AMERICA AT WAR
The new edition of _Leaves of Grass_ pleased the critics as little
as its predecessors, but had a wider circulation. Some four or five
thousand copies had been sold before the house of Thayer and Eldridge
went down in the financial crash which followed on the outbreak of the
war.[323] Emerson came in again for some share of the critical assault,
though his name was in no way connected with the new issue. Of Whitman
himself a London journalist declared[324] that he was the most silly,
the most blasphemous, and the most disgusting writer that he had ever
perused.
But if it found fresh enemies, the new edition found also new friends;
and notably in England, whither a few adventurous copies of the earlier
versions had already penetrated. Both Emerson and Thoreau had sent
them to their English friends--among whom was Carlyle--but apparently
with scant acknowledgment. Ruskin's correspondent, Mr. Thomas Dixon
of Sunderland, had purchased a few examples of the first edition at
Dutch auction; and some of these he forwarded to Mr. William Bell
Scott, who again handed on one of them to Mr. W. M. Rossetti; an act
which, as the story will show, proved to be of great importance to Walt
Whitman.[325] It was the book of 1860, however, which first aroused
the younger generation of Englishmen, among whom was the late Mr.
Addington Symonds. "Within the space of a few years," says he, "we were
all reading and discussing Walt."
* * * * *
The book appeared under the shadow of impending war. With the
Presidential election of 1860, America came to the edge of the abyss;
and the return of Abraham Lincoln was promptly followed by the
organisation of secession. Whitman was still in Boston when, early in
the spring, Lincoln first made his appearance in New York, W. C. Bryant
introducing him to a great meeting at the Cooper Institute.
The famous speech which he then delivered lived long in its hearers'
memory; but even the personal impression which he made, remarkable as
it was, hardly prepared New York to learn in the following May that it
was Abraham Lincoln, and not W. H. Seward, the nominal leader of the
Republican party, who had received the Presidential nomination at the
great Chicago Convention.
Had the Democratic party been able to hold together, Lincoln could
not have carried the election; but it was now split, and further
weakened by the appearance of a Constitutional Union Party.[326] The
most dangerous of the opposing candidates seemed to be Lincoln's
old antagonist and subsequent loyal supporter, Judge Douglas, who
represented his well-worn policy of local option, or "squatter
sovereignty". Breckinridge of Kentucky openly advocated the extension
of slave territory; while Bell, the Unionist, kept his own counsel.
Early in the summer of that great struggle, Whitman returned to New
York. In June[327] he was among the immense crowd of interested
spectators who filled Broadway from side to side, on the arrival of
the first Japanese embassy to America; and he was of the thousands
who welcomed the succession of distinguished visitors who came, that
ominous summer, to the capital of the West. There was the _Great
Eastern_, that leviathan of the modern world, whose advent was so long
and so eagerly anticipated; there was Garibaldi, fresh from the fields
whereon Italy had become a kingdom--not indeed the sister republic of
Mazzini's ardent dream, who should have given the new law of Liberty to
Europe, but at least something more than a memory and a geographical
term.
Another, in whom Whitman felt an even warmer interest, was "Baron
Renfrew," otherwise the Prince of Wales. The fair royal stripling
of those days attracted the stalwart Democrat, who like old George
Fox, could recognise a man under a crown as readily as a man in rags.
Whitman's eyes were keen to read personality; perhaps we should
rather say that the sense by which personality is distinguished was
highly developed in him. And he to whom the attributes of rank were
non-existent, fell in love with this young man[328] whose warm heart
was to make him perhaps the best beloved of monarchs, as he afterwards
fell in love with many a private soldier carried in wounded from
the field. Albert Edward was one of those strangers in whom Whitman
recognised a born comrade; and this fact at once raises his democratic
sentiment out of the region of class feeling.
