Disunion! Civil War is Proclaimed! (2 Viewers)

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A War Not for Abolition

In September 1861, over 1,000 soldiers marched through Manhattan singing "reverentially and enthusiastically in praise of John Brown," as one observer of the scene put it. Thousands of private citizens joined in the celebration of John Brown's noble in "the cause of freedom." This scene caused consternation to those who favored the Civil War as a battle to preserve the Union and one not for abolition, as set forth by the New York Herald.

These two competing goals had been there from the very beginning. What the Union fought for has been the subject of much debate and Gary Gallagher has recently published a recent book on the matter.

Those opposed to making the Civil War as a war against abolition claimed that the abolitionists had caused the Civil War with the hope of ending slavery and when secession did not lead to slavery, they then sought to convert the War into one of emancipation. This was generally true and abolitionist editors and speakers were from the very beginning trying to make this into a war about ending slavery, starting with William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the Liberator. Senator Charles Sumner had also been favoring emancipation as the principal goal of the Civil War.


William Lloyd Garrison

However, Lincoln would initially resist the goal of the Civil War as one for emancipation. Even when he embraced it as a military strategy, he did not feel he had the authority to pursue abolition in and of itself.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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Vive L'Union

As this article makes clear, getting your message across is not just a 20th or 21st Century creatoin.

In October 1861, the U.S. minister to France, William Dayton, suggested that someone be appointed as counsel in Paris who was familar with France and its press who could counteract anti-Union sentiment. That someone turned out to be John Bigelow, a veteran New York newspaper man and Republican Party operative. Fellow agents had also been sent to London, Rome and other European capitals. All were charged with giving “a right direction to public sentiment” by making themselves acquainted with the leading men of the national press. Bigelow's principal role was not to tranlate Union propaganda into French but to "animate native voices capable of interpreting the American cause to the French mind in its own idiom."


John Bigelow

Bigelow made contact with Édouard-René Lefèbvre de Laboulaye, a leading expert on American history and government. After getting a positive reception, de Laboulaye delivered a 50 page essay and Bigelow saw to it that the essay was delivered to each member of the Institute of France, a prestigious group of academics; the entire Paris bar; every diplomat residing in Paris; prominent statesmen throughout Europe; and the leading journals of Europe.


Édouard-René Lefèbvre de Laboulaye

The essay was a hit and a leading French journal of the day, Journal des Débats, which had been taking a pro-Confederacy stance, shifted to a more pro-Union stance.

This was only the beginning for de Laboulaye as he wrote more essays, pamphlets and books which Bigleow then distributed to leading officials and intellectuals throughout Europe.

The author of the piece concludes that "Laboulaye’s achievement was to translate the American conflict into something French readers could grasp, to depict it as part of a historic, international contest between slavery and liberty, democracy and despotism."

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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The Battle of Ball's Bluff and the Death of Senator Edward Baker

October 21, 1861. The North was eager to expand the Virginia foothold at Arlington that it held opposite Washington, D.C. as the Confederates held the banks further upriver from the Potomac. General McClellan had ordered subordinates to press the advantage whenever they could.

On October 20, Union forces crossed the Potomac from Maryland to the 100 foot high bluffs near Leesburg, Virginia. On October 21, Senator Edward Baker of Oregon, but now a Colonel of the First California Volunteers, crossed the river into Virginia to reinforce Union troops, who were met by Confederate forces. Fighting raged all day when Union forces were driven down the slope until the water. Although Oliver Wendell Holmes, future Supreme Court Justice was shot, but survived, Colonel Baker was not so lucky. He was hit by a revolver from close quarters, with one ball passing through his head and was killed.


Senator Edward Baker


Death of Colonel Baker at Ball's Bluff

It was a terrible Union loss, with hundreds surrendering, while others scrambled down the rocky slope to the bank below. Remaining troops were run over the edge to their deaths or drowned. Days later bloated bodies of Union soldiers floated to Washington.

