by Bruce Catton
Saturnine Count Gurowski, that frequently self-deceived observer, asserted that Seward himself still hoped for compromise. Seward, said Gurowski, “disbelieved in the terrible earnestness of the struggle,” and continued to hope that “he shall be able to patch up the quarrel.” Seward was a moral dictator, who led Lincoln by the hand and, “having complete hold of the President, weakens Lincoln’s mind by using it in hunting after comparatively paltry expedients.”4 Gurowski did not quite know what was going on. Lincoln was out of his leading strings; he would address Congress now, and from his address and what it evoked in Congress would emerge the shape of the war itself. It would slowly become evident that when they committed themselves at last to secession, not as a threat but as an accomplished fact armed for violence, the devoted men who wanted to preserve the Southern way of life had made a tactical error. The ultimate fate of their cause would be largely determined by what was done in Washington. Leaving Washington forever, they had fatally surrendered the initiative. Now their enemies would seize it.
The Republicans had firm control over both houses of Congress. Of forty-eight Senators, they now had thirty-two; of 176 in the House, they had 106. The House began by electing Galusha Grow, of Pennsylvania, speaker. (His chief opponent was the same Frank Blair who had labored so powerfully, and so irregularly, for the Federal cause in Missouri.) Grow made his own warlike position clear in a brief address in which he declared that “if the republic is to be dismembered and the sun of its liberty must go out in endless night, let it set amid the roar of cannon and the din of battle, when there is no longer an arm to strike or a heart to bleed in its cause.”5 Then, on July 5, the two houses met in joint session to hear a message from the President of the United States.
In the message which he sent up to the Capitol, Mr. Lincoln had a good deal to say. He had done a great many extraordinary things since Congress last met, and now he must give an accounting. Specifically, he had called out the militia; he had blockaded the ports of the seceded states; he had called for 42,000 volunteers for three-year terms; he had authorized an increase of 22,000 in the regular army and of 18,000 men in the navy; he had authorized suspension of the writ of habeas corpus; and he had committed the government to the expenditure of large sums. It might not be necessary for Congress to give formal approval to all of these steps; men like Senator Breckinridge argued that it could not and there were Unionists who argued that it should not, since doing it might imply that the actions had originally been illegal. But at least a tacit approval was needed. The President had to be sure Congress would go along.
For his justification he relied largely on the history of recent events, which he recited: secession, seizure of forts, bombardment of Fort Sumter, attack on Harper’s Ferry and the Gosport Navy Yard, the creation of an “insurrectionary government.” These things, he felt, had no possible motive except a desire to destroy the authority of the Federal Union, and they compelled Americans to ponder on haunting questions. Could “a government of the people by the same people” maintain itself against domestic foes? Or, put more sharply: “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”
All of this, he went on, had led him to exert the war power of the government, and he left no room for doubt about where he would strike the first blow. The rival government had established its capital in Richmond. “The people of Virginia have thus allowed this giant insurrection to make its nest within her borders; and this government has no choice left but to deal with it, where it finds it.” Just as clearly, he indicated what he would do about the strange new government which was proclaiming itself in western Virginia, saying that “these loyal citizens” must be recognized and protected “as being Virginia.” He denied that there was such a thing as a right of secession, and denied as well that any of the border states could be neutral; their neutrality, he said, could help no one but disunionists and was “treason in effect.” (This last shaft, clearly, was aimed at Kentucky, where Lincoln did not need to tread quite as delicately as he had earlier. In a Congressional election on June 30 Kentucky had elected nine Unionists and only one States’ Rights candidate, and the Union cause had gained a big majority in the popular vote, 92,000 against 37,000.)
The recital of causes went on, and the involved justification of things done, followed by the blunt assertion “this is essentially a people’s contest” and the pledge that it would be fought until the visible authority of the people’s government had been fully restored. Then, at last, came the pointed request—not for a blank check covering war measures taken in haste, but for a grant of $400,000,000 in money and 400,000 soldiers in uniform.6
Here was a new estimate of the war’s dimensions, out on the table for all men to see. The struggle in which the nation was involved had begun without a plan; it had been a formless war, so far a very small one, almost inactive, its ultimate potentialities unexplored. Lincoln was giving it a form and a plan; he would develop its full potential and make it great—partly because the pressure was on him, and partly because the war, of itself, had reached its moment of transition. So far it had been a muddle touched with violence. Now it was something that must either be abandoned or transformed. If secession was not to be accepted, it must be recognized as something infinitely greater than a mere local disorder created by “combinations too powerful to resist,” which a few ninety-day militia regiments could handle.
