The ‘terrific panic’ of ‘small men’
Every fall should be a reminder of that far-off day on which the fate of the republic was decided, at least tentatively. I know it is for me. I never fail to recall the bloodshed and horror and hope. To do so this year may be more important than ever – for then, like now, the future appeared bleak.
“Our rulers seem to be crazy,” a diarist, Charles Francis Adams, wrote in year two of the Civil War 1862. The great-grandson of the second president of the United States, Adams visited Washington in late August. He was appalled by what he found.
“The air of this city seems thick with treachery,” he recorded. “… Everything is ripe for a terrific panic, the end of which I cannot see or even imagine.”
Adams, the grandson of another past president, John Quincy Adams, came away convinced that “small men with selfish motives [are in] control … without any central power to keep them in bounds.” He pronounced himself “terrified and discouraged.”
When he was not telling jokes or one of his famous frontier parables, President Lincoln could frequently be heard bemoaning the sorry state of affairs. “The bottom is out” was a favorite phrase uttered in private to White House visitors. He wondered how much longer he could count on Northern support for the war against Southern secession.
It seemed apparent that the Rail Splitter, having taken on the cloak of a benevolent dictator, had lost control of the war along with his war-making powers. If his generals weren’t tardy or timid, they were insubordinate – young Gen. McClellan, in charge of the Army of the Potomac, in particular. Constant defeats at the hands of the Confederates was proving debilitating.
The Union officer corps, newspaper editorialists, indeed all manner of citizens, were deeply divided over the issue of slavery and Union: some wanted the “peculiar” institution abolished, in consideration of the declaration that all men are born equal; others favored letting it alone. In the latter group, some feared emancipation for its own sake; others feared what emancipation of the enslaved would mean to border state politicians and legislatures.
There were whispers of a compromise peace.
The string of Union defeats stretched all the way back to the Battle of Bull Run, in the hopeful first months of the war. Defeat at Second Bull Run was especially hard to take. Its consequences were unfathomable. Before the battle, Gen. John Pope told Washington authorities, “Unless something is done to restore tone to this Army, it will melt away before you know it.”
As summer turned to autumn, Smithfield’s own James Abraham was bivouacked with his cavalry outfit six miles from the Capitol. The men were “never so eager for a fray,” he wrote home.
On Sept. 17, Lt. Abraham got his “fray” and then some along Antietam Creek in the bucolic Maryland countryside near Sharpsburg.
The battle turned out to be the bloodiest day of the whole war. Drenched in sweat and fatigue, a Connecticut soldier afterward remarked that he was “glad to march over the field at night, for we could not see the horrible sights so well. Oh what a smell – some of the men would vomit as they went along.”
Lt. Abraham now called the fight between erstwhile countrymen “unnatural … yet it is right.” Awakening, as it were, from a dreamlike state in which Union victory would be easily won, the Fayette County native henceforth expected a long and bitter struggle.
Antietam barely qualified as a Union victory. But for Lincoln, it was good enough of one to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, without appearing unduly desperate. At the turn of the new year, the war for the preservation of the republic had an added purpose: freedom for the enslaved.
The gory and knotted end of the war was still far off. Thousands more would die on both sides.
Maybe Lincoln and Lt. Abraham were wrong. Maybe the South should have been allowed to go its own way, should have been given a permission slip to break the promises, pledges, and practices that bound us – irascible, contentious Americans – together. But the rub is that would have opened the door for future secessionist movements, whenever one side or the other lost an election, just as the South lost the election of 1860. As Lincoln and common soldiers like James Abraham tried to make manifest, we’re in this for the long run, or not at all.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.