A Disease in the Public Mind (46 page)

The South's reaction to the proclamation was vitriol. “What shall we call him?” raged the
Richmond Enquirer
. “Coward, assassin, savage, murderer of women and babies? Or shall we consider them all as embodied in the word fiend, and call him Lincoln the Fiend?” The murderous language reinforced Lincoln's suspicion that doing his duty about slavery might cost him his life. It was also dolorous proof that Thomas Jefferson's dread of a race war continued to permeate the southern public mind.
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From abroad came better news. England was no longer tilting toward recognition of the Confederacy. The ruling class's favorite magazine,
Punch,
portrayed Lincoln in dozens of grotesque and uncomplimentary ways. But the preliminary proclamation had stirred a surge of approval among the middle and lower classes. This was doubly amazing because a shortage of southern cotton had put 500,000 men and women out of work in Britain's textile mills. The antislavery seed John Woolman had planted was flowering again to rescue his agonized country.
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As January 1 approached, Lincoln made another attempt at a negotiated peace. In his annual message to Congress, the president asked the lawmakers to consider a constitutional amendment that would guarantee
compensated emancipation to any state, including those in rebellion, that would agree to abolish slavery gradually by 1900. He added a long, carefully reasoned argument in support of this idea, and closed it with one of his most effective phrases: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.”

The abolitionists exploded in almost insane fury. William Lloyd Garrison declared, “The president is demented—or else a veritable Rip Van Winkle.” His proposal “borders upon hopeless lunacy” and stirred thoughts of impeachment. Wendell Phillips said the president “had no mind whatever” and compared him to a tortoise. “He may be honest [but] nobody cares whether the tortoise is honest or not.” As hatred-inflamed as ever, the abolitionists were blind to the way their rage poisoned Lincoln's peace proposal for the South.
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•      •      •

From our distance of a century and a half, there are two clauses in the proclamation that have become hugely important in our evolving comprehension of the Civil War. The first dealt directly with the fear of a race war.
And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self defence; and I recommend to them, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.
The slaves' response to this exhortation suggested that Thomas Jefferson's race war nightmare was created by the special circumstances of the struggle for freedom in Haiti. Not even in the southern counties where blacks heavily outnumbered whites was there any explosion of the bloodshed that Jefferson had dreaded and John Brown envisioned in his tormented soul.

The second clause was even more important for the future self-respect of the freed slaves.
And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed services of the United States to garrison forts, stations and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.

Here Lincoln was reaching back to that early emancipator, George Washington, and his decision to give black Americans the right to fight for the
independence of the United States from 1775 to 1783. Thanks to this clause in the proclamation, 200,000 black Americans served in the Union army, displaying heroic courage on some of the war's bloodiest battlefields.
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•      •      •

On December 13, another battle cast the darkest shadow yet over the proclamation. Big-bellied Ambrose Burnside of Rhode Island, arguably the worst general of the war, was now in command of the Union army. He attacked Robert E. Lee's army of 78,500 men, entrenched on the south side of the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Burnside ordered his 106,000 men to cross the icy stream and hurl themselves at Lee's men in a series of suicidal frontal assaults that piled Union dead in heaps at various points along the ten-thousand-yard front. The Union army finally retreated with 12,700 men killed or wounded. In an explosion of frustration they looted and wrecked most of the town of Fredericksburg. It was the most humiliating defeat of the war. Burnside had attacked because the abolitionists in Congress had warned him that he would be hauled before the Committee on the Conduct of the War if he did not become more aggressive.
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•      •      •

Some people wondered if Lincoln might abandon the Emancipation Proclamation after this catastrophe. Wouldn't it now seem to be what Secretary of State Seward had warned against—the last cry of a collapsing federal government? If Lincoln confronted this possibility, he mentioned it to no one. He went ahead with the January 1, 1863, announcement, as planned.

On December 31, Lincoln revised the proclamation's text one more time, working far into the night. The next morning, he sent his handwritten copy over to the State Department for “engrossing” in the heavy type of an official document. A servant brought him his usual light breakfast. As he ate, his wife Mary appeared in the doorway. Three of her Kentucky brothers were fighting for the Confederacy. She had repeatedly tried to convince him not to issue the proclamation. “Well,” she said. “What do you intend doing?”

“I am a man under orders,” the president said. “I cannot do otherwise.”

At 11:15 Mary joined him, and they descended the wide White House staircase to spend the next three hours smiling and shaking hands in the traditional New Year's Day White House reception for the diplomatic corps, the army's generals and the navy's admirals, the judges of the Supreme Court, and other government officials. At noon, the doors were opened to admit a huge crowd of average citizens. Noah Brooks told his newspaper that the president seemed “in fine spirits and cracked an occasional joke with intimate friends.”

That afternoon, Secretary of State Seward and his son Fred arrived with the engraved copy of the proclamation. Lincoln read it carefully one more time and picked up a pen. As he leaned forward to sign it, his hand and then his whole forearm started trembling violently. He put down the pen, rubbed the arm and hand and tried again. The same thing happened. Fearing he would splatter ink on the document, he pushed back his chair.

A wave of dread swept Lincoln's mind and body. Was this a terrible mistake, as Mary had been telling him? Were these tremors a warning that he was about to perpetrate a disaster? Would the proclamation, coming on the heels of the bloody defeat at Fredericksburg, destroy order and harmony in the North as well as sow additional rage and fear in the South?

