American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  From a tower above the center of the Confederate position, Captain Edward Alexander could see men streaming to the rear, and others hurrying forward, as the two sides fought amidst the wrecked Union batteries. Then, off to the southwest edge of the fight, he could see a great cloud of dust raised by a fresh unit marching toward the sound and the fury. Was it Union or friendly? As he watched a shell burst over the northern lines. The blue-clad troops recoiled before the fresh onslaught. It was Kirby Smith’s brigade, just arrived from the Shenandoah. They had marched right from their trains into battle.

  The Union soldiers, exhausted from fourteen hours of marching and fighting, now outnumbered and outflanked, had had enough. With little panic—but with little stopping—the Northerners retreated back across Bull Run. Some officers tried to hold them back with drawn sabers, to no avail. In a few places the retreat began to turn into a mad rout. Fearful that the rebels were right on their heels—actually, Beauregard’s men were themselves too exhausted and bloodied to follow—the Union soldiers streamed toward Washington, meeting political celebrities and sightseers who had come to watch the rout of the rebels. The powder-begrimed soldiers became locked in a hellish traffic jam with the civilians, whose spotless carriages were laden with fashionable ladies and sumptuous picnic lunches. The army’s retreat ended after a few miles, but the sightseers dashed back to the capital with wild tales of disaster.

  Beauregard was left in possession of the battlefield. It was a scene of carnage. The dead, a Confederate noted, were scattered for three miles along the battlefield. “The countenances & postures generally indicated the suffering of agonizing pain.…Clotted blood, in what had been pools, were under or by almost every corpse. From bullet holes in the heads of some, the brains had partly oozed out.” Men’s faces had turned black, save for white froth on their mouths; horses lay about, tangled in their own intestines; as survivors approached, fly-covered corpses seemed to come alive as the flies sprang off together in a grotesque caricature of the dead. A terrible stench hung over the field.

  Far from the battlefield, a wave of exultation swept through the South, while the sting of defeat produced shock, anger, and recriminations in the North. Horace Greeley, now castigated by his critics for his “Forward to Richmond” war cries in the Tribune, seemed to falter under the strain; he wrote Lincoln that after his “seventh sleepless night” he wondered if the Union could win, and that if the President felt it could not, he should ask for an armistice. Otherwise, “every drop of blood henceforth shed in this quarrel will be wantonly, wickedly shed, and the guilt will rest heavily on the soul of every promoter of the crime.….” Lincoln had lain awake too, on a sofa in the Executive Office, but he was already making plans for a broadening of the war effort.

  Southerners indulged in some braggadocio. A “few more Bull Run thrashings” would bring the Yankees “under the yoke,” said the Louisville Courier-Journal, “as docile as the most loyal of our Ethiopian chattels.” The Confederates paid a price for their victory, however. Having won what was greeted as the decisive battle of the war, many recruits refused to re-enlist. But this was only a temporary loss. Their main problems were far more serious—problems of organization and ideology.

  The difficulty was not simply that the Confederacy lacked adequate war factories, transport, medical supplies; this was partly made up by heroic effort and sacrifice, such as the donation of church bells to be recast into cannons. The trouble lay in a decentralized structure of government charged with prosecuting a war that increasingly demanded central direction and control. The Confederate constitution prohibited protective tariffs, spending for internal improvements, and export taxes, except by a two-thirds legislative majority, and it lacked a general welfare clause. Born and bred on the doctrine of states’ rights, the Southerners still took it very seriously. Thus, the governor of Florida charged that central control of the army would “sap the very foundation of the rights of states.” Davis’ astute War Secretary, Judah Benjamin, warned that the only way to defend the states was “by a concentration of common strength under one head.” But he was fiercely attacked for subverting the power of the states and for assuming dictatorial power.

  Nor was the central government itself organized for war. The Congress was weak, and prone to argue over trivialities. The Cabinet was not strong as a unit, and the few effective members were occasionally at odds with the military, as in the case of Benjamin’s altercations with both Johnston and Stonewall Jackson. Inevitably, Davis had to exercise strong presidential direction—even to the point of treating cabinet heads like clerks—only to be accused of “executive usurpation.” In fact, Davis had to share his executive powers with the state governors, who also interfered in military operations. It was not surprising that the Confederacy was slow in furnishing arms to its men and in raising revenue. The Treasury fueled inflation by issuing much printed money—money printed on paper smuggled through the Union lines.

  Behind a government in disarray lay an ideology in disarray. When the Southerners talked about defending their rights, they were referring to liberty in its various forms, constitutional, individual, local, sectional. All these liberties were defined negatively—as “leave us alone” against oppressive government, northern interference, and now the central Confederate government itself. Not only did the Southerners hold a limited and negative view of liberty, in common with most Americans of the day, and not only did their leaders offer little conception of the broad possibilities and creative dimensions of liberty, in common with virtually all intellectual leaders North and South; many Southerners confounded the problem even further by not comprehending the concessions they might have to make in wartime in order to protect even their own negative brand of liberty. Thus, libertarians railed against even Davis’ highly selective and limited suspensions of habeas corpus. “Away with the idea of getting independence first, and looking after liberty afterwards,” proclaimed Vice-President Stephens. “Our liberties once lost, may be lost forever.”

