Other soldiers found consolation and renewed personal strength in the face of danger because revivals reminded them that whatever happened to them on earth, God’s reward waited for them after death. All around him, soldiers were “getting religion & fitting themselves to die,” Edward Brown reported approvingly. Renewed religiosity among the troops could help the cause, he hoped, because “men who are not afraid to die will fight better than those who have dark forebodings of the future.” Yet better fighting would be a fortunate side effect, not the driving purpose, of renewed religious enthusiasm. “We are still expecting a fight yet the people seem to care for or dread it far less than ever before,” Brown concluded, because revivals reminded them that God’s will would be done, and that a better world awaited those who died in God’s grace. 177 That better world made the present world seem less important, and encouraged soldiers to look past it rather than try to reform it.
IN SHORT, the distinctive character of white southern religion helped to sustain Confederate soldiers because it admitted no doubts about the rightness of the South’s social order, and therefore no doubts about a war to preserve that social order. 178 Whatever twists and turns God’s plan took in the meantime, it was bound to end in Confederate victory, many troops assumed, because God was certain to favor the side fighting to preserve a divinely ordained way of structuring society. We are passing through a “fiery ordeal” now, Confederates admitted, but if our faith remains strong and we withstand the test with fortitude, then God will bring us through at a time and in a way that accords with the will of the Almighty. 179 While personal attention to one’s individual failings might help hasten the day when God rewarded white Southerners with victory, Confederates certainly need not consider reforming their society or rethinking its basic structures. To do so would tamper with God’s will and risk divine wrath. Instead, white Southerners should patiently bear their burdens, trusting that suffering made them worthy, and the rest was a matter of time.
Meanwhile, chastened by the nature and the continuation of the war, many Union troops undertook the very sort of introspection and social reexamination that white Southerners found threatening and heretical. If white Northerners’ complicity in the sin of slavery was partly to blame for the war, then repentance for that sin should eventually convince God to bless the Union with victory. While fraught with more anxiety and a heightened sense of obligation compared to white Southerners’ religious beliefs, Union soldiers’ religious faith also assumed that eventual victory was certain because it was the will of God. Yet despite the assurance of both Union and Confederate soldiers in 1863, the year ahead would remind them all that God worked in mysterious ways.
Confederate troops holding Atlanta, 1864. Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Hardship mounted in 1864, especially in the South, as poverty and the movements of both armies drove refugees like these from their homes. Even those who stayed home faced shortages and other difficulties. Courtesy of the National Archives
Confederate violence against black Union troops escalated in 1864, as portrayed in this Harper’s Weekly illustration, “Rebel Atrocities.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress
CHAPTER 5
“Many Are the Hearts That Are Weary Tonight”:
The War in 1864*5
AS 1864 dawned, Charleston Harbor rang with the songs and speeches of black Union Army regiments commemorating the fact that “one year ago a proclamation was issued from the Chief of this land that severed the bonds of thousands of our race and opened a door that had been shut against us for centuries.” 1 On Morris Island, Sgt. William Gray had taken great pains to organize his regiment’s “first jubilee meeting.” Several enlisted men delivered short remarks while others played the drums, but the climax of the day came when Gray himself addressed the gathering. Even as he congratulated black soldiers for the past year’s “accumulated testimony of negro patriotism and courage,” Gray knew that many of his listeners seethed with resentment over unequal pay and a prohibition against black officers. Still, on this day he asked them to concentrate on the changes that had taken place since the war began, and to remember, “our children will refer with pride to their fathers, who, for the sake of the liberty of the human race, suffered the baptism of fire.” 2
By combining ideas of suffering, pride, and human liberty in a single sentence, Gray’s remarks hinted at the paradoxical nature of black Union soldiers’ experiences, and the war in general, in 1864. As the conflict took unexpected turns, African American men in the ranks retained hope and fought for continued advances in the face of biting disappointment and emerging dissent. Faced with setbacks, white Union troops held the line on emancipation but backslid on matters of racial equality in the spring and summer of 1864. Confederate leaders sought to control the political situation at home and influence the upcoming Union presidential election by emphasizing the Lincoln administration’s insistence on emancipation as the chief stumbling block to peace. In their letters home, Confederate troops emphasized how necessary they believed the prevention of abolition to be and why they saw it as so crucial. Meanwhile, as the sheer force of the war undermined the very racial distinctions white Southerners thought the Confederacy was supposed to guarantee, Confederate men in the ranks increasingly reacted with desperation and violence. The war in 1864 revealed a vast array of postwar possibilities; it also exposed a broad spectrum of reactions to those possibilities, ranging from enthusiasm to hesitation to violent resistance.
