A Disease in the Public Mind

by Thomas Fleming

  CHAPTER 23

  The End of Illusions

  Lee’s resignation was a shock to many people. His cousin, Orton Williams, who was on General Scott’s staff, reported that the whole army was “in a stir over it.” Simon Cameron, the Secretary of War, wrote in a memorandum much later that Lee should have been arrested before he left General Scott’s office. President Lincoln felt embarrassed. He knew the story of his offer to Lee would become public knowledge.

  Three days later, former Colonel Lee departed by train for Richmond with Judge John Robertson, an advisor to Virginia’s governor, John Letcher. Lee had met several of Robertson’s associates in front of Christ Church in Alexandria, when he attended services there on the day after he resigned. Lee’s daughter Agnes, watching the men converse, had no doubts about their topic. Her father’s face showed “a mortal struggle, much more terrible than any known to the din of battle.” The men were telling Lee that Governor Letcher had invited him to Richmond to discuss Virginia’s military needs and plans. Their conversation closed with Lee agreeing to meet Robertson in Alexandria for the trip.1

  Agnes was not the only spectator of this conversation in front of Christ Church. Virtually the entire congregation watched from a discreet distance. The local paper had just published an editorial, urging the governor to consider Colonel Lee for a high post. “There is no man who would command more of the confidence of the people of Virginia than this distinguished officer,” the editor wrote. An acquaintance who saw Lee on the train said he was “the noblest looking man I had ever gazed upon—handsome beyond all men I had ever seen.” Unquestionably, Lee had the look of a leader. Just short of six feet tall, at fifty-four he still emanated physical vitality. His dark hair had only a few streaks of grey; his trim mustache was entirely black. At two stations on the trip to Richmond, Lee was forced to go to the rear platform of the train to acknowledge crowds of people calling his name and cheering when he appeared. Obviously many Virginians had been hoping even relying—on his help as the crisis with the North grew more ominous.2

  At Richmond, Lee went directly to the capitol, where Governor Letcher awaited him. A baldheaded, bottle-nosed lawyer, Letcher had been a cautious unionist until Lincoln called for troops after Fort Sumter’s bombardment. The governor probably told Lee that the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, had just arrived in Richmond to negotiate an alliance with Virginia. Letcher was a busy man and did not waste words. Would General Lee accept an appointment as “commander of the military and naval forces of Virginia, with the rank of major general?” he asked. The governor added that his advisory council had already recommended Lee for the post.

  When Lee said yes, Governor Letcher sent his acceptance to the Virginia convention, which was still in session. The delegates approved the appointment unanimously. Former Colonel Robert E. Lee was now a major general in the army of a seceded state.3

  • • •

  Meanwhile, the first blood in the war had been spilled in an unlikely place: Baltimore. The Sixth Massachusetts Regiment arrived there on April 19. It was one of the three regiments that Bay State Governor John Andrew had rushed to the capital to help fight the war he so eagerly welcomed. There was no direct rail service to Washington, DC; Baltimore had banned soot-spewing steam engines from its streets. There were five stations at which trains arrived from the west and north. The Bay State soldiers were on a Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad train, which arrived at the President Street station. Their cars were to be towed by horses through the city to the Camden Street station, where a Baltimore & Ohio engine would haul them to Washington.

  The soldiers arrived fearing the worst. Baltimore was known as “Mob City,” with a tradition of civic unrest that went back to the War of 1812. Worsening matters was Maryland’s hostility to the Republican Party. Lincoln had received only 3.6 percent of the vote in Baltimore and 2.6 percent in the state. On the previous day, over five hundred Pennsylvania militia had arrived at the Bolton Street Station and they were immediately confronted by an angry mob. They endured volleys of bottles, stones, and epithets as they marched through the city to the Mount Clare Station to embark on another line to Washington, DC.

  Local police made little or no attempt to control the mob; they frequently laughed at the volunteers’ discomfiture. The Keystone State’s soldiers headed for Washington with several of their number painfully wounded by flying stones.

