America Aflame (58 page)

Then, news from the front suddenly and dramatically altered the dynamics of the campaign. On September 3, Horace Greeley and several Republican governors were polling the party's rank and file to gauge interest in a new nominating convention to dump Lincoln. That same day, the Democratic Party, with much fanfare, issued a proclamation pronouncing the war a “failure.” In the midst of these events, Lincoln received a telegram from General Sherman: “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”
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Jefferson Davis had his wish for a fighting general fulfilled. John Bell Hood abandoned his predecessor's defensive posture and went after Sherman, sustaining over fourteen thousand casualties to less than half that for the Federals in a series of disorganized and ill-planned attacks. In the eleven days since he had taken command, Hood lost almost as many men as Johnston had in seventy-four days. The citizens of Atlanta stood on their rooftops to watch the fighting and pray for a Rebel victory. When Sherman launched artillery shells, they fled to the cellars or dug holes in the ground. The remaining Atlantans were mostly women, children, and the elderly, as the able-bodied men had been conscripted. The morale of Hood's army plunged. Private Sam Watkins reported that he and his comrades “were broken down with their long days' hard marching—were almost dead with hunger and fatigue. Every one was taking his own course, and wishing and praying to be captured.… Each one prayed that all this foolishness might end one way or the other.”
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Sherman took control of the railroads, cutting off Atlanta from its supplies. Hood had given his left arm and right leg to the Rebel cause, but he would not give up his army. Rather than suffer the fate of Pemberton in Vicksburg, Hood abandoned the city on September 1, setting off explosions to prevent the Federals from seizing munitions and other supplies. Six days later, Sherman ordered the city's remaining citizens to leave. He aimed to “make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war as well as the organizing armies.” Atlanta's strategic rail connections had enabled the Confederacy to prolong the war against the Union, and Sherman expressed little concern for the city or its residents. “Now that war comes home,” he explained, “you feel very different—you deprecate its horrors, but did not feel them when you sent carloads of soldiers and ammunition and molded shells and shot, to carry war into Kentucky and Tennessee.” Wagons loaded with possessions and the elderly filled the roads from Atlanta. Hood protested to Sherman that the evacuation “transcended in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever before brought to my attention in the dark history of war,” but he did nothing to stop the exodus, and, in fact, could do nothing. Sherman responded, “If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war and not popularity-seeking.”
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“Refugeeing.” The war disrupted southern civilian life as most of the conflict was fought in the Confederate states. Here a family leaves home to escape Sherman's oncoming troops. (National Archives and Records Administration)

The news of Sherman's victory electrified North and South. George Templeton Strong, a persistent critic of the president, wrote joyously in his diary, “Glorious news this morning. Atlanta is taken at last!!!!… It is (coming at this political crisis) the greatest event of the war.” The victory infused northerners with a sense that the war was winnable, that the battlefield and not the negotiating table offered the best opportunity for achieving the war's objectives.
Harper's
advised that “no other effort for an immediate cessation of hostilities should be made by the loyal American people except renewed and overwhelming vigor in the war to confirm the absolute supremacy of the Government.” While northerners rejoiced, southerners plunged into despair at the broader meaning of Atlanta's capitulation. “The disaster at Atlanta,” the
Richmond Examiner
editorialized, came “in the very nick of time” to “save the party of Lincoln from irretrievable ruin.… It will diffuse gloom over the South.”
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Two other important military victories occurred that late summer and early fall to seal Lincoln's reelection. Mobile was the last remaining Gulf Coast port open to the Confederacy's blockade-runners. On the morning of August 5, Admiral David Farragut and his fleet of eighteen ships, including four ironclads, sailed into Mobile Bay, guarded by two heavily armed forts and by the CSS
Tennessee
, reputedly the most powerful ironclad vessel afloat. When a torpedo sank his lead ironclad, Farragut allegedly shouted to his men, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.” Despite the rocky start, Farragut took the forts and closed Mobile Bay to Confederate shipping. Now only Wilmington, North Carolina, remained as a viable Rebel base for blockade-running.

