This Hallowed Ground (72 page)

Apparently Sherman believed that he was doing what Lincoln would have wanted done. Certainly he was moved by a warm feeling of sympathy for the South and by a determination to prevent, if he possibly could, any post-war reprisals. For a man who made very hard war he was surprisingly ready to make a soft peace.

But he had gone far beyond anything permissible to an army commander. In effect, he had disposed of the whole reconstruction issue — that dangerous block of political dynamite that had been getting Mr. Lincoln’s most delicate, patient handling for two years — and he had readmitted the Confederate states to the Union on (so to speak) their own recognizance. A man who disliked all politicians and who had an ingrained distrust of the democracy generally, he simply was not able to foresee the
reaction that would inevitably follow on what he had done, nor could he understand that his government would unquestionably frown on the idea that Confederate armies should carry all of their weapons back home and put them in state arsenals where they could easily get at them again if they decided to fight some more.

When Sherman’s terms reached Washington the government almost blew up. It seems very likely that Lincoln would have disapproved of Sherman’s treaty if he had still been alive, but his disapproval would have been quiet and orderly. Now Lincoln was gone and the government for the moment was, to all intents and purposes, Secretary Stanton, and Stanton went into a public tantrum. He issued a statement denouncing Sherman and all but openly accusing him of disloyalty and completely repudiating the proposed treaty. The newspapers suddenly were filled with articles bitterly criticizing Sherman and accusing him of everything from insanity to the desire to make himself a pro-slavery dictator. Grant was sent down to Raleigh to make certain that Sherman should give Johnston terms precisely like those that had been given Lee — no more and no less — and from being one of the idols of the North, Sherman almost overnight became the object of a large amount of the bitterest sort of criticism.

 … In the course of time it would all wash off. The South would forget that Sherman had nearly ruined himself by his effort to befriend it, and the North would forget it also, and after a few years he would be complete villain to one section and unstained hero to the other. Meanwhile, however, the wild uproar over the way in which Sherman had tried to end the war was lengthening the odds against the kind of peace Lincoln would have wanted. By discrediting Sherman for trying to let the South off too easily, the radical Republicans (with whom Stanton was firmly allied) were beginning to build up their case for a peace that would need to be nailed down with bayonets.

On a road a few miles north of Raleigh, General Slocum one day came upon a group of Sherman’s soldiers standing around a loaded wagon to which they had just set fire despite the desperate protests of its civilian driver. The wagon was loaded with New York newspapers, just arrived, full of criticism of General Sherman. Slocum remarked that this was the last property he ever saw Sherman’s men destroy, and he said that he watched the burning “with keener satisfaction than I had felt over the destruction of any property since the day we left Atlanta.”
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Through four desperate years Abraham Lincoln had been groping his
way toward a full understanding of the values that lay beneath the war. He had seen a profound moral issue at stake, and more than any other man he had worked to make that issue dominant. Amid the confusing uproar of battle, the struggle of the place-hunters, and the clamor of the men who were simply on the make, he had listened for the still small voice; beyond hatred and fear and the greed for profit and advantage, he had sought to appeal to the basic aspirations of the human race. Taking final victory for granted, he had worked to give the victory an undying meaning.

Yet a fog of dust and smoke lay on the land, the horizon was forever ringed in murky flame, and wherever he turned — from the beginning of the war to its end — he kept touching a great mystery. Something bigger than men intended seemed to be at work; when he remarked half despairingly that he had not controlled events but had been controlled by them he was referring to the incomprehensible current which was moving down the century, compelling men to accomplish a thing greater than they had willed, moving toward a goal that was visible only at rare intervals. In the end it was not a party or a section that had triumphed but the entire nation, and the dreams and desires that would move the nation’s ultimate generations; and the terrible price that was paid was paid by all and not just by the losers.

Over and over throughout the war Lincoln had tried to put this into words. In the spring of 1864 he had written to a correspondent in Kentucky that after three years of warfare “the nation’s condition is not what either party or any man devised or expected. God alone can claim it … If God now wills the removal of a great wrong and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.” And in the spring of 1865, when he came to take the presidential oath for the second time, and delivered his inaugural address to a crowd that huddled before the capitol under a lowering sky, he carried the thought farther.

“… Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other … The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”
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There were a right and a wrong in the war; of that much he was certain. Yet it was beyond human wisdom to make a just appraisal of the extent to which individual men or groups of men ought to receive the praise or shoulder the blame. The loss and the victory were common
property now. The blame also was perhaps a common property. The whole war was a national possession, the end result a thing fated by the clouded stars, a great moment of opportunity, of sorrow, and of eternal hope, brought to a people who had touched elbows with destiny. Here was the supreme mystery; apparently an entire nation, wishing much less, had been compelled to help work out the will of Providence. So the President went on, to pose a majestic and unanswerable question:

“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?”

Like Jacob wrestling with the angel, Lincoln had grappled with this question through the years of bloodshed and loss and grief. There had come to him, in his lonely office in the White House, the endless casualty lists, the hard decisions that would mean innumerable deaths, the streaming thousands of people who wanted understanding, or mercy, or power and money in the pocket; and out of all of this he had grasped a vision. A whole nation could atone for a wrong; atonement made, it could then go on, with charity and without malice, to create a new right. It would be hard to do, of course. An intricate network of hot passions and whipped-up emotions would have to be broken, and many ties of self-interest would have to be severed. But it could be done, and the most adroit and skillful political leader in American history would be responsible for it. The spring of 1865 might be the time for it.

