A History of the American People Part 10

The truth is, by opposing slavery and by insisting on the integrity of the Union, Lincoln identified himself and his cause with the two most powerful impulses of the entire 19th century-liberalism and nationalism. He did not have to work at a powerful diplomatic effort-though he did-as world opinion was already on his side, doubly so after he issued his Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation. It was the South which needed to put an effort into winning friends. It was not forthcoming. Davis hated Britain anyway. The South had many potential friends there-the Conservative Party, especially its leading families, newspapers like The Times, indeed a surprisingly large section of the press. But he did not build on this. The envoys he sent were extremists, who bellowed propaganda rather than insinuated diplomacy. The British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, was a Whig-Liberal nationalist who played it cool: on May 13, 118611 he declared 'strict and impartial neutrality.' The North's naval blockade caused much less friction with Britain than the South had hoped, because it conformed strictly to British principles of blockading warfare, which the Royal Navy was anxious to see upheld for future use. The one really serious incident occurred in November 1861, when the famous explorer Captain Charles Wilkes (1798-1877), commanding the USS San Jacinto, stopped the British steamer Trent and seized two Confederate commissioners, John Slidell and James M. Mason. This caused an uproar in Britain, but Seward, as secretary of state, quickly defused the crisis by ordering the men's release, on the ground that Wilkes should have brought the ship into harbor for arbitration.

Added to improvident economics and incompetent diplomacy, the South saddled itself with a political system which did not work. It was a martyr to its own ideology of states' rights. Although Davis and his fellow-Southerners were always quoting history, they did not know it. Had they studied the early history of the republic objectively, they would have grasped the point that the Founding Fathers, in drawing up the Const.i.tution, had to insure a large federal element simply because the original provisional system did not work well, in war or in peace. The Confederacy thus went on to repeat many of the mistakes of the early republic. Each state raised its own forces, and decided when and where they were to be used and who commanded them. To many of their leaders, the rights of their state were more important than the Confederacy itself. Men from one state would not serve under a general from another. Senior commanders with troops from various states had to negotiate with state governments to get more men. Davis had to contend with many of the identical difficulties, over men and supplies and money, which almost overwhelmed Washington himself in the 1770s-and he had none of Washington's tact, solidity, resourcefulness, and moral authority. Everyone blamed him, increasing his paranoia. As a former military man and war secretary, he thought he knew it all and tried to do everything himself. When he set up his office, he had only one secretary. His first Secretary of War, Leroy P. Walker, was a cipher. Visitors noticed Davis summoned him by ringing a desk bell, and Walker then trotted in 'exhibiting a docility that dared not say "nay" to any statement made by his chief.' Congress refused to take account of any of his difficulties and behaved irresponsibly-it was composed mainly of vainglorious extremists. Davis had more trouble with his congress than any Union president, except possibly Tyler. He vetoed thirty-eight Bills and all but one later pa.s.sed with Congress overriding his veto. Lincoln had to use the veto only three times, and in each case it stuck.

But many of Davis' difficulties were of his own making. His constant illnesses did not help, as during them he became short-tempered and dictatorial. As his absurd row with Scott showed, he could not distinguish between what mattered and what was insignificant. Virtually all his early appointments, both Cabinet and army, proved bad. Davis resumed personal vendettas going back to the Mexican War and even to his West Point days. In the South, everyone knew each other and most had grudges. In picking senior commanders, Davis favored former West Point cla.s.smates, war-service comrades, and personal friends. Things were made even more difficult by each state demanding its quota of generals, and by muddles Davis made over army regulations. A lot of his bitterest rows with colleagues and subordinates had nothing to do with the actual conduct of the war. The Navy Secretary Stephen Mallory (1813-73), a Trinidadian and one of the few Confederate leaders who knew what he was doing, deplored the fact that 'our fate is in the hands of such self-sufficient, vain, army idiots.' Davis was not the man to run difficult generals, and he became almost insensate with rage when he was personally blamed for lack of men and supplies, above all lack of success. Varina admitted: 'He was abnormally sensitive to disapprobation. Even a child's disapproval discomposed him ... and the sense of mortification and injustice gave him a repellent manner.' Faced with criticism he could not bear, he took refuge in illness.

A lot of Davis' strategic difficulties were his own fault. Despite conscripting go percent of its able white manpower, the South was always short of troops. In January 1862 its army rolls numbered 351,418, against a Unionist strength of 575,917. It reached its maximum in January 1864, when 481,180 were counted under the Confederate flag. Therafter the South's army declined in strength whereas the North's rose, so that in January 1865 the respective numbers were 445,203 and 959,460.78 That being so, Davis should have concentrated his smaller forces in limited areas. Instead, he took seriously and followed to the letter his inauguration oath to defend every inch of Confederate territory. This was an impossible task. It involved, to begin with, defending over 3,500 miles of coastline, without a navy to speak of. Texas alone had 1,200 miles of border. If Kentucky had seceded, it would have provided a simple water-border. For a time it kept out both sides, but eventually the Unionists menaced the South from there too. Missouri was also divided but its settled eastern reaches, centered on St Louis, were firmly Unionist, and that left an almost indefensible 300-mile straight-line border in northern Arkansas. Hence a large percentage of the Confederate army, perhaps a third or even more, was always employed on non-combative defensive duties when its active commanders were clamoring desperately for troops. It is true that the Unionists also used vast numbers of men on the gradually extending lines of communication-but then they had more men to use.

Early in the war the Confederate capital was moved from Montgomery to Richmond, mainly to insure that Virginia stayed committed to the fight. This was a mixed blessing. The polished Virginians regarded the South Carolinans, who formed the core of the government, as loudmouthed, flashy, dangerous extremists. They looked down their noses at the Davises. The ladies noted Varina's dark color and thick lips, comparing her to 'a refined mulatto cook' and called her the 'Empress,' a reference to the much-despised Eugenie, wife of the French dictator, Napoleon III. The Georgians, especially Thomas Cobb, were hostile to Davis: he was, said Cobb, as 'obstinate as a mule,' and they dismissed J. P. Benjamin (1811-84), the AttorneyGeneral and by far the ablest member of the Confederate government, as a 'Jew dog.' Senator Louis T. Wigfall of Texas was a strong Davis supporter until their wives fell out, wherupon Charlotte Wigfall, a South Carolina sn.o.b, called Varina 'a course, western woman' with 'objectionable' manners, and Wigfall preached mutiny and sedition in the Congress, often when drunk. Confederate Richmond gradually became a snakepit of bitter social and political feuds, and the Davises ceased to entertain.

