by Bruce Catton
But different men had different thoughts about the war and, like Lincoln, they put them in writing. There was old John Brown, who had looked ahead to the war from the shadow of the hangman’s noose … “the crimes of this land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.” If he had hoped to prevent much bloodshed, old Brown had in fact brought much bloodshed on; and he had swung in the air and then vanished, leaving his own blighted heritage to the land. Now there was John Wilkes Booth, who also had thoughts. He jotted them down: “This country was formed for the white, not for the black man. And, looking upon African slavery from the same viewpoint held by the noble framers of our Constitution, I for one have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation.”2 The great blessing was gone now, and Booth would strike a blow of vengeance. He struck, and left his own heritage. Lincoln’s words spiraled off in the starless darkness, and it would be a long time before anyone could invoke the spirit of charity and call for a peace made without hate.
Lincoln’s casket lay beneath the echoing dome of the capitol, and then it was taken all across the country, to be seen by hundreds of thousands of Americans; a great procession of sorrow, skillfully arranged by men who wanted to do precisely what Lincoln himself would not have done.
These were the radicals — the Stantons, the Ben Wades, the Thaddeus Stevenses, the Charles Summers, and the rest; the party leaders who had fought Lincoln as often as they had helped him, who distrusted his belief in reconciliation, who had opposed his plan for restoring the southern states to the Union, and who saw the beaten Confederacy as a conquered province which they could rebuild any way they chose. Their way would be a harsh one, and its most pathetic victim would be the recently freed Negro. Swearing now that they meant to protect him and help him walk erect as a man, they would make the race problem harder to solve. By the reaction they provoked they would finally help Jim Crow to come in and (for a time) take the place of Uncle Tom.
They are usually pictured as bad men, but the term is too strong. Some of them were bad and some were good, and the most were a mixture of good and bad; the real trouble was that they were men fatally limited — limited and wholly determined, sure of their own rightness, not unlike the men who in 1860 had dreamed of creating a glittering slave empire that would have the future in its keeping. The blame for the chance that was missed after the war ended is like the blame for the war itself; a common national possession.
President Andrew Johnson, who felt as they felt until experience taught him to feel otherwise, had not yet begun to assert himself. When at last he did he would do it ineptly, a man cursed with a genius for making enemies and estranging friends. Right now these men were running the government. The controls were in their hands, and their first effort was to create an atmosphere in which their kind of peace would look just and natural.
So they gave Lincoln a great funeral, inviting the people to look on the clay of the great leader slain in his hour of triumph. With this, and with the public denunciation of Sherman for his overgenerous offer of peace, they could whip up a state of mind in which charity and forbearance could be made to look like a betrayal. The light that had lit the room when Grant and Lee sat down together and that had gleamed brightly between Sherman and Johnston began to grow dimmer and dimmer. Dusk began to steal across the land, with long shadows to cloud men’s vision.
Far to the south things went on to their appointed end. In Alabama, Wilson’s tough troopers sat by their campfires in awed silence when they were told that Lee and Johnston had surrendered and that the war was over. “They resisted belief,” one man recalled long afterword; “they dared not trust the story.” Later they learned that Lincoln had been killed, and they saw that the Negroes everywhere were overcome by fear. The laves had come to believe that it was Lincoln and Lincoln alone who had made them free; if he could be killed, would they not be returned to bondage? “For days the trembling creatures could not be induced to leave the camps, and it was only slowly and with difficulty that they could be made to realize that their former masters were finally deprived of power over them.”3
Making a last effort to break a way through to the land beyond the Mississippi, where it might just be possible to keep the war going, Jefferson Davis was captured and brought north to be imprisoned. It was said that when taken he was wearing his wife’s cloak and shawl, and the cruel story went abroad that he had tried to escape by disguising himself in woman’s clothing — just as, in the early spring of 1861, men had jibed that Lincoln came to Washington crudely disguised in a long robe and a grotesque Scotch tam o’shanter. The last Confederate troops in Alabama and Mississippi surrendered, and then finally the orphaned Confederate army beyond the Mississippi laid down its arms. The last embers of the southern republic had been stamped out. There would be no more shooting. Nothing was left now but the tragic and moving memories which would lie close to the bones of the American people forever.
