CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
The Course of the War is Changed
The Role of Slavery in the Conflict
The foremost myth perpetuated by modern history revisionists is that the War of 1861 was fought by the North with the view of freeing the Southern slaves and extending to them social and political equality, and by the South in the interest of extending the institution of slavery and continuing the oppression of the Black race. Such a claim is made in clear opposition to the historical record and completely ignores the many factors other than slavery which accumulated to bring on the conflict. In July of 1864, when asked by Colonel James F. Jacques, self-appointed peace envoy for the North, and James R. Gilmore, a Northern journalist, how the war could be stopped, Confederate States President Jefferson Davis replied:
I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, and for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize the musket and fight our battle, unless you acknowledge our right to self-government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence, and that, or extermination, we will have....
...[Slavery] never was an essential element. It was only a means of bringing other conflicting elements to an earlier culmination. It fired the musket which was already capped and loaded. There are essential differences between the North and the South, that will, however this war may end, make them two nations.... [emphasis in original](1)
In the Preface to his monumental work entitled The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Davis again stated:
Another great perversion of truth has been the arraignment of the men who participated in the formation of the Confederacy and who bore arms in its defense, as the instigators of a controversy leading to disunion. Sectional issues appear conspicuously in the debates of the Convention which framed the Federal Constitution, and its many compromises were designed to secure an equilibrium between the sections, and to preserve the interests as well as the liberties of the several States. African servitude at that time was not confined to a section, but was numerically greater in the South than in the North, with a tendency to its continuance in the former and cessation in the latter. It therefore thus early presents itself as a disturbing element, and the provisions of the Constitution, which were known to be necessary for its adoption, bound all the States to recognize and protect that species of property. When at a subsequent period there arose in the Northern States an antislavery agitation, it was a harmless and scarcely noticed movement until political demagogues seized upon it as a means to acquire power. Had it been left to pseudo-philanthropists and fanatics, most zealous where least informed, it never could have shaken the foundations of the Union and have incited one section to carry fire and sword into the other.(2)
These assertions are substantiated by the fact that the vast majority of those who fought in the Southern armies, especially in Virginia, were not slaveholders and had no personal interest in either the continuance or extension of slavery. As Beverley B. Munford documented in 1909, the United States census for the year 1860 fixed the White population of Virginia at 1,047,299 and the number of slaveholders in that State at only 52,128 — a total percentage of slaveholders at just under five percent.(3) In his American Nation series, French Ensor Chadwick added, "Of the 52,128 slaveholders in Virginia, one-third held but one or two slaves; half held one to four; there were but one hundred and fourteen persons in the whole state who owned as many as a hundred each, and this out of a population of over a million whites."(4)
In addition to the census data, we also have the personal testimony of the Southern soldiers themselves. For example, Major Robert Stiles, who served for four years under General Robert Edward Lee, testified, "Why did they [Southerners] volunteer? For what did they give their lives?... Surely, it was not for slavery they fought. The great majority of them had never owned a slave, and had little or no interest in the institution. My own father, for example, had freed his slaves long years before."(5) Confederate veteran Randolph H. M'Kim wrote:
I was a soldier in Virginia in the campaigns of Lee and Jackson, and I declare I never met a Southern soldier who had drawn his sword to perpetuate slavery. Nor was the dissolution of the Union or the establishment of the Southern Confederacy the supreme issue in the mind of the Southern soldier. What he had chiefly at heart was the preservation of the supreme and sacred right of self-government. The men who made up the Southern armies were not fighting for their slaves when they cast all in the balance — their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor — and endured the hardships of the march and the camp and the perils and sufferings of the battle field. Besides, it was a very small minority of the men who fought in the Southern armies who were financially interested in the institution of slavery.(6)
Likewise, Dr. Hunter McGuire, medical director under General Thomas Jonathan Jackson, wrote, "The Stonewall Brigade of the Army of Northern Virginia was a fighting organization. I knew every man in it, for I belonged to it for a long time; and I know that I am in proper bounds when I assert, that there was not one soldier in thirty who owned or ever expected to own a slave."(7)
As the war dragged on into its fourth year, the Confederate authorities at Richmond even considered abolishing the institution in exchange for Europe's recognition of the Southern Confederacy. One month before the collapse of the Government, the Confederate Congress, at the request of General Lee, authorized the recruitment of three hundred thousand slaves into the army, promising them their freedom for their service.(8) This, if defeat had not stymied the measure, would have been the virtual death of slavery in the Southern States. In the words of the Jackson Mississippian, "Let not slavery prove a barrier to our independence. If it is found in the way — if it proves an insurmountable object of the achievement of our liberty and separate nationality, away with it! Let it perish!"(9)
Considering the claim that the North fought the war to free the slaves and the South fought to hold them in bondage, would not the fact that there were only two hundred thousand slaveholders in the Southern army as opposed to three hundred and fifteen thousand in the Northern army(10) — the percentage in the latter being over fifty percent higher than in the former — stand as an insurmountable obstacle to its acceptance as truth? What is such a claimant to do with the additional fact that the commanding General of the Southern army, Robert Edward Lee, was not a slaveholder and was vocal in his denunciation of the institution as a "great evil,"(11) while the commanding General of the Northern army, Ulysses S. Grant, was not only a slaveholder by marriage, but also refused to manumit his wife's slaves until forced to do so by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment after the close of hostilities — an amendment written, incidentally, by a Southern man?(12) One would have to admit, based on these facts alone, that something is seriously amiss in the accounts of the causes of the war which have since been popularized by Northern historians and propagandists.
