House and the Senate; southern men by the score left also the lower ranks
of the civil service and went home to offer their services to the new
Confederacy; southern officers withdrew from the army and the navy as
their States seceded; the authorities of the newly federated States took
possession, as they left the old Union, of the arsenals, forts, custom
houses, and post offices within their territory. Before the authorities
at Washington had made up their minds what to do every fortified place
in the South was in the possession of the Confederacy except Fortress
Monroe in Chesapeake Bay, Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, Fort Pickens
at Pensacola, and the fortifications near Key West. All familiar things
seemed dissolving, and Mr. Buchanan scarcely knew what government he had
to handle. Some of the men about him upon whom he was obliged to depend
believed that the southern states had a right to do as they were doing;
others denied their right but knew not how to check them; still others
knew what ought to be done but had not the courage or the initiative to
do it. All the country waited, the President himself included, to see
what Mr. Lincoln and his Republican advisers would do.
[Illustration: LINCOLN MAKING HIS FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS]
[Illustration: FORT SUMTER ON NOVEMBER 10, 1863]
Men noted the sad and anxious eyes of the new President; noted also,
with a certain deep misgiving, his gaunt and uncouth figure, as of a
man too new, too raw, too awkward, too unschooled in affairs for the
terrible responsibilities and tangled perplexities of the great office
he undertook. They did not know the mastery of the man; they did not
see that the straight fibre of this new timber was needed to bear the
strain of affairs grown exigent beyond all common reckonings. There was
the roughness of the frontier upon him. His plain clothes hung unthought
of on his big, angular frame; he broke often, in the midst of weighty
affairs of state, into broad and boisterous humor; he moved and did the
things assigned him with a sort of careless heaviness, as if disinclined
to action; and struck some fastidious men as hardly more than a shrewd,
good natured rustic. But there had been a singular gift of insight in him
from a lad. He had been bred in straitened, almost abject poverty; his
shiftless father had moved from place to place in search of support and
shelter for his growing family, and had nowhere got for them more than
a bare subsistence; and yet this lad had made even that life yield him
more than other boys got from a formal schooling. He matured as slowly as
another; his life quietly kept pace with the simple folk who were his
neighbors, no vital sign of his special gifts giving noticeable prophecy
of what he was to be; but there came a power of mastery into his mind,
nevertheless. He took pains to get to the heart of what others about him
but half understood; he used his wits for argument and observation as
another lad might have used them for play, and made the use of words,
the exact speech which hit his meaning always at the centre, his method
of analysis. And so his mind had filled as each item of his experience
made its record, as each glimpse of the world came to him. He had made
a career for himself in his State which culminated in his debate with
Senator Douglas, to which all the country paused to listen; and he was
ready to be President by the time he became President. He called both Mr.
Seward and Mr. Chase, the hitherto accepted leaders of his party, into
his cabinet, the one as Secretary of State, the other as Secretary of
the Treasury; but he associated others with them who were of other views
and of his own personal choosing; and he himself made his own choice of
policy.
His breeding among plain people like himself, accustomed to respect
law with simplicity and obey it without subtlety, gave him the direct
vision which politicians lacked. He revered the constitution, had sworn
to preserve and defend it, and would not “take an oath to get power and
break the oath in using that power”; but he viewed his duty in the large,
and declared it his conviction that it would be breaking that oath, and
not keeping it, if, “to save slavery or any minor matter,” he should
“permit the wreck of government, country, and constitution all together.”
He sought to combine conciliation with this clear purpose to preserve
the Union; but while those about him swung from this measure to that and
were weak in their excitement, he was only patient and watchful, waiting
for opinion and the right day of action.
The time came when, early in April, 1861, word was sent from Washington
to the governor of South Carolina that Fort Sumter would be reinforced
and provisioned against seizure. The message was sent on April 8th. On
the 12th fire was opened upon the fort; on the 14th, ere reinforcements
could reach them, its little garrison surrendered. On the 15th Mr.
Lincoln called, by proclamation, for seventy-five thousand volunteers.
Upon that signal, four more southern States seceded: Arkansas on the 6th
of May, North Carolina on the 20th, Virginia on the 23d; and Tennessee on
the 8th of June. Issue was made up, and all men knew what it meant,—not
compromise, but war.
[Illustration: SLAVERY IN THE UNITED STATES, 1775-1865.
BORMAY & CO., N. Y.]
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF FORT SUMTER AFTER THE BOMBARDMENT, DECEMBER,
1863]
The southern leaders had not at first expected this. They had thought to
bring on a constitutional crisis, but not a civil war. They had meant at
any hazard to make good their rights under the federal arrangement, and
had deliberately resorted to secession because they thought that better
terms could be made out of the Union than in it; but they had expected
their opponents at the North to come to terms. Their people had followed
and upheld them upon that expectation, and would not willingly have
followed them on any other. But when the sound of the guns at Sumter
was heard it became at once another matter. The thrill of a new purpose
and passion shot through the country, north and south. It was with the
one side as with the other. The southern people would not at the first
choice have deliberately set themselves with open eyes to bring a war
of revolution on; the people of the North, as conservative of law and
of right as the men of the South, drew back, at the first shock and
surprise of secession, from coercion or violence, questioned anxiously
what they should do, and hesitated as their government did. Mr. Seward,
of the President’s own household, made the amazing suggestion that the
slavery question be ignored and the country drawn together to support
some aggressive stroke of foreign policy, which should rekindle the
national feeling and fill all sections alike with the old temper of
patriotism, the South with the rest. It was the sound of war and the
call for men that changed the very atmosphere, north and south alike,
and set all thoughts in a new channel. Richmond was made the capital
of the Confederacy, instead of Montgomery, as if to put the officers of
its government at the front, the northern and southern capitals face
to face. Mr. Davis called for volunteers in the South, as Mr. Lincoln
did in the North; and the call was responded to eagerly and at once, in
the one section as in the other. Even then men were slow to realize the
awful business in hand; expected the fighting to be brief, accommodation
or surrender to come at once. In the South men flocked to the rallying
places and set out with their regiments in blithe spirits, as if for a
holiday excursion, not knowing the grip of fate that had closed upon
them. But a little while, and these hallucinations had passed away.
The war which ensued disclosed its real nature soon enough. For a year
it lingered and was desultory, without plan, speed, or vigor, as if both
sides waited, as indeed they did, to muster their resources, contrive
a proper organization for the struggle, and discover each beyond a
peradventure the temper and purpose of the other. But after that there
was neither doubt nor pause in the desperate business, and all the world
saw how the flames of civil war had enveloped a whole continent. It was
a noteworthy thing how prompt and decisive the grapple of the sections
was, for all there had been at first long months of doubt and hope, of
confused preparation and all the slow processes by which conservative men
adjust themselves to the exigencies of a revolutionary crisis. In the
South there was a government to make, as well as an army; in the North a
government to remake, a civil service to reconstitute. A year was needed
to supply administrative means and make men and methods ready, on the one
side as on the other. But a year sufficed.
[Illustration: FORT SUMTER, AS REBUILT]
Actual fighting, no less than strenuous efforts to be ready for it,
had added its sharp definition to all else that the year disclosed. In
July (1861) General McDowell had moved with the new federal levies from
Washington southward, for a stroke at Richmond. At Bull Run, on the
21st, he had met the confederate forces under Generals Beauregard and
Joseph E. Johnston, and after a stubborn and sanguinary battle had been
thrown back in utter rout, his regiments not to be kept together because
of the panic and confusion of their flight. But it had been a battle
and nothing more. The troops on the one side as on the other were raw
volunteers; both governments had hoped until the other day to see the
conflict ended by a mere show of force or by some sudden stroke, and the
confederate commanders were as little prepared to follow up an advantage
as their opponents would have been. For a moment the South thought that
this battle was all; the confederate troops themselves believed that it
was, and incontinently set out in crowds for their homes, without leave
taken. In fact it had only shown that there must be set campaigns and a
war of conquest.
