Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  The news of Hood's "irretrievable disaster" and of Savannah's surrender to Sherman spread dejection through the South. This was "one of the gloomiest [days] in our struggle," wrote Ordnance Chief Josiah Gor-gas on December 19. "The darkest and most dismal day . . . a crisis such as not been experienced before," moaned War Department clerk John B. Jones on the same date. "The deep waters are closing over us," wrote diarist Mary Chesnut—also on December 19.15

  As the full extent of Hood's defeat became known and as shortages exacerbated by Sherman's and Sheridan's ravages became more serious,

  14. Sam R. Watkins, "Co. Aytch": A Side Show of the Big Show (Collier Books ed., New York, 1962), 241.

  15. Frank E. Vandiver, ed., The Civil War Diary of General Josiah Gorgas (University, Ala., 1947), 156; Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Swiggett), II, 357, 359; Woodward, Chesnut's Civil War, 694.

  the head of the Confederate War Bureau conceded that "things are getting worse very rapidly. . . . Ten days ago the last meat ration was issued [to Lee's army] and not a pound remained in Richmond. . . . The truth is we are prostrated in all our energies and resources." The price of gold rose to 5,000, and the value of the Confederate dollar slipped to less than 2 percent of its 1861 level. The heretofore resolute General Gorgas, who had performed miracles to keep rebel armies supplied with arms and ammunition, wondered in January 1865: "Where is this to end? No money in the Treasury—no food to feed Gen. Lee's army—no troops to oppose Gen. Sherman. . . . Is the cause really hopeless? Is it to be lost and abandoned in this way? . . . Wife and I sit talking of going to Mexico to live out there the remnant of our days."16

  The upbeat tone of Lincoln's annual message to Congress on December 6 provided a northern counterpoint to southern gloom. "The purpose of the people . . . to maintain the integrity of the Union, was never more firm, nor more nearly unanimous, than now," said Lincoln. And the resources to do the job "are unexhausted, and, as we believe, inexhaustible." With 671 warships the navy was the largest in the world. With a million men in uniform the army was larger and better equipped than ever. And despite the deaths of over 300,000 soldiers, immigration and natural increase had more than made up the loss. Thus while "material resources are now more complete and abundant than ever," we also "have more men now than we had when the war began. . . . We are gaining strength, and may, if need be, maintain the contest indefinitely."17

  These were chilling words to the South. Josiah Gorgas noted in his diary that "Lincoln's message spawns nothing but subjugation."18 Nor was the president's talk of abundant and inexhaustible resources mere gasconade. On the contrary, the demands of war had boosted the northern economy to new heights of productivity following the temporary setback of 1861–62 caused by departure of the South with its markets and raw materials. Coal and iron production declined in the first year or so of the war, but increased by 1864 to higher levels than ever before. Iron production in the Union states was 29 percent higher in 1864 than for the whole country in the previous record year of 1856; coal production

  16. Younger, ed., Inside the Confederate Government, 181, 184; Vandiver, ed., Civil War Diary of Josiah Gorgas, 163–64, 166.

  17. CWL, VIII, 144, 149–51.

  18. Vandiver, ed., Civil War Diary of Josiah Gorgas, 155.

  in the North during the four war years was 21 percent greater than in the highest four peacetime years for both North and South. The North built more merchant ship tonnage during the war than the whole country had built in any comparable peacetime period despite the crippling of the transatlantic merchant marine by southern commerce raiders and the competing demands of the navy on shipbuilding capacity. Although new railroad construction slowed during the war, the amount of traffic over existing lines increased by 50 percent or more, absorbing the excess capacity created by the railroad-building boom of the 1850s. Traffic on the Erie Canal also increased by more than 50 percent during the war. Despite a drastic decline of 72 percent in the North's leading industry, cotton textiles, the overall manufacturing index stood 13 percent higher in 1864 for the Union states alone than for the entire country in 1860. The North had to import hundreds of thousands of rifles in the first year or two of the war; by 1864 the firearms industry was turning out more than enough rifles and artillery for the large Union army.