However, we are not left to draw mere inferences from the above facts. Lincoln himself had stated in 1858 that "all the States have the right to do exactly as they please about all their domestic relations, including that of slavery...."(13) In keeping with this sentiment, he clearly stated in his first Inaugural Address that he had no intention of fighting a war against slavery: "I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." The following amendment had been previously passed by a strong majority in the House of Representatives on 28 February 1861 and two days later in the Senate: "That no amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give Congress power to abolish or interfere within any State with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labour or servitude by the laws of said State."(14) This amendment, written by Thomas Corwin, a Northern Congressman who would later serve as Lincoln's minister to Mexico, and approved by a Republican-dominated Congress,(15) would likely have become the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina not seceded following Lincoln's unlawful proclamation of 15 April 1861. Noting the congressional passage of this amendment in protection of slavery, Lincoln said in his Inaugural Address, "I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable." Under Lincoln's direction, William Seward made the following statement in a diplomatic circular intended for the courts of Europe:
The condition of slavery in the several States will remain just the same.... The rights of the States, and the condition of every human being in them, will remain subject to exactly the same laws and form of administration, whether the revolution shall succeed or whether it shall fail. Their constitutions and laws and customs, habits and institutions in either case will remain the same. It is hardly necessary to add to this incontestable statement the further fact that the new President, as well as the citizens through whose suffrages he has come into the administration, has always repudiated all designs whatever, and wherever imputed to him and them, of disturbing the system of slavery as it is existing under the Constitution and laws. The case, however, would not be fully presented were I to omit to say that any such effort on his part would be unconstitutional, and all his acts in that direction would be prevented by the judicial authority, even though they were assented to by Congress and the people.(16)
In addition, the following Joint Resolution was passed in the House of Representatives on 22 July 1861 and three days later in the Senate — long after the departure of the eleven Southern States:
Resolved, That the present deplorable civil war has been forced upon the country by the disunionists of the Southern States now in revolt against the constitutional Government and in arms around the capital; that in this national emergency Congress, banishing all feeling of mere passion or resentment, will recollect only its duty to the whole country; that this war is not prosecuted upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and all laws made in pursuance thereof and to preserve the Union, with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired; and that as soon as these objects are accomplished the war ought to cease.(17)
It was under these assurances that the majority of the Northern soldiers took up arms in the war against the South. As pointed out by George Lunt, "A war simply for the abolition of slavery would not have enlisted a dozen regiments at the North."(18) In fact, even such a prominent Northern figure as General Grant was reported as having said, "The sole object of this war is to restore the Union. Should I become convinced it has any other object, or that the Government designs using its soldiers to execute the wishes of the Abolitionists, I pledge you my honor as a man and a soldier I would resign my commission and carry my sword to the other side."(19) We also have the dispatch of Lincoln's first Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, to General Benjamin Butler in the occupied city of New Orleans: "It is the desire of the President that all existing rights in all the States be fully respected and maintained. The war now prosecuted on the part of the Federal Government is a war for the Union, and for the preservation of all constitutional rights of States, and the citizens of the States in the Union."(20) Finally, we again quote the words of Lincoln himself:
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it would help to save the Union, and what I forebear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help save the Union [emphasis in original].(21)
The Radicals Seek a Revolution
For the first year and a half of the conflict, Lincoln steadfastly refused to reconsider his position against interfering with slavery in the South. On 6 March 1862, he expressed his opposition to a proclamation of emancipation, recommending instead the remuneration for slaves by appropriation from Congress. In a letter transmitted to Congress, he wrote, "...[I]n my judgment, gradual and not sudden emancipation is better for all. In the mere financial or pecuniary view, any member of Congress, with the census tables and the Treasury reports before him, can readily see for himself how very soon the current of expenditure of the war would purchase, at a fair valuation, all the slaves in any named state." He again affirmed his oft-repeated conviction that the general Government lacked any authority "to interfere with slavery within state limits," and insisted that his plan of gradual emancipation with remuneration left "the absolute control of the subject in each case to the state and its people immediately interested."(22)
What then induced Lincoln to change his policy and to finally agree to issue a proclamation of emancipation? That it was done for political expediency, and not for principle, is evident from the facts. The Radical Republican element in Congress and in key positions of authority throughout the North had long protested against the Joint Resolution of 24 July 1861, which denied that the war was being prosecuted for the purpose of destroying slavery in the South. Republican Representative Martin F. Conway of Kansas had denounced this "save the Union" policy with these words:
I cannot see that the policy of the Administration... tends, in the smallest degree, to an anti-slavery result. The principle governing it is, that the constitutional Union, as it existed prior to the rebellion, remains intact; that the local laws, usages, and institutions of the seceded States are to be sedulously respected, unless necessity in military operations should otherwise demand. There is not, however, the most distant intimation of giving actual freedom to the slave in any event....
The wish of the masses of our people is to conquer the seceded States to the authority of the Union, and hold them as subject provinces. Whether this will ever be accomplished no one can, of course, confidently foretell; but, in my judgment, until this purpose is avowed, and the war assumes its true character, it is a mere juggle, to be turned this way or that — for slavery or against it — as the varying accidents of the hour may determine....
Eight hundred thousand strong men, in the prime of life, sober and industrious, are abstracted from the laboring population of the country to consume and be a tax upon those who remain to work.... Nearly two million dollars per day will hardly more than suffice to cover existing expenditures; and in one year and a half our national debt, if the war continues, will amount to $900,000,000.
This is the immense sacrifice we are making for freemen and the Union; and yet it is all to be squandered on a subterfuge and cheat! For one, I shall not vote another dollar or a man for the war until it assumes a different standing, and tends directly to an anti-slavery result.(23)
Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania likewise stated in the House, "Sir, I can no longer agree that this Administration is pursuing a wise policy.... Its policy ought to be to order our army, wherever they go, to free the slaves, to enlist them, to arm them, to discipline them as they have been enlisted, armed and disciplined everywhere else, and as they can be here, and set them shooting their masters, if they will not submit to this Government. Call that savage if you please."(24) J.M. Ashley, another Republican from Ohio, said, "In my judgment, an enduring peace can be secured only by conquering the rebels, confiscating their property, and emancipating their slaves."(25)
The hue and cry raised by the Radicals in favor of using the war to revolutionize the Government and to forever remove the possibility of a restoration of the Union on a constitutional foundation was becoming deafening. The North American, a Republican newspaper published in Philadelphia, openly declared, "This war has already shown the absurdity of a government of limited powers; it has shown that the power of every government ought to be and must be unlimited."(26) Nathaniel Prentice Banks, who had been Governor of Massachusetts in 1856 and later became a general in the Northern army, dreamed of "a time when this Constitution shall not be in existence — when we shall have an absolute military dictatorial Government, transmitted from age to age, with men at its head who are made rulers by military commission, or who claim an hereditary right to govern those over whom they are placed."(27) He also expressed a hope that "when this war is over... there will be no longer New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians, Virginians, etc., but we shall all be simply Americans."(28) Simon Cameron voiced the same views.(29) Thus, the old consolidationist faction was beginning to show its hand, and, in its struggle to destroy Jeffersonian republicanism once and for all, the Constitution and those who defended it were the prime targets of its wrath.
