These Truths
Page 35
While Republicans campaigned for Honest Abe, Democrats gathered in Baltimore for their second convention in June. An American flag was hung in the front of the hall, embroidered with the hopeful motto: “We Will Support the Nominee.” The convention opened with the proposal of a loyalty oath: “every person occupying a seat in this convention is bound in good honor and good faith to abide by the action of this convention, and support its nominee.”43 The deliberations fell apart. At one point, one delegate drew his pistol on another. For the nomination, the convention was deadlocked through fifty-seven roll calls. On June 22, 1860, the Democratic Party split: the South walked out. The next day, Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts, presiding, stepped down, declaring, “The delegations of a majority of the States of this Union have, either in whole or in part, in one form or another, ceased to participate in the deliberations of this body.” But the convention ultimately nominated Douglas, as the candidate of the Northern Democratic Party, while the bolting southern delegates reconvened down the street, opened their own convention, and nominated John C. Breckinridge, U.S. senator from Kentucky, on their first ballot, the candidate for the Southern Democratic Party.44
In November, when Longfellow heard that Lincoln had won the election, he exulted. “It is the redemption of the country,” he wrote in his diary. “Freedom is triumphant.”45 Lincoln won every northern state, all six states in which the Lincoln-Douglas debates had been published, and all four states in which black men could vote. But Lincoln had won hardly any votes in the South, and his election led to unrest in the North, too, including attacks on abolitionists. In December, when Frederick Douglass was slated to speak in Boston’s Tremont Temple on the occasion of the anniversary of John Brown’s execution, a mob broke into the hall to silence him. To answer them, Douglass days later delivered a blistering “Plea for Free Speech,” in which, as had Longfellow, he placed abolition in the tradition of the nation’s founding. “No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech,” Douglass said, and “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.”46
Broadsides printed early in 1861 notified citizens of the seceding states that their legislatures had dissolved the Union by repealing their ratification of the 1787 Constitution. Many in the South pressed for secession. Others urged patience. Two days after the election, the New Orleans Bee printed a one-word response to Lincoln’s victory: “WAIT.”47 They did not wait for long. Six weeks after the election, South Carolinians held a convention in which they voted to repeal the state’s ratification of the Constitution, declaring, “The union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of ‘The United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.”48 Six states followed—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—and in February 1861 they formed the Confederate States of America, with, as president, former Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis, a man the Texan Sam Houston once called “as ambitious as Lucifer and as cold as a lizard.”49
“The dissolution of the Union goes slowly on,” Longfellow wrote in his diary, miserably. “Behind it all I hear the low murmur of the slaves, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy.”50
II.
AT HIS INAUGURATION, Jefferson Davis, tall and gaunt, insisted that only the Confederacy was true to the original Constitution. “We have changed the constituent parts, but not the system of government. The constitution formed by our fathers is that of these Confederate States.”51 But when delegates from the seven seceding states met in secret in Montgomery, Alabama, they adopted a constitution that had more in common with the Articles of Confederation (“We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character . . .”).
The truths of the Confederacy disavowed the truths of the Union. The Confederacy’s newly elected vice president, a frail Georgian named Alexander Stephens, delivered a speech in Savannah in which he made those differences starkly clear. The ideas that lie behind the Constitution “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races,” Stephens said, but “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea: its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and moral condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”52 It would become politically expedient, after the war, for ex-Confederates to insist that the Confederacy was founded on states’ rights. But the Confederacy was founded on white supremacy.
The South having seceded, Lincoln was nevertheless inaugurated, as scheduled, on March 4, 1861. He’d grown a beard since Election Day, a development that, in a quieter year, might have caused more of a stir. He rode from his hotel to the ceremony with James Buchanan in an open carriage, driven by a black coachman, surrounded by battalions of cavalry and infantry: there was every reason to fear someone might try to kill him. Riflemen positioned themselves in the windows of the Capitol, prepared to shoot anyone in the crowd who drew a gun.
Sworn into office by the Chief Justice Roger Taney, who’d presided over Dred Scott, Lincoln went on to give the most eloquent inaugural address in American history. “One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended,” he said. “This is the only substantial dispute.” He hoped that this dispute could yet be resolved by debate. He closed:
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.53
The better angels did not prevail. Debate had failed.
