After repelling the Confederates on three fronts, the Yankees renewed their advances, stalled since spring, in Virginia and in both western subtheaters. As Lincoln perceived the strategic situation, the North needed unrelenting simultaneous offensives against three cities: Richmond to destroy Lee’s army; Chattanooga to protect Kentucky and Tennessee and open the gateway into the South’s interior; and Vicksburg to secure the Mississippi. The president believed McClellan and Buell would never do the hard fighting necessary to achieve these objectives. They feared defeat more than they craved victory, detested emancipation, and, as Lincoln said about McClellan, “did not want to hurt the enemy.” Burnside replaced McClellan, and Rosecrans replaced Buell. The commander in chief made one other change, sending Banks to New Orleans to succeed Butler. The one Army commander who remained in his post was Grant, about whom Lincoln said, “I can’t spare this man. He fights.” Both Banks and Grant had Vicksburg as their target. Unknown (at least officially) to Grant or Banks, a third force would also converge on the South’s river Gibraltar. In October Lincoln secretly gave John McClernand, one of Grant’s divisional commanders and a powerful prewar Democrat, authority to recruit an army in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa. With the assistance of Davis’s gunboats, he would move downriver against Vicksburg.
Although proclaiming his own incapacity for high command, Burnside seemed an admirable choice. Personally brave, he had conquered Roanoke Island and fought at Antietam, where he urged McClellan to renew the battle on September 18. Tragically, he assessed his abilities accurately. When he assumed command, the Union army was at Warrenton. Instead of advancing against Lee’s forces at Culpeper, Burnside proposed an eastward movement to Fredericksburg followed by a drive on Richmond. While Lincoln opposed substituting the capital for Lee’s army as the main objective, he approved the plan. Success depended on rapid marching to sidestep Lee and the timely arrival of pontoon bridges to cross the Rappahannock. Burnside’s army covered forty miles in two days, leaving Lee temporarily baffled as to its destination. However, unpardonable errors caused by Halleck delayed the pontoons a week. By then Lee had reacted, getting his army into a stout defensive position along a series of ridges west and south of Fredericksburg. On the left, Longstreet held Marye’s Heights; on the right, Jackson’s corps occupied Prospect Hill. Recovered from Antietam, the Army of Northern Virginia numbered 75,000 men.
Burnside’s army, 113,000 strong and divided into grand divisions under Sumner, Hooker, and William B. Franklin, crossed the Rappahannock on December 11–12. Franklin’s division opened the battle on the 13th, temporarily breaching Jackson’s line before a furious counterattack closed the gap. Meanwhile Sumner’s men hurled themselves futilely against Marye’s Heights. With Sumner’s division wrecked, Burnside ordered Hooker to storm the Heights. Hooker, known as “Fighting Joe,” prophetically protested that the task was suicidal, but Burnside would not retract the order, and the Yankees, said Longstreet, “were swept from the field like chaff before the wind.” Darkness finally ended the massacre. In the one-sided killing match the North suffered 12,600 casualties, the South fewer than 5,000. This was not Lincoln’s idea of hard fighting. “If there is a worse place than Hell, I am in it,” he said when told of the battle’s outcome.
News from the Mississippi River did not elevate Lincoln from the nether world. While McClernand recruited his army and forwarded regiments to Memphis, Grant began an overland advance on Vicksburg. But, suspicious of McClernand’s activities, he requested clarification of his authority. Halleck, who favored professionals over nonprofessionals, replied that Grant had “command of all troops sent to your Department, and have permission to fight the enemy where you please.” Grant immediately ordered Sherman to Memphis, where he commandeered McClernand’s troops and made a riverborne descent to Vicksburg. Both prongs of Grant’s offensive ended badly. Forrest destroyed long stretches of Grant’s main rail line, and on December 20 Van Dorn wrecked his supply base at Holly Springs. His communications with the North broken and deprived of supplies, Grant withdrew to Memphis, abandoning forever any idea of taking Vicksburg by the overland route. The frailty of railroads made prolonged campaigning deep in enemy territory too difficult. Without Grant to worry about, the Confederates easily repulsed Sherman’s assault against Chickasaw Bayou on December 29. Meanwhile, snarled in Louisiana’s administrative problems and confronted by Confederates at Port Hudson, Banks came upriver no farther than Baton Rouge.
