Abolitionists had taken note of Butler, and presumably Private Edward Pierce, in charge of the contrabands at Fortress Monroe, suggested to him that he not only employ the black men rushing to his camp but also arm them. For the abolitionists pushing for emancipation decided that, for them, the defeat at Bull Run had been a victory of ideological sorts. Butler said in retrospect, “one might reverently believe that a special Providence ordered it, so that slavery might be wiped out. Because if we had beaten at Bull Run, I have no doubt the whole contest would have been patched up and healed over by concessions to slavery, as nobody in power was ready then for its abolition.”
MEANWHILE, THE IMPETUOUS Pathfinder had again stepped onto the stage, this time in the theater of war. After losing, as expected, his bid for the presidency in 1856, John Frémont had returned to California to shore up his increasingly indebted gold mines. In 1861, he sent word to President Lincoln that he wouldn’t mind being placed in the field, and in the summer of 1861, he accepted a commission as commander of the new Department of the West, a region that ran from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains and included the rough and poorly protected border state of Missouri, where secessionist guerrillas burned bridges and sharpshooters terrified settlers. The government and the press had been concentrating on the eastern theater of war, not the West, as Frémont noted when he arrived in St. Louis in July. “Our troops have not been paid,” he complained, “and some regiments are in a state of mutiny, and the men whose term of service is expired generally refuse to re-enlist.” It was a messy, explosive situation, but Major General Frémont would make it worse.
On August 30, Frémont shocked President Lincoln, he shocked conservative Republicans, and he shocked abolitionists, Democrats, and Southerners, by declaring martial law and—outdoing Butler—declaring free the slaves of anyone in his department who had taken up arms against the federal government.
Frémont’s timing was poor. His own star had been falling. Accused of peremptoriness, imperiousness, and lavish living, Frémont had been rapidly losing the support of Missouri’s Blair family in an internecine squabble that would have national implications, especially since the intelligent and voluble Montgomery Blair, formerly the counsel for Dred Scott, was now Lincoln’s postmaster general, and his brother Frank Blair, a leading Missouri Republican, was the chair of the House Committee on Military Defense. Lincoln had been concerned about Frémont’s military prowess anyway. When the redheaded, rash Brigadier General Nathaniel Lyon had been shot in the heart at the battle at Wilson’s Creek, it was Frémont who had been blamed, even though he had urged Lyon to retreat until reinforcements arrived. But with casualties high and morale low, the press wanted to know why Frémont had not reinforced Lyon sooner. His answer was that he had fewer troops under his command than he had let on and that they were needed to defend St. Louis.
Lincoln, who had not been notified in advance of Frémont’s proclamation, knew that if he permitted Frémont to free the slaves of Missouri rebels, he risked losing credibility with all the border states, and he needed them, if not on his side, to be neutral. As Lincoln’s friend Joshua Speed (a Kentucky slaveholder) reminded the president, “You had as well attack the freedom of worship in the north or the right of a parent to teach his child to read—as to wage war in a slave state on such a principle.” So in a private communication to Frémont, Lincoln requested that he revise the proclamation to conform to the Confiscation Act. In response, Frémont demanded Lincoln openly order him to do so, which would force Lincoln to suggest publicly that he was against emancipation.
Jessie Frémont went to Washington to deliver her husband’s reply in person. As she recalled, she had rushed to the White House without changing out of her dusty clothes. Lincoln did not ask her to sit. Instead, he listened to her appeal and read the general’s letter; later he said he had had to muster all his “awkward tact” just to be polite. He must have been furious at Frémont’s cheek. When she again tried to argue with him about her husband’s proclamation, he called her “quite a female politician”—not exactly a compliment—and told her “it was a war for a great national idea, the Union, and that General Frémont should not have dragged the negro into it—that he never would if he had consulted with Frank Blair.” Refusing to grant her another interview, Lincoln ordered her husband to retract the proclamation.
A few days later, Frémont arrested Frank Blair for insubordination. That was the final straw. Vilified as imperious, incompetent, a poor general, a corrupt administrator, and even as an opium eater, Frémont was forced out of the Department of the West.
