Chapter Fourteen
The War To Save the Union
The nomination of Lincoln had succeeded brilliantly for the Republicans, but had his election been a good thing for the country? As the inauguration approached,
everyone waited tensely to see whether he would oppose secession with force. His inaugural address was conciliatory but firm. Southern institutions were in no danger from
his administration. Secession, however, was illegal. "A husband and wife may be divorced," Lincoln said, employing one of his homely and unconsciously risque metaphors, "but the different parts of our country cannot." His concluding words catch the spirit of the inaugural perfectly:
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory ... will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Border-state moderates found the speech encouraging. So did the fiery Charles Sumner. The Confederates, however, read Lincoln's denial of the right of secession as justifying their decision to secede.
Fort Sumter: The First Shot
While denying the legality of secession, Lincoln had in fact temporized. The Confederates had seized most federal property in the Deep South. Lincoln admitted frankly that he would not attempt to reclaim this property. However, two strongholds, Fort Sumter, on an island in Charleston harbor, and Fort Pickens, at Pensacola, Florida, were still in loyal hands. Most Republicans, Lincoln included, did not want to surrender them without a show of resistance. To do so, one wrote, would be to turn the American eagle into a "debilitated chicken."
Yet to reinforce the forts might mean bloodshed that would make reconciliation impossible. After weeks of indecision, Lincoln took the moderate step of sending a naval expedition to supply the Sumter garrison with food. Unwilling to permit this, the Confederates opened fire on the fort on April 12, 1861. After holding out against the bombardment of shore batteries for 34 hours, Major Robert Anderson and his men surrendered.
The attack precipitated an outburst of patriotic indignation in the North. Lincoln promptly issued a call for 75,000 volunteers. This caused Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee to secede. After years of crises and compromises, the nation chose to settle the quarrel between the parties by force of arms.
Southerners considered Lincoln's call for troops an act of naked aggression. They were seeking what a later generation would call the right of self-determination. How could the North square its professed belief in democratic free choice with its refusal to permit the southern states to leave the Union when a majority of their citizens wished to do so?
Lincoln took the position that secession was a rejection of democracy. If the South could refuse to abide by the result of an election in which it had freely participated, then everything that monarchists and other conservatives had said about the instability of republican governments would be proved true. This was the proper ground for Lincoln to take, both morally and politically. A majority of northerners would not have supported a war against slavery. Slavery was the root cause of secession, but the North's determination to resist secession resulted from the people's commitment to the Union.
The Blue and the Gray
In any test between the United States and the 11 states of the Confederacy, the former possessed tremendous advantages. There were 20.7 million people in the northern states (excluding Kentucky and Missouri, where opinion was divided), only 9 million in the South, of which about 3.5 million were slaves, whom the whites hesitated to trust with arms. The North's economic capacity to wage war was even more preponderant. It was manufacturing nine times as much as the Confederacy and had a far larger and more efficient railroad system. Northern control of the merchant marine and the navy made possible a blockade of the Confederacy, a particularly potent threat to a region so dependent on foreign markets.
The Confederates discounted these advantages. Many doubted that public opinion in the North would sustain Lincoln if he attempted to meet secession with force. Northern manufacturers needed southern markets, and merchants depended heavily on southern business. Many western farmers were still sending their produce down the Mississippi. Should the North try to cut Europe off from southern cotton, the powers, particularly Great Britain, would force open southern ports and provide the Confederacy with the means of defending itself forever. Moreover, the South provided nearly three-fourths of the world's cotton, essential for most textile mills. "You do not dare to make war on cotton," Senator Hammond of South Carolina had declared. "No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king."
The Confederacy also counted on certain military advantages. The new nation, it was assumed, need only fight a defensive war, less costly in men and material and of great importance in maintaining morale and winning outside sympathy. Southerners would be defending not only their social institutions but their homes and families.
Both sides faced massive difficulties in organizing for war. The Union mustered its military, economic, and administrative resources slowly because it had had little experience with war, none with civil war. After southern defections, the regular army consisted of only 13,000 officers and men, far too few to absorb the 186,000 volunteers who had joined the colors by early summer, much less the additional 450,000 men who had volunteered by the end of the year. The hastily composed high command, headed by the elderly Winfield Scott, debated grand strategy endlessly while regimental commanders lacked even decent maps of Virginia.
The Whig prejudice against powerful presidents was part of Lincoln's political heritage; consequently he did not display the firmness of a Jackson or a Polk in his dealings with Congress. Fortunately, in the early stages of the war, Congress proved to be cooperative. But he proved capable of handling heavy responsibilities. His strength lay in his ability to think problems through, to accept their implications, and then to act unflinchingly. Anything but a tyrant by nature, he boldly exceeded the conventional limits of presidential power in the emergency, expanding the army without congressional authorization and even suspending the writ of habeas corpus when he thought military necessity demanded that action.
Lincoln displayed a remarkable patience and depth of character: He would willingly accept snubs and insults from lesser men in order to advance the cause. He kept a close check on every aspect of the war effort, yet he found time for thought too. His secretary, John Nicolay, reported seeing him sit sometimes for a whole hour like "a petrified image," lost in contemplation.
The Confederacy faced far greater problems than the North, for it had to create an entire administration under pressure of war, with the additional handicap of the states' rights philosophy to which it was committed. The Confederate Constitution explicitly recognized the sovereignty of the states and contained no broad authorization for laws designed to advance the general welfare. State governments repeatedly defied the central administration, located at Richmond after Virginia seceded, even with regard to military affairs.
