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By Root 1815 0

word “slavery” or indicate that military efforts had any purpose other than to suppress “insurrectionary combinations” that prevented the execution of the laws. In his call for 75,000 militiamen issued two days after Sumter surrendered, he explicitly stated that the “utmost care” would be taken to avoid any “interference” with property in the seceded states. Two weeks after the war began, Lincoln assured Garrett Davis, a Unionist senator from Kentucky, that he intended to “make no attack, direct or indirect” on the domestic institutions of “any state.” Lincoln believed that making slavery a target of the war effort would drive all the states of the Upper South to secede and shatter northern unanimity. In the immediate aftermath of Sumter, northern Democrats made it abundantly clear that, as one newspaper put it, “we are not fighting for negro freedom or negro abolition.” Even in staunchly antislavery Wayland, Massachusetts, when the abolitionist David Child told a town meeting that slaves should be allowed “to fight on our side,” his audience responded that the war was about national unity, “and they wouldn’t hear a word about the niggers.” As so often, Lincoln sought the lowest common denominator of public sentiment—in this case, a war to preserve the Union.64

War, however, has a way of producing unanticipated consequences. Even in these early weeks, antislavery rhetoric made its appearance in patriotic pronouncements, and not simply among Radicals. “The time is not yet,” his friend Orville H. Browning, one of the more conservative Republicans, advised Lincoln, “but it will come when it will be necessary for you to march an army into the South and proclaim freedom to the slaves.” One Ohio journal that had supported Breckinridge in 1860 and denounced Lincoln’s inaugural address as a “virtual declaration of war upon the institution of slavery,” now called on him to punish the “vile traitors” who “would convert the land of the free into a chattel mart.” “If the people become satisfied,” Senator James R. Doolittle informed Lincoln from Wisconsin, “that either slavery or the union and constitution must perish,” they would readily sacrifice slavery. The Confederacy had adopted a constitution that explicitly protected slave property; its vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, had called slavery and belief in black inferiority the new nation’s “cornerstone.” What was the point, wondered the Washington correspondent of the New York Times, in seeking an “end to the present war…which leaves the cause of it in existence?”65

Four decades earlier, at the time of the Missouri debates, John Quincy Adams, with remarkable prescience, had confided in his diary that differences over slavery might lead to civil war, a “calamitous” eventuality that, however, would inevitably result in “the extirpation of slavery from this continent.” He repeated the thought in 1836 and 1842 in the House of Representatives. Were the slaveholding states to become “the theatre of a war, civil, servile, or foreign,” Adams announced, the “war power” would supercede all the barriers “so anxiously erected” in the Constitution for the protection of slavery. In 1836, he assigned the power of emancipation to Congress, but six years later he identified the commander in chief of the army as possessing the authority to “emancipate all the slaves in the invaded territory.” During the secession crisis, John A. Bingham of Ohio read excerpts from Adams’s speeches on the floor of the House.

With the outbreak of war, Radical Republicans and abolitionists hastened to remind Lincoln of Adams’s words. As soon as he heard of the attack on Fort Sumter, Senator Charles Sumner rushed to the White House and told the president “that under the war power the right had come to him to emancipate the slaves.” A few days later, Wendell Phillips spoke in Boston. Like William Lloyd Garrison, Phillips had long advocated disunion in order to free the North from its connection with slavery. To support the war, he told a fellow abolitionist, would be to “renounce my past…start anew with a new set