Qass. ■"VGS- Book J %4 0^.y A Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from The Library of Congress http://www.archive.org/details/civilwarOOpaxs HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE No, 25 Editors: The Rt. Hon. H. A. L. FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, Litt.D. LL.D., F.B.A. Prof. Sir J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. Prof. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A. A complete classified list of the volumes of The Home University Library already published will be found at the back of this book. THE CIVIL WAR FREDERIC CPAXSON U PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN Author of ^^The Independence of the South American Republics^'' ^^The Last American Frontier'''' NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY LONDON THORNTON BUTTERWORTH. LTD. ^ Copyright, 1911, BY flEENRY HOLT AND COMPANY CONTENTS CHAP. FAOB I The Law of the Land . . ^ . • • . . 11 II Secession 25 III Abraham Lincoln 39 IV Civil War 54 V Afloat and Abroad 79 VI 1862: McClellan and Emancipation ... 92 VII 1862: The Mississippi Valley 115 VIII Ulysses S. Grant 135 IX Gettysburg and Reconstruction 160 X The Balance of Power 186 XI The Union Party 209 XII The Confederate Collapse 232 Bibliographical Note 251 Index 253 LIST OF MAPS PAGE I The United States in 1860 36 II Railroads of the United States, 1861-1865 . 57 III The Seat of War in the East 93 IV The War in the West 114 PREFACE It is the attempt of this book to show that the Civil War was more than a succession of battles; that it was a struggle between two civilizations, each the logical result of its environment, and each endeavoring to work out the best American interest as it saw it. That of the two civilizations, one was reactionary, and opposed to both the humani- tarian sentiments of the nineteenth century and the economic profit of the race, is quite as true as the fact that honesty and intelligence were about evenly divided in the contest. The motive for secession, slavery, was indefensible in the long run, but men brought up with that institution believed in it, and were led by it to believe that the Con- stitution had not created a nation, — a position in which they were contradicted by the facts of industry and the law of the land. On both counts, slavery and secession, American history must adjudge the South to have been mistaken. It is reasonably clear to-day, that the South would of hei'self have discarded slavery in another generation ; that the New Nationalism would have X PREFACE come about without the Civil War. Yet the war dominated in the American mind for forty years, and is worthy of study if only on this account. The reader of this book is ui-ged to study the campaigns with the map before him. The larger strategy of the Civil War was simple and direct, but, without a map, it will remain incompre- hensible. The writer of the book is indebted to innumer- able fore-runners, who have re-fought the battles on paper, and disputed controverted points. The limits of a preface do not permit all the acknowl- edgments that he would like to make. But the greatest of his debts is one which he, in common with every other student of the Civil War, owes to the profound, judicial, and enlightened pages of James Ford Rhodes, Madison, Wisconsin, August, 1911, THE CIYIL WAR CHAPTER I THE LAW OF THE LAND After more than fourscore years of storm and calm, of war and politics, of trying hardships and yet more trying prosperity, the United States remained both independ- ent and united in 1860. In commerce as in government it had managed, one way and another, to hold together and to grow. Through accretion and happy accident, rather than foresight or construction, it had attained a size and wealth surprising to its critics and overwhelming to its citizens. Only a few of these knew whence it had come or whither it was tending, yet in the souls of nearly all there burned a love of country and pride of performance that made the American a marked man wherever he appeared in the society of the world. The American Civil War was fought on both sides by men who had lived through a period of national adolescence. Their in- tellectual heritage was one. In the conduct 12 THE CIVIL WAR of their affairs they showed the weaknesses as well as the strength of their experience. They were essentially American whether they were right or wrong. Only the calm judgment of posterity can determine which side was wrong. Few of the men who voted for or against Abraham Lincoln in 1860 knew enough real history to be influenced by it. What they thought was history they had taken from the lips of their statesmen, as they had read the speeches of Webster or Calhoun. The sources of their knowledge were themselves colored by the facts of the prolonged controversy that had given life to American politics for thirty years. Yet, after all, one side was right and one was wrong. Though advocates of either were frequently mistaken in their application of historic facts, though par- tisans of both were always more honest than informed, one side of the quarrel har- monized generally with the trend of human experience and the laws of economic and political evolution; the other was reactionary and as such condemned by time. Any explanation of the causes of the Civil War must take into account the forces which had made the American and the southern environments. Fundamental among those of the latter was the cultivation of the cotton plant, and the type of labor which it permitted. From the earliest days of Amer- ican colonization there had been divergent THE LAW OF THE LAND 13 tendencies to separate the plantations of the southern seaboard from the farms of the Atlantic coast north of Delaware Bay. Climate, in the South, checked the physical activities of white men, whereas in the North it stimulated and invigorated them. The northern soil responded only to per- sistent and vigorous attack; the farm lands along the southern rivers invited the easy cultivation of a few staple crops. Every- where the question of labor supply was great. In a new country the invitation to work must always be more generous than the response of workers. But in North and South this invitation called for different answers. The northern laborer before 1830 was most likely to be a farmer, or to be con- nected in some way with agricultural en- terprise. The range of crops to which his labor could be applied was so wide that no single product dominated. All the year round he worked, in the fields or indoors at domestic manufactures. Turning from job to job, doing a dozen different tasks between sunrise and sunset, he succeeded best who had those traits which the term Yankee has come to signify — quick alertness, readi- ness of initiative, intelligence and compe- tence. Working by himself, and generally for himself, at tasks that called for close individual application, the northern laborer was the highest of his kind. The oppor- tunity which the New World offered for 14 THE CIVIL WAR advancement quickened his intellect and inspired his exertions. Unless he was a Yankee he could not prosper. The southern climate and soil permitted the use of a different kind of labor from that which was essential to the North. Single crops, which could be cultivated by routine, could be grown over wide areas. It was not that individual application and industry could not succeed in the South, but that conditions allowed this industry to exploit a variety of labor that could not justify its existence in the North. Had half -civilized negro laborers been usable in the North, slavery would have flourished there, for labor was in high demand, and the average ethics of the seventeenth century saw noth- ing anomalous in a human chattel. But in the southern climate the low-class negro laborer adapted himself readily. Improvi- dent and incompetent he was, but under white direction, in a new and fertile land, he could be used to the profit of his owner. The plantation system, which is only the application of gang labor and routine tasks to agriculture, had already become a south- ern type before the American Revolution. The negro was held as a slave largely be- cause no other way was known to control barbarian laborers. The slave-owner was not yet troubled by logical deductions from the rights of man. At the beginning of the American govern- THE LAW OF THE LAND 15 ment under the Constitution, in 1789, there was a difference existing between the labor systems of the northern and southern states; but there were many other differences among the sectionahstic and locaHstic states that were beheved to be more serious. "It is too probable that no plan we propose will be adopted," the most eminent American had admitted in 1787 when he confronted the task of finding a working basis for friendly relations among thirteen independent states. During the War of Independence, common interests had produced such similarity of result among the states that many have believed that they were then really united. During the years of the Confederacy diver- gent selfish interests reduced to complete incompetence the congress of ambassadors created by the Articles of Confederation. And when in 1789 the new Constitution was allowed to go into effect the doubters and scoffers were innumerable. The states, though resembling each other in language, government, and practices, were in fact in- dependent and jealous. They had been units as British provinces; and between 1776 and 1789 they had developed so few economic interests that crossed state lines, that the convention, entrusting all these general interests to the new government, had summed them up in a single clause respecting commerce. The economic development of the United 16 THE GIVIL WAR States after 1789, is a part of that great in- dustrial revolution that has re-made nearly every government of modern Europe. In America population multiplied and spread. Crossing the Alleghanies the pioneers of the West erected new states which, one by one, were admitted to the Union until in 1860 the original thirteen had been enlarged to thirty-three. The western commonwealths perpetuated the ideas and economic institu- tions of their eastern predecessors. Follow- ing climatic lines, the territories of the Northwest found their prosperity in free labor, and had been so manifestly predeter- mined in this that Congress had been able in 1787 to respond to a new humanitarian sentiment and forbid slavery, forever, in the Old Northwest. The Southwest throve on the cotton crop, made ever more im- portant by the invention of the gin, the sewing machine, and the application of steam, and continued the exploitation of negro labor on the plantation in the culture of that staple. The minute localism of interests which had characterized the American states in 1789 was in part destroyed by 1830. One group of states, possessing climatic similarity and geographic propinquity, had acquired a common quality that gave to it weight in the counsels of the nation out of proportion to its population or wealth. The northern states remained individualistic and often THE LAW OF THE LAND 17 antagonistic, but south of Pennsylvania and the Ohio River, every state possessing the plantation system and slave labor felt its closeness to its neighbors in the common jealousy of anything which might injure the value of its slave property. The South had become a section that in many ways forgot state lines. Its representatives in Congress voted as a unit. The philanthropic notions of the nineteenth century aroused its fears and antagonisms. Vitally interested in the property which its economic situation had allowed it to accrue, it could see no good in social movements that threatened the per- manence of its vested rights. Economic unity, based upon slave labor, had come to the South before 1830. Such unity, over a large portion of the United States, had not been anticipated by the f ram- ers of the Constitution whose experience had been with the centrifugal forces of local rivalry. Once recognized, however, it gave to the states involved such an advantage in federal affairs that they were able to control the government. After twenty years of this control, they had come to believe them- selves entitled, as of right, to direct those national policies which an accident of eco- nomics had thrown into their hands. In the twenty years after 1830, while the South was exulting in its dominance over Congress, the northern states underwent a unifying process, and became the North. 18 THE CIVIL WAR Here, as in the South, it was the trend of business that produced unity. There, a common method of production gave rise to a community of interests that was intensi- fied when the rest of the world repudiated slavery. Interchange of wares destroyed the localism of the North. I The Allegheny Mountains were both an obstacle and an encouragement to the eco- nomic development of the North. So long as they were crossed only by narrow and devious wagon paths, they prevented any large ex- change of commodities. They were but a slight obstruction to the South, which passed them and found on their western slopes rivers flowing easily into the Gulf of Mexico and providing abundant routes to a market for their products. But they were a real barrier between the Northeast and the Northwest. The latter region found that it was limited to the markets reached by the tedious courses of the St. Lawrence or the Mississippi. It coveted the trade of the populous eastern states, and this desire caused it to press for roads across the moun- tains. Turnpikes, useful but inadequate, were built, used, and discarded for canals; while these in turn were superseded by the railroad just as soon as steam was brought under control. During the two decades in which the South was convincing itself that cotton was king, and was rushing its crop to a receptive THE LAW OF THE LAND 19 world by the water routes that nature had provided, the North and Northwest were strugghng with grades and tunnels, cuts and embankments. Before 1840 railroads scarcely diverted the streams of American trade. In the next ten years the trunk lines climbed the Alleghenies. During the fifties, 10,000 miles of railway were opened in the Old Northwest alone, and every farmer north of the Ohio could ship direct to tidewater on the Atlantic. It was not a habit or a system of labor that produced the economic unity of the North in contrast to that of the plantation South. It was a physical amal- gamation that suddenly appeared between 1850 and 1860, and it was based upon 20,000 miles of railway track which defied the sec- tionalism of geography. From 1830 to 1850 the united South con- trolled the policies of the United States. Few even of its leaders foresaw the economic trend of the North. The quick changes of the fifties, operating everywhere in the United States, but most strikingly in the free states, where capital was mobile and was not tied up in an owned labor supply, came as a shock to the South, which had long been a united section and which did not abandon hope of permanent control until after 1860. The conditions of 1789, in which each state lived by and for itself, had forever passed away by 1860. Even in the South independence by states was out of the ques- m THE CIVIL WAR tion. The railway net, and the growing industriaHsm of society demanded govern- ment of a type not foreseen when, in 1789, the states forswore their sovereignty and entered the Union. The development of the national government was inevitable. Had the Constitution been as the southern leaders persuaded themselves it was, there must have been revolution or wholesale amendment to adapt it to modern life as shaped by machinery and steam transporta- tion. Happily, however, it was adequate to the needs of the nineteenth century, and the odium of revolutionary attempt falls upon the section that tried to construe it so as to turn back the hands of time. The Constitution had been adopted as an experiment. Many believed that it was too rigorous for liberty to survive under it. Others lamented the absence of a more strongly centralized machine. It was a compromise, reached by a convention that sat in secret, and ratified as the last hope of avoiding anarchy and dissolution. That commercial growth should in less than a century weld the thirteen rival states, and twenty more, into an industrial unit was not anticipated by even the wilder enthusiasts of federalism. Many of the framers would probably have admitted that, if the experi- ment should fail to work, the states could resume their former independence. Yet they had inserted in the document phrases THE LAW OF THE LAND 21 whose ratification destroyed the possibility of rupture of the new Union by anything short of revolution. "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof," the sixth article runs, "shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." To the courts created by the Constitution was assigned judicial power extending "to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Consti- tution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority." Without catching the attention of most of its contemporaries a new nation had come into being with all the power necessary to maintain itself. Within the limits of its delegated authority, concern- ing whose extent its own supreme court was to be the final judge, the nation was supreme. In the years following 1789 one state after another became discontented with its treat- ment under the Constitution, and in bad temper denied its obligation to submit to federal exaction. But every time a local grievance produced its protest the weight of the disinterested states stifled it. As business came gradually to the courts of the United States, these accepted freely the doctrine that the Constitution had become the law of the land. When Calhoun, realiz- 22 THE CIVIL WAR ing the essential sectionalism which slavery gave to the South, announced again the doctrine of secession as a remedy within the Constitution, Webster found, in all the dis- interested states, lawyers and laymen to follow him when he made his ringing plea for "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable! " After 1830, southern leaders continued in general adherence to the Calhoun theory of the right of the state to refuse to obey what it believed to be unconstitutional laws. The cotton fields spread out of the old South into the Southwest, and the glamour of the great plantation owners' wealth concealed the undesirable position of the low class whites and the absence of that social uniformity which was the triumph of the North. From the knowledge that slave labor was personally profitable to the favored class it was easy to develop a plausible argument that it was profitable to the society that employed it, although in the whole South only about one person in ten owned any slaves, and fewer than 12,000 owned as many as 50, in 1860. It was forgotten that listless, incom- petent labor is dear even when employed without a wage. Until the railway appeared, with its large demand for free capital for investment, the South could not see the fact that it was bound to a system that forbade change in method or adaptation to the con- ditions of modern life. The men who proi- THE LAW OF THE LAND 2S ited by the institution had made themselves into an aristocracy that controlled the poli- tics as well as the business of their section, and whatever threatened their interests was treason to the social order. In the national government they met each step against slavery with threats of dissolution of the Union, but in no case before 1860 were they compelled to carry out their threat, since their compact unity controlled Congress. The North had passed the South in both population and wealth; being free itself, it had come to dislike slavery; and not sharing in the profits of slavery it had been able to develop a public opinion antagonistic to it. But until the trunk line railways were done in the early fifties, it had no political unity that could give its opinions weight. The generation of Webster passed away, leaving behind in the North a new generation that had declaimed his reply to Hayne in their school days, and had grown up to see an indestructible Union, in law, become one in economic fact. Until 1854 every time the South faced Congress with the alternatives of concession to slavery or secession, it carried its point against the disorganization of the northern states. Before the end of the fifties, the changing North became a nation that must one day refuse to be scared by the bogey of disunion, and stand its ground on the hard facts of economics and law. From the beginning, the Constitution had been m THE CIVIL WAR the supreme law of the land. Under it, a majority was entitled to rule. Before 1860 a united nation, bound unbreakably by the irons of 30,000 miles of railway and nearly independent of sectionalism that was based on geographic accident, lived under the Constitution and was prepared to test its strength. CHAPTER II SECESSION The rise and growth of the Republican party is the measure of the reahzation on the part of the North that it had a unity as well as a political purpose. For many years Lundy, Garrison, Channing, and Parker had preached against the slavery which the North had outgrown. Exasperating to the South, and ineffective in the North, the new gospel was the work of individuals and produced no reaction that could check the annexa- tion of Texas, the conquest of Mexico, the opening of the territories to slavery, or the repeal of the Missouri compromise. Both great parties. Whig and Democrat, feared the loss of the southern vote. Their leaders repeatedly professed themselves to believe that the rising question was settled. Re- gardless of party lines, southern politicians voted with unerring vision when sectional interests were involved. But in the year in which the first Chicago railway reached the Mississippi there was born a party of opposition to the continued exactions of the South. 25 26 THE CIVIL WAR The opening of the railways was followed by hopeful speculation throughout the North. Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and St. Louis struggled among themselves for the control of the markets of the East. New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston sent their agents out to secure the markets of the West. New activities and general prosperity are recorded in the com- mercial journals of the fifties. Close upon these, intellectual and political enthusiasms followed. Every mile of track increased the weekly range of the New York Tribune. Unity in trade relations became the founda- tion of an approach to uniformity in con- viction and action. The deep emotions aroused among individuals when Douglas, in 1854, directed the organization of Kansas and Nebraska, and opened the territories to slavery, came at a time when newspapers were circulating with a new ease, and men in the North were becoming conscious of their political weight. The Kansas-Nebraska law, passed in May, 1854, repealed the Missouri compromise and organized two territories, whose status as to slavery or freedom should be regulated in the future by their occupants. Before it was signed, resistance to its fundamental premise had appeared throughout the North. On July 13, the anniversary of the great Northwest ordinance of 1787, numerous mass meetings denounced the repudiation of SECESSION 27 a sacred compromise. In the autumn elec- tions, a new party showed itself able to break down, here and there, a party line. In every month after July, 1854, the new party, named Republican, became stronger and more clearly defined throughout the North as a sectional party, favoring opposition to the sectional policy of the South that had won every important division for nearly thirty years. In 1856 the Republican party entered upon its first national campaign. It was too weak to hope for success; leaders of assured repu- tation were yet unready to imperil their future by accepting its nominations. Made of men of diverse antecedents, with no common bond save the desire to restrict the extension of slavery, it was forced to feel its way among the old issues. It contented itself with a candidate no more important than John C. Fremont, whose title to fame was his service as an explorer, and whose meagre abilities were ever to be over-exploited by his better half, a daughter of Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Yet the new party carried eleven northern states and polled a third of the popular vote. Fremont was defeated by James Buchanan, an elderly northern Democrat, backed by the united South; but the old Whig party was almost extinguished and the Republicans now took their place as one of the two great party or- ganizations. Thus far they had been a party 28 THE CIVIL WAR of idealists; hereafter the practical politician gained more than a foothold among them. In the next four years the sectional char- acter of the controversy became more clear. Forgetful that it had been the first to estab- lish a permanent sectionalism in politics, the South denounced the sectional character of the "Black Republicans." Bad temper, which had always been associated with the slavery struggle, became worse. Ignorance of the motives and character of the Republi- cans, on the part of the South, was exceeded only by the northern ignorance of the ca- pacity of the negro and the temper of the slave-holder. The greatest test of popular government must always come when the constitutional majority is separated from the minority by a geographic line. When parties are intermingled over the same area the majority always knows the minority too well to be unduly harsh. But sectional parties are separated by a gulf of ignorance which no charity can bridge, and either side is willing and anxious to believe the worst of its opponent. Thoroughly American on both sides, devoted to the Union as they knew it and the ideals that flourished in their sections, the North and South came to face an issue in which one must triumph and the other surrender. Henry Clay had outlived the period of compromises and now a con- solidating North could no longer yield. The platform of the Republicans was clear SECESSION 29 in 1856. Its leaders were yet to be developed from the three classes of men who acted with the party. Mature Democrats and mature Whigs abandoned their old relations, in their opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska meas- ures. To these were added young men, who had read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as youths, and who came to their first vote in 1856 or 1860. Most prominent of the leaders who took up the new fight was William H. Seward, former governor of New York, enthusiastic, vigorous, and plausible, whose best known phrase gave name to the "irrepressible con- flict." Next to Seward was Governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, once a Democrat, of solid legal knowledge and first-rate administra- tive ability, who fell short of greatness only through his touch of personal ambition. After these came the lesser lights, inspired by principle or hope of profit. Some were spoilsmen who abandoned sinking ships, others were abolitionists whose radical ideas found too little play within the new organi- zation. One of them was a western poli- tician, no longer young and without great prominence, whose right to leadership was slowly established during the administration of James Buchanan. Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, had endeared himself to his associates, but had made no impression upon the United States in 1856. He was a country lawyer, brought up on a raw frontier, deprived of formal schooling. 30 THE CIVIL WAR and making only a moderate success at his profession, when he left his office to cam- paign for the Republican party. He might never have passed beyond the activities of a local politician had not chance thrown him against a more successful citizen of his state, who had established himself as the leader of the Democrats. Stephen A. Douglas lifted Lincoln into the national vis- ion. Fighting the Kansas-Nebraska principle, Lincoln was ever on the trail of Douglas, the author of the bill. In 1858 they were both engaged in a contest over a legislature which was to choose a senator to fill Douglas's seat. After the custom of the time they toured the state, speaking in joint debates which failed to defeat Douglas for re-elec- tion, but which clarified the issues, and made the aims of both great parties clear and unmistakable. In these debates Lincoln, as a speaker and popularizer, impressed the news correspondents who had come west to report the speeches of Douglas. The Repub- lican party found his arguments their best campaign material. With good temper, simplicity, and logic he stated the theories of majority rule, and expressed his belief that slavery would cease to exist. For the federal government he claimed only a single right: to exclude slavery from any of the territories of the United States. Over these, he maintained that Congress had ample power. The Dred Scott decision, which SECESSION 31 denied this power, he criticized as bad law, while he pledged his party to unswerving opposition to any variety of slavery extension. Among the Republicans, Lincoln was a moderate. Though believing slavery wrong, he denied any power in Congress to limit or abolish it within the states. The aboli- tionists thought him impervious to the ethical question. He was regarded as too radical by the practical politicians of his party be- cause he frankly attacked the law of the Dred . Scott case and explicitly stated his desire to abolish slavery in the territories. If any one had cared to note it, he might have seen that, in his personal judgments, Lincoln was not censorious, that he had no disposition to denounce the slave-holder but was content to fight the issue. Up to the meeting of the Republican con- vention, in June, 1860, few foresaw that Lincoln would secure the nomination, and those few were generally engaged in manag- ing his campaign. The newspaper lists of possible candidates rarely included his name, but the disabilities of the reputed candidates were quite as important for him as his own qualities. Though an old Whig, he had been too obscure to arouse the antagonisms that headed off the other candidates for the nomi- nation. It was a disappointing shock to eastern Republicans when they learned that at Chicago their party had been induced to accept a candidate without experience, with 32 THE CIVIL WAR little national reputation, and with standing chiefly as a man of words. But dissatisfied as many Republicans were, their unity was stronger than that of any other party in the impending campaign. The rise of the Republicans was contempo- rary with the breakdown of the Whigs and the schism of the Democrats, the last being partly the result of Lincoln's generalship. It was he who pointed out to the South that when Douglas spoke of popular sovereignty he meant what he said, — that popular sovereignty might mean rejection of slavery as well as its extension. To the South, which had accepted Douglas's doctrine as a means of extending slavery, this interpretation was disconcerting. The extremists repudiated both the doctrine and its author; the moder- ates clung to him. When the party met in national convention at Charleston, in April, 1860, Douglas controlled the organization, but could not prevent a radical minority from bolting the convention. Panic-stricken, the convention adjourned to Baltimore, only to find the schism wider. Split for the first time, with John C. Breckinridge of Ken- tucky heading the bolters and Douglas as the nominee of the regulars, the Democrats offered victory to the better united Repub- lican party. This victory was made more certain when a fourth ticket, of conservative Constitutional Unionists, brought John Bell of Tennessee into the field. SECESSION 33 The canvass of 1860 was attended by the same threats that had appeared in every previous slavery debate. Having only a mi- nority in the United States, the South had no hope of continuing its control if ever the real majority should become united; and with its party split, defeat at the polls now seemed inevitable. Talk of secession was frequent; if it failed to frighten the Repub- licans it was because it had been repeated too often. In November Lincoln was elected, and the South faced the alternatives of accepting him or making good its threats. Four days after the election of Lincoln South Carolina called a convention to face the crisis. That the Republican party would be content to restrict slavery in the territo- ries and leave it unmolested in the states, no southerner believed. The South preferred, instead, to think that John Brown was the true exponent of the Republican theory, and saw in his fanatical attempt at a servile revolt a forerunner of abolitionist control. In the prolonged fight the section had con- vinced itself that slavery was an economic good, to be preserved at any cost. The leaders now only had to lead, for behind them was a popular sentiment for secession that grew stronger every day. The South Carolina convention met on December 17, 1860, and three days later, with popular applause, repealed the ordinance by which a similar convention had adopted the Consti- 34 THE CIVIL WAR tution of the United States. It declared that South Carolina resumed her sovereign powers among the nations, issued a declara- tion of causes which, like the declaration of independence, justified the act, and published an address to the people of the slave-holding states. Then it adjourned to await the action of Congress and the South. There was no confusing of the issue and no doubt that slavery was the cause. Fear of aggression upon slavery had produced the resort to Calhoun's final remedy. Had all the slave-holding states followed the example of South Carolina it is doubtful if the Union could have been maintained. But in none was secession unanimous, while in some the Union sentiment was as strong as the devotion to slavery. In the lower South the movement was most intense. South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas fronted on the Atlantic and the Gulf, had seaports in abundance, and were the centre of the plan- tation system. Within their borders planta- tions were the largest and cotton culture was the most highly organized. If any communi- ties needed to hang together to save their slaves these did; and the time of their seces- sion was fixed only by convenience. During December and January their members in Congress worked out a program of co-oper- ation, in accordance with which the six other states of the lower South followed SECESSION 35 South Carolina in repudiating the Consti- tution. By February 1, 1861, they had all acted, and interest was concentrated upon the states of a second group. Just north of the lower South came a tier of states less identified with the plantation system, having fewer slaves as well as a larger proportion of non-slave-holding whites. North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas were doubtful. Had slavery been the only issue they might not have risked secession for it. But they, as their neighbors, had been taught for many years that the Union was a compact, terminable at will, upon suspicion of violation. The sovereign rights which all the states had possessed in 1787 they believed still to exist, since none of their political teachers had dwelt heavily upon the maxim that "this Constitution . . . shall be the supreme Law of the Land." Fear of aggression upon slavery might not have moved them, but should coercive means be used to hold the lower South in the Union, such attack upon the cherished sovereignty of states was likely to drive them to secede. The four border states — Delaware, Mary- land, Kentucky, and Missouri — were still more lukewarm to slavery. Financial interest in slavery decreased steadily to the North, and these states, bordering upon free states, regarded slaves as only one among many forms of property. There was sufficient industrialism among them for them to have SECESSION 37 a different view of the Union than prevailed south of the Potomac. What course they would follow was problematic until 1863. Both sides hoped to retain their support, while their uncertainty did much to shape the policies of Lincoln's first administration. On February 1, 1861, seven states had announced their withdrawal from the Union. Six of them met by their delegates in con- vention at Montgomery, Alabama, on Feb- ruary 4, to form a Constitution for the new Confederacy which they proposed to erect. Separatist though they were, they had no idea of maintaining severally their independ- ence. Their repugnance was not to union, but to a Union in which they constituted a minority. Their men of vision looked for- ward to a southern Confederacy embracing all the slave-holding states and perhaps including the states of the upper Mississippi Valley. They failed to see that the railroads had substituted artificial routes for the well- known natural highways of the Ohio and the Mississippi. But whether they enticed the Northwest from the Union or not, slavery was their fundamental basis. The "corner stone" of the new republic, said Alexander H. Stephens, its vice-president, was the great truth that the negro is inferior to the white man, and that slavery is his natural condition. The formation of the Confederate Consti- tution was an easy matter. In ability and experience its framers had no superiors in 38 THE CIVIL WAR the South. They represented, not a con- spiracy of selfish traitors, but a popular uprising that had no doubts as to the right- eousness of the cause. Long familiarity with the procedure of state governments, of Con- gress, and the executive departments at Washington, made them able to adapt the old Constitution to the new needs in a few days. After they had affirmed the right to property in slaves, asserted the special doc- trine of state sovereignty, and forbidden the enactment of a protective tariff, there were few changes which they desired to make. When the provisional president, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, undertook to put the new frame of government into operation, he found abundant administrative experi- ence ready to be drawn upon. On February 18, the provisional government was formally inaugurated at Montgomery. Departments of state, treasury, war, navy, justice, and post office were speedily organized, and before a hand had been lifted to check secession, the new Confederate States of America existed as a state, — within or without the United States, as the event should prove. CHAPTER m ABRAHAM LINCOLN James Buchanan, fifteenth President of the United States, had been representative and senator, minister to the court of St. James and secretary of state, before he defeated John C. Fremont in 1856, and ac- ceded to the chief magistracy. Having much experience in pubhc affairs, great skill in local politics, and long association with the other leaders of the Democratic party, he had none of that ignorance which made many northerners unfair judges of the con- duct and motives of the southerner. His judicial temperament restrained him from emotional excess in either direction. He inclined to be affected more by the unre- strained inaccuracies of the abolitionists than by the ethical question of slavery. From long co-operation with the leaders of the South he had come to judge them kindly. His legal experience left him doubtful as to the coercive powers of the Union, and sym- pathetic with those who had been driven, he believed, to desperate and unjustifiable ex- tremes by the attack upon their social order. 