Once Northern armies began to penetrate Confederate soil, the interests of the states diverged and it was everyone for himself, reflected in Richmond's savage political feuding. It is a curious paradox that ordinary Southerners, who had not been consulted, fought the war with extraordinary courage and endurance, while their elites, who had plunged them into Armageddon, were riven by rancorous factions and disloyalty, and many left the stricken scene long before the end. Davis was too proud, aloof, and touchy to build up his own faction. He thought it beneath him to seek popularity or to flatter men into doing their duty. Hence 'close friends sometimes left shaking their heads or fists, red with anger and determined never to call on him again.'"' But at least he went down with the stricken cause, ending up in Unionist fetters.

It may be asked: all this being so, why did the South fight so well? Why did the war last so long? In the first place, it has to be understood that Lincoln was operating under many restraints. He did not seek war, want war, or, to begin with, consider he was in any way gifted to wage it. He made a lot of mistakes, especially with his generals, but unlike Davis he learned from them. The South was fighting for its very existence, and knew it; there was never any lack of motivation there. The North was divided, bemused, reluctant to go to war; or, rather, composed of large numbers of fanatical anti-slavers and much larger numbers of unengaged or indifferent voters who had no wish to become involved in a b.l.o.o.d.y dispute about a problem, slavery, which did not affect them directly. Then there were the four border states, all of them slave-owning, whose adherence to the Union it was essential to retain. Lincoln, beginning with a professional army of a mere 15,000, was fighting a war waged essentially for a moral cause, and he had to retain the high moral ground. But he had also to keep the rump of the Union together. That meant he had to be a pragmatist without ever descending into opportunism. His great gift-perhaps the greatest of the many he possessed-was precisely his ability to invest his decisions and arguments with moral seemliness even when they were the product of empirical necessity. He was asked to liberate the slaves-what else was the war about? He answered: it was to preserve the Union. He realized, he knew for a fact, that if he did preserve the Union, slavery would go anyway. But he could not exactly say so, since four of his states wanted to retain it.

Some of Lincoln's generals, for military purposes, began to issue local emanc.i.p.ation decrees, hoping to get the Southern slaves to rise and cause trouble behind Confederate lines. Lincoln had to disavow these efforts as ultra vires. He hated slavery. But he loved the Const.i.tution more, writing to a friend in Kentucky:

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel, and yet I have never understood that the presidency conferred on me an unrestricted right to act officially on this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Const.i.tution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power.

He made public his intentions about slavery in an order disavowing an emanc.i.p.ation decree issued by General David Hunter. Declaring it 'altogether void' and rejecting the right of anyone except himself to liberate the slaves, he nonetheless made it publicly clear that such a right might well be invested in his presidential power: 'I further make it known that whether it be competent for me, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, to declare the slaves of any State or States free, and whether at any time and in any case, it shall have become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the Government to exercise such supposed power, are questions which, under my responsibility, I reserve to myself, and which I cannot feel justified in leaving to the decision of commanders in the field.'

He followed this up by writing a reply to Horace Greeley, who had published a ferocious editorial in the New York Tribune, ent.i.tled 'The Prayer of Twenty Millions,' accusing Lincoln of being 'strangely and disastrously remiss' in not emanc.i.p.ating the slaves, adding that it was 'preposterous and futile' to try to put down the rebellion without eradicating slavery. Lincoln replied by return of post, without hesitation or consultation, and for all to read:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some slaves and leaving others alone I would do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race I do because I believe it helps to save the Union ... I shall d, less whenever I believe that what I am doing hurts the c do more whenever I believe doing more helps the cause.

In seeking to keep the Union together, and at the same time do what was right by the slaves, the innocent victims as well as the cause of the huge convulsive struggle, Lincoln was fully aware that the Civil War was not merely, as he would argue, an essentially const.i.tutional contest with religious overtones but also a religious struggle with const.i.tutional overtones. The enthusiasts on both sides were empowered by primarily moral and religious motives, rather than economic and political ones. In the South, there were standard and much quoted texts on negro inferiority, patriarchal and Mosaic acceptance of servitude, and of course St Paul on obedience to masters. In the events which led up to the war, both North and South hurled texts at each other. Revivalism and the evangelical movement generally played into the hands of extremists on both sides. When the war actually came, the Presbyterians, from North and South, tried to hold together by suppressing all discussion of the issue; but they split in the end. The Congregrationalists, because of their atomized structure, remained theoretically united but in fact were divided in exactly the same way as the others. Only the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, and the Catholics successfully avoided public debates and voting splits; but the evidence shows that they too were fundamentally divided on a basic issue of Christian principle.

Moreover, having split, the Christian churches promptly went to battle on both sides. Leonidas Polk, Bishop of Louisiana, entered the Confederate army as a major-general and announced: 'It is for const.i.tutional liberty, which seems to have fled to us for refuge, for our hearthstones and our altars that we fight.' Thomas March, Bishop of Rhode Island, preached to the militia on the other side: 'It is a holy and righteous cause in which you enlist ... G.o.d is with us ... the Lord of Hosts is on our side.' The Southern Presbyterian Church resolved in 1864: 'We hesitate not to affirm that it is the peculiar mission of the Southern Church to conserve the inst.i.tution of slavery, and to make it a blessing both to master and slave.' It insisted that it was 'unscriptural and fanatical' to accept the dogma that slavery was inherently sinful: it was 'one of the most pernicious heresies of modern times.'

To judge by the hundreds of sermons and specially composed church prayers which have survived on both sides, ministers were among the most fanatical of the combatants from beginning to end. The churches played a major role in dividing the nation, and it may be that the splits in the churches made a final split in the nation possible. In the North, such a charge was often willingly accepted. Granville Moddy, a Northern Methodist, boasted in 1861: 'We are charged with having brought about the present contest. I believe it is true we did bring it about, and I glory in it, for it is a wreath of glory round our brow.' Southern clergymen did not make the same boast but of all the various elements in the South they did the most to make a secessionist state of mind possible. Southern clergymen were particularly responsible for prolonging the increasingly futile struggle. Both sides claimed vast numbers of 'conversions' among their troops and a tremendous increase in churchgoing and 'prayerfulness' as a result of the fighting.'

