The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 2 (of 2) / A Narrative and Critical History

by George Cary Eggleston

There is not the smallest doubt that McClellan issued this proclamation with Mr. Lincoln's full approval and even probably by his direction. In any case it reflected the President's attitude and purpose at that time.

At an earlier date, in May, 1861, General B. F. Butler, then commanding at Fortress Monroe, was appealed to for the return of three fugitive slaves who had escaped into his lines. He refused upon a law point of great subtlety. He contended that as negro slaves—chattels of their owners—were capable of being made useful to the Confederates, not only as producers of food for the support of the Southern armies, but also as laborers upon the fortifications and the like, they were properly "contraband of war" precisely as arms and ammunition and foodstuffs are. From that time forward an escaping slave was called a "contraband," and in view of the astonishing lies told by such "contrabands," and the errors of judgment into which those imaginary bits of information often led the Northern press and people, there was at last a general ridiculing of all statements based upon the testimony of "intelligent contrabands."

Mr. Lincoln did not interfere with General Butler's policy of holding escaped slaves as merchandise "contraband of war." But in other cases he did interfere with the strong hand. In August, 1861, General Fremont, commanding in Missouri, issued a proclamation declaring free the slaves of every Confederate engaged in war against the Union. Mr. Lincoln repudiated the proclamation and himself abrogated its terms.

Seven months later, in March, 1862, Mr. Lincoln gravely asked Congress to adopt a policy of compensated emancipation. The war had already cost about a billion dollars, and it threatened to cost twice or thrice that sum in addition, with an uncertain result as the outcome.

Accordingly, Mr. Lincoln planned to end the struggle by a business-like negotiation. He asked Congress (March 6, 1862), to authorize the Government to lend pecuniary aid to every state which should adopt measures looking to the gradual abolition of slavery. He saw and felt that it would be cheaper for the Government to buy every slave in the land at twice his market value, than to prosecute the war upon the enormously costly scale which it had assumed. Incidentally, also, the making of such an arrangement, if it had been possible to make it, would have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of men—the flower of the country's youth on both sides of the line.

It was a business-like and humane thought, and Congress assented to it. But it was based upon the mistaken notion that the Confederates were fighting primarily for their property rights in slaves. It ignored the supremely important fact that the war was costing the Southern people incalculably more than double the value of all the slaves owned in those states. It failed to recognize the equally important fact that, rightly or wrongly, the Southern people sincerely believed themselves to be contending for liberty, for the constitutional rights of the states, for the principle of local self-government; that they were contending against that basilar principle of imperialistic oppression—the government of communities by a power outside of themselves. To Mr. Lincoln's own dictum that "no man is good enough to govern any other man without that other man's consent" they had added the corollary that no community and no nation is good enough to govern any other community without that other's consent. They were fighting, as they confidently believed, for the fundamental principle of self-government among men, and to that cause they were ready to make sacrifice of slavery as cheerfully and as heroically as they were already making sacrifice of all else that they held dear.

Mr. Lincoln misunderstood them and misinterpreted their attitude and their condition of mind. If they had been offered ten thousand dollars apiece for all their slaves—worth on the average only a few hundreds at most—they would have rejected the offer angrily as a tendered bribe to induce them to give up and betray that cause of human liberty, states' rights, and the right of local self-government, in behalf of which they had taken up arms.

To such men, inspired by such beliefs and engaged in such a cause, no price could offer the smallest temptation. Mr. Lincoln had misunderstood the Southern people, as they had misunderstood him. Their warfare had no element of commercialism or of greed in it, precisely as his was directed not, as they supposed, to the destruction of State autonomy, but to the sole object of restoring and perpetuating the American Union. As fanaticism in antagonism to slavery could not swerve him, so considerations of merely pecuniary advantage did not and could not influence them. His proposal, which was in effect, to buy all the negroes in the South, made no more impression upon the Southern mind than would a proposal to purchase their wives and children, or their right to sign their own names.

It was under this misapprehension of Southern sentiment that Mr. Lincoln for a space rejected every suggestion of negro emancipation and sought to hold his generals in the field to a policy of complete non-interference with slavery in the Southern States.

We have seen in what fashion he dealt with General Fremont's proclamation of emancipation in Missouri. On the twelfth of April, 1862, General David Hunter, in command of the forces on the South Carolina coast, issued a general order to the effect that all slaves within his immediate jurisdiction should be confiscated as contraband of war, and instantly set free. On the ninth of May he issued another general order in which he declared all negroes resident in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida to be free men.