08Agust 2010
AUGUST PROGRAM
On Wednesday August 18 at 7:30 pm the SDCWRT will hold its 288th meeting at Palisades Presbyterian Church, 6301 Birchwood St., San Diego, CA 92120.
This month’s speaker will be one of our own members, Barbara Hemmingsen.
Over the last 149 years a great deal of attention has been paid to the Civil War Battles in the Eastern Theater. But we now recognize, thanks to the efforts of Pedro Garcia and others, that Union victories in the Western Theater and along the Mississippi river were equally, if not more, important in the ultimate outcome of this dreadful conflict.
Battle of Chickamauga
Barbara Bruff Hemmingsen’s great, great grandfather, Joseph Bruff, participated in all of the major battles and campaigns in 1863-1864 (Chickamauga, GA; Chattanooga, TN; March to Atlanta and Battle for Atlanta, GA; Franklin, TN; and Nashville, TN). He left behind numerous letters describing the activities of the Army of the Cumberland and of the 125th Ohio Volunteer Infantry of which he was an officer. Drawing on these letters, and the accounts of various historians, Barbara will describe in separate lectures each of these battles or campaigns that ultimately brought the states between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River back into the Union and freed the slaves. She will start with the Battle of Chickamauga, Sept. 1863, the only Union defeat in the series.
Also don’t forget we will be voting on the Best Presentation of the Year at this meeting.
July 2010 Meeting
By Travis Fuqua
In our first meeting out-of-doors, on July 21, 2010, the SDCWRT was honored to have guest speaker, Larry Tagg return to present: “The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln” Part 2. Mr. Tagg presented last year on the subject of President Lincoln and he was returned for a second lecture by popular demand. This time, Mr. Tagg focused on the Emancipation Proclamation and the process by which Lincoln came to view emancipation as a necessary action.
The Emancipation Proclamation has traditionally been seen as the point when the Civil War expanded beyond the restoration of the Union to the abolition of slavery, but this is not necessarily true. Rather, many in the North were not eager for emancipation at the time Lincoln announced it. When the war began, it was universally understood that it was solely for the preservation of the Union with Lincoln himself saying that the war was not at all revolutionary, but conservative in the sense that the Union was to be conserved. At the time, the United States and her democracy were still an experiment and hitherto, popular government had ended in failure as it did with the Greeks and Romans, and even by the mid-nineteenth century, many felt the United States would eventually meet the same end.
When General John Frémont emancipated the slaves in Missouri in August of 1861, Lincoln feared the move would push Missouri to the Confederacy and ordered Frémont to reverse his decision. When a friend of Lincoln, Orville Browning, told him that he was going against people’s basic freedoms, Lincoln replied by stating that such a proclamation about people’s property amounted to a dictatorship. This was a difficult issue in emancipating the slaves at that time as property was a basic right in the United States being one of her founding principles and one of the reasons this country fought for independence from Great Britain. Thus, while there were innumerable problems with slavery, they were species of property and legally, albeit reprehensibly, protected by one of the most valued principles of the country. The phrase: “life, liberty, and property” by seventeenth century English philosopher John Locke was strong on the minds of everyone and even slavery was included in this phrase by many on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.
It was not until a year in to the war that Lincoln would begin to change his mind about emancipating the slaves. The North had several misfortunes on the battlefield and Lincoln sought a way to re-invigorate the war. Lincoln faced an immense challenge to emancipation not only from the South, but also the North as prejudice there against blacks was almost insufferable at times.
Lincoln began seriously thinking about emancipation during the Peninsular Campaign in July of 1862 while at the telegraph office waiting for reports from the front. Senator Sumner asked Lincoln to make July 4 a day of freedom for all by emancipating the slaves, but Lincoln declined on account that it would drive several states to join the Confederacy. On July 12, Lincoln thought of compensated gradual emancipation of $400 per slave and their deportation back to Africa, but the border states declined this idea. Lincoln began to agonize over the issue. The following day, Lincoln was riding with Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and thus said that emancipating the slaves was a necessity. He announced this to the Cabinet on July 22, but this was a statement and not a debate. William Seward did tell him, however, that he would do best to wait until the North was in a stronger strategic position before issuing such as strong proclamation.
Lincoln thus waited throughout the rest of the summer through more Federal defeats until the victory at Antietam on September 17. On September 22, 1862, President Lincoln read the Emancipation Proclamation to the seven-man Cabinet with mixed results. Edwin Stanton was the most enthusiastic. Attorney General Edward Bates was a supporter only because of the original clause to deport the slaves. Gideon Welles questioned the constitutionality of Lincoln’s actions. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair thought the move would ruin the Republicans at the polls in a couple of months. Secretary of the Interior Caleb Smith resigned in protest in December. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase was in conflict over the issue. William Seward was also conflicted as he wanted to make the proclamation himself and it also ended any hope of compromise of which he was a supporter.
The announcement received various reactions not only in the United States, but even in foreign countries with the London Times commenting on the issue. At home, the Chicago Times said it was usurpation and a disaster. The New York World said Lincoln had gone outside the Constitution. Even abolitionist papers were not in favor of the announcement as they saw it as a cold legal document, which was actually Lincoln’s lawyerly intent as he did not want it to fail in a court of law, rather than the moral one for which they had hoped. In the midterm elections in November, the Republicans suffered heavily. Many accused Lincoln of further dividing the nation and even the moderate Harper’s Weekly went against Lincoln. In the time of the issuing of the statement in September and the document’s actual effective date on January 1, 1863, many did not believe that emancipation would come to pass.
When it did become law on January 1, 1863, the Federal Army was very dissatisfied and there were upwards of 3,000 deserters a month. In the next month, Lincoln found he only had two supporters in the House of Representatives. Had there been an election at that time, Lincoln would not have won. Lincoln, however, was convinced that he was correct in his actions as he has spent the most time brooding over the issue. Lincoln was very slow to make a decision, but once he made one, it was permanent. Some even saw Lincoln as a greater threat to democracy and the Union than the South. No slaves immediately became free and criticism was rampant, but Lincoln remained stoic, perhaps as a testament to his great character.
With the deserters in the Army and some of the border states ceasing recruitment altogether, the North faced a severe personnel problem. Some border states were tempted to leave the Union and perhaps take other dissatisfied states with them. As a result, Congress passed the first conscription laws which later resulted in the Draft Riots of 1863 in New York City which was the worst urban insurrection in the nation’s history. Lincoln also faced a political battle with the Copperheads who wanted to end the war at once.
By the end of 1863, however, the worst was behind Lincoln and the nation began to see emancipation in addition to the restoration of the Union as the only outcomes of the war. The Battle of Gettysburg gave the Union more hope and the continued defeats of the South in the following year and their defeat in 1865 gave Lincoln’s position on emancipation even more strength. Later in the war, after his re-election in 1864 was secure, Lincoln began to work on what would become the Thirteenth Amendment to ensure that his Emancipation Proclamation would become a permanent fixture.
Lincoln’s great reserve and tact during the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation and ensuing crisis were shown by Mr. Tagg to be a statement of how magnificent a man Abraham Lincoln was during the Civil War and America’s greatest crisis.