The clerical interpretation of the war's progress was equally dogmatic and contradictory. The Southern Presbyterian theologian Robert Lewis Dabney blamed what he called the 'calculated malice' of the Northern Presbyterians and called on G.o.d for 'a retributive providence' which would demolish the North. Henry Ward Beecher, one of the most ferocious of the Northern clerical drum-beaters, predicted that the Southern leaders would be 'whirled aloft and plunged downward for ever and ever in an endless retribution.' The New Haven theologian Theodore Thornton Munger declared, during the 'March through Georgia,' that the Confederacy had been 'in league with h.e.l.l,' and the South was now 'suffering for its sins' as a matter of 'divine logic.' He also worked out that General McClellan's much criticized vacillations were an example of G.o.d's masterful cunning since they made a quick Northern victory impossible and so insured that the South would be much more heavily punished in the end.

As against all these raucous certainties, there were the doubts, the puzzlings, and the agonizing efforts of Abraham Lincoln to rationalize G.o.d's purposes. To anyone who reads his letters and speeches, and the records of his private conversations, it is hard not to believe that, whatever his religious state of mind before the war again, he acquired faith of a kind before it ended. His evident and total sincerity shines through all his words as the war took its terrible toll. He certainly felt the spirit of guidance. 'I am satisfied,' he wrote, 'that when the Almighty wants me to do or not to do a particular thing, he finds a way of letting me know it.' He thus waited, as the Cabinet papers show, for providential guidance at certain critical points of the war. He never claimed to be the personal agent of G.o.d's will, as everybody else seemed to be doing. But he wrote: 'If it were not for my firm belief in an overriding providence it would be difficult for me, in the midst of such complications of affairs, to keep my reason in its seat. But I am confident that the Almighty has his plans and will work them out; and ... they will be the wisest and the best for us.' When asked if G.o.d was on the side of the North, he replied: 'I am not at all concerned about that, for I know the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord's side.' As he put it, 'I am not bound to win but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to the light I have.'

Early in the war, a delegation of Baltimore blacks presented him with a finely bound Bible, in appreciation of his work for the negroes. He took to reading it more and more as the war proceeded, especially the Prophets and the Psalms. An old friend, Joshua Speed, found him reading it and said: 'I am glad to see you so profitably engaged.' Lincoln: 'Yes. I am profitably engaged.' Speed: 'Well, I see you have recovered from your skepticism [about religion and the progress of the war]. I am sorry to say that I have not.' Lincoln: 'You are wrong, Speed. Take all of this book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier and a better man.' As he told the Baltimore blacks: 'This Great Book ... is the best gift G.o.d gave to man.' After reading the Bible, Lincoln argued within himself as to what was the best course to pursue, often calling in an old friend like Leonard Swett, to rehea.r.s.e pros and cons before a sympathetic listener.

Thus arguing within himself, Lincoln incarnated the national, republican, and democratic morality which the American religious experience had brought into existence-probably more completely and accurately than a man committed to a specific church. He caught exactly the same mood as President Washington in his Farewell Message to Congress, and that is one reason why his conduct in the events leading up to the war, and during the war itself, seems, in retrospect-and seemed so to many at the time-so unerringly to accord with the national spirit. Unlike Governor Winthrop and the first colonists, Lincoln did not see the republic as the Elect Nation because that implied it was always right, and the fact that the Civil War had occurred at all indicated that America was fallible. But, if fallible, it was also anxious to do right. The Americas, as he put it, were 'the Almost Chosen People' and the war was part of G.o.d's scheme, a great testing of the nation by an ordeal of blood, showing the way to charity and thus to rebirth.

In this spirit Lincoln approached the problem of emanc.i.p.ating the slaves. The moment had to be well chosen not merely to keep the border states in the war, and fighting, but because in a sense it marked a change in the object for which the war was being fought. Lincoln had entered it, as he said repeatedly, to preserve the Union. But by the early summer of 1862 he was convinced that, by divine providence, the Union was safe, and it was his duty to change the object of the war: to wash away the sin of the Const.i.tution and the Founding Fathers, and make all the people of the United States, black as well as white, free. Providence had guided him to this point; now providence would guide him further and suggest the precise time when the announcement should be made, so as to bring victory nearer.

Lincoln had weighed all the practical arguments on either side some time before he became convinced, for reasons which had little to do with political factors, that the slaves should be declared free, and laid his decision before the Cabinet on July 22. He told his colleagues he had resolved upon this step, and had not called them together to ask their advice but 'to lay the subject-matter of a proclamation before them.' Their response was pragmatic. Edwin M. Stanton (1814-69), Secretary of War, and Edward Bates (1793-1869), Attorney-General, urged 'immediate promulgation' for maximum effect. Chase thought it would unsettle the government's financial position. Postmaster-General Montgomery Blair (1813-83) said it would cost them the fall elections. Lincoln was unperturbed. The decision was taken: all that was now required was guidance over the timing. 'We mustn't issue it until after a victory,' he said, many times. That victory came, as he knew it would, on September 17, with Antietam. Five days later, on September 22, the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, the most revolutionary doc.u.ment in United States history since the Declaration of Independence, was made public, effective from January 1, 1863. Despite an initially mixed reception, the ultimate impact of this move on the progress of the war was entirely favorable-as Lincoln, listening to the heedings of providence, knew it would be.

Political considerations-holding the Union together, putting his case before world opinion, in which emanc.i.p.ation played a key part, satisfying his own mind that the war was just and being justly pursued-were not the only considerations for Lincoln, or even the chief ones. The overriding necessity, once the fighting began, was to win, and that Lincoln found the most difficult of all. His problem was not providing the men and the supplies, or the money to pay for them. The money was spent on a prodigious scale, and soon exceeded $2 million a day. At the outset of the conflict, the US public debt, which had risen slowly since President Jackson wiped it out, was a little under $70 million. By January 11, 1866, when the end of the insurrection was officially proclaimed, it stood at $2,773 million. But Congress was willing to vote heavy taxes including, for the first time, a tax on personal incomes of from 3 to 5 percent (it was phased out in 1872). All the same, payments in specie had to be suspended at the end of December 1861, and in February 1862 Lincoln signed an Act making Treasury notes legal tender. This was followed by the issue of greenbacks, so called on account of their color, both simple paper and interest-bearing.

The fluctuations in the value of government paper against gold were at times frenzied, depending on the military news, and some serious mistakes were made. In attempts to reduce inflation, Treasury Secretary Chase went in person to the Wall Street markets and sold gold, and he got Congress to pa.s.s an Act prohibiting contracts in gold on pain of fines and imprisonment. This crude and brazen attempt to interfere with the market proved disastrous. Chase was forced to resign, and his successor, William P. Fessenden (1806-69), quickly persuaded Congress to withdraw it. But on the whole inflation was kept under control and some of the wartime measures-the transformation of 1,400 state banks of issue into a much smaller number of national banks, 1863-4, for instance-were highly beneficial and became permanent.

