Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  The South professed indifference: Lincoln’s writ did not run in the Confederacy. Some hostile critics, especially British conservatives, professed to see in the Proclamation only an incitement to slave rebellion and murder. Some radicals were disappointed that he had given the rebel states three months’ grace. On the whole the decision was hailed as it deserved. The slaves knew that ‘Linkum’ had done a great deed for them even if they could not read, and even though the Confederacy tried to suppress all reports of the Proclamation before it reached them. The news ran from mouth to mouth across Dixie by the rapid bush-telegraph that always so amazed the planter class, and was being exhaustively discussed in many slave quarters before the masters knew what had happened.

  Yet the road to the final Proclamation was not quite straight. Lincoln liked to proceed by two steps forward, one step back, so as to make absolutely sure that his support was solid, indeed, clamorous; and he was never more careful than in this great matter. So on 1 December 1862 he put forward, not for the first time, proposals for gradual, compensated emancipation and for the colonization overseas of the freed blacks. He had several things in mind: among others, that only through Constitutional amendment could the Emancipation Proclamation be made permanent, and perhaps only gradual emancipation would be acceptable to Congress and the states. His central purpose was to test the waters; and, sure enough, they were stormy. But the wind blew strongest in one direction. The border states might chafe and petition against the Proclamation, but the radical Republicans in Congress vehemently demanded that he hold to it. Airs Stowe came down to Washington to urge the same (he greeted her: ‘so this is the little lady who made this big war’). The House of Representatives passed a resolution in support of the Proclamation. It was enough. On the afternoon of New Year’s Day, 1863, Lincoln signed the final Emancipation Proclamation, confident that he could make it stick. At first his hand trembled so much that he had difficulty in writing. He had a superstitious pang, and then remembered that he had been shaking hands all morning with the crowd that had poured into the White House, according to custom, to wish him Happy New Year. He laughed, pulled himself together and wrote his name firmly.

  In Boston two great public meetings were waiting for the news – one, mainly white, at the Music Hall, the other, mainly black, at Tremont Temple. When the news came by telegraph Frederick Douglass led the singing at the Temple; at the Music Hall the crowd shouted for Mrs Stowe, and before them all she bowed and wept for joy. The abolitionist crusade was vindicated, and the work of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was achieved. An elderly planter in Kentucky thought the same. He called his slaves together, read out the Proclamation and told them that though it did not formally apply to them, he was sure their freedom was at hand, and advised them to make ready for it. In Washington a crowd of both races gathered outside the White House to cheer the President. The blacks said that if he would ‘come out of that palace’ they would hug him to death; that it was a time of times; that nothing like it would ever be seen again in this life.

  Lincoln had done his duty; now the black people did theirs. They deserted the plantations in larger numbers than ever, at considerable risk, greatly weakening the Confederate military effort. The armies of the Union were correspondingly strengthened. Slaves and contrabands proved to be invaluable spies, guides and foragers for the advancing Northerners. Behind the Confederate lines the slaves eagerly succoured Union prisoners of war as best they could and helped them to escape in hundreds. ‘If such kindness does not make one an abolitionist, he must have a heart of stone,’ said one of these grateful fugitives, and another dedicated the book he wrote about his adventures ‘to the Real Chivalry of the South’ – the blacks who had helped him and the others. Nor was that all. Whether as soldiers or hired labourers, Negroes laid miles and miles of military roads; dug innumerable rifle-pits, raised forts, felled forests. They built bridges, drained marshes, filled sandbags, unloaded vessels, threw up entrenchments, dragged cannon to the front. They humped cotton bales abandoned by Southern planters down to the Mississippi levees, where they could be shipped to Union headquarters – demeaning work, since it seemed like a reversion to slavery. They stood on guard duty for endless tedious hours. And more and more they were allowed to fight. The first black regiment to be raised, the 54th Massachusetts, was nearly wiped out in a valiant but unsuccessful attack on Fort Wagner, the key to the seaward defences of Charleston, in 1863. The New York Times called this battle the blacks’ Bunker Hill, for though they lost the fight, it proved their commitment to the Union cause and their excellent quality as soldiers. The black garrison of Fort Pillow on the Mississippi was actually wiped out in the following year, by Southern soldiers who would not accept their surrender – an infamous action which excited widespread passionate condemnation in the North. The Battle of Milliken’s Bend (1863) was won by black troops, who later figured in large numbers and with conspicuous gallantry in Grant’s great Virginian campaign and in the Battle of Nashville. By the end, Negroes had furnished 178,975 soldiers, organized in 166 regiments, to the Union army – one-eighth of its entire strength. They had provided a quarter of the sailors in the Union navy. They had successfully insisted on being treated, iri the all-important matter of pay, as the equals of white soldiers, and had convinced Northern opinion that they deserved it. They had won fourteen Congressional Medals of Honour, the highest military decoration. In the end the Emancipation Proclamation had justified all the hopes placed on it.

