Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (164 page)

21
. If slaves are counted as capital, the southern decline was 74 percent.

22
. Data compiled from Donald B. Dodd and Wynelle S. Dodd,
Historical Statistics of the South
1790–1970 (University, Ala., 1973); Lee Soltow,
Men and Wealth inthe United States
1850–1870 (New Haven, 1975); Stanley Engerman, "Some Economic Factors in Southern Backwardness in the Nineteenth Century," in John F. Kain and John R. Meyers, eds.,
Essays in Regional Economics
(Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 291, 300–302; and James L. Sellers, "The Economic Incidence of the Civil War in the South,"
MVHR
, 14 (1927), 179–91.

Union strategists were slow to make the capture of Fort Fisher a top priority. In 1863 the wasteful diversion of resources to the futile attempt to seize Charleston delayed the project. Finally in the fall of 1864 Admiral David D. Porter assembled the largest fleet of the war—nearly sixty warships plus troop transports to carry 6,500 soldiers—for an all-out effort against Fort Fisher. Commander of the infantry was Benjamin Butler, who by virtue of his early, politically motivated promotion to major general outranked everyone in the eastern theater except Grant. Butler conceived the idea of loading an old ship with 215 tons of gunpowder, running it into the shallows near the fort, and exploding it with the expectation that the blast would damage the fort and stun its garrison. Storms delayed the project until Christmas Eve day. The exploding ship did virtually no damage, the open air having absorbed the shock wave. The fleet then pummelled the fort with the heaviest bombardment of the war but managed to damage only a few of its guns. Butler got part of his infantry onto the beach but called off the attack when he found the parapet bristling with artillery and the approaches mined with "torpedoes."

This fiasco provided Grant with the excuse he had been looking for to get rid of Butler. With the election safely over, Lincoln could disregard the political influence that had kept Butler in the army so long; on January 8, 1865, the Massachusetts general was relieved of his command. Grant ordered a second attempt against Fort Fisher, this time with the bright young General Alfred Terry in command of a beefed-up infantry force of 8,000. On January 13 they waded ashore through the surf and worked their way down the narrow peninsula toward the fort's north face while the fleet opened a barrage that rained 800 tons of shot and shell on the defenders. This time the navy's big guns disabled nearly all of those in the fort and cut the detonating wires for the mines, preparing the way for an assault on January 15 by 4,500 infantrymen against the north face while 2,000 sailors and marines stormed the bastion from the seaward side. Although the attackers took more than a thousand casualties, the army troops finally broke through and captured the fort along with its garrison of 2,000 men. Wilmington was cut off from the sea, and Lee's soldiers in the trenches at Petersburg would have to tighten further their belts whose buckles were already scraping their backbones.

Wilmington itself soon fell, and most of coastal North Carolina was in Yankee hands. Desertions from Lee's army, especially of North Carolina troops, rose to disastrous levels. "Hundreds of men are deserting nightly," reported Lee in February. In a single month the army lost 8 percent of its strength by desertion. Most of these men went home to protect and sustain their families; some went over to the enemy, where they knew they could find food and shelter. A Massachusetts soldier on the Petersburg line wrote to his parents: "The boys talk about Johnnies as at home we talk about suckers and eels. The boys will look around in the evening and guess that there will be a good run of Johnnies."
²³
Confederate officers recognized that "the depressed and destitute conditions of the soldiers' families was one of the prime causes of desertion," but that "the chief and prevailing reason was a conviction among them that our cause was hopeless and that further sacrifices were useless." Whatever the reasons for this "epidemic" of desertions, wrote Lee, "unless it can be changed, [it] will bring us calamity."
²⁴

