Upon the Altar of the Nation (73 page)

So what cannot be judged? Not what, but
who.
God cannot be judged or contained in human categories. “The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.” This was not the Puritans’ God or the abolitionists’ God. Their God answered the prayers of the righteous and granted them victory. They had the jeremiad to prove it. And God was bound by its rhetoric to deliver His chosen people.

Lincoln, however, bowed to a different God. Lincoln’s God was more inscrutable. Quoting Jesus, Lincoln condemned both sides: “Woe unto the world because of offences!” Both sides offended God because both sides were implicated in the sin of slavery—a point Lincoln made repeatedly on other occasions. What if slavery was one of those offenses that required horrendous penalties for everyone? And what if God’s judgment fell equally on both sides, even though only one human agency actually caused the war? How could anyone in the South
or
the North complain? If God “gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?” Any self-respecting Christian knew that the answer to this was of course not. So in place of self-righteous assurance, the best Americans could do was hope:

Earlier, Lincoln had had little good to say about the black race, even as he had condemned slavery vociferously. But in this address,
Lincoln’s
jeremiad, only the blacks escaped the judgments of the Lord. They, after all, had already been judged by white Americans, North and South.

Implicit in everything Lincoln said was the presumption that, as horrific as the war was, it would eventually cease, because this same inscrutable God had unmistakably destined America to be his last best hope. So, when that ecstatic moment came, how ought the victors to respond? This was the answer everyone was waiting for—the denouement of a short but incredibly powerful peroration. Here, on this most pressing issue, Lincoln offered up his greatest surprise. In place of pride and revenge, he could only say:

Clearly the Second Inaugural stands with the Gettysburg Address as America’s greatest sermons.
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But what grants it its enduring power is the fact that it was also his sermon to the world. Peace—an honorable peace—was not only America’s destiny for itself but its burden for the world. Lincoln’s Christlike “malice toward none” applied not only to Americans but to human beings everywhere. Everywhere. Lincoln’s mandated universality set him apart from other national leaders promoting their nationalism as an end in itself.

“With all nations.” The last three words of this great speech were the greatest, for they incarnated an enduring civil religion of America the Redeemer Nation. At the same time, they ordained its prophet, soon to become its martyred messiah. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural provided the interpretive and mythic context that not only explained America to itself but also explained America to the world. And because of America’s sheer power, stunningly apparent in 1865, that world had to pay attention.

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural realized muted praise in the Northern press. Republican radicals in Congress, led by Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, resented the irenic tone of Lincoln’s address and, instead, pledged “no mercy” on the “conquered provinces.” Lincoln himself was aware that his speech would not make him popular. In a letter to New York’s politico Thurlow Weed, he wrote:

In the Northern religious press, supposedly conscious of a “God governing the world,” Lincoln’s inauguration was also ignored. The real center of news at the inauguration was Vice President Johnson’s intoxication: “Drunkenness in High Places ... the grief, surprise and shame we feel at this development, cannot be put in words.”
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In like fashion, the
New York Observer
passed over Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, reprinting it with no commentary, and focused instead on Johnson’s intoxication: “The facts are sufficiently distressing in themselves, but they are less so than the silence, or gentleness of rebuke, with which the political papers favorable to Johnson’s election, treat this great national calamity.” Then, in an ironically prophetic afterthought: “When we contemplate the relations in which Mr. Johnson stands to the chief magistracy, and that already in our brief political history two presidents have died in office ... we are appalled by the contingency that may suddenly transfer to the Presidency a man of such infirmity.”
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With Columbia and Charleston in smoke and rubble behind him, Sherman turned his troops to the north. As he moved on to North Carolina, it was clear (much to Jefferson Davis’s frustration) that General Johnston was in no shape either to block Sherman or to come to Lee’s defense. But there would be one last try. Sherman moved his two-winged juggernaut toward Goldsboro, North Carolina. Meanwhile, Johnston learned that the wings were far enough apart possibly to concentrate his seventeen-thousand-man army on Sherman’s left wing near Bentonville.

The fighting broke out on March 19 and caught the Yankees by surprise. After some initial gains, however, Johnston could not overrun the exposed wing. Once again he had to break off the attack, as Sherman’s army recovered and marched in overwhelming force on the hopelessly outnumbered rebels. Unlike Grant—or perhaps learning from him—Sherman was unwilling to engage a costly frontal assault on Johnston. Besides, his army was tired and undersupplied. Instead of pursuing Johnston, Sherman allowed him to retreat, saving Union energies for a move into Virginia and the destruction of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. While food was plenteous, shoes and uniforms were not. By March Sherman’s Federals resembled Confederates: smoke-black faces, dirty and ragged clothes, and many bootless feet wrapped in cloth.