Of course the Confederacy made heavy use of the precedents and administrative machinery taken over from the United States. The government quickly decided that all federal laws would remain in force until specifically repealed, and many former federal officials continued to perform their duties under the new auspices. The call to arms produced a turnout even more impressive than that in the North; by July 1861 about 112,000 men were under arms.
President Jefferson Davis represented the best type of slave owner. A graduate of West Point, he was a fine soldier and a planter noted for his humane treatment of his slaves. He was courageous, industrious, and intelligent, but rather too reserved and opinionated to make either a good politician or a popular leader. He devoted too much time to details, failed to delegate authority, and was impatient with dull-witted people, a type politicians often have to deal with. He fancied himself a military expert because of his West Point training and his Mexican War service, but unfortunately for the South, he was a mediocre military thinker. Unlike Lincoln, he quarreled frequently with his subordinates, held grudges, and allowed personal feelings to distort his judgment.
The Test of Battle: Bull Run
As summer approached, the two nations prepared for battle, full of pride, enthusiasm, and ignorance. The tragic confrontation was beginning. "Forward to Richmond!" "On to Washington!" Such shouts propelled the armies into battle long before either was properly trained. On July 21, at Manassas Junction, Virginia, which was 20 miles below Washington, on a stream called Bull Run, 30,000 men under General Irvin McDowell attacked a roughly equal force of Confederates commanded by the "Napoleon of the South," Pierre G. T. Beauregard. McDowell swept back the Confederate left flank. Victory seemed sure. But then the southerners counter-attacked, driving the Union soldiers back. As often happens with green troops, retreat quickly turned to rout. Panic engulfed Washington and Richmond exulted, both sides expecting the northern capital to fall within hours.
The inexperienced southern troops were too disorganized to follow up their victory. Casualties on both sides were light, and the battle had little direct effect on anything but morale. Southern confidence soared, while the North began to realize how immense the task of subduing the Confederacy would be.
After Bull Run, Lincoln devised a broader, more systematic strategy for winning the war. The navy would clamp a tight blockade on southern ports as part of General Scott's "Anaconda Plan" to starve the South into submission. In the West, operations designed to gain control of the Mississippi would be undertaken. Most important, a new army would be mustered at Washington to invade Virginia. To lead this army and to command all the Union forces, Lincoln appointed a 34-year old major general, George B. McClellan.
McClellan possessed a fine military bearing, a flair for the dramatic, the ability to inspire troops, remarkable talent as an administrator, and a sublime faith in his own destiny. He dreamed of striking swiftly at the heart of the Confederacy to capture Richmond, Nashville, even New Orleans. Yet he was sensible enough to insist on massive logistical support, thorough training for the troops, iron discipline, and meticulous staff work before making a move.
Paying for the War
By the fall of 1861 a real army was taking shape along the Potomac: disciplined, confident, and adequately supplied. Northern shops and factories were producing guns, ammunition, wagons, uniforms, and the countless other supplies needed to fight a war.
At the beginning of the war Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase failed to ask Congress for enough money to fight the war properly. In August 1861 Congress passed an income tax law (3 percent on incomes over $800, which effectively exempted ordinary wage earners) and assessed a direct tax on the states. Loans amounting to $140 million were authorized. As the war dragged on and expenses mounted, new excise taxes on every imaginable product and service were passed, and still further borrowing was necessary. In 1863 the banking system was overhauled.
During the war the federal government borrowed a total of $2.2 billion and collected $667 million in taxes, -about 20 percent of its total expenditures. These unprecedentedly large sums proved inadequate. Some obligations were met by printing paper money unredeemdable in coin. About $431 million in "greenbacks"-the term distinguished this fiat money from the redeemable yellowback bills-were issued during the conflict. Public confidence in paper money vacillated with each change in the fortunes of the Union armies, but by the end of the war the cost of living in the North had doubled.
The heavy emphasis on borrowing and currency inflation was expensive but not irresponsible. In a country still chiefly agricultural, people had relatively low cash incomes and therefore could not easily bear a heavy tax load.
Politics as Usual
Partisan politics was altered by the war but not suspended. The secession of the southern states left the Republicans with large majorities in Congress. Most Democrats supported measures necessary for the conduct of the war but objected to the way the Lincoln administration was conducting it. When slavery and race relations were under discussion, the Democrats adopted a conservative stance and the Republicans divided into Moderate and Radical wings.
As the war progressed, the Radical faction became increasingly powerful. In 1861 the most prominent Radical senator was Charles Sumner, brimful of hatred for slaveholders. In the House, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania was the rising power. Sumner and Stevens were uncompromising. They demanded not merely abolition but the granting of full political and civil rights to blacks. Moderate Republicans objected to treating blacks as equals and opposed making abolition a war aim.
Even many of the so-called Radicals disagreed with Sumner and Stevens on race relations. Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, for example, was a lifelong opponent of slavery, yet he had convinced himself that blacks (he habitually called them "*******") had a distinctive and unpleasant smell. He considered the common white prejudice against African Americans perfectly understandable. But prejudice, he maintained, gave no one the right "to do injustice to anybody." He insisted that blacks were as intelligent as whites and were entitled not merely to freedom but to political equality.
At the other end of the political spectrum stood the so-called Peace Democrats. These "Copperheads" (apparently the reference was not to the poisonous snake but to an earlier time when some hard-money Democrats wore copper pennies around their necks) opposed all measures in support of the war. Few were actually disloyal, but their activities at a time when thousands of men were risking their lives in battle infuriated many northerners.
