Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  In any war, the men who die for patriotism die also for the enrichment of cold-eyed schemers who risk nothing, and every battlefield is made uglier by the greed of men who never fight. But what was happening here, although it included all of that, went far beyond it. This was the conclusive evidence that the warring states were tragically and mysteriously bound together. Fighting to destroy each other, the two nations still had to have each other’s help.

  2: The Ultimate Meaning

  In the early part of the war Abraham Lincoln had warned that it might become a remorseless revolutionary struggle, and at the end of it he remarked that neither he nor any man had expected a result as “fundamental and astounding” as it finally brought; and he confessed that he himself had not so much dominated events as he had been dominated by them. In the year that began with the retreat from Bull Run and ended with the retreat from the Chickahominy, the war became too great for any man to manage. After the summer of 1862 one could hope only to understand it—and, understanding, to give meaning to it. When he returned to Washington from Harrison’s Landing, Mr. Lincoln found this was his greatest task.

  The war was going to run its course; that much was clear. In both the east and west the Federal government had lost the initiative, and even though much had been won it must nerve itself for a new effort greater than any it had made before. Presidential Secretary John Nicolay wrote that the second week in July was “a very blue week here,” and went on to say: “I don’t think I have ever heard more croaking since the war began than during the past ten days. I am utterly amazed to find so little real faith and courage under difficulties among public leaders and men of intelligence.” Attorney General Bates admitted that it was hard to be cheerful, and he saw “no foresight, no activity, no enterprise, no dash” in what was being done. Thomas Scott, concluding a stint as Assistant Secretary of War, told Barlow that people felt gloomy and were losing confidence, and predicted that unless some military success were won soon “all will be lost and separation of the states become inevitable.”1

  This was not wholly the result of military failure. The war of late had gone badly, but it had also gone far: so far that men had to re-examine the basis on which they were fighting. This was what was really disturbing. The people of the North had formally declared that they were making war solely to restore the Union; and yet this war, which could not conceivably have occurred if slavery had not existed, was bound to become a war about slavery if it went on long enough, and that moment was now at hand. (Of all the miscalculations ever made by an American soldier, the greatest may well have been General McClellan’s notion that victory deferred would leave the peculiar institution undamaged.) When Northern armies entered the South they touched cotton, and the government had to do something about it, even though what it did was unrehearsed, irregular, and quite unsatisfactory; they also touched slavery, and government was going to have to do something about that too, although nobody could be sure what effect this might ultimately have.

  Whatever the effect might be, President and Congress knew that it was time to move.

  On July 12 Congress passed a new confiscation act, providing sterner penalties for secession. Persons convicted of treason, said the act, would suffer death and their slaves would be freed, and people who joined in the rebellion or aided it in any way would be subject to fine or imprisonment and the loss of their slaves. Furthermore, any slaves who escaped from, were abandoned by, or were captured from people engaged in rebellion “shall be forever free of their servitude and not again be held as slaves.” The fugitive slave law would be inoperative unless the fugitives belonged to loyal masters, and the President might use ex-slaves in any way he chose to help win the war. Finally, the President was authorized to make provision for the transportation and resettlement “in some tropical country beyond the limits of the United States” of any slaves thus freed who were willing to emigrate.

  This was a declaration of intent rather than a solid piece of legislation. Enforcement of the act was left hazy, and Mr. Lincoln was startled to find Congress asserting its power to free a slave within a state; he even prepared a veto message, and was induced to approve the act only when Congress adopted a proviso that the slaves in question were war captives and, as such, government property. (If the government itself owned slaves it of course could free them without raising constitutional questions.) This bill plainly restated the fact that slaves were property, and it offered nothing at all to the Negro who was owned by a Unionist.2

  Nevertheless, it was a step of great significance. If it did not quite mean emancipation it meant that Congress was prepared to accept emancipation. Property which would become non-property if the owner’s political orientation was considered defective had a most uncertain future. The bill invited the President to go as far as he liked in using former slaves to fight slavery—a leaf, after all, from the book of old John Brown—and it rested on the unspoken assumption that the war itself was writing slavery’s doom.

  This assumption Mr. Lincoln shared. On the day Congress approved the confiscation bill he called Senators and Representatives from the border states to the White House and urged them to support the plan for compensated emancipation, and his plea amounted to a statement that slavery was dying and that in self-interest the slave states ought to realize what they could on an investment which eventually would be wiped out.

  “If the war continue long,” said the President, “as it must, if the object be not sooner attained, the institution in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion—by the mere incidents of war. It will be gone, and you will have nothing valuable in lieu of it.” In their consultation with self-interest, he said, the border states need do no more than make up their minds: “I do not speak of emancipation at once, but of a decision at once to emancipate gradually.”

