Shattered Nation

by Jeffrey Brooks

  Seymour finally concluded his speech, perhaps three-quarters of an hour after he had started it. To Marble’s dismay, however, he had merely been the first speaker of many. For the next few hours, Marble sat and listened to speaker after speaker. Congressman Daniel Voorhees of Indiana, Congressman Fernando Wood of New York, and Governor Joel Parker of New Jersey each had their turn at the podium, as did many lesser lights of the Democratic Party. The message was the same every time: the war was a disaster, too many men had died, too much money had been wasted, and it was time to bring the fighting to a halt and restore the Union through negotiation rather than further bloodshed.

  Marble smiled when he saw General Joseph Hooker, who had only just days before submitted his resignation to the War Department, take the podium. The man who had the undesirable record of having suffered a major defeat at the hands of both Lee and Johnston spent twenty minutes castigating the Lincoln administration for its poor management of the war. He denounced Grant as a butcher who cared nothing for the lives of his men and ridiculed Sherman as a lunatic unfit to command a company. When he left the podium to rousing applause, Marble recalled their meeting in Cincinnati several weeks before. It had obviously been a good investment.

  The hours passed. A long succession of speakers came and went from the podium, representing the various factions of the party and the geographic regions of the Union, all saying more or less the same thing. Marble’s hand began to cramp from all the notes he was taking, and he eventually had to blink hard repeatedly to keep himself from falling asleep. He wished very much that he could have a glass of strong whiskey.

  Finally, Seymour returned to the podium.

  “We shall now hear the report of the Committee on Resolutions regarding our party political platform.”

  A hush descended over the Wigwam. At long last, something significant and substantial was about to take place. Congressman Wood, who had been appointed chair of the committee, strolled back up to the podium and began to read the platform plank by plank.

  The first few planks were greeted with impatient silence. The first dealt with purely economic issues such as the party’s support for free trade, while the second described the need for a transcontinental railroad. The next three were basically a rehashing of the previous speeches, denouncing Lincoln’s unconstitutional abuses of power. It was when Congressman Wood got to the sixth plank that the crowd heard what it had been waiting for.

  “Resolved, that the continuing bloodshed and needless loss of life, as well as the unnecessary expenditure of vast amounts of public monies, must be brought to a halt at the earliest practicable moment. For this purpose, we demand an immediate cessation of hostilities and the opening of good faith negotiations with our Southern brethren with a view toward a termination of the present military conflict.”

  As one, the crowd stood and cheered wildly and at great length. Marble was taken aback by the outpouring of support for the peace plank. He had expected support for it would be solid and certainly hadn’t been expecting any opposition. But to hear such an immense roaring of approval demonstrated to him that support among the party faithful for a termination of the war through negotiation was even stronger than he had imagined. He only hoped that the rest of the country felt the same way.

  As he scribbled the wording of the peace plank onto his note paper, he marveled at their sheer ambiguity. It could mean practically anything anyone wanted it to mean. The term “good faith negotiations” might include any position from insisting on an immediate Southern surrender to an instant acceptance of Confederate independence. Still, the point had been made. In the 1864 election, the Democrats were going to be the party of peace and the Republicans were going to be the party of war.

  The platform was shortly thereafter approved by a simple voice vote. As near as Marble could tell, there was no meaningful opposition to any part of it, which was a very good sign. But there was more for the convention to do before the night was over. They had to get on with the business of selecting their candidate for President.

  *****

  August 29, Evening

  Grant was coming.

  Johnston sat quietly in his office, staring down at the maps. The stunning news that Sherman had been sacked and none other than the Union general-in-chief himself was coming to take charge had been forwarded to him from Richmond a week before, but somehow the surprise of it had yet to wear off. Johnston had imagined Grant’s progress by ship and train from Petersburg through Washington, Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, and Chattanooga as if he were looking at the inevitable approach of a horde of locusts.

  In retrospect, Johnston realized that he shouldn’t have been all that surprised. Sherman had suffered the worst defeat inflicted upon any Union general since the beginning of the war. Many other generals had been removed from command for much less. With General Thomas languishing as a prisoner in Camp Oglethorpe, there was no other Union officer in the Western Theater with enough experience and prestige to replace Sherman. McPherson was too young, and Schofield and Howard had only recently been promoted to the level of army command.

  Conceivably, a general from the Eastern Theater might have been sent out to take command. General Meade, the victor of Gettysburg, certainly would have commanded sufficient prestige, as would have Winfield Scott Hancock. For whatever reason, Grant had decided to take on the job himself. Worse, he was bringing heavy reinforcements with him. With Forrest and Wheeler both dead and their commands defeated, thousands of Union soldiers who had been guarding the railroads were now free to join the Union army on the north bank of the Chattahoochee. It all pointed to a major enemy operation in the near future.

  Johnston estimated that the Army of Tennessee had perhaps fifty-five thousand to sixty thousand men ready for action. Although the enemy forces had been whittled down by their losses at Peachtree Creek and the large number of regiments leaving upon the expiration of their enlistments, the arriving reinforcements were beginning to make up for this. He calculated that the combined Union forces on the other side of the river would soon amount to approximately ninety thousand men.

