The Devil's Own Work

by Barnet Schecter

  Between two and three thousand African American soldiers were billeted on Rikers Island, where Garnet was their chaplain. He had urged blacks to enlist at the outbreak of the war and was instrumental in keeping them coming by listening to their grievances and protesting abuses against them to General Dix.49†

  On the raw, cold afternoon of March 5, 1864, New York State's first black regiment marched off to war, and the cheers in the streets of New York were a miraculous change from the riots seven months earlier, when they had been "mobbed, hunted down, and beaten," James McCune Smith observed. From Rikers Island, a ferry brought the thousand troops to the Thirty-sixth Street Pier on Manhattan's East Side, and they marched down to Union Square, arriving in front of the Union League Club at 1 p.m. Henry Highland Garnet mused that the glorious reception of the troops put "ordinary miracles in the shade."50

  For Garnet and his wife, Julia, and for the other dignitaries on the platform in Union Square, the presentation of flags by the club to the regiment was an impressive sight. President Charles King of Columbia University addressed the black troops, saying they were "emancipated, regenerated—and disenthralled—the peer of the proudest soldier in the land."51

  With a band playing military tunes, the regiment marched down Broadway to South Ferry accompanied by one hundred policemen and members of the Union League Club. Garnet shook hands with each soldier at the dock as the regiment embarked for New Orleans on the USS Ericsson.52

  The New York Herald spoke for the many New Yorkers who remained unreconstructed racists, denouncing the ceremonies as a display of "miscegenation," because the presentation of flags by white women to black men constituted a "marriage ceremony."53The Workingmen's United Political Association also reacted negatively, declaring that "the very object of arming the Negroes is based on the instinctive idea of using them to put down the white laboring classes."54 Charles Halpine composed a song for his fictional Private Miles O'Reilly, titled "Sambo's Right to Be Kilt," suggesting that the Irish only welcomed black troops in the army because they would be used as cannon fodder instead.55

  Many New Yorkers, even conservatives, however, were stirred by the scene in Union Square, which signaled a repudiation of the draft riots and of Governor Seymour by the people of New York, as well as progress, however provisional and gradual, for African Americans. Maria Daly recalled:

  It was a very interesting and a very touching sight to see the first colored regiment from this city march down the street for the front. They were a fine body of men and had a look of satisfaction in their faces, as though they felt they had gained a right to be more respected. Many old, respectable darkies stood at the street corners, men and women with tears in their eyes as if they saw the redemption of their race afar off but still the beginning of a better state of affairs for them. Though I am little Negrophilish and would always prefer the commonest white that lives to a Negro, still I could not but feel moved.56

  *The recorder was the presiding judge of New York's Court of General Sessions.

  *The sepoys were Indian troops serving in the army of the British East India Company. They mutinied in 1857, sparking a widespread revolt. After numerous atrocities by both sides, the insurrection was brutally crushed by British forces.

  † Tragically, Rikers Island today is a prison, and the quest for equality launched by these first African American troops remains incomplete. For various reasons, including limited educational and economic opportunities, young black men make up a disproportionate number of Americans behind bars.

  CHAPTER 18

  "Our Bleeding, Bankrupt, Almost

  Dying Country"

  r. Brennan, I Expect to hold a pretty Honorable position in this Service before my Term of Service is Expired, that is if I do not get killed very Soon. I am very ambitious in that Respect." Matthew Powers, the Irish brass finisher, rioter, and arsonist, had seen mostly guard duty in the Union ranks and wrote to Comptroller Brennan again on Christmas Day 1863 from Beaufort, South Carolina, to thank him for getting him out of jail and into the army, where he was enjoying the strict discipline and hoping to make something of himself. His letter implied that he had political ambitions too: If he made it back to New York, he would become a loyal lieutenant for the Democrats.1*

  While the political culture of the Democratic machine continued uninterrupted in New York, the president and Congress focused their attention on the South. The capture of Port Hudson, Louisiana, on the Mississippi, Bragg's defeat at Chattanooga and retreat from Tennessee, and the Union occupation of Little Rock, Arkansas—along with growing evidence of demoralization and dissension in the Confederacy—all emboldened Lincoln to look ahead and plan for the return of rebel states into the Union. In December 1863, the president continued the process of Reconstruction by declaring that all rebels—except Confederate government officials and high-ranking military officers—would be pardoned and granted amnesty if they took an oath of allegiance to the United States.

  In order to speed the process of restoring loyal state governments, Lincoln promised to grant them official recognition when these oaths of allegiance amounted to a mere 10 percent of the voters in that state in 1860. Lincoln's lenient terms were designed to rally the submerged minority of southern Whigs and Unionists who were never die-hard secessionists and provide them with a simple procedure for getting civil government up and running again. In the meantime, military governors appointed by Lincoln were overseeing this process in the areas of Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas that had come under Union control.

