Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  5. Robert Schenck, quoted in William Frank Zornow, Lincoln & the Party Divided (Norman, Okla., 1954), 139.

  After a slow start in the Shenandoah Valley, Phil Sheridan soon gave Republicans more cheering news. Mindful of Grant's injunction to follow Jubal Early "to the death," Sheridan was also aware of the long record of Union disasters in the Valley. Therefore his Army of the Shenandoah sparred carefully with Early's rebels for six weeks without driving them any farther south than Winchester. Intelligence reports of the reinforcement of Early by four divisions from Lee (in fact he had received only two) added to Sheridan's unwonted caution. Taking advantage of this weakening of the Petersburg defenses, Grant in late August had cut the railroad linking the city to the blockade-running port of Wilmington. Forced to lengthen his lines and protect wagon trains hauling supplies around this break, Lee recalled one division from the Valley. Learning of this from Rebecca Wright, a Quaker schoolteacher and Union sympathizer in Winchester, Sheridan decided to strike. On September 19 his 37,000 bluecoats attacked the 15,000 Confederates at Winchester. The wagon train of one Union corps tangled up the troops of another and almost halted the assault before it began. But with much energy and profanity Sheridan straightened out the jam, got his troops into line, and led them forward in an irresistible wave. Northern cavalry with their rapid-firing carbines played a conspicuous role; two divisions of horsemen even thundered down on Early's left in an old-fashioned saber charge and captured the bulk of the 2,000 rebels who surrendered. "We have just sent them whirling through Winchester," wired Sheridan's chief of staff in a phrase that looked good in the newspapers, "and we are after them to-morrow."6

  Having lost one-fourth of his army, Early retreated twenty miles to a strong defensive position on Fisher's Hill just south of Strasburg. Sheridan indeed came "after them tomorrow." On September 22 two corps made a feint against Early's entrenched line while a third—mostly West Virginians and Ohioans who had fought through this rugged terrain for three years—worked their way up mountain paths to hit the Confederate left end-on. Bursting out of thick woods with the setting sun at their backs, they crumbled the surprised southern flank like a dry leaf. The Federals again sent Early "whirling" southward some sixty miles to a pass in the Blue Ridge where the rebels holed up to lick their wounds.

  "Sheridan has knocked down gold and G. B. McClellan together," wrote a New York Republican. "The former is below 200 [for the first

  6. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 43, pt. 2, p. 124.

  time since May], and the latter is nowhere."7 Grant weighed in with renewed attacks on both ends of Lee's line south and north of the James River. Though failing to score a breakthrough, Union forces advanced another two miles southwest of Petersburg and captured an important fort only six miles from Richmond. Panic gripped the Confederate capital as provost guards rounded up every able-bodied male under fifty they could find—including two indignant cabinet members—to put them into the trenches.8 But Lee's veterans stopped the Yankees before they reached these inner defenses. Northern newspapers nevertheless puffed this action into a great victory—pale though it was in comparison with Sheridan's triumphs.

  Having followed Early almost to the death, Sheridan proceeded to carry out the second part of Grant's instructions: to turn "the Shenandoah Valley [into] a barren waste . . . so that crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their provender with them."9 Besides serving as an avenue for invasion of the North, the Valley had supplied much of the food for Confederate armies in Virginia. Destroying its crops would put an end to both functions. Sheridan was the man for this job. "The people must be left nothing," he said, "but their eyes to weep with over the war." Union horsemen swept up the Valley like a plague of locusts. By October 7, Sheridan could report that they had "destroyed over 2,000 barns filled with wheat, hay, and farming implements; over seventy mills filled with flour and wheat; have driven in front of the army over 4,000 head of stock, and have killed and issued to the troops not less than 3,000 sheep." But this was just the beginning. By the time he was through, Sheridan promised, "the Valley, from Winchester up to Staunton, ninety-two miles, will have little in it for man or beast."10

  This was playing for keeps. Northern barnburners made little distinction between rebel farmers and those who claimed to be loyal to the Union. The grain and fodder of both would go to the Confederates if not seized or destroyed, or it would be consumed by the guerrillas who swarmed around the army's flanks and rear and tried to sting it to death.

  7. Strong, Diary, 494. At the same time gold rose to 3,000 against the Confederate dollar.

  8. Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Swiggett), II, 295–96.

