Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  27. CWL, VIII, 275–76.

  War. "I do not profess to be posted in history," replied Lincoln. "All I distinctly recollect about the case of Charles I, is, that he lost his head."28

  On questions of punishing rebel leaders and confiscating their property Lincoln promised generous treatment based on his power of pardon. On slavery he even suggested the possibility of compensating owners to the amount of $400 million (about 15 percent of the slaves' 1860 value).29 Some uncertainty exists about exactly what Lincoln meant in these discussions by "no receding . . . on the Slavery question." At a minimum he meant no going back on the Emancipation Proclamation or on other wartime executive and congressional actions against slavery. No slaves freed by these acts could ever be re-enslaved. But how many had been freed by them? asked the southerners. All of the slaves in the Confederacy, or only those who had come under Union military control after the Proclamation was issued? As a war measure would it cease to operate with peace? That would be up to the courts, said Lincoln. And Seward informed the commissioners that the House of Representatives had just passed the Thirteenth Amendment. Its ratification would make all other legal questions moot. If southern states returned to the Union and voted against ratification, thereby defeating it, would such action be valid? That remained to be seen, said Seward.30 In any case,

  28. Ibid., 279; Stephens, Constitutional View, II, 613.

  29. Upon his return to Washington, Lincoln actually drafted a message to Congress asking for an appropriation of this amount to compensate slaveowners after the Confederacy had surrendered and ratified the 13th Amendment. The cabinet unanimously disapproved, however, so Lincoln never sent the message to Congress—which in any case would have been unlikely to appropriate funds for such a purpose. CWL, VIII, 260–61.

  30. Some historians have interpreted this exchange as evidence that Seward and Lincoln were willing to consider a peace settlement that did not necessarily include universal emancipation. See especially Richard N. Current, The Lincoln Nobody Knows (New York, 1958), 243–47, and Ludwell H. Johnson, "Lincoln's Solution to the Problem of Peace Terms, 1864–1865," JSH, 34 (1968), 581–86. But since these discussions were informal and no contemporary record of them was kept, the evidence for this interpretation rests almost entirely on Alexander Stephens's postwar memoirs. See Stephens, Constitutional View, II, 611–12. It is probable that Stephens was reading his own viewpoint into Seward's remarks. Stephens also recalled that Lincoln had urged him to go home to Georgia and persuade the legislature to take the state out of the war and to ratify the 13th Amendment prospectively, to take effect in five years, thereby mitigating the evils of immediate emancipation. Ibid., 614. This too seems highly unlikely. Lincoln was too good a lawyer to suggest an impossibility like "prospective" ratification. Both Lincoln and Seward were committed to the ratification of the 13th Amendment as soon as possible The president expressed pride that his own state of Illinois was the first to ratify it, and he backed the successful drives for immediate abolition in Maryland, Missouri, and Tennessee. Seward had stopped off at Annapolis on his way to Hampton Roads and had successfully lobbied the Maryland legislature for ratification.

  remarked Lincoln, slavery as well as the rebellion was doomed. Southern leaders should cut their losses, return to the old allegiance, and save the blood of thousands of young men that would be shed if the war continued. Whatever their personal preferences, the commissioners had no power to negotiate such terms. They returned dejectedly to Richmond.31

  Southern professions of shock and betrayal at the North's demand for "unconditional surrender" were disingenuous, for Lincoln had never given them reason to expect otherwise. The three commissioners drafted a brief, matter-of-fact report on their mission. When Davis tried to get them to add phrases expressing resentment of "degrading submission" and "humiliating surrender" they refused, knowing that the president wished to use them to discredit the whole idea of negotiations. So Davis added the phrases himself in a message to Congress on February 6 accompanying the commissioners' report. The South must fight on, said Davis that evening in a public speech which breathed "unconquerable defiance," according to press reports. We will never submit to the "disgrace of surrender," declared the Confederate leader. Denouncing the northern president as "His Majesty Abraham the First," Davis predicted that Lincoln and Seward would find that "they had been speaking to their masters," for southern armies would yet "compel the Yankees, in less than twelve months, to petition us for peace on our own terms.32

  The press and public—in Richmond at least—took their cue from Davis. "To talk now of any other arbitrament than that of the sword is to betray cowardice or treachery," proclaimed the Whig. Ordnance Chief

  31. Stephens, Constitutional View, II, 584–619, provides the fullest account of the conference by a participant. Lincoln laid all of the correspondence concerning it before Congress; see CWL, VIII, 274–86. The most detailed secondary accounts can be found in John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York, 1890), X, 91–129; Edward Chase Kirkland, The Peacemakers of 1864 (New York, 1927), 197–251; and James G. Randall and Richard N. Current, Lincoln the President: Last Full Measure (New York, 1955), 326–40.

