American Experiment (113 page)

Most of the three-quarters of a million volunteers were farm boys. They brought with them their farm talk, their farm look, their farm knack of dealing with mules and horses. Since friends often enlisted together, they brought with them too their neighborhood associations and attitudes. The Army was a vast mosaic of neighborhoods and common interests. From Illinois alone came units of German immigrants, Galena miners,
Bloomington teachers and students, and the “Preacher’s Regiment,” so called because it included many men of the cloth.

The men brought their own leaders too, for they often elected as captains and colonels popular local politicians from back home. Some proved utterly incompetent and were court-martialed; the soldiers themselves weeded out others. “We have
forced ten resignations
from officers,” a Wisconsin private wrote home, “and put better men in their places.” Some officers made speeches and courted votes, but civilian leaders often made poor military ones. Among the best leaders were the handful of West Point graduates. Thomas Jackson, wearing a shabby coat and a battered forage cap, drilled his men with spartan discipline and evangelical fervor; he considered “a gum cloth, a blanket, a tooth brush and forty rounds of cartridges as the full equipment of a gentleman soldier,” a southern volunteer complained. The soldiers called Jackson “Old Blue Light” until he led them to victory; then they called him “Stonewall.” Sam Grant’s men referred to him as the “quiet man.” When he took command of the 21st Illinois, the volunteers lined up to hear a speech. Grant gave them one: “Men, go to your quarters!”

Camp life as always was an organized bore: drilling, policing the camp, chopping wood for fires, eating salt pork and other staples. Most of the men lived in big tent cities; close quarters and poor sanitation left thousands ill and hundreds dead before the first battles were fought. Soldiers gambled, read, sang, listened to preachers, devised elaborate practical jokes. They came to know other men from very different backgrounds. Northerners who had hardly met a black man began to encounter the bondmen who crowded around the Union camps in Maryland and Missouri. The whites were not friendly, at least in the beginning. “I don’t think enough of the Niggar to go and fight for them,” wrote an Ohio volunteer.

The men spent most of their time talking; and mostly they talked about the impending warfare. Veterans of Bull Run pictured the fear and confusion, the awful carnage around the batteries on Henry Hill. When war came to many of these soldiers in the spring of 1862 it was initially like all wars: hurry up and wait. After exhausting marches through mud or across still-frozen fields, the regiment would halt, the men would scatter, pitch their tents, start fires for cooking—and wait. Suddenly the drums would beat the long roll, the soldiers would grab their rifles, deploy nervously—and then wait. Much of the fighting was at long range: marching through woods, firing across fields, glancing off an enemy unit, and then settling down for another long wait. Then, suddenly, infantry would find themselves in a bloody holocaust, shooting and stabbing at close quarters. Shiloh, a private remembered, was “one never-ending, terrible roar.”

In the summer of ’62 the war seemed to assume its old shape. Lee sent Jackson north again in August, this time toward Manassas. The Union troops had a second chance to fight at Bull Run—and once more they lost. Pushing his advantage, Lee united his forces and marched onward into Maryland. The stakes were piled high. Lincoln needed a victory in order to take a stronger posture against slavery and perhaps to save his administration; McClellan needed a victory to save his job; Lee had to find some way to finish off the North before its overwhelming weight of numbers and firepower could be brought to bear. As the two armies raced north, dodging and chasing and parrying each other, soldiers on both sides felt the mounting tension.

McClellan caught Lee’s army near the town of Sharpsburg, astride a little stream called Antietam Creek. He hammered the Confederate lines with artillery fire, then sent 75,000 men forward, in three disjointed frontal assaults. On the right the two sides fought over a tiny cornfield, leaving it so strewn with corpses that hardly a patch of ground was left bare. In the center, the Union men pushed forward to a worn-down road, the Sunken Lane; after three hours of fighting, some of it hand to hand, they held the road but were too exhausted to press on. To the left, a handful of Confederates slaughtered Union troops as they tried to cross the single narrow bridge over the Antietam. The Northerners finally carried the bridge, only to stop when they smashed into a rebel unit dressed in captured blue uniforms. The last hours before nightfall brought more attacks, more resistance, more slaughter—and no decision.

McClellan claimed victory at Antietam, for Lee’s forces were so battered they had to pull back to Virginia. Lee could claim a victory because he had saved his army despite being outnumbered two to one. But few soldiers were claiming victory the morning after the battle. They sprawled on the ground, averting their eyes from the dead and wounded lying amid the trampled cornstalks, bodies draped over the rubble of blasted stone walls, corpses floating in the watery muck of Antietam Creek. From 20,000 men flowed the vintage of blood.

This blood soaking into the mud of Antietam—why was it being shed? For food and clothing and shelter? The great majority of men on both sides had shared in the American cornucopia. For Union or Confederacy? Few of the soldiers wished to shed blood for a particular way of organizing the general government. For some supreme goal that transcended government—that was served by government? Yes, for liberty, freedom,
justice—this is what the soldiers were told. But confusion still prevailed. Not only were Northerners and Southerners wholly at odds with each other as to what constituted liberty, who should enjoy it, how it could be safeguarded and broadened. The northern leaders seemed divided and unsure among themselves.

Lincoln was no exception. “This is essentially a People’s contest,” he had told Congress. “On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life….” But in answer to Horace Greeley’s “Prayer of Twenty Million,” in which the
Tribune
editor castigated the “preposterous and futile” idea of trying to put down a rebellion without extirpating the evil of slavery that caused it, the President wrote, “My paramount object in this struggle
is
to save the Union, and is
not
either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing
any
slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing
all
the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do
not
believe it would help to save the Union….” Lincoln could hardly have stated his priorities more clearly, but what had happened to the priority of liberation—of elevating the condition of all men?

