America Aflame (59 page)

Confederate troops in Charleston, the birthplace of the rebellion, hearing of Columbia's fate, abandoned the city, as did many of its white residents. The Federals entered Charleston on February 18 to the cheers of the city's black population. Leading the procession was a black Union soldier on a mule, carrying a banner emblazoned “Liberty.” Black soldiers from the famed 54th Massachusetts marched behind him singing “John Brown's Body.”
16

Sherman did not linger over these triumphs but continued northward, taking Wilmington, North Carolina, on February 22, closing the South's last major port. Jefferson Davis appointed Joseph Johnston to command what remained of the Army of Tennessee, with orders to confront Sherman in North Carolina. Combined with militia and cavalry scattered in the Carolinas and Georgia, Johnston could field an army of about twenty thousand men. Johnston obeyed his orders, but he confided to Lee, “In my opinion, these troops form an army far too weak to cope with Sherman.”
17

By the beginning of March 1865, it was apparent that the Confederate States of America could not perform a basic responsibility of any government: to protect its citizens and their property. It is true that Union armies had not yet vanquished Lee, but even that superb military strategist understood that if he sent his troops to stop Sherman, Grant would walk into Richmond. Joseph Johnston also knew that, at best, he would delay Sherman but could not alter the inevitable final result. Josiah Gorgas, the Confederacy's chief of ordnance, asked, “Where is this to end? No money in the Treasury, no food to feed Gen. Lee's Army, no troops to oppose Gen. Sherman.… Wife & I sit talking of going to Mexico to live out the remnant of our days.”
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If the Confederates could no longer win the war on the battlefield, they would try to negotiate a peace. It was an unlikely prospect, given the ironclad preconditions of both sides and the recent lopsided military results. In January 1865, Francis Preston Blair, with the tacit approval of President Lincoln, traveled to Richmond to meet with Jefferson Davis. Blair was an old friend of Davis's. Like Gorgas, he had Mexico on his mind. In 1864, Louis Napoleon had installed Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Austria as emperor of Mexico, backed by thirty-five thousand French troops. Blair believed that a joint campaign by Union and Confederate armies would drive the French from Mexico, after which North and South would reunite and live happily ever after. The unlikely scheme had some support in the northern and southern press, but neither Davis nor Lincoln endorsed it. Instead, Davis proposed the appointment of commissioners to “enter into conference with a view to secure peace to the two countries.” Lincoln agreed to accept any commissioner Davis “may
informally
send to me with the view of securing peace to the people of our
one common country
.” The distinction between “country” and “countries” escaped neither president, but the initiative went forward.
19

Lincoln held little optimism concerning the talks, but he could not be perceived as rejecting a peace initiative. Davis also expected failure, but he hoped to use it to rally flagging southern morale and continue the fight. Davis appointed three commissioners, including Vice President Stephens. Secretary of State Seward represented Lincoln, though at the last minute the president decided to join his colleague for the meeting on a Union steamer anchored in Hampton Roads, Virginia. If nothing else, it would be good to see his old friend Stephens.

The night before the meeting, Stephens had dinner with General Grant. It was a convivial social evening. Stephens had spent more time at his Georgia home than in Richmond during the war. He had clashed with President Davis concerning the centralizing tendencies of the Confederate government and restrictions on civil liberties. Davis had marginalized his vice president but allowed him to take part in the February peace mission as Rebel fortunes were desperate and Stephens had a cordial relationship with Lincoln.

