Northern War Aims - Emancipation
Slavery was said by some to be the cause of the rebellion only in the same sense in which it may be affirmed that cotton and sugar are the cause of it, or that Southern character, habits, climate, and social life were the sources out of which it has sprung. The agitations of the slave question were only ostensibly the motives to rebellion. They were the means made use of to give pretext and consistency to the scheme. With the unthinking or excitable masses of the South, these agitations were the principal incentives to revolt. They furnished them a ready argument, and made the threat of breaking up the Union familiar to the Southern mind, and, to a Certain extent, popular.
Secessionists and abolitionists, in the ultra phases of their respective demands, were in full accord as to the ultimate remedy of the grievances they imagined themselves to suffer. It was curious to see how, in ascending the gamut of their opposite extravagances, the two parties kept pace with each other on the scale of which the highest note on each side was disunion. Both North and South were, at the beginning, in harmony in admitting slavery to be a social evil which was to be considerately dealt with, and abandoned when that could be done without injury to existing interests.
From this point Southern enthusiasts diverged in one direction, Northern in another. With one, slavery rose to be asserted successively as a harmless utility, as a blessing, a divine institution, and, finally, as "the cornerstone rejected by the builders," upon which a new dynasty was to be constructed, and our old cherished Union to be dashed into fragments. With the other, always comparatively few and insignificant in point of numbers and influence it is true, slavery, passing through equal grades, was declared to be a disgrace; a great national sin; a special curse of Heaven, and, at last, a stigma that made the Union "a covenant of hell:" which, therefore, should be shattered to atoms to give place to another order of polity.
Lincoln at first ignored calls for emancipation, to ensure that the key Border States stayed in the Union. General Grant's first significant campaign victories in Tennessee ensured that both Kentucky and Tennessee remained in the Union from 1862 on. General JFC Fuller estimated the retention of Tennessee alone deprived the Confederates of at least 100,000 troops.
The dilemma for Lincoln was how to prevent tactical realities from over-running national strategic objectives and threatening national support for the only unambiguous national objective, restoration of the Union. His second challenge was how to make Northerners who wanted only to restore the Union and did not understand the military necessity or want to fight for the elimination of slavery, understand that, tactically, doing so could potentially lessen the need for their military service. It was a two-step hard sell at best, as the ensuing draft riots showed. As Lincoln became convinced of the military necessity for a comprehensive policy for emancipation, his last consideration was how to deliver such a document for best effect. Timing was crucial. It had to be issued during a period of military successes. In no way could the document's delivery be construed as a measure of desperation. It also had to be perceived as an additional war aim, supplementing the restoration the Union, not supplanting it.
In late 1862 Lincoln's second step was the threat of emancipation to lure rebellious states back into the Union peacefully. This failed because General Lee's string of victories in summer of 1862 left the Confederate government with no reason to negotiate, especially when the Congress passed the 1st Confiscation Act and the May 1862 Emancipation Resolution. Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act on 17 July 1862, which freed the slaves held by people in rebellion against the Union. The act served as a catalyst and revealed growing public support for action.
In July 1862, President Lincoln presented a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabmet. With their general approval he waited patiently for a Union vlctorv so he could proclaim emancipation after a momentous event. General McClellan's "victory" at Antietam in September 1862 provided the opportunity and the President used the occasion to issue the proclamation. The battle of Antietam provided Lincoln with an opportune moment to add this goal and make the crucial linkage between tactical realities and strategic objectives.
The Emancipation Proclamation was issued by Lincoln on September 22, 1862 as an executive order in his capacity as the Commander-in-Chief on the grounds of military necessity and consistency. It was essentially a warning order to the states of the Confederacy that if they remained in a state of rebellion after January 1, 1863, the Union would declare their slaves liberated and pursue all means to accomplish that objective. The document, though, said nothing about the status of slaves in the border states or the lands of the Confederacy that already had fallen under Union control. It also did not specify what exactly was to be done with the thousands of slaves who, upon hearing the news, proceeded to flock to Union lines in even greater numbers, at times ironically hindering Union military operations.
Finally, during the nearly 100 days between the draft proclamation and its formal signing on January 1, 1863, he tried to use emancipation as a tool to bring the conflict to an end. In his December 1, 1862 Annual Address to Congress, Lincoln proposed an extended emanclpatlon which would cover thirty-seven years and be completed by the end of the century. This farled to gain a response and the final Emancipation Proclamation was signed 31 days later.
In Europe, the nobility initially sympathized with the Confederates, but thought it not prudent to help them when the working classes expressed strong support for the proclamation, eventually ending any hope of European intervention on behalf of the Confederacy. The proclamation seized the moral high ground from the Confederacy. The Confederates were merely the defenders of property rights. The Union now had a higher moral mission to free a clearly oppressed people.
While advancing Union troops allowed the inhabitants to exit their dwellings, Sherman’s soldiers were soon to refer to the Southern towns they passed as “Chimneyvilles.” By 1864 the Union had embarked on what its leaders termed the “hard war.” Sherman encapsulated the approach that Union armies would take in the last years of the war in a letter to the assistant adjutant general of the Department of Tennessee: "The government of the United States has in North Alabama any and all rights which they choose to enforce in war—to take their lives [those of the inhabitants], their lands, their everything—because they cannot deny that war exists there, and war is simply power unconstrained by constitution or compact. If they want eternal war, well and good; we accept the issue and will dispossess them and [put] our friends in their place…. To those who submit to the rightful law and authority all gentleness and forbearance but to the petulant and persistent secessionist, why, death is mercy and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better. [Satan] and the rebellious saints of Heaven were allowed a continuous existence in hell merely to swell their just punishment."
Grant’s orders to Sheridan, as to how the latter should treat the Shenandoah Valley, were simply to render the area “a barren waste... so that crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their provender with them.”
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