Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  Davis authorized Kenner to go incognito to Europe and to offer France and England, in return for recognition and aid, the promise to end slavery. Mary Chesnut scoffed. “Abolish slavery to propitiate England. What does she care?”

  Wearing a fake beard and a chocolate-colored wig to cover his light hair and perceptible baldness, under the name of A. B. Kinglake, Kenner made his way to New York, where he boarded a German ship. Bearing false papers and coded messages and speaking only French, he presented Emperor Napoleon III his offer, but the monarch wasn’t interested in the issue of slavery; nor would France act alone—and Britain’s prime minister, Lord Palmerston, had already turned Kenner down. Britain did not want a war with the United States. The United States was obviously winning its own war—news of Sherman taking Atlanta had reached London—and in any case it had just passed the Thirteenth Amendment.

  Slavery’s death knell was ringing.

  DOUBTLESS THE PASSAGE of the Thirteenth Amendment had increased the pressure on the wan and fretful Jefferson Davis. “Send us protection in the shape of our sons & husbands and we will send you able bodied negroes,” Southern women begged him. With desertions rising and morale falling, with men so malnourished that a slight wound would kill them, with wives and sisters left to tend what was left of shuttered homes and neglected fields, by the middle of March even the Richmond papers were running advertisements for the recruiting of black troops.

  Perhaps more than anyone, Robert E. Lee understood the need. He was on the field, and, as in the North, on the field, numbers mattered. The Federal army could and did recruit former slaves—whom it freed—and in so doing increased its size, while Lee’s army was growing smaller, thinner, frailer. “I think, therefore, we must decide whether slavery shall be extinguished by our enemies and the slaves be used against us,” Lee reasoned, “or use them ourselves at the risk of the effects which may be produced upon our social institutions. My own opinion is that we should employ them without delay.” The enlistment of black soldiers, Lee concluded, would revitalize the military and would give the South, at last, a political advantage over the North “that would result to our cause from the adoption of a system of emancipation.” Freedom should thus be granted those black men—and their immediate families—who fought for the Confederacy.

  Charleston Mercury editor Robert Barnwell Rhett might lampoon General Lee as a closet abolitionist, but the issue of impressing black troops really did cut to the heart of the Confederate cause. Representative Thomas S. Gholson of Virginia, a member of the Second Confederate Congress (it was seated in the spring of 1864), bluntly declared, “By the conscription of slaves, we shall surrender every ground, assumed by us on the subject, at the commencement of the war.” Warren Akin, also a member of the Second Confederate Congress, wondered whether calling “forth the negroes into the army, with the promise of freedom, will . . . not be giving up the great question involved by doing the very thing Lincoln is now doing.” It was a serious problem.

  Howell Cobb was in a rage. “The proposition to make soldiers of our slaves is the most pernicious idea that has been suggested since the war began,” he said. Promoted to major general in the Confederate army, he was organizing volunteers—white volunteers, not black—in Georgia. “It is to me a source of deep mortification and regret to see the name of that good and great man and soldier, General R. E. Lee, given as authority for such a policy.” Presciently, he added, “The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”

  “It is the desperate remedy for the very desperate case,” sighed a clerk in the Confederate War Department. Increasingly frantic—after all, the institution of slavery had been written into their constitution—the Confederacy had to confront the unthinkable at last. For the issue of enlisting slaves as soldiers had come up before. It had been proposed by Kenner himself and also by Thomas Hindman’s law partner and friend, Major General Patrick Cleburne, the well-respected Irish-born soldier regarded—in the North as well as the South—as one of the finest division commanders in the Army of the Tennessee. In late 1863, Cleburne had written a memorandum, signed by several brigade and regimental commanders, recommending that slaves be enlisted in the armed forces and that, further, any slave who fought for the Confederacy until the end of the war should be freed and that his family be freed. Such a step would bring to the Confederate army the increased manpower it badly needed, he reasoned. In fact, it might even shorten the duration of the war once the Confederacy clearly and without ambivalence fought for nationhood and not to perpetuate slavery. “Slavery, from being one of our chief sources of strength at the commencement of the war,” he had cogently argued, “has now become, in a military point of view, one of our chief sources of weakness.”

