The Devil's Own Work
Page 12
Mobs in New York roughed up Confederate sympathizers, and the police had to protect Mayor Wood's house as well as the Daily News office.4 George Templeton Strong noted that "the Herald office had already been threatened with attack" and, along with the Express, had started to waver in its prosouthern pronouncements. Strong expected the less influential Journal of Commerce and Day-Book, as yet unrepentant, to change their tune shortly, because of the "growing excitement against their treasonable talk."5 Also under pressure and scrutiny was the leading Irish Catholic newspaper in the city, the Freeman s Journal, published by James McMasters, a vocal Peace Democrat. Archbishop John Hughes had founded the paper and retained his influence over it for some time after it changed ownership, but it no longer reflected his views, particularly on the war.6
In gratitude to the country that had adopted so many Irish Catholic refugees as citizens, Hughes took a strong pro-Union stand, flying the Stars and Stripes from every steeple in the archdiocese. Like Hughes, the New York Irish community's most influential secular paper, the Irish-American, backed the Union cause but opposed the Republican party and abolition with equal vehemence. Similarly, Boston's Irish Catholic Pilot exhorted readers to "stand by the Union; fight for the Union; die by the Union."7
Along with gratitude was hope that military service and sacrifice would help the Irish assimilate more fully in America and overcome decades if not centuries of nativist discrimination. While native Protestants like George Templeton Strong contended that "our Celtic fellow citizens are almost as remote from us in temperament and constitution as the Chinese," the Boston Pilot hoped military service would eventually enable Irish Americans to declare, "We too are Americans, and our fathers bled and died to establish this country."8
Anti-British sentiment also spurred Irish support for the Union, since the English appeared to be backing the Confederacy, the major supplier of cotton for their textile industry. Many Irish Americans also blamed British abolitionists for originating the movement, which spread to the United States and sowed discord between the North and South; many saw this as a British plot to divide the Republic—former colonies that had become a competitor on the world stage.9
As soon as Fort Sumter fell, Lincoln called on the states to supply seventy-five thousand national guardsmen to the federal government for ninety days of service. Under existing law, this was the longest enlistment the president could require of the militia, but in the heady opening days of the war few northerners believed it would take more than three months to crush the rebellion. New York's merchants dropped their efforts at compromise and rallied behind the war effort in a frenzy of patriotism, hoping a massive show of force would bring the war to a swift conclusion—with prompt national reunification and a resumption of trade. Volunteer regiments formed quickly, including one raised by Mayor Wood, which he managed to make the first from New York City to leave for the front.10
"One word to these gentlemen," chided William Russell of the London Times. "I am pretty well satisfied that if they had always spoken, written, and acted as they do now, the people of Charleston would not have attacked Sumter so readily."11
Eager, not to end slavery, but to preserve the nation that offered them freedom and asylum, Irish Americans volunteered enthusiastically, joining, among others, the Sixty-ninth Regiment of the New York State militia, commanded by Michael Corcoran, an ardent nationalist who had emigrated to New York in the wake of the Young Ireland revolt and had since become a leader of the Fenian Brotherhood. Many of the Irish were already enrolled in smaller all-Irish state militia regiments that had formed in the 1850s for the dual purpose of serving New York State and preparing for the liberation of Ireland. While these units marched in annual St. Patrick's Day parades, Irish nationalists had remained vigilant for opportunities to land troops in Ireland when the British might be distracted by war on other fronts. The Civil War presented a chance to obtain further military training and experience in the service of eventual Irish liberation.12
