by Bruce Catton
“I am very anxious to learn how you and men like you regard the recent proclamation of the Presdt inaugurating servile war, emancipating the slaves & at one stroke of the pen changing our free institutions into a despotism—for such I regard as the natural effect of the last Proclamation suspending the Habeas Corpus throughout the land. I shall probably be in this vicinity for some days, & if you regard the matter as gravely as I do I would be glad to communicate with you.” When the two men met the merchant tried to get the general’s vision in better focus, and McClellan wrote to Mrs. McClellan that Aspinwall “is decidedly of the opinion that it is my duty to submit to the President’s proclamation and quietly continue doing my duty as a soldier.” Probably Aspinwall was right, McClellan said; it was at least certain that he was honest in his opinion; and McClellan assured his wife that “I shall surely give his views full consideration.”12
He would get all the advice he could, first. It was just about now that he invited three generals in for dinner—his old friend Burnside, who had snorted “Treason!” at loose headquarters chatter, one evening by the campfire at Harrison’s Landing, and two former Republican politicians, Jacob Cox of Ohio and John Cochrane of New York. As Cox remembered it, McClellan said that he had been urged—by soldiers and politicians of enough stature to give their words weight—to put himself in open opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation. He himself, he said, thought that the war itself would slowly but surely end slavery, but he did not like the abolitionist upsurge behind the proclamation and he considered the document itself premature; also, he had been told that the army was so devoted to him that it would enforce any decision he might make regarding war policy.
Cox and the others quickly told him that people who talked that way to him were his worst enemies, and said that not a corporal’s guard would follow him if he actually tried to take the reins into his own hands. McClellan (according to Cox) agreed heartily, and the talk then turned to the question of issuing an order to the Army reminding everybody that their rights as citizens were bound closely to their duties as soldiers. Possibly as a result of this chat, McClellan on October 7 issued General Orders No. 163, drawing attention to the Emancipation Proclamation, remarking that it was the civil authority’s responsibility to make policy and the Army’s duty to enforce the policy thus made, and suggesting that “the remedy for political errors, if any are committed, is to be found only in the action of the people at the polls.” It was altogether a sober, unexceptionable paper, notable only for the fact that it seemed advisable to issue it at all.13
Too much loose talk was going around army headquarters, and some of it was heard in the White House. On September 26, Mr. Lincoln sent a stiff note to Major John J. Key, an officer on McClellan’s staff, bluntly asking whether Major Key, when a brother officer inquired why Lee’s army had not been captured at Sharpsburg, had replied: “That is not the game; the object is that neither army shall get much advantage of the other; that both shall be kept in the field till they are exhausted, when we will make a compromise and save slavery.” The President would be happy to have Major Key appear before him at once and demonstrate that he had not used such words.
Major Key came to the White House, along with a Major Levi Turner, to whom the offending words had been spoken. Mr. Lincoln listened to both men, found that Major Key had been correctly quoted, and promptly issued an order dismissing Major Key from the Army; remarking afterward that he did it because “I thought his silly, treasonable expressions were ‘staff talk’ and I wished to make an example.”14
The example may have been needed, may not have been needed. Certainly the atmosphere at headquarters had been odd. Too many officers were showing too much contempt for the President and the Secretary of War, and there was altogether too much talk about the need for “a march on Washington.” McClellan himself had listened to such talk; he had even suggested such a step, in a letter to his wife, and Major Key had said no more than McClellan had said when he remarked that his defeat in the Seven Days had probably been for the best. There is not much reason to draw a sharp distinction between the attitude of the commanding general and the attitude of his military household. David Strother thought that McClellan had a poor crowd around him. He felt that Fitz John Porter, “with his elegant address and insinuating plausibility … and total want of judgment,” was the evil genius, and he had bitter words for McClellan’s staff: “The people around McClellan … were the most ungallant, good-for-nothing set of martinets that I have yet met with. I do not mean that they were inefficient in their special duties, but not a man among them was worth a damn as a military advisor, or had any show of fire or boldness.”15
The commanding general wanted some resolution of the wearing conflict between desire and duty; wanted, at the least, a clear understanding of what his duty might actually be; and the martinets wanted something which they could not have, so that it was necessary to silence them by cashiering Major Key. And underneath everything, accounting for the loose talk and the desperate groping for advice, was the undeniable fact that a great change had taken place. It was going to be a different sort of war hereafter, and the serviceable Barnett sent Barlow a warning: “Furl your sails.” The proclamation, said Barnett, in effect gave the Confederacy one hundred days of grace in which to give up all thought of secession and come back to the Union. Nobody supposed the Confederacy would do anything of the kind, but “from the expiration of the days of grace the character of the war will be changed. It will be one of subjugation determination, if the North can be coerced and coaxed into it. The South is to be destroyed & replaced by new proprietors and ideas.” The gist of this, said Barnett, he had from Mr. Lincoln himself.16
He may have been tolerably accurate; the qualifying factor being that the President had committed himself to an idea rather than to a specific program. The war would be a revolution from now on, and if revolutionary means were needed to win it they would be used. This, to be sure, had been inherent in the situation from the beginning. The overshadowing fact now was that when he issued his proclamation Mr. Lincoln did in his field exactly what General Lee did in his when he struck the Army of the Potomac at Mechanicsville: he took the initiative, and he would never give it up. All of the Americans who followed this hard road of war would sooner or later have to keep step with him: both those who went with him and those who went against him.