  And the northern economy churned out plenty of butter as well as guns. Despite the secession of southern states, war in the border states, and the absence of a half-million farmers in the army, Union states grew more wheat in both 1862 and 1863 than the entire country had grown in the previous record year of 1859. Despite the food needs of the army and the civilian population, the United States actually doubled its exports of wheat, corn, pork, and beef during the war to help fill the void created by crop failures in western Europe during the early 1860s. In 1864 the president of the Illinois Agricultural Society boasted of "railroads pressed beyond their capacity with the freights of our people . . . more acres of fertile land under culture . . . and more prolific crops than ever before . . . whitening the Northern lakes with the sails of its commerce . . . and then realize, if you can, that all this has occurred and is occurring in the midst of a war the most stupendous ever prosecuted among men." It was an impressive achievement, all right, made possible by the stimulus of war production, by mechanization of agriculture, and by the expanded employment of women as well as machines in northern industry. In the contrasting impact of the war on the northern and southern economies could be read not only the final outcome of the war but also the future economic health of those regions.19

  19. Quotation from Emerson D. Fite, Social and Industrial Conditions in the North during the Civil War (New York, 1910), 23. Statistical data in these two paragraphs were obtained from ibid., passim; and from the relevant tables of Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, 1975) and Ralph Adreano, ed., The Economic Impact of the American Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 1962).

  The North had enough manpower and energy left over from the war effort to continue the process of westward expansion. As Lincoln noted in his 1864 message, a hundred miles of the eastern end of the transcontinental railroad had been surveyed and twenty miles of tracks already laid on the other end in California. Gold production held steady during the war, copper increased by 50 percent, and silver quadrupled as new mines were opened, especially in Nevada, which entered the Union as a state in 1864. Western growth had its dark side, of course: many of the new settlers were draft dodgers from states east of the Mississippi; the politics of federal aid to railroad construction were none too scrupulous; and worst of all, the extinguishment of Indian titles to the land proceeded ruthlessly, accompanied by bloody fighting in Minnesota, Colorado, and elsewhere during the war.20

  New industries also blossomed in the hothouse climate of the southern wartime economy. Gunpowder mills, ordnance plants, machine shops, and the like sprang up at Augusta, Selma, Atlanta, and numerous other places, while the Tredegar Works in Richmond turned out iron for every conceivable military use. But Yankee invasions and raids sooner or later destroyed most of this new industry, along with anything else of economic value within reach, so that by war's end much of the South was an economic desert. The war not only killed one-quarter of the Confederacy's white men of military age. It also killed two-fifths of southern livestock, wrecked half of the farm machinery, ruined thousands of miles of railroad, left scores of thousands of farms and plantations in weeds and disrepair, and destroyed the principal labor system on which southern productivity had been based. Two-thirds of assessed southern wealth vanished in the war. The wreckage of the southern economy caused the 1860s to become the decade of least economic growth in American history before the 1930s. It also produced a wrenching redistribution of wealth and income between North and South. As measured by the census, southern agricultural and manufacturing capital declined by 46 percent between 1860 and 1870, while northern capital

  20. For a succinct recent account of Indian affairs during the war, see Robert M. Utley, The Indian
Frontier of the American West 1846–1890 (Albuquerque, 1984), chap. 3.

  increased by 50 percent.21 In 1860 the southern states had contained 30 percent of the national wealth; in 1870, only 12 percent. Per capita commodity output (including agriculture) was almost equal in North and South in 1860; by 1870 the North's per capita output was 56 percent greater. In 1860 the average per capita income of southerners including slaves was about two-thirds of the northern average; after the war southern income dropped to less than two-fifths of the northern average and did not rise above that level for the rest of the nineteenth century. Such were the economic consequences of the South's bid for independence.22

