HEAVEN WAS FAR from Lincoln’s mind as he reviewed the military situation in the early summer of 1862. The Union war effort in the East was badly stalled.
In March, Major General George B. McClellan had taken the Army of the Potomac—some 100,000 strong—down the Chesapeake aboard a flotilla of 500 vessels and landed sixty-five miles southeast of Richmond on the peninsula between the Rappahannockand the James rivers. McClellan’s plan was to skirt the defenses of General Joseph E. Johnston’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia by entering the Confederate capital through the back gate. But the campaign had gone badly from the start. At Yorktown, where Washington had trapped Cornwallis and sealed an American victory in the War of Independence eighty years before, McClellan was fooled by the theatrical parading of Confederate brigadier general John B. Magruder into badly overestimating the strength of the Confederate forces. A mere 13,000 Confederate soldiers held off McClellan’s army for a month while Johnston repositioned his forces to block McClellan’s advance.
Without the element of surprise, McClellan inched toward Richmond for the next two months, wasting precious political support with each passing day. “I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now,” Lincoln wrote him in early April. “But you must act.” On the last day of May, McClellan won an ugly victory at Seven Pines that left his army on the verge of the Southern capital. “Our left is now within four miles of Richmond,” he wrote Secretary of War Stanton, “I only wait for the river to fall to cross . . . & make a general attack.” But the Union commander lost his nerve. June was nearly over when the fight for Richmond began again in earnest. And when it did, in a series of engagements known as the Seven Days’ Battles, McClellan failed utterly to seize the advantages his superior forces afforded. After an artillery barrage that left the Army of Northern Virginia in disarray, McClellan unaccountably retreated to Harrison’s Landing on the James River to regroup. His officers were stunned. Brigadier General Philip Kearny fumed that McClellan was either a coward or a traitor. “We ought instead of retreating to follow up the enemy and take Richmond,” he argued. As to tactics, Kearny was probably right. But he was overruled. The Peninsula Campaign ground to a halt.
McClellan’s problem was that he loved the aesthetics of battle, but could not abide its harrowing reality. This had profound effects on the way he fought. At West Point, where he had graduated second in his class, McClellan learned to think of warfare as a kind of chess match, to be played by professionals in bloodless and honorable competition. His proudest moments were those when “by pure military skill,” as he put it, he won apparent victory with a “trifling” loss of life.
But bloodless triumphs such as the month-long siege at Yorktown (one of his two “brightest chapters,” McClellan called it, alongside his role at Bull Run) were Pyrrhic victories if they produced weeks of delay and allowed the escape of enemy armies in the process. After his first major engagement on the peninsula, McClellan wrote to his wife that he was already “tired of the sickening sight of the battlefield, with its mangled corpses and poor suffering wounded.” Every casualty haunted him, he told her. Such affections endeared him to his soldiers. But they made him a poor general.
Talk of ending slavery was especially aggravating to McClellan. The commander of the Army of the Potomac shared the engrained racism of most of his colleagues in the Union officer corps, though he expressed it with distinctively ugly force. “I confess,” he wrote shortly after the war, “to a prejudice in favor of my own race, & can’t learn to like the odor of either Billy goats or niggers.”
Alfred Waud’s sketch of George McClellan’s headquarters during religious services on a Sunday in July 1862. The Union commander espoused a civilized and Christian model of warfare.
Emancipation, McClellan believed, would produce a bloody wave of indiscriminate racial violence. In his first command, McClellan had gone out of his way to assure the whites of western Virginia that he would use “an iron hand” to “crush any attempt” at slave insurrection. In the summer of 1861 he warned Charles Sumner that “sudden and general emancipation” would require precautions “to guard against” the “four and a half millions of uneducated slaves” that such a policy would set loose upon the nation. When McClellan ran for president against Lincoln in 1864, the Ohio abolitionist congressman Gerrit Smith reminded voters that it was McClellan “who assured the slaveholders that he would guard their homes, their wives and children from servile insurrection.” In doing so, Smith observed pointedly, McClellan had left the white men of the South free to swell the armies of the rebellion.
ON JULY 8, 1862, Lincoln traveled to Harrison’s Landing to confer with his cautious general. McClellan greeted the president with a carefully prepared statement on the basic standards of civilized warfare. At the letter’s heart lay the problem of slavery. The conflict, McClellan wrote, “should be conducted upon the highest principles known to Christian Civilization.” The war “should not be a war looking to the subjugation” of a people, not “at all a war upon population,” but exclusively a war “against armed forces and political organizations.” Most important, “neither confiscation of property” nor the “forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.”
