The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (144 page)

He spoke in this connection of “pardons and remissions of forfeiture,” these being things within his right to grant, but he added frankly that there was much else “beyond the Executive power to adjust,” including “the admission of members into Congress, and whatever might require the appropriation of money.” Nor did he sugar his offer, or advice, with any concession on other matters: least of all on the slavery issue. Not only would the Emancipation Proclamation stand, he also urged in the course of his message the adoption of a proposed
amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery throughout the United States. It had nearly passed in the last session, and would surely pass in the next, whose Republican majority had been increased by last month’s election; “And as it is to so go, at all events, may we not agree that the sooner the better?” Above all, he wanted to speak clearly, both to his friends and to his present foes, and he did so in a final one-sentence paragraph addressed to those beyond the wide-flung line of battle: “In stating a single condition of peace, I mean simply to say that the war will cease on the part of the government whenever it shall have ceased on the part of those who began it.”

All this he said, or Nicolay said for him, on December 6. The next ten days were crowded with good news: first from Georgia, where Sherman reached the coast at last, so little worn by his long march that he scarcely paused before he stormed Fort McAllister to make contact with the navy waiting off the mouth of the Ogeechee: then from Middle Tennessee, where Thomas crushed Hood’s left, in front of Nashville, and flung him into full retreat with the loss of more than fifty guns. Lincoln responded by tightening the screws. In late November the War Department had done its part by lowering the minimum standard height for recruits to “five feet, instead of five feet three as heretofore.” Now the Commander in Chief followed through, December
1
9 — Sherman by then had closed in on Savannah, which Hardee would evacuate next day — by issuing another of his by now familiar calls for “300,000 more,” this time presumably including men who were not much taller than the Springfields they would shoulder. Privately, moreover, Stanton assured Grant that still another 200,000 troops would be called up in March if those netted by the current proclamation did not suffice to “close out Lee.”

Success, as usual, fostered impatience and evoked a sense of urgency: especially in Lincoln, who had read with pleasure a message Grant sent Sherman after the fall of Atlanta, just under four months ago: “We want to keep the enemy pressed to the end of the war. If we give him no peace whilst the war lasts, the end cannot be distant.” Sherman then had marched to the sea, eastward across the Confederate heartland, and after taking Savannah, bloodlessly though at the cost of having its garrison escape, obtained approval for a follow-up march north through the Carolinas. He was preparing for it now. “I do not think I can employ better strategy than I have hitherto done,” he wrote Halleck on the last day of the year: “namely, make a good ready and then move rapidly to my objective, avoiding a battle at points where I would be encumbered by my wounded, but striking boldly and quickly when my objective is reached.” Lincoln liked the sound of that, much as he had enjoyed Grant’s hustling tone in the Atlanta dispatch. But when Stanton set out the following week, on a trip down the coast to confer with the red-haired commander, it occurred to the impatient President
that if the Westerners were to come up hard and fast to join in putting the final squeeze on Lee, there had perhaps not been enough stress on the advantage of an early start. Accordingly, he got off a reminding wire to that effect. “While General Sherman’s ‘get a good ready’ is appreciated, and is not to be overlooked,” he told the Secretary,
“Time
, now that the enemy is wavering, is more important than ever.”

His advice to the southern people, tendered in the December message to Congress, had been more grim than conciliatory; they need only reject their “insurgent leader … by laying down their arms,” and he would do what he could for them in the way of “pardons and remissions.” Since then, however, the news from Nashville and Savannah had encouraged him to believe that the hour was near when they would no longer have any choice in the matter, if only he could provoke in his generals the sense of urgency he was convinced would end the rebellion in short order, and he said as much in the wire that followed Stanton down the coast. Now that their adversary was “on the downhill, and somewhat confused,” he wanted the Secretary to impress on Sherman the importance of “keeping him going.”

III

A Tightening Noose

TECUMSEH SHERMAN SHEATHED HIS CLAWS for the occupation of Savannah. Not only did he retain the city’s elected officials at their posts, conducting business more or less as usual; he even allowed Episcopal ministers to omit from their services the traditional prayer for God to “behold and bless” the President of the United States. “Jeff Davis and the devil both need it,” he remarked, implying that Abraham Lincoln didn’t. Meantime he kept a restraining hand on the veterans he had described, on the eve of their arrival, as “burning to avenge the national wrong.” Geary’s division garrisoned the town — milder-mannered Easterners for the most part, whose commander, exercising talents he had developed as mayor of San Francisco a decade back, tempered discipline with compassion. He hauled in firewood to warm the hearths and hearts of citizens, reopened markets for the sale of farm goods, and encouraged public meetings at which, in time, a vote of thanks was tendered “the noble Geary” and a resolution was adopted urging Governor Brown to call a state convention for peace discussions. Savannah’s people knew that this was basically Sherman’s doing, and all in all the consensus was that the red-haired conqueror, whose coming they had so greatly feared while he drew nearer mile by smoky mile, had been maligned by editors whose views were printed in regions he had not visited, so far. If not benign, he proved at any rate forbearing, and certainly not the apocalyptic monster they had been told to expect before he landed in their midst.