  There was a soft knock on the door, which Johnston recognized from long experience as being Mackall’s. His chief-of-staff entered and handed over a note.

  “Telegram from the War Department, sir.”

  Johnston took it and read, frowning. He chuckled bitterly when he finished reading.

  “Not what you wanted, I suppose?”

  “Indeed not, William. Our request for cavalry reinforcements from Virginia has been denied.” Johnston had hoped that the dispatch of Union forces from Virginia to Georgia would allow for Confederate troops to be shifted in a similar fashion. Any additional reinforcements would help in the coming struggle against Grant, and the need for additional cavalry was particularly serious.

  “Well, that cannot come as a surprise, considering the President’s animosity toward you.”

  “No, but it gets worse. The President is again urging us to cross to the north side of the river and launch an offensive against the enemy before Grant arrives and before all the enemy reinforcements are in place.”

  Mackall snorted in contempt. “It’s easy for a man sitting in Richmond, hundreds of miles away, to think he can look at a couple of colored pins on a map and know the situation better than does the general on the scene.”

  Johnston nodded. They had already discussed the President’s proposal for an offensive at some length. The idea of an offensive was utter madness as far as Johnston was concerned and his opinion had been corroborated by Hardee, Stewart, and Cheatham at a meeting of the high command. Most likely, an effort to cross to the north bank of the Chattahoochee would simply result in the Southerners being pinned against the river by superior numbers and then being destroyed.

  Johnston had requested that his corps commanders attach their names to the telegram he had sent the President expressing this opinion. They had willingly done so, but Davis had responded by behaving like a piqued and spo
iled child. In the days since they had sent their telegram, Davis had sent no less than four further telegrams urging some sort of aggressive action against the Yankees. Johnston found the whole thing very irritating.

  He stared down at the map, trying to put himself in Grant’s place. Would the Union commander cross the river and attempt a frontal attack on Atlanta, as he had tried to do outside Richmond when he attacked Lee at Cold Harbor? Would Grant attempt to outmaneuver him by moving his army against the railroad connections of the city, as he had done when he moved against Petersburg? Or would Grant do something completely unexpected, as he had done more than once during the Vicksburg Campaign?

  “We are keeping the crossings of the Chattahoochee under constant surveillance, yes?” Johnston asked.

  “All of our cavalry are constantly on patrol, sir. Of course, we have only half the number of horsemen we had two months ago, when Sherman first crossed the river. Consequently, our ability to carry out reconnaissance has been severely curtailed.”

  Johnston frowned and nodded. The disastrous failure of Wheeler’s raid against Sherman’s supply lines had not only gotten Wheeler himself killed, but brought about the destruction of half of the cavalry of the Army of Tennessee. Four thousand horsemen who should have been patrolling the Chattahoochee River and scouting out the movements of the enemy were instead dead on the fields of northern Georgia or had been shuffled into the confines of Northern prison camps.

  “It’s like trying to fight a boxing match with our eyes half-closed,” Johnston complained.

  “That’s one way to put it,” Mackall said. “Which is why it is so infuriating that President Davis denied our request for any cavalry reinforcements. Surely they could have spared at least a brigade. Even a single regiment of horsemen would have been very useful.”

  “As always, William, we can expect no help from Richmond. Davis’s mind remains fervently poisoned against us.” Johnston felt that the animosity the President held toward him had already nearly caused the fall of Atlanta once. He hoped that it would not do so again. He looked back up at Mackall. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. I received a message from General Cooper’s aide advising us that they have arrived in Augusta. Barring any trouble with the railroad, they should be here tomorrow afternoon.”

  Johnston grunted. “Why did Cleburne ever have to put forward that damnable proposal?” he said bitterly. “It has caused nothing but trouble.” He was no friend of slavery himself and personally saw nothing all that shocking in the idea of freeing slaves and enlisting them in the army. However, the distraction it was creating within the ranks of the Army of Tennessee and the Confederacy as a whole was coming at the worst possible time. With Grant soon to arrive, a major Union offensive was clearly imminent. Just when his army needed to be united, the Cleburne proposal was threatening to tear it apart.

  He dearly wished that Cooper was not coming. The investigation, which would obviously involve interviews with most of the high command of the army, would only inflame the situation and set his generals against one another. President Davis, were he a man of any wisdom whatsoever, would have simply ignored the firestorm generated by the publication of Cleburne’s proposal and waited for it to blow over. Instead, he had caved in to the extremists in the Confederate Congress and initiated the Cooper investigation for purely political reasons.

  “You’ve made arrangements for General Cooper’s lodging?”

  “Yes. It’s all taken care of. He’ll be staying at the Trout House Hotel.”

  “That’s fine,” Johnston said, satisfied. Although a bureaucrat, Cooper was technically the highest-ranking officer in the Confederate Army and deserved to be treated with the utmost respect. The Trout House provided the best accommodations to be found in the Atlanta area. “When he arrives, give him my greetings and tell him that I would like to have him for dinner here at my headquarters. It would seem proper for me to talk with him before he begins his interviews.”

