Читать книгу The Other Side of Lincoln - Welby Thomas Cox Jr. - Страница 7

Lincoln was no military man, although he had served briefly in the Illinois state militia, it was the weakest of his interest. But what he lacked in the tactics of the military he more than made up in a clever mind and the utilization of the written word through the law.

From the White House, the Lincoln’s could see the campfires of the Confederates. Mary Todd was frightened for Lincoln and her family...Lincoln tried to console her with promises that troops were coming from the north to protect the Capitol and the residence at the White House. Privately, Lincoln stewed over the failure of the

military under his predecessor, President Buchanan to provide appropriate military presence in the nation’s Capital.

His own experience in coming to Washington, disguised as an invalid... provided insight to the dangers that surrounded him. Maryland and particularly Baltimore provided the most turbulent and explosive threat to the safe transit and communication to the Capitol In order to circumvent the growing threat, Lincoln met with his Cabinet and announced that one of his first decisions would be the limited suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus along the rail lines between Washington and Philadelphia, especially targeting Baltimore.

The literal translation of the Latin Habeas Corpus is “{ that} you have the body.”; a Writ of Habeas Corpus is an order issued by a court of law for the release of an individual who is being held in custody. The law, an essential part of the Constitution, derived from the English law is designed to protect individuals from arbitrary imprisonment. It provides protection for everyone from being arrested without reasonable charges in the middle of the night.

It was and is one of the individuals protections of the law for its citizens that separates America from monarchies and other governments in which soldiers or police can literally knock on your door and drag you away to jail in your nightshirt without explanation.

With the suspension of habeas corpus, Lincoln authorized General Scott to make arrests without specific charges to prevent secessionist Marylanders from interfering with communications between Washington and the rest of the nation (some say it was instituted as well because Lincoln was under pressure from his old clients, the railroad industry). Additionally, Lincoln had vowed that the three remaining border states would not secede and to that end over the next few weeks, Baltimore’s Mayor William Brown, the police chief and nine members of the Maryland legislature were arrested to prevent them from voting to secede from the Union. Was Lincoln’s flagrant abuse of the law, to his own end, a confirmation of the other abuses for which the south had accused the government, without recourse for many years?

The answer may have been provided when an unknown, individual, John Merryman was arrested. Finally, Merryman’s attorney filed a petition, requesting the Writ of Habeas Corpus. The Chief Justice Roger Taney, a Marylander rendered his opinion. The author of the controversial opinion on the Dred Scott decision, Taney issued a writ of habeas corpus for Merryman, demanding that the authorities give a valid reason for his detention. The military refused, and Taney was concerned that Lincoln might have him arrested as well, issued an argument that only Congress could suspend and that Lincoln had broken the law.

Lincoln’s response to Taney came in a July address to the Congress by asking, “Whether all the laws, but one, (were) to go unexecuted, and the government itself to go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” Lincoln further argued that the Constitution further states that “the Privileges of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be

suspended, unless when, in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public safety may require it.”

Privately, Lincoln angrily exploded on the Chief Justice stating that he had intentionally backed Taney into a corner to challenge a demented legal mind that could have issued the Dred Scott opinion and that his own statement in defense of the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus begged the greater question...”If Taney was so concerned about the Constitution, why hadn’t he and the others done anything to prevent secession?”

The answer to that question ultimately leaked to Taney and it is reported that Taney stated “that the south did not secede on fear of imprisonment... but rather, due to the tyrannical government abuses influenced by the northern interest and unfair taxation to support a growing lust for industrial expansion. The Constitution provides no recourse for thoughtful declarations in the absence of sanity and good will towards all, by men elected to protect and defend the rights of all its citizens, equally.”

The Chief Justice had thrown a flaming ball at Lincoln and the Congress for the failure to effectively deal with the issues of the south over a period of years, as the abuses were occurring in the interest of the northern lobby.

