The Fiery Trial (43 page)

“I claim not to have controlled events,” Lincoln would later write, “but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Among the most important of the events that propelled him and the country down the road to emancipation were the actions of slaves wherever the Union army ventured; the pressure of abolitionists and Radicals; the desire to eliminate the possibility of European intervention; the failure of efforts to fight the war without targeting the economic foundation of southern society; the need for additional manpower; the rejection of his gradual emancipation plan by the border states; and the antislavery measures of what one newspaper called “the Congress of the Revolution.” But Lincoln was hardly a passive observer of the actions of others. In October 1862, a black writer had shrewdly observed that although Lincoln’s actions seemed “rather equivocal,” in fact “by close observation, there could be seen a constant under-current in favor of freedom.”
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Lincoln’s course in the first two years of the war was not without miscalculations. He succumbed to wishful thinking about the extent of southern Unionism, the willingness of border slaveholders to accept any plan of emancipation, and the receptivity of black Americans to the fantastic scheme of colonization. But early in the war, he had made public a plan for emancipation that, while unsuccessful, committed the federal government to seeking an end to slavery. He made clear numerous times his wish that “all men everywhere could be free,” and signed every piece of antislavery legislation enacted by Congress, including highly controversial measures like the Militia and Second Confiscation Acts. Lincoln lagged behind the abolitionists and Radicals in recognizing the necessity of general emancipation. While celebrating the proclamation, the
Christian Recorder
urged its black readers to give thanks to Sumner, Stevens, Lovejoy, Chase, and other “apostles of liberty” for their role in changing public opinion and government policy. But popular sentiment does not exist independently of political leadership. “Your personal influence upon public opinion,” Carl Schurz had written to Lincoln in May 1862, “is immense; you are perhaps not aware of the whole extent of your moral power.” In his own way, Lincoln helped to create the public sentiment that made emancipation possible.
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Despite its palpable limitations, the proclamation set off scenes of jubilation among free blacks in the North and contrabands and slaves in the South. At Beaufort on the Sea Islands, over 5,000 African-Americans celebrated their freedom by singing what a white observer called “the Marseillaise of the slaves”: “In that New Jerusalem, I am not afraid to die; We must fight for liberty, in that New Jerusalem.” In the North, blacks gathered in their churches. “I have never witnessed,” the abolitionist Benjamin R. Plumly wrote to Lincoln from Philadelphia, “such intense, intelligent and devout ‘Thanksgiving.’” The mention of Lincoln’s name “evoked a spontaneous benediction from the whole Congregation” and the singing of “The Year of Jubilee.” “The Black people all trust you,” Plumly reported. “They believe you desire to do them justice.” When one person suggested that Lincoln might pursue “some form of colonization,” a woman shouted, “‘God won’t let him,’…and the response of the congregation was emphatic.” The process of deifying Lincoln as the Great Emancipator had begun.
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During the Civil War, Europeans carefully observed events in the United States. The announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation produced expressions of gratitude from across the continent. In ornate-ness of rhetoric, none surpassed the message from the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi and his two sons:

No American in the debates of 1861 and 1862 had linked emancipation with the restoration of Love—it took an Italian to do so. More down to earth was the comment of Karl Marx in one of his occasional dispatches from London for the
New York Tribune
: “Up to now, we have witnessed only the first act of the Civil War—the constitutional waging of war. The second act, the revolutionary waging of war, is at hand.”
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O
N
J
ANUARY
9, 1863, a little over a week after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, General Richard J. Oglesby, a former member of the Illinois legislature and a future governor of the state, spoke at a war rally in Springfield. The proclamation, he said, “is a great thing, perhaps the greatest thing that has occurred in this century. It is too big for us to realize.”
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Despite his awkward language, Oglesby understood that if emancipation opened a new chapter in American history, its long-term consequences were impossible to predict or even, in some ways, to comprehend.

When Oglesby spoke, emancipation was neither complete nor secure. The Confederate government vowed not to recognize the liberty of the slaves Lincoln had declared free. Indeed, as the fortunes of war ebbed and flowed, blacks who had tasted freedom behind Union lines sometimes found themselves reenslaved by advancing Confederate forces. In the North, Democrats denounced the edict as a violation of the Constitution and an unwarranted redefinition of the war’s purposes. When it assembled on January 8, 1863, the Democratic-controlled legislature of Indiana demanded that the proclamation be revoked. Even some Republicans refused to accept emancipation as a fait accompli. In the days after it was issued, representatives of the party’s conservative wing, including Orville H. Browning, David Davis, James R. Doolittle, and Thomas Ewing, implored Lincoln to withdraw the proclamation, arguing that it had strengthened Confederate resolve and divided the North. Lincoln refused; it was a “fixed thing,” he told them. “The proclamation,” he assured one group of visitors to the White House, “has knocked the bottom out of slavery.”
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“All the logic of the struggle,” wrote the
New York Times
in 1863, “leads us more and more toward universal freedom.” Lincoln embraced that logic. In his message to Congress of the previous December, Lincoln had called on Americans to rethink their basic assumptions. And between January 1863 and his death, Lincoln would abandon or modify many of his previous beliefs. Even as the military situation remained uppermost in his mind, Lincoln began to address questions the proclamation had left unresolved. These included the fate of slavery in the border states and the exempted parts of the Confederacy, the conditions for “rebel” states to return to the Union, and the system of labor that would replace slavery. As the disintegration of slavery continued and Union victory grew more likely, these questions became increasingly urgent. To secure complete emancipation, Lincoln again encouraged the border states to take action against slavery and made abolition a requirement for the readmission of Confederate states. In public letters and his messages to Congress he sought to persuade the American people of the wisdom of emancipation (he even encouraged Bayard Taylor, a noted poet, dramatist, and former diplomat in Russia, to give public lectures on the liberation of the serfs).
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Lincoln’s racial views began to change, and for the first time in his life, he began to think seriously about the role of blacks in a post-slavery America.

