Penguin History of the United States of America (61 page)

After that nothing went right for the North for a long, long time.

By the spring of 1862 the Army of the Potomac was well-armed, clothed and otherwise equipped for war. McClellan had won the trust and affection of his troops, which he was never to lose (they appreciated his reluctance to throw their lives away). His insistence on thorough preparation and training had brought a semblance of much-needed professionalism to the North. But his caution, his procrastination, his reluctance to move finally exasperated the politicians (especially Stanton) beyond endurance. Lincoln had been able to overlook the impertinences which McClellan was silly enough to offer him, but he could not excuse the General’s reckless refusal to consider political realities. Another great clamour for action was rising, especially among the President’s own Republicans, and Lincoln could not resist their demands for ever in order to protect a general who, it seemed, was a poltroon and (it was whispered) a traitor, and who was certainly a Democrat. Finally, in April, McClellan was forced to move.

He had devised a most promising strategy that exploited the Union’s command of the sea. He shipped his army down the Potomac to the coast of Virginia and landed it at the tip of the great peninsula where Jamestown had been settled and Yorktown had been besieged. Now, he hoped, it would see a third decisive event in American history. Certainly the capture of Richmond, which was what he hoped for, would have been a heavy blow to the South, though not so decisive as it proved at a much later stage of the war when the rest of the Confederacy had already fallen or been devastated. Protected on either flank by rivers (the James and the York), with a secure base behind him at Fort Monroe, he began to advance on a narrow front. Had he done so swiftly he would have won his crushing victory; as it was, he got closer to Richmond than any other federal general would do for nearly three years. But speed was something that McClellan could never achieve. The Southern defences were at first extremely weak, and a bold push could have overthrown them. It was not even tried. McClellan allowed himself to be deceived by a series of brilliant bluffs; he advanced at a snail’s pace; and presently found that he had merely contrived to give the Confederates time to plan and organize effectively. Stonewall Jackson kept Lincoln and Stanton in quivering alarm for the safety of Washington, so that they denied McClellan troops he badly needed; meanwhile General Joe Johnston, a soldier as cautious as McClellan himself, conducted a masterly retreat. He backed away before the Union army while he gathered his strength, always retiring, never losing a man more than he had to. He brought McClellan within sight of Richmond spires, but his army was still intact.

Then he was wounded in a skirmish and had to hand over command to General Robert E. Lee.

Lee could have retreated as skilfully as Johnston, but that was not his
style. He had a bold and restless spirit, and was especially gifted at taking his enemy by surprise and then hammering the surprise home. Besides, the time for retreat was past. He suddenly hit McClellan in his flank, and in the Seven Days’ Battles (25 June-1 July) sent the Army of the Potomac reeling down to Harrison’s Landing on the James river, desperate for a respite. Once more Virginia was secure, and once more the North had been humbled.

Lincoln and Stanton scraped together another army from the troops who had been held back from McClellan, and sent them against Lee under General Pope, who issued a threatening and boastful proclamation in the course of which he said that his headquarters would be in the saddle. Commenting that it was a better place for the hindquarters, Lee thrashed him soundly at the Second Battle of Bull Run (30 August 1862). Then he seized the initiative, at the same moment as General Braxton Bragg seized it for the Confederacy in the West. Lee’s idea was to fight and win a battle in Pennsylvania: if he did so, and Bragg succeeded in conquering Kentucky, the blow to Northern morale would be colossal, coming as it would on top of months of defeat. Britain and France might well decide to recognize Southern independence. Washington might fall. In Stonewall Jackson he had found an ideal partner: a brilliant tactician and cavalry commander. It was worth the gamble, and, given the performance hitherto of the Northern generals, Lee probably thought the risk was slight. In the first week in September he crossed the upper course of the Potomac into Maryland and vanished into the hills. The next certain news that Washington had of him was that Stonewall Jackson had successfully attacked the great federal arsenal and depot at Harper’s Ferry and carried off a mountain of booty.

