dak i aS aS The Civil War Generation NORMAN K. RISJORD f i Ae P fRepresentative Americans | The Givil War Generation SE Norman K. Risjord Professor Emeritus, History University of Wisconsin-Madison PX A Madison House Book ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham * Boulder * New York * OxfordROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A Member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group 4720 Boston Way Lanham, MD 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.com 12 Hid’s Copse Road Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ, England Copyright © 2002 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Risjord, Norman K. Representative Americans : the Civil War generation / Norman K. Risjord. p. cm.—(Representative Americans) Includes index. ISBN 0-7425-2168-0 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-7425-2169-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Biography. 2. United States—History—1849-1877—Biography. I. Title. E467 .R57 2002 973.7'092'2—de21 2002006993 Printed in the United States of America ©" The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.a] Stephen A. Douglas: The Struggle to Prevent a (Needless?) War During the 1930s, amid the general disillusionment with World War I, scholars wondered whether the conflict could have been prevented had the nations of Europe possessed better political and diplomatic leader- ship. Historians also took a second look at the American Civil War and wondered the same thing. Was that also a “needless war” caused by a “plundering generation” of vacuous leaders? If so, were there men avail- able with ideas that might have prevented the war if given the chance? Some among this “Revisionist school” of historical writing thought that Stephen A. Douglas was such a man. Douglas, they argued, was “realis- tic” enough to see that the “blundering” politicians around him were shadowboxing over phony issues. A “realist” such as Douglas recognized that there were natural limits of climate and terrain to the expansion of slavery, and once slavery had reached those limits, it would go into de- cline and eventually disappear. In the meantime, went the Revisionist argument, compromise between the North and the South was possible, perhaps along the lines that Douglas proposed, and war could have been avoided. The problem with this interpretation is that it is morally blind to the evil of human chattel slavery. That was also the blind spot in Douglas’s political character, and in the end the cause of his tragic failure. Born to Politics Stephen A. Douglas was born in Brandon, Vermont, a village nestled be- tween Lake Champlain and the Green Mountain range that bisects Ver- mont, on April 23, 1813. Brandon, a rough frontier community in 1813, was under military threat because the United States and Great Britain were at war. Douglas was only a year old when a British army descended from Canada into New York along the western shore of Lake Champlain. It was turned back only when an American naval victory enabled the United States to retain control of the lake. The thunder of cannon from Lieutenant Thomas Macdonough’s homemade fleet resounded off the walls of the village houses. Douglas was born during a war and died dur- ing a war, but he never fought in one.4 The Coming of War Stephen A. Douglas, the “Little Giant,” shortly after he entered the U.S. Senate. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.) The family was of old Puritan stock, the first Douglas having landed in Boston in 1640. Although his family had been farmers for genera- tions, Stephen's father had attended Middlebury College and was the town’s physician. Stephen never knew his father, who died at age thirty-two, when Stephen was only two months old. Stephen’s mother had inherited a small farm contiguous to that of her brother, whom Douglas later described as “an industrious, economical, clever old bachelor.” Douglas’s mother and her two small children moved in with her brother, and she served as housekeeper while he worked the two farms. Under the eye of his uncle, Douglas grew to adolescence. Farm labor occupied eight or nine months of the year; for three months in midwinter Douglas attended a district school. He did not have good memories of his youth. His uncle, he later remembered, was “rather a hard task master.” At age fifteen Douglas left home to learn a trade; by then he was ready for anything but the life of a farmer. He traveled fourteen miles north of Brandon to Middlebury, a college town and growing commercialStephen A. Douglas: The Struggle to Prevent a War 5 center, where he became apprenticed to a cabinetmaker. The year was 1828, and Vermont was caught up in the fierce presidential election con- test between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams. After listening to the Jacksonian rhetoric of equality of opportunity, Douglas became a de- voted partisan of Old Hickory. “From this moment,” Douglas later recorded, “my politics became fixed, and all subsequent reading, reflec- tion and observation have but confirmed my early attachment to the cause of Democracy.” He also showed an early penchant for political ac- tivism. He and his teenage friends tore down the handbills posted on the village walls and fences by Adams's partisans. The apprenticeship did not work out, and eight months later Douglas returned to Brandon with a new appreciation of the value of schooling as a way to get ahead. After some tutoring with a local minister, he entered the Brandon Academy. A year later, when his mother and sister married a father-son combination of New Yorkers, seventeen-year-old Stephen followed them to Canandaigua, in New York's Finger Lake district. He did not return to Vermont until he made it a campaign stop in the elec- tion of 1860. With memories of its rocky soil and stern folk, he later re- marked that Vermont was a glorious place in which to be born—provided one left it as soon as one could. Douglas entered the academy in Canandaigua and, on his own, began to study law. New York required, as a condition of a license to practice, four years of study at a college and three years of legal apprenticeship. Douglas’s mother could not afford to finance that kind of education, and Douglas had little interest in devoting that many years of his life to train- ing. He was a young man in a hurry. So, in June 1833, with $300 in his pocket, he boarded a steamer on Lake Erie and headed west. His route was a testament to the transportation revolution that was changing the face of the country. From Cleveland he took passage on a boat traversing the recently completed Ohio Canal, which terminated at Portsmouth on the Ohio River. A steamboat carried him from there to St. Louis, and an- other brought him to the Mississippi River town of Alton. His goal was a small country town with growth potential and employment opportuni- ties. The stage took him from Alton to Jacksonville, a county seat of 1,200 people on the edge of the black earth prairie of central Illinois. Morgan County was already the most populous county in Illinois, and, with a stream of migrants from New England and New York, it was also the fastest growing. Douglas taught school for a living while he continued his law stud- ies. Illinois state requirements for a license to practice law were much more lax than those of New York. There was no residence requirement, nor did the state specify any course of study. Illinois required only good moral character and an examination by a state supreme court judge. Douglas appeared before a judge in March 1834, and obtained his cer- tificate. The judge realized that Douglas's knowledge of the law was min-6 The Coming of War imal and suggested that he read another book or two. Although Douglas opened a law office, his heart was not in it. His sole interest was politics. One acquaintance later wrote that Douglas was not “a close keeper of his office”; instead he hung out with “the boys” arguing politics. Douglas liked his whiskey and cigars; as one of “the boys” he adopted the western habit of chewing tobacco. There was only one political party in Morgan County, the Democrats, but its leadership was weak and its organization informal. It was into this vacuum that Douglas moved. His gift for oratory and his total dedication to President Jackson quickly gained attention. The county organization was divided between “whole hog” Jacksonians, who supported the presi- dent on all issues, and “milk and cider” Jacksonians, who objected to the president's politics on the bank and tariff. The formation of the national Whig Party in 1834 attracted the “milk and cider” element in Illinois and allowed Douglas and his friends to solidify the county organization by confining it to reliable Democrats. The speed with which Douglas rose in the political hierarchy is re- markable given his impediments—youth (he was only twenty-one when he began making appearances at political meetings) and his physical ap- pearance. Douglas had unusually short legs and an oversized head. He reminded people of a fighting bantam cock. But he had a remarkable in- stinct for leadership and strong convictions, with a voice to match. He had a good memory for names, and with people he valued he was able to give the impression, said one observer, that he was “the frank, personal friend of each one of them.” At age twenty-one, he was designated by the legislature as the state’s attorney for a judicial district that sprawled across the center of the state to the Mississippi River. The job enabled him to befriend some of the most prominent lawyers in the state and ex- tended his political influence beyond Morgan County. He was elected to the state legislature in 1836 and helped carry Illinois for Jackson's suc- cessor, Martin Van Buren. In 1838 Douglas ran for Congress in his central Illinois district and lost to Abraham Lincoln's law partner by 36 votes out of a total of 36,495. Lincoln and Douglas had met during the legislative session without mak- ing much impression on each other, but the presidential contest of 1840 (William Henry Harrison, “Old Tippecanoe,” versus Martin Van Buren) provided the occasion for the first of several Lincoln—Douglas debates. Lincoln and a group of central Illinois Whigs challenged the Democrats to a public debate on the election issues. While that proposal floated in the air, Lincoln and Douglas became embroiled in a political argument in the back room of a store in Springfield after returning from a tour in Douglas’s judicial district. They decided to go public with their dispute and were joined by several other debaters. Lincoln thought he had won. “The Democratic giant is here,” he wrote scornfully to a friend, “but he is now not worth talking about.” Douglas was already earning the nick-Stephen A. Douglas: The Struggle to Prevent a War 7 name “Little Giant,” a reference to his short stature and commanding presence. The Democrats then accepted Lincoln's formal challenge, and de- bates were staged at several locations around the state. Each party put forth several speakers, but Lincoln and Douglas were the ones who at- tracted the crowds. Although the Whigs won the national election in a landslide, Douglas could claim victory over Lincoln, for Illinois was one of only seven states that gave its electoral vote to Van Buren. Later that year the legislature elected Douglas to the Illinois Supreme Court. He was now twenty-seven. The Democrat as Nationalist The rapid growth of Illinois, measured by the census of 1840, entitled the state to three additional congressional seats in 1843. Douglas re- signed his seat on the Illinois Supreme Court and ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in one of the newly created districts, which included some of the counties along the Mississippi River that had been in his ju- dicial district. He and his Whig opponent embarked on an arduous speaking schedule, traveling together, often in the same carriage, speak- ing from the same stand an average of two hours a day. Douglas was seven years younger than his opponent and conveyed a democratic in- formality in dress and demeanor. He was a solid Jacksonian on such is- sues as the bank and tariff. He detested all banks and their notes, preferring a currency limited to gold and silver coin. He contended that Whig tariffs discriminated against agriculture and the West and favored the rich at the expense of the poor. On the other hand, he abandoned the Jacksonian tradition of states rights and limited government on the mat- ter of internal improvements, a position not unusual for a western Democrat. He demanded federal aid for the construction of roads and canals in the West, as well as the dredging of rivers and harbors, and en- couraged the promotion of foreign markets for American farm products. He was elected by a narrow margin and then was reelected in the regu- lar election the following year. The issues of the 1844 presidential election centered on the acquisi- tion of Texas and Oregon. On the floor of Congress, Douglas committed himself to “spread eagle” expansionism. He would expand the American republic, he said at one point, until its only boundaries were the seashore. Douglas worked hard in Illinois for the election of the Democratic candi- date, James K. Polk, who campaigned on the slogan “Texas and Oregon” and defined Oregon as the entire Northwest as far as the boundary of Alaska: “Fifty-four Forty or Fight.” Polk carried Illinois by 13,000 votes, a substantial increase over Van Buren’s narrow victory four years earlier. A Missouri newspaper credited the margin to the “Young Giant of Illinois.”8 The Coming of War A treaty annexing the Republic of Texas had failed to get the neces- sary two-thirds approval of the Senate in May 1844, after Secretary of State John C. Calhoun injected the slavery issue by confessing that his chief aim in wanting Texas was to provide additional territory for slave- holders. Polk’s election later that year appeared to be a public mandate for expansion, and the question thereafter was how to prevent the anti- slavery minority in Congress from exerting a veto on Texas. Douglas was one of the architects of a scheme to evade the treaty ratification process by proceeding through a joint resolution of the two houses. That required only a simple majority of each house. He realized, of course, that Con- gress lacked the constitutional authority to acquire foreign territory by joint resolution. However, he sidestepped this obstacle by arguing that Texas had been acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and that Congress need only voice recognition of that “fact.” The stratagem worked, and Congress passed resolutions annexing Texas on March 3, 1845, the day before Polk was inaugurated president. Realizing that Texas and Oregon, one slave and one free, were wedded “like man and wife,” Douglas also proposed in that lame duck session of Congress that Oregon be given a territorial government, even if it risked war with Britain (which, by a convention of 1818, ruled the Northwest jointly with the United States). He also wanted to ensure that Oregon be made easily and safely accessible. He proposed the erection of a territorial government in the Nebraska country, the vast grasslands west of the Mis- souri River; the establishment of military posts along the Oregon Trail; and the survey of a route for the construction of a railroad to the Pacific coast. This same imperial view made Douglas an ardent supporter of the war with Mexico that broke out in May 1846, for he foresaw the conquest of the Southwest and California. Unfortunately, the slavery issue would not go away, as many in the northern and eastern parts of the United States, especially among Whigs, suspected that “Mr. Polk’s War” was undertaken principally for the benefit of land-hungry slaveholders. This suspicion took the form in August 1846 of an amendment to an army appropriation bill that would have prohibited slavery in any of the territory acquired from Mexico in the war. Offered by a Democrat from Pennsylvania, David Wilmot, the amendment became known ever after as the Wilmot Proviso. The Proviso was founded on the quite reasonable grounds that Mexico did not allow slavery and that it would be morally reprehensible to plant the institution on a land that had previously been free. Although Southerners had no realistic expectation that they could grow cotton or other slave-labor crops on the dry highlands of New Mexico and Arizona, they could not ignore the Northern challenge. They wanted the right to move into the region with their slaves, whether they did so or not. However, in a spirit of compromise, John C. Calhoun, the recognized spokesperson for the South, suggested that the 36 30’ line, by which the Compromise of 1820 prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Purchase northStephen A. Douglas: The Struggle to Prevent a War 9 of the extended southern boundary of Missouri, be extended to the Pacific. Douglas was one of the few Northern congressional representatives who supported this approach. He also argued that the Proviso was premature since the region was at present free and the slavery issue would not arise until territorial governments were formed. That alternative apparently had some effect, for when Wilmot’s amendment came to a vote before the House, where Northerners were in the majority, it failed by five votes. The issue nevertheless, to Douglas's acute distress, had divided the Democratic Party. Worse still from his standpoint—although he had yet to realize it—was that the Proviso offered a moderate alternative for peo- ple with a distaste for slavery but little notion of what to do about it. Out- right abolition of the institution had little appeal, even in the North, for it meant depriving citizens of their property and seemed to be beyond the power of the federal government. Slavery in the South existed by au- thority of state constitutions and could be abolished only by Southerners themselves. The Wilmot Proviso, however, said nothing about slavery where it was presently established; it proposed only to prevent the ex- pansion of the institution into the West, a notion that came to be called “free soil.” As the lowest common denominator of hostility to slavery, it had broad appeal. It would, before long, become the policy of Douglas’s chief opponent in Illinois politics, Abraham Lincoln. Popular Sovereignty Douglas’s hard-driving political ambition left little time for a social life and even less time for women. He formed friendships easily, but he was un- willing to devote the time and emotional energy for depth or intimacy. His physical appearance and personality were an added impediment to matri- mony. He compensated for his stubby, ungainly appearance by developing a boisterous, often coarse manner. “Every inch of him has its own alert- ness and motion,” wrote one woman. “His figure would be an unfortunate one were it not for the animation which constantly pervades it.” Nevertheless, in part because of his rapid rise to political prominence, he was regarded as one of Washington's most eligible bachelors. When a congressional friend from North Carolina introduced Douglas to his cousin Martha Martin, daughter of a wealthy North Carolina planter, there was instant attraction. The Martins had long been prominent in North Carolina politics. Martha’s great-uncle, Alexander Martin, had served as governor of the state and a U.S. senator in the 1790s. Martha had been ed- ucated at finishing schools in Philadelphia and Washington. Although frail and given to illness, she was an intelligent woman with a keen wit. At twenty-two, she was twelve years younger than Douglas when they were married in April 1847 at her father's Dan River plantation. Several years earlier Martha’s father, Robert Martin, had purchased10 The Coming of War a cotton plantation on the Pearl River in Mississippi, and he proposed to give the plantation and its slaves to Douglas as a wedding present. Douglas greeted the gift with mixed emotions. He knew nothing of cotton culture and had no interest in the life of a farmer. He also recognized that his ownership of slaves would be a political liability in Illinois. He reached a compromise with his father-in-law by which the plantation was deeded to Martha and managed by an overseer. The proceeds from cotton would be an important part of Douglas’s income until he sold the plantation a decade later. Douglas had been elected to the U.S. Senate the previous December, and it was no longer necessary to maintain a residence in his congres- sional district. He moved with his bride to Chicago, which had become Illinois’ largest city, and bought a fashionable home on the shores of Lake Michigan. He soon began investing in city lots in Chicago, investments that would prove quite useful as the costs of electioneering rose steadily. The victories of the Mexican War—the conquest of Santa Fe (New Mexico), the Bear Flag Revolt, which brought California into American hands, and the occupation of Mexico City in September 1847—fed the flames of American expansionism and gave rise in some quarters to a call for the annexation of “All Mexico.” Douglas was swept up in this move- ment, though he realized that all of Mexico would be expensive to con- quer and troublesome to rule. But he did think that the United States ought to demand the cession of Mexico’s northern provinces, Coahila, Chihuahua, and Sonora. President Polk, too, had felt the pressure of the “All Mexico” movement, and he was quite disappointed with the peace treaty negotiated by the emissary who had accompanied General Winfield Scott's army to Mexico City. By the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico recognized the loss of Texas and ceded to the United States the territory south of the forty-second parallel between Texas and the Pacific coast (Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and California). Nevertheless, rather than prolong the fight, Polk submitted the treaty to the Senate for ratification. The Senate approved the treaty with only fourteen votes in opposition—half of them Whigs who had opposed the war and half Democrats who, like Douglas, wanted more territory. Two months after the treaty was ratified, Douglas visited the White House in the company of John L. O'Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review and author of the term “Manifest Destiny,” to urge Polk to “take early measures with a view to the purchase of the Island of Cuba from Spain.” While in the House of Representatives, Douglas had served as chair of the Committee on Territories, and he was accorded the same position when he entered the Senate. It was a relatively new committee, and its powers were ill-defined. Although it caused some muttering among fel- low senators, Douglas claimed broad authority to deal with all aspects of the “Territorial business,” including the organization and supervision of territorial governments. He had little difficulty preparing a bill for the or-Stephen A. Douglas: The Struggle to Prevent a War nN ganization of the Oregon Territory, which Congress approved in August 1848. But when he attempted to set up governments in the territory ac- quired from Mexico, he collided with the Wilmot Proviso. After its initial defeat, the Proviso had come up twice more, in 1847 and 1848. Each time it passed the Northern-dominated House, but it was defeated by the South and its allies in the Senate. The mere threat of the Proviso, how- ever, prevented the formation of territorial governments in the region. The Proviso divided both political parties along sectional lines and promised to be the central issue in the presidential election of 1848. The Whigs evaded the issue by nominating a military hero, General Zachary Taylor, who ran without a platform. Among Democrats, Lewis Cass, sen- ator from Michigan and an old Jacksonian, hit upon a possible alterna- tive to the Wilmot Proviso. Writing a public letter to a Southern friend in December 1847, Cass pointed out that slavery did not exist in the Mexi- can cession and that it was unlikely that it could survive there. Because Congress, in his view, lacked the power to impose slavery, the decision would necessarily be made by the legislatures of the territories them- selves when such governments were erected. “Leave to the people, who will be affected by this question,” Cass wrote, “to adjust it upon their own responsibility, and in their own manner.” The idea, soon to be labeled “popular sovereignty,” appealed to mod- erate Democrats in both the North and the South. Letting the voters who would be most affected by the result make the decision was emi- nently democratic. It also had the virtue of removing the issue from the halls of Congress, where it had become obfuscated by oratorical ex- cesses, and it allowed the Democrats to paper over their sectional rift. The prospect of unifying the party and preserving the Union through a single, rather simple policy bewitched Douglas. He embraced the idea instantly and would adhere to it for the rest of his life, or at least until it was rendered irrelevant by the outbreak of war. Cass’s solution earned him the Democratic nomination in 1848, although, in deference to Southern extremists, the party platform avoided any mention of slavery in the territories. Implementation of popular sovereignty, however, would have to await future events, for Zachary Taylor won the election. Although he proposed no solutions and expressed few ideas, he was able to win the support of about an equal number of slave and free states. He was the last presidential candidate to do so prior to the war. The Compromise of 1850 The discovery of gold in California in the summer of 1848 and the rush of the “forty-niners” brought to a head the question of slavery in the Mexican cession. By the end of 1849 California had enough population12 The Coming of War to qualify for statehood. Although a large number of Southerners had moved to California, some with slaves, the majority of the population did not want blacks, slave or free, in their midst. California accordingly peti- tioned for admission to the Union as a free state. President Taylor, a ca- reer military officer with a penchant for snap decisions in the simplest form, agreed and passed the petition on to Congress. Alarm bells rang across the South. The admission of California would upset the balance between free and slave states in the Senate. The balance had been deliberately maintained since the Missouri Compro- mise of 1820, when the free state of Maine was paired with the slave state of Missouri. As recently as the mid-1840s the free states of Iowa and Wisconsin had been paired with Florida and Texas. Outnumbered in population—and thus outnumbered in the House of Representatives and the presidential electoral college—the South regarded the Senate as its last bastion of defense. And California, it realized, was only the begin- ning. Oregon and Minnesota would soon be knocking at the door, and neither had any slaves, With a clear Northern majority in both houses of Congress, the South could expect abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and increased Northern resistance to the return of fugitive slaves. A constitutional amendment abolishing slavery seemed only a matter of time. “This,” concluded one moderate Southern congressman, “is as good a time to resist as any other.” Prodded by Calhoun, Missis- sippi’s legislature issued a call for a convention to meet in Nashville in June 1850. The implicit threat was that, if California was admitted to the Union, the South would leave it. In January 1850 Henry Clay stepped in to fashion the last of the great sectional compromises for which he is famed. He introduced into the Senate an omnibus bill (in modern parlance, a “package deal”) by which he hoped to resolve by mutual give-and-take the most rancorous of the issues dividing the North and South. California would be admitted as a free state; there was, after all, no alternative. This would be the ma- jor gain for the North. The South would be compensated by a new Fugi- tive Slave Law, which would make it easier for slaveholders to recover their runaways by simply bringing a captive before a neighborhood jus- tice of the peace. The slave catcher’s word would be honored; the black fugitive would not be allowed to testify. Clay also proposed that two new territories—Utah and New Mexico—be carved out of the Mexican ces- sion. Texas would be compensated for the loss to New Mexico of territory east of the Rio Grande by having the federal government assume some of its debt. Finally, slavery in the District of Columbia would be retained, but the slave trade in the District would end. All of these proposals had previously been brought before Congress. It was Clay's genius to gather them into a single package and present them as a measure of conciliation, thus providing a new and realistic ba- sis for public debate. Douglas, who endorsed the idea, already had be-image not availableimage not availableimage not available6 The Coming of War The balloting for a candidate began on June 3; Cass and Buchanan were the leaders, with Douglas trailing well behind. Seventeen ballots were held that day, and Douglas gained steadily. He took the lead the following day on the thirtieth ballot, and delegations began switching to his side. Southerners, however, were suspicious of popular sovereignty and joined the Buchanan people to prevent Douglas from obtaining the necessary two-thirds. After two days of balloting the convention was tired, angry, and in a quandary. Douglas had been blocked, Buchanan’s chances were hopeless, and Cass’s strength had evaporated. On the third day and the forty-sixth ballot Southern delegations began voting for a hitherto un- known, Franklin Pierce, governor of New Hampshire. Weary delegates stampeded to Pierce, and he won the nomination. With the Whig Party disintegrating, Pierce also won the election. The Southerners appear to have known what they were doing. New Yorker William L. Marcy became secretary of state, but Pierce filled the rest of the important cabinet posts with Southerners. Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, one of the fire-eating opponents of the Compromise of 1850, became secretary of war. James Buchanan, a Pennsylvanian quite accept- able to the South, was made minister to Great Britain. Some years earlier the term “doughface” had been coined to describe “a Northern man with Southern principles.” That is what the nation got in Franklin Pierce. In January 1853 Martha Douglas gave birth to a daughter, but com- plications developed and Martha died within a few days. The baby girl followed her a month later. Martha was only twenty-eight years old. Overwhelmed with grief, Douglas decided on a change of scenery. He placed his sons with Martha’s parents and departed for Europe. He made the usual tour, from England to France, Italy, and Greece. Then he visited Turkey and Russia, where he conferred with government officials over the developing crisis in the Black Sea (the Crimean War would break out a year later). Czar Nicholas gave him an audience and assured Douglas that he was a man of peace. From St. Petersburg Douglas crossed Sweden and Denmark and visited Berlin, Vienna, and Paris before re- turning home. He was back in Washington by early November and im- mediately plunged into the political maelstrom. While Douglas had been in Europe, Pierce had sent James Gadsden, a South Carolina railroad builder, to Mexico to purchase additional terri- tory south of the Gila River, which marked the boundary between Arizona and Mexico. Gadsden returned with title to a strip of desert that seemed useless to everybody but the president and a handful of Southerners. The purpose of the Gadsden Purchase, it turned out, was to acquire a piece of relatively flat terrain, south of the high ridges of the Rocky Mountains, that could be traversed by a railroad to California. The idea of a Pacific railroad, which had been floating around for nearly a decade, had become entan- gled in the North-South rivalry. Politicians had come to realize that the route chosen—whether a northern route with terminus in Chicago or aimage not availableimage not availableStephen A. Douglas: The Struggle to Prevent a War 2 the appeal by denying that there had been any “corrupt bargain” with the South, and he defended popular sovereignty on the Jacksonian principle of nonintervention, that is, local decision making without interference from Congress. In early March the Senate passed the bill by thirty-seven to fourteen votes. Only two Southerners voted in the negative; the free states divided evenly. Most Democrats voted in favor of the bill; the Whigs split evenly. Douglas then turned his attention to the House of Represen- tatives, where Northern “Conscience Whigs” and Free Soilers were lead- ing the hue and cry against the bill. The battle continued into May, with Douglas in almost daily attendance on the House debate. On May 22 the ballot was finally taken, and the bill squeaked through by 113 to 100 votes. Douglas later boasted: “I passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act myself. I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the whole contro- versy in both houses.” A more modest tone would have been better ad- vised, for it was not at all clear what he had accomplished. The legislative struggle was over, but the battle over the implications of popular sover- eignty had only begun. Bleeding Kansas The short-term effect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was the formation of the Republican Party in the summer of 1854, a blend of Free Soilers, such as John Quincy's son Charles Francis Adams; “conscience Whigs,” such as Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner; and anti-Nebraska Democrats, such as Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, With Republican candi- dates materializing all over the North, the first public trial of the Kansas— Nebraska Act would be the off-year congressional election that autumn. Realizing the stakes, Douglas conducted a speaking tour across Illinois during August and September. In Bloomington he once again encoun- tered Abraham Lincoln, a candidate for the national and state legisla- tures, who challenged him to a debate. Douglas declined and spoke in the afternoon; Lincoln followed him with an evening speech. On October 2 Douglas arrived in Springfield, where the state fair was in progress. Encouraged by Whig friends to follow Douglas, Lincoln also appeared at the fair. Douglas gave his usual two-hour speech with a hoarse voice and visible fatigue. Lincoln gave a formal reply on the follow- ing afternoon. Douglas, with Lincoln as his shadow, gave eight speeches in as many towns over the next ten days, and then Douglas, his voice gone completely, quit and returned to Chicago. In the election the Democrats returned only four of the state's nine congressmen and lost control of both state houses. Results elsewhere in the North further staggered the Democrats. An alliance of Republicans and nativist (anti-immigration) Know Nothings captured control of Massachusetts, and Republicans won congressional seats elsewhere in New England and New York. That20 The Coming of War was only the immediate result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act; the long- term result was “bleeding Kansas.” The congressional discussion of popular sovereignty during the de- bate on the Nebraska bill revealed the ambiguity in the principle. The problem was, at what point was the choice to be made—when there was only a handful of residents in the new territory, or when it qualified for statehood? Moreover, both sides realized that the winner would be the one who could place the most voters in the territories, regardless of when the ballot was taken. Nebraska was never a problem; it was certain to be populated by free-state farmers from Iowa and Illinois. The contest cen- tered on Kansas. Missourians regarded the rich bottom lands of the Kaw River valley as their own frontier preserve. Some even felt that the se- curity of slavery in Missouri depended on expanding it into Kansas. During the Senate debate William H. Seward of New York predicted a race to Kansas. “We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas,” he told the Senate, “and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in the right.” At just that moment Massa- chusetts clergy and reformers were forming the New England Emigrant Aid Society, which planned to solicit funds from businesspeople to aid free farmers in their move to Kansas. The main effect of this and similar organizations in other Northern states was to alarm the Missourians. Farmers in counties along the Missouri River organized themselves and called on the South for help. In the race to Kansas, Missourians had the short-term advantage. President Pierce’s choice for territorial governor of Kansas was An- drew Reeder, a Pennsylvania lawyer with no political experience whom Pierce had chosen in order to pay off a local political debt. After a quick tour of the territory, Reeder set an election for territorial delegate to Con- gress for late November and scheduled elections for the territorial legis- lature early in the new year. Because the Kansas—Nebraska Act failed to define precisely the voting qualifications, crossover Missourians domi- nated both elections. The territorial delegate was pro-slavery, as was a majority of the legislature. The legislature convened in the Shawnee In- dian Mission located no more than a few hundred yards from the Mis- souri line and proceeded to adopt a law code favoring slavery. During 1855 emigrants began flowing into Kansas from the free states of the Middle West. Most came looking for better land and new homes. Slavery to them was a distant abstraction on which few had any firm opinions. They did agree, however, that they did not want black people in their midst, whether slave or free. The pioneers moved be- yond the Missouri settlements west up the Kaw River and founded Lawrence and Topeka. By midsummer it was evident that the free-state settlers outnumbered the transplanted Missourians. In September a band of free-state emigrants met in Topeka to protest the “bogus” Shawnee Mission government, and they formed a convention that en-Stephen A. Douglas: The Struggle to Prevent a War 21 acted a separate set of territorial laws, including a ban on slavery effec- tive July 4, 1857. As a result Kansas was blessed with two governments, and popular sovereignty, far from quelling the national debate, had evolved into the “Kansas question.” In the spring of 1856 Douglas reported a bill for the admission of Kansas to the Union as soon as a census recorded the minimum num- ber of people necessary for statehood. The bill appeared to envision Kansas as a slave state, for it recognized, as did the president, the legit- imacy of the Shawnee Mission government. In the course of the debate, on May 19 Senator Charles Sumner responded to Douglas's interpreta- tion of the events in Kansas with a two-day oration, “The Crime against Kansas.” Unable to contain his moral outrage, Sumner (who, as one historian has suggested, might in calmer times have found a home in the ministry rather than the Senate) undertook a ferocious personal as- sault, loaded with sexual imagery, against Douglas and two Southern senators, Andrew P Butler of South Carolina and John Y. Mason of Vir- ginia. Two days later, Congressman Preston Brooks, a blood relation of Senator Butler, entered the Senate floor and attacked Sumner, who was seated at his desk, with a hard rubber cane, knocking him senseless. Sumner survived but would be absent from his Senate seat for the next two years (a mostly symbolic protest, for he was well enough to tour Eu- rope in the interval). Only a few days later the violence in Washington was paralleled by violence in Kansas. Determined to assert its authority, the Shawnee Mis- sion government charged the leaders of the Topeka movement with trea- son, and, following a jury indictment, a local sheriff with a posse of 500 Missourians moved on Lawrence. They destroyed the presses of the local newspaper and set fire to the Free State Hotel. With customary hyper- bole, Northern newspapers labeled it “the sack of Lawrence.” News of this outrage reached the ears of a fifty-six-year-old émigré from Ohio named John Brown, a fanatical adherent of the Old Testament doctrine of retribution. Brown gathered together his pliant sons and a few other men and rode to Lawrence. Arriving too late to confront the retreating sheriff, Brown led his men to a string of homesteads along Pottawatomie Creek known to be pro-slavery. There his band slashed to death five set- tlers with knives and swords. It was with this backdrop of violence in Washington and bloodshed in Kansas that the parties met in convention to choose presidential nomi- nees for the election of 1856. Mindful of his mistakes in 1852, Douglas was more subtle in organizing his support. His most formidable opponent was James Buchanan, who had been in England for four years and had thus avoided the taint of the Kansas question. Douglas, on the other hand, had lost much of his strength in the Northwest because of his stand on Kansas. When, after fourteen ballots, a crucial Southern delegation switched from Douglas to Buchanan, Douglas abandoned the contest.image not availableimage not available24 The Coming of War admitted to the Union until after the South departed in 1861. In the meantime, the controversy had discouraged slaveholders and helped de- termine that Kansas would be free. In the census of 1860 there were only two slaves in the entire territory. The Lincoin—Douglas Debates The frequency of American elections was one of the systemic problems that helped bring on the Civil War. There never seemed to be a time for passions to abate, a time to relax and reflect on the issues of the day. Americans seemed to be either deeply involved in an election campaign or anticipating one. Discussion of the Kansas compromise had occupied much of the spring of 1858, and when Congress adjourned in June, Douglas immediately began preparing for the fall election. It was the off- year congressional election, and his own Senate seat was at stake. His first need was money. Election campaigns had become ever more expensive with the advance of democracy. Railroads allowed more travel and more appearances in remote towns, but they also entailed more expense. Stenographers were accompanying candidates to record their speeches for distribution to newspapers. There were more paid campaign workers and higher printing costs. Douglas sold some of his Illinois lands and then journeyed to New York to borrow more money. Au- gust Belmont, one of New York's wealthiest financiers and one of Wall Street’s few Democrats, arranged loans based on mortgages of Douglas’s landed property. The New York Herald subsequently estimated the value of Douglas’s “pecuniary raid on Wall Street” at $100,000. In the meantime the Republicans had met in Springfield on June 16 and nominated Lincoln to contest Douglas for the Senate seat. Lincoln accepted the nomination with his famous “House Divided” speech, in which he predicted not war—as some have felt then and since—but that the Republic would succumb to the slave power. He was suggesting that slavery was not a racial institution but an economic one, potentially as applicable to white Northern factory workers as to black Southern cotton pickers. It was a bid to involve the Northern white worker, who previously had been indifferent to the fate of Southern black people—and it bade fair to succeed. In the election campaign Lincoln's primary tactic was to widen the rift between Buchanan and Douglas, call attention to the split in the Demo- cratic Party, and exploit the inconsistency between the Dred Scott decision and popular sovereignty. To do this he had to engage Douglas in face-to- face debate. Because Douglas had no interest in debating the lesser known Lincoln, Lincoln was forced to shadow him, as he had in previous cam- paigns. Douglas opened his campaign with a speech in Chicago; Lincoln answered him with a talk of his own the following day. Douglas traveled toimage not availableimage not availableimage not available28 The Coming of War effect of the speech was electric. Republicans tumbled over Democrats in praise of his patriotic stand. On May 1, 1861, Douglas was welcomed in his home city of Chicago like a conquering hero. A crowd greeted him at the train station and formed a parade to accompany him to the National Hall, where he was scheduled to speak. The speech proved to be his last. He was by then a physical wreck. The election campaign, the frantic efforts on behalf of the Crittenden Compromise, and the final burst of militant patriotism had left him physically exhausted and emotionally drained. He and his wife took rooms at the Tremont Hotel, and over the next few weeks he grew weaker and suffered continual pain. The doctors diagnosed it as “acute rheumatism,” and it may have been the beginnings of heart fail- ure. The years of heavy smoking and drinking no doubt had also taken a toll on his heart, lungs, and liver. He died on June 3, 1861. He was only forty-eight years old. SUGGESTED READING The best biography of Stephen A. Douglas—and the only one in recent years—is Robert W. Johannsen’s Stephen A. Douglas (1973). Damon Wells’s Stephen Douglas’s The Last Years, 1857-1861 (1971) is adequate for its topic but adds nothing to Johannsen’s account. Don E. Fehren- bacher’s Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850’s (1962) is an indis- pensable analysis of Lincoln's thought. George F Milton’s The Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War (1934) is a classic re- visionist approach. David Potter's The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (1976) is the modern interpretation. Bryan Holden Reid's The Origins of the American Civil War (1996) is a recent survey by an eminent British historian.image not availableimage not availableimage not available32 The Coming of War gift for eloquence, such as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, were national heroes. Oratory was power, and the young Frederick sensed this. He ab- sorbed passages from Cicero and Cato, William Pitt defending American liberty before the House of Lords, George Washington bidding his offi- cers farewell. The book was both a lesson in oratory and a guide to the history of freedom. Seldom has a single book had so much influence upon a single human life. The more he learned, the more restive he grew with his servile status. The tensions of adolescence reinforced his anger at being held a slave. He had grown physically powerful by age fifteen, and his attitude toward white people had become surly. He was more than the gentle Sophia could handle, and in 1833 he was sent back to Thomas Auld on the East- ern Shore. Auld operated a store in the lovely fishing village of St. Michaels, and he quickly discovered that Frederick was too sullen and abrasive to handle customers. Determined to get some interest on their investment, the Aulds in March 1834 hired him out to Edward Covey, a pious, hardworking dirt farmer who was trying to scratch a living out of some sandy soil along the bay seven miles from St. Michaels. In later years Frederick Douglass spoke of him as a “nigger breaker,” though that implied more professional status than this ignorant poor white possessed. He worked side by side with his slaves, and when they failed to live up to his expectations they were whipped. The year Frederick spent with Covey, a nightmare of regular beatings and unending labor that sometimes lasted well into the night, became the grist for countless antislavery lectures and was recounted in all three of his autobiographies. In August 1834 Freder- ick escaped from the Covey farm and made his way to St. Michaels to in- form the Aulds of his mistreatment. When Thomas Auld scoffed disbelievingly and sent him back into the rural hell, Frederick’s grudging respect for the man turned into a bitter lifetime hatred. Shortly after Frederick’s return Covey confronted him in his barn. Covey grabbed him and attempted to tie him up for a whipping; Freder- ick fought back. Covey called for help from two other slaves, Bill and Car- oline, who had strolled upon the scene. Both feigned ignorance of what was wanted. Frederick and Covey grappled with one another for “nearly two hours,” as Frederick would later recount the incident, while the other slaves stood by with mocking grins. Frederick, in his remaining months with Covey, was never struck again. The Aulds hired him out again for the year 1835, this time to a farmer with a reputation for lenience toward slaves. Better treatment, however, did not quell his yearning to be free. His stay in Baltimore had been an indelible experience. There he had learned that it was possible to be both black and free. He had learned also that there were lands to the north that were free of slavery. He began making plans to escape. He found kindred souls among four other young black men hired to work on the farm. Together they decided to steal a large oyster-gathering canoeFrederick Douglass: The Case for a Just War 33 that belonged to a St. Michaels waterman, paddle to the head of the bay, and walk across the border into Pennsylvania. The plot was exposed, probably by the one free black among them (although free blacks in the North often aided runaway slaves, in the South they sometimes exposed the plans of fugitives in order to curry favor with white planters), and the conspirators were put in jail. After a week of hesitation and hand-wringing, Thomas Auld went to the jail and obtained Frederick’s freedom on the pretext that he planned to sell him to a friend in Alabama. To sell Frederick would have been in Auld’s best interest, for he was too incorrigible to be of use in St. Michaels. But, somehow, Auld could not bring himself to doom this in- telligent young man to the cotton fields of the Deep South. So he struck a bargain with Frederick. Auld sent him back to his brother in Baltimore to learn a trade and work for wages. To discourage Frederick from plan- ning another escape, he promised to set him free at age twenty-five. Frederick knew he could not wait eight years to test the reliability of this promise; he would set himself free. But, for the second time in his life, he owed a huge debt to Thomas Auld for placing freedom on the horizon. Fugitive in New England Urban slaves who were allowed to work for wages, which they were obliged to split with the master, have sometimes been described as “half free.” And that is a fair description of Frederick Bailey's life in Baltimore for the next three years. Hugh Auld had worked in a shipyard, and he quickly arranged for Frederick to serve as an apprentice caulker in one of the yards near Fell’s Point. Within two years he had risen to the rank of journeyman and was earning $1.50 a day. He deeply resented, however, having to turn over all of his wages to Auld, who provided him only with room and board. At the same time, his economic value to Auld gave him some leverage. He finally persuaded Auld to let him find his own em- ployment and his own living quarters in the city in return for remitting to Auld only $3 a week. Frederick was now twenty years old, and he had met the woman who would become his wife. We know very little of Anna Murray, for there is only the barest mention of her in Douglass’s autobiographies. She is also the first female, other than kin, that we encounter in the autobiographies. She was born on the Eastern Shore, and her parents had been manumit- ted a short time before her birth. She was thus a free woman, five years older than Frederick, employed as a domestic servant in Baltimore. She was illiterate, and Douglass, despite his passion for literacy, never taught her to read and write. Douglass was, if anything, a characteristically dom- inant, puritanical, Victorian male, and he probably thought she had no need for letters. It was his biggest failing as husband and father.34 The Coming of War Together they planned his escape. He would go first. She would come later, and they would be married on free soil. To allay Auld’s suspi- cions, Frederick, for a period of several weeks, abandoned his sullen de- meanor and cheerfully turned over the fraction of his week’s wages. Anna managed to obtain “free papers” from a black seaman, on the promise that they would be returned once Frederick reached the North. His first two autobiographies contain only the sketchiest accounts of his escape from slavery, in part because, when the first two were written, the Underground Railroad was a hot political issue, and he needed to protect the “conductors” and “station masters” along the route. On Monday, September 3, 1838, Frederick Bailey, dressed in sailor’s garb, took a horse-drawn hack, driven by a friend, to the Baltimore train station. He avoided the ticket window, where his papers would be closely examined. Instead, he and his friend waited outside the station until the train for Wilmington began to roll. The hack raced up to the train and stopped beside the car reserved for colored persons. Frederick, bag in hand, leaped aboard. The conductor, gruff with other inhabitants of the coach, had a soft spot for sailors. He barely glanced at Frederick’s papers and accepted his fare in cash. At Havre de Grace a ferry took him across the Susquehanna River, where another northbound train awaited on the shore. At Wilmington he boarded a steamboat for Philadelphia and from there a night train to New York. There he found his way to the home of David Ruggles, head of a local committee that gave refuge to runaways and helped them move on to New England or Canada. He changed his name to Frederick Johnson and remained in Rug- gles’s home for several days while Anna made her way north. It is a measure perhaps of their careful planning that the illiterate and untrav- eled woman was able to negotiate the numerous changes between trains and ferries that the trip involved. They were married in Ruggles’s home by another Maryland runaway, who was beginning a career as a Presby- terian minister. Then, as one biographer has so aptly phrased it, “they set off for New England and forty-four years of marriage.” Their destination was New Bedford, Massachusetts, a whaling port with a lively shipbuilding industry. The city also had a sizable population of Quakers, who were committed to the eradication of slavery and preached a doctrine of human equality. Its black community, which num- bered about 1,000, was firmly resolved to protect one another from the “hunters of men,” their term for the professional slave catchers who roamed the North in search of fugitives. Frederick and Anna had been di- rected to the home of Mary and Nathan Johnson, who were both African American and Quakers. The one shortcoming was that they had the same surname that Frederick had chosen in New York. Indeed, the city direc- tory was loaded with Johnsons. Nathan, who had a well-stocked library, suggested that Frederick take a name (Douglas) from Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake. Frederick liked the sound of it and, without checkingFrederick Douglass: The Case for a Just War 35 Scott’s spelling, gave it the spelling used by a prominent black family in Baltimore. Thus the metamorphosis from Frederick Bailey/Johnson to Frederick Douglass. Douglass obtained a job in a New Bedford shipyard and almost im- mediately discovered the limits to his newfound freedom—Northern racial prejudice. He was offered the job of hauling heavy timbers and fittings at a dollar a day. The foreman informed him that if he allowed Douglass to practice his skilled craft of caulking, every white laborer would walk off the job. Douglass rejected the limited job offer and instead worked in a succession of day-labor jobs: “I sawed wood, shoveled coal, dug cellars, moved rubbish from back-yards, worked on the wharfs, loaded and unloaded vessels, and scoured their cabins.” After some months of this a Quaker merchant gave him a better-paid and more con- genial job on his wharf. The position involved the fitting and stocking of whaling vessels, and Douglass’s strength earned the respect of both fore- man and fellow employees. Anna gave birth with some regularity—Rosetta in June 1839, Lewis Henry in October 1840, Frederick Jr. in March 1842, and Charles Re- mond in October 1844. Two of the boys were named after close friends of Douglass. We have no further details, for Douglass's autobiographies contain little about his family life. Douglass had become deeply religious during his years in Baltimore, and the couple began attending the Methodist church in New Bedford. Douglass resented, however, being given segregated seating in the gallery, and he was even more aggrieved by the minister’s condescending tone and glance toward “the corner where his black sheep seemed penned.” Accordingly they began attend- ing meetings of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion, a counterpart to the better known African Methodist Episcopal Church of Philadelphia. Both churches had been founded by African Americans who had ob- jected to discrimination in the white churches. The minister initially gave Douglass “authority to act as an exhorter” and, impressed by his ability to move the congregation, “licensed him to preach.” The tech- niques of communication with fellow African Americans, learned on the Lloyd plantation and on the streets of Baltimore, were being honed into a unique oratorical style. He was soon to find his true calling—the antislavery platform. He had been in New Bedford only a few months when an agent for the Mas- sachusetts Anti-Slavery Society persuaded him to accept a free trial sub- scription to The Liberator, founded by William Lloyd Garrison in 1831 to promote the concept of abolition—the immediate, uncompensated emancipation of the slaves through the principle of persuading slave- holders that they were morally in the wrong. The newspaper introduced him to, as Douglass later wrote, “the mind of William Lloyd Garrison.” Not long after, on an April evening in 1839, Garrison gave a talk in New Bedford, and Douglass was overwhelmed by the “fine flow of dazzling36 The Coming of War rhetoric” as well as “his character, his convictions, and his high moral purpose.” Douglass’s own Zion Chapel sponsored antislavery meetings, and Douglass began participating in them. He was able to tell his neighbors what slavery was like from his own experience. Former slaves had told their stories before in front of Northern audiences, but no one had ever achieved the cadence, wit, and narrative power of Douglass. He had nearly perfected his autobiographical technique by spring of 1841, when a white listener in his congregation decided that a larger audience ought to hear what this earnest, young black man had to say. William C. Coffin was a bookkeeper in a New Bedford bank, a Quaker, and a staunch abolitionist. He invited Douglass to attend the midsummer meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society on the island of Nan- tucket, whose port, also called Nantucket, was another whaling center well stocked with Quakers. When Douglass alighted from the packet ves- sel on August 16, 1841, Coffin met him on the dock and walked him to the meeting, defying the social convention that blacks and whites never strolled together in public. On the way, Coffin suggested that he rise in the meeting and speak if, like a Quaker, he felt moved to do so. Garrison was in attendance, and the first resolution put before the meeting was typically Garrisonian—it denounced not slavery itself, but the Northern tolerance of it based on Northern racial prejudice. Five or- ators had addressed an audience that numbered about 1,000 before Douglass finally gathered the courage to stand and speak. He had often denounced Northern prejudice before his church congregation; this was his first opportunity to treat the subject before a predominantly white au- dience. He recalled the moment in his 1845 autobiography: “It was a se- vere cross, and I took it up reluctantly. The truth was, I felt myself a slave, and the idea of speaking to white people weighed me down. I spoke but a few moments, when I felt a degree of freedom, and said what I de- sired with considerable ease.” In fact, he had not long been on his feet when his remarks were interrupted by the announcement that it was time to adjourn for the day. At the opening of the session the next morning he was invited to re- sume his talk. Instead of dwelling on Northern prejudice, he launched into the well-rehearsed tale of his experiences as a slave. He spoke with great force, conviction, and effect. One observer described the impact on his audience: “Flinty hearts were pierced, and cold ones melted by his eloquence. Our best pleaders for the slave held their breath for fear of in- terrupting him. Mr. Garrison said his speech would have done honor to Patrick Henry. It seemed almost miraculous how he had been prepared to tell his story with so much power.” Douglass himself, in his autobiographies, is the source of the myth, repeated by many historians, that he arose in that Nantucket meeting hall utterly unprepared and with no experience at public address andimage not available38 The Coming of War Lynn, Massachusetts, a Quaker village within a short railroad ride of Boston. As he started his lecturing duties he almost immediately en- countered Northern Jim Crow laws (requiring racial segregation), which were most rigorously enforced on the railroads, In September 1841 Douglass and John A. Collins attempted to travel together to an antislav- ery meeting in Dover, New Hampshire. The conductor ordered Douglass to move on to the “negro car.” When he refused, the conductor enlisted the help of four or five men, who dragged him out of his seat. Later that month he had another confrontation, apparently with the same conduc- tor, who identified him as a troublemaker. Before the train even left the station in Lynn, the conductor called for reinforcements to “snake out the d——d nigger.” Douglass held on to the bolted seat with his stevedore strength, and he was still sitting in it when he reached his destination. In January 1842, his speaking reputation now well established, Douglass attended the annual meeting in Boston of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. The meeting opened in the “spacious and com- modious Melodeon on Washington Street” with roughly 1,000 in atten- dance. After business was attended to, the meeting staged a debate on moral suasion versus political abolition. Douglass participated; it was his first recorded address. After two speakers had defended political action, Douglass rose in rebuttal. After pleading that he was “no debater”— always a good device for reducing an audience's expectations—he con- fronted the previous speaker’s arguments and refuted them, point by point, with a combination of personal experience and Garrisonian doc- trine. Maria Weston Chapman, a powerful speaker herself, observed, “It is interesting to see with how few words a man of color, like Douglas [sic], can beat down the mountain of prejudice, which a white man might work a day in vain to pile up proofs against.” The following evening the convention met in the House of Repre- sentatives Hall in the State House. Garrison introduced Douglass in a “particularly rousing manner” as “a thing from the South.” Douglass then stepped forward and announced dramatically: “I appear before the immense assembly this evening as a thief and a robber. I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master, and ran off with them.” The re- mainder of the speech, which was not recorded, was “a stern denuncia- tion of slavery, such as became a man who had endured its unutterable indignities.” Ferocious though it was, the talk was not without wit. One journalist reported: “He showed great imitative powers and gave an amusing exhibition of the southern style of preaching to the slaves, and the corresponding practice, which seemed to interest the meeting greatly. His active [i.e., actor’s] talents are evidently of a high order.” This was the first hint of what became known as the “Slaveholder’s Ser- mon,” in which Douglass mimicked Southern clergy hypocritical advice to slaves. He elaborated the “Sermon” in a speech on the last day of theimage not available40 The Coming of War than myself. Nor could I on the other hand be satisfied with a reversed arrangement by which I should have less than an equal fellow laborer.” Through 1844 Douglass gradually increased the length and descrip- tive details of the account of his slave experience. It had been six years since his escape from slavery, and he no doubt felt more secure. Initially he had withheld some specifics of his life in slavery for fear of being iden- tified and returned to his slave master. Moreover, by 1844 he may have felt obliged to include more details. His speeches had become so pol- ished and eloquent that some in his audiences had begun to express doubts that he had ever been a slave. The new details involved the names of his masters in Maryland and incidents that could only have been experienced as a slave. Many of these episodes found their way, a year later, into his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. The Narrative and the English Tour Douglass's autobiography was, in large measure, a response to the grow- ing doubts that he had ever actually been a slave. Douglass later re- counted the problem: They said I did not talk like a slave, look like a slave, nor act like a slave, and that they believed I had never been south of Mason and Dixon's line. “He don’t tell us where he came from—what his master’s name was—how he got away—nor the story of his experience. Besides he is educated, and is, in this, a contradic- tion of all the facts we have concerning the ignorance of slaves.” Thus, I was in a pretty fair way to be denounced as an imposter. He decided to reveal all—or at least the essentials—in a book. He worked on it through the fall of 1844, spending most of his time at home for the first time since being discovered by Garrison. The 125-page Narrative, with an introduction by Garrison, appeared in May 1845. “It is written entirely by Mr. Douglass,” the Liberator as- sured its readers, “and reveals all the facts in regard to his birthplace— the names of his mother, master, overseer, etc.” Douglass had previously been known only to antislavery audiences; the Narrative was his pass- port to national prominence. The first edition of 5,000 copies was sold out within four months, and within a year the publishers were obliged to print four more editions of 2,000 copies each. By 1850 the book was an international best-seller with sales of more than 30,000 copies. Not until Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) would an antislavery narrative have such a powerful impact. As he finished writing the book, Douglass contemplated a trip to theFrederick Douglass: The Case for a Just War 4 British Isles. “I wished to be out of the way,” he explained in a later edi- tion of his Narrative, “lest the information I had there given as to my identity, and place of abode, should induce my owner to take measures for my restoration to his ‘patriarchal care.’” Douglass also wanted to meet British abolitionists and bring international condemnation down upon the American South. He would not be the first American ex-slave to address a British audience, but, with his Narrative preceding him, he was certain to make a profound impression. After a month in Dublin, while he negotiated an Irish edition for his autobiography, Douglass moved on to Scotland. “It is quite an advantage to be a ‘nigger’ here,” he wrote jauntily to the president of the Massa- chusetts Society. “I am hardly black enough for the british [sic] taste, but by keeping my hair as wooly as possible—I make out to pass for at least half a negro at any rate.” The problem was that the British tended to at- tribute his abilities to the white blood in his veins. On the other hand, one of Douglass’s Irish admirers put a different spin on the puzzle: “Faith, an’ if half a Naigar can make a speech like that, whut would a whole Naigar do?” The tour was more than a personal triumph. He made some lifelong friendships and uncovered a fresh source of badly needed funds. What he needed, first of all, was money to buy his freedom, so he could retum to the United States without fear of capture. British abolitionists quickly put together a fund and contacted a New York banker, who in turn arranged for a Baltimore lawyer to talk to Hugh Auld. Hugh contacted his brother Thomas, and the price agreed upon was $1,250. The banker passed on the money, and the Aulds executed a deed of manumission, which was registered in the Baltimore County courthouse. Douglass was truly free at last. Douglass also gained from the tour an enormous self-confidence from being treated as an equal and with respect. The autobiography itself had been a sort of declaration of independence from Garrison and the Massachusetts Society. The next step would be a newspaper of his own. He may have thought of this before leaving America; in England he be- gan discussing the idea with friends. Among those in his confidence was an articulate antislavery worker, Julia Griffiths, with whom he formed a lasting bond. How intimate the bond was we do not know, for Douglass, a true Victorian, never discussed his