This Hallowed Ground (56 page)

Specifically, they were creating a smoky darkness at midday in Meridian, Mississippi, making a wasteland in order that Yankee armies a little
farther north might thereafter go about their business with less difficulty.

Meridian lay 150 miles east of Vicksburg, and it was a railroad junction town, a military supply depot, and a modest industrial center. Mississippi produced many Confederate guerrillas, who had a pestiferous habit of riding up into western Tennessee to disrupt Federal supply lines and other arrangements. As far as they could be said to have a base, they were based on Meridian, and Sherman felt that if Meridian became an ash heap the Yankee machine in northern Mississippi and in Tennessee could operate more smoothly. So he brought troops down to Meridian — feinting smartly so that Bishop Polk, Confederate commander in the state, thought that Mobile was being menaced and took his own troops down there to head him off — and on February 14 Sherman’s heavy-handed foot soldiers reached Meridian and began to destroy the place. The railroads were torn up for twenty-five miles around; an arsenal, two hotels, various shops and factories, vast quantities of cotton and any amount of food, textiles, army equipment, and unassorted private property were burned. The soldiers said that they had been ordered to lay hands upon every sort of property “which could in any way be applied to aid the Rebel armies” — which, when one stopped to think about it, was a category broad enough to include anything from a railroad bridge to a smokehouse full of bacon — and they were men to whom such orders did not need to be given twice. (A year earlier Sherman had told Admiral Porter that “our new troops came in with ideas of making vigorous war, which means universal destruction,” and nothing that had happened in the past year had weakened that notion in them.) The 10th Missouri, it was said, took particular pleasure in the work; it contained men who had been driven from their homes by Confederate guerrillas, and they were out to get even. Their comrades in arms, however, acting without animus, were just about as effective.

In any case, Meridian was thoroughly sacked. Sherman had appointed a solid column of cavalry to come down from the Memphis area and join him, and he had further ventures in mind, but the cavalry ran afoul of Bedford Forrest along the way and went back in ignominious defeat, so Sherman pulled his infantry out, loaded down with all the loot that could be carried (as the Confederates charged) in three hundred wagons which had been appropriated in the nearby countryside. Black smoke lay on the land as the troops marched away, and a scar that would be a long time fading; and as the column swung back toward home territory it was followed, as Sherman recalled, by “about ten miles of Negroes.”
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No other Yankee raid into southern territory brought back such an array of contrabands — five thousand of them by soldiers’ count, at least eight thousand by the estimate of angry Mississippians. These fugitives
had swarmed in from long distances, some of them carrying small children, none of them equipped for a long journey. Soldiers said some had come three hundred miles to join the column. Many died along the way. All were hungry and weary, yet they seemed to be cheerful, and while they had no real notion where the Army of the Tennessee was going they knew that its road was the road away from slavery, and they followed it with pathetic eagerness.

A Wisconsin soldier who watched them suspected that the average colored refugee had, deep within him, some very sober thoughts, for all his surface gaiety. “He was not only breaking up old associations, but was rushing out into a wholly new and untried world.… He was not certain of a full meal three times a day, or even once a day, and he must have sadly wondered what was to become of him.” Reflecting on all of this, the soldier remembered that a number of people in the North and in the South were arguing that the Negro slave was in reality quite satisfied with his lot, and he wrote angrily: “Such talk is mere twaddle.”
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Grant and Sherman were right; slavery was doomed, and the war was passing sentence upon it, no matter what doubts might assail the President. Of all societies, that of the South was least fitted to stand the shock of revolution, and the war was revolutionary. The destruction of Meridian and the ten-mile column of hopeless, hopeful colored folk who trailed out behind the triumphant northern army simply underlined the Confederacy’s inescapable problem.

