There was much discussion in the Cabinet as to the choice of his successor. It was thought unwise to give the Eastern army a commander from the West again. At Chase's instance [Transcriber's note: insistance?] the senior corps commander who was not too old, General Hooker, sometimes called "Fighting Joe Hooker," was appointed. He received a letter, often quoted as the letter of a man much altered from the Lincoln who had been groping a year earlier after the right way of treating McClellan: "I have placed you," wrote Lincoln, "at the head of the Army of the Potomac. Of course I have done this upon what appear to me to be sufficient reasons, and yet I think it best for you to know that there are some things in regard to which I am not quite satisfied with you. I believe you to be a brave and skilful soldier, which of course I like. I also believe that you do not mix politics with your profession, in which you are right. You have confidence in yourself, which is a valuable, if not indispensable, quality. You are ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm; but I think that during General Burnside's command of the army you have taken counsel of your ambition and thwarted him as much as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country, and to a most meritorious and honourable brother officer. I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I gave you the command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship. The Government will support you to the utmost of its ability, which is neither more nor less than it has done and will do for all commanders. I much fear that the spirit which you have aided to infuse into the army, of criticising their commander and withholding confidence from him, will now turn upon you. Neither you nor Napoleon, if he were alive again, could get any good out of an army while such a spirit prevails in it; and now beware of rashness. Beware of rashness, but with energy and sleepless vigilance go forward and give us victories."
"He talks to me like a father," exclaimed Hooker, enchanted with a rebuke such as this. He was a fine, frank, soldierly fellow, with a noble figure, with "a grand fighting head," fresh complexion and bright blue eyes. He was a good organiser; he put a stop to the constant desertions; he felt the need of improving the Northern cavalry; and he groaned at the spirit with which McClellan had infected his army, a curious collective inertness among men who individually were daring. He seems to have been highly strung; the very little wine that he drank perceptibly affected him; he gave it up altogether in his campaigns. And he cannot have been very clever, for the handsomest beating that Lee could give him left him unaware that Lee was a general. In the end of April he crossed the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, which still divided the two armies, and in the first week of May, 1863, a brief campaign, full of stirring incident, came to a close with the three days' battle of Chancellorsville, in which Hooker, hurt and dazed with pain, lost control and presence of mind, and, with heavy loss, drew back across the Rappahannock. The South had won another amazing victory; but "Stonewall" Jackson, at the age of thirty-nine, had fallen in the battle.
Abroad, this crowning disaster to the North seemed to presage the full triumph of the Confederacy; and it was a gloomy time enough for Lincoln and his Ministers. A second and more serious invasion by Lee was impending, and the lingering progress of events in the West, of which the story must soon be resumed, caused protracted and deepening anxiety. But the tide turned soon. Moreover, Lincoln's military perplexities, which have demanded our detailed attention during these particular campaigns, were very nearly at an end. We have here to turn back to the political problem of his Presidency, for the bloody and inconclusive battle upon the Antietam, more than seven months before, had led strangely to political consequences which were great and memorable.
CHAPTER X
EMANCIPATION
When the news of a second battle of Bull Run reached England it seemed at first to Lord John Russell that the failure of the North was certain, and he asked Palmerston and his colleagues to consider whether they must not soon recognise the Confederacy, and whether mediation in the interest of peace and humanity might not perhaps follow. But within two months all thoughts of recognising the Confederacy had been so completely put aside that even Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville caused no renewal of the suggestion, and an invitation from Louis Napoleon to joint action of this kind between England and France had once for all been rejected. The battle of Antietam had been fought in the meantime. This made men think that the South could no more win a speedy and decisive success than the North, and that victory must rest in the end with the side that could last. But that was not all; the battle of Antietam was followed within five days by an event which made it impossible for any Government of this country to take action unfriendly to the North.
On September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln set his hand to a Proclamation of which the principal words were these: "That, on the first day of January in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward and forever free."
