lois Mulkeam, ed. (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1949), pp. 25-26; see also (as referred to in Pownall) Edward Anthill, “An Essay on the Cultivation of the Vine, suited to the different climates in North America,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (Wm. and Thomas Bradford, 1771), (O.S.) I, Section II, pp. 117-97.
[Origin of first Americans]: Harold E. Driver, Indians of North America. (University of Chicago Press, 1961), Ch. 1.
[Dispersion of Indian Americans across the continent]: Geoffrey Barraclough, ed., The Times Atlas of World History (Hammond, 1979), pp. 36-37.
[Nootkas on the tide]: quoted in Richard B. Morris, ed., Encyclopedia of American History (Harper & Row, 1976), p. 10.
[Types of Indians]: Driver, Ch. 24.
[Decimation of Indians on Martha’s Vineyard and Block Island]: Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the United States (Harper & Row, 1980), p. 16.
[Tideland and piedmont Indians]: Bureau of the Census, A Century of Population Growth (Government Printing Office, 1909), pp. 39-40.
[Joseph Brant and the Iroquois]: Katharine C. Turner, Red Men Calling on the Great White Father (University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), p. 19; Angie Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States (University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), p. 71.
[Great Lakes tribes]: Debo, p. 13.
[Treaty with Cherokees]: U.S. Congress, House Committee on Indian Affairs, “Indian Territory, West of the Mississippi,” Reports of Committees, 30th Congress, 1st session, no. 736 ([Albany?]: Wendell and Van Benthuysen, [1848?]), p. 1.
[Creek-Seminole army]: Angie Debo, The Road to Disappearance (University of Oklahoma Press, 1941), p. 44·
[Population in the 1780s]: Bureau of the Census, A Century of Population Growth (Government Printing Office, 1909, 1976).
[Religious affiliation, 1775]: Morris, p. 824.
[Transportation and currency in the 1780s]: A Century of Population Growth, pp. 20-23.
[Taverns and drinking]: Frank J. Klingberg, The Morning of America (Appleton-Century, 94’) PP· 295-301.
[Patrick Henry as an “American”]: quoted in Oscar Handlin, The Americans (Little, Brown, 1963), p. 150.
[Catholic mass in Boston]: John Thayer, An Account of the Conversion of the Reverend Mr. John Thayer (J. P. Cochlan, 1787), as cited J. P. Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America, 1788. Durand Echeverria, ed. (Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 88.
[Songs in America]: James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Little, Brown, 1931), pp. 70-71.
[Omaha leader’s song]: Alice C. Fletcher, Indian Story and Song from North America (Small, Maynard, 1906), pp. 24-25.
[Americans in the 1780s]: see also St. John de Crèvecoeur. Sketches of Eighteenth Century America (Yale University Press, 1925); Percy G. Adams, ed., Crèvecoeur’s Eighteenth Century Travels in Pennsylvania & New York (University Press of Kentucky, 1961); James Schouler, Americans of 1776 (Dodd, Mead, 1906); Marshall Davidson, Life in America (Houghton Mifflin, 1974), Vol. 1, passim; Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North-America in the Years 1780-81-82 (White, Gallagher, & White, 1827).
1. THE STRATEGY OF LIBERTY
[Fiscal background of Shays’s Rebellion]: Jonathan Smith, “The Depression of 1785 and Daniel Shays’ Rebellion.” address before the Clinton, Mass., Historical Society, printed in pamphlet form by that Society (1905), and reprinted in William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 5 (January 1948), pp. 77-94; for a contemporary analysis, see Richard Cranch to John Adams, Oct. 7, 1786, John Adams Papers, Microfilm Reel 369, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.
[Leadership of the rebellion]: On Shays’s role, reflected in a dialogue between him and General Rufus Putnam, as reported by Putnam to Governor Bowdoin, see Charles Oscar Parmenter, History of Pelham, Massachusetts (Carpenter and Morehouse, 1898), pp. 395-98.
[Collective nature of the rebel leadership]: Richard B. Morris, “Insurrection in Massachusetts,” in Daniel Aaron, ed., America in Crisis (Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), pp. 31-33.
[Reaction of Massachusetts authorities to the rebellion]: see especially extensive references in correspondence in the Henry Knox Papers and the Bowdoin-Temple Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; see also Van Beck Hall, Politics Without Parties: Massachusetts, 1780-1791(University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), pp. 210-12, and references therein.
[Statement of “respectable Bostonian ”]: Joseph Warren to John Adams, Oct. 22, 1786, Adams Papers.
