America Aflame (41 page)

Yet the manner of dying was important, particularly for the living. This was Victorian America, and sentiment and form counted a great deal. If the dying soldier in his pain and delirium could not think of a grand cause, of the angels who awaited his ascension, or of love of family, others could. Some soldiers composed farewell letters before the fact and requested comrades to forward them to loved ones in the event of death. William McKinley, a future president, wrote the following two days before he saw his first action in the war: “This record I want left behind, that I not only fell as a soldier for my Country, but also a Soldier of Jesus.” The fear of an anonymous death was almost as great as the fear of battle, and sometimes greater.
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These letters told of deathbed conversions and of heartfelt expressions of love for God and country, sentiments that would have surprised the deceased's friends at home, but that consoled his family in their grief that, at last, he was saved. The wounded who could speak beseeched their comrades, “Won't you write to my folks that I died a soldier?” Parents appreciated these reassurances about their sons, that the war had not debased them. The parents of a dead Union soldier expressed their appreciation to the nurse who wrote about their son's last moments: “You wrote you thought he was praising God. It was the greatest comfort to us of anything.” It was kind and very necessary for that nurse to pick out a prayer from her patient's incoherence. Not to die in vain, to die nobly and honorably, with words of faith and family on one's lips did not remove grief, but made it more bearable.
42

It often fell to comrades to write a letter to the family and enclose a cherished possession of the deceased and perhaps a lock of his hair, always to reassure the loved ones that their son, husband, and brother died a meaningful death. Marion Hill Fitzpatrick, a Georgian in the Army of Northern Virginia, fell at Petersburg toward the end of the war. His comrade wrote the following to his mother: “I am happy to say he died happy and I certainly think that he is now better off. A few minutes before he breathed his last he sang Jesus can make a dying bed as soft as downy pillows are & he said he would of liked to of seen you before he died. He said that the Lord's will be done and for you to meet him in heaven.” It was a sentiment many southern evangelical women would have understood, especially the lines referring to Jesus, which came from an 1844 Sacred Harp hymnal.
43

Sometimes, words were all a family received. In an era when formal burial services were essential passages to heaven, their absence rode especially hard. Fortunate families received the remains of their soldiers. Most did not. More than half of the Union war dead, and a considerably larger percentage of Confederate casualties, were not even identified, let alone given proper burial in the soil of their birth. Battles reduced remains to ashes or mud, forever obliterating any remnant of a human being. A shocked Confederate soldier on his way to the battlefield at Shiloh on the second day of fighting reported, “The first dead soldier we saw had fallen in the road; our artillery had crushed and mangled his limbs, and ground him into the mire. He lay a bloody, loathsome mass, the scraps of his blue uniform furnishing the only distinguishable evidence that a hero there had died.”
44

Burials in the South occurred quickly, or as quickly as possible, and hopefully before the stench permeated the landscape for miles and before bloated bodies, human and animal, burst, and animals carried away or ate remains. Common graves and the absence of a formal religious service reflected the hastiness with which armies worked to bury the dead. Early in the war, Richmond staged elaborate funerals for the Confederate dead. The mounting death toll soon made those rituals impractical. There were 3,600 casualties at Bull Run in July 1861, 20,000 at Shiloh. And more wasteful battles were yet to come. Not to have the physical remains, the lock of hair, the swatch of cloth, the last look before the clods of dirt fell on the coffin, deepened the loss. Abraham Lincoln exhumed the coffin of his son Willie twice to gaze upon his face; no one thought that was unusual. Soldiers may have felt estranged from civilian life from time to time, but both soldier and civilian shared the bond of death.

Proper burial of the battlefield dead became increasingly difficult, especially once Grant initiated his relentless spring 1864 offensive in Virginia. The burial party here is laying to rest the remains of federal soldiers—and “remains” is the operative word—at Cold Harbor in April 1865. The battle occurred ten months earlier. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

The randomness of it all. A Confederate soldier at Fredericksburg in December 1862, with shot coming thick and heavy, made ready to discard his blanket to move more quickly; at the last moment, he felt the winter chill and rolled the blanket and tied it around his shoulder at the precise instant a Yankee bullet hurtled toward his neck only to be buried harmlessly in the cloth. Or another seemingly lucky young man, a bullet grazing his arm, a superficial wound; only now he lies in a home, a makeshift hospital and morgue in the Tennessee countryside, with his arm crimson, swollen, and blistered, swathed in filthy bandages and emitting a stench so foul, no one can bear to tend him. He will lose the arm certainly, and his life probably.
45

