What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  The resolution of seemingly intractable issues helped to prop up black troops’ faith that a racially just United States would emerge from the trials of warfare. In addition to winning the equal pay controversy, African Americans were finally granted officers’ commissions in the U.S. Army, much to the delight of members of the black rank and file from Kansas to South Carolina. A gleeful John Scott admitted that news of black officers commanding his artillery battery might sound like “a myth” after so much resistance to the prospect of black officers, but it actually was now a “fact.” The editor of the Anglo-African, to whom Scott addressed his good tidings, added the comment that black officers “foreshdow the good time coming when complexion will form no longer a barrier to promotion.” 92 When Capt. Martin Delany, one of the first African American commissioned infantry officers, visited troops stationed in South Carolina, black soldiers lined the streets to salute and cheer as he passed. 93 In Louisiana, John Cajay welcomed the promotion of Sergeant Hamblin, a fellow enlisted man in the Eleventh U.S. Colored Artillery, to the rank of lieutenant as a “great encouragement” to all who labored for “their rights and liberties, some of which we have partially gained.” Hamblin’s commission reinvigorated Cajay’s hope that “sooner or later, we shall gain them all.” 94

  In sum, African American soldiers at war’s end surveyed advances in racial equality that seemed unimaginable just four years previously, and they saw many reasons to believe that the postwar United States would continue its progress toward the inclusion of black Americans as equal citizens. “When we look at events as they have transpired from year to year, our energies become aroused and our determination strengthened,” reflected Moses Foskey. A black lawyer’s appointment as “attorney and counsellor to the Supreme Court of the United States” and “the doings of the Syracuse Convention of Colored Men” should “encourage the men in camp to look forward with hopefulness to their advancement,” Foskey declared. 95 John Cajay expanded on Foskey’s theme. Fewer than four years ago, “no person or person’s were allowed to speak in the House of Representatives, unless the blood of the Caucasion race coursed through his or their viens.” Ordinary blacks could now “walk through the Chief Executive Hall of the United States, and look any one in the face as a man, and not with that downcast look, which made us think that the predominant race in this country were our superiors.” By fighting in the ranks, and by forcing the United States to live up to its professed ideals, African Americans had helped to ensure that the United States “will truly be a free country to us all,” Cajay concluded. 96

  Black soldiers at the close of the war cherished high hopes even as they remained guarded in their optimism. They knew that racial progress was fragile and prone to backsliding in times of strain, as fluctuating white attitudes after the military disasters of spring and summer 1864 and unabashedly racist Democratic election rhetoric had made clear. But they also knew that a tumultuous war had done more than threaten the Union; it had forced white Americans to examine assumptions that had long been taken for granted and consider ideas once thought inconceivable, especially where blacks who had helped to save the Union were concerned. “The black arm” was everywhere apparent in the current “stupendous struggle,” wrote one African American soldier, and “the contraction of its muscles” was causing “a revolution of opinions.” 97 Another soldier added, “the prejudice against color and race is disappearing before liberty and justice, as the mist flees from before the morning sun. The black man has proved himself a patriot, a hero…and worthy citizen.” 98 Black soldiers at the end of the Civil War had every reason to envision equal citizenship for themselves in a United States that differed radically from the Union that went to war in 1861. In 1865, African Americans believed that they were “rising step by step to the summit of liberty and equal rights,” and, based on the experiences of the last four years, they expected to continue the climb. 99

  “If we are to depend on the slaves for our freedom it is gone anyway”

  For Confederate troops, too, the autumn of 1864 marked a turning point in the war, but to white Southerners, the fall of Atlanta, Lincoln’s reelection, and Sherman’s March looked more like disaster than divine plan. It was hard to overestimate the strategic importance of Atlanta, a critical railroad hub and an interior wedge perfectly positioned to cut the Confederacy in two, as soldiers knew all too well. “The loss of Atlanta has been a terrible blow to us,” a South Carolinian in the Army of Northern Virginia fretted, “and unless our troops fight and our generals do better, Georgia and South Carolina will be lost.” For the first time, he feared his own storied army could not carry the whole Confederacy on its back. “The Army of Northern Virginia cannot do everything,” he grumbled. 100 Atlanta also meant trouble because it was bound to energize the enemy. “The fall of Atlanta will cause great rejoycing in the North,” an Alabamian predicted, “and the Yankees will be so much inspirited by the fall of Atlanta that they will take new interest in the war.” 101 For war-weary Confederates, whose one realistic hope was that Northerners would get tired of the conflict, renewed Union vigor was bad news.