He was a witness, too, of the advent of other visitors even more
brilliant, and burdened even more to the popular fancy, and perhaps to
his own, with significance. He saw the extraordinary display of the
heavens--the huge meteor, luminous almost as the moon, which fell in
Long Island Sound, and the unannounced comet flaring in the north.
The autumn was loud with the electoral struggle. The presence of three
opposing candidates was not enough to assure Lincoln's success. The
general expectation seems to have leaned towards an electoral tie, none
of the candidates polling a majority of the votes; and this would have
resulted, as on the similar occasion of 1824, in the choice between
them being left to the House of Representatives. Upon the result of
such choice the slave party was willing to stake its hopes of success;
anticipating that even though he were the popular candidate, Congress
would not select Lincoln, but would put him aside, as it had passed by
Jackson in its previous opportunity.
But to the consternation of the South, the "black Republican"
rail-splitter polled a clear majority over all three antagonists
combined. A majority, that is to say, of electoral votes, for the
American President is not chosen directly by the people, but by the
people's delegates.[329] Each State elects its quota of Presidential
electors, chosen not in proportion to the strength of parties in the
State, but all of them representing the dominant party.[330] Thus it
may happen that a candidate, like Judge Douglas, who polls a large
minority of the total popular vote, will receive a mere handful of
electoral suffrages, having failed to carry more than one or two
States. Lincoln was chosen by 180 votes to 123; and though Douglas's
popular poll was two-thirds of Lincoln's, and nearly as large as that
of the two other candidates combined, his electoral support was only
one-tenth of the voices against Lincoln. The Republican vote in the
country fell short of the combined opposition poll by a million out
of a total of less than five million votes. From the popular point of
view, Lincoln was, therefore, in the difficult position of a minority
President.
The result of the November elections was scarcely made public before a
committee of Southern Congressmen issued a manifesto,[331] proclaiming
the immediate need for a separate Confederacy of slave-holding States,
if the institution upon which their prosperity depended was to be
saved from the machinations of Northern politicians. They audaciously
identified both Lincoln and the Republican party with the policy of
Abolition; whereas the choice of Lincoln instead of Seward, the
Abolitionist, might in itself have been accepted as sufficient evidence
that the North, while determined to preserve the Union, was resolute
against interference with the internal policy of the South.
The Manifesto was followed, on the 20th of December, by the secession
of South Carolina, ever since Calhoun's day the leader of revolt
against Federal power. Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and
Louisiana promptly joined her.
Although Lincoln's election was assured in November, the executive
power remained till the beginning of March in the feeble hands of
Buchanan, who was the creature of advisers themselves divided in
counsel, to the signal advantage of that section which supported
the revolt. When, at last, the outgoing President made up his mind
to dismiss his secessionist secretary of war, the Cotton-State
Caucus called a Convention at Montgomery, the picturesque and sleepy
old capital of Alabama; and this finally formulated a permanent
constitution for the Confederacy precisely a week after the
inauguration of the new President.[332]
In the meantime Lincoln could only stand a spectator of the wholly
ineffective measures which were being taken to frustrate the active
aggression of the slave power. But towards the end of February he set
out for Washington. Passing on his way through Indiana and Ohio, he was
received by an enormous crowd in New York; and here Whitman first saw
him, not from his favourite seat upon a stage-coach, for the streets
were too densely packed for traffic, but as one of the thirty or forty
thousand silent pedestrian onlookers collected in the city's heart,
where now the post-office stands.
Whitman well knew what the ominous silence, which greeted that
loosely-made gaunt figure, concealed;[333] and how different was the
mood of New York that day from the holiday-making good-humour with
which it was wont to greet the arrival of other illustrious guests.
Under the speechlessness lurked a black moody wrath ready to break
forth.
