America Aflame (60 page)

Few events reflected the Confederacy's desperation more than the attempt to arm and free slaves. The scheme was ill advised for two reasons. First, tens of thousands of slaves had already left their masters, and 150,000 of them were fighting for the Union. There was little incentive for slaves to take up arms against the same men who liberated them. Second, if the slaves were capable of bailing out a failing regime, then the entire theory supporting their enslavement was wrong. Pro-slavery ideology rested on the premise of black inferiority. Confederate general and politician Howell Cobb struck at the heart of the contradiction: “If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.… The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution.” The northern press saw the proposal as both an act of desperation and the height of all contradictions. “The structure can not be raised,”
Harper's
pointed out, “without knocking away the corner-stone!” Besides, if slaves were content with their condition, why would they risk death for a freedom they supposedly neither wanted nor needed?
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Sentiment for arming slaves began to build in the South in early 1864 when enlistments dried up. Patrick Cleburne, a division commander in the Army of Tennessee and a native of Ireland, presented a document proposing the idea at a general officers' meeting in January 1864. Davis quashed the proposal and forbade further discussion of the issue as too divisive.

As the military situation worsened during the latter part of the year, discussion resumed. By November, the topic of conscripting slaves was the talk of the army. “I had much rather gain our independence without it but if necessary I say put them in and make them fight,” was Marion Fitzpatrick's view. More typical, though, was the reaction of Charles Baughman, a Rebel soldier, who stated, “I think it is the worse measure that could be proposed. The army would not submit to it and half if not more than half would lay down their guns if forced to fight with negroes.” Robert E. Lee offered a crucial endorsement for both freedom and fighting. He believed that emancipated slaves would prefer to fight with the Confederacy rather than with the Yankees. “I think we could at least do as well with them as the enemy,” he predicted. On March 13, the Confederate Congress narrowly passed a bill to enlist black soldiers, but not to free them. Davis, however, issued an executive order emancipating slaves upon enlistment thus assuring that they would fight as free men. The Confederacy enrolled and drilled its first black recruits, and a Richmond newspaper informed readers that they were drilling with “as much aptness and proficiency … as is usually shown by any white troops we have ever seen.” The paper predicted that freedmen fighting in Union armies would desert to the Rebel side. The war ended before any black troops appeared on a battlefield.
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A walk through a southern town on a Sunday morning in March revealed in human terms the desperation of the Confederate cause. Silence. No church bells tolled, as congregations had melted down their bells for military ordnance. Women, some with young children, begged openly in the streets. Runaway inflation had rendered even simple items beyond the reach of many. Potatoes, for example, cost twenty-five dollars per bushel at a time when soldiers' pay was eleven dollars a month. Few men were about. Basic maintenance on buildings and streets ceased, offering a portrait of dilapidation that reflected the sagging spirit of the citizens. Inside one home, parched corn is the only thing edible for the women and children. In another house, a young woman tends to her boy, wounded by the bursting of a federal shell. In another dwelling, a woman rocks her child beside a cold hearth as there is no wood to kindle a fire. Schools were closed and churches were empty not only of people, but also of furniture and whatever else of value they possessed. There was no paper to publish a newspaper or write a letter. Money was scarcer, even though it was close to worthless.
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Little wonder that the damp weather did not darken the mood of the growing crowd in front of the East Portico. The Confederacy tottered at the precipice of extinction. Only a push from General Grant was necessary to end the rebellion. At that very moment, Sherman's war machine was churning into North Carolina. It was only a matter of time. A little after twelve noon, the president appeared on the platform. The rain ceased, the fog lifted, and rays of sunshine pierced the clouds. God blessed the man and the nation.

In the crowd before him, Lincoln recognized Frederick Douglass, to whom he nodded. Near a column of the portico, but out of Lincoln's sight, stood the actor John Wilkes Booth. As the president was introduced, “a roar of applause shook the air.”
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Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address puzzled many in the audience, inspired others, and left some cold. Most newspaper accounts of the speech were critical or politely praised its brevity; it was the second-shortest inaugural address in American history, at 701 words. It began in a low key and did not raise its tone conspicuously from then on. The opening sentence was almost apologetic for the short speech that would follow: “At this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first.” His only comment on the status of war appeared a few sentences later in the same low-key tone: “The progress of our arms … is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.” In other words, everyone knows what is happening at the front, so there is no point in discussing it. In the remainder of the speech, the tone was even more detached—Lincoln rarely used personal pronouns in this address.
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The scene at President Lincoln's Second Inauguration, March 4, 1865. The president may be seen in the center of this photo by Alexander Gardner, hatless and looking down at a sheet of paper in front of a small podium. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Lincoln did not blame the South for the war. Rather, the war happened despite good intentions on both sides: “All dreaded it [the war]—all sought to avert it.… Both parties deprecated war.… And the war came.” Nor was the cause of the war unequivocally self-evident: “All knew that this interest [slavery] was, somehow, the cause of the war.” The word “somehow” qualified the cause. He took no side in the conflict: “Neither party expected for the war the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each side looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.”

