Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (85 page)

McClellan was aware that this would cost him the support of the hard-core Peace Democrats, but he could not reconcile the battles he had fought and the lives that had been lost with a settlement that permitted the North and South simply to walk away from each other like strangers. “I intend to destroy any and all pretense for any possible association of my name to the Peace Party,” McClellan wrote two weeks before the election, “I, for one, could not look in the face of my gallant comrades of the Army & Navy who have survived so many bloody battles, & tell them that their labors and the sacrifices of such numbers of their slain & crippled brethren had been in vain.”
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The result was to divide Democratic loyalties at just the moment when only united effort could hope to upset the incumbent Republicans.

So, almost when it was past expectation, Lincoln was handed hope again for the war—or rather, for both of his wars. On September 22, 1864, Frémont, the Radical splinter candidate, withdrew his competing nomination, and Lincoln was allowed to go on bearing the party banner alone. And not only the banner of the Republicans—in a last appeal to the War Democrats, the Republican nominating convention had chosen as Lincoln’s vice presidential candidate the Tennessee Unionist Democrat Andrew Johnson, and announced they would not run under the banner of the Republican Party only, but as the “National Union Ticket.” On election day, November 8, 1864, Lincoln and Johnson carried 55.1 percent of the popular vote (2.2 million to McClellan’s 1.8 million), and 212 out of 233 electoral votes, while the Republicans/ Unionists in Congress won 145 out of 185 seats in the House and 40 out of 52 in the Senate. Most surprising of all, Lincoln garnered 78 percent of the votes of the soldiers, including the Army of the Potomac, thus destroying forever the mystique of McClellan as the hero of the armies.
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At last, Lincoln had the political mandate that had eluded him for the four years of his first term. He had, at least for the time being, won his political war. It now remained to be seen how he would win the war that still waited for him down below Petersburg.

F
or a man who believed in the “cold, calculating” power of “reason” to order his life, Abraham Lincoln retained a peculiar interest in the folk religion of dreams, portents, and signs. Herndon thought Lincoln was “superstitious,” and claimed that Lincoln had consulted a fortune-teller “to give him his history, his end, and his fate,” and once tried to cure his son Robert of a dog’s bite with “a supposed mad stone.” Lincoln once described to John Hay and Francis Carpenter a portent he had seen just after his nomination for the presidency in 1860. Exhausted from the celebrations, Lincoln was resting “on a lounge in my chamber” when he saw a reflection of himself in the “swinging glass” that sat on top of a bureau opposite the couch. “My face, I noticed, had two separate and distinct images. … I was a little bothered, perhaps startled, and got up and looked in the glass, but the illusion vanished.” He lay down, the “illusion” returned, “and then I noticed that one of the faces was a little paler—say, five shades—than the other.” He was troubled by the strange double image, and a few days later he tried to conjure it up before a mirror at his home. He did, and it worried Mary, who was sure he was playing with something occult. “She thought it was a sign that I was to be elected to a second term of office and that the paleness of one of the faces was an omen that I should not see life throughout the last term.”
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More than omens in mirrors, it was his dreams that haunted Lincoln. Sad-eyed Willie, who died in 1862, often visited his dreams, and in June 1863, when Mary and his youngest son, Tad Lincoln, were visiting in Philadelphia, Lincoln wired her to put the boy’s small gift pistol away: “I had an ugly dream about him.” But it was the recurring dreams about assassination that increasingly preyed on Lincoln’s mind. In more untroubled moments, Lincoln dismissed people’s fears about assassins. “I have received quite a number of threatening letters since I have been president, and nobody has killed me yet,” he assured a Missouri congressman; “the truth is, I give very little consideration to such things.” But the threats paced more and more around the edges of his consciousness. He alarmed both Mary and his self-appointed bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, by describing a dream in which he saw himself awakened in the White House by the sound of weeping and sobbing. His dream-self moved from room to room in search of the sound until he came to the East Room of the White House, where he found a “throng of mourners,” a guard of soldiers, and a catafalque, where a body was lying in state. Lincoln’s dream-self asked one of the soldiers, “Who is dead in the White House?” The answer was chilling: “The President. He was killed by an assassin.”
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Lamon, whom Lincoln had named United States marshal for the District of Columbia, was already uneasy for Lincoln’s safety in Washington, and on election night in 1864 he went to the extreme of curling up like a guard dog outside Lincoln’s door in a blanket, armed with a collection of knives and revolvers. Lincoln thought Lamon “insane upon the subject of his safety,” but it was a derangement that also possessed the secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, who made sure that Lincoln’s carriage had a secure cavalry escort, that a company of infantry guarded the White House grounds, and that a District of Columbia policeman accompanied the president whenever Lincoln went to the theater.
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Sometimes, though, the dreams pointed to happier conclusions. The dreams about Willie actually gave Lincoln a comfort that eluded the boy’s mother. “Did you ever dream of some lost friend and feel that you were having a sweet communion with him,” Lincoln asked an army staffer. “That is the way I dream of my lost boy Willie.” And there was a particular dream that came back to him again and again, and always just before the arrival of good tidings. In this dream, his dream-self stood on the deck of “some singular, indescribable vessel,” pointed toward a dim shore ahead. He had dreamt this dream just before some of the most important victories of the war, and he had it again in April 1865. As he told his cabinet at a meeting the next morning, he knew that
it meant that good news was once again on the way. “I think it must be from Sherman,” Lincoln explained. “My thoughts are in that direction, as are most of yours.”
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But perhaps the dream had a meaning wider than Sherman. There was a dim shore ahead for the whole nation in the spring of 1865, an unmapped future that would involve reintegrating the Confederate states back into the political Union, bringing freed slaves into the full citizenship that their centuries of unrewarded labor had earned them, and manhandling the old Democratic South into the new Republican future of railroads, markets, and free labor. But, as Lincoln told his cabinet that day, he was confident that his dream was proof that the dimness would yield to certainty, and that everything that was now confused, bloodied, and embittered would all be sorted out at last.

