Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  Elsewhere, the Inquirer speculated on the “reported deaths of Hill and Longstreet” and praised the bravery of the soldiers: “It would take reams of paper and more time than we have at present writing, to tell of the gallant deeds done by detached bodies and individuals. Let it suffice to say that all did well and nobly, and fought with the desperation of tigers. Never were troops so well handled—neither have they ever gained for themselves so much glory and renown.” Throughout, the tones were dramatic and mythic in recounting “lightening” raids and “trembling” earth. Confederate losses were staggering, while “our loss was comparatively small.”8

  Glory could not compensate the emptiness for individuals who lost loved ones. One especially emotional account was provided by New York Times correspondent Samuel Wilkerson. After earlier describing the magnitude of the battle, he eventually reported the battle’s aftermath alongside the body of his dead son. In words almost too pure to bear, he wrote:Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburg have baptized with your blood the Second birth of Freedom in America, how you are to be envied! I rise from a grave whose set clay I have passionately kissed, and I look up and see Christ spanning this battlefield with his feet and reaching fraternal and lovingly up to heaven. His right hand opens the gates of Paradise—with his left he beckons to those mutilated, bloody, swollen forms to ascend.9

  Music, while it could not capture the morality of war, effectively embraced the suffering. In the popular “Angel Mother I’m Coming Home,” the writer explained that the inspiration for the song was a soldier’s letter from Gettysburg: “A sweet smile o’er spread his features, his lips moved, and he whispered George I am dying, tell the boys we shall meet again where parting does not come.” Again he spoke of his happy childhood, his brothers, sisters, and his mother, who had died since his enlistment. His last words were, “Angel mother I’m coming home! After which he sunk back to rise no more.”10 In song no less than speech, war’s horrors were submerged in a sea of romanticization that hid the starker realities from citizens in the North and South who did not want to know.

  In response to a serenade on July 7, President Lincoln evidenced the germs of ideas he developed more fully at Gettysburg Cemetery in December. First Lincoln repeated the scripture on which his faith rested. July Fourth, he argued, was of unparalleled importance, because “for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’ ” For this reason, he continued, the date assumed a mystical significance, confirmed by the deaths of Adams and Jefferson on that date, and “another president, five years after, was called from this stage of existence on the same day.”

  Now, in the midst of civil war,on this last Fourth of July just passed, when we have a gigantic Rebellion, at the bottom of which is an effort to overthrow the principle that all men are created equal, we have the surrender of a most powerful position ... and not only so, but in a succession of battles in Pennsylvania, near to us, through three days, so rapidly fought that they might be called one great battle ... and on the 4th the cohorts of those who opposed the declaration that all men are created equal, “turned tail” and ran.

  But then he stopped: “Gentlemen, this is a glorious theme, and the occasion for a speech, but I am not prepared to make one worthy of the occasion.”11 Five months later he would be prepared, and on that occasion, he solidified Gettysburg’s reputation as the apotheosis of the Civil War and made his speech America’s greatest sermon.

  In the weeks following, Lincoln’s ebullience waned as the failure of Meade’s army to seal the victory set in. By failing to pursue Lee, Meade had rendered Gettysburg inconclusive, a tactical success but a strategic bust. In a moment of unrestrained anger and frustration, Lincoln drafted (but wisely never mailed) a stiff rebuke to his general of the Army of the Potomac:You had at least twenty thousand veteran troops directly with you, and as many more raw ones within supporting distance, all in addition to those who fought with you at Gettysburg, while it was not possible that he [Lee] had received a single recruit, and yet you stood and let the flood run down [the Potomac], bridges be built, and the enemy move away at his leisure without attacking him.... I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape.12

  Others, lacking Lincoln’s grim appetite for greater short-term casualties in the interests of long-term ends, were more forgiving of Meade. After describing the glorious Northern victory, a writer for the Christian Herald praised all of the generals unstintingly and reprinted General Meade’s congratulatory address to the troops, in which he acknowledged God’s providential assistance to the Union cause. “It is right and proper,” he asserted, “that we should, on suitable occasions, return our grateful thanks to the Almighty Disposer of events, that in the goodness of His providence, He has thought fit to give victory to the cause of the just.”13 Whatever the personal religious convictions of the generals, they contributed to their sacralization with purple providential prose claiming a God who smiled on the justness of their devastation.