39 40 THE CIVIL WAR Too old to create or execute vigorous policies, feeling keenly the unfairness of the attacks upon the South, construing the Constitution strictly in all its bearings, he was at the close of an unsatisfactory administration when the election of 1860 brought the downfall of his party and gave the national govern- ment over to the Republicans. Even if Buchanan had held an enlarged view of the power of the government, there is little that he could have done in the four months between the election and the inaug- uration of Lincoln. Congress was in session nearly all the time, with power to block at pleasure. Unless it enlarged the powers of the President, he could do nothing. Upon it rested the chief responsibility for providing the machinery for enforcing the laws, should they be violated. Yet it remained indifferent to this obligation, and until near the end of the session was actually under the influence of those southern leaders who were shortly to take their place at Richmond or in the field. Federal officials were resigning through- out the South, and when the Senate neg- lected to confirm the appointment of their successors, the President was helpless. Yet there is little that any Congress could have done to prevent secession. Until resistance to the law occurred, the pretended with- drawal from the Union had no standing either under or against the Constitution. Freedom to meet, to organize, to talk, were and had ABRAHAM LINCOLN 41 been dear to the American imagination. Even northern extremists would have been slow to give real grievance to the South by interfering with its freedom of expression, and many took the southern conduct so lightly that its possibilities were discounted. It was no new thing for the North to hear the South complain and threaten secession. The United States had become so callous to murmurings that had never materialized, that their repetition was undervalued in 1860 by those who made as well as those who heard them. Until election day few north- erners believed that the South would fulfil its promise. If South Carolina did secede, as she had nullified in 1832, it was a fair guess that she would allow herself to be coaxed back into the Union and rewarded for her grumbling by a larger share of privilege. Even in the South there was little belief that it would be necessary to carry out the threat to its rigorous extreme. The North was thought to be timid or low-spirited. It would either yield the point, or allow seces- sion to occur without a fight. The individ- ual was rare on either side who counted on secession followed by a war. The first effect of the events of December, 1860, and January, 1861, was as might have been foreseen. The northern extremist fell under a cloud. The abolitionist was charged with having caused the trouble. Democrats, old line Whigs, and even cautious Republicans 42 THE CIVIL WAR took occasion to throw the blame where Buchanan threw it in his annual message, upon the "long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States." In Congress the compromiser was in evidence. The responsibility for the failure of Con- gress to repeat the attempts of 1820 and 1850 in a general slavery compromise, rests upon the shoulders of the president-elect. From the start the committees in both Senate and House of Representatives realized that no compromise could stand without the concurrence of those Republican leaders who were to have complete charge of the government after March 4, 1861. Some- what frightened by their success and the demonstration it had provoked from the South, these were disposed to yield, and accept amendments, guaranteeing slavery in the states and perpetuating it in a portion or all of the territories. Lincoln himself was willing to record in an amendment what he believed already to be the law, — that no interference with the domestic institutions of the states should be allowed. But when the southern congressmen, as the price of Union, demanded the territories, Lincoln, inexperienced country lawyer though he was, stood by the main platform of his party — the right of Congress to legislate over the territories and to exclude slavery therefrom — and refused to be moved by ABRAHAM LINCOLN 43 persuasion or menace. Unwilling to support any plan which curtailed this power, Lin- coln became responsible for the failure of the compromise, and, in a sense, made the decision that plunged the country into war. If slavery was right, and if the southern minority was justified in its determination to control or break the nation, he made a mistake. For three months. Congress worked over the forlorn hope of compromise; a peace convention deliberated in informal session; public opinion wavered from side to side; and the single sure and responsible group of men in the United States proceeded in the organization of the Confederacy. Buchanan believed that there was no power in the gov- ernment to check secession by force. Cer- tainly Congress had given him no aid. Tentative in his poHcies, a northern secre- tary resigned from his cabinet because he was too lenient; a Mississippian went out because he was too severe. Even on the immediate question of retaining United States property in the South, custom houses, forts, navy yards, and the like, his course was un- certain until nearly the end of his adminis- tration. He had no doubt as to his power in this detail, but held off from giving added provocation which might prevent a com- promise. Not unlike Webster, who in his old age made concessions to slavery to save the Union, Buchanan sacrificed his standing 44 THE CIVIL WAR in popular repute to his belief that concilia- tion was as yet better than force. And so the spring of 1861 advanced, with indecision on every side except that of the Confederacy. Mr. Davis proceeded with the organization of his government but put off the day of conflict of jurisdiction as long as possible. The United States mails ran un- molested through the South until nearly the end of May. In the North there was no coherent public opinion in the first three months of the year. Leaders, most of them upset and nervous, ranged the whole dis- tance from coercion at any cost to thank- fulness at the riddance. Followers of the Confederacy came to believe that secession would be peaceable and that the new Presi- dent would not attempt to interfere. On March 4 Abraham Lincoln was in- augurated despite the predictions that he would be murdered or that the ceremony would be otherwise prevented. Since the election, he had remained quietly in his home in Springfield, listening to the ebb and flow of advice and opinion, but refraining from new utterances in public that might embarrass Buchanan or himself. It does not appear that he worked out any policy in detail. As time went on, men learned that he had no set rules of administration, but met his business, piece by piece, settling it as nearly in accord with his fundamental convictions as might be. When the editors ABRAHAM LINCOLN 45 asked what he proposed to do, he referred them to his speeches. He did not conceal from his intimates his behef that slavery was wrong. It was too late to prevent southerners from dwelling upon his most important public phrases: "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved, — I do not expect the house to fall, — but I do expect that it will cease to be divided." And it was to be ex- pected that they would doubt the sincerity of his disclaimers of power in the govern- ment to touch slavery in the states. But although he refrained from public discus- sion, he placed himself in touch with all the elements in and out of his party. The sug- gestion that he ward off suspicion by taking into the cabinet a southerner or two, he followed up by a vain search for the honest southerner who would take the place. Modest and never opinionated, he sought for the men who could help him make a cabinet, regardless of their attitude towards himself. Yet he kept an open mind about some of his final selections until the eve of the inauguration. The fears of an interrupted inauguration proved unfounded. General Scott filled the capital with troops, and waited nervously while the ceremony progressed. What Lin- coln was to say, aroused as much interest as whether he would be allowed to say it; 46 THE CIVIL WAR but whatever it should be, Stephen A. Douglas had determined that his own loyalty to the United States should be equally noticeable and pronounced. When the pres- ident-elect looked helplessly around the stand for a place to put his hat, his defeated rival reached out and held it while the in- augural was delivered. There was nothing sensational in the address and nothing new. Quietly and carefully Lincoln reiterated his pledges that he had "no purpose, directly or indirectly to interfere with the institu- tion of slavery in the States where it exists." But he went on to assure his fellow citizens that "in view of the Constitution and the laws the Union is unbroken, and to the ex- tent of my ability I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States." It was clear from the tenor of his words that there could be no peaceable secession unless a divided opinion in the North should impede his actions. If the North should sustain him there must be a fight. The national government, whose direction Mr. Lincoln now assumed, was far from perfect and fell below the standard of the next generation. The idea of appointment for merit and the utility of expert service had not yet reached the popular mind. Every American citizen was still believed, in the rampant democracy of the middle- ABRAHAM LINCOLN 47 century, to be fitted for any job he could get. Since the inauguration of Andrew Jackson each new administration had wit- nessed a federal house-cleaning, and a new distribution of the spoils of office. This substitution of new and inexperienced clerks for those of greater knowledge had often embarrassed administrations before 1860, when the change was only from one Demo- cratic regime to another of the same faith. A clean sweep was to be anticipated when the radical change from Democrat to Re- pubhcan took place, — so clean that a keen Irish journalist thought not a few of the federal officials in the South were quickened in their devotion to the Confederacy by their certainty of being dismissed from the service of the United States. Lincoln's cabinet revealed both the strength and the weakness of the prevailing system. William H. Seward was invited to become secretary of state. His high fitness for the post could not be questioned, and he came well within the tradition that this office, at least, must be filled by a man of parts. He was regarded, and regarded himself, as the real head of the Republican party, and had been defeated in the convention only by his over-prominence. In the cabinet he met and tested strength with another of the defeated factional chiefs, Chase of Ohio. Of the three strong men of the cabinet, Seward stood easily the head, and was a 48 THE CIVIL WAR creditable appointment upon any theory. Salmon P. Chase had no qualifications for the treasury except his unquestioned loyalty, his power in the Northwest, and his good general ability. His appointment to the most technical post in the government was purely political, and was successful only by accident. Yet few of his contemporaries questioned the wisdom of placing a man unskilled in finance in charge of the intri- cate processes of national credit. That he succeeded is, after all, proof that the Ameri- can idea is not wholly wrong. His appoint- ment, indicating Lincoln's failure to connect special skill with specific duties, was far better than the first appointment to the war department. Simon Cameron, Mr. Lincoln's first secre- tary of war, was given his portfolio as the result of a political deal, apparently unau- thorized by the president-elect, but not shocking to the political ethics of 1860. In control of the Pennsylvania delegation, a "favorite son" before the convention, he had been bought off by the tender of a seat in the cabinet. His incapacity, if not worse, was notable even in a day of amateur ad- ministrators; and when he was permitted to resign, his chief filled his place with his third great secretary, Edwin M. Stanton. It made no difference to Lincoln that Seward and Chase had been his rivals, or that Stan- ton, a Union Democrat, had hated and de- ABRAHAM LINCOLN 49 spised him. These were men of force and influence in a time when it was quite as im- portant to fill the government with men who could command a majority in the North as to run the government smoothly and economically. The other seats in the cabinet were distributed where they would do the most good, to citizens of Connecticut, In- diana, Missouri, and Maryland. The aim of the President was to unite all shades of Union sentiment that his main purpose might be carried out. Seward doubted the wisdom of the "compound cabinet.'' "I was at one time on the point of refusing,'* he wrote his wife, "nay, I did refuse for a time to hazard myself in the experiment." In the confusion resulting from the change of administration it was several weeks before definite action could be reached on any of the problems which Buchanan had handed over to his successors. New officers had to learn something of their work, the most pressing subordinate appointments had to be made, the cabinet had yet to find which of his leaders was the chief, and public opinion was still far from unity on any point. In legal power Lincoln was exactly where his predecessor had been, but Con- gress had gone home, to remain there for the long recess, and unless he invited it he had no immediate interference to fear. In the intervals between the visits of clamorous office-seekers he devoted himself to study 50 THE CIVIL WAR of the existing situation and to sounding the political temper of the Union. The retention of the public property of the United States presented the earliest con- crete problem for the cabinet of Lincoln. Buchanan had allowed the southern arsenals and forts to be seized by the states in which they lay, and had permitted officers in the army and civil service to deliver the prop- erty of the United States, which they were under oath to guard, to agents of the Con- federacy. He had done this rather than raise new issues by a forcible retention, and if compromise measures had brought back the South there could have been little criti- cism of it. Uncertain as to the willingness of the United States to back him up, he had played for time. On the inauguration of Lincoln opinion was still unformed, though the clear analysis in his inaugural brought some change during the ensuing weeks. The first vote of his cabinet, March 15, favored the continuation of Buchanan's policy. Until nearly the end of March, the commanding general of the army, Winfield Scott, believed the southern forts could not be retained. The forts in Charleston harbor were by common consent accepted as the test case, and had figured largely in secession news since Christmas, 1860. Three of them there were, in charge of a trifling garrison of federal troops, commanded by a southern ABRAHAM LINCOLN 51 officer, Major Robert Anderson. Their de- livery had been demanded by South Caro- lina, immediately upon the passage of the ordinance of secession, but while overtures for their surrender were making at Wash- ington, Anderson abandoned the untenable Fort Moultrie and moved his troops to the island on which Fort Sumter lay. Here, on his own responsibility, he raised his flag, and by giving notoriety to his position in- creased the difficulty for the administration which should abandon him. Fort Sumter remained the centre of discus- sion. The waverings of Buchanan's cabinet respecting it ended in part when Buchanan determined, on December 31, not to deal with commissioners from the seceding states, and agreed a few days later to try to re-enforce the fort. A coasting steamer, the "Star of the West," was sent from New York with supplies, since the garrison was scantily provided. But the troops of South Carolina fired upon the steamer as she en- tered the harbor, and her captain brought her back to New York. The re-enforcement, thus defeated by armed resistance, brought about a cabinet crisis and a group of new appointments, after which Confederate en- croachments were fewer until the end of the administration. Major Anderson was still hanging on to Fort Sumter, in a state of siege, when Lin- coln became President, and his support or 52 THE CIVIL WAR withdrawal was the first issue. With a cabi- net voting against re-enforcement, it took the President a month to reach his determination. Early in April he decided that rations must be sent in spite of the menacing presence of a South Carolina army and the demands of the Confederate commissioners. Before he could induce co-operation among the members of his cabinet the determination leaked out, a formal demand for surrender, made by order of the Confederate government, was delivered to Major Anderson, and, early on the morning of April 12, the Charleston batteries opened fire. For a day and a half Anderson held out, though in a ramshackle fortress with few rations and little ammuni- tion. About noon on the 13th, with barracks burning and the garrison in imminent dan- ger of destruction, he accepted overtures which typified the disorderly enthusiasm of the southern cause. A former senator from Texas, Wigfall by name, was in Charleston as an unofficial aide to General Beauregard. Without authority, but with the zeal of a volunteer. Colonel Wigfall buc- kled a sword about his frock coat, forced a negro to row him in a small boat to the fort, clambered through an embrasure with a white handkerchief tied to his sword, and had agreed upon terms of surrender before the arrival of a formal detail of officers to demand it. On April 14, according to the agreement, Anderson ran up his flag and ABRAHAM LINCOLN 53 saluted it, and then embarked unmolested to return to the United States, his only loss of life being one private killed during the salute. With the fall of Fort Sumter occurred the first clash that public opinion chose to notice, marking a victory in tactics for Lincoln. Both he and Davis had hoped that if con- flict must come it might occur in such a way as to hurt the other cause and consolidate their own. Davis, with only seven states in his Confederacy and the upper South yet undecided, needed such a crisis as would show to those reluctant slave states the federal government in the role of an oppressor, trampling upon the doctrine of state rights. Lincoln, contrariwise, strove to avoid an appearance of coercion, and to make it clear to his uncertain North that enforce- ment of the law, rather than war against a group of states, was his determination. The zeal of South Carolina here lost the Con- federacy a point. Her bombardment pre- ceded the arrival of re-enforcements at the fort, instead of following that event, and was accepted in the North as a gratuitous attack. At once there appeared a new certainty of purpose. None could deny that the South meant war, that it had made the first attack, and that disunion was at hand. CHAPTER IV CIVIL WAR No officer in the service of the United States or the Confederate States, in April, 1861, had seen, in one time or place, more than three-fourths of the little regular army. This had remained for years near 16,000, and aggregated in June, 1860, 16,006 officers and men. Yet on April 15, 1861, President Lincoln called upon the states for 75,000 volunteers to enforce the laws and repossess the property of the United States. There was no general officer with experience ade- quate to command such a force, no machinery in the war department, under its incapable secretary, to feed, clothe, arm, move, or pay it, and no plan in the mind of any re- sponsible official for its immediate use. The laws which had been violated were to be enforced by the President, using those powers which the Constitution gives to him in case of armed insurrection; but Lincoln's greatest chance of speedy success in the restoration of order lay in the disorganization of the op- posing army which, though already several weeks old, was nearly as chaotic as his own. 54 CIVIL WAR 55 The United States was not a military nation, though it possessed in abundance the materials which go to make one. With a vigorous and growing population, with great potential wealth and light taxation, it needed only a motive and training to evolve not one great war machine, but two. Until 1863 fighting was highly experimental, neither government possessing a reliable force in either officers or men. After that year, fight- ing was professional on both sides, affording to military experts processes for emulation rather than examples to be avoided. Yet prior to Lincoln's call for volunteers a prophecy as to the outcome of the struggle might have been undertaken. The states of the Union, iti 1860, extended to the western border of Texas, with one complete tier of states beyond the Mississippi, and two outlying states upon the Pacific Coast. It contained an aggregate of about 31,000,000 inhabitants, whose proportions in the hostile camps depended upon the intensity of grievance and the plausibility of statesmen. If the Confederacy had carried with it not only the seven states of the lower South, and the four of the upper South which followed speedily upon the call for troops, but all the fifteen slave-holding states, the disproportion of population would have been much less. But as the lines were finally drawn, twenty- two of the states of 1860, and part of a twenty-third, remained with 56 THE CIVIL WAR the Union and massed a population of 22,700,000 against the 8,700,000 who occu- pied the eleven states of the Confederacy. More uneven were the figures of white in- habitants, since in the Union there remained nearly 22,000,000 of these, while the Con- federacy had but 5,096,000. With more than four white citizens north of the Potomac to every white person in the South, the contest was unequal at the outset. That it could have been undertaken cheerfully and with belief in ultimate success by the Confederate leaders excites amazement. In geographic relations the South was and appeared to be somewhat better placed to resist invasion than the North was to exe- cute it. A compact, well- watered territory with abundance of seaports and penetrating rivers, the South could protect its military frontier with a minimum of exertion. Wait- ing for the attack, and repelling it on the border, it could manage on a smaller war budget and a slighter commissariat to defend itself. The North had longer distances to traverse to reach the fighting line, and was always operating from outside the defences, whereas the South moved in the short line from the centre to the circumference. This geographic advantage took a leading place in the southern mind among the causes contributing to success. It was of value throughout the war, though its utility had been lessened by industrial facts with which 58 THE CIVIL WAR the South was not intimately familiar. The old North had possessed inadequate routes of communication, and the Northwest, whose sympathy the South hoped for, had been a section by itself, more dependent on the South then on the East. But in the ten years before secession the railroads had appeared. The South thought of its internal water routes and the aid they could derive from local railways. All the seaboard states were connected by rail, and from them trunk lines crossed the hills of Virginia and those of Georgia, converging upon Chattanooga and continuing west to the Mississippi River at Memphis. North and south the Mississippi was paralleled, by the Mobile and Ohio, and its branches. Kentucky and Virginia had local roads and, should Maryland secede, the Baltimore and Ohio would bring an added trunk line within the Confederate territory. But these southern roads, important as they were, had changed the facts of geog- raphy less than those of the North. Be- sides the Baltimore and Ohio, which was retained in Union hands, the North had trunk lines in the Pennsylvania, Erie, New York Central, and Grand Trunk systems. The Ohio River was touched by northwestern railways at Pittsburg, Steuben ville. Wheeling, Marietta, Portsmouth, Cincinnati, Lawrence- burg, Jeffersonville, New Albany, Evans- ville, and Cairo. Without these lines the North could hardly have hoped to crush the CIVIL WAR 59 Confederacy: with them the disadvantage of distance was compensated for by the speed of movement. The South had some advantage in geog- raphy. In industry, its chance depended upon keeping its seaports open and getting its cotton to the European market. Could this be done, the proceeds of the cotton would keep the government in munitions and food, but should the ports be closed the South had few manufactures and could not be self- sustaining. The North was a manufacturing community. Not yet self-sufficient, it had the beginnings of most of its industries, and need not suffer even if all its foreign com- merce were destroyed. Yankee ingenuity had begun to provide labor-saving inven- tions. The introduction of the reaper into the northwest wheat fields was a national gain. Said the secretary of war, in 1861: "The reaper is to the North what slavery is to the South. By taking the places of regiments of young men in the Western harvest fields, it releases them to do battle for the Union at the front, and at the same time keeps up the supply of bread for the nation and the nation's armies." Yet the reaper was only one out of many inventions which made the northerner more effective, man for man, than his southern fellow citizen. Based on its manufactures, the North had wealth, taxable values and credit in excess of those of the South, and far greater 60 THE CIVIL WAR than even well-informed southerners believed. From the financial panic of 1857 the South had escaped, since she possessed few of the institutions that could be affected most by industrial depression, — banks, railways, fac- tories, and cities. In every aspect of her life, the lack of ready capital showed itself. The North, however, with a more complex economic organization, had suffered griev- ously, and had presented what the South read as a lesson upon the evils of industrial society. Sensible southerners believed that the sufferings of the North and the immunity of the South proved that a society organized on the plantation and slavery was safer and wealthier than one based upon manu- factures and industry. Upon this belief many founded their hopes for a successful outcome. Convinced that its country was admirably situated for defence, that its social order was not subject to financial disturbance, that in the cotton crop it had an unquenchable source of revenue, and, finally, that one healthy southerner could lick ^ve Yankees, the Confederacy faced the overwhelming numbers of the North without fear. The firing upon Fort Sumter and the call for troops on April 15, 1861, gave a text throughout the North, and made it forget that it had ever been undecided. The Union was attacked, and volunteers crowded around their local leaders to demand en- listment. The wires to Washington were CIVIL WAR 61 crowded with tenders of regiments and companies, and sturdy Governor Andrew of Massachusetts, who had drilled his militia all the spring, had only to call them to their armories and start them south. Not only Americans, educated to a confidence in the Union and additionally excited by a hatred of slavery, but newcomers of the last two decades, shouldered the musket and learned the manual. Out of the eastern cities came the Irish, driven from their old home by starvation and induced to enter the American mihtia by the deep hope of a future war for Ireland, and now paying for their military tuition. Out of the western cities, Cincin- nati, Chicago, and St. Louis, came the Germans, immigrants of '48 and later, many of them trained as soldiers in the Father- land, and all inspired by an abiding spirit of hberty and nationality. Home-born or foreign, the enlistment went beyond the call, and Lincoln accepted 90,000 without satisfying the enthusiastic response to his proclamation. The management of this army, whose numbers continued to grow until it finally included more than 1,000,000 men, fell upon a war department accustomed only to a handful of troops and the routine of peace. The regular army, necessarily called upon for officers, was disorganized by numerous resignations of men from the South who elected to go with their states. The most 62 THE CIVIL WAR promising of its officers, to whom even was tendered the general command, was Robert E. Lee, of a famous Virginia family, whose loyalty to his state, in a cause which he dis- trusted, deprived the Union of his services. After Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, com- mander of the Utah expedition of 1857, was the greatest loss. But in both armies, men trained at West Point dominated through- out the war, although they formed only a small fraction of all the officers employed. The professional soldier showed his vast superiority to the volunteer in the per- formance of his trade. Volunteer officers rose to high rank, but few of them stand among the generals of proved reputation in 1865. Men who had resigned from the army before the war, frequently to use their tal- ents in railway enterprises, asked for reap- pointment and were freely given commands in the great organization camps, where they applied their experience to the training of raw recruits. As the regiments poured into Washington, the national capital speedily became the greatest of the camps. Partly from senti- mental reasons it was the centre of opera- tions. But sentiment was re-enforced by military necessity, since just across the Potomac were the Confederate outposts, and even north of that river conditions were insecure. Baltimore was rebellious, and the secession of Maryland was not impossible. CIVIL WAR 63 The safety of Washington was the first mili- tary problem of the war, and remained among the most difficult until the end. Upon a loyal Virginian, a testy old veteran of two wars, Major-General Winfield Scott, the preliminary organization of the Union army developed. On the date of the call for troops there had been seven states in the Confederacy. Four more — North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas — seceded soon after the call, voicing their indigna- tion at the proposal to use their militia to coerce their fellow states. The strategic problem from April to July, after the de- fence of Washington, was the control of the border states, of which Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri were most important. The future of these was in doubt, and it will always be uncertain whether their ultimate loyalty was due the more to their convictions or to their nearness to the North which made coercion easy. To these the President, act- ing upon the maxim of one of his successors, "spoke softly and carried a big stick." Appealing in every way to their Union citizens, he mobilized troops at strategic points — Washington, Cincinnati, and St. Louis — where secession tendencies could most easily be checked. The arsenal at Harper's Ferry had been lost at the outset, but Mary- land was held under a control that improved as time went on. At the extreme west of the line of the M THE CIVIL WAR border states, Missouri was the seat of a civil war of her own, with rival state govern- ments struggling for control, and both fac- tions recognizing the strategic value of St. Louis and the mouth of the Ohio. Between Missouri and Virginia, Kentucky tried to avoid decision by proclaiming a neutrality that assumed a degree of state sovereignty quite as high as that which the seceding states maintained. But, hopeful of her ulti- mate adherence, the Union armies tried to respect the neutrality, until invasion of Kentucky by a Confederate force compelled a counter attack. All along the line regiments were collect- ing until, in December, there were upwards of 600,000 men in camp. Reputations were rising and falling in the process of weed- ing out officers and proving ability. In St. Louis, in the summer, Fremont was at the height of his power, in command of the West and joining politics to war. At Cincinnati, in the late spring, a young regular, G. B. McClellan, was forcing the Ohio volunteers into shape. In front of Washington, Mc- Dowell took charge of the new regiments as they arrived for the same purpose. On July 4, 1861, the confusion at Wash- ington was increased by the meeting of Con- gress in special session to provide ways and means for the maintenance of the armies. Thus far Lincoln had acted upon his own responsibility and the slender powers given CIVIL WAR 65 by the old militia act of 1795. The volun- teer army had already begun to receive criticism because the advance on Richmond had not yet begun and Congress added to the political pressure for fighting regardless of preparation. Even the President thought the army no worse off than that of the enemy, and that the impatient people must be given a sign that the government was at work in their behalf. Facing Washington, and in the road of an advance against the Confederate capital, at Richmond, lay a considerable army that had been accumulating while the troops were forming in the North. The Confed- erate government, which had raised it, had escaped some of the embarrassments that worried Lincoln. Jefferson Davis was him- self a West Pointer, with long experience in both the army and the war department. He had no existing army from which the old and incompetent senior officers must be eliminated. He was sustained unanimously by his people, once secession was a fact. From the former United States officers who applied he could select commanders as he needed them, with a discrimination founded upon personal knowledge of nearly every officer who had left West Point for thirty years. Lincoln was forced to rely upon hearsay as to reputations. Davis knew them all at first hand. And in addition to his superior skill and knowledge, Davis was 66 THE CIVIL WAR under less political pressure than his oppo- nent and was forced to reward fewer local politicians with commissions in the army. Moving the capital to Richmond early in June, Davis was defended by two armies, one under Joseph E. Johnston, in the Shenan- doah Valley, above Harper's Ferry, and the other under Beauregard, the hero of Fort Sumter, who lay along the Potomac threat- ening Washington. Against these raw Confederate forces, McDowell was compelled to move his equally raw Union army, while members of Congress, on July 21, drove out along the road to Manassas Junction to see the fight. Politi- cians had not yet given up the notion that it was to be a three months' war, and still expected that the first battle would break down the Confederacy. They and the peo- pie of the North hoped that this would be the battle. Along the banks of a small tributary of the Potomac, Bull Run, about twenty-five miles from Washington, the armies met on a scorching day. About equal in strength, both showed their inexperience, but the Union regiments gave way first, and the return to Washington was a disgraceful rout. Three months after the call for troops the Confederacy, instead of being suppressed, was stronger than ever. The control of Missouri was not yet certain, and there had been no considerable Union victories any- CIVIL WAR 67 where. The disaster at Bull Run deepened the gloom of the North and suggested the thought that the war was more serious than had been anticipated. The country looked about helplessly for any man who gave promise of ability and steadiness, and who might ultimately redeem the cause. At only one point along the mihtary line of the border states had success rewarded the Union efforts. This was in the western counties of Virginia, where population and industry had created a condition unfavorable to the secession cause. Years before 1860 it had been prophesied that should Virginia ever carry out her threat to leave the Union a portion of her citizens would turn the doc- trine of secession against her and rend the state. Tidewater Virginia had been an old centre of the plantation South, but had been engaged in a perennial struggle for control with the upland and mountain counties which contained few slaves and had slight sympathy with the southern social order. Extending from the Chesapeake to the Ohio, the Old Dominion contained two clearly defined areas and groups of population, of which the mountain region was always in- surgent and ever for the Union. Within a month after Virginia joined the Confederacy, her western citizens organized for the crea- tion of a new, Union, state which should com- prise her western end. This division of sentiment in Virginia, 68 THE CIVIL WAR which was paralleled, though to a lesser de- gree, in the mountain regions of Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina, attracted the attention of Lincoln early in the con- troversy. One of his earliest schemes for a campaign included an army for the relief of the southern Unionists. To McClellan, in command at Cincinnati, the call for aid from western Virginia came in April and May, and toward the end of June he crossed the Ohio with some twenty-seven regiments and rallied the unionists at Graf- ton. After a few trifling engagements in July, in which he drove away the enemy, he remained in possession of the mountain valleys, the only Union leader with a record of success when, on the morning after Bull Run, his country seemed most to need a general. That very day, July 22, Lincoln summoned him to Washington to supersede McDowell. George Brinton McClellan was one of four major-generals ranking next to General Scott and commissioned by the President in May, 1861. Not quite thirty-five years of age he possessed a training and record that would have made him prominent without his little successes in Virginia. Born in Philadelphia, the son of a physician of standing, he had been admitted to the military academy at West Point a few months under legal age, but had justified his admission by graduating second in his CIVIL WAR 69 class in 1846, and making the engineers' corps, which was even then the reward of the brilHant. Fresh from the academy, he went into the Mexican War, from which he emerged with credit, experience, and the brevet rank of captain. In 1848 he was de- tailed as instructor in engineering at West Point, and here he continued his own pro- fessional studies in the art of war. Napo- leon, his hero, was equally the model of his colleagues. After three years in the classroom he was sent out into the field to do his share in the survey for the continental railroads. First in Texas, then in the North- west, he was engaged in the reconnoissance. By 1855 the young captain was a marked man, being sent to the field of the Crimean War to observe the European armies at close range, and making there a detailed study of comparative organization, equipment, and tactics. On his return to America with an ideal preparation for a soldier, McClellan yielded to the industrial tendencies of the prosperous fifties, and resigned his commis- sion to become, first, the chief engineer, and then the vice-president of the newly opened Illinois Central railway. In 1860 he accepted the presidency of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad Company, with headquarters at Cincinnati, where he settled down with a charming bride to the work of a civilian. Upon the call for troops McClellan went back into the harness and worked so sue- 70 THE CIVIL WAR cessfuUy that after Bull Run he was seized upon as the destined hero. Nominally under General Scott, he was actually in control of all the armies around Washington, and his real power was scarcely altered when on No- vember 1, 1861, his aged chief retired to private life. Before taking up his command, McClellan had shown both the strength and the weakness that have made his place in history more difficult to iax, and more bitterly controverted than that of any other officer of the war. As far back as 1853, when en- gaged under General Isaac I. Stevens on the Northern Pacific survey, he had vexed his commander by over-caution and a disposi- tion to magnify the obstacles in his road. But he had shown a capacity for organi- zation and preparation, which had been deepened by technical studies of European armies in those processes in which he most excelled. Had he been taught by adversity and chastened by waiting and experience, he might have risen to permanent command, for no Union officer was better endowed or trained. His phenomenal rise, however, turned his head, and he never fully justified the confidence which Lincoln placed in him. Before the battle of Bull Run, McClellan had, in his private heart, begun to patronize General Scott. "I value that old man's praise very highly," he said to his wife in a letter of July 19, "and wrote him a short note last night telling him so." In CIVIL WAR 71 three months more he spoke of a visit from the President of the United States as an interruption. Through all the summer and fall MeClellan organized his Army of the Potomac. He withdrew from the streets of Washington the military loafers, officers and men, who had infested them, set to work upon the forti- fications, trained and equipped his troops and made an army. No general of the Civil War attained a greater success than he in winning a love and popularity that were not incompatible with the highest discipline of his men, or in welding the component parts into a military unit. By November, when he succeeded General Scott in first command, his machine was regarded as ready for use, but he was still at work upon his deliber- ate plan "to display such an overwhelming strength as will convince all our antagonists, especially those of the governing, aristocratic class, of the utter impossibility of resistance." The public and the government, more patient since the revelations of Bull Run, now began again to demand that he move against the enemy. Before New Year it appeared likely that there might be two enemies, since it was learned that England was hurrying troops to Canada, had taken steps to increase her fleet upon the North Atlantic station, and was threatening instant war. CHAPTER V AFLOAT AND ABROAD Before the first troops reached Washing- ton in response to the call for volunteers, Lincoln took the second step in suppressing the Confederacy and at once involved the United States in the erection of a navy and in a legal argument upon the nature of the war. On April 19, 1861, he issued a proclama- tion declaring a blockade of the ports of the seven states of the lower South, being all those which had as yet joined the Confeder- acy, and announcing that interference under pretext of Confederate authority with any vessel of the United States would be regarded as piracy and treated as such. The task of making the blockade effective became the work of the new secretary of the navy, Gideon S. Welles of Connecticut. When this blockade was announced as a means of bringing the South to terms, the navy of the United States included some ninety vessels, whereas the seacoast to be controlled contained nearly two hundred harbors and stretched 3549 miles from Alex- andria, Virginia, to the mouth of the Rio 72 AFLOAT AND ABROAD 73 Grande. Most of the warships were small and antiquated, and during the next four years the navy department both built a new fleet and struggled with the complexi- ties involved in the change from sail to steam and, greater still, from wood to iron. Welles, a journalist, provided the adminis- trative skill in this transition; his assistant secretary, Gustavus V. Fox, was an expert naval engineer and directed the practical work. Without ostentation, and infrequently in the public eye, the navy did its work. Its personnel received little of the sudden praise or indiscriminate blame that unsettled the souls of officers on land. Yet "Uncle Sam's web feet" were ever active, and the President gave them ample credit: — "Wherever the ground was a little damp," he said, "they have been and made their tracks." The navy was largely free from the difficulties brought into the army by political ambition. Every village politician believed himself competent to be a colonel if not a brigadier- general, while the public, unaccustomed to dwell upon special fitness, assumed that military capacity was inherent in all. But few fancied themselves able to command a ship without experience, and the navy was left, generally, to the control of experts. It called for a large fleet and tiresome months of unromantic service on station to fill the President's order of blockade; but 74 THE CIVIL WAR it required an even greater degree of ingenuity to explain the legal theory upon which the order was based, and to persuade the nations of the world that it was justifiable. "No State upon its own mere motion," declared Lincoln in the inaugural, "can lawfully get out of the Union." Upon this theory of the perpetuity of the Union he based his acts. The so-called Confederacy was in his eye only a conspiracy of men masquerading as states and pretending to be a nation; it was only an insurrection against the laws of the United States to be suppressed by an en- larged police. The confusion in the United States resulting from it was merely a domestic ruction, to which other nations, like friendly and discreet neighbors, were expected to be blind and deaf. This theory of the municipal character of the insurrection was satisfactory according to constitutional law, and was en- titled to respect in international law so long as the United States acted upon it. The municipal theory of the Civil War had great advantages for the administration called upon to fight it. The President can suppress insurrection as the result of his constitutional powers. He cannot, however, make war without a preceding declaration by Congress or an actual invasion by a foreign power. To admit that South Carolina had invaded the United States, admitted that she had got out of the Union, which was the fact that she desired to establish. Main- AFLOAT AND ABROAD 75 taining the logical impossibility of leaving the Union, the President was forced to take his ground that the states were yet inside and component members of it. No theory that could have satisfied the domestic needs of the situation could quite cover all the facts of the obvious temporary independence of the southern states. But in issuing the proclamation of blockade the President forgot his own asseveration that there was no war, and declared his intent to use powers which no domestic revolt, however serious, could justify. He proposed to establish an effective blockade, to seize vessels of any nation attempting to elude it, and to subject them to the processes of prize courts. As long as the disturbance was within the land, and its pacification did not involve the rights of neutral nations, the theory was adequate, but as soon as the first British blockade runner was arrested and taken into port it was certain that Secretary Seward would have to explain how this vio- lation of a friendly nation could take place in time of peace. The inconsistency of the mere-insurgency theory with a proclamation of blockade ap- pears never to have been fully realized by Lincoln, though the Supreme Court recog- nized it in the first case appearing before it. The resistance and the powers needed to suppress it went beyond the incidents of mob violence, and became a war, and Lincoln 76 THE CIVIL WAR "was bound to meet it in the shape it pre- sented itself, without waiting for Congress to baptize it with a name; and no name given to it by him or them could change the fact." Thus ran the decision in the Prize Cases, which went on to point out that only a war, implying two sides and throwing other nations into the place of neutrals, can justify the rights of blockade and those of search. This was the strong contention of the United States during the Napoleonic wars, when both England and France were disposed to forget it, and it is a curious reversal of positions to see Great Britain, in 1861, solicitous over the rights of neutral states. Blind to the inconsistency, Lincoln deter- mined to use the rights of war, yet to deny to Great Britain the privileges of neutrals. The organization of the foreign service of the United States fell to Seward, and attracted small attention from the President. As usual the ministers commissioned by Bu- chanan were recalled, one by one, and re- placed by members of the ruling party. The British post was regarded as the chief ap- pointment, as it always has been, and in the Civil War gained an added importance be- cause the interest of Great Britain was affected more than that of all the world outside. The Confederate States counted on the cotton crop as their means of carrying on the war. The sale of this abroad was to produce AFLOAT AND ABROAD 77 the revenue needed by the army, while the interest of the European countries in the crop was beheved to be sufficient to induce them to quarrel with the United States should a blockade attempt to interfere with it. More than five million bales of cotton were marketed by the South in 1860, nearly half of it going to the spindles of the British factories. Yearly the demand for it was strengthening. The invention of the sewing machine, revolutionizing the clothing indus- try, had multiplied the demand for cotton cloth, to the great profit and encouragement of the South. In England great cities lived upon the manufacture of this cloth. Should their supply be cut off starvation would con- front them and, if the southern diagnosis was correct. Great Britain would be forced to go to war on behalf of the Confederacy. Early in 1861 Confederate agents were de- spatched to sound the courts of Europe and to lay in stores for the new government. Information respecting their status was sent to the American minister in London even before the inauguration. Dallas was in- structed to represent to the British ministry that these agents of an insurgent govern- ment had no standing in law, and that the whole trouble was domestic. All the foreign ministers were instructed by Seward that, if the resistance should call for force, it would be out of order for governments to issue proc- lamations of neutrality, since there would be 78 THE CIVIL WAR no war. All were to prevent a recognition of independence at any cost. Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts, son of one President and grandson of another, was appointed minister to Great Britain in April and left Boston on May 1. The British government to which he was commissioned was in the hands of the Liberals, — but Lib- erals so old in office that they had lived down the enthusiasms of youth and were unlikely to be influenced in their conduct by any motive but the advantage of their country. Lord Palmerston, their prime min- ister, was an old man who had distrusted American politicians during a long and active life. Lord John Russell, his foreign secretary, was less unfriendly to Americans, but both he and Palmerston partook somewhat of the temper of the British ruling class that knew the southerner more intimately and liked him better than the northern business or professional man. There was a predis- position in England to sympathize with the South, regardless of slavery, which Great Britain had outlawed. Davis and his col- leagues were "gentlemen" but none had heard of Lincoln as possessing social standing or aspirations. Until it was entirely clear that slavery was the motive force of the Confederacy, this sympathy remained. It had been understood at Washington, from the despatches of Mr. Dallas, that the status to be accorded to the Confederacy by the AFLOAT AND ABROAD 79 British government would not be determined until after the arrival of Mr. Adams, who reached London on May 13, 1861. The fall of Fort Sumter and the issuance of the proclamation of blockade on April 19, had changed the necessities of the situation for Lord Palmerston's government. Except in a war, no blockade could be legal; and if this was to be a war, the close commer- cial ties of Great Britain to southern ports compelled the observance of a strict neu- trality. On the very day of Adams's arrival in London, and greatly to his discomfiture, Lord Russell announced that her Majesty had seen fit to issue a proclamation of neutrality, which could not avoid according belligerent rights to the Confederacy during the ensuing war. American public opinion, as blind as the cabinet to the legal incon- sistency of blockades in an insurrection, took the act as evidence of unfriendliness, if not of bad faith, and the tension upon Anglo-American relations, so conspicuous throughout the war, began. Later reflection reverses the contemporary opinion; neutral- ity was eminently proper and, had the proc- lamation been put off until after the battle of Bull Run, it might reasonably have been a proclamation of recognition. In the middle of May, Mr. Adams took up his long diplomatic duel with Lord John Russell. Both of mature age, deliberate and unemotional, clear of vision and honest in 80 THE CIVIL WAR intention, their mutual respect steadily in- creased, and no difficulty ever became worse through slipshod manners on the part of either. Neutrality had been proclaimed and belligerent rights conceded in what Adams regarded as unfriendly haste, but there yet remained recognition to be prevented; while that neutrality which Great Britain had so readily assumed needed to be watched lest in practice her subjects should depart from it. No less than the British government, Adams had to watch the secretary of state, for the sagacious mind of Mr. Seward more than once fell into vagaries whence only the wisdom of his chief or his subordinate rescued him. Seward believed that he was to be head of the cabinet and was to dictate the policies of government. On the 1st of April, while affairs were still unsettled, he had presented a memorandum to Lincoln which took the ground that since the President had no policy the secretary was willing to provide one, and that as a counter-irritant to secession it would be wise to provoke a foreign war with England, France, or both, in order to evoke a strong national spirit which might bring back the South. Lincoln forgave and concealed the impertinence, where most men would have dismissed the offender, and used Seward as his strongest adviser until his death. He did not however prevent the occasional drafting of a note too AFLOAT AND ABROAD 81 strong to be wise, and had not Adams used his own discretion when instructions were too belhcose, these would have led to an unnecessary collision. During the summer of 1861, with only disheartening news coming from the army, Adams devoted himself to the task of explaining the United States to England. The unofficial agents of the Confederacy learned that they were being watched. In the spring they had been received informally at the foreign office, but under the per- suasion of Adams, and convinced that the Union had a policy at last. Lord Russell ffiially closed his doors to them. In Septem- ber the Confederate tactics changed, and the commissioners were superseded by a special mission. It was decided to send ministers to both Great Britain and France, in the hope that formal agents, fully accredited, would receive an audience. The success at Bull Run, followed by other skirmishes along the line of the border states, determined President Davis to try the effect of simultaneous embassies to the courts of St. James and the Tuileries. The men selected to represent the Confeder- acy had weight, accomplishments, and local standing. John Slidell, commissioner to France, had had diplomatic experience before the war. James M. Mason, commissioned to England, ranked high among Virginia politicians. Accompanied by their families, 82 THE CIVIL WAR secretaries, servants, and hampers of pro- visions, for the Atlantic voyage was no vacation trip in 1861, they ran through the blockade at Charleston in October, and arrived safely in Havana, where on Novem- ber 7 they took passage for Southampton. On November 8 the boat which carried them, the British mail packet "Trent, " was arrested in the Bahama Channel by the United States gunboat, "San Jacinto," Captain Wilkes. Disregarding the indignant protests of the captain of the "Trent," who had stopped his boat only after a shot had been fired across her bows, Wilkes took a strong board- ing force upon the British steamer and re- moved the ministers and their secretaries. With these he returned to American waters, allowing the "Trent" to proceed to her destination. The prisoners were confined at Boston while America went wild over the arrest. Only in the light of the repeated discour- agements of the first campaign, and the delay of McClellan with the army of the Potomac, can the enthusiasm which greeted the exploit of Captain Wilkes be understood. Americans, long hungry for something that looked like victory, lost their heads. Dinners and pres- entation swords were showered upon the captain, the House of Representatives form- ally thanked him, and the secretary of the navy wrote him a note of congratulation. All through November the excitement lasted. AFLOAT AND ABROAD 83 undimmed by the thought that Great Britain might resent the act. A few of the Union leaders — Sumner, Blair, Linculn — doubted the wisdom of the seizure from the first. Seward, pleased at the start, had a speedy second thought. In England, the government was appre- hensive of a seizure from the time it learned that commissioners were to be despatched. First came the rumor that they had escaped in a Confederate warship, in which case a seizure would have involved no one. But if, as it was later believed, the commissioners were to be taken from a British mail boat, perhaps even in the British Channel, by one of the American vessels there on station, Palmerston feared the consequences of an aroused public opinion, and gained no com- fort from the law officers of the crown. On November 11 he met a group of his legal ad- visers to consider the course of Great Brit- ain if the packet should be stopped and the passengers removed, and these advised him that an American cruiser would be justified, by British precedent, not only in a search upon the West India packet, but in a removal of the southern men and their despatches. Four days later he sought reassurance from Adams, who disavowed any intention to re- move the agents from the "Trent." Ten days after he had calmed the fears of the prime minister, Adams went down into the country to a house party. There, on 84 THE CIVIL WAR November 27, he received a telegram con- veying the unwelcome news that the very- crisis that he had explained away had come to pass, and that Mason and Slidell had been prisoners for a week on the day of his con- ference with Palmerston. Dismayed at the news, certain that Palmerston would doubt his good faith, and not sure that Seward had not given way to his belligerent tendencies, Adams went up to London on the 28th, nearly convinced that there was nothing to be done. Not until December 17 did he re- ceive an instruction on the subject from the secretary of state, and then it was only a statement that Wilkes had acted without orders and that the matter was under consideration. Meanwhile, undeterred by the advice of its law officers that the United States had a right to do what it had done, the Brit- ish government was threatening retaliation. "Lord Palmerston is very agreeable," the historian Bancroft had written fourteen years before, "but he belongs to the old school of British statesmen, who think John Bull is everything, and that inter- national law, treaties, and interests of all sorts must yield to British pretensions." True to the description, the instruction to the British minister in Washington, Lord Lyons, was dated November 30, before any explanation had been, or could have been, received. Release and apology were de- AFLOAT AND ABROAD 85 manded peremptorily, and additional in- structions ordered the minister to return to London with legation and archives, if these should not be granted in a week. Long before Lord Lyons presented the ultimatum from his chief, the cabinet in Washington realized that wholesale jubila- tion did not cover all the facts. Besides the great embarrassment of a British war at this time, a war which could scarcely avoid accomplishing the aims of the Confederacy, the difficulty of justifying the captures by Captain Wilkes loomed up. Serious advisers at home and abroad told Seward that the act was an outrage. On a friendly vessel, between two neutral ports, individuals who were in no sense military had been arrested. Grave doubts existed as to the legality of such seizure on any terms, but Captain Wilkes had made a bad case worse by acting himself as judge and jury in taking the pris- oners and releasing the carrier. Had the arrest been proper, the "Trent" ought to have been seized and sent to port for trial and condemnation or release. By Christ- mas, Seward saw that the captives must be given up. On December 25 and 26 the cabinet sat in a prolonged session over a note which Seward had written in reply to Lord Lyons's demand, and which marks the highest point reached by the secretary as a political dip- lomat. Laboriously he convinced his col- S6 THE CIVIL WAR leagues on the main point, then read the note which, while conceding the release, made an appeal likely to soften the humilia- tion to his fellow citizens. Justifying the right to arrest such individuals as these, he inquired whether the detention had been in good form and according to the legal precedents. Here he found that the British contention was "an old, honored, and cher- ished American cause." Ever since the administration of Jefferson it had been the American principle, urged repeatedly in the face of British practice, that whenever property supposedly liable to condemnation was found upon a neutral vessel, the offend- ing vessel must be carried into port. Wilkes had not done this. "If I decide this case in favor of my own Government, I must dis- allow its most cherished principles, and reverse and forever abandon its essential policy. The country cannot afford the sac- rifice. If I maintain these principles, and adhere to that policy, I must surrender the case itself. . . . We are asked to do to the British nation just what we have always insisted all nations ought to do to us." Shortly after the New Year, the prisoners were given up and taken to England, where they were less useful to the Confederate cause than when in an American prison. War, which had been dangerously close, was avoided. But the United States never for- gave the undue haste with which Lord Pal- AFLOAT AND ABROAD 87 merston sent out his ultimatum and followed it with troops, while Palmerston, always suspicious of Americans, was doubly irritated by the note of Seward which, while closing the case by a compliance, made the compli- ance in terms unpalatable to any Briton, and of doubtful applicability to the case in hand. The prime question in the case of Mason and Slidell concerns the right of a belligerent to capture enemy property or persons, not military, on a voyage between neutral ports. Though falling short of a war, the "Trent" affair left English opinion ready to sympa- thize with the successes of the Confederacy and to delight in the defeats of the United States. Adams found in the months imme- diately following another problem of even greater legal difficulty, which finally got beyond his control. This was the attempt of the Confederacy to build a navy. The same reasons which kept volunteer politicians from interfering with the manage- ment of the United States navy made it hard for the Confederacy to maintain any navy. Only mariners could command. The South had not been commercial in organiza- tion and possessed but a small sea-faring element among its population. Some of the naval officers of the tJnited States resigned, but these in their work of organizing a Con- federate navy were forced to rely upon the services of foreigners for personnel and to 88 THE CIVIL WAR secure most of their material equipment abroad. A few United States vessels were seized at the time of secession, certain merchantmen and coasters were converted into cruisers, but any large naval equipment called for different resources than those which the Confederacy contained. The purchase and construction of ships of war was one of the first objects of Confed- erate diplomacy, and became the occasion of the special mission of James H. Bulloch, a former captain of the United States navy, who arrived in England in the summer of 1861. The most important of Bulloch's contracts was made with a great ship-build- ing firm. Laird Brothers, with yards at Birk- enhead, while the vessel built to his order was launched in the spring of 1862. The construction of this ship soon came to the attention of the American minister, who at once represented to the foreign office the impropriety of permitting the delivery to the Confederacy of a vessel to be used against the commerce of the United States. The duties of neutrals, according to the accepted rules of international law, do not prevent the traffic in munitions of war between their subjects and those of the belligerents, but they do forbid direct en- gagement in the war or the use of the neu- tral country as a military or naval base. Accordingly, Mr. Adams contended that since the Confederacy was under blockade AFLOAT AND ABROAD 89 it would not be practicable to deliver the vessel into a Confederate port before commis- sioning her. Instead, she would start upon her career from England or the high seas, and in either case would involve the Brit- ish government in a violation of neutrality. Repeatedly during the summer of 1862 Adams urged the foreign office to seize "No. 290, " as the offending cruiser was known upon the books of Laird Brothers. But he found the British government reluctant to see evidence pointing to her illegal character, and slow to act. When at the last minute the law officers advised that she might be held, it was too late. The ship was nearly done in July, when rumor informed the Confederate agents that arrest was probable. They acted quickly, ran her out of English waters on July 28, and took her to sea un- armed. The equipment, guns, and ammuni- tion left England from a different port and met "No. 290" in the Azores, where she was christened "Alabama," and ran up the Con- federate flag. Under the command of Raphael Semmes she set about her work, and gained a notoriety out of all proportion to her size. Her burden was only 1040 tons; her length 220 feet. The British papers chronicled her escape and chuckled at the clever shrewd- ness with which the law had been evaded. An unarmed vessel had left Liverpool, and could not be considered a violation of neu- trality; a cargo of munitions had left a 90 THE CIVIL WAR different port in a legal traffic; where was there anything for the astute Yankee min- ister to lay his hands upon? The reply of Adams was that in matters maritime the intent governs the act, that violators of the law always seek to disguise their acts, that it was the duty of Great Britain to prevent evasions and to have ample laws empowering her servants to act efficiently; and, finally, that the United States would hold her responsible for every injury done by the "Alabama" or her kind. In vain, for the present, Adams collected his evidence and presented his claims. Brit- ish opinion ran high against American pre- tension in the second year of the war, and talk not only of mediation but of recognition was in the air. McClellan's reputed genius had accomplished little, and sober English- men began to think that the Confederacy would make good its determination. In a speech at Newcastle in October, the chan- cellor of the exchequer, William E. Glad- stone, spoke of the American situation, saying, in ominous words for Mr. Adams's peace of mind, "There is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and the leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made, what is more than either — they have made a nation." So far definitive action by the government had been warded off. The sympathies of England were clearly with AFLOAT AND ABROAD 91 the South, but her cabinet was unlikely to sacrifice any interest to these while the military outcome remained in doubt. For another year, until the emancipation procla- mation and the Union victories had changed the outlook, Adams had constantly to be on the alert to explain, or soothe, or rebuke. CHAPTER VI 1862: McCLELLAN AND EMANCIPATION "On to Richmond" had begun to be the cry of the Union even before the fiasco of Bull Run. Temporarily silenced by the evi- dence of unpreparedness, it did not echo loudly again until the army of the Potomac took shape under the skilful hands of Mc- Clellan in the autumn, but through the early winter the pressure for an immediate advance increased. McClellan at his head- quarters saw all the obstacles in the road of that advance. Between the two rival capitals, Washing- ton and Richmond, the distance as the crow flies is about one hundred miles. But the intervening country could hardly have been less adapted to the movements of armies if nature had exerted herself to discourage them. The Potomac and the James, on which the two cities lie, run nearly parallel. Between them the Rappahannock and the York, with a network of branches, cross every direct line of march, and fill with marsh and swamp, almost uncharted in 1862, such portions of the country as were 92 94 THE CIVIL WAR not already obstructed by dense forests. Bounded on the east by the river mouths widening into Chesapeake Bay, some sixty miles from the direct line, the region is bounded on the west, at a similar distance, by the hills of the Blue Ridge, behind which, running northeast through the great valley, the Shenandoah River waters a fertile farm land and empties into the Potomac at Har- per's Ferry. Here, in an area slightly over one hundred miles square, was the battle- field which became the inevitable seat of the war in the East when the Confederacy fixed its place of government at Richmond, the capital of Virginia. Regardless of its military importance or strategic value, which was slight, eastern Virginia was forced to the front because of the necessity upon each government to defend its capital and threaten that of the enemy. Always an embarrass- ment to either government, yet not decisive upon the outcome of the war, the fighting between Washington and Richmond was on a larger and more costly scale than any other. The Napoleonic plan which McClellan had conceived in 1861 involved the creation at Washington of an army of a quarter- million or more, with which, overawing all resistance, he could march through Rich- mond to the southern limit of the Confed- eracy. The project might not have been impossible had either people or government 1862: McCLELLAN — EMANCIPATION 95 been willing to wait until the gigantic force was ready for use. Before the year was over» Lincoln thought that an advance upon Rich- mond, at least, might be begun, and was disposed to urge it along the direct line be- cause such an advance would keep the Army of the Potomac always between Washington and the enemy. In vain he struggled to get McClellan to move before Christmas, or in the early spring; and when the general finally consented to start, he had changed his plan, abandoned the direct attack, and determined to ship his force by sea to the peninsula between the York and the James, up which he might march upon Richmond with less natural obstruction to overcome. Grateful for movement on any plan, Lincoln co-operated with the manoeuvre, only stip- ulating that Washington must not be left uncovered. Over the interpretation of this stipulation the peninsular campaign of 1862 broke down. It was the belief of McClellan that a vigor- ous attack upon Richmond would be Wash- ington's best defence. It would compel the enemy to concentrate his whole army at his own threshold. But Lincoln's advisers were nervous unless an actual army was stationed around the District of Columbia, and as soon as McClellan had started the President yielded to political pressure and organized three armies for the greater security of the capital. One was in western Virginia, where 96 THE CIVIL WAR there was no enemy, but where Fremont, who had to have a command, could be sta- tioned; another was in the Shenandoah Valley under Banks, guarding the "back door" to Washington; the third was under McDowell, at Washington. It is the opinion of many military experts that this caution of the President was both needless and unwise, and that McClellan's plan was right; yet without these troops, diverted from his com- mand for political reasons, McClellan started up the Peninsula in the spring in 1862 with a larger army than could be placed in the field against him. The Confederate army, acting upon the orders of President Davis, who believed him- self a great strategist, was organized for a defensive campaign around Richmond and contained among its leaders two generals who would have been famous in any company, and who outclassed McClellan. The Union army, during April and May, advanced up the Peninsula, from Yorktown to Williams- burg, across the Chickahominy, and was almost in sight of the city of Richmond before General Robert E. Lee left his desk, where he had been chief military adviser to Davis, to take command of the Confederate army. After two months of hard fighting, McClellan had about 100,000 men before Richmond in June. Lee had 30,000 less. But the campaign had already been made a failure by the exer- tions of "Stonewall" Jackson. 1862: McCLELLAN — EMANCIPATION 97 It was at Bull Run, in 1861, that Thomas Jonathan Jackson, a Virginia Scotch-Irish- man, having placed his brigade in the strong- est position in the Confederate line, held it there until he had earned the nickname "Stonewall." Neither his brilliancy nor his profound strategy had come to him by accident. A deliberate student of military history, he had taught himself the larger things which he had not learned at West Point or in the Mexican War. For ten years before the Civil War he was professor in a Virginia military school for boys, preparing against the day when he should return to the field. Honest, narrow, devout, no repu- tation of the Civil War is more secure or picturesque than his. A tremendous lover of truth in private life, as a commander he deceived and misled everyone but himself, keeping the enemy entirely ignorant of his movements until they were accomplished, and giving even his friends little inkling of his real intent. Like the old Puritans, he fought best after prayer. "The General," said his body-servant, Jim, "is a great man for prayin'. He pray night and mornin' — all times. But when I see him get up several times in the night, an' go off an' pray, den I know there is goin' to be somethin to pay, an' I go right away and pack his haversack." While McClellan was yet marching up the Peninsula, Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley was endangering his campaign. Through 98 THE CIVIL WAR April and May he created the impression of having a large force ready to plunge down the Valley the instant McClellan got away. Masking both his intentions and his small force, he first deceived and then defeated Banks, who commanded the Union army in the Valley, and frightened Lincoln into efforts to crush him by the concerted movements of the three armies of Fremont, Banks, and McDowell. Jackson eluded the attack, and as soon as it was thoroughly under way he slipped out of the Valley, reporting in Rich- mond with his army in the end of June. He had tied up a great and useless Union force on the Shenandoah, and was now ready to help Lee with McClellan. Whether McClellan needed McDowell's army or not is a matter for military critics, but there can be no difference of opinion that the diversion created by Jackson's ma- noeuvre broke his confidence. By the last week in June the success of his campaign was questionable. Through July he only held his own. And in August the Army of the Potomac was recalled from the Pen- insula. McClellan reported his return to Washington a day or two before his suc- cessor in the public favor collapsed. If there had been nothing to offset Mc- Clellan's campaign, the spring of 1862 would have been indeed doleful. The British- built Confederate navy was getting to sea and the public had not yet realized how 1862: McCLELLAN — EMANCIPATION 9a important were the armies in the West. But the navy, non-poHtical and efficient, was making progress. Its first triumph closed the period of the wooden battleship. Early in 1862 the naval defence of Wash- ington was endangered by the Confederates' possession of the hulk of the "Merrimac," seized and armored after the abandonment of the Norfolk navy yard, and rechristened the " Virginia." Before this impregnable gunboat frigate after frigate collapsed, until on March 9 she met the new invention of Ericsson, the turret "Monitor." No bat- tleship less orthodox than the "Monitor" in her appearance ever floated; nor did any look less dangerous than she, with her small cylindrical gun-house upon her nearly sub- merged deck. But the naval duel in Hamp- ton Roads that day determined the course of naval construction for two generations, and rendered obsolete nearly every navy in the world. Yet the old frigates of the United States navy did some more service before they were broken up. In April Farragut, wearied with the difficulties of blockading the many mouths of the Mississippi, sailed up the river, ran the forts, and took posses- sion of New Orleans. With General Butler in command of the conquered city. New Orleans ceased to be a menace to the Union cause. Not squeamish in methods, and perhaps willing to profit by illicit trade, the latter nevertheless showed himself a com- 100 THE CIVIL WAR petent ruler in cleansing the town and managing its affairs. While McClellan was winding up his cam- paign and complaining of the refusal of Lincoln to let him have McDowell, the ad- ministration had found new commanders and had placed its trust in them. These were Halleck, who, having superseded Fremont in the West, was now made general-in-chief, and military adviser at Washington, and Pope, who was called from the Mississippi Valley to command the three armies of Fremont, Banks, and McDowell. Pope was even less successful than McClellan had been, and lacked both the popularity and the prestige of his predecessor. Toward the end of August he was out-generalled and out- fought at the second battle of Bull Run, and on September 2, in despair and against the wishes of his cabinet, Lincoln called upon McClellan to resume command. It was high time for some one to take command. Lee, encouraged by his unwar- ranted success in frightening Washington and neutralizing the peninsular attack, had determined to carry the war into the North by way of the Shenandoah Valley. He still hoped that Maryland might rise against the oppressor and that it might be possible to dictate a peace on northern soil. There was no better general to rally and reorganize the discouraged Union armies than McClellan, but before his new command was two weeks 1862: McCLELLAN — EIVIANCIPATION 101 old he again missed his chance. Through a captured despatch he learned of a risky division of Lee's army, leaving either half at his mercy for a few hours. He thought it over all night instead of moving on the instant, and Lee closed up before it was too late. Paralleling Lee's army, as it moved north, McClellan had more than twice his numbers. On September 17, 1862, the armies met along the banks of Antietam Creek, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, where Lee made a brilliant stand. McClellan entered the fight with 87,000 Union troops, and with rifled cannon with which to oppose Lee's ragged 50,000. The aggregate losses ran to more than 20,000, and at the end of the day Lee, escaping in defiance of all the laws of strategy, started his retreat. The southern discouragement at the complete failure of Maryland to rise to expel the Union forces was surpassed by northern grief and bitter- ness that McClellan had not crushed Lee, and would not follow him in vigorous pursuit. Without molestation the Confederate army returned into Virginia, and the first invasion of the North was over. McClellan settled down to reorganize and rest. The hints and orders of the President that he cross the Potomac and resume the fight, he disregarded. Here, as elsewhere, he failed to realize that public opinion was a force to be estimated and accounted for, not to be ignored, and that it was Abraham Lincoln who was com- 102 THE CIVIL WAR mander-in-chief of the armies and President of the United States. Five weeks after An- tietam, MeClellan entered Virginia, having allowed Lee ample time to prepare to re- ceive him. In the first week in November he had an advance in contemplation. But on November 7 he was relieved of his command by Lincoln who had at last yielded to the critics. Unsatisfactory as MeClellan was, he had no known superior in the Union ranks, and Burnside, his second successor, failed as signally as Pope. But this time his military eclipse was final. As a spec- tator he watched the rest of the war, gaining comfort from the sympathies of his adherents and considering himself the victim of vicious politics. "I think that I have done all that can be asked in twice saving the country," was his reflection. The career of MeClellan illustrates the unhappy mixture of politics and war that impeded the Union cause. In the Confed- eracy, independence was the one important object. To it all other needs were subor- dinate. But Lincoln was forced not only to maintain the Union, but to keep together a majority that could control his party and his Congress, in order that such maintenance might be assured. The unquestioning loy- alty of the spring of 1861 never returned. The Democratic party resumed its old work of obstruction. Republican radicals and conservatives both added their embarrass- 1862: McCLELLAN — EMANCIPATION 103 ments. In no phase of his policy was his task more intricate during 1862 than it was with the citizens of the border states. During the poHtical campaign of 1860, through the trying months before his inaugu- ration, and as late as the battle of Bull Run, Lincoln and his party stood steadily for the permanence of the Union, no aggression against slavery in the states, and the restor- ation of the Constitution as it was before secession. But public opinion developed during 1861, until it became apparent to all that slavery was the fundamental cause of the loss of peace and life and property afflict- ing the United States. It became doubtful whether even the Union could be preserved; but if it was, the spirit which maintained it could not be content until it had ended not only the fact of resistance to the law but the cause which had produced it. Yet four slave states stood loyal to the Union. The abolition of slavery by force of arms or of determined majority would fall as the unfair reward for their loyalty upon the shoulders of the citizens of the border states. To avert this injustice and satisfy the rights of these states before the collapse of slavery, which he anticipated, was Lincoln's hope in the winter of 1861 and 1862. The temper of the Union respecting slavery, with which Lincoln had to deal in his nego- tiations, came out in the army, in Congress, and in public opinion. Twice he found that 104 THE CIVIL WAR subordinate officers went more rapidly than he could follow. Fremont, in August, 1861, issued a military order of confiscation which emancipated the slaves of persons in insur- rection against the United States within his department. Abolitionists throughout the North received the proclamation with joy, — which may have been Fremont's motive for issuing it, — but Lincoln, after vainly giv- ing the author a chance to modify it, him- self disallowed it in a general order. In the next spring. Hunter, within a southern department, issued a similar order, which was likewise recalled. The comments through- out the North upon these unauthorized acts would have convinced a less sagacious poli- tician than Lincoln that opinion was shift- ing. In December, 1861, Congress, which had resolved in July that the war was only for the Union, refused to re-enact the resolution. Lincoln continued to maintain that under no conditions could Congress touch slavery in the states; but there were other regions whose dependence upon that branch of the government was a matter of prime Republi- can creed. Slavery, in the District of Colum- bia and in the territories, early came under attack, and was abolished in both before the summer of 1862. The disposition to abolish was not entirely humanitarian; in part it was vindictive, and the desire to punish, which could not encompass aboli- 1862: McCLELLAN — EMANCIPATION 105 tion in the states, revealed itself in acts of confiscation. The war session of Congress, in 1861, passed a confiscation act which may be regarded as the first formal step against slavery. Butler, in Virginia, had already devised the term "contraband of war," to apply to slaves escaping into Union lines, and had used the contraband as camp labor- ers. The law of August, 1861, declared the confiscation of all persons or property used against the United States. Lincoln signed the act reluctantly, for retaliation was far from his desire. He was forever looking for- ward to the time when the war would be over, and every act of unnecessary cruelty would be a bar to reconciliation. The second confiscation act, of July, 1862, was even further from his wish. This declared that after sixty days all the property of persons holding military or civil office under the Confederacy should be liable to public con- fiscation. It is notable among civil wars that these acts were never fully carried out. Save in a few isolated instances, the most notable being Arlington, the home of General Lee, such property as was taken by the United States was restored at the close of the war. No general confiscation or proscription was ever applied. The temper toward the South shown in the debates on these measures served notice on Lincoln that. Constitution or no Consti- tution, the slavery matter was imminent, 106 THE CIVIL WAR and he tried to save the border states. Com- pensated emancipation, with the consent of those concerned, was the measure which he advocated as just and expedient. It was just, because the holder of slave property had in no way violated the law, or the tra- dition of his region, and ought not to be forced to carry the whole cost of a change in national sentiment. It was expedient be- cause it would at once reward those who had been loyal in a time of stress, and discour- age the enemy. After citizens of Maryland or Kentucky had sold their slaves to the United States there would be no chance of their ever joining the Confederacy; while the financial advantage given to them might easily induce citizens of the Confederacy to press for peace and compensation. Indeed it was a habit of Lincoln to figure out the number of days in which the cost of keeping up the Union armies would equal the value of all the slaves, and to urge that if only as a measure of economy it would pay