Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  Yet the time was still not right.

  General David Hunter, on the other hand, did not care about politics. He needed more troops. Since his requests to Secretary of War Stanton had been ignored, and since the number of former slaves was very large, in frustration, on May 9, 1862, Hunter on his own initiative declared “forever free” all the slaves throughout the Department of the South. This might have been a military necessity, but it was emancipation nonetheless. “John Brown IS a-marching on,” exulted the former moderate George Templeton Strong, “and with seven league boots.” And, far more radical than the proclamations of Butler or of Frémont, Hunter’s edict also authorized the conscription of all able-bodied black men ages eighteen to forty-five in the 1st South Carolina Volunteers.

  Inspired by Hunter’s proclamation, on the night of May 13, 1862, the young slave Robert Smalls, along with a few crewmen (fellow slaves), boarded the Planter, a Confederate gunboat owned by his master, and secretly piloted the boat out of Charleston Harbor and toward Port Royal. Well stocked with artillery and ammunition as well as Smalls’s friends and family, the Planter sailed past Fort Sumter and Moultrie to freedom with Smalls at the helm. Then it headed to open seas. Hoisting up a bedsheet and a Federal flag, Smalls surrendered to the U.S. Navy. In the North, the courageous Smalls was hailed as a hero—and, thanks to Hunter, a free man.

  But there was a problem. When the freedmen did not volunteer in droves, as Hunter had mistakenly assumed they would, the draconian general instructed his men to pull the former slaves out of their cabins under the cover of darkness, yank them by day from the cotton fields, tear them from their families, and bully them into uniform at the point of a gun. Five hundred black men were pressed into service and loaded upon a ship at Beaufort to be transported to Hilton Head. Issued certificates of freedom, the men, it was said, sighed “for the ‘old fetters’ as being better than the new liberty.”

  Lincoln closed Hunter down just eleven days later, on May 20. Rescinding the proclamation, he also halted the brutal impressment. But he stood by Hunter, a friend, who perhaps had launched the trial balloon on emancipation that Lincoln, this time, had already approved. “Gen. Hunter is an honest man,” the president explained to a delegation representing the border states. “I valued him none the less for his agreeing with me in the general wish that all men everywhere could be free.” Separating his personal belief from what was politically advisable, Lincoln said he had had no choice in the matter. The proclamation would at present do more harm than good.

  Regardless, Hunter’s impatience had one salutary effect in the North: the issue of whether to arm black men was again on the table, very plainly, for all to see.

  THE ARMING OF black men was debated in Congress, to a degree. In March 1862, a new article of war had prohibited the army from returning fugitive slaves to their masters. In April, all slaves in the District of Columbia were freed. In June, slavery was prohibited in all U.S. territories (though slaves remained slaves in the states). In July 1862, Lincoln issued an order to enlist persons of “African descent” for war service, declaring that these persons would receive wages for their labor. That same month the radical majority now seated in Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act, which declared those slaves belonging to rebels and in Union lines to be captives of war but, nonetheless, “forever free.”

  The aim of the war was changing.

  “Broken eggs cannot be mended,” Lincoln said.

  Part of the reason for the change—or the rationalization for it—was one of so-called military necessity, and military necessity, meaning the military itself, would help effect the major, most lasting social transformation caused by the war: the eradication of slavery. Still, General McClellan adamantly opposed any talk about abolition as a cause or a consequence of the war. “Neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of States; or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment,” McClellan wrote to Lincoln in July, adding that “a declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present armies.” Nonetheless, the war was pulling in a different direction.

