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January 22 - February 19, 2021
“The Union is older than any of the States,” Lincoln asserted, “and, in fact, it created them as States.” The Declaration of Independence transformed the “United Colonies” into the United States; without this union then, there would never have been any “free and independent States.” “Having never been States, either in substance, or in name, outside the Union,” asked Lincoln, “whence this magical omnipotence of ‘State rights,’ asserting a claim of power to lawfully destroy the Union itself?” Perpetuity was “the fundamental law of all national governments.” No government “ever had provision in
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Neither Lincoln nor any other northerner denied the right of revolution. After all, Yankees shared the legacy of 1776. But there was no "right of revolution at pleasure,” declared a Philadelphia newspaper. Revolution was “a moral right, when exercised for a morally justifiable cause,” wrote Lincoln. But “when exercised without such a cause revolution is no right, but simply a wicked exercise of physical power.”
“Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery,” Lincoln wrote to key senators and congressmen. “The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.” Crittenden’s compromise, Lincoln told Weed and Seward, “would lose us everything we gained by the election. . . . Filibustering for all South of us, and making slave states would follow . . . to put us again on the high-road to a slave empire.” The very notion of a territorial compromise, Lincoln pointed out, “acknowledges that slavery has equal rights with liberty, and surrenders all we have contended
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“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Lee had made clear his dislike of slavery, which he described in 1856 as “a moral and political evil.” Until the day Virginia left the Union he had also spoken against secession. “The framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation,” he wrote in January 1861, “if it was intended to be broken up by every member of the [Union] at will. . . . It is idle to talk of secession.”7
“I must side either with or against my section,” Lee told a northern friend. His choice was foreordained by birth and blood: “I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children.”
He told his friend General Scott regretfully that he must not only decline, but must also resign from the army. “Save in defense of my native State,” said Lee, “I never desire again to draw my sword.” Scott replied sadly: “You have made the greatest mistake of your life, but I feared it would be so.”
The opposing Union commander was Ulysses S. Grant, slouchy and unsoldier-like in appearance, of undistinguished family, a West Point graduate from the lower half of his class who had resigned from the army in disgrace for drunkenness in 1854 and had failed in several civilian occupations before volunteering his services to the Union in 1861.
Much confusion of uniforms occurred during the battle. On numerous occasions regiments withheld their fire for fear of hitting friends, or fired on friends by mistake. The same problem arose with the national flags carried by each regiment. With eleven stars on a blue field set in the corner of a flag with two red and one white horizontal bars, the Confederate “stars and bars” could be mistaken for the stars and stripes in the smoke and haze of battle. Afterwards Beauregard designed a new battle flag, with white stars embedded in a blue St. Andrew’s Cross on a red field, which became the
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In a sermon on a text from Proverbs—"adversity kills only where there is a weakness to be killed"—one of the North’s leading clergymen expressed this new mood of grim resolution. It was echoed by a soldier in the ranks: “I shall see the thing played out, or die in the attempt.” Even as Greeley was writing despairingly to Lincoln, an editorial in the Tribune by another hand maintained that “it is not characteristic of Americans to sit down despondently after a defeat.
With the benefit of hindsight, participants on both sides agreed after the war that the one-sided southern triumph in the first big battle “proved the greatest misfortune that would have befallen the Confederacy.” Such an interpretation has become orthodoxy in Civil War historiography.
As Frederick Douglass expressed this conviction: “To fight against slaveholders, without fighting against slavery, is but a half-hearted business, and paralyzes the hands engaged in it. . . . Fire must be met with water. . . . War for the destruction of liberty must be met with war for the destruction of slavery.”
Slave labor was so important to the southern war effort that the government impressed slaves into service before it began drafting white men as soldiers. “The very stomach of this rebellion is the negro in the form of a slave,” said Douglass. “Arrest that hoe in the hands of the negro, and you smite the rebellion in the very seat of its life.”
