On January 1, Thomas Wentworth Higginson attended services to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation. Higginson had been one of the secret six that supported John Brown\u2019s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, and was now serving at Port Royal, South Carolina, as the colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first black regiment authorized by the federal government during the war. Located in Beaufort County, Port Royal fell into Union hands early in the war and, since then, Northern whites and local blacks had participated in an experiment in free plantation labor.<\/p>\n
The proclamation was read and the colors presented. As Higginson saluted the flag,<\/p>\n
there suddenly arose, close beside the platform, a strong male voice, (but rather cracked and elderly), into which two women\u2019s voices instantly blended, singing, as if by an impulse that could be no more repressed than the morning note of the song-sparrow,<\/p>\n
My Country \u2019tis of thee,Sweet land of liberty,Of thee I sing \u2026 !<\/p>\n
I never saw anything so electric; it made all other words cheap; it seemed the choked voice of a race at last unloosed.<\/p>\n
p. 65\u21b5Lincoln had followed through and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The final Proclamation included several important changes from the preliminary decree announced one hundred days earlier. It omitted any reference to schemes of colonization. It specified those places that were \u201cthis day in rebellion against the United States\u201d and declared that all persons held there as slaves \u201chenceforward shall be free.\u201d (The preliminary decree said \u201cforever free,\u201d but now that the deed was done, as opposed to promised, the additional rhetoric seemed unnecessary.) The document also included a provision for receiving \u201cpersons of suitable condition\u201d into the military. This would prove to be of signal importance in the war effort and for the future of African Americans. At a meeting with his cabinet held December 31, Lincoln added a line, proposed by Salmon Chase, that allowed the legalistic document to breathe: \u201cAnd upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of almighty God.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Proclamation elated Northern Republicans, dismayed Northern Democrats, and outraged Southern rebels\u2014Jefferson Davis called it the \u201cmost execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man.\u201d The enslaved heard the news that the day of Jubilee had come, and their pace of escape to Union lines increased: \u201cwhole families of them are stampeding and leaving their masters,\u201d wrote one officer. Many Union soldiers responded with joy that the war was not merely a battle \u201cbetween North & South; but a contest between human rights and human liberty on the one side and eternal bondage on the other.\u201d But others expressed alarm. A surgeon with the Army of the Potomac confessed, \u201cI have no fancy for emancipating a lot of uneducated wild, ferocious, and brutal negroes.\u201d Some officers complained to the president about this dramatic shift in military objectives and asked him to revoke the Proclamation. Lincoln responded that \u201cbroken eggs can not be mended. I have issued the emancipation proclamation and I cannot retract it. \u2026 And being made, it must stand.\u201dp. 66\u21b5<\/p>\n
6.\u00a0This print captures the strain on Lincoln as he drafted the Emancipation Proclamation. Looking haggard and sitting in shirtsleeves and slippers, he has his hand on a Bible that rests atop the Constitution. The print is crammed with symbols and references, including allusion to John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, and George Washington.<\/p>\n
The Proclamation was one of several actions Lincoln took in January in his effort to advance the Union\u2019s military success. On January 4, he ordered General Grant to rescind his Special Order Number 11, which had expelled all Jews as a class from his military department. Henry Halleck, who like Grant evinced hostility to Jewish merchants, said the president opposed proscribing \u201can entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks.\u201d Later in the month, Lincoln replaced Burnside with Joseph Hooker as commander of the Army of the Potomac. Hooker had graduated from West Point in 1827 and served in the Mexican War. He was ambitious, and after making the appointment Lincoln warned him to \u201cbeware of rashness.\u201d After\u00a0p. 67\u21b5the defeat at Marye\u2019s Heights, the army needed reorganization and a morale boost, and Hooker provided it. Finally, in the west, Grant personally took over the campaign against Vicksburg, Mississippi, which had begun unsuccessfully in December 1862.<\/p>\n
The war was taking its toll north and south. Military losses and a shortage of enlistments led Lincoln to sign an Enrollment or Conscription Act on March 3. Male citizens between the ages of twenty and forty-five had to enroll, and quotas for various congressional districts were set to be filled by the states. As with Confederate conscription, the Union draft permitted the hiring of substitutes. On both sides there were also serial volunteers, men who would enlist, receive as much as several hundred dollars in gold, and desert, only to sign up again for another bounty. By midsummer, the draft would lead to violent conflict.<\/p>\n
The Confederacy had instituted its draft a year earlier but now found itself suffering from shortages of food and goods. Attempts to convince planters to switch from cotton to food production had limited success. And Southerners bristled at being told by the government not to distill liquor from corn because the grain was needed. Drought in 1862 had destroyed much of the crop in Virginia and elsewhere, and a scarcity of salt, which was used as a preservative, kept army meat rations skimpy. High inflation crippled the economy as the price of wheat and milk tripled. Speculators tried to profit off of the situation, and in several cities riots took place in the spring. On April 3, in Richmond, women broke into food and clothing stores, shouting \u201cbread, bread.\u201d Only the threat of the militia firing broke up the crowd.<\/p>\n
Seeking a solution to the food problem, the Confederate Congress passed a tax-in-kind law on April 24. The tax took 10 percent of all agricultural produce and any livestock raised for slaughter. It did little to ease the supply crisis, but it increased tensions within the Confederacy over how the war was being fought and whether its professed principles were being upheld. States\u2019 rights ideologues,\u00a0p. 68\u21b5who believed that the reason for secession was to escape a tyrannical centralized government, were increasingly reluctant to comply with the Confederate government\u2019s demands, essential though they were to waging war effectively.<\/p>\n
The Chancellorsville Campaign of April 30 to May 6 renewed Confederate hopes. After crossing the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers above Fredericksburg, Hooker\u2019s army of 115,000 concentrated near Chancellorsville. Faced with superior numbers attacking his force of sixty thousand, Lee boldly divided his army. Meeting resistance on the Orange Turnpike, which led to Fredericksburg, Hooker inexplicably halted, assumed defensive positions, and yielded the initiative to Lee, who again divided his forces, sending Stonewall Jackson to attack the Union right flank. They were unprepared for the attack. Hooker never brought his reserve forces into the battle, and after several days the Army of the Potomac retreated. The Union suffered 17,000 casualties compared to 12,800 for the Confederacy. But one of those Confederate casualties was Stonewall Jackson, a man described by Lee as \u201cmy right arm,\u201d who died eight days later from complications with a wound received in battle. Lee had won a brilliant victory but had failed to follow up. He hardly could, with troops ragged and undernourished, men and horses severely undersupplied. Instead, he would reorganize his army and prepare to invade the North.<\/p>\n
When news of the loss reached Washington, Lincoln could not contain his despair. \u201cWhat will the country say! What will the country say!\u201d he cried. At the same time, he faced a political crisis in the Union over what he called \u201cthe fire in the rear,\u201d the vocal opposition of Northern Peace Democrats to the ongoing prosecution of the war. Dismayed by declarations of sympathy for the enemy, General Burnside, commanding the military district of Ohio, issued an order in April that anyone who acted in support of the enemy would be tried as a spy or traitor and executed if convicted.<\/p>\n
p. 69\u21b5It didn\u2019t take long before Clement Vallandigham tested the order. A former Democratic congressman, Vallandigham had his eye on the governorship of Ohio. When he delivered a speech on May 1 denouncing Lincoln and the war effort, it was not the first time that he had spoken out. On January 14 in an address to the House, \u201cThe Great Civil War in America,\u201d he had declared that the war should not continue, its cause was not slavery but abolition, and peaceful reunion was still possible. But now, before a crowd of ten thousand in Mt. Vernon, Ohio, he lambasted a \u201cwicked, cruel, and unnecessary war, one not waged for the preservation of the Union, but for the purpose of crushing out liberty and to erect a despotism; a war for the freedom of the blacks and the enslavement of the whites.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vallandigham was arrested for violating Burnside\u2019s order. Authorities denied him a writ of habeas corpus and tried him before a military tribunal, which found him guilty and sentenced him to two years\u2019 confinement. Lincoln altered the sentence to banishment but upheld his general\u2019s orders. A political firestorm erupted. The president, who had only selectively addressed the public directly on state matters, decided to issue a letter in response to a protest from a group of New York Democrats led by Erastus Corning, head of the New York Central Railroad, who condemned the arrest and trial as \u201ca fatal blow\u201d to the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.<\/p>\n
In the missive, Lincoln did not simply declare his position; he walked readers through his logic. \u201cOurs is a case of rebellion,\u201d he said, \u201cin fact, a clear, flagrant, and gigantic case of rebellion.\u201d The Constitution stated that the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended except in \u201ccases of rebellion or invasion.\u201d Lincoln said that in this case there was no distinction between areas of military occupation and those not so occupied\u2014the whole nation was at war, and Vallandigham\u2019s arrest \u201cwas made because he was laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops; to encourage desertions from the army; and to leave the rebellion\u00a0p. 70\u21b5without an adequate military force to suppress it.\u201d He then asked readers: \u201cMust I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch the hair of the wily agitator who induces him to desert?\u201d and answered his own question: \u201cI think that in such a case to silence the agitator, and save the boy is not only constitutional, but withal a great mercy.\u201d He must have known as well how soldiers felt. One captain wrote to his brother, \u201cMy\u00a0first\u00a0object is to crush this infernal Rebellion the\u00a0next\u00a0to come North and bayonet such fool miscreants as Vallandigham.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Lincoln sought to quell the fire in the rear, the fire on the front gathered force. Through the spring, Grant planned and executed an assault on Vicksburg, which sat on a bluff high above the Mississippi on its eastern bank. To take the heavily fortified fortress at Vicksburg would be to control the mighty river, gain access to the lower Confederacy, and cut off the trans-Mississippi Confederacy from the rest of it. Overcoming great obstacles, Grant marched his army south of Vicksburg and sent supporting barges and transports down the river past the Confederate batteries, which fired relentlessly on the flotilla. He then recrossed the river. Living off of the land, Grant\u2019s army, now divided, fought its way west and defeated opposing forces at Jackson (May 14), Champion Hill (May 16), and Big Black River (May 17). Grant now had Confederate general John Pemberton\u2019s army trapped at Vicksburg. After two brutal frontal assaults failed, Grant settled in for a siege of the city. His men dug miles of trenches and tunnels, some of which reached into Confederate lines. The siege would be a long one, and at times, at night, soldiers from each side gathered to exchange rations and stories. Lincoln called the campaign\u2014whether or not Vicksburg fell\u2014\u201cone of the most brilliant in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Vicksburg came under siege, another general who had Proved to be a brilliant tactician planned a Confederate invasion of the North. Lee\u2019s Army of Northern Virginia had eighty thousand men organized into three infantry corps led by James Longstreet,\u00a0p. 71\u21b5Richard Ewell, and Ambrose Powell Hill. James E. B. Stuart, who had literally run a circle around McClellan\u2019s Army of the Potomac a year earlier in the Peninsula campaign, commanded the cavalry. In May, the Confederate cabinet gave approval to Lee\u2019s plan, which had several objectives: to relieve pressure on Richmond, to exploit the rich resources of the Pennsylvania countryside, and perhaps, by capturing a major Northern city, to win support for the Confederacy from England.\u00a0Harper\u2019s Weekly\u00a0speculated that Lee\u2019s invasion sought to boost Confederate morale in the face of the siege at Vicksburg but thought it could not possibly succeed because \u201cno army the size of Lee\u2019s can operate as a moving or flying column without a base.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lincoln feared that Hooker was not up to the task of confronting Lee. He was frustrated that, like McClellan, the general seemed more focused on Richmond than on Lee\u2019s army. He told Gideon Welles that \u201cHooker may commit the same fault as McClellan and lose his chance.\u201d \u201cAlmost every one sees,\u201d wrote one newspaper correspondent, \u201cthat if General Lee gains a decisive victory over Hooker, which he is very likely to do, the cause of the North is virtually lost.\u201d On June 28, Hooker offered his resignation; Lincoln appointed George Gordon Meade to command the Army of the Potomac.<\/p>\n
