On July 25, Lincoln issued a proclamation warning all Rebels that if they did not “cease participating in, aiding, countenancing, or abetting the existing rebellion,” they would suffer “the forfeitures and seizures” spelled out in the Second Confiscation Act.190 But because the statute provided no mechanisms for enforcement or for oversight of its implementation (thus giving Lincoln wide discretionary power to carry it out as he saw fit), he virtually ignored it. Though almost no Confederate property was seized under the provisions of the Second Confiscation Act, its passage was significant, for it helped pave the way for the Emancipation Proclamation. It showed Lincoln that issuing such a proclamation would not be as politically risky as it had earlier seemed, and the lengthy congressional debates helped undermine the notion that blacks were property. As Senator John Sherman noted, the statute “was more useful as a declaration of policy than as an act to be enforced.”191
Bombshell Proposal to Issue an Emancipation Proclamation
On July 13, Lincoln took a fateful carriage ride with Welles and Seward. A day earlier he had unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the Border States to accept his gradual emancipation plan; that failure persuaded him it was time for more drastic steps. As he rode with his secretaries of state and the navy to attend the funeral of Stanton’s infant son, Lincoln discussed issuing an emancipation proclamation. According to Welles, he “dwelt earnestly on the gravity, importance, and delicacy of the movement, said he had given it much thought and had about come to the conclusion that it was a military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union, that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued, etc., etc.” This was “the first occasion when he had mentioned the subject to any one, and wished us to frankly state how the proposition struck us. Mr. Seward said the subject involved consequences so vast and momentous that he should wish to bestow on it mature reflection before giving a decisive answer, but his present opinion inclined to the measure as justifiable, and perhaps he might say expedient and necessary.” Welles agreed. “Two or three times on that ride the subject, which was of course an absorbing one for each and all, was adverted to, and before separating[,] the President desired us to give the question special and deliberate attention, for he was earnest in the conviction that something must be done. It was a new departure for the President, for until this time, in all our previous interviews, whenever the question of emancipation or the mitigation of slavery had been in any way alluded to, he had been prompt and emphatic in denouncing any interference by the General Government with the subject. This was, I think, the sentiment of every member of the Cabinet, all of whom, including the President, considered it a local, domestic question appertaining to the States respectively, who had never parted with their authority over it. But the reverses before Richmond, and the formidable power and dimensions of the insurrection, which extended through all the Slave States, and had combined most of them in a confederacy to destroy the Union, impelled the Administration to adopt extraordinary measures to preserve the national existence. The slaves, if not armed and disciplined, were in the service of those who were, not only as field laborers and producers, but thousands of them were in attendance upon the armies in the field, employed as waiters and teamsters, and the fortifications and intrenchments were constructed by them.”192
Though disappointed by the Border State lawmakers, Lincoln took heart from the positive response he received from Welles and Seward, the cabinet’s leading Moderates. He assumed he could rely on the support of the more radical Chase and Stanton. Therefore he began drafting an emancipation proclamation that would be far more effective than the Confiscation Acts, which required a trial for disloyal slaveholders before their slaves would become legally free, and even then it was doubtful that the forfeiture of property could last beyond the lifetime of convicted traitors. To justify so momentous a step, Lincoln decided not to appeal to the idealism of the North by denouncing the immorality of slavery. He had already done that eloquently and repeatedly between 1854 and 1860. Instead, he chose to rely on practical and constitutional arguments that he assumed would be more palatable to Democrats and conservative Republicans, especially in the Border States. He knew full well that those elements would object to sudden, uncompensated emancipation, and that many men who were willing to fight for the Union would be reluctant to fight for the liberation of slaves. To minimize their discontent, he would argue that emancipation facilitated the war effort by depriving Confederates of valuable workers. Slaves might not be fighting in the Rebel army, but they grew the food and fiber that nourished and clothed it. If those slaves could be induced to abandon the plantations and head for Union lines, the Confederates’ ability to wage war would be greatly undermined. Military necessity, therefore, required the president to liberate the slaves, but not all of them. Residents of Slave States still loyal to the Union would have to be exempted, as well as those in areas of the Confederacy that the Union army had already pacified. Such restrictions might disappoint Radicals, but Lincoln was less worried about them than he was about Moderates and Conservatives.
The reliance on pragmatism rather than idealism to justify emancipation was not unique to Lincoln. Since the defeat at Bull Run, even Radicals like Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson and abolitionists like Frederick Douglass had been urging that the slaves be freed in order to weaken the Confederacy militarily. Moderates and Conservatives echoed their appeals.
