To be sure, Anne Carroll was not alone in perceiving the possible value of the Tennessee River as a military route. Lincoln and his generals appear to have been considering the idea before she offered it.36 Grant’s pilot, Scott, later contested Anne’s claims for a government paycheck by saying that he came up with the idea and that Grant himself mulled it over in the fall of 1861. But Anne Carroll can be credited with studying the Tennessee River strategy closely, working out many of its details on maps and surveys, and explaining it in forceful prose that may have helped spur military action. Although Grant and Halleck deservedly received most of the praise for the Tennessee River campaign, it’s hard to dispute Edwin Stanton’s remark that Anne “did the great work that made the others famous.” And she was quick to grasp the larger implications of the campaign. By recognizing Vicksburg, the Confederacy’s key stronghold on the Mississippi, as the most important target of Union forces in the West, she anticipated Grant’s later capture of Vicksburg, a major turning point in the war.
Anne’s support of forceful military action and strengthened executive power did not place her completely in Lincoln’s camp. Her relationship with the president was sometimes testy. Once, when she approached him with a proposal he disliked, he said sharply, “We differ in a lot of things.”37 Although he subsequently apologized for this comment, he was being truthful.
Their main point of disagreement related to slavery. Even though she had freed between twenty and thirty enslaved people of her own, she persisted in believing that the Constitution did not permit interfering with slavery where it existed. Lincoln initially supported this idea, but fundamentally he loathed slavery and wished it to be abolished. Anne clung to the constitutional defense of slavery far longer than he did.
For a time she took advantage of his Old Whig conservatism, which he never completely shed. An ardent colonizationist, she worked to devise a viable plan for transporting blacks. Liberia, she argued, was too distant and not a welcoming place for African Americans, and Haiti was too small to accept a large number of émigrés. She proposed Central America—Honduras, in particular—as the preferred destination. Lincoln, who entertained the idea of colonization during the first two years of the war, supported the idea (which others proposed as well), and when the Panama region of Chiriquí emerged as the top choice, she studied it and reported on it to him. Lincoln offered a plan of voluntary colonization to a delegation of blacks who visited the White House in August 1862.
By then, however, he had already drafted the Emancipation Proclamation, a preliminary version of which he would issue the next month. Also, he had signed into law two Confiscation Acts, which called for the seizure of Confederate property, including enslaved persons, who became free when taken by Union troops. Anne Carroll initially opposed the confiscation of enslaved persons, which she considered against the rules of war. She wrote, “I do not think there is any grant in the Constitution, but rather an express inhibition upon the power of Congress to abolish slavery or confiscate the property of rebels.”38 If Lincoln permitted these unconstitutional acts, he would be the worst tyrant since Charles I or Charles II, who had persecuted Puritans like her seventeenth-century ancestor Thomas King.39 In April 1862, she encouraged him to veto the bill abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, and she initially opposed the idea of setting free the enslaved by proclamation. Eventually she supported emancipation by any means. Also, during Reconstruction she sided with the Radical Republicans who advocated fair treatment of African Americans in the South. But she was a latecomer to emancipation.
On slavery, she did not apply the laws of war in ways that influenced Lincoln. That task was left to others.
THE EMANCIPATION JUGGERNAUT
The force that first brought about the actual emancipation of large numbers of enslaved persons in the Civil War—military emancipation—has a rich history.40 The seventeenth-century Dutch statesman Hugo Grotius had advanced the notion of a just war. In his view, war could be justified by human law, natural law, or divine law. A nation at war could appeal to God in battling for the right. “It is God’s Will that certain wars should be waged,” Grotius wrote. “No one will deny that whatsoever God will, is just. Therefore, some wars are just.”41 Grotius is also recognized as the father of natural law. But neither he nor his eighteenth-century follower John Locke, another influential advocate of just war and natural law, had progressive views on slavery. The main early publicist of natural law, Emmerich de Vattel, in his landmark 1758 book The Law of Nations, upheld the traditional notion that enslaved people captured by a foreign army during war must be returned to their rightful owners once the war was over.
