This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [220]
And it began to look to many folk in the North that the Confederacy perhaps could never really be beaten, that the attempt to win might after all be too heavy a load to carry, and that perhaps it was time to agree to a peace without victory. This sentiment would affect the presidential election, which was only a few months away. Conceivably — even probably, as things looked in midsummer — it could bring about the election of a President who would consent to a division of the country if he could get peace in no other way. It was not long after the battle of the Crater that Abraham Lincoln wrote out a despairing yet defiant little document, which he signed, sealed, and put away for later use:
“This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President-elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterward.”5
It might come to that, and it might not. Victory was only a question of time, but time moved now with unendurable slowness, each moment bought by a new record of men killed and maimed, a new scar of loss and suffering laid on a people who had already endured much. The people themselves would finally decide, and they would decide by showing whether their endurance went all the way to the foundations of the American dream.
Chapter Twelve
WE WILL NOT CEASE
1. That Bright Particular Star
SHORTLY after the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan and plunged into the Wilderness, ninety thousand young men led by William Tecumseh Sherman abandoned their camps in the neighborhood of Chattanooga and started to walk in the general direction of Atlanta, one hundred miles to the southeast. As they began to move, the last act of the war was opened.
Most of the ninety thousand were veterans, and most of them came from the western states. It was noticed that they averaged a little larger than the Easterners — army quartermasters had found that when they ordered shoes for these men they had to specify larger sizes than were ordered for the Army of the Potomac1 — and they were loose-jointed, supple, rangy, tramping off the miles with a long, swinging stride as if they were used to long marches. They had walked across Kentucky and Tennessee and Mississippi, and some of them had gone far out in Missouri and Arkansas as well; they had been burned a deep mahogany color by three years of southern sunlight, and they were men without inhibitions or reverence. If an officer or courier rode by and the men felt that his horse was skinny and underfed, whole regiments would begin to caw lustily, until it appeared that a convention of derisive crows was in session. Frank Blair — the same who had, as a civilian, exercised so much extra-legal power in Missouri back in the war’s youth — was a major general commanding the XVII Army Corps now, and he drove his men hard in forced marches to overtake the rest of the army; and when he came in sight his troops began to cry “Bla-a-a-i-r! Bla-a-a-i-r!” like a herd of indignant sheep, the bleating call running from one end of the column to the other. Passing a country cemetery, Illinois soldiers saw one of their number who had collapsed, from heat and weariness, amid the gravestones; they gave him a casual look and agreed that he was in luck to have had his sunstroke so handy to a convenient burying ground.2
Quiet little Joe Johnston, with his winsome smile, his courtly air, and his ability to lash out with a deadly counterattack against any people who looked like enemies, was waiting for these rowdy marchers with both barrels loaded. His army — it contained probably something like sixty thousand