Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (82 page)

However, Hood’s 39,000 men were pitifully unequipped for a November campaign. Hood himself was too much of a physical wreck from his wounds, and the opium and alcohol he took as a cure for pain, to seize the opportunities thrown into his path. On November 30, at Franklin, Tennessee, Hood caught up with part of the force Thomas was supposed to be using to watch him, and attempted to overwhelm it by throwing his men at the Yankees in a daylong frontal assault. All those tactics did was leave Hood with 6,300 casualties, including twelve of his general officers and fifty-five regimental commanders, while the Federals slipped away north to join Thomas at Nashville.
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Unwilling to admit defeat, Hood advanced on Nashville, where Thomas had concentrated his 60,000 men, and tried to besiege it. Grant was frantic to see Hood destroyed, and warned Thomas, “If you delay attack longer the mortifying spectacle will be witnessed of a rebel army moving for the Ohio River. … I am in hopes of receiving a dispatch from you to-day announcing that you have moved.” However, Thomas would not be hurried, even by Ulysses S. Grant. “They treat me as if I were a boy and incapable of planning a campaign,” complained the normally unflappable Thomas. “If they will let me alone, I will fight this battle just as soon as it can be done.” Only when he was satisfied of the odds, on December 15, 1864, did Thomas move out from Nashville and smash Hood’s army in a running two-day battle. Hood fell back into Mississippi, where he found that he could rally only 15,000 men. The ill-starred Army of Tennessee was finished, and so was Hood, who resigned on January 13, 1865. Also finished, for that matter, was the Confederacy. Just as Grant had
predicted a year earlier, and Sherman had predicted in October, the real heart of the Confederate war effort lay along the terrible line that stretched from Fort Henry to Savannah, and once that line was in Federal hands, the Virginia theater, along with Lee and his fabled army, was living on borrowed time.
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The summer of 1864 was one of the gloomiest seasons of the war for Lincoln and his administration. Grant was bogged down below Petersburg after a campaign that had cost the Union staggering casualties, Sherman was still struggling slowly toward Atlanta, and the
Alabama
was still burning Northern merchantmen on the high seas. To add insult to injury, Lee detached from the Army of Northern Virginia four infantry divisions and four cavalry brigades under General Jubal Early (about 14,000 men) and sent them on a raid into the Shenandoah Valley. Lee hoped that Early’s raid, like “Stonewall” Jackson’s in 1862, would draw off Federal troops from the Petersburg siege. In the event, not only did Early chase the Federals out of the Shenandoah, but on July 11 he even dared to cross the Potomac and make a lunge at Washington. Grant was forced to pull an entire infantry corps (Horatio Wright’s 6th Corps) out of the Petersburg lines and send it to Washington, where the troops arrived just in time to fend off an attack by Early on the outer ring of Washington’s fortifications. Early merely drew off into Maryland, where he extorted immense ransoms from the citizens of Hagerstown and Frederick. When the citizens of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, refused to pay a ransom of $500,000 for their town, Early unhesitatingly burned the town to the ground. “The entire heart or body of the town is burned,” wrote one despairing civilian. “The Courthouse, Bank, Town Hall, German Reformed Printing Establishment, every store and hotel in the town, and every mill and factory in the space indicated, and two churches, were burnt,” along with “three and four hundred dwellings… leaving at least twenty-five hundred persons without a home or a hearth.”
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Lincoln faced opposition from other quarters than just Jubal Early in the summer of 1864. Supreme Court interference in his war powers and proclamations remained a vivid possibility until Roger Taney’s death in October, and the president continued to endure criticism and harassment from the Democrats, and especially
from the Peace Democrats, who seized on Grant’s overland campaign as an example of Republican butchery and incompetence. But with the fall of 1864 meaning another presidential election, Lincoln also now had to deal with a rising tide of disgruntlement from within his own Republican party, some of it within his own cabinet.

Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln’s secretary of the Treasury, had always considered himself better presidential material than Lincoln, and he had been sorely disappointed in 1860 when he was passed over for the Republican nomination. “He never forgave Lincoln for the crime of having been preferred for President over him,” wrote Alexander McClure, the prominent Pennsylvania Republican, “and while he was a pure and conscientious man, his prejudices and disappointments were vastly stronger than himself, and there never was a day during his continuance in the Cabinet when he was able to approach justice to Lincoln.”
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Chase’s disappointment had not abated after three years of serving as Treasury secretary, and he was particularly incensed at Lincoln’s habit of parceling out tasks to the members of his cabinet as though they were so many errand boys, rather than paying earnest heed to the presumably wiser counsel that Chase longed to unburden himself of. Now, with the 1864 election looming large and the armies conquering little, Lincoln was looking more and more like a liability to the Republican Party, and Chase’s moment seemed to have come at last.

In December 1863 Chase’s supporters began building a boom for Chase as a dump-Lincoln candidate. The marriage of his daughter, Kate Chase, to Rhode Island governor William Sprague gave Chase a foothold in New England politics and unlocked the Sprague fortune and the blockhouse-like Greek Revival mansion at 6th and E Streets in Washington that Sprague bought for the secretary’s political uses. In February 1864 Chase’s political manager, Kansas senator Samuel C. Pomeroy, arranged for the publication of a pro-Chase pamphlet,
The Next Presidential Election
, which declared that a second term for Lincoln would be a national calamity, that the next president needed to be a statesman with a record of advanced economic thinking, and that Lincoln was manifestly inferior to Jefferson Davis as an executive. Though the pamphlet did not expressly advocate a Chase presidency as the alternative, it was clear that no more likely person to fill such a need was then living in the Republic than Salmon P. Chase. The pamphlet itself was a cheap, discreditable essay in political character assassination, and it looked all the more cheap for having been distributed to Senator John Sherman’s Ohio constituents by means of Sherman’s postage-free frank.
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The impact might not have been nearly so embarrassing for Chase had not Pomeroy also boiled down its essential points into a “strictly private” circular letter to Republican Party backers two weeks later naming Chase—“a statesman of rare ability and an administrator of the highest order” whose “private character furnishes the surest guarantee of economy and purity in the management of public affairs”—as the proper successor to Lincoln. The idea that Chase would sit in Lincoln’s cabinet and encourage his political foot soldiers to stab Lincoln in the back made party regulars blanch. Chase rushed to Lincoln to swear that he had known nothing about the Pomeroy circular, and he even offered to resign from the Cabinet. Lincoln pointedly gave Chase’s protests a chilly reception, and, knowing that it would be easier to keep a leash on Chase’s ambition inside the cabinet rather than outside, refused the resignation. The Chase boomlet had worried Lincoln a good deal, and McClure remembered that it was the only occasion when he had seen Lincoln “unbalanced … like one who had got into water far beyond his depth.”
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Lincoln now had Chase where he wanted him: Chase’s chances for the nomination vanished into thin air, and even the Republicans in his native Ohio rejected any notion of his candidacy. “The Pomeroy Circular has helped Lincoln more than all other things together,” wrote one of John Sherman’s constituents. At the end of June Chase offered again to resign over a minor disagreement about patronage, and this time Lincoln accepted his offer. “You and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relation which it seems can not be overcome, or longer sustained,” Lincoln wrote coldly. He replaced him with William Pitt Fessenden, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee. That December, Lincoln got rid of Chase once and for all by kicking him upstairs to become chief justice of the Supreme Court, a position that no one had any hope of using as a springboard for the presidency.
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The kind of clash Lincoln had with Chase was really little more than a cloakroom dispute, and it paled by comparison with the struggle Lincoln faced when his fellow Republicans openly declared their disagreements with him on substantial questions of war policy. The Thirty-eighth Congress, which had been formed in the painful 1862 elections (and which met for its first session on December 7, 1863), counted 102 Republican Representatives in the House and 36 Republicans in the Senate, which gave them a clear majority over against the 75 Democratic Representatives in the House and 9 Democrats in the Senate.
