Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

guard of soldiers, and a catafalque, where a body was lying in state. Lincoln’s dream-self asked one of the soldiers, “Who is dead in the White House?” The answer was chilling: “The President. He was killed by an assassin.”2

Lamon, whom Lincoln had named United States marshal for the District of Columbia, was already uneasy for Lincoln’s safety in Washington, and on election night in 1864 he went to the extreme of curling up like a guard dog outside Lincoln’s door in a blanket, armed with a collection of knives and revolvers. Lincoln thought Lamon “insane upon the subject of his safety,” but it was a derangement that also possessed the secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, who made sure that Lincoln’s carriage had a secure cavalry escort, that a company of infantry guarded the White House grounds, and that a District of Columbia policeman accompanied the president whenever Lincoln went to the theater.3

Sometimes, though, the dreams pointed to happier conclusions. The dreams about Willie actually gave Lincoln a comfort that eluded the boy’s mother. “Did you ever dream of some lost friend and feel that you were having a sweet communion with him,” Lincoln asked an army staffer. “That is the way I dream of my lost boy Willie.” And there was a particular dream that came back to him again and again, and always just before the arrival of good tidings. In this dream, his dream-self stood on the deck of “some singular, indescribable vessel,” pointed toward a dim shore ahead. He had dreamt this dream just before some of the most important victories of the war, and he had it again in April 1865. As he told his cabinet at a meeting the next morning, he knew that it meant that good news was once again on the way. “I think it must be from Sherman,” Lincoln explained. “My thoughts are in that direction, as are most of yours.”4

But perhaps the dream had a meaning wider than Sherman. There was a dim shore ahead for the whole nation in the spring of 1865, an unmapped future that would involve reintegrating the Confederate states back into the political Union, bringing freed slaves into the full citizenship that their centuries of unrewarded labor had earned them, and manhandling the old Democratic South into the new Republican future of railroads, markets, and free labor. But, as Lincoln told his cabinet that day, he was confident that his dream was proof that the dimness would yield to certainty, and that everything that was now confused, bloodied, and embittered would all be sorted out at last.

General Grant had been sitting in on the cabinet meeting that morning. When it adjourned, Lincoln asked if the general and his wife would be interested in attending Ford’s Theatre that night, where the Lincolns had promised to go to see actress Laura Keene’s benefit performance of Our American Cousin. The general, pleading conflict of schedule, declined. The Lincolns would have to find someone else to join them in the box at the theater that night. Perhaps by that time Lincoln would have heard the good news his dream had promised.5

THE PASSING OF THE DEAD

Sherman’s march across Georgia delivered a fatal body blow to the Confederacy. The fragile network of southern railroad lines had already been badly shaken by Rosecrans’s capture of Chattanooga in 1863, while the fall of Atlanta to Sherman a year later wrecked the single most important rail junction between the lower Confederacy and Virginia. The march to the sea finished off what was left of the shorter regional rail lines in Georgia and made it almost impossible to keep Lee’s army in Virginia supplied with food and ammunition from the granaries and factories of the lower South.

The situation for Lee was made even gloomier by the siege of Petersburg. Lee had dreaded the possibility of a siege being clamped around Richmond and Petersburg ever since McClellan’s Petersburg campaign, since he knew full well that a siege would destroy both his army and the Confederate capital. Pinned through the winter of 1864–65 into a maze of trenches below Petersburg, the James River throttled by the Federal army, soldiers of the besieged army were under the strain of constant day-in, day-out pressure, with none of the usual opportunities between battles for reorganization and reequipment. “Lee’s Miserables” (as they liked to call themselves, after Victor Hugo’s 1862 best seller, Les Misérables) would be shackled to one comparatively small area from which to forage and draw supplies, an area they would quickly eat down to the bare bone. “I have no doubt that there is suffering for want of food,” Lee reported sadly. “The ration is too small for men who have to undergo so much exposure and labor as ours.”6

Only by clinging to the Weldon & Petersburg railroad (which ran south from Petersburg to North Carolina) and the Southside railroad (which ran west to Lynchburg and the Shenandoah Valley) did Lee manage to keep any supplies filtering into the hands of his army. “There is nothing within reach of this army to be impressed,” Lee despondently informed the Confederate secretary of war. “The country is swept clear; our only reliance is upon the railroads.” But even those lines were unsure and vulnerable to Grant’s unceasing pressure. In October, Grant suddenly reached westward from his own lines and cut the Weldon & Petersburg railroad. Later the same month, Philip Sheridan, Grant’s fiery chief of cavalry, tracked down and defeated Jubal Early’s small Confederate force in the Shenandoah, and proceeded to lay waste to the entire valley.

Yet Lee could not simply walk away from Richmond: too much of the vital munitions that armed his soldiers came from Richmond factories; too much of the food that managed to reach his army’s mouths came by the railroads that terminated in Richmond and Petersburg. And so, for the first time in the war, the Army of Northern Virginia began to suffer a crisis in morale. “The common soldier perceived that the cause