Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (152 page)

Early's foray to the outskirts of Washington caused the London
Times
to comment that "the Confederacy is more formidable than ever." Many discouraged Yankees agreed. Gold soared to 285. "I see no bright spot anywhere," wrote New York diarist George Templeton Strong, only "humiliation and disaster. . . . The blood and treasure spent on this

12
. James G. Randall and Richard N. Current,
Lincoln the President: Last Full Measure
(New York, 1955), 200; Benjamin P. Thomas,
Abraham Lincoln: A Biography
(New York, 1952), 434.

summer's campaign have done little for the country."
¹³
On July 18, Lincoln issued a new call for 500,000 men, with quota deficiencies to be filled by a draft just before the fall elections. "Lincoln is deader than dead," chortled a Democratic editor.
¹⁴

Angered by the inability of fragmented Union forces to run Early down, Grant cut through the Washington red tape and put Phil Sheridan in charge of a newly created Army of the Shenandoah consisting of the 6th Corps, several brigades from David Hunter's former Army of West Virginia, two divisions recently transferred from Louisiana, and two divisions of Sheridan's own cavalry. Grant ordered Sheridan to go after Early "and follow him to the death."
¹⁵
Sheridan was just the man for the job, but it would take him time to organize this composite army. Meanwhile Grant suffered another frustration in his attempt to break Lee's lines at Petersburg.

This was the famous battle of the Crater. In conception it bid fair to become the most brilliant stroke of the war; in execution it became a tragic fiasco. A section in the center of the Union line at Petersburg held by Burnside's 9th Corps lay within 150 yards of an enemy salient on high ground where the rebels had built a strong redoubt. One day in June, Colonel Henry Pleasants of the 48th Pennsylvania, a Schuylkill County regiment containing many coal miners, overheard one of his men growl: "We could blow that damn fort out of existence if we could run a mine shaft under it." A prewar mining engineer, Pleasants liked the idea, proposed it to his division commander, who submitted it to Burnside, who approved it. Pleasants put his regiment to work excavating a tunnel more than 500 feet long. They did so with no help from the army's engineers, who scoffed at the project as "claptrap and nonsense" because ventilation problems had limited all previous military tunnels in history to less than 400 feet.
¹⁶
Meade consequently put no faith in the enterprise. Nevertheless, the 48th Pennsylvania improvised its own tools and found its own lumber to timber the shaft. Burnside borrowed an old-fashioned theodolite from a civilian so Pleasants could triangulate for distance and direction. Pleasants also rigged a coalmining

13
.
Times
quoted in Foote,
Civil War, III
, 461; Strong,
Diary
, 467, 474.

14
.
CWL
, VII, 448–49; Frank L. Klement,
The Copperheads in the Middle West
(Chicago, 1960), 233.

15
.
O.R
., Ser. I, Vol. 37, pt. 2, p. 558.

16
. Henry Pleasants, Jr.,
The Tragedy of the Crater
(Washington, 1938), 32; William H. Powell, "The Battle of the Petersburg Crater,"
Battles and Leaders
, IV, 545.

ventilation shaft with a fire at the base to create a draft and pull in fresh air through a tube. In this manner the colonel confounded the skeptics. His men dug a shaft 511 feet long with lateral galleries at the end each nearly forty feet long under the Confederate line in which they placed four tons of gunpowder. Reluctantly converted, Meade and Grant authorized Burnside to spring the mine and attack with his corps through the resulting gap.

The sidewhiskered general's enthusiasm for the project had grown steadily from the time it began on June 25. Here was a chance to redeem his failure at Fredericksburg by capturing Petersburg and winning the war. Burnside's corps contained four divisions. Three had been worn down by combat since the Wilderness; the fourth was fresh, having seen no action except guarding rear-area supply lines. It was a black division, and few officers in the Army of the Potomac from Meade down yet believed in the fighting capacity of black troops. Burnside was an exception, so he designated this fresh division to lead the assault. The black soldiers received special tactical training for this task. Their morale was high; they were eager "to show the white troops what the colored division could do," said one of their officers.
¹⁷
Grant arranged a diversion by Hancock's corps north of the James which pulled several of Lee's divisions away from the Petersburg front. Everything seemed set for success when the mine was scheduled to explode at dawn on July 30.

Only hours before this happened, however, Meade—with Grant's approval—ordered Burnside to send in his white divisions first. Meade's motive seems to have been lack of confidence in the inexperienced black troops, though in later testimony before the Committee on the Conduct of the War Grant mentioned another reason as well: If things went wrong, "it would then be said . . . that we were shoving these people ahead to get killed because we did not care anything about them. But that could not be said if we put white troops in front."
¹⁸

Apparently demoralized by the last-minute change of his battle plan, Burnside lost all control over the operation. The commander of the division designated to lead the assault (chosen by drawing straws!), James H. Ledlie, had a mediocre record and an alcohol problem. During the assault he stayed behind in the trenches drinking rum cadged from the surgeon. With no preparation and without leadership, his men attacked

17
. Henry Goddard Thomas, "The Colored Troops at Petersburg,"
Battles and Leaders
, IV, 563.

