Never Call Retreat (43 page)
Yet some sort of progress was being made—in the mind of the President if nowhere else. His letter to General Banks gave quiet burial to the old project of colonization—the proposal that the country transplant the liberated Negroes in some place beyond the seas. That was simply a plan to evade the problem of racial equality, and he had supported it for a long time. Less than a year earlier he had met with Negro leaders and had pleaded with them to accept colonization, pointing out sadly that "there is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us."
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The unwillingness remained, but now he was hoping to soften it, and he was searching for ways by which the American people could (as he put it) live themselves out of it. In their watch-night services at Philadelphia at the beginning of the year, when they met to pray and sing because the great proclamation was at last being issued, jubilant Negroes had said that the President would never really insist on colonization, and they gave "God's in his heart!" as ground for their belief
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; and although he was following his head rather than his heart, he was justifying their confidence.
He would face up to the problem rather than run from it; and at the year's end he was stronger politically than he had been for a long time. The by-elections had gone heavily in his favor. The Republicans—Unionist Party, technically, since temporary alliances had been made with war Democrats—had carried all the Northern states except New Jersey, good Republican governors like John A. Andrew of Massachusetts and Andrew G. Curtin of Pennsylvania had been re-elected —and Clement Vallandigham had been badly beaten in Ohio.
Vallandigham had survived his Southern exile and had made his way into Canada, and at Windsor in Ontario he had campaigned, in absentia, as Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio; looking formidable as summer began, looking much less so as autumn approached, losing finally to the Unionist John Brough by a record-breaking 100,000 votes. Fate had not been kind to Vallandigham. He was the candidate of despair, and when the people voted most of them had ceased despairing. After Gettysburg and Vicksburg his appeal was blunted, and it became even blunter when John Hunt Morgan, the dashing Confederate cavalryman, led 2400 troopers north of the Ohio River on an unauthorized and wholly meaningless raid. Morgan got into Indiana about the time Lee got into Pennsylvania, and he moved over into Ohio, apparently with some idea of riding eastward to join forces, rallying the Ohio Copperheads as he went; but his men harried the farmers and small-town businessmen so relentlessly that many Copperheads were converted to Republicanism on the spot, and the raid at last flickered out in southeastern Ohio, with Morgan and most of his men taken prisoner. All that had been done was to take votes from Vallandigham.
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Thus Mr. Lincoln had won some sort of endorsement at the polls. So had the Republican radicals, and although for the moment there was happy harmony between the President and the radicals it was unlikely to endure. At bottom they all wanted the same thing—a restored Union and an end to slavery—but the very fact that the election improved their chances of getting it meant that there must soon be a trial of strength because they saw it in such different ways. As Mr. Lincoln had said, the radicals wanted to go to Zion and so did he; but they disagreed with him, both on the best way to get there and on what Zion ought to look like after it had been reached. They were already sniffing suspiciously at the ten percent plan that had been entrusted to General Banks, and when these men had suspicions they neither suppressed them nor kept quiet about them.
What all of this meant was that the President himself and the Northerners who disagreed with him—those who thought he was going much too far, and those who thought he was not going far enough—were looking ahead now to the end of the war, looking with blind hope and tormenting anxiety. Victory was almost being taken for granted, and everyone was trying to prepare for its consequences; the war had grown so far beyond its original dimensions that it was time to define it anew. As they groped for a definition people found themselves looking intently at the war's most terrible single aspect, as if from their own grief and agony they could extract a meaning that would be worth remembering when more grief and agony were demanded of them. On a hilltop at Gettysburg they were about to dedicate a cemetery.
The cemetery had been planned by the governors of the states (the Northern states, that is) whose men had fought at Gettysburg. There was a park-like place across the road from the spot where Southern infantry had broken into Howard's artillery in the hot twilight of the second day, a few rods north of the clump of trees where the battle reached its climax the next afternoon; and in this little park the Union dead were laid to rest. In the fall of 1863 the work had not ended. Re-interments were still taking place, sixty or more every day when the weather permitted, and it would be spring before all was finished. But the dreadful wreckage that littered the field had mostly been cleared away, there was green sod on some of the graves, and it was time for the ceremonies. These would take place on November 19, and a Gettysburg citizen named David Wills, who had charge of the arrangements, wrote to Mr. Lincoln about it. There would be a parade, the sacred soil would be consecrated, the famous Edward Everett would deliver a suitable oration, the governors would be present, and it was hoped that the President himself might attend and "formally set apart these grounds to their sacred use by a few appropriate remarks . . . and perform this last but solemn act to the soldier dead on this battlefield."
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Mr. Everett would speak at length because that was his function; he was an orator, and the occasion called for an oration. Mr. Lincoln would act the part of President, receiving and dedicating ground that was to be a national shrine, intoning suitable words as he did so. To the arrangements committee both men were simply items on the program; the occasion was a day of mourning, and the graves themselves were what mattered.
More than 12,000 people crowded into the little town on the appointed day, and they had a hard time because neither transportation nor accommodation was adequate. They had not come to Gettysburg to hear anyone make a speech. A great many of them were relatives of men who had been killed in the battle, and they wanted to see where these men were buried, or at least where they had died, as if some sort of healing and understanding would come that way. A reporter listened to their stories, and wrote down two remarks as typical of all:
1 have a son who fell in the first day's fight and I have come to take back his body, for his mother's heart is breaking and she will not be satisfied until it is brought home to her. . . . My brother was killed in the charge of the Pennsylvania Reserves on the enemy when they were driven from Little Round Top, but we don't know where his remains are. . . .
From all over the country these people had come to spend a few hours with their feelings of loss; as the President surmised, they would little note nor long remember any fine speeches that might be made.