“Slavery cannot tolerate free speech,” Frederick Douglass had said, in his “Plea for Free Speech.”54 The seventeenth-century battle for freedom of expression had been fought by writers like John Milton, opposing the suppression of religious dissent; the eighteenth-century struggle for the freedom of the press had been fought by printers like Benjamin Franklin and John Peter Zenger, opposing the suppression of criticism of the government; and the nineteenth century’s fight for free speech had been waged by abolitionists opposing southern slave owners, who had been unwilling to subject slavery to debate.
Opposition to free speech had long been the position of slave owners, a position taken at the constitutional convention and extended through the gag rule, antiliteracy laws, bans on the mails, and the suppression of speakers. An aversion to political debate also structured the Confederacy, which had both a distinctive character and a lasting influence on Americans’ ideas about federal authority as against popular sovereignty. Secessionists were attempting to build a modern, proslavery, antidemocratic state. In order to wage a war, the leaders of this fundamentally antidemocratic state needed popular support. Such support was difficult to gain and impossible to maintain. The Confederacy therefore suppressed dissent.55
“The people have with unexampled unanimity resolved to secede,” one South Carolina convention delegate wrote in his diary, but this was wishful thinking.56 Seven states of the lower South seceded before Lincoln’s inauguration, but the eight states of the upper South refused to do the same. And even in the lower South, the choice to secede was not a simple one. Nor was it an easy victory.
The most ardent supporters of secession were the wealthiest plantation owners; the least ardent were the great majority of white male voters: poor men who did not own slaves. The most effective way to persuade these men to support secession was to argue that even though they didn’t own slaves, their lives were made better by the existence of the institution, since it meant that they were spared the most demeaning work. Prosecessionists made this argument repeatedly
, and with growing intensity. James D. B. DeBow’s The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-Slaveholder (1860) was widely excerpted in newspapers, reminding poor white men that “No white man at the South serves another as a body servant, to clean his boots, wait on his table, and perform the menial services of his household.”57
Nevertheless, rather than trusting a decision about secession to the voters, or even to a ratifying convention, Georgia legislator Thomas R. R. Cobb advised his legislature to make the decision itself: “Wait not till the grog shops and cross roads shall send up a discordant voice from a divided people.” When Georgia did hold a convention, its delegates were deeply split. The secessionists cooked the numbers in order to insure their victory and proceeded to require all delegates to sign a pledge supporting secession even if they had voted against it. One of the first things the new state of Georgia did was to pass a law that made dissent punishable by death.58
As hard as secessionists fought for popular support, and as aggressively as they suppressed dissent, they were nevertheless only partially successful. Four states in the upper South only seceded after Confederate forces fired on U.S. troops at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12. Even then, Virginia kept on stalling until, on April 17, Governor Henry Wise walked into the Virginia convention and took out his pistol and said that, by his order, Virginia was now at war with the federal government, and that if anyone wanted to shoot him for treason, they’d have to wrestle his pistol away from him first. The convention voted 88–55 to recommend secession. That went to the state’s electorate on May 23, which voted 125,950–20,373 in favor. Most who opposed it were in the western part of the state. In June, they held their own convention and effectively seceded from the state, to become West Virginia. Four more states in the upper South still refused to secede, even as the cords that tied the nation together were being cut. Telegraph wires were only just first stretching all the way across the American continent. The first message sent, from east to west, had read: “May the Union Be Perpetuated.” After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln ordered the telegraph wires connecting Washington to the South severed.59
By May of 1861, the Confederacy comprised fifteen states stretching over 900,000 square miles and containing 12 million people, including 4 million slaves, and 4 million white women who were disenfranchised. It rested on the foundational belief that a minority governs a majority. “The condition of slavery is with us nothing but a form of civil government for a class of people not fit to govern themselves,” said Jefferson Davis.60
The Civil War inaugurated a new kind of war, with giant armies wielding unstoppable machines, as if monsters with scales of steel had been let loose on the land to maul and maraud, and to eat even the innocent. When the war began, both sides expected it to be limited and brief. Instead, it was vast and long, four brutal, wretched years of misery on a scale never before seen. In campaigns of singular ferocity, 2.1 million Northerners battled 880,000 Southerners in more than two hundred battles. More than 750,000 Americans died. Twice as many died from disease as from wounds. They died in heaps; they were buried in pits. Fewer than 2,000 Americans had died in battle during the entire War with Mexico. In a single battle of the Civil War, at Shiloh, Tennessee, in 1862, there were 24,000 casualties. Soldiers were terrified of being left behind or lost among the unnamed, unburied, unremembered dead. One soldier from South Carolina wrote home: “I have a horror of being thrown out in a neglected place or bee trampled on.” On battlefields, the dead and dying were found clutching photographs of their wives and children. After yet another slaughter, Union general Ulysses S. Grant said a man could walk across the battlefield in any direction, as far as he could see, without touching the ground but only the dead.61
