Upon the Altar of the Nation (36 page)

id Deming, chief correspondent of the Associated Press, was arrested for breaking the gag and removed to Washington for his printed account of plummeting morale in the army. It did not help Deming that he was a champion of McClellan and an enemy of Halleck. To blunt criticisms of Lincoln for adopting a suicidal total-war strategy, Burnside issued a public apology to the Associated Press, taking sole responsibility for the debacle.
¹¹

While quick to criticize Northern leadership for the defeat at Fredericksburg, no public commentators remarked on the level of slaughter. In fact, Lee’s lament came too late. The two nations had already grown far too fond of war to give up on it anytime soon. The infantry of patriotism, reinforced with the artillery of mounting hatred, rendered both sides mindless killing machines bent on destruction.

One Confederate chaplain wrote in the
Central Presbyterian:
“We should add to the prayer for peace, let this war continue, if we are not yet so humbled and disciplined by its trials, as to be prepared for those glorious moral and spiritual gifts, which Thou designest it should confer upon us as a people, and upon the Church of Christ in the Confederacy, and upon mankind.”
¹²

 

Meanwhile, in the days following Fredericksburg, Burnside’s public acceptance of blame reaped a whirlwind of public rage in the press and in the War Department. Again, Lincoln faced the prospects of incompetent command and mounting criticism at home. A scathing cartoon in the
New York Illustrated News
depicted Secretary of War Stanton and Lincoln garbed in country dresses with the caption: “This is old mother Lincoln explaining to old mother Stanton how the slaughter of our troops at Fredericksburg reminds him of an anecdote he heard out west.”
¹³

From the trenches, James Gassner wrote to his mother:

Left out of this ordinary soldier’s perception from ground level was the tactical truism that McClellan would never have had to retreat because he would have never advanced.

Not all fatalities were on the battlefield. For Henry Joslin, a baker with the Union army, death came slowly by disease. In letters to his mother in January 1863, he described problems with scurvy that placed him on light duty. By February he asked for a furlough to heal but was denied. In March he wrote his mother, “I have taken out a bunk in the hospital tent where I can have better care and rations then in the Co. quarters where I have been.” But it would not help. His final letter, written near Potomac Creek, Virginia, was a last-ditch plea for his mother’s help:

By the time his mother arrived, Henry Joslin, “soldier boy,” had died.

On December 22 Lincoln conferred in Washington with Burnside and congratulated the army for its bravery at Fredericksburg, publicly labeling the defeat an “accident.” Despite the good face, Lincoln was desperate for leadership that could expend lives but at the same time win victories.

W
hile the Army of the Potomac licked its wounds in the East, Lincoln’s eventual redeemers Grant and Sherman continued to tarnish their reputations in the West, both on and off the battlefield. In Grant’s case, criticism surrounded his infamous General Orders No. 11. Concerned over exploitative peddlers and speculators preying on Union camps, Grant pointed the finger at all Jews with the following order: “The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of the order.”
¹

Though never put into effect and eventually rescinded by Lincoln, the order did its damage. Grant added to the stigma of alcoholism the opprobrium of anti-Semitism. But neither of these dark marks dislodged Lincoln’s confidence in Grant’s military abilities. Given the way the war was going, a world of sins could be forgiven by one victory.

In Richmond, the
Daily Dispatch
exploited Grant’s attempted expulsion of Jews from his department as “all in keeping with the professed religious toleration of the puritans.” In contrast, they held up Judah Benjamin, their Jewish secretary of state, as an example of superior toleration. The paper went on to defend religious toleration as a sacred principle and blasted “Yankee historians” who traced intolerance back to the South.
²
The editors seemed to make a point of welcoming Jews and Catholics into the Southern tent as they published commentaries by rabbis and bishops who supported the Confederate cause.
³
They also explained how Irish Catholics were being duped into fighting for the North, and later defended the Jews when they were singled out in the war as extortionists.
⁴

