Editors proposed draconian measures to deal with these criminals. The Chicago Tribune, a Republican newspaper, suggested having “robbery of the army and navy made a capital offence.” The Newark Daily Advertiser concluded, “The people everywhere demand that the punishment of all offenders in this direction shall be summary and severe.” Lawmakers heard the outcry, and Congress passed legislation enabling the government to haul cheating contractors before military rather than civilian tribunals. Between 1863 and 1865, at least a dozen contractors found themselves in these courts.33
The outrage far exceeded the reality. Contractors faced tight deadlines, often working at an unprecedented scale, dependent on a workforce subject to high turnover, and at the mercy of suppliers for raw materials. It was undeniable that some contractors made enormous profits and some produced “shoddy” goods. The system worked well for the most part, however, thanks to Quartermaster General Meigs and his staff. The Union army was the best-fed and best-equipped army the world had ever seen up to that time. The civilian population generally prospered, especially the expanding urban middle class and market-oriented farmers. The North fought a war and thrived at the same time. Corruption was hardly a new outcropping on the American landscape. The phrase “spoils system” had a lengthy lineage in the United States. The stuffers of ballot boxes in city elections and on the Plains of Kansas, and the “Buchaneers” of the Buchanan administration who made sweetheart land deals with cronies, were more threatening to democratic institutions than the alleged defalcations of “Honest Abe’s” administration.34
The source of the outrage lay less in the reality of widespread profiteering than in the rapid economic change that disoriented northern civilians and their assumptions about the egalitarian nature of American society: of the relationship between capital and labor; and of the shared community of interest in prosecuting a holy war in a holy manner. The war, its horribly bloody toll on the battlefield, and the huge profits cascading into boardrooms seemed starkly at odds with the exalted goal of a nation reborn. A nation that prided itself on individual initiative and freedom now confronted the results of that pride. Corruption and outrageous fortunes made for good political theater. It would have many curtain calls in the coming Gilded Age. The reality, though, was much less sinister than the imagined ravishing of Columbia. The reality was that a new nation was emerging and Americans did not know quite yet of what to make of it.
This new nation would not have existed were it not for the Union victory on the battlefield. By the end of 1863, the growing confidence in the North supported bond issues, booming factories, and military enlistments. The draft, which had caused so many problems during the spring and summer, became less relevant. Through the remaining months of the war, volunteers exceeded draftees. In the end, only fifty thousand soldiers entered the Union army via conscription. Gettysburg and Vicksburg had an enormously positive psychological impact on the North at a time when the war was going badly for Union forces. In late fall, another significant Union victory emerged from the mountain fog of southeastern Tennessee.35
In late June, after much prodding from Lincoln, William S. Rosecrans moved his Army of the Cumberland against Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee, pushing the Confederates back to Chattanooga on July 7. After the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the campaign in southeastern Tennessee now assumed priority in the Lincoln administration. Defeating Bragg’s army and occupying Chattanooga would open the way to the South’s last and greatest rail center, Atlanta. And beyond Atlanta lay the rich farmlands of central Georgia, the breadbasket of the Confederacy. Rosecrans did not, however, press the attack against the Rebels. Prodded again, Rosecrans swung around Chattanooga into northwest Georgia, threatening Bragg’s supply and communications lines and forcing the Confederates to abandon Chattanooga to protect their lines. Rosecrans took control of the city with a small force.
Bragg may have given up the city, but not the fight. His army attacked Rosecrans at Chickamauga Creek on September 19. According to legend, two Indian tribes had fought a desperate battle at the same place centuries earlier, with great slaughter on both sides. The survivors named the creek Chickamauga, or River of Death. In a reprise of the carnage from the distant past, General James B. Longstreet smashed through the right center of the federal line and seemed poised to destroy Rosecrans’s army, most of which retreated toward Chattanooga, but could not budge the remaining federal corps under General George H. Thomas. Thomas’s men, running low on ammunition, resorted to clubbed muskets and bayonets to fend off Longstreet’s charges, earning their general fame as the “Rock of Chickamauga.” That night, Thomas retreated to Chattanooga, where the remaining units of Rosecrans’s army hunkered down for a siege. The Confederates for once outnumbered Union forces, sixty-six thousand to fifty-eight thousand men. Both armies suffered losses amounting to 28 percent of each fighting force, losses that the Confederacy could not sustain much longer.