Elizabeth Blair Lee, the sister of Montgomery and Frank, had already accused Frémont of playing to “the abolition horde in the north.” There was a degree of truth in the charge. Northerners rallied round him. To John Greenleaf Whittier, Frémont appeared to be a brave man, albeit “without the statesman’s tact,” who would “strike at cause as well as consequence.” Even the conservative Republican James Russell Lowell was moved to ask, “How many times we are to save Kentucky and lose our self-respect?” That is, how long will we perpetuate the horror of slavery just to coddle border states? The citizens of Hamburg, Ohio, sent the president a petition supporting Frémont and his proclamation, and so did a committee representing the German volunteer regiments in New York. The revocation of Frémont’s proclamations will make abolitionists of us all, cried Harper’s Weekly. And the more moderate Orville Hickman Browning of Illinois frankly told Lincoln that Frémont’s proclamation “was accomplishing much good. Its revocation disheartens our friends, and represses their ardor.” Yet whether Frémont was a hothead trying to reclaim his tattered reputation or whether he was sincerely trying to make emancipation the centerpiece of the war, his proclamation did invigorate the slavery debate.
Regardless, abolition was still unthinkable to many in the North or on the border, such as the Blair family, who hoped to revive the now moribund notion of colonization to rid the country of blacks altogether. So too did Lincoln—though he favored and put forward a plan of gradual emancipation whereby the loyal slave owner would be offered compensation for the freed slave. The freed slave would then be repatriated—to a colony called Lincolnia, sardonically suggested one newspaper—and slavery would be extinct in about twenty or thirty years.
Frederick Douglass pointedly asked, “Why, oh why, may not men of different races inhabit in peace and happiness this vast and wealthy country?”
Though Lincoln’s plan, which he offered to the Delaware legislature in a test run, does seem unadventurous compared to Garrisonian abolitionism, no other president of the United States had gone as far. The proposal went too far and not far enough: too far, in that conservatives shuddered at the thought of a slippery slope—emancipated slaves might actually clamor for citizenship—and not far enough in that buying slaves in order to free them still presumed them to be nothing more than sticks of furniture.
In early 1862 the proposal died in Delaware’s House of Representatives. Lincoln continued to pursue Congress with his idea of compensated emancipation, but it was an idea not supported in the border states in any case. The effort, however misguided, reveals and foreshadows one of the knottiest questions of the war and its aftermath: that of the meaning of full citizenship. Contraband, freed slave, freeman: “These terms are milestones in our progress,” noted Edward Pierce; “and they are yet to be lost in the better and more comprehensive designation of ‘citizens,’ or, when discrimination is convenient, ‘citizens of African descent.’ ”
THE POPULAR SINGERS from New Hampshire whose repertoire included such temperance favorites as “Father’s a Drunkard and Mother Is Dead” entertained the Army of the Potomac near Washington with “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground” and “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” But when they set to music Whittier’s “Hymn to Liberty,” inspired by Luther’s hymn “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”) and sang to the soldiers about how slavery was destroying the nation, the Hutchinson Family
Singers heard a rustle and then loud and long and angry boos. General McClellan promptly revoked the Hutchinsons’ permit to sing in the army camps, reminding them with asperity that abolition was not the object of the war. “I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union & the power of the Govt—, on no other issue.”
Regardless of what he said he was fighting for, by March 1862, seven months after McClellan had taken command, very little had happened. George B. McClellan could not or would not move his army. His troops might adore him, but the president was losing confidence in Young Napoleon. So was the new secretary of war, the aggressive and sometimes bullish Edwin Stanton. Horace Greeley, never one to mince words, called McClellan an outright Copperhead (as Northerners who opposed the war were called after a box of snakes, presumed to be poisonous, escaped from a package bound for Washington, D.C.). And few observers could understand the wisdom of McClellan’s proposed “peninsular strategy” in which he would ship his huge army by sea to the tip of the York-James Peninsula and then fight westward, toward Richmond.
