Campfire and battlefield

The range known as the South Mountain, which is a continuation of the Blue Ridge north of the Potomac, is about a thousand feet high. The two principal gaps are Turner's and Crampton's, each about four hundred feet high, with the hills towering six hundred feet above it.

When McClellan learned the plans of the Confederate commander, he set his army in motion to thwart them. He ordered Franklin's corps to pass through Crampton's Gap and press on to relieve Harper's Ferry; the corps of Reno and Hooker, under command of Burnside, he moved to Turner's Gap. The movement was quick for McClellan, but not quite quick enough for the emergency. He might have passed through the Gaps on the 13th with little or no opposition, and would then have had his whole army between Lee's divided forces, and could hardly have failed to defeat them disastrously and perhaps conclusively. But he did not arrive at the passes till the morning of the 14th; and by that time Lee had learned of his movement and recalled Hill and Longstreet, from Boonsborough and beyond, to defend Turner's Gap, while he ordered McLaws to look out for Crampton's.

Turner's Gap was flanked by two old roads that crossed the mountain a mile north and south of it; and using these, and scrambling up from rock to rock, the National troops worked their way slowly to the crests, opposed at every step by the Confederate riflemen behind the trees and ledges. Reno assaulted the southern crest, and Hooker the northern, while Gibbon's brigade gradually pushed along up the turnpike into the Gap itself. Reno was opposed by the Confederate brigade of Garland, and both these commanders were killed. There was stubborn and bloody fighting all day, with the Union forces slowly but constantly gaining ground, and at dark the field was won. The Confederates withdrew during the night, and in the morning the victorious columns passed through to the western side of the mountain. This battle cost McClellan fifteen hundred men, killed or wounded. Among the wounded was the lieutenant-colonel in command of the Twenty-third Ohio regiment—Rutherford B. Hayes, afterward President—who was struck in the arm by a rifle-ball. The Confederate loss in killed and wounded was about fifteen hundred, and in addition fifteen hundred were made prisoners. The fight at Crampton's Gap—to defend which McLaws had sent back a part of his force from Harper's Ferry—was quite similar to that at Turner's, and had a similar result. Franklin reached the crests after a fight of three hours, losing five hundred and thirty-two men, inflicting an equal loss upon the enemy, and capturing four hundred prisoners, one gun, and three battle-flags. These two actions (fought September 14, 1862) are generally designated as the battle of South Mountain, but are sometimes called the battle of Boonsborough. In that the enemy was driven away, the ground held, and the passes used, it was a victory, and a brilliant one, for McClellan. But in that Lee, by delaying the advance of his enemy a whole day, thereby gained time to bring together his own scattered forces, it was strategically a victory, though a costly one, for him. But then again it might be argued that if Lee could have kept the four thousand good troops that McClellan deprived him of at South Mountain, it might have fared better with him in the struggle at Antietam three days later.

When Lee retired his left wing from Turner's Gap, he withdrew across the Antietam, and took up a position on high ground between that stream and the village of Sharpsburg. His right, under McLaws, after detaining Franklin till Harper's Ferry was surrendered, crossed the Potomac at that place, recrossed it at Shepherdstown, and came promptly into position. Lee now had his army together and strongly posted. But it had been so reduced by losses in battle and straggling, that it numbered but little over forty thousand combatants. The effect upon the army itself of invading a rich country with troops so poorly supplied had probably not been anticipated. Lee complained bitterly that his army was "ruined by straggling," and General Hill wrote in his report: "Had all our stragglers been up, McClellan's army would have been completely crushed or annihilated. Thousands of thievish poltroons had kept away from sheer cowardice." General Hill, in his anger, probably overestimates the effect; for McClellan had somewhat over seventy thousand men, and though he used but little more than half of them in his attacks, there is no reason to suppose he would not have used them all in a defence. The men that Lee did have, however, were those exclusively that had been able to stand the hard marching and resist the temptation to straggle, and were consequently the flower of his army; and they now awaited, in a chosen position, a battle that they knew would be decisive of the campaign, if not of the war.

