A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (71 page)

When Hooker descended to the low expectations many had of him, Grant recommended Meade for command of the Army of the Potomac. Even after Lincoln gave Grant overall command of the army, he and the president were not particularly friendly, despite their similarities. For one thing, Mary Todd Lincoln, whose bitterness knew no bounds once it was directed at someone, despised Grant’s wife, Julia.
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Grant intended to grind down the Confederates with a steady series of battles, even if none proved individually decisive. Grant’s style caught the Rebels off guard. One Confederate soldier wrote:

 

We had been accustomed to a programme which began with a Federal advance, culminating in one great battle, and ended in the retirement of the Union army, the substitution of a new Federal commander for the one beaten, and the institution of a more or less offensive campaign on our part. This was the usual order of events, and this was what we confidently expected when General Grant crossed into the Wilderness. But here was a new Federal General, fresh from the West, and so ill-informed as to the military customs in our part of the country that when the Battle of the Wilderness was over, instead of retiring to the north bank of the river and awaiting development of Lee’s plans, he had the temerity to move by his left flank to a new position, there to try conclusions with us again. We were greatly disappointed with General Grant, and full of curiosity to know how long it was going to take him to perceive the impropriety of his course.
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The Rebels quickly realized that “the policy of pounding had begun, and would continue until our strength should be utterly worn away….”
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The low point for Grant’s reputation came in May 1864, when he launched a new offensive through the Wilderness again. Two days of bloody fighting at the Second Battle of the Wilderness ensued, and more bodies piled up. On this occasion, however, Grant immediately attacked again, and again. At Spotsylvania Court House, Lee anticipated Grant’s attempt to flank him to get to Richmond, and the combat lasted twelve days. Despite the fact that Grant’s armies failed to advance toward Richmond spatially, their ceaseless winnowing of the enemy continued to weaken Confederate forces and morale. It was costly, with the Union suffering 60,000 casualties in just over a month after Grant took over, and this politically damaged Lincoln.

Continuing to try to flank Lee, Grant moved to Cold Harbor, where, on June first, he sent his men against entrenched positions. One Confederate watched with astonishment what he called “inexplicable and incredible butchery.”
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Yankee troops, recognizing the futility of their assaults, pinned their names and addresses to their coats to make identification of their bodies easier. One of Lee’s generals saw the carnage and remarked, “This is not war, this is murder.”
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Grant lost 13,000 men to the Confederates’ 2,000—the only battle in which the Army of Northern Virginia achieved any significant ratio of troops lost to the numbers engaged in the entire war.

Cold Harbor was the only action that Grant ever regretted, a grand mistake of horrific human cost. Callous as it seemed, however, Grant had, in more than a month, inflicted on the Confederates 25,000 casualties, or more than Gettysburg and Antietam put together. Shifting unexpectedly to the south, Grant struck at Petersburg, where he missed an opportunity to occupy the nearly undefended city. Instead, a long siege evolved in which “the spade took the place of the musket.”
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Searching for a way to break through Lee’s Petersburg fortifications, Grant received a plan from Colonel Henry Pleasants, a mining engineer in command of a regiment of Pennsylvania coal miners, who proposed tunneling under the fortifications and planting massive explosives to blast a hole in the Confederate defenses. On July twenty-seventh, the tunneling was completed, and tons of black powder were packed inside the tunnel. Troops prepared to follow up, including, at first, a regiment of black soldiers who, at the last minute, were replaced on Burnside’s orders. When the charge detonated on July thirtieth, a massive crater was blown in the Rebel lines, but the advance troops quickly stumbled into the hole, and Confederates along the edges fired down on them. It was another disaster, costing the Union 4,000 casualties and an opportunity to smash through the Petersburg defenses.

Since 1862 Lincoln had faced turmoil inside his cabinet and criticism from both the Radical Republicans and Democrats. Prior to 1863, antislavery men were angry with Lincoln for not pursuing emancipation more aggressively. At the same time, loyal “war Democrats” or “Unionists” who remained in Congress nipped at his heels for the army’s early failings, especially the debacles of McDowell, Burnside, and Hooker. Their favorite, McClellan, who scarcely had a better record, nevertheless was excused from criticism on the grounds that Lincoln had not properly supported him.

