The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876

by Nester, William

  Bragg followed up his victory by besieging Rosecrans in Chattanooga. He was able to do so because Rosecrans neglected to occupy let alone fortify two crucial heights overlooking the city, Lookout Mountain to the southwest and Missionary Ridge stretching from the south to the northeast. Bragg deployed most of his army on those heights just two miles from the city. He also sent troops west to block the train line and main road that ran south of the Tennessee River and erected batteries along the riverbanks. Finally, he dispatched Longstreet and his corps to drive Burnside from Knoxville. Although Burnside held Knoxville, Rosecrans was nearly forced to surrender Chattanooga, where the troops were malnourished on half rations while starvation killed ten thousand draft animals and cavalry horses The men were too weak to fight and the surviving animals too weak to pull a wagon or mount a man.

  Lincoln responded decisively to the crisis. He transferred Gen. Joseph Hooker’s corps from the Army of the Potomac to Chattanooga to join Gen. William Sherman’s corps that he had ordered to join Rosecrans even before news of Chickamauga. In late October he replaced Rosecrans with Thomas. Finally, he ordered Ulysses Grant to unify the Departments of the Ohio, Tennessee, and Cumberland into the Department of the Mississippi and take charge at Chattanooga.

  Upon reaching Chattanooga on October 23, Grant first secured supply lines to the city. He cleared enemy forces along the routes and got provisions and fresh troops to Chattanooga by steamboat, wagon, and eventually train. By late November he had massed enough troops and supplies to take the offensive. He devised a double envelopment whereby Sherman attacked the rebel right flank on Missionary Ridge and Hooker the left on Lookout Mountain. On November 24 Hooker’s men captured Lookout Mountain with only five hundred casualties, but the rebels repulsed Sherman’s attack. The following day Grant ordered Hooker and Thomas to clear enemy troops from the foot of Missionary Ridge, while Sherman renewed his attack on the rebel right. The Confederates once again blunted Sherman’s attack. Hooker’s men routed the rebels at the ridge’s west end. In vengeance for Chickamauga, Thomas’s troops not only captured the foot of the ridge but, without orders, struggled up the steep slope after the fleeing Confederates. The defenders on top did not fire for fear of hitting their own men, then skedaddled with them down the far slope. By late afternoon Thomas’s troops triumphantly planted their American and regimental flags along the summit. In the battle of Chattanooga, the Federals suffered 5,824 casualties while inflicting 6,667 and capturing forty cannons. Grant did not stop there but pursued the enemy for several days down to Ring-gold, in north Georgia.21

  The news of great victories arriving from the west during 1863’s summer and autumn contrasted with the stalemate in the east. The two enemy armies had settled into positions in northern Virginia. Meade was content to sit tight. Lee typically sought a victory. In October he arched his army around Meade’s and tried to cut his supply line to Washington. The campaign ended when federal troops repelled an attack by A. P. Hill’s corps at Bristoe Station, five miles south of Manassas, on October 14. The following month Lincoln finally roused Meade from his lethargy. Emulating his adversary, Meade stole a march on Lee and led his army across the Rapidan River toward the enemy’s supply line. Lee raced troops to head him off. The rebels reached and fortified Mine’s Run. Meade prudently chose not to attack and instead withdrew his army to his former position.

  The string of resounding military victories did not mask the worsening fatigue and outright opposition to the war on the home front. This was partly due to the war’s soaring costs in blood and treasure for two years with no end in sight. But atop this, military necessity forced Lincoln and Congress to do something that exacerbated the opposition.

  Solely volunteers filled Union ranks until after the Enrollment Act passed on March 3, 1863.22 The law empowered the War Department’s Provost Marshal’s Bureau to organize and head a system whereby all able-bodied men from age twenty to forty-five had to register and were liable to be drafted. Each congressional district had a provost whose duty was to collect the names of all eligible men and draw them by lottery until a quota was filled. Men could avoid being drafted by finding a substitute or paying a $300 fine.

  Varying proportions of people resented and resisted the draft everywhere, nowhere more than in New York City. Two groups—free blacks and Irish Catholics—competed for low-skill and low-wage jobs at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy and were largely despised by the classes above them. Blacks and Irish were also political rivals. Although blacks could not vote let alone run for office, they naturally favored the Republican Party, split between those who opposed slavery’s extension and those who championed its abolition. Nearly all Irish Catholics backed the Democratic Party, split between those favoring southern independence and those favoring reunification without emancipation. The Irish were and blacks were not eligible for the draft. Most Irish hated the notion of fighting for the emancipation of a different race of people who drove down wages and stole their jobs.

