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By Root 1688 0

army by tradition even though no law required it. Throughout 1861, northern free blacks offered their services, only to be turned away. So did runaway slaves. Early in the war, Henry Jarvis, who escaped to Fortress Monroe, offered to enlist. General Butler, Jarvis later recalled, “said it wasn’t a black man’s war. I told him it would be a black man’s war before they got through.” Disgusted, Jarvis emigrated to Africa. He returned two years later and, federal policy having changed, enlisted in the Union army. In fact, the Confederacy raised black soldiers before the Union did. New Orleans had a long tradition of free black militia service, dating back to the period of French rule. Early in 1862, officials there began to enroll black soldiers into the First Native Guards to help defend the city. (When federal forces captured New Orleans, these soldiers proclaimed their allegiance to the Union, saying they had been coerced into serving the Confederacy.)47

Lincoln said nothing when Secretary Welles in September 1861 authorized the navy to begin enrolling blacks at its lowest rank, “boy.” But in October, when Cameron allowed General T. W. Sherman to utilize the “services” of blacks in any capacity he saw fit in the expedition to the South Carolina Sea Islands, Lincoln added a sentence that this did not include “a general arming of them for military service.” Lincoln left intact the rest of Cameron’s language, which seemed to imply that if necessary, some blacks could be armed. But Lincoln feared reaction in the border states and the army itself to a policy of welcoming black recruits. Undeterred, Cameron included in his annual message a recommendation for freeing the slaves and enlisting blacks in the army. Lincoln ordered Cameron to remove the offending passage, and government censors tried to block publication of the original draft. Both versions of the report from the Secretary of War appeared in the press, to Lincoln’s considerable annoyance. In January 1862, Lincoln replaced Cameron with Edwin M. Stanton, a far more capable secretary of war.48

Clearly, no consensus about dealing with slavery as yet existed within the Republican party. Justin S. Morrill, a moderate Republican member of the House from Vermont, illustrated how constitutional scruples and doubts about blacks’ readiness for freedom counterbalanced the widespread desire for action against slavery. “I hope and pray,” he wrote, “that the institution of slavery may receive its deathblow in this great struggle, and I believe it will.” But Congress should “make haste slowly.” Morrill approved acting against the slaves of rebels, but the idea of freeing those of “loyal men,” even with monetary compensation, struck him as “a wild and utterly impracticable scheme,” far beyond the lawmakers’ constitutional authority. Moreover, loose talk about emancipation might arouse “the passions of these poor degraded Africans,” with consequences no one could foresee. Nevertheless, as the correspondent of the New York Times in the capital noted, even moderates who praised the president favored “a very radical treatment of the disease” (slavery). This, he added, “cannot fail to influence the policy of the administration.”49

IV

APART FROM the capture in February of Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee by Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant, the winter of 1861–62 witnessed little significant military action. But public discussion of slavery intensified. In part, this resulted from frustration at the lack of military progress, in part from renewed agitation by the abolitionists. Lincoln’s secretary John Hay ridiculed the “little handful of earnest impracticables” clamoring for a policy of emancipation. But their efforts began to have an impact in the North. By early 1862, petitions with thousands of signatures calling for action against slavery began piling up in Washington. “Rousing anti-slavery meetings” took place at the Smithsonian Institution. Lincoln himself sat on the podium during Horace Greeley’s talk there on January 3, to the dismay of one Democratic congressman, who demanded