personal life and never showed pas- sion about anything except human rights. But the close friendship lasted until they died, nearly half a century later. When he informed Julia of his plan to start up a newspaper, she offered to find financial support in Britain. Four years later she would move to America to work as an assis- tant on the paper. When he returned to Boston, Douglass carried a bank draft for 500 pounds, a healthy endowment with which to launch his publication.42 The Coming of War The North Star Garrison's Liberator had never been financially self-sustaining. Its most loyal subscribers were a handful of free blacks in the Boston area. Garri- son was kept in business by Maria Chapman's annual bazaars and by oc- casional handouts from the New York philanthropists Arthur and Lewis Tappan, but their donations ceased with the schism of 1840. A rival pa- per would pose a real threat, and Douglass could anticipate opposition from his Massachusetts friends. But he was determined to forge ahead. He had returned from Britain brimming with self-confidence and deter- mined to address the slavery question in his own words and in his own way. That could only be done through the columns of his own newspaper. As if to signal a complete breakaway (although he was still on cordial terms with Garrison), he chose to make a new home for his family and his paper in Rochester, New York. Situated on the Genesee River, just above its entry into Lake Ontario, Rochester was widely known as the last stop on the Underground Railroad. It was populated with antislavery citizens eager to help fugitives onto the last leg of their journey, to the safety of Canada. In naming his newspaper Douglass chose the most im- portant symbol of all to runaway slaves, the North Star. The first issue of the paper appeared on December 3, 1847. Al- though Douglass's reputation helped promote the venture, the subscrip- tions barely paid for the printing costs and postage. Like Garrison, Douglass survived only with the help of friends. Chief among these was Gerrit Smith, whose father had made a fortune in land speculation dur- ing New York’s spurt of growth between 1800 and 1820. Smith, who had helped to rescue Douglass from an angry mob on one of his New York tours, resided near Syracuse some ninety miles from Rochester. Smith did not underwrite the paper, but his periodic contributions of $100 or $200 helped keep Douglass financially afloat. In February 1848 Douglass journeyed to Lynn to bring Anna and the boys to Rochester. The older daughter, Rosetta, had already been sent to Albany to live and study with the Mott sisters, Abigail and Lydia, cousins to the husband of the formidable abolitionist and women’s rights advo- cate Lucretia Coffin Mott. Because Anna was illiterate, we have no record of her reaction to Douglass’s public career and his frequent ab- sences from home. She was a thoroughly domestic woman who waited on her husband when there were guests in the house as if he were sim- ply another guest. And there are indications that she was not happy at being uprooted every time she settled into a community. Her disposition did not improve when she learned that they would have to board in Rochester until they could find a house. Late in February, Douglass wrote the Mott sisters that he was a “most unhappy man.” His “house hunting” had met only frustration, and “Anna has not been well—or veryFrederick Douglass: The Case for a Just War 4% good humored since we came here.” In April they finally purchased a pleasant town house from a local abolitionist—to the dismay of nearly all the white neighbors on the street. Anna busied herself with a large, well- tended garden, but she declined all association with her white neighbors or even with the small, but tightly knit, black community. Shortly after Douglass got his family settled in their new house, he came across a stirring item in a local newspaper. The Seneca County Courier, bearing the date July 14, 1848, contained an announcement of a women’s rights convention to meet just five days later in Seneca Falls, in the heart of New York's Finger Lake District. The idea for such a meeting had been born eight years earlier, in 1840, when Lucretia Mott and Eliz- abeth Cady Stanton had attended the World's Anti-Slavery Congress in London and found themselves shunted into a special section, with a skirted railing separating them from the male delegates. Both were in- stantly converted to the cause of women’s rights. Stanton subsequently moved to Seneca Falls because the frantic pace of Boston was too strenu- ous for her lawyer/abolitionist husband. After issuing their call for a con- vention, Mott and Stanton commandeered the town’s Methodist church to host the meeting. Douglass was present when the convention opened on July 19. He, like other Garrisonians, had long since coupled women’s rights with the cause of antislavery, and he no doubt hoped to peddle a few subscriptions to his newspaper. On the opening day the convention adopted the fa- mous Declaration of Sentiments, patterned on the Declaration of Inde- pendence, with “man” substituted for the British “king.” On the second day the convention took up a series of resolutions, only one of which caused trouble. This was Stanton’s proposal that women work to secure the “elective franchise.” The proposal was too radical for Stanton’s own husband, who, with Douglass, was one of the few males present. Lucre- tia Mott feared it would make the convention look “ridiculous.” However, Stanton later reported that, “with the help of Frederick Douglass,” the resolution passed by a small majority after “heated discussion.” Political Abolitionist Reporting on the Seneca Falls Convention a week later Douglass wrote, “We are free to say that in respect to political rights, we hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for man.” There was no point in winning po- litical rights if they were not exercised. In distancing himself from Garri- son, Douglass had begun to question Garrison's rejection of political activity. Garrison's disunionism, which Douglass at one time had sup- ported, now seemed particularly silly. Since 1842 the Liberator had borne the slogan “No Union with Slaveholders.” To eject the South, Douglass44 The Coming of War realized, might leave the North morally pure, but it condemned the slaves to the mercy of the slaveholders. As early as 1844 Douglass had attended the presidential nominating convention of the Liberty Party just to listen to their ideas. During his stay in Britain he had publicly denounced the Mexican War and embraced the Wilmot Proviso. Douglass's new friend- ship with Gerrit Smith upon his return was probably the decisive factor. Smith was a political abolitionist, a member of the Liberty Party, and a free soiler. Douglass decided to work with the free-soil movement in the hope of steering it away from its preoccupation with a lily-white West and into a more active role in the crusade against slavery. The year 1848 was another presidential election year, and, under the stimulus of the Wilmot Proviso, the Liberty Party had metamorphosed into the Free Soil Party. Douglass was among the delegates attending the convention in Buffalo that founded the party. He was not at all happy with the party’s choice of candidate, ex-president Martin Van Buren, but, with no alternative on the horizon, the North Star gave Van Buren an uneasy endorsement. The election of Zachary Taylor, a war hero, a Southerner, and a slaveholder, showed just how far the antislavery move- ment had yet to go. Another bout with Northern prejudice was an added discourage- ment. Rosetta was now nine and had been well prepared for school by the Mott sisters. She passed an entrance exam for Miss Lucilia Tracy's Seward Seminary, and Douglass paid her tuition. After he returned from one of his frequent absences Rosetta tearfully told him that Miss Tracy had placed her in a separate classroom by herself. Douglass flew down to the school in a rage and was told that Rosetta must be kept apart for a term until “prejudice would be overcome.” At Douglass's insistence the teacher took a poll of the children and found them eager to have Rosetta in their class. Still worried about her finances, Miss Tracy polled the par- ents, and when a single father objected, Rosetta was sent home with her books. Douglass arranged for her admission to another school and then blasted the sole parent—a “despised minority” of one—for deciding by himself “which color is most pleasing to God.” A week earlier, Frederick and Anna’s fifth and last child had been born. They named her Annie. Douglass’s mounting frustration was evident in 1849 when he shocked an audience in Boston's Faneuil Hall with the most bloodthirsty statement he ever made in public. “I should welcome the intelligence to- morrow,” he told the assemblage, “should it come, that the slaves had risen in the South, and that the sable arms which had been engaged in beautifying and adorning the South, were engaged in spreading death and devastation.” The statement has been much quoted by historians (it does make good copy), but it is noteworthy that this was the only occa- sion that Douglass ever publicly endorsed slave uprising—or any otherFrederick Douglass: The Case for a Just War 45 violence, for that matter. For the next decade Douglass would swing wildly between the extremes of hope and despair. Despair reached a nadir the following year when Congress enacted the Fugitive Slave Law as part of the Compromise of 1850. Douglass cared little for the admission of California to the Union and even less for the doctrine of popular sovereignty. The Fugitive Slave Law, on the other hand, was a threat to every black in the North who did not have in pocket written proof that he or she was free. But then hope dawned. William H. Seward, senator from New York, and Salmon P. Chase, con- gressman from Ohio, each took out a subscription to his newspaper, and Douglass seized the opportunity to initiate a correspondence with the men. He took heart from the spread of antislavery feeling among im- portant politicians. The feud with Garrison that had been simmering since Douglass started his own paper broke into the open in 1851. Douglass attended a meeting of the American Antislavery Society in Syracuse and angered the assembled Garrisonians by defending the U.S. Constitution. For a decade Garrison had been denouncing the Constitution, along with the Federal Union, as a buttress for slavery. To the contrary, argued Douglass, the Constitution, properly interpreted, could be “wielded in behalf of eman- cipation.” The delegates retaliated by passing a resolution prohibiting members of the society from subscribing to any newspaper that did not condemn the Constitution. Douglass not only ignored the proscription but changed the name of his publication to Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In the summer of 1852 Douglass, who apparently had a fair income from book sales and lectures, purchased a hillside farm about two miles south of Rochester. He retained his town house for rental income. His new home stood in “a neighborless place, its only roadway at that time the private road leading to his door.” In making the move he escaped the ill-concealed prejudice of his white neighbors in Rochester, and his place became a frequented stop for fugitives on their way to Canada. That au- tumn Douglass took heart from the election of Gerrit Smith to Congress, predicting the dawn of a new political age. Unfortunately, Smith lasted only one term; he went down to defeat in 1854. The Kansas—Nebraska Act of that year revived the excitement over slavery and sent Douglass into another paroxysm of gloom. In a speech in Chicago in October, he predicted that the whole chain of Southern ag- gression, from the annexation of Texas to the opening of Kansas to slav- ery, would bring upon mankind the wrath of God. In 1855 he published the strongest of his three autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom. The book was far more than an attempt to bring his life story up-to-date. It was a call for action uttered in a voice of desperation. Ironically, he was soon to meet the Joshua that he felt the country needed—in the form of aman named John Brown.46 The Coming of War Friend of John Brown Douglass had first met Brown in 1848. Brown was then living in Spring- field, Massachusetts, and was a tanner by trade. He was one of those rare abolitionists who actually counted blacks among his personal friends. At the suggestion of a pair of mutual friends, Brown invited Douglass to visit as Douglass passed through Springfield on his way to Rochester. The house was in a working-class neighborhood, and Brown’s wife served them at a plain pine table. Like many others later, Douglass found Brown's ap- pearance unforgettable. He looked old, though he was still in his forties, yet he seemed “lean, strong, and sinewy . . . built for times of trouble.” Brown was already thinking of establishing, somewhere in the Ap- palachian Mountains, a refuge for black runaways. There, with their own government, Brown thought that armed squads of twenty-five men each could successfully repel any Southern effort to retake them. We do not know what Douglass thought of this plan, but it was his habit to respond favorably to anyone willing to take action against slavery. In 1855 Brown, by then living in Ohio, temporarily abandoned his plan of a mountain refuge and with his sons joined the flow of free-state farmers migrating to Kansas. We do not know what Douglass thought of the Pottawatomie Massacre in May 1856, where Brown hacked a family of pro-slavery men to death with broadswords. However, he did claim, in the fall of 1856, that a black man had as much right to forcibly defend himself as a white man. In the wake of the Pottawatomie Massacre free- soil settlers in Kansas made it clear to Brown that he was no longer wel- come, and he returned east, ostensibly to raise money. In December, he trudged up the hill to Douglass's farm to pay a visit. Brown had revived his idea of a mountain free-state refuge. But he also proposed to Douglass an alternative plan—a corridor running from the Great Valley of Virginia through Pennsylvania and New York to Canada. Guarded by armed men in stations along the way, it would be- come a highway along which slaves could move in a mass exodus to free- dom. Again, we know nothing of Douglass’s reaction, though the corridor idea must have had some appeal to a man who had long served as a sta- tion master on the Underground Railroad. From Rochester, Brown went on to Boston, where he met with abolitionist leaders. Although Garrison, the pacifist, rebuked him for his violence, a cabal of Unitarian ministers and business leaders—later known as the Secret Six—was formed to channel money to Brown. The sixth man in the cabal was Douglass's friend Gerrit Smith; Douglass was never brought into this group. John Brown, however, had more confidence in the integrity of a black man than of any of the Unitarian ministers. In January 1858 he knocked on the door of Douglass's secluded farmhouse and offered to pay a modest sum for room and board while he perfected his revolution- ary plans. He still had in mind the establishment of a black refuge in theFrederick Douglass: The Case for a Just War 47 mountains of western Virginia, and during the time he spent at Douglass's house he drafted a constitution for the new state. Douglass may well have been intrigued by the idea; in any case, he made no effort to dis- courage Brown. Throughout 1859 black abolitionists speculated as to what Brown might be up to. The antislavery press commonly cited rumors of an ap- proaching slave uprising. In late September or early October 1859, Brown's son, John Brown, Jr., called on Douglass to tell him that his sup- port was badly needed. He suggested that Douglass meet with Brown in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, Brown's current hideaway. Douglass and a Rochester friend, Shields Green, traveled to the rendezvous by way of Brooklyn, where Douglass gave a lecture, and Philadelphia, where he un- successfully sought financial aid for Brown from a black church congre- gation. In a rock quarry on the edge of Chambersburg, Brown told them of his plan to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, situated on the point of land where the Shenandoah River flowed into the Po- tomac. Brown apparently planned to issue a call for slaves to join him, and he would arm them with the stores in the arsenal. This was far different from the plans that had earlier intrigued Douglass. It involved an armed attack on a federal installation; it would certainly bring down the wrath of both the United States and Virginia. Moreover, there were only a few thousand slaves in the vicinity of Harpers Ferry, as against more than 100,000 whites. Douglass told Brown that he was “going into a perfect steel trap, and that once in he would not get out alive.” For two days Brown tried to persuade Douglass to join his cause. He said he had a special need for Douglass: “When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I want you to help hive them.” The notion of serving as queen bee to a swarm of fugitives struck Douglass as utter madness. He gave a final “no” to Brown and left Shields Green, an uneducated runaway, decided to stay and fight with Brown. He died in the arsenal under the Virginia guns commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee. When Brown was captured, authorities found among the papers in his hideaway a letter Douglass had written in 1857 implying that Douglass was raising money for Brown’s enterprises. Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia expressly asked President James Buchanan for help in apprehending Brown's accomplices, including “Frederick Douglass, a negro man . . . charged with . . . inciting servile insurrection.” When Douglass's letter was published in the Rochester newspaper, he knew he must leave the country. After dark, on October 22, 1859, he rode to the wharf below the falls of the Genesee River and, like so many runaways he had helped, boarded a boat for Canada. The next day, U.S. marshals ar- rived in Rochester looking for him. Douglass had been planning a second tour of England for some time, and he had announced the plan in his paper before Brown's raid. Board-48 The Coming of War ing a vessel in New Brunswick, he sent an open letter to readers of Douglass’ Monthly (the latest name for his paper) that he was relinquish- ing his editorial duties to undertake a long-planned overseas lecture tour. He never mentioned that he was also fleeing federal prosecution. Frederick Douglass’s Civil War Douglass was in Glasgow in April 1860 when he received news of the death of his youngest child, Annie. Eleven-year-old Annie, more lively than the serious Rosetta and quicker witted than Douglass’s sons, had for some years been the one bright spot in Douglass’s troubled home life. He was utterly devastated and blamed himself for not having been at home when the girl became sick. Douglass impetuously sailed for home, ignoring the danger that might await him. As it happened, Congress in January 1860 had shut down any further investigation of Brown’s accom- plices, lest it give the slaveholders more political ammunition. Douglass immediately resumed publication of his journal, but it was some months before he took up political discourse. When he did, he found, for the first time in his life, that he was on the winning side. Through the 1850s Douglass had been frustrated in his efforts to rad- icalize, first the Free Soil Party and then the Republican Party. Both par- ties remained committed to the preservation of slavery in the South; they resisted only its expansion into the West. In the end, the one who became co-opted was Douglass. In 1856 he had supported the Republican candi- date, John C. Fremont, simply because there was no alternative. On that same reasoning he swung his support behind Abraham Lincoln in the summer of 1860. He rationalized his stand on the pragmatic ground that Lincoln at least represented a groundswell of antislavery feeling among the people of the North. Douglass had come to realize that, in the end, a broad popular impulse, even though its common denominator was the half-a-loaf concept of free soil, had a better chance of success than the purer, but narrowly supported, doctrines of abolitionism. He also foresaw that a Republican victory would force the South to react, perhaps vio- lently, and that would start a chain of events that might lead eventually to emancipation. That, of course, is precisely what happened. Lincoln's victory in the presidential election that autumn induced the states of the lower South to secede from the Union and form a confederation of their own. Douglass’s reaction to these events was cautious. For twenty years he had seen the South appeased and sectional conflicts end in compromise. He had little reason to believe the outcome would be different this time. He never- theless disagreed fiercely with the Garrisonians, who had long advocated disunion and now favored letting the South go in peace. Peaceable dis- union, Douglass realized, meant abandonment of the slaves. Through theFrederick Douglass: The Case for a Just War 49 spring of 1861 Douglass fretted over the efforts of Congress to reach a compromise, and when the guns finally roared at Fort Sumter in April, he was overjoyed. Like most Americans, he had no inkling of what a costly conflict it would be Once the fighting started Douglass viewed the war in apocalyptic terms. He saw it as a cosmic contest between the forces of good and the forces of evil. He also interpreted it as a divinely rendered break between two historic ages. The old Union had been hopelessly corrupted by cru- elty and racial prejudice. The war would usher in a new millennium of peace and harmony. Given this construct, it is scarcely surprising that Douglass had little patience for Lincoln's limited objective of preserving the Union. A moralist rather than a strategist, Douglass gave no thought to the military importance of the border slave states, which were central to Lincoln's policies. In the spring and summer of 1862 Douglass joined other abolitionists in presenting a series of lectures at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The ceaseless pressure eventually reached its mark, and on July 22 Lincoln presented to his cabinet a draft of a procla- mation of emancipation. When the proclamation was finally issued in September, Douglass was elated. It mattered not that Lincoln had freed only the slaves in the South over whom he had no control. At stake was the principle of freedom—it was now a war to free the slaves. When the cheers for the emancipation proclamation died down, Douglass had ready at hand another cause—enlistment of black men into the army and navy. Douglass was eager to involve blacks in the war, not only to hasten the victory but to ensure the nation’s respect for them. The black community in the North itself sensed this. When Lincoln is- sued a call for volunteers in April 1861, thousands of black men across the North stepped forward and organized themselves into militia units. Unfortunately, military policy excluded them from joining Union forces for the first year and a half of the war. Until the emancipation of slaves became an official war aim, the Lincoln administration had no intention of alarming the South and stiffening its fighting spirit by employing black soldiers. The one exception was Port Royal, a South Carolina sea island that the navy seized in November 1861 to provide a base for its ships blockad- ing the Southern coastline. When the marines landed, the white planters fled, leaving their slaves behind. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, onetime Unitarian minister and one of the Secret Six who had aided John Brown, appeared on Hilton Head and organized the males of mili- tary age into a regiment, the First South Carolina Volunteers. He then began a series of destructive forays into the South Carolina interior, bringing the war home to the state that had initiated secession. Douglass used the exploits of this force as evidence that blacks could be made into the best of fighters. Following the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in50 The Coming of War September 1862, Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts called for volunteers to form a black regiment. Douglass lent his voice to the re- cruitment effort with an editorial in his Monthly, “Men of Color to Arms.” Among the volunteers who formed the famous 54th Massachu- setts was Charles Douglass, age twenty-two. On May 28, 1863, the regi- ment, after undergoing review by the governor on the Boston Common, marched through the city streets to the music of “John Brown's Body” and boarded a transport ship for the sea islands. Problems of Northern prejudice remained. Blacks were confined to their own units, they were placed under white officers, and they were paid less than white soldiers. More discouraging to enlistments was an act of the Confederate Congress on May 1, 1863, declaring that black sol- diers who were taken prisoner would be treated as insurrectionary slaves. The punishment would almost certainly be death. President Lincoln re- taliated with an order on July 30, 1863, that a rebel soldier would be ex- ecuted “for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war.” A few weeks later Douglass made a “flying visit” to Wash- ington to carry his protest concerning the treatment of blacks in the Union army to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Stanton pledged to equalize the soldiers’ pay and open the way for blacks to become com- missioned officers. He then turned to Douglass and cynically offered him a commission if he would go to Mississippi and help the army recruit runaways who had fled to Union lines. Douglass liked the idea of a mili- tary commission but was less certain about going to Mississippi, where his son Frederick Jr. was already employed recruiting blacks. The com- mission never materialized, and Douglass refused to go without it. Douglass's next interview was more satisfactory. “I went directly to the White House [and] saw for the first time the President of the United States,” he wrote. This was indeed a historic visit; never before had an African American been granted an interview with the president. Lincoln listened attentively as Douglass expressed his concerns about the pay, promotion, and treatment of prisoners. Lincoln explained that his slow pace in freeing slaves and recruiting blacks was due to “popular preju- dice,” and he predicted that the prejudice would be overcome by black heroism on the battlefield. The entire interview was, for Douglass, an ed- ucation in political pragmatism. “Though I was not entirely satisfied with his views,” Douglass later wrote, “I was so well satisfied with the man and with the educating tendency of the conflict that 1 determined to go on with the recruiting.” He came away from the meeting so convinced that the war would bring the end of slavery that, upon his return to Rochester, he wrote a “Valedictory” issue and ceased publication of his paper, the Douglass Monthly. Along with ending his career as a journalist, Douglass also ceased his recruiting efforts, Whoever in the North was willing to join the army had done so by the end of 1863. For the rest of the war most black recruitsimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableHarriet Tubman: Moses to Her People 61 helpful was well known on the slaves’ underground communications network, a network so efficient that one Georgia planter estimated that it could carry news 100 miles in a week. The network also told her where freedom lay. She later recorded her feelings when she crossed the line into Pennsylvania: “When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if | was the same person. There was such a glory over every- thing; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and T felt like I was in Heaven.” Harriet’s first destination was Philadelphia, where she found employ- ment as a housekeeper in hotels and clubs. Before long she was intro- duced to William Still, secretary to the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, who told her of his organization's “railroad” to New York and Canada. It was probably also Still who gave her the names of reliable in- termediaries in Maryland through whom she could communicate with her family. Bringing her family north was her first objective, and she would start with her sister Mary Ann, who had two children. (One of these, Harriet’s nephew, later recorded the details of the escape.) In the fall of 1850, having spent a year in Philadelphia earning money and putting away savings for the venture, Tubman (unable herself to read or write) dictated a letter to be sent to her sister through an in- termediary. Mary Ann had married a free black and was residing in Cam- bridge, Maryland, a fishing village near the mouth of the Choptank River. Notwithstanding her marriage, Mary Ann was willing to flee, because the heirs to the estate of the onetime owner of the Ross family planned to put her on the auction block. She somehow escaped the auction pen and hid in a nearby house. Her husband, who may have been a fisherman, placed his wife and their two children in a small boat and sailed to Balti- more. Harriet, who had come to Baltimore by train, met them at a ren- dezvous and took them north, in the words of the nephew, “aboard the Underground Railroad.” They almost certainly went on foot or by wagon, because no black was allowed to leave Baltimore by train or boat unless carrying a bond “signed by persons well-known locally.” A few months later she returned to Maryland and brought away a brother and two other men. It was on her third trip, in autumn of 1851, that she went to fetch her husband, found him living with another woman, and washed her hands of him (though she kept his name). In- stead she collected a party of volunteers (her movements were clearly be- ing tracked on the slave grapevine) and guided them to Philadelphia. By then the impact of the Fugitive Slave Law was being felt. Still and others on the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee feared that any destination short of Canada was dangerous for fugitives. Accordingly, on her fourthimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableHarriet Tubman: Moses to Her People 65 begged his New England friends to send him Harriet Tubman. Tubman responded, roused herself from bed, and had reached New York when Brown, fearful that further delay would risk exposure, struck on October 16, 1859. In his “army” of twenty-one were five blacks, none prominent in the antislavery movement. Three died in the battle, one died on the gallows with Brown, and one escaped. Although her illness almost cer- tainly saved her life, Tubman revered Brown ever after, feeling that he, rather than Abraham Lincoln, was the true emancipator of her people. Charles Nalle and the Battle of Troy While John Brown's friends in New England went into hiding or fled to England in the wake of the Harpers Ferry fiasco, Harriet Tubman partic- ipated in the most spectacular incident of all in the decade of resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law. It has been estimated that, in the course of the decade, no more than 200 runaways were arrested under the act, and of those about 30 were freed by the courts, mostly because of mistaken identity. Another 15 were rescued or escaped without assistance. The act, in sum, was of negligible value to Southern slaveholders, and it was of positive service to the antislavery movement. Most important of all in feeding the abolitionist propaganda mill and arousing Northern opinion were the highly publicized attempts to rescue fugitives from the jaws of justice—Joshua Glover in Milwaukee and Anthony Burns in Boston, both in 1854, and Charles Nalle in Troy, New York, in April 1860. It was in this last rescue that Harriet Tubman made her most emphatic statement of resistance to the law. It was about noon on a sunny day, April 27, 1860, and the shops of Troy were closed as the citizenry gathered in front of the courthouse in the market square. A Virginia slave catcher had arrested a fugitive, Charles Nalle, and brought him before the county court to have him re- manded to a life of slavery. Sensing the potential for good theater, Gerrit Smith had suggested that Harriet Tubman visit the town. She agreed to do so, in part because a brother resided in the vicinity. Although the courtroom was jammed with people, she managed to inveigle her way past the jailer who manned the door by assuming a hunched and diminutive appearance and an innocent, toothless smile. The principal witness for the prosecution was Nalle’s half brother, a mulatto of somewhat lighter skin. When the court pronounced judgment in favor of the slave catcher, Nalle leaped to the window, threw it open, and crawled onto the ledge of the second story. “The crowd at this time numbered nearly a thousand persons,” reported the Troy Whig. “Many of them were black, and a good share of the female sex.” As the crowd shouted encouragement, Nalle pondered an instant too long the danger- ous drop to the street. The bailiffs grabbed him and wrestled him backimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableHarriet Tubman: Moses to Her People B ater, she was bedridden for the rest of the year, stricken by the mysterious illness that had often plagued her when she visited the North. Among her visitors that summer and fall was Sarah Hopkins Bradford of Geneva, New York, who had been collecting stories about her. With little else to do Tubman poured out the tales of her adventures, and the Geneva woman published them shortly after the war as Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tub- man, with a revised edition and additional remembrances in 1886. Brad- ford’s work remains today the principal source for what little we know of Harriet Tubman. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” In the spring of 1865 Tubman started for Washington to provide nursing service in the government hospitals there. In Philadelphia, however, she was intercepted by some officials of the Sanitary Commission, which had organized the army’s medical service and operated a number of hospitals for wounded soldiers. They persuaded her to go instead to the govern- ment hospitals on the James River and at Fort Monroe that were full of casualties from General Grant's siege of Richmond and Petersburg and in desperate need of nurses. Her work there ended in July, and she started for home carrying a pass as a hospital nurse, which entitled her to half fare on the trains. Somewhere north of Washington or Baltimore, the conductor refused to honor her pass. With racial insult, he declared that her people were not entitled to half fare. She tried to explain that nurses were entitled to half fare, the same as soldiers, but with more racial slurs he grabbed her by the arm to remove her. She resisted, and he had to call on the help of three male passengers. The four men finally wrestled her into the baggage car, spraining her arm in the process. She lay there in agony all the way to New York. After having escaped bullets and cannon shot her only war- related wound was sustained on her return to civilian life. It was also a foretaste of the postwar fate of the freedmen and her own troubles with a white-dominated, indifferent government. She settled in Auburn and spent her days caring for her parents and any black itinerants who knocked on her door. She spent a great deal of energy trying to collect from the government the $1,800 she felt was owed her for her South Carolina service. But she met with no success, even when Secretary of State Seward wrote a letter on her behalf. In 1869 proceeds from the sale of her biography, which Sarah Bradford shared with her, enabled her to pay off her debt to Seward, still owed for the house, and retain enough surplus to enter formal marriage vows with Nelson Davis. We know little of this man, except that he participated in several military engagements in the last year of the war. They lived in ap-image not availableimage not availableimage not availablei Stonewall Jackson: Christian Soldier Nearly everyone prays during wartime. As a World War II army chaplain noted, perhaps somewhat cynically, “There are no atheists in the fox- holes.” Although most soldiers pray for their personal safety, some be- lieve that God is patriotically on their side. Stonewall Jackson's God, however, was more than a cheerleader. He was an active participant in the Civil War. When Jackson won a battle, God received the credit. When things went awry, God was punishing Jackson for some unspecified mis- demeanor. God and Jackson were military allies. One could only wish that this holy partnership had a more noble goal than the dismember- ment of the Union and the preservation of human slavery. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. (Courtesy of the National Archives.)80 The Warriors The Making of a Soldier Thomas Jonathan Jackson was born on January 21, 1824. His family, of Scots-Irish stock, had gone from rags to riches to rags in three genera- tions. His great-grandfather, as well as his great-grandmother, came to America as prisoners. Each had been convicted of stealing and sen- tenced to seven years of servitude in the colony of Maryland. In America British convicts would be sold to a planter, work out their period of in- denture as bondspersons, and then be set free. In the years before the Revolution, ex-convicts made up a little more than a third of the popula- tion of Maryland. The two convicts, John Jackson and Elizabeth Cummins, met and fell in love on ship. By hard work each earned an early release from bondage, and they were married in 1755. They then moved across the Blue Ridge to the South Branch of the Potomac (present-day West Vir- ginia) and prospered in this virgin land. John Jackson became a wealthy landowner, a member of the Virginia General Assembly, and a represen- tative in the U.S. Congress. His sons were prominent merchants and landowners in Clarksburg, a fast-growing community on the Mononga- hela River. John Jackson's grandson, Jonathan, born in the 1790s, was less fortunate. He studied law and hung out a shingle in Clarksburg, but he failed miserably. Too fond of drinking and gambling, Jonathan Jackson ran through his inheritance in short order, and by the time his son Tom was born in 1824 he was deeply in debt. Tom was the third of the Jacksons’ children. An older sister was five when he was born, and a brother was three. In 1826 his mother, Julia, was pregnant again when tragedy struck anew. The oldest daughter suc- cumbed to typhoid fever, and Jonathan Jackson followed her to the grave two weeks later. Julia Jackson was widowed with two small children and a new baby. Relatives helped some with family finances, but Tom Jack- son's early years were spent in miserable penury. In later life he rarely mentioned his father, but he never forgot the lesson his father taught— that moral irresponsibility was the root of human misery. In 1830 Julia Jackson married again, and her choice of men re- mained poor. Her new husband, also a lawyer, had only a meager income. Worse, he was mean to the children. Within six months, Julia, already suffering from tuberculosis, felt obliged to send her two sons to live with Jackson relatives who had preserved their inheritance. Jackson's Mill was a 1,500-acre plantation in the rich bottomlands of the West Fork of the Monongahela (near present-day Morgantown). Presiding over this estate was Tom's step-grandmother, Elizabeth Brake Jackson, age fifty-nine, who embraced the two children as her own. Also occupying her two-story log home were her two daughters, each engaged to be married, and six sons (Tom’s bachelor uncles). The estate got its name from its center- piece, a large sawmill built by Tom’s grandfather Edward Jackson in 1806.Stonewall Jackson: Christian Soldier 81 Not long before Tom’s arrival, the river had been dammed, and a large grist mill, powered by two waterwheels, had been erected next to the sawmill. A carpenter's shop, blacksmith’s forge, and quarters for a dozen slaves completed the domain. It would be Tom Jackson's home for eleven years. In charge of the business was Elizabeth's oldest son, Cummins Jackson, age twenty-nine. Too busy making money to play the role of fa- ther, Cummins was essentially a boisterous older brother to Tom, who re- membered him ever after with affection. Cummins Jackson soon noticed two traits in his young nephew—a desire to improve his condition in life and a thirst for knowledge. The two, of course, were related. Cummins prevailed upon a neighbor with more than average education to open a school at the mill. At this school, Tom revealed a natural talent for mathematics and absorbed every other tidbit of knowledge the teacher had to offer. Cummins sent him on to an- other teacher in the county seat of Weston (Virginia had no public school system). Jackson's progress was such that, at age sixteen, he himself was employed as a teacher by the county. For a three-month term in a log cabin not far from the mill, he taught reading, writing, and spelling to a class of three girls and two boys. About this time two events changed the course of Jackson's life—he encountered the Bible and he obtained an appointment to West Point. No one in Jackson's family had ever evidenced much interest in religion. The uncles who surrounded the boy at Jackson's Mill were men of affairs who attended church, if at all, for social and political reasons. Where he obtained a Bible we do not know, perhaps in the well-stocked library of Baptist neighbors, who had moved into the valley from Pennsylvania. Jackson poured over the military campaigns narrated in the Old Testa- ment; he absorbed hungrily the promises of love and security in the New Testament. He began attending the Baptist church, which was the clos- est house of worship to Jackson's Mill, and religion entered his soul. He began praying nightly, and letters to his sister became filled with refer- ences to “Almighty God” and “an all-wise Providence.” Jackson turned eighteen in January 1842, and a few weeks later the congressman whose district was northwestern Virginia (a seat once held by Jackson’s great-grandfather and great-uncle) announced a competi- tion for appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Jackson instantly saw his future and eagerly took the exam. A slightly better edu- cated candidate won the nomination, but the would-be cadet was un- nerved by the stern and demanding life of the academy and resigned shortly after he got there. Learning of the sudden vacancy, the Jackson family obtained letters of recommendation from merchants, lawyers, and county officials. Tom Jackson placed these documents in a saddlebag, along with a few items of clothing, and set out for the nation’s capital. He traveled by horseback to Clarksburg, rode by stage from there to Cumber- land, Maryland, and completed the journey with his first ride on a train.82 The Warriors When Jackson walked into the congressman's office, a bare two weeks had passed since the first candidate had resigned. The congress- man was quite embarrassed by the abdication of his first nominee and immediately wrote the secretary of war that he had an able replacement with whom he was “personally and intimately acquainted.” Within two days Jackson was on a northbound train with the secretary of war’s cer- tificate of appointment in his pocket. Founded in 1802, West Point had just completed its fourth decade, and it was recognized as the leading school of engineering in the nation. Few of its alumni had lasted long in the ill-equipped peacetime army. In- stead they had become the builders of the nation’s rapidly expanding network of highways, railroads, and canals. In Jackson’s freshman class was a brace of Virginians who would fight by his side in the Civil War, A.B (“Powell”) Hill and George E. Pickett. Jackson liked neither of them at West Point, nor they him. ‘The schedule at the Academy was heavily regimented and unvarying. For six days a week the cadets were aroused at 6:00 and engaged in an hour of study until breakfast. Classes began at 8:00 and consisted of recitations of books and papers memorized the night before. Classes went on for seven hours with an hour-long break for lunch. Late afternoon was spent in drill and parades. Evening study in the barracks was required; lights went out at 10:00. The orphan boy who had always been subject to the will and whim of others thrived in this environment. He also plunged into his studies with enthusiasm. The curriculum was indeed demand- ing, perhaps more so than any college in the country. Math and physics were at the core of it, but students were also expected to become profi- cient in French, history, mapmaking, horsemanship, and the use of a sword. Jackson lacked the educational background of most of his fellow cadets. He survived that first year by shunning his classmates, avoiding frivolity, and burrowing into his books. Ulysses S. Grant, a first classman when Jackson entered the Academy, was heard to remark that Jackson “was the most honest human being I ever knew—painfully conscientious, very slow in acquiring information, but a hard, incessant student.” At the end of his first year Jackson was ranked seventy-first in a class of 101 stu- dents. By the time he entered his final year, as a first classman, he was in the upper third. He graduated in the spring of 1846 seventeenth in his class. Several of his fellow students felt that if there had been one more year in the curriculum, he would have graduated first. Pursuing Fame in War In May of that year the United States declared war on Mexico. Jackson was eager for combat and hoped to be assigned to the artillery, an honored branch of the army that had been Napoleon's specialty. When the finalStonewall Jackson: Christian Soldier 83 grades came out in June and revealed Jackson's class ranking, he got his wish. His initial military service would be in the First Artillery Regiment. The pay for a second lieutenant was $300 a year. With additional allowance for living quarters and a horse, the annual stipend came to about $1,000. By the time Jackson reached Mexico the American commander, General Zachary Taylor, had defeated the Mexicans in battles along the Rio Grande and had occupied the provincial capital of Monterey. There the American advance halted. Jackson’s first war experience was weeks of boring inactivity. He passed the time touring the countryside and learning a bit of Spanish. In early 1847 Winfield Scott, a veteran of the War of 1812 and the army’s ranking general, announced that he would take the field himself. He pointed out to President Polk that Taylor at Monterey was 600 miles from the Mexican capital, and that if he tried to cross that arid high country, his supply line would be dangerously exposed. Scott proposed to lead an amphibious expedition that would land at the Mexi- can port of Vera Cruz and march up to Mexico City on Mexico’s National Road. Polk, who mistrusted both Taylor and Scott as Whigs with political ambitions, reluctantly agreed. Jackson’s First Artillery was one of the reg- iments detached from Taylor’s army and sent to Lobos Island, Scott's staging base in the Gulf of Mexico, 180 miles north of Vera Cruz. Scott’s landing—the largest amphibious operation in history to that time—began on March 9. Jackson and his company waded ashore as in- fantry, but when their field pieces landed they participated in the bom- bardment of the fort at Vera Cruz. From the beginning Jackson's fellow officers noted his coolness under fire. One wrote that “Old Jack” (a nick- name he had acquired at the Academy) was “as calm in the midst of a hurricane of bullets as though he were on dress parade at West Point.” The first major battle came a month later when Mexican forces made a stand at a high mountain pass called Cerro Gordo. Jackson fought well enough to earn praise from his commander, but the true lesson he learned from the battle was that fame and rank go to the most venture- some. The hero of the battle was Captain John B. Magruder, who had dashed with a handful of his artillerymen through a hail of bullets, cap- tured Mexican cannon, and turned the pieces on the enemy. Jackson loved that sort of daring-do and began thinking of obtaining a transfer. His opportunity came in June when General Scott designated four artillery companies to become light, quick-moving units. One of these was Magruder’s. Magruder needed a second lieutenant; Jackson applied and got the job. By mid-August the American army was within ten miles of Mexico City. The Mexican commander, General Santa Anna, made another stand, and Magruder’s company was assigned to bombard a hill on the Mexicans’ western flank. Magruder later reported to his division commander that Jackson's bravery and aggressiveness were “conspicu- ous throughout the whole day,” and he recommended Jackson for pro- motion. Jackson was elevated to first lieutenant.image not availableimage not availableimage not availableStonewall Jackson: Christian Soldier 87 bread and a glass of cold water. Jackson, who suffered from gastrointesti- nal ailments all his adult life, always ate simply. When he went to war he was capable of going for days with no more sustenance than a piece of fruit (he adored lemons and peaches). Jackson maintained slaves in his household as a matter of course. He possessed a total of six in the late 1850s, three of them given to him by his father-in-law as a wedding present. He never apologized for slav- ery, nor spoke in favor of it. Because it is mentioned in the Bible, he prob- ably thought the institution sanctioned by the Lord. He was a strict but humane master. He allowed at least one to earn his freedom by working for VMI, probably as a waiter, for which the school paid Jackson $120 a year. Both that slave and another one, a forty-year-old woman, had come to Jackson and asked to be purchased, fearing that otherwise they would be sold to a slave trader and taken south Jackson's correspondence in the 1850s contains little of politics. Like nearly all white Virginians, he was a Democrat and favored states’ rights, but he did not appear to follow issues closely. His seeming indifference ended abruptly with John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859. Brown was subdued and captured by military units from both the federal and state governments. Brown was convicted of treason in a state court and sentenced to hang on December 2. The hanging would take place in Charlestown, seat of the county where the uprising had oc- curred. Since the Virginia militia was stationed at Harpers Ferry to sup- press any possible slave uprising, the governor worried about security in Charlestown. He asked the VMI corps to go there and help “preserve the peace and dignity of the commonwealth in the execution of John Brown.” Sixty-four cadets were formed into two companies of infantry, and another twenty-one under the command of Major Jackson were to man two howitzers. Jackson clearly enjoyed the trip down the valley to the mouth of the Shenandoah. It was his first military service in eight years. The state's wary governor had mobilized every element of the militia, and soldiers at the execution far outnumbered civilians. Jackson's two howitzers were given a prominent place in front of the execution scaffold, and Jackson himself, unwilling to be surprised or to be found unprepared, gave de- tailed instructions to his lieutenants on what sort of powder and fuse to be used in the event of attack. The hanging went without incident, and Jackson described every detail in a long letter to Anna. The cadets re- turned by train by way of Washington and Richmond, where a grateful governor staged a parade and review. After returning to Lexington Jackson began to pay close attention to political events. Throughout the presidential contest of 1860 he re- mained an adherent of the states’ rights candidate, John C. Breckin- ridge, but he never advocated secession. He thought it was better for the South to maintain its rights within the Union, rather than out of it. Jack-image not availableStonewall Jackson: Christian Soldier 89 By May 23d, when Virginians went to the polls to ratify the state’s withdrawal from the Union, Jackson's force at Harpers Ferry numbered 7,000. Virginia’s switch to the Confederacy cost Jackson his command. The Confederate War Department assigned one of its highest ranking of- ficers to take command in the Shenandoah Valley, Brigadier General Joseph E. Johnston. Jackson, nevertheless, was not put to pasture. His skill at bringing military order to the mess at Harpers Ferry had im- pressed Governor Letcher’s military aide, Colonel Robert E. Lee. With Lee's help, Jackson was put in charge of the Virginia troops in the Valley, thus making him second in command to Johnston. Jackson's force amounted to an undersized brigade of about 1,500 men. They were organized into three regiments and a battery of artillery. The artillerymen, favorites of Jackson, came from Lexington and its vicin- ity and were commanded by a West Point graduate whom Jackson had known as the rector of the Episcopal church in Lexington. In deference to their clergyman-captain, the artillerymen christened their four can- nons Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Jackson's letters to Anna revealed his happiness. He was in the field and preparing troops for battle. That meant instilling a rigid discipline and obedience to orders. Many of his recruits were at first put off by his unprepossessing appearance. His uniform was VMI blue (he later donned the Confederate gray), without adornment, and often dusty and ill-kempt. He wore a gray kepi on his head, pulled low over his eyes. His horse, Little Sorrel, was small and without distinctive markings. But the animal did have one invaluable trait. It was absolutely immune to the sound of gunfire. In combat, with bullets flying, cannon roaring, and men screaming, Little Sorrel was as calm and collected as its rider. Al- though scornful at first, Jackson's men came to admire him for his at- tention to training and discipline. They quickly picked up the nickname “Old Jack” and applied it with affection. While Jackson waxed content, his superior plunged into depression. General Johnston regarded Harpers Ferry as a death trap, and he watched with dismay the federal buildup across the Potomac. Even after he sent Jackson to burn the bridges on the river (Jackson gave his men their first taste of a quick-step night march), Johnston felt threatened. He finally obtained the consent of the War Department to evacuate, and on June 14 he ordered Jackson to retire to Winchester, some thirty miles to the south. Jackson’s men spent a day blowing up the Baltimore and Ohio railroad trestle (it would be burned and rebuilt nine times during the war), and they set fire to the armory and machine shops. While Johnson dug trenches on the north side of Winchester, Jack- son placed his brigade in an advanced position at Martinsburg, where the Manassas Gap Railroad connected the Valley with the northern Vir- ginia Piedmont. When a Union expedition of 3,000 appeared on his front, Jackson prepared to fight, though he was outnumbered by more90 The Warriors than two to one. After a brief skirmish—Jackson’s first taste of combat in the war—the Union force retired to Harpers Ferry. When word of this action reached Richmond, the War Department promoted Jackson to the rank of brigadier general in the Provisional Army of the South- ern Confederacy (his previous rank had been conferred by the state of Virginia). By July 1861 both Confederacy and Union alike realized that the most strategic point in northern Virginia was the village of Manassas Junction, where the state’s principal north-south railroad, the Orange and Alexandria, crossed the Manassas Gap Railroad, which linked the Shenandoah Valley with the nation’s capital. In Washington General Ir- win McDowell commanded a force of raw recruits that numbered 33,000, while at Manassas General PG.T. Beauregard (victor over Fort Sumter) had some 22,000 Confederates lined up along a small stream known as Bull Run. McDowell started his armed mob south toward Man- assas on the 16th of July. It was clear to everyone except the federal com- mander at Harpers Ferry that the key to the battle was Johnston’s 11,000-man army in the Valley. Without help from Johnston, Beauregard would be undone. After receiving a telegram from the War Department that McDow- ell was on the move, Johnston summoned Jackson and other brigade commanders. The plan they established was simple but effective. At dawn on the 19th, Stuart's cavalry rode north to Charlestown to create dust and confusion. The general commanding Harpers Ferry thought an attack was imminent and put his men in trenches for two days, while Johnston's army slowly disappeared. Jackson's brigade led the way, wading across the chest-deep Shenandoah River and up over the Blue Ridge. Coming down off the ridge at 2:00 A.M. on the morning of the 20th, Jackson gave his men a two-hour rest. By 8:00 A.M. (while the rest of Johnston's army was still climbing over the mountains) Jack- son's men had reached Piedmont Station on the Manassas Gap Rail- road. There they boarded freight and cattle cars and bumped and jolted for eight hours as the train crawled the remaining thirty-four miles to Manassas. Bull Run, like all of Virginia’s rivers east of the mountains, ran in a southeasterly direction, and it passed about two miles north of Manas- sas Junction. Beauregard had placed his army at each of the half a dozen fords where roads that led to the village crossed the stream. When Jackson reported, Beauregard placed his exhausted men in the center of his overextended line, just to the rear of a brigade guarding a ford. The rest of Johnston's army arrived later that evening, and his units were inserted among Beauregard’s. With a force now equal in size to McDowell's, Beauregard planned to attack the next day. Unfortu- nately, McDowell trumped him by attacking first, and Beauregard col- lapsed into confusion. When the battle began, he issued orders andStonewall Jackson: Christian Soldier Pi counterorders with a reckless abandon that literally left his brigade commanders on their own. Sometime on July 20 McDowell's scouts had found an unguarded ford several miles upriver from the Confederate army. Boldly, McDowell sent almost half of his army on a nighttime march to the crossing, and at dawn 13,000 blue-clad soldiers crossed Bull Run and descended on the Confederate flank. Around 9:30 on the morning of the 21st Jackson re- ceived an urgent message from the Confederate general who com- manded the left flank indicating he was being overrun and needed help. Jackson quickly put his regiments into motion on a narrow country road that paralleled the river. A soldier from the valley left this dramatic ac- count: “Our brigade was ordered to double-quick for about five miles to the extreme left . . . running that distance like panting dogs with flopping tongues, with our mouths and throats full of the impalpable red dust of that red clay country, thirsting for water almost unto death, and worn and weary undescribably.” Reaching the Confederate flank, Jackson surveyed the terrain and spotted a hill that afforded a good defensive position. Jackson placed his men on the backside of the hill in a pine woods that afforded some protection from federal cannon shot. While the broken Confederate line streamed past him, Jackson positioned his cannons at the crest of the hill, where they could fire at the advancing enemy and be reloaded in safety as the recoil sent them back below the crest. For the next three hours Jackson’s men lay in the woods while federal artillery shells ex- ploded above and around them. Then, when the federal infantry started up the hill, Jackson’s men went into action. In a ravine just east of the hill, Confederate officers were frantically trying to sort out bits and pieces of units and establish a defensive line. One of them looked up and saw Jackson's firm line along the crest of the hill. “Look men!” he shouted. “There is Jackson standing like a stone wall. Let us deter- mine to die here, and we will conquer! Follow me!” Thus was born the most famous nickname in American military history. And with it was born a legend. Johnston and Beauregard poured reinforcements into the Confeder- ate flank, and the defense stiffened. The federal charge slowly lost its momentum. About 3:30 in the afternoon Beauregard ordered a counter- attack, and Jackson was happy to oblige, telling his valley regiments to “yell like furies.” The Virginians came screaming down the hill, and in that moment another legend was born—the famous “Rebel Yell.” Federal troops were accustomed to cheering in unison. Said one Virginian: “The Rebels cheer like a lot of school boys, every man for himself.” The federal retreat became a rout, as the poorly trained and ill-disciplined troops dropped their weapons and ran for the safety of the nation’s capital, car- rying with them congressmen and officeholders who had driven out in their carriages to see the show.92 The Warriors The Valley Campaign In October 1861 the Confederate War Department reorganized its army. It established a Department of Northern Virginia and placed it under the command of Joe Johnston. Within that department were three geo- graphical districts. The Valley District stretched from the Blue Ridge to the Ohio River, although much of what became the state of West Virginia in 1863 was in Union hands. Jackson, now a major general, was put in command of this sprawling theater. He had long wished independent command in the West, in part because it was his home, but it meant leaving the regiments that he had personally molded into unbreakable fighting units. Worse, the War Department decided it could not spare any significant numbers of men from the Potomac theater. Jackson would have to create an army in the West from scratch. The Shenandoah Valley was of enormous strategic importance. Mil- itarily it formed General Johnston's western flank; economically it was the “bread basket” of Virginia. Formed by the Blue Ridge on the east and the great wall of the Allegheny Mountains on the west, it was drained by the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers to the north and the tributaries of the James River (the Cowpasture and Bullpasture Rivers) to the south. The Valley floor was limestone covered with a black, alkaline soil ideal for grain. Populated principally by Scots-Irish and German farmers familiar with cattle raising and cereals, the Valley was the most productive agri- cultural region east of the Appalachian plateau. Although no railroad ran through the Valley north to south, the state had built a turnpike from Winchester to Lexington. Between Winchester and Staunton the road was the latest in highway construction, two lanes wide and paved with crushed limestone (known as macadam, after the Scot who invented the process) Jackson set up headquarters in Winchester and immediately started building an army. At the outset he had some widely scattered regiments of ill-trained state militia, some of them armed with antiquated flintlock muskets. He issued a call for all militiamen in the Valley to muster at Winchester, and his command totaled about 3,000 men. Opposing Jack- son were two federal forces, each twice the size of his. At Harpers Ferry and Martinsburg was a force of about 6,000. Across the Allegheny ridge at Romney, principal town on the South Branch of the Potomac, were about 4,000 Union troops. If the two forces ever converged on Winches- ter, Jackson was in serious trouble. Fortunately, there was no coordina- tion in the Union command. The troops at Martinsburg were part of the Army of the Potomac, now under the command of General George Mc- Clellan. The force at Romney was part of the Department of Western Vir- ginia, which paid little attention to either McClellan or the Union generals in the West.Stonewall Jackson: Christian Soldier 93 ~ tarpon Martinsburg * ¥ » $ FS ~~ é Contact "Badgovatog~ raster ‘store (\ CH. /eNcDowel jot Rive, \ s : * ‘Swift Run\ ) wv mee on x le " ‘Sition Jackson's Valley Campaign. Jackson's first objective was to get his old unit, now famed as the “Stonewall Brigade,” transferred to the Valley. The War Department fi- nally agreed, although General Johnston furiously opposed the move. Re- united with the men he had trained, Jackson in November made plans to take the offensive. Noting that armies normally went into winter quarters at that time of year, he thought he could get across the mountains ahead of the winter snows and take the Romney garrison by surprise. Any prob- lems created by weather, he assured his superiors, would be handled “through the blessing of God who has thus far so wonderfully prospered our cause.” General Johnston’s estimate of the value of God's blessing mattered less than his evaluation of his opponent, McClellan. He had known McClellan at West Point and considered him far too cautious a94 The Warriors man to take the offensive in the winter. Feeling secure on his side of the Blue Ridge, Johnston had no objection if Jackson wanted to undertake a campaign to the West. Although Romney was a mere forty-three miles from Winchester, the Allegheny front was a steep, forbidding mass of mountains with no good passes. Jackson accordingly laid out an indirect route. He would follow the Potomac River pass through the mountains and seize the towns of Bath (now Berkeley Springs) in Virginia and Hancock in Mary- land, near the forks where the North and South Branches of the river came together. Having placed himself between the two federal forces and isolated Romney, he would descend on the centerpiece of the rich South Branch Valley. He gave his men their marching orders on New Year’s Eve. They were to draw five days of rations and prepare to depart at 3:00 A.M. In three days he made it as far as Bath, garrisoned by 1,400 green troops from Illinois and Pennsylvania. Jackson himself was still learning the art of command. He failed to coordinate the attack or remain in contact with his regimental com- manders. In some places Virginia militia came across raw farmers from Illinois, and both dropped their guns and fled. Jackson himself finally galloped into the mess and led his army into town. The Confederates bagged about two dozen prisoners and enough supplies to give them their first decent meal in days. Freezing rain began to fall that night, and six inches of snow fell the following day. Jackson engaged in an artillery duel with a federal battery across the river in Hancock, which turned into what one Virginian de- scribed as a snowball fight. Jackson had no choice but to abandon the campaign, and the march back to Winchester in freezing temperatures and icy roads was a nightmare. It appeared that Jackson's only accom- plishment in this winter campaign was to tear up a few miles of the Bal- timore and Ohio Railroad. But even if God was not at Jackson's service, his enemies were. Fearing another attack, the federals abandoned Rom- ney. Jackson could go into winter quarters with his flanks secure. Disease and desertion depleted Jackson’s ranks that winter. Al- though his army numbered 13,759 on paper, only 5,000 were fit for duty, and only half of those could be counted on in combat. Facing Jackson at the northern end of the Valley was a federal force of 38,000 commanded by General Nathaniel P Banks. Fortunately for Jackson, Banks was no soldier. He was a Massachusetts politician who had served in Congress and as governor. The state legislature, assuming that the war would be short and fighting inconsequential, had honored him with a commission as general. On March 7, 1862, Banks shuffled forward to within five miles of Winchester. Jackson put his infantry into trenches north of the town and waited for an attack. Assuming that Jackson was far stronger than he was, Banks also dug in and waited for Jackson to attack. It was General Johnston, rather than the enemy, who forced Jack-Stonewall Jackson: Christian Soldier 95 son’s hand. Badly outnumbered by McClellan's army along the Potomac, Johnston withdrew behind the Rappahannock River. Jackson, whose force served as Johnston’s left flank, was forced to abandon Winchester and retreat up the Valley. Jackson's retreat was orderly. From Strasburg south he was able to have his supplies carried on the Manassas Gap Rail- road. From Strasburg to Harrisonburg, a distance of about fifty miles, the Valley was split by a steep ridge known as Massanutten Mountain. The wider part of the Valley, and hence the turnpike, lay to the west of this ridge. To the east, between Massanutten Mountain and the Blue Ridge, the Shenandoah River flowed through the narrow Luray Valley, traversed by a single, one-lane country road Using Massanutten Mountain as a shield, Jackson for the next three months played peekaboo with the federal army. In fact, he was facing not one but two federal armies, each numerically superior to his own. In ad- dition to Banks’s force, General John C. Fremont was converging on Jackson from the South Branch Valley. Jackson's strategy depended on speed and surprise. He taught his men to march in “route step,” that is, in any way they pleased so long as they kept up with