by Bruce Catton
Yet there was still the old dream: one nation, running from ocean to ocean, a land in which ideals that had never amounted to much elsewhere could finally be made real; a country whose inner meaning would finally be freedom and unity for everyone. In all human history no people had ever served a greater dream, and it was not to be given up easily. So there was a balancing of costs and possible gains all across the North this summer; and for their reading matter people had fearful lists of men killed and maimed, and stories about hard battles and endless marches, and subtle hints that perhaps it all could be ended if the government would just stop being so stiff-necked … and, here and there, bright patches in a dark fabric, things like Abraham Lincoln’s letter to a Mrs. Bixby, who had lost two or three or five sons in battle action: “… the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice on the altar of freedom.”
The Republicans had renominated Abraham Lincoln, largely because they could not help themselves. More and more, control of the party was passing into the hands of bitter men who hated and wanted to destroy. To them it seemed that the President was not tough enough. He had moved slowly on the matter of emancipation, he was openly trying now to arrange things so that the states lately in a condition of secession could quietly be restored to the Union, and he had grave doubts about the status of the Negro once slavery had died. Like everyone else, these men could see an almost insoluble problem arising after the war, and — like some of the leaders in the South — the only answer they could see was the brutal one of extermination1; yet where certain Southerners assumed that it was the colored race that must be exterminated, these men believed that it was the Southerner himself. Let the terrible pounding of the war (they argued) continue until everything that had supported slavery and secession had been ground down to dust; the wreckage might provide a suitable foundation for the building of a new society.
They were busy this summer trying to shelve Lincoln. Such men as Roscoe Conkling, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Horace Greeley, erratic editor of the New York Tribune, and David Dudley Field and Henry Winter Davis were meeting quietly and were arranging for an extraordinary convention in Cincinnati late in September to concentrate Union strength “on some candidate who commands the confidence of the country, even by a new nomination if necessary.”2
Meanwhile there were the northern Democrats. They were looking more and more like a peace party, even if the price of peace might be acceptance of a division in the nation. The Vallandigham who had been exiled from Ohio and sent south had crept back into the country by way of Canada, and when the Democratic convention met in Chicago late in August his voice seemed to be dominant. The delegates met (in an atmosphere rendered slightly murky by the presence of numerous ineffective but busy Confederate agents) and nailed this plank into the party’s platform: “This convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war … justice, humanity, liberty and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an immedate convention of the states, or other peaceable means, to the end that at the earliest practicable moment peace may be restored on the basis of the federal union of the states.”3
If an armistice and a general convention could restore the Union, that might be all to the good; as a practical matter, the war, once dropped, could never be picked up again, and everybody knew it. This plank supported Lincoln’s contention that the Democratic nominee, if elected, would have won the election on grounds that would make victory impossible. The bitter-end Republicans were not in the least surprised when the Democratic convention which had adopted this declaration went on from there to nominate as its candidate none other than the one-time hero of the Army of the Potomac, General George B. McClellan. Had he not always been a soft-war man?
By the end of August, then, that was the situation. Fighting men on both sides appraised it in the same way. Someone sounded Grant out on the matter of Lincoln’s possible replacement, and Grant exploded angrily: “I consider it as important to the cause that he should be elected as that the army should be successful in the field.” On the Confederate side, valiant General Stephen D. Ramseur of North Carolina wrote to his wife that men just back from the North were saying that McClellan would be elected and that the election would bring peace, “provided always that we continue to hold our own against the Yankee armies.”4
If they could hold their own … continued stalemate could actually mean victory for the Confederacy. It believed itself to be unconquerable, and men could argue that in this dreadful summer it was proving itself so. Hang on, keep the Yankees from making any visible gains, let war-weariness carry the election — and that will be the end of it. So ran the southern hope; so, also, ran the genuine possibility.