  It did no good. Of the twenty-seven border state men at this meeting, only eight would go along. The rest saw objections: the plan would cost too much, it would make the secessionists angrier than ever, it would probably lead in the end to unconstitutional emancipation all across the board—and in short they would have none of it.3

  Behaving so, they played into the hands of the abolitionists.

  If the slavery problem had to be touched at all—and by the summer of 1862 it obviously did—compensated emancipation represented the gentlest approach possible. Now Mr. Lincoln was informed that this gentleness would get no response from the very people it was supposed to please. If, thereafter, border state sensibilities meant much less to him it is not to be wondered at; border state support just was not there when he needed it most.

  Broadly speaking, the border state men represented the moderates, the men who felt either that slavery was acceptable or at least that it must not be interfered with by any government in Washington. To carry moderate Northerners with him, Mr. Lincoln had overruled every Federal officer who tried to push the government into emancipation—first General Frémont, then Secretary Cameron, most recently General Hunter. The moderates had applauded, but their applause amounted to little more than a polite patter-patter of clapped hands. Now a larger, harder, longer war effort was needed, and Mr. Lincoln had to rally men who had iron in them, the men who were ready to be wholly immoderate in their backing of the Union cause. These included of course the abolitionists, who were vigorous and noisy but still a minority. Much more important, however, were the men who had been willing to let slavery alone as a matter of tactics, but who nevertheless had deep antislavery convictions. These men were in a majority in the North, and the war itself had come because the party which spoke for them had won the election in 1860; leaders of the cotton South had believed, probably correctly, that slavery must eventually die if that party controlled the government. To suppose now that these men would accept defeat and disunion rather than try to destroy slavery outright was simply to delude one’s self.

  Mr. Lincoln’s attitude was hardening, and so was his language. Reverdy Johnson went to New Orleans o
n a mission for the State Department, and sent back word that Louisiana Unionists were falling away from the faith because they feared the Federal government was headed toward emancipation. Mr. Lincoln replied curtly that he doubted it, and he warned: “It may as well be understood, once for all, that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed.” When Cuthbert Bullitt, a Treasury official in New Orleans, turned in a report similar to Johnson’s, the President asked him if the Louisiana loyalists really imagined that he would lose the war in order to save their slaves. Then he went on, with the tenseness of a man who has had all the argument he wants: “What would you do in my position? Would you drop the war where it is? Or would you prosecute it in future with elderstalk squirts charged with rosewater? Would you deal lighter blows rather than heavier ones? Would you give up the contest leaving any available means unapplied?” For himself, he said, he would not give up. He would do everything possible to save the Union, and he made but one qualification: “I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.” Some time after this he explained to the painter, F. B. Carpenter, that in this summer of 1862 he felt that he had “reached the end of the rope,” and (with a return to the figure of speech used in the letter to Reverdy Johnson) that “we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics or lose the war.”4

  He changed his tactics and thereby changed the character of the war … and the future of America.

  Ten days after he had his talk with the border state men the President held a cabinet meeting. To this July 22 cabinet meeting he presented a certain paper, saying that he did not want any advice on the substance of it, because he had made up his mind; he just wanted his cabinet members to know what was coming, and he would hear any comments that they might have to make. The paper was a document which has come down in history as the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

  It began as a simple recital of the fact that Congress had passed a new confiscation act, and it warned all of the people who might be affected by that act to take note of its provisions and be guided accordingly. It served notice that at the next session of Congress the President would once again press for compensated emancipation, and it went on to say that the sole purpose of the war remained what it always had been—to restore and maintain “the constitutional relation between the general government and each and all of the states wherein that relation is now suspended or disturbed.” Then came the meat of it:

  “And, as a fit and necessary military measure for effecting this purpose, I, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, do order and declare that on the first day of January in the year of Our Lord one thousand, eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized, submitted to, and maintained, shall then, thenceforward, and forever, be free.”5

  In many ways this was an odd document. Clearly, the President had doubts about the legal basis for emancipation. He had always insisted that Congress lacked power to overturn slavery, and even stout antislavery men like Secretary Chase agreed with him; the whole thing now was pinned to the President’s war powers—he would issue this proclamation in his military capacity, as a military measure. Even odder was the fact that the proclamation would apply to the embattled Confederate states but not to slave states like Kentucky and Maryland which were still in the Union, nor to those parts of the seceded states which were now under Federal control. This writ, in other words, would run only in those states where the Federal government had no power to enforce its writs; unless it were heeded by men who were already fighting like grim death to get entirely out from under the Federal government, it would be heeded by nobody. Finally, the proclamation did no more than announce that another proclamation would be issued later unless the war were won much more speedily than anyone anticipated.