Thirteen thousand Americans were arrested during the war years, nearly all of them were Democrats, giving rise to the charge, even by members of his own party, that Lincoln was a tyrant, as charged by Taney...acting more as a dictator than as the President of a Democracy.

On May 24, 1861, Ulysses S. Grant relegated to commanding a unit of Illinois volunteers applied for reinstatement into the regular army. A few weeks before, Robert E. Lee had made his fateful decision by resigning his commission in the army to serve his beloved Virginia...another soldier was trying desperately to get himself back into the army.

The two men, who had met briefly during the war with Mexico, couldn’t have been more different. Lee was courtly, patrician, southern gentleman while Grant, the son of a flinty, tough Ohio tanner and self-made businessman was seen as a crude, sullen drunk. A low grade laborer sort...Grant had been an abject failure at almost everything he tried, including his early army career, except when it came to making modern war.

Born in Ohio on April 27, 1822, the future general and president was the first child of Jesse Root Grant and Hannah Simpson Grant. The Grants named their son Hiram Ulysses and moved soon after his birth to Georgetown, Ohio where the boy spent the first sixteen years of his life.

Jesse Grant, whose own father had been unable to support his children, had been apprenticed to a tradesman at the age of eleven, and a hard pioneer childhood had made him mean-spirited as well as ambitious. Always disappointed with Ulysses, Jesse Grant never failed to let his son know that he showed so little potential. To escape his father’s belittling and the tanning business, Grant worked on the farm owned by his father.

After a year at a Kentucky boarding school, the seventeen-year old Grant was sent to West Point. When he arrived at “the Point,” Grant stood at five foot one and weighed 120 pounds. In a momentous twist of fate his name was changed forever. Grant discovered that he had been preregistered and his middle name Hiram had been changed for his mother’s maiden name of Simpson. Unable to correct the error, Grant took the new name as his own...which it really was.

If it hadn’t been for the Civil War, Grant might have been relegated to history’s dung heap. Though he had served in Mexico, his postwar army career in the depressing northwest frontier had been clouded by his resignation under a charge of drunkenness.

After that, his every business venture, every investment as a civilian, even a small farm, all failed. Grant was back working as a clerk in his father’s tannery in galena, Illinois...a humiliating personal defeat when the war broke out and rescued him. He immediately saw a return to service as the only road to his future.

Grant also tried the personal approach, going to the Cincinnati headquarters of George B. McClellan who had been named a general of the Ohio volunteers. McClellan had recollections of Grant’s reputation and of Grant being on a drinking spree when their paths crossed at Fort Vancouver in 1853. The general avoided an interview with Grant, and Grant settled for the command of a group of Illinois volunteers.

As in Lee’s first Civil War battle, Grant’s first encounter was also less than glorious. Early in the morning of November 7, 1861, some three thousand Union troops under Grant were transported by boat from their camp at Cairo, Illinois, and met the Confederate forces under the command of the inept General Gideon Pillow, one of Jefferson Davis’s worst political appointments. Though the Confederates fought stubbornly, they were pushed back to their camp at Belmont, Missouri on the banks of the Mississippi.

Grants troops were celebrating and looting the Confederate camp when they suddenly came under heavy fire from cannons on a high bluff across the river. These troops were commanded by General Leonidas Polk (1806-1864), another friend of Davis. A west Pointer, Polk had traded his sword for the robes of an Episcopal bishop but then returned to the Confederate army. Now he ferried twenty-seven hundred Confederate troops across the river and attacked Grant.

“General Grant...” and aide cried out in horror and surprise... “We are surrounded by the enemy.”

General Grant seated beside his command tent, took a cigar stub from his pocket and calmly lit it before responding to the young officer, “Well we must cut our way out as we cut our way in.”

