Grant and Sherman could rest content with their tactics because the rules of war had changed. As Sherman explained in a famous letter to his adjutant R. M. Sawyer, the enemy was subject to the government and its armies such that “any and all rights which [the generals] choose to enforce the war—to take their lives, their homes, their lands, their everything”—was permissible. Whatever the designation, be it “hard” war or “total” war, this conflict had certainly become all-encompassing by nineteenth-century standards. For Sherman it represented nothing less than his “theology of the battlefield.”
17
Unlike “Christian” generals like Lee, Jackson, or Howard, Sherman did not even have God at one remove. Indeed, he almost defied God by saying that God was not in the war. Almost alone among Civil War generals, Sherman forsook God as well as the rules of war, and, to all appearances, never entertained the possibility that Providence would make him pay.
18
On the Northern home front, America’s clerical arbiters supported the conduct of the war without any real qualifications. For Boston’s George E. Ellis, the hoary prospects of failure justified any means, so that
“all inflictions and calamities short of that were to be regarded as conditions for averting it, and therefore to be submitted to, without halting or even protest.”
Nothing but the kindest motives governed war strategy: “A grand and holy inspiration of humanity overrules all other motives and aims of the war.”
Earlier in his sermon, Ellis acknowledged that his listeners in Harvard Yard hardly knew there was a war going on in any direct sense of the term, let alone how others suffered. He did not know much either: “It is the greatest of wars, because for the greatest stake that was ever at issue in war. It is, in its conduct on this nation’s part, the most humane war that was ever waged on the earth, engaging in us the least of ferocity, of barbarity, of reckless and fiendish cruelty, and the most relieved and chastened by forbearing mercy and thoughtfulness as to every needful measure of severity.”
19
One can only imagine how relieved Ellis’s listeners must have been to hear that it was “the most humane war that was ever waged on the earth.”
On December 15 Thomas attacked Hood’s army southeast of Nashville. The blow fell, sudden and ruthless. By hitting both of Hood’s flanks with his superior numbers, Thomas turned Hood’s army into a panicked herd. Hood tried desperately to re-form his army on a second line, but failed miserably. His soldiers broke and raced to the Tennessee River with Yankees nipping at their heels, picking up stragglers and surrendering soldiers. Only Forrest’s brilliant delaying campaign saved the army from an utter rout. A thoroughly dispirited Hood was relieved of his command and replaced by Johnston. In Petersburg Grant congratulated Thomas with a two-hundred-gun salute.
Two of Thomas’s attacking brigades were black. Colonel Thomas J. Morgan, commander of the Fourteenth U.S. Colored Infantry, later described his troops’ behavior as they charged up Overton Hill side by side with white soldiers:
It was with breathless interest I watched that noble army climb the hill with a steady resolve, which nothing but death itself could check. When at length the assaulting column sprang upon the earthworks, and the enemy seeing that further resistance was madness, gave way and began a precipitous retreat, our hearts swelled as only the hearts of soldiers can, and scarcely stopping to cheer or to await orders, we pushed forward and joined in the pursuit, until the darkness and the rain forced a halt.
For General James B. Steedman, a Democrat who had long opposed the enlistment of African American troops, the battle was definitive. In his official report, he commented:
The larger portion of these losses, amounting in the aggregate to fully 25 per cent of the men under my command who were taken into action, it will be observed fell upon the colored troops. The severe loss of this part of my troops was in their brilliant charge on the enemy’s works on Overton Hill on Friday afternoon. I was Unable to discover that color made any difference in the fighting of my troops. All, white and black, nobly did their duty as soldiers.
20
By October 1864 there were 140 “Negro” regiments in the army with a total strength of 102,000 men. They would serve in every major Union campaign in the last year of the war except Sherman’s march through Georgia and the Carolinas.