Down all the long border between North and South which followed the river
Ohio to the Mississippi, the lines had been made clear, the while, which
were to be the boundaries of the Confederacy, its outer lines of defence.
The western counties of Virginia, beyond the long southwestern line of
the Blue Ridge, sympathized, in this issue between slavery and the Union,
with the men of the North, not with the men who had carried their State
out of the Union, and federal troops, operating there out of Ohio under
General McClellan, drove the detachments of confederate volunteers sent
against them back over the mountains. In Kentucky also and Missouri
slowly gathering armies out of the North pressed the frontier of
secession in; and kept the great stream of the Ohio open beyond its
junction with the Cumberland and the Tennessee, flowing southward, all
the way to the Mississippi itself. Missouri, though at first it had
seemed as if the other faction would control her, was held off from
co-operation with the Confederacy by the sentiment of her own people.
Kentucky, too, slave State though she was from of old, refused to cast
in her lot with the seceding States about her; and confederate forces,
though they operated for a little while within her territory and found
many sympathizers and partisans there, and many men willing to swell
their ranks, operated almost as if upon alien ground and kept their lines
at constant hazard. These, then, it presently appeared, were the long
extended frontiers, from the Potomac, upon which the national capital
lay, through the far Cumberland Gap to the Mississippi at Columbus in
Kentucky, from which the northern armies, growing in strength with every
month, must strike in at the defences of the South.
[Illustration: SERGEANT HART NAILING THE COLORS TO THE FLAG-STAFF, FORT
SUMTER]
Mr. Lincoln called Congress to assemble in extra session on July 4,
1861; and it addressed itself very heartily to the task of supplying
the government with means of mastery. It voted the moneys asked for
by the Executive, and the loan necessary to supply them; authorized
the President to call for five hundred thousand volunteers; declared a
blockade of the southern ports; gave explicit statutory definition to
conspiracy against the government; and provided for the confiscation of
all property used against it. In the regular session which presently
followed, in December, it set out at once, in systematic wise, upon the
policy of aid and taxation by which it meant at one and the same time
to increase the resources of the country and put them at the service
of the government. By midsummer, 1862, its programme was complete and
enacted into law. Tariff duties were increased at every point at which
domestic producers could be protected against foreign competition, and
direct taxes were laid upon the products thus favored: specific taxes
on iron, steel, paper, coal oil, leather, and a few other manufactures
put upon a special list, and on other manufactures a general tax _ad
valorem_. A liberal charter was given for a Union Pacific Railway which
was to bind the two coasts of the continent together and give an eastern
outlet to the produce of the West, and with it were given immense grants
of public land along its route in aid of its construction. “Homestead”
plots of the public land were offered at a nominal price to heads of
families who would settle upon them in the West; and large sections
of the public domain were voted to the western States in aid of the
establishment of agricultural colleges,—in order that the spread of
population and of productive industry might be more than ever quickened
and the accumulation of wealth forced on apace; while at the same time
a general income tax was established, railway, steamboat, and express
companies were required to pay to the government a percentage of their
gross receipts, and various occupations were closed except to those who
would take out federal licenses. It was a policy of nurse and use which
could not fail to yield the sinews of war. It meant that the resources of
the North were to be added to and diversified at the very time they were
being spent.
[Illustration: DAVID DIXON PORTER]
It had already become evident that the federal government must look for
no sympathy from abroad in its effort to prevent secession. The sympathy
of foreign governments, it was plain, if the events of the first year of
the anxious business were to be read as evidence, was with the South, not
with the North. It was likely they would observe very complacently any
process of war or disintegration which promised to break the power of
the huge republic growing up in the west, ere its rivalry in trade and
influence should menace them. The blockade of the southern ports was,
moreover, a direct blow at a lucrative trade in which more than one of
them was interested. Immediately upon receiving news of Mr. Lincoln’s
proclamation of the blockade and of Mr. Davis’s answering offer to grant
letters of marque and reprisal against the commerce of the United States
both France and England had issued proclamations of neutrality which gave
to the confederate government international standing as a belligerent;
and before the year was out an ugly incident seemed for a moment to
threaten war with England.
[Illustration: SIGNATURES OF THE COMMISSIONERS OF VIRGINIA AND THE
SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY]
The most influential classes in England were known to sympathize with
the South; hundreds of English factories must stand idle and thousands
of workingmen be brought to the verge of starvation, if the South, the
great cotton field of the world, was to be shut against commerce; and
the southern leaders were prompt to seek England’s active countenance.
They sent commissioners over sea both to England and to France, to ask
recognition: to England Mr. James M. Mason, of Virginia, a grandson
of George Mason, the statesman of the Revolution; to France Mr. John
Slidell, of Louisiana. Leaving Charleston for the West Indies, they took
passage at Havana on the English steamer _Trent_ for England. On the 8th
of November the steamer was overhauled in the Bahama channel by a United
States man-of-war, and the commissioners were taken from her and carried
prisoners to Fort Warren, in Boston harbor. It was a gross breach of
international law, and of principles which the United States government
had itself always been forward to insist upon; and England made instant
protest, significantly accompanied by preparations for war. The act was
disavowed and the prisoners released so soon as the matter was looked
into. Mr. Lincoln had no mind to take any false step or cast any doubt on
the principles of his government at such a juncture. But the unpleasant
feelings provoked by the unfortunate affair were not so easily put by.
War between the two nations had come close enough to give both a very
disturbing glimpse of possible fatal antagonisms.
The spring of 1862 saw armies upon all the long borders of the
Confederacy and fleets upon the coasts and on the western rivers. The
area of the war was defined. Before the end of the year its whole scope
and character were determined. In the West stroke after stroke of the
federal arms forced the confederate lines southward. The accumulating
northern armies and flotillas broke their way down the valleys of the
western rivers like an irresistible, crushing weight. In the East, on
the contrary, all things hung doubtful. The federal commanders there had
not the gifts of the men in the West and fought against antagonists who
outplayed them at every move. They found no way to concentrate their
force upon the southern armies; were puzzled how to take the best way
of attack and yet keep Washington covered; and Richmond seemed more
inaccessible than the heart of Alabama.
Men who had the character and the capacity to succeed in the field
made their way one by one to federal command in the West at the very
outset: conspicuous among them Ulysses Grant, a quiet soldier whose
qualities only a day of action could bring out. He had won a first
lieutenancy at twenty-five in the Mexican war; but few except his
immediate superiors had noticed how his capacity had shown itself upon
occasion in that fighting. He came of plain stock in which there was
small impulse of achievement; his faculties fell dull in all ordinary
seasons; there was a rustic simplicity about him which made him pass
unnoticed among strangers, a lack of self-assertion which rendered him
disinclined to quarrel with obscurity. He had withdrawn from the army at
thirty-two because the empty routine of a soldier’s life worked a deep
demoralization upon his easy-going nature when no action of consequence
was in hand; but at the outbreak of the war he had enlisted again, as a
volunteer, and had been given command of southeastern Missouri with the
rank of general of brigade in the volunteer service.
[Illustration: THE OSAGE, TYPE OF IRON-CLAD USED ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER]
Then it was that the qualities which had slept in him, save for a few
glimpses of the day amidst the fighting in Mexico, began to be shaken
wide awake by what was to be done, and the responsibility which lay upon
him to do it. It was he who, in the early autumn of 1861 (September 4th
and September 6th), occupied Cairo and Paducah, the keys to the rivers at
his front. The one lay at the junction of the Ohio and the Mississippi,
the other at the junction of the Ohio and the Tennessee. From Cairo
the Mississippi flowed down to the Gulf through the very heart of the
Confederacy; at Paducah the Tennessee found its outlet, coming all the
long way round about Tennessee out of the northern counties of Alabama;
and near at hand, scarcely ten miles away, came down the Cumberland from
its six hundred mile journey through Kentucky and northern Tennessee.
