For Welton, racism provided reason enough to oppose emancipation, which makes it easy to leap to the conclusion that all northern racists resisted emancipation, but despite obvious exceptions like Welton, Union soldiers by and large proved themselves perfectly able to retain prejudice and support the proclamation at the same time. According to Fred Pettit, “nine tenths of the army” supported the proclamation because “a Negro has rights as a dog has rights and [we] think his rights should be respected.” 43 Reassuring his parents that he was “no nigger worshiper,” David Nichol affirmed his own racial prejudice even as he praised the proclamation for striking “at the root of the Evil,” and helping to “end this war.” 44 Sergeant Nichol saw no contradiction between calls to end the institution of slavery and personal bigotry toward black people because, like most white Northerners who so much as glanced at a newspaper in the 1850s but whose prewar lives rarely or never brought them into contact with actual African Americans, Nichol had plenty of practice reading or thinking about the abstract institution of slavery without giving a thought to flesh-and-blood black Americans. For other Northerners, racism even made it easier to support emancipation, because their assumptions of the innate inferiority of black people convinced them that nature would keep African Americans in unthreatening, subordinate positions even without the legal institution of slavery. “This talk about ‘putting ourselves on an equality with niggers,’ is to me, the boldest nonsense or rather an insult to me as one of the Saxon race,” claimed Leigh Webber, an ardent supporter of abolition long before the proclamation. As he saw it, whites’ “natural superiority” made any notion of equality an “absurdity.” 45 In short, most white Union troops felt that they did not need to believe that black Americans were equal to white Americans in order to support the destruction of the institution that brought the war. Illinoisan Amos Hostetter, who devoted no thought to freeing slaves before the war, admitted that he and many of his fellow soldiers “like the Negro no better now than we did then but we hate his master worse and I tell you when Old Abe carries out his Proclamation he kills this Rebellion and not before. I am henceforth an Abolitionist and I intend to practice what I preach.” 46
In fact, many of Hostetter’s fellow Midwesterners felt especially pressed to affirm their support for the proclamation in order to salvage the good name of their home states. Exaggerated stories of enraged Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio soldiers stacking weapons rather than fighting for emancipation, along with the denunciation of the Emancipation Proclamation by the state legislatures of Indiana and Illinois, embarrassed and angered many midwestern troops. When James Dodds heard of letters in his hometown newspaper purporting to be from soldiers “on the point of laying down their arms on account of the Proclamation,” he angrily dismissed them as “all untrue,” and claimed instead that “the army was never more united than now.” While Dodds’s assessment of unity was exaggerated, his disgust at reports of opposition was sincere. 47 William Lewis insisted that if any antiproclamation demonstrations took place, they must have been the work of officers. “I no that the soldier had nothing to Doo with it it wer sholder straps and no one Elttze,” he claimed. Enlisted men were too busy fighting the war to protest a measure that was likely to help win it. 48 When the men of the 105th Ohio “heard that there is also a story going the rounds in the north that the soldiers of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and other western states that are in the army of the west are willing to throw down their arms and let the cause go as it will,” they passed resolutions supporting the proclamation and criticizing its opponents as “traitors to our cause and country.” 49
Some pragmatic troops praised specific benefits of emancipation as a war measure. One soldier wrote to his hometown newspaper to remind readers that emancipation robbed the Confederacy of a valuable war resource. “Any man who comes into, or goes with the army will see that the white men of the South are in the Southern army, and their negroes are at home raising crops to support their families,” he pointed out. Free the slaves, and “the white men will be obliged to come home to look after the welfare of their families and go to work themselves or starve.” 50 A lifelong Democrat from Ohio, Sam Evans, succinctly explained his reasons for supporting the proclamation to his father, who opposed it: “my doctrine has been any thing to weaken the enemy.” 51 Whatever else motivated soldiers, most of them wanted to go home, and they welcomed a measure they believed would help speed their returns.
