Never Call Retreat (69 page)
The worst experience on earth could be remembered that way, with a still-youthful veteran dreaming about foes meeting under two flags and one all-embracing sky. No civil war ever ended quite like this. The men who lost at the Boyne or at Culloden did not write memoirs in this vein.
6. To the Dark Indefinite Shore
IT BEGAN WITH one act of madness and it ended with another. John Brown heard history's clock strike in the night and tried to hurry the dawn along with gunfire; now John Wilkes Booth heard the clock strike, and he tried with gunfire to restore the darkness. Each man stood outside the human community, directed by voices the sane do not hear, and each kept history from going logically. Brown, the Old Testament prophet gone wrong, wrote that the crimes of a guilty land must be washed out with blood, and in the bloodshed he evoked the nation learned that some things cannot be washed out that way. Booth, the actor who played for an audience that lived far back in the shadows, wrote that America was forever ordained to be the white man's country, leaving his fellows to reflect that the Negro also had become an American. The line from Harper's Ferry to Ford's Theater is a red thread binding the immense disorder of the Civil War into an irrational sort of coherence.
On Good Friday, April 14, Abraham Lincoln told his cabinet a haunting story. Something big was about to happen, he said, because he had a dream that always came just before some great event. He had had it before the firing on Fort Sumter, before the battles of Bull Run, before Antietam and Stone's River and Gettysburg and Vicksburg; once in a while, for this man, the sky failed to touch the horizon and he saw moving shapes, off beyond.
Naturally enough, the ministers asked what the dream was, and Gideon Welles wrote it down. Mr. Lincoln said that "he seemed to be in a singular, indescribable vessel . . . and that he was moving with great rapidity toward a dark and indefinite shore." No one could read this riddle, but the President was sure it meant good news: doubtless Joe Johnston was about to surrender to General Sherman. General Grant, who attended this meeting, remarked tartly that as far as he could see Stone's River had not been good news for anybody, but the President was undisturbed; this dream was an omen and it must mean news from Sherman because he could think of no other place big news was apt to come from right now.
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That night Mr. Lincoln went to see
Our American Cousin
at Ford's Theater, and Booth shot him to death.
He died, as they say, in his hour of triumph; an accurate saying, if triumph on the battlefield expresses the whole meaning of the Civil War. He had returned to Washington in time to hear the city come crashing awake on the morning of April 10, when a 500-gun salute announced Lee's surrender, broke windows in Lafayette Square and sent government clerks and everybody else out to parade and sing and cheer in the rain. That night a crowd came to the White House with brass bands, demanding some word from the President. When at last he came to the window to make a bow he said that tonight he could say nothing—except to ask that the bands play "Dixie," which he considered a good tune, a fair prize of war—but he suggested that if people wanted to come back the next evening he might make a speech. So on the night of April 11 a crowd gathered on the White House lawn. It was misty, with candles burning in every window, transparencies shining along the avenues, the white dome of the capitol all illuminated, gleaming in the wet darkness like a high cloud touched by faraway sunrise. When the President at last appeared there was a tremendous cheer, and Correspondent Noah Brooks felt that "there was something terrible" in the enthusiasm the people displayed.
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They did not get the kind of speech they wanted. This was a night for celebration; the people who had come here wanted to fire guns, and shout, and hear the eagle scream, so that they could spend themselves in the happy thought that the rebellion had been put down and all troubles were over. What they got was a sober, unemotional talk about the job that lay ahead of them—the job of building a new union and a new freedom that would be great enough for all the generations of men. They wanted to hear about victory, and the President made them attend a seminar on reconstruction.
Specifically, Mr. Lincoln talked about Louisiana.
