Judge Douglas had warned the President, in the hour of their reconciliation, that, instead of calling on the country for 75,000 men, he should have asked for 200,000. “You do not know the dishonest purposes of those men as I do,” he had impressively remarked. In a few days, it was evident that the rebellion was assuming colossal proportions, and therefore President Lincoln, on May 3rd, issued another call for 42,000 three-year volunteers, and ordered the addition of 22,114 officers and men to the regular army, and 18,000 seamen to the navy. This demand was promptly responded to, for the draft had as yet no terrors. On the 18th of April, a plot had been discovered by which the secessionists in Washington, aided by Virginia, hoped to fire the city, seize the President and Cabinet, and all the machinery of government. By prompt action, this plan was crushed. A part of it was to burn the railway bridges, and make the roads impassable, and this was successfully executed. Yet, in the face of this audacious attack, the Democratic press of the North and the rebel organs of the South continued to storm at the President for irritating the secessionists, declaring that “coercion” or resistance of the Federal Government to single states was illegal. But at this time several events occurred which caused great anger among loyal men: one was the loss of the great national armoury at Harper’s Ferry, and also of Gosport Navy Yard, with 2000 cannon and several large ships. Owing to treachery, this navy yard, with about 10,000,000 dollars’ worth of property, was lost. Another incident was the death of Colonel Ellsworth. This young man, who had been a law student under Mr. Lincoln, was the introducer of the Zouave drill. For many weeks, a rebel tavern-keeper in Alexandria, in sight of Washington, had insulted the Government by keeping a secession flag flying. On the 24th May, when General Mansfield advanced into Virginia, Ellsworth was sent with 13,000 troops to Alexandria. Here his first act was to pull down the rebel flag. On descending, Jackson shot him dead, and was himself promptly shot by private Brownell. Two days previous, the first considerable engagement of the war had occurred at Big Bethel, and here Major Winthrop, a young Massachusetts gentleman of great bravery and distinguished literary talent, was killed. The grief which the deaths of these well-known young men excited was very great. They were among the first victims, and their names remain to this day fresh in the minds of all who were in the North during the war. The funeral of Ellsworth took place from the White House, Mr. Lincoln—who was affected with peculiar sorrow by his death—being chief mourner.
During this month the war was, to a degree, organised. As soon as Washington was made safe, Fortress Monroe, the “water-gateway” of Virginia, was reinforced. Cairo, Illinois, commanding the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, was occupied, and Virginia and North Carolina were efficiently blockaded. Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, the District of Columbia, and a part of Virginia, were divided into three military departments, and on the 10th May another was formed, including the States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, under charge of General Geo. B. M‘Clellan. The object of this department was to maintain a defensive line on the Ohio River from Wheeling to Cairo.
In the month of July, 1861, the rebels, commanded by General Beauregard, threatened Washington, being placed along Bull Run Creek, their right resting on Manassas, and their left, under General Johnston, on Winchester. They numbered about 35,000. It was determined to attack this force, and drive it from the vicinity of Washington. Both sides intended this to be a great decisive battle, and it was generally believed in the North that it would end the war. Government had been supplied with men and money beyond its demands, and the people, encouraged by Mr. Seward’s opinion that the war would last only sixty days, were as impatient now to end the rebellion by force as they had been previously to smother it by concessions. There were few who predicted as Charles A. Dana did to the writer, on the day that war was declared—that it would last “not less than three, nor more than six or seven years.” On the 16th July, the Federal army, commanded by General M’Dowell, marched forth, and the attack, which was at first successful, was made on the 21st. But the reinforcements which Johnston received saved him, and a sudden panic sprung up among the Federal troops, which resulted in a headlong retreat, with 480 killed and 1000 wounded. The army was utterly beaten, and it was only the Confederates’ ignorance of the extent of their own success which saved Washington. It was the darkest day ever witnessed in the North, when the telegraph announced the shameful defeat of the great army of the Union. Everyone had anticipated a brilliant victory; but yet the news discouraged no one. The writer that day observed closely the behaviour of hundreds of men as they came up to the bulletin-board of the New York Times, and can testify that, after a blank look of grief and amazement, they invariably spoke to this effect, “It’s bad luck, but we must try it again.” The effect, in the words of Raymond, was to rouse still higher the courage and determination of the people. In twenty-four hours, the whole country was again fierce and fresh for war. Volunteers streamed by thousands into the army, and efforts were promptly made to establish Union forces at different places around the rebel coast. This was the beginning of the famous Anaconda, whose folds never relaxed until they strangled the rebellion. Between the 28th August and the 3rd of December, Fort Hatteras, Port Royal in South Carolina, and Ship Island, near New Orleans, were occupied. Preparations were made to seize on New Orleans; and, by a series of masterly movements, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, which had been in a painful state of conflict, were secured to the Union. Virginia proper had seceded with a flourish of States Rights. Her