The imperatives of war did not allow the extended debate, philosophizing, legislating, compromising, adjusting inevitable in a pluralistic system of checks and balances. Decisions had to be made. Abolitionist pressure was mounting as the war lagged. European opinion—especially English liberal opinion—was waiting for Lincoln to take leadership against slavery. Senate and House might act if he did not; as early as August 1861 Congress had legislated for the emancipation of slaves who were used in arms or labor against the North, and within a year after that had acted to liberate slaves belonging to rebels or traitors. By midsummer 1862 the President had decided on some form of general emancipation. On July 22 Lincoln informed his Cabinet of his decision, adding that he had made up his mind on the main point but would hear suggestions as to details. As usual, the Cabinet was divided, but the President had to agree with the view that the emancipation proclamation must be issued only after a victory; otherwise it would seem an act of weakness and desperation—in Seward’s words, “the last
shriek
on our retreat….”

But where was the victory? Although a bitter disappointment to Lincoln,
Antietam was enough of a victory to permit public announcement of his emancipation intention; thus the blood shed in that battle acquired some meaning. Late in September the President summoned his Cabinet. After reading a few pages from the humorist Artemus Ward, to the non-amusement of Seward and Chase, Lincoln said he would now announce the proclamation. The Cabinet divided again. Bates, dreading any move toward black equality, held that forced colonization should accompany emancipation. Seward privately feared that the proclamation might incite a slave rebellion in the South and alienate moderate opinion in the North, but he supported the President. Blair was still concerned about its possible impact on Union supporters in the border states. Chase approved the idea as a moral necessity, Welles as a military one. Next day the President published his decree, warning that in one hundred days—on January 1, 1863—all slaves in any states or area still in rebellion would be declared free.

“We shout with joy,” Frederick Douglass said, “that we live to record this righteous decree.” Other abolitionists were pleased, though wary; they would maintain pressure on the President. Moderate and conservative Republicans were apprehensive, most Democrats hostile, and Confederate spokesmen enraged and yet pleased to be vindicated in their warnings about the Republicans’ satanic intentions.

The “hundred days” proved the most harrowing in Lincoln’s life, and perhaps in the Union’s. Even as McClellan boasted of his “victory” at Antietam, the President was searching for a general who could
fight
, amid rumors of disaffection within the Union armies toward the Commander in Chief in the White House. There were more delays, stalemates, and reversals in western operations. The fall congressional elections went against the President. Republican senators were holding long and heated caucuses in which they criticized the President, denounced the moderates and incompetents around him, and discussed ways of gaining greater control of the war. Even worse, the Cabinet was split several ways, and, worst of all, factions within the Administration were tying in with congressional blocs. These centrifugal forces threatened to break the government apart. Then, in mid-December, came the frightful news of the slaughter at Fredericksburg, where Lee shattered Burnside’s army—almost 1,300 Union soldiers killed, another 10,000 wounded.

Fredericksburg precipitated a government crisis. Caucusing senators asked that the Cabinet be reorganized; they criticized Seward so sharply for his moderate attitude toward slavery and his alleged influence on Lincoln that the Secretary of State felt obliged to tender his resignation. At a meeting with Lincoln the senators demanded a more active role for
a reorganized Cabinet, and especially for their friend Chase. Lincoln quietly heard them out, asked them to return the following evening, and called a cabinet meeting for the next day. In an open discussion Lincoln gained the agreement of all—including Chase—to his claim that the Cabinet had seldom disagreed on basic issues. When the senators arrived that evening, they found Lincoln there with his Cabinet save for Seward. After reasserting that his cabinet members were fundamentally in harmony, the President called on the members to vouch again for this position. Cornered, Chase now contradicted the statements he had made to the senators on the Hill. The Senate delegation was left in disarray, Seward in vindication, Chase in humiliation.

Shortly, Chase returned to the White House. He had prepared his resignation, he told the President.

“Where is it?” asked Lincoln. Chase produced a letter but seemed reluctant to part with it.

“Let me have it,” said the President, reaching out and snatching it. He was exultant. Now he had both Seward’s and Chase’s tenders. He would accept neither resignation. He had the balance he wanted. “I can ride now,” he said to a friend. “I’ve got a pumpkin in each end of my bag.”

It was a small triumph amid the gloom of December. Lincoln suddenly seemed drawn and aged. He spent hours waiting for news of battles, other hours in reflection, reassessing the course of the war. “The dogmas of the quiet past,” he told Congress in his annual message, “are inadequate to the stormy present.…As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

On New Year’s Eve, the night before the Emancipation Proclamation was to be signed, Lincoln “tossed in fitful sleep, dreaming of corpses on a distant battlefield in Tennessee, of guns flashing in the night, of silent troops lying exhausted in the rain, of crowds reading casualty returns at Willard’s Hotel.” Next day, after the President had greeted a long procession of guests, his arm seemed almost paralyzed, and his fingers trembled so that he had to take a firm grip on the gold pen. “If my name ever goes into history,” he said to the cabinet members and officials gathered around him, “it will be for this act.” It was not an impressive-looking document, with its detailed exemptions and its admonition to slaves to refrain from unnecessary violence. But five words stood out in the order: after January l, 1863, slaves in rebelling states and areas shall be “
THEN, THENCE-FORTH, AND FOREVER FREE.
”

A black preacher raced down Pennsylvania Avenue to read the proclamation to a crowd of blacks. They shouted, clapped, sang. Later, blacks
and whites gathered in front of the White House and called for the President to appear. When he came to the window and bowed to them, ecstatic cheering broke out, and one black exclaimed that if he would only “come out of that palace, they would hug him to death.”

1863. Somewhere around a campfire a Union troop was singing: