Our One Common Country (2 page)

P
ROLOGUE

 

Shortly after breakfast on a springlike day in the winter of 1865, Abraham Lincoln slipped out of the White House alone and into a waiting carriage. To deceive passersby, his Irish-born valet, carpetbag in hand, lagged a minute or two behind him. At the Washington City depot, a train with a single car had been summoned to take him to Annapolis, where the fastest ship on Chesapeake Bay would be ready to run him south to Hampton Roads, Virginia, for a peaceful talk with the enemy in the midst of a shooting war. It had never happened before. It has never happened since. Apart from his Secretary of State, who had quietly gone ahead of him, neither his Cabinet nor his staff had been told that he was going.

After nearly four years of war, Northern forces had taken much of the Confederacy's territory, cornered its battered armies, and all but broken the rebellion, but no one knew when it would end. Indeed, it might yet be revived. Over 600,000 young Americans were dead. A Northern push to victory would kill tens of thousands more, humiliate the South, and delay for generations what Lincoln wanted most and the beleaguered Rebel leader in his capital at Richmond even now refused to consider—a reconciled nation, healed of its painful wounds. Reasonable men of the North and South were coming to Hampton Roads in search of a way out.

Entrenched in a fortified arc on the edge of Petersburg, Virginia, one day's march from Richmond, General Robert E. Lee was praying for their success. The 50,000 men and boys of the Army of Northern Virginia were ragged, gaunt, and bleeding. The opposing Union forces—smartly uniformed, splendidly equipped, more than 100,000 strong—had failed to dislodge them in June and had dug in beside them instead, grinding them down night and day, taking their blows in return. Half a century later, fighting side by side in France, their grandsons would call it trench warfare. It was in its eighth month when Lincoln went south to the enemy. A seventeen-year-old Union infantryman would still be reliving its horrors in 1926, deep in old age. “Wish I could forget many, many dread sights that I saw around Petersburg.” Even on dress parade, assembled for
inspection with other frightened boys, he had seen arms and legs reaching out from shallow graves.

Interspersed with the trench-side tombs were dozens of primitive forts named for officers struck dead in the vicinity, an old American tradition. Out of place in the nineteenth century, they were throwbacks to the ninth, with walls of earth and timber impaled by sharpened stakes, ringed by pits and moats like some Dark Age warlord's stronghold. One such edifice on the Union side of the lines intersected the Jerusalem Plank Road. The War Department called it Fort Sedgwick. Its residents called it Fort Hell. On the opposite side of no-man's-land was the Rebel fortification known as Fort Mahone or Fort Damnation, depending on who was asking. Hell and Damnation were a few hundred yards apart, sporting range for sharpshooters who honed their country marksmanship taking aim at careless heads. Mortars and artillery wreaked indiscriminate mayhem and respected no safe havens. A South Carolinian was struck in the mouth while lying at the bottom of a trench, reading a letter from home. “The piece of shell broke his left jaw-bone, severed two arteries on that side of his face, tore out several teeth and lodged there. He was laid out dead. Providentially the blood clotted and prevented his bleeding to death” until someone caught him breathing.

Within Fort Hell was the warren of holes and hovels that its garrison called home. The most desirable Hellish residences were dug from the battered ground, covered with logs and branches, roofed with a yard of earth to absorb exploding shells. A former Yankee coach maker described the “undiscoverable, almost inconceivable nooks” where less fortunate men lived. The “upholsterer's art,” he found, had not been “lavished upon our beds.” Less agreeable still were the lodgings outside the walls, “little pits the size of a common grave, though not half so well furnished.”

And then there were the pickets—the unfortunate souls pushed out in front of the trenches in parallel lines of holes to serve as human trip wires in the event of an attack and kill the other side's pickets. A veteran of the 48th Pennsylvania said a brick could be tossed with ease from one picket line to the other. Bullets traveled faster.

Closer to death than anyone, pickets behaved oddly when they found themselves within chatting distance. They chatted. An unwritten code
of picket etiquette determined when its subscribers could socialize and when they could try to kill each other. After dark, the popping of picket fire could be as constant as “the dropping of hail,” but pickets stopped firing at dawn and gave fair warning when ordered to do otherwise. One Rebel threw a rock with a note tied around it: “Tell the fellow with the spy-glass to clear out or we will have to shoot him.” In the quiet of the day, pickets traded rumors, jokes, and whatever was edible, readable, or smokeable, negotiating with their lungs, making airborne deliveries with their pitching arms. Ever short of ammunition, Rebel pickets had been known to toss tobacco plugs to their trading partners in exchange for the lead they had fired at them the night before.

Pickets were not alone in the art of fraternization. A teenaged Midwesterner was proud to distinguish himself as “the boy that caused peace at times.” Confronting a regiment of overactive Virginians, he shouted across the way that the 60th Ohio had moved in, and urged them to quit wasting good ammunition. They proposed to stop shooting if the Ohioans did. “A glad cry went up along the lines, and there was peace and quiet for some time after that. We exchanged coffee with them for some tobacco and papers.”

Joining forces to fight the cold, axmen in blue and gray felled trees together for fuel and shared the proceeds equitably. On Christmas Day, pickets had stood up “in full sight of each other, shouting the compliments of the season, giving invitations to cross over and take a drink, to come to dinner, to come back into the Union.” Well-provisioned Yankees could afford their generosity. More than a few Northern regiments opened gifts sent down by rail and enjoyed a festive dinner. The same could not be said for the Americans across the way. Six Southern men had about as much to eat as one of their Northern counterparts. “While our men were dressed in good warm pants, blouses, and overcoats and evidently well fed and taken care of,” a New Englander said, hardly two of “the poor Johnnies” were dressed alike. Many of them were barefoot, their eclectic outfits “ragged and worn with long service, a blanket with a hole in the centre placed over their shoulders forming jacket and overcoat, and with hats of all shapes. But let them hear the word ‘forward' and you would be surprised to see what a lively set of men they could be.”

