Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  The oddity of the Democratic protests over Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and the Vallandigham arrest was how atypical the Vallandigham, Merryman, and Milligan cases were. When historians have looked closely at the record of civil arrests under Lincoln’s administration, most of them have turned out to be arrests for wartime racketeering, the imprisonment of captured blockade runners, deserters, and the detention of suspicious Confederate citizens, not the imprisonment of political dissenters; most of the cases concerning the notorious military commissions occurred, in fact, in areas of the occupied Confederacy, not in the North.78 The Vallandigham case notwithstanding, Lincoln was as undisposed to erect a political despotism over the North as he was to fashion a legislative despotism over Congress. When measured against the far vaster civil liberties violations levied on German Americans and Japanese Americans in America’s twentieth-century world wars, Lincoln’s casual treatment of Vallandigham appears almost dismissive.

  Lincoln’s presidency has often been characterized as a “war presidency,” and indeed Lincoln’s four years as president are unique for having coincided almost in their entirety with a condition of war. Still, that should not distract attention from the very considerable energy he devoted to domestic issues. In addition to rebuilding the national banking system, Lincoln and his Congress introduced a sweeping new tariff plan—the Morrill Tariff, named for Vermont senator Justin Smith Morrill—that would offer the shield of import duties not only to American manufacturing but to agriculture and mining as well. The Morrill Tariff, which came into effect even before Lincoln took office, pegged tariffs as high as 36 percent; thus it “radically changed the policy of our customs duties,” wrote Maine congressman James Blaine, “and put the nation in the attitude of self-support in manufactures.” A Homestead Act, introduced by the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy at the opening of the first regular session of the 37th Congress, opened up 160-acre blocks of federal lands in the western territories at the fire-sale price of $1.25 an acre. No longer could pro-slavery propagandists such as George Fitzhugh boast that Northern factory workers were just as enslaved to their benches as black slaves were to their plantations; the way was now open for every immigrant, every day laborer, every “penniless beginner in the world” to acquire “a patch of wild, vacant public land, and convert it into a homestead and productive farm.” In July 1862 Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Bill, which put government-backed loans at the disposal of the single greatest internal improvements project in American history: the transcontinental railroad.79

  Lincoln and his Congress understood both the war and the politics of the war to be devoted to a single goal, and that was the ushering in of a great free-labor millennium in which middle-class culture in the form of free schools, small-town industry, and Protestant moralism would spread peace, prosperity, and liberal democracy across the continent. “Commerce and civilization go hand in hand,” proclaimed Pennsylvania Republican James H. Campbell, “civilization of that high type which shall spread the cultivated valley, the peaceful village, the church, the school-house, and thronging cities.”80 In that respect, Lincoln was as much the last Whig president as the first Republican one, and his presidency marked the triumph of most of Henry Clay’s old “American System” over the political legacy built up since 1800 by successive Democratic administrations.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE SOLDIER’S TALE

  The ordinary soldier of the Civil War was in almost every case a temporary volunteer. Unlike most of the European nations, which either used a universal military draft and a trained national reserve (as did France or Prussia) or relied upon an army of long-serving professionals (Britain), the armies of the American Civil War were filled with untutored amateurs who had left their plows in their fields or their pens by their inkwells and fully expected to return to them as soon as the war was over. What their officers knew about tactics, combat, and war in general could have been fitted onto a calling card without crowding. Although both the Union and the Confederacy eventually resorted to a compulsory draft to keep their ranks filled, the number of men who were actually drafted for war service was comparatively small. Even when the draft itself was a motivation, right down to the end of the war it was the volunteer, signing the enlistment papers of his own volition, who shouldered the burden of war.

  These volunteers had almost as many reasons for enlisting as there were ordinary soldiers to volunteer. In the first weeks of conflict, Confederate secretary of war Leroy P. Walker was swamped with offers from 300,000 men to serve in the Confederate army, and not a few of them were straightforward in their frank willingness to fight for slavery. When asked why he had enlisted, Douglas J. Cater, a musician in the 3rd Texas Cavalry, “thought of the misguided and misinformed fanatical followers of Wm. Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe” who had driven the issue of slavery through Congress until the Southern states “saw no other solution than a peaceful withdrawal and final separation.” Cater owned no slaves himself, but he was convinced that slavery was the right condition for blacks. Northerners “had now become fanatical, and wrote and preached about it, without considering the condition of the Negro in the jungles of Africa as compared to his happy condition (of course there were exceptions) with his master in the cultivation of the fields of the southern states.” As a result, secession was merely the South’s “exercise of Constitutional rights in their desire for harmony and peace.”1

  For many more Southerners, it was individual local patriotisms rather than the defense of slavery or even the Confederacy that tipped the tide toward enlistment. Joseph Newton Brown, who enlisted in the 1st South Carolina Rifles in 1861, dismissed secessionist political rhetoric as claptrap and insisted, “The war was brought on by the politicians and the newspapers.” He enlisted anyway, and stayed in the Confederate army all through the war out of a sense of responsibility to his community. Similarly, Patrick Cleburne, a well-born Protestant immigrant from Ireland, owned no slaves and had no interest in slavery, but he enlisted in the 1st Arkansas in 1861 because “these people have been my friends and have stood up to me on all occasions.”2

