Page:Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography (1892, volume 3).djvu/757

Rh til the Army of the Potomac could arrive and be concentrated to support him. McClellan's move- ments, however, were so deliberate, and there was such a want of confidence and co-operation on the Sart of his officers toward Gen. Pope, that the rational army met with a decisive defeat on the same battle-field of Bull Run that saw their first disaster. Gen. Pope, disheartened by the lack of sympathy and support that he discerned among the most eminent officers of the Army of the Potomac, retreated upon Washington, and Gen. McClellan, who seemed to be the only officer under whom the army was at the moment willing to serve, was placed in command of it. Gen. Lee, elated with his success, crossed the Potomac, but was met by the army under McClellan at South Mountain and Antietam, and after two days of great slaughter Lee retreated into Virginia.

President Lincoln availed himself of this occasion to give effect to a resolve that had long been maturing in his mind in an act the most momentous in its significance and results that the century has witnessed. For a year and a half he had been subjected to urgent solicitations from the two great political parties of the country, the one side ap- pealing to him to take decided measures against slavery, and the other imploring him to pursue a conservative course in regard to that institution. His deep-rooted detestation of the system of domes- tic servitude was no secret to any one ; but his rev- erence for the law, his regard for vested interests, and his anxiety to do nothing that should alienate any considerable body of the supporters of the government, had thus far induced him to pursue a middle course between the two extremes. Mean- while the power of events had compelled a steady progress in the direction of emancipation. So early as August, 1861, congress had passed an act to confiscate the rights of slave-owners in slaves em- ployed in a manner hostile to the Union, and Gen. Fremont had seized the occasion of the passage of this act to issue an order to confiscate and eman- cipate the slaves of rebels in the state of Missouri. President Lincoln, unwilling, in a matter of such transcendent importance, to leave the initiative to any subordinate, revoked this order, and directed Gen. Fremont to modify it so that it should con- form to the confiscation act of congress. This ex- cited violent opposition to the president among the radical anti-slavery men in Missouri and elsewhere. while it drew upon him the scarcely less embar- rassing importunities of the conservatives, who wished him to take still more decided ground against the radicals. On 6 March, 1862, he sent a special message to congress inclosing a resolution, the passage of which he recommended, to offer pe- cuniary aid from the general government to states that should adopt the gradual abolishment of slavery. This resolution was promptly passed by congress ; but in none of the slave-states was pub- lic sentiment sufficiently advanced to permit them to avail themselves of it. The next month, how- ever, congress passed a law emancipating slaves in the District of Columbia, with compensation to owners, and President Lincoln had the happiness of affixing his signature to a measure that he had many years before, while a representative from Illi- nois, fruitlessly urged upon the notice of congress. As the war went on, wherever the National armies penetrated there was a constant stream of fugitive slaves from the adjoining regions, and the com- manders of each department treated the compli- cated questions arising from this body of " contra- bands, as they came to be called, in their camps, according to their own judgment of the necessities or the expediencies of each case, a discretion which the president thought best to tolerate. But on 9 May, 1862, Gen. David Hunter, an intimate and esteemed friend of Mr. Lincoln's, saw proper, with- out consultation with him, to issue a military or- der declaring all persons theretofore held as slaves in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina forever free. The president, as soon as he received this order, issued a proclamation declaring it void, and reserving to himself the decision of the question whether it was competent for him, as commander- in-chief of the army and navy, to declare the slaves of any state or states free, and whether at any time or in any case it should have become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the govern- ment to exercise such supposed power, and prohib- iting to commanders in the field the decision of such questions. But he added in his proclamation a significant warning and appeal to the slave-hold- ing states, urging once more upon them the policy of emancipation by state action. " I do not argue, he said ; " I beseech you to make the argument for yourselves. You cannot, if you would, be blind to the signs of the times. I beg of you a calm and enlarged consideration of them, ranging, if it may be, far above personal and partisan politics. This proposal makes common cause for a common ob- ject, casting no reproaches upon any. . . . Will you not embrace it f So much good has not been done, by one effort, in all past time, as in the providence of God it is now your high privilege to do. May the vast future not have cause to la- ment that you have neglected it." He had several times endeavored to bring this proposition before the members of congress from the loyal slave-hold- ing states, and on 12 July he invited them to meet him at the executive mansion, and submitted to them a powerful and urgent appeal to induce their states to adopt the policy of compensated emancipation. He told them, without reproach or complaint, that he believed that if they had all voted for the resolution in the gradual emancipa- tion message of the preceding March, the wai would now have been substantially ended, and that the plan therein proposed was still one of the most potent and swift means of ending it. " Let the states," he said, "which are in rebellion see definitely and certainly that in no event will the states you represent ever join their proposed con- federacy, and they cannot much longer maintain the contest." While urging this policy upon the conservatives, and while resolved in his own mind upon emancipation by decree as a last resource, he was the subject of vehement attacks from the more radical anti-slavery supporters of the gov- ernment, to which he replied with unfailing mod- eration and good temper. Although in July he had resolved upon his course, and had read to his cabinet a draft of a proclamation of emancipation which he had then laid aside for a more fitting oc- casion (on the suggestion from Mr. Seward that its issue in the disastrous condition of our military affairs would be interpreted as a sign of despera- tion), he met the reproaches of the radical Repub- licans, the entreaties of visiting delegations, and the persuasions of his eager friends with argu- ments showing both sides of the question of which they persisted in seeing only one. To Horace Greeley, on 22 Aug., Mr. Lincoln said: "My para- mount 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." And