What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  Conclusion:

  What This Cruel War Was Over*7

  ON APRIL 3, 1865, Richmond, Virginia, reverberated with so many explosions that it sounded as if a battle was raging within city limits. In the earliest hours of the morning, the last vestiges of the Army of Northern Virginia set fire to Libby Prison, blew up stockpiles of ammunition, ignited boats, bridges, and wharves, and exploded an ironclad while the Confederate government evacuated the city. By nine o’clock, detonations continued to shake Richmond, but the entrance of the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry and the Twenty-ninth Connecticut Infantry, both black regiments, rocked the Confederate capital as surely as any demonstration of firepower could do. The first mounted Union troops to enter the city, the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry rode through Richmond’s thoroughfares as “thousands of citizens, colored and white…cheered and cheered as we rode in triumph along the streets.” 1 From a Richmond battlement occupied only hours earlier by members of Lee’s army, the men of the Twenty-ninth Connecticut hailed the sight of the recent Confederate “Capitol, over which majestically waved the glorious Stars and Stripes.” “Thus another link in the chain of anarchy and degradation has been severed; and trembling like an aspen in the wind, over the yawning abyss of misery and oblivion, hangs the remnant of the rebellion,” one member of the Twenty-ninth reflected. 2 Charles Beman, a private in the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry, told his father even more matter-of-factly that “the Confederate States of America have fallen.” 3

  In May 1865, Union Army soldiers from both eastern and western armies marked the end of the war with a two-day parade through Washington, D.C., known as the Grand Review. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

  Beman’s diagnosis was premature, but not by much. As his regiment paraded through Richmond and President Lincoln reviewed troops in Petersburg, Virginia (also occupied by Union forces on April 3), the Army of Northern Virginia headed west, hoping to turn south and join forces with Gen. Joseph Johnston’s army in North Carolina. The Army of the Potomac clashed with the Army of Northern Virginia one last time at Sayler’s Creek on April 6, and on Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Gen. U. S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. A handful of additional battles took place throughout the Confederacy before word of Lee’s surrender reached the hinterlands, but it did not take long for news to travel. Four years after the first shots at Fort Sumter, the rebellion had run its course. 4 The fall of Richmond and the surrender at Appomattox marked the end, and Confederate and Union soldiers knew it. “No further resistance will be offered,” a Texas soldier promised his cousin once he heard the news. “Even if the officers were willing to continue the struggle, they could not possably gain the support of the troops…. It appears that the idle dream of the independence of the Southern Confederacy has ‘vanished into thin air.’” 5 As the victors, Union troops responded with exuberance. “The joy of the boys knew no bounds,” related Lewis Bissell from Appomattox Court House. “They gave cheer after cheer, yell after yell…. Flags waved, drumsrolled, bands played and hats flew up in the air…. There was no disputing that now this cruel war was at an end…. Beyond a doubt slavery has played out.” 6

  The news that President Lincoln was shot by an assassin on April 14 and died the next day brought even the giddiest celebration to an abrupt halt. One after another, Union troops wrote of the “gloom” or the “dismal cloud” that descended on the Army as news of the president’s death reached camp. 7 “The soldier feels as though he had lost his best friend and the country her best Statesman,” mourned Nathan Parmater. 8 From his post in Florida, a black soldier confirmed that “sorrow and misery fell upon us and was depicted upon the countenance of every loyal heart.” 9 Some northern soldiers felt stronger revenge impulses than the grisliest battlefield had been able to stir in them. “Oh I would like that Booth in my power I would chain him fast to some plaice and plaice all of the best victuals all around him just out of his reach and then have four nigers with hot irons to punch him if he offered to go to sleep,” vowed a New York sergeant, who emphasized that he had never felt such hatred “since I have been in the Army.” 10 The loss of Lincoln pained soldiers so deeply because of the strong attachment they had formed to the president, an attachment made of ideological as well as emotional bonds. Soldiers had grasped early that slavery had brought the war and must die with the war, and that the outcome of the conflict and the fate of the Union mattered to all humanity. They had also come to see the war as punishment levied on the whole nation for the shared sin of slavery, for which Northerners as well as southern slaveholders must atone. Loved ones at home had often seemed not to understand or share the insights that war brought to the Union ranks—but Lincoln had. In his speeches, especially the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln had articulated a vision of the war that matched soldiers’ own. Now he was gone.