  9. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 43, pt. 2, p. 202; Vol. 40, pt. 3, p. 223.

  10. Thomas C. Leonard, Above the Battle: War-Making in America from Appomattox to Versailles (New York, 1978), 18; O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 43, pt. 1, pp. 30–31.

  Partisans cut the throat of one of Sheridan's aides, shot his medical inspector, and murdered another popular officer after he had surrendered. Enraged by these incidents, bluecoated arsonists took it out on civilians whom they believed to be sheltering these "bushwhackers." One Union officer claimed that Sheridan's swath of destruction had finally "purified" the Valley of partisan bands: "As our boys expressed it, 'we burned out the hornets.' "11

  It was a hard war and would soon become even harder, down in Georgia and South Carolina. Meanwhile the rebels decided that they could not give up the Shenandoah Valley without another fight. Lee reinforced Early with an infantry division and a cavalry brigade, which caused Sheridan to postpone the planned return of the 6th Corps to the Petersburg front. Leaving his army camped near Cedar Creek fifteen miles south of Winchester, Sheridan entrained for Washington on October 16 for a strategy conference to decide what to do next. While he was gone, Early borrowed a leaf from the book of his mentor Stonewall Jackson and decided to make a surprise attack. On the night of October 18–19 four Confederate divisions silently moved into position for a dawn assault on the two left-flank Union divisions. The surprise was complete. The rudely awakened bluecoats fell back on the next two divisions, communicating their panic and causing the whole Army of the Shenandoah to retreat in a rout four miles down the Valley after losing 1,300 prisoners and eighteen guns.

  Early believed he had won a great victory. So did his hungry soldiers, who broke ranks to forage in the Union camps. But it was only ten o'clock in the morning. The Union cavalry and the 6th Corps, which had not been routed, remained intact with remnants of four broken divisions scattered behind them. And Sheridan was coming. He had returned to Winchester the previous evening. Puzzled at breakfast by the ominous rumbling of artillery off to the south, he saddled up and began his ride into legend. As Sheridan approached the battlefield, stragglers recognized him and began to cheer. "God damn you, don't cheer me!" he shouted at them. "If you love your country, come up to the front! . . . There's lots of fight in you men yet! Come up, God damn you! Come up!" By dozens and then hundreds they followed him. Sheridan's performance this day was the most notable example of personal battlefield leadership in the war. A veteran of the 6th Corps

  11. Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (Garden City, N.Y., 1953), 286.

  recalled: "Such a scene as his presence and such emotion as it awoke cannot be realized but once in a century."12

  While across the way Early seemed mesmerized by his victory, Sheridan reorganized his army during the hazy autumn afternoon and sent it forward in a counterattack. With cavalry slashing in from the flanks and infantry rolling ahead like ocean surf, the Yankees sent Early's gray-backs reeling back over the morning's battleground. Driving the rebels across Cedar Creek, bluecoats captured a thousand prisoners along with the eighteen guns they lost in the morning and twenty-three more for good measure. Early's army virtually disintegrated as it fled southward in the gathering darkness with blue cavalry picking off most of its wagon train. Within a few hours Sheridan had converted the battle of Cedar Creek from a humi
liating defeat into one of the more decisive Union victories of the war.

  To follow it up, Grant tried another double swipe at both ends of Lee's line at Petersburg and Richmond. Though unsuccessful, this forced Lee to lengthen his defenses further, until they now stretched 35 miles from a point east of Richmond to another one southwest of Petersburg. This line was so thin, Lee informed Davis, that, unless he could get more troops, "I fear a great calamity will befall us."13

  Northerners were beginning to think so too. Scenting victory and wanting to be part of it, many three-year veterans who had mustered out in the spring re-enlisted in the fall. They helped fill enlistment quotas and relieved the pressure of the draft, which proceeded with unexpected smoothness. They also helped restore the Army of the Potomac's tone, which had all but disappeared during the summer under the weight of conscripts, substitutes, and bounty-jumpers.

  Republican politicians knew how to use this scent of victory to their advantage. One of their best campaign documents was a poem, "Sheridan's Ride," written by Thomas B. Read after the battle of Cedar Creek. Recited aloud in the meter of a galloping horse (from Winchester to the battlefield), it seldom failed to rouse crowds at political rallies to roars of patriotic fervor:

  Up from the South, at break of day,

  Bringing to Winchester fresh dismay . . .

