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

  Elated by this private assurance from the general-in-chief (and flattered by Lincoln, who told him later that morning, in the course of a boatride down the James: “General Sheridan, when this peculiar war began I thought a cavalryman should be at least six feet four inches high, but I have changed my mind. Five feet four will do in a pinch”) he was alarmed the following afternoon by news that Sherman was expected at City Point that evening. His concern proceeded from awareness that his fellow Ohioan was not only badly in need of mounted reinforcements, still having only Kilpatrick’s frazzled division on hand at Goldsboro, but was also an accomplished talker, possessed of considerable “zeal and powers of emphasis,” which might well enable him to persuade his friend Grant to revise his plan for keeping Sheridan and all three of his divisions in Virginia. Disturbed by the threat, he got the last of his troopers over the James by nightfall — one month, to the day, since they left Winchester — then boarded a train and set out for headquarters. Breakdowns delayed his arrival till nearly midnight, just as Grant and Sherman were ending the conference that followed their meeting with Lincoln aboard the River Queen. So far as he could tell, the interloper had not changed their chief’s mind about the use of cavalry in the pending operation against Lee, if indeed the subject had come up. Still the danger remained, and Sheridan continued to fret about it, even after all three of them had turned in for the night. His alarm increased next morning, March 28, when the red-head came to his room and woke him up, talking earnestly of “how he would come up through the Carolinas and hinting that I could join him.” Sheridan responded so angrily, however, that Sherman dropped the subject and retired.

  There was by now little time for argument, even if Sherman had thought it would do any good. He and Grant were scheduled to see Lincoln again this morning, and the President’s concern for the safety of his army in his absence had led him to promise that he would start back for Goldsboro as soon as this second meeting aboard the Queen was over; in which connection David Porter, who was there to give advice on naval matters, had volunteered to substitute the converted blockade-runner Bat for the sluggish Russia, thus assuring the western general a faster voyage down the coast. This time, coming aboard the presidential yacht, Grant remembered to tender his and Sherman’s respects to the First Lady, but when her husband went to her stateroom she sent word that she hoped they would excuse her; she was unwell. Whereupon the four men — Grant and Sherman, Porter and Lincoln — took their seats in the saloon, and the high-level conference began.

  It was not, properly speaking, a council of war; “Grant never held one in his life,” a staffer was to note; but it did begin with a discussion of the military situation here and in North Carolina. In regard to the former, Grant explained that Sheridan’s horsemen had crossed the James in preparation for a strike at Lee’s rail supply lines, which, if successful, would leave the old fox no choice except to surrender or (as he had done on a lesser scale three days ago at Fort Stedman, no doubt to his regret) come out and fight: unless, that is, he managed to slip away beforehand, in which case Meade and Ord would be close on his heels in pursuit. As for the danger to Sherman, in the event that Lee made it south to combine with Johnston, the red-head assured Lincoln that his army at Goldsboro was strong enough to hold its own against both rebel forces, “provided Grant could come up within a day or so.” As for a matching attempt by Johnston to give him the slip, either on foot or by rail, he saw little chance of that; “I have him where he cannot move without breaking up his army, which, once disbanded, can never be got together.”

  Tactically, the Commander in Chief was satisfied that victory was at last within reach. But it seemed to him, from what had just been pointed out, that all this squeezing and maneuvering was leading to a high-loss confrontation, an Armageddon that would serve no purpose on either side except to set the seal on a foregone conclusion. “Must more blood be shed?” he asked. “Cannot this last bloody battle be avoided?” Both generals thought not. In any case, that was up to the enemy; Lee being Lee, there was likely to be “one more desperate and bloody battle.” Lincoln groaned. “My God, my God,” he said. “Can’t you spare more effusions of blood? We have had so much of it.”