The death of Baker hit the President hard as Baker was a close friend but sometimes political rival of Lincoln's. He served in the Illinois House with the President and served in Congress, coming from the same district as Lincoln. He relocated to the far west and was appointed a Senator from Oregon in 1860. However, he was also a friend of the President's; Lincoln's son Edward was named after Baker.

One of Lincoln's secretaries observed that the "president loved him like a brother, and mourned his untimely death bitterly."

Baker was the only sitting senator ever killed in action and his death led to the creation of the Congressional Joint Committee on Conduct of the War, charged with investigating the War's progress. Baker's death brought further scrutiny to McClellan's leadership.

General Charles Stone, who commanded the troops at Ball's Bluff, was blamed for the disaster, suspected of disloyalty and imprisoned for six months without charges being brought. As the author of the piece notes, "A beloved senator was dead and someone would have to pay."

There are two articles on Ball's Bluff. The first one, which can be accessed here, focuses on the battle. The second article, which focuses on Senator Baker, can be accessed, here.

 

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My Kingdom for a Map

The Battle of Ball's Bluff was a vivid example of a lack of Union intelligence: the area had not been mapped at all. The belief is that this absence contributed to the Union rout. Had General Stone known of the difficult topography he may not have sent his troops across the Potomac to Leesburg.

The absence of cartographic knowledge about the region is manifest in the maps created by soldiers immediately after the battle. The map of Robert Knox Snedden of the 40th New York Volunteers made after the battle, shown below, emphasizes the terrain, and thus vividly conveys the sense that Union forces were trapped not just by the Confederates, but by the landscape itself. Yet the terrain took on importance only because of the battle, and especially its outcome.


Robert Knox Sneden, “Plan of the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, VA. Fought October 21st 1861

Similarly the map of Capt. William Francis Bartlett of 20th Massachusetts, an eyewitness to the battle, shows the difficulty of the terrain. Bartlett orients the map from the perspective of a Union soldier, with the top of the map moving from Maryland toward Virginia across the Potomac.


Bartlett map from Francis W. Palfrey, “Memoir of William Francis Bartlett.”

As the author points out, "The maps drawn by soldiers in the aftermath of battle serve as grim reminders of that most basic question of wartime intelligence: what lies ahead?"

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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The Purchase by Blood

An article about how soldiering was something that was done together as men marched off to war surrounded by workmates, childhood friends and relatives. Although this produced great solidarity and helped to maintain morale, the loss of a soldier in battle meant that these losses were felt disproportionately within the population.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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Mr. Seward's Little Bell

One of the most controversial actions of the Lincoln administration during the Civil War was the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus (which requires that a prisoner be brought before the court to determine if the government has the right to continue detaining him).

Secretary of State Seward boasted to the British Ambassador, Lord Lyons, “My Lord, I can touch a bell on my right hand, and order the arrest of a citizen in Ohio. I can touch the bell again, and order the arrest of a citizen in New York. Can the Queen of England, in her dominions, do as much?”

One of the most famous and early case of the suspension of the writ was the Merryman case. In late April 1861, the President had issued the following order to then commander of the Union Army, General Winfield Scott:

"You are engaged in repressing an insurrection against the laws of the United States. If at any point on or in the vicinity of the military line … between the City of Philadelphia and the City of Washington … you find resistance which renders it necessary to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus for the public safety, you, personally or through the officer in command … are authorized to suspend that writ."

On May 25, federal troops arrested John Merryman, a landowner, slaveholder and scion of one of Maryland’s oldest families, who was reportedly organizing and training a company of men to fight for the Confederacy. From his cell in Fort McHenry, in Baltimore harbor, Merryman petitioned Roger Taney, chief justice of the Supreme Court and judge of the Circuit Court for the District of Maryland, for a writ of habeas corpus.


John Merryman

Taney, the notorious author of the Dred Scott decision, promptly issued the writ, which was ignored. Taney then issued a written opinion challenging Lincoln's suspension order, which challenge was on solid ground.


