Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  Lincoln’s policy during the war had two clearly distinct but overlapping phases. In the first, his task was to find the means of winning and to convince his fellow-citizens that victory was worth its cost. In the second, he had to prepare a peace.

  By the autumn of 1863 he had substantially completed his first task. So he accepted an invitation to deliver a few suitable words at the dedication of a cemetery for the fallen at Gettysburg. The main address of the day was delivered by an elegantly fluent windbag, who gave a speech full of clichés that lasted two hours. Lincoln’s lasted barely two minutes. Yet very soon this little Gettysburg Address was being quoted and applauded everywhere; for in it Lincoln at last achieved the perfect distillation of what he had been trying to teach his people since, in his inaugural address, he had first put the case for majority government.

  Fourscore and seven years ago [he began] our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

  Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

  But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate–we can not consecrate — we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

  For Lincoln’s original audience the importance of the address was that it summed up their deepest beliefs, which, whatever their validity (the twentieth century has shown up a certain element of presumption in them, as well as their essential correctness), were neither cheap nor silly. In their name, summoned by Lincoln’s sober language, they could continue to fight in stern Puritan hopefulness.

  For Lincoln the important point was probably the single phrase ‘all men are created equal’ (lifted from the Declaration of Independence). For him, by now, the causes of Union and of emancipation were one. The casualty lists were continually lengthening, and the deaths from diseases contracted in the appalling hospitals were double the number of those in battle. As Lincoln contemplated the horrible suffering, he wondered, ever more anxiously, what sins of omission or commission he and his countrymen had committed to deserve this chastening at God’s hands – the God in whom, before the war, he had almost ceased to believe; and he resolved that in the making of the peace, the remaking of the Union, those sins would not be repeated.

  The deepest sin, of course, the root of the whole matter, was slavery, but that was well on the way to final extinction. The Emancipation Proclamation was doing its work. As a wartime measure it could not permanently outlaw slavery, even though it freed the slaves; but already proposals were being brought forward for an amendment to the Constitution, ending the peculiar institution for ever. More pressing were the intimately related problems of what to do with the former slaves, and what to do with the rebels.

  Lincoln, determined to avoid those faults of arrogance and rigidity which had played so large a part in bringing about the Civil War, early decided on his course. The blacks would have to trust to the wisdom and mercy of their former masters; this might not be a bad fate if the South was shown wisdom and mercy by the federal government. Lincoln demonstrated what he meant in his plans for the reconstruction of Louisiana, the first Southern state to fall back entirely into Union hands. Let 10 per cent of the state’s voters take the oath of loyalty to the Union and renounce slavery, and they could set up a new government, which would be readmitted to the Union on the old terms. Lincoln’s only reservation was that certain categories of rebel – functionaries of the ‘so-called’ Confederate government, for example, or men who had resigned US military or naval commissions – would be excluded; otherwise pardon would be available to all who took the loyalty oath.

  Lincoln can have had few illusions about the difficulty of what he was undertaking, and was as flexibly ready as ever to try something else if this scheme failed; but underneath the magnanimity and caution which were such leading traits of his character lay a flint-like self-assurance. Against all odds, he was successfully guiding the Union towards victory; he would also guide it towards peace, and a just future. The difficulties quite failed to daunt him.

  Yet they were formidable, and on one of them his enterprise must, I think, have foundered. The Southern whites were obdurate. They were of no mind, it proved, to show wisdom and mercy to the blacks. Had Lincoln lived he would have been faced by such tokens of resistance as the infamous Black Codes,4 and thus have been forced to take the road of radical reconstruction. To suppose that he would not have done so is to mistake the nature of his relationship with the Republican parry, of which he was after all the leader; and to forget that he was, and knew himself to be, the Great Emancipator. He had incurred grave responsibilities for the welfare of the former slaves; he was not the man to shirk them.

  In his lifetime it was resistance from the other side, from these same radical Republicans, which seemed likeliest to thwart his generous projects. The stronghold of these men was Congress, which they had dominated since the Southern withdrawal in 1861. The radicals did not share either Lincoln’s magnanimity or his self-confidence, and some of them wanted another presidential candidate in 1864: one more extreme in his views and more subservient to Congress. They did not trust the Southern planters, and thought that far more obstacles should be placed in their way, lest they regain control of the states and both oppress the freedmen and challenge the Republican ascendancy in Congress. They felt further that a reconstruction plan should have some explicit provisions for safeguarding the interests of the blacks, though at this stage neither they nor the President were willing to do more than toy with the idea of Negro suffrage. They were appalled by actual events in Louisiana (General Banks, Lincoln’s agent there, showed himself much too co-operative with the planters). All through the spring and summer of 1864 the dispute raged. Eventually the radicals pushed the so-called Wade-Davis bill through Congress: it embodied some of their own stringent ideas, for example by requiring 50 per cent of the white male citizens to take an ‘ironclad’ loyalty oath before a state might recover its powers. Lincoln vetoed it, since it would have tied his hands. The radicals were enraged. They were convinced that the war had been caused solely by the machinations of the planters (not true Americans, in their view, but aristocrats and Tories) and they were determined to break the oligarchy’s power once for all. They were reinforced in their determination by many of the allies that the Republican party’s success had won for it. They were the supporters of protective tariffs, of transcontinental railways, men who had done well out of the war and meant to do well out of the peace, and the thousands upon thousands of office-holders. All of these feared what a vengeful, unreformed, politically adroit South might achieve if allowed back into the Union on anything but the stiffest terms. After all, the South had usually dominated the federal government before the war. She must never do so again.