An important reinterpretation of natural law came with the 1772 decision in Somerset v. Stewart. The judge in the case, Lord Mansfield, ruled that slavery was such a vile institution that it violated natural law and could only be created by positive (or statute) law.42
Military emancipation grew from a fusion of the notions of just war and post-Somerset antislavery natural law. In the American Revolution and the War of 1812, the British emancipated enslaved American blacks who fled to their lines. During the Seminole Wars of the 1830s, generals Thomas Jesup, Zachary Taylor, and Edmund P. Gaines awarded freedom to fugitives who assisted their military effort.
John Quincy Adams ardently defended military emancipation as a congressman. In 1836, addressing the emancipation of fugitives in the Seminole Wars, he distinguished between the peace power and the war power. The peace power, he said, “is limited by regulations and restricted by provisions prescribed within the Constitution.” The war power, in contrast, “is limited only by the laws and uses of nations. This power is tremendous; . . . it breaks down every barrier so anxiously erected for the protection of liberty, of property, and of life.”43 Six years later, inspired by the emancipation of enslaved people in a war in Colombia, Adams repeated, “In a state of actual war the laws of war take precedence over civil laws and municipal institutions. I lay this down as the law of nations.” He went so far as to say that during war “not only the President of the United States, but the Commander of the Army has the power to order the universal emancipation of the slaves.”
Early in the Civil War, antislavery advocates felt empowered by this heritage of military emancipation to launch a full-scale defense of the Constitution as an antislavery document. William Lloyd Garrison, who had formerly criticized the Constitution for what he considered its proslavery implications, issued a pamphlet, The Abolition of Slavery: The Right of the Government Under the War Power, in which he cited Adams as well as more recent defenders of military emancipation, such as the antislavery leaders Congressman Joshua Giddings and Senator Charles Sumner. These two went to the extreme of suggesting that civil law evaporates during war. Giddings in 1861 said, “By the laws of war, an invaded country has all its laws and municipal institutions swept by the board, and martial law takes the place of them.”44 Sumner argued that “the war power” is provided by the Constitution but, simultaneously, is “above the Constitution, because, when set in motion, like necessity, it knows no other law. For the time, it is law and Constitution. The civil power, in mass and in detail, is superseded, and all rights are held subordinate to this military magistracy.” According to this radical outlook, the Civil War permitted the North’s political leaders to take extreme measures to emancipate the South’s enslaved millions
Military emancipation got a huge boost from religion. Many Civil War soldiers thought they were fighting for the highest of higher laws: divine law.
Views of divine law changed during the first two years of the war. The North’s leading general during the early phase, George McClellan, associated religion with civility and conservatism in war. He followed what he considered a civilized form of warfare. Not only should the South’s enslaved population remain untouched, but its other property should be as well. War, he said, “should be conducted upon the highest principles known to Christian civilization. . . . Neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of States or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.”45 Although he opposed slavery, he wrote, “I confess to a prejudice in favor of my own race, & I can’t learn to like the odor of either Billy goats or niggers.”46 He vowed to return fugitives to their owners and to suppress slave insurrections if he witnessed any. “Help me to dodge the nigger,” he begged a Democratic politician; “we want nothing to do with him.” He also loathed abolitionism. He stated flatly, “I will not fight for the abolitionists.”
A more hard-nosed, progressive attitude toward war emerged, principally from two sources: the Puritan revolutionary Oliver Cromwell and the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz. During the Civil War, the Columbia University professor and Union military adviser Francis Lieber drew from both these sources and from the historical precedent of military emancipation, by which people held in slavery by the enemy were awarded freedom if they escaped or were taken in the course of war. With the approval of Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, Lieber codified his rules of war in Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field, published by the War Department as General Order No. 100.
