Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  With McPherson’s death, General O. O. Howard assumed command of the Army of the Tennessee. When later accused of favoring West Point graduates, Sherman responded, “I was not intentionally partial to any class. I wanted to succeed in taking Atlanta, and needed commanders who were purely and technically soldiers, men who would obey orders and execute them promptly and on time.” Then, in a swipe at the critical officers, Sherman argued, “I regarded both Generals [John] Logan and [Francis] Blair [political generals] as ‘volunteers,’ that looked to personal fame and glory as auxiliary and secondary to their political ambition, and not as professional soldiers.” But that still left Hooker to contend with. Upon learning that he had been passed over for Howard, Hooker indignantly applied to be relieved of his command, which General Thomas “heartily recommended.” Sherman agreed as well and replaced Hooker with General Henry Slocum, feeling a distinct “sense of relief” that Hooker was gone.18

  With Howard in command of the Army of the Tennessee, Sherman’s relentless war machine was ready to march on Atlanta. Unwilling to waste time on a siege, Sherman began shelling the city into submission with two thirty-pound Parrotts able to hit any target at will. Yankee artillerists would, Sherman assured General Henry Halleck, quickly turn Atlanta into a “used up community.” By this time Halleck too had abandoned not only the West Point Code but, worse, even Lieber’s Code, which stipulated that “[c]ommanders, whenever admissible, inform the enemy of their intention to bombard a place, so that the non-combatants, and especially the women and children, may be removed before the bombardment commences.” But of course all laws were negotiable and subject to “military necessity.” The shelling continued for three weeks, as often as not over the heads of Hood’s soldiers into the town’s houses and stores. Terrified citizens hid in dugout caves or “bomb proofs” in their backyards, sometimes receiving direct artillery fire.19

  At the gates of Atlanta, facing a running army, John Emerson Anderson exulted in the terror his forces struck:A shell was thrown into the city from these guns once in five minutes day and night.... We sometimes watched the shells as they sped on their way, and when we saw the splinters flying from the roof, or the gable end of a building on Whitehall St. or a fire kindled by their explosion in a store or warehouse in the center of the city, we knew the owners thereof would become anxious to have the war cease just in proportion to the blows dealt them.20

  Forced to choose between flight or fight, Hood withdrew his forces from the garrisoned city, allowing Sherman to occupy it unopposed on September 2. In reporting to an ecstatic President Lincoln, Sherman announced, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” Summarizing Sherman’s achievement, his commander and friend General Grant observed: “The campaign had lasted about four months, and was one of the most memorable in history.” Beyond military annals, Grant realized another consequence of Sherman’s victory. It “probably had more effect in settling the election of the following November than all the speeches, all the bonfires, and all the parading with banners and bands of music in the North.”21

  For the citizens of Atlanta the bonfires were quite different. In his photographic history of Atlanta’s destruction, the photographer George Barnard documented the utter desolation left behind. What Sherman’s shells did not destroy his troops did as they filed into the city (and later out of the city), blowing up houses, public buildings, and rail lines. On Atlanta’s main thoroughfare, Whitehall Street, only one building was left standing. Throughout the city up to five thousand buildings were destroyed with only four hundred houses left intact. These damages could one day be repaired; the civilian casualties could not. No exact figures survive, but in a letter to General Hood, Sherman estimated that five hundred “rebel” civilians were killed and twenty-five hundred wounded. Given the source, one can assume these figures are significantly understated.22

  Boxcars loaded with civilian “refugees,” 1864. As part of his campaign to “break the will” of the South, General Sherman expelled Atlanta’s citizens from the city.

  Atlanta represented Sherman’s first great conquest, and he was not done. With the city captured, there ensued one of the most morally fraught decisions of the war. Unwilling to either feed civilians or protect himself from them, Sherman determined to turn Atlanta into a military base. He ordered all the citizens to leave the city and go either north with his support or south on their own. All the still-standing houses of Atlanta would be used for military storage and occupation.

  In a letter to General Halleck announcing his purpose, Sherman concluded: “If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity-seeking. If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war.” By considering Southern civilians as, in effect, belligerents, Sherman could proceed “with the absolute certainty of its justice.” Furthermore, he asserted, “I knew that the people of the South would read in this measure two important conclusions: one, that we were in earnest; and the other, if they were sincere in their command and popular clamor ‘to die in the last ditch,’ that the opportunity would soon come.”

  In the ensuing days, more than 700 adults and 860 children were “sent south” with as many of their belongings as Hood could accommodate. The sight was pathetic, the event dangerous. In most cases, these were Atlanta’s young, females, and elderly, and many had no place to go.

  Sherman’s order would spark controversy for a century and longer. While actions against civilian “irregulars” or bushwhackers could be justified by the laws of war, no immediate attacks on Federal forces in Atlanta had occurred to justify forced expulsion of an entire population who surrendered to the invader. In a plea for mercy, Atlanta’s mayor begged Sherman to reconsider because “it will involve in the aggregate consequences appalling and heart-rending ... we know of no such instance ever having occurred—surely never in the United States—and what has this helpless people done, that they should be driven from their homes, to wander strangers and outcasts, and exiles, and to subsist on charity?”23

  Sherman was unmoved and lectured the town fathers on the nature of war: “You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable, and the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home is to stop the war.”