Chief Justice Roger Taney

Lincoln ignored the challenge and defended his actions in his July 4 message to Congress, saying "In my opinion I violated no law. It was with the deepest regret that the Executive found the duty of employing the war-power, in defense of the government, forced upon him. These measures, whether strictly legal or not, were ventured upon, under what appeared to be a popular demand, and a public necessity; trusting, then, as now, that Congress would readily ratify them.”

Congress neither condemned nor endorsed Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, but did authorize all of the other executive actions he had taken on behalf of the Union cause. Undeterred by the absence of congressional sanction for his actions suspending habeas corpus, Lincoln continued to use the tactic whenever he felt that military circumstances dictated.

Congress finally sanctioned the suspension policies when, in March 1863, it passed the Habeas Corpus Act, authorizing the president to suspend the privilege of the writ whenever “in his judgment the public safety may require it.” The bill’s passage led to a significant increase in suspensions.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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On October 31, 1861, the steamer, the State of Maine, approached Boston harbor, making its way towards the military prison at Fort Warren, an island garrison near the waters edge. Her cargo? 800 Confederate prisoners, including 100 political prisoners that included a former Kentucky governor, the mayor of Baltimore and the marshal of the Baltimore police.


Fort Warren in Boston Harbor

The conditions at the Fort were not very good and in response to sympathetic accounts of the conditions at the Fort, Bostonians responded by donating food, iron bedsteads, mattresses, blankets, medicine, clothing and other supplies.


Captain George F. Frescott, a prisoner at Fort Warren

The conditions of imprisonment were also made better by the character and humanitarian impulse of Colonel Justin Dimick, the commandant of Fort Warren, who was widely admired by both Union and Confederate troops for his years of military service and his strong Christian convictions. Dimick diligently complied with the initial order that the prisoners were to be “treated with all kindness,” and his humane tone was largely echoed by the Union troops.


Colonel Justin Dimick

When Justin Dimick passed away in 1871, both Union and Confederate officers served as his pallbearers. But perhaps a greater testament to Dimick and the relatively humane conditions of Fort Warren is that only 13 Confederate prisoners out of the more than 2,000 rebels who were imprisoned within its walls died during the Civil War — or just over half of 1 percent, compared to the 12 percent mortality rate for Confederates in all Union prisons combined.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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The Napoleon of the American Republic

November 2, 1861 - General Winfield Scott, commanding general of the Army retires. Although the 75 year old General cott had many ailments that made retirement inevitable, one of the reasons he retired was the insubordination of his young underling, General George McClellan, who constantly went over to Scott's head to the President.


Winfield Scott

He excoriated fellow Union officers as well as civilian leaders, bypassed Winfield Scott to write directly to the president, and began to display a propensity to exaggerate the size of enemy forces that bred the battlefield caution that was ultimately his undoing.

McClellan's relationship with Scott came to a head on September 27 when in a meeting with the president and his cabinet, Scott took his young subordinate to task for neglecting to keep him abreast of the disposition, condition and plans for the Army of the Potomac when it was obvious that everyone else present had been regularly briefed. Something had to be done and on October 31, Lincoln accepted Scott's resignation and replaced him with the man who was dubbed the American Napoleon.


George McClellan

Lincoln eventually grew weary of McClellan's caution about using the Army of the Potomac, at one point suggesting to McClellan, "If you don’t want to use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while” and sacked him in 1862. Grant, one of McClellan's eventual successors, remarked in 1877 "McClellan is to me one of the mysteries of the war."


Lincoln meeting with McClellan

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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The Storm That Nearly Lost the War

In early November 1861, the largest Union fleet ever assembled set sail from Fort Monroe for the South Carolina coast. Their objective? To capture the Confederate garrisons at Port Royal, South Carolina, halfway between the Charleston and Savannah, Georgia, in order to complete the blockade of the Southern seacoast. October had been a difficult month for the Union as two rebel diplomats assigned to Europe (James Mason and John Slidell) had escaped the blockade and gone missing and Senator Edward Baker had been killed at Ball's Bluff so the success of the fleet carried great weight.