Lincoln still had things to learn. He restated his old belief that the Confederacy somehow spoke for a minority: “It may well be questioned whether there is, today, a majority of the legally qualified voters of any State, except perhaps South Carolina, in favor of disunion. There is much reason to believe that the Union men are the majority in many, if not in every other one, of the so-called seceded states.” Actually there was no real reason to believe anything of the kind; yet this unfounded faith was undoubtedly one of the things that led Lincoln, in this same speech, to speak of the terms on which the old Union could be reconstructed after secession had been destroyed: “The executive deems it proper to say, it will be his purpose, then as ever, to be guided by the Constitution and the laws; and that he probably will have no different understanding of the powers and duties of the Federal government, relatively to the rights of the States, and the people, under the Constitution, than that expressed in the inaugural address.” Here, if anyone had seen it, was a promise of an easy peace, with continued life for slavery. Apparently no one saw it. The lights were fading; it was beginning to be hard to see things clearly unless they had bulk and a sharp outline.
Sharp outlines were very evident in Congress, where once conservative men used harsh words and spoke with a heat which, in the old days, only the abolitionists had used. Congress would obviously vote the men and the money Lincoln had asked, and when border-state men protested that this huge war program seemed to be aimed at outright subjugation of the South, Senator Jacob Collamer, of Vermont, had an answer for them. The classic meaning of the verb “to subjugate,” he pointed out, meant to compel beaten enemies to pass under a yoke—sub juga. He himself did not want to make anyone pass under a literal yoke, but subjugation in the modern sense, he said, was exactly what he was looking for. When Senator Lazarus Powell, of Kentucky, tried to amend an army-supply bill with a rider stipulating that troops could not be used to interfere in any way with African slavery, he was promptly voted down. James Dixon, of Connecticut, warned him that if it came to a pinch, “and it should turn out that either this government or slavery must be destroyed,” the conservative people of the North would unhesitatingly destroy slavery. Senator Henry S. Lane, of Indiana, made it even more pointed: “… let me tell gentlemen that although the abolition of slavery is not an object of the war, they may, in their madness and folly and treason, make the abolition of slavery one of the results of this war.”
That word “treason” was used often. One day the Senate found itself considering a measure to expel eight Southern
Senators who had left the chamber months earlier to go with the Confederacy. Since the seats of these eight men had already been declared vacant, and since their former occupants had not the faintest desire to return, the resolution would have no practical effect, and one Senator objected to it: he knew the men in question and they were honorable men, while the act of expulsion implied moral turpitude. Senator Joseph A. McDougall, of California, replied that the resolution ought to pass. There was no question of turpitude; the absentees had simply committed treason, and “treason was always a gentlemanly crime, and in ancient times a man who committed it was entitled to the axe instead of the halter.” For whatever it might be worth, the resolution was adopted.
There were still men who shared Lincoln’s belief that most Southerners were Unionists at heart. Congressman John A. McClernand, of Illinois, a Douglas Democrat once known as a good friend of the South, declared that this was really a war of liberation rather than of conquest—“as the Federal flag advances toward the heart of this rebellion, thousands and tens of thousands of loyal men in the seceded States will be found rallying around it ready to uphold it.” However, Mr. McClernand would leave nothing to chance, and he brought in a resolution which was quickly passed that “this House hereby pledges itself to vote for any amount of money and any number of men which may be necessary” to win the war. Congressman John Hickman, of Pennsylvania, was grimmer; if half a million men could not destroy the Confederacy, he would vote for a million, and in the end “this government will be preserved and the gallows will eventually perform its office.” Even grimmer was Owen Lovejoy, of Illinois, an old-time abolitionist who would stop at nothing. He was willing to wipe out the Southern nation, he said, just as Rome had wiped out Carthage: “If there is no other way to quell this rebellion, we will make a solitude and call it peace.”
A great deal of this, to be sure, was just talk without much solidity behind it. Tough Andrew Johnson—an East Tennessean who remained in the Senate even though his state had formally left the Union—offered a resolution stating that the war had been forced upon the country by Southern disunionists and that the Federal government was fighting neither to subjugate Southern states nor to interfere with slavery but simply to maintain the Constitution and uphold the Union. Senator Breckinridge objected that the South had forced no war on anybody, and remarked that after listening to what his colleagues had been saying, he believed this really was a war for subjugation; but in the end the Senate adopted Johnson’s resolution with only five dissenting votes, and shortly afterward the House passed it by a thumping 121 to 2.7
The lines were not yet firmly drawn. Most good Unionists were disturbed by the talk of conquest and subjugation, and although the Congress was overwhelmingly in favor of going on with the war, it was willing, within limits, to be moderate. But Northern men of good will, friendly to the South, had no firm ground to stand on. Their problem was defined by Samuel F. B. Morse, the distinguished inventor of the telegraph, who despised abolitionists, believed that the South had suffered genuine wrongs, and said that he would do nothing to support the war beyond paying his taxes. By its “inappeasable, implacable, stubborn resolve of permanent disunion,” he wrote to a friend, the Confederacy had hamstrung Northerners who felt as he felt. The Southern leaders “have struck at friends and foes alike, and left their friends without their support to battle it with fanaticism alone”; they had thus given to their worst enemies “the prestige of the flag of the Union, the war cry of liberty, the enthusiasm of Revolutionary recollections, the plausibility of defence of government and the semblance of justice to the outcry of treason.” This, it seemed to him, was “an unwise, a most disastrous step.”8
