The Soul of America

by Jon Meacham

  Grant, who arrived in the early afternoon to find Lee already inside McLean’s house, had been suffering from a debilitating headache in the final days of the fighting. Relieved now—quietly “jubilant,” he recalled, at the turn of events—the Union general chose to enter the parlor alone, leaving his officers outside for a moment. It was a small sign of respect, even of humility, on the part of the victor to the vanquished.

  Taking Lee’s hand, Grant spoke of their shared experience in the Mexican War. “I met you once before, General Lee,” Grant said. “I have always remembered your appearance and I think I should have recognized you anywhere.” They talked on for a bit; Grant was anxious to be gracious, and the past was a safer topic for the moment than the present. At last it fell to Lee to bring up the painful work at hand. “I suppose, General Grant, that the object of our present meeting is fully understood,” Lee said. “I asked to see you to ascertain upon what terms you would receive the surrender of my army.”

  The business was handled with dispatch. Grant was magnanimous, allowing Lee’s men to keep their horses so that the former Confederates could, Grant said, “put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter.” Lee was pleased. “This will have the best possible effect upon the men,” Lee told Grant. “It will be very gratifying, and will do much toward conciliating our people.”

  The occasion was muted, the generals gracious. These were soldiers, and they understood one another. In defeat Lee was stoic; in victory, Grant was sympathetic. “As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassable face,” Grant recalled of Lee, “it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings…were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought.”

  Grant sent word to the Union troops: no gloating. “The war is over,” he said. “The rebels are our countrymen again.” As the two generals parted in the yard outside McLean’s house, Grant took off his hat as Lee rode by; Lee raised his own in mutual tribute.

  Yet the comity of the commanders augured little about what was to come. The clash of arms was over, yes, but the battle between North and South, between Union and rebellion, between nothing less, really, than justice and injustice was not fully resolved in Mr. McLean’s parlor. Far from it: What President Lincoln, who within a week of the surrender would be dead, the victim of an assassin’s bullet, had called the “fiery trial” of the Civil War was only a chapter in the perennial contest between right and wrong in the nation’s soul.

  As things turned out, Appomattox was as much a beginning as an end. In the war’s tragic wake we can see the possibilities of the American experiment and its all-too-persistent realities. As president, Grant fought against the Ku Klux Klan, but he was bracketed by Andrew Johnson, who attempted to obstruct many steps toward equality, and by Rutherford B. Hayes, who in 1877 agreed to remove federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction as part of a bargain to secure the presidency in a closely contested election. A number of the decisions made after Lincoln’s assassination long delayed the “new birth of freedom” of which the president had spoken at Gettysburg.

  For many, a new order in which blacks were equal to whites was disorienting and had to be fought with ferocity. The battle was especially pitched for white Southerners, whose wartime crusade, they told themselves, had been righteous. In the creed of the Lost Cause, arguments over states’ rights, not over slavery, had led to war. And now postbellum Southerners had to shift from military to political means in the battle for state power, which in practice meant the battle for white supremacy. Our history and our politics even now are unintelligible without first appreciating the roots of white Southern discontent about the verdict of the Civil War.

  * * *

  —

  More than a century and a half on, the immensity of the Confederate defeat can be difficult to appreciate. Scholars estimate that between one in three and one in five Southern troops died during the conflict. Many, many more were injured either in body or mind. (A revealing, oft-cited detail: Mississippi earmarked 20 percent of its entire state budget in 1866 for wooden limbs.) In its attempt to make sense of the loss and to justify such staggering casualties, the South looked at once backward and, crucially, forward.

  The years leading up to war had been fraught, even mad. Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina nearly killed Senator Charles Sumner with a cane on the floor of the Senate chamber. Virginia chose to hang John Brown after Harpers Ferry when, as Robert Penn Warren pointed out, he probably should have been committed to a mental institution. The decision to execute, Warren wrote, “thereby proved again what is never in much need of proof, that a crazy man is a large-scale menace only in a crazy society.” James Petigru, a Union man from South Carolina, is reported to have observed that his state was “too small for a republic, but too large for an insane asylum.”

