A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (68 page)

By 1863 the Confederacy was employing seventy thousand civilian bureaucrats as the government itself ran ordinance bureaus, mills, clothing manufacturing, cotton gins, meat packing plants, salt storage sheds, distilleries, vegetable packing facilities, all the while forcing the industrialization of a rural region and literally sucking out its sustenance. Alabama produced four times as much iron in 1864 as
any
state had prior to the war; yet by 1864, Confederate soldiers were starving in the field. Stories of rebels bartering with Yankees, exchanging shoes or even powder for food, were not uncommon by the end of the war. Across the board—in everything from the treatment of (white) human rights, to freedom of speech and the press, to market freedoms—scholar Richard Bensel found that the North had a less centralized government and was a much more open society than the South. Six specific comparisons of private property rights between North and South, including control of railroads, destruction of property, and confiscation, showed the Confederacy to be far more government centered and less market oriented. Analyzing dozens of specific laws and points of comparisons, with possibly the suspension of habeas corpus the main exception, Bensel concluded that the North’s commitment to liberty in all areas ensured its victory.
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The Proclamation

The Seven Days’ Battles had provided an opportunity for McClellan to crush Lee, but once again, the Union forces let the Rebels off the hook. Lee’s strategy, however, was deeply affected by the near defeat. Increasingly, lacking foreign support, the South perceived that it needed to deliver a knockout punch. Lee decided to invade Maryland. Misled into thinking the Marylanders would support the Confederate Army, Lee announced he was coming to liberate a “sister state.” Swinging far to the west, away from Washington, the Rebel army entered Maryland at, fittingly, Leesburg on September 5, 1862. Dispatching Jackson with 25,000 men to seize Harper’s Ferry, Lee divided his force in the face of superior odds.

McClellan, meanwhile, had by default regained overall command of the army in the East. Given the low quality of other commanders, he was Lincoln’s only real choice. His men loved him. He was plodding, but he had inflicted terrible damage on the Rebel army. At the Seven Days’ Battles, for example, despite failing to capture Richmond, McClellan had licked Lee’s best forces. At that point, a jewel fell into McClellan’s hands. A Union soldier picked up three cigars off a fallen Rebel officer, and found them wrapped in the actual orders Lee had given his company commanders. All the battle plans McClellan needed—the disposition of the Rebel army, its size, everything—had just dropped into his lap. He even enthusiastically announced to his staff, “Here is a paper with which if I cannot whip ‘Bobbie Lee’ I will be willing to go home.”
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Then McClellan proceeded to move cautiously.

Unaware McClellan had intercepted his battle orders, Lee nevertheless realized that he had badly divided his forces and that Union armies were converging on him like bats to fruit. He planned to stake out a defensive position at Sharpsburg, Maryland, along Antietam Creek. There the Potomac River protected his left and rear, but if the Union overran his position, it also would have him in a killing box. On September fifteenth, McClellan’s advance forces located the Confederates and should have attacked immediately; instead, despite outnumbering the Rebels 87,000 to 35,000, McClellan hesitated. Finally, two days later, the battle commenced. While all the fighting exceeded human description in its savagery and desperation, the worst of the carnage occurred when Union forces attacked across open ground against Confederates dug in behind a sunken road. It was a premonition of Gettysburg, but the Yankees soon quit and outflanked the road to the south, peppering the Southern ranks with fire from the front and two sides. On September eighteenth, after two bloody days, the Confederates withdrew, and, incredibly, McClellan did not pursue them.
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Lee could technically claim victory since McClellan had not driven him out, but neither side could take much heart in the combined numbing losses of 24,000 men killed or wounded. It was the single bloodiest day in American history—September 11, 2001, notwithstanding. Although the numbers of men littering the battlefield in blue and gray uniforms were almost evenly divided, the Confederates again absorbed a disproportionate amount of punishment, losing well over 22 percent of their entire force. Yet McClellan inexplicably missed an opportunity to pursue Lee and use his superiority to end the war. An aggressive follow-up attack might have finished Lee off then and there, and McClellan’s failure cemented his dismissal. Yet Lee’s withdrawl under federal guns gave Lincoln the window of opportunity he needed to inform his cabinet of one of the most important proposals in American history.

