This Hallowed Ground (57 page)

 … If people could not see it or say it, they could sing it. There was a tinny, jingling little song in the air that year across the North: a Tin Pan Alley ditty, mocking and jeering and pulsing somehow with a
Ca Ira
sort of revolutionary drumbeat. It spoke for the colored folk in a queer inverted way, although it had not yet reached them, and in a ten-cent manner it voiced what the year meant. It was called “The Year of Jubilo”:

It went on, shrill and imperious, the song of the great overturn, the cheap little tune to which a great gate was beginning to turn painfully on creaking hinges:

It would be that sort of year: year of Jubilo, year of overturn and disaster and ruin, year of infinite bloodshed and suffering, with the foundations of the great deep broken up; hard tramp of marching military feet, endless shuffle of splay-footed refugees running away from something they understood little better than they could understand what they were running toward; the significance of their march being that it led toward the unknown and that all America, like it or not, was going to follow.

Beyond the war there would be peace. It was still a long way off, and a great many young men would have to die before it could become real, but Abraham Lincoln never took his eyes off it. For the peace would have to justify its cost, which was immense beyond calculation, and if the war was being fought to bring the Union together again, the
Union would need to be rebuilt on something better than hatred and suspicion and a sullen longing for revenge. So in the beginning of 1864, Lincoln was reaching out to shape the peace that had not yet been won.

In a moment of candor he once remarked that he could not claim to have controlled events but that events rather had controlled him. All in all, the events of war had not been kind to him. He had become the instrument through which more than he desired was being done. He wanted to restore something — the shape of a lost golden age, perhaps, which early America had thought that it possessed — and the past had gone beyond restoration. Among those who supported him (supported him reluctantly, and only because they could not help themselves) were men who wanted the very destruction and overturn which he himself most dreaded; hard men, made for hatred, to whom reconciliation was a paltry word and who would be happy to play the part of conquerors. As 1864 began, Lincoln was trying to lay his own hands on the peace before victory itself had been won.

In December of 1863 he had set forth his program, which was essentially an effort to get both seceded persons and seceded states back into the Union with the least possible difficulty. Pardon and restoration of full rights would go to any Confederate (with certain stated exceptions) who would swear to support the Constitution and the Union of the states and to abide by all of the Federal government’s acts and pronouncements in respect to slavery. And a state itself could return to its old position in the Union whenever as many as ten per cent of the state’s voters should re-establish a loyal Union government within that state. In effect, he was trying to get the citizens of southern states to make at least a start in the direction of rebuilding the old Union.

There were difficulties. Radical Republicans were asserting that the southern states, by the act of secession, had in effect committed suicide; they would have to be rebuilt anew, and the agency that must say how and when they could be rebuilt must be the Federal Congress, not the President. Furthermore, the first steps which Lincoln so greatly desired could be taken, obviously, only in such southern states as were already largely occupied by the Union army. The most conspicuous of these was Louisiana, a large part of which had been effectively held since the middle of 1862. Here was the logical place to make a beginning. Yet Louisiana had been ruled for a time by Ben Butler, with whom even the most Union-minded of Southerners would hesitate to co-operate; and after Butler’s removal there was divided Federal authority in the state, with purely military problems competing for attention with the problems of reconstruction, and the work went forward very slowly.

Nevertheless, the start was being made, and Major General Nathaniel P. Banks, that devoted politician and maladroit strategist, was in charge
of it. As the winter progressed, Banks was calling for elections — election of a civilian governor and election of delegates to a convention that should create a new constitution. (In Washington, bitter-enders like Thaddeus Stevens and Ben Wade were sputtering furiously against all of this, but the work was going forward.) The basic complication lay in the fact that Banks’s effort to reconstruct Louisiana politically was going hand in hand with an effort to conquer another section of the Confederacy by force of arms, and under Banks’s handling the two projects got in each other’s way. Banks was to lead a military expedition up the Red River toward Texas. This would complete the occupation of Louisiana, would enable a Union army to move down toward the Texas border — thereby, presumably, putting the fear into Napoleon III of France, who had been ostentatiously fracturing the Monroe Doctrine by installing luckless Maximilian on the throne in Mexico — and just incidentally it should scoop up considerable quantities of cotton for the hungry textile mills of New England, with whose problems General Banks was closely familiar.

So Banks was a busy man in this winter of 1864, and Louisiana was buzzing with activities which unfortunately were not entirely compatible. In the end, none of these ventures would actually come to anything; Wade and Stevens and their cohorts would scuttle Lincoln’s cherished “ten per cent plan,” and there were armed Confederates in waiting to defeat the Red River expedition, and the whole program would come to look like an eccentric thrust, a diversion of effort away from the main channels of the war program. Yet it did represent a valiant attempt to shape the war with post-war ideals in mind; an effort to reassert control over those events that thus far had been out of control. Every other ounce of attention had to go simply to the task of making victory certain. Here, at least, was a try at looking beyond victory. It would not work, finally, for a variety of reasons, among them the grim fact that war lays down its own rules, but the motives back of it were good. Not unless it was forced upon him would Lincoln accept the war as a complete uprooting and overturning.
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Meanwhile there was the war itself; and in March 1864 the Federal government took the decisive step. Congress created the post of lieutenant general in the regular army and Lincoln gave the job to U. S. Grant; solid insurance, finally, that the war would be fought remorselessly and methodically until the South was capable of no further resistance.