During the 1862 congressional election, criticism escalated, and the Republicans barely hung on to the House of Representatives, losing seats in five states where they had gained in 1860. These, and other Democratic gains, reversed a series of five-year gains for the Republicans, with the cruelest blow coming in Illinois, where the Democrats took nine seats to the Republicans’ five and won the state legislature. Without the border states, James G. Blaine recalled, the hostile House might have overthrown his emancipation initiative.
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If the House losses were troublesome, Salmon Chase posed a genuine threat to the constitutional order. His financing measures had proven remarkably efficient, even if he ignored better alternatives. Yet his scheming against Seward, then Lincoln, was obvious to those outside the administration, who wrote of the Chase faction, “Their game was to drive all the cabinet out—then force…the [reappointment] of Mr. Chase as Premier, and form a cabinet of ultra men around him.”
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Seward, tired of the attacks, submitted his resignation without knowing the larger issues that swirled around him. Lincoln convened a meeting with several of the senators involved in the Chase schemes. Holding Seward’s resignation in his hand, he demanded the resignation of all his cabinet, which he promptly placed in his top desk drawer and threatened to use if he heard of further intrigue. Lincoln’s shrewd maneuver did not end the machinations by the Radicals, but it severely dampened them for the rest of the war.

An equally destabilizing issue involved the draft. Liberal Democrats and influential Republican editors like Horace Greeley opposed conscription. After announcement of the first New York conscriptees under the 1863 Enrollment Act, some fifty thousand angry Irish, who saw that they were disproportionately represented on the lists, descended upon the East Side. Mobs terrorized and looted stores, targeting blacks in particular. Between twenty-five to a hundred people died in the riots, and the mobs did $1.5 million in damage, requiring units from the U.S. Army to restore order. The new Gatling guns—the world’s first machine gun, developed by American Richard Gatling—were turned on the rioting Irish.
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The rioters were in the unfortunate circumstance of confronting troops direct from Gettysburg, who were in no mood to give them any quarter.

Another threat to the Union came from so-called Peace Democrats, known in the North as Copperheads for their treacherous, stealthy attacks. Forming secret societies, including the Knights of the Golden Circle, Copperheads forged links to the Confederacy. How far their activities went remains a matter of debate, but both Lincoln and Davis thought them significant. Copperheads propagandized Confederate success, recruited for the Rebel cause, and, in extreme situations, even stole supplies, destroyed bridges, and carried correspondence from Southern leaders. Even when arrested and convicted, Copperhead agitators often found sympathetic judges who quietly dismissed their cases and released them.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, but no less damaging to Lincoln, were the Radical Republicans. Congressional Republicans from 1861 onward clashed with the president over which branch had authority to prosecute the war. In May 1864, Radicals held a meeting in Cleveland to announce their support of John C. Frémont as their presidential candidate in the fall elections. Rank-and-file Republicans, who eschewed any connection to the Radicals, held what would have been under other circumstances the “real” Republican convention in June, and renominated Lincoln. However, in an effort to cement the votes of “war” or “unionist” Democrats, Lincoln replaced Hannibal Hamlin, his vice president, with a new nominee, Democrat Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee.

The main source of Radical opposition to Lincoln targeted his view of reconstructing the Union. Radicals sought the utter prostration of the South. Many had looked forward to the opportunity to rub the South’s nose in it, and Lincoln’s moderation was not what they had in mind. Two of the most outspoken Radicals, Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio and Henry W. Davis of Maryland, authored a bill to increase the number of persons required to sign loyalty oaths to 50 percent, and to ensure black civil rights. The Wade-Davis Bill flew in the face of Lincoln’s consistently stated desire to reunite the nation as quickly and peacefully as possible, and it would have provoked sufficient Southern antipathy to lengthen the war through guerrilla warfare. Yet Lincoln feared that Congress might override a veto, so he exercised a special well-timed pocket veto, in which he took no action on the bill. Congress adjourned in the meantime, effectively killing the legislation, which infuriated the Radicals even more. Wade and Davis issued the Wade-Davis Manifesto, which indicted not only Lincoln’s plan for reunification but also disparaged his war leadership.

