The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

  His pride in his army and its conduct during the battle—which was in a way a coda to the Kentucky excursion, launched soon after he took command at Tupelo, Mississippi, back in June—was expressed in his report, where he listed with satisfaction the capture of 6273 prisoners and enemy colors in abundance, along with 31 cannon and 6000 small arms, as well as “a large amount of other valuable property, all of which was secured and appropriated to proper uses.” Moreover, he declared by way of final proof of moral superiority over his antagonist, “the army retired to its present position behind Duck River without giving or receiving a shot.” Within the ranks of that army, however, though the men agreed that they had won a victory, there were fewer signs of elation. The retreat was made in wretched weather, and as they plodded southward through the mud, alternately drenched with rain and pelted with sleet, bent beneath the weight of their sodden packs, it seemed to them that the Perryville technique—fight; win; fall back—had been repeated. “What does he fight battles for?” they grumbled, beginning to discern a discouraging pattern to their efforts under Bragg. Similarly at home, as one civilian diarist recorded, “It was small surcease to the sob of the widow and the moan of the orphan that ‘the retreat to Tullahoma was conducted in good order.’ ”

  Rosecrans, on the other hand—who had not made a single offensive move since the explosive attack on his right wing at dawn of the 31st, who had allowed a foe he claimed was beaten to withdraw from his immediate front without so much as a threat of molestation, and who was so cautious in pursuit that his eventual movement to the east bank of Stones River, from which he had withdrawn on the night of January 3 lest the rising waters expose his troops to destruction in detail, amounted to practically no pursuit at all—was praised not only by those below and above him in the army, but also by the public at large, including the Ohio legislature, which tendered him before the month was out a resolution of thanks “for the glorious victory resulting in the capture of Murfreesboro and the defeat of the rebel forces at that place.” Cheered by his soldiers as he rode among them, he received equally gratifying responses to the dispatches by which he announced his victory to the authorities in Washington. “God bless you, and all of you,” the President replied, and the Secretary of War (who had said of Rosecrans’ appointment at the outset, “Well, you have made your choice of idiots. Now you can await the news of a terrible disaster”) was quite expansive, wiring: “The country is filled with admiration of the gallantry and heroic achievement of yourself and the officers and troops under your command.… There is nothing you can ask within my power to grant to yourself or your noble command that will not be cheerfully given.” Even Halleck, who had prodded and nudged him for weeks beyond endurance, eventually joined the chorus of praise, though not before he had waited a few days for verification in Confederate newspapers smuggled across the border. “Rebel accounts fully confirm your telegrams from the battlefield,” he wired, and added: “You and your brave army have won the gratitude of your country and the admiration of the world.… All honor to the Army of the Cumberland—thanks to the living and tears for the lamented dead.”

  Bragg, he knew, was playing a cagey game at Tullahoma (“We shall fight him again at every hazard if he advances, and harass him daily if he does not,” the terrible-tempered general was telling his superiors even now) but Rosecrans was firm in his intentions and had already reverted to the use of vigorous phrases he had been employing two weeks back, on the eve of battle. “We shall press them as rapidly as our means of traveling and subsistence will permit,” he notified Stanton on January 5. Next day, though he was still at Murfreesboro, he boldly repeated words he had used at Nashville in mid-December: “I now wish to press them to the wall.”

  When Davis returned to Richmond that same January 5, to be met on the portico of the White House by his wife and their four children—three sons and a daughter, stair-stepped at two-year intervals so that their ages ranged from just past one to almost eight—Mrs Davis, observing that her husband was near exhaustion, insisted that he retire at once to rest from the exertions of his journey. Presently, however, they heard the thump and blare of drums and horns and the cheers of a crowd that had gathered in front of the house to welcome him back with a serenade. Weary though he was, and despite his desire to be alone with his family—“Every sound is the voice of my child and every child renews the memory of a loved one’s appearance,” he had written home from Tennessee, “but none can equal their charms, nor can any compare with my own long-worshipped Winnie”—he felt that he could not ignore the shouts of the crowd or fail to acknowledge the courtesy being tendered.

