Chapter 10 - Land of Hope - PDF

CHAPTER TEN THE HOUSE DIVIDES PRESIDENT-ELECT ABRAHAM LINCOLN MOVED QUIETLY AND cautiously during the four months between the election and his taking office. As well he should have, since he would be faced with extraordinarily weighty and complex decisions...

CHAPTER TEN THE HOUSE DIVIDES PRESIDENT-ELECT ABRAHAM LINCOLN MOVED QUIETLY AND cautiously during the four months between the election and his taking office. As well he should have, since he would be faced with extraordinarily weighty and complex decisions from the moment he became president. How active should he be in trying to prevent secession? How conciliatory should he be toward the Southern states? Could conciliation persuade the states of the Upper South not to follow the Deep South into secession? And if secession occurred anyway, what would he do about it? Would he go to war and oppose secession by use of military force, or would he allow the Southern states to go in peace? If he did the former, how was he to go about fighting a war to force the antagonistic parts of a free nation to stay together? If he did the latter, might the United States be left so weakened and diminished by its dismemberment, and so vulnerable to further disintegration, that its rising status in the world would soon end, and then be decisively reversed? As Lincoln assembled his cabinet, a task at which he labored until the very day of his inauguration, he pondered all these things and more, and yet gave very few outward signs of what he was planning to do. Much of the public was nervous about the coming presidency of this lanky, awkward man of the prairies, and he disclosed little in his four-month waiting period to reassure them. His initial thinking began to emerge more clearly in his eloquent First Inaugural Address on March 4, 1861. Its tone was, in the main, highly conciliatory. The South, he insisted, had nothing to fear from him regarding his protection of slavery where it already existed. He was willing to accept the Corwin Amendment, which had been passed by both houses of Congress and would institutionalize that protection, and he would enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, so long as free blacks were protected against its misuse. He promised not to use force against the South, unless the South were to take up arms in an insurrection against the government. But secession was another matter. Lincoln was crystal clear about that: it would not be tolerated. The Union, he asserted firmly, was perpetual and indissoluble. Secession from it was impossible, particularly if undertaken by any individual state, acting “upon its own mere motion,” that had not first sought to gain the consent of all other states to withdraw from their shared contract. Even by the logic of the compact theory of the Constitution, he was implying, what South Carolina and the other Deep South states were doing was wrong. Still, despite the vein of iron he had revealed, Lincoln concluded his speech not with a rebuke or a threat but with a gentle and emotional appeal to unity and to the shared sentiments and experiences that had animated and bound together the United States for its eight and a half decades as a nation. “We are not enemies, but friends,” he pleaded. “We must not be enemies.” The passions of the moment “must not break our bonds of affection.” It was not too much to hope that “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union.” Such splendid presidential oratory had not been heard in Washington since the days of Thomas Jefferson. In other respects, though, there was little practical difference between Lincoln’s initial approach and Buchanan’s. Lincoln’s strategy would soon need to shift, however, once he faced his first crisis: the siege of Fort Sumter, a federal facility located on a small island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, the white-hot center of secessionist sentiment. Secessionists in South Carolina had demanded that the fort be evacuated, something Buchanan had refused to do; but Buchanan’s effort to resupply the isolated post had been driven away by Confederate artillery fire. Such was the stalemated situation when Lincoln became president. When Sumter’s commanding officer, Major Robert Anderson, declared that he and his sixty-nine men had only a few weeks’ supplies left, Lincoln made the decision to attempt again to resupply him and the fort. Unwilling to permit this, the Confederates opened fire on the fort and, after more than thirty hours of shelling, forced its surrender in advance of the arrival of the resupply effort. This was a seeming defeat for the Union. But actually the result was an important strategic triumph, for Lincoln had shown political and tactical shrewdness by maneuvering the South Carolinians into firing the first shots. If war was unavoidable, then it should be begun on terms favorable to the Union. He could easily have chosen other, more muscular measures. For example, he could have wasted no time in attacking the South Carolinian forces head-on. But any such measures would have sacrificed the moral high ground, always important in modern warfare, and especially important in the conduct of a civil war whose success would depend on the direction of public opinion, and whose ultimate objective was not a conquest but a reconciliation of the warring factions. It was of inestimable value for him, and the federal forces, to be able to claim in truthfulness that they were not the ones to initiate the violence and that their response was one not of aggression but instead one of self-defense. Immediately after the surrender of Fort Sumter, which produced an outburst of indignation in the North, Lincoln called on the Northern states to supply seventy-five thousand militiamen to help in the battle against the Confederacy, an effort to be followed by a blockade of Southern ports. These actions were viewed as an affront by Southerners, and that was enough to bring four Upper South states into the Confederacy, including the all-important Virginia, as well as Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina. However, the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Delaware, and Maryland did not join, and it would be an important strategic