Not quite all of the friends of the South in this Congress felt hamstrung. One who insisted on being heard was a handsome, gifted Democrat from Ohio, a good lawyer and an orator of repute-Clement Laird Vallandigham, of Dayton, known as a supporter of Southern rights ever since the war with Mexico and still firm in the faith. On July 12 Vallandigham offered a resolution in the House: “… before the President shall have the right to call out any more volunteers than are already in the service, he shall appoint seven commissioners, whose mission it shall be to accompany the Army on its march, to receive and consider such propositions, if any, as may at any time be submitted from the executive of the so-called Confederate States, or of any one of them, looking to a suspension of hostilities, and the return of said States, or any one of them, to the Union and to obedience to the Federal Constitution and authority.” He was voted down—his resolution gained twenty-one votes—and when, a few days later, he offered further motions to censure the President for acts performed before Congress met, his resolutions were quietly tabled. The war machine had rolled over him, but it left him undaunted. In a New York speech in the fall of 1860 he had promised that he would never vote “one dollar of money whereby one drop of American blood should be shed in a civil war,” and to this stand he would cling. If war weariness ever seized the North, Vallandigham would give it a rallying point and a means of expression.9
In plain fact the Congress did not yet quite know its own mind. It had accepted Andrew Johnson’s motion, disavowing any intent to subjugate the South, and insisting that it had no desire to interfere with slavery; it had also supported the drastic steps Lincoln had taken, it had voted the men and the money for an all-out war, and it had made it clear that it expected men and money to be used vigorously. Then, before the session ended, it got entangled with the same problem that had confronted General Butler—the fact that slavery was a central factor in the Southern war effort, impossible to ignore even though top policy said that it must be ignored. It found itself considering a bill “to confiscate property used for insurrectionary purposes,” and one section of this bill said that slaves used in the Confederate war program should be declared free.
This touched the untouchable, and it led to much oratory. Even Republicans agreed that the Federal government lacked power to interfere with slavery in the states. They had voted, all but unanimously, that they did not propose to try to interfere with it. Now they were about to provide that in certain cases they would interfere, that some slaves could and would be given their freedom by direct intervention of the Federal authority. Apparently the thing was unconstitutional all around; apparently, also, it was necessary.
Border-state men protested bitterly, arguing that the section “amounts to a wholesale emancipation of the slaves in the seceding or rebellious states.” Not so, replied Congressman John Bingham, of Ohio; it applied only in cases where owners were directly using their slaves, or letting others use them, to overthrow the government. Such men were traitors, and “I aver that a traitor should not only forfeit his slave but he should forfeit his life as well.” Yet the Constitution was explicit in its definition of treason, and it said that there could be no forfeiture of a traitor’s goods “except during the lifetime of the offender.” This forfeiture would apply forever. How now? Would this not “furnish those in arms against the Government a pretext for misrepresenting the purposes and objects of this war,” which the Congress had just defined as being something very different?
The answer came, at last, from the Republican leader of the House, Thaddeus Stevens, who in the years ahead would raise his voice again and again to call down woe upon the South; crippled Thad Stevens with his ill-fitting wig and his burning eyes, a bitter, implacable man, a mixture of idealism and hatred, sometimes a radical for human rights and sometimes a straight Pennsylvania Republican in the most traditional meaning of the words. Stevens now evoked the policy on which, in the end, the question of slavery would be handled.
“I thought the time had come,” he said, “when the laws of war were to govern our action; when constitutions, if they stood in the way of the laws of war in dealing with the enemy, had no right to intervene. Who pleads the Constitution against our proposed action? Who says the Constitution must come in, in bar of our action? It is the advocates of rebels, of rebels who have sought
to overthrow the Constitution and trample it in the dust—who repudiate the Constitution.… I deny that they have any right to invoke this Constitution, which they deny has any authority over them, which they set at defiance and trample under foot. I deny that they can be permitted to come here and tell us we must be loyal to the Constitution.”10
Considering the fact that the war was hardly three months old, and that the time of desperate expedients was still far ahead, these were very powerful words. If this kind of guidance were to be followed, almost anything could happen. The laws of war run all the way to the farthest horizon; in the last analysis they say, simply: “Do what you think needs to be done to win.” Unless General McDowell, who, oppressed by many doubts, was about to take his army down toward Richmond, could quickly win a decisive and final victory, the war might lead in a direction not contemplated by any of the people who had started it.
The section in regard to slavery was at last adopted. Considered by itself, it was narrow enough; it said no more than that any master who let his slave be used by the Confederacy on direct military work—building forts, digging trenches, restoring warships or navy yards, and so on—would lose his title to that slave once and for all. In a way, and with careful restrictions, it simply endorsed the essence of Ben Butler’s curbstone opinion about contrabands. But it might be a precedent.