Aaron Sheehan-Dean on how Civil War observers “didn’t know when the end was coming”

Aaron Sheehan-Dean, author of Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia, recently edited The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It, the final installment in the landmark four-volume series published by The Library of America. Sheehan-Dean is Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies at Louisiana State University.

What does the experience of reading these contemporary, eyewitness accounts offer readers that standard narrative histories don't, particularly with regard to this final year of the war?

I think readers will be surprised by the continuing uncertainty about the course of the war. The popular Civil War narrative peaks at Gettysburg in July 1863. But the characters who populate this book didn’t know when the end was coming—Confederates remained optimistic and Unionists quite skeptical until very late in 1864. And even when the end did come, people didn’t know what to make of the war. The closing scenes allow us to see how Americans, North and South, tried to work out the war’s meaning, something that we’re continuing to do.

What does the volume tell us about the role of African Americans in the war?

In 1864, enslaved people in the South confronted the true risks of seeking freedom. White owners pursued every means to deter their flight, Union officials often proved unhelpful and unreliable, and even the environment seemed to conspire against them: Joseph Miller, an escaped slave from Unionist Kentucky, describes losing his entire family when they were expelled from Camp Nelson in the midst of freezing weather. But despite all of these dangers, southern African Americans fled slavery by the hundreds of thousands. And they did so partly because free men of color, fighting under the U.S. flag, led the way into the South destroying slavery as they went. Thomas Morris Chester’s dispatches covering the U.S. Colored Troops in the Army of the James eloquently argued that this military service earned black people full citizenship in the United States.

What do the pieces tell us about the diversity of experiences and outlooks in the North and the South?

They remind us of the huge scope and scale of this conflict. The South alone was larger than continental Europe, and although Napoleon crossed more borders in his campaigns I don’t think he encountered a broader range of people than Grant and Sherman did on their campaigns. So while we speak of this as an American conflict, the range of human experience in it was tremendous. That’s part of what makes it eternally fascinating. It would be hard to find two more conflicting views of the war than those between C. Chauncey Burr, an anti-war Democratic newspaper editor, and Wilbur Fisk, a Republican soldier from Vermont. Burr denounced Lincoln for leading “a war against a great principle—the principle of liberty and self-government” while for Fisk, “slavery and despotism have challenged war with us.”

Are there particular writers you grew closer to, or came particularly to admire, while working on the book?

It’s always a treat to find common diarists and letter writers who did not prepare their works for publication but who write with a brilliant pen. Catherine Edmondston, a plantation mistress in North Carolina, is one of those writers whose range of learning, wit, and clever invective should charm even the most skeptical readers. She tracked the armies’ movements carefully, but expended her sharpest barbs for those Confederate politicians whose failures doomed her nation. She thundered against the Richmond Enquirer’s advocacy of enlisting slaves as soldiers in January 1865: “it offers to sell the birthright of the South, not for a mess of pottage, but only for the hope of obtaining one.”

Most interesting discovery you made while assembling the book?

Given the discussion of “big data” these days, I am always surprised to find nineteenth-century Americans who make the most astute judgments based on nothing more than watching and listening. Charles Francis Adams Jr., whose father served as American minister to Great Britain (and whose grandfather and great-grandfather had each served as president), offered one of the sharpest assessments of Ulysses S. Grant ever recorded. Adams’s unit guarded Grant’s field headquarters in 1864 and he regarded Grant as physically undistinguished but uniquely capable at leading the northern armies. “He handles those around him so quietly & well,—he so evidently has the faculty of disposing of work & managing men,” Adams observed. “He is cool & quiet, almost stolid & as if stupid,—in danger & in crisis he is one against whom all around, whether few in number or a great army as here, would instinctively lean. He is a man of the most exquisite judgment & tact.” The pieces in this volume from Adams Jr. and his brother Henry, and father, all bristle with intelligence and wit.

Piece you think readers will find most surprising?

The story of Appomattox is so well known that we assume every northern soldier reacted with euphoria. That’s why Stephen Minot Weld’s letter to his sister always stops me cold. Weld came from a privileged Boston background and retained a skeptical view of his experiences, but his slow comprehension of Lee’s surrender reminds us of how completely the war had swallowed him. “I had a sort of impression that we should fight him all our lives,” Weld wrote. “He was like a ghost to children, something that haunted us so long that we could not realize that he and his army were really out of existence to us.”

Do you have a favorite piece in the collection?

I often quote Spottswood Rice when speaking with students about slavery and emancipation. Rice escaped from bondage and set out to reclaim his children. His steadfastness and confidence reveals how radically the war upended the southern social order. He warned the children’s owner, “when I get ready to come after mary I will have bout a powrer and autherity to bring hear away and to exacute vengencens on them that holds my Child . . . I have no fears about getting mary out of your hands  this whole Government give chear to me and you cannot help your self.”

The Battle of Chattanooga (November 23–25, 1863): “Another laurel leaf is added to Grant’s Crown”

Guest blog post by Brooks D. Simpson, Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It. The third volume of the series was published earlier this year.

On the afternoon of November 25, 1863, Ulysses S. Grant stood on Orchard Knob east of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and pondered what to do next. It was just over a month since he had arrived at the town where the Army of the Cumberland, in the aftermath of its defeat at Chickamauga on September 20, found itself besieged by the victorious Army of Tennessee under the command of Braxton Bragg. Grant’s job was to break the siege and defeat the enemy.

It was a daunting task. The Confederates looked down upon their beaten foe from defensive positions along Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain. The Rebels had also moved westward along the Tennessee River to sever the Yankee supply line, leaving the Army of the Cumberland in a perilous situation. The Lincoln administration labored to relieve the beleaguered army, dispatching two corps from the Army of the Potomac in Virginia and one from Grant’s Army of the Tennessee in Mississippi to do what they could to pry open the Confederate grip on Chattanooga. Having lost faith in the ability of William S. Rosecrans, the Army of the Cumberland’s commander, to salvage the situation, President Lincoln turned to the victor of Vicksburg to save the day. Elevated in mid-October to a command that spanned the area from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River valley, Grant took advantage of an option provided in his orders to replace Rosecrans with George H. Thomas, who promised Grant that he would hold Chattanooga until his men starved.

By the time Grant arrived at Chattanooga on October 23, the Union forces were ready to take action. Rosecrans and his chief engineer William F. Smith had already framed a plan to reopen a supply line along the Tennessee River. Grant ordered that it be implemented. Meanwhile, he hurried forward William T. Sherman’s troops from the Army of the Tennessee, intending to entrust the key blow of the upcoming battle to Sherman instead of Thomas or Joseph Hooker, who had come westward with the Potomac soldiers. It was not until November 23 that Grant could set his plan in motion. That day Thomas undertook a reconnaissance in force that easily captured Orchard Knob. The result was more than Grant expected. Still, one observer noted that he was “well pleased at what had been accomplished. He seems perfectly cool, and one could be with him for hours, and not know that any great movements were going on. Its a mere matter of business with him.”¹

That night there was a near total eclipse of the moon. Major James A. Connelly of the 123rd Illinois Infantry noted that “it was ominous of defeat, but not for us; we concluded that it meant Bragg because he was perched on the mountain top, nearest the moon.”² As noon came on November 24 “the fiercest and most tremendeous roars of both cannon and musketry” broke out along Lookout Mountain. Hooker’s men scrambled up its slopes, driving the enemy away. That night Union observers could see “Camp fires and flashes of musketry” illuminate the mountain’s slopes: the following morning Grant’s headquarters discovered that Hooker’s men had planted a United States flag at the summit.³ Meanwhile, Sherman had moved into place opposite the Bragg’s right on Missionary Ridge, ready to smash the Confederate flank and drive the Rebels off the ridgeline.

On the morning of November 25 Sherman attacked, only to discover that he has misjudged the terrain in front of him. Patrick Cleburne’s division repelled several Union assaults, and by early afternoon it was clear that Sherman was getting nowhere. On the Union right Hooker’s men found it tough going to make progress against the Confederates, in part because they needed to replace destroyed bridges. At Orchard Knob, Grant, Thomas, and several officers stood in a cold wind and contemplated what to do next as Confederate shells “whizzed past” every few minutes.⁴

By mid-afternoon Grant knew he had to do something. He directed Thomas to order his four divisions to move forward and capture, the Confederate rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge, and then await further orders. When the moment was right, he would order them to resume their advance.

