Terrible Swift Sword (53 page)

This was of no help.
The Northern government was vigorously promoting the cotton trade, for a
variety of reasons— to assuage the New England mill owners, to improve the position
of the dollar in foreign exchange, and to persuade Southern planters that it
was good to do business with the Old Union—and the protests of the soldiers had
little effect. The War Department overruled Grant, and Sherman fumed that
Memphis now would be more useful to the Confederacy than it was when the
Confederates occupied it. Neither Bragg nor Van Dorn, he declared, could
maintain his army without the meat that was preserved by contraband salt that
came down from the North and the munitions that were bought with gold that was
paid for cotton, and he wrote to the Adjutant General that "this cotton
order is worse to us than a defeat."
⁸

The case was intricate. In the spring of 1862
Confederate Secretary of War George W. Randolph warned Major General Samuel
Jones, commanding the Confederate Department of Alabama and Western Florida,
that although a military commander was authorized to destroy export cotton if
he thought it was going to go to the enemy, it was necessary to use discretion:
"He should bear in mind that it is good policy to exchange produce for
arms and munitions of war with anyone willing to make such exchange." A
few months later Mr. Randolph notified President Davis that the Confederate commissary
general believed that "the Army cannot be subsisted without permitting
trade to some extent with Confederate ports in possession of the enemy."
As far as Mr. Randolph could see, the Confederacy could violate its policy of
keeping cotton out of Yankee hands, or it could risk the starvation of its
armed forces. He presented his own recommendation: "I advise that the
commissary general be authorized to contract for bacon and salt, and the
quartermaster general for blankets and shoes, payable in cotton, and that the
general commanding on the Mississippi be instructed to permit the cotton delivered
under these contracts to pass our lines." In the fall of the year, a
French cotton broker in New Orleans wrote to Secretary Randolph offering a
deal: he could forward 100,000 sacks of salt for the Confederate government if
in return he could get 10,000 bales of cotton, to be sent out through New
Orleans to France. He could also provide bacon, shoes, blankets, and flannel on
the same terms. President Davis wrote his own comment: "The objection to
this is the proposed shipment to a port in the possession of the enemy. If the
supplies can be obtained free from this objection it should be done
...
As a last resort we might be justified
in departing from the declared policy in regard to exports, but the necessity
should be absolute."
⁹

The trouble was that the necessity was
absolute. By the winter of 1863 Mr. Randolph's successor as Secretary of War,
James A. Seddon, was confessing that the Department had contracted for various
things from suppliers inside the Federal lines; "the contracts were of
course made reluctantly; but under a strong conviction of the necessity of resorting
to such means of obtaining adequate supplies." Such deals, he agreed,
tended to produce much more illicit trade, and sometimes demoralized good
Southern civilians, but the armies had to be fed and clothed, and sometimes
"irregular modes of supply" were the only recourse. It would probably
be necessary to do more of this, and if so the army commanders in the field
would have to get used to it.
¹⁰

It was a two-way street. Cotton was well
on its way toward a price of a dollar a pound in the Northern market; salt was
rapidly climbing at the same rate in the South. Without salt, meat could not be
preserved, armies could not be fed and even the slaves in the cotton fields
would go hungry. The Confederacy had extensive saline wells in southwestern
Virginia, and these were being exploited to the limit, but the South had never
come close to providing all of its own salt; in the three years before the war,
New Orleans alone imported about 700,000 sacks annually. Now the salt-cotton
combination became too much for any government to control; military necessity
was allied with an economic pressure that went beyond the possibility of
restraint. One of Secretary Chase's Treasury agents explained how the pressure
was felt in New Orleans:

A
sack of salt could be bought in Federally occupied New Orleans for $1.25. On
the far side of Lake Pontchartrain, in Confederate territory, each sack could
be sold for anything from $60 to $100. A trader who could take a thousand sacks
across the lake, therefore, could make $60,000 or more on an investment of
$1250; and with the money thus made he could buy cotton at ten cents a pound
with the certainty that he would get at least sixty cents for it as soon as he
got it back within the Federal lines.
¹¹
No government that ever
existed could stop a trade which dripped money as copiously as that; and in
this case the two governments which ostensibly wanted to stop it had their own
reasons for hoping that at least some of it would continue.

There was not much the army commanders
could do about it. Halleck, the new Federal generalissimo, told Grant in
mid-August to do everything he could to kill the contraband trade, but he also
tried to rationalize the matter of bringing in the cotton: the Army had to have
cotton to make tents for those 300,000 new volunteers, and anyway the
Confederates could buy munitions at Nassau with baled cotton just as easily as
they could buy them with the gold they got by selling cotton to the Yankees.
Sherman, who noticed that every time he halted a southbound shipment of
contraband at Memphis he heard anguished wails from the respectable merchants
at Cincinnati, declared angrily that "Cincinnati furnishes more contraband
goods than Charleston, and has done more to prolong the war than the State of
South Carolina."
¹²

Some soldiers protested and did the best they
could; others adjusted themselves, and possibly did better—for themselves, at
any rate, if not for the common cause. High priest of those who found
adjustment pleasant was Major General Benjamin Butler, Federal commander at New
Orleans.

