Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  But the states of the Confederacy—“any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized” was how he insisted on describing them—were another matter. Having removed themselves from civil jurisdiction, the Confederate states were now under the jurisdiction of the president as commander in chief of the army and navy of the United States. Under the rubric of those powers, Lincoln was prepared to do what no president under any other circumstances could have done legally, and that was declare general emancipation of all the slaves, without exception, in all rebellious areas; the emancipated slaves were “permanently free, thenceforward, and forever.”

  On the advice of his cabinet, Lincoln waited to publish the preliminary Proclamation until the Federal armies had won some significant victories, so that the Proclamation would not appear as a counsel of despair on Lincoln’s part. This delay frustrated abolitionist editors such as the New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley, and Greeley (who had evidently caught up a rumor that Lincoln had some sort of edict ready to hand) wrote his provocative “Prayer of Twenty Millions” in August as an expression of that frustration. Lincoln’s reply that the “paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union” has often been read as a refusal to consider outright emancipation. But given that the Proclamation was already, literally, sitting in a pigeonhole in his desk, the very fact that Lincoln would almost nonchalantly announce that “if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it” was actually a radical statement, bundled into the most diffident possible language. No president in the previous six decades, from Jefferson to Buchanan, would ever have dreamt of suggesting that he might consider “freeing all the slaves,” or any slave at all, under any circumstances.

  On September 17, the battle at Antietam gave Lincoln all he needed in the form of a victory, and on September 22, 1862, Lincoln released the text of the Proclamation with the warning that unless Southern resistance ceased before January 1, the terms of the Proclamation would automatically go into effect on that date. The Confederates did little more than rain curses on Lincoln’s head, and on January 1, 1863, the Proclamation became official.

  No one found the wait for emancipation more unbearable than the people who longed to be free. “How long! How long! O Lord God of Sabaoth!” Frederick Douglass exclaimed in 1847. Not long, if the outbreak of the war seemed to mean anything. When a Union naval flotilla steamed into South Carolina’s Port Royal Sound in November, 1861, the slaves on the Sea Islands in the sound thought they knew exactly what the rumble of the Federal naval guns meant. “Son, dat ain’t no t’under,” whispered one slave boy’s mother, “dat Yankee come to gib you Freedom.”86 When the preliminary Proclamation was released in September 1862, Frederick Douglass greeted it with a yelp of jubilation: “Ye millions of free and loyal men who have earnestly sought to free your bleeding country from the dreadful ravages of revolution and anarchy, lift up now your voices with joy and thanksgiving for with freedom to the slave will come peace and safety to your country.”

  When Lincoln finally signed the Proclamation in midafternoon on January 1, it touched off wild celebrations of rejoicing. In Philadelphia, where a 100-gun salute broke the night’s stillness “in honor of the President’s Proclamation,” Mother Bethel Church “was crowded to overflowing, at least one-fourth of the congregation being whites, who seemed to take a deep interest in the exercises. … until a few minutes of twelve o’clock, when the whole congregation knelt in silent prayer to welcome in the new-born day of liberty.” In Boston’s Tremont Temple, the citadel of the free Massachusetts black community, Douglass, Charles Lenox Redmond, William Wells Brown, and John S. Rock spoke in celebration of the Proclamation. “In the evening when the Proclamation came to hand,” it was read aloud to the audience “who received it with uproarious applause, shouting, tossing up their hats, rapping on the floor with their canes, and singing ‘Blow ye the trumpet, blow.’”87

  Thirty years before, white Bostonians “deemed it a duty that they owed to God” to harass abolitionists, but now “things was a-workin.” When the news came over the wires that the Proclamation had indeed been signed, “the joyous enthusiasm manifested was beyond description. Cheers were proposed for the president and for the Proclamation, the whole audience rising to their feet and shouting at the tops of their voices, throwing up their hats and indicating the gratification in every conceivable manner.” Douglass wrote, “The fourth of July was great, but the first of January, when we consider it in all its relations and bearings is incomparably greater. The one respect to the mere political birth to a nation, the last concerns the national life and character, and is to determine whether that life and character shall be radiantly glorious with all high and noble virtues, or infamously blackened, forevermore, with all the hell-darkened crimes and horrors which attach to Slavery.”88

