The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

  Sadly the Illinois ministers filed out; but one, encouraged by the closing words, remained behind to register a plea in that direction. “What you have said to us, Mr President, compels me to say to you in reply, that it is a message to you from our Divine Master, through me, commanding you, sir, to open the doors of bondage that the slaves may go free.” Lincoln gave him a long look, not unlike the one he had given the Quaker woman. “That may be, sir,” he admitted, “for I have studied this question by night and by day, for weeks and for months. But if it is, as you say, a message from your Divine Master, is it not odd that the only channel he could send it by was the roundabout route by way of that awful wicked city of Chicago?”

  These remarks were in any case supplementary to those he had made already in reply to Horace Greeley, who published in the August 20 Tribune an open letter to the President, titled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions,” in which he charged at some length that Lincoln had been “strangely and disastrously remiss in the discharge of your official and imperative duty.” The first such duty, as Greeley saw it, was to announce to the army, the nation, and the world that this war was primarily a struggle to put an end to slavery. Lincoln, having heard that the New Yorker was preparing to attack him, had asked a mutual friend, “What is he wrathy about? Why does he not come down here and have a talk with me?” The friend replied that Greeley had said he would not allow the President of the United States to act as advisory editor of the Tribune. “I have no such desire,” Lincoln said. “I certainly have enough on my hands to satisfy any man’s ambition.” But now that the journalist had aired his grievance publicly, Lincoln answered two days later with a public letter of his own, headed “Executive Mansion” and addressed to Greeley:

  As to the policy I “seem to be pursuing,” as you say, I have not meant to leave anyone in doubt.

  I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored, the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. 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 destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by 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. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors, and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

  I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.

  And having thus to some extent forestalled his anticipated critics—particularly the conservatives, whose arguments he advanced as his own while pointing out the expediency of acting counter to them—he read to the cabinet this latest draft of what he called a Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Two opening paragraphs emphasized that the paper was being issued by him as Commander in Chief, upon military necessity; that reunion, not abolition, was still the primary object of the war; that compensated emancipation was still his goal for loyal owners, and that voluntary colonization of freedmen, “upon this continent or elsewhere,” would still be encouraged. In the third paragraph he got down to the core of the edict, declaring “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 designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” He closed, after quoting from congressional measures prohibiting the return of fugitive slaves to disloyal masters, with the promise that, on restoration of the Union, he would recommend that loyal citizens of all areas “be compensated for all losses by acts of the United States, including the loss of slaves.”

  In this form, after adopting some minor emendations suggested by Seward and Chase, Lincoln gave the document to the world next morning. Return to the Union within one hundred days, he was telling the rebels, and you can keep your slaves—or anyhow be compensated for them, when and if (as I propose) the law takes them away. Otherwise, if you lose the war, you lose your human property as well. It was in essence counterrevolutionary, a military edict prompted by expediency. Whoever attacked him for it, whatever the point of contention, would have to attack him on his own ground.

  This the South was quick to do. Recalling his inaugural statement, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so,” southern spokesmen cried that Lincoln at last had dropped the mask. They quoted with outright horror a passage from the very core of the proclamation which seemed to them to incite the slaves to riot and massacre: “The Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof … will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.” What was this, they asked, if not an invitation to the Negroes to murder them in their beds? Bestial, they called Lincoln, for here he had touched the quick of their deepest fear, and the Richmond Examiner charged that the proclamation was “an act of malice towards the master, rather than one of mercy to the slave.” Abroad, the London Spectator reinforced this view of the author’s cynicism: “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.” Jefferson Davis, while he deplored that such a paper could be issued by the head of a government of which he himself had once been part, declared that it would inspire the South to new determination; for “a restitution of the Union has been rendered forever impossible by the adoption of a measure which … neither admits of retraction nor can coexist with union.”

  In the North, too, there were critics, some of whom protested that the proclamation went too far, while others claimed that it did not go far enough. Some, in fact, maintained that it went nowhere, since it proclaimed freedom only for those unfortunates now firmly under Confederate control. One such critic was the New York World, whose editor pointed out that “the President has purposely made the proclamation inoperative in all places where we have gained a military footing which makes the slaves accessible. He has proclaimed emancipation only where he has notoriously no power to execute it.” Not only were the loyal or semiloyal slave states of Delaware and Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri omitted from the terms to be applied, but so was the whole rebel state of Tennessee, as well as those parts of Virginia and Louisiana under Federal occupation. This was a matter of considerable alarm to the abolitionists. For if emancipation was not to be extended to those regions a hundred days from now, they asked, when would it ever be extended to them? What manner of document was this anyhow?