The great struggles of history are not always visible and dramatic. They can take place out of sight, in the hearts and the minds of millions of men who have a choice to make. It went thus in 1864. The final word about the Civil War would be spoken by the people back home, most of whom had never seen a battlefield, carried a musket, or known what it was like to watch pain and death take form in the red-gray mist of smoke and flame. Out of what they felt, the choice would come.
The wheel had swung full circle. In 1861, war had come because emotion took charge when hard decisions were to be made. Emotion would take charge again this year; emotion, springing from no one could say what involved thoughts and deep griefs and hopes, given final form perhaps by the news from the battle fronts. In one way or another the men of the North would decide whether they wanted to go on to the finish or give up and write off all that they had suffered and all that they had once hoped for. Their verdict would be final. Lincoln knew it, and the little slip of paper he had filed away in a pigeonhole shows what he feared the decision might be like: shows, too, that if the decision was unfavorable to everything he had lived for he would get around it if he possibly could. There have been few bitter-end fighters in all history quite as tenacious as Abraham Lincoln.
Then, at the moment when despair was deepest, a great wind swept across the sky and drove the clouds off in shreds, and it was possible to see the sunlight once more. To begin with, there was Admiral Farragut and Mobile Bay.
The venerable admiral, who would not consider himself old until he found himself unable to turn a handspring on his birthday, had assembled a powerful fleet at the mouth of Mobile Bay, and early in August he struck with it. Mobile was important, the Confederacy’s last port for blockade-runners on the Gulf coast (except for ports in Texas, which, having been cut off, hardly counted any more). Grant had wanted to take Mobile right after Vicksburg fell, but Halleck had ruled otherwise. Now Farragut would try it. The town itself he might not get, but if he could run past the harbor forts and anchor his fleet inside the bay, the port would be closed, and one more Confederate gateway to the outer world would be sealed off — those gateways to the outer world, whose help must come in if the Confederacy was to live.
August 5, and a hot sunny morning; Farragut’s wooden sloops of war came steaming in toward the mouth of the bay, topmasts and upper yards sent down, everything cleared for action. The ships were in double file, with the monitors going on ahead; the sun came down hard on the flat iron decks of these latter, making the heat below almost unendurable. Along the channel the Confederates had planted mines — “torpedoes,” as the word was used in those days — and on the east side of the channel was powerful Fort Morgan, a masonry work of great strength which Farragut could not hope to pound into submission; his best chance was to run past it, as he had run past the New Orleans forts. Then the fort would be isolated, and the army could bring in troops and siege guns and reduce it at leisure.
Inside the bay the Confederates had a small fleet. Except for one vessel, the ironclad Tennessee, this was made up of light gunboats that could never stand up to Farragut’s ships at close range, but the exception might make all the
difference. The Tennessee had been built on the Alabama River, near Selma, after the Merrimac pattern — low in the water, with a slant-sided citadel armored with five- and six-inch iron plating, heavily armed, with a ram bow. She was clumsy and her steering mechanism was exposed, but at that moment she may have been the most formidable warship afloat. With her consorts she waited in the lee of Fort Morgan while the Federal fleet came in through the windless morning, black plumes of smoke training off on the smooth water.
At the start there was trouble. The torpedoes were a menace, and when the fort and the Confederate ships opened fire the Union fleet fell into confusion. Monitor Tecumseh, at the head of the line, put her forefoot on one of the torpedoes and blew up, going to the bottom like a stone and carrying her captain and most of her crew down with her. Ships behind her sheered off, slowed down, and stopped. Farragut, in the flagship Hartford, was astern of them; he scampered up the rigging to a point just below the main top, peering ahead into the smoke while an anxious junior passed the bight of a line around him to keep him from falling into the water. For the fleet to stay here, huddled under the fire of the fort’s big guns, was to invite complete destruction. Angrily Farragut demanded to know the reason for the delay.
Torpedoes ahead, he was told: Tecumseh is gone already, and if we go on we will lose more ships.
