Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  With this kind of rhetoric from their leaders, it was little wonder that some white workingmen took their prejudices into the streets. In a half-dozen or more cities, anti-black riots broke out during the summer of 1862. Some of the worst violence occurred in Cincinnati, where the replacement of striking Irish dockworkers by Negroes set off a wave of attacks on black neighborhoods. In Brooklyn a mob of Irish-Americans tried to burn down a tobacco factory where two dozen black women and children were working. The nightmare vision of blacks invading the North seemed to be coming true in southern Illinois, where the War Department transported several carloads of contrabands to help with the harvest. Despite the desperate need for hands to gather crops, riots forced the government to return most of the blacks to contraband camps south of the Ohio River.

  Anti-black sentiments were not a Democratic monopoly. The antebellum Negro exclusion laws of several midwestern states had commanded the support of a good many Whigs. In 1862 about two-fifths of the Republican voters joined Democrats to reaffirm Illinois's exclusion law in a referendum. Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, architect of the confiscation act, conceded that "there is a very great aversion in the

  33. Resolution of the Pennsylvania Democratic convention, July 4, 1862, quoted in Williston Lofton, Jr., "Northern Labor and the Negro during the Civil War," Journal of Negro History, 34 (1949), 254; Columbus Crisis and Chicago Times, quoted in V. Jacque Voegeli, Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro during the Civil War (Chicago, 1967), 6; New York Day Book quoted in Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Berkeley, 1968), 35.

  34. CG, 37 Cong., 2 Sess., Appendix, 242–49; Hughes quoted in Foote, Civil War, I, 538. For another and similar pronouncement by Hughes, see Benjamin J. Blied, Catholics and the Civil War (Milwaukee, 1945), 44–45.

  West—I know it to be so in my State—against having free negroes come among us. Our people want nothing to do with the negro."35 To placate this aversion, some Republicans maintained that it was slavery which forced blacks to flee North toward freedom; emancipation would keep this tropical race in the South by giving them freedom in a congenial clime. This thesis encountered considerable skepticism, however. To meet the racial fears that constituted the party's Achilles' heel, many Republicans turned to colonization.

  This solution of the race problem was stated crudely but effectively by an Illinois soldier: "I am not in favor of freeing the negroes and leaving them to run free among us nether is Sutch the intention of Old Abe but we will Send them off and colonize them."36 Old Abe did indeed advocate colonization in 1862. From his experience in Illinois politics he had developed sensitive fingers for the pulse of public opinion on this issue. He believed that support for colonization was the best way to defuse much of the anti-emancipation sentiment that might otherwise sink the Republicans in the 1862 elections. This conviction underlay Lincoln's remarks to a group of black leaders in the District of Columbia whom he invited to the White House on August 14, 1862. Slavery was "the greatest wrong inflicted on any people," Lincoln told the delegation in words reported by a newspaper correspondent who was present. But even if slavery were abolished, racial differences and prejudices would remain. "Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence." Blacks had little chance to achieve equality in the United States. "There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain among us. . . . I do not mean to discuss this, but to propose it as a fact with which we have to deal. I cannot alter it if I would." This fact, said Lincoln, made it necessary for black people to emigrate to another land where they would have better opportunities. The president asked the black leaders to recruit volunteers for a government-financed pilot colonization project in Central America. If this worked, it could pave the way for the emigration of thousands more who might be freed by the war.37

  Most black spokesmen in the North ridiculed Lincoln's proposal and

  35. CG, 37 Cong., 2 Sess., 1780.

  36. Wiley, Billy Yank, 112.

  37. CWL, V, 370—75, from New York Tribune, Aug. 15, 1861. The Tribune's reporter submitted this account as the "substance of the President's remarks."

  denounced its author. "This is our country as much as it is yours," a Philadelphia Negro told the president, "and we will not leave it." Frederick Douglass accused Lincoln of "contempt for negroes" and "canting hypocrisy." The president's remarks, said Douglass, would encourage "ignorant and base" white men "to commit all kinds of violence and outrage upon the colored people." Abolitionists and many radical Republicans continued to oppose colonization as racist and inhumane. "How much better," wrote Salmon P. Chase, "would be a manly protest against prejudice against color!—and a wise effort to give free[d] men homes in America!"38

  But conservatives chided their radical colleagues for ignoring the immutability of racial differences. Abolitionists "may prattle as they wish about the end of slavery being the end of strife," wrote one conservative, but "the great difficulty will then but begin! The question is the profound and awful one of race." Two-thirds of the Republicans in Congress became sufficiently convinced of the need to conciliate this sentiment that they voted for amendments to the District of Columbia emancipation bill and the confiscation act appropriating $600,000 for colonization. As a practical matter, said one Republican, colonization "is a damn humbug. But it will take with the people."39

  The government managed to recruit several hundred prospective black emigrants. But colonization did turn out to be a damn humbug in practice. The Central American project collapsed in the face of opposition from Honduras and Nicaragua. In 1863 the U.S. government sponsored the settlement of 453 colonists on an island near Haiti, but this enterprise also foundered when starvation and smallpox decimated the colony. The administration finally sent a naval vessel to return the 368 survivors to the United States in 1864. This ended official efforts to colonize blacks. By then the accelerating momentum of war had carried most northerners beyond the postulates of 1862.

