Penguin History of the United States of America (64 page)

Grant left Meade in command of the Army of the Potomac, but himself settled the strategic and tactical plans of campaign for dealing with Lee. He marched his men south in May 1864, disappearing with them into the thick green woods of Virginia, like so many Northern generals before him, and like them came to grief. In a series of battles (the Wilderness, 5-6 May; Spotsylvania Court House, 8 – 19 May; Cold Harbor, 3 – 11 June) he and Lee inflicted frightful punishment on each other’s armies: Union casualties were 55,000, Confederate, 40,000; and at the end of it Grant had neither destroyed the Army of Northern Virginia (his essential objective) nor taken Richmond. Instead he found himself laying siege to the Confederate capital from the south and east; while Lee’s army, though grievously reduced, was
securely entrenched on his front, with the vital railway lines that brought in supplies from the interior of the South quite out of reach. And Northern opinion shuddered at the length of Grant’s ‘butcher’s bill’.

Other Union generals had despaired when confronted with lesser difficulties; but Grant never despaired, and Lincoln backed him steadily, even when he was at fault. He had neglected the Shenandoah valley, down which so many surprise Confederate attacks had driven so often in the past; now Lee mounted one more. He sent General Jubal Early on a spectacular raid against Washington, followed by another into Pennsylvania, which produced panic in the federal capital and greatly damaged Lincoln’s chances of re-election. Grant retaliated by sending one of his most competent and pitiless generals, Phil Sheridan (1831 – 88), to devastate the valley, which was not only Early’s base but also one of Lee’s chief sources of supply. After he had finished Sheridan commented that if a crow now wanted to cross the valley he would have to carry rations. And though Lee and his men survived in their entrenchments at Petersburg, a few miles south of Richmond, they were also trapped. If Grant kept up the pressure, their defeat could only be a matter of time.

Yet once again the outlook for the Union in the late summer was as gloomy as it had been cheerful in the spring. A swelling chorus of discontent spoke of failing Northern morale. The Copperheads were more active and vociferous than ever. The Presidential election being at hand, the Democrats drafted an election platform which in effect conceded independence to the Confederacy, for it demanded an immediate armistice and made no mention of slavery. They nominated General McClellan for the Presidency: he accepted the nomination but rejected the platform. Nevertheless, a McClellan victory would probably mean victory for the platform too, since it would be read, probably correctly, as a popular repudiation of the war as well as of the war-making President; and at the end of August it seemed very likely to Lincoln that McClellan would win.

Then came the news that on 1 September Sherman had taken Atlanta, Georgia. His campaign had lasted all summer. He had fought his way down from the mountains to the edge of the Georgian plain only in the teeth of an intensely skilful retreat by Joe Johnston, who had kept his army effective and in being every inch of the way, and on the whole inflicted more damage than he had received. But Johnston’s Fabian tactics were deeply resented by Jefferson Davis, for they were allowing the Yankees to get at the untouched heart of the Confederacy. When Sherman reached the outskirts of Atlanta the President lost patience and replaced Johnston by General John B. Hood, who had been intriguing against his commander for months. It was a fatal choice. Hood had some virtues, but common sense was not one of them. To save Atlanta he launched a series of vigorous attacks which only weakened his army. He was able to delay the inevitable for a few weeks more, but at the end of August had to abandon the place after destroying his supply dumps there. This loss was serious enough on its own, for Atlanta was a
centre of communications and of the South’s infant industrial production. What was worse, its fall gave just that fillip to Northern morale which was needed. Abraham Lincoln was re-elected by a landslide. Worst of all, Georgia was laid open to Sherman’s army.