Bragg secured a commanding position above the city on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, holding Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland prisoner in Chattanooga. It was Vicksburg in reverse. Rosecrans would either starve or surrender. Within weeks, ten thousand horses had succumbed to starvation. Soldiers dined on hard bread. The weather grew colder, and Rosecrans’s men lacked shoes and clothing suitable to the season.
The Union had too many resources to allow the Army of the Cumberland to wither away. Ulysses S. Grant, now commander of all Union forces from the Mississippi River to the Appalachians, dispatched four divisions to rescue Rosecrans. Two corps from the East under the command of a rehabilitated Fighting Joe Hooker also repaired to Tennessee. Grant forged a precarious lifeline into Chattanooga along the Tennessee River and provisioned the city. Bragg waited on his mountain. Down below, a Union soldier watching the bluecoats pour into camp struck up a popular tune, and soon a chorus of thousands joined him: “We’ll rally round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again / Shouting the battle cry of Freedom.” The October woods were golden, and now, suddenly, so were Union fortunes.36
With Bragg content to roost on his perch, and Union forces growing daily below, Grant took some time one day to reconnoiter along Chattanooga Creek. Confederate and Union pickets faced each other across the creek, periodically conversed, and often met on a log thrown across the creek from which both sides drew water. When Grant rode up, a Union picket called out, “Turn out the guard for the commanding general.” A while later, a Confederate picket shouted, “Turn out the guard for General Grant,” and saluted him. Grant rode up to the log, where he engaged a blue-clad soldier, asking him whose corps he belonged to. The lad, touching his cap in respect, replied politely, “General Longstreet’s corps, sir.” By this point in the war, Confederates wore any decent garments they could get their hands on, regardless of color.37
With the situation in Tennessee stabilized for the moment, and the fall elections going favorably for the Republicans, Lincoln took some time off on the evening of November 9 to indulge in his beloved pastime, the theater. He saw The Marble Heart, starring one of his favorite actors, John Wilkes Booth. The president was so taken with Booth’s performance that he invited him to dinner at the White House. Booth declined.
Jefferson Davis, concerned about the concentration of federal troops near Chattanooga, visited Bragg. The president suggested that Bragg send Longstreet to attack Ambrose Burnside at Knoxville to regain east Tennessee for the Confederacy while also diverting some of Grant’s troops from Chattanooga. Grant, however, was too wily to go off chasing Longstreet. On November 24, Grant decided it was time to break the siege of Chattanooga. He sent Hooker to attack the Rebel positions on Lookout Mountain, but Fighting Joe and his men quickly disappeared into a heavy morning fog. All that the commanders on both sides could see of the battle was flashes of red light. When the fog dissipated in the afternoon, the sunlight shone on a scene of retreating Rebels and pursuing Federals in what came to be known as the Battle Above the Clouds. Hooker’s men planted the Americ
an flag atop the mountain, and a band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The victory cleared the way for the main federal assault on Missionary Ridge.38
General William T. Sherman and the Army of Tennessee attacked the Ridge on November 25, marching against Bragg’s right flank. The depleted Rebels held their ground. Grant ordered four divisions of the Army of the Cumberland, now commanded by George Thomas, to mount a diversionary attack on Confederate rifle pits at the base of the ridge to relieve pressure on Sherman’s forces. Thomas’s divisions took the rifle pits and then, with no orders to do so, charged up the steep, boulder-strewn grade of Missionary Ridge in the face of Rebel artillery fire and routed the astonished Confederates. Bragg’s headquarters stood on top of the ridge. The Rebel general made a quick exit, mounted his horse, and rode full-tilt down the other side of the ridge and out of his command. Bragg had never been a favorite either among his fellow officers or with the common soldier. He was officious and quarrelsome and did not take criticism well. He alienated everyone except for Jefferson Davis. But even Davis did not possess unlimited patience with the man soldiers claimed had “the iron hand, the iron heart and the wooden head.” Davis replaced him with Joseph E. Johnston.39
Sherman’s opposition retreated. The federal armies could now enjoy Chattanooga. Burnside held off Longstreet at Knoxville long enough for Sherman to arrive and lift that siege. More important, the Federals broke a key east-west rail connection. The road to Georgia now lay open for the Union armies. Yet Bragg’s army was mostly intact. Grant’s men were too exhausted to pursue the retreating Rebels.