It was a pleasant afternoon, just twelve months after that other
February day when Whitman and Emerson had paced up and down the slope
of Boston Common in earnest colloquy. Lincoln went silently into the
Astor House without any demonstration either of welcome or of open
hostility; thereafter proceeding to his inauguration. He was compelled
to pass secretly through Baltimore, where violence was only too ready
to manifest itself on the slightest encouragement. The fact that the
President-elect, in order to reach the capital, had thus to travel
through a State which was only with difficulty retained for the Union
cause, shows how close that cause was to disaster. And though, as
Lincoln stated in his inaugural address, the bulk of the American
people opposed secession, and the party which favoured it was but a
comparatively small minority; yet it could only be either an ignorant
optimism, or on the contrary a firmly founded and earnest faith in
the devotion of the great mass of the citizens to the ideals of their
fathers, which could face such a situation without dismay.
The weight of numbers, however, favoured the North. A review of the
census returns show that at their first compilation in 1790 the
population of the Southern and the Northern divisions of the country
was almost absolutely equal; but that from the beginning of the century
the increase in the latter was the more rapid; so that in 1860 the free
population of the North was more than double that of the South.
But in spite of this great numerical preponderance, the North itself
was not united on the question at issue, as is clearly shown by the
returns of the Presidential election, when Douglas polled a million
Free-state votes. For though Douglas opposed secession, he did not
oppose the extension of slavery. It is shown clearly, too, in the
attitude of New York; of which more, later.
And beyond this the Southerner was in some respects better fitted,
as well by his virtues as by his faults, for a military life. The
qualities of leadership and of obedience are cultivated under an
aristocratic ideal, as they are not under a democratic. And the South,
which had practically controlled the executive under Buchanan, and
especially the department of war, was better prepared to take the field
than was the North. On the other hand, the strength of the Union lay
in its cause, and in the latent idealism of the American people, which
woke into activity at the first menace to the Stars and Stripes.
Whether the war really settled anything, whether it might possibly have
been avoided, whether secession left to itself would not literally have
cut its own throat, these are interesting philosophic speculations into
which we need not enter. For already the spectre of war had long been
abroad, stalking through the unharvested fields of Kansas and Nebraska,
and gesticulating with horrid signs and mocking whispers in every
corner of America. When the slave party had first raised its fatal
cry of "our institution in danger," it had raised the cry of war. And
when at last men like Lincoln retorted with the declaration that the
Union was irrefragable--that secession could only be justified after
some criminal use of the Federal power to override the rights of the
minority--the battle was manifestly joined.
It is but fair to add that although the party of Lincoln had now truly
become the party of the Union, the first line of cleavage between North
and South was marked out by a schismatic spirit in the North itself,
by its support of its own sectional interests, when enforcing a policy
of protection upon the whole country.[334] There can be little doubt
that the mistrust felt in the South, while largely due to anterior
causes, was born under this evil star. So true does it seem that when a
nation's policy is being shaped according to merely material interests,
the seeds are being sown of future revolution.
* * * * *
The fatal movement of American destiny towards its crisis must have
dominated much of Whitman's thought at this time. Secession was in the
very air he breathed; for at its first proclamation an echoing voice
was heard in New York itself.
Here Mayor Wood, after a short period of deserved seclusion, had
returned to power. Unsatisfied with his patronage he dreamed of wider
fields. Was it not the splendid vision of a Presidency which encouraged
this fatuous person to declare for a second secession, the creation
of a new island republic of New York? "Tri-Insula" was to have been
its title,[335] and its territories would have comprised Mannahatta,
Staten, and Long Islands. The proposal was enthusiastically received by
the absurd creatures of Tammany, who then sat upon the City Council.
But their complacent folly was of brief duration. It was dispersed by
the first rebel gun-shot.
* * * * *
Whitman had been at the opera on Fourteenth Street,[336] and was
strolling homeward down Broadway about midnight, on the 13th of April,
when he was met by the newspaper boys crying the last extras with
more than ordinary vehemence. Buying a copy and stopping to read it
under the lamps of the Metropolitan Hotel, he was startled by the news
that war had actually broken out. The day before, Confederate troops
had fired upon the flag at Charleston Harbour and Fort Sumter. South
Carolina had flung her challenge down.
