XXIII From Roanoke Island to Chattanooga 1862-1863 (LETTERS 1254 TO 1387) IN MID-JANUARY 1862 Secretary of War Simon Cameron, against whose appoint­ ment to the Cabinet Bryant had warned the President a year before, was dis­ missed from office after revelations of great waste and corruption in provision­ ing the army, to be succeeded by Edwin M. Stanton. Governmental finances were at that time virtually crippled through the refusal of Eastern banks to make specie payments, which caused Treasury notes to be sharply discounted. In the crisis, Treasury Secretary Chase yielded to congressional pressure by accepting a bill empowering the administration to print unsupported currency, or "Green­ backs," by designating them as legal tender. Bryant protested strongly and repeatedly against this measure, in editorials and in letters to Lincoln and Chase. "Desperate remedies should be left for desperate circumstances," he argued in an open letter to the President; he thought no such stringency existed. "We are," he wrote, "the richest nation in the world in proportion to our population." Our great wealth could easily bear taxes to support the war. The unlimited issue of paper money would destroy government credit and force the North to "patch up an ignominious peace." Further, subject to ruthless speculation it must depreciate rapidly, with the bur­ den of rising prices bearing most heavily on the old, the sick, and the poor. To John Murray Forbes, who begged him to intensify his struggle against "financial folly," he replied, "probably you do not know that I am covered all over with the scars received in the battle fought twenty years ago for specie payments .... ""\Ve gained the victory and I had hoped it was a victory for my day at least. To be obliged to go into the battle again, to be forced to do all the work over a sec­ ond time, fills me with intense disgust-and is exceedingly discouraging." Nonetheless, he pressed on. We must pay as we go, he insisted, not through increased tariffs and excise taxes such as Congress had ineffectively levied, but by laying a charge on all legal and business transactions. What could not be realized from taxes should be raised through long-term bond issues, which he was sure would be patriotically subscribed. He pleaded with Charles Sumner and other members of Congress to oppose the legal tender clause, but in vain. Chase wrote him that, though the bill was as "repugnant" to him as to Bryant, "as a temporary measure, it is indispensably necessary." The law was passed, and Bryant's urgent appeal to Lincoln to veto it was fruitless. His position was soon vindicated, for the flow of Greenbacks reached nearly half a billion, with prices soaring until only thirty-nine dollars in specie bought one hundred in currency. The year 1862 saw a marked shift in Bryant's opposition to slavery, from his earlier argument that freedom for slaves would probably result from military 242 LETTERS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT exigencies, to direct advocacy of emancipation as a moral and human impera­ tive. After Lincoln had made a futile proposal that slaves in the Border Stares be freed by their masters, with compensation from federal funds, a plan which radical Senator Thaddeus Stevens called a "diluted, milk-and-water gruel prop­ osition," Bryant assumed the presidency of a newly-formed Emancipation League in New York. Soon after, he presided over a mass meeting at Cooper Union, introducing as the main speaker martyred Elijah Lovejoy's brother Owen, an Abolitionist Illinois congressman, who wrote him afterward that it was "highly gratifying ... that you should give the influence of your name and fame to the cause of emancipation." On the day Lincoln first read a draft of his proposed Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet, Bryant made a fervent plea in the Evening Post for the abolition of slavery, and soon afterward sup­ ported the demand of Robert Dale Owen for immediate emancipation. Many cautious anti-slavery voices suggested that freedom should be granted only gradually, so as not to alienate loyal slaveholders or upset the economies of Border States. To Bryant, such a plan was intolerable. Lincoln's proclama­ tion, taking effect on January 1, r863, freed slaves only in states then in rebel­ lion against the national government. It was essentially a war measure which, as Secretary Seward put it, "emancipated slaves where it could not reach them, and left them in bondage where it could have set them free." The measure was necessarily one of gradual application, effective only as Union forces occupied rebel territory. And Lincoln explicitly stated his support of gradualism. But his policy was unacceptable to anti-slavery leaders. At a meeting in support of Missouri loyalists who had come east to protest harassment by southern sympa­ thizers, Bryant aimed his sharpest scorn at the gradualists who controlled that