On February 17, 1865, the Union soldiers were in Columbia, South Carolina, where, intoxicated as much by victory as by alcohol, they ran loose all over town, stealing what they could carry and sending men and women and children, some half naked, from their beds into the streets as their houses went up in smoke. Many could find shelter only in the lunatic asylum or the churches. Appalled, Sherman gave orders to put out the fires while the men apparently kept setting them. By morning, the streets, the gardens, and the large ash trees were smoldering. “War, after all, has horrors even greater than the battle-field,” cried one witness. Called “Sherman’s Brick Yard,” the city lay in ruins, though it remains unclear whether it was because Sherman’s men had drunk too much confiscated whiskey or because the Confederates, on the orders of General Wade Hampton, had actually burned their own cotton before riding out of town. John Bell Hood had no doubt; the fire was Sherman, all Sherman. “This unprecedented measure transcends in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever brought to my attention in the dark history of war,” Hood exclaimed. “In the name of God and humanity, I protest.”
Sherman answered quickly; war was cruelty, as he had said; peace was the higher law justifying what he’d had to do. The Confederacy had declared war, not peace, and should therefore expect cruelty. He had no hand in making the war, he continued, which was founded in error and perpetuated in pride, but he would sacrifice as much, if not more, than anyone, to secure peace. Peace was what he was after.
THE “GRAY GHOST” who struck in the early-morning fog and then vanished into the haze was John Singleton Mosby, who, with his Partisan Rangers, cast a spell over the Virginia countryside. Herman Melville visited the Federal troops in Virginia in what he called Mosby territory, where it was unsafe to travel without a Union escort, and he saw Union soldiers capture several of Mosby’s “wandering brood.” Mosby “seems a satyr’s child—,” he later wrote in “The Scout toward Aldie,” which Edmund Wilson said romanticized Mosby a little too much. Many a writer did romanticize him, though Walt Whitman sharply observed that Mosby’s men “would run a knife through the wounded, the aged, the children, without compunction.”
Before Virginia seceded, Mosby had been opposed to slavery, and though he was not in favor of secession, he cleaved to his Virginia, much as Robert E. Lee had. But his predilection for violence was long-standing. While a student at the University of Virginia, he’d shot a man during a quarrel. He was expelled, but the governor eventually pardoned him, for Mosby, who weighed under 130 pounds, was said to be so frail he simply had to carry a gun in self-defense.
Trained as a lawyer, well read, interested in antiquity, quiet, gray-eyed, wiry, and smart, Mosby had enlisted in the Confederate army in 1861 and soon joined the staff of Jeb Stuart’s command as a skilled scout with a fondness for irregular action. It was his reconnaissance that allowed Stuart to ride successfully around McClellan’s army during the peninsular campaign. But he resigned his formal commission and in Virginia formed his own band of brothers, wore a feather in his cap, carried two pistols at his side, and so riled General Grant in August 1864 that Grant gave orders to hang, if captured, any of Mosby’s guerrillas without trial.
Mosby’s tactics were to a certain extent sanctioned by Richmond, though General Lee believed all irregulars should be eliminated. “I regard the whole system,” he told the Confederate secretary of war, “as an unmixed evil.” Yet there was no denying Mosby was good at what he did: seizing horses, robbing trains, capturing guns and rations and other loot, and wounding or killing Union soldiers, especially stragglers. Mosby hanged so many Federal stragglers that it was said that Union desertions actually decreased; no bluecoat wanted to meet up with him, and northern Virginia became known as “Mosby’s Confederacy,” for, among other things, its citizens offered him intelligence and shelter.
Earlier, Mosby’s enemy had been Union major general David Hunter, who had been sent to the Shenandoah Valley to replace Franz Sigel. Hunter was also the man who had issued his own early version of an Emancipation Proclamation in the Sea Islands, annoying Lincoln. Removed from the Carolina coast and needing to burnish his reputation, Hunter became notorious in the Shenandoah Valley for an unwonted ruthlessness that pushed those formerly sympathetic to the Union into the arms of the Confederacy.