Lincoln treated dissenters with a curious mixture of repression and tolerance, He suspended the writ of habeas corpus in critical areas and applied martial law freely, arguing that the government dared not stand on ceremony in a national emergency. His object, he explained, was not to punish but to prevent. Elections were held in complete freedom throughout the war. After the war, in Ex parte Milligan (1866), the Supreme Court declared illegal the military trials of civilians in areas where the regular courts were functioning, but by that time the question was of only academic interest.
The most notorious domestic foe of the administration was the Peace Democrat Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio. Vallandigham was a zealot. "Perish life itself," he once said, "but do the thing that is right." In 1863, after he had made a speech urging that the war be ended by negotiation, Vallandigham was jailed by the military. Of course his followers protested indignantly. Lincoln ordered him released and banished to the Confederacy. Once at liberty Vallandigham moved to Canada, from which refuge he ran unsuccessfully for governor of Ohio. In 1864 he returned to Ohio. Although he campaigned against Lincoln in the presidential election, he was not molested.
Behind Confederate Lines
The South also revised its strategy after Bull Run. President Davis relied primarily on a strong defense to wear down the Union's will to fight. Although the Confederacy did not develop a two-party system, there was plenty of internal political strife. Davis made enemies easily, and the southern devotion to states' rights and individual liberty (for white men) caused endless trouble.
Finance was the Confederacy's most vexing problem. The blockade made it impossible to raise much money through tariffs. The Confederate Congress passed an income tax together with many excise taxes, but these taxes raised only 2 percent of the government's needs. The most effective levy was a tax-in-kind, amounting to one-tenth of each farmer's production. The South borrowed as much as it could ($712 million), even mortgaging cotton undeliverable because of the blockade in order to gain European credits. But it relied mainly on printing paper currency; over $1.5 billion poured from the presses during the war. When the military fortunes of the Confederacy began to decline, the bottom fell out, and by early 1865 a Confederate dollar was worth less than two cents in gold.
Because of the shortage of manufacturing facilities, the task of outfitting the army strained southern resources to the limit. Large supplies of small arms (some 600,000 weapons during the entire war) came from Europe, but as the blockade became more effective, it was increasingly difficult to obtain European goods.
The Confederates did manage to build a number of munitions plants, and they captured huge amounts of northern arms. No battle was lost because of a lack of guns or other military equipment, though shortages of shoes and uniforms handicapped the Confederate forces on some occasions.
Foreign policy loomed large in Confederate thinking, for the "cotton is king" theory presupposed that the Europeans would break any northern blockade to get cotton for their textile mills. Southern expectations were not realized, however. The attitude of Great Britain was decisive. The cutting off of cotton did not hit the British as hard as the South had hoped, and British crop failures necessitated the importation of large amounts of northern wheat. The fact that the mass of ordinary people in Great Britain favored the North was also important in determining British policy.
Nevertheless, the British government gave serious thought to recognizing the Confederacy. But the deteriorating military situation determined British policy; once the North obtained a clear superiority on the battlefield, the possibility of British intervention vanished.
War in the West: Shiloh
Northern superiority was achieved slowly and at enormous cost. After Bull Run, no battles were fought until early 1862. Then, while McClellan continued his deliberate preparations to attack Richmond, important fighting occurred far to the west. In March 1862, a Texas army advancing beyond Santa Fe clashed with a Union force in the Battle of Glorieta Pass. The battle was indecisive, but a Union unit destroyed the Confederates' supply train. They then retreated to the Rio Grande, ending the Confederate threat to the Far West.
Meanwhile, far larger Union forces led by a shabby, cigar-smoking West Pointer named Ulysses S. Grant invaded Tennessee from a base at Cairo, Illinois. Grant captured Forts Henry and Donelson, strong points on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. Next he marched toward Corinth, Mississippi, an important railroad junction.
To check Grant's invasion, the Confederates massed 40,000 men under Albert Sidney Johnston. On April 6 Johnston struck suddenly at Shiloh, 20 miles north of Corinth. Grant's men stood their ground, and in the course of the second day of battle the tide turned. The Confederates fell back toward Corinth, exhausted and demoralized.
Grant, shaken by the unexpected attack and appalled by his losses, allowed the enemy to escape. For this blunder he was relieved of his command and his battle tested army was broken up, its strength dissipated in a series of uncoordinated campaigns. A great opportunity had been lost.
Shiloh had other results. The staggering casualties shook the confidence of both belligerents. More Americans fell there in two days than in all the battles of the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War combined. Union losses exceeded 13,000 out of 63,000 engaged; the Confederates lost 10,699, including General Johnston.
More accurate guns and more powerful artillery were responsible for the carnage. The generals began to reconsider their tactics and to experiment with field fortifications and other defensive measures. And the people-North and South stopped thinking of the war as a romantic test of courage and military guile.
McClellan: The Reluctant Warrior
In Virginia, General McClellan was finally moving against Richmond. Instead of trying to advance across the difficult terrain of northern Virginia, he transported his army by water to the tip of the peninsula formed by the York and James rivers in order to attack Richmond from the southeast.
McClellan's plan alarmed many congressmen because it seemed to leave Washington relatively unprotected. But it simplified the task of supplying the army in hostile country. However, McClellan now displayed the ' e weaknesses that eventually ruined his career. His problems were intellectual and psychological. He saw the Civil War not as a mighty struggle over fundamental beliefs but as a complex game (like chess with its castles and knights) that gentlemanly commanders played at a leisurely pace and for limited stakes. He believed it more important to capture Richmond than to destroy the army protecting it. The idea of crushing the South seemed to him wrong headed and uncivilized.
Beyond this, McClellan was temperamentally unsuited for a position of so much responsibility. Beneath the swagger and the charm he was a profoundly insecure man. He talked like Napoleon, but he did not like to fight. He knew how to get ready, but he was never ready in his own mind.