Rosecrans also failed to attain his objective, though at least he won a battle. On December 26 his 44,000-man Army of the Cumberland moved from Nashville toward Murfreesboro, where Bragg had concentrated his 36,000-man Army of Tennessee. The night of December 30 found the armies encamped within earshot of each other. Southern bands blared “Dixie,” Federals countered with “Yankee Doodle,” and then one band struck up “Home Sweet Home.” Soon the cedar thickets rang with dozens of bands playing the tune, accompanied by thousands of voices with southern drawls and northwestern twangs. In the morning the killing began. Bragg crumpled the Union right, the combat roar becoming so loud that men paused in midcharge to stuff their ears with cotton plucked from open bolls. Although jackknifed into a tortured position, the Union lines held. Neither side attacked on New Year’s Day, but on the 2d Bragg tried to settle the issue, hitting the Union left. After initial success the attack stalled, and on the evening of the 3d Bragg withdrew to Tullahoma. Approximately one-third of the men on each side were casualties. For the North the Battle of Stones River (or Murfreesboro) helped offset the Fredericksburg disaster and Vicksburg debacle and gave Lincoln a much-needed win to coincide with the official enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1. But the victory was not decisive. Success so mangled Rosecrans’s army that it would remain at Murfreesboro for six months recuperating. Bragg’s army, battered but intact, still blocked the pathway to Chattanooga.
The year of nearly continuous indecisive battles that ended at Stones River proved one point decisively: The war would not be short. Neither side derived comfort from this realization. The North’s inability to make better progress in subduing the South fostered discontent across the political spectrum. Radicals demanded harsher war, while Peace Democrats preached conciliation. Antiwar sentiment was particularly strong in the northwest, where some Democrats came close to treason in their criticism of the administration’s war effort. Actually the North had made considerable progress during the year, especially in the west. When 1861 ended, Union forces were poised along a line from southern Missouri to Cairo and up the Ohio to western Virginia. As 1863 began, Union armies held new positions from northern Arkansas to Memphis, Corinth, and Murfreesboro. Although the Yankees were still at bay, a ripple of defeatism twinged the South. The western territorial losses and the death and maiming of tens of thousands of the Confederacy’s bravest men discouraged even the most resolute rebels. A drastic decline in the home-front standard of living resulting from the twin evils of commodity shortages and monetary inflation fueled the discontent. As the South assessed its prospects for independence, the future was perhaps more discouraging than the past. No one perceived this more clearly than Davis. “Our maximum strength has been mobilized,” he told the secretary of war, “while the enemy is just beginning to put forth his might.”
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SEVEN
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The Civil War, 1863–1865
“In considering the policy to be adopted for suppressing the insurrection,” Lincoln wrote in December 1861, “I have been anxious and careful that the inevitable conflict for this purpose shall not degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle.” Yet the president always emphasized that he would employ “all indispensable means” to preserve the Union and that he would “not surrender this game leaving any available cards unplayed.” By the winter of 1862–1863 his conciliatory policies had failed to preserve the Union, and Lincoln began laying his unplayed cards on the table. He issued the final Emancipation Proclamation, armed bl
ack troops, supported conscription, and continued to suppress civil liberties in the North in order to control antiwar activities. The war’s length and intensity had spawned the “violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle” that Lincoln wanted no more than did McClellan.