The problem was generals who would fight-and win. General Scott, head of the army, was not a man of the highest wisdom, as we have seen; he was also seventy-five and ultra-cautious. The overall strategy he impressed on Lincoln was to use the navy to blockade the Confederacy, the number of vessels being increased from 90 to 650, and to divide the South by pushing along the main river routes, the Mississippi, the Tennessee, and the c.u.mberland. But there was a desire among lesser generals, especially Confederate ones, to have a quick result by a spectacular victory, or by seizure of the enemy's capital, since both Richmond and Washington were comparatively near the center of the conflict. In July 1861 one of Davis' warriors, General P. G. T. Beauregard (1818-93), a flashy New Orleans aristo of French descent, who had actually fired the first shots at Sumter, pushed towards Washington in a fever of anxiety to win the first victory. He was joined by another Confederate army under General Joseph E. Johnston (1807-91), and together they overwhelmed the Unionist forces of General Irvin McDowell (1818-85) at Bull Run, July 21, 1861, though not without considerable difficulty. The new Unionist troops ended by running in panic, but the Confederates were too exhausted to press on to Washington.

The battle had important consequences nonetheless. McDowell was superseded by General George B. McClellan (1826-85), a small, precise, meticulous, and seemingly energetic man who knew all the military answers to everything. Unfortunately for Lincoln and the North, these answers added up to reasons for doing nothing, or doing little, or stopping doing it halfway. His reasons are always the same; not enough men, or supplies, or artillery. As the North's overwhelming preponderance in manpower and hardware began to build up, McClellan refused to take advantage of it, by enticing the South into a major battle and destroying its main army. The War Secretary said of him and his subordinates: 'We have ten generals there, every one afraid to fight ... If McClellan had a million men, he would swear the enemy had two million, and then he would sit down in the mud and yell for three.' Lincoln agreed: 'The general impression is daily gaining ground that [McClellan] does not intend to do anything.' At one point Lincoln seems to have seriously believed McClellan was guilty of treason and accused him to his face, but backed down at the vehemence of the general's response. Later, he concluded that McClennan was merely guilty of cowardice. When Lincoln visited the troops with his friend O. M. Hatch, and saw the vast array from a high point, he whispered 'Hatch-Hatch, what is all this?' Hatch: 'Why, Mr Lincoln, this is the Army of the Potomac.' Lincoln (loudly): 'No, Hatch, no. This is General McClellan's bodyguard.'

The best thing to be said for McClellan is that he had close links with Allan Pinkerton (1819-84), the Scots-born professional detective, who had opened a highly successful agency in Chicago. During Lincoln's campaign for the presidency, and his inauguration, Pinkerton had organized his protection, and undoubtedly frustrated at least one plot to a.s.sa.s.sinate him. McClellan employed him to build up a system of army intelligence, part of which worked behind Confederate lines, with great success. It eventually became the nucleus of the federal secret service. But Lincoln seems to have known little of this. He believed, almost certainly rightly, that at Antietam in September 1862, McClellan, with his enormous preponderance, could have destroyed the main Confederate army, had he followed up his initial successes vigorously, and thus shortened the war. So he finally removed his non fighting general, and Pinkerton went with him; and the absence of Pinkerton's thoroughness was the reason why it proved so easy to murder Lincoln in 1865.

First Bull Run had mixed results for the Confederates. It appeared to be the doing of Beauregard, and so thrust him forward: but he proved one of the least effective and most troublesome of the South's generals. In fact the victory was due more to Johnston, who was a resolute, daring, and ingenious army commander. On April 6-7, 1862, in the first major battle of the war at Shiloh, at Pittsburg Landing in Tennessee, Johnson hurled his 40,000 troops against General Ulysses S. Grant (1822-85), who had only 3 3,000. The first day's fighting brought overwhelming success to the Confederates but Johnston was wounded towards the end of it. That proved a disaster for the South: not only was their best general to date lost, but Grant turned the tide of battle the next day by leading a charge personally and the Confederates were routed. However, Johnston was not the only man brought to the fore by First Bull Run. During the melee, the officer commanding the South Carolina volunteers rallied his frightened men by pointing to the neighboring brigade commanded by General Thomas J. Jackson (1824-63) and saying: 'There stands Jackson like a stone wall.' The name stuck and Jackson's fame was a.s.sured. But it was inappropriate. Jackson was not a defensive commander but a most audacious and determined offensive one, with the true killer instinct of a great general. There was only one way the South might win the war. That was by enveloping and destroying in battle the main Unionist Army of the Potomac, taking Washington and persuading the fainthearts on the Unionist side-there were plenty of them-that the cost of waging the war was too high and that a compromise must be sought. Had Lincoln thus been deserted by a majority in Congress, he would have resigned, and the whole of American history would have been different.

Jackson was an orphan, the son of a bankrupt lawyer from Allegheny, Virginia. He was about as unSouthern as it was possible for a Virginia gentleman to be. As Grant put it, 'He impressed me always as a man of the Cromwell stamp, much more of a New Englander than a Virginian.' He was a Puritan. There is a vivid pen-portrait of him by Mrs James Chesnut, a Richmond lady who kept a war diary. He said to her dourly: 'I like strong drink-so I never touch it.' He sucked lemons instead and their sourness pervaded his being. He had no sense of humor, and tried to stamp out swearing and obscene joking among his men. He was 'an ungraceful horseman mounted on a sorry chestnut with a shambling gait, his huge feet with out-turned toes thrust into his stirrups, and such parts of his countenance as the low visor of his stocking cap failed to conceal wearing a wooden look.' Jackson had no slaves and there are grounds for believing he detested slavery. In Lexington he set up a school for black children, something most Southerners hated-in some states it was unlawful-and persisted in it, despite much cursing and opposition. His sister-in-law, who wrote a memoir of him, said he accepted slavery 'as it existed in the Southern States, not as a thing desirable in itself, but as allowed by Providence for ends it was not his business to determine.'

Yet, as Grant said, 'If any man believed in the rebellion, he did.' Jackson fought with a ferocity and single-minded determination which no other officer on either side matched. Mrs Chesnut records a fellow-general's view: 'He certainly preferred a fight on Sunday to a sermon. [But] failing to manage a fight, he loved next best a long, Presbyterian sermon, Calvinist to the core. He had no sympathy for human infirmity. He was the true type of all great soldiers. He did not value human life where he had an object to accomplish.' His men feared him: 'He gave orders rapidly and distinctly and rode away without allowing answer or remonstrance. When you failed, you were apt to be put under arrest.' He enjoyed war and battle, believing it was G.o.d's work, and he was ambitious in a way unusual for Southerners, who were happy-go-lucky except in defense of their beliefs and ways. Jackson would have liked to have been a dictator for righteousness. But, having won the terrifying Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863, he was shot in the back by men of one of his own brigades, Malone's, who supposedly mistook him in the moonlight for a Yankee. After Jackson's death the Confederacy lost all its battles except Chickamauga.