“Are these men, women, and children, slaves? Are they free? . . . What has been the effect of the rebellion and a state of war upon [their] status? . . . If property, do they not become the property of the salvors? But we, their salvors, do not need and will not hold such property . . . has not, therefore, all proprietary relation ceased?”
And in any case, “can it be pretended that it is any longer [a] . . . government of Constitution and laws, wherein a General, or a President, may make permanent rules of property by proclamation?”27 One wonders if Lincoln remembered these words when a year later he did endeavor to make a permanent rule of property with his Emancipation Proclamation declaring the slaves “forever free.”
Gone was the romantic innocence of Rebs and Yanks who had marched off to war in 1861. “I never realized the ‘pomp and circumstance’ of the thing called glorious war until I saw this,” wrote a Tennessee private after the battle. “Men . . . lying in every conceivable position; the dead . . . with their eyes wide open, the wounded begging piteously for help. . . . I seemed . . . in a sort of daze.” Sherman described “piles of dead soldiers’ mangled bodies . . . without heads and legs. . . . The scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war.”27
But Vicksburg proved another matter. Summoned to surrender, the military governor of the city replied: “Mississippians don’t know, and refuse to learn, how to surrender. . . . If Commodore Farragut . . . can teach them, let [him] come and try.”37 He came, he tried, but he did not conquer.
Austere and humorless, Davis did not suffer fools gladly. He lacked Lincoln’s ability to work with partisans of a different persuasion for the common cause. Lincoln would rather win the war than an argument; Davis seemed to prefer winning the argument.
Conscription dramatized a fundamental paradox in the Confederate war effort: the need for Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends. Pure Jeffersonians could not accept this. The most outspoken of them, Joseph Brown of Georgia, denounced the draft as a “dangerous usurpation by Congress of the reserved rights of the States . . . at war with all the principles for which Georgia entered into the revolution.”
For the war as a whole the Union experienced inflation of only 80 percent (contrasted with 9,000 percent for the Confederacy), which compares favorably to the 84 percent of World War I (1917–20) and 70 percent in World War II (1941–49, including the postwar years after the lifting of wartime price controls).
Until the 1850s, that is. Although several people contributed to the development of a practicable military rifle, the main credit belongs to French army Captain Claude E. Minié and to the American James H. Burton, an armorer at the Harper’s Ferry Armory. In 1848 Minié perfected a bullet small enough to be easily rammed down a rifled barrel, with a wooden plug in the base of the bullet to expand it upon firing to take the rifling. Such bullets were expensive; Burton developed a cheaper and better bullet with a deep cavity in the base that filled with gas and expanded the rim upon firing. This
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This was one reason why about 18 percent of the wounded rebels died of their wounds compared with 14 percent of the wounded Yankees.37 The record of both armies in this respect, of course, was abysmal by twentieth-century standards. In the Korean War only one of every fifty wounded Americans died of his wounds; in Vietnam the proportion was one in four hundred. The Civil War soldier was eight times more likely to die of a wound and ten times more likely to die of disease than an American soldier in World War I.
But this was owing more to the state of medical knowledge in general than to the particular incompetence of army doctors. The Civil War was fought at the end of the medical Middle Ages. The 1860s witnessed the dawn of a new era with the research in Europe of Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and others who discovered those microscopic culprits that infected water and food and entered the bloodstream through open wounds.
In several states a militia draft became necessary to fill the quotas. This draft met violent resistance in some areas, especially Irish Catholic neighborhoods in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, Butternut districts in Ohio and Indiana, and German Catholic townships in Wisconsin. Mobs murdered two enrollment officers in Indiana and wounded a commissioner in Wisconsin.
On September 24, Lincoln issued a proclamation suspending the writ of habeas corpus and subjecting to martial law “all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting militia drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice affording aid and comfort to the rebels.” The War Department took off the gloves to enforce this decree. Stanton created a network of provost marshals who arrested and imprisoned without trial several hundred draft resisters and antiwar activists, including five newspaper editors, three judges, and several minor political leaders.
