This Hallowed Ground (63 page)

It does not matter much. McPherson was engaged to Miss Emily Hoffman of Baltimore, and he had planned to take leave in the winter of 1864 and go north and marry her. But the winter became very busy, and after Grant was summoned east and there were promotions all along the line Sherman had called McPherson in and had told him he could not have leave just now; McPherson was an army commander, the army had to be made ready for hard fighting, and his leave would have to wait until fall, or until next winter, or until some other time. McPherson had acquiesced, and he was still a bachelor; and now, late in July, he was bringing his army in on Atlanta from the east while Thomas’s men buried the dead in front of Peachtree Creek, and Hood caught his formations off guard and was threatening to inflict a ruinous defeat.

McPherson was at lunch when the news reached him. He got his horse and galloped off to the scene of action, and along the way advancing Confederate skirmishers had found a gap in the Union lines and were pushing through for the rear. McPherson ran into some of them, wheeled to retreat, and was shot dead from the saddle; and farther on his leading division repulsed a frontal attack just in time to turn around and meet an attack that was coming in from the rear. General John A. Logan succeeded to McPherson’s command and rode down the fighting lines, his felt hat clutched in one hand, his black hair and mustachios streaming
in the wind, crying out to his men: “Will you hold this line for me? Will you hold this line?” The men liked Logan, and as they plied ramrods in hot musket barrels they began to chant his nickname — “Black Jack! Black Jack!” They held the line, beating off assaults that seemed to come bewilderingly from all directions; and as the hot day wore away, the Army of the Tennessee at last managed to hold its position, Hood’s counterblow was broken, and by evening the Union army was safe again.
⁹

Grim General Sherman wept unashamedly when McPherson’s body was brought to headquarters. After the battle he wrote to Emily Hoffman in Baltimore, the girl who by now would have been Mrs. McPherson if Sherman had not intervened; a girl from a strongly southern family which had not approved of her engagement to this Union general. When the telegram that announced McPherson’s death came the girl heard a member of her family say: “I have the most wonderful news — McPherson is dead.” Emily Hoffman went to her bedroom and did not come out of it for a solid year, living there with curtains drawn, trays of food brought to her door three times every day, speaking no word to anyone. To her, Sherman poured out his heart in a long letter:

“I yield to no one on earth but yourself the right to exceed me in lamentations for our dead hero. Rather the bride of McPherson dead than the wife of the richest merchant of Baltimore.… I see him now, so handsome, so smiling, on his fine black horse, booted and spurred, with his easy seat, the impersonation of the gallant knight.”

Lamenting thus, Sherman thought of the fire-eaters who had helped bring on the war, and he lashed out at them: “The loss of a thousand men such as Davis and Yancey and Toombs and Floyd and Beechers and Greeleys and Lovejoys, would not atone for that of McPherson.” Then, looking darkly into the mist of war that still lay ahead of him, this uncontrollable fighter tried to put a personal grief into words:

“Though the cannon booms now, and the angry rattle of musketry tells me that I also will likely pay the same penalty, yet while life lasts I will delight in the memory of that bright particular star which has gone before to prepare the way for us more hardened sinners who must struggle to the end.”
¹⁰

The bright particular star was gone forever, and something that could never be regained went out of the war when McPherson died, just as had happened with the deaths of thousands of other young men who might have swung a golden light across the dark infinite sky; and meanwhile there was Hood’s army in Atlanta, still defiant and still dangerous, and the war could not stop because something irreplaceable had been lost, even though many women had to retreat to darkened rooms to live in the muted dusk of grief. The war had to be won and a good part
of it was up to Sherman, and he had to get on with the job.

He had not managed this battle too well, as a matter of fact. While the Army of the Tennessee had to take the pounding, Sherman had let Thomas’s and Schofield’s men remain out of action. They might have been sent in with an offensive that would have taken Atlanta then and there, for Hood was holding the lines in their front with one corps while he massed everything else against McPherson. A brilliant strategist, Sherman was not always a complete master of battlefield tactics.

