Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  Missouri and Kentucky offered problems, too. In Missouri, Price and McCulloch were on most evil terms, Price anxious to fight, McCulloch anxious to retreat; it seemed to Mr. Davis that he ought to send an outsider in to take top command, but if that happened Price’s whole army would probably disband, in which case the theory that Missouri had recently entered the Confederacy would remain a thin theory and nothing more. Kentucky’s situation was baffling. The legislature was firmly Unionist, and Governor Magoffin, who earlier had sounded like a secessionist, apparently was under the legislature’s influence now, or under the influence of the Union generals; in either case he was hardly a man the Confederacy could count on. Secessionist Kentuckians wanted to wrench at least a part of Kentucky loose from its old moorings and bring it into the Confederacy—an attractive idea, but most irregular, since it was the precise counterpart of the illegal game the Yankees were playing in western Virginia. Something of the sort probably would have to be done, however, because the Kentuckians “are in a state of revolution.”

  Finally, there was the problem of money. Secretary of the Treasury was earnest Christopher Memminger, a careful lawyer who had served in the South Carolina legislature and whose fiscal horizon until recently had been bounded by routine Charleston philanthropies and the peacetime budget of a small and thrifty state; responsible now for balancing apparently limitless expenditures, like an inverted pyramid, on narrowly restricted means. He said that the Confederate treasury could carry on through April, but he did not know what would happen after that; somehow, the cost of fighting the war must be reduced. Both Mr. Davis and Secretary of War Judah Benjamin immediately assured him that this was out of the question.… Gold was being hoarded, there was a flood of paper money, and Mr. Bragg gloomily wrote: “By and by the crash will come, do what we may. It is to be hoped the war will end first—we could then recover after no great while.”4

  … The money question was unnerving, and yet it was a source of grim comfort, in a certain sense, because it did at least seem to impose a limit on a business which was getting more and more out of hand. On both sides there were sober men of affairs who believed that the war must end before long simply because it was moving beyond its financial base. Not long after Mr. Bragg saw the inevitability of trouble, Charles Francis Adams, surveying the aftermath of the Mason-Slidell trouble, wrote to his son about “the crushing nature of our expenditure, which must stop this war if something effective does not follow soon.”5 It was still possible, at the end of 1861, to believe that if all else failed war might flicker out because it had grown too expensive.…

  The trouble was not so much the money problem, nor even the manpower problem, as it was the extent of the power which Mr. Davis’s government had or could assert. Men could be made to enter the Army, or to stay in once they had entered; spending could be made to go far beyond the point where business prudence would set a limit; worthless pieces of paper could be made to serve (for a time, at least, and at a certain cost) as valid tools of exchange—if the government which controlled such matters insisted that these things be done. One man who was thinking along these lines was Robert E. Lee, who not long after the White House meeting wrote to Governor Letcher of Virginia to express concern about the problem of re-enlistment of the twelve-month men in the spring.

  “I tremble to think of the different conditions our armies will present to those of the enemy at the opening of the next campaign,” said General Lee. “On the plains of Manassas, for instance, the enemy will resume operations, after a year’s preparation and a winter of repose, fresh, vigorous, and completely organized, while we shall be in the confusion and excitement of reorganizing ours. The disbanding and reorganizing an army in time of peace is attended with loss and expense. What must it be in time of active service, in the presence of an enemy prepared to strike? I have thought that General McClellan is waiting to take the advantage which that opportunity will give him. What then is to stand between him and Richmond?”

  Like the impatient Republican radicals in Washington, Lee felt that the Army of the Potomac was being held in its camps beyond its time; unlike the radicals, he thought that the army’s commander must have some sensible reason for his inaction.… Returning to the Confederacy’s difficulty, Lee remarked that he knew of no way to hold the short-term regiments in service “except by the passage of a law for drafting them ‘for the war’ unless they volunteer for that period.” Then he went on to state the feeling of the dedicated soldier and patriot, to put into simple words the incredible paradox which made revolutionists out of profound conservatives:

  “The great object of the Confederate states is to bring the war to a successful issue. Every consideration should yield to that; for without it we can hope to enjoy nothing that we possess, and nothing that we do possess will be worth anything without it.”6

  In these words General Lee demanded and defined all-out war. Victory was all that mattered, and no price for it could be too high. No matter what changes war brought they would be accepted: in all-out war they have to be accepted; fixing their gaze upon victory itself, men become unable to see more than a millimeter beyond it, thereby putting themselves at the mercy of the implacable future. Three years from this fall the Confederate officer who ran the Bureau of Conscription—an agency which would come into being because of the truth voiced by General Lee—tried to describe the kind of war the Confederacy had been fighting. It had become, he said, one of those wars “in which the whole population and the whole production of a country (the soldiers and the subsistence of armies) are to be put on a war footing, where every institution is to be made auxiliary to war, where every citizen and every industry is to have for the time but one attribute—that of contributing to the public defense.”7

  The pressure was felt by both Presidents, by the man in Washington as well as by the man in Richmond. Two thirds of a year had passed since they had said the words which set the guns firing around Fort Sumter; so far, neither man had finished the task of preparing to fight the war which had then begun; yet each man was beginning to see that this war might presently become something that had not been bargained for in the springtime. Mr. Davis was being compelled to think about what the war was going to do; Mr. Lincoln, in equal perplexity, was being compelled to think of what the war was going to mean. Each man was beginning to see things that had not been visible in April.

