Tarnished Victory Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations and Maps

  Preface

  PART I

  Inscription Rude in Virginia’s Woods

  The Mouldering Coat and Cuddled-up Skeleton

  From Their Graves in the Trenches

  Photos 1

  PART II

  She with Thin Form Presently Drest in Black

  Horseman and Horse They Knew

  From Charred Atlanta Marching

  Photos 2

  PART III

  With Burning Woods Our Skies Are Brass

  Forests of Bayonets

  No More to Know the Drum

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Sources and Acknowledgments

  Index

  Copyright © 2011 by William Marvel

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Marvel, William.

  Tarnished victory : finishing Lincoln’s war / William Marvel.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-547-42806-2

  1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Campaigns. 2. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Military leadership. I. Title.

  E470.M38 2011

  973.7'3—dc22 2011009156

  eISBN 978-0-547-60779-5

  v2.0114

  To the camaraderie of two boys

  who fended off many a Yankee charge

  from behind South Conway’s stone walls

  in that memorable summer of 1961

  List of Illustrations and Maps

  All illustrations courtesy of the Library of Congress unless otherwise credited.

  BEGINNING [>]

  Chauncey and Sarah Hill (Minnesota Historical Society)

  The Wilderness battlefield

  Union wounded awaiting treatment

  Armory Square Hospital

  The 9th Veteran Reserve Corps

  Andersonville prison camp

  North Anna River pontoon-bridge construction

  Artillery-damaged house

  Confederate defenses outside Atlanta

  Bombproofs inside Fort Sedgwick

  Atlanta after capture

  Phil Sheridan at Cedar Creek

  Lincoln’s chief cabinet officers

  Interior Secretary John P. Usher

  Congressman Thaddeus Stevens

  Senator Ben Wade

  BEGINNING [>]

  Allatoona Pass

  Republican political print maligning George McClellan

  Spectators outside Nashville

  South Carolina swampland

  Edward R. S. Canby

  Lincoln’s second inauguration

  Flag raising inside Fort Sumter

  Political print linking Northern dissidents to Lincoln assassination

  The Bennett farm

  Andersonville Cemetery (National Archives)

  The steamboat Sultana

  The Grand Review

  Lincoln assassination military commission

  The Veteran in a New Field

  Selling a Freedman to Pay His Fine

  A former slave, 1937

  MAPS

  All maps are by Catherine Schneider.

  Theater of War [>]

  Between the Potomac and the James [>]

  The Siege [>]

  The War in the East [>]

  Sherman’s War [>]

  The War in the West [>]

  Preface

  Writing late in April of 1864 to his mother, back in Confederate Texas, Major Thomas Goree reminded her, “God has certainly blessed our armies this year. Whenever we have met the enemy . . . the victory has been ours, with apparently very little effort on our part.” He listed seven states where Southern arms could claim recent triumphs. Of the actions he alluded to, only the repulse of forty thousand Union soldiers on Louisiana’s Red River involved what would have been considered significant fighting and casualties as the fourth year of the Civil War began, but Goree assured his mother that all his comrades in Robert E. Lee’s army shared his “great confidence” that peace and independence would soon be theirs.1 Wishful thinking and exaggerated accounts of minor exploits helped to maintain or restore such confidence for many loyal Confederate citizens and soldiers that spring, but even without such artificial stimuli a genuine conviction survived in the seceded states that the battle would ultimately be won. A comprehensive examination of the military situation, or the condition of Southern agricultural and industrial systems, might have fractured the foundations of that faith, but such examinations were not readily conducted, and in any case faith often persists in the face of the most contradictory evidence.

  Despite signal Union victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga in the second half of 1863, Confederate confidence still leaned heavily on the expectation of defeating Union armies in the field. Major Goree had seen more of the winning side of the war, even during a season in the Western theater, where rebel armies routinely failed, and experience allowed him to imagine that General Lee could save the new nation by destroying a Union army roughly twice the size of his own. That dream dissipated through the spring and summer of 1864, as the principal armies in Virginia and Georgia fell steadily backward under the pressure of greater numbers and Ulysses Grant’s coordinated grand strategy, losing both the tactical initiative and more soldiers than they could ever replace. Thereafter, rebel hopes lay more in endurance than in military prowess, with much emphasis on the 1864 presidential election.

  North and South, the campaign to unseat Abraham Lincoln was viewed with equal exaggeration as an expression of the Northern people’s readiness to give up the fight. On that assumption, ardent Confederates hoped he would be cast from office, and with a war for the national destiny in the balance President Lincoln came much closer to that fate than his ten-point margin of the popular vote seemed to suggest. It was a measure of dissatisfaction with the administration’s war, or wartime policies, that Lincoln’s Democratic opponent, George McClellan, won enough popular votes to have secured a majority of the electoral college, had they been distributed a little differently. When Lincoln survived the election, stubborn advocates of Southern independence could cling only to the prospect of holding out until the next one, in 1868, but a surprising number of rebels in and out of uniform embraced that daunting determination.