Other soldiers embraced emancipation because it eliminated an embarrassing source of hypocrisy, and moved the American Republic closer to living up to its own ideals. William White saluted the proclamation because it announced that the flag of the United States “shall triumphantly wave over a free land, which it has never done yet.” 52 Until emancipation was achieved, an Indiana private held that “this war has not done its work.” He fought to “sustain a principle, to protect a right, and secure the liberties of the oppressed.” Emancipation constituted “a check to the tyrany of European monarchs” and a step in “the establishing of free government throughout the earth.” 53 If the existence of slavery had mocked the propositions of human equality and universal justice in the United States, then eliminating slavery should strengthen those ideals and certify the success of the United States’ republican experiment in the eyes of the world.
Once the proclamation turned the ending of slavery into official war policy, it also alerted many complacent troops who had been advocating emancipation while ignoring the future of freed slaves to the reality that, as Sgt. Maj. Stephen Fleharty put it, “the status of the negro in the future organization of our government” was a “vexed question” they could no longer ignore. 54 Few soldiers had clear ideas of how a postslavery, biracial society might function. As Pennsylvanian Jacob Seibert pointed out, “we don’t want [former slaves] in the north.” 55 Some troops pinned their hopes on labor schemes that kept former slaves in southern fields and at a safe distance from white Northerners. An April 1863 edition of The Banner of the Ironsides advocated a solution adopted in Louisiana, in which black workers labored for wages on sugar plantations. According to the Banner, “hundreds of negroes” now proved themselves to be “commendable” workers in a free labor system. 56 Others hoped emancipation would pave the way for genuine equality such as had never yet existed in the United States. A black man “is our brother and has God’s likeness,” Stephen Emerson reminded his mother, even predicting that “prejudice against him will soon begin to wear away.” 57 While Emerson’s optimism proved to be inflated, he accurately recognized that the Emancipation Proclamation eliminated the comforting luxury of emancipation as an abstract proposition. Just as it forced many federal soldiers to admit the imperfection of the old Union, the proclamation also insisted that even reluctant Northerners begin to envision new roles for black Americans within the American Republic.
Even more than emancipation, the enlistment of black soldiers into the Union Army forced many white Union soldiers to face questions about the standing of black Americans within the nation. African American soldiers had served in early conflicts such as the Revolution and the War of 1812, but they had been barred from the Mexican War, which was the conflict freshest in American memory when the Civil War broke out. Since military service was a long-standing hallmark of citizenship, black enlistment in the Army forced white Americans to reexamine the place of African American men within the American social structure. Moreover, black soldiers bore witness to how revolutionary the war had become by 1863. For these reasons, black enlistment proved more controversial among Northerners than emancipation. James Brewer wholeheartedly endorsed freeing slaves, but he was “awfull mad about Negroe arming,” which he regarded as “a burlesk on the white man’s Soldiering.” 58 Yet by late spring 1863, the discouraging progress of the war was fast convincing many troops that a Union victory would require new measures. Stationed near a black regiment from Arkansas, Leigh Webber noted that soldiers who “less than a year ago would threaten to desert if the Government even e
nlisted negroes are now among the most earnest in the new policy.” 59
Soldiers grew more favorable toward black enlistment for many of the same reasons they espoused emancipation. “The purpose of employing negroe soldiers is to make them be serviceable to the country,” one soldier noted. As a “war measure,” arming blacks who were anxious to fight their former masters was simply “the most efficient means that can be brought into action,” especially as the North faced the prospect of its first nationwide draft in 1863. 60 Cpl. Charles Musser and his regiment agreed. “The arming of Negroes for Soldiers is now considered by all or a large majority of the boys as a necessity, and they go in Strong for it,” Musser maintained. 61 Lt. Anson Patterson, meanwhile, saw potential benefits in black Union enlistment, because the very sight of black soldiers would terrify Confederates and convince them that “the closing scene of the Rebellion” had arrived. 62
