Upon the Altar of the Nation (65 page)

In September disaster happened. With Sherman’s occupation of Atlanta and Sheridan’s movements in the Shenandoah Valley, the tide suddenly swung in Lincoln’s favor. The ill-fated insurgency of John C. Frémont did not amount to anything, and Lincoln was easily renominated in September, with victory now in his grasp. The Republican platform endorsed all of Lincoln’s war measures, demanded the unconditional surrender of the Confederacy, and proposed a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. To emphasize the mandate to restore Union, the party temporarily renamed itself the National Union Party and nominated for vice president Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat who had remained loyal to the Union and stayed in the Senate.

Besides endorsing all of Lincoln’s policies, the Republicans had no comment on the conduct of the war or the ways in which Sherman and Sheridan were treating noncombatants. The streams of homeless refugees multiplied and the historian James M. McPherson estimates that as many as fifty thousand Confederate civilians probably perished.
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Still, no one asked hard questions.

That the Republicans remained quiet and incurious may be predictable, especially in an election year. The Democrats’ blind eye is more surprising. Democratic critics adamantly opposed emancipation and decried the Republican administration’s constitutional abuses, but they said little about the conduct of the war, even as it moved into its “hard” phase against Southern civilians. It may be overstated to claim that this joint avoidance was a “conspiracy of silence.” Yet it is certainly the case that neither side evidenced the least desire to question the conduct of their generals in the field, who as often as not commanded as many Democratic soldiers as Republican soldiers.
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While slow to comment on the conduct of the war, Democratic boosters did not hesitate to step up their racist platform. At every opportunity, Democrats pumped up their racist denunciations of African Americans and almost paranoid fears of miscegenation. Music, incorporated in the struggle for the North’s political soul, featured the same racist themes, often to the tunes of the classics. In place of the “John Brown Tune,” they sang:

And in place of the traditional “We Are Coming, Father Abraham,” they sang:

By fall it became clear that public reactions to the Emancipation Proclamation would determine the election.

Meanwhile, on the battlefield, Lincoln continued to roll out his agenda for total war. With Grant investing Petersburg for the winter, the principal theaters of action shifted to the Shenandoah Valley and Georgia. Like Grant and Sherman, Sheridan was attacking not only an army but also a symbolic legend in Jubal Early, whose raid on Washington’s outskirts had terrified the nation even as his wanton destruction of Chambersburg enraged them.

When word reached Sheridan that two of Early’s divisions were sent back to Petersburg, he employed his numerical advantage immediately and, on September 19, routed Early’s smaller forces at the third battle of Winchester. The losses on both sides were heavy, with Sheridan losing 4,018 and Early 3,921.

With a characteristic arrogance that Northerners loved and Confederates hated, Sheridan brazenly announced: “I attacked the forces of General Early on the Berryville Pike at the crossing of Opequon Creek, and after a most stubborn and sanguinary engagement, which lasted from early in the morning until 5 o’clock in the evening, completely defeated him, and driving him through Winchester captured about 2,500 prisoners, five pieces of artillery, nine army flags and most of their wounded.”
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These were the sorts of boastful and destructive words Northern audiences (and Lincoln) wanted to hear. Others were more humble. For the surgeon Daniel M. Holt, physician to the 121st New York Volunteers attached to Sheridan’s army, the victory was divinely ordained: “I cannot sufficiently extol and magnify His name, nor with sufficient humility prostrate myself before Him. Forgive me, oh my savior for ever distrusting Thy power, or ever rebelling against Thee.”
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The news for the Confederacy was not good. Sheridan’s victory virtually restored Union control of the lower valley from the Potomac to Strasburg, effectively securing Pennsylvania and Maryland from any further incursions. Following the victory Sheridan wasted no time in pursuing Early’s fleeing army up the valley and, on September 22, inflicted another grave blow on Early’s rebels posted on Fisher’s Hill. Overwhelmed by Union soldiers, the Confederates broke in what Sheridan later sketched as an “indescribable panic.” Although not the total defeat that Sheridan hoped for, the results were encouraging.
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Sheridan’s Shenandoah campaign would put the death knell to Democratic hopes for the 1864 election, which, as late as August, ran high. Whatever distant possibilities persisted after Atlanta were now utterly lost. Lincoln and his Republican Party would rule four more years—more than enough time to subdue the rebellion by force of arms and restore a united Christian America.

When, on October 3, Sheridan’s engineer officer, Lieutenant John R. Meigs, was reportedly murdered by three men dressed in Union uniforms, Sheridan’s response was swift and harsh. The people must suffer:

Earlier, in May and June, Hunter had employed identical tactics against supposed abettors of John Singleton Mosby’s irregular rangers, ordering that “the houses and other property of every secession sympathizer residing within a circuit of five miles from the place of outrage, shall be destroyed by fire.”
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Left unsaid by Sheridan was the obvious fact that many innocents suffered alongside those guilty of harboring saboteurs. Even more disturbing is the fact that he wrote this years later, by which time it was well known that Lieutenant Meigs had not, in fact, been murdered by local guerrillas. He died while attempting to flee his Confederate captors.
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The whole rationale had been a ruse to pummel innocent civilians. No matter, the valley war was rapidly moving into its “hard” phase.

