Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (158 page)

III

Sensational revelations of copperhead activities in Missouri helped the Republican effort to discredit the opposition as disloyal. Democrats fought back with their tried and true weapon—racism. On this issue the party remained united and consistent. Sixty-five of sixty-eight Democratic congressmen had voted against the 13th Amendment, denying it the necessary two-thirds majority in the House. These congressmen also published a manifesto denouncing the enlistment of black soldiers as a vile Republican scheme to establish "the equality of the black and white races."
²⁵
Democratic opposition forced compromises in a Republican bill to equalize the pay of black and white soldiers. Under the terms of

25
.
CG
, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., 1995; Forrest G. Wood,
Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction
(Berkeley, 1968), 42.

the militia act passed in July 1862, blacks enrolled in the army were regarded as laborers and paid several dollars a month less than white soldiers. A concession to prejudice, this provision was blatantly inconsistent with the combat status of 100,000 black soldiers by 1864. In response to bitter protests by abolitionists and incipient mutiny among black troops, Republicans sponsored a law for retroactive equalization of pay. But a coalition of Democrats who opposed any equalization and conservative Republicans who questioned the retroactive clause prevented passage. To satisfy the latter and enact the bill, Congress made equal pay retroactive only to January 1, 1864—except for blacks who had been free before the war, who received equal pay from date of enlistment.
²⁶

Having gained votes in 1862 by tarring Republicans with the brush of racial equality, Democrats expected to do the same in 1864. The vulgarity of their tactics almost surpasses belief. An editor and a reporter for the
New York World
, McClellan's most powerful newspaper, coined a new word with their anonymous pamphlet
Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races
. Pretending to be Republicans, the authors recommended "miscegenation" as a solution of the race problem. This fusion, the pamphlet declared, would particularly "be of infinite service to the Irish." If the Republicans were re-elected they would prosecute the war to "its final fruit, to the blending of the white and the black." Although the Democratic press tried to pump up this hoax into a serious Republican program, few readers except confirmed copperheads seemed to take it seriously.

Democrats nevertheless exploited the miscegenation issue
ad nauseam
. The Emancipation Proclamation became the Miscegenation Proclamation. A pamphlet entitled
Miscegenation Indorsed by the Republican Party
circulated far and wide. Numerous cartoons showed thick-lipped, grinning, coarse black men kissing apple-cheeked girls "with snow-white bosoms" or dancing with them at the "Miscegenation Ball" to follow Lincoln's re-election. The "Benediction" of a leaflet entitled "Black Republican Prayer" invoked "the blessings of Emancipation throughout our unhappy land" so that "illustrious, sweet-scented Sambo [may] nestle in the bosom of every Abolition woman, that she may be quickened by the pure blood of the majestic African."
²⁷
Campaign pamphlets and

26
. Ira Berlin et al., eds.,
Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation
1861–1867, Series II:
The Black Military Experience
(Cambridge, 1982), 362–405.

27
. Sidney Kaplan, "The Miscegenation Issue in the Election of 1864,"
Journal of Negro History
, 34 (1949), 274–343; Wood,
Black Scare
, 53–76, and reproductions of campaign broadsides between pp. 92 and 93.

newspapers reported that "a great many squint-eyed yellow babies" had been born in New Orleans since Benjamin Butler was there; that New England schoolmarms teaching freedpeople on the South Carolina sea islands had produced numerous mulatto children; and that five thousand mulatto babies had been born in Washington since 1861. This, declared a Democratic pamphlet, was "what the President means by 'Rising to the Occasion.' "
²⁸

"Abraham Africanus the First" was of course the chief target of the tar brush. "Passing the question as to his taint of negro blood," commented a Catholic weekly, "Abe Lincoln . . . is brutal in all his habits. . . . He is obscene. . . . He is an animal. . . . Filthy black niggers, greasy, sweaty, and disgusting, now jostle white people and even ladies everywhere, even at the President's levees."
²⁹
Lincoln was "Abe the Widowmaker" who had sent half a million white men to their graves in this insane war to free the slaves because he "loves his country less, and the negro more." Commenting on petitions to suspend the draft, a Pennsylvania newspaper urged citizens to "go a step further, brethren, and suspend Old Abe—by the neck if necessary to stop the accursed slaughter of our citizens."
³⁰
And a copperhead editor in Wisconsin published a parody of the song "When Johnny Comes Marching Home":

The widow-maker soon must cave,
Hurrah, Hurrah,
We'll plant him in some nigger's grave,
Hurrah, Hurrah.

Torn from your farm, your ship, your raft,
Conscript. How do you like the draft,
And we'll stop that too,
When little Mac takes the helm.
³¹

For all their stridency, Democrats appear to have profited little from the race issue in this election. For most undecided voters, the success

28
. Arnold M. Shankman,
The Pennsylvania Antiwar Movement, 1861–1865
(Rutherford, N.J., 1980), 165; "The Lincoln Catechism," in Frank Freidel, ed.,
Union Pamphlets of the Civil War
(Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 1000–1001.

29
.
New-York Freeman's Journal & Catholic Register
, Aug. 24, April 23, 1864.

30
. Freidel, ed.,
Union Pamphlets
, 983; Shankman,
Pennsylvania Antiwar Movement
, 192.

