Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (100 page)

Lincoln now recognized that the cessation of recruiting in April had been a mistake. But he feared that if he issued a new appeal for recruits in the wake of the Seven Days', "a general panic and stampede would follow." Seward solved this dilemma with a clever tactic. He hastened to New York and conferred with northern governors. They agreed to issue an address (written by Seward) to the president urging him to call on the states for new volunteers to "follow up" the "recent successes of the Federal arms" and "speedily crush the rebellion." Seward backdated this document to June 28 in order to avoid the appearance of a panicked response to McClellan's retreat. In pretended compliance with the governors' appeal, Lincoln on July 2 called for 300,000 new volunteers to bring the war "to a speedy and satisfactory conclusion."
³

Once again recruiting committees in the North geared up their machinery. Governors called on men to join up to fight for "the old flag, for our country, Union, and Liberty." James S. Gibbons, a Quaker abolitionist with "a reasonable leaning toward wrath in cases of emergency," wrote a popular recruiting poem that was set to music by Stephen Foster, Luther O. Emerson, and others, "We are Coming, Father Abraham, Three Hundred Thousand More." But the three hundred thousand came forward with painful slowness. The parades and rallies of 1862 were a pale imitation of the stirring demonstrations of 1861. The lengthening casualty lists had taught people that war was not a glorious game. Although the North had mobilized only a third of its potential military manpower, a booming war economy and the busy summer season on farms had left few young men at loose ends and ready to volunteer. Moreover, the new recruits, like those already in the army, had to enlist for three years. Governors informed the War Department

2
. Samuel L. M. Barlow to Henry D. Bacon, July 15, 1862, Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library; Strong,
Diary
, 234, 236, 239, 241;
CWL
, V, 292.

3
.
CWL
, V, 292–97. The War Department established state quotas for these 300,000 volunteers apportioned on the basis of population.

that they could easily raise enough short-term men to fill their quotas, but getting three-year recruits would be difficult.

In response the government adopted an ingenious carrot and stick approach. The carrot was bounties. The War Department authorized payment in advance of $25 of the traditional $100 bounty normally paid in full upon honorable discharge. In addition, some states or cities offered bounties to three-year recruits. Intended as a compensation for the economic sacrifice made by a volunteer and his family, these initially modest bounties were the forerunner of what later became a mercenary bidding contest for warm bodies to fill district quotas. The stick was a militia law enacted by Congress on July 17, 1862. This law defined the militia as comprising all able-bodied men between ages eighteen and forty-five and empowered the president to call state militia into federal service for a period of up to nine months. Since the militia in several states had fallen into a comatose condition, a key provision of the act authorized the president to "make all necessary rules and regulations . . . to provide for enrolling the militia and otherwise putting this act into execution."
⁴
Here was a potential for an enormous expansion of federal power at the expense of the states. The government did not hesitate to use this power to reach across state boundaries and institute a quasi-draft. On August 4 the War Department imposed on the states a levy of 300,000 nine-month militia
in addition to
the 300,000 three-year volunteers called for a month earlier.
⁵
Moreover, any deficiency in meeting quotas under the earlier call must be made up by levying an equivalent number of additional nine-month men. And if the states did not mobilize these militia, the War Department would step in and do it for them. Secretary of War Stanton softened the blow of this big stick, however, with a regulation stipulating that every three-year volunteer enlisted above quota would be counted as four men against the nine-month militia quota.

Although of dubious legality and confusing arithmetic, this regulation achieved its purpose. With the help of several postponed deadlines, most states enrolled a sufficient combination of three-year and nine-month recruits to avoid a draft of nine-month men. Before the end of 1862 this procedure had produced 421,000 three-year volunteers and 88,000 militiamen, which according to Stanton's arithmetic exceeded the combined

4
.
U.S. Statutes at Large
, XII, 597.

5
. Men employed in several occupations vital to the war effort were exempted from militia service.

quotas by 45 percent. Most of the volunteers were recruited by the time-honored method of organizing new regiments with their complement each of thirty-odd officers' commissions as political plums. Some of these new regiments became crack units by 1863, but in the process they had to go through the same high-casualty trial-and-error experiences as their 1861 predecessors.

In several states a militia draft became necessary to fill the quotas. This draft met violent resistance in some areas, especially Irish Catholic neighborhoods in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, Butternut districts in Ohio and Indiana, and German Catholic townships in Wisconsin. Mobs murdered two enrollment officers in Indiana and wounded a commissioner in Wisconsin. The army had to send troops into all four states to keep order and carry out the draft. On September 24, Lincoln issued a proclamation suspending the writ of habeas corpus and subjecting to martial law "all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting militia drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice affording aid and comfort to the rebels." The War Department took off the gloves to enforce this decree. Stanton created a network of provost marshals who arrested and imprisoned without trial several hundred draft resisters and antiwar activists, including five newspaper editors, three judges, and several minor political leaders.
⁶

Most of the men arrested were Democrats. This did not signify a determination by the Republican administration to get rid of its political adversaries—as Democrats charged. Rather it reflected the reality that virtually all those who denounced and resisted the militia draft were Democrats. They represented the most conservative wing of the party on such issues as emancipation, the draft, and the financial legislation passed by the Republican Congress in 1862. Opposition to these measures was strongest among Irish and German Catholics and among Butternuts of the southern Midwest whose wealth and income were significantly below the northern median. These groups rioted against the draft while carrying banners proclaiming "The Constitution As It Is, The Union As It Was" and "We won't fight to free the nigger."
⁷

Such slogans offer a key to understanding both the motives of antidraft

6
.
CWL
, V, 436–37; Robert E. Sterling, "Civil War Draft Resistance in the Middle West," Ph.D. dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1974,
chaps. 3
–
4
.

