The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln

by Larry Tagg

  General Wadsworth truly says, that never a noble subject was more belittled by the form in which it was uttered.

  Frederick Douglass likewise deplored the proclamation’s brittle tone:

  [Its words] kindled no enthusiasm. They touched neither justice nor mercy. Had there been one expression of sound moral feeling against Slavery, one word of regret and shame that this accursed system had remained so long the disgrace and scandal of the Republic, one word of satisfaction in the hope of burying slavery and the rebellion in one common grave, a thrill of joy would have run around the world, but no such word was said, and no such joy was kindled.

  Karl Marx said the document reminded him of “ordinary summonses sent from one lawyer to another.”

  Massachusetts Governor Andrew was more generous, calling it “a poor document, but a mighty act.” It was, in fact, the mightiest act of Lincoln’s or any other Presidency, one that would trigger an explosion of feeling from all points of the compass.

  The very first hearers of the Proclamation, Lincoln’s own Cabinet members, were perplexed. War Secretary Edwin Stanton was the most enthusiastic; he recognized its usefulness as a weapon in removing the strong prop of slave labor from the Southern war effort. Stodgy old slave state native Edward Bates was a surprising supporter, but he especially liked the paragraph that recommended that the ex-slaves be deported. Navy Secretary Gideon Welles was initially silent, worried by the proclamation’s doubtful constitutionality; it seemed to him “an arbitrary and despotic measure in the cause of freedom.” Montgomery Blair was against it on political grounds, warning that it would put a club into the hands of the Democrats in the next election. Caleb Smith of Indiana was harshest, telling his Assistant Secretary that if Lincoln issued it, “I will resign and go home and attack the administration.”

  Salmon Chase’s response was the most conflicted. He could not cheer it. He would rather the generals organize and arm the slaves. As the Radical champion, he had to give his blessing, but his support was tinged with resentment that the unwilling Lincoln would be seen as the champion of freedom, and not he, the true abolitionist.

  William Seward also remained skeptical. His advice to postpone the proclamation in July had probably been an attempt to accomplish its defeat. He feared it might ignite a race war that would halt cotton production and bring worried European powers in on the side of the South. Also, he thought the measure too divisive; it went against his policy of settling the war by compromise. Finally, Seward saw no need for the proclamation as long as the Union armies advanced. “It is mournful,” he said, “to see that a great nation shrinks from a war it has accepted and insists on adopting proclamations, when it is asked for force.”

  When the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was released to the public the next day, the Cabinet’s rainbow of opinion was reproduced across the whole nation.

  Antislavery men leaped up in jubilation. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune proclaimed, “It is the beginning of the end of the rebellion, is the beginning of the new life of the nation… . GOD BLESS ABRAHAM LINCOLN.” “The President may be a fool,” wrote George William Curtis to a fellow Lincoln critic. “But see what he has done. He may not have a policy. But he has given us one.” All the great New England men of letters—Whittier, Bryant, Lowell—sang praises. Most fulsome was Emerson, who published a rhapsody in the Atlantic Monthly whose pages scanned like poetry.

  Lincoln himself did not share the euphoria of the bards of New England. From the first, he was doubtful about the success of the act. Unsurpassed as a reader of the public mind, Lincoln feared that he lacked enough personal popularity to enlist the nation in a crusade that a majority of Americans, even a majority of Northerners, disapproved. On the evening of September 24, the day after the proclamation was published, Lincoln broke his rule against impromptu remarks and spoke five sentences to the jubilant serenaders who gathered on the lawn of the White House. “I can only trust in God I have made no mistake,” he began. “I shall make no attempt on this occasion to sustain what I have done or said by any comment. It is now for the country and the world to pass judgment on it, and, may be, take action upon it. I will say no more upon this subject. In my position I am environed with difficulties.”

