Never Call Retreat (19 page)

People in the North sent clothing for the inmates, and here the Sanitary Commission agent found an unexpected problem. When a child died the Negroes who were all but naked would use the very best garments they had to clothe the dead child for burial. It was useless to try to explain that the clothing was desperately needed for the living. The parents could think only of the children who had died, who never in their brief lives had worn good clothing, and their answer invariably was: "We want them to look pretty."
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By slow degrees the worst abuses were corrected, and although many people died most of them after all lived; and the authorities tried to work out a system by which these fugitives could become self-supporting. Abandoned plantations were taken over, leased on one-year terms, and the contrabands were put to work for wages: $7 a month for able-bodied men, $5 for women, half-price for children. One investigator reported that "This plan would have answered a tolerable purpose had the lessees of the plantations been honest, upright, humane men; but with few exceptions they were adventurers and camp followers, who were ready to turn their hands to any opportunity of getting gain by the oppression of the poor, the weak or the defenceless." The army appointed commissioners to supervise the business, but mostly the commissioners sided with the lessees rather than with the Negroes. The investigator noted that wages were based on the slave-hire rate that prevailed when cotton sold for 10 cents a pound; it sold for 70 cents now, $2 a head was deducted for medical care which often was not provided, and in many cases wages stopped on rainy days.

This exploitation was not confined to the Mississippi Valley. In the vicinity of Port Royal, South Carolina, the story was about the same. A number of plantations there were sold to Northerners who set up a share-crop system. One man acquired thirteen plantations, employing 400 former slaves, "not one of them able-bodied, all being old men, old or feeble women, or children." He raised sea island cotton, investing $40,000 altogether and clearing an $81,000 profit for his year's effort. On an average, his workers got $16.50 a month. In some instances small plantations were leased and operated by the Negroes themselves, and this seemed to work out fairly well except that the Negroes often feared to bring their crops to market because soldiers and civilian speculators either swindled them or took their produce by force.

A Federal officer said that he "found the prejudice of color and race here in full force, and the general feeling of the army of occupation was unfriendly to the blacks. It was manifested in various forms of personal insult and abuse, in depredations on their plantations, stealing and despoiling them of their crops and domestic animals and robbing them of their money." It was considered that the system set up by General Banks in Louisiana was the worst of all, labor being enforced by the army "often with great rigor" with everything arranged for the benefit of the planters. Here, as elsewhere, there was heavy mortality in the camps.
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Dawn was a long way off, and if there was a light in the sky the light was streaky, blood-red against the darkness. Yet the slaves kept on coming in, and on the whole what they came to seemed to matter less to them than what they were getting away from. After a few months of it General Grant told his friend and patron, Congressman Elihu B. Washburne of Illinois: "Slavery is already dead and cannot be resurrected. It would take a standing army to maintain slavery in the South if we were to make peace today guaranteeing to the South all their former Constitutional privileges." Grant went on to say that he himself had never been an abolitionist, "not even what could be called anti-slavery"; he was simply telling what he saw.
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Grant was not overstating the case. The great change was taking place, and as the winter passed Negroes were not only coming into the army's lines: in increasing numbers they were coming into the army itself, the administration having at last made up its mind to put Negroes in uniform and make soldiers out of them.

