War is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means.
—Karl von Clausewitz
On November 1, 1862, in Albany, New York, a Democrat perusing his local party newspaper, the Atlas and Argus might well have paused over an ominous official announcement: county commissioners would administer a recently authorized militia draft. A description of exemptions was there, too, along with notice of a commissioners’ meeting on November 6 to hear appeals of men seeking relief from conscription. Six days later in Rochester, New York, the Republican sheet, oddly titled the Daily Democrat and American, reported that the city’s draft office was being flooded with phony medical affidavits after false reports about an impending call-up had caused a panic.1
By the fall of 1862 the combined effects of disease, battles, expiring enlistments, and desertions had created a manpower crisis in the North. Spring and summer recruitment had lagged, and in July Congress had authorized a militia draft of over 300,000 men for nine months’ service. Governors, griping all the while about War Department procedures, had scrambled to fill their states’ quotas with volunteers, hoping to avoid a draft at least until after the autumn elections.2 Lincoln’s recently issued preliminary Emancipation Proclamation would mean little if there were not enough troops available to win a major battlefield victory in the eastern theater.
Besides stirring controversy, the conscription and bounty system offered opportunities for a few enterprising citizens. Some agents promised to collect bounties, advise families in the subtleties of military law, and secure exemptions. For $2.00 a young man might purchase George W. Raff’s comprehensive Manual of Pensions, Bounty, and Pay. Did this mean that patriotism had been replaced by a more selfish calculus? Bounty men and conscripts made notoriously unreliable soldiers and sometimes deserted their regiments while still in training camp. Volunteers expressed cool contempt for men who had to be bribed or dragooned into service.3
Recruitment had inevitably become entangled in state politics. McClellan had hoped to replenish skeleton regiments with new recruits, but delicate negotiations between federal and state officials caused irksome delays. Governor Andrew Curtin, for instance, asserted the right of Pennsylvanians to join new regiments and elect their officers. Faced with uncooperative state officials and enlistees reluctant to serve with veteran regiments, Stanton finally decided to abandon, at least temporarily, any effort to force the issue.4
Public officials treaded carefully for fear of provoking armed resistance. From Massachusetts, where Governor John A. Andrew kept troops on alert to suppress rioting; to Pennsylvania, where the Molly Maguires vigorously opposed conscription; to Indiana, where two enrollment officers were murdered, the threat of violence lurked beneath the surface of public debate. Many citizens had begun to feel the force of government in general and centralized power in particular for the first time in their lives, and the adjustment was painful. A mob of nearly a thousand Belgian Catholics and German Protestants gathered under a banner proclaiming “No Draft” and ransacked the Osaukee County, Wisconsin, courthouse, destroying documents and pummeling a local draft commissioner. Only a strong show of military force by the governor prevented a similar outbreak in Milwaukee. Jittery Washington officials tried to prevent news of these disturbances from passing over the telegraph lines.5
Given the public outcry, obstructionist tactics by state governors, and the War Department’s caution, it is not surprising that the militia draft raised only around a quarter of the men authorized by Congress. As a Republican editor in Wisconsin noted with alarm (and some accuracy), the greatest resistance to the draft occurred in the most heavily Democratic counties.6 Indeed, the political unity of the war’s first year was crumbling. Even as armies in the western theater were advancing and defeating Rebel armies, little progress had been made in the eastern theater, and the war threatened to settle into a bloody standoff. Alarm about conscription and opposition to the recently adopted emancipation policy helped revive the Democratic Party. The approaching congressional and state elections placed Lincoln on the defensive and emboldened the opposition.
A key battleground was New York, a heavily populated, closely competitive state with labyrinthian politics. Secretary of State William H. Seward was never far removed from his home turf’s political battles, and his chief henchman, Thurlow Weed, still pulled wires in the state Republican Party. Both Seward and Weed favored creating a “Union” coalition to unite moderate Republicans with War Democrats, but their old nemesis and fervent radical Horace Greeley insisted the Republican Party stand foursquare for emancipation.
