Upon the Altar of the Nation (56 page)

B
y 1864 both North and South had acknowledged that generals stood as a breed apart, as “brilliant” in the business of killing as philosophers with ideas or painters on canvas. They stood as the warrior priests of America’s dawning civil religion, entrusted with making the sacrificial blood offerings that would incarnate the national faith. The generals joined Lincoln and Davis as subjects of songs. Given their respective changes in fortune, attention shifted from McClellan to Grant. One triumphant song sheet, “All Hail to Ulysses!” was printed with a lithographic portrait of Grant on the cover. The stanzas were reverential:

Chorus:

Likewise in the Confederacy, the “Beauregard Manassas Quickstep—A beautiful edition, with an accurate lithographic likeness of Gen. Beauregard” became a musical composition of choice.
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Virtually every issue of the
Southern Illustrated News
featured a lithograph and biographical sketch of Confederate generals. Not even defeat could dull their aura.

While the lauds were certainly extravagant and widely distributed, the actual number of truly great commanders was limited. By New Year’s =1864, Northern and Southern armies combined approached 1.5 million soldiers. On such a vast scale, commanding generals oversaw units that exceeded their entire armies of two years earlier.
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Battle decisions spanning troop deployments over miles had to be made in minutes, inevitably saving or destroying thousands of lives. In such battles, individuals mattered and one great commander was literally worth a corps.

General Meade’s aide, Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Lyman, a Harvard graduate and an “unpaid volunteer,” observed Meade and Grant and their corps commanders in their eastern campaigns and understood their rarity. “To be a good officer requires a good man,” Lyman noted. “Not one man in ten thousand is fit to command a brigade; he should be one who would be marked anywhere as a person (in that respect) of superior talent. Of good corps commanders I do not suppose there are ten in this country, after our three-years’ war. Of army commanders, two or three.”
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Few doubted the capacity of Stonewall Jackson or Robert E. Lee to command armies in the heat of battle. But no such persons had appeared in the North. Only in 1864 did Lincoln finally believe that he had found his own Lee in General Grant, and he promptly commissioned him general in chief of the Union armies.

On the evening of March 24, President Lincoln met Grant for the first time. The two plain-speaking midwesterners conferred at the White House. Grant’s mission was clear to both: “Get Lee.” Lincoln expressed frustration at the “procrastination on the part of [earlier] commanders,” and Grant assured him that he would “avoid as far as possible annoying him or the War Department.” Two days later Grant was back in Virginia, putting together “the plan” that would bring decisive Northern victory.

On the recommendation of Lincoln’s advisers—and Lincoln himself—Grant did not share his plans with Lincoln. The reason was simple. “He was so kind-hearted,” Grant would later recall, “so averse to refusing anything asked of him, that some friend would be sure to get from him all he knew.” For good measure, Grant also refused to share his plans with Secretary of War Stanton or Chief of Staff General Halleck, confirming just how autonomous commanding generals were.

While unwilling to hear Grant’s plan, Lincoln was only too eager to share his own military thoughts on the situation. According to Grant:

Grant’s presence in the field, meanwhile, compromised the authority of General Meade, the titular commander of the Army of the Potomac. It bespeaks all the more the quality of Grant’s leadership that the two worked hard to avoid a rupture. But Grant’s two most valuable warrior priests were not with the Army of the Potomac. One, the redeemed General Sherman, advanced to Grant’s former command in the West. The other, the youthful Irishman General Philip Sheridan, had command of the cavalry in the Shenandoah Valley and was already the stuff of legend.

Grant’s strategy was brutally simple. In the past, Union armies had operated independently, allowing Confederates to shift defenses to trouble spots as needed. Under Grant, “concentration of force” on all fronts would be the order of the day. In a communique to Sherman, written on April 4, Grant confided, “It is my design, if the enemy keep quiet and allow me to take the initiative in the spring campaign, to work all parts of the army together, and somewhat towards a common centre.”
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That center, of course, would be Richmond. The Army of the Potomac under Meade’s and Grant’s command would dog Lee’s army: “Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.” Sherman would march into Georgia against the formidable General Joe Johnston and reduce Atlanta. Sheridan would operate in the Shenandoah Valley, checking Forrest’s equally legendary cavalry, and razing the land to cut off Lee’s food supply and demoralize the citizenry.

Alongside these central campaigns, Grant intended to see every other major Confederate army pinned down and unable to assist Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. Grant’s lesser (political) generals—Nathaniel P. Banks, who moved from the Red River campaign in Texas (which he badly mishandled) to Mobile, Alabama, and Franz Sigel (appointed to appease German Americans)—were to march south in the Shenandoah. Grant appointed the ineffective Benjamin Butler, a political Democrat whom Lincoln felt he had to retain until the national elections, commander of the Department of Virginia and North Carolina with orders to move against Richmond from the south side of the James River.
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To this bold but simple strategy Grant applied tactics intended to be equally direct—and harsh. For these armies to succeed, the Confederate will to fight must be crushed so completely that Davis and his generals would finally recognize the futility of continuing the war. Lincoln and Grant realized that in this newly escalated citizens’ war, the people must be engaged and crushed. Otherwise the armies could fight forever.