Jackson was not the only superb commander on the Confederate side. Colonel John Singelton Mosby (1833-1916), who worked behind the Unionist lines, also had the killer instinct. Like many Southern officers, he was a wonderful cavalryman, but he had solid sense too. General Richard Taylor, son of President Taylor, who wrote the best book about the war from inside the Southern high ranks, summed it up: 'Living on horseback, fearless and dashing, the men of the South afforded the best possible material for cavalry. They had every quality but discipline.' Mosby would have none of that nonsense and was the first cavalryman to throw away his saber as useless and pack two pistols instead. He hated the Richmond set-up-'Although a revolutionary government, none was ever so much under the domination of red tape as Richmond'-and that was one reason he chose the sabotage role, remote from the order-chattering telegraph. The damage he did to the Unionist lines of communication was formidable and he was hated accordingly. On Grant's orders, any of his men who were captured were shot. In the autumn of 1864, for instance, General George Custer executed six of them: he shot three, hanged two, and a seventeen-year-old boy, who had borrowed a horse to join Mosby, was dragged through the streets by two men on horses and shot before the eyes of his mother, who begged Custer to treat the boy as a prisoner-of-war. This treatment stopped immediately Mosby began to hang his prisoners in retaliation.

Mosby was 'slender, gaunt and active in figure ... his feet are small and cased in cavalry boots with bra.s.s spurs, and the revolvers in his belt are worn with an air of "business." He had piercing eyes, a flashing smile, and laughed often but was always in deadly earnest when fighting. He was the stuff of which Hollywood movies are made and indeed might have figured in one since he lived long enough to see Birth of a Nation. He became a myth-figure in the North: he was supposed to have been in the theater when Lincoln was shot, masterminding it, and to have planned all the big railroad robberies, long after the war. But he was the true-life hero of one of the best Civil War stories. During a night-raid he caught General Edwin H. Stoughton naked in bed with a floozie and woke him up roughly. 'Do you know who I am, sir?' roared the general. Mosby: 'Do you know Mosby, General?' Stoughton: 'Yes! Have you got the -- rascal?' Mosby: 'No, but he has got you!'

Jackson and Mosby were the only two Confederate generals who were consistently successful. Jackson's death made it inevitable that Lee would a.s.sume the highest command, though it is only fair to Lee to point out that he was finally appointed commander-in-chief of the Southern forces only in February 1865, just two months before he was forced to surrender them at Appomattox. Lee occupies a special place in American history because he was the South's answer to the North's Lincoln: the leader whose personal probity and virtuous inspiration sanctified their cause. Like Lincoln, though in a less eccentric and angular manner, Lee looked the part. He radiated beauty and grace. Though nearly six feet, he had tiny feet and there was something feminine in his sweetness and benignity. His fellow-cadets at West Point called him the 'Marble Model.' With his fine beard, tinged first with gray, then white, he became a Homeric patriarch in his fifties. He came from the old Virginian aristocracy and married into it. His father was Henry Lee III, Revolutionary War general, Congressman and governor of Virginia. His wife, Anne Carter, was great-granddaughter of 'King' Carter, who owned 300,000 acres and 1,000 slaves. That was the theory, anyway. In fact Lee's father was also 'Light Horse Harry,' a dishonest land-speculator and bankrupt, who defrauded among others George Washington. President Washington dismissed his claim to be head of the United States Army with the brisk, euphemistic, 'Lacks economy.' Henry was jailed twice and when Robert was six fled to the Caribbean, never to return. Robert's mother was left a penurious widow with many children and the family's reputation was not improved by a ruffianly stepson, 'Black Horse Harry,' who specialized in adultery.

So Lee set himself quite deliberately to lead an exemplary life and redeem the family honor. That was a word he used often. It meant everything to him. He led a blameless existence at West Point and actually saved from his meager pay at a time when Southern cadets prided themselves on acquiring debts. His high grades meant he joined the elite Corps of Engineers in an army whose chief occupation was building forts. He worked on taming the wild and mighty river Mark Twain described so well. Lee served with distinction in the Mexican War, ran West Point, then commanded the cavalry against the Plains Indians. It was he who put down John Brown's rebellion and reluctantly handed him over to be hanged. He predicted from the start that the 'War between the States,' as the South called, and calls, it, would be long and b.l.o.o.d.y. All his instincts were eirenic and, the son of an ardent federalist, he longed for a compromise which would save the Union. But, as he watched the Union Washington had created fall apart, he clung to the one element in it which seemed permanent-Virginia, from which both he and Washington had come and to which he was honor-bound. As he put it, 'I prize the Union very highly and know of no personal sacrifice I would not make to preserve it, save that of honor.'

Lee was a profound strategist who believed all along that the South's only chance was to entrap the North in a decisive battle and ruin its army. That is what he aimed to do. With Johnston's death he was put in command of the Army of Northern Virginia and ran it for the next three years with, on the whole, great success. He ended McClellan's threat to Richmond (insofar as it was one) in the Seven Days Battle, routed the Unionists at Second Bull Run (August 1862) but was checked at Antietam the following month. He defeated the Unionists again at Fredericksburg in December 1862 and again at Chancellorsville in May 1863. This opened the way for an invasion of Pennsylvania, heart of the North's productive power, which would force it to a major battle. That is how Gettysburg (July 1863) came about. It was what Lee wanted, an encounter on the grandest possible scale, though the actual meeting-point was accidental, both Lee and General George G. Meade (1815-72), the Unionist commander, blundering into it. Lee had strategic genius, but as field commander he had one great weakness. His orders to subordinate generals were indications and wishes rather than direct commands. As his best biographer has put it, 'Lee was a soldier who preferred to suggest rather than from confrontation. He insisted on making possible for others the freedom of thought and action he sought for himself.' This method of commanding a large army sometimes worked for Lee but at Gettysburg it proved fatal. On the first day the Confederate success was overwhelming, and on the second (July 2), General James Longstreet (1821-1904) led the main attack on the Union right but delayed it till 4 P.M. and so allowed Meade to concentrate his main force on the strongpoint of Cemetery Ridge. Some positions were secured, however, including Culp's Hill. Meade's counterattack on the morning of July 3 retook Culp's Hill and confronted Lee with the crisis of the battle. He ordered an attack on Cemetery Ridge but did not make it clear to Longstreet that he wanted it taken at any cost. Jackson would have made no bones about it-take the hill or face court-martial. The charge was led by the division commanded by General George E. Pickett (1825-75), with a supporting division and two further brigades, 15,000 in all. Longstreet provided too little artillery support and the a.s.sault force was ma.s.sacred by enfilading Union artillery, losing 6,000 men. Only half a company of Pickett's charge reached the crest; even so, it would have been enough, and the battle won, if Longstreet had thrown in all his men as reinforcements. But he did not do so and the battle, the culmination of the Civil War on the main central front, was lost. Lee sacrificed a third of his men and the Confederate army was never again capable of winning the war. 'It has been a sad day for us,' said Lee at one o'clock the next morning, 'almost too tired to dismount.' 'I never saw troops behave more magnificently than Pickett's division ... And if they had been supported as they were to have been-but for some reason not yet fully explained to me, were not-we would have held the position and the day would have been ours.' Then he paused, and said 'in a loud voice': 'Too bad! Too bad! OH! TOO BAD!''

