America Aflame (49 page)

Meade might well have destroyed Lee's army and ended the war if he had pursued the retreating Confederates. Consider, though, that Meade had only recently assumed command of the Army of the Potomac. He was still learning about his corps commanders and officers. His army, after intense fighting in summer heat, was utterly exhausted. As was Meade. He wrote to his wife on July 8, “Now over ten days, I have not changed my clothes have not had a regular night's rest, and many nights not a wink of sleep, and for several days did not even wash my face and hands, no regular food, and all the time in a great state of mental anxiety.”
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Lincoln's unsent letter to General Meade referred to “our late successes.” One day after Pickett's fateful charge, Vicksburg fell to the Federals, dealing a double blow to the Confederacy. On May 14, Grant swept aside General Joseph Johnston's small (twelve thousand men) army at Jackson, destroyed the city's factories and cotton reserves, and bore down on Vicksburg. Pemberton established a ring of forts around the city that provided his troops with strong defensive positions from which they repulsed two attacks by Grant. The Union general then laid siege to Vicksburg, bombarding the city day and night, denying sleep or rest either to the soldiers defending it or its inhabitants. The Federals hurled six thousand shells into Vicksburg every twenty-four hours and an additional four thousand onto Rebel lines. Amazingly, only three civilians were killed during the siege.

To relieve tensions, soldiers on both sides occasionally hailed each other from their entrenchments. “Well, Yank, when are you coming into town?” a Rebel picket would call. In reply, “We propose to celebrate the Fourth of July there.” Confederates exchanged tobacco for hard bread. The soldiers engaged in a game of hot potato, lobbing unarmed grenades back and forth to each other. These lighter moments between Americans temporarily alleviated the serious and tragic business of war.
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Reinforcements swelled Grant's army to seventy-one thousand men. With such a numerical advantage, Grant would have intercepted any attempt of Pemberton's force to leave the city. Living conditions deteriorated in Vicksburg during the siege, with residents, many of them women and children, taking refuge in caves gouged out from the bluffs and eating rats, dogs, and mules to avoid starvation. The soldiers were no better off and sent Pemberton a petition on June 28 stating, “If you can't feed us, you had better surrender.” Pemberton and Grant met on July 3 to arrange the surrender of troops and the city. On July 4, the Rebels marched out and stacked their arms. Union soldiers shared their rations with the starving Rebels. There was no celebration in front of the Confederate troops, just “a feeling of sadness … in the breast of most of the Union soldiers,” Grant noted, “at seeing the dejection of their late antagonists.” Lincoln, however, permitted himself an exaltation, “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” He added, “Grant is my man.”
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The Confederacy had lacked a coherent strategy for the western theater. Their adoption of a passive defense saved troops but lost key territory. And, whenever a Rebel force ventured an attack, it usually suffered heavy casualties. The loss of Forts Donelson and Henry (and, therefore, of Kentucky), the fall of Memphis and New Orleans, and the losses at Shiloh and Corinth cost the Confederates dearly in men, access to the Mississippi River, supplies, and food. Vicksburg was essential to Confederate fortunes in the West. Holding on to Vicksburg kept the Federals out of a major stretch of the river and the Gulf of Mexico and shut off the Old Northwest from using the river as a commercial outlet. The economic impact on the Old Northwest was severe enough that some political leaders there had discussed the possibility of a separate peace with the Confederacy.