18
. Powell, "The Battle of the Petersburg Crater,"
ibid.
, 548.

in disordered fashion. The explosion blew a hole 170 feet long, 60 feet wide, and 30 feet deep. One entire rebel regiment and an artillery battery were buried in the debris. Confederate troops for a couple of hundred yards on either side of the crater fled in terror. When Ledlie's division went forward, its men stopped to gawk at the awesome spectacle. Mesmerized by this vision of what they supposed Hell must be like, many of them went
into
the crater instead of fanning out left and right to roll up the torn enemy flanks. The two following white divisions did little better, degenerating into a disorganized mob as rebel artillery and mortars found the range and began shooting at the packed bluecoats in the crater as at fish in a barrel. Frantic officers, with no help from Burnside or from division commanders, managed to form fragments of brigades for a further penetration. But by mid-morning a southern division commanded by William Mahone was ready for a counterattack. The black troops who had finally pushed their way through the milling or retreating white Yankees caught the brunt of Mahone's assault. As on other fields, rebel soldiers enraged by the sight of black men in uniform murdered several of them who tried to surrender. When it was all over, the 9th Corps had nothing to show for its big bang except 4,000 casualties (against fewer than half as many for the enemy), a huge hole in the ground, bitter mutual recriminations, and new generals commanding the corps and one of its divisions. Grant pronounced the epitaph in a message to Halleck: "It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war. Such opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to have."
¹⁹

III

The months of July and August 1864 brought a greater crisis of northern morale than the same months in 1862. The theme of homefront war songs (which enjoyed an extraordinary popularity during the conflict, with sheet music selling millions of copies) took a sudden turn from ebullient patriotism to a longing for peace.
When This Cruel War Is Over
, with its haunting refrain "Weeping, sad and lonely" became the best-seller of 1864, while the chorus
of Tenting on the Old Camp Ground
seemed more than ever to echo northern sentiment: "Many are the hearts that are weary tonight, Wishing for the war to cease." From the presses poured new songs whose titles hardly encouraged martial enthusiasm:

19
.
O.R.
, Ser. I, Vol. 40, pt. 1, p. 17.

Bear This Gently to My Mother; Yes, I Would the War Were Over; Brother, Will You Come Back? Tell Me, Is My Father Coming Back?

Even the spectacular achievement of David Farragut's fleet in Mobile Bay did little at first to dispel northern depression. As the fog lifted on the morning of August 5, Farragut took his fourteen wooden ships and four Monitors past the largest of the three forts guarding the entrance to Mobile Bay. During a terrific duel between fort and fleet, Farragut climbed the mainmast to see what was going on above the smoke from the guns of his flagship
U.S.S. Hartford
. A quartermaster lashed the admiral to the mast and thereby created an unforgettable image in the rich traditions of the U.S. Navy. Farragut soon added a memorable phrase as well. The rebels had scattered mines across the channel. One of them blew up the leading Monitor and sent her to the bottom with more than ninety of her crew. This halted the whole fleet under the punishing guns of the fort. Refusing to countenance retreat, Farragut shouted "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead." He took his flagship through the minefield safely, followed by the rest of the fleet. When they reached the bay they pounded into submission a rebel flotilla led by the giant ironclad C.S.S.
Tennessee
, the most redoubtable but also one of the most unwieldly ships afloat. During the next three weeks, combined operations by the navy and one army division captured the three forts. Though the city of Mobile thirty miles to the north at the head of the bay remained in Confederate hands, this last blockade-running port in the Gulf east of Texas was out of business.

The dimensions of Farragut's victory were more apparent to the North in retrospect than in August, when so much dismal attention was focused on the apparent lack of progress in Virginia and Georgia. Defeatism and a desire for peace spread from the copperheads like widening rings from a stone thrown in the water. "Stop the War!" declared editorials in Democratic newspapers. "If nothing else would impress upon the people the absolute necessity of stopping this war, its utter failure to accomplish any results would be sufficient." By the beginning of August the veteran Republican leader Thurlow Weed was convinced that "Lincoln's reelection [is] an impossibility. . . . The people are wild for peace."
²⁰

Clement L. Vallandigham had returned from his Canadian exile in

20
. Wood Gray,
The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads
(New York, 1942), 174; Edward Chase Kirkland,
The Peacemakers of 1864
(New York, 1927), 108.

June to attend an Ohio Democratic convention which denounced this "unnecessary war" and adopted resolutions calling for an "immediate cessation of hostilities" to negotiate "a just and lasting peace." Not wishing to revive Vallandigham's martyrdom, Lincoln decided to leave him alone. Aware that the Ohio copperhead had been elected "Grand Commander" of a shadowy organization known as the Sons of Liberty—which Republican propaganda pumped up to a vast pro-Confederate conspiracy—the administration probably hoped that if given enough rope he would hang himself. Instead, Vallandigham's return seemed to kindle a forest fire of peace resolutions in Democratic district conventions throughout the North. It appeared that the peace faction would control the party's national convention beginning in Chicago on August 29.
²¹

Believing that all was lost, the mercurial Horace Greeley wrote to the president in July. "Our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country," he declaimed, "longs for peace—shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood." Greeley had learned that two Confederate envoys were at Niagara Falls, Canada, supposedly bearing peace proposals from Jefferson Davis. "I entreat you," Greeley wrote Lincoln, "to submit overtures for pacification to the Southern insurgents." The president responded immediately, authorizing Greeley to bring to Washington under safe conduct "any person anywhere professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery."
²²

Lincoln knew perfectly well that Davis had not authorized negotiations on such conditions. He also knew that the rebel agents had come to Canada not to negotiate peace but to stir up antiwar opposition in the North. Union detectives had infiltrated copperhead groups that were in contact with these agents in Canada. The detectives had uncovered a series of bizarre plots linked to the Richmond government. Confederate leaders shared with Republicans the conviction that a potent fifth column of southern sympathizers in the Midwest stood poised for an uprising to take their states out of the Union and establish a separate peace with the Confederacy. That this "Northwest Conspiracy" existed only in the dreams of fringe elements among the Peace Democrats did