Penguin History of the United States of America (59 page)

‘Thus saith the Lord,’ bold Moses said,
‘Let my people go!
Or else I’ll strike your first-born dead!
Let my people go!’
Go
down Moses! ‘Way down in Egypt’s land:
Tell old Pharaoh, Let My People Go!

Contraband Hymn, 1861

If the attack on Fort Sumter settled that there would be a war, it also largely determined what sort of a war it would be. Lincoln and the North never hesitated in their response to the event: this was rebellion, and would have to be suppressed. On 15 April the President issued a proclamation announcing a blockade of all Southern ports and calling for a force of 75,000 volunteers to restore federal authority in the South. As a man who believed in the permanence of the Union he could do no less. But to the Upper South he seemed to be doing a great deal too much. The choice before these states was indeed agonizing. Virginia, for example, had refused to follow the example of the Cotton Kingdom because she did not see Lincoln’s election as any particular danger: she was well used to the ups and downs of two-party politics and was, besides, deeply loyal to the Union which she had done so much to create. But neither she nor any other of the Southern states understood that term in Mr Lincoln’s sense. For them the states came first; the Union was a limited compact, as the old anti-Federalists had taught, and the states retained their sovereignty, including the right to secede if they saw fit. Above all, the Union was one of consent: the essence of the Constitution and its checks and balances was that the majority should not be able, legitimately, to coerce a minority. As the
North Carolina Standard
had put it the previous autumn, ‘a Constitutional Union is the only one worth preserving… A Union of force, cemented and kept together by force, and perhaps by blood, is not the Union of the Constitution.’
So Lincoln’s proclamation was promptly followed by the secession of Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri might have gone too, but the Unionist forces and the power of the federal government were just sufficient to keep them loyal. ‘I hope to have God on my side, I must have Kentucky,’ said Lincoln, for without that state the North risked being split in two, and Washington might be untenable. As it was, the second secession, vastly increasing the area and population of the Confederacy, made Lincoln’s task nearly impossible.

Few great nations have been less ready in any way for war than were the Americans, North and South, in 1861. The military potential of both sides was enormous, or the struggle could never have dragged on for four years; but at the outset the means for realizing that potential were almost non-existent. True, the United States had founded an official military academy at West Point on the Hudson river in 1802. This institution had done so well that its graduates provided almost all the effective military leadership on either side during the Civil War, and did so from the start: Beauregard and Anderson were both West Pointers. Nor was it only their formal education which trained them: the men of the Academy had run the army during the decades of peace, had fought Indians and Mexicans in the occasional small war, and in some cases, such as that of George McClellan, who had been a railroad official, had gained further valuable experience in civilian life. As was quickly to be shown, in short, the professional American Officer Corps compared favourably in quality with any other in the world, except perhaps the Prussian.

But there were very few of these professionals, though there were more than peacetime America had been able to employ, at least as soldiers. To most of their countrymen titles like ‘Colonel’ and ‘Major’ were merely honorific, dealt out on the frontier even more lavishly than handles such as ‘Judge’ and ‘Squire’. Soldiering meant parading in a fancy uniform on the Fourth of July and shirking militia training all the rest of the year. War, when it did not mean hunting down Indian villages, meant brilliant cavalry charges in red trousers, sweeping the paltry foe before you; it never lasted more than a few weeks. Morale, whether civilian or military, meant the confident assumption that nobody could beat an American, not even another American. As to problems of diplomacy, logistics, supply or finance, they were ignored, or at best dealt with by such slogans as ‘Cotton is King’. Even the educated, even the politicians, knew little better. Abraham Lincoln was wise enough to see that he had everything to learn about his duties as Commander-in-Chief: he took to studying books on tactics and strategy in odd moments. Jefferson Davis was misguided enough to suppose that some fighting in the Mexican War and a term as Secretary of War in Pierce’s Cabinet had taught him all he needed to know – taught him enough to teach his generals. In this vanity he was much the more representative of the two leaders.
¹

The first months of the war were, therefore, chiefly shaped by the general unpreparedness. Perhaps the most important occurrences were the attempts by Lincoln and Davis to say what it was all about. In July Lincoln sent a message to Congress in which he began his long series of attempts to persuade his countrymen and the world that this was a war for democracy, a war to show whether a constitutional republic, ‘a government of the people by the same people’, could maintain its integrity against a rebellion. Jefferson Davis, in a message to the Confederate Congress, identified his cause with states’ rights: with the right of a state to secede and the right of a minority to protect itself against a tyrannous majority. But even in such a solemn message, designed to put the best face on Southern actions, he was not able to conceal the connection between his political doctrines and slavery. The Northern majority was tyrannous, he said, because it actively opposed slavery, and so secession was practically justified as well as constitutionally proper. The truth was that ‘states’ rights’ had evolved, as a creed, from the necessity to protect the peculiar institution. Virginia, for example, was not a cotton state, but she was a slave state, economically dependent on her relations with the other slave states, which purchased her surplus Negroes. If slavery was going to war, states’ rights was a splendid excuse for Virginia to enlist on her customers’ side. Not that it appeared that way to her people. Many of them – for example, Robert E. Lee – had freed their slaves; but when the war came they rallied to what was still their truest country. Lee, the favourite of General Winfield Scott, was offered the command of the United States army as well as that of seceding Virginia; he debated the matter with himself all night, before going with his state. But, like it or not, and he did not like it, he thereby committed himself – very effectively, as would soon be shown – to the military defence of slavery.

