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12 The Switch If we are ever to put down the rebellion we cannot afford to refuse any of the means recognized by the usage of civilized warfare. The slave must be armed and sent against his master—our armies must ¤nd subsistence as far as possible at the expense of the enemy . . . [Those] who would do for the best interests of their country without regard to slavery must be put at the head of our columns. . . . The people are ripe for extreme measures. —R. R. Enos, of Spring¤eld, Illinois, to Senator Lyman Trumbull, July 14, 1862 The con®ict that had simmered since the war began, pitting Lincoln’s policy of conciliation against the likes of the widespread and popular demand, echoed in the Chicago Tribune, that the South be rendered “a desolated, blackened country” had come to its boiling point. Now, in July 1862, the point of decision arrived. The army, its ranks being depleted by casualties, disease, and the discharge of many men who should never have been accepted in the ¤rst place, needed a fresh in®ux of new volunteers. McClellan’s resounding and unexpected defeat shocked the country, calling into question all the premises upon which the war was being fought. As signi¤cant as it was, that defeat was but part of the ever-increasing evidence that the people of the South had no desire to be liberated, that instead they had a deeply seeded desire to go their own way. Lincoln needed to quickly and clearly establish a war policy that would inspire con¤dence all across the Union, a new policy by which he could carry on the war to a successful conclusion.1 Responding rather too late to the predictable result of Secretary of War Stanton’s suspension of recruiting in April—a shortage of soldiers in July— Lincoln had on July 1 issued a call for 300,000 new volunteers. He would settle for half that number, he told New York governor Edwin Morgan, “if I could have them now.” They were not forthcoming. Peter Watson, Stanton’s dour and cautious assistant secretary, con¤dentially passed word to the New York Tribune’s Adams Sherman Hill on June 22 and again on July 14: “As to enlistments, he says they are very slow—slower in the West than in the East.” In fact, during July the state of Illinois managed to raise and muster only two regiments. The problem became obvious to the interested general public. “Recruiting is dull,” wrote the New York Union League’s George Templeton Strong in mid-July, re®ecting on a massive rally calculated to liven it up in his city of New York.2 Nothing ¤gured more drastically in the inability to recruit than McClellan ’s defeat at the gates of Richmond. The euphoria of 1861 had long since evaporated into the reality of war as men endured it. In the spring of 1862 there had been a universal hope that a few swift victories would quickly end the war. Even a pragmatist like Ulysses Grant thought so as he took Forts Henry and Donelson.3 However, rather than melting away after their defeats, the rebels had staged their massive counterattack at Shiloh. When the rebel army at Richmond succeeded in driving McClellan’s host back down the James Peninsula, all prospect of an early victory vanished. Then, as the rebel armies launched offensives that drove the Union armies out of Virginia and most of Tennessee, the possibility of victory at any foreseeable time dimmed as well.4 It was time for the Union to regroup, to harness new weaponry, to adopt new policies that would attract the recruits needed to win the war. Many observers linked the recruiting problem perceived in the early days of the summer of 1862 to the presence of the conciliatory policy. “Freemen are reluctant to join the army, expose their lives and destroy their health merely to enforce Order No. 3 [Halleck’s regulation turning fugitive blacks out of the army’s camps] & guard rebel property,” argued the Chicago Tribune ’s Medill to his senator, Lyman Trumbull. At a recruiting rally in Bangor , Maine, Vice President Hannibal Hamlin felt obliged to promise new recruits, “[W]e want to send forth no Federal bayonets to protect rebel property . We don’t ¤ght the rebels to save their property.”5 No one, it seemed, was quicker to realize the need for a clear statement of national war policy after McClellan...

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