Alexander Hamilton, the father of this faction, had ridiculed the Constitution as a "frail and worthless fabric,"(30) and his ideological descendants did not differ from him in this sentiment. Influential Abolitionist Wendell Phillips called the Constitution "a mistake" and demanded that it be torn in pieces. "Our aim is disunion, breaking up of the states," he said. "...[O]ur work cannot be done under our institutions.... [The Republican party] is the first sectional party ever organized in this country.... The Republican party is a party of the North pledged against the South."(31) The Chicago Tribune, a leading Republican organ, declared, "The Union as it was will never bless the vision of any pro-slavery fanatic or secession sympathizer, and it never ought to! It is a thing of the past, hated by every patriot, and destined never to curse an honest people, or blot the pages of history again!"(32) James Henry Lane, a Republican Senator from Kansas, said, "I would like to live long enough to see every white man in South Carolina in hell, and the negroes inheriting their territory."(33) Horace Greeley, who had previously defended the right of the Southern States to depart in peace, became one of the leading advocates of their destruction: "...[W]e mean to conquer them, not merely to defeat, but to conquer, to subjugate them. But when the rebellious traitors are overwhelmed in the field, and scattered like leaves before an angry wind, it must not to be to return to peaceful and contented homes! They must find poverty at their firesides, and see privation in the anxious eyes of mothers, and the rags of children. The whole coast of the South, from the Delaware to the Rio Grande, must be a solitude" [emphasis in original].(34)
Thaddeus Stevens, who was quoted above, also openly called for an abandonment of the Constitution and a policy of subjugation of the Southern people:
This talk of restoring the Union as it was, and under the Constitution as it is, is one of the absurdities which I have heard repeated until I have become sick of it. There are many things which make such an event impossible. This Union never shall, with my consent, be restored under the Constitution as it is!...
The Union as it was, and the Constitution as it is — God forbid it! We must conquer the Southern States and hold them as conquered provinces.(35)
There also was formed by the Northern Radicals a conspiracy to depose Lincoln and replace him with John C. Fremont if he would not acquiesce to their demands to change the war into a crusade for the utter destruction of slavery and Southern culture. On 16 September 1862, less than a week before the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was wrung from the President's pen, the following telegraph was sent from Washington:
Most astounding disclosures have been made here to-day, by letters and verbal communications, from prominent politicians, showing that a vast conspiracy has been set on foot by the radicals of the Fremont faction to depose the present administration, and place Fremont at the head of a provisional government; in other words, to make him military dictator. One of these letters asserts that one feature of this conspiracy is the proposed meeting of the governors of the northern states to request President Lincoln to resign, to enable them to carry out their scheme.... From other well informed sources it is learned that the fifty thousand independent volunteers proposed to be raised under the auspices of the New York National Union Defence Committee were intended to be a nucleus for the organization of the Fremont conspiracy.... This startling disclosure is vouched for by men of high repute in New York and other northern states. It is the last card of those who have been vainly attempting to drive the President into the adoption of their own peculiar policy.(36)
In this historical context, it should be obvious that the "Great Emancipator" acted much more in the interest of saving his own job than in the interest of the slaves when he finally issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Ward H. Lamon, who was a close associate of Lincoln's throughout the war, wrote from first-hand experience of the President's views on the welfare of the Blacks:
None of Mr. Lincoln's public acts, either before or after he became President, exhibit any special tenderness for the African race, or commiseration of their lot. On the contrary, he invariably, in words and deeds, postponed the interest of the negro to the interest of the whites. When from political and military considerations he was forced to declare the freedom of the enemy's slaves, he did so with avowed reluctance; he took pains to have it known he was in no wise affected by sentiment. He never at any time favored the admission of negroes into the body of the electors of his State, or in the States of the South. He claimed that those negroes set free by the army were poor spirited, lazy and slothful; that they could only be made soldiers by force, and would not be ever willing laborers at all; that they seemed to have no interest in the cause of their own race, but were as docile in the service of the rebellion as the mule that ploughed the fields or drew the baggage trains. As a people, Lincoln thought negroes would only be useful to those who were at the same time their masters, and the foes of those who sought their good. He wanted the negro protected as women and children are. He had no notion of extending the privilege of governing to the negro. Lincoln always contended that the cheapest way of getting rid of the negro was for the Nation to buy the slaves and send them out of the country.(37)
Did Lincoln Really Free the Slaves?
Section 11 of the Act of Congress of 17 July 1862 made it clear that "the President may employ, organize, and use as many persons of African descent as he pleases to suppress the rebellion, and use them as he judges for the public welfare." It was this power to seize the property of belligerents that lay behind Lincoln's much-celebrated, but little understood, Emancipation Proclamation:
WHEREAS, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:
"That on the first day of January, A.D. 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.
"That the executive will on the 1st day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State or the people thereof shall on that day be in good faith represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such States shall have participated shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State and the people thereof are not then in rebellion against the United States."
Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-In-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, and in accordance with my purpose so to do, publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days from the first day above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof, respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States the following, to wit:
Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the parishes of St. Bernard, Palquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebone, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Northhampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Anne, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts are for the present left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.
And by virtue of the power and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States are, and henceforward shall be, free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.
And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.
And I further declare and make known that such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.
