Never Call Retreat (33 page)

When Lee at last reached the Potomac near Williamsport, and dug in to await attack while his engineers were preparing a crossing, Meade found the Confederates well posted in a strong position. He consulted his corps commanders, found that hardly any of them felt that the army ought to attack, studied the situation at more length, made up his mind to attack anyway—and learned next day that Lee had crossed the river during the night and early morning, and that the last chance to strike a finishing blow was gone. On top of this came Halleck's messages indicating that the President and the general-in-chief were dissatisfied, and Meade told his wife: "It is hard after working as I have done and accomplishing as much to be found fault with for not doing impossibilities."
¹⁰

It was hard, and probably it was unjust: the one fact that mattered was that Lee had got away. The Army of Northern Virginia had not been taken off of the board, and Mr. Lincoln was no more interested in the reasons why it had not been removed than Mr. Davis was interested in the reasons why Vicksburg had been surrendered. In point of fact, the Army of Northern Virginia had done well to get away at all. It had been hurt worse than Meade's army had been hurt and it had been weaker to begin with; all of the reasons that kept the Federal army from making a rapid pursuit rested on this army with equal weight; and yet somehow, on the march back to Virginia, Lee's army had found the extra ounce of energy that enabled it to move quickly in spite of exhaustion. (One Confederate soldier remembered, with feeling: "For 96 hours we were almost constantly on our feet, and during all that time I don't think there was an intermission of 4 hours all put together when it was not raining. Of course there was no time to cook rations & the boys went on about two biscuits and no meat a day.")
¹¹

Lee himself was not downcast. Before he went south across the Potomac he wrote to Mrs. Lee unemotionally: "You will have learned before this reaches you that our success at Gettysburg was not as great as reported. In fact, that we failed to drive the enemy from his position & that our army withdrew to the Potomac." Three days later he gave her a slightly more detailed appraisal of the campaign: "The army has returned to Virg., dear Mary. Its return is rather sooner than I had originally contemplated but having accomplished what I purposed on leaving the Rappk. viz: relieving the valley of the presence of the enemy & drawing his army north of the Potomac, I determined to recross the latter river." A few days later he assured her: "The army has labored hard, endured much & behaved nobly. It has accomplished all that could have been reasonably expected." To President Davis he said that the army "in my opinion achieved under the guidance of the Most High a general success, though it did not win a victory."
¹²

Lee was no man to offer excuses or to gloze an unpleasant reality. He was saying nothing that was not justified by what he had said before the campaign began: he had done about what he expected to do, and although his army was coming back sooner and leaner than had been anticipated it had pushed the war out of the homeland and had disrupted all Yankee plans for the campaign in Virginia.
¹³
If it had not won a victory it had not suffered a shattering defeat: its losses had been desolating, but General Lee was quite as willing as Mr. Lincoln to read letters of blood so long as the record thus written was favorable. He saw the situation now, as a matter of fact, much as Mr. Lincoln saw it: whatever the Federals had won at Gettysburg might mean a good deal less than the fact that the Army of Northern Virginia remained in being, able to go on with the war.

The war was not over. It might have ended this summer, but instead it had made almost a new beginning; because it had not ended it was going to cut more deeply than ever before, plowing new forces to the surface and forcing men to deal with them as best they could. It would either create or reveal its significance as it went along, and a few days after Gettysburg Mr. Lincoln groped for a clearer understanding of it.

On July 7 a jubilant crowd, fortified by brass bands and by memories of Independence Day and military victories, came to the White House to serenade him, and he made a brief impromptu reply. It was not one of his more notable utterances. (Oddly, this veteran of political stump speaking was rarely at his best when he spoke without careful preparation.) Yet he did drop one thought that had long echoes. He said that the Declaration of Independence was worth especial remembrance this year because the Republic was coping with "a gigantic Rebellion, at the bottom of which is an effort to overthrow the principle that all men are created equal." He went on to make some homespun remarks about notable things that had happened on July 4 in other years, then returned to this theme, referring to Confederate armies as "the cohorts of those who oppose the declaration that all men are created equal."
¹
*

The war was growing, with a hard logic of its own. First it had been a fight to restore the Union, then it became a fight to destroy slavery, and now apparently it was a fight to establish the equality of all classes of men. This was a definition not of war but of a general overturn; a social reconstruction for the North as well as for the South, more than most men had bargained for. As a grim footnote there came, less than a week later, the draft riots in New York City.

The draft riots were based upon ignorance, misery, fear, and the inability of one class of men to understand another class; upon the fact that there really were "classes of men" in classless American society. The riots loosed war's violence on a city where violence was supposed to be a private matter between the police and the underworld. The rioters had malignant prejudice, and those rioted against had another prejudice equally malignant; if the lynchings and the burnings and the pitched battles in city streets meant anything they meant that this notion of equality was going to be hard to live with.

The draft law itself was at the root of the trouble. Built into it was a rule that a man with money could not be compelled to go into the army. All men had to register, of course, but one whose name was drawn could get release from service (at least until the next drawing) if he could pay a commutation fee of $300. He could get permanent release if, spending more than this, he hired a substitute to go soldiering for him. If he did neither of these things he must serve, under penalty of being shot as a deserter if he ran away.

To the factory hands and casual workers of New York, already pressed by a seasonal drop in employment, and by the fact that the war had raised prices much more effectively than it had raised wages, $300 was a figure from dreamland— the better part of a year's income, more money than any wage-earner ever saw or hoped to see at one time. To make matters worse, these men had been told, month after month, that the war had been basely perverted into a fight to free the Negro slave—who, once freed, would unquestionably flood the Northern cities, take any work he could find at any wages he could get, and so deprive the white worker of the little he had now.