  Others cast the war in dramatic terms as a war of national self-defense, protecting hearth and home from invaders. However protracted the debates over secession had been before the war, the Confederacy was no slaveholders’ coup. Texas lieutenant Theophilus Perry believed that he “was standing at the threshold of my door fighting against robbers and savages for the defense of my wife & family.” Georgian William Fleming declared that he was fighting “not only for our country—her liberty & independence, but we fight for our homes, our firesides, our religion—every thing that makes life dear.” Then there was Philip Lightfoot Lee, of Bullitt County, Kentucky, who offered a whole calendar of loyalties as his reason for joining the Confederacy. At first, he explained, he was for the Union; if that split apart, he was for Kentucky; if Kentucky failed, he would go for Bullitt County; if Bullitt County collapsed, he would fight for his hometown, Shephardsville; and if Shephardsville was divided, he would fight for his side of the street. And of course there were always those such as John Jackman, who enlisted simply on the impulse of a friend’s suggestion while walking to the local railroad station to buy a newspaper.3

  Northern soldiers found themselves enlisting for an equally wide variety of reasons. For some Northerners, the war was a campaign to keep the American republic from being torn in two and made vulnerable to the hungry ambitions of foreign aristocracies. Ulysses S. Grant was moved by the fear that “our republican institutions were regarded as experiments up to the breaking out of the rebellion, and monarchical Europe generally believed that our republic was a rope of sand that would part the moment the slightest strain was brought upon it.” Wilbur Fiske, who enlisted in the 2nd Vermont, believed that “slavery has fostered an aristocracy of the rankest kind,” and unless it was rooted up, it would choke the last stand of democracy. Walt Whitman, who found part-time government work in Washington so that he could ser
ve as a nurse in the army hospitals, wrote in 1863 that a divided America would reduce the world’s greatest liberal experiment to the level of a third-rate power, which would then lie prone at the feet of England and France. “The democratic republic,” groaned Whitman, has mistakenly granted “the united wish of all the nations of the world that her union should be broken, her future cut off, and that she should be compell’d to descend to the level of kingdoms and empires.” So long as the war raged, Whitman believed, “there is certainly not one government in Europe but is now watching the war in this country, with the ardent prayer that the United States may be effectually split, crippled, and dismember’d by it.”4

  The war not only endangered the possibility of popular government by inviting foreign intervention but also raised the question of whether, if the Confederacy succeeded, popular government could ever be made to work again at home. “If the ground assumed by the States in revolt is yielded, what bond is there to hold together any two States that may remain—North or South, East or West?” asked Ezra Munday Hunt, a surgeon in the 19th New Jersey. “What becomes of our national power, or title to respect? In such an event, must not the wealth and enterprise and energy of this young nation become the prey of contending factions, and our very name be a hissing and a byword among other nations?” On the other hand, declared one Union colonel at a mass Union rally in Indianapolis in February 1863, if the Union was saved, it would keep the principle of republican government alive for the benefit of every other nation yearning to throw off the shackles of aristocracy. It “would be to not only strengthen our own government, but to shed a radiating light over all the other nations of the world by which the down-trodden people could see their way to liberty.” As a Harvard student named Samuel Storrow (who enlisted in the 44th Massachusetts) explained to his disapproving parents, “What is the worth of this man’s life or of that man’s education if this great and glorious fabric of our Union… is to be shattered to pieces by traitorous hands… If our country and our nationality is to perish, better that we should all perish with it.” This was nationalism of a very ideological sort—not the Romantic nationalism of race and blood, but a highly intellectualized, universal nationalism, based on the open-ended promise of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.5

  For many other men in the Northern armies, as in the Confederate armies, there were considerations that impelled them to sign their lives away that had nothing to do with politics or ideology. Like his Southern counterparts Patrick Cleburne and Joseph Newton Brown, Edward King Wightman of the 9th New York enlisted out of a simple sense of civic obligation. “It is not only desirable that our family should have a representative in the army, but where we are so well able to furnish one, it would be beyond endurance disgraceful for young men [to be] living peacefully and selfishly at home, while the land is rent by faction and threatened with ruin by violence.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was a “pretty convinced abolitionist,” but he remembered as his prevailing reason for joining the 20th Massachusetts the need to demonstrate his manhood to his generation. “As life is action and passion,” Holmes wrote twenty-five years later, “it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.” Samuel Hinckley, a Massachusetts mill owner, heartily approved of his son’s enlistment in the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry, believing that “this civil war will work good to the young men of this age & land.” Peace and prosperity had led to softness and effeminate self-indulgence; now, “money-making & peddling give place to higher aspirations and this war is marking a distinctly manly character in our young men.”6

