A Just and Generous Nation

by Harold Holzer

  Grant appointed Sherman, perhaps the Union’s most efficient scorched-earth strategist, to succeed him in command of Union troops stationed in the western theater of the war. Sherman almost immediately proceeded east to invade the state of Georgia, with the objective of a direct frontal assault on Atlanta, its largest city. Sherman captured Atlanta on September 2, 1864. It was a military triumph so important that it reversed simmering anti-Lincoln sentiment and reenergized public support for his reelection in the upcoming presidential contest. At last, Lincoln had generals in the field who not only were winning battles but had a clear plan for winning the war.

  Lincoln now sounded more confident in describing God’s purpose than ever before in his presidency. This was the moment when he began to say of the war that “God alone can claim it,” going on to say that “if God now wills the removal of a great wrong . . . impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.” Lincoln was more convinced than ever that he could describe himself as God’s agent and say that “great good” would follow all the suffering and sacrifice.

  In the weeks and months after Lincoln’s reelection, the South faced even more suffering and sacrifice. From November 15 through December 21, 1864, promising Grant that he would make “Georgia howl,” Grant’s chief lieutenant pursued the most famous of all the war’s scorched-earth campaigns, in what became known as Sherman’s March through Georgia. Announcing that “my business is down South,” Sherman led sixty-two thousand men from Atlanta to Savannah in five weeks. Sherman was able to move his army forward by living off the land, eliminating the need to wait for food supplies to catch up with his rapidly moving army. The general’s strategy was to take what he could use and destroy what he did not take. By his own reckoning, he left in his wake more than $100 million in property damage. Sherman called this new approach “hard war.”

  Rather than limit himself to fighting pitched battles, Sherman destroyed railroads and private homes and commandeered or destroyed crops and livestock. For the first time in the American Civil War—and perhaps in modern warfare—a general took systematic aim at the infrastructure of the enemy economy. Sherman’s strategy was to treat the Southern civilian economy as a critical part of the Southern military infrastructure. The objective was to leave nothing behind that could continue to provide economic support for the Southern armies. The Southern economy and society had become the real enemy and could be treated as a military target. Whereas Lincoln remained committed to a policy that did not treat women and noncombatants as soldiers, he had no qualms about destroying the economic base of the South that supported its armies.

  Sherman then persuaded Grant to allow him to march north through the Carolinas. In particular he targeted South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union. Sherman captured the state capital, Columbia, on February 17, 1865. Fires in the city began that night, and by the next morning most of the central city lay in ruins. Sherman had achieved his three principal objectives: enabling his troops to march quickly by living off the land of his opponents, reducing the economic capability of the South, and striking a direct blow to the morale of the civilian Confederate population.

  At the same time, Grant and Sheridan relentlessly pursued Lee’s shrinking army, now diminished by a lack of provisions. On April 1, 1865, Sheridan cut off Lee’s lines of economic support at Five Forks, forcing Lee to evacuate Petersburg. On April 6 Sheridan captured 20 percent of Lee’s men. Fully in support of the results of the scorched-earth policy, Lincoln sent Grant a telegram on April 7: “General Sheridan says ‘if the thing is pressed I think that Lee will surrender.’ Let the thing be pressed.” On April 9 Sheridan blocked Lee’s escape, and Lee agreed to surrender to Grant, effectively ending the formal military phase of the Civil War.

  Lincoln, Grant, Sheridan, and Sherman had successfully implemented the new “hard war” program that, in less than twelve months, fully defeating the Southern rebellion. The Union armies that had taken Richmond and destroyed the economic infrastructure of the Confederacy were, in Lincoln’s language, God’s army. Lincoln was merely God’s agent. Near the conclusion of his Second Inaugural Address, delivered just a month before the fighting finally came to a close, Lincoln reminded his audience (and himself) that God was responsible for continuing the war:

  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.”

  In a way, Lincoln had long capitalized on the growing anger in the North against the South for perpetuating its unjust war. But he was not alone in giving voice to it. In the last year of the war, more and more Northerners expressed their feelings through the harsh words of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” sung to the tune of the antislavery anthem “John Brown’s Body”:

  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;

  He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

  He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;

  His truth is marching on.

  Yet in the end, Lincoln did not give in to this anger, especially realizing (as he must have that March) that the war would soon come to an end. He knew that anger—“the fateful lightning of [God’s] terrible swift sword”—could not be the basis for peacetime reconstruction, just as he understood that it served no place in creating the American society he envisioned for the future. Fondly did he hope, it might be argued, that the Northern states and the new western states would continue to build on the nation’s middle-class foundation. He may even have hoped that, after welcoming the South back into the Union, the abolition of slavery would be accepted by a majority of Southerners who could then choose to build a new middle-class society of their own. To encourage this new era of good feelings, Lincoln concluded his Second Inaugural Address on a positive and welcoming note: “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.”