Lieber did not dispense wholly with the spirit of “civilized” war of the McClellan variety. There was a strong moral element to Lieber’s code, one that has placed limitations on warfare ever since. “Men who take up arms against one another in public war,” he wrote, “do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God.”47 For instance, Lieber discountenanced the use of poison, torture, assassination, and the violation of truce flags or agreements. But Lieber called for tough tactics and progressive ends. The seizure of enemy property, including enslaved persons, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure and food sources in hostile territory were permissible. Extreme violence was justified as long as it aimed toward a decisive victory.48
Lieber’s views merged with Lincoln’s in 1863, the third year of the war. By then, Lincoln had become frustrated by the tentative performances of generals like McClellan, Halleck, and Meade. He was furious when McClellan failed to pursue Lee’s retreating army after the Battle of Antietam in the fall of 1862 and when Meade made the same mistake after Gettysburg the following July. Lincoln wrote disdainfully of war fought “with elder-stalk squirts [that is, squirt guns], charged with rose water.”49
Both Lieber and Lincoln came under the influence of Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan warrior whose toppling of the British monarchy in the British civil wars was one of the inspirations for later battles against tyranny. Francis Lieber, a devout Christian, saw “wonderful greatness” in Cromwell and had special admiration for two of Cromwell’s followers, John Pym, a harsh critic of Charles I, and John Hampden, who died in battle while fighting against the king’s forces.50
Over the years, Oliver Cromwell’s reputation had shifted notably. During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the Puritan leader was frowned on as a zealot who was overly fond of battle and (ironically for a man who helped to usher in human rights) dictatorial when he became the Lord Protector of England in the 1650s. Reviled by rationalists, including Thomas Jefferson, Cromwell was resurrected in the 1830s by Thomas Carlyle, who portrayed him as a stern but passionate fighter for principle. A Cromwell cult arose, fueled in part by popular biographies, especially Joel Tyler Headley’s The Life of Oliver Cromwell (1848).
John Brown, a devout Calvinist who patterned himself after Cromwell, kept Headley’s book on a shelf next to the Bible. In Brown’s eyes, Cromwell was the ideal warrior for justice. When fighting proslavery forces in Kansas, Brown often repeated Cromwell’s famous line, “Trust in God and keep your [gun]powder dry.” Brown’s contemporaries compared him to Cromwell more than to any other historical figure.51 Thoreau, who revered Brown, said of him, “He died lately in the time of Cromwell, but he reappeared here. Why should he not? Some of the Puritan stock are said to have settled in New England.” Brown’s hard words about slaveholders were, Thoreau said, “like the speeches of Cromwell compared with those of an ordinary king,” and his band of soldiers in Kansas missed being “a perfect Cromwellian troop” only because there was no clergyman worthy of joining it.52
Such praise, however, masked controversies that surrounded both Cromwell and Brown. Cromwell was notorious for his excesses in Ireland, where at towns like Drogheda and Wexford he ordered the slaughter by sword of thousands of civilians and priests. Brown, too, had killed in the name of a cause. In May 1856 he directed the slaying by sword of five proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas. Then came Brown’s deadly antislavery raid on Harpers Ferry, which polarized the nation. Equally controversial were his views of race and war, which were the opposite of McClellan’s. Brown saw slavery as a war against an entire race. He and his followers waged what they considered a holy war to emancipate America’s enslaved millions. Brown’s goal was the integration of black people into mainstream society, with full social and political rights awarded to them.
Few Americans—even committed antislavery Northerners—were ready to go as far as Brown did in his call for integration and racial equality. At the start of the war, most Northern volunteers were prepared to battle against Southern “traitors” but not for emancipation. In time, as James McPherson notes, the Northern soldiers assumed a more antislavery position.53 Like them, initially Lincoln recoiled from the abolitionist Brown, whose courage he admired but whose violent tactics he at first rejected. Not only did he renounce Brown during his presidential run, but in the first year of the war, he decried a war for emancipation, which he associated with John Brown. As the New York Herald reported in December 1861: “The President is resolutely determined to veto schemes whatever, involving the emancipation of negroes in a manner that they are turned loose upon the Southern States on an equality with white occupiers of the soil. He, on Saturday evening, uttered the following words:—‘Emancipation would be equivalent to a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale.’”54
Distancing himself from John Brown, however, was not easy. A Southern newspaper, noting “a vein of coercion” beneath Lincoln’s moderate exterior, announced, “In the body of Lincoln the spirit of John Brown lives.”55 A broadside of 1861 criticized “Old Abe Lincoln and his Abolition war—his Old John Brown raid against the South, and his usurpations and tyranny, and schemes of death and hell—rapine, plunder, murder, piracy.”56
The alleged connection between Brown and Lincoln persisted through the war and beyond, as signaled by a pro-Southern editorial, published three months after Appomattox, that generalized bitterly: “The name of John Brown and Abraham Lincoln will indeed go down to posterity together . . . into the abyss of infamy and eternal shame . . . The administration of Abraham Lincoln was a John Brown raid on the grandest scale; and it was no more. That is the place it will occupy in history.”57
Extreme as this statement is, it made sense from the South’s vantage point in 1865. By then, Lincoln’s war had become a war for emancipation, infused by a religious spirit. Shortly before his
hanging, Brown had handed his jailer a note that read:
Charlestown, Va. 2nd, December, 1859.
