Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  17. Slidell to Jefferson Davis, July 25, 1862, Mason to Mrs. Mason, July 20, 1862, quoted in Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis: Confederate President (New York, 1959), 294, 292.

  18. Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., July 19, 1861, in Ford, Cycle of Adams Letters, I, 166; Dudley quoted in Strode, Davis, 294.

  19. Seward and Russell quoted in Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy, 330, 353.

  may fall into the hands of the Confederates. If this should happen, would it not be time for us to consider whether . . . England and France might not address the contending parties and recommend an arrangement upon the basis of separation?" Russell was ready and willing. On September 17—the very day of the fighting at Sharpsburg—he concurred in the plan to offer mediation, adding that if the North refused, "we ought ourselves to recognise the Southern States as an independent State." But even before reports of Antietam reached England (news required ten days or more to cross the Atlantic), Palmerston turned cautious. On September 23 he told Russell that the outcome of the campaign in Maryland "must have a great effect on the state of affairs. If the Federals sustain a great defeat, they may be at once ready for mediation, and the iron should be struck while it is hot. If, on the other hand, they should have the best of it, we may wait awhile and see what may follow."20 Having learned of Lee's retreat to Virginia, Palmerston backed off. "These last battles in Maryland have rather set the North up again," he wrote to Russell early in October. "The whole matter is full of difficulty, and can only be .cleared up by some more decided events between the contending armies."21

  But Antietam did not cool the ardor of Russell and Gladstone for recognition. They persisted in bringing the matter before the cabinet on October 28, despite Palmerston's repeated insistence that matters had changed since mid-September, "when the Confederates seemed to be carrying all before them. . . . I am very much come back to our original view that we must continue merely to be lookers-on till the war shall have taken a more decided turn."22 The cabinet voted Russell and Gladstone down. The French weighed in at this point with a suggestion that Britain, France, and Russia propose a six months' armistice—during which the blockade would be suspended. This so blatantly favored the South that pro-Union Russia quickly rejected it. The British cabinet, after two days of discussion, also turned it down.

  Thus ended the South's best chance for European intervention. It did not end irrevocably, for the military situation remained fluid and most

  20. This correspondence is conveniently published in James V. Murfin, The Gleam of Bayonets: The Battle of Antietam and Robert E. Lee's Maryland Campaign, September 1862 (New York, 1965), 394, 396–97, 399–400.

  21. Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, II, 170; Murfin, Gleam of Bayonets, 400–401.

  22. Palmerston to Russell, Oct. 22, 1862, in Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy, 351.

  Britons remained certain that the North could never win. But at least they had avoided losing. Antietam had, in Charles Francis Adams's understatement, "done a good deal to restore our drooping credit here."23 It had done more; by enabling Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation the battle also ensured that Britain would think twice about intervening against a government fighting for freedom as well as Union.

  II

  On September 22, five days after the battle of Antietam, Lincoln called his cabinet into session. He had made a covenant with God, said the president, that if the army drove the enemy from Maryland he would issue his Emancipation Proclamation. "I think the time has come," he continued. "I wish it were a better time. I wish that we were in a better condition. The action of the army against the rebels has not been quite what I should have best liked." Nevertheless, Antietam was a victory and Lincoln intended to warn the rebel states that unless they returned to the Union by January 1 their slaves "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." The cabinet approved, though Montgomery Blair repeated his warning that this action might drive border-state elements to the South and give Democrats "a club . . . to beat the Administration" in the elections. Lincoln replied that he had exhausted every effort to bring the border states along. Now "we must make the forward movement" without them. "They [will] acquiesce, if not immediately, soon." As for the Democrats, "their clubs would be used against us take what course we might."24

  The Proclamation would apply only to states in rebellion on January 1. This produced some confusion, because the edict thus appeared to "liberate" only those slaves beyond Union authority while retaining in bondage all those within the government's reach. A few disappointed radicals and abolitionists looked upon it this way. So did tories and some liberals in England. The conservative British press affected both to abhor and to ridicule the measure: to abhor it because it might encourage

