America Aflame (46 page)

A federal field hospital, Savage Station, Virginia, June 1862, during the Seven Days' Battles. Makeshift field hospitals, overcrowded and providing only straw on the bare ground for comfort, offered little sanitation or care for wounded soldiers. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Like Whitman and Barton, Cumming had little patience for sanctimony. When southern women hesitated to enter the nursing ranks, she shot back: “Not respectable! And who has made it so? If the Christian, high-toned and educated women of our land shirk their duty, why others have to do it for them.” Her heart broke to see the young men come in with rags for clothes, barefooted, and exhausted. She deeply resented the attitude of surgeons who dismissed any good idea she had. “I ask but one thing from any surgeon, and that is, to be treated with the same respect due to men in their own sphere of life.”
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Cumming traveled to where she was needed, and she was needed everywhere. The southern built landscape became a hospital. Homes, churches, schools, stores, public buildings, hotels, and railroad depots served as repositories for the sick and wounded. The line between civilian and combatant in the South blurred as war came, literally, to southerners' doorsteps.

In early 1863, the end of the war was unimaginable. At dinner parties, in offices, and on the streets of cities and towns in the North, talk of a negotiated peace flourished in the first month of the new year. The legislature in Lincoln's home state, Illinois, debated a resolution to call a Peace Convention. New Jersey legislators considered proposals to send commissioners south to treat with the Davis administration to determine on what terms the Confederate states might rejoin the Union.

“Our Women and the War,” 1862, attributed to Winslow Homer (1836–1910). Both northern and southern society expected women to fulfill various supportive roles. (Smithsonian American Art Museum / Art Resource, NY)

General Burnside, armed with new orders from President Lincoln to destroy Lee's army, prepared to cross the Rappahannock in mid-January and redress the December disaster. By the time he acted, a series of winter storms had slammed into Virginia, turning the roads to mud. The mire trapped and killed draft animals, prevented artillery and supply wagons from moving, and created an army of soaked, mutinous, and dispirited soldiers. General Lee and his men remained safe and dry.
Harper's
asked plaintively, “Have We a General Among Us?”
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The West hardly looked better than the East for Union fortunes that bitter January. Lincoln directed General William S. Rosecrans to move against Confederate General Braxton Bragg and take Chattanooga. Rosecrans cited impassable roads and remained idle. Worse yet, Ulysses S. Grant had failed to capture Vicksburg, the important Mississippi River port and rail junction. The city sat on bluffs two hundred feet above the river, an excellent defensive promontory. Grant ordered General William T. Sherman to attack the bluffs on December 29. The assault was a disaster reminiscent of Fredericksburg. Grant, one newspaper wrote, “is a jackass in the original package. He is a poor drunken imbecile. He is a poor stick sober, and he is most of the time more than half drunk, and much of the time idiotically drunk.”
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Volunteer totals plummeted for the Union armies. Growing public sentiment of incompetence among the civilian and military high commands, as well as opposition to emancipation as a war aim, reduced enthusiasm for service. The situation forced the administration to institute its first general draft in March 1863, for all males between the ages of twenty and forty-five. These individuals would enter a lottery, with names drawn until the army met its quota. A controversial provision allowed draftees to buy an exemption for three hundred dollars, an inconceivable sum for members of the working class.

Talk of a peace settlement became so general in the North that Republican leaders and the press felt compelled to remind citizens of the stakes involved. In an article headlined “No Surrender!”
Harper's
initiated the media's reeducation campaign, recycling arguments articulated at the start of the war: allowing the separate existence of the southern states would encourage other states to do the same, resulting in constant friction, warfare, and, ultimately the anarchy of “feeble, jarring States, exhausting their strength in internecine conflicts.” The only acceptable result of the conflict was the creation of a strong central government untrammeled by dissenting factions. “There will be but one nation, but one Government, but one Union upon our domain,” and its constituent parts would owe “absolute obedience to the lawful supreme national authority.”
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The press not only warned of the consequences of peace but also wrote of the nobility of war. “No such war as ours has ever been waged since the Crusades.” In a variation of the “House Divided” rationale,
Harper's
rallied northern citizens to fight “the battle of Democracy against Aristocracy—labor against capital—manhood against privilege.… A nation must be governed by the one or by the other. Both can not coexist.”
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Lincoln understood that lack of civilian support could cripple the war effort. On January 26, 1863, he dismissed Burnside and appointed Joseph Hooker to lead the Army of the Potomac. “Fighting Joe” looked like a general—tall, handsome, and a commanding presence in the saddle or out. He had earned his nickname accidentally, as a newspaper typesetter omitted a comma after “Fighting,” in an article on an early battle. Hooker had a reputation for drinking and womanizing. Slang for both a shot of whiskey and a prostitute allegedly derived from his last name.
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At Antietam, Hooker had demonstrated good leadership skills and bravery. His outsized ego, though, infuriated colleagues. Known for brash talk, he once declared that the country would benefit from a military dictator. Lincoln, desperate for a soldier who not only fought but won, overlooked these shortcomings. Besides, unlike Burnside, Hooker had earned the affection and respect of his men. Taking command, he ordered fresh fruits and vegetables for his dispirited troops, granted generous furloughs, and set about to train his 138,000-man army for the spring campaign against Robert E. Lee.

As the war closed in on the two-year mark, the Confederacy should have gained in confidence. Its armies in the East and West remained intact; the naval blockade, while annoying, had not closed down commerce; its forces had thwarted an attack on the vital port of Vicksburg; Lee had pinned a ruinous defeat on a larger force at Fredericksburg. Dissension had grown in the North, and hopes for peace bloomed in the South as a result.