The policy and the true effect of this act cannot be understood without some examination. Still less so can the course of the man who will always be remembered as its author. First, in regard to the legal effect of the Proclamation; in normal times the President would of course not have had the power, which even the Legislature did not possess, to set free a single slave; the Proclamation was an act of war on his part, as Commander-in-Chief of the forces, by which slaves were to be taken from people at war with the United States, just as horses or carts might be taken, to subtract from their resources and add to those of the United States. In a curiously prophetic manner, ex-President John Quincy Adams had argued in Congress many years before that, if rebellion ever arose, this very thing might be done. Adams would probably have claimed that the command of the President became law in the States which took part in the rebellion. Lincoln only claimed legal force for his Proclamation in so far as it was an act of war based on sufficient necessity and plainly tending to help the Northern arms. If the legal question had ever been tried out, the Courts would no doubt have had to hold that at least those slaves who obtained actual freedom under the Proclamation became free in law; for it was certainly in good faith an act of war, and the military result justified it. A large amount of labour was withdrawn from the industry necessary to the South, and by the end of the war 180,000 coloured troops were in arms for the North, rendering services, especially in occupying conquered territory that was unhealthy for white troops, without which, in Lincoln's opinion, the war could never have been finished. The Proclamation had indeed an indirect effect more far-reaching than this; it committed the North to a course from which there could be no turning back, except by surrender; it made it a political certainty that by one means or another slavery would be ended if the North won. But in Lincoln's view of his duty as President, this ulterior consequence was not to determine his action. The fateful step by which the end of slavery was precipitated would not have taken the form it did take if it had not come to commend itself to him as a military measure conducing to the suppression of rebellion.
On the broader grounds on which we naturally look at this measure, many people in the North had, as we have seen, been anxious from the beginning that he should adopt an active policy of freeing Southern slaves. It was intolerable to think that the war might end and leave slavery where it was. To convert the war into a crusade against slavery seemed to many the best way of arousing and uniting the North. This argument was reinforced by some of the American Ministers abroad. They were aware that people in Europe misunderstood and disliked the Constitutional propriety with which the Union government insisted that it was not attacking the domestic institutions of Southern States. English people did not know the American Constitution, and when told that the North did not threaten to abolish slavery would answer "Why not?" Many Englishmen, who might dislike the North and might have their doubts as to whether slavery was as bad as it was said to be, would none the less have respected men who would fight against it. They had no interest in the attempt of some of their own seceded Colonists to coerce, upon some metaphysical ground of law, others who in their turn wished to secede from them. Seward, with wonderful misjudgment, had instructed Ministers abroad to explain that no attack was threatened on slavery, for he was afraid that the purchasers of cotton in Europe would feel threatened in their selfish interests; the agents of the South were astute enough to take the same line and insist like him that the North was no more hostile to slavery than the South. If this misunderstanding were removed English hostility to the North would never again take a dangerous form. Lincoln, who knew less of affairs but more of men than Seward, was easily made to see this. Yet, with full knowledge of the reasons for adopting a decided policy against slavery, Lincoln waited through seventeen months of the war till the moment had come for him to strike his blow.
Some of his reasons for waiting were very plain. He was not going to take action on the alleged ground of military necessity till he was sure that the necessity existed. Nor was he going to take it till it would actually lead to the emancipation of a great number of slaves. Above all, he would not act till he felt that the North generally would sustain his action, for he knew, better than Congressmen who judged from their own friends in their own constituencies, how doubtful a large part of Northern opinion really was. We have seen how in the summer of 1861 he felt bound to disappoint the advanced opinion which supported Frémont. He continued for more than a year after in a course which alienated from himself the confidence of the men with whom he had most sympathy. He did this deliberately rather than imperil the unanimity with which the North supported the war. There was indeed grave danger of splitting the North in two if he appeared unnecessarily to change the issue from Union to Liberation. We have to remember that in all the Northern States the right of the Southern States to choose for themselves about slavery had been fully admitted, and that four of the Northern States were themselves slave States all this while.