  At times all these disputes seemed premature. The blockade was tightening daily on the southern coastlines; no hope now of rescue for the Confederacy from Europe. In eastern Tennessee the South had thrown away the victory of Chickamauga
(19 – 20 September 1863) when the Union Army of the Cumberland had come within an inch of total destruction; failure to follow through had given Washington time to hurry in reinforcements, by road, river and (most spectacularly) railroad, and to put the whole operation under the command of Ulysses S. Grant. On 24 – 25 November the Union took its revenge, and in the Battle of Chattanooga expelled the Confederacy from Tennessee. The next step would be to break through the mountain barrier into central Georgia, but Grant would not take it in person: Lincoln, at last acknowledging his outstanding talents, plucked him away from the West to make him overall commander of the Union armies with the rank of lieutenant-general (the first soldier since Washington to hold that rank). His brilliant second-in-command, William Tecumseh Sherman (1820 – 91), was left to complete the Western campaigns. But it was long indeed before these victories and dispositions produced their promised fruit.

  Grant left Meade in command of the Army of the Potomac, but himself settled the strategic and tactical plans of campaign for dealing with Lee. He marched his men south in May 1864, disappearing with them into the thick green woods of Virginia, like so many Northern generals before him, and like them came to grief. In a series of battles (the Wilderness, 5-6 May; Spotsylvania Court House, 8 – 19 May; Cold Harbor, 3 – 11 June) he and Lee inflicted frightful punishment on each other’s armies: Union casualties were 55,000, Confederate, 40,000; and at the end of it Grant had neither destroyed the Army of Northern Virginia (his essential objective) nor taken Richmond. Instead he found himself laying siege to the Confederate capital from the south and east; while Lee’s army, though grievously reduced, was securely entrenched on his front, with the vital railway lines that brought in supplies from the interior of the South quite out of reach. And Northern opinion shuddered at the length of Grant’s ‘butcher’s bill’.

  Other Union generals had despaired when confronted with lesser difficulties; but Grant never despaired, and Lincoln backed him steadily, even when he was at fault. He had neglected the Shenandoah valley, down which so many surprise Confederate attacks had driven so often in the past; now Lee mounted one more. He sent General Jubal Early on a spectacular raid against Washington, followed by another into Pennsylvania, which produced panic in the federal capital and greatly damaged Lincoln’s chances of re-election. Grant retaliated by sending one of his most competent and pitiless generals, Phil Sheridan (1831 – 88), to devastate the valley, which was not only Early’s base but also one of Lee’s chief sources of supply. After he had finished Sheridan commented that if a crow now wanted to cross the valley he would have to carry rations. And though Lee and his men survived in their entrenchments at Petersburg, a few miles south of Richmond, they were also trapped. If Grant kept up the pressure, their defeat could only be a matter of time.

  Yet once again the outlook for the Union in the late summer was as gloomy as it had been cheerful in the spring. A swelling chorus of discontent spoke of failing Northern morale. The Copperheads were more active and vociferous than ever. The Presidential election being at hand, the Democrats drafted an election platform which in effect conceded independence to the Confederacy, for it demanded an immediate armistice and made no mention of slavery. They nominated General McClellan for the Presidency: he accepted the nomination but rejected the platform. Nevertheless, a McClellan victory would probably mean victory for the platform too, since it would be read, probably correctly, as a popular repudiation of the war as well as of the war-making President; and at the end of August it seemed very likely to Lincoln that McClellan would win.

  Then came the news that on 1 September Sherman had taken Atlanta, Georgia. His campaign had lasted all summer. He had fought his way down from the mountains to the edge of the Georgian plain only in the teeth of an intensely skilful retreat by Joe Johnston, who had kept his army effective and in being every inch of the way, and on the whole inflicted more damage than he had received. But Johnston’s Fabian tactics were deeply resented by Jefferson Davis, for they were allowing the Yankees to get at the untouched heart of the Confederacy. When Sherman reached the outskirts of Atlanta the President lost patience and replaced Johnston by General John B. Hood, who had been intriguing against his commander for months. It was a fatal choice. Hood had some virtues, but common sense was not one of them. To save Atlanta he launched a series of vigorous attacks which only weakened his army. He was able to delay the inevitable for a few weeks more, but at the end of August had to abandon the place after destroying his supply dumps there. This loss was serious enough on its own, for Atlanta was a centre of communications and of the South’s infant industrial production. What was worse, its fall gave just that fillip to Northern morale which was needed. Abraham Lincoln was re-elected by a landslide. Worst of all, Georgia was laid open to Sherman’s army.

