The Man Who Saved the Union (31 page)

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W
ASHBURNE RESPONDED WITH COMPLIMENTS FOR
G
RANT AND AN
agenda for the administration. “
I learned with great pleasure that you had been placed in command of the western army,” the congressman wrote. “I think the country will hail it as the precursor of more active and vigorous operations. It is scarcely possible for you to imagine the impatience of the public at the manner in which the war is being conducted. They want to see more immediate moving upon the enemy’s works. In fact they want to see
war
.” Washburne explained that Grant’s stern policy toward rebels and their property was playing well in Washington. “Your order in regard to the secessionists of Memphis taking the oath or leaving has been accepted as an earnest of vigorous and decided action on your part.” Washburne welcomed signs that Lincoln was reaching a similar view. “The administration has come up to what the people have long demanded—a vigorous prosecution of the war by all the means known to civilized warfare.”

William
Sherman concurred with Grant and Washburne on the need for stern treatment of rebels and their sympathizers, but he thought the administration needed firmer nudging. “
I write plainly and slowly because I know you have no time to listen to trifles,” Sherman wrote Salmon Chase, the Treasury secretary. “This is no trifle; when one nation is at war with another, all the people of the one are enemies of the other; then the rules are plain and easy of understanding. Most unfortunately, the war in which we are now engaged has been complicated with the belief on the one hand that all on the other are
not
enemies. It would have been better if, at the outset, this mistake had not been made, and it is wrong longer to be misled by it.” Sherman explained the situation
in his part of the western theater: “There is not a garrison in Tennessee where a man can go beyond the sight of the flag-staff without being shot or captured.” Talk of loyal Southerners was willful deception; the North and South were effectively two nations at war.

Sherman was writing Chase because the Treasury handled matters of Southern trade, which had become dangerously perverse, in Sherman’s opinion. “These people had cotton,” he said of the Southerners around Memphis, “and, whenever they apprehended our large armies would move, they destroyed the cotton in the belief that, of course, we would seize it and convert it to our use. They did not and could not dream that we would pay money for it. It had been condemned to destruction by their own acknowledged government, and was therefore lost to their people; and could have been, without injustice, taken by us and sent away, either as absolute prize of war or for future compensation.” But the rules established by the administration in Washington allowed the development of a lucrative trade, and a shameful one, Sherman thought. “The commercial enterprise of the
Jews”—a common shorthand for speculators that revealed both the reflexive anti-Semitism of the era and the highly visible role of certain Jewish merchants in the speculation—“soon discovered that ten cents would buy a pound of cotton behind our army; that four cents would take it to Boston, where they would receive thirty cents in gold. The bait was too tempting, and it spread like fire, when here they discovered that salt, bacon, powder, fire-arms, percussion caps, etc., etc., were worth as much as gold; and, strange to say, this traffic was not only permitted but encouraged.”

The encouragement was what particularly irked Sherman. He didn’t expect any better behavior from those he called Jews, but he thought the administration should have weighed its policies more carefully. Sherman appreciated that Chase and the administration were facilitating the
cotton trade to keep a shortfall from driving Britain and perhaps
France to recognize the Confederacy. But the trade was funding and fueling the Confederate war effort. “Before we in the interior could know it, hundreds, yea thousands of barrels of salt”—bartered for the cotton—“and millions of dollars had been disbursed; and I have no doubt that
Bragg’s army at Tupelo, and Van Dorn’s at Vicksburg, received enough salt to make bacon, without which they could not have moved their armies in mass; and that from ten to twenty thousand fresh arms, and a due supply of cartridges, have also been got, I am equally satisfied.”

Sherman explained that he had taken matters into his own hands in
the sector for which he was responsible. He had declared that gold and silver were contraband of war and had ordered that they not be allowed into the interior. He realized he was contradicting administration policy, but he was certain he was doing the right thing. He told Chase—and through Chase, Lincoln—not to worry about the British. “We are not bound to furnish her cotton. She has more reason to fight the South for burning that cotton than us for not shipping it.”

Sherman shared his views with Grant. “
I found so many Jews and speculators here trading in cotton, and secessionists had become so open in refusing anything but gold, that I have felt myself bound to stop it,” he wrote Grant. “This gold has but one use—the purchase of arms and ammunition, which can always be had for gold, at Nassau, New Providence, or Cincinnati; all the guards we may establish cannot stop it. Of course I have respected all permits by yourself or the Secretary of the Treasury, but in these new cases (swarms of Jews) I have stopped it.” Sherman urged Grant to issue a similar ban for the western department as a whole. “We cannot carry on war and trade with a people at the same time.”

A
nother item of Southern commerce posed an even greater challenge. Slaves had begun fleeing their places of bondage almost as soon as Union troops came within running range. What to do with them tested the consciences, resolve and ingenuity of Union commanders. Some, including Henry Halleck, initially took the position that since Congress had not repealed the
Fugitive Slave Act, Union officers were duty bound to assist slave owners who attempted to reclaim their servants. This position accorded with the Lincoln administration’s policy of reassuring slaveholders in the loyal border states that slavery was safe under the Union flag. But other officers, most notably
Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, who headed the occupation of New Orleans after its surrender in the spring of 1862, considered slaves to be contraband of war and subject to seizure and retention by Union forces. The contraband label caught on, as did a policy of letting the fugitive slaves follow the Union armies to which they fled. Congress subsequently made the policy official by forbidding the return of
escaped slaves to their owners. The legislature also authorized putting the slaves to work on behalf of the Union.