General Grant had been sitting in on the cabinet meeting that morning. When it adjourned, Lincoln asked if the general and his wife would be interested in attending Ford’s Theatre that night, where the Lincolns had promised to go to see actress Laura Keene’s benefit performance of
Our American Cousin
. The general, pleading conflict of schedule, declined. The Lincolns would have to find someone else to join them in the box at the theater that night. Perhaps by that time Lincoln would have heard the good news his dream had promised.
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Sherman’s march across Georgia delivered a fatal body blow to the Confederacy. The fragile network of southern railroad lines had already been badly shaken by Rosecrans’s capture of Chattanooga in 1863, while the fall of Atlanta to Sherman a year later wrecked the single most important rail junction between the lower Confederacy and Virginia. The march to the sea finished off what was left of the shorter regional rail lines in Georgia and made it almost impossible to keep Lee’s army in Virginia supplied with food and ammunition from the granaries and factories of the lower South.

The situation for Lee was made even gloomier by the siege of Petersburg. Lee had dreaded the possibility of a siege being clamped around Richmond and Petersburg ever since McClellan’s Petersburg campaign, since he knew full well that a siege would destroy both his army and the Confederate capital. Pinned through the winter of 1864–65 into a maze of trenches below Petersburg, the James River throttled by the Federal army, soldiers of the besieged army were under the strain of constant day-in, day-out pressure, with none of the usual opportunities between battles for reorganization and reequipment. “Lee’s Miserables” (as they liked to call themselves,
after Victor Hugo’s 1862 best seller,
Les Misérables
) would be shackled to one comparatively small area from which to forage and draw supplies, an area they would quickly eat down to the bare bone. “I have no doubt that there is suffering for want of food,” Lee reported sadly. “The ration is too small for men who have to undergo so much exposure and labor as ours.”
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Only by clinging to the Weldon & Petersburg railroad (which ran south from Petersburg to North Carolina) and the Southside railroad (which ran west to Lynchburg and the Shenandoah Valley) did Lee manage to keep any supplies filtering into the hands of his army. “There is nothing within reach of this army to be impressed,” Lee despondently informed the Confederate secretary of war. “The country is swept clear; our only reliance is upon the railroads.” But even those lines were unsure and vulnerable to Grant’s unceasing pressure. In October, Grant suddenly reached westward from his own lines and cut the Weldon & Petersburg railroad. Later the same month, Philip Sheridan, Grant’s fiery chief of cavalry, tracked down and defeated Jubal Early’s small Confederate force in the Shenandoah, and proceeded to lay waste to the entire valley.