But there was no time to waste in mourning lost opportunities. With this battle out of the way Sherman resumed his attempt to outflank the defenders; and he had the Army of the Tennessee, still bearing the grime of battle, set out on another of its long marches, pulling it behind the rest of the army in a wide arc so that instead of facing Atlanta from the east it was, a few days later, approaching the town from the west. Hood shifted strength to meet it, detected an opening once more, and on July 28 came out with another savage attack at Ezra Church, west of Atlanta. Again the Army of the Tennessee beat off the attack, and when it ended, Hood’s army was very nearly fought out. It had struck three times to drive the Yankees away from Atlanta, and each blow had failed. After Ezra Church a Yankee picket called out to a weary Confederate: “How many of you are there left, Johnny?” The Confederate’s reply was brief and eloquent: “Oh, about enough for another killing.”
¹¹

Sherman shifted his command arrangements just before Ezra Church. He refused to retain Logan as commander of the Army of the Tennessee; there was a coolness between Logan and Thomas, and cordial co-operation between the two seemed unlikely. McPherson’s old job went to Oliver Otis Howard, a prim sobersides of a New Englander who seemed excessively pious and strait-laced for this army of free-thinking Westerners but who, for some inexplicable reason, was doing a much better job with them than he had been able to do when he led troops in the more sedate Army of the Potomac. Howard had lost his right arm fighting under McClellan at Fair Oaks in front of Richmond; he never drank and never swore, and on Sundays he liked to visit hospitals and distribute religious tracts and baskets of fruit. He was never brilliant but he was reliable, and Sherman — his exact opposite, in most respects — had come to trust him.

Now Sherman settled down to put Atlanta under siege. He brought guns up and kept the town and its defenses under heavy bombardment, he refused to assault the strong Confederate trenches and he kept shifting his troops farther and farther around toward his right, trying to cut the railroads that linked Atlanta with the rest of the South so that he might capture both the city and the Confederate army that defended it.

And the month of August slowly wore away, while Sherman played
what looked like a waiting game and people in the North began to feel that neither his army nor Grant’s would ever win a clear-cut, decisive victory that would bring peace nearer.

The people of the North were about to decide whether they would carry the load any longer. They would decide by means of a presidential election, which would finally be interpreted either as a decision for war to a finish or as a vote to give up and let things slide. In midsummer it looked very much as if the Lincoln administration would be beaten.

The war had gone on for more than three years. It had touched every family circle in America. Every isolated farm, every peaceful village, and every great city knew perfectly well what names like Stone’s River and Chickamauga and Cold Harbor meant; and by now many folk were wondering if the terrible price they were paying was really going to buy what they wanted. The Confederates still held Richmond, Atlanta, and the heart of the South. Lee’s army was secure and defiant behind the Petersburg trenches. Hood’s army hung on in Atlanta. Early’s men continued to hold the Shenandoah Valley; and although the United States flag waved within eyesight of the two great citadels, the North had spent very close to one hundred thousand casualties to put it there, and nothing to speak of had come of it all. If people were beginning to question whether all of this was worth going on with any longer, it is not especially surprising.

Yet there was still the old dream: one nation, running from ocean to ocean, a land in which ideals that had never amounted to much elsewhere could finally be made real; a country whose inner meaning would finally be freedom and unity for everyone. In all human history no people had ever served a greater dream, and it was not to be given up easily. So there was a balancing of costs and possible gains all across the North this summer; and for their reading matter people had fearful lists of men killed and maimed, and stories about hard battles and endless marches, and subtle hints that perhaps it all could be ended if the government would just stop being so stiff-necked … and, here and there, bright patches in a dark fabric, things like Abraham Lincoln’s letter to a Mrs. Bixby, who had lost two or three or five sons in battle action: “… the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice on the altar of freedom.”