The President immediately called for troops, and the response of the
North was instantaneous. New York herself did not hesitate, but voted
at once a million dollars and sent forward her quota of men.[337] Mayor
Wood was among the many thousands of Democrats who became patriots that
day--in so far as one can suddenly become patriotic.
Whitman was not among the volunteers, but his brother George, who was
ten years his junior, was one of the first to offer.[338] He had been
following the family trade as a Brooklyn carpenter, and henceforward
proved himself a brave and able soldier. He was neither braver nor
abler than Walt, but the latter stayed at home, and there are those who
have blamed him for it.
[Illustration: WHITMAN AT FORTY-FOUR]
Putting on one side, as they have done, his subsequent service to
the army, such blame springs from a misunderstanding of the man's
nature. There are some men wholly above the reproach of cowardice or
indifference, whom it is impossible for us to conceive as shouldering
a gun. And for those who knew him most intimately, Whitman was such
a man. Many men who loved peace heard the call to arms and obeyed.
Abraham Lincoln[339] himself--to whom America was entrusting the
conduct of the war--had but now proclaimed its futility, while his
whole nature revolted from its cruel folly. And had his destiny bidden
him to join the colours one cannot doubt that Walt Whitman would have
done so.[340] But that inner voice, which he obeyed, rather forbade
than encouraged him.
And even in years of war there is service one can do for one's country
out of the ranks. No war can wholly absorb the energies of a civilised
people, for the daily life of the nation must be continued. There
are, besides, tasks that have a prior claim upon the loyalty of the
individual, even to the defence of the flag. And Whitman had such a
task, for he bore, as it were, within his soul the infant of an ideal
America, like a young mother whose life is the consecrated guardian of
her unborn babe. His book was now, in a sense, complete; but none could
feel more strongly than he that even his book was only an inadequate
expression of his purpose; while life lasted his days were to be
devoted to the creation of an immortal comradeship, and a spiritual
atmosphere in which the seeds concealed in his writings might germinate.
It must also be noted that, though in his open letter to Emerson[341]
he had written of war almost as a soldier whose blood kindles at the
sound of the trumpets, and though the spirit of his book is one which
"blows battles into men," yet the last edition had been marked by a
curious and significant approximation to Quakerism. It was in 1860,
when war was so near at hand, that he substituted the Friendly numeral
equivalents for the usual names of the months and days of the week;
not, assuredly, because he objected to the recognition of heathen
deities, like the early Friends, but in order to avow some relationship
between himself and Quakerism. The increase of mystical consciousness
may have made him more aware at this time of his real identity with
this society of mystics to which he never nominally belonged.
We have had repeated occasion to note the Quaker traits in Whitman's
character, and here, at the opening of the war, it is well to emphasise
them anew.[342] His love of silence, his spiritual caution, his
veracity and simplicity of speech, his soul-sight, and the practical
balance of his mysticism--that temperance of character upon which
his inspirational faculties were founded--and, finally, the equal
democratic goodwill he showed to all men; these qualities speak the
original Quaker type. And the world may well extend to Whitman the
respect it acknowledges for the Quaker's refusal to bear arms.
It was, indeed, because he loved America so well that he did not fight
with the common weapons. We have seen that he associated himself
intimately with the American genius, a genius which necessarily
includes the qualities of the South at least equally with those of the
North; he himself[343] inclining to lay the emphasis upon the Southern
attributes, as though their wealth in the emotional and passionate
elements were more essential than any other. America robbed of the
South would, indeed, have been America divided against herself. Hence
he shared to the full in the desire and struggle for unity against the
sordid party which instigated secession. But he knew that a victory of
arms was not necessarily a victory of principles, and it was for the
principle that he strove.
May we not assert the possibility of a highly developed and powerful
personality exerting itself upon the side of Justice and Liberty in
moments of national crisis, in some manner more potent than that of
merely physical service? Would not Whitman have been wasting his forces
if he had surrendered himself to the spirit of the hour, and gone
forth with the volunteers to stop or to forward a bullet or a bayonet?
