Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  HIS NAME WAS William Clarke Quantrill. He said he was an abolitionist, but he sold the fugitive slaves he had presumably saved. He robbed mail trains, he stole horses, he ambushed Union soldiers, and he enjoyed killing. He was sandy-haired, thin, and soft-spoken and wore a smiling mustache; he was self-confident, enigmatic, and preternaturally calm—the calmer, the more dangerous, it was said. The son of a schoolteacher, he came from Ohio, and he too had taught school for a while. He went to Kansas, where he pretended to be a jayhawker—an abolitionist bandit along the lines of John Brown—but he was in fact the slaveholders’ spy. Soon he was hailed as the bloodiest man in the annals of America, which is saying something, especially during the Civil War, when he had to vie for the title of “butcher” with Grant and Nathan Bedford Forrest.

  Quantrill had formed a band of like-minded, pro-Confederate “irregulars,” or guerrilla partisans, as they were also known, men and boys—Missouri boys, in this case—who fought outside the regular army, on their own, raiding and stealing and sowing terror. To join his particular and infamous band, all a boy had to do was answer one qualifying question Quantrill asked: “Will you follow orders, be true to your fellows, and kill those who served and support the Union?”

  Wearing a loose, flowing shirt, Zouave-like, with a low-cut collar, the twenty-six-year-old Quantrill, in the summer of 1863, ordered his gang to saddle up and head toward that city of abolitionists, Lawrence, Kansas. Several women who had sheltered guerrillas such as Quantrill had been recently imprisoned in a rickety Kansas City jail, and when it suddenly collapsed, critically wounding them, Quantrill and his boys were set on revenge. Around sunup on August 21, 1863, a clear day, they rode into Lawrence, about four hundred of them; they’d attracted a good number of stragglers along the way. Quantrill was wearing a black slouch hat, his standard guerrilla shirt ballooning in the breeze, and gray pants tucked into his boots. He shouted his orders: torch every building, kill every male big enough to carry a gun, even the clergyman, who was milking his cow that morning, and even the twenty or so boys, teenagers or children as young as ten years old. When it was all over, more than 150 people lay dead, incinerated, shot, or mutilated.

  Border warfare in Kansas and Missouri had not ended; it had been institutionalized by the larger war, and of course Washington knew that Missourians had mired themselves in what Lincoln sadly called a “pestilent factional quarrel amongst themselves.” So it was, so it continued, lawless or with new laws concocted to mete out retribution in more orderly fashion. Union general Thomas Ewing, a brother-in-law of Sherman and the man responsible for imprisoning the wives and sisters of the guerrillas in Kansas City, issued the infamous General Order No. 11, which called for the compulsory removal, in fifteen days, of all citizens, whether adult or child, from four counties in western Missouri. Ewing assumed that they, like the women he’d jailed, were Confederate sympathizers. The 15th Kansas Cavalry then enforced the order with a burning spree that left the region, soon called the Burnt District, in smoldering ruins. A Union colonel told his wife, “It is heart sickening to see what I have seen since I have been back here. A desolated country and men & women and children, some of them allmost [sic] naked. Some on foot and some in old wagons. Oh God.”

  By the fall of 1863, Quantrill sometimes wore a Confederate uniform with three dark gold stars on the collar. Although living by conventional, or army, protocols had never much appealed to him, he had ridden all the way to Richmond to secure an official military appointment, and if Richmond demurred, it nonetheless recognized his effectiveness. After the sacking of Lawrence, Quantrill was heading south toward Texas when he happened on information that two companies of Federal troops were en route to Fort Baxter, Kansas. And since the wagon train and its escort happened to include General James Blunt, the new commander of the District of the Frontier, Quantrill changed into his other signature garb, a Union blue coat, and attacked. Taken unawares, Blunt’s men were overwhelmed and most of them were killed. Their wagons were looted. Blunt escaped and was deprived of his command, and Quantrill calmly continued on to Texas.

