America Aflame
Page 30
For African Americans, the war for freedom was more than a metaphor. The war represented Exodus and Armageddon rolled into one glorious cause. Frederick Douglass rejoiced that “the keen knife of liberty” hurtled at white southern throats. In a speech in June 1861, Douglass called the conflict a “war in heaven” between the archangel Michael and the dragon, and when it was over “not a slave should be left a slave in the returning footprints of the American army gone to put down this slaveholding rebellion.”12
Northern religious rhetoric often focused on slavery. In November 1861, Boston abolitionist Julia Ward Howe penned the words to a song that became a surrogate anthem for the Union army during the war. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was the Rebel yell set to music, a bloodthirsty cry hurling wrath and sword against a profligate enemy. “Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel.” Howe encouraged the young Union soldiers to Christ-like martyrdom: “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” Howe had an epiphany after the war and became a pacifist.
Harriet Beecher Stowe believed she was witnessing the unfolding of the Book of Revelation. The Civil War was a millennial war, she and many fellow evangelicals believed, “the last struggle for liberty” that would precede the coming of the Lord. “God’s just wrath shall be wreaked on a giant wrong.” Her brother Henry Ward Beecher related the familiar story of Exodus to his congregation, how Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt to the Red Sea, and how the sea parted and allowed the Chosen People to escape while burying their pursuers. “And now our turn has come,” he exclaimed. “Right before us lies the Red Sea of War.” And God was ready; foretelling Julia Ward Howe’s famous lines, “that awful wine-press of the Wrath of Almighty God” would come down from the heavens and bury the South.13
The causes of God and country blended together as the young men marched off to war, just as they had merged in the political crises of the 1850s. It was a natural conflation: a nation apart from history, sanctified by God, and a prelude to His coming. Political leaders spoke in biblical cadences and verses. And citizens believed in their country’s divine destiny as much as in the salvation of their souls. When the young men wrote their first letters home or confided their thoughts to a diary, they wrote of how much they missed their loved ones, yet of how they felt themselves drawn to a cause greater than themselves. A diary entry from a twenty-three-year-old Iowa soldier: “Tuesday, July 9, 1861: I have volunteered to fight in this war for the Union and a government. I have left the peaceful walks of life and ‘buckled on the harness of war’ not from any feeling of enthusiasm, nor incited by any hopes of honor [or] glory, but because I believe that duty to my country and my God, bid me assist in crushing this wicked rebellion against our government.”14
Confederate soldiers expressed their secular reasons for fighting less in terms of country than in terms of self-determination or self-government and, most of all, home and family. Like the Union soldiers, they naturally blended the sacred and the secular in their writing. A Mississippian claimed he and his compatriots fought “for a sacred principle—for the right of self-government, for the protection of their homes, and their families and their altars.”15
In the beginning, faith reinforced the romance of war. “The men first gathered to defend the borders were men … in whom the love of an abstract principle became, not a religion, but a romantic passion.” There were also men who responded skeptically to the call for a crusade, believing that to employ Christianity to kill represented less a sacred mission than a grave sacrilege. And there were men who saw through the charade of faith parading as patriotism. “All wars are sacred,” Rhett Butler scoffed, “to those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn’t make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight?” Butler is fictional, of course; it would be difficult to find some contemporary to express such thoughts. Margaret Mitchell had the benefit of hindsight.16
God may have authored the war, but men would have to fight it. The Confederate States of America faced, by far, the more difficult task. The list of challenges confronting President Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Congress was daunting: create a nation and develop an attachment to it among a citizenry deeply suspicious of central government; overcome class, political, and geographic divisions to rally around a common cause; establish a financial system to run government and pay for war; erect factories to supply an army not yet raised; and direct farms and plantations to produce adequate food supplies for both civilian and military needs. Jefferson Davis was capable, but he was not a magician.
The wives of Confederate leaders cheered the transfer of the rebel capital from Montgomery to Richmond. From a strategic standpoint, Richmond’s proximity to enemy territory may have been a disadvantage, but its location also lured Union forces into numerous ill-fated confrontations. “On to Richmond!” became less a battle cry than a punch line. From an esthetic standpoint, Richmond was a hands-down winner. Montgomery’s muddy main street had once swallowed an oxen team whole after a particularly heavy rain. At the city’s two hotels, the mosquitoes were the only guests that ate well. Many have portrayed the move to Richmond as a bow to Virginia’s power, but Confederate congressmen could not wait to pack their bags. Besides, Richmond’s seven hills gave Rebel leaders the illusion they shared something with Rome.
Rome was not built in a day, but the Confederacy had to be. Davis recognized that adherence to states’ rights conflicted with the needs of the new nation. He created a centralized administration that managed the cultivation of food crops for the military, forcibly commandeered both men and materiel, created a national currency, tax, and financial system, passed the first conscription act in American history (a year before the North instituted its draft), engaged in a vigorous international diplomacy, and planned military strategy. The Davis administration built a federal bureaucracy of seventy thousand workers, more than its counterpart in Washington. If the South was truly fighting for states’ rights, it lost in spirit almost immediately.
