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

Boston reporter saw “one Amazonian woman… with hair streaming, arms swinging, and her face the picture of phrenzy… rushed again and again to the assault.” One neighborhood girl remembered women holding up their infants to the windows of the arsenal and daring the soldiers inside to shoot.5

Cabot refused to allow his men to fire. But after forty-five minutes, the crowd began slamming its collective weight against the arsenal doors, and Cabot had no choice but to order one of the 6-pounder howitzers his artillerymen had brought with them loaded with a double charge of canister. At eight-fifteen the door gave way before the mob, and Cabot gave the order to fire. The gun blast blew the mob back into the street, and within a few minutes they had scattered out of sight. Eight people were dead, four of them small children.

The mob was not done, however. Bloodied and desperate, the crowd regrouped around the corner and broke into whatever gun shops they could find for weapons. Robertson James, a second lieutenant in the 54th Massachusetts, barricaded himself with a dozen other soldiers on the upper floor of Read’s Gun Shop; below, the mob was “hunting down any man in certain localities… wearing the uniform of our army.” As James recalled, black soldiers’ lives “were not worth five minutes purchase.” As they worked their way down the line of shops that led toward old Faneuil Hall, the rioters were headed off by a squad of policemen, two companies of militia, a company of mounted dragoons with drawn sabers, and the mayor of Boston with the Riot Act in his hand. The shiver of sabers in the red summer sunset cowed them, and the mob gradually broke up and faded into the oncoming dusk. By 11:00 PM, Boston was quiet again.6

With that, it became apparent even to the most blue-dyed Yankee and the most radical Republican that Richmond was not the only city in 1863 that was beginning to stagger under the weight of the war’s burdens. No city in America was more identified with abolitionism than Boston; no governor had pressed more quickly or more tirelessly to move emancipation and abolition to the front of the war agenda than Governor John Andrew. But the people in the streets of Boston had not been prepared for the costs that a war to emancipate African American slaves would impose on them. They had certainly not bargained for the war to turn into a nightmare that requisitioned their sons, brothers, and fathers by force, then sent them off to be slaughtered either to no apparent purpose or in the name of a purpose linked with black freedom. The temper of the war was failing in the North in 1863; emancipation and abolition were all well and good, but they would mean nothing if not secured by Union military victory. And if the war could not be won, and soon, perhaps it might be better to admit that it could never be won at all.

IF IT TAKES ALL SUMMER

Grant’s victory at Chattanooga in November 1863 brought the Federal armies only one-third of the way between their old base in Kentucky and the Confederacy’s Atlantic and Gulf coastlines. Now that Grant had complete power over all the western Federal armies, he might choose to push southward directly to Atlanta and complete the disruption of the Confederacy’s western rail links, or he might shift his line of operations to aim at Mobile, Alabama, which would close one of the Confederacy’s last remaining ports and, in the process, roll over the Confederacy’s vital foundries and arsenals in northern Alabama.

His first inclination was to strike for Mobile. In August Grant wrote to Charles Dana in the War Department, “I am very anxious to take Mobile while I think it can be done,” and four months later, he told General in Chief Halleck that he wanted “to move by way of New Orleans and Pascagoula on Mobile. …” A move on Atlanta was a logistical impossibility right now, Grant explained to Halleck; instead he proposed to leave only a garrison strong enough to secure Chattanooga, then move the old Army of the Cumberland via steamboat down to New Orleans for the campaign against Mobile “and with the balance of the army make a campaign into the interior of Alabama, and possibly Georgia.” This plan might have the additional bonus of forcing “Lee to abandon Virginia and North Carolina” to protect Georgia. In any case, the government should give up looking to capture Richmond and concentrate its attention on the West instead. Grant was now convinced that the campaigns in Virginia were really only so much tactical boxing, and that the only way to strike a truly decisive blow at the Confederacy was to slash away at its strategic intestines in Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas.7

Halleck replied in January to Grant’s Mobile proposal, cautiously authorizing Grant to proceed—but with the crippling requirement that all of Tennessee first be securely in Union hands. What was more, “I have never considered Richmond as the necessary objective point of the Army of the Potomac,” Halleck added in February. For him, the real question of the war was how best to defeat Lee’s army. If Grant were permitted to concentrate Union forces in the West, then “all the forces which Lee can collect will be moved north, and the popular sentiment will compel the Government to bring back the army… to defend Washington, Baltimore, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia.”

Halleck’s hesitation was not the only wet blanket on Grant’s plans. In January, much to Grant’s annoyance, Nathaniel P. Banks, the Federal military commander in Louisiana, took a joint army-navy expedition up the Red River into the upcountry of Louisiana and eastern Texas. Banks’s expedition was a political move rather than a military one. Both Lincoln and Banks wanted to consolidate the hold of the newly reconstructed government in occupied Louisiana over the rest of the state (and its valuable cotton) and perhaps send a useful message to