The ground occupied by the Confederate army, with one flank resting of the Potomac, and the other on the Antietam, which flowed in front, was advantageous. The creek was crossed by four stone bridges and a ford, and all except the northernmost bridge were strongly guarded. The land was occupied by meadows, cornfields, and patches of forest, and was much broken by outcropping ledges. McClellan only reconnoitred the position on the 15th. On the 16th he developed his plan of attack, which was simply to throw his right wing across the Antietam by the upper and unguarded bridge, assail the Confederate left, and when this had sufficiently engaged the enemy's attention and drawn his strength to that flank, to force the bridges and cross with his left and centre. Indeed, this was obviously almost the only practicable plan. All day long an artillery duel was kept up, in which, as General Hill says, the Confederate batteries proved no match for their opponents. It was late in the afternoon when Hooker's corps crossed by the upper bridge, advanced through the woods, and struck the left flank, which was held by two brigades of Hood's men. Scarcely more than a skirmish ensued, when darkness came on, and the lines rested for the night where they were. If Lee could have been in any doubt before, he was now told plainly what was to be the form of the contest, and he had all night to make his dispositions for it. The only change he thought it necessary to make was to put Jackson's fresh troops in the position on his left. Before morning McClellan sent Mansfield's corps across the Antietam to join Hooker, and had Sumner's in readiness to follow at an early hour. Meanwhile, all but two thousand of Lee's forces had come up. So the 17th of September dawned in that peaceful little corner of the world with everything in readiness for a great struggle in which there could be no surprises, and which was to be scarcely anything more than wounds for wounds and death for death.

In the vicinity of the little Dunker church, the road running northward from Sharpsburg to Hagerstown was bordered on both sides by woods, and in these woods the battle began when Hooker assaulted Jackson at sunrise. There was hard fighting for an hour, during which Jackson's lines were not only heavily pressed by Hooker in front, but at length enfiladed by a fire from the batteries on the eastern side of the Antietam. This broke them and drove them back; but when Hooker attempted to advance his lines far enough to hold the road and seize the woods west of it, he in turn was met by fresh masses of troops and a heavy artillery fire, and was checked. Mansfield's corps was moving up to his support when its commander was mortally wounded. Nevertheless it moved on, got a position in the woods west of the road, and held it, though at heavy cost. At this moment General Hooker was seriously wounded and borne from the field, while Sumner crossed the stream and came up with his corps. His men drove back the defeated divisions of the enemy without much difficulty, and occupied the ground around the church. His whole line was advancing to apparent victory, when two fresh divisions were brought over from the Confederate right, and were immediately thrust into a wide gap in Sumner's line. Sedgwick, whose division formed the right of the line, was thus flanked on his left, and was easily driven back out of the woods, across the clearing, and into the eastern woods, after which the Confederates retired to their own position. Fighting of this sort went on all the forenoon, one of the episodes being a race between the Fifth New Hampshire Regiment and a Confederate force for a commanding point of ground, the two marching in parallel lines and firing at each other as they went along. The New Hampshire men got there first, and, assisted by the Eighty-first Pennsylvania Regiment, from that eminence threw a destructive fire into the ranks of the regiment they had out-run. The fighting around the Dunker church was so fierce, and so much artillery fire was concentrated upon that spot, that when the woods were cut down, years afterward, and the logs sent to a saw-mill, the saws were completely torn to pieces by the metal that had penetrated the wood and been overgrown.

A short distance south and east of the Dunker church there was a slightly sunken road which crossed the Confederate line at one point and was parallel with it for a certain distance at other points. A strong Confederate force was posted in this sunken road, and when the National troops approached it there was destructive work on both sides; but the heaviest loss here fell upon the Confederates, because some batteries on the high ground east of the Antietam enfiladed portions of the road. This sunken road, which was henceforth called Bloody Lane, has made some confusion in many accounts of the battle, which is explained by the fact that it is not a straight road, but is made up of several parts running at different angles.

