Lincoln meanwhile called a cabinet meeting and coolly proposed that the Federal government offer to the Southern states four hundred million dollars in six per cent government bonds, as compensation for the property values which would be destroyed by emancipation, on condition that the Southern states return to the Union within two months. The Cabinet was stunned and slightly indignant. In vain Lincoln pointed out that if the war lasted only another hundred days it would cost all of the money he was now proposing to spend. No one would agree that this was the way to get peace and reunion, and at last Lincoln put away the draft of his proposal, saying: "You are all opposed to me."

In Richmond, Davis addressed a patriotic rally, inviting all Southerners to "unite our hands and hearts" in the fond belief that before midsummer it would be the Yankees who would be crossing the lines to ask for terms. Stephens conceded that Davis made a brilliant speech, although he considered it "not much short of dementation," and when Davis asked what he proposed to do next the little Vice-President was blunt: "Go home and stay there." ²⁵

No peace, then, except by the sword, and the eerie light that had so briefly touched the winter sky faded out. It had been building up to this for four years, and here it was, visible and final: the war would end only when one side or the other had been pounded into helplessness, for men had passed beyond the point where they could negotiate or compromise. It was up to the soldiers, after all.

The soldiers were hopeful, but sober, for the war had worked on them. In the Petersburg trenches and camps, no one was ever heard to sing "Tenting Tonight," once the favorite campfire song: "That song is especially dedicated to the brave and stalwart homestayers." There was little horseplay, little joviality, few campfire jokes and pleasant yarns— not, as one man wrote, because men had grown discouraged, but simply because the wide range of a regiment's personal characteristic now "is narrowed to almost the definiteness of one special class: the steady and sober men." Yet there was little complaining, and very little self-pity: "The army laughs far more than it weeps." ²⁶

A Massachusetts gunner sat down and figured that in another 200 days his battery would reach the end of its enlistment and could go home, and he tried to write down what the rest of his term of service would amount to:

". . . only 200 more days of service, of which 33 are guard duty and the same of regular fatigue; three times mustered for pay-marching, fighting, perhaps; 2,000 hard tack, 75 pounds of pork, 125 pounds of beef to eat, 72 gallons of coffee to drink, part of it every day, and it will be done." ²⁷

2 Great Light in the Sky

Fort Stedman was a square box of a place, with solid walls enclosing a space for the guns. Inside the enclosure were sodded mounds over the dugouts in which the soldiers slept and kept their stores. In front and on each side were the spiky entanglements of the abatis, and to right and left were the trenches which tied Fort Stedman into the main line of Federal works facing Petersburg.

The fort had stood here for nine months, and there was nothing in particular to distinguish it from several dozen other forts in the Federal lines except that it was in bad repair. It was less than 200 yards from the Confederate works, and that was easy range even for average marksmen, and so when the fort's walls settled that winter the authorities did not order them rebuilt because the men who worked on them would probably be shot. Behind the fort there was higher ground from which one could look into the fort, and there was no abatis in the rear, and all in all Stedman was one of the weakest spots in the whole Federal line. That did not matter much, however, for it seemed very improbable that the Rebels would ever make an attack. The New York heavy artillery regiment which held this part of the line kept pickets out in front—they were almost within handshaking distance of the Rebel pickets, the lines here were so close—but as long as these men stayed awake and the works behind them were adequately manned the weakness of Fort Stedman seemed nothing to worry about.¹

This was sensible enough, as good sense goes in wartime. But the old balances were falling, and suddenly now the war was going to go with a rush and a roar toward the final smash-up, all of the tensions built up in nine months of strained equilibrium letting go in one comprehensive explosion. Fort Stedman had been built across the path of Fate, and its imperfect walls enclosed the spot from which a man who looked sharply might see the beginning of the end.