Rejecting Maj. Gen. John A. Dix, the Seward-Weed faction’s gubernatorial candidate, the state Republican convention nominated Brig. Gen. James S. Wadsworth, an ex-Democrat and Free-Soiler. While serving as military governor of the District of Columbia, Wadsworth, as befitting an old Van Buren Democrat, denounced the southern “aristocracy” and vowed to “save the lives of white men who are perishing by the thousands in this country.” This statement, along with earlier remarks about blacks being a “docile people” and “industrious peasantry,” were clearly intended to blunt the Democrats’ racist attacks on emancipation; but Wadsworth was no dough-face on slavery, and his acceptance letter unequivocally endorsed emancipation. Only a few days before the election the general proudly declared himself an abolitionist and denounced Democrats as secret disunionists.7
* * *
Attempting to build a coalition with backers of the old Constitutional Union Party, Democrats nominated conservative Horatio Seymour for governor. A veteran of many bruising factional quarrels, Seymour, an old-fashioned states’ rights Democrat, condemned government centralization without renouncing the war itself. Posing as a moderate alternative to the radical Republicanism of Wadsworth and Greeley, Seymour vigorously campaigned not so much as an enemy of the Lincoln administration but as a constitutional strict constructionist and Unionist. Without succumbing to the defeatism of the peace faction, he could make racist appeals against emancipation and criticize the arbitrary arrests of citizens. To Seymour, McClellan represented the military ideal, a general who would conduct the war along safely conservative lines.8 Ironically like Lincoln, Seymour tried to appeal to a broad political center.
By late fall Democrats were campaigning with energy and confidence. One enterprising firm was even marketing Seymour lithographs at $1.00 each. A Democratic ratification meeting in Albany on October 31, complete with a 100-gun salute and marching clubs, attracted a crowd of more than 7,000. Indignantly denying Republican charges that a vote for Seymour was a vote for Jefferson Davis, speakers explicitly linked their party to McClellan and tried to isolate the radicals by suggesting that even Lincoln would not be entirely displeased if Seymour won the election.9
This absurd notion notwithstanding, the prospect of losing New York frightened Republicans. A Seymour victory would mark the Union’s death knell, several editors warned. England and France would likely recognize the Confederacy and intervene in the war. Reactionaries in London would rejoice, and the Rebels in Richmond would exult as the American republic tottered toward its downfall. The Democratic standard-bearer might pretend to sustain the war effort, but he was a traitor at heart. Greeley wildly predicted that Seymour would recall New York regiments from the field and “inaugurate an insurrection against the General Government.”10 All across the country anxious Republicans followed the New York canvass with great interest, and many foresaw disaster.11
On election day large crowds gathered near the offices of New York City’s major newspapers to scan the latest bulletins. Prominent New York lawyer George Templeton Strong’s initial hopes for a light turnout were dashed when he learned that Seymour had carried the city by around 31,000 votes. “God help us,” he scribbled in his diary.12 Seymour won the state by a slender majority of less than 11,000 of more than 600,000 votes cast (Republicans held on to their legislative majority), but this relatively narrow margin hardly made his triumph any less significant. As Democrats reveled in a victory over “radicalism,” Seymour lauded the people for having risen up against the forces of patronage and corruption to protect constitutional rights.
