The revolution of 1862–63 also forced a shift in the relationship between ending slavery and the purpose of the war. In 1861, soldiers saw slavery as something akin to a malignant mole on the body politic: it was an unsightly blemish with the ability to poison the entire nation, but since slavery appeared only in a limited area, Union troops assumed it could be excised with little impact on the rest of the body. After nearly two years of observing slavery, interacting with slaves, and fighting a horrible war, the Union rank and file now recognized slavery as a much more insidious cancer, embedded in the very spine and sinew of the nation. Its elimination amounted to traumatic surgery for the entire organism. Northerners as well as Confederates must help “up root [slavery] and cast it out,” Pvt. Orra Bailey insisted, even though he knew that the process would be harrowing. “We of the free states have yielded to this peculiar institution…untill it has become so deeply rooted that [removing] it will shake the nation and our institutions to the very center.” 7 Like many of his fellow enlisted men, Bailey knew a revolution when he saw one.
Slaves initiated much of the shaking themselves, as Union soldiers continued to observe. Tennessee slaves on an abandoned farm proved to be more than a match for Confederate guerrillas in an episode recounted by a Union Army surgeon. As the guerrilla band’s leader rode onto the farm to round up escaped slaves, a black man stepped out from behind a fence and sent a bullet “crashing through his ribs and heart.” After watching their comrade fall, the rest of the raiders “thought discreshion the better part of valor and took to a hasty flight, doubtless supressing a whole brigade” of guerrillas, the surgeon surmised. As he saw it, the incident handily illustrated “the way the Blacks will treat…the Robbers of their labor[,] of their children[,] and their freedom.” 8
The actions of slaves were crucial in eroding the institution of slavery, but they also asked the least of white Northerners, since the impact of slaves’ acts of self-liberation fell primarily on slaves themselves and on white Southerners. The Emancipation Proclamation and the enlistment of black Union soldiers, in contrast, involved everyone. When the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, 1862 (just days after Union forces claimed victory at Antietam), it announced that all slaves held in areas still in rebellion against the Union on January 1, 1863, would be free. The document mentioned voluntary colonization of former slaves outside the United States as one possible alternative for freedpeople, while saying nothing about black enlistment, even though blacks had begun joining Union regiments raised in Kansas and South Carolina. The final Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, freed all slaves in areas still in rebellion, just as the preliminary proclamation had promised. The final proclamation also exempted from emancipation slaves in several areas under Union control, but, unlike the first document, it omitted any mention of colonization and explicitly endorsed the enlistment of black soldiers into the Union Army.
By making abolition a matter of national policy, the Emancipation Proclamation and black enlistment directly implicated all Americans, even though the territory specified by the proclamation included only areas under Confederate control. The proclamation and the arming of black Union troops made it much harder to ignore complicated questions about the place of former slaves and other blacks within the American Republic, which most Union soldiers had resolutely avoided since the war began. Even acknowledging the limited jurisdiction of the proclamation, it is impossible to overstate its magnitude, for it took direct aim at an institution even older than the nation itself. It was issued by a man renowned for the statement, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The nation must become all slave or all free, Lincoln had famously argued. 9 The proclamation pointed the country in the all-free direction, which was uncharted territory for a nation in which slavery had always existed, and where it had profoundly shaped foreign policy, domestic affairs, and the national character. 10 To destroy the institution was to create a new United States unlike one that had ever existed before.
Given the immensity of the transformation wrought by the proclamation, it comes as no surprise that the measure elicited a wide variety of strong reactions among Union soldiers and civilians, but soldiers’ responses were not nearly as negative or simplistic as has long been supposed. The idea that Union troops reacted to the Emancipation Proclamation with fury, throwing down their arms by the regiment and plunging the Army into a morale crisis from which it never fully recovered, has proven both popular and tenacious, but it is based on a set of three assumptions rather than on evidence. 11 The assumptions go like this. First, since Union morale declined in the winter of 1862 and 1863, and since the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation arrived in the autumn of 1862, followed by the final proclamation in January 1863, the proclamation must have caused the dip in morale. 12 Second, since many Union soldiers held racist views, they must have objected to the proclamation. 13 Finally, since antiwar and anti-emancipation Democrats made gains in the 1862 state and Congressional elections, which were held hard on the heels of the preliminary proclamation, the election results amount to soldiers’ repudiation of emancipation. 14 None of these assumptions holds up under scrutiny.
