were on their way to Maryland. The North stood
aghast!

[Footnote 818: On Spaulding's motion to close debate, Conkling demanded
tellers, and the motion was lost,--yeas, 52; nays, 62.--_Congressional
Globe_, February 5, 1862; _Ibid._, p. 618.]

Much more ominous than military disaster and financial embarrassment,
however, was the divisive sentiment over emancipation. Northern
armies, moving about in slave communities, necessarily acted as a
constant disintegrating force. Slaves gave soldiers aid and
information, and soldiers, stimulated by their natural hostility to
slave-owners, gave slaves protection and sympathy. Thus, very early in
the war, many men believed that rebellion and slavery were so
intertwined that both must be simultaneously overthrown. This
sentiment found expression in the Fremont proclamation, issued on
August 30, 1861, setting free all slaves owned by persons who aided
secession in the military department of Missouri. On the other hand,
the Government, seeking to avoid the slavery question, encouraged
military commanders to refuse refuge to the negroes within their
lines, and in modifying Fremont's order to conform to the Confiscation
Act of August 6, the President aroused a discussion characterised by
increasing acerbity, which divided the Republican party into Radicals
and Conservatives. The former, led by the _Tribune_, resented the
attitude of army officers, who, it charged, being notoriously in more
or less thorough sympathy with the inciting cause of rebellion, failed
to seize opportunities to strike at slavery. Among Radicals the belief
obtained that one half of the commanding generals desired to prosecute
the war so delicately that slavery should receive the least possible
harm, and in their comments in Congress and in the press they made no
concealment of their opinion, that such officers were much more
anxious to restore fugitive slaves to rebel owners than to make their
owners prisoners of war.[819] They were correspondingly flattering to
those generals who proclaimed abolition as an adjunct of the war.
Greeley's taunts had barbed points. "He is no extemporised soldier,
looking for a presidential nomination or seat in Congress," he said of
General Hunter, whose order had freed the slaves in South Carolina,
Georgia, and Florida. "He is neither a political or civil engineer,
but simply a patriot whose profession is war, and who does not
understand making war so as not to hurt your enemy."[