  32. Younger, ed., Inside the Confederate Government, 196; Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis: Tragic Hero (New York, 1964), 140–43; Randall and Current, Lincoln the President: Last Full Measure, 336–37; Rowland, Davis, VI, 465–67; Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Swiggett), II, 411; Richmond Dispatch, Feb. 7, 1865, quoted in Nicolay and Hay, Lincoln, X, 130.

  Josiah Gorgas reported that "the war feeling has blazed out afresh in Richmond," while war clerk John B. Jones recorded similar "cheerful" tidings. "Valor alone is relied upon now for our salvation," wrote Jones. "Every one thinks the Confederacy will at once gather up its military strength and strike such blows as will astonish the world."33

  III

  If William Tecumseh Sherman had read these words he would have uttered a sigh of exasperation. Having bent but apparently not broken the South's "unconquerable defiance," his army was now smashing and burning its way through South Carolina to finish the job.

  At the beginning of 1865 the only sizable portions of the Confederate heartland still untouched by invading Yankees were the interior of the Carolinas and most of Alabama. Grant and Thomas planned a two-pronged campaign to deal with the latter. Using troops drawn from the Army of the Gulf and from Thomas's force in Tennessee, General E. R. S. Canby was to invade southern Alabama through Mobile. At the same time twenty-seven-year-old James H. Wilson, who had risen to command of Thomas's cavalry, was to take 13,000 troopers armed with repeating carbines on a strike from Tennessee into Alabama to destroy the munitions complex at Selma and seize the original Confederate capital of Montgomery. Both operations got under way in March; both were complete successes, especially Wilson's raid. Brushing aside Forrest's outmanned and outgunned horsemen, the blue cavalry burned or smashed or blew up great quantities of cotton, railroads, bridges, rolling stock, factories, niter works, rolling mills, arsenals, a navy yard, and captured Montgomery, while Mobile fell to Canby's infantry in April.

  Destructive as these enterprises were, they became a sideshow to Sherman's march through South Carolina. As his army had approached Savannah in December 1864, Georgians said to Sherman: "Why don't you go over to South Carolina and serve them this way? They started it." Sherman had intended to do so all along. He converted Grant to the idea, and on February 1, Sherman's 60,000 blue avengers left Savannah for their second march through the heart of enemy territory.

  33. Richmond Whig, Feb. 6, 1865, quoted in Kirkland, Peacemakers, 254; Vandiver, ed., Civil War Diary of Josiah Gorgas, 168; Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Swiggett), II, 411.

  This one had two strategic purposes: to destroy all war resources in Sherman's path; and to come up on Lee's rear to crush the Army of Northern Virginia in a vise between two larger Union armies and "wipe out Lee," in Grant's succinct phrase.34

  Sherman's soldiers had a thi
rd purpose in mind as well: to punish the state that had hatched this unholy rebellion. "The truth is," Sherman informed Halleck, "the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina. I almost tremble at her fate, but feel that she deserves all that seems to be in store for her." The soldiers' temper was not improved by the taunts of southern newspapers against this "grand army of Mudsills." One of the mudsills, an Ohio private, vowed to make South Carolina "suffer worse than she did at the time of the Revolutionary War. We will let her know that it isn't so sweet to secede as she thought it would be."35 Another soldier declared: "Here is where treason began and, by God, here is where it shall end!" A South Carolina woman whose house was plundered recalled that the soldiers "would sometimes stop to tell me they were sorry for the women and children, but South Carolina must be destroyed."36

  Destroyed it was, through a corridor from south to north narrower than in Georgia but more intensely pillaged and burned. Not many buildings remained standing in some villages after the army marched through. The same was true of the countryside. "In Georgia few houses were burned," wrote an officer; "here few escaped." A soldier felt confident that South Carolina "will never want to seceed again. . . . I think she has her 'rights' now." When the army entered North Carolina the destruction of civilian property stopped. "Not a single column of the fire or smoke which a few days ago marked the positions of heads of column, can be seen on the horizon," noted an officer after two days in North Carolina. "Not a house was burned, and the army gave to the people more than it took from them."37

  34. Lewis, Sherman, 446; Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won:A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana, Ill., 1983), 656–57; Foote, Civil War, III, 737–38.