  Meanwhile there was still a war to be fought, little progress was being made, and it would be some time before the effect of emancipation would be felt. The western armies were held up at Vicksburg, a strongpoint on the Mississippi which denied the Union control of the river and thereby prevented it from splitting the Confederacy into two. In December the Army of the Potomac, commanded by the well-intentioned but not very clever General Burnside, launched an attack across the river Rappahannock at Fredericksburg, against an unconquerable Southern position. Lee beat back the Unionists easily, in his most convincing if not his most elegant victory. Northern casualties (12,500 dead or wounded) were as bad as those at Antietam. At the New Year a long-drawn-out, bloody and inconclusive battle was fought at Murfreesboro in central Tennessee. When it was over the Confederates, under Braxton Bragg, retreated eastwards, but the Federals were too exhausted to pursue them and stayed where they were for another six months. Again the casualties had been appallingly numerous: 13,000 Federals, 10,000 Confederates.

  The military character of the Civil War was now clear. It was the first industrialized conflict. This meant, among other things, that it was technically feasible to arm, supply and reinforce enormous armies continuously and move them rapidly to any battlefield. Had it not been for the railways the South might have made good her independence. Instead, the existence of 22,000 miles of railway in the North meant that soldiers and supplies could be moved easily from one end of the country to the other, if necessary. Thus the South’s advantage of interior lines of communication was neutralized, and her comparative shortage of railway mileage (9,000 miles) became a major strategic weakness. Still worse was the fact that she did not have the resources to maintain her roadbeds, rails and engines adequately. In this and many other ways the Confederacy suffered crucially from under-industrialization: its only important manufacturing plant was the Tredegar Ironworks at Richmond, whereas the North had innumerable works of the kind. All the devotion, energy and more than Yankee ingenuity which Southern inventors gave to the Cause, and which Southern soldiers applied to the capture of material from the North, could not make good the fearful gap. But both sides operated on a scale hitherto unknown anywhere.

  Hence the colossal scale of Civil War battles. These proved to be fearfully debilitating. After two years of war the volunteer spirit began to flag, and both North and South had to resort to conscription, which caused bad trouble, especially in the North. The aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg was marred by an outbreak of ferocious anti-conscription riots in Ne
w York, which quickly turned into anti-black riots, in which a black children’s orphanage was burned down and several blacks were lynched; hundreds of whites died. Inflation, caused by the vast borrowings of the federal government, galloped away: prices had increased by 99 per cent by the end of the war. A vociferous minority of Peace Democrats, nicknamed ‘Copperheads’ (after a common poisonous snake), indulged in an opposition which was nearly, and occasionally quite, treasonable. War-weariness, and resentment of the administration’s bad luck and incompetence, were expressed at the polls: the Republicans did badly in the 1862 Congressional elections (though they did not lose control of the houses) and might expect to do worse in the Presidential election of 1864 unless they had won the war by then. Three Confederate ships, Florida, Alabama and Shenandoah, built surreptitiously in England, ravaged the unarmed maritime commerce of the North; since they could not carry their prizes home through the blockade, they burned them on the high seas. Their activities deeply embittered Northern opinion against Britain, which had blunderingly allowed the raiders to escape from Birkenhead; at times it looked as if there might yet be a third Anglo-American war.