  He waited for some time, considering what to do. His line of communication with his base at Chattanooga and Nashville was already dangerously long and was threatened by Confederate cavalry raiders under the brilliant leader Bedford Forrest. To move forward through hostile country and protect his communications at the same time was, Sherman decided, beyond his strength. To stay where he was, in Atlanta, was to condemn himself to impotence. Boldly, he decided to cut loose from his base and march through Georgia to the Atlantic, living off the country. He knew that the South was so weakened that he would be unlikely to meet any very formidable resistance; but he had insight enough to see that there was another, crueller, stronger reason for such a campaign. If he cut a trail of scorched earth through the Southern heartland it would be a fatal blow to Confederate strength and morale. The rebels would discover their total impotence and accept that their defeat was certain. Before long they would surrender. He resolved to ‘make Georgia howl’. As soon as Lincoln was safely re-elected, Sherman disappeared. Burning everything of military value in Atlanta so that it would be of no use to the enemy, he marched off to the sea.

  He had the easiest possible passage. Hood knew as well as Sherman that he could offer no effective resistance to the march; but he thought he might counter it by striking at Sherman’s base at Nashville. If he succeeded there, he said boastfully, he would march on Ohio. This decision would have had little to recommend it, even if Sherman had left Nashville undefended, since he clearly thought he was now independent of his communications: if he was right, the loss of the city would make little difference to him. But Nashville was far from undefended. Hood staked one of the last two Southern armies there, and lost his gamble: he was utterly defeated by General George H. Thomas (1816 – 70), a Unionist Virginian who had never before had quite such a splendid opportunity to show what he could do. His demonstration now was absolutely convincing. As Bruce Catton says, at the Battle of Nashville (15 – 16 December 1864), ‘for the one and only time in all the war, a Confederate army [was] totally routed on the field of battle’.5 Next month Hood was relieved at his own request, and the fragments of his army were sent to do what little they could against the triumphant Sherman.

  That commander had reached the sea and taken Savannah, as a Christmas present for Abraham Lincoln, on 21 December. His month of invisibility had stirred considerable anxiety in the North, but it had been a strategic triumph. Behind him lay a swath, some fifty miles wide by 250 miles long, of burned-out mansions, liberated slaves, devastated fields, wrecked railway lines and despairing white civilians. He had also picked the country clean of livestock and provisions. Georgia was finished. Now it was South Carolina’s turn: at last the proud Palmetto state, which had been the heart and centre of the rebellion, would receive her punishment. The trail of destruction turned north; and Sherman continued to display his mastery of war. He outwitted his opponents (Johnston and Beauregard were only two of the generals now gathered against him) as well as outfighting them; he bypassed Charleston, which fell all the same, and seized the state capital, Columbia, on 17 February 1865. That night half the town burned to the ground, in fires that were lit accidentally-on-purpose by drunken, vengeful Northern soldiers (Sherman
got the blame, though it was quite untrue that, as alleged, he had ordered the arson). As spring began the army turned towards North Carolina and Virginia, to rendezvous with Grant at Richmond.

  Before it got there, however, the war was over.

  On 31 March Grant launched his long-prepared offensive against Lee’s lines at Petersburg.6 Lee was now so weakened that he could offer no effective resistance. By this time even his devoted soldiers were despairing. There were so few of them left, and under Grant’s inexorable pressure of men and guns they had to stretch their lines ever thinner. They were dressed in rags, barefoot, underfed and dangerously short of ammunition. And what was there left to fight for? The Cause was petering out in bitter squabbles between the political leaders, each blaming anyone but himself for the débâcle. It was, said the soldiers, ‘a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight’. It had taken them a long time to realize it; and the rich men had already lost not only the war, but the thing for which they had launched it. In the North, thanks in large part to strong pressure by the administration, Congress had finally passed the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery for ever, and sent it to the states for ratification. In the South, Jefferson Davis, as a last desperate measure to raise new manpower, had induced the Confederate Congress to give freedom to any slave who enlisted in the army. Slavery was dead, and the Confederacy almost so. And now Sheridan turned Lee’s flank, while Grant destroyed his centre. On 2 April Richmond had to be evacuated. Jefferson Davis and the government fled south-west; Lee began a desperate march to the west, hoping to get beyond the Federal pursuit so that he could turn south and link up with Joe Johnston.

  The President of the states so soon to be re-united was waiting for the finish behind the federal lines. He could not quite believe that he was witnessing it. Only a month earlier, as he took the oath of office for the second time, he had seemed oppressed with the idea that all might still be far from over.