Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  With Lincoln's agreement, Gilmore published a brief report of this meeting in northern newspapers. His account appeared at the same time as the story of Greeley's meeting with rebel agents at Niagara Falls. After all the publicity, no one could doubt that Davis's irreducible condition of peace was disunion while Lincoln's was Union. This served Lincoln's purpose of discrediting copperhead notions of peace and reunion through negotiations. As the president later put it in a message to Congress, Davis "does not attempt to deceive us. He affords us no excuse to deceive ourselves. He cannot voluntarily reaccept the Union; we cannot voluntarily yield it. Between him and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible. It is an issue which can only be tried by war, and decided by victory."32

  But in the dejected state of northern morale during August, Democratic newspapers were able to slide around the awkward problem of Davis's conditions by pointing to Lincoln's second condition—emancipation—as the real stumbling block to peace. "Tens of thousands of white men must yet bite the dust to allay the negro mania of the President,"

  31. Several versions of Davis's exact words appeared subsequently in print—three of them by Gilmore in the Boston Transcript, July 22, 1864, in the Atlantic Monthly, 14 (Sept. 1864), 378–83, and in James R. Gilmore, Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War (Boston, 1898), 261–73; and one by Judah P. Benjamin in a circular to James M. Mason, "Commissioner to the Continent," Aug. 25, 1864, in O. R. Navy, Ser. II, vol. 3, pp. 1190–95. Although these versions varied in wording, they agreed in substance. The quotations here are mainly from the version accepted by Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis, Tragic Hero: 1864–1889 (New York, 1964), 76–81. See also Kirkland, Peacemakers of 1864, 85–96.

  32. CWL, VIII, 151.

  according to a typical Democratic editorial. "Is there any man that wants to be shot down for a niger?" asked a Connecticut soldier. "That is what we are fighting for now and nothing else." Even staunch Republicans condemned Lincoln's "blunder" of making emancipation "a fundamental article," for it "has given the disaffected and discontented a weapon that doubles their power of mischief."33 Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times and chairman of the Republican National Committee, told Lincoln on August 22 that "the tide is setting strongly against us." If the election were held now, party leaders in crucial states believed they would lose. "Two special causes are assigned to this great reaction in public sentiment,—the want of military success, and the impression . . . that we can have peace with Union if we would . . . [but that you are] fighting not for Union but for the abolition of slavery."34

  These reports filled Lincoln with dismay. He denied that he was "now carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition. It is & will be carried on so long as I am President for the sole purpose of restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done." Lincoln pointed out to War Democrats that some 130,000 black soldiers and sailors were fighting for the Union: "If they stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept." To abandon emancipation "would ruin the Union cause itself. All recruiting of colored men would instantly cease, and all colored men now in our service would instantly desert us. And rightfully too. Why should they give their lives for us, with full notice of our purpose to betray them? . . . Abandon all the posts now possessed by black men, surrender all these advantages to the enemy, & we would be compelled to abandon the war in 3 weeks." Besides, there was the moral question: "There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson & Olustee [a battle in Florida in which black soldiers fought]. I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends & enemies, come what will."35

  33. Columbus Crisis, Aug. 3, 1864; Henry Thompson to his wife, Aug. 17, 1864, quoted in Randall C. Jimerson, "A People Divided: The Civil War Interpreted by Participants," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1977, p. 131; Strong, Diary, 474.

  34. Raymond to Lincoln, Aug. 22, 1864, in CWL, VII, 517–18.

  35. These quotations are from the draft of a letter to a Wisconsin War Democrat dated August 17 and from notes taken by one of two Wisconsin Republicans who talked with Lincoln on August 19. A modified version of these notes was published in the New York Tribune, Sept. 10, 1864. CWL, VII, 499–501, 506–7.