More than 144,000 Irish-born soldiers would fight for the Union in the Civil War, to be joined by at least as many Irish Americans. Thousands were killed, most of them enlisted in regiments with no particular ethnic identity. In order to highlight the Irish Catholic contributions and sacrifices in the war, Corcoran raised the Irish Legion, and fellow Irish nationalist Thomas Francis Meagher commanded another brigade of Irish regiments—recruited from New York, Boston, and Philadelphia—in the Army of the Potomac. In addition to Meagher's command, known as the Irish Brigade, and Corcoran's legion, there were several other Union regiments and brigades composed mostly of Irish soldiers. Eighty-nine Irish-born soldiers earned Congressional Medals of Honor, and officers of Irish descent, including Generals George Meade and Philip Sheridan, played key roles in the war.13*
While the pressure of unemployment and the promise of regular pay swept many Irish American volunteers into the Union forces, they were also driven by a desire for acceptance in their adopted country. Charles Halpine, a soldier and journalist, wrote that he and other volunteers thought they were "earning a title, which no foul tongue or niggardly heart would dare to dispute, to the full equality and fraternity of an American citizen."14
• • •
Northerners' high hopes for a quick, ninety-day war were dashed with the Union defeat at Bull Run on July 21, 1861. The assumption of many Irish Americans and other conservatives that they were supporting and fighting in a war to preserve the Union—but not for abolition—also came into question. Congress had recently passed resolutions disclaiming any intent to destroy slavery, but after Bull Run the idea of all-out war on the Confederacy gained ground. Republicans began to defend emancipation as a "military necessity." Slaves—who made up more than 50 percent of the South's workforce—not only toiled in fields, mines, and factories but filled numerous noncombat roles in the Confederate army.15
"To fight against slaveholders, without fighting against slavery, is but a half-hearted business, and paralyzes the hands engaged in it," declared black abolitionist Frederick Douglass.16 While the expectations of the Irish community seemed threatened, African Americans were encouraged by the new agenda of emancipation that appeared to be taking hold.17
That agenda also began to divide War Democrats from Republicans in Washington, where April's thrilling rush of martial unity had faded. The first piece of northern war legislation that failed to win the support of both parties in Congress was the Confiscation Act of August 6, 1861, which authorized Union forces to seize any property—including slaves—that the rebels were using to wage war. Democrats and border-state representatives voted against the measure in vain. By confiscating the property of individuals as punishment for treason, Republican lawmakers narrowly circumvented the protections for slavery in the Constitution.* While this spelled out a very limited scope for freeing slaves, it was nonetheless a first step that within eighteen months would help shift the goal of the Civil War from a struggle solely to save the Union to a conquest of the South and the destruction of slavery.18
John C. Fremont hoped to set that course even sooner. The Republican party's first presidential candidate and a famous explorer, Fremont had recently been appointed commander of the army's Western Department. On August 30, he declared martial law in Missouri and freed all the slaves of Confederate sympathizers. Lincoln, who feared the border states—Maryland, Missouri, and particularly Kentucky—would break away from the Union if their slaveholders were faced with total confiscation, first asked and then ordered Fremont to bring his proclamation in line with the congressional act, freeing only those slaves directly used by the Confederate army.19
Lincoln's move against emancipation and his subsequent dismissal of Fremont intensified the debate over slavery in the North and helped drive Republicans into the abolitionist camp.
