Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  New England ministers were especially apt to link America’s present to their Puritan past and to interpret the national Thanksgiving Day as their gift to the nation. At a “Union Service” in New Britain, Connecticut, the Reverend Lavalette Perrin blatantly ignored the facts of the past and sounded the new orthodoxy that Puritans were not really about the construction of a biblical theocracy and religious intolerance, but about the creation of a democratic redeemer nation, governed by “we the people.” Reading back from the Declaration of Independence to New England’s Puritan past, Perrin came to the astounding conclusion that “[a]ll men are created equal [was] the pearl of great price for which these spiritual merchantmen of old England, the Puritans, came hither searching.”

  This patently false but stirring conclusion contained, in embryo, what would become the founding myth of America’s civil religion, linking Republican present to Puritan past in one seamless divine destiny where God is “using us ... in the world’s bloody and prolonged struggle for redemption from the grasp and curse of oppression.” Having summarized how the Puritans won the Revolution, Perrin went on to show how the Republican Party loyalists were their heirs and constituted the only true party in America: “This was a victory, not of party as against party—not of candidate as against candidate, merely ... but a victory of principles over prejudice; a victory of patriotism over partisanship; a victory of right and justice over covetousness and selfish ease.” Despite being “underdogs” in the struggle, Northern forces had right on their side, and “while the magnificent armies of liberty around Richmond and Atlanta tighten their hold upon the lungs of this writhing monster, let us lift up our hearts with our voices, and sing in grand chorus this one hundredth Psalm.”13

  While Lincoln was singled out for special praise, the generals were not ignored. In a sermon preached on The Sacrifice of Continual Praise, Long Island’s Cornelius L. Wells singled out the generals for adoration: Grant, “the indomitable hero of Vicksburg ... and shall I speak of Sherman, the gallant commander of the Army of the South West? ... From Missionary Ridge to Dalton, from Dalton to Resaca, and Dallas, and Altoon Pass, and Lost Mountain, and on to Marietta; yet on until our victorious hosts enter Atlanta, with banners flying and shouts of victory bursting forth from every heart.” Grant and Sherman did not stand alone: “Need I stop to speak of Sheridan; young, bold, intrepid? The victories of the Shenandoah Valley are not eclipsed by any of the whole war.”14

  America’s first national Thanksgiving also became the occasion for widespread charitable appeals, in particular for the Christian Commission which, in distinction to the “Unitarian” Sanitary Commission, kept Christ in its charitable activity. In conjunction with Thanksgiving Day, writers for the American Presbyterian emphasized the need for one million dollars in donations for the Christian Commission, “the only national organization which proposes as its object the salvation of the bodies and souls of our soldiers and sailors.” The paper went on in the following week’s issue to urge “the best men in the country” to volunteer to visit the army occasionally as members of the commission.

  Most writers did not trust the Sanitary Commission and the Unitarians who supported it. One tract, entitled False Comfort to the Dying Soldier, told of a Unitarian pamphlet in which was “not a word of a Saviour, not a word of repentance, nor of a day of judgment, but blank, stark universalism.” Despite opposing causes, Northern Presbyterians were one with Southern Presbyterians in judging Unitarianism to be “unmitigated heathenism.”15

  CHAPTER 40

  “I CAN MAKE THIS MARCH, AND MAKE GEORGIA HOWL!”

  While the North did their “simple and solemn duty” by reelecting their war president, Confederates waited anxiously to discover what Sherman would do next. In an attempt to rally the people, President Davis assured the South that Sherman was vulnerable to an attack in his rear. Conventional logic connected armies to their supplies. If you could get in their rear, destroy their supplies, and harass their troops, there would be nowhere to run, “and retreat, sooner or later, he must.”

  But Sherman had other plans—audacious plans, as it turned out, that took even Grant and Lincoln by surprise. But first he had to attend to Atlanta and Hood’s army. With thirty-four thousand infantry and twelve thousand cavalry, Hood remained a formidable but evasive foe who constantly harassed Sherman’s superior army without engaging a fixed battle.

