A Disease in the Public Mind (47 page)

Finally, the wandering doctor caught up to his wounded son. He had been shot in the neck this time. A single expert glance told Dr. Holmes he would survive the wound. “How are you, Boy?” he said.

“How are you, Dad?” the Captain coolly replied.

Holmes realized he was speaking to a son who would never again be a boy. Oliver Jr. had become a man in his own right.

Captain Holmes soon returned to the war. He rejected an offer to be a major in a black regiment. Back in the Twentieth Regiment, he was greeted by his best friend and fellow captain, Henry Abbott, who told Holmes how pleased he was that he had decided to remain a captain and stay with them. Abbott and most of the Twentieth regiment were totally disillusioned with the war. Only their sense of honor as soldiers kept them in uniform. Above all else they detested the abolitionists, who had gotten them into this murderous nightmare.
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Holmes's letters from the front explain this angry disillusionment. “It is singular with what indifference one gets to look at dead bodies,” he wrote. “As you go through the woods you stumble constantly and if after dark, as last night on picket, perhaps tread on the swollen bodies already fly blown and decaying, of men shot in the head, back or bowels—many of the wounds are terrible to look at—Well, we licked 'em.” In 1863, in a slide into total discouragement, he thought he and his fellow soldiers were “working to effect what never happens—the subjugation (for that is it) of a great civilized nation.”
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Abbott was killed leading his company in the chaotic Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. A heartbroken Captain Holmes anonymously published a poem to his memory in the
Boston Evening Transcript.
Its last two lines summed up his admiration:

Noble heart, full soon we follow thee

Lit by the deeds that flamed along thy track.

After the war, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. rose in the legal profession to become an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. For seventy years, he repeatedly condemned the abolitionists and others who claimed they had a message from some higher power that everyone had to obey. Above all he voiced his contempt for people whose claim to certitude often persuaded other men to kill each other.

In a letter to the British radical Harold Laski, Holmes wrote, “You put your ideals or prophecies with the slight superior smile of a man who is sure he has the future (I have seen it before in the past from the abolitionists . . . ).” In another letter, he said, “Communists show in the most extreme form what I came to loathe in the abolitionists—the conviction that anyone who did not agree with them was either a knave or a fool.”
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Perhaps his most devastating postwar comment was one that cut through a hundred years of mythical American history to one of the central truths about the war. Holmes said he now realized he had been fighting for the United States—the Union. He thought he had been fighting for Boston.
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EPILOGUE

Lincoln's Visitor

On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee's 27,000 gaunt, exhausted soldiers trudged into the village of Appomattox Court House in southern Virginia to find the road ahead of them blocked by thousands of Union cavalrymen. Almost simultaneously, a courier arrived with a message from fleeing President Jefferson Davis, declaring he hoped to fight on. “Tell the President that the war is ending just as I have expected it would from the first,” Lee replied. The words add retrospective depth to Robert E. Lee's inner anguish when he refused command of the Union army in 1861.

Pursuing Lee's men was a 120,000-man Union army led by stumpy General Ulysses S. Grant. “Sam” Grant had recovered from his near defeat at Shiloh to win crucial victories in the western theater. President Lincoln had made him the Union army's commander in chief in March 1864. Like Lee he was a West Point graduate, but his career in the Union army before the war had been undistinguished.

What would the country think if he surrendered, Lee asked his staff officers? One tear-choked young aide replied, “There has been no country, General, for a year or more. You are the country to these men.”

Lee's thirty-year-old artillery commander, General Edward Porter Alexander, spoke for the younger officers. “Why not disband the army, order the men to scatter like rabbits and partridges in the bushes?”

Here was a moment when a word of assent from Lee would have launched a guerilla war that might have lasted for decades. “The men would have no rations,” Lee said. “They'd have to rob and plunder.”

“A little more blood or less now makes no difference,” Alexander persisted. “Spare the men who have fought under you for four years the mortification of having to ask Grant for terms and have him say unconditional surrender . . . General—spare us the mortification of that reply!”

Unconditional surrender was the merciless terms that the abolitionists in Congress were recommending. Although it was sometimes invoked when demanding the surrender of a fort or a city—Grant had used it twice in his victories over Confederate armies in the West—it had not been invoked in negotiating peace between warring nations since Rome had demanded it of Carthage in 126 BC.

“General Grant will not demand unconditional surrender,” Lee assured Alexander. “He will give us as honorable terms as we have a right to expect.”

West Point's spirit of brotherhood played a part in Lee's response. Far more influential were words that President Abraham Lincoln had spoken on March 4, 1865, when he was inaugurated for a second term:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

Whether General Lee had read these words, or heard only fragments of them, we do not know. But we can be sure that even fragments would have stirred a profound response in a man who, more than any other soldier, personified the divisions of heart and mind that had begun the war. We know
that General Grant had heard the words. In addition, he had conferred with President Lincoln on April 3, when the president visited Richmond after Lee's army had retreated from the wrecked Confederate capital.

Grant and Lee met in the Appomattox home of man named McLean. After they chatted briefly, Lee asked if Grant was ready to discuss surrender terms. Grant's reply was succinct and simple. The surrendered men would be paroled and “disqualified from taking up arms again.” Once they gave up their weapons and ammunition, they would be free to return to their homes. They would not be “disturbed by the United States authority” as long as they observed their paroles.

