The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox

  But this too went largely unnoticed. A peripheral shift having little to do with the close-out maneuver everyone could see was in the making on the seaboard, such a subtraction had no more bearing on the central issue than, say, the death of seventy-one-year-old Edward Everett, whose two-hour oration had preceded Lincoln’s two-minute speech at Gettysburg just over a year ago. By now, with the end conceivably in sight, men looked beyond the cease-fire to insist with a new fervor that the victory be put to proper use. Slavery returned as the burning issue it had been at the outset.

  Everett died on January 15, amid a congressional furor over the proposed adoption of a constitutional amendment — the first in more than sixty years — forbidding the existence of slavery “within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The Senate had approved it nine months earlier, but House proponents then had failed to secure the two-thirds vote required. Lincoln in his December message urged reconsideration during the present session, on grounds that approval would surely follow the seating of newly elected Republicans at the next. “As it is to so go, at all events, may we not agree that the sooner the better? ” He asked that, yet he also did a good deal more than ask. He set out to get the necessary votes, mainly by logrolling. One opposed Democrat was promised a government job for his brother in New York; another was assured support in holding onto his contested seat; while a third, hired by a railroad to fight off adverse legislation, was guaranteed the threat would not mature. These three came over more or less gladly, and eight others, firmer in their resistance or more fearful of the home reaction to an outright shift, were similarly bargained into agreeing to abstain. Finally, on the last day of January — as soon as the Administration was reasonably certain of the outcome — House Speaker Schuyler Colfax put the resolution to a vote. Members and spectators alike followed the tally with mounting excitement. It came out 119 aye, 56 nay; passing thus with three switched votes to spare. Colfax’s announcement of the result, according to the usually staid Congressional Globe, was greeted with an outburst of emotion. “The members on the Republican side of the House instantly sprang to their feet, and, regardless of parliamentary rules, applauded with cheers and clapping of hands. The example was followed by male spectators in the galleries, who waved their hats and cheered long and loud, while the ladies, hundreds of whom were present, rose in their seats and waved their handkerchiefs, participating in adding to the general excitement and intense interest of the scene. This lasted for several minutes.”

  Outside the chamber it lasted considerably longer. Three batteries of regular artillery, loaded and ready when the time came, began firing a hundred-gun salute from Capitol Hill, and men embraced on the streets in celebration. In addition to the realization that a goal had been reached, there was the feeling that a new road had been taken, even though by no means all were pleased to travel it, not being satisfied that they wanted to go where it led. All twelve amendments up to now, including the last in 1804, had dealt exclusively with governmental powers and functions; that is, they were “constitutional” in the strictest sense. But this one — lucky or unlucky Thirteen — went beyond that to effect reform in an area recently considered outside the scope of the Constitution, overriding protests that no combination of parties to that contract, however sizeable their majority, could alter it to outlaw a domestic institution that existed before it was written. Pendleton of Ohio, McClellan’s running mate in November, voiced his party’s opposition in the debate leading up to the roll call. “Neither three-fourths of the states, nor all the states save one, can abolish slavery in that dissenting state,” he told the House, “because it lies within the domain reserved entirely to each state for itself, and upon it the other states cannot enter.” Such was the States Rights position, many of whose principal supporters had departed, just four years ago this month, to set up on their own. Then came the vote, and States Rights went by the board. Moreover, any last-ditch hope that the Supreme Court might overturn the measure was abandoned when it was noted, not only that five of the nine members — including Salmon Chase — were present for the vote, but also that their judicial gravity scarcely masked their satisfaction at the outcome.

  Ironically, this Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, rather than assuring its continuance, as a direct result of secession. Six weeks before Sumter, both the Senate and the House had passed by a two-thirds vote a proposed Thirteenth Amendment stating flatly that Congress could never be given “the power to abolish or interfere within any State with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.” Buchanan signed it on the eve of Lincoln’s inauguration, but the measure was forgotten when the issue swung to war. On the other hand, if the departed Southerners had remained in Washington they and their northern friends, whose influence would have been for peace, could almost certainly have secured the requisite three-fourths ratification by their respective states. Charles Sumner, well aware of this, wasted no time in consolidating the victory he had worked so hard to win. He appeared before the Supreme Court next day, February 1, to move that a fellow lawyer, John S. Rock of Boston, be admitted to practice before it. Embraced by the Chief Justice, who had prepared his colleagues, the motion carried. Here indeed was a change; for Rock was a Negro, the first of his race to address that high tribunal, which less than a decade ago had denied that Dred Scott, a non-citizen, even had the right to be represented there.

