The first cloud on the horizon of Union military success in 1862 appeared in the Shenandoah Valley. A small Northern army had moved south into this fertile breadbasket of Virginia in conjunction with McClellan’s advance against the main Confederate army defending Richmond. The Union commander was General Nathaniel P. Banks, one of the North’s “political generals” appointed not because of his military skills but because of his political influence. It was Banks’s misfortune that he faced Confederate General Thomas J. Jackson, known as “Stonewall” since his brigade’s stand at Manassas the previous July. Jackson’s mission was to create a diversion that would compel Lincoln to divert to the Valley some of the reinforcements slated for McClellan.
The bold, secretive, eccentric Jackson succeeded so brilliantly that he became the most renowned commander in the South and most feared in the North until his death a year later. From May 8 to June 9, 1862, Jackson demonstrated what could be accomplished by deception, daring, and mobility. With only 17,000 men he moved by marches so swift that his infantry earned the nickname “Jackson’s foot cavalry.” Using the terrain of mountains, valleys, and mountain gaps, Jackson pounced unexpectedly on separate enemy detachments that his forces always outnumbered at the point of attack, even though the total number of Union troops trying to combine against Jackson outnumbered him by more than two to one. Of the five battles that Jackson fought and won during this month, the main victory took place at Winchester on May 25 when the Confederates drove Banks’s routed division in precipitate flight all the way across the Potomac into Maryland.
This battle caused a temporary panic in the North and elation in the South. It slowed the momentum of Union victory that had seemed irresistible. And the failure of converging forces to trap Jackson during the next two weeks produced great frustration in the North. Having predicted daily the imminent fall of Richmond, the Northern press was taken aback by Banks’s “severe and most mortifying disaster” at Winchester, which created “astonishment and alarm” in the North. Nevertheless, declared the New York Times in perhaps a Northern version of whistling past the graveyard, Jackson’s actions were but “an episode” that “will have no important result” and “cannot affect in the slightest degree the general progress of the campaign.”1
To Southerners, Jackson’s victories were much more than an episode. “The hearts of the people will thrill with joy,” predicted the Richmond Enquirer.2 And so they did. From Virginia to Louisiana, civilians and soldiers filled their diaries and letters with paeans of praise for “the tremendous whipping” that the “great and good” Stonewall had given Banks.3 During the months of Confederate defeats, wrote a South Carolina woman who had three brothers in the army, “I poured out prayers to God for victory. . . . My prayer was heard. Stonewall Jackson gained a brilliant victory.”4
While Jackson was escaping the mismanaged effort to trap him between two converging Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley, General Joseph Johnston launched an equally mismanaged Confederate attack on a portion of McClellan’s army five miles east of Richmond on May 31–June 1. The most significant result of this drawn battle (called Seven Pines by the Confederates and Fair Oaks by the Federals) was the wounding of Johnston and his replacement by Robert E. Lee.
Lee’s appointment elicited little enthusiasm in the South. His first field command in western Virginia had failed to dislodge Union forces from that region. Sent by Jefferson Davis in November 1861 to the South Atlantic coast, Lee had recognized that Union naval supremacy made defense of river estuaries impossible and had pulled Confederate defenses back to strategic inland points. Recalled to Richmond in March 1862, Lee became Davis’s military adviser just in time to receive some of the blame for Confederate reverses during the spring. Some Southern newspapers nicknamed him “Granny Lee” or “Evacuating Lee.” Few seemed aware that Lee deserved much of the credit for devising Jackson’s Valley campaign. One of Lee’s first actions as the new commander of what he designated the Army of Northern Virginia was to strengthen the earthwork fortifications ringing Richmond. This project produced another pejorative reference to Lee as the King of Spades. Critics failed to understand that Lee’s purpose was to put the works in shape to be held by fewer men in order to release the rest for the counteroffensive he planned.
General Robert E. Lee, whose firm countenance only hints at the “audacity” that characterized his generalship. (Library of Congress)
Many in the South, therefore, shared McClellan’s opinion of Lee as “cautious & weak under grave responsibility . . . wanting in moral firmness when pressed by heavy responsibility . . . likely to be timid & irresolute in action.” A psychiatrist could make much of this statement, for it really described McClellan himself. It could not have been more wrong as a description of Lee. A Confederate officer who knew Lee well said that “his name might be Audacity. He will take more chances, and take them quicker than any other general in history.”5 By this stage of the war, Lee had concluded that the Confederacy’s best chance for victory lay in a spoiling offensive that would disrupt McClellan’s methodical advance. Lee became the foremost examplar of an offensive–defensive strategy. He believed that the North’s greater population and resources would assure Union success if it became a prolonged war of attrition. To forestall this prospect, Lee intended to gather the South’s maximum strength and strike a blow to knock the enemy back on its heels.
Meanwhile, what was McClellan doing with his army of 100,000 men? Much of his energy went into a series of telegrams to the War Department complaining that he lacked this and that, the roads were too wet to move up his artillery, and he faced 200,000 enemy troops (the maximum number Lee would be able to bring against him was 90,000, the largest Confederate army ever assembled) and needed reinforcements before he he could take the offensive.
While McClellan bickered with Washington, Lee acted. On June 12 he sent cavalry commanded by the dashing Jeb Stuart on a reconnaissance to locate McClellan’s right flank. Stuart did the job; he then made himself famous and embarrassed McClellan’s cavalry by riding all the way around the Army of the Potomac and returning to his own lines with the loss of only one man. Lee shifted most of his army north of the Chickahominy River and brought Jackson’s troops from the Valley for an attack on the Union right scheduled for June 26. The previous day McClellan had probed Confederate lines south of the Chickahominy in an operation that, in retrospect, became known as the first of the Seven Days Battles. From June 26 on it was the Army of Northern Virginia that did the attacking— repeatedly, relentlessly, with a courage bordering on recklessness, without regard to heavy casualties that would total 20,000 Confederates (and 16,000 Federals) for the whole Seven Days.