Proceeding deliberately, he floated an army of 112,000 men down the Potomac and by May 14 had established a base less than 25 miles from Richmond. A swift thrust might have ended the war quickly, but McClellan delayed, despite the fact that he had 80,000 men in striking position and large reserves. As he advanced slowly, the Confederates caught part of his force separated from the rest by the Chickahominy River and attacked it. The Battle of Seven Pines was indecisive, yet resulted in more than 10,000 casualties.
At Seven Pines the Confederate commander, General Joseph E. Johnston, was severely wounded; leadership of the Army of Northern Virginia then fell to Robert E. Lee. Although a most reluctant supporter of secession, Lee was a superb soldier. He was McClellan's antithesis: gentle, courtly, and entirely without McClellan's swagger and vainglorious belief that he was a man of destiny. McClellan seemed almost deliberately to avoid understanding his foes, acting as though every southern general was an Alexander. Lee, a master psychologist on the battlefield, cleverly took the measure of each Union general and devised his tactics accordingly. Where McClellan was complex, egotistical, perhaps even unbalanced, Lee was tactful, unassuming, and level headed. Yet on the battlefield Lee's boldness sometimes skirted the edge of foolhardiness.
To relieve the pressure on Richmond, Lee sent General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson on a diversionary raid in the Shenandoah Valley, west of Richmond and Washington. In response, Lincoln dispatched 20,000 reserves to the Shenandoah to check Jackson-to the dismay of McClellan, who wanted the troops to attack Richmond from the north. But after Seven Pines, Lee ordered Jackson back to Richmond. While Union armies streamed toward the valley, Jackson slipped stealthily between them.
Jackson's troops gave Lee a numerical advantage. On June 26 he launched a massive surprise attack. For seven days the battle raged. McClellan, who excelled in defense, fell back, his lines intact, exacting a fearful toll. Under difficult conditions he transferred his troops to a new base on the James River. Again the losses were terrible: northern casualties totaled 15,800, those of the South nearly 20,000.
Lee Counterattacks: Antietam
McClellan was still within striking distance of Richmond, in an impregnable position with secure supply lines and 86,000 soldiers ready to resume the battle. Yet Lincoln, exasperated with McClellan for having surrendered the initiative, reduced his authority by placing him under General Henry W. Halleck, who ordered him to move his army to the Potomac, near Washington. A great opportunity had been squandered. Had the Union army made any aggressive thrust, Lee would not have dared to move from the defenses of Richmond. When it withdrew, Lee, with typical decisiveness and daring, marched north. Late in August, after some complex maneuvering, the Confederates drove confused troops commanded by General John Pope from the field. It was the same ground, Bull Run, where the first major engagement of the war had been fought.
Thirteen months had passed since the first failure at Bull Run, and despite the expenditure of thousands of lives and millions of dollars the Union army stood as far from Richmond as ever. Dismayed by Pope's incompetence, Lincoln turned in desperation back to McClellan, who regrouped the shaken army.
Despite his successful defense of Richmond, Lee believed that unless some dramatic blow was delivered on northern soil to persuade the people of the United States that military victory was impossible, the South would be crushed in the long run by the weight of superior resources. He therefore marched rapidly northwestward around the defenses of Washington.
Acting with his usual boldness, Lee divided his army of 60,000 into a number of units. One, under Stonewall Jackson, descended upon weakly defended Harper's Ferry, capturing more than 11,000 prisoners. Another pressed as far north as Hagerstown, Maryland, nearly to the Pennsylvania line. McClellan pursued with his usual deliberation until a captured dispatch revealed to him Lee's dispositions. Then he moved a bit more swiftly, forcing Lee to stand and fight on September 17, 1862, at Sharpsburg, Maryland, between the Potomac and Antietam Creek.
On a field that offered Lee no room to maneuver, 70,000 Union soldiers clashed with 40,000 Confederates. When darkness fell, more than 22,000 lay dead or wounded on the bloody field. Although casualties were evenly divided and the Confederate lines intact, Lee's position was perilous. McClellan, however, did nothing. For an entire day, while Lee scanned the field in futile search of some weakness in the Union lines, he held his fire. That night the Confederates slipped back across the Potomac into Virginia.
The invasion had failed, Lee's army had been badly mauled, the gravest threat to the Union in the war had been checked. But McClellan had let victory slip through his fingers. Soon Lee was back behind the defenses of Richmond, rebuilding his army. Once again, this time finally, Lincoln dismissed McClellan from his command.
The Emancipation Proclamation
Antietam gave Lincoln the excuse he needed to take a step that changed the character of the war. As we have seen, when the fighting started, only a few radicals wanted to free the slaves by force. However, pressures to act against the South's "peculiar institution" mounted steadily. Slavery had divided the nation; now it was driving northerners to war within themselves. Love of country led them to fight to save the Union, but fighting roused hatreds and caused many to desire to smash the enemy. Sacrifice, pain, and grief made abolitionists of many who had no love for blacks-they sought to free the slave only to injure the master. To make abolition an object of the war might encourage the slaves to revolt. Lincoln disclaimed this objective; nevertheless the possibility existed.
Lincoln would have preferred to see slavery done away with by state law, with compensation for slave owners and federal aid for all freed slaves willing to leave the United States. He tried repeatedly to persuade the loyal slave states to adopt this policy, but without success. He moved cautiously. By the summer of 1862 he was convinced that for military reasons and to win the support of liberal opinion in Europe, the government should make abolition a war aim. He delayed temporarily, fearing that a statement in the face of military reverses would be taken as a sign of weakness. The "victory" at Antietam gave him his opportunity, and on September 22 he made public the Emancipation Proclamation. After January 1, 1863, it said, all slaves in areas in rebellion against the United States "shall be then, thence forward, and forever free."