McClellan had evidently paid attention to his law of war training at West Point (meager though it was). His letter was a near-perfect restatement of the American establishment orthodoxy on the laws of war. He presented a vision of war without passions, war that left private citizens almost completely untouched. “All private property and unarmed persons should be strictly protected,” he told the president, “subject only to the necessities of military operations.” In the event private property had to be taken for military use, compensation was required. “Pillage and waste” by Union soldiers “should be treated as high crimes”; unnecessary trespasses were to be “sternly prohibited,” and any “offensive demeanor by the military towards citizens” was to be “promptly rebuked.” McClellan was even willing to concede that limited and targeted emancipations might be warranted “upon grounds of military necessity,” though only with compensation to the owners. But any “declaration of radical views” on slavery would “rapidly disintegrate our present armies” and undo the nation’s long-standing attachment to civilized war.
McClellan’s letter had a powerful effect on Lincoln, but it was not the one McClellan had intended. Coming at the low point of a mostly dismal year of war, McClellan’s letter resolved Lincoln on a new departure in Union policy toward slavery. For three agonizing months, McClellan’s version of civilized war had been unable to take Richmond. Now the clarity of his letter forged an unmistakable connection between limited Enlightenment-style war and the failure of Union forces to bring the war nearer to a close.
As Lincoln returned from Virginia to Washington, he decided to throw off the constraint on which McClellan had insisted most strongly. On Sunday, July 13, in a carriage on the way to the funeral of Secretary Stanton’s infant son, Lincoln confided to Welles and Seward that he had “come to the conclusion” that emancipating the slaves “was a military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union.” It was, the president revealed, “the first occasion” on which “he had mentioned the subject to any one.” A little more than a week later, Lincoln quietly dropped his bombshell in a cabinet meeting. In the final sentence of a proposed order executing Congress’s Second Confiscation Act, Lincoln proposed “as a fit and necessary military measure” for restoring the Union, that “all persons held as slaves” within the Confederacy on January 1, 1863, “shall then, thenceforward, and forever, be free.” Lincoln had resolved on emancipation.11
WITHOUT EVER PUTTING it in so many words, Lincoln had come to his decision by rehearsing the basic moral structure of Enlightenment just war thought. As he often did, he sat down with a pen and worked through the problem. His initial proposition was, he thought, self-evident: “The will of God prevails.” But the difficulty of thinking about God’s will in war was immediately apparent as well: “In great contests,” Lincoln continued, “each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God.” But of course the contending sides could not both be right. “Both may be, and one must be wrong,” Lincoln wrote to himself, because “God cannot be for, and against the same thing at the same time.” The great problem, he concluded, was that people could never know for sure whether God had chosen them to be his “human instrumentalities.”
In a few short strokes, Lincoln had come to the idea underlying the entire array of Enlightenment rules for civilized warfare. Human beings could never know for sure that they comprehended God’s justice. Legal limits on war reflected the fact that both sides inevitably believed they were in the right. But now Lincoln grasped a conceptual puzzle at the root of the idea. Didn’t war itself require certainty about the justice of one’s cause? Why go to war at all—why set in motion war’s terrible violence—if you were not sure you were right? The Union armies had already suffered almost 200,000 casualties in little over a year of fighting. At least 150,000 southerners had been killed, wounded, or captured as well. If the war were justified, there had to be something more than moral uncertainty to sustain it. And so Lincoln took a tentative next step, one that cut against the grain of the Enlightenment’s approach to limiting just wars. In uncharacteristically hesitant language, Lincoln continued his notes: “I am almost ready to say this is probably true—that God wills this contest.”
Lincoln gave voice to his thinking on the subject in September when a church delegation from Chicago came to the White House to present a memorial endorsing emancipation. By now Lincoln had privately resolved on emancipation. But he was still considering the reasoning behind his momentous decision. He told the delegation that religious men regularly approached him with advice. They were invariably “certain that they represent the Divine will.” But they came with radically opposing views (“the most opposite opinions and advice”), and not all of them could be right. It might even be that all of them were wrong. And there was the nub of the problem. How could one learn God’s will, and if one could not, how could one make the grave decision to increase the destructiveness of the war? “If I can learn what it is I will do it!” Lincoln said. But God’s justice was inscrutable. “These are not,” he reminded his memorialists, “the days of miracles.” There would be no “direct revelation.” In a moment of playfulness, Lincoln suggested facetiously that rebel soldiers might well be “praying with a great deal more earnestness . . . than our own troops.” The more serious point was that Confederate soldiers were no doubt “expecting God to favor their side” just as Union men thought that God would favor theirs.