These are questions we well may ponder, and without attempting to give
reasons for so doing, we may answer in the affirmative.
Certain it is that two or three days after he first read the news of
South Carolina's challenge, and the day following the President's
appeal, he recorded this singular vow in one of his notebooks as though
it were the seal upon a struggle of his spirit: "April 16th, 1861. I
have this day, this hour, resolved to inaugurate for myself a pure,
perfect, sweet, clean-blooded, robust body, by ignoring all drinks but
water and pure milk, and all fat meats, late suppers--a great body, a
purged, cleansed, spiritualised, invigorated body."[344]
Read with its context of the events which were occupying his mind,
may we not surmise that this was a new girding of the loins for some
service of the great cause, more strenuous than ever, though perhaps
yet undefined; that this vow of abstinence for the establishment of a
spiritualised body, made thus at the opening of the war, and at the
time of George's enrolment, when Lincoln's call for volunteers was
ringing in the heart of every loyal citizen[345]--that this vow was
that of an athlete going into training for a supreme effort; and an
athlete whose labours are upon that unseen field, whereon it may be the
battles of the visible world are really won. It was thus that Whitman
obeyed the calls of duty both within him and without.
* * * * *
Lincoln's first tasks were to create an army and to confine the area of
insurrection. He proclaimed the blockade of the Southern ports; called
out more regulars and volunteers, and succeeded in preventing West
Virginia and Missouri from joining the Confederacy. Had he been able to
retain for the service of the Union a certain brilliant young officer,
the war might have opened and closed upon a very different story; but
Robert Lee had already joined the Southern army, though not without an
inward conflict.
No leader of equal genius appeared upon the other side until Grant came
out of the West. The weakness of Northern generalship was only too
clearly evidenced in the defeat at Bull Run, midway between the two
capitals, which were now little more than a hundred miles apart, the
Confederate Government having removed to Richmond. As a result of the
defeat Washington itself lay in imminent peril; and if General Johnston
had followed up his advantage, it would have fallen into his hands. But
he missed his hour, and the consternation of the North was followed by
a mood of stubborn resolution.
Slowly but surely Lincoln built up his military organisation. In the
whirlpool of currents he remained steadfast to his single policy
of maintaining the Union. He succeeded in evading the occasions of
war which threatened abroad; he conciliated all in the South which
was at that time amenable to conciliation; and, eager as he was for
emancipation, he refused to be driven before the storm of Abolitionist
sentiment which had risen in the North.
During 1862, while Grant and Farragut were gradually clearing the
Mississippi, the great natural thoroughfare of America, Lee was more
than holding his own among the hills and rivers of Virginia. The
opposing army of the Potomac remained ineffective under the brilliant
but dilatory McClellan, and his more active successors, Burnside and
Hooker. Lee assumed the aggressive, and invaded Maryland; but was
turned back from a projected raid into Pennsylvania by the drawn battle
of Antietam; in which, as in many of the previous engagements of this
army, George Whitman fought.
Antietam was immediately followed by the preliminary proclamation of
emancipation, to take effect in all States which should still continue
in rebellion at the commencement of the new year. Lincoln's mind had
long been exercised upon the best means of compassing the liberation of
the slaves; and until the close of the war, he himself looked for the
ultimate solution of the problem to the method of compensation adopted
by Great Britain in the West Indies. This was successfully applied to
the district of Columbia, but the offer of it received no response
either from the other States to which it was magnanimously made, or
from Lincoln's own Cabinet. The present proclamation was intended as a
blow at the industrial resources of the rebellion.
