Terrible Swift Sword (68 page)

Like
Lee, McClellan was led to pause. On September 19 he got troops down to the bank
of the Potomac, and Fitz John Porter thrust a detachment across the river to
see where the Rebels had gone. The next morning this detachment found out that
the Rebels had not gone far. A. P. Hill struck it hard, driving it back into
Maryland with substantial losses, and thereafter the Army of the Potomac
remained in camp and tried to repair battle damages. It had suffered from straggling,
too. George Gordon Meade, temporarily commanding Hooker's corps, reported that
the corps had fewer than 6000 men present for duty the day after the battle;
five days later it numbered more than 14,000. In one division alone, 4000 men
returned to the ranks in those five days.
³
Like Lee's army, this
army had been hurt.

McClellan had no intention of following
up the victory until his army had been fully restored to health; a reasonable
idea, in view of his abiding conviction that Lee's army was always larger than
his. It did occur to him, however, that he ought to follow up on the political
advantages which the victory seemed to offer, and he set out quickly to demand
a reorganization of the War Department and a free hand for himself. On
September 20, while Lee was trying to find some way to get north of the Potomac
and renew the fighting, McClellan wrote to Mrs. McClellan that he had taken
his stand:

"I have insisted that Stanton shall
be removed & that Halleck shall give way to me as Comdr. in Chief. I will
not serve under him—for he is an incompetent fool—in no way fit for the
important place he holds.
...
The
only safety for the country & for me is to get rid of lots of them."
That evening he sent her another letter along the same line: "I hope that
my position will be determined this week. Through certain friends of mine I
have taken the stand that Stanton must leave & that Halleck must restore my
old place to me. Unless these two conditions are fulfilled I will leave the
service. I feel that I have done all that can be asked in twice saving the
country. If I continue in its service I have at least the right to demand a
guarantee." Meditatively, he went on: "You should see my soldiers
now!
You never saw anything like their enthusiasm.
It surpasses anything you ever imagined."
⁴

It seemed for a time that some such
reorganization would come to pass. The Interior Department clerk and political
eavesdropper T. J. Barnett, who had an acute ear for gossip which he was not
always able to appraise accurately, wrote to McClellan's friend Barlow on September
19 that things looked bad for the radicals: "McClellan is the acknowledged
man. Unless I much mistake me, henceforth he will have a
party
that shall bestride these lilliputians. I
think a new and conservative era has commenced; & that the day of little
men & demagogues is waning."
⁵

To an extent, Barnett was right. One day
was waning, a long day in the life of the republic, the last of its light going
out as the shadows rose out of the valley of Antietam Creek and darkened the
heights where men had fought so hard. Morning would bring a new day and not
everyone could recognize it immediately. Perhaps the only man who really saw
what Antietam meant was Abraham Lincoln, and he could do what neither Lee nor
McClellan could do: follow up the opportunity which the battle presented. He
had been waiting for a victory, and at last he had one—shaded, incomplete, unexploited,
but still a victory. He would give it a meaning which the soldiers could not
give it. On September
22
he called his cabinet together to present the
final draft of the preliminary Proclamation of Emancipation.

There
were no dramatics, because none were needed. Mr. Lincoln even opened the
session by reading a chapter from the topical humorist, Artemus Ward, which
struck Secretary Stanton as a most unseemly way to behave on so great a day.
Then he laid the book aside and took up the proclamation, which he had put into
final form the day before, and when he presented it he mused quietly as a man
might who, doing a great deed, believed that God's hand had been on his shoulder.
As Secretary Welles remembered it, the President said that while he waited for
victory over the army of invasion he had made what amounted to a covenant with
God: a victory over Lee would mean that God intended the slaves to be free,
and the President of the United States would guide himself accordingly. It
might seem strange, Mr. Lincoln went on, that he should make such a covenant
when his own mind was not really clear about things, but that was how it had
been. Now Lee had been beaten, and the meaning was unmistakable: "God had
decided this question in favor of the slaves."
⁶

As the President spoke, one fear that he
had carried ever since Fort Sumter dropped from his shoulders. Montgomery Blair
held it up to view for the last time: Would not this action carry the border
states over into secession?

Here was the question which always
before had brought paralysis. The border states, where slaveowners upheld the
Union, had been nursed along with great care. Twice the President had
overruled antislavery pronouncements, lest the border be lost because freedom
was too great a word; but the border would not listen when he spoke of
compensated emancipation, and the hope that a slave-owning society might,
under exceptionally favorable conditions, read the signs of the times and
adjust itself had finally died. It would never happen, such a society
being—because of what it stood upon—too rigid for any adjustment whatever.
Answering Mr. Blair, the President simply said that he had thought about the
border state problem but that it was too late, and that right now "the
difficulty was as great not to act as to act." He had argued with the
border state people and it had been in vain, and it seemed to Mr. Lincoln that "slavery
had received its death blow from slave-holders—it could not survive the
rebellion."
⁷

The
same thought occurred to Secretary Chase. After the meeting he told John Hay
that the behavior of the slaveholders had been "a most wonderful history
of the insanity of a class that the world had ever seen." If (Chase went
on) the slave states had remained in the Union the peculiar institution might
have gone on living for many years; it was protected, and no party, no aroused
public feeling in the North, could hope to do much to it. By going to war the
slavery people had "madly placed in the very path of destruction"
the institution which they insisted must be preserved at any price.
⁸

Truly
it was too late. Nearly a year earlier the President had told Congress that he
hoped to win the war without letting it become "a violent and remorseless
revolutionary struggle," but the hope had been vain. Violent enough, in
all conscience, the war had been, from Fort Donelson and Shiloh to Gaines's
Mill and Antietam, the violence growing greater and deadlier with each battle.
As the war grew more violent it grew larger, and as its dimensions were
enlarged so also was its meaning; and hereafter it would be revolutionary,
waged after the revolutionary manner—without remorse. It was no longer a war to
erase a boundary line from a map, but a war fought to erase a word from the
books. The Emancipation Proclamation simply ratified a process that had been
started long before.

