Never Call Retreat (42 page)

In short, 1863 was not 1862 . . . Lee could not advance, and it was pointless to stay where he was, and so he brought his army back, skirmishing and sparring along the way. He made a stand on the Rappahannock River, at last, planning to remain there, but the aggressive Federals wrenched a bridgehead away from him, and finally he returned to the old position behind the Rapidan. The campaign had lasted a month, and at its close things were about as they had been when it began—except that Lee had been compelled to realize that his army now was too weak to carry the war to the enemy. Nobody knew it then, but the Army of Northern Virginia had made its last offensive campaign.

If not the offensive, then the defensive. Late in November Meade moved out to try what three could do against two, and he got down past Lee's right, crossed the Rapidan and went on into the eastern fringe of the Wilderness in the hope that he could crush Ewell's corps before the rest of Lee's army could come to its rescue. Meade's general plan was excellent, but it called for movement by several columns, and one of these was headed by French and the III Corps. French took a wrong turn at a crossroads, and then let one of Ewell's divisions delay him for a day, and the whole movement was thrown off schedule. Lee moved over to meet this thrust and posted his army behind a little brook known as Mine Run. Meade ordered an assault on the center of this line, but he quickly changed his mind when Major General G. K. Warren of the II Corps assured him that it would be possible, on Warren's front, to overwhelm the Confederate right. Meade gave Warren powerful reinforcements and told him to make the assault. But he got no fight at all because Warren, after a day's delay, took a fresh look in the cold dawn of November 30, considered Lee's lines too strong and canceled the attack. No other openings appeared, and the Army of the Potomac, humiliated but not hurt very much, went back to its old camp; and presently both armies went into winter quarters.
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By putting on blinders and looking resolutely at nothing but the area between Richmond and Washington, it was possible to argue that the Confederacy was as well off at the year's end as it had been at the beginning. The rival armies had neither advanced nor retreated: all the might the Federals could bring to bear here had gained nothing at all, and the fiasco at Mine Run was significant—"Forward to Richmond" always meant either a bloody beating or a shameful fumble for the invaders.

But nobody could wear blinders now, neither the President nor the ordinary thoughtful citizen. The war was not just what happened between Richmond and Washington, and although no Southerner was ready to think of the awful word, Defeat, it was impossible to deny that the sky was getting darker. Looking back after the war, a Richmond woman remembered that fall as a time when "gloom pervaded our hearts," and said that there was no way to dispel it: "The fine weather, the bracing atmosphere, the delicious, dreamy influence of the Indian summer, could not chase from our doors the dread phantom that lurked on the threshold— could not drive from the dark closet the skeleton of the house."
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When Mr. Davis addressed the Congress on December 7 he tried, as in duty bound, to put a good face on things, but his speech was somber.

It could hardly be anything else. The government was almost bankrupt, with an inflated currency and a grossly inadequate tax system; it had no foreign affairs worth mentioning, the kingdoms of the earth having apparently concluded that this was no nation but simply a revolted province that would eventually be brought back to its old condition; and during the year cities, states, rivers, and armies had been lost, so that in the time just ahead a larger burden would have to be borne by a strength that had been diminished. To meet this, Mr. Davis called on his people to be steadfast, and to realize that the men who controlled the government at Washington were demanding nothing short of complete submission.

"They refused," he cried, "even to listen to proposals for the only peace possible between us—a peace which, recognizing the impassable gulf which divides us, may leave the two peoples separately to recover from the injuries inflicted on both by the causeless war now being waged against us." It was necessary therefore to talk the one language that could be understood, the language of military force: "We now know that the only reliable hope for peace is in the vigor of our resistance."

