Chapter 3

1862

In early January, Lincoln met with Montgomery Meigs, the quartermaster general of the Union army. The depressed president told Meigs, “The people are impatient; Chase has no money, and he tells me he can raise no money; the Gen. of the army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?” On January 27, he issued General War Order Number 1, which commanded the forward movement of all troops by Washington’s Birthday.

In February, uplifting news arrived from the western theater of military operation. Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston commanded forces stretching four hundred miles across Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Union command of the Department of Missouri was led by Henry Halleck, whose book Elements of Military Art and Science Lincoln had been reading. Don Carlos Buell, head of the Department of the Ohio, had orders to move into Tennessee, and while he was slow to act, another general, Ulysses S. Grant, who commanded the district of Southeast Missouri, was not.

After graduating from the United States Military Academy, Grant had served in the Mexican War, but he resigned his commission in 1854 under suspicion of drinking on duty. He farmed and clerked until the outbreak of war gave him another chance at success. He was described as short and round-shouldered; one soldier said of him that “he habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall.” On February 6, in conjunction with a fleet of gunboats, Grant attacked Fort Henry on the Tennessee River, taking it on the same day. Grant then moved on Fort Donelson, twelve miles away on the Cumberland River. After several days of vigorous back-and-forth fighting, on February 16, Donelson fell on the only terms Grant would accept: “unconditional and immediate surrender” of its twelve thousand men. With this act, the initials U. S. Grant gained new meaning. The Union now controlled two main rivers and had a direct line to Nashville, which the Confederates would soon evacuate.

Celebrations erupted as news of the victories spread across the Union. Church bells rang and cannons were fired. One editorial declared that for failing to join in the festivities, “any person found sober after nine o’clock in the evening would be arrested as a secessionist.” Writing from London in March, Henry Adams reported “the talk of intervention, only two months ago so loud as to take a semi-official tone, is now out of the mouths of everyone.” Southerners were shocked by the “disgraceful” and “shameful” losses, and knew that the defeats harmed their case abroad. On February 22, Jefferson Davis delivered an inauguration address and acknowledged that “we too have had our trials and our difficulties.” But although “the tide for the moment is against us, the final result in our favor is not doubtful.”

Whatever joy Lincoln might have felt was quickly dashed by the tragic death of his eleven-year-old son, Willie, from typhoid fever. The minister who delivered the funeral sermon spoke of “the dark shadow of affliction” that had fallen on the Lincolns. It had fallen as well on the nation. Two years later, Jefferson Davis would also lose a son, who fell from the second floor of the Confederate executive mansion. Both these leaders suffered acutely from the rising tide of death and both knew personally what parents had to endure.

The worst death toll in a single battle to that point came on April 6, near Shiloh Church, Tennessee. Johnston, united now with Beauregard, surprised Union forces under the command of William T. Sherman. In a brutal day of fighting, Union forces were driven back, but Grant, reinforced by General Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio, arrived late in the day. Johnston was mortally wounded. A counterattack the next day won back the ground lost, and Beauregard, now in command, retreated. Men on both sides were exhausted, having marched and fought for days through mud and rain without nourishment.

The battle marked the emergence of Sherman as a valuable asset to Grant. To that point, Sherman’s career had been checkered. After West Point, the Ohioan had served in California during the Mexican War. He then wandered on to various occupations: banker, lawyer, railroad man, superintendent of a military college. His military service in Kentucky as commander of the Department of the Cumberland in the fall of 1861 went off kilter and, perhaps overcome by stress, he took a leave. He returned to Grant’s Army of the Tennessee as a division commander, and by force of will became a warrior.

Shiloh put an end to any Northern hopes of a quick resolution to the war. One soldier, who earlier predicted the rebellion would end in six months, now wrote in his diary, “If my life is spared I will continue in my country’s service until this rebellion is put down, should it be ten years.” Grant was roundly criticized, and rumors spread that he had been drinking. But Lincoln stood by the general.

More than three thousand died in the battle, and over sixteen thousand were wounded. One reason for the lethal results of Civil War battles was the shift away from smoothbore muskets to rifled barrels that fired new bullets, called Minie balls, that had greater accuracy and range. One soldier observed, “Those Minie, Sharp, & Enfield balls tear a terrible hole. Their weight & velocity is so great that bones stand a poor chance. Out of any given number of men who are shot in battle it is said that twice as many dies who are struck by these balls as among those who are hit by the ordinary musket balls.” Grant would later write that the battlefield “was so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground.” A Confederate soldier said, “It was too shocking too horrible.” Herman Melville later wrote a poem about Shiloh that contained these lines:

Foemen at morn, but friend at eve—

Fame or country least their care:

(What like a bullet can undeceive!)

