• • •
In Charleston, South Carolina, on that same day, April 14, 1865, abolitionists celebrated raising the American flag over Fort Sumter. The city had been in Union hands since General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army had occupied it after their destructive march through Georgia. The chief speaker was the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Beside him on the platform sat William Lloyd Garrison, the man who had launched the abolitionist movement.
Beecher had been a strong supporter of the Union cause throughout the war. Garrison too, while not always able to restrain his sharp tongue, had backed the president after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. A grateful Lincoln had yielded to their desire to go to Charleston for the symbolic flag raising.
Henry Ward Beecher paid no attention whatsoever to Lincoln’s inaugural plea for malice toward none and charity towards all. “I charge the whole guilt of this war upon the ambitious, educated, plotting political leaders of the South,” he roared. There could be no lasting reunion without the kind of retribution that the God of the Old Testament so often visited upon the enemies of ancient Israel. “God shall say: Thus shall it be to all who betray their country!”8
Nothing illustrates the psychological and spiritual limitations of the abolitionists more than this heartless speech, flung in the face of a defeated South. The seeds of a hundred years of future sectional and racial antagonism were in those words. One of their first by-products was an indictment for treason against Robert E. Lee, issued by a Federal grand jury three months later. General Grant threatened to resign as the Union army’s commander in chief and the charge was dropped.9
Late on the night of April 14, the telegraph in the Union army’s Charleston headquarters clicked words that changed the history of the nation and the world: “The President was shot in a theater tonight and perhaps mortally wounded.”
• • •
If Lincoln had lived to serve out his term, could he have overcome the abolitionist haters and maintained a policy of forgiveness that healed the wounds of the war? Would he have been able to win acceptance and equality for black Americans in both the North and the South? No one can or should minimize the hugeness of both these tasks. But one of the most important things to remember about Lincoln was the nickname his White House aides gave him: The Tycoon.10
Four years of wielding the presidency’s war powers had made him a political leader in every sense of the word: a man who was ready to master every challenge that confronted him, from winning the most terrible war in America’s history to surmounting the difficulties of peace. He had become a master at rallying a divided people at war. Now he was ready to master the even more difficult art of modifying the public mind for the politics of peace. During the war his aides placed dozens of anonymous articles in key newspapers, backing his policies. The Associated Press, coming into its own as a news source for papers everywhere, seldom published anything that opposed his views. Reporters like Noah Brooks became virtual disciples, committed to his ideals.
At least as important for meaningful reconciliation were numerous southerners who were ready to cooperate with Lincoln. None was more central to this hope than Robert E. Lee. Even before the last Confederate armies surrendered, Lee had given an interview to a northern reporter. He told the man that he was prepared “to make any sacrifice or perform any honorable act that would lead to the restoration of peace.”11
• • •
Let us close with a recollection of the potential Lincoln, the Tycoon with this southern ally, in the words of a senator who visited him on the last day of his life. The senator was used to seeing a haggard, sleepless president enduring a seemingly interminable war. On April 14, the visitor could scarcely believe his eyes. Lincoln’s “whole appearance, poise and bearing had marvelously changed,” the senator said. “He seemed the very personification of supreme satisfaction. His conversation was exhilarating.”12
The senator was looking at a triumphant Tycoon. It is heartbreaking—but also somehow inspiring—to imagine what this extraordinary man might have accomplished if he had lived. Remembering this Lincoln may persuade the Americans of the twenty-first century to achieve the central message of his legacy—and the reason for writing this book—genuine brotherhood between North and South, and between blacks and whites. An understanding of the diseases of the public mind that caused the war’s cataclysm of blood and fury is now possible, thanks to the work of generations of historians. The truth, as Lincoln once remarked, is often “the daughter of time.”
• • •
When the Marquis de Chambrun heard the news of Lincoln’s assassination, the stricken Frenchman remembered the day he and the president and Mrs. Lincoln were returning from their visit to Richmond. As they approached Washington, DC, the capitol’s looming dome reminded Mary Lincoln of her husband’s congressional critics. “This place is full of enemies,” she said.
“Enemies?” Lincoln said. He shook his head, thinking of the devastated South. “We must never use that word again.”13
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My favorite metaphor for writing a history book is the image of an author standing on the shoulders of dozens of previous scholars. This image is especially true for this book. My debt to various writers, some of them friends, is large and humbling. At the top of my friend list is Harold Holzer, Lincoln scholar extraordinaire, whose books have helped me see Father Abraham’s greatness and his complexity. In the same category is Charles Bracelen Flood, whose riveting narrative, 1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History, prompted Mr. Holzer to say, “No one can comprehend Lincoln without reading this essential book.”
A similar thank you must ascend to Elysium for the late James Thomas Flexner, who stirred similar realizations for George Washington. Allied with him in my mind is a biographer of Washington whose insights into various aspects of his personality, especially his relationship to his slaves, is unparalleled—Peter Henriques. Although I have met him only briefly, letters and emails have more than justified the word friendship.
