by Shelby Foote
He was concerned about the reception of his speech that afternoon. “What did you think of it?” he asked friends as they passed down the line. He had heard and seen the cheers and tears of people near the platform, but tonight he was like a neglected author in wistful search of a discerning critic. Later, writing to Thurlow Weed, he said that he expected the address “to wear as well — perhaps better than — anything I have produced; but I believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.” Actually, the difficulty lay elsewhere. Some among his hearers and readers found his style as turgid, his syntax as knotty to unravel, as that of the new Vice President in the tirade staged indoors. “While the sentiments are noble,” a disgruntled Pennsylvanian would complain this week in a private letter, “[Lincoln’s inaugural] is one of the most awkwardly expressed documents I ever read — if it be correctly printed. When he knew it would be read by millions all over the world, why under the heavens did he not make it a little more creditable to American scholarship? Jackson was not too proud to get Van Buren to slick up his state papers. Why could not Mr Seward have prepared the Inaugural so as to save it from the ridicule of a sophomore in a British university?”
In point of fact, the British reaction was quite different from the one this Keystone critic apprehended. “It was a noble speech,” the Duke of Argyll wrote his friend Sumner, “just and true, and solemn. I think it has produced a great effect in England.” The London Spectator thought so, too, saying: “No statesman ever uttered words stamped at once with the seal of so deep a wisdom and so true a simplicity.” Even the Times, pro-Confederate as it mostly was, had praise for the address. Nor was approval lacking on this side of the Atlantic, even among those with valid claims to membership in the New World aristocracy. “What think you of the inaugural?” C. F. Adams Junior wrote his ambassador father. “That rail-splitting lawyer is one of the wonders of the day. Once at Gettysburg and now again on a greater occasion he has shown a capacity for rising to the demands of the hour which we should not expect from orators or men of the schools. This inaugural strikes me in its grand simplicity and directness as being for all time the keynote of this war; in it a people seemed to speak in the sublimely simple utterance of ruder times. What will Europe think of this utterance of the rude ruler, of whom they have nourished so lofty a contempt? Not a prince or minister in all Europe could have risen to such an equality with the occasion.”
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Others besides Adams drew the Gettysburg comparison, being similarly affected, and presently there was still another likeness in what followed. Lincoln fell ill, much as he had done after the earlier address, except then it had been varioloid, a mild form of smallpox, and this was a different kind of ailment — noninfectious, nonspecific, yet if anything rather more debilitating. In fact, that was at the root of his present indisposition. He was exhausted. “Nothing touches the tired spot,” he had begun to say within a year of taking office, and lately he had been referring again to “the tired spot, which can’t be got at,” somewhere deep inside him, trunk and limbs and brain. “I’m a tired man,” he told one caller. “Sometimes I think I’m the tiredest man on earth.”
If so, he had cause. In the past five weeks — hard on the heels of a bitter campaign for reëlection, which only added to the cumulative strain of leadership through four bloody years of fratricidal conflict — he had cajoled and logrolled Congress into passing the Thirteenth Amendment, dealt with the Confederate commissioners aboard the River Queen in Hampton Roads, and kept a watchful eye on Grant while raising the troops and money required to fuel the war machine. All this, plus the drafting and delivery of the second inaugural, was in addition to his usual daily tasks as Chief Executive, not the least of which consisted of enduring the diurnal claims of office-seekers and their sponsors, often men of political heft and high position. Two cabinet changes followed within a week, both the result of his acceding to Fessenden’s plea that the time had come for him to leave the Treasury and return to his seat in the Senate. Lincoln replaced him on March 7 with Hugh McCulloch, a Maine-born Hoosier banker, only to have Interior Secretary John P. Usher resign on grounds that he too was from Indiana. Iowa Senator James Harlan was named to take his place, a felicitous choice, since he was a close family friend and the President’s son Robert was courting the senator’s daughter with the intention of marrying her as soon as he completed his military service.
