America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  By mid-July, Grant’s grand plan was stalled. The Army of the Potomac squatted in damp trenches before Petersburg, much reduced in size since the early spring and unlikely to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia anytime soon. Sherman camped on the Chattahoochee seven miles outside Atlanta with both the city and his opposing army very much intact. In the midst of a growing malaise in the North, Confederate General Jubal Early launched a series of cavalry raids that, while strategically inconsequential, served as a metaphor for Union ineffectiveness.

  The origin of Early’s quixotic campaign lay in Union attempts to seize the valuable farmlands of the Valley of Virginia in the spring of 1864. The campaign was part of Grant’s grand plan. Union control of the valley would eliminate a vital source of food for the Confederacy and would end guerrilla operations in the region, freeing up troops for Grant’s operations against Lee. The Federals failed but caused considerable property damage, motivating Early to cross the Potomac River and boldly advance on Washington with ten thousand men on July 9. Along the way, he marched into Frederick, Maryland, and imposed a $200,000 levy on city officials, an expeditious if unorthodox means of replenishing the depleted Confederate treasury. As Early advanced on Washington’s suburbs, General Halleck called up every soldier in the city, including invalids, to defend against the expected attack. Early swept through Silver Spring as the president left his White House sanctuary for nearby Fort Stevens to get a better view of the action. He stood on a parapet, his trademark stovepipe hat making an inviting target for Rebel snipers. Naturally, he drew enemy fire. When a bullet wounded the man standing next to the president, Lincoln’s alarmed military escort, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., cried out, “Get down, you damn fool, before you get shot!”41

  The Federals fortified Washington sufficiently to deter Early from an assault, but the Confederate general was not through. Early returned to the valley and then headed north into Maryland and Pennsylvania. He rode into Chambersburg on July 30 and threatened to burn the town to ashes unless its residents paid a ransom of $500,000 in currency or $100,000 in gold. The citizens could not raise such a sum, and Early set fire to the town, justifying it as retaliation for federal depredations in the valley. “It was a most disagreeable duty to inflict such damage upon those citizens,” he wrote later, “but I deemed it an imperative necessity to show the people of the Federal States that war has two sides.” Confederate soldiers looted and robbed citizens and left three hundred families homeless. Miraculously, no citizen was killed in the conflagration. The only casualty was a Confederate officer who lingered too long in the town enjoying the contraband he had looted from a liquor store. Incensed townspeople shot him dead and buried him outside of town only up to his shoulders, so that birds and varmints could feast on his head. That Early could operate with relative impunity so close to the federal capital and destroy a northern town dealt another blow to the administration, already reeling from the bloody stalemates in Virginia and Georgia.42

  Sherman would cite Chambersburg as a justification for his army’s harsh treatment of Georgians during his march through that state later in the year, explaining, “The Rebels were notoriously more cruel than our men.” While both armies pledged to minimize the impact of war on civilians, much of that restraint had dissipated by the third year of the war. Since most of the battles occurred in the South, southern civilians suffered considerably more than their counterparts in the North.43

  The month of July ended appropriately for the Union in a spectacular fiasco at Petersburg. The 48th Pennsylvania regiment, composed mainly of coal miners familiar with explosives, concocted a plan to build a tunnel under Confederate entrenchments, plant eight thousand pounds of black powder, and blow the Army of Northern Virginia sky high. Just before dawn on July 30, a thunderous explosion occurred underneath one of the Rebel lines, sending men and cannon hurtling high in the air like leaves on a windy fall day. The blast created a large crater, 170 feet long, 30 feet deep, and about 70 feet wide. Poorly led Union soldiers stood gaping at the hole in amazement for four hours before entering and advancing toward the enemy rather than skirting the crater’s rim. Confederate units, stunned at first, surrounded and charged the hole and picked off the Federals before Union officers sounded the retreat. The Federals lost four thousand men that morning, while the Rebels counted fifteen hundred casualties.