  When the Massachusetts soldiers arrived at the President Street station, the pro-secessionist mob was far more organized. They had stockpiled rocks and bricks along the line of the march. Some people carried pistols. The mere mention of the word Massachusetts further inflamed everyone. These were the abolitionist Yankees who had started this war.

  Fearing the worst, the commander of the Sixth Massachusetts distributed twenty rounds of ammunition to his men and authorized them to fire at anyone they saw aiming a gun at them. Again, Baltimore’s police chief made no attempt to control the gathering crowd. From all sides catcalls and insults rained on the marching men. Then came the bricks, stones—and gunshots. The soldiers fired back, killing a sniper who toppled from a second floor window into the street. A Massachusetts soldier was hit by a brick and fell into the gutter, where the mob beat him to death. His name was Luther C. Ladd; he is considered the first casualty of the war.

  The regiment reached Washington with four men dead and seventeen wounded. Behind them on Baltimore’s bloody streets lay twelve dead civilians and an uncounted number of wounded. Southern newspapers called it “the Baltimore Massacre.”4

  The mayor and the police chief persuaded Maryland’s governor to let them destroy the railroad bridges that connected Baltimore to Philadelphia and Harrisburg, severing the two chief train routes to Washington, DC. The governor declared Maryland’s “neutrality” in the war. President Lincoln reacted with executive ferocity. He ordered the U.S. Army to arrest secessionist leaders, including the mayor and police chief, and incarcerate them in Fort McHenry. When lawyers for one of the prisoners demanded his freedom on a writ of habeas corpus, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney heard the case and ordered his release. The president refused to obey the order. He said that his reading of the Constitution entitled him to jail anyone who assailed the federal government verbally or physically while it was fighting a war.

  Lincoln also ordered federal marshals to raid telegraph offices in every northern state and seize copies of all messages sent and received in the previous twelve months. The goal was detection of conspiracies against the government. The president also commandeered millions of dollars in the U.S. Treasury without any authorization or knowledge of Congress (it was not in session) and secretly sent huge amounts by special messengers to industrialists with orders for guns and uniforms and equipment for the embryo Union army. Many of the five hundred Pennsylvanians had arrived without weapons or uniforms.5

  • • •

  The ruined Baltimore bridges did not prevent thousands of additional volunteers from reaching Washington, DC, by more circuitous routes. Soon the capital was safe from southern attack. Many of the arriving regiments sang a new marching song as they entered the city. Based on a traditional camp meeting melody, it had been introduced by a Massachusetts regiment departing from Boston and won instant popularity among New England soldiers.

  John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave

  John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave

  His soul’s marching on!

  Regiments from other states added their own often irreverent words to the basic text. One of the favorites was, “We will hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree.” A Chicago version had a mocking verse:

  He captured Harpers Ferry with his nineteen men so few

  And frightened old Virginny till she trembled thru and thru

  They hung him for a traitor, themselves the traitor crew

  But his soul is marching on.

  Later in the year, Julia Ward Howe, wife
of one of John Brown’s secret backers, converted the song into a fiery hymn, which began:

  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord

  He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.

  The Battle Hymn of the Republic helped transform the war into a holy crusade for many soldiers.

  The South soon responded with its own song.

  I wish I was in the land of cotton

  Old Times they are not forgotten

  Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land!

  Originally a minstrel tune, popular in vaudeville theaters, Dixie radiated love of the South. The Confederate government soon made it a war song.

  Southern men the thunders mutter!

  Northern flags in South winds flutter

  To arms! To arms! To arms, in Dixie6

  • • •

  On May 23, by a four-to-one margin, Virginia voters approved the convention’s decision to secede. The Old Dominion was now part of the Confederacy, and General Scott decided it was time to seize the high ground on the Virginia side of the Potomac, including the Lee estate at Arlington. He ordered the town of Alexandria occupied as well. Rebel troops were stationed there and the Confederate flag flew from several poles.