[Illustration: THE CHICKASAW, TYPE OF IRON-CLAD USED ON THE MISSISSIPPI
RIVER]
In February, 1862, the movement of the federal troops southward began,
up the valleys of the rivers, under General Pope, General Buell, General
Thomas, and General Grant, supported at each advance by gunboats on the
rivers, and by midsummer a great wedge of armed men and boats had been
driven into the confederate territory. General Grant, supported by a
fleet of gunboats under Commodore Foote, moved up the Tennessee River
and took Fort Henry on February 6th; and on the 16th crossed to the
Cumberland and took Fort Donelson. Following his movement, a force under
General Pope, similarly supported by an armed flotilla, with infinite
difficulty cleared the Mississippi of the confederate blockades at
New Madrid and Island Number Ten, lying like outposts at the northern
boundary lines of Arkansas and Tennessee.
[Illustration: THE DE KALB, TYPE OF IRON-CLAD USED ON THE MISSISSIPPI
RIVER]
General Grant, with that grim thoroughness which all men presently saw
in him when once he was afoot, pressed forward, beyond the forts on the
Tennessee and the Cumberland, to strike at Corinth, a railway centre
in northern Mississippi. It was his principle to be moving always,
forcing the fighting. He knew the men against whom he acted, he thought;
most of them had been his comrades in Mexico. He thought he knew what
mistakes they would make. But they checked him very sharply whenever
he blundered or exposed himself without force enough to crush them. On
a Sunday morning, the 6th of April, a confederate force under General
Albert Sidney Johnston fell upon his regiments by Shiloh church with
an onset which could not be withstood, and only the confusion of their
rushing victory and a steadfast regiment here and there to stem the tide
saved his force from being caught in a corner between river and creek,
his base at Pittsburgh Landing from being taken. But Johnston had been
mortally wounded. A wound had severed an artery; he had ignored it and
led a desperate charge in person; and had gone from the field to die. The
next day brought Grant reinforcements which gave him commanding numbers,
and he moved forward again, forcing General Beauregard, now in command
in Johnston’s stead, to retire before him. The federal army advanced
upon Corinth at its leisure, one hundred thousand strong, under General
Halleck, commander-in-chief in the West. A slow siege was drawn about the
place, and on the 30th of May, when everything was ready for the final
assault, Beauregard abandoned it, deeming it untenable. The abandonment
of Corinth, added to the possession of the forts on the Tennessee and the
Cumberland, gave the federal commanders control of the railways which led
to Memphis on the river upon either flank, and it became impracticable
for the confederate forces to hold the Mississippi anywhere above
Vicksburg. On June 5th Fort Pillow was abandoned; and on the 6th the
federal gunboats, by desperate fighting, broke the defences of Memphis.
The river was open down to Vicksburg.
[Illustration: PIERRE GUSTAVE TOUTANT BEAUREGARD]
Meanwhile, a fleet operating from the sea below had gained control
of the lower reaches of the river also, and Vicksburg was accessible
by the federal forces from the south. On the 18th of April Commodore
Farragut, who, as spring approached, had been sent to the Gulf to see
what could be done to render the blockade effective at New Orleans, had
opened fire on the forts which guarded the main outlets of the river. His
fire proving of slow effect, he determined to attempt the passage of
the river without taking them, and on the 24th ran past them. The next
day he took possession of the city, which had been evacuated upon his
approach. The forts, thus isolated, were given up, and General Butler
was put in possession of New Orleans, with the troops which had been
waiting, ineffective till Farragut came, on Ship Island. When the year
was out the confederate power touched the Mississippi nowhere but at Port
Hudson and at Vicksburg, standing high upon its bluffs, a tangle of marsh
and stream drawn about it everywhere but at the south and east, where
the confederate armies were most easily handled to maintain it. Grant,
still striking southward, attempted the formidable place before the year
closed, seconded by General Sherman moving south from Memphis on the
river. Each struck in turn; but each failed. The place remained to be
taken.
In the East, meanwhile, in Virginia, where the fighting beat back and
forth between the two capitals, fortune showed another face. There
the federal commanders were outgeneralled and beaten. All the winter
through, since the first fighting at Manassas, General McClellan, fresh
from his successes in West Virginia, had been making ready an “Army of
the Potomac” to move against the confederate capital. When spring came
he showed himself in force on the old battle ground of the Revolution,
taking his troops by water to Fortress Monroe and striking thence,
against Joseph E. Johnston, up the peninsula which lay between the York
and the James rivers. By dint of a month’s siege he took Yorktown (May
4th). Following Johnston’s retreat, he attacked him at Williamsburg and
sought to prevent his crossing the Chickahominy, but could not. Johnston,
in his turn, himself across the river, attacked a part of McClellan’s
force which had crossed at Fair Oaks, before the rest could cross to
their assistance, and two days’ hard fighting barely saved the federal
commander a disastrous loss. General Johnston having been wounded in the
conflict, General Robert E. Lee took his place, a man whose quality of
genius the Army of the Potomac was to learn until it had had its fill.
[Illustration: A CALL FOR REINFORCEMENTS]
He was son to famous Lighthorse Harry Lee of the old days of the
Revolution, but showed little of the dashing soldier in his person and
bearing. He showed, rather, the modesty and unaffected gentle breeding
of the old southern training; seemed never to stand for show but always
for quiet principle, making those who dealt with him feel that he was a
Christian as well as a gentleman, and felt the compulsion of nothing so
much as the dictates of duty and honor. But, for all he was so simple
and modest, he handled men under arms in such fashion as presently made
him the foremost soldier of his time. He was already distinguished.
Since a lad he had served in the armies of the United States, loving the
Union and serving it in the spirit he had taken from his father. The men
who had served with him knew his genius; Mr. Lincoln had offered him
the command of the army which was to act against the South. But he had
declined the command, and, seeing how all things were turning in the
home of his youth, had exchanged his federal commission for one held
of Virginia for the coming struggle. He did not believe in secession;
he utterly rejected the view of the constitution which so many of his
neighbors had taken from Mr. Calhoun; it was revolution, in his view,
nothing less, to break away from the government Washington and Madison
and Hamilton had set up: they would have constructed no such rope of sand
as the politicians about him told him it was meant to be. But he was of
the breeding of the South: the breeding men in the North found it so hard
to comprehend. Virginia was his home; there all his love and allegiance
had their intimate rootage. If she seceded he must go with her; if armies
were sent against her he must defend her. He explained it so, very
frankly, before Virginia had acted, to General Blair, who brought him
Mr. Lincoln’s offer of the command of an army of attack. “I told him,”
he said, “as candidly and courteously as I could, that though opposed to
secession and deprecating war, I could take no part in _an invasion of
the Southern States_.” It was this quiet man, of clear principle, with
a sentiment for his own people which was for him a thing as strong and
imperative as principle, who now found himself in chief command against
the army he might have led.
[Illustration: GEORGE BRINTON McCLELLAN]
McClellan had expected to be joined by reinforcements under General
McDowell; but the military genius of another confederate commander
prevented that. Thomas J. Jackson had shown his quality in part at
Manassas. There he had held his men unshaken against charge after charge
of the federal regiments, and had been dubbed “Stonewall” Jackson from
that day. Now he showed gifts of another kind. He was oddly compounded
of Covenanter and strategist; showed in all things a steadfastness, a
stiffness of character and principle which seemed strangely contrasted
with the audacity and sudden dash with which he moved when in the field.
In fact the two things were united with singular harmony in the man:
the iron character and the instant purpose: the will that operated
like an impulse but which achieved its end with the precision of a
thing calculated and long foreseen,—the almost instinctive energy of a
mind that never doubted or turned aside. Hard-set principle and bold
initiative were things to be looked for in combination in men of his
Scots-Irish blood. By a series of sudden marches and surprises such as
his opponents presently learned to expect but could never foresee or make
themselves safe against, he cleared the Shenandoah valley of federal
troops, seemed to threaten Washington itself, and kept McDowell where
he was, to guard the seat of government. Then, as suddenly, he turned
about and carried his forces by rail to General Lee, to assist against
McClellan. For seven memorable days the two beat McClellan’s army back
until Richmond was safe and the federal forces once more on their farther
base at the James.
