CHAPTER 29

Sambo’s Right to Be Kilt

As frustrating as Lincoln found McClellan’s incomplete victory, it did give him the pretext for an epochal act. He had been waiting since midsummer for a Union triumph so he could issue his Emancipation Proclamation. Historian Stephen B. Oates called it “one of the great ironies of the war” that it was McClellan, Lincoln’s most outspoken foe in the army, a racist and pro-South Democrat, who gave him that opportunity.

Lincoln had come to this watershed in tentative stages. He had said repeatedly since before the war began that abolishing slavery was never his goal. After Horace Greeley got over his post-Manassas fit of brain fever in 1861, he had gone back to hectoring the president about it. On January 3, 1862, Lincoln had attended a Greeley lecture at the Smithsonian Institution. Blinking through his spectacles directly at the president, Greeley had insisted that the abolition of slavery was the “one sole purpose of the war.” Exasperated, Lincoln asked a Tribune Washington correspondent, “What in the world is the matter with Uncle Horace? Why can’t he restrain himself and wait a little while?”

Knowing how widely unpopular abolition still was in the North, Lincoln assayed some half-measures before committing to it. That March he tried to convince the four border states of the Union that still allowed slavery—Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky—to begin programs of gradual manumission. He failed. He also tried to keep the colonization idea vital, bringing a group of “Free Negroes” to the White House to try to enlist their support for creating a Liberia-type colony in Panama. He failed at that too. At the same time, one of his generals was pushing him from another direction. General David Hunter, a cousin of David Hunter Strother, was commander of the army’s Department of the South (South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida). He unilaterally declared all slaves under his jurisdiction free, and issued an order to recruit two regiments of Negro soldiers from among them.

Charles Halpine, a.k.a. Miles O’Reilly, had left Corcoran’s 69th by then and was a staff officer to Hunter. As an Irishman and Tammany Democrat, Halpine had no great love for Negroes. He once wrote his wife that he thought contrabands “ought all to be drowned.” But he believed that the Union should prosecute the war by any means available, so at Hunter’s direction he drafted the order to recruit black regiments, and even organized the first one, called the 1st South Carolina Volunteers (African Descent). Meanwhile, as Miles he wrote a little ditty for the Herald, “Sambo’s Right to be Kilt,” which began:

Some tell us ’tis a burnin’ shame

To make the naygers fight;

And that the thrade [trade] of bein’ kilt

Belongs but to the white:

But as for me, upon my sowl [soul]!

So liberal are we here,

I’ll let Sambo be murthered instead of myself,

On every day in the year.

In New York, the Democracy staged a giant anti-Hunter rally at Cooper Union. Fernando Wood was the star speaker, denouncing “Black Dave” and all abolitionists, who he said had started the war in the first place and were now doing everything they could to drag it out. The packed crowd of several thousand huzzahed.

Lincoln liked and admired Hunter; Hunter had been in the retinue who trained with him from Springfield to Washington for his inauguration. But the president didn’t want to be rushed by him any more than by Horace Greeley. He immediately nullified his friend’s rash acts. Then a few more months of pondering, and more lectures from Greeley and from Radicals like Sumner, finally brought him to the justification that declaring Southern slaves free could strike a serious economic, psychological, and political blow against the Confederacy. He discussed it with his cabinet in July. Seward advised him to wait until the army achieved some significant victory in the East, lest it look like a desperate attempt to distract the world from the army’s ongoing failures.

They were still waiting for that Union victory when Greeley ran an open letter to the president in the August 19 Tribune. Under the headline “The Prayer of Twenty Millions,” Greeley cried that “a great proportion of those who triumphed in your election… are sorely disappointed and deeply pained” by how “strangely and disastrously remiss” Lincoln was in not immediately emancipating Southern slaves. Lincoln responded with an open letter of his own. He didn’t send it to the Tribune, however, but to his more dependable friend Raymond, who published it in the Times. It included the often-cited passage:

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.