31
. Jean H. Baker,
Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in theMid-Nineteenth Century
(Ithaca, 1983), 40.

or failure of the war was more salient than the possibility of blacks marrying their sisters. Republicans were far more successful in pinning the label of traitor on Democrats than the latter were in pinning the label of miscegenationist on Republicans. If anything, racism may have boomeranged against the Democrats this time, for after Sherman's and Sheridan's victories many northern voters began to congratulate themselves on the selflessness of their sacrifices in this glorious war for Union
and
freedom.

On one issue tangentially linked to racial policy—the prisoners of war issue—the Democrats undoubtedly suffered a backlash, for northerners embittered by the condition of Union soldiers in southern prisons were not likely to favor a party stereotyped as pro-southern. The Democratic platform contained a plank condemning the administration's "shameful disregard" of "our fellow-citizens who now are, and long have been, prisoners of war in a suffering condition."
³²
When this plank was written, the overcrowding and shocking circumstances at Andersonville in particular had already become notorious. The anger evoked by this situation opens a window on one of the most emotional issues of the war.

The relatively few prisoners captured in 1861 imposed no great strain on either side. Obsolete forts, converted warehouses, county jails, and other existing buildings proved sufficient to hold prisoners while they awaited the informal exchanges that occasionally took place. Field commanders sometimes paroled captives or worked out local exchanges on the spot after a skirmish. Not wishing the burden of feeding prisoners, the Confederacy pressed for a formal exchange cartel. The Lincoln administration was reluctant to grant the official recognition that such a cartel might imply. After the fighting from Fort Donelson to the Seven Days' poured thousands of prisoners into inadequate facilities, however, the administration succumbed to growing northern pressure for regularized exchanges. Taking care to negotiate with a belligerent
army
, not government, the Union army accepted an exchange cartel on July 22, 1862. Specifying a rank weighting whereby a non-commissioned officer was equal to two privates, a lieutenant to four, and so on up to a commanding general who was worth sixty privates, this cartel specified a man-for-man exchange of all prisoners. The excess held by one side or another were to be released on parole (that is, they promised not to take up arms until formally exchanged). For ten months this arrangement

32
. Edward McPherson,
The Political History of the United States during the Great Rebellion
, 2nd ed. (Washington, 1865), 420.

worked well enough to empty the prisons except for captives too sick or wounded to travel.
³³

But two matters brought exchanges to a halt during 1863. First was the northern response to the southern threat to reenslave or execute captured black soldiers and their officers. When the Confederate Congress in May 1863 authorized this policy, which Jefferson Davis had announced four months earlier, the Union War Department suspended the cartel in order to hold southern prisoners as hostages against fulfillment of the threat. A trickle of informal exchanges continued, but the big battles in the second half of 1863 soon filled makeshift prisons with thousands of men. Grant averted an even greater problem by paroling the 30,000 Vicksburg captives; Banks followed suit with the 7,000 captured at Port Hudson. But the South's handling of these parolees provoked a second and clinching breakdown in exchange negotiations. Alleging technical irregularities in their paroles, the Confederacy arbitrarily declared many of them exchanged (without any real exchange taking place) and returned them to duty. Grant was outraged when the Union army recaptured some of these men at Chattanooga.
³⁴

Attempts to renew the cartel foundered on the southern refusal to treat freedmen soldiers as prisoners of war or to admit culpability in the case of the Vicksburg parolees. "The enlistment of our slaves is a barbarity," declared the head of the Confederate Bureau of War. "No people . . . could tolerate . . . the use of savages [against them]. . . . We cannot on any principle allow that
our property
can acquire adverse rights by virtue of a theft of it." By the end of 1863 the Confederacy expressed a willingness to exchange black captives whom it considered to have been legally free when they enlisted.
³⁵
But the South would "die in the last ditch," said the Confederate exchange commissioner, before "giving up the right to send slaves back to slavery as property recaptured." Very well, responded Union Secretary of War Stanton. The 26,000 rebel captives in northern prisons could stay there. For the Union government to accede to Confederate conditions would be "a

33
. William B. Hesseltine,
Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology
(Columbus, Ohio, 1930),
chaps. 1
–
5
.

34
.
Ibid.
, 99–113;
O.R.
, Ser. II, Vols. 5 and 6.

35
. Edward Younger, ed.,
Inside the Confederate Government: The Diary of Robert Garlick Hill Kean
(New York, 1957), 92–93; Benjamin F. Butler to Kellogg Carter, Nov. 29, 1863, Civil War Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library; Dudley Taylor Cornish,
The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–186;
(New York, 1956), 171.

shameful dishonor. . . . When [the rebels] agree to exchange all alike there will be no difficulty."
³⁶
After becoming general in chief, Grant confirmed this hard line. "No distinction whatever will be made in the exchange between white and colored prisoners," he ordered on April 17, 1864. And there must be "released to us a sufficient number of officers and men as were captured and paroled at Vicksburg and Port Hudson. . . . Non-acquiescence by the Confederate authorities in both or either of these propositions will be regarded as a refusal on their part to agree to the further exchange of prisoners."
³⁷
Confederate authorities did not acquiesce.