Mr. Lincoln tried a change of commanders. General McClellan was removed,
and General Pope was brought, fresh from his exploits on the Mississippi
at New Madrid and Island Number Ten, to take his place. The theatre of
operations was shifted northward to the courses of the Rappahannock,
that the full bulk of the federal armies might be interposed between
General Jackson and the city of Washington. But Pope fared worse than
McClellan. By a forced march through the mountains, Jackson turned his
flank and defeated General Banks at the western end of his line at Cedar
Mountain (August 9th). On the 29th of August Pope’s own command was
attacked at Grovetown, and the next day routed at Manassas, by Lee and
Jackson combined. A confederate force despatched westward on the federal
flank captured Harper’s Ferry, with its arsenal and its supplies and
eleven thousand federal troops; and Lee crossed the upper Potomac into
Maryland and confronted his opponents once more, at Antietam. There, on
the 17th of September, battle was joined again, McClellan once more in
command,—but without decisive result. Lee was checked and foiled, that
was all. He found himself obliged, nevertheless, to recross the Potomac
and withdraw towards his base of operations.
The success was not enough to satisfy the authorities at Washington.
Once more they took the command of the unhappy Army of the Potomac from
McClellan, to bestow it, by way of further experiment, upon General
Burnside, who immediately proved himself the wrong man for the task.
On the 13th of December he threw himself upon the confederate forces
intrenched on Fredericksburg Heights, and was repulsed with great loss.
It was the last action in the East until spring should come again. The
federal commanders could show no progress made in that quarter.
[Illustration: MILLARD FILLMORE]
Opinion shifted uneasily, the while, the nation through. The unexpected
scope and magnitude of the war, its slow and sullen movement, its anxious
strain of varying fortune, its manifest upheaval of the very foundations
of the government, turned men’s hopes and fears now this way now that,
threw their judgments all abroad, brought panic gusts of disquietude
and dismay which lasted a long season through before any steady winds
of purpose found their breath and their settled quarter. For eighteen
months Mr. Lincoln had waited upon opinion, with a patience which deeply
irritated all who wished radical action taken. He knew the hazards of the
time as well as any man: feared that at almost any moment news might come
of the recognition of the southern Confederacy by the old governments
abroad; knew how important success was to hold opinion at home no less
than to check interference from without; was keenly conscious how the
failures of the Army of the Potomac offset and neutralized the successes
of the federal arms in the West; and realized to the full how awkward it
was, whether for the government of opinion at home or over sea, to have
no policy more handsome than that of conquest and subjugation. It was
necessary to put the South at a moral disadvantage by transforming the
contest from a war waged against States fighting for their independence
into a war against States fighting for the maintenance and extension of
slavery, by making some open move for emancipation as the real motive
of the struggle. Once make the war a struggle against slavery, and the
world, it might be hoped, would see it a moral war, not a political; and
the sympathy of nations would begin to run for the North, not for the
South. But Mr. Lincoln knew also that the thoughts of the people changed
more slowly than the thoughts of politicians; that the mass of men, who
must fill the ranks of the armies and vote at the polls in the elections,
quitted their old ways of thinking stiffly and with reluctance. He waited
for their purpose to harden. He had come into office declaring that the
party he led had no intention whatever to molest slavery in the States
which had already established it; and he knew that he must wait for
the people at his back to change their temper under the strain of the
fighting before he openly turned about to accept a revolution and seek
emancipation as the object of the war.
By midsummer, 1862, he was convinced that opinion was ready. He waited
only for some show of victory by the Army of the Potomac to put the
new, aggressive policy he contemplated in countenance. The check given
Lee at Antietam served the purpose, in lieu of something better; and on
the 22d of September he issued a proclamation which gave formal notice
that unless the southern States returned within a hundred days to their
allegiance to the Union he would declare the slaves within their limits
free. On the 1st of January, 1863, accordingly, he put forth a definitive
proclamation of emancipation. It was an act which bound no one except
commanders in the field. The President had no authority to alter or
abolish the laws of the southern States, in open secession though they
were. He could do nothing more in actual execution of the proclamation
than command federal officers in the field to set free the negroes who
fell into their hands, and keep their freedom secure within the territory
actually occupied or controlled by their troops. That he could do as
an act of war, under his authority as commander-in-chief. Some of the
federal commanders had already ventured to set the negroes free in the
districts they occupied, but Mr. Lincoln had rebuked them and annulled
their acts till he should be ready. The proclamation, when it came, was
no law, but only his deliberate declaration of policy, for himself and
for his party; and changed, as he had meant that it should change, the
whole air of the struggle, and of politics as well.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF WAR SCRIP ISSUED BY THE CONFEDERATE
LEGISLATURE OF MISSOURI]
For a moment opinion seemed to swing back, as if he had gone too far
and too fast. The autumn elections, which followed the preliminary
proclamation of September, showed in some quarters a marked uneasiness
that he should have made so sharp a revolution in the avowed purposes
of the party and the government he led; and a number of Republicans
in the less steadfast constituencies lost their seats in the House of
Representatives to Democrats. But opinion set steadily forward again with
the President before the winter was out, and the reverses of the autumn
elections did not slacken the action of Congress or daunt its leaders.
Their radical measures matched with what they believed to be the real
temper of the country in the face of a crisis which seemed to increase
in magnitude and gravity with every campaign of the contending armies.
In December, 1862, they did not hesitate to sanction the division of
Virginia into two distinct States by admitting the western counties of
Virginia to representation in Congress as the State of West Virginia. The
forty western counties of the Old Dominion, which lay beyond the Blue
Ridge, had not sympathized with secession or a war for the maintenance
of slavery. Northern troops under McClellan had got control of them
at the very outset of hostilities, because of the friendliness of
their people and the weak hold of the confederate commanders upon the
region. The antagonisms between the people of the eastern and western
counties,—the people beyond the mountains and the people within the
Shenandoah valley and by tide-water,—were an old story. The mountains
separated them in commercial interest; life ran differently on the one
side and the other; the settlers beyond the mountains said that too
little heed was paid to their affairs at Richmond,—or too much, by
way of restriction. When the State went out of the Union, therefore,
they deemed it a good time to make their separate interests known. A
revolutionary state government was established, for which they asked
admission into the Union. The constitution of the United States forbade
the division of any State without its own consent, but the Republican
leaders in Congress were ready to accept the theory that the provisional
government set up in western Virginia, inasmuch as it was loyal to the
Union, was the only legitimate government of Virginia, and could itself
authorize the division of the State. West Virginia was, accordingly, in
due form admitted to the Union,—without too curious an examination of the
constitutional law of the case.
[Illustration: STATUE OF FARRAGUT IN MADISON SQUARE, NEW YORK CITY]
The houses were in a radical temper. In March, 1863, the President was
authorized to suspend the operation of the writ of _habeas corpus_ in
cases of persons suspected of disaffection towards the United States;
and a Draft Act became law which substituted compulsory for voluntary
military service upon a scale which showed a new system and purpose
in the prosecution of the war. The operation of the writ of _habeas
corpus_ had already been frequently suspended. Mr. Lincoln had not
hesitated since his first call for volunteers in April, 1861, to proclaim
martial law wherever it seemed to him necessary or serviceable to
proclaim it. Congress now gave him explicit authority to set aside the
rights of individuals wherever it seemed necessary to do so in order
to safeguard the Union. The Draft Act meant that Congress realized at
last the magnitude and the almost desperate difficulty of the war it
had embarked upon. In carrying it into execution the government learned
something more of the temper of the people. Intense excitement everywhere
accompanied the progress of the conscription. In some places it was
forcibly resisted, not so much because of the deep unpopularity of the
thing itself as because it seemed to be enforced with gross partisan
partiality. Democratic counties, it began in some parts of the country
to appear, were much more heavily drawn upon than those whose votes
had been cast in the elections for the party in power. The excitement
culminated more sharply and ominously in New York than anywhere else; and
in the city of New York very serious outbreaks occurred,—savage “draft
riots” which were to linger in the recollection many a long year like
an ugly nightmare. For four whole days of that memorable summer (July
13-16, 1863) the town was practically at the mercy of mobs which surged
in its streets almost at will, and defied the government to put the
obnoxious act into execution. It was executed, none the less, in the end.
