Abolitionism as Logical Conclusion: General James S. Wadsworth as a Case Study in Anti-Southern Sentiment and the Radicalizing Experience of the Civil War

Abolitionism as Logical Conclusion: General James S. Wadsworth as a Case Study in Anti-Southern Sentiment and the Radicalizing Experience of the Civil War

Essays on Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction

General James Wadsworth and his actions as an abolitionist and radical Republican

Judith A. Hunter

JSTOR
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wrmq5.6

University of Virginia Press

2011

Public Domain

University of Virginia Press
Chapter Title: Abolitionism as Logical Conclusion: General James S. Wadsworth as a Case Study in Anti-Southern Sentiment and the Radicalizing Experience of the Civil War
Chapter Author(s): Judith A. Hunter
Book Title: The Struggle for Equality
Book Subtitle: Essays on Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction
Book Editor(s): Orville Vernon Burton, Jerald Podair, Jennifer L. Weber
Published by: University of Virginia Press. (2011)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wrmq5.6
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Abolitionism as Logical Conclusion
General James S. Wadsworth as a Case Study
in Anti-Southern Sentiment and the Radicalizing
Experience of the Civil War
E E E
Judith A. Hunter
When James S. Wadsworth, a prominent Union general well-known for
his military exploits, his politics, and his background, died after the
battle of the Wilderness in 1864, it moved a North that had seen all too many
deaths. In fact, John Hay remarked that Abraham Lincoln felt the loss of
Wadsworth keenly:
I have not known the President so a√ected by a personal loss since the death
of [Colonel Edward D.] Baker, as by the death of General Wadsworth. . . .
[Lincoln said that] no man has given himself up to the war with such selfsacrificing
patriotism as Gen. Wadsworth. He went into the service not wishing
or expecting great success or distinction in his military career and profoundly
indi√erent to popular applause, actuated only by a sense of duty
which he neither evaded nor sought to evade.∞
Lincoln’s respect and the public’s acclaim for Wadsworth were shaped in
large part by the fact that he had immediately volunteered for the war, leaving
behind an enormous agricultural empire in western New York, serving without
pay, and volunteering to start as close to the bottom as a prominent man in
his fifties could, as a major. Quickly promoted to brigadier general for both his
service at Bull Run and his eminence in New York politics, Wadsworth was
passionate in his defense of the Union and his opposition to slavery.≤ However,
his abolitionist feelings were an endpoint in a long process, one that
modern biographers have not examined. It was a process that is illustrative of
how feelings about slavery in the North gradually changed and hardened in
response to events, especially the experience of the Civil War itself.
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30 Judith A. Hunter
Because Wadsworth’s endpoint was as a member of the faction of the
Republican Party known as the Radicals, it has been tempting for scholars to
assume that he always had radical positions on the subject of slavery. Yet that
characterization does not accurately describe Wadsworth’s beliefs for most of
his life. Although he left scant records to examine, those that survive show no
concern for the condition of slaves or indignation at the immorality of slavery
until after the war had begun. Wadsworth had had a long political career in
the antebellum period, and what prompted him to speak out in the 1840s and
1850s was not so much slavery as ‘‘the slave power.’’ Wadsworth became
convinced, as did many Northerners during the antebellum period, that a
cabal of powerful proslavery Southerners was endangering the freedoms and
very existence of the republic in their zeal to protect and promote the institution
of slavery. This conviction, more than concern about slavery’s iniquity,
was his main motivation.≥
The first event to goad James Wadsworth toward antislavery had more to
do with political infighting among Democrats than anything else. Although
his father, the founder of the family fortune and his hometown, was, unsurprisingly,
a Whig, James S. Wadsworth’s earliest known political allegiances
were to the Democrats and to Martin Van Buren. He was outraged
when Martin Van Buren was, as the young Wadsworth saw it, cheated out of
the Democratic nomination in 1844. Instead, the Democrats chose James K.