There were hundreds of unmarked Confederate graves in fields where new wheat was growing, and hardly anyone noticed them, although the reporter was moved to rhapsodize: "So swift does the plowshare of Peace cover up, and the emerald mantle of kindly Nature conceal, the wrath and destruction of war." An officer who fought by the little clump of trees felt that it would have been better if all of the dead had been treated so, with no new graves for anyone. A soldier (he argued) ought to be left in the grave his comrades dug for him, at the place where he fell, and if all of the burial mounds finally vanished altogether under grass or grain or trees the dead would rest just as well. To this veteran (who himself was to die in action at Cold Harbor, half a year later) there was something grotesque about making this showplace cemetery: "The skeletons of these brave men must be handled like the bones of so many horses, for a price, and wedged in like herrings in a box on a spot where there was no fighting—where there was no fighting—where none of them fell! It may be all right, but I do not see it."
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November 19 came in clear and pleasant. Judge Wills had everything organized and the procession moved promptly at ten o'clock. The parade marshals were brightly done up in straw-colored satin sashes fastened at the shoulder with mourning rosettes, each man wearing a red-white-and-blue rosette on his breast, his saddle-cloth made of white cambric edged in black; minute guns pounded away as the parade moved, and a "national salute" was fired when the head of the column reached the cemetery. When Mr. Everett at last arose to deliver the address of the day he was a figure to catch the eye. He was tall, white-haired, trim in a closely buttoned frock coat, worth looking at although (as a reporter confessed) not a tenth of the audience could hear what he was saying. His speech ran to 13,000 words and took the better part of two hours to deliver; incredibly, he had memorized every word of it and never referred to notes or manuscript, and although few people could hear him everyone could feel him. The reporter wrote with awe of "the gesture, once observed never to be forgotten, when the orator rises to some climax and, the arms outspread, the fingers, quivering and fluttering, as one said, like the pinions of an eagle, seem to rain down upon the audience the emotions with which they vibrate." Mr. Everett was a professional, at the top of his form, and although another reporter considered the audience "most orderly, but phlegmatic and undemonstrative" the men and women who went to the cemetery unquestionably got what they had gone there to get.
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Which is to say that they got a performance. They got all that an oration could give them. They had come to Gettysburg to remember their dead, and this was part of the ritual, just as the minute guns and the military bands were part of it. Beyond that there were only the graves, those marked and those unmarked and those lost beneath the new grain, and the day began and ended with them. Their presence was what counted, and the fact that the men buried in them had spent themselves here was what would be remembered so long.
The graves had their own terrible eloquence, saying that victory by itself was not enough; saying this to a land whose millions, in the North and in the South, had come to believe the exact opposite. The more sensitive and devoted a man was, the more likely he was to feel that the war and the lives it consumed would lose all meaning if
his
cause did not win; and if this was so, half of the dead men here had been hideously deluded, along with all who mourned for them, and there was nothing to dedicate except the dust that covered the thousands of lifeless bodies. The people watched Mr. Everett's persuasive fingertips, while the wind carried his words away, and presently a choir sang an ode composed especially for this occasion. And at last Mr. Lincoln arose to make the appropriate remarks he had been asked to make.
He was very brief; perhaps what had to be said here was phrasing itself in men's hearts and needed only to be touched lightly in order to be brought alive. He spoke of liberty and equality instead of victory, as if these words alone could give meaning to what had been done here, and instead of dedicating the ground he called upon those who stood there to dedicate themselves to something that might justify all that Gettysburg had cost them; and after two minutes he had done with it, and the Associated Press man wrote that there was "long-continued applause." Then the crowd broke up and people began their long journeys home, and by eight o'clock that night Gettysburg was quiet again.
Secretary John Hay, who had spent a pleasant twenty-four hours in the town, put an entry in his diary: "Mr. Everett spoke as he always does, perfectly—and the President, in a fine, free way, with more grace than is his wont, said his half-dozen words of consecration, and the music wailed and we went home through crowded and cheering streets. And all the particulars are in the daily papers."
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3. Amnesty and Suffrage
ALTHOUGH THE 38th Congress had mostly been chosen in the fall of 1862, when the Republicans did poorly in the elections, it had a safe Unionist majority when it convened on December 8, 1863. In the House of Representatives Republican Schuyler Colfax of Indiana was elected speaker, with 101 votes; his principal opponent, the mellifluous Sunset Cox
of Ohio, an unmitigated Democrat, got 42, and 39 votes were scattered to the winds among six candidates who had no hope of winning anything. In the Senate only five members voted against seating two Senators from one of the administration's newest creations, the state of West Virginia.
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Once organized, the two houses heard and applauded a message from the President of the United States.
The message was long, unemotional, and dutifully optimistic, routine except for one point: it included the text of a general Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction which the President had that day issued.
The important word, of course, was "reconstruction." The most sustained fighting of the war lay ahead, but the President had already begun to put the country together again. The proclamation explained how he was going about it; essentially, it was a careful exposition of the ten percent plan which even now was being presented to the people of Louisiana and Arkansas.
Amnesty, it said, would go to residents of seceded states who took a solemn oath, and the wording of the oath showed what Mr. Lincoln expected in the way of a changed mind and heart. The oath taker was called upon to swear "that I will henceforth faithfully support, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and the Union of the States thereunder; and that I will, in like manner, abide by and faithfully support all acts of Congress passed during the existing rebellion with reference to slaves, so long and so far as not repealed, modified or held void by Congress, or by decision of the Supreme Court; and that I will, in like manner, abide by and faithfully support all proclamations of the President made during the existing rebellion having reference to slaves, so long and so far as not modified or declared void by decision of the Supreme Court."