Before the proclamation was issued this looked like too risky a step to take, and in the summer of 1862 President Lincoln had refused to take it. But after the proclamation came out he changed his mind, remarking to General John A. Dix at Fort Monroe that inasmuch as "we have it, and bear all the disadvantage of it (as we do bear some in certain quarters) we must also take some benefit from it, if practicable." He asked Dix if he could not raise Negro regiments, using them to garrison places in the rear areas so that the white troops there could be freed for field service. To Andrew Johnson, military governor of Tennessee, he wrote that the nation needed nothing so much as to have a man like Johnson—"an eminent citizen ol a slave-state, and himself a slave-holder"—raise Negro troops. "The colored population," wrote Mr. Lincoln, "is the great
available
and yet
unavailed
of force for restoring the Union. The bare sight of 50,000 armed and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi would end the rebellion at once. And who doubts that we can present that sight, if we but take hold in earnest?"
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The hope that this spectacle would of itself end the rebellion turned out, of course, to be a wildly optimistic miscalculation, but a decision of immense importance had been made, and the administration pushed the program with energy. Authority to recruit and use Nero regiments had been granted by Congress much earlier, and before the winter was out the War Department sent Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to the Mississippi Valley to see that such units were raised, officered, drilled and used. Halleck sent a private letter to Grant, remarking that he understood many of Grant's officers mistreated Negro refugees and tried to make them return to their masters and ordering him to "use your official and personal influence to remove prejudices on this subject and to fully and thoroughly carry out the policy now adopted and ordered by the government." This policy, in brief, was "to withdraw from the use of the enemy all the slaves you can, and to employ those so withdrawn to the best possible advantage against the enemy."

As Grant hardly needed to be told, this marked a significant change in the administration's attitude toward Secession, and Halleck underlined it:

"The character of the war has very much changed within the last year. There is now no possible hope of a reconciliation with the Rebels. The Union party in the South is virtually destroyed. There can be no peace but that which is enforced by the sword"—by the sword, the instrument which Mr. Vallandigham considered wholly impotent in this case.
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It was a long, painful process; a revolutionary change embraced reluctantly and from dire necessity. The nation had not been driven to war by its desire to free the slaves; instead it had been driven to free the slaves by its desire to win the war.

Now it had to change its thinking, and this was hard to do. Under the revolution involved in the act of changing slaves into free men, even into soldiers, there lay a profounder revolution involving the way individual men looked at their fellow human beings. Men of unquestioned good will found old habits of thought hard to break. Presidential Secretary John G. Nicolay this spring went to a Washington party where the Haitian Charge d'Affaires was a guest, attended by his Secretary of Legation: two men of color, accepted on an equal footing in a roomful of whites. "They were quiet and well behaved, and said to be quite intelligent," wrote Nicolay. "But on the whole it was rather difficult to dissociate them in one's mind from the other colored waiters in the room."
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It was difficult: even more so for men not conditioned as Nicolay had been conditioned. Colonel Edward S. Bragg of the 6th Wisconsin was a distinguished combat soldier, leader of one of the best regiments in the Army of the Potomac, and he found adjustment impossible. A few weeks before the Battle of Gettysburg he wrote thus to his wife:

"I understand there is a Negro regiment in town, but as I am confined to my room I have not had my nerves shocked by seeing 'a woolly head and black face' decked out in Uncle Sam's uniform. I wish a white man was as good as a Negro and elicited as much sympathy and attention. A man must be either 'a foreigner or a black' to receive early notice at the hands of our exceedingly discriminating public.

"A little nigger just came in my room, with 'our corps' badge on his hat which was given him by a Lieutenant—by the aid of a knife I soon destroyed the 'Cuffie's' plumage. What an ass a man must be to put his uniform on a dirty nigger that didn't belong to him."
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Something irrevocable was happening. A good many Cuffies were putting on the country's uniform this spring, and they had no illusions about the way they were regarded. One Federal officer intimately connected with the enlistment of Negro soldiers wrote frankly: "They were fully aware of the contempt, often times amounting to hatred, of their ostensible liberators. They felt the bitter derision, even from officers of high rank, with which the idea of their being transformed into available soldiers was met." But they had their own point of view, which was expressed bluntly by Frederick Douglass, the one-time slave who was the acknowledged spokesman for free Negroes in the North. He put it this way:

"Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters,
U. S.;
let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States."
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For when the Negro put on his country's uniform it followed logically that at last he had a country.

CHAPTERTHREE

Remorseless Revolutionary Struggle

1. Ironclads at Charleston

THE GENERAL usually signed himself simply as G. T. Beauregard; which seems a pity, because there was a fine resonance to his surname when the three given names marched ahead of it, and the general was a resonant man. To say "Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard" is to get a little of the flavor of him; and yet the fact that he cut the name down when he signed official papers was fully in character, because he was a conscientious worker. Like Jeb Stuart, he was both flamboyant and competent, and his habit of devising strategic plans far too elaborate for the Confederacy's resources did not keep him from making good use of the limited means that were available.