Western portion recognised the doctrine so far as to claim its right to leave the mother-state and return to the Union. This was not done without vigorous fighting by Generals Rosencranz and Morris, to whom the credit of both organising and acting is principally due, although General M‘Clellan, by a clever and Napoleonic despatch, announcing victory, attracted to himself the chief glory. General M‘Clellan had previously, in Kentucky, favoured the recognition of that state as neutral territory, as the rebels wished him to do—an attempt which Lincoln declared “would be disunion completed, if once entertained.” On the 1st Nov., 1861, General Scott, who had hitherto commanded the armies of the Union, asked for and obtained his discharge, and was succeeded by General M‘Clellan. “If,” as Holland remarks, “he had done but little before to merit this confidence, if he did but little afterwards to justify it, he at least served at that time to give faith to the people.” For three months he organised and supervised his troops with the talent which was peculiar to him—that of preparing great work for greater minds to finish. His photograph was in every album, and on every side were heard predictions that he would be the Napoleon, the Cæsar, the Autocrat of all the Americas. The Western Continent would be, after all, the greatest country in the world, and the greatest man in it was to be “Little Mac.” He was not as yet known by his great botanical nom de guerre of the Virginian Creeper.
CHAPTER VIII.
Relations with Europe—Foreign Views of the War—The Slaves—Proclamation of Emancipation—Arrest of Rebel Commissioners—Black Troops.
With so much to call for his care in the field, President Lincoln was not less busy in the Cabinet. The relations of the Federal Government with Europe were of great importance. “The rebels,” says Arnold, with truth, “had a positive, vigorous organisation, with agents all over Europe, many of them in the diplomatic service of the United States.” They were well selected, and they were successful in creating the impression that the Confederacy was eminently “a gentleman’s government”—that the Federal represented an agrarian mob led by demagogues—that Mr. Lincoln was a vulgar, ignorant boor—and that the war itself was simply an unconstitutional attempt to force certain states to remain under a tyrannical and repulsive rule. The great fact that the South had, in the most public manner, proclaimed that it seceded because the North would not permit the further extension of slavery, was utterly ignored; and the active interference of the North with slavery was ostentatiously urged as a grievance, though, by a strange inconsistency, it was deemed expedient by many foreign anti-slavery men to withdraw all sympathy for the Federal cause, on the ground that its leaders manifested no eagerness to set the slaves free until it became a matter of military expediency. Thus the humane wisdom and moderation, which inspired Lincoln and the true men of the Union to overcome the dreadful obstacles which existed in the opposition of the Northern democrats to Emancipation, was most sophistically and cruelly turned against them. To a more cynical class, the war was but the cleaning by fire of a filthy chimney which should have been burnt out long before, and its Iliad in a nutshell amounted to a squabble which concerned nobody save as a matter for amusement. And there were, finally, not a few—to judge from the frank avowal of a journal of the highest class—who looked forward with joy to the breaking up of the American Union, because “their sympathies were with men, not with monsters, and Russia and the United States are simply giants among nations.” All this bore, in due time, its natural fruit. Whether people were to blame for this want of sympathy, considering the ingenuity with which Southern agents fulfilled their missions, is another matter. Time, which is, happily, every day modifying old feelings, cannot change truths. And it cannot be denied that hostilities had hardly begun, and that only half the Slave States were in insurrection, when the English and French Governments, acting in concert, recognised the government at Montgomery as an established belligerent power. As to this recognition, Mr. Charles F. Adams, the United States Minister to England, was instructed by Mr. Seward to the effect that it, if carried out, must at once suspend all friendly relations between the United States and England. When, on June 15th, the English and French ministers applied to Mr. Seward for leave to communicate to him their instructions, directing them to recognise the rebels as belligerents, he declined to listen to them. The United States, accordingly, persisted until the end in regarding the rebellion as a domestic difficulty, and one with which foreign governments had no right to interfere. At the present day, it appears most remarkable that the two great sources of encouragement held out to the rebels—of help from Northern sympathisers, and the hope of full recognition by European powers—proved in the end to be allurements which led them on to ruin. Had it not been for the defeat at Bull Run, slavery would perhaps have still existed; and but for the hope of foreign aid, the South would never have been so utterly conquered and thoroughly exhausted as it was. It must, however, be admitted that the irritation of the Union-men of the North against England at this crisis was carried much too far, since they did not take fully into consideration the very large number of their sincere friends in Great Britain who earnestly advocated their cause, and that among these were actually the majority of the journalists. To those who did not understand American politics in detail, the spectacle of about one-third of the population, even though backed by constitutional law, opposing the majority, seemed to call for little sympathy. And if the motto of Emancipation for the sake of the white man offended the American Abolitionists, who were unable to see that it was a ruse de guerre in their favour, it is not remarkable that the English Abolitionists should have been equally obtuse.
