American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Lincoln, indeed, might be excused for thinking the Navy to be too aggressive, for one ship commander almost triggered a war with Britain. Captain Charles Wilkes had been patrolling the eastern Caribbean in the sloop San Jacinto, searching for Confederate commerce raiders, when he learned that two southern diplomats, James M. Mason and John Slidell, had slipped through the blockade and were on their way to Europe aboard the British mail steamer Trent. On his own initiative, and against the advice of his second-in-command, Wilkes intercepted the Trent in the Bahama Channel on November 8, stopped her with a shot across the bow, and sent a boarding party to bring Mason and Slidell back to the San Jacinto. The northern press applauded when Wilkes arrived in Boston with his prisoners, but the British government professed to be outraged. Lord Palmerston and his Cabinet tacitly sympathized with the Confederacy; the combination of southern cotton and northern insolence seemed an almost irresistible inducement to war. While the London Times breathed fire, and British troop transports prepared to sail for Canada, the Prime Minister demanded that the American government apologize and release the captive envoys.

  The northern public, happy to turn against America’s old enemy, showered Wilkes with gifts and testimonials. Lawyers, congressmen, and editors called upon Lincoln to defy the British ultimatum. Secretary of State Seward seemed taken with the idea of bringing the South back into the Union by starting a war with Europe. “We will wrap the whole world in flames!” he told Times correspondent William Russell. But neither popular pressure nor diplomatic cleverness swayed Lincoln. The President, wanting just “one war at a time,” dictated a conciliatory reply to Palmerston. The note, although filled by Seward with references to Britain’s violations of American neutral rights during the Napoleonic wars, disavowed Wilkes’s action and “cheerfully” promised to release Mason and Slidell. In London, Charles Francis Adams adroitly presented the American case, and Queen Victoria worked for peace; the crisis subsided.

  While meeting one challenge with soft words, Lincoln brazenly ignored another. As an emergency measure in the days after Sumter, Lincoln had authorized the Army to seize and hold suspected traitors without regard to the right of habeas corpus. This action embroiled the President and the military in a clash with the courts, as represented by the nation’s highest judicial official, still Chief Justice Taney. When soldiers from Fort McHenry arrested John Merryman, lieutenant in a secessionist militia company in Baltimore, Taney himself wrote out the writ of habeas corpus. He ordered the arresting officer to appear before him with Merryman, “certify and make known the day and cause of the capture and detention of said John Merryman,” and then “submit to and receive whatever the said Court shall determine upon” concerning the arrest.

  General George Cadwalader, commandant of McHenry, declined to appear before Taney; a messenger who tried to serve the court’s writ upon the general was denied admission to the fort. The Chief Justice, having no troops of his own, could only dictate a scathing opinion. Congress, not the President, had the power to suspend habeas corpus under the Constitution; if Lincoln’s action went unchallenged, then “the people of the United States are no longer living under a government of laws.” Rather every citizen would hold “life, liberty and property at the will and pleasure of the army officer in whose military district he may happen to be found.” Taney sent his opinion to the President, calling upon that “high official,” whose oath of office the Justice himself had administered only months before, “to perform his constitutional duty to enforce the laws; in other words to enforce the process of this Court.” Lincoln, knowing that the North held the Supreme Court in contempt because of Taney’s ruling in the Dred Scott case, serenely ignored the command; the Chief Justice was as powerless as John Marshall had been thirty years earlier, when Taney’s mentor Andrew Jackson had defied the court’s ruling in the Cherokee lands case.

  “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” James Madison had written—and his strategy was working even amid civil war, as the crisis brought the Congress as well as the judiciary into conflict with the President. The foundations for a permanently large and powerful chief executive were building under the stupendous wartime pressures. In the long run, the increased scope of presidential power and the magnitude of the issues at stake in the war guaranteed that President and Congress would clash.