Slavery, then, was the central issue of the war from the start, though it was not at first convenient for Lincoln to say so. Not only was there far too much anti-black feeling in the North, there was the attitude of the loyal slave-holders of Kentucky and Maryland to consider (not that they were very sincerely loyal: many of them slipped off South to join the Confederates). He therefore laid enormous stress on the Union; it was for that he fought. As he was to say in August 1862, ‘My paramount object in this struggle
is
to save the Union, and is
not
either to save or destroy Slavery.’ It was to save the Union that, in the spring of 1861, thousands of young men flocked to Washington.

What did the Union mean to them? Curiously, this crucial question is seldom asked by American historians, and never answered satisfactorily. It is, to them, too obvious to bear thought. But non-Americans must consider it.

Many of the soldiers were no doubt unrefiective types, content to accept
words like ‘Union’, ‘rebel’ and ‘nation’ and act accordingly. But the intensely political quality of American life meant that for at least as many of these young citizens the matter had to be thrashed out in argument and private thought; their society forced them to be like Cromwell’s russet-coated trooper, who knew what he fought for and loved what he knew.
²
Their leaders had to justify themselves to their followers, and the followers had to justify themselves to each other and to the folks back home. It was common practice to elect junior officers, as if a regiment were a township or a pioneer train. No wonder that the army was intensely politicized and that Lincoln had always to take its views into consideration. Eventually his pains were repaid: it was the army vote which re-elected him triumphantly in 1864, an explicit vindication of the Union cause.

Attachment to the Union had long been a commanding feeling, even before Andrew Jackson in 1830 proposed his famous toast: ‘Our Federal Union – it must be preserved.’ The rituals of American life fortified it, not only on the Fourth of July but in every schoolroom where, in that enlightened age, boys were taught the art of public speaking and practised the peroration of Daniel Webster’s Second Reply to Hayne:

When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonoured fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance, rather, behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic… still full high advanced… bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as, What is all this worth? Nor those other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first, and Union afterwards: but everywhere, spread over all in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart – Liberty
and
Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!

The feeling was no doubt greatly reinforced by economic interests: as Stephen A. Douglas warned the South in i860, ‘You cannot sever this Union without severing every hope and prospect that a Western man has on this earth.’ There were innumerable ways in which the various parts of the great republic had grown economically intertwined; even the South, even if there had not been a war, would have suffered grievously from its self-imposed exclusion from the markets and resources of the North; and then there was the plain geographical fact that, as Lincoln said in his first inaugural, ‘physically speaking, we cannot separate’. The Americans were stuck with each other in one continent. Their religion, origins and political
culture were much the same, their language was English. The Union seemed to be the merest expression of common sense and inevitability.

But these considerations have little to do with the passions of the Civil War. At the bottom of all American patriotism lay, and lies to the present day, the commitment to freedom – the favourite word, the favourite idea, the favourite boast. This freedom was a very concrete thing, the essential stuff of the American historical experience. The colonial and Revolutionary eras had been a continuous struggle to be free of England, in religion, politics, trade and everything else. In the nineteenth century, freedom meant the ability to go west, to run your own life, to make your own future, to worship your own God, to bring up your children in your own way, to speak your mind. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and eighty-odd years of political experience had not only reinforced, deepened and broadened the commitment to freedom, they had incarnated it in the United States, in a nation. It was not, perhaps, true that American freedom could not have survived the defeat of the North in the Civil War; but the great majority of Northerners, from Lincoln downwards, believed it to be true. Everything they valued in life seemed to be at risk with the Union. No wonder they fought.

It took them a long time to learn how. General Scott, the corpulent veteran of the War of 1812 and Mexico, had a strategic plan that he called the Anaconda, which was in many respects the same as that which eventually defeated the Confederacy: the rebels were to be attacked from all sides, from the sea, the West and the North, and squeezed to death. But the United States only had a tiny navy, so the decision to blockade the South created plenty of work for the Navy Secretary, Gideon Welles (1802–78), just as its interference with the regular course of North Atlantic trade would create plenty of work for Secretary of State Seward. Above all, an army had to be shaped out of the mass of green recruits provided by the state militias. Washington hummed with activity. Unfortunately this deluded the inexperienced press, politicians and parents of America into imagining that everything was in fair train to an early victory, and Lincoln, who was still over-optimistic himself, felt enormous pressure to launch an offensive to end matters briskly.

Appearances were never more deceptive. The South too was organizing. The Confederacy transferred its capital from Montgomery to Richmond, Virginia. Beauregard took command of the scratch army that was hastily assembling there. The fire-eater, Yancey, led a mission to Europe in search of diplomatic recognition of the new nation. But the North discounted all these signs of serious purpose. ‘On to Richmond!’ was the cry. Impatience mounted, and voices began to be heard impugning Scott’s loyalty: after all, he was a Virginian. So at last the generals gave in. Scott being too old and fat to exercise field command himself, the job was given to Irvin McDowell, unluckiest of commanders. On 21 July, a boiling day, his raw levies attacked Beauregard’s almost equally unripe troops in their strong position at