* * * * *
In mid-December General Burnside lost nearly 13,000 men at
Fredericksburg, Virginia, and reading the long lists of wounded,
the Whitmans came upon George's name among the more serious
casualties.[346] Great was the distress in the home on Portland Avenue,
and Walt set off at once to seek him at the front. His pocket was
picked in a crush at Philadelphia Station, and he arrived penniless
in Washington.[347] There, searching the hospitals for three days and
nights, he could get no news of his brother's whereabouts, but managed
somehow to make his way to the army's headquarters at Falmouth. It had
been a long, melancholy journey; but arrived at the camp, he found his
brother already well again, his wound having healed rapidly.
This sudden journey had momentous consequences for Whitman. His stay
in New York was, perhaps naturally, drawing to a close. There are
indications in the last poems that he was contemplating a westward
journey, and possibly a settlement beyond the Rockies.[348] Although he
paid it frequent visits, he never lived again in Brooklyn.
At Falmouth he found among the wounded a number of young fellows
whom he had known in New York.[349] He took a natural interest in
their welfare, and even though he felt he could do little for them,
lingered till a party going up to Washington offered him an opportunity
for usefulness in their escort. Arriving at the capital, he found
innumerable similar occasions in the many hospitals which had been
established in and about the city. These he began to visit daily,
supporting himself by writing letters to the New York and Brooklyn
press--to the _New York Times_ in particular--and by copying work in
the paymaster's office.[350] It was not till two years later that he
obtained regular employment in the Civil Service; but during the whole
of that time he was paying almost daily visits to the wards, in his
honorary and voluntary capacity, as friend of the wounded.
The number of these was periodically swollen by great battles. On the
4th of May, 1863, General Hooker lost the day at Chancellorsville, and
was replaced by Meade. Early in July, Lee made a second alarming dash
into the North, but was turned back by General Meade from the bloody
field of Gettysburg, where the total losses reached the appalling
figure of 60,000.
By this time, more than two years after the fall of Fort Sumter, the
first easy boasting of a short campaign and an overwhelming triumph,
indulged by both sides, had long died; and the solemn sense of the
great tragedy being enacted before its eyes possessed the nation. This
sentiment could not have been more nobly expressed than in the words
used by the President, when, speaking at the dedication of a portion of
the Gettysburg battlefield as a national cemetery,[351] he said: "We
here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom: and that
government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish
from the earth".
Meade's victory, and the news following fast upon it of Grant's capture
of Vicksburg, with the consequent reopening of the Mississippi,
reassured the wavering faith of many patriots. But the situation
was still full of peril. In this same month--July, 1863--there were
serious riots in New York,[352] instigated by the "Copperheads," as the
Northern sympathisers with the Confederacy were dubbed, in opposition
to the first draft for the army under the general conscription law of
March. In these, more than a thousand persons were killed or wounded.
The riots were the more difficult to quell because all available
troops and volunteers had been sent to the front; and these of course
included a great proportion of the stabler citizens. At the same time
the disaffected elements remained in their full strength. The political
character of the disturbance was plain enough; for the rioters set upon
any negroes they met, slinging them to the lamp-posts, and would have
burned down the hospital, full of wounded Union soldiers, had they not
been prevented.
It is some satisfaction to know that we cannot couple the name of
Fernando Wood with these outrages. There was something genuine in
his patriotism. He was now in Congress, and had recently been vainly
attempting, in his usual futile fashion, to negotiate a peace.
* * * * *
Both the draft and the riots caused the Whitman family no little
anxiety. George, who had entered the army as a private and was
promoted stage by stage till he became a lieutenant-colonel, was of
course already at the front;[353] and Jeff, who had married four years
earlier, was keeping the home together for the old mother and helpless
youngest son, as well as for his own wife and their young children.
Anything that happened to him would involve the happiness of the whole
family. They feared especially that he might be drawn for service; and
Walt wrote from Washington that in that event, he would do all in his
power to raise the necessary money to provide a substitute.[354]
Walt himself never closed his ears against the call to serve in the
ranks, if it should come to him. Had he himself been drawn, he might
have regarded the circumstance as the intimation of duty; but he
was not. Instead he took the risks of small-pox in the infectious
wards, as well as that which is incurred by the frequent dressing of
gangrened wounds; and he bore the spiritual burden of all the pathetic
war-wreckage which drifted into Washington month after weary month.