No single slave was freed directly by Lincoln's announcement, which did not apply to the border states or to those sections of the Confederacy, like New Orleans and Norfolk, Virginia, already controlled by federal troops. But henceforth every Union victory would speed the destruction of slavery.
Some of the president's advisers thought the proclamation inexpedient and others considered it illegal. Lincoln justified it as a way to weaken the enemy. Southerners considered the proclamation an incitement to slave rebellion-an "infamous attempt to incite flight, murder, and rapine ... and convert the quiet, ignorant, dependent black son of toil into a savage." Most antislavery groups approved but thought it did not go far enough. Foreign opinion was mixed: Liberals tended to applaud, conservatives to react with alarm or contempt.
As Lincoln anticipated, the proclamation had a subtle but continuing impact in America. Its immediate effect was to aggravate racial prejudices. Millions of white Americans disapproved of slavery yet abhorred the idea of equality for African Americans. In 1857 the people of Iowa rejected ***** suffrage by a vote of 49,000 to 8,000. To some people, emancipation threatened an invasion of the North by blacks who would compete with them for jobs, drive down wages, commit crimes, spread diseases, and-eventually-destroy the "purity" of the white race.
The Democrats tried to make political capital of these fears and prejudices. So strong was the antiblack feeling that most of the Republican politicians who defended emancipation did so with racist arguments. Far from encouraging southern blacks to move north, they claimed, the ending of slavery would lead to a mass migration of northern blacks to the South. When the Emancipation Proclamation began actually to free slaves, the government pursued a policy of "containment," that is, of keeping the freedmen in the South. Panicky fears of an inundation of blacks then subsided.
The Draft Riots
In March 1863, volunteering having fallen off, Congress passed a conscription act drafting men between 20 and 45. However, the law allowed draftees to hire substitutes or even to obtain exemptions for $300, which was obviously unfair to the poor. In addition, conscription represented an enormous expansion of governmental authority over the citizenry, and it was bitterly resented.
Widespread rioting broke out, the most serious occurring in New York City in July 1863. Most of the New York rioters were poor Irish laborers who resented both the local blacks who competed with them for work and the middle-class whites who seemed sympathetic to the blacks. Public buildings, shops, and private residences were put to the torch. Blacks were hunted down and killed without reason. They in turn fought back with equal ferocity. By the time order was restored more than a hundred people had lost their lives.
Northern hostility to emancipation rose from fear of change more than from hatred of African Americans. Liberal disavowals of any intention to treat blacks as equals were in large measure designed to quiet this fear. To a degree the racial backlash reflected the public's awareness that a change, frightening but irreversible, had occurred.
Most white northerners did not surrender their comforting belief in black inferiority, and Lincoln was no exception. Yet Lincoln was evolving. He talked about deporting ex-slaves to the tropics, but he did not send any there. And he began to receive black leaders in the White House and to allow black groups to hold meetings on the grounds.
The Emancipated People
To blacks, both slave and free, the Emancipation Proclamation served as a beacon. Even if it failed immediately to liberate one slave or to lift the burdens imposed by white prejudice from one black back, it stood as a promise of future improvement. "I took the proclamation for a little more than it purported," Frederick Douglass recalled in his autobiography.
After January 1, 1863, whenever the "Army of Freedom" approached, slaves laid down their plows and hoes and flocked to the Union lines. "We-all knows about it," one black confided to a northern clergyman. "Only we darsen't let on. We pretends not to know." Such behavior came as a shock to slave owners. "[The slaves] who loved us best-as we thought-were the first to leave us," one planter mourned.
A revolutionary shift occurred in white thinking about using black men as soldiers. Although they had fought in the Revolution and in the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812, a law of 1792 barred blacks from the army. During the early stages of the rebellion, despite the eagerness of thousands of free African Americans to enlist, the prohibition remained in force. By 1862, however, the need for manpower was creating pressure for change. After the Emancipation Proclamation specifically authorized the enlistment of blacks, the governor of Massachusetts organized a black regiment, the famous Massachusetts 54th. Swiftly thereafter, other states began to recruit black soldiers, and by the end of the war one soldier in eight in the Union army was black. This changed the war from a struggle to save the Union to a kind of revolution. "Let the black man ... get an eagle on his button and a musket on his shoulder," wrote Frederick Douglass, "and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has won the right to citizenship."
Black soldiers were segregated and commanded by white officers. But they soon proved themselves in battle; of the 180,000 who served in the Union army, 37,000 were killed, a rate of loss about 40 percent higher than that among white troops. Their bravery-21 were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor-convinced thousands of northern white soldiers that blacks were not by nature childish or cowardly.
Southerners were another matter. Black soldiers were cruelly mistreated in Confederate prison camps. Still worse, many black captives were killed on the spot. Lincoln was tempted to order reprisals, but he and his advisers realized that this would have been both morally wrong (two wrongs never make a right) and likely to lead to still more atrocities. "Blood can not restore blood," Lincoln said in his usual direct way.
Antietam to Gettysburg
To replace McClellan, Lincoln chose General Ambrose E. Burnside, known to history for his magnificent side-whiskers, ever after called sideburns. Unlike McClellan, Burnside was aggressive-too aggressive. He planned to ford the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg. Lee concentrated his army in impregnable positions behind the town. Burnside should have called off the attack when he saw Lee's advantage; instead he he sent his troops across the river over pontoon bridges and occupied Fredericksburg. Then, in wave after wave, they charged the Confederate defense line while Lee's artillery riddled them from nearby Marye's Heights. They were stopped with frightful losses.