  After two months of sparring and maneuvering, the two armies remained unchecked, and Sherman was getting edgy. Unwilling to launch a potentially devastating frontal assault on Hood, and knowing he could not protect his rail supplies all the way from Tennessee to Georgia, Sherman came to a radical conclusion. He could eliminate the supply vulnerability by breaking out from his entire army four corps, one cavalry, one artillery—sixty thousand in all—and live off the people of the South, pursuing a course of destruction yet to be determined. The solution to the supply line was brilliantly simple: get rid of the Union supply line altogether, and in the process absolutely demoralize the citizenry whose armies could do nothing to protect them.

  On October 9 Sherman telegraphed Grant at City Point:I propose that we break up the railroad from Chattanooga forward, and that we strike out with our wagons for Milledgeville, Millen, and Savannah. Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless for us to occupy it; but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people, will cripple their military resources. By attempting to hold the [rail]roads, we will lose a thousand men each month, and will gain no result. I can make this march, and make Georgia howl!1

  Sherman had already made the moral leap to justify destroying everything in his path, by redefining citizens as no different from combatants. Again, civilians would not be directly murdered (though many would no doubt starve or die of malnutrition), but they would be considered the enemy. To protect his rear from Hood, Sherman would send a strong holding detachment under General George Thomas back to Tennessee, where Hood was heading. Though disappointed, Thomas had an essential role to play: he would hold Hood’s leg while Sherman skinned Georgia alive. Hood could do nothing about it. Hood would no longer be feared—or even respected; he would be rendered irrelevant.

  Sherman’s plan—to head for the Atlantic, out of communication with his commanders and live off the land and its people as he went along—was unprecedented in scale. Others had done so on a smaller scale: Grant at Vicksburg and Winfield Scott in the Mexican War. But this far outstripped the earlier occasions. Grant and Lincoln would have to trust Sherman’s judgment to accomplish the plan without their knowing from day to day where he was or what was emerging.

  In time, they trusted him. But not right away. Shortly after proposing his audacious scheme, Sherman followed up with another, more urgent letter noting that the rail and communications lines could never remain functioning as long as he was pinned down in Atlanta and Hood’s army was free to destroy his lines. But if the offense was taken he could move “with my effective army ... through Georgia, smashing things to the sea.... Instead of guessing at what [Hood] means to do, he will have to guess at my plans.... I can make Savannah, Charleston, or the mouth of the Chattahoochee. Answer quick, as I know we will not have the telegraph long.”2

  As Sherman and Grant contemplated the lethal march through the heartland of the South, Confederates around Virginia were desperately trying to rally the people to whatever form of fight the war required. The times were bleak. A writer for the Richmond’s Central Presbyterian lamented the fact that even religion was suffering: “There have been many hindrances to the regular and efficient use of the means upon which the church depends for success.”3 Some were even considering enlisting slaves in return for their freedom, though in 1864 that was premature and generally rejected both officially and privately.4 Orators rushed to recount the great “historic significance” of “The Southern Revolution,” but they saw few signs of success.

  Inevitably, Confederates began to question whether their leaders had the ear of God, in particular their pres
ident. Although a consummate bureaucrat, courageous warrior, and loyal friend, Davis nevertheless lacked rhetorical charisma. He remained unable to harness a moral vision to his cause with sufficient power and clarity to overcome mounting trials and disappointments. When Northern Republicans turned to Lincoln for moral vision, the Confederacy seemed only to turn to their generals, especially Robert E. Lee.