21
Unlike Grant and Thomas, Sherman had no black units, preferring instead that African Americans serve behind the lines as laborers and “pioneers.” A reluctant abolitionist, Sherman supported the South’s right to slaves until they seceded. Even then he favored emancipation but opposed a perfect equality and “[commingling] their blood with ours.” As for political rights: “The negro should, of course, be protected in his industry and encouraged to acquire property, knowledge, trade, and every means possible to better his condition, but I think we should all be rather too slow than too fast in extending political rights.”
Whatever Sherman thought of the slaves, they perceived him as their savior: “Whenever they heard my name, they clustered about my horse, shouted and prayed in the peculiar style, which had a natural eloquence that would have moved a stone.” In inquiring whether they understood the cause of the war, one told Sherman “though we professed to be fighting for the Union, he supposed that slavery was the cause, and that our success was to be his freedom.” On that basis, Sherman pleaded with the man to tell the freed slaves not to follow in his train “with useless mouths, which would eat up the food needed for our fighting-men; that our success was their assured freedom.” With these warnings, Sherman had very few African Americans follow his army.
22
The freed slaves revered Sherman as they did Grant and Lincoln. In a letter to the abolitionist Gerrit Smith, General Absalom Baird described how, after the occupation of Savannah:
I chanced on two or three consecutive days after our arrival to be in General Sherman’s rooms when he was receiving the negroes of the place. Poor creatures! They came to him as their deliverer, and one black preacher told him, like Simeon in the Bible, he had prayed for this day, and all he now wanted was to see Mr. Lincoln. Some of them wanted to kneel before him, but the general would not permit it, and told them they must not kneel to any one but their Maker.
23
By December 10 Sherman’s united wings stood at the gates of Savannah defying Confederates to resist. In a letter to General Hardee in Savannah, Sherman did not mince words: “Should I be forced to assault ... I shall then feel justified in resorting to the harshest measures, and shall make little effort to restrain my army.”
24
Meanwhile, Sherman prepared a siege and reestablished communications with the outside world through Port Royal. On December 21 a hopelessly outgunned Hardee abandoned the city and its inhabitants to the invading host. The next day, President Lincoln received a message from Sherman: “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah.”
Following the occupation of Savannah and Thomas’s sound thrashing of Hood at Nashville, Abraham Lincoln wrote Sherman an appreciative letter that confirms just how independently Sherman had acted in his Southern campaign:
When you were about leaving Atlanta for the Atlantic coast, I was anxious, if not fearful; but, feeling that you were the better judge, and remembering, “nothing risked, nothing gained,” I did not interfere. Now, the undertaking being a success, the honor is all yours ... in showing to the world that your army could be divided, putting the stronger part to an important new service, and yet leaving enough to vanquish the old opposing force of the whole, Hood’s army, it brings those who sat in darkness to see a great light.
25
Besides validating Sherman, Lincoln’s gratitude also reveals Lincoln himself. The reelected and triumphant president increasingly saw things in terms of “the world” observing America. And in his perception of bringing “those who sat in darkness to see a great light,” he evidenced the increasing biblicism that marked his last days with an apocalyptic sensibility.
John Emerson Anderson was also confident in the justice of Sherman’s cause, though he conceded that it raised questions in his mind of just conduct. While marching, “we were to burn and destroy, that which if left unharmed would be of use to the enemy in prolonging the war.... In fact we were to strip the country of every vestige of provender, or forage, for man or beast.” In Savannah he uneasily observed
the Engineer Corps with their fire brands, as they applied the torch to building after building. When we took our departure in the morning the city, except an occupied dwelling house, here, and there, was a mass of smoking and blackened ruins. This burning was only a foretaste of what was to be the fate of the country through which our advancing columns were then moving. War. Terrible war, such as the enemy had carried into the union loving district of eastern Tennessee, and the peace loving hills of Pennsylvania was about to be brought upon this beautiful country that had so long escaped.
26
Whatever scruples some soldiers may have felt, secular and religious commentators at home gleefully reported the destruction and progress with no hard questions. The Banner of the Covenant had no problem with “General Sherman’s Invasion” and applauded “the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton gins etc. [and] enforce a devastation, more or less relentless, according to the measure of such [rebel] hostility.” For behavior like this, the journal exulted, “the North is blessed with the Fall of Savannah—Sherman’s Christmas gift.”