  This seemed clear enough. But the pressure to back away from a public commitment to abolition as a condition for negotiations grew almost irresistible. At the same time Lincoln was well aware of a move among some Republicans to call a new convention and nominate another candidate. The motive force of this drive was a belief that Lincoln was a sure loser; but many of its participants were radicals who considered his reconstruction and amnesty policy too soft toward rebels. These crosscutting pressures during August made Lincoln's life a hell; no wonder his photographs from this time show an increasing sadness of countenance; no wonder he could never escape that "tired spot" at the center of his being.

  Lincoln almost succumbed to demands for the sacrifice of abolition as a stated condition of peace. To a War Democrat on August 17 he drafted a letter which concluded: "If Jefferson Davis . . . wishes to know what I would do if he were to offer peace and re-union, saying nothing about slavery, let him try me." While he pondered whether to send this letter, the Republican National Committee met in New York on August 22. Speaking through Henry Raymond, they urged Lincoln to send a commissioner "to make distinct proffers of peace of Davis . . . on the sole condition of acknowledging the supremacy of the constitution,—all the other questions to be settled in a convention of the people of all the States." This would be a public relations gesture, said Raymond, not a real abandonment of emancipation. For "if it should be rejected, (as it would be,) it would plant seeds of disaffection in the south, dispel all the delusions about peace that prevail in the North . . . reconcile public sentiment to the War, the draft, & the tax as inevitable necessities." Lincoln authorized Raymond himself to go to Richmond and "propose, on behalf [of] this government, that upon the restoration of the Union and the national authority, the war shall cease at once, all remaining questions to be left for adjustment by peaceful modes."36

  Having gone this far, Lincoln pulled back. On August 25 he met with Raymond and convinced him that "to follow his plan of sending a commission to Richmond would be worse than losing the Presidential contest—it would be ignominiously surrendering it in advance." Whatever the purport of this ambiguous statement, recorded by one of Lincoln's private secretaries, Raymond did not go to Richmond nor did

  36. CWL, VII, 501, 518n., 517.

  Lincoln send his "let Jefferson Davis try me" letter. His peace terms remained Union and emancipation. The president fully anticipated defeat in November on this platform. "I am going to be beaten," he told an army officer, "and unless some great change takes place badly beaten." On August 23 he wrote his famous "blind memorandum" and asked cabinet members to endorse it sight unseen: "This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards."37

  Lincoln expected George B. McClellan to be the next president. McClellan was the most popular Democrat and the most powerful symbol of opposition to Lincoln's war policies. The only uncertainty concerned his position on the peace plank to be submitted by Vallandig-ham, chairman of the resolutions subcommittee of the platform committee. Although McClellan had endorsed a copperhead candidate for governor of Pennsylvania the previous year, he was widely known as a War Democrat and in a recent address at West Point he had seemed to sanction the cause of Union through military victory. This caused the Peace Democrats to look elsewhere, though they could apparently find no one except Thomas S
eymour of Connecticut, who had lost the gubernatorial election in 1863, or Governor Horatio Seymour of New York—who refused to be a candidate. Nevertheless, the peace faction would command close to half of the delegates and might jeopardize McClellan's chances by bolting the party if the convention nominated him. Behind the scenes, McClellan's principal adviser assured doubters that "the General is for peace, not war. . . . If he is nominated, he would prefer to restore the Union by peaceful means, rather than by war." McClellan himself reportedly told a St. Louis businessman on August 24: "If I am elected, I will recommend an immediate armistice and a call for a convention of all the states and insist upon exhausting all and every means to secure peace without further bloodshed."38

  37. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York, 1890), IX, 221; William Frank Zornow, Lincoln and the Party Divided (Norman, Okla., 1954), 112; CWL, VII, 514.

  38. Samuel L. M. Barlow to Manton Marble, Aug. 24, 1864, S. L. M. Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library; James Harrison to Louis V. Bogy, Aug. 24, 1864,37. Clement C. Clay Papers, National Archives, quoted in Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada, 93. If McClellan really did say this, it represented a reversal of his position from two weeks earlier, when he rejected advice that he should write a letter suggesting an armistice, and commented: "These fools will ruin the country." McClellan to W. C. Prime, Aug. 10, 1864, McClellan Papers, Library of Congress.