Many of Davis’s contemporaries gave him little credit until postwar historians rewrote the history of the war. Richmond harbored nests of spies, squads of soldiers, refugees from the countryside, office seekers, con men, and politicians and bureaucrats of varying competence. Some liked Davis; most did not. His belief that the new nation required a strong central government to make war and secure independence was, however, correct. His policies elicited such strong opposition from states’-rights advocates that Davis bitterly offered “Died of a Theory” as the Confederacy’s epitaph. The Confederacy, though, died not from too much government or too little but on the battlefield.17
Davis’s aloofness shielded him against an incompetent Congress and a mediocre cabinet. The Congress often met in secret session, a fact Vice President Alexander Stephens applauded, since that “kept from the public some of the most disgraceful scenes ever enacted by a legislative body.” Unbound by any party discipline—there were no parties—the members often demonstrated no discipline at all, erupting into mayhem and even murder on one occasion. They saved their worst behavior for the president. A cabinet member snarled that Davis was a “false and hypocritical wretch.” Linton Stephens, half brother of the vice president, collected a basket of adjectives to describe Davis as a “little, conceited, hypocritical, sniveling, canting, malicious, ambitious, dogged knave and fool.” Little wonder that Mary Chesnut in October 1861 reported the false rumor that Davis had fled to a farm with his doctor to escape his Richmond critics.18
The sniping at Davis reflected a microcosm of the Confederacy. Divisions and dissension abounded, waxing and waning with military fortunes. Some of these divisions existed prior to the war, among Unionists opposed to secession, white yeomen farmers resentful over planter hegemony, and most of the four million slaves representing nearly one third of the total population. The opposition did not dissolve with war, and in some cases grew. If white southerners had supported the war wholeheartedly, there would have been no ne
ed for the draft in February 1862 and for subsequent conscription measures. Terms added to the popular lexicon such as “before-breakfast secessionists” and “bomb-proofs” denoted those who waved the flag and then sought shelter in exempted occupations or property-ownership brackets. North Carolina journalist and future governor W. W. Holden, commenting on the numerous exemptions included in the 1862 conscription act, charged that the conflict had become a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” an allegation echoed around military campfires throughout the war.19
The so-called twenty-nigger law, which exempted those owning twenty slaves or more, fueled resentment, especially since the loss of able-bodied men on nonslaveholding farms could have a devastating economic impact on families and localities. A Confederate congressman unsuccessfully seeking the law’s repeal argued, “Its influence upon the poor is most calamitous.” Fighting against starvation, wives and daughters encouraged desertion at the risk of severe punishment. Mary Chesnut reported witnessing an impressment officer carting off a man as his wife cried, “You desert again, quick as you kin. Come back to your wife and children.”20
The mountains of western North Carolina and east Tennessee, the hills of northern Alabama, and the German districts of Texas harbored Unionists opposed, sometimes violently so, to Confederate authorities. Geographic and class divisions abounded, especially in the Appalachian South. North Carolina governor Zebulon B. Vance reported “an astonishing amount of disloyalty” to the Confederacy in the mountain counties of western North Carolina. A farmer in Winston County in northern Alabama summarized the attitude of these dissenters: “All tha want is to git you … to fight for their infurnal negroes and after you do their fightin you may kiss their hine parts for a tha care.”21
Victories on the battlefield could overcome these divisions. The plan of the Davis administration to create those victories contradicted conventional military wisdom. Offensive tactics won wars. A defensive war seemed more sensible, however, for a new nation encompassing 750,000 square miles, or roughly twice the size of the thirteen colonies. Confederate leaders made frequent analogies to the Revolutionary War and how the ill-equipped and outmanned Continental Army had held off superior British forces. The great Napoleon faltered before the vastness of Russia. The South’s wooded and hilly terrain, traversed by rivers difficult to ford, and the logistical problems presented by the Appalachian barrier made invasion difficult. The more territory the invading army seized, the more soldiers would be taken out of battle to perform the duties of occupation.
The Confederacy, though, could not wage a purely defensive war. Defensive wars are hard on the land and the people. They take time, which is part of the strategy: the enemy will eventually run out of patience and negotiate. At some point, however, time becomes the enemy as well, especially as shortages of manpower and materiel worsen the longer the war progresses. The Confederacy could not win a war of attrition.
The South instead adopted a hybrid approach, defending when necessary and selectively launching offensives when the opportunity arose. Southern armies were the first military forces in the world to take advantage of railroads to move and mass troops, overcoming topography and distance. The Confederacy also had the advantage of fighting on its own terrain and among a friendly population. Any offensive movements, however, carried with them new dangers as a result of improved weaponry. Rifled, as opposed to smoothbore, muskets increased the range and accuracy of minié balls from one hundred to upwards of four hundred yards. This pushed back artillery, rendering it less effective. Cavalry charges against massed infantry, however romantic, would be futile.22
West Point manuals counseled concentrated offensive charges against defensive positions. By the time defenders had a chance to reload—a process involving nine separate steps—the offensive troops would be on them with bayonets. Not so with rifles, where soldiers holding defensive positions could pull off three rounds before a charging enemy closed. Defensive wars conserved armies; offensive tactics could destroy them. The Confederacy would employ offensive tactics sparingly; the key was timing.