  Despite Lee’s escape, morale among Northern soldiers was high, and most supported Meade. As the ones slated to do the actual fighting and dying, many did not agree with Lincoln’s harsh assessment of Meade’s failings as general. John Emerson Anderson, who had earlier toured the desolate battlefield, considered the toll staggering and the idea of pursuit something only critical “northern newspapers” would entertain: “Without doubt if General Meade should advance now, we should be checked or repulsed, owing to our weakness in numbers and the advantage General Lee would have by placing himself on the defensive.”14

  In a letter to his father, Union soldier John Francis Gleason revealed that Confederates were not the only soldiers lacking shoes. Yet Union spirits were high: “We have now been on the move for fifty days, and six of those have been fighting days.... Human nature can endure wonderfully when inspired by an idea.... It was rather hard for some of the boys to travel over those macadamized turnpikes barefoot—the route was marked with their blood—but they did it cheerfully for the sake of the cause.”15

  At the same time that Gettysburg came to its strategically inconclusive end, a far more decisive campaign was winding down in the western theater. There U. S. Grant staged one of the most brilliant and definitive victories of the war at Vicksburg, Mississippi. Although not destined to live like Gettysburg in American memory, the Vicksburg campaign far eclipsed the eastern action in actual strategic significance by controlling the Mississippi River and dividing the Confederacy in two. It also provided a classic instance of patient but forthright command tactics maintained over a sustained period of time, beginning in November 1862 and not concluding until July 1863. After months of unsuccessful feints and engagements, Grant hit on the bold plan to march his army into the heart of Mississippi, even if it meant separating from his supply lines and living off the land.

  On May 7 Sherman’s corps linked up with Grant, and the forty thousand Union troops prepared to attack General Joseph E. Johnston in the field at Jackson, Mississippi. They hoped to draw General Pemberton’s army out of its Vicksburg fortress. Pemberton’s twenty-five thousand men and Johnston’s army of about the same number were unable to unite against Grant and Sherman. Grant lodged his army between the two rebel contingents, allowing him to do to the rebels what Hooker could not do to Lee at Chancellorsville. By isolating Johnston and Pemberton and imaginatively shifting his interior lines, Grant was able to attack each wing in succession—a classic Napoleonic divide and conquer.

  On May 12 Grant ordered one wing of his army under General James B. McPherson to attack Johnston at Jackson. By May 14 the capital city belonged to Grant. Then Grant wheeled west and routed Pemberton’s hapless forces as they attempted a rescue at Champion’s Hill on May 16. Beaten but not surrendered, Pemberton retreated to the fortress.

  On May 19 and again on the twentieth, Grant unsuccessfully stormed the fortress, taking heavy casualties along the
way. Unable to carry the assault, Grant laid siege to the Confederate “Gibraltar.” Every day, artillery shells rained down on the fortress’s soldiers and civilians alike. One Union lady living in the Vicksburg fortress through the siege described the terror that accompanied Union shelling:A shell burst right outside the window in front of me. Pieces flew in, striking all around me, tearing down masses of plaster that came tumbling over me. When H. rushed in I was crawling out of the plaster, digging it out of my eyes and hair. When he picked up a piece as large as a saucer beside my pillow, I realized my narrow escape.... Another [shell] came crashing near, and I snatched up my comb and brush and ran down here. It has taken all the afternoon to get the plaster out of my hair, for my hands were rather shaky.16

  Eventually the starving inhabitants could hold out no longer. Just as Grant was planning another assault, Pemberton surrendered his army on the unfortunate date of July 4. Unlike Gettysburg, the victory was complete. Between March 29 and July 4, Grant defeated an army of forty thousand, won five battles, captured twenty-nine thousand Confederates, and destroyed hundreds of artillery pieces and munitions. Four days later, the final Confederate fortress on the Mississippi at Port Hudson surrendered to General Nathaniel Banks, leaving the Federals in control of the river and effectively dividing the Confederacy in half.

