A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (72 page)

On February seventeenth, Sherman entered Columbia, South Carolina, whereupon fires swept through the city, delighting many Unionists who hoped for the total destruction of this hotbed of rebellion. Most evidence points to Sherman’s vengeful soldiers as the arsonists. The following day, the Stars and Stripes was hoisted above Fort Sumter. Marching north, Sherman further compressed the tiny operating area left to Lee and Johnston. This was perfectly in sync with Grant’s broad strategy of operating all the armies together on all fronts. Every army had orders to engage, a strategy to which Lincoln agreed: “Those not skinning can hold a leg.”
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As the end neared, in December 1864, President Davis and his wife attended a “starvation party,” which had no refreshments because of the food shortages. Already, Davis had sold his horses and slaves to raise money to make ends meet, and his wife had sold her carriage and team. He and other leaders knew the Confederacy did not have long to live. At that late date, Davis again proposed arming the slaves. In a sense, however, it might be said that Robert E. Lee’s army was already relying heavily upon them. At the Tredegar Iron Works, the main Southern iron manufacturing facility, more than 1,200 slaves hammered out cannon barrels and bayonets, and in other wartime plants, free blacks in Alleghany, Botetourt, Henrico, and other counties shaped nails, boilers, locomotives, and a variety of instruments of war.
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Added to that, another few thousand free blacks actually served in the Confederate Army as cooks, teamsters, and diggers, or in shoe repair or wheelwright work. Little is known of their motivation, but it appears to have been strictly economic, since the Rebel military paid more ($16 per month in Virginia) than most free blacks could ever hope to get in the South’s impoverished private sector.
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Most were impressed under state laws, including some 10,000 black Virginians immediately put to work after Bull Run throwing up breastworks in front of Confederate defensives positions. Ironically, some 286 black Virginia Confederate pensioners received benefits under Virginia law in 1926—the only slaves ever to receive any form of institutionalized compensation from their government.

Still, resistance to the use of slave soldiers was deep-seated, suggesting that Confederates well knew the implications of such policies: an 1865 Confederate House minority report stated, “The doctrine of emancipation as a reward for the services of slaves employed in the army, is antagonistic to the spirit of our institutions.”
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A Mississippi newspaper claimed that arming slaves marked “a total abandonment of the chief object of this war, and if the institution is already irretrievably undermined, the rights of the States are buried with it.”
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This constituted yet another admission that to white Southerners, the war was, after all, about slavery and not states’ rights.

Of course, when possible, slaves aimed to escape to Northern lines. By 1863, Virginia alone counted nearly 38,000 fugitives out of a population of 346,000, despite the presence of armed troops all around them.
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Philosophically, the Confederacy placed more emphasis on recovering a black runaway than in apprehending a white deserter from the Army of Northern Virginia.

Despite the presence of a handful of Afro-Confederate volunteers, the vast majority of slaves openly celebrated their freedom once Union forces arrived. In Norfolk, Virginia, for example, new freedmen held a parade, marching through the city as they trampled and tore Confederate battle flags, finally gathering to hang Jefferson Davis in effigy.
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Upon receiving news of emancipation, Williamsburg, Virginia, blacks literally packed up and left town. Blacks from Confederate states also joined the Union Army in large numbers. Louisiana provided 24,000, Tennessee accounted for more than 20,000, and Mississippi blacks who enlisted totaled nearly 18,000.

