Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  221 And though higher: For preparations for counting and burying the dead and for tending the wounded, as inaugurated by Bull Run, see Drew Gilpin Faust’s excellent This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).

  222 “The South was proud”: Douglas, I Rode with Stonewall, 11–12.

  CHAPTER 10: BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM

  223 “Either slavery is essential”: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Ordeal by Battle,” The Atlantic Monthly 8 (July 1861), 94.

  223 “not waged upon”: Quoted in Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 36.

  224 “From the instant”: John Quincy Adams, Speech of the Honorable John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives, May 25, 1836 (New York: H. R. Piercy, 1836), 15.

  225 “Shall they [Confederates] be allowed”: Benjamin F. Butler, Private and Personal Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler During the Period of the Civil War, vol. 1 (Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1917), 106.

  225 “did not affect”: Benjamin F. Butler, Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin F. Butler: Butler’s Book (Boston: A. M. Thayer, 1892), 258. See also OR, vol. 2 (May 25, 1861), 649.

  225 “Our troops could not act”: Ibid., 650.

  225 “contraband of war”: Ibid.

  225 “bad one”: Butler, Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin F. Butler, 259.

  225 “increased the dilemma”: “Negroes Taking Refuge at Fortress Monroe,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 8, 1861, 55; see also Edward L. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe,” The Atlantic Monthly 8 (November 1861), 627.

  226 “$60,000 worth of them”: Butler, Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin F. Butler, 258.

  226 “the slave question . . . stumbling-block”: Ibid., 259.

  226 “The venerable gentleman”: Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe,” 627.

  226 “one might reverently”: Butler, Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin F. Butler, 293.

  227 “Our troops have not”: Allan Nevins, The War for the Union: The Improvised War, 1861–1862, vol. 1 (New York: Scribner’s, 1959), 312.

  228 “You had as well attack”: Joshua F. Speed to Abraham Lincoln, Sept. 3, 1861, Abraham Lincoln Papers, LC.

  228 “awkward tact”: Quoted in John Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay, ed. Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 123.

  228 “quite a female politician”: Pamela Herr and Mary Lee Spence, eds., The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 246; see also Frederick J. Blue, No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Anti-Slavery Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 258.

  229 “the abolition horde in the north”: Virginia Jeans Laas, ed., Wartime Washington: The Civil War Letters of Elizabeth Blair Lee (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 86.

  229 “without the statesman’s tact”: John Greenleaf Whittier, The Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, vol. 3 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), 222.

  229 “How many times”: James Russell Lowell, The Complete Writings of James Russell Lowell, vol. 15, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), 63.

  229 “was accomplishing much good”: Orville H. Browning to Abraham Lincoln, Sept. 17, 1861, Abraham Lincoln Papers, LC.

  229 Regardless, abolition was still unthinkable: See G. S. Boritt, “The Voyage to the Colony of Lincolnia: The Sixteenth President, Black Colonization, and the Defense Mechanism of Avoidance,” The Historian 37 (August 1975), 619.

  229 “Why, oh why”: Quoted in Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 3, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 286; see also David W. Blight, “The Bugbear of Civilization,” Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 122; and Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, 139.

  230 Though Lincoln’s plan: The historian Eric Foner calls it “a bold initiative”; see Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 183.

  230 In early 1862: For two fine discussions of the Delaware legislative proposal and Lincoln’s subsequent, almost naive, appeal to Congress, see Foner, The Fiery Trial, and Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

  230 “These terms are milestones”: Edward L. Pierce, “The Freedmen at Port Royal,” The Atlantic Monthly 12 (September 1863), 291.

  230 But when they set to music: See Robert Penn Warren, John Greenleaf Whittier’s Poetry: An Appraisal and a Selection (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), and Samuel T. Pickard, Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 467–68.

  230 “I am fighting to preserve”: George B. McClellan, The Civil War Papers of General George McClellan, 1861–1865, ed. Stephen W. Sears (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989), 128.

  231 “no terms except”: See, e.g., William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 101.

  231 “It was as if General McClellan”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Chiefly about War Matters,” The Atlantic Monthly 10 (July 1862), 45.

  232 “the brain of Lee”: John Hay, Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries and Letters of John Hay, ed. Tyler Dennett (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1939), 89.

  233 “The watchword”: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “The Ordeal by Battle,” The Atlantic Monthly 8 (July 1861), 95.

  234 “Colored men were good enough”: “A Black Man on the War,” New-York Tribune, Feb. 13, 1862, 7.

  234 “It is as clearly a right” : Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America, during the Great Rebellion (Washington, D.C.: Philip & Solomons, 1871), 294.

  234 “Every negro ought to”: Henry James, Sr., to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, July 30 [1862], Mann Papers, Courtesy Antioch College.

  234 “deep as a well”: James R. Gilmore, Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War (Boston: L. C. Page, 1898), 44.

  235 “John Brown IS a-marching”: George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 3, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 216.