Polk, primarily because Van Buren had come out against the annexation of
Texas (which, all sides assumed, would add vast new slave territories to the
United States and provoke war with Mexico). Wadsworth wrote a livid letter
to the former president after the nominating convention: ‘‘I have seen no full
account of the debates, but I do not perceive that the dictation and selfishness
of the South were properly rebuked. They have filled the Executive Chair 44
years, the North 12, and yet because we are not prepared to embark in a most
unjust and iniquitous war to extend their ‘Institutions’—meaning Slavery—
our rights are again to be deferred.’’∂
Had Wadsworth’s primary political concerns revolved around slavery at
this point, he could have supported the third-party candidacy of the Liberty
Party’s James G. Birney, who garnered enough votes in western New York to
help throw the state into Polk’s column in the 1844 election. There is no
record of Wadsworth’s having done so. In fact, he expressed approval of Polk
as vice-presidential material in the same letter to Van Buren, saying, ‘‘I have a
favourable opinion of Mr. Polk and hoped to have seen him nominated, but
not where he is.’’ Antiquarian accounts suggest Wadsworth became reconciled
enough to Polk to support his presidential candidacy and place wagers
on his victory.Σ
A sense of outraged honor, in this case that Van Buren had been unfairly
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Abolitionism as Logical Conclusion 31
deprived of the Democratic presidential nomination by scheming Southerners,
often seemed to motivate Wadsworth to take his strongest political
positions. He was not at all typical of most of the Van Buren supporters who
split from the New York Democracy. Jonathan Earle’s careful examination of
Northern Democrats who pushed for the limitation of slavery to its existing
boundaries (‘‘Free Soilers’’) demonstrates that Van Buren’s defenders in New
York typically came from a very di√erent background than James Wadsworth
did. They tended to come from rural areas that were economically stagnant
and isolated; he finds them to have been outside the economically, politically,
socially, and religiously fertile area of upstate New York historians refer to
as the ‘‘burned-over district.’’ Although there is no evidence that suggests
Wadsworth took part in the religious or social ‘‘enthusiasms’’ of his region,
they surrounded him in the prosperous Genesee Valley, a part of the burnedover
district. His great wealth and its source were also unusual for the ‘‘Barnburners’’
(New York Democrats who bolted their party to remain loyal to Van
Buren). Earle finds that many of them were involved in the antirent agitations
against large landholders that characterized rural New York in this period, so
Wadsworth’s role as a land baron made him a most anomalous Barnburner.Π
Henry B. Stanton recounts an anecdote in his memoirs about Wadsworth’s
activities as a Barnburner that strongly hints that Wadsworth was
chiefly motivated by his feelings of indignation rather than an ideological
position on slavery. Bitter recriminations between the Barnburners and their
rivals, the ‘‘Hunkers,’’ marked the 1847 New York Democratic convention in
Syracuse. The Hunkers’ treatment the previous year of Silas Wright, the
unsuccessful Barnburner candidate for governor, had angered Wadsworth’s
faction. Wright’s death just a short time later increased the bitter feelings. As
Stanton recalled, James Wadsworth dramatically and physically let everyone
know whom he held responsible for their leader’s demise: ‘‘In the convention
some one spoke of doing justice to Silas Wright. A Hunker sneeringly responded,
‘It is too late; he is dead.’ Springing upon a table, Wadsworth made
the hall ring as he uttered a defiant reply: ‘Though it may be too late to do
justice to Silas Wright, it is not too late to do justice to his assassins.’ ’’π
The slight to Van Buren ended up permanently dividing New York Democrats,
who had di≈culty working together from that point. The Barnburners,
Wadsworth’s faction, bolted the 1848 Democratic national convention
over the Wilmot Proviso (a free soil measure they supported and the national
party did not) and spurned the nominee, Lewis Cass, in favor of Van Buren,
whom they helped to put at the head of the third-party Free Soil ticket.