  On December 3, Mr. Lincoln was obliged to send his regular message to the Congress. He began almost as if there were no war at all, pointing out that the land had been blessed with good health and abundant harvests; he discussed certain vacancies on the Supreme Court, suggested changes in the Federal judicial system, proposed that the nation’s industrial interests be represented at an exhibition which was to be held in London, and told how territorial organization was progressing in Colorado, Dakota, and Nevada. Then, at last, he got down to it.

  “The war continues,” said Mr. Lincoln. “In considering the policy to be adopted for suppressing the insurrection, I have been anxious and most careful that the inevitable conflict for this purpose shall not degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle. I have therefore, in every case, thought it proper to keep the integrity of the Union prominent as the primary object of the contest on our part, leaving all questions which are not of vital military importance to the more deliberate action of the legislature.” Everything that needed to be done to save the Union would of course be done, but “radical and extreme measures” would be avoided, if possible. For the time being the President would stand on the policy previously announced: the war was being fought for reunion and would not be waged so as to interfere with any domestic institution.

  Yet the business was infernally complicated, with ominous overtones. In Richmond it was beginning to be seen that a Confederacy militantly dedicated to states’ rights might have to ignore its basic doctrine and embrace the very centralism it was fighting to avoid, if it wished to live; and in Washington the domestic institution which
was not to be touched was being touched every time the war itself was touched. The war which was not being fought to end slavery was somehow about slavery; or, at the very least, slavery lay underneath everything, ready to be turned up whenever the plowshare cut through the thin sheltering crust. This meant that the remorseless revolutionary struggle which Mr. Lincoln was so anxious to avoid lay likewise just beneath the surface. How could it be avoided?

  So far, the President had done his best. General Frémont had proclaimed freedom for the slaves in Missouri and had been quickly overruled; was, by this time, altogether on the sidelines, a general without a command, removed by Presidential order just after Scott himself had resigned, replaced (after a brief interval) by the General Halleck whom Scott had groomed as his own replacement. Not long after that, Secretary of War Cameron inserted in his annual report a flat statement that the government had the right to turn slaves into soldiers and would exercise that right whenever it needed to do so; Lincoln made him recall the report and remove the offending statement, substituting for it a platitudinous paragraph about the government’s obligation to protect slaves who had been abandoned by their masters, as in the area around Beaufort, South Carolina.8 The radical and extreme measures which were forever being proposed had not yet been adopted.

  Yet these were expedients. Like President Davis, President Lincoln had to realize that what had been done so far was makeshift. The hard reality was that if the Federal government waged war to destroy a government based on slavery it could not, by any imaginable maneuver, keep the war from revolving about the fundamental concept of human freedom. This concept is dangerous; it takes fire, like phosphorus, whenever it is exposed to the air, and the war was exposing it to the winds of heaven. No disclaimer could hide the fact that a class which lived by the slavery of one group of people, on the acquiescence of another group which enjoyed personal freedom, had taken up arms to maintain its privileges. Here was the inescapable dilemma, and President Lincoln had to look at it.

  He brooded on the fact, as he continued with his message to Congress.

  This “insurrection,” he said, was fundamentally a war on “the first principle of popular government—the rights of the people.” (As the ineffable Ben Butler had pointed out, slaves somehow were people, and if they were people they had rights, from which it followed that the rights of those who were more widely recognized as people were also involved.) Somewhere, said Mr. Lincoln, far down in the struggle, there might be at stake the whole idea of a classless society in which the ordinary man was truly independent, free to rise as far as his talents and industry would take him. This ordinary man owned his own labor and he relied on it, and labor (said Mr. Lincoln, following this elusive idea) was superior to capital; it came first, and its rights deserved “much the higher consideration.” A few men, owning much capital, either hired or bought men to labor for them, but they were in a minority. Most men—most men even in the slave states—neither worked for others nor had others working for them. They worked for themselves, on farms or in little shops, “taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand or of hired laborers or slaves on the other.” Their position was not fixed. The world was open to them, and this independence was, just possibly, what finally was at stake in this war. So Mr. Lincoln had a word of warning for the free white Americans who thought that their blessings were from everlasting to everlasting: “Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which, if surrendered, will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they, and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them, till all of liberty shall be lost.”

