Two nights later the president himself was shot.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A Hard War Without Hatred
BRIGADIER GENERAL P. G. T. BEAUREGARD of the Confederate army addressed this ardent cry to the “good people” of three northern Virginia counties:
A reckless and unprincipled tyrant has invaded your soil. Abraham Lincoln, regardless of all moral, legal, and constitutional restraints, has thrown his abolition hosts among you, who are murdering and imprisoning your citizens, confiscating and destroying your property, and committing other acts of violence and outrage too shocking and revolting to humanity to be enumerated. All rules of civilized warfare are abandoned…All that is dear to man, your honor, and that of your wives and daughters, your fortunes, and your lives, are involved in this momentous contest.
Had this reckless and unprincipled tyrant Abraham Lincoln indeed abandoned all rules of civilized warfare? It was perhaps a little premature for General Beauregard to say so, because he issued this outcry from Alexandria on June 5, 1861, before Lincoln and his “abolition hosts” had had an opportunity to conduct much warfare at all. The Union forces had withdrawn from Fort Sumter under shelling by Beauregard himself; had seen Harpers Ferry and Gosport Navy Yard taken over by Virginia troops and added to the collection of federal installations seized by seceding states; had managed after a struggle to get troops around and through Baltimore to protect the endangered capital; and in the person of Lincoln’s friend Elmer Ellsworth had been shot dead trying to remove a Confederate flag flying in Alexandria itself.
A month and a half after Beauregard’s utterance his commander Jefferson Davis issued another roar of anticipatory outrage:
[T]hey [the United States]…are waging an indiscriminate war…with a savage ferocity unknown to modern civilization. In this war, rapine is the rule: private residences, in peaceful rural retreats, are bombarded and burnt: Grain crops in the field are consumed by the torch.
Mankind will shudder to hear of the tales of outrages committed on defenceless females by soldiers of the United States now invading our homes.
Davis too was perhaps a little premature: he made this condemnation of “the outrages of a brutal soldiery” the day before the first major encounter, the battle of Bull Run.
The condemnation of the Union effort as an immoral war conducted by an immoral leader with immoral means was thus already in place before there had been any war, and it has continued full whistle in Lost Cause circles throughout American history ever since. During the war that condemnation served the political purpose of strangling any impulse toward re-union on the part of the rebel constituency; Jefferson Davis’s speeches often include a description of the horrid deeds done by horrid people of the North, with whom one was embarrassed ever to have been connected and with whom one certainly would never want to be connected again. In the war’s long aftermath the myth of Northern outrages would serve other political purposes: the memory of a glorious victory would provide the North with what Robert Penn Warren called a “treasury of virtue,” but the legend of Yankee perfidy would provide the South a deposit of collective self-justification.*63
One reason that belief that the Union’s armies used immoral means seeped into public discourse after World War II was that many historians used the term “total war” to describe what the American Civil War became. Unwary readers may, understandably, infer that the totality includes—everything. And that that everything would include the deliberate targeting of civilians.
Surely the term “total war” is not useful, either for description or for moral appraisal. It is a twentieth-century term that even in its home century may blur important practical and moral distinctions; applied retroactively to a nineteenth-century war, even one as destructive and bloody as the American Civil War, it is a source of confusion, not of understanding. It must be a cardinal rule in fighting wars, in writing history, and in making moral judgments that one keep clearly in mind the distinctions that matter. Although property was appropriated and destroyed on a large scale, and there was guerrilla warfare in some areas, and specific atrocities, the American Civil War nevertheless, in the main, did not become a “total war.” And the man at the head of the U.S. government was something very different from an unprincipled tyrant.
To say that the Civil War was not a “total war” is not to deny that it was an extremely destructive event. It took place in what had been “the least militarized of Western societies.” Each side sent out “hastily assembled amateur armies” expecting a quick victory. But neither attained that early victory, and each enlarged its army and enlarged it again, until the South would assemble nearly 1 million men in arms, and the North 2 million, out of a total prewar national population of 32 million. Of these men, on the two sides, battle and disease would cause the deaths of 620,000—more than the number of Americans killed, it is commonly observed, in both world wars, Korea, and Vietnam combined.
Historian James McPherson has calculated:
If the same proportion of soldiers to the total American population were to be killed in a war fought today, the number of American war dead would be five million. Fully one-quarter of the white men of military age in the South lost their lives. And that ghastly toll does not include an unknown number of civilian deaths, nearly all in the South…Altogether nearly 4 percent of the Southern people, black and white, civilians and soldiers, died as a consequence of the war…The amount of property and resources destroyed in the Confederate States…has been estimated at two-thirds of all assessed wealth, including the market value of slaves.