  Few of the white Union recruits listed any interest in destroying slavery as a motivation for enlistment. The 24th Michigan Volunteers gave as their collective reason for enlistment to “fight for the Union and maintain the best government on earth,” not the abolition of Southern slavery. Indiana sergeant Samuel McIlvaine wrote his parents to explain that he had enlisted to defend “this Government, which stands out to the rest of the world as the polestar, the beacon light of liberty & freedom to the human race.” So in February 1862 Sergeant McIlvaine made no effort to stop “three or four slave hunters” from entering the regiment’s campsite and seizing two runaway slaves who “got mixed with the Negro cooks and waiters and were thus endeavoring [to] effect their escape to the North.” Even though the runaways had armed themselves with a pistol and a butcher knife, “they had evidently counted on being protected in the regiment but they were sadly disappointed, as they were disarmed by their pursuers and taken back without molestation on our part.”7

  Some Union soldiers were, in fact, even more hostile than their Confederate counterparts to the notion that the war had anything to do with slavery. “If anyone thinks that this army is fighting to free the Negro, or that that is any part of its aim, they are terribly mistaken,” declared Massachusetts sergeant William Pippey. “I don’t believe that there is one abolitionist in one thousand, in the army.” Indianan John McClure had enlisted because he thought “we were fighting for the union and constitution” and not “to free those colored gentlemen.” He was enraged by the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln’s apparent aim of having “all the niggars on an equality with you” and wished that “if I had my way about things I would shoot every niggar I cam across.” Even William Tecumseh Sherman was at best indifferent to making the war a crusade against slavery. “I would prefer to have this a white man’s war and provide for the negroes after the time has passed,” Sherman wrote to his wife, Ellen Ewing Sherman, “but we are in revolution and I must not pretend to judgment. With my opinion of negroes and my experience, yea, prejudice, I cannot trust them yet.”8

  As the war brought more and more Northerners into close contact with the brutal realities of the slave system, the urge to destroy slavery gradually became an important part of the soldiers’ motivations. “I had thought before that God had made the Negro for a slave for the whites,” Elisha Stockwell of the 14th Wisconsin recalled, but after seeing one slave owner abuse two female slaves, “my views on slavery took a change.” Marcus Spiegel, a German Jew who rose to command an Ohio regiment before his death in battle in 1864, enlisted as a pro-Union Democrat, believing that “it is not necessary to fight for the darkies, nor are they worth fighting for.” By early 1864, Spiegel had seen enough of slavery in Louisiana to change his mind. “Since I am here I have learned and seen more of what the horrors of Slavery was than I ever knew before and I am glad indeed that the signs of the time show towards closing out the accused institution.” Never again would Spiegel “either speak or vote in favor of Slavery; this is no hasty conclusion but a deep conviction.” Later in the war, a white Iowa regiment captured twenty-three prisoners from a Confederate unit that had participated in the massacre of black federal soldiers at Fort Pillow; the angry whites interrogated the prisoners, asked them if they remembered Fort Pillow, and then shot them all.9

  Sometimes both Union and Confederate volunteers would be led by more pragmatic motives to join the armies. Some simply wanted to get away from home. The Federal army set eighteen as the minimum age for its recruits, but recruiting officers did not mind winking at restless teenagers in order to fill a recruiting quota.10 Henry C. Matrau was just fourteen when he joined Company G of the 6th Wisconsin in 1862, but the mustering officer simply treated the boy’s presence on the line as a pleasant joke:

  More than a hundred men who had become interested in the little chap stood around to see if he would pass muster. He had picked out a pair of large shoes into which he stuffed insoles that would raise him up a half inch or more, higher heels and thicker soles had been added to the shoes. The high crowned cap and the enlarged shoes lifted the little fellow up. … I can see him as he looked when he started to walk past the mustering officer. I can see Captain McIntyre of the Regular Army, who mustered our regiment. The minute the boy started down the line, his eyes were fixed upon him, and he watched him until he reached the left of the com
pany. I can see the captain’s smile of approval as the little fellow took his place. He had won the day. He was mustered into Uncle Sam’s service for three years or during the war.11

  As many as 10,000 boys below the age of eighteen managed to join the army legally, as drummer boys or musicians. Johnny Clem was a ten-year-old runaway who attached himself to the 22nd Michigan as a drummer boy and whose pay had to be anted up by the regiment’s officers. Clem grew up into a reliable soldier, eventually exchanging his drum for a rifle and actually wangling an officer’s commission after the close of the war (he retired in 1916 as a major general). Besides the legally enrolled Johnny Clems, it is entirely possible that as many as 800,000 underage soldiers, many as young as fifteen, slipped past cooperative recruiters. Elisha Stockwell was one of these fifteen-year-olds when he signed up to join Company I, 14th Wisconsin Volunteers, and though his father successfully voided the enlistment, in February 1862 the boy took the first chance he had and ran away to join the regiment. Stockwell admitted that he thought of politics as “only for old men to quarrel over.” He just wanted to get off the farm and see the wider world.12