  Lincoln's colonization activities in August 1862 represented one part of his indirect effort to prepare public opinion for emancipation. Although he had decided to withhold his proclamation until Union arms

  38. New York Tribune, Sept. 20, 1862; Douglass' Monthly, V (Sept. 1862), 707–8; David Donald, ed., Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase (New York, 1954), 112.

  39. Boston Post, quoted in Boston Commonwealth, Oct. 18, 1862; Robert F. Durden, James Shepherd Pike: Republicanism and the American Negro, 1850–1882 (Durham, N.C., 1957), 37.

  won a victory, he did drop hints of what might be coming. On August 22 he replied to Horace Greeley's emancipation editorial, "The Prayer of Twenty Millions," with an open letter to the editor. "My paramount object in the struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery," wrote Lincoln in a masterpiece of concise expression. "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."40 Here was something for all viewpoints: a reiteration that preservation of the Union remained the purpose of the war, but a hint that partial or even total emancipation might become necessary to accomplish that purpose.

  The same intentional ambiguity characterized Lincoln's reply on September 13 to a group of clergymen who presented him a petition for freedom. The president agreed that "slavery is the root of the rebellion," that emancipation would "weaken the rebels by drawing off their laborers" and "would help us in Europe, and convince them that we are incited by something more than ambition." But in present circumstances, "when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel states . . . what good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do? . . . I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will necessarily see must be inoperative, like the Pope's bull against the comet!"41 Here too was someth
ing for everybody: an assertion that emancipation was desirable though at present futile but perhaps imminent if the military situation took a turn for the better.

  Military matters preoccupied Lincoln as he uttered these words. For two months, events in both the western and eastern theaters had been deteriorating to the point where by mid-September three southern armies were on the march northward in a bold bid for victory. But within the next few weeks the Confederate tide receded southward again without prevailing, thus ending the chance for European recognition and giving Lincoln the victory he needed to issue the emancipation proclamation.

  40. CWL, V, 388–89.

  41. Ibid., 419–21.

  17

  Carry Me Back to Old Virginny

  I

  While Lee was driving McClellan away from Richmond, prospects also began to turn sour for Union forces in the West. The conquest of the Mississippi bogged down before Vicksburg. Triumphs on land came to a halt at Corinth. Why did this happen? The usual answer is to blame Halleck for dispersing his army and missing a grand opportunity to cripple the rebellion in the Mississippi Valley. The true answer is more complex.

  Four tasks faced Halleck after his army of 110,000 occupied Corinth at the end of May. 1) Push on south after the retreating rebels and try to capture Vicksburg from the rear. 2) Send a force against Chattanooga to "liberate" east Tennessee. 3) Repair and defend the network of railroads that supplied Federal armies in this theater. 4) Organize occupation forces to preserve order, administer the contraband camps where black refugees had gathered, protect unionists trying to reconstruct Tennessee under military governor Andrew Johnson whom Lincoln had sent to Nashville, and oversee the revival of trade with the North in occupied areas. In the best of all possible worlds, Halleck would have done all four tasks simultaneously. But he did not have the resources to do so. Secretary of War Stanton and General Grant thought his first priority ought to be the capture of Vicksburg. Halleck's decision to defer this effort in favor of the other three has been the subject of much critical appraisal. An all-out campaign against Vicksburg, according to the critics, might have severed this Confederate artery and shortened the war.1

  This thesis overlooks some physical, logistical, and political realities. The disease problem for unacclimated northern soldiers has already been mentioned. An unusually wet spring had turned into a disastrously dry summer. The streams and springs that supplied water for men and horses were rapidly drying up in northern Mississippi. Several cavalry and infantry brigades did pursue the Confederates twenty miles south of Corinth but could go no farther by July for lack of water.2 Halleck's detachment of several brigades for railroad repair and guard duty was not so obtuse as it is sometimes portrayed, for as the rivers dropped below navigable stage the armies became wholly dependent on rail supply. Any overland campaign against Vicksburg would have been vulnerable to rebel raids on railroads and supply depots, as Grant learned six months later when such raids compelled him to abandon his first campaign against Vicksburg. Other brigades had to be detached from combat forces for the politically necessary tasks of policing and administering occupied territory. Finally, Lincoln's cherished aim of restoring east Tennessee made this political goal into a top military priority.3

  Halleck therefore divided the Army of the Tennessee4 under Grant into several fragments for occupation and railroad-repair duties, detached a division to reinforce Union troops confronting a new threat in Arkansas, and ordered the 40,000 men in the Army of the Ohio under Buell to move against Chattanooga. Buell's campaign—the major Union effort in the West during the summer of 1862—turned out as badly as McClellan's drive against Richmond. As old army friends, Buell and McClellan had much in common. Buell's idea of strategy was similar to McClellan's: "The object is," wrote Buell, "not to fight great battles,

  1. Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, 2 vols. (New York, 1886), I, 381–84; Bruce Catton, Grant Moves South (Boston, 1960), 278–79; Foote, Civil War, I, 542–45; Nevins, War, II, 112.