Amid the celebrations over Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Lieutenant Quincy Campbell of the 5th Iowa expressed a more sober and, as it turned out, a more accurate view. These Union victories did not prefigure “the fall of the Confederacy. Many hard battles are yet to be fought, and months, perhaps years, of fighting stand between us and peace.” The war would continue because “the chastisements of the Almighty are not yet ended … [T]he nation has not yet been brought down into the dust of humility and will not
let the oppressors go free
.… [T]he Almighty has taken up the cause of the oppressed and … he will deny us peace until we ‘break every yoke' and sweep every vestige of the cursed institution from our land.” It would be a sentiment that others, including Abraham Lincoln, would express during the next two years. Until God was satisfied that the blood had washed away the sin of slavery, the war would continue.
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The dual losses threw the Confederacy into the same despair northerners had experienced after Chancellorsville. Deeper, considering the optimism after Lee's great victory over Hooker. As one Confederate official lamented, “Yesterday, we rode on the pinnacle of success. Today absolute ruin seems our portion. The Confederacy totters to its destruction.” Across the South crowds congregated at railroad depots and telegraph offices, anxious for news from Gettysburg and Vicksburg, understanding that the war's outcome likely hung in the balance. When the news finally arrived, disbelief mingled with despair. Both peace and independence seemed far off now. A Rebel private captured at Vicksburg wrote, “I see no prospect now of the South ever sustaining itself.” And a North Carolina woman wrote to her husband, “The people is all turning Union here since the Yankees has got Vicksburg. I want you to come home as soon as you can.” President Davis admitted, “We are now in the darkest hour of our political existence.”
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As disheartening as the turn of events was for the Confederacy, it did not diminish the will to fight. The prospect of subjugation by the Yankees and the economic and racial consequences that would follow spurred southerners to continue the fight. Private Marion Fitzpatrick of Georgia allowed that the defeats “just fire me up to fight the harder.”
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While northerners rejoiced, the largest civil insurrection in American history broke out in their midst. The implementation of the March conscription law was the immediate cause of the disturbance on July 13 in New York City. Few working-class New Yorkers, least of all the city's large Irish Catholic population, could afford the three-hundred-dollar exemption fee. The draft was tinder to racial and religious tensions that had simmered in northern cities for years. New York City was a Democratic Party stronghold. Its citizens supported the Union war effort up to a point. They opposed Republican incursions on civil liberties, the party's abolition policy, and its anti-Catholic fringe. The Emancipation Proclamation and the new draft law occurred only months apart. It was one thing to lay one's life on the line for the Union; quite another to liberate blacks who would come north to “steal the work and the bread of the honest Irish.” Shippers on the city's docks had employed black strikebreakers the year before, triggering violence. New York's Democratic leaders used the draft and the sagging Union military fortunes in the spring to whip up public sentiment against the Republican administration.
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On the morning of July 13, hundreds of workers from the city's docks and construction sites beat copper kettles in front of the provost marshal's office, protesting the draft lottery scheduled to take place that day. A volunteer fire company arrived and obligingly set the office ablaze. That their grievances transcended the draft became apparent when the assaults spread to the homes of Republican politicians and to factories producing war materiel. The rioters burned the building housing the nation's leading Republican newspaper, the
New York Tribune
. The most concentrated and vicious violence occurred against the city's black population. The mob burned the Colored Orphans Asylum to the ground, home to over two hundred orphans, after looting the furniture and supplies. Miraculously, the children escaped without loss of life.

The mob had grown to a small army of thousands of men, women, and children by the afternoon. They attacked, murdered, or lynched any African American they encountered. As younger boys marked black houses by throwing rocks through windows, older boys and men followed, assaulting the residents. Sixteen-year-old Patrick Butler became a mob hero when he helped to lynch a crippled black coachman and then, as the crowd cheered, dragged the body through the streets by the genitals. They threw a black child from a fourth-story window, instantly killing him. A woman cradling an infant no more than a few hours old was set upon and savagely beaten. Several children were torn from their mothers' embrace and their brains blown out. The rioters also killed a sixteen-year-old Irish girl who had protested the violence.

