Penguin History of the United States of America (63 page)

Yet at least he could see that the South was growing weaker and weaker: she could not afford to depend solely on the hope that Northern war-weariness would increase, unassisted, to such an extent that Lincoln would give up the struggle; she might give up first herself. So Lee once more turned to the offensive. In the late spring of 1863 he began to move North again.

Essentially his plan was the same as that which had so nearly succeeded in the previous year. Seasoned by all its campaigning under its incomparable commanders, the army of Northern Virginia was at this point as fine a force, in terms of fighting quality, as any that the world has seen. Lee could depend on his soldiers implicitly, as he could on Stonewall Jackson, as he could, he thought, on the doltish command of the Army of the Potomac. Richmond strained every nerve to supply him adequately. He set out to
invade Pennsylvania. If he succeeded, the fright given to Northern civilians would alone be well worthwhile: it might induce them to withdraw troops from the West, where it was beginning to look as if Vicksburg might fall at last. He might, in addition, capture Washington and thereby win the war: for surely, after such a fear, Britain and France would recognize the Confederacy. To do all this, to be sure, it would be necessary to destroy the Army of the Potomac, which in spite of all the batterings he had administered to it he had never yet quite contrived; but Lee had not earned his reputation by pessimism. He set to work.

First it was necessary to protect Richmond against another Northern offensive, which was launched in April. This Lee did by the victory of Chancellorsville on 2 May 1863. In dense forest – the untouched wilderness of central Virginia – it proved easy enough to bewilder and outflank the invader. Lee even dared to break the old rule and divide his army in the presence of the enemy, so that he could attack from two sides at once. The outcome entirely justified him: the Army of the Potomac had to retreat, after sustaining heavy losses, and Mr Lincoln began to look about for yet another new commander (the loser at Chancellorsville was General Hooker). Yet perhaps the Confederate loss was the heavier: Stonewall, returning from a moonlit reconnaissance, was shot by one of his own sentries. He took a day or two to die, lingering in delirium. His last words were: ‘Let us cross the river and rest in the cool of the trees.’ But his comrades had a long hot road to go: he crossed the river alone.

Lee crossed, not Jordan, but the Potomac. He feinted as brilliantly as ever: the North was first puzzled, then terrified. In Washington all was confusion: at length command of the resistance was given to General George Meade (1815 – 72), a West Pointer of little prominence (the appointment was so unlikely that when Meade was roused from sleep to receive it he thought the messenger had come to arrest him). The Army of the Potomac hurried after Lee, who now burst out of the Maryland hills into the broad valleys of central Pennsylvania, just west of the state capital, Harrisburg, and the great alluvial plain: fat farmlands, hitherto untouched by war.

But Lee did not have quite the complete control of his army that he had enjoyed in Stonewall’s time. His cavalry commander, Jeb Stuart, was by no means so reliable, and perhaps the gracious Lee was incapable of being sufficiently firm with him. At any rate, at this crucial moment, Jeb Stuart was away on a raid, and Lee had no knowledge of the whereabouts of the enemy, except that he was somewhere on his flank. Then on 1 July they blundered into each other at the small town of Gettysburg. Longstreet, commander of Lee’s first corps, dislodged the Federals from the town easily enough, but at the price of driving them southwards into an admirable defensive position along a fish-hook shaped ridge. It was Fredericksburg reversed; not Lee’s sort of battle. He said afterwards that it was all his fault, but beforehand his clear judgement was that manoeuvring was impossible (because the Yankees would simply watch their opportunity and then hit
him in the flank) and so was retreat. So he resolved on the same tactics that had decimated poor General Burnside’s men seven months before: a series of frontal attacks uphill.