  Belief in both Confederate military capacity and Southern obstinacy flourished in the loyal states, too, as the great armies heaved from their winter’s slumber and swarmed toward each other for a fourth bloody year. As firm a supporter of forcible reunion as the affluent New Yorker George Templeton Strong sensed a perilous degree of impatience with the economic and human cost of a war that multitudes considered unwinnable, or not worth pursuing. Writing in the wake of the Union disasters hailed by Major Goree, Strong feared overwhelming public outrage at anything short of quick and complete success on the battlefield. While the progress of the spring campaigns did not constitute decisive success, it did postpone any crescendo of complaint, but when the war bogged down at midsummer the cry for peace again rose high and clear above the fray. Defeat, through frustration and discouragement, seemed possible until near the very end. Yankee soldiers and newspapers described increasingly numerous signs of imminent Confederate collapse after the November election, but the administration’s friends had been retailing similar observ
ations for three years, crippling the credibility of such claims, and many in the North doubted that the South could ever be beaten. While Union cavalry and William Sherman’s relentless infantry pushed the remnants of rebel armies all over the rest of the map, Lee’s ragged divisions kept those doubts alive by occasionally trouncing Grant’s troops in Virginia, embarrassing the vain and aggressive Phil Sheridan as late as ten days prior to the surrender at Appomattox.2

  Defeatism attracts a particular opprobrium in wartime, as though anything less than a willingness to fight to the death amounts to treason, but by the spring of 1864 some of the most loyal supporters of Lincoln and his war began to show subtle evidence of the ennui that long contests inevitably breed. The politically supportive father of one conscientious soldier applauded tales of widespread reenlistment among the Union army’s veterans, but he revealed a disposition to avoid any more sacrifices of his own, if possible: he urged his own son not to sign up for another term, and to accept a discharge before his first enlistment expired, if the opportunity offered. The wife of one of the most senior generals in the U.S. Army wondered what good could possibly come of all the bloodletting. Ten days before Major Goree wrote his optimistic view of Confederate prospects, the commanding general of the Army of the Potomac admitted to his wife that he sometimes felt “very despondent” about the war ever ending, or of coming out of it alive. That April, even President Lincoln seemed to recognize that the war had become a liability, for which he sought to escape political responsibility.3

  The intensity of the exhilaration, dejection, and uncertainty felt by those who witnessed the worst of all American conflicts is often diminished in the telling, and especially in those stage-by-stage analyses that usually follow a predictable if spasmodic pattern of gradual Union dominance. A chronological perspective affords a better view of the degree of pessimism and opposition that infected the Northern population, as well as a better understanding of why it existed. This book concludes a four-volume history of the Civil War that began with Mr. Lincoln Goes to War, each volume of which encompasses a thirteen-month segment, beginning just before South Carolina militia fired the first shot at the Star of the West and ending with the Grand Review, a few days after the war’s final volley had been delivered in faraway Texas.

  Most multivolume histories of the war have tended to emphasize the more attractive elements of the story—commemorating the abundant heroism, celebrating the restoration of the Union, and hailing the eradication of slavery. Those works frequently overlook that much of the heroism was wasted by military ineptitude and political perfidy; they usually ignore that the restored Union was no longer a voluntary community, and forget that the war did not really eradicate human bondage. Although none of those historians do, or could, deny the tragedy of the conflict, neither do any allow it to cloud the overall theme of glorious triumph. Yet it would be difficult to imagine a more inefficient and undesirable path to the original goal of reunion, or to the subsequent aim of emancipation. Because the leaders of that period chose to address their differences with the sword, it is now impossible to know with any certainty whether, sometime between the Civil War of the 1860s and the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, those issues might not have been resolved more satisfactorily, less acrimoniously, and without resort to such an orgy of violence. Neither, however, can it be confidently claimed—although many seem to believe as much—that the actors of that day took the best, or only, courses available to them.

  Intolerant nationalism made it dangerous to speak against going to war in the days following Fort Sumter, and that necessarily muted the volume of opposition to coercion, but a vocal minority of Northerners nevertheless denounced Lincoln’s decision to fight. On May 4, 1861, while militia and volunteers gathered in Washington in response to the first call for troops, the Democratic Standard of Concord, New Hampshire, warned its readers that the country was diving headlong into something much worse than anyone anticipated. “When our land is filled with widows and orphans,” wrote the editor, “and our homes [are] draped in mourning as they will be in two short years, and we then find our brothers of the same race still unconquered, all will be for peace.” Those prophetic words went unheeded, but not unpunished, and three months later the office of the Democratic Standard was destroyed by a Unionist mob led by some of the state’s returning ninety-day heroes.4 The prudent scoffed at the common belief in a quick triumph over supposedly halfhearted rebels, warning that victory would require vast armies and years of bloody struggle. Some added that, even if Union forces prevailed in such a cataclysm, it would take decades of military occupation to reconcile Southerners to reunion by force, and in fact the additional postwar demands for immediate emancipation and black suffrage made that prediction especially accurate. As so often happens, the determination to win the peace fell far short of the enthusiasm for going to war, and the victors finally settled for a sullen reunion only by sacrificing the freedmen to a reconstructed version of slavery.

