Or that they already had.
Rosetta's time teaching was not getting any better and she told her father, "I hate this school. I am thinking of leaving." Douglass often sent her money, never inquiring to how she spent it but hoping her spirits might improve. Rosetta took comfort in thinking of Rochester, her parents and brothers, and knowing Douglass would welcome her home if that were her decision. She was struggling with long teaching hours, a mile and a half walk to and from the school, the unruly nature of her students, missing meals and sometimes feeling on the verge of fainting in front of her charges.46
Rosetta came as close as anyone to understanding her father's guarded nature. "I often think of your loneliness," she wrote, empathizing with his lack of close friends. Knowing that while he was a famous man with thousands of acquaintances all over the world, he was emotionally connected to few. She could sense his depression in the letters he sent her; as she told him, "Please don't grow despondent and write soon." She also possessed unusual sensitivity. It is common to find in her letters friendly words such as, "My love to Ms. Assing." Douglass worried that she was too careless in speaking of certain family business, but she reassured him, "father you are mistaken in supposing that I spread family differences." In the end, nothing could change her having "too great a family pride, pride for yourself to say anything to make people acquainted with such things with which they have no business."47
Douglass's old ties still held strong, particularly those to his British supporter Julia Griffiths Crofts. Douglass wrote her about the challenges of the war and even domestic issues, such as his worries about Rosetta's teaching problems. Griffiths Crofts also understood the severe stress Douglass felt over whether this war could bring about his ultimate goals. By virtue of the unpredictable nature of recent events, she described him as being in a "constant state of excitement." One possibility she dreaded was that Douglass might enlist if indeed his long-held dream of black soldiers became a reality. She warned, "Do not I beseech of you, be hurried away into taking up arms . . . your work is with your pen not With, a sword or guns!"48
Unaware that their enigmatic president was sitting on a measure that would dramatically recast the war, the Radical Republicans in Congress continued to press the administration to confront slavery. The passage of the Second Confiscation Act was a considerable blow aimed at the heart of the Confederacy. This act was based on the practicalities that General William Sherman, utterly unsympathetic to abolitionists, articulated to an old Confederate friend: "Even without the Confiscation Act, by the simple laws of War we ought to take your effective slaves. I don't say to free them, but to use their labor & deprive you of it."49The act decreed that the enslaved of those found guilty of treason toward the United States were free, and that those engaged in rebellion could be imprisoned and executed. The duty of the president was to seize rebels' property, which now meant their slaves. Congress instructed the Union army to stop returning those escaping from their chains back to their masters—unless their owner was loyal to the United States.
Toward the end of the Second Confiscation Act, Congress authorized Lincoln to "employ as many persons of African descent as he may deem necessary and proper for the suppression of this rebellion." This could mean merely manual labor—the common interpretation—yet the tantalizing allusion to organizing black troops was unmistakable. On the other hand, the act also permitted and allocated money for the president's desire to encourage black colonization.
In the second year of the war, with the Union armies thwarted on the field except for some signal victories along the Mississippi River, from New Orleans to Fort Donelson, it seemed that every positive step forward was accompanied with the poison pill of colonization, even the prospect of arming freed black people. In the same vein, Sumner presented Lincoln with a copy of George Livermore's An Historical Research: Opinions of the Founders of the Republic on Negroes as Slaves, as Citizens, and as Soldiers. As casualties mounted in the war, Lincoln also heard support for black troops from those who were hardly champions of racial justice. Governor Samuel J. Kirkwood of Iowa told Lincoln's chief general, Henry Halleck, that he would have no regrets if part of the Union dead would be black "and that all are not white men."50
Sumner believed that in their moments together, he glimpsed the careful and deliberate thought that Lincoln was bringing to an emancipation decision. To those who harped on criticisms of Lincoln, as Douglass did, Sumner wrote, "I am confident that if you knew him as I do, you would not make it."51
The future of the nation resided on his long sloping shoulders. As a student of history, Lincoln fully understood the importance of making the right decision on emancipation. For better or worse, what he decided would determine the fate of this democratic experiment, and the decision would send reverberations through the world for hundreds of years to come. As he said in his second annual message, the outcome of the war was "for a vast future also."52If the wrong move caused any border states to shift to the Confederacy, he would be responsible for the loss of his country. He had only the slimmest margin for political miscalculation in the months that led up to the Emancipation Proclamation. At the commencement of a cabinet meeting on September 2, Lincoln expressed half-jokingly that he was almost ready to hang himself.53
CHAPTER 8
On the Wire
September 17, 1862, was the bloodiest day in American history. The instinct of Robert E. Lee was to be always on the offensive, and he had invaded the North for the first time in the war. Around the peaceful fields of Sharpsburg, Maryland, where the Antietam Creek ran, Lee encountered George McClellan's significantly larger Army of the Potomac. After the remarkable good fortune of finding Lee's battle plan wrapped in discarded cigar papers, McClellan should have had a decided advantage. Yet, fearing that the Confederate invaders possessed overwhelming numbers, McClellan hesitated for crucial hours. When battle did begin on the morning of September 17, a lack of Union coordination created almost three separate battles, a godsend to Lee, who was able to shift and adjust in response.
