"...increasingly radicalized groups, particularly in Boston, long regarded as the hotbed of abolitionism in the United States. Men such as Henry Cabot Lodge, a Senator for Massachusetts, roared in an address to the National Emancipation League: "The hour of penance for this continent's original sin is at hand," while former President Joseph Foraker declared to a cadre of departing University of Cincinnati students in his hometown, in one of his last addresses, "There is no more noble cause than the one upon which you now endeavor - the breaking of the shackles that enslave the North American Negro."
Cabot Lodge and Foraker were not exactly no-name fringe politicians, but their position of "total abolitionism" had long been a small minority in the Liberal Party, traditionally the one of the two major Yankee parties more sympathetic to Black concerns. However, by the autumn of 1914 the "soft abolitionism" point of view had risen to encompass a majority of Liberals and Democrats alike, though there was a disagreement on how exactly it could be achieved, as the United States began genuinely threatening Confederate territory. This is not to understate the considerable racism and prejudices of key American politicians - modern pop history that likes to post facto cast the Great American War as a noble crusade on Philadelphia's part to rid the Americas of chattel slavery is really just a post facto justification by Americans to make themselves feel better about a grievously bloody and horrifying conflict - and there was a great deal of ambivalence in many quarters of both major parties about what exactly a post-slavery world would look like, with even sympathetic voices to the slave's cause expressing remarkable doubt about what kind of society they could build after generations of bondage, plantation economy and illiteracy. Nonetheless, it had become a bipartisan general agreement that something was going to be done about slavery, and whether it was due to the moral righteousness of such a goal, because it would wreak havoc on the Confederacy and bring the war to an end more quickly, or simply because the Yankees were consumed with hatred and simply could, is perhaps immaterial.
President Charles Evans Hughes was himself a longtime "soft" on abolition, a devout Baptist who deplored the institution of slavery but had never made it a key element of his public or political persona, which makes the Confederate view that his election was part of the cause of the war as it "put a known emancipator in the White House" quite ironic. Up until mid-1914, however, he had not given much if any consideration to the slave question, concerning himself more with the immediate concern of driving the Confederacy off American soil. With American troops deep into Kentucky, besieging El Paso and occupying both banks of the Potomac by early autumn, however, the question now arose again, and Hughes went back to study the approach of Abraham Lincoln, the President during the War of Secession to explore how the matter had been handled the last time the Sister Republics had been at war.
What he found didn't help him much - the context of Lincoln's time, with slave states remaining inside the Union during the conflict who could not be provoked, did not suggest much of a course of action, and at any rate the war had ended without any kind of formal abolition, which would have to wait half a decade for Lincoln's successor Salmon Chase. But Hughes did find that Lincoln had pondered issuing a proclamation at some point over a year into the war, declaring the abolition of slavery an explicit wartime goal, a consideration that had been foreclosed upon by the defeat at Sharpsburg and Chambersburg in September of 1862.
So in a very different context from long-gone President Lincoln, Hughes issued War Directive 107 to the Secretaries of War and the Navy, to be disseminated amongst their commanders - "all Negro persons in enemy territory occupied by the United States are to be considered Free Men, regardless of their status in enemy society preceding the war." In essence, anywhere American troops were, slavery was de facto abolished, and the advance of the Army deeper into the Confederacy thus inferred that slavery would be gradually eradicated to the drumbeat of marching American boots. Abolitionists both total and soft rejoiced when word of this was quickly leaked and disseminated to the press, while the Confederate reaction was one of apoplexy, though Dixie's public opinion had long been that the United States was committed to destroying them, so Directive 107 did little but confirm to them what they already believed. [1]
Hughes' Directive 107 is a key pillar of his strong historical reputation as President, but in the immediate aftermath it had little practical effect. The United States, from the top down, still did not regard emancipating slaves as their first-order priority in the heat of war, the occupied parts of Kentucky and northern Virginia had some of the lowest ratios of enslaved persons in the Confederacy, and Confederate landowners rapidly evacuated their chattel southwards ahead of the advancing US armies. It made no proclamation as to what would occur at the end of the war, nor did it establish abolition as an explicit war goal, contrary to Confederate claims then and now. [2] It was rather a practical, pragmatic and most importantly enforceable directive, but nonetheless it was so celebrated that September 30th is still noted in many Confederate Black circles as Directive Day, particularly in Kentucky where it indeed had immediate impacts..." [3]
- A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy [4]
[1] Should note that due to the very different contexts of OTL's ACW and TTL's GAW, this is basically the precise opposite of the Emancipation Proclamation, a mostly unenforceable gamble by Lincoln that declared all slaves in unoccupied territory that was in rebellion were now considered free; this basically says that slaves in occupied territory, where the US can actually free them and enforce said freedom, are now emancipated.
[2] I'm focusing on Confederate reactions here so much because this book is, in the end, about the end of slavery in the Confederate States; think of his update, and some to follow, as prologues or early chapters in it
[3] More on that later - was originally to be the focus of this update, but I decided the thought process of and reaction to Hughes and the rest of US leadership coming around to an alt-Emancipation Proclamation was more important to set the scene first
[4] Decided to scrap Beyond Bondage moving forward, since we've been following that book since the 1860s or thereabouts. I wanted to tell a story now more specific to the Black experience of the immediate war years and their aftermath