Lincoln had stated the case for restraint in wartime. Moral uncertainty demanded moderation. But the Chicago Christians replied with a much older idea, one that tracked the just war framework not of the Enlightenment but of the Middle Ages. Unbeknownst to them, their reply followed the course Lincoln’s own thinking had been taking over the previous weeks. Moral uncertainty, they observed, could not excuse paralysis. “Good men,” they conceded, “differed in their opinions.” But “the truth was somewhere,” and men could not merely set one opinion against another and throw up their hands. The moral leader had to act, had to bring “facts, principles, and arguments” to bear and come to a conclusion as to what justice required. Lincoln had already made his decision, though he had not told them so. And when the interview closed, it was clear that Lincoln and his Chicago petitioners were not so far apart after all. “Do not misunderstand me, because I have mentioned these objections,” Lincoln told them. “Whatever shall appear to be God’s will I will do.”
GOD’S WILL OR otherwise, Lincoln’s advisers urged caution. When the president shared his plan with the cabinet, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase (the most antislavery member of the cabinet) immediately urged that any emancipation policy aim to avoid the“depredation and massacre” so many feared would follow freedom for the slaves. Chase proposed instead that Lincoln allow local commanders “to organize and arm the slaves,” since officers who were close to the ground would be in a better position to manage and police slave populations. Attorney General Bates had long worried about the risk of a slave uprising, and he insisted that the proclamation be coupled with a deportation measure to remove the dangerous population of former slaves from the country.
William Seward, another strong antislavery man, spoke up as well. Given the condition of the Union war effort, he noted, emancipation might be viewed as a sign of weakness, or (worse yet) a sign that the Union had decided to ask the slaves for help in winning the war. It would look, Seward said, as if the government was “stretching forth its hands to Ethiopia, instead of Ethiopia stretching forth her hands to the government.” Given the widespread controversy going back before the war over the propriety of a civilized nation setting slaves in arms against their masters, no one could doubt Seward’s meaning here. It was not merely that issuing a call for emancipation from a position of weakness would look desperate. The problem Seward saw was that an emancipation announcement would appear as the last throes of a government that had cast away the limits of civilized warfare. Seward’s idea, Lincoln later recalled, was that emancipation “would be considered our last shriek.” The observation struck the president with “great force.” At Seward’s urging, Lincoln put off announcing emancipation to await a Union victory on the battlefield.
It took two months for such a victory to come about. The Union war effort got worse before it got better. At Bull Run, where the Union had suffered its embarrassing first major defeat of the war, Union forces, now fighting under Major General John Pope, were badly defeated for a humiliating second time. Many, including Lincoln himself, believed that McClellan and his trusted ally, Major General Fitz John Porter, had secretly hoped for Pope’s defeat.
Only after the Union’s grim victory at Antietam on September 17 did Lincoln resolve to announce the emancipation plan to the nation. Calling together his cabinet on Monday, September 22, Lincoln told them that he had promised himself he would issue an emancipation proclamation if the Union turned back Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia at Antietam. Hesitating just a little, Lincoln added that he had made a promise with his Maker, a covenant with God, that if God “gave us the victory” at Antietam, he would “consider it an indication of Divine will” on the emancipation question. It was hard to imagine that the age of miracles had really returned on the bloody battlefield in Maryland. September 17 was the deadliest single day of the entire war. McClellan, restored just weeks before to command of the Army of the Potomac, had characteristically failed to follow up his terrible victory and deliver a decisive blow. Yet Lincoln viewed the day’s events as a sign from heaven. “God had decided this question,” Lincoln said, “in favor of the slaves.”
In language that was Lincoln’s own, his proclamation announced that on January 1, 1863, all people held as slaves within a state in rebellion against the United States would be “forever free.” The armed forces of the United States, the president resolved, would thenceforward “recognize and maintain the freedom” of the former slaves and would “do no act or acts to repress” the freedpeople “in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.”
In deciding on emancipation, Lincoln had not so much solved the problem of moral uncertainty as he had chosen one side of the dilemma and decided to stick with it. His annual message to the Congress in December 1862 offered a kind of coda to the agonizing deliberations of the summer and fall. “We say we are for the Union,” Lincoln wrote. “The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility.” This, of course, had been the message of the Chicago petitioners. Lincoln had not chosen war lightly. Rescuing the Union was his sacred cause, and if there were means available, it was imperative that he exercise them. His stirring conclusion defended Emancipation in the same terms:
We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.
Here, then, was a Christian answer to McClellan’s “highest principles known to Christian Civilization,” an answer that was rooted in the justice of the path selected. “The dogmas of the quiet past,” Lincoln told the Congress, “are inadequate to the stormy present.” It was apparent that there were means that might advance the desperate end of saving the republic. If we could “disenthrall our selves” from the orthodox nostrums of constraint, the president now argued, “then we shall save our country.”