Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  The struggle of the Union and Confederate economies to supply and support their armies thus became a reflection of the prewar antagonism between liberal democracy and slavery. The free-labor ideology of the Republican Party, with its confidence that a “harmony of interests” naturally existed between capital and labor, found convenient expression in Stanton’s decision to step back from drastic economic interventions and allow Northern capitalism to lay its own golden eggs for the war effort. The Confederacy, insensibly obeying the logic of an authoritarian labor system, conscripted, confiscated, and imposed state-ordered controls. And within that logic lay many of the seeds of the Confederacy’s destruction.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE YEAR THAT TREMBLED

  EAST AND WEST, 1863

  Early on the morning of April 1, 1863, an angry group of women gathered in the small, squat brick building of the Belvidere Hill Baptist Church in the Confederate capital of Richmond. They met for complaint, not for prayer. Some of the women had husbands in the Confederate army and were fending for themselves on the pittances they could earn and the broken promises of assistance made by the Confederate government. Others had husbands in the Tredegar Iron Works whose pay fell woefully short of subsistence levels. Food supplies in the Confederate capital had dwindled as the fruits of the last year’s harvest were consumed by Robert E. Lee’s army and the civilian population of the city. What was now offered for sale by Richmond’s merchants, bakers, and butchers went for astronomical prices. One woman, Mary Jackson (who was variously described as a farmer’s wife, a sign painter’s wife, and the mother of a soldier), stood up behind the pulpit of the church and demanded action: let the working-class women of Richmond assemble the next day, march to Governor John Letcher’s mansion on Capitol Square, and force the governor to make good on the promises of assistance. If assistance was not forthcoming, then let them turn on the “extortioners” in the shops and levy their own brand of fairness by ransacking the bakeries and market stalls for what they needed.

  The next morning, a crowd of 300 women joined Mary Jackson at a city marketplace four blocks from Capitol Square. Armed with a Bowie knife and revolver, Jackson led a seething procession through the streets to the governor’s mansion, where Letcher met them on the front steps. The governor, however, had nothing to offer them but a few expressions of personal concern, and after a short speech the governor retreated behind his door and left the dissatisfied crowd milling around in his front yard. Another woman named Mary Johnson, “a tall, daring Amazonian-looking woman” with a “white feather, standing erect from her hat,” took the lead of the crowd and pointed them down Richmond’s Main Street. “Clubs and guns and stones” appeared, and the crowd surged down the street toward Richmond’s shops.1

  Over the next several hours, all semblance of order disappeared in Richmond’s commercial district as the enraged women broke down doors and windows, seized bread and meat, and then went on to loot jewelry, clothing, hats, “and whatever else they wanted.” The hapless Governor Letcher and Richmond’s mayor, Joseph Mayo, appeared on the scene to calm the mob, but the women were beyond listening to the words of the politicians. At last a company of soldiers, normally detailed for service at the Tredegar Ironworks, filed into Main Street. Someone or some people in the crowd pulled a wagon into the street as a hasty barricade, and at that moment, all that was needed for Confederate soldiers to begin shooting down Confederate women in the middle of Richmond was one reckless gesture, one careless word. 2

  No one had ever thought of Jefferson Davis as possessing a dramatist’s sense of timing, but on this occasion the president of the Confederacy appeared at precisely the right moment. It is not clear whether someone summoned Davis (who lived only a few blocks away) or whether he was simply following his own ear for trouble, but he found the mob and the soldiers at the point where each was ready to begin a melee. Coolness under pressure had been Davis’s long suit ever since his army days, and he quickly mounted the barricade wagon and began to speak. His speech was conciliatory, reproachful, and threatening by turns. He knew the people of Richmond were hungry, but he pointed out that farmers in the countryside would only be more unwilling to bring their produce to market in Richmond if they knew that it would be stolen by rioters there. He shamed them by pointing to the stolen jewelry and clothing in their hands when their protest was supposed to be for bread. He even offered them money from his own pockets. He closed by taking out his pocket watch and announcing that if the crowd had not dispersed in five minutes, he would order the soldiers to open fire. A minute or two crawled past, and then the crowd slowly began to break up and drift away. Eventually forty-one women, including Mary Jackson, and twenty-four men were arrested on theft and riot charges.3

