Once again the secular press flip-flopped its position in this dynamic war. For the Examiner to come this far toward piety reflects just how desperate the Confederate cause had become in this ever-changing war.
Religion blossomed as well in Northern prisoner-of-war camps. This account is from Elmira, New York:
About ten thousand prisoners are under confinement at the Rebel Camp in Elmira, New York. They are supplied with preaching by the local clergy, and are allowed to choose, from time to time, whom they will hear, the only limitation of choice being that none but ministers of undoubted loyalty should be invited. Strange to say, they have never asked for a man of questionable patriotism. Thomas K. Beecher is quite a favorite among them. Their preaching audiences sometimes number more than two thousand. They have prayer meetings every morning and evening, on the open green, where it is affecting to witness often large masses kneeling in solemn supplication to heaven.
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Meanwhile, in a speech to the U.S. Senate, Senator Benjamin Brown of Missouri fulminated at Lincoln’s refusal to lay out a plan of radical reconstruction, but then went on to note how important religion was becoming in the North: “The nation is putting on its Puritanism. Thanksgivings appoint themselves unitedly. Days of supplication are become somewhat more than holidays. The bowing down has ceased to be a mockery in the presence of the multitudinous remembered dead; and even they who heretofore have been accounted most indifferent begin to hold to a realizing conviction that God does direct the affairs of nations by His special providences.”
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Back on the fields of battle, Lee’s army began filing into the Petersburg trench works with a determination to halt Grant once again. By the time the Federals finally mounted a massive assault on June 18, Lee had dug in; the Yankees were unwilling to face another Cold Harbor. After a couple of token raids, in which it became clear that the Yankees would not fight suicidally any longer, Meade called off the assaults. Grant decided that Petersburg would have to be invested (besieged). Once again the opportunity to smash Lee’s army came and went, leaving Lincoln frustrated and Grant more determined than ever. By retaining control of the railroad to Richmond, Lee avoided a full-scale siege of starvation and could communicate with the rest of the Confederacy. But he lacked all room and resources for maneuver in the face of Grant’s superior numbers.
After June 22 battles ceased for the summer and the war deteriorated into a duel of trench systems where snipers ruled. Lee worried less about Grant, whom he felt confident he could withstand, than about food. In a message to President Davis on June 26, he declared:
I am less uneasy about holding our position than about our ability to procure supplies for the army. I fear the latter difficulty will oblige me to attack Genl Grant in his entrenchments, which I should not hesitate to do but for the loss it will inevitably entail. A want of success would in my opinion be almost fatal, and this causes me to hesitate in the hope that some relief may be procured without running such great hazard.
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Petersburg, in other words, was in danger of becoming Lee’s own Andersonville.
Petersburg afforded a glimpse of the future, in which trench warfare would replace frontal assaults. Every day was potentially a soldier’s last, as snipers took aim at close range from trench to trench. George Elsworth described the new realities: “We are on pickett every other day and only about thirty yards apart. I had 6 of my Co. kild last night.... I wish to be remembered by all and tell them I have seen the Elephant. I have been in twenty two battles and only was wounded once in the left wrist slightly. I have never seen a day in the first 3 years but what I should do duty and not one in the last [year].”
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Again, when not engaged in the business of killing, soldiers engaged in conversation across the line. In a letter written in August, Union Private Blynum described picket duty: “We are now picketing the extreme left near Petersburg. Our line is within speaking distance of the ‘Johnies’ and yesterday we exchanged papers with them.”
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Besides unveiling a new type of war, battles around Petersburg greatly enhanced the reputation of African American soldiers fighting on the outskirts. African American troops were assigned the hardest fighting against forts near Petersburg. A white officer attached to the Twenty-second U.S. Colored Infantry described their triumphant charge up “an almost impassable ravine” that led to a rebel “skedaddle” (retreat). Their performance left no doubt in his mind: “The problem is solved. The negro is a man, a soldier, a hero.”
