Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

have shaken loose from their foundations,” wrote one of Finney’s correspondents in 1864. “So many are sceptical, doubtful, so many good people are cutting loose from creeds & forms. … I am sometimes tempted to ask whether prayer can make any difference.” Evangelicals themselves would unwittingly aid this process by withdrawing in confusion from their public roles to concentrate on ever more personalized forms of religious conversion and exotic attempts to hook current events onto the promise of the coming millennium.93

The public discourse of American intellectuals would, by the 1890s, be taken over by the Romantic intellectuals who had risked so little in the war, and who had therefore lost so little in it. They would be immeasurably aided in this process by the postwar impact of Charles Darwin and his shocking but quintessentially Romantic theory of evolution. But the Civil War proved nearly as deadly to the credibility of American Protestant intellectuals as did any Darwinian apes. Taken together, the Civil War baffled and horrified both secular and Protestant intellectuals, and only in later years, when suffering could be transmuted by memory into moral triumph, and racism effaced by memories of battlefield heroism, could they even begin again to mention the subject. For men of the mind, as well as for men of color and women of all descriptions, America during the Civil War was a world turned upside down.

CHAPTER TEN

STALEMATE AND TRIUMPH

David Howe was an officer, but evidently no gentleman.

Around noon on July 14, 1863, Howe turned the corner at the foot of Prince Street in the mostly Irish North End of Boston. His job was to deliver notices to an unstated number of Prince Street men that their names had been pulled from a drum by draft enrollment officers, and under the terms of the new Federal Enrollment Act, they had ten days to report for induction into the United States Army. Serving these notices was not a popular job, and on an upstairs floor in one Prince Street building Howe was confronted by an Irish woman who refused to accept what was probably a notice for one of the men in her family. She must not have found either Howe’s manners or Howe’s news all that welcome, because after some time spent arguing, the woman hauled off and slapped Howe across the face.1

Enraged at the woman’s boldness, Howe announced that as an agent of the United States government, he intended to have the woman arrested, which he may have supposed would shut her up fast. It didn’t. She shrieked and howled more loudly, and in short order a curious and not altogether friendly-looking crowd began to drift together around Howe. The nervous officer hurriedly descended to the street with the crowd milling after him, and there a quick-witted policeman bundled him into a store at the corner of Prince and Causeway Streets and persuaded the crowd to disperse. After a while the coast seemed clear, and Howe quietly stepped back out into Prince Street with as much of his dignity as he had left. His timing could not have been worse. The crowd from the Irish woman’s building had dispersed only long enough to gather up sticks, stones, and reinforcements, and they came boiling down Prince Street just in time to catch Howe out in the open, where they proceeded to beat the draft officer to within an inch of his life.2

Howe’s erstwhile police protector now sent off for more policemen. By the time they arrived, the crowd had swollen to more than 300 people, and they nearly stomped the hapless coppers to death. With its blood up, the crowd needed direction, and according to the Boston Journal, it got it from “an Irishwoman” who held up “a photograph of her boy who she said was killed in battle,” and led them all to Haymarket Square, four blocks away. It was now 2:00 PM, and the crowd was numbering near 500.3

Massachusetts governor John Andrew was at that moment across the Charles River listening to the salutatorian at the Harvard College commencement drone out a scrupulously esoteric oration in Latin. Andrew was on the point of nodding off when an aide jabbed him awake with an urgent message about a disturbance in the North End. Andrew had been anticipating trouble in Boston, but not over the draft: the all-black 55th Massachusetts had been due to parade through Boston and Andrew had prudently put the militia and Federal artillerymen from the harbor forts on notice in case race-baiting toughs tried to stir up a little trouble. Andrew’s face paled at the whispered news, causing the Harvard salutatorian to forget his Latinate lines, and the governor abruptly walked off the platform and left the commencement audience stewing in whisper and rumor. By 6:00 PM Andrew had mobilized four companies of militia and a battery of artillery and ordered them to rendezvous at the Cooper Street arsenal, only two blocks from Haymarket Square; in another hour, two companies of Federal heavy artillerymen were on their way to the arsenal as well.4

The heavy artillerymen were the last to arrive at the Cooper Street arsenal, and they were only just in time. Around seven-thirty, a mob nearly 1,000 strong roared around the corner of Cooper Street, throwing bricks and bottles and shattering the glass in the arsenal windows. The officers in charge of the troops in the arsenal—Federal artillery major Stephen Cabot and Massachusetts militia captain E. J. Jones—stepped outside and ordered the crowd to disperse. Instead, the rocks and bottles now came showering down on the two officers, and some of the militia fired a volley over the heads of the crowd to scare them into flight. The volley only maddened the mob, and now the enraged men and women in the street began an attack on the arsenal in earnest, hurling paving stones, bricks, and anything else they could lay hands on. Like the Richmond bread riot three months before, women angrily took charge of the assault. A