Then came Lincoln’s turn. The applause was ecstatic—the applause of winners. Flags appeared everywhere. Everyone in attendance knew that the defeat of the Confederacy was assured and the time for celebration at hand. In fact, it was a time to gloat. Beyond gloating, the crowd looked forward to words of revenge to punish the demonic South for all the pain and suffering it had imposed on a righteous Union.
The audience would be surprised. Lincoln would offer no lengthy denunciations of the enemy. He would offer no length at all on any theme. In a mere 703 words Lincoln brought together the mystical and fatalistic themes that would later render his speech America’s Sermon on the Mount. The address consisted of a series of propositions in response to the unasked questions that were lodged in the back of every Northern American’s mind. More meditation than pep talk, the speech led ultimately to a unique jeremiad, unlike any heard in the pulpits, newspapers, or arts. Throughout, Lincoln assumed no personal glory in the effort, but instead spoke in the third person.
How was the war going? Lincoln began with the most important question. Elections, political campaigns, the prospect of reconstruction were all secondary to the great all-encompassing question of war. Happily the signs were good. “The progress of our arms ... is as well known to the public as to myself.” Did this mean that victory was so certain that no further cause for concern existed? Not really. “With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.” So much for the celebration.
Who caused the war? The North surely had its faults, to which he would return later. But causing the war was not one of them: “Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.” The resulting collision was inevitable: “And the war came.”
Why would the South make war on the Union? To protect and extend slavery: “All knew this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.”
So far so good. Now that good had been separated from evil, it would be time to ask how to punish the miscreants. But again Lincoln headed in an unexpected direction. How could like-minded Christians come to such violently opposed answers to slavery and Union? Both, after all, “read the same Bible, and pray to the same God.” Each “invokes His aid against the other.” Yes, the audience nodded, but we know whose side God was really on. Wrong. Strange as it seemed to own slaves and call it charity, as Southern moralists did to the bitter end, “let us judge not that we be not judged.” What? Judgment, as any Northern minister could have told his congregation, was precisely what God required of his obedient servants.
So what cannot be judged? Not what, but who. God cannot be judged or contained in human categories. “The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.” This was not the Puritans’ God or the abolitionists’ God. Their God answered the prayers of the righteous and granted them victory. They had the jeremiad to prove it. And God was bound by its rhetoric to deliver His chosen people.
Lincoln, however, bowed to a different God. Lincoln’s God was more inscrutable. Quoting Jesus, Lincoln condemned both sides: “Woe unto the world because of offences!” Both sides offended God because both sides were implicated in the sin of slavery—a point Lincoln made repeatedly on other occasions. What if slavery was one of those offenses that required horrendous penalties for everyone? And what if God’s judgment fell equally on both sides, even though only one human agency actually caused the war? How could anyone in the South or the North complain? If God “gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?” Any self-respecting Christian knew that the answer to this was of course not. So in place of self-righteous assurance, the best Americans could do was hope:Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”
Earlier, Lincoln had had little good to say about the black race, even as he had condemned slavery vociferously. But in this address, Lincoln’s jeremiad, only the blacks escaped the judgments of the Lord. They, after all, had already been judged by white Americans, North and South.
Implicit in everything Lincoln said was the presumption that, as horrific as the war was, it would eventually cease, because this same inscrutable God had unmistakably destined America to be his last best hope. So, when that ecstatic moment came, how ought the victors to respond? This was the answer everyone was waiting for—the denouement of a short but incredibly powerful peroration. Here, on this most pressing issue, Lincoln offered up his greatest surprise. In place of pride and revenge, he could only say:With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
Clearly the Second Inaugural stands with the Gettysburg Address as America’s greatest sermons.1 But what grants it its enduring power is the fact that it was also his sermon to the world. Peace—an honorable peace—was not only America’s destiny for itself but its burden for the world. Lincoln’s Christlike “malice toward none” applied not only to Americans but to human beings everywhere. Everywhere. Lincoln’s mandated universality set him apart from other national leaders promoting their nationalism as an end in itself.
“With all nations.” The last three words of this great speech were the greatest, for they incarnated an enduring civil religion of America the Redeemer Nation. At the same time, they ordained its prophet, soon to become its martyred messiah. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural provided the interpretive and mythic context that not only explained America to itself but also explained America to the world. And because of America’s sheer power, stunningly apparent in 1865, that world had to pay attention.