In Washington there would be two grand reviews to wind everything up; one for the Army of the Potomac, and another next day for the Army of the Tennessee, with President and Cabinet in a reviewing stand by the White House and with jubilant thousands lining the streets to cheer. The armies had marched up from Virginia and Carolina for this final ceremony, crossing many old battlefields as they came. Wisconsin men in the Army of the Potomac remembered tramping past the desolate acres around Spotsylvania Court House and the Wilderness and seeing hundreds of bleached skeletons, still unburied; in one place army surgeons were collecting skulls in gunny sacks. An old man hoeing weeds in a corn patch as the soldiers passed saw what the men were looking at and shook his head sadly. “Ah, sir,” he said to one soldier, “there are thousands of both sides lying unburied in the Wilderness.”4
Sherman’s men crossed the Petersburg area, where the rival armies had faced each other in trenches for nine deadly months, and they looked at the fortifications with professional interest. The log huts which the Potomac soldiers had built for winter quarters struck the Westerners as excellent, but the Confederate works were not as imposing as they had expected them to be; out West (they insisted) the Rebs had built much tougher forts than these!5 Sherman’s XX Corps came up through Richmond and realized suddenly that it had made the most prodigious swing of any corps in the whole Union army. This corps was composed of the troops Joe Hooker had taken west from the Army of the Potomac in the fall of 1863, when Rosecrans needed rescuing after Chickamauga. Some of the men had come down across the Chickahominy with McClellan in the spring of 1862, getting so near the Confederate capital that they had seen its spires and on quiet mornings had heard the far-off tinkle of its church bells. Then they had retreated down the James, and after that they had fought in such battles as Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. Finally they had gone to Tennessee, and they had hiked from Chattanooga to Atlanta and from there to Savannah, and from Savannah they had come north across the Carolinas — and now, at last, they were entering Richmond, three years after first seeing it, from the south instead of from the north.
In due time the armies reached Washington and went into camp. They gave the authorities a certain amount of trouble. To the very end the Potomac soldiers were trimmer, neater, better dressed, and better drilled; Sherman’s men had never been very distinguished for any of these virtues, and after their long winter campaign they tended now to be even more ragged and informal than ever. When men from one army met men from the other it usually took little more than a sidelong glance to touch off a fight. In addition, the Army of the Tennessee was bitter about the treatment the government had given Sherman, and in Washington saloons Sherman’s officers had a way of jumping on top of bars and calling for three groans for Secretary Stanton. With the ice thus broken, it would be only a question of time before some Westerner would remark that the Easterners were paper-collar soldiers who had never b
een anywhere or licked anybody. The riot would begin immediately afterward. Eventually Grant had to put the two armies in camps on opposite sides of the Potomac River. It was noted that farmers whose lands were near Sherman’s camping grounds began to complain that their chickens were not safe.
These Federal volunteer armies had existed for four years. For many thousands of young men, army life embraced all that they had ever seen of manhood. Now — suddenly, although there had been much forewarning — there came to all of these the realization that this tremendous experience was over. Never again would they rise to bugle call or drumbeat, make slogging marches in dust or mud, sleep tentless in the rain, or nerve themselves for the racking shock of battle; nor would they ever again go rioting across whole states with a torch for every empty house and a loaded wagon to carry away hams and turkeys and hives full of stolen honey for a campfire feast in the cool evening. They would be cut off, now and forever, from everything they had become used to; the most profound experience life could bring had come to them almost before boyhood had ended, and now it was all over and they would go back to farm or village or city, back to the quiet, uneventful round of prosaic tasks and small pleasures that are the lot of stay-at-home civilians.