While this great struggle was in progress on McClellan's right, his centre and left, under Porter and Burnside, did not make any movement to assist. Porter's inaction is explained by the fact that his troops were kept as the reserves, which McClellan refused to send forward even when portions of his line were most urgently calling for assistance. He and Porter agreed in clinging to the idea that the reserves must under no circumstances be pushed forward to take part in the actual battle. This conduct was in marked contrast to that of the Confederate commander, who in this action had no reserves whatever.

At noon Franklin arrived from Crampton's Gap, and was sent over to help Hooker and Sumner, being just in time to check a new advance by more troops brought over from the Confederate right.

At seven o'clock in the morning Burnside was ordered to have his corps in readiness for carrying the bridge in his front, crossing the stream, and attacking the Confederate right, which order he promptly obeyed. An hour later the order for this movement was issued by McClellan, but it did not reach Burnside till nine o'clock. The task before him was more difficult than his commander realized or than would be supposed from most descriptions of the action. The bridge is of stone, having three arches, with low stone parapets, and not very wide. On the eastern side of the stream, where Burnside's corps was, the land is comparatively low. The road that crosses the bridge, when it reaches the western bank has to turn immediately at a right angle and run nearly parallel with the stream, because the land there is high and overhangs it. As a matter of course, the bridge was commanded by Confederate guns advantageously placed on the heights. The problem before Burnside was therefore exceedingly difficult, and the achievement expected of him certain in any case to be costly. The task of first crossing the bridge fell upon Crook's brigade, which moved forward, mistook its way, and struck the stream some distance above the bridge, where it immediately found itself under a heavy fire. Then the Second Maryland and Sixth New Hampshire regiments were ordered to charge at the double quick and carry the bridge. But the fire that swept it was more than they could stand, and they were obliged to retire unsuccessful. Then another attempt was made by a new storming party, consisting of the Fifty-first New York and Fifty-first Pennsylvania regiments, led by Col. Robert B. Potter and Col. John F. Hartranft. By this time two heavy guns had been got into position where they could play upon the Confederates who defended the bridge, and with this protection and assistance the two regiments just named succeeded in crossing it and driving away the immediate opposing force, and were immediately followed by Sturgis's division and Crook's brigade. The fighting at the bridge cost Burnside about five hundred men. The Fifty-first New York lost eighty-seven, and the Fifty-first Pennsylvania one hundred and twenty. At the same time other troops crossed by a ford below the bridge, which had to be searched for, but was at length found. These operations occupied four hours, being completed about one o'clock P.M. Could they have been accomplished in an hour or two, the destruction or capture of Lee's army must have resulted. But by the time that Burnside had crossed the stream, captured a battery, and occupied the heights overlooking Sharpsburg, the fighting on McClellan's right was over. This left Lee at liberty to strengthen his imperilled right by bringing troops across the short interior line from his left, which he promptly did. At the same time the last division of his forces (A. P. Hill's), two thousand strong, arrived from Harper's Ferry; and these fresh men, together with those brought over from the left, assumed the offensive, drove Burnside from the crest, and retook the battery.

Here ended the battle; not because the day was closed or any apparent victory had been achieved, but because both sides had been so severely punished that neither was inclined to resume the fight. Every man of Lee's force had been actively engaged, but not more than two-thirds of McClellan's. The reason why the Confederate army was not annihilated or captured must be plain to any intelligent reader. It was not because Lee, with his army divided for three days in presence of his enemy, had not invited destruction; nor because the seventy thousand, acting in concert, could not have overwhelmed the forty thousand even when they were united. It was not for any lack of courage, or men, or arms, or opportunity, or daylight. It was simply because the attack was made in driblets, instead of by heavy masses on both wings simultaneously; so that at any point of actual contact Lee was almost always able to present as strong a force as that which assailed him. In a letter written to General Franklin the evening before the battle of South Mountain, General McClellan, having then received the lost despatch that revealed Lee's plans and situation, set forth with much particularity his purposes for the next few days, and summed up by saying: "My general idea is to cut the enemy in two and beat him in detail." No plan could have been better or more scientific; but curiously enough, when it came to actual battle General McClellan's conduct was the exact opposite of this. By unnecessary and unaccountable delays he first gave the enemy time to concentrate his forces, and then made his attacks piecemeal, so that the enemy could fight him in detail.

