Upon the Altar of the Nation (46 page)

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Authors: Harry S. Stout

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In accusing Lincoln’s troops of unjust conduct, Davis was especially concerned that Lincoln, as commander in chief, refused to “disclaim having authorized them,” thus raising the haunting specter that such actions were approved at the highest levels of Union government. If this was the case, Davis averred, a price would be exacted: “I have, notwithstanding, refrained from the exercise of such retaliation, because of its obvious tendency to lead to a war of indiscriminate massacre on both sides, which would be a spectacle so shocking to humanity and so disgraceful to the age in which we live and the religion we profess that I cannot contemplate it without a feeling of horror that I am disinclined to doubt you would share.”
3
Significantly, Lincoln did not reply.
While correct that Lincoln had authored the hard-war policy on civilian populations, Davis could not substantiate the innocence he claimed; in fact, both armies were descending into an ethical gray zone. Davis did not raise the subject of “irregular” Confederate assaults on innocent civilians, nor the Partisan Ranger Act of April 1862, and for good reason. By this act, the Confederate government, in effect, legitimated guerrilla organizations and produced local heroes such as John Mosby, the “Grey Ghost” who terrorized Union soldiers in the Shenandoah Valley or Nathan Bedford Forrest, “the Wizard of the Saddle,” or John Hunt Morgan. But at least these were under orders and paid by the Confederate government. In the language of Lieber’s Code, they were partisans.
 
Meanwhile, an entirely different category of guerrillas arose: unsupervised “freebooters” and criminals who preyed on innocent populations at will. The most infamous was the former Ohio schoolteacher William Clarke Quantrill. Quantrill’s murderous band, bent on robbing and killing unarmed civilians, included Frank and Jesse James.
4
On the very day (August 21) that churches and armies fasted throughout the Confederacy, a dark event was playing itself out in “Bleeding Kansas.” Quantrill and his “rangers”—minus sixteen-year-old Jesse James, deemed too young by the gang—entered the “abolitionist” town of Lawrence, Kansas, with cold-blooded murder on their minds. As the rioters shouted, “Kill! Kill!” they rounded up the local population and killed 150 unarmed men and boys in a senseless display of wanton violence. They then torched the town, leaving it in ashes.
Northerners and Southerners condemned the attacks. One Northern account informed readers:
We learn from Leavenworth, Kansas, that a band of rebel guerrillas made a descent on Lawrence on the night of the 20th instant, murdered the inhabitants, and pillaged the town finally setting it on fire and destroying it.... The list of killed and wounded is said to number one hundred and eighty ... the loss at Lawrence, it is estimated, will amount to about two millions, which will fall heavily on New York as well as Lawrence merchants.
5
If anything, the Confederacy condemned the attack more than the Union. General Lee prevailed on President Davis to repeal the Ranger Act that gave “irregular” partisans liberty without discipline or order.
Northern commanders used the massacre as a rationale to ratchet up the war on the South to a more total form of war directed against civilians—enemies all—as well as armies in the field. Key Union commanders, including Grant, Sherman, Halleck, and Sheridan, had all experienced guerrilla opposition of a less murderous variety than seen in Lawrence, and one directed at soldiers, not innocent civilians. But they nevertheless lost whatever qualms they felt about civilian suffering in the aftermath of Quantrill’s raid and parallel “irregular” attacks on Union forces. From the experience of rebel guerrilla action, now expanded to include civilians in general, the “strategy of exhaustion” that marked the campaigns of 1864 and 1865 emerged.
In response to Lawrence, Federal forces now turned reciprocally vengeful in an escalating rain of horror on (mostly) innocent civilians. The turn to total war on civilians began with General Orders No. 11. These authorized Federal forces first to drive from their homes ten thousand Missouri citizens in suspected guerrilla territories that bordered Kansas, then commanded them to burn to the ground the homes of suspected abettors.
6
The orders were followed to the letter, leaving as many dead civilians in their wake as Quantrill had murdered. The Civil War’s version of “war crimes” had now moved into high gear.
Aware of public criticisms of total war, particularly emanating from the Democrats, Lincoln defended civilian suffering—short of massacre—as common to war. In a letter to James C. Conkling, his lawyer friend from early days, written on August 26, Lincoln summarized his view of a just war: “Civilized belligerents do all in their power to help themselves, or hurt the enemy, except a few things regarded as barbarous or cruel. Among the exceptions are the massacre of vanquished foes, and non-combatants, male and female.”
7
Besides taking the war more directly to civilians and the partisans hidden among them, Lincoln continued to defend his suspension of habeas corpus when dealing with disloyal and traitorous citizens. The decision was difficult, he conceded, and “I was slow to adopt the strong measures.” But military necessity required it:
Civil courts are organized chiefly for trials of individuals, or, at most, a few individuals acting in concert—and this in quiet times, and on charges of crimes well defined in the law.... Habeas corpus does not discharge men who are proved to be guilty of defined crime; and its suspension is allowed by the Constitution on purpose that men may be arrested and held who cannot be proved to be guilty of defined crime, “when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.” This is precisely our present case—case of rebellion wherein the public safety does require the suspension.
8
While the war escalated to new levels of civilian involvement, Confederate revivals soared and news of “the spirit of the Army” inspired civilians at home. As one writer observed, “The Southern army is in fact the Southern people. It contains the cream of chivalry, the patriotism, the physical stamina, and the moral worth of the land.”
9
As Lee’s badly mauled army licked its wounds, a recovered Confederate Army of Tennessee, under General Braxton Bragg, engaged General William Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland (supported by Ambrose Burnside) for a rematch, this time across the Tennessee River at Chattanooga.
Preliminary engagements on September 18, 1863, set the stage for a pitched battle the next day at Chickamauga, Tennessee, between Federal forces totaling sixty-two thousand and Confederate forces numbering sixty-five thousand.
10
With Longstreet present on loan from Lee, and avoiding offensive charges wherever possible, Confederate generals improved their chances. Instead of open-field charges, they chose densely wooded areas and swamps that maximized the advantage of local knowledge and allowed for little tactical control of units in the field. In large part because of the thick woods, neither the Southern nor the Northern commander knew exactly where either the enemy or his own units were.
For two hours, the Federal left commanded by General George Thomas held off heavy attacks with their unyielding defenses. But Longstreet was not to be denied. By exploiting a temporary gap in Federal lines, Longstreet’s trusted subordinate, General John Bell Hood, crashed through the lines, leaving the Union army dangerously divided.
In a monumental miscalculation—or loss of nerve—Rosecrans assumed his entire army had been destroyed and fled to Chattanooga, leaving Thomas and what was left of the Army of the Cumberland alone in the field to block Longstreet’s advance. One unwitting participant in Rosecrans’s retreat—a runaway slave named Thomas Cole—was picked up by Northern troops just in time to join the battle. In his later account, he recalled his first moments in battle assigned to support a cannon: “Finally they ... puts me to work helping with the cannons. I feels ‘portant then, but I didn’t know what was in front of me, or I ’spects I’d run off ’gain.”
Unable to run, Cole stayed for the first day’s fight, and afterward surveyed the horror of the dead and wounded, “blood running out them and the top or sides their heads gone, great big holes in them.” The next day was a rout: “The Rebels gins shooting and killing lots of our men, and General Woods ain’t come, so General Rosecrans orders us to ’treat and didn’t have to tell me what he said, neither. The Rebels comes after us, shooting, and we runs off and leaves that cannon what I was with setting on the hill, and I didn’t want that thing nohow. We kept hotfooting till we gits to Chattanooga, and there is where we stops.”
11
Abandoned by Rosecrans, Thomas, who never left a battlefield throughout the war and never lost a battle, held his position with scant ammunition and fixed bayonets until help arrived from the Army of the Kentucky. Thomas was not always the fastest commander in a fight, but his bulldog tenacity at Chickamauga earned him the moniker “The Rock of Chickamauga.”
In what was becoming a numbing ritual, both sides suffered 28 percent casualties, including four thousand killed. In tactical terms, Bragg’s plan worked and gave him a decided victory. But with no reserves to exploit Longstreet’s success, the strategic objective was lost. The North’s superior numbers grew yet larger. This would mark the last Confederate victory in the western theater. Meanwhile Thomas’s unbowed troops heaped acclaim on their fearless general.
Back in both the Union and the Confederate camps, recriminations flew in all directions. Lincoln thought Rosecrans “confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head” and relieved him of command, together with two of his commanders, for leaving the field while others fought.
12
Lincoln then created the Division of the Mississippi under the command of his new hero, U. S. Grant, and rewarded General Thomas with command of the Army of the Cumberland.
In the Confederacy, the already heavily criticized Bragg underwent the humiliation of a council of war with President Davis and his generals, where every subordinate commander urged Bragg’s dismissal. Lacking any viable alternative, and still close friends with Bragg, Davis turned a blind eye to reality and refused. One obvious replacement for Bragg was General Longstreet, but in a remarkable testimony to the power of generals to negotiate their fate, Longstreet declined, preferring a different command or a return to Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. Eventually Bragg would be relieved by General Joseph E. Johnston and reassigned to Richmond as a military adviser to Davis. But by then the damage was done, facilitated in no small measure by Davis’s inability to rise above friendships (and enmities) to make disinterested judgments.
13
 