General Meade was criticized for not following up Lee's retreating forces immediately and with energy, but that was easier said than done-his own men had been terribly mauled. But he was a reliable general and with him in charge of the main front on the Atlantic coast Lincoln could be satisfied. Meanwhile, the war in the West was at last going in the Union's favor. Lincoln's strategy was to neutralize as much of the South as he could, divide it and cut it into pieces, then subdue each separately. The naval war, despite the North's huge preponderance in ships, did not always go its way. The South equipped commercial raiders who altogether took or sank 350 Northern merchant ships, but this was no more than minor attrition. When the Union forces abandoned the naval yard at Portsmouth, Virginia, at the beginning of the war, they scuttled a new frigate Merrimac. The Confederates raised it, renamed it Virginia, and clad it in iron. It met the Union ironclad Monitor in Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862 in an inconclusive five-hour duel, the first battle of iron ships in history. But the Confederates were not able to get the Virginia into the Mexican Gulf, where it might have served a strategic purpose. They stationed more troops guarding its base than it was worth. The South could run the blockade but they never came near breaking it, and the brilliant campaign of Commodore David Farragut in the Gulf finally sealed the mouth of the Mississippi.

To the north, and in the Western theater, General Grant achieved the first substantial Union successes on land when he took Forts Henry and Donelson; and after Shiloh he commanded the Mississippi as far south as Vicksburg. The North now controlled the Tennessee River and the c.u.mberland and it took New Orleans and Memphis. But the South still controlled zoo miles of the Mississippi between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Louisiana. Vicksburg was strongly fortified and protected by natural defenses. Attempts to take it, in May-June 1862 and again in December January 1863 failed. In May 1863 Grant made a third attempt, and after a fierce siege in which each side lost 10,000, he forced it to surrender the day after Meade won Gettysburg (July 4). Five days later Port Hudson fell, the entire Mississippi was in Union hands, and the Confederacy was split in two.

In Grant Lincoln at last found a war-winning general, and a man he could trust and esteem. Unlike the others, Grant asked for nothing and did not expect the President to approve his plans in advance and so take the blame if things went wrong.' Grant was an unprepossessing general. Lincoln said: 'He is the quietest little man you ever saw. He makes the least fuss of any man I ever knew. I believe on several occasions he has been in [the Oval Office] a minute or so before I knew he was there. The only evidence you have that he's in any particular place is that he makes things move.' Grant was born in 1822 at Point Pleasant, Ohio. His father was a tanner. In his day West Point was, as he put it, a place for clever, hard-working boys 'from families that were trying to gain advancement in position or to prevent slippage from a precarious place.'

Lee, an aristocrat of sorts, was unusual. In Grant's cla.s.s of '43 were Longstreet, McClellan, and Sherman, among other Civil War generals-all of them meritocrats. The chief instructor in Grant's day, Dents Hart Mahan-father of the outstanding naval strategist-taught them that 'carrying the war into the heart of the a.s.sailant's country is the surest way of making him share its burdens and foil his plans.' Lee was never able to do this-Grant and Sherman did. Grant was in the heat of the Mexican War, fighting at Palo Alto, Resaca, Monterrey, and Mexico City, and he learned a lot about logistics, later his greatest strength. But he hated and deplored the war, which he regarded as wholly unjust, fought by a Democratic administration in order to acquire more slave states, especially Texas. He saw the Civil War as a punishment on the entire country by G.o.d-'Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.'

Grant was a man with a strong and simple moral sense. He had a first-cla.s.s mind. He might have made a brilliant writer-both his letters and his autobiography have the marks of genius. He made an outstanding soldier. But there were fatal flaws in his system of self-discipline. All his adult life he fought a battle with alcohol, often losing it. After the Mexican War, in civilian life, he failed as a farmer, an engineer, a clerk, and a debt-collector. In 1861 he was thirty-nine, with a wife, four children, a rotten job, and not one cent to his name, in serious danger of becoming the town drunk. He welcomed the Civil War because he saw it as a crusade for justice. It changed his life. A neighbor said: 'I saw new energies in him. He dropped his stoop-shouldered way of walking and set his hat forward on his forehead in a jaunty fashion.' He was immediately commissioned a colonel of volunteers and, shortly after, brigadier-general. He was not impressive to look at. He was a small man on a big horse, with an ill-kept, sc.r.a.ppy beard, a cigar clamped between his teeth, a slouch hat, an ordinary soldier's overcoat. But there was nothing slovenly about his work. He thought hard. He planned. He gave clear orders and saw to it they were obeyed, and followed up. His handling of movements and supplies was always meticulous. His Vicksburg campaign, though daring, was a model of careful planning, beautifully executed. But he was also a killer. A nice man, he gave no mercy in war until the battle was won. Lincoln loved him, and his letters to Grant are marvels of sincerity, sense, brevity, fatherly wisdom, and support. In October 1863 Lincoln gave Grant supreme command in the West, and in March 1864 he put him in charge of the main front, with the t.i.tle of General-in-Chief of the Union army and the rank of lieutenant-general, held by no one since Washington and specially revived in Grant's favor by a delighted Congress.