  Four days later, he told his worry in a reply to the congratulations of Vice President Hannibal Hamlin:

  My Dear Sir: Your kind letter of the 25th is just received. It is known to some that while I hope something from the proclamation, my expectations are not as sanguine as are those of some friends. The time for its effect southward has not come; but northward the effect should be instantaneous.

  It is six days old, and while commendation in newspapers and by distinguished individuals is all that a vain man could wish, the stocks have declined, and troops come forward more slowly than ever. This, looked soberly in the face, is not very satisfactory. We have fewer troops in the field at the end of six days than we had at the beginning—-the attrition among the old outnumbering the addition by the new. The North responds to the proclamation sufficiently in breath; but breath alone kills no rebels.

  I wish I could write more cheerfully; nor do I thank you the less for the kindness of your letter. Yours very truly,

  A. Lincoln

  It appeared to the skeptical Gideon Welles that the proclamation “had imparted no vigor but rather depression and weakness to the North.”

  Lincoln had certainly not solved his political problems by issuing the proclamation. Rather, he had multiplied them. It shattered the coalition of War Democrats, Border State Unionists, and conservative Republicans that he had patiently built and carefully cemented since the beginning of the war. After the proclamation’s release, conservative fury was signaled by the sullen silence of the governors of New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Dark mutterings were also heard from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

  Even as he cast off from the conservatives, Lincoln knew he could never depend on the support of the Radicals. They had never embraced him. Even now, many of them, unhappy with the proclamation’s lack of whole-souled anti-slavery rhetoric, did not recognize Lincoln’s proclamation as the blow at slavery that they had sought.

  They must have taken some delight, however, in the shrieking of the angry editors in the Southern press. There, Lincoln’s proclamation was seen as a wicked effort to incite the rampant bloodshed and chaos of slave revolt—a “reign of hell on earth,” in the superheated prose of the Richmond Enquirer. The Enquirer expected the return, on a massive scale, of scenes from the Nat Turner massacre in 1831. “What shall we call him?” it asked: “Coward, assassin, savage, murderer of women and babies? Or shall we consider them all as embodied in the word fiend, and call him Lincoln, the Fiend?” The Staunton (Va.) Spectator roared that the proclamation would “strengthen the South and weaken the North, and bring down upon the Lincoln Administration the condemnation of the whole civilized world,” who would surely see that “the Lincoln Government is now the most tyrannical military despotism which has ever existed upon the earth.”

  The fury from the South, of course, was predictable. But the cynics prevailed even in the European press. The anti-slavery papers regretted the proclamation’s halfway measures. The London Spectator, for example, sneered that its principle “is not that a human being cannot justly own another but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.” A London Punch cartoonist drew Lincoln as a Satanic gambler attempting to trump the Confederacy with the ace of spades. The London Times, the British newspaper most widely regarded in America and Europe, forecast a lurid holocaust:

  Mr. Lincoln will, on the 1st of next January, do his best to excite a servile war in the States which he cannot occupy with his arms… . He will appeal to the black blood of the African; he will whisper of the pleasures of spoil and of the gratification of yet fiercer instincts; and when blood begins to flow and shrieks come piercing through the darkness, Mr. Lincoln will wait till the rising flames tell that all is co
nsummated, and then he will rub his hands and think that revenge is sweet.

  Two weeks later, the Times damned Lincoln with this prophesy:

  Lincoln … will be known to posterity and … ultimately be classed among the catalogue of monsters, the wholesale assassins and butchers of their kind. [The Emancipation Proclamation] will not deprive Mr. Lincoln of the distinctive affix which he will share with many, for the most part foolish and incompetent, kings and emperors, caliphs and doges, that of being Lincoln—“The Last.”