It didn’t quite work out that way. After Union artillery commenced shelling the ridge, Thomas’s men “moved forward at the rifle pits of the enemy as if they knew they were going to succeed,” as Smith described it. The Confederates “broke from behind their protection and up the hill, our men following with chear upon chear and the cannon and musketry on top of the hill pouring shot and shell upon them.”⁵

In truth, the advancing Yankees had no choice. Having taken the rifle pits with relative ease, they discovered that they were now vulnerable to deadly fire from the ridge above them. Withdrawal would only expose them to more fire. The only option was to advance without waiting for orders from headquarters. Some commanders thought that the crest of the ridge was the ultimate objective; others thought the advance was to stop at the rifle pits. That confusion no longer mattered. “The line ceased to be a line,” Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs recalled. “The men gathered towards the points of least difficult ascent” and streamed up toward the crest. Although Confederate artillery fired away, Major Connolly later explained that “they couldn’t even scare us, as they couldn’t depress their guns to reach us, but had to blaze away far over our heads.” As Smith described it, “Regiment after regiment gained the top and planted their colors—most of them gaining it by the many roads that passed from the valley to the top of the ridge.”⁶

That was not how Grant had planned it. Meigs recorded how Grant declared that “it was contrary to orders, it was not his plan—he meant to form the lines and then prepare and launch columns of assault, but, as the men[,] carried away by their enthusiasm had gone so far, he would not order them back.” What had seemed at first akin to suicide had turned into a smashing success.⁷

That evening no one could quite believe what they had seen, although it did not take long for the assault on Missionary Ridge to pass into legend. Bragg’s “beaten and discontented army” was “in full retreat”; Tennessee and Kentucky were now safe from invasion. It was, Meigs decided, “[t]he grandest stroke yet struck for our country.… It is unexampled—Another laurel leaf is added to Grant’s Crown.”⁸

Years later the editors of Century Magazine suggested to Grant that Bragg had detached some of his army to attack Knoxville in early November because he thought the Missionary Ridge position was impregnable. With “a shrewd look,” Grant replied: “Well, it was impregnable.”<sup>9

1</sup> William Wrenshall Smith: Journal, November 13–25, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 576.
² James A. Connolly to Mary Dunn Connolly, December 7, 1863, ibid., 593.
³ Smith, ibid., 577-78.
⁴ Montgomery C. Meigs: Journal, November 23–25, 1863, ibid., 585.
⁵ Smith, ibid., 580.
⁶ Meigs, ibid., 587; Connolly to Mary Dunn Connolly, November 26, 1863, ibid., 590; Smith, ibid., 580.
⁷ Meigs, ibid., 587.
⁸ Ibid., 589.
⁹ Ulysses S. Grant: Chattanooga, in Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (1888), vol. III, 693n.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Jefferson Davis tries to rally Confederate morale (Fall 1863)
• Brooks D. Simpson: The Battle of Chickamauga (September 19–20)
• Brooks D. Simpson: Grant lays siege to Vicksburg (May 22, 1863)

Jefferson Davis Tries to Rally Confederate Morale (Fall 1863)

Guest blog post by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Fred C. Frey Chair in Southern Studies at Louisiana State University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It. The third volume of the series was published earlier this year.

The summer of 1863 had been a poor one for the Confederacy. Robert E. Lee’s army was not just repulsed from its invasion of Pennsylvania but bloodily beaten at Gettysburg. At the same time, William S. Rosecrans maneuvered Braxton Bragg’s Confederates out of Middle Tennessee at the cost of less than six hundred Union casualties. Farther west, Ulysses S. Grant had at last captured Vicksburg, the strongest Confederate citadel of the Mississippi, and delivered complete control of the “Father of Waters” to the Union. Lee safely retreated into Virginia and spent the rest of the year rebuilding his army, aided partly by a controversial offer of amnesty to deserters who returned to their units.

The only good news came in September when Bragg, after receiving reinforcements from Mississippi and Virginia, took advantage of Rosecrans’s dispersed positions in northwest Georgia south of Chattanooga. The ensuing battle along Chickamauga Creek on September 19–20 devastated the Union Army of the Cumberland and forced it to retreat back into the city. Bragg initiated a siege, but his senior commanders expressed great frustration that they had not aggressively pursued Rosecrans’s fleeing army and taken Chattanooga. As a result, Jefferson Davis found himself traveling to Georgia in an attempt to contain something close to a generals’ mutiny. When Davis arrived at the headquarters of the Army of Tennessee overlooking Chattanooga on October 9, four of Bragg’s corps commanders called for his replacement. Addressing the army the next day, Davis reminded them that “obedience was the first duty of a soldier” and “prompt, unquestioning obedience” of superiors “could not be too highly commended.” He then confidently predicted that the Army of Tennessee would soon “plant our banners permanently on the banks of the Ohio.”¹

Davis toured through Alabama, eastern Mississippi, Georgia, and the Carolinas after he restored a semblance of order to the Army of Tennessee. In Wilmington, he celebrated the steadfastness of North Carolina residents, particularly in the “Eastern portion of the state which had suffered the most from the enemy and was perhaps the most loyalty and devoted portion of the whole State.”² Davis was undoubtedly thinking of western North Carolina, which some Confederates believed was infected with the same poisonous unionism that defined East Tennessee. Despite Davis’s pronouncements about solidarity between regions, the Mountain South remained suspect throughout the war. But Davis himself overlooked a much more serious problem in eastern North Carolina: the continuing exodus of black families from the region. The Union army had captured New Bern in March 1862 and black residents began fleeing to Union lines almost immediately. In late 1863 Brigadier General Edward Wild recruited a sizable number of black North Carolinians into his “African Brigade,” which then began raiding tidewater plantations to free more enslaved people and recruit more soldiers for the Union. Davis’s vision of the Confederacy excluded free black people, but they nonetheless represented an increasing threat to the survival of southern independence.

If Davis ignored the determination of many black North Carolinians to fight for the Union, he confronted head on the problem of white southerners who their personal welfare ahead of the well-being of the Confederacy. In his speech at Wilmington, Davis condemned “the wealth gathered and heaped up in the spirit of Shylock, in the midst of a bleeding country” that “would go down with a branding and a curse.”³ As Davis knew, the opportunities for profit in running the Union blockade were substantial, especially in Wilmington, the last open Confederate deep-water port on the Atlantic. Loyal ship captains were supposed to return with cargoes of weapons, ammunition, medicine, shoes, and salt, but few could resist the temptation to stock their holds with luxury goods that sold quickly to still-wealthy members of the southern elite. In urban areas inland shopkeepers often withheld goods from sale until the prices rose. Confederate newspapers labeled such practices “extortion” and condemned merchants as public enemies, but no easy solution presented itself. What was the appropriate profit to make in a time of war? Shopkeepers had to pay their rent and feed their families like anyone else. Nonetheless, they became ready scapegoats for a Confederate government that needed targets for the mounting public anger over the toll, duration, and experience of the war. Military reverses in the summer of 1863 did not guarantee Confederate defeat in the war, but they did increase pressure on the Davis administration to ensure that sacrifices were borne equally, and that such sacrifices would ultimately produce victory.

¹ Jefferson Davis: Speech at Missionary Ridge, October 10, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 547.
² Jefferson Davis: Speech at Wilmington, November 5, 1863, ibid., 553.
³ Ibid., 552.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Brooks D. Simpson: The Battle of Chickamauga (September 19–20)
• Brooks D. Simpson: Grant lays siege to Vicksburg (May 22, 1863)
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: The Battle of Chancellorsville, and the Death of Stonewall Jackson (April 30–May 6, 1863)

The Battle of Chickamauga (September 19–20): Missed Opportunity

Guest blog post by Brooks D. Simpson, professor of history, Arizona State University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It. The third volume of the series was published earlier this year.

In June 1863 the Union Army of the Cumberland under William S. Rosecrans commenced a skillful campaign of maneuver. In just over twelve weeks it drove the Confederate Army of Tennessee under Braxton Bragg out of its namesake state and into northern Georgia. Jefferson Davis compelled Robert E. Lee to detach two divisions from the Army of Northern Virginia under the command of James Longstreet and send them to reinforce Bragg in anticipation of a counterstrike.