objective of Lincoln’s, throughout the war, to keep the border states in the Union and out of the Confederacy. And so the war began, with neither side expecting anything like the lengthy and destructive struggle that was to come. Even so, vital principles were in conflict, and the conflicts extended back many years. Southerners believed that Lincoln and the North were violating the important principle of state sovereignty by refusing to allow the Southern states to do as a majority of their citizens wanted to do, by means of a vote of delegates in the very same bodies, state conventions, that had ratified the Constitution. Lincoln, conversely, saw secession as a form of sheer anarchy, one that, by refusing to accept the results of a legitimate election, would serve to subvert and discredit the very idea of democracy itself in the eyes of monarchists and aristocrats around the world. For Lincoln, the restoration and preservation of the Union was the chief goal of the war. All other objectives were subordinated to that one. It is important to stress this. It was not until well into the war that the overthrow of slavery became an important part of the Northern agenda. There could be no doubt that the existence of slavery was a central cause of the war; but there also can be no doubt that, as the war began, opposition to slavery was not the central reason why the North embraced a war against secession. It might seem completely self-evident that, going into the war, the North enjoyed huge advantages in all the most important ways. It had the larger population (twenty-two million to nine million, with the latter number including four million slaves); held more states (twenty-three to eleven); had a larger economy; controlled the nation’s banking and financial systems, most of the nation’s industry, and most of its iron and coal; had huge advantages in transportation (more wagons, ships, and horses and 70 percent of the nation’s railroads); had a decent-sized navy; and on and on. Totaling up the relative assets of the two sides, the South didn’t seem to have had a prayer of success. But wars are not won merely by comparing lists of material assets, and in this case, such lists would not adequately reflect some very real advantages that the Confederacy brought to the struggle. First and foremost, there was the fact that its war objectives were far simpler and far more easily met. The two sides needed to achieve very different things. To attain their objective of political independence, the Confederate states needed only to hang on to the territory they claimed for themselves, territory they already controlled. In other words, they had only to fight a defensive war on familiar and friendly territory to win, while the North had to conquer and occupy an unfamiliar and hostile area equivalent in size to Western Europe – and then convince the conquered section to reenter the nation. The Confederates were defending their homeland, the most potent of all military motivations, while the North was fighting for an abstraction, “the Union.” In addition, many of the nation’s most talented military leaders, men such as Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, were Southerners who had left the Union Army to join the Confederate cause. It seemed quite possible that with such leaders, and with the legendary marksmanship and fighting spirit of Southern soldiers, so visible in the Mexican War, the rebel force would be able to put up a compelling resistance. The South also had other reasons for hope that did not seem unrealistic at the war’s outset. It seemed entirely possible, for example, that European demand for Southern cotton might eventually induce one or another country to extend diplomatic recognition and financial support to the Confederacy, just as the support of the French in the American Revolution had led to the colonists’ victory against all odds. In addition, it did not seem unreasonable to hope that the people of the North might tire of an extended war, particularly one to reimpose a Union upon people who no longer wanted it, a Union that seemed hopelessly broken and beyond repair. Lincoln faced a very complicated job, and although he came into office with some sources of popular support, he was a minority president whose support was neither deep nor wide. The successful conduct of the kind of war he was facing would be reliant on steadiness and patience in public opinion. Without a stable stream of conspicuous victories in the field of battle, the Northern citizenry might well become restless, lose patience with the war effort, and opt to force Lincoln into suing for peace through a negotiated settlement. That was precisely one of Lincoln’s fears, and as we shall see, it turned out to have some considerable foundation in reality. In addition, the Union was a long way from having a true national army. When Lincoln issued his call to the state militias in the wake of Fort Sumter, what arrived in Washington and other mustering locations was a motley assortment of men whose irregular uniforms reflected the natural diversity of what was still a highly decentralized and loosely organized republic. Some states had dressed their fighting men in blue, but others were in various combinations of gray, emerald, black, or red. The New Yorkers sported baggy red breeches, purple Oriental blouses, and red fezzes in tribute to the French Zouaves. One observer said that the first Union forces assembling in Washington looked less like a serious army than “like a circus on parade.” It was not a condition that would last, but it was indicative of the obstacles that both Lincoln and his military leaders would face in welding together a capable fighting unit. It would take time. The hope that the war could be concluded quickly, however, was widespread. Lincoln had signed up the first volunteers for enlistments of only ninety days. He hoped that a single effective stroke could end the South’s ability to resist and allow the Union Army to march straight to the Confederate capital at Richmond, putting an end to the war. That hope would be shattered on July 21 by the first major land encounter of the war, the First Battle of Bull Run just south of Washington. Confederate General Jackson humiliated a