Hay, too, was privy to Lincoln’s intentions early on. Writing to Mary Jay, the daughter of a New York abolitionist, on July 20, he let slip that the president “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. Even now he speaks more boldly and sternly to slaveholders than to the world.” It is entirely possible that Hay had already seen a draft of the president’s proclamation, which Lincoln might have begun as early as mid-June.
HAY HAD BEEN OFFENDED by slavery for as long as he could remember, his sense of outrage inherited from his parents and intensified by incidents such as the runaway slave in the cellar when he was a boy and further politicized by his association with Lincoln in Springfield and now in Washington. Yet like most northerners, including Lincoln, he was not a Radical abolitionist. “Abolition,” as a term, was synonymous with extremism and, in its own way, just as much to blame for the Civil War as the stubborn pro-slavery stance of the South. “Both [extremes are] equally mad and equally criminal,” Hay wrote in the summer of 1862, as Lincoln was preparing to introduce the proclamation on emancipation. “They have brought all our troubles, and if a hundred of the leaders on each side could be hung in pairs over oak limbs, the tumult would subside and the peace of the country be restored.” But since the government had been “dragged into this bloody strife by traitors North and South,” he reasoned, “and now that the life of the nation, and the condition of the nigger, is at stake, we must fight it through.”
Hay shared Lincoln’s fundamental wish “that all men could be free.” Complete equality of races, however—citizenship for Negroes, say, or granting Negroes the right to vote—was a topic that Hay and Lincoln rarely discussed, much less contemplated. Later in the summer Lincoln would tell a delegation of black leaders that “even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race.” This blunt assessment, it must be said, was not so divergent from the momentous and, to abolitionists, loathsome pronouncement of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857, which asserted that Negroes were not intended to be included in the “all men are created equal” phrasing of the Declaration of Independence.
Hay, who before arriving in Washington had never been in the presence of blacks in any number, except perhaps those he encountered on the wharves of Warsaw, received a graphic glimpse of this inequality—and the very otherness—of southern Negroes in June, during a brief tour of Union lines at Yorktown, Virginia, as the Peninsula campaign was coming to an unpleasant end. Most of the white families had already evacuated the invaded town, leaving a “general impression,” Hay wrote bluntly, “of old houses and old darkies—big guns and little niggers—dull skies and bright mulattos—complex uniforms and complexions not uniform—piccaninnies and Enfan[t]s Perdus—and a general flavor of Colored Persons.”
His shading of this tableau of “seedy gentility”—and his casual usage of “darkies” and “niggers”—presents a frank measure of his ingrained racial prejudice, although one that would not have shocked his midcentury readers. But even more, Lincoln’s secretary (and editorialist) was conveying a deep revulsion for the degradation of a race by the peculiar institution of slavery. Under such pitiable circumstances, with little precedent and few role models, it was hard to imagine blacks and whites as peers—not soon, anyway. The reason that Lincoln, and, by association, Hay as well, advocated colonization for blacks was not to banish them but to give them a chance to stand on their own, safely beyond the lash, and yardstick, of white culture; the gulf between the races was that immense.
ON JULY 22, 1862, Lincoln convened his cabinet and, after rehashing the terms of the most recent Confiscation Act and his proposal for compensated emancipation, he took dead aim, reading the first draft of what thereafter would be known as the Emancipation Proclamation. Beginning on January 1, 1863, he decreed, “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.”
Though not an actual order, it was a military decision nonetheless, drawing upon the war powers vested in him as commander in chief. The proclamation made no mention of justice, equality, or the rights of man. Yet in a single sentence, Lincoln turned confiscation into liberation for 3 million enslaved Negroes in eleven southern states. He could do nothing about the slaves in border states, and he did not want to. As it was, these states would be agitated enough by the prospect of freed slaves pouring northward; besides, Lincoln knew that the Constitution did not accord him war powers against states that were not at war. Still, it was the mightiest possible blow he could have struck under the circumstances. Winning the war was the goal. All other ramifications went unstated.
Lincoln invited discussion of the draft proclamation but informed his cabinet that he had already made up his mind. Secretary of War Stanton immediately grasped the military advantage of so many blacks quitting their masters and laboring for the Union cause. Others worried that the South would be inflamed to fight more fiercely or that owners would murder their slaves en masse, and vice versa. Secretary of State Seward warned that a racial war in the South might provoke England and France to intervene, recognizing Confederate sovereignty for the sake of stabilizing cotton exports. Seward also made the point that, because the proclamation was a military decision necessitated in part by recent reversals on the Peninsula, to issue it just now “may be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government.” It might be better, he suggested, to wait until Union forces scored a military victory. Lincoln saw the wisdom in Seward’s counsel and tucked the message away in his desk.
Victory, however, was slow in coming. After the Peninsula debacle, McClellan’s Army of the Potomac was reconfigured, many of its men and officers joining the newly formed Army of Virginia under General John Pope, who had proven himself a fighter in the West. McClellan, meanwhile, was essentially without portfolio, although still commander of the diminished Army of the Potomac.