  The issue came to a head in the spring of 1862, when, after a string of military reversals and a lag in volunteering and re-enlisting, Davis called for conscription. The call touched the rawest nerves of the South. It would make “free-born citizens” the “vassals of the central power,” alleged Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia. The Conscription Act, though passed by the Confederate Congress by more than two to one in mid-April, “brought into the open the deadliest conflict within the Confederacy,” in Charles Roland’s words, “that of state rights as opposed to Southern nationalism.” Critics virtually equated individual, local, and states’ rights, all defined as liberty or freedom from.

  No one epitomized this confusion of thought better than Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina. Jealous of Davis, angry that he had been left out of the Cabinet after years of fighting for southern independence, Rhett from the start was critical of the President’s moderate policies. As time passed, he became increasingly strident in his attacks on what he characterized as the President’s trend toward executive usurpation and even military despotism. But Rhett wanted a stronger prosecution of the war and hence approved the presidential call for conscription. Essentially Rhett reflected the militance of South Carolinians, their pride at having led the way for the whole South, their fierce devotion both to liberty as they defined it and to Confederate victory as they envisaged it.

  And for a time it seemed that they and the rest of the Southerners would have both. In the summer of 1862 the Confederate Army under Lee’s leadership went on to a series of brilliant victories. It was not clear at the time how a small, hastily established confederation, with all its economic and social weaknesses and organizational and ideological divisions, could mobilize and sustain one of the most versatile and telling military forces known to that time. It was still something of a mystery a century later. Perhaps a clue lay in the rural heartland of the South, upper and lower. Out of that heartland had come the votes for Breckinridge, just as Lincoln’s votes sprang from the rur
al areas of the North. Out of that southern heartland came the farm boys hardened to the rough-and-ready life of the outdoors, accustomed to handling guns and horses and wagons, used to the ways of rutted roads and treacherous swamps, protecting a southern culture and way of life as compelling as it was unsettled, defending the land they loved and knowing the land they defended.

  MEN IN BLUE AND GRAY

  War is a great engine of change; the more nearly total the war, the faster and broader the flow of change tends to be. But the shape and texture of that change, economic, social, political, ideological, depends on human beings and how they respond to the “impersonal” forces streaming around them—whether they succumb or adjust to them, or try to guide or transcend or even transform them. Responding to change is a supreme test of leadership.

  A shift in the fortunes of war was all too evident to Abraham Lincoln as he looked out of the White House windows at the beaten and exhausted Union soldiers, swaying in their saddles or slumping down on the steps of houses, who trickled into Washington in the days after Bull Run. The crisis brought out the iron in Lincoln’s soul. “But the hour, the day, the night pass’d,” Walt Whitman wrote later. “The President, recovering himself, begins that very night—sternly, rapidly sets about the task of reorganizing his forces, and placing himself in the position for future and surer work.”

  The war had already forced Lincoln to adapt his operational ideas to new conditions. As a Whig congressman he had opposed Polk’s vigorous use of presidential power. “Were I President,” he had said, “I should desire the legislation of the country to rest with Congress, uninfluenced by the executive in its origin or progress.…” Now, as President, he turned the Whig conception of the presidency upside down. In the first few months he did not dominate Congress—he governed without it, by the simple expedient of failing to call the lawmakers back to Washington for a special session until many weeks after Sumter. During those intervening weeks he expanded the Army and Navy, called for more volunteers, raised and spent money, declared a blockade, and suspended habeas corpus. This “great democrat, the exponent of liberty and of government by the people,” said James Randall seventy-five years later, “was driven by circumstances to the use of more arbitrary power than perhaps any other President has seized.”

  But Lincoln knew what he was doing, and why. “Was it possible to lose the nation and yet preserve the Constitution?” he asked. “By general law, life and limb must be protected, yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb.” The President also knew that he would be charged with executive usurpation. He was so pleased when Anna Ella Carroll, daughter of a former Maryland governor, wrote a pamphlet upholding his executive authority and charging Congress with despotic tendencies, that he helped her publish it and put copies into the hands of senators and congressmen.

  By the time Congress met in late July, the impact of Bull Run united executive and legislature at least for a time. In seventy-six public acts in twenty-nine working days, Congress passed legislation of unprecedented scope, authorizing an army of one-half million troops and a budget of over $300 million. Lincoln had the support of some powerful senators pressing for a stronger prosecution of the war. With every military setback their voices became louder. Douglas had already helped rally Democrats behind the war in this, his last and finest hour, and had gone home to die; his support of the Union and the war effort had left a standard for others in his party to follow. In the House the blunt, salty Thaddeus Stevens, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, exhibited forceful legislative leadership in driving through the big financial bills.

  To the Commander in Chief fell the responsibility for strategic planning, and Bull Run forced Lincoln to lay out explicitly what the North must do. Over several days and nights, sitting on the sofa in his office, or on the lounge in the cabinet room, he penciled a program for immediate action:

  “Let the plan for making the Blockade effective be pushed forward with all possible despatch.