“For liberty—but not for equality—nor fraternity—except in the limited sense.”
For much of 1864, a year many Northerners had been sure would bring peace and victory, military affairs ranged from disappointing to disastrous. The spring began auspiciously, when President Lincoln promoted Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, the hero of Vicksburg, to lieutenant general, and brought him east to lead the Army of the Potomac. Grant planned simultaneous campaigns in the East and West, but at first, none of the efforts worked. Instead, telegraph wires that were supposed to proclaim victory began to transmit some of the longest casualty lists of the war. In May and June, the Army of the Potomac lost 50 percent of its fighting forces at places like the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor. As the summer advanced, the Army of Northern Virginia entrenched in a long line from Petersburg, Virginia, to the capital at Richmond, consigning the Army of the Potomac to a dispiriting siege. In the West, Union forces under Gen. William T. Sherman had pushed Confederates closer and closer to Atlanta, but the city remained in Confederate hands. The setbacks took their toll, especially in the Army of the Potomac. At Spotsylvania, the normally cheerful Vermont private Wilbur Fisk ran from the battlefield, and afterward admitted that his “patriotism was well nigh used up.” 3 Writing from “Cold Harbor and Hell,” Pvt. Lewis Bissell reported, “the roar of musketry was terrible but not so awful as the cries of the wounded,” which numbered over three hundred casualties in his regiment alone. “If there is ever again any rejoicing in this world,” Bissell concluded, it would not happen until the war was over. 4
To make matters worse, the military downturns happened just as the three-year enlistments of 1861 volunteers were set to expire. Unlike the Confederacy, the Union did not simply extend all enlistments, which meant that soldiers’ decisions about reenlisting or going home would be voluntary. To ensure that the ranks would remain full for the spring campaign season, the Army launched its reenlistment drives in the winter of 1863–64, a time when war-weariness and complacent certainty that the war was already won (and therefore would not need men’s services any longer) combined to make reenlistment an uphill battle. The U.S. government tried to counter with bounties, alcohol, furloughs, and manipulation of peer pressure and unit pride. Any regiment in which three-quarters of the members reenlisted would be designated a “veteran regiment,” while units with lower reenlistment rates would be shuffled together and denied the proud title of “veteran.” Illinois sergeant James Jessee noted that even these measures met with only limited s
uccess. On the first day of a week-long reenlistment drive, alcohol flowed plentifully, men gave speeches, and soon the regiment lacked a mere sixty-five of its three-quarters goal. The next day, hangovers and doubts descended, and the pace slowed down, leading Jessee to observe that “Lager beere has nearly lost its veteran Power.” 5 In the end, the regiment reached its quota, but the effort required showed that eagerness for the fray had waned. 6
The military downturn, mounting casualty counts, and listless reenlistment drives gave new life to antiwar and anti-emancipation sentiment. No draft riots tore through northern cities as they had the previous summer, but antiwar meetings sprang up throughout the North. Just as the list of Cold Harbor dead and wounded hit northern newspapers in June, Clement Vallandigham returned from Canadian exile to attend a convention condemning this “unnecessary war” and adopting resolutions in favor of an “immediate cessation of hostilities” and a negotiated peace. Twice in the summer of 1864, Presidents Lincoln and Davis used agents to communicate to each other their conditions for peace negotiations, but far from allaying popular dissatisfaction, the failed attempts actually handed anti-war and anti-emancipation Democrats more fodder. While Lincoln’s irreducible conditions consisted of both reunion and abolition, his detractors insisted that only the president’s stubbornness on emancipation prevented a peaceful settlement, just as President Davis hoped would happen if he kept quiet about a separate Confederate nation as a precondition to settlement. 7 A hardened Kentucky private grumbled, “this is nothing but an abolition war it is for nothing only to free the negros,” and if he had his “way at the abolitionist party I would kill every one of them.” 8 Forced to downplay emancipation in the 1863 elections, antiwar Democrats looking forward to the 1864 presidential contest now grasped the opportunity to portray the war as a protracted bloodbath carried out by a Republican administration not to restore the Union, but simply to destroy slavery. As the outspoken Copperhead newspaper The Crisis put it, “Tens of thousands of white men must yet bite the dust to allay the negro mania of the President.” 9