The performance of black soldiers also converted many white troops to the idea of black enlistment, even though it did not wholly dislodge white soldiers’ racial prejudices. After a Florida expedition, Pvt. Orra Bailey noticed that black soldiers “whip[ped] the rebels handsomely,” fighting “like tigers” and striking horror in the enemy, who regarded no fate as worse than “being taken prisner by a niger.” 63 Some members of Samuel Storrow’s Massachusetts regiment objected to the prospect of black soldiers before “fighting alongside them” in North Carolina. Witnessing black troops’ bravery, according to Corporal Storrow, changed many soldiers’ minds. 64 Changing minds did not mean that bigotry disappeared. Henry Kircher was “very much for” arming black soldiers, as long as he did not have to fight next to them and risk being “wounded by the same bullet that first trafficks with a Negro and then pays me a visit.” If black and white regiments mixed too closely, “gradually the difference between white and black will show less and less until it has disappeared,” warned Lieutenant Kircher. “What is a white who forgets that he stands above the African?” he wondered. 65
Even though black enlistment did not wholly eliminate white racism, black soldiers like Joseph Williams recognized that it still underscored both how revolutionary the war had become by 1863 and how crucial African Americans’ actions had been in that process. Just three years previously, Williams reminded readers of the Christian Recorder (a northern black newspaper), “slavery, with all its wrath was upon us.” In contrast, emancipation brought “hope, happiness, and enjoyment” by turning the “bondman” into a “freeman.” Now black soldiers stood to attain even more. “Determined to hold every step which has been offered to us as citizens of the United States,” blacks fought “for our elevation which represents justice, the purity, the truth, and aspiration of heaven.” 66 Bitter disappointments like lower pay and a prohibition against black officers would plague black soldiers’ aspirations to racial equality, but few of these setbacks were apparent when black regiments first began fighting for what black private William Matthews called the “great and glorious Cause of Union and Liberty.” 67
The determination and performance of black soldiers, the passage of time, and soldiers’ experiences in the South and on the battlefield helped to change the minds of some white troops who initially objected to the Emancipation Proclamation. As early as February, Terah Sampson began to reassess his dislike of the measure, and asked for his family’s opinions on the matter to help him reformulate his own. 68 By March, an Ohio soldier reported, “the Pres. Proclamation is gaining favor in the army every day,” as troops grew to recognize it as “the right move at the right time.” 69 Even Chauncey Welton had begun to reconsider by June. He still disliked abolitionists and blacks, but he had also come to believe that the once-odious proclamation represented a “means of haistining the speedy Restoration of the union and the termination of this war,” and he was willing to stand by it as a pragmatic war measure. 70
Welton also came around partly because he grew disenchanted with the anti-emancipation and antiwar wing of the Democratic Party, known as the Peace Democrats, or Copperheads. A loyal Democrat, Welton did not change his mind all at once, but as the Copperheads stepped up attacks on emancipation and the war, Welton, like many others, began to associate opposition to emancipation with a lack of support for soldiers or the war effort. Far from mirroring the anti-emancipation rhetoric of Copperheads in 1862 and 1863, soldiers increasingly resented it, and shaped their own opinions in direct opposition to it. That progression took time, but it had largely been accomplished by the summer of 1863.
The autumn of 1862 was an eventful political time for the Union. State and Congressional elections took place just weeks after Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which may have guaranteed that slavery and race would dominate the 1862 elections in any event, but a move by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton compounded matters. On September 18, just one day after Antietam and four days before the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Secretary of War Stanton ordered that black refugees at Cairo, Illinois, be sent by rail to communities throughout the Midwest, which were to feed, clothe, and employ them. 71 In June, Democratic Congressman Samuel Cox of Ohio, in a widely publicized speech, had raised the specters of labor competition and racial mixing as logical outcomes of emancipation. 72 Racist propaganda capitalized on white voters’ prejudice and fear and kept the issue of race at the forefront of political debate during and after the campaign season. An Ohio soldier, for instance, sent his wife a song called “Fight for the Nigger,” which he identified as “a specimen of the Trash the damned Copperheads have been sending.” Exploiting popular prejudices, the lyrics of the song asked soldiers, “What if with your fighting you all lose your lives? / You help the Abolitionist to get nigger wives.” 73 The Emancipation Proclamation and Stanton’s order persuaded many civilian voters (especially Midwesterners) that Cox and propagandists like the author of the offensive “Fight for the Nigger” were right about racial threats to whites, just as discouraging casualty lists and malaise kept Republican voters at home. 74 The Republican Party was by no means trounced (in fact, Republicans actually gained Senate seats), but Democrats picked up key victories, such as the state legislatures of Indiana and Illinois and the governorship of New York.
