Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (113 page)

29
. Indiana colonel quoted in Nevins,
War
, II, 239; John H. Burrill to his parents, Jan. 1, 1863, Civil War Times Illustrated Collection, United States Military History Institute;
O.R
., Ser. I, Vol. 24, pt. 3, p. 157.

30
. McClellan to Ellen McClellan, Sept. 25, Oct. 5, 1862, McClellan Papers, Library of Congress; McClellan to William H. Aspinwall, Sept. 26, 1862, Civil War Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

31
. Porter to Manton Marble, Sept. 30, 1862, quoted in Nevins,
War
, II, 238–39; the case of the cashiered major can be followed in
CWL
, V, 442–43, 508–9, and in Nicolay and Hay,
Lincoln
, VI, 186–88.

remedy for political errors, if any are committed," concluded Mc-Clellan with an artful reference to the imminent elections, "is to be found only in the action of the people at the polls."
³²

Democrats scarcely needed this hint. They had already made emancipation the main issue in their quest for control of Congress. The New York Democratic platform denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as "a proposal for the butchery of women and children, for scenes of lust and rapine, and of arson and murder." The party nominated for governor the suave, conservative veteran of thirty years in New York politics Horatio Seymour, who declared: "If it be true that slavery must be abolished to save this Union, then the people of the South should be allowed to withdraw themselves from the government which cannot give them the protection guaranteed by its terms."
³³
Democrats in Ohio and Illinois took similar ground. Branding the Emancipation Proclamation "another advance in the Robespierrian highway of tyranny and anarchy," they asserted that if abolition was "the avowed purpose of the war, the South cannot be subdued and ought not to be subdued. . . . In the name of God, no more bloodshed to gratify a religious fanaticism." An Ohio Democrat amended the party's slogan to proclaim "the Constitution as it is, the Union as it was,
and the Niggers where they are
."
³⁴

Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus to enforce the militia draft also hurt the Republicans. "A large majority," declared an Ohio editor, "can see no reason why
they
should be shot for the benefit of niggers and Abolitionists." If "the
despot
Lincoln" tried to ram abolition and conscription down the throats of white men, "he would meet with the fate he deserves: hung, shot, or burned."
³⁵
The arrests of Democrats for antiwar activities and the indictment of forty-seven members of the Knights of the Golden Circle in Indiana probably backfired against Republicans by enabling Democrats to portray themselves as martyrs to civil liberty.

Subsuming all these issues was the war itself. "After a year and a half of trial," admitted one Republican, "and a pouring out of blood and treasure, and the maiming and death of thousands, we have made no

32
.
O.R
., Ser. I, Vol. 19, pt. 2, pp. 295–96.

33
. Nevins,
War
, II, 302, 303.

34
. Wood Gray,
The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads
(New York, 1942), 115; Frank L. Klement,
The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandighamand the Civil War
(Lexington, Ky., 1970), 106, 107.

35
. Gray,
Hidden Civil War
, 112.

sensible progress in putting down the rebellion. . . . The people are desirous of some change, they scarcely know what."
³⁶
This remained true even after northern armies turned back Confederate invasions at Antietam, Perryville, and Corinth. None of these battles was a clear-cut Union victory; the failure to follow them with a blow to the retreating rebels produced a feeling of letdown. In October, enemy forces stood in a more favorable position than five months earlier: Bragg's army occupied Murfreesboro in central Tennessee only thirty miles from Nashville, and Lee's army remained only a few miles from Harper's Ferry. Jeb Stuart's cavalry had thumbed their noses at the Yankees again by riding around the entire Army of the Potomac (October 10–12), raiding as far north as Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and returning to their own lines with 1,200 horses while losing only two men. If anything seemed to underscore northern military futility, this was it.

Democrats scored significant gains in the 1862 elections: the governorship of New York, the governorship and a majority of the legislature in New Jersey, a legislative majority in Illinois and Indiana, and a net increase of thirty-four congressmen. Only the fortuitous circumstance that legislative and gubernatorial elections in Ohio and Pennsylvania were held in odd-numbered years and that the Republican governors of Illinois and Indiana had been elected in 1860 to four-year terms prevented the probable loss of these posts to the Democrats in 1862. Panicky Republicans interpreted the elections as "a great, sweeping revolution of public sentiment,"
"a most serious and severe reproof."
Gleeful Democrats pronounced "Abolition Slaughtered."
³⁷
Nearly all historians have agreed: the elections were "a near disaster for the Republicans"; "a great triumph for the Democrats"; "the verdict of the polls showed clearly that the people of the North were opposed to the Emancipation Proclamation."
³⁸

But a closer look at the results challenges this conclusion. Republicans retained control of seventeen of the nineteen free-state governorships and sixteen of the legislatures. They elected several congressmen in

36
.
Ibid.
, 110.

37
. Strong,
Diary
, 271; Carl Schurz to Lincoln, Nov. 20, 1861, in
CWL
, V, 511;
Indianapolis State Sentinel
, Oct. 5, 1861, quoted in V. Jacque Voegeli,
Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro during the Civil War
(Chicago, 1967), 64.