  Hood was outraged. In the letter war that followed between the generals—reprinted in both Southern and Northern presses—each spoke on behalf of his nation and lectured the other on the morality of the war’s conduct. For his part, Hood saw in Sherman’s expulsion of every citizen regardless of age, gender, or health an unspeakable outrage on a civilian population. Sherman’s sole purpose was national self-interest at the expense of any moral standard: “You announced the edict for the sole reason that it was ‘to the interest of the United States.’ This alone you offered to us and the civilized world as an all-sufficient reason for disregarding the laws of God and man.”24

  For Hood, Sherman’s decision to expel civilians and destroy property was made by a general who deliberately sought to terrorize innocents: “And now, sir, permit me to say that the unprecedented measure you propose transcends, in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever before brought to my attention in the dark history of war. In the name of God and humanity, I protest, believing that you will find that you are expelling from their homes and firesides the wives and children of a brave people.”

  Outraged himself by Hood’s “impertinence,” Sherman made his case in equally strong moral terms. By positioning his interior lines near Atlanta’s civilians during the bombardments of the city, Hood was, in effect, using his own civilians as human shields: “You defended Atlanta on a line so close to town that every cannon-shot and many musket-shots from our line of investment, that overshot their mark, went into the habitations of women and children.” As for invoking God:I ask you not to appeal to a just God in such a sacrilegious manner. You who, in the midst of peace and prosperity, have plunged a nation into war ...
expelled Union families by the thousands, burned their houses, and declared, by an act of your congress, the confiscation of all debts due Northern men for goods had and received! Talk thus to the marines, but not to me.... If we must be enemies, let us be men, and fight it out as we propose to do, and not deal in such hypocritical appeals to God and humanity. God will judge us in due time, and he will pronounce whether it be more humane to fight with a town full of women and the families of a brave people at our back, or to remove them in time to places of safety among their own friends and people.

  For Sherman, God had long ceased to be the governor of this war. The cause was just and indeed holy, but the conduct profane and disconnected to God and the Suffering Savior. Sherman’s religion was America, and America’s God was a jealous God of law and order, such that all those who resisted were reprobates who deserved death. To make this war work, Sherman argued in a follow-up letter to Assistant Secretary of State Charles Dana, “We must and will harden our hearts. Therefore when preachers clamor, and sanitaries wail, don’t join in, but know that war, like the thunderbolt, follows its laws, and turns not aside even if the beautiful, the virtuous and charitable stand in its path.”25 Thus absolved of all responsibilities or accountability, Sherman could blame the enemy for anything and everything that happened to them. They deserved it.

  While Southerners were horrified to read Sherman’s callous words, Northerners thrilled to the rhetoric and cried for more. It has often been said by scholars and writers who wish to absolve Sherman of moral culpability that he talked tougher than he behaved. But that is irresponsibly evasive. Sherman did have a cadet’s sense of honor and integrity, and his word was his bond. Take Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg at face value, then take Sherman’s words at Atlanta—and Sweetwater, and Roswell Mill, and numerous stops to come.

  In response to Sherman’s claim that citizens were used as human shields, Hood pointed out what everyone who knew Union armies understood:There are a hundred thousand witnesses that you fired into the habitations of women and children for weeks, firing far above and miles beyond my line of defense. I have too good an opinion, founded both upon observation and experience, of the skill of your artillerists, to credit the insinuation that they for several weeks unintentionally fired too high for my modest field-works, and slaughtered women and children by accident and want of skill.26

  Whether shields or innocent targets, it did not matter to Sherman. There were no innocents anymore, and everyone got what they deserved.

  Both generals had legitimate moral complaints to make, but they came far too late and too little to matter. Halleck, Grant, and Lincoln all signed off on Sherman’s proposal and heaped praise on him. Civilians were not innocents in this citizens’ war and their nerves had to be shattered if their will was to be broken. But this did not include deliberate “slaughter” of women and children, as Hood accused. Even Sherman had his strict limitations. By adhering to the letter of the law and avoiding, for the most part, violent crimes of rape and murder, Sherman could defend his actions as just.

  In fact, both generals were disingenuous, preferring a massive destructive war, no matter what the consequences. And both generals were right. By holing up in the city and exposing civilians to the risk of artillery assaults, Hood was, in effect, using them as human shields. And in pursuing his “hard” war, Sherman was right that there were no “innocents” in this citizens’ war. Even old people and children must feel its hard edge.

