That policy had been pursued for over a year and Lincoln was convinced that it had failed. He was ready to move on. He read the letter but made no comment on it except to thank the general for his opinions. Later he remarked that McClellan’s advice on how to carry on the affairs of the nation made him think of “the man whose horse kicked up and stuck his foot through the stirrup. He said to the horse, ‘If you are going to get on I will get off.’”
The President did not visit Harrison’s Landing to learn how the war should be conducted; he went looking for the best way to end a costly and fruitless campaign. McClellan was mortified that Lincoln asked him for no account of the recent battles and was not interested in explanations of the army’s failure. Not confiding his views to the general, the President merely asked him and each of his corps commanders to estimate the strength of the Union forces and the location and condition of the Confederates. He then made the telling inquiry: “If you desired, could you remove the army safely?” McClellan saw pretty clearly the direction of Lincoln’s thinking, and he reported to his wife that the President seemed like “a man about to do something of which he was much ashamed.” “I do not know to what extent he has profited by his visit,” he reflected; “not much I fear, for he really seems quite incapable of rising to the height of the merits of the question and the magnitude of the crisis.”
On July 11, two days after the President returned to Washington, he showed just how much he had learned; he named Henry W. Halleck “to command the whole land forces of the United States, as General-in-Chief.” That appointment signaled a repudiation of McClellan, and of McClellan’s view of the war. It was a decision Lincoln had been working through for many weeks. Clearly he had had in mind both a change in command and a change in strategy when he visited General Scott in June. Though he told reporters who cornered him on the way back from West Point that his conference “had nothing whatever to do with making or unmaking any General in the country,” this was a little less than the whole truth.
The appointment of Pope had been an early signal that Lincoln was changing his military strategy. The President had confidence in this handsome, black-bearded new general who was the son of an old Illinois associate and had been part of the presidential party on the inaugural trip to Washington. He liked his record. Pope had served well in the capture of Island No. 10 on the Mississippi River, and he had led a wing of Halleck’s army in the campaign against Corinth. Doubtless he was pleased that Pope, unlike the generals closest to McClellan, was an ardent antislavery Republican. He was a protégé of Secretary Chase and the son-in-law of a stalwart Republican representative from Ohio. Even more, Lincoln liked Pope’s idea of warfare. Boastful and indiscreet, Pope made no secret of his scorn of Eastern generals, like McClellan, who he thought grossly overestimated the strength of the Confederates, and he ridiculed those who believed that strategy was more important than fighting.
Finding Pope knowledgeable and articulate, Lincoln was reluctant to let him leave Washington, and during the desperate Seven Days’ battles informally made him his chief military adviser and aide. Day after day, Pope worked alongside the President in the War Department telegraph office, helping Lincoln interpret McClellan’s frequent dispatches and making no secret of his belief that the general’s retreat to the James River was a blunder. But Pope grew restive in this advisory role and wanted to take to the field. It was at his repeated urging that the President brought in Halleck, who had also been warmly recommended by General Scott.
Freed from his desk job, Pope took up his command and immediately made it clear that, unlike McClellan, he would not fight a soft war. He published a series of tactless orders informing his exhausted and dispirited Eastern soldiers that he came from the West, “where we have always seen the backs of our enemies,” and promising that he would pay more attention to his lines of advance than to his lines of retreat. Pope ordered his soldiers so far as possible to live on the country they were passing through, and he prescribed a stern loyalty oath for all “disloyal male citizens” behind Union lines, with heavy penalties for “evil-disposed persons.” The words and the rhetoric were John Pope’s—but before he issued his orders he submitted them to the President, who gave them his tacit approval.
As Pope took command, Lincoln’s confidence began to return. Bustling and energetic, the new general rapidly whipped his troops into shape, and he projected a direct, overland advance against the Confederate capital—just the strategy that Lincoln had unsuccessfully urged McClellan to follow. Greatly encouraged, Lincoln by mid-August was so confident that he told Sumner the Union army would be in Richmond within two weeks.
III
Two days after Lincoln appointed Halleck general-in-chief, he made an equally significant shift in his policy toward slavery. Characteristically he made no public announcement of either change, and in neither case did he make a clean break with the past. Just as he continued to support McClellan’s campaign on the Peninsula while he was creating a new army under Pope, so on the domestic scene he worked hard for his old policies of gradualism and compensation even while he was moving toward general emancipation.
Committed to his inaugural pledge that the federal government would not interfere with slavery in the states where it already existed, Lincoln continued to urge the individual states, with financial support from the federal government, to adopt a plan of gradual, compensated emancipation. On July 12, just before Congress adjourned, the President summoned the representatives and senators from the border states to the White House and again pleaded with them to endorse his plan. Slavery in their states, he pointed out, would soon be extinguished by the “mere friction and abrasion” of the war. Apart from that, he reminded them, his hand might soon be forced, because antislavery sentiment throughout the North “is still upon me, and is increasing.” As patriots and statesmen they should recommend his plan to the people of their states as the way to bring speedy relief from the war. “As you would perpetuate popular government for the best people in the world,” he urged, “I beseech you that you do in no wise omit this.”
