Upon the Altar of the Nation (35 page)

With these orders, issued at the highest level, the war now descended directly upon the homes, farms, and lives of Southern civilians. Clearly any war on civilian populations rendered questions of just conduct acute in the minds of those responsible for setting orders in motion and the soldiers who would carry them out. Where were the answers? Incredibly, there existed no English-language handbook on the code of war. When asked how soldiers had been guided in the Mexican War, Winfield Scott had to concede that they operated only from an “unwritten code.” In December 1862, with emancipation and total war looming, Lincoln commissioned a board to draw up, for the first time, a code of just conduct in time of war. The only civilian on the board, Francis Lieber, turned out to be the chief architect and author of the resulting code.

Lieber had personal and intellectual interests in the project that made him ideally suited for the task at hand. Despite spending sixteen years teaching in South Carolina before moving north to the Columbia Law faculty, Lieber had no sympathy with either secession or slavery. His experience as a young German soldier fighting at Waterloo convinced him that states required strong central governments to rein in secessionist impulses. In his view, the Union must be preserved. But also weighing on his personal positions was the fact that all three of his sons were fighting in the Civil War. Hamilton Lieber fought for the Union and lost an arm at the battle of Fort Donelson. Norman Lieber, also a Union soldier, fought against his rebel brother, Oscar Lieber, at the battle of Williamsburg (May 1862), where Oscar was killed, cursing his father and the North as he lay dying.

Lieber completed his work in April 1863, noting in a letter to Henry Halleck, “I had no guide, no groundwork no textbook.... Usage, history, reason, and conscientiousness, and a sincere love of truth, justice, and civilization have been my guides.” Lincoln approved the document immediately and distributed it to his commanders as General Orders No. 100.

The manifest object of Lieber’s Code was to limit the abuses of total war described generally as “savagery.” The reason for laws of war, Lieber recognized, was moral: “Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God.” Offenses of “wanton violence against persons in the invaded country,” wrote Lieber, “all destruction of property not commanded by the authorized officer, all robbery, all pillage or sacking, even after taking a place by main force, all rape, wounding, maiming, or killing of such inhabitants, are prohibited under the penalty of death, or such other severe punishment as may seem adequate for the gravity of the offense.” While conceding that “the citizen or native of a hostile country is thus an enemy ... and as such is subjected to the hardships of war,” it was also advisable that “the unarmed citizen is to be spared in person, property, and honor as much as the exigencies of war will admit.”
¹

But all this attempt at humane treatment was undermined by the higher duty to win the struggle no matter what the cost. By identifying the national cause with the war and valuing the survival of the nation over all competing considerations, anything could ultimately be justified under the rubric of what Lieber termed “military necessity”:

What Lieber contributed to restraint under the duty of humane treatment and protection of private life on the one hand, he removed with the other as “military necessity” Lieber’s Code effectively gave commanders a blank check for operations in the field. As the ethicist James Turner Johnson recognizes: “Where the difference between private and public is hard to discern, or where the aims of war are so broadly defined as to do away with that difference, then it is difficult to see how Lieber’s argument for protection of noncombatants can have any restraining force at all.”
²
Lincoln could not have asked for any more.

“Military necessity” supplied the moral cloak permitting war on civilian populations. In effect, civilians were transformed from “noncombatants” to “the enemy” of the nation state. The code protected American officers and soldiers from virtually any reprisal. While a few soldiers were tried and executed for rape during the war, there would be no trials for destruction of civilian property or lives.
³

Union generals showed scant interest in the code and soldiers none. Confederates probably studied it more closely for its vagueness in preventing “retaliation” or revenge on enemies and its wide-open definition of “military necessity” that, if necessary enough, could justify just about anything. But Lieber’s Code gave Lincoln and his generals what they needed as they contemplated a new war that would deliberately invade civilian lives and properties.

 

Besides a liberal code of military conduct, Lincoln desperately needed his own Lee or Jackson to win major battles in the East, where voters and the media were concentrated. Lieber’s Code would mean little if there were no commanders willing and able to implement crushing overland campaigns with strategic sensibilities. Already Democrats had seized on unprecedented carnage and unfulfilled war goals to make sizable inroads in state and Federal midterm elections. Without victories, Lincoln stood no chance of reelection, and without great warrior generals there would be no victories.

McClellan was not such a general, and on October 1, 1862, an angry Lincoln visited McClellan in the field and again expressed his frustrations over McClellan’s failure to pursue Lee’s retreating army. When McClellan continued to pursue the cautious path of limited war instead of crossing the Potomac while the November roads were still passable, Lincoln once again relieved McClellan of his command on November 5, and replaced him with Major General Ambrose Burnside.