  236 Inspired by Hunter’s proclamation: For information on Robert Smalls, see Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), and more recently, the well-narrated Philip Dray, Capitol Men (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008). See also “Letter from the Negro Robert Smalls,” The Liberator, Sept. 12, 1862, 148.

  236 “for the ‘old fetters’ ”: Quoted in Edward A. Miller, Jr., Lincoln’s Abolitionist General: The Biography of David Hunter (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), 101.

  236 “Gen. Hunter is an honest man”: Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859–1865, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Library of America, 1989), 341.

  237 “Broken eggs cannot be mended”: Ibid., 347.

  237 “Neither confiscation of property”: George B. McClellan, “The Army of the Potomac: General McClellan’s Report,” The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events, with Documents, Narratives, Illustrative Incidents, Poetry, Etc.—Supplement, vol. 1, ed. Frank Moore (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1864), 596.

  238 “Do you know Pope is a humbug”: Charles Frances Adams, A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), 177.

  238 “in danger of utter demoralization”: Ibid., 178.

  238 “I rather think many”: Rachel Sherman Thorndike, ed., The Sherman Letters: The Correspondence between William Tecumseh Sherman and John Sherman from 1837 to 1891 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), 164–66.

/>   238 “We must free the slaves”: Gideon Welles, “The History of Emancipation,” The Galaxy 14 (December 1872), 842.

  239 “I think that the best”: Bell Irvin Wiley, Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 109.

  239 “the perversion of the war”: Quoted in Horace Greeley, The American Conflict: A History of the Great Rebellion in the United States of America 1860–’64, vol. 2 (Hartford: O. D. Case, 1867), 254.

  239 “military necessity”: Quoted in James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), 91.

  239 “All of that old abolition”: James Robert Gilmore, “Our War and Our Want,” Continental Monthly 1 (February 1862), 114.

  239 “the Rebellion, if crushed out”: Horace Greeley, “Prayer of Twenty Millions,” New-York Tribune, August 20, 1862.

  240 “My paramount object”: Lincoln, Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859–1865, 358.

  240 “Was ever a more heartless”: The Liberator, Sept. 5, 1862, quoted in McPherson, The Struggle for Equality, 117.

  241 “arm, uniform, equip”: OR, ser. 1, vol. 14, Aug. 25, 1862, 377–78.

  241 This was an anomalous position: See Charlotte Forten Grimké, The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, ed. Brenda Stevenson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 405.

  242 “from the dull and tedious”: James Branch Cabell and A. J. Hanna, The St. Johns: A Parade of Diversities (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1943), 208.

  242 “intensely human”: See Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 125.

  242 “sucks everything”: Oliver Wendell Holmes, “My Hunt after ‘The Captain,’ ” The Atlantic Monthly 10 (December 1862), 743.

  243 “The carnage was frightful”: John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, vol. 6 (New York: Century Co., 1890), 140.

  244 To conceive of his proclamation: Benjamin H. Hill, Senator Benjamin H. Hill of Georgia: His Life, Speeches and Writings, ed. Benjamin H. Hill, Jr. (Atlanta: T. H. P. Bloodworth, 1893), 573.

  244 “The President can do nothing”: William Lloyd Garrison, The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison: Let the Oppressed Go Free, ed. Walter M. Merrill (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), 114–115.

  244 General McClellan insisted: James Alexander Scrymser, Personal Reminiscences of James A. Scrymser in Times of Peace and War (New York: James A. Scrymser, 1915), 36–38.

  244 In Europe, the response: See Martin Duberman, Charles Francis Adams, 1807–1886 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 299.

  244 “the Emancipation Proclamation”: Quoted in James McPherson, “The Saratoga That Wasn’t: Confederate Recognition and the Effect of Antietam Abroad,” Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory Thomas, ed. Lesley J. Gordon and John C. Inscoe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 105.

  244 “of being taken back”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Miscellanies, vol. 11, ed. Edward W. Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), 319.

  244 “We have recovered ourselves”: Ibid., 320.

  245 “There is now no possible hope”: OR, ser. 1, vol. 24, pt. 3, March 31, 1863, 157.

  245 “My Country, ’Tis of Thee”: Elizabeth Pearson Ware, ed., Letters from Port Royal, 1862–1868 (Boston: W. B. Clarke and Co., 1906), 130; see also “Higginson’s Black Brigade,” Springfield Republican, Jan. 1, 1863, 1.

  246 “Our negro troops”: Quoted in Wineapple, White Heat, 135.

  246 “At last the North”: Samuel Longfellow, ed., The Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with Extracts from His Journals and Correspondence, vol. 3 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 22.

  247 A tall, thin man: See Robert Gould Shaw, Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Robert Gould Shaw, ed. Russell Duncan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 356.

  247 “It was as abominable”: Quoted in Lydia Minturn Post, ed., Soldiers’ Letters, from Camp, Battle-field and Prison (New York: Bunce & Huntington, 1865), 252. I have also told the story of the Massachusetts 54th in White Heat, chapter 7, and the following section is taken from that book.

  247 “This indiscriminate burning”: Quoted in Wineapple, White Heat, 136.