  Lincoln’s burdens were crushing, and visibly aged him; those of Jefferson Davis were worse. The Southern President had his weaknesses (of which a poor judgement of men was probably the worst), but he was the best man available for his almost impossible job, of creating a nation state and fighting for its life simultaneously. He met obstruction and heartbreaking difficulties at every turn. The blockade, steadily tightening, prevented the importation of goods from Europe in any quantity, and such blockade-runners as there were (they made enormous fortunes) tended to import items, such as hats and dresses from Paris, with an eye to their own profit rather than to the military needs of the Confederacy. Anyway, the South had few resources with which to pay for imports. The idiotic King Cotton policy meant that when cotton could have been got to Europe and there exchanged for arms, it had been withheld, in order to intimidate the Europeans (who discovered, much to their own surprise, that they could at a pinch manage without Southern cotton, using Indian instead); then it had been burned, to keep it out of the Yankees’ clutches and to forestall those unpatriotic planters who might have been tempted to defy the embargo; finally the cotton-fields had largely been turned over to food crops from which to feed the armies. The South was able to raise a certain amount of money on the London and Paris exchanges on the security of future cotton crops, but nothing like enough to buy all it needed.

  As if this was not enough, Davis had also to struggle with the inadequacies of the South’s political structure. States’ rights had been the slogan under which the South seceded; states’ rights were enshrined in the new Confederate Constitution; for states’ rights the South would, it seemed, commit suicide. All too frequently Davis had to struggle bitterly with state Governors (Joe Brown of Georgia and Zebulon Vance of North Carolina): at first over matters of principle, such as conscription and the suspension of habeas corpus; in the end over desperately needed military supplies. He was not helped by his Vice-President, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who denounced him as ‘weak and vacillating, timid, petulant, peevish, obstinate, but not firm’, or by a Cabinet that consisted largely of mediocrities. He was not even able to evolve a system of priorities for the allocation of such supplies as there were. The western and eastern theatres were left to scramble against each other for men and munitions; the eastern theatre, being that of Richmond, Virginia and Robert E. Lee, tended to get the lion’s share, although the war would eventually be won and lost in the West. Davis was partly to blame for this: he never saw, until it was far too late, the need for a supreme military commander; he thought he could do it all himself. The one person in a position to make him see sense in time was Lee, but Lee himself thought and fought rather as a Virginian than as a Southerner: he too seems not to have understood the importance of the West and the imperative need for devising an overall strategy. The contrast with another Virginian general is instructive: he was in some respects the Confederacy’s George Washington, but he lacked Washington’s comprehensive grasp of politics and war.

  Yet at least he could see that the South was growing weaker and weaker: she could not afford to depend solely on the hope that Northern war-weariness would increase, unassisted, to such an extent that Lincoln would give up the struggle; she might give up first herself. So Lee once more turned to the offensive. In the late spring of 1863 he began to move North again.

  Essentially his plan was the same as that which had so nearly succeeded in the previous year. Seasoned by all its campaigning under its incomparable commanders, the army of Northern Virginia was at this point as fine a force, in terms of fighting quality, as any that the world has seen. Lee could depend on his soldiers implicitly, as he could on Stonewall Jackson, as he could, he thought, on the doltish command of the Army of the Potomac. Richmond strained every nerve to supply him adequately. He set out to invade Pennsylvania. If he succeeded, the fright given to Northern civilians would alone be well worthwhile: it might induce them to withdraw troops from the West, where it was beginning to look as if Vicksburg might fall at last. He might, in addition, capture Washington and thereby win the war: for surely, after such a fear, Britain and France would recognize the Confederacy. To do all this, to be sure, it would be necessary to destroy the Army of the Potomac, which in spite of all the batterings he had administered to it he had never yet quite contrived; but Lee had not earned his reputation by pessimism. He set to work.

