Never Call Retreat (70 page)

So Johnston and Sherman met in a little cabin near Durham Station, North Carolina, on April 17. As soldiers, they respected each other—-they had indeed developed an odd sort of mutual liking, although they had not met before—and when Johnston admitted that his military position was hopeless, Sherman confessed that "to push an army whose commander had so frankly and honestly confessed his inability to cope with me were cowardly and unworthy the brave men I led." Both generals were worried that the end of organized Confederate resistance would bring guerrilla warfare and general disorder, and instead of talking about Johnston's surrender they presently began to discuss an all-embracing settlement that would cover every armed Confederate everywhere. Sherman observed that Johnston had no authority over any army but his own, but Johnston said that could be fixed; not far away was General John C. Breckinridge, who two months earlier had replaced James A. Seddon as Confederate Secretary of War, and Breckinridge had power over all the armies. So the men met again on April 18, this time with Breckinridge present, and out of this came a strange document that undertook to settle everything.
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This document was entitled "A Memorandum or Basis of Agreement," and it contained several interesting items.

All Confederate armies (it said) were to go to their state capitals, disband, deposit their weapons in state arsenals and agree to cease from all acts of war and submit to Federal authority; the deposited weapons, pending action by the United States Congress, could be used "to maintain peace and order within the borders of the states." (This would take care of guerrillas and marauders.) State governments would be recognized as soon as state officers took the oath of allegiance to the Constitution of the United States, Federal courts would be re-established, and Southerners would be guaranteed "their political rights and franchises, as well as their rights of person and property, as defined by the Constitution of the United States and of the states, respectively." There would be amnesty for everyone, with an armistice while the word got around; and as a final note Johnston and Sherman admitted that they had not been empowered to sign any such agreement as this but promised "to promptly obtain the necessary authority and to carry out the above program."

Thus the generals, inept but well-intentioned, tried to arrange things so that the nation could live at peace; fighting men have made worse mistakes, and have shown less humanity making them. . . . Sherman sent the document to

Grant by courier, with a letter explaining that this was total victory: it made peace, restored the Union and settled the problem of guerrilla warfare, and "if you can get the President to simply indorse the copy and commission me to carry out the terms, I will follow them to the conclusion."
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Sherman is rarely called an innocent, but no other word applies here. Rushing in where no reasonably sophisticated angel would dare to tread, he had composed and signed something that practically recognized the Confederacy, took reconstruction entirely out of the hands of President and Congress, left the South fully armed and cast grave doubt on the validity of emancipation; every line of it written with the purest motives a man could have. Grant realized that it was all wrong the moment he saw it, and hurried to show it to Secretary Stanton; and on the night of April 21 President Johnson and the cabinet unhesitatingly rejected the agreement and sent Grant off to Raleigh to break the news to Sherman. The armistice must be canceled and Johnston must be called on to surrender on exactly the terms that had been given Lee.

Sherman was not badly surprised, some remnant of practical judgment having warned him, apparently, that what he and Johnston had done would be too much for the War Department. Grant was tactful, keeping his visit as nearly secret as possible so that Sherman's soldiers would not realize that their general had been overruled by the general-in-chief in person; Sherman obeyed orders cheerfully, Johnston was summoned to a new conference, and on April 26 he and Sherman signed terms duplicating those signed at Appomattox. What infuriated Sherman was his discovery, shortly after this, that Stanton had made a merciless public attack on him, saying that Sherman had willfully violated President Lincoln's orders, implying that he had granted an armistice in order to let Jefferson Davis escape, and stopping just short of accusing him of actual disloyalty. With public statements and an unofficial prodding of news correspondents, Stanton had opened a campaign that seemed designed to drive Sherman out of public life altogether.
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This, as a matter of fact, it never came close to doing, and it was not what Stanton really had in mind. The Northern public had no sooner digested this attack than it learned that Joe Johnston had surrendered all over again, giving up 39,000 soldiers and closing out the war everywhere except along the Gulf Coast and beyond the Mississippi, and it was hard to feel hostile toward the soldier who had forced this development. Sherman was a popular hero in the North anyway, and although Stanton's attack aroused Sherman's undying hatred it accomplished no more . . . except that it served notice on one and all that reconstruction was not to be hurried for the sake of an easy solution, which probably is just what it was meant to do in the first place.

Sherman had stumbled onto a fact that was basic to everything that happened in the reconstruction period.

Once such soldiers as Lee and Johnston formally accepted military defeat, there would be amazingly little trouble in getting the seceded states to reaccept the Union—provided that these states were allowed to interpret emancipation and Negro rights in their own way. The dream of an independent Southern nation was fading rapidly, and what was left of it could spiral off into Lost Cause romanticism without ever again being a real problem to anyone; what remained, however, touched with no romanticism whatever, was the determination that the Negro, slave or free, must stay just about where he was and must on no account be given any real control over his own destiny. On this point the reserves of resistance were all but inexhaustible. Sherman warned Chief Justice Chase that to assert political equality for the Negro might "rekindle the war" on a bloodier and more destructive basis than ever. At about this time General Oliver Otis Howard was made head of the new Freedman's Bureau, which was supposed to see to it that the former slave got fair treatment all along the line, and Sherman advised him that there was no sense in going to extremes about it. To provide votes for the Negro, for instance, was to court grave danger: "If that be attempted, we arouse a new and dangerous element, prejudice, which, right or wrong, does exist and should be consulted. . . . As we have just emerged from one attempted revolution it would be wrong to begin another."
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. . . possibly wrong; and unquestionably much more trouble than most people were prepared to take now. There was not going to be a second revolution. Practical men were going to agree that although prejudice must be deplored it must also be consulted, and as Montgomery Blair had predicted a year earlier, once good conservatives everywhere recognized their common interests the high fever of radicalism would subside. Lincoln was dead, and no one else could arouse the terrible enthusiasm that he aroused, or make sensible use of what remained of it. For that matter, Lee was a soldier no longer and the terrible enthusiasm he had evoked was not transferable, either; perhaps men everywhere had used all of the enthusiasm they had, for a time, and instead of trying to think what the war meant were content simply to know that it had stopped.