Farragut exploded: Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! The line began to move again; firing mechanisms in the torpedoes proved defective — Hartford brushed against one, but it failed to explode — and the fleet exchanged enormous broadsides with the fort while it plowed on into the bay. The fight was hot and heavy while it lasted, and Hartford took a brutal pounding. An army signal officer who was stationed aboard her recalled afterward that he had read, in stories about sea fights, tales about decks running with blood and had thought it all imagination; he really saw it this morning.
The fleet passed the fort at last and got well inside the bay. The Confederate ships drew off briefly, and Farragut had his ships anchor and repair damages. Then Tennessee came steaming in to the attack, and the fight was renewed — a whole fleet coming to grips with one grim black ironclad. One of the wooden sloops rammed Tennessee, hurting the Confederate not at all but wrecking her own bow; another tried to ram, missed, and crashed into Hartford, almost sinking the flagship, and again Farragut sprang into the rigging for a better view of what was going on. The guns of the fleet could not penetrate Tennessee’s mailed sides, but they kept hammering, surrounding her and penning her in; a monitor held position just astern of the big ironclad and slammed away with fifteen-inch solid shot; Tennessee lost her stacks, her steering failed, she was helpless, her gun ports could not be opened — and finally, with the other Confederate ships sunk, the fort by-passed, and no hope remaining, she pulled down her flag.
Farragut’s victory was complete. His men had paid for it — one hundred and forty-five killed and one hundred and seventy-four wounded — and some of his ships were badly racked, but he had Mobile Bay. Mobile was no longer a seaport, Fort Morgan would fall whenever an effort was made, and here, suddenly, was encouraging news for war-weary people in the North.5
It was followed a few weeks later by even better news. Sherman captured Atlanta.
Sherman had been extending his lines around to the east and south of the city, trying to cut its railway connections, and at the beginning of September he finally succeeded. He hoped to bag Hood’s army as well — after all, this army was really his primary objective — but the Hood who could not quite tell when to go in and slug and when to spar and play for time was canny enough to keep his army from being involved in the loss of the citadel, and when he saw that Atlanta could not be saved he got his army out intact. In a sense he kept Sherman from getting the prize he wanted. But in the end it did not matter.
It did not matter because the news that Atlanta had fallen was a mighty intoxicant for the people back home. Mobile Bay, then Atlanta — the war was being won, after all, the stalemate was being broken, and certain victory lay not far away. Even sedate General Thomas lost his control when news of the triumph came to him; he skipped, combed his whiskers with eager fingers, and, as Sherman reported, did everything but actually caper.
Washington got the news on the night of September 2 in a wire from General Henry W. Slocum. Slocum commanded the troops Hooker had had earlier — Hooker disliked Sherman, and when command of McPherson’s army went to Howard he resigned in a huff — and Slocum messaged Stanton: “General Sherman has taken Atlanta.” A day or so later Sherman sent his own message, beginning: “So Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” Wild rejoicing went all across the North, and Grant ordered his batteries in front of Petersburg to fire a hundred-gun salute, with all guns shotted and trained on the Rebel works.
This was not the end of it. Before the end of September Phil Sheridan won a smashing victory over Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley.
Sheridan had been slow getting into action. He had a strong advantage in numbers, but guerrilla warfare in the valley had been carried to such a pitch of perfection that he had to use a good many of his men to guard trains and supply lines, and he seems to have overestimated Early’s strength. In addition, he was not altogether sure of the quality of all his troops. He had the VI Corps from the Army of the Potomac — as good a combat outfit as there was in either army — but the rest of his men did not seem quite so solid, and he had taken his time about launching an offensive. But on September 19 he was ready, and he came down and crushed Early in a hard, sharp battle near Winchester.