McClellan went to pieces. He was defeated, even if his army was not. After the largest battle of the Seven Days, at Gaines’ Mill on June 27, he abandoned all thought of making a stand or launching a counterattack. When the Confederates assaulted the 30,000 Federals north of the Chickahominy at Gaines’ Mill, McClellan had 70,000 men facing only 25,000 south of that river. But the distraught Union commander wired Washington on June 28 that he was under attack by superior numbers on both sides of the river. “I have lost this battle because my force was too small,” he told Stanton. “The government must not and cannot hold me responsible for the result. . . . I have seen too many dead and wounded comrades to feel otherwise than that this Government has not sustained this army. . . . If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army.”6 A startled colonel in the telegraph office deleted the final two sentences before sending this dispatch to Stanton. The secretary and president did not see these accusations.
McClellan decided to retreat southward to a new base on the James River, where Union gunboats could protect his communications. The Army of the Potomac conducted a fighting retreat that punished the attackers, especially at Malvern Hill on July 1. Despite pleas from some of his subordinates that he use this battle as a springboard for a counterattack, McClellan continued the retreat. Confederates could justly claim a strategic victory in the Seven Days even though they won only one tactical battle (Gaines’ Mill). On June 26 most of the Army of the Potomac was five miles from Richmond; on July 2 it was more than twenty miles away at Harrison’s Landing on the James and its commander, still believing he was outnumbered by two to one, was in no mental shape to resume the offensive.
The Seven Days turned Southern despair to elation. “The almost funereal pall which has hung around our country since the fall of Fort Donelson, seems at last to be passing away,” declared the Richmond Enquirer on July 4. “From out [of] the gloom and disaster of the past, the martial spirit has emerged” and “the superior skill and valor of our men over our brutal foe is incontestably established.” Not to be outdone, the Richmond Dispatch proclaimed that “history has no record of such a succession of triumphs. . . . Throughout all time they will stand without parallel in the annals of warfare.”7
From one end of the Confederacy to the other, sighs of relief turned into cries of rejoicing. “It is such good news that we can hardly believe it is true,” wrote a young woman in Louisiana whose brother was with Lee’s army. In Georgia, Lieutenant Charles C. Jones Jr. exulted that “the recent successes of our arms, by the blessing of God, have been even more remarkable and encouraging than were our former reverses depressing and unexpected.” In Richmond itself the War Department clerk John Jones exulted that “Lee has turned the tide, and I shall not be surprised if we have a long career of successes.”8
The Seven Days came as a huge shock to the North. Right up to the eve of the battles, the press had continued to predict the fall of Richmond by the Fourth of July. Instead, by that date the very fate of McClellan’s army seemed in doubt. The plunge of Northern morale was all the greater because expectations built on almost uninterrupted success over the previous four months had been so high. A panic on Wall Street sent stocks as well as the value of the new greenback dollar into a temporary free fall. The New York Times, a good barometer of mainstream Northern opinion, acknowledged on July 3 that this “entirely unexpected” reverse “shatters the high hope which the whole country has of late indulged.” Other newspapers found the situation “exceedingly discouraging and gloomy.” They described the public mood as “disappointed and mortified” by this “stunning disaster” which had caused “misery” and “revulsion” throughout the North.9
Rather than celebrating Independence Day, “the nation is in the most eventful crisis of its history,” declared the New York World. A nurse in an army hospital in Washington said the capital “was never so sad as today!”10 An official in the State Department wrote that this Fourth of July was “the gloomiest since the birth of this republic. Never was the country so low, and after such sacrifices of blood, of time, and of money.” A Connecticut congressman who talked with Lincoln reported the president to have said that when he learned of the retreat to Harrison’s Landing, “I was as nearly inconsolable as I could be and live.”11
Lincoln knew that in a democratic society whose citizen soldiers stayed in touch with their families and communities, morale on the homefront was as important as morale in the army. The roller coaster ride of public opinion in response to events on the battlefields, both in the North and South, was a crucial factor in the war. Victory pumped up civilian as well as army morale and sustained the will to keep fighting; defeat depressed morale and encouraged defeatism. The vigorous, free, and sometimes irresponsible press, especially in the North, intensified the volatility of public opinion by publishing frequent “Extras,” by magnifying victories, and sometimes by initially minimizing defeats only to admit subsequently that a defeat was in fact a “disaster.”
