The Pivot of the War: Emancipation and the Union Army, Part 1
By Tom Nank,
Interpretation Intern, CWI, Gettysburg College
On
September 17, 1862, one of the great battles in history was fought near the
banks of Antietam Creek. On that day alone, over 23,000 men fell killed,
wounded, and missing in action in the span of just twelve hours.
Union General George B. McClellan’s
success at Antietam in September 1862 had finally given President Abraham
Lincoln the battlefield victory he wanted.
Lincoln was ready that July to change the face of the war. He knew that the increasingly long casualty
lists must come to mean more than a simple reunion of the states that existed
before his election. Lincoln knew,
finally, once and for all, there was an opportunity that summer of 1862 to
bring to an end 86 years of argument, compromise and delay on the issue of
slavery in the United States. The time
was now, not just militarily but morally, to emancipate the slaves in areas in
rebellion against the government. With
victory finally in hand, Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation
Proclamation on September 22, five days after Antietam. Almost as an afterthought, the last clause of
the final version of the Proclamation, effective January 1, 1863, provided also
that “such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed
service of the United States”. This
would effectively double the offensive punch of the Proclamation: not only
would the freed slaves and their labor be subtracted from the southern war
effort, but they would also be armed and added to the Union ranks to fight
rebel armies. How, or whether at all,
the Union armies that year would welcome African American soldiers would be
critical to the winning of the war to preserve Lincoln’s new United States.
In Army Life in a Black Regiment, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
the commander of the colored
1st South Carolina Infantry regiment, the first all-black unit mustered into
Union Army service, lamented the intense public focus his new command had
generated. The “constant surveillance”,
he wrote, “guaranteed the honesty of any success, while fearfully multiplying
the penalties had there been a failure.”
A single mutiny, he continued, “a single Bull Run, a stampede of
desertions, and it would have been all over for us; the party of distrust would
have got the upper hand, and there might not have been, during the whole
contest, another effort to arm the negro.”1 Higginson was right
to be concerned. For the first time,
free African-Americans were being armed, equipped and trained as soldiers in
the U. S. Army. Black leaders,
abolitionists and radical Republicans had pushed since the beginning of the war
for the enlistment of black soldiers, and Higginson’s regiment was the vanguard
of what would ultimately be over 180,000 free blacks and former slaves serving
in Union blue. Not everyone approved of
the initiative; bigotry and racial undertones ran strong through the country in
the mid-19th century. Some of the most
important members of the “party of distrust” Higginson referred to were white
Union soldiers.
In April 1861, immediately after the
shelling of Fort Sumter, Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to
suppress the rebellion by the southern states.
Some men joined to fight the Rebels, some men joined to fight for the
Union, some joined just to fight. Songs,
posters, parades and newspaper broadsides celebrated patriotism, the
Constitution and the founding fathers. Few, if any, of these calls to action
mentioned freeing slaves. In the early
days of the war, most men of the Union armies were ambivalent on the issue of
slavery. Some, however, were aware of
the importance of the issue as the cause of the conflict. Sergeant Andrew Walker, a schoolteacher from
Illinois, enlisted after Fort Sumter to help the north “forever set aside
Slavery.”2 A private in the 2nd
Vermont wrote his fiance’ in late 1861, that “slavery was the cause of all our
animosities and wranglings and this accursed rebellion… I hope the dark stigma
upon our nation may be wiped out.”3 Some believed
pre-war North-South political compromise should continue. Captain Henry Potter, a schoolteacher before
joining the 4th Michigan Cavalry, wrote home “I am not willing to fight one
moment for Slavery. Whenever [the
rebels] are ready to come back, then I say stop fighting, for God’s sake, and
let reason once more be heard on both sides.”4 Some, perhaps a majority, openly opposed
freedom. Private Edward H. C. Taylor of
the 4th Michigan Infantry wrote home to his family: “When we cease to fight for
the Union and begin to fight for Negro equality, I am ready to lay down my arms
and will.” True to his word, Taylor did
not reenlist when his 3-year term of enlistment was up.5
Like nothing else could, first-hand
exposure to the southern slave-holding aristocracy changed minds. For many Union soldiers, the fiction of
slavery that they had only heard and read about became fact and took on life as
the armies moved south. In a letter home
to his family in Buffalo County, Private Chauncey Cook in the 25th Wisconsin
Infantry described his interaction with slaves in Union-occupied Kentucky:
I
listened for two hours this morning to the stories of a toothless old slave
with one blind eye who had come up the river from near Memphis. He told me a lot of stuff. He said his master sold his wife and children
to a cotton planter in Alabama to pay his gambling debts, and when he told his
master he couldn’t stand it, he was tied to the whipping post, stripped, and
given 40 lashes. The next night he ran
into the swamps. The bloodhounds were
put on his track and caught him and pulled him down. They bit him in the face and put out his eye
and crushed one of his hands. He
stripped down his pants and showed me a gash on one of his hips where the
hounds dug into him until he nearly bled to death… I told this to some of the
boys and they said it was all bosh, that [they] were lying to me. But this story was just like the ones in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and I believe them.6
By early 1862, as Union armies moved
south into the slave states, most soldiers realized that slavery was supporting
the southern army’s war effort, and took efforts to stop it where they
could. Union Major General John C.
Fremont, on his own initiative, freed the slaves of Missouri secessionists in
the Western Division where he commanded.
His order was rescinded as premature, and when he was removed from
command, Private Adam Marty of the 1st Minnesota Infantry wondered why the
administration had “interfered” with an action that “would soon end this war by
removing the cause of it.”7 Lieutenant Evan
Woodward of the 2nd Pennsylvania Reserves observed up close slaveholders who
“preferred a system of labor that gave wealth and luxuriant ease to the few, at
the expense of the prosperity and elevation of the masses and the degradation
of labor.”8 In some cases, the
soldier’s views changed over time. When
he enlisted, Jasper Barney and his brother-in-law were both ambivalent about
slavery. Two years into the war, after
campaigns in Missouri and Tennessee with the 16th Illinois, Barney wrote his
relative: “I was of the same opinion as yourself when I first came in service,
but I have learned better. The war will
never come to a close while the Negro is left where they are…. But if we take
away the main root of evil and confiscate all their property they will have
nothing to fight for.”9
Jasper Barney and Abraham Lincoln
were thinking the same thing. The
Emancipation Proclamation later that fall would change everything.
Notes:
1. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, reprint
ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 4.
2. Andrew J. Walker, to parents, April
1861, Henderson IL, Andrew J. Walker Papers, Library of Congress.
3. Jerome Cutler, to fiance’ Emily,
November 11 1861, Camp Griffin, Fairfax County VA, Jerome Cutler Letters,
Vermont Historical Society.
4. Richard Bak, A Distant Thunder: Michigan in the Civil War (Huron River Press,
2004), 49.
5. Bak, Distant Thunder, 47.
6. Chauncey H. Cook, “Letters of a
Badger Boy in Blue: Into the Southland,” Wisconsin Magazine of History, IV
(1920-1921), 328-329.
7. Chandra Manning, A Vexed Question: White Union Soldiers on
Slavery and Race (University Press of Kentucky: 2007), 35.
8. Evan M. Woodward, Our Campaigns (Philadelphia: John E.
Potter, 1865), 14.
9. Jasper Barney, to brother-in-law
John Dinsmore, October 24, 1862, Mound City Hospital, KS, John C. Dinsmore
Letters, Illinois State Historical Library.
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