Antiwar and anti-emancipation impulses influenced the Democratic convention, which met in Chicago in August 1864 to select George McClellan as the party’s nominee for president in November and to articulate its platform, which soon became known as the Chicago platform. 10 Describing the war as “four years of failure,” the platform criticized Republican infringements on civil liberties and condemned emancipation as an unconstitutional trespass on the rights of southern states. It called for an immediate “cessation of hostilities, with a view of an ultimate convention of the States” to negotiate a peace by which the states regained all rights, including slavery, enjoyed before the struggle broke out. 11
Embittered by the brutality around Richmond or the enervation of the ongoing siege of Atlanta, some troops welcomed the resurgence of the Peace Democrats, especially with the popular Gen. George McClellan heading the party’s ticket. Charles Bates still liked McClellan so much that he pledged to vote for his old hero “if it cost me a dollar.” 12 Sick of the war, Vermont corporal Peter Abbott felt sure that compromise was out of the question “if oald Abe is elected.” McClellan, on the other hand, might bargain with the South and end the fighting, which would achieve Abbott’s main goal of going home. 13 Some responded favorably to the anti-emancipation thrust of the Democratic platform. Languishing on the Mississippi River, Pvt. Adin Ballou complained about “the ‘nigger’ upon whose shoulders I knew the republicans rested their platform…and I find I am fighting for him.” Compared to “Northern Abolitionists” whose inflexible convictions made “compromise…out of the question,” Democratic offers to forgo emancipation in favor of peace looked highly attractive to Ballou. 14 Meanwhile, Democrats made even greater gains among civilians. 15
Yet for most Union troops, even those who considered themselves loyal Democrats, nothing could make a platform that opposed emancipation and the war palatable because the war had established emancipation and Union as national necessities, not legitimate grounds for partisan debate. Despite his family’s traditional Democratic identity, E. C. Hubbard insisted, “Slavery is gone. Peace propositions to Richmond won’t save it,” and any person or party incapable of grasping that central point could “think and howl to the contrary” all they liked, the truth remained that “all men who have seen the actual working of the Proclamation” knew “the war could never be ended without [slavery’s] destruction.” 16 Hubbard did not stop identifying himself as a Democrat, but he did put his partisan identity aside where the issues of war and emancipation were concerned. No stauncher Democrat had joined the Army than Chauncey Welton of Ohio, but when Welton’s father asked the young corporal whom he supported for president, Welton was stunned. He could not believe that any “true and loyal man in the North (especially one who had a son in the armey)” would harbor anything other than disgust for an anti-emancipation, antiwar platform that offered “the onely hope that the Rebels now entertain.” 17 When news of a deadly scuffle that broke out between local Copperheads and Illinois soldiers home on leave reached Union soldiers encamped in Georgia, Democrat James Connolly reserved all his sympathies for the soldiers, confiding to his wife that “those Illinois copperheads need killing just a little.” 18 By provoking such hostility, Peace Democrats unwittingly emphasized two points the Union rank and file, including many of its Democratic members, regarded as nonnegotiable even in the grimmest days of 1864: the importance of saving the Union to sustain the whole world’s hopes for self-government, and the necessity of emancipation.