Inequalities in its enforcement as between locality and locality were
corrected, but its essential rigor was not abated.
[Illustration: JOHN ERICSSON]
If the war was to be successfully prosecuted, there must be created,
as Congress and the President saw, not only vast armies, but also huge
fleets to close the southern ports. When Mr. Lincoln proclaimed the
southern ports blockaded, in April, 1861, there were but forty-two
vessels of war in commission. The southern coasts were full three
thousand miles long. So early as August, 1861, Fort Hatteras, in North
Carolina, had been taken by a federal force, and early in November
Port Royal in South Carolina; Fortress Monroe, within the capes of the
Chesapeake, remained in possession of the federal authorities from the
first, and federal fleets could lie in Hampton Roads; Key West, in the
Florida Keys, and Fort Pickens, by Pensacola, within the Gulf, had not
fallen into the hands of the Confederacy; but nowhere else on the long
reaches of the interminable coast was there any other harbor of refuge
or rendezvous for the scant blockading force, until Fort Pulaski, which
guarded the approaches to Savannah, was taken (April, 1862) and Farragut
occupied New Orleans, at the spreading mouths of the Mississippi. For a
little while the southerners had seemed quicker than the North in putting
their power on the sea. Early in 1862 they sent out of Norfolk against
the fleet which lay in Hampton Roads an iron-clad ram, improvised out of
a sunken frigate, which for a memorable twenty-four hours seemed likely
to sweep the whole anchorage of its transports and men-of-war. Only the
timely arrival of an armored craft of another pattern out of New York
saved the fleet from annihilation. The confederates had given their
ram, the _Virginia_, sides which sloped like a roof, and had cased them
in railway iron. The strange craft brought from New York to meet her had
been devised by John Ericsson, a Swedish engineer who had sought his
fortune in England at twenty-three and come to America at thirty-six
(1839); the man who, more than any other, had made the use of the screw
propeller practicable in navigation. The low, flat body of his _Monitor_
rose but a foot or two above the level of the water. She carried her
battery within an iron martello tower so constructed as to revolve, as
if upon a pivot, so that her fire might be delivered in any direction.
On the 9th of March the two novel craft made trial of each other, and
the _Virginia_ was worsted. Her shot made no impression on the turret in
which the _Monitor_ carried her guns or on the iron-sheathed deck about
it, and the low iron hull of her antagonist afforded no target.
[Illustration: THE MONITOR]
A new age of naval construction began the day of that extraordinary duel.
Henceforth, as the world saw, vessels of war must be built and clad with
iron upon the principles taught by John Ericsson and the confederate
naval constructors at the Norfolk navy yard. But the revolution could not
be wrought in a moment. The federal authorities promptly made plans to
construct some sixty vessels of the _Monitor_ type; but they bought and
built craft of every other sort, the while, to make good their investment
of the long coast. Before the close of 1861 two hundred and twenty-six
vessels were in commission; one hundred and sixty-three were added
in 1862, one hundred and sixty-one in 1863,—over and above all lost,
captured, wrecked, or burned:—steamers armored and unarmored, side-wheel
and screw; sailing vessels great and small; craft of any kind that could
carry guns or be made in any way to serve in the difficult blockade.
Confederate privateers and cruisers, fitted out for the most part in
foreign ports, stole in and out of the blockaded harbors and ranged the
seas with a singular audacity, like the revolutionary craft of the old
days of the war for Independence; captured merchantmen almost at will,
until the losses they inflicted counted up into the millions; almost
swept the sea for a time of all commerce under the federal flag. But one
by one they were trapped and taken. Even fleet-footed steamers presently
found it impossible to run the blockade of the southern ports. The coast
lights were out; the blockading fleets lay with no sign set the night
through. The best pilots in the southern waters were likely to throw
their craft away by a rush in the dark; and in the daytime it was madness
to attempt the passage amidst the crowding men-of-war.
A third year of fighting brought no radical change of fortune in the
fields where the armies moved. Still the federal commanders stormed
their way southward in the West; still they were beaten and foiled in
Virginia. After Fredericksburg, General Hooker had taken Burnside’s place
in command of the Army of the Potomac; and Hooker in his turn had made
a movement upon Richmond. On the second and third days of May, 1863,
he tried conclusions with Lee and Jackson at Chancellorsville, and was
utterly defeated. But the fighting, though it gave them victory, cost
the confederates the life of Stonewall Jackson. He was shot, by tragical
mistake, by his own pickets, as he returned from a reconnaissance. The
loss was as irreparable as the loss of Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh
church. They could have spared an army better than either of these men of
genius.
[Illustration: BATTLE OF FREDERICKSBURG. VOLUNTEERS CROSSING THE RIVER]
Following up his advantage, Lee moved forward into Pennsylvania, upon
the aggressive; met Meade at Gettysburg; and was repulsed, with heavy
loss. He threw his men across long open spaces against the federal troops
strongly posted and intrenched. For three days, the first three days of
July, he beat doggedly upon them. The second day he drove their lines
partly in and took a part of their position; but the third day the lost
ground was recovered and he was driven back, his army almost decimated,
to seek his base again in Virginia. Had he succeeded, no man can say what
radical sweep of reaction there might have been at the North, in the face
of his successful invasion, or what decisive advantage he might have won.
But he failed; and the tide of war seemed to all the nation to turn.
Almost on that very day, moreover, Vicksburg yielded to the siege of
General Grant. The defence of the place had been stubborn, prolonged,
heroic, almost successful. Every plan of direct attack had failed.
General Grant found it necessary to sweep round about the town upon every
side, clear the country back of it of troops and all means of succor, and
take Jackson, the capital of the State, forty miles away, in order to
command all approaches. He sat down at last in patient siege, and forced
the garrison of the place to surrender to him, half starved, on the 4th
of July. On the 9th Port Hudson, below, yielded to the same necessity
and was surrendered to General Banks. The Confederacy was broken in
half. Louisiana and Texas were cut off. Throughout its entire length the
Mississippi was in the hands of the federal power.
Grant turned from his hard-earned success at Vicksburg to take charge
of the federal army shut up in Chattanooga. Upon the evacuation of
Corinth, Mississippi, in May of the preceding year, General Braxton Bragg
had taken thirty-five thousand confederate troops east to Chattanooga,
and had struck northward thence into Kentucky. But General Buell had
met him in a decisive action at Perryville, October 8, 1862, and had
compelled him to retire again to his base. General Van Dorn, meanwhile,
had sought to take Corinth again, and had given General Rosecrans two
days of desperate fighting to prevent it (October 3-4, 1862). Finding
it impossible to extend their operations, the confederate commanders
drew back upon the central strongholds of Tennessee and Georgia. Just
as the year 1862 passed away and the year 1863 came in (December 31st
to January 2d) Rosecrans and Bragg grappled in three days’ desperate
fighting around Murfreesboro. Bragg attacked with a spirit, dash, and
stubborn ardor which no troops but troops of the same race with his own
could have withstood; but Rosecrans’ men held their ground, or, having
lost it, regained it, and Bragg withdrew. The new year saw him forced
back step by step, the summer through, by the successful movements of the
federal forces at his front, until autumn came and even Chattanooga had
to be abandoned. Then (September 19 and 20, 1863) he made final stand
against Rosecrans at Chickamauga and inflicted upon him a defeat which
nothing but the extraordinary coolness and firmness of General Thomas,
who commanded the left federal wing, prevented from becoming the most
overwhelming federal disaster of the war.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF THE FINAL EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION OF JAN.
