This is the only substantial dispute.” The fact that slavery was the crux and cause of the war did not mean, however, that Northerners were ready to fight and die to end slavery. In early 1862, Lincoln believed that most people in the North cared “comparatively little about the Negro, and [were] anxious only for military successes.” As he reminded a visiting abolitionist toward the end of January: “We didn’t go into the war to put down slavery. To act differently at this moment would, I have no doubt, not only weaken our cause but smack of bad faith.… The first thing you’d see would be a mutiny in the army.”As if in response, The Atlantic Monthly, the voice of New England’s abolitionist intellectuals, devoted the cover of its February 1862 issue to a new poem of five short stanzas by a Boston writer named Julia Ward Howe. Even by the standards of Boston, hotbed of America’s antislavery movement, the poet and her husband held extreme views. Samuel Gridley Howe was an educator and philanthropist whose hatred of slavery and the plantation aristocracy led him to support violent action even before the war broke out.