The night after the proclamation was published a crowd came to the White House to serenade the President and to demand a speech. Never one to say anything of importance on an impromptu basis, Mr. Lincoln did not try to tell them much, and what they heard was no more than a somber warning:
“What I did, I did after a very full deliberation, and under a very heavy and solemn sense of responsibility. I can only trust in God I have made no mistake. 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, and, may be, take action upon it.”17
6: Nobly Save or Meanly Lose
Far underneath the war there lay a fear, and the proclamation compelled men to look at it; the fear that the peculiar institution was so dangerous and so unstable that it would explode if it were touched. The declaration that the Federal government would make war to free the slave, and would even turn the freed slave into a soldier to help carry on the fight, seemed to be a threat to take the lid off of the bottomless pit—as if freedom could not be given to millions of bondsmen without bringing terror and the realization of the ultimate peril.
In the days that followed the issuance of the proclamation both houses of the Confederate Congress gave way to bitter oratory as the anger born of this fear found expression. Resolutions to enslave all captured Negro soldiers and to execute their white officers were considered, and discarded. William L. Yancey had urged earlier that Congress resolve that Washington now was making war on the Southern people as well as upon their government, and that individual citizens would thus be justified in shooting Yan
kee soldiers who tampered with their property. J. B. Jones, the Rebel war clerk who kept such a useful diary, noted at the end of September that “some of the gravest of our Senators favor the raising of the black flag, asking and giving no quarter thereafter,” and from as sober a soldier as General Beauregard came the same demand.
“Has the bill for execution of abolition prisoners after 1st of January next passed?” he asked, in a letter to Porcher Miles. “Do it, and England will be stirred into action. It is high time to proclaim the black flag for that period. Let the execution be with the garrote.”1
How England would have responded to a wholesale strangling of prisoners of war was never put to the test. The frothy talk of alarmed super-patriots meant in the end no more than the frothy talk of the martinets at McClellan’s headquarters. Yet there were responsible Englishmen who shuddered at the notion that the United States government would fight to end slavery. On October 7 the London Times spoke as if the unhappy slave were a subhuman monster who could be liberated only at the price of unspeakable outrages:
“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 armies.… He will appeal to the black blood of the Africans. He will whisper of the pleasures of spoil and of the gratification of yet fiercer instincts; and when blood begins to flow and when shrieks come piercing through the darkness, Mr. Lincoln will wait amid the rising flames, till all is consummated, and then he will rub his hands and think that revenge is sweet.… Sudden and forcible emancipation resulting from the ‘efforts the Negroes may make for their actual freedom’ can only be effected by massacre and utter destruction.”2
In 1862 a man did not have to be wholly unhinged to suppose that massacre and utter destruction would accompany emancipation. The most dreadful thing about slavery was the fact that it prepared neither the owners nor the owned for the slightest change in their relationship. It provoked fear on one side, and it was logical to imagine that it provoked desperate hatred on the other; it lived by the invocation of unlimited force, and no one could be blamed for thinking that it would die in the same way. The man who wrote the screed for the London Times was doing no more than put quivering, orgiastic prose around a thought that tormented many lesser mortals, in America and in England as well.
Yet the Times spoke for nothing but that tortured, dying thought. The Emancipation Proclamation might flutter the pulses of upper-class Britons who did not in any case expect anything good to come out of America, but once the news of it crossed the Atlantic it began to exert a powerful effect on the attitude of the British government. Mr. Lincoln’s opponents found themselves on the defensive: a man who sided with the Confederacy now must at least appear to be siding with slavery. The textile workers of Lancashire who were suffering because the United States fleet kept cotton from the mills would not now demand that their government sweep away that fleet and let the cotton in; the blockade that was ruining the cotton trade was also destroying human servitude, and this meant something even to men thrown on the parish: perhaps especially to them. When the war was no more than a bloody struggle between factions there might well be intervention for the sake of the payrolls in the Midlands. Now it was different. If the American Union lived slavery would die, and if it died slavery would live, and although to say this involved a staggering oversimplification the basic issue was clear. Only a ruthless and determined British government could move in now to help the Southern Confederacy.
The British government was neither ruthless nor determined. It was simply old, Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary being both beyond their time. Furthermore—and this was as weighty as the proclamation itself—Lee after all had lost at Antietam, and the South right now did not look like a winner. As Minister Adams had pointed out a year earlier: “Great Britain always looks to her own interest as a paramount law of her action in foreign affairs.”3 It was not in the British interest to bail out a losing cause. When Lee found that he could not go back across the Potomac and force his reluctant antagonist to fight again, the moment for British intervention passed.