  Elated, a crowd with a brass band trooped onto the White House lawn that night and shouted for the President, who came out on a balcony to take the music and greet the serenaders. “Speech! Speech!” they called up, and he obliged them. He praised Congress’s action yesterday as “the fitting if not indispensable adjunct to the consummation of the great game we are playing,” and emphasized that his aim all along had been to root out this basic cause of national disturbance —slavery — against the day when the states would be reunited. The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued with that in mind, he said, even though it freed only those slaves who came within the reach of blue-clad soldiers. Moreover, once the war had ended, it might be held invalid by the courts, leaving much of the evil uncorrected and still a subject for contention. “But this amendment is a King’s cure for all the evils. It winds the whole thing up.” Applauded, Lincoln paused and then remarked in closing that he could not but congratulate all present — himself, the country, and the world — “upon this great moral victory.”

  The victory claim was valid on other grounds as well, but only within problematical limitations. Ratification, once it came, would give the nation all that he maintained. Yet the dimensions of the victory depended altogether on the dimensions of the country when the amendment was adopted, and this in turn depended — more or less as had been the case, over the past two years, in the application of the Emancipation Proclamation — on the progress, between now and then, of Union arms. In short, it depended on whether Grant’s close-out plan succeeded. Sherman’s part was the critical one, at least in the early stages, and by coincidence he set out in earnest, this same February 1, on his march north through the Carolinas to gain Lee’s rear.

  Although he was thus some four weeks behind the schedule he had set for himself when he wrote Grant on Christmas Eve that he expected to start north “in about ten days,” the delay was unavoidable. Heavy winter rains had swollen creeks and swamps along his projected route of march, while ice on the Potomac — their staging area, once they arrived from Nashville — prevented Schofield’s men from steaming downriver aboard transports on their way to Wilmington. This last did not disturb the red-haired general, any more than had Butler’s failure to clear the way by reducing Fort Fisher. “Fizzle; great fizzle!” he snorted when he heard of that yuletide fiasco. “I shall have to go up there and do that job myself. Eat ’em up as I go, and take ’em backside.” In this connection he requested Dahlgren to keep up the scare along the South Carolina coast, maneuvering his warships as if to cover a series
of landings by Foster, whose troops would go along. That would confuse the rebels throughout Sherman’s period of preparation at Savannah. Later, when his march had pulled the defenders inland and cut the seaports off from reinforcements and supplies, such feints could be converted to actual landings, probably against nothing worse than token opposition, and possibly not even that. “I will shake the tree,” he told Foster, “and you must be quick to pick up the apples.”

  He was feeling good, despite the delay, and he showed it. Pride in all his men had done was matched by pride in their conduct throughout the present span of comparative repose: as was demonstrated in a letter informing Grant that, “notwithstanding the habits begotten during our rather vandalic march,” the behavior of his soldiers in Savannah had “excited the wonder and admiration of all.” Not even a four-day visit by Stanton, January 11–15 — ostensibly for reasons of health, but actually to explore his fellow Ohioan’s position on the Negro question — upset Sherman’s feeling of well-being. He fancied he had set the Secretary straight as to his views on “Inevitable Sambo,” alarming though they were to abolitionists up in Washington. “The South deserves all she has got for her injustice to the negro,” he wrote Halleck at the time, “but that is no reason why we should go to the other extreme.” Stanton heard him say such things, and seemed not to disapprove. As for the restoration of states now claiming to have departed from the Union, Sherman told Georgians who called on him in the course of the Secretary’s visit: “My own opinion is that no negotiations are necessary, nor commissioners, nor conventions, nor anything of the kind.… Georgia is not out of the Union, and therefore talk of ‘reconstruction’ appears to me inappropriate.” Meantime he kept busy, doing all he could to “make a good ready” for the expedition north. Dahlgren’s loss of the Patapsco outside Charleston, along with 64 of her crew, was more than offset by the news that Porter and Terry had taken Fort Fisher that same day, preparing the way for Schofield, who wrote that he would be off down the coast as soon as the Potomac ice broke up. January was more than half gone by now, and Sherman stepped up the pace of his preparations.

