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December 29, 2024 - January 1, 2025
the arrogant laziness of a gifted student,
A disgusted Gideon Welles wrote in his diary following the collapse of the Peninsula Campaign, “McClellan is an intelligent engineer but not a commander. . . . He likes shows, parade and power. Wishes to outgeneral the Rebels, but not to kill and destroy them.”
The piles of amputated arms, feet, hands, and legs that vividly feature in so many descriptions of Civil War field hospitals were a gauge both of medical knowledge during what has been termed “the very end of the medical Middle Ages” and of military technology at the very beginnings of its era of modern lethality. The Minié ball was capable of rendering horrific damage to the human body. Its hollow conical shape, soft lead composition, and relatively slow speed guaranteed it would flatten, spread, and deform when striking flesh and bone, sometimes breaking into multiple fragments that could
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Of the 175,000 Union soldiers wounded in the war, 30,000 underwent amputation, with a 26 percent mortality rate: reasonable odds considering the alternatives.
“No disease is so contagious, or so depressing to vital energy when taken, as inactivity and gloominess of mind,” insisted one regimental surgeon, who sarcastically dismissed those who thought differently as suffering from “gangrene of the mind, for want of free ventilation of the brain.”
Letterman’s system of field evacuation and a dedicated ambulance corps to support it would be adopted for the entire army by an act of Congress in March 1864, in turn becoming the model for every other army in the world.
136,000 Union soldiers, more than half of those who had volunteered in 1861 and whose three-year enlistments were set to expire in the summer of 1864, reenlisted. And an overwhelming majority of Union troops, 78 percent, cast their votes for Lincoln that fall, rejecting the Democratic Party’s call for peace negotiations and with that the man they had nominated, their still-admired former chief, George McClellan.
openly advocated raising “the black flag” and giving “no quarter to the violators of our homes and firesides.” (“The Bible is full of such wars,” he offered by way of justification for murdering prisoners.)
Whatever intangible gifts of tactical intuition he possessed, he had also learned from experience the pivotal value of intelligence, coordinated action, and biding one’s time on the tactical defense, allowing the enemy to dash himself to pieces first, then swiftly and devastatingly counterattacking at the decisive moment.
Of Lee he pointedly observed, “He found it hard, the enemy in sight, to withhold his blows.”
Longstreet had arrayed the defenders to create what a modern soldier would recognize as a “kill zone,” a box of converging fire that trapped any attacker attempting to cross. Additional lines of troops positioned on the rise behind the lane were able to fire over the heads of the men in the trenches, adding to the withering volleys that caught the Union troops in front.
Thomas Welsh, commander of the Ninth Corps brigade that had carried the right wing of the attack nearly to the outskirts of Sharpsburg, wrote his wife afterward. “It makes me sick to contemplate the result. The whole Rebel Army—could have been captured or destroyed easily before it crossed the Potomac—but indeed it seems to me that McClellan let them escape purposely.”
had not the lessons of James Longstreet’s example been subsumed in postwar revisionism fueled by unreconstructed Southerners marching under the banner of the Lost Cause, determined to make a scapegoat of him for the Confederacy’s defeat. The operational concepts Longstreet employed at Second Bull Run and Antietam would be put to devastating effect by the Confederate army in later battles like Fredericksburg and ignored with devastating failure at Gettysburg.
“All we have to do is file around his left and secure good ground between him and his capital,” Longstreet pleaded. He spoke in unusually personal and emotional terms. “I have been a soldier all my life,” Longstreet said, “and it is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position.” But Lee had impatiently gestured to the Union brigades lining the ridge above and replied, “The enemy is here, and if we do not whip him, he will whip us”; any maneuvering would be taken by the men as a demoralizing retreat.
Longstreet’s cardinal sin after the war was to accept defeat. He wrote a letter to the newspapers urging Southerners to acknowledge reality, “abandon ideas that are obsolete and conform to the requirements of law,” and, like him, accept Reconstruction, and Black suffrage. “It will ruin you, son, if you publish it,” warned his Methodist minister uncle, to whom he had shown a draft.
