March 7, 1865---"A strong Union party"

MARCH 7, 1865:        

Ray W. Potter of New York City patents the tintype.

 

General William Tecumseh Sherman and his rampaging army reach the northern border of South Carolina at Cheraw, on the Great Pee Dee River. He halts his force before crossing over into North Carolina to issue new Orders:

"All officers and soldiers of this command are reminded that the State of North Carolina was one of the last States that passed the ordinance of secession. And from the commencement of the war there has been in this State a strong union party...it should not be assumed that the inhabitants are enemies of our government, and it is to be hoped that every effort will be made to prevent any wanton destruction of property, or any unkind treatment of citizens."

North Carolina was in fact the last State to secede and join the Confederacy, and it has contributed more men to the Union cause than any other seceded State, excepting Tennessee (which sent more men north than south).

Most of the Tidewater Coast of North Carolina has been firmly in Union hands since 1862 at the latest, and the western, mountainous third of the State is so heavily pro-Union that Confederate recruiters lose their lives traveling there. Only central North Carolina --- the region Sherman plans to cross --- has a sizeable contingent of Confederates, mostly among its tobacco and cotton planters and among its slaveholding smallholders. Having used the stick in Georgia and the torch in South Carolina, Sherman believes that North Carolina can be won over with the carrot. The terrified Tarheels, having heard word of Sherman’s merciless degradation of South Carolina and Georgia, are shocked when his massive army marches into the State and proceeds northeastward in picture-book ranks.

Sherman has his depot at Wilmington, and does not need to forage for supplies. He knows his army of 80,000 is facing Joe Johnston’s army of 25,000 only a few miles across the State. He keeps his men organized and on high alert, ready for a fight.

For his part, General Joseph E. Johnston C.S.A. could be more ready, but he has no choice. Just as the grass begins to green, there is going to be a showdown amidst the rolling hills of North Carolina. Whether Johnston knows this is the endgame or not, it must be played out.

March 6, 1865---The Battle of Natural Bridge, Florida

MARCH 6, 1865:       

The Battle of Natural Bridge:

Florida is the forgotten child of the Confederacy. With a tiny population in 1860 (140,000, divided 60% White-40% Black), Florida’s manpower contribution to the Confederacy was less than 20,000. It did, however, send more of its men to fight than any other State, North or South per capita.

Florida’s Civil War history is obscure. There are no great Floridian Generals. No massed armies fought in Florida. Florida missed its opportunity to be the birthplace of the Civil War in early April 1861 when local Confederates permitted the Union to resupply Fort Pickens in the Panhandle rather than draw a line in the sand as the South Carolinians did at Fort Sumter a week later.

The Union bottled up Florida’s ports fairly early in the war, and the State’s largest city --- Key West ---flew the Stars and Stripes throughout the war (although the city acted in effect as a neutral port serving both combatants).

Florida’s role in the war was as a supply depot for the Rebel Cause. The State provided the Confederacy with millions of tons of salt, beef, pork, cereals, grains, fruits, lumber, and other supplies between 1861 and 1865. 

The battles in Florida rate only footnotes in the great histories of the Civil War. Even the largest battle in the State, at Olustee in February 1864, hardly rates a mention but for the fact that it ended in a Confederate victory that saw the slaughter of negro Union troops.

For the most part, the Union dominated Florida in the Civil War though it did not retake it. The State became a refuge for deserters and for people fleeing the battles further north. An unknown number of fighting men disappeared down into the heart of the peninsula or moved southward along the coasts.

There was a strong Unionist contingent in the State, even though Florida’s politics were dominated by the Panhandle-based Plantation Belt. As of March 1865, only two State capitals remained in Confederate hands --- faraway Austin in the Trans-Mississippi, and Florida’s own Tallahassee.

On February 26^th, a large Union force made an amphibious landing at Cedar Key, planning to seize (and burn) Tallahassee before moving north through westernmost Georgia. Opposing them were a mere handful of toothless Confederate regiments worn out from battle elsewhere, a few companies of well-drilled State Militia, and a grab-bag collection of ill-armed, ill-trained, but determined County and local irregulars.