Americans were the world’s preeminent newspaper-reading people, with by far the largest per capita circulation of any country. The war vastly increased their insatiable appetite for news and the impulsive response to it. “We must have something to eat, and the papers to read,” said Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose son and namesake was a lieutenant in the 20th Massachusetts fighting in Virginia. “Everything else we can do without. . . . Only bread and the newspaper we must have.”12
With time for reflection after the Seven Days, the astute “Lounger” columnist in Harper’s Weekly (George W. Curtis) discussed the “lesson” of these battles: “Don’t despise your enemy.” Northerners had believed that the rebels were “demoralized, disheartened, and coerced; that their cause was hopeless, and the issue only a question of a little time,” wrote Curtis. “We have all shared this happy confidence. . . . Let us be childish no longer.” There was no reason for despair; the North could still win the war if its people made up their minds to work and fight harder. “There is not the least reason for doubt. . . . But there is every reason for keeping our eyes steadily open upon the facts.”13
Several Northern newspapers picked up this theme. Like the Richmond press several months earlier, the New York Times and Tribune in particular tried to counter the “exaggerated depression” of public opinion with editorials titled “The Silver Lining” and “Counterblast to Croaking.” A huge war rally took place in New York City on July 15, cheered on by the Tribune which insisted that “the dead speak to us with many thousand voices and point out the path of duty. The sacrifices already made . . . must not be in vain. . . . If the first flush of enthusiasm has passed away, it has been succeeded by a graver, sterner, more inflexible resolution.”14
These cheer-up-and-fight-harder messages seemed to make little headway against the “sullen gloom . . . settling on every heart.” The Times conceded that despite its efforts, “the great mass of the people are discouraged and disheartened.”15 The inventor of the telegraph, Samuel F.B. Morse, saw “no hope of Union. . . . I have no heart to write or do anything. Without a country: Without a country!” A member of the prominent Vail family of New Jersey, which had helped Morse develop the telegraph, thought matters were “darker than ever, just now. I have never felt any doubts about the result of this war until recently.”16
The prominent New York lawyer and treasurer of the United States Sanitary Commission, George Templeton Strong, whose diary reflected the pulse of public opinion, reported through the heat of that summer of Northern discontent that “we have been and are in a depressed, dismal, asthenic state of anxiety and irritability . . . permeated by disgust, saturated with gloomy thinking. I find it hard to maintain my lively faith in the triumph of the nation and the law. . . . We begin to lose faith in Uncle Abe.” Uncle Abe went through his own bouts with loss of faith. Lincoln’s friend Orville Browning, senator from Illinois, saw the president on July 15. “He looked weary, care-worn, and troubled,” reported Browning, who advised Lincoln to get some rest. “He held me by the hand, pressed it, and said in a very tender and touching tone—‘Browning I must die sometime.’”17
Perhaps inevitably, the setback of the Seven Days led to a round of scapegoat hunting. Northern newspapers accepted McClellan’s estimate that he had confronted 200,000 enemy soldiers. The Democratic press took its cue from McClellan and blamed the administration for failing to send him the reinforcements he requested. By implication the fault was Lincoln’s, but the Democrats concentrated their fire on Secretary of War Stanton (who had made no secret of his disillusionment with McClellan) and on radical Republicans whom they accused of deliberately sabotaging McClellan in order to get rid of him. Such men were “a faction of traitors,” shouted the New York Herald, singling out editor Horace Greeley of the rival Tribune as well as Stanton. The secretary of war was “the tool of the abolitionists, the organizer of disasters, the author of defeats.” His “reckless mismanagement and criminal intrigues” produced the result that “thousands of lives have been thrown away, unnecessarily sacrificed, wantonly squandered, heedlessly murdered.”18 McClellan himself privately described Stanton as “the most depraved hypocrite & villain that I have had the bad fortune to meet with.” If he “had lived in the time of the Saviour, Judas Iscariot would have remained a respected member of the fraternity of Apostles.”19
The Herald was the most widely read newspaper in the Army of the Potomac at that time. Many officers and men echoed its opinions. McClellan remained their hero. For them as for him, it was an article of faith that they had not been outfought or outgeneraled, but beaten by superior numbers because traitors in Washington had withheld reinforcements. A soldier in the crack 83rd Pennsylvania, which had suffered 65 percent casualties in the Seven Days (including 111 killed), wrote on July 9 that “no one thinks of blaming McClellan. His men have the fullest confidence in his ability. . . . Anyone who saw how the rebels . . . pour five different lines of fresh troops against our one, can tell why he does not take Richmond.” This soldier blasted Greeley and radical Republicans in Congress who used their influence with Lincoln “to prevent his being reinforced, to secure his defeat, and in some way to so prolong the war as to make the abolition of slavery a military necessity. Curses loud and deep are heaped on such men. Old Greeley would not live twenty-four hours if he should come here among the army.”20
Exhausted and discouraged Union soldiers stand down after the Seven Days Battles. (Library of Congress)
Many other soldiers echoed these sentiments, denouncing the “miserable fanatics who have been wishing” for McClellan’s failure, while “his men almost worship him.”21 A New Jersey officer expressed unbounded bitterness toward “the craven politicians at home and in Congress, who will not give us reinforcements . . . men who to gratify personal feelings of envy, of hatred, of ambition and of the lowest selfishness . . . keep an army on the offensive and at the same time see it outnumbered 2 to 1.” As for Stanton, a Massachusetts officer considered him “the great murderer of his age, for to him are fairly imparted the deaths of all the men who have fallen since the siege of Yorktown.”22
Greeley and most Republicans were much more muted in criticism of McClellan than his partisans were in criticism of them. An exception was Michigan’s Senator Zachariah Chandler, who considered McClellan “an imbecile if not a traitor,” and if a “traitor he ought to be shot.” These statements, like McClellan’s about Stanton, were made in letters to their wives. But publicly Chandler—and others—challenged the claim that the Army of the Potomac was outnumbered. In this they were right. McClellan’s problem was not lack of reinforcements, they charged, but lack of the will to fight. “We feel much obliged to you for your exposure of that windbag and humbug McClellan,” wrote one of Chandler’s correspondents.23
Although McClellan’s support within the Army of the Potomac was solid, it was not unanimous. Lieutenant Daniel Brewster of the 10th Massachusetts, which had fought itself to exhaustion on the Peninsula, was “sick tired and disgusted” with McClellan’s leadership. “This grand army we have bragged so much about, never made an attack on the enemy yet, he has always attacked us and surprised us, and generally worsted us.” Brewster’s own company “are all reduced to shadows and look as though they are on their last legs. They have a dreamy, listless look.” Two of the army’s best division commanders, Joseph Hooker and Philip Kearny, were privately scathing in criticism of McClellan. When Kearny received the order to resume the retreat after the repulse of Confederate assaults at Malvern Hill on July 1, he burst out: “We ought instead of retreating to follow up the enemy and take Richmond. . . . I say to you all, such an order can only be prompted by cowardice or treason.”24 One of the army’s best regimental commanders, Colonel Francis Barlow of the 61st New York, pulled no punches in his private comments. “McClellan & many more of our Generals are damned miserable creatures,” he wrote. “Unless there is a change in the leaders, the enemy will whip us again & again.” The surgeon of the 5th Wisconsin agreed that “McClellan is a failure. . . . Never since the retreat from Moscow has there been so disgraceful a failure as the Peninsula campaign.”25
Party politics in the conventional sense did not enter into these evaluations. Kearny, for example, was as opposed to radical Republicans and the kind of war they wanted to wage as McClellan was. But army politics in the sense of cliques and rivalries for promotion and preferment probably played a part. The army’s senior corps commander, Erasmus D. Keyes, no friend of McClellan, deplored “the cloud of envy, jealousy, & malice under which this army has been shrouded.”26 The poison had seeped deeper into the Army of the Potomac. Only time would tell whether it would so weaken the army that “the enemy will whip us again and again,” as Barlow feared.
