Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward

— I

378 THE CREATURE FROM JEKYLL ISLAND

coming to the aid of the Union undoubtedly had little to do with emancipating the slaves in the South. England and France had been maneuvering to break up the Russian empire by splitting off Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Crimea, and Georgia. Napoleon III, of France, proposed to Great Britain and Austria that the three nations immediately declare war on Russia to hasten this dismemberment.

Knowing that war was being considered by his enemies, Tsar Alexander decided to play a chess game of his own. In September of 1863, he dispatched his Baltic fleet of war ships to Alexandria, Virginia, and his Asiatic fleet to San Francisco. The significance of this move was explained by Russian-born Carl Wrangell-Rokassowsky:

No treaty was signed between Russia and the United States, but their mutual interest, and the threat of war to both, unified these two nations at this critical moment. By dispatching his Baltic Fleet to the North American harbors, the Tsar changed his position from a defensive to an offensive one. Paragraph 3 of the instructions given to Admiral Lessovsky by Admiral Krabbe, at that time Russian Secretary of the Navy, dated July 14th, 1863, ordered the Russian Fleet, in case of war, to attack the enemies' commercial shipping and their colonies so as to cause them the greatest possible damage. The same instructions were given to Admiral Popov, Commander of the Russian Asiatic Fleet.1

The presence of the Russian Navy helped the Union enforce a devastating naval blockade against the Southern states which denied them access to critical supplies from Europe. It was not that these ships single-handedly kept the French and English vessels at bay. Actually there is no record of them even firing upon each other, but that is the point. The fact that neither France nor England at that time wanted to risk becoming involved in an open war with the United States and Russia led them to be extremely cautious with overt military aid to the South. Throughout the entire conflict, they found it expedient to remain officially neutral. Without the inhibit-ing effect of the presence of the Russian fleet, the course of the war could have been significantly different.

1. Carl Wrangell-Rokassowsky, Before the Storm (Ventimiglia, Italy: Tipo-Litografia Ligure, 1972), p. 57.

GREENBACKS AND OTHER CRIMES 379

The beginning of the war did not go well for the North, and in the early years, the outcome was far from certain. Not only did the Union army face repeated defeats on the battlefield, but enthusiasm from the people at home was badly sagging. As mentioned previously, at the outset this was not a popular war based on humanitarian principle; it was a war of business interests. That presented two serious problems for the North. The first was how to get people to fight, and the second was how to get them to pay.

Both problems were solved by the simple expediency of violating the Constitution.

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

To get people to fight, it was decided to convert the war into an anti-slavery crusade. The Emancipation Proclamation was primarily a move on the part of Lincoln to fan the dying embers of support for the 'Rich-man's war and the poor-man's fight,' as it was commonly called in the North. Furthermore, it was not an amendment to the Constitution nor even an act of Congress. It was issued, totally without constitutional authority, as the solitary order of Lincoln himself, acting as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.

Preservation of the Union was not enough to fire men's

enthusiasm for war. Only the higher issue of freedom could do that. To make the cause of freedom synonymous with the cause of the North, there was no alternative but to officially declare against slavery. After having emphasized over and over again that slavery was not the reason for war, Lincoln later explained why he changed his course and issued the Proclamation:

Things had gone from bad to worse until I felt we had reached the end of our rope on the plan we were pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics or lose the game. I now determined upon the adoption of the emancipation policy.1

The rhetoric of the Proclamation was superb, but the concept left a great deal to be desired. Bruce Catton, writing in the American Heritage Pictorial History of the Civil War explains: Technically, the proclamation was almost absurd. It proclaimed freedom for all slaves in precisely those areas where the United States could not make its authority effective, and allowed slavery to continue in slave states which remained under Federal control.... But in the end 1. Quoted by Charles Adams, Fight, Flight, Fraud: The Story of Taxation (Curacao, The Netherlands: Euro-Dutch Publishers, 1982), p. 229.

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it changed the whole character of the war and, more than any other single thing, doomed the Confederacy to defeat.1

The Proclamation had a profound impact on the European

powers as well. As long as the war had been viewed as an attempt on the part of a government to put down rebellion, there was nothing sacred about it, and there was no stigma attached to helping either side. But now that freedom was the apparent issue, no government in Europe—least of all England and France—dared to anger its own subjects by taking sides against a country that was trying to destroy slavery. After 1862 the chance that Europe would militarily intervene on behalf of the Confederacy rapidly faded to zero. On the propaganda front, the South had been maneuvered into a position which could not be defended in the modern world.

Converting the war into an antislavery crusade was a brilliant move on Lincoln's part, and it resulted in a surge of voluntary recruits into the Union army. But this did not last. Northerners may have disapproved of slavery in the South but, once the bloodletting began in earnest, their willingness to die for that conviction began to wane. At the beginning of the war, enlistments were for only three months and, when that period was over, many of the soldiers declined to renew. Lincoln faced the embarrassing reality that he soon would have no army to carry on the crusade.

RAISING ARMIES ON BOTH SIDES

Historically, men are willing to take up arms to defend their families, their homes, and their country when threatened by a hostile foe. But the only way to get them to fight in a war in which they have no perceived personal interest is either to pay them large bonuses and bounties or to force them to do so by conscription. It is not surprising, therefore, that both methods were employed to keep the Union army in the field.