The Devil's Own Work

by Barnet Schecter

  With a second bill on July 17, Congress also expanded the North's mobilization of troops. Simply to call upon the states for more troops in the wake of a major defeat might have looked desperate and sown panic across the North. Instead, Secretary of State Seward met with northern governors, who agreed to release a statement—drafted by Seward and backdated to June 28, before McClellan's retreat during the Seven Days' Battles—asking the president to resume recruitment and "follow up" the "recent successes of the Federal arms" and "speedily crush the rebellion." Thus on July 2, when Lincoln called for three hundred thousand additional volunteers to finish off the rebels, he could claim to be satisfying a groundswell of support from the states.38

  "We are Coming, Father Abraham, Three Hundred Thousand More" was the title of a recruiting poem by James Gibbons, a Quaker abolitionist in New York City. Set to music by Stephen Foster, among others, the verses became popular but failed to bring in volunteers in numbers even approaching the torrent of men the year before. The horrors of war were apparent, and the ranks of the Union army were dwindling. Only one-third of the North's eligible men were under arms, and with plenty of employment available on farms and in factories, few men volunteered. Lincoln's new call required men to commit for three years, which deterred many who were willing to sign up for a shorter term of service.39

  Under the existing system, the federal government did not draft men directly. The states offered bounty money and recruited volunteers, contributing them to the national force—a standing army of only about sixteen thousand men—according to quotas set by the federal government. The states also required all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five to perform militia duty and mustered them for federal service in an emergency.40

  However, on July 17, 1862, Congress passed a militia law authorizing the president to summon state troops for up to nine months of service to the federal government. The president was also empowered to "make all necessary rules and regulations" to enforce the law, indeed to supplant the state governments in raising the militia, particularly in states where enrollment was lax. With this expansion of executive power, Congress laid the groundwork for the federal government to draft men directly. The bill of 1862 also gave the president the option of enrolling blacks in the Union army, paving the way for them, eventually, to serve in combat as well as supporting roles.41

  A few weeks later, Secretary of War Stanton used the new law to require from the states 300,000 nine-month militiamen above and beyond the 300,000 three-year volunteers Lincoln had called for less than a month earlier. As an incentive for the states to recruit three-year men, Stanton announced that each one raised above a state's quota would count as four men in reducing the militia levy. In the coming months, the states exceeded Stan-ton's overall goal by raising 421,000 three-year volunteers, with most states, including New York, managing to avoid the 1862 militia draft altogether.42

  However, a dearth of three-year men in some states triggered the militia draft, which had to be enforced by U.S. troops in areas where resisters attacked enrollment officers. The violence against the militia draft foreshadowed, on a smaller scale, the fierce opposition the federal draft would engender the following year. In 1862, Irish Catholics in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania rioted, as did German Catholics in Wisconsin and draftees in southern Ohio and Indiana. Two draft officials were killed by mobs in Indiana, and another was wounded in Wisconsin. Calling for the protection of slaveholders' rights in the Constitution and peaceful reunification of the country, rioters carried banners that read: "The Constitution As It Is, The Union As It Was" and "We won't fight to free the nigger."43

  Responding to these outbreaks of resistance, in September 1862 Lincoln declared that anyone obstructing recruitment or the draft or aiding the rebel war effort would be subject to martial law and denied a writ of habeas corpus. Stanton carried out Lincoln's proclamation by dispatching deputies to arrest hundreds of draft resisters and peace activists, among them newspaper editors, judges, and politicians, who were jailed without due process or trial. Stanton's use of military police officers for enforcing conscription and punishing dissent would be codified and expanded less than six months later by the passage of a new draft law and the appointment of a provost marshal general at the head of a powerful new bureaucracy within the War Department.44