In June 1864, for instance, Hunter’s troops had broken into the home of Stonewall Jackson’s Pennsylvania-born sister-in-law, ransacked the cellar, slaughtered the sheep, and stole the horses. At Virginia Institute, they stripped the laboratories of equipment, looted the classrooms, and then set fire to every building except the superintendent’s quarters. They plundered the library at Washington College, they razed the home of Virginia governor John Letcher. And all that took place before Grant said that if Hunter couldn’t cut the rail lines, he should devastate the valley—turn it into a wasteland so that, as Grant graphically put it, “crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their provender with them.” As if reconsidering what he had said, he backed off a little and added, “I do not mean that houses should be burned, but all provisions and stock should be removed, and the people notified to move out.”
Nestled between the Allegheny and the Blue Ridge Mountains, the opalescent Shenandoah Valley was of significant strategic importance to the Confederacy: it led right to Washington and, with its yellow grain, fertile soil, and plentiful livestock, it operated as a rich breadbasket for Lee’s army. Grant knew that; capturing the valley and destroying its provisions would help defeat the Army of North Virginia as much if not more than the taking of Richmond. At the same time he would try to prevent Lee’s army from getting its supplies from points south of Richmond by seizing Petersburg, a rail center, located on the Appomattox River about twenty miles below the Confederacy’s capital.
War was no longer confined to the battlefields of Bull Run, Antietam, or Gettysburg; it had spilled into hearts and homes, with Union soldiers avenging themselves and guerrillas avenging the avengers: soldiers such as Mosby had become the raiders and pirates of war. The men of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry—or perhaps Custer’s men—captured several of Mosby’s rangers and hanged them when they refused to divulge Mosby’s hideaway. “I was sorry enough the other day that my Brigade should have had a part in the hanging and shooting of some of Mosby’s men who were taken,” observed the Harvard-educated Union soldier Charles Russell Lowell. “—I believe that some punishment was deserved—but I hardly think we were within the laws of war, and any violation of them opens the door for all sorts of barbarity.” Yet what were the rules of modern warfare? Were there rules at all? Sherman had thought so but then saw what war did to people, so he reframed his question—and his answer—in order to simplify its moral complexity. War is cruelty. Better avoid war; once war came, there was no turning back: raze the city and sow it with salt.
Hunter’s philosophical outlook on war, whatever it may have been, was not so boldly stated as Sherman’s. The behavior of his men seems entirely without purpose. Moreover, Hunter had been a disappointment to Lincoln and Grant. For weeks he avoided the single-minded Confederate general Jubal Early, come to stanch—and avenge—Hunter’s destruction of the countryside. Uneasy, Grant replaced Hunter with the thirty-three-year-old Philip Sheridan, the head of the Cavalry Corps of the Potomac, and sent him to command the newly formed Army of the Shenandoah. In the Shenandoah, Sheridan was to place himself south of the enemy and then follow that enemy “to the death.” As Sheridan explained to another officer, his instructions were to make the valley “untenable.” No more grain and food for Lee’s army; no more planting; no more irregular recruits, many of whom (including Mosby’s men) came from there. Quakers, however, were to be left alone, as well as loyal citizens such as Mennonites and “Dunkers” (Baptist Brethren). And if the loyal citizens objected to the necessary destruction, they could take their complaints to Washington.
Grant needed to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants, Union sympathizers and Confederates. It wo
uld not be easy, and soldiers such as Grant, as even-tempered as he had often seemed, were pushed to the limit. Major General Sheridan was just the man for the job. Short—only five feet, four inches, if that, and weighing 115 pounds—he was bandy-legged, his face narrow, his mustache long and bushy. But “Little Phil,” as he was known, was a crack horseman and a hard fighter, and was taken aback slightly when Lincoln repeated to him the old joke about no one ever seeing a dead cavalryman (implying that cavalrymen didn’t fight).