  23. Adams to C. F. Adams, Jr., Oct. 17, 1862, in Ford, Cycle of Adams Letters, I, 192.

  24. David Donald, ed., Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase (New York, 1954), 149–52; Howard K. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (New York, 1960), I, 142–45; John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York, 1890), VI, 158–63; the text of the Procla mation is in CWL, V, 433–36.

  a servile rebellion that would eclipse the horrors of the 1857 Sepoy uprising in India; to ridicule it because of its hypocritical impotence. "Where he has no power Mr. Lincoln will set the negroes free; where he retains power he will consider them as slaves," declared the London Times. "This is more like a Chinaman beating his two swords together to frighten his enemy than like an earnest man pressing forward his cause."25

  But such remarks missed the point and misunderstood the president's prerogatives under the Constitution. Lincoln acted under his war powers to seize enemy resources; he had no constitutional power to act against slavery in areas loyal to the United States. The Proclamation would turn Union forces into armies of liberation after January 1—if they could win the war. And it also invited the slaves to help them win it. Most antislavery Americans and Britons recognized this. "We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree," wrote Frederick Douglass, while William Lloyd Garrison considered it "an act of immense historic consequence."26 A British abolitionist pronounced September 22 "a memorable day in the annals of the great struggle for the freedom of an oppressed and despised race"; a radical London newspaper believed it "a gigantic stride in the paths of Christian and civilized progress."27 Lincoln's own off-the-record analysis showed how much his conception of the war had changed since ten months earlier, when he had deprecated a "remorseless revolutionary struggle." After January 1, Lincoln told an official of the Interior Department, "the character of the war will be changed. It will be one of subjugation. . . . The [old] South is to be destroyed and replaced by new propositions and ideas."28

  Would the army fight for freedom? From an Indiana colonel came words that could have answered for most soldiers. Few of them were abolitionists, he wrote, but they nevertheless wanted "to destroy everything that in aught gives the rebels strength," including slavery, so "this army will sustain the emancipation proclamation and enforce it with

  25. Times, Oct. 7, 1862.

  26. Douglass' Monthly, Oct. 1862, p. 721; Liberator, Sept. 26, 1862.

  27. Quoted in Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, II, 153, and Nevins, War, II, 270.

  28. T. J. Barnett to Samuel L. M. Barlow, Sept. 25, 1862, Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library. These words were Barnett's paraphrase of Lincoln's comments, but the president's sentiments were "indicated plainly enough," according to Barnett.

  the bayonet." A Democratic private in the Army of the Potomac whose previous letters had railed against abolitionists and blacks now expressed support for "putting away any institution if by so doing it will help put down the rebellion, for I hold that nothing should stand in the way of the Union—niggers, nor anything else." General-in-Chief Halleck explained his position to Grant: "The character of the war has very much changed within the last year. There is now no possible hope of r
econciliation. . . . We must conquer the rebels or be conquered by them. . . . Every slave withdrawn from the enemy is the equivalent of a white man put hors de combat."29

  But would McClellan and officers of the Army of the Potomac go along with this? Much Republican opposition to McClellan stemmed from the belief that he would not. And indeed, the general's first response to the Proclamation indicated indecision. He considered it "infamous" and told his wife that he "could not make up my mind to fight for such an accursed doctrine as that of a servile insurrection." McClellan consulted Democratic friends in New York, who advised him "to submit to the Presdt's proclamation & quietly continue doing [your] duty as a soldier."30 But some of McClellan's associates stirred up opposition to the new policy. Fitz-John Porter denounced this "absurd proclamation of a political coward." A staff officer confided to a colleague that Lee's army had not been "bagged" at Sharpsburg because "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." When word of this conversation reached Lincoln he cashiered the officer to "make an example" and put a stop to such "silly, treasonable expressions."31 Belatedly awakening to the danger of such loose talk among his officers, McClellan on October 7 issued a general order reminding them of the necessity for military subordination to civil authority. "The

  29. Indiana colonel quoted in Nevins, War, II, 239; John H. Burrill to his parents, Jan. 1, 1863, Civil War Times Illustrated Collection, United States Military History Institute; O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 24, pt. 3, p. 157.