  Violence had erupted between the two groups numerous times, most seriously when Irish rioted against blacks who took over stevedore jobs in June 1863. Hatreds were still white-hot when the provost scheduled a draft lottery for July 11. The city was stripped of its regular and militia regiments, which had been hurried off to help repel the Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania. The first day’s round of picks was met with sullen fatalism. But then the men retired to their pubs and with each round of drinks more heatedly called for resisting the draft. Riots erupted the next day and persisted for four days until troops that had been rushed to the city finally reasserted control. In all, 119 people were killed; 73 soldiers, 105 police, and 128 civilians were injured; and $3 million worth of property was destroyed. Of the 443 people arrested, 221 were soon released without charges, 10 were later let go, 74 were indicted but never brought to trial, and 14 acquitted; of the 40 people convicted, 27 received plea bargains and were released and only 14 served any prison time, the longest term of which was three years for a Virginian who provoked a mob to burn a draft lottery office. In all, the rioters and murderers got off lightly.23

  Those riots deeply aggrieved the president. He deplored the loss of innocent lives and condemned those who committed the mayhem and murder. Yet he understood the rage of the workers who feared losing their jobs to blacks or their lives on distant battlefields. In a letter he eventually deemed politically imprudent to send, he tried to convince Democratic Party leaders just why a draft was a military necessity. Men volunteered for military service from a range of motives, including “patriotism, political bias, ambition, personal courage, love of adventure, want of employment, convenience.” Unfortunately, after more than two devastating years of war, these motives among physically fit young men had sharply diminished. Thus military necessity demanded and the Constitution empowered the government to institute a draft to fill the widening gap between the army’s growing needs and its diminishing volunteers.24

  “Copperhead” was the derogatory label for Peace Democrats. A copperhead was a venomous northern snake whose coloring blended in with the forest floor and whose bite could be deadly. Copperheads, the political variant, infested the southern half of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois because southerners had largely settled this region and remained culturally and economically tied to their ancestral slave states. Copperheads were not confined to the western states. Some big-city Democratic mayors back east were just as vociferous in expressing similar sentiments, most notoriously Fernando Wood of New York, who organized what he called a “Monster Peace Convention” that attracted thirty thousand demonstrators on June 3, 1863. In the North the abolition of slavery most threatened laborers who feared that liberated blacks would take their jobs by accepting much lower wages.

  While many of those who supported the war smeared Copperheads as traitors, most Peace Democrats simply wanted to end the fighting by giving in to rebel demands. Nonetheless, secret groups did exist, like the Knights of the Golden Circle, Sons of Liberty, and Order
of American Knights, that were dedicated to undermining the Union and aiding the Confederacy. Hundreds of rebel agents infiltrated the United States to gather intelligence, foment dissent, and instigate riots and sabotage. At times the line between pacific and traitorous beliefs and groups was hazy. Gen. Ambrose Burnside, the Department of the Ohio’s commander in 1863, was determined to cut through that haze. On April 13 he issued General Order Number 13, warning that anyone who committed treasonous speech or acts would be subject to arrest and prosecution.25

  Depending on one’s point of view, the most renowned Peace Democrat or most reviled Copperhead was Clement L. Vallandigham, an Ohio congressman. Secretly he was the Sons of Liberty’s “Grand Commander.”26 Publicly, he mercilessly attacked Lincoln’s handling of the war and called for foreign intervention to impose a peace. On May 1 he made an especially incendiary speech that urged mass resistance against the war, including draft evasion and desertion. Burnside had the congressman arrested on May 5. A military tribunal convicted Vallandigham of treason and sentenced him to prison for the war’s duration. This provoked a chorus of protests from both Peace Democratic and Radical Republican leaders and newspapers. These usually fiercely opposed groups united in condemning the administration for violating Vallandigham’s rights of freedom of speech and habeas corpus.

  Lincoln found a way to finesse their arguments. On May 25 he had Union cavalry escort Vallandigham under a flag of truce to the rebel lines near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, an act that at once freed the agitator while making the point that he was a traitor. In a letter to the New York Tribune, Lincoln explained that he exiled Vallandigham “because he was damaging the army, upon the existence and vigor of which the life of the nation depends.” He tried to evoke public empathy with a haunting question: “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?”27 The Loyal Publication Society, affiliated with the Republican Party, published and distributed half a million copies of that letter as a pamphlet that perhaps as many as ten million people may have read.28

  The sky over Gettysburg was crystal blue and the bright sun soon drove off the morning chill on November 19, 1863. The air, however, reeked with the stench of thousands of often half-buried, rotting corpses of men and horses. Scattered in the fields surrounding the town were clusters of hogs, vultures, and bluebottle flies feeding off any exposed flesh.

  Toward noon four military bands played martial songs and led a procession that included the president, a group of dignitaries, and many of Gettysburg’s twenty-five hundred people from the main square along the road to the cemetery on the eastern hill. Upon reaching the cemetery’s heart, Lincoln and the other dignitaries took their seats atop a platform flanked by the bands and the crowd massed in front. A minister opened the ceremony with a prayer. The marine band played a dirge. Edward Everett, the keynote speaker, stepped behind the podium. Everett was popularly known as the nation’s finest orator. Whether or not that was true, he certainly did not want for words—his speech lasted for two hours as the crowd thinned. After he finally sat down, a glee club sang a poem composed for the occasion.