On December 14, the day following this futile assault, Burnside, tears streaming down his cheeks, ordered the evacuation of Fredericksburg. Shortly thereafter General Joseph Hooker replaced him.
Hooker proved no better than his predecessor, but his failings were more like McClellan's than Burnside's. By the spring of 1863 he had 125,000 men ready for action. Late in April he forded the Rappahannock and concentrated at Chancellorsville, about 10 miles west of Fredericksburg. His army outnumbered the Confederates by more than two to one; he should have forced a battle at once. Instead he delayed, and when he did, Lee sent Stonewall Jackson's corps (28,000 men) across tangled countryside to a position directly athwart Hooker's unsuspecting flank. At 6 P.m. on May 2, Jackson attacked.
Completely surprised, the Union army crumbled. If the battle had begun earlier in the day, the Confederates might have won a decisive victory; as it happened, nightfall brought a lull, and the next day the Union troops rallied and held their ground. Heavy fighting continued until May 5, when Hooker retreated in good order behind the Rappahannock.
Chancellorsville cost the Confederates dearly, for their losses, in excess of 12,000, were almost as heavy as the North's and harder to replace. They also lost Stonewall Jackson, struck by the bullet from one of his own men while returning from a reconnaissance. Nevertheless, the Union army had suffered another fearful blow to its morale.
Lee now took the offensive. With 75,000 soldiers he crossed the Potomac again, a larger Union force dogging his right flank. By late June his army was in southern Pennsylvania, 50 miles northwest of Baltimore, within 10 miles of Harrisburg, the capital of the state.
On July I a Confederate division looking for shoes in the town of Gettysburg clashed with two brigades of Union cavalry northwest of the town. Both sides sent out calls for reinforcements. Like iron filings drawn to a magnet, the army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac converged.
The Confederates won control of the town, but the Union army, now commanded by General George G. Meade, took a strong position on Cemetery Ridge, just to the south. Lee's men occupied Seminary Ridge, a parallel position. On this field the fate of the Union was probably decided.
For two days the Confederates attacked Cemetery Ridge. During General George E. Pickett's famous charge, a handful of his men actually carried the Union lines, but reserves drove them back. By nightfall on July 3 the Confederate army was spent and bleeding, the Union lines unbroken. For the first time Lee had been clearly bested on the field of battle.
Lincoln Finds His General: Grant at Vicksburg
On Independence Day, far to the west, Union soldiers won another great victory. When General Halleck was called east in July 1862, Ulysses S. Grant reassumed command of Union troops in the area. Grant was by then one of the most controversial officers in the army. At West Point he had compiled an indifferent record, ranking 21 in a class of 39. During the Mexican War he served well, but when he was later assigned to a lonely post in Oregon, he took to drink and was forced to resign his commission.
The war gave him a second chance. His reputation as a ne'er-do-well and his unmilitary bearing worked against him, as did the heavy casualties suffered by his troops at Shiloh. Yet the fact that he knew how to manage a large army and win battles did not escape Lincoln.
Grant's major aim was to capture Vicksburg, a city of tremendous strategic importance. Vicksburg sits on a high bluff overlooking a sharp bend in the Mississippi River. So long as it remained in southern hands, the trans-Mississippi region could send men and supplies to the rest of the Confederacy.
When Vicksburg proved unapproachable from either west or north, Grant crossed to the west bank of the Mississippi and slipped quickly southward. Recrossing the river below Vicksburg, he abandoned his supply lines and in a series of engagements his troops captured Jackson, Mississippi, cutting off the army of General John C. Pemberton, defending Vicksburg from other Confederate units. Turning next on Pemberton, Grant won two decisive battles and drove him inside the Vicksburg fortifications. By mid-May the city was under siege. Grant applied relentless pressure, and on July 4 Pemberton surrendered. With Vicksburg in Union hands, federal gunboats could range the entire length of the Mississippi. Texas and Arkansas were isolated and for all practical purposes lost to the Confederacy.
Grant's victory had another result: Lincoln gave him command of all federal troops west of the Appalachians. Grant promptly took charge of the fighting in south-central Tennessee. Shifting corps commanders and bringing up fresh units, he won another decisive victory at Chattanooga. This cleared the way for an invasion of Georgia. Suddenly this unkempt, stubby little man, who looked more like a tramp than a general, emerged as the military leader the North had been so desperately seeking. In March 1864 Lincoln summoned him to Washington, named him lieutenant general, and gave him supreme command of the armies of the United States.
Economic and Social Effects, North and South
Though much blood would yet be spilled, by the end of 1863 the Confederacy was on the road to defeat. Northern military pressure, gradually increasing, was eroding the South's most precious resource, manpower. An ever-tightening naval blockade was reducing its economic strength. Shortages developed that, combined with the flood of currency pouring from the presses, led to a drastic inflation. By 1864 an officer's coat cost $2,000 in Confederate money, cigars sold for $ 10 each, butter was $25 a pound, and flour $275 a barrel. Wages rose but not nearly so rapidly. The southern railroad network was gradually wearing out; the major lines maintained operations only by cannibalizing less vital roads. Imported products such as coffee disappeared; even salt became scarce. Efforts to increase manufacturing were only moderately successful because of the shortage of labor, capital, and technical knowledge.
In the North, after a brief depression in 1861 caused by the uncertainties of the situation and the loss of southern business, the economy flourished. Government purchases greatly stimulated certain lines of manufacturing; the railroads operated at close to capacity and with increasing efficiency; the farm machinery business boomed because so many farmers left their fields to serve in the army; a series of bad harvests in Europe boosted agricultural prices.