This too was a problem for Lincoln — or, more specifically, for his wife; which came to the same thing. Just out of college, the young man wanted to enter the army despite strenuous objections by his mother, who grew sick with fear of what might happen to him there. As a result, Lincoln had worked out a compromise, back in January, that might satisfy them both, depending on Grant’s response to a proposal made him at the time: “Please read and answer this letter as though I was not President, but only a friend. My son, now in his twenty-second year, having graduated from Harvard, wishes to see something of the war before it ends. I do not wish to put him in the ranks, nor yet to give him a commission to which those who have already served long are better entitled, and better qualified to hold. Could he, without embarrassment to you or detriment to the service, go into your military family with some nominal rank, I, and not the public, furnishing his necessary means? If no, say so without the least hesitation, because I am as anxious, and as deeply interested that you shall not be encumbered, as you can be yourself.” Grant replied that he would be glad to have the young man on his staff as an assistant adjutant, his rank to be that of captain and his pay to come from the government, not his father. In mid-February the appointment came through. Soon after attending the inaugural ceremonies in the hard-galloping carriage with his mother and his prospective father-in-law, Robert set out down the coast for City Point. Lincoln was glad to have the difficult matter settled, but it came hard for him that he had had to settle it this way, knowing as he did that he had drafted into the shot-torn ranks of the nation’s armies hundreds of thousands of other sons whose mothers loved and feared for them as much as Mary Lincoln did for hers.
As a result of all these pressures and concerns, or rather of his delayed reaction to them, what should have been for him a time of relieved tension — Congress, having adjourned, was not scheduled to reconvene until December, so that he had hope of ending the war in much the same way he had begun it; that is, without a host of frock-coated politicians breathing down his neck — turned out instead to be the one in which he looked and felt his worst. It was as if, like a spent swimmer who collapses only after he has reached the shore, he had had no chance till now, having been occupied with the struggle to keep afloat in a sea of administrative and domestic frets, to realize how close he was to absolute exhaustion. “His face was haggard with care and seamed with thought and trouble,” Horace Greeley noted after a mid-March interview. “It looked care-ploughed, tempest-tossed and weather-beaten.” One reporter diagnosed the ailment as “a severe attack of influenza,” but another remarked more perceptively that the President was “suffering from the exhausting attentions of office hunters.” In any case, on March 14—ten days after the inauguration — Lincoln was obliged to hold the scheduled Tuesday cabinet meeting in his bedroom, prone beneath the covers but with his head and shoulders propped on pillows stacked against the headboard of his bed.
That day’s rest did some good, and even more came from a new rule setting 3 o’clock as the close of office hours, so far at least as scheduled callers went. By the end of the week he felt well enough to go with his wife and guests to a performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute at Grover’s Theatre, enjoying it so much indeed that when Mrs Lincoln suggested leaving before the final curtain reunited the fire-tested lovers, he protested: “Oh, no. I want to see it out. It’s best, when you undertake a job, to finish it.” Much of his fascination was with one of the sopranos, whose feet were not only large but flat. “The beetles wouldn’t have much
of a chance there,” he whispered, nodding toward the stage.
Here was at least one sign that he was better, though it was true he often joked in just this way to offset the melancholia that dogged him all his life. He still felt weary — “flabby,” as he called it — and no amount of rest, by night or day, got through to the tired spot down somewhere deep inside him. He considered a trip, perhaps a visit to the army in Virginia, “immediately after the next rain.” Then on March 20 a wire from Grant seemed to indicate that the general either had read his mind or else had spies in the White House. “Can you not visit City Point for a day or two? I would like very much to see you, and I think the rest would do you good.”
Lincoln at once made plans to go. He would leave in the next day or two, aboard the fast, well-armed dispatch steamer Bat. “Will notify you of exact time, once it shall be fixed upon,” he replied to Grant. But when he told his wife, she announced that she too would be going; it had been two weeks since Robert left for City Point, and she would see him there. So the expanded party shifted to the more commodious River Queen, retaining the Bat for escort. Tad would go, along with Mrs Lincoln’s maid, a civilian bodyguard, and a military aide. Lincoln had heard from Grant on Monday, and on Thursday he was off down the Potomac, sailing from the Sixth Street wharf in the early afternoon.
