Walt himself never closed his ears against the call to serve in the ranks, if it should come to him. Had he himself been drawn, he might have regarded the circumstance as the intimation of duty; but he was not. Instead he took the risks of small-pox in the infectious wards, as well as that which is incurred by the frequent dressing of gangrened wounds; and he bore the spiritual burden of all the pathetic war-wreckage which drifted into Washington month after weary month.
The tension of those days was terrible to him. Devoted to the “Mother of All,” the American nation, he loved her sons both North and South with an equal affection, their suffering and destruction wringing his heart. For, mystic as he was, he had all the strong passions of humanity, and felt to the full the agonies of the flesh. On the one side also, his own brother was in the hottest of the fighting throughout these years; while on the other, it is just possible that some young son of his own, known or unknown to him, may have served among the boys in the opposite ranks before the war was over. His Abolitionist friends would sigh, and say the struggle must go on till every slave should be free; but he who valued freedom not less than they, and understood perhaps better what it really means, dissented from them.
The first sight of a battlefield made him cry out for peace; and if in the following months he felt the exhilaration which breathed from the simple heroism displayed by the soldiers, he still saw that war is not all heroic, but in time must darken the fairest cause. The terrible burden of its inconceivable extravagance began to weigh upon him like a nightmare. Each new season, with its prospective train of ambulances, its legion of tragedies, bewildered him with its horror; till he angrily denied that the whole population of negroes could be worth so terrific a purchase.[355] It may have been the exaggerated retort to an extremist argument; but indeed it was not for the negroes that the war was being fought; it was not for the powerful but highly coloured manifesto of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but for the “Declaration of Independence,” and for the Constitution of America. And this both Whitman and Lincoln realised: they knew the negro of the South as the New Englander never knew him, and were firm in demanding for him the rights of a human being; but they knew also that mere abolition would not give him these, nor could it render him capable of the right exercise of American citizenship.
Though Lee had been thrown back from Gettysburg, his army had never recognised a defeat; and the chief danger to the cause of American unity lay in the conviction of the South that its general and his men were really invincible. For two more years they kept the field, with a heroic determination that appears at the same time little short of criminal when we consider the conditions involved upon all the parties to resistance. And when we add to these the story of the Southern military prisons, even the chivalrous fame of Lee becomes stained with an ineffaceable shame. Better a thousand times to have acknowledged defeat than to have been guilty of enforcing such things. But the pride of the South had become rigid, and would only admit defeat after it was broken. Its political leaders had staked everything upon victory; and it would seem that they preferred to sacrifice a whole generation of their supporters and victims rather than bear the penalty of their failure.
When Grant, or rather the reckless courage of his American volunteers,[356] had crushed General Bragg at Chattanooga, and his friend Sherman had completed the work of clearing Tennessee, Lee’s army remained the sole hope of the desperately impoverished South. But still in itself and in its leader it was absolutely confident.
A similar confidence inspired the hearts of the Union soldiers, when in March, 1864, the downright laconic general from the West was given supreme command, and went into Virginia to crush his antagonist by mere force of numbers and determination.
In Grant at last both Lincoln and the army had found the man they were waiting for. But still a year went by before the task was accomplished—a year whose memory is the most terrible of the war—upon whose page are inscribed such names as, The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Bloody Angle, North Anna, Cold Harbour, recalling those awful fields whereon more than a hundred thousand soldiers fell. While Grant was stubbornly pushing Lee back upon Richmond, and finally holding him there, Sherman was cutting him off from further support by that extraordinary march south-eastwards from Chattanooga through Atlanta to the sea. He captured Savannah just before Christmas; and afterwards turning north, and wading through all the morasses and crossing all the innumerable streams and rivers of the Carolinas, he completed his errand a few days before his chief entered the Southern capital.
Several futile attempts had been made to bring about a reconciliation between North and South before the bitter end;[357] but Lincoln, eager as he was for peace, stood out irrevocably for the acknowledgment of the Union, and now added to it the emancipation of the slaves. It was clear that nothing short of Lee’s capitulation could satisfy the country or end the war. On the 3rd April, Richmond surrendered to Grant; and on the day after, the President, who was then with the army, entered the city which the evacuating forces had fired. Five more days and Lee gave himself up: by the end of the month the surrender of the Confederate troops had been effected, while Jefferson Davis was captured in Georgia on the 10th of May. A fortnight later the combined hosts of Grant and Sherman passed before the President in a last grand review along Pennsylvania Avenue and before the White House, to be thereafter disbanded.