  BACK IN 1862, former congressman Thomas Hindman, the dapper Arkansan, then thirty-four years old, had capitalized on the readiness of partisans to plunder and pillage and retaliate against jayhawkers, thieves, and Union guerrillas. Fight fire with fire: that had always been Hindman’s way. (Just three years after the war, he would be murdered in his home in Helena, Arkansas, when an assailant shot him through a window.)

  Hindman had traded his patent-leather shoes for army boots, and as the fierce commander of the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi District, he intended to clear the place, particularly Missouri, of Federals. After Jefferson Davis, who never much liked the guerrillas, nonetheless approved the Confederate Partisan Ranger Act, which allowed officers to form bands of partisan rangers, Hindman followed suit and welcomed Quantrill into his ranks. “With the view to revive the hopes of loyal men in Missouri and to get troops from that State,” he declared, “I gave authority to various persons to raise companies and regiments there and to operate as guerrillas. They soon became exceedingly active and rendered important services, destroying wagon trains and transports, tearing up railways, breaking telegraph lines, capturing towns, and thus compelling the enemy to keep there a large force that might have been employed elsewhere.”

  What else could he do? Richmond had been ignoring the Trans-Mississippi for a very long time, and the Confederacy was short on manpower. According to one of Robert E. Lee’s aides, Lee himself understood that “since the whole duty of the nation would be war until independence should be secured, the whole nation should for the time be converted into an army, the producers to feed and the soldiers to fight.” In many cases, the irregular soldiers took the law into their own hands, which was what Quantrill had done. And especially during the months preceding the election of 1864, the partisans in Arkansas and Missouri hoped that the havoc they created and the blood they spilled might help elect a presidential candidate in the North willing to negotiate a peace, which is to say grant the Confederacy its independence.

  Yet what exactly separated a partisan from a soldier from a bandit? In Missouri, on the border, the lines between Confederate sympathizer, Union loyalist, regular soldier, civilian, and desperado were blurry. Often it was difficult to distinguish irregulars from Confederate soldiers, which led many a soldier to despise them, for the guerrillas were often so indiscriminate—they didn’t care whom they killed or what farm they destroyed—that they created a backlash against the graycoats. Confederate brigadier general Joseph Shelby angrily complained to one of his men that “if this detestable system of ‘jayhawking’ is not broken up they [citizens] will soon come to prefer the Federals to us.”

  “Arrest all bands of jayhawkers, whether Southern or Union, who may be committing outrages on the citizens,” Shelby ordered, though he himself had welcomed the guerrillas into his column. “In all cases when the proof is sufficient against any person or persons who may be or who have committed depredations on the citizens of Arkansas, you will cause them to be shot,” he continued. “All squads and unorganized bands must be broken up.” Thomas Hindman, on the other hand, had been protesting against the fact that the Union treated Confederate guerrillas as if they were pirates. General Sherman was nonplussed. “Now, whether the guerrillas or partisan rangers, without uniform, without organization except on paper, wandering about the country plundering friend and foe, firing on unarmed boats filled with women and children and on small parties of soldiers, always from ambush, or where they have every advantage, are entitled to the protection and amenities of civilized warfare is a question which I think you would settle very quickly in the abstract,” he said. “In practice we will promptly acknowledge the well-established rights of war to parties in uniform, but many gentlemen of the South have beseeched me to protect the people against the acts and inevitable result of this war of ununiformed bands, who, when dispersed, mingle with the people and draw on them the consequences
of their individual acts. You know full well that it is to the interest of the people of the South that we should not disperse our troops as guerrillas,” he added ominously, “but at that game your guerrillas would meet their equals, and the world would be shocked by the acts of atrocity resulting from such warfare.”

  By late 1863, after Sherman had seen too many irregulars fire at steamboats, he irritably declared, “To secure the safety of the navigation of the Mississippi River I would slay millions. On that point I am not only insane, but mad. Fortunately, the great West is with me there.”

