Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

Greeley’s go-in-peace editorials represented a dual gambit, one part aimed at the North and the other at the South. Like most Republicans, Greeley believed at first that southern states did not really intend to secede; “they simply mean to bully the Free States into concessions.” Even after South Carolina went out, Greeley wrote to Lincoln that “I fear nothing . . . but another disgraceful backdown of the free States. . . . Another nasty compromise, whereby everything is conceded and nothing secured, will so thoroughly disgrace and humiliate us that we can never again raise our heads.”42 To advise the North to let the disunionists go, therefore, became a way of deflecting compromise.

These constitutional amendments were to be valid for all time; no future amendment could override them.44

We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten. . . . If we surrender, it is the end of us. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum. A year will not pass, till we’ shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union.”

Next day the House adopted a proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing slavery in the states against any future interference by the federal government.

If Confederates opened fire on the unarmed boats carrying “food for hungry men,” the South would stand convicted of an aggressive act. On its shoulders would rest the blame for starting a war. This would unite the North and, perhaps, keep the South divided.

The upper South, like the lower, went to war to defend the freedom of white men to own slaves and to take them into the territories as they saw fit, lest these white men be enslaved by Black Republicans who threatened to deprive them of these liberties.

Jefferson Davis said repeatedly that the South was fighting for the same “sacred right of self-government” that the revolutionary fathers had fought for. In his first message to Congress after the fall of Sumter, Davis proclaimed that the Confederacy would “seek no conquest, no aggrandizement, no concession of any kind from the States with which we were lately confederated; all we ask is to be let alone.”5

In their explanations of war aims, therefore, Confederates rarely mentioned slavery except obliquely in reference to northern violations of southern rights. Rather, they portrayed the South as fighting for liberty and self-government

A concern for northern unity underlay this decision to keep a low profile on the slavery issue. Lincoln had won less than half of the popular vote in the Union states (including the border states) in 1860. Some of those who had voted for him, as well as all who had voted for his opponents, would have refused to countenance an antislavery war in 1861. By the same token, an explicit avowal that the defense of slavery was a primary Confederate war aim might have proven more divisive than unifying in the South. Both sides, therefore, shoved slavery under the rug as they concentrated their energies on mobilizing eager citizen soldiers and devising strategies to use them.

A rebellion sustained by slavery in defense of slavery could be suppressed only by moving against slavery. As Frederick Douglass expressed this conviction: “To fight against slaveholders, without fighting against slavery, is but a half-hearted business, and paralyzes the hands engaged in it. . . . Fire must be met with water. . . . War for the destruction of liberty must be met with war for the destruction of slavery.”

This was the first breach in bipartisan support for Union war measures. It was a signal that if the conflict became an antislavery war it would thereby become a Republican war.

A major goal of Confederate diplomacy in 1861 was to persuade Britain to declare the blockade illegal as a prelude to intervention by the royal navy to protect British trade with the South. Cotton was the principal weapon of southern foreign policy. Britain imported three-quarters of its cotton from the American South.

By the winter of 1861–62 the bloom had faded from southern enthusiasm for the war. “The

Despite its success in getting more men into the army, conscription was the most unpopular act of the Confederate government.

Conscription represented an unprecedented extension of government power among a people on whom such power had rested lightly in the past.

Conscription dramatized a fundamental paradox in the Confederate war effort: the need for Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends.

This kind of inflation became, in effect, a form of confiscatory taxation whose burden fell most heavily on the poor. It exacerbated class tensions and caused a growing alienation of the white lower classes from the Confederate cause.

Far more important in potential, though not at first in realization, were the new internal taxes levied in the North, beginning with the first federal income tax in American history enacted on August 5, 1861.

