Upon the Altar of the Nation (34 page)

In like fashion, the African American bishop Daniel A. Payne wrote a note for the
Weekly Anglo-African
questioning “the opinions of the government [that] are based upon the ideas, that white men and colored men cannot live together as equals in the same country.”
¹³
To a person the delegation made plain that they were, after all, fully and equally American—a fact that Lincoln’s buoyant but racist nationalism could not embrace. An angry editorial in
The Liberator
castigated Lincoln’s words and behavior at the August meeting: “What could be more undeserved, or what more insulting, than the remark of President Lincoln to the committee whom he was addressing, ‘But for your race among us, there could not be a war... it is better for us both therefore, to be separated.’ ”
¹⁴

 

If the Emancipation Proclamation did not render Lincoln the “Great Emancipator” in any immediate sense, what was his motive? Emancipation legitimated—and promoted—an escalation of the war on the battlefields and the Southern home fronts like no other action could do. Just as Southern secession cannot be understood without understanding its symbiotic connection to slavery, neither can Lincoln’s Northern Emancipation Proclamation be understood without understanding its symbiotic connection to a commitment to total war as the only means to preserve the Union. In moral terms, Lincoln repeatedly made it quite clear that he did not need emancipation to fight a just defensive war.
¹⁵
But in practical terms, emancipation was necessary as a means to total war.

When Democrats (and some Republicans) accused Lincoln of shifting a war for Union into a war for abolition, Lincoln denied the charge, but then, in a telling concession, explained that emancipation was his “lever” for a total war that would engage freed black soldiers. The war, Lincoln explained, was not “for the sole purpose of abolition. It is ... for the sole purpose of restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done.”
¹⁶

However much his Republican citizens clamored for Confederate blood and civilian suffering, Lincoln did not easily come to total war. It was he, after all, who would have to answer for it both to history and to God. But decide he did, and in terms far harsher than the “Christian civilization” McClellan argued for in his Harrison’s Landing letter.

On this issue, Lincoln would differ significantly from the Republican theologian Charles Hodge. In Hodge’s widely circulated moral reflection on the war, he turned from questions of just cause
( jus
ad
bellum)
to just conduct
( jus in hello),
and here he remained a West Point Christian. From credible sources, Hodge had learned “that men and women [in the North], professing to be Christians, have been so demoralized or demented by passion, as to maintain that it would be just to visit the South with the fate of the Canaanites.” That would be wrong, Hodge asserted, a “sin, a violation of the law of God, for our government to disregard any of the established laws and usages of modern warfare in its efforts to suppress the rebellion.”

In time of civilized war, wrote Hodge, “the lives of non-combatants [must] be regarded as sacred.” Besides protecting the lives of noncombatants, “it is one of the humane regulations of modern warfare that private property is entitled to protection. Robbery or marauding, on the part of soldiers, is punishable with death.” Hodge conceded that sometimes food for men and horses must be taken in enemy territory, but that was a far cry from “the doctrine that the private property of non-combatants is a lawful prize in war.”
¹⁷

Lincoln did not agree with Hodge nor with McClellan and the Democratic Party, which was even more adamant on limiting the scope and conduct of the war. His sense of just means was considerably wider and grew more so with every passing battle. But unlike Hodge’s vengeful countrymen, his motives were more pragmatic and “prudential” than blood revenge.
¹⁸
Almost alone among his American contemporaries, Lincoln evidenced an almost otherworldly capacity to prescribe hard actions “with malice towards none.

 

Lincoln’s strategy worked nearly perfectly. Far more than the Confiscation Act, Lincoln’s proclamation encouraged black enlistments in the army and freed all slaves in secessionist states, those of secessionists and loyalists alike. And with emancipation, a policy of total war enjoyed an unprecedented moral stature, allowing the Northern public to fasten on the “good” of emancipation without ever inquiring into the “bad” of unjust conduct in a total war.
¹⁹
From the very inception of the war, Northern clergy had focused their moral commentary on the sin of slavery to the virtual exclusion of all other moral considerations—including
jus in hello
and (with prominent exceptions) Northern racism. Emancipation merely reinforced their unrestrained cheers and unacknowledged silences. On the subject of slavery and emancipation, the clergy insisted loudly through all media that it was their right and moral obligation to “preach politics” in a cause so just that the world would be transformed. On the subjects of
jus
in
bello
and total war, they retreated to the “spirituality” of the church and said nothing.
²⁰

A group of “Contrabands” (former slaves) standing outside a shanty. Many would go on to work actively for the Union both on the battlefront and behind the scenes.

Behind this moral silence, which featured the clergy but also included intellectuals and artists, lay a disturbing fact. The war was steadily becoming its own end. Daily battlefield accounts, graphic in detail, accompanied by lithographs, music, art, drama, and, after Antietam, photography, instilled an irrational, but insatiable, fascination with war that fed off its own energy. Many Northerners recognized a revolution brought on by the Emancipation Proclamation that highlighted emancipation as the true cause of the war and its intended effect. That revolution, from military campaign to moral “crusade,” meant new limits would be implemented in the execution of the war.

