read; he smiles, shakes his head, and holds up a well-worn Bible, saying that “he had no wants which his Bible could not supply.”75 In another story, a soldier named Charles promises his mother that he will read the Bible every day. He does, and he meets a dying veteran who confesses that he is a skeptic and a sinner. When Charles reads him Bible passages promising redemption through Christ, the veteran dies with the blissful assurance of heaven.76
Religion was also a powerful motivator for the Confederacy. The Constitution of the Confederate States, adopted in March 1861, invoked “the favor and guidance of Almighty God” in its preamble—a rebuff to the godless US Constitution.77 The South had no problem defending slavery in the name of religion. To the contrary, it prided itself on preserving what it considered a God-ordained institution. The Confederacy’s leading Episcopal bishop, Stephen Elliott, declared that Southerners had a holy mission to convert heathen Africans to Christianity. God, he said, “has caused the African race to be planted here under our political protection and under our Christian nurture.”78 Northern agitators, in contrast, had been the “fountain of evil whence have sprung all these bitter waters.” Denouncing “these wretched infidels, the harbingers of war, of woe, and of anarchy,” Elliott fumed: “I cannot conceive any thing more hateful to God than the infidelity which has revelled in the Eastern States for the last forty years, . . . especially in the philosophy of abolitionism.”
Although the Confederacy did not have many religious publishing centers, Northern publishers shipped around 300,000 Bibles to the South, despite the ban on trade between the sections. A Richmond man smuggled 10,000 Bibles, 50,000 New Testaments, and 250,000 abridged Bibles to the South from England.79
In the course of the war, Jefferson Davis issued ten religious proclamations, one more than Lincoln. Revivals swept through Southern troops. Especially notable was the religious frenzy that overtook Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia between September 1862 and May 1863, and even more strongly, from August 1863 through May 1864, known as “a high point in army evangelism.”80 At such times, the Southern soldiers felt that “no army in all history—not even Cromwell’s ‘Roundheads’—had in it as much of real, evangelical religion and devout piety as the Army of Northern Virginia.”81
Moreover, the Confederates had a Cromwell in their midst: Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Other Confederate generals, such as J. E. B. Stuart, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Robert E. Lee, were cut in the Cavalier mold of Southern agrarianism, chivalry, honor, and gentlemanliness. Jackson was different. A pious Presbyterian, he was sober, plainspoken, and devoted to Bible reading. On the battlefield he was as fearless and ruthless as Cromwell. A contemporary noted that while other Confederates resembled “the Cavaliers of Prince Rupert, . . . Jackson himself might have passed for a type of all that was best and worthiest in their Puritan enemies,” with a bearing that was “decidedly of the Puritan stamp.”82 He was called “a typical Roundhead” and the “Cromwell of the Cavaliers.”83 Along with Robert E. Lee and John Wilkes Booth, Jackson had attended the hanging of John Brown in 1859. Although Jackson rejected Brown’s views on slavery, he felt a kinship with the Puritan warrior. He prayed for Brown’s soul on the night before the execution, and as he wrote his wife, when he witnessed Brown’s “unflinching firmness” on the scaffold, “I sent up the petition that he might be saved.”84
If Jackson had sympathy for an antislavery Northerner like Brown, many Northerners respected Jackson. When he died of pneumonia after being wounded by friendly fire at Chancellorsville in May 1863, there was an outpouring of grief throughout the South and homages in the North and in Europe. Herman Melville in a poem called Jackson “True to the thing he deemed was due, / True as John Brown or steel.”85 Lincoln’s journalist friend John W. Forney wrote an article praising Jackson as a “great general, a brave soldier, a noble Christian, and a pure man,” despite his dedication to a bad cause.86 Forney sent his piece to the president, who replied, “I wish to lose no time in thanking you for the excellent and manly article in the Chronicle on ‘Stonwall [sic] Jackson.
MILITARY NECESSITY AND MORAL GRANDEUR: TOWARD THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION
Although Lincoln saw religion as an important catalyst for battlefield vigor, he avoided references to divine law in his public pronouncements on slavery during the first two years of the war. He pursued emancipation indirectly and cautiously. He knew that slaveholders believed in God and the Bible as much as Radical Republicans did. He feared losing the border states and alienating the substantial number of political conservatives and moderates in the North. He stayed on his tightrope. In a widely quoted article, the New York World remarked: “President Lincoln is a very Blondin in the art of political balancing. When in his elevated position a portion of the balancing pole is thrown out on the left side, he deftly projects an equal weight of it on the right. Thus he maintains his equilibrium.”88
That is, he constantly adjusted his stance, now leaning toward the conservative and now toward the radical. He knew that if he shifted too strongly in either direction at the wrong moment, both he and the nation could fall.