  “He will, in all likelihood, ask to interview you as part of the investigation. Davis and Bragg may intend to entrap you in the same web in which they seem intent to entrap Cleburne.”

  Johnston nodded, having considered this. As he had many times before, he wondered whether his most dangerous foes were to be found among the Yankees or among his own kind.

  *****

  August 30, Morning

  Becoming an officer meant that McFadden had been given a sword and a pistol, but the promised horse had yet to materialize. He doubted that it ever would. Relatively few horses had been captured at Peachtree Creek because the Yankees had been able to shoot most of them before they had fallen into Southern hands. Good horses had long been in short supply in the Army of Tennessee and the few that were available were obviously needed by the cavalry and artillery. Besides, the heavily forested terrain was not well suited to riding. McFadden was perfectly content to walk, as he had been doing since he had first joined the army.

  The men of Granbury’s Texas Brigade marched with a cocky swagger that exuded arrogance, their rifles held every which way, their feet moving to no beat but their own. It was as if they were challenging any observer to comment on their apparent lack of discipline. McFadden had always liked it that way. The men chattered happily and loudly with one another as they walked, filling the air around them with laughter.

  They were moving steadily northwards toward the Chattahoochee River, having left their encampment north of Atlanta about an hour before, immediately after sunrise. Had a battle been imminent, they probably would have been awoken long before dawn, but the recent lull in campaigning did not seem likely to end anytime soon.

  The 7th Texas was the second regiment in line, following behind the 18th Texas Dismounted Cavalry, which had fought as infantry for as long as McFadden could remember. He dearly wished that his regiment could have marched as the vanguard of the brigade, for the dust was always considerably less bothersome in that position. As it was, all the dust being kicked up by the men ahead of them was choking the eyes and throats of the 7th Texas and annoying them to no end.

  “I don’t believe a word of it,” Pearson said, just loudly enough for McFadden to hear. “No way old Pat Cleburne wrote anything like it. It’s a damn lie, I tell you.”

  “I don’t often agree with you, Pearson,” Balch said. “But this time I do. If you ask me, it’s all just a story cooked up by William Walker to make Cleburne look bad.”

  The rest of the 7th Texas took up the conversation as McFadden listened with a deep interest. The rumor that General Cleburne had put forth some sort of proposal to free the slaves had reached the brigade’s camp a few days earlier. A corporal working as a brigade courier, who claimed he had been in downtown Atlanta to deliver a message to the army quartermaster, said that everyone in the city was talking about it. The rumors had only been confirmed when a copy of the an Atlanta newspaper containing the story had arrived in camp the previous night.

  McFadden was interested in what the men were saying for two reasons. First, as an officer, it was important for him to see how the rumor was affecting the morale of the regiment. Second, the subject was interesting in and of itself. He did not know what to think about it, so listening to the opinions being tossed about by his men might help give him a proper perspective.

  Pearson was still talking. “Well, I’ll tell you this, boys. If it is true, then Jeff Davis is going to bump Cleburne down to a private, just like us. No way they’ll let some abolitionist order us around. We’re fighting this war to keep our slaves, after all. Why would Cleburne want us to fight so hard only to give them up?”

  “You say what you want, Pearson,” Balch replied. “If they do anything to Pat Cleburne, I won’t fight any more. No, sir! I’ll throw my rifle into the Chattahoochee and go on back to Texas, by God!”

  McFadden was momentarily tempted to reprimand Balch for talking in such a way, but decided against it. One of the hallmarks of the Army of Tennessee was that the enlisted men were allowed to speak the
ir minds. Besides, he seriously doubted that Balch, trickster though he might be, was actually contemplating desertion. More importantly, he knew the men would rapidly lose respect for him if he beat them down for such minor infractions. They would have seen it as a needless abuse of power.

  McFadden had never given any thought to what Cleburne’s opinions about slavery might have been. Why should he have? The private thoughts of the commander of his division were obviously no business of his. Still, if Cleburne had actually proposed freeing the slaves, and this fact was now being splashed across the newspapers, what had been private thoughts had become public proposals. Needless to say, that made it the business of every man in the Army of Tennessee.

  Though he knew no one would bother to ask him his opinion, McFadden had to admit that he saw nothing particularly shocking in Cleburne’s proposal. The Confederacy was outnumbered by the Yankees, so it made perfect sense to enlist black troops in the army if any were willing to fight. Those Southerners who had an ingrained and instinctive need to defend slavery, such as Teresa Turnbow, had always struck McFadden as vain and absurd.

  He personally doubted that any slave would fight for the Confederacy, even if they were offered their freedom. After having been enslaved for the entirety of his life, why would a man want to fight on behalf of the people who had enslaved him? McFadden felt it much more likely that the slaves would simply turn their guns against the Confederacy and call for help from the nearest Yankee army.

  As he listened to his men discuss the news, McFadden did not hear anyone express any disloyalty to Cleburne. This didn’t surprise McFadden. For one thing, every soldier in Cleburne’s division had a deep love for their commander. For another, the men of the regiment were largely drawn from the Texas frontier, where slavery was not well established.