The state’s leading Democratic newspaper, the New York World, echoed these sentiments. All New Yorkers desired was the preservation of their liberties, vigorous prosecution of the war, and an end to political interference with generals in the field.13 This oblique reference to McClellan only hinted at the larger military significance of the election.14 In Oswego, New York, fervent abolitionist Ruth Whittemore wrote her eighteen-year-old brother, then serving in the 50th New York Engineers, that with Seymour as governor, “you might as well throw down your arms and hurrah for Jeff Davis.” Her neighbors, “stinking ‘Secesh’ Democrats,” even now “hoped every man would be shot that went to fight against the South.” In the Army of the Potomac news of Seymour’s win heartened Democrats who welcomed the possibility of an early end to the war but depressed other soldiers who worried that the Union had been lost.15
Bitter recrimination further weakened New York Republicans. Moderates, convinced that a more conservative candidate would have beaten Seymour, blamed the radicals. Even Republican editors in neighboring Connecticut feuded over which faction had been responsible for the New York debacle. Weed moved quickly, advising the newly elected governor to avoid extreme measures, and the more cynical Republicans speculated that Seymour would pay more attention to distributing patronage than to assailing the Lincoln administration. Others hoped Seymour would not betray the public trust, despite his associations with unsavory peace advocates in New York City.16
New York radicals refused to accept responsibility for the defeat. Instead they blamed the Weed-Seward faction for undermining Wadsworth’s candidacy. Concessions to moderates, abolitionist editors argued, had weakened the party’s moral and political appeal, and the nation’s leading religious weekly credited an unholy trinity of liquor dealers, proslavery men, and secret traitors with electing Seymour. Brig. Gen. John Cochrane, who was angling for Wadsworth’s former command in Washington, informed Lincoln and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase that the people were so disappointed with the slow progress of the war that “they have been aching for a head to smash.” The hapless Wadsworth was their first victim.17
But he was not the only candidate to get his head smashed. All across the country Republicans had gone down to defeat or eked out narrow victories. Outside New England, voters turned out many incumbent congressmen, and the Democrats captured the critically important states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. In some areas Democratic margins were thin, but the Republican majorities had fallen off in districts once considered safe.18 A flood of depressing telegrams and letters arrived in Washington for Lincoln and his advisers; the president pored over the details of both congressional and state contests.19
Attempts to rally public opinion and form a broad-based Union coalition were floundering by the fall of 1862. The Democrats, seemingly moribund for the first year and a half of the war but now resurgent and combative, sought the right issue to use against the administration and the Republicans. As longtime defenders of laissez-faire and small government, they instinctively turned to a classic defense of liberty. The nature of the crisis was unmistakable: government tyranny threatened sacred rights. During the summer of 1862 federal marshals had detained persons accused of supporting the Confederacy but had paid most attention to draft evaders. Lincoln had tacitly approved “arbitrary arrests” and on September 24 had officially suspended the writ of habeas corpus to enforce the militia draft. With some hesitancy Republicans supported these measures and deplored opposition attempts to erect legal barriers to conscription. But in denouncing “military despotism” the Democrats had struck a responsive chord as even their opponents reluctantly conceded.20
After the last vote was tallied in early November, Democrats concluded that the civil liberties question had helped carry the day.21 However that might be, they continued to press the issue throughout November and into December. Stung by the attacks, many Republicans, including some radicals, admitted that government officials had been overzealous and thus had provided a political opening for unscrupulous “demagogues.”22
On November 22 the War Department ordered the discharge of “political” prisoners who had been arrested for discouraging enlistments or opposing the draft. Even the imperious Stanton later acknowledged that mistakes had been made. Republicans hoped this gesture would end the clamor against the government and defuse the civil liberties issue.23 Cynics naturally traced this newfound sense of justice to the election returns. The New York Herald extravagantly described the prisoners’ release as “opening the doors of our Bastilles” and denounced Stanton as a barbarian. Democrats kept repeating what soon became their political mantra: “The Constitution as it is; the Union as it was; the Negroes where they are.”24
The last clause in this catchphrase was no afterthought. Fear of emancipation had become a staple of party rhetoric. Throughout the campaign Democrats had roundly condemned abolitionists and explicitly defended a “white man’s” government. They had sketched out for their supporters a series of horrors that would certainly appear in the wake of emancipation. Thousands of black immigrants flocking to the North taking jobs away from white husbands and fathers would be just the beginning. Political equality and miscegenation would follow, bringing to American streets bloody scenes reminiscent of the French Revolution.25
Victorious Democrats cheered the rout of abolitionism. Conservative friends (or pretended friends) of the Lincoln administration claimed that the election returns proved how wrong the president had been to abandon his once moderate course and yield to the radicals on the slavery question. The Union would now be safe from extremists in both sections, triumphant Democrats predicted. Congressman Samuel S. Cox of New York lampooned the Republican opposition with a racist version of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not take unto thee any graven image of ebony. . . . Thou shalt not take the name of Liberty in vain. . . . Thou shalt not degrade the white race by such intermixtures as emancipation will bring. . . . Thou shalt not bear false witness against their neighbors, charging them falsely with disloyalty. Thou shall not covet their neighbor’s servants... nor tax the people for their deliverance.” Such debates on the home front spilled over into the army camps. For politically savvy soldiers the fate of slavery remained a matter for intense discussion. Some agreed that voters back home had repudiated the abolitionists, and one New Yorker hoped that the election had scotched the careers of “political preachers” who were “really wolves in sheep’s clothing.”26 Perhaps the war against the southern disunionists would not become an uncontrollable revolution after all.