The Valley Campaign, another unfulfilled piece of Grant's grand plan, reversed in the Federals' favor. The turning point came on August 1, when Grant placed General Philip H. Sheridan in command of the operation. Grant's instructions to Sheridan and the Army of the Shenandoah reflected his thinking that only relentless war against soldier and civilian alike would bring the conflict to its speediest conclusion: “Take all provisions, forage, and stock wanted for the use of your command; such as cannot be consumed destroy.… [T]he people should be informed that so long as an army can subsist among them recurrences of these raids must be expected, and we are determined to stop them at all hazards.… Give the enemy no rest.… If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.” The valley became a sea of fire, and the flames took provisions and dwellings alike. Sheridan made no apologies: “Death is popularly considered the maximum of punishment in war, but it is not; reduction to poverty brings prayers for peace more surely and more quickly than does the destruction of human life.” Sheridan's actions in the valley so incensed southerners that the
Richmond Whig
set out a detailed plan on how to “burn one of the chief cities of the enemy, say Boston, Philadelphia or Cincinnati.”
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Sheridan did not operate unchallenged. John Singleton Mosby commanded a group of eight hundred irregulars in the area. They destroyed supplies and sniped at Sheridan's men, fighting mainly at night or from ambush. Mosby had developed such a menacing reputation in the North that many believed the normal rules of engagement, such as they were, should not apply to guerrillas like him. Walt Whitman averred that Mosby's guerrillas were “men who would run a knife through the wounded, the aged, the children, without compunction.” After Mosby's men killed one of Sheridan's aides, the general ordered George Armstrong Custer to burn every house within a five-mile radius of the incident. Custer not only carried out Sheridan's orders but also rounded up and executed seven of Mosby's men, vowing, “I mean to return evil for evil until these scoundrels cease their depredations.” The war had been cruel from the beginning, but it was clearly entering an even more retributive phase. Both sides were desperate—the Union to finish off the Rebels, and the Confederates to sustain their fading dream of independence.
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Jubal Early was the greater threat to Sheridan's mission. He gave the squat, bow-legged Union general a spirited fight. A crucial and climactic confrontation at Cedar Creek in October saw Sheridan riding back and forth waving his odd-shaped little hat, rallying his troops forward. His superior numbers, thirty thousand to eighteen thousand for the Confederates, helped Sheridan prevail, nearly destroying Early's army and giving Union forces virtually free reign in the Valley. Several thousand of Sheridan's troops left for Petersburg to assist in Grant's siege of the city. Grant ordered a hundred-gun salute in Sheridan's honor. He aimed the guns at Petersburg.

The work of Sherman and Sheridan secured the reelection of Abraham Lincoln. It was a remarkable achievement to hold a presidential election in the midst of a bloody civil war. The election demonstrated the commitment to government by the consent of the governed among civilians, government officials, and the military. The Union proved itself not only to Americans but also to the rest of the world. Franklin Dick wrote of the election, “It proves to the world & all times the ability of the People for self government—Oh, it is today an honor to be an American. Our strength is re-established—our permanency assured; for the ability of the nation now to suppress the rebellion cannot be doubted.” The experiment that many Americans considered fragile now seemed stronger.
Harper's
summarized the ultimate import of the election. “Yet the grandest lesson of the result is its vindication of the American system of free popular government.” Many northerners came to believe that the election was as great a victory over the Rebels as Gettysburg or Atlanta, and more lasting.
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The Republicans called themselves the Union party in this election to broaden their appeal. Just as the North was becoming synonymous with America, the Republicans hoped to forge an identity in the minds of voters between the party and the nation. The Democrats, by implication, represented the old-fashioned factional politics, loyal to local constituencies, not to a national entity. Their calls for peace, or as Republicans phrased it “peace at any price,” and their racist rants sounded parochial and hollow after the Atlanta and Valley campaigns. The Republicans won 55 percent of the vote, regaining almost all of the seats lost in the off-term elections of 1862.

Nearly four out of five soldiers voted for Lincoln, a testimony to their belief in the war and the president's leadership. It was an impressive figure considering many soldiers came from Democratic families. Some soldiers had worried as much about the declining support at home as about the enemy confronting them on the battlefield. After troops voted, many for the first time, they sat around their campfires and sang a song they first learned when they marched off to war.

Way down in old Virginni, I suppose you all do know,

They have tried to bust the Union but they find it is no go,

The Yankee boys are starting out de Union for to sabe,

And we're going down to Washington,

To fight for Uncle Abe.

