“You profess to be a Christian?”
“I do, Mr. President.”
“As do millions on both sides of this conflict—each summoning God to their defense.”
“It grieves me to see it, Mr. President. All through the South, for years, I have listened to the invoking of God on behalf of the scourge of slavery. It sickens me. Of course, as they say, the Bible does not strictly forbid slavery. But that hardly makes it right.”
“You certainly do not speak like a loyal Southerner,” said Lincoln dryly. “My men warned me that you were a free thinker.”
“As I told my wife recently, I am a loyal American first, then a loyal Virginian. Well, that is not exactly true… I am a loyal Christian first, then a loyal American.”
“So if I as your president ordered you to do something that went against your faith as you perceived it, you would not obey me?”
“I am afraid that is correct, Mr. President. I have been reading a great deal about the Quakers recently. I find a kinship in my heart to some of their great men and their ideas. Conscientious disobedience is one of their founding principles.”
“Ah, yes… their man John Woolman. I have been reading portions of his Journal lately myself as I struggle with what to do concerning slavery.”
“He was a remarkable man,” said Richmond.
“I admire him greatly,” rejoined Lincoln. “Woolman spoke of slavery and its evils a hundred years ago. Would that the country had listened then,” he sighed. “He was certainly a man of principle, as I perceive you are.”
“I hope I am, Mr. President. But only God holds the key to my conscience. I hope you are not offended.”
“On the contrary,” smiled Lincoln. “In fact, I am glad to hear it. It makes me know you to be a man I can trust.”
“I am not sure I understand you, Mr. President.”
A long and thoughtful silence followed.
“I have a great decision to make with regard to slavery,” said Lincoln at length. “I must seek the counsel of trustworthy men, on both sides. That is no doubt why my men insisted on my coming to see you. As you might imagine, I have few opportunities to speak with Southerners these days! But I have to make a decision that is best for the entire nation, and its future.”
Lincoln paused thoughtfully. It was silent for several seconds.
“I recently received a letter from Horace Greeley,” he went on, “an open letter that was printed publicly. In it he said that slavery is everywhere the inciting cause of the treason behind this war. He urged me to do away with it completely. I cannot say I disagree with him. I think I agree with our Quaker friend Woolman that slavery at its root is intrinsically evil. Yet I am the president of a political country. I must make decisions on the basis of the good of the nation. My answer to Greeley, which you may have read, if it was printed in the papers down here, is that my paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union. It is not primarily to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves, I would do it. If I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it. If I could even save the Union by freeing some and not others, I would do that also. We must preserve this nation. But now that the South has taken us into this conflict, the question of how to do so is very difficult.”
He paused and took a long breath. When he continued, it was in a different vein.
“I am therefore interested in the effect freeing slaves had on your plantation,” said Lincoln. “Tell me, how long ago was it when all this took place?”
Six years.
“And your plantation has continued to prosper?”
“The war has made finding workers difficult,” replied Richmond. “Times are hard right now and I confess that we are falling behind with certain financial obligations. But prior to the war… yes, we were doing quite well.”
“You must have suffered some serious opposition?”
Richmond smiled and nodded.
“At one time some of my Virginia colleagues wanted me to run for Congress,” he said. “Needless to say, their enthusiasm declined sharply after our decision.”
“By that you mean you and your wife? She was in agreement with you?
“Completely.”
“Would you mind telling me how your decision came about?”
“Not at all.”
“I am especially intrigued with what mental processes you went through to arrive at the course of action you chose and what have been the long-term effects, both pro and con.”
“Well for us, Mr. President, it was a decision of prayer, based on what we felt was our personal responsibility. Unlike yourself, we had nothing else to consider. We did not have an entire nation to worry about. I do not envy you.”
Lincoln sighed. “It is daunting,” he said. “But I came to hear your story not bemoan my own troubles.”
Richmond went on to explain how he had spoken with their slaves and given them money to go north or stay and start new lives as free wage earners. He then recounted how things had gone at Greenwood since, not, however, dwelling on their recent activities with the Underground Railroad.
“Thank you for illuminating your story to me,” said Lincoln. “I must say I have never heard the like before. Even more than that I must say thank you for the courage your action obviously took. That is what this country needs, more men and women to take their spiritual convictions seriously. Men are eager to take any conviction seriously—slavery, states’ rights—except spiritual convictions. But we are a nation of Christian roots. All too often, however, it seems that politics rule men’s opinions and decisions more than the spiritual priorities of this nation’s foundations. If it continues, I shudder to think where it will lead—”
Suddenly the door crashed open and a little black girl of seven or eight burst in. She scampered across the floor toward the two men seated on the far side of the room. Richmond Davidson’s first instinct was to shoo her away before she divulged the very thing they had been trying so hard to conceal. But almost immediately he realized the incongruity of doing so in light of everything they had just been speaking of. Was this little girl any less worthy or precious in God’s eyes than even the president of the United States?
She ran straight toward him and he opened his arms to receive her.
“Hello, Sarah,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“I wuz playin’ wiff Miz Waters,” replied the rambunctious girl, “but I ran away an’ hid from her. She’s neber fin’ me here! What is you doin’, Mister Dab’son?”
