Never Call Retreat, page 53
They did not get the kind of speech they wanted. This was a night for celebration; the people who had come here wanted to fire guns, and shout, and hear the eagle scream, so that they could spend themselves in the happy thought that the rebellion had been put down and all troubles were over. What they got was a sober, unemotional talk about the job that lay ahead of them—the job of building a new union and a new freedom that would be great enough for all the generations of men. They wanted to hear about victory, and the President made them attend a seminar on reconstruction.
Specifically, Mr. Lincoln talked about Louisiana.
Here the fabulous ten percent plan was being tried. Twelve thousand citizens had adopted a new state government and a new constitution, and the state thus rebuilt wanted to resume its place in the Union. Congress had refused to seat the new Louisiana legislators, and Mr. Lincoln felt that Congress was making a mistake. He did not think that the program adopted in Louisiana was the only possible plan for reconstruction, nor did he think it was necessarily the best plan, but at least it was a start, and he enumerated its advantages:
"Some twelve thousand voters in the heretofore slave state of Louisiana have sworn allegiance to the Union, assumed to be the rightful political power of the state, held elections, organized a state government, adopted a free-state constitution, giving the benefit of public schools equally to black and white and empowering the Legislature to confer the elective franchise upon the colored man. Their Legislature has already voted to ratify the Constitutional amendment recently passed by Congress, abolishing slavery throughout the nation. These twelve thousand persons are thus fully committed to the Union, and to perpetual freedom in the state—committed to the very things, and nearly all the things, the nation wants —and they ask the nation's recognition and its assistance to make good their committal."
Admittedly there were flaws in the plan. It would be better if many times 12,000 had supported the new organization; better too if the franchise had been given outright to at least some former slaves—to "the very intelligent," and to those who had served in the army. But to reject the plan would be risky: "We in effect say to the white man, 'You are worthless, or worse—we will neither help you nor be helped by you.' To the blacks we say, 'This cup of liberty which these, your old masters, hold to your lips, we will dash from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when, where and how.' If this course, discouraging and paralyzing both white and black, has any tendency to bring Louisiana into proper practical relations with the Union, I have so far been unable to perceive it."3
It was Abraham Lincoln's last speech, and it struck no sparks; and yet under his labored exposition of the uninspiring Louisiana plan his vision of the future was clear enough if men made giddy by victory achieved could stop to think about it. He wanted to do two things at once, each of them extraordinarily difficult. The millions of Southerners who had tried so hard to leave the Union must somehow be brought back into the old relationship, welcomed rather than coerced, themselves rebuilding the shattered house until reconciliation was complete. Along with this, the Negro must have complete freedom and membership in the American community, he must be brought along as fast as possible to full citizenship, and—hardest of all—much of this must be done by the very society that had formerly held him in slavery, with the understanding and approval of the people who had beaten that society into helplessness. Both reunion and liberty were to be total and indivisible. Mr. Lincoln was proposing reconstruction, not just of the broken South but of America itself.