Congress passed a number of economic measures long desired but held up in the past by southern opposition: (1) the Homestead Act (1862) gave 160 acres to any settler who would farm the land for five years; (2) the Morrill Land Grant Act of the same year provided the states with land at the rate of 30,000 acres for each member of Congress to support state agricultural colleges; (3) various tariff acts raised the duties on manufactured goods to an average rate of 47 percent in order to protect domestic manufacturers from foreign competition; (4) the Pacific Railway Act (1862) authorized subsidies in land and money for the construction of a transcontinental railroad; and (5) the National Banking Act of 1863 gave the country, at last, a uniform currency. Under this last act, banks could obtain federal charters by investing at least one-third of their capital in United States bonds. They might then issue currency up to 90 percent of the value of those bonds.
All these laws stimulated the economy and added to public confidence. Whether the overall economic effect of the Civil War on the Union was beneficial is less clear.Although the economy expanded, it did so more slowly during - the 1860s than in the decades preceding and following. Prices soared beginning in 1862, averaging about 80 percent over the 1860 level by the end of the war. As in the South, wages did not keep pace. This condition did not make for a healthy economy-nor did the fact that there were chronic shortages of labor in many fields, shortages aggravated by a sharp drop in the number of immigrants entering the country. The war undoubtedly hastened industrialization. It posed problems of organization and planning, both military and civilian, that challenged the talents of creative persons and thus led to a more complex and efficient economy. The mechanization of production, the growth of large corporations, the creation of a better banking system, and the emergence of business leaders attuned to these conditions would surely have occurred in any case, for industrialization was under way long before the South seceded. Nevertheless, the war greatly speeded all these changes.
Civilian participation in the war effort was far greater than in earlier conflicts. In North and South, church leaders took the lead in recruitment drives and in charitable activities supporting the armed forces. They raised the money and coordinated the personnel needed to provide soldiers with Bibles, religious tracts, and other books, along with fruit, coffee, and spare clothing.
Women in Wartime
Many southern women took over the management of farms and small plantations when their menfolk went off to war. Others became volunteer nurses, and some served in the Confederate medical corps. Quite a few southern women worked as clerks in newly organized government departments. Southern "ladyhood" was another casualty of the war. The absence or death of husbands or other male relations changed attitudes toward gender roles. When her husband obeyed a military order to abandon Atlanta to the advancing Union armies, Julia Davidson, about to deliver, denounced the "men of Atlanta" for having "run and left Atlanta" and their homes, Such women learned to fend for themselves. "Necessity," Davidson later wrote her husband, would "make a different woman of me."
On the other side, large numbers of northern women also contributed their share to the war effort. Farm women went out into fields to plant and harvest crops, aided in many instances by new farm machinery. Many others took jobs in textile factories; in establishments making shoes, uniforms, and other supplies for the army; and in government agencies. Besides working in factories and shops and on farms, northern women, again like their southern counterparts, aided the war effort more directly. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American woman doctor of medicine, helped set up what became the United States Sanitary Commission, an organization of women dedicated to improving sanitary conditions at army camps, supplying hospitals with volunteer nurses, and raising money for medical supplies. Additionally, over 3,000 northern women served as army nurses during the conflict. The "proper sphere" of American women was expanding, another illustration of the modernizing effect of the war.
Grant in the Wilderness
Grant's strategy as supreme commander was simple and ruthless. He would attack Lee and try to capture Richmond. General William Tecumseh Sherman would drive from Chattanooga toward Atlanta, Georgia. Like a lobster's claw, the two armies could then close to crush all resistance. Early in May 1864 Grant and Sherman commenced operations, each with more than 100,000 men.
Grant marched the Army of the Potomac into the tangled wilderness south of the Rappahannock, where Hooker had been routed. a year earlier. Lee, having only 60,000 men, forced the battle in the roughest possible country, where Grant found it difficult to maneuver his larger force. For two days (May 5-6) the Battle of the Wilderness raged. When it was over, the North had sustained 18,000 casualties, far more than the Confederates.
But unlike his predecessors, Grant did not fall back after being checked. Instead he shifted his troops to the southeast, attempting to outflank the Confederates. Lee rushed his divisions southeastward and disposed them behind hastily thrown up earthworks around Spotsylvania Court House. Grant attacked. After five more days, which cost the Union army another 12,000 men, the Confederate lines were still intact. Grant remained undaunted. He was certain that the war could be won only by grinding the South down beneath the weight of numbers. He could replace his losses, Lee could not. When critics complained of the cost, he replied doggedly that he intended to fight on in the same manner if it took all summer. Once more he pressed southeastward in an effort to outflank the enemy. At Cold Harbor, nine miles from Richmond, he found the Confederates once more in strong defenses. At dawn on June 3 he attacked and was thrown back with frightful losses.
Sixty thousand casualties in less than a month! The news sent a wave of dismay through the North. There were demands that "Butcher" Grant be removed from command. Lincoln, however, stood firm. Although the price was high, Grant was gaining his objective. At Cold Harbor, Lee had not a single regiment in general reserve, whereas Grant's army was larger than at the start of the offensive. When Grant next swung round his flank, striking toward Petersburg, Lee had to rush his troops to that city to hold him.
Grant put Petersburg under siege. Soon both armies had constructed breastworks and trenches running for miles in a great arc south of Petersburg. Methodically the Union forces extended their lines, seeking to weaken the Confederates and cut the rail connections supplying Lee's troops and the city of Richmond. By late June, Lee was pinned to earth. Moving again would mean abandoning Richmond tantamount, in southern eyes, to surrender.