Lincoln, meantime, had hastily recalled McClellan, presumably because, of all the available generals, he had been defeated least recently. McClellan quickly reorganized the Army of the Potomac and put some spirit into its disheartened soldiers, who were thoroughly glad to be once more under the command of Little Mac. Then he set off in pursuit of Lee. Whether, left to himself, he would have found him before Lee was ready cannot be known: by a stroke of pure good luck a copy of Lee’s orders fell into his hands, and he was able to bring the Confederate General to battle at Antietam Creek in Maryland, just below the Pennsylvania border. 17 September proved to be the bloodiest day of the war: the Union army had to attack uphill and suffered terrible loss (12,000), but its greater numbers saved it from defeat and enabled it to inflict almost equal casualties on the Confederates. At the end of the battle Lee was left in possession of the field, but the Army of the Potomac was still in being, and the Confederate forces had suffered so horribly that there could be no question of continuing the campaign. Lee retreated into Virginia, where he heard that Bragg’s offensive had also failed at the last minute. McClellan pursued him, but not vigorously enough to satisfy the President. On 7 November the General was dismissed, this time for good.

Six weeks previously, on 22 September, Lincoln had issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

The President had been meditating some such step for months, for events were coming to point inexorably in the direction of a major assault on slavery.

Foremost was the consideration that slavery had caused the great rebellion. It had also poisoned political life for more than thirty years. The only way of making sure that it would never wreak such mischief again was to destroy it. Lincoln no longer had any doubt that it was a legitimate aim of the war to remove the cause of the war.

Then there was the question of morale, already mentioned. As the news of defeats poured in during that dreadful summer Northern spirits sank as much as Southern ones were lifted. Lee was right in thinking that it might not have taken much to break the Union will to go on fighting. But there was one element of Northern opinion that never faltered, that grew, in fact, more vigorous and vociferous: the abolitionists, who were steadily gaining ground in Congress, in the Republican party and in the country at large. Wendell Phillips, who before the war had at various times denounced Lincoln as ‘that slave hound from Illinois’ and as a huckster in politics, was still phrase-making at the President’s expense, though he conceded that Lincoln was ‘Kentucky honest’. Frederick Douglass called him ‘the slow coach at Washington’. They were holding large and enthusiastic meetings. At the very least, it was unfortunate that they were dividing the North. Their energy could be immensely useful if harnessed to the Union cause by an emancipation decree. It might bring forth another surge of idealistic young recruits for New England’s last crusade. They were badly needed, for the death-rate, as much from diseases caught in hospital as from wounds received on the battlefield, was appalling.

Emancipation might mitigate the manpower problem in another way as well. Ever since the war broke out the free blacks of the North had been trying to enlist. Intense race prejudice had usually rebuffed them, although one or two had succeeded in getting into uniform, like the runaway slave whose blood was the first shed for the Union: his head was cut open by a brickbat thrown by a pro-Confederate mob in Baltimore as his unit marched through the town on 18 April 1861. Then in August and September 1862, at New Orleans, General Ben Butler began to organize a regiment of free black volunteers, the 1st Louisiana Native Guards, which was mustered in on 27 September. There were tens of thousands more such men who might be enlisted, but they would not be likely to volunteer in any numbers if they felt that emancipation was not a Northern war-aim.

As a matter of fact no such doubt existed among the African-Americans, North or South, slave or free. To use the language of the day, Ethiopia was stirring. Four and a half million black Americans, who had never before been allowed much opportunity to shape their own destiny, were now taking a hand. In the North they thronged about the recruiting-offices, waiting for
the call. In the South they preserved their usual calm appearance before their masters, but wherever Union armies drew near they ran away in enormous numbers. Soon every federal unit in the South was followed by a straggling crowd of escaped slaves. They had to be looked after, which was a nuisance; but they were also put to work, as cooks, drivers, navvies. It was not long before voices were heard suggesting that they might make soldiers.