  Closer and more dangerous to Lincoln were the Democratic editors in the North. They had smoldered while Lincoln had conserved slavery; now they ignited. The Chicago Times branded the Emancipation Proclamation “a monstrous usurpation, a criminal wrong, and an act of national suicide.” Over its copy of the proclamation, The Crisis flew the banner, “The ‘Irrepressible Conflict’ upon Us—President Lincoln Succumbs to the Radical Abolitionists—Four Millions of Blacks Turned Loose upon the Country.” Another Crisis editorial asked, “Is not this a Death Blow to the Hope of Union?” and declared, “We have no doubt that this Proclamation seals the fate of this Union as it was and the Constitution as it is… . The time is brief when we shall have a DICTATOR PROCLAIMED, for the Proclamation can never be carried out except under the iron rule of the worst kind of despotism.” The New York World shouted that “Lincoln has swung loose from … constitutional moorings” and was “fully adrift on the current of radical fanaticism.” The New York Evening Express called it an “act of Revolution” that would render “the restoration of the Old Constitution and Union impossible.” Border State opinion was especially outraged at Lincoln’s betrayal. The Louisville Journal was defiant:

  “Masks and Faces”

  “Abe Lincoln’s Last Card”

  “Under the Veil”

  The measure is wholly unauthorized and wholly pernicious. Though it cannot be executed in fact, and though its execution probably will never be seriously attempted, its moral influence will be decided, and purely hurtful… . It is a gigantic usurpation, … aggravated by the menace of great and unmixed evil.

  Kentucky cannot and will not acquiesce in this measure. Never!

  Lincoln was not blown off course by the gale of criticism. John Hay spoke to Lincoln on September 26 about the editorials in the leading papers. “He said he had studied the matter so long that he knew more about it than they did,” Hay wrote in his diary. According to a correspondent of the Springfield Republican, Lincoln had good-naturedly mentioned the wrathful newspapers to a friend, telling him, “Having an hour to spare on Sunday I read this batch of editorials and when I was through reading I asked myself, ‘Abraham Lincoln, are you a man or a dog?’”

  While the press howled, angry letters piled up on Lincoln’s desk and spilled onto the floor. William O. Stoddard, the secretary in charge of reading Lincoln’s mail, wrote:

  Dictator is what the Opposition press and orators of all sizes are calling him. Witness, also, the litter on the floor and the heaped-up wastebaskets. There is no telling how many editors and how many other penmen within these past few days have undertaken to assure him that this is a war for the Union only, and that they never gave him any authority to run it as an Abolition war. They never, never told him that he might set the negroes free, and, now that he has done so, or futilely pretended to do so, he is a more unconstitutional tyrant and a more odious dictator than ever he was before. They tell him, however, that his … venomous blow at the sacred liberty of white men to own black men is mere brutum fulmen [empty threat], and a dead letter and a poison which will not work. They tell him many other things, and, among them, they tell him that the army will fight no more, and that the hosts of the Union will indignantly disband rather than be sacrificed upon the bloody altar of fanatical Abolitionism.

  * * *

  This last was true: General McClellan was considering revolt. He wrote to his wife on September 25, “The Presdt’s late Proclamation, the continuation of Stanton & Halleck in office render it almost impossible for me to retain my commission & self respect at the same time. I cannot make up my mind to fight for such an accursed doctrine as that of a servile insurrection—it is too infamous.” In the coming weeks, he would return to an old, bitter theme on the subject of his Commander-in-Chief: “[T]he good of the country requires me to submit to … men whom I know to be greatly my inferiors socially, intellectually, & morally! There never was a truer epithet applied to a certain individual than that of the ‘Gorilla.’”

  McClellan’s top officers naturally adopted his views. One of his pet generals, Fitz-John Porter, in a letter to the editor of the New York World, called the emancipation edict the “absurd proclamation of a political coward,” and reported:

  The Proclamation was ridiculed in the army—causing disgust, discontent, and expressions of disloyalty to the views of the administration, amounting I have heard, to insubordination, and for this reason—All such bulletins tend only to prolong the war by rousing the bitter feelings of the South—and causing unity of action among them—while the reverse with us. Those who fight the battles of the country are tired of the war and wish to see it ended soon and honorably—by a restoration of the union—not merely a suppression of the rebellion.