Confederate officials regarded the loss of Fort Fisher as a "stunning" blow. Alexander Stephens pronounced it "one of the greatest disasters that had befallen our Cause from the beginning of the war."
²⁵
The southern Congress, then in session, stepped up its attacks on the administration. Secretary of War Seddon succumbed to the pressure and resigned. Some congressmen even called on Davis to step down in favor of Robert E. Lee as dictator. Congress did pass a law creating the post of general in chief. Although Davis recognized this as a gesture of non-confidence in his own leadership, he appointed Lee to the position. Davis and Lee maintained their cordial relationship, and both vowed to fight on until victory. But the fall of Fort Fisher had convinced many congressmen that "we cannot carry on the war any longer" and should "make terms with the enemy, on the basis of the old Union."
²⁶

In this climate of opinion another movement for peace negotiations flared up and then fizzled out. This time it was the old Jacksonian Francis Preston Blair—as quixotic in his own way as Horace Greeley—who set up a meeting between Lincoln and Confederate commissioners. Convinced that he could reunite North and South by proposing a joint

23
.
O.R.
, Ser. I, Vol. 46, pt. 2, p. 1258; Bruce Catton, A
Stillness at Appomattox
(Garden City, N.Y., 1957), 330–31.

24
. Catton,
Never Call Retreat
, 414; Ella Lonn,
Desertion During the Civil War
(New York, 1928), 28.

25
. Jones,
War Clerk's Diary
(Swiggett), II, 389; Alexander H. Stephens, A
Constitutional View of the War between the States
, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1868–70), II, 619.

26
. Vandiver, ed.,
Civil War Diary of Josiah Gorgas
, 166. See also Younger, ed.,
Inside the Confederate Government
, 187–88.

campaign to throw the French out of Mexico, Blair badgered Lincoln to give him a pass through the lines to present this proposal to Jefferson Davis. Lincoln wanted nothing to do with Blair's hare-brained Mexican scheme, but he allowed him to go to Richmond to see what might develop. For his part, Davis anticipated nothing better from negotiations than the previous demands for "unconditional submission." But he saw an opportunity to fire up the waning southern heart by eliciting such demands publicly. Davis thus authorized Blair to inform Lincoln that he was ready to "enter into conference with a view to secure peace to the two countries." Lincoln responded promptly that he too was ready to receive overtures "with the view of securing peace to the people of our one common country."
²⁷

Hoping to discredit the peace movement by identifying it with humiliating surrender terms, Davis appointed a three-man commission consisting of prominent advocates of negotiations: Vice-President Stephens, President
pro tem
of the Senate Robert M. T. Hunter, and Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell, a former U.S. Supreme Court justice. Their proposed conference with William H. Seward, whom Lincoln had sent to Hampton Roads to meet with them, almost aborted because of the irreconcilable differences between the agendas for "two countries" and "our one common country." But after talking with Stephens and Hunter and becoming convinced of their sincere desire for peace, General Grant telegraphed Washington that to send them home without a meeting would leave a bad impression. On the spur of the moment Lincoln decided to journey to Hampton Roads and join Seward for a face-to-face meeting with the Confederate commissioners.

This dramatic confrontation took place February 3 on the Union steamer
River Queen
. Lincoln's earlier instructions to Seward formed the inflexible Union position during four hours of talks: "1) The restoration of the National authority throughout all the States. 2) No receding by the Executive of the United States on the Slavery question. 3) No cessation of hostilities short of an end of the war, and the disbanding of all forces hostile to the government." In vain did Stephens try to divert Lincoln by bringing up Blair's Mexican project. Equally unprofitable was Hunter's proposal for an armistice and a convention of states. No armistice, said Lincoln; surrender was the only means of stopping the war. But even Charles I, said Hunter, had entered into agreements with rebels in arms against his government during the English Civil

27
.
CWL
, VIII, 275–76.

