by Larry Tagg
Many anti-slavery men had grown so comfortable with their contempt for Lincoln that they simply could not break the habit. One was future President James Garfield, who looked down his nose at the Proclamation’s author. “Strange phenomenon in the world’s history,” he sniffed, “when a second-rate Illinois lawyer is the instrument to utter words which shall form an epoch memorable in all future ages.” Other Radicals who applauded the Proclamation doubted that Lincoln had the sand to see it through. Congressman William P. Cutler of southern Ohio wrote, “The feeling prevails that Lincoln allows the policy of the war to be dictated by Seward, Weed, and the border state men. To human vision all is dark … . All is confusion and doubt… . How striking the want of a leader! The nation is without a head… . The earnest men are brought to a dead-lock by the President.”
Within a month, as conservative Republicans who had been Lincoln’s closest supporters peeled away, even Radicals who had thrown their hats in the air on January 1 began to leave the celebration. John P. Hale of New Hampshire was one who became convinced before February that “we had made a great mistake upon the slavery question, and that it would have been better for the cause of the Country, and of emancipation if nothing had been said in regard to the negro since the war commenced.” Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune and anti-slavery champion, wrote to Illinois congressman Washburne on January 14 to propose an armistice. He listed his reasons for throwing in the towel—all, he said, stemming from what he called the “central imbecility” of Lincoln. He concluded,
I can understand the awful reluctance with which you can be brought to contemplate a divided union. But there is no help for it. The war has assumed such proportions—the situation is so desperate and stubborn, our finances are so deranged and exhausted, the democratic party is so hostile and threatening that complete success has become a moral impossibility… . Lincoln is only half awake, and never will do much better than he has done. He will do the right thing always too late, and just when it does no good.
Friends of freedom across the North feared that the army, instead of delivering the slaves from bondage, would instead go home. Morale in the Army of the Potomac was already perilously low after the Battle of Fredericksburg. “The army is tired with its hard and terrible experience,” wrote twenty-one-year-old Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “I’ve pretty much made up my mind that the South have achieved their independence.” When the Emancipation Proclamation came on the heels of that slaughter, fighting spirit in the army went into free fall. Thomas Ewing confided to Browning his worry that “many of our officers would resign, and a 100,000 of our men lay down their arms.” Other friends told Browning they had visited the army, and had “conversed with a great many soldiers, all of whom expressed the greatest dissatisfaction, saying they had been deceived—that they volunteered to fight for the Country, and had they known it was to be converted into a war for the negro they would not have enlisted. They think that scarcely one of the 200,000 whose term of service is soon to expire will re enlist.”
Correspondents traveling with the army claimed that hardly one soldier in ten approved of the Emancipation Proclamation. The Philadelphians of the 106th Pennsylvania regiment were hostile, “with many … boldly stating that they would not have entered the army had they thought such would be the action of the Government.” In the 51st Pennsylvania regiment, made up of veterans who had bravely stormed across Burnside’s Bridge in a hail of bullets at Antietam, “officers and men swore that they would neither draw a sword or fire a shot in support of such a proclamation.” Henry Abbot, a major in Boston’s highly-educated “Harvard Regiment,” huffed, “The president’s proclamation is of course received with universal disgust, particularly the part which enjoins officers to see that it is carried out. You may be sure that we shan’t see to any thing of the kind, having decidedly too much reverence for the constitution.” Mailbags left the army bulging with letters like the following:
I … would like to see the North win, but as to any interest in freeing the Negroes or in supporting the Emancipation Proclamation I in common with every other officer & soldier in the Army wash my hands of it… . I came out to fight for the restoration of the Union and to keep slavery as it is without going into the territories & not to free the niggers.”
Every day during the month of January hundreds of deserters from the Army of the Potomac protested the Proclamation by skulking home along the back roads. One Vermont soldier reported on January 25 that his mates were “getting disgusted … and it is nothing uncommon for a Capt. to get up in the morning and find half his company gone.” Senator John Sherman wrote to his brother General William Sherman, serving with the western army: “Military affairs look dark here in the Army of the Potomac… . The entire army seems demoralized.”
Here was darkness at war’s noon. With Northern political factions more bitterly divided than ever by the Emancipation Proclamation, with the army disintegrating from defeat and in full revolt against Lincoln’s shifting of war aims, even the Emancipation Proclamation’s supporters concluded that it was a dead letter, and dropped the subject.
Lincoln, in contrast, showed a growing steeliness, a hardening of his belief that the Proclamation would ultimately prove to be the bold stroke that would cut the hard knot of the slavery argument. On January 25, when a group of Boston abolitionists journeyed to the White House to complain that the Proclamation had not accomplished its purpose, he conceded that it had accomplished little, and told them, according to one, that “he had not expected much from it at first and consequently had not been disappointed. He had hoped, and still hoped, that something would come of it after a while.” Wendell Phillips, who was in the Boston delegation, quoted Lincoln as saying that “he doubted whether the proclamation had not done more harm than good.” Lincoln used the same phrase when he told Senator George Julian, “My proclamation was to stir the country; but it has done about as much harm as good.” Only an unquenchable confidence could have conceded so much so readily.
