A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

On April fourteenth, all but a few western Confederate armies had disarmed. Mary Lincoln noticed her normally morose husband in the cheeriest of moods.140 It was Good Friday, and Washington buzzed with the excitement that for the first time in four years citizens could celebrate an evening without the apprehension of the next day’s casualty lists. Along with two guests, Major Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, the Lincolns attended Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater. Lincoln did not have his bodyguard/Secret Service agent, Allan Pinkerton, with him.

  At seven o’clock in the evening, with the carriage already waiting, the president’s bodyguard at the White House, William Crook, was relieved three hours late by his replacement, John Porter. As always, Crook had said, “Good night, Mr. President.” But that night, Crook recalled, Lincoln replied, “Good-bye, Crook,” instead of the usual, “Good night, Crook.” The day before, he had told Crook that he knew full well many people wanted him dead, and “if it is to be done, it is impossible to prevent it.”

  After intermission, Porter left his post outside the president’s box and went next door to a tavern for a drink. When Act III started, John Wilkes Booth entered the unguarded anteroom leading to the president’s box, braced its door with a wooden plank, opened the door to Lincoln’s box slightly, and aimed the .44-caliber single-shot derringer at the back of the president’s head, then fired. In the ensuing struggle with Major Rathbone, Booth leaped over the railing, where one of his boots snagged on the banner over the box. He fractured one of his legs as he hit the stage. “Sic semper tyrannis,” he screamed at the stunned audience, “Thus be it ever to tyrants.” Hopping out the door to his waiting horse, Booth escaped. Lincoln, carried unconscious to a nearby house, died nine hours later on the same bed John Wilkes Booth had slept in just one month prior. At one-thirty in the morning, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton made a public statement in which he said, “It is not probable the president will live through the night.”141 “Now he belongs to the ages,” said Stanton on Lincoln’s death.

  Booth, in one maniacal act of defiance, had done more to immortalize Lincoln than all the speeches he ever made or all the laws he signed. The man who only a half year earlier stood to lose the nomination of his own party now rose, and rightfully so, to join the ranks of Washington and Jefferson in the American pavilion of political heroes. Booth worked with a group of conspirators who had hoped to knock out many more in the Washington Republican leadership, including Andrew Johnson and William Seward, that night. Seward was stabbed but the wound was not fatal. The assassins fled to Port Royal, Virginia, where Booth was trapped in a barn that was set afire. He shot himself to death. Other conspirators, quickly rounded up, were tried by a military tribunal. Three men and one woman were hanged; three others received life prison terms; and one went to jail for six years.142 Davis, still free at the time, came under immediate suspicion for authorizing the conspiracy, but he knew nothing of it.

  At ten o’clock the following morning, Andrew Johnson was sworn in as president of the United States. Walt Whitman, who had worked in the Union’s hospital service, penned “O Captain, My Captain” in homage to Lincoln.143

  Had Lincoln survived, perhaps the wounds inflicted by the war itself could have healed in a less bellicose Reconstruction. After all, only in America would a rebellion end with most of the leaders excused and the rebellious state emerging without being obliterated. Whatever damage the South suffered—and it was severe—it pales in historical comparison to the fates of other failed rebellions. Indeed, modern history is littered with successful rebellions (Biafra, Bangladesh) whose human cost and physical devastation exceeded that of the defeated Confederacy’s. With Lincoln’s death, a stream of tolerance and mercy vanished, and the divisions that brought on the war mutated into new strains of sectional, political, and racial antagonisms that gave birth to the perverted legend of “the Lost Cause.”

  Marxist Revisionists, Lost Cause Neo-Confederates

  In the decades following the Civil War, a truly remarkable thing happened. The rebellious South, which had been utterly invaded, destroyed, and humiliated, concocted a dubious explanation of its past. This reconstruction of history reshaped every aspect of the Civil War debate, from causes (slavery was not a sectional issue) to battlefield defeats (the South only lost because of the ineptness of some of its generals, most notably James Longstreet at Gettysburg) to the legality and constitutionality of secession to the absurd notion that the South, if left to its own devices, would have eventually given up slavery.144 The Lost Cause myth accelerated in the twentieth century when pop historians and even a few trained scholars bought into the false premises.