1, 1863]
Bragg advanced, shut Rosecrans up in Chattanooga, and drew his force
about the place to take it. General Grant came from Vicksburg to save
it. The town lay with a sweeping amphitheatre of hills about it. Upon
these coigns of vantage General Bragg had disposed his army: at the
one end of the long semicircle abrupt Lookout Mountain, at the other
steep Missionary Ridge, both alike, it might well seem, impossible of
assault. Grant attempted and took them, nevertheless (November 24th and
25th). Sherman was sent to take Missionary Ridge, Hooker to take Lookout
Mountain: the four greatest commanders of the northern armies directed
the battle or moved upon the field,—Grant, Thomas, Sherman, Sheridan.
Their men circled and climbed the steep ridges of the hills in a drifting
fog; regiments of volunteers threw themselves with splendid recklessness
upon the centre of Bragg’s position, to hold him off from concentrating
his force against Sherman on his left, and, before they could be
stopped, took the heights where his guns were. The siege was raised; the
confederate army fell back on Dalton. Grant had attacked when Bragg was
weakened by the absence of a part of his force sent under Longstreet to
meet Burnside in eastern Tennessee. Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain
being lost, and Bragg dislodged, Longstreet did not return, but crossed
the mountains and joined Lee in Virginia.
Then came the winter’s pause of arms. No man who looked about him could
fail to see that, despite Lee’s victorious movement in the East against
the Army of the Potomac, the whole aspect of the war had changed. A
girdle of arms had been drawn about the South, and her means alike of
aggression and of defence were being slowly choked within her. On the
one side of her were armies which grew with every campaign, while her
own diminished; on the other, increasing fleets which closed every port
from Hampton Roads to Galveston. Though it had taken two years to build
and muster ships enough to make the blockade a thing of fact, it was
now at last a stern reality. The South knew herself face to face with
bankruptcy. Her exports were her only source of wealth; only her cotton
could command the money of the world; and her cotton was locked useless
within her ports. With closed ports she was ruined. A successful blockade
runner here and there could bring no compensation for her throttled trade.
Her levies, too, drew, not upon an increasing, but upon a diminishing
population. The confederate government resorted to draft acts, as the
government at Washington did, when volunteers lagged or were not to be
had; but it had no such population to draw upon. There were but five
and a half million white people in all the seceded States when the war
came; in the North twenty-two millions. As the southern armies grew,
business offices, courts, counting houses, plantations were emptied, and
only women and boys were left to direct the work which was to sustain
the government and feed the armies. The federal government, knowing its
advantage, refused to exchange prisoners; and for every man lost or taken
the South had to find another from its thinning ranks for the fighting
line.
[Illustration: THE HARTFORD, FARRAGUT’S FLAG-SHIP]
It was a singular and noteworthy thing, the while, how little the quiet
labor of the negroes was disturbed by the troubles of the time and the
absence of their masters. No rumor of the emancipation proclamation
seemed to reach the southern country-sides. No sign of the revolution
that was at hand showed itself upon the surface of southern life.
Gentlewomen presided still with unquestioned authority upon the secluded
plantations,—their husbands, brothers, sons, men and youths alike, gone
to the front. Great gangs of cheery negroes worked in the fields, planted
and reaped and garnered and did their lonely mistresses’ bidding in all
things without restlessness, with quiet industry, with show of faithful
affection even. No distemper touched them; no breath of violence or
revolt stirred amongst them. There was, it seemed, no wrong they fretted
under or wished to see righted. The smiling fields not yet trodden by the
feet of armies still produced their golden harvests of grain under the
hands of the willing slaves, and the armies were fed.
But the quiet tillage of her fields was all that remained of the old
life of the South. Her trade was dead for lack of markets; her business
offices were empty; the flower of her population was drawn into her
armies; her resources were sapped and could not be renewed. The North,
on the contrary, increased in wealth and population alike the long
struggle through, despite the hundreds of millions poured out in money
and the hundreds of thousands of men sent to the slaughter of the field
of battle. In the South there was presently nothing to tax, and the
confederate government was at its wits’ ends where to get money. In the
North taxes yielded whatever Congress demanded. New direct taxes were
imposed; still heavier duties were laid on imports; and, though many
grumbled, all paid, and most were abundantly able to pay; for trade and
industry were not checked.
Congress even succeeded at last in devising a banking system which should
relieve the strain upon the Treasury and at the same time serve the
business interests of the country,—a system which solved the difficulties
which had stood unsolved ever since General Jackson destroyed the Bank
of the United States and Mr. Van Buren set up the Independent Treasury.
Twenty-five years before, New York had erected, in its “free banking”
act of 1838, the model for the system which the federal government now
tardily adopted. By that act New York had abandoned the old and vicious
practice of granting special charters to individual banking companies,
and had thrown banking privileges open to any group of responsible
persons who would comply with the requirements set forth in the new law.
Chief among these requirements was the deposit of recognized securities
with the state government by every bank of issue to the full value of
its circulating notes, in order that their payment might in any case
be made good. In an Act of February 25, 1863, Congress made provision
for a similar system of national banks; and by an Act of June 4, 1864,
perfected the system and put the new law on a permanent footing by a
thorough revision. The Act created a new bureau of the Treasury, under a
Comptroller of the Currency, to superintend and secure the enforcement
of its provisions. The Comptroller was authorized to permit the free
establishment, for a term of not more than twenty years, of banking
associations consisting of not fewer than five persons and having a
capital of not less than one hundred thousand dollars; and in small
places associations having even a smaller capital. Such associations were
required to deposit with the Treasury Department bonds of the United
States of the value of at least one-third of their capital; in return for
which there should be issued to them from the Treasury circulating notes
representing an amount equal to ninety _per cent._ of the market value of
their bonds, but never exceeding ninety _per cent._ of their par value.
The total issue of currency to be made under the Act was limited to three
hundred millions; and that amount, it was provided, should be apportioned
among the States in proportion to their population and banking capital.
The immediate object of the Act as a government measure was to create
a market for the bonds of the United States and quicken the processes
of borrowing upon which the government was in large part obliged to
depend for the support of the war. It served the convenience of the
country, however, hardly less than it helped the government; and what
was primarily intended as a measure of public finance became the prop
of private business. An Act of the following year (March 3, 1865) put a
tax of ten _per cent._ on the circulation of all state banks, and forced
them, if they would continue banks of issue, to qualify under the federal
law.
[Illustration: UNITED STATES SLOOP OF WAR KEARSARGE]
The fourth year of fighting was the last. The crushing weight of the
North told more and more; and the South tottered to collapse. By the
spring of 1864 the federal armies were ready for their final movements,
the confederate armies freshened, recruited, posted as best they might
be for their last stand and defence. The final reallotments of federal
commanders had been made. General Grant had become commander-in-chief
and had taken personal command of the Army of the Potomac against Lee.
General Sherman, upon whom Grant had learned to depend at Vicksburg and
Chattanooga, was in command in the West. In May, Grant, with Meade,
moved forward from the Potomac into the broad “Wilderness” of wood
and thick undergrowth that stretched south of Fredericksburg and the
Rappahannock to the York River, forcing Lee to make a slow retreat before
him. The retreat was slow indeed. Lee operated upon shorter lines than
his enemy, and behind intrenchments. He had scarcely seventy thousand
men, and knew not where to get more; Grant had one hundred and twenty
thousand, and could have as many more as he needed. By the first of
November Grant had lost eighty thousand,—more than Lee had had to face
him with at the outset; but his ranks were still full. Lee outplayed
him in the great game of war, but could not stand before the ceaseless
movement of his accumulating force. For sixteen days of almost continuous
fighting he held Grant in hand, his slow withdrawal southward like the
manœuvres of a long battle rather than like a retreat; and at the end,
when he found a place to his mind, at Cold Harbor, on the 2d of June,
made stand and repulsed the federal attack along his entire front.
