Never Call Retreat (65 page)

4. None Shall Be Weary

INAUGURATION DAY in 1861 had seen riflemen alert in the windows of the capitol, cavalry with drawn sabers riding Jose to the presidential carriage, other troops posted in side streets; the nation that installed its new President was tot sure that he would survive the day or that the nation itself would survive his term of office, and it waited, all tense, to hear what he had to say. Abraham Lincoln took the oath and made a speech that was both an appeal for peace and a challenge to the warlike. The appeal failed and the challenge was taken up, and in the war that followed more than 600,000 men lost their lives and a long era came to an end. Now it was March 4, 1865—rainy, with deep mud in the streets of Washington, and a huge bedraggled crowd waiting in the open space east of the capitol—and there would be another oath-taking and another speech.

As Mr. Lincoln pointed out, this was not the occasion or a long address. The four years had delivered their own terrible message, and interpretation must come later. Now he could only say that men had done infinitely more than they intended. They had made a war when they wanted peace, the result had been more "fundamental and astounding" than any had foreseen, and perhaps Northerners a Southerners alike had been instruments used by a power greater than themselves; now they must accept the result and go into the future with dedication and without hatred. This speech was well received, although the President did not think it would be immediately popular. As he told Thurlow Weed "Men are not flattered by being shown that there has be a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. If the last four years had shown nothing else, in all conscience they had at least shown that much.
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Inauguration Day had been oddly stage-managed. First Vice-President Johnson took the oath in the Senate chamber He had been most unwell, just before entering the chamber he took whiskey to fortify himself, the dosage was too heavy and after he was sworn in he made clumsy, rambling remarks that were a five-day scandal. (The scandal faded after a while, when men came to realize that whatever other faults he might have Andrew Johnson was no drunkard. Then, when Mr. Lincoln came on the platform in the open air to deliver his address, the drizzle stopped and the clouds parted, the sun shone down, and a bright star was visible in the blue sky near the sun. Lounging in the background not far from where the President stood was a pale, sardonic spectator, the young actor John Wilkes Booth.

The oath of office was administered by the Chief Justice of the United States, Salmon P. Chase—Chase, who tried so hard to put himself in Mr. Lincoln's place, who was dropped from the cabinet, and who after the election was nonetheless made Chief Justice: doing today what Taney had done four years earlier, his appearance as Taney's successor a visible sign that this was not the world of 1861. When the oath was given, Mr. Lincoln bent, as by ancient custom, and kissed the open pages of the Bible. Chase noted the precise spot the lips had touched, marked the place, and later gave the Bible to Mrs. Lincoln. The marked verses were the 2 and 28th verses of the fifth chapter of Isaiah:

"None shall be weary nor stumble among them; nor shall slumber nor sleep; neither shall the girdle of their loins be loosed, nor the latchet of their shoes be broken;

"Whose arrows are sharp, and all their bows are bent their horses' hoofs shall be counted like flint, their wheels like a whirlwind."
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The text was apt; Mr. Lincoln was most alert this spring to guard against weariness and stumbling, and he wanted his armies to keep driving. In January Secretary Stanton showed him a dispatch from Sherman, who planned to "get a good ready" before invading the Carolinas. Mr. Lincoln told Stanton that this was fine but that
"time,
now that the enemy is wavering, is more important than ever before. Being on the downhill, and somewhat confused, keep him going. Please say so much to General S." Early in March the President wrote a stiff telegram which Stanton signed and sent to General Grant, who had just received from General Lee a note proposing a meeting to discuss "the possibility of arriving at a satisfactory adjustment of the present unhappy difficulties by means of a military convention." The wire Stanton signed was firm: THE PRESIDENT DIRECTS ME TO SAY TO YOU THAT HE WISHES YOU TO HAVE NO CONFERENCE WITH GENERAL LEE UNLESS IT BE FOR THE CAPITULATION OF GEN. LEE'S ARMY, OR ON SOME MINOR AND PURELY MILITARY MATTER. HE INSTRUCTS ME TO SAY THAT YOU ARE NOT TO DECIDE, DISCUSS OR CONFER UPON ANY POLITICAL QUESTION. SUCH QUESTIONS THE PRESIDENT HOLDS IN HIS OWN HANDS; AND WILL SUBMIT THEM TO NO MILITARY CONFERENCES OR CONVENTIONS. MEANWHILE YOU ARE TO PRESS TO THE UTMOST YOUR MILITARY ADVANTAGES.
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Get on with the war, in other words: and this Grant was doing. While Sherman was coming north from Savannah, Schofield and 20,000 of Thomas' veterans were brought east and sent down to North Carolina. After picking up General Terry and the men who had taken Fort Fisher, they occupied Wilmington and established a garrison there; then they moved up the coast to New Berne and started to march inland, preparing for an eventual meeting with Sherman at Goldsboro, one hundred miles from the coast and not much farther than that from Grant's lines at Petersburg. When he reached this point, Sherman would have a secure seacoast base, all of the supplies he could need, and a field army of more than 80,000 men for the final stage of his campaign.