  The cheers were redoubled as the big front door swung ajar once more and the President came out onto the steps. Captain J. B. Smith’s Silver Band played “Listen to the Mocking Bird” and several other airs which the crowd enjoyed while waiting for the speech they had come to hear. Davis did not disappoint them. Carried forward perhaps by a sort of verbal secondary inertia, he spoke as he had been speaking now for more than three weeks, to similar crowds and with similar words, in the course of his nearly three-thousand-mile trip to “the further West” and back.

  “I am happy to be welcomed on my return to the capital of the Confederacy—the last hope, as I believe, for the perpetuation of that system of government which our forefathers founded—the asylum of the oppressed, and the home of true representative liberty.” His voice, as he thus began, showed the strain to which it had been exposed, but as usual it gathered strength as he continued, reverting to the deeds of olden days in the Old Dominion, where the earlier Revolution had been proclaimed and, finally, won. Now once more, he told these latter-day Virginians, “anticipating the overthrow of that government which you had inherited, you assumed to yourselves the right, as your fathers had done before you, to declare yourself independent, and nobly have you advocated the assertion which you have made. Here, upon your soil, some of the fiercest battles of the Revolution were fought, and upon your soil it closed by the surrender of Cornwallis. Here again are men of every state; here they have congregated, linked in the defense of a most sacred cause. They have battled, they have bled upon your soil, and it is now consecrated by blood which cries for vengeance against the insensate foe of religion as well as of humanity, of the altar as well as of the hearthstone.” Thus he repeated the bitterness he had voiced in his home state, ten days ago. Nor, with first-hand accounts of the sack of Fredericksburg now added to the list of northern depredations—not the least of them being the recently issued Emancipation Proclamation, which, as he saw it, incited the slaves to the murder of their masters—had that reaction been tempered by second thought. Rather, the bitterness had increased: as he now showed. “It is true,” he told his listeners, “you have a cause which binds you together more firmly than your fathers were. They fought to be free from the usurpations of the British crown, but they fought against a manly foe. You fight against the offscourings of the earth.”

  Applauded, he passed on to a brief review of recent Confederate successes in the field, which he predicted would bring discord to northern councils, and then returned to his condemnation, not only of the conduct of the Federal armies of invasion, but also of the men who had sent them South. “Every crime which could characterize the course of demons has marked the course of the invader … from the burning of defenseless towns to the stealing of silver forks and spoons.” In this last he had particular reference to Ben Butler, known as “Beast” Butler and “Spoons” Butler as a result of his alleged brutality and deftness in the exercise of his authority in command of the occupation of New Orleans, and Davis made the charge explicit, asserting that the Massachusetts general had “exerted himself to earn the excoriations of the civilized world, and now returns [to Washington] with his dishonors thick upon him to receive the plaudits of the only people on earth who do not blush to think he wears the human form.… They have come to disturb your social organization on the plea that it is a military necessity. For what are they waging war
? They say to preserve the Union. Can they preserve the Union by destroying the social existence of a portion of the South? Do they hope to reconstruct the Union by striking at everything which is dear to man?—by showing themselves so utterly disgraced that if the question was proposed to you whether you would combine with hyenas or Yankees, I trust every Virginian would say: ‘Give me the hyenas.’ ”

  “Good! Good!” his listeners cried, and there was laughter. They wanted more along these lines.