Their legal status was highly uncertain. In the very earliest days of the war a Southern gentleman had actually crossed into federal lines at Fort Monroe in Virginia to claim the return of some of his runaway slaves. He had been firmly refused by Ben Butler (then commanding at that place) on the grounds that since slaves were property, they could rightfully be seized as contraband of war, even if they did the seizing themselves. This ingenious argument was thankfully adopted by Lincoln and the rest of the North: from then on the runaways were commonly spoken of as ‘contrabands’. And as the war deepened in intensity, as both sides (but perhaps particularly the North) began to try deliberately to bring it home to each other by a policy of devastation and to deny each other necessary resources, Union soldiers began deliberately to encourage the slaves to desert the plantations. They could see how loss of the labour force would cripple the economy of the Confederacy, and therefore its capacity to make war; they could see what an accession of strength to themselves the four million slaves might be. Their racial attitudes probably did not much alter: some remained sympathetic to the blacks, some hostile, most indifferent; but they became abolitionists, of a very effective kind. By August 1862, some of them, at least, were welcoming the idea of enlisting ‘the darkeys’.

There were some minor considerations present to Lincoln’s mind: the fact that Maryland was now secure, and that Missouri and Kentucky were already so deeply divided that emancipation could hardly make things worse; the knowledge that foreign opinion, especially in England, would find it much easier to sympathize with the North if an explicit emancipation policy were adopted. But he was probably unaware of one major consideration, at least in all but its peripheral manifestations. Slavery was dying from the inside. The planters’ revolution had already failed.

‘Independence’ and ‘our domestic institutions’ (slavery) – these were the twin themes that recurred in speech after speech, editorial after editorial, at the time of secession. War was accepted, eagerly in many cases, as the necessary price. In the high tide of the Confederacy before Antietam it was not yet thought seriously possible that the South might lose the war and her independence; but her domestic institution had already suffered debilitating blows.

Cotton production was plummeting, because of the embargo, and because of the blockade and the war (since food crops had to be grown instead). This had two weakening effects: it slashed the planters’ income, and it unsettled their slaves. Worse still was the effect of the Confederacy and
state governments’ demands on Southern manpower, both black and white. The master went off to battle, the slave was carried away to work for the Confederate government as a blacksmith, factory hand, building labourer or a dozen other things, and the personal bond between the owner and his ‘property’ snapped for good. Worst of all was the direct effect of the war. It did not seem to matter whether a Union or a Confederate army crossed a plantation: either way the result was devastation, as crops were trampled down, stock was stolen, fences were destroyed. One Mississippi planter commented that there was no such thing as a friendly army in retreat. That was in 1864, but the ominous symptoms – weedy fields, empty slave quarters, half-wrecked buildings – had begun to appear long before. Many planters in areas of fighting sought to escape some, at least, of the ill-effects of war by retiring with their slaves deeper into the interior: many Southern roads were choked by lines of refugees trudging from one plantation to another; but this too was profoundly disruptive of slavery, and highly unprofitable. So the prosperity of the South, which slavery was supposed to guarantee and which in turn was essential to the continuance of slavery, was a thing of the past after only a year of war. Nor were there many symptoms of recovery. Here and there, the white men having gone to war, slaves turned recalcitrant. They worked shorter hours, or not at all, or only in response to pleadings – not the whip. True, slave labour was still plentiful and a huge economic asset to the Confederacy, since it implied long hours and little allowance for the weaknesses of sex or age; but the problem of controlling it, which had always been at the heart of the planters’ concerns, was growing more and more intractable.

Seen in retrospect, against this background, the decision to issue an emancipation proclamation seems inevitable and easy. It was not so for Abraham Lincoln and his advisers. Under the Constitution the President had no right to meddle with private property in such a sweeping fashion except perhaps on the plea of the most extreme military necessity. More than that, an assault – any assault – on property – any property – was fundamentally antipathetic to the American tradition, which regarded property as sacred. Except perhaps for Salmon P. Chase no member of the Cabinet could lightly agree to what Gideon Welles, staring at the idea, called ‘an arbitrary and despotic measure in the cause of freedom’. Lincoln might carry on with a high hand in other respects – suspending
habeas corpus
, for instance – but in this case, might he not at last be going altogether too far?