And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God.(38)
Lincoln scholar James G. Randall wrote, "So famous has this proclamation become, and so encrusted with tradition, that a correct historical conception of its actual effect is rarely found in the voluminous literature which the subject has evoked. The stereotyped picture of the emancipator suddenly striking the shackles from millions of slaves by a stroke of the presidential pen is altogether inaccurate."(39) The reader will notice that, not only did this document refer exclusively to the slaves "within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States" — leaving slavery completely untouched in the border States(40) and in those parts of the Confederacy already occupied by Northern troops — but it did so "as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion."(41) It was Lincoln's belief that "the Constitution invests its commander-in-chief with the law of war in time of war"(42) and that he therefore had "a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy."(43) Not departing from the stated conviction of his first Inaugural Address that he had "no lawful right" to "interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists," he admitted that the issuance of the Proclamation had "no constitutional or legal justification, except as a military measure."(44)
That the edict had no justification whatsoever was the view of Democrats throughout the North, who denounced it as a "gigantic usurpation" as "unwarrantable in military [and] civil law," and predicted that it would only serve to "protract the war indefinitely."(45) Former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis also criticized the Proclamation on the same legal grounds:
This proclamation... by an executive decree, proposes to repeal and annul valid State laws which regulate the domestic relations of their people. Such is the mode of operation of the decree....
It must be obvious to the meanest capacity, that if the President of the United States has an implied constitutional right, as commander-in-chief of the army and navy in time of war, to disregard any one positive prohibition of the Constitution, or to exercise any one power not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, because, in his judgment, he may thereby "best subdue the enemy," he has the same right, for the same reason, to disregard each and every provision of the Constitution, and to exercise all power, needful, in his opinion, to enable him "best to subdue the enemy."
It has never been doubted that the power to abolish slavery within the States was not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, but was reserved to the States. If the President, as commander-in-chief of the army and navy in time of war, may, by an executive decree, exercise this power to abolish slavery in the States, which power was reserved to the States, because he is of opinion that he may thus "best subdue the enemy," what other power, reserved to the States or to the people, may not be exercised by the President, for the same reason, that he is of the opinion that he may thus best subdue the enemy?...
The necessary result of this interpretation of the Constitution is, that, in time of war, the President has any and all power, which he may deem it necessary to exercise, to subdue the enemy; and that... every right reserved to the States or the people, rests merely upon executive discretion.
But the military power of the President is derived solely from the Constitution; and it is as sufficiently defined there as his purely civil power. These are its words: "The President shall be the Commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several States, when called into the actual service of the United States."
This is his military power. He is the general-in-chief; and as such, in prosecuting war, may do what generals in the field are allowed to do within the sphere of their actual operations, in subordination to the laws of the their country, from which alone they derive their authority [emphasis in original].(46)
The above legal defects notwithstanding, Lincoln's Proclamation did not actually accomplish what many people believe it did. The editors of the New York World made the following observations:
The President has purposely made the proclamation inoperative in all places where we have gained a military footing which makes the slaves accessible. He has proclaimed emancipation only where he has notoriously no power to execute it. The exemption of the accessible parts of Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia renders the proclamation not merely futile, but ridiculous....
Immediate practical effect it has none; the slaves remaining in precisely the same condition as before. They still live on the plantations, tenant their accustomed hovels, obey the command of their master... eating the food he furnishes and doing the work he requires precisely as though Mr. Lincoln had not declared them free....
The proclamation is issued as a war measure, as an instrument for the subjugation of the rebels. But that cannot be a means of military success which presupposes the same... success as the condition of its own existence.... A war measure it clearly is not, inasmuch as the previous success of the war is the thing that can give it validity.(47)
British foreign minister and observer of the war, Earl John Russell, likewise commented in a letter dated 17 January 1863:
The Proclamation of the President of the United States... appears to be of a very strange nature. It professes to emancipate all slaves in places where the United States authorities cannot exercise any jurisdiction... but it does not decree emancipation... in any States, or parts of States, occupied by federal troops... and where, therefore, emancipation... might have been carried into effect.... There seems to be no declaration of a principle adverse to slavery in this proclamation. It is a measure of war, and a measure of war of a very questionable kind.(48)
Lincoln's Secretary of State Seward expressed his own disgust for the Proclamation when he bitterly complained, "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them, and holding them in bondage where we can set them free."(49) Seward also feared that the Proclamation would be viewed as "the last measure of an exhausted government" and "our last shriek in retreat."(50) One week before the original Proclamation was issued, Lincoln himself expressed his fears that such an edict would be as ineffective toward its alleged purpose of emancipation as "the Pope's bull against the comet." He went on to reason:
Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel states? Is there a single court, or magistrate, or individual that would be influenced by it there? And what reason is there to think it would have any greater effect upon the slaves than the late law of Congress, which I approved, and which offers protection and freedom to the slaves of rebel masters who come within our lines? Yet I cannot learn that that law has caused a single slave to come over to us. And suppose they could be induced by a proclamation of freedom from me to throw themselves upon us, what would we do with them? How can we feed and care for such a multitude? Gen. Butler wrote me a few days since that he was issuing more rations to the slaves who have rushed to him than to all the white troops under his command. They eat, and that is all.(51)
Near the end of the war, Lincoln's doubts as to the validity of the Proclamation had not subsided: "A question might be raised whether the proclamation was legally valid. It might be urged, that it only aided those that came into our lines, and that it was inoperative as to those who did not give themselves up; or that it would have no effect upon the children of slaves born hereafter; in fact, it would be urged that it did not meet the evil."(52)
The Real Purpose of the Proclamation
If the true purpose of the Emancipation Proclamation was not to emancipate, what then did its author really have in mind when he issued it to the world? It should be kept in mind that the first two years of the war were not going well for the North. Nearly every major engagement — from the first Battle of Manassas in July of 1861 to the Battle of Fredericksburg in December of 1862 — had been a decisive Confederate victory. Even the bloodiest battle ever fought on American soil — the Battle of Sharpsburg (Antietam) — ended in a stalemate for both sides. The public credit of the North was plummeting in proportion to the rising discontent among the Northern people with Lincoln's war policy. According to James Randall, "Many urged that the South was ready for a reasonable peace and that it was only the obstinacy of the Lincoln administration which prolonged the war...."(53) The pro-war Radicals, on the other hand, openly criticized Lincoln for what they considered to be his incompetence as a military commander-in-chief. The cost of the war had escalated to an astronomical $1 million per day,(54) and, with no end in sight, even Lincoln himself admitted that the Government at Washington was at "the end of [its] rope" militarily.(55) Moreover, Great Britain had pledged its neutrality on 13 May 1861, which had the effect of granting the Southern Confederacy de facto belligerent status under international law — a status the Lincoln Government was zealous to deny the Confederate Government. The other European powers had followed England's example. James Spence's outstanding defense of the South and the constitutional right of secession, entitled The American Union, had been published in London in early 1862 and the British press, which reflected the views of English society, was decidedly pro-Southern. As Confederate diplomats were also being sent throughout Europe and Mexico in the hopes of soliciting full-scale recognition of the South as an independent member of the "family of nations," and as the North continued to fail militarily, the world generally refused to accept Lincoln's specious claim that the conflict was merely a "police action" against a domestic insurrection, seeing it rather for what it really was — a struggle "for empire on the side of the North and for independence on that of the South...."(56) With the number of American dead reaching horrendous heights, Minister Russell had expressed his opinion that the time had come for Great Britain to offer "mediation... with a view to the recognition of the independence of the Confederates,"(57) and that, in the event of a failure to mediate between the two belligerents, England should on her own part recognize the South.
