What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  As many Union troops saw it, Lincoln had to win not only to end the war, but also to end it right by eliminating slavery once and for all. Like many of his compatriots, Pvt. John Brobst regarded Lincoln as “the only man that can settle this war up and do it as it should be settled.” To end the war “by letting [Confederates] have their slaves” would cause the war to “end in four months, for ten years only.” By insisting on emancipation, Lincoln would end the war “eternally” by eliminating the cause of the conflict. 12 Pvt. Oscar Cram echoed Brobst’s reasoning. After telling his wife that the election of McClellan was exactly what Confederates most hoped for, Cram went on to ask, “which would you prefer, to have the war ended & Slavery continue…or have the war continue a year longer & slavery abolished & me stay out here?” Whatever course his wife favored, Cram left no doubt that in his opinion, only a vote for Lincoln and the end of slavery could successfully end the conflict. 13

  Naturally, some troops disagreed. McClellan’s personal popularity never completely vanished, numerous lifelong Democrats stood by the old party, and a few of the war-weary attributed the conflict’s prolonged existence to the party in power. Hermon Clarke, who broke partisan ranks to vote for Republicans in the 1863 state elections, intended to return to his family’s Democratic loyalties because he blamed Republicans for delays in soldier pay. “I think some new administration might do better by us,” he explained when he wrote home to ask his father to mail him a Democratic ticket. 14 Resentful because he had been drafted, Edwin Horton pledged himself “a McLellan man up to the handle.” 15 Also, while Lincoln’s commitment to emancipation won the support of most soldiers, it alienated some troops. “Lincolnism and Niggerism is in the ascendant,” career cavalryman Charles Bates observed with disgust, “and a poor fellow like me with McClellan in his mind” grew increasingly lonely in the ranks, where nearly everyone else supported Lincoln and an end to slavery. 16

  Black soldiers expressed mixed opinions about Lincoln. Since voting was governed by state laws and most states outside of New England restricted the franchise to white men, most black troops could not cast ballots, but they still took the election seriously. To some, Lincoln qualified as God’s instrument chosen to erase the nation’s ugliest stain. 17 One man in the Thirty-first U.S. Colored Troops associated “Honest Abe” with “our Year of Jubilee,” and many black soldiers wrote to Lincoln personally with their needs and requests. 18 Others despised McClellan and the Chicago platform, but criticized Lincoln’s slow pace toward racial justice. Chaplain Henry McNeal Turner thought the framers of the Chicago platform “ought to every one be hung till dead by the neck,” but he also regretted that Lincoln had not adopted a firm line on slavery more promptly. “The principles which should have governed him, were those of eternal justice; they were clearly laid down in the Bible…. And had these principles been his modus operandi, or his compass, to run the national ship by,” both the Copperheads and the Confederates would have been beaten much earlier. 19 Yet while many black troops harbored reservations about Lincoln, all preferred him to McClellan.

  The election process in the fall was cumbersome, makeshift, and excluded most black troops, but the fact that it occurred at all was noteworthy. Methods and polling dates varied by state. Eighteen states allowed soldiers to vote in the field (if they were eligible to vote at home) and then send the returns to state election officials. The Army granted furloughs to some men in other states so they could go home to vote. 20 Some soldiers, like Cpl. Charles Harris of the 157th New York, sent ballots home and authorized fathers or brothers to cast them on election day. 21 The Twenty-ninth Ohio “elected ‘Viva Voce’ three judges and two Clerks” to oversee the balloting, ensure that soldiers cast their votes fairly, and count the votes afterward. The following day, the clerks prepared the returns to send back to all seventeen Ohio counties represented in the regiment. 22