Medical knowledge was an oxymoron. A visit to a field hospital confirmed it. Sam Watkins, the young Tennessee private in Albert Sidney Johnston's army, decided to see a wounded friend near his camp. The field hospital was not difficult to find; just follow the penetrating odor caused by gangrene and sepsis, conditions that were rampant. And much more preventable had the overworked doctors and the caring nurses known what general practice would know in another decade or two. The evidence of this ignorance lay in the rear of the building in the form of rotting arms and legs taken from these young men to save their lives. Amputation was the first course of treatment. Watkins stumbled on his friend James Galbreath, who had received a severe wound several days earlier yet was still alive. Watkins gave the wounded soldier some water and promised to write to his family. He asked his comrade how he felt, and Galbreath pulled down his cover. “The lower part of his body was hanging to the upper part by a shred, and all of his entrails were lying on the cot with him, the bile and other excrements exuding from them, and they full of maggots.” Watkins pulled the blanket back up. “I then kissed him on his lips and forehead, and left.”
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The young men could not help but wonder when their turn would come, and how it would be for them. A New Yorker on the way to his first engagement came across a wounded Confederate soldier, lying by the road “with a sabre cut in the side of his head four inches long, and his brains were running out on to his coat. O! How sick I felt.… I thought to myself, if I got sick at the sight of one dead man what would I do on a battle field.” Another New York recruit, coming up to replace a decimated unit at Fredericksburg in December 1862, hard-pressed to avoid stepping on mangled blue-clad corpses, saw “their ghastly gaping death wounds” and wondered if they predicted “what might be in store for us.”
47

Dead federal soldier, Petersburg, April 1865. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Dead Confederate soldier, Petersburg, April 1865. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

A federal soldier disemboweled during the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1863. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Another soldier came upon a small group of severely wounded men moving on their hands and knees and led by a fellow whose face lacked a lower jaw, now replaced by weirdly angled shards of bone and flesh. The men crawled to a creek to drink its water, but lacked the strength to back away or keep their heads up. They drowned.
48

Sometimes a young soldier envied the wounded with their red badges of courage; sometimes there was thankfulness that your wound was not as bad as another fellow's. Sam Watkins, shot in the arm, retreated to a field hospital. Along the road he encountered a comrade whose left arm was completely gone. Looking closer, he exclaimed “‘Great God!' for I could see his heart throb, and the respiration of his lungs.” The man soon collapsed and died.
49

The longer you lived, the worse you felt. Death sundered the bond you had formed with the comrade who marched with you, shared your hardtack, sang songs, and talked about home and love and family. And suddenly, he was gone, just as the one before and perhaps the one after. The only permanency was the killing. You went through this because you believed you fought for a finer thing, an idea, a faith, a loved one. You wondered at times whether these were enough, whether anything would be enough to cover the broken hearts, the shattered bodies, and the lives ended.

In the meantime, the war would go on for three more bloody years. For Abraham Lincoln, God had obviously willed the war to continue, as no side appeared to gain a conspicuous advantage. Although it was not possible yet to discern God's plan for America, He must have a purpose in perpetuating the conflict. While waiting for God to decide, Union soldiers transformed Shiloh Chapel into a field hospital and ripped up the wooden floorboards to make coffins for their dead.

CHAPTER 11

BORN IN A DAY

FANNY BURDOCK RECALLED THE TIME
she saw him. “We been picking in the field when my brother he point to the road then we seen Marse Abe coming all dusty and on foot.” President Lincoln himself was making his way down that hot Georgia road. Burdock and her brother ran to the fence where a water bucket rested. “We give him nice cool water from the dipper. Then he nodded and set off.”
1

Abraham Lincoln never set foot in Georgia, but so powerful and personal were the memories of him among former slaves that his presence in their lives assumed a literal meaning. It is fashionable now among some historians to downplay Lincoln's role as the “Great Emancipator.” The main story line is that slaves stole their own freedom, and the Emancipation Proclamation, effective on January 1, 1863, did not free any slave in practical terms. Both assertions are generally correct. Tens of thousands of slaves flooded into Union camps. Without a Union victory and a corresponding federal legal sanction, their liberation would have been short-lived. Lincoln's proclamation placed the power of the U.S. Constitution (and by war's end it became part of that document in the form of the Thirteenth Amendment) behind the slaves' exodus and provided cover for thousands more who would leave bondage in the remaining two years of the war. Emancipation also hastened the Confederacy's defeat by removing a large portion of its work force and by placing 150,000 freedmen under Union arms. Even if the document freed few slaves in actuality, it stands as an affirmation of the objectives for which Union forces fought to save their country. It brought the full faith of the U.S. government to secure the right of all Americans to be free.