Across North and South, the war quickly dashed any romantic ideals that had led Americans to believe glory and honor were to be found on the battlefield. After Shiloh, one Union artilleryman from Illinois wrote to his father: “Will spare you the horrid and disgusting details of the thousands of suffering wounded, and mangled corpses I saw. … We have at last had our wish for a hard battle gratified and never again do I expect to hear the same wish from the lips of our men. We are just as ready now to do our duty as we were, but to desire another hard battle, with the same chances of loss to our company, is quite a different thing.”

The war would be neither brief nor limited. After Shiloh, terror grew. A year into the conflict, Americans were beginning to realize just how bloody a price would be paid, not for glory but for peace.

The artilleryman’s letter indirectly raised the issue of what soldiers thought they were fighting for during the war. “To do our duty,” is vague, though once in the military, fighting for one’s unit, one another, and out of fear of being seen as cowardly certainly kept many a man going forward. Seeing one’s friends slaughtered added another potent motivator: “My heart was rilled with hatred and revenge against the enemy. … I could not restrain my tears and felt that I would hazard my life in any position to mow down their ranks with canister. After this I had a feeling of utmost indifference as to my fate.”

Other generalizations about the motivations of each side can be suggested. Rage militaire drove men to arms when appeals to patriotism crested. In the Union, hundreds of thousands of immigrants, as much as a quarter of the military, enlisted. Undoubtedly, they saw service as an opportunity to support the country they hoped to make their own. Many Irish, Scots, and German immigrants joined together and formed their own regiments. Whether immigrants or natives, men signed up to support the government in its contest against “anarchy and revolution.”

Few mentioned hostility to slavery as the reason for enlisting, though some spoke of opposition to the slave power. And they spoke generally about liberty and the need to preserve the Union. Over time, however, some began to write about the need to eliminate slavery to achieve these goals. In January 1862, one soldier, a private in the Fifth Iowa, declared, “I believe that Slavery (the worst of all curses) is the sole cause of this Rebellion and until this cause is removed and slavery abolished the rebellion will continue to exist.”

Confederate soldiers also cited the abstractions of liberty and self-determination, but added to the mixture questions of honor in the defense of their homeland against invasion by an enemy bent on subjugating them. Time and again they said they were fighting for their “rights,” which also meant the right for some of them to own slaves. One soldier wrote that he would “rather die the Death of a brave and truehearted Southern soldier than to see my country trodden down by the Northern invader.” All the men, he proclaimed, “will spill the last drop of blood in their veins before they will submit to the Federal Government.”

And yet the two sides often fraternized while on picket duty, exchanging newspapers and goods (coffee for tobacco was a favorite) and sometimes whistling alternate notes of tunes to one another. After trading “canteens and carterages [sic]” one Union soldier wrote “now you might think it strange but I cant help but be just friendly to one of them as I would to one of my own country.” On December 23, Charles Haydon, a Union lieutenant colonel, recorded the following in his diary:

This m’g one of their pickets called to one of ours, “I say Yank what are you fighting about?” “I don’t know.” “Say Reb what are you fighting about?” “I don’t know.” “Let’s throw our guns into the river & end the d——d war.”

Both sides suffered from the ordeals of soldiering: long, exhausting marches in shoes that blistered the feet (“found one of our men dead at noon laying by the fence. He had been marched so hard that he fell over dead”); rations that were often barely edible (“two cups of muddy coffee & a few squares of hard tack per day”); lice-infested clothes and bouts of illness, especially fevers and diarrhea (one soldier concocted a potion consisting of “blackberry roots and sweet bark gum boiled down to a syrup and sweetened” to ease diarrhea). And camp was filled with temptation and vice, whether drinking, gambling, cursing, or the visits of prostitutes. One exasperated officer exclaimed, “If the men pursue the enemy as vigorously as they do whores they will make very efficient soldiers.”

Fear was a constant, dealt with in different ways, whether the bravado of willingness to die for one’s country or the fatalism that God’s will would be done or the actions of soldiers who seemed to disappear once the firing began. What they saw and did changed them. Men “curse, swear, and play cards all night in a tent where there is a corpse,” wrote a Confederate officer. Another acknowledged that he experienced a change such that “I look on the carcass of a man now with pretty much such feeling as I would do were it a horse or hog.” A Union soldier observed after one battle that the “sun rose bright and clear this morning to spread his brilliant light over thousands of mangled human bodies.”

Soldiers wrote frequently about the aftermath of battles: “The dead lay in all postures … one I saw on his hands & knees with his head shot off. Two men were found lying opposite each other with each his bayonet through the other’s body. … A few of the dead remain unburied. They are so bloated as to burst open the legs of their pants & the sleeves of their coats. Their features are entirely obliterated & the face when not consumed by maggots is but a smooth, dark shining mass of putridity.” In 1865, one sergeant confessed, “I cannot write anymore long letters like I used to. I do not feel like the same person I was a year ago.” A captain reflected, “I do actually believe that I have forgotten how to act look or walk like a civilian.”

The terrors of war notwithstanding, armies needed men, and in April the Confederate Congress passed a law making males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five subject to conscription. A supplemental act later in the year exempted one white man for every twenty slaves on a plantation and provided for the purchasing of substitutes, which favored the wealthy and led some to call the conflict “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.” Facing the draft, even after initially volunteering and serving, many men “chose” to reenlist. As one Confederate soldier put it in a letter home, “Pa, we have all reenlisted for the ‘War.’ We had to do it and I thought I would come on as a patriot soldier of the South.”

The Conscription Act exposed a deep ideological flaw in the Confederacy. States had seceded to control their own destiny and to remove themselves from centralized authority. But it took a nationalized command to run a war, and the demands of the government often conflicted with the desires of states. Georgia’s governor, Joseph E. Brown, for example, objected vigorously to the law and called conscription “subversive of [Georgia’s] sovereignty, and at war with all the principles for the support of which Georgia entered into this revolution.” The longer the war threatened to last, the more resistance the individual states might demonstrate. It had been a long time since the Confederate victory at Manassas; losses in Missouri, Kentucky, western Virginia, Tennessee, and even New Mexico left Southerners fearing the worst.

The longer the war went on, the more the U.S. Congress legislated what could not have passed while Southern Democrats were in the Union, and in the process remade the nation according to the Republican ideal of a liberal, capitalist society populated by educated, independent landowners. The Homestead Act (signed May 20) provided land to applicants willing to develop the acreage in return for which, after five years, they would gain title; the Morrill Land Grant Act (signed July 2) gave states thousands of acres of land for the development of agricultural and mechanical schools; the National Banking Act (signed February 25, 1863; revised in 1864) created a national currency and charters for a system of national banks and served to help finance the war.

Congressional debate on these issues came in the midst of a spring campaign against Richmond. Lincoln was anxious for McClellan to move forward. On February 27, he lamented that the “general does not intend to do anything.” On April 9, he wrote to McClellan: “It is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help this … you must act.” McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign had actually begun in March. The battle at Hampton Roads on March 8–9 between two ironclad ships, the Union Monitor against the Confederate Virginia, ended inconclusively but forever transformed naval warfare. In late March, an armada of tens of thousands of men sailed from Alexandria to Fortress Monroe. McClellan had superior forces to the Confederate army (the Army of the Potomac had 105,000 men; Richmond was defended by 60,000), but he balked from attacking under the mistaken belief that the Southern army was at least equally strong.

Although Union forces gained access to the James River, McClellan made only halting progress toward Richmond, or in subduing Confederate forces under the command of Joseph E. Johnston, who was wounded on May 31 at the Battle of Seven Pines. Two days of fighting yielded heavy casualties (a total of more than eleven thousand) but little change in position. The most important result for the future of the war was that the wounded Johnston was replaced by Robert E. Lee, who renamed his command the Army of Northern Virginia.

Lee would soon develop a mystique that intimidated Union men and made him revered by rebels. Formal, poised, gentlemanly, after the war he would be venerated. A Union sergeant wrote, “I think old Lee is too sharp for our men”—a typical expression of the beliefs of Union soldiers. Even toward war’s end, Southerners would not criticize the General. “What a position does he occupy,” exulted one woman, “the idol, the point of trust, of confidence & repose of thousands.” Lee’s reputation undoubtedly shaped the military conflict, but it cut both ways. While his audacity and standing, along with the belief in the martial superiority of the rebels, may have cost the Union in battle, over time it is likely that Lee’s willingness to take questionable offensive chances stemmed in part from a belief in his army’s invincibility.