For their part emancipationist Republicans and their abolitionist allies worried that Democrats might just be right, that a conservative tide would sweep away their hard-won gains. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts considered the election in New York “worse for our country than the bloodiest disaster on any field of battle.” But he and other radicals stood fast and spurned any compromise on the slavery question. A few more sound Republican newspapers might stay the course of political reaction, Horace Greeley irritably suggested, because “the newspaper is the chief bulwark of the Republican cause, as the Grogshop is the natural citadel of our adversaries.” Other wishful thinkers hoped the recent defeats might force Lincoln to join forces in a permanent alliance with the antislavery radicals. Yet even the most sanguine could hardly ignore rumors that the president considered the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation the greatest mistake of his political life. And who could be sure what direction the administration might take when such marplots as Seward and Weed still wielded so much influence?27
Sumner and his friends were right in one respect: the greatest danger stemmed not so much from the Democrats, at least in the short term, but from divisions in Republican ranks. Conservative and moderate party leaders had often sidestepped emancipation during the recent campaign to accommodate their constituents’ racial prejudices. After the elections, some of these same Republicans complained that the administration’s antislavery stance had cost the party precious votes in tightly contested districts.28 Little wonder, then, that reports circulated of the party waffling on the slavery question. Senator John Sherman of Ohio, an influential moderate, now considered the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation “ill timed,” and conservatives pressed Lincoln to delay issuing a final Emancipation Proclamation.29
Although the claim that many loyal voters were in the army was obviously a convenient excuse, Republicans firmly believed that this had cut into their political base. By the same token, stay-at-home Democrats had led their party to victory.30 But whether soldiers in the Army of the Potomac were strong Republicans was debatable. Democrats bragged how McClellan’s many friends in the ranks had warmly supported Seymour. According to a New York artilleryman, “Republicanism is played out in the army.” Democrats had reportedly been steadily gaining strength with the soldiers.31
“Messrs. Lincoln, Seward, Stanton & Co., you have done your work badly, so far. You are humbugs. My business is stopped, I have got taxes to pay, my wife’s third cousin was killed on the Chickahominy, and the war is no nearer an end than it was a year ago. I am disgusted with you and your party and shall vote for the governor or the congressman you disapprove, just to spite you.” Thus George Templeton Strong described the typical Democratic voter. Most people remained loyal, he believed, but they had lost faith in the national administration. The increasingly beleaguered Lincoln came under enfilading fire from both ends of the political spectrum. “You are surrounded by an atmosphere of treachery, disloyalty and slavery,” a New York radical warned the president. “Do you ever realize that the desolation, sorrow, and grief that pervades this country is owing to you? That the young men who have been maimed, crippled, murdered, and made invalids for life owe it to your weakness, irresolution, and want of moral courage?”32
The president endured the barrage of criticism stoically for the most part. When his old Illinois friend Orville Hickman Browning held forth at length about how the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation had badly hurt the party, Lincoln sat in stony silence. Visitors upbraided the president in his own office. An enraged Pennsylvania Republican used an awkward double negative but still got his point across: “I am sorry to say it was not your fault that we are not all beaten.” Some disgruntled partisans had even been heard to say that Lincoln should be strung up to the nearest lamppost. Such harsh invective proved how precipitously Lincoln’s political stock was falling. Typically, he summoned up a bit of dark humor to deal with the criticism: “I feel like the boy in Kentucky who stubbed his toe while running to see his sweetheart, and who said he was much too big to cry, but far too badly hurt to be able to laugh.”33