There was a deep
continuity at work here. Many years earlier (just about fourscore and seven, as
a matter of fact) the people had found it necessary to carry the word
"freedom" into a war already begun, and by doing so they had broken
an empire and put the world in a ferment. Now they were at it again, and their
President was proclaiming freedom "thenceforward and forever" as a
rallying cry: and the most vital, disturbing and unforgettable word in the
language was being placed at the center of the nation's ideas about the future.
Nothing would ever be quite the same after this.

. . . Secretary Seward treated himself
to a quiet and mildly rueful chuckle as he reflected on the strange ways of
destiny. Years ago he had warned that something like today's business was going
to happen because slavery condemned the nation to an irresistible conflict in
which a higher law would come into operation, and the words had sounded
dangerous and Seward had been denied a presidential nomination as a result.
Now he thought about it, and he wrote to his daughter: "Having for twenty
years warned the people of the coming of this crisis, and suffered all the
punishment they could inflict upon me for my foresight and fidelity, I am not
displeased with the position in which I find myself now—of one who has not put
forth a violent hand to verify my own predictions." He did hope that the
timing of this proclamation was right.
⁹
The proclamation was read,
commented upon, given a minor correction or so, and at last signed, and on the
next day it was made public, to tell all men that the government had changed
its policy; and at close range it was hard for many people to see just what had
happened and what it meant. David Strother, who called himself a Virginia
Yankee and perfectly embodied the border state man who would die for the Union
but did not like a fight against slavery, wrote angrily: "The war is going
against us heavily. The Revolution is raging at all points while the folly,
weakness and criminality of our heads is becoming more decidedly manifest.
Abraham Lincoln has neither sense nor principle. . . . The people are strong
and willing, but 'there is no king in Israel.' The man of the day has not yet
come." In the Army of the Potomac a young Massachusetts officer named
Robert Gould Shaw wrote that he could not see what practical good the proclamation
could do: "Wherever our army has been there remain no slaves, and the
proclamation won't free them where we don't go." One of Barlow's
innumerable political tipsters exulted that the proclamation would be "the
knell of the Republican party," giving all of the border states to the
Confederacy, and Barnett told Barlow that the administration was highly
nervous, fearful of what the Army of the Potomac might do, dreading a
revolution in the North. The proclamation, he felt, had simply hastened the
crisis, and the question now was whether the Democrats would invoke a
revolution, striving "to create a chaos in the hope of a more perfect
creation."
¹⁰

A
great many people worried about what the army might do; and it is worthy of
note that in all of the doubt and speculation on this matter "the
army" meant, exclusively, the Army of the Potomac. No one ever dreamed or
hinted that any other army—Grant's, Buell's, or anybody's—might resist the
proclamation, or fall into sulks because of it, or in any other way make it
risky for the government to issue and enforce the new pronouncement. It was
only this army that raised doubts, and this was in no way accidental; it
happened so because only in this army had the high command openly and with
passionate devotion aligned itself with the political opposition to the
administration.

General Porter, for instance, was writing to
Manton Marble of the New York
World
that
"the proclamation was resented in the army" and that it had led to
expressions of discontent "amounting, I have heard, to
insubordination." The men who had to do the fighting, said Porter,
"are tired of the war and wish to see it ended honorably by a restoration
of the union— not merely a suppression of the rebellion." Such a
distinction might be a little too finely drawn for the ordinary soldier to
follow, but Porter insisted that the soldier's heroism was offset "by the
absurd proclamation of a political coward."
¹¹

General McClellan was
not quite certain what he ought to do; his uncertainty arising primarily from a
doubt that this proclamation really applied to him. Three days after the proclamation
was published he wrote to his friend, the New York merchant William H.
Aspinwall, asking for advice:

"I am very anxious to learn how you and
men like you regard the recent proclamation of the Presdt inaugurating servile
war, emancipating the slaves & at one stroke of the pen changing our free
institutions into a despotism—for such I regard as the natural effect of the
last Proclamation suspending the Habeas Corpus throughout the land.
1
shall probably be in this vicinity for some
days, & if you regard the matter as gravely as I do I would be glad to
communicate with you." When the two men met the merchant tried to get the
general's vision in better focus, and McClellan wrote to Mrs. McClellan that
Aspinwall "is decidedly of the opinion that it is my duty to submit to the
President's proclamation and quietly continue doing my duty as a soldier."
Probably Aspinwall was right, McClellan said; it was at least certain that he
was honest in his opinion; and McClellan assured his wife that "I shall
surely give his views full consideration."
¹²

He would get all the advice he could,
first. It was just about now that he invited three generals in for dinner—his
old friend Burnside, who had snorted "Treason!" at loose headquarters
chatter, one evening by the campfire at Harrison's Landing, and two former
Republican politicians, Jacob Cox of Ohio and John Cochrane of New York. As Cox
remembered it, McClellan said that he had been urged—by soldiers and
politicians of enough stature to give their words weight —to put himself in
open opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation. He himself, he said, thought
that the war itself would slowly but surely end slavery, but he did not like
the abolitionist upsurge behind the proclamation and he considered the
document itself premature; also, he had been told that the army was so devoted
to him that it would enforce any decision he might make regarding war policy.