Captain Samuel F. Du Pont, commander of the Union Fleet

Unfortunately for the fleet it ran into a Category 1 storm and the ships broke formation and dispersed. The fleet was feared lost, bad news to Union ears but good news to the South. Said the Richmond Enquirer on November 4, "The blast of the storm has sounded in our ears like sweetest music.”


The "Great Expedition on its way to Port Royal

The fleet limped into Port Royal Sound and regrouped and the Battle of Port Royal begun; it ended soon thereafter in a decisive Union victory.

The victory was phyrric as the Navy captured the Southern ambassadors off the coast of Cuba and took them off an English vessel, sparking an international crisis.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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The Great Escape

The trials and tribulations of one Private John Wesley Pierson of the Seventh Iowa Infantry who took part in the Battle of Belmont, Missouri in November 1861, and who, when his regiment withdrew to transports along the Mississippi River, got left behind.


John Wesley Pierson, circa 1862


Map of the battlefield near Belmont, Mo.

After the transports left, Pierson surrendered and he and fellow soldiers were transported to Tennessee where they were incarcerated in the Memphis Medical College. When it came time to abandon the College in February 1862, Pierson and two of his comrades hid from the Confederates and escaped. In the middle of March they were recaptured and remained in prison until April 6 when, as a result of the ongoing Battle of Shiloh, the authorities sent him to Corinth, Mississippi. On the day after he arrived in Corinth, hundreds of Union soldiers captured in the Battle of Shiloh were paraded through the town and in his guards' haste to see the captured soldiers, he and a fellow soldier escaped.

They passed the Confederate Army undetected until they came close to Union lines. Posing as a Confederate, he was told by a Confederate doctor to give orders to a lieutenant regarding a wounded officer. They then walked to the Union lines until they came to the 57th Illinois. The next day he was returned to his comrades in the 7th, more than five months after his capture at Belmont.

Pierson declined to re-enlist after his three year term expired in 1864, was mustered out a Corporal and returned to Iowa, where he raised a family.

The full article can be accessed here

 

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Rehearsal for Reconstruction

After the Union fleet had captured Port Royal on November 7, 1861, and the local slave owners and planters abandoned island, thousands of slaves were left behind. Union soldiers, profiteers, government agents and missionaries quickly moved into Port Royal. Some took advantage of the situation for their own gain, but others tried to organize the ex-slaves into self-sustaining citizens to prove that a system of free labor was better than slavery. What began as a Union effort to establish a Southern base for its naval blockade soon became “the Port Royal Experiment,” or, as the historian Willie Lee Rose called it, a “rehearsal for Reconstruction.”


Port Royal, South Carolina, Slave Quarters, April 1862

The legal status of the slaves was unclear as Lincoln didn't want to emancipate them for fear of angering the border states that had remained within the Union. Instead they were treated like contraband in the same way General Benjamin Butler had treated the slaves that escaped to Fort Monroe, Virginia early in the War.

Although many competing groups had ideas as what to do with the slaves -- from trying to prove that free labor was superior to slave labor, to organizing the ex-slaves into self sustaining citizens -- few came to fruition.

However, the ex-slaves and their new Union overseers helped turn Port Royal into a profitable source of cotton, though it was nowhere near as productive as in the antebellum era. For one thing, many of the ex-slaves had no desire to continue picking cotton. Families who were given or bought their own land to cultivate preferred to grow crops for their families. And, after 1863, African-Americans were allowed to serve in the Union Army, and many of Port Royal’s best workers chose to fight. Nevertheless, many successful plantations developed, and the ex-slaves created a tightly knit community that endured into the 20th century.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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Showdown in the Atlantic

November 8, 1861 – Officers from the Union ship San Jacinto board the British mail steamer the Trent and at gunpoint seizes four Confederate passengers headed for England: Commissioners James Mason and John Slidell and their two secretaries. The delegation was on its way to Europe to lobby for support in the South’s goal to be recognized as an independent nation.


A cartoon from Harper’s Weekly showing the arrest of Commissioners Mason and Slidell.

The seizure caused an international incident. In the United States, the action was applauded whereas England, France, Austria and Prussia all branded the raid as illegal. The British government demanded the release of the delegation and an apology.