Whatever had been the straggling on the march, none of the commanders complained of any flinching after the fight began. They saw veterans taking, relinquishing, and retaking ground that was soaked with blood and covered with dead; and they saw green regiments "go to their graves like beds." There had been a call for more troops by the National Administration after the battles on the peninsula, which was responded to with the greatest alacrity, men of all classes rushing to the recruiting-offices to enroll themselves. It was a common thing for a regiment of a thousand men to be raised, equipped, and sent to the front in two or three weeks. Some of those new regiments were suddenly introduced to the realities of war at Antietam, and suffered frightfully. For example, the Sixteenth Connecticut, which there fired its muskets for the first time, went in with 940 men, and lost 432. On the other side, Lawton's Confederate brigade went in with 1,150 men, and lost 554, including five out of its six regimental commanders, while Hays's lost 323 out of 550, including every regimental commander and all the staff officers. An officer of the Fiftieth Georgia Regiment said in a published letter: "The Fiftieth were posted in a narrow path, washed out into a regular gully, and were fired into by the enemy from the front, rear, and left flank. The men stood their ground nobly, returning their fire until nearly two-thirds of their number lay dead or wounded in that lane. Out of 210 carried into the fight, over 125 were killed and wounded in less than twenty minutes. The slaughter was horrible! When ordered to retreat, I could hardly extricate myself from the dead and wounded around me. A man could have walked from the head of our line to the foot on their bodies. The survivors of the regiment retreated very orderly back to where General Anderson's brigade rested. The brigade suffered terribly. James's South Carolina battalion was nearly annihilated. The Fiftieth Georgia lost nearly all their commissioned officers." The First South Carolina Regiment, which went into the fight with 106 men, had but fifteen men and one officer when it was over. A Confederate battery, being largely disabled by the work of sharp-shooters, was worked for a time, at the crisis of the fight, by General Longstreet and members of his staff acting as gunners. Three generals on each side were killed. Those on the National side were Generals Joseph K. Mansfield, Israel B. Richardson, and Isaac P. Rodman; those on the Confederate side were Generals George B. Anderson, L. O'B. Branch, and William E. Starke. The wounded generals included on the one side Hooker, Sedgwick, Dana, Crawford, and Meagher; on the other side, R. H. Anderson, Wright, Lawton, Armistead, Ripley, Ransom, Rhodes, Gregg, and Toombs.

General McClellan reported his entire loss at 12,469, of whom 2,010 were killed. General Lee reported his total loss in the Maryland battles as 1,567 killed and 8,724 wounded, saying nothing of the missing; but the figures given by his division commanders foot up 1,842 killed, 9,399 wounded, and 2,292 missing—total, 13,533. If McClellan's report is correct, even this statement falls short of the truth. He says: "About 2,700 of the enemy's dead were counted and buried upon the battlefield of Antietam. A portion of their dead had been previously buried by the enemy." If the wounded were in the usual proportion, this would indicate Confederate casualties to the extent of at least 15,000 on that field alone. But whatever the exact number may have been, the battle was bloody enough to produce mourning and lamentation from Maine to Louisiana. It was the bloodiest day's work of the whole war. The battles of Shiloh, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, the Wilderness, and Spottsylvania were each more costly, but none of them was fought in a single day.