Beloved by his troops, insubordinate to the commander in chief, courted by Democrats, and despised by radicals, the handsome McClellan seemed to dillydally while, in the West, the unkempt, spare-spoken soldier with a reputation for drinking too much actually captured Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. That was in February 1862, and the general was Ulysses S. Grant. Grant, not McClellan, had won the first major Union victory. And it was the now-famous Grant who had told Confederate general Simon Buckner that “no terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.” This was news, this was excitement, this was soldiering, yet all the while the Army of the Potomac had not budged.
Finally, after almost six months of delay, in early March 1862 McClellan and his huge army finally advanced toward Centreville, near the Bull Run battlefield, still covered with bones whitening in the spring sun. It was an inauspicious start. The Confederates had withdrawn—they had also left Yorktown—and McClellan and his men discovered not the huge fortifications he’d imagined but wooden logs painted black to resemble cannon. “It was as if General McClellan had thrust his sword into a gigantic enemy,” scoffed Nathaniel Hawthorne, “and beholding him suddenly collapsed, had discovered to himself and the world that he had merely punctured an enormously swollen bladder.” Besides, Washington learned with mounting dismay that the Confederates had fortified the peninsula and McClellan’s maps were inaccurate. And that he had continued to delay, constructing earthworks and inflating the numbers of the enemy he said he would have to face.
Union armies were soon occupying Corinth, Mississippi, and they’d already taken Memphis. New Orleans had fallen into Union hands. But though McClellan’s Army of the Potomac finally did advance close enough to Richmond—within five miles—to hear the clang of its church bells, it did not capture the Confederate capital. McClellan had remained cautious while Robert E. Lee—the new head of the Army of Northern Virginia—took the offensive, summoning Brigadier General J. E. B. Stuart, a fine soldier, blue-eyed, twenty-nine years old, and in command of the cavalry. Stuart, who liked to wear a red-lined cape, a large yellow sash, jack boots, and on his head, a soft broad hat with a footlong ostrich plume jutting out of it, rashly wanted to ride entirely around McClellan’s large army to assess its position. Lee let him do it, and Stuart glamorously galloped into history for his successful expedition. Lee also summoned the inexorable Stonewall Jackson, who arrived fresh from his success in the Shenandoah Valley campaign, where he had defeated far larger forces than his own and sustained far fewer casualties than he inflicted. Lee also had in his command the combative Ambrose P. Hill, Daniel H. Hill (no relation), and General James Longstreet, the husky forty-one-year-old West Pointer whom Lee called his war horse; Longstreet was “the brain of Lee as Stonewall Jackson was his right arm,” said Lincoln’s secretary.
With a bold battle plan for direct assault—and the successful defense of Richmond—Lee took the offensive in what became known as the Seven Days battle. Yet despite crushing the Confederates who (foolishly) assaulted Malvern’s Hill on July 1 and leaving more than 8,000 of them dead or wounded there, McClellan fell back to Harrison’s Landing on the bank of the James, deluded, believing himself to be outnumbered and refusing to take the offensive even though he had defeated the Confederates assaulting Malvern Hill. The Seven Days Battle was a protracted bloodletting of unthinkable proportion. More than 35,000 men were killed or wounded—more even than had fallen at Shiloh just six weeks earlier and more than would fall at Antietam in a few months. To Northerners, the battle was a bitter, exhausting, dispiriting, and perhaps even predictable fiasco. McClellan had failed.
“THE WATCHWORD ‘IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT’ only gave the key,” wrote the optimistic Thomas Higginson, “but War has flung the door wide open, and four million slaves stand ready to file through.” Well, the door wasn’t as wide open as this abolitionist liked to think, but it had been pried ajar at least a crack by Generals Butler and Frémont—and by Major General David Hunter, who, in the matter of abolition, would make more of a stir.
