This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [198]
If there was in this the desperate overstatement common to wartime propaganda, there was nevertheless reason for thoughtful Southerners to feel this way. The attempt to make an independent confederacy had been, in a sense, nothing more than a despairing effort to do something about the problem of slavery. The war was a great forced draft applied to a long-smoldering flame, and under its white heat the problem was changing. Not for nothing was slavery called “the peculiar institution,” and its chief peculiarity seemed to be that it would not stay put. It changed when it came under examination; the question now was not so much what could be done about slavery as what could be done about the Negro, and this in turn was becoming a problem of what to do about white society itself. There was material here for an almost unlimited overthrow of human institutions, because existing institutions had been built, by and large, on the happy assumption that the basic problem would not have to be faced at all.
Lincoln himself had shared in this belief. Ten years earlier he had confessed that if he had all earthly power he would not know what to do about slavery; it was a wrong that cried for settlement, but millions of Negroes were physically here in America, and if they were not slaves they would be free men, headed for ultimate equality with white men; and “we cannot … make them equals.” More recently — in the middle of 1862 — he had protested to a Maryland correspondent that all thinking Southerners must know that “I never had a wish to touch the foundations of their society.” Yet the foundations were being touched with a hand of iron, and no one was more disturbed by this than Lincoln. As recently as July 31, 1863, he had seemed to be less than certain about the Emancipation Proclamation itself. Writing about this proclamation (to a general who had asked for guidance), he seemed to be brooding about a decision not yet final: “I think I shall not retract or repudiate it. Those who have tasted actual freedom I believe can never be slaves or quasi-slaves again. For the rest, I believe some plan, substantially being gradual emancipation, would be better for both black and white.”2
Yet even as he brooded the decision had been made, if not by the President, by the war itself. In that same summer Grant had written bluntly: “Slavery is already dead and cannot be resurrected. It would take a standing army to maintain slavery in the South if we were to make peace today, guaranteeing to the South all their former constitutional privileges.” And grim Sherman was contemptuously saying: “All the powers of earth cannot restore them their slaves any more than their dead grandfathers.”3 Now, early in 1864, Sherman’s soldiers were making fairly substantial strides with an operation that the Congress at Richmond would undoubtedly have considered part of the overthrow of the southern social and political fabric; they were doing it in a wild rough holiday mood, with taunting, boisterous laughter, simply as a means of getting on with the war.
Specifically, they were creating a smoky darkness at midday in Meridian, Mississippi, making a wasteland in order that Yankee armies a little farther north might thereafter go about their business with less difficulty.
Meridian lay 150 miles east of Vicksburg, and it was a railroad junction town, a military supply depot, and a modest industrial center. Mississippi produced many Confederate guerrillas, who had a pestiferous habit of riding up into western Tennessee