Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (77 page)

D
avid Howe was an officer, but evidently no gentleman.

Around noon on July 14, 1863, Howe turned the corner at the foot of Prince Street in the mostly Irish North End of Boston. His job was to deliver notices to an unstated number of Prince Street men that their names had been pulled from a drum by draft enrollment officers, and under the terms of the new Federal Enrollment Act, they had ten days to report for induction into the United States Army. Serving these notices was not a popular job, and on an upstairs floor in one Prince Street building Howe was confronted by an Irish woman who refused to accept what was probably a notice for one of the men in her family. She must not have found either Howe’s manners or Howe’s news all that welcome, because after some time spent arguing, the woman hauled off and slapped Howe across the face.
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Enraged at the woman’s boldness, Howe announced that as an agent of the United States government, he intended to have the woman arrested, which he may have supposed would shut her up fast. It didn’t. She shrieked and howled more loudly, and in short order a curious and not altogether friendly-looking crowd began to drift together around Howe. The nervous officer hurriedly descended to the street with the crowd milling after him, and there a quick-witted policeman bundled him into a store at the corner of Prince and Causeway Streets and persuaded the crowd to disperse. After a while the coast seemed clear, and Howe quietly stepped back out into Prince Street with as much of his dignity as he had left. His timing could not have been worse. The crowd from the Irish woman’s building had dispersed only long
enough to gather up sticks, stones, and reinforcements, and they came boiling down Prince Street just in time to catch Howe out in the open, where they proceeded to beat the draft officer to within an inch of his life.
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Howe’s erstwhile police protector now sent off for more policemen. By the time they arrived, the crowd had swollen to more than 300 people, and they nearly stomped the hapless coppers to death. With its blood up, the crowd needed direction, and according to the
Boston Journal
, it got it from “an Irishwoman” who held up “a photograph of her boy who she said was killed in battle,” and led them all to Haymarket Square, four blocks away. It was now 2:00
PM
, and the crowd was numbering near 500.
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Massachusetts governor John Andrew was at that moment across the Charles River listening to the salutatorian at the Harvard College commencement drone out a scrupulously esoteric oration in Latin. Andrew was on the point of nodding off when an aide jabbed him awake with an urgent message about a disturbance in the North End. Andrew had been anticipating trouble in Boston, but not over the draft: the all-black 55th Massachusetts had been due to parade through Boston and Andrew had prudently put the militia and Federal artillerymen from the harbor forts on notice in case race-baiting toughs tried to stir up a little trouble. Andrew’s face paled at the whispered news, causing the Harvard salutatorian to forget his Latinate lines, and the governor abruptly walked off the platform and left the commencement audience stewing in whisper and rumor. By 6:00
PM
Andrew had mobilized four companies of militia and a battery of artillery and ordered them to rendezvous at the Cooper Street arsenal, only two blocks from Haymarket Square; in another hour, two companies of Federal heavy artillerymen were on their way to the arsenal as well.
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The heavy artillerymen were the last to arrive at the Cooper Street arsenal, and they were only just in time. Around seven-thirty, a mob nearly 1,000 strong roared around the corner of Cooper Street, throwing bricks and bottles and shattering the glass in the arsenal windows. The officers in charge of the troops in the arsenal—Federal artillery major Stephen Cabot and Massachusetts militia captain E. J. Jones—stepped outside and ordered the crowd to disperse. Instead, the rocks and bottles now came showering down on the two officers, and some of the militia fired a volley over the heads of the crowd to scare them into flight. The volley only maddened the mob, and now the enraged men and women in the street began an attack on the arsenal in earnest, hurling paving stones, bricks, and anything else they could lay hands on. Like the Richmond bread riot three months before, women angrily took charge of the assault. A Boston reporter saw “one Amazonian woman… with
hair streaming, arms swinging, and her face the picture of phrenzy… rushed again and again to the assault.” One neighborhood girl remembered women holding up their infants to the windows of the arsenal and daring the soldiers inside to shoot.
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Cabot refused to allow his men to fire. But after forty-five minutes, the crowd began slamming its collective weight against the arsenal doors, and Cabot had no choice but to order one of the 6-pounder howitzers his artillerymen had brought with them loaded with a double charge of canister. At eight-fifteen the door gave way before the mob, and Cabot gave the order to fire. The gun blast blew the mob back into the street, and within a few minutes they had scattered out of sight. Eight people were dead, four of them small children.

