In the summer of 1864 Lincoln and the Republican stalwarts
thought they might lose the November election, and with it the war.
The two campaigns were inextricably linked. Without a military
breakthrough by Grant in Virginia and Sherman before Atlanta,
antiwar sentiment was bound to keep rising in a strong but tired
North, while in the exhausted South not losing meant winning. Peace
feelers were sent out. The Confederates appreciated their value as
instruments of psychological warfare; indeed this was their real
purpose. For on substance, the two sides were as far apart as they
had been when the war began, with Lincoln defending the
abolitionist position and Davis adamant on the bedrock Southern
ideology, white supremacy.
In this sense as in so many others—especially, alas, in the way
it inaugurated industrial warfare—the American Civil War represents
the leapfrogging of the United States ahead of its Old World
progenitors. The French Revolution and its war against the
monarchial regimes of Europe had invented ideological conflict, as
well as mass mobilizations. Waterloo and the Concert of Europe put
a brake on this trend but was unable to consign it to the shelf of
bad ideas best forgotten.
It may have been, and probably was, a lousy idea, but it could
not be forgotten. Too many demons had been let loose. In the
American case, a conservative revolution, to secure ancient English
rights, was subverted by the institution of slavery and the
unwillingness of the revolutionary generation to put an end to it.
They outlawed the Atlantic slave trade and hoped, not unreasonably,
the expanding continental economy would render the whole wicked
thing impractical. Instead, as every schoolboy knows, a man named
Eli Whitney invented a machine called the cotton gin and slave
labor became economically profitable.
The line from there to the conundrum of the summer of 1864 and
its deep and abiding ideological connotations was by no means
straight. But we see it that way now. We have to. We make some
sense of history, knowing that we do this not because there is any
sense in history, but because it is human to do so—otherwise it can
only be, as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus called it, a nightmare
from which are trying to awake.
I happen to have been reading James McPherson’s magisterial work
of 1988, Battle Cry of Freedom. It is a narrative history,
from the Missouri Compromise (1820) to the end of the Civil War,
when the American promise was fulfilled. It was fulfilled by the
defeat of the Southern slavocracy, the passage of the 13th
Amendment abolishing slavery, and the vision of a “rebirth of
freedom,” “with malice toward none.”
It was all so long ago; what meaning can it have to us today?
What relevance? What importance?
With understated erudition—he knows everything—and a wonderful
story-telling manner, McPherson takes the reader, late in the book,
through the hair-raising summer and autumn of ’64, when it really
seemed possible that Lincoln would either be repudiated by his own
party or would lose to McClellan, the leader of the peace
Democrats, and the whole ghastly sacrifice of the past four years
would be for naught. It really could have happened. History is not
foreordained.
Then Sherman took Atlanta and Lee’s army—or the part of it
commanded by Jubal Early—was routed in the Shenandoah Valley by
Sheridan in an absolutely extraordinary feat of snatching victory
from defeat. The war, in military terms, was over, although it
dragged on into the first months of 1865. Lincoln’s re-election was
saved, and with it the Union, the end of slavery, and, in
fine, America.
What good fortune we had. Had we a James Buchanan or a Martin
Van Buren instead of Lincoln, the whole experiment would have most
likely crashed and failed.
And Lincoln: “…to General Grant, his skillful officers, and
brave men, all [honor] belongs.…” Far be it from him to seek
political or any other advantage in a military victory that
happened on his watch. In our time, we know what a president does
when something good happens despite his helpless, clueless
policies, pursued with neither vision nor purpose. In the same
speech, Lincoln expanded upon one of the main issues of the
forthcoming reconstruction, namely how to integrate the former
slaves politically and otherwise. Without rancor and with the
utmost common sense, he suggested that white and black find a path
toward gradual political equality.
He never played the race card, nor did he ever play the
celebrity card. He needed neither, and neither did the
country.