For several years Frederick Douglass, the former slave who used his newspaper as a clarion for abolitionist columns, had edged Lincoln toward the abolitionist camp. He expressed his frustration that Lincoln had not embraced abolition as the central war aim in 1861, and continued to lament the president’s unwillingness throughout 1862. After the Emancipation Proclamation, however, Douglass observed of Lincoln, “From the genuine abolition view, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent, but measuring him by the sentiment of his country—a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult—he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” Lincoln had inched further toward emancipation since July 1862, when he had met with a group of border-state representatives in the White House with another proposal for gradual compensated emancipation in the border states. “The war has doomed slavery,” he told them, and if they rejected compensation at that time, they would not get a penny when it disappeared.
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He received a chilly reception. Why should they—loyal Unionists—free their slaves when there was a chance that the Rebels might still come back into the Union and keep theirs? Lincoln could not disagree with their reasoning. That meeting impressed upon him that “if abolition was to come, it must commence in the Rebel South, and then be expanded into the loyal border states.”
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Truly, it was a “Damascus Road” experience for the president. The following day, in a carriage ride with William Seward and Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, Lincoln stunned the two cabinet officials by stating that given the resistance and persistence of the Confederates, it was a necessity and a duty to liberate the slaves. Before the flabbergasted secretaries could respond, they saw a different Lincoln—one who in an “urgent voice” informed them that the time had passed when the two sections could reach an amicable agreement. He intended to rip out the “heart of the rebellion,” destroy the institution that had torn the nation asunder, and end the charade that the South could reject the Constitution that created the Union on the one hand and invoke it to protect slavery on the other.
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Lincoln had firmed up in his own mind the issue that had nagged at him for years. The war was not about union, after all, because the Union as a constitutional entity was itself the result of something else. He put it best at Gettysburg when he said that it was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” A union not dedicated to that proposition was no union at all; thus, he seemed to realize, for years he had placed the cart ahead of the horse. For the United States as a union of states to have any moral force at all, it first had to stand for the proposition of equality before the law. The Rebels’ actions were despicable not only because they rent that legal fabric embodied in the Constitution, but also because they rejected the underlying proposition of the Declaration.

So it is critical that an understanding of emancipation begin with Lincoln’s perception that it first and foremost was a moral and legal issue, not a military or political one. However, Lincoln also understood the plexiform nature of emancipation as it involved the war effort: militarily, it would threaten the South’s massive slave support system that took the place of civilian or noncombatant military personnel behind the lines; diplomatically, it struck at the heart of Rebel efforts to gain British and French support; and economically, it threatened to throw what was left of the Confederate financial system into chaos, depending as it did on slave valuations as assets used by planters to secure loans. The more Lincoln looked at emancipation, the more he liked it.

Congress had moved toward emancipation with its second confiscation act, which stated that if the rebellion did not cease in sixty days, the executive would be empowered to confiscate all property of anyone who participated in, aided, or abetted the rebellion. Lincoln thought such half measures impractical. Therefore, he determined to brush slavery away in a giant stroke, taking the burden upon himself. On July 22, 1862, he read the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet, making the abolition of slavery an objective of the Union war effort come January 1, 1863.

Despite the presence of many solid free-soilers and antislavery politicians in the cabinet, the response was tepid at best. Chase ruminated about the financial impact, possibly destabilizing the fragile banking structure. Secretary of War Stanton and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, though supportive, nevertheless expressed grave reservations. They argued that the nation “was not ready” for such a step, whereas Seward feared that the Europeans would see the proclamation as a sign of weakness—“our last shriek on the retreat.”
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For it to appear legitimate, they argued, emancipation must wait until the Union had a victory in the eastern theater. Grant’s piecemeal deconstruction of Rebel forces in the West was deadly efficient, but it did not constitute a good old “whippin” of “Bobby Lee.”