  His march would be due north in two columns, enabling him to feint simultaneously at Charleston and Augusta, on the right and left, while aiming in fact at Columbia, between and beyond them. North of the South Carolina capital he would feint again, this time at Chester and Charlotte, then turn east-northeast, through Cheraw and Fayetteville, for Goldsboro — chosen because two rail lines ran from there to Wilmington and New Bern, up which Schofield would be marching with supplies from those two ports. Refitted and reinforced to a strength of better than 80,000 Sherman then could drive on Raleigh, the North Carolina capital, en route to Petersburg and the combination with Meade. Now as before, Slocum would lead the two-corps left wing, Howard the two-corps right, while Kilpatrick’s horsemen shielded the western flank. This time, though, they would stay closer together, cutting a narrower swath for readier mutual support, since an attack was considered far likelier here than in Georgia, where the outcome had been less obviously disastrous to the Confederate high command. “If Lee is a soldier of genius,” the red-head explained to his staff, “he will seek to transfer his army from Richmond to Raleigh or Columbia. If he is a man simply of detail, he will remain where he is and his speedy defeat is sure. But I have little fear that he will be able to move; Grant holds him in a vise of iron.”

  In point of fact, so far as interference was concerned, there was more to fear from rebel terrain than there was from rebel armies. Not only would the Carolinas march — 425 miles, all told, from Savannah to Goldsboro — be nearly half again longer than the one from Atlanta to the sea; the difference in natural obstacles he would encounter, both in kind and number, made the earlier expedition appear in retrospect as something of a lark, a holiday outing in pleasant weather, through a region of rich crops, ripe for harvest, and livestock waiting only to be rounded up and butchered. Here the crops had already been gathered, such as they were, and the cattle were few and scrubby at best, having little to graze on but muck and palmetto. Moreover, luck had exposed him to almost no rain on his way through Georgia, and it would not have mattered a lot in any case; whereas he would be marching now in the dead of winter, the rainiest in years, and it mattered a great deal. Many rivers lay ahead, all reportedly brim full. After the Savannah, there would be the Salkehatchie and the Edisto, the Congaree and the Wateree, the Pee Dee and the Lumber, the Cape Fear and finally the Neuse, all nine of them major streams, with creeks and bayous webbing the swampy ground between, wet with all the rain that had fallen and was falling between the seaboard and the near slopes of the Appalachians. Yet here too Sherman could prepare for trouble, much as he had done when he drilled repair crews for work on the railroads north of Atlanta and Chattanooga. Michigan lumbermen and rail-splitters from Indiana and Illinois were organized into a pioneer corps, 6600 strong, armed with axes for cutting, splitting, and laying saplings flat-side-down to corduroy roads for the 2500 wagons and 600 ambulances rolling northward in the wake of his 60,000 marchers. He did not intend to get bogged down, nor did he intend to be slowed down in avoiding it: in token of which he had already selected a rangy half-thoroughbred bay named Old Sam to serve as his accustomed mount on the campaign. Sam, a staff major noted ominously, was “a horribly fast-walking horse.”

  Beginning the feint, Sherman sent Howard’s wing by boat to Beaufort, forty miles up the coast beyond Port Royal Sound, with instructions to move inland and occupy Pocotaligo, on the railroad about midway between Savannah and Charleston. By January 20 this had been done, and Slocum began slogging in the opposite direction, thirty miles up the drowned west bank of the Savannah River to Sister’s Ferry, as if about to close upon Augusta. Unrelenting rain made the march a roundabout nine-day affair, with much discomfort for the troops. For them, however, as for their chief, “city life had become dull and tame, and we were anxious to get into the pine woods again.” Moreover, they were sustained by anticipation of another kind. Ahead lay South Carolina, and they had been promised a free hand in visiting upon her the destruction she deserved for having led the Confederate exodus from the Union. “Here is where treason began, and by God here is where it shall end,” they vowed, pleased with their role as avenging instruments and eager to put into sterner practice the talents they had acquired on the march through Georgia, accounts of which had reached and frightened the people in their new path northward. Sherman approved of the fear aroused. “This was a power, and I intended to utilize it,” he said later, explaining: “My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. ‘Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’ ”