  Atlanta also mattered because as the Confederate flag slipped down the mast of Atlanta’s city hall, it carried with it George McClellan’s chances for victory in the federal elections. A Georgia sergeant told his mother, “the fall of Atlanta was truly a great calamity and has cast a deep gloom upon the people and the army,” more because of “the influence it will have against us in the Northern elections for President than anything else…. The fall of Atlanta will operate against that [Democratic] party and I fear defeat it.” 102 When Lincoln beat McClellan, he dashed the hopes for peace that news of the Chicago convention had inspired among Confederates the previous summer. 103 “You need not build any hopes of peace soon for there will be none,” Grant Taylor morosely announced once he learned that “old Abe Lincoln is elected again.” 104 Upon hearing the election news, Abel Crawford dejectedly resigned himself to “the hardships of another four years war if any of us should survive that long.” 105 Hopes for victory vanished along with hopes of peace in E. L. Cox’s regiment, where “many long faces” greeted news of the election results because the prospect of four more years of Lincoln erased soldiers’ faith “in our ultimat success.” 106

  As Sherman’s army made its way through Georgia, it spread even more “gloom which now hangs over the country,” as one cavalryman put it. 107 Even in the Army of Northern Virginia, where soldiers maintained much higher morale than elsewhere, despondency began to mount as 1864 drew to a close and the biggest war news outside Virginia concerned Sherman’s March. Reports that “Sherman’s [army] is making his way through Georgia as hard as he can” convinced Pvt. Cornelius Oliver that “the Yankees will whip us. I don’t see any other chance and if they are to do it I won’t care how quick.” 108 Men in another regiment became “so disheartened” by the news that “old sherman had his own way as he went through Georgia & laid every thing to distructions” that they began seriously to suspect that “god is not for us.” 109 As 1864 ended, Virginia private Jim Griggs told his cousin, “in my opinion every man killed or wounded after this it will be cold blooded murder. All know that it is useless for the war to be further persisted.” 110

  Sherman’s March hurt the Confederacy because it destroyed supplies and weakened will, but it also damaged the Confederate war effort by aggravating the internal divisions that grew naturally out of Confederate patriotism’s individualistic focus on the best interests of one’s self, home, and family. Hunkering down in Savannah as Sherman’s troops approached that city, Georgia private Felix Prior hoped that Union forces would pass through the rest of Georgia quickly and then go bother South Carolina so that Georgia men like himself “may be permitted to come home and stay.” 111 To Georgia soldiers stationed outside of their home state, the mission of their regiment faded in importance as news of Georgia’s troubles made it into camp. Pvt. Robert Jackson cared little about whether his army’s attempt to hold Petersburg, V
irginia, succeeded, because if it fell, only Virginians (he believed) would suffer. Meanwhile “old Hood is just leting the Vandles envade our own State Georgia,” which bothered him considerably more. Jackson wished he was back home, fighting where it mattered. 112 On the other hand, Georgia’s woes evoked limited sympathy from many soldiers of other states. A Mississippi man awaiting marching orders was “much elated at the idea of getting out of Georgia,” and declared that “Sherman is perfectly welcome to all” of it, especially if it kept Union forces away from Mississippi. “I would not give one acre of our black land” to rescue Georgia, he declared, “but home I want saved.” 113

  As reasons for discouragement piled up, including the Army of Tennessee’s virtual disintegration after defeats at Franklin and Nashville, the loss of the Shenandoah Valley, and the fall of Fort Fisher, North Carolina (entry point for provisions supplying the Army of Northern Virginia), some Confederate troops rejected the predominant mood of defeatism and redoubled demands for Confederate independence. 114 From south of Richmond, John Kinyoun vowed, “We must and will whip them in the end, [we] can not aferd anything else if it takes us ten years and all the men of the South.” 115 Similarly, Ethelbert Fairfax clung to his desire for “the accomplishment of our complete independence.” 116

  But to many, talk of independence rang hollow because so many parts of what independence meant and why it mattered had already disappeared. The early conviction that white Southerners were morally superior to Northerners and needed their independence in order to escape contamination had crumbled. “Our country is ruined,” Pvt. David Ballenger concluded, because “the morals of the people, both male and female, are ruined.” Optimists had predicted that the challenges of war would bring out the best in the Confederate character, but instead, social turmoil and the demands of survival led individuals to behave in ways they never would have countenanced in ordinary times. According to Ballenger, white Southerners had grown “full of vice and crime, unfit to associate with civil people.” 117 Belief that a Confederate government would better adhere to principles of good and limited government under the wise guidance of superior leaders had also vanished. Far from selfless dedication to the common weal, “our leaders” devoted their attention and efforts to their own “fame and notoriety,” grumbled a Florida sergeant. 118 Anyone who had expected more power to reside with the states than with the nation also found himself sorely disappointed, in big ways and small. One outraged Georgia soldier wrote to the newspaper to demand an explanation for an episode involving state sovereignty and socks. The Georgia Relief Association had sent socks to Richmond, Virginia, where authorities decided to distribute the footwear to Confederate troops in need regardless of their state of origin. Infuriated, the Georgia soldier insisted that not a single sock from Georgia was “intended for other than the Georgians.” 119 The idea that an independent Confederacy best served the interests of white individuals no longer held any weight for soldiers like Cornelius Oliver, who condemned a government in the hands of what he called “a parcel of drunken politicians that care not what becomes of we poor Privates.” 120 Most obviously, the belief that an independent Confederacy would do a better job of furthering the interests of white southern families looked tragically ridiculous by the fourth year of the war, when men in the ranks regularly received letters from hungry families, heard accounts of ravaged farmlands and blacks who refused to show deference, and worried about the very survival of their loved ones. As Oliver wrote to his wife in a later letter, “your being in trouble causes me to see trouble.” Mrs. Oliver was pregnant, hungry, unable to procure salt, and tired of selfish neighbors who cared too much about their own interests to help her, which made it hard for her husband, Private Oliver, to see what the point of independence was any longer. 121