  The first foretaste of the conflict was evident in July, when the lawmakers approved Lincoln’s emergency measures only grudgingly and in part, in a last-minute rider tacked onto a military pay bill. Now in December, as they convened for the regular session, congressional leaders looked for ways to increase their influence on the war effort. In the House, the Committee on Government Contracts launched a series of investigations into the purchasing practices of the War Department, amassing eleven hundred pages of evidence of fraud and mismanagement. With these probes, and with its support of the civilian Sanitary Commission, which worked to improve conditions in the military hospitals and camps, Congress succeeded in saving money and lives.

  Not all of the legislative initiatives were constructive. A group of radical Republicans led by Benjamin Wade and Zachariah Chandler organized a Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, their goal being to push for a quick end to both the war and slavery. As the winter dragged on and the Union armies continued to drill, the Joint Committee began to question the loyalty of Union officers. General Charles Stone was imprisoned for six months at the committee’s behest; his “crime” had been to send a patrol across the Potomac that ended in disaster and death for several hundred northern men—including Edward Dickinson Baker, a former senator and a close friend of Lincoln. Another old soldier, bedeviled by congressional witch hunters, wrote bitterly about serving a government “where to be suspected, merely, is the same as to be convicted.”

  Lincoln had to deal cautiously with the members of the Joint Committee; they had powerful support in Congress and in the country. The war had intensified the hopes of abolitionists across the North, and Wade’s group championed their cause. Lincoln had to fend off antislavery agitation even in the Army itself, canceling emancipation orders issued by Generals Fremont and Hunter. To attack slavery before the Union Army was able to take the offensive against the South, the President feared, would be to lose the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland—in his view, to lose both Union and abolition.

  The radicals played into Lincoln’s hands. Cameron, already on shaky ground as the inefficiency of the War Department became exposed, made a play for the abolitionists’ support. Without White House consent he issued a call for the arming of freed slaves to help put down the rebellion. Racial war—the very thought terrified Unionist slaveholders and stiffened Confederate resolve. Cameron had overreached himself; Lincoln “reluctantly accepted his resignation,” sent him to Russia as American ambassador to the Tsar, and appointed Edwin Stanton as Secretary of War. Cameron’s interference with the war effort was ended, the radicals were temporarily discredited, and Lincoln gained some relief from congressional pressure.

  The only way fully to satisfy Congress and the people, however, was to push the war to a victorious conclusion. In February of 1862 the northern forces finally began their offensive, advancing all across the broad front. The Navy led off, landing an amphibious force at Roanoke Island. In the West, a flotilla of gunboats and transports commanded by a saltwater sailor, Commodore Andrew Foote, carried Grant’s division down the Cumberland River into Tennessee. Fort Henry on the Cumberland surrendered to the gunboats, and Grant’s men trapped a small enemy army in Fort Donelson on the Tennessee River. The forty-year-old general became a national hero in mid-February when he accepted the “unconditional surrender” of 14,000 rebel soldiers at Donelson. A second northern force under Don Carlos Buell captured Nashville, and by the end of March most of Tennessee was in Union hands.

  Confederate forces under Albert Sidney Johnston regrouped and counterattacked Grant’s column, which had grown to an army of 50,000 men by the beginning of April. Bot
h sides were mauled in the two-day battle at Shiloh Church—Johnston and 40,000 men in blue and gray were gunned down—but the Confederates were forced to retreat. The northern onslaught resumed. New Orleans fell on April 25 to units of David Farragut’s fleet, which had run the batteries of the forts defending the city. Charles Ellet was killed when Confederate gunboats sortied to defend Memphis, but the ships that he had built for the Union cleared the way into that city. Farther west, a small Union army marched into Arkansas, destroying a mixed force of Confederates and Indians at Pea Ridge. On July 1 Farragut was able to sail upriver and join forces with the gunboat fleet at Vicksburg, the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi.