I

A
MONG THE MOST RADICAL PROVISIONS
of the Emancipation Proclamation was Lincoln’s invitation to African-American men to enlist in the Union army. The recruitment of blacks, remarked Congressman William P. Cutler of Ohio, “is a recognition of the Negro’s
manhood
such as has never before been made by this nation.” For this very reason, the arming of black soldiers inspired as much controversy as emancipation itself. On January 12, 1863, Thaddeus Stevens introduced a bill in the House authorizing Lincoln to raise 150,000 black soldiers. Slaves who enlisted would become free, as would their families, with the government paying monetary compensation to loyal owners.

Only “partisan demagogues,” Stevens declared, failed to realize that “if we are to continue this war, we must call in the aid of Africans.” But during the next few weeks, Congress engaged in rancorous debate over black military service. “No such strife has been produced by any other measure during this Congress,” remarked one member. Democrats and border Unionists denounced black enlistment as the “despairing cry” of a discredited administration, part of a Radical plan to “exterminate” the white people of the South or, at the very least, elevate blacks to full equality. They predicted that white soldiers would find themselves taking orders from “Colonel Sambo,” an intolerable insult. They used innumerable quorum calls and motions for adjournment to delay a vote. Amended to bar the enlistment of the slaves of loyal owners in the border states and Tennessee, Stevens’s bill finally passed the House. But in the Senate, it ran into further difficulty. Finally, Henry Wilson, chair of the Committee on Military Affairs, withdrew the measure, declaring it redundant since the Militia Act of July 1862 had already empowered the president to employ black men in any military capacity he saw fit.
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Having previously opposed black recruitment and doubted blacks’ military capacity, Lincoln in 1863 became an avid proponent. In January, he authorized Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts to organize a black regiment. With Robert Gould Shaw, the son of a prominent Boston abolitionist, as its commanding officer, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts infantry enlisted black volunteers from throughout the North. Abolitionists urged blacks to enlist. “A century may elapse,” wrote the
Weekly Anglo-African
, “before another opportunity shall be afforded of reclaiming and holding our withheld rights…. Freedom is ours. And its fruit, equality, hangs temptingly on the tree beckoning our own brave arms to rise and clutch it.”
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Shortly after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the Washington correspondent of the
New York Tribune
reported that the president still planned to use black troops primarily in noncombat roles, not “to put arms in their hands.” But Lincoln soon changed his mind. Early in March 1863, he received a long letter from Thomas Richmond, a former member of the Illinois legislature, urging him to press forward immediately with enrolling “the muscle and sinew of the slave population.” Unless the government speedily armed the slaves, Richmond warned, “the Confederates will.” On the envelope in which the letter arrived, Lincoln wrote, “Good advice.” That month, the War Department authorized a massive recruiting effort in the occupied South. This decision may have been influenced by the success on the battlefield of the First and Second South Carolina Volunteers, nearly all of them former slaves, who occupied Jacksonville, Florida, early that month. Lincoln sent a congratulatory message to General David Hunter, noting the importance of black units: “The enemy will make extra efforts to destroy them; and we should do the same to preserve and increase them.” Shortly after the battle, Lincoln dispatched a letter to Andrew Johnson, the military governor of Tennessee, urging him to begin enrolling black troops. “The colored population,” Lincoln wrote, “is the great
available
and yet
unavailed
of, force for restoring the Union. The mere sight of fifty thousand armed and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once.”
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Lincoln also instructed Secretary of War Stanton to have Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas move forward with recruiting in the Mississippi Valley. In April 1863, Thomas delivered a speech to Ulysses S. Grant’s army, then in northern Louisiana. Stating that he spoke “with full authority from the president,” Thomas declared that the Union army must enforce emancipation and recruit black troops. Any soldier, whatever his rank, who mistreated the freedmen would be dismissed. The performance of black soldiers that spring and summer at Port Hudson and Milliken’s Bend in Louisiana and Fort Wagner in South Carolina dispelled lingering doubts about their abilities. Only the operation at Milliken’s Bend (where black soldiers rescued beleaguered white troops) was a military success. The Fifty-fourth Massachusetts lost half its men in the failed assault on Fort Wagner. But in all these places, black soldiers performed heroically, proving themselves, Stanton wrote, “among the bravest of the brave in fighting for the Union.” Fort Wagner, in particular, was a turning point in recognition of blacks’ capacity to serve in the army. The battle, commented the
New York Tribune
, would become for them what Bunker Hill had been for whites during the War of Independence (forgetting that blacks had also fought at Bunker Hill).
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By August 1863, Lincoln was writing to General Grant that he hoped “at least a hundred thousand” could quickly be enrolled. Grant responded that emancipation was “the heaviest blow yet given to the Confederacy” and that “by arming the negro we have added a powerful ally.” His letter reflected a broad evolution of opinion within the army. To be sure, “aversion to the negro,” as
Harper’s Weekly