Forced to leave behind his wounded and the captured Confederate materials from the “Pillow fight,” Grant was fortunate to escape with his command intact and his life. From his bluff position, General Polk could see Grant clearly at his encampment, and invited soldiers to “try your marksmanship on him if you please.” Fortunate for Grant and the Union he was out of range of the marksmen. Grant later called the action a “raid” and said he had won but his claim was disputed by Polk who called it a “battle” that he had clearly won with Grant and the Union in retreat.

Polk and the Confederacy, later realized the significance of the opportunity lost to eliminate a brilliant foe on that battlefield at Belmont, Missouri. As we shall see later, Grant will utilize the Anaconda Plan originated by the aging General Winfield Scott to move his troops systematically down the Mississippi, establishing security post along the way and cutting off the commerce of the south including the gunrunners. The fat old General with the Gout, whom all made fun of including the press and the President and the drunk... squeezing the life slowly from a Confederacy, locked resolutely in the ever tightening hold of the giant (Grant) boa.

This tactical error on the part of the Confederacy had been followed by perhaps the most glaring military error of the entire war...a mistake in judgment at the very top of the Command...by Jefferson Davis himself occurred on July 21, 1861 at the Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas). Pierre G.T. Beauregard, who had ordered and led the attack on Fort Sumter, took command of a Confederate army guarding a strategic train junction at Manassas, Virginia, about thirty miles southwest of Washington , D.C.. Being in short supply of forces, Beauregard issued a proclamation to the locals asking them to rouse to defend their state against the “reckless and unprincipled tyrant invading your soil.”

Beauregard’s troops were responsible for blocking the federal approach to the Confederate capital, which had been moved to Richmond, Virginia from Montgomery, Alabama when Virginia seceded. He was also ordered to hold the railroad junction at Manassas where Beauregard had deployed his troops along a small river called Bull Run.

Some fifty miles away, at the northern end of Virginia’s rich Shenandoah Valley, two more armies faced each other. The Union troops were under general Robert Patterson, and aging army veteran; the Confederates commanded by General Joseph E. Johnston (1807-1891). Patterson’s orders from Washington were to block Johnston so he could not slip south to Manassas to reinforce Beauregard.

Marching from Alexandria, Virginia on July 16, the Union army, commanded by fellow West Pointer General Irvin McDowell (1818-1885) began to move into Confederate territory. McDowell had problems as well...many of his men were three month volunteers with a rapidly approaching discharge date. To add to the problem McDowell had been pressured to heed the Union press and politicians to take Richmond. With this strong political pressure behind him, McDowell, an aging hulk of a man who was said to eat a whole watermelon for dessert, was one of the few regular army commanders who had remained loyal to the Union...continued unabated without maps but with great pomp and circumstance into the greatest battle of the war.

The regimental band played “Dixie” as these green recruits marched in ragtag manner, they sung the tune that caused lumps to grow in the throats of their opponents...they had no idea what lay ahead except the glory of the Union and the victory that was soon to come.

Adding to the pomp and almost festive mood of the crowds of civilians and politicians from Washington accompanying the army in what Lincoln’s private secretary, John G. Nicolay would later describe as a “triumphal march.”

A Confederate observer said the procession included “gay women and strumpets” and said they carried picnic baskets, opera glasses, champagne and tickets that had been printed for a “grand ball in Richmond.”

McDowell ignored the fifty odd reporters and spectators. He was far more concerned about the undisciplined troops, who had no experience, were no familiar with the rigors of a forced march and had little or no experience of combat. The march had the air of a country outing as the soldiers broke ranks to pick berries and fill canteens their overconfidence was only bolstered when the first Confederate sentries retreated before their celebratory advance. But then came a brief exchange of fire between the Union troops and the Confederates under James K. Longstreet; like his fellow Confederates generals Johnston and Beauregard, Longstreet was still wearing his army uniform. At this first sign of a fight some of the Union soldiers began to have second thoughts. Volunteers nearing the end of their enlistment period quickly decided that this was a good time to request an early discharge.