“Daring American Acrobat.” Watched by the rulers of Europe, Lincoln prepares to advance from “Emancipation” to “Utter ruin.”
Others, however, had neither the patience nor farsightedness of Lincoln. Wendell Phillips told an audience that the President’s “stumbling, faithless, uncertain” steps were to blame for a hopeless situation where “matters of vexed dispute”—that is, emancipation—had “passed into dead issues.”
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Defending the rightness of the Emancipation Proclamation against such widespread opposition was a huge drain on Lincoln, who had never cocooned himself with yes-men, but instead talked to and contended with men of every political hue all day, every day. Many people attested that his appearance during this period was shocking. Benjamin Brown French, the man responsible for the upkeep of the White House and a familiar figure in the halls of the Executive Mansion, wrote on February 22 that the President was “growing feeble. He wrote a note while I was present, and his hand trembled as I never saw it before, and he looked worn & haggard.” A naval lieutenant who saw Lincoln then observed the strain: “Lincoln looks completely worn out,” he wrote, “almost haggard, and seems very much depressed.” Perhaps most shocking of all, Admiral John Dahlgren noted in his diary, “I observe that the President never tells a joke now.”
Mary Lincoln could not console her husband, for she herself was inconsolable. Dressed in black every day, she was still consumed in mourning over Willie’s death, and now that its anniversary approached, she was overcome with a new wave of grief. Neither could the President spend a carefree hour with his one friend in Congress, Orville Browning. The new Illinois legislature had replaced him with a Democrat, and Browning had left Washington on January 30. Nor was there any comfort in the familiar rituals of Washington society. The Emancipation Proclamation had been a stone upon which the conservatives and the radicals had sharpened their hatred for each other; all now carried daggers in their teeth.
As the cold hard rai
ns of winter announced the approach of the third year of the war’s unimaginable sorrow, Lincoln found himself largely isolated and alone. Congressman A. G. Riddle of Ohio wrote that, in late February 1863, the “criticism, reflection, reproach, and condemnation” of Lincoln in Congress was so complete that there were only two men in the House who defended him: Isaac Arnold of Illinois and Riddle himself. Author and lawyer Richard Henry Dana, after a visit to Washington in February, reported that “The lack of respect for the President in all parties is unconcealed.” Two weeks later, he made the same observation in a letter to Charles Francis Adams. “As to the politics of Washington,” he wrote, “the most striking thing is the absence of personal loyalty to the President. It does not exist. He has no admirers, no enthusiastic supporters, none to bet on his head. If a Republican convention were to be held to-morrow, he would not get the vote of a State.” Dana listed Lincoln’s crimes:
He does not act, or talk, or feel like the ruler of a great empire in a great crisis. This is felt by all, and has got down through all the layers of society. It has a disastrous effect on all departments and classes of officials, as well as on the public. He seems to me to be fonder of details than of principles, … of patronage, and personal questions, than of the weightier matters of empire. He likes rather to talk and tell stories with all sorts of persons who come to him for all sorts of purposes than to give his mind to the noble and manly duties of his great post. It is not difficult to detect that this is the feeling of his cabinet. He has a kind of shrewdness and common sense, mother wit, and slipshod, low-levelled honesty, that made him a good Western jury lawyer. But he is an unutterable calamity to us where he is.
With no friends in Washington, with his armies shivering in their winter quarters, and with the Emancipation Proclamation null and void until the campaigns of spring, Lincoln suddenly heard warnings of a new threat to the nation as menacing as the rebel armies. He now told Charles Sumner he feared “the fire in the rear”—that is, the Democrats in the Northwest—more than the enemies at the front. Tales of treason were coming from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.
Chapter 27
The Rise of the Copperheads
“Jefferson Davis rules New York today.”
In the first week of January, only days after the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln received a letter from the Republican governor of Indiana, Oliver P. Morton. Morton enclosed this clipping, the last paragraph of an editorial in the January 1 Indiana State Sentinel:
Where, then does ABRAHAM LINCOLN derive his authority to issue a general emancipation proclamation? He has none. If he issues such a document, it is the act of an usurper; it is the exercise of despotic power. It is infamous. It means servile war—the butchery of white men not in arms, of helpless white women and children, by a race of semi-barbarians. Are the people willing that the American nation shall become the reproach of the whole civilized world by such acts of infamy? No, never. It cannot be. It must not be. If such a proclamation is issued to day, the people should rise in their might and repudiate it and its author. They have the power to do it, and they will be unworthy of the name of men and of Christians, if they do not.
This call for Hoosiers to “rise in their might” and throw off the Emancipation Proclamation’s author sounded much like the Southern calls for secession two years earlier. Governor Morton’s attached message to Lincoln was chilling: “We are on the eve of civil war in Indiana, and you need not be surprised to hear of a collision here at any time.”