the column. The sol- diers marched four abreast and carried their packs and weapons any way that was comfortable. Jackson himself rode up and down the column on Little Sorrel with continual encouragement of “press on, press on.” In the relatively level terrain of the Valley, his army could move up to twenty miles a day. After a victory or two, won by speed and surprise, the soldiers took pride in their marching ability and began calling themselves “Jack- son's foot cavalry.” While Banks's army labored southward on the Valley Turnpike, Jack- son crept north through the narrow Luray Valley and descended on Win- chester in Banks's rear. When Banks tried to corner him, Jackson slipped into the Allegheny Mountains and surprised Fremont. By his skill and daring Jackson tied up a federal force of more than 30,000 through the spring of 1862. The importance of Jackson's Valley campaign was not lost on Con- federate officials in Richmond, for they faced a new and dangerous move by Union general George McClellan. With the Confederate army seem- ingly well entrenched along the Rappahannock River, McClellan in the spring of 1862 proposed a massive flanking movement. He would take advantage of Northern naval supremacy and move his army down the Chesapeake Bay to the peninsula between the York and James Rivers. He could thus attack Richmond from the rear with only one river, the Chick- ahominy, to cross. Lincoln approved the plan on condition that McClel- lan leave a large force at Fredericksburg to protect Washington. Both McClellan and Lincoln also depended on Banks in the Valley to protect the capital’s western approach. In late March a fleet of more than 300 Union vessels ferried 70,000 men and 300 cannon to Fort Monroe, at the tip of the Williamsburgimage not availableimage not availableimage not availableStonewall Jackson: Christian Soldier 99 ternoon. By then he could hear the sounds of battle three miles to the south, He had missed the opening engagement altogether. At the village of Mechanicsville, facing the right flank of McClellan's line, A. P. Hill had become anxious about Jackson's tardiness and the weakness of the defenses left in Richmond. He went on the attack on his own initiative. Lee, caught off guard by this change in plans, sent fresh units to Hill’s support. The Confederates were repulsed with heavy losses, and the Battle of Mechanicsville, the first of the Seven Days Bat- tles June 25-July 1, 1862), ended in a draw. During the night McClellan learned of Jackson's presence off to the northeast toward the York River, and he instantly panicked. Concluding that he was facing a Confederate army of 200,000, he ordered the gen- eral commanding his right flank to retreat into a defensive posture in a swamp next to the Chickahominy. Lee threw both Hill's and Longstreet’s divisions at this position on June 27 (Battle of Gaines Mills). Again Jack- son missed the fight. He was rigidly obeying the only orders he had—to keep between McClellan and the York River and wait for the federals to come fleeing into his arms. Although the Confederates were repulsed at Gaines Mills with heavy losses, McClellan, still in panicky uncertainty as to Jackson's whereabouts, ordered a retreat to the James, where he had naval support and a supply base at Harrison's Landing. Lee followed, at- tacking the Union rear guard, and making a final assault on federal de- fenses on Malvern Hill (July 1). Jackson became bogged in swamps and bridging the Chickahominy and missed every battle but the last. Somewhere in those seven days both the North and the South came to realize that this was a war that would not soon end and that it would be hideously expensive in human life. The South had lost 20,000 killed and wounded; Union losses were about 11,000. Although Jackson's divi- sion had been mauled at Malvern Hill—the infantry charge up the slope ordered by Lee (as ill-advised as Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg) had cost 5,000 men—he wanted to continue the attack now that McClellan was huddled against the James River. Lee and Jefferson Davis overruled him. Lee now reorganized his army into two sections. Longstreet would com- mand the major part of it in the east. Jackson, with seven brigades, was to return to the Blue Ridge and keep an eye on the federals from there. Second Manassas While McClellan cowered on the James River and prepared to load his men on ships for the return to the Potomac, Lincoln chose a new com- mander for the federal forces guarding Washington (about 50,000 men). His choice was Major General John Pope, a man of limited experience and less sense and who compensated for both with a gift for bragging. He reportedly dated one of his early proclamations “Headquarters in the700 The Warriors Saddle.” Southern wits made great sport of that. There were endless variations on the story of the big-mouthed general who put his head- quarters where his hindquarters ought to be. Jackson and his men returned to the Piedmont by the route they had come, on the rickety Virginia Central Railroad. Observing Pope’s disposi- tion of his army, Lee spotted its weakness. The federal divisions were widely scattered; Pope’s left wing was at Fredericksburg, and his right at Culpeper, fifty miles to the west. If Jackson could pounce on one of these isolated outposts, he might win a cheap victory. Lee sent him reinforce- ments of 18,000 men under the command of A. P. Hill. Lee admired Hill for the fighting qualities he had revealed in the Seven Days, and Jackson thought well of him for the same reason. However, the differences in personality between the two men spelled future trouble. In addition, Hill distrusted Jackson for what Hill supposed was laggard conduct during the Seven Days. Jackson, ever ready to take the offensive, rolled into motion the mo- ment the reinforcements arrived. On August 9 he soundly defeated his old adversary, General Banks, at Cedar Mountain (between Orange and Culpeper) and pushed on to the Rappahannock. By this time Lee was willing to gamble that McClellan was actually leaving the peninsula for good, and he sent Longstreet north with another 30,000 troops to join Jackson. Lee's strategy was to knock Pope out before McClellan and his huge mass of undefeated, and largely untried, humanity could return to the Potomac theater. On Sunday afternoon, August 24, Lee summoned Jackson, Long- street, and J.E.B. Stuart to his field headquarters on the Rappahannock, some ten miles north of Culpeper. Sitting at a table covered with maps in the middle of a field, Lee outlined another bold flanking maneuver. Jack- son was to take his division up the river far enough to find a shallow cross- ing and swoop down on the Orange and Central Railroad, which was Pope’s umbilical cord to Washington and his supply base. When Pope turned to confront Jackson, Lee and Longstreet would hit him from the south. Jackson loved the idea, excitedly drawing a map in the dirt with his foot. Lee ended the meeting by asking Jackson when he would be able to start. “I will be moving within an hour,” Jackson replied. By nightfall the following day Jackson had reached the Salem station on the Manassas Gap Railroad, some twenty miles east of Front Royal. The following morning, August 26, Jackson's army turned east and fol- lowed the railroad through Thoroughfare Gap in the Bull Run Moun- tains. By then they were directly in the rear of Pope's army, and his men sensed something important looming. In midafternoon Stuart and his cavalry, who had been sent forward by Lee, caught up with Jackson, hav- ing made an all-night ride. Jackson put Stuart’s men in an arc to the front and sides of his force to avoid running into any federals by surprise. That evening they reached Bristoe Station, on the Orange and Alexan-Stonewall Jackson: Christian Soldier 101 Mee Bape me re a ar 1B Royas Xx 7 wen io ee eh Sermon a a ey oe Cpa cH conadi stone : coaurme j ee Fimo / 2 yp ae Second Battle of Bull Run (Manassas). 1 Staton dria Railroad. They turned a switch, tore up some track, and watched de- lightedly as first one supply train and then another ran off the track and twisted themselves into a snarl of iron and splintered wood. Jackson's men had marched fifty-six miles in two days, and they were too tired to go on that night to Manassas Junction, a mere five miles away. However, one commander, Isaac Trimble, who had earlier vowed to become “ei- ther a Major General or a corpse,” offered to lead his North Carolina and Georgia regiments on an all-night march to the Junction. Jackson grate- fully accepted the offer. Trimble's surprise was complete. He fell on the Junction shortly af- ter midnight and captured its garrison of 300 troops. Jackson and the rest of the army arrived the next morning to find Trimble in possession of a mountain of federal supplies. He had also captured eight cannon, 175 horses, and 200 runaway slaves. Jackson's men loaded up what they could carry and burned the rest. They then disappeared into the hills be- low the Bull Run Mountains. Pope, having learned of the destruction of the railroad, was already in hot pursuit. He found Jackson at sunset of August 28 and prepared to attack at dawn. Jackson had placed his men in the cuts and fills of an unfinished railroad. The position gave Jackson a second opportunity to play the “stone wall.” By nightfall on the 29th half of Pope's army had battered itself to pieces in six bloody assaults on Jackson's line, suffering huge losses. Lee and Longstreet appeared on the following day and dispatched the other half of the Union army. When the Second Battle of Bull Run (or Second Manassas) was over, Pope’s102 The Warriors army of 60,000 had suffered 16,000 casualties, while Lee, with an army of 50,000, had lost 9,200. From Antietam to Fredericksburg Two days after the battle ended Lee decided to cross the Potomac and in- vade the Union. It was a risky decision, but at the time it seemed his only alternative. He could not stay where he was, for the war had stripped northern Virginia of food and forage. To retire to Richmond would mean surrendering all he had gained at Second Manassas. To attack the Union army, which now numbered 80,000 with McClellan back in command, was out of the question. An invasion of the North also had potential po- litical dividends. It would be another blow to Northern morale, already shaky after a string of defeats in the Virginia theater, and it might trigger diplomatic intervention from Britain or France, both of whom were known to be sympathetic to the Southern cause. Longstreet opposed the idea. He favored a defensive war on the not unreasonable grounds that Southern resources were limited, while the North seemed to have infinite quantities of men and money. Jackson, ever ready to go on the attack, was delighted with Lee’s proposal. He rushed back to his own headquarters and told his men to be ready to march at dawn. As usual, he told no one where they were going. Lee's army began splashing across the Potomac on the 4th of Sep- tember. Jackson had hoped to be in the vanguard, but A. P. Hill’s division was slow to move. Jackson confronted the general, and an argument en- sued in which Hill tendered his sword in resignation. Instead, Jackson ordered him placed under arrest for disobeying orders and promoted an- other to command the division. Jackson later recognized Hill’s fighting abilities and silently restored him to command. Satisfied with nothing short of complete exoneration, Hill wrote Lee demanding a court-mar- tial. Lee, feeling that his lieutenants had better things to do, declined. The controversy between Hill and Jackson was still simmering when Jackson died. In the meantime, the two fought the enemy side by side. After passing through Frederick, Lee decided to cross South Moun- tain (Maryland’s extension of the Blue Ridge) in order to shield his movements and open a supply line into the Shenandoah Valley. That meant he had to possess Harpers Ferry. On September 9 he ordered Jackson's corps to capture the post, while he and Longstreet proceeded north in an effort to sever the Pennsylvania Railroad at Harrisburg. Jack- son recrossed the Potomac and placed his men on the hills surrounding Harpers Ferry. The rivers necessarily divided his army. One part of it was in Maryland across the Potomac from the village; the other two were on each side of the Shenandoah River. Jackson coordinated the attack using semaphore flags and began an artillery bombardment on September 15.Stonewall Jackson: Christian Soldier 103 When the federals threw up a white flag, Jackson demanded uncondi- tional surrender. The arrangements were completed by the end of that day. Because Jackson could not spare the men to guard prisoners, the Union soldiers were placed on parole—that is, a promise that they would not fight again—and sent home. In the meantime, in perhaps the worst security leak in American mil- itary history, Lee’s orders, through a mistake by his couriers, had fallen into McClellan's hands. Lee had sent half his army to Harpers Ferry, and the other half was in broken units struggling across South Mountain. As historian Bruce Catton has written, “No Civil War general was ever given so fair a chance to destroy the opposing army one piece at a time.” Mc- Clellan saw the importance of his opportunity and told his subordinates that if he couldn't “whip Bobbie Lee” this time, “I will be willing to go home.” Characteristically he spent sixteen hours preparing to “whip Bob- bie Lee,” and in the meantime Lee got his army across the mountain. However, his plan to invade Pennsylvania was no longer feasible. Learn- ing of Jackson's success at Harpers Ferry, Lee decided to accept battle along Antietam Creek near the village of Sharpsburg, Maryland. Lee had lost entire regiments of men when he crossed the Potomac, most of them Virginians who had fought to protect their homes but were unwilling to be part of an invasion force. Lee lost many more to illness and sore feet, for almost half his army was without shoes. With Jackson still in Harpers Ferry, Lee had only 19,000 men when he halted to face the federal onslaught on September 15. McClellan, with a force of 75,000, decided not to chance a precipitous attack and spent two days maturing his plans. In the meantime Jackson arrived from Harpers Ferry, and Lee positioned his corps on the Confederate left. When McClellan finally attacked at dawn on the morning of Septem- ber 17, the Confederate army was in as good a placement as the fairly level terrain afforded. Longstreet, with the main body of the army, was in front of the village of Sharpsburg, his right on Cemetery Hill, his left con- cealed in a sunken road, hollowed over the years by farm wagons. Jack- son’s men were just north of the sunken road, on a well-forested ridge behind a Dunker (i.e., German Baptist) church that stood on the Ha- gerstown Pike. In front of Jackson was a cornfield and a pasture, providing an excellent field of fire. For the third time in his career Jackson had the challenge of standing like a stone wall, and he did so as his men repulsed the main brunt of the federal attack throughout that morning. Toward noon Jackson ordered a counterattack across the cornfield and suffered staggering losses. That ended the fighting on his flank, as both sides col- lapsed in exhaustion. The cornfield was so littered with bodies that one soldier claimed he could have walked through it without touching the ground. That afternoon McClellan attacked the Confederate right. Lee threw A. P Hill, whose division was late arriving from Harpers Ferry, into the melee late in the afternoon, and the federal thrust was halted.104 The Warriors Night fell on a battlefield whose horrors were beyond description. Approximately 2,100 Northerners and 2,700 Southerners were dead. Another 18,500 (split almost evenly between the armies) were wounded, 3,000 of them mortally. It was the bloodiest single day of the war—or of any other war Americans have ever fought. That evening, while “half of Lee’s army was hunting the other half,” Confederate commanders gath- ered at Lee's headquarters. Jackson wanted to go on the offensive the next morning. Lee temporized. He lacked the men to go on the attack but was unwilling to run. He decided to hold his position and see if Mc- Clellan wanted to renew the struggle. The two sides glared at each other through the following day, and at sundown Lee’s army slowly moved back across the Potomac. On September 18, the day after the battle, the Confederate Congress again reorganized its army, adopting a modern corps system. Lee’s army was divided into two corps. Longstreet was put in charge of one; Jackson, promoted to lieutenant general, commanded the other. Longstreet placed his men on the Rappahannock line in the Piedmont. Jackson undertook the defense of the Valley and made his headquarters at Winchester. Mc- Clellan delayed for a month his pursuit of Lee and finally crossed the Po- tomac in mid-October. He then dawdled for another month while begging Lincoln for more men and supplies. Lincoln finally lost patience in No- vember and replaced him with Ambrose E. Burnside (whose famous side whiskers added the term “sideburns” to American English). Burnside promptly began marching east toward Fredericksburg. His thought was to get around Lee to the east and head for Richmond. The speed of his movements took Lee by surprise, but then, as so often hap- pened with federal plans, things went awry. Burnside reached the bank of the Rappahannock opposite Fredericksburg but found that the pon- toons he had ordered as a base for a floating bridge across the river had unaccountably gone astray. That gave Lee time to summon Jackson from the Valley and position Longstreet in the heights above the city. As a re- sult, when federal troops finally made their crossing on December 12, the Southerners were ready. The Battle of Fredericksburg (December 13, 1862) was actually two separate fights. Longstreet had positioned his artillery on St. Mary's Heights overlooking the city. He placed his infantry at the bottom of the hill in a sunken road behind a stone wall. An open pasture in front of the infantry afforded a perfect field of fire. Lee sent Jackson's half of the army downriver to guard the fords below the city and protect Longstreet’s flank. In Burnside’s battle plan the main attack was to be against Jackson, un- dertaken by a force of 50,000 commanded by General William B. Franklin. Burnside himself planned to lead a diversionary force through the center of the city and feign an attack on St. Mary’s Heights. However, he failed to make his plans clear to Franklin and, worse, made no effort to coordinate the two attacks, even though timing was essential. Franklin,Stonewall Jackson: Christian Soldier 105 who had the cautious temperament of a McClellan, chose to think that he was the diversion and Burnside on the main attack. When the federals laid down their second pontoon bridge on his front on December 12, Jackson quickly called his men back from the downriver fords and consolidated them on a low ridge overlooking the river. Below the ridge was the embankment of the Richmond, Freder- icksburg and Potomac Railroad, and between that and the river was a dirt road that led to Richmond. Franklin began his assault on the morn- ing of the 13th, but his men were slow to move, and they crumpled un- der a withering fire once they crossed the railroad track. One detachment did occupy a ravine between Jackson's men and A. P. Hill’s that neither general had thought to fortify, but when that gap was closed the blue-clad troops fled for cover under the railroad embankment. The fighting on Jackson’s wing was all but over when Burnside began his “diversion” in the city. It is Burnside’s half of the battle that receives most of the attention in history books because of the hideous losses he suffered in throwing wave after wave of soldiers against Longstreet’s stone wall. The Union army suffered 12,600 casualties in the debacle, nearly all of them in front of the sunken road and the stone wall. Morale in the Union army dropped to rock bottom in the wake of that awful blunder. By January 1863 desertions were averaging 200 a day. Lincoln replaced Burnside with “Fighting Joe” Hooker, who was popular with the troops because of his tolerance for the army’s camp followers. Like Burnside, his name also enriched the American language. Chancellorsville Jackson spent a pleasant winter on the plantation of the Corbin family, one of Virginia’s oldest and wealthiest, eleven miles downriver from Fredericksburg. He occupied himself much of the winter composing bat- tle reports of the 1862 campaigns while pleading with the government in Richmond for more tents, clothing, and shoes for his men. Almost half his corps were without shoes that winter. Men walked through the ice and snow with their feet wrapped in canvas. Unsure when Hooker might mount an offensive, he refused to allow his men to go home on furlough In late November Anna had given birth to a girl at the Irwin home in Charlotte, but, having denied a furlough to his men, Jackson felt obliged to deny one to himself. However, in April he did manage to bring Anna and the baby north to Richmond. Governor Letcher put them up in his own house and then personally put them on a train to Guinea Station, where Jackson had found suitable quarters. Jackson's family had been in Virginia a little more than a week when, on the 28th of April, Hooker crossed the Rappahannock near Chancel- lorsville, a country inn some ten miles west of Fredericksburg. Although106 The Warriors Hooker's army totaled 134,000, he chose to leave 50,000 of them in front of Fredericksburg to menace Lee’s flank. If Lee turned west to face Hooker's main force, the Union army in Fredericksburg had clear sailing to Richmond. Lee left a token force of 10,000 in Fredericksburg and sent the rest of his army west to Chancellorsville on May 1. Hooker was un- aware of the Confederate movements because the place where he had chosen to cross the river was a dense woods of second-growth forest. Be- cause the virgin timber had been removed, sunlight allowed the growth of brush and vines. Residents of the neighborhood referred to the tract, some twelve miles long and six miles deep, as “the Wilderness.” Jackson, as usual, was in front of Lee’s main force. Encountering some South Carolina brigades who were digging trenches along the road that led past Chancellorsville to Orange Court House, he persuaded them to drop their shovels and join him in an attack. Jackson’s attack caught Hooker completely by surprise and forced him to change his plans for a flanking movement. Not knowing where the enemy was, he drew up his army in an elongated semicircle with its back to the river. J.E.B. Stuart scouted the road to the west and reported to Jackson that there were no federals in that direction. That evening Lee and Jackson sat down on a log at the intersection of two forest roads and discussed what to do. The news from Stuart that there were no federals to the west inspired the idea of a flanking march, a tactic that they had used repeatedly for the past year. Lee would hold the front with a mere 18,000 men against Hooker's 70,000. Jackson would lead 28,000 men on a fourteen-mile march to attack the Union flank, using roads that were not on any map but which were known to a local planter, who agreed to serve as guide. Jackson began his march at 7:30 A.M. on May 2. Even in the Wilder- ness the movement of that many men could not be completely hidden, and federal scouts spotted his column several times during the day. How- ever, when they reported to Hooker, the Union general decided that the movement must be part of a Confederate retreat, since Jackson was mov- ing away from the battlefront. Hooker's right flank had been left dangling in a hayfield about a mile west of the Chancellorsville inn. The officers in command had not bothered to throw up breastworks or set pickets. As Jackson’s men quietly deployed for battle about 5:00 in the afternoon, the Union soldiers had stacked their guns and lit fires to prepare the evening meal. The first sign of trouble came when a host of wild ani- mals—deer, fox, and rabbits—came racing out of the woods. Behind them was a line of men in gray screaming “like furies.” The Union sol- diers did not have time to retrieve their rifles; they simply ran. The Union lines collapsed all the way back to the Chancellorsville inn, but then the Confederate attack lost momentum. Units were broken up in the melee; Southerners fired on one another. Hooker's army was simply too massive to be routed altogether by a flanking force less than aaa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.an dames Anderson: Infantryman in Blue The young state of Wisconsin, which had entered the Union in 1848, was about as distant from the South and remote from slavery as one could get. Yet in the first year of the Civil War, 1861, 14,000 Wisconsin men volun- teered for military service. This represented about 9% of the white males of military age in the state, a higher proportion of the population than has ever stepped forward in the first year of any war the United States has fought. By the end of the war Wisconsin contributed more troops per capita to the Union army than any other state except Massachusetts. And once in the army the “Badger Boys in Blue” fought ferociously. The Iron Brigade, which consisted mostly of Wisconsin regiments, was one of the most storied units of the war. Indeed, it was disbanded midway through the war because there was virtually no one left in it. Why did young Wisconsin farm boys, most of whom had never met a black person and had only the vaguest notion of slavery, volunteer on such a scale and fight so valiantly? For that matter, why did ordinary men of meager education and little worldly experience go so eagerly to war in both the North and the South? Why did they willingly participate in in- fantry attacks—such as those undertaken by the Union army at Freder- icksburg and the Confederate army at Gettysburg—that were patently suicidal? The answer to these questions can be found in the diaries and letters of the soldiers themselves. The eminent Civil War historian James M. McPherson has exam- ined the letters of 1,076 soldiers, 647 from the North and 429 from the South, in an attempt to determine the soldiers’ reaction to war. He quan- tified his data, compared it with the results of psychological tests con- ducted by the U.S. Army during and after World War II, and published the results under the title For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). McPherson's data provide answers to three specific questions: Why did men voluntar- ily enlist in the army? What induced them to stay in the army and in many cases to reenlist when their terms expired? What nerved them to face repeatedly the extreme danger of combat? One of the most remarkable of the collections of Civil War letters is that of James Anderson, an infantry private and ultimately corporal, from Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The collection is remarkable because it consists110 The Warriors of a diary with almost daily entries over his entire period of enlistment, 1861 to 1864, as well as frequent letters to his family—all of which were preserved by his family and currently reside in the State Historical Soci- ety of Wisconsin. Anderson was not given to boasting, and some of the horrors of combat that he experienced have to be inferred by reading be- tween the lines of his letters. He survived the war, as so many of his com- rades and other letter writers did not. His reaction to the war was often similar to that of other soldiers examined by Professor McPherson, but in other respects it was quite different. This chapter seeks to place James Anderson’s story in the context of the broad picture of why men went to war in 1861 and fought so bravely for the next four years. Volunteering as a Rite of Passage James Anderson was a tall, fair-haired Scottish boy who had been born in Glasgow on Christmas day, 1841. His father worked in a textile mill, an industry that had set the pace for Britain’s industrial revolution and had, by the 1840s, turned Glasgow into a filthy, crime-ridden slum. The An- derson family fled this environment in 1852, journeyed to America, and followed a common immigrant route by steamboat into the upper Great Lakes, They disembarked in Manitowoc, a mill town that derived its power from a steep drop in the Manitowoc River just before it entered Lake Michigan. The Andersons at first tried to carve a farm out of the re- cently logged “cut over,” but abandoned that effort in 1855 and moved into town. James's father got a job in one of the sawmills that were sup- plying lumber for fast-growing Chicago; James and his two sisters were put in school. Manitowoc, like much of eastern Wisconsin, had initially been settled by migrants from New York and New England. However, the potato famine of the 1840s and revolutions in Europe brought a tide of immi- grants—Germans, Irish, Norwegians, and Bohemians—to the village, and by 1860 more than half of its population of 3,000 was foreign born. Nev- ertheless, the Yankee minority, which lived for the most part on the north side of the river, controlled the town’s commerce and set the tone of its politics. In the presidential election of 1860 Lincoln carried the village by a margin of two to one. The attitude of the people was not so much anti- slavery as anti-Southern. Newspapers portrayed the South as a land with- out schools, whose “masses are growing up in ignorance and vice” and whose unruly men resorted to “violence and bloodshed, rather than calm discussion and courts of justice to settle their disputes and difficulties.” The South's firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 sent a wave of patri- otic furor across the North, a phenomenon that the French have labeled a rage militaire. Manitowoc was one of the many towns and cities thatJames Anderson: Infantryman in Blue m erupted into a volcano of oratory and recruiting rallies. Anderson noted in his diary that “nearly all labor was suspended [as] men gathered on street corners to discuss the situation.” Popular meetings passed resolu- tions condemning the South for attempting to bring about the “dissolu- tion and tearing into fragments of the best government on the earth.” The consciousness of duty was prevalent in mid-nineteenth-century America. Many Union soldiers explained their reasons for enlisting as simply a “sense of duty” to defend the country and overcome the “anar- chy” and “disorder” inherent in the South’s secession. Duty was closely linked to honor, and both were key elements in the concept of masculinity in Victorian America. The letters of Union sol- diers bristled with references to honor and its opposite, shame. For young men in their upper teens, then, enlistment became a passage into masculine adulthood. Fifteen-year-old Martin Adams, who would fight by Anderson’s side, told a patriotic meeting in Manitowoc: “I do not court death, but I do feel as if to die in vindication of my whole country’s honor, it would be a glorious death.” When young men like Adams enlisted, could older, stronger men hold back? Peer pressure was a vital element, not only in early enlistments but in later unit co- hesion in combat. There were other motives for enlisting. One was the opportunity for adventure and perhaps glory. It was universally assumed that the war would be a short and relatively bloodless one. A stint in the army was one way of seeing the country at the government's expense. Many a Yankee farm boy enlisted to escape the drudgery and sameness of life in the backwoods. And there was the matter of money. The government offered privates in the army $13 a month, with $5 extra if they had families. This clearly influenced Anderson’s decision to enlist. His family was poor, with his father employed only part time, and James had little prospect of higher education. If he could save his army pay to “grub stake” an edu- cation (as he did), he could rise to wealth and respectability (as he did). Within three weeks after Fort Sumter fell ninety-six men in Mani- towoc County had volunteered for the army. (The county would eventu- ally send almost 2,500 men to war.) Twenty-eight of them, including Anderson, were still in their teens. The army had as yet no recruiting service nor any formal way of inducting men. The volunteers simply or- ganized themselves as the Manitowoc County Guards. In the tradition of American militia, going back to colonial times, the company elected its own officers. The unanimous choice for captain was Temple Clark, a thirty-four-year-old attorney from the north side of town, a natural leader for whom Anderson bore great respect in the early fighting. For the next six weeks the company, without weapons or uniforms, marched and drilled in a city park, while the volunteers fretted that the “war” would end before they could participate in a battle.112 The Warriors Off to War After Temple Clark, who had once served in the state senate, made a trip to Madison to plead with the governor to call the company to active duty, the County Guards were told to report to Camp Randall, a training depot in the capital city. There the volunteers were given uniforms (a nonde- script gray, for neither side had as yet settled on a standard uniform), and they were reorganized into Company A of the Fifth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment. More weeks of drilling and marching ensued, and the initial thrill of living in tents and singing around campfires at night gave way to boredom and complaining about the food. During the third week of July news arrived of the federal rout in the Battle of Bull Run, followed shortly thereafter with orders to report to Washington as soon as possible. On July 24 the Fifth Wisconsin packed its gear, boarded railroad cars on tracks near the camp, and departed for Chicago amid a mob of well- wishers. There was at that time no trunk line linking Chicago to the East Coast. The first railroads imitated the wagon roads; most ran from a point in the hinterland into an urban hub. The soldiers had to transfer from one local line to another as they wound through southern Michigan to Toledo and Cleveland, and then south to Pittsburgh. From there the nascent Pennsylvania Railroad carried them to Harrisburg, and a spur line took them through York to Baltimore. Given a brief leave in Baltimore to sightsee, Anderson came into his first contact with blacks and slavery. He had been opposed to slavery in principle; encountering it in practice hardened his views. “I am more of an anti-slave man than ever,” he informed his family. “A Nigger here is thought less of than a Horse or Ox and any white man |can] knock him down and maltreat