Like his predecessor, Meade had graduated from West Point in 1835 and served in the Mexican War. He had also worked as a civil engineer. He had been wounded during the Seven Days\u2019 battles but had recovered and had fought at Second Bull Run. Coming so suddenly, the appointment shocked Meade, and he protested against it. He took command just days before the battle against Lee commenced on July 1 when a Confederate brigade encountered Union cavalry along the Chambersburg Pike west of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. After the first day of fighting, Confederates drove back outnumbered Union forces, who took a position on Cemetery Hill. That evening, the remaining forces on both sides reached Gettysburg\u2014a total\u00a0p. 72\u21b5of more than 150,000 men (83,000 Union and 75,000 Confederate).<\/p>\n
On July 2, Lee ordered Longstreet to attack the Union left, with a secondary assault on the right led by Ewell. The day saw gruesome combat as Confederates repeatedly attacked and Union forces held their ground. The fighting on the left occurred at Little Round Top, Devil\u2019s Den, the Wheat Field, and Peach Orchard and the fighting on the right at Culp\u2019s Hill. A few weeks later, a Union soldier wrote:<\/p>\n
Bullets whistled past us; shells screeched over us; canister and grape fell about us; comrade after comrade dropped from the ranks; but on the line went. No one took a second look at his fallen companion. We had no time to weep \u2026 forward we went again and the Rebs were routed, and the bloody field was in our possession; but at what a cost! The ground was strewed with dead and dying, whose groans and prayers and cries for help and water rent the air. The sun had gone down and in the darkness we hurried, stumbled over the field in search of our fallen companions, and when the living were cared for, laid ourselves down on the ground to gain a little rest, for the morrow bid far more stern and bloody work, the living sleeping side by side with the dead.<\/p>\n
On July 3, Lee decided to attack the Union center, embedded along Cemetery Hill. Longstreet thought it would be better to outflank the Union line on the left and maneuver behind them. But Lee was determined to fight. A division of fresh troops led by George Pickett had arrived the night before. In the morning, Union soldiers battled at Culp\u2019s Hill and regained what they had lost the day before. At the same time, J. E. B. Stuart\u2019s cavalry, which had arrived only the previous day, failed in an attempt to sneak behind Union lines. At one o\u2019clock in the afternoon, Confederate artillery began an intense bombardment of the Union center. For a time, Union artillery responded, but then it stopped, for several reasons: to conserve ammunition, to deceive the Confederates into thinking they had put it out of action, and, as\u00a0p. 73\u21b5one Union artillerist honestly put it, to endure \u201cdreadful artillery fire [that] seemed to paralyze our whole line for [a] while.\u201d After two hours of shelling, the rebels emerged from the woods.<\/p>\n
Nine infantry brigades, some 12,500 men, led an assault across three-fourths of a mile of undulating open field toward entrenched Union positions behind a low stone wall. The Confederate line stretched a mile wide, with Pettigrew and Trimble on the left and Pickett on the right. The assault, straight into a \u201ctorrent of iron & leaden ball,\u201d lasted an hour. When it ended, the Confederate attackers were decimated, having suffered casualties of 50 percent. Thousands were killed, wounded, or captured, with extremely high casualties among officers. A few brave Confederates made it over the stone wall and there ended their journey. Pickett would never get over the destruction of his division, and after the war those generals who hailed from Virginia would cast blame on Longstreet, who was born in South Carolina and had expressed concern about Lee\u2019s plan. As Lee sought to gather what was left of his army (he suffered total casualties of over twenty-eight thousand; the Union lost nearly twenty-three thousand) he was heard to say, \u201cIt\u2019s all my fault.\u201d Later, he would blame Longstreet and Stuart. He would also offer a jeremiad, pronouncing \u201cwe have sinned against almighty God\u201d and calling for a purging of collective sin to win God back to the Confederate side.<\/p>\n
It poured on the evening of July 4. The next day, Union troops renewed their march. One soldier wrote:<\/p>\n
Crossing the battlefield\u2014Cemitary Hill\u2014the Great Wheat Field Farm\u2014Seminary ridge\u2014and other places where dead men, horses, smashed artillery, were strewn in utter confusion, the Blue and the Grey Mixed\u2014Their bodies so bloated\u2014distorted\u2014discolored on account of decomposition having set in that they were utterly unrecognizable, save by clothing, or things in their pockets\u2014The scene simply beggars description.p. 74\u21b5<\/p>\n
7.\u00a0One of the most iconic photographs of the Civil War, this image shows bloated bodies lying in the foreground as fog-shrouded figures loom in the background. The corpses are shoeless, their footwear removed to supply others.<\/p>\n
Lee retreated from Gettysburg, but Meade did not counterattack, and his failure to do so enraged Lincoln, especially after rains came and the rising waters of the Potomac prevented Lee from crossing back into Virginia. On July 14, he wrote a letter to Meade: \u201cMy dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee\u2019s escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely.\u201d Lincoln decided not to send the rebuke, using back channels instead to get his message to the general.<\/p>\n
One of the other successes Lincoln alluded to was Vicksburg, which, on July 4, surrendered to Grant. Pemberton\u2019s force of thirty thousand had been reduced by disease as well as the constant\u00a0p. 75\u21b5shelling inflicted on the city. The diary of one Mississippi soldier narrated the struggle to survive on quarter rations, weeds, slaughtered mules, and trapped rats. The soldiers sent the commander a petition on June 28: \u201cIf you can\u2019t feed us, you had better surrender.\u201d The siege had lasted forty-six days. Pemberton delivered his men and arms. Grant paroled the soldiers, allowing them to go home after they swore not to take up arms again. He used the captured rifles to reequip his men.<\/p>\n
On both sides, commentators recognized the momentousness of the event. Jefferson Davis had said that \u201cVicksburg is the nail head that [holds] the South\u2019s two halves together.\u201d If so, the nail had been pulverized. One Confederate wrote, \u201cThis is the most terrible blow that has been struck yet.\u201d Davis, \u201cin the depth of gloom,\u201d confessed \u201cwe are now in the darkest hour of our political existence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gideon Welles noted in his diary that \u201cthe rejoicing in regard to Vicksburg is immense \u2026 [it] has excited a degree of enthusiasm not excelled during the war.\u201d Lincoln wrote to Grant, whom he had never met, and thanked him for \u201cthe almost inestimable service you have done the country.\u201d Sherman wired Grant calling it \u201cthe best fourth of July since 1776. Of course we must not rest idle, only don\u2019t let us brag too soon.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sherman was prescient. More good news arrived with word of the surrender of Port Hudson on July 9, which gave complete control of the Mississippi to the Union. But then New York exploded in riots over the draft. On July 11, names were first drawn in New York in compliance with the Conscription Act passed several months earlier. Two days later, another drawing was to be held, but a crowd of several hundred attacked the draft office. Many of the protesters were Irish immigrants, Democrats who had multiple resentments: that the wealthy could buy substitutes for $300, that the war showed no sign of ending, and that they had to compete for jobs with free blacks, whose numbers they believed\u00a0p. 76\u21b5would only grow with emancipation. The rioters overwhelmed the police and let loose on the black community a wave of horrific racial violence. They burned buildings, including the Colored Orphan Asylum, and lynched more than a dozen blacks, stringing them up from lamp posts. They also sought out the homes of leading Republicans such as Horace Greeley. After two more days of violence, the riots subsided when New York militia regiments arrived to reestablish order. One witness testified afterward: \u201cI believe if I were to live a hundred years I would never forget that scene, or cease to hear the horrid voices of that demoniacal mob resounding in my ears.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lincoln would not tolerate rebellion against federal authority in the North any more than he tolerated it in the South. He reasserted his intentions to \u201csee the draft law faithfully executed.\u201d When New York next held draft selection, twenty thousand troops made certain there was no violence. Ironically, at the moment that racial hatred ignited draft riots, black troops began to make their presence felt in the war effort.<\/p>\n
Prior to 1863, selected black units had been organized. Lincoln feared that arming blacks, including those formerly enslaved, would result in the loss of the border states, and he shared many of the prejudices of the day concerning the ability of black men in the field, believing that they would either be too docile or too savage. But all of this changed with the Emancipation Proclamation, which called for accepting blacks into the military. Lincoln came to realize that \u201cthe colored population is the great\u00a0available\u00a0\u200aand yet\u00a0unavailed\u00a0of, force for the restoration of the Union. \u2026 The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lincoln thought of black soldiers primarily as helping to end the war, but recruiters such as Frederick Douglass saw more deeply into the meaning of their service. Only by allowing black men to\u00a0p. 77\u21b5fight would \u201cthe paper proclamation \u2026 be made iron, lead and fire.\u201d And their service would not only help save the union but also win them citizenship rights: \u201cOnce let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.\u201d<\/p>\n
Images as well as words played a role in the recruitment process. When during the spring a runaway slave appeared in Union lines, a photographer had him pose with his shirt off. The resulting image shocked viewers who saw evidence of the barbaric cruelty of slavery; yet the beaten slave still held his chin up and even defiantly placed his hand on hip. Entitled \u201cThe Scourged Back,\u201d or \u201cA Map of Slavery,\u201d that photograph circulated as a carte de visite. One newspaper declared that the \u201cCard Photograph should be multiplied by the 100,000 and scattered over the states. It tells the story in a way that even Mrs. Stowe cannot approach because it tells the story to the eye.\u201d<\/p>\n
The image also appeared as an engraving in\u00a0Harper\u2019s Weekly\u00a0in its issue of July 4, 1863. Under the title \u201cA Typical Negro,\u201d the weekly told the man\u2019s story. His name was Gordon, and he had entered Union lines at Baton Rouge, having escaped from his master in Mississippi. During his escape, he carried onions to throw dogs off his scent. He arrived tattered and starving, as depicted in the first sketch. The second, drawn from the photograph, shows him undergoing examination before being mustered into the service. And the third \u201crepresents him in United States uniform, bearing the musket, and prepared for duty.\u201d The images served as an effective recruitment poster.<\/p>\n
By war\u2019s end, nearly 180,000 men served in the United States Colored Troops, close to 10 percent of the entire Union army. Another nineteen thousand served in the navy. Black soldiers faced myriad difficulties. Though eager to see combat, most of\u00a0p. 78\u21b5them were initially placed in noncombat situations working on fortifications or as teamsters and cooks. And they suffered the taunts of white soldiers, who enjoyed such pranks as sneaking up on blacks and throwing flour in their faces. Prejudice against them meant not only skepticism about their ability to fight but also harsher punishments and unequal treatment. They served in segregated units commanded by white officers and received less pay than white soldiers\u2014$10 per month with $3 deducted for clothing, compared to $13 plus a clothing allowance for white soldiers; one outraged black corporal wrote directly to the president and declared, \u201cWe have done a Soldier\u2019s duty. Why can\u2019t we have a Soldier\u2019s pay?\u201d Finally, captured black soldiers faced a Confederate threat of being returned to slavery, a threat that led Lincoln to issue a general order that announced there would be\u00a0p. 79\u21b5reprisal against any Confederate prisoners should black troops or their white officers face mistreatment.<\/p>\n