Twenty thousand Union troops fresh from Gettysburg fired howitzers into the crowd, ending the riot, after the mob had its way with the city for three days. The toll included 119 dead, 18 of whom were black (most of the rest were Irish), $5 million worth of property damage, and 3,000 citizens left homeless. The Democratic city council appropriated funds to buy exemptions for all of the city's draftees. Most citizens, though, condemned the mob, often using the same rhetoric as the mob employed against blacks. Jeff Whitman told his brother Walt he was sorry Union troops “did not kill enough” of the Irish. “I am perfectly rabid on an irishman. I hate them worse than I thought I could hate anything.”
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Resistance to the draft occurred throughout the North, in parts of Ohio, upstate New York, Newark, New Jersey, Chicago, and the mining districts of Pennsylvania. Only in New York City, however, did the protests turn deadly. White southerners took some solace from the riot. In a month of bad news, the insurrection in Manhattan looked like a silver lining. “I see one bright ray in these dark times,” Marion Fitzpatrick wrote hopefully. “There was a general insurrection in New York a short time ago, caused by trying to enforce the draft.… Now if the Yankees will fight among themselves and let us alone it will please me the best in the world.”
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The Republican press dismissed the mob as a small number of “thieves, incendiaries, and assassins,” ignoring the deep class, racial, and religious divisions that the riot laid bare. Editors painted a halcyon portrait of the working class, noting that the “generally intelligent and industrious, from the laborer of yesterday who is the rich man of to-day to the laborer of to-day who is to-morrow the rich man … the true ‘bone and sinew'” did not join with the mob. Whether the trajectory of the city's working class ever resembled this saga is questionable. Many Americans, though, including Abraham Lincoln, whose own career reflected these ideals, believed in the story. The disconnection between myth and reality, as the riot demonstrated, was growing and would fracture in the new nation birthed by the Civil War.
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The riots also fixed in the minds of many northerners the image of the disloyal and violent Irishman, despite the bravery of the Union's Irish brigade at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg. Some felt that once the Union won the war against slavery, the next conflict would be against the Roman Catholic population. A Union soldier expressed the views of many, writing that Catholics, like slaveholders, were opponents of American values; in fact, “they are the next thing to Slavery.”
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By late fall, war news had supplanted stories of urban insurrection. The governor of Pennsylvania directed David Wills, a landscape architect, to lay out a formal cemetery for the “fallen heroes” of Gettysburg. Wills invited President Lincoln to make a few remarks at the cemetery's dedication. Edward Everett, former governor of Massachusetts and a silver-tongued orator, delivered the main address. Everett gave a masterful speech on the battle of Gettysburg lasting more than two and a half hours and moving his audience to tears. The president's comments, which followed, contained 272 words. The crowd applauded politely and left the grounds.
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Since the 1850s, Lincoln had viewed the conflict between North and South, slave and free, as a moral contest above all. Constitutional issues were important, but the integrity of the Union as a beacon to the world took precedence. The global mission was predicated on the nation's unique grounding in the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Slavery was the great obstacle in fulfilling the nation's destiny. The Gettysburg Address, simple as it was, articulated the North's moral stake in the war.

The address adopted a biblical cadence, evident from the opening, “Four score and seven years ago.” The Founders “brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty,” recalling the woman of St. John's Revelation who “brought forth a man child who was to rule all nations.” Lincoln connected the young men who sacrificed their lives four months earlier “to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The Civil War was the ultimate test to determine whether “any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.” The words of the Declaration of Independence were at the core of the contest. And the men who sacrificed their lives would bring forth a new nation shorn of sin and true at last to the propositions of the founders. Only then would the American experiment be secure.

The men who died on the battlefield had consecrated the ground. What was the task of the living? “That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The “new birth of freedom” derived from evangelical Protestant culture. A nation born again, cleansed of sin.

Lincoln made his case for the sacrifice succinctly. The war was not only about freedom for the unfree, but even more about securing freedom for everyone by saving the only kind of government compatible with equality. He never mentioned the battle, the cemetery, the Confederacy, or the future prospects for the war. The common thread that bound Americans was the national idea dedicated to the unique proposition that all men are created equal. The address was transcendent. It gave meaning to the war and to the sacrifices in its name.
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