Yet all was not well in Dixie. The two-year toll on men and materiel, both in much shorter supply in the South than in the North, began to gnaw at the resolve of southerners. Shortages and inflation forced civilians to make hard choices in their lives, especially those who lived in towns and did not grow their own food. Union soldiers commented on the threadbare appearance of Rebel captives. While northern factories hummed at full speed, southern manufacturing stumbled, plagued by manpower shortages, worn-out machinery, and an increasingly devalued currency. Foreign recognition, which would have provided loans, munitions, and consumer goods, remained elusive. Since most of the fighting had occurred in the South, the destruction of roads, bridges, livestock, and housing added to the discomfort for civilians. “Refugeeing” women and children escaping advancing Union armies created a large dislocated population with little means of support. The hardships led to a growing peace sentiment in the South that would become more formidable as the year progressed.

Both the Davis administration and the press attempted to counter the peace party with reminders of Yankee barbarity and the certainty of subjugation if peace were achieved on the North's terms. The Emancipation Proclamation revived the martial spirit for many throughout the South. The
Richmond Examiner
called the document “the most startling political crime, the most stupid political blunder, yet known in American history.… Southern people have now only to choose between victory and death.”
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Given those options, the Confederacy would fight on. If desertion rates and draft evasion were any measures, however, soldiers were the greatest advocates for peace. The inability to protect their families, especially women and children, the need for their labor on farms, and the sheer brutality and inconclusiveness of the war to date left most Rebel soldiers praying for peace. In early January, a Confederate private in Tennessee wrote in despair, “I am sick and tired of this war, and, I can see no prospects of having peace for a long time to come, I don't think it ever will be stopped by fighting, the Yankees cant whip us and we can never whip them.”
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In less troubled times, Americans looked forward to the end of winter. Not so this year. Spring no longer meant soft fragrances, bright colors, freshly turned earth, and days bountiful in sunshine yet cool. A Confederate soldier wrote home, “Never before has returning spring brought with it such feelings of sorrow & regret. Regret because a winter so suitable for making peace should have passed and nothing done & sorrow at the thoughts of so many bloody battles this coming spring we'll be called upon to witness, and the many family circles that will have to mourn the loss of one or perhaps more of its members.”
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As winter turned to spring across the South, neither side seemed anxious to renew the battle. In the West, Confederate Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton, a West Pointer and a Philadelphian with a wife from Virginia, still held Vicksburg with a modest force of twenty-nine thousand men. Grant had yet to figure out a way to capture the well-fortified city. Rosecrans and Bragg were content to stare at each other in southeastern Tennessee. In the East, Lee waited for Hooker while the latter continued to drill and discipline his army. Marion Hill Fitzpatrick of the 27th Georgia saw the lull as a promising sign of impending peace. He wrote home, “The boys … think we will have peace soon. We whipped the yanks last Summer. They gained nothing the past winter, a great many of their soldiers' times is up the first of May.… All these reasons I think bring at least a glimmering ray of hope for peace.”
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The pace quickened in April. Grant moved south of Vicksburg, crossed the river, and marched overland to the state capital at Jackson, cut Pemberton's supply lines and attacked the river city from the east. In the East, Hooker forded the Rappahannock, boasting, “I have the finest army the sun ever shone on. My plans are perfect, and when I start to carry them out, may God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none.” After smashing Lee's army, Hooker planned to march into Richmond and end the war.
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On May 1, Hooker bore down on Lee's left flank with seventy-three thousand men, having left forty thousand men behind to mind Fredericksburg. Encountering resistance, he hesitated and then withdrew to form a defensive line at the crossroads town of Chancellorsville in an area of heavy underbrush and woods known, appropriately, as the Wilderness. The decision amazed his fellow officers, who felt the campaign was proceeding well. Hooker's hesitation allowed Lee to recover. The terrain mitigated Hooker's two-to-one advantage in troops and made judging the course of the battle nearly impossible, a major factor in Hooker's misapprehension of Confederate strength and position.
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Lee discovered that Hooker's right flank was “in the air,” without solid defensive ground to anchor it, and boldly divided his army, sending Stonewall Jackson on a brilliant maneuver through the Wilderness to fall upon the exposed flank. Late in the afternoon of May 2, some Federals noticed frightened deer and rabbits fleeing the woods. Jackson's foot cavalry burst out of the cover with Rebel yells and blazing rifles to rout the immobile Union right. Jackson hoped to continue the assault through the night, taking advantage of the moonlight. But in the process of reconnoitering the enemy's defenses, Jackson was wounded by his own troops. Hooker, fearing for the destruction of his army, withdrew back across the Rappahannock. The Army of the Potomac had suffered seventeen thousand casualties, a greater defeat than the debacle at Fredericksburg five months earlier. The Confederates counted thirteen thousand casualties, a considerably higher percentage than the Federals, 22 percent to 13 percent.

The news devastated Lincoln, who had only recently recovered from Fredericksburg. A colleague reported that he had never seen the president “so broken, dispirited, and so ghostlike.” He paced back and forth in a room at the White House muttering, “My God! My God! What will the country say! What will the country say!”
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Robert E. Lee derived the wrong lesson from his smashing victory at Chancellorsville: it fed his growing sense of invincibility. It was a conclusion seconded by the southern press, numerous northern newspapers, and a good many civilians on both sides. In his official report of the battle, Lee wrote, “The conduct of the troops cannot be too highly praised. Attacking largely superior numbers in strongly entrenched positions, their heroic courage overcame every obstacle of nature and art and achieved a triumph.” Lee displayed strategic brilliance at Chancellorsville, but Hooker's incompetence and Jackson's discovery of a hidden farm road through the dense Wilderness played significant roles in the victory. Against a more competent opponent and with a little less luck, the outcome might have been different.
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