During the weeks surrounding the Seven Days, Lincoln took several actions to revitalize the Union war effort. The impact of these actions in the short run was equivocal, though in the long run they changed the course of the war. On June 17 the president summoned General John Pope from the West to take command of the newly designated Army of Virginia, formed partly from the various units that had made such a poor showing against Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. Pope’s task was to operate between Washington and Richmond and if possible to cooperate with McClellan in a pincers movement against the Confederate capital. Although he brought east a reputation as a successful commander, one of Pope’s first actions confirmed the opinion of some fellow officers that he was a self-promoting braggart. “I come to you out of the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies,” he declared in an “Address” to his new command shortly after the Seven Days. “I am sorry to find so much in vogue among you . . . certain phrases [like] . . . ‘lines of retreat,’ and ‘bases of supplies.’ . . . Let us study the probable lines of retreat of our opponents, and leave our own to take care of themselves. Let us look before and not behind. Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear.”27
No one, least of all McClellan, missed the point of this maladroit denigration of his army as well as of Pope’s own army. And in Washington, Pope made no secret of his opinion of McClellan, whose “incompetency and indisposition to action were so great” that Pope said he could expect little cooperation from the Army of the Potomac. McClellan and his subordinates had a similarly negative attitude toward Pope. General Fitz-John Porter, commander of V Corps in the Army of the Potomac and McClellan’s closest associate, declared after reading Pope’s address that he “has now written himself down what the military world has long known, an ass.” When McClellan learned in mid-July that Lee had sent Jackson with (initially) 12,000 men to confront Pope near the Rapidan River, McClellan wrote to his wife: “The Pope bubble is likely to be suddenly collapsed—Stonewall Jackson is after him, & the paltry young man [Pope was four years older than McClellan] who wanted to teach me the art of war will in less than a week either be in full retreat or badly whipped. He will begin to learn the value of ‘entrenchments, lines of communication and of retreat, bases of supply etc.’”28 Lincoln’s hopes for concord between McClellan and Pope appeared doomed to disappointment.
General John Pope, who did not endear himself to Union officers and soldiers in Virginia when he boasted of his successes in the Western theater. (National Archives)
The president also brought another general from the West to try to remedy problems in the East. Recognizing that his and Stanton’s efforts to function as surrogate generals in chief had not worked very well, Lincoln called Henry W. Halleck to Washington and appointed him general in chief on July 11—exactly four months after relieving McClellan from that post. McClellan considered the appointment of Halleck—”whom I know to be my inferior”—to be “a slap in the face.”29 McClellan may have been right on both counts. Halleck’s high reputation owed more to Grant’s success in the West than to his own. Lincoln expected his new general in chief to coordinate the strategies of all Union armies and to plan bold new offensives. But in this expectation he was also to be disappointed. Halleck turned out to be pedantic, fussy, unimaginative, and wary of responsibility.
These deficiencies would only gradually become clear to Lincoln. Meanwhile, he took other steps to beef up the war effort. Recruiting for Union armies had virtually ceased in April 1862. Some 650,000 men were then in the army—more than could be fully equipped and trained. Besides, it then seemed likely that the war would soon be over and won. By the end of June that notion had gone. The need was now imperative for more troops to cope with a rebellion that was more alive and well than anyone had thought. Yet Lincoln did not want to increase Northern alarm by issuing a new appeal for troops. So Seward met with Northern governors on June 30 and arranged to have them ask the president to issue a call for 300,000 new three-year volunteers so that “the recent successes of Federal arms may be followed up . . . to speedily crush the rebellion.” Lincoln did so on July 1.30
Congress also passed a militia act on July 17 authorizing the president to call state militia into federal service for nine months (the previous limit had been three months) and to draft them if a state failed to fulfill its quota. By October 1862 these measures produced 421,000 new three-year volunteers and 88,000 nine-month militia. Most of the former and all of the latter were organized into new regiments rather than being fed into existing veteran regiments to bring them up to full strength. This practice was deplored by professional army men but preferred by state governors (who appointed the officers) and local communities that raised the companies for these regiments. Many of the new regiments eventually became first-class units that helped win the war. But some of those that went into action for the first time in Maryland and Kentucky in September and October 1862, with little training and no combat experience, may have been more hindrance than help to Union forces at Antietam and Perryville.
