A Stillness at Appomattox (98 page)

There
were
strong
men
in
the
North
who
wanted
revenge. The
old
technique
of
plowing
up
the
site
of
a
conquered
city and
sowing
the
ground
with
salt
had
fallen
into
disuse,
since the
fall
of
Carthage,
but
they
would
do
the
best
they
could with
some
modern
variant.
The
Ben
Wades
and
the
Thad Stevenses
and
the
Zach
Chandlers
had
great
capacity
for hatred,
and
the
South
was
not
part
of
the
country
as
they
saw it.
Lincoln
stood
in
their
way,
and
because
they
could
not budge
him
they
cried
that
he
was
soft
and
irresolute,
and they
would
put
one
of
their
own
kind
in
his
place
if
they could.
Standing
with
them
were
the
men
whose
minds
were laudably
high
but
deplorably
narrow—the
abolitionists,
the men
who
had
taken
scars
in
the
long
fight
in
the
day
when
the odds
were
all
against
them
and
who
now
were
disposed
to judge
a
man
by
the
iron
which
he
was
willing
to
put
into
the matter
of
punishment
for
the
slave-owners.

There
was
something
to
be
said
on
their
side.
They
could remember
Bully
Brooks
and
his
murderous
assault
on
Sumner, and
the
taunts
and
jibes
of
men
like
Texas's
Wigfall,
who would
have
turned
the
Senate
into
a
place
where
only
an
expert
duelist
could
speak
freely.
If
they
were
grim
and
implacable,
it
is
at
least
possible
to
see
how
they
got
that
way; and
in
addition
they
were
that
part
of
the
Union
cause
which would
never
surrender
or
stop
to
haggle
over
costs.
They
provided
a
good
part
of
the
nerve
and
sinew
which
enabled
the North
to
bounce
back
from
Fredericksburg
defeats
and
Wilderness
casualty
lists,
and
neither
Lincoln
nor
any
other
Republican
was
likely
to
win
the
election
if
they
went
actively on
the
warpath.

What
had
kept
them
off
the
warpath
so
far
was
partly
the fact
that
Lincoln
did
seem
to
have
most
of
the
people
with

him,
and
partly
the
old
political
truism:
You
can't
beat
somebody
with
nobody.
To
date,
only
nobodies
had
offered
themselves
against
him,
men
like
John
Charles
Fremont,
who
was heading
a
rickety
third-party
slate.
But
Butler
was
a
somebody.
Soldiers
might
know
him
as
a
cipher,
but
with
abolitionists
and
bitter-enders
he
was
a
mighty
hero.
He
had boundless
ambition
and
a
total
lack
of
scruples,
and
he
saw himself
as
a
presidential
possibility.
If
the
army
suddenly dropped
him
he
would
land
in
the
arms
of
the
political
extremists.
What
that
would
mean,
to
the
war
and
to
the
things that
would
finally
come
out
of
the
war,
was
nothing
good men
could
speculate
about
with
easy
hearts.

So
the
truth
of
the
matter
probably
is
that
in
the
infinite, complicated
economy
of
the
Civil
War
it
was
better
to
keep Ben
Butler
a
major
general,
even
though
soldiers
were
needlessly
killed
because
of
it,
than
it
was
to
inject
him
back
into the
political
whirlpool.
Washington
saw
it
so,
at
any
rate,
and Washington
had
to
balance
fearful
intangibles
when
it
made its
decision.
And
although
there
was
not,
fortunately,
anyone else
quite
like
Butler,
there
were
many
other
cases
where similar
intangibles
had
to
be
balanced—cases
where
the
Administration
had
to
ask,
in
effect:
Where
will
this
man
do
the least
harm—as
a
general,
or
as
a
politician
out
of
control? Often
enough
the
wrong
guess
was
made,
but
that
was
the kind
of
riddle
the
times
were
asking.

Halleck
understood
these
matters,
and
when
Grant
first
began
suggesting
that
it
would
be
easier
to
win
the
war
with Butler
a
civilian,
Halleck
tried
to
explain
to
him
that
political considerations
must
at
times
override
even
the
professional judgment
of
the
general
in
chief.
A
little
earlier,
Halleck
had frankly
confessed
in
a
letter
to
Sherman
that
"it
seems
little better
than
murder
to
give
important
commands
to
such
men as
Banks,
Butler,
McClernand,
Sigel
and
Lew
Wallace,
and yet
it
seems
impossible
to
prevent
it."
¹³
Halleck
was
right. It
was
impossible
to
prevent
it.
The
trouble
was
that
the
army had
to
carry
these
costly
misfits
on
its
shoulders.

But
the
political
generals
were
only
part
of
the
story,
as
far as
the
army
was
concerned.
As
the
army
settled
into
its trenches
after
four
days
of
battle
in
front
of
Petersburg—four days
which
cost,
roughly,
as
many
killed
and
wounded
as
had been
lost
in
all
twelve
days
at
Cold
Harbor—some
of
its
professionals
were
giving
cause
for
worry.