What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  The speech turned things around among North Carolina troops. When Pvt. David Thompson’s brother described Vance’s speech after the governor visited his brigade, David could hardly wait for “next Tuesday,” when Vance was scheduled to speak to his regiment. “I wouldent miss his speech for nothing,” Thompson vowed. 130 Some troops remained unmoved by Vance’s dramatic performances (Adelphos Burns, for example, remarked, “Governor Vance told us up at Orange to fight until Hell freezes over That’s rather longer than I care to fight”), but for the most part, the governor’s words about safeguarding the South’s racial order hit their mark. 131 Some Confederate prisoners of war were so exhilarated when they read Vance’s speech that they formed a committee to draft a letter of praise. The governor was exactly right, the prisoners agreed: reunion would be just the excuse the Republican administration desired “to confiscate the property of our people, both real and person, and to apportion it among their soldiers and freedmen (slaves whom they have liberated).” Worse, “they propose to take the arms from the whites and put them in the hands of the negros, they propose to extend the right of suffrage to the blacks; while among the whites it is to be restricted.” In short, “the order of nature would be reversed,” and the South would become “one vast ruin,” groaning under “a tyranny more revolting than the visage of death.” 132 In the field, Vance’s spirited platform steeled the resolve of war-weary men like Isaac LeFevers, who admitted that he was “as tired of the War as enny man, but to support Holden I cant.” Furthermore, he predicted, “Vance will make a clean sweap in the Armey.” 133

  Vance’s bid for reelection benefited in April 1864 from the battle of Plymouth, North Carolina, which gave soldiers the opportunity to act on Vance’s racially incendiary themes. Located where the Roanoke River met Albemarle Sound, Plymouth was one of the few places in the state to experience occupation. Under Union control since 1862, Plymouth housed a community of escaped slaves who had begun to build new lives and institutions for themselves by 1864. Among the Union troops fortifying Plymouth was a company of locally recruited African American soldiers who served in Wilde’s Brigade. 134 On April 17, the town was attacked by North Carolina troops pulled from elsewhere in North Carolina and from Virginia. When the Union General Henry W. Wessells surrendered on the morning of April 20, the Confederate soldiers who captured the town suddenly found themselves presented with the opportunity to lash out at the people whose emancipation they feared and blamed for causing the war. Confederates pillaged Plymouth and unleashed their rage on captured black Union troops like members of the Second U.S. Colored Cavalry. Samuel Johnson, a sergeant in that regiment, survived because he stripped off his Union uniform and passed as a local slave. No “negros found in blue uniform or with any outward marks of a Union soldier” were so lucky, Johnson later testified. Some soldiers were “taken into the woods and hung,” while others were robbed of their uniforms, lined up along a riverbank, and shot. Still others “were killed by having their brains beaten out by the butt end of the muskets in the hands of the Rebels.” White officers and some black soldiers were kept alive for one day, only to be humiliated the next when they were dragged through town with ropes around their necks. Then the “remainder of the black soldiers were killed.” 135

  The violence at Plymouth was ruthless, but not senseless. Savaging Plymouth gave white Confederate soldiers whose whole world seemed to be spinning out of control the chance to vent their fear and resentment of blacks released from bondage. Former black slaves occupying property that once belonged to white Southerners, in a town where armed black Union soldiers now enforced the law, embodied the threats that Vance’s campaign platform insisted the end of slavery would pose. Plymouth not only permitted Confederate troops to strike at the personifications of their racial fears, but it also proved that fighting really could prevent those fears from coming to pass. Newspapers in Virginia and North Carolina promised, “repeat Plymouth a few times and we shall bring the Yankees to their senses.” 136