Nevertheless, the war was not yet won, and it is a tribute to the extraordinary determination of people in the South, and the almost unending courage of its soldiers, that, despite all the South's handicaps, and the North's strength, the war continued into and throughout 1864, more desperate than ever. The two main armies, the Army of the Potomac (North) and the Army of Northern Virginia (South) had faced each other and fought each other for three whole years and, as Grant said, 'fought more desperate battles than it probably ever before fell to the lot of two armies to fight, without materially changing the vantage ground of either'-it was, indeed, a murderous foretaste of the impenetrable Western Front of World War One. What to do, then? Grant, after much argument with Lincoln, who steered him away from more ambitious alternatives, determined on a two-p.r.o.nged strategy. One army under General William T. Sherman (1820-91), who had taken over from Grant as commander-in-chief in the West, would sweep through Georgia and destroy the main east-west communications of the Confederacy. Grant's main army would clear the almost impa.s.sable Wilderness Region west of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in preparation for a final a.s.sault on Lee's army. The Battle of the Wilderness began on May 5-6, 1864, while on the 7th Sherman launched his a.s.sault on Atlanta and so to the sea.

The Wilderness battle proved indecisive, though horribly costly in men, and three days later Grant was repulsed at Spotsylvania with equally heavy loss. At the end of the month Grant again attacked at Cold Harbor, perhaps the most futile slaughter of the entire war. In six weeks Grant had lost 60,000 men. Lee, too, had lost heavily-20,000 men, which proportionate to his resources was even more serious than the North's casualties. Nonetheless, Lincoln was profoundly disturbed by the carnage and failure. The Speaker of the House, Schuyler Colfax, found him pacing his office, 'his long arms behind his back, his dark features contracted still more with gloom,' explaining: 'Why do we suffer reverses after reverses? Could we have avoided this terrible, b.l.o.o.d.y war? ... Is it ever to end?' Francis B. Carpenter, who was painting his First Reading of the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation by President Lincoln, described him in the hall of the White House, 'clad in a long morning wrapper, pacing back and forth a narrow pa.s.sage leading to one of the windows, his hands behind him, great black rings under his eyes, his head bent forward upon his breast-altogether ... a picture of the effects of sorrow, care and anxiety.'

All the same, the noose was tightening round the South. Davis himself felt it. Even before Gettysburg, he had personally been forced to quell a food riot of hungry women in Richmond. Unionist troops overran his and his brother's property, taking the whites prisoner and allowing the blacks to go. Some 137 slaves fled to freedom leaving, on Davis' own estate, only six adults and a few children. His property was betrayed by a slave he trusted, the soldiers cut his carpets into bits as souvenirs, they drank his wine, stabbed his portrait with knives, and got all his private papers, spicy extracts from which duly appeared in the Northern newspapers. In Richmond, Davis had to sell his slaves, his horses, and his carriage just to buy food-ersatz coffee, pones or corncakes, bread, a bit of bacon. Jeb Stuart, Davis' best cavalry commander, fell, mortally wounded. He had one good general, Lee, marking Grant; but Lincoln had two-and Sherman now took Atlanta, moved through Georgia, burning and slaughtering, and on December 21, 1864 was in Savannah, having cut the Confederacy in two yet again. By Christmas much of the South was starving. Davis had made Lincoln's job of holding the North together easier by proclaiming, for four years, that he would not negotiate about anything except on the basis of the North admitting the complete independence of the South. Now he again insisted the South would 'bring the North to its knees before next summer.' On hearing this rodomontade, his own Vice-President, Alexander Stephens (1812-83), told him in disgust he was leaving for his home and would not return-it was the beginning of the disintegration of the Confederate government.

Much of the South was now totally demoralized by military occupation. Sarah Morgan of Baton Rouge, who kept a diary, described the sacking of her house:

one scene of ruin. Libraries emptied, china smashed, sideboards split open with axes, three cedar chests cut open, plundered and set up on end; all parlor ornaments carried off. [Her sister Margaret's] piano, dragged to the center of the parlor had been abandoned as too heavy to carry off; her desk lay open with all letters and notes well thumbed and scattered around, while Will's last letter to her was open on the floor, with the Yankee stamp of dirty fingers. Mother's portrait half cut from the frame stood on the floor. Margaret, who was present at the sacking, told how she had saved father's. It seems that those who wrought destruction in our house were all officers!

The destruction in Georgia was worse. Like Grant, Sherman was a decent man but a fierce, killer general, determined to end the war and the slaughter as speedily as possible and, with this his end, anxious to demonstrate to the South in as plain a manner as he could that the North was master and resistance futile. He cut a swathe 60 miles wide through Georgia, destroying everything-railroads, bridges, crops, cattle, cotton-gins, mills, stocks-which might conceivably be useful to the South's war-effort. Despite his orders, and the generally tight discipline of his army in action, the looting was appalling and the atrocities struck fear and dismay into the stoutest Southern hearts.

Sherman's capture of Atlanta and his rout of the Southern army in Georgia came in time-just-to insure Lincoln's reelection. During the terrible midsummer of 1864 there had been talk, by 'Peace Democrats,' of doing a deal with Davis and getting control of both armies, thus ending both the rebellion and Republican rule. Many prominent Republicans thought the war was lost and wanted to impose Grant as a kind of president-dictator. He wrote to a friend saying he wanted 'to stick to the job I have'-and the friend showed it to Lincoln. Lincoln observed: 'My son, you will never know how gratifying that is to me. No man knows, when that presidential grub starts to gnaw at him, just how deep it will get until he has tried it. And I didn't know but what there was one gnawing at Grant.' The general put an end to intrigue by stating: 'I consider it as important to the cause that [Lincoln] should be reelected as that the army should be successful in the field.'

Sherman's successes in September, and his continued progress through Georgia, swung opinion strongly back in Lincoln's favor. The increasing desperation of the South, expressed in terrorism, bank-raids, and murder in Northern cities, inflamed the Northern ma.s.ses and were strong vote-winners for the Republicans. The resentful McClellan fared disastrously for the Democrats. Lincoln carried all but three of the partic.i.p.ating states and 212 electoral votes out of 233, a resounding vote of confidence by the people. He entered his second term of office in a forthright but still somber mood, in which the religious overtones in his voice had grown stronger. They echo through his short Second Inaugural, a meditation on the mysterious way in which both sides in the struggle invoked their G.o.d, and G.o.d withheld his ultimate decision in favor of either:

Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same G.o.d; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just G.o.d's a.s.sistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes: 'Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it needs be that offenses come, but woe unto that man by whom the offenses cometh!' . . . Fondly do we hope-fervently do we pray-that this mighty scourge of war may pa.s.s away. Yet if G.o.d wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two-hundred-and-fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid with another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether'.

