This Hallowed Ground (69 page)

However it happened, it happened, and Columbia was burned, and there is very little point in arguing over the responsibility for it. Years afterward General Sherman was on the witness stand, being questioned about the business; he insisted that retreating Confederate troopers had ignited baled cotton, and at last he burst out that “God Almighty sent wind” and that flecks of fire had gone streaming across the city, licking down to bring homes and churches and business blocks to ashes.
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It may have been that way, and it may have been some other way. The one certainty is that if Sherman’s soldiers had not found fire in Columbia they would have started fire of their own. God Almighty send wind … or heedless men sowed the wind, in the days when the time of payment seemed remote and unreal, and in the end there was a whirlwind to reap. This, finally, along with much death and heartache, was what came out of pride and anger and general stiffness of the neck, and the smoke of the torment of the people who stood in the whirlwind’s path went up without ceasing.

Sherman himself had not willed the fire. In the end he and his generals began to regain control over their men and made a real effort to stop the blaze. This did not help very much. Most of Columbia was destroyed. Almost universally the soldiers shrugged it off — they approved of the fire, and they said that if they had not found the city ablaze they would have left it that way. General Slocum, a proper man who never wanted to be cast in the part of destroying angel, wrote later that he believed simple drunkenness was the real trouble, and he added: “A drunken soldier with a musket in one hand and a match in the other is not a pleasant visitor to have about the house on a dark, windy night, particularly when for a series of years you have urged him to come so that you might have an opportunity of performing a surgical operation on him.”
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The army stayed in Columbia’s ruins for two days and then marched on. The country was swampy and the winter rains had been falling steadily — though not steadily enough to save Columbia — and more than half of the time the soldiers had to corduroy the roads so that the wagons and artillery could move. They met little opposition. General Johnston commanded such troops as the Confederacy had been able to get together — a remnant from the broken army Hood had brought back from Tennessee, the men Hardee had pulled out of Savannah, and a scattering of other levies — but he was too weak by far to meet Sherman in open combat, and to Lee he wrote despairingly: “I can do no more than annoy him.” To make things even more one-sided, Sherman was marching now toward strong reinforcements. General Schofield had brought troops east from Tennessee, had taken Wilmington, and was marching toward Goldsboro, North Carolina, to join hands with Sherman.

On March 7 Sherman’s army crossed over into North Carolina. An immediate change in behavior took place. Sherman ordered his officers to “deal as moderately and fairly by North Carolinians as possible,” and the soldiers were informed that there would be no more burning of property; anyone caught starting a fire would be shot forthwith. But when they marched through the turpentine forests, the stragglers who continued to fringe the moving army set fire to the congealed resin in notches on the trees, and for mile after mile the army moved under a pall of odorous pine smoke. An officer wrote that the flames in the forest aisles “looked like a fire in a cathedral,” and one soldier remembered “the endless blue columns swaying with the long swinging step,” and said that above the crackle of the flames could be heard the massed singing of “John Brown’s Body.” When Fayetteville was reached, a Confederate arsenal and machine shop were burned, but nothing else was destroyed. The men apparently had exhausted their fury in South Carolina. They felt that this state was different, and even the bummers were more or less restrained.
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Nearing Goldsboro, the army began to run into resistance. There was
a sharp little fight at Averysboro, and on March 19 Johnston moved in and struck the exposed left wing of the army, under Slocum, at Bentonville. But Johnston just was not strong enough to win a victory, even when he hit only half of Sherman’s army. Sherman sent in reinforcements, Johnston was driven off, and on March 23 Sherman marched into Goldsboro and joined Schofield. Thus reinforced, Sherman now commanded eighty thousand veterans, men as cocky and as sure of themselves as any Americans who ever marched. Johnston could be an annoyance but nothing more. This army could go wherever it wanted to go, and the Confederacy was powerless to stop it.

At Goldsboro the soldiers learned that the old days were over. Foraging parties were ordered to give up their horses, and the bummers and stragglers were quietly warned that they had better rejoin their own regiments and be good. With its own supply line established, the army would no longer support itself by living on the country. It was in North Carolina now, and in a matter of weeks it would rub elbows with the better-behaved Army of the Potomac, and everyone now would mind his manners. The protracted Halloween spree had come to an end. There would be no more fires.