  Already there were signs that the two-pronged feint was working in both directions. Augusta was in ferment over Slocum’s approach, and in Charleston, menaced from the landward side by Howard and by Dahlgren from the sea, clerks were busy packing and shipping official records and historical mementos to Columbia for safe-keeping, never suspecting that the inland capital was not only high on Sherman’s list of prime objectives, but was also to be dealt with as harshly as Atlanta had been served two months ago. “I look upon Columbia as quite as bad as Charleston,” he wrote Halleck while cooling his army’s heels in Savannah, “and I doubt if we shall spare the public buildings there as we did in Milledgeville.” What was more, subordinates from private to major general took this prediction a step further when the march began in earnest, February 1. Blair and Logan cleared Pocotaligo and Davis and Williams crossed the Savannah in force that day. On the far left, at Sister’s Ferry, Kilpatrick’s troopers led the way, hoofs drumming on the planks of a pontoon bridge thrown there the day before. Soldiers of a Michigan infantry regiment, waiting their turn to cross, had heard that the bandy-legged cavalry commander had instructed his men to fill their saddlebags with matches for the work ahead, and now they believed it; for as he rode out onto the bridge he called back over his shoulder, “There’ll be damned l
ittle for you infantrymen to destroy after I’ve passed through that hell-hole of secession!”

  Here indeed was an end to what the Richmond editor termed “the repose of the tiger,” in the course of which Sherman had told Old Brains: “The truth is the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina. I almost tremble for her fate, but feel that she deserves all that seems in store for her.”

  2

  A proposal that the women of the South cut off their hair for sale in Europe, thereby bringing an estimated 40,000,000-dollar windfall to the cause, had gained widespread approval by the turn of the year, despite some protests — chiefly from men, who viewed the suggested disfigurement with less favor than did their wives and sweethearts — that the project was impractical. After the fall of Fort Fisher, however, the Confederacy’s last port east of the Mississippi was no longer open to blockade runners, coming or going, and the plan was abandoned. Even if the women sheared their heads there was no way now for the bulky cargo to be shipped, either to Europe or anywhere else; or if it could somehow be gotten out — from Charleston, say, in a sudden dash by a high-speed flotilla — the odds were even longer against a return with whatever the money would buy in the way of necessities, all of which were running low and lower now that the war was about to enter its fifth spring. Like so many other proposals, farfetched but by no means impossible if they had been adopted sooner, this one came too late.

  Another was a return to the suggestion advanced informally by Pat Cleburne the previous winter, soon after Missionary Ridge, that the South free its slaves and enlist them in its armies. Hastily suppressed at the time as “revolting to Southern sentiment, Southern pride, and Southern honor,” the proposition seemed far less “monstrous” now than it had a year ago, when Grant was not at the gates of Richmond and Sherman had not made his march through Georgia. Seddon, for one, had been for it ever since the fall of Atlanta, except that he believed emancipation should follow, not precede, a term of military service. In early January, Governor William Smith — “Extra Billy” to Old Dominion voters — proposed that Virginia and the other states, not the central government, carry out the plan for black recruitment. Appealed to, R. E. Lee replied that he favored such a measure. “We must decide whether slavery shall be extinguished by our enemies and the slaves used against us, or use them ourselves at the risk of the effects which may be produced upon our social institutions. My own opinion is that we should employ them without delay. I believe that with proper regulation they can be made efficient soldiers.” This was powerful support. If Lee wanted Negro troops, a once-oppugnant Richmond editor wrote soon afterward, “by all means let him have them.” Westward, Richard Taylor agreed. In Mobile, when he congratulated a group of impressed slaves on their skill in building fortifications, their leader told him: “If you will give us guns we will fight for these works, too. We would rather fight for our own white folks than for strangers.” Down in South Carolina, however, Mary Boykin Chesnut had her doubts. “Freeing Negroes is the latest Confederate Government craze,” the mistress of Mulberry Plantation wrote in her diary. “We are a little slow about it; that is all.… I remember when Mr Chesnut spoke to his Negroes about it, his head men were keen to go in the army, to be free and get a bounty after the war. Now they say coolly that they don’t want freedom if they have to fight for it. That means they are pretty sure of having it anyway.”