But different men had different thoughts about the war and, like Lincoln, they put them in writing. There was old John Brown, who had looked ahead to the war from the shadow of the hangman’s noose … “the crimes of this land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.” If he had hoped to prevent much bloodshed, old Brown had in fact brought much bloodshed on; and he had swung in the air and then vanished, leaving his own blighted heritage to the land. Now there was John Wilkes Booth, who also had thoughts. He jotted them down: “This country was formed for the
white
, not for the black man. And, looking upon African slavery from the same viewpoint held by the noble framers of our Constitution, I for one have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation.”
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The great blessing was gone now, and Booth would strike a blow of vengeance. He struck, and left his own heritage. Lincoln’s words spiraled off in the starless darkness, and it would be a
long time before anyone could invoke the spirit of charity and call for a peace made without hate.

Lincoln’s casket lay beneath the echoing dome of the capitol, and then it was taken all across the country, to be seen by hundreds of thousands of Americans; a great procession of sorrow, skillfully arranged by men who wanted to do precisely what Lincoln himself would not have done.

These were the radicals — the Stantons, the Ben Wades, the Thaddeus Stevenses, the Charles Summers, and the rest; the party leaders who had fought Lincoln as often as they had helped him, who distrusted his belief in reconciliation, who had opposed his plan for restoring the southern states to the Union, and who saw the beaten Confederacy as a conquered province which they could rebuild any way they chose. Their way would be a harsh one, and its most pathetic victim would be the recently freed Negro. Swearing now that they meant to protect him and help him walk erect as a man, they would make the race problem harder to solve. By the reaction they provoked they would finally help Jim Crow to come in and (for a time) take the place of Uncle Tom.

They are usually pictured as bad men, but the term is too strong. Some of them were bad and some were good, and the most were a mixture of good and bad; the real trouble was that they were men fatally limited — limited and wholly determined, sure of their own rightness, not unlike the men who in 1860 had dreamed of creating a glittering slave empire that would have the future in its keeping. The blame for the chance that was missed after the war ended is like the blame for the war itself; a common national possession.

President Andrew Johnson, who felt as they felt until experience taught him to feel otherwise, had not yet begun to assert himself. When at last he did he would do it ineptly, a man cursed with a genius for making enemies and estranging friends. Right now these men were running the government. The controls were in their hands, and their first effort was to create an atmosphere in which their kind of peace would look just and natural.

So they gave Lincoln a great funeral, inviting the people to look on the clay of the great leader slain in his hour of triumph. With this, and with the public denunciation of Sherman for his overgenerous offer of peace, they could whip up a state of mind in which charity and forbearance could be made to look like a betrayal. The light that had lit the room when Grant and Lee sat down together and that had gleamed brightly between Sherman and Johnston began to grow dimmer and dimmer. Dusk began to steal across the land, with long shadows to cloud men’s vision.

Far to the south things went on to their appointed end. In Alabama, Wilson’s tough troopers sat by their campfires in awed silence when they
were told that Lee and Johnston had surrendered and that the war was over. “They resisted belief,” one man recalled long afterword; “they dared not trust the story.” Later they learned that Lincoln had been killed, and they saw that the Negroes everywhere were overcome by fear. The laves had come to believe that it was Lincoln and Lincoln alone who had made them free; if he could be killed, would they not be returned to bondage? “For days the trembling creatures could not be induced to leave the camps, and it was only slowly and with difficulty that they could be made to realize that their former masters were finally deprived of power over them.”
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Making a last effort to break a way through to the land beyond the Mississippi, where it might just be possible to keep the war going, Jefferson Davis was captured and brought north to be imprisoned. It was said that when taken he was wearing his wife’s cloak and shawl, and the cruel story went abroad that he had tried to escape by disguising himself in woman’s clothing — just as, in the early spring of 1861, men had jibed that Lincoln came to Washington crudely disguised in a long robe and a grotesque Scotch tam o’shanter. The last Confederate troops in Alabama and Mississippi surrendered, and then finally the orphaned Confederate army beyond the Mississippi laid down its arms. The last embers of the southern republic had been stamped out. There would be no more shooting. Nothing was left now but the tragic and moving memories which would lie close to the bones of the American people forever.

In Washington there would be two grand reviews to wind everything up; one for the Army of the Potomac, and another next day for the Army of the Tennessee, with President and Cabinet in a reviewing stand by the White House and with jubilant thousands lining the streets to cheer. The armies had marched up from Virginia and Carolina for this final ceremony, crossing many old battlefields as they came. Wisconsin men in the Army of the Potomac remembered tramping past the desolate acres around Spotsylvania Court House and the Wilderness and seeing hundreds of bleached skeletons, still unburied; in one place army surgeons were collecting skulls in gunny sacks. An old man hoeing weeds in a corn patch as the soldiers passed saw what the men were looking at and shook his head sadly. “Ah, sir,” he said to one soldier, “there are thousands of both sides lying unburied in the Wilderness.”
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Sherman’s men crossed the Petersburg area, where the rival armies had faced each other in trenches for nine deadly months, and they looked at the fortifications with professional interest. The log huts which the Potomac soldiers had built for winter quarters struck the Westerners as excellent, but the Confederate works were not as imposing as they had expected them to be; out West (they insisted) the Rebs had built much tougher forts than these!
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Sherman’s XX Corps came up through Richmond
and realized suddenly that it had made the most prodigious swing of any corps in the whole Union army. This corps was composed of the troops Joe Hooker had taken west from the Army of the Potomac in the fall of 1863, when Rosecrans needed rescuing after Chickamauga. Some of the men had come down across the Chickahominy with McClellan in the spring of 1862, getting so near the Confederate capital that they had seen its spires and on quiet mornings had heard the far-off tinkle of its church bells. Then they had retreated down the James, and after that they had fought in such battles as Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. Finally they had gone to Tennessee, and they had hiked from Chattanooga to Atlanta and from there to Savannah, and from Savannah they had come north across the Carolinas — and now, at last, they were entering Richmond, three years after first seeing it, from the south instead of from the north.