  If the Proclamation answered one question—What shall we do about slavery?—the answer only opened the door to another: What shall be done with the freed slaves? “How shall we deal with four millions of liberated blacks?” asked William Grosvenor in the New Englander. “Rightly considered, it is the most awful problem that any nation ever undertook to solve.” Frederick Douglass hoped that the war would show white Americans how “the fate of the Republic and that of the slave” were tied together “in the same bundle.”89 But neither Lincoln nor the federal government seemed to give Douglass much hope that emancipation would do more than leave the freed slave in a sort of civic limbo—no longer a slave, but now… what? A citizen? The political equal of every white citizen? But what exactly was a citizen? The Constitution offered only vague hints about whether citizenship was a privilege bestowed and defined by the individual states or by the United States as a whole.

  Lincoln, still hoping to evade a punishing white backlash against emancipation, at first hoped that he could dodge the question by promoting several schemes for colonizing emancipated blacks elsewhere—in effect, suggesting that they find political equality someplace other than the United States. Colonization had been one of the pet solutions of the Whigs for slavery ever since the days of Henry Clay, and in August 1862 Lincoln the ex-Whig tried to persuade a delegation of free black leaders led by Edward M. Thomas that it would be all for the best if African Americans could find a new life for themselves in Liberia, Central America, or the Caribbean, rather than trying to raise themselves to political equality in white America. Few black leaders saw any reason why they should have to abandon the only country they had known. Frederick Douglass was outraged when he heard of Lincoln’s plans for colonization. “Mr. Lincoln assumes the language and arguments of an itinerant Colonization lecturer,” Douglass stormed on the pages of his newest publication, Douglass’ Monthly, in September 1862, “showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” A mass meeting of free blacks in Philadelphia denounced the colonization plans: “Shall we sacrifice this, leave our homes, forsake our birthplace, and flee to a strange land to appease the anger and prejudice of the traitors now in arms against the Government?”90

  Nevertheless, Lincoln persisted. Congress appropriated funds, and a developer, Bernard Kock, was contracted to organize a freedmen’s colony on Î le-à-Vaches, an island off the southern coast of Haiti, in 1863. Kock was only ever able to recruit fewer than 500 volunteers for the project, and he mishandled so many aspects of the settlement that in March 1864 Lincoln finally ended support for the colony and evacuated all the colonists. Lincoln’s “distress” over the “mistakes” of the Î le-à-Vaches project was “as keen as it was sincere,” wrote Chaplain John Eaton, who was in charge of the “contraband camps” the army was setting up across the South for newly freed slaves. “The spectacle of the President of the United States, conducting the affairs of the Nation in the midst of civil war,” worrying over the fate of the hapless colonists he had dispatched there “was a spectacle that has stayed with me all my life.”91

  So,
in the end, it came back to Lincoln to persuade a nation whose basic racial theories were usually little more than variations on bigotry that they were going to have to accept black people, free as well as newly freed, as their political and social brethren. In August 1863, when Frederick Douglass came to the White House to meet Lincoln for the first time, he was sure that he would still meet a president who was “preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.” Douglass came away with a view of Lincoln very different from what he had expected. Lincoln was “the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, or the difference of color.”92