With a complexion so dark that some of his West Point classmates called him “Black Dave,” and though his brown hair was receding (it was sometimes said he wore a wig), Hunter when young had been rather handsome. A duelist who had once challenged a superior officer and a former friend of Jefferson Davis, he had since the 1860 presidential campaign served Abraham Lincoln, and, fearful for Lincoln’s life, had accompanied him during the long ride from Illinois to Washington and the inaugural. At the time of Fort Sumter’s bombardment, Hunter, then fifty-eight, was not well known outside of the military. By 1886, the year of his death, he was considered a war criminal by Southerners for his slash-and-burn Shenandoah campaign in Virginia in 1864—and, for that matter, for his radical abolitionism.
Wounded in the neck at Bull Run, Hunter had served briefly in the West, and in March 1862 he was appointed commander of the Union’s Department of the South, which consisted of sections of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, as well as the tropical Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, which the Union forces had taken over. Treasury Secretary Chase dispatched government agents to extract the cotton crops (estimated at $2 million) and also appointed his friend Edward Pierce to superintend the former slaves. The wealthy white population had fled the Islands, leaving behind, in their hurry, the cutlery on the table, the linens in the cupboard, the pianos, the livestock, the cotton plantation—and the slaves, about ten thousand of them: more contraband. Pierce, however, refused to call those men and women “contraband.” They were freedmen and ready to work, he said.
Would they fight? The topic of black volunteer regiments remained taboo. “Colored men were good enough to fight under Washington,” scoffed Frederick Douglass, “but they are not good enough to fight under McClellan.” As early as November 1861, Secretary of War Cameron had been advocating the arming of freed slaves. Like Frémont, Cameron had tried to circumvent Lincoln by releasing a report to the press before Lincoln could read it. “It is as clearly a right of the government to arm slaves, when it becomes necessary, as it is to use gunpowder taken from the enemy,” he wrote. “Whether it is expedient to do so is purely a military question.” Irate, Lincoln had ordered Cameron to retract the report, believing it to be premature, as he had told the Frémonts, and politically damaging. It was too late. Papers such as the Chicago Tribune said that arming slaves would be impolitic in Kentucky—but not arming them in Beaufort, South Carolina, was just plain stupid. And Henry James, Sr., declared, “Every negro ought to be armed; it is a crying shame that the Govnt. doesn’t take the thing in hand more earnestly and devote itself to it.” Cameron was asked to leave the cabinet six weeks later; his tenure at the War Department was known for incompetence, mismanagement, and possible corruption, but his release of the report played its part in the discussion of arming freed slaves.
For all Lincoln’s seeming transparency, the tall man with the keen intelligence who sometimes lo
oked like an undertaker and wielded his down-home humor kindly—and like a club—was, as one observer noted, as “deep as a well.” He was in a thorny situation regarding emancipation in the border states. And there was the question of England and France to consider: would emancipation make them less likely to recognize the Confederacy? Lincoln was troubled, especially since recently there’d been a near disaster in international relations—and the horrific possibility of a war between the Union and Great Britain—when two Confederate agents had been arrested aboard a British ship.
The two envoys were James M. Mason of Virginia (whose wife had tangled publicly with Lydia Maria Child over John Brown) and Louisiana’s John Slidell, the wealthy merchant from New Orleans who was partial to filibustering expeditions. On November 8, 1861, they were leaving Cuba on a special British packet, the Trent, bound for England, when Captain Charles Wilkes of the U.S. frigate San Jacinto, on blockade patrol, intercepted the Trent and, something of a bully, arrested Mason and Slidell. Incensed, the British accused the United States of violating neutrality laws and of insulting the British flag. The British War Office heatedly talked of reprisals, and British-leaning Confederates—there were many—noisily denounced the American North.
Aware that the United States was in the wrong and that the incident might damage the Union cause in any case, Secretary of State William Seward adroitly managed to defuse the matter. Insisting that Captain Wilkes had acted on his own recognizance, he made sure that Lincoln quickly released Mason and Slidell. Of course, they soon headed back to Europe in a long—and ultimately fruitless—attempt to secure recognition of the Confederacy. But knowing that he had to keep Britain and France out of this war, Lincoln also calculated that making emancipation an aim of the war might just do that.
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