This Great Struggle (50 page)

As the campaign progressed, Lincoln had to deal with practical difficulties presented on both sides, by those who believed he was prosecuting the war too vigorously and with too much concern for the freedom and rights of blacks and those who believed he was displaying exactly the opposite fault. The Radical Republicans in Congress found a way to make Lincoln’s summer difficult by challenging him for control of Reconstruction, the process by which the rebellious states were to be restored to their proper relationship to the nation as a whole and to the national government.

The process of Reconstruction had begun as soon as Union armies had made their first strides in reconquering Rebel states. Lincoln had directed the establishment of loyal state governments in the Union-held areas of Tennessee, Virginia, and Louisiana. In order to encourage the citizens of the rebellious states to rally around the new governments and withdraw their support from the Confederacy, Lincoln in December 1863 issued a proclamation on Reconstruction, containing what came to be called his “Ten Percent Plan.” Lincoln’s program offered a lenient, gentle return for the Union’s erring southern citizens. At its heart was a provision that as soon as a number equal to 10 percent of a state’s 1860 voters took an oath henceforth to be loyal to the Union, those who had taken the oath could participate in the formation of a loyal state government.

The challenge from the Radical Republicans came in the form of the Wade-Davis Bill, introduced the preceding December and passed by Congress on July 2. Its entire approach to Reconstruction contrasted sharply with Lincoln’s. Whereas the president believed the rebellious states had never left the Union and needed only to be restored to their proper practical relationship with it, the Radical Republicans, including the bill’s sponsors, Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Congressman Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, maintained that the states claiming to be part of the Confederacy had committed “state suicide” or were “conquered provinces.” Either way, they were to be administered by the national government until they met stringent requirements for readmission as states. The Wade-Davis Bill stipulated that a southern state could form a loyal state government when a majority, not 10 percent, of its total number of 1860 voters took an “Ironclad Oath,” swearing that they had never voluntarily supported the rebellion. Under those terms, no Confederate state could have formed a government without a great deal of perjury—unless it extended the vote to black former slaves, virtually all of whom could have taken the Ironclad Oath with complete honesty.

Although the bill’s provisions were in many ways reasonable and just (and included much that was later incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution), it clashed with Lincoln’s ideas not only by claiming congressional rather than presidential authority over the process of Reconstruction but also by making it more difficult to entice wavering southerners to abandon their rebellion and return their allegiance to the United States, as had been Lincoln’s goal in issuing the Ten Percent Plan. It also posed a threat to the Union-loyal governments Lincoln had already established in the Union-held sections of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Since Congress had adjourned for its summer recess a few days after passing the bill, Lincoln was able to give it a “pocket veto” by simply declining to sign it. He later issued a statement explaining that the Wade-Davis Bill offered a fine plan of Reconstruction for any southern state that might choose to adopt it, but he did not wish to make it the only available choice. As usual, Lincoln was balancing justice against practicality. The war continued in all its fury, and to the president even a bit of excessive leniency might be acceptable if it could still the guns sooner while preserving Lincoln’s two nonnegotiable goals of Union and emancipation.

The Radicals were furious. On August 4, the sponsors of the bill issued a manifesto denouncing Lincoln, and the next day Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune
printed it. Wade and Davis denounced Lincoln in strident language, complaining of presidential encroachment on the powers of Congress as if the Constitution had said nothing at all about the veto power. Wade and Davis accused Lincoln of ruling the country as a despot and trying to use Reconstruction to set up his own reelection.

As for Horace Greeley, he was finding additional ways to make Lincoln’s reelection more difficult, with the assistance of Jefferson Davis. In early July, while Early’s Confederates were rampaging through Maryland and bearing down on Washington, Greeley informed Lincoln that he had received a missive from two men in Niagara Falls, Ontario, purporting to be agents of the Confederate government with powers to negotiate a peace settlement. Greeley made an emotional appeal to Lincoln to follow up this contact. Professing to know that the Confederate people universally longed for peace, Greeley “ventured to remind” the president “that our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country also longs for peace—shudders at the prospect of fresh conscription, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood.” This was entirely in keeping with the severely defeatist tone of Greeley’s editorials of late.

Lincoln realized that the affair offered precisely no chance at all of bringing about peace with reunion and emancipation, his minimum terms, and that if the men actually were agents of the Confederate government, their mission was merely to depict Lincoln as a warmonger who would not accept a reasonable peace agreement and further to demoralize the northern people into giving up the war and voting for McClellan. Wisely, the president replied, “If you can find any person anywhere professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and the abandonment of slavery, whatever else it embraces, say to him he may come to me with you.”

This was not what Greeley expected, and he tried to beg off in a letter complaining that the Rebel envoys were unlikely to show him their credentials, much less share with him their terms. “I was not expecting you to send me a letter,” Lincoln wrote in reply, “but to bring me a man, or men.” To sound the matter to its bottom, Lincoln dispatched one of his private secretaries, John Hay, to carry his letter to Greeley and then accompany Greeley to Niagara Falls to meet with the purported Confederate agents. To Greeley, Lincoln added, “I not only intend a sincere effort for peace, but I intend that you shall be a personal witness that it is made.”

Quite unwillingly, Greeley accompanied Hay to the Canadian border, and together they found that the Confederate agents had no peace proposals to make or any intention of serious negotiation. Not surprisingly, the pair was hardly on its way back to Washington before the rumor was abroad that Lincoln had turned down a perfectly reasonable peace proposal. Lincoln would have liked to counteract the rumor by publishing excerpts of his correspondence with Greeley, but to this Greeley would not agree unless his own defeatist outburst was published as well. Lincoln thought it best to forbear and endure the rumor.