The Internal Revenue Act of 1862 taxed almost everything but the air northerners breathed. It imposed sin taxes on liquor, tobacco, and playing cards; luxury taxes on carriages, yachts, billiard tables, jewelry, and other expensive items; taxes on patent medicines and newspaper advertisements; license taxes on almost every conceivable profession or service except the clergy; stamp taxes, taxes on the gross receipts of corporations, banks, insurance companies, and a tax on the dividends or interest they paid to investors; value-added taxes on manufactured goods and processed meats; an inheritance tax; and an income tax. The law also created a Bureau of Internal Revenue, which remained a permanent part of the federal government even though most of these taxes (including the income tax) expired several years after the end of the war. The relationship of the American taxpayer to the government was never again the same. The Internal Revenue Act was strikingly modern in several respects. It withheld the tax from the salaries of government employees and from dividends paid by corporations. It expanded the progressive aspects of the earlier income tax by exempting the first $600, levying 3 percent on incomes between $600 and $10,000, and 5 percent on incomes over $10,000.39 The first $1,000 of any legacy was exempt from the inheritance tax. Businesses worth less than $600 were exempt from the value-added and receipts taxes. Excise taxes fell most heavily on products purchased by t...

The second session of the 37th Congress (1861–62) was one of the most productive in American history. Not only did the legislators revolutionize the country’s tax and monetary structures and take several steps toward the abolition of slavery;43 they also enacted laws of far-reaching importance for the disposition of public lands, the future of higher education, and the building of transcontinental railroads.

it was the war—or rather the absence of southerners from Congress—that made possible the passage of these Hamiltonian–Whig–Republican measures for government promotion of socioeconomic development.

By its legislation to finance the war, emancipate the slaves, and invest public land in future growth, the 37th Congress did more than any other in history to change the course of national life. As one scholar has aptly written, this Congress drafted “the blueprint for modern America.”

From now on the North would fight not to preserve the old Union but to destroy it and build a new one on the ashes.

By the beginning of 1862 the impetus of war had evolved three shifting and overlapping Republican factions on the slavery question. The most dynamic and clearcut faction were the radicals, who accepted the abolitionist argument that emancipation could be achieved by exercise of the belligerent power to confiscate enemy property. On the other wing of the party a smaller number of conservatives hoped for the ultimate demise of bondage but preferred to see this happen by the voluntary action of slave states coupled with colonization abroad of the freed slaves. In the middle were the moderates, led by Lincoln, who shared the radicals’ moral aversion to slavery but feared the racial consequences of wholesale emancipation. Events during the first half of 1862 pushed moderates toward the radical position.

“When I say that this rebellion has its source and life in slavery, I only repeat a simple truism,” declared Julian. The four million slaves “cannot be neutral. As laborers, if not as soldiers, they will be the allies of the rebels, or of the Union.” By freeing them the North would convert their labor power from support of treason to support of Union and liberty. This would hasten the day of national triumph, but even if the nation should triumph without such action “the mere suppression of the rebellion will be an empty mockery of our sufferings and sacrifices, if slavery shall be spared to canker the heart of the nation anew, and repeat its diabolical deeds.”

On March 6, Lincoln asked Congress to pass a resolution offering “pecuniary aid” to “any state which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery.”

Emancipation was a means to victory, not yet an end in itself.

Lincoln privately told Seward and Welles of his intention to issue an emancipation proclamation.

He had decided that emancipation was “a military necessity, absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union. We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued. The

Lincoln brushed aside the argument of unconstitutionality. This was a war, and as commander in chief he could order seizure of enemy slaves just as surely as he could order destruction of enemy railroads. “The rebels . . . could not at the same time throw off the Constitution and invoke its aid.

On four crucial congressional roll-call votes concerning slavery in 1862—the war article prohibiting return of fugitives, emancipation in the District of Columbia, prohibition of slavery in the territories, and the confiscation act—96 percent of the Democrats were united in opposition, while 99 percent of the Republicans voted aye. Seldom if ever in American politics has an issue so polarized the major parties.

Because of secession the Republicans had a huge majority in Congress and could easily pass these measures, but an anti-emancipation backlash could undo that majority in the fall elections.

