America Aflame (47 page)

Good fortune lasted only a short while for Lee. A bullet had shattered the bone in Stonewall Jackson's left arm just below the shoulder. There were no medical treatments for shattered bones at the time other than amputation. Lee remarked presciently, “He has lost his left arm, but I my right arm.” Jackson endured a bone-jarring twenty-seven-mile wagon ride to a safe location. Pneumonia settled in, another condition for which the medical practice of the time had no cure. On May 10, the general repeated the words of a favorite hymn, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the trees.” Moments later, he died. May 10 was a Sunday. With the master of the daring flanking movement gone, a grief-stricken Lee wept, “I know not how to replace him.”
27

The Holy Cause had a Holy Martyr. For a nation still groping for a national identity, the martyrdom of Stonewall Jackson provided an opportunity to build sentiment for a common purpose and destiny. Sara Pryor, a Richmond resident, wrote, “On May 10 the General died, and we were all plunged into the deepest grief. By every man, woman, and child in the Confederacy this good man and great general was mourned as never man was mourned before.” Jackson had assumed a legendary character even before his death, with his lightning raids, brilliant tactical maneuvers, and uncanny stealth. At a memorial service, a piece called “Stonewall's Requiem” declared him to be “the Martyr of our country's cause.” On the fourth Sunday in May, ministers across the Confederacy began their sermons with 2 Samuel 3:38: “Know ye not that there is a prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel?”
28

Even northerners stopped to praise their fallen adversary. Henry Ward Beecher, the abolitionist preacher, announced Jackson's death from his pulpit: “A brave and honest foe has fallen.” Herman Melville expressed the ambivalence of many northerners with his elegiac poem “Stonewall Jackson,” admiring the man but not the cause.

The Man who fiercest charged in fight

Whose sword and prayer were long—

Stonewall!

Even him who stoutly stood for Wrong,

How can we praise? Yet coming days

Shall not forget him with this song.
29

Stonewall Jackson combined piety with valor. In an increasingly bloody war where success was measured in body counts, it was easy to lose sight of basic values and transcending causes. Jackson's death brought those values and causes to the fore. To what end remained unclear. The certitude of a holy cause that greeted the war's onset slid into doubt, the same doubt about God's intentions that Lincoln had expressed. How to understand why the best of men, “such men as Jackson[,] are cut down in the zenith of their glory?” Kate Cumming learned about Jackson's death while at her post in a Chattanooga hospital. “How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways are past finding out” she wrote. “For who hath known the mind of the Lord.” It was difficult, especially for evangelical Christians, to reconcile the death of a good and pious man with God's everlasting love.
30

In late May, Union General Nathaniel Banks launched an assault on Confederate fortifications at Port Hudson, Louisiana, on the Mississippi River. The attack was part of a larger plan to open up the river for Union navigation. The battle marked one of the first deployments of black troops in combat. Though the assault failed to dislodge the Rebels, the troops, many of whom were free people of color from Louisiana, gave a good account of themselves. Banks noted in his report, “Whatever doubt may have existed heretofore as to the efficiency of Negro regiments, the history of the day proves conclusively to those who were in condition to observe the conduct of these regiments that the Government will find in the class of troops effective supporters and defenders.”
31

The decision to deploy black troops was not an easy one for the Lincoln administration. Many high-ranking Union officers and government officials remained convinced that African Americans were best suited for menial support occupations or tilling the soil at abandoned plantations. While many soldiers approved of emancipation in the abstract, fighting alongside black troops was quite another matter. Blacks, however, were anxious to fight for their own freedom, and numerous African Americans in the North lobbied the president to open recruiting for colored regiments.

In August 1862, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton approved the enlistment of five thousand black troops in South Carolina. Lincoln allowed the order to stand. The final draft of the Emancipation Proclamation authorized the recruitment of black troops. With emancipation a fact and the war going badly, Lincoln became a devoted convert to the idea: “The bare sight of 50,000 armed and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi would end the rebellion at once.” To the contrary. The prospect of armed black men threw Confederates into a murderous frenzy.
32

The Davis administration warned that the army would consider captured black soldiers as “slaves captured in arms,” not as prisoners of war, and therefore subject to execution. Lincoln advised the Richmond government that he would match man for man the death of captive black soldiers. The Confederacy never carried out this edict formally, though Rebel troops, on several occasions, killed black soldiers after they had surrendered. At Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in April 1864, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest's troops murdered three hundred black prisoners, many of whom had begged for mercy. A Confederate soldier described the scene at Fort Pillow following the executions: “Human blood stood about in pools and brains could have been gathered up in any quantity.” Another Rebel soldier stated flatly, “It was understood among us that we take no negro prisoners.” After capturing several black soldiers during the assault on Fort Wagner near Charleston Harbor in July 1863, a Georgia soldier reported with satisfaction that the prisoners were “literally shot down while on their knees begging for quarters and mercy.” Union officials found these incidents difficult to corroborate. Only later did sources confirm these murders.
33

“A Shell in the Rebel Trenches,” Winslow Homer, 1863. Yes, blacks did “fight” for the Confederacy, but rarely voluntarily, and here is one of many reasons why. The army used slaves to dig trenches and for other menial chores. It was dangerous work, as this sketch indicates. The help slaves provided for the Confederate cause supported the case for their enlistment in the Union armies. (The New York Public Library / Art Resource, NY)