  12. Bruce Catton, Never Call Retreat (Pocket Books ed., New York, 1967), 374; Catton, Stillness at Appomattox, 314.

  13. Clifford Dowdey, ed., The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee (New York, 1961), 868.

  But there is a road from Winchester town,

  A good, broad highway leading down. . . .

  Still sprang from these swift hoofs, thundering south,

  The dust like smoke from the cannon's mouth,

  Or the trail of a comet, sweeping faster and faster,

  Foreboding to traitors the doom of disaster. . . .

  II

  Republicans also knew how to make the best use of evidence, real and imagined, of continued Democratic involvement with rebel schemes hatched in Canada. The aborted uprising at the Chicago Democratic convention did not put an end to such enterprises. The most bizarre was an attempt to capture the U.S.S. Michigan, the sole navy gunboat on Lake Erie, where it guarded the prisoner of war camp at Johnson's Island near Sandusky, and to liberate Confederate prisoners there. On September 19 some twenty rebel agents from Canada seized a steamboat near Sandusky with the idea of boarding the Michigan whose officers were to have been drugged by northern sympathizers. But a War Department detective had infiltrated the group. The northern sympathizers were arrested and the Michigan put on alert. Forestalled, the Confederates steamed back to Windsor empty-handed and scuttled their captured boat.14

  More ambitious but equally abortive was a plot for an uprising by copperheads in Chicago and New York on election day. Having apparently learned nothing from the fiasco at the time of the Chicago convention, southern agents listened with pathetic eagerness to a few Democratic desperadoes who promised that this time their army of peace men would surely go into action—if enough rebel gold was forthcoming. Once again dozens of Confederate ex-soldiers turned up in Chicago as well as New York and other cities a few days before the scheduled rising. Once again nothing happened—except that Federal authorities, forewarned by secret service operatives who had penetrated the loose security of the Sons of Liberty, arrested more than a hundred copperheads and rebels in Chicago and seized a cache of arms. In New York, Benjamin Butler arrived with 3,500 soldiers to prevent trouble on election day. Whatever his deficiencies as a battlefield commander, Butler

  14. Oscar A. Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada and the North (North Quincy, Mass., 1970), 104–16.

  demonstrated anew—as he had done in Baltimore and New Orleans—his ability to cow potential civilian rioters. "This election has been quiet beyond precedent," wrote a surprised resident of New York.15

  From the supposed hotbed of copperhead sentiment in southern Indiana came spectacular revelations—some of them probably true—of skullduggery and treason. Provost marshals uncovered hiding places containing weapons and arrested several prominent members of the Sons of Liberty. In October these men went on trial before a military court for "conspiracy, affording aid and comfort to the rebels, inciting insurrection, [and] disloyal practices." Testimony by Union agents who had infiltrated the order implicated prominent Democrats including Vallan-digham. Republican newspapers fed voters a daily diet of sensational headlines: "REBELLION IN THE NORTH!! Extraordinary Disclosure! Val's Plan to Overthrow the Government! Peace Party Plot!"16 The military court condemned four defendants to death. Delays and appeals kept them in prison until after the war, when the Supreme Court invalidated the conviction of one of them—Lambdin P. Milligan—on the ground that civilians could not be tried by military courts in non-war zones where civil courts were functioning. The alleged conspirators—along with several others convicted by military courts—went free.

  But in October 1864 all that lay in the future. Simultaneously with the Indiana treason trials, U.S. Judge-Advocate General Joseph Holt released a report on the Sons of Liberty that portrayed them as a disciplined, powerful organization armed to the teeth and in the pay of Jefferson Davis to help him destroy the Union. "Judea produced but one Judas Iscariot," Holt perorated, but "there has arisen together in our land an entire brood of such traitors . . . all struggling with the same relentless malignity for the dismemberment of our Union."17 This report became grist for Republican mills. The party and the Union Leagues

  15. Strong, Diary, 510. Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada, 148–63, is a sober, matter-of-fact account of the Chicago and New York conspiracies. James D. Horan, Confederate Agent: A Discovery in History (New York, 1954), 181–98, 208–10, is a more romanticized story of the same events. Nat Brandt, The Man Who Tried to Burn New York (Syracuse, 1986), combines elements of sobriety and romance. Frank L. Klement, Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (Baton Rouge, 1984), dismisses these conspiracies as mostly figments of Republican propaganda, but a close reading of this book reveals a considerable core of truth to them in Klement's own evidence.