8.\u00a0This engraving of Gordon was based on a photograph of the runaway slave who entered Union lines and showed his back, scarred from the many whippings he had received. He would leave camp a soldier, one of tens of thousands of black men who served in the Union army.<\/p>\n
In combat, when the chance came, black troops proved their valor and won over skeptics. They played an important role at Port Hudson and Milliken\u2019s Bend in the Vicksburg Campaign (one soldier wrote, \u201cThe problem of whether the Negroes will fight or not has been solved\u201d). Their performance on July 18 at Fort Wagner, south of Charleston Harbor, where the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth under Colonel Robert Gould Shaw led the assault, forever earned them respect. Shaw was killed, as were scores of his men. He was buried with them in a pit. One bitter Massachusetts officer, blaming Shaw\u2019s death on his troops, groused, \u201cniggers won\u2019t fight as they ought.\u201d But a soldier from Ohio expressed a more widespread and growing belief: \u201cThere is not a Negro in the army that is not a better man than a rebel, and for whom I have not a thousand times more respect than I have for a traitor.\u201d Arming blacks, General Grant declared, was \u201cthe heaviest blow yet given the Confederacy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lincoln grew tired of hearing from supporters of the Union still upset by the Emancipation Proclamation and other administration policies. In August, he used an invitation from his friend James Conkling to write a letter to be delivered at a Union rally in Illinois, held on September 3. Conkling had the missive read to the crowd of fifty thousand there, and it was later published in newspapers throughout the Union.<\/p>\n
Lincoln defended the Proclamation, saying that \u201cas law, [it] either is valid, or is not valid. If it is not valid, it needs no retraction. If it is valid, it can not be retracted any more than the dead can be brought to life.\u201d He went further: \u201cSome say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union.\u201d He expressed hope, in the aftermath of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, that peace might come soon. When that day arrived, he said,\u00a0p. 80\u21b5\u201cthere will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The speech electrified readers, united supporters, and perhaps even converted a few critics. The\u00a0New York Times\u00a0named Lincoln a \u201cleader who is peculiarly adapted to the needs of the time.\u201d The\u00a0Chicago Tribune\u00a0called it \u201cone of those remarkably clear and forcible documents that come only from Mr. Lincoln\u2019s pen. \u2026 God bless Old Abe.\u201d<\/p>\n
And yet the war showed no signs of relenting. A border war between Kansas and Missouri turned savage on August 21, when William Quantrill, leader of a pro-Confederate guerilla band, raided Lawrence, Kansas, and murdered some two hundred men and boys and burned down buildings. \u201cThe citizens were massacred by the light of their burning homes, and their bodies flung into wells and cisterns,\u201d reported one paper. \u201cNo other instance of such wanton brutality has occurred during the American war.\u201d<\/p>\n
In September, a year after Antietam, Union forces under William Rosecrans\u2019s Army of the Cumberland engaged in a brutal battle with Braxton Bragg\u2019s Army of Tennessee at Chickamauga, Georgia. Earlier in the year, in June, Rosecrans had managed dramatic success against Bragg when he took Chattanooga, but his accomplishment went almost unacknowledged in the Union successes at Vicksburg and Gettysburg. Now, Bragg had Longstreet, who arrived from Virginia in time to break through Union lines and drive them back to Chattanooga. Combined casualties were nearly 35,000 out of some 120,000 engaged. The victory provided the Confederacy with a morale boost. \u201cThe whole South will be filled again with patriotic fervor,\u201d noted a Richmond\u00a0p. 81\u21b5resident. Writing to his brother, Henry Adams predicted that the loss \u201censures us another year of war.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two months later, fortunes would be reversed at Missionary Ridge, which stretched southeast from Chattanooga. In October, Lincoln had placed Grant in charge of the entire western military department. Grant traveled to Chattanooga to oversee operations in the Tennessee theater. Bragg was dug in atop the seemingly impregnable four-hundred-foot ridge. And yet on November 25, Union forces charged up the ridge and drove the rebels from their position, routing Bragg and his army. The next day, a civilian clerk wrote, \u201cIt would seem incredible to one who had not seen it, to think that men could climb up such a hill, in face of the fire they were receiving, and not only get up the hill, but, actually drive a force, superior in numbers off of it.\u201d The Union now held Chattanooga, the \u201cGateway to the Lower South.\u201d For the most part, the remainder of the year was quiet as both armies settled into winter quarters, waiting for the spring to resume warfare.<\/p>\n
On November 19, days before the success at Missionary Ridge, Lincoln visited the site of the summer\u2019s momentous Union victory at Gettysburg to participate in ceremonies dedicating the Soldiers National Cemetery. The main speaker was Edward Everett, former governor and senator from Massachusetts, whose oration went on for two hours. Following a hymn, Lincoln offered his remarks, approximately 272 words, though the total varies with a word here, a word there, in the five known manuscript copies of the address.<\/p>\n
The speech\u2019s rhetoric was historical and biblical, as Lincoln grounded the meaning of the war in what took place in 1776 (four score and seven years earlier) and defined what had taken place then as the creation of a nation devoted to liberty and equality. The cadences are musical, the rule of threes doing its work effectively: \u201cwe cannot consecrate, we cannot dedicate, we cannot hallow this ground\u201d; \u201cof the people, by the people, for the people.\u201d\u00a0p. 82\u21b5Lincoln separated words from actions, knowing that in war the latter were the coin of victory, and yet words helped give meaning to deeds.<\/p>\n
Lincoln\u2019s opponents were livid. They saw what he had done. He had hijacked the meaning of the nation in such a way as to make liberty and equality central to its identity, and he had taken the events of the year\u2014from emancipation through Gettysburg and Vicksburg and through the enlistment of black troops\u2014to define what this \u201cgreat civil war\u201d was about: not simply restoring the Union but creating a better nation dedicated to making palpable the principles of the revolution. A Democratic newspaper called it \u201ca perversion of history so flagrant that the most extended charity cannot regard it as otherwise than willful.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lincoln was already contemplating the end of the war and how the nation would be reconstituted. It was a question he was not alone in considering. More than a year earlier, one soldier wondered in his diary: \u201cWhat shall we do with the conquered country? With the slaves? With meddlesome foreigners? With our vast debt? With the rebels themselves?\u201d On December 8, the president issued a \u201cProclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction.\u201d Lincoln offered a full pardon to participants in the rebellion (except government officials, high-ranking officers, and those rebels who had mistreated prisoners of war) who took an oath of allegiance, with property restored to them save for slaves. Furthermore, whenever 10 percent of those who voted in a state in the election of 1860 took the oath, state government could be reestablished and would be recognized. He also declared he would not object to provisions established to aid former slaves, \u201ca laboring, landless, and homeless class\u201d of people.<\/p>\n
The proclamation initially pleased both radical and conservative elements within the Republican Party. It was a first attempt to look beyond the war to the terms of reconstruction\u2014the ways the divided nation would be restored to one. The proclamation also\u00a0p. 83\u21b5seemed to play to a growing peace movement within the Confederacy, as representatives hostile to Jefferson Davis gained seats in the fall elections and North Carolina expressed interest in opening separate peace negotiations. But the process of reconstruction was still a long way off. Late in the year, both sides began to strategize over the presidential election scheduled for 1864. In a war that had not been going well for the Confederacy, the defeat of Lincoln might still salvage the rebels\u2019 cause. Entering the year, Lincoln was uncertain about his chances. There was not only much war weariness and opposition from Northern Democrats but also dissent from radical and conservative Republicans. The nation was not yet ready for reconstruction, not by a long shot.<\/p>\n
In December 1863, Salmon Chase suggested adding the phrase \u201cIn God We Trust\u201d to American coins, and with the Coinage Act of 1864 Congress approved the motto. Both sides believed that God supported their cause, and soldiers often expressed a deep religious faith, at least in combat. \u201cIf ever one needed God\u2019s help,\u201d wrote a Georgia private, \u201cit is in time of battle.\u201d Though the embrace of religion seldom showed in attendance at Sunday services in camp, one soldier observed that \u201cstill there is large amt of a certain kind of rude religious feeling.\u201d Through 1864, Confederate soldiers in particular experienced revivals of religion. They held prayer meetings and used faith to spur courage. But at the start of the year, problems within the Confederacy were taking their toll. One North Carolinian wrote to the governor, \u201cThe tide is against us, everything is against us. I fear the God who rules the destinies of nations is against us.\u201d<\/p>\n
With the effects of the blockade taking hold, and ill-advised fiscal policies that relied heavily on paper money to finance the war, inflation began to wreak havoc. Planters had failed to shift from cotton to staples, and transportation networks, such as they were, had been disrupted. One diarist listed prices in Richmond as $275 a barrel for flour; $25 a bushel for potatoes; $9 a pound for bacon. A pair of shoes could cost over $100. In 1860, a typical Southerner spent $6.55 to feed a family for a week; by 1864 the amount had\u00a0p. 85\u21b5ballooned to $68.25 for the same staples. Women especially, held up in Southern culture as refined and pure, carried the burden and suffered from want and fear, especially in situations where they were left alone to manage slaves. Perhaps as many as one in ten Confederate soldiers deserted, many to return to help their families. A revised Conscription Act passed in February made men aged seventeen to fifty susceptible to the draft. \u201cWe want this war stopped,\u201d wrote one man. \u201cWe will take peace on\u00a0any terms\u00a0that are\u00a0honorable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jefferson Davis faced not only an unraveling economic situation, but a difficult political one as well. More extreme political elements in the government, such as Barnwell Rhett and William Yancey, had little respect for the Confederate president. Davis had cobbled together his cabinet to appease the interests of individual states rather than bring the best people into government. Rather than lubricating the engine of government, one-party politics actually made it more difficult for Davis to act as a strong executive because a constantly changing constellation of interests pulled and pushed in different directions; by comparison, in the Union, the existence of the Democrats helped unify the Republicans in support behind Lincoln. Davis enjoyed no such support. Indeed, many an antiadministration official came to feel about Davis as did the editor of the\u00a0Southern Literary Messenger, who called him \u201ccold, haughty, peevish, narrow-minded, pig-headed,\u00a0malignant.\u201d And the tension between the doctrine of states\u2019 rights and the need for national actions continued to impede the Confederate war effort as governors resisted Davis\u2019s call for men and material.<\/p>\n
Despite being ridiculed as \u201cno military genius,\u201d Davis inserted himself directly into military affairs and throughout the spring consulted with Lee about operations. They were especially concerned about what Grant might do. On March 1, Lincoln nominated Grant to command all armies, and on March 9, a day after meeting him for the first time, Lincoln placed him in charge.\u00a0p. 86\u21b5Grant made his headquarters the Army of the Potomac, located where Union forces would be going head-to-head against Lee. But where they would tangle remained uncertain. On March 25, Lee wrote to Davis and warned him of falling prey to reports in Northern newspapers as to Union military intentions. \u201cI would advise,\u201d Lee wrote, \u201cthat we make the best preparations in our power to meet an advance in any quarter, but be careful not to suffer ourselves to be misled by feigned movements into strengthening one point at the expense of others, equally exposed and equally important.\u201d<\/p>\n