to pur- chase every slave in the United States. Acting upon his policy, Lincoln, in March, 1862, urged Congress to offer to co-operate with any state desiring to emancipate its slaves, and held during the spring and sum- mer a series of conferences with represen- tatives of the border states in which he urged his measure upon them. Congress responded favorably to the President's suggestion, but the border states refused to act. Self-interest 1862 : McCLELLAN — EMANCIPATION 107 as well as obstinacy stood in the road of their compliance. In 1862 secession had not been proved a failure, and if the South were ever recognized as independent the border states would desire to join the Confeder- acy. The credit of the United States at this time was none too good. Its bonds, in which payment for slaves would probably have been made, were below par, and should the Union fail and the bonds collapse, the border citizens would have lost both their slaves and their remuneration. Beside interest, as it appeared to the border states, there also stood in the road of adjustment the reluc- tance of Democrats to co-operate heartily in any measure urged by Lincoln. By the middle of July Lincoln gave up his idea of compensated emancipation as hopeless, but reached at the same time the conclusion that emancipation was bound to come. Congress could not emancipate a single slave in any state, but Lincoln believed that the President, as commander-in-chief, in time of war, could properly harass the enemy by an attack upon their property. John Quincy Adams had long since told his south- ern opponents that the only menace to slavery was the war power of the President, which they threatened to provoke. And now Lincoln reached the conviction that only a military emancipation could save the Union. It was not the slave that he considered primarily, though he adhered to his belief 108 THE CIVIL WAR that "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." When in the summer Horace Greeley joined the throng of abolitionists that were worrying the President to convert the war into a war against slavery, Lincoln had already reached his conclusion but had not announced it. Greeley called his mani- festo "The Prayer of Twenty Millions of People," and it was typical of the man and the reformer. Extreme, ill-founded, far from true in the numerical backing which it claimed, it is only another evidence of the popular pressure. To it, Lincoln replied in a personal letter which went directly to the point, and revealed himself as standing where he always had stood. "My paramount ob- ject is to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery," he wrote. "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, 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, and leaving others alone, I would also do that." On the constitutional side, if any slaves were to be freed nothing short of a constitu- tional amendment, save the war power of the President, could accomplish it. When the border states refrained from ac- cepting the principle of compensated eman- cipation, Lincoln determined that he must go along without them, and that at a suitable time it would be expedient to rally the North and discourage the Confederacy by executive 1862: McCLELLAN — EMANCIPATION 109 emancipation. The first draft of his proc- lamation was written early in July, but it was not communicated to the cabinet until towards the end of the month, after Congress had adjourned. Then it was presented for information, not for debate. The man whom Seward had accused of having neither policy nor ability to frame one, had reached his conclusion unaided, and had announced it at liis own time. Verbal amendments to the proclamation were made, but the only serious criticism came from the secretary of state, who questioned the expediency of issuing such a proclamation after as disas- trous a campaign as the Peninsula had been. Issued in July or August, it would appear as a desperate effort in a forlorn cause. Con- vinced by the suggestion, Lincoln withheld the proclamation and prayed for such a vic- tory as might give it a proper appearance. When Pope collapsed at second Bull Run, his disappointment was great. When Mc- Clellan managed to check Lee at Antietam with nearly twice the latter's force, it was decided that a good-enough victory, at least the only one in sight, had been attained. On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued the preliminary proclamation of emancipa- tion. Announcing first his continued belief in the principle of compensation, and calling attention to the confiscation acts of Congress, he declared that on January 1, 1863, "all persons held as slaves within any State or 110 THE CIVIL WAR designated part of a State the people whereof shall be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." The North was taken by surprise when the emancipation proclamation appeared, and misunderstood its bearings then, as it has, generally, ever since. Slavery was not af- fected by the preliminary proclamation, or by the final proclamation, which appeared on January 1, in any of the border states, or in any portion of the Confederacy not in actual resistance to the United States. Over citizens of the United States not engaged in insurrection the President could have no control, and claimed none. So far as his act had legal weight, it applied only to per- sons within what he designated as the rebel- lious area in his final proclamation. Yet so long as these remained rebellious and con- tinued to acknowledge only the jurisdiction of the Confederate government, they could not be reached and the proclamation could not be enforced against them. After they had submitted in any portion of the area, and become peaceful, it is highly doubtful whether any act of the President seques- trating their property was lawful. Only im- peachment could punish him for not aiding them to recover their property, but it is hard to believe that any United States court would have decided that their title to their slaves was extinguished. The emancipation 1862: McCLELLAN — EMANCIPATION 111 proclamation did not free the slaves, but it served notice that the war had become an attack upon slavery as well as disunion, while legal steps sanctioned the policy an- nounced by Lincoln in less than three years. Emancipation by constitutional amend- ment had been urged in many congresses, and was defeated by adverse majorities until the end of 1864. After 1862 it became an administration measure, but the passage of an amendment accomplishing it was deferred until February, 1865. In the ten ensuing months the states gave it their support. Three-fourths of all, as the Constitution prescribes, had approved it when Seward issued, on December 18, 1865, his proclama- tion declaring that the thirteenth amend- ment had been adopted. Incorporating in its body the phrases of the memorable north- west ordinance of 1787, it declared that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude . . . shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." The hope of Lincoln that the emancipation proclamation would consolidate the North be- hind him was not realized at once. Abroad, the feeling towards the United States imme- diately grew better, but at home his act only widened the cleavage among factions, and brought him rebuke at the congressional elections of 1862. Seward had believed, in the loyal outburst after Sumter, that all party lines in the North were gone; but they 112 THE CIVIL WAR were only submerged in a tide of emotion that ebbed away in the second year of the war. At best, Lincoln was supported by a tem- porary fusion of diverse elements. The abolitionists were the radicals among his backers and had Chase as their spokesman in the cabinet. Seward represented the moderate Republicans who were unionists above all else. The war Democrats, who had voted for Douglas and like him had stood by the Union, claimed McClellan as one of their number and were reached by Stanton, secretary of war. Bates and Blair were bor- der state Democrats, whose friends expected the Union to be maintained without damage to slavery. No single faction could control a majority in the North, and it was not certain that any single one could be spared. Yet to harmonize their interests was an almost impossible task, and more nearly broke down in the fall of 1862 than at any other time. Always among the avowed opposition were conservatives who sympa- thized with the South and denied the con- stitutionality of coercion. "Copperheads," as they came to be called, they harassed the President in his every act, and varied in conduct from open support of the Confed- eracy to severe criticism of the policy of the administration. Lincoln was never a good executive or disciplinarian. He rarely thought in terms of efficient administration. 1862: McCLELLAN — EMANCIPATION 113 More than once he tried to save law-breakers whose friends were necessary to his policy. But the fact that he managed, in any way, to conduct the Union cause with the sort of backing that he had, places him at the head of the world's consummate politicians. The immediate result of the emancipation proclamation was discouraging. Its critics outshouted its supporters in the North. In the elections conservatives everywhere gained a hearing and iinseated numerous Repub- licans. In 1860 Lincoln had carried every northern state except New Jersey. In 1862 his party was ousted in a solid tier of states north of the border: — New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Only by a bare majority did the Republicans retain their control of Congress, and it is fair to regard the elec- tion as a general vote of censure implying lack of confidence in the administration. The backwoods lawyer, whom political ma- nipulation had seated in the White House, had not yet convinced his country of his essen- tial greatness. His followers were only just beginning to identify the Republican party with the Union, and to maintain that the defeat of either would involve the downfaU of the other. The war, however, had to go on. McClellan was dismissed immediately after the election, and the country entered upon the darkest eight months in its history. CHAPTER Vn 1862: THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY The war in the West was not confined to a narrow arena, bounded by two rival cap- itals and embracing an area that remained for four long years unchanged. Instead, it ranged from the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico and followed up the tributaries of the Mississippi until it reached the limit of Confederate resistance, wherever that might be. It contained few scenes of marching up and down, with loud confusion, voluminous dust, and lack of progress, but was a con- tinuous development, from the days of 1861, when loyal citizens of Missouri were organ- ized into a committee of safety, until, after four years, the armies of the West completed their advance down the Mississippi Valley, around the Allegheny Range, and up against the armies of Virginia from the South. The centre of the stage in that great west- ern theatre of war was the mouth of the Ohio River, where the straggling town of Cairo stood on stilts to avoid the floods which repeatedly washed over the southern tip of Illinois. Here, "within a radius of twenty- 115 116 THE CIVIL WAR five miles, is the centre of the Mississippi Valley, whence easy routes of communication lead in every direction. The Ohio River, with its extensive northern tributaries, great canals, and numerous railroads, afforded to all the North ready access to this point. Entering the Ohio, from the south, only a few miles above its mouth, come two other rivers of almost equal importance. The Cumberland, sweeping down from the moun- tains of eastern Kentucky, could be as- cended easily to Nashville, the capital of Tennessee. South of the Cumberland, and parallel to it near its mouth, the Tennessee empties into the Ohio the drainage of several states. The Mississippi River, carrying the waters of all these, gives the broadest of natural highways to the sea. In a country sparsely settled, where no large army could live upon the near-by land, but must carry with it all its food, munitions, and clothing, transportation routes were of supreme importance. The rivers dominating the Southwest were supplemented by two great railways, and an uncompleted third, that fixed by their location the strategic centres subordinate to the mouth of the Ohio. Some twenty miles below Cairo, on the Mississippi, at Columbus, Kentucky, was the northern terminus of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad which ran parallel to the Mississippi and furnished connections to New Orleans and Mobile. At right angles 1862: THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 117 to this road, and not far south of the great bend of the Tennessee River, ran the most important east and west railway of the South, the Memphis and Charleston. Cairo, Colum- bus, and the mouths of the Cumberland and Tennessee constituted the primary stra- tegic centre; the secondary centres were in a line along this road, at Memphis, where it touched the Mississippi, at Corinth, where it crossed the Mobile and Ohio, and at Chat- tanooga, in eastern Tennessee, where it touched the Tennessee River and was met by other roads from both Georgia and Vir- ginia. South of the Memphis and Charleston, and parallel to it, another line to the east extended from Vicksburg, through Jackson, into Alabama and Georgia. It was com- pleted after the war began. The Civil War was well advanced before the importance of the western field was recognized. Habit, as well as Washington and Richmond, turned general attention towards the East. In the West heavy fighting went almost unnoticed save by the north- west states whose boys were being killed, and generals acquired real skill in the routine performance of their duties before the public discovered their existence and put them in the illuminated places of eminence. Missouri, the old storm centre of the slavery quarrel, was torn to pieces by the divergent forces of Union and secession. Her governor in 1861, a rampant secessionist, thought 118 THE CIVIL WAR to organize his state for the Confederacy. "Your requisition in my judgment," he re- pHed to Lincoln on the call for volunteers, "is illegal, unconstitutional, and revolution- ary in its object, inhuman and diabolical, and cannot be complied with." Opinion in St. Louis ran high. On a street car a splut- tering youth was heard to bluster that "Things have come to a pretty pass when a free people can't choose their own flag. Where I come from if a man dares to say a word in favor of the Union we hang him to a limb of the first tree we come to." He subsided only when his neighbor retorted that "after all, we are not so intolerant in St. Louis as we might be; I have not seen a single rebel hung yet, nor heard of one; there are plenty of them who ought to be, however." The youth's excitement was provoked by the seizure, in May, of the arsenal, and the arrest of the Confederate militia by the combined efforts of Francis P. Blair, Jr., and a captain of the regular army, Nathaniel Lyon. During the summer months, until his death at Wilson's Creek in August, Lyon held Missouri. There was heavy fighting in the southern half of the state, nominally directed by Major-General John C. Fremont, from his headquarters in St. Louis. But until Fremont was removed in November no constructive plan was adopted for the protection of the division of the West. Hal- 1862: THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 119 leek, who sueeeeded him, had eommand of the Union forces of the upper Mississippi Valley, and as far east as the Cumberland River. Next to him, in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, Buell was in charge. The strategic importance of the Cairo region was acted upon by the Confederate leaders before it was seen elsewhere. Leon- idas Polk, after he had laid aside his bishop- ric and gone back to the army of his youth, seized the river end of the Mobile and Ohio railway, at Columbus, Kentucky, and be- gan the fortification of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers at points where they are only twelve miles apart, near the southern boundary of Kentucky. His superior officer, Albert Sidney Johnston, in command of the western forces of the Confederacy, followed up Polk's design, hurried on the construction of the Cumberland and Tennessee forts, and stretched his line up into central Kentucky. With divisions of his army in western, mid- dle, and eastern Tennessee, he prepared for a general advance through Kentucky to the Ohio River, despite the neutrality which Governor Magoffin of that state had excitedly proclaimed. The keen regard of the Con- federate leaders for the sovereignty of their own states was blunted in the case of a neutral state. When Halleck took com- mand in November, 1861, Johnston had been perfecting his first line of defence for two months. 120 THE CIVIL WAR The first step against Johnston was taken in September by one of Fremont's subor- dinates named Grant, a retired regular cap- tain, who had entered a volunteer regiment of Illinois, and had speedily been given a brigade of the inexperienced, disorderly, west- ern regiments. At the end of August, Grant was assigned control of Missouri and Illi- nois, below St. Louis, and on September 4 he established his headquarters at Cairo, which he estimated at once at its strategic importance. A few days later he seized commanding stations at the mouths of the Cumberland and Tennessee, and kept garri- sons not only at Cairo but at Paducah. The citizens of the latter had expected to welcome the Confederate outposts when Grant moved in. The "neutral" governor of Kentucky inquired by what right the sovereignty of the state was thus invaded. When Halleck arrived. Grant had the nucleus of an army waiting for him at the place where it could best be used. WTiile McClellan was drilling along the Potomac, Grant lay waiting at Cairo with a few regiments. The way to attack John- ston's line of defence was obvious, but not until the middle of the winter would Halleck authorize a joint movement by Grant and the gunboats on the river against the Con- federate forts that closed the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Mississippi to further ad- vance, — forts Donelson, Henry, and Island 1862: THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 121 No. 10. The day after the orders to move on Fort Henry were received, the expedition was on its way. The spirit of its leader, who had almost no professional soldiers under him, has a novel ring among the notes of protest and explanation that crowd the records. Movements were slow because of mud and rain, he wrote; but this, however, "will op- erate worse upon the enemy, if he should come out to meet us, than upon us." With a celerity not seen thus far in any operation of the war, the first Confederate line was broken. The advance upon Fort Henry began on February 2, and ended four days later in the surrender of the fort. Its commander had foreseen the futility of a stand here, and had slipped out most of his troops, marching them across the narrow neck of land to Fort Donelson, before the attack began. The whole Confederate line was thrown into a panic by the prospect of a movement on Donelson, since, should this fall, Nashville lay undefended and Tennessee would be opened to the Union invader. Immediately upon the capture of Fort Henry, Grant prepared to take Fort Don- elson, and called upon Halleck for re- enforcements. Before the gunboats could go down the Tennessee and come back up the Cumberland the army had invested the fort and its 20,000 defenders with some 15,000 men, who were shortly re-enforced 122 THE CIVIL WAR to 27,000. The panic existing within thfc Confederate army was unknown to Grant, but he, as well as Johnston, could see the strategic outcome. Within Fort Donelson private apprehen- sions were added to public fears. Floyd, in command, had been secretary of war in Buchanan's cabinet, and was popularly believed to have betrayed his post by dis- tributing United States stores where the Confederacy could get them. His dishonest intent has been well-nigh explained away, but the incompetence which he had shown in the war department, added to his fear of personal capture, destroyed what small usefulness he had. With the concurrence of his subor- dinates, he fled. His second in command. Pillow, escaped with him. Buckner, the third in rank, stood by the fort, loaded up the haversacks of his men, and organized a sortie in the hope of saving the army. On the morning of February 15, the United States army stood, wet and unhappy, on the rough, frozen mud around Fort Donelson. Its commander was holding a conference with Foote aboard one of the gunboats in the Cumberland, and was contemplating the unpleasantness of a siege. As he landed for the ride back to camp, he learned that the Confederates had started an attack. Sur- prised by this, for he had had no idea of having a fight unless he provoked it. Grant hurried back. He understood Buckner's plan 1862: THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 123 to escape only when he knew that the troops were carrying their haversacks. To rally his startled brigades, and spring a counter attack against that portion of the Confed- erate line which was being abandoned, took little time. Not over 4000 got away; the others returned to the fort. At daybreak on the 16th the Union commander could send in his laconic reply to a request for terms: "No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works." Buckner surrendered nearly 15,000 troops that day. Nine days later, Nash- ville, the capital of Tennessee, was occupied by detachments from both Grant and Buell, without a fight. The spectacular capture of forts Henry and Donelson, coming at a time when McClellan was just preparing to move into the Penin- sula, and when Union victories were few and far between, made Grant a major-general of volunteers and ended the period of hearty co-operation from his chief, Halleck. Though rebuffing Grant's first overtures upon the campaign, Halleck had finally worked ear- nestly with Grant and Foote. Official credit for the success came to him as chief in com- mand, and his department was extended to include the army of Buell. Hereafter his support ceased to be either regular or vig- orous, and suspicions of the competence of Grant entered his mind. So suspicious was 124 THE CIVIL WAR he, that the immediate advance up the rivers which Grant desired was forbidden, until Johnston had organized his defence along the second Confederate line, Memphis, Cor- inth, and Chattanooga. The logical termination of the Donelson campaign was left to Pope, who was, in March, sent against the forts in the Mis- sissippi near New Madrid and Island No. 10. After manoeuvring the enemy out of the village, with the co-operation of Foote's gunboats he compelled the surrender of the island, receiving some 7000 prisoners from its garrison. Missouri hereafter was detached from the main Confederate line, and though much fighting remained to be done, in a population that was divided against itself, it ceased to play a part in the larger strategy of the war. Upon the extension of his command in March, Halleck directed from St. Louis two considerable armies in the field, that of Buell at Nashville, and that of Grant at Fort Henry. It is difficult to prove that he had a deliberate plan of campaign. The most probable aim appears to have been to unite the two forces at some point on the Tennessee River, near the crossing of the Mobile and Ohio and the Memphis and Charleston railways, from which point the latter railway could be broken. He hoped to induce the enemy to retreat from Corinth. The destruction of the hostile army appears not to have been 1862: THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 125 undertaken. It was the occupation of points that dominated Halleck's mind. Remote from the scene of action, perplexed by a double manoeuvre, and aggravated by the political situation in Missouri, he rarely knew the exact status at the front, and directed a less successful campaign than his subordinates could have carried out alone, or than he would have carried out if in the field. The success of the occupation of the line of the Memphis and Charleston depended upon the celerity with which Grant and Buell brought their armies together, before the Confederate line could be re-formed. Johnston had withdrawn his force from central Kentucky upon the fall of Nash- ville, and had hurried from Murfreesboro to Hunts ville, in Alabama, and thence down the left bank of the Tennessee towards Corinth. At Corinth, Beauregard organized the troops on the left of the Confederate line. By the last week in March the two forces had been joined without interfer- ence, Johnston had assumed command of the whole, and was preparing not only to de- stroy Grant and Buell, in succession, but to march across the lost region to the Ohio. He had 50,000 troops, with whom to march, as he told them, "to a decisive victory over the agrarian mercenaries sent to subjugate and despoil you of your liberties." It was a fiction much used in proclamations by Con- federate leaders that the northern troops 126 THE CIVIL WAR were both cowards and mercenaries; while theirs were gentle, brave, and chivalrous. Yet the Confederate, Bragg, only a few days before this proclamation of Johnston, had written that the whole country "seems paralyzed. . . . The unrestrained habits of plunder and pillage have done much to pro- duce this state of affairs and reconcile the people of the country to the approach of the enemy, who certainly do them less harm than our own troops." Grant had been prevented from acting quickly by the perplexing and contradictory orders of Halleck, but toward the end of March he threw his army into camp along the left bank of the Tennessee, at Pittsburg Landing, while Buell, entirely independent of his control, was hurrying up from the north- east. Neither Grant, nor Sherman, in whom he placed complete confidence, anticipated a vigorous attack from Johnston, and the disorder which prevailed in the Union camp is explained rather than excused by the extreme rawness of his troops. Most of the men had never been under fire, or even seen the enemy. When, in the early morning of April 6, Johnston opened a general engage- ment, it was several hours before the Union leaders realized that it was more than one of the skirmishes that had amused their outposts daily for two weeks. When they learned the magnitude of the attack, it was almost too late to save the day. 1862: THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 127 With somewhat over 40,000 troops, John- ston entered at daybreak upon a pitched battle, that raged all day between Shiloh Church and Pittsburg Landing, and left his army that night on the Union line, to eat captured rations and sleep in federal tents. Grant had some 2000 more, and always maintained that, without aid, he could have won the battle. On both sides, regiments broke and fled repeatedly, the incessant hammering getting on the nerves of the green farmers' boys in either army. John- ston himself was slain in the afternoon while trying to rally one frightened regiment. His successor, Beauregard, prepared that night to fight it out on the 7th, and telegraphed to Richmond that victory was already won. "I am able to announce to you, with entire confidence," wrote Davis in a special mes- sage to the Confederate Congress, "that it has pleased Almighty God to crown the Confederate arms with a glorious and de- cisive victory over our invaders." The Confederate rejoicing was somewhat premature, however. On the night of the 6th, Buell came up with 20,000 fresh troops in the Army of the Ohio. They were tired with forced marching, but their nerves had not been unstrung by fight and slaughter. On the morning of the 7th they took the front, and before the day was done the Con- federate army was in retreat towards Corinth. Among the battles of the Civil War, this 128 THE CIVIL WAR engagement at Shiloh, or Pittsburg Landing, as southern writers prefer to call it, has evoked more acrimonious dispute than any other. On any basis it was a great fight, with 100,000 men engaged, and 20,000 of them killed or wounded at the close of the second day. It has been asked, — Was Grant surprised .f* — Was he defeated on the 6th? — Did BuelFs army save him. 5^ The armies of the Ten- nessee and the Ohio have answered all these differently when they have gathered at their camp-fires and reunions. In part, they will remain forever unanswered, but it seems clear from Grant's own words that he was unprepared for an engagement of such mag- nitude. Yet he kept his courage, re-formed his broken lines, admitted no defeat, and it is by no means certain that Buell's army was indispensable to his salvation. McClellan, in the East, was still worrying his way up the Peninsula when Shiloh added the second to the great Union victories in the West. Halleck, aroused by the size of the battle, hurried down from St. Louis to reorganize the armies, and resume his scru- tiny of Grant. Donel^on had begun with Grant absent from the field; at Shiloh he was unprepared; and his chief may be par- doned for wondering whether the victories were won because of Grant's efforts, or in spite of them. The advance of the army had been slow when Halleck directed it from St. Louis; 1862: THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 129 with him in camp it was still more delib- erate than Beauregard's retreat to Corinth. Slowly and carefully, as all the books of military tactics prescribe, Halleck made his steps toward the railway crossing that had been the objective of his campaign. When he was at last ready to assault, Beauregard evacuated Corinth. Memphis fell of its own weight when Corinth became a Union camp. By the middle of June the Mississippi was clear of Confederate armies from Cairo to Vicksburg, while the second Confederate line had lost its centre and its western end. The capture of New Orleans by the navy added another to the western successes. From the view of the war department, Hal- leck had planned and executed Donelson, Shiloh, and Corinth. He had certainly brought order out of Fremont's chaos. It was reasonable that he should be summoned east when the government needed an ad- viser. When the campaign in the Peninsula was given up, he was made general-in-chief. Pope was taken east about the same time to organize the army of Virginia for the defence of Washington. After the fall of Corinth, the alternatives confronting Halleck's army pointed towards the immediate occupation of Vicksburg, which would complete the opening of the Mississippi, or that of Chattanooga, which would control the junction of the three rail- ways from Memphis, Atlanta, and Rich- ISO THE CIVIL WAR mond. Neither solution was undertaken, promptly; instead, the armies were scattered to hold the places and reconstruct the rail- ways that had fallen into Union hands. Be- fore a man of Halleck's deliberateness could have begun anew, his promotion because of the deeds of his subordinates removed him to another sphere of action, and left the west- ern control divided. Grant succeeded to the armies west of the middle of Tennessee, while Buell retained his command of those east of this point, his old Army of the Ohio. But the removal of Halleck and the division of the forces were not without their compen- sations, since they left the field commanders in command, and placed Halleck where his meddling could do less harm. Grant, en- trusted with the armies of the Mississippi and the Tennessee, was somewhat more successful than Buell in the disposition of his troops. Ulysses S. Grant, who now gained his first independent command, with no superior but the general-in-chief at Washington, had been the subject of distrustful inquiry ever since he became a colonel of Illinois volun- teers, and remains to-day something of an enigma. "At the age of thirty-nine. Grant was an obscure failure in a provincial town," writes the briefest and most brilliant of his biographers. He was born in Ohio, bred as a farmer's boy, and destined for the trade of tanner, which he refused. Unable to pro- vide him with a different trade, his father 1862: THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 131 procured for him a political appointment to West Point, where he was graduated in 1843, somew^hat below the middle of his class. In the Mexican War he was promoted for gallantry, and became a captain ten years after graduation. The next year, 1854, he threw up his commission under a cloud whose shadow has never left him. He drank too much, in a day when strong drinking was not generally a disqualification for office, and was in danger of dismissal from the service. The next seven years of his life were sad and discouraging. He drifted from place to place, having none of the business ability commonly called practical. At no time did he earn even a fair livelihood, or provide for his family more than a meagre sustenance. Slight of frame, silent to a fault, incurably simple in kind and habit, and driven from his profession by his own weakness, none could have anticipated a career for him in 1860. Lee and McClellan, of social standing and military brilliance, were marked men before the war began. Grant was distrusted, down and out. He did not overvalue himself, and when he volunteered his services, first to the adjutant- general at Washington, then to McClellan at Cincinnati, he thought of no greater re- sponsibility than that of colonel. Ignored in his applications, he took what came to him without complaint, and entered a volun- teer regiment in his adopted state. 132 THE CIVIL WAR Slowly but inevitably he rose. Under stress he produced a will that his native indolence disguised. Well-known, and to his own detriment, by his superiors, no promo- tion came to him unearned. Halleck gave him as little rope as he could. McClellan had no confidence in him. After Fort Don- elson, he was relieved from command on scanty pretext which Halleck had not enough candor to admit when he restored him. After Shiloh, he was again superseded until Hal- leck was transferred to Washington. Yet he compelled promotion. The rumors of his past bad habits handicapped him more and more as he rose. There is no evidence that, during the war, drink at any time inter- fered with the performance of his duties. If it ever did, the loyalty that he inspired in all those who approached his person has led them to conspire to keep it secret. "I can't spare this man: he fights," said Lincoln when he thought of McClellan, and the Pen- insula, and the days after Antietam. When the virtuous and temperate approached, urg- ing him to dismiss such a bad example from command, he turned them off with his fa- mous rejoinder: "I wish I knew what brand of whisky he drinks. I would send a barrel to all my other generals." The bad reputation under which Grant suffered for another year, after the battle of Shiloh, was probably his military salvation. It steadied him, and kept from his ear the 1862: THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 133 vicious adulation that destroyed many of his colleagues. Tied to his task, within narrow limits, he learned his trade and improved his skill before he convinced Lincoln and the nation that in his simple person was the brain for which both had steadfastly searched. After the occupation of Corinth, the mili- tary movements west of the Mississippi, ex- cept as they were involved in the Vicksburg campaigns of 1863, ceased to be an important part of the main strategy of the war. Never had they been decisive, but all along the frontier, from Santa Fe to St. Paul, there were episodes, locally interesting and more or less connected with the war. On the extreme border of Texas, the mining regions and the old communities along the Rio Grande necessitated a campaign in 1861 and 1862. Confederate forces actually pos- sessed themselves of New Mexico and part of Arizona, only to be driven out by a com- bined attack from Colorado and California. In Colorado territory, an enthusiastic gov- ernor, Gilpin by name, believed he saw a conspiracy to take the Pike's Peak camps over the Confederacy. With great vigor he enlisted the young prospectors of the territory into volunteer regiments, which certainly saved it from whatever danger threatened it. Farther north, the new state of Minnesota was afflicted towards the end of the year with a serious Indian uprising. The Sioux of the Minnesota Valley, above 134 THE CIVIL WAR St. Paul, had been accumulating grievances against the United States for more than ten years before the war began. A casual fron- tier row in August, 1861, developed into a gen- eral attack that drove the settlers from the valley in wild distress. Nearly a thousand were slain; others were captured; and the occasion called for greater strength than Minnesota possessed. Her militia was aug- mented, and Pope, relieved of the Army of Virginia after the second battle of Bull Run, was sent to restore confidence on the north- west border. In Missouri, Arkansas, and Kansas, the fighting was more orderly, but had little more permanent consequence than that on the outlying frontiers of Minnesota or New Mexico. In these three states the sentiment of the population had run high through the fifties when the fight over slavery was before Congress. When war came, many entered each army, while the least reputable of either side formed guerrilla bands that plundered and murdered at pleasure. Quantrill is the most notorious of these raiders. Price, in his attack upon Missouri, and Banks, in the Red River campaign of 1864, conducted the most notable of the formal campaigns. But none of these affected the general out- come. After one more campaign under Grant, the Mississippi became a Union river, and Confederate operations in the trans-Missis- sippi ceased to be important. CHAPTER VIII ULYSSES S. GRANT The occupation of Corinth, Mississippi, which ought to have occurred immediately after Shiloh, and probably would have if Halleck had not intervened with theory and authority, opened up two courses for con- sideration. Neither Vicksburg nor Chatta- nooga was beyond the reach of a vigorous general, had he acted at once, taking ad- vantage of the confusion in the Confeder- ate ranks caused by the repulse of April and the death of Albert Sidney Johnston. But first came a cautious tactician, and then re- organization of command, while the enemy profited by the respite and fortified both places. It was twenty months before the advantage gained at Shiloh was harvested. In the reorganization of the Confederate army, during the weeks of Union inaction, . Braxton Bragg became commander in the West, where Johnston had been, and con- trolled the whole Confederate line from Atlanta to Vicksburg. As June and July advanced it became clear that if any attack upon him were to come, it would be from 135 136 THE CIVIL WAR Buell, whose army Halleck had started to- wards Chattanooga. Accordingly he set out to control that place, where Johnston had collected large amounts of army stores, and where the highways opened into the heart of the Confederacy. In August, he appeared in person on the scene, with more than half his total force, and had closed all the approaches before Buell, who had started before him, had reached his destination. In- stead of seizing Chattanooga as the result of Shiloh, Buell found himself on the defen- sive in August. His enemy, encouraged, not only held his own in eastern Tennessee, but contemplated taking the initiative. September and October, 1862, were months of Confederate aggression. Lee's first in- vasion of the North was barely checked at Antietam on September 17. Bragg led an attack on Buell in the same month, while, at the left of his line. Van Dorn created a demonstration to hold Grant in the vicinity of Corinth. The motives inspiring Bragg's attack were similar to those of Lee. Eastern Tennessee was nearly as tepid towards seces- sion as western Virginia had been, and Ken- tucky was immovable thus far; yet the enthusiasts had not abandoned the hope of their aid or the illusion that only Union oppression prevented it. Bragg began his campaign in the end of August, trying to fire the lukewarm heart by a proclamation: "It is for you to decide whether our broth- ULYSSES S. GRANT 137 ers and sisters of Tennessee and Kentucky shall remain bondmen and bondwomen to the abolition tyrant, or be restored to the freedom inherited from their fathers." His raiders, Morgan and Forrest, were already showing the Confederate uniform in fields where the northern invader was a more fa- miliar object. Bragg was not certain as to his ultimate goal, Nashville, to the northwest, or Louis- ville, further away but due north. He chose the latter, finally, since Buell was concen- trating at Murfreesboro, between him and the former, and plunged across Tennessee into Kentucky. It would have been sounder strategy to take Nashville first, and use it as a base for the country further north, but Bragg's march was political as well as mili- tary, and was intended to show that the Union lines were not immune from inva- sion. Had Halleck refrained from weaken- ing Buell's command, the Confederate army ought to have been caught and destroyed. As it was, Buell raced the Confederate army to Louisville, arrived there first, and on October 8, 1862, fought a battle at Perry ville, Ken- tucky, which checked the advance of Bragg, and started him on a retreat to Chattanooga. Though he had held the invader, Buell had lost the confidence of Halleck, and was forced at the end of October to transfer his command to Rosecrans, under whom it was named the Army of the Cumberland. If Perryville had 138 THE CIVIL WAR done nothing more than give his chance to a brigadier named Sheridan, with eight raw regiments out of twelve, it would have been worth while. Confederate aggression from Chattanooga continued during the fall of 1862. Bragg fell back on his base, re-fitted, and started for Nashville, whither he ought to have gone originally. He got as far as Murfreesboro, in front of which town Rosecrans attacked him on the last day of the year. After three days' fighting at Stone's River, as this engage- ment is called, Bragg was so demoralized