“This gentleman and I were having a talk.”
“Oh…” said the girl, drawing the word out slowly as she turned around. Now first she realized that Richmond was not alone. But one thing young Sarah was not was shy. She walked straight toward the Davidsons’ esteemed guest where he sat on the couch. She stopped in front of him and gazed up into his dark rugged face.
“I’m Sarah,” she said.
“I heard that that was your name,” said the president in a deep baritone. “Do you and your parents live here and work for the Davidsons?”
“No, we’s jes’ stayin’ her till we can git norf,” replied Sarah. “We’s slaves but we run away an’ we’s hidin’ from da men dat do bad things ter slaves like us.”
Unexpectedly Sarah now jumped onto the couch and climbed into the president’s lap. Taken by surprise, slowly Lincoln’s arm reached around her. Sarah leaned back against his chest, then arched her neck around so that she could see the president’s face.
“Duz you help slave folks like Mister Dab’son?” she asked.
“I don’t have the chance to meet very many slaves,” he replied.
“Why not?”
“Because I live in the North. There are no slaves there. I am visiting Mr. Davidson too.”
“When we gits ter da Norf, we won’t be slaves no mo’ either. Den we’s be free cuz dere’s a man named Abraham dere dat’s jes’ like dat Abraham or Moses or sumbody in da Bible, dat’s what my mam
a seyz, an’ he don’t let nobody hurt no black folks, even effen dey be runaways. So we’s goin’ ter da Norf. Dat’s where freedom is. Dat’s where Abraham is. What’s yo’ name, Mister?”
Richmond glanced over and saw tears rising in the president’s eyes.
“What’s the matter, Mister?” said Sarah. “You look sad.”
Lincoln smiled, reaching one hand up to wipe at his eyes. “No, Sarah,” he said. “Actually, I think I am very happy… happy to talk to you.”
“Well, good-bye, Mister,” said Sarah, scrambling down to the floor. “Good-bye, Mister Dab’son. I’s go fin’ Miz Waters now so we kin play sum more.”
As quickly as she had appeared, she hurried out the door and was gone. It remained silent for some time between the two men.
“Let me tell you something, Richmond,” said Lincoln at length. “I hope you do not mind if I address you with such familiarity.”
“Of course not.”
“You have been so kind to my men, and myself, that a Mister hardly sounds right on my lips. But what I wanted to tell you is that I have a dream, a dream of equality and freedom for all Americans. I doubt that I shall live to see it. But some dreams must wait. Yet they are worth fighting for, even if we do not see all that will become of them one day. I call it my American Dream.”
“I think it is a worthy dream, Mr. President. And perhaps you and I shall live long enough to see more of it than we think. When little Sarah climbed into your lap just now, I think I saw some of your dream being fulfilled before my eyes.”
That same evening at dusk, Abraham Lincoln disappeared into the night to begin his secretive journey back to the safety of the Union, leaving Richmond and Carolyn Davidson to wonder whether they had imagined the whole thing.
The battles of mid-1862 might well have ended the war. Though Robert E. Lee was outnumbered in his defense of Richmond against McClellan’s superior numbers, McClellan’s chronic hesitation, a defect Lincoln had already noticed, failed to seize the advantage. His golden opportunity to take the Confederate capital was lost and he was compelled to retreat.
Lee’s strategic victory led to a second Confederate victory in as many years at Manassas Junction, and Lee marched his army north in an attempt to invade the North through Pennsylvania and to take the federal rail center at Harrisburg. Had he succeeded, the northern border would have been breached and Lee might have had a clear march to Philadelphia, even New York.
After his waffling and indecision throughout the seven-day assault on Richmond, which ended in failure, Lincoln relieved McClellan of command of the Potomac army. But now, only a month later, he was compelled to send General Pope west to deal with an uprising of the Sioux. Lee was moving north, and with no one else close at hand, Lincoln reluctantly had little choice but to put the incompetent General George McClellan back in command of the Grand Army of the Potomac. It was a decision the president would bitterly regret.
McClellan pursued Lee north through Virginia to try to ward off the invasion of Pennsylvania. The two armies met at Sharpsburg, Maryland on September 16, facing one another across the little creek called Antietam.
But even an incompetent general, if he has vastly superior troops, ought to be able to win a decisive victory. And McClellan had more than twice Lee’s number. He also had something else—he knew Lee’s battle strategy ahead of time. Three days earlier, in a deserted Confederate camp en route to Sharpsburg, a Union corporal had discovered three cigars wrapped in a piece of paper. That paper was a copy of Lee’s orders and battle plan.
Yet with such a great advantage on his side, McClellan did not seize his strategic superiority and attack. He waited and waited, allowing Lee to deploy his troops to the best advantage. When the fighting finally began, though the sheer numbers made a Union victory inevitable, McClellan’s timid responses to Lee’s moves, and his constant hesitation to hurl the might of his army forward against Lee, allowed the Confederate army to remain defeated but not broken.