Lincoln also feared that Roger Taney’s Supreme Court might object. The constitutional basis for such a bold decree would have to be the war powers of the president, a somewhat vague concept implied in the chief executive’s status as “Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States” and in the presidential oath of office. In 1842, Congressman John Quincy Adams had emphatically insisted that in a civil or foreign war, “not only the President of the United States, but the commander of the army has power to order the universal emancipation of the slaves.”193 Charles Sumner, Henry Ward Beecher, and other antislavery militants had endorsed Adams’s dictum and urged Lincoln to act on it. With these thoughts in mind, Lincoln drafted his momentous proclamation. He may have been influenced by The War Powers of the President, and the Legislative Powers of Congress in Relation to Rebellion, Treason and Slavery, a book which appeared that spring. Written by the Boston abolitionist William Whiting, it argued that “the laws of war give the President full belligerent rights” and that “personal property of every kind, ammunition, provisions, contraband, or slaves, may be lawfully seized, whether of loyal or disloyal citizens, and is by law presumed hostile, and liable to condemnation, if captured within the rebellious districts. This right of seizure and condemnation is harsh, as all the proceedings of war are harsh, in the extreme, but it is nevertheless lawful.”194 Lincoln befriended Whiting and appointed him solicitor of the War Department.
On July 20, John Hay wrote that the president “has been, out of pure devotion to what he considers the best interests of humanity, the bulwark of the institution he abhors, for a year. But he will not conserve slavery much longer. When next he speaks in relation to this defiant and ungrateful villainy it will be with no uncertain sound.”195 The following day, the president summoned his cabinet for an unusual Monday meeting. Chase recorded that Lincoln “had been profoundly concerned at the present aspect of affairs, and had determined to take some definitive steps in respect to military action and slavery.” But instead of springing his proclamation on the cabinet, Lincoln merely announced that he had prepared orders allowing commanders in the field to have their troops subsist off the land in Confederate territory; authorizing the employment of blacks within Union lines as laborers; and providing for colonization of blacks overseas. These measures were discussed at length. When the use of blacks as troops came up, Lincoln expressed reservations and proposed to discuss that matter, along with the others, on the morrow.
That fateful day, July 22, the cabinet reconvened to continue discussion of the arming of blacks, which Chase heartily sup
ported. The president demurred but added that he planned to issue a proclamation, based on the Second Confiscation Act, warning that all slaveholders who continued rebelling against the Union would have their property (including slaves) confiscated; declaring that he would once again urge Congress to renew its endorsement of his earlier offer of gradual, compensated emancipation; and reaffirming that the war was being fought to restore the Union. The final sentence of this brief document stated that “as a fit and necessary military measure for effecting this object [i.e., restoration of the Union] I, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, do order and declare that on the first day of January in the year of Our Lord one thousand, eight hundred and sixty three, all persons held as slaves within any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized, submitted to, and maintained, shall then, thenceforward, and forever, be free.”196 Lincoln explained that he “had resolved upon this step, and had not called them together to ask their advice, but to lay the subject-matter of a proclamation before them” and solicit suggestions.197
Surprisingly, the conservative Edward Bates agreed heartily. But he wanted colonization linked with emancipation. Long opposed to slavery, he hoped that the bondsmen would be freed and then emigrate. He voiced the widely held belief that the two races could not coexist without intermarriage, which would degrade whites without improving blacks. At the opposite end of the cabinet’s ideological spectrum, Chase approved Lincoln’s proclamation in general but raised some objections. In his diary, the treasury secretary noted that “I said that I should give to such a measure my cordial support, but I should prefer that no new expression on the subject of compensation should be made, and I thought that the measure of Emancipation could be much better and more quietly accomplished by allowing Generals to organize and arm the slaves (thus avoiding depredation and massacre on the one hand, and support to the insurrection on the other) and by directing the Commanders of Departments to proclaim emancipation within their Districts as soon as practicable; but I regarded this as so much better than inaction on the subject, that I should give it my entire support.”198 Stanton recorded a different version of Chase’s remarks. According to the war secretary, Chase “thinks [emancipation] a measure of great danger, and would lead to universal emancipation.”199 Astonished at the treasury secretary’s reservations, Lincoln exclaimed: “What! You Chase, the father of abolitionism, object!”200
Stanton himself favored prompt issuance of Lincoln’s decree. Blair, who arrived late at the White House, objected that such a move would cost the Republican Party the fall elections. The conservative Caleb B. Smith did not voice an opinion at the meeting, but immediately afterward he told the assistant secretary of the interior that if Lincoln did issue an emancipation proclamation, “I will resign and go home and attack the administration.”201 When no one else seemed willing to make suggestions, Seward delivered what Stanton called “a long speech against its immediate promulgation.” According to the war secretary, Seward predicted that “foreign nations will intervene to prevent the abolition of slavery for [the] sake of cotton.” A proclamation “would break up our relations with foreign nations and the production of cotton for sixty years.”202
Lincoln recalled Seward’s remarks differently. To the artist Francis B. Carpenter, the president summarized the secretary of state’s argument: “I approve of the proclamation, but I question the expediency of its issue at this juncture. The depression of the public mind, consequent upon our repeated reverses, is so great that I fear the effect of so important a step. It may be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help; the government stretching forth its hands to Ethiopia, instead of Ethiopia stretching forth her hands to the government.” Lincoln recollected that Seward’s “idea was that it would be considered our last shriek, on the retreat.” So, the Sage of Auburn argued, “while I approve the measure, I suggest, sir, that you postpone its issue, until you can give it to the country supported by military success, instead of issuing it, as would be the case now, upon the greatest disasters of the war!” (Seward boasted to a senator, “I have done the state service, for I have prevented Mr. Lincoln from issuing an emancipation proclamation in the face of our retreating army.”)203 Lincoln told Carpenter that Seward’s analysis “struck me with very great force. It was an aspect of the case that, in all my thought upon the subject, I had entirely overlooked. The result was that I put the draft of the proclamation aside, as you do your sketch for a picture, waiting for a victory. From time to time I added or changed a line, touching it up here and there, anxiously watching the progress of events.”204 For the next two months, those events would be unpropitious.