  Lincoln had stretched his constitutional authority as president to the limit and soon ran up against the powers of Congress, whose members wanted to exert their legitimate influence over Reconstruction. Once new state governments were formed, Congress asserted its sole right to decide if a state's senators and representatives should be recognized and seated at the Capitol in Washington. Congressional leaders were concerned that unrepentant rebels could submit to the loyalty oath falsely and regain power at the expense of true Unionists. Many Republicans in Congress also favored giving ex-slaves the right to vote as a check on the political power of secessionists. Lincoln, as he had with emancipation, moved more slowly than many Republicans on the issue of black suffrage, but he looked forward to giving blacks the right to vote, he said, "at least . . . on the basis of intelligence and military service."2

  While Lincoln and congressional Republicans debated the fine points of the rebel states' legal status and competed to define and control Reconstruction, they left the rebellious city of New York out of their plans. Strong, Olmsted, and Gilmore, among others, had asked Lincoln to impose a military regime and in effect to reconstruct the city just as he was doing in parts of Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Like the oaths of allegiance Lincoln proposed, the investigation of the draft riots requested by these staunch Republicans was intended to isolate disloyal Copperheads and ensconce Unionists as the loyal core around which New York City could rally to create a new political culture. Instead, a Democratic, white supremacist resurgence was taking hold in New York City, which in the next dozen years helped to undermine Republican plans for national Reconstruction.

  "The plan for creating a Revolution in the West by the release of prisoners was first presented by me to the authorities at Richmond in the month of February, 1864," recalled Captain Thomas Hines, the guerrilla raider and mastermind of Morgan's recent prison break in Ohio.3 This "Revolution," known as the "Northwest Conspiracy," promised to free some fifty thousand Confederate prisoners of war held in various camps in the Midwest, including Camp Douglas outside Chicago; Rock Island, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River; Johnson's Island near Sandusky, Ohio; and a facility in Indianapolis that held many of Morgan's cavalrymen.4

  The freed prisoners were to join forces with the secretive Sons of Liberty— previously known as the Order of American Knights, and before that as the Knights of the Golden Circle—who, according to Confederate spies, had almost five hundred thousand armed members ready
to overthrow local and state governments in the Midwest. While taking the entire region out of the Union so it could resume friendly relations with the South, the Sons of Liberty also hoped to drive free blacks and abolitionists from their states or murder them if they resisted. The plan called for Morgan to support the uprising with an even larger raid than he had launched in 1863, and for teams of arsonists to burn Chicago and New York to the ground.5

  A Missourian known to history only as Captain Longuemare was actually the first to lay the plan before Jefferson Davis, two years earlier, and described the president of the Confederacy "jumping to his feet with the quick nervous motion peculiar to him." Pacing the floor, Davis declared: "It is a great plan. In the West you have men, in the East only mannequins. You show me that this conspiracy is engineered and led by good men. I want military men: men that were connected with West Point. Give me some, even if only one or two, and I will have confidence in it."6

  Clement Vallandigham was the "Grand Commander," the titular head of the Sons of Liberty, but they lacked military leadership. Longuemare's plan was shelved until the Confederacy grew more desperate to recover its prisoners, and Hines, basking in the glow of his raids and his escape from prison with Morgan, stepped forward. Hines urged the Confederate government to send agents to Canada, which, like England, was officially neutral, but in practice supported the Confederacy. By rallying escaped rebel prisoners there, Hines could more easily launch forays into the United States and mobilize the midwestern Copperheads.7

  In March, Hines received written orders from Confederate secretary of war James Seddon, which allocated funds from the sale of two hundred bales of cotton—about one hundred thousand dollars—for the mission. As the Northwest Conspiracy unfolded, the Confederacy apparently spent ten times that amount on its various operations.8 Unlike civilian agents sent to Canada by ship through the Union naval blockade of the South, Hines was instructed to make his way overland through the northern states, stopping to meet with Peace Democrats and other sympathetic leaders and involve them in his plans.9

  Jacob Thompson, former U.S. secretary of the interior under Buchanan, and Clement Clay, a former U.S. senator from Alabama, were among the civilian agents in Canada, where they disbursed funds to Peace Democrats— to subsidize their newspapers, political campaigns, and rallies. Thompson funneled twenty-five thousand dollars to Fernando and Ben Wood's Daily News in New York, to cultivate and sustain the paper as an outlet for Copperhead propaganda. The agents in Canada also purchased arms and supplies for arsonists. By not only selecting military targets but robbing banks and burning the property of wealthy northerners, Thompson hoped to make them "feel their insecurity and tire them out with the war."10

  While the draft riots were apparently a popular revolt, not a Confederate conspiracy, the bloody week in New York had displayed the potential for disruption behind Union lines that Edmund Ruffin and others had pointed out on the eve of the Civil War. Fernando Wood had spoken of New York and other parts of the Union breaking away, and Ruffin had envisioned an alliance of the Midwest and the South against the North. In April 1864, Hines arrived in Toronto determined to make these Confederate dreams a reality.11

  Lincoln needed generals who could win the war before northerners grew tired of it, and in the spring of 1864, the cream of Union military leadership finally rose to the top. Lincoln promoted Grant to general in chief of all Union forces, demoting Halleck to chief of staff. Sherman took charge of the armies west of the Appalachians, while Grant established his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac. Meade kept his command, but Grant would dictate the strategy, and he brought Philip Sheridan east to lead the cavalry.