  Despite McClellan's failure in the Seven Days' Battles at the end of June 1862, Lincoln resisted Republican pressure to dismiss the general. An outspoken Democrat and opponent of emancipation, McClellan blamed the administration for his defeat in Virginia, claiming he had not received adequate reinforcements—though in fact he vastly outnumbered the rebels. Democrats spread McClellan's complaints among their constituents, and party leaders, including Fernando Wood, had visited the general at his battlefield headquarters asking him to run for president. Many Union soldiers idolized McClellan for whipping the army into shape and shared his opposition to an abolition war. Thus Lincoln hesitated to replace McClellan for fear of mutiny among the troops and Democratic resurgence in the North.45

  Intent on protecting the Republican majority in Congress from a political backlash in the upcoming fall elections, Lincoln also postponed action on emancipation. On July 22, Lincoln had taken to his cabinet the draft of a proclamation to free the slaves in the Confederacy. Since the measure could only be enforced by taking over the South, Lincoln followed Secretary of State Seward's advice to wait until Union forces were winning, so that the declaration did not appear completely rhetorical and unenforceable.46

  During the summer, Democrats on the campaign trail stirred up fears of emancipation and labor competition from free blacks flooding the North. Riots against blacks erupted across the country. In Cincinnati, Ohio, where blacks had been brought in as strikebreakers, Irish longshoremen and their supporters launched a series of attacks on black enclaves. Targeting the black women and children working inside, an Irish mob set fire to a tobacco factory in Brooklyn. Despite a shortage of laborers, in southern Illinois rioters drove off black farmhands brought in by the government to help with the harvest.47

  Confirming Lincoln's worst fears, the threat of emancipation prompted a referendum in his home state of Illinois in which Republicans joined Democrats to bar blacks from the state. When Republicans failed to calm northerners by saying that freed blacks would remain in the South because of the warm climate, Lincoln and others began to promote colonization outside the United States as a solution. While proponents saw this as a concession that would soothe the public and ease the way to emancipation, Frederick Douglass lambasted Lincoln for his racism and "hypocrisy" and predicted the president's support for exiling blacks would provoke "ignorant and base" whites "to commit all kinds of violence and outrage upon the colored people."48

  Unaware of Lincoln's pending proclamation to free the slaves, radical Republicans also denounced Lincoln for his inaction. Horace Greeley grew increasingly frustrated and by August began pushing hard in the pages of the Tribune. For the previous eight months, Greeley had been duped into restraining his criticism of the administration.49 Greeley had been approached by James Gilmore, a former cotton broker whose travels in the South had turned him completely against slavery. Gilmore had since become a freelance journalist and entrepreneur and had invested in several magazines, including one, yet to be launched, that would press for emancipation. In persuading Greeley to write for the new magazine, Gilmore mentioned that one of its backers was a trusted adviser to Lincoln. Gilmore would thus be privy to "all the inner workings of the administration" and, he implied, could give the Tribune a jump on the competition by keeping Greeley informed.

  Gilmore also presented the arrangement to Lincoln, who agreed to play along. Lincoln had no intention of releasing advance information, but by allowing Gilmore to relay flattering remarks about Greeley and drawing him into an exclusive back channel of communication, the president managed to rein in the Tribunes attacks on administration policy. By August 1862, however, Greeley realized that Lincoln wa
s not keeping his end of the supposed bargain. Lincoln had neither kept the Tribune informed nor listened to its advice about emancipation, and Greeley intended to step up the pressure, he informed Gilmore, who reported back to Lincoln.

  "I infer from the recent tone of the Tribune that you are not always able to keep Brother Greeley in the traces," Lincoln said to Gilmore. That was true, Gilmore allowed, but he was developing a relationship with the paper's new managing editor, Sidney Gay, who had "softened Mr. Greeley's wrath on several occasions."

  "What is he so wrathy about?" Lincoln asked. Gilmore replied that Greeley was particularly agitated about the president's "neglect to make a direct attack upon slavery." Sidney Gay had told him, Gilmore said, that Greeley was "meditating an appeal to the country," which would force Lincoln "to take a decided position."