Characteristically, he was making tentative approaches, and his first experiments had not gone well. The Louisiana plan was in trouble, the cabinet had refused to agree that the South should be paid for its loss of human property, and shortly before his death he saw that his plan for making limited and informal use of the Virginia legislature was not going to work. Not only was the cabinet opposed; in Richmond, Justice Campbell was pushing the plan in a way neither the Republican leadership nor Mr. Lincoln himself could accept. Campbell was saying that there could be an armistice while the Federal government and the Southern state legislatures held "a very grave, important and patient inquiry" into the terms of reunion; among the things to be inquired into, as Campbell saw it, was the basic question of whether anything in particular needed to be done about slavery. This was too much for the President, and it would certainly be a great deal too much for the cabinet and Congress, and so on April 12 Mr. Lincoln ordered General Weitzel not to permit the proposed meeting of the gentlemen who had been acting as the Virginia legislature.4
He would have to make a new approach; and as he always did in such cases Mr. Lincoln sparred for time. At the haunted cabinet meeting on Good Friday he listened to a proposal from Secretary Stanton, providing for military government in the Southern states with a methodical re-establishment of post offices, Federal courts, revenue and customs offices and the like; self-government would follow afterward, and the whole question of Negro suffrage was left for later consideration. To this plan Mr. Lincoln expressed a guarded, tentative approval, and he asked the cabinet members to study the matter and present their comments at the next cabinet meeting—Tuesday, April 18. He indicated that it would be well to get some plan into operation fairly soon, so that the reconstructed state governments could be in full operation when Congress convened in December. As Secretary Welles remembered it, the President said that there were men in Congress whose motives were good but who "had a feeling of hate and vindictiveness in which he could not participate." These, to be sure, were the radical Republicans—the men who, as he had said, were most unhandy devils to deal with, but still men whose faces were set toward Zion: "nearer to me than the other side, in thought and sentiment, though bitterly hostile personally."5
That was the point. The radicals would attack him but they would also work with him—in the end because he and they wanted to reach the same goal. (People bound for Zion almost always have trouble with their fellows along the way.) It had been so during the war, and it could have been so after the war. The fury with which the radicals eventually destroyed Andrew Johnson came chiefly because Johnson was interested in just half of the Lincoln program, the half that the radicals would accept only if a new deal for the Negro came with it. They had their full share of hate and vindictive-ness, to be sure, but they were also passionately interested in freedom, sharing with Edward Bates the belief that if the Negro was freed at all he was freed completely and must share in all of the safeguards which the Constitution provides for free Americans.6 This spring they were watching Abraham Lincoln with much suspicion, tormented by the old myth that he was too weak to take a firm stand, fearful lest the Negro be sacrificed in the interests of an easy peace; and yet there was no impassable gulf between their position and his. In thought and sentiment they were near to him.
No one will ever know what Abraham Lincoln would have done—with Stanton's scheme for military government, with radicals like Wade and Sumner and Stevens, with any of the separate aspects of the intricate problem that lay ahead— because it was at this delicate moment (about half-past ten on the night of April 14) that Booth came on stage with his derringer. Booth pulled the trigger, and the mind that held somewhere in cloudy solution the elements that might some day have crystallized into an answer for the nation's most profound riddle disintegrated under the impact of a one-ounce pellet of lead: the heaviest bullet, all things considered, ever fired in America. Thinking to destroy a tyrant, Booth managed to destroy a man who was trying to create a broader freedom for all men; with him, he destroyed also the chance for a transcendent peace made without malice and with charity for all. Over the years, many people paid a high price for this moment of violence.
With Lincoln gone, other men had to go about the job of closing out the war and creating a peace. One of these was Andrew Johnson, unluckiest of politicians, still living down the sorry spectacle born of ill health and whiskey when he took the oath of office; somewhat dazed, now, able for the immediate present to do no more than assure callers that treason must be made odious and that the martyred President's program would be carried out, while Secretary
Stanton reigned as temporary dictator. Another was General Sherman, who tried earnestly to do what Lincoln would have wanted him to do, misunderstood what that might be, and blundered into a short-lived peace treaty with Joe Johnston that aroused the worst suspicions of all of the radicals.
It was strange, about Sherman. He was the worst the South had to fear, the man who had burned his way across Georgia and South Carolina exulting in destruction, brutal and ruthless and wholly without compassion: emerging suddenly as an advocate of the softest peace, giving to the defeated Confederates so much more than Lincoln himself was willing to give that he almost wrecked his own career. Grant was praised for magnanimity because he let Lee's soldiers keep their side-arms and their horses: Sherman seemed willing to let the men who surrendered to him—all Confederate soldiers from Carolina to the Rio Grande, as he and Johnston set it up—keep everything but complete independence. Stanton's anger when he heard about it was matched only by Sherman's anger when he learned what Stanton was saying about him.