Union troops generally did not greet black comrades with equanimity.
Harper's
reported that white Union soldiers stationed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, mutinied when a black regiment camped nearby in February 1863. White officers assigned to black troops experienced the opprobrium of fellow officers. When Frederick Douglass noted that soldiering was an important step toward full citizenship and equality for blacks, he confirmed the fears of many white northerners who shuddered at the thought of racial equality. As a northern editor explained, an “aversion to the negro is deeply ingrained” among “a large number of our Northern troops.”
34

There were enough reported incidents (and likely many more unreported) to substantiate racism among northern soldiers. Union soldiers in Kentucky fired on a black church for no particular reason. Another soldier murdered a black man in Louisiana and escaped punishment because, as a colleague admitted, “a negroes life is little more regarded than that of a dog.” At the siege of Petersburg beginning in the summer of 1864, Confederate and Union pickets agreed they would not fire upon each other. As part of the agreement, the Yanks would alert the Rebels when black pickets took their positions. At those times, the agreement was off.
35

These views were not unanimous. Some Union soldiers believed with a young Illinois soldier that “the nation will be purified” and “God will accomplish his vast designs” because “prejudice against color is fast going away.” Some white soldiers never forgot the cheers and tears of African Americans who greeted them on wharves, along streets, and at country crossroads throughout the South. Nor the obvious pride of blacks as they put on the blue uniform and shouldered a rifle for the first time. Eventually, black soldiers would comprise 10 percent of the Union army, nearly 150,000 men.
36

The exhilaration of fighting for one's freedom or liberating an enslaved population could come with considerable costs for black recruits, especially those from the South. They not only had to navigate the deep prejudices of white officers and troops, they feared for the safety of the families they left behind, and for their own lives should Confederates capture them. Sometimes families accompanied the soldiers to Union camps, but often they remained behind on farms and plantations where masters could retaliate against them. One slave woman in Missouri wrote to her soldier husband in December 1863, “I have had nothing but trouble since you left.… They abuse me because you went & say they will not take care of our children & do nothing but quarrel with me all the time and beat me scandalously the day before yesterday.” She begged him to come home.
37

For northern blacks, to fight for the freedom of their brothers and sisters in the South was a matter of honor that would earn the respect of whites. Self-help mattered more than self-preservation. In April 1863, Henry Gooding, a young black sergeant from Massachusetts, sent a letter to the editor of the
New Bedford
(Mass.)
Mercury
urging his fellow black citizens to enlist despite the great dangers they would face. “As one of the race, I beseech you not to trust to a fancied security, laying in your minds, that our condition will be bettered because slavery must die … [If we] allow that slavery will die without the aid of our race to kill it—language cannot depict the indignity, the scorn, and perhaps violence, that will be heaped upon us.”
38

Frederick Douglass threw himself into the recruiting effort and managed to enlist a hundred African American men in upstate New York for the 54th Massachusetts under the command of a young white officer, Robert Gould Shaw. Douglass gave two of his sons to the unit. The film
Glory
chronicled the exploits of the 54th Massachusetts, and a sculpture of Shaw and his men adorns Boston Common. On May 28, 1863, the 54th paraded through the streets of Boston en route to the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Just nine years earlier, federal marshals had dragged former slave Anthony Burns through the same streets to return him to his master. Now these black men marched as heroes, off to defend their country and to secure their own rights and privileges under the Constitution.

The 54th Massachusetts distinguished itself in the assault on Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor in July, though in a losing cause. Shaw fell mortally wounded. When his father requested Rebel officials to ship his body to Massachusetts, a courtesy both sides attempted to honor for high-ranking officers, they informed him that they had thrown his body into a pit with “his niggers.” Yet even some Union soldiers interpreted Shaw's death as proof of black incompetence, despite evidence to the contrary. Major Henry Abbott of the 20th Massachusetts wrote to his mother, “Poor Shaw. He was too good a fellow to be sacrificed for an experiment, & an experiment I think that has demonstrated niggers won't fight as they ought.”
39

If only the Confederacy could manufacture 150,000 recruits in a few months. Robert E. Lee was a fine engineer. He understood the math. The rate of attrition through casualties and desertions, the deteriorating standard of living among civilians, and the growing challenges of provisioning the armies added up to impending crisis. Lee wrote an earnest letter to Jefferson Davis after Chancellorsville detailing the difficulties of sustaining the war with diminishing resources. He urged Davis to cultivate the “peace party” in the North as “the most effectual mode of accomplishing [peace].” Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, endorsed Lee's analysis and told Davis, “Were I in conference with the authorities at Washington … I am not without hopes, that
indirectly
, I could now turn attention to a general adjustment upon such a basis as might ultimately be acceptable to both parties.” The timing, Stephens argued, after the South's victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, was right.
40

While the Davis administration mulled over the prospects for peace, Lee took the matter into his own hands. A decisive and dramatic military blow against the North would encourage northern peace advocates and force the Lincoln administration to the bargaining table. For the second time in less than a year, he decided to take the war to the North. Leading the Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania would also relieve Virginia from the devastating warfare that had disrupted the state economy, prevented spring planting, and created a large number of refugees.