This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [98]
“The white Rebel, who had done his utmost to bring about the rebellion, is lionized, called a plucky fellow, a great man, while the Negro, who welcomed us, who is ready to peril his life to aid us, is kicked, cuffed and driven back to his master, there to be scourged for his kindness to us … There must be a change in this regard before we shall be worthy of success.”
This soldier saw at a Tennessee crossroads one day a road sign that read: “Fifteen miles to Liberty.” He reflected: “If liberty were indeed but fifteen miles away, the stars tonight would see a thousand Negroes dancing on the way thither; old men with their wives and bundles, young men with their sweethearts, little barefoot children all singing in their hearts.”13
… The war itself, in plain words, was going to destroy slavery; not the fevered arguments of the abolitionists, nor the stirring of vague humanitarian sentiments among the northern people, but simply the war, and the fact that men were going to do whatever they had to do to win it. Lincoln himself was governed by this as much as was the most heedless soldier in the ranks.
For Lincoln this was an uneasy summer. The military machine had slowed almost to a stop and there did not seem to be any easy way to get it started again. He had brought John Pope east from Mississippi and had created a new army for him in upper Virginia, an army made up of the baffled fragments that had tried so clumsily to round up Stonewall Jackson a few weeks earlier. This had led to the immediate resignation of John Charles Frémont, but so far it had had no other good result. A week after Malvern Hill, Lincoln went down to Harrison’s Landing to talk to McClellan, who was jaunty and confident and who thought that he could yet take Richmond if he were properly reinforced. (That phantom, nonexistent Rebel army of the Pinkerton reports was still being taken seriously at headquarters.)
McClellan had another thought, which he put on paper for the President’s benefit. He believed that the Union armies would refuse to fight if this war became a war against slavery.
In a long memorandum McClellan spelled out his ideas of what war policy ought to be: “Neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of states or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.” Military power should never be used to interfere with “the relations of servitude”; where contrabands were pressed into army service, their lawful owners should be properly compensated.14
It was a bad time for a general to hand that sort of document to Lincoln, who was not contemplating property confiscation, political executions, or territorial organization of rebellious states, but who had reached the conviction that he could not win the war without coming out against slavery.
Lincoln was a mild-mannered prairie politician who, in his own brief time as a soldier, had been told to go to hell by red-necked volunteers and had been ordered by a court-martial to carry a wooden sword for gawky unofficerlike ineffectiveness; but of all the leaders of the North, he more than any other had the hard, flaming spirit of War — the urge to get on with it at any cost and to drive on through to victory by the shortest road. So far he was little more than a name to the men in the ranks, and McClellan was the man they adored above all others; but of the two, it was the President and not the general who understood what was on the enlisted man’s mind.
Lincoln had said that if he did anything at all about slavery he would do it solely because he believed that it would help to win the war. Now the machine was stalling, and he had to get it moving again; and he had concluded that to do this he would have to call on the emotional power of the anti-slavery cause. The thoughts that would finally become the Emancipation Proclamation were taking shape in his mind when he visited McClellan; less than