A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  An equally destabilizing issue involved the draft. Liberal Democrats and influential Republican editors like Horace Greeley opposed conscription. After announcement of the first New York conscriptees under the 1863 Enrollment Act, some fifty thousand angry Irish, who saw that they were disproportionately represented on the lists, descended upon the East Side. Mobs terrorized and looted stores, targeting blacks in particular. Between twenty-five to a hundred people died in the riots, and the mobs did $1.5 million in damage, requiring units from the U.S. Army to restore order. The new Gatling guns—the world’s first machine gun, developed by American Richard Gatling—were turned on the rioting Irish.119 The rioters were in the unfortunate circumstance of confronting troops direct from Gettysburg, who were in no mood to give them any quarter.

  Another threat to the Union came from so-called Peace Democrats, known in the North as Copperheads for their treacherous, stealthy attacks. Forming secret societies, including the Knights of the Golden Circle, Copperheads forged links to the Confederacy. How far their activities went remains a matter of debate, but both Lincoln and Davis thought them significant. Copperheads propagandized Confederate success, recruited for the Rebel cause, and, in extreme situations, even stole supplies, destroyed bridges, and carried correspondence from Southern leaders. Even when arrested and convicted, Copperhead agitators often found sympathetic judges who quietly dismissed their cases and released them.

  At the opposite end of the spectrum, but no less damaging to Lincoln, were the Radical Republicans. Congressional Republicans from 1861 onward clashed with the president over which branch had authority to prosecute the war. In May 1864, Radicals held a meeting in Cleveland to announce their support of John C. Frémont as their presidential candidate in the fall elections. Rank-and-file Republicans, who eschewed any connection to the Radicals, held what would have been under other circumstances the “real” Republican convention in June, and renominated Lincoln. However, in an effort to cement the votes of “war” or “unionist” Democrats, Lincoln replaced Hannibal Hamlin, his vice president, with a new nominee, Democrat Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee.

  The main source of Radical opposition to Lincoln targeted his view of reconstructing the Union. Radicals sought the utter prostration of the South. Many had looked forward to the opportunity to rub the South’s nose in it, and Lincoln’s moderation was not what they had in mind. Two of the most outspoken Radicals, Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio and Henry W. Davis of Maryland, authored a bill to increase the number of persons required to sign loyalty oaths to 50 percent, and to ensure black civil rights. The Wade-Davis Bill flew in the face of Lincoln’s consistently stated desire to reunite the nation as quickly and peacefully as possible, and it would have provoked sufficient Southern antipathy to lengthen the war through guerrilla warfare. Yet Lincoln feared that Congress might override a veto, so he exercised a special well-timed pocket veto, in which he took no action on the bill. Congress adjourned in the meantime, effectively killing the legislation, which infuriated the Radicals even more. Wade and Davis issued the Wade-Davis Manifesto, which indicted not only Lincoln’s plan for reunification but also disparaged his war leadership.

  All of these factors combined to produce a remarkable development in the late summer and early fall of 1864 in which some Republican Party members started to conduct a quiet search for a nominee other than Lincoln. At the Democratic convention in August, George B. McClellan emerged as the nominee. He planned to run on a “restoration” of the Union with no change in the Confederacy except that the Richmond government would dissolve. Adopting a “peace plank,” Democrats essentially declared that three years of war had been for naught—that no principles had been affirmed. Here was an astonishingly audacious and arrogant man: an incompetent and arguably traitorous Democratic general running against his former commander in chief in time of war and on a peace platform six months before the war was won! The peace plank proved so embarrassing that even McClellan soon had to disavow it. Even so, facing McClellan and the “purer” Republican Frémont, Lincoln privately expected to be voted out.

  At about that time, Lincoln received welcome news that Admiral David Farragut had broken through powerful forts to capture Mobile Bay on August 5,1864. Threatened by Confederate “torpedoes” (in reality, mines), Farragut exhorted his sailors with the famous phrase, “Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead.” Other important Confederate ports, most notably Charleston and Wilmington on the Atlantic, held out, but remained blockaded. With Mobile safely in Union hands, the major Gulf Coast Rebel cities had surrendered. Farragut’s telegrams constituted the first of three highly positive pieces of war news that ensured Lincoln’s reelection. The second was Sherman’s early September report of the fall of Atlanta. Sherman recommended that Grant order him to march southward from Atlanta to “cut a swath through to the sea,” taking Savannah.120 In the process, he would inflict as much damage as possible, not only on the Rebel army, but on the Southern economy and war-making capacity. A third and final boost to Lincoln’s reelection came a few weeks later from the Shenandoah Valley, where General Philip Sheridan was raising havoc. Between Stuart’s loss at Yellow Tavern and the destruction of the Shenandoah, Lincoln’s prospects brightened considerably.

  Still, he took no chances, furloughing soldiers so they could vote Republican and seeing to it that loyalists in Louisiana and Tennessee voted (even though only the Union states counted in the electoral college). McClellan, who once seemed to ride a whirlwind of support, saw it dissipate by October. Even Wade and Davis supported Lincoln, and Grant chimed in with his praise for the administration. Lincoln beat McClellan by 400,000 votes and crushed the Democrat in the electoral college, 212 to 21. McClellan’s checkered career as a soldier/politician had at last sputtered to an end.