Lincoln’s Second Inaugural realized muted praise in the Northern press. Republican radicals in Congress, led by Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, resented the irenic tone of Lincoln’s address and, instead, pledged “no mercy” on the “conquered provinces.” Lincoln himself was aware that his speech would not make him popular. In a letter to New York’s politico Thurlow Weed, he wrote:I believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference in purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a trust which I thought needed to be told; and as whatever humiliation there is in it, falls most directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it.2
In the Northern religious press, supposedly conscious of a “God governing the world,” Lincoln’s inauguration was also ignored. The real center of news at the inauguration was Vice President Johnson’s intoxication: “Drunkenness in High Places ... the grief, surprise and shame we feel at this development, cannot be put in words.”3 In like fashion, the New York Observer passed over Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, reprinting it with no commentary, and focused instead on Johnson’s intoxication: “The facts are sufficiently distressing in themselves, but they are less so than the silence, or gentleness of rebuke, with which the political papers favorable to Johnson’s election, treat this great national calamity.” Then, in an ironically prophetic afterthought: “When we contemplate the relations in which Mr. Johnson stands to the chief magistracy, and that already in our brief political history two presidents have died in office ... we are appalled by
the contingency that may suddenly transfer to the Presidency a man of such infirmity.”4
With Columbia and Charleston in smoke and rubble behind him, Sherman turned his troops to the north. As he moved on to North Carolina, it was clear (much to Jefferson Davis’s frustration) that General Johnston was in no shape either to block Sherman or to come to Lee’s defense. But there would be one last try. Sherman moved his two-winged juggernaut toward Goldsboro, North Carolina. Meanwhile, Johnston learned that the wings were far enough apart possibly to concentrate his seventeen-thousand-man army on Sherman’s left wing near Bentonville.
The fighting broke out on March 19 and caught the Yankees by surprise. After some initial gains, however, Johnston could not overrun the exposed wing. Once again he had to break off the attack, as Sherman’s army recovered and marched in overwhelming force on the hopelessly outnumbered rebels. Unlike Grant—or perhaps learning from him—Sherman was unwilling to engage a costly frontal assault on Johnston. Besides, his army was tired and undersupplied. Instead of pursuing Johnston, Sherman allowed him to retreat, saving Union energies for a move into Virginia and the destruction of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. While food was plenteous, shoes and uniforms were not. By March Sherman’s Federals resembled Confederates: smoke-black faces, dirty and ragged clothes, and many bootless feet wrapped in cloth.
Moving through North Carolina, Sherman’s forces did not replicate the wholesale pillaging that drove them in South Carolina. But looting continued, as did the persecution of slaves. African Americans soon learned that Union soldiers, especially those from the West, were no abolitionists; indeed they were outright racists. As in South Carolina, soldiers routinely plundered slave lodgings for food, clothing, and what few belongings the slaves possessed. Instances of racial assault continued even as Sherman made plain his determination to rid himself of freedmen following in his army’s wake.
Sherman’s strategy of demoralization through direct civilian suffering backfired in the areas most affected. Hatreds grew that would never dissipate. It was not the killing that bothered so many rebels—that was an accepted part of the vagaries of warfare—it was the pillage of civilian property. In particular, the women would not forget. Even more than soldiers in the field, their memories were seared and would find no absolution. In their defiance, the “Religion of the Lost Cause” would be born.5
The writer Cornelia Spencer of North Carolina confirmed that hatred for the Yankees did not emerge from the battlefield, heartbreaking as the killing fields were, but by “acts of indiscriminate and licensed pillage which were more to be deprecated than any consequence of the blood shed in fair and open fight during the war.”6 Triumphant Northern statesmen and generals would rewrite the moral economy of war so that civilian suffering was “just.” But they could not rewrite the rules in the minds of the victims. All might be fair in war, but this war had gotten very dirty.
By March 25, the railroad link from Goldsboro to New Bern was complete, allowing Sherman to resurface from the journey into darkness and reunite with the army of General Schofield and General Alfred Howe Terry. Immediately he began thinking of moving north to join Grant at Richmond. To that end, he boarded a train for Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia, to persuade his commander to wait until his army could join Grant at Richmond.
But Grant had other things on his mind, including a strategic meeting with Lincoln aboard the River Queen on March 27 and 28. By all accounts, Sherman and Lincoln dominated the conversations, with Grant listening closely. Lincoln needed assurances that Lee could never join up with Johnston, which Sherman provided. Both generals assured Lincoln “that one or the other of us would have to fight one more bloody battle, and that it would be the last.” With that Lincoln responded “that there had been blood enough shed, and asked us if another battle could not be avoided.”
Then Lincoln talked about the looming peace, stressing his desire to reunite the country as peacefully as possible with a minimum of revenge or retribution. He hoped Davis would flee the country, and “all he wanted of us,” Sherman would later write, “was to defeat the opposing armies, and to get the men composing the Confederate armies back to their homes, at work on their farms and in their shops.”7 All realized that the greatest threat to peace would be a guerrilla war that could go on indefinitely. With Missouri as a microcosm for the nation, that was a scenario to be avoided at all costs.
