No doubt frustrated by the Lincoln Administration's refusal to address the slave issue, Gordon hailed John C. Fremont's "Emancipation Proclamation" in Missouri and hoped that it would be followed with "similar proclamations by commanders of all departments." No longer, he declared, would there be to patriotic ears "anything offensive in the word Abolitionist." At last the country was awakened to the "natural wretchedness which comes from the act of slaveholding" and had "aroused itself to the conviction that we are at war, entirely, totally, earnestly at war." Lt. Robert Shaw expressed his hope that Fremont would not be interferred with by the government, but Capt. Richard Cary's reaction was more typical of the feeling of his brother officers: "[I]f this had been the object of the war I should not have been here."

Afraid that a great many men shared Cary's opinion and would quit the army were the emancipation of the slaves to become the policy of the Government--not to mention the potential loss of the loyal slave states--Lincoln rescinded Fremont's proclamation.

Chaplain Alonzo Hall Quint denied that he was in any way a fanatic on the slavery issue ("I never even voted a Republican ticket"), but this did not prevent him from condemning the institution. "The sins of slavery! There are none; it is slavery itself that is the sin. It's effect on the masters is one of its greatest evils; it perverts the conscience, warps the intellect, brutalizes the heart. Believe no such nonsense that 'the slaves are contented.' They, with no noticeable exception, long to be free." Quint appreciated the great irony that had the slave states remained loyal, slavery would have been protected. "It is now too late."

Quint did not see the people of the South giving up their cherished institution without a long and bloody fight. "The Southern scoundrels, who deify stealing and lying, have too much at stake to submit, even though they ruin their whole territory. Moreover, slaveholding has trained them to be despots, and despots they will be to the end. It makes men thieves, and they will steal as long as they can. It makes me braggarts, and they will brag on the very brink of destruction....Men may cry 'peace,' but until the removal of slavery is plainly, quietly, constitutionally provided for, whether instant or remote is a small question, there is no peace. Slavery is the root of our troubles, because slavery makes men tyrants, and tyrants thwarted are rebels."

Still, Quint conceded that were slavery made the object of the war "our armies would melt away." The men who answered Lincoln's call were fighting to supress a rebellion. They were fighting for the flag. They were not fighting for the abolition of slavery. "So far as the army feels, slavery is not a prominent theme or thought."

One day early in 1862, an incident occured that had a profound influence upon the hearts and minds of the officers of the 2^nd Massachusetts. While waiting for a ferry to be repaired, they were lounging on the grass when they were approached by a half dozen blacks, who were curious to see the Northern soldiers who had come to "liberate" them. Among them was a white man with two boys.

"That's a white slave," remarked Lt. Harry Russell.

Their interest aroused, the officers called the man over and asked him his trade.

"Nothing, Sir, but working in the field under another man."

As they spent an hour or taling talking with the man, Lt. Robert Gould Shaw was struck by the man's intelligence and eloquence. "He said he had nine children all whiter than the two boys with him. Some one asked if any of them were ever sold. He said no--& that often when he looked round at his children sitting about him, he thought of other Fathers and Mothers crying for theirs he felt how kind God had been to him. 'Yes,' he said, 'taking away my children from we would be the same as if a man should tear out my heart,' and he thrust his hand inside his vest, 'and throw it down & stomp on it.'"

Upon questioning, the man admitted that his father was also his Master and that "it had often been a bitter pill to swallow when he had been badly treated by him to think that it was so. He said it was 'like having a fork stick in him."

The interview ended with Capt. George Bangs gave the man some advice on getting to the North, but its effects upon the white officers was far reaching. Capt. Richard Goodwin, who had hitherto considered himself on the pro-slavery side of the issue, was so moved by the meeting that he wrote home: "...I really begin to feel now that if slavery could be killed at the same time that the Union is restored that not only we, but the world & the great cause of humanity at large, would be benefitted & that we should be able to sing our patriotic song about 'the land of the free & home of the brave' without putting a lie in our mouths every time we sing it." The day the United States became free from "the sin of slavery," he concluded would be "a bright one in the annals of history."

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATON

Shaw's reaction was lukewarm. "I can't see what practical good it can do now. Wherever our army has been, there remain no slaves, and the Proclamation will not free them where we don't go." He was more concerned about the reaction the Proclamation would have in Richmond, where his cousin, Harry Russell, was still a prisoner of war. "Jeff Davis will soon issue a proclamation threatening to hang every prisoner they take, and will make this a war of extermination."

His lack of enthusiasm must have triggered a heated response from his parents because he found himself defending his comments. It wasn't that he thought the Proclamation was not the right thing to do. As an act of justice, "and to have any real effect, it ought to have been done long ago," he argued. But as a War measure, he simply saw no immediate benefit , and much of its moral force "has been lost by our long delay in coming to it."

Charles Morse initially thought that the Proclamation would have little effect on the war, but upon reflection, decided that it would "set us straight with foreign nations" on the issue. "It gives us a decided policy, and though the President carefully calls it nothing but a war measure, yet it is the beginning of a great reform." By calling the Emancipation Proclamation the "first blow struck at the real, original cause of the war," Morse articulated what many still refused to acknowledge.

Chaplain Quint hoped that Lincoln would stand firmly behind his bold step and counted only a few who voiced opposition to the Proclamation, or who deemed servitude the "proper condition of an 'inferior' race." What a difference a year made! Now that the officers and men had come into contact with the slaves and witnessed their misery first-hand, it had "brought about an immense change of opinion as to the character of slavery and the civilization of the slaveholders." Some supported the Proclamation on the "on the grounds of decided opposition to all slavery." But the majority, he said, viewed it only as a military measure and "feel no excited interest in it whatever." Still, no matter how individuals felt about the Proclamation, "a slave-hunter would be kicked out of our lines."

The elections of 1863 convinced Quint that the majority of Northern soldiers now acknowledged that slavery was the true cause of the rebellion. "The army is abolitionized," he announced, adding that there could and would be no lasting peace until the last vestages of slavery and the "ruling oligarchy" were stamped out. "I do not say that no peace ought to be made without the overthrow of slavery; but that no real peace, without it, can be made." There was only one policy for the United States Government to embrace, and that was one which declared slavery in any state "contrary to natural right and therefor unlawful."

In 1864 Capt. Henry Newton Comey proclaimed that he had yet to met a slave "who did not wish to be free," even those who might have been physically better off had they remained in bondage. And while recognizing that slavery was "unjust and unnatural," Comey saw great suffering as the immediate price of freedom. "Future generations will be the gainers, I hardly think the present will be."