It was four in the morning of March 25, 1865, black and still as polar midnight, with never a sound from the picket lines. Half a mile north of Stedman was another Union strong point, Fort McGilvery, and a sergeant in this fort peered off to the south, listened intently, and then went to rouse his commanding officer: "Captain, there is some disturbance on our left in the direction of Fort Stedman, but I can't make out what it is." The captain went to have a look, and the men could see a few pin-pricks of flame, and then they could hear scattered musket fire. Then they saw one of Stedman's cannon fired—not in front, toward the Rebel army, but off toward the rear.²

Several hundred yards south of Fort Stedman a Catholic chaplain had been saying predawn mass for sixty-odd communicants in Union Fort Haskell. He heard rifle firing, and the boom of cannon, and he got through the service as soon as he decently could, after which the worshipers took their weapons and ran to the parapets. And then there was a rising swell of firing, and the sound of men shouting, and there was a flashing of heavy guns in the Confederate lines —and Rebel infantry was past Fort Stedman, running out to seize Union trenches and batteries to right and left, and an assaulting column was swinging around to attack Fort Haskell while other troops were forming for a drive straight through to the Union rear.³

This part of the line belonged to the IX Corps. Burnside had gone home long since, the attack on the crater having been his final contribution, and the corps was in command of his former chief of staff, a pleasant-faced, competent general named John G. Parke. Parke was asleep at corps headquarters, well to the rear, when the fighting began. When he was roused and learned that he had a fight on his hands he also was told that Meade was temporarily absent and that, by seniority, he himself was in command of the Army of the Potomac. He notified the other commands that the Rebels were attacking, and got troops moving toward the danger area. Also, he brought up his own third division which had been in reserve and sent it in to mend the break.

This division was made up of six new Pennsylvania regiments, which had enlisted just before Christmas and were still under training. They seem to have contained good men —not all of the recruits were worthless bounty-jumpers and substitutes—and they were commanded by a first-rate soldier, General John Hartranft, who as a colonel had led the successful attack on Burnside's bridge at Antietam Creek in one of the battles of the long ago. Hartranft took his men forward, and Federal artillery began to open a heavy bombardment as soon as dawn brought enough light to make targets visible.

The 200th Pennsylvania charged in against the Confederate advance, wrecking itself but blunting the spearhead of the Southern charge and forcing it to a halt. The garrison of Fort Haskell beat off the column that was attacking there, and in Fort McGilvery men hoisted cannon over the embankments by hand so that they could fire on the high ground behind Stedman. Hartranft got a solid battle line strung out across the open country to the rear—and before long it was clear that the crisis was over. The Confederates had punched a clean hole in the Union line but they could not widen the hole enough to mount a new attack that would break the secondary defenses, and by eight o'clock Lee sounded the recall.⁴

Many of the Confederates never returned to their own lines. Yankee artillery was laying a heavy fire on the ground they had charged across and to retreat was as dangerous as to advance, and when Parke finally sent the Pennsylvanians smashing forward to recover Fort Stedman and the lost trenches and batteries hundreds of Confederates surrendered. In the end the attack cost Lee's army 4,000 men—twice the total of Union casualties—and the lines were as they had been before.

Meade got back from City Point just as the fighting died down, and he reasoned that Lee must have weakened his forces elsewhere to make this attack. He ordered the II

Corps and the VI Corps, accordingly, to attack the entrenched Rebel picket lines in their front. They did so, seizing the lines, taking hundreds of prisoners, and gaining excellent positions from which to assault the main Southern defenses if that should ever seem advisable.⁵

The grimy Federals who cleared the recaptured trenches, sent wounded men and prisoners to the rear, and put the burial squads to work had had a bigger day than they could realize. They had beaten off the last great offensive thrust of the Army of Northern Virginia.

That army had struck at its Yankee antagonists many times—at Gaines's Mill and at Bull Run, at Chancellorsville and at Gettysburg, and on many other fields, and always it struck with terrible power, tough soldiers running forward under the shrill yip-yip of the Rebel yell, red battle flags sparkling above flashing muskets, cold fury of battle lighting the eyes of the gray warrior who directed the blows. It would never happen again. It was a new war now, and the end was coming.

In the afternoon there were visitors on the battlefield-Abraham Lincoln and U. S. Grant, coming up by rattletrap military train from City Point, Meade and his staff officers going to meet them. Lincoln walked over the field, saw wounded men not yet removed to hospital, and dead men for whom graves were not yet ready. Grant had seen this many times and on many dreadful fields and Lincoln had never seen it at all except for a little at Fort Stevens; and these two men who were so very different were much alike in that neither one was ever able to forget the human cost of glorious victories, or his own responsibility for that cost. An army surgeon told how Lincoln once visited a hospital in Washington and afterward stopped to chat with the doctors. One of these was telling about a difficult operation just performed, in which a wounded soldier's arm had been removed at the shoulder joint, and he went into much technical detail, the other doctors listening intently. At last, as he finished, and the others were asking this and that about the operation, Lincoln burst out with the one question that interested him, the one question which no doctor had thought to asks "But how about the soldier?"⁸ Neither Lincoln nor Grant, who remorselessly held the country up to month after month of wholesale killing, ever got far away from that question.