that his general officers urged him to retreat to save the army. He fell back at once to the hills around Chattanooga, while Rose- crans occupied Murfreesboro and both went into quarters for more than half a year. After the departure of Halleck, Grant had remained at Corinth with a widely scattered army, over which his command was only by inference until October. Halleck left him no plan, and apparently had no use for him except as he held on to Corinth and was ready to re-enforce Buell on demand. The administration used the time to get cotton out of the South for northern mills, and to permit a licensed trade with the enemy, ad- vantageous to the latter and demoralizing to the discipline as well as to the private honesty of the Union force. When Bragg started on his Kentucky raid, he left Van Dorn, with Price's army from Missouri, to ULYSSES S. GRANT 139 hold Grant from sending help to Buell. In September Grant was thrown upon the defen- sive; directing an engagement at luka, on the 19th, he fought again, two weeks later, at Corinth, with the result that his position was secured from further attack. On Octo- ber 25 he was placed formally in command of the department of the Tennessee, and per- mitted to take the initiative against Vicks- burg that he desired. For ten months after October, 1862, Grant was on trial, and knew it. His enemies, who were more fluent and more plausible than himself, had the ear of the secretary of war and the general-in-chief. Army contractors, whose peculations he exposed, cotton brokers, whose pernicious influence upon morale he attacked, temperance advocates who thought him dissipated, co-operated to place him under suspicion and keep him there. Early in 1863, Charles A. Dana, a journahst who later was made assistant secretary of war, was inflicted upon him as a member of his official family, to watch his conduct and keep the administration informed. Grant brought upon himself much of this. He was a wretched correspondent, and his military reports were brief and general. He never had a better place for his papers than his coat pocket (resembling in this the admin- istrative technique of Lincoln, whose tall hat was a well-known receptacle for memo- randa), and the quiet persistence with which 140 THE CIVIL WAR he followed up his own counsels often left the administration in doubt as to his real intent. He bore with Dana, with a modesty unusual in major-generals, and won him for a friend. Vicksburg, Grant's first goal, would have been inconvenient in approach, even if it had not been fortified in long anticipation of attack. Set on the Mississippi, just below the Yazoo Valley and its marsh lands which protected it on the north, it was perched at the northern extremity of a long range of high bluffs. These rose directly from the water's edge, making the town almost in- accessible from the west. The guns of its forts commanded long reaches of the river, above and below, making an assault impos- sible. Only on the east and southeast were dry approaches available, and these were heavily entrenched. Against these Grant started in the early winter, with Memphis as his base and Holly Springs as his supply station. It was to be a joint attack on Vicksburg, like that of the early spring on forts Henry and Donelson. Sherman was to drop down the river from Memphis, convoyed by the fleet, and try the fortifications by the water route. Grant, meanwhile, was to march overland against the rear, to drive the de- fending army of Pemberton back upon his entrenchments. Neither operation was a success; Grant failed to get near the city be- ULYSSES S. GRANT 141 cause of a successful raid that destroyed his stores at Holly Springs, while Sherman was turned back after a vain assault. The winter of 1862-1863 was passed in devising ways and means, in digging canals through the swamps and inventing schemes for getting round the batteries. The spring of 1863 was well advanced before Grant reached his plan of action. With his army on the right bank of the Mississippi opposite Vicksburg, where he had placed it after the failure of his first attack. Grant came to the conviction that capture from the river side was out of the question. Only from the south or south- east was there any chance of success, but to get to Jackson, Mississippi, the natural centre for an attack from this direction, there were but two methods. He might go back to Memphis, and march south and inland from the river, with a good base at his rear, and hope for better things than in December, when the cowardice of an officer lost him Holly Springs. Such procedure was sound according to military principles, but would be a confession that the removal of the army to the right bank was a mistake. Or he might go down the river, running the batteries of Vicksburg with whatever risk it entailed, find a landing somewhere below, and march up upon the rear. Most of his advisers feared the rifled guns of Vicksburg, and a piece of comic opera engineered by 142 THE CIVIL WAR Porter, of the fleet, showed how real that danger was. One dark night the Confed- erate sentinels of Vicksburg saw a monitor coming down the stream and gave the alarm. No one could see that she was only a scow, with pork-barrel funnels and dummy guns. The defenders opened a furious fire that proved the vigilance of their watch, and even blew up one of their iron-clad gunboats to avoid capture. Yet in spite of the risk. Grant determined to try this course. Sending Sherman up the river to create a diversion on the Confederate right, Grant put his army on transports, — river steamers of all sorts, manned mostly by volunteers from the ranks, — and, with the fleet as con- voy, ran the batteries in April, through a bom- bardment that was more spectacular than dangerous. Until this moment, Pember- ton, the favorite of Davis who commanded at Vicksburg, had been in the dark as to the Union intention. Now the plan was clear. Re-enforcements were called for, and the Confederate left was prepared to drive the invader back into the swamps. "Joe" John- ston, with an army in eastern Mississippi, tried to help. On the last day of April, Grant put his army back on the left bank of the Mississippi, at Bruinsburg, and began his march inland and to the north. In most military operations, a base is re- garded as essential, but Grant was getting further and further away from his. He ULYSSES S. GRANT 143 fell tlie nervousness in Washington, that was likely to stop the course he had in mind, and realized that only the loyalty of his generals kept them active in a manoeuvre which they doubted. They felt none of the relief that he experienced at getting on dry land, even though Vicksburg was between him and his supplies. He needed none of these. He put five days' cooked rations in his haversacks, abandoned his trunks and tents, and with his own personal baggage consisting of "a brier- wood pipe, a pouch of tobacco, and a toothbrush," on a borrowed horse, he cheerfully left what little base he had. He wired his intentions to Halleck at the last minute, and then abandoned his communications before that cautious strate- gist could countermand his movements. To one who asked where his headquarters would be, he is said to have replied, "Ask Pem- berton." "No formalities," he later wrote, "were to retard our progress until a posi- tion was secured when the time could be spared to observe them." For ten days after May 7, 1863, Grant was busy in places unknown to the war department. Repeated engagements met him on all sides. His five days' rations were supplemented by the forage and the bacon of the countryside. His wagon trains were recruited from the farm wagons and the family coaches of the Yazoo delta. Pember- ton, in front of his left, and Johnston, to his 144 THE CIVIL WAR right, were split apart. Jackson was taken from the latter on May 14, and all hope of joining the two Confederate armies was de- stroyed. By May 19, Pemberton was locked up within the city of Vicksburg, while Grant completely invested its fortifications, with his right wing resting on the Mississippi above and his left wing on the Mississippi below the town. Assaults failing, the Union army settled down to formal siege. Pem- berton's ability has always been doubted; his loyalty was questioned at the time of the investment, for he was northern born. Tradition gives his reply to his accusers: "When the last pound of beef, bacon, and flour; the last grain of corn; the last cow, and hog, and horse, and dog shall have been consumed, and the last man shall have perished in the trenches, then, and only then, will I sell Vicksburg." The siege of Vicksburg was so uncom- fortable to the besieged that they have remembered it with pride and satisfaction ever since. Their food gave out and disease came in. Men lived in caves and cellars to avoid Grant's bombs. Ink and vivacity remained to the city's press, but paper on which to use them disappeared. Along the lines of the opposing pickets there was much fraternizing among "Yanks" and "Johnny Rebs," with mutual exchanges of souvenirs, tobacco, and Confederate notes. Individuals in the ranks showed no personal hostility ULYSSES S. GRANT 145 to their opponents, as individuals. By the end of June, Pemberton was in sight of the last of his food, and offered armistice, only to meet the same reply that Buckner had got at Donelson. On July 4 the whole Con- federate force of 30,000 surrendered to Grant and were placed upon parole, and the Mis- sissippi was free from Confederate control from Cairo to the sea.^ In the enthusiasm that spread over the North as the meaning of the surrender was understood, Lincoln wrote to Grant his thanks, described his former doubts, and now wished "to make the personal acknowledgement that you were right and I was wrong." Halleck, aroused from his suspicions by the accomplished fact, wrote, "You and your army have well deserved the gratitude of your country, and it will be the boast of your children, that their fathers were the heroic army which reopened the Mississippi River." "Well aware of the vanity of our foe," wrote Pem- berton in his report, trying to explain his course and its disaster, "I knew that they would attach vast importance to the en- trance on the 4th of July into the stronghold of the great river, and that, to gratify their national vanity, they would yield then what could not be extorted from them at any other time." For six months in 1863, while Grant was ^ The statement is usually made this way, although a minor place, Port Hudson, held out five days longer. 146 THE CIVIL WAR fighting along the Mississippi, Rosecrans sat in eastern Tennessee, confronting Bragg. and doing nothing. Grant prodded him, and Halleck did the same, without driving him from his conviction that it was a bad business to fight two decisive battles at one time. He at least understood the importance of Vicksburg and Chattanooga, which were the keypoints to the Confederate integrity. Toward the end of June, with a skill and ease that showed it was not incompetence that held him back, Rosecrans moved his Army of the Cumberland, and speedily locked up Bragg in Chattanooga, under siege, and occupied Knoxville besides. From August 20 to September 20 he was engaged in getting the enemy out of Chattanooga. All the other Union armies were resting during Rosecrans' campaign, which termi- nated in the two days' battle of Chicka- mauga, on September 19 and 20, 1863. President Davis realized the full significance of the attack, and sent to Bragg a division here, and another there, until at the final test Bragg could bring to the battle line 66,000 troops. They represented the whole circle of the Confederacy, coming from Rich- mond, Charleston, Mobile, and Vicksburg, and including among their commanders Longstreet, Polk, and Buckner. The last of these, Buckner, was a Kentucky militiaman, who had risen rapidly to com- mand, and had been left by his superiors to ULYSSES S. GRANT 147 bear the burden of the surrender of Fort Donelson. In later Hfe, his political activities finally placed him on the same ticket with one of his Union opponents, John M. Palmer, in a presidential campaign. Longs treet had come west, at his own request, to re-enforce Bragg, after fighting through all the great engagements in Virginia. The tempera- mental barrier between him and his com- mander weakened the value of his aid. Polk knew the lower IVIississippi Valley perhaps better than any of his colleagues. After graduating at West Point, in 1827, he had gone into the church, and had been the first Episcopal missionary bishop of the South- west. No pioneer roughness was too crude for him, and when episcopal translation put him at the head of the diocese of Louisiana, he continued his travel up and down the valley, that made his name and figure famil- iar to most of its inhabitants. Against his preferences he buckled the sword over the gown at the request of Davis, kept it there under the same request, when he thought the assignment of Albert Sidney Johnston to the western armies ought to have relieved him, and continued to his death in the service of the cause of constitutional liberty as he saw it. By the middle of September, Bragg had received and placed his men, preparing to offer a general battle. He was on the verge of giving the order for attack, when Rose- 148 THE CIVIL WAR crans, with Thomas on his left, along the Chickamauga River, began a fight on the morning of the 19th. During the first day, Rosecrans had what advantage there was, as he had had during the whole of the manoeuvre thus far. The exigencies of the battle arrangement had led both armies away from their objective, but as the battle came, Rosecrans was between Bragg and Chattanooga. On the 20th the fight was resumed, to the confusion of the Union forces. Rosecrans left the field, and hurried into Chattanooga to prepare to receive his retreating army; only the stubbornness of Thomas saved the day from total destruc- tion. He held the road while the other divi- sions escaped and Bragg used up his strength in repeated but ineffective assaults. By September 22, Chattanooga was a Union city as the result of an engagement, which is generally regarded as a Union defeat. Bragg was now the besieger and settled down to starve the Army of the Cumberland out of its position. The campaign had accomplished its purpose, but its last three days had de- stroyed the fame of Rosecrans. When Grant accepted the command of all the armies of the West, a few days later, he took this army from its leader, and gave it to Thomas, the "rock of Chickamauga." The survivors of the Army of the Cumber- land maintain that Chickamauga was a Union victory in that it gained for Rosecrans ULYSSES S. GRANT 149 his objective. The country thought differ- ently, and turned to the one consistent victor in the West. Grant had been inspecting posts in his command since Vicksburg had destroyed the last resistance of the enemy. His request for orders to take Mobile had been denied. He was sick at New Orleans when ordered to re-enforce Rosecrans, and was not well when ordered by the secretary of war to report at once at Cairo. From Cairo he was sent to Louisville, and was joined on the way by Secretary Stanton, who had come out to offer him command of a new military division of the Mississippi, with subordinate departments of the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee, and control of nearly all the forces of the West. On October 20 Grant started for the centre of his command, having telegraphed Thomas to hold tight, and received the encouraging response, "We will hold the town till we starve." Starvation was not far away. The Union army was closely watched by Bragg, upon the near-by hills; its route to its sup- plies at Nashville was cut off by the enemy; its horses were dying, and its men were living on "half rations of hard bread and heef dried on the hoof'' On the afternoon of October 23 Grant arrived at Chattanooga, "wet, dirty, and well;" went at once to Thomas's head- quarters; thrust his muddy top boots into the warmth of the grate fire; lighted a fresh 150 THE CIVIL WAR cigar; and took command of the invested army. Before he went to bed he had issued orders for the opening of a "cracker" Hne through which food and ammunition might come more safely, and when he rode around the Hues the following morning it was evident to all that the command had changed. Be- fore the end of the month the siege was raised, Bragg had divided his army by sending Long- street to try to get Knoxville, and Grant had begun to consolidate his own force for the aggressive. Sherman was summoned from Vicksburg to Chattanooga. With the arrival of Sherman and his army corps, there were brought together, for the first and only time during the war, four men whose names are, perhaps, brightest among those who fought for the Union. Grant, Sherman, Thomas, and Sheridan never lost their hold on public confidence, and the affectionate regard of the people for them continued increasingly until the war was over. Other generals had their ups and downs: these went always up. Others may have been as skilful, and were certainly as brave, but none were more successful, and, what is still more important as military reputations go, none were so consistently lucky. Grant had gained the control of the fight- ing in the West, and had given Sherman his old Army of the Tennessee, while Thomas had the Army of the Cumberland. William Tecum seh Sherman began his "Memoirs" ULYSSES S. GRANT 151 with an account of his service in the ThircJ Artillery at Charleston, under Captain Rob- ert Anderson, in 1846. Had he begun them with his youth, he would have recorded his birth in Ohio, and his graduation at West Point in the class of 1840. A younger brother, John, who remained at home, was senator from Ohio when the Civil War began, while William had resigned from the army and become superintendent of the state military academy of Louisiana. In March, 1861, he journeyed up the railway through Jackson, Mississippi, to Columbus, Kentucky, along which he was to do so much laborious fighting the next year, and was in St. Louis, as was Grant, when Captain Lyon seized the arsenal and saved the state. He had no doubt, from the first, about the seriousness of the war, and damned the politicians. When Lincoln snubbed him at the White House, in spite of the prestige of his senatorial brother, he lost his temper. "You have got things in a hell of a ^x, and you may get out of them as best you can," he said to John. After Bull Run, in which he participated as colonel commanding a brigade, he was sent west, where his rise was more rapid than that of most of the West Pointers. After Vicksburg, he was famous and knew it, but his relations to Grant, his chief, remained intimate and confidential. Grant's first thought on receiv- ing his promotion, was that Sherman should succeed him in the Army of the Tennessee. 152 THE CIVIL WAR "The Army of the Confederacy is the South," wrote William to John, toward the end of 1863, "and they still hope to worry us out. The moment we relax they gain strength and confidence. We must hammer away and show such resistance, such bottom that even that slender hope will fail them." On October 27 he received his orders to march from Mississippi into eastern Tennessee; on Nov- ember 14 he rode into Chattanooga. Major-General George H. Thomas, com- manding the Army of the Cumberland, graduated in Sherman's class at West Point, and was one of those Virginians who stayed by the Union. His regiment, the Second Cavalry, lost by resignation all its officers outranking him, including its commander, Albert Sidney Johnston, so that he entered the war, a colonel through seniority, at the age of forty-four. In August, 1861, he was detailed for service in Kentucky, where he worked his way up in the Army of the Cum- berland until at Chickamauga his conduct was distinguished the more because of the uncertainty of that of Rosecrans. He passed on his army corps to John M. Palmer, one of the political major-generals from Illinois, when he succeeded Rosecrans. DeHberate and slow, he was eminently a soldier. Grant believed, in later years, that Thomas could not have conducted Sherman's aggressive campaigns, but that "if it had been given him to hold the line which [Joe] Johnston tried to ULYSSES S. GRANT 153 hold, neither that general, nor Sherman, nor any other officer could have done it better." Among Thomas's subordinate command- ers, none outclassed Philip H. Sheridan, an Irish-American who as a cavalry leader had no superior in the Civil War, and for whom the war ended too soon, not giving him a chance to prove that he had no superior of any sort. Like the others of this group, he was a West Pointer, but of a later generation, graduating in 1852. Before the battle of Perryville, at which Buell checked Bragg's invasion of Kentucky, he had risen from lieutenant to captain, from captain to colonel, and to brigadier-general. After Stone's River his distinguished services made him a major-general of volunteers, while after Grant's campaign at Chattanooga he was taken east to command the cavalry division of the Army of the Potomac. In addition to Sherman, Thomas, and Sheridan, there was another commander whose arrival at Chattanooga made a mate- rial increase to Grant's strength. Joseph Hooker, with two army corps, was shifted by rail from the army of the Potomac to the Tennessee, and arrived early in October with no wagon trains, but with an experience gained in all ranks of the army of the Poto- mac, from brigadier-general to general-in- command. The transfer of his corps is one of the many cases in which the northern railways formed an extra arm of the Union 154 THE CIVIL WAR service. The failure of his superiors to give him wagons and animals tied him to Nash- ville and deprived Rosecrans of his aid for three weeks, while Rosecrans' s resulting in- activity convinced those same superiors of his incompetence. The situation confronting Grant at Chat- tanooga required strategy quite as much as fighting, for Bragg was so entrenched tfeat front attacks could be repelled at pleasure. His army lay in a long curve on the moun- tains east and south of Chattanooga, with his right on Missionary Ridge and his left on Lookout Mountain. Around his right ran the Chickamauga River, on which Rose- crans had fought him in September. Chat- tanooga Creek pierced the centre of his line and emptied into the Tennessee River a few miles below the city. Facing Bragg, Grant lined up Sherman on his left, Thomas in his centre, and Hooker on his right. The bulk of the fighting, as he arranged it, was intended to fall on Sherman, in whose leadership he had the greatest confidence. Sherman was ordered to march secretly, to cross the Tennessee, and to fall on Bragg's right flank, at the north end of Missionary Ridge, while the rest of the army was to hold Bragg's left, so that it could not re-enforce. The secret movement was a success, though delayed by the difficulty of moving heavy trains along the wretched mountain paths. To conceal Sherman's ULYSSES S. GRANT 155 movement, Thomas, on September 23, drew up his division in the centre of the line, in readiness to storm the heights before him. It was planned that on the following day he should make an advance. Sherman, mean- while, accomplished his crossing on the 23d, and on the morning of the 24th, when he ought to have sprung his assault, found himself misled by his maps, and separated from the enemy by a ravine of whose exist- ence he was unaware. The reconnoissance of Thomas, by this accident, deviated from a demonstration into a battle. Hooker, on Thomas's right, with a mixed army of 10,000 men representing the three armies of the Potomac, the Cumberland, and the Mis- sissippi, was in front of the heights of Look- out Mountain when the fight began on the 24th. All day he worked his men through the fog, up the side of Lookout Mountain, until at night Bragg's left was so crumpled up and brushed away that Hooker could prepare to pursue his retiring regiments on the 25th. The value of Sherman's manoeuvre is still debated by tacticians. He and Grant believed that he held Bragg's right, and compelled him to strengthen it from the centre, thus weakening the Confederate ranks on Missionary Ridge, at the middle of the line. Yet the Army of the Cumber- land, which faced that middle, had reasons to believe that it remained unweakened all 156 THE CIVIL WAR through the 24th. On the afternoon of the 25th, Thomas moved his army, still angry over the slights cast upon it after Chieka- mauga, against the entrenchments at the foot of Missionary Ridge. Above him were the heights whose inaccessibility had induced Grant to try to outflank the enemy. But once the advance was started and the first rifle-pits attained, the soldiers of the Army of the Cumberland took charge and went on up the hill. Their officers went with them, but that was all. In an hour they had dis- possessed Bragg's centre, captured his guns and his forts, to say nothing of prisoners, left nearly 4,000 of their own men killed and wounded on the hillside, and ended an en- gagement as decisive as Vicksburg had been. Grant had brought 56,000 men into the fight, against 44,000 Confederates. Both armies settled down for the winter shortly after Chattanooga. Bragg retreated into Georgia, where he was soon relieved by "Joe" Johnston, whose skill in delaying the advance of an army was not surpassed in any of his colleagues. He fortified himseK at Dalton and waited for attack. The army of the Cumberland lay at Chattanooga under Thomas. Knoxville was relieved by various Union forces, while Longstreet, who threat- ened it, went back to the defence of Rich- mond. Sherman resumed his minor opera- tions in Mississippi, and wintered near Huntsville, Alabama. ULYSSES S. GRANT 157 When the spring of 1864 opened, Grant rose in rank once more, for in the eighteen months since Antietam the armies in eastern Virginia had continued at their old work of attack and defence, with but httle change in their relations. One commander after another had been tried and discarded before Congress, in February, 1864, revived the office of lieutenant-general, unused since the death of Washington, and in which the Sen- ate promptly confirmed the appointment of General Grant. A few days later the new general-in-chief of all the armies came quietly into Washington, stood in line at the desk of the Willard House until the important clerk had time to read on the register his unassuming "U. S. Grant and son, Galena, 111.," and received his commission from the hand of Lincoln. A letter from Sherman followed him east with advice that is worth recording: "Come out west; take to your- self the whole Mississippi Valley; let us make it dead sure, and I tell you the Atlantic slope and the Pacific shores will follow its destiny as sure as the limbs of a tree live or die with the main trunk! . . . Here lies the seat of the coming empire; and from the west, when our task is done, we will make short work of Charleston and Richmond, and the impoverished slope of the Atlantic." Until the appointment of Grant, Lincoln continued to feel his responsibility as con- stitutional commander-in-chief, and tried to 158 THE CIVIL WAR supplement the efforts of his eastern gen- erals. He had even called for books on the art of war, and studied them in the min- utes between his political engagements. He brought to the task common sense beyond the average, but his biographers generally admit that he was not at his best as a mili- tary adviser. His disposition and attitude, however, were exactly what ought to be aimed at by the political leader charged with the conduct of a war. Repeatedly he chose generals, placed full confidence in them, saw them fail, and felt forced to intervene with his amateur strategy. During the events of 1862 he had suffered from the absence of the commander of the Army of the Potomac in the field, and had summoned Halleck, — the most successful man he could see, — to reside in Washington and explain or advise as the case might need. He did not want ever to intervene, but knew that his was the responsibility for the safety of the Union. When McClellan rode his command with too high a hand, Lincoln only said, over- looking ostentatious personal slights, "I will hold McClellan's horse, if he will only bring us success." When he learned that Hooker had foolishly said that the country needed a dictator, he contented himself with replying: "Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. WTiat I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship." When Grant pre- ULYSSES S. GRANT 159 pared his orders for his first general campaign in 1864, the President wrote him, "The particulars of your plan I neither know, nor seek to know." For once Lincoln found no complaint coming from headquarters; Grant replied, "Should my success be less than I desire and expect, the least I can say is, the fault is not with you." CHAPTER IX GETTYSBURG AND RECONSTRUCTION The three successors of McClellan made slight progress with the attack upon Rich- mond between the battle of Antietam and the arrival of Grant in Washington. Burn- side, Hooker, and Meade fought three of the bloodiest battles of the war; at Fred- ericksburg the Union loss was nearly 11,000; at Chancellorsville it was over 11,000; at Gettysburg it was 17,684. The Confeder- ate loss to offset these in the three engage- ments was 38,000. When they were all over, the Union armies lay entrenched near the Potomac, while Lee continued to block the road to Richmond. At most times throughout the war General Robert E. Lee was held by President Davis to that defensive fighting that he thought most wise. The invasion of Maryland had been, in many ways, only a piece of aggressive defence, in order to compel the Union leaders to let up on Richmond. After the battle of Antietam, Lee fell back into Virginia and waited through the autumn of 1862, to see what McClellan would do next. When Mc- 160 GETTYSBURG — RECONSTRUCTION 161 Clellan was replaced by Ambrose E. Burn- side, on November 7, Lee had to take up anew his series of studies of the personality and tactics of Union commanders. Long- street is responsible for the assertion that Lee regretted to part with McClellan, "for we always understood each other so well. I fear they may continue to make these changes till they find some one whom I don't under- stand." Greater confidence permeated the Confederate ranks after the successes of the year, and large numbers of absentees came back into the army. When they saw that McClellan's removal was due to his unwilling- ness to fight, they knew that his successor would try to fight before winter set in. The strategy of Burnside's campaign was simple and almost predetermined. Of the three ways of getting to Richmond, McClel- lan had tried two. In the spring he had gone to the Peninsula; while in the fall he was at work on the route along the foothills of the Blue Ridge, — the Piedmont, — when dis- missed. Neither of his plans could be taken up again without somewhat discrediting the authorities who removed him. Accordingly, Burnside proceeded on the middle route, moving at once on Fredericksburg, and hop- ing to skirt Lee's right flank and get be- tween him and Richmond. The Richmond and Potomac railway was relied on as a car- rier of Union supplies. On November 17, the advance of the Union army reached the 162 THE CIVIL WAR Rappahannock River, opposite Fredericks- burg, and could, and would have occupied the town at once, had not Burnside held back for a pontoon train and a heavier force. It was Lee's first desire to let Burnside cross the Rappahannock and get further into the Wilderness, and then destroy him in a pitched battle; but Davis intervened. In October, Gladstone had let out a note of British sympathy for the Confederacy, which made the Richmond leaders hope that a recogni- tion by Great Britain might follow and make the danger of a great battle unnecessary. Before Burnside got his army ready to cross the river, Lee was waiting for him along the top of the heights behind the city, with a line more than six miles long, Longstreet on the left and "Stonewall" Jackson on the right. On December 13, 1862, Burnside began his attack. Lee had allowed him to build his bridges and cross the Rappahannock without serious interference. Entrenched along the ridges, he was content to wait and fight under cover, since his weaker force of 72,000 was to oppose 106,000 Union effec- tives. Nowhere along the line was the attack of December 13 successful. Toward the close of the day, as a last chance, Burn- side sent column after column up the hill, along the Orange Plank Road, against a stone wall at the foot of a rising known as Marye's Hill. One army corps lost more GETTYSBURG — RECONSTRUCTION 163 than a quarter of its men in the vain assault. Hooker's division, at the last, kept up the fight long after its failure was plain to every- one but Burnside. On December 14, the army lay, winded, around Fredericksburg. The next day it crossed the Rappahannock again and returned to quarters. The snap was gone from the Army of the Potomac, and when "Fighting Joe'' Hooker took the reins from Burnside his rolls showed that 84,000 men v/ho ought to have been present had quietly melted from the ranks. Neither this army nor Lee's was made up of pro- fessional soldiers yet. The morale of either broke down in the face of defeat. Even the victorious Confederate army dwindled in numbers, and Lee had to make repeated demands for re-enforcements. Wiser than many of the other Confederate leaders, he saw the logical outcome, unless some acci- dent should intervene. "We should not," he wrote in the spring of 1863, "conceal from ourselves that our resources in men are con- stantly diminishing, and the disproportion in this respect between us and our ene- mies ... is constantly augmenting." The Army of the Potomac wintered after Fredericksburg in its old quarters around Falmouth, on the narrowest neck of land between the Rappahannock and the Potomac, about fifty miles from Washington. Under Hooker, the spirits of the men revived more than those of its officers, for the latter, though 164 THE CIVIL WAR knowing him as a brave fighter, distrusted his judgment and his personal character. By April, 1863, when the President came down to camp to review the troops, in a heavy snowstorm, there were 130,000 effectives present, organized in seven army corps. On April 12, Hooker began to shoe his horses and clean up his hospitals. In a few days more he was marching up the Rappahannock to a crossing above Fredericksburg, near Chancellorsville, where on the last day of the month he established his headquarters at the Chancellor House. Part of his force he had thrown across the river below Fred- ericksburg, so that Lee lay between his divided left and right wings. The Confed- erates were in their old entrenchments of December, and began to readjust their lines only on the morning of May 1. There were perhaps 60,000 of them. Longstreet had been detached from the army for service elsewhere, leaving Jackson and Lee to direct the fighting. By the night of the 1st, these had established a new line, touching the Union outposts, and here the soldiers bivou- acked where they happened to be. Lee and Jackson slept together on a heap of pine boughs. The next morning the latter set off with his army for a destination unannounced, which proved, in the afternoon, to be Hooker's right flank, which he reached by an inconspicuous farm road. In the early evening his men plunged upon the surprised GETTYSBURG — RECONSTRUCTION 165 wing, with the "rebel yell." The victory which they gained cost a high price, for Jackson rode into his own line of fire and was torn to pieces by Confederate bullets. Many of Hooker's generals believed that the battle could have been saved on May 3. The division of the Union army for attack had given Lee a great advantage; but he had divided his own force for defence, and Hooker had abundant fresh troops on the 3d, who might have destroyed Jackson's flanking party on his right. He abandoned his right, however, and tried to take the heights of Fredericksburg, on his left, al- though they had proved impregnable in Burnside's fight. An assault on them was finally successful, but before the wing which took them was in full possession. Hooker had been stunned by a cannon ball and had left the field. His orders that the army be withdrawn terminated the aggressive cam- paign. A good opportunity had been lost by mismanagement, and the superior general- ship of Lee. The government was in a quandary when the news of Lee's victory reached Washing- ton. It was obvious that Hooker could not be allowed to blunder away another battle, yet it was hard to agree on any one to take his place. Nearly every general of the Army of the Potomac who had distinguished him- self had been tried in chief command. The embarrassment was increased by the knowl- 166 THE CIVIL WAR edge that many of Hooker's subordinates, including Couch, who had taken charge on the 3d, would resign if he were not removed. Before a decision could be reached Lee added to the perplexity by breaking camp, and Hooker surmised that he was heading for the Potomac. The surmise was correct, for Lee had slipped once more into the Shenandoah Valley, with an invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania in his mind. Hooker suggested that he ought to "pitch into his rear," at Fredericksburg, again. But Lincoln, cautious after two experiences with the hills of Fredericksburg, advised him to stay north of the Rappahannock, saying, "I would not take any risk of being entangled upon the river, like an ox jumped half over a fence, and liable to be torn by dogs, front and rear without a fair chance to gore one way or kick the other." General George G. Meade, commanding the fifth corps of Hooker's army, was asleep in his tent near Frederick, Maryland, when he was aroused by the chief of staff of the secretary of war and, instead of being taken to Washington, under arrest, as he had sleepily anticipated, was led, protesting, to Hooker's tent, under peremptory orders to as- sume command of the Army of the Potomac. Caution, quick temper, and irritability are the qualities in Meade which made the great- est impression on his associates. He did not belong to the "gallant soldier" class, was GETTYSBURG — RECONSTRUCTION 167 not a politician, and had no capacity to humor the whims of the pubKc. He was, however, a brilliant engineer and an unusual tactician, who stood better with his superiors than with his subordinates. Unlike most of the generals he came of an old and well- known family, and had a standing on the floor of the Philadelphia ^'Assembly Balls" as secure as in the camp. It was on June 28, with an army sprinkled over two states, that he took command. There was great risk in changing leaders on the eve of a general engagement. Meade had not been in the confidence of Hooker, whom he had preceded by two years at West Point, and had no accurate knowledge of the location of the various corps that had moved north on the inner circle, as Lee moved on the outer. Hooker had been following Lee, and on June 28, Meade, after taking account of stock, ordered the armies to con- tinue their march to the Susquehanna and to keep Washington, Baltimore, and Phil- adelphia well covered. There was commotion in the eastern cities of the North. New York and Philadelphia called for McClellan once more, while their governors enlarged the home guard and took measures for defence that were novel north of the Potomac. "Business stopped," says Rhodes, and it was said "that bankers and merchants were making preparations to remove specie and other valuables" from 168 THE CIVIL WAR Philadelphia. But with all the alarm, stocks stayed where they were, and there was no financial panic. Even the shares of the Penn- sylvania Railroad, whose line was likely to be torn to pieces by one army or the other, fell less than two points in the open market. On June 28, 1863, Longstreet was already in Pennsylvania, near Chambersburg, while the southern army, stretched behind him, was beginning to consider concentration. Lee had no notion of staying in the North, — if he broke up the attacks on Richmond he would do enough. But by June 29, he had got so far that he must either fight a battle or fall back. He did not fear the outcome, for his army had grown steadily since Chan- cellorsville, and was now a trained and tem- pered machine, full of confidence acquired in two great victories. The numbers were not far apart. Meade had 88,000 men; Lee, 76,000. Meade suspected that Lee had reached his farthest north, and seized a convenient cross- roads, where he might easily intercept the return, by whatever route. Gettysburg, in southern Pennsylvania, is the meeting place of several important roads leading from York, Harrisburg, Carlisle, and Chambersburg, on the north, and back to Maryland, on the south. Lee was north of the town when Meade's advance pushed into and through it, on July 1. A httle further on, the Union men met the head of the enemy, marching south. GETTYSBURG — RECONSTRUCTION 169 and were driven back upon the rear of their column, after a long day's fight. The death of Reynolds, their commander, early in the day, might have accounted for greater demor- alization than occurred. Meade had a sub- stitute ready at once, and Hancock was on the field by the middle of the afternoon, to straighten out the regiments in the cemetery south of Gettysburg. That night both Lee and Meade realized that the battle was before them, and prepared for it. The former was somewhat weakened in his judgment because of the contempt he had begun to acquire for the Army of the Potomac. As the ground lay, he was forced to take the offensive. During the forenoon of July 2, Lee's skirmishers explored the long Union line, as it lay on the ridge of Cemetery Hill. They found it to be in the form of an inverted capital U, with the bend pointing north. It followed the natural contour of the field, being nearly everywhere on a hillside. At the extreme right, on the east. Gulp's Hill formed a natural termination of the line; another hill. Round Top, performed a similar function on the left. It was about two miles from the cemetery to the end of the left; the right extremity was three-quarters of a mile nearer; while it was possible to com- municate with all portions of the line from the rear, which lay in