  In the pause that followed — for they had no answer, except to repeat that the choice was not with them — Sherman observed again, as he had done the night before, the effect four years of war had had on the leader charged with its conduct all that time. “When in lively conversation, his face brightened wonderfully, but if the conversation flagged his face assumed a sad and sorrowful expression.” Presuming somewhat on his feeling of sympathy, and wanting to be prepared for what was coming, he then “inquired of the President if he was all ready for the end of the war” and, more specifically, “What was to be done with the rebel armies when defeated?” That was the question, as he recalled it a decade later, when he also set down Lincoln’s answer. “He said he was all ready; all he wanted of us was to defeat the opposing armies, and to get the men composing the Confederate armies back to their homes, at work on their farms and in their shops.” Warming to the subject, Lincoln went on to expand it. He was also ready, he declared, “for the civil reorganization of affairs in the South as soon as the war was over.” In this connection, the general would remember, “he distinctly authorized me to assure Governor Vance and the people of North Carolina that, as soon as the rebel armies laid down their arms, and resumed their civil pursuits, they would at once be guaranteed all their rights as citizens of a common country,” and he added that in order to avoid anarchy in the region, “the state governments then in existence, with their civil functionaries, would be recognized by him as the government de facto till Congress could provide others.”

  Sherman, “more than ever impressed by his kindly nature, his deep and earnest sympathy with the afflictions of the whole people, resulting from the war and the march of hostile armies through the South,” perceived (or gathered) from these remarks, uttered offhand and in private, that Lincoln’s “earnest desire seemed to be to end the war speedily, without more bloodshed or devastation, and to restore all the men of both sections to their homes.” All, he said; but did he mean it? Did that apply to the fire-eaters who had engineered secession; to the stalwarts, in and out of uniform, who sustained the rebellion after the fire-eaters fell by the wayside? Coming down to the most extreme example, Sherman wanted to know: Did the hope for such restoration apply to Jefferson Davis?

  Now it was Lincoln’s turn to pause, though not for long. As Chief Executive, the possible reviewing authority for any future legal action taken in the matter, he was “hardly at liberty to speak his mind fully,” he declared, yet he was willing to reply, as he had done so often down the years, with a story. “A man once had taken the total-abstinence pledge. When visiting a friend he was invited to take a drink, but declined, on the score of his pledge; when his friend suggested lemonade, which was accepted. In preparing the lemonade, the friend pointed to the brandy bottle, and said the lemonade would be more palatable if he were to pour in a little brandy; when his guest said, if he could do so ‘unbeknown’ to him, he would not object.” Thus Sherman retold the story, no doubt tightening it up a bit in the transcription, from which he inferred that the northern President hoped his southern counterpart would “escape, ‘unbeknown’ to him” — clear out, leave the country — “only it would not do for him to say so openly.”

  By then it was close to leaving time; Barnes had steam up on the Bat, waiting for Sherman to come aboard, and Lincoln was no less anxious for him to get started down the coast, where he could look to the security of his army and prepare for the movement scheduled to begin on April 10, first on Raleigh to dispose of Johnston, then north across the Virginia line to Burkeville, chosen as his objective because it was there that the Southside and Danville railroads crossed, fifty miles west of Petersburg; which meant that, once he reached that point, he would not only have cut Lee’s two remaining all-weather supply lines — if, indeed, they survived till then
— but would also be in position to intercept him if he retreated in that direction. Before he left, however, he and Grant and the President took a walk along the river bank, glad of a chance to stretch their legs after confinement in cramped quarters on the Queen for the past three hours. A reporter saw and described them as they strolled. “Lincoln, tall, round-shouldered, loose-jointed, large-featured, deep-eyed, with a smile upon his face, is dressed in black and wears a fashionable silk hat. Grant is at Lincoln’s right, shorter, stouter, more compact; wears a military hat with a stiff, broad brim, has his hands in his pantaloon pockets, and is puffing away at a cigar. Sherman, tall, with a high, commanding forehead, is almost as loosely built as Lincoln; has sandy whiskers, closely cropped, and sharp, twinkling eyes, long arms and legs, shabby coat, slouched hat, his pantaloons tucked into his boots.” As usual, the red-head did most of the talking —“gesticulating now to Lincoln, now to Grant,” the newsman noted, “his eyes wandering everywhere” — but at one point the President broke in to ask: “Sherman, do you know why I took a shine to Grant and you?”

