Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  The failure of compensated emancipation to win any support from any quarter provides an important insight into the war. Try as he might to popularize a morally acceptable and diplomatically expedient solution to the war and slavery, Lincoln would not be heard. In 1863 hardly anyone was ready to quit the killing. Nevertheless, Lincoln’s efforts to arrange for a compensated emancipation, though unsuccessful, should not be overlooked. They reveal Lincoln to be one of the few principals in the war capable of transcending the prevailing rhetoric of absolute right and wrong.

  For any kind of compromise to work, both sides had to be able to see ways in which guilt resided on all sides. Northern abolitionists could countenance this no sooner than could Southern fire-eaters. From the abolitionists’ stance of moral superiority and absolute identification of God with His Northern New Israel, the slaveholding sinner should not be compensated for his sin, even if it saved lives and ultimately cost less. Why? Because the North was utterly right and the South utterly wrong. Such moral high ground was, as Lincoln recognized, sheer hypocrisy that ignored the utter complicity of Northern traders and consumers in the “peculiar institution.”

  Reverend Moses Smith of Connecticut agreed: “We invented the machinery and opened the [slave] markets. We took mortgages on southern property, and became owners of men. We fitted out the ships and became the slave traders of the land. Northern men voted in the Fugitive Slave Bill.”10 Both Lincoln and Smith were correct. It was not morality that blocked the acceptance of compromise of any sort, but rather a self-interested rewriting of history.

  The proclamation came as no surprise to the Confederates. A writer for the Richmond Daily Dispatch insisted “Lincoln’s proclamation changes nothing; this has been an abolitionist war from the beginning.”11 But they howled at a codicil that declared that “the Executive Government of the United States ... will do no act... to repress such persons... in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.” Confederates interpreted these words as an incitement to servile insurrection, dubbing Lincoln’s proclamation the “Insurrection Proclamation.”

  Southern reactions to the Emancipation Proclamation were generally flat except for the implied call to slave insurrection, which they read into it. Confederates had assumed from the very start of hostilities that the war of “Northern aggression” was a thinly disguised, New England-driven abolitionist war.

  President Davis’s first inclination (never implemented) was to hand over all Union officer prisoners to state civil authorities so that they would be tried and executed according to capital laws covering incitement to servile insurrection. Later, Davis insisted that the proclamation “affords to our whole people the complete and crowning proof of the true nature of the designs of the party which elevated to power the present occupant of the Presidential chair at Washington and which sought to conceal its purpose by every variety of artful device.”12

  On October 9, the Richmond Religious Herald echoed Davis’s outrage in a column titled “The Proclamation of Abolition.” In it, the editor pointed to the revolutionary effects of this document, if implemented: “The sudden revolution would break the whole fabric of society in pieces, and slaveholders and non-slaveholders, of the present generation at least, would struggle hopelessly to extricate themselves from the universal wreck of financial interests and domestic institutions.... If successful, it would create a new Pariah race to curse the world, and to be itself accursed of God and man.”

  Others were less offended and downplayed the proclamation. The Southern Illustrated News saw in Lincoln’s proclamation “a state of desperation” that had little immediate effect on anyone, while the Augusta Weekly Constitutionalist likened the futility of Lincoln’s aspirations for the South to “the Pope’s Bull against the Comet.”13 In fact, the South had promulgated the myth that the Civil War was waged solely for emancipation so vigorously that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not have quite the symbolic effect on them that it did in the North. But it did mean an all-or-nothing war.

  Confederate fears of widespread slave insurrections diminished as it became clear that life for most slaves went on as usual. Occupied places, such as New Orleans or Port Royal, South Carolina, where slaves ran to freedom, were the exception. In 1863, with no Federal troops yet in view, slaves continued to work the plantations and armories and to support the army from behind the lines. The buying and selling of slaves remained as robust as ever, with prices ranging from $3,000 to $5,000.14

  In the North, African Americans recognized the futility of insurrection once the war began. In an editorial for the African Methodist Episcopal Christian Recorder, the writer wrote that no Northern statesmen counseled insurrection before the war. Now, the writer continued:[T]hat same people want the slaves to rise up and fight for their liberty. Rise against what?—powder, cannon, ball and grape-shot? Not a bit of it. They have got too much good sense. Since you have waited till every man, boy, woman and child in the so-called Southern Confederacy has been armed to the teeth, tis folly and mockery for you now to say to the poor, bleeding and downtrodden sons of Africa, “Arise and fight for your liberty!”15

  If Lincoln employed emancipation as a ground for total war, Southern voices employed emancipation as a ground for attacking the group they hated most: evangelical clergy. Southern observers exposed the utter captivity of the Northern churches to the patriotic cause and to the lawyer-politicians who orchestrated it. In a column printed in the Southern Illustrated News on “Odium Theologicum,” the Richmond-based editors focused on the Northern church as the embodiment of “servile” political preaching:And when we say “the Church,” we use the term in no restricted or sectarian sense... but as embracing all who acknowledge the Christian faith, in any manner, Trinitarians or Unitarians, Protestants or followers of Rome, from the disciples of Theodore Parker to the brethren of the Pennsylvania Conference bordering on the Pan-Handle, and from the applauding audience that attends the performances of Beecher to the devout flock that awaits the benediction of Archbishop Hughes. Not only are the religionists of the North unanimous in their support of the war, but they far outstrip the politicians in the rancor and hatred they exhibit.

