by H. W. Brands
Northerners might complain that Lincoln’s plan made them pay Southern slaveholders while receiving nothing in exchange. “Yet the measure is both just and economical,” Lincoln rejoined. “In a certain sense the liberation of slaves is the destruction of property—property acquired by descent or by purchase, the same as any other property.” Northerners were hardly blameless in the matter of slavery. “The people of the South are not more responsible for the original introduction of this property than are the people of the North; and when it is remembered how unhesitatingly we all use cotton and sugar and share the profits of dealing in them, it may not be quite safe to say that the South has been more responsible than the North for its continuance. If, then, for a common object this property is to be sacrificed, is it not just that it be done at a common charge?”
Lincoln again pointed out that his plan would save Northerners money, by shortening the war, which was burning through money at a rate that would pay for all the slaves in the country in a matter of months. Moreover, the discounting effect of growth in the American population and economy made a dollar today more expensive than a dollar years or decades in the future. “A dollar will be much harder to pay for the war than will be a dollar for emancipation on the proposed plan. And then the latter will cost no blood, no precious life. It will be a saving of both.”
Lincoln granted that he was asking a lot. But the moment demanded a lot. “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
In language unusually emotional for him in a written message, Lincoln concluded, “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.”
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BUT HIS WAY WAS not followed; Congress once again ignored Lincoln’s plea. And so, on January 1, 1863, he took the fateful step. He repeated the language of the preliminary proclamation, listed the states then in rebellion, excepting the counties that had fallen under Union control, and said, “I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated states and parts of states are and henceforward shall be free, and that the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.” He cautioned the newly freed men and women to refrain from violence, unless in self-defense, and he encouraged them to seek paid work.
He continued, “I further declare and make known that such persons 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.”
He closed, “Upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God.”
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JEFFERSON DAVIS READ the Emancipation Proclamation as a cry of Union despair. Or so he told the Confederate legislature, which was inclined to agree. As mightily as Lincoln had struggled to keep slavery out of his public discussion of war aims, Confederate leaders had put slavery at the center of what they said they were fighting for. Alexander Stephens, Lincoln’s hope for Georgia, had abandoned his Unionism when his state fell in line with the other seceders, and he had identified slavery as the fundamental issue on which the Confederacy rested. Stephens noted that Thomas Jefferson and the other founders had labored under the assumption that all men were created equal. “This was an error,” Stephens said. The Confederacy had gotten things right. “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.” Most people in America hadn’t seen the light. “Those at the North who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind, from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity.” The Confederacy stood against this insanity. And the Confederacy would prevail because it stood on the truth of white supremacy and black subordination. “It is upon this,” said Stephens, “our social fabric is firmly planted; and I cannot permit myself to doubt the ultimate success of a full recognition of this principle throughout the civilized and enlightened world.”
On the strength of such views, Stephens became vice president of the Confederacy, sitting beside Jefferson Davis, the president. Davis had been one of the three members of the Senate committee that investigated John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry; he signed his name to the committee report that called the raid “the act of lawless ruffians, under the sanction of no public or political authority—distinguishable only from ordinary felonies by the ulterior ends in contemplation by them, and by the fact that the money to maintain the expedition, and the large armament they brought with them, had been contributed and furnished by citizens of other states of the Union under circumstances that must continue to jeopard the safety and peace of the Southern states, and against which Congress has no power to legislate.” Davis and the committee urged Congress to remedy this deficiency. Until it did—until federal law allowed the slave states protection against future John Browns—the Union would be in mortal peril. “The committee can find no guarantee elsewhere for the security of peace between the states of the Union.”
Davis sponsored a Senate resolution affording the South protection against other Browns. His resolution asserted that slavery was essential to the welfare of the South; that its existence had been endorsed by the Constitution, which had been ratified by all thirteen states; that “no change of opinion or feeling on the part of the non-slaveholding states of the Union in relation to this institution can justify them or their citizens in open or covert attacks thereon”; and that “all such attacks are in manifest violation of the mutual and solemn pledge to protect and defend each other, given by the states respectively, on entering into the constitutional compact which formed the Union.”
The Senate approved Davis’s resolution, albeit on a party-line vote, with Democrats in favor and Republicans against or abstaining. The failure of the party of Lincoln, who had just won the Republican nomination, to support the resolution disposed Davis to doubt the Republicans’ devotion to constitutional principles. He subsequently refused to believe Lincoln’s claims as candidate and then as president that he had no designs against slavery in the states.