Soon Longstreet was the cause of all the Confederate army’s defeats. The keepers of Lee’s “sacred memory,” including his former artillery chief the Episcopal Reverend William Pendleton, invented a series of outright fabrications accusing Longstreet of disobeying Lee’s command to attack earlier, thereby losing the Battle of Gettysburg, and with it the cause of Southern independence. When James Longstreet died in 1904 the good ladies of the United Daughters of the Confederacy voted not to send flowers to the funeral. His recognition as a great general far ahead of his time would have to await
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Matthew Brady’s “National Portrait Gallery,” at the corner of Broadway and 10th Street in New York City, announced by a small placard hanging at the door bearing the title, “The Dead of Antietam.” The forty-five photographs exhibited, with copies of stereoscopic views available for purchase at fifty cents apiece, were the first actual images taken of American dead on a battlefield, the first such
The climax of her account of the Battle of Antietam in her “Work and Incidents” lecture was the moment she opened the farmhouse door of a field hospital she had driven up to with her supplies. There she beheld Dr. James L. Dunn, whom she had assisted at the Battle of Culpeper by cooking soup and supplying shirts for the wounded men under his care. At the sight of her, the doctor “threw up his hands” and was speechless, Barton recounted, but, recovering himself after a moment, declared, “God has indeed remembered us.
Clara Barton reflected the experiences of thousands of other women for whom the Civil War created new opportunities without abandoning old expectations. European visitors in the first half of the nineteenth century were startled by American women’s assertions of social equality, which they interpreted as a direct consequence of the expanding democratic values of the new republic. Women mingled with men on nearly all social occasions, which had not previously been the case;
Female literacy, especially in the North, soared in the decades following the Revolution, and the nineteenth century saw the founding of many academies for the education of women, focusing not on “ornamental” subjects like drawing, dancing, and music to amuse the male sex, but on the acquisition of such enlightened knowledge—grammar, arithmetic, history, geography—as would benefit society as a whole,
An anonymous poem at the dawn of the century captured the new republican spirit that made the rights—or at least the education and social standing—of women an inescapable question in a country established upon the rights of man. Let us not force them back, with brow severe, Within the pale of ignorance and fear, Confin’d entirely by domestic arts: Producing only children, pies and tarts.
Women who had worked as midwives in colonial America were pushed aside in the professionalization of medicine in the ensuing decades,
An estimated 20,000 women worked in the hospitals of the Union armies during the war. They included not only those enrolled by the Army medical bureau under Dix’s superintendence, but thousands more employed by the Sanitary Commission or directly by regimental surgeons, plus thousands of others listed as cooks, laundresses, or “matrons,” all of whose duties overlapped with those of nurses.
A stock tale in memoirs of women Civil War nurses relates a dying soldier, overcome with agony and fear of his impending end, being sternly chastised by the author along the lines, “If you must die, die like a man, and not like a coward.” Then—the invariable happy ending—a rapturous glow suffuses the dying soldier’s face as he accepts Jesus at the last, and slips away to eternity. That
Dr. Dyer of the 19th Massachusetts was probably typical of many male surgeons in regarding what they saw as ignorance, meddling, and self-righteousness of amateur nurses as more trouble than they were worth. His last straw came after Gettysburg. Most of the women quarreled with each other, each whispering very quietly that they didn’t want to associate with some others, on account of their reputation not being good. It is singular that each one was the only truly pious and virtuous one in the whole lot. A man wounded in the head wanted [a nurse] to wash and fix him up a little, as blood was
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(As Ann Wood pointed out, “There is pity, but there is an undernote of I-told-you-so, in the tone of these nurses when they describe, as Mary Livermore did, mutilated men deliriously screaming, ‘Mother! Mother!’
raised an interesting possibility about the place of women in society which would not quite go so quietly away. “If the world was a home,” Wood pointedly asked, “where would their ‘influence’ end?”
The utopianism which, along with amateurism, tinged many women’s charitable causes before the war shaded over into a rich variety of crank enthusiasms for health and diet fads, dress reform, and spiritualism, and these too were legacies of Barton’s antebellum past she never grew beyond. In later years she fell under the sway of a spiritualist, who, reading her subject without difficulty, conducted seances for her at which Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Kaiser Wilhelm spoke from the other side to praise her work and assure her of her lasting fame, all of which
lawsuit that went to Maryland’s highest court, which ruled that while belief in spiritualism did not in itself establish incapacity to make a valid deed, the simulated trances and supposed messages from the departed produced by the defendant amounted to fraudulent inducement.
Livermore indeed became an effective leader in the women’s rights movement after the war, and her experience was duplicated by others who had their confidence emboldened, their eyes opened, and their outrage stirred by their work during the war. Louisa Schuyler, a great-granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton, who became one of a dozen women managers in the Sanitary Commission’s New York branch, called the commission “a great educator of women of the day,”
one never-forgotten lesson. It had, she said, “opened my eyes to the great value and the great power of organization—of which I had known nothing.” After the war she secured the approval of the State of New York for an association to inspect its poorhouses, worked successfully to have the care of the insane transferred to hospitals, and opened one of the first nurses’ training schools in the country, at New York’s Bellevue Hospital.
his revocation of an order by the Union commander occupying the sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia that decreed the abolition of slavery within his military department outraged the radicals of his Republican Party,
Even the relatively limited antislavery measures enacted by Congress in 1862, providing for compensated emancipation in the District of Columbia, barring slavery from the territories, and prohibiting the return of fugitive slaves by the army, had galvanized Democratic opposition, with 96 percent of its party’s representatives voting no.