  Cleburne also thought that enlisting black men as soldiers with the promise of their future freedom would strengthen the position of those Copperheads in the North weary of the war and ready for peace. But he encountered virulent opposition from division commanders, who called his idea, as one of them stormed, “revolting to Southern sentiment, Southern pride, and Southern honor.” Cleburne’s memorandum was forwarded to Jefferson Davis, who ignored it, and Cleburne, despite his demonstrated skill as a leader, was quietly denied promotion.

  Years later, Cleburne’s commanding officer, John Bell Hood, praised him as being “in advance of many of our people. He possessed the boldness and the wisdom to earnestly advocate, at an early period of the war, the freedom of the negro and the enrollment of the young and able-bodied men of that race. This stroke of policy and additional source of strength to our Armies, would, in my opinion, have given us our independence.”

  Cleburne was killed in the fall of 1864 while fighting under Hood in the futile and horrific Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, during which there were almost 7,000 Confederate casualties—and five generals lost. (He’d opposed the attack as suicidal.) “And how could man die better / Than facing fearful odds,” Mary Chesnut wrote, quoting Thomas Macaulay’s “Horatius at the Bridge,” on learning of Cleburne’s death. “The deep waters are closing over us,” she shuddered.

  FORMER FIRE-EATERS, SLAVEHOLDERS, and many of those committed to the peculiar institution remained indignant. Yet as the proslavery Warren Akin acidly noted, those who opposed arming the slaves were mainly the planters. “Have you ever noticed the strange conduct of our people during this war? They give up their sons, husbands, brothers & friends, and often without murmuring, to the army; but let one of their negroes be taken, and what a howl you will hear. The love of money has been the greatest difficulty in our way to independence.”

  Yet the die was cast. So Jefferson Davis, along with Lee, urged the governor of Virginia to raise black troops by promising “to seek legislation to secure unmistakable freedom to the slave, who shall enter the army, with a right to return to his old home when he shall have been honorably discharged from military service.” Fort Fisher had fallen, Sherman was relentless, Grant was single-minded, Lee’s forces were shrinking, peace efforts had failed, Europe had turned its back. On March 13, 1865, the Confederate Congress passed a Negro enlisting bill, authorizing what had been unthinkable even just a few months earlier, the recruitment of able-bodied black men into the military—with the permission of their owners, of course—for the duration of the war.

  Though the law pointedly did not mention freedom or gradual emancipation for the black man or his immediate family, congressmen such as Gholson of Virginia continued to oppose the measure. “What is this but abolition?” he fumed. He was not wrong. Making a slave a soldier would create, as it had in the North, a revolution. “You may make a soldier out of a slave, very readily,” Thomas Higginson had recently said, “but you can no more make a slave out of a soldier than you can replace a bird in the egg.”

  Jefferson Davis promised putative freedom to those who enlisted—as if to say, grudgingly, that slaves were not property but human beings who needed t
o be treated as such or at least to be treated as such until the war ended. On March 23, Davis signed the army’s General Order No. 14, maintaining, “No slave will be accepted as a recruit unless with his own consent and with the approbation of his master by a written instrument conferring, as far as he may, the rights of a freedman.” Davis called on the states for 300,000 more soldiers. Few came, and none of the black soldiers fought; the war would end too soon for that. Regardless, the linchpin of the Confederate cause—as it had been articulated in 1861—could no longer be slavery. As the Charleston Mercury observed, “Assert the right in the Confederate Government to emancipate slaves, and it is stone dead.”

  That meant Howell Cobb had been right—if slaves make good soldiers, the whole theory of slavery is wrong. Cobb’s point must be that only men can be good soldiers, and if a slave can be a soldier, he must be a man, a person. The Confederacy was proving just that—that slaves were persons—by turning to them and asking for their assistance, although the request came mostly in the form of a demand.

  By admitting that the slave could fight and die for a cause and that if he did so he deserved to be free, the Confederacy could no longer logically argue that it fought to defend slavery. Neither could it fall back on the ideology of states’ rights. If the individual Confederate states didn’t fill enlistment quotas, President Davis was authorized to “call on each State, whenever he thinks it expedient, for her quota of 300,000 troops, in addition to those subject to military service under existing laws.” By doing that, though, the president was overreaching his authority, wasn’t he? The struggle between local and centralized power had long unsettled the Confederacy, and it opened Davis to criticism, condemnation, hostility, and intrigue.