At one time or another Butler was a thorn in
practically everybody's side. He was a politician of subtle skills and excellent
connections, a soldier of practically no military capacity, an opportunist
alert to every shift in the wind, and a capable administrator who gave New
Orleans a dictatorial military government as efficient as it was distasteful.
He managed to win the hatred and contempt of Southerners as no other Yankee
ever did—their mildest epithet for him was "Beast," they accused him
of everything from stealing teaspoons to insulting Southern womanhood, and Mr.
Davis at last proclaimed him "an outlaw and common enemy of mankind"
and directed that if he were ever captured he should be put to death without
trial.
¹³
This grew out of the fact that when Butler first reached
New Orleans he hunted down and hanged one William B. Mumford, a citizen who had
torn down and mangled a United States flag hoisted by Farragut's men. Inasmuch
as Mumford did this before the Federals formally took possession of the city
he had committed no crime, under military law or any other kind of law, and
good Southerners considered the hanging no better than plain murder.

Butler
was in command at New Orleans just when people began to realize that there was
something to be said for doing business with one's enemies. New Orleans, of
course, was one of the chief places where such business was done, and a special
odor hung over the cotton-sugar-salt-contraband traffic that took place under
Butler's regime. Butler himself insisted that he was scrupulously honest
throughout, and nobody ever proved anything to the contrary. Yet there always
seemed to be a dead rat back behind the wainscoting somewhere. A frustrated
Treasury agent reported that Butler "is such a
smart
man" that it would be very hard to find
anything he really wished to hide, and said that "it is the general impression
here that money will accomplish anything with the authorities." Certainly
the general's brother, Colonel Andrew J. Butler, was making all kinds of deals,
raking in profits which were estimated to run as high as $2,000,000. Despite
his title, Colonel Butler was not in the Army; he was just
with
the Army, one of a number of enterprising
merchants who had followed the Army into the cotton south. He traded in nobody
knew quite what, up the Mississippi, shipping goods in boats which the Army had
seized. He traded also across Lake Pontchartrain, in salt, and it was said that
he had made a fortune sending sugar back to New York; and, all in all, be was
typical of his time and place. The multiplicity of deals that were going on
inspired a cynical wisecrack among Union men in New Orleans. They said that
they wished Ben Butler was President of the United States: he would make millions
for himself during the first three months of his presidency, but he would go
on and win the war during the next three months.
¹⁴

What happened in the west happened also in
the east. A clerk in the Confederate War Department at Richmond wrote that
"it is sickening to behold the corruption of the commercial men,"
and he said that the Confederate capital was infested with Baltimore merchants
who were importing huge quantities of goods from the North and selling them in
Richmond at fabulous prices; some of them, he was told, were making $50,000 a
month clear profit. At the end of the year a Confederate enrolling officer
asked permission to raise a force to squelch the contraband trade that was
coming down the eastern shore of Maryland and across the Rappahannock; the
"northern Neck" of Virginia, he said, was "worse than Yankeedom
itself." But the War Department warned him that the case must be
approached with much discretion: "All trade with the enemy is demoralizing
and illegal and should, of course, be discountenanced, but at the same time,
situated as the people to a serious extent are . . . some barter or trading for
the supplies of their necessities is almost inevitable and excusable."
¹⁵

The demoralization was real; it existed
on both sides, and it was costly. A few months before the end of the war one of
Bragg's officers who had been touring Mississippi turned in a somber judgment:
"The fact is that cotton, instead of contributing to our strength, has
been the greatest element of our weakness here. Yankee gold is fast
accomplishing what

Yankee arms could never achieve—the
subjugation of this people." At that same time a committee of the Federal
Congress, finishing a survey of the illicit trade, concluded that it had cost
the North much more than it was ever worth, both physically and morally. Trade
with the enemy, said this committee, had prolonged the war and had cost
thousands of lives "and millions upon millions of treasure," and had
gone far to support the Confederate armies in the west. Occupied New Orleans,
the committee believed, had helped the Confederacy more than any of the
Confederacy's own seaports with the single exception of Wilmington.
¹⁶

In any war, the men who die for
patriotism die also for the enrichment of cold-eyed schemers who risk nothing,
and every battlefield is made uglier by the greed of men who never fight. But
what was happening here, although it included all of that, went far beyond it.
This was the conclusive evidence that the warring states were tragically and
mysteriously bound together. Fighting to destroy each other, the two nations
still had to have each other's help.