The invading Union force was made up largely of U.S.C.T.

The defending Confederate force was led by Generals William Milton C.S.A. (the son of the Governor), William Miller C.S.A., and Samuel Jones C.S.A. 

The Union troops had been harried in their progress up the St. Marks River, and when they reached Natural Bridge, just before Tallahassee, they were met by a force consisting of every local man who could hold a rifle, including squads of teenaged cadets from West Florida Seminary’s Day School (now Florida State University).

Intending to take the natural bridge that spanned the St. Marks River (and gave the town its name at the time --- it is now Woodville), the Union forces struck aggressively at the C.S. force. Driven back, for a time the Grays yielded the natural bridge to the Blues, but soon regrouped, called for reinforcements, and drove the Yankees away from the river. The Confederates poured fire into the Union ranks, especially the U.S.C.T. units, who sustained heavy casualties.

The Union launched three separate assaults on the Confederate force as the day wore on. The fight degenerated into hand-to-hand combat with bayonets. Battered but defiant, the worn-out Southern regiments and irregulars held the natural bridge against all odds and expectations, denying the Union access to Tallahassee. As the shadows lengthened, the Union commander called off the attack, and withdrew down the St. Marks River back to Cedar Key. The Confederates did not pursue. 

The Union commander, General John Newton, a Virginian by birth, later admitted he was surprised at the tenacity of the local forces. The Confederate veterans of the fight afterward expressed the general opinion that the Union too readily sacrificed U.S.C.T. units. As at Olustee, the Floridian forces were convinced of the inferiority of black soldiers, though no post-battle butchery of blacks went on.  By now familiar with Confederate sentiments toward black fighting men, the Union commanders tried to leave no man behind.

The Union lost 150 men in the battle, while the Confederates lost only 25. A small battle in scale, the Battle of Natural Bridge nevertheless was historically significant as the final Confederate strategic victory of the Civil War.  The South held on to Tallahassee, and the destruction planned for far western Georgia never took place.

March 5, 1865---"Lincoln's Sword"*

MARCH 5, 1865:       

Among the mass of spectators who attended the Inauguration is John Wilkes Booth, within only a few yards of Lincoln as the President speaks. Within six weeks, the famous actor will kill the President.

As day dawns on a world altered by the Second Inaugural, small battles are raging in northern Florida, near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and outside of Petersburg, Virginia.  In South Carolina, General Sherman burns the town of McPherson.

The author and historian Douglas L. Wilson refers to Lincoln’s skill with words as “Lincoln’s Sword,” and in an eponymous book, Wilson titles the chapter on the Second Inaugural simply as “ A Truth That Needed To Be Told.” The Second Inaugural, along with the “House Divided” speech of the prewar years,  Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech in Brooklyn and the “Lost Speech” at Chicago, the lyric but ultimately ineffective First Inaugural, and the Emancipation Proclamation form the canons of what historian Gabor Boritt calls “The Gettysburg Gospel” along with the Gettysburg Address itself. In these remarkable public announcements, Lincoln laid the true foundations of the secular religion that is America. Building upon the work of The Founders, Lincoln changed America from a minor provincial democratic republic into a world superpower, though in Lincoln’s lifetime that power that was America lay quiescent, a quickening seed which would birth a mighty offspring in its appointed season. Indeed, with the Second Inaugural, Lincoln became one of The Founders.

Over the course of the war, Lincoln had written perhaps thousands of short reflections, epigrams, and notes on both the practical and philosophical aspects of the conflict. Meant for no one but himself, they constituted what he referred to as “Meditations.”  Some survive. No doubt many have been lost to time. Sometime in 1864, he wrote a few thoughtful paragraphs which, quite unusually, he felt were worthy of being shared in their rough state. He read them out loud to the portraitist Francis B. Carpenter during one of their frequent sittings. Carpenter later said that Lincoln himself seemed arrested by the pith of his own thoughts: “Lots of wisdom in that document, I suppose,” Lincoln mused. Quite characteristically for Lincoln the wisdom lay in the document, not in the mind that had produced it. Carpenter later heard its phrases in the Second Inaugural.