He waited for some time, considering what to do. His line of communication with his base at Chattanooga and Nashville was already dangerously long and was threatened by Confederate cavalry raiders under the brilliant leader Bedford Forrest. To move forward through hostile country and protect his communications at the same time was, Sherman decided, beyond his strength. To stay where he was, in Atlanta, was to condemn himself to impotence. Boldly, he decided to cut loose from his base and march through Georgia to the Atlantic, living off the country. He knew that the South was so weakened that he would be unlikely to meet any very formidable resistance; but he had insight enough to see that there was another, crueller, stronger reason for such a campaign. If he cut a trail of scorched earth through the Southern heartland it would be a fatal blow to Confederate strength and morale. The rebels would discover their total impotence and accept that their defeat was certain. Before long they would surrender. He resolved to ‘make Georgia howl’. As soon as Lincoln was safely re-elected, Sherman disappeared. Burning everything of military value in Atlanta so that it would be of no use to the enemy, he marched off to the sea.

He had the easiest possible passage. Hood knew as well as Sherman that he could offer no effective resistance to the march; but he thought he might counter it by striking at Sherman’s base at Nashville. If he succeeded there, he said boastfully, he would march on Ohio. This decision would have had little to recommend it, even if Sherman had left Nashville undefended, since he clearly thought he was now independent of his communications: if he was right, the loss of the city would make little difference to him. But Nashville was far from undefended. Hood staked one of the last two Southern armies there, and lost his gamble: he was utterly defeated by General George H. Thomas (1816 – 70), a Unionist Virginian who had never before had quite such a splendid opportunity to show what he could do. His demonstration now was absolutely convincing. As Bruce Catton says, at the Battle of Nashville (15 – 16 December 1864), ‘for the one and only time in all the war, a Confederate army [was] totally routed on the field of battle’.
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Next month Hood was relieved at his own request, and the fragments of his army were sent to do what little they could against the triumphant Sherman.

That commander had reached the sea and taken Savannah, as a Christmas present for Abraham Lincoln, on 21 December. His month of invisibility had stirred considerable anxiety in the North, but it had been a strategic triumph. Behind him lay a swath, some fifty miles wide by 250 miles long, of burned-out mansions, liberated slaves, devastated fields, wrecked railway
lines and despairing white civilians. He had also picked the country clean of livestock and provisions. Georgia was finished. Now it was South Carolina’s turn: at last the proud Palmetto state, which had been the heart and centre of the rebellion, would receive her punishment. The trail of destruction turned north; and Sherman continued to display his mastery of war. He outwitted his opponents (Johnston and Beauregard were only two of the generals now gathered against him) as well as outfighting them; he bypassed Charleston, which fell all the same, and seized the state capital, Columbia, on 17 February 1865. That night half the town burned to the ground, in fires that were lit accidentally-on-purpose by drunken, vengeful Northern soldiers (Sherman got the blame, though it was quite untrue that, as alleged, he had ordered the arson). As spring began the army turned towards North Carolina and Virginia, to rendezvous with Grant at Richmond.

Before it got there, however, the war was over.

On 31 March Grant launched his long-prepared offensive against Lee’s lines at Petersburg.
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Lee was now so weakened that he could offer no effective resistance. By this time even his devoted soldiers were despairing. There were so few of them left, and under Grant’s inexorable pressure of men and guns they had to stretch their lines ever thinner. They were dressed in rags, barefoot, underfed and dangerously short of ammunition. And what was there left to fight for? The Cause was petering out in bitter squabbles between the political leaders, each blaming anyone but himself for the débâcle. It was, said the soldiers, ‘a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight’. It had taken them a long time to realize it; and the rich men had already lost not only the war, but the thing for which they had launched it. In the North, thanks in large part to strong pressure by the administration, Congress had finally passed the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery for ever, and sent it to the states for ratification. In the South, Jefferson Davis, as a last desperate measure to raise new manpower, had induced the Confederate Congress to give freedom to any slave who enlisted in the army. Slavery was dead, and the Confederacy almost so. And now Sheridan turned Lee’s flank, while Grant destroyed his centre. On 2 April Richmond had to be evacuated. Jefferson Davis and the government fled south-west; Lee began a desperate march to the west, hoping to get beyond the Federal pursuit so that he could turn south and link up with Joe Johnston.