Grant\u2019s strategy was for Meade\u2019s Army of the Potomac (one hundred fifteen thousand men) to move against Lee\u2019s Army of Northern Virginia (sixty-five thousand men). Auxiliary attacks would include action on the James River and in the Shenandoah Valley. In addition, Sherman (with one hundred thousand men), who now assumed Grant\u2019s old command, would focus on Georgia, where he faced Joseph Johnston (with sixty-five thousand troops). Nathaniel Banks would lead a campaign in Louisiana on the Red River. But these auxiliary campaigns in March, April, and May came to nothing. Grant would go to Virginia and face Lee without the help these actions, had they been successful, would have provided.<\/p>\n
Whatever impact Union losses in peripheral battles such as Olustee in Florida, Poison Springs in Arkansas, and Fort Pillow in Tennessee had on Northern morale, reports of atrocities committed by rebels against black troops in these engagements shocked the North. At Fort Pillow, on April 12, forces under Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest murdered dozens of men after they surrendered. In his report three days later, Forrest wrote, \u201cThe river was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for two hundred yards.\u201d Lincoln rejected outright retaliation, but the administration continued to refuse any exchange of prisoners unless black soldiers received equal treatment. And Union soldiers found ways to retaliate. After a battle in Mississippi, a lieutenant\u00a0p. 87\u21b5wrote, \u201cWe did not take many prisoners. The Negroes remembered \u2018Fort Pillow.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n
The prisoners-of-war issue became especially controversial when Northerners learned of the abhorrent conditions at Andersonville Prison in Georgia. Opened in February, by the summer the camp population swelled to over thirty thousand. Men had no shelter, very little food, and water only from a polluted stream. The soldiers, one Union prisoner wrote, were \u201cwalking skeletons, covered with filth and vermin.\u201d Thousands died from disease and malnutrition. One soldier who kept a diary wrote on August 22 that \u201cthe men dys verry fast hear now from 75 to 125 per day.\u201d After the war, Henry Wirz, a Confederate commander in charge of the prison, was tried for murder and executed. Through the spring, the Confederates continued to refuse equal treatment of black soldiers, and Grant became convinced that as Confederate forces diminished in strength it might be best not to exchange rebels, who would in all likelihood only return to the fight. By war\u2019s end, 194,000 Union and 215,000 Confederate soldiers had been held as prisoners, resulting in 30,000 Union and 26,000 Confederate deaths.<\/p>\n
Grant hoped his Virginia offensive, known as the Overland Campaign, would take many more prisoners. On May 5\u20137, the first battle took place at the Wilderness, some seventy square miles of forested terrain in central Virginia. During two days of brutal warfare in dense woods, Union forces suffered nearly eighteen thousand casualties and the Confederates eleven thousand. Had Grant withdrawn, it would have been a Confederate victory. Instead it was a tactical draw, with Grant determined still to push onto Richmond. On May 11, he informed Lincoln: \u201cI propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.\u201d<\/p>\n
The telegram came in the midst of fighting at Spotsylvania Courthouse. Lee had time to build up his defenses with logs and earthworks. The fight, which pulsated over two weeks, included a\u00a0p. 88\u21b5span of twenty-two hours where the forces engaged in hand-to-hand combat at a location called the \u201cBloody Angle.\u201d Bodies piled several deep filled the trenches, and men shot and stabbed one another both through and over the fortifications. The rifle fire was so furious that it felled a sturdy oak tree. One Confederate called it \u201ca Golgotha of horrors.\u201d In the end, the Union suffered eighteen thousand casualties and Confederates twelve thousand. But Grant simply disengaged and continued his attempt to outflank Lee and threaten Richmond.<\/p>\n
Grant\u2019s Overland Campaign culminated on June 3, when he ordered a frontal assault at Cold Harbor against Lee\u2019s well-fortified men. Union soldiers, who had survived Spotsylvania, knew what to expect. Some pinned their names to their uniforms so that their bodies could be identified afterward. They never made it to the entrenchments. In an hour, seven thousand were killed or wounded, compared to fifteen hundred rebels. Fighting would continue sporadically for a few more days, but Grant gave up on taking Richmond directly and now set his sights on Petersburg, a crucial rail junction south of the capital. In two months, the Army of the Potomac had lost almost two-thirds the number of men it had lost in the previous three years combined. Following days of operating on the wounded, John G. Perry, a Union surgeon, exclaimed, \u201cWar! War! War! I often think that in the future, when human character shall have deepened, there will be a better way of settling affairs than this of plunging into a perfect maelstrom of horror.\u201d<\/p>\n
The defeat at Cold Harbor came at a politically precarious time for Lincoln. Any number of rivals, including his own secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase, were angling for the Republican presidential nomination in 1864 (the party called itself the National Union Party to make clear its purpose). A bitter John C. Fremont, the Republican candidate in 1856, aggrieved over having been relieved of his command, emerged as the candidate of a group of radical Republicans. Other names\u00a0p. 89\u21b5surfaced, including Benjamin Butler. Some mentioned Grant as a candidate. In addition to the factionalism within the Republican Party, Lincoln had to worry about the Peace Democrats and keeping the support of so-called War Democrats, who favored seeing the contest through to its end. This was no easy task. Democrats in general, whether for continuing to prosecute the war or demanding immediate peace, constituted a significant percentage of voters in the North. In the election of 1860, counting only those states that remained in the Union, Lincoln won 47.2 percent of the votes and the two Democratic candidates 46.6 percent.<\/p>\n
While some nationally prominent Republicans may have challenged Lincoln, governors and others attuned to grassroots sentiment successfully promoted him as the people\u2019s choice. At the national convention held in Baltimore from June 7\u20138, delegates unanimously renominated the President. On hearing the news, he said, \u201cI will neither conceal my gratification, nor restrain the expression of my gratitude, that the Union people, through their convention \u2026 have deemed me not unworthy to remain in my present position.\u201d The platform approved of the government\u2019s refusal \u201cto compromise with rebels, or to offer them any terms of peace, except such as may be based upon an unconditional surrender,\u201d and at Lincoln\u2019s behest, endorsed a constitutional amendment that \u201cshall terminate and forever prohibit the existence of slavery within the limits of the jurisdiction of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n
Such an amendment, the Thirteenth, was already in the works. On January 8, the first of several proposals came forward, and the Senate Judiciary Committee resolved differences in language to present an amendment that stated \u201cneither slavery nor involuntary servitude\u201d shall exist in the United States. On April 8, the Senate passed the measure, by a vote of 38 to 6. The House voted twice but failed in February and again in June to muster the necessary two-thirds majority. Passage of the\u00a0p. 90\u21b5amendment would have to wait until after the presidential election.<\/p>\n
Whereas Lincoln\u2019s emancipation policies faced opposition from both War and Peace Democrats in Congress, his reconstruction policies were challenged by radical Republicans. On July 2, Congress hastily passed the Wade-Davis Bill. Sponsored by Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, the bill offered a more stringent approach to reconstruction than the president\u2019s. Under its terms, 50 percent of the eligible voters had to take an oath of allegiance; only those who could take an \u201ciron-clad oath\u201d that they had never supported the rebellion would be enfranchised; and a constitutional convention would have to be held before state officials could be elected. Lincoln pocket vetoed the measure. He refused to be \u201cinflexibly committed to any single plan of restoration,\u201d not to mention one that differed from his own, and he would not repudiate the progress already made by Arkansas and Louisiana under the presidential plan of reconstruction.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, he refused to \u201cdeclare a constitutional competency in Congress to abolish slavery in States\u201d; on this he had been consistent throughout. Instead, he hoped for eventual passage of a constitutional amendment. On August 5, Wade and Davis issued a manifesto in response to Lincoln\u2019s veto: \u201ca more studied outrage on the legislative authority of the people has never been perpetrated,\u201d they averred.<\/p>\n
Through the summer, Union efforts in the war went little better than they had in the spring, leaving Lincoln even more vulnerable politically. On June 18, the Army of the Potomac lost an opportunity to take Petersburg when Lee managed to reinforce his entrenched position. Union forces suffered eight thousand casualties and settled in for a siege of the city. Weeks later, they filled a mine shaft they dug beneath Confederate defenses and exploded it, creating a huge crater. But in the ensuing battle the\u00a0p. 91\u21b5Union corps under Burnside was beaten back. The siege of Petersburg would continue.<\/p>\n
Matters fared no better in the lower South, where Sherman had begun his Atlanta campaign, in which he would face off against Joseph E. Johnston and his Army of the Tennessee. Before it was over, at least nine separate battles would be fought in addition to countless skirmishes. But at places such as New Hope Church and Pickett\u2019s Mills in May, and Kennesaw Mountain in June, Confederate forces repulsed Sherman\u2019s army. The frontal assaults that so devastated the Army of the Potomac had the same effect on the military division of the Mississippi.<\/p>\n
Despite these successes, Confederate leaders grew unhappy with Johnston, who seemed, like McClellan, not to want to fight. On July 17, Davis relieved him of command and replaced him with John Bell Hood. Only thirty-three years old, Hood was wounded at Gettysburg, where he was beaten at Little Round Top. In September, another wound led to the amputation of his right leg. It would fall to the aggressive Hood, who had to be strapped into his saddle, to defend Atlanta.<\/p>\n
In the heat of the summer, it seemed as if the war was stalemated. A year had passed since Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and still the Confederates\u2014undermanned, undernourished, undersupplied\u2014fought on, and not just defensively. In early July, Confederate infantry and cavalry under Jubal Early crossed the Potomac for a raid on Washington itself. He reached the outer fortifications of the capital, defended by additional troops hastily recalled from Meade\u2019s army. Although Early had to retreat to Virginia, at the end of July his cavalry burned the town of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where residents refused to pay a $100,000 ransom.<\/p>\n
These developments further depressed morale in the North and gave sustenance to the peace movement, which called for an end to the war under conditions to be negotiated. \u201cWhat a difference\u00a0p. 92\u21b5between now and last year!\u201d wrote a visitor to Philadelphia, \u201cNo signs of any enthusiasm, no flags; most of the best men gloomy and despairing.\u201d Even Horace Greeley joined the chorus, declaring, \u201cOur bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country also longs for peace.\u201d Lincoln tried to maintain a public face of good cheer and abiding faith, but in July one visitor described him as \u201cquite paralyzed and wilted down.\u201d One critic said, \u201cHe does not act or talk or feel like the ruler of a great empire in a great crisis. \u2026 He is an unutterable calamity to us where he is.\u201d Lincoln came to believe that he would lose the election in November. On August 23 he prepared a memorandum that he asked his cabinet to sign without reading. It stated: \u201cThis morning, and for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.\u201d<\/p>\n