I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without verry [sic] much bloodshed; it might be done.58
Brown’s conviction that “this guilty land” would be punished by God for its “crimes” was echoed in several of Lincoln’s religious proclamations during the war. Though never a church member, Lincoln respected God’s will and mysterious purposes. He was sensitive to religious groups who approached him, many of whom expressed their opinion that the Civil War was God’s punishment of the nation for its sins. Scattered throughout Lincoln’s nine religious proclamations were Calvinist images of sin and retribution. In August 1861 he proclaimed a day of prayer “to recognize the hand of God in this terrible visitation, and in sorrowful remembrance of our own faults and crimes as a nation and as individuals, to humble ourselves before Him, and to pray for His mercy,—to pray that we may be spared further punishment, though most justly deserved.”59 Similarly, in a proclamation of March 1863 he asked that because “we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People?”60
Because Lincoln avoided identifying himself with contested historical figures, he did not openly embrace Cromwell or John Brown. But their presence was culturally inescapable during the war. Northern soldiers sang “John Brown’s Body” as they marched, and they were frequently compared in the popular press with Cromwell’s New Model Army, aka the Roundheads or Ironsides. Just after the war, one commentator noted, “The Union soldiers were often compared to the famous ‘Ironsides’ of Cromwell. The comparison was natural.”61
Southerners viewed themselves as chivalric gentlemen in the vein of the British Cavaliers, while they denigrated the northern “Puritans” as lowly scum—“Roundheads,” in the words of one paper, “these greasy mechanics, these vulgar tradesmen, this ‘inferior race’ . . . of the north, . . . arrayed against the very flower of the English aristocracy and their adherents.”62 In turn, democratic averageness became a badge of honor among the Northern troops, who could boast of fighting with Cromwellian passion against decadent Southerners who defended slavery.
A regiment from Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, an area originally settled by Cromwellian Covenanters, nicknamed itself the Roundheads. They were described by their captain as “men that will hold slavery to be a sin against God and a crime against humanity and will carry their bibles into battle,” and by a reporter as “true and lion-hearted men of Puritanic times.”63 They fought in major battles of the Civil War and held regular reunions in the postwar decades.
Cromwell’s main influence on the North’s soldiers was his combination of piety and relentlessness in battle. A New England journalist noted, “Cromwell, it is well known, believed that those soldiers that pray fight best.”64 Sarah Emma Edmonds, who served as a man in the Union army, wrote, “Cromwell and his praying puritans were dangerous men to meet in battle. ‘The sword of the Lord and of Gideon’ was exceeding sharp, tempered as it was by hourly prayers.”65
Lincoln continually cultivated religion and morality among the Union troops. By the second year of the war, the government had spent nearly $1.5 million for chaplains in military units.66 Lincoln also encouraged the work of the United States Christian Commission, headed by the Philadelphia philanthropist George H. Stuart. A nongovernment agency made up of more than five thousand volunteer agents, the Christian Commission distributed religious literature and provided counsel, comfort, and food in military camps. Over the course of the war, Stuart reported, the commission distributed some two million free Bibles to army and navy men. It also handed out eighteen million copies of religious newspapers and eight million religious tracts like Newman Hall’s Come to Jesus and William Reid’s The Blood of Jesus.67
Lincoln met with George Stuart during the war, corresponded with him, and attended several Christian Commission events. When he could not attend, he sent supportive notes, as in February 1863, when he wrote that although his work prevented him from joining a commission meeting, “I can not withhold my approval of the meeting, and it’s [sic] worthy objects. Whatever shall be sincerely, and in God’s name, devised for the good of the soldier and seaman, in their hard spheres of duty, can scarcely fail to be blest.”68
Among the works distributed by the Christian Commission was the American Tract Society’s reissue of Oliver Cromwell’s Bible, a short Bible for soldiers that Cromwell had started providing for his troops in 1643. Cromwell had selected military-oriented passages from the Geneva Bible (or Breeches Bible). The Geneva Bible, first published in 1599, five decades before the King James Version, was the Bible favored by Puritans like Cromwell, John Bunyan, and the Mayflower Pilgrims. The Geneva Bible “continued to be used by the Puritans long after King James’s version was published,” a Massachusetts paper explained.69 Cromwell’s abridged version included Bible passages under headings like “A Souldier must not doe wickedly,” “A Souldier must be valiant for Gods cause,” “A soldier must denie his own,” “A Souldier must pray before he goes to fight,” and the ambiguous “A Souldier must love his enemies as they are his enemies and hate them as they are God’s enemies.”