  The peace movement intensified in the North, just as Lee had hoped. The huge losses sustained by Union armies since the early spring necessitated another draft. The cries of “Stop the War!” came from an expected quarter, the so-called Copperheads or Peace Democrats residing mainly in the southern-leaning areas of the Lower Midwest. But they also emanated from Republicans who, party leader Thurlow Weed of New York asserted, were “wild for peace.” In early July, Republican editor Horace Greeley informed Lincoln that Confederate agents in Canada had contacted him, with the approval of President Davis, to serve as Lincoln’s intermediary to negotiate a peace settlement. Greeley pleaded with the president, “Our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country longs for peace—shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood.” Here was an opportunity to end the carnage, Greeley insisted.44

  Lincoln believed little if anything would emerge from these negotiations, but, given the public uproar in the North over the recent course of the war, he sent John Hay, his private secretary, to Canada to meet with Greeley and the Confederate agents. Hay carried a letter from Lincoln detailing the Union’s conditions for peace: “Any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery … will be received and considered by … the United States.” The Rebel agents, who, in fact, had no authority to negotiate anything, broke off the meeting, condemning Lincoln for his bad faith in submitting preconditions for peace that he knew the Confederate government could not accept. The agents postured, “If there be any citizen of the Confederate States who has clung to the hope that peace is possible,” the terms of Lincoln’s letter “will strip from their eyes the last film of such delusion.” Turning to northerners, the agents urged the “patriots and Christians who shrink appalled from the illimitable vistas of private misery and public calamity” guaranteed by further pursuit of the war to throw Lincoln and the Republicans out of office in the November elections.45

  The Confederates had scored a public relations victory in a North hungry for peace. Greeley was apoplectic in the Tribune. “No truce! No armistice! No negotiation! No mediation! Nothing but [Confederate] surrender at discretion! I never heard of such fatuity before.” Lincoln could not ignore the anguish of his friends, not to mention the millions of northerners who would vote in November. On July 17, two emissaries from the North, one a journalist and the other a soldier and Methodist minister, met with Jefferson Davis and the Confederate secretary of war, Judah P. Benjamin, in Richmond. The northerners repeated Lincoln’s terms: reunion and emancipation. Now it was Davis’s turn for apoplexy: “We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence—and that, or extermination we will have.… You may emancipate every negro in the Confederacy, but we will be free. We will govern ourselves … if we have to see every Southern plantation sacked, and every Southern city in flames.”46

  “Columbia Demands Her Children!” 1864. The summer of 1864 was a horrible time for President Lincoln and the Union war effort. Huge casualties overwhelmed the promise of Grant’s spring offensive, a movement was under way to dump the President as the Republican Party candidate in the fall, and a new draft calling for five hundred thousand conscripts outraged many in the North. Here Columbia is saying, in effect, enough is enough. Lincoln responds not with gravity, but by telling a joke. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  Davis implied that independence was now more important than the maintenance of slavery. Whether he really believed that and whether his constituents would agree with him were beside the point. Davis was well aware of the propaganda value of
his declaration. And, even if Lincoln were to abandon emancipation as a condition for peace, Davis would never accept reunion. The New York Times placed the matter in its proper context. The meeting in Richmond “established that Jeff. Davis will listen to no proposals of peace that do not embrace disunion.… In view of the efforts now being made by the Peace Party of the North to delude our people into a belief that peace is now practicable without disunion,” Davis’s conditions were “peculiarly timely and valuable.”47

  The “Peace Party” referred to the Peace Democrats, or Copperheads. They elided the issue of reunion and focused instead on Lincoln’s condition of abolition. The Democratic New York World asserted that Lincoln “prefers to tear a half million more white men from their homes … to continue a war for the abolition of slavery rather than entertain a proposition for the return of the seceded states with their old rights.” Davis would never have accepted such a compromise, but Democrats hoped to convince northerners that slavery was the only stumbling block to peace.48

