ON January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln, weary from a day of greeting well-wishers and shaking hands, slowly put pen to paper and signed the Emancipation Proclamation. His signature declared free more than three million people, but the fulfillment of the proclamation’s promise was highly contingent upon the course of events. Lincoln’s action might be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court or be revoked by his successor if the Democrats won the 1864 presidential election. Above all, the success of emancipation depended on the Union winning the war, an outcome that was far from certain as the new year began.
The previous year had shown how uncertain the course of the conflict could be. After a winter and spring marked by northern victories in Kentucky, western Tennessee, northern Arkansas, coastal North Carolina, and southern Louisiana, the Union retreat during the Seven Days’ Battles outside Richmond in late June sharply curtailed northern hopes that the war might be won before the end of the year. Union expectations that support for southern independence might erode in the face of battlefield reverses or the experience of occupation proved wistful. Lincoln found his faith in southern unionism misplaced, as many tepid loyalists declined to assert themselves forcefully. In turn, Confederate hopes for decisive victory in 1862 faded after late summer counteroffensives in Kentucky and Maryland ended in retreat. Both of these abortive incursions into the border states failed to rally large numbers of supporters to the secessionist cause, and in their wake expectations diminished that the British and French governments would recognize Confederate independence or offer to mediate a settlement to the conflict.
Despite these setbacks, many Confederates began 1863 confident of continued battlefield success in the east. Robert E. Lee had proved himself to be an audacious and determined commander when he drove George B. McClellan away from Richmond and routed John Pope at Manassas. Determined to retain the strategic initiative, Lee then invaded Maryland, where he barely fended off McClellan at Antietam before escaping back across the Potomac. In December he had defeated the Army of the Potomac when its new commander, Ambrose Burnside, launched an offensive across the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg. After fighting four campaigns against numerically superior opponents and besting three Union generals, Lee believed the Army of Northern Virginia was nearly invincible. Many white southerners shared his conviction, as well as Lee’s deep confidence in his three principal subordinates, Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson, James Longstreet, and J.E.B. Stuart. But few observers could be oblivious to the human cost of Lee’s four campaigns in 1862. While the Union had lost more than 70,000 men killed, wounded, captured, or missing fighting Lee, casualties in the Army of Northern Virginia under his command totaled 48,000. This was a rate of attrition that the Confederacy, with three-tenths the white male population of the free states, could not sustain indefinitely. And despite its bloody repulse at Fredericksburg, the Army of the Potomac began the new year still encamped on the northern bank of the Rappahannock, only sixty miles from Richmond.
No Union commander in 1862 had matched Lee’s success. Once hailed as the “Young Napoleon” by his supporters in the press, George B. McClellan had failed to take Richmond and was judged by Lincoln to be too lethargic in the wake of Antietam. Relieved of the command of his beloved Army of the Potomac, McClellan was awaiting “further orders” at year’s end. John Pope had been sent to Minnesota to fight the Dakota after his defeat at Manassas, while the disaster at Fredericksburg appeared to confirm Ambrose Burnside’s own doubts about his ability to lead an army. In the west, the nearly unknown Ulysses S. Grant had emerged to national prominence with his stunning victory at Fort Donelson in February 1862, but his subsequent narrow escape from defeat at Shiloh had drawn intense criticism. Grant spent the summer and fall defending Union gains in western Tennessee and northern Mississippi before making a failed attempt to take Vicksburg at year’s end that renewed doubts about his leadership. In the upper South, Don Carlos Buell, the commander of the Army of the Ohio, had turned back the Confederate invasion of Kentucky but was then relieved by Lincoln for failing to pursue Braxton Bragg’s retreating Army of Tennessee. At the turn of the year William S. Rosecrans, Buell’s replacement, won a narrow victory at Stones River that forced Bragg to fall back into southern Tennessee. While the Confederacy succeeded in 1862 in retaining control of the Mississippi between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, its commanders failed at Pea Ridge, Shiloh, Iuka, Corinth, Perryville, Prairie Grove, and Stones River to win victories that would give it the strategic initiative in the west and allow it to reclaim territory lost to the Union in the first half of the year.
Support for the conflict wavered in 1862 on both sides as its cost in blood and treasure mounted, and it became increasingly hard to recruit volunteers motivated by patriotism or the desire for adventure. In the spring the Confederate Congress passed a conscription act that provoked widespread evasion and resistance throughout the South, especially in upland regions. By midyear Union authorities were also considering introducing conscription, although for the moment federal and state officials relied upon bounties and the threat of a nine-month militia draft to encourage enlistment. In the fall, Democrats capitalized on war weariness and opposition to emancipation to win state elections in Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, and New York, and reduce the Republican majority in the House of Representatives by thirty-four seats. Although some Democrats favored continued prosecution of the war while others advocated reunion through negotiation, the party was united in its hostility to emancipation and its willingness to ask voters why white men should die so black people could be free.
It was only after months of cautious deliberation that Lincoln decided in the summer of 1862 that the immediate emancipation of the slaves in Confederate-controlled territory was necessary to save the Union. In March he had proposed using federal funds to compensate slave-owners in states that adopted plans for gradual emancipation. Determined to prevent any “radical change of our social system,” representatives from the border states refused to support this proposal. At the same time, Lincoln angered many blacks and Radical Republicans by repeatedly calling for the voluntary colonization of former slaves abroad, which he earnestly believed would protect the freed people from the racial backlash he expected to follow emancipation. While Lincoln had sought support for gradual emancipation, he also signed into law a series of antislavery measures initiated by Republicans in Congress. In the spring and summer of 1862, Congress prohibited the military from returning runaway slaves, abolished slavery in the District of Columbia and the federal territories, and passed a confiscation act that created an unwieldy legal mechanism for freeing slaves held by disloyal masters. As Congress, the President, and the cabinet debated alternative courses of action, thousands of slaves had sought freedom by fleeing into Union-held territory, while thousands more were liberated by the advance of the Union armies, eroding the foundations of the “peculiar institution” from below. By year’s end the prospect of enlisting blacks in the Union forces offered the promise not only of augmenting northern military power, but also of laying the foundation for claims of citizenship on behalf of those who would now help to preserve the nation.
As 1863 opened, the course of the war was as uncertain as ever. Would Lee continue his mastery over the commanders of the Army of the Potomac, and at what human cost? Would Grant take Vicksburg? Could Bragg regain central Tennessee, or would Rosecrans seize Chattanooga and open the way for a Union invasion of Georgia? Would the Union navy continue to tighten its hold on the southern coastline, or was there some way for the Confederates to break the blockade? Was the possibility of foreign intervention indeed at an end, or could it be revived in the wake of new Confederate successes? What measures would each side have to embrace to maintain their armies, and how would they affect public support for the conflict? In particular, how would the Confederacy be able to reconcile the principle of states’ rights with a central government that enforced conscription and asserted the power to impose martial law? Would slaves in Confederate-controlled areas rebel or flee en masse? Would emancipation help the Union war effort, or would it only intensify opposition among Democrats to the policies of the Lincoln administration? How would Confederates, and white Union soldiers, react to the sight of black men in blue uniforms?
By the beginning of 1863 both sides had reluctantly accepted the reality that only long and hard fighting could bring the conflict to an end, although there was still a lingering hope that one great battle, an American Austerlitz or Waterloo, might go far to achieve that result. What was even more uncertain than the war’s end was what would follow. If, as Lincoln said, “broken eggs can not be mended,” it seemed increasingly likely that the old union was so broken by war that whatever nation—or nations—emerged from the conflict would take on radical new forms that no one could envision.
Brooks D. Simpson