At five thirty A.M., the fighting started with Union forces advancing toward a modest, white German-American Baptist church. Vicious fighting filled the cornfields, with the advantage changing hands repeatedly. Storms of lead ripped apart crops and soldiers. Then the battle shifted to the center of the Confederate's entrenched position in front of a sunken piece of ground, worn down from years of wagon traffic. In a few short hours, more than five thousand casualties lay in a long trench that had become a conduit of blood. As in the fighting at the cornfields and church, there was no firm advantage either way. In midafternoon, the third phase of the battle centered on the incompetent Union general Ambrose Burnside attacking the southern end of the Confederate line, by attempting to cross the creek over a narrow stone bridge. Had he done it hours earlier, it could have won the day decisively, but one delay after another gave Lee precious time. The bridge itself became a deadly holdup for thousands of federal soldiers crossing it. General A. P. Hill's men had been on a wearing seventeen-mile trek from Harpers Ferry and arrived at just the right moment. At four thirty, they threw themselves into the progressing Union army and pushed Burnside's men back to the bridge across which they had just fought their way.
Lincoln meeting with McClellan at Antietam, Maryland,
October 3, 1862. Photograph by Alexander Gardner.
Over twenty-two thousand Americans were casualties on the day. Had McClellan attacked the next day, he might have been able to inflict fatal damage on the outnumbered and ailing Confederate forces, but he was too cautious and troubled by the ghastly nature of the day before. General Lee's loyal and damaged army turned back for Virginia. Though a military stalemate, the fact that it ended Lee's northern invasion rendered the battle a success for the Union. By virtue of not being an utter defeat, it seemed the closest thing yet to victory for the North in this theater of the war.
And it was all Lincoln needed. Five days after the armies clashed, Lincoln issued a document pro
claiming his intention to fully emancipate all enslaved people held in rebel territory within three months. The text pronounced that as of January 1, 1863, all those held in slavery within any state rebelling against the government would be "forever free." Because the legal basis of the order was weak to the extreme, the whole act rested upon the doctrine of military necessity; thus, the border states were exempted from this emancipation since they were not at war with the federal government. In fact, several Union states, notably Maryland, preserved slavery within their borders until late in the war. In another oddity borne of its war footing, any southern state that reentered the Union would also be exempt from the act, thus "saving" slavery in the state.
The Emancipation Proclamation was always conceived as a ramshackle, temporary measure that, at best, moved the country along until a constitutional amendment could firmly and finally eradicate slavery. If the war ended quickly, even with a Union victory, the actual legal status of slavery was not clear—and with the United States Supreme Court still in the hands of Chief Justice Roger Taney, a case could be made that the war would have been fought to no abolitionist purpose whatsoever.
Lincoln's proclamation also declared that "such persons [former slaves] of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service."1Lincoln did not state that black men would be fighting, but accepting them into the armed forces for these tasks was a monumental step.
Provisional or not, cautious and full of half-measures or not, the announcement was a bombshell for North and South. It certainly took Douglass by total surprise. Only days before, he had written to Gerrit Smith, "Your gloomiest predictions have been even now more than realized—and I shudder at what the future may still have in store for us." He felt that Lincoln was beholden to conservative army figures such as McClellan, who had no interest in emancipation. His letter continued, "I think the nation was never more completely in the hands of the slave power," and Lincoln was "doing his utmost to destroy the country."2
As the summer of 1862 ended, however, things looked infinitely more promising, and Douglass understood the Emancipation Proclamation's true revolutionary nature in a way that Lincoln's detractors ignore. Well understanding its limitations, Douglass cried, "We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree." To all those who had labored for freedom throughout the South, Douglass told them to "lift up now your voices with joy and thanksgiving." Not all was forgiven for this president, as "Abraham Lincoln may be slow, Abraham Lincoln may desire peace even at the price of leaving our terrible national sore untouched, to fester on for generations." Yet here was a sizable step forward.3
The idea of a proclamation that freed people in places Lincoln had no power over while it left black people in bondage in places that Lincoln could touch disturbed Douglass, but he "saw in its spirit a life and power far beyond its letter." Though the dry legal language belied it, Douglass sensed an expansive moral power being unleashed, a power that neither Lincoln nor anyone else could really control.4
Reactions of soldiers throughout the country were diverse. Consider the contrasting statements of two New York soldiers—one noted that the Proclamation had some soldiers "threatening to abandon the service, declaring that they came to fight for the Union and to maintain the Constitution," and another wrote, "Thank God . . . the contest is now between Slavery & freedom, & every honest man knows what he is fighting for." Others respected the practicality of the act. A Pennsylvania soldier made it clear, "I am no Nigger worshiper," yet slavery gave the South strength through labor so "nothing will end this war sooner" than emancipation.5