In their new version, however, they substituted “vote” for “fight.”
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The soldiers sensed that a Lincoln victory would further demoralize Rebel forces. The Confederacy's only hope for peace and for at least some concessions lay with a Democratic victory. George Hannaford, a Union soldier, wrote home to his wife, “If [Lincoln] is elected, it will do more to discourage the rebels than to lose a dozen battles.” As another cold winter settled in, the assertion seemed to be accurate. A Rebel soldier wrote, “The Armey is very much demoralized. I don't believe that the men will fight much.” Another admitted, “Every thing looks quite gloomy at the present & prospects don't seem to get no brighter.” Indeed, when southerners looked around at the end of 1864, there was precious little, if anything, to encourage a spark of hope. Quite the opposite. The
Weekly Register
, a southern paper, confessed, “We cannot contemplate this verdict of the Northern masses with any other than painful emotions.… We must take it as an avowal of the people of the North that this war is to continue until
we are subjugated
—until the last vestige of liberty is gone—until our homes are abandoned, and our lands become the property of the hireling soldiery who are sent to destroy us.” If, as many southerners still believed, “this war is waged not for a reconstruction of the Union … [but] for our property—our lands and houses—our broad rivers—our beautiful valleys, for the possession of a country which they have long envied us,” then the cruel war would go on, and the beautiful land would continue to be stained with blood.
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On November 10, a group of supporters serenaded Lincoln at the White House. In his brief remarks to the revelers, he typically placed the election in a global context. His affirmation by voters “demonstrated that a people's government can sustain a national election in the midst of a great civil war. Until now it has not been known to the world that this was a possibility. It shows also how
sound
, and how
strong
we still are.” It was important, however, not to lose sight of the task at hand. The election may have been a great step forward in constituting a new Union, but, Lincoln warned, “the rebellion continues; and now that the election is over, may not all, having a common interest, reunite in a common effort, to save our common country?” To achieve that result would yet require uncommon sacrifice, including the president himself.
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CHAPTER 15

ONE NATION, INDIVISIBLE

MARCH 4, 1865.
America had come to town. Washington, D.C., overflowed with visitors. Hotels were jammed, sidewalks impassable, and pedestrians and horse-drawn vehicles battled for space in the streets. Late arrivals bedded down in firehouses if they were lucky, outdoors if they were not. The blustery March weather did not dampen the revelry. Citizens began to gather in front of the Capitol's East Portico several hours before Abraham Lincoln would deliver his inaugural address. The Capitol dome, unfinished at Lincoln's first inauguration, was now portentously complete.

Some in the crowd recalled the event four years earlier when the new president delivered a careful speech balancing his constitutional duty as he saw it with the unfolding reality of a nation falling apart. That had been a somber day. Today was different. The flags flew higher and brighter, even in the rain. The bands played “Hail, Columbia!” “Yankee Doodle,” and one of the president's favorites, “Dixie.” Soldiers in fresh blue uniforms with shiny brass buttons milled about, smiling and chatting with comrades. Ten inches of mud clogged the city's unpaved streets. The soldiers felt at home. Women wore their finest dresses anyway, getting their “crinolines smashed, skirts bedaubed, and velvet, laces and such dry goods streaked with mud from end to end.” Who cared? The war was as good as over, and America had come to its capital city to hear the president deliver a victory speech, thank God for His support, and look forward to the new nation's bright future.
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Looking back on the four months since Lincoln's reelection, they saw the Union's ascendancy on the battlefield, and the Confederacy's marked disintegration. On November 16, Sherman burned what remained of Atlanta and began his march to the sea. The undulating blue ranks stretched for miles, thousands of gun barrels glinting in the autumn sun, followed by a train of white-topped wagons five miles long and a huge drove of cattle. The men sang as they marched, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord / He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” Corydon Foote, a Michigan soldier in Sherman's legion, recalled, “Anything seemed possible with an army like that.”
2

With Confederate General John Bell Hood's tattered troops marching in the opposite direction toward Tennessee, Sherman expected few challenges. He had failed to destroy Hood's army as Grant had hoped. Georgia would be a good consolation. Noting the parallel between removing the Indians and removing the slaveholders to make way for a new nation, Sherman explained, “We must reconquer the country … as we did from the Indians. We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people. We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible … that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.” Sherman vowed to “make Georgia howl!” Cut off from his supply base, he determined that his army would “forage liberally on the country during the march.” Sherman relished his growing reputation as the cool angel of vengeance. Sentiment was for civilians.
3

Moving his sixty-thousand-man army along four separate routes, Sherman had his way with Georgia. Residents fled in advance, carrying what they could, while the Federals took or burned the rest, though Sherman had issued orders to destroy property only if the residents resisted the troops. A chaplain accompanying the Federals reported, “The question … is never asked how much the farmer needs for his subsistence, but all is taken—literally everything.” Only the slaves remained behind, despite masters' warnings that the Yankees would drown their babies, sell them to Cuba, or work them to death building fortifications. They followed Sherman's army to the sea, often bearing “gifts” of the masters' livestock. Other men came into camp as well. They were haggard figures, emaciated, weeping at the sight of food and the flag—fugitives from Andersonville. If the soldiers required additional motivation, these men provided it.
4