The Richmond
Examiner,
which rarely found itself on Mr. Davis' side, was with him all the way when it came to demanding bitter-end defiance of the malevolent Yankee, and its editor shaped one sentence that summed up the world which Confederate President and people had to live in at the close of 1863: "Our sole policy and cunningest diplomacy is fighting; our most insinuating negotiator is the Confederate army in line of battle."
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This stated the case accurately, but it was also a cruel statement of ruinous limitations. A later generation would criticize Mr. Davis for being too engrossed by purely military problems, but he was a man beset. The terrible gulf he was talking about did exist, because men believed that it did, and the Confederate nation was alone on the far side of it. To build a bridge that would reach across the gulf to the future was beyond him. There was only the army, drawn up in line of battle; the army, and the hope that out of dwindling resources it could be made strong enough to keep the battle line from breaking.

2.
Eloquence at Gettysburg

MR. DAVIS believed that the gulf was impassable; Mr. Lincoln believed that it did not really exist. His refusal to admit that there were two countries was as firm as Mr. Davis' insistence that there could never be anything but two, and although the war was a fearful destroyer—of young men, of wealth, of the certainties the nation used to live by—Mr. Lincoln was compelled to see it as an instrument of continued growth. It was necessary for him to believe that when the war ended there would be one country, big enough now both for those who had fought to save it and those who had fought to divide it. Believing this, and trying to make victory certain, he had greatly raised the stakes; unless what he had done was to be disowned, the nation must eventually be big enough for everybody who lived in it, for master and servant as well as for friend and foe, claiming the loyalty of all men because it recognized all men as equals. Political unity based on acceptance of the fundamental unity of human beings would be unbreakable; it was also, at the moment, almost unimaginable.

The dread of equality was one of the things that had destroyed unity in the first place. When the President proclaimed the emancipation of slaves he had made it impossible for the Southern leadership to accept reunion, and he had disturbed many people in the North as well. The proclamation was a commitment to the future, of almost unlimited scope. In the war that had called it forth the past was breaking up, and a thing done to win the war had to be at the same time a thing done to help shape the future.

It was useless for the President to insist—as he did insist, over and over—that everything he did was done solely to bring military victory. When Secretary Chase urged him to broaden the Emancipation Proclamation he refused, saying that the proclamation "has no constitutional or legal justification except as a military measure," and that to extend it without direct military necessity would put him "in the boundless field of absolutism"; and yet the proclamation meant much more than battles won and everybody knew it, and Mr. Chase voiced the belief that unless people recovered from their infatuated confidence in Mr. Lincoln the country was done for.
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One of the first men to discover where the President's thinking was taking him was General Banks, in New Orleans.

Mr. Lincoln was going to try an experiment. He wanted to begin to rebuild the Union before the fighting stopped, and he had a plan that would be tested in Louisiana. Under this plan, if one-tenth of the qualified voters in the state would take the loyalty oath, abjuring secession and all of its works and specifically accepting the death of slavery, any state government they formed would be recognized and defended in Washington; legally, Louisiana would be back in the Union, with its own executive, courts and Congressional representation, and there would be amnesty (with certain stipulated exceptions) for all, including the non-jurant majority.
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The first question to arise, naturally, was what this new, war-born state government would be expected to do about emancipation, and when he wrote about this to Banks the

President ranged far ahead of military victory and reflected on the distant future. It would be best, he said, if Louisiana would draft a constitution recognizing the Emancipation Proclamation, and adopting emancipation in those parts of the state not covered by the proclamation; but there was more to it than that, and he tried to make it clear.

"And while she is at it," wrote Mr. Lincoln, "I think it would not be objectionable for her to adopt some practical system by which the two races could gradually live themselves out of their old relation to each other, and both come out better prepared for the new."

Apparently it was hard to define it better than that—as a matter of fact, in a century to come a better definition would not be found—and Mr. Lincoln felt strongly that "education for the young blacks" ought to be included in the plan. He considered, too, that the self-interest of the owning class might be appealed to: "As an anti-slavery man I have a motive to desire emancipation which pro-slavery men do not have; but even they have strong enough reason to thus place themselves under the shield of the Union ... to hedge against the recurrence of the scenes through which we are now passing."