This made a mixture as explosive as a keg of black powder, and the explosion came in the Ninth Congressional District of New York, a district filled with Irish laborers almost all of whom were Democrats. In an office at Third Avenue and 46th Street, on July 13, a dutiful army officer and some clerks fed names into a drum and began to turn it. Someone threw a paving stone through the window, this range-finding shot was followed by a regular salvo, and then a crowd of angry men came in, officer and clerks fled for their lives, the police guard was beaten half to death, the draft office was set on fire, and in another hour the entire block had been burned; and the tumult began to spread all across the city, a political protest that quickly turned into a flaming race riot.

Men made furious because they might have to serve in an army that did not seem to be fighting for anything they themselves wanted found that their fury could be vented upon the Negroes who seemed to be at the bottom of all the trouble. Policemen were killed, the mayor's house was attacked, streetcar tracks were torn up, and authority of whatever kind was derided in any way possible; then a colored orphanage was burned, business houses employing Negroes were looted, and toward evening the uproar exploded into innumerable "small mobs chasing isolated Negroes as hounds would chase a fox." Negro fugitives caught by these mobs were hanged, or burned alive, or simply kicked and beaten to death. A number of policemen and private citizens died trying to prevent such lynchings, but the police were outnumbered and the militia could not be called out at once because most of it had been sent to Pennsylvania to repel invasion, and for three days the authorities could do little more than try to set some sort of limits to the area of violence.

Finally the business was tamped down. Archbishop John J. Hughes addressed a gathering of 5000 Irishmen, urging them to "keep out of the crowd where immortal souls are launched into eternity" and reminding them that their Ireland "has been the mother of heroes and poets, but never the mother of cowards," and his words had good effect. The draft act was suspended, not to be put back into operation until combat soldiers from the Army of the Potomac reached town to restore order, and the city authorities announced that municipal funds would pay the $300 commutation fee for any drafted man too poor to pay it himself. Police estimated that a thousand people had been killed or wounded (the accuracy of this estimate is in dispute to this day and apparently the figure was badly inflated) and guesses on property damage ranged from $400,000 to $2,500,000. The violence did end, at last, and good men who loved the Union could look about them and try to understand what had happened.
¹⁵

True understanding did not come easily. Respectability was appalled by the Irish precisely as the Irish were appalled by the freed Negro. The eminent diarist, George Templeton Strong, expressed sheer horror at what he had seen. The mobs were made up of "the lowest Irish day laborers"; they were homogeneous, "every brute in the drove was pure Celtic hod-carrier or loafer"; he was aghast at "the fury of the low Irish women"; and he wound up by crying that "Rabbledom is not yet dethroned any more than its ally and instigator, Rebeldom."
Harper's Weekly
insisted that the draft act "is in reality fair, liberal and humane," shook its head at the excesses of "the operatives of this large city, who have never been forced to realize the obligations of citizenship," and concluded that the real trouble lay in the demagoguery of Democratic politicians and editors.
¹⁰
About all anyone could be sure of was that if equality came now it was going to have an immense impact.

3. Servants of the Guns

MORRIS ISLAND looked much like any other unused part of the South Carolina coast: a long stretch of sand caught between tacky green scrub and blue water, Atlantic Ocean on the east and flat reedy marshes not far to the west. It was made an island by a chain of pools and tidal creeks that cut it off from the mainland, its width varied from one hundred to one thousand yards, and it began at the entrance to Charleston Harbor and ran south three and one-half miles to Lighthouse Inlet. Nobody in the Civil War would have paid the least attention to Morris Island except for two facts: the main ship channel to Charleston ran parallel to its length a mile offshore, and the northern tip of the island was less than a mile from Fort Sumter.

Because these things were so, Morris Island in 1863 became the deadliest sandspit on earth. It was dug up by spades and by high explosive, almost sunk by sheer weight of metal and human misery, fought for with a maximum of courage and technical capacity and a minimum of strategic understanding; a place of no real consequence, lying at the end of one of those insane chains of war-time logic in which men step from one undeniable truth to another and so come at last to a land of crippling nonsense.

The logic that brought the war to Morris Island was above reproach.

The war had begun at Charleston. To win the war the Federal power must take Charleston. It could reach the city only by water and to do that its ships must pass Fort Sumter, which mounted heavy guns. Therefore, Fort Sumter (where there was a score to settle anyway) had to be destroyed. To destroy Fort Sumter (the navy's ironclads by themselves being unable to do it) it was necessary for the Federals to plant powerful siege guns on the nearest dry land, which of course was Morris Island. But the Confederates had already built a stout fort on Morris Island,

three-quarters of a mile below the extreme northern tip—a construction of palmetto logs and sand bags, known as Battery Wagner, armed with one 10-inch Columbiad, half a dozen 32-pounders, and a few ordinary fieldpieces. No Federal siege guns could accomplish anything on Morris Island until this strong point had been silenced.
Therefore
—to win the war the Federals must capture Battery Wagner.

All of this had logical coherence, and yet it ended in sound and fury. Battery Wagner was at last taken, the Federal siege guns were installed, and Fort Sumter was pounded down to a heap of broken masonry in which guns could no longer be mounted, and so it could properly be said to have been destroyed; and when all of this had been done the Federals found that they were no closer to victory than when they began. Their best warships still could not get into the harbor, their infantry could not even set foot on the rock-pile that had once been Fort Sumter, the fabulous city where the dream of secession was born was slightly battered but still lovely, defiant, and unattainable—and months of desperate effort had not brought the war one glittering minute nearer to its end. The fighting died down, at last, and the army and navy fell into bitter argument about who was supposed to have been helping whom. (Was the army, all along, trying to take the forts so that the navy could take Charleston, or was the navy simply trying to help the army besiege and capture the forts?) All that had really been proved was that Charleston would fall when and if the Confederacy fell and not before.
¹