by H. W. Brands
Sherman was writing Chase because the Treasury handled matters of Southern trade, which had become dangerously perverse, in Sherman’s opinion. “These people had cotton,” he said of the Southerners around Memphis, “and, whenever they apprehended our large armies would move, they destroyed the cotton in the belief that, of course, we would seize it and convert it to our use. They did not and could not dream that we would pay money for it. It had been condemned to destruction by their own acknowledged government, and was therefore lost to their people; and could have been, without injustice, taken by us and sent away, either as absolute prize of war or for future compensation.” But the rules established by the administration in Washington allowed the development of a lucrative trade, and a shameful one, Sherman thought. “The commercial enterprise of the Jews”—a common shorthand for speculators that revealed both the reflexive anti-Semitism of the era and the highly visible role of certain Jewish merchants in the speculation—“soon discovered that ten cents would buy a pound of cotton behind our army; that four cents would take it to Boston, where they would receive thirty cents in gold. The bait was too tempting, and it spread like fire, when here they discovered that salt, bacon, powder, fire-arms, percussion caps, etc., etc., were worth as much as gold; and, strange to say, this traffic was not only permitted but encouraged.”
The encouragement was what particularly irked Sherman. He didn’t expect any better behavior from those he called Jews, but he thought the administration should have weighed its policies more carefully. Sherman appreciated that Chase and the administration were facilitating the cotton trade to keep a shortfall from driving Britain and perhaps France to recognize the Confederacy. But the trade was funding and fueling the Confederate war effort. “Before we in the interior could know it, hundreds, yea thousands of barrels of salt”—bartered for the cotton—“and millions of dollars had been disbursed; and I have no doubt that Bragg’s army at Tupelo, and Van Dorn’s at Vicksburg, received enough salt to make bacon, without which they could not have moved their armies in mass; and that from ten to twenty thousand fresh arms, and a due supply of cartridges, have also been got, I am equally satisfied.”
Sherman explained that he had taken matters into his own hands in the sector for which he was responsible. He had declared that gold and silver were contraband of war and had ordered that they not be allowed into the interior. He realized he was contradicting administration policy, but he was certain he was doing the right thing. He told Chase—and through Chase, Lincoln—not to worry about the British. “We are not bound to furnish her cotton. She has more reason to fight the South for burning that cotton than us for not shipping it.”
Sherman shared his views with Grant. “I found so many Jews and speculators here trading in cotton, and secessionists had become so open in refusing anything but gold, that I have felt myself bound to stop it,” he wrote Grant. “This gold has but one use—the purchase of arms and ammunition, which can always be had for gold, at Nassau, New Providence, or Cincinnati; all the guards we may establish cannot stop it. Of course I have respected all permits by yourself or the Secretary of the Treasury, but in these new cases (swarms of Jews) I have stopped it.” Sherman urged Grant to issue a similar ban for the western department as a whole. “We cannot carry on war and trade with a people at the same time.”
Another item of Southern commerce posed an even greater challenge. Slaves had begun fleeing their places of bondage almost as soon as Union troops came within running range. What to do with them tested the consciences, resolve and ingenuity of Union commanders. Some, including Henry Halleck, initially took the position that since Congress had not repealed the Fugitive Slave Act, Union officers were duty bound to assist slave owners who attempted to reclaim their servants. This position accorded with the Lincoln administration’s policy of reassuring slaveholders in the loyal border states that slavery was safe under the Union flag. But other officers, most notably Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, who headed the occupation of New Orleans after its surrender in the spring of 1862, considered slaves to be contraband of war and subject to seizure and retention by Union forces. The contraband label caught on, as did a policy of letting the fugitive slaves follow the Union armies to which they fled. Congress subsequently made the policy official by forbidding the return of escaped slaves to their owners. The legislature also authorized putting the slaves to work on behalf of the Union.
Details of implementation fell to the commanders in the field, who devised rules as they went along. “Fugitive slaves may be employed in the quartermaster’s department, subsistence and engineer’s departments, and wherever by such employment a soldier may be saved to the ranks,” Grant ordered during the summer of 1862. “They may be employed as teamsters, as company cooks (not exceeding four to a company), or as hospital attendants and nurses.” Officers could engage them as private servants, but in such cases the officers, rather than the government, would be responsible for their pay.
Grant perceived the Negro question as he did everything else at that time: in the context of the war effort. “I have no hobby of my own with regard to the negro, either to effect his freedom or to continue his bondage,” he wrote his father. “If Congress pass any law”—regarding slavery as an institution—“and the President approves, I am willing to execute it.” But until Congress and the president took definitive action on slavery, he would leave that troublesome subject to others. “One enemy at a time is enough.”