But he was too heavily outnumbered. General Grant was not like the other
men who had commanded the Army of the Potomac. No defeat stopped him or
so much as gave breathing time. He filled his ranks and moved forward,
whether in the face of victory or in the face of defeat, determined
“to hammer continuously until by mere attrition,” if in no other way,
the stubborn army at his front should be worn to a weakness that must
bring him his triumph. It became a mere question of who could stand the
heaviest losses. Six thousand Union soldiers had fallen at Cold Harbor in
a single hour; but their places were not long vacant. Flank movements,
now upon this hand now upon that, rendered each position of Lee’s army in
turn untenable; and he was obliged at last to concentrate upon Petersburg
and Richmond. There direct attack availed the federal commanders little.
They were forced to sit down about Petersburg in a nine months’ formal
siege.
[Illustration: WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN]
Meanwhile General Sherman had driven Johnston in like fashion, with
like difficulty and stubborn fighting, back through northern Georgia
upon Atlanta; and would have had infinite slow labor to the last had
not Mr. Davis, displeased that Johnston did not beat the overwhelming
army at his front, removed him from the confederate command,—the one
man available who could make inferior numbers formidable against such
an opponent,—and so made the task of the invading army easy. Johnston
out of his way, Sherman cut Atlanta’s communications to the southward,
forced the evacuation of the place without serious difficulty, and,
leaving Johnston’s successor, General Hood, to face Thomas at the north,
whither he was forced to turn, himself pushed on to the cities of the
coast. At Franklin, Tennessee, November 30th, Hood threw himself, in his
impetuous fashion, on Thomas’s advance force of eighteen thousand men,
and was checked. At Nashville, on the 15th of December, Thomas himself
attacked, and so utterly routed him that his army was never again brought
together as an effective force. Sherman, confident that Thomas could
take care of Hood at his rear, moved steadily on to Savannah and took
it (December). Before he left Savannah, Wilmington, North Carolina, and
the formidable batteries at Fort Fisher had been taken by naval and
military forces co-operating on the coast: and when he left Savannah and
advanced into Carolina his movement forced the evacuation of Charleston.
Mobile had been taken by Farragut and land forces operating with him
early in August. Not a port of consequence remained to the Confederacy;
and the very fields that had fed the southern people were swept bare.
Sherman’s men had left little enough in their track. They had devoted
themselves to destruction and the stripping of the land they crossed with
a thoroughness and a care for details hardly to be matched in the annals
of modern warfare. The old heats of civil war, dreaded since the world
began, had been blown very hot as year was added to year in the bitter
struggle, and each soldier played the marauder very heartily. What the
South had not spent or war consumed he stripped her of as he could. What
he did not need or want he destroyed.
[Illustration: TABLE USED AT THE SURRENDER AT APPOMATTOX COURT HOUSE]
[Illustration: CHAIR USED AT THE SURRENDER AT APPOMATTOX COURT HOUSE]
By spring, as Sherman swept slowly northward through the Carolinas
for a final junction with Grant in Virginia, the inevitable had been
accepted, and the war was over. Lee had not had the strength to prevent
the federal lines from being drawn completely around him. By the first
days of April he had found Richmond untenable and had withdrawn towards
Danville, hoping to effect a junction with Johnston, now once more in
command of the decimated force that was facing Sherman coming north;
but everywhere he was cut off, entangled, outnumbered; and on April 9th
he surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox Court House. On the 26th
Johnston surrendered to Sherman; and the end had come. The most honorable
terms were granted. Both men and officers were to be released on parole.
They were to keep their horses, “because they would need them for the
spring ploughing and farm work,” General Grant said, in his simple
fashion. The horses were not the property of the confederate government,
the federal commander was surprised and touched to learn, but of the men
who rode them,—like almost everything else they had or used. The final
arrangements were made almost as if by a conference between friends, both
commanders quieted and solemnized by thoughts of the great matter they
were bringing to a close. Another course had been pressed upon General
Lee, by some of his own officers, and even suggested by the President of
the Confederacy. It had been proposed that he should disperse his army,
to gather it again in small fighting squads at every point of vantage
and make the conquest of the South impossible through the quick and
ceaseless operations of guerrilla bands moving broadcast over the whole
face of the various country. But he had refused with a sort of solemn
anger. “You must remember we are a Christian people,” he said. “For us,
as a Christian people, there is now but one course to pursue. We must
accept the situation; these men must go home and plant a crop; and we
must proceed to build up our country on a new basis.” The way of duty was
plain to him.
And then, at the end, when the terrible days were over and a healing time
of peace at hand in which passion might run cool again and men remember
their common ties of citizenship and fraternity, a deeply tragical thing
happened, as if to fill the cup of sectional bitterness to the brim
and mark forever the fatal distemper of civil strife. On the evening
of the 14th of April, 1865, five days after General Lee’s surrender at
Appomattox, ere Johnston had yielded to Sherman, Mr. Lincoln was shot in
his box at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, and the next day lay dead. The
assassin had been John Wilkes Booth, the distinguished actor, half crazed
by blind enthusiasm and poignant regret for the lost southern cause.
Mr. Lincoln had but a short month before entered upon his second term as
President. The election had been held while General Grant was drawing
his lines closer and closer about Petersburg and Richmond, while Sherman
was sweeping southward from Atlanta to the coast of Georgia, while the
struggle culminated which the last election had brought on. Passion
had stirred in it as in the contest of arms itself,—not the ordinary
ardor of parties arrayed against one another by sharp differences of
principle, but the deeply excited passion which days of revolution and
supreme crisis must always breed. The war had not run its extraordinary
course without touching the very government itself with revolution.
The constitution had been framed with no thought to provide for such
days as these, when States were breaking away from the Union and the
government was struggling for life itself; and with the unlooked for
exigency had come unlooked for and arbitrary acts of power. The whole
authority of the nation had seemed of a sudden to be concentrated in
the Executive, without restraint of law. Citizens suspected of sympathy
with the southern Confederacy had been arrested and thrown into prison,
deported even, upon orders which were no better than _lettres de
cachet_. Many an undoubted principle of the constitution had seemed as
if for the time suspended, in order that the executive and military power
might move supreme, to meet a supreme necessity. Mr. Lincoln had acted
oftentimes with the authority almost of a dictator, and had permitted
his Secretaries, particularly the Secretary of War, a license of power
greater even than he would himself have used. Individual rights had
seemed for a time suspended.
[Illustration: JOHN WILKES BOOTH]
The men who knew the President and were near him saw no permanent danger
in all this, for they knew the singular nature of the man, detected not
a movement of personal ambition in his exercise of power, felt with what
kindliness of judgment and with what sober motives of public service he
acted, and looked confidently to see all things restored as of course
to their old poise and balance when the storm of war had passed. But
men who were not near him could not so see him. Even politicians of
his own party thought him unsafe. Many plain people everywhere thought
him more,—thought him capable of hopelessly marring the government and
permanently weakening the foundations of individual liberty in the very
act of saving the Union from overthrow. Fortunately rank and file had
caught the spirit of the war, and the spirit of the man. Moreover, in his
own homely phrase, it was no time, as every thoughtful man perceived,
to risk swapping horses in the midst of the stream; and he received the
electoral votes of every State that took part in the election except New
Jersey, Delaware, and Kentucky.
There had seemed for a brief while, nevertheless, not a little danger of
his defeat, and he had been nominated for his second term by a convention
not gathered from the Republican ranks merely but made up to represent
all men, of whatever party allegiance hitherto, who deemed him the
nation’s indispensable instrument and servant at that time of crisis.
As a consequence of the composite make-up of the convention, Mr. Andrew
Johnson, a Union man but a Democrat, of Tennessee, had been nominated
for the Vice Presidency, as if to mark and emphasize the co-operation of
groups and sections which the time had called forth. Mr. Lincoln’s death
made Mr. Johnson President. The first tasks of peace were to be hardly
less difficult and perplexing than the tasks of war had been, and the
party which had triumphed was left without executive leadership at their
very threshold.