  It could not be seen very clearly, and the words which could express the things so dimly seen had to be groped for: but here in fact was the remorseless revolutionary struggle, stated as clearly as might be by a man who felt the immense values that were involved. And Mr. Lincoln closed by saying: “The struggle of today, is not altogether for today—it is for a vast future also.”9

  Yet the future was hidden in a blinding mist. Both Richmond and Washington were reaching out for the future with uncertain hands, unable to see what they groped for, unable to know that the very act of reaching was going to create unending change. In his sketch of an ideal America where most people neither owned nor were owned, Mr. Lincoln was describing the country he knew, the magically lighted, subtly fading land of small farms and village industries, simple, uncomplicated, transitory, the breeding ground for the homeliest and loveliest of virtues. Far ahead, beyond the vision of any living man, lay Pittsburgh and Detroit, Gary and Los Angeles, the industrialized American empire with all of its greatness and infinite complications, a society in which no man could ever again be an island, something which Mr. Lincoln could neither foresee nor prevent: something endurable only if the loss of the kind of independence the President was talking about could be accompanied by the everlasting acquisition of a moral and political freedom broad enough to preserve somehow the concept of a society in which the unattached individual was the man who really mattered.

  Mr. Lincoln could no more see how this would come out of the war than Mr. Davis could see that before the war ended he himself would be calling on his government to embrace the very thing his government had gone to war to prevent—emancipation. Each President was trying to project the present into the future, and each man was compelled to do things which would send the present back into the abandoned past. Perhaps each man was haunted by a dim awareness that this might be so.

  For each President had to listen to a categorical imperative: “Get on with the war.” This could not be escaped. This made each man a prisoner. The time of preparation was over, and now the war itself, with its imperious demands on all Americans, was about to take charge.

  The Attorney General of the United States, the same Edward Bates who had contested with Mr. Lincoln for the Republican presidential nomination early in the summer of 1860, closed this year’s entries in his diary on December 31 by lamenting the slowness of Federal military movements. Enormous efforts, Mr. Bates believed, were being made, and great battles undoubtedly were about to take place, yet there seemed to be no central direction; Mr. Bates recalled that he had recently warned Mr. Lincoln that it was time for the President to take effective control.

  “I insisted,” wrote Mr. Bates, “that being ‘Commander in Chief’ by law, he must command—especially in such a war as this.… If I were President, I would command in chief—not in detail, certainly—and I would know what army I had, and what the high generals (my Lieutenants) were doing with that army.”10

  At about the same time Judge David Davis, out in Illinois, got a letter from a friend in Washington who had been digesting the President’s message and who felt that it was not nearly belligerent enough. Things around the capital, said this man, looked and felt much as they had just before Bull Run, with the same desperate eagerness for action raising war’s demands to an unendurable pitch: “There is springing up again both in Congress & the country a good deal of restlessness & impatience, at the apparent inactivity of the immense army we have in the field. And you need not be at all surprised if there should be in a very short time another tremendous ‘On to Richmond’ cry.”11

  Always there was the Army, growing larger, covering the fields and roads all about Washington, moving toward no one knew quite what, looking for a definition of what it would soon be doing. People who saw its moving columns on the march were stirred by feelings that clamored to be put into words, and a woman who had seen these parading battalions sat by her hotel window early one morning and got some of the words down on paper. She wrote about a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel, of the trampling out of the winepress of the Almighty, of the terrible swift sword which was flashing a fateful lightning, and it seemed to her that God was on the march … marching on through the cloud that hung over Presidents, soldiers, and all the people everywhere.

  6: The Want of Success

  As t
he old year ended Mr. Greeley’s Tribune remarked that Washington was dirty, sickly, and possibly done for. Streets and alleys were “reeking,” deep with mud and other matters. The army was very slow about removing the dead horses and mules which littered the encircling camps, typhoid fever was common not merely with the military but in the homes of the wealthy—even General McClellan had come down with the disease, bringing strategy to a standstill—and it struck the editor that if Congress did not quickly get things cleaned up “then typhus, and not Beauregard, will ere long force the Government and the inhabitants generally to abandon the doomed city.”1

  Mr. Greeley, to be sure, was the most mercurial editor in the history of American journalism, alternating between soaring enthusiasm and the most abysmal panic, and the year seemed to be opening brightly enough. New Year’s Day, in 1862 as always, saw a big reception at the White House. Cabinet members and Justices of the Supreme Court attended, and Secretary Seward’s daughter Fanny saw Mrs. Lincoln as “a compact little woman with a full round face,” noted that she wore “a black silk, or brocade, with purple clusters on it,” and discovered happily that the first lady was most cordial. The foreign diplomats were present, all a-glitter in bright uniforms, and they were followed by a great many Army and Navy officers, also in full regalia. When these eminent folk left the police opened the gates to the general public and an immense throng came in. Senator Orville Browning discovered when the crush subsided that his pocket had been picked and that he was out between $50 and $100 in gold, and Attorney General Bates wrote that the people were “overwhelming the poor fatigued President.”2