“Oh, how I wish the border States would accept my proposition!” Lincoln exclaimed to Illinois Representatives Isaac N. Arnold and Owen Lovejoy the day after this meeting. “Then you, Lovejoy, and you, Arnold, and all of us, would not have lived in vain!” But, as he doubtless anticipated, the border-state congressmen refused to follow his lead, and, with a few exceptions, joined in a long, legalistic rebuttal of Lincoln’s appeal, questioning the logic of his arguments and the consistency of his policies. “Confine yourself to your constitutional authority” was the gist of their message.
Even before Lincoln received their predictable response he was moving toward a new course of action. On July 13, riding in a carriage with Secretaries Seward and Welles to the funeral of Stanton’s infant son, he informed these two conservative members of his cabinet that he “had about come to the conclusion that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.” Both Seward and Welles were startled, because hitherto the President had been emphatic in rejecting any proposal to have the national government interfere with slavery. Both said they needed more time to consider the idea. But the President urged them seriously to think about it, because “something must be done.”
The idea of emancipation by presidential decree was, of course, not a new one. On the day that the news of the firing on Fort Sumter reached Washington, Sumner had gone to the White House to remind the President that emancipation of the slaves of a military opponent fell within his war powers, and repeatedly he urged Lincoln to act. Frémont’s proclamation in August 1861, freeing the slaves of Missouri rebels, was another reminder of what the executive power might accomplish. In December of that year, in his final report as Secretary of War, Cameron had also proposed emancipation by decree. As recently as May, General David Hunter, in command of the Military Department of the South, announced that “slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible” and proclaimed that therefor
e persons held as slaves in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina were “forever free.”
Though Secretary Chase insisted that it was “of the highest importance ... that this order be not revoked,” Lincoln promptly declared Hunter’s proclamation “altogether void”—as he had all previous moves toward emancipation by executive decree. “No commanding general shall do such a thing, upon my responsibility, without consulting me,” he told Chase. But in revoking Hunter’s order, a new tone appeared in Lincoln’s language. For the first time he made it clear that he had no doubt of his constitutional power to order emancipation. Whether he exercised that authority would depend on a decision that abolition had “become a necessity indispensable to the maintainance of the government.” A little later he observed that he had no legal or constitutional reservations about issuing an emancipation proclamation because, “as commander-in-chief of the army and navy, in time of war, I suppose I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy.”
After overruling Hunter’s proclamation, Lincoln began to think of emancipation as a question to be decided on grounds of policy rather than of principle, and he started to formulate his ideas for a proclamation of freedom. He probably talked over the idea with Stanton in May, and he may have discussed a very preliminary draft of such a proclamation with Vice President Hamlin as early as June 18. Later that month, in the cipher room of the War Department telegraph office, which the President frequented while anxiously awaiting dispatches from the army, he asked Major Thomas T. Eckert for some foolscap, because, he said, “he wanted to write something special.” At the telegraph office, he remarked, he was able to work “more quietly and command his thoughts better than at the White House, where he was frequently interrupted.” He then sat down at Eckert’s desk, which faced onto Pennsylvania Avenue, and began to write. “He would look out of the window a while and then put his pen to paper,” Eckert remembered, “but he did not write much at once. He would study between times and when he had made up his mind he would put down a line or two, and then sit quiet for a few minutes.” That first day he filled less than a page, and as he left he asked Eckert to take charge of what he had written and not allow anyone to see it. Almost every day during the following weeks he asked for his papers and revised what he had written, adding only a few sentences at a time. Not until he had finished did he tell Eckert that he had been drafting a proclamation “giving freedom to the slaves in the South.”
During June and July when Lincoln was drafting an emancipation order, he often played a kind of game with the numerous visitors who descended on him to urge him to free the slaves. The measures they advocated were precisely those that he was attempting to formulate in his document at the War Department. If he challenged their arguments, he was, in effect, testing his own. No doubt he enjoyed his little game, relishing the use of his lawyer’s skills to make the worst cause sound the best. No doubt, too, he was pleased to retain total flexibility, since these discussions committed him to nothing.
Thus to Sumner, who called at the White House twice on July 4 “to urge the reconsecration of the day by a decree of emancipation,” the President said that a general order was “too big a lick,” though Sumner believed he was “not disinclined” to issue a proclamation covering eastern Virginia. On reflection, though, Lincoln changed his mind about even that limited measure, because, as he told the senator, such a proclamation might cause Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland to secede. Besides, it would probably be mere brutum fulmen, unless he could enforce it.
