This Hallowed Ground Read online

  BOOKS BY BRUCE CATTON

  This Hallowed Ground

  Banners at Shenandoah (juvenile)

  U. S. Grant and the Military Tradition

  A Stillness at Appomattox

  Glory Road

  Mr. Lincoln’s Army

  The War Lords of Washington

  CASTLE BOOKS

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  Edison, New Jersey 08837

  Published by arrangement with and permission of

  DOUBLEDAY, a division of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

  Copyright © 1955, 1956, by Bruce Catton

  All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-94748-2

  v3.1

  To Nellie Catton

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE: The Hurricane Comes Later

  1. Sowing the Wind

  2. Where They Were Bound to Go

  3. Light over the Marshes

  CHAPTER TWO: Not to Be Ended Quickly

  1. Men Who Could Be Led

  2. In Time of Revolution

  3. The Important First Trick

  4. The Rising Shadows

  CHAPTER THREE: Men Who Shaped the War

  1. The Romantics to the Rescue

  2. Trail of the Pathfinder

  3. He Must Be Willing to Fight

  CHAPTER FOUR: To March to Terrible Music

  1. Sambo Was Not Sambo

  2. War along the Border

  3. Come On, You Volunteers!

  4. To the Deep South

  CHAPTER FIVE: A Long War Ahead

  1. Hardtack in an Empty Hand

  2. Springtime of Promise

  3. Invitation to General Lee

  4. Delusion and Defeat

  CHAPTER SIX: Turning Point

  1. Kill, Confiscate or Destroy

  2. Cheers in the Starlight

  3. High-Water Mark

  CHAPTER SEVEN: I See No End

  1. The Best There Was in the Ranch

  2. There Was No Patience

  3. Thin Moon and Cold Mist

  4. Down the River

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Swing of the Pendulum

  1. The Hour of Darkness

  2. Stalemate in the Swamps

  3. The Face of the Enemy

  4. End of a Campaign

  CHAPTER NINE: The Trees and the River

  1. Final Miscalculation

  2 Moment of Truth

  3. Unvexed to the Sea

  CHAPTER TEN: Last of the Might-Have-Beens

  1. Pursuit in Tennessee

  2. Ghoul-Haunted Woodland

  3. The Pride of Soldiers

  4. A Half Dozen Roasted Acorns

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: And Keep Moving On

  1. Year of Jubilo

  2. Vote of Confidence

  3. The Great Decision

  4. A Question of Time

  CHAPTER TWELVE: We Will Not Cease

  1. That Bright Particular Star

  2. Wind across the Sky

  3. The Grapes of Wrath

  4. The Enemy Will Be Attacked

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Twilight and Victory

  1. Reap the Whirlwind

  2. The Fire and the Night

  3. Telegram in Cipher

  4. Candlelight

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  LIST OF MAPS

  First and Second Bull Run

  Shiloh

  Vicksburg

  Gettysburg

  Chickamauga and Missionary Ridge

  Chapter One

  THE HURRICANE COMES LATER

  1. Sowing the Wind

  THE senator was tall and handsome, with wavy hair to frame a proud ravaged face, and if hearty feeding had given him the beginning of a notable paunch he was erect enough to carry it well. He had the easy grace of a practiced orator — his speeches, according to spiteful enemies, were carefully rehearsed night after night before a mirror in his chambers, while an awed colored boy stood by with a lighted candle — and there was a great humorless arrogance about him, for he had never been blessed with a moment of self-doubt. He liked to say that he was in morals, not in politics. From this the logical deduction was that people who opposed him, numerous though they undoubtedly were, must be willfully wrong.

  Such a deduction Senator Charles Sumner was quite capable of drawing for himself. He would draw it today in the Senate chamber. In his speech, he had told a friend, he would “pronounce the most thorough philippic ever uttered in a legislative chamber.”

  It was an ominous promise. The date was May 19, 1856, and although there was still a little time left it was running out fast, and angry words might make it run faster. Yet angry words were about the only kind anyone cared to use these days. Men seemed tired of the reasoning process. Instead of trying to convert one’s opponents it was simpler just to denounce them, no matter what unmeasured denunciation might lead to.

  The point at issue was, at bottom, simple enough: how to legislate so that Kansas might someday become a state. But Kansas was a symbol rather than a territory. Men saw what they feared and hated, concentrated on its wide empty plains, and as they stared they were losing the ability to see virtue in compromise and conciliation. The man on the other side, whatever one’s vantage point, was beginning to look ominously alien. He could not easily be dealt with, and perhaps it was best simply to lash out at him. In the charged atmosphere thus created the lightest act could be fateful. All of the things that were slipping beyond hope of easy solution — sectional enmities, economic antagonisms, varying interpretations of the American dream, the tragic unendurable race problem itself — all of these, somehow, might hinge on what was done about Kansas, so that the wrong phrase in an enacting clause could mean earth’s best hope lost forever.