the centre of the U. The only portion which was net well pro- 170 THE CIVIL WAR tected, was toward the left, where Sickles had advanced beyond his station and rested in the open fields. This, Longstreet at- tacked, pushing Sickles back to where he ought to have been, but no further. Every- where along the front the attack became general as the day wore on, and at the right. Gulp's Hill was seized and held over night. On the morning of July 3, Lee thought to end a battle and record a victory. Instead, he found Gulp's Hill taken from him, and learned that Longstreet's supposed victory over Sickles had only rectified, not weakened, Meade's position. The Union commander, less than a week in office, was waiting calmly for the next attack. A young Wisconsin offi- cer has described his appearance: "There was no arrogance of hope, or timidity of fear discernible in his face; but you would have supposed that he would do his duty conscientiously and well, and would be willing to abide the result." The same officer heard Meade talk with Hancock and others during the morning, and learned that he was pleased with the left, and satisfied with the right, and "was not of the opinion that the enemy would attack the centre, our artillery had such sweep there." The forenoon of the third day of Gettys- burg passed with nothing more than skirmish- ing along the front. The general position of Lee was well known, but his intentions had been revealed to his own generals only GETTYSBURG — RECONSTRUCTION 171 after the reoccupation of Gulp's Hill. He lay concealed in the timber of a row of hills generally concentric to, and outside of, Ceme- tery Hill, and known as Seminary Ridge. Between the two lines, along the Union left, was nearly a mile of fields and orchards, with the Emmitsburg Road running down the middle. He had failed to make a gain at either flank, and now proposed to use fresh troops against the thinnest part of Meade's line, where Meade did not expect him. The light camp lunch was consumed, the cigars had been smoked, and the generals who had eaten with Meade had started back to their posts when Lee commenced a terrific bom- bardment of Meade's position. After more than an hour of this, the fire slackened and rumor ran through the Union ranks that the enemy was advancing. Out of the woods, in front half a mile long, column after column moved slowly into position, as if on parade. Eighteen thousand men, chiefly Pickett's division, marched across the open fields against the centre of the Union line. The shrapnel and cannister rained upon them, but only made the files close up to fill their gaps. Without haste, and without a quiver, the finest charge of the Civil War was made. In cold-blooded, deliberate courage it sur- passed the assault of Missionary Ridge. The front of the column crossed the whole interval between the armies, and fought, hand to hand, with the regiments of the 172 THE CIVIL WAR wavering Union line. But the line held, miscellaneous regiments were led by strange officers to the rescue, and in a few minutes those of Pickett's column who remained alive began their retreat. The three days' fighting had cost Lee 22,000 men; it cost the victor nearly 18,000.i Like the battle of Antietam, Gettysburg was followed by a period of inaction. Lee slowly withdrew, and Meade slowly followed him, never gaining the credit which military critics believe he might have had of destroy- ing his adversary. Both armies crossed the Potomac, Meade keeping to the Piedmont, east of the Shenandoah Valley, where Mc- Clellan had been in the fall of 1862. When winter came, their positions were not far different from what they had been a year before. The victory of Gettysburg preceded the fall of Vicksburg by one day. On July 5, the whole United States knew that the Mississippi was opened, and that the irre- sistible Lee had been defeated. Neither triumph had had its equal in the war, and the combination led the sanguine to hope that the end was near. In any foreign war either would probably have been decisive, but this was not a war to be won by points. The determination of the Union to main- tain itself was equalled by the determination * Here, as elsewhere, the figures include the dead and wounded, but not the captured. GETTYSBURG — RECONSTRUCTION 173 of the Confederacy to secure its independence. Until the last army in the field was gone, until the last dollar had been borrowed and spent, and the last old man lined up beside the last small boy in the Confederate ranks, the war was not to end. If Davis and his advisers had the intellectual acumen, or honesty, to see the end, and failed to ask for terms at this time, the moral responsibility that they assumed was great. Their people, generally misled by their own press, had little notion of the catastrophe. Gettysburg was a severe defeat, but Lee was not overwhelmed by it. He retired in good order, showing such strength that Meade would not provoke him to another test. He resumed his guard of Richmond, and all through the next year kept it so vigi- lantly that the greatest of Union leaders, with unlimited resources, could not break it down. Vicksburg, on the other hand, was a victory that cleared the ground. It ended the strug- gle for the Mississippi, and restricted the working area of the Confederacy to the seaboard and the lower South. In no way do the relative results of the fighting appear more clear than in connection with the civil measures resorted to by Lincoln in the West and in the East. By the end of 1863, large portions of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana were actually within the Union lines, and contained no trace of organized resistance. In the East, the lines were where 174 THE CIVIL WAR they had been in 1861, except for the moun- tain region of Virginia. A counter-revolution in Virginia, in 1861, partially undid the work of secession. In the convention which determined to secede, the vote was eighty-eight to fifty-five, the minority representing the western counties, where the number of slaves, always small, had actually diminished since 1850. Inter- course between the sections had been slight. From the West came always a few members of the legislature, and a few inmates of the penitentiary, it is said, but there was little else. Among these mountain Virginians, the ordinance of secession was repudiated at once, and an irregular state government was erected at Wheeling, that declared all the existing state offices vacated by the act of treason, chose new officers, and called upon Lincoln to recognize it as the actual government of Virginia. Francis H. Pierpont was chosen governor on June 20, 1861. It was the belief of Lincoln that no state could get out of the Union. The seceding governments he described as illegal con- spiracies, and he was quite willing to recog- nize as the legal government, this provisional administration erected by the loyal citizens of the state. Congress agreed with him, admitting senators and representatives elected to take the places of those Virginians who had resigned. One of the senators from Ten- nessee, Andrew Johnson, a Union Democrat, GETTYSBURG — RECONSTRUCTION 175 led in the advocacy of the right of these men to their seats. After they had been recognized by Con- gress as the state of Virginia, the western Virginians soon presented a popular memorial, approved by their legislature, asking for the division of the state and the creation of a new state in the West. "No new State shall be formed . . . within the Jurisdiction of any other State . . . without the Consent" of the legislature of the state concerned, says the Constitution. This consent was here obtained without difficulty since the eastern population, which would have opposed it, had refused to co-operate with the loyal government, and had thus thrown away its voice. On the last day of 1862, Lincoln signed a bill admitting West Virginia into the Union. The debates over West Virginia gave rise to constitutional discussion of the nature of secession, that gained greater interest as the war went on. To the casual observer, the state of Virginia in the Confederacy ap- peared to have all of the attributes of the old state in the Union, to be that state in fact, as it claimed to be. If this were true, the Pierpont government was without legal basis, and could not give constitutional assent to the partition of the state. But, in this case, it would have also to be admitted that Virginia, constitutionally or not, had in fact got out of the Union and maintained 176 THE CIVIL WAR an existence outside of the Constitution. Any act of the United States that admitted that the Confederate state of Virginia was Virginia, must be an admission that secession was a fact. Lincoln denied the logical and physical possibility of secession. Maintaining the in- destructibility of the Union, he was forced to hold that Virginia was still in the Union, though prevented from performing her duties by an illegal conspiracy of her citizens. This conspiracy, which obstructed the laws, was to be broken down by the President, under his constitutional obligation to enforce the law. He was ready to use his discretion in recognizing as Virginia any loyal government that appeared to have no opposition among loyal citizens. This was highly expedient, and he believed it to be entirely constitu- tional. His cabinet was evenly divided on the question, however, and in Congress there was wide range of opinion. Some admitted that secession had broken the Union; others, like Sumner, held secession to have consti- tuted an act of suicide, ending the existence of the state, and reducing it to the condi- tion of other unorganized territory of the United States. Thaddeus Stevens, of Penn- sylvania, went even further, held that secession was annihilation, that the status during the war was of no consequence, that if the South should be won back by force it must be considered as a conquered province, GETTYSBURG — RECONSTRUCTION 177 subject in all things to the will of the con- queror. In this confusion, Lincoln held tight to his guiding doctrine of the perma- nence of the Union, recognized the Pierpont government as legal, and signed the West Virginia bill. The Pierpont government became a quaint curiosity after the admission of West Vir- ginia, in which alone it had any supporters. The Virginia which it claimed, in its reduced degree, to represent, was in Lee's possession, and was content to be there. For a time, Pierpont and his state officials, remained on what fragment of Virginia soil they could find within Union lines; but ultimately the government was disregarded and aban- doned, as representing no political fact. The only portion of the Confederacy, east of the Appalachians, won and held by Lincoln at the end of 1863, was the mountain country now admitted as the state of West Virginia. The progress of the war in the West raised problems similar to those in Virginia, on a larger scale. As soon as the Union armies had gained a foothold in Tennessee, after the surrender of Fort Donelson and the oc- cupation of Nashville, Lincoln appointed a war governor to administer the civil interests of those Tennessee citizens within the Union lines. East Tennessee, with Knoxville as its metropolis, was as loyal as West Vir- ginia, and might have acted similarly had it been nearer to the Ohio River. On March 178 THE CIVIL WAR 5, 1862, the Senate confirmed the appoint- ment of Andrew Johnson, as miHtary gov- ernor, — an office that had no previous existence, no precedents, and no legal limits for its guidance. Johnson, its incumbent, was better qualified to hold it by his aggres- sive loyalty than by his temper or discretion. The personality of Andrew Johnson, which became of critical importance in 1865, was shown in 1861, when he refused to be bound by the secession of Tennessee, and retained his seat in the United States Senate. Clamor at home, threats, and epithets failed to move him. "I intend to stand by that flag," was his resolute utterance. Stubborn honest loyalty was the keynote of his character. In thirty-five years of public life before the war, he had proved in his person that Amer- ica was the land of opportunity. Born in poverty and ignorance, which his widowed mother could not lighten, he was one of the humble class of "poor whites" so common in the South. He began life as a tailor in Tennessee. His wife taught him to write, and experience taught him the deep gulf between the southern aristocrat and the commoner. Before he was thirty he had been mayor of his village and member of the legislature. He served five terms in Congress before he became governor of Tennessee, in 1853; and after two adminis- trations at the head of his commonwealth he became its senator. His career is one of GETTYSBURG — RECONSTRUCTION 179 the evidences that the power of the planta- tion class was waning even before secession. His prominence, loyalty, courage, and popu- larity among Tennessee Unionists, justified his appointment to a difficult and undefined office. The functions of the military governor of Tennessee were to silence treason, restrain the press, maintain the peace, administer justice, and feed the destitute. All these Johnson did with an ability that made him a conspicuous figure throughout the United States. He was to keep things going, in accordance with Lincoln's theory that Ten- nessee remained a state, with all the rights that it was practicable to accord her. Late in 1862, by order of the President, he tried to hold an election for congressmen, but found that conditions were too much dis- turbed for it. Indeed, for six months more, eastern Tennessee was in confusion. In July, 1863, there were forty counties repre- sented in a Union convention at Nashville, and Lincoln began to hope for a new conven- tion to undo the work of secession. In September, he wrote to Johnson: "All Ten- nessee is now clear of armed insurrectionists. You need not to be reminded that it is the nick of time for reinaugurating a loyal State government." Chickamauga and Chat- tanooga had both to be fought before actual conditions justified the President's state- ment, but by December, Tennessee was 180 THE CIVIL WAR free and ready for reconstruction. "Ten- nessee is not out of the Union, never has been, and never will be out," thundered the governor as he encouraged his loyal followers. "Treason must be made odious, traitors must be punished and impoverished," he declared on another occasion. Personally rancorous toward the members of that aristocracy from which he was excluded, Johnson's spirit was far different from that of Lincoln. While Johnson was following up the vic- torious Union army as it occupied Tennessee, another war governor was established in Louisiana, with headquarters at New Or- leans. The occupation of New Orleans in the spring of 1862, brought with it problems of government in Louisiana that could not be evaded. Loyal citizens were fewer than in Tennessee, but people and city could not be left outside the law. George F. Shepley, who was appointed governor in August, 1862, had been military mayor of New Or- leans, by order of General Butler. Courts were soon established, and early in 1863, an election of congressmen was held in two districts, — the only two within the Union lines. A military governor for Arkansas, John S. Phelps, was appointed a few weeks after Shepley, but until after Vicksburg, and the taking of Little Rock in September, 1863, the Union forces had too little foothold in that state to do effective work. GETTYSBURG — RECONSTRUCTION 181 Congress was changing its views regarding slavery in 1862, but it continued to give its countenance to Lincoln's steps in reorganiz- ing the Confederate states as rapidly as they were occupied. It had admitted senators and representatives from Virginia, for the term expiring March 4, 1863. It now ad- mitted the two representatives chosen in Louisiana, seating them for the remainder of the same session. Tennessee v/as prevented by the Confederate raiders from taking part in these early elections, although in fact she was more completely Unionized than either Louisiana or Virginia. This compliance of Congress, and the military successes at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, led the President to take another step toward reconstruction. By December, 1863, at least three states were ripe for reorganization, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. In these the President had fulfilled his constitutional obligation to see that the laws be faithfully executed, and had restored a fair degree of peace. He believed that his was the right to determine the end of resistance, as he had the beginning, as well as to pardon offend- ers against the laws. On December 8, 1863, he issued a proclamation which was the result of his interpretation of these powers. All persons who had been impli- cated in the insurrection, with certain ex- ceptions, were authorized to take an oath of allegiance to the United States, and receive 182 THE CIVIL WAR full pardon. The excepted classes embraced those holding important civil, military, or diplomatic offices in "the so-called Confed- erate government," those who had resigned similar offices in the United States to aid the Confederacy, and those who had mal- treated prisoners of war. The rank and file, whom Lincoln believed to have been deceived by their leaders, were to have only a formal obstacle placed in their return. When in any state a number, equal to one-tenth of the vote cast for President in 1860, had taken the oath, a government was to be erected by the loyal citizens, which Lincoln pledged himself to recognize as legal. He could not guarantee that its senators and representa- tives would get into Congress, since each house is the exclusive judge of the admission of its members, but so far as the Executive could determine the fact, the restoration would be complete. The reception of this proclamation by Congress was such as to encourage the Pres- ident. "It is rare," wrote his secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, "that so important a state paper has been received with such unanimous tokens of enthusiastic adhesion." The last Congress had admitted represen- tatives from the restored states, and, said the secretaries, the new Congress raised no voice of discord. "Men acted as though the millenium had come. Chandler was de- lighted, Sumner was joyous, apparently GETTYSBURG — RECONSTRUCTION 183 forgetting for the moment his doctrine of State suicide; while at the other poHtical pole Dixon and Reverdy Johnson said the message was highly satisfactory. . . . The con- servatives and radicals vied with each other in claiming that the message represented their own views of the crisis. . . . For a moment the most prejudiced Democrats found little to say against the message; they called it 'very ingenious and cunning, admirably calculated to deceive. ' " The progress of the war had made it pos- sible for Lincoln to begin the reconstruc- tion of three of the states of the Mississippi Valley, upon which Vicksburg had set its seal. Gettysburg had released nothing; West Virginia had dropped away from the Confederacy of its own weight. The defen- sive strategy of Lee had held the Confederate line through both battles of Bull Run, the Peninsula campaign, Antietam, Fredericks- burg, Chancellorsville, and even Gettysburg. Meade was no nearer to Richmond than McClellan had been. The crisis of the war, however, was passed, and no days in the future were to be so dark as those that had gone. Men who had it in them to become Unionists, had become so. For these, Lincoln took advantage of events to phrase a paragraph that summed up all the aspirations of the nation. On September 19, he attended the dedication of a cemetery at Gettysburg, and listened to the ripe 184 THE CIVIL WAR oration of Edward Everett. When the latter finished his peroration, "the echoes of which were lost in the long and hearty plaudits of the great multitude," the President of the United States spoke a few sentences that embraced the whole history of the Union, and constitute the most distinctive American utterance of the nineteenth century: "Fourscore and seven years ago 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 battlefield 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 cannot dedicate — we can- not consecrate — we cannot 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 GETTYSBURG — RECONSTRUCTION 185 before us — that from these honored 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." CHAPTER X THE BALANCE OF POWER A CAUSTIC pen, in the hand of Owen Wister, in his httle Hfe of Grant, has described the change of feeHng that was hastened in Eng- land when the news of Gettysburg and Vicks- burg was heard. "The London Times and Saturday Review,"" he says, "had lately been quoting the Bible as sanction for slavery; for England dearly loves the Bible; but now many voices in London became sure that slavery was wicked; for England dearly loves success." The crisis in foreign relations was passed as soon as the outcome of the war was clear. Recognition is to be justified only by the success of the people fighting for their independence; it is out of question in a struggle doomed to failure. But any account of English opinion, which relates only the motives of expediency that inspired the British cabinet, falls far short of the fact, and ignores a disinterested, unselfish popular movement that has few parallels in history. The balance of power between the Union and the South was indeed carefully watched, but after 1862 the English middle class 186 THE BALANCE OF POWER 187 became convinced that one of the two sides was right. The fullest and most judicious account of the trend of English opinion, after the escape of the Alabama in 1862, is to be found in the pages of Mr. James Ford Rhodes, who shows that direct sympathy with the South was confined largely to members of one aristocracy, feeling for those of another. Sympathy was re-enforced by dislike of the United States, on its own account, — a con- sciousness of its stubbornness that was incon- veniencing the rest of the world, and that could be summed up in the words: "The war can only end in one way. Why not accept the facts and let the South begone.^^" The English radicals, who were with the United States at all times, were in opposition to Lord Palmerston's government, and made him less willing to see good in the northern cause. After the second Bull Run, Russell and Palmerston agreed that the time had nearly come to offer mediation; but Antietam postponed the day, while the emancipation proclamation started a new and positive current of feeling among the middle and lower classes. The London Times denounced the emanci- pation proclamation as an attempt to incite a servile war, but anti-slavery sentiment ac- cepted it as something different, greeting "the dawn of the new year [1863] as the beginning of an epoch of universal freedom 188 THE CIVIL WAR upon the Western continent, and of close friendship between the people of England and America." Workmen began to appre- ciate its significance. Laborers of Man- chester and Sheffield, some of them idle and hungry from the closing down of the cotton mills, resolved against the "wicked object" of the Confederacy. John Bright, always a liberal, summed it up in a speech to the London trades unions: "Impartial history will tell that, when your statesmen were hostile or coldly indifferent, when many of your rich men were corrupt, when your press — which ought to have instructed and de- fended — was mainly written to betray, the fate of a continent and its vast population being in peril, you clung to freedom with an unfaltering trust that God in His infinite mercy will make it the heritage of all His children." The American minister in London recog- nized that the current of opinion had set in favor of the Union, early in 1863; but it remained to be seen whether it would be stronger than official distrust. In the spring. Parliament debated the American situa- tion, using the Alabama correspondence as a text. Friends of America attacked the government from the opposition benches, bringing out explanations from the prime minister and the solicitor-general. Palmer- ston sneered at the claims of the United States, denounced them as a means of THE BALANCE OF POWER 189 creating political capital, and assured Par- liament that England had enforced her neutral obligations. As Adams wrote in his diary, he indulged "as usual, in derogatory and insulting language rather than in conciliation." Friends of the North, says Mr. Rhodes, believed that this debate presaged war, and the Confederate envoys, unrecognized though they were, took comfort. Since the departure of the Alabama the vessels for their navy had been hurried on. One of them, the Alexandra, was seized by Russell in April; but two others, iron-clad rams, continued under construction in the yard of the Lairds. When Adams called these to the attention of the foreign office, Lord Russell found that while, by common knowledge, they were for the Confederacy, the contracts showed them to belong to a French firm, and to be building for the service of a peaceful country. Yet Adams continued to bring in testimony as to their real intent. On September 1, 1863, the foreign secretary wrote him that there was no evidence on which his govern- ment could interfere. Four days later, the American minister, fearing the worst, and mindful of the debates of March, wrote his final note of protest, in which he used words that have become historic: "It would be superfluous in me to point out to your lord- ship that this is war." It was a fortunate accident that Adams's 190 THE CIVIL WAR letter of the 5th crossed in the mails a further note from the foreign office stating that the rams had been seized. Lord Russell was trying to do both the friendly and the legal thing, and had reached, finally, the conclusion that it was better to err on the side of cau- tion, if at all. After this episode, there was no more fear of recognition of the Confed- eracy by either England or France. Up till July, Napoleon III had been trying to prod the English cabinet to a mediation or a recognition, but the news of Gettysburg and Vicksburg changed the aspect of events, and removed the positive dangers of European interference. The growth of middle-class sympathy worked for the creation of a positive friendship. The distribution of strength between the Union and the South, which showed its proportions in the critical year, 1863, was based on population, wealth, and improved opportunity. The long contest between Washington and Richmond shows clearly that the North did not win because of superior valor or higher generalship. With ragged troops, for whom a victory often spelt rations and shoes, as well as glory, and whose num- bers were shrinking, Lee was standing off army after army. The numbers of his adver- sary had much to do with the result; his wealth had more to do with it. The key to the understanding of the war is to be found in the material resources of the contestants. THE BALANCE OF POWER 191 In the eleven states which entered the Confederacy, excluding West Virginia, there were, in 1860, 1,200,000 men who came within the military ages of seventeen and fifty before 1865. Nearly all of these volun- teered, or were drafted into the army. It is a matter of pride throughout the South that there were few stay-at-homes. The materials do not exist for an accurate state- ment of the aggregate of enlistments, for the Confederacy was too hardly pressed to put much stress on formal records, and many of those that once existed have been de- stroyed. But the closest student of numbers and losses, Colonel Thomas L. Livermore, has estimated that the total of enlistments, for various terms, was quite as large as the total military population; while the period of service was equivalent to that of about 1,000,000 men, serving each three years. In the Union armies, it is known that over 2,800,000 men enlisted, equivalent, on the three-year basis, to 1,500,000. The Confed- eracy gave a larger proportion of its men to the ranks than did the North, yet it was outnumbered in the ratio of three to two. The enthusiasm with which the South sent this million to the front is commonly over- stated. After a year of war, voluntary en- listment fell away, in both sections. It was stimulated in the North for another year by cash bounties, which the South could not afford to duplicate. In April, 1862, the 192 THE CIVIL WAR Confederacy was forced to fall back upon conscription, and during the next three years it developed an elaborate machine for drafting into the armies every available man between the ages of seventeen and fifty. The willingness of individuals to fight is no test of the popularity of any war. With its men on the firing-line, industry in the South would have stopped, had not its women taken the reins and its slaves stayed loyal. That class, which northern abolitionists regarded as downtrodden and oppressed, continued at work with a devo- tion and fidelity that are the best answers to those who deny it virtue or capacity. Cotton and tobacco continued to be planted and harvested. Food was always to be had. In Richmond, men with money could live well. But as the Union blockade tightened its grip on southern ports, and kept both the cotton in and the luxuries out, southern life was reduced to the lowest terms of mere necessities. It was made clear how com- pletely the old South had depended on the outside world, in its devotion to its staple products. Clothing grew simpler and plainer until it became threadbare. The family silver remained, to decorate pork, corn-pone, and potatoes. The sick suffered for the lack of delicacies, and medicines were to be had only when a successful blockade runner evaded the watchful Union gunboats. Even then, what medicines escaped impressment THE BALANCE OF POWER 193 for the armies were too costly for general use. When the war was over, the southern states were worn out and demorahzed. What- ever broke down, remained unrepaired for the lack of labor and materials. The rail- ways, worn under heavy traffic, could not be renewed. Machinery stood idle for the lack of single parts. Even had the men remained at home, the blockade would ultimately have reduced the South. The cost of slave labor and the exploita- tion of restricted crops was paid when the South needed all its strength, and found it limited. Never had the old South possessed the capital for industrial development. Its railways were built on money borrowed north or abroad. Every planter who was successful found himself obliged to keep reinvesting his profits in land and slaves, and had no surplus for general investment. In its incapacity either to borrow from its citi- zens, or to tax them, the Confederacy proved the weakness of the plantation system. War, after all is said, is chiefly a matter of finance. Upon the shoulders of C. G. Mem- minger. Confederate secretary of the treas- ury, fell the burden of finding, somewhere, the means for maintaining the army in fight- ing trim. The first miscalculation was funda- mental: cotton had been relied on as capital, but when the blockade became effective, and Europe failed to intervene to break it, this resource collapsed, for the South could neither 194 THE CIVIL WAR eat nor manufacture its staple product. There are only two means of raising money- known to governments; these are loans and taxes. In the long run, taxes are the sole reliance, for nations, like persons, cannot continue permanently to consume more than they produce; for short periods, however, the public debt may supplement the tax. Heavy taxation was urged by Memminger, early in 1861, as needed both for revenue and to solidify the government. He was blocked by the fact that one of the chief subordinate motives of secession was the only method of taxation which the United States had found effective. Rarely had the United States raised funds by direct taxa- tion; it had instead relied upon the easily collected tariffs, levied upon goods imported. Against a tariff for protection the South had long contended; it did not know how to levy one purely for revenue; and, had it known how, any tariff would have been reduced in value because the blockade was effective in excluding from Confederate ports those imports on which it could be collected. The tariff bill that was finally passed imitated the last Democratic tariffs of the United States, and produced during the Civil War about $1,000,000 in specie. The Union armies often consumed thrice as much in a single day. Internal taxes, alone, were left, and these were reduced in their effectiveness by both THE BALANCE OF POWER 195 the legal system of the Confederacy, and its economic condition. Dreading heavy taxa- tion, says Schwab, the able historian of Con- federate finance, the Congress started, in 1861, with a direct tax of one-half of one per cent on all the property in the Confed- eracy. If all of this had been collected in coin, it would have produced $21,000,000; but some of it was never paid, and most of it was avoided by the people. Tender of state susceptibilities. Congress had allowed the states to pay their quotas directly, and then reimburse themselves by taxing their citizens. Most of them borrowed the money to pay their quotas, thus avoiding the taxa- tion. Only a willingness to pay the cost can justify a revolution; or the ability to pay, make it succeed. Here the Confederacy imposed upon posterity as much of the cost of the war as it could. But even if it had been disposed to submit to heavy direct taxes, the South had little ready money with which to pay, and after the loss of its cotton market could not hope to raise large sums. Taxation soon broke down, and the govern- ment accepted payments in kind, in cotton bales, or agricultural produce. It fed as much of the latter to the troops as possible, and stored the former in government ware- houses, hoping for a happy accident that would enable it to ship the bales to European mills. Once in a while, a cargo succeeded in dodging the blockade, and commanded a 196 THE CIVIL WAR famine price abroad, but the total return was slight. Schwab thinks the total Confederate revenue, from taxation of all kinds, was equivalent to about $100,000,000, in specie. Borrowing was tried when taxation failed. Bonds of the Confederate States were au- thorized in 1861, and were sold at home and abroad. At home they realized some $15,000,000, in gold, and abroad, especially in England and France, they were readily disposed of. The foreign loan had a face value of £2,500,000, but netted for the Con- federacy not over $6,250,000. Counting in all the sources from which the government obtained coin, the most important being the fifteen-million loan, the foreign loan, and seizures from United States depositories in the South, Schwab estimates that in the whole four years, not over $27,000,000 found its way into the Confederate treasury. Voluntary loans and taxation played an insignificant part in the Confederate war. Forced loans, which took the form of an irredeemable paper money, were the chief reliance. Before the attack on Fort Sumter, the issue of promissory notes was begun, and before the end of the first year, these constituted nearly eighty per cent of the total indebtedness. Confederate notes be- came the ordinary currency of the South, and declined in value, steadily, as the war progressed. For a few months, only, did patriotic enthusiasm keep them at par. Their THE BALANCE OF POWER 197 increasing flood was swollen by the issues of states, cities, banks, and individuals, until it is impossible to tell, even roughly, the total amount afloat. There is reason to believe that in crises the oflficials of government issued unauthorized millions to tide over emergencies. The value of this currency is more easily learned than its volume. Gas at fifty dollars a thousand is reported, and flour at three hundred dollars a barrel. In the month of Vicksburg, a gold dollar would buy nine dollars in Confederate paper; it would buy twenty a year later; in March, 1865, it would exchange for sixty-one. The public finances of the United States stand out in glaring contrast to those of the Confederacy. Like the seceding states, the Union resorted to taxation, to voluntary loans, and to paper currency, but the amounts of these, all of which were ultimately main- tained at par, showed a credit which the southern leaders had not anticipated. Con- gress raised by taxation, in the four years ending in 1865, $667,000,000; it was able to increase the bonded debt by $2,140,000,000; it circulated $458,000,000 in promissory notes. During these four years, the treasury paid out over $3,300,000,000. There are no figures of Confederate expenditure to put beside these; if there were, the deprecia- tion of the currency would make their in- terpretation a fiscal puzzle. The total of $27,000,000, in specie, which Schwab believes 198 THE CIVIL WAR the southern treasury received, suggests, but does not really afford, a comparison. The average annual expenditure of the United States in the five years before the war was under $67,000,000; in the next four years, it was over $800,000,000, while the duty of directing the transition to this twelve-fold increase was entrusted by Lin- coln to the Ohio lawyer, Salmon Portland Chase. Prior to the war, nearly the whole revenue came from the protective tariff, and there had been no internal revenue since the War of 1812. The belief of Congress that the new war was not to be protracted, made it reluctant to impose unpopular taxes on the North. There was a new protective tariff, bearing the name of Morrill, of Vermont, passed in the closing days of Buchanan's ad- ministration, and still untried when Congress convened, on July 4, 1861, for its first war session. The internal and income taxes, levied at this session, did not become effec- tive until the second year of the war, netting by the summer of 1863 only $40,000,000. But Congress learned much about taxation and the willingness of the North to pay. In the last year of war, the internal revenue produced $209,000,000. In successive acts. Congress laid a tax wherever it could find "an article, a product, a trade, a profession, or a source of income;" stamps of the internal revenue were stuck wherever a place large enough to hold them could be THE BALANCE OF POWER 199 found. The North paid them all without distress. The receipts from the tariff were soon equalled and outdone by the internal revenue. The Morrill act was revised in 1862 and 1864, partly to secure larger revenue, and partly to protect the heavily taxed Ameri- can manufacturer from foreign competition. From all sources, the taxation of the four years amounted to $667,000,000, while the fourth year produced nearly six times as much as the first. ^ ' Neither the North nor the South had, in 1861, a currency equal to the stress which was placed upon it. There was no national bank, and even the coined money issued by the United States was insufficient. Federal officers, with large disbursements to make, occasionally had to wait at the mints, while the money was being manufactured. The deficiency in money was provided for by some sixteen hundred state or private banks, which, without restraint or uniformity, sup- pHed paper notes for their immediate com- munities. They professed to redeem these in gold, on demand, but their reserves were too little, even in time of peace. They sus- pended specie payment before the end of 1861, while the public treasury, forced to suspend also, early in 1862, faced insolvency. In February, 1862, Congress authorized the issue of $150,000,000 legal tender notes to replace the coin, as well as to constitute an 200 THE CIVIL WAR indirect loan. In later acts, the " greenbacks," as the notes were called, and the fractional notes, or " shinplasters," reached a total of $458,000,000. There were no irregular issues and Congress never lost control of its paper money; but enough was floated to add to the derangement of the currency, and to inflict an unfair portion of the cost of the war on those least able to bear it. After a few months, the greenbacks fell below par, and their value in gold became a barometer of Union hopes and fears. At their lowest, in the summer of 1864, they dropped to thirty-nine cents on the dollar, but generally they were worth from sixty to eighty cents in gold, and always they remained a better currency than the Con- federate notes. Their fluctuations, however, served to raise prices, and to increase a burden upon wage or salary earners which traders and speculators could avoid. Their necessity v/ill always be debatable; a more honest course would have been for the treasury to shoulder the loss, and raise public money by selling United States bonds at their market price. The paper money was a small fraction of the total debt of $2,600,000,000 created dur- ing the Civil War. Four-fifths of the ex- penditures were met by borrowing, and the sale of bonds was the constant occupation of the treasury. Chase borrowed from the banks, from day to day, during much of THE BALANCE OF POWER 201 1861. Later he appointed scores of agents throughout the country to help dispose of bonds, but only one of these helped him much. This one, Jay Cooke, a young Phila- delphia banker, became the principal reliance of the treasury as the war progressed, devis- ing means of distributing the bonds quite as picturesque as most of the military cam- paigns, and much more effective. Jay Cooke rose to fame by selling at par $3,000,000 of Pennsylvania bonds that con- servative bankers had declared unsaleable. Appointed agent by the governor of the state, he visited banks and individuals, appealed to their patriotism, and cheered or shamed them into contributions. "I took care," he said, "to have this patriotic subscrip- tion, giving the names and amounts of all the subscribers, noticed in the newspapers of the country." He sent a copy of the list to Jefferson Davis for his discouragement. Unlimited enthusiasm, coupled with a shrewd regard for the value of printers' ink, helped Cooke in his task. He knew that, over all the country, large sums of coin were in seclu- sion, in old stockings or strong boxes, waiting to be coaxed out by the person who could convince the owners that the United States was safe. He sent his agents everywhere, advertised in the local