For secession had been an attempt to perpetuate the past: to enable a society based on slavery to live on, as an out-of-date survival in the modern world. Slavery was above all else a primitive mechanism, and the society that relied on it could survive, in the long run, only if the outside world propped it up. But the southern society was not itself primitive at all. It needed all of the things the rest of the world needed — railroad iron, rolling mills, machine tools, textile machinery, chemicals, industrial knowledge, and an industrial labor force — yet it clung to the peculiar institution that prevented it from producing these things itself, and it relied on the rest of the world to make its deficiencies good. Now the rest of the world had ceased to contribute, except for the trickle that came in through the blockade. Instead, that part of the outside world that lay nearest — the North — was doing everything it could to destroy such industrial strength as the South possessed, and what it destroyed could not be replaced. The valor that sent southern youth out to fight barefooted in cotton uniforms with a handful of acorns in the haversack was not enough. Federal soldiers would be destructive because destruction pointed to victory, and as cotton gins and clothing factories went up in smoke the peculiar institution itself would crumble,
dim human aspirations seeping down into a submerged layer and undermining all of the foundations.

The southern Congress was quite right; an overturn was coming, and it was precisely the sort of overturn that the men who had created the Confederacy could not at any price accept. No peace based on reunion (the only sort of peace that was really conceivable) could be contemplated, because reunion, by now, inevitably meant the end of slavery. The more hopeless the military outlook became — the more inescapable the cruel parallel between dead grandfathers and slaves escaped from bondage — the more bitterly would southern leaders insist on fighting.

In this fact lay the real horror of 1864. The end of the war could not be hastened, even though it might become visible; it would have to go on until the last ditch had in fact been reached. The peculiar institution was at last taking its own revenge; taking it by the singular dominance it exerted over the minds of men who had gone to arms to perpetuate it.

Six weeks before Sherman made his raid on Meridian there was a singular little meeting one evening in the headquarters tent of General Joe Johnston, commanding what had been Bragg’s hard-luck army, at Dalton, Georgia. All corps and division commanders, with one exception, were present; among them, Irish General Pat Cleburne, who had fought so stoutly against Sherman’s troops at Chattanooga. General Cleburne had been considering the plight of the South, and he had a paper to present. With Joe Johnston’s permission (although not, it would appear, with his outright approval) he read it to the other officers.

The Confederacy, said Cleburne, was fighting a hopeless struggle. It had lost more than a third of its territory; it had lost many men and had “lost, consumed or thrown to the flames an amount of property equal in value to the specie currency of the world.” It was badly outnumbered and the disparity was getting worse instead of better, and the Confederate soldier was “sinking into a fatal apathy” and was coming more and more to “a growing belief that some black catastrophe is not far ahead of us.” Worst of all, at the beginning of the war slavery was one of the Confederacy’s chief sources of strength; now, from a military point of view, it had become “one of our chief sources of weakness.”

In any area that had been touched by northern armies, said Cleburne, slavery was fatally weakened, and with this weakness came a corresponding weakness in the civilian economy. The Confederacy thus had an infinite number of vulnerable spots: there was “one of these in every point where there is a slave to set free.” The burden could not be carried any longer. Therefore — said Cleburne, reaching the unthinkable conclusion — the South must boldly and immediately recruit Negro troops, guaranteeing in return freedom to every slave who gave his support to
the Confederacy. In substance, what Cleburne was asking for was emancipation and black armies. If the peculiar institution was a source of weakness, Cleburne would abolish the institution and turn its human material into a source of strength.

The war, said Cleburne, was killing slavery anyway. From one source or another, the Negro was going to get his freedom; as clearly as Sherman, Cleburne saw that the old relationship belonged in the grave with departed grandfathers. Make a virtue of necessity, then (said this foreign-born general), “and we change the race from a dreaded weakness to a position of strength.”

Cleburne’s proposal had certain support. It was signed by two brigadiers and a number of field officers from his own division, as well as by a stray cavalry general; and the first signature on the list, of course, was that of Cleburne himself. But the net effect of this modest proposal, dropped thus into a meeting of the commanding generals of the Confederacy’s western army, was about the effect that would be produced in a convention of devout churchmen by the unexpected recital of a grossly improper joke. It was received with a shocked, stunned, and utterly incredulous silence. Cleburne had mentioned the unmentionable.