  General Sherman, now the head of the Georgia campaign, intended to seize manufacturing areas and destroy the South’s provisions and munitions as he and his army marched all the way from Vicksburg to Atlanta. In February 1864 he and about 25,000 of his men had moved southward from Vicksburg to Meridian, Mississippi, a small town of about 800 inhabitants and a supply center for the Confederates. From there he planned to trudge to Selma, Alabama, and blow up the cannon foundry. Along the way, as Sherman reported to General Halleck, “we lived off the country and made a swath of desolation 50 miles broad across the State of Mississippi, which the present generation will not forget.” Jefferson Davis said that the Yankees were a cruel, traditionless, uncivilized people, “worse than vandal hordes.”

  When Sherman arrived in Meridian on Valentine’s Day, the warehouses were empty, the town evacuated. Angry, his men tore up the railroad tracks, and, in what became one of their most notorious actions, they heated the rails over bonfires and then twisted them around trees or telegraph poles: those were the so-called Sherman neckties. They also destroyed the town—houses and warehouses were pummeled with axes, crowbars, and sledges—and torched the debris. When it was all over, Meridian was gone.

  Sherman was a garrulous, intelligent, and candid man with decided points of view he very much wanted circulated, and since they were well known—and have continued to be—and since the general, and not Quantrill or Hindman, has come to best represent warfare against civilians as it was practiced during the war, his comments are worth quoting at length. “Should we treat as absolute enemies all in the South who differ from us in opinion or prejudice, kill or banish them, or should we give them time to think and gradually change their conduct so as to conform to the new order of things which is slowly and gradually creeping into their country?” he asked. And he answered, “When men take up arms to resist a rightful authority, we are compelled to use like force, because all reason and argument cease when arms are resorted to. When the provisions, forage, horses, mules, wagons, etc., are used by our enemy, it is clearly our duty and right to take them also, because otherwise they might be used against us. In like manner all houses left vacant by an inimical people are clearly our right, and as such are needed as storehouses, hospitals, and quarters. But the question arises as to dwellings used by women, children and non-combatants. So long as non-combatants remain in their houses and keep to their accustomed peaceful business, their opinions and prejudices can in no wise influence the war, and therefore should not be noticed; but if any one comes out into the public streets and creates disorder, he or she should be punished, restrained, or banished, either to the rear or front, as the officer in command adjudges. If the people, or any of them, keep up a correspondence with parties in hostility, they are spies, and can be punished according to law with death or minor punishment. These are well-established principles of war,” he concluded, “and the people of the South having appealed to war, are barred from appealing for protection to our constitution, which they have practically and publicly defied. They have appealed to war, and must abide its rules and laws.”

  As if to stave off the public outcry sure to come, before Meridian, Sherman had fervently broadcast his intentions in a long letter he wanted made public. “When the inhabitants persist too long in hostility it may be both politic and right we should banish them and appropriate their lands to a more loyal and useful population,” he stated. “No man will deny that the United States would be benefited by dispossessing a rich, prejudiced, hard-headed, and disloyal planter, and substituting in his place a dozen or more patient, industrious, good families, even if they be of foreign birth.”

  Sherman was decided and impatient, as hard as his features—the pointed nose, the creased face, the close-cropped reddish hair, the unblinking eyes. His son had recently died of typhoid. But the man did not stop for death; he sublimated. He was heated, intense, quick, a warrior, and now, writing for himself and strangers—and his superiors—about war and peace, he explained why he was about to do what he did: “I believe that war is the result of false political doctrine, for which we all as a people are responsible; that any and every people have a natural right to self-government, and I would give all a chance to reflect and when in error to recant. . . . In this belief, whilst I assert for our Government the highest military prerogatives, I am willing to bear in patience that political nonsense of slave rights, States’ rights, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, and such other trash as have deluded the Southern people into war, anarchy, bloodshed, and the foulest crimes that have disgraced any time or any people.”

  He also promised “gentleness and forbearance” to those people who “submit to the rightful law and authority.” He would not handle Confederates—whether or not they wore a uniform—with the same gentleness and forbearance: “to the petulant and persistent secessionists, why death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better.”