  Yet these objections were raised only by those who read it critically. Most people did not read it so. They took it for more than it was, or anyhow for more than it said; the container was greater than the thing contained, and Lincoln became at once what he would remain for them, “the man who freed the slaves.” He would go down to posterity, not primarily as the Preserver of the Republic—which he was—but as the Great Emancipator, which he was not. “A poor document, but a mighty act,” the governor of Massachusetts privately called the proclamation, and Lincoln himself said of it in a letter to Vice-President Hamlin, six days later: “The time for its effect southward has not come; but northward the effect should be
instantaneous.” Whatever truth there was in Davis’ claim that it would further unite the South in opposition, Lincoln knew that it had already done much to heal the split in his own party; which was not the least of his reasons for having released it.

  Seward understood such things. Asked by a friend why the cabinet had done “so useless and mischievous a thing as to issue the proclamation,” he told a story. Up in New York State, he said, when the news came that the Revolutionary War had been won and American independence at last established, an old patriot could not rest until he had put up a liberty pole. When his neighbors asked him why he had gone to so much trouble—wasn’t he just as free without it?—the patriot replied, “What is liberty without a pole?” So it was with the present case, Seward remarked between puffs on his cigar: “What is war without a proclamation?”

  Something more it had done, or was doing, which was also included in Lincoln’s calculations. Abroad, as at home, a bedrock impact had been felt. In London, like the pro-Confederate Spectator, the Times might call the proclamation “A very sad document,” which the South would “answer with a hiss of scorn”; a distinguished Member of Parliament might refer to it as “a hideous outburst of weak yet demoniacal spite” and “the most unparalleled last card ever played by a reckless gambler”; Earl Russell himself might point out to his colleagues that it was “of a very strange nature” and contained “no declaration of a principle adverse to slavery.” Yet behind these organs of opinion, below these men of influence, stood the people. In their minds, now that Lincoln had spoken out—regardless of what he actually said or left unsaid—support for the South was support for slavery, and they would not have it so. From this point on, the editors might favor and the heads of state might ponder ways and means of extending recognition to the Confederacy, but to do this they would have to run counter to the feelings and demands of the mass of their subscribers and electors. Not even the nearly half-million textile workers already idle as a result of the first pinch of the cotton famine were willing to have the blockade broken on such terms. And the same was true in France. With this one blow—though few could see it yet: least of all the leader most concerned—Lincoln had shattered the main pillar of what had been the southern President’s chief hope from the start. Europe would not be coming into this war.

  Another change the document had wrought, though this one was uncalculated, occurring within the man himself. Sixteen years ago, back in Illinois, when an election opponent charged that he was an infidel, Lincoln refuted it with an open letter to the voters; but this was mainly a denial that he was a “scoffer,” and not even then did he make any claim to being truly religious. Herndon, who saw him almost daily through that period, as well as before and after, later declared that he had never heard his partner mention the name of Jesus “but to confute the idea that he was the Christ.” The fact remains that in a time when even professional soldiers called upon God in their battle reports, Lincoln seemed not to be a praying man and he never joined a church. Concerned as he had always been with logic, he had not yet reached a stage of being able to believe in what he could not comprehend. But now, in this second autumn of the war, a change began to show. In late September, when an elderly Quaker woman came to the White House to thank him for having issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln replied in a tone quite different from the one with which he had addressed her fellow Quaker the month before.

  “I am glad of this interview,” he told her, “and glad to know that I have your sympathy and prayers. We are indeed going through a great trial—a fiery trial. In the very responsible position in which I happen to be placed, being a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father, as I am, and as we all are, to work out his great purposes, I have desired that all my works and acts may be according to his will; and that it might be so, I have sought his aid. But if, after endeavoring to do my best in the light which he affords me, I find my efforts fail, I must believe that for some purpose unknown to me, he wills it otherwise. If I had had my way, this war would never have been commenced. If I had been allowed my way, this war would have been ended before this. But we find it still continues, and we must believe that he permits it for some wise purpose of his own, mysterious and unknown to us; and though with our limited understandings we may not be able to comprehend it, yet we cannot but believe that he who made the world still governs it.”