There was even more to it than Antietam. The great Confederate counteroffensive had also failed in the west.
When Don Carlos Buell took his army out of central Tennessee and went north toward the Ohio, some sort of opportunity had been briefly offered to Braxton Bragg and Bragg had never quite been able to accept it. His army was just a little too small, Kirby Smith was just a little too far away and too independent, the dire things that would happen if he fought and lost were just a little too easy to see—and, after all, the kind of resolution that drives a man to risk all in order to win all is an uncommon trait; the Confederacy had one army commander who possessed it, and perhaps one was its share. Anyway, the opportunity faded and disappeared. Bragg maneuvered after the time for maneuver had passed. He went to Frankfort and helped to install a true Confederate as governor of Kentucky, and by this time it was too late to win the battle which would have validated the installation. Buell at last was coming to meet him, and on October 8 the two armies collided in a savage, inconclusive engagement near the town of Perryville. More than seven thousand men were casualties, nobody won anything of consequence—so ill-directed was the encounter that the two armies actually fought for hardly more than access to a supply of drinking water, Kentucky’s streams being nearly dry at the time—and after it was over Bragg took thought of the length of the odds that were against him. His army had never quite been able to join hands with the army of Kirby Smith, who was also reflecting on the odds; the people of Kentucky had not risen to join him, and the hope that they would do so had been the only thing that really justified the northward march in the first place—and at last Bragg turned about and marched back to Tennessee, Kirby Smith did likewise, and the western invasion came to a dismal end.
Like the eastern invasion, it had ended in a drawn battle which was nevertheless—as a milestone, if as nothing more—profoundly significant. The Southern tide never again rose as high as it was when it touched Antietam and Perryville; and as it ebbed, after those battles, there came a subtle change in Southern hopes. The Confederacy might yet win, by a sudden dazzling stroke, by Northern ineptitude and war-weariness, or simply by dogged refusal to admit defeat, but the old jaunty optimism was gone. President Davis, who was as stouthearted as any man in the South, reflected the change in a dispatch he sent to Major General T. H. Holmes, who commanded in the trans-Mississippi region:
“The expectation that the Kentuckians would rise en masse with the coming of a force which would enable them to do so, alone justified an advance into that state while the enemy in force remained in Tennessee. That expectation has been sadly disappointed, and the future is to be viewed in the light of our late experiences.” This light showed, among other things, that the Confederacy could not reinforce certain vital points which badly needed to be strengthened, and Mr. Davis explained this in a letter to Governor J. G. Shorter of Alabama, who feared that the Federals were menacing Mobile:
“I have felt long and deeply the hazard of its condition and an anxious desire to secure it, but have vainly looked for an adequate force which could be spared from other localities. The enemy greatly outnumber us and have many advantages in moving their forces, so that we must often be compelled to hold positions and fight battles with the chances against us. Our only alternatives are to abandon important points or to use our limited resources as effectively as the circumstances will permit.”
At about the same time he notified harassed Governor John Milton of Florida that even though the Yankees seemed likely to overrun that isolated state, “we have no reinforcements that could be spared without injustice to other sections equally important and equally threatened.”4
Mr. Davis was being forced once more to look at the grim reality which had been so distressingly visible in the spring—the fact that the Confederacy could not resist all of the pressures which the Federal government was able to apply whenever it made unre
lenting use of them. This was a reality which Mr. Lincoln had tried in vain to draw to the attention of his generals. Resenting political interference in matters of strategy, they had paid little notice, and as a result Lee and Bragg had carried the war almost to the doorsteps of the North, and Southern prospects had looked much better than they actually were. But now, after two drawn battles and one proclamation, the reality was regaining its visibility. Mr. Davis could see it clearly, and it was time for the Federal generals to see it too.
Among these was General Buell. Far back in January, Mr. Lincoln had written to him, trying earnestly to make the point: “… we have the greater numbers, and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision … we must fail unless we can find some way of making our advantage an over-match for his … by menacing him with superior forces at different points at the same time.”5 This had done no good. The Federals had had vastly superior forces in Tennessee all spring and summer but they had not menaced anything very much, either singly or in combination, and at last General Bragg with a smaller army had drawn Buell all the way to northern Kentucky, fighting there a battle in which less than half of Buell’s army got into action, and marching back to Tennessee afterward with a wagon train full of supplies. Buell made no more than a formal pursuit. He was glad that Bragg was leaving, but he felt that before he could go after him he must rest, reorganize and re-equip his own army, and repeated telegrams from Halleck could not get any speed out of him. One of Buell’s soldiers, irritated by the failure to pursue the retreating Confederates, put into words the thought that was unquestionably bothering the President: “The way the hed generals are a doing now I am afraid this war will never end.”6