Most northerners agreed that the war would somehow alter the institution of slavery, perhaps even end it. Few, however, believed that the federal government should intervene to formally abolish slavery. Concerns about racial strife, constitutional issues, the fear of thousands of freed blacks streaming north, and just plain racism accounted for these views. Lincoln balanced these views with pressure from more radical members of his own party. He hoped for the abolition of slavery, called it immoral, but believed he lacked the constitutional authority to abolish it where it existed. Saving the Union remained paramount in Lincoln's thinking; that was the best chance for slavery's demise.

The vast majority of federal soldiers entered the war assuming they were fighting to preserve the Union of their fathers and the freedoms—personal and national—it stood for. Few looked upon the conflict as a war against slavery. Abolitionists remained a small minority in the North. The sentiment toward slavery among the Union soldiers began to change once they ventured south. They witnessed slaves stealing their own freedom, streaming into Union lines, offering to work for their keep. The Federals benefited from “black dispatches”—news of Confederate troop strength and movements delivered by fugitive slaves. As soon as the war began, slaves knew “the Union was ‘IT', and we were all ‘Yankees,'” one recalled. One slave in northern Virginia had a wife who washed and cooked for a group of Robert E. Lee's officers. She signaled the direction of Confederate troop movements by moving colored garments up and down a clothesline, a color for each corps commander.
2

Robert Smalls, an escaped slave, pirated the Confederate gunboat
Planter
out of Charleston Harbor at three in the morning in June 1862, with a crew of fellow freedmen and their wives and children. According to Union military authorities, the
Planter
“was the most valuable war vessel the Confederates had at Charleston.” An incoming tide slowed their progress, and daybreak found them beneath Rebel guns at Fort Sumter. Smalls, a veteran pilot, knew the signal for safe passage and slipped out of the harbor unmolested. Once outside of the range of Confederate guns, he hoisted a white flag and steamed for the federal blockade ship the
Augusta
.
3

Union soldiers also saw how much slaves aided the Confederate cause, repairing railroads, digging trenches, ferrying supplies, and working the plantations to feed the armies and enable white men to go off and fight. In October 1861, a Wisconsin soldier reported to a newspaper in his state, “The rebellion is abolitionizing the whole army.” Now that they had seen slavery, “men of all parties seem unanimous in the belief that to permanently establish the Union, is to first wipe [out] the institution” of slavery.
4

This rising sentiment against slavery did not imply a more egalitarian attitude toward African Americans. As one Union soldier put it, “I have a good degree of sympathy for the
slave
, but I like the
Negro
the farther off the better.” These were military, not moral, calculations, though some soldiers saw the contradiction of fighting in the name of freedom while four million human beings remained in bondage.
5

Lincoln's thinking moved with the troops, though privately. During the early months of the war, he worked to keep the border states within the Union. Any step to legalize the informal acceptance of runaway slaves into Union lines risked losing the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri. Some Union officers obeyed the letter of the law and returned the runaway slaves to their masters. Others acted differently, such as Frémont in Missouri and General David Hunter on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. Lincoln dismissed Frémont and revoked Hunter's edict. The president stated his position clearly in September 1861: “We didn't go into the war to put down slavery, but to put the flag back, and to act differently at this moment, would, I have no doubt, not only weaken our cause but smack of bad faith.” Of Lincoln's attitude, Radical Republican Benjamin Wade of Ohio sneered that it was all that could be expected “of one, born of ‘poor white trash' and educated in a slave State.”
6

In May 1862 Robert Smalls (1839–1915), a slave, hijacked the Confederate transport boat the
Planter
and sailed it through Charleston Harbor past Rebel batteries to Yankee lines, liberating himself to the bargain. Smalls became a Republican congressman from South Carolina after the war. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Lincoln correctly assessed the precarious nature of the border states and, more important, of northern public opinion on slavery. An editorial in
Harper's
in August 1861 reflected the thinking of many northerners on the slavery issue. The writer believed “that negro slavery will come out of this war unscathed is impossible.” Slavery would fall because of the slaves who would take leave of their bondage at the first opportunity. Given this “natural” disintegration of slavery, “the hour of battle is not the time for the emancipation of four millions of slaves.” Such a proclamation would overlook loyal slaveholders and run the risk of “servile wars and wholesale massacres.” Better that slavery should dissipate gradually with the advance of Union armies.
7

Congress nudged the “natural” process along by passing two confiscation acts in August 1861 and July 1862, which followed the letter of the Constitution by declaring slaves “contraband,” that is, property seized from rebellious citizens. The first act called for the seizure of all property in aid of rebellion—including slaves. The legislators made it clear that only those owners in defiance of the government stood to lose their slaves. The second, bolder act provided for the confiscation of all property of those in rebellion against the United States
and
the emancipation of their slaves.