Nothing was done on the 18th, and when McClellan determined to renew the attack on the 19th he found that his enemy had withdrawn from the field and crossed to Virginia by the ford at Shepherdstown. The National commander reported the capture of more than six thousand prisoners, thirteen guns, and thirty-nine battle-flags, and that he had not lost a gun or a color. As he was also in possession of the field, where the enemy left all their dead and two thousand of their wounded, and had rendered Lee's invasion fruitless of anything but the prisoners carried off from Harper's Ferry, the victory was his.

The war had now (September, 1862) been in progress almost a year and a half; and nearly twenty thousand men had been shot dead on the battlefield, and upward of eighty thousand wounded, while an unknown number had died of disease contracted in the service, or been carried away into captivity. The money that had been spent by the United States Government alone amounted to about one billion dollars. All this time there was not an intelligent man in the country but knew the cause of the war, and yet more than a hundred thousand American citizens were killed or mangled before a single blow was delivered directly at that cause. General Frémont had aimed at it; General Hunter had aimed at it; but in each case the arm was struck up by the Administration. One would naturally suppose, from the thoroughness with which the slavery question had been discussed for thirty years, that when the time came for action there would be little doubt or hesitation on either side. On the Confederate side there was neither doubt nor hesitation. On the National side there was both doubt and hesitation, and it took a long time to arrive at a determination to destroy slavery in order to preserve the Union. The old habit of compromise and conciliation half paralyzed the arm of war, and thousands of well-meaning citizens were unable to comprehend the fact that we were dealing with a question that it was useless to compromise and a force that it was impossible to conciliate.

Mr. Lincoln had hated slavery ever since, when a young man, he made a trip on a flat-boat to New Orleans, and there saw it in some of its more hideous aspects. That he realized its nature and force as an organized institution and a power in politics, appears from one of his celebrated speeches, delivered in 1858, wherein he declared that as a house divided against itself cannot stand, so our Government could not endure permanently half slave and half free. "Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South." Why, then, hating slavery personally, and understanding it politically, and knowing it to be the cause of the war, did he not sooner declare it abolished?

On the one hand, he was not, like some of our chief magistrates, under the impression that he had been placed in office to carry out irresponsibly a personal policy of his own; and, on the other, he was shrewd enough to know that it would be as futile for a President to place himself far in advance of his people on a great question, as for a general to precede his troops on the battlefield. Hence he turned over and over, and presented again and again, the idea that the war might be stopped and the question settled by paying for the slaves and liberating them. It looked like a very simple calculation to figure out the cost of purchased emancipation and compare it with the probable cost of the war. The comparison seemed to present an unanswerable argument, and in the end the money cost of the war was more than one thousand dollars for every slave emancipated, while in the most profitable days of the institution the blacks, young and old together, had not been worth half that price. The fallacy of the argument lay in its blindness to the fact that the Confederates were not fighting to retain possession of their actual slaves, but to perpetuate the institution itself. The unthrift of slavery as an economic system had been many times demonstrated, notably in Helper's "Impending Crisis," but these demonstrations, instead of inducing the slaveholders to seek to get rid of it on the best attainable terms, appeared only to excite their anger. And it ought to have been seen that a proud people with arms in their hands, either flushed with victory or confident in their own prowess, no matter where their real interests may lie, can never be reasoned with except through the syllogisms of lead and steel. Perhaps Mr. Lincoln did know it, but was waiting for his people to find it out.

The Louisville (Ky.) Courier, in a paragraph quoted on page 63 of this volume, had told a great deal of bitter and shameful truth; but when it entered upon the prophecy that the North would soon resume the yoke of the slaveholders, it was not so happy. And yet it had strong grounds for its confident prediction. Not only had a great Peace Convention been held in February, 1861, which strove to prevent secession by offering new guaranties for the protection of slavery, but the chief anxiety of a large number of Northern citizens and officers in the military service appeared to be to manifest their desire that the institution should not be harmed.