The tension of those days was terrible to him. Devoted to the "Mother
of All," the American nation, he loved her sons both North and South
with an equal affection, their suffering and destruction wringing
his heart. For, mystic as he was, he had all the strong passions
of humanity, and felt to the full the agonies of the flesh. On the
one side also, his own brother was in the hottest of the fighting
throughout these years; while on the other, it is just possible that
some young son of his own, known or unknown to him, may have served
among the boys in the opposite ranks before the war was over. His
Abolitionist friends would sigh, and say the struggle must go on till
every slave should be free; but he who valued freedom not less than
they, and understood perhaps better what it really means, dissented
from them.
The first sight of a battlefield made him cry out for peace; and if
in the following months he felt the exhilaration which breathed from
the simple heroism displayed by the soldiers, he still saw that war
is not all heroic, but in time must darken the fairest cause. The
terrible burden of its inconceivable extravagance began to weigh upon
him like a nightmare. Each new season, with its prospective train of
ambulances, its legion of tragedies, bewildered him with its horror;
till he angrily denied that the whole population of negroes could be
worth so terrific a purchase.[355] It may have been the exaggerated
retort to an extremist argument; but indeed it was not for the negroes
that the war was being fought; it was not for the powerful but highly
coloured manifesto of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, but for the "Declaration
of Independence," and for the Constitution of America. And this both
Whitman and Lincoln realised: they knew the negro of the South as
the New Englander never knew him, and were firm in demanding for him
the rights of a human being; but they knew also that mere abolition
would not give him these, nor could it render him capable of the right
exercise of American citizenship.
* * * * *
Though Lee had been thrown back from Gettysburg, his army had never
recognised a defeat; and the chief danger to the cause of American
unity lay in the conviction of the South that its general and his men
were really invincible. For two more years they kept the field, with
a heroic determination that appears at the same time little short of
criminal when we consider the conditions involved upon all the parties
to resistance. And when we add to these the story of the Southern
military prisons, even the chivalrous fame of Lee becomes stained with
an ineffaceable shame. Better a thousand times to have acknowledged
defeat than to have been guilty of enforcing such things. But the pride
of the South had become rigid, and would only admit defeat after it
was broken. Its political leaders had staked everything upon victory;
and it would seem that they preferred to sacrifice a whole generation
of their supporters and victims rather than bear the penalty of their
failure.
When Grant, or rather the reckless courage of his American
volunteers,[356] had crushed General Bragg at Chattanooga, and his
friend Sherman had completed the work of clearing Tennessee, Lee's army
remained the sole hope of the desperately impoverished South. But still
in itself and in its leader it was absolutely confident.
A similar confidence inspired the hearts of the Union soldiers, when
in March, 1864, the downright laconic general from the West was given
supreme command, and went into Virginia to crush his antagonist by mere
force of numbers and determination.
In Grant at last both Lincoln and the army had found the man they
were waiting for. But still a year went by before the task was
accomplished--a year whose memory is the most terrible of the war--upon
whose page are inscribed such names as, The Wilderness, Spotsylvania,
Bloody Angle, North Anna, Cold Harbour, recalling those awful fields
whereon more than a hundred thousand soldiers fell. While Grant was
stubbornly pushing Lee back upon Richmond, and finally holding him
there, Sherman was cutting him off from further support by that
extraordinary march south-eastwards from Chattanooga through Atlanta
to the sea. He captured Savannah just before Christmas; and afterwards
turning north, and wading through all the morasses and crossing all
the innumerable streams and rivers of the Carolinas, he completed his
errand a few days before his chief entered the Southern capital.
Several futile attempts had been made to bring about a reconciliation
between North and South before the bitter end;[357] but Lincoln, eager
as he was for peace, stood out irrevocably for the acknowledgment
of the Union, and now added to it the emancipation of the slaves.
