Never Call Retreat (35 page)

Perhaps all that was needed was for men to get used to the appalling powers they had grasped; the knowledge of the best ways to use these powers would eventually come once the will to inflict unmeasured damage became dominant, and this developed rapidly. During this eventful summer, while his engineers worked so hard to get at the forts, Gillmore had a gun emplacement built in the swamps a mile or more southwest of Battery Wagner; a cunningly engineered affair of pilings, wooden flooring, and sand bags, supporting an 8-inch Parrott rifle that fired a 200-pound shell. This gun was dubbed the Swamp Angel and it was mounted so that it could fire directly into the city of Charleston. When all was ready, Gillmore sent word that unless Sumter and Wagner were immediately evacuated he would bombard the city, and when this threat was ignored the Swamp Angel opened fire.

The firing began shortly after midnight on August 22. Most of the time the gunners used a new kind of incendiary shell, in the hope that they could set the city on fire, and Beauregard sent over a flag-of-truce message protesting against this firing into "a city taken unawares and filled with sleeping women and children." This protest was ignored and the firing continued. The incendiary shells seem to have been defective, for the city did not burn, and after thirty-six shots had been fired the Swamp Angel exploded. The bombardment of the city had been meant to be most destructive, but had not been so; once again, man's reach had exceeded his grasp, and although the sum total of fear in the world had indeed been increased for a few nights no substantial material damage had been done.
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It would hardly be worth mentioning, except that it showed how war had hardened men's emotions, so that things that would have been horrifying in ordinary times horrified no longer. The idea of throwing Greek fire (or, as at Vicksburg, ordinary high explosives) into homes where women and children slept did not seem dreadful at all. Good men even rejoiced in it. In the Federal army before Charleston, for instance, there was a Regular Army brigadier from Massachusetts, George H. Gordon, who heard about the Swamp Angel's work and wrote: "What a wonderful retaliation! Frightened inhabitants fleeing from the wrath of a just avenger . . . ah indeed, but this was sweet!" And far away in London another good man from Massachusetts, Minister Charles Francis Adams, noted in his diary that the latest news from America told of the destruction of Fort Sumter "and the shelling of that pestilent nest of heresy, Charleston" and felt that the effect of all of this would be good.
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When good men could talk so they consented to terror. A later generation might be able to make incendiaries that would really work.

4. The Road to Zion

AT
THE END of July, the month when so many young men died, John J. Crittenden of Kentucky died also; an old man (older in fact than the Constitution itself) who had done his best to keep young men from having to kill each other. In 1860 he had worked for compromise, proposing that North and South agree to keep the past intact by stretching it into a tight protective film to contain the monstrous slavery issue; and when this failed and war came he tried to keep the war limited, offering (and seeing Congress accept) a resolution insisting that the war was being waged to restore the Union but not to interfere in any way with the right of strong men to own weaker men. Crittenden had opposed the confiscation act, emancipation, and the enlistment' of Negro soldiers, but there had never been any question about his devotion to the Union; he simply believed that it could be saved by mutual consent if the attempt to save it could be strictly divorced from the attempt to define what it would be like afterward. He once asked, despairingly: "Is it not our duty to save our own country first and then turn around and save the Constitution?"
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Now he was gone, and most of what he stood for was gone with him, for there was no longer any chance of mutual consent. Mr. Lincoln had once accepted Mr. Crittenden's resolution on war aims; now he was firm in the belief that slavery and secession must be destroyed together. If there had been any doubt about it he made it clear in a brief exchange of messages with General Rosecrans, who submitted a mildly unorthodox proposal advanced by Colonel James Frazier Jaquess of the 73rd Illinois Infantry.

Colonel Jaquess had been a Methodist minister before the war, and he believed that many people in the South wanted to return to the Union. He knew many Southerners, largely through his church connections, and he believed that if he could go south and talk with them he could set in motion a genuine Southern peace movement. He had asked General Rosecrans to let him undertake this mission, and what he wanted now (aside from a presidential blessing) was some light on the peace terms Mr. Lincoln was prepared to offer.

Formal presidential blessing he could not get, but light was available. Mr. Lincoln was interested in this slightly fantastic plan; he had always believed, despite much evidence to the contrary, that there was a deep Union sentiment in the South, and this might be a good way to test it. He pointed out that Jaquess could not go south with any government authority whatever, and warned that if he went without it the Confederates might shoot him as a spy. However, if the man wanted to take his chances and go on his own hook, and if General Rosecrans cared to give him a furlough so that he could get away from his regiment, the President would rather like to see him try it. As to terms: the South must of course return to the Union, and it must accept universal emancipation, and the Federal war debt must be shared by all of the states in the restored Union. In return the Federal government would offer general amnesty, with no enforcement of the confiscation act "except as against the leaders."
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Whatever else these terms meant, they certainly did not mean compromise. If the Confederacy wanted peace it must begin by consenting to its own dissolution, and in the spring of 1863 (the President formulated these terms more than a month before the victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg) few things seemed less likely. What Mr. Lincoln had been willing to subscribe to in 1861—the simple statement that the Federal government was fighting solely "to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several states unimpaired"—he subscribed to no longer. He would undo nothing that had happened in the last two years. Such words as dignity, equality, and rights had grown larger than they used to be; they no longer applied just to states but had begun to attach themselves to people who had not previously known anything about them, and this had to be accepted even if its implications were still unfathomable. What the President really was saying was that if there was to be a peace conference, Southerners would have to take the future on faith— believing (as the abolitionist poet Whittier would have said) where they could not prove. A peace conference so conceived was apt to be hard to arrange.