Grant, meanwhile, continued his relentless pursuit of Lee’s army, suffocating Petersburg through siege and extending his lines around Richmond. Lee presented a desperation plan to Davis to break out of Petersburg and retreat to the southeast to link up with whatever forces remained under other Confederate commanders. Petersburg fell on April second, and, following desperate maneuvers by the Army of Northern Virginia, Grant caught up to Lee and Longstreet at Appomattox Station on April 8, 1865. Following a brief clash between the cavalry of General George Custer and General Fitzhugh Lee, the Confederates were surrounded. “I would rather die a thousand deaths,” Robert E. Lee said of the action he then had to take.
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Opening a dialogue with Grant through letters delivered by courier, Lee met with Grant at the home of Wilmer McLean. The Confederate general dressed in a new formal gray uniform, complete with spurs, gauntlets, and epaulets, and arrived on his faithful Traveler, while Grant attended the meeting in an unbuttoned overcoat and boots splattered with mud—no sword, no designation of rank. Grant hastily wrote out the conditions, then, noticing that Lee seemed forlornly staring at the sword hanging at his side, decided on the spot that requiring the officers to formally surrender their swords was an undue humiliation. He wrote out, “This will not embrace the side-arms of the officers, nor their private horses or baggage.”
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Lee wrote a brief acceptance, glumly walked out the door and mounted Traveler, and as he began to ride off, Grant came out of the building and saluted. All the Union officers did the same. Lee sadly raised his hat in response, then rode off.

Grant had given the Confederates extremely generous terms in allowing all of the men to keep sidearms and horses, but they had to stack muskets and cannons. The men had to swear to obey the laws of the land, which would exempt them from prosecution as traitors. Grant’s policy thus became the model for the surrender of all the Rebels. Fighting continued sporadically for weeks; the last actual combat of the Civil War was on May twenty-sixth, near Brownsville, Texas.

Davis had little time to ponder the cause of Confederate failure as he fled Richmond, completely detached from reality. Having already packed off his wife, arming her with a pistol and fifty rounds of ammunition, the Confederate president ran for his life. He issued a final message to the Confederacy in which he called for a massive guerrilla resistance by Confederate civilians. Expecting thousands of people to take to the Appalachians, live off the land, and fight hit-and-run style, Davis ignored the fact that not only were those sections of the South already the poorest economically—thus unable to support such a resistance—but they were also the areas where the greatest number of Union partisans and federal sentiment existed. Few read Davis’s final desperate message, for by that time the Confederacy had collapsed and virtually no newspapers printed the news. Davis hid and used disguises, but to no avail. On May tenth he was captured at Irwinville, Georgia, and jailed.
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The call for guerrilla war inflamed Northern attitudes against Davis even further. Many wanted to hang him, and he remained in military custody at Fort Monroe, for a time in leg irons. In 1867 he was to be indicted for treason and was released to the control of a civilian court. After Horace Greeley and Cornelius Vanderbilt posted his bail, Davis languished under the cloud of a trial until December 1868, when the case was disposed of by President Andrew Johnson’s proclamation of unconditional amnesty. By that time, Davis had become a political embarrassment to the administration, and his conviction—given the other amnesty provisions in place—unlikely anyway.

Lincoln’s Last Days

In the two years since the Emancipation Proclamation, Maryland and Missouri had freed their slaves, the Fugitive Slave Law was repealed, and Congress had passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which provided that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
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With that amendment, Lincoln had steered the nation from a house divided over slavery to one reunited without it. Now he had two overarching goals ahead of him: ensure that the South did not reinstitute slavery in some mutated form, and at the same time, bring the former Rebels back into the Union as quickly and generously as possible.

He laid the groundwork for this approach in his second inaugural when he said, “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”
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The president intended for Reconstruction to follow his “10 percent plan.” By this definition, he recognized former Confederate states Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Virginia as reconstructed in late 1864, even as Lee held out in Richmond. However, Radicals refused to seat their delegations nor to allow those states to cast electoral votes in the November 1864 election. One thing is certain: Lincoln wanted a quick and magnanimous restoration of the Union, not the Radicals’ dream of a prostrate and subjugated South. When it came to traitorous Confederate leaders, Lincoln told his last cabinet secretaries, on the day he was killed, “Enough lives have been sacrificed.” On matters of black economic opportunity, Lincoln was less clear. No one knows what measures Lincoln would have adopted, but his rhetoric was always several steps behind his actions in matters of race.