him without fear of the consequence.” He went out of his way to converse with black people on the street, and he discovered that they “could talk as intelligently about any subject as a majority of white man.” The experience gave him a new, moral commitment to the Union cause. In Washington, Anderson was given more time off. He toured the city, gazed at the capitol, whose dome had recently been enlarged, visited the patent office, and watched stonemasons work on the Washington Monument. During its stay in the nation’s capital, the regiment was given the new blue uniforms of the Union army. Quartermasters passed out clothing to the soldiers without regard to size, and the men traded until they obtained something that fit. The Fifth Wisconsin then joined the Union army, grown to nearly 100,000 strong, camped near Fairfax Court House in northern Virginia. It was a miserably hot and rainy summer, and the regiment slept in the open until it was issued tents on the 15th of September. A week later the Manitowoc boys got their first taste of combat. The Confederates had pulled an artillery battery within range of the Union camp, and the Wis-James Anderson: Infantryman in Blue 13 consin troops were ordered to push them back. The Confederate artillery opened up on them, and federal cannon answered back. “Their shells came humming over our heads in fine style bursting a short distance from [us] . . . throwing the dirt around us in a lively manner,” Anderson excitedly wrote home. The Southerners retired, and no one was hurt. War was still fun. The sport ended when the army went into winter quarters that au- tumn. Officers put the men to work cutting trees and erecting wooden fortifications. As the soldiers roamed the woods looking for likely trees, concealed Southern snipers fired on them, making life dangerous as well as difficult. The rain was incessant; morale sagged. In late October An- derson wrote home: “We have seen the hardest times the last week that we have seen so far. We would have to [be] out and chop hard all day and then have to be down in the line of battle all night under heavy rain. Be- sides all this our rations did not reach us regular so we would be hungry, wet, and tired all at the same time.” Anderson’s mood darkened further during the winter when his pre- war sweetheart abandoned him for another. Addie Carpenter was em- ployed as a maid by a Manitowoc family, and she was a good friend of James's sisters. When he went off to war, James and Addie had ex- changed promises of love and loyalty. Upon reaching Washington, he had his picture taken and sent it to her. She sent him a small portrait of her- self, Although he wrote her long, loving letters through the summer and fall, her responses were shorter and increasingly impersonal. In Decem- ber he learned that she had returned to her home in the northern part of the county and planned to marry. Anderson informed his sister in Jan- uary: “I wrote a rather hard letter to Addie and told her to return my head picture to you and burn my letters.” With McClellan on the Peninsula As the Union military buildup along the Potomac continued, the Confed- erate army prudently withdrew south across the Rappahannock, making that stream part of its line of defense. Realizing that an attack across a river that must be bridged, rather than waded, might be costly, General George McClellan, who had been placed in command of the Army of the Potomac after the debacle at Bull Run, persuaded Lincoln in the spring of 1862 to let him mount a massive flank attack. McClellan would employ the Union navy to ferry his army down the Chesapeake Bay and land on the peninsula formed by the James and York Rivers, That movement would place him at the rear of the unprotected Confederate capital. Al- though Anderson and other common soldiers were not told of the plan, they could feel the excitement of preparation. The Fifth Wisconsin was issued new breach-loading rifles made in Austria to replace the muzzle-14 The Warriors The Virginia-Maryland theater of war. loading muskets that they had been issued when they passed through Bal- timore the previous summer. In addition to being quicker to load, the ri- fles fired an elongated bullet (rather than the musket’s ball) that spun through the air and thus had much greater range and accuracy. The new French-invented minié bullet helped account for the extremely high ca- sualties in this “first of modern wars.” The Manitowoc contingent boarded its vessel at the Alexandria dock on the afternoon of March 22. There was, wrote Anderson, loud “cheering as each boat shoved off with her load of human beings.” The voyage to Fort Monroe, at the tip of the Williamsburg peninsula, took thirty hours. Dis-James Anderson: Infantryman in Blue 15 embarking, the Fifth Wisconsin marched along the shore of Hampton Roads, through the deserted and half-burned village of Hampton, and spent its first night in the fishing village of Newport News. Dogwood and other spring flowers were in bloom, and the march up the James River had the atmosphere of a spring excursion, though Anderson was shocked at the burned-out farms and slaughtered animals the Confederates had left behind in their retreat. The mood of springtime outing soon faded. The Confederates had fortified Yorktown, where the battlements of Washington’s 1781 siege of Cornwallis were still very much in evidence. Instead of bypassing the earthwork fortress, which could have been neutralized by a small encir- cling force, McClellan foolishly laid siege. The Fifth Wisconsin was sum- moned across the peninsula to the York River by hard marches and made camp in the rain and mud at Warwick Court House, about three miles from Yorktown. On April 9 the regiment was ordered into its first serious engagement—an assault on Confederate earthworks that were part of the Yorktown defense system. The infantry laid low while each side pounded the other with cannon fire. Ordered to attack, the regiment as- saulted what Company A’s surgeon described as “great ridges . . . bristling with bayonets and covered with men.” Anderson later had little memory of the fight other than that he had become confused and nearly lost “in the midst of a terrible scene.” The first experience of fierce combat is a surprise and a shock to sol- diers of every army in every time because there is no way of preparing for the emotional impact. After recovering from the shock, the next reaction of most Northern soldiers, as recorded in their letters home, was that they never wanted to experience it again. Although most did return to battle out of a sense of honor and duty, they did it with a veteran’s solem- nity. Gone was the anticipation and excitement. James Anderson did not record his reaction to his first combat experience. He may not have been as traumatized as some, because he was not asked to fight again for twelve days, and then he engaged in only a minor skirmish. The siege of Yorktown held up McClellan's offensive for a month, and during that time Company A suffered no casualties. Confederate General Joseph Johnston had used the time to bring his army south from the Rappahannock and place it between McClellan and Richmond. In early May he withdrew his force from Yorktown to concen- trate the army around Richmond. The Fifth Wisconsin was in the van- guard of the pursuit. At Williamsburg it encountered the Confederate rearguard commanded by James Longstreet. The Wisconsin boys attacked and then withstood a ferocious Confederate counterattack. When the Confederate withdrawal turned into a footrace, General Winfield Scott Hancock, commanding that section of the Union army, dubbed the regi- ment the “Bloody Fifth.” In the course of the battle Anderson and a friend became separated116 The Warriors from the company and were taken prisoners by a troop of Georgia cavalry. The horsemen disarmed them and started them on the road to Rich- mond, Passing a thicket too dense for horses, Anderson and his friend darted into the underbrush and got free. Finding his way back to his company at the end of the battle, Anderson was berated by his company commander for losing his rifle. Still exuberant over battle, despite this experience, and full of pride, Anderson wrote home: “Our boys fought like devils and have earned a name for themselves and their state. 1 do not think there was another regiment on the field fought so desperate as ours [and] even our best generals stood and looked on amazed at our bravery.” McClellan himself complimented the regiment for its “bravery and discipline” and declared: “Through you we won the day.” The victory was expensive, for Company A suffered its first casual- ties. Three of Anderson's friends were killed and two more wounded. Among the wounded was Captain Horace Walker, who had replaced Temple Clark (reassigned to the Army of the Tennessee) as company commander. Nevertheless, morale improved as the rains ceased and the weather grew warm. On May 9 the regiment broke camp and started up the road to Richmond. “We are now within twenty-five miles of that city,” wrote Anderson, “and I expect the next letter I send you will be mailed from that point.” On May 24 the Fifth Wisconsin made camp north of the Chickahominy River on a crossroads known as Gaines Mill. It had been a tough march, and the food wagons had failed to keep up. Anderson wrote that he and his friends “looked like living skeletons,” but he was buoyed by the conviction that the war would soon be over. Anderson’s assumption that Richmond was doomed might have been correct had he been serving under a more adventurous and imagi- native commander than George McClellan. Ever cautious, McClellan had convinced himself that the Confederate force was superior, though in fact Joe Johnston’s army numbered little more than half of McClel- lan’s. McClellan also fretted that the enemy was more familiar with the terrain, and he worried constantly that they might pull a surprise attack. Asa result he moved forward cautiously, and units like the Fifth Wiscon- sin, catching his mood, dug rifle pits for defense, rather than preparing for a quick-strike offense. True to form, Johnston counterattacked on May 31] at Seven Pines. The Confederates were driven back with severe losses on both sides. Al- though the Fifth Wisconsin was not involved, Anderson described in a letter what he heard and saw of the battle: “The booming of cannon and the continual roll of musketry is perfectly awful and . . . no less than 5000 were detailed last night to bring in the wounded.” Among the wounded on the Confederate side was General Johnston, who was re- placed by Robert E. Lee. The battle, although technically a federal vic- tory, sent McClellan deeper into numb confusion. His army sat still forJames Anderson: Infantryman in Blue mW another three weeks, during which Lee was reinforced by Stonewall Jackson’s army from the Shenandoah Valley. The campaign known as the Seven Days Battles opened on June 26 when Lee attacked the right side of the Union line at Mechanicsville, several miles to the north of where the Fifth Wisconsin was camped. The attack was beaten back with severe losses, and McClellan sent orders around the army that the Confederates had been soundly defeated. Al- though “bands were playing” in the Union camp, Anderson wrote, “Our tegt was silent as the grave. We had been deceived so much that we all said, ‘Wait and See.’” It had taken a while, but the eager recruit was now a somber veteran. The Wisconsin men were right. The following day Lee threw the main part of his army at the Union forces camped at Gaines Mill. The fighting was intense, and the Fifth Wisconsin was right in the middle of it. The battle went on throughout the day and into the night, with both sides suffering the highest casualties yet experienced in the war. “The fight was continued long after dark and was one of the most splendid sights I ever witnessed,” wrote Anderson, eager that his family be proud of his courage. But, he continued, “the illusion was dispelled by a mus- ket ball which struck me in the leg just above the knee making a painful but not dangerous wound.” Although the Confederate attack at Gaines Mill was stopped and driven back, McClellan grew ever more cautious. Virtually abandoning his idea of capturing Richmond, he ordered the army to consolidate south of the Chickahominy and within reach of his supply base on the James. On the morning of June 28 the Fifth Wisconsin was roused at 4:00 A.M. and started to march at dawn. The men were bewildered by the southerly direction they were taking because they had been expecting to push on toward Richmond, and they grumbled throughout the day. To- ward sunset the Confederates fell upon the retreating column, but they were again beaten back after a hot fight. Anderson, still nursing his wound, probably did not participate in the fight. Since he made no men- tion of being carried by wagon, he probably hobbled along with his com- pany on foot. Passing through Savage Station (on the Richmond and York River Railroad) on the morning of the 29th, the regiment saw other soldiers de- stroying an immense quantity of Union supplies and munitions to pre- vent them from falling into enemy hands. “Boxes of Splendid Rifles were tuthlessly smashed to pieces on the rails, cars and locomotives blown up, shells and cartridges thrown into pools and wells, while we . . . waded knee deep in coffee and sugar,” Anderson wrote in disgust. The only thing left standing were the hospital tents, where the regiment deposited its sick and wounded, leaving them to be taken prisoner by the Confeder- ates. Three of Anderson's friends in Company A were left behind. He, ap- parently, was healthy enough to keep up with the retreating regiment.118 The Warriors The Fifth Wisconsin had moved about two miles south of the railroad when, about sunset, the soldiers heard heavy gunfire behind them. The Confederates had attacked again, and the Battle of Savage Station was under way. The regiment whirled and returned to battle. It took up a po- sition along the railroad bed and withstood three waves of Confederate at- tackers. When the assault subsided, the regiment withdrew into the night. At 3:00 A.M., wrote Anderson, “we threw ourselves down by the side of the road and slept till dawn when we was again aroused and marched to join the rest of the Brigade from which we had been cut off.” Later that day, June 30, the Union army fought another rearguard action at the crossroads of Glendale. The Fifth Wisconsin was some- where on the Union flank stationed in a thick woods. The Confederate attack created “a scene of great confusion,” wrote Anderson, and the reg- iment retreated once more. It was lost much of the afternoon, walking through piney woods on roads that seemed to go nowhere. The day was hot, and men were dropping from exhaustion, among them Anderson. “My wounded leg had been troubling me and fatigue over-powered me and I fell insensible in the road,” he later wrote. Comrades poured water over his head to revive him, and the regiment, harassed by Confederates, continued its flight. Anderson was unable to keep up and was lucky to have escaped at all. “Some of the stragglers,” he later recounted, “caught some mules that had been stampeded by the panic and hitched them to an empty wagon and about 20 of us proceeded in that way.” He added, “Had it not been for this, I should certainly have fallen into the hands of the enemy.” On July 1 the main part of McClellan's army fortified itself atop Malvern Hill and withstood waves of Confederate attacks in the final bat- tle of the Seven Days. The Fifth Wisconsin rejoined the army while the battle was in progress and watched in horror from a nearby hill. The scene, said Anderson, with pardonable exaggeration, involved “some of the most terrible fighting ever known in the history of the world,” at the end of which McClellan's “Grand Army scattered like a flock of sheep, everyone going his own way.” It was, in fact, the Southerners who fell back after suf- fering terrible losses in an infantry attack on an enemy entrenched upon a hill. After the battle—and this may be the retreat Anderson was describ- ing—the weary Union army straggled into McClellan’s base at Harrison’s Landing on the James River. Anderson never again spoke of a short war or an easy victory. A Close Call at Antietam McClellan could not move rapidly even on the retreat. The Union army sat huddled at Harrison's Landing for six weeks after the Seven Days Battles. The army finally boarded naval vessels in mid-August and beganJames Anderson: Infantryman in Blue n9 disembarking in Alexandria on the 24th. Five days later Lee and Jackson disposed of McClellan’s replacement as commander of the Army of the Potomac, General John Pope, at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Follow- ing that disaster Lincoln reinstated McClellan as commander of the army charged with defending the nation’s capital. The Fifth Wisconsin had been ordered to move in the direction of the battlefield, but it was back in Alexandria on September 2. At that point the leisurely communications that had been coming down from McClellan’s headquarters turned into frantic demands for movement. The Wisconsin regiment was ordered to cross the Long Bridge into Georgetown and in Washington to board a train headed north. The men were utterly mystified by this sudden, and apparently purposeless, burst of activity. What they did not know was that Lee, following his victory at Bull Run, had decided to invade the North. On September 4 his army splashed across the Potomac some forty miles upriver from Washington and marched to Frederick, Maryland. When the Wisconsin regiment alighted from its train at Rockville, it joined the huge Union army that McClellan had gathered and positioned between Lee and the capital. As the Wisconsin regiment marched northwest through a Maryland countryside glorious in late-summer bloom, Dr. Alfred Castleman, the regiment's chief surgeon and inveterate diarist, noticed a change in the mood and demeanor of the men. The shame of the peninsula campaign had receded, and the men were regaining some of their old confidence and sense of adventure. They marched, Castleman observed, with “the cool determination of veterans,” and “the camp at night, even after our long marches, resounds with mirth and music.” Some of the men had even begun to feel, once again, that they might be heading into the last battle of the war. The Fifth Wisconsin was initially ordered to go to the rescue of the beleaguered garrison in Harpers Ferry, but that order was counter- manded when Harpers Ferry fell on September 15. The regiment then camped near Brownsville, about halfway between Harpers Ferry and Sharpsburg, where Lee, having abandoned his plans to invade Pennsyl- vania, was preparing for battle. Anderson was put on picket duty for two days and two nights. Early on the morning of the 17th, after his regiment had already departed, he was brought in and sent scampering up the Hagerstown Pike to Sharpsburg and another mile beyond, where the armies faced one another on either side of Antietam Creek. Although Anderson did not mention it in his diary, he had to pass between the two armies in order to reach his regiment, which was on the Union right. The Fifth Wisconsin lay on the edge of the infamous cornfield of the Miller farm, north of the whitewashed Dunker church. When Anderson joined his company, it was on the front line and un- der heavy artillery fire. General Winfield Scott Hancock, commanding that part of the line, ordered the regiment to attack. The Fifth Wisconsin120 The Warriors and Sixth Maine moved into the cornfield, but at that moment McClel- lan countermanded the order and repositioned the two regiments be- tween two of the Union artillery batteries. Although pinned down by Confederate cannon fire, the Wisconsin troops could observe from where they crouched the terrible bloodletting as wave after wave of blue- and gray-clad men crossed and recrossed the cornfield throughout the morning. “I shall never forget the horrible sights I witnessed where we lay in the cornfield,” Anderson later wrote his family. At the end of that morning, when the fighting shifted to another part of the battlefield, “the wounded and the dead were strewn thick as autumn leaves after a storm.” McClellan's order had almost certainly saved Anderson's life and allowed him to survive the war. After a day of eerie silence in which Lee expected another attack and McClellan declined to move, the Confederate army slipped back across the Potomac and escaped. The Union soldiers, who had hoped that this might be the final battle, realized that the war would go on. Mc- Clellan, fumed Dr. Castleman, “can be nothing short of an imbecile, a coward, or a traitor.” The home folks were equally distressed at the seem- ing mismanagement of the war. In the fall election of 1862 voters in Manitowoc County and northeastern Wisconsin replaced their Republi- can congressman with a Democrat and returned a solidly Democratic delegation to the state assembly. A year and a half after Anderson marched eagerly off to war, enlistments in Manitowoc dropped to near zero. People throughout the North felt the same despair. To fill the gaps in the Union army the government would have to resort to conscription. On the Sidelines at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg President Lincoln replaced McClellan with Ambrose E. Burnside in early November. If the new commander was a man with energy or even a plan, it was not evident to the men in the lower ranks. For a month the Fifth Wisconsin marched and camped, without aim or direction, in the level Virginia countryside between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers. Then, on the morning of December 11, they were awakened early and put on the road to Fredericksburg. By sunrise they could hear the thun- der of huge siege guns. In Burnside’s plan for attack on the city, the Fifth Wisconsin was placed in General Franklin’s command, scheduled to cross the river two miles below the city and form the main attack. Engi- neers worked all that day erecting the three pontoon bridges that Franklin's Grand Division was to use in crossing. Early on the morning of the 12th the corps of which the Wisconsin regiment was a part moved down to the bridges, each soldier carrying his own ammunition and three days of rations. Fog mixed with smoke from the previous day’s cannonading shrouded their movements. “Our regtJames Anderson: Infantryman in Blue 121 leading the Division over the left bridge,” Anderson wrote, “we formed a line close to the river while the other troops were crossing.” With the Fifth Wisconsin and Fifth Vermont in the front, the division advanced to the Richmond Stage Road. At that point the sun broke through the fog, and, with bayonets glistening, 40,000 men charged forward to the rail- road track that lay at the base of the hill where Stonewall Jackson had placed his Confederate troops. At that point Confederate skirmishers came out of a ravine on the regiment's flank, and the Fifth Wisconsin came under heavy cannon fire. “We again fell back across the [stage] road,” Anderson wrote, “and lay behind a bank which was alongside. We lay there all day and night and the next morning was relieved by another regt and put into the second line of battle.” Although he heard the sounds of the battle inside the city, Anderson never witnessed the fearful slaughter of Union troops in front of St. Mary’s Heights. ‘That night Anderson and other members of his company were ordered out on picket duty. He later wrote to his family: “You may be sure this was not very pleasant news for men who had been lying in the mud shivering with cold for 3 days to hear, but it was no use to say no or swear about it, so off we went in no very pleasant mood.” They crept to within fifty yards of the Confederate pickets and remained there for the night. When the sun rose, the two lines of pickets could plainly see and communicate with each other. The other men were from Texas, and they were as anxious for peace and safety as those from Wisconsin. The two groups quickly arranged their own armistice, agreeing not to fire on each other unless the armies themselves advanced. Men on both sides wanted to see another Christmas and, in Anderson’s case, his twenty-first birthday. Although Company A left the Fredericksburg battlefield without suf- fering any casualties, the Union army had taken a terrible beating. It had suffered 13,000 dead and wounded and gained nothing. The loss cut deep into army morale. “There is no use dodging the fact,” Anderson ad- mitted, “the late Fredericksburg disaster disheartened our army greatly and there is not a man who does not dread the idea of going across the Rappahannock to attack the enemy in their fortifications.” The regi- ment’s sensitive surgeon, Dr. Castleman, had seen enough useless bloodshed and quit the army. While ordinary soldiers had to serve out their three-year enlistments, officers were allowed to resign at any time. The doctor was a caring man, and Anderson was sorry to see him leave. Anderson was even more distressed by the departure of the regiment’s commander, Colonel Amasa Cobb. Anderson regarded the colonel as “fine a man as ever lived . . . brave as a Lion and he never asks a man to go where he would not himself.” Disgusted with the poor judgment of the army’s commanding officers, Colonel Cobb had won election to the House of Representatives in November and resigned from the army after the Battle of Fredericksburg. Anderson's morale was further weakened that winter by friction with122 The Warriors his company commander, Captain Horace Walker, who had been an elected lieutenant when the company was formed and had been elevated to captain when Temple Clark was reassigned to the western army. As a lieutenant, Walker had frequently been involved in disputes with other of- ficers. He was a man who played favorites, and Anderson clearly was not one of them. We have only Anderson's side of the story, but Anderson at- tributed his disfavor to the fact that he “would not be a spy and tattler for him.” The clearest mark of the captain's displeasure was his refusal to pro- mote Anderson. “I hate to see men in the company,” James complained to his father, “inferior both in Education and Capacity promoted over my head and whom I must obey.” In three years Anderson rose only one step in rank and finished his military service a corporal. The Fifth Wisconsin went into winter quarters at White Oak Church, just to the east of Fredericksburg and across the river. In con- trast to the previous winter, their tents were warm and spacious. Each group of three had a tent ten feet long, six feet wide, and seven feet high at the ridge. At the bottom of the canvas the men placed split oak logs to keep out the wind. A sleeping compartment at the rear contained three cots, and the “parlor” in front had a wood-burning stove. After supper on Christmas day, a number of the Manitowoc boys crowded into one of the tents, shared a bucket of hard cider, and sang well into the night. Combat had matured Anderson and improved his self-confidence. With little else to do in winter quarters, he pondered his future. He was determined “to succeed in life,” he told his father, and he thought he had “both the talents and the energy to do so.” He was saving his money so he could attend college after the war, and then he thought he might study law. But first he must survive the war. As it turned out, the fortunes of battle broke in his favor. While Anderson tried to look to the future, the men around him that winter wallowed in depression. “We have none of our original field offi- cers left,” complained one of Anderson's friends in January 1863, and “there are so many of the old hands leaving and new recruits coming in that it scarcely seems like the same regiment.” It was not the same regi- ment, and that was part of the morale problem. The letters of soldiers, both Northern and Southern, indicate that the ability to stand up to the fear and stress of combat stemmed from the soldiers’ dependence upon one another and on pride in their unit. The same letters—as well as psy- chological studies of soldiers’ behavior in the Second World War—indi- cate that attrition and the replacement of familiar faces with new ones gradually destroy unit cohesion, and with that a unit’s fighting ability. The Fifth Wisconsin did not exactly fit this model. Although the men were in a funk throughout the winter, spirits and self-confidence re- turned with the spring. When it was called upon to fight again, it fought hard and well. The regiment never again found itself in the front line of a major battle, but that was almost certainly not the result of consciousJames Anderson: Infantryman in Blue 123 decisions by Union division and corps commanders. It was the random fortune of a small cog in a mighty military machine. When the new Union commander, “Fighting Joe” Hooker, planned his advance across the Rappahannock west of Fredericksburg in April 1863, he left a third of his army, 40,000 men, along the river on the east side of the city. This corps was commanded by the popular New Englan- der General John Sedgwick. If Lee, as expected, turned west to face Hooker, Sedgwick’s mission was to seize Fredericksburg and march on Richmond. Since it was already in place, the Fifth Wisconsin was made part of Sedgwick’s corps. When Hooker crossed the Rappahannock on April 30, Lee moved west to do battle. But with an army of only 60,000 he could leave only 10,000 in the defensive works at Fredericksburg. While Lee and Jackson outmaneuvered the inept Hooker in the Bat- tle of Chancellorsville (May 1-3), Sedgwick entered Fredericksburg and ordered an attack against St. Mary's Heights and the infamous stone wall beneath the hill, the “Slaughter Pen” of the previous December. Company A and four other companies of the Fifth Wisconsin were picked for the front line of the attack. When the order was given, about 9:00 a.M. on May 1, the men dashed across the field through a storm of cannon fire, scaled the wall, and dropped onto the thin line of Confederates. “Our Boys dashed forward furiously,” Anderson later wrote. “Bayonetted many of the Rebels where they stood and taking nearly all the rest prisoners.” They then continued up the steep hill and captured the artillery batteries. It was the regiment's first victory in a very long time, but it was a costly one for Company A. It suffered eight killed and fifteen wounded. Among the wounded were Captain Walker and three members of Ander- son's singing group. Anderson told his family that Lewis La Count, one of his best friends, “was shot down by my side and cried out for me to help him back but I told him I could not then but would come back after we had carried the Heights.” Many Union soldiers suspected that men who halted in the midst of an infantry charge in order to help a wounded comrade were in fact shirking battle. Whatever Anderson's motives, he did return to find La Count but could not. He instead helped other wounded soldiers down the slope to a field hospital. Conditions in the hospital were so ghastly that he abandoned further thought of looking for his friend. “There was no surgeon on the grounds at first,” he later wrote, “so I stayed with the wounded all that afternoon and I assure you I had my hands full. I carried water for them and washed the Blood off their Bodies, and dressed their wounds the best way I could.” Company A had not suffered serious attrition to that point, and An- derson still had great pride in it. Even though less than half the Fifth Wisconsin had been involved in the attack, Anderson boasted to the home folks: “Not a man in our Regiment was shot in the back and all our dead lay with their heads toward the enemy.” He was certain that the vic- tory would get some well-deserved recognition from the people back124 The Warriors home. Praise from home was important to all Union soldiers, who were avid readers of newspapers. The army had recognized this and had con- tracted with a subscription agency to provide papers to the soldiers at the front at 10 cents a copy. This price, of course, was beyond the means of the average soldier, but it was well within the finances of a company pool. Although this service clearly would not include the Manitowoc papers, Anderson apparently obtained copies from friends and relatives. Anderson was bitterly disappointed in the absence of praise in the Manitowoc press. He thought it a shameful lack of concern for the needs and feelings of the families left behind by the members of Company A. His resentment at the hometown papers increased when he read of their lavish praise for the Manitowoc companies serving in Tennessee. He at- tributed it to class prejudice, for the officers of those companies came from the town’s elite on “Yankee Hill” north of the river. He thought the unfair treatment of Company A was due to the influence of this “Codfish aristocracy.” He wrote angrily to his father: “There is none of the Codfish aristocracy in Co. A, nothing but a lot of hardfisted farmers and greasy mechanics.” Although he probably did not pay for the army’s newspaper subscription service, Anderson would have found that the eastern city papers also ignored the action in Fredericksburg. The story was swamped by the monumental Union disaster at Chancellorsville ten miles to the west. Anderson was alive but unheralded. The fortunes, and misfor- tunes, of war. On May 5 the Fifth Wisconsin retired back across the Rappahannock and returned to its camp at White Oak Church. They remained there for a month and a half while Lee crossed the Potomac and began his second invasion of the North. On June 11, the Wisconsin regiment was roused. from its tents and pushed into a series of forced marches northward. The weather was oppressively hot, and the men trudged silently down the dusty roads, not sure where they were going or why. Anderson thought of June 14 “the most severe march I ever was on.” Nine men in the brigade “dropped dead from exhaustion.” It seemed that for the last month the Army of the Potomac had lost all sense of moderation. Its soldiers either lay in their tents in deadly tedium or were ordered to move farther and faster than they could reasonably be expected to endure. North along the Potomac the regiment tramped, though Dumfries, Fairfax Court House, Dranesville, and across the Potomac just above the Great Falls. By July 1 they were in Manchester, Maryland, some thirty miles from Gettysburg, where the greatest battle of the war had already begun. They marched all night long and all the next day. By 1:00 in the afternoon they could hear the sounds of battle. They arrived on the field at 5:00, just as General Longstreet was making his belated attack on the Devils Den and Little Roundtop. The Wisconsin regiment was placed in reserve, ready to go into action should the Confederates break through the Union flank. It remained in reserve through the following day, whileJames Anderson: Infantryman in Blue 125 the center of the Union line withstood Pickett’s Charge. Although the Union army suffered more than 23,000 casualties in the three-day bat- tle, the Fifth Wisconsin came through unscathed Surviving By October the Fifth Wisconsin was back in Virginia, camped near War- renton in the northern Piedmont. On November 7 the brigade of which they were a part was ordered to assault an earthworks thrown up by the Confederates at Rappahannock Station on the railroad that connected Alexandria with the Shenandoah Valley. The brigade commander con- sidered the Fifth Wisconsin and the Sixth Maine his best regiments, and he ordered them to lead the attack. The Wisconsin and Maine boys had fought side by side since Antietam. “No better regiment than the 6th Maine ever marched,” Anderson claimed, adding that “between them and the 5th Wisconsin there was a peculiar affection.” Although ordered to attack with bayonets only, the Wisconsin veterans defiantly put bullets in their guns. The two regiments flung themselves at the Confederate works and carried them after fierce fighting. The Southerners were sent scamper- ing back to the river, and many of them drowned trying to cross it. It was a great victory, but an utterly meaningless one. It had no impact on the outcome of the war and is rarely mentioned in the history books. Yet Company A took fearsome casualties. Among those who had been with the unit from the beginning of the war, three, including Captain Walker, were dead and four were wounded. That engagement ended the regi- ment’s fighting for the year. It went into winter quarters at Brandy Sta- tion, near Culpeper, in the Virginia Piedmont. The death of Captain Walker removed a major obstacle to Anderson's promotion, and he spent much of the winter angling for a commission as a lieutenant. He felt he had fought hard enough to deserve the promo- tion, it would bring in more money for his family, and it would enable him to “spite certain ones [among his friends in Manitowoc] who have twitted a little on my being in the ranks so long.” He managed to obtain glowing recommendations from his superiors, both commissioned and noncommissioned officers, but it was to no avail. Apparently the only openings were in the “Colored Regiments,” which the Lincoln adminis- tration was belatedly forming among the black residents of the North. “I can get a recommendation for a Colored Regiment commission easy but I will put that off until last,” Anderson wrote home, revealing the racial bias of most Northerners. He could be a strong opponent of slavery, but he was not at all eager to serve with black troops, even as an officer. Ap- parently there was no prestige in that at all. He remained a corporal and spent another glum winter.