The most eminent of the Federal generals, McClellan, when he first took the field in West Virginia, issued a proclamation to the Unionists, in which he said: "Notwithstanding all that has been said by the traitors to induce you to believe our advent among you will be signalized by an interference with your slaves, understand one thing clearly: not only will we abstain from all such interference, but we will, on the contrary, with an iron hand crush any attempt at insurrection on their part." In pursuance of this, he returned to their owners all slaves that escaped and sought refuge within his lines. It was an every-day occurrence for slaveholders who were in active rebellion against the Government that he was serving, to come into his camps under flag of truce and demand and receive their runaway slaves. The Hutchinsons, a family of popular singers, by permission of the Secretary of War, visited his camp in the winter of 1861-62, to sing to the soldiers. But when the general found them singing some stanzas of Whittier's that spoke of slavery as a curse to be abolished, he forthwith issued an order that their pass should be revoked and they should not sing any more to the troops. And even after his retreat on the peninsula, McClellan wrote a long letter of advice to the President, in the course of which he said: "Neither confiscation of property ... nor forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.... Military power should not be allowed to interfere with the relations of servitude, either by supporting or impairing the authority of the master, except for repressing disorder."

In all this General McClellan was only clinging blindly and tenaciously to the idea that had underlain the whole administration of the government while it was in the hands of his party: that the perpetuation of slavery, whether against political opposition or against the growth of civilization and the logic of political economy, was the first purpose of the Constitution and the most imperative duty of the Government. Democratic politicians had never formulated this rule, but Democratic Presidents had always followed it. President Polk had obeyed it when with one hand he secured the slave State of Texas at the cost of the Mexican War, and with the other relinquished to Great Britain the portion of Oregon north of the forty-ninth parallel, but for which we should now possess every harbor on the Pacific coast. President Pierce had obeyed it when he sent troops to Kansas to assist the invaders from Missouri and overawe the free-State settlers. President Buchanan had obeyed it when he vetoed the Homestead Bill, which would have accelerated the development of the northern Territories into States. And innumerable other instances might be cited. The existence of this party in the North was the most serious embarrassment with which the Administration had to contend in the conduct of the war—not even excepting the border States. As individuals, its members were undoubtedly loyal to the Constitution and Government as they understood them, though they wofully misunderstood them. As a party, it was placed in a singular dilemma. It did not want the Union dissolved; for without the vote of the slave States it would be in a hopeless minority in Congress and at every Presidential election; but neither did it wish to see its strongest cohesive element overthrown, or its natural leaders defeated and exiled. What it wanted was "the Union as it was," and for this it continued to clamor long after it had become as plain as daylight that the Union as it was could never again exist. Whenever the National armies met with a reverse, if an election was pending, this party was the gainer thereby; if they won a victory, it became weaker. Whenever a new measure was proposed, Congress and the President were obliged to consider not only what would be its legitimate effect, but whether in any way the Democratic press could use it as a weapon against them. Hence the idea of emancipation, though not altogether slow in conception—for many of the ablest minds had leaped at it from the beginning—was tardy in execution.

As early as 1836 John Quincy Adams, speaking in Congress, had said: "From the instant that your slaveholding States become the theatre of war, from that instant the war-powers of the Constitution extend to interference with the institution of slavery in every way in which it can be interfered with." And in 1842 he had expressed the idea more strongly and fully: "Whether the war be civil, servile, or foreign, I lay this down as the law of nations—I say that the military authority takes for the time the place of all municipal institutions, slavery among the rest. Under that state of things, so far from its being true that the States where slavery exists have the exclusive management of the subject, not only the President of the United States, but the commander of the army has power to order the universal emancipation of the slaves." The poets, wiser than the politicians, had long foretold the great struggle and its results. James Russell Lowell, before he was thirty years of age, wrote:

Twenty years later he saw his prediction fulfilled. But generally the anticipation was that the institution would be extinguished through a general rising of the slaves themselves. Thus Henry W. Longfellow wrote in 1841:

It seems a singular fact that throughout the war there was no insurrection of the slaves. They were all anxious enough for liberty, and ran away from bondage whenever they could; but, except by regular enlistment in the National army, there never was any movement among them to assist in the emancipation of their race.