Wadsworth’s public statements on the issue prompted the Maryland politician
Francis Preston Blair to write him approvingly, commending him for
avoiding even the appearance of abolitionism: ‘‘You make an admirable dis-
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32 Judith A. Hunter
tinction when you point the attention to the fact that the true Democrats of
the country aim to extend its prosperity by providing for the white race, whilst
abolitionism is only concerned for the black.’’ Blair continued in a vein that
made it clear that he did not consider James Wadsworth to be a radical in any
way on the subject of slavery: ‘‘The truth is that the abolitionists and the
slave propaganders [sic] are much nearer allies in their sympathies than we
with either. They are both Negro lovers—the first because they are political
property—the second because they are personal property.’’∫
Another strong indication that James Wadsworth was not deeply and
personally concerned with actual slaves, rather than the expansion of slavery,
comes from his philanthropic activity during the antebellum period. Wadsworth
was renowned for his support of charitable causes. For instance, during
the height of the Irish potato famine, he provided a full shipload of grain to
the famine relief e√ort. In the 1850s he donated sums of three to five thousand
dollars annually to benevolent organizations. Yet Wadsworth was noticeably
inactive in funding antislavery e√orts. The only exceptions were fifty dollars
he contributed toward the fines levied against a fugitive slave in Wisconsin in
1855 and a fairly mysterious reference to his providing financial support to the
Underground Railroad in the Albany area in an Albany activist’s letter.Ω
Although Wadsworth and the rest of the Barnburners temporarily reentered
the Democratic fold after 1848, they left it permanently following the
Kansas-Nebraska Act. Wadsworth presided over a ‘‘Democratic-Republican
Convention’’ in July of 1856 at Syracuse, the result of which was the final
transfer of the Barnburners into the new Republican Party. Wadsworth came
close to the Republican gubernatorial nomination that year. All of these
activities would be consistent with Wadsworth’s free soil principles and his
frustration with what he saw as Southern domination of the federal government
(and his former party).∞≠
As the sectional crisis deepened in the immediate aftermath of Abraham
Lincoln’s election as president in 1860, the governor of New York appointed
James Wadsworth one of New York’s delegates to the peace conference that
met that winter in Washington in an attempt to avert civil war. The New
Yorker heard nothing as a member of the Peace Convention of 1861 that
softened his views of Southern leadership, and he refused to compromise on
the issue of slavery’s extension. L. E. Chittenden, a delegate from Vermont,
later recalled an outburst by Wadsworth, who was furious at what he saw as
Southern bad faith at the convention. According to Chittenden, the New
Yorker demanded of a Virginian delegate, ‘‘Why do you persist in your attempt
to deceive the North? You secessionists mean fight! You will keep right
on with your treasonable schemes until you either whip us or we discipline
you.’’ Although he had given up any hopes for the convention’s success,
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Abolitionism as Logical Conclusion 33
Wadsworth went on to say that he would stick it out in Washington until its
conclusion: ‘‘I shall stay here until Congress adjourns on the 3d of March,
because I cannot honorably resign from the Conference. Then I shall go
home and help my people to get ready for the war in which you slaveholders
intend to involve the republic!’’∞∞
Wadsworth was certainly willing to fight, but he wanted to fight slaveholders
rather than slavery when the war began. Indeed, one of the most
explicit statements Wadsworth made on his feelings about slavery prior to the
war makes it clear that abolition was further than he was prepared to go.
In testimony to the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission only a few
months before he died, Wadsworth claimed, ‘‘At the beginning of the war, I
was hardly a Republican. I thought slavery should be restricted to the ground
where it stood, but was opposed to interfering with it there. I dreaded insurrections,
massacres, and violence.’’∞≤
Yet it is apparent that James Wadsworth’s participation in the Civil War
reassured him on that score, so that he quickly became a champion of emancipation,
the ‘‘radical’’ position. Enlisting in the Union e√ort at the rank of
major, Wadsworth saw action at Bull Run, the first full battle of the war. After
acquitting himself admirably in the fight as a volunteer aide to the commanding
general, Irvin McDowell, Wadsworth won quick promotion to the rank
of brigadier general. Obviously, his eminence and political status were large
factors in his elevation, but Wadsworth worked diligently to be worthy of
command. During the long winter of 1861–62, when the public chafed because
the Army of the Potomac did not go on the o√ensive, Wadsworth and
his brigade were stationed at Upton’s Hill, the closest point on the Union
lines to the rebel army. There, he strove to protect the welfare of his men, but
he also became concerned for the welfare of individual slaves who came to his
attention. Some Virginian owners who had fled the Union occupation of
their region had abandoned their chattel. Wadsworth wrote to Charles Sumner,
the Republican senator from Massachusetts who was well-known for his
antislavery views, to secure his help in getting three or four families who were
‘‘practically emancipated’’ safely north. Ignoring his technical obligation to
return such ‘‘property’’ to their owners (the Fugitive Slave Law was still in
e√ect), Wadsworth helped other slaves by employing them in his camp.
No longer a faraway abstraction, slaves became an everyday presence whom
Wadsworth treated with his customary charity and pragmatism.∞≥
That pragmatic approach also caused Wadsworth to come to appreciate
the slaves he met as valuable sources of intelligence. He interviewed as many
of them as he could about the strength of the enemy forces in nearby Centerville
and Manassas, getting consistent enough answers that he became very
confident in his estimate of the size of the Confederate army, which he, along
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34 Judith A. Hunter
with many other frustrated Northerners, was eager to attack. As he would
testify to Congress, ‘‘I think we are largely superior to our enemies in numbers.’’