The success of anti-emancipation candidates at the polls in 1862 has often been assumed to indicate troops’ dissatisfaction with the Emancipation Proclamation, but the electoral results reveal less about soldiers’ stances on the proclamation than enlisted men’s reactions to the campaign and elections do. Because most states had not yet made provision for absentee balloting by the 1862 elections, few soldiers in the field voted, but they paid attention anyway. Pvt. Constant Hanks believed that Republican victories were so important that he wrote home to insist that his ill and elderly father “if he lives and can…must go & vote for Gen. [James] Wadsworth for Governor” of New York. Wadsworth “is a firm supporter of Lincons policy of cutting Slavery up by the roots in all the Reble States, so that it never can disturb the peace of the country again.” The Democratic candidate, Horatio Seymour, supported the idea of the Union as it was before the proclamation, which Hanks felt certain would cause war to “break out again in a few years worse than ever.” In fact, the prospect of anti-abolitionists in power so worried Hanks that he wished “women could vote” so that his mother could also cast a ballot for pro-emancipation candidates. 75 After the elections, a Pennsylvania soldier interpreted Congressional victories of anti-emancipation Democrats as better news for Confederates than for loyal Union supporters. “The rebles that we take prisoner tell us with an air of triumph that we are getting divided among ourselves and point to the Democratic majority for proof and they are very much tickled about it,” he informed his brother and sister. 76 Union troops felt they had less to celebrate, according to soldiers like Pvt. John Garriott, who found things “mighty glumey” in the wake of “the late lections,” or Capt. Maschel Manring, who reported that “the news of the elections in the free states has so discouraged the army that they are almost re
ady to weigh anker.” 77
In 1863, antiwar Democrats could add dissatisfaction with conscription to their platform. The U.S. Congress passed its first conscription law in March 1863, scheduling a draft to take place in the summer. It differed from the Confederate law in several ways. First, while the Confederate draft automatically placed every nonexempt able-bodied white man of military age into the ranks, the Union draft created a lottery system. The names of eligible men aged twenty to forty-five were entered, but a man was conscripted only if his name was drawn. 78 Also unlike the Confederate draft, Union conscription did not extend the enlistment terms of soldiers already serving. Finally, the Union draft offered different escape hatches. Whereas the Confederate draft provided only for substitution and various class and occupational exemptions, the Union conscription law contained a controversial commutation clause, which permitted draftees to purchase exemption from the draft for $300 per round. One New Yorker who was “down on” conscription objected to the measure “not because it is a Conscription Law, but because it was framed for the benefit of the rich and the disadvantage of the poor.” 79 Pvt. Phillip Reilly complained that commutation transformed the government into a “bold Highwayman [who] says to every man in the loyal states ‘three hundred dollars or your life!’” 80 Opposition notwithstanding, commutation was actually more fair than class-based exemptions or substitution alone, which cost far more than $300 and therefore was available only to the wealthy. Further, numerous immigrant, workers’, and municipal groups banded together to form “draft insurance pools” to pay the commutation fee of any drafted member. In the end, of 207,000 northern men drafted, only 46,000 actually entered the ranks. 81 Nevertheless, commutation looked unfair, and inequity in a war waged to uphold a government dedicated to the ideal of equality angered many enlisted men. The unrelenting continuation of the war and its incessant casualty lists heightened frustration with a war that now required more soldiers than the number willing to volunteer for it.
What This Cruel War Was Over Page 13