In the weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation, a secessionist convulsion in the Old Northwest—the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois— threatened to take those states out of the Union just as Northern morale reached its lowest ebb of the war. Discontent in those states was deeper and more dangerous than anyplace else in the North. Their alliance with New England had always been uneasy. Westerners had never been rooted in the Yankee tradition. Below a line running through Columbus, Indianapolis, and Springfield, the people of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were largely immigrants from Virginia and Kentucky, and had an affinity for the culture, people, and agricultural traditions of the South, strengthened by the ties of commerce on the Mississippi. Their natural friends were downriver. They were pro-slavery, and they looked with distrust on the commercial, industrial East.
This was especially true in early 1863, as the people of the Northwest chafed under new economic hardships brought on by the war. With the Mississippi River blocked by the Confederacy, river trade collapsed. Farm surpluses intended for Southern and foreign markets rotted in granaries. The prices of crops plummeted. With the Mississippi closed to commerce, Northwestern farmers were forced to use canals and railroads to get their products to markets in the East, and Yankee railroad barons gouged them with doubled and tripled freight rates. Jobs disappeared and banks failed: of the 112 Illinois banks doing business before the war, only seventeen had survived even 1861. As they struggled through mean times, Westerners watched New England manufacturers get fat from war contracts.
Economic pain translated into political poison. Democrats capitalized on Northwesterners’ hardships and blamed Lincoln and the Republicans for their woes. The Democratic Party, historically controlled by Southerners, had always dominated the Northwest. The fall elections of 1862 had reestablished the Democratic ascendancy that had only recently been interrupted by the Republicans. As Ohio’s Senator John Sherman put it, “They will fight for the flag & the country, but they hate niggers, and [are] easily influenced by a party cry.” Now, when Lincoln proclaimed emancipation on New Year’s Day, the resurgent Democrats interpreted it to mean that he had surrendered to abolitionist pressure and thrown in with the New Englanders. Anti-Lincoln and anti-Eastern feeling in the Northwest reached a level of intensity reminiscent of the Cotton States in the Secession Winter.
With this as background, a second alarm came from Governor Morton on the heels of the first: “I am advised that it is contemplated when the Legislature meets in this State to pass a joint resolution acknowledging the Southern Confederacy, and urging the States of the Northwest to dissolve all constitutional relations with the New England States. The same thing is on foot in Illinois.” Thus alerted, Lincoln looked anxiously toward the opening of the heavily Democratic Illinois and Indiana legislatures.
The Hoosier legislature, as it turned out, lacked the will to secede from the Union as Morton feared. Instead, it passed a resolution demanding that Lincoln withdraw his Emancipation Proclamation. The Illinois legislature, opening at the same time as the Indiana legislature and working in tandem with the Indiana Democrats, likewise protested the Proclamation in purple prose:
Resolved: That the emancipation proclamation of the President of the United States is as unwarranted in military as in civil law; a gigantic usurpation, at once converting the war, professedly commenced by the administration for the vindication of the authority of the constitution, into the crusade for the sudden, unconditional, and violent liberation of 3,000,000 negro slaves; a result which would not only be a total subversion of the Federal Union, but a revolution in the social organization of the Southern States, … the present and far-reaching consequences of which to both races cannot be contemplated without the most dismal foreboding of horror and dismay. The proclamation invites servile insurrection as an element in this emancipation crusade – a means of warfare, the inhumanity and diabolism of which are without example in civilized warfare, and which we denounce, and which the civilized world will denounce, as an uneffaceable disgrace to the American people.
Loyal onlookers were horrified at the noisy session: “All the [D]emocratic members of the legislature are open secessionists,” one wrote. “They talked about going to Washington, hurling Mr Lincoln from the presidential chair, and inaugurating civil war north.”
Appalled at the mischief of the Illinois lawmakers, Republican Governor Richard Yates used an obscure technicality to permanently adjourn the session before it could do further harm. For the next two years, Yates w
ould rule his state like a prince, without legislative authority. There was a similar abrupt ending to the Indiana session. When a bill was introduced giving a Democratic committee the power to fund (or, more likely, to de-fund) the war, the Republican congressmen bolted. Without a quorum, the legislature adjourned, and for the next two years Governor Morton refused to call it back into session. He, like Yates in Illinois, would govern from 1863 to 1865 without a legislature, depending for money on handouts from Washington.
The anti-Lincoln voices inside the state capitols were restrained, as always, by eyes to re-election. On the street, there was no such restraint. As one Illinoisan wrote to Congressman Washburne, “Treason is everywhere bold, defiant—& active, with impunity!” After the Emancipation Proclamation, the Peace Democrats, known as “Copperheads”—named after the poisonous snake, but now openly wearing shiny copper Liberty head pennies in their lapels as badges of pride—lost all inhibition in the press. Wilbur F. Storey of the Chicago Times, Samuel Medary of the Columbus Crisis, Henry N. Walker of the Detroit Free Press, Charles H. Lanphier of the Springfield Illinois State Register, and more from a host of smaller cities all now bitterly attacked Lincoln and came out for peace without delay. They declared that there was not the remotest possibility that the rebellious Southern states could be subdued, and reprinted clippings from defiant Southern papers and letters from discouraged Union soldiers to prove it.