After several days of skirmishing, on September 18 the Confederates commenced their advance. One Texas soldier, William W. Heartsill, looked forward to giving the Yankees all they could handle. As he lay down for the night seeking warmth in “my old Green army coat,” Heartsill readied “to think and dream of comeing events or of loved ones at home.” It was time to beat back “cruel invaders that come to drench our sunny south in blood and drag us to worse than slavery.” There was only one thing left to do: “Up southrons and strike for God and our native land may the God of the right hover ore our Battle flag and may our independance be dated, from the begining of this pending contest,” a fight that promised to be “one of the most sanguinary and decisive battles of the war.”¹

Sanguinary certainly describes the Battle of Chickamauga, which took place over the next two days. Heartsill’s regiment spent September 19 advancing to the sound of the guns and encountering prisoners and fields covered with dead. The next day it advanced to the front. A cannon ball took the life of brigade commander James Deshler—“It is useless to pass eulogies upon Gen D. for to know him was to love him,” Heartsill remarked—but by that evening the Texas soldier could scribble his recollections of the events of the day by the light of a fire that had just that morning warmed a Yankee’s body.² Elsewhere the woods caught fire, consuming the bodies of dead and wounded soldiers.

In two days of battle each side had lost nearly one third of its strength in dead, wounded, and missing. In later years people claimed that Chickamauga meant “river of death,” and the battle seemed to sanctify that understanding. During the second day of fighting, Kentucky soldier John S. Jackman, who served in a Confederate brigade commanded by none other than Ben Hardin Helm, Mary Todd Lincoln’s brother-in-law, crossed the same ground covered by the division to which Heartsill belonged. Jackman was chilled by what he saw: “The dead of both sides were lying thick over the ground. . . . Men and horses were lying so thick over the field, one could hardly walk for them.”³ Late that morning the Kentuckians advanced, only to be repulsed three times. Helm was mortally wounded, one of some 18,454 casualties in a force some 66,000 strong.

Unfortunately for Heartsill, Jackman, and their fellow Confederates, living, wounded, and dead, Chickamauga was not decisive. Although the Rebels punched right through a gap in the Federal line on September 20, Union corps commander George H. Thomas conducted a gallant defense along Snodgrass Hill, winning the sobriquet “the Rock of Chickamauga.” At first, it appeared that Thomas might have merely staved off the inevitable, for Rosecrans pulled his army back into Chattanooga, Tennessee, only to find himself besieged by the pursuing Bragg. There it looked as if the Yankees might be starved into submission. Once the Confederates dug in and waited, however, their own generals began feuding. Before long Bragg found himself in heated combat, not with the bluecoats, but with his own commanders. President Davis declined to relieve Bragg, instead shuffling a few subordinates and earmarking Longstreet to advance upon Knoxville, Tennessee, defended by a force under the command of the ill-fated Ambrose Burnside.

Abraham Lincoln had his problems with his generals as well. When reports reached Washington claiming that Rosecrans was dispirited, desperate, and might even abandon Chattanooga altogether, the President decided to turn to the only general in the west upon whom he could rely. Orders went out naming Ulysses S. Grant commander of the newly-created Military Division of the Mississippi, putting him in charge of operations from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. Given the choice to retain Rosecrans or to elevate Thomas to command of the Army of the Cumberland, Grant chose the latter, and wired Thomas to stay where he was. Back came the answer: “I will hold the town until we starve.”<sup>4

1</sup> William W. Heartsill: Journal, September 17–28, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 523.
² Ibid., 525.
³ John S. Jackman: Diary, September 18–20, 1863, ibid., 532.
⁴ George H. Thomas to Ulysses S. Grant, October 19, 1863, in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, volume 9, ed. John Y. Simon (Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 302.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Story of the Week selection on the aftermath of the Battle of Chickamauga
“The Nameless Dead,” Kate Cumming (a Confederate Army nurse)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Brooks D. Simpson: Grant lays siege to Vicksburg (May 22, 1863)
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: The Battle of Chancellorsville, and the Death of Stonewall Jackson (April 30–May 6, 1863)
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: General Henry Halleck writes to General Ulysses Grant: “The North must conquer the slave oligarchy or become slaves themselves” (March 31, 1863)

Brooks D. Simpson on the “roller coaster of emotions” during the Civil War’s pivotal year

Brooks D. Simpson, author of six books (including Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865), spoke with us recently about The Civil War: The Third Year Told By Those Who Lived It, the latest entry in the critically acclaimed LOA series on the Civil War.

What are the major turning points of the Civil War covered in this third volume?

This volume covers January 1863 to March 1864, the period that marked the final effort of the Confederates to undertake significant offensive operations. These efforts ended in failure at Gettysburg and in the aftermath of Chickamauga. The volume also marks the rise of Ulysses S. Grant to high command. His triumphs at Vicksburg and Chattanooga made him an obvious choice to direct Union military operations in 1864. Americans white and black, North and South, felt the revolutionary impact of the emancipation and enlistment of African Americans, even as dissent, dissatisfaction, and in some cases outright resistance to government policies such as conscription also increased.

What does the experience of reading these contemporary, firsthand eyewitness accounts offer readers that standard narrative histories don't, particularly with regard to this third year of the war?

Readers encounter events much as did the people who described what was happening: no one quite knows what is going to happen next. There’s speculation about the future, misinformation about the present, and a sense of anxiety and exhaustion as people come to terms with the notion that a decisive victory on the battlefield that might bring an end to the conflict remains a long way off.

What does the volume tell us about the role of African Americans in the war?

If the story of 1862 is Abraham Lincoln’s slow but steady journey toward issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, the story of 1863 is how African Americans were active agents in securing their freedom and defining what it meant. At a time when white enlistments were sagging and people protested the implementation of conscription, black Americans did what they could to ensure that what Lincoln called “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” included them among “the people” who would secure and define that “new birth of freedom.” At Port Hudson, Milliken’s Bend, and Fort Wagner, black soldiers staked a claim not only for freedom but also for equality.

What do the pieces about the homefront tell us about the diversity of experiences and outlooks in the North and the South?

Americans at home experienced a roller coaster of emotions in 1863. One sees hope giving way to despair when news comes of another battlefield setback, while even the most joyous exultations welcoming news of a victory are soon tempered by the realization that the end is still not in sight. Women and children work hard to make ends meet in the absence of husbands and fathers, always in fear that they may never see their loved one again. By the end of 1863 people on both sides are beginning to wonder whether the war will ever end and whether the struggle is worth the cost.

Which piece do you think readers will find most surprising?

Contemporary American readers will find that their concerns often echo those of the Americans in this book. Both Lincoln and Jefferson Davis struggled to justify administration policies against an increasing tide of dissent which at times erupted in violence as in the Richmond bread riots in April or the New York City draft riots in July. How does one balance freedom with security? When does dissent become disloyalty, and who makes that call? What happens when a war for freedom compromises freedoms?

Do you have a favorite piece in the collection?

Abraham Lincoln’s letter to James C. Conkling and his fellow Illinois supporters of the Union in August 1863 represents his most direct statement yet about the war now being waged, and he offers as blunt a defense of emancipation as one would ever see. I especially like the penultimate paragraph, which offered Americans the following pointed reminder about the legacy of preserving the Union:

It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost. And then, there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.

Grant lays siege to Vicksburg: “For nobody else believed in it!”

Guest blog post by Brooks D. Simpson, professor of history, Arizona State University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It. The third volume of the series was published earlier this month.

It had been a long and difficult winter for Ulysses S. Grant. For months his army had struggled in the bayous and swamps around Vicksburg, Mississippi, looking for some way to attack the Confederate citadel that blocked Union control of the Mississippi River. He had come under heavy criticism from many quarters, including some of his own subordinates. One of his corps commanders, the politically connected former congressman John A. McClernand, was busily intriguing to replace him by writing to President Lincoln about his shortcomings. Rumors circulated that Grant was drunk, stupid, or both. Newspaper reporters and editors freely abused him, and the authorities at Washington had dispatched several emissaries whose mission included finding out exactly what was going on in the Army of the Tennessee.