38
. Peter J. Parish,
The American Civil War
(New York, 1975), 208–9; Joel H. Silbey, A
Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era
, 1860–1868 (New York, 1977), 144; William B. Hesseltine,
Lincoln and the War Governors
(New York, 1948), 165.

Missouri for the first time, made a net
gain
of five seats in the Senate, and retained a twenty-five-vote majority in the House after experiencing the
smallest
net loss of congressional seats in an off-year election in twenty years. It is true that the congressional delegations of the six lower-North states from New York to Illinois would have a Democratic majority for the next two years. But elsewhere the Republicans more than held their own. And the Democratic margins in most of those six states were exceedingly thin: 4,000 votes in Pennsylvania, 6,000 in Ohio, 10,000 each in New York and Indiana. These majorities could be explained, as Lincoln noted, by the absence of soldiers at the front, for scattered evidence already hinted at a large Republican edge among enlisted men, a hint that would be confirmed in future elections when absentee soldier voting was permitted.
³⁹

Although disappointed by the elections, Lincoln and the Republicans did not allow it to influence their actions. Indeed, the pace of radicalism increased during the next few months. On November 7, Lincoln removed McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac. Although military factors prompted this action, it had important political overtones. In December the House decisively rejected a Democratic resolution branding emancipation "a high crime against the Constitution," and endorsed the Emancipation Proclamation by a party-line vote. Congress also passed an enabling act requiring the abolition of slavery as a condition of West Virginia's admission to statehood.
⁴⁰

During December the Democratic press speculated that Lincoln, having been rebuked by the voters, would not issue the final Emancipation Proclamation. The president's message to Congress on December 1 fed this speculation. Lincoln again recommended his favorite plan for gradual, compensated emancipation in every state "wherein slavery now exists." Worried abolitionists asked each other: "If the President means to carry out his edict of freedom on the New Year, what is all this stuff about gradual emancipation?" But both the friends and enemies of freedom misunderstood Lincoln's admittedly ambiguous message. Some failed to notice his promise that all slaves freed "by the chances of war"—

39
.
The Tribune Almanac for
1863 (New York, 1863), 50–64; Lincoln to Carl Schurz, Nov. 10, 1862, in
CWL
, V, 494; Daniel Wallace Adams, "Illinois Soldiers and the Emancipation Proclamation,"
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society
, 67 (1974), 408–10; Oscar O. Winther, "The Soldier Vote in the Election of 1864,"
New York History
, 25 (1944), 440–58.

40
.
CG
, 37 Cong., 3 Sess., 15, 52; U.S.
Statutes at Large
, XII, 633.

including his Proclamation—would remain forever free. The Proclamation was a war measure applicable only against states in rebellion; Lincoln's gradual emancipation proposal was a peace measure to
abolish the institution
everywhere by constitutional means. The president's peroration should have left no doubt of his position: "Fellow citizens,
we
cannot escape history. . . . The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. . . . The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. . . . In
giving
freedom to the
slave
, we
assure
freedom to the
free
. . . . We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."
⁴¹

On New Year's Day Lincoln ended all speculation. The Proclamation he signed that day exempted the border states along with Tennessee and Union-controlled portions of Louisiana and Virginia. To meet the criticism that the preliminary Proclamation had invited slaves to revolt, the final edict enjoined them to "abstain from all violence." But in other respects this Proclamation went beyond the first one. Not only did it justify emancipation as an "act of justice" as well as a military necessity, but it also sanctioned the enlistment of black soldiers and sailors in Union forces.
⁴²

Here was revolution in earnest. Armed blacks were truly the
bete noire
of southern nightmares. The idea of black soldiers did not, of course, spring full-blown from Lincoln's head at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. The notion had been around since the beginning of the war, when northern blacks in several cities had volunteered for the Union army. But on the principle that it was "a white man's war," the War Department had refused to accept them. Despite the service of black soldiers in the Revolution and the War of 1812, Negroes had been barred from state militias since 1792 and the regular army had never enrolled black soldiers. The prejudices of the old order died hard. Lincoln had squelched Secretary of War Cameron's reference to arming slaves in December 1861, and the administration refused at first to accept the organization of black regiments in Kansas, occupied Louisiana, and the South Carolina sea islands during the summer of 1862.

The Union navy, however, had taken men of all colors and conditions from the outset. Blacks at sea served mainly as firemen, coal heavers, cooks, and stewards. But as early as August 1861 a group of contrabands

41
.
Boston Commonwealth
, Dec. 6, 1862;
CWL
, V, 529–37.

42
.
CWL
, VI, 28–30.

served as a gun crew on the
U.S.S. Minnesota
. In May 1862 a South Carolina slave, Robert Smalls, commandeered a dispatch boat in Charleston harbor and ran it out to the blockading fleet. Smalls became a pilot in the U. S. navy.

Meanwhile black leaders, abolitionists, and radical Republicans continued to push for enlistment of black soldiers. This would not only help the North win the war, they said; it would also help free the slaves and earn equal rights for the whole race. Frederick Douglass made the point succinctly: "Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship."
⁴³