Then, with Fort Pillow in mind, the officer added a moral of his own:
Our men, unfortunately, owing to the irregular feature of the ground, took no prisoners. Sir, we can bayonet the enemy to terms on this matter of treating colored soldiers as prisoners of war far sooner than the authorities at Washington can bring him to it by negotiation. This I am morally persuaded of. I know further that the enemy won’t fight us if he can help it. I am sure that the same number of white troops could not have taken those works.... The real fact is, the rebels will not stand against our colored soldiers when there is any chance of their being taken prisoner.
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While Petersburg lay under siege, Richmond nervously awaited its fate. Davis made clear that “we have no friends abroad,” but still retained hope in Johnston’s army to escape Sherman’s snare, aid Lee, and deliver up the Federals.
Newspapers on both sides continued to print rumors and declare victories prematurely. On June 18 the
Philadelphia Inquirer
ran front-page headlines on “The Capture of Petersburg.” The news was spectacular: “Baldy Smith Attacks Petersburg,” “The Rebel Fortifications Carried,” “The City Now Held by U.S.”
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The problem, of course, was that the assault had failed, and, on that very day, Grant determined to invest the city and begin a siege.
While Confederate currency was rapidly reduced to near-worthless paper, the Northern stock market, strong for a while, showed signs of panic. In another signal of mounting desperation, the price of gold surged. Northern audiences were meanwhile shocked by the scale of destruction launched by Grant’s armies. After the loss of fifty thousand boys, Grant was—on paper anyway—no closer to Richmond than McClellan two years earlier. And the bodies continued to pile up. Democratic pleas for a negotiated settlement were stronger than ever. What victories there were lost their luster as life in some communities rent by the war became one continuous funeral procession. Casualties that took only weeks to multiply would require years to recover from.
In response, Lincoln proclaimed a fast day for August 4. Word of Lincoln’s proclamation quickly reached the Southern papers and excited much religious response. The secular
Richmond Daily Dispatch
had, by 1864, become as religious as the religious press had become worldly. On July 16 a writer commented, “A despot humbles himself because his bloody crimes have not yet produced their desired result. Can anything more shockingly blasphemous be imagined?” Clearly both sides thought the other reprobate (regardless of soldierly respect).
The following week, another shot was lodged at the fast day. Conveniently forgetting that the Confederacy had long-since been “Puritanized” with its observation of civil fast days, the paper accused the North of a “blending of politics and religion ... a distinctive characteristic of Puritanism.” Without religion, the writer declared, the evil war could not continue. But Lincoln’s proclamation for a fast day and the churches’ willing acquiescence proved that “[t]he Puritan pulpit is the big drum for the Yankee war, calling sinners to the battlefield instead of to repentance.”
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While on the losing side more often than not, Southern opinion was not as sour as that in the North. In part, they were encouraged by a Northern Democratic resurgence. And in larger part, they were encouraged by Lee. That his forces could fight to the death and, at the same time, turn to Christ in record numbers provided a mighty inspiration. Americans have always loved an underdog, and in that role Lee and his army held uncontested sway over the Confederate public imagination. As long as Lee stood, so did the Confederacy.
Although loath to assault Lee’s impregnable fortifications at Petersburg, Grant was not one to sit idle. In late June he hatched a brilliant scheme to employ a regiment of coal miners from Pennsylvania to dig a five-hundred-foot tunnel under the Southern trenches and pack it with an immense eight-thousand-pound load of gunpowder to blast the rebels into oblivion.
The engineering and the explosion on July 30 were nearly textbook perfect, but the follow-up proved to be yet another Federal slaughter. It began when Meade countermanded Burnside’s orders to lead the assault with a division of black veterans led by an experienced commander and instead chose a white division with a green commander chosen by drawing straws. Worse, the commander, James H. Ledlie, failed to appear at all, staying behind the lines drinking rum. The blast was so enormous that it created a crater twenty-five feet deep and two hundred feet wide and momentarily stunned the rebel defenders.