  But Davis spoke calmly now, as if to refute the charge made by his critics that he was cold in his attitude toward the people, unconcerned for their welfare, and anxious to avoid commingling with them—as if, indeed, he had brought back East from his journey West an increased awareness of the warmth and strength proceeding from contact with those who looked to him for leadership not only as their President but also as a man. “My friends, constant labor in the duties of office, borne down by care, and with an anxiety which has left me scarcely a moment for repose, I have had but little opportunity for social intercourse among you. I thank you for this greeting, and hope the time may come soon when you and I alike, relieved of the anxieties of the hour, may have more of social intercourse than has heretofore existed.” Flushed with confidence as a result of the victories won by the nation’s armies in the course of his trip, he added: “If the war continues we shall only grow stronger and stronger as each year rolls on. Compare our condition today with that which existed one year ago. See the increasing power of the enemy, but mark that our own has been proportionately greater, until we see in the future nothing to disturb the prospect of the independence for which we are struggling. One year ago, many were depressed and some were despondent. Now deep resolve is seen in every eye; an unconquerable spirit nerves every arm. And gentle woman, too; who can estimate the value of her services in this struggle? … With such noble women at home, and such heroic soldiers in the field, we are invincible.”

  He waited for the applause to die away, and then concluded his remarks, once more on a personal note. “I thank you, my friends, for the kind salutation tonight; it is an indication that at some future time we shall be better acquainted. I trust we shall all live to enjoy some of the fruits of the struggle in which we are engaged. My prayers are for your individual and collective welfare. May God prosper our cause, and may we live to give to our children untarnished the rich inheritance which our fathers gave us. Good night!”

  Unhappy New Year

  NEW YEAR’S 1863 WAS FOR ABRAHAM LINCOLN perhaps the single busiest day of his whole presidential life, and it came moreover at dead center of what was perhaps his period of deepest gloom and perplexity of spirit. Not only was there political division within his party, and even within his own official family, but with the possible exception of Rosecrans, whose battle was in mid-career and appeared worse than doubtful, all his hand-picked commanders had failed him utterly, through enemy action or their own inaction, in his hopes for a multifaceted early-winter triumph in which he himself had assigned them the parts they were to play in putting a quick end to rebellion. One by one, sometimes two by two, they had failed him. Burnside and his fellow generals on the Rappahannock, having blundered into defeat at Fredericksburg, were engaged in a frenzy of backbiting such as not even the highly contentious Army of the Potomac had ever known before. Grant, according to the New York Times, remained “stuck in the mud of northern Mississippi, his army of no use to him or anybody else.” Banks, caught in a toil of imported New Orleans cotton speculators, was stymied by a previously unsuspected fort on the Mississippi, two hundred and fifty miles downstream from his assigned objective. And McClernand, from whom the Commander in Chief had perhaps expected most, was apparently the worst off of all. He not only had done nothing with his army; the last Lincoln had heard from him, he could not even find it.

  Nor had these and other failures of omission and commission gone unnoticed by the country at large, the voters and investors on whose will and trust the prosecution of the war depended. The Democrats, still on the outside looking in, but with substantial gains in the fall elections to sharpen their appetite for more, had seen to that: especially Ohio Representative Clement L. Vallandigham, who was savagely pointing out, from the vantage point of his seat in Congress, the administration’s errors. “Money you have expended without limit,” he told Republicans in the House, “and blood poured out like water. Defeat, debt, taxation, and sepulchers—these are your only trophies.” Others, less violent but no less earnest, including his disaffected former allies, were accusing the President in a similar vein; so that now, perhaps, with his own critics crying out against him, he could feel more sympathy for James K. Polk than he had felt when he spoke against him in Congress, fifteen years ago this month, in the midst of another war. “I more than suspect already,” the youthful Lincoln had declared from a seat in the rear of the House, “that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong; that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to heaven against him; that originally having some strong motive … to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory … he plunged into it and has swept on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation … he now finds himself he knows not where.… His mind, tasked beyond its power, is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature on a burning surface, finding no position on which it can settle down and be at ease.… He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man. God grant he may be able to show there is not something about his conscience more painful than all his mental perplexity!”