Several days later, the Democrats meeting in Chicago nominated McClellan for president. Since being removed by Lincoln in November 1862, he had lived in New Jersey, writing reports defending his military service and making contact with Democratic leaders. His opposition to Lincoln on issues of emancipation and states\u2019 rights remained as vociferous as ever. In his letter of acceptance, McClellan declared that \u201cthe preservation of our union was the sole avowed object for which the war commenced. It should have been conducted for that object only. \u2026 The Union is the one condition of peace\u2014we ask no more.\u201d The party platform, however, written in part by no less than Clement Vallandigham, placed peace before union, proclaimed the war a failure, and suggested that after hostilities were halted a \u201cConvention of States\u201d would determine the basis of the \u201cFederal Union of the States.\u201d McClellan was a War Democrat forced to run on a peace platform, a combination that could prove untenable.<\/p>\n
p. 93\u21b5Republicans such as Gerrit Smith, a founder of the Liberty Party, a social activist and philanthropist, and one of the secret six who had supported John Brown, denounced McClellan\u2019s nomination. Calling the Democratic Party \u201cneither more nor less than the Northern wing of the rebellion,\u201d he ridiculed McClellan\u2019s \u201cpathetic appeal for the votes of soldiers and sailors. What an impudent affectation in him to profess regard for these brave and devoted men, whilst he worms his way up to the platform in which the cause they are battling, bleeding and dying for is condemned and its abandonment called for.\u201d<\/p>\n
That appeal worried Lincoln and the Republicans, who knew how loyal the men were to the chivalrous McClellan (\u201cNo general could ask for greater love and more unbounded confidence than he receives from his men,\u201d wrote one officer) and feared the soldiers\u2019 vote in the field (eighteen states allowed it, out of which twelve counted the vote separately; only Illinois, Indiana, and New Jersey forbade it) might help swing the election McClellan\u2019s way. Fall was approaching, and the Union needed something to help turn momentum its way.<\/p>\n
It arrived on September 3 in the form of a telegram from Sherman: \u201cAtlanta is ours, and fairly won.\u201d In a campaign that began in May, Sherman\u2019s men had fought multiple battles around Atlanta from July onward. The Union commander\u2019s strategy was to cut off Hood\u2019s supply lines, but repeated attempts failed. Starting on July 20, for weeks, Sherman\u2019s artillery bombarded the city, much of whose population of twelve thousand had fled. \u201cI doubt if General Hood will stand a bombardment,\u201d wired Sherman on July 21, but stand it he did. Sherman intensified the effort, bringing in from Chattanooga eight large siege guns. Sherman intended to \u201cmake the inside of Atlanta too hot to be endured.\u201d Finally, in late August, Sherman moved against Hood\u2019s railroad supply lines. One of his soldiers explained the general\u2019s tenacity this way: \u201cSherman dont know the word Cant.\u201d When\u00a0p. 94\u21b5Confederate soldiers failed to stop the Union forces at Jonesborough, Hood had no choice but to evacuate Atlanta.<\/p>\n
The news that Atlanta had fallen revived Northern morale and Lincoln\u2019s chances for reelection. The\u00a0Chicago Tribune\u00a0declared, \u201cThe dark days are over. We see our way out.\u201d The\u00a0New York Times\u00a0said that \u201cthe skies begin to brighten. \u2026 The clouds that lowered over the Union cause a month ago are breaking away. \u2026 The public temper is buoyant and hopeful.\u201d George Templeton Strong, in his diary, effused, \u201cGlorious news this morning\u2014Atlanta taken at last.\u201d<\/p>\n
The fall of Atlanta brought to Confederates a reality they did not want to face. The\u00a0Richmond Enquirer\u00a0called it a \u201cstunning blow.\u201d A North Carolina planter confessed, \u201cnever until now did I feel hopeless,\u201d and a soldier in Lee\u2019s army wrote, \u201cI am afraid that the fall of Atlanta will secure Lincoln\u2019s re-election.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to news of Atlanta\u2019s capture, Lincoln had received word that Admiral Farragut had managed to overcome heavy fire from two forts and dodge a minefield and sail into Mobile Bay, giving the Union control of the waterway and isolating Mobile. Lincoln was so overjoyed by the double-shot of Mobile and Atlanta that, on September 3, he issued a Proclamation of Prayer and Thanksgiving. He called for \u201cdevout acknowledgement to the Supreme Being in whose hands are the destinies of nations\u201d and set aside the following Sunday for thanksgiving to be \u201coffered to Him for His mercy in preserving our national existence against the insurgent rebels who so long have been waging a cruel war against the Government of the United States, for its overthrow.\u201d<\/p>\n
More success for the Union cause came in September and October, with Philip Sheridan\u2019s campaign through the Shenandoah Valley. Embarrassed by Jubal Early\u2019s raid on Washington, Grant created the Army of the Shenandoah and put Sheridan in command. He won a stirring victory on September 19\u00a0p. 95\u21b5at Opequon Creek and another at Fisher\u2019s Hill three days later. On October 19, after Jubal Early surprised the Union at Cedar Creek, Sheridan launched a counterattack that almost destroyed the Confederate army in the area. Union command had learned that the war was as much about resources as men, and just as cutting supply lines in Atlanta had led to victory, so now Sheridan wreaked havoc on the rich farmland of the valley that sustained Lee\u2019s army. He reported, \u201cI have destroyed over 2,000 barns filled with wheat, hay, and farming implements; over seventy mills filled with flour and wheat; have driven in front of the army over 4,000 head of stock, and have killed and issued to the troops no less than 3,000 sheep.\u201d He said he would leave the valley \u201cwith little in it for man or beast.\u201d Mary Chesnut, the wife of former South Carolina senator James Chesnut and an inveterate diarist, spoke for many Southerners when she wrote, on hearing news of Sheridan\u2019s exploits, \u201cThew stories of our defeats in the valley fall like blows upon a dead body. Since Atlanta I have felt as if all were dead within me.\u201d<\/p>\n
More good news came Lincoln\u2019s way. Not only were military actions succeeding but political initiatives as well. In September, Louisiana, in response to Lincoln\u2019s plan for reconstruction, adopted a new state constitution and abolished slavery. Maryland followed suit, its voters approving a new constitution on October 13, to take effect November 1. And three new states had been added to the Union\u2014Kansas in 1861, West Virginia in 1863, and Nevada in 1864, states that would add to his electoral total. Early returns from state elections also boded well: it seemed that Republicans were winning and that the earlier momentum of Democrats calling for peace had been staunched.<\/p>\n
The election campaign through the fall turned nasty. Opponents attacked Lincoln personally and suggested that if he was reelected blacks and whites would mingle freely across the nation. A new word was coined,\u00a0miscegenation, to describe a supposed mixing of the races that would necessarily follow a Republican victory. One\u00a0p. 96\u21b5political caricature, titled \u201cThe Miscegenation Ball,\u201d showed interracial couples dancing and talking in a hall with a portrait of Lincoln and a banner reading \u201cUniversal Freedom. One Constitution. One Destiny. Abraham Lincoln PREst\u201d<\/p>\n
9.\u00a0In the election of 1864, Republican opponents sought to stoke Northern fears of racial intermingling, and this caricature depicts blacks and whites dancing together. A portrait of Lincoln hangs over the stage. The word\u00a0miscegenation\u00a0was coined in the lead-up to the election.<\/p>\n
Democratic race-baiting failed to carry the Northern electorate. On November 8, the nation learned that Lincoln had been reelected by an overwhelming margin. He won 55 percent of the popular vote. In the electoral college, he took 212 votes and carried 23 states. McClellan won 21 electoral votes and 3 states: New Jersey, Maryland, and Kentucky. The soldier vote also went overwhelmingly for Lincoln. He won at least 78 percent of the votes that were separately counted. One soldier, from the Eleventh Iowa Infantry, reported, \u201cOur regiment is strong for Old\u00a0p. 97\u21b5Abraham\u2014three hundred and fourteen votes for Lincoln and forty-two for McClellan\u201d\u2014these men were not about to vote against continuation of the war and the honor of their fallen comrades. The president would continue in office come March, but with a new vice president, Andrew Johnson, a prominent war Democrat who had been serving as military governor of Tennessee since March 1862.<\/p>\n
On November 10, Lincoln stood before a crowd that had come to serenade him. Now that it was over, he said that the election, even with all the strife, \u201chas done good too. It has demonstrated that a people\u2019s government can sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war. Until now it has not been known to the world that this was a possibility. \u2026 We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elation among Lincoln\u2019s supporters reached unprecedented heights. Diarist George Templeton Strong declared, \u201cthe crisis has been past [sic], and the most momentous popular election ever held since ballots were invented has decided against treason and disunion.\u201d A sergeant in the 120th New York, who had lost a son and a brother-in-law, proclaimed the election \u201ca grand moral victory gained over the combined forces of slavery, disunion, treason, tyranny.\u201d And Charles Francis Adams Jr., in the Union cavalry, wrote to his brother in London, \u201cThis election has relieved us of the fire in the rear and now we can devote an undivided attention to the remnants of the Confederacy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those remnants tried publicly to put on a brave face. The\u00a0Richmond Examiner\u00a0said, \u201cthe Yankee nation has committed itself to the game of all or nothing; and so must we.\u201d But they couldn\u2019t fail to notice how peaceably even Lincoln\u2019s staunchest opponents reacted to the election. Grant wired \u201cno bloodshed or rioit [sic] throughout the land.\u201d Lee had warned Davis in September that\u00a0p. 98\u21b5\u201cour ranks are constantly diminishing by battle and disease, and few recruits are received; the consequences are inevitable.\u201d And now the ranks thinned even further with desertion and a sense of hopelessness filtering in. Women wrote asking their husbands and sons to come home, and many of them complied, knowing how severely the war effort had transformed the lives of mothers and daughters who had been forced to take over the responsibilities of running plantations and farms. On November 18, a dispatch from Lee read \u201cdesertion is increasing in the army despite all my efforts to stop it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the devastating losses, Davis and Lee remained resolute. Lincoln informed Congress in his annual message of December 6: \u201cthe war continues.\u201d He added that \u201cthe most remarkable feature in the military operation of the year is General Sherman\u2019s attempted march of three hundred miles directly through the insurgent region.\u201d He left Atlanta on November 15 with sixty-two thousand men for a 285-mile trek to the seaport city of Savannah. His aim was not so much to engage in combat as to destroy resources and sap the will of a hostile people. \u201cWe cannot change the hearts of those people in the South,\u201d he said, \u201cbut we can make war so terrible \u2026 [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.\u201d Sherman divided his army into three columns and told Grant that he would \u201cmake Georgia howl.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sherman\u2019s army cut a sixty-mile swath across Georgia. On leaving Atlanta, they set a fire that ended up destroying one-third of the city, and they kept up the burning as they marched toward the sea. Sherman\u2019s official orders called for widespread foraging, destruction of mills and cotton gins, confiscation of all animals, and the liberation of any able-bodied slaves who could be of service. He explicitly ordered that \u201csoldiers must not enter the dwellings of the inhabitants, or commit any trespass,\u201d but those orders often went disobeyed as stragglers unattached to the army wreaked havoc. One soldier recalled, \u201cWe had a gay old\u00a0p. 99\u21b5campaign. \u2026 Destroyed all we could not eat, stole their niggers, burned their cotton & gins, spilled their sorghum, burned & twisted their R. Roads and raised hell generally.\u201d<\/p>\n
On December 21, Sherman captured Savannah, a week after a detachment of the Union Army of the Tennessee destroyed what was left of John Bell Hood\u2019s forces in a battle at Nashville. Sherman wired Lincoln that he had a present for him, to which the president responded, \u201cmany, many thanks for your Christmas gift\u2014the capture of Savannah.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Christmas Eve, Sherman wrote to Henry Halleck: \u201cWe are not only fighting armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies. I know that this recent movement of mine through Georgia has had a wonderful effect in this respect. Thousands who had been deceived by their lying papers into the belief that we were being whipped all the time, realized the truth, and have no appetite for a repetition of the same experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Earlier in the spring, Jefferson Davis tried as best he could to arouse the Confederate nation against the remorseless war brought to their land: \u201cplunder and devastation of the property of non-combatants, destruction of private dwellings and even of edifices devoted to the worship of God, expeditions organized for the sole purpose of sacking cities, consigning them to flames, killing the unarmed inhabitants and inflicting horrible outrages on women and children are some of the constantly recurring atrocities of the invader.\u201d This was before Atlanta and before Sherman\u2019s march. Davis could do little but watch the Confederate armies continue to melt away (\u201ctwo-thirds of our men are absent,\u201d he wrote).<\/p>\n