"Free every slave—slay every traitor—burn every rebel mansion, if these things be necessary to preserve this temple of freedom," thundered radical Republican congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvan
ia. Such calls for a "radical revolution" to destroy slavery, along with the largely party-line vote on the Confiscation Act, reinforced Lincoln's fear that his fragile coalition of moderate Republicans, War Democrats, and southern Unionists from the border states would shatter if emancipation became the Union's avowed goal. The Republicans would then have to fight the war alone, Lincoln said, "and the job on our hands is too large for us."20
Democrats had their own factional troubles. They had lost the entire southern wing of their party—now absent from Congress, where the all-northern Republican party held sway—and could not afford further divisions within their ranks. Peace Democrats, especially Vallandigham and the Wood brothers, were particularly worrisome to the mainstream party leadership in New York—Samuel Barlow, August Belmont, and Samuel Tilden—because antiwar rhetoric drove patriotic War Democrats out of the party and into the Republican camp. The Copperheads' insistence on a negotiated peace with the Confederacy also enabled the Republicans to label the entire Democracy as disloyal—"to pin the tail of treason on the Democratic donkey."21
The peace men continued to draw adherents, dividing the Democrats and thereby boosting the Republicans, whose uniform support for the war helped them win elections across New York State in November 1861, including the three-way mayor's race in New York City, where Republican businessman George Opdyke prevailed and Fernando Wood lost.22
Early in 1862, in an effort to resuscitate the party, the War Democrats and Peace Democrats tried to paper over their differences at least in the short term by rallying around their common abhorrence of emancipation.* They calculated that racism could galvanize the party's factions and even lure some conservative, anti-abolition Republicans over to the Democracy. The Republicans faced thorny questions not only about emancipation but about the position blacks should attain in America after they were free—questions which Democrats could try to exploit in order to divide the radicals from the conservatives. Barlow, Belmont, and Tilden remained vigilant for an opportunity to capitalize on public fears about the rising tide of abolitionist sentiment in the North. For the moment, however, Lincoln's cautious course on emancipation deprived the Democrats of a unifying issue.23
"The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?" Lincoln asked one of his generals in January 1862. The Union army had lost several major battles the previous year; the treasury was empty; and George McClellan, commanding the Army of the Potomac, had been incapacitated for almost a month with typhoid fever. Operations were bogged down in the western theater of the war as well.24
However, in the next four months, Union forces won a series of victories on the rivers in the West, culminating in early April with the massive Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee, which permanently turned the tide of the war in the Mississippi Valley. At the same time, David Farragut's saltwater fleet captured New Orleans, the South's largest city, and later Baton Rouge and Natchez. However, despite a joint operation by Grant and Farragut, the Confederates refused to surrender Vicksburg, and the effort had to be abandoned for that summer.
Shiloh showed General Grant, and the Union, the tenacity of the rebels in the West and confronted northerners with the fact that they would have to conquer the South, not simply win a decisive battle, to win the war. With about ten thousand killed and wounded on each side, the carnage at Shiloh was a watershed between the smaller battles of the war's first year and the huge ones that followed in the next three years.25
By April, McClellan had moved his army down to the Yorktown Peninsula in Virginia and was slowly closing in on Richmond. Seeing progress in both the East and the West—and frustrated with the cumbersome, decentralized system of raising troops—Secretary of War Stanton took the fateful step of shutting down all recruitment for the armed forces in order to come up with a more efficient approach.26
In the House of Representatives, radical Republican leader George Julian of Indiana described the emancipation of the slaves as both a military necessity and a moral imperative. Not only would the loss of four million laborers weaken the Confederate war effort, he declared, but a Union victory would be hollow "if slavery be spared to canker the heart of the nation anew, and repeat its diabolical deeds." In the spring of 1862, most conservative and moderate Republicans, who had hoped for a gradual end to slavery followed by colonization, underwent a major shift and began to support the radicals' call for the confiscation of slaves by the Union army.27
The realities of the war had pressured Congress to take action. Union forces had captured fifty thousand square miles of territory and were bringing many slaves under their control behind the lines, where they were known as "contrabands" because of their uncertain legal status. In the absence of the Democrats' southern delegations, Congress was dominated by Republicans, and radicals headed key committees in both the House and the Senate. On March 13, Congress forbade Union army officers to return fugitive slaves to their masters. Building on this measure, on April 10 Congress granted Lincoln's request to offer compensation to states willing to enact gradual emancipation.28