That September, McClellan’s victory gave Lincoln his opening. Within a few days of the battle he called his cabinet together to announce his intentions. Yet even then he marked time. He flabbergasted cabinet members when he began the momentous meeting by reading aloud two chapters of The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, which had been published the previous spring, and cackling at all his favorite lines. Artemus Ward was the pen name of Charles Farrar Browne, a New Englander who had created his frontier alter ego Ward and his fictitious town of Baldinsville, Ohio, while writing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1858. In 1860, Browne moved to New York City to take over the editorship of Vanity Fair from Whitman’s friends at Pfaff’s. When the war started, he made Ward “Captin of the Baldinsville Company,” and “havin notist a gineral desire on the part of young men who are into the crisis to wear eppylits, I detarmined to have my company composed excloosively of offissers, everybody to rank as Brigadeer-Ginral.” He “recroots” new men with questions like, “If I trust you with a real gun, how many men of your own company do you speck you can manage to kill durin the war?”

Lincoln found Ward’s exploits hilarious. His cabinet members were unmoved. “Not a member of the Cabinet smiled; as for myself, I was angry,” Stanton later recalled. “It seemed to me like buffoonery.… I was considering whether I should rise and leave the meeting abruptly, when he threw his book down, heaved a sigh, and said: ‘Gentlemen, why don’t you laugh? With the fearful strain that is upon me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die, and you need this medicine as much as I do.’”

Privately, the cabinet was not unanimous in approving the proclamation. Blair worried, correctly as it turned out, that it would cost many Republicans votes in the upcoming midterm elections. Bates thought that the Supreme Court, still very conservative and with Taney still its chief, might declare it unconstitutional. Secretary of the interior Caleb Smith, one of the more conservative cabinet members, was against it on general principles and would soon resign.

Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, five days after Antietam. He would sign it into effect on January 1, 1863. He worded it with lawyerly care to try to avoid conflict with the Supreme Court, and expressly defined it not as a humanitarian gesture but a strategic tool, “a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing rebellion.” He exempted those four border states, and any Southern territory that had been taken by Union forces. Emancipation was strictly a blow against the Confederacy.

Even with these limitations, blacks and abolitionists cheered. At a big “Jubilee Meeting” a few nights after the announcement, in the Shiloh Church on Prince Street, black New Yorkers heard the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, a former slave who’d become one of the city’s leading abolitionists, thank God and sing the president’s praises. At Plymouth Church, Beecher conceded that the proclamation “may not free a single slave, but it gives liberty a moral recognition.” In the Tribune, Greeley enthused that the proclamation “is one of those stupendous facts in human history which marks not only an era in the progress of the nation, but an epoch in the history of the world. Shall we recognize and use it wisely, or shall we, blindly and foolishly, refuse to see that he have now our future in our own hands, and enter upon that downward career which leads eventually to ruin and oblivion?” With a little more reserve, Raymond declared that “looking at its possible economical and moral results in the future,” the proclamation “is undoubtedly one of the great events of the century.”

Many Northern whites, however, reacted negatively. White workers, still fearing that freed blacks would compete for their jobs, hit the streets in angry protest rallies in the major cities. The majority of Northerners, including those in uniform, had believed that the point of the conflict was to put North and South back together and restore the nation, even if that meant allowing slavery to continue in the South. The president himself had said it over and over, and reiterated it in that letter in the Times just a few weeks earlier. To learn that they were now supposed to sacrifice and die to free the slaves and create an entirely different nation enraged and disgusted a good number of them. Soldiers deserted in record numbers in the months after the Preliminary Proclamation. Some New York City and State regiments were decimated. A soldier in the city’s 51st Regiment wrote in a letter home, “Soldiers are constantly deserting & say that they will not fight to put niggers on a par with white men—that they had been duped & that they only enlisted for the preservation of the Union & nothing else.” Officers’ resignations also rose sharply. “I did not come out to fight for the nigger or abolition of slavery,” Lieutenant Colonel Henry Hubbell of the 3rd New York Infantry wrote his brother. “I would sooner see every nigger now free in slavery, than see slavery abolished.” A lieutenant in the city’s 99th Infantry, formerly a loyal and dedicated young officer, wrote his wife, “I am sick and tired of this Nigger War. A soldier has nothing to encourage him to fight for a lot of Nigger lovers at home.” He resigned.

