This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [102]
Lee reunited his divided army on the field of battle, while Pope supposed that only Jackson’s corps was present. Mistaking a rearrangement of the Confederate lines for the beginning of a withdrawal, Pope exultantly telegraphed Washington that the Rebels were in retreat and that he would pursue them with horse, foot, and guns. Then, just as what Pope imagined to be his pursuit was getting under way, Lee struck him hard in the flank with James Longstreet’s thirty thousand veterans, and Pope’s army was broken and driven north across Bull Run in a state of confusion little better than the one that had been seen at the end of the first battle a year earlier. A good part of McClellan’s army had joined Pope just before the battle, but these men fared no better than Pope’s own soldiers; and as September began, the whole disorganized lot was withdrawing sullenly into the fortifications around Washington, and almost all of Virginia was back in Confederate hands.2
And here was a cruel end for all of the high hopes which the spring had created — Virginia lost, most of Tennessee lost, Bragg’s victorious army heading for the Ohio River and reclaiming Kentucky as it went, brushing aside the green Federal troops which midwestern governors were hastily sending down into that state, while Buell came plodding north in ineffective pursuit. Lee’s hard-fought soldiers went splashing across the Potomac fords, their bands playing “Maryland, My Maryland,” while Bragg openly made plans to inaugurate a Confederate governor in Kentucky’s capital city of Frankfort. And in Washington it seemed a question whether the demoralized men who had been whipped at Bull Run could possibly be pulled together into an effective army in time to accomplish anything whatever.
All of this came just as Abraham Lincoln was preparing to issue a proclamation of emancipation for Negro slaves.
He had made up his mind this summer. The base of the war would have to be broadened and an immeasurable new force would have to be injected into it. It would become now a social revolution, and there was no way to foretell the final consequences. At the very beginning Lincoln had accepted secession as a variety of revolution and had unhesitatingly used revolutionary measures to meet it, but he had clung tenaciously to the idea that the one ruling war aim was to restore the Union, and he had steered carefully away from steps that would destroy the whole social fabric of the South.
But it could not be done that way. The necessities of war were acting on him just as they acted upon the private soldier. To a correspondent, this summer, he was writing that he had never had a wish to touch the foundations of southern society or the rights of any southern man; yet there was a necessity on him to send armies into the South, and “it may as well be understood, once for all, that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed.” To another correspondent he was writing that there was no sense to try “rounding the rough angles of the war”; the only remedy was to remove the cause for the war. To do this he would do everything that lay ready for his hand to do: “Would you drop the war where it is, or would you prosecute it in the future with elder-stalk squirts charged with rose water?”3
He would not use elder-stalk squirts. There was no way now to avoid the fundamental and astounding result. Come what might, Lincoln would free the slaves, as far as the stroke of a pen on a sheet of paper could accomplish that.
Yet he could not do it now. Secretary Seward, who had talked of a higher law and an irrepressible conflict long before the war began, was warning him: Issue your proclamation