  Greeley turned down an invitation to the White House for a talk with the president, and before Lincoln could dispatch Gilmore to explain his plans for emancipation, a Tribune editorial, "The Prayer of Twenty Millions," reverberated across the country and in Europe. Greeley asserted that the great majority of public opinion in the North favored the crushing of the rebellion and dismantling of its "inciting cause"—slavery. Greeley demanded that the president carry out the provisions of the recent Confiscation Act by freeing slaves captured from the rebels and employing them in the Union army.

  Lincoln continued to hold his proclamation in reserve. In an open letter to Greeley, the president wrote, "My paramount object is to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery." However, privately, Lincoln had already come to the point, he said, when he felt that "slavery must die that the nation might live."

  Despite McClellan's retreat toward the Yorktown Peninsula during the Seven Days' Battles, the main Union army had remained within twenty miles of Richmond in early July. Lincoln appointed Henry Halleck general in chief, expecting "Old Brains" to rally federal forces and keep the pressure on the rebel capital.* Instead, Lee had managed to march his troops northward in July and August, resume the offensive, and shift the war from the outskirts of Richmond to within twenty miles of Washington, D.C. It was an astonishing feat, especially since the combined Union forces under John Pope, north of Richmond, and McClellan to the east, outnumbered the rebels two to one. With the Confederate victory in the Battle of Second Manassas (Bull Run) on August 29—30, 1862, Lee's forces were poised to invade Maryland and descend on Washington. While the wounded Union troops retreated to the defenses around the nation's capital, northern morale plummeted.50

  Sensing this mood, and emboldened by imminent Confederate offensives in Kentucky and Tennessee, Lee felt compelled to press his advantage instead of retreating to rest his battered and hungry army. With northern congressional elections approaching in the fall, Lee calculated that the presence of his troops at the doorstep of the capital would make voters turn to the Peace Democrats and call for a treaty with the South. The invasion might also win diplomatic recognition for the Confederacy from England and France, further securing the South's independence.

  The Confederates, numbering some fifty-five thousand men, crossed the Potomac on September 4, captured Harpers Ferry on the fifteenth, and hunkered down in the village of Sharpsburg, Maryland, to fight the Army of the Potomac under McClellan, ordered by Lincoln "to destroy the rebel army, if possible." As usual, McClellan procrastinated, and Lee's army consolidated its various corps. When Union forces finally crossed Antietam Creek and assaulted the rebels on the seventeenth, the ensuing bloodbath claimed a combined total of twenty-three thousand casualties from both sides—the most in any one day of the Civil War.51

  While McClellan failed to pursue and crush Lee's retreating army, the repulse of the Confederate invasion at Antietam was enough of a victory to constitute a major turning point in the war. European intervention was forestalled, and Lincoln finally had the military success and momentum that, three months earlier, Secretary of State Seward had convinced him were necessary before declaring the slaves in the Confederate states "forever free." On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, to take effect on January % 1863, if the rebellion had not ended by then.52 •:

  By this proclamation, the war became a struggle to end slavery. Paradoxically, it did not free slaves in the Border states—Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri—for fear of driving them out of the Union. As Seward admitted, "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free."53

  While it was a political expedient and a tool of war that did not immediately set a single slave free, the proclamation nonetheless put the war on a moral footing, which abolitionists welcomed wholeheartedly. Greeley, who had helped push Lincoln toward this position, rejoiced. "GOD BLESS ABRAHAM LINCOLN . . . It is the beginning of the end of the rebellion . . . it is the beginning of the new life of the nation," the Tribune declared.54

  Indeed, the Emancipation Proclamation effectively marked the beginning of Reconstruction—not the physical rebuilding of a nation ravaged by war, but rather the process of thoroughly revolutionizing American race relations and society. In order to reconstruct America—to fulfill the promise of human equality articulated in the founders' Declaration of Independence and in Lincoln's proclamation—the Civil War generation would first have to begin tearing down a centuries-old slaveholding culture in the South as well as the caste system and residual bigotry where the institution had still existed, only decades earlier, in the North.55