force of thirty-seven thousand raw Union troops, sending them racing back to Washington in a panic, along with a contingent of curiosity seekers and observers. There would not be a single decisive stroke by the Union forces. In the meantime, General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, who had been a hero in the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, but was now seventy- four years old and in poor health, was tasked with developing the overall Union strategy. He devised an approach that became known, irreverently, as the Anaconda Plan, named for the large tropical snake that defeats its prey by constricting and suffocating it. It was an appropriate image, however, despite its mocking intention, since the plan would rely heavily on the denial of trade and resources rather than on attacking and defeating the enemy in the field, to “squeeze” the Confederacy into submission. The Union would use the superiority of the Union Navy to blockade the Southern ports, which would have punishing effects upon the import-dependent Southern economy. In addition, the Union would take possession of New Orleans and the Mississippi River, which would allow it to control vital commerce on the river and to split the Confederacy in two. It was a good strategy, and if it had been followed consistently, it could conceivably have led to a relatively bloodless and undisruptive outcome to the war. But it had one major defect: it took too long to have any visible effect. This was not a military defect, but it was a political one, as Lincoln recognized when he replaced the retiring Scott with General George C. McClellan, who confidently promised to push the battle forward as general-in-chief. The political pressure to make quick, visible progress in the field of battle, and eventually to march “Forward to Richmond,” was so great that Lincoln could not afford to ignore it. © DAVID LINDROTH Major campaigns of the Civil War. The haughty and fussy McClellan soon proved to be unsatisfactory to Lincoln, however. A stiffly professional West Point man who believed in thorough preparation, he insisted upon putting his troops through extensive training before going into battle, not moving on Virginia until March 1862. Lincoln’s impatient complaints were brushed aside by the arrogant general, who made no secret of his disdain for the president’s intelligence. Finally, McClellan devised an ingenious strategy for attacking the Confederate capital. Instead of attempting to advance southward over the difficult terrain of northern Virginia, he moved an army of 112,00 men down the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay to the neck of land between the James and York rivers, the peninsula containing Jamestown and Yorktown, with the ultimate intention of coming into Richmond from the southeast, by the back door. This opening gambit of McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign worked well and succeeded in placing his army within twenty-five miles of the Confederate capital. But then, in what became a pattern with him, McClellan hesitated and thereby frittered away the immediate advantage of his success. Through a series of tactically brilliant Confederate moves, many of them led by Robert E. Lee, McClellan’s advance was repulsed, and he was eventually forced to retreat. Lee, buoyed by these triumphs and intent upon an even greater success, decided on a bold move of invading the North, specifically the enemy territory of Maryland and Pennsylvania. It would be risky, but Lee was willing to take the risk, considering the benefit that would come to the Confederate cause, especially in the eyes of potential European supporters, from a victory on the enemy’s own turf. It would be even riskier than Lee could have guessed, since he did not know that McClellan had obtained a copy of his secret orders detailing his battle plan for the next engagement with Union troops. McClellan exulted in this advantage, but he again failed to press it and gave Lee time to gather his forces. The two armies met at Antietam Creek in Maryland on September 17, 1862, and what ensued was the bloodiest single day of the entire war, with some twenty-two thousand men killed or wounded. Casualties of this magnitude had never before been seen on the soil of the United States. The immediate result of the battle at Antietam was inconclusive. For all intents and purposes, it was a tactical standoff, despite the North’s prior knowledge of Confederate plans and its possession of a two-to-one advantage in troop numbers going into the battle. True, the progress of Lee’s army was stopped cold; his Northern-invasion ideas had been thwarted so far. But McClellan had failed to capitalize on this fact, something he easily could have done. He could have turned a standoff into a smashing victory simply by mobilizing his reserves and continuing to bring the fight to Lee, pushing him back to the Potomac River behind him and trapping him. All he had to do was seize the moment. But he didn’t, and thanks to his indecision, the remnants of Lee’s army were able to slip away and live to fight another day. Lincoln was furious. He had expected far better results from such favorable circumstances, and as a consequence, he curtly removed McClellan from command, replacing him with the more aggressive General Ambrose Burnside. In fact, however, for all its disappointing aspects, the bloody standoff at Antietam Creek would turn out to be an important strategic victory for the Union. For one thing, it had denied the South a victory it had needed very badly. But perhaps even more importantly, Antietam had given the North a great opportunity, precisely the opportunity that it had failed to produce for the South: the right moment to make an appeal for the favorable attention of the world. Even before Antietam, Lincoln had already been contemplating making moves to weaken American slavery. Even though he had not ever been an abolitionist in his politics, he had always regarded slavery as “an unqualified evil” whose eventual extirpation was an ultimate end for which he ardently wished. He was getting pressure from members of his own party and abolitionist groups to act. He knew that such a move on the part of his government would gain the