It was clear that nothing short of Lee's capitulation could satisfy
the country or end the war. On the 3rd April, Richmond surrendered
to Grant; and on the day after, the President, who was then with the
army, entered the city which the evacuating forces had fired. Five more
days and Lee gave himself up: by the end of the month the surrender of
the Confederate troops had been effected, while Jefferson Davis was
captured in Georgia on the 10th of May. A fortnight later the combined
hosts of Grant and Sherman passed before the President in a last grand
review along Pennsylvania Avenue and before the White House, to be
thereafter disbanded.
But the President was no longer Abraham Lincoln. Re-elected in the
preceding autumn, in spite of Republican intrigues and the dangerous
opposition of General McClellan, who was put forward by the Democrats,
Lincoln had been assassinated during a performance at Ford's Theatre,
on the evening of the 14th of April, the fourth anniversary of the fall
of Fort Sumter.
The loss to his country was irreparable. More than any other of its
Presidents, either before or since, Abraham Lincoln embodied the real
genius of the American nation, and in the hour of their agony he was
the father of his people. Slowly they had learnt his strength and his
wisdom; but they had hardly begun to understand the greatness of a
heart which was able to love the South with a mother's tenderness even
while it was in arms against him.
The Vice-President, who stepped into his place, was a Union Democrat;
he also loved the South, but less wisely than well. His rash haste
in the reconstruction of the governments of the defeated States
threw the nation into the hands of the group of narrowly partisan
Republicans which continued to rule America with unscrupulous ability
and ill-concealed self-interest[358] for sixteen years, threatening by
its attitude towards the Southern people to alienate their sympathies
forever from the Union.
FOOTNOTES:
[323] Burroughs, 20, 21.
[324] _Literary Gazette_, 7th July, 1860; _qu._ Bucke, 202.
[325] W. M. Rossetti, _Selections from W. W._, introd., and E. Rhys,
_Selections from W. W._, introd.; W. B. Scott, _Autobiog._, ii., 32,
33, 268, 269.
[326] There is no fact more important to be remembered for a right
understanding of the events that follow than this, that the Slave party
only controlled a portion, perhaps a minority, of the Democrats.
[327] _L. of G._, 190; _Mem. Hist. N.Y._, iii., 472.
[328] _L. of G._, 1876.
[329] Bryce, _op. cit._, i., 46, 47.
[330] But see _ib._, i., 44.
[331] _Camb. Mod. Hist._, 445.
[332] _Camb. Mod. Hist._, 449.
[333] _Comp. Prose_, 302.
[334] See _supra_, p. 24.
[335] Roosevelt, 202-04.
[336] _Comp. Prose_, 15, 16.
[337] Roosevelt, 203; _Mem. Hist. N.Y._, iii., 485.
[338] _W.'s Memoranda during the War_, 59.
[339] Inaugural, 1861.
[340] Bucke, 104.
[341] _L. of G._ (1856), Appendix.
[342] _Cf. In re_, 213.
[343] _Cf._ _Comp. Prose_, 255, etc.
[344] MSS. Harned.
[345] _Camb. Mod. Hist._, 451.
[346] _Comp. Prose_, 15.
[347] _Wound-Dresser_, 23, 47, 48.
[348] _L. of G._ (1860), 371.
[349] _Comp. Prose_, 21; _Wound-Dresser_, 24.
[350] Burroughs, 29; _Wound-Dresser_, 10, etc.
[351] 19th Nov., 1863.
[352] Roosevelt, 203-206.
[353] _Wound-Dresser_, 94.
[354] _Wound-Dresser_, 95.
[355] _Cf._ Kennedy.
[356] Owen Wister's _Grant_ (Beacon Biogs.), 95, 96.
[357] _Camb. Mod. Hist._, 579.
[358] _Camb. Mod. Hist._, 638.