The battle began badly. Somehow Sheridan’s marching orders got fouled up and his troops came to the field slowly. The first attack was knocked back on its heels, and around midday it looked as if the Confederates might win an unexpected victory. But Sheridan was all over the field in person, riding at a pelting gallop on his big black horse, his hat gripped in one fist and his starred battle flag in the other; he reorganized his lines, brought up his reinforcements, and at last drove home an irresistible charge, a whole division of mounted cavalry shearing in behind the Confederate flank, every man in action — and Early’s army went hurrying south through Winchester, and for the first time in the war the North had won a victory in the Shenandoah.
The victory would have consequences. Sheridan would go on, devastating the rich valley farmland with cold, methodical effectiveness, so that it never again could serve as a base of supplies for Confederate armies. Early would counterattack a month later at Cedar Creek, catching Sheridan’s army off guard (with Sheridan himself absent) and coming close to driving it north in rout. But Sheridan made a dramatic twenty-mile ride to the scene from Winchester, rallied his stragglers, pulled the lost battle out of the fire, and closed the day by giving the Confederate army such a furious beating that it no longer had any weight as a dangerous combat force.
The war was being won, and the election would be won, too, because it was obviously absurd now to campaign on a plank stating that the war effort was a failure. And to cap it all, McClellan himself pulled the main prop out from under the Democratic platform by the simple process of refusing to accept it.
McClellan had had his troubles and he undeniably had his faults, but now and then he could measure up. He had done so after Second Bull Run, when he pulled the Army of the Potomac together and prepared it for Antietam. He did it now, when — quietly and with dignity — he gave the lie to the bitter-end Republicans who had considered him little better than a traitor, and showed that although he might not swallow the Republican version of the war program he was as determined as anyone to insist on a restored Union and an end to the Confederacy.
The Democratic committee went to McClellan to give him formal notification that he had been nominated. McClellan responded, as a candidate always does, but he did not quite make the response he had been expected to make. Blandly he remarked that as far as he was concerned the party’s platform meant that the North was not to offer peace on any terms short of a reconstructed Union. To take any
thing less, he added, would be to insult and affront the thousands of northern soldiers who had died in battle. The Democrats might look like a peace party, but their candidate had his own ideas.
As the upswing developed, the move to find a new candidate in place of Lincoln withered. Pathfinder Frémont had been brought out, dusted off, and put in position as a species of third-party candidate, to bid for the votes of rock-ribbed abolitionists. He quietly retired, the Republican radicals dutifully lining up behind President Lincoln. Salmon P. Chase, the dignified Treasury Secretary who had always imagined himself as the statesman destined to come in and supply the firm hand Lincoln lacked — Chase, too, was in retirement, no longer a member of the Cabinet, an aspirant for the presidency whom no one could ever take quite seriously. Lincoln had a clear road at last.
In the West and the South, Thomas and Sherman prepared their armies for the mopping-up process; and in the long lines that ran down the James River and half encircled Petersburg, the Army of the Potomac held its ground, pinning Lee’s army there by sheer weight, taking daily casualties and looking less and less like the gallant host that had marched down to the Rapidan in May with bands playing and flags afloat, but still holding on with an unbreakable grip. Autumn was wearing away, and the Confederacy’s last winter was drawing near.
3. The Grapes of Wrath
On November 8 the people of the North re-elected Abraham Lincoln and endorsed a war to the finish. One week later General Sherman and sixty thousand veterans left Atlanta on the march that was to make that finish certain — the wild, cruel, rollicking march from Atlanta to the sea.
Two months had passed since the capture of Atlanta. A part of this time had been spent in resting and refitting the army. Several weeks more had been consumed in a fruitless chase of John B. Hood, who still commanded forty thousand good men and who circled off to the northwest, molesting Sherman’s supply line and hoping to draw the invaders off in retreat. Sherman had tried to catch and destroy this Confederate army, but he had not had much luck, and he complained bitterly, if illogically, that the real trouble was Hood’s eccentricity: “I cannot guess his movements as I could those of Johnston, who was a sensible man and did only sensible things.”