If there is one book that awoke my desire to understand more about American slavery, it is Time on the Cross: The Economics of Negro Slavery, by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. This controversial attempt to find a new, more positive view of the black American experience in bondage resonated with me for a special reason, aside from its original point of view. It stirred comparisons to the Irish/Irish-American experience of the long dark night of three hundred years of semi-slavery in Great Britain’s oppressive grip, and the impact of freedom for those who emigrated to America’s shores, like my four grandparents. I am equally indebted to Mr. Fogel’s later books, Without Consent or Contract, The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, and The Slavery Debates. The latter is an essential tool for anyone writing about the complex, ever-evolving scholarship on this sensitive subject.
Closely allied in my psychological historical map is Stephen Hahn, whose groundbreaking books on black achievements as slaves and as a pseudo-free (a.k.a. segregated) minority I have read with special interest. I have known Steve since I played a part in bringing his Yale Ph.D. thesis to the attention of the Society of American Historians, which awarded him the Allen Nevins prize. Later published as The Roots of Southern Populism, the book won the Frederick Jackson Turner award of the Organization of American Historians, launching Steve’s notable career. His 2004 book, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, won three major prizes and has deeply influenced my understanding of the slave experience.
Next on my gratitude list comes my wife, Alice Fleming, author of more than thirty superb history books for young readers. She devoted two of these books to the very different lives of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. They are full of insights into the black struggle for freedom that have put me in her debt in a new way. For years beyond counting, she has been my in-house editor, and more recently, thanks
to her proficiency on the computer, my researcher-in-chief in the exploding world of internet sources. Even a casual glance through my endnotes will make this apparent.
Two friendships that I have valued were with Ralph Ellison, author of The Invisible Man, and with John A. Williams, author of The Man Who Cried I Am. I praised the latter book in the New York Times Book Review. This led to a visit to my apartment, during which we talked with memorable frankness about black-white relationships in America. Thanks to these two men, I glimpsed the wound that slavery and segregation inflicted on even the most gifted and generous-spirited black Americans, who were ready to reach across the barrier to extended white hands.
Linked to these black friends in memory is the late Benjamin Quarles, the gifted black historian whose book The Negro in the American Revolution was a revelation to me—and to many others. I invited him to speak at a dinner meeting of the American Revolution Round Table of New York. Talking with him for several hours made me realize we were soul brothers—an extravagance that I hasten to add neither of us uttered aloud.
Next comes a debt that anyone and everyone writing about slavery must acknowledge: to David Brion Davis. His magisterial books on the history of slavery, most notably that remarkable summation of his life’s work, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, are in a class unto themselves. I owe a special debt to his brief but oh-so-pungent volume, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style. During the same period of study, I discovered David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, a searing exploration of the abolition-driven hatred of the South in a post–Civil War nation shorn of Lincoln’s healing power.
Among other books I should mention as contributors in a large way to this book’s point of view are The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States by Laird Bergad and Written in Blood: the Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1971 by Robert Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl. The latter was recommended to me by my close friend Robert Cowley, who was the editor. The book brings alive in awful detail the source of the South’s primary disease in their public mind, the dread of a race war. Equally important is Henry Mayer’s All on Fire, a definitive biography of the founder of abolitionism, William Lloyd Garrison. Again and again we see Garrison’s inability to summon an iota of sympathy for or understanding of the Southerners’ anxiety as the number of slaves swelled to four million and fear of an insurrection clotted the good intentions of men like Thomas Jefferson and his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph.
Perhaps most influential to my overall view of the war as a gigantic tragedy is Drew Gilpin Faust’s The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. With sympathy and clarity and not a trace of sentimentality, Faust has rediscovered the tidal wave of pain and grief and loss that the war flung over both the North and the South.
I must also thank the many librarians who have been helpful in my toils. Mark Bartlett and his staff at the New York Society Library have again been indispensable. Also valuable have been Gregory S. Gallagher, librarian of the Century Association in New York City, and Lewis Daniels, director of the Westbrook (Connecticut) Public Library. Lew’s readiness to hunt down obscure and out-of-print books in the Steady Habits state’s libraries made my summer months as productive as my winter ones in New York City. At least as helpful in exploring the Library of Congress and other Washington, DC, collections, as well as trolling years of microfilms of southern newspapers, was Steven Bernstein, a talented researcher I have called on for several books. Steve has recently published a superb Civil War history of his own, The Confederacy’s Last Northern Offensive, about Jubal Early’s 1864 raid on Washington, DC. My son, Richard Fleming, a graduate of the Columbia University School of Library Science, used his access to his alma mater’s great collections with equally helpful results.
A very large thank you goes to my literary agent, Deborah Grosvenor, and my editor at Da Capo Press, Robert Pigeon. I have wanted to write this book for two decades. Thanks to their openness to new ideas, it has come to life. Bob’s steady encouragement and his suggestions for improving the manuscript were equally invaluable.