It is important to remember that the commonly cited figure for soldiers’ deaths in the Civil War—620,000—includes more who died from disease than from bullets. Historian John Keegan puts the round numbers at 200,000 dead in battle, 400,000 from disease or hardship. The American Civil War was one of the last major wars in the Western world in which deaths of soldiers from disease exceeded deaths from battle, a point that, as we have seen, Lincoln recognized.*64
For the most part the adversaries in the American Civil War did maintain the distinction between combatants and noncombatants; there was no systematic, deliberate targeting of civilians en masse by the U.S. armies, not even by Sherman. The absence of any equivalent of the firebombing of Tokyo, or the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, London, Coventry, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki, was not the result simply of the absence of the airplanes or missiles to deliver such destruction; murderous attacks on civilians had certainly been perpetrated before such means were available for that purpose, and they have been carried out without them in terrible wars since.
In many wars the number of civilians killed has been larger than the number of soldiers; James McPherson notes that “[p]robably twice as many civilians as soldiers in Europe died as a direct or indirect result of the Napoleonic wars.” This was not true in the American Civil War.
It was an immensely destructive war, as we have said; at the same time, there were limits and restraints in its conduct. The question for historians would be whether to underscore the destruction or the restraint. Mark Neely in 1991 asked, “Was the Civil War a total war?” and gave the answer no, emphasizing, with evidence, the restraint. Even though there were many particular misdeeds, he wrote, “Union and Confederate authorities were in substantial agreement about the laws of war, and they usually tried to stay within them.” Historian Michael Fellman—who having written a book on the guerrilla warfare in Missouri, and a biography probing the tormented “war is hell” warrior William Tecumseh Sherman, surely knows the dark side of the American Civil War—denies that it can be described as a “total war”:
Unlike the combatants on both sides of the guerilla war, Sherman never intended in actual practice, nor would he permit, a level of destructive war that would erase the line between civilian and military enemies…He certainly had the military means to make total war—overwhelming force and no viable opposing army…but he held himself and his men back because of the shared cultural value system.
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p; Mark Neely, returning to this topic in a Gettysburg lecture on atrocity and retaliation, gives evidence that the war did not necessarily become “harder” as it went on but rather that harsher attitudes and actions and more humane and restrained ones—including forgiveness—contended throughout the war:
When all was said and done…the President and much of the society he directed to victory in the Civil War, came down on the side, not of retaliating for atrocities, but of avoiding atrocity…[T]he relative absence of atrocity from the history of the Civil War remains to this day one of its most remarkable qualities. It is wrong to think of the war’s “destructive,” “terrible,” and “hard” qualities, vividly real though they certainly were, as the things that call out to us for historical explanation more than their opposite. What needs explanation and description now is the remarkable restraint of the people who had organized and mobilized such vastly powerful armies. And President Lincoln’s role in retaining those traditional limits on war needs reaffirmation more than ever.
We want to reaffirm that role: to specify the ways in which Lincoln encouraged the warriors to observe traditional moral limits on warfare. But at the same time we need to note again Lincoln’s role in widening and hardening the war (the “directed severity”), which increased the opportunity for, and pressure toward, unrestrained warfare and therefore increased the necessity and difficulty of that restraint.
It is in the combination of these two roles—as a resolute and aggressive leader of the nation’s armed services to an essential victory, and as an interpreter of the war who mitigated its vengeful passions and brutal conduct—that Lincoln’s moral distinction is to be found.
When it became his duty to suppress this giant rebellion, the peacefully inclined but profoundly dutiful civilian Abraham Lincoln expected that the task could be completed in a relatively short time with a relatively small force—relative, that is, to what actually happened. On the day after the fall of Sumter, as we have seen, he called into service 75,000 of the federalized state militia, whose term of service under the 1795 Militia Act was ninety days. Four years later he would say, surely correctly, that no one on either side had expected a war of the “magnitude” or “duration” that it would by then have attained. In the end more than two million men would have served under his ultimate command in the U.S. armies; the war would have lasted all of four years, with much more destruction than anyone foresaw. Lincoln was known to have remarked on his own “aversion to bloodshed.” Once he mused, “[D]oesn’t it seem strange that I should be here—I, a man who couldn’t cut a chicken’s head off—with blood running all around me?” And yet, strange or not, there he was.
Lincoln’s avowed purpose, put forth in his First Inaugural Address, was to fulfill his duty: to preserve the Union, to restore the authority of the United States against “a clear, flagrant, and gigantic case of Rebellion.” When as president-elect out in Springfield he had read of the purported “secession” of South Carolina and six other states, and of their takeovers of forts, mints, customhouses, and other general facilities within their borders, his first instinct had been to write General in Chief Winfield Scott asking him to prepare a plan to take back those usurped federal facilities, and in his first draft of his inaugural he announced his intention to do that. Under the advice of his friend Browning and the counsels of prudence, as we have seen, he struck the announced intention to “repossess” the federal facilities and limited his immediate stated purpose to holding the facilities still in federal control—which meant Fort Pickens and, above all, Fort Sumter, whose symbolic importance became thereby intense. When the South Carolina forces fired upon the American flag and “reduced” the fort, Lincoln in his call for the militia felt freed now to propose the recovery of the purloined facilities, but at the same time he stated quite sharply the limited Union purposes:
I deem it proper to say that the first service assigned to the forces hereby called forth will probably be to re-possess the forts, places, and property which have been seized from the Union; and in every event, the utmost care will be observed, consistently with the objects aforesaid, to avoid any devastation, any destruction of, or interference with, property, or any disturbance of peaceful citizens in any part of the country.