The chief _general authorities_ for the years covered by this
chapter are the fifth and sixth volumes of Schouler; the
fourth volume of Bryant and Gay; Alexander Johnston’s _History
of American Politics_ and articles in Lalor’s _Cyclopaedia
of Political Science, Political Economy, and United States
History_, especially the articles _Secession_, _Dred Scott
Case_, _Rebellion_, and _Confederate States_; Larned’s _History
for Ready Reference_; the second, third, and fourth volumes
of James Ford Rhodes’s _History of the United States from the
Compromise of 1850_; the sixth and seventh volumes of von
Holst’s _Constitutional and Political History of the United
States_; and Nicolay and Hay’s _Abraham Lincoln: A History_.
Among _special treatises_, dealing with particular interests
or aspects of the war and its policies, the following are
important and representative of a vast number of books: Horace
Greeley’s _American Conflict_; Henry Wilson’s _Rise and Fall
of the Slave Power in America_; Edward A. Pollard’s _Lost
Cause_; Joseph Hodgson’s _Cradle of the Confederacy_; Edward
McPherson’s _Political History of the Rebellion_; Frederick Law
Olmsted’s _Cotton Kingdom_; Jesse Macy’s _Political Parties in
the United States, 1846-1861_; William H. Seward’s _Diplomatic
History of the Civil War_; James M. Callahan’s _The Diplomatic
History of the Southern Confederacy_; John C. Ropes’s _Story
of the Civil War_; William A. Dunning’s _Essays on the Civil
War and Reconstruction_; James Spence’s _The American Union_;
H. C. Fletcher’s _History of the American War_; George Lunt’s
_Origin of the Late War_; Frederic Bancroft’s _The Final
Efforts at Compromise_ in the sixth volume of the _Political
Science Quarterly_; J. D. B. DeBow’s _Industrial Resources of
the Southern and Western States_; T. S. Goodwin’s _Natural
History of Secession_; Joel Parker’s _Personal Liberty Laws_;
Marion G. McDougall’s _Fugitive Slaves_; Leverett W. Spring’s
_Kansas_ and Nathaniel S. Shaler’s _Kentucky_ in the _American
Commonwealth Series_; F. W. Taussig’s _Tariff History of the
United States_; and A. S. Bolles’s _Financial History of the
United States_.
Among the important _biographies_, whether for weight of
narrative or for side aspects of the great struggle, are
George Ticknor Curtis’s _Life of James Buchanan_; John T.
Morse’s _Abraham Lincoln_ in the _American Statesmen Series_;
Henry J. Raymond’s _Life of Lincoln_; F. W. Seward’s _Seward
at Washington_; Edward L. Pierce’s _Memoir and Letters of
Charles Sumner_; Lyon G. Tyler’s _Letters and Times of the
Tylers_; Pleasant A. Stovall’s _Life of Robert Toombs_; Charles
Francis Adams, Jr.’s _Charles Francis Adams_ in the _American
Statesmen Series_; William P. Trent’s _Life of W. G. Simms_;
A. M. Williams’s _Sam Houston and the War of Independence in
Texas_; Susan D. Smedes’s _Memorials of a Southern Planter_;
Alfred T. Mahan’s _David Farragut_; Henry A. White’s _Robert E.
Lee and the Southern Confederacy_; Robert M. Hughes’s _General
Johnston_; Frederic Bancroft’s _Life of William H. Seward_;
and Albert Bushnell Hart’s _Salmon P. Chase_ in the _American
Statesmen Series_.
The _military history_ of the war and the _discussion of
slavery_ which necessarily went along with it may be found set
forth in Theodore A. Dodge’s _Bird’s-Eye View of Our Civil
War_; Comte de Paris’s _Military History of the Civil War in
America_; John W. Draper’s _History of the Civil War_; The
Century Company’s _Battles and Leaders of the Civil War_; Heros
von Borcke’s _Memoirs of the Confederate War for Independence_;
Lieutenant Colonel G. F. R. Henderson’s _Stonewall Jackson
and the American Civil War_; Mary Tremain’s _Slavery in the
District of Columbia_, in the _Publications_ of the Historical
Seminary of the University of Nebraska; Richard Hildreth’s
_Despotism in America_; Samuel Seabury’s _American Slavery
Justified_; Robert L. Dabney’s _Defence of Virginia and the
South_; Thomas R. R. Cobb’s _Inquiry into the Law of Slavery_;
H. Sherman’s _Slavery in the United States_; William H.
Chambers’s _American Slavery_; Daniel R. Goodwin’s _Southern
Slavery in its Present Aspects_; John Henry Hopkins’s _Views
of Slavery_; James Williams’s _The South Vindicated_; A. T.
Bledsoe’s _Is Davis a Traitor?_; John C. Hurd’s _Law of Freedom
and Bondage_ and _Theory of Our National Existence_; and P. C.
Centz’s _Republic of Republics_.
Some of the _sources_ for the period may be found in
_The Congressional Globe_, the official documents of the
government, notably the _Official Records of the Rebellion_;
the contemporary newspapers; _Appleton’s Annual Cyclopaedia_,
especially under the titles _Congress of the United States_,
_Congress_, _Confederate_, _Confederate States_, _United
States_, _Army_, and _Navy_; Horace Greeley’s _History of the
Great Rebellion_; Alexander H. Stephens’s _Constitutional View
of the War Between the States_; O. H. Brownson’s _American
Republic_; Thurlow Weed’s _Autobiography_; G. T. Curtis’s
_Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley_; Hugh McCullough’s _Men
and Measures of Half a Century_; John Sherman’s _Recollections
of Forty Years in House, Senate, and Cabinet_; _The Sherman
Letters_; Ben. Perley Poore’s _Perley’s Reminiscences_;
Henry A. Wise’s _Seven Decades of the Union_; S. S. Cox’s
_Three Decades of Federal Legislation_; J. H. Gilmer’s
_Southern Politics_; William H. Seward’s _Autobiography_;
James Buchanan’s _Buchanan’s Administration_; Frederick Law
Olmsted’s _Journey in the Seaboard Slave States_, _Texas
Journey_, and _Back Country_; Hinton R. Helper’s _The Impending
Crisis_; Mrs. Coleman Chapman’s _Life of John J. Crittenden_;
E. D. Keyes’s _Fifty Years’ Observation of Men and Events_;
L. E. Chittenden’s _Reports and Debates of the Conference
Convention_; the third volume of Alexander Johnston’s
_Representative American Orations_; George Cary Eggleston’s
_A Rebel’s Recollections_; Reuben Davis’s _Recollections of
Mississippi and Mississippians_; Jones’s _A Rebel War Clerk’s
Diary_; Ulysses S. Grant’s _Personal Memoirs_; William T.
Sherman’s _Memoirs_; A. G. Riddle’s _Recollections of War
Time_; Dabney H. Maury’s _Recollections of a Virginian in the
Mexican, Indian, and Civil Wars_; Judith W. McGuire’s _Diary
of a Southern Refugee During the War_; Herndon’s _Life of
Lincoln_; L. E. Chittenden’s _Recollections of Lincoln and His
Administration_; James S. Pike’s _First Blows of the Civil
War_; A. T. Porter’s _Led On Step by Step_; Jefferson Davis’s
_Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government_; Nehemiah Adams’s
_South Side View of Slavery_; William Harper’s _The Pro-Slavery
Argument_; the _Papers_ of the Southern Historical Society;
James Stuart’s _Three Years in North America_; Frederick
Douglass’s _Life and Times, Written by Himself_; Solomon
Northrop’s _Twelve Years a Slave_; the case of _Dred Scott vs.
Sanford_, reported in the 19th volume of Howard’s Reports; and
the case of _Texas vs. White_, the leading decision of the
Supreme Court with regard to the right of secession, reported
in 7th Wallace’s Reports.