Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (138 page)

The fruits of war: remains of a plantation house near Fredericksburg

Library of Congress

Richmond on April 4, 1865, as viewed from the Confederate Treasury building, with Yankee cavalry horses tied in the foreground as their owners finish putting out the fires set by departing rebels

U.S. Army Military History Institute

little investigative reporting by Republicans dug up information about his views on the war, which were similar to Vallandigham's. "Slavery was intended as a special blessing to the people of the United States," believed Woodward. "Secession is not disloyalty," he had written in 1860, for the election of Lincoln had destroyed the old Union of consent and comity. "I cannot in justice condemn the South for withdrawing. . . . I wish Pennsylvania could go with them." Although two of his sons fought in the Army of the Potomac, Woodward did not think reunion could be achieved by military victory. As a state judge, he wrote an opinion that the national conscription act was unconstitutional and inoperative in Pennsylvania. A prominent Democrat campaigning for Woodward declared that when elected he would unite with Governors Vallandigham of Ohio and Seymour of New York (representing together nearly half of the North's population) "in calling from the army troops from their respective States for the purpose of compelling the Administration to invite a convention of the States to adjust our difficulties."
²²

Both Woodward and Vallandigham had been nominated before the Union triumphs at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. These battles undercut their theme of the war's failure. Though neither candidate changed his personal views, the party recognized that excessive antiwar statements would alienate War Democrats whose votes were necessary for victory. It came hard for War Democrats to swallow Vallandigham, but Woodward proved more digestible. He published a statement condemning the rebellion. And on election eve the party achieved a coup by persuading McClellan (who resided in neighboring New Jersey) to write a letter stating that if he could vote in Pennsylvania he would "give to Judge Woodward my voice and my vote."
²³

Because of Republican advantages on the war question, however, Democrats concentrated mainly on such tried and true issues as emancipation. In Ohio the party portrayed the contest as an " 'irrepressible conflict' between white and black laborers. . . . Let every vote count in favor of the
white
man, and against the Abolition hordes, who would place negro children in your schools, negro jurors in your jury boxes,

22
. Arnold Shankman, "For the Union as It Was and the Constitution as It Is: A Copperhead Views the Civil War," in James I. Robertson, Jr., and Richard M. McMurry, eds.,
Rank and File: Civil War Essays in Honor of Bell Irvin Wiley
(San Rafael, Cal., 1976), 97–98, 104.

23
. Arnold M. Shankman,
The Pennsylvania Antiwar Movement
, 1861–1865 (Cranbury, N.J., 1980), 133, 139.

and negro votes in your ballot boxes!" Party orators lampooned the portly Republican gubernatorial candidate John Brough as a "fat Knight of the corps d'Afrique." Similar though less strident outcries against "political and social equality" also typified the Pennsylvania campaign.
²⁴

But anti-abolitionism and racism seemed to have lost potency as Democratic shibboleths. Two almost simultaneous events in July 1863 were largely responsible for this phenomenon. The first was the New York draft riot, which shocked many northerners into a backlash against the consequences of virulent racism. The second was a minor battle in the campaign against Charleston. At dusk on July 18 two Union brigades assaulted Fort Wagner, a Confederate earthwork defending the entrance to Charleston harbor. Leading the attack was the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. This was not unusual in itself: Bay State regiments fought in the hottest part of many battles, and the combat casualties of Massachusetts were among the highest for Union states. But the 54th was the North's showcase black regiment. Its colonel and lieutenant colonel were sons of prominent abolitionist families. More was riding on the 54th's first big action than the capture of a fort, important as that might be. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw had implored his brigade commander to give the regiment a chance to prove its mettle. The general responded by assigning Shaw to lead the frontal assault across a narrow spit of sand against this strong earthwork. The result was predictable; the rebels drove back the attacking brigades and inflicted heavy losses.

The 54th took the largest casualties, losing nearly half of its men including Colonel Shaw with a bullet through his heart. Black soldiers gained Wagner's parapet and held it for an hour in the flame-stabbed darkness before falling back. The achievements and losses of this elite black regiment, much publicized by the abolitionist press, wrought a change in northern perceptions of black soldiers. "Through the cannon smoke of that dark night," declared the
Atlantic Monthly
, "the manhood of the colored race shines before many eyes that would not see." The
New York Tribune
believed that this battle "made Fort Wagner such a name to the colored race as Bunker Hill had been for ninety years to the white Yankees." When a Confederate officer reportedly replied

24
. Frank L. Klement,
The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War
(Lexington, Ky., 1970), 245, 243; Wood Gray,
The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads
(New York, 1964 [1942]), 150; Shankman,
Pennsylvania Antiwar Movement
, 103–4.