Thus, in the words of Frank Lawrence Owsley, "[T]he South almost realized its ambitions of drawing England in upon its side."(58) Lincoln knew that if such occurred, it would mean disaster for the Northern cause and probably war with England. Therefore, first and foremost, the Proclamation was a specious piece of propaganda, carefully designed to influence the anti-slavery European nations to side with the North rather than the South. In the 13 August 1862 issue of the New York Tribune, the editors reasoned thusly:
The liberal sentiment of Christendom would be fixed and intensified on the side of the Union by such a decree. At present, any champion of the rebel cause, who rises to speak in Parliament or elsewhere, begins by solemnly asseverating that slavery has nothing to do with the contest — that the North is fighting for slavery as well as the South, and quoting our dispatches, resolves and speeches to sustain that position. A decree of emancipation would effectively quelch that falsehood.... No foreign country but Dahomey would venture to side with the Davis Confederacy, if it were made clear that it was fighting for slavery, while we were fighting against it.(59)
That Lincoln intended by his "bull against the comet" to affect European perceptions of the war, and to prevent recognition of the Confederacy, is beyond reasonable doubt. However, he may also have had another, and more sinister, motive in mind. Although he had, over the years, gone to great lengths to deny any affinity for the philosophies and tactics of the South-hating Abolitionists of the North, Lincoln appeared to have caved in to pressure and come full circle to employ their most cherished weapon — servile insurrection — "as a punishment for the seceding States."(60)
Slave uprisings were hardly unheard of in the Nineteenth Century. In fact, by the time the Republicans came to power in the United States, the revolutionary doctrines of the French Revolution had generated no less than eighty such insurrections in the Caribbean alone. For example, when agitation began in the Constituent Assembly in 1791 for the abolition of slavery in the French colonies, an Abolitionist by the name of Jacques Brissot, leader of The Society of Friends of Blacks, instigated the slaves of St. Domingo to organize an insurrection. They responded on the 31st of October, by raping, torturing, and slaughtering Whites by the thousands:
In an instant twelve hundred coffee and two hundred sugar plantations were in flames: the buildings, the machinery, the farm offices, reduced to ashes; the unfortunate proprietors hunted down, murdered or thrown into the flames by infuriated negroes. The horrors of a servile war universally appeared. The unchained African signalized his ingenuity by the discovering of new and unheard-of modes of torture. An unhappy planter was sawed asunder between two boards; the horrors inflicted on the women exceeded anything known even in the annals of Christian ferocity. Upon the indulgent master young and old, rich and poor, the wrongs of an oppressed race were indiscriminately wreaked. Crowds of slaves traversed the country with the heads of white children affixed on their pikes; they served as the standards of these furious assemblages. In a few instances only, the humanity of the negro character resisted the savage contagion of the time; and some faithful slaves, at the hazard of their own lives, fed in caves their masters or their children, whom they had rescued from destruction.(61)
The worst of these insurrections had occurred when Napoleon issued a proclamation in 1801 emancipating the slaves throughout Haiti, and declaring them to be "all alike free and equal before God and the Republic." A British naval officer, who witnessed the ensuing uprising, described what the Blacks did to their former masters: "Some they shot having tied them from fifteen to twenty together. Some they pricked to death with their bayonets, and others they tortured in such a manner too horrid to describe." Napoleon sent in 45,000 troops to restore order, but in the end, 20,000 Whites had been massacred by rampaging Blacks.(62)
That Lincoln was well aware of these catastrophes cannot be honestly disputed. He also could not have been ignorant of the Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1825, in which the perpetrator, a free Black, had appealed to the Old Testament in an effort to convince the slaves of Charleston, South Carolina to rise  up to sack the city and murder its White inhabitants in cold blood,(63) or of the Southampton, Virginia insurrection of 1831, in which fifty-seven Whites, most of whom were women and children, were slain in their sleep by a mob of Blacks led by a hallucinating slave preacher named Nat Turner.(64) He was certainly aware of John Brown's botched plans in 1859 to incite a massive slave uprising throughout the South, and he was also aware of the incendiary Helper book which had been endorsed two years before that by the Republicans in Congress, most notable among whom was his own Secretary of State, William Seward. It should be remembered that, with the male population of the South largely absent, the plantations during the war were, for the most part, left in the hands of women, children, and the elderly, as well as vast numbers of their slaves. That Lincoln hoped for and fully expected these slaves to respond to his Proclamation by rising up in violent revolt against the nearly defenseless families of Southern soldiers, thus requiring them to quit the field and return home to quell domestic insurrection, was suspected by many observers. It was such an agenda that was denounced by Horatio Seymour, Governor of New York and staunch Unionist:
The scheme for an immediate emancipation and general arming of the slaves throughout the South is a proposal for the butchery of women and children, for scenes of lust and rapine, arson and murder, unparalleled in the history of the world. Its effect would not be confined to the walls of cities, but there would be a widespread scene of horror over the vast expanse of great States, involving alike the loyal and the seditious. Such malignity and cowardice would invoke the interference of civilized Europe. History tells of the fires kindled in the name of religion, of atrocities committed under the pretext of order or liberty; it is now urged that scenes bloodier than the world has yet witnessed shall be enacted in the name of philanthropy.(65)
The editors of the London Herald saw the Proclamation in the same light:
Another symptom of increasing ferocity — a new source of frightful crime, on the one side, and provocation to horrible vengeance on the other, is disclosed in the demand made in New York for the Abolitionist Proclamation. So far as its nominal purpose goes, this would be as futile as Mr. Lincoln's other edicts. Before he can emancipate the Southern negroes, he must conquer the South. But the demand is not made with a view to the real liberation of the slaves. It is meant to diminish the rebel army, by calling away many officers and men to the defense of their homes. The object is not negro emancipation, but servile insurrection — not the manumission of slaves, but the subornation of atrocities, such as those at Cawnpore and Meireut against women and children of Southern families.