  30. McClellan to Ellen McClellan, Sept. 25, Oct. 5, 1862, McClellan Papers, Library of Congress; McClellan to William H. Aspinwall, Sept. 26, 1862, Civil War Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

  31. Porter to Manton Marble, Sept. 30, 1862, quoted in Nevins, War, II, 238–39; the case of the cashiered major can be followed in CWL, V, 442–43, 508–9, and in Nicolay and Hay, Lincoln, VI, 186–88.

  remedy for political errors, if any are committed," concluded Mc-Clellan with an artful reference to the imminent elections, "is to be found only in the action of the people at the polls."32

  Democrats scarcely needed this hint. They had already made emancipation the main issue in their quest for control of Congress. The New York Democratic platform denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as "a proposal for the butchery of women and children, for scenes of lust and rapine, and of arson and murder." The party nominated for governor the suave, conservative veteran of thirty years in New York politics Horatio Seymour, who declared: "If it be true that slavery must be abolished to save this Union, then the people of the South should be allowed to withdraw themselves from the government which cannot give them the protection guaranteed by its terms."33 Democrats in Ohio and Illinois took similar ground. Branding the Emancipation Proclamation "another advance in the Robespierrian highway of tyranny and anarchy," they asserted that if abolition was "the avowed purpose of the war, the South cannot be subdued and ought not to be subdued. . . . In the name of God, no more bloodshed to gratify a religious fanaticism." An Ohio Democrat amended the party's slogan to proclaim "the Constitution as it is, the Union as it was, and the Niggers where they are."34

  Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus to enforce the militia draft also hurt the Republicans. "A large majority," declared an Ohio editor, "can see no reason why they should be shot for the benefit of niggers and Abolitionists." If "the despot Lincoln" tried to ram abolition and conscription down the throats of white men, "he would meet with the fate he deserves: hung, shot, or burned."35 The arrests of Democrats for antiwar activities and the indictment of forty-seven members of the Knights of the Golden Circle in Indiana probably backfired against Republicans by enabling Democrats to portray themselves as martyrs to civil liberty.

  Subsuming all these issues was the war itself. "After a year and a half of trial," admitted one Republican, "and a pouring out of blood and treasure, and the maiming and death of thousands, we have made no

  32. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 19, pt. 2, pp. 295–96.

  33. Nevins, War, II, 302, 303.

  34. Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (New York, 1942), 115; Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandighamand the Civil War (Lexington, Ky., 1970), 106, 107.

  35. Gray, Hidden Civil War, 112.

  sensible progress in putting down the rebellion. . . . The people are desirous of some change, they scarcely know what."36 This remained true even after northern armies turned back Confederate invasions at Antietam, Perryville, and Corinth. None of these battles was a clear-cut Union victory; the failure to follow them with a blow to the retreating rebels produced a feeling of letdown. In October, enemy forces stood in a more favorable position than five months earlier: Bragg's army occupied Murfreesboro in central Tennessee only thirty miles from Nashville, and Lee's army remained only a few miles from Harper's Ferry. Jeb Stuart's cavalry had thumbed their noses at the Yankees again by riding around the entire Army of the Potomac (October 10–12), raiding as far north as Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and returning to their own lines with 1,200 horses while losing only two men. If anything seemed to underscore northern military futility, this was it.