  With so much of what they loved crushed, and with so much of what should have made an independent Confederacy worth fighting for in tatters, many Confederate troops almost reached the breaking point between Lincoln’s reelection and February 1865. “The Armey is very much demoralized. I don’t believe that the men will fight much,” predicted Henry Morgan, while Spencer Barnes sighed, “every thing looks quite gloomy at the present & prospects don’t seem to get no brighter.” Barnes even predicted, “the next campaign will bring [the Confederacy] down.” 122 Robert Jackson harbored a similar view, prophesying that the Union Army “will whip us yet,” and Grant Taylor supposed, “this poor little confederacy is about played out.” 123 Despite valiant protestations to the contrary from some members of the Army of Northern Virginia, defeatism threatened to overtake soldiers and civilians alike. As Jesse Hill explained to his wife, “it is of no use to have the men kild up and destroyed for nothing.” 124 Throughout the Confederacy, public meetings also added to the clamor for peace. In Georgia, citizens met to debate Governor Joseph Brown’s suggestion that Georgia take itself out of the Confederacy and negotiate a separate peace with the Union. Even Richmond, the capital city inhabited by both the Confederate government and the famed Army of Northern Virginia, oozed so much defeatism and peace sentiment that one newspaper editor reported that civilians “have not the heart to do anything but meet together and recount their losses and suffering.” 125

  Yet despite the gloom and doom, the war did not end when 1865 began because, grim as things looked, the most important reason to fight still remained. In fact, in February 1865, Confederate morale spiked one last time, in response, ironically, to a failed attempt at peace. On February 3, Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, Virginia senator R. M. T. Hunter, and Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell met with U.S. President Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward aboard the steamer River Queen at Hampton Roads, Virginia. 126 Soldiers like Cpl. William Andrews waited anxiously, hoping that the mission would bring peace. 127 Instead, the conference foundered, sunk by the Union’s peace conditions (restoration of the Union and emancipation) and by the news that the U.S. Congress had passed the Thirteenth Amendment. When word of the conference, the conditions, and the Thirteenth Amendment was published in Virginia on February 6, a huge mass meeting assembled in Richmond, a city that just days before had seethed with peace sentiment, to affirm ongoing resistance to Yankee despotism. Meanwhile, newspapers carried word of the unsuccessful conference to Confederate camps. 128

  Some soldiers regretted the failure. Devastated to learn that “peace is all nocked on the head,” Cornelius Oliver blamed “Old Jeff” for being too stubborn to give peace an honest chance. Oliver’s regiment held a meeting in the wake of the failed conference, and “the vote was put to our company…whether we were for carrying this war on or whether we ware for peace. The whole company was for stopping.” The company then sent two delegates to brigade headquarters to help “draft resolutions to that effect.” When brigade officers learned that “we were for peace,” Oliver continued, they “said the dam privates should not have a sayso in it, so they had it publish[ed] that our brigade (Ransom’s) was for the war which was an infernal lie.” 129 Yet despite the sincerity of his regret, Oliver differed from most Confederate troops in his reaction to Hampton Roads.

  When most Confederate soldiers heard the conditions for peace and especially when they learned that the U.S. Congress had passed the Thirteenth Amendment, other dissatisfactions faded because no matter how much they hated Richmond, and no matter how tired they were of the war, the Union meant emancipation. As long as the Confederacy stood a chance of avoiding abolition, reason remained to keep up the fight. When Hiram Harding heard that the federal “Congress had passed an act on the 21st ult. abolishing & prohibiting slavery throughout the United States,” and that peace would require the South to abide by the act, he was relieved that the Confederate commissioners agreed to “no extended truce or armistice.” 130 Many soldiers were more than relieved; they were reenergized. By 1865, Charles James filled most of his letters to his sister with stern lectures about her dissipated character, but he changed the subject once he read about Hampton Roads and the Th
irteenth Amendment, which showed that peace would only come if soldiers “submit to the laws of the Washington government: in other words have our property confiscated, our slaves emancipated, our leaders hung, and we become serfs in the land of our fathers.” Of the conditions Fenton listed, only adherence to the Union government and emancipation were true, but from those he assumed the rest and determined that the prospect was unthinkable. “The report of our commissioners has gone forth,” he reported and now soldiers were “girding on armor afresh,” invigorated once again by the “spirit of patriotic devotion which at first roused the country to arms.” 131 Robert Bunting agreed that Hampton Roads and the “amendment of the Constitution abolishing slavery” reminded Confederates why they went to war in the first place. “We have been awakened to the solemn reality of the situation,” Bunting wrote. The Union meant “Federal bondage” for white Southerners “and their children,” and that reminder took Confederates “back again to the point we started at four years ago,” steeling the white southern man to refuse “to stretch out his hand for Northern fetters, and bow his dishonored head for the yoke which abolitionism stands ready to place upon him.” 132