But Pope, for all his aggressiveness, performed no better in the field than had Little Mac. On August 30, the Confederate Army—led by Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, James Longstreet, and J. E. B. Stuart—turned Pope’s flank and for the second time thrashed the Union forces at Bull Run, a defeat that McClellan had predicted and, by his spiteful, intentional tardiness in lending reinforcement, had abetted.
“[A]bout Eight o’clock [on September 1],” Hay noted in his diary, “the President came to my room as I was dressing and calling me out said, ‘Well John we are whipped again, I am afraid.’ ” But rather than acting despondent, Lincoln appeared “in a singularly defiant tone of mind.” Earlier he had told Hay, “We must hurt this enemy before it gets away,” and when Hay continued moping over the second defeat at Bull Run and the Union’s dim prospects, Lincoln countered sharply, “No, Mr. Hay, we must whip these people now.”
But Lincoln, in his urgency and desire for one decisive victory, was short on options. In a move that stunned his cabinet, instead of reprimanding McClellan for his latest display of hesitation—or relieving him of duty entirely, as the secretary of war desired—the president placed him in charge of the defense of the capital. Staying put, after all, was McClellan’s proven forte, and withal, he remained immensely popular with his troops. Lincoln acidly dubbed the reconstituted Army of the Potomac “McClellan’s bodyguard.”
Two days after McClellan’s reassignment, Lee and nearly forty thousand Confederates crossed the Potomac within a one-day ride of Washington and pushed into western Maryland. Lincoln and General Halleck had little choice but to send McClellan and the Army of the Potomac, merged with the remainder of the Army of Virginia, to meet the invasion. “Again I have been called upon to save the country,” McClellan crowed.
Lee’s and McClellan’s armies converged on hilly farm ground near Sharpsburg, and on September 17 the two sides pour
ed their blood into Antietam Creek. With his far superior numbers and despite a customary overestimation of his opponent’s strength, McClellan was able to hurt Lee badly, as Lincoln had wished, although he did not succeed in crushing him. Total casualties, North and South, exceeded twenty-two thousand, the greatest loss of American life and limb in a single day, a mournful record that still stands. The next day, Lee’s army limped back across the Potomac, and McClellan, though he had held a third of his force from the fray, elected not to give chase.
Lincoln was hugely peeved at McClellan’s failure to pursue Lee and destroy him more thoroughly, but he chose to regard the repulse of the Confederate Army from northern soil as sufficient victory; the time had come to present the Emancipation Proclamation. Over the summer he had refined and expanded the document, providing one early version to William Stoddard for transcription and safekeeping. “Mr. Lincoln says that he has promised God that he would issue that paper if God would give us the victory over Lee’s army,” Stoddard recalled.
Up to the very last minute, Lincoln was careful not to show his hand. “If anyone tried to dissuade him [from the idea of emancipation], he gave the argument in its favor,” Hay observed. “If others urged it upon him, he exhausted the reasoning against it.” At the end of August, when Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune had accused the president of not doing enough to end slavery, Lincoln had responded cagily: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”
Two weeks after Antietam, in a response to several Christian leaders who had pressed him to issue a proclamation, Lincoln wondered, “What good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do, especially as we are now situated? I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope’s bull against the comet!” Little did the clergymen realize that only one day earlier, John Hay had witnessed the president carefully writing out the proclamation, four pages, straight through.
On September 22, Lincoln convened his cabinet and broke the ice. As he had done frequently, and at least once in his nightshirt for the amusement of Hay and Nicolay, Lincoln began by reading aloud an item that tickled him—in this instance a colloquial yarn by the humorist Artemus Ward about a dim-witted yokel who drags a wax figure of Judas Iscariot from a display of The Last Supper and then “commenced fur to pound him as hard as he cood.” Lincoln, who grasped that he himself might be in for a pounding, then read aloud the Emancipation Proclamation, the centerpiece of which was the decree that, on January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any state . . . in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
The cabinet, for the most part, voiced approval. Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, War Secretary Stanton, and Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase were gratifyingly earnest in their support, as was Seward, who offered some minor improvements in the wording. Attorney General Edward Bates and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, both from border states, were the only skeptics, Blair warning that Democrats would seize the proclamation as “a club to be used against us.”
And indeed they soon did, calling the proclamation an act of national suicide. General McClellan, a Democrat whose designs on Lincoln’s job were already well formed and well known, vowed that he would refuse to fight for the “accursed doctrine.” For this indiscretion, along with failure to pursue Lee after Antietam and yet more displays of military paralysis soon afterward, Lincoln at last relieved McClellan of duty altogether in early November.
From the other side, many Radicals complained that the proclamation was an empty gesture; nothing short of total manumission would do. The Negro leader Frederick Douglass initially lamented that Lincoln’s decision “touched neither justice nor mercy.”