The Second Inaugural is a call to end the war, and a call to remake the United States as “a more perfect Union.” Clearly, Lincoln abjures slavery, seeing in it the fundamental bedrock reason for the conflict, but in quoting St. Matthew --- “Judge not” --- he looks not toward blame but toward mutual healing, rapproachment, and sublime change. In Lincoln’s vision, the terrible war takes on a cast of inevitability not because of the South’s intransigence but because of the failure of all Americans to dispassionately and humanely address the issue of bondage throughout nearly nine decades of the national life.  Importantly, indeed critically, in the last words of the Second Inaugural he distinguishes not at all between North and South nor Black and White. Had Lincoln’s successors taken to heart the lessons which this man’s soul had wrung out of the agony of the Civil War, the United States would be a much different and far finer nation today.

The Second Inaugural is more. It is a glimpse at the face of Divine Providence --- Lincoln was not conventionally religious but was deeply spiritual --- and he perfectly describes the next and ongoing task of We The People:

To bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

As is the custom until today, the Vice-President was sworn in before the President. Then as now it was customary for the new Vice-President to make a few brief remarks.  In a foreshadowing of future troubles, the newly-inaugurated Andrew Johnson is drunk at the podium, and rambles incoherently for some minutes before he is led back to his seat. Lincoln does not bother himself to see his new Vice-President again until the afternoon of April 14^th.

As was common in the Nineteenth Century, the Inaugural speech was delivered prior to the actual swearing-in. After speaking, Lincoln takes the Oath of Office from his old political rival and Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, who he elevated to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court after the death of Roger B. Taney in 1864. 

*I have borrowed the title of Douglas Wilsom's excellent work on Lincoln's writings for the title of this post.

 

THE FOURTH YEAR: THE TORTUROUS PATH TO PEACE: March 4, 1865---". . . With malice toward none, with charity for all . . . "

MARCH 4, 1865:       

Abraham Lincoln gives his Second Inaugural Address on the steps of the newly-domed Capitol as he begins his second term as President of the United States.

Widely considered at least the second greatest speech given in American history (following Lincoln’s own Gettysburg Address), the Second Inaugural speaks not only of the end of the Civil War but of the restoration of national peace in ringing, Biblical tones. The lyrical beauty and gravitas of Lincoln’s words still echo down the years. The United States has been a far different nation simply because these words were uttered by that tall, gangly man on a brisk late winter day one and one-half centuries ago:

Fellow-Countrymen:

At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. 

Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war — seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. 

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. 

It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." 

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? 

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

While the Union is inaugurating a President, the Confederate Congress is approving a new national standard. Although it must have galled most Confederates to think in such terms, Major Arthur L. Rogers C.S.A. pointed out that the dimensions of the second national flag, the Stainless Banner, could cause it to be mistaken for a flag of surrender or truce at certain angles or on windless days. He lobbied for the enlargement of the “Cross and Stars” canton from a square to a rectangle, and for a broad red stripe to be added to the fly end of the flag.

The new flag quickly became known as the “Blood Stained Banner.”

Very few original Blood Stained Banners were ever manufactured. At this late point in the war, most Confederate military units were less than concerned about an essentially cosmetic change to the national flag. They continued to use the Stainless Banner (or even the Stars and Bars in some areas). Other Confederates merely sewed a strip of red cloth to existing Stainless Banners. A few Blood Stained Banners were produced for the Confederacy’s public buildings in Richmond*, and a few found their way to the Army of Northern Virginia, but the majority of Confederates had no idea that the Blood Stained Banner was their flag until after the war’s end.

*Even in 1865, most flags produced by Richmond flagmakers retained the square canton rather than the rectangular one specified by law, and most reenactor reproductions also use the square canton. It is difficult to find a Blood Stained Banner that matches the exact dimensions laid down in Confederate law.