This Great Struggle (56 page)

On February 17, the same day Sherman’s troops marched into Columbia, Confederate forces, threatened by Sherman’s advance with the prospect of being cut off along the coast, evacuated Fort Sumter. The Union forces on the coast, which had been besieging and bombarding the fort for more than a year and a half, took possession of both the fort and the city of Charleston without opposition. With that, the place where Confederates had, almost four years before, fired the first shots of the war was back in Union hands.

On March 7 Sherman’s troops crossed into North Carolina. They continued to forage, as they had to in order to eat, but the extraneous house burning ceased the moment they crossed the state line. On March 23 Sherman’s columns reached Goldsboro, North Carolina, where they linked up with Schofield and his thirty thousand men. Transported by the navy to the Union-held coastal enclave on the North Carolina coast, Schofield’s army advanced to Goldsboro to reinforce and resupply Sherman, whose force now totaled more than ninety thousand men. From Goldsboro it was less than 150 miles to Grant’s and Lee’s positions around Petersburg and Richmond.

Sherman’s two great campaigns through the interior of the South, first through Georgia and then through the Carolinas, were enormously important in weakening both the ability and the will of the southern people to carry on a hopeless fight. The very fact that Sherman was able to march his troops hundreds of miles through the interior of what purported to be the Confederacy, seemingly unhindered by any efforts of the Confederate army, was evidence of the helplessness of the slaveholders’ republic. The marches did enormous damage to the Confederacy’s continued ability to support armies in the field, destroying warehouses, depots, stockpiles, factories, and hundreds of miles of railroad track.

More important, the mere presence of Sherman’s troops, even though they did not abuse civilians—perhaps all the more because they did not abuse civilians—demoralized Confederates all across the South and especially in the Confederacy’s armies. For southern boys who had given little thought to the issues of the war and enlisted simply to keep the Yankees out of their home counties, the presence of Union troops back home, methodically destroying factories and railroads and confiscating much of the food and livestock, was proof that the war was already lost. A steady trickle of desertion in Lee’s army rose steadily throughout the fall and winter months. One study of a Georgia regiment in Lee’s army revealed that the desertion rate in each company of the regiment was directly proportional to the amount of time Sherman’s troops spent in that company’s home county. More than the fall of Fort Fisher or even the operations around Petersburg, Sherman’s marches tore the heart out of the Confederacy and hastened the end of the war.

Sherman’s campaigns were also evidence that Union forces had by this time so dominated the Confederacy’s western armies as to overrun all of the South east of the Mississippi, except for the part of Virginia between Richmond and the Blue Ridge. Now the main striking power of the Union’s western armies was advancing northward, along the eastern seaboard, and was about to invade Virginia from the south. In a grand strategic sense the movement of the Union’s western armies had been a right-wing left wheel on a continental scale. On the right end of the Union line and thus the outside edge of that enormous left wheel, Grant’s own Army of the Tennessee had started out from Cairo, Illinois, at the beginning of the war; had advanced down the Mississippi Valley all the way to Vicksburg and beyond; had moved east to help secure Chattanooga and take Atlanta, then farther southeast to the Atlantic coast at Savannah; and finally moved north toward Virginia and the last enclave of the rebellion. Lee might continue to hold Richmond and its environs, but in the heartland of the Confederacy, where the really decisive action had taken place, the war was already over except for minor mopping-up operations.

CONFEDERATE DESPERATION AND THE DECISION TO ENLIST BLACK TROOPS

Desperation steadily increased inside the Confederate capital. In the press and elsewhere in Richmond, many complained bitterly of what they saw as the mismanagement of the war. In late January the dissatisfaction boiled up to the point that the Virginia state legislature passed a resolution calling for a wholesale cabinet shake-up. The real target of the criticism was Jefferson Davis, who had throughout the war maintained rigorous personal control of every decision. The censure was most galling for Secretary of War James A. Seddon, a Virginian and a capable administrator whose office nevertheless associated him most closely, second to Davis at any rate, with all that was going badly for the Confederacy. Humiliated by the censure of his home state’s legislature, Seddon resigned on February 1. To replace him Davis chose former U.S. vice president, 1860 presidential candidate, and, more recently, Confederate general John C. Breckinridge.

The Confederate congress was also in a mood to clip the president’s wings and in that frame of mind passed legislation creating the position of general in chief of the Confederate armies. The act was tailored to win Davis’s acceptance, providing that the general in chief was to serve under the president’s command, but the clear intent was to have someone else making the decisions that would guide the Confederate war effort. Even more clearly, the man the legislators had in mind was Lee. Davis signed the bill into law January 23 and on February 6 named Lee to fill it and to continue to serve as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. The Confederate senate promptly approved the nomination. One of Lee’s first actions as general in chief was to persuade Davis to return Joseph Johnston to command, this time in charge of the Confederate forces attempting to impede Sherman’s northward march through the Carolinas. Davis reluctantly acquiesced, comforting himself with the reflection that perhaps with Lee to supervise him, Johnston would do better than he had in the past.