A much more serious trouble than that of European indifference soon arose in the negro question. There were in the rebel states nearly 4,000,000 slaves. In Mr. Lincoln’s party, the Republican, were two classes of men—the Abolitionists, who advocated immediate enfranchisement of all slaves by any means; and the much larger number of men who, while they were opposed to the extension of slavery, and would have liked to see it legally abolished, still remembered that it was constitutional. Slave property had become such a sacred thing, and had been legislated about and quarrelled over to such an extent, that, even among slavery-haters, it was a proof of honest citizenship to recognise it. Thus, for a long time after the war had begun, General M‘Clellan, and many other officers like him, made it a point of returning fugitive slaves to their rebel masters. These slaves believed “the Yankees” had come to deliver them from bondage. “They were ready to act as guides, to dig, to work, to fight for liberty,” and they were welcomed, on coming to help their country in its need, by being handed back to the enemy to be tortured or put to death. So great were the atrocities perpetrated in this way, and so much did certain Federal officers disgrace themselves by hunting negroes and truckling to the enemy, that a bill was soon passed in Congress, declaring it was no part of the duty of the soldiers of the United States to capture and return fugitive slaves. About the same time, General B. F. Butler, of the Federal forces, shrewdly declared that slaves were legally property, but that, as they were employed by their masters against the Government, they might be seized as contraband of war, which was accordingly done; nor is it recorded that any of the slaves who were by this ingenious application of law confined within the limits of freedom ever found any fault with it. From this time, during the war, slaves became popularly known as contrabands.
It should be distinctly understood that there were now literally millions of staunch Union people, who, while recognising the evils of slavery, would not be called Abolitionists, because slavery was as yet legal, and according to that constitution which they properly regarded as the very life of all for which were fighting. And they would not, for the sake of removing the sufferings of the blacks, bring greater misery on the whites. Badly as the South had behaved, it was still loved, and it was felt that Abolition would bring ruin on many friends. But as the war went on, and black crape began to appear on Northern bell-handles, people began to ask one another whether it was worth while to do so much to uphold slavery, even to conciliate the wavering Border States. Step by step, arguments were found for the willing at heart but unwilling to act. On the 1st January, 1862, the writer established in Boston a political magazine, called “The Continental Monthly,” the entire object of which was expressed in the phrase, Emancipation for the sake of the white man, and which was published solely for the sake of preparing the public mind for, and aiding in, Mr. Lincoln’s peculiar policy with regard to slavery. As the writer received encouragement and direction from the President and more than one member of the Cabinet, but especially from Mr. Seward, he feels authorised, after the lapse of so many years, to speak freely on the subject. He had already, for several months, urged the same principles in another and older publication (the New York “Knickerbocker”). The “Continental” was quite as bitterly attacked by the anti-slavery press as by the pro-slavery; but it effected its purpose of aiding President Lincoln, and the editor soon had the pleasure of realising that many thousands were willing to be called Emancipationists who shrunk from being classed as Abolitionists.
In this great matter, the President moved with a caution which cannot be too highly commended. He felt and knew that the emancipation of the slaves was a great and glorious thing, not to be frittered away by the action of this or that subordinate, leaving details of its existence in every direction to call for infinite legislation. It is true that for a time he temporised with “colonisation;” and Congress passed a resolution that the United States ought to co-operate with any state which might adopt a gradual emancipation of slavery, placing 600,000 dollars at the disposition of the President for an experiment at colonisation. Some money was indeed spent in attempts to colonise slaves in Hayti, when the project was abandoned. But this was really delaying to achieve a definite purpose. On August 22nd, 1862, in reply to Horace Greeley, Mr. Lincoln wrote:—
“My paramount object is to save the Union, and not to either save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.... I have here stated my purpose according to my views of official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish, that all men everywhere could be free.”