Morale in the Union did plummet in the winter and spring of 1862 and 1863, and the preliminary proclamation did arrive in the autumn of 1862, followed by the final proclamation on the first day of 1863. Yet to most Union soldiers, emancipation and declining morale were distinct phenomena, not two halves of a cause-and-effect relationship. Union troops themselves attributed their sagging morale mainly (but not solely) to military factors, although the precise triggers differed between eastern and western armies.
In assessing the mood of the Army of the Potomac, a New Jersey private explained, “patriotism has oozed out through the pores opened by the imbecility of [army] leaders, and the fatigues and disappointments of a fruitless winter campaign.” 15 The spirits of the Army of the Potomac began to decline in the summer of 1862, when the Peninsula Campaign failed to take Richmond. Morale perked up in the wake of Antietam, but only temporarily. By November, when Richmond remained as firmly in Confederate hands as ever and the Army of the Potomac seemed stuck in an everlasting rut, a Massachusetts soldier noticed, “I hear nothing but curses both loud and deep even from some of the best men, whom I left at Harrisons Landing full of faith and hope.” 16 An equally frustrated President Lincoln identified Gen. George McClellan as the main obstacle to Union progress, and removed him from command of the Army of the Potomac on November 7. However necessary, McClellan’s demotion cast a “gloom over [the] army,” as one Little Mac supporter put it, because many members remained loyal to the general. 17 It also failed to solve the Union’s high command woes, as a string of ill-fated successors and a winter of bad fortune made clear. Tracing low Union morale like a trouble-some river, many soldiers located its origins in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where the badly mismanaged December attack achieved nothing but appalling Union casualties. To John Babb, the mere fact of being “whiped, and that severely” at Fredericksburg would have been bad enough, but the humiliation and senselessness of sacrificing “ten thousand lives” all for nothing made it worse. 18 The aftereffects of Fredericksburg and the so-called Mud March that followed lingered for months. In February, Cpl. Adam Muezenberger reported that disconsolate soldiers remained unable to recover from the effects of the battle, some of them so downhearted that only “the thought of their families keeps them from suicide.” 19 After a winter of dispiriting inactivity, and the Army of the Potomac’s loss and retreat at Chancellorsville in May, one Pennsylvania sergeant claimed he had “never seen the Armey so much demorralised as it is at the Pressent time.” 20 Battlefield reverses and leadership woes made the Army of the Potomac feel as if it had been put through a wringer.
Despair took longer to set in among western armies, where morale held reasonably steady through 1862, but by February of the new year, the unique set of challenges facing western regiments took their toll. Soldiers most often attributed
their dreary spirits to idleness, soaring disease rates, and the futility of a grand design to regain the Mississippi River by moving it. The scheme entailed digging through swamps and diverting the Mississippi from its riverbed into a new channel to get around the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg. The absurdity of the task was enough to make digging detail miserable, but even worse, days spent in the unhealthy conditions led to disease rates so high that Iowa private Charles Musser described duty along the Mississippi as “wholeSale murder.” Musser warned that his dysentery-plagued regiment was so “tired of the war” and of the fruitless channel digging that “if there is not some great movements made between this and spring, I believe one half of the army will throw down their arms and go home.” 21 When spring came, battles at Jackson, Champion’s Hill, and Big Black failed to capture Vicksburg, and Union troops settled in for a grim siege.