For the negro the Northerners care nothing, except as a possible weapon in their hands, by which the more safely and effectually to wreak a cruel and cowardly vengeance on the South. Inferior in every respect to the Sepoys, the negro race would, if once excited to rebellion, outdo them in acts of carnage, as they would fall below them in military courage. They may be useful as assassins and incendiaries; as soldiers against the dominant race, they would be utterly worthless.... These new Abolitionists do not conceal their motives; they have not the decency to pretend conviction; they seek, avowedly, nothing but an instrument of vengeance on their enemy, and an instrument so dastardly, involving the commission of outrages so horrible, that even a government which employs a Mitchell and a Butler must shrink from such a load of infamy.(66)
This anticipated slaughter of White Southerners was justified by the Radical Northern leaders and by the Northern press as an exigency of the war. Charles Sumner, in a speech delivered at Faneuil Hall in Boston, said of the Southern people, "When they rose against a paternal government they set an example of insurrection. They cannot complain if their slaves, with better reason, follow it."(67) According to the North American Review of Boston, "It may be that the slaves thus armed will commit some atrocities. We shall regret it. But we repeat, this war has been forced upon us.... We hesitate not to say, that it will be better, immeasurably better, that the rebellion should be crushed, even with the incidental consequences attendant on a servile insurrection, than that the hopes of the world in the capacity of mankind to maintain free institutions should expire with American liberty."(68) Likewise, the New York Courier and Enquirer advised that "the negroes be let loose on the whites, men, women and children indiscriminately...."(69)
Lincoln's own views were apparently no different. Not only had he previously denounced as "seditious" a resolution introduced before the outbreak of the war by Stephen Douglas that those inciting the insurrection of slaves should be punished,(70) but he also declared that he would not urge "objections of a moral nature in view of possible consequences of insurrection and massacre at the South."(71) The reader is invited to compare these expressed sentiments with the rather hollow admonition in his Proclamation to Southern slaves to "to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence." In addition, the following dispatch was issued five months later from Washington, D.C.:
Washington, D.C.
May 19, 1863
General: A plan has been formed for a simultaneous movement to sever the rebel communications throughout the whole South, which has been sent to some General in each military department in the seceded States, in order that they may act in concert and thus secure success.
The plan is to induce the Blacks to make a simultaneous movement of rising, on the night of the 1st of August next, over the entire States in rebellion, to arm themselves with any and every kind of weapon that may come to hand, and commence operations by burning all the railroad and country bridges, and tear up railroad tracks, and to destroy telegraph lines, etc., and then take to the woods, swamps, or the mountains, where they may emerge as occasion may offer for provisions and for further depredations. No blood is to be shed except in self-defense.... This is the plan in substance, and if we can obtain a concerted movement at the time named it will doubtless be successful.
The main object of this letter is to state the time for the rising that it may be simultaneous over the whole South. To carry out the plan in the department in which you have the command, you are requested to select one or more intelligent contrabands, and, after telling them the plan and the time (night of the 1st of August), you will send them into the interior of the country within the enemy's lines and where the slaves are numerous, with instructions to communicate the plan and the time to as many intelligent slaves as possible, and requesting of each to circulate it far and wide over the country, so that we may be able to make the rising understood by several hundred thousand slaves by the time named.
When you have made these arrangements, please enclose this letter to some other General commanding in the same department with yourself, some one whom you know or believe to be favorable to such movement, and he, in turn, is requested to send it to another, and so on until it has traveled the entire round of the Department, and each command and post will in this way be acting together in the employment of negro slaves to carry the plan into effect.
In this way, the plan will be adopted at the same time and in concert over the whole South, and yet no one of all engaged in it will learn the names of his associates, and will only know the number of Generals acting together in the movement. To give the last information, and before enclosing this letter to some other General, put the numeral "1" after the word "approved" at the bottom of the sheet:
And when it has gone the rounds of the Department, the person last receiving it will please enclose it to my address, that I may then know and communicate that this plan is being carried out at the same time.