Another part of Thomas' army, 16,000 men under General A. J. Smith, was sent to the Gulf Coast to join General E. R. S. Canby, who at last was moving against Mobile as Grant and Farragut had wished in 1863. On Smith's arrival, Canby would have a field army of 45,000 men, to operate against a foe who could hardly muster a fourth of that number. Grant wanted everybody to hurry, and Halleck late in February sent Canby a brief warning: "I hope your expedition will be off before this reaches you, for Genl Grant is very impatient at delays & too ponderous preparations. He says that nearly all our generals are too late in starting & carry too much with them."
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Thomas was getting his cavalry into action, not to raid but to cripple. Striking east through the Great Smokies came General George Stoneman with three brigades of troopers, aiming to disrupt Confederate supply and transportation arrangements in the area where Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina met, and to end the last chance that Lee could get any sort of help from the west. (Stoneman had led Hooker's cavalry unsuccessfully during the Chancellorsville campaign, and had gone into temporary eclipse; now, operating under a better general, he was a better cavalryman.) Meanwhile, Thomas' top cavalry commander, the youthful General James H. Wilson, was putting together the strongest mounted striking force seen in all the war—13,000 troopers armed with repeating carbines, trained to move as cavalry but to fight as infantry, carrying more fire power than the ordinary army corps; taking no part in the romantic cavalry tradition, using horses only because the man who rode to work could get there more quickly than the man who walked. Wilson was preparing to move down into Alabama, to destroy the important munitions center at Selma and then to occupy Montgomery, where Jefferson Davis once stood under the flags to meet the tragic hour.
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The Confederacy was being torn up by the roots, including the ones that went deepest. Charleston fell before Mr. Lincoln was sworn in for his second term. For four years it had been proof against bombarding fleets, storming parties and the long blockade, but it went down forever when Sherman's marching army tramped across its supply lines fifty miles inland. This drowsy, haunted, passionate city, where first the Democratic party and then the Federal Union had been gloriously broken amid a tossing foam of palmetto flags and brave cadets in shining gray-and-gold, surrendered without dramatics on February 18. Hardee's troops hastily marched away, on orders from Charleston's own Beauregard, with rear-guard patrols setting fire to warehouses, ammunition dumps, warships, and stacked cotton bales; then the mayor sent a deputation down to a wharf and formally turned the city over to a Yankee colonel, who had just come up the harbor in a transport's lifeboat. Presently the Federal fleet came steaming in, and the ugly grim ships that had been kept out so long anchored close to the Battery. That evening a Federal brigade marched through Charleston to go on provost guard duty. One regiment in this brigade was the 5th Massachusetts, colored troops, some of the men once held to service in this very city, going in proudly now with their forage caps held aloft on fixed bayonets, fife-and-drum corps playing "John Brown's Body."
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Sherman had been the cause of this, although neither he nor his soldiers got within many miles of Charleston. He was marching north without a pause, crossing the flooded low country as if it were dry land, corduroying roads and building bridges as he came; Joe Johnston, who had supposed nobody could make a campaign in that land in winter, remarked that there had been no army like Sherman's since the days of Julius Caesar. The army came up to Columbia, went into it (which was when Charleston had to be given up) and presently marched on again, leaving behind it the dying flames and charred timbers of a burned-out city; leaving behind, also, an unending argument about the responsibility for the fire. Sherman himself did not order Columbia burned, and he argued later that the city was destroyed because retreating Confederate cavalrymen set fire to much cotton and because a high wind made these flames uncontrollable. It is permissible, though difficult, to accept this explanation; but it is also necessary to realize that if the fire had not started so it would quickly have been started in some other way, because, as the capital of the first state to secede, Columbia was certain to go up in flames as soon as these soldiers reached it. One of Sherman's veterans came close to the truth when he wrote to his wife, not long after the army entered North Carolina: "The army burned everything it came near in the state of South Carolina, not under orders but in spite of orders. The men 'had it in' for the State, and they took it out in their own way. Our track through the state is a desert waste." Perhaps all that needs to be understood is that Columbia began to burn when Sherman's soldiers arrived, and stopped burning when they left. All their bows were bent, and their wheels were like a whirlwind.
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The one fixed point in a dissolving Confederate world was Lee's army, which held the lines around Petersburg and Richmond as it had been doing for nine months and more. The lines were longer now, and the army was smaller: with thirty-seven miles of works to hold, Lee by March had no more than 50,000 men at his disposal; the Federals in his immediate presence had more than 120,000, with reinforcements available in case of need. Day after day, in summer and autumn and winter, there had been firing along the battle lines, with a steady wastage of manpower. Visiting Grant at City Point, Abraham Lincoln got a distant glimpse of this, once, in March, when a furious cannonade broke out late at night. It was dark—"as dark as a rainy night without a moon could be," the President said—and the firing went on for two hours and more, the bright flashes from the guns lighting up the black underside of the heavy clouds. The President told Stanton: "It seemed to me a great battle, but the older hands here scarcely noticed it, and, sure enough, this morning it was found that very little had been done."
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Little had been done—but men died under such cannonades, and for an army like Lee's, which found replacements almost impossible to get, the unending attrition was crippling.