  Unlike Greeley, more conservative Americans had no desire for what would soon be called Reconstruction, which they saw as an upheaval of the status quo by meddlesome extremists, the destruction of a divinely ordained social structure and racial hierarchy based on the self-evident superiority of whites.56

  "There is no law but the despotic will of poor Abe Lincoln, who is a worse knave because he is a cover for every knave and fanatic who has the address to use him. Therefore we have not one devil, but many to contend with," Maria Daly, wife of the New York Democratic judge Charles Patrick Daly, lamented about the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. "Yet he only stands between us and internal revolution. It is terrible. God help our unhappy country!"57

  By "internal revolution," she meant the Confederate secession. War Democrats like Maria Daly and her husband supported an armed struggle to maintain the integrity of the Union. Charles Daly had been one of the leading proponents of the militia draft in 1862 and an active recruiter, making numerous speeches to spur volunteering in and around New York. However, with mounting losses on the battlefield and a growing sense that the war was being fought not only for the Union but for emancipation, conservatives like the Dalys found themselves in a quandary.58

  Irish Americans, who had volunteered in great numbers early in the war, became increasingly reluctant to serve in the military. "The government complains that but few Irish, comparatively, volunteer. They have no idea of fighting for the blacks," Maria Daly recorded in her diary. "The abolitionists, [the Irish] say, tell them that soon they will have good, faithful, colored servants, and that these Irish will then have to go back to their poorhouses. The Irish believe the abolitionists hate both Irish and Catholic and want to kill them off. The abolitionists always, the Irish say, put them in front of the battle."59

  While the Irish community was busy raising money for the numerous widows and orphans of soldiers killed in battle, in the fall of 1862 the Catholic Orphanage in Brooklyn burned down; along with widows and orphans, the number of homeless children was growing at an alarming rate. To keep them out of the clutches of the Protestant-run Children's Aid Society, Archbishop Hughes and other Irish Catholic leaders founded the Catholic Protectory, which opened the following year with room for a thousand homeless children. Charles and Maria Daly led similar relief efforts, including the Working Women's Protective Association, which assisted seamstresses, among other poorly paid workers, and provided day care for working mo
thers.

  City governments had also pledged to support the wives and children of Union army volunteers, but the help was generally less than what had been promised. When public funds were not forthcoming in New York late in 1862, two hundred destitute wives of soldiers rallied in Tompkins Square, where one angry Irishwoman reminded officials, "You have got me men into the souldiers, and now you have to kepe us from starving."60

  With the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln knew he risked alienating the rank and file of the army as well as War Democrats on the home front. He also knew that conservatives within his own party would be unhappy with this expansion of the war's purpose. For Democratic party strategists, headquartered in New York, the militia draft and the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation provided issues around which to continue the process of Democratic unification and resurgence that had peaked in July 1862 with the statewide anti-emancipation meetings and the rally in Manhattan. The proclamation also drove a wedge between radical and conservative Republicans, even spurring some of the latter to defect to the Democracy.61

  Among these disgruntled conservative Republicans was twenty-nine-year-old Manton Marble, editor of the struggling New York World. The son of an Albany schoolteacher—and a fervent Baptist with rigid ideas about achieving a life of morality, principle, and nobility of spirit—Marble wanted to be "in the world, yet not of it."62However, when he had trouble raising funds to buy a controlling stake in the paper, his ruthless entrepreneurial side had emerged. "I would give my right hand to succeed," Marble wrote to his mentor at the seminary he had attended in Rochester, "but failure stares me in the face." Marble's politics followed his bottom line, and in August 1862, he sought financing from Samuel Barlow, a wealthy corporate lawyer and one of the Swallowtail Democrats who bankrolled the party.63