  If the same warlike sentiments appeared in the Southern pulpits, which they certainly did, that did not mark hypocrisy, the editors argued, because the South’s cause was utterly just. And because secession was just, the Southern cause was purely self-defense: If it be said that it is natural that the feelings of Christians should be with their country in time of war, that patriotism is a high Christian duty, and that our own clergymen are actively engaged in the cause of the Confederate States, many of them being in military command, we could answer that there is all the difference conceivable between an offensive and defensive war. The Southern people have never desired hostilities. They have only taken up arms to protect their altars and fire-sides.16

  Here, in the deafness to one’s own “applauding” and blindness to the pulpit of hatred, appears a compelling illustration of the “servile” cultural captivity of the churches, North and South, to their nations.

  Responses in the North rang predictably strong on all sides. Northern white abolitionists, slaves, and freedmen all adjudged the proclamation good but insufficiently strong. Only universal emancipation, they believed, would satisfy God’s will. In its September 26 issue, The Liberator reprinted the Emancipation Proclamation and remarked:Though we believe this Proclamation is not all that the exigency of the times and the consequent duty of the government require,—and therefore are not so jubilant over it as many others,—still, it is an important step in the right direction, and an act of immense historic consequence, and justifies the almost universal gladness of expression and warm congratulation which it has simultaneously elicited in every part of the Free States.

  In an important concession, The Liberator added: “In view of the fact that the old Union has literally ceased to exist and cannot be restored, we think that the Abolitionists who may be drafted, and who are not committ
ed to radical peace principles, will be justified in standing loyally by the government as such, on the battle-field or in any other capacity.”

  One such nonpacifist abolitionist was William R. Williams of New York, whose abolitionist thought piece entitled Of the Birth and Death of Nations arrived at a justification for total war solely on the foundation of abolition. Where most Republicans were willing to escalate war on civilians for the preservation of the Union, Williams would only accept as morally just a total war that sought immediate and universal emancipation. The pretenses of a war merely to preserve the Union must be dropped and the war fought as an abolition war: “There is then no alternative for this nation; either its own original, divinely endowed life must be surrendered up, or it must conquer and destroy its unappeasable enemy, slavery.”

  From there Williams moved to an explicit analysis of the general “laws of war” in terms that justified a turn to total war. Quoting an unnamed source, he wrote:[S]ince the object of a just war is to suppress injustice and compel justice, we have a right to put in practice against our enemy every measure that will tend to weaken or disable him from maintaining his injustice. To this end, we are at liberty to choose any and all such methods as we may deem most efficacious.

  Not content with total war to end slavery, Williams concluded by urging the Union government not only to free the slaves and employ them behind the lines but also to arm them for frontline combat. By dying in battle they too could share in the nation’s sacred atonement: “If, in the present supreme hour, ‘there can be no salvation without the shedding of blood,’ they also should have the privilege of making the great sacrifice. It is the needed discipline and necessary preparation for the possession of freedom, that they who seek it, should be willing to die for it. It is for you to give them the opportunity.”17

  Lincoln refused to bargain with God on the basis of his moral superiority over the enemy. He knew there was more than enough guilt on all sides. But not so abolitionists. In a note of moral hubris distinct to the North and especially abolitionists, Israel E. Dwinell dared to see the war in global terms: “It seems to me that the world—and I say it knowing the danger and the sin of presumption, but I say it not as an American, but more, a man regarding the interests of the whole race,—that the world cannot afford to spare us.” Obviously not entirely at ease with his world-regenerative creed, he quickly backed off: “This is a dangerous point, and I leave it.”18 But the point was made. In a sort of providential blackmail, Dwinell implied that by holding up the trump card of abolition, God would be forced to give the North victory and allow America to save the world.

  In an address delivered at Boston’s Faneuil Hall on October 6, Massachusetts’s abolitionist senator Charles Sumner made plain his support for the Emancipation Proclamation as a “war measure” and “not as an abolitionist.” With that token disclaimer for pretext, Sumner pronounced the remainder of the oration not as a Union warrior but in the clear language of an abolitionist, and speculated on the implications of emancipation for America’s world-regenerative mission:But, fellow-citizens, the war which we wage is not merely for ourselves; it is for all mankind.... In ending slavery here we open its gates all over the world, and let the oppressed go free. Nor is this all. In saving the republic we shall save civilization.... In such a cause no effort can be too great, no faith can be too determined. To die for country is pleasant and honorable. But all who die for country now, die also for humanity. Wherever they lie, in bloody fields, they will be remembered as the heroes through whom the republic was saved and civilization established forever.19

  Although antislavery sentiment spread in the North, ultra-abolitionist senators like Sumner still remained a minority, and abolitionist ministers did not necessarily speak for the congregations or even their profession. Many Northern ministers remained antislavery but not abolitionist. Princeton Theological Seminary’s venerable Charles Hodge evidenced a clear grasp of just-war theory and where abolition fit in it. In terms similar to those of Lincoln and other antislavery Republicans, he made a strong moral case for civil war justified solely by the preservation of the Union.