Even worse, now, was the fact that so many men were losing heart. Late in February, Lee drew the War Department's attention to "the alarming number of desertions that are now occurring in this army," pointing out that in the last fortnight four hundred men had run away from two of A. P. Hill's famous divisions, with other men leaving other commands. During a nine-day period in March more than a thousand men disappeared from Longstreet's corps, and Lee made a bleak report: "The number is very large and gives rise to painful apprehensions. ... I do not know what can be done to put a stop to it." General R. H. Anderson, a highly reliable corps commander, did not think anything could be done, and he explained later: "The depressed and destitute condition of the soldiers' families was one of the prime causes of desertion, but the chief and prevailing reason was a conviction among them that our cause was hopeless and that further sacrifices were useless." One of the stoutest fighting men in the army, General John B. Gordon, remarked that "Everything was exhausted except devotion and valor." General John S. Preston, head of the Bureau of Conscription, who had reported that more than 100,000 deserters were scattered all over the Confederacy, asserted: "So common is the crime that it has, in popular estimation, lost the stigma that justly pertains to it, and therefore the criminals are everywhere shielded by their families and by the sympathies of many communities. They form the numerical majorities in many places."
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As spring came the net was drawn more tightly. Early in March, Phil Sheridan led 10,000 troopers up the Shenandoah, and at Waynesboro where the road from Staunton came east to tidewater he destroyed the meager army with which Jubal Early was maintaining a shadow of Confederate sovereignty west of the Blue Ridge. Almost all of Early's infantry had long since been called back to Lee's army, so that his total force amounted to no more than 2000 men; these were overwhelmed, half of them captured and the rest routed, and Early himself barely got away with fewer than a hundred men as the remnant of an army that had taken the war to the gates of Washington in the summer of 1864. Now the valley of Virginia was locked up, and Sheridan was coming east to join Grant, destroying railroads and the James River canal as he came. Upon his arrival, Grant would have a powerful mobile force to reach out around the right of Lee's entrenchments and strike at the last railroad lines that enabled Lee's army to stay alive.