  “I don’t know, Mr Lincoln,” he replied. “You have been extremely kind to me, far more than my deserts.”

  “Well, you never found fault with me,” Lincoln said.

  This was not true. Sherman had found a good deal of fault with the President over the past four years, beginning with the day he heard him say, almost blithely, “Oh, well, I guess we’ll manage to keep house.” But it was true from this day forward. For one thing, Lincoln had in fact managed to “keep house,” though sometimes only by the hardest, and for another, now that Sherman knew him he admired him, perhaps beyond all the men he had ever known. Again at the wharf, he boarded the Bat and set out down the James. Afterwards, looking back, he said of Lincoln, who had walked him to the gangplank: “I never saw him again. Of all the men I ever met, he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness, than any other.”

  3

  Grant began his close-out sidle in earnest the following day. Ord’s four divisions, after crossing the James in the wake of Sheridan’s troopers, had replaced the six under Humphreys and Warren at the far end of the line the night before, freeing them to move in support of the cavalry strike around Lee’s right, and Grant was leapfrogging his headquarters twenty miles southwest down the Vaughan Road, beyond the western limit of his intrenchments at Hatcher’s Run, so he could watch the progress of events and make, first hand, such last-minute adjustments as might be needed in that direction. After breakfast, around 8.30, while he and his staff waited beside the tracks at City Point for their horses and gear to be loaded onto boxcars, Lincoln joined them and stood talking with the general for a time. Finally, after handshakes with the President all round — including one for Robert, about to take the field in his first campaign — Grant and his military family got aboard the cars. As the engine began to strain they raised their hats in salute to Lincoln, who lifted his in turn to them, and the train chuffed off, south then west, behind the long slow curve of trenches the army had dug in the course of the past nine months of stalemate here in front of Petersburg, a type of warfare the present shift had been designed to end.

  In Richmond, that same March 29, Brigadier General Josiah Gorgas received at his office in the Ordnance Department, which he headed, a hastily written note signed Jefferson Davis. “Will you do me the favor to have some cartridges prepared for a small Colt pistol, of which I send the moulds?” Gorgas, a Pennsylvania-born West Pointer who had married south — and who, starting with next to nothing in the way of machinery, skilled labor, raw materials, or the means of producing them, in the past four years had turned out seventy million rounds of small-arms ammunition, along with so much else, including weapons, that no Confederate army, whatever it suffered from being deprived of food and clothing, ever lost a battle for lack of ordnance equipment or supplies — filled the requisition overnight. The cartridges were not for Davis himself, but for his wife. He gave her the pistol and showed her how to load, aim, and fire it, saying: “You can at least, if reduced to the last extremity, force your assailants to kill you.”

  Four days ago, at the time of Lee’s latest warning that Richmond was to be given up, he had told her she must prepare to leave without him. “My headquarters for the future may be in the field, and your presence would embarrass and grieve me instead of giving comfort.” Though she begged to stay and help relieve the tension, he was firm in refusal. “You can do this in but one way: by going yourself and taking the children to a place of safety. If I live, you can come to me when the struggle is ended,” he said: adding, however, that he did not “expect to survive the destruction of constitutional liberty.” Regretfully she began her preparations for departure, hampered by his insistence that she not ask friends to look after the family silver, lest they be “exposed to inconvenience or outrage” when the Yankees took the city. So she sent the silver, together with some of the furniture, to an auctioneer for sale under the hammer. Then she “made the mistake,” as she later said, of telling her husband that she intended to take along several barrels of flour she had bought — at the going price of $1500 a barrel — to help withstand the expected siege. He forbad this, saying flatly: “You can’t take anything in the shape of food from here. The people need it.” Saddened, she turned to packing what little was left, mainly clothes for herself and the four children, who ranged in age from ten years to nine months.