Union cause much favor and support in foreign capitals and decisively counteract any strictly economic appeal of the Southern cause. Several concerns had been holding him back, though. Some were constitutional, some were military, and some were social or political. Some were questions of high principle, whereas others were questions of practical politics. In the former category was the fact that the institution of slavery was protected under the Constitution, a fact that he himself had repeatedly stressed and even campaigned on. While it could be argued that the coming of the war changed the general context for his past remarks, it did not change the Constitution itself. Lincoln had an unusually high regard for the law in general and a respect bordering on religious veneration for the Constitution in particular. The strength of the Union depended on the nation’s unflagging devotion to that document. If he were ever going to use his executive authority to restrict or inhibit slavery, it would have to be done in a way that entirely passed constitutional muster. And it would have to be done in a way that could not simply be overturned in the next election. Lincoln had several other concerns on his mind. As mentioned before, he needed to keep the support of border states, such as his native Kentucky and Missouri, both of which were slave states that had not joined the Confederacy. A sudden move toward abolition would surely spell an end to that support and tip those states to the other side. Furthermore, it was not at all clear that a majority of Northerners would take well to abolition, and the end result of pushing ahead with it anyway might well be a division of the country, leading to a fatal undermining of the war effort. Lincoln needed to be careful not to get too far out in front of public opinion. Nevertheless, it appears that by July 1862, he was convinced that the time had come for the national government to adopt a strongly antislavery position and that such a position could be justified both on military grounds (the freed slaves could participate in the war effort) and on diplomatic ones (to attract support from Europe). He would have preferred to see slavery abolished by the individual states through their own laws, with compensation for slave owners and federal aid for freedmen who wished to emigrate. But he had not enjoyed any success in persuading the border states to consider that approach and was now prepared to try to use the powers of his own office. He had discussed the possibility of an Emancipation Proclamation with his cabinet and received a decidedly mixed response from them. Several feared anarchy in the South and a possible foreign intervention. His secretary of state, William Seward, favored the idea but advised him to wait to issue the Proclamation until there had been a significant Union victory, so that it would not appear that the Union was issuing a “last shriek of retreat.” And so Lincoln would do. The Battle of Antietam, as an important if qualified victory, gave him the opportunity to make that bold move, in a way that showed strength rather than weakness. On September 22, 1862, just five days after the battle, he made public the first part of the Emancipation Proclamation, a preliminary statement that outlined the intent of the whole Proclamation, announcing that all slaves in Confederate-held “States and parts of States” as of January 1, 1863, would be “then, thenceforward, and forever free.” The second part of the Proclamation would then be issued on that latter date. Theoretically, Confederate states and parts of states that ceased their rebellion by that date would have been allowed to keep their slaves. That last item underscores something important about the Emancipation Proclamation: it was tailored as a war measure. Lincoln handled the matter this way out of his profound respect for the Constitution. He insisted that during peacetime, he had no legitimate power to abolish slavery where it already existed and already enjoyed constitutional protections. But in wartime, different considerations applied. He still could not abolish slavery by fiat. But as commander in chief of the nation’s armed forces, he had martial powers under the Constitution to free slaves in rebel states “as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion.” This meant that the four slaveholding border states in the Union, as well as the retaken parts of Tennessee and a few other areas, were exempted from the measure. Many observers then and since have wished for a more resounding document, one comparable to the Declaration of Independence, that would mark the end of slavery dramatically and once and for all. The historian Richard Hofstadter disparaged the Proclamation by comparing it to a “bill of lading” and claiming that it did not free a single slave. But such criticisms miss the point of Lincoln’s statesmanship. Yes, it can justifiably be claimed that Lincoln, though often soaring in his rhetoric, tended to be lawyerly in his ways. But that was because Lincoln wanted slavery abolished in the right way. He was in no doubt that the Constitution’s provision for slavery, while it had thus far been complicit in carrying forward the national wound wrought by that institution, was inconsistent with the Constitution’s fundamental makeup, precisely because it was inconsistent with the Declaration’s insistence upon the natural rights of all human beings. The remedying of that flaw would, he believed, render the Constitution more fully the instrument it was meant to be: a document of liberty, a “picture of silver” framing the “apple of gold,” the Declaration. But the law could be corrected only by means of the correct use of the law, not by the overturning of the law – and there were legal means available for doing just that. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, not a second resonant Declaration, would be the proper way to accomplish it. And one further observation about the Emancipation Proclamation: it had the effect of enlarging the war’s purpose. Lincoln would make this point explicitly in the Gettysburg Address, a few months later in 1863. But it was now clear (if still mainly implicit) that, by putting the process of emancipation into motion, Lincoln had determined that the war was no longer just about the preservation of the Union. After the upward turn of events at Antietam, the Union’s fortunes quickly got worse. And Lincoln’s generalship problems only grew. If McClellan had been an excessively cautious leader, General Burnside turned out to be the polar opposite: an incautious, emotional, even reckless one. When he attacked Lee’s army at Fredericksburg, he sent in waves of men in traditional charges to be mowed down by Lee’s well-entrenched units and suffered horrific casualties – twelve thousand to Lee’s five thousand. The following day, a tearful Burnside withdrew his decimated forces and limped away from Fredericksburg, so to be replaced by General Joseph Hooker. As 1862 ended, the Union forces were stymied and demoralized, in a war that had been longer and far bloodier than anyone had expected, and with no end in sight. Hooker, a pugnacious and vindictive man nicknamed “Fighting Joe,” but better known for his overweening ambition, was unlikely to make things better. And he didn’t. In May 1863, he encountered Lee’s army in Chancellorsville, Virginia, with a force of 130,000, the largest Union Army so far, and yet, despite outnumbering the Confederates at least two to one, was badly beaten by Lee’s tactical brilliance and his own inert and plodding leadership. A consolation for the Union, though, was that the Confederates paid heavily too, losing even more of their men (thirteen thousand casualties out of sixty thousand) than they had at Antietam, and losing the extraordinary General Stonewall Jackson, who died from accidental wounds produced by confused “friendly” fire from his own pickets in the darkness, which mistook his returning party for a Union cavalry unit. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of Jackson’s death and the grief elicited by it. He was arguably the most gifted and most beloved of all the Confederate generals, a deeply pious man who was also a brilliant tactician, the general whom Lee considered to be his irreplaceable “right arm.” His loss was not only a military setback but a profound blow to the morale of the Confederate Army and its leaders, and to the Southern public. The immediate Union reaction to Chancellorsville, too, was one of shock and disbelief. But the Confederacy’s heavy losses, including the loss of the irreplaceable Jackson, were beginning to tell. In fact, the war’s turning point was coming. In the first week of July 1863, the Confederacy suffered two colossal defeats, one in the West and the other in the East, that placed the Union well on the road to victory. First there was Vicksburg. One part of the Anaconda Plan involved gaining control of the Mississippi River, and by spring 1863, that objective was nearly accomplished. New Orleans was under Union control, as was most of the river, and all that remained was the taking of the heavily fortified city of Vicksburg. General Ulysses S. Grant, who had been remarkably effective in securing the river, and had won an important early victory for the Union at Shiloh in Tennessee, would take Vicksburg easily, by means of a prolonged and punishing seven-week siege, on July 4. The Confederacy was now cut in two; Texas and Arkansas were isolated and, in effect, lost. Then came Gettysburg. Robert E. Lee had once again decided to take the offensive and invade the North, hoping to strike while Northern morale was still low in the wake of Chancellorsville and the defeats of 1862. If he could win a great victory or capture a Northern city, that might yet induce a foreign country to intervene or move a sufficient number of discouraged Northerners to sue for peace. On July 1, the invading forces encountered Union units near Gettysburg in southern Pennsylvania and then began a three-day battle that would be the most important of the war. The Union Army under General George G. Meade had positioned itself on Cemetery Ridge, just south of the town, and repeated efforts by Lee’s army, including a famously futile charge by General George Pickett’s fifteen thousand infantry on July 3, failed to break his line or dislodge his army. Oddly, once again, Meade failed to follow up and crush the defeated Confederate force. But there could be no doubt that Lee had suffered a profound and unambiguous defeat. Four and half months later, at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery near the Gettysburg battlefield, Lincoln delivered one of his greatest speeches, which read the Constitution through the lens of the Declaration of Independence. A masterpiece of reverent commemoration, the Gettysburg Address was also a crisp and memorable statement of national purpose and national identity, meant to provide a higher meaning for a war that cried out for such meaning, as it had grown into something far greater and far more destructive than had been imagined at its outset. Surely an ordeal so costly must, in some larger providential scheme, be procuring something very large – larger, perhaps, than the American people had hitherto realized. In a sense, what Lincoln did in an address of fewer than three hundred words was to redefine the war not merely as a war for the preservation of the Union but as a war for the preservation of the democratic idea – “government of the people, by the people, for the people” – which America exemplified in the world. As such, it reached back to the nation’s beginnings and echoed the words of Hamilton and other Founders, who saw in American history a larger purpose being carried out on behalf of all humankind. From its origins in 1776, it was to be a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” language that Lincoln took directly from the Declaration of Independence. The current war, he said, was a time of testing for that idea, a time that had produced immense pain and suffering, and there was no end to it yet in sight. But Lincoln urged his listeners to be awed and inspired by the sacrifice that the dead soldiers had already made and to resolve that this immense sacrifice would not be in vain – resolve that they would go forward to finish the work the dead men had begun and bring the war effort to a victorious end. And in conclusion, it quietly but firmly asserted that this work included the commitment