This Great Struggle (24 page)

The official policy of applying the Fugitive Slave Act even on behalf of people who were actively in rebellion against the government was intended both to assure white southerners that the government in Washington intended no social revolution such as immediate abolition of slavery would bring and that it was committed to respecting all of the property rights they claimed. That applied to food or draft animals that might be of great use to passing Union armies in the prosecution of the war, and it applied most strongly to the property rights white southerners claimed in their slaves. Just as a constitutional right to privacy was to become a code word for abortion rights in the late twentieth century, so a constitutional right to property had in the mid-nineteenth century become a shibboleth for the defense of slavery.

The first fifteen months of the war had demonstrated to Lincoln and to other perceptive observers, especially the common soldiers in the Union armies, that white southerners were deeply committed to both of the closely intertwined causes of the Confederacy and slavery. Indeed, Lincoln had learned to his dismay that even southerners who did not back the Confederacy still clung tenaciously to the institution of slavery and the white supremacy it protected.

Despite his having reversed Freémont’s local emancipation proclamation the preceding year, Lincoln was—and had been since the day he took office—deeply committed to ending slavery as soon as he could do so in a way that would have a chance of surviving both politically and legally. He also hoped to accomplish his purpose with the minimum of painful upheaval to the country. Consistent with these goals, Lincoln hoped to persuade Congress to appropriate funds to compensate slaveholders for the emancipation of their slaves, and he hoped to persuade state legislatures to enact statutes for the gradual emancipation of the slaves within their borders. No one had ever questioned the legal right of a state legislature to take such action, and that would keep the matter out of the hands of the Supreme Court with its proslavery majority and rabidly proslavery Chief Justice Roger B. Taney.

For just these reasons Lincoln had been skeptical about other attempts to chip away at the edifice of slavery during the first year of the war. In August 1861 Congress had passed and Lincoln signed a Confiscation Act providing for the freeing of slaves actually used by the Confederate army for the building of fortifications and other warlike purposes. It was a start, but Lincoln doubted that it would stand up to constitutional scrutiny by the Supreme Court. In any case, it was cumbersome to implement and could never be expected to free very many slaves. When in April 1862, Major General David Hunter had issued an order freeing slaves within his command in the Union-held enclave on the southern coast, Lincoln had rescinded it as legally hopeless. Congressional bans on slavery in the District of Columbia and all U.S. territories, passed in April and June 1862, were positive steps, but Taney was already on record about the latter, and his views could be easily guessed about the former.

Lincoln’s preferred approach to ending slavery started with the Union-loyal slave states. Lincoln hoped to persuade them to enact programs of long-term, gradual emancipation with congressionally funded compensation for slaveholders who had to give up their chattels. In order to achieve that goal and because he held the highly pessimistic view of race relations in a nonslave society that was widespread at that time, Lincoln also hoped to persuade freed slaves to accept colonization somewhere outside the United States. If the border slave states enacted gradual emancipation, owners were reimbursed, and freedmen left the country, states in the Confederacy would see that slavery could be given up without financial disaster or social upheaval and was therefore not worth fighting for. If slavery was not worth fighting for, there would be no reason to fight for the Confederacy. It was this belief that led Lincoln to imagine that Union military success, within the context of a conciliatory policy, would lead to the collapse of the Confederacy and the restoration of the Union. “We should urge it persuasively,” he wrote in a March 24, 1862, letter to Horace Greeley, “and not menacingly, on the South.”

He was destined to be disappointed on all counts. The border states indignantly rejected Lincoln’s urging that they adopt gradual, compensated emancipation. Even Delaware, which had a tiny percentage of slaves and had never seriously considered secession, gave no consideration to the idea of the eventual emancipation of its slaves. If even Delaware would not entertain such a proposition, it clearly had little chance in any other state. Black Americans were understandably unenthusiastic about the prospects of leaving the country. Being in America, being at least prospective heirs to all its promise for the future, was the chief compensation they had for their and their ancestors’ years of toil, and, as time was to show, it was no inconsiderable blessing but rather a boon sought eagerly in future generations by persons from every corner of the globe. They could hardly be expected to give it up willingly, and Lincoln, to his credit, would not see them go any other way.

Gradual, compensated emancipation and colonization were both clearly faint hopes by the beginning of the summer of 1862, and McClellan’s retreat from Richmond during the last week of June, though militarily less significant than the events of the past six months in the West, was nevertheless the kind of high-profile, morale-raising event for the Confederacy that ruined whatever chances Lincoln may have had of applying overall military pressure on the Confederacy to the point that its populace began to doubt the wisdom of their decision for secession. The prospects for a short war, conciliatory policies, and voluntary emancipation all seemed to be fading to the vanishing point.

It was time to take a further dramatic step. Emancipation was not going to happen the easy way, was not going to happen at all, perhaps, unless Lincoln tried something new. As Lincoln himself put it two years later, “I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the game!”
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His answer was the Emancipation Proclamation. When he started writing the proclamation is something historians still argue about. Sources conflict.

He presented it to his cabinet for the first time on July 22. He began by explaining that he was not asking their approval on the policy. That was settled and was something that Lincoln said he owed to God. He said he was open to any suggestions they might have on the specific wording of the proclamation. The document he read announced that in all areas still in rebellion at the end of one hundred days, all slaves would be permanently free. He based the proclamation on his war powers as commander in chief. In that respect it differed from the Second Confiscation Act, which Congress had passed only a few days before. Lincoln believed his proclamation would prove more legally defensible. As commander in chief, Lincoln had the power to wage war against the nation’s enemies, capture their ships, bombard their forts, shoot their soldiers—and take their slaves.

