Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  What was going on? Did Pomeroy intend to pit Salmon Chase against Lincoln and divide Republicans so that they would abandon the president, introduce a third candidate, and then throw the nomination back to Chase? “This is a very pretty game,” snorted the Lincoln-leaning Chicago Tribune, “but it won’t work.” What did Chase know about all this? He was sitting in Lincoln’s cabinet, after all, and stabbing the president in the back if he did know, which it seems he did.

  Chase, Pomeroy, and whoever else was involved had overplayed their hand. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair’s brother Frank, back in Congress, blasted Chase, charging that the Treasury Department was a den of fraud and corruption and that Chase was himself speculating and profiting on cotton from the Sea Islands. For Chase had been in an awkward position for a while. On his shoulders fell the responsibility of financing the war. Though a Democrat, a hard-money man, and a free trader, he issued legal tender notes (“greenbacks,” so named because of the color of the ink with which they were printed) and oversaw a graduated income tax to help pay for the war. (Chase’s own face was imprinted on the dollar bill, so everyone knew what he looked like. And as a pious man, he’d also added the pious phrase “IN GOD WE TRUST” to the tender.) Chase had also sought the assistance of the financier Jay Cooke to sell government bonds to the public but was criticized for allowing Cooke a monopoly on the sale of those bonds. Calling Chase corrupt and devious, Frank Blair accused him of receiving kickbacks from the sale.

  Such allegations, along with a virulent backlash against the Pomeroy Circular, derailed Chase’s presidential juggernaut. In early March, his reputation tarnished, the secretary irritably announced that he was not a candidate for the presidency after all. Embarrassed—and cravenly protesting that he was ignorant of his allies’ machinations—he wrote a sniveling letter to Lincoln affirming his loyalty and offering to resign his post. “The Salmon is a queer fish,” quipped the New York Herald, “very shy and very wary, often appearing to avoid the bait just before gulping it down.” Lincoln replied in a short, unflappable way: he was not yet ready to accept the resignation. He wanted to keep an eye on Chase.

  Since Chase had allowed his ambition to override his genuine zeal for reform, his presidential bid obscured the legitimate complaints of the Radical Republicans (as the radical wing of the Republican Party had been dubbed). They had passed the confiscation acts, repealed the Fugitive Slave Act, and at least on paper authorized equal pay for black regiments. And now they feared that a lenient Reconstruction would restore former rebels to power. To a Radical such as Wendell Phillips, for instance, Lincoln had been nothing but slow, untrustworthy, and vacillating. “What McClellan was on the battle-field—‘Do as little hurt as possible!’—, Lincoln is in civil affairs—” Phillips charged. “ ‘Make as little change as possible.’ ”

  Radical Republicans were labeled fanatics in their own time and later. Regardless, as Rebecca Harding Davis observed, “fanatics must make history for conservative men to learn from.”

  This may or may not have been the case with John Frémont, if he actually was a Radical Republican. He was, more certainly, a man with a grudge who never forgave the president or the Blair family for the loss of his prestige and the loss of his command in Missouri and then in the Mountain Department (western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and part of Tennessee), and he was ready for the spotlight once again. Some Radical Republicans, disappointed by Lincoln, were beguiled by Frémont. Wendell Phillips preferred him to the president; it seemed that the man who early on had declared the slaves free would do battle for civil rights—equality for all men under the law, without regard to race or color.

  In May in Cleveland, at Cosmopolitan Hall, notorious abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, and Wendell Phillips, women’s rights activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and disappointed Republicans such as the journalist James Redpath expected to patch together a third political party, which they called the Radical Democratic Party, in the hope of attracting disillusioned War Democrats as well as disillusioned Radical Republicans to a platform more radical than any offered by Lincoln and moderates. That is, their platform pledged to prosecute the war without compromise, to safeguard the First Amendment and the writ of habeas corpus, to push for constitutional amendments abolishing slavery and protecting civil rights, and to recommend a one-term presidency. Frémont accepted their nomination. Running with him was the New York War Democrat General John Cochrane. Frémont’s political adviser was David Dudley Field, a brother of the man who had tried to lay the transatlantic telegraph cable.

