This Great Struggle (23 page)

The fighting that began with McClellan’s minor push on June 25 and continued every day through the bloody finale at Malvern Hill came to be known as the Seven Days’ Battles or just the Seven Days. They had produced bloodshed on a scale of which the nation had scarcely dreamed before. The Army of the Potomac, out of its total strength of 104,000 men, lost ten thousand killed and wounded and another six thousand captured. The Army of Northern Virginia, which started the battles with a strength of ninety-two thousand, suffered more than twenty thousand casualties, almost all of them killed and wounded, losses the Confederacy could not afford on a regular basis. Lee had failed in his effort to trap and annihilate McClellan’s army, which was now securely ensconced around its base of supplies on the James River with naval vessels standing by to provide gunfire support. Yet in one week the scene of the fighting had shifted from the outskirts of Richmond to a point about thirty miles away. Additionally, Lee, though at a ruinous cost to his army, had established a towering reputation that would henceforth haunt the minds and inhibit the plans of every army commander he would meet—except the last one.

6

CONFEDERATE HIGH TIDE

LINCOLN TAKES A NEW GRIP

T
he Seven Days’ Battles had powerful repercussions. Many things would change in their wake, and one of those was George McClellan’s relationship with his government. The change could easily have been more sudden than it was. On the evening of June 28, in the midst of the Seven Days’ fighting, McClellan had telegraphed the president reporting recent action and complaining bitterly, “I have lost this battle because my force was too small,” blaming Lincoln and rejecting any personal responsibility, even though he had kept many of his troops idle. Then he added, “If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army.” War Department personnel who decoded the dispatch were aghast at the last two sentences and deleted them without even informing Lincoln of their inflammatory nature. The president never knew McClellan had written them and responded to the rest of McClellan’s dispatch, “Save your Army at all events. . . . If you have had a drawn battle, or a repulse, it is the price we pay for the enemy not being in Washington.”

Even though McClellan’s most insulting sentences never reached Lincoln’s eyes, the general’s stock with the president was clearly falling. Lincoln had once said he would hold McClellan’s horse if the general would bring victories, but it now appeared questionable that McClellan could do that. When Lincoln visited McClellan’s camp at Harrison’s Landing a few days after the end of the campaign, the general showed that he could be questionable in other ways as well. There on July 7 McClellan handed Lincoln a letter urging that the war should be fought only for the Union and not in any way to curtail much less eliminate slavery. Only the most limited of means should be used, as had been the case hitherto, treating Rebel civilians as if they were friendly civilians and not resorting to any of the harsh measures that were customary in time of war. McClellan further seemed to hint that if any other course were pursued, the army would not support it. This would have been going a bit too far, even for a general who had not just been beaten in a major campaign. As it was, McClellan’s advice was just the opposite of the direction Lincoln was thinking of going and probably increased the president’s skepticism about the wisdom of retaining him.

Firing McClellan outright would be politically risky. Instead of removing McClellan from the head of the army, Lincoln decided to remove the army gradually from under McClellan. Even before the beginning of the Seven Days’ Battles, Lincoln had decided that the various Union troops operating in northern Virginia while McClellan was on the peninsula needed to be under a single commander. For that commander Lincoln looked to the West, where Union forces had scored one victory after another. The man he chose was John Pope, lately commander of the Army of the Mississippi under Halleck. Pope had snapped up several posts along the Mississippi that the navy had largely won for him and had participated in Halleck’s hesitation waltz from Pittsburg Landing to Corinth.

Pope took over his new command on June 27, even as the Battle of Gaines’ Mill was raging down on the peninsula. Christened the Army of Virginia, it consisted of McDowell’s corps, which would never join McClellan outside Richmond, as well as Banks’s hard-luck command from the Shenandoah Valley, and a third corps containing a relatively high proportion of German American regiments and commanded by none other than Franz Sigel, who had turned in a questionable performance at Wilson’s Creek the preceding summer but was always a favorite of the typical German American soldier, who famously announced with pride, “I fights mit Sigel.” All together Pope’s new army counted fifty-one thousand men in its ranks. At any rate, Lincoln now had the option of transferring one unit at a time from McClellan’s command on the peninsula to Pope’s in northern Virginia, where Lincoln had always believed the true road to Richmond began.