However, the English government had no desire to go to war with the United States and its official communication was worded as to invite Washington to save face by releasing the prisoners on the grounds that the naval officers had acted without orders. Lincoln was in a quandary: on the one hand, public opinion supported the action and cared little for the niceties of international law. On the other hand, the United States justifiably feared a two-front war against Britain and the Confederacy.

The Lincoln administration finally capitulated and let the delegation go on its way. Yet the acquiescence was only partial: the official response to Britain admitted a technical contravention of international law but maintained that the U.S. captain had essentially been in the right, implying that releasing the prisoners was a goodwill gesture that the Union would have refused had the issue been more significant.

In the end, it was a pyrrhic victory for the South as England cared more about the danger of war with the United States than it ever did about the Confederacy, with which it refused to have official diplomatic relations, even after this incident.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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Sherman's Demons

We know all about William T. Sherman: the conqueror of Atlanta and his famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) March to the Sea. He is loved in some quarters but reviled in others.


General William T. Sherman

However, probably few of us know that on November 9, 1861, Sherman was paralyzed by depression, so much so that he was relieved of command, at his own request. He had what is now called bipolar disorder. He was re-assigned to a different post in St. Louis but his downward spiral did not stop there. His wife, Ellen Sherman, collected him on December 1 for leave back home in Lancaster, Ohio. She began to nurse him back to health with a rest cure. The real cure, though, as in all bipolar illness, is nature: the average mood episode rarely lasts longer than six months before it goes into remission by itself.

By the time he returned to active duty on December 19, his bipolar was bottoming out and Henry Halleck placed him in charge of the training camp in St. Louis. Several weeks later, confident that he was on the mend, Halleck assigned him to Cairo, Illinois to serve as logistical coordinator for Grant, who soon brought him down to the front at Pittsburgh Landing, Tennessee and put him in charge of a division.

During the Battle of Shiloh, Sherman led his men with considerable personal bravery and tactical skill. Following this battle, his spirits soared. He experienced an almost instant internal transformation: from the despairing, self-proclaimed loser in Kentucky to the confident and brilliantly creative commander who would do so much, in word as well as deed, to destroy the Confederacy.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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Been rather delinquent lately so I will just provide capsule summaries of some of the recent postings.

Was Freedom Enough?

When four million Africans Americans were finally free in 1865, they had achieved physical freedom but, aside from that, what had really been achieved? The ex-slaves had freedom but no power to influence their lives, no self sufficiency, no economic freedom. The ex-slaves may have had rights but no power to enforce them. True freedom would take longer to achieve.

The full article may be accessed here.

The Conspiracy at Lick Creek

East Tennesse Unionists plotted to simultaneously burn nine railroad bridges as far away as northeast Alabama on November 8, 1861, effectively severing all rail and telegraph connections between Virginia and the heartland of the Confederacy. They were successful in burning five of the nine bridges. The bridge-burning conspiracy, one of the greatest guerrilla plots of the Civil War, could have been even larger had promised Union support come through.


An illustration from Harper’s Weekly, showing a group of East Tennessee Unionists giving a pledge of allegiance

The full article can be accessed here.

Whistler's Brother

Dr. William McNeill Whistler, scion of a storied Anglo-American military family and brother of the artist James McNeill Whistler, arrived in Richmond, Va., to lobby Confederate leaders for a medical officer’s commission. Initially he failed but in the fall of 1862 Confederate authorities commissioned Dr. Whistler as assistant surgeon and assigned him to duty in the Richmond area. In April 1864, he was assigned as an assistant surgeon to the First South Carolina Rifles, also known as Orr's Rifles. Whistler proved his mettle during the Battle of Spotsylvania and Petersburg. Eventually the rigors of campaigning became too much and in February 1865 departed to London, carrying important dispatches. One week after he delivered them, the South surrendered.

Dr. Whistler never returned to America. He wandered through Europe for about a year, and worked for a time in Paris, where he most likely posed for his carte de visite photograph wearing his Confederate uniform, perhaps for the last time. He eventually settled in London and rose to prominence as a physician and academic.