reported, remained widespread in the ranks. Two of Grant’s officers resigned rather than cooperate in raising black troops. But Grant himself recognized that the new policy required not only enlisting black soldiers but also “removing prejudice against them.”
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Increasingly, the army actively encouraged the disintegration of slavery, even in places exempted from the proclamation. “While in the field I am an abolitionist,” one officer wrote to his wife from Tennessee in 1863. More and more Union soldiers embraced the change in the character of the war. Few whites had joined the army to abolish slavery. But increasing numbers saw the institution as a barrier to the country’s mission of exemplifying “the great principles of liberty and self-government.” They now fought for a new nation without slavery rather than the restoration of the prewar Union and accepted the necessity of using black soldiers to that end. Encountering the harsh reality of bondage in the plantation South reinforced support for emancipation. “Since I am here,” a Democratic colonel wrote from Louisiana,” I have learned and seen…what the horrors of slavery was…. Never hereafter will I either speak or vote in favor of slavery.” All in all, as James A. Garfield declared in January 1864, “the rapid current of events has made the army of the republic an Abolition army.”
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Black soldiers played a part in this transformation. By the war’s end, more than 180,000, the large majority recently emancipated slaves, had served in the Union army—over one-fifth of the nation’s adult male black population under age forty-five and about 10 percent of all the soldiers who fought for the Union. Many originated in the border states and Tennessee, where the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply and military service, for most of the war, offered the only legal route to freedom. Here, black enlistment pushed the administration’s commitment to abolition beyond the terms of the proclamation. At first, Lincoln authorized only the enrollment of free blacks and the slaves of disloyal owners. In October 1863, however, he extended recruitment to all slaves in Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Tennessee, with compensation to loyal owners of $300 (the same amount a free person could pay to secure exemption from the draft). All slaves who enlisted “shall forever thereafter be free.” Because of vehement opposition from Kentucky, the War Department did not set up a recruiting post for black soldiers in the state until January 1864, and not until June did it begin enlisting slaves there without the consent of their owners. Governor Thomas E. Bramlette informed Lincoln that anyone encouraging a slave to leave his master, including military officers, would be prosecuted under state law. But by the end of the war, nearly 24,000 black soldiers had served from Kentucky, a majority of the state’s eligible black men and a total second only to that of Louisiana. Early in 1865, Congress freed the families of all black soldiers. Well before its legal demise, black enlistment undermined slavery in Kentucky.
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“The government,” wrote Orestes Brownson early in 1864, “by arming the negroes, has made them our countrymen.” To be sure, black soldiers, organized into segregated regiments, often found themselves subjected to abuse from white officers. Even after proving themselves in battle, blacks could not advance into the ranks of commissioned officers until the final months of the war. Their pay, as established by the Militia Act of 1862, which anticipated blacks serving largely as military laborers, was considerably less than that of white soldiers. Black regiments also faced unique dangers. The Confederate government refused to recognize them as prisoners of war (to do so, one southern newspaper declared, would violate the premises of “the social system for which we contend”) and threatened them with enslavement, or execution as slave rebels. Some Confederate officers refused to take black prisoners; the murder of black soldiers after surrender occurred in every theater of the war.
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Nonetheless, black soldiers played a crucial role not only in winning the Civil War but also in defining its consequences. Just as runaway slaves had forced the administration to begin to make policy about slavery in 1861, black military service put the question of postwar rights squarely on the national agenda. Its “logical result,” the Missouri Radical Charles D. Drake observed in 1864, was that “the black man is henceforth to assume a new status among us.” This transformation happened first in the army. For the first time in American history, large numbers of blacks were treated as equals before the law, if only military law. In army courts, they could testify against whites, something unknown in the South and much of the North. Demanding to be treated identically with other Union soldiers, the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Massachusetts regiments refused to accept their monthly stipends and continued to do so after the state legislature voted to make up the difference in pay. Soldiers flooded black newspapers with complaints about the pay issue, dispatched petitions to Congress and the president, and enlisted Governor John Andrew to lobby Lincoln and the War Department on their behalf. The issue, declared a petition signed by seventy-four enlisted men, was not money, but “liberty, justice and equality.” The soldiers’ campaign persuaded Congress in June 1864 to enact a measure for equality in pay, enlistment bounties, and other compensation retroactive to the time of enlistment for free-born blacks and to the beginning of 1864 for former slaves. In March 1865, Congress provided for full retroactive pay equality. These were among the first federal statutes based on the principle of equal rights regardless of race.
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