  So now the Confederate States of America was running headlong into the question of how it might endure or prevail. No one knew. As Sherman marched inexorably eastward to meet the obdurate Grant, the South’s “peculiar institution” was doomed from within and perhaps so too the very notion of the Confederacy as a group of independent states.

  THE TEXAS CAVALRY in Virginia, once 5,000 men strong, now numbered only 180. Varina Davis, the president’s wife, sold the family furniture at auction and left the city with her children. Certain Richmond ladies offered their silver and their jewelry to raise money for the troops. Bridesmaids wore black. On Clay Street in Richmond the residents hung out red banners to indicate that their belongings were for sale or their houses could be rented by the highest bidder. Bacon sold for $20 a pound; ditto butter. New black troops marched through the city as if on display. And the chilly rumor about town was that Grant had a total of 200,000 men under the commands of Sherman, Thomas, Sheridan, and himself, and they were soon to converge on Richmond.

  On the evening of March 24, the Confederates were preparing to break the Union line around Petersburg by attacking Fort Stedman. It was another of Lee’s bold assaults. He hoped that he could withdraw some of his entrenched troops from Petersburg and send them to reinforce Joe Johnston in the North Carolina hills so that Johnston might attack Sherman before Sherman reached Grant. It was the desperate measure of desperate men. The night before the attack, to be led by General John B. Gordon, Gordon’s wife stayed up late tearing strips of white cloth so the soldiers could identify each other during the confusing fog of battle, when blues and grays and butternut brown all merged together in the haze. The next day, Gordon’s men hurled themselves at Fort Stedman. The Union line stayed intact. Lee lost 5,000 soldiers he could not spare as well as General A. P. Hill, who was killed. A few days later, on April 1, in the battles that culminated at the intersection called Five Forks, Sheridan and his 12,000 cavalrymen helped deliver a blow to Confederate forces under General George Pickett, who, because he and several other officers had been to a traditional Virginian shad bake, arrived late on the scene. One Southern cavalry officer called Five Forks the Waterloo of the Confederacy.

  Grant, who had 120,000 troops outside Petersburg, had effectively sliced what was left of Lee’s brave army in half. Lee ordered an evacuation of the city and on April 2 telegraphed Davis that Richmond also had to be evacuated.

  On that mild Sunday morning, Davis was sitting in his pew at the fashionable St. Paul’s Episcopal. Guns boomed in the distance as the pale man with the sunken face solemnly walked out of the church, saying nothing, after reading the telegram from Lee. By afternoon, word was all over town. Women dressed in black stood in doorways and wept. At about eleven that night, bound for Danville, Virginia, Davis and members of his government boarded special trains at the depot. Always effervescent and waving his cigar, Judah Benjamin tried to cheer his friends by talking about other great causes that had seemed lost—but that had, at the last minute, been rescued by the unforeseen. Some chance event or deus ex machina would save the Confederacy yet.

  The exodus from Richmond told a different story. People fled the city on horses, on mules, on foot. Those who stayed ran through the streets, clutching one another as the air turned blue-black, Mary Chesnut wrote. Tobacco warehouses, public buildings, flour mills had all burst into flame, set afire by retreating graycoats headed by the one-legged General Ewell. Federal soldiers not far from the Confederate capital heard a sound like thunder just seconds before the blaze lit the darkness and rockets shot deep into the night sky. Exploding magazines destroyed what was left of the armory building. A south wind fanned the flames. Newspaper offices and banks were burned to a crisp. Piles of brick and broken glass cluttered the streets. “Secession was burned out,” said Thomas Morris Chester, the thirty-year-old black war correspondent who wrote for The Philadelphia Press, “and the city purified as far as fire could accomplish it.”