And in January 1863 he wasn’t surprised by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which he condemned as a monstrous assault on the people of the South—“the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man.” It was a cry of “impotent rage” on the part of Lincoln and the North. The Confederacy must and would respond. Davis declared that any Union officers captured while leading black troops would be delivered to state authorities for punishment according to the state laws aga
inst fomenting slave revolts. These typically mandated capital punishment. Union enlisted men would be treated as unwilling accomplices in said crimes.
Beyond its furious impotence, the Union proclamation revealed the fundamental duplicity of Lincoln and the Republicans, Davis said. The Confederate president quoted the passages from Lincoln’s inaugural address disavowing both the authority and the inclination to interfere with slavery in the states. The new proclamation gave the lie to Lincoln’s words. “The people of this Confederacy, then, cannot fail to receive this proclamation as the fullest vindication of their own sagacity in foreseeing the uses to which the dominant party in the United States intended from the beginning to apply their power; nor can they cease to remember with devout thankfulness that it is to their own vigilance in resisting the first stealthy progress of approaching despotism that they owe their escape from consequences now apparent to the most skeptical.”
Davis took comfort from the fact, as he saw it, that the proclamation rendered impossible any reconciliation with the United States. “It has established a state of things which can lead to but one of three possible consequences—the extermination of the slaves, the exile of the whole white population of the Confederacy, or absolute and total separation of these states from the United States.” The first possibility, the extermination of the slaves, might result from the race war to which Lincoln and the Republicans were goading the slaves of the South. The second would occur if Union arms so assisted the slaves as to make a victory for whites impossible; whites would not consent to live in a black country and would emigrate. The third—the most likely—would follow from the rallying of the white South to the banner of the Confederacy and the defeat of the Union.
Davis predicted that Lincoln’s proclamation would be read by the world as an admission of Northern weakness—“an authentic statement by the government of the United States of its inability to subjugate the South by force of arms.” Britain and other foreign countries would accord the Confederacy the diplomatic recognition it deserved. Davis predicted that Northerners themselves would perceive it as the last gasp of a failing administration. “That people are too acute not to understand that a restitution of the Union has been rendered forever impossible by the adoption of a measure which, from its very nature, neither admits of retraction nor can coexist with union.”
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THE SATISFACTION OF feeling that he had been right all along about Lincoln—that the Republican president was John Brown in a frock coat—didn’t much help Jefferson Davis or the Confederate cause. Lincoln indeed was now waging war against slavery, as Brown had done, but where Brown’s war had failed miserably to win the support of its intended beneficiaries, Lincoln’s succeeded famously. Slaves had been fleeing their homes for Union lines for some time; the Emancipation Proclamation caused their numbers to increase dramatically, and Lincoln’s invitation to the former slaves to join the fight for freedom prompted a substantial portion of them to do just that.
Frederick Douglass couldn’t resist an I-told-you-so at Lincoln’s expense. “When first the rebel cannon shattered the walls of Sumter and drove away its starving garrison, I predicted that the war then and there inaugurated would not be fought out entirely by white men,” Douglass declared. Others should have realized the same thing. “Only a moderate share of sagacity was needed to see that the arm of the slave was the best defense against the arm of the slaveholder.”
But finally Lincoln had acted, and it was up to black men to respond. “From East to West, from North to South, the sky is written all over ‘NOW OR NEVER,’ ” Douglas said. “Liberty won by white men would lose half its luster. Who would be free themselves must strike the blow. Better even to die free than to live slaves.”
Few slaves read Douglass’s paper, being mostly illiterate. But males of military age responded to the sentiment he expressed and took up arms for their freedom. Eventually some hundred thousand joined the Union ranks. The Union war department initially envisioned employing the freedmen in support of white troops, on account of both their inexperience and the peculiar hazards they encountered in battle. Where white troops who were captured were treated as prisoners of war, former slaves might be re-enslaved or simply shot. But plans changed amid the fighting, and before long freedmen found themselves in the thick of battle.
An early engagement took place at Milliken’s Bend on the Mississippi, where a Union garrison was supporting Ulysses Grant’s siege of Vicksburg. A Confederate force under Henry McCulloch received orders to drive the Federals into the river. McCulloch maneuvered his men close to the Union lines and turned them loose. “The troops charged the breastworks, carrying it instantly, killing and wounding many of the enemy by their deadly fire, as well as the bayonet,” McCulloch reported afterward. He added, with some surprise, “This charge was resisted by the negro portion of the enemy’s force with considerable obstinacy.” Their white comrades had shown no such courage. “The white or true Yankee portion ran like whipped curs almost as soon as the charge was ordered.”