  The words rebounded from the target, boomeranged down the years, and came back in other forms to strike the sender. Orestes Brownson, the prominent Boston author and former transcendentalist, wrote of Lincoln: “His soul seems made of leather, and incapable of any grand or noble emotion. Compared with the mass of men, he is a line of flat prose in a beautiful and spirited lyric. He lowers, he never elevates you. You leave his presence with your enthusiasm dampened, your better feelings crushed, and your hopes cast to the winds. You ask not, can this man carry the nation through its terrible struggles? but can the nation carry this man through them, and not perish in the attempt?” Brownson was of no uncertain mind where Lincoln was concerned. “He is thickheaded; he is ignorant; he is tricky, somewhat astute, in a small way, and obstinate as a mule.… He is wrong-headed, the attorney not the lawyer, the petty politician not the statesman, and, in my belief, ill-deserving of the soubriquet of Honest. I am out of all patience with him,” he added, rather anticlimactically, and inquired: “Is there no way of inducing him to resign, and allow Mr Hamlin to take his place?” Senator William Pitt Fessenden, a Maine Republican high in the party’s councils, replied in somewhat the same vein when told that he should be a member of the cabinet in order to be at Lincoln’s elbow and give the nation the full benefit of his advice. “No friend of mine should ever wish to see me there,” he answered. “You cannot change the President’s character or conduct. He remained long enough in Springfield, surrounded by toadies and office-seekers, to persuade himself that he was specially chosen by the Almighty for this crisis, and well chosen. This conceit has never yet been beaten out of him, and until it is, no human wisdom can be of much avail. I see nothing for it but to let the ship of state drift along, hoping that the current of public opinion may bring it safely into port.” Similarly, a Boston philanthropist, railroad magnate J. M. Forbes, convinced that Lincoln was badly off the track, was asking: “Can nothing be done to reach the President’s ear and heart? I hear he is susceptible to religious impressions; shall we send our eloquent divines to talk to him, or shall we send on a deputation of mothers and wives, or can we, the conservators of liberty, who have elected him, combine with Congress in beseeching him to save the country?”

  In point of fact, one such group of “eloquent divines” as Forbes suggested did come to call on Lincoln at this time, protesting with considerable hea
t the lack of progress in the war; but he gave them little satisfaction beyond a brief, short-tempered lecture comparing the administration’s predicament to that of a tightrope walker in mid-act. “Gentlemen,” he told them, “suppose all the property you were worth was in gold, and you had put it in the hands of Blondin to carry across the Niagara River. Would you shake the cable or keep shouting out to him, ‘Blondin, stand up a little straighter!’ ‘Blondin, stoop a little more!’ ‘Go a little faster’; ‘Lean a little more to the north’; ‘Lean a little more to the south’? No. You would hold your breath as well as your tongue, and keep your hands off until he was safe over. The government is carrying an immense weight. Untold treasures are in their hands. They are doing the very best they can. Don’t badger them. Keep silence, and we’ll get you safe across.” The visit, he said afterwards, made him “a little shy of preachers” for a time. “But the latchstring is out,” he added, “and they have the right to come here and preach to me if they will go about it with some gentleness and moderation.”

  Gentleness and moderation were easier to prescribe than they were to practice. An infinitely patient man, he was beginning to lose patience: with the result that some who formerly had complained that he lacked firmness were now protesting that he had assumed the prerogatives of a dictator, spurning their counsels and high-handedly overruling their objections. It was true in some respects. His accustomed tact sometimes failed him under pressure nowadays, and he gave short answers, though rarely without the saving grace of humor, the velvet glove that softened the clutch of the iron hand. This was evident, for example, in a clash with Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase about this time. An economist came to Lincoln with a plan for issuing greenbacks. Lincoln heard him out, liked the notion, but told him: “You must go to Chase. He is running that end of the machine.” The man left, then presently returned, saying that the Secretary had dismissed him with the objection that the proposal was unconstitutional. Lincoln grimaced. “Go back to Chase,” he said, “and tell him not to bother himself about the Constitution. Say that I have that sacred instrument here at the White House, and am guarding it with great care.”