Yours respectfully, your obedient servant,
Augustus S. Montgomery.(72)
This nefarious plot was aborted when the above dispatch fell into the hands of the Confederate authorities in Louisiana on the eighteenth of July. Again, the reader should take notice of the hollow admonition that "no blood is to be shed except in self-defense." It is difficult to imagine how "several hundred thousand" Negro slaves, their minds full of Abolitionist propaganda, their hearts thereby stirred to hatred for their Southern masters, and, in addition, armed with "any and every kind of weapon," could have been restrained by mere words on a page from shedding blood. That there never was a widespread uprising of the Southern slaves during the war can be attributed, of course, to the merciful and over-ruling Providence of God. However, from a temporal standpoint, the general unwillingness of the slaves to revolt in the absence of their male masters and to engage in the sort of atrocities hoped for by the Radical Republicans, can only be explained by the mutual feeling of friendship that existed between Whites and Blacks in the old South.(73) These politicians, inflamed with sectional hatred, never understood how such a close relationship could exist between master and slave; to them, Southern planters were all "Simon Legrees," guilty of wickedly scourging or otherwise mistreating their slaves, and the Southern Blacks were all "Uncle Toms," groaning for deliverance from an intolerable labor system as did the Israelites under Egyptian bondage. The Republicans viewed emancipation as a holy crusade against the social evil of the Nineteenth Century, even though they had no love for the Negroes themselves, and, as Lincoln would proclaim in his second Inaugural Address, "two hundred and fifty years of unrequitted toil" had to be atoned for by the blood of the Southern people. It was this irrational animosity, and its ultimate expression in the Emancipation Proclamation, that made a peaceful reunion of the States forever an impossibility. Jefferson Davis noted, "It has established a state of things which can lead to but one of three consequences — the extermination of the slaves, the exile of the whole white population of the Confederacy, or absolute and total separation of these States from the United States."(74) As we shall see, all three of these consequences were partially realized in the decade following the war which has commonly been called the Reconstruction era.
Endnotes
1. Davis, quoted in James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States (New York: Harper Brothers, 1893), Volume IV, page 575.
2. Davis, Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume I, page vi.
3. Munford, Slavery and Secession, page 125.
4. French Ensor Chadwick, Causes of the Civil War (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1906), page 33. It should also be remembered that Virginia had the largest population of slaves out of all the slave States, which calls into question the assertion in Mississippi's "Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union" that the position of the people of that State was "thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world" (see "Declarations of the Causes of Secession of the Southern States").
5. Robert Stiles, Four Years Under Marse Robert (New York: The Neale Publishing Company, 1904), page 49.
6. Randolph H. M'Kim, "Injustice to the South," Gray Book, pages 36-37.
7. McGuire and Christian, Confederate Cause and Conduct, page 22.
8. Richard Shenkman, Legends, Lies, and Myths of American History (New York William Morrow and Company, 1988), page 127.
9. Jackson Mississippian, quoted by Emory M. Thomas, The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1971), page 119.
10. Rutherford, Truths of History, page 14; Rhodes, History of the United States, Volume IV, page 344.
11. Although Lee was not an Abolitionist of the radical New England stripe, he was nevertheless an advocate of gradual emancipation, as was also Jefferson Davis. During the war, Lee was interviewed by Herbert C. Saunders of London on the subject of slavery and other matters concerning the South. Saunders' recollections of the conversation were in part as follows: "On the subject of slavery, he assured me that he had always been in favour of the emancipation of the negroes, and that in Virginia the feeling had been strongly inclining in the same direction, till the ill-judged enthusiasm (amounting to rancour) of the abolitionists in the North had turned the Southern tide of feeling in the other direction" (Herbert C. Saunders, quoted by Robert E. Lee, Jr., Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee [Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing Company, 1924], page 231).
12. The author of the original bill was John Brooks Henderson of Missouri, a slave State.
13. Lincoln, speech delivered at Jonesboro, Illinois on 15 September 1858; in Johannsen, Lincoln-Douglas Debates, page 131.
14. Congressional Globe (Thirty-Sixth Congress, Second Session), pages 1284-1285.
15. According to James G. Blaine:
This [amendment] was adopted [in the House] by a vote of 133 to 65. It was numbered as the thirteenth amendment to the Federal Constitution, and would have made slavery perpetual in the United States, so far as any influence or power of the National Government could affect it. It intrenched slavery securely in the organic law of the land, and elevated the privilege of the slaveholder beyond that of the owner of any other species of property. It received the votes of a large number of Republicans who were then and afterwards prominent in the councils of the party....
When the proposition reached the Senate, it was adopted by a vote of 24 to 12, precisely the requisite two-thirds.... Only twelve out of the twenty-five Republican senators voted in the negative (Twenty Years of Congress, Volume I, page 266).
16. William Seward, letter to U.S. Ambassador to France William L. Dayton, 22 April 1861; quoted by Pollard, Lost Cause, page 217.
17. Statutes at Large, Volume XIV, page 814. Senator John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky was one of five who voted against this resolution and the only one who did so out of distrust of the sincerity of its supporters rather than on the basis of a mere objection to the wording of the document. In his opposition speech, Breckinridge accused his Republican colleagues of prosecuting "not only a war of subjugation, but a war of extermination," and he predicted that such a war would "be the grave of constitutional liberty upon this continent" (Congressional Globe, 25 July 1861, page 261). In this and subsequent chapters, the reader will have opportunity to see just how prophetic were these words.
18. Lunt, Origin of the Late War, page 432.
19. Ulysses S. Grant, quoted by Carey, Jr., Democratic Speaker's Handbook, page 33.
20. Simon Cameron to Benjamin F. Butler, 8 August 1861; quoted in Harper's Weekly, 24 August 1861, page 531; Congressional Record (Thirty-Seventh Congress, First Session), page 83.
21. Lincoln, letter to Horace Greeley, 22 August 1862; quoted by John G. Nicolay, A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: The Century Company, 1911), page 336.
22. Lincoln, quoted by Carpenter, Logic of History, page 175; Rhodes, History of the United States, Volume III, page 631.
23. Martin F. Conway, speech delivered in the House of Representatives on 12 December 1862; in Congressional Globe (Thirty-Seventh Congress, First Session), pages 83, 86, 87.
24. Thaddeus Stevens, speech delivered in the House on 5 July 1862; op. cit., (Thirty-Seventh Congress, Second Session), page 3127.
