by Bruce Catton
Douglas died in Chicago on June 3. He was forty-eight, a man who could have been useful to the nation in the time just ahead; he was the one leader of them all who might, just possibly, have come to serve as a bridge between the two nations—might have done so, except that the chasm now was too wide for bridging—and when the end came, he was broken financially, physically, and emotionally. Ever since Fort Sumter he had been speaking for the Union cause, rallying to its service thousands of Westerners who might not have rallied without him. Now he was down, stricken with rheumatism, stricken too with typhoid fever, and it was clear that death was near. He received the last rites of the Catholic Church. Once he rallied long enough to dictate a final letter—a letter addressed to Virgil Hicox, chairman of the Democratic state committee in Illinois, meant for all the men who had believed in Douglas so deeply. In this letter he stoutly urged these men to stand firmly for the Union in this strange war which "is being waged against the United States for the avowed purpose of producing a permanent disruption of the Union and a total destruction of its government." He had hoped for peace, he said, had hoped that there still remained in the South a body of men who loved the Union and would make their voices heard, but he had come to believe that the secessionists were determined "to obliterate the United States from the map of the world." No man, said Douglas, could be a true Democrat now unless "he is a loyal patriot."1
This was about the last of him. Just after daylight on the morning of June 3 he sank back on his pillow. With long pauses between each word—words wrenched from him by who knows what final moment of despair?—he murmured "Death . . . death . . . death." He roused briefly, when someone asked him if he had any final message for his two sons. "Tell them," he said, with a flash of his old spirit, "to obey the laws and support the Constitution of the United States." His lovely wife, Adele Douglas, sat by the bedside holding his hand, sobbing convulsively. Through the shutting mist Douglas seems to have heard someone in the room whisper a fear that the dying man was suffering greatly. He whispered: "He . . . is . . . very . . . comfortable." Then, in a few moments, he was gone.2
He was going to be missed, and tributes were paid to his memory. The War Department, seeing "a national calamity" in his death, ordered regimental colors draped in black crepe. In the Senate, Orville Hickman Browning, of Illinois, saw "something almost sublime" in the way Douglas had spoken for the Union cause, and felt that Douglas had achieved "a conspicuous niche in the temple of fame." And far to the south little Alec Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, wrote to his brother that he almost wished Douglas "had lived longer or died sooner." If there had been no Douglas, said Stephens, the Charleston convention in the spring of 1860 would not have divided and there would have been no disunion; but now-—"Had he lived he might have exerted great power in staying the North from aggressive war. I can but think this would have been his position. He would have been against attempted subjugation. He would have been for a treaty of recognition & for peace."3
Alec Stephens may have been right, but it was too late. He himself knew pessimism. Speaking at Augusta, Georgia, he confessed that the war was bound up with deep consequences, "not unto us but to the people of the North." The end, as far as he could see, was clouded in darkness, but he believed that to those who had begun the war the worst consequences would come. Looking north, now that Douglas was gone, he saw only anarchy. "How long will they be able to war against us? I tell you it will be until we drive them back. There is no hope for us, there is no prospect for an early and speedy termination of the war until we drive them back."4
Alec Stephens spoke out of the growing shadows. The little pale star had a fragile strength, but no hands to smite; he could see disaster on its way, but he could neither lead his people out from under it nor help them move straight on into it with the hard purpose to salvage what might be saved from disaster's wreckage; he could see too much and dare too little, and the iron was not in him. Of all the leaders, two men had the terrible capacity to make men love them and to strike with unrestrained fury—Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln. These two would be followed to the bitterest end, to the sorrow, the glory, and finally the salvation of their common country. The others would do what was in them to do and pass on. Eventually the two great antagonists would dominate the stage.
Meanwhile, other men would have their say. One of them was Ben Butler, of Massachusetts, a man seemingly appointed now, in the infinite Providence of God, to cast his own strange ray of revealing light on the way the war must go. To the relief of everyone, Butler had been lifted out of Maryland and had been set down, by the Federal War Department, at Fort Monroe, at the tip of the Virginia peninsula. Here, trying to be an administrator and a warrior, succeeding imperfectly in each, he would bring up for definition the one thing both sides did not want mentioned just now—the deep underlying wrong of human slavery. Meaning nothing more than a good lawyer's shrewdness, he helped to define the war.