  Some Republicans either ignored or misunderstood Jefferson Davis’s adherence to southern independence as a nonnegotiable issue and also focused on slavery. The failure to resolve the slavery issue resulted in a civil war. Now slavery appeared as the major obstacle to ending that war. Greeley, who two years earlier had attacked Lincoln for dragging his feet on emancipation, wrote in the Tribune, “We do not contend that reunion is possible or endurable only on the basis of Universal Freedom.… War has its exigencies which cannot be foreseen … and Peace is often desirable on other terms than those of our own choice.” Lincoln remained steadfast, however. Nearly a hundred thousand blacks had joined the Union army, and their contributions had been significant. The president believed he would “be damned in time and eternity” if he abandoned his commitment to the former slaves.49

  The July peace initiatives revealed three things. First, given the positions of each president, the war would not end until one side surrendered unconditionally to the other. Second, northern support for emancipation was soft. Most northerners acknowledged the military benefits of freeing the slaves, but fewer recognized its moral dimension, or they believed that an end to the killing represented a higher morality. Finally, the issues of war and peace and of race and rebellion were likely to dominate the unfolding presidential election of 1864.

  The Republicans renominated Lincoln for the presidency at a subdued convention in Baltimore in June. A movement by Radicals concerned about Lincoln’s commitment to emancipation to nominate John C. Frémont came to naught. As the military situation deteriorated in late June and July, and the peace negotiations went nowhere, Lincoln’s prospects looked dim. In August, Thurlow Weed pronounced that the president’s reelection was “an impossibility.” Lincoln agreed. “I am going to be beaten, and unless some great change takes place badly beaten.” In a desperate move, New York Times editor Henry Raymond urged Lincoln to appoint a commissioner to “make distinct proffers of peace to Davis … on the sole condition of acknowledging the supremacy of the Constitution.” Lincoln hesitated, but eventually dismissed the proposal as a betrayal of trust.50

  On August 31, the Democrats nominated George B. McClellan for president and approved a platform that demanded “immediate efforts … for a cessation of hostilities,” without any preconditions. McClellan’s acceptance letter contradicted the platform. He supported peace negotiations, but only on the precondition of reunion. The Peace Democrats had their platform, and the War Democrats had their candidate. Whether this “compromise” would divide or unite the party depended in great part on the course of the war over the next several months. In the meantime, the Democrats launched the most racist presidential campaign in American history, a strategy they believed would resonate in a war-weary North.51

  The Democratic press and party leaders hammered on two themes: that the Republican Party was the party of blacks and, therefore, against the best interests of white Americans, and second, that the Republican fixation with the African was the major obstacle to ending the bloodshed. Typical among the campaign literature published by the Democrats was The Lincoln Catechism, which, among other slanders, called the president “Abraham Africanus the First” and posted Lincoln’s personal Ten Commandments, the first of which declared, “Thou shalt have no other God but the negro.” A new word entered the American lexicon, courtesy of the Democrats: miscegenation. Victorian sensibilities prohibited the discussion of interracial sexual relations on the stump, but everyone understood the meaning of the new word by its context. Democrats falsely charged that the Republicans promoted racial intermarriage, and routinely referred to the Emancipation Proclamation as the Miscegenation Proclamation.52

  The Democrats carefully wove together the themes of peace and white supremacy, less to take the hard edge off their racial obsession than to sharpen it. McClellan did not descend to such tactics, though everyone knew the meaning behind his oft-repeated declaration, “The Union is the one condition of peace—we ask no more.” The Democratic press informed readers more directly, “Tens of thousands of white men must yet bite the dust to allay the negro mania of the President.” Editors reprinted “scientific” articles asserting the racial inferiority of African Americans. A London publication wrote, “We do not hesitate to recognize [the negro] as a member of the human family. All we maintain is, that he is an inferior member.… What mockery, then, if not madness, to think of placing them on an equality in the powers of Government!” These arguments would persist through the Reconstruction era, and northern whites would become well versed in their implications. The Democratic press also reprinted articles of dubious veracity from southern newspapers alleging orgies of rape and looting by freed slaves, including the rape of a “Mrs. G” no less than eleven times while she suckled a six-month infant at her breast. At least twenty similar cases occurred, the article noted.53