McDowell’s army trudged along but at Centerville they were delayed for two days. General Johnston used the time to move about two thirds of his Confederates troops from the Shenandoah Valley to Bull Run by train, giving the armies almost equal strength. In so doing, he made military history: it was the first time that troops used the railroad for strategic mobility-one of many historic first of the Civil War.

On Sunday, July 21st the battle began in earnest. Initially the Union forces seemed justified in their confidence as the Confederates retreated. But among those troops fresh from the Shenandoah Valley was a brigade of Virginians commanded by Thomas J. Jackson (1824-1863). Born in western Virginia, Jackson was the son of a debt-ridden lawyer who died of typhoid when the boy was two-years old. When his mother died five years later, Thomas was separated from his brother and sister and raised by a bachelor uncle. With the equivalence of only a fourth grade education, he was admitted to West Point in 1842, rising steadily in the class rankings, he graduated in 1846, seventeenth in a class of fifty-nine.

Daring, calm and tactically brilliant that day at Manassas, General Barnard Bee told Jackson that he was being beaten back, but Jackson said that he would stop the Union advance with bayonets if necessary. What happened next belongs to Civil War mythology. Bee called out, “Oh men, there is Jackson and his Virginians, standing behind you like a stone wall. Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer, follow me.”

Thus Bee supposedly gave Jackson his immortal nickname but Bee would not live beyond this day to ever again call out to one of the inspirations and hero’s that day...Stonewall Jackson and his 1st Virginia Brigade, the “Stonewall Brigade.”

At a moment when both armies were exhausted by the day’s fighting and the fate of the battle hung in the balance, fresh faces reinforced the thinning Confederate lines. Their arrival had an extraordinary effect. What first looked like a sure Union victory quickly turned into a massive route of the inexperienced Union volunteers, who wilted under the Confederate surge. Stonewall Jackson then issued the order. “Charge, men and yell like the furies...” The General began to yell a fearful high shrill scream and his men began to emulate the man they so admired.

This was the Union soldiers’ first experience at hearing the blood-curdling “Rebel-Yell,” a shrieking, high-pitched scream that has entered Civil War folklore. First heard from the throat of the legendary Stonewall Jackson whose own natural voice was a high pitched eriesom shrill voice...nearly all woman...a voice Abraham Lincoln would have identified with... for he too had such a voice, but there is little doubt that the old log splitter would have used the Rebel Yell...but who knows for on that day at Manassas, the Yankees were marching to and singing Dixie.

As one Union newsman reported, “All sense of manhood seemed to be forgotten...even the sentiment of shame had gone...Every impediment to fight was cast aside. Rifles, bayonets, pistols, haversacks, cartridge-boxes, canteens, overcoats, parasols’, champagne bottles, picnic baskets, and broken carriages lined the road.” Self-assured and confident three days earlier, the Union army turned back toward Washington in a riotous dash of soldiers, horses, and all those civilians and the northern press who had come to watch Johnny Reb get his ass whipped, now carried theirs back to the Capital.

A jubilant Jefferson Davis came over to the Manassas battlefield from Richmond, Stonewall Jackson asked him for ten thousand troops to follow the fleeing Union army right into Washington and end this war. But Davis ignored the request, not out of disrespect but in shame that the Confederacy lacked the funds to supply such an effort on behalf of its valiant fighting men.

The Confederate press turned on Davis as well, criticizing him for not pursuing the defeated Union army. His Secretary of War, Leroy Brown Walker resigned in disgust as the Confederate Secretary of War due to Davis’s failure to approve the request for the troops. But others were impressed by the stunning victory, the powers of Europe and the Lincoln administration believed the legitimacy of the Confederate

intent and their competency to win over; numbers, power, equipment, money and cause.

In the wake of the battle, Stonewall Jackson sent off an envelope to his pastor. Expecting a battle report, the preacher discovered a contribution for his church’s “colored Sunday school,” which Jackson had forgotten to send the day of the battle.