  2. Col. Edward Hatch of the 2nd Iowa Cavalry to Thomas Smith, July 10, 1862, Civil War Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

  3. For defenses of Halleck, see Stephen E. Ambrose, Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff (Baton Rouge, 1962), 55–57; and Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana, Ill., 1983), 205–6.

  4. Sometimes called the Army of West Tennessee in 1862. The Army of the Tennessee was formally designated in October 1862 and known by that name for the rest of the war. When Halleck went to Washington as general in chief in July 1862, command of the two principal Union armies in the West was divided between Grant and Buell.

  and storm impregnable fortifications, but by demonstrations and maneuvering to prevent the enemy from concentrating his scattered forces."5

  A political conservative, Buell also believed in limited war for limited goals. This slowed his drive toward Chattanooga along the railroad from Corinth through northern Alabama. Guerrillas cut his supply lines frequently. "We are attacked nightly at bridges and outposts," reported one division commander. Buell's belief in a "soft" war precluded a ruthless treatment of the civilian population that sheltered guerrillas or a levy upon this population for supplies. Buell therefore could move only as fast as repair crews could rebuild bridges and re-lay rails. Three weeks after leaving Corinth he had advanced only ninety miles and was still less than halfway to Chattanooga. On July 8, Halleck informed the harassed Buell: "The President telegraphs that your progress is not satisfactory and that you should move more rapidly."6

  By this time the Army of the Ohio was approaching Stevenson, Alabama, where it opened a new rail supply line from Nashville. But Buell's troubles had barely begun. Just as the first trainload of supplies started south from Nashville on July 13, Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry struck the Union garrison at Murfreesboro. Forrest captured the garrison, wrecked the railroad, and escaped eastward through the Cumberland Mountains before a division sent by Buell could catch him. When the repair crews finished mending the damage, Forrest struck again, destroying three bridges just south of Nashville and once more escaping the pursuing Federals. Forrest's attacks stalled Buell's creeping advance for more than two weeks. From Washington came further word of "great dissatisfaction." When Buell tried to explain, back came a threat of removal if he did not remedy his "apparent want of energy and activity."7

  As Buell finally prepared to cross the Tennessee River twenty miles from Chattanooga, disaster struck again in the form of yet another rebel cavalry raid. This time the enemy commander was John Hunt Morgan, a thirty-six-year-old Kentuckian whose style combined elements of Stuart's dash and Forrest's ferocity. Soft-spoken, a fastidious dresser, Morgan had raised a brigade of lean and hard Kentucky horsemen who first achieved fame in July 1862 with a thousand-mile raid through Kentucky

  5. Buell to "My Dear Friend," Dec. 18, 1861, Civil War Collection, Henry E. Huntingon Library.

  6. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 10, pt. 2, p. 180, Vol. 16, pt. 2, p. 104.

  7. Ibid., Vol. 16, pt. 2, p. 360.

  and middle Tennessee that captured 1,200 prisoners and tons of supplies at the cost of fewer than ninety Confederate casualties. In mid-August, Morgan's merry men suddenly reappeared in middle Tennessee and blocked the railroad north of Nashville by pushing flaming boxcars into an 800-foot tunnel, causing the timbers to burn and the tunnel to cave in. This exploit cut Buell off from his main supply base at Louisville.

  These cavalry raids illustrated the South's advantage in fighting on the defensive in their own territory. With 2,500 men Forrest and Morgan had immobilized an invading army of forty thousand. Living off the friendly countryside and fading into the hills like guerrillas, rebel horsemen could strike at times and places of their own choosing. To defend all the bridges, tunnels, and depots along hundreds of miles of railroad was virtually impossible, for guerrillas and cavalry could carry out hit-and-run raids against isolated garrisons or undefended stretches almost with impunity. The only effect
ive counterforce would be Union cavalry equally well mounted and led, with troopers who knew the country and could ride and shoot as well as the southerners. Such a force could track and intercept rebel cavalry, could fight on equal terms, and could carry out its own raids deep into the Confederate rear. Union commanders learned these things the hard way in 1862. The Yankees did not catch up with the rebels in this respect until 1863, when they finally began to give as good as they got in the war of cavalry raids.

  Buell's campaign also illustrated the strengths and weaknesses of railroad logistics. The iron horse could transport more men and supplies farther and faster than the four-legged variety. As an invading force operating on exterior lines over greater distances, Union armies depended more on rail transport than did the Confederates. In January 1862 the northern Congress authorized the president to take over any railroad "when in his judgment the public safety may require it." The government rarely exercised this power in northern states, though Stanton used it as a prod to induce railroads to give priority and fair rates to military traffic. But in the occupied South the government went into the railroad business on a large scale. In February 1862 Stanton established the U.S. Military Rail Roads and appointed Daniel McCallum superintendent. A former Erie Railroad executive and an efficient administrator, McCallum eventually presided over more than 2,000 miles of lines acquired, built, and maintained by the U.S.M.R.R. in conquered portions of the South.