From the day he took command in North Carolina, Joe Johnston felt that his principal duty was to make a decent peace. He fought his last battle on March 19, attacking a wing of Sherman's army at Bentonville in a vain attempt to win a victory before Schofield came up, and after this fight he found himself obliged to withdraw to the region of Raleigh and await developments. By the first week in April he had about 18,000 effective infantry; Sherman and Schofield, united now, had more than 80,000, and when he learned of Lee's surrender Johnston was convinced that it was time to quit. On April 12 he saw President Davis at Greensboro and told him frankly that "it would be the greatest of human crimes for us to continue the war," adding that the President should "exercise at once the only function of government still in his possession and open negotiations for peace." When the harassed President explained that the Federals would not recognize his authority to negotiate Johnston blandly pointed out that his military commanders could do it for him . . . and won permission to write to General Sherman.7
So Johnston and Sherman met in a little cabin near Durham Station, North Carolina, on April 17. As soldiers, they respected each other—-they had indeed developed an odd sort of mutual liking, although they had not met before—and when Johnston admitted that his military position was hopeless, Sherman confessed that "to push an army whose commander had so frankly and honestly confessed his inability to cope with me were cowardly and unworthy the brave men I led." Both generals were worried that the end of organized Confederate resistance would bring guerrilla warfare and general disorder, and instead of talking about Johnston's surrender they presently began to discuss an all-embracing settlement that would cover every armed Confederate everywhere. Sherman observed that Johnston had no authority over any army but his own, but Johnston said that could be fixed; not far away was General John C. Breckinridge, who two months earlier had replaced James A. Seddon as Confederate Secretary of War, and Breckinridge had power over all the armies. So the men met again on April 18, this time with Breckinridge present, and out of this came a strange document that undertook to settle everything.8
This document was entitled "A Memorandum or Basis of Agreement," and it contained several interesting items.
All Confederate armies (it said) were to go to their state capitals, disband, deposit their weapons in state arsenals and agree to cease from all acts of war and submit to Federal authority; the deposited weapons, pending action by the United States Congress, could be used "to maintain peace and order within the borders of the states." (This would take care of guerrillas and marauders.) State governments would be recognized as soon as state officers took the oath of allegiance to the Constitution of the United States, Federal courts would be re-established, and Southerners would be guaranteed "their political rights and franchises, as well as their rights of person and property, as defined by the Constitution of the United States and of the states, respectively." There would be amnesty for everyone, with an armistice while the word got around; and as a final note Johnston and Sherman admitted that they had not been empowered to sign any such agreement as this but promised "to promptly obtain the necessary authority and to carry out the above program."
Thus the generals, inept but well-intentioned, tried to arrange things so that the nation could live at peace; fighting men have made worse mistakes, and have shown less humanity making them. . . . Sherman sent the document to
Grant by courier, with a letter explaining that this was total victory: it made peace, restored the Union and settled the problem of guerrilla warfare, and "if you can get the President to simply indorse the copy and commission me to carry out the terms, I will follow them to the conclusion."0
Sherman is rarely called an innocent, but no other word applies here. Rushing in where no reasonably sophisticated angel would dare to tread, he had composed and signed something that practically recognized the Confederacy, took reconstruction entirely out of the hands of President and Congress, left the South fully armed and cast grave doubt on the validity of emancipation; every line of it written with the purest motives a man could have. Grant realized that it was all wrong the moment he saw it, and hurried to show it to Secretary Stanton; and on the night of April 21 President Johnson and the cabinet unhesitatingly rejected the agreement and sent Grant off to Raleigh to break the news to Sherman. The armistice must be canceled and Johnston must be called on to surrender on exactly the terms that had been given Lee.