Fields where once waved stalks of corn and wheat yielded harvests of nothing but suffering and death or, falling fallow, nothing but graves. All of this, each misery, its grand scale, for the first time in history, was captured on camera, archived, displayed, exhibited. A thousand photographers produced hundreds of thousands of photographs on battlefield after battlefield. After the first major battle fought in the North, in Maryland—the worst day in American military history, with 26,000 Confederate and Union soldiers killed, wounded, captured, or missing—Mathew Brady, in his National Photographic Portrait Gallery, on the corner of New York’s Tenth Street and Broadway, opened The Dead of Antietam, an exhibit of photographs of the carnage taken by a Scottish immigrant named Alexander Gardner. “Mr. BRADY has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war,” the New York Times reported. “If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.”62
Alexander Gardner, another kind of sharpshooter, took this photograph of a dead Confederate sharpshooter at Gettysburg. On a scorched Wednesday, July 1, 1863, the turning point in the war came at the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. By the third day of fighting, each side had lost more than 20,000 men, and the Confederate general, the fifty-six-year-old Virginian Robert E. Lee, began his retreat. Five thousand horses, fallen, were burned to stop their rotting, the smoke of those fires mingling with the steam that rose from the fetid remains of unburied men. Samuel Wilkeson, a reporter for the New York Times, went to report on the battle and found that his oldest son, a lieutenant, had been wounded in the leg and had died after his surgeons abandoned him when Confederates neared the barn where they were attempting an amputation. On July 4, America’s eighty-seventh birthday, Wilkeson buried his son and filed his report. “O, you dead, who died at Gettysburg have baptized with your blood the second birth of freedom in America,” he wrote in agony, before supplying his readers with a list of the dead and wounded.63 The next day, Alexander Gardner and two of his team showed up with their cameras and took shots from which Gardner made some eighty-seven photographs, a field of ghosts. They lay in trenches, they lay on hilltops; they lay between trees, they lay atop rocks.
Gardner gathered them together in a book of the dead, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, America’s first book of photographs. Gardner had been an abolitionist, and the book included photographs of the dead and dying but it included, too, scenes of towns and streets and scenes that told the story of slavery. On a brick building of a trading house was printed: “Price, Birch & Co. Dealers in Slaves.” Gardner titled it Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia.64 Gardner was a Union soldier, his camera his weapon.
Four months after the carnage, Lincoln set out for Gettysburg. Thousands of bodies had lain, barely covered by dirt; hogs rutting in the fields had dug up arms and legs and heads. But with caskets provided by the War Department, the corpses had been uncovered, sorted, and catalogued; a third had been reburied, the rest waited. Lincoln had been invited to dedicate their burial. After an eighty-mile train ride, he arrived in Pennsylvania at dusk to find coffins still stacked at the station. The next morning, still in mourning for his own young son, he rode at the head of a march of one hundred men astride horses. The oration that day was given by Edward Everett. Lincoln, offering a dedication, spoke for a mere three minutes. With a scant 272 words, delivered slowly in his broad Kentucky accent, he renewed the American experiment.65
He spoke first of the dead: “We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.” But a cemetery is not only for the dead, he said:
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.6
6
He did not mention slavery. There would be those, after the war ended, who said that it had been fought over states’ rights or to preserve the Union or for a thousand other reasons and causes. Soldiers, North and South, knew better. “The fact that slavery is the sole undeniable cause of this infamous rebellion, that it is a war of, by, and for Slavery, is as plain as the noon-day sun,” a soldier writing for his Wisconsin regimental newspaper explained in 1862. “Any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks,” a soldier writing for his Confederate brigade’s newspaper wrote that same year, “is either a fool or a liar.”67 By then, the emancipation had begun.
III.
IT WAS AN American Odyssey. “They came at night, when the flickering camp-fires shone like vast unsteady stars along the black horizon,” W. E. B. Du Bois later wrote, “old men, and thin, with gray and tufted hair; women with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt.”68 They came, too, in daylight, and on horseback, by wagon and cart. They clambered aboard trains. They packed food and stole guns. They walked and they ran and they rode, carrying their children on their backs, dedicating themselves to the unfinished work of the nation: freeing themselves.