  In Senator Sumner’s view the wrong phrase was on the verge of adoption. The bill which the Senate was about to pass would, as he saw it, mean that Kansas must eventually become a slave state. In addition, it would give a great deal of aid and comfort to slavery’s advocates, wherever they were. It was not to be thought of calmly; it was not merely wrong, it was an actual crime. Furthermore, it was no common crime; it was (he solemnly assured the Senate) a fearful thing, “the crime against nature, from which the soul recoils, and which language refuses to describe.” Yet if language could not describe it the senator could, and he would do so.

  He was a man of breeding and education, given to much study of the classics; and he stood now in the Senate chamber, looking imperiously about him as one who has glimpsed the tables of the law on the mountaintop, and he dwelt extensively on “the rape of a virgin territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery.” The South, he said, was guilty of a “depraved longing for a new slave state, the hideous offspring of such a crime.” Force had been used, he declared, “in compelling Kansas to this pollution.”1

  The desk in front of Senator Sumner was empty. It belonged to Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, and when Sumner first became a senator, white-haired Butler had been pleasant and cordial — so much so that Sumner wrote to a friend that he had learned, from the old gentleman’s kindness, “to shun harsh and personal criticism of those from whom I differ.” But that had been years ago, when men from Massachusetts and South Carolina could
still exchange courtesies in the Senate chamber; and in any case Sumner was always ready to denounce even a close friend, and in the most unmeasured terms, if he suspected that the friend had fallen into error. Butler was a spokesman for slavery, he had had his part in the crime against nature, and the fascinating exercise of discussing political opposition in terms of sexual depravity could be carried on — by this bookish man, still unmarried at forty-five — with Butler as the target. Sumner addressed himself to the absent Butler.

  The South Carolina senator considered himself a chivalrous knight, but Sumner had seen the truth: “He has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight — I mean the harlot slavery. For her his tongue is always profuse with words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator.”

  There was quite a bit more of this, ranging all the way from Senator Butler to the ancient Egyptians, “who worshipped divinities in brutish forms,” with due mention of the “obscene idols” to which the Aztecs had made human sacrifices; the connection of these latter with the harlot slavery not being of the clearest. At one stage Sumner interrupted himself to cry: “Mr. President, I mean to keep absolutely within the limits of parliamentary propriety;” and then he went on, his speech still unfinished at the session’s end.

  The senator managed to reach his conclusion the following day, reminding the presiding officer (perhaps unnecessarily) that “an immense space has been traversed,” and in closing he came back from brutish idols and obscene Aztecs to Senator Butler, from whom he had learned not to let political arguments get personal. There was not, he said, “any possible deviation from the truth” of which Butler was innocent, although fortunately these deviations were made in the heat of such passion “as to save him from the suspicion of intentional aberration.” Still, there it was: “The senator touches nothing which he does not disfigure — with error, sometimes of principle, sometimes of fact.”2

  A philippic, as he had promised. No single vote had been changed by it; the Senate would decide, at last, precisely as it would have done if he had kept quiet. But he had not been trying to persuade. No one was, these days; a political leader addressed his own following, not the opposition. Sumner had been trying to inflame, to arouse, to confirm the hatreds and angers that already existed. In the North there were men who from his words would draw a new enmity toward the South; in the South there were men who would see in this speaker and what he had said a final embodiment of the compelling reasons why it was good to think seriously about secession.

  At the very end Sumner had a gloomy moment of insight.

  The fight over Kansas, he said, spreading from the western plain to the Senate chamber, would spread still farther; would go to a nationwide stage “where every citizen will be not only spectator but actor.”3

  There is a rowdy strain in American life, living close to the surface but running very deep. Like an ape behind a mask, it can display itself suddenly with terrifying effect. It is slack-jawed, with leering eyes and loose wet lips, with heavy feet and ponderous cunning hands; now and then, when something tickles it, it guffaws, and when it is made angry it snarls; and it can be aroused much more easily than it can be quieted. Mike Fink and Yankee Doodle helped to father it, and Judge Lynch is one of its creations; and when it comes lumbering forth it can make the whole country step in time to its own frantic irregular pulse-beat.

  Senator Sumner had invited it out with his fine talk. So had the eminent clergyman, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, who had told the world that a Sharps rifle was a greater moral agency than a Bible, as far as Kansas was concerned. Yet these men need not have bothered. Rowdyism was coming out anyway, having been invited by men of the South as well as by men of the North, and the spirit of rowdyism was talking in the spirit of Sumner’s and Beecher’s exhortations without the fancy trimmings. It was saying now, south of the slavery line, that “we will continue to tar and feather, drown, lynch and hang every white-livered abolitionist who dares to pollute our soil,” and in Kansas it had legislated that anyone who denied the legality of slave ownership in the territory should get five years in prison.4

  In Kansas there was a town called Lawrence. It had existed for two years, and although it was so new, it was solid and substantial, with buildings of brick and stone, including a hotel that was massive enough to serve as a fort. (In point of fact, the hotel had been built with that end in mind.) The town was a piece of New England set down in the prairie, but it was a New England all distorted, as if someone were seeing bizarre dream-shapes that were slipping into nightmare. In place of white steeples and colonial doorways it had grim buildings and men who carried “Beecher’s Bibles” — Sharps rifles, named with a cynicism matching that of the reverend clergyman himself — and it was expressive of the stern New England purpose that had planted it there. It was named for a Massachusetts millowner who had given money to fight slavery, and it was the stronghold and rallying point of all Kansas settlers who believed that the extension of slavery must be stopped at the Missouri line.