This testimony clearly aligned Wadsworth with Republicans upset
with the overall command and approach of General George B. McClellan, a
known conservative on slavery. However, it may very well be that Wadsworth
joined the radicals’ opposition to McClellan’s policies out of personal experience
as much as political conviction. During the long period after Bull Run in
which the Army of the Potomac failed to move on the enemy, McClellan
repeatedly insisted that his army could not attack because they faced such
a huge opposing force. Wadsworth’s intelligence activities, which included
scouting and interviewing prisoners as well as refugee slaves, led him to
conclude they only faced somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 men. He
reported this estimate up the chain of command, only to have his commander,
who was sure that the Confederates’ strength was closer to 150,000 men,
rudely dismiss Wadsworth’s conclusions. As later events showed that the
correct number was within five hundred of Wadsworth’s estimate, it is not
surprising that Wadsworth’s attitude toward McClellan became one of suspicion.∞∂
The well-known conflict between Wadsworth and McClellan in the
spring of 1862 over the number of troops left to defend Washington during
the Peninsula Campaign needs to be interpreted with the dispute of the
previous winter in mind, when Wadsworth learned to doubt McClellan’s
wisdom and judgment.
Indeed, personality issues need to be taken into account in tracing Wadsworth’s
growing radicalism, as James Wadsworth defined himself as being in
opposition to others besides ‘‘Little Mac.’’ It was a repeated pattern. Much as
his activities as a Free Soil Democrat were due to his conflict with those who
betrayed Martin Van Buren, the divisions that existed in his new party between
former Democrats and former Whigs must have influenced many of his
activities as a Republican. Wadsworth was a New York Republican who began
as a Democrat, and his relations with former Whigs in the New York party
were not always smooth. Since William Seward, the leader of that faction, was
a leading moderate in his position as Lincoln’s secretary of state, Wadsworth
may have instinctively avoided that camp. In fact, Wadsworth had actively
worked against Seward’s getting the Republican nomination in 1860, helping
to undermine the expected nominee’s viability by asserting Seward would not
be able to carry New York in the general election. Wadsworth and Seward
would hardly be inclined to become close allies once the war began.∞Σ
General Wadsworth clashed with General McClellan over his concerns
about the capital when the Army of the Potomac finally began to leave
Washington for the Peninsula Campaign because Wadsworth was now responsible
for the capital’s safety. Lincoln had appointed Wadsworth military
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Abolitionism as Logical Conclusion 35
governor of the District of Columbia when he reorganized the Federal army
in March of 1862. In this capacity, Wadsworth found that he had to deal with
the legal and practical issues that immediately arose as ‘‘contrabands,’’ enemy
property in the form of slaves, showed up in Washington. At that point the
Fugitive Slave Act still bound the national government, and the Constitution
forced it to return ‘‘property’’ to owners, many of whom appealed to the
government for help in getting back their slaves. This was an awkward issue
for the Lincoln administration, particularly with Maryland slaveholders,
whose state was so important to Lincoln’s border state policies. Wadsworth
insisted that contrabands whose owners he determined to be disloyal were
under his jurisdiction, and he issued each written certificates of military
protection. But the civil authorities (usually Lincoln’s friend Marshal Ward
Lamon) disagreed and on several occasions jailed such fugitives. Wadsworth
was continually involved in bureaucratic and legal disputes on this issue, and
once he actually ordered soldiers to the jail in the middle of the night to free
all the imprisoned contrabands. The general was also responsible to some
degree for the feeding, shelter, and employment of the great numbers of
fugitive slaves in the District of Columbia, another experience that must have
helped shape his feelings on abolition. He gained a reputation as their advocate
and protector. Adam Gurowski, a Polish diarist who seemed to exist to
pass judgment on the important players in Civil War–era Washington, was
an unabashed admirer of Wadsworth’s actions (which he exaggerated as he
praised): ‘‘General Wadsworth is the good genius of the poor and oppressed
race. But for Wadsworth’s noble soul and heart the Lamons and many other
blood-hounds in Washington would have given about three-fourths of the
fugitives over to the whip of the slavers.’’∞Π
One tantalizing anecdote survives that suggests Wadsworth felt great
frustration with Lincoln’s slow movement on the issue of slavery during the
early period of the war. Adams S. Hill, a New York Tribune reporter, wrote to
his editor an account of a conversation he had one evening in July of 1862 with
the general: ‘‘He is cheerful in view of military prospects, but thinks political
signs gloomy. . . . He says that the President is not with us; has no Antislavery
instincts. He has never heard him speak of Anti-slavery men, otherwise
than as ‘radicals,’ ‘abolitionists,’ and of the ‘nigger question’ he frequently
speaks.’’ In fact, Wadsworth predicted ‘‘that if emancipation comes at all it
will be from the rebels, or in consequence of their protracting this war.’’