  Others had done what Varina Davis was doing now, though with less conscientious interference by their husbands with regard to such household items as flour and silver. Since early February, foreseeing that the end of winter meant the end of Richmond, men of substance had been sending their wives and children to outlying estates, north and west of the threatened capital, or to North Carolina towns and cities so far spared a visit from Sherman. All through March the railway stations were crowded with well-off “refugees” boarding trains to avoid the holocaust at hand. Having no choice, those with nowhere to go (and no money either to pay the fare or live on when they got there) remained, as did the heads of families whose government duties or business interests required their presence; with the result that by the time the First Lady started packing, alerted for a sudden removal to Charlotte, where Davis had rented a house for her and the children, Richmond’s population was predominantly black and poor and male. A sizeable group among these last had been composed of the 105 congressmen and 26 senators, most of them eager for adjournment so they too could get aboard the cars rattling westward, away from the seven-hilled capital and the blue flood lapping the earthworks east and south — muddy dikes buttressed only by the scarecrow infantry under Lee, who was rumored to have given the government notice that they would not be there long.

  In any case, these 131 elected representatives of the people felt that they had done all they could by March 18, when they adjourned and scattered for their homes, those who still had them. And, indeed, they had done much this term: including the unthinkable. After long and sometimes acrimonious debate, the House on February 20 and the Senate on March 8 authorized the enlistment of Negroes for service in the armies of the Confederacy. On March 13 a joint bill to that effect was forwarded for approval by the Chief Executive, who promptly signed it despite objections that it fell considerably short of what he — and Pat Cleburne, fifteen months ago — had wanted. For one thing, the recruits must all be volunteers, and at second hand at that; only “such able-bodied slaves as might be patriotically rendered by their masters” were to be accepted, although the President was authorized to call on the states to fill their respective quotas, limited in each case to no more than one fourth of its male slaves between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. Moreover, while it was stipulated that Negro soldiers were to receive the same pay, rations, and clothing as other troops, no mention was made of emancipation as a reward for military service, and it was even stressed in a final rider that nothing in the act was “to be construed to authorize a change in the relation whi
ch the said slaves shall bear toward their owners, except by the consent of their owners and of the states in which they may reside.” Mainly, though, Davis regretted the extended debate that had kept the bill so long from his desk. “Much benefit is anticipated from this measure,” he remarked, “though far less than would have resulted from its adoption at an earlier date, so as to afford time for organization and instruction during the winter months.”

  Grim as the warnings leading up to passage of the act had been, the fulminations that followed were even grimmer. “If we are right in passing this measure,” Robert Hunter told his fellow senators, “we were wrong in denying the old government the right to interfere with the institution of slavery and to emancipate slaves.” Howell Cobb agreed, writing from Georgia: “Use all the Negroes you can get, for the purposes for which you need them” — cooking, digging, chopping, and such — “but don’t arm them. The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” Even Robert Kean, head of the Bureau of War, who knew better than most the urgent need for men in the ranks of the nation’s armies, saw nothing but evil proceeding from a measure which, he noted in his diary, “was passed by a panic in the Congress and the Virginia Legislature, under all the pressure the President indirectly, and General Lee directly, could bring to bear. My own judgment of the whole thing is that it is a colossal blunder, a dislocation of the foundations of society from which no practical results will be reaped by us.” Robert Toombs, after his brief return to the service during Sherman’s march through Georgia, was strongest of all in condemnation of this attempt to convert the Negro into a soldier; a Confederate soldier, anyhow. “In my opinion,” he wrote from his plantation in Wilkes County, where he had put down a full crop of cotton last year in response to a Davis proclamation calling on planters to shift to food crops, “the worst calamity that could befall us would be to gain our independence by the valor of our slaves.… The day that the army of Virginia allows a negro regiment to enter their lines as soldiers they will be degraded, ruined, and disgraced.”