to a request for the return of Shaw's body with the words "we have buried him with his niggers," Shaw's father quelled a northern effort to recover his son's body with these words: "We hold that a soldier's most appropriate burial-place is on the field where he has fallen."
²⁵

This apotheosis of Shaw and his men took place just after Democratic rioters in New York had lynched black people and burned the Colored Orphan Asylum. Few Republican newspapers failed to point the moral: black men who fought for the Union deserved more respect than white men who fought against it. Lincoln expressed this theme in a public letter of August 26 addressed to Democrats. "You are dissatisfied with me about the negro," wrote the president. But "some of the commanders of our armies in the field who have given us our most important successes, believe the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion."
²⁶
"You say you will not fight to free negroes," continued Lincoln. "Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union. I issued the proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union." When this war was won, concluded the president, "there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it."
²⁷

Lincoln's letter set the tone for Republicans in the 1863 campaign. Many of them had previously felt defensive about emancipation; now they could put Democrats on the defensive. Opposition to emancipation became opposition to northern victory. Linking abolition and Union, Republicans managed to blunt the edge of Democratic racism in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York (where legislative elections were held in 1863). The party carried two-thirds of the legislative districts in New

25
.
Atlantic Monthly
, quoted in Lawrence Lader,
The Bold Brahmins
(New York, 1961), 290;
New York Tribune
, Sept. 8, 1865; Luis F. Emilio, A
Brave Black Regiment: History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry
1863–1865 (Boston, 1894), 102–3.

26
. This was a reference to Grant, who had written to Lincoln on August 23 that "by arming the negro we have added a powerful ally. . . . This, with the emancipation of the negro, is the heaviest blow yet given the Confederacy. . . . They will make good soldiers and taking them from the enemy weakens him in the same proportion they strengthen us." Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.

27
.
CWL
, VI, 401–10.

York. In Ohio it buried Vallandigham under a victory margin of 100,000 votes, winning an unprecedented 61 percent of the ballots. Especially gratifying to Republicans was their 94 percent share of the absentee soldier vote. Efforts to persuade soldiers to "vote as they shot" paid off in a big way. Significantly, in an opinion written by none other than George Woodward, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had ruled a year earlier that soldiers could not vote outside their home districts. Since only a few thousand Pennsylvania soldiers could be furloughed home for the election, their votes contributed only a small part of the Repub-lians' 15,000-vote victory (51.5 percent) over Woodward.

Republicans additionally scored significant gains in state and local elections elsewhere. They interpreted these results as signs of a transformation of public opinion toward emancipation. The Republican newspaper in Lincoln's hometown of Springfield commented that if a referendum had been held on the Emancipation Proclamation a year earlier, "there is little doubt that the voice of a majority would have been against it. And yet not a year has passed before it is approved by an overwhelming majority." A New York Republican observed that "the change of opinion on this slavery question . . . is a great and historic fact. . . . Who could have predicted . . . this great and blessed revolution? . . . God pardon our blindness of three years ago." The Emancipation Proclamation had been "followed by dark and doubtful days," admitted Lincoln in his annual message to Congress on December 8, 1863. But now "the crisis which threatened the friends of the Union is past."
²⁸
If Lincoln's optimism proved premature, it nevertheless mirrored the despair that threatened to undermine the southern will to continue fighting.

28
.
Illinois State Journal
, Dec. 1, 1863, quoted in V. Jacque Voegeli,
Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro during the Civil War
(Chicago, 1967), 131; Strong,
Diary
, 408;
CWL
, VII, 49–50.

23
When This Cruel War Is Over

I

Unhappily for Jefferson Davis, elections for the Confederate Congress took place in the fall of 1863 when southern morale was at low ebb. The Davis administration suffered a more severe rebuke from voters than the Lincoln administration had sustained the previous year in a similar situation. The difference resulted not only from the greater calamity to Confederate arms but also from the different political structures in North and South.

Formal political parties did not exist in the Confederacy. This state of affairs arose from two main causes: the erosion of the two-party system in the 1850s and the perceived need for a united front during the emergencies of secession and war. Although the Whig party had experienced a brief reincarnation as the Constitutional Union party in 1860, it seemed to disappear again in the crisis of 1861. Below the surface of southern politics Whiggery persisted in the form of memory and sentiment, but the most assiduous researchers employing the tools of roll-call analysis have been unable to identify party organizations or significant partisan patterns of voting in the Confederate Congress from 1861 through 1863.
¹

1
. Thomas B. Alexander, "Persistent Whiggery in the Confederate South, 1860–1877,"
JSH
, 27 (1961), 305–10; Richard E. Beringer, "The Unconscious 'Spirit of Party' in the Confederate Congress,"
CWH
, 18 (1972), 312–16; Thomas B. Alexander and Richard E. Beringer,
The Anatomy of the Confederate Congress
(Nashville, 1972), 35–57.