  It can easily be shown, in other words, that it was a singularly weak document. And yet … there was a war on, and thousands of men were dying for intangibles no more solid than the look of a flag adrift in the wind or the ring of a phrase; and between Canada and the Rio Grande there were more than three million people who were slaves and knew freedom only by hearsay; and when the President of the United States said with whatever qualifications that these people should be then, thenceforward and forever free his words would have the echoing reach of a great trumpet call in the night. Once said they could never be recalled. They would go on and on—then, thenceforward and forever.

  The cabinet was somewhat taken aback, but it was receptive. Secretary Seward and Secretary Welles had had forewarning; a little more than a week earlier they had ridden in a carriage with the President on the way to funeral services for an infant child of Secretary Stanton, and the President had told them he believed emancipation was “a military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union.” He asked their opinion, and both men had said that they felt the same way but that they would like to have time to think about it a little longer. Having thought, they now voiced warm support. Montgomery Blair was somewhat dubious, fearing the effect on the fall elections, on the money market and on morale generally—the Blairs, after all, were border state men. Secretary Chase was just a little nonplused. He had written a month earlier that when the armies advanced “slavery met us at every turn, and always as a foe,” and had considered it obvious that either slavery or the Union must perish, but the President’s proposal made him uneasy. He would support it, but he was afraid that it might lead to a slave insurrection, and thought it might be safer to let army commanders in the field take the lead.

  In the main, the cabinet gave the President its backing. Secretary Seward did have a word of caution, however. Issued now, he said, the proclamation would come on the heels of military disaster and might sound like a despairing plea for the help of the slaves rather than a bold assertion that the slaves would be freed: would it not be better to wait for a victory so that the proclamation could rest on military success? Mr. Lincoln saw the point at once and the proclamation went into a pigeonhole, to stay there until somebody won a battle. Meanwhile, its existence would remain a deep secret.6

  Among the millions who were not in on the secret was the eminent editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley. With all of his eccentricities Mr. Greeley frequently spoke for the great body of Northern sentiment which the President was determined to hold in line, and as the summer waned Mr. Greeley felt it necessary to call the President to time. The August 20 issue of the Tribune contained an open letter to Mr. Lincoln, headed “The Prayer of Twenty Million,” which complained bitterly that the President was losing the war because he was too soft in regard to slavery.

  The President, said Mr. Greeley, was “strangely and disastrously remiss” in failing to enforce the emancipation provisions of the new confiscation act; he was unduly influenced by “certain fossil politicians” from the border states; the Union cause was suffering intensely from “mistaken deference to rebel Slavery,” and loyal Northerners unanimously felt that “all attempts to put down the rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause are preposterous and futile.” It was time for the President to free the slaves, and Mr. Greeley wanted action now.7

  Mr. Lincoln was prompt to reply, and on August 25 the Tribune printed his letter to Mr. Greeley—a letter which was aimed not so much at the editor himself as at the millions in the North who, in the end, would decide whether there would be an unbroken Union and whether slavery could endure.

  His policy, said Mr. Lincoln, was very simple: he would save the Union—as quickly as possible and in a Constitutional way. Next:

  “If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it b
y freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.” In closing, he wrote that this expressed his view of his official duty; as a person, he hoped as he had always done that all men could be free.8

  One of the interesting things about this letter is that it was written exactly one month after Mr. Lincoln told his cabinet that he was going to proclaim freedom for the slaves: a fact of which the editor was given no faintest hint. Mr. Lincoln told him that he would do what the war made him do, but he did not tell him that he already knew what this would be and that he already had made up his mind to do it. The Emancipation Proclamation was not going to come out as a letter to the editor. It would come out when some victory in the field could give it life … life for words and an idea, bought by the deaths of many young men.

  In these days when he waited for victory the President seemed to keep probing for the ultimate meaning of the thing which he was about to do. To change the Negro from a chattel to a man would have unending consequences. What were they going to be? How would the nation adjust to them? When a delegation of “Chicago Christians of All Denominations” called to present a memorial favoring emancipation, Mr. Lincoln responded with a brooding soliloquy. What practical effect would a proclamation have? Would it help the Union cause more than it hurt it? Might it not be well first to rally the people behind the idea that the constitutional government itself was at stake? This was “a fundamental idea, going down about as deep as anything.” What about the slaves themselves? “Suppose they could be induced by a proclamation of freedom from me to throw themselves upon us, what should we do with them?”9