With a nose for blood, Sheridan’s army chased Early’s fleeing troops for thirteen miles to New Market, where they were forced to hole up. In letters to his wife, Daniel M. Holt described the military and civilian scene: “Never since I was born, did I have such real
sport
in following up a band of disorganized flying rebels. It pays for all our hard marches and sleepless nights.” In confronting the citizens, he noted both their resignation and their hatred: “The women are particularly hostile and wolfish.”
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With Early bottled up, if not utterly defeated, Sheridan moved to phase two of the plan: destruction of more civilian property. Victory over the rebel army was important, but no more important than the second objective, in Grant’s oft-cited command, to turn “the Shenandoah Valley [into] a barren waste ... so that crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their provender with them.”

Grant’s motives in making such draconian orders were twofold. First, by destroying all food and material products that would be useful to Confederate armies—principally Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia—the enemy might quite literally be starved into defeat. Second, as Sherman discovered in Atlanta and soon rediscovered in the Carolinas, the destruction of food and property could break the will of the Southern white population to continue the war. Bereft of food and shelter, with their own armies unable to protect them from the enemy, the civilians would supposedly crumple.

The plan was sound and, in fact, eventually triumphed. Few asked if it was right. Ultimately, the moral justification for this action, stated or un-stated, was relentlessly simple: the Federals recognized no “civilians” or noncombatants in the South. Since some Confederates harbored guerrillas, citizens were rendered de facto “irregulars”—in effect, fair targets. It was no longer simply the Confederate army that brought war to the Union on West Point terms, but “the South,” and that meant women, children, and the elderly, as well as soldiers and guerrillas. Many Union soldiers did not have the stomach for such tactics, but those who did justified them on the basis of “military necessity” in fighting a just “defensive” war that was unwillingly brought upon them.

Here again, we come to a moral touchstone of the war. Grant and Lincoln’s moral justification for orders to Sheridan and Sherman presumed not only a nation of Confederates but a nation of guerrillas as well. Yet the evidence for widespread terrorism is scant. Just as army atrocity stories were exaggerated, so also were Northern fears about an armed and violent civilian population. Life in Charleston, Richmond, or New Orleans went on. Women were too busy supporting their families to be saboteurs. Men were either impressed or on the run or old. By 1864, moreover, following the savagery in Missouri, Confederate leaders were disbanding irregular forces and would eventually repeal the Partisan Ranger Act.

Still, Lincoln and the North needed a moral rationale if the destruction was to continue. Most Northern civilians—especially Republicans—were more than prepared to endorse virtually any rationalization as long as it came from the state and the army. Emancipation worked as a moral lever for escalating the military destruction of armies in the field but not for inflicting civilian suffering, especially suffering by the nonslaveholding majority of white Southerners in the Shenandoah Valley. There needed to be a terrorist threat to justify the destruction of nonmilitary targets. And that is precisely what the Union generals, and Lincoln, and, to be sure, pesky rebel bushwhackers, provided.

Sheridan understood his commanders’ intentions exactly and set out immediately, “carrying out ... my original instructions for desolating the Shenandoah country, so as to make it untenable for permanent occupation by the Confederates.” Valley farmers, of course, had no knowledge of the orders. When with little warning, Sheridan’s infantry ominously appeared on the landscape, followed by the dreaded cavalry, no Confederate army was in sight to defend the civilians. Soon, the wrath of God had descended into their midst. The results were immediate and devastating. Wherever the families looked, “the many columns of smoke from burning stacks, and mills filled with grain, indicated that the adjacent country was fast losing the features which hitherto had made it a great magazine of stores for the Confederate armies.”
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Thus began “Red October” in the valley, when “the work of destruction” began and civilians howled. In all, Sheridan calculated that in a matter of weeks, “I have destroyed over 2,000 barns filled with wheat, hay and farming implements; over 70 mills, filled with flour and wheat; have driven in front of the army over 4,000 head of stock, and have killed and issued to the troops not less than 3,000 sheep.” He then added ominously, “The people here are getting sick of the war.”

While right about the destruction he wrought in the valley, Sheridan was wrong to assume that “the people” were broken. The people were tired of war but their will had not been broken—especially not that of the women left to view the devastation. The refrain, “we are all loyal,” rang throughout the zones of desolation. In Harrisonburg, twenty-eight women petitioned Secretary of War James A. Seddon to raise and arm a regiment of ladies “to leave our hearthstones—to endure any sacrifice—any privation for the ultimate success of our Holy Cause.”
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If the distant Northern civilian population turned deaf and blind to the civilian suffering unleashed by Sherman and Sheridan, witnesses were not so easily sanguine. Union surgeon Daniel M. Holt considered the destruction appalling. Local “hostility” could not justify the virtually indiscriminate ruin: “A prettier or more fruitful Valley never lay stretched out upon the face of the Earth than this. It goes to destruction by order of General Grant.” The next day he wrote, “It might in truth be said that we are
foraging
to an awful extent. Nothing that lives and is used as food or in anywise conduces to the comfort of men, is left behind. We take all we can and
burn
what we cannot get away.”