Hooker’s crucial assault on Lookout Mountain might never have occurred, or the results could have been very different, were it not for the growing efficiency and centralization of power in Washington. Under normal conditions, it would have taken a month to move Hooker’s forces from the East to Chattanooga. The federal government, however, commandeered the railroads and transported Hooker’s twenty thousand men and three thousand horses and mules from Virginia to Tennessee in a mere seven days. Contrast that with Longstreet’s circuitous journey westward to join Bragg, which required nineteen railroads and six weeks of travel. Timing and the speed of troop movements were crucial variables in determining the outcome of battles. By late 1863, the Union had the logistical support to effect the rapid redeployment of its armies.
The Tennessee campaign was over. The men of the Union armies threw worn clothing they had not washed for over a month into huge kettles of boiling brine. Some of the more hardy soldiers dipped in the icy waters of the Tennessee and scrubbed dirt, lice, and everything else off their bodies by a roaring fire. They looked forward to a winter of rest, lodged in their cozy log cabins with a fireplace, where they could play cards or read dime novels to their heart’s content. Once a week a band came through to sponsor a “gander dance,” at which soldiers taught each other the latest steps, tying handkerchiefs on the arms of the men who were to be girls. Sherman had requisitioned all of the railroads in the region, ensuring a steady supply of rations. One hundred and twenty ten-ton carloads of supplies arrived each day, and the mail came and went on a regular basis. When the snow fell and the creeks froze in Tennessee, the soldiers huddled under comfortable blankets and overcoats. They drank real coffee in the morning. The Union war machine, at least in this theater, operated with great efficiency. Photographers and topographers went out in advance of the army to map the terrain. If a stream or river needed crossing, pontoniers would throw a makeshift pontoon bridge across the water. Engineers repaired damaged railroads with lightning speed. When news arrived that Confederates had wrecked a tunnel behind the federal lines, a Rebel prisoner told his comrades, “It’s no use, boys, Sherman’s sure to carry a duplicate. The thing’s all fixed by now.”40
Constructing Telegraph Lines, April 1864. (National Archives and Records Administration)
Confederate quarters in the brutal winter of 1863–64, when temperatures dropped below zero even in the Lower South, were not as comfortable. Patchwork tents housed the common soldier, and neither horses nor cows had much meat on them. For those fortunate to possess an overcoat, it was likely threadbare by this time. The prized possessions consisted of canteens, haversacks, writing paper, and clothing from dead Yankees or prisoners. Rags and newspapers were stuffed into boots to provide warmth against the cold. Hard meal bread and bacon washed down by something called coffee made from parched corn kernels comprised the common meal. The Confederates had maps, but they were mostly outdated. Reading material, unless filched from a Union soldier, consisted of letters and newspapers, at least until newsprint and paper ran out.41
The Rebels knew the contrast between their situation and that of the enemy. They took prisoners and they rifled haversacks of the dead. When Jefferson Davis reviewed the troops on Missionary Ridge, some soldiers called out, “Send us something to eat, Massa Jeff.” Sam Watkins of Bragg’s Army of Tennessee reported that he and his comrades were “starved and almost naked, and covered all over with lice and camp itch and filth and dirt. The men looked sick, hollow-eyed, and heart-broken, living principally upon parched corn, which had been picked out of the mud and dirt under the feet of officers’ horses.” These were the men sent into battle against Grant’s armies. When Joseph Johnston took over command of the Army of Tennessee, he found a force depleted by desertion, perhaps in the thousands. Watkins admitted, “The morale of the army was gone. The spirit of the soldiers was crushed, their hope gone. The future was dark and gloomy.” The federal soldiers lived and looked like they were winning the war.42