  Nor did Lincoln mean to allow others to remind Douglass of the issue of color, and Lincoln was soon implementing a series of measures that would at last bring African Americans closer to the mainstream of American life. The first of these measures came in the form of an economic experiment. When the Federal navy seized the islands in the Port Royal Sound in the fall of 1861, the navy expected only to use the islands as a coaling station for the blockade of the Carolina coast. Slave owners on the islands fled from the Northern occupation, leaving their plantations, and in many cases their slaves, behind. Since the slaves could now be deemed “contraband,” Treasury officials at Port Royal began putting the slaves to work harvesting the cotton on the abandoned plantations. Then, with the backing of anti-slavery societies in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, a small army of “Gideonites” descended upon Port Royal with evangelical fire in their hearts and schoolbooks in their hands to preach, to teach, to heal, and to divide up the old plantations into farm plots for the newly free slaves to manage as their own property. The results were extremely gratifying—one of the new cotton-planting operations easily cleared $80,000 in one year—and they demonstrated that free black people had the full capacity to compete equally with white people in the free-labor society of the North, without requiring subsidies or preferment.93

  The second measure was military. At the beginning of the war, thousands of free blacks had volunteered to serve in the Union army. “The prejudiced white men North or South never will respect us until they are forced to do it by deed of our own,” declared the Weekly Anglo-African, and Frederick Douglass urged the readers of Douglass’ Monthly to put “the keen knife of liberty” to “the throat of slavery” and “deal a death-blow to the monster evil of the nineteenth century”:

  Friends of freedom! be up and doing;—now is your time. The tyrant’s extremity is your opportunity! Let the long crushed bondman arise! and in this auspicious moment, snatch back the liberty of which he has been so long robbed and despoiled. Now is the day, and now is the hour!94

  Three days after Lincoln’s April 15, 1861, militia proclamation was issued, a company of “Hannibal Guards” from Pittsburgh offered its services, declaring that “although deprived of all political rights, we yet wish the government of the United States to be sustained against the tyranny of slavery, and are willing to assist in any honorable way or manner to sustain the present administration.” One hundred and fifteen black students from Wilberforce University offered themselves as a company to Ohio governor William Dennison in 1861, and when Federal forces occupied New Orleans in the spring of 1862, three regiments of black and Creole Louisianans who made up the Louisiana Native Guards proposed to volunteer as entire units for Federal service.

  In every case, the black volunteers were turned away. “My belief is that any attempt to make soldiers of negroes will prove an ignominious failure and should they get into battle the officers who command them will be sacrificed,” reflected the artist turned cavalry colonel David Hunter Strother in May 1862. A Pennsylvania sergeant was more blunt: “We don’t want to fight side and side by the nigger. We think we are too superior a race for that.”95

  Not until Congress amended the Militia Act in July 1862 did Lincoln have the presidential discretion to begin enlisting black soldiers as he saw fit, and only after the Emancipation Proclamation became official was black recruitment begun in earnest. At first black recruits were mustered into state volunteer regiments such as the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry, the 29th Connecticut Colored Infantry, and the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Infantry, and they limited blacks to service in the ranks (as a result of border state opposition in Congress, commissions as officers were reserved for whites). In May 1863 the War Department created a Bureau of Colored Troops to organize and muster black troops directly into Federal service as the 1st through the 138th United States Colored Troops (USCT), along with six regiments of U.S. Colored Cavalry, fourteen of heavy artillery, and ten batteries of light artillery. The USCT units remained racially segregated ones, and not until the end of the war did the War Department agree to pay them on an equal plane with white soldiers. All the same, they promised to treat the disease of rebellion “in the shape of warm lead and cold steel, duly administered by two hundred thousand black doctors.”96

  In the process, they shocked a number of white Union soldiers out of their smug bigotry. “I never believed in niggers before,” wrote one Wisconsin cavalryman, “but by Jesus, they are hell in fighting.” Lincoln was confident that the biggest surprise would be the one experienced by the rebels. “The bare sight of fifty thousand armed and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi would end the rebellion at once,” Lincoln wrote to Andrew Johnson, the Unionist military governor of Tennessee. “And who doubts that we can present that sight if we but take hold in earnest.”97 Eventually 178,000 African Americans enlisted in the Union army, and almost 10,000 served in the navy.