27
By December, a reelected and confident Lincoln was already thinking about the future, and the ultimate meaning of his war. Both had to be concerned with slavery. Earlier, on October 13, Maryland voters had narrowly adopted a new state constitution abolishing slavery. Lincoln would go further. On December 6 he proposed that Congress enact a constitutional amendment forever outlawing slavery on the American continent. With striking clarity, it became apparent that this was what the war was all about. In retrospect, anyway, this atoned for all the bloodshed on the battlefield and the suffering inflicted on defenseless civilians. Now, more than ever, Lincoln understood his messianic destiny as an instrument in the hands of the Almighty to redeem this “almost chosen people.”
In his classic history of the Civil War, Bruce Catton fashioned a summary of what, in 1864, Lincoln eventually took to be the innermost meaning of the war—and, by extension, what later Americans have taken to be the innermost meaning of America:
[T]he war was about to be won, and Mr. Lincoln was looking to the future, which was still plastic. Americans at that moment had a strange, terrifying power. Not only could they shape the future; they had conquered time, so that what they did now could send the future’s meaning backward, putting significance in the insensate killings that ran from Franklin all the way back to Shiloh and Bull Run. Out of pain and horror already endured they could light a beacon fire.
28
Although right about emancipation’s “beacon fire,” neither Lincoln nor Catton could discern another innermost meaning to the “insensate killings.” They could not see a new religion, baptized and confirmed, imbuing a powerful unified nation-state with the power—and sanctity—of God. Therein lay the hidden innermost meaning, the power of which derived, in part, from its very invisibility. Visibly, most believed America (North and South) to be a “Christian nation.” Invisibly, few could see that America was incarnating a millennial nationalism as the primal religious faith.
CHAPTER 41
“UPHOLD THE CAUSE AND STRENGTHEN THE HANDS OF THE FAITHFUL”
O
n January 31, 1865, President Davis appointed Robert E. Lee general in chief of all Confederate armies, explicitly recognizing the obvious, that the South’s hope lay fully invested in this one man. By then, however, it was too late. As Sherman prepared to depart Savannah and as Grant held Lee in Petersburg, General Schofield’s Twenty-third Corps (re-created as the Department of North Carolina) marched on Fort Fisher—the original target of Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan, conceived four years earlier at the start of hostilities. On January 15, after a massive bombardment of the fort, an invading force of sixty-five hundred infantrymen and marines stormed the northern wall, compelling the surrender of the fort and taking nineteen hundred prisoners. With Fort Fisher reduced, Wilmington, North Carolina, soon succumbed as well. With Wilmington’s fall, Lee’s hungry soldiers—surviving miserably in the trenches at Petersburg—lost an indispensable food source from the Carolinas.
1
The fall of Fort Fisher, though minimal in terms of lives lost, had an enormous psychological impact on the Confederacy. Informed citizens were stunned by the news and recognized that the end of the Confederacy was quite possibly in view. Without the capacity to feed his army from the Carolinas, Lee would eventually be starved into submission. For Petersburg diarist Martha Wayles Robertson, trapped in her home and unable to travel any roads, the fall of Fort Fisher was ominous, but still not hopeless: “The times seem dark and gloomy, but God will uphold the right cause, and let us trust in His justice and mercy! Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” Despite hopeless odds, the citizens clung to their righteousness. Robertson complained not only of the Yankee invaders but also of the “servants,” who posed an increasing problem she regularly described in terms of “the
ingratitude
of servants!”
2
In a last-ditch attempt to win a negotiated peace, meanwhile, President Davis agreed to an overture from General Francis Preston Blair to send commissioners to meet with Lincoln and Seward on February 3 over the fate of “the two countries.” Lincoln agreed to a meeting to secure peace “to the people of our one common country.” Neither Davis nor Lincoln expected anything substantive to come of the meetings, and they were not surprised. But both sensed strategic advantages from putting forth an outward show of seriousness.