2.
The Ultimate Meaning

In the early part of the war Abraham
Lincoln had warned that it might become a remorseless revolutionary struggle,
and at the end of it he remarked that neither he nor any man had expected a
result as "fundamental and astounding" as it finally brought; and he
confessed that he himself had not so much dominated events as he had been
dominated by them. In the year that began with the retreat from Bull Run and
ended with the retreat from the Chickahominy, the war became too great for any
man to manage. After the summer of 1862 one could hope only to understand
it—and, understanding, to give meaning to it. When he returned to Washington
from Harrison's Landing, Mr. Lincoln found this was his greatest task.

The
war was going to run its course; that much was clear. In both the east and west
the Federal government had lost the initiative, and even though much had been
won it must nerve itself for a new effort greater than any it had made before.
Presidential Secretary John Nicolay wrote that the second week in July was
"a very blue week here," and went on to say: "I don't think I
have ever heard more croaking since the war began than during the past ten
days. I am utterly amazed to find so little real faith and courage under
difficulties among public leaders and men of intelligence." Attorney General
Bates admitted that it was hard to be cheerful, and he saw "no foresight,
no activity, no enterprise, no dash" in what was being done. Thomas Scott,
concluding a stint as Assistant Secretary of War, told Barlow that people felt
gloomy and were losing confidence, and predicted that unless some military
success were won soon "all will be lost and separation of the states
become inevitable."
¹

This was not wholly the result of
military failure. The war of late had gone badly, but it had also gone far: so
far that men had to re-examine the basis on which they were fighting. This was
what was really disturbing. The people of the North had formally declared that
they were making war solely to restore the Union; and yet this war, which could
not conceivably have occurred if slavery had not existed, was bound to become
a war about slavery if it went on long enough, and that moment was now at hand.
(Of all the miscalculations ever made by an American soldier, the greatest may
well have been General McClellan’s notion that victory deferred would leave the
peculiar institution undamaged.) When Northern armies entered the South they
touched cotton, and the government had to do something about it, even though
what it did was unrehearsed, irregular, and quite unsatisfactory; they also
touched slavery, and government was going to have to do something about that
too, although nobody could be sure what effect this might ultimately have.

Whatever
the effect might be, President and Congress knew that it was time to move.

On July 12 Congress passed a new
confiscation act, providing sterner penalties for secession. Persons convicted
of treason, said the act, would suffer death and their slaves would be freed,
and people who joined in the rebellion or aided it in any way would be subject
to fine or imprisonment and the loss of their slaves. Furthermore, any slaves
who escaped from, were abandoned by, or were captured from people engaged in
rebellion "shall be forever free of their servitude and not again be held
as slaves." The fugitive slave law would be inoperative unless the
fugitives belonged to loyal masters, and the President might use ex-slaves in
any way he chose to help win the war. Finally, the President was authorized to
make provision for the transportation and resettlement "in some tropical
country beyond the limits of the United States" of any slaves thus freed
who were willing to emigrate.

This was a
declaration of intent rather than a solid piece of legislation. Enforcement of the
act was left hazy, and Mr. Lincoln was startled to find Congress asserting its
power to free a slave within a state; he even prepared a veto message, and was
induced to approve the act only when Congress adopted a proviso that the slaves
in question were war captives and, as such, government property. (If the
government itself owned slaves it of course could free them without raising
constitutional questions.) This bill plainly restated the fact that slaves were
property, and it offered nothing at all to the Negro who was owned by a
Unionist.
²

Nevertheless, it was a step of great
significance. If it did not quite mean emancipation it meant that Congress was
prepared to accept emancipation. Property which would become non-property if
the owner's political orientation was considered defective had a most uncertain
future. The bill invited the President to go as far as he liked in using former
slaves to fight slavery—a leaf, after all, from the book of old John .Brown—and
it rested on the unspoken assumption that the war itself was writing slavery's
doom.

This assumption Mr.
Lincoln shared. On the day Congress approved the confiscation bill he called
Senators and Representatives from the border states to the White House and
urged them to support the plan for compensated emancipation, and his plea
amounted to a statement that slavery was dying and that in self-interest the
slave states ought to realize what they could on an investment which eventually
would be wiped out.

"If the war continue long,"
said the President, "as it must, if the object be not sooner attained, the
institution in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and
abrasion—by the mere incidents of war. It will be gone, and you will have
nothing valuable in lieu of it." In their consultation with self-interest,
he said, the border states need do no more than make up their minds: "I do
not speak of emancipation
at once,
but
of a
decision
at
once to emancipate gradually."