Recognition from the European powers, promising in the spring, now seemed further away than ever for the Rebels. Confederate battlefield reverses damaged the Davis government’s credibility abroad, but European realpolitik hindered the Rebels’ diplomatic objectives as well. The elite of both Great Britain and France could barely conceal their delight at the possible breakup of a rival nation. Throughout the war, however, they were constrained by the realities of European politics. The staunchest supporter of the Union cause was Russia. That the most despotic regime on the continent supported the most democratic nation on earth was strictly a matter of self-interest. The Russians viewed a united America as an effective rival to their perennial enemies, France and England. When the Russian Atlantic and Pacific fleets called on New York and San Francisco, respectively, in 1863, many observers interpreted the maneuver as a signal of support for the federal navy and a warning against British or French intervention. In truth, the tsar wished to remove his fleet from Russia’s ice-bound harbors for the winter in case tensions with Great Britain escalated into war.43
The British and French positions were of vital interest to the Confederacy. Early in the conflict, both countries recognized the Confederate States of America as a belligerent, which enabled the Davis administration to obtain loans and munitions. When a U.S. naval ship intercepted a British vessel carrying two Confederate envoys and detained them, British authorities threatened retaliation and sent two troop vessels to Canada to support their claim. The Lincoln administration wisely apologized and released the captives. The crisis passed.
The Confederacy was never able to gain recognition from Britain and France as an independent nation. The European powers feared American reprisal, and the military situation of the Confederacy deteriorated after the losses at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863. Also, Europe experienced a number of short grain crops and now relied increasingly on shipments from the North.
The French would not intrude into the American conflict without the British, though they managed to make trouble elsewhere, invading Mexico in 1862 over the alleged nonpayment of a debt and installing Maximilian of Austria as emperor. They were confident that the Americans, engaged in a civil war, would not interfere. When the Civil War ended in April 1865, the Lincoln administration massed troops at the Mexican border as a warning, and the French withdrew. Mexican nationalists overthrew Maximilian and established a republic in 1867.
Though th
e British aristocracy favored the Confederacy, the middle and working classes championed the Union cause, especially once emancipation became a war aim. Even the textile workers who suffered from the cessation of the cotton trade supported the Union cause. A statue of Abraham Lincoln graces a square in the center of Manchester, England. The inscription on the pedestal reads in part, “This statue commemorates the support that the working people of Manchester gave in their fight for the abolition of slavery during the American Civil War.”
Despite the Confederacy’s diplomatic reverses, the result of the war was not foregone in that bitter winter of 1863–64. The Davis government had substantial armies in the field and the will to continue the fight. The Rebels, though, no longer confronted the same enemy they had battled earlier in the war. Behind and in support of the Union forces loomed a new nation. A nation energized and inspired by the war’s ideals, fueled by the prosperity of factories, railroads, technology, and entrepreneurial endeavors, and coordinated by a government stretching its influence across the vast continent. The South had changed as well from the war’s outset. States bound together by slavery had forged a national government, a national currency, a national army, and national legislation to prosecute the war. They had not yet, however, forged a nation. The conflict between North and South had transformed from a conflict of regions to a war between insurgents and a nation, between yesterday and tomorrow. Now, the South battled America.
CHAPTER 14
WAR IS CRUELTY
WAR REVERSED THE SEASONS. Soldiers looked forward to winter as a time of regeneration. Spring brought death. The men settled in winter quarters could not know that the spring of 1864 would also mark a change in the rhythm of the conflict. Relentless, unforgiving war lay ahead. Had they known, perhaps the soldiers would have cherished their time in camp. Maybe they would have tolerated better the bitter cold, incessant lice, constant diarrhea, ranting preachers, and crashing boredom. As it was, the soldiers appreciated their sabbatical from death well enough. They appreciated the regular mail from home, and the food and clothing that often accompanied the letters. And every winter everyone hoped for the end of the war. That hope spurred rumors, and those rumors produced more hope. Marion Fitzpatrick, in winter quarters with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, wrote to his wife optimistically, “It is prophesied by a good many that this cruel war will end before a great while and then we will all get furloughs.” He added, “I long for the time to come when I can return to you and my darling boy.”1
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