  In Washington Lincoln was far less concerned with Sherman’s conduct of the war (which he approved) than with the implications of the Atlanta victory for the coming national election. Before Atlanta, Lincoln had been certain he would lose. He drew up contingency plans for a massive escalation in the time he had left before the inauguration of his rival. But, like Grant, he now imagined that victory would be his, as did ordinary citizens. In a letter from John M. Howe to his brother, Howe wrote: “Our glorious old ship Constitution and Union must and will be preserved by electing Abe for the presidency.... I well know and so do you that there is a party composed of bloodlessness and ignorance with a few traitors at the head that are bound to break up the Union. But the God on high has flanked them in giving the union army the victory at Atlanta.”27

  Confederate critics of Northern fasts and religiosity had a point when they accused Northerners of trusting in guns more than God. As citizens of Virginia and Georgia reeled from the massive destruction unleashed by Grant and Sherman and sought the face of God, Northerners thought ahead to summer vacations in August. On the day of the Northern fast, the American Presbyterian issued an editorial, complaining, “It is to be regretted that the very general scattering of church-going people, with their pastors, in pursuit of health and recreation, will interfere with the public celebration of this day.”28 In Branford, Connecticut, the Episcopal rector Frederick Lewin complained that as the South starved, the “sins of the north” multiplied in extravagance and materialism. People were getting wealthy! Women were dressing up! Reform must begin with the individual: “The Sabbath-breaker and the profane swearer, the drunkard and the profligate, the skeptic and the infidel, and all who forget God and break his laws ... are real enemies to this country—strong obstacles in the way of lasting peace and prosperity.”29

  On the same fast day that the American Presbyterian decried the lack of public following for a fast in summer vacation months, it again gnawed at the bone of God in the Constitution. In contrast to the inclusivity of America’s civil religion, premised on the separation of church and state, these clergy wanted something explicitly Christian. In an editorial titled, “Shall we be a Christian nation,” the editors argued for a constitutional amendment whose preamble would explicitly mention God, Jesus Christ, and the scriptures as “supreme authority.” This they posed in opposition to “this senseless clamor about church and State. It is an old stager—a fogy of the fogiest kind.”30

  Although unwilling to proclaim America a Christian nation on the grounds of the separation of church and state, and aware of the Confederacy’s boasted Christianity, Lincoln agreed to a compromise that would strengthen the links between Christianity and America’s civil religion, while keeping each distinct. Without seeking to amend the Constitution to create a Christian republic, he would create a national motto invoking trust in God and have it struck on the nation’s coinage. On April 22, the first coins were struck with the new Federal motto, “In God We Trust,” a calculated response to clerical and evangelical demands for a Christian Constitution. Given the materialism condemned in Northern pulpits, Lincoln could not possibly have picked a more ironic symbol to represent Christianity than the nation’s cash.

  Where Lincoln thought he was Christianizing the Republic, one fast-day preacher argued the reverse. Though he lacked the contemporary terminology of “civil religion,” Worcester’s James Cruickshanks did perceive that the war was elevating America as its own religion. In words that captured the transformations wrought by the war, he asked: “If indeed God be a God of peace, and he is Almighty, we ask, why is war, with its untold evils, permitted to brood over this fair land?” The answer—instead of trusting in God, the people placed their faith in armies, scanning newspapers daily, looking at little else but the movement of armies: “In a word, the army is the people’s God. They idolize it—they worship it.” Besides armies, they worshipped “some military leaders.” Too much “hero-worship” of generals prevailed: The American people are given in a peculiar manner to the indulgence of this spirit. The General—whoever he may be—who is on the crest of popularity is, for the time being, the demigod of the nation. If his reputation has been established as a military leader, he becomes the idol of the nation. The people accord to him every attribute except that of deity, and even this—blasphemous as it appears—seems not to be withheld when the people are glutted with the successes of their deified hero.

  Faced with such powerful nation worship, Cruickshanks could draw only one conclusion: “We are then as a people a nat
ion of idolaters. We are at once, the most religious, and the most idolatrous people on the globe.”31 Significantly, Cruickshanks did not move from condemnations of nation worship to moral questions about the war itself.

  CHAPTER 38

  “RED OCTOBER”: “THE WORK OF DESTRUCTION”

  On May 15, 1864, at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, the Reverend F. W. Conrad of the English Lutheran Church delivered a Thanksgiving sermon blasting the Confederate army for unjust conduct: “They have shot down our pickets, fired into our hospitals, bayoneted our wounded, and dispatched our soldiers without quarter.... They have seized noncombatants and imprisoned them ... they have neglected our wounded, amputated their limbs unnecessarily, and maltreated our sick.” The conclusion was obvious: “The pages of history are examined in vain, to find examples of meanness and infamy, of cruelty and barbarity, comparable with those inflicted by the rebels.”1 Little could Conrad have realized how prescient he was. Even as he preached, Jubal Early contemplated a direct retaliatory attack on innocent civilians—Chambersburg’s civilians.

  On July 30 Confederate forces under General John McCausland approached the defenseless town of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. In retaliation for General David Hunter’s tactics in the Shenandoah Valley, McCausland (under Early’s orders) imposed an impossible demand on the citizens of Chambersburg: come up with a cash payout of $500,000 specie in compensation for Hunter’s destruction of VMI and the governor’s mansion, or see their town burned to the ground. Unable to raise the money, and disbelieving the threat as too callous even for men at war, the citizens waited. A reluctant McCausland, on orders from Early, then put the inner city to the torch, leaving only the home of a respected veteran and the Masonic Temple standing. Before the fires subsided, 278 houses, factories, and businesses lay in rubble.