McCulloch wasn’t the most reliable of witnesses; his report read as though the Confederates won the battle, which in fact they lost. But it revealed the fighting ability of the former slaves. Their own white officers asserted the same thing. “We were attacked here on June 7, about 3 o’clock in the morning, by a brigade of Texas troops, about 2,500 in number,” reported Matthew Miller, a captain of a black Louisiana regiment. “We had about 600 men to withstand them, 500 of them negroes.” Of the company Miller commanded, half were killed in the battle and all but one of the rest were wounded. “I never felt more grieved and sick at heart than when I saw how my brave soldiers had been slaughtered, one with six wounds, all the rest with two or three, none less than two wounds. Two of my colored sergeants were killed, both brave, noble men; always prompt, vigilant, and ready for the fray. I never more wish to hear the expression, ‘The niggers won’t fight.’ Come with me 100 yards from where I sit and I can show you the wounds that cover the bodies of 16 as brave, loyal, and patriotic soldiers as ever drew bead on a rebel.”
A Union general who witnessed the same battle told Charles Dana, the assistant war secretary, “It is impossible for men to show greater gallantry than the negro troops in that fight.” This view quickly pervaded Union thinking about black soldiers. “The bravery of the blacks in the battle at Milliken’s Bend completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of negro troops,” Dana observed. “I heard prominent officers who formerly in private had sneered at the idea of the negroes fighting express themselves after that as heartily in favor of it.”
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DURING THE MONTHS after the Emancipation Proclamation, the war as a whole turned in the Union’s favor. Grant took Vicksburg, reclaiming the Mississippi for the North and cutting the Confederacy in two. George Meade’s Army of the Potomac defeated Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg, neutralizing a threat to Washington and dealing the entire Confederate project a demoralizing blow.
Washington hailed the thrilling news. A large crowd gathered in front of the National Hotel and shouted itself hoarse before heading west on Pennsylvania Avenue. The Marine Band joined them, playing exuberant airs. On reaching the White House, the happy mob called for the president to come out. Lincoln appeared at the window. “Fellow citizens,” he said. “I am very glad indeed to see you tonight, and yet I will not say I thank you for this call, but I do most sincerely thank Almighty God for the occasion on which you have called.”
Great cheers from the crowd.
Many others had noted the coincidence between the recent Union victories and America’s Independence Day; Lincoln took this as his theme. “How long ago is it?—eighty odd years—since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’ ” Lincoln
rambled through a brief history of the Fourth of July before thinking better of the effort. “Gentlemen, this is a glorious theme, and the occasion for a speech, but I am not prepared to make one worthy of the occasion.” Maybe at another time. Seeking escape, he nodded toward the band: “I will now take the music.”
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LINCOLN HAD HARDLY ABSORBED the meaning of Vicksburg and Gettysburg when a new and alarming front in the war developed. New York City had never liked the Union war effort. The commercial hub of the North had long-standing ties to the South, with cotton coming into the city, often for transshipment elsewhere, and loans flowing back to the planters. Other parts of the state were friendly to the likes of John Brown and Frederick Douglass, but the city preferred slaveholders to slaves. As secession carried off the South, the mayor of New York, Fernando Wood, recommended that his city secede from his state and the Union to form a de facto alliance with the slaveholders. “With our aggrieved brethren of the slave states, we have friendly relations and a common sympathy,” Wood said. “While other portions of our state have unfortunately been imbued with the fanatical spirit which actuates a portion of the people of New England, the city of New York has unfalteringly preserved the integrity of its principles of adherence to the compromises of the Constitution and the equal rights of the people of all the states. We have respected the local interests of every section, at no time oppressing but all the while aiding in the development of the resources of the whole country. Our ships have penetrated to every clime, and so have New York capital, energy and enterprise found their way to every state, and, indeed, to almost every county and town of the American Union. If we have derived sustenance from the Union, so have we in return disseminated blessings for the common benefit of all. Therefore, New York has a right to expect and should endeavor to preserve a continuance of uninterrupted intercourse with every section.” Wood predicted that the secession spirit would catch on across the country. “California and her sisters of the Pacific will no doubt set up an independent republic and husband their own rich mineral resources. The western states, equally rich in cereals and other agricultural products, will probably do the same.” What was good for the other sections would be good for New York City, which had been consistently ill-used by both the federal government and the state government of New York. “Why should not New York City, instead of supporting by her contributions in revenue two-thirds of the expenses of the United States, become also equally independent? As a free city, with but nominal duty on imports, her local government could be supported without taxation upon her people. Thus we could live free from taxes, and have cheap goods nearly duty free. In this she would have the whole and united support of the Southern states, as well as all the other states to whose interests and rights under the Constitution she has always been true.”