Lee replied with a request. Could the cavalrymen and artillerymen keep their horses? They all owned them privately. Grant instantly agreed. Anyone who claimed a horse or mule would be allowed to take it home “to work their little farms.”

“This will have the best possible effect upon my men,” Lee said. “It will be very gratifying and it will do much toward conciliating our people.”

Next Lee confessed his men were close to starvation. Grant turned to his commissary general, who was sitting nearby. Within hours, fresh beef, salt, hard bread, coffee, and sugar were flowing into the Confederate lines. As the food arrived, Union army bands began playing and artillery batteries fired victory salutes. General Grant ordered an immediate halt to these celebrations. “The rebels are our countrymen again,” he said.
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•      •      •

On the evening of April 11, 1865, two days after General Lee surrendered, a jubilant crowd gathered in front of the White House and began calling for President Lincoln. Noah Brooks, the reporter for the
Sacramento Daily Union
who was visiting the president, described the throng as “a vast sea of faces, illuminated by the lights that burned in the festal array of the White House, and stretching far out into the misty darkness.”

Lincoln appeared at the window over the mansion's main entrance, a place from which he and other presidents often spoke. The crowd fell silent. Instead of a few random remarks, Lincoln had a prepared speech. It swiftly
became apparent that he was using this opportunity to begin discussing his postwar policy toward the defeated South.

Brooks held an oil lamp so Lincoln could read the speech, while the president's young son, Tad, grasped the pages as they were read and fluttered to the floor. Lincoln began by expressing his hope for a “righteous and speedy peace.” Then he turned to what he called “the re-inauguration of national authority” in the South. He warned his listeners that this might be a difficult task. “We, the loyal people, differ among ourselves” about how to reconstruct the shattered Union.

Lincoln was aware that a number of abolitionist Republican politicians in Congress did not agree with the policy of forgiveness he had enunciated in his second inaugural speech. Senators Ben Wade of Ohio and Zachariah Chandler of Michigan and their allies wanted to prosecute Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and other Confederate leaders for treason, and hang them. Then they planned to rule the South as a captured province, divided into military districts. Senator Wade had made it clear that he had no hesitation about forcing Lincoln to accept this policy. Senators were not the president's “mere servants, obeying everything that we may ascertain to be his wish and will,” Wade had snarled.

Lincoln was now in even stronger disagreement with Wade and his circle. The president's visit to ravaged Richmond had appalled him. Southern civilization had been all but eradicated. There were no courts, no banks, no police. Union army officers told the president that other southern cities were not in much better condition.

Along with restoring the government of the Southern states as swiftly as possible, Lincoln told his listeners that he wanted to give African Americans the right to vote. He planned to begin by conferring the privilege “on the very intelligent and those who had served our cause as soldiers.”

Those words showed how far Abraham Lincoln had travelled from the politician who had assured Illinois voters in 1858 that he did not think blacks and whites could live together, and that colonization was the only solution to racial peace. Now he was saying he favored black participation in
the electorate, and by implication full citizenship for all the ex-slaves when education made them ready for its privileges and duties.
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Among the listeners in the crowd was the mustachioed actor John Wilkes Booth and burly Lewis Paine, his partner in an already simmering plot against Lincoln's life. When the president said he wanted to give the vote to blacks, Booth turned to Paine and muttered: “That's the last speech he'll ever make.”
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•      •      •

Listening to Lincoln's words at a nearby White House window was a visitor who was a link to George Washington. Adolphe, the Marquis de Chambrun, was a grandson of the Marquis de Lafayette through his daughter Virginie. Chambrun had come to Washington, DC, in February 1865 as an informal representative of the French government. Relations between America and France had been strained by Emperor Louis Napoleon's decision to set up a puppet government in unstable Mexico, headed by Archduke Maximilian of Austria. The venture was a foolish fragment of the dream of a New World empire that had led Napoleon Bonaparte to his ruinous invasion of Saint-Domingue (Haiti).
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Chambrun had charmed Mrs. Lincoln and become part of the White House's inner circle. Mary Lincoln had invited the Frenchman to accompany them when she and the president visited ruined Richmond. Chambrun had seen the liberated slaves of that city singing joyous hymns in the street and falling on their knees with cries of gratitude to the president. It was a remarkable fulfillment of Lafayette's dream of joining George Washington in eliminating slavery from the republic they had fought to create.
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In early 1862, Lincoln had testified to another link to Washington when he warmly approved a proposal to read the founder's Farewell Address aloud in Congress. It was a perfect way to underscore the president's decision to make the primacy of the Union the central reason for his decision to resist southern secession. His 1863 proclamation, emancipating the slaves of the seceded states, was intimately linked in Lincoln's mind with the war
powers Washington and his collaborator James Madison had made sure that the Constitution gave the president.

After his reelection in 1864 made it clear that the war was almost won, Lincoln took a step that confirmed his deep personal commitment to freedom for all Americans. He backed and even encouraged abolitionists in Congress who called for an amendment to the Constitution banning slavery from all the states of the American Union. Lincoln welcomed its passage, because it removed once and for all the possibility that sometime in the future a hostile Supreme Court might declare the Emancipation Proclamation unconstitutional. The amendment, Lincoln said, was “a King's cure for all the evils” of slavery.

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As Lincoln ended his speech, people in the audience called out for a song. An army band had serenaded them for a half hour before the president appeared at the White House window. Many if not most of the listeners expected the president to choose one of the war's hymns to vengeance: “John Brown's Body” or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”