  It is useful to recount, as historian James McPherson does, the total defeat inflicted on the South:

  By 1865, the Union forces had…destroyed two-thirds of the assessed value of Southern wealth, two-fifths of the South’s livestock, and one quarter of her white men between the ages of 20 and 40. More than half the farm machinery was ruined, and the damages to railroads and industries were incalculable…Southern wealth decreased by 60 percent.145

  To that could be added the thorough destruction of the Southern banking system and the regionwide dissolution of the social structure based on slavery.146

  Lost Cause theorists emphasized the irrelevancy of slavery as a cause of war, and sought to make the conflict about economic issues such as the tariff and cultural differences between the “honorable South” and the immoral North. They emphasized constitutional values and states’ rights, not the issue of human chattel. But the record was quite different. Jefferson Davis “had frequently spoken to the United States Senate about the significance of slavery to the South and had threatened secession if what he perceived as Northern threats to the institution continued.”147 In 1861 Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens called the “great truth” of slavery the “foundation” and “cornerstone” of the Confederacy.148 The Confederate constitution specifically provided for protection of the “right of property in slaves.” Far from moving toward emancipation anywhere, the South, as Allan Nevins pointed out, was making slavery harsher and more permanent. New laws reinforced slavery, throttled abolitionist materials, and spread the net of compliance to more and more nonslaveholding whites.149 Indeed, the best argument against the notion that the South would have voluntarily given up slavery is that there was not the slightest indication of movement toward emancipation in any Southern state prior to 1861.

  Contrary to the perpetrators of the Lost Cause story, once the Southerners saw the war on their doorstep, their defense of states’ rights and principles all but vanished as the Confederacy increasingly toyed with the notion of emancipating its own slaves if they would fight for the CSA. The first such recommendations came in February 1861, but most officials dismissed them. By mid-1863, however, after Vicksburg fell, the Confederacy suddenly entertained arguments about emancipation. “Cannot we who have been raised with our Negroes and know how to command them, make them more efficient than the Yankees can?” asked one proponent of arming the slaves.150

  The Lost Cause myth took root during Reconstruction, with pro-Southern writers emphasizing the corruption of federal occupation and the helplessness of white citizens against the power of the federal government and the proportionately large numbers of blacks who went to the polls. Neo-Confederate writers’ imaginative attempts to portray the antebellum South as a utopia were outrageously distorted and ultimately destructive. They planted in a large number of Southerners (though not the majority) the notion that the Confederacy had fought for important moral principles, and they labored to move the argument away from slavery.

  The modern-day voices of the Lost Cause who received new support (after the fall of the Dixiecrats in the 1960s) came from modern libertarians who, for the most part, viewed the Union government as more oppressive than the Confederacy. Emphasizing the infractions against civil and economic liberties by the Union government during and after the war, this view has maintained a dedicated but small group of adh
erents.151 To these Lost Cause proponents, Lincoln remains the ultimate monster, a tyrant whose thirst for power enabled him to provoke the South into firing on Fort Sumter. Had he only let the lower Confederacy secede, their argument goes, the remaining United States would have embarked on a golden age of liberty, and the South, eventually, because of market forces (claim the libertarians) or its own noble character (as the neo-Confederates assert), would have emancipated the slaves. These views are as deceptive as they are erroneous. Virtually no evidence exists to suggest that the South would have peacefully emancipated its slaves. Indeed, since slavery was supported with the power of a Confederate government fully behind it, the institution could have survived for decades, if not perpetually. Slavery existed in some empires in the world for centuries—and still exists in parts of the Arab world today. It was seldom voluntarily eradicated from within. Equally as destructive is the notion that states—or principalities—could choose their own terms when it suited them to be in the Union.