  247 “Then you die”: George Crockett Strong to Benjamin Franklin Butler, June 29, 1863, in Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, during the Period of the Civil War, vol. 3 (Springfield, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1917), 94.

  247 “had done it to white soldiers”: Quoted in Wineapple, White Heat, 136.

  247 “Do not think this rapid organization”: Ibid.

  248 “We presume too much”: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, letter to the editor, The New York Times, February 21, 1864, 5; see also Higginson, “Appendix D,” Army Life in a Black Regiment, and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 1997), 222. See also Higginson, Massachusetts in the Army and Navy during the War of 1861–1865, vol. 1 (Boston: Wright Potter, 1895), 83, and Higginson, “The Shaw Memorial and the Sculptor St. Gaudens III. Colored Troops under Fire,” Century 54 (June 1897), 194.

  248 The physician serving: “Letters of Dr. Seth Rogers,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 43 (February 1910), 346.

  248 Higginson’s and Montgomery’s regiments: See, e.g., Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “The First Black Regiment,” Outlook 59 (July 2, 1898), 521.

  248 “Well I guess we will”: Shaw, Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune, 51.

  CHAPTER 11: THIS THING NOW NEVER SEEMS TO STOP

  250 “When you meet people”: Mary Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 370.

  251 unity of Southern interests: Douglas Southall Freeman and Richard Barksdale Howell, Lee: An Abridgment in One Volume of the Four-Volume “R. E. Lee” by Douglas Southall Freeman (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 105.

  251 “I could take no part”: Rev. J. William Jones, Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of Gen. Robert E. Lee (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1875), 141.

  251 “He moves his agencies”: Quoted in Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Vintage, 1993), 235.

  251 “Confederate hero par excellence”: Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 428.

  251 “I always thought we ought”: Thomas J. Jackson, The Life and Letters of General Thomas J. Jackson, ed. Mary Anna Jackson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1892), 310.

  252 “otherwise rational men proposed”: E. M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 134.

  253 “These people seem, indeed”: Edward L. Pierce, “The Freedmen at Port Royal,” The Atlantic Monthly 12 (September 1863), 295.

  253 “we forget there”: Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 428.

  253 “lamentable incapacity”: William J. Cooper, Jr., Jefferson Davis, American (New York: Vintage, 2001), 411.

  253 “the mob”: Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 288.

  254 There were some exceptions: See Albert Burton Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York: Hillary House, 1963).

  254 Twenty Negro Act: Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865, 134.

  254 “bloodless spade”: “A Cry to Arms,” Charleston Mercury and Daily Courier, March 4, 1862.

  254 “endless field”: Henry Timrod, “The Cotton-Boll,” in War Poetry of the South, ed. William Gilmore Simms (New York: Richardson and Co., 1866), 315.

  255 “vaunt over our heads”: Edward A. Pollard, “Hints on Southern Civilization,” Southern Literary Messenger 32 (April 1861), 310.

  255 “Are we to bend”: John L. O’Sullivan, “Close the Ranks,” in War Poetry of the South, 188–89.

  255 “sacred sands”: Henry Timrod, “Carolina,” in War Poetry of the South, 113.

  255 “ten times ten”: Ibid
., 115.

  255 “Avenge the patriot gore”: James Ryder Randall, “Maryland, My Maryland,” in Poets of the Civil War, 179.

  255 “codfish poltroons”: Quoted in Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 239.

  256 “species of demon”: Royster, The Destructive War, 44.

  256 “We should be”: Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures, and Letters (Boston: James Redpath, 1863), 540.

  257 “Nothing here nowadays”: Laura Stedman and George M. Gould, eds., The Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman, vol. 1 (New York: Moffatt, Yard, 1910), 260.

  257 Fat generals: See Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches (Boston: James Redpath, 1863), 78.

  257 “I must say I cannot”: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Civil War in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 259.

  257 Burnside was dubious: See James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 570.

  258 “It seemed foolhardy”: George F. Williams, Bullet and Shell: War as the Soldier Saw It (New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert, 1884), 114–15.

  258 “They want us to get in”: Frank Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events, vol. 6 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1863), 98.

  259 “A chicken could not live”: James Longstreet, “The Battle of Fredericksburg,” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. 3, ed. Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel (New York: Century Company, 1884), 79.

  259 “We might as well”: G. H. Washburn, A Complete Military History and Record of the 108th Regiment N.Y. Vols., from 1862 to 1894 (Rochester: E. R. Andrews, 1894), 27.

  259 “coming up in succession”: Darius N. Couch, “Sumner’s ‘Right Grand Division,’ ” in Johnson and Buel, Battles and Leaders, vol. 3, 113.

  259 “The spectacle we saw”: Longstreet, “The Battle of Fredericksburg,” 79.

  259 “It can hardly be”: Moore, The Rebellion Record, vol. 6, 100.

  259 This was no battle: See Hannah Ropes, Civil War Nurse: The Diaries and Letters of Hannah Ropes, ed. John R. Brumgardt (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), 114.