  A ragtag bunch, sneered General Halleck. “I don’t believe there are bladders enough in this country, if every one should be inflated to its utmost capacity, to float such a mass of corruption and humbugs.” And perhaps Frémont was a humbug after all, for in pandering to Democrats, he reneged on the equality platform. Disillusioned dissidents, such as Anna Dickinson, decided to support President Lincoln and his so-called compromises after all, and Radical Republicans of a practical bent, such as Zachariah Chandler, conferred with Ben Wade; if Lincoln would remove Montgomery Blair from the cabinet, they would back Lincoln.

  Along with prominent abolitionists such as John Greenleaf Whittier, they asked Frémont to withdraw from the field, which he finally did in September, though not because he’d cut a deal. He believed that the Democratic nominee for president, George Brinton McClellan, if elected, would end the war—and restore slavery. That would be awful.

  BY THE SPRING of 1864, the country had seen the horrors of Antietam and Gettysburg firsthand in the photographs of Alexander Gardner; it had read with revulsion about the carnage at Shiloh, Cedar Mountain, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Fort Wagner, and Murfreesboro, just to cite a few of the towns or places that had once been unknown by most people but had grown familiar. People now spoke knowingly of breech-loading muskets and grape shot and minié balls and Parrott guns, names of things that could tear through arms and legs and hearts.

  Most recently, in April, Americans had learned of a place called Fort Pillow. An earthwork located on a high bluff on the east bank of the Mississippi and north of Memphis by about forty miles, it had been captured by bluecoats in 1862. By the spring of 1864, more than 260 black soldiers and almost 300 white ones were occupying it, living, eating, and sleeping within its thick walls: one battalion of the 6th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery, formerly the 1st Alabama Siege Artillery African Descent; one section of the 2nd U.S. Colored Light Artillery; and one battalion of the 13th Tennessee Cavalry (white).

  On the morning of April 12, 1864—which happened to be the fourth anniversary of Fort Sumter—one of General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s divisions surrounded Fort Pillow. Forrest arrived, demanded unconditional surrender, and when the fort’s commander refused, Forrest attacked. Union casualties numbered more than three hundred dead or wounded.

  There were ugly rumors about what had happened: atrocities, barbarities. Had the Confederates attacking Fort Pillow really screamed, “No quarter! No quarter! Kill the damned niggers; shoot them down!”? Why had black soldiers made up nearly two-thirds of the dead? What had Forrest’s men done? Had they burned black soldiers in their barracks? Buried men alive? Had a black man really been nailed to the side of a building outside of the fort and then the building torched? After the Union soldiers fled to the riverbank, where they vainly hoped that a gunboat would cover them, had they thrown down their arms, putting their hands up in surrender, only to be picked off by rifle fire? Had Forrest’s men shot them at point-blank range before throwing their bodies into the river? A surviving bluecoat told his family that a Rebel had found him on the ground and yelled, “ ‘You’ll never fight with niggers again, you d—ded yankee,’ and he snapped his revolver, but she wouldn’t go off as he had shot the last load out when he killed the soldier by my side.”

  To what extent was Nathan Bedford Forrest responsible? Did he really leave Fort Pillow around six in the evening, unaware of the atrocities—if, that is,
they had even occurred? Did he try to stop the shooting once it was clear he had won the day? Did he witness the murders—the atrocities—and do nothing to halt them? Should he be held accountable? Was he a soldier or a guerrilla? Was there a difference?

  Forrest already had a reputation as a little bit of both. Familiarly called the Wizard of the Saddle, he was an expert horseman whose battle strategy was to get there first with the most men, shoot everything blue, and keep up the scare. Sixteen when his father died, he supported his large family by speculating in stocks, gambling, farming, and trading in horses and human flesh. By the age of twenty-five, he was a prosperous planter, married, and living in Memphis not too far from the slave pens he owned downtown. He claimed to be a millionaire. He was elected alderman. When Tennessee seceded, he enlisted and raised a cavalry regiment.