Confederate success in the Shenandoah Valley and the Seven Days Battles reopened the question of foreign recognition of the Confederacy. Many in Britain and France regarded these battles as confirmation of their belief that the North could never subdue the South. Many of the gentry and aristocracy in Britain tended to sympathize with the Confederacy, while the working class identified with the Union as the champion of free-labor democracy. But the cotton famine was beginning to hurt workers as hundreds of textile mills in Britain and France shut down or went on short time. Unemployment soared. Seward’s earlier assurance that Union capture of New Orleans would lead to a resumption of cotton exports from that port was not fulfilled, as Confederates in the lower Mississippi Valley burned their cotton rather than see it fall into Yankee hands. Only a trickle of cotton made it across the Atlantic in 1862. The conviction grew in Britain and France that the only way to revive cotton imports and reopen the factories was to end the war. Pressure built throughout the summer for an offer by the British and French governments to mediate a settlement—which of course would mean Confederate independence.
As soon as news of Jackson’s exploits in the Valley reached Europe (much magnified as it traveled), the government-controlled press in France and anti-American newspapers in Britain began beating the drums for intervention. The Paris Constitutionnel insisted in June that “mediation alone will succeed in putting an end to a war disastrous to the interests of humanity.” In similar language, the London Times said it was time to end this war that had become “a scandal to humanity.”31 The “humanity” they seemed most concerned about were textile manufacturers and their employees. The American minister to France, citing information coming to him from that country as well as from across the channel, reported “a strenuous effort . . . to induce England and France to intervene. . . . I should not attach much importance to these rumors, however well accredited they seem to be, were it not for the exceeding pressure which exists for want of cotton.”32 In mid-June the Richmond Dispatch headlined one story “Famine in England—Intervention Certain.” Northern newspapers published many alarmist news stories and editorials about “British Intervention,” “Foreign Intervention Again,” and “The Intervention Panic”—all before news of the Seven Days reached Europe.33
Unemployed British textile workers queuing up for distribution of food and coal as the “cotton famine” took hold in the summer of 1862. (Illustrated London News)
Southerners hoped and Northerners feared that the Seven Days would greatly increase the chances of intervention. “We may [now] certainly count upon the recognition of our independence,” wrote Edmund Ruffin. The Richmond Dispatch was equally certain that this “series of brilliant victories” would “settle the question” of recognition.34 Under such headlines as “The Federal Disasters in Virginia—European Intervention the Probable Consequence,” Northern newspapers regardless of party affiliation warned that “we stand at the grave and serious crisis of our history. The recent intimations from Europe look to speedy intervention in our affairs.”35
Although perhaps not so critical as this rhetoric might suggest, the matter was indeed serious. “Let us hope that the North will listen at last to the voice of reason, and that it will accept mediation before Europe has recognized the Confederacy,” declared the Paris Constitutionnel. On July 16 Napoleon III granted an interview to Confederate envoy John Slidell. The “accounts of the defeat of the Federal armies before Richmond,” said the emperor, confirmed his opinion that the “re-establishment of the Union [is] impossible.” Three days later Napoleon sent a telegram to his foreign minister, who was in London: “Demandez au government anglais s’il ne croit pas le moment venu reconnaître le Sud” (“Ask the English government if it does not believe the time has come to recognize the South”).36
Les Anglais seemed willing—many of them, at least. The Times stated that if England could not “stop this effusion of blood by mediation, we ought to give our moral weight to our English kith and kin [Southern whites], who have gallantly striven so long for their liberties against a mongrel race of plunderers and oppressors.” The breakup of the United States, said the Times in August, would be good “riddance of a nightmare.” The London Morning Post, semi-official voice of the Palmerston ministry, proclaimed bluntly in July that the Confederacy had “established its claim to be independent.”37
Even pro-Union leaders in Britain and France sent dire warnings to their friends in the North. “The last news from your side has created regret among your friends and pleasure among your enemies,” wrote John Bright to Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on July 12. “I do not lose faith in your cause, but I wish I had less reason to feel anxious about you.” Richard Cobden likewise sounded an alarm with Sumner: “There is an all but unanimous belief that you cannot subject the South to the Union. . . . Even they who are your partisans & advocates cannot see their way to any such issue.”38
From France, Count Agénor-Etienne de Gasparin, who despite his title was a friend of the Union, wrote to Lincoln that only a resumption of Northern military victories could stem the tide toward European recognition. Lincoln took this opportunity to reply with a letter expressing his determination to stay the course. Yet, he added in a tone of frustration, “it seems unreasonable that a series of successes, extending through half-a-year, and clearing more than a hundred thousand square miles of country, should help us so little, while a single half-defeat should hurt us so much.”39
Unreasonable it may have been, but it was a fact. A pro-Confederate member of Parliament introduced a motion calling for the government to cooperate with France in offering mediation. Scheduled for debate on July 18, this motion seemed certain to pass. The mood at the American legation was one of despairing resignation. The current was “rising every hour and running harder against us than at any time since the Trent affair,” reported Henry Adams.40
But in a dramatic moment, Prime Minister Palmerston temporarily stemmed the current. Seventy-seven years old and a veteran of more than half a century in British politics, Palmerston seemed to doze through parts of the interminable debate on the mediation motion. Some time after midnight, however, he lumbered to his feet and in a crisp speech of a few minutes put an end to the debate and the motion (the sponsor withdrew it). Parliament should trust the Cabinet’s judgment to act at the right time, said Palmerston. That time would arrive when the Confederacy’s independence was “firmly and permanently established.” One or two more Southern victories, he hinted, might do the job, but until then any premature action by Britain might risk rupture with the United States.41
This did not end the matter. James Mason wrote the following day that he still looked “speedily for intervention in some form.” In Paris on July 25 John Slidell declared himself “more hopeful than I have been at any time since my arrival in Europe.”42 The weight of both the British and French press still leaned strongly toward recognition. And just before he left England in August for a tour of the continent with Queen Victoria, Foreign Secretary Russell arranged with Palmerston for a Cabinet meeting when he returned in October to discuss mediation and recognition.