  The Confederacy had weathered a desperate winter in 1863-64 with barely enough to eat. Having instituted the draft before the Union, the Confederate Congress now did away with substitution—retroactively and going forward—and in mid-February refused to honor the upcoming expiration of three-year enlistments. The range of draft age was lowered to seventeen and raised to fifty. With families starving at home, soldiers deserted to support them despite the new restrictions, and Union forces poised for a spring offensive in Virginia and Georgia soon outnumbered the rebels more than two to one.

  However, occupation of one hundred thousand square miles of territory already captured by Union armies and the job of maintaining order in the border slave states drained considerable manpower from Grant's combat forces. When the Federals penetrated deep into the South, they also expected to leave many troops in the rear to protect their supply lines, again deducting from their principal fighting force. Moreover, the remaining rebel forces were in high spirits, despite the hardships; many of the veterans had decided to stay on before the order came from the government. Inspired by the example of Robert E. Lee, they were ready to fight with the tenacity of men who have everything to gain and nothing to lose.12

  In the North, the Union's three-year men who had signed up at the beginning of the war received incentives, not orders, to stay on. These included a four-hundred-dollar federal bounty in addition to state and local money. "They use a man here just the same as they do a turkey at a shooting match, fire at it all day and if they don't kill it raffle it off in the evening," wrote one veteran, "so with us, if they can't kill you in three years they want you for three more—but I will stay." He was one of about 136,000 who reenlisted.13

  Conscripts, substitutes, and bounty-hungry volunteers brought in by the first draft in 1863 were supposed to replace the wounded and the dead in the hard-hit Army of the Potomac, as well as the one hundred thousand veterans who chose not to stay on.14 However, most of these replacements made poor, unreliable soldiers. Many were career criminals who added bounty jumping to their repertoire, collecting multiple bounties by enlisting, deserting, and reenlisting in new locations under different names.

  Some had rioted against the draft and then avoided prison by temporarily joining the army. A captain in the Eighty-third Pennsylvania Regiment complained that a mob of New Yorkers was ruining the unit.

  These were the cream and flower, the very head and front of the New York rioters, gamblers, thieves, pickpockets and blacklegs, many of whom, it was said, had fled to escape punishment for the crimes of arson, robbery, and homicide . . . They fought, gambled and stole after they got to the regiment. The company streets of the once-peaceful Eighty-third became uproarious at times with their midnight broils and battles. They were always spoiling for a fight except when in the presence of the enemy. One would have supposed that when men would wake up at midnight and fall to pummeling each other in bed, as they often did, they would have become transported at the prospect of battle; but it was at such times that they skulked and seized the opportunity to desert. They would get each other drunk and pick each other's pockets while asleep. They would decoy each other out of camp after dark, on pretense of going out to get something good to drink, and then knock their deluded victims down and rob them of their money. In short, the men would have disgraced the regiment beyond all recovery had they remained three months in it; but thanks to a kind Providence, or to some other invisible power of redemption, they kept deserting, a dozen at a time, until they were nearly all gone.15

  Grant calculated that a staggering 80 percent of these new recruits deserted, leaving the Union forces with much less of an advantage over the rebels in 1864 than the War Department had expected.

  Lee had factored in the potentially disruptive effect of expiring enlistments and the Union's first draft before invading the North less than a year before; in early 1864, he hoped to exploit Grant's manpower shortage in the service of a defensive strategy. If the Confederate armies could simply stand their ground until the northern presidential election in the fall, conquest of the South would appear increasingly futile, Lee hoped, and Democrats might well elect the next president—someone amenable to a negotiated settlement of the war and Confederate independence. Grant was determined to capture Richmond before that scenario could unfold.16

  Grant ho
ped to stretch the rebel armies thin and isolate them from each other by launching attacks in several places at once. Meade was ordered to pursue Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia, keeping him busy while Sherman advanced into Georgia, attacking Johnston's army and destroying Confederate infrastructure and supplies. Three other generals, Benjamin Butler on the Peninsula in Virginia, Franz Sigel in West Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley, and Nathaniel Banks in Louisiana, were to play supporting roles, moving against strategic railroads and cities to engage secondary rebel forces and prevent them from reinforcing Lee and Johnston. When told of the coordinated plan, Lincoln summed it up enthusiastically, like a hunter who has bagged a deer: "Those not skinning can hold a leg."17

  Sergeant Peter Welsh was delighted in April by news that his wife's brother Francis had arrived in New York from Ireland and that she would at last have some companionship in her husband's absence. Liquor had changed the course of Welsh's life, and he offered his young brother-in-law some advice "from dearly bought experiance and with sincere brotherly afection." Welsh had an immigrant's love of New York as a place of boundless opportunity but hinted at the city's dangers: its dives, saloons, and street gangs.