As an old-time statehouse politician Mr. Lincoln knew the tricks political conventions are capable of, and later in the fall he warned General Banks (an old-time statehouse man himself) that no sharp practices would be allowed: "If a few professedly loyal men shall draw the disloyal about them and colorably set up a state government, repudiating the Emancipation Proclamation and re-establishing slavery, I cannot recognize or sustain their work." There could be no return to the Union, in other words, without the destruction of slavery; yet the President was prepared to be reasonable in regard to gradual emancipation provided always that the gradualists were honest.

"I have said and say again," he wrote, "that if a new state government, acting in harmony with this government and consistently with general freedom, shall think best to adopt a reasonable temporary arrangement in relation to the landless and homeless freed people, I do not object; but my word is out to be
for
and not
against
them on the question of their permanent freedom."
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Embedded in the thinking of many Americans was the conviction that these landless and homeless ones were natural inferiors who would always need guidance and restraint. Almost everyone had a little of this feeling; some were full of it, and showed prejudice in its most graceless form. Early in August one John McMahon, from the north woods of Pennsylvania, sent President Lincoln a telegram of protest:

EQUAL RIGHTS & JUSTICE TO ALL MEN IN THE UNITED STATES FOREVER. WHITE MEN IS IN CLASS NUMBER ONE & BLACK MEN IS IN CLASS NUMBER TWO & MUST BE GOVERNED BY WHITE MEN FOREVER. Secretary John Nicolay wrote a reply whose phrasing clearly came from Mr. Lincoln. After reporting that the President had received this telegram and was meditating on it, Nicolay wrote: "As it is my business to assist him whenever I can, I will thank you to inform me, for his use, whether you are either a white man or a black one, because in either case you cannot be regarded as an entirely impartial judge. It may be that you belong to a third or fourth class of
yellow
or
red
men, in which case the impartiality of your judgment would be more apparent."
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How this sat with John McMahon is not recorded, but the man had merely said bluntly what other men put in smoother terms. Belief in the inevitability of emancipation was growing, but many of the believers refused to admit that the death of slavery should mean any genuine change in the levels on which the two races lived. Near the end of the year Montgomery Blair, Postmaster General and a faithful leader of border state Republicans, wrote to Democrat Barlow insisting that no such change was necessary. It was absurd, Blair said, for Barlow or any other man to think that the war could possibly end without the destruction of slavery; but there was abundant room for Republicans and Democrats (including the presently embattled Democrats of the deep South) to join hands against the abolitionists "in sustaining this exclusive right of government in the white race." This was little less than John McMahon had been rebuked for saying, but no Presidential secretary asked Blair if he happened to be Chinese or Indian; after all, he was a member of the cabinet, and of The Blair Family to boot, and besides he was stoutly insistent that men who still thought slavery could be kept alive were fools. A few days later he sent Barlow an edged warning for conservative Democrats: "Carlyle tracing the growing disorders of the French Revolution to the obstinate adherence to the past which characterized the noblesse who surrounded poor Louis—says in his quaint way, 'A political party that knows not
-when it is beaten
may become one of the fatalest things to itself & to all.' "
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Change was coming down the wind, as Blair saw it, but if moderate men rallied it need not be revolutionary change.

It was going to look revolutionary, simply because so many people took it for granted that the Negro was different— a man against whom one could of course commit a crime but on whom it was hardly possible to inflict a real injustice inasmuch as injustice was his natural lot. There was, for example, a young Union cavalryman whose squadron this fall was sent out on a foraging expedition near Brandy Station, Virginia, to collect lumber, cattle and other items. He wrote to his wife, telling how they had looted a fine plantation house, and he was disturbed by what had been done: "Bureaus were overhauled, and all they contained stolen or destroyed. Book cases were pillaged or tipped over; furniture smashed or stolen; crockery broken to pieces; mirrors stolen or broken ... it sickened me to look on." Then, virtuously, he added: "I did nothing in the way of sacking the house. I was busy tearing down Negro huts to get the lumber. That was not destroying property needlessly; it was only getting stuff to make officers comfortable."
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