  PART I

  LIKE SNOWS THE CAMPS ON SOUTHERN HILLS

  1

  Inscription Rude in Virginia’s Woods

  OLD YANKEES WOULD remember the spring of 1864 as a phenomenal sugaring season. In the Androscoggin Valley of western Maine, Edgar Powers tapped the trunks of 118 maples on March 9, and by April 8 he had boiled down 379 pounds of sugar and syrup, despite one cold week when no sap ran. April 11 brought a heavy, wet snowstorm that covered most of New England, and more fell in the third week of the month. New Englanders believed that snow would prolong the run, and indeed farmers in southern New Hampshire were still sugaring off past the middle of April. On the upper reaches of Vermont’s West River it was nearly May before they began taking down their buckets.1

  Two thousand miles to the west, where the Missouri River found its source in the shadows of the Bitterroot Mountains, the scattered residents of what would soon become Montana Territory also saw unseasonable cold and late snow. They, too, had had a profitable season, however, and many of the miners were preparing to cross over the Rockies on the long road back to civilization as soon as the weather broke, taking their accumulated gold where it could buy so much more than in the costly boomtowns of Virginia City and Bannack. Others turned their sights several hundred miles north, to the Kootenai country of Idaho, where men were rumored to be sifting as much as six pounds of gold a day from their claims. Such riches lured migrants up the big river by the hundreds. Down in the lower corner of Dakota Territory, entrepreneurs worked hard to assure that the Missouri remained the dominant route to the gold fields; scoffing at the notion of a long road over the prairie from Saint Paul, they lobbied the government for a string of forts to protect the pilgrims who would buy their last load of supplies from Yankton merchants. Three thousand mounted volunteers from Iowa, Minnesota, and the territories gathered at Sioux City that spring to satisfy those constituents, and Brigadier General Alfred Sully came up from Saint Louis to lead them against the Sioux in and beyond the Black Hills.2

  This Sully, a West Point graduate and the son of a renowned portrait painter, had come out to the Indian country after a contretemps in the East the previous spring, in which his superiors disliked his handling of a mutiny. He had served in the West before, but most of the troopers in his new brigade had not, and had never dreamed that they would. The vast majority of them had enlisted under the expectation (which some newspapermen mistook for a desire) that they would go south to fight the Confederate army or occupy captured territory in the Southern states. Low water kept the expedition on the Iowa side of the river weeks longer than anyone had anticipated; by the time Sully started into Dakota Territory at the end of spring, he was fielding reports of raids by the “warlike Uncpapas,” who were so brazen as to demand compensation for the buffalo and timber taken from their lands to feed white settlers and Missouri River steamboat furnaces. When he finally passed Fort Pierre, Sully found the Hunkpapas and other Sioux holding ominous tribal conventicles.3

  The labors and tribulations o
f Sully’s command escaped the notice of the rest of the country, except for those few with an immediate relative in the gold fields or the frontier army. From New England to the Continental Divide and beyond, the Southern rebellion occupied most people’s minds to one degree or another that sodden spring. On the upper Missouri the war with the Confederates posed a more hypothetical interest, for so many men from that sparsely settled expanse had volunteered to fight Indians that no draft ever intruded on the territories. That—and the hope for government troops to encourage the emigrant trade their way—may have contributed to the fervent editorial support that Abraham Lincoln and his war enjoyed in that region. More evidence of dissent surfaced from the Mississippi eastward, where men as old as forty-five stood a good chance of being forced into the contest, and even those who brayed loudest for aggressive war often strove to stay clear of the fighting themselves.4

  “I do not want to go,” insisted Judson Bemis, a Saint Louis physician who very much wanted to see the Confederacy crushed, and who had made so much money the previous year that his income tax assessment alone exceeded three times the annual pay of a Union soldier.5 He could afford the price of a substitute or commutation if he were drafted, but those of less means than the doctor often cherished less ardor for the war than he, and had to devise other methods of avoiding service. The young men in one Ohio family simply scattered, keeping a step ahead of the enrollment officers or evading them completely. “I shant go if there is any Honest way of getting Out of it,” one of them informed his father, and constant travel seemed as honest a method as any: he drifted across Iowa and into Nebraska, while one of his brothers fled to Canada West.6