Black Recruitment and Conscription
January 1, 1863, was a Day of Jubilee. One hundred days earlier Lincoln had issued a Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation promising to release a final Emancipation Proclamation on this date. But would he? Pressure to rescind the promise was intense, and the president’s racial views remained ambiguous. True to his word, Lincoln signed the final Proclamation, basing it on his war powers as commander in chief rather than on humanitarian grounds. The president took grave risks issuing the document. Fighting for the Union and emancipation might fragment northern support for the war while uniting southerners behind the Confederate cause. Conservatives in the North considered the Proclamation unconstitutional and feared it would precipitate a race war. The new war aim might provoke even fiercer southern resistance, push the border slave states into the Confederacy, and alienate southern Unionists. Yet few other acts had such important military advantages. The prospect of European intervention ultimately waned further. If emancipation outraged some northerners, others considered freedom a great moral battle cry, infusing new vigor into the war effort. Since slavery supported the South’s economy and social system, freeing the slaves was an excellent method of economic and psychological warfare. As the trickle of slaves responding to freedom’s lure by crossing over behind Union lines became a torrent, southern white men had to serve in agriculture and industry instead of in the ranks. “Every slave withdrawn from the enemy,” Halleck wrote Grant, “is the equivalent of a white man put hors de combat.”
Perhaps the greatest military asset flowing from the Proclamation was the large-scale recruitment of black men. Utilizing blacks for military purposes was not unprecedented. The Navy had always employed blacks, and black soldiers served in the colonial wars, the Revolution, and the War of 1812. Furthermore, by 1862 the Union Army was exploiting black labor, and some generals, without official approval, had organized black regiments. In occupied territory Union officers acted virtually as new masters over fugitive slaves, forcing them to build fortifications and abusing them unmercifully. Black people also aided the Army in less onerous ways—as scouts and spies, teamsters and carpenters, cooks and nurses. Meanwhile, ignoring government policy, James H. Lane organized the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteers, composed of Missouri fugitive slaves and northern free blacks; Butler raised the 1st, 2d, and 3d Louisiana Native Guards from among the free blacks and escaped slaves in New Orleans; and Hunter recruited the 1st Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers from blacks on the Sea Islands.
The government hesitantly moved toward black recruitment during the last half of 1862. The Second Confiscation and Militia Acts of July 17, 1862, authorized the president to employ black soldiers at his discretion, and on August 25 Stanton officially sanctioned raising black troops for the first time. The secretary of war ordered Rufus Saxton, who had replaced Hunter in South Carolina, to arm and equip up to 5,000 former slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation was the final step, indicating Lincoln’s intention to employ black soldiers to the maximum extent. Dual motives of exploitation and idealism had irresistibly converted a white man’s war into a black man’s war as well. “The colored population is the great available and yet unavailed of, force for restoring the Union,” Lincoln wrote. A song written by a Union staff officer best expressed the element of crass exploitation in black manpower mobilization:
Some tell us ’tis a burnin’ shame
To make the naygers fight;
An’ that the thrade of bein’ kilt
Belongs but to the white:
But as for me, upon my sowl!
So liberal are we here,
I’ll let Sambo be murthered instad of myself
On every day in the year.
Yet many people supported black recruitment for noble reasons. Soldiering would give blacks a claim to not just freedom but also equality. “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket,” said the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, “and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.”
The organization of black regiments began in earnest during the first half of 1863. Initially the War Department authorized state governors and enterprising citizens to enlist regiments, just as they had organized white units. However, the national government soon exercised a near monopoly over black recruitment. In March it sent Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to the Mississippi Valley to organize as many black regiments as possible, and in May it established the Bureau of Colored Troops in the War Department to administer recruitment nationwide. Officially 178,892 blacks, commanded by approximately 7,000 white officers, served in the Army and at least 10,000 more in the Navy. Approximately 9 percent of all men fighting for the Union were black. Although black army units did a disproportionate share of fatigue duty, they bore an increasing combat responsibility as the war neared its end, fighting in thirty-nine major battles and dispelling the myth of black docility and cowardice.