  35. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 44, p. 799; John G. Barrett, Sherman's March Through the Carolinas (Chapel Hill, 1956), 44; Davis, Sherman's March, 142.

  36. Soldier quoted in Lewis, Sherman, 489; Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel quoted in James G. Randall and David Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction (Boston, 1969), 432.

  37. Lewis, Sherman, 493; Joseph T. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman's Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns (New York, 1985), 146; John Bennett Walters, Merchant of Terror: General Sherman and Total War (Indianapolis, 1973), 203.

  The war of plunder and arson in South Carolina was not pretty, and hardly glorious, but Sherman considered it effective. The terror his bummers inspired "was a power, and I intended to utilize it. . . . My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us." It seemed to work: "All is gloom, despondency, and inactivity," wrote a South Carolinian on February 28. "Our army is demoralized and the people panic stricken. . . . The power to do has left us. . . .to fight longer seems to be madness."38

  Even more important, perhaps, than the destructive vengeance of Sherman's army in spreading this demoralization was its stunning logistical achievements. Sherman himself later rated the march through the Carolinas as ten times more important in winning the war than the march from Atlanta to the sea. It was also ten times more difficult. "The march to the sea seems to have captured everybody," said Sherman after the war, "whereas it was child's play compared with the other."39 Terrain and weather posed much greater problems in South Carolina than in Georgia. The march from Atlanta to Savannah proceeded 285 miles parallel to major rivers in dry autumn weather against token opposition. The march northward from Savannah was aimed at Goldsboro, North Carolina, 425 miles away, where Sherman expected to be resupplied by Union forces moving inland from Wilmington. Sherman's soldiers would have to cross nine substantial rivers and scores of their tributaries during what turned out to be the wettest winter in twenty years.

  Confederate defenders expected the swamps in tidewater South Carolina to stop Sherman before he got fairly started. "My engineers," wrote Joseph E. Johnston, "reported that it was absolutely impossible for an army to march across the lower portions of the State in winter." Indeed, so far under water were the roads in this region that Union scouts had to reconnoiter some of them in canoes. But Sherman organized "pioneer battalions" of soldiers and freedmen (some of the latter recruited from the thousands of contrabands who had trailed the army to Savannah)

  38. Foote, Civil War, II, 753; Sherman, Memoirs, II, 249; South Carolinian quoted in Barrett, Sherman's March Through the Carolinas, 95.

  39. Barrett, Sherman's March Through the Carolinas, vii.

  to cut saplings and trees to corduroy the roads, build bridges, and construct causeways. Meeting resistance from Wheeler's cavalry at some rain-swollen streams and rivers, the bluecoats sent out flanking columns that waded through water up to their armpits, brushing aside alligators and snakes, and drove the rebels away. The worst obstacle was the many-channeled Salkehatchie River fifty miles north of Savannah. "The Salk is impassable," declared southern General William Hardee. The Yankees built miles of bridges and crossed it. "I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it," commented Hardee. Northward lapped the blue wave at a rate of nearly ten miles a day for forty-five days including skirmishing and fighting. Rain fell during twenty-eight of those days, but this seemed to benefit South Carolina only by slightly damping the style of Sherman's arsonists. "When I learned that Sherman's army was marching through the Salk swamps, making its own corduroy roads at the rate of a dozen miles a day," said Joseph Johnston, "I made up my mind that there had been no such army in existence since the days of Julius Caesar."40