  In the East, General Ambrose Burnside’s amphibious force crossed from Roanoke Island to the North Carolina mainland, seized the port of New Bern, and threatened the interior of the state. But the focus of attention was the Potomac, where McClellan began to move his army. The main Union force descended the river in transports and landed at the tip of the York peninsula, where Cornwallis’ surrender had ended the American Revolution years before. As McClellan pushed cautiously up the peninsula with 100,000 men, a second army occupied Manassas, while a third advanced into the Shenandoah Valley. By mid-May, the Union controlled most of northern Virginia, and the Army of the Potomac stood on the outskirts of Richmond.

  Southerners responded to the Union invasion with éclat. They proved that the North had no monopoly on “Yankee ingenuity”; a single Confederate gunboat, its sides protected by several inches of iron plating, challenged the combined Union fleet at Vicksburg, crippled several ships, and escaped unscathed. A second ironclad, the rebuilt old frigate Merrimac, threatened to cut off McClellan’s army on the peninsula, until the Union ironclad Monitor checked it in a duel off Hampton Roads. Nathan Bedford Forrest and other Confederate cavalry commanders were able to tie down and halt the Union forces in the West by raiding behind their lines, burning supplies, and sending false messages on the occupying army’s telegraphs. The leadership of two men, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, saved the Confederate capital and finally reversed the spring tide of Union victory. Lee had fewer than 80,000 men to withstand the three advancing northern armies, yet he sent Jackson into the Shenandoah Valley with 18,000 men to divert what Union forces he could. Jackson and his soldiers performed brilliantly. Dancing around a cumbrous army twice their strength, they fought five battles in as many weeks, forced Lincoln to stop the Union force at Manassas from marching to join McClellan, and then rushed back to Richmond. At Jackson’s return, Lee launched another desperate gamble. Again dividing his forces, he attacked the isolated northern wing of the Army of the Potomac, drove it back, and bluffed McClellan into withdrawing his entire force. After seven days of continuous fighting, McClellan’s men found themselves back on the James River, camped on the plantation where President Harrison had been born; the bells of Richmond were no longer in earshot.

  Presidents can plan, and generals can command, but the outcome of wars turns largely on the individual decisions of thousands of individual soldiers to advance or wait or retreat, to lead or follow or run. The men in blue and gray were, more often than not, still boys; the majority of them had not been old enough to vote in the election that precipitated the war. Charles Fair saw in the Civil War soldiers “a curious kind of naïveté,” as though each was “too unguardedly himself, the villains obviously and totally villainous, the virtuous cleareyed and straight as strings, the country boys so rustic and simple one cannot believe them.” That innocence would not survive four grinding years of war. In shaping the destiny of the Union, the soldiers—and through them the American people—would themselves be reshaped.

  Most of the three-quarters of a million volunteers were farm boys. They brought with them their farm talk, their farm look, their farm knack of dealing with mules and horses. Since friends often enlisted together, they brought with them too their neighborhood associations and attitudes. The Army was a vast mosaic of neighborhoods and common interests. From Illinois alone came units of German immigrants, Galena miners, Bloomington teachers and students, and the “Preacher’s Regiment,” so called because it included many men of the cloth.

  The men brought their own leaders too, for they often elected as captains and colonels popular local politicians from back home. Some proved utterly incompetent and were court-martialed; the soldiers themselves weeded out others. “We have forced ten resignations from officers,” a Wisconsin private wrote home, “and put better men in their places.” Some officers made speeches and courted votes, but civilian leaders often made poor military ones. Among the best leaders were the handful of West Point graduates. Thomas Jackson, wearing a shabby coat and a battered forage cap, drilled his men with spartan discipline and evangelical fervor; he considered “a gum cloth, a blanket, a tooth brush and forty rounds of cartridges as the full equipment of a gentleman soldier,” a southern volunteer complained. The soldiers called Jackson “Old Blue Light” until he led them to victory; then they called him “Stonewall.” Sam Grant’s men referred to him as the “quiet man.” When he took command of the 21st Illinois, the volunteers lined up to hear a speech. Grant gave them one: “Men, go to your quarters!”