that he had already made in the Emancipation Proclamation, that the nation would, under the providence of God, see “a new birth of freedom” emerge out of these sufferings. Reports vary widely as to the audience’s reaction to the speech that day in Gettysburg. Some accounts suggest that it was overwhelmed by the much longer, more elaborate, and more learned speech by Edward Everett, the former governor of Massachusetts, president of Harvard, U.S. senator, and secretary of state. Others contend that its gemlike concentrated magnificence was fully appreciated on the spot. We can never know for sure. But we do know that it soon became regarded as one of the classic speeches in the English language, one that British prime minister Winston Churchill (no mean orator himself) would years later call “the ultimate expression of the majesty of Shakespeare’s language.” With Grant’s victory in Vicksburg, and a third brilliant performance at Chattanooga by Grant and generals under his direction, Lincoln felt he had finally found the fighting general for whom he had so long been looking. By 1864, Lincoln had brought him to Virginia and given him command of the Union Army. Grant was tasked with formulating a grand strategy for victory. There was nothing fancy about Grant’s approach. It was a plan of brutal attrition, reflecting the outlook and tactics that had brought Grant success at Shiloh and Vicksburg. Wear the enemy down. Destroy his supply lines. Starve his army (and civilians, if necessary). Deploy massive blocks of troops to pound relentlessly at the resistance. Do not retreat. If necessary, abandon your own supply lines and live off the land, pillaging the enemy’s crops and goods. Do not hesitate to incur significant casualties on your own side, so long as you are moving forward, and the enemy’s capacity to fight is being degraded and, eventually, obliterated. Such tactics would have been unthinkable just three years earlier, when no one could have imagined how long, wasting, and destructive the war would turn out to be. They were hardly ideal tactics for the conduct of a civil war that aimed at eventual reconciliation. But their ascendancy reflects another transformation that was being wrought by, and in, the war. Just as what began as a war for the Union was turning into a war for freedom, so what began as a more conventional war of armies clashing in the fields of battle was turning into a total war. Hence the American Civil War became a first glimpse of what modern war would become in the twentieth century: the clash of whole societies, in which the mobilization of each society’s total assets – its economy, its culture, its transportation system, its social cohesion and way of life, its morale – became a key element in the battle, as important as strictly military tactics. Accordingly, the goal of war was becoming not merely to defeat the enemy on the battlefield, let alone to win that one decisive battle that would change everything, but instead a relentless process of grinding and pounding, constantly challenging and destroying the enemy’s ability and willingness to fight – and, in the process, obliterating the confidence of enemy civilians in the ability of their government to protect them. Grant was about to become one of the most eminent generals of military history, but he certainly did not look the part. He was a completely unprepossessing-looking man, with a perpetual stubble on his face and a slovenly and unmilitary bearing. He was known for the cigar ashes that seemed a constant presence on the front of his unkempt uniform. There was not a hint of the great man about him; one of his biographers called him “a nobody from nowhere.” He finished in the lower half of his class at West Point, and he compiled a respectable record in the Mexican War but then resigned from the army amid rumors of alcoholism. He was at a loss in civilian life and went on to fail at almost everything else he tried, finally ending up taking a position in his father’s leather goods company in Galena, Illinois, then being run by his younger brothers. And then the war came, and Grant was moved to seek recommissioning as an officer in the Union cause. The rest was history, a steady run of military successes that vaulted him into a preeminent role in the eventual Union triumph. But the man behind those achievements has always remained inscrutable. “Most men who saw U. S. Grant during the Civil War felt that there was something mysterious about him,” wrote Civil War historian Bruce Catton. “He looked so much like a completely ordinary man, and what he did was so definitely out of the ordinary, that it seemed as if he must have profound depths that were never visible from the surface.” Catton recalled that “even [General William Tecumseh] Sherman, who knew him as well as anybody did, once remarked that he did not understand Grant and did not believe Grant understood himself.” Be that as it may, his effectiveness was beyond dispute. In May 1864, he went back on the move, taking the 115,000 men of the Army of the Potomac south into eastern Virginia. There he engaged Lee’s army in a series of bloody encounters, including the frightening Battle of the Wilderness on May 5–6, where the armies fought blindly through the woods, amid confusion and wildfires, with heavy casualties on both sides. In fact, the casualties were far heavier on the Union side. But in the aftermath, it was clear this would not be like Chancellorsville. There would be no interruption of Grant’s drive southward. Even the battle at Cold Harbor a month later, in which Grant lost seven thousand men to an ill-fated frontal assault on Confederate positions, did not stop him. He did not stop until he arrived at Petersburg, south of Richmond and a vital railhead, where he trapped Lee’s army and laid siege to it for the next nine months. As part of the larger strategy, General Sherman set out from Chattanooga, Tennessee, with a force of nearly one hundred thousand men, bound toward Atlanta and then across Georgia to Savannah and the sea. In some respects, Sherman’s March, as it became known, resembled the scorched-earth tactics of many generations of conquerors in ages past, going back at least to the legendary Roman destruction of Carthage. But