Trailing back behind the army, from Savannah to the North Carolina line, there was a smoking path marked by charred timbers and cold ashes. Houses and towns and cities had been consumed, and South Carolina had been visited by the limitless wrath that had been turned loose by secession. Long ago, in December of 1860, the South Carolina convention had taken a vote, and great placards had put the word on the streets: The Union is Dissolved! Now the placards were gone, along with the gay spirit that had greeted them. Except for the details, the Union had been put back together again.

On March 22 the youthful General Wilson, commanding twelve thousand and five hundred cavalrymen armed with repeating carbines, crossed the Tennessee River and moved down toward the heart of Alabama. To oppose him the Confederacy had nothing except Bedford Forrest — who, as a matter of fact, was quite a lot — and perhaps half as many troopers as Wilson was leading; troopers much less well equipped, driving east from Mississippi well aware that they were riding off on a forlorn hope. General Wilson was heading for Selma, a munitions center of considerable importance — just about the last one, aside from Richmond, which the Confederacy still possessed — and he moved with full confidence that he had the strength to go wherever he might be told to go.

His men were similarly confident. A young Iowa trooper in the command, who had been feeling poorly all winter, wrote that this expedition was good for him: “Nothing could be better for restoring my health than a campaign like this — the smoky dark pine woods and the color it adds with the splendid exercise of riding thirty miles or more a day will give health when all else fails. I am perfectly contented for the first time, and enjoy it fine.”
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This feeling of power, of having an irresistible energy that would quickly overcome all obstacles, was felt in all the Union armies. A New Englander in Meade’s army noted that increasing numbers of deserters from Lee’s troops were coming through the lines every night, and remarked that his comrades discussed this matter just as fishermen back home, in the spring, would discuss the way the fish were running in the rivers; sitting around the campfire in the evening, the men would talk things over and predict that “there will be a good run of Johnnies.”
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In the upper Shenandoah, Sheridan was crunching in on Waynesboro, where the pathetic remnant of Jubal Early’s army held a cheerless winter camp; Sheridan’s tough troopers would attack it, scatter it for keeps, and then move east to join Grant’s army in front of Richmond, leaving behind them a valley that had been gutted as thoroughly as any place Sherman’s army had visited. Down by the Gulf coast, General Edward R. S. Canby was leading a Union army in to besiege and capture Mobile. Mobile was no longer a real seaport, what with Union warships anchored in the bay, but it was fortified and it held Confederate troops; Canby would take it, and there would be one less Confederate flag on the map.

Behind the lines, men looked ahead to the end of the war and reflected on what the war had meant, reaching various conclusions. At City Point, the vast Union base supporting the siege of Petersburg, a Massachusetts agent for the Christian Commission looked on the military cemetery that had sprung into being there, and he could think only of the deaths that had come to so many thousands of young men, Union and Confederate alike.… “I though of the many homes made desolate by this war. All the way from the left, beyond Petersburg, to the right of Richmond, all through the Shenandoah Valley, on the banks of the Rappahannock, at Fredericksburg, in the Wilderness, our brave boys are sleeping, making it in truth one vast burial place. Here one grave, there another, ten, one hundred, one thousand, and more.… Truly all through coming time must the soil of Virginia be sacred, because moistened by the blood of so many heroes.” In Washington, General Jacob Cox stopped off to meet with friends on his way to join Schofield in North Carolina, and he found the die-hard Republicans bitter at Lincoln for his approaching victory. “Baboon,” he said, was the mildest epithet these men had for the President, and the politicians were openly vexed at the
Union soldiers’ habit of yelling “Hurrah for Lincoln!” to taunt their Confederate foes. When Lincoln went down to Hampton Roads to talk with peace commissioners sent across Grant’s lines by Jefferson Davis, these Republican leaders denounced him as being a weak compromiser.
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This meeting with the peace commissioners resulted in nothing, as it was bound to do. Led by wizened little Alexander Stephens of Georgia, Vice-President of the Confederacy, the Southerners came to see Lincoln about some means of bringing peace to “the two countries”; the very phrase (written into their instructions by Davis) was testimony to the Confederate authorities’ final flight from reality. There were not two countries now, and there never could be; the Confederacy was a pinched-off triangle of land in southern Virginia and upper North Carolina, beset by overwhelming power; nothing could be more certain than that it would be ground to fragments as soon as spring made the roads dry enough for army movements. Peace for one united country was the only thing Lincoln would consider, and the commissioners were not even allowed to talk about it.… Lincoln was prepared to offer terms. He even suggested that if the South should lay down its arms now he would go to Congress and ask it to appropriate money to pay southern slave owners for the slaves who would very shortly be set free; at four hundred dollars a head this would be expensive, but he remarked that it would cost no more than going on with the war a few months longer would cost, and besides, it would not kill any young men. But the subject was inadmissible, and the commissioners returned to Richmond, where Davis valiantly addressed a mass meeting and called for war to the bitter end.