Here the fabulous ten percent plan was being tried. Twelve thousand citizens had adopted a new state government and a new constitution, and the state thus rebuilt wanted to resume its place in the Union. Congress had refused to seat the new Louisiana legislators, and Mr. Lincoln felt that Congress was making a mistake. He did not think that the program adopted in Louisiana was the only possible plan for reconstruction, nor did he think it was necessarily the best plan, but at least it was a start, and he enumerated its advantages:
"Some twelve thousand voters in the heretofore slave state of Louisiana have sworn allegiance to the Union, assumed to be the rightful political power of the state, held elections, organized a state government, adopted a free-state constitution, giving the benefit of public schools equally to black and white and empowering the Legislature to confer the elective franchise upon the colored man. Their Legislature has already voted to ratify the Constitutional amendment recently passed by Congress, abolishing slavery throughout the nation. These twelve thousand persons are thus fully committed to the Union, and to perpetual freedom in the state—committed to the very things, and nearly all the things, the nation wants —and they ask the nation's recognition and its assistance to make good their committal."
Admittedly there were flaws in the plan. It would be better if many times 12,000 had supported the new organization; better too if the franchise had been given outright to at least some former slaves—to "the very intelligent," and to those who had served in the army. But to reject the plan would be risky: "We in effect say to the white man, 'You are worthless, or worse—we will neither help you nor be helped by you.' To the blacks we say, 'This cup of liberty which these, your old masters, hold to your lips, we will dash from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when, where and how.' If this course, discouraging and paralyzing both white and black, has any tendency to bring Louisiana into proper practical relations with the Union, I have so far been unable to perceive it."
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It was Abraham Lincoln's last speech, and it struck no sparks; and yet under his labored exposition of the uninspiring Louisiana plan his vision of the future was clear enough if men made giddy by victory achieved could stop to think about it. He wanted to do two things at once, each of them extraordinarily difficult. The millions of Southerners who had tried so hard to leave the Union must somehow be brought back into the old relationship, welcomed rather than coerced, themselves rebuilding the shattered house until reconciliation was complete. Along with this, the Negro must have complete freedom and membership in the American community, he must be brought along as fast as possible to full citizenship, and—hardest of all—much of this must be done by the very society that had formerly held him in slavery, with the understanding and approval of the people who had beaten that society into helplessness. Both reunion and liberty were to be total and indivisible. Mr. Lincoln was proposing reconstruction, not just of the broken South but of America itself.
Characteristically, he was making tentative approaches, and his first experiments had not gone well. The Louisiana plan was in trouble, the cabinet had refused to agree that the South should be paid for its loss of human property, and shortly before his death he saw that his plan for making limited and informal use of the Virginia legislature was not going to work. Not only was the cabinet opposed; in Richmond, Justice Campbell was pushing the plan in a way neither the Republican leadership nor Mr. Lincoln himself could accept. Campbell was saying that there could be an armistice while the Federal government and the Southern state legislatures held "a very grave, important and patient inquiry" into the terms of reunion; among the things to be inquired into, as Campbell saw it, was the basic question of whether anything in particular needed to be done about slavery. This was too much for the President, and it would certainly be a great deal too much for the cabinet and Congress, and so on April 12 Mr. Lincoln ordered General Weitzel not to permit the proposed meeting of the gentlemen who had been acting as the Virginia legislature.
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He would have to make a new approach; and as he always did in such cases Mr. Lincoln sparred for time. At the haunted cabinet meeting on Good Friday he listened to a proposal from Secretary Stanton, providing for military government in the Southern states with a methodical re-establishment of post offices, Federal courts, revenue and customs offices and the like; self-government would follow afterward, and the whole question of Negro suffrage was left for later consideration. To this plan Mr. Lincoln expressed a guarded, tentative approval, and he asked the cabinet members to study the matter and present their comments at the next cabinet meeting—Tuesday, April 18. He indicated that it would be well to get some plan into operation fairly soon, so that the reconstructed state governments could be in full operation when Congress convened in December. As Secretary Welles remembered it, the President said that there were men in Congress whose motives were good but who "had a feeling of hate and vindictiveness in which he could not participate." These, to be sure, were the radical Republicans—the men who, as he had said, were most unhandy devils to deal with, but still men whose faces were set toward Zion: "nearer to me than the other side, in thought and sentiment, though bitterly hostile personally."