Desperate as might have been the step of reinstating Johnston, the Confederate president was prepared to go even farther. By early 1865 Davis was willing to consider sacrificing the institution of slavery if that was the price of survival. It was one of the strange ironies of war that white southerners who had set out to overthrow national authority in order to protect slavery were now willing to abandon slavery in order to resist national authority. Yet the Confederacy’s shortage of manpower had become so acute as to suggest the hitherto unthinkable expedient of placing rifles in the hands of slaves and using them as soldiers.

Among the first to broach the idea, a year before Davis openly embraced it, was Army of Tennessee division commander Patrick R. Cleburne, who in January read a paper on the subject to his fellow generals of that army in its winter camp near Dalton, Georgia. The Irish-born-and-raised Cleburne may not have understood fully the visceral depth of the issue of slavery in the South. Some of his listeners that evening had gone away in stunned horror, most of the rest in a towering rage. Apprised of the event, Davis ordered it hushed up.

Now, more than a year later, with Cleburne in his grave not far from Franklin, Tennessee, the situation had become sufficiently desperate that the Confederate president had come around to the late general’s point of view. “It is now becoming daily more evident to all reflecting persons,” he wrote early in 1865, “that we are reduced to choosing whether the negroes shall fight for us or against us.” Many others agreed with Davis. As early as October 6, 1864, the
Richmond Examiner
had come out in favor of enlisting slaves as Confederate soldiers. Others disagreed strongly despite the Confederacy’s obviously desperate plight. Former Confederate cabinet member Howell Cobb of Georgia summed up their view when he astutely noted, “The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the [Confederacy]. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”
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Nevertheless, after intense debate the Confederate house of representatives on February 20, 1865, passed an act for the enlistment of slave soldiers. The Confederate senate approved the bill on March 13 by a one-vote margin, and Davis promptly signed it. A key factor in its passage was Lee’s known advocacy of the use of black soldiers. The new law provided that slaves could be freed only with the consent both of their owners and of their home states. Davis, who at Lee’s urging lost no time in implementing the act, therefore enlisted only those slaves whose masters volunteered them for service and subsequent emancipation. By the end of March, Confederate officers had enrolled two companies, or about two hundred black soldiers, though they had not yet issued them rifles. By that time, the U.S. government had fielded some two hundred thousand black troops.

LINCOLN’S SECOND INAUGURAL

The month of March also saw Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration to a second term as president of the United States. As the Constitution provided in those days, the event took place on March 4 and, by custom, on a platform erected in front of the East Portico of the Capitol. The weather had been rainy of late, as was seasonable, and the day began under overcast skies. The sun broke through the clouds just as Lincoln stepped to the podium to give one of the most eloquent speeches of his remarkable career of public speaking. After briefly alluding to the path that had taken the nation into civil war and to the prayers of both sides to the same God, beseeching that the war might be avoided or that it might be quickly won, Lincoln concluded,

The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
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It was the shortest, most powerful, and most overtly religious inaugural address in the nation’s history, and it came from a president who was so reticent about his own religion that the personal beliefs of this, the most intensively studied historical figure in America’s past, remain a mystery. He had long since rejected the hard-shell Baptist faith of his parents and had been an atheist or an agnostic in his youth. In the 1850s he had come to believe in God’s existence and seemed to be seeking, but what, if anything, he found, remains unknown. Through it all, the doctrinaire predestinationism of his Calvinist upbringing lingered in his thinking in the form of a vague fatalism, something he called “the doctrine of necessity.” Man had no free will, he thought, but rather thought and did as some power, or Power, ordained he should think and do. Yet Lincoln did not act or speak consistently with that belief. In this, the most fatalistic of his public speeches, he nevertheless urged his listeners to have “firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right” and exhorted them to “strive on to finish the work we are in.”

THE BATTLE OF FIVE FORKS AND THE FALL OF RICHMOND

Robert E. Lee was under no illusions as to the direction in which the war was trending. Grant’s repeated probes and stabs as part of his quasi siege of Petersburg and Richmond were steadily stretching and sapping the Army of Northern Virginia. So too was the steady—and growing—trickle of desertions. Lee knew that his army was rapidly approaching the point at which it could not stretch any farther or hold its lines any longer. He believed the Confederacy’s only remaining military option was for the Army of Northern Virginia to slip free of Grant’s grasp, abandoning Richmond, and head south to link up with Johnston’s small army in North Carolina. The combined Confederate armies would then defeat first Sherman and then Grant. In fact, this was the most forlorn of hopes. Even before Schofield reinforced Sherman, the latter’s command would still have been roughly equal to the total number of troops remaining in the ranks of Lee’s and Johnston’s armies. Nevertheless, the plan was the only card left to play. Early in March Lee notified Davis, and the president accepted the fact that they would soon have to give up Richmond.