National conscription was an even more profound assertion of centralized authority. On April 16, 1862, the Confederacy enacted the first national draft law in American history. Fighting for freedom and states’ rights, the South paradoxically forced individuals to serve under central authority. The Confederate congress understood that conscription, although distasteful, was necessary. Casualties were high, few men volunteered, and the 1861 one-year enlistments soon expired. The law made all white males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five members of the army for three years, automatically reenlisting the one-year volunteers for two more years. Subsequent legislation extended the age limits to seventeen and fifty, and in February 1864 the congress ordered all men already in the army to serve for the duration. Compulsory reenlistment meant that southerners served until they were killed or discharged due to disability, they deserted, or the war ended.
Two features weakened Confederate conscription. First, the law permitted substitutes. The substitute market was discriminatory and fraudulent. Prices soared to more than $5,000, which only the rich could pay, and many substitutes were unfit or soon deserted. When the Confederate congress later abolished substitution and made men who had provided substitutes liable for service, the rich felt betrayed. Second, although the original law contained no exemptions, a mere five days later congress began to correct this “oversight” by providing for several exempt categories; subsequent legislation expanded the exemption list. Exemptions included a large number of state and national government officials, militia officers, workers in critical war-production occupations, professional men, and one white man for every twenty slaves. Southerners abused many of these categories, and ultimately the Confederacy exempted about 50 percent of the men called out by conscription.
The North also felt a manpower squeeze during 1862. Realizing his error, Stanton reestablished Federal recruiting in June, and on July 2 Lincoln called for 300,000 three-year volunteers, but the response was slow. Like the South, the North turned to compulsion, though less directly. The Militia Act of July 17, 1862, authorized the president to “make all necessary rules and regulations” for states without adequate militia laws. Broadly interpreting that provision, on August 4 the government called for a draft of 300,000 nine-month militia. A proviso stated that a special militia draft would be conducted to meet the deficiency of three-year volunteers in those states failing to reach their quotas. Governors protested their quotas were too high and that the date for the special draft was too soon, and antidraft disturbances occurred in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Under pressure Stanton postponed the militia draft, which never went into effect. However, the threat of conscription brought forth 421,000 volunteers and 87,
500 militiamen. Since the government considered one volunteer equivalent to four nine-month militiamen, the states more than met the July and August calls. But it had not been easy.
Confronted with the grievous casualties of the 1862 fall and winter campaigns, the likelihood of even greater losses in the upcoming campaigns, and the growing reluctance of volunteers to come forward, the North needed a more certain method of obtaining men. On March 3, 1863, Congress adopted a Conscription Act (also known as the Enrollment Act) based on the constitutional clause permitting the government “to raise and support armies.” The law established a bureaucracy for administering and enforcing the draft that gave primary responsibility to military officers. At the apex was another new War Department bureau, the Provost Marshal General’s Bureau headed by James B. Fry. At the base were 185 enrollment boards, one for each congressional district. To compile a list of eligible men, a board divided its district into subdistricts and for each one appointed an enrollment officer who went from house to house writing down the names and addresses of draft-age men. Between the apex and the base Fry appointed one or more acting assistant provost marshal generals for each state who would coordinate district affairs and serve as intermediaries between himself and local officials.
In important respects the Conscription Act contained features similar to militia laws. First, it maintained the principle of universal military obligation, imposing it on all able-bodied male citizens and alien declarants between the ages of twenty and forty-five. It divided enrollees into two classes: Class I, including all men between twenty and thirty-five and unmarried men between thirty-five and forty-five; and Class II, containing all men not in Class I. No Class II enrollees would be drafted until the Class I pool was exhausted. If a man was drafted, the term of service was three years or the duration, whichever ended first. However, as in militia laws, universal military service was theoretical, not actual. Congress intended to raise men indirectly, using the threat of conscription to spur volunteering. The president set draft quotas for each enrollment district based on population and the number of men from a district already in service. Districts had about fifty days to fill their quotas with volunteers. If too few volunteers entered service, a draft would be held to meet the deficiency. Ironically, Confederate conscription was a more forthright exertion of national authority. Southern lawmakers designed their act to raise troops directly, not to stimulate volunteering.
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