This “utmost care” passage would lead a distinguished historian to observe: “This was a national strategy of limited war—very limited, indeed scarcely a war at all, but a police action to quell a rather large riot.”
Well before the stunning defeat at Bull Run, however, the president had become aware that this was going to be more than a police action to quell a riot. In his first annual message to Congress, on December 3, 1861, he made a statement that was often to be quoted about avoiding degeneration into “a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle,” and also about not resorting to “radical and extreme measures.” But in this midst of these cautionary self-restrictions, he made a statement about using “all indispensable means” to preserve the Union. That statement was the true harbinger of the future, the core purpose he would state many other times and act upon until the rebellion was in fact quelled.
In the late winter and early spring of 1862, when there had been victories in the West and at sea, and when McClellan’s mighty Army of the Potomac was preparing to fight its way up the peninsula to take Richmond, there was an optimistic expectation for a limited war and an early government victory. But the battle of Shiloh in Tennessee in early April began to change that expectation, and the nature of the war. A key figure, Ulysses S. Grant, wrote in his memoirs about that battle:
Up to the battle of Shiloh I, as well as thousands of other citizens, believed that the rebellion against the Government would collapse suddenly and soon, if a decisive victory could be gained over any of its armies…But when Confederate armies were collected which not only attempted to hold a line farther south, from Memphis to Chattanooga, Knoxville and on to the Atlantic, but assumed the offensive and made such a gallant effort to regain what had been lost, then, indeed, I gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.
Did Grant’s civilian commander back in Washington, who had not yet met him, at this point believe in the necessity of “complete conquest”? Perhaps not yet. Grant went on to say about his policy after Shiloh:
Up to that time it had been the policy of our army…to protect the property of the citizens whose territory was invaded, without regard to their sentiments, whether Union or Secession. After this, however, I regarded it as humane to both sides, to protect the persons of those found at their homes, but to consume everything that could be used to support or supply armies…Their destruction was accomplished without bloodshed and tended to the same result as the destruction of armies. I continued this policy to the close of the war…This policy I believe exercised a material influence in hastening the end.
Grant’s most important subordinate, William Tecumseh Sherman—who would prove to be a key figure indeed in the policy of a harder war—had fought in border country with guerrilla warfare not unlike that in Missouri: “[Sherman’s] experiences in Tennessee and Mississippi, where guerrillas sheltered by the civilian population wreaked havoc behind Union lines, convinced him that ‘we are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make [them]…feel the hard hand of war.’”
Had Lincoln come to his version of this conclusion? Perhaps not until the failure of McClellan before Richmond the following summer. In July 1862, when he realized that this rebellion against the United States was not going to be suppressed by the limited and conciliatory means recommended and pursued by McClellan, he made large decisions: an order that “contemplated authority to Commanders to subsist their troops in the hostile territory” and the preliminary emancipation proclamation. The “foraging” by Union armies—by Pope, Grant, Sheridan, and particularly Sherman—with results that represent one charge of unjust conduct by critics, thus had one root in an order presented to the cabinet by Lincoln himself.
Lincoln ha
d the clarity of mind and the discipline of will to face difficulties rather than to deny that they existed or to avoid them or to postpone dealing with them. His letters in 1848–49 to his shiftless stepbrother, telling Johnston rather briskly to shape up and go to work where he was and not dream of some other place, are often cited as evidence of this Lincolnian trait—but then his whole life is. He was a person who confronted reality as it was.
“The year 1863 marked a significant watershed,” writes historian Mark Grimsley, “because during that year one can see the emergence of large-scale destruction carried out, in fairly routine fashion, by large bodies of troops.” That year also saw important Union victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, the first two neatly falling on July 4. Gettysburg stopped a second northern advance by Lee’s army, but once again Lincoln was frustrated that the U.S. general, George Meade, did not follow up the victory with an attack upon the retreating rebel army. Lincoln seems always to have been urging his generals to attack.
The victory of Vicksburg, which had even greater practical importance, split the Confederacy and gave the Union control of the Father of Waters. The taking of Chattanooga in November split the Confederacy on an east-west line. But these successes did not lead to Confederate capitulation.
So the war went on into 1864, bringing the campaigns by Union armies that were at once the most destructive, the most often subject to moral condemnation, and the most important in achieving Union victory: Grant’s holding the line “if it takes all summer,” chewing and choking Lee’s army in Virginia; Sherman’s taking Atlanta and marching his army through Georgia and the Carolinas; and Sheridan’s following Jubal Early to the death, upsetting the “breadbasket of the Confederacy” and ending the use of the Shenandoah Valley as an attack route on Washington. These aggressive actions by the American army were all encouraged by the commander in chief.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 45