Generally, though, the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation met with resounding jubilation. Two nights after news of the proclamation galloped across the telegraph, a large crowd gathered on the White House grounds to serenade and cheer the president. “There was no doubt about the feeling that animated the floating population of Washington last night,” Hay wrote. “They collected in large numbers at Brown’s Hotel and moved up the Avenue, keeping time to the music of the Marine Band, and halted before the white columns of the portico of the Executive Mansion, standing lucid and diaphanous . . . like the architecture of a dream. The crowd flowed in and filled every nook and corner of the grand entrance as instantly and quietly as molten metal fills a mold.” With considerable reluctance, Lincoln finally appeared at the upstairs window and offered a few cautious remarks: “I shall make no attempt on this occasion to sustain what I have done. . . . It is now for the country and the world to pass judgment on it.”
Unlike Lincoln, Hay did not mince words. The Emancipation Proclamation, he had averred immediately after the September 22 cabinet meeting, was nothing less than a warning that “the Government [was] done with leniency or paltering with murderous traitors, and had given them but one more opportunity for repentance and safety. If they reject this, let their ruin rest upon their heads.”
After the serenade, he joined a group of cabinet members at the home of Secretary Chase. “They all seemed to feel a new and exhilarated life,” he observed. “[T]hey breathed freer; the [proclamation] had freed them as well as the slaves. They gleefully and merrily called each other and themselves abolitionists, and seemed to enjoy the novel sensation of appropriating that horrible name.”
As promised, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, after a sleepless night and a long day of greeting visitors at the White House New Year’s reception. His strong right arm, which when raised straight from the shoulder once was able to hold a heavy ax parallel to the ground, was played out. “I have been shaking hands since nine o’clock this morning,” he reportedly said. “If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it. If my hand trembles when I sign the Proclamation, all who examine the document hereafter will say, ‘He hesitated.’ ” But sign it he did, remarking with a smile, “That will do.”
CHAPTER 4
Bolts of War
The Emancipation Proclamation produced no overnight miracles—not for the nation nor for the White House. Lincoln, meanwhile, continued to be whipsawed by Democrats and members of his own party, many of them demanding that he withdraw the proclamation before wholesale slave insurrection shook the South and stampeded northward; before northern soldiers who had joined the army to rescue their beloved Union but decidedly not to free the Negro refused to fight or, worse, rebelled themselves; and before the proclamation was declared unconstitutional and the president was driven from office in disgrace.
None of these scenarios came to pass, but in the beginning of 1863, Lincoln was a lightning rod needing badly to reverse the current of dissatisfaction and demoralization that threatened to cripple his administration. The proclamation was not negotiable—“a fixed thing,” he reiterated. What would quell his doubters and recharge the republic’s resolve, he well knew, was success, a string of successes, on the battlefield.
The year was not off to a good start. Fredericksburg, at the end of December, was a lopsided loss. General William Tecumseh Sherman had his nose badly bloodied as he approached Vicksburg. The retaking of Galveston by Confederates a few days later was a strategic embarrassment. After relieving McClellan of command of the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln had put General Ambrose Burnside in charge. But after Burnside was humiliated at Fredericksburg, the president felt obliged to cast about yet again for a general who could fight and win. Joseph Hooker stirred cautious hope for the accomplishment of at least one of those criteria; his nickname was “Fighting Joe.” For the moment, though, the Army of the Potomac was still “stuck in the mud,” John George Nicolay wrote to Therena Bates back in Illinois. In a separate letter to her, he offered an equally frank apprai
sal: “Our military condition, I am sorry to say, does not appear as yet to improve. Little disasters still tread on each others’ heels.” With what optimism he could muster, he added, “Nevertheless every point is being strained by the government, and we must continue to hope in patience.”
John Hay, however, was running short of patience. It was hard not to feel frustrated and disconsolate, given the grind and disappointment of a war now nearly two years old. Perhaps one indication of the depth of his doldrums is the complete absence of diary entries and letters over the last two months of 1862. When he finally resumed in January, he wrote to his friend Adam Badeau, an aide to General Thomas Sherman, serving in New Orleans: “The war seems to have paralyzed all pens except professional ones. . . . I am far from ranking myself among men of letters, yet when I remember that I used to scribble to my own intense delight and by the kind sufferance of friends who read, I can hardly admit that the used up machine who sits at my desk is the same person still. I can’t write any longer. I need a plunge into respectable society and an exile from Washington to save me from absolute inanity.”
Once again, Lincoln, who was every bit as harried but could not afford a respite of his own, let his young secretary go. Nominally, Hay’s assignment was to carry dispatches to Admiral Samuel Du Pont, who was then preparing a naval assault on the blockaded port of Charleston, South Carolina. Lincoln was especially keen on this campaign. To retake Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie, to avenge the insult of April 1861, would boost federal spirits immensely.
Hay had his own reasons for going. With several hundred thousand young men in uniform, he was anxious not to be counted among the shirkers. “I want my abolition record clearly defined and that will do it better than anything else, in my own mind and the minds of a few dozen people we know,” he told Nicolay. Without actually enlisting, however, the best he could do was serve as a volunteer aide-de-camp to General David Hunter, commander of the Department of the South, headquartered at Hilton Head. He was well satisfied, for his younger brother, Lieutenant Charles Hay, was on Hunter’s staff as well.
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