While Musser, Muezenberger, Babb, and others freely admitted to discouragement, they did not blame the Emancipation Proclamation. Pvt. Dayton Flint, who personally opposed emancipation, listed the proclamation as one of many factors, but even he judged woeful army leadership, battlefield defeats, disease, and the removal of McClellan to be more responsible than the Emancipation Proclamation for poor morale. 22 Furthermore, timing does not support a link between emancipation and demoralization. If soldiers’ low spirits resulted from the preliminary or final Emancipation Proclamation, then morale should have dropped at the same time throughout the entire Union Army, right after one or the other of the proclamations. Instead, morale in the Army of the Potomac slid in November and plunged most steeply in December, months after the preliminary proclamation but before the final proclamation. Meanwhile, morale in the West did not drop until February. Demoralization, in short, struck eastern and western armies at different times in response to local circumstances, not as the result of emancipation, which troops everywhere had known was coming since September.
In fact, when the preliminary and final proclamations came, many soldiers regarded them less as unwelcome surprises than as evidence that a tardy federal government was finally catching up to what soldiers had known for more than a year. Three weeks before Lincoln issued the preliminary proclamation, a German immigrant who fought with the Twelfth Missouri argued impatiently that emancipation was “the only proper policy,” and without it, “the war will not take a successful turn.” 23 Once news of the preliminary proclamation reached the camp of the Third Kansas Cavalry, Joseph Trego announced, “we are rejoiced to learn that Abraham has, at last begun at the bottom of the difficulty to solve it.” 24 Gratified though Elijah Penny was by news of emancipation, he could not help but grumble, “if the Presidents proclamation had been proclaimed one year sooner than it was I think the war would have been just so much nearer the end.” 25
However much soldiers may have anticipated the destruction of slavery, the final Emancipation Proclamation still amounted to big news. An Iowa regiment gathered for a reading of the document and greeted it with “3 times 3 hearty cheer[s] from the whole regiment, hurrah for the proclamation and old Abe.” 26 In Louisiana, the Eleventh Illinois listened to a speech reminding soldiers that “the Negroes was free, as free as the wind that blows, and that they had to be treated as men & women.” After the speech, Sgt. William Parkinson admitted that approval of the proclamation was “not a unanimous thing,” but he added that overall, “I never in all my days saw such inthusiasm.” A “large majority” of the men greeted the proclamation and the speech with “shouts & Hurrahs.” 27
When Parkinson remarked that response to the proclamation was “not a unanimous thing,” he rightly noted that soldiers remained individuals with their own, sometimes conflicting, opinions. Yet despite a wide range of outlooks, a predominant view clearly emerged, and it is best summed up by a soldier who explained, “slavery is the primary cause, or the root of the matter”; therefore, the Emancipation Proclamation made good sense, because “to distroy the tree root & branch is the surest way to brake this rebellion.” 28 Certain that “the ware never will come to a close while the negros is left where they are,” Pvt. Jasper Barney set out to persuade his socially elite brother-in-law (an officer and Barney’s superior in rank), who worried that emancipation would upset the social order. “Even if we could suppress the rebellion and leave the main root where it was before,” Barney argued, “it wouldent be long before they would try the same game as before. But if we take away the main root of evil and confiscate their property they will have nothing to fight fore hereafter.” 29 To soldiers who had been claiming that emancipation was the only way to end the war once and for all, the proclamation seemed like plain old common sense.