Next to events on the battlefield and the worsening cotton famine, the slavery issue influenced European attitudes. Something of a paradox existed on this question, however. The American cotton wanted by British and French mills was nearly all grown by slaves. Yet most Europeans were antislavery. Britain had abolished slavery in its New World colonies in 1833 and France had done the same in 1848. The British were proud of their navy’s role as the world’s police against the African slave trade. Many in Britain who were inclined to sympathize with the Confederacy found slavery a large stumbling block. If they thought at all about where the cotton would come from without slavery, they assumed that free black farmers would grow it.
In any event, Confederate envoys in Britain acknowledged early in the war that “the public mind here is entirely opposed to the Government of the Confederate States of America on the question of slavery.” Lincoln recognized the importance of this issue. In January 1862 he reportedly said in a private conversation: “I cannot imagine that any European power would dare to recognize and aid the Southern Confederacy if it became clear that the Confederacy stands for slavery and the Union for freedom.”43
When Lincoln said this, however, the Union did not stand for freedom—though a growing number of Republicans were calling for a war against slavery. Not understanding the crosscutting pressures from various quarters for and against emancipation as a Union war policy, and not appreciating Lincoln’s need to keep border slave states and Northern Democrats in his war coalition, many European observers assumed that he could announce emancipation whenever he wanted to. Since “the North does not proclaim abolition and never pretended to fight for anti-slavery,” asked Englishmen who might otherwise be inclined to support the Union, “how can we be fairly called upon to sympathize so warmly with the Federal cause? . . . If they would ensure for their struggle the sympathies of Englishmen, they must abolish slavery.”44 When a pro-Union MP said in the July 18 parliamentary debate on mediation that the American war was one between freedom and slavery, he was met with jeers and loud cries of “No, No!”45
Foreign-policy considerations were only part of the pressures pushing Lincoln toward a commitment to emancipation in 1862. “I am naturally anti-slavery,” Lincoln insisted. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Yet, “I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling.”46 Because he had no constitutional power to interfere with slavery in the states, and because he needed to retain the support of border states and Democrats, Lincoln in the first year of the war repeatedly defined his policy as restoration of the Union—which of course meant a Union with slavery.
From the beginning, however, abolitionists and radical Republicans echoed the words of black leader Frederick Douglass: “To fight against slaveholders, without fighting against slavery, is but a half-hearted business. . . . War for the destruction of liberty must be met with war for the destruction of slavery.” More and more Republicans—eventually including Lincoln—came to agree with this idea as the war ground on. They took note of Southern boasts that slavery was “a tower of strength to the Confederacy” because slaves did most of the labor in the South, thus enabling Confederates “to place in the field a force so much larger in proportion to her [white] population than the North.” Douglass declared that he could not understand “why? Oh! why, in the name of all that is national, does our Government allow its enemies this powerful advantage? . . . The very stomach of the rebellion is the negro in the condition of a slave. Arrest that hoe in the hands of the negro, and you smite rebellion in the very seat of its life.”47
Slave labor was so important in Confederate armies as well as on the home front that the government impressed slaves into service before it began drafting white men as soldiers. Thousands of slaves worked as army laborers, teamsters, cooks, musicians, servants, and in other support capacities. They provided much of the logistical “tail” of these armies (functions initially performed by white soldiers and civilians in Union armies) and thereby freed a high proportion of Confederate soldiers for combat duty. As time passed, more and more Yankees began asking: Why not convert this Southern asset of black labor into a Northern asset by confiscating slaves as enemy property, freeing them, and putting them to work for the Union?
The slaves themselves entered this debate in dramatic fashion. Many of them saw the war as a potential war for freedom as soon as abolitionists did. They voted with their feet for freedom by escaping from their masters to Union military camps in the South. By creating a situation in which Union officers would either have to return them to slavery or acknowledge their freedom, escaping slaves took the first steps toward achieving freedom for themselves and making the conflict a war for freedom as well as for the Union. They turned the idea of confiscation into a reality.
The issue came up early in the war at Fortress Monroe in Virginia, near the mouth of the James River. The only place in a Confederate state controlled by Union forces in early May 1861, the fort attracted runaway slaves from nearby Confederate camps. The Union commander at the fort was Benjamin Butler, who proved to be a better lawyer and politician than fighting soldier. Butler refused to return the escapees to their masters and ingeniously labeled them “contraband of war” subject to confiscation because they had worked for the Confederacy. The phrase caught on quickly; for the rest of the war slaves who came within Union lines were known as contrabands.
Frederick Douglass, who pressed Lincoln in 1862 to turn the war for Union into a war for freedom. (National Archives)
On August 6, 1861, Congress took a big step toward legitimizing this concept by passing a confiscation act that authorized the seizure of all property, including slaves, that had been used in aid of rebellion. Nearly all Republicans in Congress voted for this bill and almost all Democrats and border-state Unionists voted against it. Thus began a process whereby the emancipation issue defined the sharpest difference between parties.