Details of implementation fell to the commanders in the field, who
devised rules as they went along. “
Fugitive slaves may be employed in the quartermaster’s department, subsistence and engineer’s departments, and wherever by such employment a soldier may be saved to the ranks,” Grant ordered during the summer of 1862. “They may be employed as teamsters, as company cooks (not exceeding four to a company), or as hospital attendants and nurses.” Officers could engage them as private servants, but in such cases the officers, rather than the government, would be responsible for their pay.

Grant perceived the Negro question as he did everything else at that time: in the context of the war effort. “
I have no hobby of my own with regard to the negro, either to effect his freedom or to continue his bondage,” he wrote his father. “If
Congress pass any law”—regarding slavery as an institution—“and the President approves, I am willing to execute it.” But until Congress and the president took definitive action on slavery, he would leave that troublesome subject to others. “One enemy at a time is enough.”

L
incoln was no more eager than Grant to tackle the slavery question, but events forced his hand. The anomalies of fighting the slave power but not slavery intensified over time; Lincoln had to work ever harder to explain himself and his policy. Horace Greeley told him he was failing dismally because the administration’s policy was fatuous. “
On the face of this wide earth, Mr. President,” the
New York Tribune
editor wrote in an open letter to Lincoln, “there is not one disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union cause who does not feel that all attempts to put down the Rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause are preposterous and futile—that the Rebellion, if crushed out tomorrow, would be renewed within a year if Slavery were left in full vigor.” The president must terminate this intolerable situation. “Every hour of deference to Slavery is an hour of added and deepened peril to the Union.”

Lincoln responded that he loved the Union no less than Greeley did. They differed simply on the best way to preserve it. “
I would save the Union,” Lincoln wrote in a letter Greeley published. “I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution.” Slavery was secondary and would remain so. “My paramount object in this struggle
is
to save the Union, and is
not
either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing
any
slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing
all
the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and
leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do
not
believe it would help to save the Union.”
Lincoln said that his goal was fixed, but his tactics were flexible. “I shall do
less
whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do
more
whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.” Lincoln added, lest Greeley and the country think him an agnostic on the morality of slavery: “I have here stated my purpose according to my view of
official
duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed
personal
wish that all men everywhere could be free.”

Lincoln had more to say on slavery and the Union, but he wouldn’t say it yet. For months the president had made a habit of retreating to the War Department’s telegraph office to escape the crowds and bustle of the Executive Mansion. “
One morning he asked me for some paper, as he wanted to write something special,” Major
Thomas Eckert, who headed the telegraph office, recalled. Eckert fetched some foolscap, and Lincoln began writing. The work went slowly. “He would look out of the window a while and then put his pen to paper, but he did not write much at once,” Eckert said. “He would study between times and when he had made up his mind he would put down a line or two.” At the end of his first session he had not filled a single sheet. He handed the paper to Eckert. “Keep it locked up until I call for it tomorrow,” he said.

Lincoln repeated the exercise most mornings for a few weeks. Some days he wrote merely a line or two; other days he revised what he had written before. Finally he finished. He informed Eckert what he had been doing. “He told me he had been writing an order giving freedom to the slaves in the South, for the purpose of hastening the end of the war.”

Yet he wasn’t prepared to issue the order. He summoned the cabinet in July
1862 and read what he had written. “
I said to the cabinet that I had resolved upon this step and had not called them together to ask their advice, but to lay the subject-matter of a proclamation before them,” Lincoln remembered two years later. He nonetheless received advice.
Montgomery Blair predicted that
emancipation would cost the Republicans the fall elections.
Salmon Chase worried that it would roil the financial markets on which the government relied for war funding. William Seward offered the most telling counsel. “Mr. President, I approve of the proclamation,” the secretary of state said. “But I question the expediency
of its issue at this juncture. The depression of the public mind, consequent upon our repeated reverses, is so great that I fear the effect of so important a step. It may be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help; the government stretching forth its hands to Ethiopia, instead of Ethiopia stretching forth her hands to the government.”

Lincoln heeded Seward and decided to wait for a victory. But the military situation got worse before it got better. As part of the reorganization that made Halleck general-in-chief, Lincoln appointed
John Pope to command the hopefully named
Army of Virginia. Lincoln applauded Pope’s energy as he drove south from the Potomac, and he took comfort from first reports of a battle with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at
Bull Run, near where the battle of the previous summer had been fought. As late as the third day of the battle
Edwin Stanton brimmed with confidence. “
He said that nothing but foul play could lose us this battle,”
John Hay, Lincoln’s secretary, remembered of the war secretary.

But Pope did lose the battle, with ten thousand men killed or wounded. The general was wholly discredited.
Alpheus Williams, a brigadier general in Pope’s army, summarized his superior’s disastrous accomplishment: “
A splendid army almost demoralized, millions of public property given up or destroyed, thousands of lives of our best men sacrificed for no purpose.” Williams went on: “More insolence, superciliousness, ignorance and pretentiousness were never combined in one man. It can in truth be said of him that he had not a friend in his command from the smallest drummer boy to the highest general officer.”

Lincoln bemoaned the defeat and lamented his continuing failure to find an effective general. “
The President was in deep distress,” Attorney General
Edward Bates recorded. “He seemed wrung by the bitterest anguish—said he felt almost ready to hang himself.” Lincoln had never been religious, but now he began searching for guidance from above. “
The will of God prevails,” he mused privately. “In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both
may
be, and one
must
be wrong. God cannot be
for
and
against
the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.” The ways of the Almighty were inscrutable. “He could have either
saved
or
destroyed
the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun, He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.”