  Doubts about McClellan's peace credentials persisted, however, so the party "bridged the crack" between its peace and war factions by nominating the general on a peace platform and giving him as a running mate Congressman George Pendleton of Ohio, a close ally of Val-landigham. Scion of an old Virginia family, Pendleton had opposed the war from the start, had voted against supplies, and expressed sympathy with the South. The platform condemned the government's "arbitrary military arrests" and "suppression of freedom of speech and of the press." It pledged to preserve "the rights of the States unimpaired" (a code phrase for slavery). On these matters all Democrats could agree. More divisive (but adopted almost unanimously) was the plank drafted by Vallandig-ham: "After four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war. . . [we] demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of the states, or other peaceable means, to the end that, at the earliest practicable moment, peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union."39

  This crucial resolution made peace the first priority and Union a distant second. Republicans and Confederates alike interpreted it thus, and responded accordingly. "It contemplates surrender and abasement," wrote a New York Republican. "Jefferson Davis might have drawn it." Alexander Stephens declared joyfully that "it presents . . . the first ray of real light I have seen since the war began." The Charleston Mercury proclaimed that McClellan's election on this platform "must lead to peace and our independence . . . [provided] that for the next two months we hold our own and prevent military success by our foes."40

  BUT . . . From the diary of George Templeton Strong, September 3, 1864:

  39. Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States During the GreatRebellion, 2nd ed. (Washington, 1865), 419–20.

  40. Strong, Diary, 479; Stephens to Herschel V. Johnson, Sept. 5, 1864, and Charleston Mercury, Sept. 5, 1864, both quoted in Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric, 115, 113. Neither Stephens nor the editor of the Mercury had learned of the fall of Atlanta when they penned these remarks.

  "Glorious news this morning—Atlanta taken at last!!! . . . It is (coming at this political crisis) the greatest event of the war."

  Or as a Republican newspaper headlined the news:

  VICTORY

  Is the War a Failure?

  Old Abe's Reply to the Chicago Convention

  Consternation and Despair Among the Copperheads41

  41. Strong, Diary, 480—81; St. Paul Press, Sept. 4, 1864, quoted in Gray, Hidden Civil War, 189.

  26

  We Are Going To Be Wiped Off the Earth

  I

  It happened this way. While Sherman's and Hood's cavalry had gone off on futile raids into each other's rear during the first half of August, the Union infantry had continued to probe unsuccessfully toward the railroad south of Atlanta. When all but one blue corps suddenly disappeared on August 26, Hood jubilantly concluded that Sherman had retreated. But celebrations by Atlantans proved premature. Sherman had withdrawn nearly all of his army from the trenches, all right, but they were marching south to slice across the roads and railroads far beyond Confederate defenses. As the Democrats met in Chicago to declare the war a failure, northern soldiers 700 miles away were making "Sherman neckties" out of the last open railroad into Atlanta by heating the rails over a bonfire of ties and twisting the iron around trees.

  Hood woke up to the truth a day too late. On August 30 he sent two corps against the enemy at Jonesborough twenty miles south of Atlanta. They found the Yankees too strong and were repulsed with heavy loss. Next day Sherman counterattacked and mauled the rebels. To avoid being cut off and trapped, Hood evacuated Atlanta on September 1 after destroying everything of military value in it. Next day the bluecoats marched in with bands blaring Union songs and raised the American flag over city hall. Sherman sent a jaunty wire to Washington: "Atlanta is ours, and fairly won."

