Upon the Altar of the Nation (26 page)

In April 1862 the Presbyterian minister Robert Dabney resigned his Richmond pulpit and his professorship at Union Theological Seminary in order to accept an offer from Stonewall Jackson to serve as chief of staff of his army. Dabney’s motives, unlike those of the secular press, were religious and patriotic. In a letter to the board he confessed:

Dabney’s forthright behavior typified the responses of many ministers, even if few enlisted for combat.

 

Though unable to take Richmond, General McClellan was unwilling to deviate from the limiting goals of the West Point Code, taking the moral high ground of honorable victory with minimal casualties. In a June 23 letter to his wife, Mary Ellen, written from his headquarters at Harrison’s Landing, McClellan confessed: “[E]very poor fellow that is killed or wounded almost haunts me! My only consolation is that I have honestly done my best to save as many lives as possible [and] that many others might have done less towards it.”
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If John Moncure Daniel blistered President Davis for his religious softness, General McClellan condemned his commander and chief for his religious harshness. Shortly after the Seven Days’ Battles, McClellan, by then well aware of Lincoln’s taste for blood and the country’s broad base of support for such a war, urged restraint and respect for the innocents. McClellan objected to a strategy of total war in terms of both military casualties (proportionality) and civilian suffering (discrimination).

In a letter on July 7 to Lincoln written from his headquarters at Harrison’s Landing, McClellan insisted that “our cause must never be abandoned.” Nevertheless, there needed to be clearly articulated rules of engagement for armies in the field because “this rebellion has assumed the character of war.” This meant that the Confederates had to be treated less as criminals or rioters than as citizens and soldiers of a hostile state in which the conduct of war would be governed by the international rules of engagement.

As commander in chief, Lincoln was responsible for determining such “a civil and military policy,” and, in McClellan’s view, that policy should invoke the highest principles to ensure the speediest and most amiable reconciliation:

To achieve victory, McClellan urged Lincoln to appoint a commander in chief of the army and, in not very subtle terms, implied that he might be just the man. God was never far from McClellan’s thoughts and he closed the letter: “I may be on the brink of eternity and as I hope for forgiveness from my maker I have written this letter with sincerity towards you and from love for my country.”
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For all its nobility, McClellan’s West Point Code did not extend to slaves. But equally tragic, few voices were willing or able to pick up McClellan’s call for a war of “highest principles.” When Northern Democrats echoed McClellan’s theme, the bedrock of their appeal lay less in “Christian civilization” for all than in a white Christian civilization, grounded in both North and South upon the central cultural principle of white supremacy and the politics of apartheid.
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Two days after receiving McClellan’s letter, a frustrated and disappointed Lincoln paid a personal visit to the general at his headquarters. When forced to choose between a principled war and victory, Lincoln chose victory. He removed McClellan from command, appointing Henry Halleck general in chief of the army, with headquarters in Washington. Lincoln then brought fiery General John Pope from the West to command the armies of John C. Frémont, Irvin McDowell, and Nathaniel P. Banks in the new Army of Virginia, and ordered McClellan to withdraw his army from the Peninsula and join Pope. After spending three weeks in Washington, D.C., with Lincoln and Stanton, Pope clearly understood the new course his commander wanted him to take. In a word, escalation—a war that would unavoidably carry deep into the lap of the enemy, impacting civilians as well as soldiers.

Pope immediately alienated his own troops and McClellan in an impudent address to the soldiers of the eastern army: “Let us understand each other. I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies.” Having thus humiliated the eastern soldiers, he went on to describe the kind of war he favored. Not surprising for a tough talker, he chose the tactical offensive:

McClellan protested Pope’s appointment in vain. In a letter to his wife on August 8, he reflected on Pope’s reputation for cruelty and confided that if he were still commander, he would “give directly the reverse instructions to my army—forbid all pillaging and stealing and take the highest Christian ground for the conduct of the war—let the Govt [i.e., Lincoln] gainsay it if
they dare.”
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McClellan was not heeded (losing generals seldom are), and “the highest Christian ground” was lost forever.

T
he summer of 1862 would mark the end of the West Point Code. As the fact of nearly unanimous Southern belligerence became undeniable, Lincoln came to understand, in advance of most of his generals, that if his aim of preserving the Union was to be achieved, the war would have to be escalated to a total war on both citizens and soldiers. And that meant unavoidably a war that no longer exempted civilian suffering.
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When Unionists in New Orleans protested Lincoln’s war policy he replied:

In the early period of the Civil War, instances existed of “hard” war, to be sure. Even assaults on innocent civilians occurred. These, as we have seen, appeared especially in the Missouri territories, where civilian bushwhackers plundered and killed at will on both sides of the conflict. But these were not officially sanctioned acts by armies in the field; they were more like mob rioters and criminals, repudiated by both Presidents Lincoln and Davis. Indeed, Federal soldiers in Missouri served, in part, specifically to stop the terrorist war on civilians.
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No one in 1861 or 1862 could imagine that such acts of civilian barbarism would become paradigmatic for an invading army commanded by West Point graduates and a president who began with a conciliatory strategy.
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President Davis faced similar challenges in the Confederacy and met them with similar responses. Wherever he could wage a total war he would, and he too would leave no card unplayed, including, most ominously, guerrilla warfare in the event his armies were defeated. Earlier than Lincoln’s proclamation of September 24, he suspended writs of habeas corpus. And, like Lincoln, his actions met with strident opposition in state governments. But he, like Lincoln, recognized that the cause required draconian measures.
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Sadly for Davis, he was in no position to mount a hard overland campaign into the North. By spring 1862, with crushing defeats at Forts Henry and Donelson, Pea Ridge, Shiloh, Corinth, New Orleans, and Memphis, he was approaching a physical and mental breakdown. More bad news came from the newly created Trans-Mississippi Department, where his new commander, Major General Thomas C. Hindman, abruptly declared martial law, alienating the local population and his own officers. On top of everything else, Davis’s poor judgment of men came to the fore when he replaced Hindman and appointed Theophilus H. Holmes, his incompetent friend and West Point classmate, as the new commander of the Trans-Mississippi Department.
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Faced with his own embarrassing defeats and unimaginable losses at First Bull Run, Shiloh, and the Seven Days’, Lincoln and his Northern commanders came to the shared understanding that limited war would not work. With reluctance, but before most others, Lincoln abandoned his earlier presumption of a strong corps of nonslaveholding, small yeomen Unionists in the Confederacy. Like it or not, the Confederacy looked like a nation, thought like a nation, and fought like a nation. Lincoln could call them “rebels” as much as he wanted (and he never thought about them in any other terms), but nothing short of total war could break their will to fight and coerce them back into an abolitionist Union they despised.
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Total war meant a war that would put civilians immediately at risk. Total war to transform society meant conquest and occupation by a president who, in 1848, had vigorously protested the Mexican War because, in his own words, it was a “war of conquest” that “places our President where kings have always stood.”
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A mere fourteen years later, Lincoln was placing himself in a similar position for a different cause.

 

The conventional dating of the beginning of total war is usually marked by President Lincoln’s appointment of General Grant as commander of the Federal armies, and the subsequent appointments of Sherman and Philip Sheridan to key commands in 1864. The decision itself actually came earlier, in July and August 1862, at the same time Lincoln was drafting his Emancipation Proclamation. It was made not by commanding generals, but by their commander in chief, President Lincoln.

In his brief tenure as commander of the Army of the Potomac, Major General John Pope, with Lincoln’s approval, passed general orders directing the Army of the Potomac to live off the land (General Orders No. 5) and requiring that “all villages and neighborhoods through which they pass will be laid under contribution.”
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Lincoln allowed his military champion a free hand to wage war. Between July 18 and 23, 1862, Pope ordered the punishment of civilians—including the destruction of their homes and the forced payment of indemnities—living in areas where his army suffered the effects of guerrilla warfare or sabotage. Since any citizen could be a guerrilla, the Union army effectively carried a blank check to deal with civilians as they pleased, short of rape or murder.

The effects of Pope’s orders were predictable. Soldiers on both sides and civilians in occupied areas reported widespread marauding and cruel destruction. No one was immune from Pope’s concept of total war. Writing from Corinth, Mississippi, where he was stationed with the Ninth Brigade, Twelfth Illinois, Private A. W. Bill described the new license afforded by General Orders No. 5:

In New Orleans General Benjamin Butler, the Federal military governor, ruled the city with an iron fist that gave no succor to civilians and earned him the sobriquet “Beast” Butler. Already an incompetent (political) general who lost battles, he knew how to alienate. In May 1862 Butler had issued an order that any woman caught insulting Northern soldiers “shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.” Butler later had a civilian named William B. Mumford publicly hanged for pulling down a United States flag.

In response, an outraged President Davis issued a general order declaring “the said Benjamin F. Butler to be a felon deserving of capital punishment.... I do order that he be ... considered... an outlaw and common enemy of mankind, and that in the event of his capture the officer in command of the capturing force do cause him to be immediately executed by hanging.” Beyond Butler, Davis also declared all commissioned officers in Butler’s command outlaws and “criminals deserving death, and that they and each of them be, whenever captured, reserved for execution.”
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Predictably, Davis’s General Order did little more than render Butler a hero in the North.

Few Republicans or soldiers objected to the new rules of war. But some voices were heard. C. C. Coffin, a correspondent for the
Boston Journal,
wrote a letter to Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts from Hilton Head, South Carolina, marked “private and confidential.” In it he wrote: “I am sorry to say that the Mass. 24th has been acting outrageously here, robbing, burning houses, killing cattle, etc.—ravishing negro women—beating their husbands who attempted protection.”
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