At the same time, tolerance had its limits. Virtually all Confederates agreed that Northern-only movements such as Mormonism and Spiritualism did not deserve the term “religion.” Instead, these movements must be viewed as evil outgrowths of a deeply rooted, Puritan-derived fanaticism that had taken a religious form.
⁵
The
Richmond Daily Dispatch
printed a letter on “Thoughts for Soldiers” that contrasted the piety of the Christian South to the heresies of the North: “Hence the materialism of Practical Phrenology, the irresponsibility from Mesmeric Influences, the ridiculous revelation of Mormonism to Joe Smith, the ascension robes of Millerism, the seven spheres of Spiritualism, etc.” Only secession could save the continent for Christ, “as the consequence of the foregoing God cut us off from the North, not only to save us from this contamination, but to save to the cause of Christ one branch of the church as yet unshaken. Mark! not for our merit, or because we were without fault, but as the Jews were often saved because ‘to them were committed the oracles of god.’ ”
⁶

On the battlefield, General Sherman suffered another ill-advised Federal defeat when he took an expedition down the Mississippi from Memphis to Chickasaw Bluffs north of Vicksburg. On December 29, in a movement reminiscent of Fredericksburg, he advanced on General John Clifford Pemberton’s well-entrenched forces and was soundly beaten back. Out of 31,000 effectives, Sherman lost 1,776 compared to only 207 Confederates.
⁷

 

Meanwhile, Confederate civilians continued to feel the brunt of battle in their home lives. Letters to the Confederate Treasury Department continued to overwhelm Secretary Christopher Gustavus Memminger. One particularly poignant appeal to President Davis came from Julia Williams of Petersburg, Virginia. Williams’s husband had been killed at Malvern Hill even as Yankee forces were destroying her home. Davis forwarded her appeal to Secretary Memminger with the note “widow of Lt. Williams killed at Malvern Hill.” Her story speaks for itself:

Behind the suffering lay a mounting fury that generated blood appetites that could not be satisfied. These sentiments found their most strident voice in the clergy and their calls for blood revenge. In a funeral sermon “for Lieutenant Abram Carrington of the CSA,” reprinted in the
Central Presbyterian
of Richmond, the firebrand Robert Dabney preached an incendiary sermon condemning the North for an “aggressive war,” which, in moral terms, “is wholesale murder.”

Lieutenant Carrington, a close friend of Dabney’s, had become the most recent victim of the conflict. After extolling Carrington’s courage at the battle of Frayser’s Farm on June 30, 1862, Dabney took aim at the hearts of his congregation’s young men:

The language of blood as a “precious libation” could not go unnoticed by Dabney’s young hearers as they prepared themselves for sacrifice.

 

The effect of joining emancipation and total war assumed an eerie confirmation when New Year’s Day newspapers presented coverage of both the Emancipation Proclamation and a frightful new battle with horrific casualties. This time the center of attention shifted to the western theater. There Confederate forces in retreat from Perryville, Kentucky, under the command of General Braxton Bragg, met advancing Federal forces under General William Rosecrans near the town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Both commanders were hot-tempered and eventually lost their commands, but not before clashing in a full-fledged bloodbath.

On December 31, forty-four thousand Yankees faced off against thirty-eight thousand rebels just west of Stones River. That night, with battle looming, the contending bands played their rival national tunes. Then in another poignant moment of American fellow feeling, both bands and armies joined together in singing “Home Sweet Home.” Two armies, one home. The next day they met in battle.

Ironically, both generals planned to attack the other’s right flank and get into his rear, cutting his army from its base.
¹⁰
General Rosecrans ordered his attack to start at daybreak after breakfast. But as at Shiloh, the Confederates caught the coffee-sipping Yankees by surprise. With a burst of bloodcurdling rebel yells, the Confederates advanced and drove the Federal right flank back three miles before they were finally stopped. A fierce holding action and counterattack by the young and extremely gifted General Philip Sheridan bought sufficient time for the Federals to regroup. In the course of a furious four-hour firefight, Sheridan lost one-third of his men and all of his brigade commanders. But the imperiled flank held, and with it Sheridan’s reputation.

By noon, the Union line had regrouped in a precarious position likened by military historians to a “jackknife with its blade nearly closed.” If the Confederates could break the Federal line anywhere along the Nashville turnpike, the blade would snap shut and the Union army would be destroyed.
¹¹
The crucial angle where the blade joined the handle lay in a four-acre oak grove named Round Forest, but which the soldiers would rename “Hell’s Half Acre.” Confederate corps commander and former Episcopal bishop Leonidas Polk ordered his Mississippi rebels to charge across an open field to attack the Round Forest.