The former West Pointer never slept and never got angry, at least according to a young officer who fought with him, and he liked to ride at the front of his troops both to encourage his men and to keep a lookout up ahead. “With forehead of no promise and hair so short that it looks like a coat of black paint,” remarked George Templeton Strong, “of all our chieftains he alone has displayed the capacity of handling men in actual shock of battle, turning defeat into victory.” Strong noted this in the fall of 1864, after the rout at Cedar Creek, where Jubal Early had launched a surprise attack so devastating that the Union troops had retreated quickly to Winchester. Sheridan, who had been in Washington conferring with higher-ups, arrived in Winchester, put his ear to the ground, and, hearing the rumble of what was clearly a fight, rode his soon-to-be-famous black horse, Rienzi, twelve miles to Cedar Creek, yelling at the defeated soldiers who lined the road to “Face the other way, boys. We are going back to our camps. We are going to lick them out of their boots.” The soldiers followed him back to the “slaughter,” said one of them, “as hounds follow their master.” The battle was then won by the very men who had lost it, recalled John De Forest, a soldier from Connecticut who would live to write a novel of the war. Sheridan’s ride was celebrated far and wide in Thomas Buchanan Read’s poem: “The first that the general saw were the groups / Of stragglers, and then the retreating troops. / What was done? what to do? a glance told him both; / Then, striking his spurs, with a terrible oath, / He dashed down the line, ’mid a storm of huzzas, / And the wave of retreat checked its course there, because / The fight of the master compelled it to pause.”
Sheridan earned a reputation for destruction in the valley that outstripped even that of Hunter and his brigands. Barns filled with hay and straw, gristmills and fences and corncribs, gardens and cornfields—all of them went up in columns of dark smoke. “Relentless, merciless,” said an onlooker, “the terrible torch has done its work in the centre and on either side of the valley.” The gleaming light of distant fire could be seen for miles and miles. “The time had fully come to peel this land and put an end of the long strife for its possession,” a chaplain from the 1st Rhode Island Cavalry later wrote. “Sheridan was to do for the valley what Grant was doing for Richmond—clean it out. The flames here shortened the work of war, and so were a mercy. Loss of property is nothing as measured with blood. The order led to the destruction of about two thousand barns, seventy mills, and other property, valued in all at twenty-five millions of dollars.” Women and children looked for places to hide. Refugees piled into trains—if they could find them.
Sheridan: by his own unapologetic account, he took war right up to the door of the civilian. Up to the door, but not inside in that he didn’t wish to make wholesale arrests, and he did not. Years later, he reportedly told Otto von Bismarck that “the people must be left with nothing but their eyes to see and lament the war.”
Sheridan estimated that he had burned 2,000 barns and 70 mills in only one month in the Shenandoah. “Death is popularly considered the maximum of punishment in war, but it is not,” he observed. “Reduction to poverty brings prayers for peace more surely and more quickly than does the destruction of human life, as the selfishness of man has demonstrated in more than one great conflict.”
MARCH 4, 1865, Inauguration Day: Much had happened. Charleston, South Carolina, the city where the war had begun, had been evacuated, and the day after Columbia burned, the Union army had taken back Fort Sumter. Twenty-five cannon, captured from Charleston, were fired in salute, and Federal soldiers drank to the health of the president in the tumblers of wine they had confiscated.
Sheridan had more or less finished laying waste to the Shenandoah Valley, having defeated Early’s men at Waynesborough, and he would meet up with Grant near Petersburg, the city Grant still had under siege. The war could not last much longer, or so many Northerners began to believe, especially since Lee’s army was dwindling and stretched too thinly. In Washington, the Radical Republicans were in a good mood. And Lincoln had been courting Democrats, hoping they would support the new constitutional amendment outlawing slavery throughout the United States.