  The Richmond bread riot was not an isolated case. During 1863, similar riots broke out in Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama; in Mobile, a crowd of women carrying banners with slogans such as “Bread or Blood” and “Bread and Peace” marched down Dauphine Street, smashing shop windows as they went. A group of “Soldiers’ Wives” wrote to North Carolinian Zebulon Vance to complain that with “our Husbands & Sons… now separated from us by this cruel War not only to defend our humble homes but the homes & property of the rich man,” he should understand that “there are few of us who can make over a dollar a day. … Many of us work day after day without a morsal of meat to strengthen us for our Labours and often times we are without bread. Now, Sir, how We ask you in the name of God are we to live.”4

  By 1863, the war that Southerners had entered into so confidently two years before was imposing strains on Southern society that few had imagined in the heady spring of Sumter and the high summer of First Bull Run. The creation of a workable Southern nation required more than enthusiasm—it required time to resolve the numerous contradictions in Southern society between slaveholders and nonslaveholders, between the Romantic image of the South as a society of plantation aristocrats and the grubby rationality of cotton capitalism, between states’ rights and the urgency of centralizing every Southern resource in order to win the war. Unfortunately, time was in short supply in the Confederacy. Southern armies were losing territory, Southern men were quietly avoiding war service, and Southern families were going hungry. If Southerners were ever to have the time they needed to understand why they were fighting this war, then the Confederate armies must strike and strike quickly to secure Confederate independence, or else the stress of performing this experiment in nation building under the sword would push the Southern nation into collapse.

  The day after the Richmond bread riot, the lead editorial in the Richmond Dispatch was resolutely headlined, “Sufferings in the North.”5

  SOMEONE MORE FIT TO COMMAND

  On November 7, 1862, President Lincoln finally dismissed George Brinton McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac. The immediate reason for McClellan’s dismissal was his slowness in pursuit of Lee’s battered Army of Northern Virginia after its hammering at Antietam the previous September. Looming behind that was the larger conflict between Lincoln and McClellan over slavery and emancipation. But getting rid of McClellan only solved half the problem; it now became necessary for Lincoln to find a more politically reliable replacement who would be aggressive enough to pursue and defeat the Army of Northern Virginia.

  At first Lincoln thought he had found such a man in another of McClellan’s corps commanders, Major General Ambrose Burnside. A floridly bewhiskered, six-foot-tall midwesterner, Burnside was admired by one reporter as “the very beau ideal of a soldier.” A West Point graduate of 1847, Burnside had served briefly in the Mexican War (he arrived the day Mexico City fell, so he saw no action) and then resigned from the army in 1853 to go into the arms business, where he patented a breech-loading rifle known as the Burnside carbine. When the war broke out, he was appointed to command the 1st Rhode Island Volunteers and led the expedition that captured Roanoke Island in February 1862. The Roanoke Island expedition made Burnside’s reputation as an aggressive
leader, and when McClellan’s Peninsula campaign collapsed that July, Lincoln offered Burnside command of the Army of the Potomac on the spot. But Burnside had known McClellan since West Point, counted him as a friend, and felt too much personal gratitude to McClellan for past favors to take advantage of McClellan’s failure. By November, however, there was no question that McClellan had to leave the army, and Burnside reluctantly obeyed Lincoln’s summons to replace him.6