The Peninsula Campaign concluded with a series of savage engagements known collectively as the Seven Days Battles, fought between June 25 and July 1. The sixth and final battle took place at Malvern Hill, where Lee attacked an entrenched Union position and paid for it with heavy casualties. “It was not war—it was murder,” agonized one Confederate general. Despite victory, McClellan pulled back, and Richmond was no longer threatened.

Through the spring, with Johnston and Lee fighting on the peninsula, Thomas Jackson, nicknamed “Stonewall” after his heroics at Bull Run, led a campaign through the Shenandoah Valley. A graduate of the United States Military Academy and a former professor at the Virginia Military Institute, Jackson distinguished himself as one of the most imaginative and daring Confederate generals. A series of victories at such places as Front Royal, Winchester, Cross Keys, and Port Republic left Jackson in control of the valley and in a position to reinforce Lee’s armies at Richmond. He moved vigorously across the valley, defeated a larger but divided enemy army, and gave an enormous boost to Confederate confidence in the aftermath of defeats in the west.

And yet the Confederates felt they should have accomplished more. On July 9, Lee wrote to his wife: “Our success has not been as great or complete as we could have desired, but God knows what is best for us.” McClellan’s army was there for the breaking. But at other points, so, too, was Lee’s. In the aftermath, both sides scrutinized what they might have done differently. But there is so much in war that no one can control: the weather, communication, intelligence, organization, and just plain luck. Only Jackson’s campaign seemed pristine, a model of a general in perfect command, executed with bravado.

Lincoln longed to find what was best for the Union cause. Unable to sleep, losing weight, he tried to maintain a positive attitude, but the only unadulterated good news all spring had been the capture of New Orleans by Admiral David Farragut in late April. On July 7, Lincoln traveled to Harrison’s Landing, a stretch of five miles or so on the east side of the James River, to see McClellan and visit the troops.

McClellan presented Lincoln with a letter explaining that he thought the war “should be conducted upon the highest principles known to Christian Civilization. It should not be a War looking to the subjugation of the people of any state, in any event. It should not be, at all, a War upon population; but against armed forces and political organizations. Neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of states or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.”

Lincoln already knew McClellan’s attitudes toward the war. The general consistently overestimated the enemy’s troop strength and was reluctant to commit his men to battle. He had become a master of inactivity. And he seemed unwilling to take any actions that might be seen as unchivalrous by Southerners. In June, for example, McClellan would not allow wounded soldiers to use an estate owned by Mrs. Robert E. Lee as a military hospital. McClellan said he had made a promise, and Lincoln apparently told a noted physician, “I will break it for him.”

On July 11, Lincoln named Halleck general-in-chief of all land forces. The change in command marked the beginning of a change in strategy. The war would be prosecuted more energetically and aggressively. The property of civilians would become a legitimate military target, and the struggle began its shift from a war against an enemy army to a war against a people in rebellion.

Lincoln and Congress also began gradually but systematically to attack slavery. On March 6, Lincoln asked Congress to adopt a joint resolution stating that the government would cooperate with any state that adopted an act of gradual emancipation. He had in mind the slave states still in the Union and hoped that by taking steps to eliminate slavery these states would shatter Confederate hopes that they would eventually join in the rebel cause. Lincoln was careful to say that his proposal “sets up no claim of a right, by federal authority, to interfere with slavery within state limits.” He merely hoped to accelerate the process by offering pecuniary aid. Congress passed the resolution, but the border states did not accept the offer.

A week later, Congress took a decisive step by passing an article of war that prohibited officers from returning escaped slaves to their masters, even if they were loyal to the Union. Any officer found guilty of violating the act would be court-martialed. This had the effect of expanding the terms of the Confiscation Act of August 1861.

Congress was not done. On April 16, Lincoln signed an act abolishing slavery in Washington, D.C. More than three thousand slaves received their freedom, but, much to the dismay of radical Republicans, the government compensated the owners for their loss and set aside money to promote colonization. Still, the blemish of slavery on the capital of the republic had been removed. “At the national capital Slavery will give way to Freedom,” exulted Charles Sumner, “but the good work will not stop here. It must proceed. What God and Nature decree, Rebellion cannot arrest.”