there was a difference. This campaign of deliberate destruction was a textbook guide to the logic of total war, carried out calmly and methodically by a man who understood that logic better than almost anyone else. Facing virtually no organized opposition, Sherman’s army cut a swath of devastation sixty miles wide across central Georgia, confiscating food and farm animals, freeing slaves, destroying railroads and mills, and burning down the grand homes of planters (while usually sparing the humble houses of ordinary people), acts designed to terrorize the population into submission and destroy its capacity to fight. Sherman was explicit about psychological terror as his goal, and there was an edge of wanton cruelty in his voice: “My aim was, to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their innermost recesses, and make them fear and dread us.” He added, in words that echoed a famous biblical saying, “Fear is the beginning of wisdom.” There was more than a touch of hubris in such words. Small wonder that the name of Sherman would be loathed even more than that of Lincoln by generations of southerners to come. In the midst of all the fighting, the American constitutional system required that another presidential election be conducted in November 1864. So the political dimension to all of these events could not be ignored, and certainly not by Lincoln, who could not take his reelection for granted, given that he had become a lightning rod for all of the public’s dissatisfaction with a seemingly endless war. In his own Republican Party, while the majority supported him, the loud and articulate and morally insistent Radical wing viewed him as insufficiently abolitionist and feared he would allow the South back into the Union on overly lenient terms. The Democratic Party, which of course here means only the northern remnant of it, was divided. The War Democrats supported the war effort but wanted only a restoration of the Union as it existed in 1860. Others, such as the Copperhead faction, so named in 1862 by Republicans to liken them to the poisonous snake, opposed the war and wanted an immediate end to the conflict on terms acceptable to the South. They thought of Lincoln as a tyrant, and some bordered on being pro-Confederate in their sympathies. The party nominated General McClellan as its candidate, which was another jab at Lincoln, although it also complicated the election, because McClellan himself did not entirely endorse his own party’s platform. Despite the Democratic divisions, though, there was the real possibility that Lincoln would not be able to prevail in the fall. In fact, in early 1864, before Grant’s successful push to Petersburg and Sherman’s taking of Atlanta and Savannah, the war effort had bogged down so much, and public morale was so low, as to convince Lincoln that he would indeed lose the election. It would have been an almost unimaginably bitter pill for him to swallow, to see all his labors, all the blood spilled, and all the treasure sunk into the war effort rendered naught and even thrown away.  We tend to forget about such things today. We forget, or are unaware of, the depth and breadth of Lincoln’s unpopularity during his entire time in office. Few great leaders have been more comprehensively disdained or loathed or underestimated. A low Southern view of him, of course, was to be expected, but it was widely shared north of the Mason–Dixon line. As the Lincoln biographer David Donald put it, Lincoln’s own associates thought him “a simple Susan, a baboon, an aimless punster, a smutty joker”; he was, in the view of the abolitionist Wendell Phillips, a “huckster in politics” and “a first-rate second-rate man.” McClellan openly disdained him as a “well-meaning baboon.” We need to remember that this is generally how history happens. It is not like a Hollywood movie, in which the background music swells and the crowd in the room applauds and leaps to its feet as the orator dispenses timeless words and the camera pans the roomful of smiling faces. In real history, the background music does not swell, the trumpets do not sound, and the carping critics often seem louder than the applause. The leader or the soldier has to wonder whether he is acting in vain, whether the criticisms of others are in fact warranted, whether time will judge him harshly, whether his sacrifice will count for anything. Few great leaders have felt this burden more completely than Lincoln. But the string of military victories, which also included Admiral David Farragut’s dramatic naval victory at the Battle of Mobile Bay in August 1864, turned the tide, and by the time of Lincoln’s reelection, there was little doubt about the war’s ultimate outcome and that its end would be coming soon. Although Lincoln still was a Republican, he ran as a candidate of the National Union Party, a name concocted to attract Democrats and others in the border states who would not vote Republican. For similar reasons, he chose the War Democrat Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a border state, as his running mate. They won in a landslide. The war was not yet done, though. In December 1864, Sherman finally arrived in Savannah, and after gathering his strength, in the new year, he marched north to Columbia, South Carolina, the very capital of secession, burning it and more than a dozen towns along the way. Then he headed to North Carolina, advancing relentlessly against Johnston’s increasingly eroding army. Grant kept up the pressure against Lee’s lines at Petersburg. The Confederates could smell defeat in the air. On March 4, Lincoln was inaugurated into his second term and once again rose to the occasion to deliver an inaugural speech for the ages. In a relatively short but hauntingly eloquent text, he reflected on the larger meaning of this enormous conflict and began to lay the groundwork for the postwar settlement. We know from Lincoln’s personal papers that he had been increasingly preoccupied with the problem of God’s providential will, of discerning how He had steered these events and to what end, and it seems clear that Lincoln had searched the Bible and various theological writings for answers. The results of his meditations are evident in his Second Inaugural, a speech permeated