“There is a hope felt here of disposing of the Negro question in a constitutional way this session,” Elizabeth Blair Lee reported. “A large number of Democrats are willing to vote for it now—Our people are working hard for it.”
Two months before the inauguration, in early January, James Ashley was again managing the amendment to abolish slavery turned down by the House the previous spring but that had passed the Senate. Abolition had been on the minds of many—for years. In early 1864, the leaders of the Women’s National Loyal League, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, had collected the signatures of 100,000 women on a petition for an amendment to free the slaves. And now Representative Green Clay Smith of Kentucky, an unconditional Unionist, was declaring that “we should destroy slavery, root and branch, as soon as possible. We must have the Union without slavery.” Smith believed the amendment would ensure a permanent peace because abolition would remove the war’s most “distracting cause.” Frederick E. Woodbridge, a Republican from Vermont, called slavery a relic of barbarism. Promised patronage for his brother by Ashley, Anson Herrick, a Democrat from New York, changed his vote from the “nay” of the previous spring and explained, “I think such action on my behalf is best calculated to assist in the maintenance of the Government, the preservation of the Union, and the perpetuation of the free institutions which we inherited from our fathers.”
Yet there were those, such as George Pendleton of Ohio, McClellan’s running mate, who challenged the constitutionality of the proposed amendment, arguing that such an amendment violated states’ rights. Aghast at the specter of states’ rights again raising its ugly head, particularly after the bloodshed of recent years, Ashley pushed back. He condemned the “defending [of] the State sovereignty dogmas, and claiming that the national constitution cannot be so amended as to prohibit slavery.” If the Constitution could not be amended, he inveighed, then it was nothing more than “a dead letter, the States sovereign, the Government a confederation, and the United States not a nation.”
Samuel S. Cox, a Democrat from Ohio, feared that abolishing slavery might prolong the war. On the fence, he withheld his affirmative vote when he heard rumors that three Confederate peace commissioners, Alexander Stephens, R. M. T. Hunter, and John Archibald Campbell, were en route to Washington. The president denied that any envoys had come to the city, which was technically true; they were coming to talk about peace, but they were headed to Fortress Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, not Washington. Cox held firm.
Yet technicalities and arm-twisting carried the day. The Blair family vigorously worked to wrest votes for the amendment from Democrats. So did William Seward, who presumably promised to hand out offices or other bonuses as a reward for voting with the administration. Allegations of corruption swirled around Seward, accused sub rosa of bribing congressmen for their votes. Lincoln too had actively worked to convert moderate Democrats and lukewarm Republicans to his side, making the legislative process his business. In his annual message the previous December, he had informed Congress that the time for an amendment banning slavery had come at last; recent elections had suggested as much, and the amendment would be passed sooner or later. And, he added, almost as a warning, that while he was president of the United States, he would not retract or modify the Emancipation Proclamation or return any person to slavery who had been made free by it. What he implied w
as that the country had an obligation—for the sake of the war effort, for the sake of the nation, for the sake of justice—to protect the freedom of all men and women.
Whatever had happened behind closed doors in Washington, whatever patronage plums were offered or accepted, in January fifteen Democrats who had earlier opposed the amendment now voted to pass it, and when James English of Connecticut voted “aye,” the chamber’s members broke into applause. Speaker Schuyler Colfax finished calling the roll, then announced that there were 119 yeas—all Republicans were in favor—and 56 nays, and that the joint resolution amending the Constitution had passed.
Stunned silence filled the room before it erupted into hurrahs and hugs, congressmen throwing their arms around each other. Grown men wept. On the balcony, women waved their handkerchiefs, and though one congressman proposed adjourning in honor of the tremendous event, the Copperheads insisted on a recalling of names. The names were recalled amid the pandemonium. The cannon of Washington fired in triumph and relief. Said Carl Schurz, “It is worth while to live in these days.”
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