Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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Johnston continued as best he could, but Sherman occupied Raleigh, North Carolina, on April 13. The Confederacy was almost entirely occupied and Johnston was effectively surrounded, and without ammunition or stores. He surrendered his army of 37,000 on April 17, despite the itinerant and deranged Davis’s poor wail of appeal to continue. Sherman, as magnanimous in victory as he was remorseless in battle, gave his gallant and resourceful adversary even more generous terms than Grant had accorded Lee. (Sherman and Johnston became friends, and Johnston died 26 years later from pneumonia contracted from attending Sherman’s funeral and burial, under-clothed for the raw northern weather. He was 84, 13 years older than Sherman, and he said Sherman would have done the same had the roles been reversed.)
The supreme figure of the great and terrible drama and providential redeemer of America, including the South, did not survive the war to win the peace. In what many consider the greatest of all his oratorical triumphs, Abraham Lincoln said in his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, that “The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well-known to the public as to myself and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.... Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away” (a line of poetry). “Yet if God wills that all the wealth piled up by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and that every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ With malice toward none, with charity for all ... let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
This in the plainest and most powerful terms was Lincoln’s strategy for America: the complete, unarguable, bone-crushing defeat of secessionism, and abolition of slavery, which he called “a peculiar and powerful interest,” and the eventual determination that it is an evil that must be ended, for which purpose “He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.” Lincoln made no effort to restrain Sherman’s depredations, but wished a generous peace of forgiveness and reconciliation. Lincoln was initially prepared to pay something to slaveholders for emancipation, to pick up some of the Confederate debt, and to readmit the southern states to the Union easily, as long as they pledged loyalty to the Union. He never regarded the insurgents as traitors. He knew that such a reconstituted Union would emerge immensely powerful, economically, militarily, and morally, that no power would ever dare to meddle in the Americas again, and that it would not be long before the Europeans, so complicatedly and finely balanced between themselves, would be soliciting America’s assistance to one side or another there, rather than presuming to offer mediation and imagining the Americas were any rightful province of their interest.
The world was, indeed, appropriately awed by the ferocity of what was, if the various Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are divided up into a series of wars of shifting coalitions, the greatest war in the history of the world. The U.S. Civil War produced 360,000 Union and 300,000 Confederate combat deaths, about 90,000 civilian deaths, and approximately 475,000 wounded, military and civilian. The Union had almost four times the free population and twice as many combatants as the Confederacy, and roughly three-fifths of the 1.25 million total casualties, about 4 percent of the total free population, North and South, black and white, men, women, and children. No foreigners had foreseen the vehemence and fury of the struggle, or had imagined the emergent might of the victorious armies. Those who had thought America the light of the world, now knew it to be so. Those who had lamented the moral palsy of slavery behind the Jeffersonian message, rejoiced. And those who had doubted the strength, as opposed to the diplomatic agility, polemical talent, and geographic good fortune of the Americans and their leaders, saw the strength of the American people, of their devotion to their country and its ideals, and were struck almost dumb by the genius and humanity of their leader.
Lincoln visited Richmond on April 4, arriving by ship, first a flotilla, then the captain’s launch, and finally, so heavy was the wreckage and mass of dead horses and undetonated torpedoes in the water, by rowboat. The conquering president was completely unruffled and found it reminiscent of the man who had come to ask him for a post of consul in a great foreign city and gradually scaled back his requests to humbler and humbler positions, and finally to the gift of a well-worn pair of trousers.90 As he stepped ashore, many African Americans greeted him on their knees and Lincoln helped raise them up, and said “You must kneel to God only and thank him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.” Demonstrating that he had never ceased to be the president of the United States, he walked two miles to Jefferson Davis’s office, with security provided by a black regiment, and followed by a large and mainly black crowd of well-wishers, and was regarded from windows with neutral curiosity. He sat in Davis’s desk chair without a hint of triumphalism, asked for a glass of water, and authorized the convening of the Virginia legislature, as long as it repealed the act of secession and removed Virginia’s armies from the war (which were done). The butler said Mrs. Davis had told him, just two days before, to make the official residence ship-shape “for the Yankees.”91
Apart from Lincoln’s folkloric standing, his pure strategic achievements for the nation are rivaled among his predecessors only by Washington. The Union was impregnable, slavery’s blight and shame had been erased as a bonus to suppressing the insurrection, and the United States was rivaled only by the British Empire and Bismarck’s Prussia as the world’s greatest power, and it had a hemisphere practically to itself. There was no balance of power in the Americas, only American power. Now the United States could receive floods of eager European immigrants, crank up its laissez-faire economy, and swiftly achieve an industrial scale of which the world had never dreamed. Lincoln (and Grant and Sherman) had severed the ball-and-chain from the nation’s ankle, and America could be America, and accelerate toward the summit of the world’s nations.