They had hated the war and the army and they had wanted passionately to be rid of both forever; yet now they began to see that the war and the army had brought them one thing that might be hard to find back home — comradeship, the sharing of great things by men set apart from society’s ordinary routine. They had grown used to it. They wanted to go home, they were delighted that they would presently take off their uniforms forever, and yet …
In Nashville, Pap Thomas held a farewell review for the stout old Army of the Cumberland, and as the men prepared to disband they found themselves feeling lost, almost sad.
“None of us,” wrote a survivor, “were fond of war; but there had grown up between the boys an attachment for each other they never had nor ever will have for any other body of men.” An Iowa cavalryman, awaiting the muster-out ceremony he had so long wanted, wrote moodily in his diary: “I do feel so idle and lost to all business that I wonder what will become of me. Can I ever be contented again? Can I work? Ah! How doubtful — it’s raining tonight.”6
In Washington the great reviews were held as scheduled, toward the end of May. Thousands of men tramped down Pennsylvania Avenue, battle flags fluttering in the spring wind for the last time, field artillery trundling heavily along with unshotted guns, and great multitudes lined the streets and cheered until they could cheer no more as the banners went by inscribed with the terrible names — Bull Run, Antietam, Vicksburg, Atlanta — and President Johnson took the salute in his box by the White House. It was noticed that Sherman’s army unaccountably managed to spruce up and march as if parade-ground maneuvers were its favorite diversion. Sherman had apologized to Meade in advance for the poor showing he expected his boys to make; when he looked back, leading the parade, and saw his regiments faultlessly aligned, keeping step and going along like so many Grenadier Guards, he confessed that he knew the happiest moment of his life.
And finally the parades were over and the men waited in their camps for the papers that would send them home and transform them into civilians again.
… There was a quiet, cloudless May evening in Washington, with no touch of breeze stirring. In the camp of the V Corps of the Army of the Potomac men lounged in front of their tents, feeling the familiar monotony of camp life for the last time. Here and there impromptu male quartets were singing. On some impulse a few soldiers got out candles, stuck them in the muzzles of their muskets, lighted them, and began to march down a company street; in the windless twilight the moving flames hardly so much as flickered.
Other soldiers saw, liked the looks of it, got out their own candles, and joined in the parade, until presently the whole camp was astir. Privates were appointed temporary lieutenants, captains, and colonels; whole regiments began to form, spur-of-the-moment brigadiers were commissioned, bands turned out to make music — and by the time full darkness had come the whole army corps was on the parade ground, swinging in and out, nothing visible but thousands upon thousands of candle flames.
Watching from a distance, a reporter for the New York Herald thought the sight beautiful beyond description. No torchlight procession Broadway ever saw, he said, could compare with it. Here there seemed to be infinite room; this army corps had the night itself for its drill field, and as the little lights moved in and out it was “as though the gaslights of a great city had suddenly become animated and had taken to dancing.” The parade went on and on; the dancing flames narrowed into endless moving columns, broke out into broad wheeling lines, swung back into columns again, fanned out across the darkness with music floating down the still air.7
As they paraded the men began to cheer. They had marched many weary miles in the last four years, into battle and out of battle, through forests and across rivers, uphill and downhill and over the fields, moving always because they had to go where they were told to go. Now they were marching just for the fun of it. It was the last march of all and, when the candles burned out, the night would swallow soldiers and music and the great army itself; but while the candles still burned, the men cheered.
The night would swallow everything — the war and its echoes, the graves that had been dug and the tears that had been shed because of them, the hatreds that had been raised, the wrongs that had been endured and the inexpressible hopes that had been kindled — and in the end the last little flame would flicker out, leaving no more than a wisp of gray smoke to curl away unseen. The night would take all of this, as it had already taken so many men and so many ideals — Lincoln and McPherson, old Stonewall and Pat Cleburne, the chance for a peace made in friendship and understanding, the hour of vision that saw fair dealing for men just released from bondage. But for the moment the lights still twinkled, infinitely fragile, flames that bent to the weight of their own advance, as insubstantial as the dream of a better world in the hearts of men; and they moved to the far-off sound of music and laughter. The final end would not be darkness. Somewhere, far beyond the night, there would be a brighter and a stronger light.