  In a desperate message sent to the Confederate Congress on November 7 and timed to influence the North’s presidential election the following day, Jefferson Davis signaled a willingness to fight any kind of war that victory over the hated North required. In words that belied the original presumption of fixed armies protecting citizens and cities, he fell back on a different, grimmer rhetoric:There are no vital points on the preservation of which the continued existence of the Confederacy depends. There is no military success of the enemy, which can accomplish its destruction. Not in the fall of Richmond, nor Wilmington, nor Savannah, nor Mobile, nor of all combined, can save the enemy from the constant and exhaustive drain of blood and treasure, which must continue until he shall discover that no peace is attainable unless based on the recognition of our indefeasible rights.5

  Davis’s call to fight on without cities or armies was a call to guerrilla warfare and terrorism. If enacted it would complete Sherman’s prophecy, making civilians into soldiers. In a profound—if demonic—sense it represented another side of Sherman’s moral logic that, if implemented, would hoist Sherman and his commanders on their own petard—a literal blurring of the line between Southern soldiers and civilians. Moreover, by making Sherman’s case literally true—no innocents in the white South—it was a war the South could win despite Sherman’s legions.6 Many Southerners, moreover, would have agreed that Sherman deserved it. But was it just? With Missouri in view, most Confederate generals resisted this draconian option. Soon enough, all these cities would indeed fall, leading to the question of who would ultimately control the fate of the Confederacy, the president or the generals?

  If Davis’s communications were the language of a doomed cause, they were also a rich source of intelligence for Sherman, who read the Southern papers carefully and learned of Hood’s movements and intentions. He learned as well that Governor Brown of Georgia, a critic of the Davis administration, withdrew his state troops from Hood’s army for the purpose of gathering in the season’s crops. Besides the open feuding between president and governor that this action signaled, it also told Sherman that rich food supplies intended for the people could be his for the taking.

  As the country faced its bloodiest battles throughout 1864, the Union generals came to know each other well. They gained a personal sense not only of their fellow generals—with Grant and Sherman being the epitome—but also of the enemy. In correspondence with one another, generals would routinely refer to the enemy army as “Lee” or “Sherman” or “Hood” rather than use the name of the armies themselves. When Lincoln ordered Grant to “Get Lee” instead of “Get the Army of Northern Virginia,” he was instinctively underlining how critical the generals were to the success or failure of the war effort both on the battlefield and, perhaps even more, on the home front.

  Well might Lincoln personalize the war around the generals, for in fact, by 1864, they dictated its conduct. And in this arena, at least, it would be inaccurate to say that silence greeted the subject of just conduct in the war. De facto, the generals determined what was “just” conduct through edict and experience and articulated it in the form of orders that were invariably supported by their administrations. And invariably they found any conduct, short of rapine and genocide, just. The generals proved as adept in covering their moral flanks as they were in covering their infantry flanks in time of battle. The war effort depended on both. For the war to play out in the way that it did, it was imperative to protect both flanks or see the cause turned and rolled up.

  Many questioned military tactics, especially in defeat, but no voices questioned the generals’ deliberations or rethought criteria for just and unjust conduct. Clergy, intellectuals, artists, and journalists remained silent. The generals made the hard pragmatic decisions of war and then turned to the public moralists—chiefly the clergy—to provide moral justification and endorsement or, failing that, to turn a deaf ear. This conspiracy of silence over just conduct goes a long way to explain how military destruction and civilian suffering reached the levels they did.

  In 1864 Sherman needed his moral flanks covered even as he traveled into unknown areas—geographically and ethically. Though prepared to support Sherman, Grant and Lincoln were skeptical. The gains, of course, were immense. So were the risks. In the end, the consequences of doing nothing loomed larger than the risks of approving Sherman’s march.

  In the Confederacy, Davis and Hood proved a horrible match for one another. In their common repudiation of Johnston’s policy of protraction, they played right into Union hands. A protracted war might have won the South its independence. An attack risked suicide. Grant recognized that at last both sides had grown weary of war, but the South could hold out longer if its armies remained intact and on the move.

  “In the North,” Grant later observed, “the people governed, and could stop hostilities whenever they chose to stop supplies. The South was a military camp, controlled absolutely by the government with the soldiers to back it, and the war could have been protracted, no matter to what extent the discontent reached, up to the point of open mutiny of the soldiers themselves.”7 While correct about the South, Grant was wrong to suppose a different North. There, too, war would continue until the soldiers mutinied.