For their part, the Confederates were more than prepared to respond in kind. Nobody could avoid the subject of war as a focus crowding into all aspects of life, religious no less than social. This obsession had its roots less in moral introspection than in sheer preoccupation with battles and destruction.

Emancipation put to final rest any thoughts of a negotiated peace by which the South would be permitted to leave the Union or, conversely, to return with slaves and existing leaders intact. As long as Lincoln and the Republican Party were in power, the Union would stand and slavery be put on notice. With slavery—not Union—as the focal point, commentators could accept the escalation of war virtually without restraint.

 

From the issuance of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on, Americans in the North and the South would not look back to restrained codes or charity. Total war, with emancipation as the inner accelerator, meant articulating a war ethic in which civilian suffering could be presumed and morally justified. By the spring of 1863 Lincoln’s legal scholar, Francis Lieber, would complete a rationale for total war that would stand as a new American foreign poliCy.
²¹
If enough attention could be paid to emancipation, however minimal the actuality might be, no one would ask hard questions about the moral implications of either a turn to total war or enduring white supremacy. The slippery slope began.

Northern thanksgiving sermons happily endorsed the new terms of war. In his thanksgiving “discourse” denouncing Northern racism, Moses Smith also picked up the Bushnellian theme of a Christian (Puritan) America. Despite pretensions to being a “Christian nation,” the Lincoln government “[has] resounded with sneers against any law higher than the Constitution.... [O]ur honored President, with all his praise-worthy efforts for the oppressed, and with all his appeals to praying people for God’s direction and assistance, not so much as recognizes the idea, that God and righteousness have anything to do with the deliverance of 4,000,000 bondsmen.” But happily, Smith concluded, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation set the nation on a reforming course and established that “our nation is not forsaken.” With that proclamation, victory could be assured.
²²

Philadelphia Presbyterian Albert Barnes agreed with Smith. It was not enough to restore the Constitution: “I believe that mistakes were made in framing that constitution... there are evils contained in the constitution which it is possible still to remedy and remove.”
²³
Chief of these evils was, of course, slavery, and if coercive emancipation was the only way to change the Constitution, then, Barnes concluded, so be it.

In the Dutch Reformed Church of Stapleton, New York, Thomas H. Skinner undertook to examine the nation “from the stand-point of Eternal Providence,” and, in effect, speak for God’s global intentions in the war. Clearly God was only on the side of the North, and the South was “simply demonic.”
²⁴
America, Skinner concluded, and not Christ’s return to earth, would lead the world into millennial glory.

In such nationalistic millennialism, the historian James Moorhead discerns a “dangerous substrate” that identifies Providence with “the idealistic conception of American destiny.” Such identification minimizes moral restraints or adherence to international standards of war common to all civilized nations. Instead, it can legitimate excesses and raw terrorism. By linking emancipation and the “crusade” against slavery to total war and a “crusade” against the Confederacy, Lincoln’s administration watered the seeds of an American-led Christian imperialism that was not without costs in later American history.
²⁵

 

On December 1, 1862, President Lincoln delivered his State of the Union message to the Thirty-seventh Congress. The news for the Union was good. Europe remained out of the war and refused to recognize the Confederacy. Despite the enormous costs of war, Federal receipts were satisfactory and “the public credit has been fully maintained.” Bloody Indian wars might be avoided through forced relocation of warring tribes. If colonization would not work with African Americans, forced relocation and confinement on Federal “reservations” would, Lincoln asserted, work for Native Americans.
²⁶
Most important, a way eventually to abolish slavery was found.

With the moral good of emancipation on the floor, Lincoln turned to national ends. Questions of just conduct and habeas corpus were not raised. “Honor” would be invoked, but not the honor of the West Point Code. Only emancipation was referenced as the tag for a stirring conclusion that would introduce phrases for an American scripture:

Total war was regrettable, but not as regrettable as sacrificing the world’s last best hope. When white Unionists in New Orleans protested Union policies of emancipating slaves in occupied territories, Lincoln responded: “I am a patient man—always willing to forgive on the Christian terms of repentance; and also to give ample time for repentance. Still, I must save the government if possible.... [And] it may as well be understood, once for all, that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed.”
²⁸
Soon enough all would learn that Lincoln meant exactly what he said.

L
incoln’s decision to wage total war meant that he was prepared to obliterate prior rules and that, in turn, meant that more and more attention inevitably had to be given over to the question of noncombatant immunity. Lincoln’s executive order permitting commanders “to seize and use any property, real or personal” that would further the war effort, issued on July 22, 1862, together with General Orders Nos. 5,7, II, and 13, allowed the Army of the Potomac to “subsist upon the country.” The army could also hold rebel civilians responsible for attacks on army personnel in their region. Any civilian who refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the United States—in essence every white Southerner—would be liable to be turned out of their homes and sent within rebel lines.