Douglass deemed that it would change how Europe viewed the war, putting the North finally on the right side of justice and civilization. From his own knowledge of Britain and his contacts there, he did not think these governments could now aid the Confederacy. An overlooked quality of Douglass's Civil War years was his influence on British public opinion, which was vital because their recognition of the Confederate States of America would have been disastrous. The elite of Britain had political and economic reasons to encourage the Confederacy. Britain was a world leader in antislavery advocacy, however, and the North could have lessened this lingering English sympathy for the Confederacy had they made emancipation an original war aim. No small debt is owed to abolitionists such as Douglass for the fact that the Confederacy never received the aid and recognition it desired from Britain during these first two years of war.6
Oddly, the initial reaction to the proclamation was not positive in England, where many viewed it as cold political maneuvering. The London Spectator observed, "The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States." Some felt that out of desperate political opportunism Lincoln was inviting a gruesome racial war, something they should prevent out of an obligation to humanity. The London Times wrote, "the reign of the last PRESIDENT [was] to go out amid horrible massacres of white women and children, to be followed by the extermination of the black race in the South? Is LINCOLN yet a name not known to us as it will be known to posterity, and is it ultimately to be classed among that catalogue of monsters, the whole sale assassins and butchers of their kind." An English subscriber to the Douglass Monthly wrote a letter to Douglass in November on emancipation, asserting that "we see clearly this is not the object of the war."7
Ottilie Assing sent this perspective home to Germany: "As important and fateful as this proclamation will prove to be, one has to recognize that it again reveals itself as one of those halfway measures so characteristic of this president and his advisors." Douglass's friend Mary Carpenter, a distinguished reformer in her own right, wrote him, "I don't see that it can do very much as the slaves in the South will he free because Mr. Lincoln or all the people of the North declare them to be so." Douglass knew that, strictly speaking, she was correct.8
Douglass, in a long address to British readers in his October Monthly, explained what the Emancipation Proclamation meant in a larger sense. He thanked them for their moral support and the money they sent him for his antislavery efforts, and informed them that "Our arguments, appeals and entreaties combining with events, have at last moved the Government to this high duty, and opened up to the downtrodden millions the hope of speedy deliverance from a bondage whose horrors and crimes no pen can describe." The proclamation did not free anyone, but it showed that the American government, after sixty years, no longer placed itself on the side of slavery. Now they had turned the page to "the first chapter of a new history."9
Douglass had his British friend Henry Richardson send his writings on the proclamation to editors at the London Daily News, Daily Chronicle, Newcastle Guardian, Leeds Mercury, and other publications around the island. People all over England read Douglass's impassioned plea, full of vivid metaphorical imagery, that those in bondage would soon be free as long as the British did not extend their "potent and honored hand to the blood-stained fingers of the impious slaveholding Confederate States of America." It would take a few months for people to understand that the nature of the war had genuinely changed, and then British opinion shifted lastingly against intervention. Richardson told him, "I quite think there is a turn of tide observable, and that the Northern States are beginning to be looked upon with some favor. Your appeal has doubtless helped in this change."10
Still, there was danger lurking for the Union. William Gladstone, chancellor of the exchequer and a figure who was thought to be sympathetic to abolition, gave a surprising speech on October 7 proclaiming that the southern leaders "have made a nation." Winning the battle of Antietam had staved off disaster, but the Lincoln administration was not out of the woods. Any turn of events or another audacious victory by Robert E. Lee could send Britain to the side of cheap cotton and a divided America.
Lincoln knew that proclaiming the slaves free did not make them so; pushing the reach of
their military and winning the war would. Finally despairing of McClellan's inaction and timidity, Lincoln and Stanton fired him, realizing that the Democrat might well oppose them in the upcoming presidential contest. Republicans had decided that the general was fighting to preserve the old nation on old terms, instead of smashing the Confederacy. Though Lincoln had held out longer than many of his advisors thought reasonable, Wendell Phillips said of McClellan that he might not have been a traitor, "but I say this, that if he had been a traitor from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, he could not have served the South better than he has done as Commander-in-Chief."11
In mid-December, the armies in the eastern theater faced each other across the Rappahannock River. Fredericksburg, a picturesque Virginia town before war found it, was the scene of a grisly battle on December 13. In bitter cold, General Ambrose Burnside sent his soldiers across the river, through the town, and up the slopes toward Marye's Heights. Brigade after brigade bravely charged, but not a man reached a Confederate line entrenched behind a firmly built stone wall. From a position of cover, the rebel army unleashed blazing, merciless firepower. The Union suffered thirteen thousand casualties, far more than double the number of Confederate casualties. It was a massacre, and worse, an unnecessary and brutally incompetent one.
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