That the back had not yet been broken on Confederate morale appeared on many fronts. Sheet music, for example, continued to thrive in the dying Confederacy, often in denial of realities. In “Wait Till the War, Love, Is Over,” one stanza glossed war and the home front:

In fact, many Confederate brides were not telling their soldier men to wait but to come home now. This was especially true for wives separated from battlefields—and from the sight of occupying Federal forces. For them (unlike wives closer to war zones), need and grief displaced rage and revenge. What began as a united home front and war front had, by 1864, extended too long for many women to tolerate. They began to launch their own private moral crusade questioning the war’s integrity. In a letter to her husband, George, Martha Fort angrily asked: “How many lives are to be laid on the alter of ambition of men. I look on this war as nothing else but to gratify unholy ambition.”
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Yet the Confederates were far from ready to capitulate. Lincoln and Grant intended to change that.

In 1864 civilian suffering did not mean mass murder of innocent civilians (that would wait for another century) nor rape. In fact, such tactics would backfire by stiffening enemy civilian resolve and eroding Union soldiers’ discipline. Starvation, destruction of homes and property, and widespread marauding, however, were a different story.

Here the Federal commanders engaged a moral gray zone. Generals could not command rapine to get their wishes. That would not look good in subsequent review. Instead, they had only not to discourage it with mass courts-martial or executions. Already by 1863, Sherman had noted the fact that generals “make feeble efforts to stay the disorder, but it is idle.” The fact was that war—or at least this war—could not be controlled: “You cannot help yourself, and the only possible remedy is to stop war.” This, in turn, required Sherman “to destroy both the rebel army and whatever of wealth or property it has founded its boasted strength upon.”
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With sentiments like these, generals could rely on the soldiers to follow their instincts, steeled by three years of war and unremitting civilian hatred. Whether this civilian suffering should be termed “hard” war, “destructive” war, or “total” war is a scholar’s game. The point was that citizens must suffer. This, in turn, meant an irrevocable end to the ideals of “Christian civilization” touted by McClellan and the Democratic Party for their own racist ends. With Lieber’s Code at the ready, the justification for waging a war of deprivation on civilians was in place. And with the leadership of Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, the men to accomplish it were assembled and in place. Each general had dealt directly with guerrilla and “irregular” warfare in the West and border states, and each had lost whatever vestiges of the West Point Code they originally harbored.

Clearly Grant had a draconian plan. But would it work? For three years the two armies had dueled with severe casualty rates, but neither could achieve a decisive victory. In fact, soldiers on both sides questioned “which would whip” in the event of a final showdown.

Grant, however, knew he would whip—as long as the press and people supported him. His orders—and inclinations—were to promote a final engagement from which there would be no retreat, no matter what the casualties. No proportionality of losses could mitigate against this end—moral reflection about acceptable losses could not even be part of the equation. Instead, pragmatism must define the line between acceptable and unacceptable losses, and the cost would be high indeed. Grant understood that to annihilate Lee he would have to engage in “as desperate fighting as the world has ever witnessed.”
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Perhaps more than any other battles, the spring 1864 campaigns of Grant and Lee highlighted the nearly mythical status of generals and their people’s loyalties. Lee’s veteran lieutenant James Longstreet summarized the situation on the eve of the battles:

Predictably, as massive battles loomed, Congressman Samuel S. Cox again urged restraint and conciliation. In a congressional speech delivered on May 4 he insisted:

Though eloquent in his compassion, Cox left unsaid the underlying reality that his “spirit of fraternity” and “Christian fellowship” was a whites-only fraternity, and its “fabric” woven with the racist thread of white supremacy.

 

Meanwhile, Lincoln fretted that a lack of convincing victories would cost him the 1864 election to McClellan. Yet his party remained overwhelmingly supportive of the war, not only in the army, but among the rank and file. The exception was John C. Frémont, the disgruntled general who was deprived of a high command by his humiliation in Missouri. Frémont tried to create a third party composed of Republican abolitionists and radical German Americans with a platform that was nearly the mirror opposite of Cox’s. Cox branded Lincoln with the icon “nigger lover”; Frémont accused Lincoln of being a rebel lover, unwilling to extract the last measure of blood revenge. Frémont intended to be God’s self-proclaimed enforcer, with radical congressmen as his henchmen. The tragedy of the Civil War’s legacy would be the triumph of both: white supremacy and vengeful reconstruction.