With the coming of spring, however, the roads and the levees began to dry, allowing Grant to make the move he had wanted to undertake since his arrival opposite Vicksburg at the end of January. Once Union gunboats and transports ran pass the batteries defending Vicksburg, Grant would move south, cross the Mississippi, and secure a foothold on dry land that would finally allow him to advance against the enemy citadel. He was aware that much depended upon the success of this maneuver. “I am doing my best and am full of hope for complete success,” he wrote to his father. Although he was aware of the criticism directed at him, “I have no idea of being driven to do a desperate or foolish act by the howlings of the press.” If he was to be removed from command, so be it; until then, he would continue to try “to put down the rebellion in the shortest possible time without expecting or desiring any other recognition than a quiet approval of my course.”¹

The course Grant took over the next month won him more than quiet approval: his campaign against Vicksburg is hailed today as a military masterpiece. Crossing the Mississippi on April 30, the lead elements of Grant’s command defeated a Confederate force at Port Gibson, Mississippi, the following day. As Iowa soldier Taylor Peirce recalled in a letter home, “when the victory was complete you ought to have heard the shout that rung out on the evening air. It was enough to pay us for all our fatigues and dangers.”² Two weeks later Grant entered the state capital at Jackson and drove off the Confederate forces gathering there before turning to face John C. Pemberton’s army east of Vicksburg. At Champion Hill on May 16 and Big Black River on May 17 Union forces scored decisive triumphs, driving Pemberton’s men back into the city. After two attempts to take Vicksburg by assault failed, Grant settled down on May 22 to lay siege to the city and its 30,000 defenders.

Within three weeks in May Grant had won five battles. Outnumbered at the outset of the campaign, he had beaten back two Confederate forces as they had attempted to converge on his army and annihilate it. His men lived off the land as they marched through the Mississippi countryside, while a flustered foe flailed away in an effort to sever non-existent supply lines (Grant had wagon convoys move his army’s medical supplies and munitions). Now he had Vicksburg and its defenders by the throat. William T. Sherman, who earlier had expressed his doubts about the operation, greeted his commander warmly as blue-clad soldiers crossed the Big Black River, declaring, “General Grant, I want to congratulate you on the success of your great plan. And it is ‘your plan,’ too, by heaven, and nobody else’s. For nobody else believed in it!”³

Back in Washington, Grant received an even more important seal of approval. “Whether Gen. Grant shall or shall not consummate the capture of Vicksburg, his campaign from the beginning of this month up to the twenty second day of it, is one of the most brilliant in the world,” Abraham Lincoln wrote to an Illinois congressman who had been critical of his military appointments.⁴ A few weeks later, the President declared that if Grant succeeded in opening the Mississippi, “why, Grant is my man and I am his the rest of the war!”

Little did Lincoln know when he thus spoke that Ulysses S. Grant had entered Vicksburg the previous day, July 4, 1863. Grant had bagged an entire Confederate army for the second time in the war. The President had found his general.

¹ Ulysses S. Grant to Jesse Root Grant, April 21, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 152.
² Taylor Peirce to Catharine Peirce, May 4, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year, 187.
³ James F. Rusling, Men and Things I Saw in Civil War Days (1899), 140.
⁴ Abraham Lincoln to Isaac N. Arnold, May 26, 1863, in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859–1865 (The Library of America, 1989), 449.
⁵ James F. Rusling, ibid., 17.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: The Battle of Chancellorsville, and the Death of Stonewall Jackson (April 30–May 6, 1863)
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: General Henry Halleck writes to General Ulysses Grant: “The North must conquer the slave oligarchy or become slaves themselves” (March 31, 1863)
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Vallandigham Denounces the Draft (February 23, 1863)
• Brooks D. Simpson: The “Mud March” of the Army of the Potomac (January 1863)

The Battle of Chancellorsville, and the Death of Stonewall Jackson

Guest blog post by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Eberly Family Professor of Civil War History at West Virginia University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It. The third volume of the series will be published this week.

The bloody Union defeat at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in December 1862 and the aborted “Mud March” along the Rappahannock River the following month demoralized the Army of the Potomac and caused a widespread loss of confidence in its commander, Ambrose Burnside. On January 26, 1863, President Lincoln replaced Burnside with Joseph Hooker, who reorganized the army’s command structure and raised its morale by improving camp conditions, providing better food, and granting furloughs. With 134,000 men under his command, on April 27 Hooker began an offensive designed to drive Lee out of his defensive positions along the Rappahannock and force him either to retreat or fight on open ground. While one wing of his army prepared to cross the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg, Hooker sent the other wing upriver to turn Lee’s left flank. By April 30 Hooker’s flanking force had crossed the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers and reached Chancellorsville, a crossroads clearing ten miles west of Fredericksburg in the midst of an area of scrub woods and dense undergrowth known as the Wilderness. Captain Charles F. Morse, a staff officer with the Twelfth Corps, recalled that when Hooker reached Chancellorsville that evening, the Union commander said “in the most extravagant, vehement terms” that “he had got the rebels, how he was going to crush them, annihilate them, etc.”¹

Surprised by Hooker’s adroit movement, Lee nonetheless responded audaciously by dividing his already outnumbered army of 60,000 men. Leaving 10,000 troops to defend Fredericksburg against the Union forces that had crossed the Rappahannock just below the city, he sent Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson and the remainder of his men to oppose the Union forces advancing from the west. On May 1 the two sides fought at the edge of the Wilderness, three miles east of Chancellorsville. When Hooker withdrew his men to defensive positions around the Chancellorsville clearing, Lee and Jackson decided to again divide their forces and seize the initiative. While Lee kept 14,000 men to face the 70,000 Union troops at Chancellorsville, Jackson marched 33,000 men twelve miles through the Wilderness on May 2 and struck at Hooker’s exposed right flank. “We loaded & started in run yelling & soon saw the blue rascals running like turkeys & our men—shooting, cheering, & pursuing as fast as they could,” wrote Alabama infantryman Samuel Pickens. “When Yanks got behind hill or breastwk they would stop & shoot & minute or two—but as our men would come charging upon them they’d be off again.”² Jackson’s men drove the Union right wing back toward Chancellorsville until night fell. Seeking to continue his offensive, Jackson rode forward in the darkness and was accidentally shot by his own men.

On the morning of May 3 Lee attacked the Union forces around the Chancellorsville clearing. “The rebels came up to the attack in solid masses and got within three hundred yards, but they were slaughtered by the hundreds by the case-shot and canister, and were driven back to the woods,” Morse wrote.³ Union Captain Samuel W. Fiske was taken prisoner in the dense undergrowth. As Fiske and his guard made their way toward the Confederate rear, they had to step “among mangled corpses of friend and foe, past men without limbs and limbs without men.”⁴ After several hours of intense fighting Hooker withdrew to a new defensive position closer to the Rappahannock as Lee learned that Union troops under John Sedgwick had captured Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg and were advancing on Chancellorsville.

Leaving about 20,000 men to face Hooker, Lee attacked Sedgwick on May 4 at Salem Church, four miles west of Fredericksburg. After an inconclusive battle, Sedgwick withdrew across the Rappahannock on the night of May 4. Hooker retreated across the river the following night, ending a campaign in which the Union lost about 17,000 men killed, wounded, or missing, and the Confederates about 13,000. Among the dead was Stonewall Jackson, who died from his wounds on May 10. On her North Carolina plantation Catherine Edmondston mourned “the nation’s idol,” who had died in “the brightness of his glory, a Christian patriot, unselfish, untiring, with no thought but for his country, no aim but for her advancement.”⁵

Many in the Army of the Potomac believed that the campaign had shown Hooker to be without “the qualities necessary for a general.”⁶ Nevertheless, Hooker’s failure did not markedly change the strategic situation. Despite Lee’s triumph, the Army of the Potomac was still encamped on the northern bank of the Rappahannock, only sixty miles from Richmond. Lee’s desire to drive it away from the Confederate capital, and his renewed confidence in the Army of Northern Virginia, would soon cause him to look north toward Pennsylvania.

¹ Charles F. Morse to His Family, May 7, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 196.
² Samuel Pickens: Diary, May 1–3, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year, 175.
³ Charles F. Morse to His Family, May 7, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year, 200.
⁴ Samuel W. Fiske to the Springfield Republican, May 9, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year, 206–07.
⁵ Catherine Edmondston: Diary, May 5–7, 9, and 10–11, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year, 194.
⁶ Charles F. Morse to His Family, May 7, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year, 203.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: General Henry Halleck writes to General Ulysses Grant: “The North must conquer the slave oligarchy or become slaves themselves” (March 31, 1863)
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Vallandigham Denounces the Draft (February 23, 1863)
• Brooks D. Simpson: The “Mud March” of the Army of the Potomac (January 1863)

General Henry Halleck writes to General Ulysses Grant: “The North must conquer the slave oligarchy or become slaves themselves”

Guest blog post by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Eberly Family Professor of Civil War History at West Virginia University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It. The third volume of the series just arrived from the printer this past week and will be in bookstores on May 2.

