By
early 1864 the slaughter and carnage of war had stunned the Northern
public into weariness, yet Lincoln stubbornly pushed Grant and Sherman
on to subjugate the South. Jefferson Davis said of Lincoln’s war: “You
would deny to us the one thing you exact for yourselves – the right of
self government.”
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Remorseless Brutality and Northern Prosperity
“By
early June 1864, war-weary Northerners began to suspect that they had
been betrayed by rosy promises of victory, just as they had been
disappointed in every spring since 1861. They had been led to believe
that the armies of Generals Grant and Sherman . . . would finally
achieve the triumph that had eluded the Federal armies through three
years of slaughter.
As
usual, the War Department sent forth cheerful bulletins about great
“victories” and Northern newspapers emblazoned headlines: “Glorious
Successes – Lee Terribly Beaten” [and] “Our Army in Full Pursuit of
the Enemy Towards Richmond.”
In
fact, Secretary Stanton deliberately withheld the truth that Grant’s
forces had suffered horrendous losses in the wilderness, Spotsylvania,
and Cold Harbor battles and that they had finally moved across the James
River to about the same place where General McClellan had been two
years before.
In
the few weeks of direct frontal attacks on Richmond’s defenses Grant
lost more than 50,000 men – killed, wounded, and missing – almost as
many men as Lee had in his entire army. Other estimates of Union losses
ran much higher. John Tyler, an officer with Lee’s staff, claimed the
total was 70,000. “Grant has shown great skill and prudence combined
with remorseless persistency and brutality.”
Eventually
the enormous losses could no longer be concealed as the [Northern]
people read the lengthening lists of killed and wounded in their
newspapers, and boatloads of maimed soldiers arrived at the Washington
waterfront from the killing fields of Virginia. Hidden among the
seriously injured were hundreds of men only slightly hurt, along with
“shirks, stragglers and bounty-jumpers” who forced their way into the
boats, as Noah Brooks recorded this ugly truth in his dispatches to the
Sacramento Union: “The number of “dead beats,” as the men call the
shirks and stragglers in the army, has been, I am sorry to say, very
large.”
Thurlow
Weed observed a depressing scene in New York State: “Regiments are
returning home, worn, weary, maimed and depleted. Our cities and
villages swarm with skulking, demoralized soldiers.” Her also lamented
that “there is a reckless, money-making spirit abroad which, profiting
by our disasters, favors a long war.”
“The
commercial metropolis of the Union is flushed with prosperity and riots
in extravagance,” one newspaper found. “A war may be a fearful
calamity, but the gay denizens of Manhattan don’t see it . . . there is a
wasteful race for display between the gold gamblers, the blockade
runners, and the shoddy aristocracy . . . Broadway presents the gaiety
of a continued holiday.”
War
profiteers made a vulgar display of their ill-gotten wealth . . . the
war was only a dim and distant sound coming out of the South making no
difference in their carefree lives, as long as they didn’t have to share
personally in the mud and blood of the battlefield.”
They
could hire substitutes for a few hundred dollars each and let the
Irish, the Germans, and the freed slaves fill the ranks and endure the
hardships of battle and risk their lives for the Union.”
(The Dark Intrigue, The True Story of a Civil War Conspiracy, Frank van der Linden, Fulcrum Publishing, 2007, pp. 112-114
Even Levon Helm's daddy knew that the last chapter is yet to be written.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't heard that. Thanks.
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