The mob was not done, however. Bloodied and desperate, the crowd regrouped around the corner and broke into whatever gun shops they could find for weapons. Robertson James, a second lieutenant in the 54th Massachusetts, barricaded himself with a dozen other soldiers on the upper floor of Read’s Gun Shop; below, the mob was “hunting down any man in certain localities… wearing the uniform of our army.” As James recalled, black soldiers’ lives “were not worth five minutes purchase.” As they worked their way down the line of shops that led toward old Faneuil Hall, the rioters were headed off by a squad of policemen, two companies of militia, a company of mounted dragoons with drawn sabers, and the mayor of Boston with the Riot Act in his hand. The shiver of sabers in the red summer sunset cowed them, and the mob gradually broke up and faded into the oncoming dusk. By 11:00
PM
, Boston was quiet again.
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With that, it became apparent even to the most blue-dyed Yankee and the most radical Republican that Richmond was not the only city in 1863 that was beginning to stagger under the weight of the war’s burdens. No city in America was more identified with abolitionism than Boston; no governor had pressed more quickly or more tirelessly to move emancipation and abolition to the front of the war agenda than Governor John Andrew. But the people in the streets of Boston had not been prepared for the costs that a war to emancipate African American slaves would impose on them. They had certainly not bargained for the war to turn into a nightmare that requisitioned their sons, brothers, and fathers by force, then sent them off to be slaughtered either to no apparent purpose or in the name of a purpose linked with black freedom. The temper of the war was failing in the North in 1863; emancipation and abolition were all well and good, but they would mean nothing if not secured by Union military victory. And if the war could not be won, and soon, perhaps it might be better to admit that it could never be won at all.

Grant’s victory at Chattanooga in November 1863 brought the Federal armies only one-third of the way between their old base in Kentucky and the Confederacy’s Atlantic and Gulf coastlines. Now that Grant had complete power over all the western Federal armies, he might choose to push southward directly to Atlanta and complete the disruption of the Confederacy’s western rail links, or he might shift his line of operations to aim at Mobile, Alabama, which would close one of the Confederacy’s last remaining ports and, in the process, roll over the Confederacy’s vital foundries and arsenals in northern Alabama.

His first inclination was to strike for Mobile. In August Grant wrote to Charles Dana in the War Department, “I am very anxious to take Mobile while I think it can be done,” and four months later, he told General in Chief Halleck that he wanted “to move by way of New Orleans and Pascagoula on Mobile. …” A move on Atlanta was a logistical impossibility right now, Grant explained to Halleck; instead he proposed to leave only a garrison strong enough to secure Chattanooga, then move the old Army of the Cumberland via steamboat down to New Orleans for the campaign against Mobile “and with the balance of the army make a campaign into the interior of Alabama, and possibly Georgia.” This plan might have the additional bonus of forcing “Lee to abandon Virginia and North Carolina” to protect Georgia. In any case, the government should give up looking to capture Richmond and concentrate its attention on the West instead. Grant was now convinced that the campaigns in Virginia were really only so much tactical boxing, and that the only way to strike a truly decisive blow at the Confederacy was to slash away at its strategic intestines in Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas.
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Halleck replied in January to Grant’s Mobile proposal, cautiously authorizing Grant to proceed—but with the crippling requirement that all of Tennessee first be securely in Union hands. What was more, “I have never considered Richmond as the necessary objective point of the Army of the Potomac,” Halleck added in February. For him, the real question of the war was how best to defeat Lee’s army. If Grant were permitted to concentrate Union forces in the West, then “all the forces which Lee can collect will be moved north, and the popular sentiment will compel the Government to bring back the army… to defend Washington, Baltimore, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia.”