  “Miscegenation Ball,” 1864. During the presidential campaign of 1864, the Democrats portrayed the Republicans, and Lincoln in particular, as favoring the intermingling of the races and as being so obsessed with racial equality that they would continue a bloody war to achieve that end. In this caricature white men and black women consort, dance, and flirt with each other in a suggestive manner. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  The reelection of Lincoln, these articles warned, guaranteed that these fiends would come north to take white jobs and white daughters. Such articles energized the Democrats’ urban working-class constituencies. Workingmen received the least benefit from the war’s economic boom, and the Republican administration dealt harshly with protesting laborers. In New York City, a Democratic stronghold, workers feared competition from emancipated blacks. “We do not want the freed negroes overrunning the North as paupers for us to support, or as low priced laborers, crowding white men out of work.… If the negro is everywhere freed, the laboring man of the North is reduced to the vassalage of the middle ages.” This was precisely the point made by pro-slavery apologists like George Fitzhugh before the war: that slavery guaranteed the freedom of the white man by ensuring the permanent subordination of the African. At an August rally, the city’s workers charged the Lincoln administration with refusing to “make peace or restore the Union until white men and negroes are reduced to a common level—until our heretofore proud white republic shall become a disgusting mass of mongrels and hybrids; until, indeed, we adopt and practice amalgamation!” At Democratic rallies in Ohio, young girls paraded with banners imploring, “Father, save us from Negro Equality.” Democratic cartoonists depicted Lincoln as a simian creature, craven before his black masters.54

  The Republicans rarely responded directly to these arguments, except to dismiss them as fantasy. Many white northerners believed in black inferiority and were jittery about the prospect of four million freed slaves descending on their towns and cities. Conditions in the prisons, the mounting casualties of war, and the dashed prospects for peace convinced Republican strategists to steer away from racial issues. Their strategy instead
tarred the Democrats with disloyalty, a difficult argument when the war was going badly. Thomas Nast summarized the Republican argument in a memorable cartoon, “Compromise with the South,” which appeared in Harper’s on September 3, 1864. A crippled and defeated Union veteran shakes hands with a vigorous and victorious Rebel soldier while Columbia, kneeling by a tombstone for Union soldiers who died in a “Useless War,” weeps. In the background, Nast depicts life in the North as totally prostrate as a result of the “compromise.” The article accompanying the drawing summarized the sentiment: “Compromise with armed rebellion is abject submission.”55

  Then, news from the front suddenly and dramatically altered the dynamics of the campaign. On September 3, Horace Greeley and several Republican governors were polling the party’s rank and file to gauge interest in a new nominating convention to dump Lincoln. That same day, the Democratic Party, with much fanfare, issued a proclamation pronouncing the war a “failure.” In the midst of these events, Lincoln received a telegram from General Sherman: “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”56

  Jefferson Davis had his wish for a fighting general fulfilled. John Bell Hood abandoned his predecessor’s defensive posture and went after Sherman, sustaining over fourteen thousand casualties to less than half that for the Federals in a series of disorganized and ill-planned attacks. In the eleven days since he had taken command, Hood lost almost as many men as Johnston had in seventy-four days. The citizens of Atlanta stood on their rooftops to watch the fighting and pray for a Rebel victory. When Sherman launched artillery shells, they fled to the cellars or dug holes in the ground. The remaining Atlantans were mostly women, children, and the elderly, as the able-bodied men had been conscripted. The morale of Hood’s army plunged. Private Sam Watkins reported that he and his comrades “were broken down with their long days’ hard marching—were almost dead with hunger and fatigue. Every one was taking his own course, and wishing and praying to be captured.… Each one prayed that all this foolishness might end one way or the other.”57