  The other Democratic officers in Porter’s tent shared his feelings. According to a New York Tribune reporter, McClellan’s staff was mutinous, and plotted to “countermarch [the army] to Washington and intimidate the president.” Another reporter added that the officers regarded Lincoln with contempt, believed the war futile, and that they were fighting for a boundary line and not to restore the Union. Rumors drifted back to Washington that McClellan would march his army on the capital and put “his sword across the government’s policy.” McClellan’s quartermaster-general Montgomery Meigs spoke of “officers of rank” in the Army of the Potomac who openly threatened “a march on Washington to ‘clear out those fellows.’” General Pope, too, reported a “Potomac Army clique,” among whom there was open talk “of Lincoln’s weakness and the necessity of replacing him by some stronger man.”

  There were enough angry letters home from McClellan’s soldiers to give color to the rumors of a military coup. A large conservative element among the enlisted men felt, with Lt. George Breck of the 1st New York Light Artillery, that the proclamation was “an ill-timed, mischief making instrument … uncalled for, except by a crazy lot of abolitionists, who are bent on destroying slavery, [even] if it costs the life of the nation, and sheds oceans of blood.” The Wayne County (Ohio) Democrat, under the headline “The Death-Blow of the Nation,” published three letters from soldiers that it said represented the feeling in the army. All were against emancipation. “I did not enlist to free the infernal niggers,” said the first. The second predicted, “If the president makes this a war to carry out his Emancipation proclamation and it gets to be so understood by the army he will have to get a new set of soldiers.” The third warned, “Those men of the South who have had no reason to fight, now have a reason to protect their slaves; and they say that we may kill them all but we can never whip them. They further say that if we succeed in whipping them they will teach their children to fight us.” A New York Herald correspondent attached to the Army of the Potomac felt its temper and feared for the Republic:

  The army is dissatisfied and the air is thick with revolution… . God knows what will be the consequence, but at present matters look dark indeed, and there is large promise of a fearful revolution which will sweep before it not only the administration but popular government.

  When Lincoln visited the army’s camps in early October after the Battle of Antietam, some of the regiments sulked as he passed. “His proclamation, issued last month, has caused considerable discontent among the regiments of Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and the West,” according to one army surgeon. An aristocratic colonel, New Yorker Charles Wainwright, wrote his disgust at seeing the President of the United States ride up in “a common ambulance, with his long legs
doubled up so that his knees almost struck his chin, and grinning out of the windows like a baboon.” “Mr. Lincoln,” he concluded, “not only is the ugliest man I ever saw, but the most uncouth and gawky in his manners and appearance.” These soldiers showed an antagonism to Lincoln shared by masses of betrayed conservatives across the North. As they saw it, Lincoln had cast off his mask and shown his true nature—the meddling Puritan fanatic.

  * * *

  Then, on the day after the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln issued a second proclamation, suspending the writ of habeas corpus across the entire country.

  Lincoln suspended habeas corpus to prevent resistance to another unpopular measure signed into law two months before. This was the Federal Militia Act, which had authorized the first military draft in the history of the United States. The draft was the realization of a great American fear. It ran counter to the Minuteman tradition that said that conscription was tyranny and that volunteer armies were the only true defense of a democracy. By early August, the Detroit Free Press was rejoicing at the exodus of hundreds of men leaving for Canada to flee the draft. Hundreds of citizens of Chicago and Rochester, too, were reported escaping across the border. Draft officials met organized resistance from Wisconsin to Maryland, particularly among the Irish and Germans. Mothers threw pots of scalding water at recruiters going house to house. Self-mutilations—cutting off fingers, knocking out teeth—were spotted by examining surgeons in recruitment offices. Rioters in Indiana destroyed the enrollment lists and the draft ballot box at one office, requiring 300 infantry to restore the peace. The most serious disturbances were in the Pennsylvania coal country, where thousands of armed protesters prevented trains loaded with draftees from leaving for Washington.