One of the generals who had heard him hastened to write to good Bishop Polk. He began with a simple confession: “I will not attempt to describe my feelings on being confronted by a project so startling in its character — may I say so revolting to Southern sentiment, Southern pride and Southern honor.” He went on: “If this thing is once openly proposed to the Army the total disintegration of that Army will follow in a fortnight, and yet to speak and work in opposition to it is an agitation of the question scarcely less to be dreaded.” Secretary of War Seddon wrote earnestly to General Johnston, expressing Jefferson Davis’s conviction that “the dissemination or even promulgation of such opinions under the present circumstances of the Confederacy … can be productive only of discouragement, distraction and dissension.” General Johnston passed the word down the line, Cleburne put his paper away and agreed not to press it any farther, and the matter was buried.
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It had to be buried, for what Cleburne had quite unintentionally done was to force his fellow officers to gaze upon the race problem which lay beneath the institution of slavery, and that problem seemed to be literally insoluble. It did not, in that generation, seem possible to most men that white and black folk could dwell together in one community in simple amity. There had to be a barrier between them — some tangible thing that would compel everyone to act on the assumption that one race was superior and the other inferior. Slavery was the only barrier imaginable. If it were removed, society would be up against something monstrous and horrifying.

A great many men of good will felt that way. Lincoln himself had hoped that the business might be settled by some scheme of colonization, with freed Negroes transplanted bodily to some other continent in order that a free society might not have to admit them to full membership. Davis, addressing the Confederate Congress at the beginning of 1863, had denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as “the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty men”; it was a program, he said, “by which several millions of human beings of an inferior race, peaceful and contented laborers in their sphere, are doomed to extermination.” A junior officer in the Confederate War Department, addressing himself to Secretary Seddon about the time Cleburne was putting his own thoughts on paper, had spoken feelingly of “the difficulties and conflicts that must come from exterminating the Negro, which upon this continent is the only mode of exterminating slavery.”
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None of these folk who talked so lightly of extermination really meant it, of course. It would be left for a much more ruthless society in a far more brutal age to try the actual experiment of genocide. All anyone actually meant was that to make human brotherhood a working reality in everyday life seemed too big a contract for frail human beings. The privilege of belonging to an admittedly superior race — the deep conviction that there actually were superior and inferior races — could not be wrenched out of human society without a revolutionary convulsion. The convulsion was unthinkable, yet it was beginning to take place, even though hardly anyone had consciously willed it; it was coming down the country roads with the swaggering destructive columns in weathered blue, lying across the landscape behind the haze of smoke that came down from the ridges around Gettysburg and Chattanooga, and there was no stopping it. The bugle that would never call retreat had been heard by people who had not previously been allowed to look upon themselves as persons possessing any rights which other people were bound to respect. To end slavery was to commit the nation permanently to an ideal that might prove humanly unattainable. The inner meaning of the war now was that everything which America had done before — its dreams and its hopes, its sacrifices and its hard-bought victories — was no more than prologue to a new struggle that would go on and on for generations, with a remote ideal lying dim but discernible beyond the dust of the coming years.

Here was the real revolution: here was the fundamental and astounding conclusion, which had been implicit in the first crash of the marsh guns around Fort Sumter, which had followed Old Glory and Palmetto Flag down so many streets amid so many gaily cheering crowds. Here was what was being bought by infinite suffering, tragedy, and loss. Here was the showdown, not to be understood at once, not to be accepted
for generations, but nevertheless wholly inexorable. Mr. Lincoln was worried and Mr. Davis was desperate, and General Cleburne was quietly snubbed; and down the dusty roads came ten miles of Negroes, bags packed for a journey longer than any man could understand, marching toward a future that could never again be built in the image of the past.