Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (35 page)

Friends of freedom! be up and doing;—now is your time. The tyrant’s extremity is your opportunity! Let the long crushed bondman arise! and in this auspicious moment, snatch back the liberty of which he has been so long robbed and despoiled. Now is the day, and now is the hour!
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Three days after Lincoln’s April 15, 1861, militia proclamation was issued, a company of “Hannibal Guards” from Pittsburgh offered its services, declaring that “although deprived of all political rights, we yet wish the government of the United States to be sustained against the tyranny of slavery, and are willing to assist in any honorable way or manner to sustain the present administration.” One hundred and fifteen black students from Wilberforce University offered themselves as a company to Ohio governor William Dennison in 1861, and when Federal forces occupied New Orleans in the spring of 1862, three regiments of black and Creole Louisianans who made up the Louisiana Native Guards proposed to volunteer as entire units for Federal service.

In every case, the black volunteers were turned away. “My belief is that any attempt to make soldiers of negroes will prove an ignominious failure and should they get into battle the officers who command them will be sacrificed,” reflected the artist turned cavalry colonel David Hunter Strother in May 1862. A Pennsylvania sergeant was more blunt: “We don’t want to fight side and side by the nigger. We think we are too superior a race for that.”
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Not until Congress amended the Militia Act in July 1862 did Lincoln have the presidential discretion to begin enlisting black soldiers as he saw fit, and only after the Emancipation Proclamation became official was black recruitment begun in earnest. At first black recruits were mustered into state volunteer regiments such as the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry, the 29th Connecticut Colored Infantry, and the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Infantry, and they limited blacks to service in the ranks (as a result of border state opposition in Congress, commissions as officers were reserved for whites). In May 1863 the War Department created a Bureau of Colored Troops to organize and muster black troops directly into Federal service as the 1st through the 138th United States Colored Troops (USCT), along with six regiments of U.S. Colored Cavalry, fourteen of heavy artillery, and ten batteries of light artillery. The USCT units remained racially segregated ones, and not until the end of the war did the War Department agree to pay them on an equal plane with white soldiers. All the same, they promised to treat the disease of rebellion “in the shape of warm lead and cold steel, duly administered by two hundred thousand black doctors.”
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In the process, they shocked a number of white Union soldiers out of their smug bigotry. “I never believed in niggers before,” wrote one Wisconsin cavalryman, “but by Jesus, they are hell in fighting.” Lincoln was confident that the biggest surprise would be the one experienced by the rebels. “The bare sight of fifty thousand armed and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi would end the rebellion at once,” Lincoln wrote to Andrew Johnson, the Unionist military governor of Tennessee. “And who doubts that we can present that sight if we but take hold in earnest.”
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Eventually 178,000 African Americans enlisted in the Union army, and almost 10,000 served in the navy.

Lincoln was fully conscious, when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, that he was sending the war and the country down a very different road than people had thought they would go. If he seems to have taken an unconscionably long time about taking that turn, and if he made a number of ambiguous utterances about the relationship of the war and slavery beforehand, it was largely because all of Lincoln’s instincts led him to avoid tumultuous challenges over issues and seek evasions or compromises that would allow him to get the decision he wanted without paying the costs. He had yet to confront for himself the full implications of some of the issues of black freedom and black equality, and he knew that the North was even further from having come to grips with them. Nevertheless, “no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done,” Lincoln realized.
To bring African Americans out of slavery and into the war to save the Union meant that the Union, if victorious, had an immense obligation to grant them full political equality as Americans. In his mind, it had become “a religious duty” to see that “these people, who have so heroically… demonstrated in blood their right to the ballot,” get the “humane protection of the flag they have so fearlessly defended.”
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The problem Lincoln would now face would be finding a general for the Army of the Potomac with a similar vision for the war. And when he finally dismissed George B. McClellan in November 1862, he had no idea that it would take two more bloody years before he would find one.