NOTES
Chapter One: THE HURRICANE COMES LATER
Sowing the Wind
1 The Crime against Kansas: Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner in the Senate of the United States, 19th and 20th May, 1856; Boston, Cleveland and New York, 1856; History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, by James Ford Rhodes, Vol. II, pp. 132-33; Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, by Carl Sandburg, Vol. I, p. 103.
2 Life of Charles Sumner, by Walter G. Shotwell, pp. 217, 241; Rhodes, op. cit., pp. 135-36.
3 The Crime against Kansas.
4 John Brown, 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After, by Oswald Garrison Villard (cited hereafter as Villard), p. 93.
5 Rhodes, op. cit., pp. 155-57; Villard, op. cit. 142-45.
6 Rhodes, op. cit., pp. 158-60; A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, by William E. Connelley, Vol. I, pp. 551-52; Bleeding Kansas, by. Alice Nichols, pp. 105-9.
7 Alleged Assault upon Senator Sumner; report of the Select Committee appointed under the resolution of the House, passed on the 23rd day of May, 1856; Shotwell, op. cit., pp. 331-32.
8 For the conflicting testimony about the seriousness of Sumner’s injuries, see the report of the House Committee, cited above. A grave view of the after effect of the blows is taken in the Shotwell biography of Sumner, p. 342. Brooks’s cane appears to have been a hollow affair made of gutta-percha, easily broken. That Sumner was considered, by himself and his doctors, to have been seriously injured is clearly evident in the letters he wrote and received throughout the summer of 1856. (Manuscript collection owned by Mrs. Mary Reeve of Clearfield, Pennsylvania.)
9 Villard, op. cit., pp. 85, 93, 153.
10 Rhodes, op. cit., p. 162; Villard, op. cit., pp. 153-54.
11 This account of the Pottawatomie murders follows Villard, op. cit.,
p. 155 et seq.
Where They Were Bound to Go
1 A fascinating description of the Lake Superior-St. Mary’s River country before the building of the Soo Canal is to be found in The Long Ships Passing: The Story of the Great Lakes, by Walter Havighurst, pp. 43-44, 72, 200. See also Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State, p. 124.
2 History of the Sault Ste. Marie Canal, by Dwight H. Kelton, pp. 6-15; Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State, p. 345; Cleveland, the Making of a City, by William Ganson Rose, pp. 222-24, 236, 274; Havighurst, op. cit., pp. 230-31.
3 Main Line of Mid-America: The Story of the Illinois Central, by Carlton J. Corliss, pp. 63-65, 76, 82, 84; Havighurst, op. cit., p. 83, pp. 128-29.
4 Life in the Middle West, by James S. Clark, pp. 10-15, 25. This artless book contains a singularly ingratiating account of life on the Ohio frontier.
5 Ibid., p. 35.
6 Democracy in the Middle West, by Jeannette P. Nichols and James G. Randall, p. 31. For a good summary of the change that came over the Middle West in the pre-war decade, see The Growth of the American Republic, by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, Vol. I, p. 618.
Light Over the Marshes
1 In a speech made at Peoria, Ill., on Oct. 16, 1854. See The Living Lincoln, edited by Paul Augle and Earl Schenck Miers, pp. 161–73.
2 Capt. James Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” from Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. I, pp. 20-31. (This work is cited hereafter as B. & L.) In the same Volume, see also Gen. Abner Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” pp. 40-47; in addition, Maj. Anderson’s message to Adj. Gen. Samuel Cooper, Official Records, Vol. I, pp. 2, 3.