Lincoln was no more eager than Grant to tackle the slavery question, but events forced his hand. The anomalies of fighting the slave power but not slavery intensified over time; Lincoln had to work ever harder to explain himself and his policy. Horace Greeley told him he was failing dismally because the administration’s policy was fatuous. “On the face of this wide earth, Mr. President,” the New York Tribune editor wrote in an open letter to Lincoln, “there is not one disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union cause who does not feel that all attempts to put down the Rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause are preposterous and futile—that the Rebellion, if crushed out tomorrow, would be renewed within a year if Slavery were left in full vigor.” The president must terminate this intolerable situation. “Every hour of deference to Slavery is an hour of added and deepened peril to the Union.”
Lincoln responded that he loved the Union no less than Greeley did. They differed simply on the best way to preserve it. “I would save the Union,” Lincoln wrote in a letter Greeley published. “I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution.” Slavery was secondary and would remain so. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. 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 save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.” Lincoln said that his goal was fixed, but his tactics were flexible. “I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.” Lincoln added, lest Greeley and the country think him an agnostic on the morality of slavery: “I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.”
Lincoln had more to say on slavery and the Union, but he wouldn’t say it yet. For months the president had made a habit of retreating to the War Department’s telegraph office to escape the crowds and bustle of the Executive Mansion. “One morning he asked me for some paper, as he wanted to write something special,” Major Thomas Eckert, who headed the telegraph office, recalled. Eckert fetched some
foolscap, and Lincoln began writing. The work went slowly. “He would look out of the window a while and then put his pen to paper, but he did not write much at once,” Eckert said. “He would study between times and when he had made up his mind he would put down a line or two.” At the end of his first session he had not filled a single sheet. He handed the paper to Eckert. “Keep it locked up until I call for it tomorrow,” he said.
Lincoln repeated the exercise most mornings for a few weeks. Some days he wrote merely a line or two; other days he revised what he had written before. Finally he finished. He informed Eckert what he had been doing. “He told me he had been writing an order giving freedom to the slaves in the South, for the purpose of hastening the end of the war.”
Yet he wasn’t prepared to issue the order. He summoned the cabinet in July 1862 and read what he had written. “I said to the cabinet that I 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,” Lincoln remembered two years later. He nonetheless received advice. Montgomery Blair predicted that emancipation would cost the Republicans the fall elections. Salmon Chase worried that it would roil the financial markets on which the government relied for war funding. William Seward offered the most telling counsel. “Mr. President, I approve of the proclamation,” the secretary of state said. “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 heeded Seward and decided to wait for a victory. But the military situation got worse before it got better. As part of the reorganization that made Halleck general-in-chief, Lincoln appointed John Pope to command the hopefully named Army of Virginia. Lincoln applauded Pope’s energy as he drove south from the Potomac, and he took comfort from first reports of a battle with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Bull Run, near where the battle of the previous summer had been fought. As late as the third day of the battle Edwin Stanton brimmed with confidence. “He said that nothing but foul play could lose us this battle,” John Hay, Lincoln’s secretary, remembered of the war secretary.
But Pope did lose the battle, with ten thousand men killed or wounded. The general was wholly discredited. Alpheus Williams, a brigadier general in Pope’s army, summarized his superior’s disastrous accomplishment: “A splendid army almost demoralized, millions of public property given up or destroyed, thousands of lives of our best men sacrificed for no purpose.” Williams went on: “More insolence, superciliousness, ignorance and pretentiousness were never combined in one man. It can in truth be said of him that he had not a friend in his command from the smallest drummer boy to the highest general officer.”
Lincoln bemoaned the defeat and lamented his continuing failure to find an effective general. “The President was in deep distress,” Attorney General Edward Bates recorded. “He seemed wrung by the bitterest anguish—said he felt almost ready to hang himself.” Lincoln had never been religious, but now he began searching for guidance from above. “The will of God prevails,” he mused privately. “In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.” The ways of the Almighty were inscrutable. “He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun, He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.”
Robert E. Lee pushed the contest by invading Maryland. His army had scoured northern Virginia of all the supplies the region could produce; the farms and fields across the Potomac beckoned to his hungry soldiers. The North was vulnerable; its army was “much weakened and demoralized,” Lee told Jefferson Davis. Maryland contained numerous Southern sympathizers; a successful invasion would rally them to the Confederate cause. An invasion might demoralize Northern voters ahead of the elections and compel the Lincoln administration to change its policies. And by demonstrating Southern strength, an invasion could well prompt—or force—British and French recognition of the Confederacy, which could do for Southern independence what French help had done for American independence in the Revolutionary War.