Lincoln found those arguments persuasive. He appreciated that emancipation would produce some violent responses in the North as well as the South. There would be race riots, for example. So Lincoln used the remainder of the summer of 1862 to soften up the opposition by touting colonization again—a subject that he trotted out more as a deflector shield than a serious option. In August 1862, he met with several black leaders in Washington, informing them of a new colonization plan in Central America. “You and we are different races,” he noted, and whites had inflicted great wrong on blacks. Oppression would only continue in freedom, he predicted, and he urged the leaders to consider colonization. Some supported it, but Frederick Douglass called Lincoln a hypocrite, full of “pride of race and blood.”
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Lincoln, of course, was neither—he was a practical politician who realized that the highest ideals had already demanded phenomenal sacrifices and that even in emancipation, the job would just be beginning.

Douglass’s sincerely felt condemnations aside, Lincoln
had
moved steadily but inexorably toward emancipation and racial equality. A famous open letter in the
Tribune
to Horace Greeley, who, like Douglass, thought Lincoln too timid, contained the lines, “My paramount objective 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.”
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Missed in the debate about Lincoln’s opinion on race is the fact that he had taken in this
Tribune
letter another concrete step toward emancipation by claiming in public the authority to free the slaves—something neither he nor any other president had ever advanced. As with a play-fake in football, Lincoln allowed his own views of race to mesmerize proponents and opponents of abolition, absorbing both the attention and the punishment, while his
actions
moved unflinchingly toward freedom.

Then came the news from McClellan at Antietam. It was an incomplete victory, but a victory nonetheless. Lincoln had the moment he had waited for, and called his cabinet together on September 22, 1862, to read them the proclamation. For the border states, he would urge Congress to pass compensated emancipation; for freed slaves who so desired, he would press for colonization. But for the states still in rebellion as of January 1, 1863, the president on his own authority would free “thence forward and forever” all slaves, and the military forces of the United States would protect their liberty. After entertaining criticisms—including the possibility of a mass slave uprising in the South—Lincoln went ahead to publish the decree the following day.
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Much has been made of the fact that not a single slave was freed by the proclamation itself. After all, those states still in rebellion were not under federal control, and thus no slaves were freed in the South. Since the proclamation said nothing about the border states, except that Lincoln would urge Congress to act there as well, no slaves were actually free there either. Thus, the famous charge that “where he
could
free the slaves, Lincoln would not, and where he
would
free the slaves, he could not,” has a measure of truth to it. Nevertheless, word filtered South through a slave grapevine like wildfire, although slaves attempted to hide the fact that they had heard about the proclamation. Southern whites had suspicions that blacks had kept up with news of the war. A Louisiana planter complained that his slaves “know more about politics than most of the white men. They know everything that happens.”
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Odd as it may seem, changing the status of slaves constituted only one of three critical goals of the proclamation. The second objective, and the one most easily achieved, involved perceptions. Lincoln needed to turn—in the eyes of Europe, particularly England and France—a set of brave Confederate revolutionaries into international pariahs. By shifting the war aims from restoring the Union (which evoked neither excitement nor sympathy abroad) to emancipation, Lincoln tapped into a strong current of Western thought. Both England and France had abolished slavery in their empires in the decades before the Civil War on strictly moral grounds. They could hardly retreat on that position now. As long as Jefferson Davis’s diplomats could maintain the pretense that the war was a struggle for independence on the grounds of constitutional rights—not much different than the rights of Englishmen—then they could still hope for foreign support. Once Lincoln ripped away the facade of constitutionality and exposed the rebellion for what it was, an attempt by some to legitimate their enslavement of others, neither Britain nor France could any longer consider offering aid.