It did no good. Of the twenty-seven
border state men at this meeting, only eight would go along. The rest saw objections:
the plan would cost too much, it would make the secessionists angrier than
ever, it would probably lead in the end to unconstitutional emancipation all
across the board— and in short they would have none of it.
³
Behaving
so, they played into the hands of the abolitionists. If the slavery problem had
to be touched at all—and by the summer of 1862 it obviously did—compensated
emancipation represented the gentlest approach possible. Now Mr. Lincoln was
informed that this gentleness would get no response from the very people it
was supposed to please. If, thereafter, border state sensibilities meant much
less to him it is not to be wondered at; border state support just was not
there when he needed it most.

Broadly
speaking, the border state men represented the moderates, the men who felt
either that slavery was acceptable or at least that it must not be interfered
with by any government in Washington. To carry moderate Northerners with him,
Mr. Lincoln had overruled every Federal officer who tried to push the
government into emancipation—first General Fremont, then Secretary Cameron,
most recently General Hunter. The moderates had applauded, but their applause
amounted to little more than a polite patter-patter of clapped hands. Now a
larger, harder, longer war effort was needed, and Mr. Lincoln had to rally men
who had iron in them, the men who were ready to be wholly immoderate in their
backing of the Union cause. These included of course the abolitionists, who
were vigorous and noisy but still a minority. Much more important, however,
were the men who had been willing to let slavery alone as a matter of tactics,
but who nevertheless had deep antislavery convictions. These men were in a
majority in the North, and the war itself had come because the party which
spoke for them had won the election in 1860; leaders of the cotton South had
believed, probably correctly, that slavery must eventually die if that party controlled
the government. To suppose now that these men would accept defeat and disunion
rather than try to destroy slavery outright was simply to delude one's self.

Mr. Lincoln's attitude was hardening,
and so was his language. Reverdy Johnson went to New Orleans on a mission for
the State Department, and sent back word that Louisiana Unionists were falling
away from the faith because they feared the Federal government was headed
toward emancipation.

Mr. Lincoln replied curtly that he
doubted it, and he warned: "It may as well be understood, once for all,
that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed."
When Cuthbert Bullitt, a Treasury official in New Orleans, turned in a report
similar to Johnson's, the President asked him if the Louisiana loyalists really
imagined that he would lose the war in order to save their slaves. Then he went
on, with the tenseness of a man who has had all the argument he wants:
"What would you do in my position? Would you drop the war where it is? Or
would you prosecute it in future with elderstalk squirts charged with
rosewater? Would you deal lighter blows rather than heavier ones? Would you
give up the contest leaving any available means unapplied?" For himself,
he said, he would not give up. He would do everything possible to save the
Union, and he made but one qualification: "I shall do nothing in malice.
What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing." Some time after this
he explained to the painter, F. B. Carpenter, that in this summer of 1862 he
felt that he had "reached the end of the rope," and (with a return to
the figure of speech used in the letter to Reverdy Johnson) that "we had
about played our last card, and must change our tactics or lose the war."
⁴

He changed his
tactics and thereby changed the character of the war . . . and the future of
America.

Ten days after he had his talk with the
border state men the President held a cabinet meeting. To this July 22 cabinet
meeting he presented a certain paper, saying that he did not want any advice on
the substance of it, because he had made up his mind; he just wanted his
cabinet members to know what was coming, and he would hear any comments that
they might have to make. The paper was a document which has come down in
history as the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

It began as a simple recital of the fact
that Congress had passed a new confiscation act, and it warned all of the
people who might be affected by that act to take note of its provisions and be
guided accordingly. It served notice that at the next session of Congress the
President would once again press for compensated emancipation, and it went on
to say that the sole purpose of the war remained what it always had been— to
restore and maintain "the constitutional relation between the general
government and each and all of the states wherein that relation is now
suspended or disturbed." Then came the meat of it:

"And, as
a
fit
and necessary military measure for effecting this purpose, I, as
Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, do order and
declare 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
states, wherein the constitutional authority
of
the
United States shall not then be practically recognized, submitted to, and
maintained, shall then, thenceforward, and forever, be free."
⁵

In many ways this was
an odd document. Clearly, the President had doubts about the legal basis for
emancipation. He had always insisted that Congress lacked power to overturn
slavery, and even stout antislavery men like Secretary Chase agreed with him;
the whole thing now was pinned to the President's war powers—he would issue
this proclamation in his military capacity, as a military measure. Even odder
was the fact that the proclamation would apply to the embattled Confederate
states but not to slave states like Kentucky and Maryland which were still in
the Union, nor to those parts
of
the seceded states
which were now under Federal control. This writ, in other words, would run only
in those states where the Federal government had no power to enforce its writs;
unless it were heeded by men who were already fighting like grim death to get
entirely out from under the Federal government, it would be heeded by nobody.
Finally, the proclamation did no more than announce that another proclamation
would be issued later unless the war were won much more speedily than anyone
anticipated.