Now Grant was the top northern general, and Halleck was reduced to the position of chief of staff. Broadly speaking, Grant would have a free hand. He could make his headquarters where he chose, and within wide limits he could do as he pleased with the country’s armies, with
White House and War Department pledged to give him full support. He was the fourth man to hold this position during the war, and he stood in odd contrast to the generals who had gone before.

First there had been Winfield Scott — old, swollen with dropsy, vain and fussy, a stouthearted man and a sound strategist, but so infirm physically he could not mount a horse, could indeed hardly so much as get out from behind his desk without help. Scott had understood the kind of war that was being fought, and he had done his part to get the country off to a good start; his only trouble was that he was fifteen years past his prime, and he had been quietly shelved after a few months, his place taken by the brilliant young McClellan. McClellan, too, had contributed his bit; he had given organization, order, and high morale to the Army of the Potomac, but he had never understood either the war itself or his own place in it; he had become obsessed by his picture of himself as the virtuous hero forever hampered by scheming and treacherous men of ill will, and the capacity for hard driving fighting was not in him. So he had gone, too, and Halleck had come in: Halleck, the book soldier who quickly reduced himself to the role of paper-shuffler, a man fond of details of office work and given to writing long, gossipy letters to his subordinates, pettish and querulous, wholly unfitted for the direction of a war that went by none of the old rules. Now there was Grant.

He had had his ups and his downs, and nobody in his senses would ever give him any of the nicknames that had been given to his predecessors — Old Fuss and Feathers, the Young Napoleon, Old Brains. He was not a man for nicknames, or for striking attitudes, or for impressing other people. A physician on his staff once asked him about the art of war, expecting a dissertation on Jomini or some other world authority. Grant replied that the art of war was really simple enough; at bottom, it meant to “find out where your enemy is, get at him as soon as you can and strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”
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This uncomplicated creed he had followed ever since Belmont and Fort Henry, and it precisely expressed the quality that Abraham Lincoln had been looking for in his generals for so long a time. Now Lincoln had the man he wanted; from the spring of 1864 the Federal armies would keep moving on, and sooner or later the end would come.

Grant took over the high command in a little ceremony at the White House on March 9, and he got to work at once. As he sat down to survey the situation and figure out the best way to put his little creed into effect, he could see that in a way his task was quite simple. The Confederacy possessed two principal armies — the Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by Robert E. Lee, and the Army of Tennessee, commanded by Joseph E. Johnston. Lee’s army was in camp below the
Rapidan River, lean and taut and ready for action; Johnston’s was encamped in northern Georgia, near the town of Dalton. Behind Lee lay Richmond, and behind Johnston lay Atlanta. These armies and the territories they defended were Grant’s destined striking points. To get at them as quickly as possible, hit them hard and keep moving on, was the Federal commander’s main responsibility. If they could be put out of action, the war would be won.

There were side shows: most notably, General Banks’s expedition, of which Grant heartily disapproved, on the twin grounds that it was not aimed at a vulnerable point and that it drew men and effort away from the real targets. Banks was getting progressively deeper into trouble while Grant was taking over his new job; he captured the Louisiana city of Alexandria and pushed forward hopefully enough, but within weeks he was to be so roundly defeated that he would narrowly escape losing his entire army and Admiral Porter’s pet fleet of ironclads along with it. But what he might or might not be able to do would make very little difference. Johnston and Lee were the real antagonists, and the war would be won or lost in Virginia and Georgia. It was these points that got Grant’s attention.

In the West things looked favorable. When he moved east Grant gave Sherman top command in the West, and Sherman kept prodigiously busy during the winter getting his supplies and transportation in shape for the big drive. Technically Sherman was what would now be called an army group commander. Under him there were close to one hundred thousand combat soldiers, more than half of whom belonged to George Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland. Then there was Sherman’s old Army of the Tennessee, led now by James B. McPherson — smaller than the Army of the Cumberland, less well disciplined, cockier and faster on its feet. With these there was a third army, led by General John Schofield: the little Army of the Ohio, really no more than an army corps, its leader the young man who had served as very junior assistant to Lyon out in Missouri in the early days of the war. With these three armies, made as ready as the enormous resources of the North could make them, Sherman was waiting for the signal. His instructions were clear and uncomplicated; as he himself put it later, “I was to go for Joe Johnston.”
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As Sherman’s army went for Joe Johnston, the Army of the Potomac was to go for Robert E. Lee, and it was with this army that Grant himself decided to move. It was believed in Washington that this army needed the all-out drive that only the general-in-chief could provide. George Gordon Meade, its own commander, was a solid and conscientious soldier, but neither he nor any of his predecessors had ever quite been able to make the army fight all out. The Virginia theater of operations
was the war’s show window, closest to the capital and to the big eastern centers of population, most thoroughly covered by the newspapers, so that it sometimes seemed as if the real war was being fought here and that everything else was a side show; yet the Army of the Potomac, for all the glamor that was attached to its name, was in reality the inglorious hod carrier for the Union cause. It had been blooded at Bull Run, and it had fought on the Virginia peninsula, along the Rappahannock, in Maryland and in Pennsylvania. The evil forces of politics had flickered over it; Robert E. Lee had played cruel games with its generals, deceiving them and leading them on so that they would get many of their men killed to no good purpose. The army had tramped through the choking red dust and the clinging mud of Virginia without seeming to accomplish much, its two victories were purely defensive, and all in all it had never got the habit of triumph. Its men were fatalists, doing the best they could, taking their beatings — Gaines’s Mill, Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville — and coming back for more, always ready but never really confident, clinging to fond memories of the departed McClellan, and ready enough to admit that the greatest general of all was the man who commanded the opposing Confederate army, General Lee.