  War, he began, is a “tremendous evil.” To kill fellow human beings on battlefields, “there must be a moral obligation on a people to make war, or the war itself is a crime.” To fight an offensive war for abolition would be a “crime”:Now it cannot be asserted that the abolition of slavery, however desirable in itself, is one of the ends for which our national government was instituted. We are not bound to abolish slavery by war, as we should be bound to resist invasion, or as we are bound to suppress rebellion by force of arms... to make such abolition the end of the war, is a plain and palpable violation of the oath of allegiance to the Constitution, and of the law of God.20

  In terms of just-war theory and the stated goals on which war was predicated in 1861, Hodge was right. But by 1863 there were more than enough Northerners willing to transform emancipation from a means to an end, and deliberately overlook the constitutional limitations, if it would sustain the war on a sufficient scale to destroy the Confederacy. In fact, Hodge himself would eventually reform and declare, with his denomination, that the sin of slavery was “the” cause of the war.

  Other Northern Unionists—including many soldiers—agreed with Hodge’s initial position and believed that the proclamation had wrongly changed the cause of the war from the Union to emancipation, and from defensive war to protect the Union to an offensive war to occupy the South and transform it through force of arms. In New York, William Shedd, the Old Light pastor of the Brick Presbyterian Church, evidenced long-standing hostility toward abolitionists and coercive emancipation and recommended instead a gradualist emancipation:The American people and Government have not been able to see that an instantaneous emancipation of the four millions in bondage would be best either for them or for the nation.... On the contrary, they look to a gradual method, that shall prepare them for freedom and self-government.... A compulsory reform, even if it is possible, is undesirable.

  As for the war, “let it be confined strictly to the restoration of the authority of the Constitution over all parts of the land.”21

  In the political arena, both “War” and “Peace” Democrats were unalterably opposed to the Emancipation Proclamation. In every congressional vote that concerned slavery, they united in their opposition. And they were temporarily successful. Five of the North’s largest states who went for Lincoln in 1860 turned in the fall by-elections of 1862 and returned Democratic majorities to Capitol Hill. The linchpin of their strength remained white supremacy.

  In a speech to the Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia, Frederick Douglass recognized that race-based slavery defined the very identity of the Democratic Party:The Democratic party is for war for slavery; it is for peace for slavery; it is for the habeas corpus for slavery; it is against the habeas corpus for slavery; it was for the Florida war for slavery; it was for the Mexican war for slavery.... It has but one principle, one master; and it is guided, governed, and directed by it.22

  Few Democrats disagreed with Douglass. In a speech before the House of Representatives of Maine in February 1863, Moses Page complained:The people are getting weary. They see that this war is being perverted from its true and legitimate purpose of restoring the Union as it was, and upholding the Constitution as it is, to a war upon the institutions of States in rebellion. The soldiers, too, are getting uneasy; they are unwilling to endure the vicissitudes of battle and the privations of the camp, for any other purpose than to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution, and to preserve the Union.23

  Other political critics feared the effects of a black influx into their states. In an address to the U.S. House of Representatives, Ohio’s Samuel Cox employed racist humor to signal his grave reservations: If the rush of free negroes to this paradise continues, it would be a blessing if Providence should send Satan here in the form of a serpent, and an angel to drive the descendants of Adam and Eve into the outer world. If
it continues, you will have no one here but Congressmen and negroes, and that will be punishment enough. [Laughter.] You will have to enact a fugitive slave law, to bring the whites to their capital. [Laughter.] ... It is a practical question as the war is already throwing them within our borders in great numbers.24

  One Southern Unionist, Bryan Tyson, who was forced to flee Moore County, North Carolina, for Washington, D.C., wrote for Northern Democrats and the white race. Though in favor of the Union, Tyson opposed Lincoln’s proclamation because it had no one’s best interests at heart, including the slaves’. Because “the negro is an inferior species of the human race,” he declared, liberation would simply leave him vulnerable to superior and exploitive whites. Instead of coerced emancipation, “I am for first applying to them the anointing oil of learning and Christianity; and, whenever it shall have been clearly demonstrated that they are in a fit condition to take care of themselves, I am then for their going out free.”25

  Soldiers were also divided. In a letter to his mother, Private Henry Joslin, destined to die in battle one year later, reflected on emancipation and his civil war in terms that could not have been more starkly opposite of the abolitionists’:You may depend that after the “boys” get into Massachusetts again they will not sit where he does now. There are a good many voters learning something (as well as I am) who did not come out here to fight on the nigger question but for the Union of the U.S. and the protection of the Capital and the Constitution.26