The result was the most terrible battle of the war, a struggle which went on for two days, producing frightful casualties (23,000 killed, wounded or missing for the North, about the same for the South). The Confederate soldiers performed prodigies of valour, but at last could do no more. The final attack failed; Lee ordered a retreat. It was made more dismal by pouring rain, but perhaps that, and the exhaustion of the Northern army, preserved Lee from total destruction. Once more he got away with a saving remnant across the Potomac; and once more Abraham Lincoln, who had felt that he had his enemy in his grasp at last, soundly berated his victorious general for too sluggish a pursuit. Yet overall he could afford to rejoice: the South would never again be able to launch such an offensive, and on 4 July, Independence Day, the day after Gettysburg, Grant took Vicksburg. Lincoln proudly announced that ‘the Father of Waters flows once more unvexed to the sea’. Even the outbreak of the New York draft riots could not destroy the meaning of the two great victories. The strategic initiative had passed to the North for good, and the South’s doom was sure, so long as the Union’s will held firm.

It was time, and more than time, to consider what to do when the Union had achieved its final victory. True, that process, thanks to Robert E. Lee, was going to take eighteen months more, and there was going to be at least one agonizing moment when it looked as if all might be lost; but no one knew this in the summer of 1863. And for months Congress had been steadily growing more assertive on the question of the post-war settlement. If one wants to pick a moment as the opening of the Reconstruction tragedy, the fall of Vicksburg will do as well as any other.

Lincoln’s policy during the war had two clearly distinct but overlapping phases. In the first, his task was to find the means of winning and to convince his fellow-citizens that victory was worth its cost. In the second, he had to prepare a peace.

By the autumn of 1863 he had substantially completed his first task. So he accepted an invitation to deliver a few suitable words at the dedication of a cemetery for the fallen at Gettysburg. The main address of the day was delivered by an elegantly fluent windbag, who gave a speech full of clichés that lasted two hours. Lincoln’s lasted barely two minutes. Yet very soon this little Gettysburg Address was being quoted and applauded everywhere; for in it Lincoln at last achieved the perfect distillation of what he had been trying to teach his people since, in his inaugural address, he had first put the case for majority government.

Fourscore and seven years ago [he began] our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate–we can not consecrate — we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

For Lincoln’s original audience the importance of the address was that it summed up their deepest beliefs, which, whatever their validity (the twentieth century has shown up a certain element of presumption in them, as well as their essential correctness), were neither cheap nor silly. In their name, summoned by Lincoln’s sober language, they could continue to fight in stern Puritan hopefulness.

For Lincoln the important point was probably the single phrase ‘all men are created equal’ (lifted from the Declaration of Independence). For him, by now, the causes of Union and of emancipation were one. The casualty lists were continually lengthening, and the deaths from diseases contracted in the appalling hospitals were double the number of those in battle. As Lincoln contemplated the horrible suffering, he wondered, ever more anxiously, what sins of omission or commission he and his countrymen had committed to deserve this chastening at God’s hands – the God in whom, before the war, he had almost ceased to believe; and he resolved that in the making of the peace, the remaking of the Union, those sins would not be repeated.

The deepest sin, of course, the root of the whole matter, was slavery, but that was well on the way to final extinction. The Emancipation Proclamation was doing its work. As a wartime measure it could not permanently outlaw slavery, even though it freed the slaves; but already proposals were being brought forward for an amendment to the Constitution, ending the peculiar institution for ever. More pressing were the intimately related problems of what to do with the former slaves, and what to do with the rebels.

Lincoln, determined to avoid those faults of arrogance and rigidity which had played so large a part in bringing about the Civil War, early decided on his course. The blacks would have to trust to the wisdom and mercy of
their former masters; this might not be a bad fate if the South was shown wisdom and mercy by the federal government. Lincoln demonstrated what he meant in his plans for the reconstruction of Louisiana, the first Southern state to fall back entirely into Union hands. Let 10 per cent of the state’s voters take the oath of loyalty to the Union and renounce slavery, and they could set up a new government, which would be readmitted to the Union on the old terms. Lincoln’s only reservation was that certain categories of rebel – functionaries of the ‘so-called’ Confederate government, for example, or men who had resigned US military or naval commissions – would be excluded; otherwise pardon would be available to all who took the loyalty oath.