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Of the Republican senators,
seventeen of them formed an especially critical core of radical Republican determination. They expressed themselves time and again in pressing for the swiftest and most extreme solutions to the problems of war policy, including emancipation and black civil rights.

The figurehead of the Senate Radicals was Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, and no one could match Sumner’s eloquence in pleading for an aggressive prosecution of the war, emancipation, and racial equality. While Sumner was a great talker, he had few skills as a practical politician. Far more talented among the Radicals in wielding the political knife was Benjamin Franklin Wade, crude and competent, and the author of the greatest anti-slavery
bon mot
in the history of the Congress. (In the debates in the 1850s over the extension of the slavery into the territories, one southern senator shed eloquent tears over the Republicans’ refusal to allow him to take his old black mammy to Kansas with him; Wade replied that he had no objection to the senator’s taking his mammy with him to Kansas, only to selling her once he got there.) Sumner and Wade were joined in radicalism by Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, and the unfortunate Pomeroy of Kansas, and Wilson, Wade, Sumner, Trumbull, and Chandler all sat together as one phalanx on the right side of the aisle on the floor of the Senate.
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Most of the Radicals were old veterans of the anti-slavery struggle, and many had even longer ties to the old Whig Party; as a result, they were inclined to regard Lincoln as a political novice. “I begin to despair of ever putting down this rebellion through the instrumentality of this administration,” raged Ben Wade; Lincoln’s ideas “could only come of one, born of poor white trash, and educated in a slave state.” While Lincoln hesitated over colonization, compensated emancipation, and the recruitment of black soldiers, the Radical Republicans used the majority they achieved in the Senate after the withdrawal of the Southern senators to lead the way in expelling Democratic senators of dubious loyalty, in abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, in amending the Militia Act to open up recruitment to black soldiers, in repealing the Fugitive Slave Law, in barring the issue of charters to District of Columbia streetcar companies that practiced racial discrimination, and in equalizing pay for the USCT regiments.
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The conventional wisdom about these Radical Republicans sees them as vengeful, ambitious men, eager to use emancipation as a means of subduing the South once and for all to Northern free-labor capitalism. There may be some debate about their lust for vengeance or self-aggrandizement,
but it is certainly true enough that they had embraced the protection of Northern industry through high tariffs, the opening of western public lands to homesteaders as a means of avoiding the formation of a propertyless urban proletariat, and the replacement of slavery in the South with free labor. By these means, argued Wade, the Union would “build up a free yeomanry capable of maintaining an independent republican Government forever.”
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“For nearly two generations, the slaveholding class, into whose power the Government early passed, dictated the policy of the nation,” wrote Henry Wilson. It scarcely took the war to convince them that the South was an obstacle to the triumph of Republicanism and needed a root-and-branch re-creation. The Radicals crafted the confiscation bills in 1861 and 1862 and called for the treatment of rebels as traitors whose penalty, “as established by our fathers, was death by the halter.” Their no-compromise attitude and determination to grant the Republican Party a lock on the national government frequently made them impatient with Lincoln’s administration. In 1862 they tried to unseat Seward as secretary of state, and a few obliquely suggested that even Lincoln should resign.
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Lincoln, by contrast, has been portrayed as a moderate and far-seeing statesman, desiring only to end the war without bitterness. Lincoln, after all, had won the Republican nomination in 1860 precisely on the grounds that he was more of a moderate than Seward or Chase and could win more votes, while his slowness in moving toward emancipation has been interpreted as proof of Lincoln’s distaste for Radicals. Deep in Lincoln’s temperament was a resistance to radical schemes of social change. “In declaring that they would ‘do their duty and leave the consequences to God,’” the abolitionists “merely gave an excuse for taking a course that they were not able to maintain by a fair and full argument. To make this declaration did not show what their duty was.” Sometimes, Lincoln said to his attorney general, the Missourian Edward Bates, these Radical Republicans were “almost fiendish” in their intensity to bully him into agreement with their agenda. “Stevens, Sumner and Wilson, simply haunt me,” Lincoln complained to Missouri senator John B. Henderson. “Wherever I go and whatever way I turn, they are on my trail.”
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