  Lincoln, who said very little about McClellan’s letter, further annoyed the general by appointing the western commander, Henry W. Halleck (commonly known as “Old Brains”) to head the Union forces as “General in Chief.” Halleck ordered McClellan to withdraw from the peninsula southeast of Richmond and coordinate with General John Pope along the Rappahannock River for the campaign that would become known as the Second Battle of Bull Run (or Second Battle of Manassas). McClellan, who still had his heart set on Richmond, protested, if for no other reason than that he objected to Pope’s appointment. “Do you know Pope is a humbug,” asked one soldier, “and known to be so by those who put him in his present place?” Ordered to leave the peninsula and return to northern Virginia, McClellan had moved slowly, far too slowly, suspiciously slowly, and by so doing, he’d effectively refused to reinforce Pope. The Federal army slunk back to Washington, said Charles Adams, “in danger of utter demoralization.”

  Rumors, jealousy, and dissension had spread while accusations of incompetence were whispered in Washington as well as on the field.

  Besides, in early August 1862, Stonewall Jackson and his famous foot cavalry defeated the Massachusetts major general Nathaniel Banks north of Cedar Mountain, in Virginia, killing 30 percent of Banks’s army. Jackson then marched his troops fifty miles to seize the depot at Manassas Junction, and together with Lee and Longstreet, had defeated Pope at the disastrous Second Battle of Bull Run.

  This decisive and second thrashing of Union forces at Bull Run woke up those who still dreamed about a short war. This would be a long, aggressive war, a fight to the finish. William Tecumseh Sherman confided to his brother the senator that “I rather think many now see the character of the war in which we are engaged. I don’t see the end or the beginning of the end, but suppose we must prevail and persist or perish. I don’t believe that two nations can exist within our old limits, and therefore that war is on us and we must fight it out.”

  Two nations not existing within their old limits also implied the end of slavery, even if only out of necessity. Gideon Welles, Lincoln’s secretary of the navy, where blacks were already serving, recalled that Lincoln had said, “We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.” The Union could not be restored without the destruction of slavery; this was obvious from the start to many although few had been willing to admit it aloud. But times were changing.

  Slowly. For not everyone agreed. “I think that the best way to settle the question of what to do with the darkies would be to shoot them,” one Federal enlistee had declared. To McClellan abolition was “the perversion of the war for the Union into a war for the Negro.” At the same time, abolitionists decried the notion of emancipation as “military necessity”—to damage the Confederacy while swelling Union ranks—because it ignored the real and human fact that a slave was entitled to freedom and nothing less. Freeing slaves as a “ ‘military necessity,’ ” said Parker Pillsbury, would be “the most God-insulting doctrine ever proclaimed.” Yet as James R. Gilmore, the editor of The Continental Monthly (a new journal devoted to national policy and literature), had pointed out, “All of that old abolition jargon went out and died with the present aspect of the war.” Expedience was all—no longer could the abolitionist afford to wait for humanitarian or evangelical arguments to win hearts and minds. Likely, military arguments would be—had become—the more persuasive ones.

  In all this discussion, some of it rancorous, Lincoln heeded himself. More than anything, he cared for the Union, which was facing defeat. Toward the end of July, after Hunter repeatedly asked to authorize enlisting more black troops, Lincoln called together his cabinet and announced his decision—to issue an emancipation proclamation and free all slaves within the rebellious states. (The proclamation would not touch slaves in the border states.) Secretary of State Seward counseled the presid
ent to wait before issuing the proclamation, for the North first needed a military victory; military necessity must trump higher law in order to enforce it.

  The restive Horace Greeley, not privy to the inner workings of the administration but eager for attention—and emancipation—issued his own declaration in the New-York Tribune on August 19, 1862. In his “Prayer of Twenty Millions,” Greeley reminded readers that “the Rebellion, if crushed out to-morrow, would be renewed within a year if Slavery were left in full vigor—that army officers, who remain to this day devoted to Slavery, can at best be but half-way loyal to the Union—and that every hour of deference to Slavery is an hour of added and deepened peril to the Union.” Alert to the power of the press, Lincoln swiftly replied, and with political panache put his own inimitable rhetorical stamp on the question. He raised hope, he dashed it. He insinuated, he did not state. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. 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. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”

  No compromiser on the matter of preserving the Union, for which too many men had already died, and which, for him, was an absolute, Lincoln would compromise on the issue of slavery, which he intimated was the negotiable part of his plan. Or so he said. He hinted something else: that he would in fact free all the slaves, some of whom had already been freed under the Confiscation Acts. What he intended, few knew, except of course it was clear that he could and would draw a line between his personal views and what he termed his “official duty.” “I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free,” he insisted.