Their alacrity had limits. From his headquarters nine miles east of the front, Ulysses S. Grant was extending his trenches daily, filling them with fresh troops, killing Lee's stick figures one and two and three at a time, starving and bleeding and breaking them. Unaccustomed to the cold, Captain John Evans of the 23rd South Carolina wrote home in a heavy snow. “It makes me sorry to see so much suffering . . . we poor fellows are in the mud and water . . . the dissatisfaction is spreading fearfully, and especially in the North Carolina brigade it looks like a general stampede for home will take place before spring.” Every night, a Yankee said, “half-frozen and repentant Rebels, in large numbers, made their appearance on our picket line, and were sent to the rear.”

Their suffering was not entirely unrelieved. From time to time official truces were called to recover the dead and wounded in the wake of an attack, discuss a prisoner exchange, or adjust the rules of engagement. When the white flags flew, foul-smelling men crawled out of their holes, the colonels conducted their business, and the privates conducted theirs. Blue and gray laundry was washed side by side in the same refreshing streams. Memorable feats of marksmanship were acknowledged and admired. A consensus was reached on the ineptitude of officers. There had even been North–South wrestling matches, cheered on by partisan fans. A Rhode Island regiment's football games “never failed to interest the Johnnies,” who would gather a stone's throw away, “taking as much pleasure therein as if no deadly feud existed between us.”

When the truce flags came down, the combatants returned to their work. Some of them died every day. Others would still be suffering when FDR was president, getting dressed with one hand in Alabama, crying out in the night in New York, burdening their families in Mississippi, enduring their pity in Maine. The killing rarely stopped. As the North replenished its ranks, the South's diminished daily. “I think hardly any man in that army entertained a thought of coming out of the struggle alive,” a Virginian would later say, but the most intrepid of them persisted “in vaguely hoping and trying to believe that success was still to be ours, and to that end we shut our eyes to the plainest facts, refusing to admit the truth which was everywhere evident, namely, that our efforts had failed, and that our cause was already in its death struggles.”

On Sunday, January 29, 1865, a Rebel flag of truce appeared in front of Fort Damnation, and the neighborhood mood improved. A sergeant of the 8th Michigan reported the enemy overture to Captain Thomas Parker of the 51st Pennsylvania, a bright young man with a walrus mustache, commanding the local picket line. Parker climbed up on a parapet to take a look for himself.

On both sides of no-man's-land, hundreds of men and boys were doing the same, with a keener intensity than usual. For the past several weeks, Northern and Southern newspapers had been full of rumors of peace, deplored by most editorialists (none of them under fire) as a Yankee trick, or a Rebel play for time, or a craven substitute for victory. The pundits on the siege line were decidedly more bullish. Southern pickets had been shouting peaceful forecasts to their Yankee interlocutors. “This Rebellion is played out.” “There will be glorious news within ten days.”

Having reported the flag of truce, Captain Parker shed his sword, walked out to the middle of no-man's-land with his own white flag, and saluted Lieutenant Colonel William Hatch, a handsome young Kentuckian. After “passing the compliments of the day,” Hatch requested an audience with no less a figure than General Grant's Chief of Staff. Three Southern dignitaries had just arrived from Richmond, he said, to meet with President Lincoln for the purpose of ending the war. The general was expecting them. They would wait for his pass in Petersburg, and hoped to reach his headquarters that night. Stunned, no doubt, to hear it, Parker promised a quick reply, the officers returned to their lines, and a Northern lieutenant colonel came out to speak with Hatch.

Rumor was on the wing on the overlooking parapets. From the moment the flag of truce appeared, Parker said, “the enemy and our men watched the whole proceeding in silence until its import was made manifest.” In a triumph of military intelligence, its import was made manifest in both armies simultaneously, and both started shouting.

As the officers down in no-man's-land walked on and off the stage, applauded from the balconies, “the works were covered with men, yelling, cheering, and making every demonstration of joy at the prospect of
having no more fighting to do.” The news “spread like a contagion” as officers of every degree went “flying on horseback in all directions” to pass the jubilant word. A citizen of Fort Hell recalled how “very soon a bit of white cloth stuck on the end of a stick or ramrod could be seen floating from the top of each picket post on both sides.” With the winter sun shining on a hundred daubs of white, some enterprising men ventured out into no-man's-land, scanning the lunar landscape in search of lead or fuel. Entertainment was provided while the scavengers plied their trades. “One of our boys invited a reb to come out on neutral ground and have a free fight,” a Union man said. “The reb whipped the Yank, when each returned to their respective sides amid loud and prolonged cheers from the rebs.”

Monday morning broke cold and sunny, and thousands of men and boys stood up in perfect safety to watch the doves fly through the lines, only to be disappointed. The disconcerting word was spread that the War Department was holding them up, but the truce stayed in place like a second day of Christmas. With the dignity characteristic of his publication, the
New York Times
correspondent on the siege line allowed that there was “considerable excitement” about the prospect of getting out of it alive, but the
Times
was skeptical of peace talks. “Our men know that peace is not to be gained by smooth words. ‘Talk is cheap,' said one the other day.”

On the following morning, a wire came through from Grant's headquarters, producing shouts of joy. The general's senior aide was on his way to the front to receive the Rebel peace commission. The word came none too soon. In the course of the past two days, so many men and boys had been crossing over to “confer with the enemy,” a Northern soldier said, that both sides had posted guards. Otherwise, “the blue and the gray would have got so mixed up, that so far as regards these two armies, the war would have ended right
there
and
then,
in spite of all officers and orders to the contrary.”