  This was a theme that would bear developing. In the proclamation itself he had omitted any reference to the Deity, and it was at the suggestion of Chase that he invoked, in the body of a later draft, “the gracious favor of Almighty God.” But now, out of the midnight trials of his spirit, out of his concern for a race in bondage, out of his knowledge of the death of men in battle, something new had come to birth in Lincoln, and through him into the war. After this, as Davis said, there could be no turning back; Lincoln had sounded forth a trumpet that would never call retreat. And having sounded it, he turned in these final days of September to the inscrutable theme he had touched when he thanked the second Quaker woman for her prayers. His secretary found on the presidential desk a sheet of paper containing a single paragraph, a “Meditation on the Divine Will,” which Lincoln had written with no thought of publication. Hay copied and preserved it:

  The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true; that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power on the minds of the now contestants, he could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun, he could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.

  4

  Whatever else it was or might become, whatever reactions it produced within the minds and hearts of men—including Lincoln’s—the proclamation was first of all a military measure; which meant that, so far, its force was merely potential. Its application dependent on the armies of the Union, its effect would be in direct ratio to their success, 1) in driving back the Confederate invaders, and 2) in resuming the southward movement whose flow had been reversed, east and west, by the advances of Lee and Bragg into Maryland and Kentucky. The nearer of these two penetrating spearheads had been encysted and repelled by McClellan, and for this Lincoln was grateful, though he would have preferred something more in the way of pursuit than an ineffectual bloodying of the waters at Shepherdstown ford. Even this, however, was better than what he saw when he looked westward in the direction of his native state. The other spearhead was not only still deeply embedded in the vitals of Kentucky, but to Lincoln’s acute distress it seemed likely to remain so. After winning by default the race for Louisville, Buell appeared to be concerned only with taking time to catch his breath; with the result that, near the end of September, Lincoln’s thin-stretched patience snapped. He ordered Buell’s removal from command.

  His distress no doubt would have been less acute if he had known that, with or without pressure from Buell, Bragg was already considering a withdrawal. At the outset the North Carolinian had announced that he would make the “Abolition demagogues and demons … taste the bitters of invasion,” but now he found his own teeth set on edge. From Bardstown, which he had reached three days before, he reported to Richmond on September 25 that his troops were resting from “the long, arduous, and exhausting march” over Muldraugh’s Hill. “It is a source of deep regret that this move was necessary,” he declared, “as it has enabled Buell to reach Louisville, where a very large force is now concentrated.” Then he got down to the bedrock cause of his discontent: “I regret to say we are sadly disappointed at the want of action by our friends in Kentucky.
We have so far received no accession to this army. General Smith has secured about a brigade—not half our losses by casualties of different kinds. We have 15,000 stand of arms and no one to use them. Unless a change occurs soon we must abandon the garden spot of Kentucky to its cupidity. The love of ease and fear of pecuniary loss are the fruitful sources of this evil.”

  In saying this he took his cue from Smith, who—though privately he admitted, “I can understand their fears and hesitancy; they have so much to lose”—had written him from Lexington the week before: “The Kentuckians are slow and backward in rallying to our standard. Their hearts are evidently with us, but their blue-grass and fat cattle are against us.” The day after Bragg reached Bardstown—with Buell still moving northward, more or less across his flank and rear—Smith told him that he regarded “the defeat of Buell before he effects a junction with the force at Louisville as a military necessity, for Buell’s army has always been the great bugbear to these people, and until [it is] defeated we cannot hope for much addition to our ranks.” In other words, before the citizens would risk their lives and property in open support of the Confederates, they wanted to be assured that they would stay there. But to Bragg it seemed that this was putting the cart before the horse. He later explained his reluctance in a letter to his wife: “Why should I stay with my handful of brave Southern men to fight for cowards who skulked about in the dark to say to us, ‘We are with you. Only whip these fellows out of our country and let us see you can protect us, and we will join you’?”