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.128 The Warriors made with McClellan two years before. On July 20 he boarded a north- bound train, and by the evening of the next day he was in Chicago. The soldiers were home in Manitowoc by the end of the month, having been well entertained in Milwaukee on the way. The survivors of the Mani- towoc volunteers accompanying Anderson numbered fifteen. With the money he had saved, Anderson entered Lawrence College in Appleton in the fall of 1865. He graduated in 1870 and immediately began the study of law. He lived many years in Manitowoc, a prosperous lawyer and respected citizen. He died in 1927. SUGGESTED READING Kerry A. Trask has done a splendid job of mining the Anderson papers for the story of this Civil War soldier, and the results of his scholarship are Fire Within: A Civil War Narrative from Wisconsin (1995). The papers themselves are on deposit in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison. The importance of James M. McPherson's book For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997) has already been noted. Two still useful descriptions of military life, also drawn from the letters of soldiers, are Bell I. Wiley’s The Life of Johnny Reb (1943) and The Life of Billy Yank (1952).eS William Tecumseh Sherman: “War Is Hell” Lancaster, Ohio, was a bustling market town in 1820, situated on the post road about halfway between the university community of Athens and the recently founded state capital, Columbus. Lancaster had about 200 houses, half of them brick, half frame, and the surrounding coun- tryside was a rich, rolling prairie drained by the Hockhocking River. Among its inhabitants were Charles and Mary Sherman, who had come west from Connecticut in 1811. Charles Sherman took up the law and soon had a busy—though not very lucrative—practice. Joining him on the circuit of county courts was Thomas Ewing, who had come west from Virginia in 1815. Sharing beds and meals at the country inns of the legal circuit, they came to regard each other virtually as brothers. William Tecumseh Sherman. (Courtesy of the National Archives.)B0 The Warriors Ewing had come with money in his pockets, and he built for his fam- ily an elegant brick mansion on a small rise in the center of town. The house, separated from the street by a high wall and a gate, was the pride of Lancaster, and it was a favored stopover for congressional representa- tives as they passed through Ohio. The Shermans’ house, located a block away on a corner of an alley and Main Street, was a simpler, two-story frame affair. Both sets of parents were extraordinarily fecund, even for that day of large families. Tecumseh, born on February 8, 1820, was the Shermans’ sixth child. He was preceded by three brothers and two sis- ters. Mary Sherman would ultimately give birth to eleven. In the year that the Shermans had settled in Ohio the great Shawnee leader Tecumseh held sway over the lands west of the Greenville Line, once thought to be a permanent boundary between whites and Indians. Although Tecumseh was killed in battle during the War of 1812, Charles Sherman remained an ardent admirer of Tecumseh’s skill in diplomacy and war. When Mary became pregnant in 1819 he extracted a promise from her that, if the infant was a boy, they would name him Tecumseh. Although Charles was riding circuit when the son was born, Mary lived up to her promise. The name, however, soon proved to be too burden- some, and the family shortened it to “Cump.” He would be “Cump” to close friends and relatives all his life Although he failed to prosper financially, Charles Sherman was a re- spected attorney, eventually earning appointment to the state supreme court. Although a distinct honor, that position did not pay well, and when Charles died suddenly in 1829, he left his family destitute. The oldest boy, Charles Ewing Sherman, was studying law, and the oldest girl, Eliz- abeth, was engaged to be married. But Mary Sherman was at a loss to care for the other nine. Thomas Ewing felt obliged to help. He visited the Sherman house a few days after the funeral and offered to take one of Mary's sons into his own household. Because of his own sizable family, one Sherman was apparently all he thought he could manage. When asked to choose one, Elizabeth exclaimed: “Oh. Mr. Ewing, take Cump. He’s the brightest.” And she ran out to find the boy. Cump agreed. He had already been warned that the family would have to be broken up, and Phil Ewing was his best friend. The other children were distributed among relatives. John, the youngest of Mary's boys (later famed as the author of the Sherman Antitrust Act), was sent to live with a cousin of the same name, a prosperous merchant in Mount Vernon, Ohio. The Ewings absorbed Cump into their family and treated him as one of their own. He regarded them in the same way, although he never ad- dressed them as “Mother” and “Father.” He frequently had dinner with his mother, who, after divesting herself of most of her children, was able to maintain the family homestead. Maria Ewing was a devout Catholic, a rarity in Ohio at that time. Dismayed upon learning that her foster son had never been baptized, she obtained the permission of Mary Sherman,William Tecumseh Sherman: “War Is Hell” 1 an easygoing Presbyterian, to have him baptized by the itinerant priest who visited Lancaster once a month. Cump, like most children, had no say in the matter. Standing in the Ewings’ parlor, the priest asked the child’s name. Tecumseh. In disbelief, the priest asked that it be repeated. Eventually he agreed that the pagan name could be included, but that the lad must have a Christian name. Since the day happened to be one given to Saint William, he suggested that as a possibility. The boy, who understandably fidgeted through the entire ceremony, was christened William Tecumseh Sherman. ‘Two years later, in 1831, the Ohio legislature elected Thomas Ewing to the U.S. Senate, where he joined the political faction that opposed the policies of President Andrew Jackson. In 1834 this group of National Re- publicans, led by Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, formed the Whig Party. Ewing was one of the party’s few middle-western standard-bearers. Cump Sherman grew to manhood in the atmosphere of Thomas Ewing's unionist, nationalist politics. He also did well in school, and Ewing, to his credit, realized that Cump was probably the ablest member of his family. Among the perks of American congressmen was the nomination of con- stituents to the military academy at West Point. In 1836 he nominated the sixteen-year-old, and Cump was appointed. Since the peacetime army was poorly paid and offered little glory, we do not know why Cump accepted the appointment; perhaps he saw no good alternative. Soldier of Misfortune Sherman took pride in being a West Point cadet, and he performed well in the classroom. But he was also independent, full of energy, and impa- tient with army regulations. He graduated in July 1840, sixth in a class of forty-three. His standing would have been third, but demerits for mis- conduct, which had averaged 150 a year, brought him down by three notches. He was assigned to garrison duty in Florida, where the army was engaged in a guerrilla war with remnants of the Seminole tribe who did not want to be removed to Oklahoma. The Seminoles fought in small bands that struck swiftly at isolated outposts and then vanished into the swamps. Sherman quickly concluded that the war could be won only by sending enough troops “to literally fill the territory” and then begin a “war of extermination.” The army declared the war at an end in 1842 although the Indians had not been vanquished nor any peace treaty signed. Promoted to first lieutenant, Sherman led the itinerant life of a professional soldier in a time of peace. He was posted for a time at a fort near Mobile, Alabama, and then sent to Fort Moultrie in Charleston Harbor. Southerners, who took pride in their own military titles, treated professional soldiers with great respect, and Sherman responded to the recognition. He enjoyedaa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.William Tecumseh Sherman: “War Is Hell” 133 Although Ellen had become a Catholic like her mother, Sherman re- mained firmly unattached to any church, and the wedding took place in the Blair House. It was a gala affair, attended by President Taylor, mem- bers of the cabinet, and Senators Webster and Clay. Upon the death of President Taylor later that summer Ewing felt obliged to resign from the cabinet, but the governor of Ohio promptly named him to the U.S. Sen- ate to fill the unexpired term of an Ohioan who had been taken into the cabinet of the new president, Millard Fillmore. Ewing used his senatorial influence to further the career of his new son-in-law, and Sherman was promoted to the rank of captain. Over the next three years Sherman was posted for a time in St. Louis and then in New Orleans. Ellen gave birth to a daughter in each city. Marriage worsened Shermar’s financial problems, however, for Ellen in- sisted on maintaining the luxurious lifestyle that she had known since childhood. Sherman had made friends among businesspeople in St. Louis, and when they offered to send him to San Francisco to open a branch bank, with the handsome salary of $5,000 a year, Sherman re- signed from the army and took ship for California in the spring of 1853. Ellen did not want to go. She hated the thought of living so far away from Lancaster and her family. Her mother, in a revealing bit of parental authority, actually forbade her from going to San Francisco. Sherman compromised. He agreed to leaving Ellen and the children in Lancaster for a year while he established himself in California and found housing. As might be expected, when Ellen arrived a year later, she found San Francisco a dreadful place. She hated the fog in the summer and the dust in the winter. Compounding Sherman's problems was the collapse of the Califor- nia economy. The surface wealth in gold—mined by panning in streams or taking pick and shovel to an exposed vein—was skimmed off by the forty-niners within a few years. Digging shafts to strike the deeper loads required capital that most prospectors did not have. Some took up farm- ing; most returned East. California settled back into its ranching econ- omy. The numerous banks that had been set up in San Francisco and Monterey during the gold fever went bust. Sherman's branch closed in early 1857, and the family returned to Lancaster. Sherman’s St. Louis business associates were nevertheless happy with his bank management, and they arranged to send him to New York, where they planned to open another branch. Leaving his family in Ohio, Sherman pressed on to New York. He arrived in July only to find the city gripped by financial panic. The stock market had collapsed; banks were closing their doors. “It seems that I am the Jonah of Banking,” he wailed to his brother John. “Wherever I go there is a breakdown.” In October the parent bank in St. Louis failed, leaving Sherman both penniless and out of a job. Spurning Senator Ewing’s offer to manage his Ohio saltworks, Sher-aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.William Tecumseh Sherman: “War Is Hell” 37 room for hours, absorbed.” He was also reported to be exceedingly ner- vous, chain-smoking cigars and imbibing too much whiskey. A week after he assumed command, Secretary of War Simon Cameron stopped in Louisville on his way back to Washington from St. Louis. Cameron was the weakest member of Lincoln's cabinet; his ineptitude as an adminis- trator was matched only by his penchant for corruption. Accompanying him on his trip was a handful of newspaper reporters. Cameron invited Sherman to his quarters and said, “Now, General Sherman, tell us your troubles.” Sherman objected strongly to discussing military needs in front of journalists, but Cameron assured him, “We are all friends here.” Sherman outlined his requirements. A Confederate army had occu- pied western Kentucky, from which it menaced both St. Louis and Louisville. Kentucky was hostile country, and the Confederates had easy access to it by river and railroad. Sherman felt he needed 60,000 men to hold Kentucky and that 200,000 needed to be assembled before the west- ern armies could take the offensive. Although Cameron was impressed enough to telegraph Lincoln that Sherman needed reinforcements, when he reached Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the next day he remarked to news reporters that Sherman was “absolutely crazy.” A New York jour- nalist who worked for a Democratic paper embellished the story of Sher- man’s “insane request,” implying that Sherman wanted 200,000 men just to hold Kentucky, when in fact Sherman had been referring to an of- fensive throughout the entire Mississippi Valley. Other papers picked up the story of Sherman's insanity and spread it far and wide. When the War Department itself criticized Sherman for failing to take the offensive, Sherman telegraphed General McClellan and asked to be relieved of command. McClellan obliged. Overwhelmed by misfor- tune, stung by criticism from both his brother and his father-in-law that he was too pessimistic in estimating Southern strength, Sherman sank into a deep depression. Compounding his doubts about himself was the realization that his mother’s family had a history of mental instability. Both his maternal grandmother and his maternal uncle had died insane. Could he himself be afflicted in some way? he wondered. He was rescued from this mental cavity by an old friend from West Point, General Henry W. Halleck, commander of the armies in Missouri and western Kentucky. Halleck had served with Sherman in California and had a high regard for his abilities. He summoned Sherman to his headquarters in St. Louis and gave him a twenty-day leave to mend his spirits. Sherman returned to Lancaster with plans to resign from the army altogether. However, on reaching home he realized that the alter- native would be his father-in-law’s saltworks, which had been waiting for him for years, as Sherman said, “like purgatory.” By mid-December 1861 he was back in St. Louis. Halleck restored his confidence by giving him a series of specific as- signments and by consulting him on overall strategy. Poring over maps ofaa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.image not availableaa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.142 The Warriors sissippi River, even when he was conducting operations elsewhere. Con- cerned that the countryside had been so devastated that the population might starve, Grant asked Sherman to supply the needy with army rations. Sherman complied, but with every handout he reminded Mississippians that they were paying the price for the architects of secession. By mid-July the weather was too hot even for vandalism, and Sher- man made camp on the banks of the Big Black River. There Ellen came for a visit accompanied by the four oldest children. Their oldest son, William Ewing Sherman (“Willie”), was nine years old and proved a great favorite among the soldiers. In September came bad news. General Rosecrans, operating in East Tennessee, had captured the key railroad junction of Chattanooga but then suffered defeat at the Battle of Chicka- maugua in northwest Georgia. Rosecrans’s army managed to cling to Chattanooga, but the Confederates occupied the heights overlooking the city, thus rendering it useless as a railroad hub. Grant ordered Sherman to march his men to Memphis and then proceed to Chattanooga by train. While his family was packing for their return to Lancaster, Willie came down with a fever. He died in an inn in Memphis. Sherman cursed him- self for having urged his family to visit his camp in Mississippi. Following the defeat at Chickamaugua, Grant personally took com- mand in Chattanooga. Under his direction were three armies—the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee. Commanding the Army of the Ohio was “Fighting Joe” Hooker, whose career would come to grief six months later at Chancellorsville. George H. Thomas, whose rock- hard stand at Chickamaugua had saved the Union army from total dis- aster, had replaced Rosecrans as head of the Army of the Cumberland. Sherman was promoted to command of Grant’s Army of the Tennessee. Sherman arrived in the city on November 15 and was briefed on the Confederate positions. Chattanooga lay on the southeast bank of the river just above the Great Bend where the Tennessee ends its southwesterly flow and turns abruptly north before easing off in a westerly direction. At the top of the Great Bend, Lookout Mountain rose abruptly from the river's southern shore and loomed over the city from an elevation of 2,100 feet. To the east of the city, stretching for five miles from below the Georgia line to the river above Chattanooga, was Missionary Ridge, 500 feet high and bristling with Confederate guns and men. The Confederate commander had managed to get some infantry atop Lookout Mountain, and the level ground be- tween the two heights was filled with entrenched infantry and cannon. Grant developed a three-pronged attack. Hooker, whose army was in Georgia south of the river, was to seize Lookout Mountain. Sherman, whose army lay north of the river and upstream from the city, was to cross the river and attack the north end of Missionary Ridge. Thomas, camped at the edge of the city, would then slam the Confederate center. On November 23 Sherman's army crossed the river on a pontoonaa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.William Tecumseh Sherman: “War Is Hell” 145 ing, Hood evacuated the city, and Sherman marched in on the Ist of September. Having experienced the murderous hostility of civilians in Memphis, Vicksburg, and Jackson, Sherman decided to convert Atlanta into “a pure military garrison.” He did not want to have to leave a sizable seg- ment of his army behind to keep order when he marched to the sea, nor did he want to share with the populace his scarce food supplies. Accord- ingly, he ordered the entire population out of town. It was their choice whether they went north or south. If they chose to go north, he offered them his empty northbound supply trains. City officials cried out in protest, and General Hood, from his headquarters safely outside the city, attempted to intervene. Sherman’s “unprecedented measure,” Hood wrote, “transcends in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever before brought to my attention in the dark history of war. In the name of God, and humanity, I protest.” Sherman replied by pointing out that Hood had defended Atlanta at a line so close to the city that every cannon shot that missed the trenches struck a house inhabited by women and children “If we must be enemies,” he wrote, “let us be men and fight it out as we propose to do, and not deal in such hypocritical appeals to God and hu- manity. God will judge us in due time.” Hoping to draw Sherman out of Georgia, Hood skipped around At- Janta and headed north with his army to Tennessee. Although Hood was able to destroy the rail line that kept the Union army in supplies, Sherman made no effort to run him down. He had plans of his own and did not want to become involved in a wild goose chase. Besides there was a Union force in Tennessee, commanded by George H. Thomas, capable of handling Hood. With no organized force in front of him, Sherman felt he could spare 25,000 men to reinforce Thomas. On October 1 he telegraphed Grant that he proposed to march to the sea. When Grant approved, Sher- man telegraphed Halleck asking to have naval units and supplies waiting for him on the South Carolina and Georgia coasts. He did not want to dis- close his exact route, for fear of alerting the Confederates, but, he told Halleck, “I will turn up somewhere.” Without telling his men where they were going, Sherman issued a field order indicating what they would need. Because the railroad be- tween Atlanta and Chattanooga had been torn up, there would be no supply train. Each corps was to have its own wagon train of ammunition. Food was to be gleaned from the countryside. The troops were free to ap- propriate all livestock and the contents of vegetable gardens, but they were not to enter houses or harm people. A “devastation more or less re- lentless” would be inflicted on railroad tracks, stations, mills, and facto- ries. On November 14 Sherman ordered his Engineer Corps to burn the railroad station in Atlanta and surrounding machine shops. The fire spread to nearby warehouses where munitions were stored, and the en-aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.148 The Warriors mixed-race South, a process becoming known as Reconstruction. How much Sherman knew of the Port Royal experiment we cannot be sure, but his plan essentially would have done the same for the Georgia sea is- lands. Stanton approved and helped Sherman refine the details. The result was Sherman's Special Field Order Number 15, which re- served for the settlement of the freedmen all abandoned plantations from Charleston south to the St. Johns River of Florida to a distance of thirty miles inland from the ocean. The freedmen were to be the only settlers, and they were to manage their own affairs. The legal basis for Sherman’s order was the Confiscation Act of 1862, which authorized the confiscation of property belonging to persons who waged rebellion against the United States after passage of the act. The act was never en- forced in the postwar period, and Sherman’s order was revoked by Pres- ident Andrew Johnson. After the war Sherman contended that the special order was only an emergency war measure. What he did not say was that, if it had been put into effect, it would have reduced the pres- sure to incorporate blacks into his army. The Carolinas and the End of the War After Stanton departed happy with Sherman's attitude, Sherman in- formed both Grant and Halleck of his plans to push north into the Car- olinas. Halleck wired back enthusiastically: “Should you capture Charleston, I hope that by some accident the place may be destroyed, and ifa little salt should be sown upon its site, it may prevent the growth of future crops of . . . secession.” Sherman replied: “The truth is, the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to work vengeance upon South Carolina. I almost tremble for her, but feel she deserves all that seems in store for her.” To Grant, Sherman confided that he planned to skip Charleston as not worth the time it would take to starve into sur- rendering. Instead he would move up through the Carolina Piedmont, capturing the state capitals of Columbia and Raleigh. In Raleigh he would be at Lee’s back door, and Lee would be caught and crushed by the two Union armies. In South Carolina the march came close to becoming a class war. The wealthy and pedigreed planters of South Carolina had sneered at the farmers and working class of the North prior to the war—precisely the class of men that made up Sherman's army—and they were now sin- gled out for vengeance. The soldiers took special delight in ransacking and burning their Greek-columned mansions. Although one soldier from Indiana claimed that “the poor people are respected by the soldiers and their property protected,” many a poor farmer lost his most precious pos- sessions, his livestock and seed corn, in the universal destruction. Sherman's army entered Columbia on February 17, and that eveningaa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.William Tecumseh Sherman: “War Is Hell” 51 for the Union Pacific, following the Platte River across the plains. Con- struction began in 1866, and it gave employment to many of the railroad builders that Sherman had trained in Georgia. Protecting the railroad builders from Indians led directly to Sherman's other mission—pacifying the Plains Indians. Placing Indians on reservations had seemed to work in the East, and Congress began creating Indian reservations in the West. Sherman’s job—and that of the officers under him, Phillip Sheri- dan and George Crook—was to move the tribes onto their allotted reser- vations and persuade them to stay there. Sherman viewed the Indians as at about the same level of civilized advancement as Africans, but he did his best to be fair. When the Nava- hos in the Southwest objected to the barrenness of the lands that had been assigned to them, Sherman allowed them to move to better lands with more game. But when the Sioux went to war in the early 1870s to resist confinement, Sherman concluded that there was no alternative but their annihilation. He never issued orders to that effect, however, and instead let his subordinates handle the fighting. His “exile” in St. Louis had one tremendous advantage. He was able to steer clear of the battles between President Johnson and Congress over Reconstruction. He agreed with Johnson’s lenient approach to the South, and he objected strongly to the Radical Republicans’ drive to give freedmen the vote. Johnson tried several times to bring Sherman east and find a place for him in the government, but Sherman evaded the president. When he did venture east, it was for a social occasion, such as a West Point graduation ceremony. When Grant was elected president in 1868, Sherman was the natu- ral choice for the position of General of the Army. He could not turn down the appointment, coming as it did from his old friend, but he dreaded the thought of living in Washington. He did manage to extract from Grant a promise that the secretary of war would work through the office of the General of the Army and not issue orders directly to subor- dinate commanders. Meddling in the lower ranks of the army by the sec- retary of war had been a problem for years, and Sherman had a vivid memory of Secretary Stanton giving orders to Sherman's lieutenants. Grant’s promise was never kept, in part because Grant was oblivious to the activities of his own cabinet members. His secretary of war, William W. Belknap, disliked Sherman and deliberately bypassed the general's of- fice when making appointments in the army. Congress seemed to coop- erate with Belknap by annually reducing appropriations for the army and weakening the authority of the commanding general. By 1870 Sherman had sunk into a kind of sullen acceptance of his emasculated role. In letters to friends he frequently referred to his office as a “sinecure,” and he complained that he often had to learn of War De- partment orders to post commanders in the newspapers. “I occupy a most unenviable post,” he commented to a friend, “for the law gives me52 The Warriors no power at all & yet all the officers suppose I will control the weather.” The mystery is that he held on to the office. And he did—for fifteen years, retiring finally in 1883, when Congress voted him a pension. He held on to his sinecure in part because it paid well and he had no viable alternatives. He also loved the adulation that greeted him every- where as a prominent officeholder and war hero. He brought his family to Washington to live in General Grant’s former house, a twelve-room mansion purchased for Sherman by a consortium of New York business- men. The Shermans entertained lavishly and averaged four nights a week at balls or the theater. Sherman also compensated for his political impotence by engaging in frenzied travel. He was constantly on the move, giving orations at college graduations, on national holidays, and at the unveiling of monuments. He established Ellen and the children at summer resorts—Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, the Adirondacks, Atlantic City—and then took vacations of his own to visit them. He also went on tours of army posts that lasted months at a time. He was, for instance, at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1871 when he learned that the Democrats were considering nominating him to run against Grant in the presidential election of 1872. Although he was dismayed with Grant for having sur- rounded himself with corrupt sycophants, he would not run against him, nor, for that matter, would he have anything at all to do with politics. He wired the New York Herald the famous “Sherman no”: 1 HAVE NEVER BEEN AND NEVER WILL BE A CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT; THAT, IF NOMINATED BY EITHER PARTY, I SHOULD PEREMPTORILY DECLINE; AND EVEN IF UNAN- IMOUSLY ELECTED, I SHOULD DECLINE TO SERVE. Later that year he accepted a naval officer's invitation to sail on a warship heading for the Mediterranean. For the next ten months he toured Spain, Italy (where he conversed with the Pope), Egypt (which he compared in level of comfort and civilization to Mexico), Turkey, Russia, Germany, France, and Britain. One of the principal results of the tour was to deepen his mistrust of Catholicism. “You can see thousands of saints,” he wrote home, “sculptured and pictured, but no poor mortal who has done some act of historical merit like Columbus.