On March 31, 1863, Henry W. Halleck wrote an “unofficial letter” to Ulysses S. Grant “as a personal friend and as a matter of friendly advice.”¹ As is often the case in communications between a superior and his subordinate—Halleck was general-in-chief of the Union army, Grant the commander of the Army of Tennessee—the “friendly advice” concerned serious matters: the policy of the Lincoln administration toward slavery and emancipation, the obligation of military officers to faithfully execute government policy, and the essential nature of the war against the Confederacy.

From the beginning of the conflict slaves had sought freedom by seeking refuge with the Union army. In May 1861 General Benjamin F. Butler made the ad hoc decision to shelter fugitives who fled to Union lines from their work on Confederate fortifications. His actions received legislative endorsement in August of that year when Congress passed a confiscation act emancipating slaves being used to militarily aid the rebellion. But the confiscation act provided no guidance as to how the army should treat fugitives from the border states, or escaped slaves from the seceded states whose owners professed loyalty to the Union. In March 1862 Congress adopted a new article of war prohibiting military and naval officers from returning fugitives.

Left unresolved was the question of whether the army should actively encourage slaves to come within its lines, or to what extent the Union should embrace emancipation as a means of war. Many conservatives officers abhorred the notion of waging war against slavery. In a letter he presented to President Lincoln on July 8, 1862, George B. McClellan, the commander of the Army of the Potomac, insisted that “the forcible abolition of slavery” should not “be contemplated for a moment,” and warned that any “declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present Armies.” The war, McClellan wrote, “should not be, at all, a War upon population; but against armed forces and political organizations.”² When Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, McClellan described it as “inaugurating servile war” in a letter to a prominent New York Democrat.³

Halleck, unlike McClellan, accepted the necessity of emancipation as a war measure, and wanted to make sure that Grant accepted it as well. Believing that his army could neither provide for nor safely transport black refugees, Grant had issued orders on February 12, 1863, prohibiting them from coming into the Union camps along the Mississippi near Vicksburg. In his “unofficial letter,” Halleck bluntly expressed what the administration now expected: “It is the policy of the Government to withdraw from the enemy as much productive labor as possible. So long as the rebels retain and employ their slaves in producing grains, &c., they can employ all the whites in the field. Every slave withdrawn from the enemy is equivalent to a white man put hors de combat.” Grant was to “withdraw from the use of the enemy all the slaves you can,” and to employ them as laborers, teamsters, cooks, and, “as far as practicable,” as soldiers.⁴ It was Grant’s responsibility to see that administration policy was carried out, irrespective of the personal opinions of the officers under his command, and to appreciate the urgent nature of the struggle they were now engaged in:

The character of the war has very much changed within the last year. There is now no possible hope of reconciliation with the rebels. The Union party in the South is virtually destroyed. There can be no peace but that which is forced by the sword. We must conquer the rebels or be conquered by them. The North must conquer the slave oligarchy or become slaves themselves—the manufacturers mere “hewers of wood and drawers of water” to Southern aristocrats.⁵

Grant complied with Halleck’s directives, reversing his earlier instructions excluding fugitives from the army lines and energetically assisting Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas in his efforts to recruit black troops in the Mississippi Valley. Unlike McClellan, Grant increasingly understood that the Confederacy could not be defeated by a war waged purely “against armed forces and political organizations,” but only by a war aimed at the foundations of southern society.

¹ Henry W. Halleck to Ulysses S. Grant, March 31, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 107.
² George B. McClellan to Abraham Lincoln, July 7, 1862, in The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 307–08.
³ George B. McClellan to William H. Aspinwall, September 26, 1862, in The Civil War: The Second Year, 540.
⁴ Henry W. Halleck to Ulysses S. Grant, March 31, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year, 105–06.
⁵ Ibid., 106.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Vallandigham Denounces the Draft (February 23, 1863)
• Brooks D. Simpson: The “Mud March” of the Army of the Potomac (January 1863)

Vallandigham Denounces the Draft (February 23, 1863)

Guest blog post by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Eberly Family Professor of Civil War History at West Virginia University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It (the first two volumes of which have appeared; the third will appear this spring).

What is the proper way for Americans to express political opposition to an ongoing war? How can the party out of power maintain its own identity without appearing disloyal? Can party members oppose the conflict itself and still proclaim themselves patriots? These questions pressed themselves on the Federalists during the War of 1812 and the Whigs during the U.S.–Mexican War and have recurred in recent years, but they took on a special urgency for northern Democrats during the Civil War. (Because a political party system never emerged in the Confederacy, opposition to the war in the South developed differently than in the North.) By the fall of 1862 the party had divided into “War” and “Peace” factions. While some War Democrats accepted the necessity of attacking slavery, most remained steadfastly opposed to emancipation and hoped that military success would result in the restoration of the Union “as it was.” The Peace Democrats went further, declaring the war to be a failure and asserting that the Union could be saved only through negotiations with the seceded states. In the aftermath of the Union’s bloody humiliation at Fredericksburg, the Peace Democrats were emboldened to call for an armistice with the Confederacy while they used the Emancipation Proclamation to incite fears in the North about the supposed social, political, and economic threat posed by free blacks.

Just as Democrats condemned Lincoln as a tyrant who violated the Constitution in order to elevate blacks above whites, Republicans excoriated antiwar Democrats, calling them “Copperheads,” venomous snakes that strike without warning. In early 1863 George Templeton Strong, the treasurer of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, lamented the “way the Dirt-Eaters and Copperheads and sympathizers and compromisers are coming out on the surface of society, like ugly petechiæ and vibices, shows that the nation is suffering from a most putrescent state of the national blood.”¹ In response to this diagnosis, some Republicans proposed a radical cure: Isaac Funk, a member of the Illinois senate, urged that “these traitors on this floor should be provided with hempen collars. They deserve them. They deserve hanging, I say, the country would be the better of swinging them up.”² This sentiment was echoed by soldiers who watched the off-year elections for state offices and read Democratic newspapers with increasing dismay and anger. In Pennsylvania the chief justice of the state supreme court, George W. Woodward, denounced emancipation and ruled conscription unconstitutional. A Pennsylvania officer wrote home to warn the Copperheads that if they “inaugurate rebellion in the North, they will find a mighty army of patriots ready to crush them to the earth. Mark that!”³

The draft, as much as emancipation, inspired the ire of antiwar activists. They regarded the resort to conscription, never used in previous American wars, as evidence that Lincoln had lost popular support. Conscription conjured up images of European tyrants who used impressment to build standing armies that oppressed their own citizens. The most vociferous opponent of the draft was Ohio congressman (and future gubernatorial candidate) Clement L. Vallandigham. In a widely-quoted speech in February 1863, Vallandigham argued that the draft was nothing more than “a bill to abrogate the Constitution, the repeal all existing laws, to destroy all rights, to strike down the judiciary, and erect upon the ruins of civil and political liberty a stupendous superstructure of despotism.” And all, in Vallandigham’s view, “to secure freedom to the black man.”⁴

Vallandigham lost his bid for governor and eventually disappeared from view, but his excesses tarred Democrats with a stain they could not erase. Many Democrats supported the conflict—including Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton—and condemned the rhetoric of the antiwar wing, but Republican charges of treason weakened the party over time. For years after the war, Republicans continued to “wave the bloody shirt,” reminding northern voters of the sacrifices soldiers had made to save the Union despite the disloyalty of Democrats. From 1860 to 1932, only two Democrats—Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson—were elected to the presidency, a stunningly rapid and enduring fall from grace for what had been the dominant party throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Not all the Democrats’ postbellum electoral misfortunes can be blamed on the Copperheads, but the party’s failures in the Civil War revealed the perils that still await political dissenters in wartime.

¹ George Templeton Strong: Diary, February 3–5, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, ed. Brooks D. Simpson (Library of America, forthcoming, 2013).
² Isaac Funk: Speech in the Illinois State Senate, February 14, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It.
³ George Fisher McFarland to the Warren Mail, April 11, 1863, quoted in Timothy Orr, “‘A Viler Enemy in Our Rear’: Pennsylvania Soldiers Confront the North’s Antiwar Movement,” in The View from the Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers, ed. Aaron Sheehan-Dean (University of Kentucky Press, 1997), 180.
⁴ Clement L. Vallandigham: Speech in Congress, February 23, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Brooks D. Simpson: The “Mud March” of the Army of the Potomac (January 1863)
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Lincoln’s Cabinet crisis (December 1862)

The “Mud March” of the Army of the Potomac (January 20, 1863)

Guest blog post by Brooks D. Simpson, professor of history, Arizona State University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It (the first two volumes of which have appeared; the third will appear this spring).