Yet Lee could not simply walk away from Richmond: too much of the vital munitions that armed his soldiers came from Richmond factories; too much of the food that managed to reach his army’s mouths came by the railroads that terminated in Richmond and Petersburg. And so, for the first time in the war, the Army of Northern Virginia began to suffer a crisis in morale. “The common soldier perceived that the cause was lost,” wrote Sara Agnes Pryor, the wife of a Confederate officer. He could read collapse in the streets of Petersburg, since (as Pryor acidly remarked) the town had never been “so healthy”:

No garbage was decaying in the streets. Every particle of animal or vegetable food was consumed, and the streets were clean. Flocks of pigeons would follow the children who were eating bread or crackers. Finally the pigeons vanished having been themselves eaten. Rats and mice disappeared. The poor cats staggered about the streets, and began to die of hunger. … An ounce of meat daily was considered an abundant ration for each member of the family.
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Lee’s men could read collapse even more clearly in the letters that filtered through into the hands of the Confederate soldiers below Petersburg. Those letters now began to tell the terrible tale of civilian starvation, the devastation by Yankee raiders, and the relentless impressment of the ever-shrinking fruits of Southern agriculture by the Confederate War Department. “We have been impressing food and all the necessaries of life from women and children, and have been the mean of driving thousands from their homes in destitute condition,” Lee admitted sadly to James Longstreet in February 1865. The suffering of Confederate women now reached the breaking point, and their letters
began to teem with encouragements to desert from the Army of Northern Virginia. “The Condition of the country at large was one of almost as great deprivation & suffering as the army itself,” wrote Edward Porter Alexander, the chief of artillery in Longstreet’s corps. “Naturally, the wives & mothers left at home wrote longingly for the return of the husbands & sons who were in the ranks in Virginia. And naturally, many of them could not resist these appeals, & deserted in order to return & care for their families.”
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Beginning in early January 1865, men began to desert by the hundreds, and then the thousands. “Since Sherman’s victories,” exulted a soldier in the 20th Maine, “we see the affect it is having on Lee’s Army.” They were even deserting in groups, “not only privates but many officers with them.” Over a period of ten days in February, the army lost 1,094 men to desertion; between February 15 and March 18, 1865, almost 8 percent of Lee’s army disappeared either into the Union lines or into North Carolina. Lee himself turned harsh and punitive in an attempt to stop the flow of desertions. On February 25 he rejected a captured deserter’s appeal for mercy without even reading the appeal, and ordered the man shot. “Hundreds are deserting nightly,” Lee explained to the Confederate adjutant general, Samuel Cooper, “and I cannot keep the army together unless examples are made of such cases.” It did little good. On March 4, George Meade reported to his wife that “deserters still continue to come in, there being 75 yesterday,” and more than half of them brought their weapons with them, a sure sign that it was not a shortage of fight that afflicted them. “If we stay here,” wrote one Union officer who had passed forty deserters through his lines in forty-eight hours, “the Johnnies will all come over before the 4th of July.” Yet Lee and his army remained the one outpost of hope for what remained of the Confederacy. Josiah Gorgas hit emotional bottom in mid-January, feeling the finger of despair on his pulse, until he remembered “the brave army in front of us, sixty thousand strong. As long as Lee’s army remains intact there is no cause for despondency.”
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For Grant, the issue was now to tighten his grip on Petersburg and Richmond, slowly draining away the rebel army’s life. On the other side of the siege lines at Petersburg, the resolve of the Confederates, which had seemed so formidable when the siege began the summer before, was visibly weakening, and the real question increasingly seemed to be whether Grant was going to be able to keep Lee from slipping out of Petersburg before Grant could deliver a knockout blow. As for Sherman, he was opposed by little more than 20,000 Confederates. The old Army of Tennessee had been broken up after
Hood’s resignation, and its last effective pieces shipped over to the Carolinas to join what was left of the forlorn and homeless garrison of Wilmington, North Carolina, to threaten Sherman. At the urging of the Confederate Congress, command of this patchwork army was at last given back to Joseph E. Johnston by a grudging and suspicious Jefferson Davis on February 23, 1865. Sherman was mildly apprehensive at the return of Johnston, but Johnston knew that it was by now too late to do any serious damage to Sherman. “In my opinion these troops form an army too weak to cope with Sherman,” Johnston sighed. All that Lee could advise him was to “hope for the best.”
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