  II

  Despite Confederate disasters in the last months of 1864, the war was not yet over—at least Jefferson Davis and his colleagues refused to admit that it was over. To persuade them, the Yankees put the finishing touches on Winfield Scott's Anaconda Plan, conceived nearly four years earlier, by capturing Fort Fisher in January 1865. By then Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was the only substantial military force left in the Confederacy, and the Carolinas were just about the only region from which it could draw supplies. Many of these came on blockade runners that were still getting into Wilmington, twenty miles up the Cape Fear River from Fort Fisher. This massive L-shaped fort, almost a mile long on its seaward face, represented a new version of an ancient idea in fortifications. Instead of masonry, it was built of sand and dirt over a log framework. Twenty-five feet thick and ten to thirty feet high, sodded with tough marsh grass, it absorbed shot and shell as a pillow absorbs punches—unlike, for example, Fort Sumter which had been blasted to rubble by the Union fleet. Fort Fisher's forty-seven big guns threatened dire punishment to any Union warship that tried to close in on blockade runners weaving their way through the treacherous shoals and channels at the mouth of the Cape Fear River.

  21. If slaves are counted as capital, the southern decline was 74 percent.

  22. Data compiled from Donald B. Dodd and Wynelle S. Dodd, Historical Statistics of the South 1790–1970 (University, Ala., 1973); Lee Soltow, Men and Wealth inthe United States 1850–1870 (New Haven, 1975); Stanley Engerman, "Some Economic Factors in Southern Backwardness in the Nineteenth Century," in John F. Kain and John R. Meyers, eds., Essays in Regional Economics (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 291, 300–302; and James L. Sellers, "The Economic Incidence of the Civil War in the South," MVHR, 14 (1927), 179–91.

  Union strategists were slow to make the capture of Fort Fisher a top priority. In 1863 the wasteful diversion of resources to the futile attempt to seize Charleston delayed the project. Finally in the fall of 1864 Admiral David D. Porter assembled the largest fleet of the war—nearly sixty warships plus troop transports to carry 6,500 soldiers—for an all-out effort against Fort Fisher. Commander of the infantry was Benjamin Butler, who by virtue of his early, politically motivated promotion to major general outranked everyone in the eastern theater except Grant. Butler conceived the idea of loading an old ship with 215 tons of gunpowder, running it into the shallows near the fort, and exploding it with the expectation that the blast would damage the fort and stun its garrison. Storms delayed the project until Christmas Eve day. The exploding ship did virtually no damage, the open air having absorbed the shock wave. The fleet then pummelled the fort with the heaviest bombardment of the war but managed to damage only a few of its guns. Butler got part of his infantry onto the beach but called off the attack when he found the parapet bristling with artillery and the approaches mined with "torpedoes."

  This fiasco provided Grant with the excuse he had been looking for to get rid of Butler. With the election safely over, Lincoln could disregard the political influence that had kept Butler in the army so long; on January 8, 1865, the Massachusetts general was relieved of his command. Grant ordered a second attempt against Fort Fisher, this time with the bright young General Alfred Terry in command of a beefed-up infantry force of 8,000. On January 13 they waded ashore through the surf and worked their way down the narrow peninsula toward the fort's north face while the fleet opened a barrage that rained 800 tons of shot and shell on the defenders. This time the navy's big guns disabled nearly all of those in the fort and cut the detonating wires for the mines, preparing the way for an assault on January 15 by 4,500 infantrymen against the north face while 2,000 sailors and marines stormed the bastion from the seaward side. Although the attackers took more than a thousand casualties, the army troops finally broke through and captured the fort along with its garrison of 2,000 men. Wilmington was cut off from the sea, and Lee's soldiers in the trenches at Petersburg would have to tighten further their belts whose buckles were already scraping their backbones.