After its bloody defeat in December 1862 the Army of the Potomac settled down for the winter around Falmouth, Virginia, on the north bank of the Rappahannock River across from Fredericksburg. Aware that several of his subordinates were actively intriguing for his replacement as the army’s commander, Ambrose Burnside was determined not to sit still for long. He issued orders calling for a march westward, looking to cross the Rappahannock upriver from Fredericksburg and outflank the defensive line held by Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

The movement commenced on the morning of January 20, 1863. That night it began to pour. High winds whipped through the army’s columns and camps, rendering it impossible to set a fire or erect a tent, while the heavy rains continued to fall. “You have no idea of how soon the roads turn from good to bad here in Virginia,” wrote Lieutenant Theodore A. Dodge, the adjutant of the 119th New York Infantry. “A clayey soil is hard and the very best for marching on in favorable weather, but let it rain but an hour and troops and wagons march over the road, and the mud is worse than anyone who has not be in Virginia can conceive of.” Yet the rain did not stop. The mud swallowed wagons and cannon as soldiers struggled to make their way through the quagmire. As Dodge observed, “The horses sank into mud up to their bellies, and it is said down near the river you sometimes have to put sticks under the mules’ necks to prevent their being engulfed in the very slough of despond.”¹

Burnside called off the movement on January 22, but it took his men several more days to make their way back to their previous encampments. He faced ridicule, scorn, and pity from generals, officers, and soldiers. “I never felt so disappointed & sorry for any one in my life as I did for Burnside,” George G. Meade wrote. “He really seems to have all the elements against him.”² Exacerbated by the increasingly mutinous behavior of several outspoken subordinates, Burnside traveled to Washington to meet with Lincoln. He gave the President a choice: either punish the generals opposing his continuance in command or replace him with someone else.

Lincoln chose the latter course, and in the process rewarded one of Burnside’s most outspoken critics, Joseph Hooker. Months of whispering behind the backs of Burnside and George B. McClellan had paid off for the man they called “Fighting Joe.” But the President was not deaf to the dangers posed by insubordinate commanders. “I have heard, in such way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator,” Lincoln wrote to Hooker. “Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.” The President also observed that there was one more thing Hooker might keep in mind. “I much fear that the spirit which you have aided to infuse into the Army, of criticising their Commander, and withholding confidence from him, will now turn upon you,” Lincoln warned. “Neither you, nor Napoleon, if he were alive again, could get any good out of an army, while such a spirit prevails in it.”³ Less than four months would pass before Hooker would have cause to agree.

¹ Theodore A. Dodge: Journal, January 21–24, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, ed. Brooks D. Simpson (Library of America, forthcoming, 2013).
² George G. Meade to Margaret Meade, January 23, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It.
³ Abraham Lincoln to Joseph Hooker, January 26, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Lincoln’s Cabinet crisis (December 1862)
• Brooks D. Simpson: Lincoln and the midterm elections (November 1862)

Lincoln’s Cabinet crisis (December 1862)

Guest blog post by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Eberly Family Professor of Civil War History at West Virginia University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It (the first two volumes of which have appeared).

Less than a week after the disastrous Union defeat at Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862, Abraham Lincoln confronted one of the most serious political crises he faced during the war. The debacle fed mounting frustration among Republicans over the administration’s conduct of the war. Led by its Radical members, the Senate Republican caucus tried to force Secretary of State William H. Seward out of the cabinet. The Radicals accused Seward of opposing vigorous prosecution of the war, exercising undue influence on the President, overruling other cabinet members, and blamed him for the administration’s slowness in embracing emancipation. Many of the Radicals hoped his ouster would increase the influence of their favorite in the cabinet, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase.

Seward had indeed entered the administration in 1861 imagining that he might guide Lincoln, who, he believed, had little sense of how to respond to the great crisis facing the country. But Lincoln’s relative paucity of national experience obscured his considerable political skills. The two men developed a close working relationship in which Lincoln made it plain that he would decide and issue executive branch policies. His reluctance to endorse immediate emancipation came about because of his own astute evaluation of border state politics, and not from Seward’s influence.

A committee of predominantly Radical senators went to the White House on December 18 and shared with the President their concern about Seward’s influence in the administration. Lincoln had little patience for their conspiratorial view of his administration, exclaiming to his friend Orville H. Browning, “Why will men believe a lie, an absurd lie, that could not impose upon a child, and cling to it and repeat it in defiance of all evidence to the contrary.”¹ Nonetheless, Seward resigned in order to avoid becoming a liability to the administration. Lincoln did not accept his resignation but instead convened a meeting with his cabinet on December 19, without Seward, to ascertain their views about how the cabinet operated. Despite reservations, most of the cabinet members agreed with Lincoln’s assessment that he fairly valued their opinions and that the cabinet sought agreement in its deliberations. The President then called the senators back to the White House, where they were surprised to find themselves in a meeting with the cabinet (absent Seward). Lincoln explained that, contrary to what the senators had heard, cabinet members freely debated issues and reached a consensus before policies were announced. Although Chase offered a mild dissent, no other cabinet member contradicted the President.

Embarrassed by this turn of events, Chase submitted his resignation, precisely the turn of events Lincoln needed in order to maintain the political balance in his cabinet. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles recorded Lincoln’s response when Chase handed him his resignation: “This said he, looking towards me with a triumphal laugh cuts the Gordian knot. An air of satisfaction spread over his countenance such as I have not seen for some time. I can dispose of this subject now he added.”² Knowing that he needed the support of both radical and conservative Republicans, Lincoln refused to accept either resignation, and both Seward and Chase remained in the cabinet. As the President reportedly told Senator Ira Harris of New York in one of his characteristic rural analogies, “Now I can ride: I have a pumpkin in each end of my bag.”³ Lincoln accomplished two important goals in these delicate maneuvers. By managing the disparate personalities and ideologies in his administration he continued to enjoy the counsel of some of the North’s best political minds. The episode also preserved the President’s prerogative to administer his cabinet and the executive branch as he saw fit. Republicans, Democrats, and border state Unionists in Congress would continue to use their legislative and investigative power to promote their own agendas, but as commander-in-chief, Lincoln would possess ultimate authority in a time of war.

¹ Orville H. Browning: Diary, December 18, 1862, in The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It, ed. Stephen W. Sears (Library of America, 2012), 684.
² Gideon Welles: Diary, December 19–20, 1862, The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 692.
³ An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay’s Interviews and Essays, ed. Michael Burlingame (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996).

(This item will be cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Brooks D. Simpson on Lincoln and the midterm elections (November 4, 1862)
  
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean on the Battle of Perryville (October 8, 1862)

Brooks D. Simpson on Lincoln and the November 4, 1862, midterm elections

Guest blog post by Brooks D. Simpson, professor of history, Arizona State University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It (the first two volumes of which have appeared).

In the midterm elections of 1862, which concluded on November 4, the Lincoln administration and the Republican party suffered a serious setback at the polls. Proclaiming “the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was,” Democrats pointed to the promised Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln’s recent nationwide suspension of the writ of habeas corpus as evidence of the Republicans’ desire to impose a tyrannical dictatorship upon the republic. Nor did the prospects for decisive military victory seem bright: whatever optimism had been expressed in the wake of Antietam, Corinth, and Perryville had faded away as Union armies failed to capitalize on their successes.

Democrats claimed victory in New York with the election of Horatio Seymour as governor; they also won the governorship of New Jersey and assumed control of state legislatures in New Jersey, Indiana, and Lincoln’s home state of Illinois. The Democrats’ sizeable gains in the House of Representatives, mostly in the lower North from New York to Illinois, reduced the Republican majority to a plurality, although the Republicans would be able to control the new House with the support of Unconditional Unionists from the border states. Fortunately for the administration, the state election calendars in Pennsylvania and Ohio mandated elections in odd-numbered years, while Republican governors Richard Yates of Illinois and Oliver P. Morton of Indiana had been elected in 1860 to four-year terms. And as historian James M. McPherson has pointed out, Republicans still held most of the governorships and a solid majority of state legislatures, allowing the party to eventually pick up five Senate seats as the terms of Democrats elected in 1856–57 expired and Republican-controlled legislatures chose their replacements.

