Across Five Aprils: Chapters 10–12

Rosecrans, McCook, and Crittenden, who in the bewildering mountain terrain had completely lost control of the men they were supposed to command, were now accused of everything from downright stupidity to traitorous complicity with the enemy.

After the hope and jubilation that Vicksburg and Gettysburg had inspired in July, Chickamauga was a dreadful reversal for the North to suffer; for Nancy it was a name threatening her with “hard news” until the day John’s letter came.

But they did hold on, and as the war trailed drearily on, vindictiveness toward the stubborn stand of the seceding states grew steadily more bitter in the North.

This vindictiveness was urged on by men in high places who resented the President’s spirit of clemency as violently as they resented the tenacity of the South.

In December Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation of amnesty, in which he promised pardon and full rights to any individual Confederate who would swear to protect the Constitution and the Union of the states, to abide by the government’s pronouncements against slavery.

In the South the Confederate Congress cried out that if the Washington government called for restoration of the Union it was merely setting a cruel trap for the deluded; that it would be only a relationship between the conqueror and the conquered; that it would mean personal and public degradation and ruin.

His proclamation of amnesty was little better than treason, the President’s detractors shouted, and many people began to consider it high patriotism to talk of the coming wholesale execution of rebels.

He gave his opponent no quarter, and the stubborn tenacity with which he held on in the face of Lee’s punishment was something the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac had never seen in their idolized General McClellan.

If the price of peace was the dissolution of the Union, many people felt that compensation lay in stopping human slaughter.

The article quoted the general as saying that as far as he was concerned, the party’s platform meant that the North was not to offer peace on any terms short of the reestablishment of the Union, that to accept anything else would be an insult and an affront to the thousands of soldiers who had died in battle.

The preponderance of the soldier vote was for Lincoln that year.

The role of this state in bringing on the war served as a “just” excuse for atrocities that no thoughtful man could excuse.

Still, peace would mean a glorious sense of relief; in all his years Jethro had heard either the talk of war’s imminence or its reality.

Abraham Lincoln had been senselessly slain by the hand of a madman, and Jethro Creighton, with all the people of his time, had suffered an irreparable loss.

He had not embraced one of his brothers since the days of his very early childhood, but that morning he put his arms about Shadrach, and slowly the joy for the living assuaged a little the grief for the dead.