He himself was rather amused, seeing in all this a parallel to the behavior in far-off Natchez, well over two years ago, of propertied Confederates who found in coöperation a hope for the preservation, if not of their treasured way of life, then in any case of their fine old homes: an inducement altogether lacking, incidentally, in such new-rich towns as Vicksburg and Atlanta, whose defiance was characterized as an outgrowth of their war-boom attitude. He could chuckle over that,
referring to Savannah’s mayor, Dr Richard D. Arnold, as “completely ‘subjugated.’ ” But there was little of amusement in the reaction of those editors who had warned of his savage nature. “A dangerous bait to deaden the spirit of resistance in other places,” the Richmond
Examiner
said of this pretended mildness down the coast, and the rival
Dispatch
was even more specific that same day, January 7, in exposing the duplicity being practiced. “Sherman seems to have changed his character as completely as the serpent changes his skin with the approach of spring,” the Virginia editor observed, and then discerned a likeness in the general to an animal just as sneaky in its way, but considerably more voracious: “His repose, however, is the repose of the tiger. Let him taste blood once more and he will be as brutal as ever.”

In point of fact, there were sounder grounds for this suppositional metaphor than anyone had any way of knowing without access to certain letters the Ohioan was sending and receiving through this period of rest and preparation. “Should you capture Charleston,” Halleck wrote on learning that the Carolina march had been approved, “I hope that by
some accident
the place may be destroyed, and if a little salt should be sown upon its site it may prevent the growth of future crops of nullification and secession.” Sherman’s plan was not to move on Charleston, “a mere desolated wreck … hardly worth the time it would take to starve it out,” but rather to feint simultaneously at that point and Augusta, respectively on the right and left of his true line of march, and strike instead at Columbia, the capital between. However, he told Halleck, “I will bear in mind your hint as to Charleston, and do not think ‘salt’ will be necessary. When I move, the XV Corps” — Logan’s: the Illinois soldier-politician returned to duty January 8, bringing Lincoln’s congratulatory thank-you note along — “will be on the right of the right wing, and their position will naturally bring them into Charleston first.… If you have watched the history of that corps, you will have remarked that they generally do their work pretty well.”

Nor was that the worst of it, by far. For all the alarm rebel editors felt on contemplating the repose of the tiger in coastal Georgia, they would have been a great deal more disturbed, and with equal justification, if they had known what was in store for them throughout the rest of their country east of the Mississippi. Sherman’s march to scourge the Carolinas on his way to gain Lee’s rear, while altogether the heftiest, was by no means the only move Grant planned to make on the thousand-mile-wide chessboard he pored over in his tent at City Point. The time had come to close out the Confederacy entirely, he believed, and he proceeded accordingly. He did so, moreover, not without a measure of personal satisfaction, although this was incidental to his larger purpose. Benjamin Prentiss, John McClernand, Don Carlos Buell, William Rosecrans, all had incurred his displeasure in the course of his rise to the top of the military heap — with the result that, shelved or snubbed into retirement,
they were all four out of the war. And so too now, to all effect, was George Thomas: or soon would be, so far at least as a share in the final victory was concerned. Idle since its mid-December triumph over Hood, his army was quite the largest force available for carrying out the peripheral work Grant had in mind, but the general-in-chief had no intention of exposing himself to another nerve-wracking span of trying to prod Old Slow Trot into motion. Instead he proposed to do to the Virginian, in the wake of the botched pursuit that followed Nashville, what Halleck had done to Grant himself after Shiloh and Vicksburg; to wit, dismember him. This he would do by dispersing his troops — some 46,000 of them, all told — leaving Thomas with barely a third of his present command to garrison Middle and East Tennessee and northern Alabama: a thankless assignment, unlikely to call for much fighting, if any, unless Lee somehow managed to get away westward, in which case Thomas would be expected to stand in his path while Meade and Sherman came up in his rear to accomplish his destruction.