  The war had been about the most fundamental of things: slavery and freedom. William H. Seward had called the clash over chattel labor the “irrepressible conflict.” As the years passed after Appomattox, however, more and more Southerners sought to diminish the role of slavery in bringing about the clash of arms. In his memoirs, Jefferson Davis said the Confederacy sought to preserve not slavery but “the inalienable right of a people to change their government…to withdraw from a Union into which they had, as sovereign communities, voluntarily entered,” adding: “African servitude was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.” Though this view was to be echoed in sundry memorial addresses, tracts, sermons, and casual conversations down to the present day, it was unconvincing, not least because of what Southerners had said when the war itself was actually coming about.

  In the month before Fort Sumter, Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president of the newly formed Confederate States of America, made his “Cornerstone Speech” in Savannah, Georgia. The crowd was raucous; feeling ran high. The Confederacy’s “foundations are laid,” Stephens said, “its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

  To the North, on the banks of the Potomac, Abraham Lincoln set about rescuing the Union. The Republican Party’s emergence in the mid-1850s had brought a fresh moral dimension to American politics. This is not to argue that the Party of Lincoln, as it was to become, was a perfect instrument. It is clearly the case, however, that restrictions on the expansion of slavery lay at the heart of the Republican claim to power.

  “I am naturally anti-slavery,” Lincoln was to write in April 1864. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.” As early as 1854, speaking in Peoria, Illinois, Lincoln had called slavery a “monstrous injustice,” saying: “Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it….If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.”

  He was less certain, though, about exactly how to design and implement this plan of salvation. “If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution,” he said at Peoria, continuing:

  My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia—to their own native land. But a moment’s reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible….W
hat then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition?…Free them, and make them politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not….A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded. We can not, then, make them equals. It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted; but for their tardiness in this, I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the south.

  Intensely practical, attuned to the subtleties of public opinion, Lincoln was “always calculating, and always planning ahead,” William Herndon, his law partner, remarked. “His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.”

  What, then, as Lincoln came to the White House, were the objects of that ambition? For him it was, in the first instance, the rescue of the Union so long as slavery remained a Southern, not a Western, institution. He rejected any compromise in the Secession Winter of 1860–61 that would have expanded slavery. By the summer of 1862 it became evident to him that emancipation, even in a limited way, would be militarily wise and, in the abolitionist precincts of the North, politically beneficial—all while having the virtue, he believed, of being morally right.

  To prepare public opinion for emancipation, Lincoln wrote the New York editor Horace Greeley in August 1862. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” Lincoln wrote. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that….I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.”

  By speaking of “freeing all the slaves,” Lincoln was openly broaching the boldest of maneuvers—and, in the wake of the Confederate retreat from Antietam in September, he believed the time was right to strike. Lincoln told his cabinet that he had made a bargain with God: If the Union forces could prevail in Maryland, he, the president, would move on emancipation. Now victory had come, Lincoln said, and he was ready to act. He had drafted a proclamation and would entertain any minor editorial thoughts from the cabinet, but that was all he was interested in. He had, he told them, “resolved upon this step, and had not called them together to ask their advice, but to lay the subject-matter of a proclamation before them.” The decision was the president’s to make, and he had made it.

  With the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862, (which would free the slaves in Confederate states if those states did not end the rebellion by New Year’s Day), and the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 (which followed through on the warning issued in September), Lincoln gave the words that Julia Ward Howe had written earlier in the war, published as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in The Atlantic Monthly, newly urgent significance:

  As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

  While God is marching on.

  * * *

  —

  Yet the war was not as morally dispositive as we tend—or like—to think. “The Union,” the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote, “fought the Civil War on borrowed moral capital.” To accept emancipation did not mean one favored equality. Lincoln himself was forever evolving on the question. “Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people,” Lincoln told a delegation of blacks in August 1862. “But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race….I do not propose to discuss this, but to present it as a fact with which we have to deal. I cannot alter it if I would.” One answer, Lincoln allowed, was the removal of blacks from the nation—colonization to Africa, perhaps. “But for your race among us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other….It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”

  With the Emancipation Proclamations (one in September 1862, the other in January 1863), Lincoln transformed the Civil War from one to preserve the Union to one that included the cause of liberty for the enslaved, a project realized, in legal terms, with the Thirteenth Amendment.