  That reluctance should have warned Lincoln that all was not what it seemed with Burnside. Despite the reputation he had won as a fighter in the Roanoke expedition, Burnside was actually hesitant and unsure of himself as a general, and the higher he ascended the ladder of command responsibilities, the more hesitant and unsure he grew. At Antietam, McClellan had ordered Burnside to send the four divisions of Burnside’s 9th Corps across a bridge on the Antietam Creek and attack Lee’s right flank. Burnside found getting across the creek and across the bridge far more difficult than anyone had imagined, and not until after noon did the Federals finally storm across and drive off the thin curtain of Confederate skirmishers who had been defending it. He then paused for two hours to straighten out the alignment of his divisions, allowing just enough time for a full Confederate division under A. P. Hill to arrive pell-mell from Harpers Ferry and knock the 9th Corps back to the creek. Caution and uncertainty caused Burnside to throw away a golden opportunity to crush Lee’s army, and he escaped criticism only because so much of Lincoln’s disappointed wrath after Antietam was poured out on McClellan’s head instead. Replacing McClellan with Burnside, Lincoln imagined, would give the Army of the Potomac an aggressive commander, but it would also placate any unrest among McClellan’s stalwarts in the senior officer ranks by selecting someone who was supposed to be one of McClellan’s friends.7

  Burnside was aware that despite the lateness of the year, Lincoln and the War Department would expect him to mount a campaign as soon as possible to make up for the time McClellan had wasted in the fall. He also understood that there would be no patience with any plans for another flanking campaign down to the James River peninsula, with a careful and bloodless siege of Richmond. Lincoln wanted confrontation and he wanted it now, and anything less than a head-on overland drive would be interpreted politically as weakness of will. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, not Richmond, must be the real object of attack. So within a week of taking over the Army of the Potomac, Burnside called the army’s major generals together and unveiled his plan. Abandoning McClellan’s James River route, he would march overland, cross the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg, and draw Lee into a knock-down, drag-out fight in the flat country somewhere between Fredericksburg and Richmond. Since the bridges across the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg had been destroyed as the city changed hands through 1862, Burnside would surprise Lee by building bridges of pontoon boats there, and be on the south side of the Rappahannock before Lee knew what was happening.8

  The critical point in this plan was getting across the Rappahannock quickly, for if Lee got wind of what was going on and moved the Army of Northern Virginia to Fredericksburg first, the Army of the Potomac would have to fight its way across the Rappahannock and out of Fredericksburg at a decided disadvantage. Unhappily for Burnside, this was precisely what happened. Although Burnside took only three days, from November 14 to November 17, to march the Army of the Potomac down to the Rappahannock opposite Fredericksburg, his pontoons were nowhere to be found. By the time the first elements of Burnside’s pontoon train finally arrived from Washington on November 24, Lee had frantically assembled the scattered parts of the Army of Northern Virginia and dug them in along a ridge known as Marye’s Heights, just below Fredericksburg, covering the approaches south toward Richmond. Burnside had lost the advantage of surprise.9

  In any other circumstances, a commander of the Army of the Potomac would have been well advised to give up the campaign as lost and gone into winter quarters until spring brought fairer weather. Burnside was under too much pressure from Washington to stop now, though, and as if to prove that he really was the aggressive general everyone thought he was, Burnside ordered the river crossing forced and the pontoon bridges built under fire. Remarkably, his soldiers and engineers pulled it off, and by December 12, 1862, a shaky trio of bridges was thrown over the Rappahannock through a curtain of harassing rebel fire, and the town of Fredericksburg was secured. But the Confederates remained on the heights beyond the town. Burnside planned to tackle them on December 13 by staging a large-scale demonstration in front of Marye’s Heights, while swinging a third of his army around Lee’s right flank.10

  Planning an operation of this scale, however, proved beyond Burnside’s grasp. The flanking maneuver was checked by “Stonewall” Jackson, and, as if to annihilate all memory of any hesitancy at Antietam, Burnside ended up making not one or two but six perfectly formed but ghastly frontal assaults on Marye’s Heights. From behind a stone wall at the foot of the heights, the Confederates mowed down the thick, slow-moving Federal formations all day, until more than 12,000 Union soldiers were dead or wounded, 6,000 of them piled in front of Marye’s Heights alone. “We had to advance over a level plane, and their batteries being on high ground and they being behind breastworks, we had no chance at them, while they could take as deliberate aim as a fellow would at a chicken,” wrote George Washington Whitman to his brother three weeks after the battle, “The range was so short, that they threw percussion shells into our ranks that would drop at our feet and explode, killing and wounding Three or four every pop.” The next day Burnside wanted to make one more attack, which he would lead personally, but his disgusted corps commanders talked him out of it.11