  Johnston soon acquired the dubious honor of trying to stop these latter-day legions. One of Lee's first acts as general in chief was to persuade Davis to appoint Johnston on February 22 to command all Confederate troops in the Carolinas. There were not many of them, and they had already been flanked out of South Carolina by Sherman's feints and fast marching. The four Union corps moved northward on separate roads in a Y formation with the forward units pointing toward Augusta and Charleston and the inner corps in a position to reinforce them quickly in case of trouble. The rebels had scraped together about 20,000 troops plus Wheeler's cavalry to resist Sherman. They consisted of the demoralized remnants of Hood's Army of Tennessee, the Charleston garrison reinforced by Hardee's troops that had evacuated Savannah, and a brigade of South Carolina cavalry that Lee sent from Virginia along with Wade Hampton to rally faltering morale in his home state. Some ten thousand of these troops were stationed in Augusta and about the same number in Charleston with the expectation that Sherman would attack one or both cities—Augusta because of its gunpowder and munitions plants, Charleston because of its symbolic value. Sherman kept up the feint toward both but went near neither. Instead he sliced through the center of the state destroying the railroad between them and heading

  40. Quotations of Johnston and Hardee in Lewis, Sherman, 484, and Jacob D. Cox, Military Reminiscences of the Civil War, 2 vols. (New York, 1900), II, 531–32.

  for the capital at Columbia. With their communications cut and an enemy army of 60,000 in their rear, the defenders of Charleston evacuated the city on February 18. The rebel troops at Augusta also slogged northward to combine with Hardee's divisions now under Johnston's overall command to offer some resistance when Sherman reached North Carolina.

  Charleston was fortunate that it was occupied by troops from the Department of the South (including black regiments), who put out fires started when departing rebels blew up military supplies, instead of by Sherman's bummers, who probably would have started new fires of their own. Columbia was not so fortunate. Units from two of Sherman's corps occupied the capital on February 17; by next morning almost half of the city was rubble and ashes. The greatest atrocity charged against Sherman, the burning of Columbia, also provoked an ongoing controversy about responsibility for the tragedy. Sherman and other Union officers maintained that the fire spread in a high wind from smoldering cotton bales set afire by rebel cavalry as they evacuated the town. Southerners believed that drunken Union soldiers torched the city. Other con
temporaries and historians have pointed the finger of guilt at vengeful Union prisoners who had escaped from a nearby prison camp, at local criminals who had escaped from jail, or at Negroes drunk with freedom or liquor or both. The fullest and most dispassionate study of this controversy blames all parties in varying proportions. It also blames Confederate authorities for the disorder that characterized the evacuation of Columbia, leaving thousands of cotton bales in the streets (some of them burning) and huge quantities of liquor undestroyed, much of it having been shipped from Charleston by merchants and wealthy citizens who had believed Columbia safe from the enemy. Black and white residents of Columbia distributed some of this liquor by the dipperful to the first troops entering town in an effort to curry their favor; instead it turned some of them into inebriated incendiaries. Sherman did not burn Columbia, but some of his men unquestionably helped to do so, and their officers' attempts to restrain them were too little and too late. On the other hand, far more Union soldiers including Sherman worked through the night to put out the fires than to set them. Only the abatement of gale-force winds after 3:00 a.m. prevented more of the city from going up. In any event, the fate of Columbia was not inconsistent with the scorched-earth policy experienced by other parts of South Carolina.41

  41. Marion Brunson Lucas, Sherman and the Burning of Columbia (College Station, Tex., 1976). This fine study reduces the estimated extent of the damage to about one-third of the buildings in Columbia, including most of the business district but relatively few homes in residential districts. Lucas also deflates the number of drunken Union soldiers and the amount of plundering from the wholesale orgy of rapine into which it had ballooned in southern mythology.

  Sherman kept the enemy guessing about his ultimate objective until mid-March, when it became clear that he was headed for Goldsboro and a junction with 30,000 additional bluecoats moving in from the coast. In the forlorn-hope style that had become southern strategy, Johnston planned to attack one wing of Sherman's army and try to cripple it before the remainder could come up in support. On March 16 two of Johnston's divisions fought a delaying action against four of Sherman's at Averasborough, thirty-odd miles south of Raleigh. From this affair the rebels learned that the two wings of Sherman's army were separated by a dozen or more miles. Johnston concentrated his infantry (17,000 men) to ambush about the same number of Federals strung out on the road in the advance of the left wing near Bentonville on March 19. The attackers achieved some initial success, but the Yankees dug in and repulsed several assaults during the afternoon. That night and next day the rest of Sherman's army was hard on the march to reinforce the left wing. On March 21 a Union division drove in the Confederate left, but Sherman called off the attack and let Johnston slip away during the night.