Into Butler's lines, late in May, came three fugitive Negro slaves, men whose master had had them using pick and shovel to erect a battery for Confederate guns. Their arrival was unwelcome. The fugitive slave law remained on the books; legally, General Butler was required to deliver these chattels up to their lawful owner, and nobody in Washington had so much as hinted that he might do something different. The lawful owner turned out to be a Colonel Charles Mallory, in the Confederate service, and Colonel Mallory wanted his possessions returned to him. Butler, wholly devoid of feeling, had a lawyer's cunning; had also, apparently, an instinct for the inner meaning of things. Property of men in rebellion against the United States, he held—spades, wagons, farms, whatnot—could be taken over by the national authority as contraband of war; these three colored men were indisputably property, owned by a man in a condition of unrelieved rebellion, and they were, accordingly, contrabands. General Butler would hold them and use them. He had given a word to the national language and an idea to the national administration, and the word and the idea would go on working.5
Other Negroes came, in the days that followed, and Butler presently told the War Department that he would keep these people and use them, letting the strong men build wharves, dig trenches, build roads, and do similar things, having the women cook meals and launder clothes, suffering the children to exist: "As a matter of property to the insurgents it will be of very great moment, the number I now have amounting, as I am informed, to what in good times would be of the value of $60,000." At least a dozen of the fugitives, he learned, had been building batteries on Sewell's Point, commanding the approaches to Norfolk; and so Butler argued that "as a military question it would seem to be a measure of necessity to deprive their masters of their services."
Unquestionably; and when Major J. B. Cary, of the Confederate army, came to see General Butler, and suggested that the Constitution required the general to deliver up errant slaves under the fugitive slave act, Butler had a ready answer. "I replied that the fugitive slave act did not affect a foreign country, which Virginia claimed to be, and that she must reckon it as one of the infelicities of her position that in so far at least she was taken at her word." Secretary of War Cameron, another man who knew his way in and out of the entanglements of legal verbiage, promptly wrote: "Your position in respect to the Negroes who came within your lines from the service of the rebels is approved. The Department is sensible of the embarrassments which must surround officers conducting military operations in a State by the laws of which slavery is sanctioned."6
The matter was not really simple. Legally, the United States government did not recognize secession; legally, therefore, the laws of the United States still applied, including the one which said that runaway slaves must be returned to the people who owned them. At the same time, Butler had agreed that slaves were property, and he was permitted to make use of the property of Rebels. Nobody was going to touch the institution of slavery. It was official policy, signed and sealed by Abraham Lincoln and the Congress, that the object of the war was not to
end slavery but simply to restore the Union. But the people who were property under the laws of states which had declared themselves out of the Union could be held and used . . . and, all in all, General Butler was right and he would be supported.
The news got about the plantation grapevine, and before long the general found himself harboring dozens, scores, and hundreds of fugitive slaves. He put all who were able-bodied to work, and in spite of himself he found himself, within weeks, controlling a "contraband camp" with 900 inhabitants. He advanced, at one time this spring, into the Virginia village of Hampton, from which point, before long, he was obliged to withdraw; when he withdrew, huge numbers of Negroes (who had been working for him, in Hampton) followed him, pursued, as Butler believed, by gray-clad soldiers who threatened to shoot the men "and to carry off the women who had served us to a worse than Egyptian bondage."
Butler wrote to the War Department for guidance. (His tongue may have been in his cheek at the time, but nevertheless he wrote.) He had, he said, treated able-bodied Negroes "as property liable to be used in aid of rebellion" and so as contraband of war. Now he had many of these people on his hands. Were they in fact property? If so, whose property were they? Their owners had abandoned them, or had been legally bereft of them. He, who now possessed them, did not own them and did not want to own them; were they now, therefore, property at all? "Have they not become, thereupon," he asked, as plaintively as if he had deep convictions on the matter, "men, women and children? ... I confess that my own mind is compelled by this reason to look upon them as men and women. If not free born, yet free, manumitted, sent forth from the hand that held them never to be reclaimed."
Secretary Cameron agreed. He wrote a reply which went all the way around Robin Hood's barn to insist that the war was being fought to preserve the Union and protect the Constitutional rights of all citizens, one of these rights being the right to repossess slaves who had fled from servitude; but at the same time, "in states wholly or partly under insurrectionary control," things were a bit different. Congress, very significantly, had recently held that slaves employed in hostility to the United States were no longer slaves. To be sure, in a state like Virginia (where there were slave owners who still professed loyalty to the Union) the case might be difficult. Still, the War Department felt that "the substantial rights of loyal masters are still best protected by receiving such fugitives, as well as fugitives from disloyal masters, into the Service of the United States, and employing them under such organizations and in such occupations as circumstances may suggest or require." At the same time, the General must be careful to do no proselytizing. His troops must not encourage "the servants of peaceable citizens in a house or field" to run away and join up with Uncle Sam. He must be passive; and, in his passivity, he must be firm.7
That settled that; which is to say that it affirmed Butler's right to receive fugitives, to put them to work, and to turn an unreceptive ear to all complaints. For the rest, however, instead of settling anything at all, it started much which would demand a deeper settlement later. This early in the war—before a single fight of any consequence had taken place between organized troops, before either side had got much beyond stating the eternal justice and rightness of its chosen position—slaves were being recognized as men, women, and children, and in that notion slavery had a loophole wide enough to march all of Egypt's fugitives, on their way through whatever Red Sea might await them. A new road was being traveled, and it would be impossible to go down it very far without confronting, finally, the question of emancipation.