Many Union generals, like McClellan, were Democrats. Some of them, especially in border states where slave-owners professed to be Unionists, refused to admit fugitive slaves to their lines or returned them to their owners. But many soldiers and junior officers had other ideas. “I never will be instrumental in returning a slave to his master in any way shape or manner,” vowed Lieutenant Charles Brewster of the 10th Massachusetts in March 1862. A soldier in the 8th Michigan described what happened when a “slavehunter” came into their camp near Annapolis to reclaim his property. The soldiers “pounced on him,” and if he had not quickly decided that discretion was the better part of valor, “he would have lost his life in this Negro Hunt. As it was he got well frightened, & I presume will think twice before he goes into a camp of Northern Soldiers to reclaim biped property.”48
“Contrabands” coming into Union lines in Virginia. (Library of Congress)
Not many Union soldiers were principled abolitionists, but a growing number of them were becoming pragmatic emancipationists. “I don’t care a damn for the darkies,” wrote an Illinois lieutenant in April 1862, but “I couldn’t help send a runaway nigger back. . . . I honestly believe that this army [in Tennessee] has taken 500 niggers away with them.” In fact, “I have 11 negroes in my company now. They do every particle of the dirty work.” An Illinois sergeant wrote from Corinth, Mississippi, that “every regt has nigger teamsters and cooks which puts that many more men back in the ranks. . . . It will make a difference in the regt of not less than 75 men that will carry guns that did not before we got niggers.”49
Combining such practical considerations with their own antislavery convictions, the Republican majority in Congress enacted a new article of war on March 13, 1862, forbidding army officers to return escaped slaves to their masters—even those masters who claimed to be loyal Unionists. Having built up a head of steam, Republicans pressed ahead: from April to July they enacted and Lincoln signed legislation to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, to prohibit it in the territories, and to confiscate the slaves of Confederate owners. “I trust I am not dreaming,” wrote Frederick Douglass, “but the events taking place seem like a dream.” A free black man in Washington joyfully informed slave friends of the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. One of them “left the room sobbing for joy”; another “clapped her hands and shouted ‘let me go and tell my husband that Jesus has done all things well.’ . . . Were I a drinker I would get on a Jolly spree today but as a Christian I can but kneel in prayer and bless God.”50
In March 1862 Lincoln had made a bid to seize the initiative on the slavery issue. He sent a special message to Congress urging passage of a joint resolution offering “pecuniary aid” to “any state which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery.” Congress complied. This offer was aimed at the border states, with the idea that their commitment to emancipation would deprive the Confederacy of any hope for their eventual alliance and thereby shorten the war. In a thinly veiled warning, the president told border-state slaveholders that if they refused this offer and the war continued, “it is impossible to foresee all the incidents which may attend and all the ruin which may follow.”51
At a meeting with Lincoln on March 10, however, border-state congressmen questioned the constitutionality of the proposal, bristled at Lincoln’s warning, and deplored the anticipated race problem that would emerge with a large free black population. Two months later Lincoln again appealed to border-state slaveholders. The changes produced by his proposal for compensated, gradual abolition “would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything. Will you not embrace it?” the president pleaded. But he then added ominously: “You can not, if you would, be blind to the signs of the times.”52
Border-state representatives, however, seemed blind to the changes that appeared on the horizon in the summer of 1862. Jackson’s and Lee’s counteroffensives in Virginia and Forrest’s and Morgan’s raids in Tennessee and Kentucky put an end to prospects of imminent Northern victory. An important consequence of this reversal of momentum was to convince many in the North that they must “take off the gloves” (a metaphor that became a cliché) and fight harder. “The star of the Confederacy appears to be rising,” wrote an Ohio colonel who came up with his own metaphors, “and I doubt not it will continue to ascend until the rose-water policy now pursued by the Northern army is superseded by one more determined and vigorous.” It was time to stop conciliating Southern civilians, many of whom were thought to be “bushwhackers” who raided behind Union lines, fired at Northern soldiers from their houses, and harassed Union operations in any way they could. Senator John Sherman wrote to his brother, General William T. Sherman, of a growing sentiment “that we must treat these Rebels as bitter enemies to be subdued—conquered—by confiscation—by the employment of their slaves—by terror—energy— audacity—rather than by conciliation.”53
Many Union soldiers on the front lines in the South were the first to espouse this notion of “hard war.” “The iron gauntlet must be used more than the silken glove to crush this serpent,” wrote an Illinois officer in June 1862. Charles Brewster of the 10th Massachusetts complained of McClellan’s conciliatory policy toward civilians on the Virginia Peninsula. “The whole aim [in] this kid glove war,” he wrote, “seems to be to hurt as few of our enemies and as little as possible.” In August 1862 an Iowa private growled that “we have been . . . playing with Traitors long enough. We have guarded their property long enough, now is the time for action.”54 When Henry W. Halleck became general in chief, one of his first orders to Grant, now commander of occupation forces in western Tennessee and northern Mississippi, was to “take up all active [rebel] sympathizers, and either hold them as prisoners or put them beyond our lines. Handle that class without gloves, and take their property for public use. . . . It is time that they should begin to feel the presence of the war.”55
Take their property. The principal form of property in the South was the slaves. A Wisconsin major insisted that “the only way to put down this rebellion is to hurt the instigators and abettors of it. Slavery must be cleaned out.” The colonel of the 5th Minnesota, stationed in northern Alabama, wrote that “I am doing quite a business in the confiscation of slave property. . . . Crippling the institution of slavery is . . . striking a blow at the heart of the rebellion.”56
Although many soldiers and officers remained opposed to fighting this kind of war, one prominent convert to the doctrine of hard war was General John Pope. In July he issued a series of general orders to his new command, the Army of Virginia, authorizing his officers to seize enemy property without compensation, to shoot captured guerrillas not in uniform who had fired on Union troops, to expel from occupied territory any civilians who refused to take an oath of allegiance, and to treat them as spies if they returned.57
