This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [97]
It was expressed very clearly by the men of the 12th Wisconsin, who occupied Humboldt, Tennessee, that summer. They took over a print shop and for a time got out a weekly newspaper, with enlisted men as editors. The paper spoke the private soldier’s mind, and one of its editorials hit the keynote: “The time for negotiating peace has passed; henceforth let us conquer a peace. Let the blows fall thick and heavy, and keep on falling. Let us lay aside the ‘pomp and circumstance’ of war, pull off our coats, and ‘wade in.’ … Let our divisions move on, kill, confiscate or destroy, throw every sympathy to the wind that might stand in the way, and bring the traitors to a traitor’s fate by the shortest and quickest way.”10
The shortest and quickest way, as far as the private soldier was concerned, was to hit hard at anything that stood in his path — to devastate country as well as to fight enemy armies; in general terms, to wreak vengeance on all inhabitants of the Confederacy. The judge advocate in a court-martial in Buell’s army summed it up a little later when he defined “a vigorous war policy” as one in which the man who actively or passively aided the secession movement “is considered to have no rights that the government is bound to respect.”11
Quite simply, this meant that the institution of slavery was doomed. The great majority of Union soldiers had entered the war with no particular feeling against slavery and with even less feeling in favor of the Negro. They had no quarrel with the idea that the Negro was property; indeed, it was precisely that fact that was moving them and writing the institutions doom. Because looting and foraging held “marvellous beauties” for the army of occupation, because ruining a farm seemed one way to strike at the enemy, and because general hell-raising was fun anyway, they were commissioning themselves to strike at Rebel property — and here was the most obvious, plentiful, and important property of all. With the Negro’s ultimate fate they rarely bothered their heads. It was enough to know that the South would have a hard time functioning without him.
U. S. Grant got this idea ahead of his troops. Grant had never been an anti-slavery man. He had once owned a slave himself, his wife had owned several, his wife’s family had owned many. But as early as the fall of 1861 he was writing to his father, saying that while he wanted to whip the rebellion but preserve all southern rights, “if it cannot be whipped in any other way than through a war on slavery, let it come to that.” In the summer of 1862 he saw the myriad contrabands that were following northern armies, and commented: “I don’t know what is to become of these poor people in the end, but it weakens the enemy to take them from them.” Somewhat later he told his friend Congressman Elihu B. Washburne: “It became patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North and South could never live at peace with one another except as one nation, and that without slavery.”12
Not only was the Negro a visible and easily removable piece of Rebel property; he was also a very helpful fellow, and Union soldiers who found him so began to feel a vague sort of sympathy for him. Ormsby Mitchel’s men were learning that contrabands would give full information about movements of Confederate troops, and if they were utterly unable to estimate numbers correctly — when asked how many Rebels were in a given detachment they would usually say, “Three hundred thousand!” — their services nevertheless were invaluable. When Buell sternly ordered Mitchel to keep fugitive slaves out of his lines, several of Mitchel’s officers came to his tent, laid down their swords, and said they could not obey the order. This was plain mutiny, but Mitchel ignored it and wrote his own angry protest