Down this road Lincoln would go one cautious step at a time. Supporting Butler's theory about contrabands, he would apply it where he had to, but he would make no general rule for all army officers. He was caught now, by his own doubts, and by the demands of the border states, where there were men who held slaves but who were standing firmly for the Union. In his inaugural address he had said that he would execute all of the laws, including the one relating to fugitives from servitude. In Washington, slavery existed under his very eyes; slavery, the attempt to escape from it, and the stern repression of such attempts. The same War Department which had upheld Butler's ingenious theory would pass on to the Federal commander in northern Virginia a note in which the President had given thought to the cases of slaves who ran away from masters in the District of Columbia and, guided by an obscure but sound instinct, had tried to find refuge in the military camps. "Would it not be well," the President had asked, "to allow owners to bring back those which have crossed the Potomac with our troops?" General Scott felt certain that the district commander shared with him the wish that the President might carry out all of his Constitutional functions; at the same time, he warned that "the name of the President should not at this time be brought before the public in connection with this delicate subject."8 The district commander was discreet. He was Irvin McDowell, serious, well-intentioned, hard-working, deeply unlucky; a husky, squarely built professional, who had served with credit in the Mexican War and in peacetime assignments thereafter, a man who neither sought nor gained popularity, something of a protege of Secretary Chase, well liked by General Scott. A major since 1856, he had been made brigadier general in the middle of May, and now he commanded what was about to become an army of invasion. The odds were against him. He had had staff assignments throughout his army career and had never commanded troops in the field; now he had a badly mixed collection of militia regiments which he must somehow turn into an army, and because no one quite understood the problems he was facing he was as a man doomed to make bricks without straw. Through no particular fault of his own he would be remembered as architect of one of the most ignominious defeats in American military history. A total abstainer, he would be accused of drunkenness; a soldier who ignored all political considerations, he would be accused of heretical softness toward the South;
and, all in all, he would have reason to regret that he ever heard of this war. Now he would hew to the line scrupulously, and if the War Department told him to bring fugitive slaves back to their owners, he would do it without a second thought.9
He did not have a great deal of time to get ready for his military operations, for his objective was visibly taking shape before everyone's eyes this June. This objective, of course, was to be the Confederate capital, whose capture, as hopeful Northerners believed, secession and the Confederacy could not long survive; and the Confederate capital now was the city of Richmond, not more than 100 miles away and apparently ripe to be taken. A New York Tribune correspondent, near the end of May, found Richmond "in the most fearful state of agitation." Troops from the South were arriving at the rate of 500 or 600 a day, but most of them were very young, "entirely inexperienced, ill-clad and ill-armed," and they would need a great deal of drill "before they will be able even to present a respectable front in a pitched battle." Venturing into an expression of personal opinion which gives him rank as one of the very worst prophets of the entire war, the Tribune man wrote that General Lee, who commanded at Richmond, was "an inferior officer in vigor of mind and energy of character" and he predicted that "the mildness of his disposition will lead him to prefer negotiations to battles." He added that recruits with and without uniform were parading the streets at all hours, and that nearly all of the soldiers chewed tobacco.10
McDowell's troops could have been described in practically the same terms; which is to say that they were very young, totally without experience, untrained, poorly equipped, and in all conceivable respects quite unready for campaigning; a fact which, at the beginning of June, seemed to be apparent to no one in the high command except to McDowell himself. Adam Gurowski, the caustic and intransigent emigre who held down a small job in the State Department and wrote copiously in a diary meant for early publication, was writing now in lofty disparagement about Northern military preparations. "Weeks run, troops increase," he wrote, "and not the first step made to organize them into an army, to form brigades, not to say divisions; not yet two regiments maneuvering together.
What a strange idea the military chief or chiefs, or department, or somebody, must have of what it is to organize an army." As a result of this, he believed, "the loss in men and material will be very considerable before the administration will get on the right track."11
He was not the only pessimist. Secretary Seward himself, taking stock in the middle of May, felt a certain gloom, partly because he was not allowed to control things. To his wife Seward wrote sadly that he was "a chief reduced to a subordinate position" and that he was under attack because he had been working for the organization of a powerful army, although "it is only from an army so strong as to dishearten the traitors that we can hope for peace or union." The military secretary to the governor of Ohio, noting that excellent men of business were eager to make money out of the war, wrote in disgust that "scoundrels get contracts because they have money; have money because they are scoundrels." The word was out that Pennsylvanians with good connections were getting a good deal from Secretary Cameron; it was said that already "there is evidently much feeling between Lincoln and Cameron" and that Lincoln had received so many complaints about Pennsylvania contracts that he "intended to have the matter examined." William T. Sherman, brought east and given a colonel's commission, meditated gloomily about the likelihood of "absolute national ruin and anarchy," and wrote that Americans might "degenerate into a new brand of men, struggling for power and plunder." Mr. Stanton told former President Buchanan that "the peculation and fraud" so visible in Washington "have created a strong feeling of loathing and disgust"; Stanton felt the country early in June was in greater danger than ever before.12