This was just the ticket, declared the New York Times, which often represented the views of moderate Republicans—including the president. “The country is weary of trifling,” according to the Times. “We have been afraid of wounding rebel feelings, afraid of injuring rebel property, afraid of . . . freeing rebel slaves. Some of our Generals have fought the rebels—if fighting it be called—with their kid gloves on”—a thinly veiled allusion to McClellan. But now “there is a sign of hope and cheer in the more warlike policy which has been inaugurated.”58
Confederate spokesmen expressed outrage at Pope’s orders; Robert E. Lee declared that this “miscreant Pope” must be “suppressed.” But Southerners scarcely denounced Pope in stronger terms than did General McClellan. If the Union government “adopts those radical and inhuman views,” McClellan wrote to his wife, “I cannot well in conscience serve the Govt any longer.”59 When Lincoln came to Harrison’s Landing on July 8 to see for himself the condition of the Army of the Potomac after the Seven Days, McClellan handed the president an unsolicited letter of advice on the proper conduct of the war. “It should not be a war looking to the subjugation of the [Southern] people,” the general instructed Lincoln. “Neither confiscation of property . . . [n]or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment. Military power should not be allowed to interfere with the relations of servitude. . . . A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present Armies.”60
Whether such a declaration would have disintegrated Union armies is doubtful. But McClellan did represent the views of his staff and several of his corps and division commanders, especially Fitz-John Porter. That general had written privately several weeks earlier that the army needed “to win the respect of the people” of the South if the Union was ever to be restored, “and by a conservative course to cause our enemies in the rear (the abolitionists) to be looked upon with contempt.” One of the corps commanders not part of McClellan’s coterie, General Erasmus Keyes, complained that McClellan’s “favorites” had in Keyes’s hearing “cursed Congress, damned the Republicans and been of that type of Breckinridge Democrat who don’t seem able to imagine we are at war.”61
Lincoln was aware of these sentiments among prominent officers in the Army of the Potomac. On July 8 he read McClellan’s letter of advice in the general’s presence without comment. But the president’s thoughts can be guessed. Several months earlier he might have agreed with much of what McClellan wrote. In his annual message to Congress the previous December, Lincoln had expressed a hope that the war would not “degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle.”62 But since then the war had become remorseless, and Lincoln was about to embrace the revolution. Democrats and border-state Unionists who complained about this turn toward what the New York Times was calling “an active and vigorous war policy” now elicited exasperation from the president. The demand of Southern Unionists “that the government shall not strike its open enemies, lest they be struck by accident,” wrote Lincoln, had become “the paralysis—the dead palsy—of the government in this whole struggle.” The war could no longer be fought “with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water,” Lincoln said sarcastically. “This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing. Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt.”63
In this mood Lincoln called border-state congressmen to the White House on July 12 to give them one last chance to accept his offer of compensated emancipation. The “signs of the times” about which he had warned them two months earlier were even more obvious now. “You can form no conception of the change of opinion here as to the Negro question,” Senator John Sherman wrote to his brother the general. “I am prepared for one to meet the broad issue of universal emancipation.” A conservative Boston newspaper conceded that “the great phenomenon of the year is the terrible intensity which this [emancipation] resolution has acquired. A year ago men might have faltered at the thought of proceeding to this extremity, [but now] they are in great measure prepared for it.”64 Lincoln bluntly reminded the border-state representatives on July 12 of the “unprecedently stern facts of the case.” The pressure for emancipation “is increasing,” he said. If they did not make “a decision at once to emancipate gradually . . . the institution in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion.” But once again a majority of the border-state men turned him down.65
One of many wartime photographs by Mathew Brady’s studio that made Abraham Lincoln one of the most readily recognized figures in the world. (Library of Congress)
Disappointed and frustrated, Lincoln evidently made up his mind that very evening to go ahead with a proclamation of emancipation, grounded in his war powers as commander in chief to seize enemy property (in this case, slaves) being used to wage war against the United States. The next day Lincoln shared a carriage with Secretary of State Seward and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles on their way to a funeral for an infant child of Secretary of War Stanton (who was then enduring a torrent of abuse from Democrats for failing to sustain McClellan). During the ride Lincoln informed the two Cabinet officials of his intention to issue an emancipation proclamation. As Welles later recounted the conversation, the president said that this matter had “occupied his mind and thoughts by day and night” for several weeks. He had concluded that emancipation was “a military necessity, absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union. . . . The slaves [are] undeniably an element of strength to those who [have] their service, and we must decide whether that element should be for us or against us.” The border states, Lincoln now recognized, “would do nothing on their own,” and perhaps it was unrealistic to have expected them to take the lead. Thus “the blow must fall first and foremost on [the rebels]. . . . We wanted the Army to strike more vigorous blows. The Administration must set an example, and strike at the heart of the rebellion.”66
Nine days later Lincoln called the whole Cabinet together to announce his decision. They expressed varying degrees of support, and only Postmaster-General Montgomery Blair dissented. A former Democrat from Maryland who had turned Republican, Blair protested that the Democrats would seize on the unpopularity of such a measure in the border states and the lower North to gain control of Congress (at least the House) in the fall elections. Seward said that he approved of the proclamation but not the timing of issuing it immediately, during this period of public discouragement with the military situation. Seward had another reason as well for counseling delay. After months of sneering at the North for not adopting emancipation, the unfriendly European press had recently—and perversely—responded to signs of growing emancipation pressures from Republicans with charges that their purpose was to foment a slave insurrection in the South. Thus for reasons of both domestic and foreign policy, Seward advised Lincoln to postpone issuing the proclamation “until you can give it to the country supported by military success.” Otherwise the world might view it “as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help . . . our last shriek, on the retreat.”67
The wisdom of this suggestion “struck me with very great force,” Lincoln said later.68 So he put the proclamation away to wait for a military victory. It would prove to be a long, dismal wait.