Back to City Point went Lincoln and Grant, to talk by headquarters campfires, their shadows falling longer and darker over the dwindling borders of a fading Confederacy. Presently there came to join them another man who also cast a long and portentous shadow, a lean and wiry man with unruly red hair and a short stubble of a close-cropped beard, dancing lights in the alert eyes that peered out of a hard face—William Tecumseh Sherman, who had made his name terrible to the South, here now for a last conference before returning to the tough, devil-may-care army which he had left in the pine hills of North Carolina.

In a sense, Sherman was responsible for the attack on Fort Stedman. What remained of the Southern Confederacy was the ground that lay between his army and Grant's, and its doom was absolutely certain if he continued his relentless advance until the two armies made contact. If Lee could break away, get south fast, pick up the inadequate army with which Joe Johnston was opposing Sherman, beat Sherman by a quick, hard blow, and then turn to deal with Grant—if all of that could be done, then the Confederacy might survive. The blow at Fort Stedman had been an attempt to knock the Army of the Potomac back on its heels and cripple it just long enough to give Lee the start he would need on a move to the south.

The odds against the success of any such program were fantastically long, and both Lee and Grant knew it. But they also knew one other fact—that the people of the North were weary of the war with a deep, numb, instinctive weariness, so that one more major disappointment might be too much for them. Whether or not he could beat Sherman, Lee might at least prolong the war for six months if he could get away from Grant, and if he could do that there was a fair chance that the North would give up the struggle.

Yet they had not met just to discuss means of insuring victory. They had held the war firmly in their hands for nearly a year now; a few more weeks of vigilance and driving energy and it would all be over. They were thinking not so much about the ending of the war as about the new beginning that must lie beyond that. They were almost incredibly different, these three—Sherman quick, nervous, and volatile, Grant stolid and unemotional and relentless, Lincoln ranging far beyond them with brooding insights, his profound melancholy touched by mystic inexplicable flashes of light—but each held the faith that the whole country, North and South together, must ultimately find in reunion and freedom the values that would justify four terrible years of war.

The discovery of those values would by no means be automatic. Much hatred and bitterness existed, and there could easily develop a program of revenge and reprisal that would make real reunion forever impossible. There was talk of hangings and of proscription lists and of conquered provinces. There were powerful leaders in the North who meant to see these threats carried out in all their literal grimness, and it was not in the least certain that they could be kept from having their way. So the principal order of business for the President and the two generals was not so much to checkmate the Confederacy as to checkmate the men who would try to make peace with malice and rancor and a length of noosed rope.

When the Southern armies surrendered the two generals would be the ones to say what the terms of surrender must be, and they would take their cue from Lincoln. If the terms expressed simple human decency and friendship, it might be that a peace of reconciliation could get just enough of a lead so that the haters could never quite catch up with it. On all of this Lincoln and Grant and Sherman agreed.

It was a curious business, in a way. The Confederacy had no more effective foes than these men. Lincoln had led the North into war, had held it firmly to its task, and had refused to hear any talk of peace that was not based on the extinction of the Confederate Government. Grant seemed to be the very incarnation of the remorseless killer, and Sherman was destruction's own self, his trail across the South a band of ruin sixty miles wide. Yet it was these three who were most determined that vindictiveness and hatred must not control the future. They would fight without mercy as long as there must be fighting, but when the fighting stopped they would try to turn old enemies into friends.

They spoke for the soldiers. The Northern and Southern armies had less bitterness now than they had had when the war began. On every picket line the cry "Down Yank!" and "Down Reb!" always preceded an outburst of firing. A veteran in the V Corps spoke for the rank and file when he said that the opposing troops in front of Fort Hell "decided that we would respect one another, as the lines at this point were very close and to keep up constant firing would make it very uncomfortable for one or the other." ⁸ These were the men who climbed on the ramparts to give three cheers for peace, and then gave three cheers for each other, and then returned to their fighting, and they did not need to be told that it would be well to make peace mean comradeship. All they needed was to see somebody try it.

So Lincoln and Grant and Sherman had their talk and agreed that it must be tried, and at one point there was a faint, ironic echo from the days of McClellan, forever critical of Washington. This came when Lincoln abruptly asked Sherman:

"Sherman, do you know why I took a shine to Grant and you?"