The fact remained that many citizens who might otherwise have voted Republican had indeed grown disgusted and impatient with the war’s halting progress. Even administration loyalists grumbled about the military stalemate. As the first disappointing election returns trickled in from the October states, Chase privately noted the people’s dissatisfaction with a “mismanaged war.” Strategic blunders and incompetent generals had left “loyal soldiers to rot in camp or be slaughtered on the field,” one of the secretary’s Ohio supporters groused. “We abhor this milk & water course at Washington,” a Michigan Republican sputtered.34 The whining of the party’s congressional leaders and even first-term members must have been especially painful to Lincoln. “Hundreds of Republicans,” Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois fulminated, “who believed that their sons and relatives were being sacrificed to the incompetency, indisposition, or treason by proslavery Democratic generals, were unwilling to sustain [the] administration.”35
According to many newspapers the elections had been a referendum on the conduct of the war. Radicals accused conservative generals of exhausting the voters’ patience, while moderates emphasized a broader frustration with indecisive campaigns and bloody battles. Public disappointment over “another winter of delay will be something terrible to contemplate,” a Philadelphia newspaper warned.36 Despite adopting an understandably defensive tone, Republicans tried to sound confident. The Lincoln administration now had no choice but to carry on the war more aggressively. The people demanded victories; unsuccessful generals would have to go. Some editors denounced McClellan by name; others vaguely predicted a reorganization of both the army and the cabinet.37
Civilians and soldiers alike execrated the war’s sluggish progress. Aside from politics and partisanship, the central question remained how and when the Confederates would be defeated. Impatient civilians demanded results. Disillusioned soldiers wondered whether their hardships, sacrifices, and bloodshed would ever lead to victory, the only thing that could silence public criticism. As one sophisticated Bostonian observed, “Military success is everything—it is the verdict which cures all ills.”38 Easily enough said, but battlefield victories against Confederate forces in the East remained frustratingly elusive, and the demoralization at home and in camp sparked rumors of peace.
* * *
Only days after the elections Lincoln began receiving urgent letters describing the supposed eagerness of Confederate leaders to begin negotiations. Shortly after he won a House seat by running on a peace platform, prominent New York Democrat Fernando Wood informed the president of the Rebels’ readiness to send representatives to the next Congress in exchange for a general amnesty. Lincoln dismissed such reports as “groundless” and refused to countenance private diplomacy.39
Republicans tried to squelch talk of a negotiated settlement with powerful, seemingly self-evident arguments. First, the Confederates would accept nothing short of southern independence. Given Rebel distrust of Peace Democrats, even if some form of reunion was acceptable, the Chicago Tribunepredicted that Confederates would insist on coming back with their own president and vice-president, likely demanding amnesty and guarantees for “slave breeders.”40 Only the disloyal clamored for peace under such conditions. “Northern Democrats will fall into the embrace of the Southern Confederacy as gently as a courtesan sinks into the arms of her paramour,” one Republican editor sniffed. Not only would Democrats welcome back traitors, but they risked inciting civil strife in the North to do it. Prominent divine Henry Ward Beecher did not doubt “that there are men in New York who would inaugurate blood, murder, and revolution, if they dared.” Unfortunately, disaffection on the home front was spreading to the troops. A Pennsylvania colonel worried that traitorous talk was doing more damage to the Army of the Potomac than 50,000 Rebel reinforcements.41
Indeed, the northern elections had also heartened the Rebels. Confederate newspapers filled their columns with reports of peace sentiment in the northern states. Virginia’s Governor John Letcher, it was rumored, had been in contact with the slippery Fernando Wood.42 Such stories revived hopes for a diplomatic breakthrough.