Without a doubt, some soldiers bitterly resented the radical transformation that they rightly saw in the Emancipation Proclamation. In July 1862, Gen. George McClellan had warned President Lincoln, “a declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present armies.” 30 General McClellan personally opposed emancipation, and habitually exaggerated the odds against any proposition he himself did not favor, emancipation included. Nevertheless, some individual soldiers shared McClellan’s hostility. Nobody could have been more angry than Ohio private Chauncey Welton, who fumed to his father, “I can tell you we don’t think mutch of [the Emancipation Proclamation] hear in the army for we did not enlist to fight for the negro and I can tell you that we neer shall or many of us anyhow no never.” Welton even agreed with McClellan’s prediction that emancipation would deplete the Union ranks. “Already men are deserting evry day from our regment,” he reported. 31
Opponents of the Emancipation Proclamation objected for various reasons, including legality and practicality. Some troops cited constitutional scruples. One Pennsylvania corporal personally opposed slavery, but worried that the proclamation violated constitutional guarantees for the institution, which mattered in a war fought in defense of the Constitution. Stretch the Constitution once, he feared, and Washington’s “set of Pollitical demagogues” would begin using the document recklessly to advance their own petty quarrels. 32 Among Chauncey Welton’s complaints was his belief that the proclamation was “both illegal and unconstitutional.” 33 Welton and others also reasoned that the proclamation would prolong rather than resolve the war, because it would inspire Confederates to fight harder. The measure, according to Welton, “swelled the southern ranks to an alarming extent.” Confederates also became so much “more ferocious” that they “fight much better since the 1st of Jan.” 34 Another soldier agreed that the proclamation “unite[d] the South almost as a unit,” which minimized the valuable asset of internal southern dissent. 35 Meanwhile, some Union troops feared that the proclamation would divide Northerners. Cyrus Boyd had no personal hostility toward emancipation, but fretted that “Rebel sympathizers at home” might use the inevitable disagreement over the issue to stir up antiwar “revolution in the north.” 36
The Emancipation Proclamation created particular dilemmas for soldiers from the border states (especially Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri), which retained both slavery and their place in the Union, even as the measure turned the war into a struggle to end slavery elsewhere. When secessionists had warned in 1861 that the slaveholding states must choose between slavery and the Union, many border-state unionists had refused to believe they would have to sacrifice either. Now they could not be so sure. Some border-state soldiers called for an end to slavery just as insistently as troops from any other state, but others, like Marylander John Babb, had their doubts. “It really seems to me that we are not fighting for our country, but for the freedom of the negroes,” Babb grumbled, and that perception was likely to “do more harm than good” to the Union cause in Maryland. 37 David Massey and Phillip Reilly came from the fiercely divided state of Missouri, home to many who had been committed to protecting and expanding slavery since the Kansas border wars of the 1850s. Both soldiers resented the war’s transformation into a “negro crusade,” as Reilly put it. 38 Massey went further, suggest
ing, “if old Abe does free the negro I say that the Democrats owt to go in with the south and kill all the Abalitians of the north and that will end this war where nothing else will.” 39 The proclamation did not disillusion Kentuckian Terah Sampson quite as badly, mainly because Sampson blamed the Confederacy for starting the war to protect slavery and therefore bringing the proclamation on itself. Nonetheless, the whole idea of being “in the army for to free nigros” did not sit easily with him. 40
Many soldiers born and raised in free states shared Sampson’s racism, and for some of them, dislike of black people was reason enough to oppose the Emancipation Proclamation. Some troops blamed slaves for the existence of the war, and resented the idea of rewarding the culprits with emancipation. Cyrus Boyd saw such scapegoating at work in his Iowa regiment, where he estimated that about one-quarter of soldiers opposed emancipation. Some of them took out their wrath on African Americans on the grounds that if it were not for slaves, the war never would have happened. “The poor African…from no fault of his—save in the fact of his black skin” was subjected to “prejudice,” “indignant language,” and threats from surly Union troops in the months following the proclamation. 41 No soldier anywhere spoke more angrily or hatefully than Chauncey Welton. In one of his outbursts, he raged:
When we think it is all for the purpose of raising the poor down troden affrican to a common with an intelligent race of beings[!] My abolition enimys…say…free the negroe at all hazzards whether the union is saved or not if it takes the last man, yes this is their language. The nigger, nigger, nigger, free him, free him, free him sacrifice money, wealth, treasure, blood, life and country, but free the nigger, and their mottow is emancipation first and the union, afterwards. 42
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