  Finally the president rose, briefly scanned the audience, and spoke a mere two and a half minutes before sitting down.29 Observers differed sharply over whether the crowd’s applause was polite or enthusiastic. What is unquestionable is that Abraham Lincoln distilled into a mere 272 words the essence of the ideals upon which America was founded and one day might realize, and he did so with a haunting eloquence that will forever be revered. He structured his speech like a classic Greek funeral oration in the manner of Pericles, first commemorating the dead, then explaining the larger meaning of their passing.

  Lincoln began by reminding his listeners that a mere “four score and seven years” separated them from when “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men were 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.” They had gathered to consecrate a military cemetery for the dead of Gettysburg, “who gave their lives that that nation might live.” He then called for “the living” to dedicate themselves “to the unfinished work which they who fought here so nobly advanced.” He ended his talk by calling on the American people to “resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”30

  11

  Total War

  The war . . . must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks . . . unless you acknowledge our right to self- government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for independence—and that or extermination we will have.

  JEFFERSON DAVIS

  We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make [them] . . . feel the hard hand of war.

  WILLIAM SHERMAN

  Eat out Virginia clear and clean . . . so that crows flying over it . . . will have to carry their provender with them.

  ULYSSES GRANT

  Those not skinning can hold a leg.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Total war is a strategy whereby one mobilizes all the essential hard- and soft-power resources of one’s side to devastate one’s enemy. Gen. William Sherman explained how to do that: “We must keep the war South until they are not only ruined and exhausted, but humbled in pride and spirit.”1 The related industrial, transportation, and communications revolutions made total war possible. The government could mass, equip, transport, and coordinate the strategies of vast armies that ruthlessly and systematically demolished the enemy’s physical and psychological capacity to resist.

  It took a year or so for Lincoln and ever more of his generals to recognize that only total war could end the rebellion.2 For Gen. Ulysses Grant, Shiloh was when “I gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.” Until then,

  I as well as thousands of other citizens, believed that the rebellion . . . would collapse suddenly and soon, if a decisive battle could be gained against any of its armies. . . . Up to that time it had been the policy of our army . . . to protect the property of the citizens whose property was invaded, without regard to their sentiments, either Union or Secession. After this . . . I regarded it as humane to both sides to protect the person of those found in their homes, but to consume everything that could be used to support or supply armies. . . . Supplies within reach of Confederate armies I regards as much contraband as arms or ordnance stores. Their destruction was accomplished without bloodshed and tended to the same result as the destruction of armies. . . . This policy I believe exercised a material influential in hastening the end.3

  No one wielded total war more thoroughly than Sherman. He explained that “we are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make [them] . . . feel the hard hand of war.”4 When Gen. John Bell Hood and Atlanta’s government protested Sherman’s order to burn Atlanta, Sherman replied, “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty and you cannot refine it, and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.”5 In his infamous “march to the sea,” Sherman vowed to “make Georgia howl.” He was true to his word. Along the way his troops “confiscated 6,871 mules and horses, 13,294 head of cattle, 10.4 million pounds of grain, and 10.7 million pounds of fodder” from Georgia. His men were just as rapacious as they marched through South and North Carolina, where they took “at least 7 million pounds of foodstuffs, 11.6 million pounds of corn, 83 million pounds of fodder, and 11,825 horses and mules.”6 Atop that they burned or destroyed anything of military value, including factories, warehouses, and railroads. Sherman explained to Grant that what he was doing “may not be war, but rather statesmanship.”7

  President Lincoln struggled with just h
ow far to carry “total war.”8 He knew that the United States could crush the Confederacy only by destroying its material and psychological means to resist, including freeing the slaves who upheld the rebel armies and economy. Yet a dilemma haunted him—the hard measures necessary to win the war might jeopardize the peace. For instance, liberating the slaves clearly undermined the rebel war effort while sowing hatreds among southerners that might take generations to overcome. Somehow the government had to inspire the rebel people to abandon slavocracy and become loyal American citizens “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” And this demanded a sensitivity and benevolence anathema to total war. While Lincoln mostly gave free rein to Grant and Sherman, he cautioned lesser generals. For instance, he wrote Gen. William Rosecrans that “I wish you to do nothing merely for revenge, but that what you may do, shall be solely done with reference to the security of the future.”9

  If total war was to be unleashed on the South, Lincoln knew just who was best capable of directing it. He issued an order to Grant on March 3, 1864, to journey to Washington, where he would take command of the entire American army and receive the rank of lieutenant general; Gen. Henry Halleck would act as the army’s chief of staff and Lincoln’s closest military advisor in Washington. Among the reasons why Lincoln worked so well with Grant was that the general was as humble and uncaring of appearances as the president. Lincoln could breathe easily with Grant after suffering the pomposity of McClellan and all too many other generals whose egos bloated with their rank.