  With help from the battle of Plymouth (and probably from Union military losses in the spring and summer of 1864), Vance’s strategy of reminding soldiers how much worse things would be in a South deprived of its customary racial order worked. Just months after Holden’s reconstruction platform looked poised for certain victory, Vance handily defeated his opponent with 80 percent of the total vote, including a stunning 87.9 percent of the soldier vote. 137 Even Sgt. Garland Ferguson, initially suspicious of Vance, grew convinced that Holden was “unsound.” Ferguson wanted peace, “but I want that peace to be better than war,” he told his brother, which was why he was for Vance. 138 Ferguson’s companions seemed to agree; on election day seventy-four soldiers in his company voted for Vance, while not one cast a Holden ballot. 139 Vance also swept R. P. Allen’s cavalry company, Henry Chambers’s infantry regiment, and even several wayside hospitals where North Carolina invalids cast votes for the sitting governor. 140 The decisive results in the Forty-first North Carolina led a gleeful Pvt. Henry Patrick to report, “Holden’s stock has gone so far below par that it is impossible to express its present status in figures.” 141 When it came down to it, Holden’s peace meant surrender and emancipation, and North Carolina soldiers were not yet prepared to confront, let alone concede, either prospect.

  Zebulon Vance’s successful campaign highlights the importance of racial fear in keeping enlisted Confederates committed to the war effort by 1864, and helps explain why even in times of hardship, men whose chief interests centered on the well-being and aspirations of themselves and their families would continue to fight a war they knew was waged primarily to prevent the destruction of slavery, despite some political strategists’ concerns that heightened emphasis on the slavery issue would dampen rather than invigorate the enthusiasm of the rank and file. Although Vance ran for a state, rather than Confederate, office, soldiers from outside North Carolina eagerly followed the race. South Carolina private William Templeton, for instance, heard Vance speak at Orange Court House, Virginia, and called the speech the best he ever heard. 142 Running on a platform that admitted the unsatisfactory nature of the Confederacy, Vance reminded voters that a faulty Confederate States of America was still better than reunion, because Union and abolition would destroy the racial order that protected soldiers’ families and defined their identities as white men. The election also provided soldiers with the opportunity to affirm their commitment to a racial hierarchy that helped keep their fears and frustrations under control, and that they believed was vital to life in the South.

  Voting for Governor Vance was confined to North Carolinians in 1864, but violence against black Union troops enabled soldiers throughout the Confederacy to channel their fears, frustrations, and hatred. By 1864, Confederate troops welcomed few mandates from Richmond, but one exception was the Davis administration’s standing decision that black Union troops were not to be treated as white troops if captured. To enlisted Confederates, that decision issued a license to practice the “black flag” or “no quarter” policy of killing black troops rather than taking them prisoner. Pvt. John Everett was a young shoemaker who had lost his father and his shoemaking business in the war, and had been “out of heart” since 1862. He worried constantly about the privations faced by his mother and younger siblings at home, and he resented the way imperious Confederate authorities failed to treat him as “a white man.” 143 In May of 1864, Everett reported that he and his regiment were “in good spirits” and felt eager to fight for the first time in two years when they learned that they were about to face black Union troops, with the “no quarter” policy in effect. 144 Meanwhile, feeling hemmed in and powerless to stop the Yankee advance toward Atlanta, Douglas Cater anticipated the opportunity to kill captured blacks with nothing short of glee, predicting, “those negros will wish they had never left their masters when they face Gilson’s Brigade of Louisianans.” 145

  The most widely renowned examples of violence toward black prisoners took place at Fort Pillow in Tennessee
and outside Petersburg in Virginia. The Fort Pillow massacre of April 12, 1864, occurred when Confederate troops under Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest slaughtered black soldiers and some white southern unionist soldiers at a (by 1864) strategically unimportant Mississippi River garrison. 146 Sgt. Achilles Clark reported that he and other Confederates who were “exasperated” by the sight and defiant attitude of black troops took delight in the killing rampage. “The poor deluded negroes would run up to our men fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down.” The fort became “a great slaughter pen. Blood, human blood stood about in pools and brains could have been gathered up in any quantity.” Once the killing lost its thrall, according to Clark, “thirty or forty” wounded “were thrown in to the trench” where they were buried alive. 147 Even more Confederates wrote of killing blacks captured at the battle of the Crater outside Petersburg, where Pvt. Henry Bird explained with obvious relish that “Southern bayonets dripped with blood” from the bodies of dying black troops. After the failed Union charge, the eerie stillness was soon broken by the order “to kill them all and rapid firing told plainly how well and willingly it was obeyed.” The “terrible vengeance” persisted until “our Genl. sickened of the slaughter and ordered that it be stayed,” Bird concluded. 148