  Publish this letter, he said, and “let them use it so as to prepare for my coming.”

  Those who broke the law, who waged war and caused war and would not stop, must be held to account, even if the accounting abrogated a moral law. Sherman knew that he would transgress the code of the professional soldier, but he had a reason, which he articulated over and over: the Southern secessionists who caused the war must suffer the consequences of what they had wrought. Even those who had not directly caused it but who stood by and let it happen or aided and abetted it and their comrades, they too were part of the problem, and if it took violence and deportation and despoliation to stop them, so be it. As far as he was concerned, they were guerrillas, all of those so-called noncombatants. He never intended to take the practices of warfare into peacetime but rather to end the war and restore the peace.

  “To make war,” Sherman had told Charles Dana, “we must & will harden our hearts.”

  General Grant did not disagree with the plans of his redheaded friend. After the carnage at Spotsylvania, in the spring of 1864, a reporter visited Grant’s tent hoping for a comment. Grant admitted that the hard fighting of that day had not accomplished much. He paused for a moment. Then he spoke again. “I do not know of any way to put down this Rebellion and restore the authority of the Government except by fighting, and fighting means that men must be killed.”

  At Kennesaw Mountain, near Marietta, Georgia, Sherman had launched an indecisive, gruesome frontal attack against General Joseph E. Johnston (who had replaced Braxton Bragg) and his Army of Tennessee; when the Federals charged uphill, said a Confederate soldier, “we mowed them down like hay.” Sherman did enter Marietta in July, and though he kept advancing, neither he nor Johnston engaged in a conclusive battle; Johnston had far fewer men and was careful not to lose them. Impatient, Jefferson Davis suddenly replaced Johnston with the aggressive John Bell Hood, who had lost the use of his left arm at Gettysburg and lost his right leg at Chickamauga. Hood finally attacked Sherman, east of Atlanta, late in July, but at one crucial point misconstrued Sherman’s actions. Sherman had been shelling the city—sometimes as often as every fifteen minutes; when he stopped, Hood thought Sherman’s army had left, which was far from the case. Hood had evacuated Atlanta on September 1, and Sherman telegraphed General Halleck his famous “Atlanta is ours.”

  As is well known, before Sherman left Atlanta, he ordered all the public buildings set afire. A high wind accomplished even more destruction than Sherman had perhaps anticipated. S
oldiers a mile away presumably read their letters from home by the light of the awful blaze, as Atlanta burned brightly in the distance. One reporter noted how the city’s blackened chimneys stood quiet as gravestones.

  In November Sherman and his men began their equally infamous eastward march to the sea, covering nearly 300 miles in twenty-six days, foraging along the way, bayoneting hogs, chicken, geese, anything they could lay their hands on, and blowing up track along the Georgia Central Railroad. Severing Lee’s vital connection with the lower South, Sherman had moved from Atlanta to Savannah and then marched his troops northward through South Carolina. Savannah surrendered unconditionally in late December rather than see itself ablaze, like Atlanta, and from there Sherman—after awarding the city to Lincoln as a Christmas gift—kept pressing on, northward up through the Carolinas. His men waded through thick swamps, bridged swollen creeks, marched over muddy roads in shoes worn and thin; they clobbered these states, cutting railroad lines and capturing locomotives, cotton, and 25,000 animals, or so one correspondent calculated, all the while drinking, dancing, looting, and torching cotton and cotton gins. Another reporter said that the sun was red with a garish afterglow. “A garden was before them,” the author Joel Headley wrote, “a desert behind them.” As Federal soldiers passed Southern homes, women hung out white tablecloths, as if in surrender, trying to protect what they had loved, sometimes to no avail. According to one soldier, wealthy residents fled and then fled again as the Yankees advanced, but though their homes were burned, their pianos taken, their libraries pilfered, and their linens shredded, the property of poorer folk was respected. From the roads you could see Sherman’s monuments: chimneys without houses. But the army also fed about 15,000 refugees, mostly dispossessed former slaves. The Union army was an army of both devastation and emancipation.