Nevertheless, Mr. Lincoln was trying to give faith something to stand on. By promising general amnesty he was indicating that although the Confederacy must be destroyed the states that had supported it could return to the Union as regular members of the American family. Accepting reunion and emancipation, they could resume their old places; a victorious government would exact neither revenge nor punishment. Here Mr. Lincoln was expressing his own faith, which included the belief that he could control the radical Republicans, whose support was essential to him and who were beginning to articulate a murky faith of their own. This faith was based on the argument that secession had been effective even though it was both illegal and short-lived. The act of secession (they held) had destroyed the states that subscribed to it; once beaten, these states would simply be conquered territory, to be disposed of as the victors saw fit, and they could not resume their old places because those places no longer existed.

Out of this faith could come nothing better than a peace of desolation, which was unlikely to be worth as much as it would cost. Mr. Lincoln was trying to head it off, and S. L. M. Barlow's correspondent Barnett got a foggy glimpse of his purpose and wrote, after Gettysburg, that "the President has
words
for the ultras and
acts
for the more conservative." To a limited extent, Barnett was right. The ultras were dreaming of vengeance, and a few months later (when the likelihood of Southern defeat was beginning to be clearer) Attorney General Bates wrote to Francis Lieber, the emigre German political scientist, to denounce their "pestilent doctrines" and to confess his dismay: "When the public cauldron is heated into violent ebulition, it is sure to throw up from the bottom of society some of its dirtiest dregs, which, but for the heat and agitation, would have lain embedded in congenital filth in the lowest stratum of society. But once boiled up to the top they expand into foam and froth, dance frantically before the gaping crowd, often concealing for a time the whole surface of the agitated mass. ... It is wonderful how, in times like these, the minds of men are made dizzy and their imaginations are wrought up to frenzy by the whirl of events."
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What was agitating the cauldron was the fact that the war could not now be ended by negotiation. Peace must follow victory, and although it was likely to take its shape from the things that were done in order to win victory, the victory nevertheless had to be gained; this was what stimulated the radicals, distressed Bates, and confused Barnett, who felt that the President was a conservative at heart. Late in August Mr. Lincoln tried to explain the situation in a letter prepared to be read at a Union mass meeting in Springfield, Illinois: a letter ostensibly addressed to the discontented Northern conservatives.

"You desire peace; and you blame me that we do not have it," Mr. Lincoln wrote. "But how can we attain it? There are but three conceivable ways. First, to suppress the rebellion by force of arms. This I am trying to do. Are you for it? If you are, so far we are agreed. If you are not for it, a second way is to give up the Union. I am against this. Are you for it? If you are, you should say so plainly. If you are not for
force,
nor yet for
dissolution,
there only remains some imaginable
compromise.
I do not believe any compromise, embracing the maintenance of the Union, is now possible. All I learn leads to* a directly opposite belief."

The trouble of course was that the use of force had led to the Emancipation Proclamation, and many conservative men willing to fight for re-union were not willing to fight for the Negro. For such men the President had this answer:

"I issued the proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union. Whenever you shall have conquered all resistance to the Union, if I shall urge you to continue fighting, it will be an apt time, then, for you to declare that you will not fight to free Negroes." Meanwhile: "Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time."
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Here of course was the rub. In order to win, Mr. Lincoln needed the help of the very men who were calling for the kind of peace that might not be worth keeping in all future time: they at least were willing to fight for the Negro, and Mr. Lincoln's conviction that this was his fight too was the point Barnett had missed. Later in the fall, when he was preparing to tell the Congress just what he meant about amnesty and reconstruction, Mr. Lincoln expressed himself in a letter to General Schofield in Missouri, where it seemed likely that the radical Republicans would win the next election. The President remarked that he was willing to see the radicals win, going on to explain: "They are nearer to me than the other side, in thought and sentiment, though bitterly hostile personally. They are utterly Iawless
^:
—the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with—but after all their faces are set Zion-wards."
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The road to Zion was unmapped and poorly lighted, and to follow it with the utterly lawless was perhaps to take a long chance. But the President was determined to go there, and if these lawless ones were the only available companions he would go with them. They at least kept moving. They had undying energy, and they shared with their enemies to the south the belief that it was essential to fight without a letup until the foe was broken. They were unhandy devils, earning hatred and distrust and giving hatred and distrust in return, but they were also most useful and in the end their help would be essential. The Federal war effort tended to go spasmodically, with fatigue and indecision enforcing long pauses between strokes; it was pausing now, in the wake of the Vicksburg-Gettysburg victories, and it actually seemed to be the Confederates who had the true spirit of war.

There was some sort of significance, for instance, in the startling exploit of a young Southern naval officer, Lieutenant Charles W. Read, who put to sea in the spring commanding the armed brig
Clarence,
with 120 men and one gun, to go commerce raiding off the Virginia capes. In three weeks he took twenty-one Yankee merchantmen, including one vessel carrying arms and clothing from New York to that famous source of Confederate supplies, the Mexican port of Matamoros. The shipping community cried out in agony and the United States Navy took off in pursuit, fatally handicapped by the fact that it did not know what it was looking for. Lieutenant Read had a way of shifting his command from one vessel to another; he transferred to the captured bark
Tacony,
burning his own brig, and after a time he burned
Tacony
and resumed his cruise in the captured schooner
Archer,
and he sailed north to the New England coast with Mr. Welles' cruisers utterly baffled. Presently Lieutenant Read sailed boldly into the harbor of Portland, Maine, and at night he boarded and captured the revenue cutter
Caleb Gushing,
in which he put to sea for more adventures. He was at last caught and overpowered by a makeshift Federal squadron out of Portland, being unable to stand and fight because he could not find where
Cushing's
former crew had stored the cutter's ammunition; and although his whole venture had really brought the South no closer to final victory it had been highly embarrassing to the United States Navy and to Mr. Lincoln's administration. It was not exactly important, but it was significant.
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