  Burnside withdrew to the north bank of the Rappahannock, hoping for a second chance to get at Lee. However, when he started a new campaign on January 20, 1863, to get across the Rappahannock several miles further west, winter rains turned the roads into bottomless morasses, and Burnside’s infamous “Mud March” slopped to a halt. It “was the meanest… the most ‘ornery’ time the Army of the Potomac ever had,” remembered one Maine captain. “For mud, rain, cold, whiskey drowned-out men, horses, mules, and abandoned wagons and batteries, for pure unadulterated demoralization… this took the cake.” With soldiers demoralized and deserting in record numbers, with most of Burnside’s corps commanders publicly criticizing his ineptitude, Lincoln had no choice but to relieve Burnside.12

  Lincoln’s second choice for a general for the Army of the Potomac was yet another soldier with a reputation for aggressiveness, Major General Joseph Hooker, a handsome, happy-go-lucky brawler with an alcoholic’s red nose and an awesome command of old army profanity. By appointing Hooker Lincoln showed that he had lost patience with the army’s McClellan loyalists, since Hooker was one of the few anti-McClellan officers in the upper echelons of the Army of the Potomac and one of the even fewer to have endorsed the Emancipation Proclamation. He was also a surprisingly good administrator, and he spent the first three months of 1863 restoring the shattered morale and organization of the Army of the Potomac until, by April 1863, Hooker was able to invite Lincoln down to the army’s camps on the Rappahannock for a grand review. While Hooker was an uncommon organizer and a popular division and corps commander, there was some question in the mind of Darius Couch, the senior corps commander in the Army of the Potomac, about whether he possessed “the weight of character” needed to “take charge of that army.” Hooker was, in fact, a braggart and a show-off. Henry Slocum, who commanded the 12th Corps in the Army of the Potomac, had “no faith whatever in Hooker’s ability as a military man, in his integrity or honor.” Instead, “whiskey, boasting, and vilification have been his stock in trade.” Nevertheless, Hooker deliberately played up to the press to swell his image as a stern, remorseless campaigner, and he reveled in the nickname the newspapers happily bestowed upon him, “Fighting Joe.”13

  Despite the image, Hooker grew unsteady and unsure under pressure. “He could play the best game of poker I ever saw,” comme
nted Hooker’s chief of cavalry, George Stoneman, “until it came to the point where he should go a thousand better, and then he would flunk.” Far worse than this, Hooker was also grasping and loyal only to his own ambitions. “Gen. Hooker,” wrote Colonel Theodore Gates of the 20th New York, “is reputed a very ambitious & some what unscrupulous man.” Hooker had privately damned McClellan behind the general’s back to members of the Cabinet, and undercut Burnside’s authority so often by criticism and innuendo that the normally placid Burnside beseeched Lincoln to have Hooker court-martialed for insubordination. He liked to hear himself talk, whether it was about how he intended to thrash Lee—“May God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none”—or how the country needed to get serious about winning the war and, like the old Roman republic, create a temporary dictatorship to finish things up.14

  Lincoln struggled to bring Hooker to heel by reminding him that it was only with serious reservations that he had been appointed to command the Army of the Potomac. “I have heard, in such way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator,” wrote Lincoln in a letter he quietly handed to Hooker after summoning the general to the White House to appoint him as commander of the Army of the Potomac.

  Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship. … I much fear that the spirit which you have aided to infuse into the Army, of criticizing their Commander, and withholding confidence from him, will now turn upon you.15