  Slavery had been conquered by the Union, but racism lived on across America. “When was it ever known that liberation from bondage was accompanied by a recognition of political equality?” the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison wrote in 1864.

  On Tuesday, April 11, 1865—two days after Lee’s surrender—Lincoln made what would be his last public speech. That evening, from the North Portico of the White House, the president acknowledged both the magnitude of the Union victory and the coming agonies of Reconstruction. “We meet this evening, not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart,” Lincoln told a large crowd that had gathered on an evening the journalist Noah Brooks described as “misty.” The weather did not matter: The throngs of Washington were eager to hail their president. There were, Brooks wrote, “cheers upon cheers” and “wave after wave of applause.”

  As Tad Lincoln picked up the pages that fell away from Lincoln’s hand, the president noted that the Confederate surrender had given the Union “hope of a righteous and speedy peace whose joyous expression cannot be restrained.” Yet he worried about the work of reunion. “We simply must begin with, and mold from, disorganized and discordant elements,” Lincoln said. “Nor is it a small additional embarrassment that we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and measure of reconstruction.” In the chaos of the peace, many Southern whites would find it possible to carry on the war even after the guns had fallen silent.

  * * *

  —

  The Southern strategy to bring victory out of defeat was articulated, among others, by the Virginia Confederate and journalist Edward Alfred Pollard. Born in 1832 in Nelson County, Virginia, near Charlottesville, Pollard was a newspaperman who had also served as clerk to the House Judiciary Committee. Before Fort Sumter, Pollard defended slavery in an 1859 book entitled Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South; during the war, he was captured by the Union navy while en route to England and was held for a time as a prisoner of war. In the wake of Appomattox, Pollard produced a treatise on the meaning of the war: The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, published in 1866. “No one can read aright the history of America,” he wrote, “unless in the light of a North and a South: two political aliens existing in a Union imperfectly defined as a confederation of States.”

  In Pollard’s formulation, the Lost Cause was both justified and enduring: It was not dead, but alive. The foe now was central authority and national will—Washington, D.C., writ large. “The people of the South have surrendered in the war what the war has conquered”—slavery and secession—“but they cannot be expected to give up what was not involved in the war, and voluntarily abandon their political schools for the dogma of Consolidation.” Pollard declared that a “ ‘war of ideas,’ ” a new war that “the South wants and insists upon perpetrating,” was under way. “The war has left the South its own memories, its own heroes, its own tears, its own dead,” Pollard wrote. “Under these traditions, sons will grow to manhood, and lessons sink deep that are learned from the lips of widowed mothers.”

  It was a bold call to fight on in the face of loss. The war, Pollard wrote, “did not decide negro equality; it did not decide negro suffrage; it did not decide State Rights….And these things which the war did not decide, the Southern people will still cling to, still claim, and still assert them in their rights and views.”

  He enlarged upon this thesis in another book, The Lost Cause Regained, published in 1868. Pollard wrote that he was “profoundly convinced that the true cause fought for in the late war has not been ‘lost’ imm
easurably or irrevocably, but is yet in a condition to be ‘regained’ by the South on ultimate issues of the political contest.” The question was no longer slavery, but white supremacy, which Pollard described as the “true cause of the war” and the “true hope of the South.”

  The reassertion of states’ rights and the rejection of federal rule was a holy cause. Likening the lot of the Southerner to that of Christ himself, Pollard spoke in terms religiously inclined Southerners—which was to say most Southerners—could understand, calling on the defeated Confederates to be patient in the tribulation of Reconstruction. The South, Pollard wrote, “must wear the crown of thorns before she can assume that of victory.”

  The blood of their brothers and the faith of their fathers had consecrated a postwar Southern path. There was to be only limited accommodation to the will of the majority. Though the North had triumphed on the field of battle, the South, anxious about ceding control of their particular affairs to the federal government, settled in for the longest of sieges.