  Camp life as always was an organized bore: drilling, policing the camp, chopping wood for fires, eating salt pork and other staples. Most of the men lived in big tent cities; close quarters and poor sanitation left thousands ill and hundreds dead before the first battles were fought. Soldiers gambled, read, sang, listened to preachers, devised elaborate practical jokes. They came to know other men from very different backgrounds. Northerners who had hardly met a black man began to encounter the bondmen who crowded around the Union camps in Maryland and Missouri. The whites were not friendly, at least in the beginning. “I don’t think enough of the Niggar to go and fight for them,” wrote an Ohio volunteer.

  The men spent most of their time talking; and mostly they talked about the impending warfare. Veterans of Bull Run pictured the fear and confusion, the awful carnage around the batteries on Henry Hill. When war came to many of these soldiers in the spring of 1862 it was initially like all wars: hurry up and wait. After exhausting marches through mud or across still-frozen fields, the regiment would halt, the men would scatter, pitch their tents, start fires for cooking—and wait. Suddenly the drums would beat the long roll, the soldiers would grab their rifles, deploy nervously—and then wait. Much of the fighting was at long range: marching through woods, firing across fields, glancing off an enemy unit, and then settling down for another long wait. Then, suddenly, infantry would find themselves in a bloody holocaust, shooting and stabbing at close quarters. Shiloh, a private remembered, was “one never-ending, terrible roar.”

  In the summer of ’62 the war seemed to assume its old shape. Lee sent Jackson north again in August, this time toward Manassas. The Union troops had a second chance to fight at Bull Run—and once more they lost. Pushing his advantage, Lee united his forces and marched onward into Maryland. The stakes were piled high. Lincoln needed a victory in order to take a stronger posture against slavery and perhaps to save his administration; McClellan needed a victory to save his job; Lee had to find some way to finish off the North before its overwhelming weight of numbers and firepower could be brought to bear. As the two armies raced north, dodging and chasing and parrying each other, soldiers on both sides felt the mounting tension.

  McClellan caught Lee’s army near the town of Sharpsburg, astride a little stream called Antietam Creek. He hammered the Confederate lines with artillery fire, then sent 75,000 men forward, in three disjointed frontal assaults. On the right the two sides fought over a tiny cornfield, leaving it so strewn with corpses that hardly a patch of ground was left bare. In the center, the Union men pushed forward to a worn-down road, the Sunken Lane; after three hours of fighting, some of it hand to hand, they held the road but were too exhausted to press on. To the left, a handful of Confederates slaughtered Union troops as they tried to cross the single narrow
bridge over the Antietam. The Northerners finally carried the bridge, only to stop when they smashed into a rebel unit dressed in captured blue uniforms. The last hours before nightfall brought more attacks, more resistance, more slaughter—and no decision.

  McClellan claimed victory at Antietam, for Lee’s forces were so battered they had to pull back to Virginia. Lee could claim a victory because he had saved his army despite being outnumbered two to one. But few soldiers were claiming victory the morning after the battle. They sprawled on the ground, averting their eyes from the dead and wounded lying amid the trampled cornstalks, bodies draped over the rubble of blasted stone walls, corpses floating in the watery muck of Antietam Creek. From 20,000 men flowed the vintage of blood.

  THE BATTLE CRIES OF FREEDOM

  This blood soaking into the mud of Antietam—why was it being shed? For food and clothing and shelter? The great majority of men on both sides had shared in the American cornucopia. For Union or Confederacy? Few of the soldiers wished to shed blood for a particular way of organizing the general government. For some supreme goal that transcended government—that was served by government? Yes, for liberty, freedom, justice—this is what the soldiers were told. But confusion still prevailed. Not only were Northerners and Southerners wholly at odds with each other as to what constituted liberty, who should enjoy it, how it could be safeguarded and broadened. The northern leaders seemed divided and unsure among themselves.