A month later, some of Lincoln’s most ardent antislavery supporters were dismayed when the president rescinded General David Hunter’s General Order Number 11, which had declared the slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida “forever free.” Hunter’s action enraged Southerners and Northern Democrats and led Jefferson Davis to offer a bounty for his capture and execution. Lincoln’s action, however, had nothing to do with his attitudes toward the abolition of slavery; instead, he rescinded the order out of his belief that only the executive, not any of his officers, could make such policy. Several months later, he would put the matter this way: “As commander-in-chief of the army and navy, in time of war, I suppose I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy.”

Lincoln took the opportunity in his May 19 message about Hunter to remind the border states of his earlier message to Congress encouraging them to adopt a plan of gradual emancipation and imploring them not to be “blind to the signs of the times.” Congress had been taking action; the president had been taking action; the generals had been taking action (without authority but still acting); and the slaves themselves had been taking action by making their way to Union lines.

Yet still, to many, it seemed that not nearly enough was being done. On July 5, one woman wrote to a family member that “as things stand the South is fighting to maintain slavery, and the North is trying to fight so as not to put it down.” On July 12, Lincoln appealed again to border-state members of Congress to adopt a plan for gradual, compensated emancipation. He tried reasoning with them: now they had a chance to get something in return for their property, whereas if the struggle continued slavery would be gone “by the mere incidents of the war.” He noted that in regard to the issue of emancipation, “the pressure, in this direction, is still upon me, and is increasing.”

Twenty of the twenty-seven congressmen from the border states rejected his plea, however, and on the next day, July 13, riding in a carriage on the way to a funeral for the infant son of Edwin Stanton, his secretary of war, Lincoln confided to Seward and Gideon Welles, the secretary of the navy, that he had decided to act against slavery. He told his cabinet members that “he had about come to the conclusion that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.”

Lincoln informed his entire cabinet of the decision and read a draft of the proclamation to them on July 22. His action was inspired partly by the passage of the Second Confiscation Act. It included a provision that proclaimed that all slaves of owners engaged in rebellion “shall be forever free of their servitude, and not again held as slaves.” Lincoln still doubted congressional authority over slavery in the states. And seeing it as a bill of attainder, he even considered vetoing the Act. Instead, he planned to ground emancipation as an executive decision. On the advice of Seward, he decided to await a Union military victory so as to bolster Northern morale, minimize the opposition that inevitably would come from Northern Democrats, and not make it seem as if emancipation was a desperate act on the part of a teetering government.

Somehow, word of Lincoln’s decision did not leak. Given the events of the year, radical Republicans railed against Lincoln’s inaction on slavery. On August 20, Horace Greeley, the influential editor of the New York Tribune, published an open letter to Lincoln titled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” He informed the president that Northerners were “sorely disappointed and deeply pained by the policy you seem to be pursuing with regard to the slaves of the Rebels” and implored him to stop his “deference to Rebel slavery,” enforce the Confiscation Act, and take executive action against the institution.

Lincoln responded on August 22: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it 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 do 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.” It was a crafty response, designed not to alienate Southern sympathizers and aimed at reaffirming what he had been saying from the start about the preservation of the Union. It was easy for men like Greeley not to notice the change suggested by the line “if I could do it by freeing all the slaves I would do it.” Lincoln hadn’t said that before.

Radical Republicans did not appreciate what they saw as waffling on the part of the president. Frederick Douglass denounced Lincoln for “making himself appear silly and ridiculous … he has been unusually garrulous, characteristically foggy, remarkably illogical and untimely in his utterances.”

Despite Lincoln’s hopes, a Union military victory was not quick in coming. Instead, the Confederates gained a significant triumph when Lee attacked again at Bull Run. This second battle began with Stonewall Jackson cutting off the Union supply line at Manassas. In a battle that raged from August 28 to August 30, Union general John Pope was outsmarted and outmaneuvered by Lee, Jackson, and James Longstreet, whose forces arrived in time to reinforce the Confederate line. Longstreet’s force of twenty-eight thousand counterattacked and drove the Union forces back for over a mile. Sixteen thousand of Pope’s sixty thousand men were killed, wounded, or missing; the Confederates suffered some nine thousand casualties out of fifty thousand men. It was a humiliating, demoralizing defeat for the Union. “For the first time I believe it possible that Washington may be taken,” wrote the correspondent for the New York Tribune. An officer confessed: “Our men are sick of war. They fight without an aim and without enthusiasm.” Lincoln fell into depression. One cabinet member described him as “wrung by the bitterest anguish—said he felt almost ready to hang himself.”