IV
But by mid-July he was ready to show his hand. “Things had gone on from bad to worse, until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursuing,” he explained later, “that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the game!” McClellan’s defeats on the Peninsula contributed to his decision, as did the demoralization of the soldiers in the Army of the Potomac and the near-mutinous state of some of their officers. So, too, did the growing chorus of antislavery opinion in the North and the dwindling trickle of volunteers for the army—a flow that Governor Andrew of Massachusetts bluntly told the President could not be increased so long as he persisted in fighting a war that would leave slavery intact.
Especially influential was the passage on July 17, 1862, by Congress, with virtually unanimous Republican support, of the Second Confiscation Act, a measure that defined the rebels as traitors and ordered the confiscation of their property, including the freeing of their slaves. Lincoln had serious doubts about many of the provisions of the Confiscation Act and drafted a message vetoing it, reminding Congress that “the severest justice may not always be the best policy.” Only after Senator Fessenden, working closely with the President, secured modification of some of the more stringent provisions did Lincoln agree to sign the measure—and even then he took the unprecedented step of placing before Congress his statement of objections to the bill he had approved.
No part of the Second Confiscation Act troubled the President more than the section declaring that, after a period of sixty days, the slaves of rebels should be “forever free of their servitude, and not again held as slaves.” “It is startling to say that congress can free a slave within a state,” he remarked, for such a statement would directly contradict the Republican platform on which he and most of the congressmen of his party had been elected. “Congress has no power over slavery in the states,” he told Browning, “and so much of it as remains after the war is over ... must be left to the exclusive control of the states where it may exist.” If power over slavery within the states existed anywhere in the federal government, it was to be found in the war powers, which he believed could only be exercised by the President as commander-in-chief. But rather than confront Congress over the abstract issue, Lincoln decided to accept the bill—and to undercut the congressional initiative for emancipation by acting first.
His preliminary conversation with Seward and Welles on July 13 had been intended to prepare the way for such action, and a week later the President was ready to discuss emancipation with the full cabinet. On July 22 his advisers did not immediately realize that they were present at a historic occasion. The secretaries seemed more interested in discussing Pope’s orders to subsist his troops in hostile territory and schemes for colonizing African-Americans in Central America, and they had trouble focusing when the President read the first draft of his proposed proclamation. The curious structure and awkward phrasing of the document showed that Lincoln was still trying to blend his earlier policy of gradual, compensated emancipation with his new program for immediate abolition. It opened with an announcement that the Second Confiscation Act would go into effect in sixty days unless Southerners “cease participating in, aiding, countenancing, or abetting the existing rebellion.” The President then pledged to support pecuniary aid to any state—including the rebel states—that “may voluntarily adopt, gradual abolishment of slavery.” Only at the end did he, “as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States,” proclaim that “as a fit and necessary military measure”—not as a measure that was just or right—he would on January 1, 1863, declare “all persons held as slaves within any state ..., wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized,... forever ... free.”
At the outset of the meeting the President informed the cabinet that he had “resolved upon this step, and had not called them together to ask their advice, but to lay the subject-matter of a proclamation before them,” and the discussion that followed was necessarily rather desultory. Stanton and Bates staunchly urged “immediate promulgation” of the proclamation. Rather surprisingly, Chase was cool. He feared an emancipation proclamation might be “a measure of great danger,” since it would unsettle the government’s financial position. “Emancipation could be much better and more quietly accomplished,” he believed, “by allowing Generals to organize and arm the slaves (thus avoiding depredation and massacre on the
one hand, and support to the insurrection on the other).” Despite his reservations, he promised to give Lincoln’s proclamation his hearty support.
Postmaster General Blair, who came in late, deprecated the proposed policy “on the ground that it would cost the Administration the fall elections.” Secretary of the Interior Smith said nothing but was strongly opposed to emancipation; he was already thinking of resigning from a cabinet where he felt increasingly out of sympathy with the President. Seward, who had been thinking over the consequences of emancipation since his carriage ride with Lincoln and Welles, argued strongly against immediate promulgation of the proclamation. He feared it would “break up our relations with foreign nations and the production of cotton for sixty years.” Foreign nations might intervene in the American civil war in order to prevent the abolition of slavery for sake of the cotton their factories so badly needed. More persuasively he argued that issuing an emancipation proclamation at this particular moment, after the severe military reverses experienced by the Union armies, would “be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help.” “His idea,” Lincoln recalled later, “was that it would be considered our last shriek, on the retreat.”
With his advisers divided, Lincoln adjourned the cabinet meeting without reaching a decision on issuing the proclamation, though he later told one visitor that he expected to issue it the next day. But that night Seward’s ally, Thurlow Weed, came to the White House and again strongly argued that an emancipation proclamation could not be enforced and that it would alienate the important border states. Reluctantly Lincoln put the document aside. Shortly afterward, when Sumner on five successive days pressed the President to issue his proclamation, Lincoln responded, “We mustn’t issue it till after a victory.”
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