state. "Gradual emancipation!," he exclaimed; "there is no grosser delusion ever entertained by man." Reversing an illustration Lincoln had cited to ex­ plain why gradual emancipation would be the better course in Missouri-his story of the man who would die if a tumor on his neck were removed in a single operation, but would live if a surgeon "tinkered it off by degrees"-Bryant countered, "My friends, if a child of yours were to fall in the fire would you pull him out gradually? If he were to swallow a dose of laudanum sufficient to cause speedy death, and a stomach pump were at hand, would you draw the poison by degrees? If your house were on fire, would you put it out gradually? ... Slavery is a foul and monstrous idol, a Juggernaut under which thousands are crushed to death .... Must we consent that the number of the victims shall be gradually diminished? If there are a thousand victims this year, are you willing that nine hundred should be sacrificed next year, and eight hundred the next, and so on until after the lapse of ten years it shall cease? No, my friends, let us hurl this grim image from its pedestal. ... Dash it to fragments; trample it in the dust." A few days later Senator Sumner wrote, "Y[ou]r words for Immediate Emanci­ pation thrilled me; there is the true ring in them. I doubt if ever the case has been stated so strongly in so few words." After successful naval operations against southern ports early in 1862, Bryant was for a time confident that the Union cause was gaining ascendancy. As the months passed, and General McClellan's inexplicable delays in maneu­ vering his Army of the Potomac in the vicinity of the South's capital culminated in June in a series of bloody and indecisive battles, Bryant's patience, like that Roanoke Island to Chattanooga 243 of many citizens and soldiers alike, was tested beyond restraint. In April he warned against the "Dangers of Delay." A few weeks later he compared un­ favorably the inaction of McClellan's massive and well-drilled forces with Gen­ eral Grant's decisive action in capturing Fort Donelson in Tennessee, despite the mud and his raw troops. He had no tolerance for the popular belief that the capture of Richmond would strike a heavy blow against the Confederacy. He thought McClellan's incompetence might defeat the federal cause. Behind distrust of field generalship was his growing conviction that the administration was derelict in its direction of strategy, if not incapable of ap­ plying it wisely. Whereas in February he had told the President "You are now winning great credit by a wise direction of our armies," by July he wondered if much of the trouble was not due to Lincoln's indecision, and a "certain tone of languor and want of earnestness" in his administration, caused by his over­ reliance on subordinates. On August 7, at the urging of other impatient New Yorkers, Bryant went to Washington for a talk with the President, during which he warned that many of his associates felt the Union cause might be "drifting to ruin if instant and powerful means were not applied to give things a new direction." In September, on the eve of the crucial battle at Antietam, Mary­ land, while conceding that Lincoln was "honest, devoted, and determined," he felt that "a large part of the nation is utterly discouraged and despondent," suspicious that "treachery lurks in the highest quarters." This, he thought, had "grown out of the weakness and vacillation of the Administration, which itself has grown out of Mr. Lincoln's own want of decision and purpose." Addressing the President personally the next month, and speaking for the "friends of the administration and the country in this quarter," he reported them "distressed and alarmed at the inactivity of our armies," and uncertain "whether the ad­ ministration sincerely desires the speedy annihilation of the rebel forces." If the present policy persists, he concluded, "the Union in our view is lost, and we shall resign ourselves to the melancholy conviction that the ruin of our republic is written down in the decrees of God." Sharp as were Bryant's strictures, they were mild by comparison with those of some of his Republican friends. One of these urged him, as among "the first & best men of the nation," to make clear to Lincoln the need for firm action to save free government from the "horrible corruption and abominable stupidity in high places," which was "paralyzing the strength of the army." Another, his­ torian George Bancroft, called the President "ignorant, self-willed," and "sur­ rounded by men some of whom are almost as ignorant as himself." Though Bryant's judgments on military operations were scoffed at by jour­ nalistic opponents, among them his former employee Manton Marble, now editor of the southern-sympathizing New York World, he had access to sources of information from the front lines which were probably better than those of any other influential editor.