Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (112 page)

In both Whitehall and on the Quai d'Orsay a sentiment favoring an offer of mediation grew stronger as reports of new Confederate victories filtered across the Atlantic. By bringing the war to an end, mediation might prove the quickest and safest way to get cotton. A joint offer by

15
. Adams,
Britain and the Civil War
, II, 19.

16
. The
Times
quoted in Owsley,
King Cotton Diplomacy
, 297, in Crook,
The North, the South, and the Powers
, 245, and in Nevins,
War
, II, 246; Eduard Thouvenel quoted in Crook,
The North, the South, and the Powers
, 247.

several powers—Britain, France, Russia, and perhaps Austria and Prussia—would be most effective, for the North could not ignore the united opinion of Europe and even the bellicose Seward could scarcely declare war on all of them. A mediation proposal would be tantamount to recognition of Confederate independence. Rumors that such a move was afoot caused euphoria among southern diplomats and plunged the American legation into gloom. "I am more hopeful," wrote Slidell from Paris, "than I have been at any moment since my arrival." In London, James Mason "look[ed] now for intervention speedily in some form."
¹⁷
Henry Adams reported "the current . . . rising every hour and running harder against us than at any time since the Trent affair." Consul Thomas Dudley in Liverpool, depressed by his failure to apprehend the
Alabama
, reported that "we are more in danger of intervention than we have been at any previous period. . . . They are all against us and would rejoice at our downfall."
¹⁸

The European belief that defeat might induce Lincoln to accept mediation misjudged his determination to fight through to victory. "I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die," Lincoln had said, and he meant it. Even after the setback at Second Bull Run, Seward told the French minister that "we will not admit the division of the Union . . . at any price. . . . There is no possible compromise." Such obstinacy compelled the proponents of mediation to pin their hopes on a Democratic triumph in the northern elections. Betraying a typical British misunderstanding of the American constitutional system, Foreign Minister Russell expected that Democratic control of the House would force Lincoln to change his foreign policy. "The Democratic party may by that time [November] have got the ascendancy," wrote Russell in October. "I heartily wish them success."
¹⁹

So did Robert E. Lee, as he invaded Maryland to conquer a peace. The fate of diplomacy rode with Lee in this campaign. The Federals "got a very complete smashing" at Bull Run, wrote Palmerston to Russell on September 14, "and it seems not altogether unlikely that still greater disasters await them, and that even Washington or Baltimore

17
. Slidell to Jefferson Davis, July 25, 1862, Mason to Mrs. Mason, July 20, 1862, quoted in Hudson Strode,
Jefferson Davis: Confederate President
(New York, 1959), 294, 292.

18
. Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., July 19, 1861, in Ford,
Cycle of Adams Letters
, I, 166; Dudley quoted in Strode,
Davis
, 294.

19
. Seward and Russell quoted in Owsley,
King Cotton Diplomacy
, 330, 353.

may fall into the hands of the Confederates. If this should happen, would it not be time for us to consider whether . . . England and France might not address the contending parties and recommend an arrangement upon the basis of separation?" Russell was ready and willing. On September 17—the very day of the fighting at Sharpsburg—he concurred in the plan to offer mediation, adding that if the North refused, "we ought ourselves to recognise the Southern States as an independent State." But even before reports of Antietam reached England (news required ten days or more to cross the Atlantic), Palmerston turned cautious. On September 23 he told Russell that the outcome of the campaign in Maryland "must have a great effect on the state of affairs. If the Federals sustain a great defeat, they may be at once ready for mediation, and the iron should be struck while it is hot. If, on the other hand, they should have the best of it, we may wait awhile and see what may follow."
²⁰
Having learned of Lee's retreat to Virginia, Palmerston backed off. "These last battles in Maryland have rather set the North up again," he wrote to Russell early in October. "The whole matter is full of difficulty, and can only be .cleared up by some more decided events between the contending armies."
²¹

But Antietam did not cool the ardor of Russell and Gladstone for recognition. They persisted in bringing the matter before the cabinet on October 28, despite Palmerston's repeated insistence that matters had changed since mid-September, "when the Confederates seemed to be carrying all before them. . . . I am very much come back to our original view that we must continue merely to be lookers-on till the war shall have taken a more decided turn."
²²
The cabinet voted Russell and Gladstone down. The French weighed in at this point with a suggestion that Britain, France, and Russia propose a six months' armistice—during which the blockade would be suspended. This so blatantly favored the South that pro-Union Russia quickly rejected it. The British cabinet, after two days of discussion, also turned it down.

Thus ended the South's best chance for European intervention. It did not end irrevocably, for the military situation remained fluid and most

20
. This correspondence is conveniently published in James V. Murfin,
The Gleam of Bayonets: The Battle of Antietam and Robert E. Lee's Maryland Campaign, September 1862
(New York, 1965), 394, 396–97, 399–400.

21
. Jenkins,
Britain and the War for the Union
, II, 170; Murfin,
Gleam of Bayonets
, 400–401.

22
. Palmerston to Russell, Oct. 22, 1862, in Owsley,
King Cotton Diplomacy
, 351.

Britons remained certain that the North could never win. But at least they had avoided losing. Antietam had, in Charles Francis Adams's understatement, "done a good deal to restore our drooping credit here."
²³
It had done more; by enabling Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation the battle also ensured that Britain would think twice about intervening against a government fighting for freedom as well as Union.