Although Hill never included the disgruntled New Yorker’s assessment in a
story, he nevertheless gave it great credence: ‘‘I value his testimony because he
has, as he says, been with the President and Stanton [the secretary of war]
every day at the War Department—frequently for five or six hours—during
several months.’’∞π
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36 Judith A. Hunter
His experiences with fugitives seem to have given Wadsworth a spur toward
outright abolitionism, and he was relieved when Lincoln finally did
make his move against slavery with his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
Yet it was his anti-Southern feelings, not any concern for African Americans,
that Wadsworth publicly spoke and wrote about when he addressed the
issue of emancipation. The New York Republicans nominated James Wadsworth
for governor in 1862, and he agreed to stand but remained serving in his
post in Washington. This arrangement meant he did little active campaigning;
when he did, he justified abolition as a means to preserve the union and punish
the South, not as an end in and of itself. He gave only one speech in New York
during the campaign, an address to a mass meeting at Cooper Union a few
days before the election, and in it he responded to Democrats’ criticisms of
Lincoln’s new emancipation policy, announced the previous month:
Mr. Lincoln has told you that he would save this country with slavery if he
could, and he would save it without slavery if he could; he has never said to
you that if he could not save slavery he would let the country go. . . . He has
said to those in rebellion against the United States: ‘‘I give you 100 days to
return to your allegiance; if you fail to do that, I will strike from under you
that institution which some of you seem to think dearer than life, than liberty,
than country, than peace.’’ . . . Gentlemen, I stand by Abraham Lincoln.
[Tremendous applause.] It is just, it is holy so to do.∞∫
Although it would be politically prudent to omit any concern for the
injustice of slavery when speaking to voters of a city that would see horrific
race riots within a year, prudence was not a quality Wadsworth possessed. In
the same speech he at last embraced the label ‘‘abolitionist’’ for the first time.
Finally reaching this conclusion was consistent with his sense of honor and
his sense of where the slave power and the war had brought the nation.
I know, for I have sometimes felt, the influence of the odium which the
spurious aristocracy, who have so largely directed the destinies of this nation
for three-quarters of a century, have attached to the word ‘‘abolition.’’ They
have treated it, and too often taught us to treat it, as some low, vulgar crime,
not to be spoken of in good society or mentioned in fashionable parlors. I
know there are many men still influenced by this prejudice; but let those who,
in this hour of peril, this struggle of life and death, shrink from that odium
stand aside. The events of this hour are too big for them.∞Ω
In the end, Wadsworth lost the race by fewer than eleven thousand votes,
despite many handicaps. He was almost totally absent from the hustings. The
absence of New York soldiers at the front (a significant potential voting bloc
in his favor) must have harmed his chances even more, as did the fact that
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Abolitionism as Logical Conclusion 37
McClellan refused to use the Army of the Potomac to follow up on the
victory at Antietam. Finally, the lack of real support from New York kingmakers
William Seward and Thurlow Weed was likely the most important
blow. Gideon Welles, Lincoln’s secretary of the navy, recalled in his diary the
fatal New York infighting that had defeated Wadsworth when he lamented
his death in 1864: ‘‘He should, by good right and fair-dealing, have been at
this moment Governor of New York, but the perfidy of Thurlow Weed and
others defeated him. I have always believed that Seward was, if not implicated,
a sympathizer in that business.’’≤≠
James Wadsworth finally converted to abolitionism because he saw it as an
e√ective war measure. As he told supporters who came to see him shortly
after his nomination,
I have never failed, gentlemen, previous to the outbreak of this rebellion . . . to
declare my earnest devotion to the Constitution of the United States, and my
desire to uphold it, with what are called compromises and concessions on
behalf of Slavery. But, gentlemen, Secession and War, bloody and relentless
war, have changed our relations to that which is the cause and the source of
the war. . . . We have the right, we are bound, moreover, by the most solemn
obligations of duty, to use this agency [emancipation], so far as we can, to put
an end to this struggle, and to save the lives of white men who are perishing by
thousands in this country.
