Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

Southern backwoods and the working-class slum. “On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”34

But Lincoln dared not push that conviction, or the war, to the point of making it an outright assault on slavery. For one thing (as he repeatedly acknowledged), he had no constitutional authority to emancipate anyone’s slaves; if he tried, the attempt would be at once appealed to the federal courts, and the final desk the appeal would arrive upon would be that of Roger B. Taney, who was still the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and frankly unsympathetic to Lincoln and to emancipation.35 Even more to the point, Lincoln believed that if the abolition of slavery became a federal war issue, the white Southern nonslaveholders (whom Lincoln still looked upon as closet Unionists) would be backed into an irreversible racial alliance with the planters, in which nonslaveholding whites would defend the slaveholders in order to prevent being put on an equal plane with freed blacks. This situation would, he feared, make them resolve to fight to the finish, resulting in a long, bloody, and expensive war. Lincoln also had to remember that there were still four slave states—Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland—that had not seceded from the Union. Any attempt on his part to expand the war to include the abolition of slavery would drive these border states straight into the Confederacy and render the war unwinnable under any strategic circumstances.

This, then, was why Lincoln had taken such pains in his inaugural address in March to disassociate the federal government from any suggestion that the preservation of the Union would lead to the abolition of slavery. “Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States, that by the accession of a Republican Administration, their property, and their peace, and personal security, are to be endangered,” Lincoln calmly observed. They need not worry, he assured the country, for “the property, peace and security of no section are to be in anywise endangered by the now incoming Administration.” Four months later, addressing the July emergency session of Congress, Lincoln again strained to reassure the South that his aim in going to war was only to restore the Union, not to interfere with slavery in the Southern states. “Lest there be some uneasiness in the minds of candid men, as to what is to be the course of the government, towards the Southern States, after the rebellion shall have been suppressed, the Executive deems it proper to say… that he probably will have no different understanding of the powers, and duties of the federal government, relatively to the rights of the States, and the people, under the Constitution, than that expressed in the inaugural address.”36 Southern states who wanted to rethink their secession ordinances would thus find a bridge back into the Union still standing, and border states that still suspected the intentions of the Republican president would have a reassuring incentive not to join the Confederacy.

George McClellan, as both general in chief of all the Union armies and the commander of the Army of the Potomac, had no argument with Lincoln’s conception of the war’s purposes. He was relieved to find that “the president is perfectly honest & is really sound on the nigger question.” Born and raised in comfortable circumstances in Philadelphia, and a Douglas Democrat by conviction and habit, McClellan genuinely disliked slavery, but without feeling the slightest desire to free African Americans. “When I think of some of the features of slavery I cannot help shuddering,” he wrote to his wife in November 1861, and he vowed that “when the day of adjustment comes I will, if successful, throw my sword into the scale to force an improvement in the condition of those poor blacks.”

McClellan looked only for a day of adjustment, not a day of judgment; for “improvement,” not freedom. He scorned the secessionists and the abolitionists in equal parts, and promised his wife that “I will not fight for the abolitionists.” He begged his fellow Democrat Samuel Barlow to “help me to dodge the nigger—we want nothing to do with him. I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union & power of the Govt” and “on no other issue.”37 On those grounds, McClellan was happy to agree with the president that the purpose of waging war was to nudge the Confederacy back into the Union, not to punish the South, seize its property, or subjugate its people.

To that end, McClellan proposed to incorporate most of the features of Scott’s passive Anaconda Plan into his own strategic initiative. First, McClellan authorized a combined army-navy operation that would secure critical locations along the Atlantic seaboard of the Confederacy. On November 7, 1861, Captain Samuel F. Du Pont steamed into Port Royal Sound, fifty miles south of Charleston, landed a small contingent of Federal soldiers, and cleared the islands of Hilton Head, Port Royal, and St. Helena of Confederates. Two months later, a Federal force of 15,000 men under a Rhode Island inventor, manufacturer, and railroad man named Ambrose E. Burnside landed on Roanoke Island in Hatteras Sound and easily drove off a scattering of Confederate defenders. In April, another naval expedition bombarded Fort Pulaski, at the mouth of the Savannah River, into submission.38

In five months’ time, Federal naval and land forces controlled virtually all of the Atlantic coastline between Savannah and Norfolk, except for Charleston harbor and Wilmington, on the estuary of North Carolina’s Cape Fear River. At the same time, McClellan also authorized Major General Don Carlos Buell, now commanding McClellan’s old Department of the Ohio, to march a small Federal army of 45,000 men through Kentucky and into eastern Tennessee, where (it was assumed) loyal Tennesseans