All of these factors combined to produce a remarkable development in the late summer and early fall of 1864 in which some Republican Party members started to conduct a quiet search for a nominee other than Lincoln. At the Democratic convention in August, George B. McClellan emerged as the nominee. He planned to run on a “restoration” of the Union with no change in the Confederacy except that the Richmond government would dissolve. Adopting a “peace plank,” Democrats essentially declared that three years of war had been for naught—that no principles had been affirmed. Here was an astonishingly audacious and arrogant man: an incompetent and arguably traitorous Democratic general running against his former commander in chief in time of war and on a peace platform six months before the war was won! The peace plank proved so embarrassing that even McClellan soon had to disavow it. Even so, facing McClellan and the “purer” Republican Frémont, Lincoln privately expected to be voted out.

At about that time, Lincoln received welcome news that Admiral David Farragut had broken through powerful forts to capture Mobile Bay on August 5,1864. Threatened by Confederate “torpedoes” (in reality, mines), Farragut exhorted his sailors with the famous phrase, “Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead.” Other important Confederate ports, most notably Charleston and Wilmington on the Atlantic, held out, but remained blockaded. With Mobile safely in Union hands, the major Gulf Coast Rebel cities had surrendered. Farragut’s telegrams constituted the first of three highly positive pieces of war news that ensured Lincoln’s reelection. The second was Sherman’s early September report of the fall of Atlanta. Sherman recommended that Grant order him to march southward from Atlanta to “cut a swath through to the sea,” taking Savannah.
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In the process, he would inflict as much damage as possible, not only on the Rebel army, but on the Southern economy and war-making capacity. A third and final boost to Lincoln’s reelection came a few weeks later from the Shenandoah Valley, where General Philip Sheridan was raising havoc. Between Stuart’s loss at Yellow Tavern and the destruction of the Shenandoah, Lincoln’s prospects brightened considerably.

Still, he took no chances, furloughing soldiers so they could vote Republican and seeing to it that loyalists in Louisiana and Tennessee voted (even though only the Union states counted in the electoral college). McClellan, who once seemed to ride a whirlwind of support, saw it dissipate by October. Even Wade and Davis supported Lincoln, and Grant chimed in with his praise for the administration. Lincoln beat McClellan by 400,000 votes and crushed the Democrat in the electoral college, 212 to 21. McClellan’s checkered career as a soldier/politician had at last sputtered to an end.

Total War and Unconditional Surrender

Fittingly, Sherman began his new offensive the day after the election. “I can make Georgia howl,” he prophesied.
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With Chattanooga and Atlanta both lost, the South lacked any major rail links to the western part of the Confederacy, causing Lee to lose what little mobility advantage he had shown in previous campaigns. “My aim then,” Sherman later wrote, “was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us.”
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Graced by stunningly beautiful Dixie fall weather, Yankee troops burned cotton, confiscated livestock and food, destroyed warehouses and storage facilities, and ripped up railroads throughout Georgia. They made bonfires out of the wooden ties, then heated the iron rails over the fires, bending them around nearby telegraph poles to make “Sherman hairpins.” Singing hymns as they marched—“five thousand voices could be heard singing ‘Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flowed’”—the Yankee soldiers had even Sherman believing “God will take care of [these noble fellows].”
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Sherman’s army had marched to Savannah by December 1864, living off the land.
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Despite Confederate propaganda that Sherman was “retreating—simply retreating,” his western soldiers were supremely confident in their commander. “I’d rather fight under him than Grant and if he were Mahomet, we’d be devoted Mussulmen,” said one midwestern private.
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Sherman’s success produced an uncomfortable relationship with Lincoln. The president wanted him to aid federal recruiting agents in enlisting newly freed slaves into the army. An insubordinate Sherman, however, insisted on using blacks as laborers or “pioneer brigades” to dig, build, and haul, but not fight.
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“Soldiers,” Sherman insisted, “must do many things without orders from their own sense…. Negroes are not equal to this.”
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Lincoln, unable to punish the one general who seemed to advance without interruption, could only congratulate Sherman on his conquest.