Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Chapter 1
Mustering In—Federal Policy on
Emancipation and Recruitment
On 12 April 1861, Confederate shore batteries at Charleston opened a two-day
bombardment of Fort Sumter, the federal outpost that commanded the harbor entrance.
The day after the garrison surrendered, President Abraham Lincoln called
on the loyal states to provide seventy-five thousand militia to put down the insurrection;
he promised Unionist or undecided residents of the seven seceded states
that Union armies would take “the utmost care . . . to avoid any . . . interference
with property.” Two days after Lincoln’s call, the Virginia legislature passed an
ordinance of secession, asserting that the federal government had “perverted” its
powers “to the oppression of the Southern slaveholding states.” Americans North
and South knew what kind of “property” the president meant “to avoid . . . interference
with.” 1
Some politicians and journalists were even more forthright. Addressing a secessionist
audience at Savannah in March, the Confederate vice president, Alexander
H. Stephens, called “African slavery . . . the immediate cause” of secession.
The new government’s “foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great
truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to
the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.” Four months later, just after
the Union defeat at Bull Run, a New York Times editorial predicted that the war
would result in the abolition of slavery. Charles Sumner, the senior U.S. senator
from Massachusetts, was equally confident. By prolonging the war, he told his
fellow abolitionist, Wendell Phillips, Bull Run “made the extinction of Slavery
inevitable.” 2
The Army’s senior officer, Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, had been weighing possible
responses to secession even before Lincoln took the oath of office. One course
of action was to assert federal authority by force. To invade the South would require
“300,000 disciplined men,” Scott told Secretary of State Designate William
H. Seward. The old general allowed one-third of this force for guard duty behind
1 The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate
Armies, 70 vols. in 128 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), ser. 3, 1: 68
(“the utmost”); ser. 4, 1: 223 (“perverted”) (hereafter cited as OR).
2 New York Times, 27 March (“African slavery”), and 29 July 1861; Beverly W. Palmer, ed.,
Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, 2 vols. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 2: 70
(“made the extinction”).