A Disease in the Public Mind (45 page)

For the rest of the night and much of the following day, the remnants of McDowell's shattered regiments reeled behind the forts that General Scott had constructed along the Potomac. Even more dismaying were wagons loaded with 1,154 wounded. Behind them on the battlefield they left 560 corpses. No one knew that Confederate losses almost equaled the Union's toll. For the next few days, Lincoln had to endure an avalanche of criticism from newspaper editors, blaming everyone and everything for the disaster. Even the picnicking senators and congressmen and their lady friends shared in the obloquy. One critic claimed that the politicians had been among the first to run and communicated their panic to the soldiers.

Unhappiest of these believers in John-Brown-fabricated illusions of easy victory was Congressman Alfred Ely of New York. He had not run fast enough and would spend the next six months in a Richmond prison.

Newspapers fanned the flames of war on both sides. James Gordon Bennett, while still damning Republicans at every opportunity, had committed the
New York Herald
to the defense of the Union. One of the paper's correspondents described how rebel artillery had taken special pleasure in blasting groups of Union wounded, and “rebel fiends in human shape” bayoneted helpless dying men. Other rampaging rebels had amputated heads from Union corpses and kicked them around the battlefield like footballs. The newsman claimed these and other sadistic acts revealed what Southerners meant by their “boasted chivalry.” He was faking it, of course, hoping hatred would restore the North's shattered morale.

At the end of the week, President Lincoln received a letter from Horace Greeley, which began, “This is my seventh sleepless night.” He told Lincoln that “the gloom in this city [New York] is funereal—for our dead at Bull Run were many and they lie unburied yet. On every brow sits sullen scorching black despair.” Greeley did not care what the president did next, as long as it involved withdrawal from the war. Lincoln could disband the army, recognize the Southern Confederacy, or call for a national constitutional
convention—the
Tribune
would support him. Greeley closed the letter, “Yours in the depth of bitterness.” Whether the latter word was directed at himself, or Lincoln, or Charles Dana (whom he would soon dismiss) was unclear.
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Lincoln did not answer the erratic editor. Instead, the president requested and obtained from Congress the power to raise another 500,000 men. In Richmond, President Jefferson Davis asked the Confederate Congress to summon 400,000 men. Civil war—on a scale never foreseen or seldom imagined by anyone North or South—had begun.

CHAPTER 24

The Third Emancipation Proclamation

In the summer of 1862, the Union cause seemed to be going nowhere. Two victories in the west made a hitherto unknown general named Ulysses Grant the hero of the moment. But a Confederate army attacked his army at Shiloh, Tennessee, and came close to inflicting a catastrophic defeat. A staggering 23,741 men were killed, wounded, or missing, making it the bloodiest clash ever fought on American soil. In the east, General George McClellan, commanding an even larger Union army, was mired in mud and equally staggering casualties on the Yorktown Peninsula, still a long way from Richmond. Intimidated by General Robert E. Lee's aggressive tactics, McClellan would soon retreat to Washington with his demoralized battalions.

Horace Greeley sent President Lincoln a letter, which he published on the front page of the
New York Tribune
and titled “the Prayer of Twenty Millions.” Claiming he spoke for the entire population of the North, Greeley told the president that he was “strangely and disastrously remiss in the discharge of your official and imperative duty.” What was that duty? To do
more to free the South's slaves. “We have fought wolves with the devices of sheep,” Greeley cried. It was time to start fighting “slavery with liberty.”
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Abraham Lincoln's reply was succinct and candid. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery.” If he could save the Union without freeing a single slave, he would do it. If he had to free all the slaves first, he would do that. The preservation of the Union was his
official
duty, as president. It did not in any way modify his “oft-expressed
personal
wish that all men everywhere should be free.”
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Behind these words lay a political no-mans-land that Lincoln had been traversing for a year. Four border states with tens of thousands of slaves Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware—had not seceded from the Union. Their politicians repeatedly warned Lincoln that any attack on slavery would turn their voters into Confederates, making the South too strong to defeat. Lincoln's native state was especially important. “To lose Kentucky,” he told a friend, “is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.”

Meanwhile, Lincoln refused to relinquish his search for a way to end the bloodshed by negotiation. The president invited politicians from these four border states to the White House and spent hours trying to persuade them to accept compensated emancipation to free their slaves. He told them that this policy would persuade other states with large numbers of Unionist voters such as North Carolina and Virginia to accept the same offer and quit the Confederacy. But the president got nowhere with these timid senators and congressmen. All of them hesitated to change what they called their “social arrangements.” Thomas Jefferson's race war nightmare still infested their souls.
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Elsewhere, several Union generals had improvised emancipation programs on their own authority. General Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts, an ex-Democrat and canny lawyer, decided he had no obligation to return slaves who fled to his protection at Fortress Monroe, the seacoast bastion where Captain Robert E. Lee and his bride had encountered Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831. Butler reasoned that slaves of rebel Virginians were now “contraband of war” and their owners had no claim on them. This clever idea became unworkable when a Maryland runaway took shelter in
the camp of an Ohio regiment. When the abolitionist-inclined Midwesterners refused to let his pursuers search their camp, a Maryland congressman warned the president that the state might soon abandon the Union.
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Elsewhere two other Union generals declared martial law and freed the blacks in states where they were in command. General John C. Fremont, the losing Republican candidate in 1856, applied this idea to Missouri, creating consternation in nearby slave-owning Kentucky. General David Hunter, from abolitionist-minded northern New York, issued a similar declaration for all slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, even though he commanded only a few offshore islands and bits of their seacoasts.