  Total War and Unconditional Surrender

  Fittingly, Sherman began his new offensive the day after the election. “I can make Georgia howl,” he prophesied.121 With Chattanooga and Atlanta both lost, the South lacked any major rail links to the western part of the Confederacy, causing Lee to lose what little mobility advantage he had shown in previous campaigns. “My aim then,” Sherman later wrote, “was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us.”122

  Graced by stunningly beautiful Dixie fall weather, Yankee troops burned cotton, confiscated livestock and food, destroyed warehouses and storage facilities, and ripped up railroads throughout Georgia. They made bonfires out of the wooden ties, then heated the iron rails over the fires, bending them around nearby telegraph poles to make “Sherman hairpins.” Singing hymns as they marched—“five thousand voices could be heard singing ‘Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flowed’”—the Yankee soldiers had even Sherman believing “God will take care of [these noble fellows].”123 Sherman’s army had marched to Savannah by December 1864, living off the land.124 Despite Confederate propaganda that Sherman was “retreating—simply retreating,” his western soldiers were supremely confident in their commander. “I’d rather fight under him than Grant and if he were Mahomet, we’d be devoted Mussulmen,” said one midwestern private.125 Sherman’s success produced an uncomfortable relationship with Lincoln. The president wanted him to aid federal recruiting agents in enlisting newly freed slaves into the army. An insubordinate Sherman, however, insisted on using blacks as laborers or “pioneer brigades” to dig, build, and haul, but not fight.126 “Soldiers,” Sherman insisted, “must do many things without orders from their own sense…. Negroes are not equal to this.”127 Lincoln, unable to punish the one general who seemed to advance without interruption, could only congratulate Sherman on his conquest.

  On February seventeenth, Sherman entered Columbia, South Carolina, whereupon fires swept through the city, delighting many Unionists who hoped for the total destruction of this hotbed of rebellion. Most evidence points to Sherman’s vengeful soldiers as the arsonists. The following day, the Stars and Stripes was hoisted above Fort Sumter. Marching
north, Sherman further compressed the tiny operating area left to Lee and Johnston. This was perfectly in sync with Grant’s broad strategy of operating all the armies together on all fronts. Every army had orders to engage, a strategy to which Lincoln agreed: “Those not skinning can hold a leg.”128

  As the end neared, in December 1864, President Davis and his wife attended a “starvation party,” which had no refreshments because of the food shortages. Already, Davis had sold his horses and slaves to raise money to make ends meet, and his wife had sold her carriage and team. He and other leaders knew the Confederacy did not have long to live. At that late date, Davis again proposed arming the slaves. In a sense, however, it might be said that Robert E. Lee’s army was already relying heavily upon them. At the Tredegar Iron Works, the main Southern iron manufacturing facility, more than 1,200 slaves hammered out cannon barrels and bayonets, and in other wartime plants, free blacks in Alleghany, Botetourt, Henrico, and other counties shaped nails, boilers, locomotives, and a variety of instruments of war.129 Added to that, another few thousand free blacks actually served in the Confederate Army as cooks, teamsters, and diggers, or in shoe repair or wheelwright work. Little is known of their motivation, but it appears to have been strictly economic, since the Rebel military paid more ($16 per month in Virginia) than most free blacks could ever hope to get in the South’s impoverished private sector.130 Most were impressed under state laws, including some 10,000 black Virginians immediately put to work after Bull Run throwing up breastworks in front of Confederate defensives positions. Ironically, some 286 black Virginia Confederate pensioners received benefits under Virginia law in 1926—the only slaves ever to receive any form of institutionalized compensation from their government.

  Still, resistance to the use of slave soldiers was deep-seated, suggesting that Confederates well knew the implications of such policies: an 1865 Confederate House minority report stated, “The doctrine of emancipation as a reward for the services of slaves employed in the army, is antagonistic to the spirit of our institutions.”131 A Mississippi newspaper claimed that arming slaves marked “a total abandonment of the chief object of this war, and if the institution is already irretrievably undermined, the rights of the States are buried with it.”132 This constituted yet another admission that to white Southerners, the war was, after all, about slavery and not states’ rights.

  Of course, when possible, slaves aimed to escape to Northern lines. By 1863, Virginia alone counted nearly 38,000 fugitives out of a population of 346,000, despite the presence of armed troops all around them.133 Philosophically, the Confederacy placed more emphasis on recovering a black runaway than in apprehending a white deserter from the Army of Northern Virginia.

  Despite the presence of a handful of Afro-Confederate volunteers, the vast majority of slaves openly celebrated their freedom once Union forces arrived. In Norfolk, Virginia, for example, new freedmen held a parade, marching through the city as they trampled and tore Confederate battle flags, finally gathering to hang Jefferson Davis in effigy.134 Upon receiving news of emancipation, Williamsburg, Virginia, blacks literally packed up and left town. Blacks from Confederate states also joined the Union Army in large numbers. Louisiana provided 24,000, Tennessee accounted for more than 20,000, and Mississippi blacks who enlisted totaled nearly 18,000.