The first refusal to return fugitive slaves was made as early as May 26, 1861, by Gen. B. F. Butler, commanding at Fort Monroe. Three slaves, who had belonged to Colonel Mallory, commanding the Confederate forces near Hampton, came within Butler's lines that day, saying they had run away because they were about to be sent South. Colonel Mallory sent by flag of truce to claim their rendition under the Fugitive Slave Law, but was informed by General Butler, that, as slaves could be made very useful to a belligerent in working on fortifications and other labor, they were contraband of war, like lead or powder or any other war material, and therefore could not and would not be delivered up. He offered, however, to return these three if Colonel Mallory would come to his headquarters and take an oath to obey the laws of the United States. This declaration—at once a witticism, a correct legal point, and sound common sense—was the first practical blow that was struck at the institution; and it gave us a new word, for from that time fugitive slaves were commonly spoken of as "contrabands." They came into the National camps by thousands, and commanding officers and correspondents frequently questioned the more intelligent of them, in the hope of eliciting valuable information as to the movements of the enemy; but so many apocryphal stories were thus originated that at length "intelligent contraband" became solely a term of derision.

The next step was the passage of a law by Congress (approved August 6, 1861), wherein it was enacted that property, including slaves, actually employed in the service of the rebellion with the knowledge and consent of the owner, should be confiscated, and might be seized by the National forces wherever found. But it cautiously provided that slaves thus confiscated were not to be manumitted at once, but to be held subject to some future decision of the United States courts or action of Congress.

Gen. John C. Frémont, the first Republican candidate for the Presidency (1856), who has had a romantic life, and in whose administration, instead of Lincoln's, the war would have occurred if he had been elected, was in Europe in 1861, and did the Government a timely service in the purchase of arms. Hastening home, he was made a major-general, and given command in Missouri. On the 30th of August he issued a proclamation placing the whole State under martial law, confiscating the property of all citizens who should take up arms against the United States, or assist its enemies by burning bridges, cutting wires, etc., and adding, "their slaves, if any they have, are hereby declared free men." The President called General Frémont's attention to the fact that the clause relating to slaves was not in conformity with the act of Congress, and requested him to modify it; to which Frémont replied by asking for an open order to that effect—in plain words, that the President should modify it himself, which Mr. Lincoln did.

On the 6th of March, 1862, the President, in a special message to Congress, recommended the adoption of a joint resolution to the effect that the United States ought to coöperate with, and render pecuniary aid to, any State that should enter upon a gradual abolition of slavery; and Congress passed such a resolution by a large majority.

Gen. David Hunter, who commanded the National forces on the coast of South Carolina, with headquarters at Hilton Head, issued a general order on April 12, 1862, that all slaves in Fort Pulaski and on Cockspur Island should be confiscated and thenceforth free. On the 9th of May he issued another order, wherein, after mentioning that the three States in his department—Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina—had been declared under martial law, he proceeded to say: "Slavery and martial law, in a free country, are altogether incompatible. The persons in these three States heretofore held as slaves are therefore declared forever free." On the 19th of the same month the President issued a proclamation annulling General Hunter's order, and adding that the question of emancipation was one that he reserved to himself and could not feel justified in leaving to the decision of commanders in the field. General Hunter also organized a regiment of black troops, designated as the First South Carolina Volunteers, which was the first body of negro soldiers mustered into the National service during the war. This proceeding, which now seems the most natural and sensible thing the general could have done, created serious alarm in Congress. A representative from Kentucky introduced a resolution asking for information concerning the "regiment of fugitive slaves," and the Secretary of War referred the inquiry to General Hunter, who promptly answered: "No regiment of fugitive slaves has been or is being organized in this department. There is, however, a fine regiment of persons whose late masters are fugitive rebels, men who everywhere fly before the appearance of the National flag, leaving their servants behind them to shift as best they can for themselves. In the absence of any fugitive-master law, the deserted slaves would be wholly without remedy, had not their crime of treason given the slaves the right to pursue, capture, and bring back these persons of whose protection they have been so suddenly bereft."