In Richmond men seemed to be in a queer, trance-like state, where the real and the unreal danced slowly in and out before minds that could no longer make sober meaning out of the things their eyes saw. On March 13 (Sherman was nearing Goldsboro, Sheridan was joining Grant, Wilson was beginning to invade Alabama with his mounted army) Jefferson Davis informed the Confederate Congress that “our country is now environed with perils which it is our duty calmly to contemplate”;
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and the Congress was laboring mightily with the very proposal that had got General Cleburne so cold a snubbing a year earlier — the proposal that certain Negro slaves be enrolled as soldiers for the Confederacy.

This idea, born of final desperation, was examined and whittled down and solemnly weighed and assessed precisely as if there was still some question about what finally would happen to slavery. A Virginia correspondent wrote to Davis in mid-February, saying that slavery was an institution “sanctioned, if not established, by the Almighty” as the most humane and salutary relationship that could exist between the white and colored races; nevertheless, he added, the military situation was getting desperate and it seemed undeniable that “the teachings of Providence as
exhibited in this war dictate conclusively and imperatively that to secure and perpetuate our independence we must emancipate the Negro.”
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And on March 23 the Confederate War Department published for the information of all concerned the text of a law just passed by Congress bearing on this subject.

Under this law the President was authorized to ask for, and to accept from their owners, the services of such numbers of Negroes as soldiers as he might consider necessary in order to win the war. These Negroes, once put into service, would be paid, fed, and clad on an equality with white troops, and if the President did not get enough of them just by asking for them he could call on the separate states to supply their proper quotas, provided that no more than 25 per cent of the male slaves of military age in any state could be called into service. As a final rider Congress stipulated that nothing in this law should call for any change “in the relation which the said slaves shall bear to their owners” except by the consent of the owners and of the states in which they lived.
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And thus, with Cleburne in his grave, a fragment of his idea was resurrected, as well as might be, and galvanized into a show of life. Nothing in particular would come of it (the sands had just about run out; when the War Department published this interesting law the Confederate government had just ten more days in which it might occupy Richmond, functioning as a government with its own capitol, its own executive officers, the trimmings and trappings of an established bureaucracy), and the enactment comes down the years as an oddity, significant in a way that nobody involved in it ever quite intended.

They never did understand, really, about slavery. Implicit in this deathbed conversion (halting, partial, and hedged with provisos, like many deathbed conversions — for the dying man suspects that he may yet recover) was the real explanation of the reason why the Confederacy had in fact come to its deathbed. Beyond the superior resources of the North — the overwhelming armies, the favor of the outside world, the wealth of supplies, the industrial machine that could produce limitless quantities of anything a nation at war might need — there was the supreme moral issue of slavery itself. Slowly, painfully, and with many doubts, Lincoln had made this issue central in the war. He had been moved, perhaps, less by conscious determination than by fate itself; for slavery, from first to last, had exerted its own force, working through men who would have preferred to ignore it. Its mere existence had lifted the war to a dimension which the Confederacy could not grasp. Beyond all of the orators and the armies, beyond the gun smoke in the valleys and the flashing of cannon on the hills, there always remained the peculiar institution itself — the one institution on all the earth that could not be defended by force of arms. A nation dedicated to human freedom but
cursed with this unconscionable barrier to freedom could not engage in a civil war without letting loose a force that would destroy the barrier forever. The war had begun in the flame and darkness of the Carolina marshes, and fire and night as a result had begun to rise around the notion that one kind of man may own another kind. Even at the final minute of the eleventh hour the men who dominated the Confederate government did not understand this, and it was their lack of understanding that had brought them to the end of the tether.