with biblical themes and imagery. Lincoln reiterated the observation that slavery was “somehow the cause of the war” but resisted the temptation to assign precise or exclusive blame to either side, while reminding his audience that the violent antagonists were brothers, part of the same culture. “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.” Then Lincoln proceeded to invoke a stunning image: that the war had, perhaps, been an atonement for the nation’s sin and that God had given “to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense [of slavery] came,” and moreover that such an act of atonement would be fully consistent with our understanding of God’s justice. Indeed, he went on, drawing on Psalm 19:9 of the King James Bible, If God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” Yet the speech concludes in more hopeful and peaceful terms. “With malice toward none, with charity for all” – such words urged a spirit of reconciliation in the land, a spirit not of vengeance but of “bind[ing] up the nation’s wounds” and “car[ing] for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphan,” and the pursuit of a “just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” It is perhaps still surprising, even today, to see those luminous words “with malice toward none, with charity for all” uttered during the worst and most murderous war in American history. It should take nothing away from the generosity of those words to observe that Lincoln’s use of them was also a sign that he knew the war was won, because only a victor can afford to be so generous. But it should also not escape our appreciation that Lincoln had never lost his clarity, even amid the turbulence of the preceding four years, about the chief purpose of the war. It was not to punish all wickedness and establish a realm of perfect justice. It was first and foremost to restore the Union. Lincoln remained clear that the perpetuation of the Union and of the constitutional order that upheld it was an essential prerequisite to the success of the liberty agenda that was on the verge of abolishing slavery. A postwar settlement dominated by malice and score settling, and lacking in the spirit of charity and forgiveness, could not ultimately succeed. The Christian virtues he was espousing in his speech were not only morally right but also practically right and politically wise. A month later, on April 3, Richmond fell to the Union forces. On April 9, after a last flurry of futile resistance, Lee faced facts and arranged to meet Grant at a brick home in the village of Appomattox Court House to surrender his army. He could not formally surrender for the whole Confederacy, but the surrender of his army would trigger the surrender of all others, and so it represented the end of the Confederate cause. It was a poignant scene, dignified and restrained and sad, as when a terrible storm that has raged and blown has finally exhausted itself, leaving behind a strange and reverent calm, purged of all passion. The two men had known one another in the Mexican War and had not seen one another in nearly twenty years. Lee arrived first, wearing his elegant dress uniform, soon to be joined by Grant clad in a mud-spattered sack coat, his trousers tucked into his muddy boots. They showed one another a deep and respectful courtesy, and Grant generously allowed Lee’s officers to keep their sidearms and the men to keep their horses and take them home for the spring planting. None would be arrested or charged with treason. Four days later, when Lee’s army of twenty-eight thousand men marched in to surrender their arms and colors, General Joshua L. Chamberlain of Maine, a hero of Gettysburg, was present at the ceremony. He later wrote of his observations that day, reflecting upon his soldierly respect for the men before him, each passing by and stacking his arms, men who only days before had been his mortal foes: Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond; – was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured?… On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer, nor word nor whisper of vain-glorying, nor motion of man standing again at the order, but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead! Such deep sympathies, in a victory so heavily tinged with sadness and grief and death. This war was, and remains to this day, America’s bloodiest conflict, having generated at least a million and a half casualties on the two sides combined: 620,000 deaths, the equivalent of six million men in today’s American population. One in four soldiers who went to war never returned home. One in thirteen returned home with one or more missing limbs. For decades to come, in every village and town in the land, one could see men bearing such scars and mutilations, a lingering reminder of the price they and others had paid. And yet, Chamberlain’s words suggested that there might be room in the days and years ahead for the spirit of conciliation that Lincoln had called for in his Second Inaugural Speech, a spirit of binding up wounds, and of caring for the many afflicted and bereaved, and then moving ahead, together. It was a slender hope, yet a hope worth holding, worth nurturing, worth pursuing. But the tender promise of that moment would not last. Only two days later, on April 14, Good Friday, the world would change again, as President Lincoln would be shot and killed by an embittered pro- Confederate actor in Washington while attending a theatrical performance at Ford’s Theater. That one action would greatly complicate the task of national reconciliation and would throw the postwar settlement into chaos. And like the biblical Moses, Lincoln was cruelly denied entry into the promised land of a restored Union, denied the satisfaction of seeing that new birth of freedom he had labored so long and hard to achieve. We can never know how well Lincoln’s postwar leadership might have fared, had he been the one to oversee that process of national reunion. But what we do know for certain is that, in his absence, the factions he had managed to keep at bay for so long would no longer be held back by his reasonableness and constraining moderation. Winning the war was hard. Winning the peace was now going to be even harder.