Wars begin in an instant, but they conclude slowly. The end would take a few more months, and in those months more lives would be lost. But both sides now sensed it was nearly over.<\/p>\n
On January 11, 1865, Robert E. Lee wrote a letter that would have been unthinkable three years earlier. He began by asserting the slaveholder\u2019s common view that the relationship between master and slave was \u201ccontrolled by humane laws and influenced by Christianity and an enlightened public sentiment.\u201d He did not want to disturb that relationship, but the course of the war required that the Confederate Congress consider recruiting slaves as soldiers. Lee pointed out that the Union already was using slaves against them, leading in time to a destruction of the institution anyhow. \u201cWe must decide,\u201d he concluded, \u201cwhether slavery will be extinguished by our enemies and the slaves be used against us, or use them ourselves at the risk of the effects which must be produced upon our social institutions. My opinion is that we should employ them without delay.\u201d He knew that a promise of freedom would have to accompany enlistment, and he was willing to make it so as to prolong the war.<\/p>\n
The idea of slaves fighting for the Confederacy had been broached previously, but always rejected. Most Southerners agreed with Howell Cobb, former congressman from Georgia and a leading Confederate, who argued: \u201cYou cannot make soldiers of slaves or slaves of soldiers. The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the Revolution. And if slaves will make good soldiers, [then] our whole theory of slavery is wrong.\u201d Lee, in\u00a0p. 101\u21b5his letter, tried to offset this belief, arguing that slaves \u201ccan be made efficient soldiers.\u201d But decades of proslavery ideology that insisted that slaves were docile and happy-go-lucky could not be overturned in a season.<\/p>\n
The war compelled Southern women, as well as men, to reconsider their attitudes toward slavery they relied on yet at times also deprecated. Typical of the intellectual gyrations of aristocratic planters, one Georgia belle confessed, \u201cI have sometimes doubted on the subject of slavery. I have seen so many of its evils chief among which is the terribly demoralizing influence upon our men and boys but of late I have become convinced the Negro\u00a0as a race\u00a0is better off with us as he has been than if he were made free, but I am by no means so sure that we would not gain by his having his freedom given to him.\u201d As for arming slaves, she thought it \u201cstrangely inconsistent\u201d to offer emancipation to blacks who fought \u201cto aid us in keeping in bondage a large portion of his brethren,\u201d whereas \u201cby joining the Yankees he will instantly gain the very reward\u201d of freedom.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, on March 13, Davis signed a bill that allowed for the enlistment of slaves. That the Confederate Congress passed such an act, however narrowly, speaks perhaps to the strength of Confederate nationalism, to a desire to establish an independent Confederacy even without the very institution, slavery, that these states had left the Union to protect in the first place. Thomas Goree, Longstreet\u2019s aide-de-camp, put the matter this way: \u201cWe had better free the negroes to gain our independence than be subjugated and lose slaves, liberty, and all that makes life dear.\u201d<\/p>\n
By the time the Confederacy acted on this issue, the Union had done something more direct and complete to assure the abolition of slavery. With the reelection of Lincoln as a mandate, on January 31 the House passed the Thirteenth Amendment by a vote of 119 to 56, only two votes over the two-thirds needed. Lincoln personally involved himself in the legislative process, believing its\u00a0p. 102\u21b5passage \u201cwill bring the war, I have no doubt, rapidly to a close.\u201d Before the amendment was submitted to the states for ratification, Lincoln signed it, even though constitutionally he did not have to. In the meantime, both Missouri and Tennessee adopted new state constitutions that abolished slavery.<\/p>\n
Few were yet thinking about the contours of postemancipation life for Southern blacks when Sherman, on January 16, issued Special Field Order Number 15, which provided that \u201cthe islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John\u2019s River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.\u201d Each black family was promised up to forty acres of tillable land. Sherman\u2019s order led to the settlement of some forty thousand blacks on confiscated and redistributed land. But by year\u2019s end, a new president would revoke the order as reconstruction policy began taking shape.<\/p>\n
Whereas Sherman acted alone with Lincoln\u2019s permission, Congress took its first steps toward thinking about the former slaves when, on March 3, it passed the bill that created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, known as the Freedmen\u2019s Bureau. The Bureau, run by Major General Oliver Otis Howard, supervised relief efforts, furnishing clothing, medicine, and food to the freedmen as well as destitute whites. It also helped with the effort to create schools and churches and supplied legal support to help resolve conflicts over labor contracts and prevent fraud. Originally intended to also oversee leasing and sales of abandoned and confiscated property to the freedmen, the bureau provided land to only some thirty-five hundred blacks before being ordered to restore the property to its original owners. Preparing for the social revolution embedded in the transition from slavery to freedom would require much effort, but first the war had to be brought to a close.<\/p>\n
p. 103\u21b5On February 3, three Confederate commissioners\u2014Vice President Alexander Stephens, John A. Campbell, a former Supreme Court justice, and R. M. T. Hunter, president of the Confederate Senate\u2014boarded the\u00a0River Queen\u00a0at Hampton Roads and met with Lincoln and Seward. Peace balloons had been sent up previously, most notably when Horace Greeley met with Confederate agents at Niagara Falls in July 1864, but they had all popped for one reason or another: Lincoln insisted on the abandonment of slavery as a precondition, and Davis insisted on using the language of peace between \u201ctwo countries.\u201d Lincoln had not seen his old friend Stephens for sixteen years. As the men talked, it became clear that they could not agree on terms, and as Lincoln reported to Congress, the conference \u201cended without result.\u201d<\/p>\n
A month later, on March 4, he was inaugurated for his second term. It rained all morning, but the sun shined through as Lincoln rose to speak. In a brief address, Lincoln offered his view of the origins of the war, never referring to the Confederates as anything but \u201cinsurgents.\u201d He acknowledged that \u201cboth parties deprecated war; but one of them would\u00a0make\u00a0war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would\u00a0accept\u00a0war rather than let it perish.\u201d He devoted much talk to God, noting that both sides \u201cread the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. \u2026 The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.\u201d Lincoln, whose generosity of spirit allowed him to forgive easily, concluded: \u201cwith malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to bind up the nation\u2019s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan\u2014to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.\u201d<\/p>\n
The military victories continued to come. Fort Fisher had fallen in January, giving the Union control of Wilmington, North Carolina,\u00a0p. 104\u21b5and cutting Lee\u2019s supply line. On April 2, after two days of battle that exacted more than ten thousand casualties combined (seven thousand of them Confederate), Lee ordered the evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond. On April 4, Lincoln visited Richmond with his son Tad. As he walked from the waterfront, thousands of blacks gathered in celebration. \u201cI know I am free for I have seen Father Abraham and felt him,\u201d declared one woman. He made his way to the Confederate White House, where he sat in Jefferson Davis\u2019s study. He then went to the state house. A meeting with a small delegation of Confederates came to nothing, and he returned to Washington after a stop at army headquarters. On April 7, having heard of Sheridan\u2019s success, Lincoln wired to Grant: \u201cGen Sheridan says \u2018if the thing is pressed I think Lee will surrender.\u2019 Let the\u00a0thing\u00a0be pressed.\u201d<\/p>\n
After exchanging messages with Grant, on April 9, Robert E. Lee and his aide rode to Appomattox Courthouse to surrender. Lee had no choice. Any further combat would decimate the Army of Northern Virginia. And he refused to resort to a guerilla war that allowed swarms of his men to continue to fight a partisan battle on their own. The generals met around two o\u2019clock in the afternoon at the home of Wilmer McLean, who ironically had moved there on fleeing Manassas after the first battle of Bull Run. Lee dressed in his finest uniform and wore a sword; Grant was muddy and had on a worn blouse as a coat. They discussed terms, and Grant generously offered not only to parole the army of twenty-eight thousand as long as men did not take up arms again but also to allow them to return home and keep their horses. An hour later, it was over. As news spread among the troops, cheers went up. \u201cTo have seen us,\u201d recalled one Union private, \u201cno one would have supposed that for four long years we had been involved in a deadly war.\u201d \u201cThe war is over,\u201d Grant was reported to have said. \u201cThe rebels are our countrymen again, and the best sign of rejoicing after the victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations in the field.\u201d Grant provided rations for Lee\u2019s starving men, who had plenty of bullets left but no biscuits. By\u00a0p. 105\u21b5June, the other Confederate armies had surrendered and Jefferson Davis was in prison.<\/p>\n
Lincoln thought about how best to restore the union quickly. Retribution was not in his makeup. In what turned out to be his final speech, he signaled support for giving black men the right to vote. He continued to joust with radical congressmen in his own party, and he listened to the opinions of his cabinet members. He often recalled his dreams, and after meeting with Grant to hear a firsthand account of what transpired at Appomattox, he told of one in which he was in a vessel and \u201cmoving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore.\u201d On April 14, Good Friday, in the afternoon before going to the theater, he took a carriage ride alone with his wife. He was joyous and cheerful. He told her, \u201cI consider\u00a0this\u00a0day, the war, has come to a close.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite being urged not to go out that evening, Lincoln assembled a party of four to see\u00a0Our American Cousin\u00a0at Ford\u2019s Theatre. Arriving late, he was resoundingly cheered as the orchestra played \u201cHail to the Chief.\u201d During the third act, John Wilkes Booth made his way to the presidential box. A prominent actor, the Maryland-born Booth supported the Confederacy and despised Lincoln as a tyrant and tool of the abolitionists. He was among the crowd on April 11 who had heard Lincoln endorse giving the vote to \u201cvery intelligent\u201d blacks \u201cand those who serve our cause as soldiers.\u201d \u201cThat means nigger citizenship,\u201d exclaimed Booth, swearing, \u201cThis is the last speech he will ever make.\u201d He contrived a plan to assassinate Lincoln, Johnson, and Seward, with the help of his henchmen, who had earlier plotted to kidnap the president and whisk him off to Richmond. The assault on Johnson miscarried; Lewis Powell repeatedly stabbed the bedridden Seward, but he survived; Booth shot the president in the head, leapt down to the stage and cried \u201cSic semper tyrannis\u201d\u2014\u201cThus always to tyrants.\u201d Lincoln was carried across the street and placed on a small bed in a narrow room. He lingered for nine hours, and then reached the indefinite shore of which he had dreamed.<\/p>\n