As the tremors slowed, Lincoln decided they had been caused by the three hours of handshaking at the White House reception. These sessions always left his hand bruised and his arm muscles stretched to the snapping point. He glanced at the two Sewards, who were staring at him with puzzlement and apprehension on their earnest faces. “I never in my life was more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper,” he said.

These were the words of a man who had achieved this certainty on his knees, in communion with his God. Later Lincoln told a friend that as January 1 approached, he had asked God “to let this cup pass from me.” Clearly he knew he was risking his own life, and he feared until these very last moments that he was risking the survival of the Union. But he had decided that the Union was in equal danger if he did not issue it. The abolitionists in Congress were threatening to throw the country into chaos by refusing further funds for the war. Those final resolute words were spoken not only
to the Sewards but to himself, affirming his conviction that this document was God's intention far more than his own.

The Sewards nodded encouragingly. Lincoln said he hoped his signature would not waver. “They will say I had some compunctions.”

He gazed at the proclamation and said, again more to himself than to his witnesses, “Anyway it is going to be done.” Slowly, carefully, he signed his full name:
Abraham Lincoln.

Then he sat back in his chair and laughed briefly—again mostly to himself, banishing the last fragments of fear. “That will do,” he said.

The war had become a struggle for the Union—and a new birth of freedom. Lincoln had rescued the noble side of the abolitionists' crusade, their hatred of slavery, and separated it from its ruinous side, their hatred of southern white men. That left him free to deal with the defeated South on his terms.
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CHAPTER 25

The Hunt After the Captain

By this time the war was changing many minds and hearts in ways that the abolitionists would never understand or approve. More and more, it became apparent that the chief motivation of most of the men in the armies of the North was the preservation of the Union. One of the best historians of the Civil War has recently devoted a book to this phenomenon.
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Early in the war, the shrewd politician William Seward wrote a memorandum to President Lincoln urging, “we must change the question before the public from one upon slavery or about slavery for a question upon Union or Disunion.” By the fourth year of the war, the wisdom of this observation had become apparent. Lincoln did not run for reelection as a Republican. He ran with a Democrat—Andrew Johnson of Tennessee—on a “Union” ticket.

Again and again, in diaries and letters, soldiers revealed that the Union was the chief reason for their decision to join the war and endure its appalling bloodshed. William Bluffton Miller, a sergeant in the Seventy-Fifth Indiana Infantry, was typical. In his diary he noted mournfully, “There are thousands now sleeping in unknown graves, and many more will have to die yet to perpetuate the best government in the world.” In the perspective of
this book, all these men were paying tribute to the power of George Washington's central message in his Farewell Address: the crucial importance of the Union to America's hopes for prosperity and peace.
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Along with this positive motivation, there was a tendency as the war dragged on to divide the blame for the conflict between slave-owning “southern oligarchs” and abolitionists. There was a saying in the army General William Tecumseh Sherman led through Georgia that most men were more inclined to shoot an abolitionist than a rebel. They learned on that march that only a small minority of Southerners owned slaves. For the rest of the Confederate soldiers, it was “a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.” But very few understood why the southern poor men were fighting so ferociously: their fear that black emancipation would be a prelude to a race war.

One of the first evidences of this phenomenon was an article in
The Atlantic Monthly
, “My Hunt After the Captain,” written by one of New England's most popular authors, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Dr. Holmes was famous for his witty, often sardonic essays, issued by the so-called Autocrat of the Breakfast Table in books with variations on that original title. He had never been an abolitionist, and when his handsome Harvard-educated son, Oliver Jr., declared his intention to join the Union army, the father had urged him not to do so.
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The son had disagreed with his famous parent and had become a captain in the Twentieth Massachusetts regiment. At the Battle of Ball's Bluff, another Union rout several months after Bull Run, Oliver Jr. had received a wound above his heart. As soon as he recovered, he had gone back to his regiment. A day after the battle of Antietam, Dr. Holmes received a telegram informing him that the captain had been wounded again. Holmes immediately set out by train and wagon for Antietam. His journey across the battlefield, less than a week after the dying had ended, was told with the careful eye for detail of the trained physician.

Antietam had replaced Shiloh as the bloodiest battle ever fought on American soil up to that time. Most of the thousands of dead bodies had been buried by the time Dr. Holmes arrived, but everywhere he saw patches of caked blood and bullet-torn hats and fragments of bloody uniforms. A crude sign announced that a rebel general and eighty of his men were all
buried in “this hole.” Tens of thousands of wounded writhed in makeshift hospitals in churches and private houses, overwhelming the Union army's exhausted doctors. No one Holmes spoke to knew anything about his son.

A friendly fellow physician took Holmes through one church hospital, constructed of boards laid over the tops of pews. The wounded lay on bundles of straw on this improvised floor. The escort held a lantern over each man, but none was Captain Holmes. The process was repeated far into the night at other crude hospitals. One sufferer was a captured Confederate officer from North Carolina. Holmes found him “educated, pleasant, gentle, intelligent.” It only took a few minutes of conversation with such an enemy to wipe away “all personal bitterness toward those with whom we or our children have been but a few hours before in deadly strife.”

At another point in his search, Dr. Holmes found himself in a camp for rebel prisoners. He asked them why they were fighting. “For our homes,” several said. The doctor turned to a Mississippi officer, “about twenty, with a smooth boyish cheek.” He told Holmes he “liked the excitement of it” and added he had read many of the doctor's books. Soon Holmes was in “magnetic relation” with him. Although he had become a public denouncer of the rebellion, Holmes had not let opposition diminish his “human sympathy” for all the young men trapped in the carnage.
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