It is one of the tragedies of his death on April 15, 1865, that Abraham Lincoln did not remain in office to direct Reconstruction, for surely he would have been a towering improvement over Andrew Johnson. Tragedy befell the nation doubly so, because his murder by an arch-Confederate actor named John Wilkes Booth doused feelings of compassion and the “charity for all” that some, if not most, Northerners had indeed considered extending to the South. The details of Lincoln’s death have taken on mythic status, and rightly so, for aside from George Washington, no other president—not even Jefferson—had so changed the Union.

On April fourteenth, all but a few western Confederate armies had disarmed. Mary Lincoln noticed her normally morose husband in the cheeriest of moods.
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It was Good Friday, and Washington buzzed with the excitement that for the first time in four years citizens could celebrate an evening without the apprehension of the next day’s casualty lists. Along with two guests, Major Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, the Lincolns attended
Our American Cousin
at Ford’s Theater. Lincoln did not have his bodyguard/Secret Service agent, Allan Pinkerton, with him.

At seven o’clock in the evening, with the carriage already waiting, the president’s bodyguard at the White House, William Crook, was relieved three hours late by his replacement, John Porter. As always, Crook had said, “Good night, Mr. President.” But that night, Crook recalled, Lincoln replied, “Good-bye, Crook,” instead of the usual, “Good night, Crook.” The day before, he had told Crook that he knew full well many people wanted him dead, and “if it is to be done, it is impossible to prevent it.”

After intermission, Porter left his post outside the president’s box and went next door to a tavern for a drink. When Act III started, John Wilkes Booth entered the unguarded anteroom leading to the president’s box, braced its door with a wooden plank, opened the door to Lincoln’s box slightly, and aimed the .44-caliber single-shot derringer at the back of the president’s head, then fired. In the ensuing struggle with Major Rathbone, Booth leaped over the railing, where one of his boots snagged on the banner over the box. He fractured one of his legs as he hit the stage. “Sic semper tyrannis,” he screamed at the stunned audience, “Thus be it ever to tyrants.” Hopping out the door to his waiting horse, Booth escaped. Lincoln, carried unconscious to a nearby house, died nine hours later on the same bed John Wilkes Booth had slept in just one month prior. At one-thirty in the morning, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton made a public statement in which he said, “It is not probable the president will live through the night.”
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“Now he belongs to the ages,” said Stanton on Lincoln’s death.

Booth, in one maniacal act of defiance, had done more to immortalize Lincoln than all the speeches he ever made or all the laws he signed. The man who only a half year earlier stood to lose the nomination of his own party now rose, and rightfully so, to join the ranks of Washington and Jefferson in the American pavilion of political heroes. Booth worked with a group of conspirators who had hoped to knock out many more in the Washington Republican leadership, including Andrew Johnson and William Seward, that night. Seward was stabbed but the wound was not fatal. The assassins fled to Port Royal, Virginia, where Booth was trapped in a barn that was set afire. He shot himself to death. Other conspirators, quickly rounded up, were tried by a military tribunal. Three men and one woman were hanged; three others received life prison terms; and one went to jail for six years.
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Davis, still free at the time, came under immediate suspicion for authorizing the conspiracy, but he knew nothing of it.

At ten o’clock the following morning, Andrew Johnson was sworn in as president of the United States. Walt Whitman, who had worked in the Union’s hospital service, penned “O Captain, My Captain” in homage to Lincoln.
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Had Lincoln survived, perhaps the wounds inflicted by the war itself could have healed in a less bellicose Reconstruction. After all, only in America would a rebellion end with most of the leaders excused and the rebellious state emerging without being obliterated. Whatever damage the South suffered—and it was severe—it pales in historical comparison to the fates of other failed rebellions. Indeed, modern history is littered with
successful
rebellions (Biafra, Bangladesh) whose human cost and physical devastation exceeded that of the defeated Confederacy’s. With Lincoln’s death, a stream of tolerance and mercy vanished, and the divisions that brought on the war mutated into new strains of sectional, political, and racial antagonisms that gave birth to the perverted legend of “the Lost Cause.”