  Many in the Union ranks coped by vowing to carry on the work of the fallen president. Members of the Eighty-third Illinois likened Lincoln’s assassination just as the war and slavery came to an end to Moses’ death within sight of the promised land. As the ancient Israelites proceeded to Canaan, so would Americans continue to labor for the establishment of genuine freedom in the United States. 11 A black navy man shared in the nation’s grief over the loss of “a Christian soldier of God’s own choice…[to] lead the nation out of the dark slough of slavery,” but vowed that “the great work of African regeneration or elevation commenced by [Lincoln] as the instrument in the hands of God cannot be fettered, or abate its onward march,” as long as the survivors pledged themselves to carrying on that work. 12

  The assassination of the man most white Southerners blamed for making the war unavoidable brought little comfort to the Confederate ranks. Sgt. William Ellis saw poetic justice in the president’s “Providential” death, believing that once Lincoln’s “fell purpose [was] accomplished, nature and humanity spurned the foul abortion and he was swept from the Earth.” Still, Lt. E. L. Cox captured the mood better when he noted, “instead of a general rejoicing…there seams to be a settled sadness upon the countenance of almost every man.” 13 Having gone to war in part to fend off perceived threats to order, many Confederates could only view the murder of a president, an act of disorder if ever there was one, with dismay. Others feared a backlash from angry Northerners who might hold the South accountable and exact revenge through harsh Reconstruction measures, but whatever the source of anxiety, most Confederates longed for an end to war and regretted the extension of violence into what should have been the beginnings of peace. 14

  With the end of the fighting, Confederate troops found themselves free to concentrate on their own interests and on the well-being of their loved ones. Rudolf Coreth, who wanted to get home in a hurry to check on his family and the state of the farm, feared “that the immediate future will bring terrible events, because the least that will happen is that the Negroes will be freed.” Yet “since that would not be prevented anyway by a prolongation of the fight” once Union victory became inevitable, he consoled himself with the thought that “the prospect of personal freedom is really very nice, after all.” 15 William Pitt Chambers was “weary of trying to solve the problems that confront us.” As a remedy for his “sick and sore” heart, he prescribed that “individually, we must address ourselves to the material problems of life,” and then he headed for home. 16

  War had come, believed Coreth, Chambers, and millions of white Southerners like them, because the election of Lincoln in 1860 had posed a threat to slavery, an institution that enlisted Confederate soldiers viewed as necessary to everything they loved and to the world as they knew it, whether or not they owned slaves. Slavery’s absence would doom the prosperity of the South and alter the basis of government dedicated to the interests of the governed, but most of all, feared enlisted Confederate soldiers, the disappearance of slavery would endanger their families’ safety, welfare, and material aspirations, and undermine their very identitie
s as white men.

  Yet aside from white Southerners’ widespread antipathy toward the Union and common certainty about the life-or-death necessity of preventing abolition, Confederates shared little common attachment to an entity called the Confederate States of America. Specifically, Confederate patriotism contained an inherent tension between the needs and interests of the Confederacy, and the needs and interests of soldiers and their families, which soldiers went to war to protect from the dangers of abolition, and which they trusted the Confederacy to serve. Initially the tension remained latent, but as the needs of families increasingly conflicted with the demands of the Confederacy, strains became harder to ignore.

  Two factors helped keep Confederate troops committed to the fight and to their disappointing new nation, even as the ferocity of the war undid every aspect of government and society that Confederates held dear. In the second half of the war, many turned to religion, sure that God had sent the war as punishment for individuals’ venal transgressions, such as drinking, swearing, or price gouging, which, once corrected, would result in an end to the war and an even more godly nation. Confederate soldiers found solace in religion not only because it promised heavenly rewards after death, but also because in demanding individual behavior modifications while discouraging wholesale social change, it reinforced white Southerners’ beliefs in the inherent superiority of their own society, including its bedrock institution of slavery.

  Even more important, Confederate soldiers reminded themselves that no matter how bad the Confederacy was, the Union was worse because the Union meant abolition and the attendant destruction of everything that mattered. That ironclad conviction compelled enlisted men to keep up the fight long after they grew to despise the Confederate government and disdain the southern citizenry. Then, in the spring of 1865, the prospect of black enlistment destroyed the guarantees provided by slavery, and, in the minds of the rank and file, eliminated any remaining reason to fight.

  In 1865, Confederate soldiers knew that their world was destroyed. “This country is ruined, dead,” Henry Richardson emphasized as he described the landscape around his home, now left desolate by the departure of the slave labor force that had once caused it to prosper. 17 Southern whites surveyed the world in tatters, and they expected no say in how the threads were to be knit back together. 18 As a Texan put it, Confederates “do not suppose, nor expect to be allowed to vote any more, as long as we live. We also expect that all the lands in the Confederacy, will be taken away from the white people to pay their war expenses then given in small 160 acre lots to the negroes.” Confederates certainly did not relish the fate they supposed awaited them, but neither did they yet believe that they had the ability to avoid it. 19 In short, white Southerners expected far more sweeping Reconstruction measures, including disenfranchisement, property confiscation, and redistribution of land to former slaves, than the federal government actually enacted, and they believed themselves in no position to object or obstruct the will of the North. 20

  Obvious to black Americans and to Confederates from the outset, slavery’s centrality to the war quickly became apparent to white Union troops, as well. In 1861, the white men who enlisted in the Union Army believed that the Union had to survive in order to prove to the whole world that a representative government founded on the ideals of liberty and equality could work. By setting out to destroy the Union in order to protect slavery, white Southerners had made the war about slavery whether white Northerners liked it or not; therefore, in the late summer and fall of 1861, a full year ahead of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Union rank and file began to insist on the destruction of slavery for a variety of motives that sometimes conflicted with one another, but that in the end distilled down to soldiers’ central insight that the only way to end the war and prevent it from happening again was to get rid of slavery, because slavery had caused all the trouble in the first place. Initially, white Union troops strove to separate slavery from the more complicated issues of black rights and racial equality, embracing abolition while evading hard questions about what the nation owed to former slaves.