Even while the Seven Days’ Battles were still raging, it was becoming clear that, organize the troops how he might, Lincoln did not have enough manpower in uniform to conquer the Confederacy. He would need more, but issuing a call for enlistments at a time when public morale had just suffered the severe blow of McClellan’s defeat in front of Richmond would be another politically risky move. Instead, Lincoln wrote a letter and gave it to Seward to take to northern state governors one by one in private discussions. “I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die,” Lincoln wrote, “or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me; and I would publicly appeal to the country for this new force were it not that I fear a general panic and stampede would follow, so hard is it to have a thing understood as it really is.” It would be helpful, Seward explained to each governor, if they would all sign an open letter, urging Lincoln to call on the states for more troops so that the Union armies would finally have enough men “to speedily crush the rebellion.” The governors did so, and on July 1 Lincoln issued a call for three hundred thousand additional three-year volunteers.

This call summoned up another great surge of patriotic recruiting. More than half a million men had already enlisted out of a population of about thirty million, and the new call would dig deep into the nation’s manpower reserves. Later that same month, Quaker abolitionist James Sloan Gibbons wrote a poem titled “We Are Coming, Father Abraham, Three Hundred Thousand More.” In it Gibbons spoke for the new recruits, expressing their willingness to serve if their country needed them:

We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more,
From Mississippi’s winding stream and from New England’s shore.
We leave our plows and workshops, our wives and children dear,
With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear.
With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear.
We dare not look behind us but steadfastly before.
We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more!

You have called us, and we’re coming by Richmond’s bloody tide,
To lay us down for freedom’s sake, our brothers’ bones beside;
Or from foul treason’s savage grip, to wrench the murderous blade;
And in the face of foreign foes its fragments to parade.
Six hundred thousand loyal men and true have gone before,
We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more!

The poem first appeared in the New York
Evening Post
and was read to an enthusiastic crowd at a mass public meeting in Chicago. Luther O. Emerson, Stephen Foster, and others set it to music so that Americans were soon singing it to several different tunes.

Modern readers might be tempted to think Sloan guilty of sentimentalism with his talk of enlistees leaving their “plows and workshops” and their “wives and children dear.” In fact, in many cases it was the simple truth. Regiments enlisted in this second great wave of patriotic enlistment tended to include a disproportionately high number of older men, in their late twenties or early thirties, married, with children. Their family responsibilities had held them back from enlisting the previous year. Now it seemed the country’s need might demand even that sacrifice. In Newton, Iowa, farmer Taylor Pierce had a long talk with his wife, Katharine. She would have to operate the farm and care for their three children if he went, but she was willing. She would not have it said that her cowardice had kept her husband from serving the country in its time of need. As Taylor put it, “The rebellion could not be put down without the government got more help.”

In Iowa City, Sam Jones also weighed enlisting. “Up to this time, I had not thought it necessary that I should go,” he later explained. “I had had a feeling that those who were enlisting were doing it because they delighted in the public martial display of the soldier life; but a feeling came over me at this time that I was needed in the defense of my country.” Could free government survive, he wondered, and would it require him to go and fight? His conclusion was, “We, the people, are the government.” That decided it for him. “I made up my mind to be a soldier and fight for my country.” Both Pierce and Jones became members of the newly recruited Twenty-Second Iowa Regiment.