Lee crossed the Potomac with élan. “To the People of Maryland,” he proclaimed: “Our army has come among you, and is prepared to assist you with the power of its arms in regarding the rights of which you have been despoiled.” Marylanders should reclaim those rights by rallying to the Confederate side.
But the Marylanders refused. Most of those bent on fighting for the South had already gone to Virginia and enlisted with the Confederacy; Marylanders still at home looked askance at Lee’s invading army—whose appearance, in any case, gave little reason to anticipate victory for the Southern cause. “When I say that they were hungry, I convey no impression of the gaunt starvation that looked from their cavernous eyes,” a Maryland woman recalled. “All day they crowded to the doors of our houses, with always the same drawling complaint: ‘I’ve been a-marchin’ an’ a-fightin’ for six weeks stiddy, and I ain’t had n-a-r-thin’ to eat ’cept green apples an’ green cawn, an’ I wish you’d please to gimme a bit to eat.’ ” Far from bolstering Lee’s ranks, the intrusion into Maryland bled him, as thousands of his famished men succumbed to their bellies and dropped out of the line of march. Lee could do little to prevent their leaving. “My army is ruined by straggling,” he confessed to a subordinate.
Those who stayed in line were the faithful and the resolute. The knowledge that they were outnumbered by the Federals didn’t bother them, for their experience had convinced them that they could beat twice their weight in Yankees. They might have been worried by one thing they did not know: that the enemy commander—George McClellan, to whom Lincoln had turned again, in desperation after Pope’s debacle—was privy to Lee’s battle plan. Lee had sent coordinating directives to his principal lieutenants; one of the copies went astray and was found, wrapped around some cigars, by a Union corporal, who passed it up the chain of command. McClellan could scarcely credit his good fortune. “Here is a paper with which if I cannot defeat Bobbie Lee, I will be willing to go home,” he declared privately. To Lincoln he wrote: “I have all the plans of the rebels and will catch them in their own trap if my men are equal to the emergency.” Lincoln responded: “God bless you, and all with you. Destroy the rebel army, if possible.”
Lee’s army had spread out as it crossed the Potomac, and McClellan moved to strike before the Confederates regrouped. But Lee, sensing uncharacteristic decisiveness in McClellan, ordered his commanders to coalesce, at Sharpsburg near Antietam Creek. Confederate general John Walker got the order at Harpers Ferry. “The thought of General Lee’s perilous position, with the Potomac River in his rear, confronting, with his small force, McClellan’s vast army, haunted me through the long hours of the night’s march,” Walker remembered. “I expected to find General Lee anxious and careworn.” Lee surprised him. “He was calm, dignified, and even cheerful. If he had had a well-equipped army of a hundred thousand veterans at his back, he could not have appeared more composed and confident.”
Lee’s confidence may have been real, but it was also for effect. The disparity in forces was daunting, at any rate to James Longstreet, another of Lee’s generals. “The blue uniforms of the Federals appeared among the trees that crowned the heights on the eastern bank of the Antietam,” Longstreet recalled. “The number increased, and larger and larger grew the field of blue until it seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see, and from the tops of the mountains down to the edges of the stream gathered the great army of McClellan.”
That army attacked i
n earnest on the morning of September 17. Union general Joseph Hooker led his troops to the edge of a large cornfield. The rays of the rising sun glinted off the bayonets of Confederates otherwise concealed among the stalks. Hooker ordered his cannons loaded with canister, and the gunners opened fire. The effect was immediate and devastating. “Every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife,” Hooker reported afterward, “and the slain lay in rows precisely as they had stood in their ranks a few moments before.”
But the Confederates fought back with stubborn, savage effect, till the battlefield became a scene of unparalleled violence. “To those who have not been witnesses of a great battle like this,” Confederate John Walker wrote later, “where more than a hundred thousand men, armed with all the appliances of modern science and skill, are engaged in the work of slaughtering each other, it is impossible by the power of words to convey an adequate idea of its terrible sublimity. The constant booming of cannon, the ceaseless rattle and roar of musketry, the glimpses of galloping horsemen and marching infantry, now seen, now lost in the smoke, adding weirdness to terror, all together make up a combination of sights and sounds wholly indescribable.”
James Longstreet perceived the fighting as something almost beyond human control. “The line swayed forward and back like a rope exposed to rushing currents,” the Confederate general recalled. “A force too heavy to be withstood would strike and drive in a weak point till we could collect a few fragments, and in turn force back the advance till our lost ground was recovered.” The determination of the two sides was formidable. “The Federals fought with wonderful bravery, and the Confederates clung to their ground with heroic courage as hour after hour they were mown down like grass.”