Halpine’s Miles O’Reilly versified, “To the flag we are pledged, all its foes we abhor, / And we ain’t for the nigger, but are for the war.” The Pittsfield Sun, Herman Melville’s local paper in the Berkshires, addressed a poem to the president with the lines:

Our mothers love their absent sons,

Our wives their husbands true,

But no one cares a mouldy fig

For Cuffy or for you

(Cuffy was a stereotypical name for a male slave, often heard in minstrel songs.)

Melville and the Democrats in his family agreed with the poem’s sentiment. Melville was neither pro-slavery nor anti-Negro, but, like Whitman, he considered emancipation a dangerous distraction from the war’s real goal of saving the union.

Fearing a general collapse of military discipline, Lincoln and Stanton cracked down. A few captured deserters were swiftly executed before assembled troops as grim examples. Officers who expressed their disgruntlement aloud—nicknamed Grunters—were summarily dismissed and court-martialed.

Michael Corcoran was putting together four regiments to form a new brigade, Corcoran’s Irish Legion, that fall. He found that recruiting Irishmen in New York wasn’t anywhere near as easy as it had been in the heady spring of 1861. When news of the terrible losses the Irish Brigade sustained at Antietam had reached the city, Irish volunteering plummeted. The added onus of fighting for Cuffy made recruitment even harder. Corcoran had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to fill the ranks. One of his new regiments, the 155th New York Infantry, or “Wild Irish Regiment,” was actually led mostly by non-Irish officers like Lieutenant John Winterbotham, who had “toured New York’s jails and prisons, offering bribes to criminals to entice them into his company.” Winterbotham disparaged his Irish troops as “childlike, drunken, and poorly educated.” An Irish officer under Corcoran tried to ban whiskey because so many of his fellow officers were drinking all the time. Some of the men even belonged to drinking associations called the Rum Rackers’ Club and the Monks of the Screw.

Lincoln had of course been prepared for much protest in response to the September 22 proclamation, but he wasn’t going to allow protest to tip over into sedition. Just three days later, on September 25, he issued another edict. He declared that “all Rebels and Insurgents, their aiders and abettors within the United States, and all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting militia drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice, affording aid and comfort to Rebels against the authority of United States, shall be subject to martial law and liable to trial and punishment by Courts Martial or Military Commission.” For good measure, he added that “the Writ of Habeas Corpus is suspended in respect to all persons arrested.”

Lincoln had suspended habeas corpus in seditious Maryland back at the very start of the war, but this blanket, Union-wide edict startled many. Congress wouldn’t pass a bill authorizing it until the following March. Still, in the space of three days Lincoln had twice rocked the North. He had radically altered the meaning of the war, for everybody. Now they were fighting to save the Union and free the slaves, and everyone in the North was going to do their part, or else.

This was a golden opportunity for New York’s Democrats, and they took full advantage. Denouncing abolitionists and “the evils which a visionary and wild radicalism has brought upon our Government, our army and our people,” they swept the midterm elections that November. Horatio Seymour, who blamed the war on Radicals suffering from “Nigger on the Brain,” went to the governor’s mansion, taking 70 percent of the vote in New York City. (It was his second time in the governor’s mansion. He’d served one term back in 1853–54.) All six of the city’s congressional seats went to Democrats. Benjamin Wood was reelected, and Fernando surfed the Lincoln backlash to a congressional seat of his own. “There has never been so great a revolution of public feeling,” Maria Daly exulted. “Everything two years ago was carried by the Republicans, but now radicals have ruined themselves and abolitionism.” However, she did not approve of the election of “those two scamps, Fernando Wood and his foolish, unprincipled brother.… It is a blot upon the party.”