Moving through North Carolina, Sherman’s forces did not replicate the wholesale pillaging that drove them in South Carolina. But looting continued, as did the persecution of slaves. African Americans soon learned that Union soldiers, especially those from the West, were no abolitionists; indeed they were outright racists. As in South Carolina, soldiers routinely plundered slave lodgings for food, clothing, and what few belongings the slaves possessed. Instances of racial assault continued even as Sherman made plain his determination to rid himself of freedmen following in his army’s wake.

Sherman’s strategy of demoralization through direct civilian suffering backfired in the areas most affected. Hatreds grew that would never dissipate. It was not the killing that bothered so many rebels—that was an accepted part of the vagaries of warfare—it was the pillage of civilian property. In particular, the women would not forget. Even more than soldiers in the field, their memories were seared and would find no absolution. In their defiance, the “Religion of the Lost Cause” would be born.
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The writer Cornelia Spencer of North Carolina confirmed that hatred for the Yankees did not emerge from the battlefield, heartbreaking as the killing fields were, but by “acts of indiscriminate and licensed pillage which were more to be deprecated than any consequence of the blood shed in fair and open fight during the war.”
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Triumphant Northern statesmen and generals would rewrite the moral economy of war so that civilian suffering was “just.” But they could not rewrite the rules in the minds of the victims. All might be fair in war, but this war had gotten very dirty.

By March 25, the railroad link from Goldsboro to New Bern was complete, allowing Sherman to resurface from the journey into darkness and reunite with the army of General Schofield and General Alfred Howe Terry. Immediately he began thinking of moving north to join Grant at Richmond. To that end, he boarded a train for Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia, to persuade his commander to wait until his army could join Grant at Richmond.

But Grant had other things on his mind, including a strategic meeting with Lincoln aboard the
River Queen
on March 27 and 28. By all accounts, Sherman and Lincoln dominated the conversations, with Grant listening closely. Lincoln needed assurances that Lee could never join up with Johnston, which Sherman provided. Both generals assured Lincoln “that one or the other of us would have to fight one more bloody battle, and that it would be the last.” With that Lincoln responded “that there had been blood enough shed, and asked us if another battle could not be avoided.”

Then Lincoln talked about the looming peace, stressing his desire to reunite the country as peacefully as possible with a minimum of revenge or retribution. He hoped Davis would flee the country, and “all he wanted of us,” Sherman would later write, “was to defeat the opposing armies, and to get the men composing the Confederate armies back to their homes, at work on their farms and in their shops.”
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All realized that the greatest threat to peace would be a guerrilla war that could go on indefinitely. With Missouri as a microcosm for the nation, that was a scenario to be avoided at all costs.

When not meeting with Lincoln, Sherman again attempted to persuade Grant to postpone his movement on Lee until Sherman and his army could share in the sweet and long-awaited victory. But Grant was not persuadable. Practical considerations and issues of pride dominated Grant’s decision. After years of inconclusive engagements with Lee he wanted the Army of the Potomac to beat Lee on its own. Were Sherman to join him for a shared victory, the “westerners” would take the credit for doing what Grant alone had not been able to accomplish, and the whole affair would become politicized.
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Besides, he did not need Sherman’s help.

 

Lee’s only hope was to break free from his entrenchments in Petersburg and attempt to link up with Johnston’s forces in North Carolina. But with Sherman now closing in from the south, it was a long shot indeed. Lee remained in his fortified lines as long as he could, hoping for a miracle. One thing was now certain: Richmond would have to be abandoned. The only question was when. In late February he wrote a note of foreboding and faith to his wife in which he conceded:

Lee understood perfectly that Grant’s intent “is now to starve us out,” but as long as farmers remained patriotic, that was not likely. Throughout, Lee’s faith in the people had remained strong, and they had reciprocated with a blind faith of their own. All were willing to do their duty in a losing cause if only to ensure that those who went before had not been sacrificed in vain.

Others were equally dutiful, especially the clergy. In Campbell County, Virginia, John Blair Dabney, a lawyer-turned-Episcopal-priest to four churches, preached regularly on the need to endure a righteous cause. The signs, he conceded, were ominous, and, in a telling moment, he embraced a scenario of apocalyptic deliverance. In a sermon on Matthew 24:44 (“Be ye also ready, for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh”), Dabney underscored the fact that it would be quite foolish to place the Second Coming of Christ “at some remote period.”

In a follow-up sermon preached on March 5, Dabney noted that the North needed to learn the lesson Napoleon had learned. In the same sermon, he conceded for the first time that the North might win. But then, in anticipation of postwar rhetoric, he stressed that their victory would never make the North right for waging such a vicious war on innocents:

Winter of 1865 brought decreasing rations, delayed pay, and increased desertions in Johnston’s army. Recognizing the impossibility of maintaining defensive lines stretching thirty miles or longer in the face of Grant’s superior numbers, Lee concluded, “We shall have to abandon our position on the James River, as lamentable as it is on every account.” Lee went on to note that a withdrawal, should it become necessary, “should be concentrated at some point on the railroad line between Richmond and Danville.”
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