When not meeting with Lincoln, Sherman again attempted to persuade Grant to postpone his movement on Lee until Sherman and his army could share in the sweet and long-awaited victory. But Grant was not persuadable. Practical considerations and issues of pride dominated Grant’s decision. After years of inconclusive engagements with Lee he wanted the Army of the Potomac to beat Lee on its own. Were Sherman to join him for a shared victory, the “westerners” would take the credit for doing what Grant alone had not been able to accomplish, and the whole affair would become politicized.8 Besides, he did not need Sherman’s help.
Lee’s only hope was to break free from his entrenchments in Petersburg and attempt to link up with Johnston’s forces in North Carolina. But with Sherman now closing in from the south, it was a long shot indeed. Lee remained in his fortified lines as long as he could, hoping for a miracle. One thing was now certain: Richmond would have to be abandoned. The only question was when. In late February he wrote a note of foreboding and faith to his wife in which he conceded:I think General Grant will move against us soon ... & no man can tell what may be the result ... but trusting in a Merciful God, who does not always give the battle to the strong, I pray we may not be overwhelmed. I shall however endeavour to do my duty & fight to the last. Should it be necessary to abandon our position to prevent being surrounded, what will you do? Will you remain or leave the city? ... It is a fearful condition & we must rely for guidance & protection upon a kind Providence. May it guard & comfort you.9
Lee understood perfectly that Grant’s intent “is now to starve us out,” but as long as farmers remained patriotic, that was not likely. Throughout, Lee’s faith in the people had remained strong, and they had reciprocated with a blind faith of their own. All were willing to do their duty in a losing cause if only to ensure that those who went before had not been sacrificed in vain.
Others were equally dutiful, especially the clergy. In Campbell County, Virginia, John Blair Dabney, a lawyer-turned-Episcopal-priest to four churches, preached regularly on the need to endure a righteous cause. The signs, he conceded, were ominous, and, in a telling moment, he embraced a scenario of apocalyptic deliverance. In a sermon on Matthew 24:44 (“Be ye also ready, for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh”), Dabney underscored the fact that it would be quite foolish to place the Second Coming of Christ “at some remote period.”
In a follow-up sermon preached on March 5, Dabney noted that the North needed to learn the lesson Napoleon had learned. In the same sermon, he conceded for the first time that the North might win. But then, in anticipation of postwar rhetoric, he stressed that their victory would never make the North right for waging such a vicious war on innocents:They may succeed in extirpating or subduing us by their superiour power in giving peace to the South by reducing it to a desert. They may be permitted by a righteous providence to inflict on us unspeakable calamities, [but] when the victims of their savage warfare shall have vanished from the earth, they may be made to suffer untold evils for their cruelty, intolerance, and pride in the destruction of their government, the dissipation of their vaunted wealth.10
Winter of 1865 brought decreasing rations, delayed pay, and increased desertions in Johnston’s army. Recognizing the impossibility of maintaining defensive lines stretching thirty miles or longer in the face of Grant’s superior numbers, Lee concluded, “We shall have to abandon our position on the James River, as lamentable as it is on every account.” Lee went on to note that a withdrawal, should it become necessary, “should be concentrated at some point on the railroad line between Richmond and Danville.
”11
On March 2 Lee wrote Grant proposing an “interview” to discuss peace “by means of a military convention.” In other words, he suggested that the warrior priests should settle the fates of their countries by themselves. On the same day, he confessed to Davis his belief “that [Grant] will consent to no terms, unless coupled with the condition of our return to the Union.”12
Clearly generals continued to matter greatly at this stage of the conflict—in particular Lee and Grant—but Grant was not yet ready to act as a statesman. He refused on the grounds that only the president had the authority to make such negotiations. One month later, Grant would change his mind and represent his nation in arranging a peace with Lee. Until a clear prospect of defeat and unconditional surrender appeared, conversations would go nowhere. In prior discussions among Secretary of War Seldon, Senator Robert M. T. Hunter, who had earlier participated in the ill-fated Hampton Roads Conference, and General Lee, the Confederate leaders came to the consensus that defeat was inevitable. Yet no one was willing to tell President Davis.
On March 1 0, 1865, the Confederacy observed what would be its last national fast. In Richmond, the observance was sincere beyond all precedent. Newspaper accounts marveled at how all stores and shops closed, and religious services were “more marked in Richmond than any previous occasion of its kind.”13
In an unpublished sermon preached at Castle Craig Episcopal Church in Virginia, John Blair Dabney turned to Job 13:15: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.” Until then, millennial rhetoric had been tied to nationalism in both the North and the South. But if God had elected defeat as the fate of his chosen nation, it might be a sign that history itself was about to end. By observing the fast, Confederates might indeed be playing their strongest hand for, to Dabney’s increasingly apocalyptic sensibilities, “[i]t is an awful reflexion, that the final issue of this war may probably depend on the manner and the spirit, in which our people discharge the duties of this day.”
Upon the Altar of the Nation Page 53