  “Was ever a more heartless policy announced?” The Liberator scornfully responded. “With the President public policy is everything, humanity and justice nothing.”

  Yet Lincoln’s reply was an eloquent lesson in responsibility—and a demonstration of the conflicts that beget compromise. If there were those so-called higher laws of freedom for all, there were also legal, even constitutional, issues to be considered as a means for achieving them and for achieving justice. And so if official duty clashed with what may have been his conscience, his conscience did not suffer defeat and it would not, for he knew how to wait, how to plan, how to deliberate, how to achieve—which so many others did not or could not. This didn’t mean he had no plan in mind or that he had forgotten about justice. As it was, after all, the Union was not being saved and, as he must have known, would never be saved by perpetuating slavery in any form.

  THE CHANGE HAD begun. On August 25, 1862, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton wrote to Brigadier General Rufus Saxton, the Massachusetts man assigned to the Sea Island plantations, who had recently requested authority to arm black men. Stanton told Saxton that he could “arm, uniform, equip, and receive into the service of the United States such number of volunteers of African descent as you may deem expedient, not exceeding 5000.” Only five thousand, true, but at least the men would be paid. “You are therefore authorized by every means within your power to withdraw from the enemy their laboring force and population,” he instructed Saxton, “and to spare no effort consistent with civilized warfare to weaken, harass, and annoy them.” These men, along with wives, mothers, and children of all men enlisted in the service, would also, like them, be declared forever free.

  Obtaining the official order David Hunter had requested, Saxton was in one way like Lincoln: he was a practical idealist. He was also a maverick among West Point graduates in that he was actually a committed antislavery man. And now he was to take possession of all plantations previously occupied by rebels and to feed, employ, and govern their remaining inhabitants, who had been left without shelter, clothing, provisions, or the wherewithal to buy any. This was an anomalous position, he ruefully admitted, one that straddled the gulf between civilian and soldier, slave driver and general, despot and humanitarian, so he reassured his troops, black troops, that no person serving under him would ever receive unjust treatment.

  To recruit and train volunteers of African descent in what he called the 1st South Carolina Volunteers (Hunter’s regiment had been disbanded), Saxton recruited the white abolitionist writer Thomas Higginson to command this, the first regiment of black troops ever regularly organized and mustered into the U.S. military. (The Virginia writer James Branch Cabell was not impressed. All that had happened, he said, was that the slave had moved “from the dull and tedious drudgery of farm work in favor of a year or two’s military service under the more noble excitements of gunfire.”)

  Since Hunter and Saxton and Higginson were convinced that the slaves could and would fight for their freedom, they knew it would be hypocritical not to allow them to do just that. But Northerners seemed to regard what was called the Port Royal experiment—not just the arming of men but the development in the Sea Island of a labor force, of cash crops, banks, and schools—as just another one of Barnum’s exhibits. Many of them flocked there—government agents, teachers, hucksters, and just plain do-gooders—and pestered Saxton with insulting inquiries about what these freed blacks were really like. Saxton testily answered, without fail, that they were “intensely human.”

  THOUGH HE’D INITIALLY been reluctant, by the end of August 1862, Butler was also mustering a troop of free black men into service—and cleverly taking credit for a position he’d formerly opposed; no matter. Two regiments were quickly filled, a third followed. A regiment of black troops was formed in Kansas, too. The abolitionist senator James Lane was recruiting them (without authorization), and by early 1863, there were six companies serving as the 1st Regiment, Kansas Colored Volunteers.