Halleck’s hesitation was not the only wet blanket on Grant’s plans. In January, much to Grant’s annoyance, Nathaniel P. Banks, the Federal military commander in Louisiana, took a joint army-navy expedition up the Red River into the upcountry
of Louisiana and eastern Texas. Banks’s expedition was a political move rather than a military one. Both Lincoln and Banks wanted to consolidate the hold of the newly reconstructed government in occupied Louisiana over the rest of the state (and its valuable cotton) and perhaps send a useful message to the French in Mexico about Federal intentions for Texas. “In regard to General Banks’ campaign… it was undertaken less for military reasons than as a matter of State policy,” Halleck explained to Grant. “It was… connected with our foreign relations, and especially with France and Mexico, that our troops should occupy and hold at least a portion of Texas.” All the same, it drained away men and supplies Grant had been counting on for his Mobile campaign. Just as he had done after Corinth and after Vicksburg, Grant was forced to sit on his triumphs.
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Grant did not sit still for long in Tennessee, any more than he had in Mississippi the year before. In December 1863, Congress proposed to reward Grant for the Chattanooga victory by reviving the rank of lieutenant general, a grade filled only once before in the history of the United States Army, by George Washington. The bill passed the Senate on February 24, 1864, and Halleck then wired Grant to come to Washington to receive the commission.
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The promotion to lieutenant general did two things for Grant. First, it immediately made him senior in rank to Halleck, who remained only a major general, and effectively booted Grant up to general in chief of the Federal armies. Halleck, with uncommon graciousness, stepped aside as general in chief to make way for Grant and assumed the new post of chief of staff to Secretary of War Stanton (a function he had actually been exercising since July 1862). Second, the promotion brought Grant east to meet with Lincoln and Stanton on March 8, and two days later the new lieutenant general rode out to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac to meet George Gordon Meade and take the measure of the eastern army.
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Grant had heard rumors ever since the preceding summer that Lincoln wanted to drop Meade from command of the Army of the Potomac, chiefly because of Meade’s failure to follow and destroy Lee after Gettysburg, and the corollary of these rumors was that Lincoln meant to bring Grant east as Meade’s replacement. Knowing what a
political cockpit the Army of the Potomac was, Grant had no desire whatever to offer himself as the next target for East Coast military intrigue. In the same letter in August 1863 in which he had broached the Mobile plan to Charles Dana, Grant laboriously thanked Dana “for your timely intercession in saving me from going to the Army of the Potomac. Whilst I would disobey no order I should beg very hard to be excused before accepting that command.” Even after his appointment as general in chief, Grant seems to have been determined to keep his headquarters in the west, and proceed with his plans to give the Army of the Potomac the shorter end of the strategic stick.
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In spite of himself, Grant was impressed with Meade and the army, and the War Department and various Republican congressional nabobs pressed on Grant the fact that Congress had bestowed the grade of lieutenant general on Grant principally in the hopes that he would lead the Army of the Potomac into battle against Lee in a showdown of tactical wits. “Unless this army of foes is defeated and broken, and our Capitol relieved of its fierce frowns,” argued Grant’s own chief of staff, John A. Rawlins, “we cannot hope that the recognition of the rebel government will be much longer postponed by European governments.”
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By the time Grant returned to Nashville, he had decided to move his headquarters east and take up general tactical command of the eastern theater. He also revised his plans for operations in Virginia to include yet another overland campaign across the Rappahannock for the Army of the Potomac in order to confront Lee and bring the Army of Northern Virginia to battle.

Grant knew that he was taking considerable risks in coming east. For one thing, he was a westerner and a stranger with surprisingly little personal grandeur or charisma about him. “Grant is a man of a good deal of rough dignity; rather taciturn; quick and decided in speech,” observed Theodore Lyman as he studied the new commander. “He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it.” It took easterners such as Lyman some time to get used to a general who had no interest in fine reviews and hip-hiphoorah. “Grant… paid us a visit yesterday,” George Washington Whitman wrote to his mother on April 14, 1864. “There was no grand Review as is generally the case, but the Regiments just fell in line and Grant rode along and looked at them and then went on about his business.” A civilian friend of one of Grant’s staff officers was amazed that “there is no glitter or parade about him. To me he seems but an earnest business man.”
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