As soon as the Federal soldiers garrisoned in Chattanooga were relieved of a possible Confederate siege, Grant went after Bragg’s ill-led army. General Halleck ordered General Hooker to seize control of the imposing Confederate defenses at Lookout Mountain, due south of Chattanooga. To most observers, the steep cliffs appeared impregnable. But in another of his mindless miscalculations, Bragg posted only two thousand soldiers on the mountain-top. With surprising ease, Hooker’s ten thousand men seized control of the mountain on November 24, in what later became known as the “Battle above the Clouds.”
The next day, General Thomas’s divisions attacked remaining Confederate strength at Missionary Ridge, Tennessee, and without orders, his troops spontaneously continued on shouting “Chickamauga! Chickamauga!” until the entire ridge was theirs. This unauthorized “soldier’s battle” effectively sealed the fate of the Confederacy in Chattanooga. With the vital communications center now in Federal hands, the stage was set for Sherman’s legendary march to the sea.
14
The “miracle of Missionary Ridge” was cheered by the Yankees and a nightmare for the Confederates. The retreating rebels seemed to have lost their nerve. How else to explain the almost uncontested abandonment of a strong fortified position? Bragg was done; Johnston would soon replace him. As 1863 drew to a close, the despondency of the South could find no solace save in the heart of their downtrodden army.
CHAPTER 28
“IN THAT IMMORTAL FIELD”
T
hough strategically inconclusive, and not the critical turning point that Antietam represented militarily and politically, Gettysburg stands in American memory as the greatest battle of the war and Pickett’s charge as the embodiment of noble sacrifice, North and South.
1
Just-war questions of proportionality were not raised then, or later. Instead, American memory of Pickett’s charge as a romantic turning point would be immortally captured in William Faulkner’s oft-cited musings from his novel
Intruder in the Dust:
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think
This time. Maybe this time
with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.

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