  Democrats scored significant gains in the 1862 elections: the governorship of New York, the governorship and a majority of the legislature in New Jersey, a legislative majority in Illinois and Indiana, and a net increase of thirty-four congressmen. Only the fortuitous circumstance that legislative and gubernatorial elections in Ohio and Pennsylvania were held in odd-numbered years and that the Republican governors of Illinois and Indiana had been elected in 1860 to four-year terms prevented the probable loss of these posts to the Democrats in 1862. Panicky Republicans interpreted the elections as "a great, sweeping revolution of public sentiment," "a most serious and severe reproof." Gleeful Democrats pronounced "Abolition Slaughtered."37 Nearly all historians have agreed: the elections were "a near disaster for the Republicans"; "a great triumph for the Democrats"; "the verdict of the polls showed clearly that the people of the North were opposed to the Emancipation Proclamation."38

  But a closer look at the results challenges this conclusion. Republicans retained control of seventeen of the nineteen free-state governorships and sixteen of the legislatures. They elected several congressmen in

  36. Ibid., 110.

  37. Strong, Diary, 271; Carl Schurz to Lincoln, Nov. 20, 1861, in CWL, V, 511; Indianapolis State Sentinel, Oct. 5, 1861, quoted in V. Jacque Voegeli, Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro during the Civil War (Chicago, 1967), 64.

  38. Peter J. Parish, The American Civil War (New York, 1975), 208–9; Joel H. Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860–1868 (New York, 1977), 144; William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors (New York, 1948), 165.

  Missouri for the first time, made a net gain of five seats in the Senate, and retained a twenty-five-vote majority in the House after experiencing the smallest net loss of congressional seats in an off-year election in twenty years. It is true that the congressional delegations of the six lower-North states from New York to Illinois would have a Democratic majority for the next two years. But elsewhere the Republicans more than held their own. And the Democratic margins in most of those six states were exceedingly thin: 4,000 votes in Pennsylvania, 6,000 in Ohio, 10,000 each in New York and Indiana. These majorities could be explained, as Lincoln noted, by the absence of soldiers at the front, for scattered evidence already hinted at a large Republican edge among enlisted men, a hint that would be confirmed in future elections when absentee soldier voting was permitted.39

  Although disappointed by the elections, Lincoln and the Republicans did not allow it to influence their actions. Indeed, the pace of radicalism increased during the next few months. On November 7, Lincoln removed McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac. Although military factors prompted this action, it had important politic
al overtones. In December the House decisively rejected a Democratic resolution branding emancipation "a high crime against the Constitution," and endorsed the Emancipation Proclamation by a party-line vote. Congress also passed an enabling act requiring the abolition of slavery as a condition of West Virginia's admission to statehood.40

  During December the Democratic press speculated that Lincoln, having been rebuked by the voters, would not issue the final Emancipation Proclamation. The president's message to Congress on December 1 fed this speculation. Lincoln again recommended his favorite plan for gradual, compensated emancipation in every state "wherein slavery now exists." Worried abolitionists asked each other: "If the President means to carry out his edict of freedom on the New Year, what is all this stuff about gradual emancipation?" But both the friends and enemies of freedom misunderstood Lincoln's admittedly ambiguous message. Some failed to notice his promise that all slaves freed "by the chances of war"—

  39. The Tribune Almanac for 1863 (New York, 1863), 50–64; Lincoln to Carl Schurz, Nov. 10, 1862, in CWL, V, 494; Daniel Wallace Adams, "Illinois Soldiers and the Emancipation Proclamation," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 67 (1974), 408–10; Oscar O. Winther, "The Soldier Vote in the Election of 1864," New York History, 25 (1944), 440–58.

  40. CG, 37 Cong., 3 Sess., 15, 52; U.S. Statutes at Large, XII, 633.

  including his Proclamation—would remain forever free. The Proclamation was a war measure applicable only against states in rebellion; Lincoln's gradual emancipation proposal was a peace measure to abolish the institution everywhere by constitutional means. The president's peroration should have left no doubt of his position: "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. . . . The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. . . . The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. . . . In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free. . . . We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."41