Lincoln fired the defiant Fremont and declared Hunter's decree “altogether void.” The president told abolitionist leaning Salmon Chase, the secretary of the Treasury, who favored Hunter's move, “No commanding general shall do such a thing, upon my responsibility, without consulting me.” In the tradition of George Washington, he was determined to protect his presidential powers from cooption and trivialization.
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The abolitionists in Congress were infuriated. Since the war began, Senator Charles Sumner had been urging fellow senators to press upon Lincoln “the duty of emancipation.” Senators Wade of Ohio and Chandler of Michigan boasted that they were often in the White House until midnight reminding Lincoln of this obligation. They had created a Committee on the Conduct of the War, which interrogated and rebuked generals such as McClellan who they thought insufficiently aggressive on the battlefield. They repeatedly expressed their contempt for West Pointers and their military science, which they considered synonymous with cowardice.
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•      •      •

Neither Horace Greeley nor Senator Sumner knew that a month before the editor hurled his rebuke at the president, Lincoln had summoned two of his cabinet members to the White House and read to them the draft of a proclamation freeing all the slaves in the seceded states. A week later, he read it to his entire cabinet. Some approved, others were dubious. Secretary of State William Seward warned the president that if he issued it now, it would be
regarded as “the last shriek” of an exhausted government. It would be wiser to wait until he could announce it when it was backed by a “military success.”

The words were scarcely out of Seward's mouth when news of another Union army catastrophe inflicted by General Robert E. Lee reached the White House—the Second Battle of Bull Run. A weary president decided Seward was right and put the proclamation away to hope for better days. That was why there was no mention of it in the president's response to Horace Greeley.
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Meanwhile, abolitionist attacks on Lincoln grew more ferocious. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher declared that there was not a line in any of Lincoln's messages that might not have been written by the Czar of Russia, Emperor Louis Napoleon of France, or Jefferson Davis. “Lincoln would like to have God on his side but he must have Kentucky,” sneered another abolitionist. Wendell Phillips called the president a mere “county court advocate” whose antislavery principles were invisible. Among the many abolitionists Lincoln disliked, Phillips was at the top of the list. “I don't see how God lets him live!” the president once exclaimed to a White House visitor after hearing about one of the Boston aristocrat's denunciations.
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•      •      •

Abraham Lincoln was not an overtly religious man. He never joined an established church. But he was a reader of the Bible from boyhood and came to believe that Americans were “an almost chosen people” whose rise held out “a great hope to all the people of the world.” In his first inaugural address, that belief had been the source of his plea to the South to have a “patient confidence” in the eventual wisdom of the people and return to the Union, trusting in God's guidance.

When Jefferson Davis decided to fire on Fort Sumter and the war began, Lincoln's relationship with God entered a new dimension. To his friend Noah Brooks, a reporter for the
Sacramento Daily Union,
he confessed that he was “driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.” As the bloodshed multiplied and the corpses became a towering mountain in his anguished mind, Lincoln repeatedly
turned to God, seeking strength to endure the seesaw struggle and wisdom to choose the right path through the slaughter.

Again and again, Lincoln told people he prayed not to get God on his side but to get his presidency on God's side. He urged people to make this the central theme of their prayers for him. To the end of his life, Congressman James F. Wilson of Iowa remembered the day a delegation of abolitionist clergymen admonished the president to take a more resolute stand on slavery. They warned him that if he did not “do right,” the nation was doomed.

Lincoln's face, Wilson said, “came aglow like the face of a prophet.” He rose to his full six feet four height and stretched out his arm. “My faith is greater than yours,” he said. “I believe He will compel us to do right in order that He may do these things, not because we desire them, but because they accord with His plans for this nation.”
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During a talk with two other antislavery clergymen, Lincoln urged them to understand that they were part of a movement, which meant they talked mostly to each other. As president, he heard opinions from many sorts of people throughout the nation and “it appears to me the great masses of the country care comparatively little about the Negro.” He urged them to go home and try to bring more people to their views. They could say anything they pleased about him, if it would help, he added wryly.

Abruptly, he became serious. “When the hour comes for dealing with slavery,” he said. “I trust I will be willing to do my duty, though it cost me my life.”
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•      •      •

Not long after General Lee's victory at the Second Battle of Bull Run, he invaded the North, hoping to end the war. The Union army met him in a tremendous battle at Antietam, Maryland. On the eve of this clash, Lincoln made a solemn vow to God. If the Union army defeated Lee, he would issue the proclamation. After another bloodletting on a par with Shiloh, Lee retreated to Virginia. The president decided Antietam looked enough like a Union victory to publish the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862.

Still hoping for a negotiated peace, Lincoln announced he would wait until January 1, 1863, to make the proclamation official. The public reaction in the North was not encouraging. “While commendation in newspapers and by distinguished individuals is all that a vain man could wish,” Lincoln wrote to Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, “the stocks have declined and troops come forward more slowly than ever.”

Worse, the Republican Party took a drubbing in the November midterm elections. Kentucky was carried for the Union using totally desperate tactics. At each polling place, there were detachments of Union troops. When a Democrat arrived to vote, the officer in command warned him that he could not guarantee his safety on his return to his home. Most of the time, the man decided not to vote. Kentucky's fraudulently elected delegation enabled the Republicans to retain control of the House of Representatives. If the Democrats had won, they would have had the power to cut off funding for the war.
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