This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [112]
With the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln had changed the war, for himself as well as for everyone else. The war now had been pushed past settlement; the unconditional surrender, the penitent submission to national authority, which the goverenment would always insist on, had become something that Confederate leaders would not even consider. Lincoln might continue to try to rally all parties and all factions to his support; increasingly, now, he would have to rely on the bitterenders, the radicals, the men who tried furiously to make the southern revolution recoil on itself and destroy everything that had bred it.… It was not a good time for a Federal general to seem hesitant or lukewarm.
Senator John Sherman of Ohio was writing this fall to his brother, General William Tecumseh Sherman, remarking that old-line regular army officers seemed to fight more from a sense of duty than from “an earnest conviction that the rebellion must be put down with energy.” This would never do, and perhaps the only salvation was for “the people to resort to such desperate means as the French and English did in their own revolutions”; ultimately, the nation perhaps could do worse than “entrust its armies to a fanatic like John Brown.”2
Halleck had cited the parallel of the French Revolution, and now John Sherman was doing it; and when safe, cautious men like these drew that comparison, something was afoot. General Sherman was replying gloomily and cryptically that “the northern people will have to unlearn all their experience of the past thirty years and be born again before they will see the truth.” Northern armies, said the general, moved into the South as a ship moves into the sea — the vessel plowed a furrow but the wave immediately closed in behind and no permanent mark had been made; “I see no end, or even the beginning of the end.”3
No end; but a turning of the tide, in the West as well as in the East. All along the line the Confederate armies had been advancing; now, in weeks, every advance was checked and the great Confederate counterstroke had failed everywhere.
In Kentucky it seemed for a time that everything was being lost. Numbers of untrained Union regiments were hurried down to delay the Confederate advance until Buell could get there, and the oncoming Confederates had rolled over these with disdainful ease, taking prisoners and guns and driving the survivors in headlong retreat; but Bragg unaccountably missed his major opportunities, and by October his advance had changed from a menacing drive into a series of rather aimless maneuverings across north-central Kentucky. The Kentuckians had not risen in universal greeting, as had been expected. They had been cordial enough, but few recruits had come forward, and the wagonloads of muskets and equipment brought north for their benefit remained largely unopened. And while Bragg moved his men this way and that, following no discernible rational purpose, Buell finally got his army around in front and made ready to attack the invader.
Buell’s army had had its troubles. It had made a long retreat from the Tennessee-Alabama sector, and the men in the ranks had seen no sense in any of it; they could see only that they were giving up much that they had gained earlier, they were striking no blows at the Confederacy, and the farther they marched the worse their morale became. In addition, Buell had lost one of his most trusted subordinates, the three hundred-pound ex-naval officer, William Nelson, who had done so much a year earlier to help keep Kentucky in the Union.
Buell lost him in the simplest and most irreversible way imaginable. General Nelson was murdered: shot to death in a Louisville hotel lobby, before a large number of witnesses, by one of his own subordinates, a brigadier with the pleasing but improbable name (for a Union general) of Jefferson Davis. The loss of General Nelson was bad enough. What made it much worse, as far as Buell was concerned, was that