  Despite the reservations of some blacks and the McClellan loyalty of a small number of white troops, when the results came in “the soldiers vote [was] like a handle on a jug, all on one side, for Lincoln,” as Sgt. Henry Hart put it. 23 In Hart’s own battery, soldiers cast sixty-four votes for Lincoln and only twelve for McClellan, even though supporters of both candidates held “good rousing meetings” to get out the vote. 24 Charles Musser’s regiment gave 493 of 544 votes to Lincoln, and other regiments in his division posted similar results. 25 In the total popular vote, Lincoln outpolled McClellan 2,219,924 (55 percent) to 1,814,228, and won 212 electoral votes to McClellan’s 21, carrying every state except Kentucky, Delaware, and New Jersey. Not every state distinguished between the soldier and civilian vote, but in those that did, soldier support for Lincoln totaled nearly 80 percent. 26

  Although Lincoln would have carried almost every state without the soldier vote, many troops saw Lincoln’s landslide among the rank and file as important because it sent the message that “it is not reasonable to suppose that men will fight for, and vote against, the same principles.” 27 After all, four out of five white Union troops chose Lincoln, and if all black soldiers had been permitted to vote, the ratio in favor of Lincoln would likely have been higher, since black soldiers showed no support for McClellan. Lincoln’s supporters included Democrats who flocked to the Lincoln banner with the zeal of the converted. Even Ohio Democrat Chauncey Welton, who in 1863 had hated Abraham Lincoln and emancipation, supported Lincoln and chided his father to do likewise. 28

  White Union soldiers loved and stood by Lincoln because by the autumn of 1864 they believed that he articulated a vision of the war’s causes and purpose that matched their own. Although black Americans had advocated the destruction of slavery even before the war began, most white troops, like Lincoln, had believed before the war that the Constitution forbade federal interference with slavery. Some regarded the institution with indifference or even mild approval. Yet their wartime experiences convinced most white Union troops that slavery must be destroyed, and they appreciated that even though the president’s views (or at least actions) evolved more slowly than their opinions did, the pattern of Lincoln’s changing attitudes matched their own. Like the Union rank and file, Lincoln knew that slavery had caused the war and must be destroyed in order to end the war, and he also, like the men in the ranks, interpreted the war as punishment and repentance for the shared national sin of slavery. By 1864, countless soldiers agreed with an Iowa man who praised Lincoln as a model of “Loyalty, Liberty, and Union,” because the president understood that in order to prove that “this war is not a failure, that Slavery must die.” 29

  As their views on slavery demonstrated, going to war changed white northern men in ways that folks at home could only imperfectly understand, and placed an ideological as well as geographical distance between white soldiers and their loved ones. Abraham Lincoln seemed to travel that distance with the troops. When Lincoln characterized the war as “a new birth of freedom,” he echoed soldiers like Pvt. Justus Silliman, who voiced the hope that the war and emancipation would infuse “new life and vigor” into “our nation.” Moreover, he articulated beliefs about the war that hardship, fear, and suffering (unshared by civilians) had led soldiers to embrace. 30 By 1864, Union soldiers everywhere referred to the president in familiar, even familial, terms like “Uncle Abe” and “Father Abraham.” 31

  Besides reelecting Abraham Lincoln, Union troops also recognized that winning the war required continued and decisive military steps. As one midwestern soldier reminded his brother, just and lasting peace “with the South” stood no chance “till they are whipped first.” 32 More than any other campaign, the march that Gen. William T. Sherman led through Georgia and the Carolinas signified Union soldiers’ commitment to completing the military work of the war. On November 15, the week after the presidential election, Sherman’s army departed Atlanta for Savannah, more than 280 miles away. Moving in four columns, Sherman’s men tore up railroads, destroyed food supplies, and instilled fear in civilians luckless enough to live along the way. The army capture
d Savannah just in time for Christmas, and early in the new year, troops headed for South Carolina, where they wreaked even more havoc because the men identified that state as the birthplace of secession. 33

