This Great Struggle (28 page)

Reaction to the proclamation in the South was predictable. An outraged Jefferson Davis inveighed against the proclamation as “the most execrable measure in the history of guilty man” and announced that henceforth captured Union officers would not be treated as prisoners of war but would instead be turned over to state authorities for punishment as “criminals engaged in inciting servile insurrection.” That threat was never carried out, possibly because the Union threatened retaliation on Confederate officers. Other white southerners denounced the proclamation in extreme terms. Confederate dentist and cartoonist Adalbert Volck depicted Lincoln as consorting with demonic spirits while writing the proclamation and contemplating with satisfaction imagined scenes of racial massacre.

Reaction among pro-Confederate northerners and even some Union-loyal Democrats was almost the same as that in the South. A regiment from southern Illinois, a part of the state where proslavery feeling ran strong, mutinied and had to be disbanded. In Virginia, McClellan was furious. To his wife he wrote, “I cannot make up my mind to fight for such an accursed doctrine.” Nonetheless, at the urging of more level-headed fellow officers, he restrained himself and issued a very correct general order to the troops of his army, reminding them that “the remedy for political errors, if any are committed, is to be found only in the action of the people at the polls.”

Abolitionists rejoiced all across the North, and a growing number of northerners who had never considered themselves abolitionists also applauded the proclamation as a necessary step toward winning the war. If slavery was trying to destroy the nation, one soldier wrote in a letter that was representative of the feelings of many northerners, then slavery needed to be destroyed. In the midterm elections that fall, the Republicans lost twenty-eight seats in the House of Representatives. Some of those losses may have been due to popular opposition to emancipation, but more were probably in response to disappointment with the apparent lack of progress in the war. Americans were and are notoriously impatient about such things. Placed in perspective, however, the Republicans’ electoral losses did not amount to much anyway. They lost fewer seats in Congress than the party holding the White House usually lost in midterm elections during that era.

British reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation was complicated. After a long and arduous political struggle, Britain had abolished slavery in all of its colonies in 1833, and since that time, Britons had come to pride themselves on their antislavery principles and feel rather superior to their American cousins on that score, as they did on every other. British leaders and much of the British press had for years sneered at the United States for its tolerance of slavery. During the first phase of the Civil War, British leadership could and did maintain that the Union cause was not the cause of freedom since the government in Washington did not have immediate emancipation as one of its direct war aims.

Now that had changed, and one would have expected to see the British government rally enthusiastically to the cause of freedom—if its prior strictures against the United States had been sincere. In fact, Prime Minister Viscount Palmerston and Foreign Minister Earl Russell were furious, ostensibly because they believed that the proclamation would incite slave revolt and massacres but perhaps because they resented losing their grounds for claiming moral superiority over the United States. At any rate, they came as close to leading Britain to war with the United States then as they ever did during the course of the war. Ultimately they did not dare to do so because of the tremendous outpouring of support for the Union among Britain’s middle and lower classes. Henry Adams, son of the highly capable U.S. ambassador to Britain Charles Francis Adams, wrote, “The Emancipation Proclamation has done more for us than all our former victories and all our diplomacy.” Though the Union cause had always been that of freedom, the Emancipation Proclamation made that fact clearly recognizable to the common man in Europe, and millions responded with enthusiastic approval. In vain, the haughty
Times
of London sniffed that the proclamation declared free only those slaves whom Lincoln had no ability to free and left in slavery all those whom he supposedly could have freed. The great majority of Britons recognized the proclamation’s tendency as clearly as Jefferson Davis had.

From that time to this, some have wondered about the apparent discrepancy the
Times
mentioned. Lincoln declared free those slaves in areas still in rebellion—areas where he had no control. He left untouched those slaves in areas loyal to the Union—areas where one might assume that he did have the power to act. In fact, Lincoln’s action was dictated by respect for law and fear of the federal courts, especially Roger B. Taney’s Supreme Court. Lincoln did not want to violate the Constitution, and he believed that emancipation as an exercise of presidential war power, a hostile act aimed at subduing enemies who were waging war against the United States, was indeed constitutional. He also knew that if given a chance, Taney would strike down any action that impinged on slavery whether it was constitutional or not. An act of war by the president would not immediately land in the federal courts and so, unlike the Confiscation Acts, would not give Taney his chance. Of course, freeing the slaves by an exercise of presidential war powers meant that Lincoln did not, in fact, have the authority to free any slaves in areas not at war against the United States, the areas the
Times
had blamed him for neglecting.

When Lincoln at last issued the final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, he therefore omitted from its application the non-Confederate slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri as well as the northwestern portion of Virginia, soon to become the separate state of West Virginia; the approximately half-liberated Confederate state of Tennessee; and several Union-occupied parishes of Louisiana around New Orleans. Of the three and a half million slaves in America at that time, only about twenty thousand actually experienced their official freedom on that day. These were contrabands who had fled into Union lines and were for the most part living in contraband camps in areas that were still technically regarded as war zones. These twenty thousand had not exactly liberated themselves, but they had cooperated in their liberation, as hundreds of thousands of their fellow slaves would do before the war was over. For slaves still behind Confederate lines on the first day of 1863 and for their masters, the Emancipation Proclamation was a declaration of war aims. A promise of what Union forces would do when they arrived. Slaves and slaveholders in the omitted areas could easily read the portents and see that once slavery was eradicated in the rebellious states, its lease on life elsewhere in the United States would be very short indeed.