The following morning, February 3, Stephens boarded the president's steamer and greeted Lincoln warmly. Stephens seemed frailer than the last time the two former Whigs met, nearly seven years earlier. The Confederate vice president wore a thick gray overcoat that descended to his ankles and threatened to swallow him. He had always looked cadaverous, but the coat made his appearance even more ghostly. A Union soldier guarding the gathering exclaimed, “My God! He's dead now, but he don't know it.” Stephens doffed his overcoat, and Lincoln chuckled, “Never have I seen so small a nubbin come out of so much husk.” The atmosphere immediately relaxed, and the two men chatted amiably about the old days before settling down to business.
20

Lincoln held fast to his conditions for peace: the establishment of national authority throughout all the states and the abolition of slavery. Stephens mentioned the Mexican scheme and raised the idea of an armistice. Lincoln dismissed both suggestions, and the conference disbanded. Before the two former friends parted, Stephens asked Lincoln to secure the release of his nephew, who was a prisoner on Johnson's Island. Lincoln agreed. After the release of Stephens's nephew, Lincoln invited him to the White House and presented him with an autographed portrait of himself with the inscription, “Don't have these where you're from.”
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Davis used the failure of the conference to renew enthusiasm for the war in a speech to a large throng in Richmond on February 9. Stephens admitted the speech was “brilliant … but little short of dementation.” The southern press, though, picked up Davis's rallying cry. The
Richmond Examiner
paraphrased Lincoln's terms: “Down upon your knees, Confederates!… your mouths in the dust; kiss the rod, confess your sins.” Davis was defiant. There would be a fight to the finish, and the Confederacy would prevail. Southern armies, he predicted, would “compel the Yankees, in less than twelve months, to petition us for peace on our own terms.” Richmond settled down to a bunker mentality. We must “conquer or die,” one newspaper declared. “There is no alternative. We must make good our independence, defend our institutions … or give up the … lands we have tilled, the slaves we have owned … all indeed that makes existence valuable.” Many Rebel soldiers, though war-weary, looked upon the failure of peace negotiations as a declaration of continuous warfare on the South. “We have been awakened to the solemn reality,” soldier Robert Bunting declared, and the southern man would refuse “to stretch out his hand for Northern fetters, and bow his dishonored head for the yoke which abolitionism stands ready to place upon him.”
22

The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution by the U.S. Congress added to the Confederacy's sense of urgency. Seward had informed the Confederate commissioners of the landmark vote. Once three quarters of the states ratified the amendment, it would become the law of the land. Slavery was dead. Lincoln saw that the news rattled the commissioners perhaps more than any other disclosure that day. The president advocated a constitutional amendment because he perceived the Emancipation Proclamation as a wartime measure that would not withstand the scrutiny of federal courts once the war ended. The proclamation applied only to those states in rebellion. Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware remained in the Union. Slavery continued in those states through the end of the war. A constitutional amendment, however, would apply to all states.

The close association between slavery and rebellion in the minds of many northerners generated widespread support for the amendment. “If [Southern slaveowners] made war once, they may make it again. Therefore the restoration of slavery is restoration of political strife,” noted one lawmaker. The
Philadelphia Inquirer
stated the matter simply: “The two terms, slavery and rebellion, are now synonymous, the one will live as long as the other, and both will expire together.” Most Democrats denounced the amendment. “The law of [God's] providence is inequality,” one Democratic legislator declared, amazed that the Republicans were “vain enough to imagine that … we can improve upon the workmanship of the Almighty.” The Democrats, however, had gotten ahead of themselves, no doubt for political reasons. The amendment guaranteed freedom for the African, not equality.
23

The Thirteenth Amendment was one manifestation of the remarkable transformation that had occurred in Americans' thinking about their nation. Many northerners saw the amendment as a logical extension of federal power, an outcome of a soon-to-be victorious conflict. The experience of war, its sacrifices, and the demands placed on the administration during the crisis clearly justified the transfer of powers from the individual states to the federal government. An Ohio Republican supporting the amendment stated unequivocally, “The supreme power of the national Government is rigorously maintained throughout the constitution. We must keep steadily in view the fact that the [and here he did not employ the common usage of “these”] United States are not a confederation, but a nation.”
24