  Grant, meanwhile, continued his relentless pursuit of Lee’s army, suffocating Petersburg through siege and extending his lines around Richmond. Lee presented a desperation plan to Davis to break out of Petersburg and retreat to the southeast to link up with whatever forces remained under other Confederate commanders. Petersburg fell on April second, and, following desperate maneuvers by the Army of Northern Virginia, Grant caught up to Lee and Longstreet at Appomattox Station on April 8, 1865. Following a brief clash between the cavalry of General George Custer and General Fitzhugh Lee, the Confederates were surrounded. “I would rather die a thousand deaths,” Robert E. Lee said of the action he then had to take.135

  Opening a dialogue with Grant through letters delivered by courier, Lee met with Grant at the home of Wilmer McLean. The Confederate general dressed in a new formal gray uniform, complete with spurs, gauntlets, and epaulets, and arrived on his faithful Traveler, while Grant attended the meeting in an unbuttoned overcoat and boots splattered with mud—no sword, no designation of rank. Grant hastily wrote out the conditions, then, noticing that Lee seemed forlornly staring at the sword hanging at his side, decided on the spot that requiring the officers to formally surrender their swords was an undue humiliation. He wrote out, “This will not embrace the side-arms of the officers, nor their private horses or baggage.”136 Lee wrote a brief acceptance, glumly walked out the door and mounted Traveler, and as he began to ride off, Grant came out of the building and saluted. All the Union officers did the same. Lee sadly raised his hat in response, then rode off.

  Grant had given the Confederates extremely generous terms in allowing all of the men to keep sidearms and horses, but they had to stack muskets and cannons. The men had to swear to obey the laws of the land, which would exempt them from prosecution as traitors. Grant’s policy thus became the model for the surrender of all the Rebels. Fighting continued sporadically for weeks; the last actual combat of the Civil War was on May twenty-sixth, near Brownsville, Texas.

  Davis had little time to ponder the cause of Confederate failure as he fled Richmond, completely detached from reality. Having already packed off his wife, arming her with a pistol and fifty rounds of ammunition, the Confederate president ran for his life. He issued a final message to the Confederacy in which he called for a massive guerrilla resistance by Confederate civilians. Expecting thousands of people to take to the Appalachians, live off the land, and fight hit-and-run style, Davis ignored the fact that not only were those sections of the South already the poorest economically—thus unable to support such a resistance—but they were also the areas where the greatest number of Union partisans and federal sentiment existed. Few read Davis’s final desperate message, for by that time the Confederacy had collapsed and virtually no newspapers printed the news. Davis hid and used disguises, but to no avail. On May tenth he was captured at Irwinville, Georgia, and jailed.137

  The call for guerrilla war inflamed Northern attitudes against Davis even further. Many wanted to hang him, and he remained in military custody at Fort Monroe, for a time in leg irons. In 1867 he was to be indicted for treason and was released to the control of a civilian court. After Horace Greeley and Cornelius Vanderbilt posted his bail, Davis languished under the cloud of a trial until December 1868, when the case was disposed of by President Andrew Johnson’s proclamation of unconditional amnesty. By that time, Davis had become a political embarrassment to the administration, and his conviction—given the other amnesty provisions in place—unlikely anyway.

  Lincoln’s Last Days

  In the two years since the Emancipation Proclamation, Maryland and Missouri had freed their slaves, the Fugitive Slave Law was repealed, and Congress had passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which provided that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”138 With that amendment, Lincoln had steered the nation from a house divided over slavery to one reunited without it. Now he had two overarching goals ahead of him: ensure that the South did not reinstitute slavery in some mutated form, and at the same time, bring the former Rebels back into the Union as quickly and generously as possible.

  He laid the groundwork for this approach in his second inaugural when he said, “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, 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 lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”139

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bsp; The president intended for Reconstruction to follow his “10 percent plan.” By this definition, he recognized former Confederate states Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Virginia as reconstructed in late 1864, even as Lee held out in Richmond. However, Radicals refused to seat their delegations nor to allow those states to cast electoral votes in the November 1864 election. One thing is certain: Lincoln wanted a quick and magnanimous restoration of the Union, not the Radicals’ dream of a prostrate and subjugated South. When it came to traitorous Confederate leaders, Lincoln told his last cabinet secretaries, on the day he was killed, “Enough lives have been sacrificed.” On matters of black economic opportunity, Lincoln was less clear. No one knows what measures Lincoln would have adopted, but his rhetoric was always several steps behind his actions in matters of race.

  It is one of the tragedies of his death on April 15, 1865, that Abraham Lincoln did not remain in office to direct Reconstruction, for surely he would have been a towering improvement over Andrew Johnson. Tragedy befell the nation doubly so, because his murder by an arch-Confederate actor named John Wilkes Booth doused feelings of compassion and the “charity for all” that some, if not most, Northerners had indeed considered extending to the South. The details of Lincoln’s death have taken on mythic status, and rightly so, for aside from George Washington, no other president—not even Jefferson—had so changed the Union.