The speech took a religious turn in the third paragraph. At a place where listeners could have expected the president to invoke God's grace on the Union, he instead invoked God's inscrutability. “Both [sides] read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.” Yet God might not favor either side. “In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time.”

Even on the question of slavery, first as a cause and then as an institution, there was no certitude of sin, a significant departure from the “higher law” doctrine advocated by many Republicans. Paraphrasing Genesis 3:19, Lincoln admitted, “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces,” then, switching to Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, “but let us judge not that we be not judged.” As the leader of a party that transformed the slavery issue from a political question to a moral imperative, Lincoln refused to judge the slaveholder or the South.

If slavery caused the war—and that was not certain to Lincoln—the mark was not on the South alone, but on the nation: “He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came.” Both sides, therefore, were complicit in slavery, and both sides must suffer God's judgment, if that was indeed His purpose. For this reason, only God, not men, could end the war. This was the Puritan theology of his father, not the evangelical tenets of free will and man's transcendence. Man figured little in the outcome; here was God's preordained plan. With both sides responsible for the war and slavery, and with the outcome in God's hands, postwar America should focus on reconciliation, not retribution. The latter judgment rested with God in any case. Lincoln concluded the address calling on all Americans to dig deep in the reservoir of mercy for the sake of a lasting peace:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

More a sermon about the limits of man, the inscrutability of God, and the nature of forgiveness—views that challenged prevailing evangelical Protestant beliefs—than a political speech, the Second Inaugural did not receive good notices from the leading Republican newspapers. With the end of a bloody war in sight, the press wanted less contemplation and more information. The
New York Times
expressed its disappointment in a petulant editorial: “He makes no boasts of what he has done, or promises of what he will do. He does not re-expound the principles of the war; does not re-declare the worth of the Union; does not re-proclaim that absolute submission to the Constitution is the only peace.” Horace Greeley's
New York Tribune
regretted the absence of an “appeal to the rebels for a cessation of hostilities.”
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Lincoln managed to touch a chord with some Republicans. Charles Francis Adams Jr. was in the crowd that day. Adams, who was from a prominent New England family that had given the nation two presidents, wrote to his father, who had served as Lincoln's ambassador to Great Britain, “That rail-splitting lawyer is one of the wonders of the day. Once at Gettysburg and now again on a greater occasion he has shown a capacity for rising to the demands of the hour. This inaugural strikes me in its grand simplicity and directness as being for all time the historical keynote of the war.” Frederick Douglass acknowledged that many around him in the crowd did not approve the conciliatory tone of the address. He was invited to a reception at the White House that evening (his third such visit), but two policemen barred him from the door until Lincoln spotted him and shouted out, “Here comes my friend Douglass.… I am glad to see you. I saw you in the crowd today, listening to my inaugural address; how did you like it?” Douglass replied, “Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.” Later, Douglass observed, “The address sounded more like a sermon than a state paper.” Lincoln was pleased with the speech, but he wrote to a friend, “I believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.”
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Five weeks earlier, Henry Ward Beecher, the self-righteous conscience of antebellum America, gave a sermon at Fort Sumter to commemorate the recapture of that landmark by federal troops. He charged, “The whole guilt of this war rests upon the ambitious, educated, plotting, political leaders of the South. They have shed this ocean of blood.… A day will come when God will reveal judgment, and arraign at his bar these mighty miscreants.… And then, [they] shall be whirled aloft and plunged downward forever and forever in an endless retribution.” This imagined a very different future from the one Lincoln had suggested.
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The Second Inaugural reflected the evolution of Lincoln's thinking on both religion and the war. Perhaps his most impressive quality was the ability to apply new facts to alter old opinions. It was evident in his beliefs on racial equality, on the issue of slavery and the arming of freedmen, on the soundness of paper money, and on reconstructing the southern states; it was also evident in his pursuit of military strategy. Today, Lincoln would be open to the charge of inconsistency—“flip-flopping”—but it was his informed flexibility and his remarkable intuition of what the public was thinking and what it needed to hear from a leader at a given point in time that marked his success as a man and as a president.

For a nation that believed weighty political issues could be parsed into good or evil, Lincoln's words offered a complexity that many found difficult to accept. The war had thrashed the certitude of evangelical Protestantism, its belief that mankind could perfect itself, its confidence in the approaching millennium and America's special role in that event, and its hubristic affirmation that it was possible to know God and His intentions. If any specific event of the war buried the Second Great Awakening, it was Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.