p. 106\u21b5On April 16, Grant received a letter of condolence from Confederate general Richard Ewell. The officer wrote to assure Grant of Southern \u201cfeelings of unqualified abhorrence and indignation for the assassination of the President of the United States. \u2026 No language can adequately express the shock produced upon myself, in common with all the other general officers confined here with me, by the occurrence of this appalling crime, and the seeming tendency in the public mind to connect the South and Southern men with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe public mind,\u201d in Ewell\u2019s apt phrase, knew not what to think, convulsed with sorrow in the North over the loss of Lincoln and in the South over the loss of the war. Shockingly, six weeks after the assassination, Andrew Johnson sought to implement his own restoration plan. Lincoln had first started thinking about reconstruction as early as 1863. His ideas developed over time and often collided with the markedly different ideas of radical Republicans. Little was settled except that the United States would be one and that slavery would be abolished. But under what terms would the states that had seceded regain their place? And how would Southern society navigate its journey from slave labor to free labor? Looking beyond a structural reconstruction of the nation, one Union officer confessed: \u201cHow are we to woo this people back to their old love for the Union is a mystery to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Andrew Johnson wasted little time announcing his policies. With Congress out of session, he issued a proclamation that provided for amnesty and the restitution of property, except for slaves, to Southerners who took an oath of allegiance. The proclamation made exceptions of certain categories of Confederate officeholders and officers, as had Lincoln\u2019s proclamation, and added anyone owning more than $20,000 of taxable property. Johnson had risen from poverty, and he held deep animosity toward planter aristocrats. He was the only Southern senator to remain in the Union when secession came, and his activities as a prowar Democrat and a military governor of Tennessee won him a spot on\u00a0p. 107\u21b5Lincoln\u2019s ticket. But like many Democrats, although he denied the legitimacy of secession, he supported states\u2019 rights generally. A former slaveholder, he also shared in the dominant racial ideology of his day.<\/p>\n
Through the summer, under terms set by Johnson, constitutional conventions met and repudiated secession as well as the Confederate debt and ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, a condition for readmission. It was ratified on December 6 when Georgia approved it, the twenty-seventh out of thirty-six states to do so. And Johnson took great personal satisfaction from having thousands of members of the Southern elite come groveling for a special pardon.<\/p>\n
Congress would not come into session until December. While some Republicans initially favored Johnson\u2019s lenient policies, radical Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens were outraged by an approach that, in the end, would actually give the South additional congressional representation. Stevens sought the enfranchisement of blacks, an action opposed not only by Johnson but also by several Northern states, including Connecticut, which in the fall defeated a state amendment giving black men the vote.<\/p>\n
On September 7, Thaddeus Stevens delivered a speech in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in which he offered his views on the work of reconstruction, or restoration as Johnson preferred to call it. The duty of the government, Stevens proclaimed, was to punish the \u201crebel belligerents, and so weaken their hands that they can never again endanger the union.\u201d To help accomplish this he insisted that \u201cthe property of the chief rebels should be seized and appropriated to the payment of the national debt caused by the unjust and wicked war which they instigated.\u201d Stevens lambasted those who argued that since secession was unconstitutional the states had never actually left the Union and therefore they could not be treated as having forfeited their place. But then how, he wondered, might any reconstruction ever take place?\u00a0p. 108\u21b5\u201cReformation,\u201d he insisted, \u201cmust\u00a0be effected; the foundation of their institutions both political, municipal, and social\u00a0must\u00a0be broken up and\u00a0relaid, or all our blood and treasure have been spent in vain \u2026 the whole fabric of Southern society must be changed.\u201d The rebel states should be treated as conquered territories, de facto alien enemies, and the some seventy thousand \u201cproud, bloated, and defiant rebels\u201d should pay for what they had put the nation through.<\/p>\n
Johnson\u2019s \u201crestoration\u201d versus Stevens\u2019s \u201creformation\u201d marked the grounds for the battles over reconstruction. Through the fall, under Johnson\u2019s terms, constitutional conventions gathered in Southern states, and these states held elections in anticipation of being quickly restored. But Congress had different ideas, and when the Thirty-ninth Congress began its work in December, members refused to seat Southern representatives. Instead, they created a joint committee to discuss reconstruction policy. The committee called witnesses and heard testimony about what was taking place on the ground in the former Confederacy. What they discovered would lead them to consider civil rights legislation and propose what would become the Fourteenth Amendment.<\/p>\n
Republicans in Congress were especially alarmed at the reports of Southern actions directed at blacks. States such as Mississippi and South Carolina passed stringent codes that discriminated against the freedmen. These included vagrancy laws and annual employment contracts aimed at limiting the movements of blacks. The codes also forbade blacks from serving on juries, stipulated harsher punishments for crimes than those given to whites, and outlawed interracial marriage. The Freedman\u2019s Bureau was in a position to help protect blacks, but Johnson, in one of the first acts that would lead him into open warfare with Congress, on February 19, 1866, vetoed a bill to extend the life of the Bureau on the grounds that it was not constitutional. In July, Congress passed a new bill, over Johnson\u2019s veto, extending the life of the Bureau and creating Freedman\u2019s Courts to help protect black rights.<\/p>\n
p. 109\u21b5Johnson also vetoed a civil rights bill passed by Congress on March 13. The bill defined persons born in the United States as citizens and guaranteed them \u201cfull and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the Security of person and property.\u201d Even the bill\u2019s supporters recognized how transformative it was. By committing federal authorities to protecting the rights of its citizens, it redefined the role of the government. One senator, who supported the measure, admitted that \u201cthis species of legislation is absolutely revolutionary. But are we not in the midst of a revolution?\u201d<\/p>\n
Not only was the bill passed over Johnson\u2019s veto; Congress, partly in response to the so-called black codes just mentioned, went about drafting and debating a new constitutional amendment, the Fourteenth, which would further protect civil rights. Section 1 defined all persons born in the United States as citizens and guaranteed them that no state law \u201cshall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens\u201d or deprive any person of life, liberty, or property \u201cwithout due process of law\u201d or deny any person \u201cequal protection of the laws.\u201d Section 2 set the terms for the apportionment of representation and, rather than give blacks the vote, simply reduced Southern representation. Section 3 prohibited anyone from holding office who had previously taken an oath to support the Constitution and then \u201cengaged in insurrection or rebellion.\u201d Section 4 renounced the Confederate debt and confirmed the validity of the federal debt. On June 13, 1866, Congress submitted the amendment to the states. Every Republican in the House voted for it; every Democrat was opposed.<\/p>\n
Abolitionists, who had been pressing for black suffrage, were keenly disappointed by section 2, which supported, implicitly at least, the rights of states to curtail voting on racial grounds. Thaddeus Stevens well understood that the amendment could not be everything he might have desired. Why do \u201cI accept so\u00a0p. 110\u21b5imperfect a proposition?\u201d he asked rhetorically. \u201cI answer, because I live among men and not among angels.\u201d<\/p>\n
One congressional act Johnson did sign was the Southern Homestead Act. Enacted on June 21, it opened up forty-six million acres of public lands across the South (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi) to settlement and development. It differed from the Homestead Act of 1862 in that one could not purchase the land outright. The Act also made clear that blacks and whites were equally eligible. Oliver Howard expressed the optimism of many that this act would go a long way toward providing a solution to the problem of the transition from slavery to freedom. He said, \u201cthere is no reason why the poor whites and freedmen of the South cannot take advantage of the present homestead law, and enter a career of prosperity, that will secure them fortunes, elevate them socially and morally, and settle the many vexed issues that are now arising.\u201d<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t turn out as Howard had hoped. Much of the land made available was of poor quality, and timber companies, through fraud, snatched up the premium acreage. The poor whites and blacks most in need of land were also the ones who did not have means to travel to the land or subsist while working it. Blacks also faced resistance from whites who feared losing a pool of wage laborers and did not want them to own their own property. A petition by a group trying to gain land in Florida asked Congress \u201cto provide for our race such transportation, rations, building materials, tents, surgeons & surveyors and such legislation as will secure among ourselves honesty, industry and frugality and deliver us from the fear of all who maliciously hate and persecute us.\u201d Such material relief, however, was not forthcoming.<\/p>\n
The fall elections promised to serve as a referendum on presidential versus congressional reconstruction. Andrew Johnson took the unprecedented measure of embarking on a speaking tour to win support for his policy of reconciliation. Instead, he drove\u00a0p. 111\u21b5prospective conservative and moderate voters away with harangues that branded his opponents traitors and even suggested that providence had played a role in making him president. Race riots in Memphis in May and New Orleans in July gave the lie to Johnson\u2019s optimistic vision of a loyal South ready for readmission: the mob in New Orleans attacked delegates to a convention on black suffrage and murdered thirty-seven blacks. If anything, it seemed as if the embers of rebellion were about to reignite. Republicans dominated the election, both nationally and locally. Even in the Upper South, a new group of Unionists supportive of black civil rights gained power.<\/p>\n
Legislators did not wait for the new members to be seated. On March 2, 1867, the Thirty-ninth Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act over Johnson\u2019s veto. The Act divided Confederate states into five military districts and made them subject to military authority, each commanded by a general. It also made state governments only provisional. When these states adopted a new constitution enfranchising black males and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, they would then be readmitted. Johnson vetoed the Act as exceeding congressional authority. Congress also sought to check presidential autonomy by passing the Tenure of Office Act, which prevented Johnson from removing any executive branch officials whose appointment had required Senate confirmation.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t take long before Johnson challenged this Act. On August 1, he suspended Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, who supported congressional plans of reconstruction. Much to the chagrin of Republicans everywhere, Grant stepped in as interim secretary. He did so to support not Johnson but the military command in the South. Johnson removed several military commanders he thought too radical, including Philip Sheridan and Daniel Sickles. When the Senate refused to uphold Stanton\u2019s suspension, Grant vacated the office, and Stanton returned. On\u00a0p. 112\u21b5February 21, 1868, Johnson removed Stanton. Three days later, the House impeached him.<\/p>\n
The trial began on March 30. Senator Charles Sumner supported conviction as \u201cone of the great last battles with slavery. \u2026 Slavery has been our worst enemy, murdering our children, filling our homes with mourning, and darkening the land with tragedy; and now it rears its crest anew with Andrew Johnson as its representative.\u201d But other senators warned against setting a dangerous precedent such that one party with an overwhelming majority could oust the president if he was a member of the opposite party. Lyman Trumbull feared that<\/p>\n
Blinded by partisan zeal, with such an example before them, they will not scruple to remove out of the way any obstacle to the accomplishment of their purposes, and what then becomes of the checks and balances of the constitution, so carefully devised and so vital to its perpetuity? They are all gone. In view of the consequences likely to flow from the day\u2019s proceedings, should they result in conviction on what my judgment tells me are insufficient charges and proofs, I tremble for the future of my country.<\/p>\n
In May, the Senate voted, and Johnson escaped conviction by one vote.<\/p>\n