As July drew to a close, Massachusetts litterateur Charles Eliot Norton voiced questions that were preying on the minds of many Northerners: “Will Lincoln be master of the opportunities, or will they escape him? Is he great enough for the time?”205
28
“Would You Prosecute the War with Elder-Stalk
Squirts, Charged with Rose Water?”
The Soft War Turns Hard
(July–September 1862)
In the summer of 1862, public disenchantment with the Lincoln administration’s “fatal milk and water policy” intensified.1 “The stern sentiment of justice and of retribution which swells even to bursting in millions of American hearts today, must be vindicated,” declared a Washington correspondent on Independence Day. “The outraged sense and patience of a long suffering nation must be trifled with no longer.”2 The people of the North “are fast getting into the belief, that as quiet & moderate war measures have accomplished no good, that severe measures are now necessary, & if the rebels will not lay down their arms—that it is the duty of the Govt to smite them hip & thigh,” Lincoln’s friend David Davis observed.3
Northerners were indeed growing bloodthirsty. “The public temper is becoming bitter & everybody cries out for extermination,” noted a Maine congressman.4 Referring to the Confederacy, a leading Unitarian divine reluctantly concluded that the nation “shall be compelled to exterminate her 300,000 slaveholders.”5 A former mayor of Chicago insisted that “extermination of the rebel whites” was necessary in addition to the emancipation and arming of slaves. “Shoot, & hang, & burn, & destroy all that we cannot use, leaving nought but desolation behind as our armies advance, is the only way to save the Union,” he declared.6 In New York, George Templeton Strong complained that “[w]ar on rebels as criminals has not begun. We have dealt with these traitors as a police officer deals with a little crowd that threatens a breach of the peace. He wheedles and persuades and administers his club-taps mildly and seldom.”7 Constituents told Ohio Senator John Sherman that the “people feel that the Government has been too tender of the supposed rights of the rebels under the Constitution,” and that it would be better to “save the National territory intact—though all the Seceded States shall be reduced to Territories—nay depopulated—than that the ‘Confederacy’ shall prove a success!”8 Illinois Governor Richard Yates warned Lincoln that the “crisis of the war and our national existence is upon us. The time has come for the adoption of more decisive measures. … Mild and conciliatory means have been tried in vain.”9 Abolitionists believed that the war must become one of “conquest & extermination, not the killing of every man woman & child, but the destruction & decimation of the ruling classes & an entire social reorganization.”10 Kansans reportedly thought that “Lincoln has pursued the policy of conciliation long enough. He has given it a fair trial.”11 Senator William P. Fessenden lamented that the “miserable policy of tenderness & conciliation, the maggot in Seward’s brain, has been disastrous [in] every way.”12
The president agreed. On July 21, he announced: “I have got done throwing grass.” From now on, he “proposed trying stones.”13 Sarcastically he asked proponents of a conciliatory policy if they intended to prosecute the war “with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water?”14 Solicit
ude for the rights of slaveholders and other Confederate noncombatants as well as for civil liberties in the North had to be modified. In August, he assured visitors that within his administration there “was no division of sentiment” regarding “the confiscation of rebel property, and the feeding the National troops upon the granaries of the enemy.”15
Lincoln would show that his legendary tenderheartedness did not prevent him from employing stern measures to win the war. In September, a well-connected Interior Department employee reported that the administration intended to wage a war “of subjugation and extermination if the North can be coerced and coaxed into it.” The social system of the South “is to be destroyed and replaced by new propositions and ideas.”16 Lincoln’s principal secretary, John G. Nicolay, wrote an editorial stating that the “people are for the war; for earnest, unrelenting war; for war now and war to the bitter end, until our outraged and insulted flag shall have been everywhere triumphantly vindicated and restored.”17
In carrying out this new strategy, Lincoln emancipated slaves, further suspended the writ of habeas corpus, drafted men into the army, confiscated Confederate civilian property, and appointed what he hoped were more aggressive, capable generals. On August 25, General Henry W. Halleck reported that the “Government seems determined to apply the guillotine to all unsuccessful generals. It seems rather hard to do this where the general is not in fault, but perhaps with us now, as in the French Revolution, some harsh measures are required.” In keeping with the new approach, Halleck criticized General Horatio G. Wright for “pursuing ‘too milk and water a policy toward the rebels in Kentucky.’ ” Sternly, he lectured Wright: “Domestic traitors, who seek the overthrow of our Government, are not entitled to its protection, and should be made to feel its power. … Make them suffer in their persons and property for their crimes and the sufferings they have caused to others. … Let the guilty feel that you have an iron hand; that you know how to apply it when necessary. Don’t be influenced by those old political grannies.”18
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2 Page 65