Southerners were elated and saw it as a time to press the advantage. Lee wrote to Davis on September 3 that “the present seems to be the most propitious time, since the commencement of the war, for the Confederate army to enter Maryland.” That invasion would culminate on September 17 in the Battle of Antietam. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac battled Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia through a day that saw repeated attacks and counterattacks and missed opportunities to exploit advantages. The combat ended with combined casualties of over twenty-three thousand. Each side suffered more than two thousand battlefield dead, and thousands more would perish from their wounds. It remains the single bloodiest day in American military history. Afterward, a New Hampshire surgeon wrote to his wife, “When I think of the battle of Antietam it seems so strange. Who permits it? To see or feel that a power is in existence that can and will hurl masses of men against each other in deadly conflict—slaying each other by the thousands—mangling and deforming their fellow men is almost impossible. But it is so and why we cannot know.”

The battle was a strategic victory for the Union, as Lee was forced to return to Virginia. Five days later, Lincoln used the occasion to issue a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The document declared that as of January 1, all slaves held in states then in rebellion would be “forever free.” It cited the article of war adopted by Congress on March 13 and the Second Confiscation Act passed on July 17. The document also reiterated the president’s goal of helping states to adopt plans of abolition and supporting the “effort to colonize persons of African descent.”

Lincoln still clung to colonization as a panacea for the race problem in America. On August 14, he had met with a “Committee of Colored Men” and told them that “even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race.” He deplored the ill effects of slavery on white men and argued that “without the institution of Slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence.” “It is better for us both,” he urged, “to be separated,” and he offered to invest government money in helping to establish a new colony in Central America. Nothing substantial came of the proposal. Privately, Salmon Chase, secretary of the treasury, snorted, “how much better would be a manly protest against prejudice against color!”

As might be expected, reactions to the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation ran the gamut. Governors of most of the Union states congratulated the president. Even those politicians who sought a more immediate and direct assault on the institution expressed enthusiasm. Sumner said, “It is enough for me that in the exercise of the war power, it strikes at the origin and mainspring of the Rebellion.” Horace Greeley instantly buried whatever ill feelings he had toward Lincoln and said, “It is the beginning of the end of the rebellion; the beginning of the new life of the nation.” A Union captain noted that “though the President carefully calls it nothing but a war measure, yet it is the beginning of a great reform and the first blow struck at the real, original cause of the war.” Disappointed, however, that there had been no spike in enlistments, on September 28, Lincoln wrote to his vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, that “the North responds to the proclamation sufficiently in breath; but breath alone kills no rebels.”

Whereas Northern Republicans by and large praised the act (although some questioned its constitutionality), most Northern Democrats, such as New York’s governor, Horatio Seymour, described it as a “bloody, barbarous, revolutionary, and unconstitutional scheme.” They were also dismayed by a second proclamation issued two days later that suspended the writ of habeas corpus, thereby giving the government broad powers to arrest “disloyal” citizens who interfered in the war, particularly with the raising of troops.

Southerners denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as “a call for the insurrection of four million slaves, and the inauguration of a reign of hell upon earth.” Jefferson Davis said it afforded “the complete and crowning proof of the true nature of the designs of the party which elevated” Lincoln to office. The Charleston Mercury saw the act as a “stroke of desperate statesmanship” issued by a crazed president beholden to radical abolitionists. The paper also realized that it was a barrier to European recognition. The war was now clearly a war against slavery, and European nations would be extra cautious about entering the fray, though the initial reaction of foreign statesmen was tepid because they believed the Proclamation tacitly supported slave insurrection.