With this, his first move toward emancipation, Lincoln aimed to split the border states from the Confederacy, but their representatives responded neither to the promise of money nor to the threat of the war's ravages. The war continued to escalate, and support for emancipation increased in the North. Abolitionists, once pariahs, were gaining respectability, and Congress contemplated a second, more sweeping confiscation act, while tens of thousands of fugitive slaves fled to the protection of the invading Union forces.29
On May 9, 1862, Union general David Hunter repeated Fremont's action of declaring martial law and freeing the slaves in his military district, the Department of the South, consisting of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Hunter's forces controlled only the coastal islands of South Carolina and Georgia, but the proclamation embraced all of the three states. Once again, Lincoln immediately countermanded the order, saying that such a decisive step was his alone to take. At the same time, however, his language revealed that he was not entirely opposed to Hunter's action—that he believed emancipation might soon "become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the government."30
In the meantime, Lincoln continued to urge the border states to embrace gradual, compensated emancipation in order to make the transition as smooth as possible. However, representatives of these states and northern Democrats still hoped the war could be ended by McClellan's capture of Richmond, a decisive military victory that would reunite the country with slavery preserved.31
Hunter's proclamation was just the opening Barlow, Belmont, and Tilden had been waiting for. Anti-emancipation became the rallying cry to unite the War and Peace factions of the Democratic party. The Albany Regency, the Swallowtails, and Tammany orchestrated a series of mass meetings across New York State to denounce Hunter's actions, and brought the cry of protest to a roar with a huge demonstration in New York City. A Fourth of July celebration sponsored by Tammany welcomed the Peace Democrats back to the fold. Tammany sachem Elijah Purdy made a great show of marching arm in arm with Fernando Wood.32
However, Democratic hopes for McClellan's capture of Richmond, a limited war, and the "Union as it was" evaporated further with Union defeat in the Seven Days' Battles of June 25 to July 1, 1862. "I expect to maintain this contest," Lincoln declared, "until successful, or till I die, or am conquered . . . or Congress or the country forsakes me." A manifesto from border-state congressmen on July 13 again rejecting gradual emancipation finally moved Lincoln away from courting the middle to favoring radical action on slavery.33
Lincoln had always been morally opposed to slavery, as he made clear throughout the 1850s, especially when campaigning against Stephen Douglas. However, as a pragmatic politician, committed to preserving the Union, he had worked hard to make the Republican party in Illinois a moderate organization and had entered the White House promising to contain slavery, not destroy it. Nonetheless, as Lincoln had told the border-state representatives and senators, public pressure in favor of
emancipation was growing: It "is still upon me, and is increasing."34
Charles Sumner, the leading radical in the Senate, had been telling Lincoln since the war began that he could and should free the slaves by executive order; the outgoing secretary of war, Simon Cameron, had included the same suggestion in a report in December 1861. The Fremont and Hunter proclamations had also spurred Lincoln. His response to Hunter's declaration in May had been a turning point, signaling that Lincoln had become convinced of his constitutional authority to free the slaves by decree. He had soon reinforced that impression, saying, "As commander in chief of the army and navy, in time of war, I suppose I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy."35
In June, Lincoln secretly began writing a proclamation "giving freedom to the slaves in the South," but publicly continued to express doubts about such a decree, telling Sumner it was "too big a lick"; the proclamation would appear futile and desperate without military successes to back it up. However, by July, McClellan's failure to take Richmond, a morale crisis in the army, and a fall-off in recruitment all impressed on Lincoln the need for drastic action. Riding in a carriage on July 13 with Secretary of State William Seward and navy secretary Gideon Welles, Lincoln revealed that he "had about come to the conclusion that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued."36
Four days later, Congress heaped more pressure on the president when moderate Republican lawmakers joined the radicals to pass two bills facilitating all-out war against the Confederacy. The Second Confiscation Act, of broader scope than the one passed almost a year earlier, freed not only blacks used by the Confederate army but also those owned by anyone deemed a "traitor." By effectively including southern civilians in this category, Congress was edging closer to an outright abolition of slavery in the South. Since Lincoln believed such a step, in order to conform with the Constitution, had to be taken by the president as part of his "war powers," he could not keep his plans a secret much longer.37