  As such, it became a focal point for hatred. The tension had been building up for months. There had been arrests and shootings and all manner of bloodthirsty threats and shouts of defiance, for nothing could be more hateful just then, to a certain attitude of mind, than the simple belief that one man ought not to own another man. A territorial grand jury with pro-slavery leanings had asked that the town’s leading citizens be jailed for treason, and it had added a rider to the effect that both of the town’s newspapers ought to be suppressed as public nuisances and that its fortress hotel should be torn down.

  Now, on May 21 — one day after Senator Sumner had finished his excellent speech — there was a posse on hand to see that the grand jury’s thoughts were properly embodied in action. This posse numbered perhaps a thousand men. A great many of them came from Missouri, for Lawrence was not far from the state line, and they rejoiced in the collective title of Border Ruffians. They owed dim allegiance to a United States marshal who had certain arrests to make in Lawrence and they were heavily armed. Unlike most posses, they dragged along with them five cannon.

  For once the people of Lawrence were on their good behavior. They offered no resistance when the marshal came in, and the arrests he wanted to make were made. The marshal thereupon dismissed his posse, which was immediately called back into service by a Kansas sheriff, a cover-to-cover believer in slavery, who announced himself as a law-and-order man and who said that he had a job of his own to do in Lawrence. The transformed posse was addressed briefly by former Senator David R. Atchison of Missouri, the great spokesman for slavery in the West, who cried: “Be brave, be orderly, and if any man or woman stand in your way, blow them to hell with a chunk of cold lead.” The sheriff then led the posse into town and the fun began.5

  Various rounds from the cannon were fired at the hotel. It had been well built — and the cannon, perhaps, were aimed and served inexpertly — and nothing in particular seemed to happen. The sheriff’s helpers then swarmed all over the town, setting fire to the hotel, raiding the two offending newspaper offices and dumping press and type into the river, ransacking homes and getting drunk and in general having a high old time. The home of a man who presumed to call himself the free-state governor of Kansas was burned, two men who apparently stood in the way were killed by flying pellets of lead, a certain amount of lesser damage was inflicted, various female free-staters were scared half out of their wits (though not, it would appear, actually harmed), and there was a great round of shouting and speechifying and wobbly-legged parading and rejoicing. If rowdyism could settle the matter, it had been demonstrated beyond recall that Kansas was slave territory and would someday be a slave state and that the writ that made it treason to doubt the legality of the pro-slavery gove
rnment of the territory would run henceforth without interference.6

  Lawrence was sacked by men with a genius for putting the worst foot forward. There were in Lawrence — and would arrive in droves in the next few days — certain newspaper correspondents who wrote from deep abolitionist conviction and who had access to the front pages of some of the country’s most influential newspapers. These men had something to write about now, and they would make the most of it. And there stood on the record now one more indication that the disagreement between sections might not finally be settled by the ordinary processes of reason, debate, and compromise.

  Next day was May 22, and Senator Sumner sat at his desk in the Senate chamber, the Senate having adjourned for the day. The senator was large, the fixed chair under his desk was high, and the base of the desk itself was screwed to the floor. The senator sat all hunched over, ankles hooked behind chair legs, intent on his correspondence. As always, he was serious, concentrating on the job at hand. He once told a friend that he never left his apartment to go to the Senate without taking a last look around, to make certain that everything he owned was just as he would wish it to be if the slave power should suddenly strike him down and he should never return to the place. Presumably he had taken such a look today.

  The chamber where the Senate met was nearly empty. A few senators lounged about near the doorways, chatting, or worked at their desks. Sumner scribbled away, and then he realized that someone was standing beside him, trying to get his attention.

  “I have read your speech twice over, carefully,” this man was saying. “It is a libel on South Carolina and on Senator Butler, who is a relative of mine.”

  Then the man raised a walking stick high in the air and brought it down as hard as he could on Senator Sumner’s head.

  The man with the cane was a South Carolina congressman, Preston Brooks, nephew to Senator Butler; a youthful six-footer of robust frame, sometime cavalryman in the Mexican War. He struck again and again with a full-arm swing, and a man who saw it said that he came down with the cane like a dragoon using his saber and striking to kill. Caught between the chair and the immovable desk, Sumner tried desperately to get up. He was heard to gasp: “O Lord!” — and then, with a great convulsive heave, he wrenched the desk loose from its fastenings and reeled to his feet. Brooks struck again; the cane broke, and Brooks went on clubbing him with the splintered butt.