The House passed the measure on January 31, 1865, by the required two-thirds majority with two votes to spare, as sixteen of the eighty Democrats joined the Republicans. Immediately, the chamber erupted into pandemonium with cheers, embraces, men's hats and ladies' handkerchiefs flying through the air, and not a few tears. African Americans joined in the celebration, a change in itself, as blacks were not allowed in the galleries prior to this time. Lincoln added his signature the following day and sent it on to the states for ratification. The United States became the only nation to abolish slavery without compensation. The
New York Times
captured the epic nature of the amendment. “With its passage, the Republic enters upon a new stage of its great career … aiming at the greatest good and the highest happiness of all its people.” Indeed, the sense that a nation and a people had been reborn filled the hall. A congressman observed, “It seemed to me I had been born into a new life, and that the world was overflowing with beauty and joy.”
25

Lincoln, observing the reaction to Seward's announcement at the peace conference, especially from his former friend, offered some advice to Stephens: “If I were in Georgia, I would go home and get the governor of the state to call the legislature together … and ratify this constitutional amendment
prospectively
, so as to take effect, say, in five years. Such a ratification would be valid in my opinion.” That way, Lincoln explained, southerners “will avoid, as far as possible, the evils of immediate emancipation.” Lincoln, according to Stephens, pledged “to remunerate the southern people for their slaves,” on the grounds that both North and South were responsible for slavery.
26

To support his pledge, Lincoln prepared legislation that would offer all the slaveholding states $400 million in government bonds, half payable by April 1, if “all resistance to national authority shall be abandoned and cease,” and the other half payable on the southern states' ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln presented this proposal to his cabinet, pleading for approval as he surmised the war would continue for “at least a hundred days” or more and cost “three millions a day, besides all the blood which will be shed.” The resolution received no support in the cabinet. Lincoln adjourned the meeting, sighing, “You are all against me.” Lincoln wanted to abolish slavery, but he understood the difficulties both black and white southerners would face during the transition from slavery to freedom. Most of all, he wanted to stop the war and its carnage.
27

The loss of slaves aside, the Confederacy was descending into chaos. As many whites as blacks were now flooding Union lines to avoid impressment in Rebel service or to escape reprisal for deserting, advocating the Union cause, or simply expressing a desire for peace. Many of these whites were poor. “I have left the Rebell army,” a Louisiana soldier wrote to his mother in late 1864, “and I intend in a few days to Seek protection in the federal lines.… I will not be governed by a people where there is no justice.… [T]hey press Cattle and hogs and take the last feed of corn from a mans Wife and Children.… I am determined in my mind not to Serve them any longer they have allways made laws to oppress the poor Since this war commenced.” Other whites joined Union foragers and former slaves in pillaging farms. A Georgia woman in the path of Sherman's army reported a wave of thievery in her town, “some by the Yankees and a great deal by the poor people and negroes.”
28

Chaos and destitution reinforced each other. The raids of Union and Confederate soldiers and various bands of outlaws, deserters, and people desperate for food left many parts of the South without livestock or draft animals. Without horses and mules, there would be no spring planting. And with the continuing raids, it was impossible to keep what little people could plant.

A new “underground railroad” appeared in the South, spiriting deserters and draft dodgers to a series of safe houses, especially in the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. In North Carolina, a shadowy pro-Union group, the “Heroes of America” or “Red Strings,” claimed ten thousand members distinguished by a secret handshake and the display of red string hanging from their windows. Still, Unionist southerners often found themselves targets of vandalism and violence from their neighbors. There was little recourse to a rapidly disintegrating law enforcement apparatus.
29

The Rebel army was “melting like a Scotch mist.” One in eight Confederate soldiers deserted (compared to one in ten Union soldiers), but the rate accelerated dramatically in late 1864 and early 1865. As the siege of Petersburg dragged on, soldiers walked away from the Army of Northern Virginia, many figuring the war was lost and it was time for spring planting. Lee complained that “hundreds of men are deserting nightly and I cannot keep the army together unless examples are made of such cases.” There would need to be mass executions, however, to implement Lee's wish, a prospect even he would not countenance. Conscription laws expanded the draft age to include boys and men from the ages of fourteen to sixty, robbing both cradle and grave, and even those measures were insufficient to replenish the thinning ranks.
30