Terrible Swift Sword Read Free Page A

leaders was general. Early in May,
governors of the Northern states lying west of New England met to urge vigorous
prosecution of the war, and their feelings were expressed in a letter drawn up
by Governor Alex Randall of Wisconsin and forwarded to President Lincoln.
    "There is a spirit evoked by this
rebellion among the liberty-loving people of the country," wrote Governor
Randall, "that is driving them to action, and if the Government will not
permit them to act for it they will act for themselves. It is better for the
Government to direct this current than to let it run wild. So far as possible
we have attempted to allay this excess of spirit, but there is a moral element
and a reasoning element in this uprising that cannot be met in the ordinary
way. There is a conviction of great wrongs to be redressed and that the
Government is to be preserved by them. The Government must provide an outlet
for this feeling or it will find one for itself. If the Government does not at
once shoulder this difficulty and direct its current there will come something
more than a war to put down rebellion—it will be a war between border States,
which will lose sight, for the time, of the Government." 18
    Using
different words, these Northerners and Southerners were all testifying to a
common belief—that this war which was going to mean fighting, pain,
destruction, and tremendous anger was destined sooner or later to go out of
control. It could not be just "a war to put down rebellion." Its elements
were too violent. Men who had never learned to endure wrongs with patience had
become convinced that wrongs were being done to them. People eternally eager to
dedicate themselves had come to feel that there were noble causes to be served.
Finally, there were enemies to be hurt in a land where the only rule about a blow
struck in anger was that it must be struck with all of the strength one had.
    . . . Tornado weather: sultriest and most
menacing, as the Wisconsin governor had said, along the border—that cross
section of nineteenth-century America that ran for a thousand miles from
Virginia tidewater to the plains of Kansas, reaching from the place of the
nation's oldest traditions to the rude frontier where no tradition ran back
farther than the day before yesterday. Here was where the fighting was
beginning— along the border—and here was where the war was going to take shape.
    For a long time the
shape of it would be hard to make out, partly because the pattern would be slow
in taking form and partly because it was so easy to look for it in the wrong
place. Then as now, the eye was drawn to Virginia, to the legendary country
between the Potomac and the James, the floodlit stage where rival governments
would have formal trial by combat. The Bull Run frenzy had gone to its limit
here, arrogant overconfidence blowing up at last in a froth of pride and shame
and panic; and the governments were thought to have learned something by it.
They would take their time now, organizing and equipping and drilling with
much care, moving (when it was time to move) according to professional plan and
not because of pressure raised by "Forward to Richmond!" headlines
in an overheated press. Here, it was said, was where the final decision would
be reached, and all that happened elsewhere would be secondary.
    But
the border ran a long way, and eastern Virginia was no more than a fraction of
it. Beyond were Allegheny valleys and Cumberland plateau, western Virginia and
eastern Tennessee, Kentucky with its rich Bluegrass farmland going west from
the mountains all the way to the central artery, the Mississippi; and beyond
them was Missouri, stretching out to the Kansas-Nebraska vastness where the war
had had at least one of its beginnings. In each of the related segments of this
border the war had a different guise and a different meaning. Here it was a
battle in which ill-equipped armies learned their trade in blundering action;
there it was a matter of shadows