The Republicans had renominated Abraham Lincoln, largely because they could not help themselves. More and more, control of the party was passing into the hands of bitter men who hated and wanted to destroy.
To them it seemed that the President was not tough enough. He had moved slowly on the matter of emancipation, he was openly trying now to arrange things so that the states lately in a condition of secession could quietly be restored to the Union, and he had grave doubts about the status of the Negro once slavery had died. Like everyone else, these men could see an almost insoluble problem arising after the war, and — like some of the leaders in the South — the only answer they could see was the brutal one of extermination
¹
; yet where certain Southerners assumed that it was the colored race that must be exterminated, these men believed that it was the Southerner himself. Let the terrible pounding of the war (they argued) continue until everything that had supported slavery and secession had been ground down to dust; the wreckage might provide a suitable foundation for the building of a new society.

They were busy this summer trying to shelve Lincoln. Such men as Roscoe Conkling, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Horace Greeley, erratic editor of the New York
Tribune
, and David Dudley Field and Henry Winter Davis were meeting quietly and were arranging for an extraordinary convention in Cincinnati late in September to concentrate Union strength “on some candidate who commands the confidence of the country, even by a new nomination if necessary.”
²

Meanwhile there were the northern Democrats. They were looking more and more like a peace party, even if the price of peace might be acceptance of a division in the nation. The Vallandigham who had been exiled from Ohio and sent south had crept back into the country by way of Canada, and when the Democratic convention met in Chicago late in August his voice seemed to be dominant. The delegates met (in an atmosphere rendered slightly murky by the presence of numerous ineffective but busy Confederate agents) and nailed this plank into the party’s platform: “This convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war … justice, humanity, liberty and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an immedate convention of the states, or other peaceable means, to the end that at the earliest practicable moment peace may be restored on the basis of the federal union of the states.”
³

If an armistice and a general convention could restore the Union, that might be all to the good; as a practical matter, the war, once dropped, could never be picked up again, and everybody knew it. This plank supported Lincoln’s contention that the Democratic nominee, if elected, would have won the election on grounds that would make victory impossible. The bitter-end Republicans were not in the least surprised when the Democratic convention which had adopted this declaration went on from there to nominate as its candidate none other than the
one-time hero of the Army of the Potomac, General George B. McClellan. Had he not always been a soft-war man?

By the end of August, then, that was the situation. Fighting men on both sides appraised it in the same way. Someone sounded Grant out on the matter of Lincoln’s possible replacement, and Grant exploded angrily: “I consider it as important to the cause that he should be elected as that the army should be successful in the field.” On the Confederate side, valiant General Stephen D. Ramseur of North Carolina wrote to his wife that men just back from the North were saying that McClellan would be elected and that the election would bring peace, “provided always that we continue to hold our own against the Yankee armies.”
⁴

If they could hold their own … continued stalemate could actually mean victory for the Confederacy. It believed itself to be unconquerable, and men could argue that in this dreadful summer it was proving itself so. Hang on, keep the Yankees from making any visible gains, let war-weariness carry the election — and that will be the end of it. So ran the southern hope; so, also, ran the genuine possibility.

The great struggles of history are not always visible and dramatic. They can take place out of sight, in the hearts and the minds of millions of men who have a choice to make. It went thus in 1864. The final word about the Civil War would be spoken by the people back home, most of whom had never seen a battlefield, carried a musket, or known what it was like to watch pain and death take form in the red-gray mist of smoke and flame. Out of what they felt, the choice would come.

The wheel had swung full circle. In 1861, war had come because emotion took charge when hard decisions were to be made. Emotion would take charge again this year; emotion, springing from no one could say what involved thoughts and deep griefs and hopes, given final form perhaps by the news from the battle fronts. In one way or another the men of the North would decide whether they wanted to go on to the finish or give up and write off all that they had suffered and all that they had once hoped for. Their verdict would be final. Lincoln knew it, and the little slip of paper he had filed away in a pigeonhole shows what he feared the decision might be like: shows, too, that if the decision was unfavorable to everything he had lived for he would get around it if he possibly could. There have been few bitter-end fighters in all history quite as tenacious as Abraham Lincoln.