  Some Confederates also directed racist violence toward black civilians. Hungry and footsore from a long march, Henry Chambers and his regiment were in no mood to respond to the “double quick” order that rang out as they approached Suffolk, Virginia, until they learned that a regiment of black Union troops was camped just on the other side of town. “We were nearly exhausted,” Chambers recorded in his diary, “but when told that the hated negroes had been encountered, we received as it were renewed vigor and on we pushed.” When the black Union regiment got away, Chambers and the men of his company turned their wrath on local black civilians. Noticing a house that “had Negroes in it,” the soldiers set fire to the structure “before the negroes could be gotten out,” killing the African Americans trapped inside. 149 The burning served no tactical purpose. Instead, it allowed white Confederate soldiers whose world was in upheaval to vent their hatred of blacks and act on their fury over upsets to the South’s racial order caused by the war.

  THE WAR in 1864 provided soldiers everywhere with glimpses of a new United States, which a Union victory could make possible. White Union troops envisioned a world of increasing racial equality and black rights, but many pulled back from that possibility as the war stubbornly refused to end or even ease, as most had expected would happen after the summer of 1863. Black Union troops foresaw that same world and continued to push toward it despite disappointments and growing dissent in their own ranks. Confederates saw the same possibilities and resisted ever more violently, for one thing that everyone knew with certainty was that those possibilities would not come to pass without a Union victory. As late as the summer of 1864, such a victory still seemed anything but assured.

  Federal soldiers in front of City Hall as the Union Army takes Richmond, April 1865. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

  As the end neared, these Confederate soldiers were taken prisoner at Five Forks, Virginia, April 1865. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

  Black Union soldiers from Arkansas mustering out. Harper’s Weekly, 1866. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Slavery’s Chain Done Broke at Last”:

  The Coming of the End*6

  MORNING mail call on February 1, 1865, brought Ohio sergeant John Keirns a letter from a friend in another regiment. When Keirns tore into the envelope, he pulled out the lyrics to “Take Your Gun and Go, John.” Written from the perspective of a soldier’s wife, the song urged the soldier to fight for his country without stopping to “think of me or the children” because “Ruth can drive the oxen, John, and I can use the hoe.” Meant to soothe, the words actually reminded Keirns that nothing—not family life, society, or basic values—remained untouched by war. The verses hit so close to home that even though he had just sent a long letter to his wife, Sarah, and their six children, Keirns sat right down to write another. “The piece is very nice and true in all its parts,” he confided, “yet I do think of you and the Children very often, Yes I may say every day.” He did not doubt that Sarah could care for the children, and he knew that she could run the farm with the help of Edwin, their oldest boy, but he missed his family terribly. It was hard to bear a war that tore him away from home and turned everything so upside down that women did the work of men and children grew up without fathers. Yet just months earlier, in spite of the relentless pressure of daily fighting around Atlanta, Keirns had chosen to reenlist because he knew that no matter how hard it seemed, the war had to be fought to the right conclusion, or else neither his suffering nor anyone else’s would have been worthwhile. He reminded Sarah of what the right conclusion must be when he asked her to “Pray for Freedom.” 1

  After nearly four years of warfare, soldiers everywhere suffered, worried about their families, and wanted to go home. The murderous fury of the conflict had turned romance and delusion into dust, compelling Union troops to revisit what the “freedom” that John told Sarah to pray for should mean and whom it should include. Unforgiving warfare had convulsed the South even more completely, forcing Confederate soldiers to give up first one principle and then another, until by 1865 the Confederacy found itself drained of all but the most stubbornly retained of its tenets and resources. Finally, in the spring of 1865, the only remaining reason for Confederate troops to fight would crack, but nobody in 1864 knew when or how or even if that moment would come.