  Equally perverse is the neo-Marxist/New Left interpretation of the Civil War as merely a war “to retain the enormous national territory and market and resources” of the United States.152 Reviving the old Charles Beard interpretations of the triumph of capitalism over an agrarian society, leftist critics find themselves in agreement with the more radical libertarian writers. Whereas the neo-Confederates harken back to an imaginary world of benign masters and happy slaves, the leftist critics complain that Lincoln was too conservative, and blocked genuinely radical (and, to them, positive) redistribution of not only plantation owners’ wealth, but all wealth.

  It is preposterous for Marxists to assert that capitalism enslaved free employees. Quite the contrary, the only hope many Southern blacks had once the Yankee armies had left for good in 1877 was the free market, where the color of money could overcome and subdue black/white racism. The government, and not the market, perpetuated Jim Crow; the government, not the market, enforced union minimum wage laws that excluded blacks from entry-level positions; and the government, not the market, passed and enforced separate-but-equal segregation laws. The market, freed from interference by racist Southern state regulations, would have desegregated the South decades before Martin Luther King Jr., the freedom riders, Harry Truman, Earl Warren, and the Civil Rights acts.

  America’s Civil War was ultimately and overwhelmingly about the idea of freedom: whether one group of people could restrict the God-given liberty of others. That the Republicans, in their zeal to free slaves, enacted numerous ill-advised taxes, railroad, and banking laws, is regrettable but, nevertheless, of minor consequence in the big picture. In that regard, the South perverted classic libertarianism—libertarianism did not pervert the South.

  A remarkable fact of the war is that the United States divided almost evenly, fought for four bloody years, and never abandoned the concept of constitutional government. Quite the contrary, if one takes Southern rhetoric at face value, the war was over the definitions of that constitutionalism. But even if one rejects Southern arguments as rationalizations for slavery, the astounding fact is that the Confederacy no sooner left the Union than it set up its own constitution, modeled in most ways on that of the United States from which it had seceded. In neither section, North or South, were elections suspended or most normal workings of civilian government abandoned. In neither section was there a coup d’état. Indeed, both sides agreed that the founding ideas were worth preserving—they just disagreed over the exact composition and priority of those ideas.

  And, finally, rather than a contest about capitalism, the Civil War was a struggle over the definition of union. No concept of union can survive any secession, any more than a body can survive the “secession” of its heart or lungs. The forging of the nation, undertaken in blood and faith in 1776 and culminating in the Constitution in 1787, brought the American people together as a single nation, not a country club of members who could choose to leave at the slightest sign of discomfort. The Civil War finalized that contract and gave to “all men” the promises of the Declaration and the purposes of the Constitution. And although thousands paid the ultimate price for completing that process, what emerged—truly “one nation, under God”—could never again be shattered from within.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Ideals and Realities of Reconstruction, 1865–76

  Hope and Despair

  Less than two weeks after Lincoln’s assassination more than 2,100 Union soldiers boarded the steamboat Sultana at Vicksburg to return to their homes via the Mississippi River. The vessel had a capacity of 376, but on that day it carried soldiers literally packed like sardines from stem to stern when, eight miles north of Memphis, a boiler exploded, collapsing the superstructure and engulfing the rest of the Sultana in flames. As if the ravages of war and the death of a president had not dealt the nation enough of a blow, when the dead were accounted for, more than 1,547 people had perished, making the Sultana explosion the worst American water-related disaster in history, exceeding the number of Americans who died on the Lusitania in 1915 by some 1,400. Their loss came as a cruel exclamation point to the end of a devastating war that had already claimed 618,000 men.