President Lincoln weathered the electoral defeat as well as could be expected. In responding to a rather harsh note from General Carl Schurz, a leading Republican who claimed, as Lincoln put it, “that we lost the late elections, and the administration is failing, because the war is unsuccessful; and that I must not flatter myself that I am not justly to blame for it,” the President wrote: “I certainly know that if the war fails, the administration fails, and that I will be blamed for it, whether I deserve it or not. And I ought to be blamed, if I could do better. You think I could do better; therefore you blame me already. I think I could not do better; therefore I blame you for blaming me.”

Even as news of the administration’s setback circulated through the newspapers, Lincoln moved decisively in removing George B. McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac on November 5, replacing him with Ambrose Burnside. The change was made just two weeks after the President had replaced Don Carlos Buell with William S. Rosecrans at the head of the Union army in Middle Tennessee. But whether new generals meant an improvement in Union military fortunes, and the political standing of the administration, remained to be seen.

(This item will be cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Aaron Sheehan-Dean on the Battle of Perryville (October 8, 1862)
• September 17, 1862: The Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg), the bloodiest single day in American history

Aaron Sheehan-Dean on the Battle of Perryville (October 8, 1862): “Fourteen hours of fire and smoke, with lead and iron hail”

Guest blog post by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Eberly Family Professor of Civil War History at West Virginia University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It (the first two volumes of which have appeared).

Writing in the 1880s, when Americans of all stripes busily commemorated the Civil War, veterans of Perryville decried the lack of attention paid to the battle. “Fourteen hours of fire and smoke, with lead and iron hail,” wrote Captain Marshall Thayer of Michigan’s Second Cavalry, “’deserves more than a contemptuous notice.’” ¹ Thayer’s concern about historical memory echoed a strange silence on the day of the battle. A rare atmospheric phenomenon called an acoustic shadow hovered over the main battleground for much of October 8, leaving the Federal commander, Major General Don Carlos Buell, ignorant of the titanic struggle going on only miles from his headquarters. Buell heard no musket fire at all and what little cannon fire reached his tent suggested a minor duel. Irritated, Buell demanded that whoever was responsible “stop that firing” and then sat down to an early dinner. ² Buell planned to engage the enemy on October 9, but Braxton Bragg’s Confederates had attacked instead, and the half of Buell’s army that was engaged barely hung on through a day most veterans would describe as their worst in the war.

What Buell missed hearing was a long and violent effort by Bragg’s Army of Mississippi to eliminate the main Union presence in Kentucky. The fighting, according to all concerned, rivaled the worst of the war’s most notoriously bloody battles. Sam Watkins, the famous Confederate memoirist described the gritty tenacity of the fighting:

We were soon in a hand-to-hand fight—every man for himself—using the buts of our guns and bayonets. One side would waver and fall back a few yards, and would rally, when the other side would fall back . . . and yet the battle raged. Such obstinate fighting I never had seen before or since. The guns were discharged so rapidly that it seemed the earth itself was in a volcanic uproar. The iron storm passed through our ranks, mangling and tearing men to pieces. The very air seemed full of stifling smoke and fire, which seemed the very pit of hell, peopled by contending demons. ³

As Thayer urged, the battle needed to be remembered for more than just its brutality. The central Kentucky bluegrass town of Perryville, about fifty miles southeast of Louisville, was an unlikely spot for a major engagement, but it proved a key moment in the Civil War. In mid-1862, Bragg, along with Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith, mounted a offensive through Tennessee and into Kentucky (paralleling Robert E. Lee’s offensive into Maryland at the same time). The high point came on October 4, when Bragg prematurely inaugurated a Confederate governor for Kentucky, a divided state but one with a strong majority of Unionists. Only hours after installing a governor, Bragg abandoned Frankfort, the state capital. Although Bragg’s attack at Perryville nearly destroyed the Buell’s army, his own confidence was shaken and his army seriously weakened by the effort. After the battle, Bragg retreated further, moving all the way back into Tennessee and abandoning Kentucky to the Union. This proved the essential feature of the campaign. As Abraham Lincoln had already noted, “to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.” Thanks to the tenacity of Buell’s soldiers and a disorganized, poorly led Confederate western command, Union-held Kentucky stayed in the game.

¹ Marshall Thayer, quoted in Kenneth W. Noe, Perryville: This Grand Havoc of Battle (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), xiv.
² Noe, Perryville, 215.
³ Sam Watkins, “The Battle of Perryville,” in The Civil War: The Second Year of the War Told By Those Who Lived It (New York: Library of America, 2012), 596.

(Cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• September 17, 1862: The Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg), the bloodiest single day in American history
• Brooks D. Simpson on “the very vortex of hell,” Second Manassas (The Second Battle of Bull Run), August 28–30, 1862

September 17, 1862: The Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg), the bloodiest single day in American history

“Antietam (called Sharpsburg by the South),” writes James McPherson in Battle Cry of Freedom, “was one of the few battles of the war in which both commanders deliberately chose the field and planned their tactics beforehand.” Confederate General Robert E. Lee believed the Federal troops were demoralized and vulnerable after their recent defeat at Second Manassas. Now was the time to strike. Ever cautious, General George McClellan became emboldened when on September 13 a Union soldier found a copy of Lee’s orders of attack wrapped around three cigars a Southern officer had lost in a field near Frederick, Maryland. “Here is a paper,” McClellan told one of his generals, “with which if I cannot whip Bobbie Lee, I will be willing to go home.”

But McClellan believed Lee’s forces to be twice the size they actually were and took two days to arrange his troops. It wasn’t until September 16 that the northern commander had 60,000 men in the field—and another 15,000 six miles away—to stand against Lee’s 25,000 or 30,000. In a letter to his daughters after the battle Brigadier General Alpheus S. Williams captures the apprehension of the Union troops the night before the battle:

At length I got fairly asleep and for two hours and was dead to all sounds or sensations. I shall not, however, soon forget that night; so dark, so obscure, so mysterious, so uncertain, with the occasional rapid volleys of pickets and outposts, the low solemn sound of the command as troops came into position, and withal so sleepy that there was a half-dreamy sensation about it all; but with a certain impression that the morrow was to be great with the future fate of our country. So much responsibility, so much intense future anxiety! and yet I slept as soundly as though nothing was before me.

Brigadier General Alpheus S. Williams
Photograph by Matthew Brady

New York Daily Tribune correspondent George W. Smalley witnessed the battle and published his account three days later. Wiliam Cullen Bryant, editor of the rival New York Evening Post, hailed the account as one of the “best battle pieces in literature.” Smalley paints the encounter in epic proportions:

Fierce and desperate battle between two hundred thousand men has raged since daylight, yet night closes on an uncertain field. It is the greatest fight since Waterloo—all over the field contested with an obstinacy equal even to Waterloo. If not wholly a victory to-night, I believe it is the prelude to a victory to-morrow. But what can be foretold of the future of a fight in which from five in the morning till seven at night the best troops of the continent have fought without decisive result?

A “Maryland maiden” who viewed the battle from a nearby attic window offers a contrasting view when she writes, “On all the distant hills around were the blue uniforms and shining bayonets of our men, and I thought it was the prettiest sight I ever saw in my life.” Eyewitness accounts closer to the fighting tell quite a different story. Here is Major Rufus R. Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin Infantry relating his experience at the center of the battle for David R. Miller’s cornfield, a swath of ground that changed ownership four times during the day:

As we appeared at the edge of the corn, a long line of men in butternut and gray rose up from the ground. Simultaneously, the hostile battle lines opened a tremendous fire upon each other. Men, I can not say fell; they were knocked out of the ranks by dozens. But we jumped over the fence, and pushed on, loading, firing, and shouting as we advanced. There was, on the part of the men, great hysterical excitement, eagerness to go forward, and a reckless disregard for life, of every thing but victory.

Everyone who witnessed the fighting close up expressed horror at the day’s carnage. Smalley notes that “The dead are strewn so thickly that as you ride over [the battlefield] you cannot guide your horse’s steps too carefully.” Dawes laments the “dreadful slaughter” and Williams reports seeing corpses “as thick as autumn leaves along a narrow lane.” A veteran campaigner known to speak his mind, Williams also offers insight into why the deaths and casualties were so great. For one, he finds fault with how some officers directed the order of battle:

The Rebels had been strongly reinforced, and Sumner’s troops, being formed in three lines in close proximity, after his favorite idea, we lost a good deal of our fire without any corresponding benefit or advantage. For instance, the second line, within forty paces of the front, suffered almost as much as the front line, and yet could not fire without hitting our own men. The colonel of a regiment in the second line said he lost sixty men and came off without firing a gun.