Lincoln continued to address the slavery issue within his view of constitutional limits and political realities. In November 1861, he drew up a plan for compensated emancipation for a Delaware legislator to introduce in that state. In March 1862, Congress endorsed Lincoln's plan for national compensated emancipation, though it did not provide any funding; and in July 1862, the president drafted a bill for Congress that included funding for national compensated emancipation. No slave state legislature stepped forward to consider compensated emancipation. Lincoln hesitated to act further: “The general government sets up no claim of a right, by federal authority, to interfere with slavery within state limits.” He also feared that uncompensated emancipation would face a severe test in a Supreme Court still presided over by Roger B. Taney.
8

Lincoln took the British example of West Indian emancipation in 1833 as a model. There, emancipation occurred gradually with compensation and the grudging support of the islands' white leadership. Lincoln did not view the compensation offered to planters as a federal giveaway but rather as seed money to ease the transition to a wage-labor system. The states most likely to accede to this plan—Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky, where the institution was weakest—did not express interest in any form of compensated emancipation. Delaware's refusal came as a particular blow. Lincoln correctly surmised the reason. As a resident of the state explained, white citizens “look upon slavery as a curse; [they] also look upon freedom possessed by a negro, except in a very few cases, as a greater curse.” Congress did pass a compensated emancipation bill in the one jurisdiction the federal government controlled—Washington, D.C. Lincoln signed it on April 16, 1862.
9

By the time of the Second Confiscation Act, however, slaves increasingly took the war into their own hands and simply left their owners. Northern religious groups, most famously the American Missionary Association, were already sending teachers and supplies to the temporary villages and camps that sprouted wherever the Union army settled. The fact of freedom preceded the law of emancipation. And saving the Union still trumped the liberation of four million slaves.

General George B. McClellan conceived of himself as the blue-eyed salvation of the Union. His men loved him as they would love no other commander throughout the war, despite a fatal flaw: he did not like to fight. Or maybe because of that flaw. There is no gainsaying his brilliance in taking a broken army after the Bull Run disaster in July 1861 and drilling it into an effective fighting force. As much as his men loved him, McClellan loved them back. With all that love, sending them to battle proved too much.

By March 1862, Union forces appeared poised to deliver a knockout blow to the Confederacy. The Rebels had not won an important engagement since Bull Run in July 1861. The federal armies in the West had racked up impressive victories. It remained for McClellan's 130,000-man army to move in the East against Confederate General Joseph Johnston. Destroy Johnston's army, capture Richmond, end the rebellion.

On April 4, McClellan and his Army of the Potomac began their march up the peninsula formed by the York and James rivers. Their objective was Richmond. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, so confident that the demise of the Confederacy was imminent, closed his department's recruiting offices. Standing between McClellan and Richmond were fifteen thousand Confederate troops protected in part by “Quaker guns”—logs painted black to resemble cannon. The sight of these “weapons” spooked McClellan into believing a much more substantial Confederate force lurked somewhere in the vicinity, so he proceeded cautiously, as if a Rebel regiment hid behind every tree between the coast and Richmond. In a month's time, he had made it only as far as Williamsburg, all the time pleading for more troops to confront an impossibly huge Confederate war machine.

Lincoln noted sarcastically that if he increased McClellan's force by an additional three hundred thousand men, the Confederate army would suddenly triple in size in the general's estimate. He implored his general: “I think it is the precise time for you to strike a blow. By delay the enemy will relatively gain upon you—that is, he will gain faster, by
fortifications
and
reinforcements
, than you can by reinforcements alone.” McClellan continued to stall. In the meantime, Jefferson Davis ordered the first draft in American history. McClellan continued to move ponderously up the peninsula toward Richmond like Hannibal's elephants crossing the Alps. Spring rains turned the roads to mud, sometimes up to soldiers' knees, and sank heavy artillery. While McClellan waded, Confederate General Joseph Johnston's army grew to ninety thousand men.
10

Walker Freeman, a private in Johnston's army, sat in a downpour outside of Richmond waiting orders to move on fortified Union positions. His brother had been killed at Bull Run. Walker took up the cause for his family. He wanted to end the war as badly as any soldier on the other side. Destroy McClellan's army and he would go home in peace, a citizen of a new nation. He would get that chance. Two corps of McClellan's troops had crept to within five miles of the Confederate capital. President Davis decided that was close enough and ordered Johnston, who was as reluctant as McClellan to engage his enemy, to attack before federal forces had an opportunity to consolidate.