  The Union defeats of late summer and early fall had threatened to roll back the tide of emancipation, but on September 17, 1862, McClellan partially redeemed himself at the bloody battle near Sharpsburg, Maryland, along Antietam Creek, where twelve hours of fighting “sucks everything into its red vortex,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes, who afterward went to find his son, who had been shot in the neck. The partial redemption came at a very high cost: another 26,000 casualties and a battlefield so deeply covered in corpses that horses couldn’t cross it; men slept, exhausted, their heads resting on the inert bodies of other men, unable to distinguish the wounded from the dead. Outside the hospitals, there were stacks and stacks of amputated arms and legs piled high. Impossible to think that death had undone so many. That is what Gardner had come to photograph.

  Pyrrhic victory? Lincoln’s secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, thought so. “The carnage was frightful, the result in no proportion to the terrible expense.” The field was left to McClellan, who had fought splendidly, or so he told his wife; the battle was his masterpiece. Yet he hadn’t finished the job. He had not renewed the attack, and instead of crushing Lee the following morning, he weighed his options, allowing Lee’s army to withdraw across the Potomac and back into Virginia.

  Whatever held McClellan back—whether caution, exhaustion, or incompetence—he had given Lincoln the victory he needed, and Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22: if the rebellious states did not return to the Union by January 1, 1863, their slaves would be pronounced forever free. Lincoln was basically annulling the Fugitive Slave Act—and doing much more, for though he did not mention the arming of black men, by virtue of the proclamation, the Union army would effectively become an army of liberation. Yet Lincoln did not free all slaves—just those in rebellious states. This was, after all, a war act; Lincoln did not have the power to abolish slavery in the loyal border states. To them (Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, Kentucky), he promised gradual and compensated emancipation. (He also continued to favor colonization, or what the former slave William Wells Brown aptly called
deportation.)

  In the South, members of the Confederate Congress fulminated, as of old, about slave insurrections: that Lincoln intended to foster uprisings among their slaves; that the slaves would kill white women and children when white men, absent from home, could not protect them. Federal soldiers harboring or employing slaves should therefore be considered criminals, not prisoners of war, and hanged. Senator Benjamin Hall of Georgia disagreed and saw Lincoln’s purpose as more political than military or moral. With autumn elections upcoming and Democrats as well as radical Republicans fidgeting, Lincoln had needed to appease border states and to curry favor with Northern abolitionists at the same time. To conceive of his proclamation in any other way, said Hill, dignified it beyond importance.

  Northern opinion was split. Though jubilant in public, William Lloyd Garrison complained in private, “The President can do nothing for freedom in a direct manner, but only by circumlocution and delay.” General McClellan insisted yet again that the proclamation would demoralize the army, though the journalist George W. Smalley would point out that it wasn’t the army that was demoralized, just certain generals. In Europe, the response was also mixed; those people already hostile to emancipation regarded the proclamation as a bid for international sympathy and support, which it was, yet frequently, like the Southerners, they regarded it as the prelude to the horrific slave insurrections that were bound to come. Nonetheless, the proclamation, following on the heels of Antietam, helped quash the idea of any involvement in the war or recognition for the Confederacy in sympathetic circles of the British government. Said Henry Adams, secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, who was now the U.S. minister to England, “the Emancipation Proclamation has done more for us here than all our former victories and all our diplomacy.”

  In Boston, where radicals argued that the scope of the proclamation was limited—it did not free all slaves—Ralph Waldo Emerson reminded people that it did not admit “of being taken back.” That is, as he said, once “done, it cannot be undone by a new administration.” As Lincoln had said, broken eggs cannot be mended. The country was headed toward true and uncompromising justice; it made “a victory of our defeats,” Emerson continued, and guaranteed that those who died in this war would not die in vain. “We have recovered ourselves from our false position, and planted ourselves on a law of Nature.” That law of Nature, that higher law, was freedom.