  The operation went smoothly. Engineers and infantry poured over the bridges across the Potomac at two a.m. on May 24 and began building trenches and forts around Arlington and elsewhere along the river. A U.S. Navy sloop of war preceded a transport carrying a regiment of Union soldiers to Alexandria. The sloop gave the small Confederate garrison an hour to evacuate the town. The rebels departed with only a few random potshots that the Union men ignored.

  The regiment, under the command of Colonel Elmer C. Ellsworth, soon disembarked. They were wearing bright red uniforms; the imaginative Ellsworth had copied the style from French colonial troops. Born in New York State, Ellsworth had moved to Illinois to practice law and had become friendly with Abraham Lincoln; for a time he had worked in his Springfield office.

  Colonel Ellsworth ordered the Alexandria railroad station occupied and headed for the telegraph office with a small escort. On the way, he noticed a Confederate flag flying on the roof of the Marshall House Inn. Irked, Ellsworth charged into the hostelry and up the stairs to the roof, where he found a ladder and quickly cut down the flag.

  As the colonel and his escort descended the stairs, James W. Jackson, the owner of the inn, stepped from the shadows on the first floor landing and killed Ellsworth with a point blank shotgun blast to his chest. Ellsworth’s escorts instantly dispatched the assassin with bullets and bayonets. Screaming hysterically, Jackson’s wife flung herself on her husband’s bleeding corpse. If it was not war, it was a gruesome imitation of it.

  A grief-stricken President Lincoln ordered Ellsworth’s body carried to the White House, where it lay in state in the East Room. Flags were lowered to half mast and church bells tolled. The president gazed at the corpse and murmured: “My boy, my boy! Was it necessary that this sacrifice be made?” Thousands came to view the fallen hero, and northern newspapers claimed his murder was proof of the South’s bloody intentions. It was a graphic summary of the hatred inflaming so many on both sides.7

  • • •

  A far more influential symptom of the growing appetite for war emanated from the New York Tribune. For more than a decade Editor Horace Greeley had been a critic of the South and slavery. But after Fort Sumter, Greeley was horrified by the oncoming bloodshed and tried to become a voice of compromise. His managing editor, handsome, forty-one-year-old Charles Dana, had a very different view of the conflict.

  New Hampshire born, Dana’s poverty had forced him to drop out of Harvard after a single year. But he managed to hobnob with New England’s elite at an experimental commune called Brook Farm and absorbed their attitude of moral superiority toward the rest of America—especially Southerners. He became an early convert to their belief in The Slave Power. At one point he shared a lecture platform with William Lloyd Garrison.

  At Dana’s urging, on June 26, 1861, the Tribune proclaimed:

  THE NATION’S WAR CRY

  Forward to Richmond! Forward to Richmond!

  The Rebel Congress must not be allowed to meet there on the 20th of July!

  BY THAT DATE THE PLACE MUST BE HELD BY THE NATIONAL ARMY!8

  Along with persuading Virginia to join the Confederacy, Vice President Alexander Stephens had proposed that Richmond become the capital. The Virginia legislature accepted the offer and President Jefferson Davis and the rest of the government began moving from Montgomery, Alabama, with visibly eager haste. It was more evidence of the importance of Virginia to the southern cause.

  Dana’s instinct to strike at this target was unquestionably sound—if one had no compunction about starting the war and were confident that the southern cavaliers were all bluster and no courage. Hadn’t their reaction to John Brown proved that?

  Dana had already demonstrated his abolitionist credentials at the Tribune with another headline. Starting in January 1861, while Greeley was out of town on a lecture tour, the Tribune began running a banner on its front page, above the daily stories: “No compromise! No concessions to traitors! The constitution as it is!” Greeley objected to this provocation, but Dana ignored him. When the editor in chief returned to New York, relations between the two men began to deteriorate.