US Civil War. Courtesy of the U.S. Army Center of Military History
As all the world knows, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865, dying the following day. There is no need to emphasize further what he accomplished for America or expatiate much on his personal qualities, other than that he was then and remains the supreme and most deserving beneficiary of the American star system, surpassing even Washington. He was morose but never lost his sense of humor, proud but without vanity, utterly scrupulous without being a bit priggish or even above a political ruse, intellectual but down-to-earth, scholarly but an autodidact, the ultimate self-made man but without chippiness or aggression. He was always saddened and never angry at the betrayals and disappointments he endured, and was not worn down by a nagging wife or the premature death of two sons. He was, as the next great Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, said, “Quiet, patient, mighty Lincoln,” who lived and suffered, and died for the people and saved the Union by lending it his strength. Public grief throughout the North surpassed in universal intensity any such impulse in the history of the country.
A terrible ordeal was ending, a prolonged period of immense spontaneity and growth was about to begin. America was unbound, before a limitless horizon.
7. AMERICA AND THE WORLD
Vice President Andrew Johnson, who was discovered on the night of April 14 in a drink-taken condition (and had taken his oath as vice president in that condition the month before), assumed office. Seward, who was wounded in an attempt on his life that was part of the same plot by disgruntled southerners, recovered and continued as secretary of state for the balance of the term. As a Democrat who had
only been 45 days the vice president, and as a self-taught Tennessean, Johnson was little-equipped to quell the designs of the forces of revenge in the North who had given Johnson’s great predecessor problems enough. A great struggle loomed and soon began for the reconstruction of the country, but the almost vertical rise of America comparative with other states was practically a certainty. It had refurnished its reputation as the land of freedom and opportunity, and the policy of almost unlimited acceptance of immigration from Europe, which had assured the victory of the free over the slave states by swift population growth, and the steady westward movement of people and economic development guaranteed that the United States would soon assume an immense scale. Battles over reconstruction would retard the advance of the African American community and create constitutional frictions between the executive and legislative branches of the government, but nothing could now stop the inexorable and accelerating rise of America.
From 1865 to 1900, the population of the United States increased from 35 million to 76 million (while the British population increased from 24 million to 35 million, and the French from 38 million to just 39 million after losing two provinces to Germany), and America accepted over 13 million immigrants. Under the Homestead Act of 1862, 160-acre parcels of farmland were distributed virtually free to settlers, and the railway companies, which expanded geometrically across and all over the country, advertised in Europe for farmer-settlers and sponsored hundreds of thousands of them. The average per capita annual income of non-farm workers grew in this period by 75 percent, and the GDP grew in absolute terms by about 400 percent in those 35 years, net of inflation (which was minimal), and grew annually at an average rate of over 5 percent, gaining nearly 7 percent per year through the 1880s. These were unheard-of growth rates for a country that before it had even rebuilt the most war-damaged areas of the South was already the wealthiest in the world.
Corporate structures evolved creatively and capital markets grew wildly to accommodate this tremendous growth, fueled not just by immigration but by enhanced production techniques in adaptation of raw materials, such as steel refining, and by mass production to feed an ever growing and always more prosperous market. The United States was at the cutting edge of innovation in every field, and even as the frontier moved west and became more urban and orderly, it harnessed the spirit of boundless optimism and endless growth to those of predestined national greatness and the innate superiority of rampant American capitalism. It was well into the twentieth century before the United States started to entertain any notion of leveling the playing fields of commercial opportunity. From 1865 to 1900, railway mileage in the United States increased from about 32,000 miles to approximately 140,000 miles. Thanks in part to the Bessemer open-hearth process, American steel production increased in the same period from a few hundred thousand tons more than 30-fold to over 10 million tons, and more than doubled again to 24 million tons in 1910, by far the largest production of steel of any nation.