William McNeill Whistler donned his Confederate uniform for this postwar portrait taken circa 1866 in France by the studio of Paris photographer Étienne Carjat.

The full article can be accessed here.

Lincoln and the Mormons

In 1861, the United States and the government of Deseret, the name by which the country the Mormons had founded in 1847 was known, had an uneasy truce. Although most Americans were thinking North and South, Lincoln, thinking ahead, was looking west; Lincoln needed as many allies as he could find, and both his government and Jefferson Davis’s coveted the west for its minerals and its access to the Pacific. On October 20, 1861, when the final lines of the transcontinental telegraph were strung together, Brigham Young said ",“Utah has not seceded, but is firm for the Constitution and laws of our once happy country.” Those were words guaranteed to warm Lincoln’s heart.

But the question was not resolved and Lincoln, doing what he did best, and he asked the Library of Congress to send him a pile of books about Mormonism, so that he could better understand them. After studying what had been sent he came to a decision and that was to do nothing.

Typically, Lincoln reached his decision through a homely parable, told to a Mormon emissary:

"When I was a boy on the farm in Illinois there was a great deal of timber on the farm which we had to clear away. Occasionally we would come to a log which had fallen down. It was too hard to split, too wet to burn, and too heavy to move, so we plowed around it. You go back and tell Brigham Young that if he will let me alone I will let him alone."


Lincoln in 1863, from a portrait taken by Alexander Gardner

The relationship was never perfect but it endured. In 1869, when the final spike of transcontinental railroad was driven into the ground, that happy act of union took place in Promontory, Utah. Lincoln had authorized that route, way back in 1862.

As the author notes, the fact that Utah is a reliably patriotic part of the United States is "one of the many ways in which, 150 years later, we still live in Abraham Lincoln’s America."

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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The Battle Hymn of John Brown

The story of the writing of the lyrics to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" by Julia Ward Howe. The song would be published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1862 become one of the most memorable patriotic songs of the Civil War.


An Early Lyric Sheet for the Battle Hymn of the Republic

When Abraham Lincoln first heard it, he reportedly cried, then requested an encore.

While the public used “John Brown’s Body” (the musical antecedent to Battle Hymn) to celebrate its namesake in a Unionist framework, Howe’s new hymn underscored God’s role in wartime. Beyond “the stirring tune” of “John Brown’s Body,” the abolitionist’s symbolic power was one of the key attractions for Julia Ward Howe. Brown was already a familiar personality to Howe; her husband Samuel was one of Brown’s “Secret Six”: the wealthy and influential white men who helped fund the attack on Harpers Ferry.


A popular daguerreotype of John Brown, taken by J.B. Heywood

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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Lincoln's Do Nothing Generals

In the early part of the conflict the principal Union generals refused to directly engage the enemy. As the war progressed, the President began to display an understanding of what it would take to win the war, which ran counter to what his generals thought, but would prove to be ultimately correct. This was a remarkable achievement, considering that Lincoln had no military experience to speak of, other than limited experience in the Blackhawk Wars of the early 1830s.

In 1860, military doctrine was still influenced by the work of Antoine-Henri Jomini, a Swiss strategist, who viewed war in precise, almost mathematical terms and believed that an enemy’s territory was the primary objective of an army, not the opposing force. As a result, wars could be won through one large, well-planned battle.


Antoine-Henry Jomini

When McClellan took over the Army, he believed that the war could be won through quick battles and territorial expansion, leaving Southern civilians and property unmolested.

This ran counter to Lincoln's views who made up for what he lacked in experience by soaking up military texts and consulting with Generals Winfield Scott and Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs. From the beginning, Lincoln viewed every military decision through the single objective of defeating the rebellion and uniting the nation. Probably the clearest expression of Lincoln’s views came in a letter to Buell and Halleck as he prodded the generals to move: “I state my general idea of this war to be, that we have the greater numbers … that we must fail unless we can find some way of making our advantage an overmatch for his; and that this can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points at the same time.”