  Union troops largely supported Sherman’s famous march, and some even reveled in it, because they viewed harsh measures as integral to crushing southern will and extracting a surrender complete enough to obliterate southern visions of independence and slavery. 34 The song “Marching Through Georgia” sang of slaves freed and foodstuffs confiscated by troops who “made a thoroughfare for Freedom and her train / Sixty miles in latitude—three hundred to the main,” and celebrated the defeat of “treason” by “the flag that makes you free.” 35 Approaching Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, Pvt. Theodore Upson and his fellow Hoosiers “began to sing ‘John Brown’s body lies a moldering in the grave but his soul is marching on.’” The words to a song that by 1865 was widely associated with the North’s most militant abolitionist “rolled up and down the vall[ey],” Upson recounted, and boosted the men’s confidence in their ability as well as responsibility to “brush [Confederates] off our path like so many flies.” 36 When a Maine soldier stationed in Virginia heard that Sherman’s men had overrun “Charleston the hot bed of treason,” he spoke hopefully of “deal[ing] the last blow to this unholy Rebellion.” 37

  Yet despite the jaunty tune of “Marching Through Georgia,” for most Union troops, the stark destruction and cruelty of the Georgia and Carolinas campaign sealed the conviction that all the suffering and horror of the war could be made worthwhile not simply by preserving the American Republic, but by making it better. Soldiers now rarely wrote of restoring the Union; instead, they preached the need to regenerate the American nation. “To have the ‘constitution as it is and the union as it was’ is an impossibility,” declared an Ohio sergeant in Atlanta, where the surrounding rubble made it obvious to him that warfare had irreversibly altered the nation. 38 Writing to his hometown newspaper, Henry Riggs claimed that the Union was “worth contending for” only if it rededicated itself to a higher “standard of ‘liberty and Freedom.’” 39 New York private John Foote frequently revisited this theme. “By war, God is regenerating this Nation,” Foote counseled his sister in September. Two months later he explained even more clearly that the war was “rescuing our country” not only from rebellion, but also from its own imperfections, by “founding it on truth & Liberty!” 40 After a hiatus in the spring and summer of 1864, the millennial view of the war was back as the hardened Union veterans of the war’s final winter concluded that regeneration and redemption had to be the effect and purpose of the war. In response, many turned their attention to what the republic that emerged from the struggle should be like.

  For a start, the purified nation must unequivocally eliminate slavery, as soldiers readily pointed out. One sergeant insisted that soldiers and civilians alike must resist “a restoration of this Union upon any other basis than that of the complete and everlasting overthrow of the institution of slavery.” If the North settled for less, “we will have gained nothing.” 41 To transform the “land of boasted freedom” from mockery into reality, John Moore, a white assistant surgeon, argued that the Union must create a new nation “based upon equality & freedom to all white, black or copper colored.” 42 Neither American ideals nor the will of God allowed any less.

  By these lights, the punishing nature of the war could be understood as righteous penance meted out by God for the sin of slavery. As southern cities fell to Union forces that left suffering women and children in their wake, one soldiers’ newspaper reminded readers of the biblical promise that “thy sin will find thee out,” and pointed to ruin in slave states as evidence that “on their sin has the punishment fallen.” 43 Many other soldiers reasoned that the war was horrible not because the South was more sinful, but because slavery was horrible, and God ordained that all who colluded in its existence (whether by sins of commission or omission) must feel the awful weight of that truth. “The nation is passing through a terrible revolution,” one black chaplain wrote, “such a one as she doubtless needs to purge” the sin of slavery. 44 As war’s end neared, John Moore rejoiced that Americans (not just Southerners) were “beginning to see that slavery is and has been a national evil,” and he reminded his wife, much as Lincoln would do in the Second Inaugural Address one month later, that “God will not bless a nation who are guilty of such gross evil.” 45

  In the winter of 1864–65, several concrete steps against slavery gratified Union soldiers, including emancipation in border states like Maryland and Missouri. Maryland adopted a new state constitution banning slavery on November 1, 1864. Five days later, the camp of the Twenty-ninth Connecticut Colored Infantry rang with the combined shouts of white and black soldiers alike, as troops celebrated “the Emancipation of Maryland from the thraldom of slavery” with speeches, music, and the announcement of the results of the election in which Marylanders voted to eliminate slavery. 46 More good news came in January, after Missouri passed an ordinance abolishing slavery on the eleventh day of 1865, to the satisfaction of many Missouri troops who had voted decisively in favor of eliminating the institution from their state. 47 “I hear that Missouri is a free State,” exalted white Missourian Francis Audsley. “That is Glorious news, and I think there will be more changes than that yet.” 48 Whooping “Missouri’s gone and did it, boys! Glory! Hallelugerum,” a Colorado soldiers’ newspaper printed the Emancipation Ordinance in its columns and congratulated the former slave state for “washing away the foul stain of human bondage!” 49 To celebrate Missouri’s achievement, the Second U.S. Colored Infantry hosted a “series of entertainments” in Key West, Florida, including a supper with decorations and bouquets on the tables, to which they invited local women. 50