Frémont's and Hunter's attempts at emancipation created a great excitement, the Democratic journals declaring that the struggle was being "turned into an abolition war," and many Union men in the border States expressing the gravest apprehensions as to the consequences. The commanders were by no means of one mind on the subject. Gen. Thomas Williams, commanding in the Department of the Gulf, ordered that all fugitive slaves should be expelled from his camps and sent beyond the lines; and Col. Halbert E. Paine, of the Fourth Wisconsin Regiment, who refused to obey the order, on the ground that it was a "violation of law for the purpose of returning fugitives to rebels," was deprived of his command and placed under arrest. Col. Daniel R. Anthony, of the Seventh Kansas Regiment, serving in Tennessee, ordered that men coming in and demanding the privilege of searching for fugitive slaves should be turned out of the camp, and that no officer or soldier in his regiment should engage in the arrest and delivery of fugitives to their masters; and for this Colonel Anthony received from his superior officer the same treatment that had been accorded to Colonel Paine. The division of sentiment ran through the entire army. Soldiers that would rob a granary, or cut down trees, or reduce fences to firewood, without the slightest compunction, still recognized the ancient taboo, and expressed the nicest scruples in regard to property in slaves.

On the 14th of July the President recommended to Congress the passage of a bill for the payment, in United States interest-bearing bonds, to any State that should abolish slavery, of an amount equal to the value of all slaves within its borders according to the census of 1860; and at the same time he asked the Congressional representatives of the border States to use their influence with their constituents to bring about such action in those States. The answer was not very favorable; but Maryland did abolish slavery before the close of the war, in October, 1864. On the very day in which the popular vote of that State decided to adopt a new constitution without slavery, October 12th, died Roger B. Taney, a native of Maryland, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, who had been appointed by the first distinctly pro-slavery President, and from that bench had handed down the Dred-Scott decision, which was calculated to render forever impossible any amelioration of the condition of the negro race.

On July 22, 1862, all the National commanders were ordered to employ as many negroes as could be used advantageously for military and naval purposes, paying them for their labor and keeping a record as to their ownership, "as a basis on which compensation could be made in proper cases."

Thus events were creeping along toward a true statement of the great problem, without which it could never be solved, when Horace Greeley, through the columns of his Tribune, addressed an open letter to the President (August 19), entitling it "The Prayer of Twenty Millions." It exhorted Mr. Lincoln, not to general emancipation, but to such an execution of the existing laws as would free immense numbers of slaves belonging to men in arms against the Government. It was impassioned and powerful; a single passage will show its character: "On the face of this wide earth, Mr. President, there is not one disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union cause who does not feel that all attempts to put down the rebellion, and at the same time uphold its exciting cause, are preposterous and futile; that the rebellion, if crushed out to-morrow, would be renewed within a year if slavery were left in full vigor; that army officers who remain to this day devoted to slavery can at best be but half-way loyal to the Union; and that every hour of deference to slavery is an hour of added and deepened peril to the Union."

Any one less a genius than Mr. Lincoln would have found it difficult to answer Mr. Greeley at all, and his answer was not one in the sense of being a refutation, but it exhibited his view of the question, and is perhaps as fine a piece of literature as was ever penned by any one in an official capacity: "If there be perceptible in it [Mr. Greeley's letter] an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend whose heart I have always supposed to be right.... As to the policy I 'seem to be pursuing,' as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.... My paramount object is to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. I have here stated my purpose according to my views of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free."