The march became a romp. No Union army ate better than Sherman's. Daily fare included turkey, pork, chicken, beef, and sweet potatoes. Soldiers woke up every morning to the pleasant aroma of coffee and bacon. Corydon Foote recalled, “There were times when the Georgia campaign seemed like a gorgeous holiday, a skylarking reward for past hardships.” Soldiers broke into the abandoned state legislature in Milledgeville and amused themselves by holding a mock session to repeal the ordinance of secession. Sherman slept in the governor's mansion. The Federals' rampage through Georgia was hardly worse than Sheridan's depredations in the Valley of Virginia, though it garnered considerably more publicity, then and now. Sherman was the better promoter, and several New York journalists had come along for the ride.
5

On December 20, the ten thousand Confederate troops protecting Savannah abandoned the city, and Sherman walked in the following day. He telegraphed the president: “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 25,000 bales of cotton.” Along the way Sherman's army had destroyed or confiscated property and resources worth $100 million. For six hundred miles along a swath twenty-five to fifty miles wide scarcely any resources remained. A wave of fire had swept over the land, leaving only a dark scar. “This may seem a hard species of warfare,” he acknowledged, “but it brings the sad realities of war home to those who have been directly or indirectly instrumental in involving us in its attendant calamities.”
6

When the news of Sherman's feat spread across the North, the elation brightened an already festive holiday season. Northerners compared Sherman favorably to Napoleon. He had marched six hundred miles in forty days without losing a wagon or a gun to the enemy. The ease with which Sherman carried out his campaign depressed southerners. A soldier in Lee's army expressed a common sentiment: “In my opinion every man killed or wounded after this it will be cold blooded murder. All know that it is useless for the war to be further persisted.”
7

The absence of most military-age men, who were off with either Hood or Lee, leaving only boys and old men to defend the state, played a significant role in Sherman's rout. The lack of resistance left the impression that southerners had given up the fight. Though some southerners appeared to lack the will to fight on, they did not embrace their conquerors. A woman who lost all of her food, crops, and livestock to Sherman's army understood the war was coming to an end, but she pronounced herself “a much stronger Rebel!” The weakening resolve to fight did not imply an accommodation with the victor or his principles.
8

As Sherman marched through Georgia, Hood moved into Tennessee. Hood hoped to disrupt the Federals' supply lines (which Sherman no longer needed in any case) and to draw their army away from Georgia by threatening Union-held Nashville. Sherman sent George Thomas with thirty thousand troops to reinforce the Tennessee capital and destroy Hood's force of thirty-three thousand.

While Thomas secured Nashville, he dispatched General John M. Schofield with most of the troops to confront Hood. Schofield entrenched outside of Franklin, fifteen miles south of Nashville. On November 30, while Sherman roared through Georgia, Hood's army charged over a mile of open field to attack the Union's defensive positions, with predictably disastrous results. The Rebels encountered a sheet of fire directly in their faces until the men could take no more and ran away at full tilt from the Union barrage. Some Confederate soldiers stopped in their tracks and allowed themselves to be taken prisoner. Hood retreated to his headquarters, where he broke down and wept.
9

Hood's army, now at 27,000 men, suffered 6,200 casualties, while Schofield's force of 25,000 lost 2,300 men in one of the few major Civil War battles where Confederates outnumbered the Federals. A mark of Confederate desperation was the sight of freezing Rebel soldiers stripping the bodies of their own generals, six of whom fell during the battle. One general, Patrick Cleburne, received forty-nine bullet wounds, attesting to the ferocity of the Union bombardment. Sam Watkins woke up the next morning and exclaimed, “O, my God! what did we see! It was a giant holocaust of death.” During the night, Schofield retreated to the defenses of Nashville, and Hood followed. Schofield later observed, “Was it not, in fact, such attacks as that of Franklin, Atlanta and Gettysburg, rather than any failures of defense, that finally exhausted and defeated the Confederate Armies?” For a regime with limited resources in men and materiel, the question was merely rhetorical. A senseless war was getting more senseless by the day. It would end only when one army lay down its arms.
10