  Grant’s relentless spring campaign that set up the siege of Vicksburg stands as one of the greatest offensives in the war and established Grant’s reputation as a strategist on par with Robert E. Lee. One writer at the time observed, “The capture of Vicksburg is the most staggering blow that has yet been dealt to the Confederacy, and reflects the highest credit on the skill and energy of General Grant.”17 Following the victory, the Inquirer ran a portrait of Grant under the headline, “The Hero of the South-West.”18 Grant himself supposed the surrender “sealed” the fate of the Confederacy For his part, Lincoln (who had not yet met Grant) believed that at last he had found his general.19

  To Northerners, the recent victories seemed irresistibly providential. Surely God had orchestrated the triumphs to fall on the Fourth of July as a signal that America was His chosen nation. The New York Evangelist gloated, “God Our Deliverer. Good news thick upon us. At last the Gibraltar of the Mississippi has fallen.”20 This was not the last providential signal to fall on a sacred day, as Lincoln’s assassination on Good Friday would tragically exemplify, but it was surely the brightest. In one fell swoop, Gettysburg and Vicksburg secured the North and the Mississippi, creating an apparently overwhelming advantage for the Union cause. Richmond and surrender were imminent.

  Of all the smaller civil wars within America’s Civil War, that of the African American would prove most just. If anyone had a “cause” that could meet all the moral scruples of a just war, it was the slaves and freedmen. W E. B. DuBois would later go so far as to argue in the extreme that even in palpably unjust wars—or battles—African American soldiers should not be held culpable:He [the African American] cannot be blamed for them so far as they were unrighteous wars (and some of them were unrighteous), because he was not a leader; he was for the most part a common soldier in the ranks and did what he was told ... he believed that by fighting for America he would gain the respect of the land and personal and spiritual freedom ... always fought for his own freedom and for the self-respect of his race. Whatever the cause of war, therefore, his cause was peculiarly just.21

  DuBois made an important point, but one that could also be extended to white soldiers following orders.

  Nineteenth-century African Americans’ victimization became dramatically evident in a series of draft riots in New York that particularly targeted blacks for violence. In March 1863 the Lincoln government passed a national conscription law and, on July 12, posted the names of the first Northerners drafted into the Union army. Democrat speakers and newspapers whipped up a rage of working-class discontent over the exemption and substitution provisions of conscription, which created the appearance of a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.

  Along the way, the Democrats singled out African American targets—hardly rich, but, just as polarizing, black. The tensions soon escalated into ethnic and racial bitterness as a civil war within the Civil War broke out in New York City on July 13. The rioting persisted through four days of dark violence. Mobs of predominantly Irish rioters rampaged through the city, burning the homes of prominent Republicans and lynching innocent blacks. Chanting “kill the naygers,” they burned the Colored Orphan Asylum down and roamed the streets seeking out more black victims. At least six African Americans were hanged and burned.22

  Women no less than men participated in the mayhem. In a report entitled “Great Riot,” the Christian Intelligencer observed how “[t]he fury of the mob was directed ... to negroes who were found in the streets.” Republican newspaper reporters were also targeted: “A young man near the spot was taken for a reporter of the Tribune. He was kicked and beaten until nearly dead.”23

  As the violence threatened to overwhelm the police, an incensed President Lincoln called troops from the battle of Gettysburg to put down the rioters. When news of the riots reached Philo Buckingham, he wrote to his wife “after the fight at Gettysburg, Penn”: “How I wish I could take this division ... to New York for a week.... Our troops here would just like the job of putting down such a riot. It would be play in comparison to some of the battles in which they have been engaged.”24