Lincoln can have had few illusions about the difficulty of what he was undertaking, and was as flexibly ready as ever to try something else if this scheme failed; but underneath the magnanimity and caution which were such leading traits of his character lay a flint-like self-assurance. Against all odds, he was successfully guiding the Union towards victory; he would also guide it towards peace, and a just future. The difficulties quite failed to daunt him.

Yet they were formidable, and on one of them his enterprise must, I think, have foundered. The Southern whites were obdurate. They were of no mind, it proved, to show wisdom and mercy to the blacks. Had Lincoln lived he would have been faced by such tokens of resistance as the infamous Black Codes,
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and thus have been forced to take the road of radical reconstruction. To suppose that he would not have done so is to mistake the nature of his relationship with the Republican parry, of which he was after all the leader; and to forget that he was, and knew himself to be, the Great Emancipator. He had incurred grave responsibilities for the welfare of the former slaves; he was not the man to shirk them.

In his lifetime it was resistance from the other side, from these same radical Republicans, which seemed likeliest to thwart his generous projects. The stronghold of these men was Congress, which they had dominated since the Southern withdrawal in 1861. The radicals did not share either Lincoln’s magnanimity or his self-confidence, and some of them wanted another presidential candidate in 1864: one more extreme in his views and more subservient to Congress. They did not trust the Southern planters, and thought that far more obstacles should be placed in their way, lest they regain control of the states and both oppress the freedmen and challenge the Republican ascendancy in Congress. They felt further that a reconstruction plan should have some explicit provisions for safeguarding the interests of the blacks, though at this stage neither they nor the President were willing to do more than toy with the idea of Negro suffrage. They were appalled by actual events in Louisiana (General Banks, Lincoln’s agent there, showed himself much too co-operative with the planters). All through the spring
and summer of 1864 the dispute raged. Eventually the radicals pushed the so-called Wade-Davis bill through Congress: it embodied some of their own stringent ideas, for example by requiring 50 per cent of the white male citizens to take an ‘ironclad’ loyalty oath before a state might recover its powers. Lincoln vetoed it, since it would have tied his hands. The radicals were enraged. They were convinced that the war had been caused solely by the machinations of the planters (not true Americans, in their view, but aristocrats and Tories) and they were determined to break the oligarchy’s power once for all. They were reinforced in their determination by many of the allies that the Republican party’s success had won for it. They were the supporters of protective tariffs, of transcontinental railways, men who had done well out of the war and meant to do well out of the peace, and the thousands upon thousands of office-holders. All of these feared what a vengeful, unreformed, politically adroit South might achieve if allowed back into the Union on anything but the stiffest terms. After all, the South had usually dominated the federal government before the war. She must never do so again.

At times all these disputes seemed premature. The blockade was tightening daily on the southern coastlines; no hope now of rescue for the Confederacy from Europe. In eastern Tennessee the South had thrown away the victory of Chickamauga (19 – 20 September 1863) when the Union Army of the Cumberland had come within an inch of total destruction; failure to follow through had given Washington time to hurry in reinforcements, by road, river and (most spectacularly) railroad, and to put the whole operation under the command of Ulysses S. Grant. On 24 – 25 November the Union took its revenge, and in the Battle of Chattanooga expelled the Confederacy from Tennessee. The next step would be to break through the mountain barrier into central Georgia, but Grant would not take it in person: Lincoln, at last acknowledging his outstanding talents, plucked him away from the West to make him overall commander of the Union armies with the rank of lieutenant-general (the first soldier since Washington to hold that rank). His brilliant second-in-command, William Tecumseh Sherman (1820 – 91), was left to complete the Western campaigns. But it was long indeed before these victories and dispositions produced their promised fruit.