  Union troops riding into the city the next morning felt as though they were entering the crater of an active volcano. Their mission was to save the burning city from itself—from the mobs of stragglers and escaped convicts and now-freed slaves roaming the streets, looting what was left of stores and homes, swiping cotton goods and tobacco, shoes, furniture, military clothing, whatever could be carried. Reporters coming into the city noted that Capitol Square “was filled with furniture, beds, clothing, crockery, chairs, tables, looking-glasses. Women were weeping, children crying. Men stood speechless, haggard, woebegone.” The journalist George Alfred Townsend, who ambled through the devastated Richmond at twilight, wrote, “There is no sound of life, but the stillness of the catacomb, only as our footsteps fall dull on the deserted sidewalk, and a funeral troop of echoes bump their elfin heads against the dead walls and closed shutters to reply, and this is Richmond. Says a melancholy voice: ‘And this is Richmond.’ ”

  One Federal brigade, along with a black drum corps, had played “Yankee Doodle” and “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” and black men and women cried “Glory to God! Glory to God!” or “You’ve come at last” and “Have you come to stay?” Still, one Federal officer told a Richmond resident that Northerners did not like Negroes any more than he did.

  While struggling to put out the fires and establish some sense of order, Richmond’s mayor, Joseph Mayo, surrendered the keys to the city to Generals Charles Devens and Godfrey Weitzel. It was an ironic moment: as a soldier, Devens had fought bravely at Ball’s Bluff, Fair Oaks, and Chancellorsville and during the battle of Cold Harbor commanded his troops from a stretcher, but in 1851, Devens, then a federal marshal in Boston, had returned Thomas Sims, a fugitive slave, to captivity, earning the scorn of the abolitionists.

  A teacher at West Point before the war, Godfrey Weitzel was in charge of the 25th Corps (Colored) Infantry; Richmond citizens thought it impolitic to have so many black troops in their city.

  Lincoln had to see it all for himself. He talked with Grant the next day, April 3, in the splintered city of Petersburg, and he visited the fallen capital of the Confederacy twice. Though Admiral David Porter was on the lookout for snipers, thousands of black men and women greeted him. Doffing his big hat, he bowed to the black population thronging about him. The owners of the Richmond slave pens h
ad thrown open the doors and told the men and women they were free, but they couldn’t believe it until they saw the president with their own eyes. “I know I am free,” said one elderly woman, “for I have seen Father Abraham and felt him.” Later, the new military governor of Richmond recalled how sad the president had looked, touched and sorrowful, at the outpouring of gratitude and relief—and commenting on how many black men and women “bore the traces of a mixed lineage,” he saw as if for the first time that black and white were not easily separated and had never been.

  WITH LITTLE TO eat but parched corn, Lee still hoped to join General Johnston, whose ranks had shrunk to 16,000. Lee was grim. In the scurry of departure, he’d taken no supply trains with him and hoped against hope to find food and ammunition for his men at Amelia Court House, thirty-five miles west of Richmond, when they arrived on April 4. There was virtually none of either.

  Sheridan had ridden south of the Appomattox River to cut off Lee and his men from the railroad, and two days later, he hit Lee. On April 6, at Sayler’s Creek, located midway between Petersburg and Appomattox Court House, the cavalryman George Armstrong Custer of the wide-rimmed hat captured more than 6,000 of Lee’s small force, including General Ewell. “The Confederate rear was crushed to fragments,” recalled General Longstreet. When Lee heard the news, Longstreet remembered, Lee cried out, “My God! Has the Army been dissolved?”

  At Appomattox Court House, John B. Gordon and his tattered troops valiantly—and fruitlessly—tried to stop Sheridan.

  The Confederate situation was hopeless, Grant reckoned. He wrote to Lee on April 7 to say that he wished “to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood, by asking of you the surrender of that portion of the C. S. Army known as the Army of Northern Virginia.” Longstreet was with Lee when the latter read the note. Lee passed it to him. “Not yet,” replied Longstreet. Lee answered Grant, asking what terms he was offering. Grant said that there were none save giving up arms against the U.S. government. The two generals were circling each other. Lee would talk peace but not surrender; Grant had no authority to talk anything but surrender. Grant sent another note while General Meade battered the Confederate rear guard. Sheridan struck the railroad at Appomattox station and seized four supply trains. Lee’s horses were by then so weak they couldn’t haul guns.