THE KENTUCKY CAMPAIGN

None of this would become reality, however, if Union armies did not win the war, and even as Lincoln issued his September 22 preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, two major Confederate offenses were still in full swing west of the Appalachians in the strategically decisive heartland of the South. Even before Lee had started his abortive foray into Maryland, Confederate forces in the West had seized the initiative, and as of the time of Lee’s retreat across the Potomac, the western Confederate forces were still pressing their offensives.

After capturing Corinth with his massive army at the end of May, Henry Halleck had dispersed his forces around West Tennessee and northern Mississippi with a view to holding the territory gained in the Union’s successful spring campaigns in the West. He had dispatched Buell with about thirty thousand men to march east from Corinth, along the line of the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, repairing the railroad as he went and using it as a supply line. His objective was Chattanooga, Tennessee. A small, ramshackle town of perhaps two thousand inhabitants sprawling on the banks of the Tennessee River at the foot of 1,500-foot Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga was the gateway to the southern Appalachians. It sat at the eastern end of the gorge by which the Tennessee River plunged through the Allegheny Range, here known as the Cumberland Plateau, and from it railroads ran not only west to Corinth and Memphis but also northeast through Union-sympathizing East Tennessee to Virginia and southeast to Atlanta and the heart of Georgia. Taking it would be a first step toward Lincoln’s long-desired goal of liberating the loyal citizens of East Tennessee, would seal off the most convenient line of rail communication between the Confederate eastern and western theaters, and would open the door for Union penetration into Georgia.

The task of defending Chattanooga fell to Confederate Major General Edmund Kirby Smith (West Point, 1845), who commanded the Confederate Army of East Tennessee. Smith’s task was complicated by the fact that he also had to defend Knoxville, one hundred miles to the northeast, which seemed to be threatened by a Union division under the command of Brigadier General George W. Morgan. Morgan had been a West Point classmate of Smith’s before dropping out because of bad grades. His force had recently driven some of Smith’s troops out of Cumberland Gap and occupied that position sixty miles north of Knoxville.

Smith felt he had far too few men to defend against these two, widely separated threats and thought his situation almost hopeless. The only ray of hope for the Confederates in East Tennessee lay in the fact that Buell was advancing very slowly, partially because he was Buell and partially because Confederate guerrillas were swarming the countryside through which he was passing, wrecking the tracks of the Memphis & Ohio behind him as fast as his men could repair them in front and necessitating constant detachments to repair tracks and chase guerrillas. As typical guerrillas, the Rebel raiders sheltered among the civil population, finding comfort and supply there and shielding behind (and thus abusing) the immunity that civilized armies attempt to show toward civilians. Just as typically in such a situation, Union troops grew increasingly frustrated with the guerrillas’ depredations and with the need to show restraint toward civilians, some of whom were undoubtedly collaborating with the bushwhackers who took potshots at them and waylaid their supply shipments. When Federal self-control slipped to the point that a Union brigade sacked the town of Athens, Alabama, a major scandal and federal government investigation followed. Nevertheless, at Athens, as on most occasions during the Civil War, the lives and persons of civilians remained safe, as the angry soldiers contented themselves with taking and destroying property.

Buell’s slow progress across northern Alabama gave the Confederates time to react. The passive stance of the scattered Union forces Halleck had left in northern Mississippi placed no pressure on Confederate forces in that sector and thus left them available to counter Buell. The Confederate Army of Tennessee (not to be confused with Grant’s Union Army of
the
Tennessee) had been encamped around Tupelo, Mississippi, since its retreat from Corinth. A few weeks after the retreat, Beauregard had granted himself an open-ended leave to recuperate at a southern Alabama health spa. Civil War commanding generals were not expected to take leaves, and this act was the last straw for Jefferson Davis, who promptly sacked Beauregard and replaced him with the army’s second-ranking general, Braxton Bragg.

It was therefore to Bragg, as well as to the authorities in Richmond, that Smith appealed for help in stopping Buell’s much larger force and saving Chattanooga. Richmond had no troops to send, and at first it seemed that Bragg was equally unable to help, faced as he was with Halleck’s originally much larger Union army at Corinth. Desperate, Smith renewed his appeals, urging that if Bragg would bring his entire army to Chattanooga and operate from there, he, Smith, would be glad to serve as Bragg’s subordinate in the campaign that would follow. Bragg outranked Smith, but since Smith had an independent command, the latter would not have been required by military law to obey Bragg unless the two were actually together at the same place. Smith was offering a higher degree of cooperation if Bragg would help him.