Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (93 page)

every poor man a farm," it did become an important part of the explosive westward expansion after the war. Even before Appomattox, 25,000 settlers had staked claims to more than three million acres, forerunners of some half-million farm families who eventually settled eighty million acres of homesteaded land.

For years Vermont's Justin Morrill—the architect of Republican tariff legislation in 1861 and chairman of the House subcommittee that framed the Internal Revenue Act—had sponsored a bill to grant public lands to the states for the promotion of higher education in "agriculture and the mechanic arts." When Morrill brought his measure before Congress again in 1861, regional tensions within the Republican party delayed its passage. The bill proposed to grant every state (including southern states if and when they returned) 30,000 acres of public land for each congressman and senator. Since New York, Pennsylvania, and other populous eastern states would get the lion's share of the bounty while all of the public land they would receive was located in the West, the plan did not sit well with many westerners. Nevertheless a sufficient number of western Republicans supported the bill—partly as a
quid pro quo
for eastern support of the Homestead Act—to pass the Morrill Act on July 2, 1862. For good measure, Congress also created a Department of Agriculture. The success of the land-grant college movement was attested by the later development of first-class institutions in many states and world-famous universities at Ithaca, Urbana, Madison, Minneapolis, and Berkeley.

Sectional conflict over the route of a transcontinental railroad had prevented action on government aid to construct such a line in the 1850s. Freed of the southern incubus, Yankee legislators highballed forward in 1862. On July 1, the same day that the Internal Revenue Act became law, Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act granting 6,400 acres of public land (later doubled) per mile and lending $16,000 per mile (for construction on the plains) and $48,000 per mile (in the mountains) of government bonds to corporations organized to build a railroad from Omaha to San Francisco Bay. Intended to prime the pump of private capital, this measure succeeded in spectacular fashion. The first rails were laid eastward from Sacramento in 1863; six years later the golden spike linked the Central Pacific and Union Pacific at Promontory, Utah. Other land grants to transcontinental railroads followed the first one, eventually totaling 120 million acres. Although these railroads became a source of corruption and of corporate power in politics, most Americans in 1862 viewed government aid as an investment in national unity and economic growth that would benefit all groups in society.

This was the philosophy that underlay all three of the land-grant laws of 1862. To some degree these laws functioned at cross purposes, for settlers, universities, and railroads competed for portions of the same land in subsequent years. Yet the 225 million acres that the government ultimately gave away under these laws constituted only a fraction of the two billion acres of public land. And despite waste, corruption, and exploitation, these land grants did help to people a vast domain, sprinkle it with schools, and span it with steel rails.

By its legislation to finance the war, emancipate the slaves, and invest public land in future growth, the 37th Congress did more than any other in history to change the course of national life. As one scholar has aptly written, this Congress drafted "the blueprint for modern America." It also helped shape what historians Charles and Mary Beard labeled the "Second American Revolution"—that process by which "the capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West drove from power in the national government the planting aristocracy of the South . . . making vast changes in the arrangement of classes, in the accumulation and distribution of wealth, in the course of industrial development, and in the Constitution inherited from the Fathers."
⁴⁴
This new America of big business, heavy industry, and capital-intensive agriculture that surpassed Britain to become the foremost industrial nation by 1880 and became the world's breadbasket for much of the twentieth century probably would have come about even if the Civil War had never occurred. But the war molded the particular configuration of this new society, and the legislation of the 37th Congress that authorized war bonds to be bought with greenbacks and repaid with gold and thereby helped concentrate investment capital, that confiscated southern property and strengthened northern industry by expanding internal markets, protecting those markets with tariffs, and improving access to them with subsidies to transportation, that settled the public domain and improved its cultivation, and rationalized the country's monetary and credit structure—this legislation did indeed help fashion a future different enough from the past to merit the label of revolution.

The revolution abounded in ironies, to be sure. Congressmen from

44
. Leonard P. Curry,
Blueprint for Modern America: Nonmilitary Legislation of the First Civil War Congress
(Nashville, 1968); Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard,
The Rise of American Civilization, 2
vols. (New York, 1927), II, 53–54.

western states had been the strongest proponents of the Legal Tender Act and the National Banking Act, in order to remedy the instability and regional imbalance of the monetary and credit system from which western states suffered most. Eastern congressmen and bankers, more satisfied with the existing system, had been lukewarm or opposed. Westerners had also been the prime supporters of federal aid to construct a transcontinental railroad, while easterners, already served by a good transportation system, were less enthusiastic. Yet the consequences of these acts were to
increase
the domination of the country's credit, transportation, and marketing structure by eastern bankers, merchants, and investors. By the 1890s the farmers of the West and South revolted against their "slavery" to an eastern "money power" that was allegedly squeezing their life blood from them. Back in the 1830s, Jacksonian artisans and yeomen had viewed with suspicion the transportation revolution, the growth of banks, and the evolution of wage-labor capitalism that seemed to threaten their republican independence. By the 1890s this economic system had penetrated the farthest reaches of the country. For the last time, perhaps, aggrieved Americans rose in the name of Jeffersonian republicanism in a counterrevolution against the second American revolution of free-labor capitalism. Once again the country rang with rhetoric of sectional conflict—this time the South and West against the Northeast—in a presidential election with the Populist ticket headed by a former Union general teamed with a former Confederate general as his running mate.

That also is a story for the next volume in this series. Before there could be such a story to tell, however, before the "Second American Revolution" could draft the "blueprint for modern America," the North must win the war. Its prospects for doing so took a sudden turn for the worse in the summer of 1862, when Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee derailed the Union war machine.