But then the plan ran awry. Instead of exploiting the gap created by the explosion and running around the crater as he was ordered, Burnside, in Grant’s words, “seemed to have paid no attention whatever to the instructions and left all the obstruction in his own front for his troops to get over.”
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The Yankees flooded
into
the crater instead of
around
it, where, to their horror, they soon found themselves entombed by recovered Confederates. What was forever after known as the Battle of the Crater became a shooting gallery as the Confederates sealed the breach and then proceeded to virtually murder the targets massed beneath them.
Again Grant looked incompetence and destruction in the eye. He later complained, “The effort was a stupendous failure. It cost us about four thousand men, mostly, however, captured; and all due to inefficiency on the part of the corps commander and the incompetence of the division commander who was sent to lead the assault.”
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James H. Payne, an African American quartermaster sergeant, agreed:
How easily Petersburg could have been taken on the 30th of July, had the white soldiers and their commanders done their duty! But prejudice against colored troops prevented them. Instead of a general effort being made, as was contemplated, only a few men were taken in to be slaughtered and taken prisoner, which is the equivalent of death, for no mercy is shone to them when captured.
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Though defeated, the division of African Americans commanded by General Edward Ferrero showed their courage and determination in action. When the rebels re-formed and counterattacked, they encountered the black division left behind. For Lee’s soldiers, who had never seen African American troops, the sight was enraging. Not content to simply shoot at the Yankees, the rebels charged into the fray, killing five hundred black soldiers and taking only two black prisoners. Many of the blacks were shot in cold blood after surrendering. Lee had observed the carnage from only five hundred yards away and obviously knew of the murders taking place. In yet another searing enactment of the inhumane racial civil war within the Civil War, he made no comment, then or later.
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CHAPTER 37
“IF THEY WANT PEACE THEY . . . MUST STOP THE WAR”
A
s Grant invested Lee’s troops at Petersburg, a very different war emerged in Georgia. Sherman had built his army less for brute strength than for maneuverability and rapid flanking movements. For John Emerson Anderson, who had fought with General Banks in the Shenandoah, suffered as a prisoner of war at Belle Isle, and then been reinstated with Sherman’s army, the first impression of the army in formation was overwhelming:
When we awoke on Monday May 9 1864, thousands upon thousands of our union boys had been collected here from all parts of the lines east, and west, organized in six army corps each one commanded by men that were a host within themselves, and the whole commanded by General W. T. Sherman whose very appearance denoted a giants strength of intellect, force and physical endurance. As we stood and gazed on the magnificent host in our sight, who were formed in mass, in the order of rank in which the columns would move at the word of command, our faith in the final triumph of the union arms was quickened.
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In all, Sherman’s army consisted of three departments or armies: the Department of the Ohio, commanded by General John Schofield and numbering fifteen thousand; the Department of the Cumberland, commanded by General George Thomas, the Rock of Chickamauga, consisting of fifty thousand; and the Department of the Tennessee, commanded by the youthful but brilliant General James B. McPherson, consisting of fifteen thousand. Ill and wounded soldiers were left behind. With this “compact army,” Sherman set out to destroy General Johnston’s army located in Dalton, Georgia, between Chattanooga and Atlanta.
Even as Grant kept Lee in his sights at all times, Sherman aimed to hound the “army of Jos. Johnston” to prevent Johnston from coming to Lee’s rescue. The key cities of Atlanta, Augusta, and Savannah mattered only insofar as they might harbor Johnston’s army.
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In a letter to General Grant on April 10, Sherman outlined a plan for provisioning his army by living off the land: “Georgia has a million of inhabitants. If they can live, we should not starve. If the enemy interrupt our communications, I will be absolved from all obligations to subsist on our own resources, and will feel perfectly justified in taking whatever and wherever we can find.”
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