Since 1861, countless troops had insisted that they fought to preserve liberty and freedom as universal ideals applicable to all humanity, and to sustain the United States government as a way of proving to a world that desired but doubted its success that an elected republican government could survive. Union soldiers grew less poetic in 1864 (in February, Thomas King described “genuine patriotism” as nothing more glamorous than willingness to put up with cold, mud, and near starvation), but they did not abandon the core of their convictions, or their anger at Confederates for betraying vital principles. 19 In the view of Abraham Irvine, an Irish immigrant in the Army of the Potomac, the war pitted “the defenders of freedom, the champions of Liberty” against “those enemies of humanity, of Liberty, & God, who would tare to attoms…the best Government that the world ever new.” The United States stood for “the principle of Self-Government” against “despotism & oppression,” and anyone who defended it was “a friend to humanity & liberty.” Irvine’s family lived in Mountnorris, Ireland, unaffected by depredations from Confederate troops. He explained that fighting mattered not to save the lives and property of his loved ones, but because the whole human family, or, as he put it, all “who would be free,” stood to benefit from a Union victory. Irvine had little patience for what he saw as suggestions to the contrary, and neither did many of his fellow Union soldiers, black or white, immigrant or native-born, eastern or western. On the whole, they agreed that the world depended on the Union’s defeating, not compromising with, any attempt to destroy it. 20 Union troops could retain such an outlook not simply because their families suffered less (even Kansas soldiers whose communities were subject to deadly guerrilla attacks shared similar views), and certainly not because they were naturally more resilient or selfless than Confederates, but rather because their version of patriotism better equipped them to ride out the war’s rough spots.
In the main, white Union soldiers regarded emancipation as an equally fixed point by 1864. Insistence on abolition was less true of some border-state soldiers. Kentuckian Benjamin Jones, for example, was “not fore freeing the negros,” but he was in the distinct minority. 21 By and large, Union troops had come to consider willingness to barter on the slavery question as a betrayal of the Union cause. “Slavery is the sole cause of the rebellion,” insisted Jacob Behm, which made it “the political, civil, moral, and sacred duty of us to meet it.” Any “compromise…would give but a breathing spell for a r
enewed struggle.” 22 By these lights, the Chicago platform would spell disaster for the Union war effort. Not content with insolently calling the war a failure, the Democratic platform appeared willing to make it a failure by leaving the root cause in place, ready to sprout back into secession at the first opportunity. As Pvt. Charles Henthorn put it, every soldier who “loves his country and sustains the administration of its laws” must be an “Abolitionist,” or he cut the ground right out from under himself. 23
Soldiers generally gave one of three reasons for their insistence on emancipation. First, Union victory required an end to slavery as a way to weaken the Confederacy, and also because the ideals for which Union troops believed they fought could not coexist with slavery any longer. “Preaching liberty” without “knocking off the band of the oppressed” could never amount to more than empty words, John Moore insisted. Peals of Union victory could only come after “the death knell of slavery.” 24 A Vermont lieutenant criticized the Chicago convention for doing “more to prolong the war than almost anything else.” Attempts to “patch the matter up with some compromise” on slavery were worse than hopeless; they were “ignoble, base [and] degrading” to the Union war effort. 25 Another Vermonter added that backtracking on slavery was unthinkable because it would displease God. “As well might Jehovah compromise with Satan and give him back part of Heaven” as the Union might advance liberty and please God by compromising on slavery. 26 Finally, the conflict’s horrific nature strengthened many soldiers’ commitment to emancipation, because no lesser outcome could make the trauma of the war worthwhile. As one soldier put it, only the consolation of a righteous cause could justify the “wondrous price of lives, misery, agony & desolation” exacted by the long and punishing war. 27 Lying in a hospital bed, Ohio private John English received a letter from his anxious wife, who wanted to know what good such a horrible war could possibly achieve. English responded that only with the elimination of slavery would “all our bloodshed and destruction…be rewarded by the blessings of liberty, justice and honor.” 28 Like so many other men in the ranks, English needed to transform the terror and loss unleashed by the war. The senseless destruction had to be converted to purposeful sacrifice offered for a goal that was large enough to make the carnage worthwhile. Preservation of the Union, though important, was not enough, unless accompanied by the ending of slavery.
What This Cruel War Was Over Page 20