Finally, I must thank my favorite West Pointer, Colonel Charles M. Adams, who helped me realize Robert E. Lee’s central role in understanding the history of the Civil War. Charlie was my escort on the day in 1964 that I began researching my history of the U.S. Military Academy. Over the next four years, as I pondered the lives of the men who made that fateful commitment to Duty, Honor, and Country, Charlie and I became close friends. After the book was published, he invited me and my wife to spend a weekend with him and his wife, Cindy, at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The visit ended with a tour of the nearby Gettysburg battlefield under his tutelage. When we reached Cemetery Hill, we paused, gazing up that harrowing slope in the deepening twilight. Charlie turned to me and said, with just a hint of his native Texas in his voice, “I was brought up to believe Robert E. Lee was the greatest man that ever lived. I believed it until I came here, and saw what he asked Pickett’s men to do.”
THOMAS FLEMING
NOTES
PREFACE
1. J. David Hacker, “Recounting the Dead,” Opinionator, Exclusive Online Commentary from the Times, New York Times, September 20, 2011. Mr. Hacker is an associate professor of history at Binghamton University in New York. I have found further evidence for the probability of Mr. Hacker’s figures in the research I did for World War I casualties for my book The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I (New York: 2003). At the end of the war, the total number of reported deaths was 120,139. In 1930, the Veterans Bureau estimated that war-related diseases, wounds, and other kinds of trauma inflicted on the Western Front had raised the total to 460,000.
2. Laird W. Bergad, The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba and the United States (New York: 2007).
3. Thomas Fleming, 1776: Year of Illusions (New York: 1975) and The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I (New York: 2003).
4. Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson,” May 23, 1792, Modern History Sourcebook, Fordham University. Abraham Lincoln, Special Session Message [to Congress], July 4, 1861, Presidential Speech Archive, Miller Center, University of Virginia, http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3508. Adlai Stevenson, speech given in Albuquerque, NM, New York Times, September 12, 1952.
5. A good example is the recent book The American Public Mind, by William E. Claggett and Byron E. Shafer (New York: 2010). It is a study of what Americans think about politics and public policy in four key areas: social welfare, international relations, civil rights, and cultural values.
6. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (Columbus, OH: Centenary Edition, 1965), 7–8.
PROLOGUE: JOHN BROWN’S RAID
1. Merrill D. Peterson, John Brown: The Legend Revisited (Charlottesville, VA: 2002), 92. James M. McPherson, Ordeal By Fire (New York: 1991), 117.
2. David S. Reynolds, John Brown: Abolitionist (New York: 2005), 240–241.
3. Edward J. Renehan, The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown (New York: 1995), 1–8.
4. Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800–1859: A Biography Fifty Years After, reprint (Gloucester, MA: 1965), 426–427.
5. Peggy A. Russo and Paul Finkelman, eds., Terrible Swift Sword: The Legacy of John Brown (Akron, OH: 2005), 119–137. Kenneth A. Carroll, the psychologist who diagnosed Brown, noted, “The manic’s enthusiasm for his project does not issue from careful logical thought but is a product of his emotional illness that intoxicates the subject with a grandiose and unshakable faith in the supreme importance of himself.” Carroll cites affidavits from Brown’s neighbors in Ohio, where he grew up, full of recollections of Brown’s manic behavior. “The evidence that he was mentally ill is clear and abundant.”
6. Villard, John Brown, 430.
7. Renehan, The Secret Six, 197.
8. Vi
llard, John Brown, 433.
9. Reynolds, John Brown, 319–320.
10. Villard, John Brown, 439–440.
11. Reynolds, John Brown, 322–323.
12. Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography, vol. 1 (New York: 1934), 394–396.
13. Villard, John Brown, 448–449.
14. Freeman, R. E. Lee, 399.
15. Villard, John Brown, 451–455.
16. Reynolds, John Brown, 329–333.
CHAPTER 1: SLAVERY COMES TO AMERICA
1. Genesis 9:18–27 (Revised Standard Edition).
2. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: 2006), 62.
3. T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (New York: 2005), 281. Innocent VIII reportedly had sixteen illegitimate children, which won him the title “Padre della Patria” (Father of the Fatherland). Thomas More, Utopia, edited by George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge, England: 1989), 77–78.
4. Robert W. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: 1989), 18–19.
5. Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 80.
6. Edgar J. McManus, Black Bondage in the North (Syracuse, NY: 1973), 65–66. Unfortunately, Judge Sewall also believed that “Ethiopians” could “never embody with us and grow up into orderly families, to the Peopling of the Land.” Both Sewall’s pamphlet and Saffin’s reply are available online, as part of the PBS documentary “Africans in America,” at www.PBS.org/wgbh/aia/part1//. Also see Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems About Slavery, 1660–1810, edited by James G. Basker (New Haven, CT: 2002), 37.
A Disease in the Public Mind Page 34