Four hundred miles to the southeast, in the little village of Hope, Indiana, saddle and harness maker William Winters, like Taylor a father of three, had a similar talk with his wife, Hattie. She too agreed, and William joined the newly organized Sixty-Seventh Indiana Regiment. Five hundred miles to the northeast of Hope, near the Pennsylvania border in the western New York State town of Portville, Amos Humiston had much the same solemn discussion with his wife Philinda about how she would manage at home with their children, seven-year-old Frank, five-year-old Alice, and three-year-old Fred. The result was the same as those in the Taylor and Winters households and tens of thousands of others across the country, and Amos went off to join the new 154th New York Regiment. Of these four men, Taylor, Jones, Winters, and Humiston, only two would survive the war.

The women who remained at home, in both North and South, had to take on new roles and responsibilities in the absence of their husbands or other male family members, performing as best they could tasks that had previously been carried out by men. With very few exceptions the women did not see their new roles as a liberation, a revelation of their latent abilities, or anything else but a terrible burden that they had to bear for their families and for their country. Nineteenth-century American society recognized men and women as being fundamentally different and assigned different roles to them in keeping with their differing abilities and natures. The arrangement worked well, and very few people wanted to change it. Certainly, to judge by their surviving diaries and letters, scarcely any of the wives and sisters whom the soldiers left behind coveted the male roles of those who were away in uniform.

A few Civil War women were different, however, and seemed to covet the most thoroughly male role in that society, that of soldier. In some cases, a young, childless wife sought to accompany her husband to war by entering the army herself. Sometimes a young single woman sought the life of a soldier for reasons of her own. Enlistment physicals, if any, were cursory in the extreme, and a number of women, carefully disguised as young men, were able to find their way into the army. Of course, the law and army regulations, as well as the overwhelming majority opinion within society, held that the army was absolutely no place for a woman, and if her sex was discovered, dismissal was immediate. Some scholars argue that possibly as many as four hundred different women may have served for at least some time during the war, a number equal to about 0.01 percent of all Civil War soldiers.

The other twenty million or so women in America seemed to agree wholeheartedly with society’s belief that soldiering was man’s work. Sometimes young women sought to shame reluctant young men into doing their duty and enlisting. An able-bodied, single young man who was slow to join the company being organized in his hometown might well find a package, left for him by anonymous local young ladies, containing a hoopskirt and suggesting that, given his apparently nonmartial proclivities, the skirt might be appropriate attire. The message was clear: a real man did his duty, even if that meant fighting and possibly dying. Women stayed behind and kept the home fires burning.

As the new recruits flocked to the colors, the army could have gotten better use out of them if it had incorporated them into veteran regiments where the new men could learn the business of war with experienced soldiers alongside them. That was not how it was done. Troops were raised by states, as complete regiments, and each new regiment gave a governor additional opportunities to curry political favor by appointing its colonel and other field officers. The new recruits also felt more at home in new regiments, where everyone else was as green as they were, though that fact was not necessarily conducive to their advantage or safety in battle. Nonetheless, experienced regiments received only a trickle of recruits and grew smaller as the war went on, while most of the new men went into new regiments like the Twenty-Second Iowa, Sixty-Seventh Indiana, and 154th New York.

LINCOLN AND EMANCIPATION

The setback on the peninsula, even coming as it did at the end of a six-month string of Union victories in the West, showed that the war was going to be harder, more costly, and longer than most Americans had previously thought. Many Union policies, including Lincoln’s own approach to the war, had been based on the idea that most white southerners were not deeply committed to the Confederacy and would not fight desperately to save it. Firm but gentle pressure from Union forces would bring these southerners to their senses. For that reason, Union policy toward southern civilians had been conciliatory, not treating them like rebellious civilians or even like civilians of an enemy country but rather like its own friendly civilians. This approach was most starkly on display when rebellious citizens of states claiming to be no longer part of the United States approached Union military commanders and demanded that they observe the Fugitive Slave Law by returning to them slaves who had escaped and fled into Union lines. During the first year of the war, Union officers had often complied with such demands, except when they were enterprising and principled enough to call the escapees contrabands and protect them or when Union soldiers, who were daily becoming less sympathetic toward slaveholders, succeeded in hiding the slaves.