On paper, Burnside looked good. An 1847 graduate of West Point and a veteran of the Mexican and Indian wars, he had resigned from the army to form a business manufacturing firearms and had invented the breech-loading rifle. But his performance in commanding massive and complex armies in the field, where outcomes were determined by contingency and improvisation, was untested. He twice refused offers to command the Army of the Potomac, and his listless performance at Antietam, when he let Lee escape, suggests that he knew himself better than Lincoln did. But Lincoln could not stick with McClellan. The only other possible candidate, Joseph Hooker, was widely disliked by his fellow officers. So Burnside reluctantly took command of the most powerful army on the continent, if not in the world.

In the next six weeks, Burnside confirmed his inability to command a large army with stunning finality.
⁴
Instead of decisively moving his massive army of 122,000 south to strike Lee’s divided army on their unprotected wings and destroy them in detail, Burnside shifted his lines east and confronted Lee’s army at the hilly town of Fredericksburg, fifty miles north of Richmond alongside the Rappahannock River. The ground behind the town was ideal for strategic defensive placements, as it rose high in the air, peaking in an area known as Marye’s Heights. Soldiers could lie six deep in a sunken road behind the stone wall, creating a virtually impenetrable barrier that, with artillery behind, could withstand any frontal assault.

And frontal assault was exactly what Burnside planned.
⁵
On a chilly Saturday, December 13, just as the morning fog gave way to startling sunlight, Confederate defenders, heavily fortified with artillery of their own, watched the oncoming Army of the Potomac with awed anticipation. Thousands of Yankees with battle flags streaming marched rank upon rank up the hill in a desperate bid to dislodge Confederate defenders from their nearly perfect defenses.

The assault was hopeless. Despite heroic charges by Burnside’s divisions, Longstreet’s line held and repulsed the Federals. None even made it to the stone wall. With inestimable bravery, if not wisdom, Federals continued to charge until nightfall, leaving behind a field stacked three deep in casualties. Finally, after fourteen separate brigade-size attacks, the Federals retreated, leaving piles of their dead in front of the stone wall.

Still unable to accept the full horror of his failed assaults, Burnside contemplated renewed assaults the next day. His officers persuaded him to revoke the orders. On the other side, Lee wisely resisted the temptation to carry a counteroffensive into well-entrenched Federal artillery aching for a payback, and held his soldiers back. The ratio of losses between North and South ranked Fredericksburg among the most one-sided battles in the war: in all, Burnside lost 12,600 men to Lee’s 5,300.

Bombardment and capture of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Despite the fact that General Ambrose Burnside (seated on his noble steed) and his Federals lost miserably at Fredericksburg, Currier & Ives chose to portray a heroic victory for Northerners on the home front.

 

Only in the gruesome aftermath would common soldiers recognize the slaughter they had wreaked upon each other. Fredericksburg itself was destroyed, though most of the civilians had escaped before the battle. The night after the battle, screams punctuated the dark as wounded men pleaded for assistance.

The dead received no respect. For Confederate forces, undersupplied and bitterly cold, the temptation to ransack Federal dead for clothing, shoes, and food proved irresistible. Starlight brought with it the haunting landscape of pale naked Yankee corpses lying in frozen suspended animation before the stone wall. They looked, one soldier later recalled, “like hogs that had been cleaned.”
⁶
A disbelieving Robert E. Lee looked at the carnage and muttered the famous words, “It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it.”
⁷

Private John E. Anderson arrived at Fredericksburg from Belle Isle Prison the day after the battle to rejoin his unit, only to find them decimated: “Thomas Plunkett has lost both arms. Hugh Gallagher has lost a finger. The rest are dead or on detached duty at the hospital.... I see many new faces, and look in vain for any of the old ones.”
⁸

After initial reports of a stunning Federal triumph, Lincoln and the War Department in Washington soon learned otherwise and were aghast at the enormity of the defeat. Besides the military setback, the political ramifications were devastating. Northern morale would plummet, and political support for the war and the party that fought it would drop still further.

To minimize the damage, Burnside imposed an immediate gag on the press, blocking all access to the telegraph wires and forbidding anyone—especially reporters—from leaving the scene of the battle. For several days, the North stood in ignorance both as to the scope of the defeat and the names of the casualties.

The same was not true in the South, where commentators mocked the stupidity of Union commanders. One writer expressed the general opinion that:

When word of the extent of defeat finally reached the Northern public, fury was unleashed both on Union commanders and on the press for supposedly suppressing the tragic news. The press immediately exonerated themselves, leaving the commanders to absorb the full rage of public sentiment. According to Murat Halstead, editor of the
Cincinnati Commercial
, who had earlier accused Sherman of being “gone in the head,” Burnside was even worse:

While pro-Republican papers like the
New York Tribune
or
Chicago Tribune
tried to minimize the disaster, opposition papers—most notably the
New York Herald
—had a field day criticizing the War Department and General Burnside. Burnside was so incensed by the blistering account registered by William Swinton in the
New York Times
that he summoned him into his tent and threatened to shoot him.