  Audacious, brave, profane, and illiterate, with a white scar running down the side of his thin face, Forrest was an improvisatory soldier who did not work by the book. Nor did he need to. It was said that twenty-nine horses had been shot from beneath him, he was said to have killed thirty men with his own hands, and he liked to say that war means fighting and “fighting means killing.” At Shiloh, wounded in the spine and coming on a regiment of blue skirmishers, he’d grabbed one hapless Union soldier by the collar and pulled him up onto his horse to use him as a human shield while he rode to safety. He was revered by his men. An increasingly anxious Confederacy considered him something of a savior. He was an electric storm, reminisced the writer George Washington Cable. Sherman called him the Devil.

  Though Forrest did admit that, at Fort Pillow, “the river was dyed red with the blood of the slaughtered for 200 yards,” the Confederate government contested the allegation of a massacre as a pack of propagandistic lies. Forrest’s superior, General Stephen Dill Lee—a veteran of the peninsular campaign, the Second Battle of Manassas, and the Battle of Antietam—asserted unequivocally to the Union forces, “Your colors were never lowered, and your garrison never surrendered, but retreated under cover of a gun-boat with arms in their hands and constantly using them. This was true particularly of your colored troops, who had been firmly convinced by your teachings of the certainty of slaughter in case of capture.”

  General Lee backed Forrest without exactly denying what had happened. “The case under consideration is almost an extreme one,” he explained. “You had a servile race armed against their masters, and in a country which had been desolated by almost unprecedented outrages. I assert that our officers, with all the circumstances against them, endeavored to prevent the effusion of blood, and as an evidence of this I refer you to the fact that both white and colored prisoners were taken, and are now in our hands.” Similarly, the Richmond Examiner faulted the Union army’s invasion of the South and its depredations of its people. “Our Northern brethren are in the position of burglars and brigands resisting the authorities; and the sheriff may do to the highwayman what the highwayman must not do to the sheriff. The constable may shoot, or starve out, or smoke out, or blow up, the resisting burglar, because he has a lawful warrant; but if the burglar perpetrates these enormities upon the constable, it chills the blood and sickens the heart.”

  A congressional committee was convened six days after Fort Pillow to investigate, and the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War released a damning report—part propaganda, part fact—that ignited a storm of protest. Some of it was directed against Lincoln. “You, Abraham Lincoln,” Henry Ward Beecher’s radical newspaper, The Independent, accused, “you who have persistently withheld from the negro the protection of the flag for which you besought and compelled him to fight—you are the chief bearer of this great and awful responsibility. Shall we now have some action by the Government which will prevent a repetition of these atrocities?” Prevention, yes; not retaliation. But in what form could prevention come? The resilient abolitionist Gerrit Smith noted that if Lincoln did not recognize the right of black men to vote, he was contributing to the outrages perpetrated upon them.

  Promising reprisals, at least at first, and no doubt responding to the heat of the hour, Lincoln consulted with his cabinet as to what he should do. The angry Stanton wanted to hold Confederate officers as hostages until the Confederates gave up Forrest and his officers for trial. Though somewhat milder in character, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles also felt that the officers in command at Fort Pillow should be held accountable. And if they weren’t turned over to Washington, other Confederate troops should be punished accordingly. Secretary of State Seward agreed, but Attorney General Edward Bates and John Palmer Usher, the new secretary of the interior, would not go that far. Lincoln spoke with Frederick Douglass, but by the time he did, he seems to have decided against taking action. “Once begun,” Lincoln told Douglass, “I do not know where such a measure would stop.”

  “Remember Fort Pillow!” cried black soldiers. If the cry went largely unheard, it also shaped the debate about emancipation and Reconstruction. In July, Senator Ben Wade and Representative Henry Winter Davis (the chairman of the House Reconstruction Committee) joined forces to sponsor a bill that differed from Lincoln’s far milder Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction. The Wade-Davis bill assuaged Radical Republicans, who feared that slavery would be allowed to persist if former Confederates, no matter what kind of loyalty oath they swore, were permitted to hold office. Under Wade-Davis, those with positions of power or authority in the Confederacy or those who had shouldered its muskets were forbidden to serve as delegates to state constitutional conventions or even to vote for the delegates who did. The Wade-Davis bill also required 50 percent of voters to swear an oath of allegiance before a rebel state could reenter the Union (instead of Lincoln’s 10 percent); it demanded that a state constitutional convention occur before there could be an election of state officials (which had not occurred in Louisiana); it repudiated all public debt, such as Confederate bonds, held under the Confederacy; and it stipulated that to return to the Union, a state must abolish slavery.