  16. Frank L. Klement, The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago, 1960), 190.

  17. O.R., Ser. II, Vol. 7, pp. 930–53; quotation from p. 953.

  printed thousands of copies; Republican campaign speakers quoted Holt freely, equating the Democratic party with copperheadism and copper-headism with treason.

  Democrats condemned Holt's report and the testimony of government detectives as "absolute falsehoods and fabrications . . . too ridiculous to be given a moment's credit." Lincoln himself did not take the conspiracy threat seriously, regarding the Sons of Liberty as "a mere political organization, with about as much of malice [as of] puerility."18 A number of modern scholars take a similar view. The leading historian of midwestern copperheads brands "the great Civil War myth of conspiracies and subversive secret societies" as a "fairy tale," a "figment of Republican imagination" compounded of "lies, conjecture and political malignancy."19

  This carries revisionism a bit too far. There was some real fire under that smokescreen of Republican propaganda. The Sons of Liberty and similar organizations did exist. A few of their leaders—perhaps only a lunatic fringe—did conspire with rebel agents in Canada, receive arms for treasonable purposes, and plot insurrections against the government. Although Vallandigham and other prominent Democrats probably did not participate actively in these plots, some of them did confer with Jacob Thompson in Canada. Vallandigham was "Supreme Grand Commander" of the Sons of Liberty, and he lied under oath when he denied all knowledge of conspiracies at the treason trials of the Chicago conspirators in early 1865. As Thompson wrote in the final report on his Canadian mission, "I have so many papers in my possession, which would utterly ruin and destroy very many of the prominent men in the North."20

  Whatever the true extent of pro-Confederate activity in the Ol
d Northwest may have been, no one could deny its potency and danger in Missouri. There the shadowy "Order of American Knights" established

  18. Klement, Copperheads in the Middle West, 205, 201; Dennett, Lincoln/Hay, 192.

  19. Klement, Copperheads in the Middle West, 202; Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham& the Civil War (Lexington, Ky., 1970), 293, 294. See also Frank L. Klement, "Civil War Politics, Nationalism, and Postwar Myths," Historian, 38 (1976), 419–38, and Klement, Dark Lanterns, passim.

  20. Thompson to Judah P. Benjamin, Dec. 3, 1864, in O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 43, pt. 1, p. 935. For balanced appraisals of this matter, see Stephen Z. Starr, "Was There a Northwest Conspiracy?" The Filson Club Historical Quarterly, 38 (1964), 323–41, and William G. Carleton, "Civil War Dissidence in the North: The Perspective of a Century," South Atlantic Quarterly, 65 (1966), 390–402.

  connections with various guerrilla bands that ravaged the state. Confederate General Sterling Price was designated "military commander" of the O.A.K.21 In September 1864, Price coordinated an invasion of Missouri with guerrilla attacks behind northern lines that represented a greater threat to Union control there than all the cloudy conspiracies in other parts of the Midwest.

  Partisan warfare along the Kansas-Missouri border continued the violence that had begun in 1854. The vicious conflicts between Border Ruffians and Jayhawkers expanded a hundredfold after 1861 as they gained sanction from Confederate and Union governments. The guerrilla fighting in Missouri produced a form of terrorism that exceeded anything else in the war. Jayhawking Kansans and bushwhacking Missourians took no prisoners, killed in cold blood, plundered and pillaged and burned (but almost never raped) without stint. Jayhawkers initiated a scorched-earth policy against rebel sympathizers three years before Sheridan practiced it in the Shenandoah Valley. Guerrilla chieftains, especially the infamous William Clarke Quantrill, initiated the slaughter of unarmed soldiers as well as civilians, whites as well as blacks, long before Confederate troops began murdering captured black soldiers elsewhere. Guerrilla bands in Missouri provided a training ground for outlaw gangs that emerged after the war—most notably the James and Younger brothers.