T
he Mississippi is well worth reading about,” wrote Mark Twain in the opening lines of
Life on the Mississippi
. “It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable.” For Twain, who was born beside it and worked upon it, most of that remarkableness was a matter of the colorful characters who populated the river, the clusters of peculiar towns along its banks, and the eccentricities of the broad, slow-winding river itself. For foreign travelers in the South, it was the sheer dimensions of the river and the vast cross section of life it contained that regularly left their mouths agape. When British war correspondent William Howard Russell arrived in Memphis in 1861, he was bewildered by how the river embraced “this strange kaleidoscope of Negroes and whites, of extremes of civilisation in its American development… of enormous steamers on the river, which bears equally the dug-out or canoe of the black fisherman” and “all the phenomena of active commercial life… included in the same scope of vision which takes in at the other side of the Mississippi lands scarcely settled.” The Mississippi was almost more than a river: as Twain remembered it, the Mississippi was “the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun” with “the dense forest away on the other side” and “the ‘point’ above, and the ‘point’ below, bounding the river-glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one.”
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Twain and Russell were not the only ones in 1862 concerned with the grandeur of the Mississippi River. Both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln had traveled, worked, and lived on the Mississippi and knew it well. Lincoln had grown up in Indiana and Illinois with the talk of the river and its great tributaries all around him, and in his youth Lincoln had conveyed cargoes of goods downriver on flatboats. Jefferson Davis’s sprawling plantation, Brierfields, occupied a portion of Davis Bend, eighty miles on the river above Natchez, Mississippi. But the immediate concern of both Davis and Lincoln with the river in 1862 was practical, not aesthetic or romantic. Whatever else the river was to Americans, it had been the great commercial highway of the American republic ever since Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase had acquired undisputed title to the territories it watered.

Before the Revolution, the economy of Britain’s North American colonies was hooked into Britain’s transatlantic trading networks, and the economic geography of that trade ran eastward, to the Atlantic seaboard. With the creation of the United States, and Britain’s surrender of all of its former colonial territory over the Appalachian Mountains, white settlers poured over the mountain passes into Kentucky, Tennessee, the Northwest territories, and eventually (after Andrew Jackson had ruthlessly cleared out the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Indians) the Alabama and Mississippi territories. Rather than attempting to trade their agricultural surpluses back over the Appalachians, the new settlers discovered instead that it was much easier to trundle their goods down to the broad navigable rivers that drained the trans-Appalachian territories—the Ohio, Cumberland, Tennessee, and Missouri Rivers. All of those rivers flowed west and south, away from the old Atlantic seaboard trading centers, and all of them emptied into the even broader southward flow of the Mississippi.

Taken together the entire Mississippi River system pulled into itself the commerce of 1.25 million square miles in a gigantic net that stretched to include Pittsburgh in the east and St. Louis in the west. The Mississippi was the commercial highway of the old Northwest and the new cotton lands of the Mississippi Delta, and it tied westerners and southerners into closer economic units than westerners enjoyed with the old East Coast. Pittsburgh, Wheeling, St. Louis, Louisville, Memphis, Natchez, and Cincinnati all grew rich on their trade southward on the river system. It was the river, too, that helped to throw Southerners into the lap of the Democratic Party in the 1830s and 1840s, since they had no wish to help the Whigs build canals and highways in the North when the river brought the nation’s commerce their way simply by force of nature. The South had in the Mississippi River system all the cheap water transportation it needed without the taxation necessary for funding “internal improvements,” and Southerners had no wish to see their western trading partners lured back toward the East by artificial networks of canals or turnpikes.