  First it was necessary to protect Richmond against another Northern offensive, which was launched in April. This Lee did by the victory of Chancellorsville on 2 May 1863. In dense forest – the untouched wilderness of central Virginia – it proved easy enough to bewilder and outflank the invader. Lee even dared to break the old rule and divide his army in the presence of the enemy, so that he could attack from two sides at once. The outcome entirely justified him: the Army of the Potomac had to retreat, after sustaining heavy losses, and Mr Lincoln began to look about for yet another new commander (the loser at Chancellorsville was General Hooker). Yet perhaps the Confederate loss was the heavier: Stonewall, returning from a moonlit reconnaissance, was shot by one of his own sentries. He took a day or two to die, lingering in delirium. His last words were: ‘Let us cross the river and rest in the cool of the trees.’ But his comrades had a long hot road to go: he crossed the river alone.

  Lee crossed, not Jordan, but the Potomac. He feinted as brilliantly as ever: the North was first puzzled, then terrified. In Washington all was confusion: at length command of the resistance was given to General George Meade (1815 – 72), a West Pointer of little prominence (the appointment was so unlikely that when Meade was roused from sleep to receive it he thought the messenger had come to arrest him). The Army of the Potomac hurried after Lee, who now burst out of the Maryland hills into the broad valleys of central Pennsylvania, just west of the state capital, Harrisburg, and the great alluvial plain: fat farmlands, hitherto untouched by war.

  But Lee did not have quite the complete control of his army that he had enjoyed in Stonewall’s time. His cavalry commander, Jeb Stuart, was by no means so reliable, and perhaps the gracious Lee was incapable of being sufficiently firm with him. At any rate, at this crucial moment, Jeb Stuart was away on a raid, and Lee had no knowledge of the whereabouts of the enemy, except that he was somewhere on his flank. Then on 1 July they blundered into each other at the small town of Gettysburg. Longstreet, commander of Lee’s first corps, dislodged the Federals from the town easily enough, but at the price of driving them southwards into an admirable defensive position along a fish-hook shaped ridge. It was Fredericksburg reversed; not Lee’s sort of battle. He said afterwards that it was all his fault, but beforehand his clear judgement was that manoeuvring was impossible (because the Yankees would simply watch their opportunity and then hit him in the flank) and so was retreat. So he resolved on the same tactics that had decimated poor General Burnside’s men seven mont
hs before: a series of frontal attacks uphill.

  The result was the most terrible battle of the war, a struggle which went on for two days, producing frightful casualties (23,000 killed, wounded or missing for the North, about the same for the South). The Confederate soldiers performed prodigies of valour, but at last could do no more. The final attack failed; Lee ordered a retreat. It was made more dismal by pouring rain, but perhaps that, and the exhaustion of the Northern army, preserved Lee from total destruction. Once more he got away with a saving remnant across the Potomac; and once more Abraham Lincoln, who had felt that he had his enemy in his grasp at last, soundly berated his victorious general for too sluggish a pursuit. Yet overall he could afford to rejoice: the South would never again be able to launch such an offensive, and on 4 July, Independence Day, the day after Gettysburg, Grant took Vicksburg. Lincoln proudly announced that ‘the Father of Waters flows once more unvexed to the sea’. Even the outbreak of the New York draft riots could not destroy the meaning of the two great victories. The strategic initiative had passed to the North for good, and the South’s doom was sure, so long as the Union’s will held firm.

  It was time, and more than time, to consider what to do when the Union had achieved its final victory. True, that process, thanks to Robert E. Lee, was going to take eighteen months more, and there was going to be at least one agonizing moment when it looked as if all might be lost; but no one knew this in the summer of 1863. And for months Congress had been steadily growing more assertive on the question of the post-war settlement. If one wants to pick a moment as the opening of the Reconstruction tragedy, the fall of Vicksburg will do as well as any other.