  The bill did not, however, require black suffrage. In that respect, it didn’t greatly differ from Lincoln’s plan. Yet Lincoln pocket-vetoed the bill—that is, he refused to sign it, and in not signing, he again asserted his executive power. Only a constitutional amendment could abolish slavery, he reasoned, not an act of Congress, which could easily be overturned by an unfriendly court.

  Wade and Davis were furious, intemperately so. Carefully distinguishing between the Republican Party, which they supported, and the man at its helm, whom they volubly disliked, they published an ill-conceived manifesto in the New-York Tribune accusing Lincoln of despotically appropriating legislative authority to himself and scuttling the root-cause of the war: slavery. To them, Lincoln was refusing to “protect the loyal men of the nation against three great dangers: 1. The return to power of the guilty leaders of the rebellion. 2. The continuance of slavery, and 3, the burden of the rebel debt.”

  Republicans were again publicly turning on one another. Moderates were worried. “The radical Republicans, those who go for slave-suffrage and thorough confiscation, are those who will defeat him, if he is defeated,” fretted one Lincoln supporter. The war dragged on, exhausted men and women were heartsore, the Union was frazzled and fractious. Henry Winter Davis said, “Everybody is looking for a new candidate.”

  But the intense indictment of Lincoln also backfired, to a degree: Lincoln wafflers now rallied to his side. New England abolitionists such as Charles Sumner and Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts did not want to split the party, and in Maryland, Henry Winter Davis lost the renomination for his congressional seat. Lincoln had affirmed his commitment to emancipation, if at his own pace. He did have his principles and still knew how to practice an art that bordered on compromise—and, as it would happen, without compromising his stand on emancipation.

  BY THE TIME Lincoln stuffed the Wade-Davis bill deep into his pocket, he had already clinched the Republican nomination the preceding June. And he had strengthened the tick
et, or so he hoped, by replacing his vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, with a War Democrat from Tennessee. That was Andrew Johnson, a man popular in the North ever since he’d declared himself a Jacksonian Unionist. His presence also had the advantage of reminding folks that Tennessee was still in the Union. (Not everyone agreed; Thaddeus Stevens, a Republican representative from Pennsylvania, was unhappy. “Can’t you find a candidate for Vice President in the United States,” he wanted to know, “without going down to one of those damned rebel provinces to pick one up?”)

  Lincoln also got rid of Salmon Chase. When the secretary tendered his resignation from the cabinet yet again—he’d done so three times already—Lincoln surprised him by accepting it. Chase had clashed with New York senator Edwin Morgan, who happened to be the national chairman of the Republican Party, and though Lincoln had bluntly told Chase that he needed Morgan’s support, Chase had refused to back down. Lincoln had had enough—but he also knew that Chase would be the best man to replace Chief Justice Taney, who had died in October, and protect emancipation or civil rights legislation.

  Despite the new ticket, the removal of Chase from the cabinet, the withdrawal of Frémont from the field, and even a presidential platform promising a constitutional amendment to end slavery, there was continued discontent, divisiveness, perfidy—and silliness—among Republicans, and some of the discontent now came from a different but no less annoying quarter: Horace Greeley.

  Greeley was an American gladiator. He loved a good fight partly because he loved to place himself at its righteous center. Grandiose and humble, he was a man of mercurial temperament, of practicality and visionary foolhardiness, and known to be “the most hysterical man of genius America ever produced.” Born in 1811 to a family of poor farmers in Amherst, New Hampshire, he too was a self-made man—“a self-made man,” quipped a fellow journalist, “who worshipped his creator.” Typesetter, printer, journalist, and then editor, with a smooth baby face, a disarming smile, a shambling gait, and a feisty prose style, by the time he was thirty he’d founded the New-York Tribune, whose circulation almost immediately rocketed to 11,000. His pungency was part of the reason. “Meek as he looks,” said Harriet Beecher Stowe, “no man living is readier with a strong sharp answer. Non-resistant as he is physically, there is not a more uncompromising an opponent and intense combatant in these United States.” Greeley knew what he was about, at least journalistically, and his successes in print often went to his conniving political head.