  “Let the volunteer forces…be constantly drilled, disciplined, and instructed without more for the present.

  “Let Baltimore be held as now, with a gentle but firm and certain hand. …

  “Let the forces in Western Virginia act till further orders according to instructions or orders from General McClellan.

  “[Let] General Fremont push forward his organization and operations in the West as rapidly as possible.…

  “Let the forces late before Manassas…be reorganized as rapidly as possible in their camps here and about Arlington.…

  “Let new volunteer forces be brought forward as fast as possible.…”

  Four days later, the President developed his plans further:

  “When the foregoing shall have been substantially attended to: 1. Let Manassas Junction (or some point on one or other of the railroads near it) and Strasburg be seized and permanently held. …2. This done, a joint movement from Cairo on Memphis, and from Cincinnati on East Tennessee.”

  Lincoln projected that, by year’s end, the forces of the Union would be massed and the Confederacy cut off by sea. Northern columns were to reach eastern Tennessee and western Virginia, where Union sympathizers had organized to resist secession; another force would be poised in Memphis, ready to drive down the Mississippi River and cut the southern nation in two.

  The President’s plan called for a collective effort far beyond anything the American pepple had known. General George McClellan was given the most exacting job: command of the Union forces massed around Washington. In West Virginia the thirty-four-year-old former railroad executive had defeated two small rebel detachments, the first northern victories to offset Sumter and Bull Run; now he was called to build and lead the largest army ever assembled on the American continent. McClellan’s first acts were to confine the troops to their camps, tighten discipline, and order a rigorous schedule of drills and parades. A few soldiers quit, and many volunteer officers unequal to the regular army routine found ways to get home, but the great majority of the men responded energetically to McClellan’s combination of harsh demands and winning personal charm. Within a few weeks of Bull Run, the fruits of the general’s labors were plain for all to see on the fields before Washington.

  “Oh, but this is grand!” wrote one infantry captain. “Troops, troops, tents, tents, the frequent thunder of guns practising, lines of heavy baggage wagons, at reveille and tattoo the air filled with the near and distant roll of drums and the notes of innumerable bugles—all the indications of an immense army.…”

  To provide all those drums and bugles—and rifles, rations, belt buckles, and the thousand other material requirements of McClellan’s Army of the Potomac as it grew to number almost 200,000 men—was another unprecedented undertaking. The job fell to the War Department, which was soon inundated with requests, complaints, and contracts. Simon Cameron, though a wily politician, proved hopelessly inadequate as an administrator; his main contributions to the war effort, Washingtonians complained, were to lose memoranda and to find special deals for his cronies from Pennsylvania. As northern farmers and industrialists churned out war goods, the tiny bureaucracy in Washington was able to feed and equip the main Union forces, but only amidst massive confusion and waste. The Army received a mishmash of supplies, many of them shoddy and few of them uniform. The cost of the purchases—inflated by unnecessary orders, overlapping contracts, and fraud—cut dangerously into the $300 million appropriated by Congress.

  McClellan was given green troops and substandard equipment, but western generals complained of receiving nothing at all. The federal government focused its supervision on the army around Washington while draining the West of troops, guns, and skilled officers. Lincoln appointed John Charles Fremont to command the main Union force in Missouri because of his prominence within the Republican party; similarly, he would relieve Fremont later in the year after the general quarreled bitterly with the Blairs.

  Left largely to their o
wn devices, the Westerners muddled through. Fremont put up $75,000 of his own money and bought what rifles he could find. In St. Louis two wealthy businessmen, James Buchanan Eads and Charles Ellet, began building a gunboat fleet that would give the Union control of the western waterways. And further south at Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers joined, a small man, of uncommanding presence, was drilling a small body of troops. Ulysses S. Grant had left the Army in disgrace several years earlier, his Mexican War heroism overshadowed by tales of drunkenness. He returned to his wife and children in Missouri, took up the backbreaking work of farming, but went bankrupt; he tried a few business ventures, but they failed; when Sumter fell, he was working as a clerk in his father’s leather store. A local politician helped Grant to appointment as a colonel and then a brigadier in the new volunteer forces, but the job that he really wanted, on McClellan’s staff in Washington, was closed to him because of his reputation. So in the autumn of 1861 Sam Grant supervised the training of his Illinois troops and waited for a chance to redeem himself.

  While the armies prepared and waited, the Navy acted. Lincoln’s head of the Navy Department, Gideon Welles, proved himself a superb organizer, his assistant, Gustavus Fox, a keen strategist, Having begun the war with 43 seaworthy ships, Welles bought or built 400 more of every size and description, from shallow-draft tugs to experimental ironclad gunboats. This motley array of vessels clamped a lid over the coast of the Confederacy, squeezing southern commerce until only a fraction of the prewar shipping was able to get through. Fox organized the Navy’s best ships into an amphibious task force that struck sharp blows against the South. On August 29, l861, an expedition seized Hatteras Island off North Carolina, and on November 7 a naval landing party hoisted the Stars and Stripes over Port Royal farther down the coast. These victories not only shook southern confidence and closed two ports; they gave the Navy advance bases from which it could tighten the blockade and strike again.