“Help me to dodge the n——er—we want nothing to do with him. I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union & the power of the Govt—on no other issue.” (Shortly after the war McClellan wrote, “I confess to a prejudice in favor of my own race & can’t learn to like the odor of either Billy goats or n——ers.”)
To the complaint that Union forces occupying New Orleans had interfered with the relations between master and slave, Lincoln retorted that there was no one to blame but those who continued to resist the authority of the government. The solution, he said, “does not lie in rounding the rough angles of the war, but in removing the necessity for the war.” He asked: “What would you do in my position? Would you drop the war where it is? Would you deal lighter blows rather than heavier ones? Would you give up the contest,
“This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing. Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt.”
Replying to an excoriating editorial in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune in August denouncing Lincoln’s pusillanimity for not proclaiming the abolition of slavery at once, Lincoln sent an open letter further preparing the ground for emancipation as a means to military success, explaining the point better in a few dozen plain words than a closely argued treatise might have done. My paramount object in the struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery.
These are not, however, the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation. I must study the plain physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible and learn what appears to be wise and right.”
Antietam now gave him the chance he had been awaiting, and five days after the battle he again met with his cabinet to say the time had come. The preliminary proclamation issued that day declared that unless the Confederate states returned to the Union by January 1, 1863, their slaves “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
It was a source of enduring wonder to Karl Marx that Lincoln’s greatest acts took the form of documents that read like the “routine summonses sent by a lawyer to the lawyer of the opposing party,” filled with “clause-ridden conditions,” “legal chicaneries,” and convoluted causes of action.
In Lincoln’s eyes, however, the legalisms were the point; far from violating the Constitution, the power of the proclamation lay in its being situated within a carefully constructed framework of “antislavery constitutionalism,” as the scholar James Oakes has described it, a legal foundation stretching back to the Constitution’s origins.
require West Virginia and Nevada to forbid slavery in their constitutions as a condition of statehood.
Second Confiscation Act, passed in July 1862, was a more muddled matter. Invoking the constitutional crime of treason, it provided for forfeiture of slaves, along with other property, as punishment for slaveholders engaged in rebellion.
as a military measure, emancipation might rest on an entirely different legal basis, one that depended on the fundamental fact which lay at the core of his own moral beliefs, that slaves were men, not property. Lincoln had often called attention to a point all the antislavery constitutionalists stressed: that everywhere in the Constitution where slavery is alluded to, slaves are described as persons, not property.
Other foundational clauses of the Constitution, notably the Fifth Amendment, made clear that all “persons,” not just citizens, are entitled to due process and the protection of the laws.
in a case decided by Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice, an English court held that a slave purchased in Virginia and carried to England was released from bondage. Somerset v. Steuart enunciated a fundamental principle of the common law: the state of slavery was “so odious” that it exists only where supported by “positive law,” and such laws do not reach across borders. Once outside the jurisdiction in which he was legally held to bondage, any slave could in theory apply to a local court for a writ of habeas corpus,
that clearly articulated precedent of English common law—freedom was the rule, slavery the exception—meant that any slave who set foot in a Northern state where slavery was not explicitly sanctioned by local law would likewise be instantly freed.
Halleck himself was an authority on the laws of war and international law, and the key point, which he would repeat in a treatise on the subject published right after the war, was embodied in Articles 42 and 43 of the “Lieber Code,” as the revised military laws were known. Art. 42. Slavery . . . exists according to municipal or local law only. The law of nature and nations has never acknowledged it. The digest of the Roman law enacts the early dictum of the pagan jurist, that “so far as the law of nature is concerned, all men are equal.”
Art. 43. Therefore, in a war between the United States and a belligerent which admits of slavery, if a person held in bondage by that belligerent be captured by or come as a fugitive under the protection of the military forces of the United States, such person is immediately entitled to the rights and privileges of a freeman.
The British had invoked that very principle in freeing slaves who reached their lines during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, even though slavery still existed in the British Empire at the time, and declined even to return those carried off by British navy vessels after the end of hostilities, in violation of the terms of the treaties ending both wars.