He acted firmly in dealing with field commanders who issued emancipation orders in their districts. He revoked the emancipation edicts of General John Frémont in Missouri in August 1861 and of General David Hunter in Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida the following May. Such orders, he insisted, were “not within the range of military law, or necessity.”89 Only he, as commander in chief, had the power to issue an emancipation proclamation. His main concern was to restore the Union, and to do that he needed to retain the loyalty of the slaveholding border states—Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and, from 1862 on, West Virginia. “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game,” he wrote. “Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. . . . We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capitol.”90
Although he strongly desired emancipation in the border states, he approached the issue gingerly. He spent much of the period between November 1861 and July 1862 promoting a program of compensated emancipation in those states. He drafted two such measures for Delaware, offering federal payment to slave owners who accepted a plan of gradual emancipation. When Delaware did not accept the plan, he sent to Congress a joint resolution offering to cooperate with any state that would agree to a plan of gradual, compensated emancipation. Congress passed the resolution, and Lincoln signed it on April 10, 1862. He tried to sell the plan to border state representatives in two meetings. They rejected it, despite his argument that they should accept the government’s money while they could, because the signs pointed toward emancipation.
Dismissed by the border states, compensated emancipation succeeded in the District of Columbia. In April 1862, Congress passed a bill for the nation’s capital similar to the one Lincoln had proposed in 1849. The Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862 liberated 3,200 enslaved persons in the District of Columbia, paying up to $300 per person and offering $100 for voluntary removal to Liberia or Haiti.91
Military emancipation, meanwhile, had begun early in the war. General Benjamin Butler was stationed at Fort Monroe in Virginia’s Hampton Roads on May 23, 1861, when three fugitives arrived at his camp. Butler took the blacks in, sending away a Confederate officer who arrived under a flag of truce to reclaim them. Within a month, Butler had accepted five hundred fugitives. They were called “contraband of war” because they were considered stolen enemy property. Within a year, tens of thousands of fugitives had made their way behind Union lines. At first, blacks worked without pay for the Union military, but by the fall of 1861 the navy was paying ten dollars a month for their labor, and the army was paying eight dollars monthly to men and four dollars to women.
Lincoln found himself on an emancipation juggernaut. He signed two Confiscation Acts passed by Congress, the first in August 1861, which freed enslaved persons who worked for the Union military, and the second, in July 1862, emancipating all who came under military control. In March 1862 he signed a bill that prohibited the military from sending runaways back to their owners. In April, he told representatives of the Freedmen’s Association, “I am entirely satisfied that no slave who becomes for the time free within the American lines will ever be re-enslaved. Rather than have it so, I would give up and abdicate.”92
The issue that had catapulted Lincoln to national visibility—preventing the westward spread of slavery—was settled quietly on June 19, 1862, when Congress passed a bill outlawing slavery in the territories. That month also saw the diplomatic recognition of Haiti and Liberia as well as a strengthened treaty between the United States and England banning the international slave trade. Early in the year, Lincoln had ordered the execution of a convicted slave trader, Nathaniel Gordon.
All of these antislavery actions saw Lincoln leaning in a radical direction. But despite impressive military successes in the West, results on the battlefield were not keeping up with the advances on the antislavery scene. McClellan’s peninsular campaign, designed to take Richmond from a southeastern position on the Virginia Peninsula, ended in the bloody standoff of the Seven Days’ Battles against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. In July, McClellan retreated to a base on the James River. He later moved north of Richmond but did little to aid the beleaguered John Pope, who suffered a devastating defeat at Second Manassas in late August. The Union forces moved to a defensive position around Washington.
Frustrated by the military losses in the East and by the unwillingness of the border states to accept compensated emancipation, Lincoln decided to take the dramatic step of issuing a presidential proclamation of emancipation. By July 1862 he had drafted a proclamation that he announced as “a fit and necessary military measure.”93 It freed the enslaved people held in rebellious states as of January 1, 1863. He discussed the matter with William Seward and Gideon Welles in a carriage ride on July 13. Nine days later, on July 22, he read the proclamation to his cabinet, whose reaction was mixed. He took the advice of Seward, who argued that he should not issue the proclamation until the Union had achieved a military victory. The wait was on.