As they had done in every election since the birth of the Republican party, northern Democrats exploited the race issue for all they thought it was worth in 1862. The Black Republican “party of fanaticism” intended to free “two or three million semi-savages” to “overrun the North and enter into competition with the white laboring masses” and m...

Old Abe did indeed advocate colonization in 1862. From his experience in Illinois politics he had developed sensitive fingers for the pulse of public opinion on this issue. He believed that support for colonization was the best way to defuse much of the anti-emancipation sentiment that might otherwise sink the Republicans in the 1862 elections.

Most black spokesmen in the North ridiculed Lincoln’s proposal and denounced its author. “This is our country as much as it is yours,” a Philadelphia Negro told the president, “and we will not leave it.”

In 1863 the U.S. government sponsored the settlement of 453 colonists on an island near Haiti, but this enterprise also foundered when starvation and smallpox decimated the colony. The administration finally sent a naval vessel to return the 368 survivors to the United States in 1864. This ended official efforts to colonize blacks.

For his part, Lincoln had lost faith in McClellan’s willingness to fight Lee. The president did not have 50,000 men to spare, but even if he could have sent 100,000, he told a senator, McClellan would suddenly discover that Lee had 400,000.

Lincoln expressed this theme in his speeches portraying the war as “essentially a People’s contest . . . a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men . . . to afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance in the race of life.”

The New York Democratic platform denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as “a proposal for the butchery of women and children, for scenes of lust and rapine, and of arson and murder.”

An Ohio Democrat amended the party’s slogan to proclaim “the Constitution as it is, the Union as it was, and the Niggers where they are.”34

Democrats scored significant gains in the 1862 elections: the governorship of New York, the governorship and a majority of the legislature in New Jersey, a legislative majority in Illinois and Indiana, and a net increase of thirty-four congressmen.

Panicky Republicans interpreted the elections as “a great, sweeping revolution of public sentiment,” “a most serious and severe reproof.” Gleeful Democrats pronounced “Abolition Slaughtered.”37

“the verdict of the polls showed clearly that the people of the North were opposed to the Emancipation Proclamation.”38

Although disappointed by the elections, Lincoln and the Republicans did not allow it to influence their actions. Indeed, the pace of radicalism increased during the next few months. On November 7, Lincoln removed McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac. Although military factors prompted this action, it had important political overtones. In December the House decisively rejected a Democratic resolution branding emancipation “a high crime against the Constitution,” and endorsed the Emancipation Proclamation by a party-line vote. Congress also passed an enabling act requiring the abolition of slavery as a condition of West Virginia’s admission to statehood.40

“Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. . . . The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. . . . The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. . . . In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free. . . . We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”41

Frederick Douglass made the point succinctly: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.”43

radical Republicans were plotting a coup to reorganize the cabinet. This last rumor contained some truth. On December 16 and 17, Republican senators met in caucus and with but one dissenting vote decided to urge a reorganization of the cabinet. Seward was the intended victim of this move, which reflected the conflict between conservative and radical Republicans symbolized by a cabinet rivalry between Seward and Chase.

talk among western Democrats of a “Northwest Confederacy” that would reconstruct a Union with the South, leaving New England out in the cold until she confessed the error of her ways and humbly petitioned for readmission. However bizarre such a scheme appears in retrospect, it commanded much rhetorical support during the war. “The people of the West demand peace, and they begin to more than suspect that New England is in the way,” warned Vallandigham in January 1863.

Republicans everywhere endorsed the principle of Morton’s action: the Constitution must be stretched in order to save constitutional government from destruction by rebellion.12

This reasoning buttressed Lincoln’s policy in the most celebrated civil liberties case of the war—the military arrest and conviction of Vallandigham for disloyalty. Vallandigham was hardly a selfless martyr in this case; on the contrary, he courted arrest in order to advance his languishing candidacy for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Ohio.