15
Billy Yank's Chickahominy Blues

I

In May 1862, prospects for the Confederacy's survival seemed bleak. Most of the Mississippi Valley had fallen to the enemy. In Virginia, McClellan's army of 100,000 had advanced to within hearing of Richmond's church bells. Irvin McDowell's corps, which Lincoln had held near Fredericksburg to cover Washington, prepared to march south to join McClellan's right wing. This would give the Union forces closing in on Richmond some 135,000 men, about twice the total that Joseph E. Johnston could bring against them. Although McClellan's past performance suggested that he would lay siege to Richmond rather than attack Johnston's army, the fall of the Confederate capital seemed only a matter of time.

The next act in this drama took place not in front of Richmond but a hundred miles to the northwest in the Shenandoah Valley. Commanding the rebel forces in that strategic region, Stonewall Jackson had been reinforced to a strength of 17,000 men by a division from Johnston's army. Its commander was Richard S. Ewell, an eccentric, balding, forty-five-year old bachelor whose beaked nose and habit of cocking his head to one side reminded observers of a bird. Everything about Ewell seemed odd, from his ulcer-induced diet of hulled wheat boiled in milk with raisins and egg yolk to his manner of cursing with a lisp. But while Ewell was an unfailing source of jokes around soldier camp-fires, Jackson seemed even more peculiar. Attired in an old army coat he had worn in the Mexican War and a broken-visored V.M.I, cadet cap, Jackson constantly sucked lemons to palliate his dyspepsia and refused to season his food with pepper because (he said) it made his left leg ache. A disciplinary martinet, Jackson had tarnished some of the fame won at Manassas by an aborted winter campaign into West Virginia that provoked a near mutiny by some of his troops. A devout Presbyterian, Jackson came across to some colleagues as a religious fanatic. Taciturn, humorless, and secretive, he rarely explained to subordinates the purpose of his orders. His rule of strategy—"always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy"—seemed to apply to his own officers as well.
¹
Before May 8, 1862, many of his soldiers considered him crazy and called him "Old Tom Fool." Events during the next month, however, showed them that he was crazy like a fox. These events made Jackson the South's premier hero for a time—until eclipsed by an even wilier fox with no tinge of fanaticism, Robert E. Lee.

It was Lee who unleashed Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. Serving as Jefferson Davis's military adviser, Lee conceived the idea of a diversion in the Valley to prevent McDowell's Union corps from reinforcing McClellan. Once before, after the battle of Kernstown in March, the northern command had cancelled the transfer of troops from the Valley to eastern Virginia. Since then, one of Nathaniel Banks's three divisions west of the Blue Ridge had departed eastward. A second was preparing to follow. Lee hoped that an offensive by Jackson would compel them to return. This was Lee's first essay in the kind of offensive-defensive strategy that was to become his hallmark. And as long as Jackson lived, he commanded the mobile force that Lee relied on to spearhead this strategy. Jackson did so now, with a series of maneuvers that did indeed mislead, mystify, and surprise the enemy.

At the beginning of May, Jackson marched part of his army east across the Blue Ridge. Federal scouts reported that he was heading toward the Richmond front. Jackson's own troops believed the same. But when they arrived at the railroad near Charlottesville, Jackson put them on trains that carried them back west over the Blue Ridge to Staunton. From there Jackson led 9,000 men a few miles farther over mountain passes to the hamlet of McDowell, where on May 8 they fought and defeated a Union force half as large. These bluecoats were part of an army of 25,000 men that John C. Frémont was assembling in West

1
. John B. Imboden, "Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah,"
Battles and Leaders
, II, 297.

Virginia for a drive 250 miles southward to capture Knoxville. This impracticable plan was a compound of Frémont's romanticism and Lincoln's desire to liberate east Tennessee. Jackson's surprise attack disrupted the campaign before it got started.

Stonewall marched his men back into the Shenandoah Valley at Harrisonburg. Banks's sole remaining division had recently retreated northward from there to Strasburg, where they dug in. Jackson made as if to follow, but at New Market he suddenly swerved eastward across Massanutten Mountain, which at that point divided the Shenandoah into two smaller valleys. Jackson had spent many hours studying maps of the Valley drawn by his brilliant topographical engineer Jedediah Hotchkiss. Now all that study paid off. While Jackson's hell-for-leather cavalry under Turner Ashby kept up a feint along the pike toward Strasburg, deceiving Banks into thinking that the rebels were coming that way, the main Confederate thrust came in the Luray Valley east of Massanutten Mountain. Here on May 23 Jackson's and Ewell's combined force overwhelmed the small Union outpost at Front Royal. Jackson was now on Banks's flank only ten miles away with a force more than double the size of the Union division.

In all of these swift, deceptive movements Jackson was aided by local scouts and spies who knew every foot of the country. Northern commanders had no such advantage. Moreover, Valley residents such as Belle Boyd of Front Royal kept Jackson informed of Federal troop dispositions. Banks had to contend not only with Jackson's army but also with a hostile civilian population—a problem confronted by every invading Union army, and one that helped make this a war of peoples as well as of armies.

Impatient toward weaknesses of the flesh, Jackson had driven his infantry at a killing pace. "He classed all who were weak and weary, who fainted by the wayside, as men wanting in patriotism," said an officer. "If a man's face was as white as cotton and his pulse so low you could scarcely feel it, he looked upon him merely as an inefficient soldier and rode off impatiently." Ewell caught the spirit and ordered his marching columns stripped to the minimum. "We can get along without anything but food and ammunition," he stated. "The road to glory cannot be followed with much baggage."
²
Although barefoot, blistered, and broken down from marching 160 miles and fighting two battles in two

2
. Foote,
Civil War
, I, 426;
O.R
., Ser. I, Vol. 12, pt. 3, p. 890.

weeks, Jackson's men no longer called him Tom Fool. Now he was Old Jack, and they were proud to be known as his foot cavalry.