Sherman was not badly surprised, some remnant of practical judgment having warned him, apparently, that what he and Johnston had done would be too much for the War Department. Grant was tactful, keeping his visit as nearly secret as possible so that Sherman's soldiers would not realize that their general had been overruled by the general-in-chief in person; Sherman obeyed orders cheerfully, Johnston was summoned to a new conference, and on April 26 he and Sherman signed terms duplicating those signed at Appomattox. What infuriated Sherman was his discovery, shortly after this, that Stanton had made a merciless public attack on him, saying that Sherman had willfully violated President Lincoln's orders, implying that he had granted an armistice in order to let Jefferson Davis escape, and stopping just short of accusing him of actual disloyalty. With public statements and an unofficial prodding of news correspondents, Stanton had opened a campaign that seemed designed to drive Sherman out of public life altogether.10
This, as a matter of fact, it never came close to doing, and it was not what Stanton really had in mind. The Northern public had no sooner digested this attack than it learned that Joe Johnston had surrendered all over again, giving up 39,000 soldiers and closing out the war everywhere except along the Gulf Coast and beyond the Mississippi, and it was hard to feel hostile toward the soldier who had forced this development. Sherman was a popular hero in the North anyway, and although Stanton's attack aroused Sherman's undying hatred it accomplished no more . . . except that it served notice on one and all that reconstruction was not to be hurried for the sake of an easy solution, which probably is just what it was meant to do in the first place.
Sherman had stumbled onto a fact that was basic to everything that happened in the reconstruction period.
Once such soldiers as Lee and Johnston formally accepted military defeat, there would be amazingly little trouble in getting the seceded states to reaccept the Union—provided that these states were allowed to interpret emancipation and Negro rights in their own way. The dream of an independent Southern nation was fading rapidly, and what was left of it could spiral off into Lost Cause romanticism without ever again being a real problem to anyone; what remained, however, touched with no romanticism whatever, was the determination that the Negro, slave or free, must stay just about where he was and must on no account be given any real control over his own destiny. On this point the reserves of resistance were all but inexhaustible. Sherman warned Chief Justice Chase that to assert political equality for the Negro might "rekindle the war" on a bloodier and more destructive basis than ever. At about this time General Oliver Otis Howard was made head of the new Freedman's Bureau, which was supposed to see to it that the former slave got fair treatment all along the line, and Sherman advised him that there was no sense in going to extremes about it. To provide votes for the Negro, for instance, was to court grave danger: "If that be attempted, we arouse a new and dangerous element, prejudice, which, right or wrong, does exist and should be consulted. . . . As we have just emerged from one attempted revolution it would be wrong to begin another."11
. . . possibly wrong; and unquestionably much more trouble than most people were prepared to take now. There was not going to be a second revolution. Practical men were going to agree that although prejudice must be deplored it must also be consulted, and as Montgomery Blair had predicted a year earlier, once good conservatives everywhere recognized their common interests the high fever of radicalism would subside. Lincoln was dead, and no one else could arouse the terrible enthusiasm that he aroused, or make sensible use of what remained of it. For that matter, Lee was a soldier no longer and the terrible enthusiasm he had evoked was not transferable, either; perhaps men everywhere had used all of the enthusiasm they had, for a time, and instead of trying to think what the war meant were content simply to know that it had stopped.
It came to its close swiftly, once the Northern President and the two great Southern armies died. Mr. Davis clung valiantly to what remained of his position, and even after Johnston's surrender he hoped that somewhere to the west a formal center of organized resistance to Federal conquest could be kept alive. As long as he and his cabinet were together, the Confederacy had a capital: if only it could be planted somewhere. It could not; and as the presidential party flitted south, across the Carolinas and down into Georgia, the most anyone dared to hope was that President Davis could get to some safe place where Federal vengeance could not reach him. It was probably just as well that Secretary Stanton never heard the story that was current around Mr. Davis' headquarters just now. At the conference with Johnston, it was said, Sherman had quietly told Secretary Breckinridge that he would provide a ship if Mr. Davis wanted to leave the country, guaranteeing safe passage to some foreign land for Mr. Davis and his family and their effects. Postmaster General John Reagan said long afterward that Mr. Davis rejected the offer, both because he did not want to be under obligations to any Yankee and because he refused to leave "Confederate soil" while a single Confederate regiment remained under arms.12
