This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [54]
For the Republican leaders in Congress — men like Ohio’s Senator Ben Wade, Michigan’s Senator Zachariah Chandler, Pennsylvania’s Congressman Thaddeus Stevens — believed not only in hard war but also in the abolition of slavery. Hard war meant smiting the Confederacy quickly and with vigor; also, as they saw it, it meant destroying what the Confederacy stood on, the institution of slavery. The two must go together, and a general who had no interest in striking down slavery probably had no real interest in striking down the Confederacy either. That the President of the United States had flatly refused to let abolition be made official policy made no difference. Notice had been served that softness on the slavery issue would ultimately be equated with softness in regard to victory itself.
… In which, perhaps, there was less political scheming and plain human cussedness than may appear. The innocent enlisted man who went to Kentucky fancying that colored folk were burnt-cork clowns who expressed their deepest feelings with the music of Stephen Foster or Dan Emmett was beginning to learn that the reality was a little grimmer than that. He was discovering, in fact, that the contraband who tried to hide in a Union camp was a fugitive from slavery and not just from a minstrel show; and he was also beginning to sense that it was going to be very difficult to wage war against the society from which those men were trying to escape, without in one way or another taking a stand on the problem of the men themselves. Ben Wade and Thad Stevens and men like them had lost their innocence far back in the unrecorded past, but the same force that was pressing on the midwestern recruit was also pressing on them. Sambo was not Sambo any longer, and the land was going to march to more terrible music than any minstrel had yet sung. Slavery had been a factor in the events that had brought on the war, and now there was no way on earth to keep it from being a factor in the war itself. Both senators and private soldiers were beginning to respond to that fact.
2. War along the Border
Among those who would feel the pressure was General George B. McClellan.
It would come a bit later, of course. The prestige he had brought to Washington — a prestige which was at least partly due to the fact that everybody hopefully expected so much of him — was not yet dimmed. There were a few private mutterings, to be sure. McClellan had had a good deal of time to get his Army of the Potomac into shape — a good deal by pre-Bull Run standards, anyway — and he was steadfastly refusing to do anything with it. Rebel armies were still camped in the Bull Run region, defiant Rebel batteries closed the Potomac River to commercial traffic, and “On to Richmond” (which hardly anyone was saying out loud these days) had a rather hollow sound.
But actually the war was making progress, even though the country’s principal army was not moving.
Shortly after Fort Sumter, Lincoln had proclaimed a blockade of the southern seacoast. There had been at the time no way to make even a respectable pretense of enforcing the blockade, and the whole business had looked a little ridiculous — the more so when, before half the spring was gone, the Confederates seized the naval base at Norfolk, Virginia, capturing enough big naval guns to equip forts all over the South and possessing themselves of the disabled hulk of one of the nation’s first-line warships, U.S.S. Merrimac; a hulk that could be raised, remodeled, and put back into service under the Confederate flag. There had been times during the last few months when the only blockade worth talking about seemed to be the one which the Southerners themselves were maintaining on the water route to the Federal capital.
The administration, however, had no intention of letting things remain in this unhappy condition, and early in August it began to take steps. These steps were