[Letter of anonymous Regulator to Gov. Bowdoin]: Bowdoin-Temple Papers, anonymous to Bowdoin, n.d. The records of the Regulators are virtually nonexistent as compared to those of the authorities. See, however, George Richards Minot, The History of the Insurrections in Massachusetts (originally written 1788), 2nd ed. (Books for Libraries Press, 1970), letter, Eli Parsons to “Friends and Fellow Sufferers,” Feb. 15, 1787, pp. 146-47; see also files of the many newspapers of the day. William Manning, The Key of Libberty (written in 1798), Samuel Eliot Morison, ed. (The Manning Association, 1922), offers the views of a “typical” farmer who was partial to neither authorities nor rebels.
[Other sources on Shays’s Rebellion]: Neville Meaney, “The Trial of Popular Sovereignty in Post-Revolutionary America: The Case of Shays’ Rebellion,” in Neville Meaney, ed., Studies on the American Revolution (Melbourne: The Macmillan Co. of Australia, 1976), pp. 151-216; Robert J. Taylor, Western Massachusetts in the Revolution (Brown University Press, 1954); Josiah Gilbert Holland, History of Western Massachusetts (Springfield: Samuel Bowles & Co., 1855), Vol. 1.
The Great Fear
[Washington’ s daily life at Mount Vernon, fall 1786]: John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Diaries of George Washington (Houghton Mifflin, 1925), Vol. 3, passim; see also Washington’s Map of Mount Vernon (reproduced in facsimile from the original). Introduction by Lawrence Martin (University of Chicago Press, 1932).
[Washington on the cause of the commotions]: Washington to David Humphreys, Oct. 22, 1786, in John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington (Government Printing Office, 1939), Vol 29, p. 27; Knox to Washington, esp. quotation of Knox by Washington in Washington to James Madison, Nov. 5, 1786, ibid., p. 51.
[Washington on inconsistency of man]: Washington to David Humphreys, Dec. 26, 1786, ibid., pp. 125-26.
[Washington to Madison on “thirteen sovereignties”]: ibid., P 52.
[Letters of John and Abigail Adams’ correspondents, and the Adamses’ responses] Adams Papers, Microfilm Reel 369, Massachusetts Historical Society; see esp. exchanges with Rufus King, Cotton Tufts, James Warren, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams. [Abigail Adams on Hyde Park]: quoted in Page Smith, John Adams (Doubleday, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 642. [John Quincy Adams on the governor as “Old Lady”]: JQA to Abigail Adams, Dec. 30, 1786, Microfilm Reel 369. [AA to JQA on “Poppa’s” new work]: AA to JQA, Jan. 17, 1787, ibid. John Adams’ new work was published in his D
efence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, published in two volumes, 1787.
[Reports to Jefferson about Shays’s rebellion, and his response]: see Julian P. Boyd, ed. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton University Press, 1954-55). Vols. 9-11, passim; see also Dumas Malone, Jefferson and the Rights of Man (Little, Brown, 1951), pp. 156-66. [Jefferson’s and Adams’ English tour]: Boyd, Vol. 9, pp. 369-75; see also L. H. Butterfield, ed. Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (Belknap Press, 1961), Vol. 3, pp. 184-86. [Abigail Adams to Jefferson on Shays’s rebellion]: AA to Jefferson, Jan. 29, 1787; and Jefferson’s reply, Feb. 22, 1787, Adams Papers, Microfilm Reel, 369, Massachusetts Historical Society. [Jefferson on revolution and the tree of liberty]: Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, Nov. 13, 1787, Boyd, Vol. 12, p. 356.
[The rebel attack on the Springfield arsenal]: see detailed reports in the Henry Knox Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; and a separate folder, “Lincoln-Bowdoin, Shays’ Rebellion Campaign, 1786-1787,” Massachusetts Historical Society, containing day-to-day reports from Gen. Lincoln to Bowdoin. See also General Shepard to Governor Bowdoin, Jan. 26, 1787, Massachusetts Archives, Vol. 190, pp. 317-18, reprinted in American Historical Review, Vol. 2, No. 4 (July 1897), pp. 694-95.
[Events in western Massachusetts after the Springfield arsenal encounter]: Robert J. Taylor, Western Massachusetts in the Revolution, pp. 162-63. [Stockbridge episode]: Electa F. Jones, Stockbridge, Past and Present (Samuel Bowles, 1854), pp. 193-98; newspaper clippings, Shays’s Rebellion, city and town libraries, Berkshire County; Robert A. Burns assisted in this research. See also Thomas Egleslon, The Life of John Paterson (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894), pp. 198-99. Edward Bellamy. The Duke of Stockbridge (Silver, Burdett, 1900), offers a fictionalized version of some of these events. See also Marion L. Starkey, A Little Rebellion (Alfred A. Knopf, 1955).
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