  In a letter to his parents, John Emerson Anderson brought the surprising news that instead of chasing Lee, he was close to home to “enforce” the draft:Our regiment is quartered in barracks on city hall park. A battery belonging to our brigade has the muzzles of their Napoleons pointing down two of the streets where the rough element has held the sway of late. Those guns are slotted for close actions, and the men that handle them are in the habit of obeying the orders of their officers without asking questions. Indeed we are all united in this sentiment namely that the enemies of our flag must be conquered wherever met.25

  And conquer they did, killing more than one hundred (largely Irish) rioters before the city was finally brought under control.

  George Templeton Strong, treasurer of the United States Sanitary Commission, was horrified at the targeting of innocent blacks, the “unspeakable infamy of the nigger persecution. They are the most peaceful, sober, and inoffensive of our poor, and the outrages they have suffered during this last week are less excusable ... than St. Bartholomew’s or the Jew-hunting of the Middle Ages.... How this infernal slavery system has corrupted our blood, North as well as South!”

  One female eyewitness to the rioting, Maria Daly, was no less offended at the violence, but considerably less sympathetic to the plight of the blacks:Three or four Negroes were hung and burned; the women assisted and acted like furies by stimulating the men to greater ferocity. ... Although very sorry and much outraged at the cruelties inflicted [by the rioters] ... I hope it will give the Negroes a lesson, for since the war commenced, they have been so insolent as to be unbearable. I cannot endure free blacks. They are immoral, with all their piety.26

  The draft riots provide a unique window into the violent tensions that boiled beneath the surface of Northern society and the complex relationships binding outraged Republicans and African American “natives” against Democratic Irish “foreigners.” In this cauldron of racial and ethnic hatreds it is clear that hatred of “the enemy” could spill internally as well as outwardly. Newspapers were unstinting in their criticism of the rioters. At first many papers blamed Southern sympathizers and Democratic Copperheads for inciting the mobs as a “diversion” from Confederate military defeats. But soon other more nativist theories prevailed.27 The fact that so many of the rioters were Irish Catholics—and Democrats—was not lost on the overwhelmingly Protestant religious press.

  A writer for the Evangelist who long championed against slavery, contextualized the violence in nativist terms that privileged black victims over immigrant white rioters:In looking over the long list of killed
and wounded we find scarcely an American name ... they are almost all Irishmen.... They were especially conspicuous in the hunting, burning, and hanging of poor negroes.... At such times we cannot forget that these Irish who thus attack a part of our population, are all foreigners, while the negroes whom they hunt like fiends, are natives of the soil—Americans by birth, that have a far better right here than this scum of a foreign population.28

  As news of the atrocities spread, support for emancipation grew steadily. Instead of denigrating African Americans, the draft riots helped transform public opinion into an increasingly supportive identification of the war with abolition.

  In tabulating the costs of the riot, the PhiLadelphia Inquirer put the total figure from damages at over one million dollars, not including “the expenses of suppressing the riot.” And for what, it asked? “Not even an escape from the Conscription Act, for the draft is to go on.”29

  CHAPTER 26

  “A POLITICAL WORSHIP”

  In contrast to the Confederacy, the Union called for no more fast days in 1863. Instead, two joyous thanksgiving days were observed, one on August 6 and the other in November, marking a premier “national” holiday. At the August 6 thanksgiving, many orators and newspapers contrasted the present happy state of the war with the dark days of Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg. They celebrated faith in God as well as the elevation of General George Meade, who acknowledged divine deliverance. This was in contrast to his predecessor, Joe Hooker, who offered a “profane boast” before Chancellorsville “that he should capture or destroy the rebel army in spite of Providence.” The ensuing “disaster” and “retreat” proved that God was on the side of the pious and not the boastful.1