Benjamin Wood resumed publishing the Daily News the following May and was shortly annoying Republicans with a new, lucrative, and probably subversive feature. Readers in the North who wished to communicate with friends or loved ones in the South took out personal ads in the News, which the Richmond Enquirer reprinted. Personal ads by Southerners in the Enquirer were reprinted in the News. By the middle of 1864 the News would be running two or three hundred such personals a day. At that point the government would order Wood to cease and desist, worried that spies were using the ads to send coded messages, which they almost surely were.

Give us back our old Commander,

Little Mac, the people’s pride;

Let the army and the nation

In their choice be satisfied.

—Septimus Winner

That November, after weeks of arguing with McClellan, Lincoln fired him, this time permanently. He gave the army to Ambrose Burnside, whose sweeping whiskers gave rise to the term “sideburns.” While he was at it, the president used the occasion to purge the army of several other Democrat officers accused of “disloyalty and insubordination.” He replaced them with loyal Republicans.

The Army of the Potomac, soldiers and officers alike, came close to mutinying over the removal of their beloved Little Mac. His aide Custer, whom he promoted to a captaincy, complained about the “dastardly attacks” of the general’s cowardly and unpatriotic enemies, and wrote his parents, “I have more confidence in General McClellan than in any man living. I would forsake everything and follow him to the ends of the earth. I would lay down my life for him.” Democrats throughout the North decried what they saw as the president’s blatantly political vendetta against the man Melville would call the “Hero of Antietam.”

In the Times, however, Raymond rallied behind his president. “We have no theory on which to explain this most extraordinary failure of Gen. McClellan as a commander, or the still more extraordinary persistence of the President in committing the fortunes of the war to his hands,” he editorialized. “Gen. McClellan has shown too many of the qualities of an accomplished soldier to attribute his failure to simple incapacity. That he is absolutely disloyal to the Government we have never permitted ourselves to believe. Yet we think it quite probable that his heart has never been in the war,—that through it all he has had hopes of a compromise which should end it, and that he has feared the effect upon such a compromise of a stern and relentless prosecution of hostilities.”

As McClellan’s train took him north to New Jersey, large crowds cheered him at every stop. New York City’s newly triumphant Democrats welcomed him as a conquering hero. He took rooms in the Fifth Avenue Hotel facing Madison Square. His reception by the city’s Copperheads was, his biographer Stephen Sears wrote, “tumultuous.” A crowd filled the street outside the hotel. When he stepped out onto his balcony, the crowd roared, a band played, and a local militia’s small field piece banged. He was soon making the rounds of balls and gala feasts. While he was careful to keep his distance from Copperhead extremists like the Wood brothers, he happily basked in the attentions of more respectably conservative Democrats including Belmont, Melville’s friend Lathers, Governor Seymour, John Van Buren, and John Jacob Astor. They made him a gift of a spacious new town house on West 31st Street off Fifth Avenue and began to groom him to run against Lincoln in 1864.

Over steaks at Delmonico’s one night a month after emancipation went into effect, Belmont, Seymour, McClellan, and other top Democrats founded the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge to publish and distribute pamphlets and scholarly papers mostly presenting their views that slavery was divinely ordained and emancipation was the folly of fanatics. They installed Samuel F. B. Morse as the society’s president and figurehead, and he obliged with language such as his description of abolitionists as “that dark conclave of conspirators, freedom-shriekers, Bible-spurners, fierce, implacable, headstrong, denunciatory Constitution-and-Union-haters, noisy, factious, breathing forth threatenings and slaughter against all who venture a difference of opinion from them.”

In the meantime, McClellan set to work organizing and writing his voluminous official reports on his tenure as commander of the Army of the Potomac—his defense against all his critics in Congress and the Republican press. His former aide and devoted fan Custer would spend the month of April 1863 in Manhattan assisting him. Custer took a room at the Metropolitan Hotel, his favorite in the city, and went each day to McClellan’s town house to work. In the evenings he made the rounds of balls, theaters, and gambling establishments. Custer loved the bustle and whirl of New York City and would often return.