September 17 was the bloodiest single day thus far in the history of the nation. After three days there were more than 23,000 dead and wounded. Finally Lee fell back in retreat.
With the Confederate invasion of the North stopped, McClellan might have ended the war then and there and become a national hero. His advantage was so great that, by pursuing Lee, the Confederacy could have been crushed in a single blow.
But he did not act.
Lincoln wired him with specific orders: “Destroy the rebel army if possible.”
But McClellan did not respond, and Lee and his army slipped quietly away into the Virginia hills.
In the days after the battle, while George McClellan rested his troops and did nothing, President Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, acted decisively with the single act, among a multitude, for which he would be best known by history, and either loved or hated by his contemporaries. Taking the Union victory at Antietam as a sign from God, Lincoln seized the opportunity he had been waiting for.
He released a proclamation which read:
On the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty three, all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part ofa State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforth, and forever free.
Jefferson Davis called it the “most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man.”
Another week passed and still McClellan sat at Sharpsburg.
Frustrated almost beyond belief with McClellan’s inaction, two weeks after the battle and a week after his Emancipation Proclamation, on the first of October, Lincoln himself traveled to Sharpsburg. In the two weeks since the battle, McClellan was still encamped at the site of the battle. The president and the general met in McClellan’s tent and Lincoln made his will clear—McClellan was to pursue Lee’s army with the objective of destroying it.
Thinking he had been clearly understood, Lincoln returned to Washington only to receive telegrams from McClellan explaining why he felt it imprudent to move. Lincoln wired back peremptorily ordering him to advance.
Yet nearly another month passed before McClellan began reluctantly to pursue Lee. By then Lee’s army was back across the Blue Ridge Mountains and safely out of McClellan’s reach.
At long last, in November of 1862, Lincoln relieved General George McClellan of command for good.
Abraham Lincoln’s unpopularity, even in the North, resulted in a drubbing in the midterm elections of November. Many of his own Republicans, disappointed that the Emancipation Proclamation did not go further, and frustrated by Lincoln’s conduct of the war, did not campaign aggressively for the president and their party. On the other side, the Democrats accused Lincoln and his administration of incompetence and abuse of power, and won both houses of Congress easily.
Rumors began to circulate that Lincoln would resign and that General McClellan would return to Washington and somehow be given command in Lincoln’s place, not merely of the Army of the Potomac, but of the entire Union.
After McClellan’s dismissal, the new commander of the Union Army of the Potomac, General Ambrose Burnside led McClellan’s former, and now grumbling, army, upset at his firing, south, intending another assault on Richmond, this time from the north.
But by early December, Robert Lee’s forces were again ready for battle. Now Stonewall Jackson had joined him from the Shenandoah and they marched east and intercepted Burnside’s army as he was attempting to seize Fredericksburg.
The war now came closer to Greenwood than at any previous time. In the distance, in the early days of December, could be heard to the north the sounds of Lee’s and Jackson’s armies moving toward Fredericksburg.
Winter set in early that December of 1862. It rained and rained and in the second week a great snowfall covered all of Dove’s Landing.
Yet unknown to anyone at Greenwood, the people of Fredericksburg only forty or fifty miles away had been ordered to evacuate the city under the
Union siege. Thousands of civilians were left without homes in the freezing weather.
When the battle began in earnest, Burnside proved no more able or decisive than McClellan, and days of fighting resulted in what could only be described as a slaughter of the Union army.
1862 ended with Confederate troops under Robert E. Lee again supreme in the East. The year had cost America 268,000 casualties, over a quarter of a million young American men killed and wounded… in a single year.
PART THREE
CONFUSED LOYALTIES
1863
Fifteen
Through the winter of 1862-63, no one on either side could see where the war would end. All optimism for quick victory was gone. The winter was long and cold. Homesickness, disease, and desertions ran rampant. Many of the boys on both sides, joining up in the heat of emotion, had begun to wonder what they were risking their lives for.
The strain as the war entered its third year was showing more decidedly in the Confederacy. After the Union’s near disastrous string of blunders, near misses, and outright defeats in the East, 1863 was the year in which the tide slowly began to shift. The huge advantage of the North in manpower and rail power and manufacturing power, alongside the South’s fewer men, fewer trains, and an economy based on agriculture, was beginning to tell.
Another major Confederate victory, even in the face of superior Union forces, repelling yet one more advance against Richmond, came in the first week of May at Chancellorsville near Fredericksburg, again under the command of Robert Lee. It seemed the Union army could accomplish nothing in the East, especially against Lee.
Yet Grant continued to make up for it in the West. After his string of victories the previous year he now laid siege a second time to Vicksburg, the South’s “invincible city” on the lower Mississippi, in the late spring and early summer.
Lee controlled the East. Grant controlled the West.
Richmond Davidson had been reading in the Journal of renowned Quaker John Woolman that he had discovered shortly before the outbreak of the war. Though his devotional reading was broad and varied, during the past year it was often to the writings of Woolman that he returned as a spiritual touchstone in his attempt to blend into his faith practicality, the unity of Christian brotherhood, daily obedience, common sense, and doctrinal integrity.
American Dreams Trilogy Page 125