From 1789 to 1861, the United States was aspirant, vigorous, but fragile. From 1865 to 1900, it grew from one of the world’s most important countries, with the British and newborn German empires, to a giant, with the same peers, but in no material sense subordinate to them. And it grew from the homogenization of the implacable problem of slavery and the new security of national unity, even with great human and physical carnage remaining to be removed and outgrown, to being a great power in the whole world—from a promising if insecure striver before the Civil War, and a stable but fatigued state after it, to a mighty incumbent growing with a force and speed and confidence that had neither parallel nor precedent, and promised to make the twentieth century a time of almost unimaginable expansion and achievement for America.
The period from 1865 to 1871 was also a time when most of the Great Powers of the coming hundred years reconfigured themselves. In this, too, America led by forcibly reenlisting dissentient parts and abolishing slavery, in 1865. In 1866, Bismarck’s Germany humbled the Austrian Empire, established itself as the premier German state, and effectively forced the Habsburg Empire (which Webster had prematurely derided in the Hülsemann letter in 1851) to accept a dualist structure that made Austria and Hungary equal in the governance of the detritus of the Holy Roman Empire, which are today, apart from Austria and Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and parts of Slovenia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Italy.
In 1867, Canada, a string of British colonies and centrifugations from Britain, France, and America along the U.S. border, was formed into a self-governing affiliate state of Great Britain, pledged to cooperation between French- and English-speaking communities and to the construction of a trans-continental railroad that would be the basis for the settlement of a country as large, though it was unlikely to be as populous, as the United States. Canada would be a long time developing a strong and confident national personality, but in terms of resources it was as rich as the United States, with only a tenth of America’s population. The foundation was laid for Canada to become, as it did in the last third of the twentieth century, one of the world’s most important economies.
In 1868, Japan, shaken by Fillmore and Pierce’s opening of its ports, peacefully underwent the Meiji Restoration, in which all governmental authority was reconstituted in the emperor, who had a universal mandate to take Japan into the world and ensure that its strength was adequate to repel the sort of Western imperialism and meddling that had so aggravated the Chinese. Japan swiftly rose to be one of the world’s Great Powers and, next to the United States, the greatest in the Pacific.
In 1870, Italy, after 50 years of struggle and internecine conflict, ably led by Giuseppe Garibaldi and Camillo Benso, Conte di Cavour, got clear of the influence of the Austrians and the French (largely because of Bismarck’s actions against both those powers), and confined the pope’s influence to an entirely sectarian one, and became a united kingdom. Italy, too, joined the Great Powers, though not in the first rank. In 1870 and 1871, Prussia decisively defeated France, took Napoleon III prisoner at Sedan, and, after a heroic siege, occupied Paris and proclaimed the Prussian Empire at the Palace of Versailles. The Bonapartes were finished, and France became a republic again, without Alsace and Lorraine, which Bismarck seized, but full of revanchist energy and cultural creativity. Beaten soundly twice in one lifetime, first by a British-led coalition and then by Prussia alone, with Bonaparte emperors chased out and Paris lengthily occupied both times, France had paid a heavy price for its political instability. The Battles of the Plains of Abraham and Waterloo, and actions in India had assured that there would be many times as many English- as French-speaking people in the world.
France remained a Great Power and magnetic culture, but was overshadowed by Prussia and would have an empire confined to Britain’s leavings, unable to challenge Britain on the high seas and requiring allies to maintain its reduced territorial integrity opposite the great German army. Its primacy in the nearly two centuries from Richelieu to Napoleon I could not be retrieved. As long as Bismarck ruled in Berlin, France would be somewhat isolated, having squandered Richelieu’s greatest bequest to France—the fragmentation of Germany, which both Napoleon and Metternich had conserved—but she would be a key ally in any counter-balancing coalition against Germany, of the kind the British could normally be relied upon to help to assemble.
Britain and Russia, the bookends of Europe, remained aloof from the fermentation in the midst of Europe and in North America. But in the realignment after 1871, the British and German Empires and the United States of America were the world’s greatest powers, France and Russia were next, Japan, Austria-Hungary, and Italy after that. Spain and Turkey and China were in decline, and physically important and foreseeably of independent significance was Canada. For some time, leading Americans remained entirely aloof from this sort of consideration. The country grappled with the reconstruction of the South and did the necessary to facilitate breakneck economic and demographic growth. No power claimed a right of interventi
on in the Americas now, and the United States was not much interested, in any political way, with what it regarded as the tawdry and primitive squabblings of Europe, or the incomprehensible folkloric aberrations of the Orient. America had no rivals and no enemies, and had only to do what came naturally to it and what it did very effectively: admit the seekers of better lives from other lands, populate its interior, work hard, and grow with astounding speed into a Brobdingnagian giant among nations.