War. "I do not profess to be posted in history," replied Lincoln. "All I distinctly recollect about the case of Charles I, is, that he lost his head."
²⁸

On questions of punishing rebel leaders and confiscating their property Lincoln promised generous treatment based on his power of pardon. On slavery he even suggested the possibility of compensating owners to the amount of $400 million (about 15 percent of the slaves' 1860 value).
²⁹
Some uncertainty exists about exactly what Lincoln meant in these discussions by "no receding . . . on the Slavery question." At a minimum he meant no going back on the Emancipation Proclamation or on other wartime executive and congressional actions against slavery. No slaves freed by these acts could ever be re-enslaved. But how many
had
been freed by them? asked the southerners. All of the slaves in the Confederacy, or only those who had come under Union military control after the Proclamation was issued? As a war measure would it cease to operate with peace? That would be up to the courts, said Lincoln. And Seward informed the commissioners that the House of Representatives had just passed the Thirteenth Amendment. Its ratification would make all other legal questions moot. If southern states returned to the Union and voted against ratification, thereby defeating it, would such action be valid? That remained to be seen, said Seward.
³⁰
In any case,

28
.
Ibid.
, 279; Stephens,
Constitutional View
, II, 613.

29
. Upon his return to Washington, Lincoln actually drafted a message to Congress asking for an appropriation of this amount to compensate slaveowners after the Confederacy had surrendered and ratified the 13th Amendment. The cabinet unanimously disapproved, however, so Lincoln never sent the message to Congress—which in any case would have been unlikely to appropriate funds for such a purpose.
CWL
, VIII, 260–61.

30
. Some historians have interpreted this exchange as evidence that Seward and Lincoln were willing to consider a peace settlement that did not necessarily include universal emancipation. See especially Richard N. Current,
The Lincoln Nobody Knows
(New York, 1958), 243–47, and Ludwell H. Johnson, "Lincoln's Solution to the Problem of Peace Terms, 1864–1865,"
JSH
, 34 (1968), 581–86. But since these discussions were informal and no contemporary record of them was kept, the evidence for this interpretation rests almost entirely on Alexander Stephens's postwar memoirs. See Stephens,
Constitutional View
, II, 611–12. It is probable that Stephens was reading his own viewpoint into Seward's remarks. Stephens also recalled that Lincoln had urged him to go home to Georgia and persuade the legislature to take the state out of the war and to ratify the 13th Amendment
prospectively
, to take effect in five years, thereby mitigating the evils of immediate emancipation.
Ibid.
, 614. This too seems highly unlikely. Lincoln was too good a lawyer to suggest an impossibility like "prospective" ratification. Both Lincoln and Seward were committed to the ratification of the 13th Amendment as soon as possible The president expressed pride that his own state of Illinois was the first to ratify it, and he backed the successful drives for immediate abolition in Maryland, Missouri, and Tennessee. Seward had stopped off at Annapolis on his way to Hampton Roads and had successfully lobbied the Maryland legislature for ratification.

remarked Lincoln, slavery as well as the rebellion was doomed. Southern leaders should cut their losses, return to the old allegiance, and save the blood of thousands of young men that would be shed if the war continued. Whatever their personal preferences, the commissioners had no power to negotiate such terms. They returned dejectedly to Richmond.
³¹

Southern professions of shock and betrayal at the North's demand for "unconditional surrender" were disingenuous, for Lincoln had never given them reason to expect otherwise. The three commissioners drafted a brief, matter-of-fact report on their mission. When Davis tried to get them to add phrases expressing resentment of "degrading submission" and "humiliating surrender" they refused, knowing that the president wished to use them to discredit the whole idea of negotiations. So Davis added the phrases himself in a message to Congress on February 6 accompanying the commissioners' report. The South must fight on, said Davis that evening in a public speech which breathed "unconquerable defiance," according to press reports. We will never submit to the "disgrace of surrender," declared the Confederate leader. Denouncing the northern president as "His Majesty Abraham the First," Davis predicted that Lincoln and Seward would find that "they had been speaking to their masters," for southern armies would yet "compel the Yankees, in less than twelve months, to petition us for peace on our own terms.
³²