In September 1861 the American Tract Society issued a facsimile edition titled Soldier’s Pocket Bible, Issued for the Army of Oliver Cromwell. Small and portable, it sold for $0.05 (or $3.50 per hundred). Promoted as “having been prepared in 1643 with the approbation of Cromwell and circulated extensively among his soldiers,” it contained “extracts from various parts of the Bible suitable to all occasions of a soldier’s life.”70 Twenty thousand copies of a facsimile of Cromwell’s Bible were published in September 1861. By the following April, more than three hundred thousand copies of the book had been sent to Union soldiers.71
Lincoln reportedly received a copy of the Cromwell Bible. George Stuart told of going to the White House and presenting the book to the president, who “seemed so interested in its distribution that he arose from his seat and thanked me for presenting him with it.”72 Stuart later related the story to a German soldier who initially refused to accept the Bible, explaining that he was a disbeliever. Stuart tried Puritan persuasion on the soldier: “I told him it was what is called Cromwell’s Bible, and I told him how Cromwell’s soldiers read this book, and how it enabled them to fight so vigorously.” The soldier remained unmoved until Stuart described his recent visit to the White House:
When I went to see the President he was writing, and when I handed him a copy of Cromwell’s Bible he stood up—and you know he was a very tall man and took a long time to straighten. He received the Bible, and made me a low bow, and thanked me; and now I shall have to go back and tell him that one of his soldiers who was fighting his battles refused to take the book which he had accepted so gladly. The German softened at once. He said, “Did the President take the book? Well, then, I guess I may take one too.”
This is not to say soldiers and sailors read only Bibles and tracts; nor did Lincoln expect them to. Their reading covered a broad spectrum, from classics—Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Dickens, and so on—all the way to yellow-covered sensational novels with titles like The Pirate’s Son and The Gold Fiend. An Indiana soldier recalled that “miserable worthless . . . novels . . . were sold by the thousand,” and men paid one dollar for “three worthless novelettes which contained a love story or some daring adventure by sea or land.” Another soldier reported that “enticing literary productions, such as Beadle’s novels, novelettes and other detestable works were received with popular favor.”73 Also popular in the camps were daily papers such as the Herald and the Tribune, illustrated papers like Frank Leslie’s Weekly, literary magazines such as the Atlantic and Harper’s, and comic weeklies, including Phunny Phellow, Budget of Fun, and Nix-Nax. Lincoln, eager to absorb the popular culture of the day, displayed equally eclectic reading tastes, which ranged from Shakespeare and serious poetry through newspapers to zany humorous books.
But both the president and his troops knew the special value of religion during wartime. “Strange feelings come over one when he is in battle and bullets are whizzing around one,” a soldier wrote. “It is a wonderful place for one who is a Christian to test his faith.”74 Not only did Cromwellian piety steel soldiers for battle, but the overwhelming amount of death and suffering made the afterlife a daily preoccupation. Soldiers and sailors read far more religious material than did civilians. The volunteer religious agencies made such reading readily available, while they discouraged secular reading. Religious literature provided real consolation; it promised the eternal reward of a reunion with loved ones in heaven. The popular press teemed with pious stories like “The Soldier’s All,” in which a dying soldier in a camp hospital is asked if he wants “any books, or papers, or magazines” to
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