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That was the point. The radicals would attack him but they would also work with him—in the end because he and they wanted to reach the same goal. (People bound for Zion almost always have trouble with their fellows along the way.) It had been so during the war, and it could have been so after the war. The fury with which the radicals eventually destroyed Andrew Johnson came chiefly because Johnson was interested in just half of the Lincoln program, the half that the radicals would accept only if a new deal for the Negro came with it. They had their full share of hate and vindictive-ness, to be sure, but they were also passionately interested in freedom, sharing with Edward Bates the belief that if the Negro was freed at all he was freed completely and must share in all of the safeguards which the Constitution provides for free Americans.
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This spring they were watching Abraham Lincoln with much suspicion, tormented by the old myth that he was too weak to take a firm stand, fearful lest the Negro be sacrificed in the interests of an easy peace; and yet there was no impassable gulf between their position and his. In thought and sentiment they were near to him.
No one will ever know what Abraham Lincoln would have done—with Stanton's scheme for military government, with radicals like Wade and Sumner and Stevens, with any of the separate aspects of the intricate problem that lay ahead— because it was at this delicate moment (about half-past ten on the night of April 14) that Booth came on stage with his derringer. Booth pulled the trigger, and the mind that held somewhere in cloudy solution the elements that might some day have crystallized into an answer for the nation's most profound riddle disintegrated under the impact of a one-ounce pellet of lead: the heaviest bullet, all things considered, ever fired in America. Thinking to destroy a tyrant, Booth managed to destroy a man who was trying to create a broader freedom for all men; with him, he destroyed also the chance for a transcendent peace made without malice and with charity for all. Over the years, many people paid a high price for this moment of violence.
With Lincoln gone, other men had to go about the job of closing out the war and creating a peace. One of these was Andrew Johnson, unluckiest of politicians, still living down the sorry spectacle born of ill health and whiskey when he took the oath of office; somewhat dazed, now, able for the immediate present to do no more than assure callers that treason must be made odious and that the martyred President's program would be carried out, while Secretary
Stanton reigned as temporary dictator. Another was General Sherman, who tried earnestly to do what Lincoln would have wanted him to do, misunderstood what that might be, and blundered into a short-lived peace treaty with Joe Johnston that aroused the worst suspicions of all of the radicals.
It was strange, about Sherman. He was the worst the South had to fear, the man who had burned his way across Georgia and South Carolina exulting in destruction, brutal and ruthless and wholly without compassion: emerging suddenly as an advocate of the softest peace, giving to the defeated Confederates so much more than Lincoln himself was willing to give that he almost wrecked his own career. Grant was praised for magnanimity because he let Lee's soldiers keep their side-arms and their horses: Sherman seemed willing to let the men who surrendered to him—all Confederate soldiers from Carolina to the Rio Grande, as he and Johnston set it up—keep everything but complete independence. Stanton's anger when he heard about it was matched only by Sherman's anger when he learned what Stanton was saying about him.
From the day he took command in North Carolina, Joe Johnston felt that his principal duty was to make a decent peace. He fought his last battle on March 19, attacking a wing of Sherman's army at Bentonville in a vain attempt to win a victory before Schofield came up, and after this fight he found himself obliged to withdraw to the region of Raleigh and await developments. By the first week in April he had about 18,000 effective infantry; Sherman and Schofield, united now, had more than 80,000, and when he learned of Lee's surrender Johnston was convinced that it was time to quit. On April 12 he saw President Davis at Greensboro and told him frankly that "it would be the greatest of human crimes for us to continue the war," adding that the President should "exercise at once the only function of government still in his possession and open negotiations for peace." When the harassed President explained that the Federals would not recognize his authority to negotiate Johnston blandly pointed out that his military commanders could do it for him . . . and won permission to write to General Sherman.
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