The river, however, was only a river until Americans actually learned how to use it, and the key to opening up the potential of the Mississippi River system was the
steamboat. In 1811, the first steam-powered vessel on the Mississippi River system was built at Pittsburgh and sent down the Ohio to the Mississippi. It easily beat out the travel time needed by flatboats to work down the rivers, and within a decade newer and faster steamboats cut the travel time from the Gulf to Louisville to under a week. By 1820, there were 89 steamboats operating on the Ohio and Mississippi; by 1840, there were 536. They could penetrate even the smaller rivers in the Mississippi system and cut the costs of shipping every kind of marketable good. In particular, the steamboats were a godsend to cotton agriculture. Baled cotton was bulky and expensive to ship to markets, and before the steamboats, shipping costs cut severely into its profitability. Prior to the 1820s, it cost as much as $5 to move 100 pounds of cotton downriver from Louisville. With the coming of the steamboats, the freight rates fell in 1830 to only $2 per 100 pounds, and in 1840 to only 25¢. Steam made cotton worth transporting to market, and cotton profits, in turn, underwrote the growth of steam navigation on the western rivers. Even the peculiar design of the riverboats was dictated largely by the need to build large, flat-bottomed river craft that could accommodate the space needed for shipping cotton.
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If the steamboat provided the means for getting the agricultural produce of the west to market, it was the port of New Orleans that provided the greatest marketplace—provided, in fact, one of the great international entrepôts of the world. Down the long river network to New Orleans went most of the grain, hogs, cattle, cotton, and other goods of Ohio, Minnesota, Illinois, and Louisiana; then, in the 1850s, as Tennessee and the border states developed new iron and textile industries, the South’s infant industrial potential poured out onto the rivers and down to New Orleans as well. Up the river from New Orleans, beating against the sluggish brown current of the Mississippi, came the imported goods and manufactures that Southern and western agriculture depended on.

By the outbreak of the Civil War, New Orleans was the sixth-largest city in the United States and the third-largest importer of goods, and it had to accommodate more than 3,500 steamboat arrivals during the year, with more than 2 million tons of freight that earned more than $185 million. It was from New Orleans that William Howard Russell could see “a grand slave confederacy enclosing the Gulf in its arms, and swelling to the shores of the Potomac and Chesapeake, with the entire control of the Mississippi and a monopoly of the great staples on which so much of the manufacture and commerce of England and France depend.”
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It was scarcely noticed that by 1860 some of the Mississippi River system’s grand predominance over the West was already beginning to slip away. Southerners in Congress could block the massive appropriations needed for building the rival systems of national roads and canals that would divert western trade back toward eastern markets, but they could not prevent state legislatures in the North from building canals of their own, such as New York’s Erie Canal, which linked the entire Great Lakes water system with the Hudson River and New York City. Nor could they prevent private railroads—the steam-powered mate of the riverboat—from extending their fingers over the Alleghenies into Ohio and Illinois and across the Mississippi into Missouri. The first commercial rail line began construction on July 4, 1828, with the laying of what would become the 73-mile track of the Baltimore & Ohio rail line; two years later, with the rail line complete, a former brewer and brickmaker named Peter Cooper put his own locomotive,
Tom Thumb
, on the B&O line and hauled the first load of thirty passengers around Baltimore. Within ten years, there was more railroad mileage in the United States than canal mileage, and over the next twenty years the railroads grew to the length of 30,626 miles of track.
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The first warning bell for New Orleans’s slipping control over the commerce of the continent rang on May 5, 1856, when the 430-ton side-wheel steamboat
Effie Afton
rammed a newly opened railroad bridge over the Mississippi at Rock Island, Illinois. The boat burned, and the vessel’s owners—her captain, clerk, and engineer—sued the owners of the bridge—the Rock Island Bridge Company, a subsidiary of the Illinois Central Railroad—on the grounds that the bridge was a hazard to navigation. The case came to trial in federal court in Chicago in July 1857 over whether “the defendants have constructed… a permanent obstruction to commerce on the river.” The real question was whether New Orleans river traffic deserved a better right-of-way than a Yankee railroad. The jury could not come to a verdict, however, and subsequent efforts to appeal the non-verdict to the Supreme Court (in 1863) and the Illinois state courts (in 1875) failed. The steamboat (and New Orleans) had lost.
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