Unfortunately for his political career, Wadsworth came to accept this fact
before the bulk of the Northern electorate did (1862 was a poor year for many
Republican candidates). Yet the argument that emancipation diminished the
Southern capacity to wage rebellion ultimately did largely win over skeptical
Northern opinion. They simply did not arrive at that point as quickly as
Wadsworth did.≤∞
The anger at the South that prodded James S. Wadsworth along the path
to abolitionism, though, creates a paradox. In his Washington speech, the
general-turned-candidate touched on a theme that was a constant refrain in
his wartime correspondence:
How long are we to bear the insolence of this Southern aristocracy? Have we
not borne it long enough? Has it not long enough disturbed and distracted
our councils, and paralyzed our energies? Has it not long enough paralyzed
the energies of the country? Nay, more, has it not long enough, in the eyes of
the other civilized nations of the world, covered us with infamy?
Wadsworth used the term ‘‘aristocracy’’ with real distaste here and elsewhere,
yet there were few Americans with a more aristocratic pedigree than
his. Besides his great wealth and illustrious ancestry, one fact from his biogra-
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38 Judith A. Hunter
phy that goes far to prove his own qualifications as an aristocrat would be that
he built his impressive home, Hartford House, after he returned from his
multiyear honeymoon abroad, exactly on the plans of the estate of Britain’s
Lord Hertford, which he and his wife had visited and admired. Yet his zeal
for the war e√ort and his support for abolition rested on republican distaste
for the South’s slave-owning class. Wadsworth followed his questions about
those Southerner aristocrats to his Washington supporters with the statement,
‘‘We are in the pangs of dissolution, or we are in the pangs of exorcism.
If we would save ourselves, we must cast out the devil which has tormented
and disgraced us from the hour of our national birth.’’ To James S. Wadsworth
the devil was not slavery; it was the aristocracy of the South. Because
abolition would prevent the Southern aristocracy from ever endangering the
nation again, Wadsworth ended his life as an avowed abolitionist.≤≤
Notes
1. John Hay, Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries and Letters of John Hay, ed.
Tyler Dennett (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1939; reprint, New York: Da Capo
Press, 1988), 182.
2. James Wadsworth has been the subject of three biographies, none of which
analyzes his changing politics: Henry Greenleaf Pearson, James S. Wadsworth of Geneseo:
Brevet Major-General, U.S.V. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913); John F.
Krumwiede, ‘‘Old Waddy’s Coming’’: The Military Career of Brigadier General James S.
Wadsworth, Army of the Potomac Series (Baltimore: Butternut and Blue, 2002);
Wayne Mahood, General Wadsworth: The Life and Times of Brevet Major General
James S. Wadsworth (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003).
3. The concept of the ‘‘slave power’’ is best set out in David Brion Davis, The Slave
Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1969). One could make a fascinating comparison between Wadsworth’s antislavery
career and that of a true radical on the subject, Gerrit Smith’s. Both men had
immense fortunes in upstate New York real estate (Wadsworth in the Genesee Valley
and Smith’s in the Utica area), and both men ended up as abolitionists. Yet Smith was
a vital leader of the ‘‘burned-over district’s’’ antislavery movement from the 1830s,
active in the single-issue Liberty Party (and elected to Congress), and he ultimately
went so far in his e√orts to eradicate slavery that he provided financial support for
John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. See Ralph Volney Harlow, Gerrit Smith: Philanthropist
and Reformer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1939; reprint, New
York: Russell and Russell, 1972). Wadsworth never got near to the abolitionist wing of
the antislavery spectrum before the Civil War.
4. James S. Wadsworth to Martin Van Buren, June 1, 1844, Presidential Papers
Microfilm, Martin Van Martin Buren Papers, Series 2: 1844 May 30 to 1845 May 7, reel
29; Pearson, James S. Wadsworth of Geneseo, 35–37; Michael F. Holt, The Fate of Their
Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York:
Hill and Wang, 2004), 11.