With the Republican Party splintered by the defection of the Radicals and Lincoln denounced as a despot by Republican congressmen while the editor of the nation’s most-read newspaper tried to make the president look like a warmonger who would not accept peace even though the enemy was supposedly eager for it, the prospects of Lincoln’s reelection looked grim. Meanwhile the Democrats appealed to the country’s war weariness while at the same time running a famous and popular, once-idolized general for president.

Much more important than all of this, however, was the continuing stalemate on both major military fronts, in Georgia and Virginia. Hopes for quick and easy victory had been far too high that spring, and the casualty lists from Virginia had been far too long ever since the campaign started. Now with both of the Union’s major fighting forces seemingly stalled short of their objectives, national morale sank to perhaps its lowest ebb of the war. Trained military men who understood strategy might recognize that Grant and Sherman had their opponents pinned down and that final victory was, as Lee himself realized, only a matter of time, but the public back home, knowing little of strategy and only what newspapers like Greeley’s told them about the war, could see only futility amid ongoing slaughter.

The Confederate military situation was desperate, with no hope of survival unless the Union tired of the fight and gave up, but by the dog days of August, it was looking more and more as if that was exactly what the northern electorate would do. McClellan might claim that he would continue the war until the Union was restored, but nearly everyone else in the country, both North and South, seemed to understand that a vote for McClellan was a vote for peace with neither Union nor emancipation and that such would follow his accession to office, almost regardless of whether McClellan wished it or not.

By August Lincoln himself, one of the most astute politicians of his day, believed the prospects of his own reelection were very dim. On the twenty-third of the month, Lincoln wrote, “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterward.” He folded the sheet of paper and placed it in an envelope, then sealed it. Later that day, he produced the envelope at a cabinet meeting and asked each member of the cabinet to sign across the flap of the envelope without knowing what was inside. Apparently Lincoln hoped that after losing the election, he might, by displaying the statement to McClellan with proof that it was dated from before the election, gain the cooperation of the president-elect in securing the political support necessary for an all-out effort to win the war before inauguration day. Yet if the nation had voted for McClellan and thus voted to give up the war as lost, further efforts to win it would have been desperate indeed.

Then on September 2 a telegram arrived from Sherman: “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.”

12

LAST CHANCES FOR THE CONFEDERACY

FROM JONESBORO TO CEDAR CREEK

B
y late August, Sherman had realized that he simply could not stretch his lines far enough to the southwest to cut Hood’s railroads. Nor would a cavalry raid suffice since horse soldiers on a raid in enemy territory could rarely afford to stop in one place long enough to make a thorough job of destroying the tracks. Nothing would suffice but getting a major force of infantry onto the tracks, and, since the trench lines could not stretch that far, the force that struck the railroad would have to cut loose from the rest of his armies, as well as its own supply lines, in order to make the raid.

It was one of Sherman’s greatest strengths as a general that when the situation in front of him required bold action, he took it. So he drew up a plan to leave only a single corps, Major General Henry W. Slocum’s Twentieth, astride the tracks north of Atlanta, maintaining the Union hold on the Western & Atlantic. Sherman would lead the remaining two corps of the Army of the Cumberland, plus all of the smaller Army of the Tennessee and Army of the Ohio, in a broad turning maneuver, casting loose of supply lines and all connection with Slocum to pass around the west side of Atlanta and reach the vital railroads directly south of the city.

The plan worked exactly as Sherman had hoped, and all three of his armies made firm lodgements on and across the railroads before the Confederates could react in force. Belatedly Hood discovered Sherman’s purpose and moved to counter him, dispatching Hardee with two of his three corps south to the railroad town of Jonesboro, twenty miles south of Atlanta, where the Army of the Tennessee had made its lodgement on the Macon & Western, the easterly of Atlanta’s two remaining rail lines. On August 31 Howard’s troops repulsed the Rebel assault more easily than they had at the battles of Atlanta and Ezra Church the month before. The next day, September 1, the Federals went over to the attack and routed Hardee’s large detachment. That left Hood with little choice but to retreat and give up Atlanta.

Sherman occupied the city the next day without making much effort to catch and capture Hood’s retreating army, but a well-developed killer instinct was not among the red-bearded Ohioan’s many strengths as a general. He was content, for now, with Atlanta and for good reason. Sherman’s capture of the city was exactly the sort of major, tangible progress that the northern voters needed in order to be assured that the war was not, as the Democrats claimed, a failure. It is possible that Lincoln would have won the election that November, even if Sherman had not taken Atlanta first. It is also possible that even if Lincoln had lost the election the Union might have won the war anyway, either before or after McClellan’s inauguration. Yet the best, almost the only remaining Confederate hope of independence lay in Lincoln’s defeat and McClellan’s election to the presidency, and after Sherman took Atlanta, Lincoln’s reelection was all but assured.

In the wake of Sherman’s victory, other Union victories seemed to cluster during the late summer months. Some had preceded the capture of Atlanta but had gone relatively unnoticed amid the prevailing northern gloom at the apparent continued futility of Union efforts in front of Richmond and Atlanta.

On June 19 the day of reckoning had finally come for the Confederate navy’s notorious CSS
Alabama
. The sleek commerce raider had been built in Britain under a false name, taken to sea, armed, and commissioned into the Confederate navy on August 24, 1862. Her twenty-four officers hailed from the Confederate States, but her 120-man crew was a motley collection from the seafaring nations of the world, most being British. Over the next twenty-two months the
Alabama
had roved the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, hunted by a total of twenty-five Union warships. She had captured sixty-six U.S. merchant vessels worth millions of dollars, burning most of them. She had also sunk a smaller Union gunboat in battle.