By then, Republicans had realized that the current of public opinion was turning against them. Democrats had gained seats in state elections the previous year, carrying New York and Pennsylvania. And in Ohio and Minnesota, Democrats rallied to defeat ballot referendums for black male suffrage. Outside New England, black men in the North could not vote any more than freed slaves in the South.<\/p>\n
On July 9, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, but it seemed that the promise of constitutional protection for all citizens only increased opposition and extralegal violence against some of them. New derogatory words entered the language: \u201cscalawag\u201d for Southerners who supported the Republicans and \u201ccarpetbagger\u201d\u00a0p. 113\u21b5for Northerners who came south to help the freedmen. The Ku Klux Klan had been founded in Tennessee in June 1866, originally as a private social club, but it quickly morphed into an organization whose members were rabid opponents of Republican politics and black equality. Led by former Confederate officers, including Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had been responsible for the massacre at Fort Pillow and now served as \u201cGrand Wizard\u201d of the white-hooded secret society, the Klan claimed tens of thousands of members. Through the fall of 1868, they murdered white and black Republican leaders, terrorized the freedmen, and burned homes and schools. One journalist, touring the South after the war, observed: \u201cThe real question at issue in the South is not \u2018What shall be done with the negro?\u2019 but \u2018What shall be done with the white?\u2019 \u2026 The viciousness that could not overturn the nation is now mainly engaged in the effort to retain the substance of slavery. What are names if the thing itself remains?\u201d<\/p>\n
During the presidential campaign of 1868, Thomas Nast, whose work for\u00a0Harper\u2019s Weekly\u00a0during and after the war helped sustain the cause of radical Republicans, offered one of his most searing indictments of the Democratic Party in his cartoon \u201cThis is a White Man\u2019s Government.\u201d Three men are standing on a prostrate black Union veteran. On the left, a caricature of the working-class Irishman whose handiwork at the Colored Orphan Asylum during the draft riots hangs in the background; in the middle, Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose belt buckle reads \u201cCSA\u201d (Confederate States of America), his knife, \u201cthe lost cause,\u201d and medal \u201cFt. Pillow\u201d; on the right is New York financier August Belmont waving money with which to buy votes. With the American flag and his Union cap lying at his side, the fallen man stretches toward the ballot box, just out of reach.<\/p>\n
On accepting the Republican nomination for president, Grant closed with the words \u201cLet Us Have Peace.\u201d His election victory over New York\u2019s Horatio Seymour showed a narrow margin in the total vote\u20143 million to 2.7\u2014but a comfortable win with 53 percent of the vote and an Electoral College victory of 214 to 80.p. 114\u21b5<\/p>\n
10.\u00a0Thomas Nast\u2019s cartoon portrays the powerful forces that combined to deprive the freedmen of their rights as citizens.<\/p>\n
p. 115\u21b5In eight states, however, the margin of difference in the popular vote was less than 5 percent. It was enough to make Republicans realize that though they had won the war, they might be losing the peace. Because they felt it was both right and politically expedient, Congress in February 1869 approved the Fifteenth Amendment, which stated that \u201cthe right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.\u201d Black men would be guaranteed the vote, and they would no doubt vote for the party of Lincoln. It was an astonishing accomplishment, whose rapidity left observers breathless. The radical abolitionist Parker Pillsbury observed that \u201csuffrage for the negro is now what immediate emancipation was thirty years ago,\u201d and yet unlike emancipation it was achieved quickly.<\/p>\n
The Fifteenth Amendment became law in March 1870, but Grant\u2019s administration faced the problem of how to protect the expansion of the franchise against efforts by the Klan and others to keep voters from the polls. Congress in short order passed several Enforcement Acts, intended to prevent election fraud and \u201cenforce the rights of citizens of the United States to vote in the several states of this union.\u201d They also passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, which sought to suppress the Klan\u2019s terrorist activities through arrests and prosecutions and authorized the president to suspend habeas corpus in areas of insurrection.<\/p>\n
In many respects, 1870 marked the end of reconstruction. By that year, every state had been readmitted to the nation. In fact, all but three (Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia) had been readmitted by June 1868 (Georgia was admitted, then excluded again, and then readmitted in 1870 with the other states). By 1871, Congress had passed whatever legislation it was going to generate to support the freedmen and help reconstruct the South, and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were signed into law.<\/p>\n
p. 116\u21b5But if political reconstruction was over, economic reconstruction continued. It took the South decades to recover its output of cotton, rice, and sugar\u2014in 1870 production stood at about two-thirds of that in 1860. Per capita income in the South continued to fall, from three-quarters to one-half the national average. Even though some individuals continued to have vast landholdings, the plantation as an economic center began to break down. The freedmen\u2019s initial response to emancipation was to assert autonomy by moving away from the master\u2019s house. Most blacks preferred small farms to plantations and quickly became embedded in various forms of land tenancy. They would often rent the land in return for cash or a share of their crop. These arrangements differed depending on what the landlord provided, and inevitably from season to season black farmers as well as white found they were always in debt, placing them in a cycle of always borrowing against future crops.<\/p>\n
With slavery ended, there was a need for labor in the South, and a struggle ensued to make fair agreements between former planters, now landlords, and former slaves, now freedmen. Republican newspapers published letters reputed to be from ex-slaves negotiating for a fair deal. For example, Jourdon Anderson wrote to his former master, who wanted him to return to work for him:<\/p>\n
We have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor\u2019s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. \u2026 If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past we can have little faith in your promises in the future.<\/p>\n
p. 117\u21b5In reality, few freedmen found fair deals. Indeed, they lost not only their economic but also their political independence as states passed assorted measures\u2014literacy tests, residency requirements, poll taxes\u2014aimed at keeping blacks from exercising the suffrage. One visitor to the South after the war offered a cogent analysis of the reasons for suppression. He said that white Southerners \u201cadmit\u201d that the government has set the slaves free, but they \u201cappear to believe that they still have the right to exercise over him the old control. \u2026 They cannot understand the national intent as expressed in the Emancipation Proclamation and the Constitutional Amendment. I did not anywhere find a man who could see that the laws should be applicable to all persons alike; and hence even the best men hold that each State must have a negro code.\u201d Blacks, concluded one Southern lawyer, have \u201cfreedom in name, but not in fact.\u201d<\/p>\n
The most significant progress for freedmen came through educational efforts. Many Northerners flocked south to teach, and many Southern black institutions of learning emerged: Fisk (1866), Morehouse (1867), Hampton (1868). The use of federal and state funds, as well as private philanthropic contributions, produced a startling result: literacy among black teenagers rose from 10 percent in 1865 to over 50 percent by 1890. Schools of industrial labor, designed to provide training in mechanical arts and trades that would enable youth to earn a livelihood, were especially widespread. One such school, the Manassas Industrial School, opened on September 3, 1894. Frederick Douglass, celebrating on that day the fifty-sixth anniversary of his escape from slavery, delivered the dedication address and told the assembled crowd that<\/p>\n
to found a school, in which to instruct, improve and develop all that is noblest and best in the souls of a deeply wronged and long neglected people, is especially noteworthy. This spot once the scene of fratricidal war, and the witness of its innumerable and indescribable horrors, is, we hope, hereafter to be the scene of\u00a0p. 118\u21b5brotherly kindness, charity and peace. We are to witness here, a display of the best elements of advanced civilization and good citizenship. It is to be a place where the children of a once enslaved people may realize the blessings of liberty and education, and learn how to make for themselves and for all others, the best of both worlds.<\/p>\n
But aside from tacit support of educational efforts, most Northerners had grown weary of the whole subject of reconstruction, seeking to heal what one writer called \u201cthe wounds and diseases of peace.\u201d In 1872, the Amnesty Act restored officeholding rights to many former Confederates. In 1873, a financial panic seized America, and many politicians and activists turned their attention away from the problems of the South. With the election of 1874, Democrats gained control of the House. In 1875, the Supreme Court, in\u00a0United States v. Cruikshank, ruled that only states, not individuals, were subject to federal prosecution for violating the constitutional rights of individuals. Since local authorities rarely tried to protect the freedmen, those who terrorized them could now act with impunity.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet us have done with Reconstruction,\u201d pleaded one New York newspaper in April 1870, \u201cthe country is tired and sick of it.\u201d From that point on, another phase, redemption\u2014the restoring of conservative Democratic leadership to the states that had made up the Confederacy\u2014proliferated. By 1875, nearly every state had shaken off Republican rule. The war had been over for ten years, and so, too, the desire to settle its outcome.<\/p>\n
By then, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner had penned their summary statement about the tectonic shifts occasioned by the Civil War: The United States was saved, now singular and not plural, never again to be threatened seriously by disunion, though the tensions between state and nation in regard to the locus of authority would continue to resonate. Slavery was abolished, and the freedmen had obtained constitutional rights guaranteed to\u00a0p. 119\u21b5them by the federal government, though in most other ways their struggle to define the contours of freedom and achieve equality had only just begun. A powerful, centralized national government used the tools at hand to extend further a dynamic capitalistic ideology that would develop markets and commercial interests at home and abroad. Southern society was left devastated as wealth in property was entirely lost or devalued, cities were destroyed, shipping and rails were immobilized, livestock were slaughtered, and production was decimated. A generation of white males aged fifteen to thirty-nine participated in the war, and one out of three was left dead or wounded: With so much death (360,000 Union and 260,000 Confederate), romance, an ideal characteristic of the decades before the carnage, yielded to realism\u2014a faith in facts and an understanding that life entailed an ongoing battle for survival.<\/p>\n
The process of settling the conflict persisted well past 1875. Both sides continued to live with their memories of war, and both sides made use of it. Northerners would \u201cwave the bloody shirt\u201d to remind voters of the Union dead, and Southerners would craft a cult of \u201cthe lost cause,\u201d a belief that the Confederacy stood for a gallant and glorious endeavor. As new generations came of age, they couldn\u2019t possibly understand what the country had been through and what the soldiers had experienced. In July 1913, on the golden anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, thousands of white veterans, federal and rebel, walked the terrain again, gathered together, and reminisced. For both sides, the past would never end, and with the mist of nostalgia heavy in the air, they would seek to recapture and remake it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On January 1, Thomas Wentworth Higginson attended services to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation. Higginson had been one of the secret six that supported John Brown\u2019s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, and was now serving at Port Royal, South Carolina, as the colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first black regiment authorized by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-97893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-paper-writing","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97893\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}