By this time the Union authorities had had a good deal of experience with guerillas and they were getting very grim about it. Much of this conditioning had been gained in states like Tennessee and Missouri, where neighbor was bitter against neighbor and barn burnings and the murderous settlement of old grudges went hand in hand with attempts to discomfit the Yankee invader, and most Federal generals considered guerillas as mere bushwhackers, candidates for the noose or the firing squad. An exception was generally (though by no means always) made in the case of Mosby's men, who were recognized as being more or less regular soldiers, but the attitude toward the rest was summed up by a Union general along the upper Potomac, who said: "I have instructed my command not to bring any of them to my headquarters except for interment." ¹⁸

This attitude spread rapidly to the rank and file, particularly when the guerillas took to killing any Union stragglers they could catch. Overlooking the fact that lawless foraging and looting by stragglers and bummers could easily provoke angry reprisals, the soldiers simply argued that if a Southerner wanted to fight he ought to be in the Confederate Army. If he was not in the Army, but fought anyway, they considered that he was outside the law. Since the guerillas could not often be captured—they usually struck at night, vanished in the dark, and became innocent farmers before the pursuit got well organized—the tendency was to take it out on the nearest civilians, on the broad ground that if they let guerillas operate in their midst they would have to take the consequences.

Most Federal soldiers would have endorsed the words and acts of a Union officer in northern Alabama, where troop trains were fired on and railroad telegraph lines were cut by anti-Unionists in a little country town. This officer assembled the townsfolk and told them that henceforth "every time the telegraph wire was cut we would burn a house; every time a train was fired on we should hang a man; and we would continue to do this until every house was burned and every man hanged between Decatur and Bridgeport." He went on to put the army viewpoint into explicit words: "If they wanted to fight they should enter the army, meet us like honorable men, and not, assassin-like, fire at us from the woods and run." He concluded by warning that if the citizens let the bushwhackers continue to operate, "we should make them more uncomfortable than they would be in Hell." Having said all of this he burned the town, arrested three citizens as hostages for the good behavior of the rest, and went his way. He wrote that this action was spoken of "approvingly by the officers and enthusiastically by the men." ¹⁹

Now it should be remembered that ordinarily the soldiers were the least bloodthirsty of all the participants in the war. Secretary Welles might write fondly of hangings, and the Chicago Board of Trade might ask that Confederate prisoners be allowed to die of hunger or disease, and it could be washed off as part of the inevitable idiocy of superpatriotism in time of war. But when the soldiers themselves began to feel an interest in creating a hell on earth for enemy civilians the moon was entering a new phase. The tragic part about it now was that this was happening in an army one of whose functions was to ravage and lay waste a populous farming area until even a crow could not support himself in it. The hand that was about to come down on the Shenandoah Valley was going to be heavy enough anyway. What the guerillas did was not going to make it come down any more lightly.

They were not gentle about it. The chaplain of the 1st Rhode Island Cavalry wrote grimly: "The time had fully come to peel this land and put an end to the long strife for its possession," and he had found the precise word for it.²⁰ The cavalry peeled the Shenandoah Valley as a man might peel an orange. The blue tide ebbed, leaving wreckage behind it, pillars of smoke rising by day and pillars of fire glowing by night to mark the place where they had been.

The general idea was simple. All barns were to be burned, and crops were to be destroyed. Farmers were to be left enough to see themselves through the winter, although the definition of "enough" was left to the lieutenants and captains commanding the detachments which had the matches, and there was no right of appeal. Anything that could benefit the Confederacy was to be destroyed, whether it was a corn-crib, a gristmill, a railroad bridge, or something that went on four legs. It was hoped that nobody would starve to death, and no violence was to be offered to any civilian's person, but the Valley was to feed no more Confederate armies thereafter.

The Rhode Island chaplain looked back on it, a dozen years later, and wrote:

"The 17th of August will be remembered as sending up to the skies the first great columns of smoke and flame from doomed secession barns, stacks, cribs and mills, and the driving into loyal lines of flocks and herds. The order was carefully yet faithfully obeyed. . . . The order led to the destruction of about 2,000 barns, 70 mills, and other property, valued in all at 25 millions of dollars." The chaplain went on to say that many guerilla bands had lived in this region and that it had finally been "purified" by fire: "As our boys expressed it, 'we burned out the hornets " ²¹

A man in the 17th Pennsylvania Cavalry gave his picture of it:

"Previously the burning of supplies and outbuildings had been incidental to battles, but now the torch was applied deliberately and intentionally. Stacks of hay and straw and barns filled with crops harvested, mills, corn-cribs; in a word, all supplies of use to man or beast were promptly burned and all valuable cattle driven off. . . . The work of destruction seemed cruel and the distress it occasioned among the people of all ages and sexes was evident on every hand. The officers and soldiers who performed the details of this distressing work were met at every farm or home by old men, women and children in tears, begging and beseeching those in charge to save them from the appalling ruin. These scenes of burning and destruction, which were only the prelude to those which followed at a later day farther up the Valley, were attended with sorrow to families and added horrors to the usual brutalities of war, unknown to any other field operations in the so-called Confederacy." ²²

Not all of the people quite got the point of what was being done. Even General Hunter had felt obliged to point out to his men, a month earlier, that there were in the Valley many people of stout Unionist sympathy, who sheltered Federal wounded men and did their best to aid the Union army; such people, he pointed out, ought to be given a little protection, which unfortunately his own army did not seem able to provide. Now the Pennsylvania cavalryman said that "the few Union people, old men, women and children, could not be made to understand the utility or necessity of the measure, while the outspoken Confederates heaped upon us maledictions. . . . The common hatred of open foes seemed to deepen, and to blot out forever all hope of future goodwill between North and South." ²³

The soldiers did not exactly enjoy their job. The historian of another regiment of Pennsylvania horse, the 6th, said that his regiment was lucky enough to avoid "the detail for this unpleasant duty," and said that he rode that day with the last element of the rear guard, marching in the wake of the men who had been swinging the torch. "The day had been an unpleasant one," he wrote, "the weather was hot and the roads very dusty, and the grief of the inhabitants, as they saw their harvests disappearing in flame and smoke, and their stock being driven off, was a sad sight. It was a phase of warfare we had not seen before, and although we admitted the necessity we could not but sympathize with the sufferers." ²⁴

A Michigan cavalryman remembered riding past a little home and seeing, in the gate of the fence by the road, an old woman, crying bitterly, blood flowing from a deep cut in one arm. He rode up to her and she told him that some soldier had struck her with his saber and then had taken her two cows. He wheeled and spurred after his regiment, found the officer in charge of the herd of confiscated cattle, recovered the two cows—or, at any rate, two cows which might have been the ones—and with the officer he tried in vain to find the man who had used the saber. Then he took the cows back to the woman, who thanked him in tearful surprise and told him that if he was ever captured by Mosby's men he should have them bring him to her home, and she would give testimony that would save him from being hanged.²⁵

So the army made its way back down the Valley, leaving desolation behind it, and the war came slowly nearer its end in the black smoke that drifted over the Blue Ridge. The war had begun with waving unstained flags and dreams of a picture-book fight which would concern no one but soldiers, who would die picturesquely and without bloodshed amid dress-parade firing lines, and it had come down now to burning barns, weeping children, and old women who had been hit with sabers. In the only way that was left to it, the war was coming toward its close. Phil Sheridan passed the word, and his scouts laughed and went trotting off to spy on the Rebels and play a clever game with the threat of a greased noose; and the guerillas met in dark copses on the edge of the army and rode out with smoking revolvers to loll the cripples, and now and then one of them was caught.

It happened so with a group of Sheridan's scouts, who captured a Captain Stump, famous as a Rebel raider, a man they had long been seeking. He had been wounded, and when he was caught they took his weapons away and brought him to Major Young, who commanded the scouts, and Major Young had a certain respect for this daring guerilla, so he told him.

"I suppose you know we will kill you. But we will not serve you as you have served our men—cut your throat or hang you. We will give you a chance for your life. We will give you ten rods' start on your own horse, with your spurs on. If you get away, all right „ . · But remember, my men are dead shots."

Captain Stump was bloody and he had been hurt, but he was all man. He smiled, and nodded, and rode a few feet out in front of the rank of his captors—skinny young men, 130 pounds or less, unmarried, the pick of the Yankee cavalry. Major Young looked down the rank, and called out; "Go!"

"We allowed him about ten rods' start, then our pistols cracked and he fell forward, dead," ²⁶

3. On the Upgrade

From the Shenandoah Valley to Chicago it is perhaps 500 miles, as one of General Grant's unrationed crows might fly, and the binding threads of war spanned these miles and tied valley and city together in an invisible bond.

In the Valley, as August came to an end, the winds from the mountains carried away the last of the smudge from charred barns and hayricks, and whether or not anybody could see it those winds came from the hour just before sunrise and there was a promise in them. In Chicago, the hour looked like the spectral twilight of collapse and defeat, and the passenger trains were unloading a large assortment of people who were prepared to stake a good deal on the belief that the great Union of the States was dying.

With that belief Abraham Lincoln himself felt a certain agreement. On August 23 he had somewhat mysteriously asked members of his cabinet to sign a curiously folded paper, which he then tucked away in his desk. None of the men who signed knew what was in the paper. If they had known they would have gabbled and popped their eyes, for in Lincoln's handwriting it contained this statement:

"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 co-operate 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."