The Emancipation Proclamation could not mask the reality that the war had not been going well for the Union. The armies had suffered costly defeats, the treasury was low on money (Congress had imposed the first federal income tax), and enlistments were down. Many Northerners were experiencing “war weariness,” and Lincoln’s proclamations on emancipation and habeas corpus energized Peace Democrats (derogatorily called Copperheads by Republicans who saw them as poisonous snakes waiting to rear up and bite). Even though Republicans gained five Senate seats, the results of the fall congressional elections were disheartening for Lincoln’s party: Democrats had a net gain of twenty-eight seats. They won the governorships of New York and New Jersey and the state houses in New Jersey, Illinois, and Indiana. They even carried Lincoln’s home district.

In the midst of the fall elections, thousands in New York had a chance to see the war in a way they hadn’t previously—through photographs. The Civil War was the first widely photographed war, and photographers of the North and the South captured tens of thousands of images of soldiers, armaments, and battlefields. Shutter speed was still too slow to record action, but the images that were circulated in galleries and on small photographic cards known as “carte de visites” gave Americans far away from the conflict what seemed like a firsthand view of the nature of war.

Mathew Brady was the main impresario of his day, and his gallery on Broadway in New York City advertised an exhibition called “The Dead of Antietam.” Two photographers in his employ, Alexander Gardner and James Gibson, had arrived at Antietam two days after the battle. Their photographs were the first to show dead bodies, some lying alone in the field, others lined up for burial. A reporter for the New York Times visited the gallery and on October 20 offered a review:

The dead of the battle-field come to us very rarely, even in dreams. We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. … Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along streets, he has done something very like it. … We should scarce choose to be in the gallery, when one of the women bending over them should recognize a husband, a son, or a brother in the still, lifeless lines of bodies, that lie ready for the gaping trenches. … Homes have been made desolate, and the light of life in thousands of hearts has been quenched forever. All of this desolation, imagination must paint[,] for broken hearts cannot be photographed.

The images destroyed any romantic notions about the war—it was all too real, and clearly something needed to be done soon to bring it to an end. Lincoln continued to press McClellan to follow up on the victory at Antietam; finally, on November 7, he relieved McClellan of command of the Army of the Potomac in favor of Ambrose Burnside, a West Point graduate who took the new position reluctantly.

On December 12, the Union army crossed the Rappahannock River and the next day repeatedly assaulted a dug-in Confederate position on Prospect Hill and Marye’s Heights near Fredricksburg. Burnside’s men time and again tried to take the Heights, but Lee’s men were shielded by a four-foot-high wall four hundred yards long. By nightfall, the bodies of Union troops littered the terrain. The Union absorbed more than twelve thousand casualties; the Confederates fewer than five thousand. Lee apparently said, “it is well that war is so horrible, or else we should grow too fond of it.”

At year’s end, Jefferson Davis, who was home in Mississippi for Christmas, gave a speech in which he admitted that “the contest has assumed proportions more gigantic than I had anticipated” and denounced the Yankee war “waged for the gratification of the lust of power and of aggrandizement, for your conquest and subjugation, with a malignant ferocity and with a disregard and a contempt of the usages of civilization, entirely unequalled in history.” He was especially appalled by Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which promised, Davis believed, to ignite servile insurrection across the South. Still, he felt the war was the Confederates’ to be won. Given that “we have entered upon a conflict with a nation contiguous to us in territory, and vastly superior to us in numbers, … the wonder is not that we have done little, but that we have done so much.”

5. Images such as this one, taken in the aftermath of the battle of Antietam, were displayed at Mathew Brady’s gallery and shocked the Northern public by bringing home the grim reality of war.

As the year came to a close, some wondered, given the fall election results and the Union’s military reverses, whether Lincoln would stand by his promise to issue on January 1 the Emancipation Proclamation, a proclamation made necessary in part by what the Confederacy had accomplished. On December 1, he elaborated at length on schemes of emancipation in his annual message to Congress and made clear that the time had come to act, to break with what had come before, because “the dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present,” and that by “giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson had no doubts that the president would follow through. In an essay published in the Atlantic Monthly, he said: “It is not a measure that admits of taking back. Done, it cannot be undone by a new administration.” Emerson appreciated what others criticized: “the firm tone in which he announces it, without inflation or surplusage.” Lincoln’s apparent reticence and moderation were his great strength, a fairness of mind whose “capacity and virtue … we have underestimated.” Emerson could hardly wait for the hour to strike. “Do not let the dying die,” he implored. “Hold them back to this world, until you have charged their ear and heart with this message to other spiritual societies, announcing the melioration of our planet.”