journals, patronized the religious weeklies, and appealed to the loyalty and interest of the small investor. He sent ducks and wine, from his Ohio 202 THE CIVIL WAR home, to writers of financial news. He pledged his faith that the government was good. His biographer tells of farmers com- ing down to Philadelphia to pay their gold to him in person. Repeatedly, his competi- tors charged favoritism, for he was close to Chase, and was a backer of Senator Sherman of Ohio; but as often as other banking houses tried to place the bonds, Cooke overbid them, and made better bargains for the gov- ernment. Without his zeal in popularizing investment in government funds, it is hard to see how the loans of the Civil War could have been placed. No efforts of Chase or Cooke, no bravery, no loyalty to the Union could have given the United States $3,300,000,000 to spend in four years if the nation had not been sound, financially. Outnumbering the white population of the Confederacy four to one, there was even greater discrepancy in wealth. The 2,800,000 enlistments from the North were the equivalent of 1,500,000 men serving for three years. To produce this number was no special strain. Nearly a third of the northern troops were foreign-born, and 180,000 of them were negroes, enlisted mostly in the South. Few families, relatively, were stranded with their wage-earners in the ranks, for over two million of the enlistments were twenty-one and under, more than a million being only eighteen years of age. At the beginning of 1861 even sanguine THE BALANCE OF POWER 203 northerners would not have beheved a prophet foretelHng the story of the next four years. The panic of 1857 still depressed private industry and produced a deficit in the national treasury. The political panic of the autumn of 1860, caused by the cessa- tion of trade between the sections, further unsettled business conditions. But the North and West, as Fite has clearly shown, were on the verge of a financial revival that all would have noticed had not the confusion of poli- tics concealed it. States had been built up solidly to the western border of Missouri before the war. Their population had moved in under the constant incentive of cheap and fertile lands, and had been specially stimulated every time a financial panic depressed the East. After the panic of 1857, the emigration swelled once more, carrying its tide into the North- west. Ohio and Indiana had been the great grain fields of the Union; Illinois and Wis- consin now took their place, with Iowa and Missouri pushing up behind, and Minne- sota coming into importance. To meet the needs of this newest West, Congress revised the land laws once more. It passed the homestead law, admitting that he who cleared a farm in the wilderness was a public bene- factor, and giving free title to residents who improved and cultivated quarter sections of the public lands. Free lands, as well as fertile, turned men 204 THE CIVIL WAR to the agricultural West in the early sixties, with such eagerness that tempting bounties could not persuade them to enlist. The great demand of Europe for American wheat held up the price. Quick fortunes invited speculation, and agricultural machinery en- larged the effectiveness of the individual worker. Science in agriculture began to ensure his crop against failure. A growing railway mileage brought new areas, as great and rich as European kingdoms, within the reach of hungry markets. Two-thirds of all the American railways in 1860 were in the North and West, and amounted roughly to 20,000 miles. Their western extremities touched the Mississippi at many places, and had reached the Mis- souri River at St. Joseph. To these, the next ten years added 23,000 miles, few of which were built within the South. The improve- ment in service rendered by the larger mile- age brought independence of river transpor- tation to nearly all the North. When the Mississippi was closed to navigation early in the war, the Northwest suffered; but when it was reopened in 1863, the old traffic would not return, for the eastern railroads had come to serve it better. Progress toward a standard gage, and consolidation of the little roads of the early railroad era, made shipments cheaper and more convenient. New bridges replaced old ferries, while many of the roads began to build themselves double THE BALANCE OF POWER 205 tracks, and to think in terms of steel instead of iron. Expanding manufactures consumed the increased raw products of the farms. Cin- cinnati lost "forever to its rival on the Lakes the proud title *Porkopolis of the West.'" In a single year, Chicago doubled the capa- city of her packing houses, and before the war was over she slaughtered 900,000 hogs and 90,000 cattle. The scarcity of cotton increased the use of wool, bringing heavier business to the woollen mills, while the revisions of the tariff helped further to aug- ment the profits of their owners. The use of elaborate machines became more common, making possible the creation of shoe and clothing factories. In 1865, the North alone patented more inventions than the whole United States had produced in 1860. Taxation failed even to check the indus- trial and commercial revival. In no period before the war had the North worked so hard, or laid the foundations of so many new interests. With an enlarged market created by the railways and the new telegraphs, individuals lost some of their identity and became merged in corporate ex- istence. Boards of Trade sprang into life to promote city competition. Stock companies consolidated individual producers. The rail- roads merged for the obvious reasons of larger profits and improved service. The Western Union consolidated scores of rival 206 THE CIVIL WAR lines, extended its wires to the Pacific, and divided the business of the continent with the American Telegraph Company. Uniformity and standardization of national life could not have come before the perfection of transpor- tation by rail; it was forced to come immedi- ately thereafter, and the Civil War neither hastened nor retarded its advance. Lincoln, at Gettysburg, had spoken of the "new nation" of 1776. In a truer sense there was a new nation coming into life through the industrial expansion after the panic of 1857. Agriculture, transportation, and manufactures tended to create it; while the development of the Far West gave it the width of the continent to occupy. The extension of agriculture to the western border of Missouri had occurred a generation before the Civil War. To the west of this frontier, the Great American Desert, as it was misnamed, interposed its barrier, half a continent in width, between the settle- ments and the Pacific. Before 1857, Cali- fornia and Oregon had been seen, appreciated, and settled, but the intervening plains and mountains remained a barrier to their incor- poration in the national life. After 1857, even this region began to yield a profit. The discovery of gold and silver in many parts of the Rocky Mountains began in 1858, and thereafter, in quick succession, hun- dreds of mining camps sprang into life to populate the desert, and reduce the unoc- THE BALANCE OF POWER 207 cupied area of the United States. New territories were called for and granted, and one of them advanced to statehood before the war was over. Colorado and Nevada represented the discoveries in the Pike's Peak and Carson Valley regions; prospectors along Bill Williams Creek created Arizona; Idaho and Montana were the response to the demands of miners on the watersheds of the Missouri and Columbia. Out of the mines came gold to replenish the dwindling stock of the United States. Yet more significant, out of them came calls for government, for transportation, for free lands, for irrigation, for national activities, which, in the ensuing generation, changed the character of the United States. East or west, wherever the presence of the armies did not cast their blighting shadow, there was prosperity such as America had never known before the Civil War. Had the leaders of the South seen the facts that are visible to-day, there could have been no Civil War. The struggle to which they, waging it without success, gave wealth and lives that were not replaced for thirty years, was not even a hindrance to the normal development of the rest of the Union. But they had misunderstood their economic foundations, and had exaggerated the importance to the North of the setback of 1857, which they had escaped. The supe- rior strength of the North might have been 208 THE CIVIL WAR ineffective, even with the co-operation of its improved transportation, if the South had been able to keep open its European connec- tions. It was the cotton crop on which the Confederacy staked its hope of success. The effective blockade and the equally effective diplomacy of the Union destroyed this reliance. In a prolonged contest, which could call forth "the last full measure of devotion," the superior wealth of the North had time to act, and there could be but one outcome. The resources of the South failed first. This result, visible after Gettysburg and Vicksburg, revealed to contemporaries the fact that the balance of power was with the Union. When Grant took hold, the end was only a matter of time, if the Republican party was retained in power. CHAPTER XI THE UNION PARTY The most important campaign of 1864 was not fought by any of the armies of the United States, but was directed by Lincoln and his advisers in their attempt to secure popular approval of their conduct of the war. The presidential election of 1864 was affected by all of the losses and successes of the year. Grant's movements in the spring played into the hands of those critics who denounced the war as a failure; Sherman's victories of the autumn were needed to prove the oppo- site. Discarded generals, Fremont and Mc- Clellan, with political friends behind them, made trouble both within the RepubHcan party and outside it. So dubious was the outlook, and so significant its importance, that the administration dropped the name Republican and, appealing to the principle of loyalty alone, renamed their party Union. Two armies held the approach to the Con- federacy when U. S. Grant assumed control in the spring of 1864. Lee, on the right bank of the Rapidan, continued to stand watch over Richmond; while Johnston, who had 209 210 THE CIVIL WAR succeeded Bragg, faced northwest from Dal- ton, Georgia, to Chattanooga, where the forces of Sherman and Thomas were concen- trated. Between Lee and Johnston were the railways on which their suppHes depended, and in the Shenandoah Valley were these supplies. Detached bands of cavalry guarded their connections. Facing south, in a long curve from the capes of the Chesapeake to the Mississippi, were nearly twenty Union armies, which had never acted in co-operation before 1864. While in the West, Grant wondered why there was confusion in the East. The answer, which he learned in a few days at Washing- ton, determined him to leave Sherman in the division of the Mississippi, and take the eastern post himself. In a multitude of counsels there had been destruction. The armies near Washington had been inspected and criticized; every politician from Lin- coln down had become an amateur strate- gist, and, though their combined wisdom had contributed no important plan, they had interfered with and blocked many campaigns. "No one else could, probably, resist the pressure that would be brought to bear upon him to desist from his own plans and pursue others," Grant wrote in his "Memoirs." He still had to learn that, while pohtical interference had been vexatious, there was a greater obstacle to be overcome, — Robert E. Lee. On January 1, 1864, there were THE UNION PARTY 211 860,000 men on the Union rolls, 481,000 on the Confederate. Early in May, the long Union line ad- vanced. Sherman, on the right with the three armies of the Tennessee, the Cumber- land, and the Ohio, curved in upon northern Georgia. Grant, directing the left, marched with Meade and the Army of the Potomac from Culpeper upon Richmond. Butler, moving up the James, was at the extreme Union left; while in the Shenandoah Valley and the Kanawha, Sigel and Crook completed the connection between the armies of the East and those of the West. It was a grand concentric movement which was to press the life out of the Confederacy. It took more men than the defence, because northern opinion would not allow ground, once gained, to be given up, or to be left unguarded. It relied upon the superior force of numbers, and hopes of a speedy peace ran high. Not all the generals under Grant were able to keep step in the main advance. Sigel failed ingloriously, and Butler was only partially successful. Grant was himself soon involved in the bloody intricacies of the Wilderness campaign. In the strip of country south of the Rapi- dan and north of the James, Grant tried, from May 5 to June 12, to dislodge or crush Lee. His army crossed the Rapidan on May 4. On the next day, in the vicinity of the Wilderness Tavern, only a few miles from 212 THE CIVIL WAR Chancellorsville, he found Lee obstructing his passage, and began to revise his judg- ment as to the extent of the resistance which he must overcome. It cost him 14,000 troops to learn that he could not push his way through the Confederate army, head on. In less than a week. Grant was fighting again. This time he tried to turn Lee's flank, shifting his own front until it faced the Confederate right wing at Spottsylvania Court House, about ten miles southeast of the Wilderness, and a little further south- west of Fredericksburg. "But Lee, by acci- dent, beat us to Spottsylvania," he later wrote. An intercepting party was prevented by a forest fire from bivouacking on iJie night of May 7, and so made an unexpected forced march, establishing itself at Spottsyl- vania before the Union column arrived. For two weeks. Grant tried to push by Lee in this position. Twice he fought severe battles, losing 10,000 men. "I am satisfied the enemy are very shaky," he reported to Halleck; but though Grant's storm of bul- lets cut down trees in the forest, Lee refused to be dislodged. On May 20, Grant shifted still further to his left, to try another point. Cold Harbor, where next the armies met, is a cross-roads less than fifteen miles north- east of Richmond, and is near the battle- field where McClellan struggled during the Seven Days. As Grant moved toward it, trying to get around Lee's right, Lee moved THE UNION PARTY 213 too; but on the last day of May, Sheridan seized and held it. Once more the two armies were lined up, and on the morning of June 3, Grant tried again to rush Lee off his feet. He lost 12,000 men without dis- lodging the enemy. "This assault cost us heavily, and was probably without benefit to compensate: but the enemy was not cheered by the occurrence sufficiently to induce him to take the offensive," was all the Union leader could say to justify the loss of life. After waiting at Cold Harbor for a week following the battle. Grant gave up as use- less his first plan of action. In three great engagements he had gained no permanent advantage beyond that of reducing the num- ber of the enemy. He could replace his dead and wounded with fresh men; every man now lost to the Confederate army meant a permanent diminution of its strength. But Lee had given him stalemate, as Dodge says. Grant's next device was begun at once. Boats were collected in the James River, while he began to shift his army from right to left, with the idea of crossing to the south bank of the James, and advancing on Rich- mond by way of Petersburg. Butler was already there, and the two armies were side by side on June 15. The chance to occupy Petersburg was missed, however, and until it was taken Richmond was safe. It lay twenty miles due south of Richmond, on the Appo- 214 THE CIVIL WAR mattox, and was so fortified that a formal siege alone could reduce it. This Grant un- dertook in June, at the time when he and Lincoln had hoped that the long fight with Lee would have been over. While Grant was in the Wilderness, Lin- coln's political future was threatened by either his success or his defeat. In the latter event, the election of a Democrat in the autumn was the least of the dangers to be feared; while if Grant should destroy Lee it was not improbable that his name would carry the Republican convention off its feet, and make him President. No one knew his politics, but if he had taken Richmond, no one would greatly have cared. In the dark days of May and June, with the news- papers printing sheets of dead, as their names came in by thousands, the critics of the administration found many to listen to them. Within the Republican party there were groups discontented for opposite reasons, — because Lincoln was a tyrant, and because he was too rarely rigorous. He had failed to push the war, declared the latter group, and had removed able generals, Fremont for instance, for political reasons. His re- construction proclamation of 1863 was too lenient to "rebels," and showed the weakness of despair, rather than the generosity of the strong. At the other end of the party from these, were honest Republicans who approved THE UNION PARTY 215 the war, but could not stand for all its incidents, who regretted the emancipation proclamation as showing a disposition to overstep the Constitution, who opposed the rigor with which criticism at the north was silenced by the strong hand of the army in defiance of the right of free speech and press. The conservative Republicans found a leader in Chase, who was willing, though sitting in the cabinet, to let himself be pushed for President against his chief. Querulous, and critical of Lincoln in small matters, he resigned twice, and each time allowed him- seK to be persuaded back. Greeley took him up for the presidential nomination, and in February, 1864, his friends put out a cir- cular which advertised his strong points and Lincoln's unfitness. The matter was ex- plained away, and Chase remained at the treasury; but when, in June, he resigned again, in another pet, Lincoln took him at his word, to his surprise. Fremont was the choice of the radical Republicans, who tried to force his nomin- ation by holding a preliminary convention of their own, at Cleveland, at the end of May. Their call denounced the "imbecile and vacillating" policy of Lincoln, and hoped to induce all the abolitionists to take up Fremont. When the President heard the details of the convention, he turned to his familiar Bible, and read to his secretaries I Samuel xxii, 2: "And every one that 216 THE CIVIL WAR was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he be- came a captain over them: and there were with him about four hundred men." Before the election, even Fremont saw that he had no followers, and dropped out of the canvass. The Republican party, convening at Bal- timore, in June, asked no embarrassing ques- tions of any persons who chose to join with them. "We pledge ourselves as Union men ... to do everything in our power to aid the government," their platform read. The minor movements, save that of Fremont, had run their course, and Lincoln's was the only name considered for the nomination. For vice-president there were various candi- dates, including Hamlin, already in office. The party proved its Union character by passing over Hamlin, and selecting the most notable war Democrat in the United States, Andrew Johnson, whose career in Tennessee had done much to break down distinctions between defenders of the Union. From the standpoint of reconstruction, it is interesting to note that if Tennessee was not a state, Johnson was ineligible as a candidate. More serious than the opposition within his party, was the Democratic attack upon Lincoln. The mildest of its weapons was the assertion that the war was a failure; that peace, with Union, was within Lincoln's reach if he chose to take it. It ought to have THE UNION PARTY 217 been entirely clear, to men of honesty and reasonable information, that the one thing which Lincoln demanded, Union, was the sole condition which the Confederacy would not yield; that only conquest could break down the devotion of the South to inde- pendence. Yet Democrats persuaded them- selves of the opposite. They declared that Davis wanted peace, and the erratic Greeley was convinced of this in 1864. The asser- tion lost its effectiveness when Lincoln drew the charge, sending Greeley to Canada to treat with any one who thought he could end the war and save the Union. After this errand, Greeley ceased to talk of peace. Tyranny, and conspiracy to override the Constitution, were more serious charges in the mouth of the opposition, because they had numerous believers among the Repub- licans, as well. The United States had never encountered cases of treason and sedition on a large scale, and had had no experience in handling them. The Confederacy was to all intents a military dictatorship; in the Union the government had the Constitution always to consider. Under the Constitution, it was extremely difficult to convict of treason. There were no precedents to show how far the minority, in time of war, was to be al- lowed to obstruct the national purpose. Yet now, the minority showed its sympathy with the South by opposing war measures, by denouncing acts of government as illegal, and 218 THE CIVIL WAR by giving secret aid directly to the Con- federacy. At times it seemed as though Democratic resistance would tie the hands of Lincoln, and let the Union be broken. Lincoln faced his opponents in the rear more boldly than even his adherents always approved. Early in the war, he suspended the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus in the North, on his own authority, in order that arrests that appeared necessary to him might not be nullified by the courts. The Constitution declares that "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." But it does not say who shall suspend the writ. Lincoln took the responsibility as his own, and though Congress regarded the act as an usurpation of its own authority, it passed, in 1863, a law indemnifying him in case he had violated the Constitution, and enacted general rules for the suspension in the future. Lincoln disregarded these rules when he believed it expedient. There are no exact figures to show how many persons were arrested arbitrarily in the North during the crises of the war. The number ran into the thousands, and was increased by unauthorized acts of zealous subordinates and military commanders. Every conspiracy that was discovered, or secret society that was brought to light, seemed to the department commander on THE UNION PARTY 219 the ground to need repression. The aggre- gate number of conspirators was large. Most numerous in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, they affected ritualistic organization, and drilled in secret, when they could. Their very numbers drew their teeth. So many Union spies were in their ranks that Lin- coln knew their plans as soon as they were formulated. They never had a close organ- ization, or were more than an aggravating nuisance. Their most serious influence was in slandering the public credit, dissuading enlistment, and encouraging desertion. The draft might not have been necessary but for them. More than 2500 deserters were returned to the ranks from Indianapolis, alone, in a single month in 1862. When the President was called upon to sign death warrants for desertion, he generally declined . the duty. Only 141 men were shot or hungT?{?^u^ for this crime throughout the war, and leniency increased the trouble. But Lin- coln made the excuse that has been more satisfactory to his fellow citizens than it was to the disciplinarians of the war department: "Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert? ... I think that in such a case, to silence the agitator, and save the boy, is not only constitutional, but withal a great mercy." The most famous arbitrary arrest was that 220 THE CIVIL WAR of Clement L. Vallandigham, an Ohio law- yer and journalist, who had represented his district in Congress since 1857. From the beginning of the war, Vallandigham denounced the usurpation of power by the President, and the wickedness of coercion. A brilliant speaker, with handsome figure and great courage, he led the most violent wing of the opposition. The term "copper- heads," which was bestowed upon his fol- lowers in reproach, they finally accepted with pride, and they wore the liberty-head, cut from the old copper cent, as an emblematic badge. "I am for peace," declared Vallan- digham. He protested against "an aggres- sive and invasive warfare;" but denied his desire to extend aid to the Confederacy. When Wade called him a traitor, he denied the charge and called its author "a liar, a scoundrel, and a coward." Through 1862, he fought the administration steadfastly. In the fall of that year, he lost his seat in Congress through a rearrangement of his district; but the military failures of the year, and the rebuke to Lincoln at the polls, encouraged him and others to keep up their opposition, and their assertions that peace, with Union, was within the reach of an honest administration. In May, 1863, Vallandigham was arrested at his home in Dayton, by order of the mili- tary governor commanding in Ohio, A. E. Burnside. The latter had recently drawn THE UNION PARTY 221 the fire of the copperheads by proclaiming in a general order that "Treason, expressed or implied, will not be tolerated in this depart- ment." Vallandigham had led in denouncing the order. He was arrested by troops, denied a hearing on a writ of habeas corpus by the United States court, tried before a military tribunal at Cincinnati, and condemned to imprisonment. His alleged crime had been committed in a state where ordinary courts were in regular session. The utterances on which he was condemned were highly parti- san, but by no means traitorous. The action of the administration in his case, declared the Democratic governor of New York, Horatio Seymour, "will determine in the minds of more than one-haK of the people of the loyal States, whether this war is waged to put down rebelHon at the South, or to destroy free institutions at the North." Although he doubted the wisdom of the arrest of Vallandigham, Lincoln did not disallow the verdict in his trial. He whim- sically commuted the sentence from confine- ment to banishment within the Confederate lines, and ordered Vallandigham to be escorted thither under guard. Protesting all the way, and seeing none of the humor of the situation, the leader of the copper- heads was taken by way of Murfreesboro to the front, and abandoned, under a flag of truce, within the outer line of Confederate pickets. The case of Vallandigham marks the height THE CIVIL WAR and decline of the activities of the copper- heads. The disastrous year, 1862, convinced many that it was safe to fight the Union, and that Lincoln was tottering. It emboldened many to a freedom of speech that would have passed unnoticed in time of peace, but which now provoked the administration to a method of defence that sober lawyers have been reluctant to justify. If, however, the Con- stitution had been allowed to fall because of its own restrictions upon the freedom of its defenders, it would have been a sad commen- tary upon the effectiveness of popular govern- ment. Vallandigham in exile was more effective than Vallandigham at large. He left the Confederacy, and took up a residence at Windsor, in Ontario. His party nominated him for governor of Ohio in 1863, and he conducted his campaign from Canadian territory. The administration threw its whole influence into the campaign to defeat him, and both Unionists and copperheads were surprised when the final vote brought out a majority of more than 100,000 for his opponent. On the whole, the best antidote for the teachings of the copperheads was their own speech and actions. Vallandigham was released from his pose of martyr after the election, and was permitted to come home, unnoticed by the government. When the Democratic national conven- tion met at Chicago, in 1864, the spirit of THE UNION PARTY 223 Vallandigham, who was a leading delegate, wrote the platform. It denounced the war as a failure and as unnecessary. It denounced, also, the violation of constitutional rights in the North; but it nominated for its can- didate General McClellan, whose letter of acceptance repudiated the most extreme charge, and pledged him to a vigorous pros- ecution of the war. The party went before the country with a platform designed to win votes from copperheads, and a candidate to win the support of loyal Democrats and critical Republicans. The lack of Union success in the fighting of the year brought the President to the extreme of discourage- ment, which he recorded in a memorandum on August 23, " . . .it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be re-elected." Ten days later his gloom was gone. On September 3, he proclaimed a day for national thanksgiving, while Seward was able to declare from the stump that "Sherman and Farragut have knocked the bottom out of the Chicago nominations." Sherman had begun to move in 1864 when Grant's long line had started its crush- ing process on the Confederacy. His chief had kept fighting away through spring and summer, without making large gains. Grant had differed from Meade, and Hooker, and Burnside, and McClellan, mainly in his control of northern opinion and his elasticity, which sent him repeatedly against the enemy. 224 THE CIVIL WAR There were no breathing spells in his cam- paign, but there were no distinctive victories. Sherman, on the other hand, continued the steady progress that Grant had begun at Cairo. "That we are now all to act on a common plan, converging on a common centre," he wrote to Grant, "looks like enlightened war." On May 5, as ordered, Sherman put his three armies in motion, about 110,000 strong, in a front twenty miles long, under Schofield, Thomas, and McPherson. There was only one way for him to advance into Georgia; this was along the line of the Western and Atlantic Railroad, running southeast, from Chattanooga to Atlanta, about one hundred and ten miles distant. He had prepared with care for his march, realizing that as his line of communications became longer his danger would increase. When his quarter- master at Nashville, his chief base, com- plained that he had too little rolling stock to haul one hundred and thirty carloads of food a day, he ordered him to seize, hold, and use, all cars and locomotives arriving from Louisville. When the president of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad remon- strated with him, on account of this, he told him to start a car ferry, and annex the rolling stock coming into Jeffersonville, Indiana, across the Ohio from Louisville. With this mongrel equipment, impressed as needed, he secured his food. THE UNION PARTY 225 Johnston, opposing Sherman, and defend- ing every inch of the way, knew better than to fight except when he was sure to win. His losses could not be replaced, and he started with only 66,000 men. Until the last week in July, the campaign was a series of patient manoeuvres, of repeated entrenching of positions, and of heavy engagements, while Johnston gradually retired upon At- lanta. Every day that he delayed, increased the chance of a happy accident that might let him destroy Sherman; a defeat for him- self would open the road into Atlanta in a single afternoon. The Western and Atlantic Railroad, along which Sherman moved, winds a sinuous course through the mountains, from the Ten- nessee River to Atlanta. It ascends the valley of the Chickamauga River for about fifteen miles, then plunges across country, bridging the Etowah River, just north of Allatoona, and the Chattahoochee, a few miles before it enters Atlanta. Johnston, when the movement started, was at Dalton, thirty-odd miles from Chattanooga. He was manoeuvred out of this position, and out of Resaca, fifteen miles further south. The Union and Confederate outposts were tapping everywhere, but there was no deci- sive engagement until Johnston had retired behind the line of the Etowah, thirty-five miles from Atlanta. Between the Etowah and the Chatta-' 226 THE CIVIL WAR hoochee, there was fighting during June. Sherman's men were gaining in confidence every week. They were now some eighty miles from Chattanooga, and nothing had happened to them. Every few days. Con- federate cavalry broke their railway, but Union repair gangs, with wrecking trains, had the gaps rebuilt almost before the raiders' hoof -prints had hardened in the mud. Their numbers were shrinking, as garrisons were posted to hold the line, but there were some new recruits and a consciousness that John- ston was losing more than they. For the last two weeks in June, there were numerous engagements in the vicinity of Marietta, Kenesaw Mountain, a victory for Johnston being the most notable. But whether John- ston won or not, Sherman's constant pressure kept him always retiring to the new earth- works which his gangs of slaves were ever throwing up for him in his rear. About July 1, Johnston was at the line of the Chattahoochee, the last he could hold before he retired into the entrenchments of Atlanta. Here, as before, Sherman's supe- rior strength drove him away. Occupying the Confederate attention with troops at the centre of the line, the Union forces massed other troops opposite Johnston's right wing, and, threatening to destroy it, compelled the whole to yield. By July 9, Johnston fell back behind the Chattahoochee; a few days later. Sherman crossed the river; yet a few THE UNION PARTY 227 days, and Davis removed Johnston from command, on the ground that he had failed to check the Union advance. Hood suc- ceeded him with a fighting pohcy, instead of one of obstruction and delay. Since Sherman had been, for two months, vainly trying to induce Johnston to fight, the change of command was a rehef to him. By the end of July, after battles at Peach Tree Creek, Atlanta, and Ezra Church, in which Hood gained no advantage to offset his heavy losses, Atlanta became the centre of the Confederate defence, while Sherman partially surrounded and invested it. The fate of Vicksburg might have been repeated here, had not Hood saved his army by decamping on September 2. The slow and sedate Thomas, when he heard the news, says Sherman, "snapped his fingers, whistled, and almost danced." The importance of Atlanta to the Con- federacy could hardly be overestimated. It was the only one of the better cities of the South that had not been endangered or disturbed by war, before 1864. Here the Confederate government had established cloth mills and uniform factories. Cotton was stored here in large quantities. Remote from what was regarded as possible Union attack, it was developed into the industrial centre of the seceding states. Sherman pro- posed to end this, and leave Atlanta, when the time came to go off on other business. 228 THE CIVIL WAR useless as an agency of the Confederacy. On September 7, he notified Hood that all non-combatants residing there would be furnished transportation to the Confederate lines. No one was to be left to require a holding garrison; factories and public stores were to be destroyed. "If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty," he wrote to Halleck, "I will answer that war is war, and not popularity-seeking. If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war." The acrimonious discussion that Hood started against this step has not yet subsided, though military experts are disposed to believe that the measure was entirely justifiable. Georgia and the Shenan- doah Valley fed and clothed the armies of the Confederacy, yet the former had not seen war within her boundaries; she was now to learn, as Sherman wrote to Hood, that "War is cruelty." The news of the fall of Atlanta, coming after long discouragement over Petersburg, and after grave doubts whether Sherman was not himself to be lost, gave new heart to the administration, and probably re-elected Lin- coln. Two other notable events of the autumn re-enforced it, and destroyed Mc- Clellan's hope of gaining the election on a platform denouncing the Union armies as without success. All through the war, the navy was on sta- tion, off the blockaded ports, doing tedious THE UNION PARTY 229 patrol duty that was enlivened only by the occasional chase of a blockade-runner, or brush with a privateer. One by one, most of the ports were taken and held, and the Confederate fleet afloat, always small, was gradually reduced. The notorious Alabama was caught off Cherbourg, on the coast of France, and sunk by the Kearsarge, after a striking naval duel. In August Farragut entered the harbor of Mobile, which was the last important Gulf port left to the Con- federacy, and won a victory that Lincoln coupled with the taking of Atlanta in his proclamation of thanksgiving. In the eastern field of the war, encourage- ment came as the presidential campaign advanced. While Grant was embedded before Petersburg, Lee tried once more the trick that had turned off McClellan's peninsular attack, and had frightened the North in two invasions. He sent Early into the Shenan- doah Valley, where that general again scared the national capital, but lost his chance to take it. He remained there through July and August, threatening the North, while his cavalry raided Maryland and burned Chambersburg, in Pennsylvania. No one seemed able to check him, until Grant deter- mined, once for all, to end the annoyance which had so often come by way of the Shenandoah Valley. Sheridan was detached from the Army of the Potomac in August, and sent into the 230 THE CIVIL WAR Valley with a generous army. He ma- noeuvred carefully against Early, until in September, Grant allowed him to take the aggressive. On September 19 he fought Early at Winchester; three days later they met at Fisher's Hill; and on October 19 the battle of Cedar Creek "finished forever the Valley campaigns." Here it was that Sheridan made the ride that every schoolboy knows. He had driven the Confederate army out of the Valley, had carried off what military supplies he could use, and had burned the rest. Barns and mills went up in smoke, until the most fertile farms of the Con- federacy were devastated, and Lee was permanently deprived of one of his chief resources. After September 1, the prospects of Lin- coln brightened. His friends gained courage to reiterate their charges that McClellan's election would mean restoration of slavery and division of the Union. The President, discouraged at times, continued evenly on the course he had mapped out. He alienated Republican radicals by refusing their vin- dictive measures of reconstruction, he main- tained the draft, he did not, for fear of Democratic votes, weaken his efforts to sup- port Grant. In November he was elected for a second time, by a plurality that showed how many of his fellow citizens were not satisfied; 2,200,000 votes were cast among the states for him, 1,802,000 for McClellan. THE UNION PARTY 231 Neither elation nor despondency changed his pace. The war, in his mind, was essen- tial, but the problems after peace were to be quite as great. Joy at the prospect of victory was tempered by sympathy for the citizens for whom his victory would mean grief and destruction. Some had professed to see in him a dictator and a tyrant. His- tory has found him the opposite, pursuing his way "with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." CHAPTER XII THE CONFEDERATE COLLAPSE The end of the war was in sight when Lincoln was re-elected, and when he was inaugurated for the second time, the exact manner of the collapse of the Confederacy was the only uncertainty. The war in the East had become an actual siege of Rich- mond, with only one termination possible. In the West, the armies were still advancing, and were to continue their progress until Lee and Johnston should be seized, as it were by a gigantic pair of tongs. Grant on one claw, Sherman on the other. The winter of 1864- 1865 did not interfere with the Union cam- paigns. It had taken Grant longer than he thought to "fight it out," but he would neither yield to discouragement nor relax his grip. One of his officers brought a spotted coach- dog into camp, promising to take it into Richmond, because "It is said to come from a long-lived breed." Continuous hammering until the last resistance was crushed had become the Union policy. Sherman did not remain long inactive in the fall of 1864. He knew that "an army 232 THE CONFEDERATE COLLAPSE 233 which had penetrated Georgia as far as Atlanta could not turn back," and, early in October, was begging Grant to let him send away his baggage, destroy the railroad in his rear, and strike out across country for Milledgeville and Savannah. "I can make this march, and make Georgia howl! " he wrote. He could both transfer his army to the coast, where it could operate in connec- tion with the fleet and the eastern armies, and strike a blow at the resources of the Con- federacy which would discourage it. The sooner every southerner was taught that the war could not succeed, and that its con- tinuance meant personal ruin, as well as ultimate defeat, the sooner Lee and John- ston's armies would melt away. For nearly a month Grant withheld his positive per- mission for the raid. He had had his mind set on Mobile for the next move. Sherman insisted that there was no enemy between him and the sea; but the rules of strategy have only criticism for a commander who abandons his base in the enemy's country, and marches away from the hostile army instead of toward it. The effect which this movement would have on the future of Atlanta, Chattanooga, and Nashville was considered before Sherman was allowed to start. Hood was already worrying the railroad, and Thomas had been sent back to Nashville, while the troops were distributed along the railroad behind Atlanta. 