Lincoln's views resembled those of Clausewitz that the best way to meet the objective of taking over countries and overthrowing governments was to destroy the an enemy's army.

Lincoln recognized that his armies had to drectly engage the enemy's armies repeatedly, and ignore the alluring prize of rebel cities in favor of seizing strategic points like railroad hubs and lines of communication.

In the end he acted as the general-in-chief until he found men like Grant and Sherman who shared his strategic vision.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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I don't normally read too many of the comments that go with each New York Times entry but having looked at some of them regarding "Lincoln's Do Nothing Generals" (including one referring to Lincoln and Stanton as two inexperienced lawyers who didn't know what they were doing), I recommend giving the readers' comments a look, if you're so inclined :smile2:

 

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Beyond 'Glory'

A look at the role of black men fighting for the Union pre-Emancipation. Since the Revolution the role of African Americans soldiers had been a source of controversy. They had fought in the United States' previous wars, distinguishing themselves in the War of 1812, for instance. They had also fought on the side of the British; they had been recruited to fight in exchange for their freedom during the Revolutionary War. This offer was repeated during the War of 1812.

These memories fueled the rhetoric of antebellum Southern politicians that all black-West Indian regiments were poised to invade the Southern coast. Northern Republican leaders were very gun shy of charges by the Democrats that the War would be one to further black equality.

Blacks had attempted to enlist when the Civil War started but had generally been turned away. However, some did manage to join. At first some of these African American soldiers, such as George E. Stewart, the son of a former slave exiled from Virginia after the Nat Turner Rebellion in 1831, had negative opinions of their white comrades. But as the Army marched into the South, there came a remarkable change, foretelling the war’s course: Stewart reported for the black newspaper the Anglo-African that “Union troops … have opened up avenues of free intercourse between Northern and Southern black men [which] compels us to admit their invasion of Southern Soil to be grand and beneficent.”


Unidentified black soldier dressed in Zouave uniform

Stewart's observations point to the war’s political effects in radicalizing a generation of “Union men,” whose votes saved Lincoln’s re-election in 1864 and propelled Radical Republicanism after the war, making citizens of the freedmen through the 14th Amendment and enfranchising them with the 15th.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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Lincoln's P.R. Coup

In 1861, Lincoln, in response to several Congressional resolutions calling for the release of “all correspondence with the English, French, Spanish, and other Governments with reference to the right of blockade, privateering, and the recognition of the so-called confederate States,” released documents that gave a detailed look into the daily operations of the United States' foreign policy and set a precedent that is still followed today.

The White House released the material to the public as well and was widely published in newspapers, where it received glowing reviews. Americans could see how the Union defended its interests in countries large and small, near and far.

Releasing the papers demonstrated an early attempt at government openness.

Interestingly, the State Department since that day has continued to publis edited collections of foreign affairs documentation. The release of the volume in 1861 set a landmark democratic precedent: that the American government must, on a regular basis, keep the public informed about its foreign policy operations. Just another contribution by Lincoln that still reverberates today.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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The State of the Union

December 3, 1861. President Lincoln delivers what today we would call a State of the Union message. However, there were notable differences. The speech was not delivered in person but read to the Congress by a clerk. Progress was summarized at the end of the year rather than at the beginning. It reported dutifully on the year that had just passed which was noteworth in that it was one of the worst years in American history.


President Lincoln, May 1861

Aside from the usual litany of things that we have come to expect from such a speech, the speech was notable in that it answered the "President's Message" of the rebellious states, by reflecting on a variety of subjects, such as the dignity of labor, a remembrance of Lincoln's poverty and that the Union was fighting for a "vast future." The comments on labor were notable for reflecting Lincoln's views on that the rewards for a man's labors should be his own and not anybody else's:

"Many independent men everywhere in these States, a few years back in their lives, were hired laborers. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just, and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way to all — gives hope to all, and consequent energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty — none less inclined to take, or touch, aught which they have not honestly earned."

The full article can be accessed here.