The President of the states so soon to be re-united was waiting for the finish behind the federal lines. He could not quite believe that he was witnessing it. Only a month earlier, as he took the oath of office for the second time, he had seemed oppressed with the idea that all might still be far from over.

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

Now it seemed that the Lord had at last relented. Peace was at hand, slavery was dead, a Freedmen’s Bureau had just been set up to help the former bondsmen, and the Union was about to be restored. To realize all this, and to demonstrate it too, Lincoln went to visit fallen Richmond on 4 April. He landed at the waterside almost unattended, and was instantly recognized and surrounded by a huge, happy crowd of rejoicing blacks, anxious to hail the Messiah come to free his children from their bondage, anxious to look at last on the spring of life, they said, after years in the desert without water; or rather, anxious no more: ‘I know I am free,’ cried one woman, ‘for I have seen Father Abraham and felt him.’ They burst into a hymn:

Oh, all ye people clap your hands,

And with triumphant voices sing;

No force the mighty power withstands

Of God the universal King.

It was a long time before Lincoln was able to walk through the crowd to the Confederate White House and sit in Jefferson Davis’s chair. When he went back to his ship he was escorted by a troop of black cavalry. Perhaps by then he and all the people of Richmond believed in the great victory.

Meanwhile Robert E. Lee was finding it impossible to stage an organized retreat. So complete was the collapse of the Confederacy that supplies could not be got to the soldiers: some went four days without rations. Desertions multiplied: for months now they had been so numerous that he had not been able to spare troops to bring back the runaways. Now men simply fell out on the road west. Grant’s pursuing army found something new: rifles abandoned at the roadside.

Grant was behind; Sheridan, in front. One more battle might be glorious, but would end in annihilation. Instead of ordering a useless sacrifice, Lee decided to surrender. On 9 April 1865 he met Grant at Appomattox Court House, a country crossroads in the forest, and handed over his sword.

It was one of the great symbolic moments of American history. Grant, to his annoyance and subsequent embarrassment, by accident had no clean uniform to put on; so it was in his usual scruffy attire that he received Lee, resplendent in grey coat and soft leather. They quickly agreed on terms. Lee did not want a guerrilla resistance, which would have poisoned the American future indefinitely. Grant wanted to ease the return of the rebels to citizenship as much as possible. The Southern soldiers were to lay down
their arms and disperse to their homes; Lee’s request that they might keep their horses to help in the spring ploughing was acceded to, and Grant (living up to his name) gave them an issue of rations. Above all, he gave his word that all the members of that army, from Lee downwards, would be left alone by federal authority so long as they kept to the terms of their parole. Grant knew that he was acting as the President would wish. Nothing must be done to add to the bitterness of defeat; all means must be tried to reconcile the Southerners to being Americans again.

A few weeks more, and Joe Johnston and everyone else had surrendered. The last hostilities of the war, curiously, took place in the North Pacific, where Union and Confederate fishing vessels fought each other until at last the great news reached them. By July the Civil War was entirely over. Roughly 359,000 Union soldiers, 258,000 Confederates, had died either on the battlefield or in military hospitals, which means that it was and is the bloodiest war in American history in terms of absolute numbers as well as in the proportion of casualties to the population. It left indelible traces on the American consciousness. It is very understandable that the soldiers of both sides hurried home and tried to put it behind them. The Union army held a great victory parade in Washington before dispersing. Jefferson Davis began an irksome captivity in Fort Monroe. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

We have the right to treat them as we would any other provinces that we might conquer.

US Representative Thaddeus Stevens, January 1863

What’s the use of being free if you don’t own enough land to be buried in?

Freedman to Whitelaw Reid, 1865

Our main and fundamental objective is the
MAINTENANCE OF THE SUPREMACY OF THE WHITE RACE
in this Republic. History and Physiology teach us that we belong to a race which nature has endowed with an evident superiority over all other races, and that the Maker, in thus elevating us above the common standard of human creation, has intended to give us over inferior races a dominion from which no human laws can permanently derogate.