Sherman in Georgia
The summer of 1864 saw the North submerged in pessimism. The Army of the Potomac held Lee at bay but appeared powerless to defeat him. In Georgia, General Sherman inched forward against the wily Joseph E. Johnston, but when he tried a direct assault at Kennesaw Mountain on June 27, he was thrown back with heavy casualties. Huge losses and the absence of decisive victory were taxing the northern will to continue the fight.
In June Lincoln had been renominated on a National Union ticket, with the staunch Tennessee Unionist Andrew Johnson, a former Democrat, as his running mate. He was under attack not only from the Democrats, who nominated George B. McClellan and came out for a policy that might almost be characterized as peace at any price, but from the Radical Republicans, many of whom had wished to dump him in favor of Secretary of the Treasury Chase.
Then, almost overnight, the atmosphere changed. On September 2 General Sherman's army fought its way into Atlanta. When the Confederates countered with an offensive northward toward Tennessee, Sherman did not follow. Instead he abandoned his communications with Chattanooga and marched unopposed through Georgia, "from Atlanta to the sea."
Sherman, like Grant, was a West Pointer who resigned his commission only to fare poorly in civilian occupations. Back in the army in 1861, he suffered a brief nervous breakdown. After recovering he fought under Grant at Shiloh and the two became close friends. "He stood by me when I was crazy," Sherman later recalled, "and I stood by him when he was drunk."
Far more completely than most military men of his generation, Sherman believed in total war-in appropriating or destroying everything that might help the enemy continue the fight. "We have devoured the land," he wrote his wife. "All the people retire before us and desolation is behind."
Another object of Sherman's march was psychological. "If the North can march an army right through the South," Sherman told General Grant, southerners will take it "as proof positive that the North can prevail." This was certainly true of Georgia's blacks who flocked to the invaders by the thousands, cheering as the soldiers put their former masters' homes to the torch.
Sherman's victories staggered the Confederacy and the anti-Lincoln forces in the North. In November the president was easily reelected, 212 electoral votes to 21. The country was determined to carry on the struggle.
At last the South's will to resist began to crack. Sherman entered Savannah on December 22, having denuded a strip of Georgia 60 miles wide. Early in January 1865 he marched northward. In February his troops captured Columbia, South Carolina. Soon thereafter they were in North Carolina, advancing relentlessly. In Virginia Grant's vise grew daily tighter, the Confederate lines thinner and more ragged.
To Appomattox Court House
On March 4 Lincoln took the presidential oath and delivered his second inaugural address. With victory sure, he spoke for tolerance, mercy, and reconstruction. "Let us judge not," he said after stating again his personal dislike of slavery, "that we be not judged." He urged all Americans to turn without malice to the task of mending the damage and to make a just and lasting peace between the sections.
Now the Confederate troops around Petersburg could no longer withstand the federal pressure. Desperately Lee tried to pull his forces back to the Richmond and Danville Railroad, but the swift wings of Grant's army enveloped him. Richmond fell on April 3. With fewer than 30,000 men to oppose Grant's 115,000, Lee recognized the futility of further resistance. On April 9 he and Grant met by prearrangement at Appomattox Court House.
It was a scene at once pathetic and inspiring. Lee was noble in defeat; Grant, despite his rough-hewn exterior, sensitive and magnanimous in victory. Acting on Lincoln's instructions, with which he was in full accord, Grant outlined his terms. All that would be required was that the Confederate soldiers lay down their arms. They could return to their homes in peace. When Lee hinted that his men would profit greatly if allowed to retain possession of their horses, Grant agreed to let them do so.
Winners, Losers, and the Future
And so the war ended. It cost the nation more than 600,000 lives, nearly as many as in all other American wars combined. The story of one of the lost thousands must stand for all-Union and Confederate. Jones Budbury, a 19-year-old Pennsylvania textile worker, enlisted at once when the war broke out. He saw action at Bull Run, in McClellans's Peninsula campaign, at Second Bull Run, at Chancellorsville, and at Gettysburg. A few months after Gettysburg he was wounded in the foot and spent some time in an army hospital. By the spring of 1864 he was a first sergeant, and his hair had turned gray.
In June he was captured and sent to Andersonville military prison, but he fell ill and the Confederates released him. In March 1865 he was back with his regiment. On April 6, three days before Lee's surrender, Jones Budbury was killed while pursuing Confederate units near Sailor's Creek, Virginia.
The war also caused enormous property losses, especially in the Confederacy. All the human and material destruction explains the hatred and resentment that the war implanted in millions of hearts.
What had been obtained at this price? Slavery was dead. Paradoxically, although the war had been fought to save the Union, after 1865 the United States was less a union of separate states than a nation. Secession had become inconceivable. In a strictly political sense, as Lincoln had predicted from the start, the northern victory heartened friends of republican government and democracy throughout the world. A better integrated society and a more technically advanced and productive economic system also resulted from the war.
The Americans of 1865 estimated the balance between cost and profit according to their individual fortunes and prejudices. Only the wisest realized that no final accounting could be made until the people had decided what to do with the fruits of victory. That the physical damage would be repaired no one could reasonably doubt; that even the loss of human resources would be restored in short order was equally apparent. But would the nation make good use of the opportunities the war had made available? What would the ex-slaves do with freedom? How would whites, northern and southern, react to emancipation? To what end would the new technology and social efficiency be directed? Would the people be able to forget the recent past and fulfill the hopes for which so many brave soldiers had given, as Lincoln put it at Gettysburg, their "last full measure of devotion"?