  Lincoln was at the apogee of his power in April 1865. The fighting was over. The new “father of the nation” had guided the democratic country successfully through its greatest trauma since the Revolutionary War. Even at the end of the Civil War, Lincoln did not demand full equality for the former slaves. But he did expect the states restored to the Union to move in this direction by acknowledging the right of former slaves to be paid for the work they would do in the future. Economic fairness, anticipating the twentieth-century idea of “equal pay for equal work,” had always been Lincoln’s bedrock idea for America.

  Life has its cruel ironies. Listening to Lincoln’s reconstruction speech on April 11, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, an ardent proponent of slavery, decided to take direct action to punish the leader of the antislavery cause. At the height of his success, Lincoln was cut down on April 14 by a bullet fired by Booth. Lincoln did not live to see the fulfillment of his American Dream. But he left a legacy of guidance for subsequent American leaders to work to achieve this goal.

  The public outcry over Lincoln’s assassination was intense. Lincoln was dead. How could the nation go on without him at the helm?

  But first the people of the North needed to say good-bye to their assassinated leader. Americans throughout the Union had not forgotten Lincoln’s inaugural journey of 1861. When the announcement was made that Lincoln’s final resting place would be in Springfield, Illinois, telegrams poured into Washington from cities and towns thr
oughout the North, asking that the funeral train repeat the path of the 1861 inaugural train, but this time north and west from Washington to Springfield.

  Secretary of War Edwin Stanton organized Lincoln’s final trip. The funeral train traveled 1,654 miles in twelve days, stopping in 180 cities. Each stopover inspired a major civic event. From April 19 in Washington through May 4 in Springfield, more than a million Americans viewed Lincoln’s open coffin. They raised him to the highest level of “American political sainthood,” second only to George Washington. They honored his achievements: saving the Union, winning the war, and forever uniting the causes of liberty, freedom, and economic opportunity. They affirmed, in their numbers, that the “cause” was worth fighting for. They bade a glorious farewell to Lincoln himself and to the hundreds of thousands who had perished for his “cause” and their country. For this moment in time, they were united behind his principles and committed to bear the burden of his “unfinished work.”

  While mourning their leader, Lincoln’s cabinet and the new president, Andrew Johnson, brought what remained of the war to a conclusion. Federal cavalry caught up with Lincoln’s assassin on April 26, and a rogue sergeant shot him dead. Booth’s coconspirators were captured and later tried and convicted. Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, was captured by Union troops on May 10 and was ironically confined to the same fort where the three runaway slaves had first presented themselves to General Butler four years earlier—to escape the chains in which slavery’s last spokesman now found himself locked.

  Now, it was time to move on from war to the business of putting the Union back together. But Lincoln was no longer at the helm to guide the reconstruction process. Instead, Congress and President Johnson addressed the task—for ill or good—of managing the aftermath of the Civil War.

  Part two

  Eight. FULL SPEED AHEAD

  WITHOUT LINCOLN AT THE HELM

  NORTHERN LEADERS WERE divided throughout the Civil War about how to deal with the return of the Southern states to the Union. While most generally agreed that the South was to blame for dividing the nation, they were not in agreement when it came to considering alternative ways to end the war and reunite the nation. Their differences were only exacerbated by Lincoln’s assassination, which forced them to forge ahead without a transformational leader with a clear vision for the future. It did not take long for Lincoln’s dream to be undermined and corrupted.

  Three distinct factions emerged, each with a different plan. Democratic members of Congress believed that white citizens of the former Confederate states should simply repledge allegiance to the Union, without committing to economic opportunities such as forty acres and a mule for free blacks. Within the Republican Party, “moderates” once led by President Lincoln believed that the central issue in the war was “restoring” the Union as quickly as possible. The moderates also wanted the former Confederate states to extend the electoral franchise to African American male citizens. But Lincoln and the moderates did not insist that the Southern states take immediate steps to provide equal rights for the now free African American slaves. Like the Democrats in Congress, Lincoln and the moderate Republicans believed the Southern rebel states should be returned to the Union after renewed pledges of allegiance to the Union by 10 percent of the voters of each of the rebellious states. The third faction, the radical Republicans, led by Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase, Senator Charles Sumner, and congressional leader Thaddeus Stevens, believed Lincoln did not go far enough in his plans for reconstruction of the rebellious Southern states. The radicals believed that the Southern states should be restored to the Union only after they had provided equal rights to the former slaves.