Those who complain that the Emancipation Proclamation is a dry, legalistic document—having “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading,” as Richard Hofstadter famously wrote—ignore the fact that Lincoln knew that, to alienate the least number of people, such a proclamation must be presented as a purely military measure, not as a moral statement about slavery.94 Lincoln also knew that outside of military necessity he lacked the authority under the Constitution to liberate the enslaved. By 1862, there was great latitude under the laws of war by which emancipating the enemy’s enslaved population could be justified as a means to gain military victory.
But Lincoln was aware that even if the proclamation appeared without moralizing, it would still shock conservatives. He felt he had to prepare for what he knew would be the stunning impact of the proclamation, which would immediately subject him to harsh attacks from the right. And so, in the period leading to issuing a proclamation, he put on a flamboyant show of centrism. Although he still hated slavery as much as any abolitionist, for now he would play the Old Whig.
He put on his best Old Whig performance when he talked with a delegation of African Americans on August 14, 1862.95 The innovation of a president holding a serious discussion with black people in the White House—a first in American history—was buffered by what he said to them. He addressed them politely, but he delivered messages that could not have pleased them. The presence of black people in America, he said, was the reason for the current war. Innate racial differences and the indelible antiblack prejudice of whites forbade the two races from living on equal terms in America. It was best for blacks, once freed, to choose to leave the country. Central America, he told them, was a most desirable destination to which American blacks could move. A colony there would soon prosper, for that region was fertile and rich in coal.
He was tilting to the right to please conservatives, in preparation for the pending release of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
Abolitionists, predictably, denounced the president. William Lloyd Garrison described Lincoln’s address to the black delegation as “insulting, . . . preposterous, . . . puerile, absurd, illogical, impertinent, untimely.”96 Black people, Garrison fumed, had as much right to live in America as whites, who had kidnapped them from Africa and had subjected them to slavery. Lincoln, Garrison said, callously ignored the immorality of slavery and racial prejudice. A black journalist in New Jersey sarcastically suggested that Lincoln and Vice President Hamlin should be shipped to Central America to dig coal.
Conservatives, in contrast, not only praised Lincoln for his colonization plan but exceeded him in their assertions of racial difference. The editor of the Philadelphia Press, for example, commended the president’s “practical and humane” proposition and used the occasion to vent racism:
Our people do not like the negro. He is not a congenial companion, nor an acceptable fellow-citizen. There must forever be an antagonism of race. . . . There can be nothing like an equality of race where the blue-veined Saxon exists. The tawny East Indians are crouching at his feet—the Chinaman cowers in dismay—the Indian proudly and submissively moves on to oblivion and the setting sun, while the negro tills his fields, grows his cotton, digs his entrenchments, and gathers his food and raiment. . . .
The negro . . . cannot eat at my table, or sit in my parlor, or ride in my carriage, or lounge in my opera-box; he cannot be my partner in business, the friend of my social life, or the husband of my kinswomen. He is forever an inferior being.97
Such explicit bigotry makes us realize that Lincoln’s words to his black visitors were not as reactionary as they initially seem. They were close in spirit to the rhetoric used by the black activist Martin Delany, who in his 1854 pamphlet Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent recommended that American blacks should move out of the country in order to flee the racial discrimination they faced in the United States.
If we compare Lincoln’s proposal to his black visitors with Delany’s words, we see similarities. Here is Lincoln: “Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people,” because “even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. . . . [O]n this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Go where you are treated the best, and the ban is still upon you.”98 Here is Delany: “[Free blacks in the North] occupy the very same position politically, religiously, civilly and socially (with but few exceptions,) as the bondman occupies in the slave States. . . . Denied an equality not only of political, but of natural rights, in common with the rest of our fellow citizens, there is no species of degradation to which we are not subject.”99 Lincoln: “The place I am thinking about having for a colony is in Central America. . . . The country is a very excellent one for any people, and with great natural resources and advantages.” Delany: “Central and South America, are evidently the ultimate destination and future home of the colored race on this continent; the advantages of which in preference to all others, will be apparent when once pointed out.”
It is understandable, given these similarities, that Delany’s Political Destiny of the Colored Race was included as an appendix to the Report of the Select Committee on Emancipation and Colonization, 10,000 copies of which were published by the authority of the House of
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