  Even more momentous, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, forever banning slavery from the nation. Such a constitutional step had been in the making since January 1864, when the Senate Judiciary Committee met to draft an amendment abolishing slavery. Completed on February 10, 1864, the amendment passed the Senate thirty-eight to six on April 8. In June, it won a majority of votes in the House of Representatives, but not the two-thirds required for a constitutional amendment. After the November elections signaled clear public support for the amendment, the House reconsidered, and on January 31, 1865, passed it 119 to 56. The House’s packed galleries erupted as men tossed their hats and women waved handkerchiefs and cheered. Rallies and celebrations greeted the news as it traveled throughout the Union. The amendment still had to be ratified by the states, but that detail was temporarily set aside amidst the jubilation engulfing the country. 51

  Soldiers joined in the nationwide elation. “An act was passed by the house of representatives forever prohibiting slavery in the United States or territories,” Joel Molyneux noted in his diary, punctuating the news with a hearty “Bully, boys!” 52 Longtime advocates of emancipation such as John Foote rejoiced that “this, heretofore a land of human bondage & oppression, has become the home of freemen and the land of liberty.” 53 A member of the Twenty-fifth U.S. Colored Troops who usually wrote with sarcasm allowed himself a rare unjaded moment when he reflected that “America has washed her hands at the clear spring of freedom.” Reverting to his more typical tone, he hoped that the amendment meant that the nation would now “make a show at least of carrying out the principles enunciated in that noble State paper—The Declaration of Independence.” 54 Even former opponents of emancipation like Chauncey Welton delighted in a “country free free free yes free from that blighting curs Slavery the cause of four years Bloody Warfare.” 55 Edward Bartlett, whose hopes for the death of slavery had strengthened with every enslaved man, woman, and child he had met over his two and a half years of service, pronounced the “Constitutional amendment vote” a “great success.” “Now I am ready for the war to be over,” he joyfully told his sister, “as the great cause, Slavery, is abolished.” 56

  Bartlett’s remarks illu
strate the real jubilation that many soldiers felt at the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, but they also reveal one of the war’s cruelest ironies: since many white troops believed that the amendment solved the problem of slavery, some felt no further obligation toward African Americans. Theodore Upson, a soldier who marched with Sherman’s army, showed that the same men who could sing about the onward march of John Brown’s soul could also play mean-spirited tricks on slaves and rudely discourage blacks from joining in the march. “We do not want them,” Upson noted in his diary, and “they had better stay on the plantations.” 57 Some troops retained harsh racist feelings that translated into cruel or even murderous actions. Charles Brewster told of a quarrel among three white sailors and one black barber in a Norfolk prison, in the midst of which “the sailors very coolly opened the window and pitched the colored man head foremost out on to the pavement and smashed his head all to pieces.” 58 In the same week, when a former Confederate deserter, now a Union volunteer in Resaca, Georgia, encountered a black man asleep by the side of the road, the “soldier…was so enraged at the poor innocent fellow for taking comfort that he shot him remarking ‘Take that you d——d niger and see if you’ll sleep again when I have to march.” 59 In many cases, even soldiers who lacked such fierce bigotry hoped for speedy reconciliation with the South, and viewed the placation of southern whites on racial matters as the quickest way to refasten ties between the two sections. An article in the camp newspaper The 83rd Illinoisan argued that now that “the real cause of the war, African Slavery, is no more,” the country needed to hasten the process by which “North and South are to return again to their old status as component parts of this great American Republic” by smoothing over the complications “that must necessarily arise from this vital question” of emancipation. 60