So Lincoln asked the nation to continue the struggle to the end, 'With malice to none, with charity to all, with firmness in the right, as G.o.d gives us to see the right.'

The Second Inaugural began the myth of Lincoln in the hearts of Americans. Those who actually glimpsed him were fascinated by his extraordinary appearance, so unlike the ideal American in its ma.s.sive lack of beauty, so incarnate of the nation's spirit in some mysterious way. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote (1862):

The whole physiognomy is as coa.r.s.e a one as you would meet anywhere in the length and breadth of the state; but withal, it is redeemed, illuminated, softened and brightened by a kindly though serious look out of his eyes, and an expression of homely sagacity, that seemed weighted with rich results of village experience. A great deal of native sense, no bookish cultivation, no refinement; honest at heart, and thoroughly so, and yet in some sort, sly-at least endowed with a sort of tact and wisdom that are akin to craft, and would impel him, I think, to take an antagonist in flank, rather than make a bull-run at him right in front. But on the whole I like this sallow, queer, sagacious visage, with the homely human sympathies that warmed it; and, for my small share in the matter, would as lief have Uncle Abe for a ruler as any man that it would have been practical to have put in his place.

Walt Whitman, looking at the President from a height in Broadway, noted 'his perfect composure and coolness-his unusual and uncouth height, his dress of complete black, stovepipe hat pushed back on the head, dark-brown complexion, seam'd and wrinkled yet canny-looking face, black, bushy head of hair, disproportionately long neck, and his hands held behind him as he stood observing the people.' Whitman thought 'four sorts of genius' would be needed for 'the complete lining of the Man's future portrait'-'the eyes and brains and finger-touch of Plutarch and Aeschylus and Michelangelo, a.s.sisted by Rabelais.'

There is a famous photograph of Lincoln, taken at this time, visiting the HQ of the Army of the Potomac, standing with some of his generals outside their tents. These officers were mostly tall for their times but Lincoln towers above them to a striking degree. It was as if he were of a different kind of humanity: not a master-race, but a higher race. There were many great men in Lincoln's day-Tolstoy, Gladstone, Bismarck, Newman, d.i.c.kens, for example-and indeed master spirits in his own America-Lee, Sherman, Grant, to name only three of the fighting men-yet Lincoln seems to have been of a different order of moral stature, and of intellectual heroism. He was a strong man, and like most men quietly confident of their strength, without vanity or self-consciousness-and also tender. Towards the end of the war, Lincoln went to see Seward, his Secretary of State, a man with whom he often disagreed and whom he did not particularly like. Seward had somehow contrived to break both his arm and his jaw in a carriage accident. Lincoln found him not only bedridden but quite unable to move his head. Without a moment's hesitation, the President stretched out at full length on the bed and, resting on his elbow, brought his face near Seward's, and they held an urgent, whispered consultation on the next steps the administration should take. Then Lincoln talked quietly to the agonized man until he drifted off to sleep. Lincoln could easily have used the excuse of Seward's incapacity to avoid consulting him at all. But that was not his way. He invariably did the right thing, however easily it might be avoided. Of how many other great men can that be said?

Lincoln was well aware of the sufferings of those in the North who actively partic.i.p.ated in the struggle. They haunted him. He read to his entourage that terrible pa.s.sage from Macbeth in which the King tells of his torments of mind:

we will eat our meat in fear, and sleep In the affliction of these terrible dreams, That shake us nightly; better be with the dead Than on the torture of the mind to lie In restless ecstasy.

One man who was also well aware of the suffering was Whitman. Too old to fight, he watched his younger brother George, a cabinet maker, enlist for a 100-day stint which turned into four years, during which time he partic.i.p.ated in twenty-one major engagements, saw most of his comrades killed, and spent five months in a horrific Confederate prison. Some 26,000 Union soldiers died in these dreadful stockades, and so great was the Union anger at conditions in them, especially at Andersonville, that its commandant, Major Henry Wirz, was the only Southerner to be punished by hanging. Instead of enlisting, Whitman engaged himself in hospital service, first at the New York Hospital, then off Broadway in Pearl Street, later in Washington DC: 'I resigned myself / To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead.'

In some ways the Civil War hospitals were bloodier than the battlefield. Amputation was 'the trade-mark of Civil war surgery.' Three out of four operations were amputations. At Gettysburg, for an entire week, from dawn till twilight, some surgeons did nothing but cut off arms and legs. Many of these dismemberments were quite unnecessary, and the soldiers knew it. Whitman was horrified by what happened to the wounded, often mere boys. He noted that the great majority were between seventeen and twenty. Some had pistols under their pillows to protect their limbs. Whitman himself was able to save a number by remonstrating with the surgeons. He wrote:

From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand, I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood.

Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv'd neck and side falling head, His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the b.l.o.o.d.y stump, And has not vet looked on it.

More arms and legs were chopped off in the Civil War than in any other conflict in which America has ever been engaged-but a few dozen fewer than might have been, but for Whitman. A paragraph in the New York Tribune in 1880 quoted a veteran pointing to his leg: 'This is the leg [Whitman] saved for me.'

Whitman calculated that, during the war, he made over boo hospital visits or tours, some lasting several days, and ministered in one way or another to over 100,000 soldiers. His book of poems Drum-Taps records some of his experiences. Not everyone welcomed his visits. One nurse at the Armory Square hospital said: 'Here comes that odious Walt Whitman to talk evil and unbelief to my boys.' The scale of the medical disaster almost overwhelmed him-one temporary hospital housed 70,000 casualties at one time. Whitman considered the volume and intensity of the suffering totally disproportionate to any objective gained by the war. Others agreed with him. Louisa May Alcott (1832-88), later author of the famous bestseller Little Women (1868), spent a month nursing in the Washington front-line hospitals before being invalided home with typhoid, and recorded her experiences in Hospital Sketches (1863). This is a terrifying record of bad medical practice, of the kind Florence Nightingale had utterly condemned a decade before, including lethal overdosing with the emetic calomel. At many points her verdict and Whitman's concurred.

Yet it is curious how little impact the Civil War made upon millions of people in the North. When Edmund Wilson came to write his book on the conflict, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962), he was astonished by how little there was of it. There were hymn-songs, of course: 'John Brown's Body,' Julia Ward Howe's 'Battle Hymn of the Republic,' to rally Northern spirits, Daniel Decatur Emmett's 'Dixie' to enthuse the South. The young Henry James was not there-he had 'a mysterious wound,' which prevented serving. Mark Twain was out west. William Dean Howells was a consul in Italy.