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Abolitionism as Logical Conclusion 39
5. Wadsworth to Van Buren, June 1, 1844; Mahood, General Wadsworth, 46; Lockwood
L. Doty, A History of Livingston County, New York: From Its Earliest Traditions,
to Its Part in the War for Our Union (Geneseo, NY: Edward E. Doty, 1876), 528. In a
truly ironic footnote, Birney ended up being reinterred by his wife alongside other
members of her family in a small cemetery just down the road from Wadsworth’s
birthplace in Geneseo. Betty Fladeland, James Gillespie Birney: Slaveholder to Abolitionist
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955), 293n.
6. Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), chap. 2. The best overview
of the ‘‘burned-over district’’ of New York remains Whitney Cross, The Burned-Over
District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New
York, 1800–1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950). Cross, however, does not
include Wadsworth’s Livingston County in his discussion, as he feels the role of
Wadsworth and his father as landlord for so much of the county made it di√erent
from other areas he discusses. Yet work that has been done on Livingston County
since the publication of Cross’s work suggests that it was very much like the rest of the
burned-over district. For example, Virginia Nestlen finds that the local Presbyterian
church experienced a significant revival episode: see Virginia Nestlen, ‘‘Revival in
1825: The Role of the Wadsworth Family in Geneseo’’ (honors thesis, State University
of New York at Geneseo, 1998).
7. Henry B. Stanton, Random Recollections (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1887), 160; John Niven, Martin Van Buren: The Romantic Age of American Politics (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 574.
8. Pearson, James S. Wadsworth of Geneseo, 40–42; Francis Preston Blair to James
S. Wadsworth, June 28, 1848, Wadsworth Family Papers, Library of Congress, Washington,
DC.
9. Pearson, James S. Wadsworth of Geneseo, 29; Frank A. Abial, History of the
Republican Party, Embracing Its Origin, Growth and Mission (Springfield, IL: Union
Publishing Company, 1884), 126; Tom Carlaco, The Underground Railroad in the
Adirondack Region ( Je√erson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2004), 191.
10. Pearson, James S. Wadsworth of Geneseo, 45–47.
11. Mahood, General Wadsworth, 58–59; L. E. Chittenden, Personal Reminiscences,
1840–1890 (New York: Richmond, Croscup and Co., 1893), 303.
12. ‘‘Testimony of a War Department Special Inspector,’’ in Ira Berlin et al., eds.,
The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South, Freedom: A Documentary
History of Emancipation 1861–1867, series 1, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 492.
13. Pearson, James S. Wadsworth of Geneseo, 95–97; Mahood, General Wadsworth,
69–74.
14. Pearson, James S. Wadsworth of Geneseo, 97, 99, 101, 104, 105; Edwin C. Fishel,
The Secret War for the Union: The Untold Story of Military Intelligence in the Civil
War (Boston: Houghton MiΔin Company, 1996), 112, 113, 129; James M. McPherson,
Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1982), 212.
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40 Judith A. Hunter
15. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party
before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 182.
16. Pearson, James S. Wadsworth of Geneseo, 46, 48, 134–41; Margaret Leech,
Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865 (New York: Harper and Brother Publishers, 1941),
247; Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States
Government’s Relations to Slavery, ed. Ward M. McAfee (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 249; Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The
End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 89–90; Adam
Gurowski, Diary from March 4, 1861 to November 12, 1862 (Boston: Lee and Shepard,
1862), 246.
17. Adams S. Hill to Sydney Howard Gay, quoted in James Ford Rhodes, History
of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at
the South in 1877, vol. 4, 1862–1864 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1913), 64n.
Rhodes indicates that he is quoting ‘‘private correspondence which has been kindly
placed at my disposal by Professor Hill.’’
18. Speech of James S. Wadsworth at the Cooper Union, New York City, Oct. 30,
1862, ‘‘compiled from the reports in New York papers of October 31’’ and reprinted in
Pearson, James S. Wadsworth of Geneseo, 158–63, quotation on 160.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 158–63, quotation on 160; Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols.
(Boston: Houghton and MiΔin Company, 1911), 2:27. For an overview of the 1862
gubernatorial race, see Stewart Mitchell, Horatio Seymour of New York (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1938), chap. 12; Mahood, General Wadsworth, chap. 11;
Pearson, James S. Wadsworth of Geneseo, chap. 5.
21. ‘‘Speech of General Wadsworth at Washington, Friday Evening, September
26, 1862,’’ Genesee Valley Collection, Milne Library, State University of New York–
Geneseo.
22. Ibid.; Mahood, General Wadsworth, 34.
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