It was necessary to be most practical now, because after two years the war was returning to the city where it began. General Beauregard was back in South Carolina, back in Charleston where two years earlier he had drawn a famous "circle of fire" around Fort Sumter. He had taken Fort Sumter after a spectacular but almost bloodless bombardment, and then for a little while the war had been a matter of high spirits and hope and waving flags, with history pivoting neatly on one heroic but inexpensive act of defiance. Since then General Beauregard had been at Shiloh and the palmetto flags had been carried to such places as Gaines' Mill and Sharpsburg, and all of 1861 *s innocence was gone forever. Now Fort Sumter was Beauregard's to defend, and the war had a new grimness. The Yankees had built and manned a whole fleet of ironclad warships—dark vessels, clumsy and ugly and inexpressibly menacing—and they were planning to use this fleet to destroy the fort and the city and to kill secession in the place where secession began.

So, at any rate, said the Northern press, which had never learned discretion; and so said the omens along the South Carolina coast, studied intently by General Beauregard. It was clear that the Federal naval commander, Rear Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont, was trying to test his new ironclads under battle conditions. The Navy Department had given him nine of them, led by U.S.S.
New Ironsides,
his flagship, a ponderous steam frigate with a high freeboard and no turrets, mounting a heavy broadside battery behind stout iron plating. There were seven monitors—eight, originally, but the vessel that gave this class its name, the original U.S.S.
Monitor,
had foundered in a mid-winter gale off Cape Hatteras. In addition there was U.S.S.
Keokuk,
listed as an "experimental ironclad," a low-hulled craft mounting two 11-inch guns in fixed citadels, bow and stern, looking like a monitor but differently arranged. As the new monitors came down they were sent to bombard Fort McAllister, on the Ogeechee River near Savannah. It appeared, from all of these trials, that the monitors could stand a heavy fire without being hurt very much, and one of them, U.S.S.
Montauk,
showed her hitting power on February 28, 1863, by reaching out past the fort to sink C.S.S.
Nashville,
a former blockade runner converted into a commerce raider, highly regarded by Confederate navalists. Admiral Du Pont's enthusiasm was temperate, for although the monitors escaped serious damage they had not hurt Fort McAllister very much either. General Beauregard got that point, too, and was comforted thereby. What was more important was the obvious conclusion that the Yankees were tuning up for an attack on Charleston.
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The fact that Beauregard commanded at Charleston indicated that he was not liked in Richmond. The army he led at Shiloh had long since been turned over to Braxton Bragg, and when the government in the fall of 1862 looked for a good man to assume the all-important defense of Vicksburg and the Mississippi River it bypassed Beauregard and chose General Pemberton. Pemberton then was on duty at Charleston, and when he went west Beauregard was ordered to Charleston as his replacement, one of the Confederacy's most famous soldiers going in to substitute for one of its most obscure. Charleston at the time was an inactive sector, and the obvious implication was that the administration did not care much who commanded there.

The war had brought changes to Charleston. The city was as determined as ever, but the early springtime rapture was gone. Gone too was Secession Hall itself, destroyed in the fall of 1861 by a fire which with notable impartiality also destroyed the home of James Louis Petigru, the city's one unreconstructed Union loyalist. Petigru was the man who greeted passage of the original ordinance of secession by remarking that the state was too small for a republic and too large for a lunatic asylum, and not long after the war began he wrote to Maryland's Reverdy Johnson that every day he saw "manifestations of an enthusiasm in which I have not the slightest participation." Nothing ever shut him up, and diarist Mary Chesnut wrote tartly that his career proved that in South Carolina "if you have stout hearts—and good family connections—you can do pretty much as you please." In an odd way the city was rather proud of him; like the village atheist, he testified by his mere existence to the stalwart orthodoxy of his community. Now the old man himself was gone, dying on March 3, 1863, as his city was preparing for new trials.
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