The cabinet members reacted with varying degrees of enthusiasm, but Secretary of State Seward had a practical suggestion. He approved of the proclamation, but Union forces had just suffered an embarrassing setback on the peninsula. If Lincoln were to issue the proclamation now, it would look bad. “It may be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government,” he explained, “a cry for help; the government stretching forth its hands to Ethiopia, instead of Ethiopia stretching forth her hands to the government.” In short, as Lincoln later explained, it would sound like “our last shriek, on the retreat.”
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Lincoln had not thought of that, and the sense of it struck him forcefully. He agreed with Seward and put the draft of the Emancipation Proclamation into his desk drawer until the nation’s armies should win a victory. It was to stay there longer than he expected.

POPE TRIES HIS HAND IN VIRGINIA

Another step that Lincoln took in order to achieve more satisfactory results in the war was to bring Henry Halleck to Washington as the new general in chief of all the Union armies. The post had been vacant since Lincoln had relieved McClellan of his duties on the eve of the Peninsula Campaign the previous March, and during that time the president himself had tried to provide central direction for the Union armies. Dissatisfied with the results of his own efforts, Lincoln now decided to bring in the learned Halleck, apparent architect of the Union’s dazzling successes in the Mississippi Valley, whose troops called him, behind his back, “Old Brains.” Lincoln issued his order promoting Halleck to Washington on July 11, and Old Brains formally took the reins of command on July 23.

By that time Pope had been in command of the Army of Virginia for almost a month. During that time he had made himself unpopular both with the enemy and with his own men. On July 10 Pope had issued an order dealing with hostile civilians and the guerrillas who sheltered among them, abusing the restraints of civilized war by using them as cover for waging their own war. Pope’s order stated that henceforth civilians who engaged in acts of war or espionage against Union forces would be subject to the normal rigor of the laws of war, which prescribed summary execution in such cases. Local civilians would be held financially responsible for the depredations of the guerrillas who operated among them and whom they were presumed to harbor. Houses used as blinds from which to take potshots at Union troops would be destroyed. The Union army would live off the land, confiscating supplies it needed from the civilian populace.

In general Pope proposed to start treating Confederate civilians in the way that the laws of war prescribed for enemy rather than friendly civilians. His action was very much in keeping with the new turn Union policy was now taking, away from conciliation and toward a more pragmatic, hard-war approach, though at this time Pope could have known nothing of emancipation, Lincoln’s ultimate hard-war policy. One did not have to be privy to White House cabinet meetings to see that white southerners had rejected northern attempts at conciliation and that nothing but stern, relentless war waging was going to end this conflict. The soldiers in the ranks of the Union armies probably knew it better than anyone else.

Nevertheless, Pope’s order was controversial and came in for criticism by some northern Democrats, including McClellan and his cronies in the Army of the Potomac, who regarded it as a departure from their own highly civilized methods and a descent to waging war in manner reminiscent of Genghis Khan. Other strong critics of Pope’s order included most Confederates who heard of it. Jefferson Davis called Pope’s new policy “a campaign of indiscriminate robbery and murder” and directed that officers of Pope’s army who fell into Confederate hands be treated as criminals rather than as prisoners of war. A furious Robert E. Lee reviled Pope as a “miscreant” and announced to a subordinate general, “Pope must be suppressed.”

A few days after issuing his controversial order, Pope issued a proclamation to his troops intended to encourage and motivate them. “Let us understand each other,” Pope wrote,

I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies; from an army whose business it has been to seek the adversary and to beat him when he was found; whose policy has been attack and not defense. . . . I presume that I have been called here to pursue the same system and to lead you against the enemy. I am sure you long for an opportunity to win the distinction you are capable of achieving. . . . Meantime I desire you to dismiss from your minds certain phrases, which I am sorry to find so much in vogue amongst you. I hear constantly of “taking strong positions and holding them,” of “lines of retreat,” and of “bases of supplies.” Let us discard such ideas. . . . Let us study the probable lines of retreat of our opponents, and leave our own to take care of themselves. Let us look before us, and not behind. Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear.
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Pope’s address hinted at the undeniable fact that the eastern Union armies had experienced little but failure while their western comrades had experienced almost nothing but victory. It also suggested that a spirit of defeatism and a feeling of inferiority toward the Rebels had infected the eastern forces, which was true, and it seemed to imply that western Union soldiers were better fighters than their eastern counterparts. That may have been true as well since the few regiments of western Union troops in Virginia were to compile a record as the Army of the Potomac’s hardest fighters. But Pope’s stating all of it in an order to his entire army was tactless in the extreme, and its possible truth, though unadmitted by those who resented it, made it rankle all the more. Thereafter, many of Pope’s troops, as well as McClellan and his officers in the Army of the Potomac, seethed with hatred toward him.

As was shortly to become apparent, pronouncements about seeing “the backs of our enemies” in Virginia were best left to generals who could make good such boasts against Robert E. Lee. Pope began to advance along the line of the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, which led generally southwest from Alexandria, on the Potomac opposite Washington, through Manassas Junction, and on into the Virginia Piedmont. Banks and Sigel’s corps joined him by marching southeast after crossing the Blue Ridge at one of its gaps. By early August Pope’s army held the town of Culpeper Court House, south of the Rappahannock River, seventy miles southwest of Washington and about one hundred miles northwest of Richmond via the Virginia Central Railroad that joined the Orange & Alexandria at Gordonsville, about thirty miles farther down the Orange & Alexandria from Pope’s position at Culpeper. Between Pope and Gordonsville was Stonewall Jackson with sixteen thousand Confederates, dispatched by Lee to impede the advance of “that miscreant Pope” and if possible begin the work of suppressing him.