7
. Sterling, "Draft Resistance in the Middle West," 96–97. This study contains valuable data correlating draft resistance with political, ethnocultural, geographic, and economic variables. See especially 129, 248, and 535.

resisters and the Republican response to them. The "copperhead" faction of the northern Democratic party opposed the transformation of the Civil War into a total war—a war to destroy the old South instead of to restore the old Union.
⁸
In Republican eyes, opposition to Republican war aims became opposition to the war itself. Opponents therefore became abettors of the rebellion and liable to military arrest. Most such arrests in 1861 had occurred in border states where pro-Confederate sentiment was rife. In 1862, many of the men arrested were northern Democrats whose disaffection from the war had been sparked by Republican adoption that year of emancipation as a war policy.

II

By the beginning of 1862 the impetus of war had evolved three shifting and overlapping Republican factions on the slavery question. The most dynamic and clearcut faction were the radicals, who accepted the abolitionist argument that emancipation could be achieved by exercise of the belligerent power to confiscate enemy property. On the other wing of the party a smaller number of conservatives hoped for the ultimate demise of bondage but preferred to see this happen by the voluntary action of slave states coupled with colonization abroad of the freed slaves. In the middle were the moderates, led by Lincoln, who shared the radicals' moral aversion to slavery but feared the racial consequences of wholesale emancipation. Events during the first half of 1862 pushed moderates toward the radical position.

One sign of this development was the growing influence of abolitionists. "Never has there been a time when Abolitionists were as much respected, as at present," rejoiced one of them in December 1861. "It is hard to realize the wondrous change which has befallen us," mused

8
. Like most political labels, "copperhead" was originally an epithet invented by opponents. Ohio Republicans seem to have used it as early as the fall of 1861 to liken antiwar Democrats to the venomous snake of that name By the fall of 1862 the term had gained wide usage and was often applied by Republicans to the whole Democratic party. By 1863 some Peace Democrats proudly accepted the label and began wearing badges bearing likenesses of the Goddess of Liberty from the copper penny to symbolize their opposition to Republican "tyranny." Albert Matthews, "Origin of Butternut and Copperhead,"
Proceedings of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts
(1918), 205–37; Charles H. Coleman, "The Use of the Term 'Copperhead' during the Civil War,"
MVHR
, 25 (1938), 263–64.

another.
⁹
The most radical of them all, Wendell Phillips, lectured to packed houses all over the North in the winter and spring of 1862. In March he came to Washington—which he could scarcely have entered without danger to his life a year earlier—and spoke on three occasions to large audiences that included the president and many members of Congress. Phillips also had the rare privilege of a formal introduction on the floor of the Senate. "The Vice-President left his seat and greeted him with marked respect," wrote a reporter for the
New York Tribune
. "The attentions of Senators to the apostle of Abolition were of the most flattering character." Noting the change from the previous winter when mobs had attacked abolitionists as troublemakers who had provoked the South to secession, the
Tribune
observed: "It is not often that history presents such violent contrasts in such rapid succession. . . . The deference and respect now paid to him by men in the highest places of the nation, are tributes to the idea of which he, more than any other one man, is a popular exponent." Even the
New York Times
gave abolitionists its imprimatur in January 1862 by sending a reporter to the convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. "In years heretofore a great deal has been said and much fun has been made . . . of these gatherings," said the
Times
. "The facts that black and white met socially here, and that with equal freedom men and women addressed the conglomerate audience, have furnished themes for humorous reporters and facetious editors; but no such motives have drawn here the representatives of fifteen of the most widely circulated journals of the North. Peculiar circumstances have given to [abolitionist meetings] an importance that has hitherto not been theirs."
¹⁰

These peculiar circumstances were the growing Republican conviction that the fate of the nation could not be separated from the fate of slavery. In an important House speech on January 14, 1862, radical leader George W. Julian of Indiana set the tone for Republican congressional policy. "When I say that this rebellion has its source and life in slavery, I only repeat a simple truism," declared Julian. The four million slaves "cannot be neutral. As laborers, if not as soldiers, they will be the allies of the rebels, or of the Union." By freeing them the North would convert their labor power from support of treason to support of

9
.
Principia
, Dec. 21, 1861; Mary Grew to Wendell P. Garrison, Jan. 9, 1862, Garrison Family Papers, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester.

10
.
New York Tribune
, March 15, 18, 1862;
New York Times
, Jan. 25, 1862.

Union and liberty. This would hasten the day of national triumph, but even if the nation should triumph without such action "the mere suppression of the rebellion will be an empty mockery of our sufferings and sacrifices, if slavery shall be spared to canker the heart of the nation anew, and repeat its diabolical deeds."
¹¹