  Earlier that month, just before Lee surrendered, the Army of Northern Virginia had marched out of Richmond to the sound of Rebels blowing up their own gunboats on the James River. One Confederate, S. R. Mallory, recalled that the men were “light-hearted and cheerful…though an empire was passing away around them.” When they reached the Richmond suburbs, however, they saw “dirty-looking women, who had evidently not been improved by four year’ military association, [and] dirtier-looking (if possible) children.” Mallory noticed the crowds had not gathered to watch the retreat, but to pillage the burning city, looting and burning “while the standards of an empire were being taken from its capitol, and the tramp of a victorious enemy could be heard at its gates.”1

  Armies of deserters and refugees thronged to Southern cities—what was left of them—only to find that even before Union troops arrived, Confederates had set fire to many of the buildings. Union cavalry entered Richmond first, surrounded by mobs of “Confederate stragglers, negroes, and released convicts,” suffocating by the air thick with smoke from the fires that swept the streets.2 Yankee troops, cheered on by former slaves, struggled to finally bring the fires under control and to stop the looting.” Northern reporters accompanying federal forces observed crowds of African Americans heading for the State House grounds, merely to walk on ground where, just days earlier, they had been prohibited from entering.3

  Washington, meanwhile, witnessed one of the grandest illuminations ever recorded, as the entire population lit candles, flew flags, and burned lamps. The secretary of war ordered a staggering eight-hundred-gun salute—five hundred in honor of the surrender of Richmond and three hundred for Petersburg—which shook the earth as men embraced, women cheered, and, for a magical moment, old animosities evaporated in goodwill toward men. That did not last long. When word came that Richmond was aflame, cries of “Burn it! Burn it!” reverberated. Reporter Noah Brooks concluded that “a more liquorish crowd was never seen in Washington than on that night.”4

  Lincoln traveled to Petersburg to meet with the commander of the Army of the Potomac, General Grant. Perhaps appropriately, the band followed “Hail Columbia,” with “We’ll All Drink Stone Blind.” The president congratulated the general, claiming to have had a “sneaking idea for some days” that Grant neared victory, and proceeded to confer for an hour with Grant over postwar occupation policies. It concerned many that Lincoln had walked exposed and unescorted through the streets of Petersburg, having arrived at an abandoned dock with no greeting party, and then, on April fourth, had ridden through Richmond itself, overcome by joy at seeing freed slaves shouting, “Glory to God! Glory! Glory!” Later, on the night of April fifth, aboard the Malvern, Lincoln jotted down his goals for reuniting the nation. He intended that all confiscated property, except slaves, would be immediately returned to its owners after a s
tate had ceased its support of the rebellion.

  Radicals in Congress who heard Lincoln’s April eleventh Reconstruction speech were unimpressed. Some considered the president shallow for failing to demand “an entire moral and social transformation of the South,” as if such were in the hands of any president.5 Virtually all of Lincoln’s cabinet, however, came away from his final meeting convinced he was more cheerful and happy than they had ever seen him. Lincoln had again insisted that while federal authority must be imposed and violence suppressed, private citizens in the South should be treated with courtesy and respect. Beyond that, we know little of Lincoln’s specific plans, for he met his fate at Ford’s Theater on April fourteenth.

  The process of readmitting former members of the Confederacy to the Union, rebuilding the South, and establishing a framework for the newly freed slaves to live and work in as free men and women in a hostile environment has been termed Reconstruction. The actual political evolution of Reconstruction, however, involved three distinct phases. Under the first phase, presidential Reconstruction, Lincoln (briefly) and Andrew Johnson attempted to control the process under two broad precepts: the South should be readmitted to the Union as quickly as possible, with as little punishment as necessary for former Confederates, and the freedmen should obtain full emancipation, free from legal barriers to employment or property ownership. Beyond that, presidential Reconstruction did not attempt to make freedmen citizens, nor did it seek to compensate them for their years in bondage.

  A second phase followed: in congressional Reconstruction the dominant Republican faction, the Radicals, sought full political equality for freedmen, pushed for economic compensation through the forty-acres-and-a-mule concept, and demanded more serious punishment for former Rebels. Naturally, the Radicals’ distinct positions put them in conflict with President Andrew Johnson, who held to more Lincolnesque views. Congressional Reconstruction further involved a program to punish Southerners for their rebellion by denying them representation in Washington or by establishing tough requirements to regain the franchise.