  The impact of this event cannot be exaggerated. Cannons boomed 100-gun salutes in northern cities. Newspapers that had bedeviled Sherman for years now praised him as the greatest general since Napoleon. In retrospect the victory at Mobile Bay suddenly took on new importance as the first blow of a lethal one-two punch. "Sherman and Far-ragut," exulted Secretary of State Seward, "have knocked the bottom out of the Chicago platform." The Richmond Examiner reflected glumly that "the disaster at Atlanta" came "in the very nick of time" to "save the party of Lincoln from irretrievable ruin. . . . [It] obscures the prospect of peace, late so bright. It will also diffuse gloom over the South."1 Gloom became a plentiful commodity indeed. "Never until now did I feel hopeless," wrote a North Carolinian," but since God seems to have forsaken us I despair." The South Carolina diarist Mary Boykin Ches-nut saw doom approaching. "Since Atlanta I have felt as if all were dead within me, forever," she wrote. "We are going to be wiped off the earth."2

  Far to the north George B. McClellan digested the news of Atlanta as he wrote his letter accepting the Democratic nomination. If he endorsed the platform, or said nothing about it, he would by implication commit himself to an armistice and negotiations. McClellan felt great pressure from the party's peace faction to do just that. "Do not listen to your Eastern friends," Vallandigham implored him, "who, in an evil hour, may advise you to insinuate even a little war into your letter of acceptance. . . . If anything implying war is presented, two hundred thousand men in the West will withhold their support."3 Early drafts of McClellan's letter would have satisfied Vallandigham: they endorsed an armistice qualified only by a proviso calling for renewal of the war if negotiations failed to produce reunion.

  But McClellan's "Eastern friends"—War Democrats including the banker August Belmont, chairman of the Democratic National Committee—convinced him that if once stopped, the war could not be started again; an armistice without conditions would mean surrender of the Union. After Atlanta such a proposal would stultify his candidacy. So

  1. Seward quoted in Lloyd Lewis, Sherman: Fighting Prophet (New York, 1932), 409; Richmond Examiner, Sept. 5, 1864.

  2. Larry E. Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric: Confederate Policy for the UnitedStates Presidential Contest of 1864 (University, Ala., 1980), 119; Woodward, Chesnut's Civil War, 648, 645.

  3. Vallandigham to McClellan, Sept. 4, 1864, McClellan Papers, Library of Congress.

  McClellan's letter released on September 8 repudiated the "four years of failure" plank. "I could not look in the faces of gallant comrades of the army and navy . . . and tell them that their labor and the sacrifice of our slain and wounded brethren had been in vain
," he wrote. No, when "our present adversaries are ready for peace, on the basis of the Union," negotiations could begin in "a spirit of conciliation and compromise. . . . The Union is the one condition of peace—we ask no more."4

  Peace Democrats fumed that McClellan had betrayed them. They held hurried meetings to consider nominating another candidate. But nobody seemed to want this dubious honor, and the revolt subsided. Most Peace Democrats including Vallandigham eventually returned to the fold—though they campaigned mainly for the party and its platform rather than for McClellan.

  A similar process occurred in the Republican party. The news from Atlanta dissolved the movement for a new convention to replace Lincoln. The president was now a victorious leader instead of a discredited loser. Only John C. Frémont's splinter candidacy stood in the way of a united party. Behind the scenes, radicals negotiated Frémont's withdrawal on September 22 in return for Montgomery Blair's resignation from the cabinet. Though some radicals remained less than enthusiastic about Lincoln, they went to work with a will. The Democrats' Janus face toward the war presented Republicans with an easy target. "Neither you nor I," said a party orator, "nor the Democrats themselves, can tell whether they have a peace platform or a war platform. . . . Upon the whole it is both peace and war, that is peace with the rebels but war against their own government."5

  4. For an analysis of the successive drafts of McClellan's acceptance letter, see Charles R. Wilson, "McClellan's Changing Views on the Peace Plank of 1864," AHR, 38 (1933), 498–505. Drafts of McClellan's letter are in the McClellan Papers, Library of Congress, and in the Samuel L. M. Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library. The first three drafts expressed "cordial concurrence" with the platform's call for a "cessation of hostilities" and declared that "we have fought enough to satisfy the military honor of the two sections." Two letters from powerful War Democrats that helped persuade McClellan to drop such phrases from the final version are August Belmont to McClellan, Sept. 3, 1864, and S. L. M. Barlow to McClellan, Sept. 3, McClellan Papers.