II

On September 22, five days after the battle of Antietam, Lincoln called his cabinet into session. He had made a covenant with God, said the president, that if the army drove the enemy from Maryland he would issue his Emancipation Proclamation. "I think the time has come," he continued. "I wish it were a better time. I wish that we were in a better condition. The action of the army against the rebels has not been quite what I should have best liked." Nevertheless, Antietam was a victory and Lincoln intended to warn the rebel states that unless they returned to the Union by January 1 their slaves "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." The cabinet approved, though Montgomery Blair repeated his warning that this action might drive border-state elements to the South and give Democrats "a club . . . to beat the Administration" in the elections. Lincoln replied that he had exhausted every effort to bring the border states along. Now "we must make the forward movement" without them. "They [will] acquiesce, if not immediately, soon." As for the Democrats, "their clubs would be used against us take what course we might."
²⁴

The Proclamation would apply only to states in rebellion on January 1. This produced some confusion, because the edict thus appeared to "liberate" only those slaves beyond Union authority while retaining in bondage all those within the government's reach. A few disappointed radicals and abolitionists looked upon it this way. So did tories and some liberals in England. The conservative British press affected both to abhor and to ridicule the measure: to abhor it because it might encourage

23
. Adams to C. F. Adams, Jr., Oct. 17, 1862, in Ford,
Cycle of Adams Letters
, I, 192.

24
. David Donald, ed.,
Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase
(New York, 1954), 149–52; Howard K. Beale, ed.,
Diary of Gideon Welles
, 3 vols. (New York, 1960), I, 142–45; John G. Nicolay and John Hay,
Abraham Lincoln: A History
, 10 vols. (New York, 1890), VI, 158–63; the text of the Procla mation is in
CWL
, V, 433–36.

a servile rebellion that would eclipse the horrors of the 1857 Sepoy uprising in India; to ridicule it because of its hypocritical impotence. "Where he has no power Mr. Lincoln will set the negroes free; where he retains power he will consider them as slaves," declared the London
Times
. "This is more like a Chinaman beating his two swords together to frighten his enemy than like an earnest man pressing forward his cause."
²⁵

But such remarks missed the point and misunderstood the president's prerogatives under the Constitution. Lincoln acted under his war powers to seize enemy resources; he had no constitutional power to act against slavery in areas loyal to the United States. The Proclamation would turn Union forces into armies of liberation after January 1—if they could win the war. And it also invited the slaves to help them win it. Most antislavery Americans and Britons recognized this. "We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree," wrote Frederick Douglass, while William Lloyd Garrison considered it "an act of immense historic consequence."
²⁶
A British abolitionist pronounced September 22 "a memorable day in the annals of the great struggle for the freedom of an oppressed and despised race"; a radical London newspaper believed it "a gigantic stride in the paths of Christian and civilized progress."
²⁷
Lincoln's own off-the-record analysis showed how much his conception of the war had changed since ten months earlier, when he had deprecated a "remorseless revolutionary struggle." After January 1, Lincoln told an official of the Interior Department, "the character of the war will be changed. It will be one of subjugation. . . . The [old] South is to be destroyed and replaced by new propositions and ideas."
²⁸

Would the army fight for freedom? From an Indiana colonel came words that could have answered for most soldiers. Few of them were abolitionists, he wrote, but they nevertheless wanted "to destroy everything that in
aught
gives the rebels strength," including slavery, so "this army will sustain the emancipation proclamation and enforce it with

25
.
Times
, Oct. 7, 1862.

26
.
Douglass' Monthly
, Oct. 1862, p. 721;
Liberator
, Sept. 26, 1862.

27
. Quoted in Jenkins,
Britain and the War for the Union
, II, 153, and Nevins,
War
, II, 270.

28
. T. J. Barnett to Samuel L. M. Barlow, Sept. 25, 1862, Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library. These words were Barnett's paraphrase of Lincoln's comments, but the president's sentiments were "indicated plainly enough," according to Barnett.

the bayonet." A Democratic private in the Army of the Potomac whose previous letters had railed against abolitionists and blacks now expressed support for "putting away any institution if by so doing it will help put down the rebellion, for I hold that nothing should stand in the way of the Union—niggers, nor anything else." General-in-Chief Halleck explained his position to Grant: "The character of the war has very much changed within the last year. There is now no possible hope of reconciliation. . . . We must conquer the rebels or be conquered by them. . . . Every slave withdrawn from the enemy is the equivalent of a white man put
hors de combat
."
²⁹

But would McClellan and officers of the Army of the Potomac go along with this? Much Republican opposition to McClellan stemmed from the belief that he would not. And indeed, the general's first response to the Proclamation indicated indecision. He considered it "infamous" and told his wife that he "could not make up my mind to fight for such an accursed doctrine as that of a servile insurrection." McClellan consulted Democratic friends in New York, who advised him "to submit to the Presdt's proclamation & quietly continue doing [your] duty as a soldier."
³⁰
But some of McClellan's associates stirred up opposition to the new policy. Fitz-John Porter denounced this "absurd proclamation of a political coward." A staff officer confided to a colleague that Lee's army had not been "bagged" at Sharpsburg because "that is not the game. The object is that neither army shall get much advantage of the other; that both shall be kept in the field till they are exhausted, when we will make a compromise and save slavery." When word of this conversation reached Lincoln he cashiered the officer to "make an example" and put a stop to such "silly, treasonable expressions."
³¹
Belatedly awakening to the danger of such loose talk among his officers, McClellan on October 7 issued a general order reminding them of the necessity for military subordination to civil authority. "The