On December 3, Grant ordered Thomas to come out from his defensive positions and attack Hood, as the Federals enjoyed a better than two-to-one troop advantage. Thomas waited. On December 6, Grant, fearing Hood would bypass Nashville, reach the Ohio River, and menace the Midwest, issued a new order: “Attack at once and wait no longer.” Thomas waited. On December 11, Grant issued the attack order again, threatening to remove Thomas from command. Thomas replied he would move when the icy weather improved. The ice melted on December 14, and the following morning, Thomas's Army of the Cumberland emerged as an apparition from thick fog and smashed Hood's Army of Tennessee. The Confederates, numbering now little more than twenty thousand men, lost six thousand soldiers; the Union army, which had grown to fifty thousand men, lost three thousand. Though a hard core of fighters remained in Hood's army, the defeat at Nashville ended both the Rebels' potential threat to the Midwest and an attempt to link up with Lee at Petersburg. Lincoln's Christmas became even merrier. The remnants of Hood's army retreated across the Tennessee River into Alabama, singing a derisive verse to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”:

You may talk about your Beauregard,

And sing of General Lee,

But the Gallant Hood of Texas

Played hell in Tennessee!

Hood sent a telegram to Richmond asking to be relieved of command, which President Davis granted immediately.
11

Sherman, like Grant, did not believe in winter vacations. On February 1, 1865, Sherman marched out of Savannah into South Carolina. His objectives were to establish a base at Goldsboro, North Carolina, and join up with Grant's army to lift the siege of Petersburg, destroy Lee's army, and end the war. The Federals viewed the Carolina campaign with great anticipation. An Ohio soldier wrote home, “No man ever looked forward to any event with more joy than did our boys to have a chance to meet the sons of the mother of traitors, ‘South Carolina.'” As the men crossed into South Carolina, a division commander rode through the ranks asking, “Boys, are you well supplied with matches, as we are now in South Carolina?” The soldiers felt a special responsibility to create havoc there. A Michigan soldier noted, “Grim as the business of destruction was, there was not a man of those who marched with Uncle Billy who did not feel but that he was right.” Jefferson Davis understood the stakes of Sherman's renewed march: “Sherman's campaign has produced a bad effect on our people, success against his future operations is needed to reanimate public confidence.” The Confederate command tried desperately to raise an army to oppose Sherman in South Carolina, but where would the men come from? Deserters flowed from the Rebel armies in torrents. Those who remained in the ranks were either pinned down at Petersburg or demoralized remnants of the Army of Tennessee now camped in Tupelo, Mississippi.
12

The rivers and swamps of South Carolina were more of a hindrance to Sherman than the token Confederate resistance. On February 17, the mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, the state capital, rode out to surrender the city to Sherman. The Union army entered the city, and some soldiers repeated their charade from Milledgeville by “convening” the state legislature. A retreating force of Confederate cavalry set fire to cotton bales to prevent them from falling to the Federals. The blaze, fanned by high winds, touched off a more general conflagration, helped along by inebriated Union soldiers who had discovered and consumed a large cache of liquor. Though Sherman issued orders against vandalism, he was even less inclined to enforce them in South Carolina. He explained, with more than a touch of sarcasm, “Somehow, our men had got the idea that South Carolina was the cause of all our troubles … and therefore on them should fall the scourge of war in its worst form.”
13

The Federals entered homes and absconded with everything they could carry, leaving the residents, mainly women and children, unmolested. A Columbia woman noted that though the soldiers were “plundering and raging,” they seemed “curiously civil and abstaining from personal insult.” Other women barely concealed their rage at the invasion. “If I were but a man how firm would be my arm to strike,” one victim declared. That the soldiers destroyed what they could not carry struck some women as more despicable than the theft itself. “One expects … [Yankees] to lie and steal,” a resident noted, “but it does seem an outrage that those who practice such wanton and useless cruelty should call themselves men.” Despite the hostile reception, the troops generally found Carolina women more refined than their sisters in other parts of the Confederacy. An Iowa sergeant observed the women of the Carolinas were “much better educated and more enlightened than they were in Ala. & Georgia, they do not use quite so much tobacco &tc.”
14

The verdict among Union troops was clear: “Never in modern times did soldiers have such fun.” In Columbia, some Federals emptied a barrel of molasses, and then tracked it all over a house. They attired their horses in women's dresses and impaled chickens on their bayonets and marched through the halls of a fine home dripping blood on imported carpets. South Carolinians taunted Sherman that he would encounter a more hostile reception in the Palmetto State than he had in Georgia. As with most Confederate boasts at this stage of the war, the threat was empty air. General Wade Hampton wished Sherman a quick passage through his state. He wrote to his fellow South Carolinian Matthew C. Butler, “Do not attempt to delay Sherman's march by destroying bridges, or any other means. For God's sake let him get out of the country as quickly as possible.”
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