25. J.M. Ashley, speech delivered in the House on 23 May 1862; quoted by Carpenter, Logic of History, page 91.
26. North American, quoted by Horton, History of the Great Civil War, page 126.
27. N.P. Banks, quoted by Carpenter, Logic of History, page 122; Horton, History of the Great Civil War, page 58.
28. Banks, quoted by Horton, ibid.
29. Horton, ibid.
30. Hamilton, letter to Gouverneur Morris, 27 February 1802; quoted by Horton, op. cit., page 19.
31. Wendell Phillips, quoted by Carpenter, Logic of History, pages 100, 101.
32. Chicago Tribune, quoted by Carpenter, op. cit., page 119.
33. James Henry Lane, quoted by Carpenter, ibid.
34. New York Tribune, 1 May 1861; quoted by Pollard, Lost Cause, page 85 (footnote).
35. Stevens, Congressional Globe (Thirty-Seven Congress, Third Session), 9 December 1862, page 51.
36. Government dispatch sent on 16 September 1862; quoted by Carpenter, Logic of History, pages 113-114.
37. Ward H. Lamon, Life of Abraham Lincoln (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1872), page 334.
38. Regarding this concluding invocation, Mildred Lewis Rutherford wrote:
On January 1, 1863, the second writing of the Emancipation Proclamation was read. The members of the Cabinet noticed that the name of God was not mentioned in it, and reminded the President that such an important document should recognize the name of Deity. Lincoln said he had overlooked that fact and asked the Cabinet to assist him in preparing a paragraph recognizing God. Chief Justice Chase prepared it: "I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God." It was accepted without a change (Truths of History, page 76).
39. Randall, Civil War and Reconstruction, page 490.
40. That the Proclamation did not end the institution of slavery is proven by the fact that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, to which the Northern States had objected so vehemently, was not repealed until 28 June 1864 — only ten months before General Lee's surrender at Appomattox (Statutes at Large, Volume XIII, page 200). Under the terms of this Act, runaway slaves who came within the lines of the Northern armies were routinely restored to their masters throughout most of the war. Those slaves whose masters could not be located were assigned to the Quartermaster's Department to be used as laborers. The reader may easily verify this with a perusal of the indices of the Official Records under the heading "slaves and slave property."
41. Lincoln had chosen his words very carefully, for being a lawyer, he knew not only that "martial law is dominant military rule springing out of necessity" (Birkhimer, Military Government, page 427), but also would have been familiar with the maxim necessitas non habet legem — "necessity has no law" (Black's Law Dictionary [Saint Paul, Minnesota: West Publishing Company, 1991; Sixth Edition], page 1030).
42. Lincoln, reply to the Chicago Emancipation Memorial, 13 September 1862; quoted by Curtis, Executive Power, page 17.
43. Lincoln, in Nicolay and Hay, Lincoln: Complete Works, Volume II, page 397.
44. Lincoln, in Nicolay and Hay, op. cit., pages 402-403.
45. Quoted by Arthur Charles Cole, The Era of the Civil War, 1848-1870 (Springfield, Illinois: Illinois Centennial Commission, 1919), page 300.
46. Curtis, Executive Power, pages 15, 18-19, 21-22.
47. New York World, 7 January 1863; quoted by Randall, Civil War and Reconstruction, page 491.
48. Earl Russell, letter to British consul Lord Richard Lyons, 17 January 1863; in Henry Wheaton (W.B. Lawrence, editor), Elements of International Law (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1863), page 37.
49. Seward, quoted by Donn Piatt, Memories of the Men Who Saved the Union (New York: Butler Brothers, 1887), page 150.
50. Seward, quoted by Rhodes, History of the United States, Volume IV, page 72.
51. Lincoln, speech delivered on 15 September 1862; quoted in Blackwood's Magazine, 1 November 1862, pages 640, 642; Nicolay and Hay, Lincoln: Complete Works, Volume II, page 234.
52. Lincoln, speech delivered on 31 January 1865; in Nicolay and Hay, op. cit., Volume II, pages 633-634.
53. Randall, Civil War and Reconstruction, page 315.
54. Samuel Sullivan Cox, speech in the House of Representatives on 15 December 1862; in Congressional Globe (Thirty-Seventh Congress, Third Session), page 95.
55. Lincoln, quoted in Paul M. Angle (editor), The American Reader (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1947), page 407.
56. London Times, 7 November 1861, page 6.
57. Russell, quoted by Ephraim D. Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War (London, England: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1925), Volume II, page 38.
58. Frank Lawrence Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1931), page 59.
59. New York Tribune, 13 August 1862; quoted by Carpenter, Logic of History, page 155.
60. Rhodes, History of the United States, Volume IV, page 344; see also Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Volume II, pages 277-278.
61. Archibald Allison, The History of Europe From the Commencement of the French Revolution to the Restoration of the Bourbons (London: Eilliam Blackwood, 1848), Volume I, pages 120-121.
62. Robert Heinl and Nancy Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492-1971 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978), pages 125-130.
63. Koger, Black Slaveowners, pages 160-186.
64. Theodore M. Whitfield, Slavery Agitation in Virginia, 1829-1832 (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1930), pages 10, 59-61.
65. Horatio Seymour, quoted by Blackwood's Magazine, 1 November 1862, page 644.
66. London Herald, quoted by Carpenter, Logic of History, page 171.
67. Charles Sumner, quoted by Ashe, Invasion of the Southern States, page 35.
68. "The Character of the Rebellion," North American Review, October 1862, pages 532-533.
69. New York Courier and Enquirer, quoted by Ashe, Invasion of the Southern States, page 35.
70. Nicolay and Hay, Lincoln: Complete Works, Volume I, page 611.
71. Lincoln, quoted in Staunton (Virginia) Spectator, 7 October 1862, page 2; Nicolay and Hay, Lincoln: Complete Works, Volume II, page 234.
72. Augustus S. Montgomery, dispatch dated 19 May 1863; in Official Records: Armies, Series I, Volume LI, Part II, page 736.
73. See Chapter Six.
74. Jefferson Davis, speech delivered to the C.S. Congress on 12 January 1863; in Pollard, Lost Cause, page 360.
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