  Lincoln was fully conscious, when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, that he was sending the war and the country down a very different road than people had thought they would go. If he seems to have taken an unconscionably long time about taking that turn, and if he made a number of ambiguous utterances about the relationship of the war and slavery beforehand, it was largely because all of Lincoln’s instincts led him to avoid tumultuous challenges over issues and seek evasions or compromises that would allow him to get the decision he wanted without paying the costs. He had yet to confront for himself the full implications of some of the issues of black freedom and black equality, and he knew that the North was even further from having come to grips with them. Nevertheless, “no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done,” Lincoln realized. To bring African Americans out of slavery and into the war to save the Union meant that the Union, if victorious, had an immense obligation to grant them full political equality as Americans. In his mind, it had become “a religious duty” to see that “these people, who have so heroically… demonstrated in blood their right to the ballot,” get the “humane protection of the flag they have so fearlessly defended.”98

  The problem Lincoln would now face would be finding a general for the Army of the Potomac with a similar vision for the war. And when he finally dismissed George B. McClellan in November 1862, he had no idea that it would take two more bloody years before he would find one.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ELUSIVE VICTORIES

  EAST AND WEST, 1862–1863

  The Mississippi is well worth reading about,” wrote Mark Twain in the opening lines of Life on the Mississippi. “It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable.” For Twain, who was born beside it and worked upon it, most of that remarkableness was a matter of the colorful characters who populated the river, the clusters of peculiar towns along its banks, and the eccentricities of the broad, slow-winding river itself. For foreign travelers in the South, it was the sheer dimensions of the river and the vast cross section of life it contained that regularly left their mouths agape. When British war correspondent William Howard Russell arrived in Memphis in 1861, he was bewildered by how the river embraced “this strange kaleidoscope of Negroes and whites, of extremes of civilisation in its American development… of enormous steame
rs on the river, which bears equally the dug-out or canoe of the black fisherman” and “all the phenomena of active commercial life… included in the same scope of vision which takes in at the other side of the Mississippi lands scarcely settled.” The Mississippi was almost more than a river: as Twain remembered it, the Mississippi was “the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun” with “the dense forest away on the other side” and “the ‘point’ above, and the ‘point’ below, bounding the river-glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one.”1

  Twain and Russell were not the only ones in 1862 concerned with the grandeur of the Mississippi River. Both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln had traveled, worked, and lived on the Mississippi and knew it well. Lincoln had grown up in Indiana and Illinois with the talk of the river and its great tributaries all around him, and in his youth Lincoln had conveyed cargoes of goods downriver on flatboats. Jefferson Davis’s sprawling plantation, Brierfields, occupied a portion of Davis Bend, eighty miles on the river above Natchez, Mississippi. But the immediate concern of both Davis and Lincoln with the river in 1862 was practical, not aesthetic or romantic. Whatever else the river was to Americans, it had been the great commercial highway of the American republic ever since Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase had acquired undisputed title to the territories it watered.

  Before the Revolution, the economy of Britain’s North American colonies was hooked into Britain’s transatlantic trading networks, and the economic geography of that trade ran eastward, to the Atlantic seaboard. With the creation of the United States, and Britain’s surrender of all of its former colonial territory over the Appalachian Mountains, white settlers poured over the mountain passes into Kentucky, Tennessee, the Northwest territories, and eventually (after Andrew Jackson had ruthlessly cleared out the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Indians) the Alabama and Mississippi territories. Rather than attempting to trade their agricultural surpluses back over the Appalachians, the new settlers discovered instead that it was much easier to trundle their goods down to the broad navigable rivers that drained the trans-Appalachian territories—the Ohio, Cumberland, Tennessee, and Missouri Rivers. All of those rivers flowed west and south, away from the old Atlantic seaboard trading centers, and all of them emptied into the even broader southward flow of the Mississippi.