  Greeley still hoped desperately for peace. President Lincoln now had 30,000 troops in Washington, DC. But it was an army in name only; almost all were untrained men wielding a wild variety of weapons from squirrel guns to Sharps rifles. Another 200,000 men were assembling at training centers elsewhere in the nation. The president described this gathering host as “the greatest army in the history of the world.”

  Greeley went along with Dana’s “Forward to Richmond” banner at first because he imagined that when this overwhelming force assembled in and around the capital, the South would come to its senses and negotiate a settlement. He too remembered the way South Carolina had collapsed when President Jackson confronted her 1833 secession with the threat of a massive invasion.

  • • •

  Dana ran the “Forward to Richmond” banner day after day. Other Republican papers, notably the influential Chicago Tribune, took up this war cry. Soon an estimated one hundred papers were running the slogan or paraphrasing it on their editorial pages. On July 4, Congress assembled in Washington, DC, and many Republicans, notably Senators Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, Ben Wade of Ohio, and Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, began saying the same or similar things. They were convinced that the corrupt slave owners lacked the courage to meet virtuous free men in open battle. A determined assault would smash their rebellion overnight.

  President Lincoln went before Congress and defended his use of executive authority since he took office by saying the South had left him no choice but to “call out the war power of the government.” The president asked for $400 million to raise an army of 400,000 men to guarantee that the contest would be “short and decisive.” Applause swept the overwhelmingly Republican legislature.9

  • • •

  In Richmond, Major General Robert E. Lee had become President Jefferson Davis’s military advisor. The two men were old if not close friends from West Point days and the War with Mexico. When Virginia joined the Confederacy and Davis arrived in Richmond, Lee expected and even hoped that he would be assigned to a field command. But Davis valued his advice too highly to let him leave his inner circle.

  Lee had never returned to Arlington after his April 23 trip to Richmond. He had immediately gone to work mobilizing an army to defend Virginia, a state the size of all New England. He did not share the Republican illusion that the conflict would be a brief struggle. On April 30, he told Mary Custis Lee that “the war may last ten years.” He issued similar warnings to the civilians in Richmond. They were “on the threshold of a long and bloody war.”

  Lee’s strategy was defensive. Virginia had neither the re
sources nor the justification for attacking the North. He vetoed a reckless proposal to rush Virginia troops to rebellious Baltimore. In another letter to his wife, Lee deplored the bombast that filled southern newspapers about the South’s ability to whip the effete abolitionists.

  At one point, an influential man talked his way into Lee’s office with his five-year-old son. The boy gave Lee a Bible and his father asked, “What is General Lee going to do to General Scott?”

  “He is going to beat him out of his breeches,” the boy piped. It was an obviously rehearsed remark.

  “My dear little boy,” Lee said. “You should not use such expressions. War is a serious matter and General Scott is a great and good soldier.” Lee’s eyes were on the father as he said these words.10

  • • •

  Lee’s first task was fortifying Virginia’s rivers to bar federal warships from threatening cities and towns with their guns. He emplaced heavy artillery found in the Norfolk Navy Yard at key points. Next he had to worry about the Harpers Ferry arsenal, seized by Virginia militia even before the state seceded. He put fellow West Pointer Thomas Jackson in charge and had no further worries about that troublesome site.

  Lee appointed other West Pointers to take command of the Virginia militia. Soon Joseph Johnston, Richard S. Ewell, and other soon-to-famous professional soldiers were beginning the task of disciplining and training an army. Its size grew rapidly as Lee pondered how many fronts he had to defend. The civilians had originally estimated that 15,000 men would be more than enough. Lee raised that figure to 51,000 and urged every man to be enlisted for the duration of the war.

  The civilians in Richmond, influenced by the overconfidence of their newspapers, envisioned a short war and voted for one-year enlistments. Lee acquiesced without protest. But he refused to enlist anyone younger than eighteen years of age. Sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds were sent home. Lee added a comment that the civilians ignored. “I fear we shall need them . . . before this war closes.”