Washington, D.C., was not surrounded by seven hills, though some of its architecture possessed Classical pretenses. It was a creature of the swamp, fetid in summer and bone-chillingly damp in the winter. Foreign diplomats considered a posting there a punishment. It was a slave city, odd for the headquarters of a government fighting against slavery. It was a southern city, and Confederate spies and sympathizers abounded. By 1861, many northern cities had made rudimentary attempts to clean and pave their streets and improve the water supply and waste disposal. Washington was impervious to these salutary trends, with many of its streets muddy quagmires—a Union soldier reported watching a mule, albeit a small mule, disappear into the mud up to his ears one morning. Drainage ditches oozed with sewage and dead animals. Pigs rooted in the streets, and droves of cattle marched down thoroughfares as if the city were some displaced Kansas stockyard. At night, fires from the military camps blotted out the stars, and residents slumbered to the incessant roll of drums. A startled visitor from Maine concluded that he had come to “a squalid, unattractive, unsanitary country town infested by malaria, mosquitoes, cockroaches, bed bugs, lice and outdoor backhouses … and no end of houses of ill-fame.”23
In this inauspicious place, the Lincoln administration took the war in hand. It faced many of the same problems confronting its Confederate counterpart—raising an army, financing a war, developing industry, dealing with dissent and divisions, and formulating a military strategy—though it possessed certain significant advantages. The North manufactured more than 90 percent of the nation’s goods. The greatest differences existed in those industries most pertinent to waging war. Northern factories turned out seventeen times more textiles, thirty times as many shoes and boots, thirteen times more iron, thirty-two times as many firearms, and eleven times as many ships and boats as southern establishments. The South owned some vessels, but not a navy, a great problem with lengthy Atlantic and Gulf coastlines to defend. Of armories the South possessed none at the start of the war. Scarce specie went abroad to purchase weapons. The North possessed twenty thousand miles of railroad track, the South ten thousand miles. Northern tracks formed a system, too, while southern rails were unconnected. The maddening variety of gauges on southern railroad tracks impeded the smooth transfer of people and goods.24
The Republican Party, true to its Whig parentage, embodied the North’s enterprising spirit, and it would build on these advantages. Lincoln’s political idol, Henry Clay, would have heartily approved the Republicans’ interest in using government to promote private enterprise. Democrats, believing the Constitution prohibited such measures, stymied Republican attempts to subsidize economic development. The Republicans hoped to use subsidies, tax breaks, and land sales to knit the nation together with a telegraph system and a transcontinental railroad. They would use government policy to help fulfill America’s destiny as a continental empire. The war and the Republican majority in Congress—grown larger with the departure of southern Democrats—provided the opportunity to develop not only a more centralized federal government but also a nation.
With a Republican in the White House and a comfortable Republican majority in the Congress, it would seem likely that the Lincoln administration would not experience the dysfunction of the Richmond government. To an extent, that is true. Lincoln never generated the volume of enemies that tormented Jefferson Davis, but he attracted vocal opponents who made his life harder than it might have been. Most people, even his detractors, liked him, and unlike Davis, he had a deprecating sense of humor that often defused tense situations. The most common charge against him, especially when the war went badly, was that he lacked the intellect to lead. His own attorney general, Edward Bates, complained that the president lacked “will and purpose” and “has not the power to command.” A fellow Republican predicted “the administration of Abraham Lincoln will stand even worse … with posterity than that of James Buchanan.” Secre
tary of State William H. Seward was probably his closest confidant in government, but his cabinet, the “Team of Rivals,” rarely met as a group. Considering the oil-and-water nature of their personalities, that may have been a good thing. Besides, Lincoln rarely consulted them. As a friend related, “They all disagreed so much he would not ask them—he depended on himself—always.” Though his office was open to an eclectic assortment of job seekers, petitioners, old friends, and crackpot inventors, he rarely sought out opinions, but listened and then made up his own mind. Lincoln’s cabinet appointments demonstrated his level of comfort with his own judgment, and his decision to hold few meetings with them reflected even better judgment.25
Charges that the president violated constitutional guarantees of civil liberties probably annoyed Lincoln more than any other criticism. He prided himself on both his knowledge of and adherence to the Constitution. He lectured one prominent Democrat, “The Constitution is not, in its application, in all respects the same, in cases of rebellion.… I can no more be persuaded that the Government can constitutionally take no strong measures in time of rebellion … than I can be persuaded that a particular drug is not good medicine for a sick man, because it can be shown not to be good food for a well one.”26
While Lincoln struggled with his reputation among his political peers, he gradually won the affection of the people. His homespun humor and absence of affectation contributed to a common image. He had the knack of articulating what the people were feeling in a simple eloquence that captured the spirit of the moment. The president rendered the abstract concept of “Union” concrete. The Union, for Lincoln, was essential to secure equality of opportunity for all Americans. As he explained to a group of Ohio soldiers visiting the White House in 1864, saving the Union would ensure “an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence, that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life.”27