  Wilmington itself soon fell, and most of coastal North Carolina was in Yankee hands. Desertions from Lee's army, especially of North Carolina troops, rose to disastrous levels. "Hundreds of men are deserting nightly," reported Lee in February. In a single month the army lost 8 percent of its strength by desertion. Most of these men went home to protect and sustain their families; some went over to the enemy, where they knew they could find food and shelter. A Massachusetts soldier on the Petersburg line wrote to his parents: "The boys talk about Johnnies as at home we talk about suckers and eels. The boys will look around in the evening and guess that there will be a good run of Johnnies."23 Confederate officers recognized that "the depressed and destitute conditions of the soldiers' families was one of the prime causes of desertion," but that "the chief and prevailing reason was a conviction among them that our cause was hopeless and that further sacrifices were useless." Whatever the reasons for this "epidemic" of desertions, wrote Lee, "unless it can be changed, [it] will bring us calamity."24

  Confederate officials regarded the loss of Fort Fisher as a "stunning" blow. Alexander Stephens pronounced it "one of the greatest disasters that had befallen our Cause from the beginning of the war."25 The southern Congress, then in session, stepped up its attacks on the administration. Secretary of War Seddon succumbed to the pressure and resigned. Some congressmen even called on Davis to step down in favor of Robert E. Lee as dictator. Congress did pass a law creating the post of general in chief. Although Davis recognized this as a gesture of non-confidence in his own leadership, he appointed Lee to the position. Davis and Lee maintained their cordial relationship, and both vowed to fight on until victory. But the fall of Fort Fisher had convinced many congressmen that "we cannot carry on the war any longer" and should "make terms with the enemy, on the basis of the old Union."26

  In this climate of opinion another movement for peace negotiations flared up and then fizzled out. This time it was the old Jacksonian Francis Preston Blair—as quixotic in his own way as Horace Greeley—who set up a meeting between Lincoln and Confederate commissioners. Convinced that he could reunite North and South by proposing a joint

  23. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 46, pt. 2, p. 1258; Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), 330–31.

  24. Catton, Never Call Retreat, 414; Ella Lonn, Desertion During the Civil War (New York, 1928), 28.

  25. Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Swiggett), II, 389; Alexander H. Stephens, A Constitutional View of the War between the States, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1868–70), II, 619.

  26. Vandiver, ed., Civil War Diary of Josiah Gorgas, 166. See also Younger, ed., Inside the Confederate Government, 187–88.

  campaign to throw the French out of Mexico, Blair badgered Lincoln to give him a pass through the lines to present this proposal to Jefferson Davis. Lincoln wanted nothing to do with Blair's hare-brained Mexican scheme, but he allowed him to go to Richmond to see what might develop. For his part, Davis anticipated nothing better from negotiations than the previous demands for "unconditional submission." But he saw an opportunity to fire up the waning southern heart by eliciting such demands publicly. Davis thus authorized Blair to inform Lincoln that he was ready to "enter into conference with a view to secure peace to the two countries." Lincoln responded promptly that he too was ready to receive overt
ures "with the view of securing peace to the people of our one common country."27

  Hoping to discredit the peace movement by identifying it with humiliating surrender terms, Davis appointed a three-man commission consisting of prominent advocates of negotiations: Vice-President Stephens, President pro tem of the Senate Robert M. T. Hunter, and Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell, a former U.S. Supreme Court justice. Their proposed conference with William H. Seward, whom Lincoln had sent to Hampton Roads to meet with them, almost aborted because of the irreconcilable differences between the agendas for "two countries" and "our one common country." But after talking with Stephens and Hunter and becoming convinced of their sincere desire for peace, General Grant telegraphed Washington that to send them home without a meeting would leave a bad impression. On the spur of the moment Lincoln decided to journey to Hampton Roads and join Seward for a face-to-face meeting with the Confederate commissioners.

  This dramatic confrontation took place February 3 on the Union steamer River Queen. Lincoln's earlier instructions to Seward formed the inflexible Union position during four hours of talks: "1) The restoration of the National authority throughout all the States. 2) No receding by the Executive of the United States on the Slavery question. 3) No cessation of hostilities short of an end of the war, and the disbanding of all forces hostile to the government." In vain did Stephens try to divert Lincoln by bringing up Blair's Mexican project. Equally unprofitable was Hunter's proposal for an armistice and a convention of states. No armistice, said Lincoln; surrender was the only means of stopping the war. But even Charles I, said Hunter, had entered into agreements with rebels in arms against his government during the English Civil