Talk of an armistice or settlement naturally spread to Lee’s army, where optimists foresaw peace by spring, if not sooner. Soldiers of course longed for a cessation of hostilities and grasped at the meagerest straws in the political wind. Maj. Gen. Lafayette McLaws, one of Longstreet’s steadiest division commanders, rejoiced that “more Christian spirits” would soon displace defeated Republicans. Other officers agreed that dissension in the North might eventually bring down Lincoln’s government and speculated that Seymour and his New York friends would help stop the fighting.43
Confederates hoped for continued political convulsions that would confound their enemies. Three of President Jefferson Davis’s most strident newspaper critics decided that the elections had deeply divided the Federals, would cripple their armies, and might even lead to a general uprising in the northern states. Ardent fire-eater Edmund Ruffin rejoiced over the growing political discord across the North and believed that an armistice followed by a convention of the states would likely occur during the next several months.44
Few leading Confederates, however, held such sanguine views. Most newspapers discouraged their readers from placing any faith in treacherous northern politicians. “These Yankee Democrats,” the Richmond Daily Whig warned, sought power for their own purposes. Surely so-called conservatives would prove just as faithless as Lincoln and the Republicans. So long as northern capitalists were making money from the war, calls for peace meant little, and in any event it was too late to restore the old Union after all the sacrifices the South had made. Nor was there evidence, despite the honey-tongued oratory of Horatio Seymour or Fernando Wood, that the northern Democracy had become a peace party.45
Even if northern conservatives could be trusted, the newly elected Congress would not assemble for over a year, and in the meantime the war would continue. The elections held out “no hope of speedy results,” a Georgia editor cautioned. Senator William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama had no more faith in the northern Democrats than in the northern abolitionists. “Let us build our own unity upon their fierce party strife and jealousies. Upon their clashings of party interests, let us bind together our patriotic energies.”46
The possible impact of the northern elections on international diplomacy could not be so easily dismissed. For months newspapers North and South had speculated about possible European intervention in the war, and during the late summer of 1862 the British had begun edging in that direction. Thinking that October might be the right time for a mediation offer, Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell had begun sounding out the French government. But the cabinet was divided, and despite his own belief that the Federals were losing the war, Prime Minister Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston, remained cautious and delayed making a final decision.47
In France the talented foreign minister Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys had clung to an attitude of strict neutrality even as Emperor Napoleon III had pushed for a more aggressive policy. The discussions in Paris and London were approaching a climax before news of the American elections reached the continent. Growing unemployment in the French textile industry, sharply higher food prices, and perhaps some public sympathy for the Confederate cause along with hopes for assistance in his Mexican venture finally spurred Napoleon III into action. On November 7 he called for the Russian, French, and British governments to propose mediation of the American conflict with an immediate six-month armistice and suspension of the Union blockade.48
After a long discussion on November 10 and 11 the British cabinet rejected the French overture. The Russians did likewise.49 This did not entirely kill mediation because much would still depend on the military situation and whether Lincoln proceeded with emancipation. Domestic politics, however, threatened to force Palmerston’s hand. By December 1862 the loss of southern cotton had thrown several hundred thousand textile workers out of work, and still more were on relief. Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic publicized the distress in England’s northern industrial districts. Manufacturers clearly favored mediation, as did labor leaders, though the latter were reluctant because of the slavery question.50
Any talk of mediation made official Washington edgy. Foreign interference in American affairs would only unite the North, Seward asserted with more hope than conviction. He tried to reassure the American minister in London, Charles Francis Adams, about recent Republican losses at the polls, but even the dour New Englander must have smiled over the secretary of state’s tortured analysis of the American elections: “People have become so confident of the stability of the Union that partisan combinations are resuming their sway here, as they do in such cases in all free countries.” So Seymour’s victory in New York could actually be interpreted as a sign of political health! Seward instructed the American minister in Paris to make no comment on Napoleon III’s mediation offer. He kept his own remarks on recent diplomatic developments—inserted into the president’s annual message to Congress—remarkably bland.51 Lincoln and his advisers nonetheless feared that a continued military stalemate might provide an excuse for foreign intervention. Consequently, their impatience with McClellan and other commanders grew. Only success on the battlefield could end this threat to American sovereignty.52