  To prepare for his grueling march, Sherman spent much of October neutralizing Hood and ensuring that his army could not be attacked from the rear should Hood decide to reverse directions. By October 26, when Sherman learned that Hood was moving south into Decatur, Alabama, he knew the way was paved for his “long-contemplated project.” General Thomas would check (and soon defeat) Hood in Tennessee, and Sherman faced no further significant military obstacles. The heartland would be his for the taking, if only Grant and Lincoln would say yes.

  On November I a still-skeptical General Grant instructed Sherman to first destroy Hood’s army. Sherman replied that if he tried, Hood would simply keep running to draw Sherman out of Georgia and delay the whole campaign. Nothing would be gained, especially with General Thomas’s army more than capable of blocking Hood in Tennessee: “I am convinced the best results will follow from our defeating Jeff. Davis’s cherished plan of making me leave Georgia by maneuvering.”8 Finally, on November 2, Grant agreed to sign off on Sherman’s scheme of a “march to the sea.”

  With Grant’s and Lincoln’s approval, Sherman decided to leave soon after the presidential election of November 8. On the morning of November 12, Sherman sent his last telegraph message to General Thomas and then severed the telegraph wire, and with it, all communication with his rear. With twenty days’ rations and no supply line, he was effectively on his own.

  His army was a marvel. Hardened veterans all, with sick and wounded sent back, it was arguably the most powerful human machine ever assembled. Grant recognized rightly that Sherman’s forces were “as good soldiers as ever trod the earth; better than any European soldiers, because they not only worked like a machine but the machine thought. European armies know very little what they are fighting for, and care less.”9

  Among the enlisted men, John Emerson Anderson shared Grant’s sense of Sherman’s awesome martial machine: “I will not attempt to describe our feelings of astonishment when it was rumored, or announced, that we were going to sever our communications with the north and march right out into the enemies country.”10 While soldiers flexed, Sherman worried. The idea had been his, and all responsibility rested on him as well. Later, he recalled: “There was a ‘devil-may-care’ feeling pervading officers and men, that made me feel the full load of responsibility, for success would be accepted as a matter of course, whereas, should we fail, this ‘march’ would be adjud
ged the wild adventure of a crazy fool.”11

  In a general order issued on November 9, Sherman had addressed the coming campaign and the subject of just conduct. Foraging, a euphemism for plundering valuables regardless of “military value,” would be necessary, but “soldiers must not enter the dwellings of the inhabitants, or commit any trespass.” In areas where the army was left unmolested, it was to show restraint. But in areas of guerrilla activity or burned bridges, the army should respond in kind, including the destruction of homes: “Army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless, according to the measure of such hostility.” As for “horses, mules wagons, etc., belonging to the inhabitants, the cavalry and artillery may appropriate freely and without limit.”12 How these limitations were to be enforced with sixty thousand vengeful soldiers in residential streets and neighborhoods Sherman never addressed.

  The first stop on the march was Atlanta, where Sherman’s soldiers burned what was left of the city to the ground and began moving south toward Savannah. The mobile army organized into two wings, with the Army of the Tennessee on the right under General Howard and the Army of Georgia on the left under General Slocum, Sheridan’s roommate at West Point.

  Lacking telegraph connections, Grant relied on Richmond newspapers to shadow Sherman’s movements across Georgia. As they marched across the countryside, Union bands played “John Brown’s Body,” striking dread into the hearts of watching civilians who were unable to protect themselves against the devastation they knew was coming. With a front that ranged between twenty-five and sixty miles wide and a pace that covered twelve miles a day, Sherman’s vengeful foragers (“bummers”) cut a swath of destruction that seemed almost a frolic to the virtually unchecked Yankees, but was a terror to defenseless civilians. One New York soldier described the devastation in chillingly entertaining terms: “Destroyed all we could not eat, stole their niggers, burned their cotton and gins, spilled their sorghum, burned & twisted their R. Roads and raised Hell generally.”13