It came to its close swiftly, once the Northern President and the two great Southern armies died. Mr. Davis clung valiantly to what remained of his position, and even after Johnston's surrender he hoped that somewhere to the west a formal center of organized resistance to Federal conquest could be kept alive. As long as he and his cabinet were together, the Confederacy had a capital: if only it could be planted somewhere. It could not; and as the presidential party flitted south, across the Carolinas and down into Georgia, the most anyone dared to hope was that President Davis could get to some safe place where Federal vengeance could not reach him. It was probably just as well that Secretary Stanton never heard the story that was current around Mr. Davis' headquarters just now. At the conference with Johnston, it was said, Sherman had quietly told Secretary Breckinridge that he would provide a ship if Mr. Davis wanted to leave the country, guaranteeing safe passage to some foreign land for Mr. Davis and his family and their effects. Postmaster General John Reagan said long afterward that Mr. Davis rejected the offer, both because he did not want to be under obligations to any Yankee and because he refused to leave "Confederate soil" while a single Confederate regiment remained under arms.
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But Confederate soil had shrunk to almost nothing, and by the end of the first week in May there was not an armed Confederate regiment within six hundred miles. No valid reason for flight existed, except the desire to leave the stage with dignity, which Mr. Davis tried his best to do. Fate was unkind to him, when Yankee cavalry at last overtook him and captured him near Irwinville, Georgia, on May 10. The cavalry swooped down on his camp in a rainy dawn, Mr. Davis snatched up a waterproof and a shawl as he left his tent, when he was taken the garments turned out to be his wife's, and unfeeling Northerners chuckled over the story that the Confederate President had tried to escape disguised as a woman—much as they had chuckled four years earlier over the story that Abraham Lincoln had sneaked into Washington disguised in a Scotch cape and tam-o'-shanter. Sherman, by the way, had nothing to do with the capture. He never forgot how President Lincoln had said that he would be happy if Mr. Davis could get out of the country "unbeknownst to me," and he said contemptuously that if Stanton wanted this fugitive arrested he ought to turn the job over to some sheriff or bailiff because the United States Army had better things to do.
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Actually, Mr. Davis was taken by men who were technically under Sherman's command—James H. Wilson's men, outriders of the great cavalry corps George Thomas had sent swinging down from Tennessee early in the spring. They had beaten Bedford Forrest (at last!), had taken Selma and Montgomery in Alabama, and then had galloped eastward almost to the Atlantic, scooping up the Confederate President as their last act of war. Even before they did this, General Canby in southern Alabama had received the surrender of the last organized Confederate army east of the Mississippi, that of General Richard Taylor, and at the moment of Mr. Davis' capture nothing remained but the inert, unmanageable lost province of trans-Mississippi.

That did not last much longer. There was a final, lonely, meaningless little spatter of a fight on May 13, when a few hundred white and colored soldiers fought a handful of Confederates at Palmito Ranch on the Rio Grande near Brownsville, Texas, in the Civil War's last useless battle. Then Edmund Kirby Smith, frustrated viceroy of the trans-Mississippi, made the final act of surrender. On paper he had 40,000 soldiers, but in actual fact he had hardly anyone he could use for an effective campaign, he wrote that "I feel powerless to do good for my country, and humiliated by the acts of a people I was striving to benefit," and on May 26 he surrendered and the war was over.
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All over, finished forever, ready to be done up in veterans'-reunion music and oratory and lilacs-on-gravestones in a thousand village cemeteries, if it had been nothing more than tragedy and shared agony. Jefferson Davis was a prisoner in a casemate at Fort Monroe, dignity returning to him as he endured the malice of captors who still looked on him as a dangerous man. Sherman was in Washington for the grand review and the muster-out of the armies, regaining his own dignity by giving a ferocious public snub to Stanton. (General and Secretary were sworn enemies, each man believing that he knew how to carry out Lincoln's dream of an enduring peace, their enmity testifying to the fact that nobody knew how to do it.) At various places in the South there were occupation troops whose generals looked vainly for guidance, seeing their duties in different ways. In Raleigh, General Schofield protested that it was neither politic nor just to let the Negro advance too rapidly toward full citizenship; and, in Savannah, General Gillmore (who had had so much trouble trying to make a campaign under Ben Butler) notified the city authorities that if they proposed to reopen their schools they must provide classes, teachers and equal facilities for children who had been born in slavery.
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It began to seem that there had been neither clear-cut victory nor defeat, but that governors and governed were simply trying to live their way through a problem that was confusingly unsettled.

Something had been won; but it was nothing more, and at the same time nothing less, than a chance to make a new approach toward a goal that had to be reached if the war and the nation that had endured it had final meaning. The ship was moving through Lincoln's dream, toward a dark indefinite shore, it had a long way to go, and the sky contained no stars the ordinary mortal could see. All that was certain was that the voyage was under way.