Even after the British had spurned mediation for the time being, rumors persisted that the French might act on their own. British opinion remained volatile. As news of the elections reached London, a new flurry of speculation began about a change in the ministry’s policy toward the United States. Even sympathetic antislavery politicians such as John Bright worried about the American administration’s apparent weakness. Irish nationalist William Smith O’Brien pointedly defended the Confederacy’s right of self-determination.53 Frederick Engels and Karl Marx discussed the American war from a more radical perspective. A sarcastic Engels had little sympathy for a people that “allowed itself to be continually beaten by a fourth of its own population and which after eighteen months of war has achieved nothing more than the discovery that all its generals are idiots and all its officials rascals and traitors.” Engels and Marx had trouble fitting the “bourgeois republic” into their theory of class warfare, and their private letters reveal much perplexity about the course of the American conflict. Believing that his comrade was too pessimistic, Marx concluded that despite the vicissitudes of northern politics, the Confederates were losing the war.54
Diplomatic indecision on the mediation question and European misunderstanding of the significance of the American elections caused great consternation in the United States. Many northerners condemned foreign meddling in U.S. affairs, especially by the British, and vilified the English upper class for sympathizing with the southern aristocracy. The British nobility appeared hell-bent, one Boston editor grumbled, on conciliating the “Richmond oligarchy.” Old resentments against European corruption and dynastic intrigue fanned hostilities. A New Jersey sergeant in the Army of the Potomac contemptuously dismissed England as that “little island across the sea.”55
Leading Democrats spurned foreign mediation and declared their un-swerving commitment to preserving the Union. Conservative victories in the recent elections, the New York Herald noted optimistically, made British intervention less likely and might even spark a counterrevolution in the Confederacy.56 Some Republicans also played down the importance of the French mediation proposal and even suggested that British hostility to the American republic was abating. In their view the northern people controlled their own destiny so long as they defeated the Rebels on the battlefield.57
Most Confederates would have agreed on the decisive importance of battles, but southern diplomats closely followed each twist and turn of international politics. Naturally the northern election returns and the French mediation effort pleased them. Convinced that the cotton famine in England might yet prove decisive, James M. Mason in London boasted that “the ability of our generals and prowess of our arms is everywhere acknowledged in Europe.” England’s rejection of mediation only temporarily dampened such exuberant spirits. Even Secretary of State Judah Benjamin half expected the French to intervene in the war without waiting for British cooperation.58
“King cotton” might make European intervention inevitable, optimists such as Mason still believed. Yet rumors of imminent diplomatic recognition had circulated since the beginning of the war, and now even hopeful Confederates hedged their bets.59 Skeptics appeared to be in the ascendancy. After many previous disappointments, who could still expect help from France or Great Britain? The European powers were in reality enemies of the South, and any prospect of foreign recognition was, according to an Augusta, Georgia, editor, a mere “bubble.” The chimera of British or French navies breaking the blockade had too long weakened the people’s will to make sacrifices. Confederates stood alone, Governor John Letcher of Virginia warned, and would have to “rely upon ourselves and fight it out.”60
A growing sense of self-reliance and dependence on divine favor shaped general opinion. “We have to conquer a Peace with our good swords & by God’s help we will do so!” plantation mistress Catherine Edmondston stoutly maintained.61 Ironically, both sides now agreed that more blood would have to be shed before the war would end. Northern newspapers pressed for a winter campaign, and a strategic military victory had become a political necessity for Republicans. The abolition wing of the party in particular feared that Lincoln might draw back from emancipation. Seymour and other Democratic leaders urged the president to conduct the war in a more “constitutional” way, and the recent retreat on “arbitrary” arrests only made them more aggressive. The unpopularity of the draft and the military deadlock all boded well for the political opposition.
For Confederates the future appeared surprisingly bright. The northern elections and talk of foreign intervention temporarily heartened the war-weary. Public confidence in Confederate arms ran high, though Jefferson Davis’s unrelenting opponents made national unity ever more elusive. The costs of the war continued to mount even when Confederate armies won important victories. Realists understood that the Yankees might appear demoralized but were sending ever larger armies into the field. Confederates, however, might hope that November would bring a lull in the fighting, a respite from the relentless pressure on dwindling resources, and a chance to replenish anemic regiments. Unfortunately General McClellan had at last bestirred himself. Yet the Army of the Potomac was moving slowly, and General Lee fully expected his soldiers to defeat a familiar and predictable opponent once again.