2
That same Thursday — March 23 — Sherman reached Goldsboro, the goal of his 425-mile slog up the Carolinas, to find Schofield waiting for him with reinforcements enough to lift his over-all strength to just under 90,000 of all arms. Both had run into their first hard fighting of the double-pronged campaign, and both had come through it more or less intact, despite losses they would rather have avoided until they combined to inflict the utter destruction of whatever gray fragments presumed to stand in the path of their northward conjunction with Grant at the gates of Richmond.
What was more, for all the wretched weather and sporadic opposition, the two blue columns — themselves divided and out of touch, each with the other, until they arrived at their common objective — had made good time. Two weeks after Columbia went up in smoke, Sherman got both wings of his army up to the Pee Dee River and called a halt at Cheraw, March 3–5, to give his bedraggled troops a chance to dry their clothes and scrape away the mud they had floundered through while crossing the rain-bulged Wateree and soft-banked Lynch’s Creek. Then he was off again, out of the Palmetto State at last. Reactions differed, up and down the long line of marchers; some looked back with cackling glee on the destruction, while others felt a softening effect. “South Carolina may have been the cause of the whole thing,” a Michigan lieutenant wrote in a running letter home, “but she has had an awful punishment.”
She had indeed, and now ahead lay the Old North State; a quite different prospect, Sherman believed, one that entailed a much higher degree of Union sentiment, which he intended to woo and play upon en route. “Deal as moderately and fairly by North Carolinians as possible,” he told subordinates, “and fan the flame of discord already subsisting between them and their proud cousins of South Carolina. There never was much love lost between them. Touch upon the chivalry of running away, always leaving their families for us to feed and protect, and then on purpose accusing us of all sorts of rudeness.”
Accordingly, guards were posted at the gates or on the steps of roadside houses, barring entrance to the marchers filing past, and the women, emboldened by this protection, came out on their porches to watch the invaders go by, shoulders hunched against the rain, feet made heavy with balled-up mud, and spirits considerably dampened. The women looked at the men, and the men looked back. “We glanced ruefully at them out of the shadow of our lowering, drenched hat rims,” one soldier was to say, recalling freer times a week ago, when their red-haired commander had scorned to practice such restraint. Denied access to residences, they exercised their arsonist proclivities on the forests of pine through which they passed between the Pee Dee and Cape Fear rivers — and found the result even more spectacular than those produced when they set fire to barns and gins, back in Georgia and South Carolina. Notched for the drawing of sap, the trees burned like enormous torches, often hundreds at a time, when a match was put to them. Overhead, “the smoke could hardly escape through the green canopy, and hung like a pall,” an Ohio colonel noted. “It looked like a fire in a cathedral.” A New York private, highly conscious of being part of what he saw, found himself awed by the tableau, “all to be heard and seen only by glimpses under the smoke and muffled by the Niagara-like roar of the flames as they licked up turpentine and pitch. Now came rolling back from the depths of the pine forest the chorus of thousands singing ‘John Brown’s body lies a-moldering.’ ” He considered it “at once a prophecy and a fulfillment.”
This final leg of the march, just over a fourth of the whole, would be covered in two sixty-mile jumps, with a rest halt in between: Cheraw to Fayetteville, a major Confederate supply base, and Fayetteville to Goldsboro, where Sherman had arranged to meet Schofield, barring serious complications. Driving rains and deepening mud, together with the washout of all bridges over the Wateree, had thrown him a bit off schedule by now, but he hoped to get back on it by making better time through the piny highlands. And so he did, despite the unrelenting downpour. “It was the damndest marching I ever saw,” he said of an Illinois regiment’s covering fifteen soggy miles in five hours. Delighted, he detached three enlisted volunteers — two of them disguised as rebel officers, the third as a civilian — to pick their way through enemy country, ninety-odd miles east to Wilmington, with a note for whoever Schofield had left in charge there: “If possible, send a boat up Cape Fear River.… We are well and have done finely. The rains make our roads difficult, and may delay us about Fayetteville, in which case I would like to have some bread, sugar, and coffee. We have abundance of all else. I expect to reach Goldsboro by the 20th instant.” He kept going, crossing the Lumber River by the light of flaming pine knots, and made it into Fayetteville before midday, March 11, five days out of Cheraw; Hardee, he learned, had left the night before, and Hampton had come close to being captured by the first blue troopers riding in that morning. After running the national flag up over the market place and establishing headquarters in the handsome former U.S. arsenal — now U.S. again — his first concern was to find out whether anything had been heard from downriver in response to the note, written three days ago, which the three-man detail had been charged with getting through to Wilmington.