—He & Cortez & Pizzaro are unknown in their origin—while saints by the million are cheap as dirt.” Ellen’s Catholicism and its effect on their children had long been a source of family discord. Religious tensions within the family seriously clouded Sherman's last years. After Willie’s death in 1863, Sherman's hopes for the family’s future centered on his next oldest son, Thomas Ew- ing Sherman, born in 1856. While Sherman was at war Tom and the other children were educated by Catholic priests. When the family moved to Washington in 1868 Tom entered Georgetown, a college run by Jesuits, and his three sisters, Lizzie, Elly, and Rachel, attended the GeorgetownWilliam Tecumseh Sherman: “War Is Hell” 153 Visitation Convent. During his tour of Europe Sherman wrote several times to his fifteen-year-old son expressing concern about the influence the Georgetown priests were having on him. Sherman's hopes for Tom’s future brightened when the young man entered the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale in 1874 and, after graduat- ing in 1876, entered the Law School of Washington University in St. Louis. Then came the defection. The day he graduated from law school in May 1878 Tom wrote his father that he did not intend to become a lawyer because he had “chosen another profession, in one word I desire to become a priest—a Catholic priest.” Sherman was thunderstruck and only half believed Ellen when she assured him (falsely) that she had made no effort to influence the young man. He wrote bitterly to General John Schofield, comrade of the Georgia campaign: “I have warned Bishop Ryan of St. Louis, that if the Catholic Church or papers boast of their achievements, of having captured the Son of General Sherman, that Gen- eral Sherman will himself denounce them with all the vehemence of his nature, and with all the force of his personal & official character, for hav- ing perverted the nature of a noble son, not for his Eternal welfare but for their worldly purpose. Though they take him from me, they shall not carry with him my silent assent—but my open curse.” In anger and de- spair Sherman drafted a will in which he expressly disinherited Tom but then thought better of it and tore up the document. Tom sailed for Eng- land to enter a Jesuit order, and it was two years before Sherman agreed to an exchange of letters. On August 11, 1880, Sherman made his most famous public remark. The occasion was an unremarkable one, a meeting of Civil War veterans at the fairgrounds in Columbus, Ohio. President Rutherford B. Hayes had given a formal address before Sherman was asked to speak. He took the podium and said: “The war is away back in the past, and you can tell what books cannot. When you talk you come down to practical realities, just as they happened. . . . There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but boys, war is all hell.” Although published by the Ohio State Journal, the statement was generally ignored. For years Sherman's youngest son, P Tecumseh Sherman (“Young Cump”), the confidante of Shermar’s last years, denied that Sherman ever said “war is hell.” Jour- nalists finally unearthed the quote on the eve of World War I. It became famous in the war-torn twentieth century. Sherman retired from the army in 1883, and the family settled in St. Louis. Shocked by Sherman's violent reaction at Tom’s decision to be- come a priest, Ellen had fled to Lancaster, but they were now happily re- united. Young Cump fondly remembered the dinnertime repartee: “It was Clear that my father and mother both superlatively enjoyed their conversations, with freedom from all restraints.” During the presidential election of the following year Sherman learned that Republicans had him under consideration. He wired the convention a second version ofaa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.160 Wartime Politics William Henry—called Harry throughout his youth—was born May 16, 1801, the fourth of the Sewards'’ six children. Preoccupied with mon- eymaking, Samuel Seward was often absent and was a strict disciplinar- ian when at home; his wife, Mary Jennings, compensated by raising the children with affectionate good sense. In a neighborhood of transplanted Yankees who espoused a religion of fire and brimstone, Mary Seward taught her children a genial tolerance for the beliefs of others. William H. Seward was one of those rare politicians who viewed religion with in- difference and never used it as a career stepping-stone. He was also— rare among Northerners of the time—raised in the presence of slaves. Slavery was not entirely eradicated in New York until 1827; Samuel Seward maintained three house servants. Young Harry on occasion found their company more interesting than the stiff adults in the parlor. “The tenants of the kitchen,” he later remembered, “had a fund of knowledge about the ways and habits of the devil, of witches, of ghosts, and of men who had been hanged; and, what was more, they were vivacious and lo- quacious, as well as affectionate toward me.” He also remembered that his parents never gave any indication that they considered black persons inferior. Tolerance and a disposition to see both sides of an issue would be ingrained features of William H. Seward’s character. Seward also recalled later in life being a family favorite as a youth be- cause of his fragile health, though he added with apparent inconsistency: “My health caused me early to be set apart for a collegiate education, then regarded, by every family, as a privilege so high and so costly that not more than one son could expect it.” Since it makes no sense to educate the off- spring least likely to survive, a more likely reason for his father’s willing- ness to finance higher education was Harry’s own quick wits. He received high marks in the one-room school he attended. When he was fifteen his father enrolled him at Union College in Schenectady, one of many church-related schools founded in the North in the years after the Revo- lution. Union derived its name from the fact that it drew financial support from several Protestant denominations. Although Seward made some lasting friends in college, he came away from the school feeling that he had not learned very much. This, he thought, was due to the college’s method of teaching by rote learning. He felt in retrospect that he had “hurried mechanically through the miserable rudiments of an American collegiate education.” He graduated from college with the highest honors, studied law for two years, and was admitted to the bar in 1822. While returning home from his bar examination he passed through the pleasant village of Auburn in the Finger Lakes region of western New York, south of Syra- cuse. While there, he learned that the two law firms in the town of 2,000 were each seeking junior partners. He accepted a position in one of them and two years later married Frances Miller, the daughter of his senior partner. Seward would make Auburn his home the rest of his life, but hisaa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.William H. Seward: The Politician as Statesman 163 westward, and a federally chartered bank to provide a national currency and credit exchange. The use of government to promote economic de- velopment appealed to Seward and Weed, who had a model before their eyes in New York’s hugely successful Erie Canal. Weed had been quietly building a New York organization to challenge the Regency, and when Clay and other opponents of Jackson founded the Whig Party in 1834, Seward and Weed presented the new party with a solid state organization in New York. The first fruit of the anti-Jackson coalition was the Whigs’ nomina- tion of Seward for governor in the election of 1836. Seward did well in western New York, but the votes of artisans and journeymen in New York City cost him the election. The votes of similar people in New York and elsewhere earned Van Buren the presidency as Jackson's successor. In the mysterious ways of American politics, the loss may have furthered Seward’s career. The panic of 1837 and the ensuing depression wrecked Van Buren’s presidency and damaged the Regency in New York. The Whigs made important gains in the legislature later that year, and Seward was elected governor in 1838. It was the most important office yet won by a Whig, and it brought him to national attention. Although most of his two-year term was occupied by matters of local concern, Seward did seize an opportunity to take a moral stand on the is- sue of slavery. In 1839 three black seamen, residents of New York, smug- gled a fugitive slave aboard a ship bound from Virginia to New York. The governor of Virginia requested that New York extradite the three seamen to Virginia for criminal trial. Seward refused, pointing out that because slavery had no legal standing in New York, the men had not committed a crime. It was a tenuous position, since the sailors were accused of com- mitting a crime under Virginia law, not New York's, but it won praise from antislavery leaders, whose popular support coincided with Seward’s political base—western New York. When Seward capitalized on his new- found issue by recommending legislation that guaranteed a jury trial for fugitive slaves, the legislature approved it. Because of the depression, the Whigs saw a fine opportunity to cap- ture the presidency in 1840, and they nominated a popular candidate, William Henry Harrison, “Old Tippecanoe,” hero of the War of 1812. Capitalizing on Harrison's western experience as governor of the Indiana ‘Territory, the Whigs made the log cabin the preeminent symbol of the campaign, implying that Harrison had the mean background of a “com- mon man” (although he was in fact born in an elegant mansion on the James River of Virginia). Thurlow Weed found funds to establish a cam- paign newspaper, the Log Cabin, and for editor he tapped young Horace Greeley, who would go on to found, with Whig support, the nation’s first nationally read newspaper, the New York Tribune. Seward and Weed were drawn to Greeley because he combined the idealism of a reformer with a firm admiration for Henry Clay and the protective tariff. Indeed,164 Wartime Politics the triumvirate of Seward, Weed, and Greeley would be a factor in New York politics for much of the next decade. The alliance ultimately fell apart due to Greeley’s insistence on political office (he finally did serve a term in Congress, where his chief contribution was to father a bill abol- ishing grog in the navy) and his backing of reform causes that were either unrewarding politically (temperance and women's rights) or on the nutty fringe (communism and phrenology, the latter a “science” for analyzing human character by the shape of the skull). Seward was hampered in his own campaign for reelection by New York’s public debt and low credit rating. He had battled the depression by putting men to work on the construction of canals and railroads, a pro- gram that was both an interesting variation on Henry Clay's concept of the use of government to promote economic growth and a hundred years ahead of its time. Seward won reelection, but he trailed the national ticket in New York. Seward’s pique with New York voters appeared to surface when, in the spring of 1841, he announced that he would not run again for re- election. He rationalized it on ideological grounds, explaining to a friend in Congress: “My principles are too liberal, too philanthropic, if it not be vain to say so, for my party.” Nevertheless, a more likely reason for his re- tirement from politics was financial. He was deeply in debt and in need of recouping himself through his law practice. Although active in the Whig Party, he remained in private practice for the rest of the decade. As with his initial political defeat in 1836, his career benefited in the long run from his obscurity. The Whig Party fell apart at the national level un- der John Tyler, successor to Harrison, who had died after only a month in office, and the Democrats recaptured the presidency in 1844. The Democrats similarly regained power in New York, as the Whigs lost members to the antislavery Liberty Party. Out of the public eye, Seward’s moderate version of antislavery was never tested by those on either side of the issue. He had nevertheless worked hard as a loyal party man dur- ing those years, and when the Whigs returned to power, as they did on both the national and state levels in 1848, he was again ready for public service. In February 1849 the legislature elected him to the U.S. Senate. “Irrepressible Conflict” Thurlow Weed was widely credited with securing the presidential nom- ination of General Zachary Taylor in 1848. Though a Southerner and a slaveholder, “Old Rough and Ready” was a hero of the Mexican War and thus in the mold of the Whigs’ only successful candidate, William Henry Harrison. In winning the election Taylor would be the last presi- dential candidate, prior to the Civil War, to win about equal support in the North and the South. The problem for Seward and Weed was thatWilliam H. Seward: The Politician as Statesman 165 ‘Taylor's vice president, Millard Fillmore, was a fellow New Yorker. That raised the question of who controlled the patronage in New York: Seward or Fillmore?* After a brief power struggle, Seward and Weed won control of the patronage, which enabled them to strengthen their political organization in the state. This victory led to the widespread feeling that Taylor, a military man with no political experience, was the mere puppet of Seward and Weed. Although that rumor has found its way into many history books, it was simply not true. President Taylor, though of limited intellect, was his own man. While his views were often similar to those of Seward, as for in- stance in the Compromise of 1850, the nuances were important. When California had asked for admission to the Union as a free state in De- cember 1849, Taylor had supported the admission without strings or other complications. Feeling that the South needed some sort of com- pensation, Henry Clay in February 1850 introduced an “omnibus bill” containing Northern concessions, notably a Fugitive Slave Act. Taylor op- posed the compromise because, to his military mind, it seemed unnec- essarily complicated and messy. Seward took the floor to deliver his maiden speech on March 11, 1850. The Washington populace, accustomed to the oratory of Webster and Clay, jammed the galleries and overflowed into the lobby. Seward, however, was no orator. He spoke from a prepared text and in a subdued monotone. Before long the galleries began to empty. However, his col- leagues, listening to what he had to say, gave him their rapt attention. Seward, like Taylor, favored the admission of California without strings attached but not because Clay’s compromise was complex. He objected to the nature of Clay’s concessions. The Fugitive Slave Law and the preservation of slavery in the District of Columbia (the one place where Congress had power to abolish it) implied a moral support for the insti- tution of slavery. Seward went on to state that “there is a higher law than the Constitution’—the law of God and morality. The suggestion of a “higher law” sent a shock wave through the country, for it was widely interpreted to disparage the law of the land. Some thought it subjected the Constitution to the law of God, whose whims—as the warfare among churches demonstrated—were anybody's guess. In truth, Seward was merely making a distinction between Cae- sar’s law and God’s law, reminding his listeners that humanmade law drew its sanction from justice and morality. Immoral laws, such as those protecting slavery, had no legitimacy. Horace Greeley reprinted the speech in full on the front page of the Tribune, and the American Anti- *The concept of “senatorial courtesy,” by which a president's appointments had to be approved by the senator of the state involved, if the senator and presi- dent were of the same party—an ironclad rule after the Civil War—was still in the process of being developed.166 Wartime Politics slavery Society distributed 10,000 copies. Although there were outspo- ken critics of slavery in the House, there had never been one in the Sen- ate. For better or worse, Seward’s “higher law” speech made him the leading spokesperson for antislavery in the upper house. It also confused and irritated President Taylor. He agreed with Seward on the admission of California, but he could not abide any criticism of slavery. Seward was thereafter unwelcome at the White House. The death of President Taylor that summer and the accession of Mil- lard Fillmore were a victory for Clay’s compromise and a near-mortal blow to Seward. Fillmore rearranged the president's cabinet, naming Daniel Webster secretary of state, and a new postmaster general de- prived Seward and Weed of a major source of patronage. Their organiza- tion was further weakened when government printing contracts in New York went to conservative Whigs. The defeat of Whig candidate Winfield Scott (whom Seward supported) in the presidential election of 1852 and the disintegration of the Whig Party thereafter further lessened Seward’s influence in national councils. While the Whigs disintegrated, the Democrats, led by Stephen A. Douglas, held sway in the Senate. Seward spoke in opposition to Douglas’s Kansas—Nebraska Bill in the spring of 1854, but his voice was drowned out by two newcomers to the Senate, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Salmon P Chase of Ohio, both better orators than Seward and more fierce in their opposition to slavery. Seward was at first leery of the Republican Party, born amid the furor that attended the act, because it drew heavily on special interests—temperance advocates, whom Seward had kept at arm’s length, and anti-immigrant nativists, whom Seward had battled in New York ever since he was governor. However, he soon discovered that he had no choice if he was to rescue his political career, and by 1856 both Seward and Weed had drifted into Republican ranks, carrying with them the tattered remnants of their state organization. Seward’s political strength revived in the mid-1850s with the blood- shed in Kansas, which revealed the fatal flaw in Douglas’s popular sover- eignty doctrine, and the Dred Scott decision, which appeared to open the entire West to slavery. Contemplating these twin events, Seward de- veloped a thesis that was political dynamite—the idea the slavery was not a “peculiar institution” confined to the South. It was quite capable of ex- isting in the North, he began to argue, and Southerners had every inter- est in spreading it to the West. Once they did, they would have a majority in Congress, and then they could reopen the African slave trade, flood- ing the country with blacks. At Rochester on October 25, while campaigning for the Republican candidate for New York governor, Seward gave a speech that drew na- tional attention. He began with the familiar theme that two radically dif- ferent systems wrestled for control of the country, one based on slave labor, the other on free. Economic development and improved commu-William H. Seward: The Politician as Statesman 167 nications were drawing the two systems increasingly into conflict. “Shall I tell you what this collision means?” he asked rhetorically. Those who think it must have been accidental or the product of fanatical agitators “mistake the case altogether.” He went on: “It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-hold- ing nation or entirely a free-labor nation.” Four months earlier, in accepting the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln had voiced a similar prediction, saying that “a house divided against itself cannot stand . [that it] cannot endure half slave and half free . . . [but must] become all one thing or all the other.” Lincoln’s argument was actually more subtle than Seward’s, for Lincoln was warning that slavery was neither pecu- liarly Southern nor particularly racial—as an economic system it might well engulf the white factory workers of the North. Nevertheless, the complementary arguments—that the slave power conspirators aimed at either an all-African labor force or threatened the enslavement of white farmers and workers—became standard Republican rhetoric for the next two years. The two speeches catapulted Lincoln and Seward into prime candidacies for the Republican nomination in 1860. Although neither man had actually predicted civil war, Seward’s “irrepressible conflict” phrase seemed the more radical. That was the perceived difference be- tween the two as they approached that crucial contest. Election of 1860 and the Secession Crisis The Republicans had won handily in New England and New York in 1856. What they needed for victory in 1860 was the electoral vote of the “swing” states of the Middle West. Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were evenly divided because the northern half of each had been settled principally by Yankees and Yorkers, while the southern half had been populated by pio- neers from Virginia and Kentucky. Recent arrivals from Germany and Ire- land added to the mix, but they were an unknown quantity. As a result Republicans decided to hold their nominating convention in Chicago. (Until the Democrats chose Cincinnati in 1856, no national nominating convention had met west of Baltimore.) Chicago was, without doubt, a boomtown, the fastest-growing me- tropolis in the nation. It was the rail hub of the Midwest; on a typical day some 150 trains stopped at its seven stations. Cyrus Hall McCormick, the Virginian who had removed to Chicago to set up a manufacturing plant for his reapers, was shipping 50,000 harvesters a year to midwestern farmers. Like all mid-nineteenth-century cities, Chicago also had its seamy side. Pigs and cattle roamed freely in the streets, collecting garbage to be sure but turning it into offal. The city’s wooden sidewalks were168 Wartime Politics home to thousands of rats. Both streets and sewers drained freely into Lake Michigan, which was also the source of the city’s drinking water. Not surprisingly, Chicago, with a population of 110,000, had the highest death rate of any American city. The city fathers took pride in being chosen as the site for the Re- publican convention, and they put up a special hall for the gathering. A wooden box without architectural refinement, it somehow became known as the Wigwam. Seward was the acknowledged front-runner for the party nomination because of his distinguished career in the Senate. Lincoln, by contrast, had not held public office since 1847, when he completed a single term in the House of Representatives. Neither candi- date had the charismatic appearance of a Webster or a Calhoun. Seward looked more like a professor than a politician, with a thin face, hawkish nose, and shock of sandy-colored hair that seemed in perpetual need of attention. Henry Adams, himself destined for a professorial chair, spoke of Seward’s “unorderly hair and clothes; hoarse voice; offhand manner; free talk, and perpetual cigar.” Yet his speeches and public papers were logically coherent and bursting with memorable phrases, reflecting per- haps the most acute political mind of the day. Edwin L. Godkin of the Nation, the country's leading magazine, called him “the clearest-headed statesman” in America. Even so, Seward had some liabilities. With Charles Sumner touring Europe, Seward was regarded as the most extreme among Republican leaders on the issue of slavery, and extremism was not popular in the sharply divided Middle Western states that the Republicans had to carry. In addition, Seward’s campaign manager, Thurlow Weed, although re- garded as the most astute political manager of his generation, brought to the campaign the aroma of whiskey and cigars, associated with back- stairs manipulating. It was common knowledge that he had bankrolled Seward’s campaign by soliciting contributions from business corpora- tions and shaking down officeholders beholden to him. Lincoln, on the other hand, was popular in Indiana and Illinois, and he brought to the convention a reputation as “Honest Abe” and a string of ambiguous statements on the issue of slavery. Lincoln's manager, David Davis, every bit as sharp as Thurlow Weed, thought that, if Lincoln could survive the first ballot, he had a good shot at the nomination. And so it went. Davis made some arrangements with delegates from New England, which had previously been solid for Seward, and on the first ballot the region cast 19 votes for Lincoln to 32 for Seward. New York was for Seward, but New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio voted for “favorite sons.” Seward'’s total on the ballot was 173% to Lincoln’s 102. The lines firmed on the next two ballots with Lincoln gaining steadily. Upon the third ballot Lincoln reached 231%, with 233 needed for nom- ination. The switch of a single delegate would do it! As the Wigwam grew hushed with tension, Davis sent a messenger to whisper in theaa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.William H. Seward: The Politician as Statesman mW clusively a war to preserve the Union because, even after a year of fight- ing, the border slave states—Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—were vital to federal military strategy. General Grant, punching into Tennessee in early 1862, was utterly dependent on a supply line that stretched through Kentucky to St. Louis, Missouri. In addition, neither the presi- dent nor Congress had the constitutional power to free slaves. The Re- publican platform had been based on the idea of restricting the spread of slavery into the West, but few in the party thought the government had the right to confiscate private property in the South. At the same time, Seward (and probably Lincoln as well) realized that the war was breeding a social revolution that would probably bring about the freeing of some, if not all, of the slaves. Seward worried, however, that a premature slave uprising in the South would terrify Northerners as well as Southerners and make restoration of the Union even more difficult. That concern quickly led to questions about assimilation. Lincoln had grave doubts as to whether the races could live together, even if the slaves were freed, and he thought of colonizing them in Africa or the West In- dies. Although Seward was asked to investigate the possibility of resettle- ment in the Caribbean, he had no confidence in the project. He did not think that any significant number of American blacks would agree to it. Nor did he think it was the proper thing to do. “I am always for bringing men and states into the Union,” he said on one occasion, “never for tak- ing any out.” His investigation nevertheless revealed that at least one Latin American nation, New Granada (present-day Colombia), was re- ceptive. Late in 1862 Congress appropriated funds for the resettlement of freedmen in New Granada, but by then Lincoln was having second thoughts. Seward quietly abandoned the idea. Through the spring and summer of 1862 Seward chipped away at the fringes of slavery. He implemented a presidential decree that ended the slave trade in the District of Columbia, supported the enlistment of blacks in the Union army, and negotiated a treaty with Britain allowing the navies of both countries to stop and search vessels on the high seas suspected of trafficking in Africans. On July 13, 1862, Lincoln, under increasing pressure to do some- thing about slavery, vented a new idea in the presence of Seward and Secretary of the Navy Welles, one that would evade the constitutional problem. As commander in chief, he suggested, had he not the power to seize (and then set free) human property belonging to the enemy, just as he could capture their railroads? Seward asked for time to think about it, but both he and Welles thought the idea of partial emancipation as a war measure had possibilities. A week later Lincoln took the proposal to the full cabinet. Seward, dominating the proceedings as usual, stated that he found the idea compelling, but he questioned the timing. Because the Union had suffered a string of defeats on the battlefield (and yet another one, Second Manassas, was only a month away), a proclamation freeing178 Wartime Politics slaves would hint of desperation. As Lincoln later told the story, Seward argued that such a proclamation should be issued on the morrow of a victory so it would not appear as “our last shriek on the retreat.” Lincoln had not considered the question of timing, but he found it persuasive and agreed to delay the proclamation. Privately, Seward had doubts about the substance of the proclamation, as well as its timing. He feared that a proclamation might trigger a slave uprising that would spread to the border states, thus damaging their loyalty to the Union. Although the Battle of Antietam in September 1862 was a draw in terms of casualties, Lee’s withdrawal southward across the Potomac per- mitted Lincoln to claim a victory sufficient to warrant issuance of his proclamation. When Lincoln read the proclamation to the cabinet, Se- ward voiced his concern about a slave uprising. At Seward’s insistence, Lincoln added language urging the freedmen “to abstain from all vio- lence unless in necessary self-defense.” Made public on September 22, the Emancipation Proclamation decreed that, as of January 1, 1863, the slaves in areas controlled by the Confederacy should be “then, thence- forward, and forever free.” While Southerners denounced the proclamation as inciting slaves to rebel, reaction in the North was mixed. Some Republican radicals thought it a step in the right direction, although Horace Greeley criti- cized the president for doing nothing about slaves in areas under federal control. A British newspaper seized upon this inconsistency, pointing out that “the principle asserted is not that a human being cannot own an- other, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.” Ironically, the one thing that Seward had not considered was the potential impact of the proclamation abroad. Despite its limitations, it lent a moral tone to the war and precluded the possibility that either Britain or France might give official aid and comfort, of any kind, to the Confederacy. This may have been the most important result of the proclamation. Seward’s fumble, fortunately, was not a costly one. Confederate Rams and a Mexican Emperor During the 1850s Europe had experienced a naval armaments race, as scientists developed rifled shells to replace the ancient cannon ball and shipmakers coated wooden vessels with iron sheeting. In propulsion, steam was replacing wind, the newly invented screw propeller replacing the paddle wheel. The United States, always niggardly with its military establishment in time of peace, remained aloof from the race. As a result the Union navy at the outset of the Civil War consisted of wooden-walled sailing vessels, some of which were equipped with auxiliary steam en- gines and paddlewheels. Worse still, the navy had nowhere near enough vessels to mount an effective blockade of the Southern coastline. It hadWilliam H. Seward: The Politician as Statesman 119 only 42 warships in active commission at the beginning of the war, and most of these were on patrol in distant seas. Secretary Gideon Welles be- gan a frenzied shipbuilding program and leased merchant vessels for conversion to warships. The size of the navy doubled by midsummer, and the number of commissioned vessels stood at 264 by the end of the year. In the interim, the Union blockade was a porous one indeed. The Confederacy had no navy at all and only one naval yard, Norfolk, Virginia, which soon fell into Union hands. However, the Confederacy proved quite resourceful in purchasing and leasing ships abroad. After learning of the outbreak of war, a Liverpool trading firm, a branch of a company based in Charleston, put all of its vessels under the British flag and sent them out with cargos for the Confederacy. In the course of 1861 at least four other steamships, leased by Confederate agents, sailed for Charleston and Savannah with military supplies. Adams knew of the sailings and protested, but Russell took the position that he had no proof that the vessels carried arms or other contraband. By 1862 Confederate agents, operating under cover as Frenchmen or Egyptians, managed to buy several swift steamships built in private British shipyards. The Confederates then sailed these to France, where they procured armaments. These Confederate raiders—the best known were the Alabama, the Shenandoah, and the Florida—wreaked havoc upon Northern commerce. The South also threatened the Union block- ade by developing a ship whose primary weapon was neither shot nor shell but an iron ram capable of punching a fatal hole in the side of a wooden sailing ship. The first of these was the Virginia. When Virginia seceded from the Union in the weeks after the sur- render of Fort Sumter, the navy evacuated the Norfolk shipyard and scut- tled the vessels it had under construction. Among these was a steamship, the Merrimac. The Virginians managed to raise the Merrimac and set her afloat in early 1862. They put iron plate on her sides and mounted a cast-iron ram on her bow. In March the vessel, rechristened the Virginia, steamed down the Elizabeth River and into the midst of the Union blockading squadron in Hampton Roads. It rammed a hole in the Cum- berland, which sank instantly with all hands, and it then set the Congress afire with red-hot shot. The following day the Virginia reappeared in the roadstead, but its attack was thwarted by the timely appearance of a Union ironclad, the Monitor, which had steamed down from New York. Although the “battle of the ironclads”—the first such in naval history— was a draw, the deadliness of a vessel armed with a ram became evident to both sides.* The Confederates again turned to British shipyards, which precipitated a new problem for Secretary Seward. *The Virginia was too damaged by the battle for sea duty, and the Confed- erates ultimately scuttled it in the James River. The Monitor sank in a storm off the Carolina capes.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for 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viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.John Wesley Powell and Clarence King 359 lands while limiting the poor corn grower to 80 acres of irrigated bot- tomlands. In Powell’s “scientifically” managed society, who would have the power to decide who got what? A government bureau? There was no need to answer that question. Even the scientific surveys of the 1870s came under attack. The fi- nal volume (1880) of King’s Fortieth Parallel Survey was Professor O. C. Marsh’s study of the fossils of the winged dinosaur (the pterodactyl), to which he gave the unfortunate title Odontornithes: A Monograph on the Extinct Toothed Birds of North America. Congress members cackled with glee when someone pointed out that the government was subsidiz- ing studies of toothed birds. When Powell's appropriation came up in 1891, a congressman from Washington State summarized Western atti- tudes: “We make appropriations everywhere to give the Geological Bu- reau an opportunity to ascertain the variety and number of butterflies and to stow away in dusty volumes the results of their examinations into prehistoric times and report whether the birds that existed in that era lived with or without teeth, but the home builder, the settler, who is de- veloping new country, building towns and villages, turning vast plains into a huge granary, building an empire on the other side of the Rocky Mountains is almost totally neglected.” Powell gave up and resigned in 1894. He died of heart failure in 1902. He had not wasted his talents. He simply discovered that his audi- ence was not listening. SUGGESTED READING The most recent biography of Powell is Donald Worster’s A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (2001). Thurman Wilkins’s Clarence King: A Biography (rev. ed., 1988) is a richly detailed, but somewhat plod- ding, study. A delightfully written overview is William H. Goetzman’s Ex- ploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (1966). Of value also is Thomas G. Manning's Govern- ment in Science: The U.S. Geological Survey, 1867-1894 (1967).American History REPRESENTATIVE AMERICANS “Professor Risjord not only gives us fascinating stories beautifully written, he also brings to his telling of these stories new research and fresh, insightful perspec- tives. His book is not only literature of a high order, it is superb history. It works for the lay reader, and it works for the professional historic n, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Americans in the middle decades of the nineteenth century were a people with boundless energy capable of heroic deeds, monumental achievements, and tragic errors. In The Civil War Generation, his newest volume in the Representative Americans series, noted scholar Norman K. Risjord uses biographical sketches to create a composite portrait of the United Stat Civil War s during and immediately after the Teste ML The Colonists ¢ The Revolutionary Generation ¢ The Romantics ¢ The Civil War Generation ¢ Populists and Progressives (forthcoming) © Generation of Destiny (forthcoming) smeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught for more than three decades. He is the author of thirteen books on American history, including a biography of Thomas Jefferson. For orders and information please contact the publisher Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4720 Boston Way Lanham, Maryland 20706 _ a 1-800-462-6420 ISBN 0-7425-2169-4 | www.rowmanlittlefield.com J Mil 30000 wl E 780742521698 ll