  Yet as the war progressed, white soldiers’ interactions with black Southerners and their perceptions of slavery’s effect on families, combined with the inspiring example of black soldiers and the fury of war itself, persuaded many that in order to regain God’s favor (which would be necessary to win the war), white Northerners must examine and redress how their own racial attitudes made them complicit in the sin of slavery. Especially after Gettysburg and Vicksburg, widely perceived in the Union ranks as God’s direct intervention on behalf of Union and true freedom, Union troops found themselves forced to confront the possibility that God had called the North to erase and atone for the national, not merely southern, sin of slavery. Some even believed that God demanded repentance for the more insidious evil of racial prejudice, and in the war’s last year, surprising numbers of white Union troops advocated advances (such as legal equality, equal pay for black soldiers, and suffrage) that only the furthest reaches of radical abolitionism broached before the war. Members of the 122d New York, for example, argued in the pages of The Third Brigade that the end of slavery must be accompanied by all-out social and moral reform, and criticized President Andrew Johnson for advocating segregation. 21 New York private Haven Putnam also conceded the need for a “social revolution” and congratulated his sweetheart, Mary, who went south to teach former slaves, for serving as a “warrior” in a “campaign” as necessary, as “arduous, and of as much social importance” as the war itself. 22 The Civil War was revolutionary in many ways, none more so than the radical advances that took place in some white Northerners’ thinking on race.

  Black Americans, meanwhile, immediately grasped that war against secession must also be a war against slavery, and interpreted the war as a struggle for black freedom, equality, and inclusion within the promises of the American Revolution. African American soldiers also envisioned the war as an opportunity to demonstrate the manhood of their race, by which they meant both their own adult male identity and the full humanity of all black Americans. Although their offers to fight were rebuffed for more than a year, before the war was over African Americans enlisted in the ranks, earned equal pay for their military service, and witnessed changes in American society ranging from the integration of public conveyances to the admission of a black lawyer to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court to reunion with family members once thought lost forever. Surveying the ways in which war had remade the racial landscape, black artilleryman David Williamson surmised, “the time has come when liberty is in reach of all men without respect to color.” 23

  In short, black Americans at the conclusion of the Civil War evinced justifiable confidence in their ability to reap the benefits and promises of the nation they had helped to regenerate for themselves and for members of their race, just at a moment when white Union soldiers’ opinions on the rights of African Americans were malleable, and when Confederates exhibited the least ability or inclination to resist any reconstructive measures, including racial reform. In a nation that had witnessed massive upheaval and vast steps forward that had once seemed inconceivable, there was certainly reason to believe that continued progress toward racial equality was not only possible, but likely. Because we know those hopes were disappointed by the turn of the twentieth century, we have assumed that the reactionary developments of the Jim Crow era in the 1880s and 1890s, when the hard-fought gains of the war and Reconstruction faded, were inevitable. 24 After all, white Union troops’ backsliding on questions of black rights and racial equality in the spring and summer of 1864, along with Confederates’ savage violence against blacks in those same months, might make the lynchings and legal segregation of the 1890s seem predictable. Yet by the spring of 1865, attitudes among white Union soldiers were shifting once again, black optimism was justifiably high, and initially, at least, white Southerners did not see themselves in any position to resist. In fact, if the spring of 1865 tells us anything,
it fairly shouts at us to let go of our notions of inevitability.

  In the spring of 1865, the cruel war was over, but the work of reconstructing the American nation had only just begun. Because that work remains unfinished, it places demands on the heirs to the world the Civil War created. Of these demands, three stand out as especially inescapable. First, Confederate soldiers’ admirable devotion to their families and abhorrent attachment to the enslavement of other human beings sound a cautionary note because those impulses were so closely related. There is little doubt that most white southern men cared first and foremost about the well-being and material advancement of their loved ones, and the steadfast love so many displayed for their families surely stands among the noblest of human emotions. Yet that very love led otherwise good and ordinary men to embrace and fight for an institution that stole the lives and bodies and families of other human beings. Clearly, the connection between soldiers’ attachment to their families and the institution of slavery does not suggest that love of family is to be disparaged, or that it inevitably leads to an atrocity like slavery, but it does raise sobering questions about the ills that human beings will justify when they convince themselves that they owe no obligation to anyone beyond those to whom they are related or who are like themselves.