  The great debate in the North over restoration versus reconstruction of the Southern states began in earnest early in 1862, long before the war came to an end. The Washington National Republican presented the essence of the radical Republicans’ point of view on February 11, 1862: “The revolt of a State against the authority of the General Government destroys its political rights under the Constitution and reduces its territory to the condition of the unorganized public domain. It forfeits all its rights. . . . It is equally clear that the seceded states can never come back into the Union until they have been reorganized. . . . Every vestige of their treason must be repudiated.” These proreconstruction Republicans understood “reorganized” to mean loss of voting rights by all secessionists—and punishment for many by excluding them from participating in politics. They also insisted on immediately providing voting rights for the freed slaves and a future open society in which both blacks and whites would have equal access to political and economic opportunities.

  Lincoln had expressed a very different point of view. In his First Inaugural Address, Lincoln said that the union of the states was perpetual under the Constitution. No state, on its own initiative, could lawfully secede from the Union. Lincoln’s secretaries Nicolay and Hay described Lincoln’s view with the following words: “The action of the government in all its departments was based on the idea that the rebellion was the unlawful proceeding of individuals which neither destroyed nor impaired any rights or obligations of Statehood.”

  Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, added a new dimension to the anticipated future. Once Lincoln had acted as commander in chief out of so-called military necessity to emancipate the slaves, it was no longer a technical or legal argument over how to parse the Constitution or whether secession was lawful in the first place. It was now a practical question of whether the president or Congress could decide if a seceded state had taken the proper steps to be restored to the Union. Lincoln took the bull by the horns when he delivered his Annual Message to Congress on December 8, 1863. In return for cessation of hostilities, it included a new presidential proclamation of amnesty, offering a full pardon with few exceptions to all those who had participated in the rebellion. The pardon carried with it a restoration of rights to property, excluding former slaves. The critical feature of Lincoln’s solution was the requirement that it would become operational in each of the ten seceded states south of Virginia when one-tenth of the total number of voters who had cast votes in the 1860 presidential election took an oath that they would “henceforth faithfully protect and defend the Constitution.”

  The radical Republicans joined the battle on July 2, 1864, when Congress passed the Wade-Davis Bill. The bill asserted the authority of Congress over the president in managing the reconstruction process. Most critically, the bill specified that 50 percent rather than 10 percent of the voters were required to swear an oath and vote in new elections to qualify a state for return to full status in the Union. Rather than a prospective oath of loyalty, the Wade-Davis Bill required an ironclad oath that the voters had never voluntarily borne arms against the United States or aided the rebellion.

  The bill reflected the continuing opposition of many radical Republicans to Lincoln’s leadership on the issues of abolition and equal rights for African Americans. In the short term, however, radical Republicans were forced to follow Lincoln’s lead. When the Wade-Davis Bill came before him, Lincoln asserted his authority by waiting for the congressional session to end without acting. His pocket veto infuriated the radicals. The gauntlet had been thrown down by Congress, and Lincoln picked it up. He claimed that Congress did not have the authority to abolish slavery in the reconstructed states, while he, the president, had that authority as commander in chief.

  The battle over the Wade-Davis Bill did not resolve the continuing differences between the moderate and radical Republicans. As the war neared its end in the early months of 1865, Lincoln’s tireless efforts seemed to be coming to a positive conclusion with the anticipated restoration of the first of the seceding states to the Union on the terms set forth by Lincoln, not Congress. Indeed, at his cabinet meeting on Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln said it was providential that he could implement a restoration plan without interference from the “disturbing elements” of the House and
Senate. Lincoln told his cabinet, “There were men in Congress, who, if their motives were good, were nevertheless impracticable, and who possessed feelings of hate and vindictiveness in which he did not sympathize and could not participate.”

  Lincoln’s death shifted the balance of power on reconstruction to the radical Republicans in Congress. Without Lincoln’s strong executive leadership, the moderate Republicans could not prevail in their efforts to bring the Southern states back into the Union quickly, with few conditions other than an affirmation of loyalty to the Union by 10 percent of the voters of each state. The radical Republicans were determined to reconstruct the Southern states so that former slaves would enjoy equal rights as citizens—including the right to vote. Not incidentally, radical Republicans realized that granting the vote to former slaves, most of whom would probably vote for the party that had liberated them, would help to establish a new Republican presence in the Southern states that would maintain Republican Party dominance of the federal government.

  The agent of radical Republican change was the new Freedmen’s Bureau, established by Congress with Lincoln’s support in March 1865 to extend equal rights and equal treatment to the free African Americans in the Southern states. With little backing from new president Andrew Johnson but much encouragement from the radical Republicans in Congress, the Freedmen’s Bureau began encouraging former slaves to become active and equal participants in the political process of the Southern states that were now coming back into the Union.

  Passage of the Fourteenth Amendment changed the Constitution from a document that defined the rights of American “white men” to one that expanded those rights to all men, including, most notably, former slaves. Equally significant, it expanded the power of the federal government to protect these rights against violation by the states.