  “By war, God is regenerating this Nation”

  After a discouraging spring and summer, military matters (and therefore troop morale) started to improve for the Union at harvest time in 1864. Mobile Bay fell to Union forces in August. In Virginia, the Union general Philip Sheridan reversed the Confederacy’s victorious battle record in the Shenandoah Valley, a region that had been critical in feeding the Confederate Army and sustaining its morale. On September 19, Federals routed Confederates at Winchester, and for the next three days chased them sixty miles south, delivering the valley into Union hands once and for all.

  But the biggest news came from Georgia. On the first of September, after failing to defeat Union troops south of Atlanta at Jonesboro, Confederate forces under Gen. John Hood destroyed everything of military value in the city and vacated Atlanta. On September 2, accompanied by the triumphal strains of army bands, Union troops under the command of Gen. William T. Sherman marched into Atlanta and raised the United States flag over city hall. 2 From the outskirts of the captured city, Ohio captain Thomas Honnoll revealed the significance that Union troops awarded the fall of Atlanta when he reflected, the “rebellion is well nigh crushed now. The Confederacy is tottering. We have pierced its heart…. their people and Army are losing confidence in their cause and Leaders.” 3 To a black chaplain, “the news of Farragut’s glorious triumphs at Mobile and Sherman at Atlanta” inspired “hopefulness of finally achieving the end for which we are battling.” 4

  The capture of Atlanta showed that the war could be won by fighting, but it did not complete the moral or military work of the war, and the men of the rank and file knew it. However much they welcomed it, many Union troops responded to the fall of Atlanta with surprising somberness. Even with Atlanta in Union hands, soldiers remained surrounded by the grimness of war and detritus of slavery, in which few could fully escape feelings of complicity. Watching Atlanta burn led to mixed feelings for Sgt. Horatio Barrington. He regretted the destruction and believed it reflected badly on both North and South, yet he saw it as morally inescapable. Atlanta “sowed the wind” every time a slave merchant “traded in the souls of men, bought and sold and whipped women and hammered off children on the auction block”; now both it and the nation that had allowed the slave trade “reaped the whirlwind” of immoral behavior. 5 Soldiers lik
e Barrington also realized that Atlanta served as a milepost on the Union road to victory, but it did not mean that the Army had arrived at its destination yet. If Gettysburg and Vicksburg had shown that God moved in mysterious (and not always speedy) ways, Atlanta reminded Union troops that God helped those who helped themselves. Plenty remained to be done before the war could end.

  For one thing, according to many Union troops, Abraham Lincoln needed to win the fall election. 6 Running on a platform that supported vigorous prosecution of the war and a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, Lincoln enjoyed overwhelming support from the men in the ranks. Many troops worried that a Democratic victory would betray the war effort because McClellan would endorse peace negotiations that fell short of the goals for which their comrades had fallen. Anxious though they were to go home, most men in the ranks opposed negotiation because “the blood of our fallen comrades would cry out against us if we did not fight on until we established those principles for which they fought and died.” 7 When Democrats tried to counter soldiers’ perception that the party undervalued troops’ contributions with a platform plank promising care and kindness to the rank and file, enlisted men rejected the effort as a transparent and insipid ploy for votes. Democrats “might as well try to catch fish with a naked hook—just as if all our soldiers wanted was care, protection, regard, and kindness,” one wrote with contempt, mocking the Chicago platform’s own words to explain why soldiers would be sticking with Abraham Lincoln. 8 A Lincoln victory, on the other hand, would be “Equivalent to a good army in putting down the Rebellion,” Nelson Glazier told his parents as he recuperated from a recent amputation. 9 Among other benefits, Lincoln’s reelection would demoralize Confederates, whose morale currently remained buoyed by hope of a McClellan victory and compromise. “McClellan for President…would be the worst thing that was ever done for the country,” Pvt. Oscar Cram admonished his wife, because “the Rebels say that is what they are depending on most.” Instead, “if Lincoln is re-elected the war closes this fall, and most of the soldiers think so too.” 10 George Hannaford agreed: “if [Lincoln] is elected,” Hannaford told his wife, “it will do more to discourage the rebels than to lose a dozen battles.” 11