A pessimistic appraisal, which since then has often been considered far too gloomy, hindsight having made clear many things not then apparent. But men in wartime have to operate without benefit of the backward glance, and in the summer of 1864 the war looked very much like a stalemate. Many men had died and there was much weariness, and as far as anyone could see the people had had about enough-** of the Administration and of the Administration's war.

Lincoln was not the only pessimist. Horace Greeley, whose progress through the war years was a dizzy succession of swings from fatuous optimism to profoundest gloom, had recently written: "Mr. Lincoln is already beaten. He cannot be re-elected." His pink cherubic face fringed by delicate light hair which always seemed to be ruffled by a faint breeze from never-never land, Greeley spoke for many Republican stalwarts when he wistfully hoped that Lincoln might somehow be replaced on the party ticket by Grant, or Butler, or Sherman. In such case, mused Greeley, "we could make a fight yet." With other prominent Republicans, Greeley had been working on a scheme to hold a national convention of radical Republicans at the end of September, so as to concentrate support "on some candidate who commands the confidence of the country, even by a new nomination if necessary." ¹

What was worrying Lincoln, of course, was not so much the prospect of his own defeat as the conviction that this defeat would mean loss of the war. In this judgment he may or may not have been correct. It is perhaps worthy of notice that one man who was very well qualified to form an expert opinion on the matter agreed with him thoroughly. When a visitor from Washington told General Grant that there was talk of running him for the presidency, Grant hit the arms of his camp chair with clenched fists and growled: "They can't do it! They can't compel me to do it!" Then he went on to show how Lincoln's leadership looked from the special vantage point of the commanding general's tent at City Point: "I consider it as important to the cause that he should be elected as that the army should be successful in the field." ²

Grant was the man who fought all-out, with few holds barred and with the annihilation of the opposing armies as the end to be sought. Yet Grant was quite able to see that although the war must be won on the battlefields it might very easily be lost back home—in Chicago, for example. The same thought had occurred to many others, including Jefferson Davis, and as a result a number of Confederate spies and military agents were converging on Chicago just now in the hope that they could stir up a great deal of trouble.

The immediate magnet was the national convention of the Democratic party, convening on August 29 to nominate a candidate to run against Lincoln. Broadly speaking, this convention was bringing together practically everybody who disliked the way the war was being run, with the single exception of the dissident Republicans who felt that Lincoln was not tough enough. Among the assembling Democrats were stout Unionists who opposed the forcible abolition of slavery and the reduction of states' rights; among them, also, were others who wanted only to have the war end—with a Union victory if possible, without it if necessary. And there were also men who saw the war consuming precious freedoms and creating tyranny, who blended extreme political partisanship with blind fury against the war party and who at least believed that they were ready to strike back without caring much what weapon they used.

So the waters in Chicago were very muddy, and to the Confederate government it seemed likely that they might offer good fishing.

For many months the Confederacy had been getting ready to exploit just this kind of situation. It had assembled a large number of operatives in Toronto under the general leadership of Colonel Jacob Thompson, who bore the vague title of Special Commissioner of the Confederate States Government in Canada and who possessed a letter from Jefferson Davis guardedly instructing him "to carry out the instructions you have received from me verbally in such manner as shall seem most likely to conduce to the furtherance of the interests of the Confederate States of America." Thompson's people were trying to do a little bit of everything. Early in the summer they had put out peace feelers, briefly hoodwinking none other than Horace Greeley himself, and although nothing much came of this venture the apparatus was hard at work on many other projects, most of them involving some form of sabotage in the Northern states.

Thompson had a wild, devil-may-care crowd at his command. One of the most effective was a slim, black-haired, almost effeminate-looking Kentuckian named Thomas H. Hines, formerly a captain in John Hunt Morgan's cavalry— the man, in fact, who had engineered Morgan's spectacular and still mysterious escape from the Ohio penitentiary a year earlier. Hines was very tough indeed, and he had been sent to Canada from Richmond immediately after the Dahlgren raid, his mission being to round up all escaped Confederate prisoners of war who could find their way north of the border and to carry out with them "any fair and appropriate enterprises of war against our enemies" that might occur to him.

The ideas these men had ranged all the way from stirring up draft riots in the Middle West to the burning of Northern cities, the capture of Northern prison camps, and the seizure of U.S.S. Michigan, the Navy's warship which patrolled the Great Lakes. To a certain extent their program was frankly terroristic, and the papers which supposedly had been found on Colonel Dahlgren's body calling for the burning and sacking of Richmond were often mentioned as full justification for such a program.³