Nothing had. But at noon next day the Sabbath quiet was shattered by the scream of a steamboat whistle; Alfred Terry, in command at Wilmington, had sent the army tug Davidson upriver in response to Sherman’s note, all three copies of which had reached him the day before. Armored with cotton bales to shield her crew from snipers, the boat’s main cargo was not sugar, coffee, or hardtack, but news of the outside world, as set forth in dispatches and a bundle of the latest papers, North and South. “The effect was electric,” Sherman was to say, “and no one can realize the feeling unless, like us, he has been for months cut off from all communication with friends and compelled to listen to the croakings and prognostications of open enemies.” He ordered the tug to return downriver at sunset, passing the word that she would take with her all the letters anyone cared to write, and gave instructions for a larger vessel to be sent back up as soon as possible, this time with the hardtack, coffee, and sugar he had requested in the first place, plus all the shoes, stockings, and drawers that could be spared. Which done, he put his men back to work destroying rebel installations, including the Fayetteville arsenal itself, and spent much of the night and the following day studying the dispatches and perusing newspapers crammed with speculations as to his whereabouts and fate.
The best of the news was that Schofield, his strength increased above 30,000 by the addition of two new divisions, one made up of convalescents sent from Washington, the other of troops from coastal garrisons such as Beaufort, was hard on the go for Goldsboro and seemed likely to get there w
ell within the time allotted. Leaving Terry to hold Wilmington with his X Corps, in case improbable rebel combinations obliged Sherman to veer in that direction at the last minute, he had sent Jacob Cox by sea to New Bern with his beefed-up XXIII Corps, under instructions to move west along the Atlantic & N.C. Railroad — which was not only shorter and more repairable than the Wilmington & Weldon, but was also provided with locomotives and cars, as the other was not — thus establishing a rapid-transit link between Goldsboro and the coast, not at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, as originally intended, but instead at the mouth of the Neuse in Pamlico Sound, which afforded the navy far better all-weather harbor facilities for unloading the mountain of supplies Sherman’s 60,000 footsore, tattered veterans would need at the end of their long swing through the Carolinas. Cox had set out from New Bern on March 1, repairing the railroad as he went, and Schofield had left Wilmington to join him, wanting to be on hand in case he ran into serious opposition from Hoke, whose division, flung out of Wilmington two weeks before, was reported to have fallen back on Kinston, where the Atlantic & N.C. crossed the Neuse, about midway between Goldsboro and New Bern.
Sherman was pleased with this news of Schofield’s progress across the way, promising as it did an early combination for the follow-up march into Virginia. He had grown more cautious since learning that Johnston, his wily Georgia adversary, was back in command of the forces in his front. So far, here inland, nothing had come of the shift, however, and Terry’s report assured him that all was well in the other direction, too. “Jos. Johnston may try to interpose between me here and Schofield about New Bern,” he had written Grant in a letter the Davidson carried downriver at sunset, March 12, “but I think he will not try that.” His notion was that the Virginian would “concentrate his scattered armies at Raleigh”: in which case, he told his friend the general-in-chief, “I will go straight at him as soon as I get our men reclothed and our wagons reloaded.” Meantime, before he moved on, there was the arsenal to be disposed of, a handsome cluster of cream-colored brick structures whose well-kept grounds served Fayetteville as a municipal park. “The arsenal is in fine order, and has been much enlarged,” he informed Stanton in a letter that went along with Grant’s. “I cannot leave a detachment to hold it, therefore shall burn it, blow it up with gunpowder, and then with rams knock down its walls. I take it for granted the United States will never again trust North Carolina with an arsenal to appropriate at her leisure.”