On the offensive side, Williams dramatizes how lethally effective an artillery battery can be:

I was near one of our brass twelve-pound Napoleon gun batteries and seeing the Rebel colors appearing over the rolling ground I directed the two left pieces charged with canister to be turned on the point. In the moment the Rebel line appeared and both guns were discharged at short range. Each canister contains several hundred balls. They fell in the very front of the line and all along it apparently, stirring up a dust like a thick cloud. When the dust blew away no regiment and not a living man was to be seen.

By nightfall, at least 3,600 men were dead and well over 17,000 were wounded. McPherson, who estimates that another 2,000 died from their injuries, puts this in perspective:

The casualties at Antietam numbered four times the total suffered by American soldiers at the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944. More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsburg as fell in combat in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War combined.

Both armies stayed in position on September 18. That evening Lee and his troops returned to Virginia.

Also of interest:

• “A Woman’s Recollections of Antietam,” this week’s Story of the Week
• Phil Leigh writes about Lee’s Lost Order on The New York Times Disunion blog 
• Read more about the Battle of Antietam at The Civil War Trust 
• Brooks D. Simpson on “the very vortex of hell,” Second Manassas (The Second Battle of Bull Run), August 28–30, 1862, a previous Reader’s Almanac post 

Related LOA works: The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It (contains more than 60 pages on Antietam, including eyewitness accounts by George W. Smalley, Rufus R. Dawnes, Alpheus S. Williams, and many others)

Brooks D. Simpson on “the very vortex of hell,” Second Manassas (The Second Battle of Bull Run), August 28–30, 1862

Guest blog post by Brooks D. Simpson, professor of history, Arizona State University and co-editor of The Civil War: The First Year

On the afternoon of August 30, 1862, Union general John Pope was determined to smash Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s line once and for all. For the better part of two days he had launched assault after assault against the Confederates, who were deployed along an unfinished railroad cut that ran along a ridge northwest of the battlefield of First Manassas. At one point the Rebels’ ammunition had run so low that they had taken to throwing rocks at the attackers. One more time, Pope believed, and victory would be his.

In gathering men for the final assault, Pope left a single brigade and an artillery battery to watch matters on his extreme left flank. Colonel Gouverneur K. Warren deployed the 10th New York to the west, along with Lieutenant Charles E. Hazlett’s Battery D, 5th U.S. Artillery, along a hill just south of the crossroads at a hamlet named Groveton, while Warren’s old regiment, the 5th New York, remained in reserve. Both New York regiments were outfitted in colorful Zouave uniforms: the red pantaloons of the 5th helped mark them as one of the most visible regiments in the entire Army of the Potomac, and they were rumored to be George B. McClellan’s favorite volunteer regiment. But the beloved Little Mac was nowhere to be found at Second Manassas. Neither was the enemy, at least for these Yankees, and the men of the 5th stacked their arms and rested.

Suddenly soldiers from the 10th emerged from the woods in front of the 5th. They were fleeing rearward as quickly as possible, pausing only long enough to alert their fellow Zouaves that the enemy was upon them and coming quick. And so they were: nearly thirty thousand Confederates under the command of James Longstreet, spearheaded by John Bell Hood’s fiery Texas brigade, were advancing on Pope’s exposed left flank. The New Yorkers were all too familiar with the Texans, for the adversaries had met just over two months before at Gaines’ Mill. No sooner had they fallen into line than bullets began ripping through their ranks. At first the 5th could not readily return fire lest they hit their retreating comrades: they could barely manage a single volley before the Confederates charged.

Within minutes the New Yorkers broke. Many of them were cut down by the pursuing Confederates as they scrambled downhill towards a creek and crossed it to a ridge in the distance. At first Hazlett’s guns, bypassed in the initial Confederate assault to the south, stayed in position, until the battery commander realized that he stood in danger of being cut off. In orderly fashion the artillerists limbered their guns and pulled back.

Warren finally rallied what was left of his command at Henry Hill, the site of hard fighting in the 1861 battle. His old regiment was shattered. Of some 560 men, over half had fallen, with some 120 men killed. Back on the hillside, one of the Texans termed the carnage “a ghastly, horrifying spectacle,” while another observer said that from afar the colorful uniforms made the hillside look as if it were covered by wildflowers. Years later the regiment’s survivors returned to the field to dedicate a monument marking the events of that day. As one of them recalled, “where the regiment stood that day was the very vortex of hell.” (quoted in Return to Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of Second Manassas by John J. Hennessy)

For Confederate lieutenant John Hampden Chamberlayne, who had been among the defenders at the railroad cut, it had been a most memorable contest. “All day long they threw their masses upon us, all day they fell back, shattered & shrieking,” he told his mother of the action of August 29. The next day had been even worse: Chamberlayne claimed that the fighting “was by far the most horrible & deadly that I have ever seen.” Although the battlefield was covered with Union dead, the foe was not destroyed. “Their discipline & the night saved them from a rout,” the lieutenant concluded.

Doubtless both the stubborn resistance of Pope’s army and nightfall played a role in preventing disaster at Second Manassas. Yet the result served as a reminder of just how hard it was to achieve total victory in one single decisive clash. Aside from Warren’s brigade and Hazlett’s battery, the Union left flank was completely vulnerable to Longstreet’s devastating blow. Terrain had helped slow down the momentum of the Confederate attack, as did the rapid response of Union defenders elsewhere in shifting to face the new threat. Still, if one could not destroy an enemy army at one blow under such circumstances, it seemed unlikely ever to happen. Enamored of visions of decisive battle, Civil War generals reluctantly learned that only after a series of indecisive bloody battles and trying sieges would they be able to pound the ragged enemy into submission and surround a foe decimated by desertion and starvation as a prelude to surrender.

Among those commanders who were frustrated by the indecision of battle was Robert E. Lee. Never again would Lee enjoy such an opportunity to smash his opponent as at Second Manassas, although he would seek once more to turn exposed Union flanks at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. Helping to frustrate that latter effort in Pennsylvania would be none other than Warren, whose appraisal of the situation from the summit of Little Round Top led him to hurry reinforcements to that position, including none other than Hazlett’s battery (although Hazlett would be cut down in the ensuing clash). For the moment, however, the Confederates claimed victory. Whether they could make any use of it would be decided in the next few weeks, as Lee decided to cross the Potomac and invade Maryland.

Also of interest:

• More on Second Manassas at CivilWar.org
• Previously on Reader’s Almanac: Brooks D. Simpson on Confederate women and the First Battle of Bull Run; Brooks D. Simpson on the “Seven Days,” June 25–July 1, 1862, and Emancipation
• Elmer Ellsworth, the first Union officer killed in the Civil War—and Lincoln's letter home, also on Reader’s Almanac 
• At Crossroads Brooks D. Simpson blogs about history, historians, and the academic life, much of it related to the Civil War

Related LOA works: The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It; The Civil War: The Second year Told by Those Who Lived It

Jim Downs on the “darker side of emancipation,” the hundreds of thousands of freedmen who died from sickness and disease

Guest blog post by Jim Downs, associate professor of history at Connecticut College and author of Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction

All he needed was a pair of shoes. But shoes, especially those needed by a formerly enslaved child, seemed to be the last thing on the Union Army’s mind. The Union Army was not the Red Cross: it was a military engaged in a long and bloody war.

Even when the U.S. Army felt generous and donated “cast-off” garments and worn shoes to the freed slaves who fled to their camps for protection during the Civil War, the clothes would be in miserable condition. Shoes would be stained with blood or dirtied with animal feces and mud, most were worn down to the soles, and all were too big to fit a small child’s feet.

For former slaves who were constantly on the move, boots mattered. Throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction, Union officials ordered emancipated slaves to be transported from one location to the next based on the military’s need for laborers or depending on the exigencies of military strategy. Before the Civil War, former slaves may have been accustomed to being barefoot. But during a war in which former enslaved people were forced to take shelter in refugee camps and negotiated their newly found freedom across the desecrated, muddy, frozen land, shoes were indispensable protection against the cold, rain, and mud.

In the case of this boy, shoes may have prevented him from ending up as we find him: in front of Union officials who realized after one look at his frozen feet that he would require amputation. According to the Union official’s report, his father had enlisted in the Union Army, but his whereabouts were unknown; the boy’s mother had recently died and, based on the Union official’s description, the boy and his siblings were “nearly starved.”