234 THE CIVIL WAK. By the end of October it was seen that Hood was after Thomas, in the attempt to ruin Sherman by destroying his base. Sherman saw the time had come to let the base go, leave Hood in Thomas's hands, and start for the coast. On November 2, Grant gave his definite assent, and Sherman began to strip his force. The baggage, the sick, and the lukewarm were sent back to Chattanooga or Nashville; the picked men from the garrisons along the railroad were gathered at Atlanta; on November 12 the last tele- graph wire connecting Sherman with Wash- ington was broken, and four days later the army, 60,000 strong, and every man a selected veteran, marched out of Atlanta, chanting: "John Brown's body lies a-mould'ring in the grave. His soul is marching on! '* In December, Thomas justified the confidence placed in him by defeating Hood and taking nearly 4500 prisoners at Nashville. The stirring words of Sherman's marching song were not set to music until the raid was over, but they tell the story. It was a holi- day trip, with almost no opposition, in spite of the impassioned appeals of Beauregard that Georgia rise to annihilate the presumptuous invader. In four columns, foraging liberally upon the country, the troops advanced. A strip of the richest lands of Georgia, " Sixty miles in latitude — three hundred to the main," THE CONFEDERATE COLLAPSE 235 was left empty in their rear. In great variety, the food of the countryside was brought in by the "bummers," as the foragers were called; while the negroes, seeing the "Yanks" for the first time, followed in the rear of their deliverers. The song tells it all: "How the darkeys shouted when they heard the joyful sound! How the turkeys gobbled which our commissary found! How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground, While we were marching through Georgia.'* The populace suffered, and Sherman's name is still a mark for southern execration. In such a campaign it is not strange that private property was not always safe. Food and stock were fair prey; money, silver, trinkets, ought to have been let alone, and Sherman's orders gave no countenance to thefts of these. But with an army of hila- rious boys, as most of the " vetreans " yet were, operating in the enemy's country, with the irrepressible love of souvenirs that still marks the American youth and runs riot over street signs and hotel silver in every college town, a nice and proper discrimina- tion between materials of war and private property could not be maintained. The women of the country, however, had nothing worse to fear than the theft of their family spoons. The men did not know where they were going and did not care; Sherman car- 236 THE CIVIL WAR ried the whole burden of responsibihty, knowing that if he failed his march "would be adjudged the wild adventure of a crazy fool." On December 13, Sherman reached the sea, whence he communicated with the fleet off-shore. Eight days later the garrison of Savannah ran a pontoon bridge across the Savannah River, and escaped into South Carolina, while the Union army entered the city the same day. The capture of the city came to Lincoln as a Christmas gift. Sher- man had found no dangers on the march, and had come into Savannah with a loss of under one thousand men. The Confederate arrangements of 1865 were dictated by the news which Sherman sent out from Savannah. He had been authorized, on January 2, to continue his march to the north, and declared his inten- tion of heading for either Charleston, north along the coast, or Augusta, up the Savannah River. Wheeler and Wade Hampton, with their cavalry, were sent to head him off, while what was left of Hood's army, after Nashville, together with some militia, was collected in the Carolinas under "Joe" John- ston, who was now restored to active com- mand. In February, Sherman's army, still about 60,000 strong, left Savannah, not for either of the points announced, but on a course between them, for Columbia. This march was no picnic, as the march THE CONFEDERATE COLLAPSE 237 to Savannah had been. It crossed all the rivers and creeks flowing seaward; it found few roads and almost no bridges; everywhere, a desperate enemy obstructed the advance, while the incessant rains of early spring prepared bottomless quagmires for the bag- gage trains. On February 17, Hampton abandoned Columbia, the capital of his state, to Sherman, and in the confusion of occupation it was destroyed by fire, — probably started by drunken irregulars who disgraced both armies. That not all of Sherman's men were destructive is proved by the discovery of one of the Iowa troops, who, after standing guard over a stranger's chickens, was "in another room minding her baby" while she was visited by the commander. From Columbia the advance continued to Fayetteville, which Sherman entered on March 11. Charleston had fallen into the hands of the fleet without a battle, as soon as her railroad connections with the interior had been cut. On March 19, Sherman's advance ran into Johnston's whole army, making a stand near Goldsboro, and was temporarily stopped. He had reached the centre of North Carolina, four hundred and twenty-five miles from Savannah. Within the next few weeks Sherman and Grant ended the war. Grant's first campaign in Virginia had resulted in great losses in the Wilderness, in 238 THE CIVIL WAR the spring of 1864, with no compensating gains. He had followed it at once with a second, an advance up the James River, in which Petersburg blocked and held him. With a tired army, cut in two by its losses, he began his siege. The importance of Petersburg to Rich- mond was greater than that of an outlying defensive fortress. It was a railroad centre of quite as much significance as the capital city. Five lines of track connected it with Richmond and City Point and Norfolk, on the James, with Goldsboro and Wilmington, to the south, and with Lynchburg, to the west. A large part of the supplies for Lee, from the south, passed through it; and sup- plies, by the summer of 1864, were coming to be of first importance to the Confederacy. Under the insistent pressure of Grant, Lee held a line thirty-five miles long, from a point north of Richmond to one south of Petersburg. The James protected his front on the left, the Appomattox covered his right. The Union armies confronting him were split by the James, below the junction of the Appomattox; Butler was north. Grant was south of the river. With smaller resources, but with a skill not surpassed by Grant, Lee turned off the attacks upon his position. In July, 1864, an attempt was made to mine the fortifica- tions of Petersburg, blow up a section of them, and carry the city by assault. The THE CONFEDERATE COLLAPSE 239 news of the mining reached the Confeder- ates, creating some of the nervousness that Grant counted on. But when the mine was exploded on July 30, the assault was mis- managed, and nearly three thousand were killed and wounded in the crater. In the next month the work of Early in the Valley in- duced Grant to detach Sheridan for the autumn campaign around Winchester. Through the rest of 1864, there were re- peated attempts to catch Lee napping, to break his thin line, to turn his flanks, or to destroy the railroads in his rear. But Sher- man, on the whole, was weakening him more than Grant. The fall of Atlanta in Septem- ber cost the Confederacy many of its existing supplies, and the hope of more. The march to the sea destroyed food and confidence; the news of burning barns and scattered families had a moral influence on the men of Lee's command. His soldiers deserted in large numbers to look after the families at home, and the people at home sheltered the deserters from the searching parties of the provost-marshals. The southern people tired of the war; if their opinion could have been registered, it would probably have stopped now; for Georgia was in almost open mutiny against the Richmond government, and North Carolina threatened to secede. But the Confederate leaders, who had revolted against a nationalized government, charging that it contemplated an attack against the 240 THE CIVIL WAR existence of their states, carried on their war with a high hand. State rights in the South were not allowed to restrict the hand of gov- ernment. The Confederate supreme court was never created, to pass upon the legality of the acts of Davis and his secretaries, and until his administration was driven to flight, with its armies actually captured or dis- persed, the war had to go on. Early in 1865, Lee could see what Davis would not admit, that the fall of Petersburg and Richmond was only a matter of time. In desperation, they both listened to the astute Benjamin, secretary of state, who advised that slavery be abolished as a means of securing European aid, and that the ne- groes be armed to fight for independence. Lee advised that Richmond be abandoned, and that the government take refuge in the Blue Ridge, beyond Lynchburg, where a handful of troops could cover the mountain passes and maintain a resistance for an in- definite period. Neither of these plans was acted upon, and the new year opened with the defence of Richmond still the primary Confederate policy. After Sheridan's successes in the Valley, and Sherman's in the South, Grant was sure he could end the war in a single brief cam- paign. The net was tightening. Along the coast, the blockade was effective. There was no retreat to the south, with Sherman there. Savannah and Charleston under Union garri- THE CONFEDERATE COLLAPSE 241 sons, and Atlanta empty. To the north, there was only Grant's inevitable line, and the devastated Valley. Behind Lynchburg was the single way out, and toward this gap both commanders turned their attention. Grant's line, when he took the field after the winter rains (through which Sherman had grimly tramped), was a long crescent, extending from the Valley, where Sheridan remained until March, to Goldsboro, where Sherman arrived in the same month. His right wing of 1864 had become his left wing for the final struggle, after traversing Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Within his embrace lay both Lee and Johnston, now deprived of their food supplies from either the Valley or the southern interior. Sheridan was specially charged to look after Lynchburg, its railroad, and its canal, lest any of them should be used by Lee in his extremity. Like Lee, Grant realized the difficulties in driving an army out of the val- leys of the Blue Ridge. Sherman was left to watch and hold Johnston, for Grant did not want him in at the finish of Lee's army, being "very anxious to have the Eastern armies vanquish their old enemy who had so long resisted all their repeated and gallant attempts to subdue them or drive them from their capital." Lee had prepared for his escape by remov- ing his supplies from Richmond, along the railroad to Amelia Court House, half way to 242 THE CIVIL WAR Lynchburg. Before he followed them, he tried once more to create confusion in the Union ranks by an assault. On March 24, he surprised and broke through the line, a little north of Petersburg, with a disastrous suc- cess, since his assaulting party got so far into the enemy's country that all were cap- tured the next morning, — a loss to Lee of nearly four thousand. The armies of the Potomac and the James moved out of their entrenchments on March 29. Sheridan was with them, having com- pleted his work at the extreme right, and now led the advance to the south of Petersburg. At Dinwiddie Court House, on March 31, and at Five Forks, the next day, Lee resisted the advance; but when, on April 2, Peters- burg was taken by storm, he abandoned his position, and Richmond too, and started on his retreat. On Monday, April 3, Davis, his government, and his archives, were moved to Danville, the President still protesting his determination to "die in the last ditch." A few days more, and they were scattered in promiscuous flight. The fall of the Confederate capital demor- alized the North with indiscriminate rejoic- ing. At Washington, it degenerated into a debauch among the clerks. The churches held services of praise and thanksgiving. Whatever had been the disposition of in- dividuals while the outcome was in doubt, all were Unionists now, and read with joy the THE CONFEDERATE COLLAPSE 243 news that Davis was in flight, that Lincoln had visited the deserted Richmond, that Grant and Sheridan were hot on the trail of Lee's retreating army. The trail was short. Lee's stores, meagre at best, that had been collected in freight cars at Amelia Court House, had been hauled back to Richmond, through the anxiety of the civil officers to save themselves. Hungry and tired, his men dropped out of the ranks. Nearly 14,000 were captured during the first week in April. But Lee pushed on, between the valleys of the Appo- mattox and the James, until on April 8 he found Sheridan, "nimbler-footed" than him- self, heading him off at Appomattox Court House. On April 7, Grant had shifted "the re- sponsibility of any further effusion of blood" by calling upon Lee to surrender his Army of Northern Virginia. On the 9th, the gene- rals met in a residence near Appomattox Court House, Lee dignified, impassive, and resplendent in a new uniform. Grant in working clothes, a shabby fatigue blouse, without a sword; but the conqueror, in his diffidence, talked about old times and the Mexican War for half an hour, until Lee recalled him to the purpose of their meeting. The terms were simple, and as generous as Lincoln could have made them, — surrender of all, but no humiliation, the officers re- taining their side arms and riding away on 244 THE CIVIL WAR their own horses, the men allowed to keep their horses to work their farms, and all fed at once by an army that turned its hostility into hospitality. Toward the end of April, Johnston surrendered to Sherman; Kirby Smith gave up his fragment of an army in the trans-Mississippi in May, and the war was over. The return of the victorious armies of the Union to the farm, the workshop, and the office, was as great a triumph as their con- quests had been. Nearly a million men were mustered out in 1865. As rapidly as Grant could direct it, the armies were brought back to the great camps around Washington. Here they were collected for one last march together, before they dispersed forever. On May 23 and 24, they paraded the length of Pennsylvania Avenue, in the midst of a great throng, with the President and their commanders on the reviewing stand. It was noticed by the observers that Sherman's troops were ragged and unkempt beyond the average. They had lived for nearly a year from hand to mouth. But they knew, and their leaders knew, that there probably had never been another sixty-thousand so tough and true, with so few weaklings among them. The officers who rode in the review, like the President who inspected them, were men whom none would have picked in 1861, as the probable leaders of the war. Scott was yet living, but in the retirement of old age; THE CONFEDERATE COLLAPSE 245 McClellan had no part in the triumph. A group of men, whose reputations had been won amidst the hardest knocks, had seized the tools of war and wielded them. In the rejoicings of the day, the men in uniform knew better than the shouters what their enemy had been, how to estimate his vir- tues, and what was the meaning of defeat. The Union remained intact after the great- est of civil wars. It had been proved that a republic can act efficiently, that a majority can rule, that a peaceful people can turn to war and conduct it with success. The Con- stitution, too, remained as it had been before the South tried to test its strength. The nation was on the eve of an industrial revolu- tion that was to bring its changes in the course of time; but a scheme of government that had outlived the Civil War was past all fear of destruction. The armies of Lee and Johnston returned to poverty and humiliation. For four years they had kept, with steady eye, the one end of independence before themselves. Every- thing they had or hoped for was staked upon it. They now went back to broken homes, to plundered farms, to nearly total devasta- tion. That they had brought these things upon themselves only deepens the pity. They were, moreover, going home in uncer- tainty as to what the future might have in -store for them, as people or as states. Lincoln had looked forward to this day of 246 THE CIVIL WAR readjustment from the time when the Union forces wrenched the first bits of soil from the armies of the Confederacy. It was a conven- ient theory for him to assert that the people were deceived, that the Confederacy was a legal phantom, that when the people should return to their senses, and obey the law, they would be restored to the enjoyment of their rights as citizens. He had acted upon this theory in his dealings with Virginia, Ten- nessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas, and Con- gress had approved his course up to 1863. But as the war dragged on, and the full measure of Confederate determination was understood, Lincoln was left alone in his generosity. The men who actually fought, on either side, had little rancor in them. To-day, the keen analysis of history has shown that the South was helpless in the hand of destiny; the scientists have shown that the law of evolution preserves the higher type with relentless and extravagant cruelty. But in the North, the desire to find someone who could be punished crowded out the thoughts of compassion as well as those of wisdom. If only from practical considerations, econ- omy and expediency forbade retaliation. Peace always comes quickest after a civil war when the victors are generous to the vanquished. Lincoln knew this, and the tones of his second inaugural show that he intended to have no hand in the punishment THE CONFEDERATE COLLAPSE 247 of leaders, or led, in the South. As he had turned every political tool which a profound politician knows to the maintenance of the Union, so he stood ready to turn them to the softening of the feelings of the North and Congress. On the night of April 14, while Washington and the North were still delirious over the collapse of the Confederacy, Lincoln was murdered by a fanatical actor. Booth by name, and the routine of the Constitution put in his place a Democrat, a southerner, and, far worse, a man of indomitable will and utter lack of tact. Andrew Johnson was the worst man who could have succeeded Lincoln, for he could not hope to act in har- mony with a Republican Congress, now that the binding issue of Union was no more. He took up the work where it had dropped, ap- pointed military governors for the southern states, and toward the end of May issued a proclamation that Lincoln had planned, offering a generous pardon, and stating the terms on which the loyal citizens of the South would be aided in restoring their state govern- ments. Probably Lincoln would have failed to carry Congress with him in this leniency; Johnson could never do it. But before Con- gress could meet or interfere, reconstruction, as Lincoln would have wished it, was well ad- vanced, and the Thirteenth Amendment, the legal child of emancipation, was being accepted by the states of the old Confederacy. 248 THE CIVn. WAR What Congress did, and tried to do, does not belong to the history of the Civil War. That ends with the termination of resistance. How Johnson, in place of fighting "traitors" in the South, turned to fight them in Congress, how he relapsed into the strict-construction- ist Democracy of his early life, how Republi- cans repudiated and belabored him, belong to the unsavory story of Reconstruction. War had been bad enough for the South. In the North it had placed a premium on resolu- tion, narrow loyalty, intolerance, the vir- tues of war, every one of which was an obstacle to the return of peace. Northern revenge, in the guise of preservation of the dearly won Union, was worse than war for the South. Yet it was the logical result of the emotional outpouring which alone made it possible to save the nation, and of the secession which made that outpouring neces- sary. It is possible to show that the South was led into secession by causes which it could not control; yet it was led into an evil path. In the words of Grant, who was "depressed ... at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly," the fact remains that the Confederate cause was "one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse." BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE The best account of the Civil War yet written is by James Ford Rhodes, in his History of the United States from the Com- promise of 1850 to the final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877 (7 vols., 1906), and it is not likely that his work will be improved upon in impartiality, scholarship, or literary skill for many years. In A. B. Hart's co-operative American Nation (27 vols., 1904-1908), there are three small volumes which together give an excellent resume of the war, and admirable lists of books relating to special phases and single campaigns: F. E. Chadwick, Causes of the Civil War, J. K. Hosmer, The Appeal to Arms, J. K. Hosmer, Outcome of the Civil War. T. A. Dodge's A Bird's-Eye View of our Civil War (1883, and later editions), has long been the best and clearest purely military view of the struggle; it is, however, very brief, and may be supplemented by J. Formby's Ameri- can Civil War (1910, with a volume of maps), or the hand- book prepared for the British Staff College, Wood and Edmonds, History of the Civil War in the United States (1905). No contemporary account gives more picturesque detail than Horace Greeley's American Conflict (2 vols., 1866), which is still readable. Shortly after the restoration of peace, two Confederate leaders presented their views of the struggle: Jefferson Davis, Rise and Fall of the Confederate Govern- ment (2 vols., 1881), and A. H. Stephens, Constitutional View of the Late War between the States (2 vols., 1870). During the eighties, the Century Company collected the reminiscences of participants, and published them first serially, and then in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (4 vols., 1888). These accounts possess all the charm of first hand narratives, but careful historians always check them up with the original correspondence that has been printed in the great United States Government series. Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies and Navies in the War of the Rebellion (more than 150 volumes, and still growing). The biographical side of the Civil War is abimdantly sup- plied with memoirs, autobiography, and biography, among 251 252 THE CIVIL WAR which the greatest book is Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (2 vols., 1886). This classic is followed closely in interest by Memoirs of William T. Sherman, by Himself (2 vols., 1875), and Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan (2 vols., 1888). G. B. McClellan's Own Story (1887) gives remarkable self- revelation upon the character of the writer, but acquits him of everything but egotism. An equally useful Confederate biog- raphy is Joseph E. Johnston, Narrative of Military Opera- tions (1874). Of formal biographies, the greatest is Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, a History (10 vols., 1890), which is a monu- mental classic that has provided the foundation for the grow- ing posthumous reputation of Lincoln. It is not critical. It has been supplemented on the personal side by Ida M. Tar- bell's Life of Abraham Lincoln (4 vols., 1907), which gives a clearer view of Lincoln's human qualities than any other work. Among the lesser biographies, there should be noted, F. Bancroft, William H. Seward (2 vols., 1900), C. F. Adams, Charles Francis Adams (1900), A. B. Hart, Salmon P. Chase (1899), E. P. Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke, Financier of the Civil War (2 vols., 1907), A. L. Long, Memoirs of Robert E. Lee (1887), G. F. R. Henderson, Stonewall Jackson and the Amer- ican Civil War (2 vols., 1900, a professional soldier's view), W. E. Dodd, Jefferson Davis (1907, by a critical southern historian). The growing interest in sides of the Civil War period, other than the military, has recently produced two books of great value. J. C. Schwab's Confederate States of America (1901) gives an intimate view of the financial and industrial condition of the South from 1861 to 1865. E. D, Fite's Social and Indus- trial Conditions in the North During the Civil War (1910), shows the progress made by the Union in spite of war, and is a good corrective to the point of view of the military historians. For additional references, the reader should consult the bibliographies in Chadwick and Hosmer, above mentioned,, and J. N. Lamed, Literature of American History (a general bibliography printed in 1902, in which the leading scholar in the history of the war. General J. D. Cox, has appraised the books bearing on the Civil War). INDEX Abolition, 25 Adams, C. F., 78-91, 186-190 Adams, J. Q.. 107 "Alabama," 87, 188, 229 "Alexandra," 189 Anmesty, 181, 247 Anderson, 51 Andrew, 61 Antietam, 101 Appomattox, C. H., 243-245 Army, Confederate, 191, 211 Army, U. S. Regular, 54 Army, U. S. Volunteer, 61, 64, 191, 202, 211 Atlanta, 243-245 Bancroft, 84 Banks, 96, 98, 134 Bates, 112 Beauregard, 52, 66, 129, 234 Bell, 32 Benjamin, 240 Blair, 112, 118 Blockade, 72, 192, 229 Booth, 247 Border States, 67, 106, 117 Bragg, 126, 135-137, 145. 155 Breckenridge, 32 Bright, 188 British sympathy, 87, 186- 190 Buchanan, 27. 39, 43, 50 Buckner, 122, 123, 146 Buell, 119, 124 Bulloch, 88 Bull Run, 66, 81. 100 Bumside, 102, 161 Butler, 99, 105. 180, 211, 238 Cairo, 115 Calhoun, 12, 22 Cameron, 48 Causes, 1-24 Cedar Creek, 230 Chancellorsville, 164-165 Chase, 29, 47, 112, 198, 215 Chattahoochee, 226 Chattanooga, 146-156 Chickamauga, 146 Cold Harbor, 212 Columbia, 237 Compensation, 106 Confederate Government, 37, 38,44 Confiscation, 105, 109 Constitutional Amendment, 42 Constitutional Convention, 15,20 Constitutional Law. 40. 74, 175. 215 "Contraband of War." 105 Cooke, 201 "Copperheads," 112, 219-222 253 254 INDEX Cotton, 12-14, 59, 76, 208 Corinth, 129, 135, 139 Crook, 211 Dallas, 77, 78 Dana, 139 Davis, 38, 53, 65, 78, 81, 96, 117, 146, 227, 240, 242 Dinwiddle, C. H., 242 Donelson, Fort, 120-123 Douglas, 30, 32, 46 Dred Scott Case, 30 Early, 229 Economic development of North, 203-207 Election of 1856, 27; of 1858, 30; of 1860, 31, 103, 113; of 1862, 113; of 1864, 209-214, 223, 230 Emancipation, 103, 104, 109- 113 Ezra Church, 227 Farragut, 99, 229 Finance, 193-203 Fisher's HiU, 230 Five Forks, 242 Floyd, 122 Foote, 122 Foreign affairs, 72-91, 186- 190 Fox, 73 France, 81 Fredericksburg, 161-163 Fremont, 27, 39. 64, 98. 104. 118, 215 Gettysburg, 167-173 Gettysburg address, 184 Gilpin, 133 Gladstone, 90 Goldsboro, 237 Grafton, 68 Grant, 120-133, 135-159. 209-214, 229, 237-244 Greeley, 108, 217 Guerrilla warfare, 134 Habeas Corpus, 218 Halleck, 100, 118, 120, 123- 125, 129. 143. 158 Hampton, 236 Hancock, 169 Harper's Ferry, 63 Henry, Fort, 120, 121 Holly Springs, 141 Hood, 227, 233 Hooker, 153, 155. 158, 163- 166 Hunter, 104 Inaugural addresses, 46, 231 Island Number 10. 120. 124 luka. 139 Jackson, Miss., 144 Jackson. 96, 97, 98, 164, 165 Johnson, 174, 178-180, 247 Johnston, A. S., 62, 119, 122. 125, 126, 135, 147 Johnston, J. E., 66, 142, 156, 210, 225-227, 236 Kansas-Nebraska. 26 Kearsarge, 229 Kenesaw Mountain, 226 Knoxville, 150, 156 Labor. 13, 22, 193 Laird Brothers. 88^ 189 INDEX ^5 Lee, 62, 96, 160-173, 209, 238-243 Lincoln, 29-32, 42, 44, 53, 64. 80, 101, 104, 105, 108- 113, 139, 158, 173-185, 214-223, 230, 247 Longstreet, 150, 156, 170 Lookout Mountain, 154 Lower South, 34; map, 36 Lyon, 118 Lyons, 84 McCIeUan, 64, 68-70, 92-103, 113, 128, 158, 223, 230 McDoweU, 64, 66, 68, 96, 98 McPherson, 224 Magoffin, 119 Mason, 81 Manassas Junction, 66 Meade, 166, 211 Memminger, 193 Missionary Ridge, 154 Missouri Compromise, 26 Monitor and Merrimac, 99 Murfreesboro, 138 Napoleon III, 190 NashviUe, 233, 234 Naval affairs, 72-76 Neutrality, 79 Neutrality of Kentucky, 64 New Madrid, 124 New York Tribune, 26 Northwest, 18, 203 Pabner, 47, 152 Pahnerston, 78, 83, 84, 87, 187 Panic of 1857, 60, 203 Peach Tree Creek, 227 Pemberton, 140, 142, 144 Peninsular campaign, 92-103 Perryville, 137 Petersburg, 213, 238-242 Phelps, 180 Pickett, 171 Pierpont, 174 Pillow, 122 Pittsburg Landing, 126 Plantation system, 14, 193 Polk, 119, 147 Pope, 100, 109, 124, 134 Population, 55, 56, 191 Porter, 142 Price, 134, 178 Prize cases, 76 Quantrill, 134 Raiboads, 19, 58, 116, 204; map of, 57 Reconstruction, 173-185, 245- 248 Resignation of officials, 40 Richmond, 242 Rosecrans, 137, 146-149 Russell, 78-89, 186-190 Savannah, 233-236 Schofield, 224 Scott, 50, 63, 68 Secession, 25-38, 41, 63 Sectionalism, 17, 28 Semmes, 89 Seward, 29, 47, 77, 80, 85, 111 Seymour, 221 Sharpsburg, 101 Shenandoah Valley, 97, 100, 229 Shepley, 180 256 INDEX Sheridan, 138, 153. 213, 229. 240 Sherman, 126, 140, 142, 150. 154, 157, 210, 211. 222-228, 233-237 Shiloh, 126-128 Sickles, 170 Sigel, 211 Sioux War, 134 Slaves, 22, 56 SUdeU, 81 Spottsylvania, 212 Stanton, 48, 112, 149 "Star of the West," 51 Stevens, 70, 176 Stone's River, 138 Sumter, Fort, 49-52, 60 Thomas, 148-152. 155. 224. 234 "Trent" affair. 82-87 "Uncle Tom's Cabin." 29 Vallandigham, 221 Van Dom, 136, 138 Vicksburg, 140-145 Webster, 12, 23 Welles, 72 West Point, 62 West Virginia, 68, 173-175 Westward movement, 16 Wheeler, 236 WigfaU, 52 Wilderness, 211 Wilkes, 82 Wilson's Creek. 118 Winchester, 230 THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE EDITED BY PROFESSOR SIR J. ARTHUR THOMSON PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY THE RT. HON. H. A. L. FISHER PROFESSOR W. T. BREWSTER ^ THE titles listed in the Home University Library are not reprints: they are especially written for this well-known series by recognized authorities in their respective fields. Some of the most distin- guished names in America and England will be found among the authors of the following books. The series embraces virtually every prominent edu- cational and cultural subject and is kept thor- oughly up to date by additions and revisions. ORDER BY NUMBER $1.25 EACH HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY ONE PARK AVENUE - NEW YORK THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE AMERICAN HISTORY [Order Number] 25. THE CIVIL WAR (1854:1865). By Frederick L. Paxson, Professor of American History, University of Wisconsin. 39. RECONSTRUCTION AND UNION (1865-1912). By Paul Leland Haworth. A History of the United States in our own times. 47. THE COLONIAL PERIOD (1607-1766). 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By Dr. D. H. Scott, LL.D., F.R.S., President of the Linnean Society of London. The story of the development of flowering plants, from the earliest zoological times, unlocked from technical language. 12. THE ANIMAL WORLD. By Prof. F. W. Gamble, F.R.S. 14. EVOLUTION. By Prof. Sir J. Arthur Thomson and Prof. Patrick Geddes. Explains to the layman what the title means to the scientific world. 15. INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS. By Pro- fessor A. N. Whitehead, D.Sc, F.R.S., author of "Uni- versal Algebra." 17. CRIME AND INSANITY. By Dr. C. A. Mercier, F.R.C.P., F.R.C.S., author of "Crime and Criminals," etc. 21. AN INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE. By Prof. Sir J. Arthur Thomson, LL.D., Science Editor of the Home University Library. For those unacquainted with the scientific volumes in the series this should prove an excellent introduction. 23. ASTRONOMY. By A. R. Hinks, Chief Assistant at the Cambridge Observatory. "Decidedly original in sub- stance, and the most readable and informative little book on modern astronomy we have seen for a long time." — ■ Nature. 24. PSYCHICAL RESEARCH. By Sir W. F. Barrett, F.R.S., formerly President of the Society for Psychical Research. 37. ANTHROPOLOGY. By R. R. Marett, D.Sc, F.R.A.I., Reader in Social Anthropology, Oxford. Seeks to plot out and sum up the general series of changes, bodily and mental, undergone by man in the course of his- tory. "Excellent. So enthusiastic, so clear and witty, and so well adapted to the general reader." — American Library Association Booklist. 41. PSYCHOLOGY, THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOUR. By Professor William McDougall, F.R.S., Reader in Mental Philosophy, Oxford University. A well-digested summary of the essentials of the science put in excellent literary form by a leading authority. 42. THE PRINCIPLES OF PHYSIOLOGY. By Prof. J. G. McKendrick. A compact statement by the Emeritus Professor at Glasgow, for uninstructed readers. 43. MATTER AND ENERGY. By F. Soddy, F.R.S., Professor of Inorganic and Physical Chemistry in the University of Oxford. "Brilliant. Can hardly be sur- passed. Sure to attract attention." — New York Sun. 53. ELECTRICITY. By Gisbert Kapp, Late Professor of Electrical Engineering, University of Birmingham. 54. THE MAKING OF THE EARTH. By J. W. Gregory, F.R.S., Professor of Geology, Glasgow Uni- versity. 38 maps and figures. Describes the origin of the earth, the formation and changes of its surface and struc- ture, its geological history, the first appearance of life, and its influence upon the globe. 56. MAN: A HISTORY OF THE HUMAN BODY. By Sir A. Keith, F.R.S., Hunterian Professor, Royal College of Surgeons of England. Shows how the human body developed. 63. THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF LIFE. By Pro- fessor Benjamin Moore. 68. DISEASE AND ITS CAUSES. By W. T. Council- man, M.D., LL.D., Professor of Pathology, Harvard University. 71. PLANT LIFE. By Sir J. B. Farmer, D.Sc, F.R.S., Professor of Botany in the Imperial College of Science, London. This very fully illustrated volume contains an account of the salient features of plant form and function. 74. NERVES. By David Fraser Harris, M.D., Professor of Physiology, Dalhousie University, Halifax. Explains in nontechnical language the place and powers of the nervous system. 85. SEX. By Profs. Sir J. Arthur Thomson and Patrick Geddes, joint authors of "The Evolution of Sex." 90. CHEMISTRY. By Raphael Meldola, F.R.S., Late Professor of Chemistry, Finsbury Technical College. Revised by Alexander Findlay, D.Sc, F.I.C., Profes- sor of Chemistry in the University of Aberdeen. Pre- sents the way in which the science has developed and the stage it has reached. 107. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF HEREDITY. By E. W. MacBride, D.Sc, Professor of Zoology in the Imperial College of Science and Tech- nology, London. III. BIOLOGY. By Profs. Sir J. Arthur Thomson and Patrick Geddes. 112. BACTERIOLOGY. By Prof. Carl H. Browning, F.R.S. 115. MICROSCOPY. By Robert M. Neill, Aberdeen Uni- versity. Microscopic technique subordinated to results of investigation and their value to man. 116. EUGENICS. By Professor A. M. Carr-Saunders. Biological problems, together with the facts and theories of heredity. 119. GAS AND GASES. By R. M. Caven, D.Sc, F.I.C., Professor of Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry in the Royal Technical College, Glasgow. The chemical and physical nature of gases, both in their scientific and his- torical aspects. 122. BIRDS, AN INTRODUCTION TO ORNITHOL- OGY. By A. L. Thompson, O.B.E., D.Sc. A general account of the characteristics, mainly of habit and be- havior of birds. 124. SUNSHINE AND HEALTH. By Ronald Campbell Macfie, M.B.C.M., LL.D. Light and its relation to man treated scientifically. 125. INSECTS. By Frank Balfour-Browne, F.R.S.E., Professor of Entomology in the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London. 126. TREES. By Dr. MacGregor Skene, D.Sc, F.L.S. Senior Lecturer on Botany, Bristol University. A concise study of the classification, history, structure, architecture, growth, enemies, care and protection of trees. Forestry and economics are also discussed. 138. THE LIFE OF THE CELL. By David Lands- borough Thomson, B.Sc, Ph.D., Lecturer in Biochem- istry, McGill University. 142. VOLCANOES. By G. W. Tyrrell, A.R., C.Sc, Ph.D., F.G.S., F.R.S.E., Lecturer in Geology in the University of Glasgow. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 35. THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY. By The Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S., Lecturer and Late Fel- low, Trinity College, Cambridge. 44. BUDDHISM. By Mrs. Rhys Davids, Lecturer on Indian Philosophy, Manchester. 46. ENGLISH SECTS: A HISTORY OF NONCON- FORMITY. By The Rev. W. B. Selbie, Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford. 50. THE MAKING OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. By B. W. Bacon, D.D., LL.D., Professor of New Tes- tament Criticism, Yale. An authoritative summary of the results of modern critical research with regard to the origins of the New Testament. 52. ETHICS. By Professor G. E. Moore, D.Litt., Lec- turer in Moral Science, Cambridge. Discusses what is right and what is wrong, and the whys and wherefores. 55. MISSIONS: THEIR RISE AND DEVELOP- MENT. By Mrs. Mandell Creighton, author of "His- tory of England." The author seeks to prove that mis- sions have done more to civilize the world than any other human agency. 60. COMPARATIVE RELIGION. By Prof. J. Estlin Carpenter, LL.D. "One of the few authorities on this subject compares all the religions to see what they have to offer on the great themes of religion." — Christian Work and Evangelist. 65. THE LITERATURE OF THE OLD TESTA- MENT. By George F. Moore, Professor of the His- tory of Religion, Harvard University. "A popular work of the highest order. Will be profitable to anybody who cares enough about Bible study to read a serious book on the subject." — American Journal of Theology. 69. A HISTORY OF FREEDOM OF THOUGHT. By John B. Bury, M.A., LL.D., Late Regius Professor of Modern History in Cambridge University. Summarizes the history of the long struggle between authority and reason and of the emergence of the principle that coercion of opinion is a mistake. 88. RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT BETWEEN OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS. By The Ven. R. H. Charles, D.D., F.B.A., Canon of Westminster. Shows how religious and ethical thought between 180 B.C. and 100 A.D. grew naturally into that of the New Testament. 96. A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. By Professor Clement C. J. Webb, F.B.A. 130. JESUS OF NAZARETH. By The Rt. Rev. Charles Gore, D.D., formerly Bishop of Oxford. SOCIAL SCIENCE I. PARLIAMENT. ITS HISTORY, CONSTITU- TION, AND PRACTICE. By Sir Courtenay P. Ilbert, G.C.B., K.C.S.I., late Clerk of the House of Commons. 5. THE STOCK EXCHANGE. By F. W. Hirst, for- merly Editor of the London Economist. Reveals to the nonfinancial mind the facts about investment, speculation, and the other terms which the title suggests. 6. IRISH NATIpNALITY. By Mrs. J. R. Green, D.Litt. A brilliant account of the genius and mission of the Irish people. "An entrancing work, and I would ad- vise everyone with a drop of Irish blood in his veins or a vein of Irish sympathy in his heart to read it." — New York Tivves Review. (Revised Edition, 1929.) 10. THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT. By The Rt. Hon. J. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P, 11. THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH. By J. A. Hobson, author of "Problems of Poverty." A study of the struc- ture and working of the modern business world. 16. LIBERALISM. By Prof. L. T. Hobhouse, LL.D., author of ''Democracy and Reaction." A masterly phil- osophical and historical review of the subject. 28. THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY. By D. H. MacGregor, Drummond Professor in Political Economy, University of Oxford. An outline of the recent changes that have given us the present conditions of the working classes and the principles involved. 29. ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH LAW. By W. M. Geldart, B.C.L., Vinerian Professor of English Law, Oxford. Revised by Sir William Holdsworth, K.C., D.C.L., LL.D., Vinerian Professor of English Law, Uni- versity of Oxford. A simple statement of the basic prin- ciples of the English legal system on which that of the United States is based. 32. THE SCHOOL: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF EDUCATION. By J. J. Findlay, M.A., formerly Professor of Education, Manchester. Presents the history, the psychological basis, and the theory of the school with a rare power of summary and suggestion. 49. ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. By Sir S. J. Chapman, late Professor of Political Economy and Dean of Faculty of Commerce and Administration, University of Manchester. 77. CO-PARTNERSHIP AND PROFIT-SHARING. By Aneurin Williams, late Chairman, Executive Com- mittee, International Co-operative Alliance, etc. Explains the various types of co-partnership and profit-sharing, and gives details of the arrangements now in force in many of the great industries. 79. UNEMPLOYMENT. By A. C. Pigou, M.A., Pro- fessor of Political Economy at Cambridge. The meaning, measurement, distribution and effects of unemployment, its relation to wages, trade fluctuations and disputes, and some proposals of remedy or relief. 80. COMMON SENSE IN LAW. By Prof. Sir Paul Vinogradoff, D.C.L., LL.D. Social and Legal Rules — Legal Rights and Duties — Facts and Acts in Law — Legis- lation — Custom — Judicial Precedents — Equity — The Law of Nature. 91. THE NEGRO. By W. E. Burghardt DuBois, author of "Souls of Black Folks," etc. A history of the black man in Africa, America and elsewhere. 98. POLITICAL THOUGHT: FROM HERBERT SPENCER TO THE PRESENT DAY. By Pro- fessor Ernest Barker, D.Litt., LL.D. 99. POLITICAL THOUGHT: THE UTILITARIANS. FROM BENTHAM TO J. S. MILL. By Professor William L. Davidson, LL.D. 103. ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT. From Locke to Bentham. By Harold J. Laski, Professor of Politi- cal Science in the London School of Economics. 113. ADVERTISING. By Sir Charles Higham. 118. BANKING. By Dr. Walter Leaf, late President, In- stitute of Bankers; President, International Chamber of Commerce. The elaborate machinery of the financing of industry. 123. COMMUNISM. By Harold J. Laski, Professor of Political Science at the University of London. The author tries to state the communist "theses" in such a way that even its advocates will recognize that an opponent can summarize them fairly. 131. INDUSTRIAL PSYCHOLOGY. Edited by Dr. Charles S. Myers, G.B.E., F.R.S., Director of the Na- tional Institute of Industrial Psychology in England. The only comprehensive study of the human factor in industry. 133. THE GROWTH OF INTERNATIONAL THOUGHT. By F. Melian Stawell. 139. LIQUOR CONTROL. By George E. G. Catlin. An impartial and comprehensive study of the subject. 140. RACES OF AFRICA. By C. G. Seligman, F.R.C.P., F.R.S.