Southerners erupted in anger toward Pope, whom they execrated with a fury felt toward no other Yankee “vandal” except Butler and, later, Sherman.
Large portions of the South were becoming a wasteland. Much of this was the inevitable destruction of war, as both armies cut down trees and tore up fences for firewood, wrecked bridges and culverts and railroads or cannibalized whatever structures they could find to rebuild wrecked bridges and railroads, or seized crops, livestock, and poultry for food. Soldiers have pillaged civilian property since the beginning of time. But by midsummer 1862 some of the destruction of southern property had acquired a purposeful, even an ideological dimension. More and more Union soldiers were writing that
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One of Halleck’s first orders to Grant, now commander of occupation forces in western Tennessee and Mississippi, was to “take up all active [rebel] sympathizers, and either hold them as prisoners or put them beyond our lines. Handle that class without gloves, and take their property for public use. . . . It is time that they should begin to feel the presence of the war.”
Grant informed his family that his only desire was “to put down the rebellion. I have no hobby of my own with regard to the Negro, either to effect his freedom or to continue his bondage. . . . I am using them as teamsters, hospital attendants, company cooks and so forth, thus saving soldiers to carry the musket. I don’t know what is to become of these poor people in the end, but it weakens the enemy to take them from them.”24
the president replied with asperity that the war could no longer be fought “with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water. . . . 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.”
He had decided that emancipation was “a military necessity, absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union. We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued. The slaves were undeniably an element of strength to those who had their service, and we must decide whether that element should be with us or against us.” Lincoln brushed aside the argument of unconstitutionality. This was a war, and as commander in chief he could order seizure of enemy slaves just as surely as he could order destruction of enemy railroads. “The rebels . . . could not at the same time throw off the Constitution and
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War and Peace Democrats would maintain a shifting, uneasy, and sometimes divided coalition, but on one issue they remained united: opposition to emancipation. On four crucial congressional roll-call votes concerning slavery in 1862—the war article prohibiting return of fugitives, emancipation in the District of Columbia, prohibition of slavery in the territories, and the confiscation act—96 percent of the Democrats were united in opposition, while 99 percent of the Republicans voted aye. Seldom if ever in American politics has an issue so polarized the major parties.
Lol, not any more buddy. We can't agree on anything now
As they had done in every election since the birth of the Republican party, northern Democrats exploited the race issue for all they thought it was worth in 1862.
And they are STILL doing it 160 years later!
“the Government seems determined to apply the guillotine to all unsuccessful generals. . . . Perhaps with us now, as in the French Revolution, some harsh measures are required.”
We are obsessed with the french revolution.
But these measures came too late to avert the most shocking revelation of internal stress—the bread riots in the spring of 1863. In a dozen or more cities and hamlets from Richmond to Mobile, desperate women raided shops or supply depots for food. Many of the riots followed a similar pattern. Groups of women, many of them wives of soldiers and some armed with knives or revolvers, marched in a body to shops owned by “speculators” and asked the price of bacon or flour. When informed, they denounced such “extortion,” took what they wanted, and marched away.49
At this juncture Jefferson Davis himself arrived and climbed onto a cart to address the mob. He commanded their attention by taking several coins from his pocket and throwing them into the crowd. He then told them to go home so that the muskets leveled against them could be turned against the common enemy—the Yankees. The crowd was unmoved, and a few boys hissed the president. Taking out his watch, Davis gave the rioters five minutes to disperse before he ordered the troops to fire. Four minutes passed in tense silence. Holding up his watch, the president said firmly: “My friends, you have one
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A government clerk told of the following exchange between a woman and a shopkeeper in Richmond who asked $70 for a barrel of flour. “My God!” she exclaimed. “How can I pay such prices? I have seven children; what shall I do?” “I don’t know, madam,” the merchant replied, “unless you eat your children.”
A Vicksburg woman who watched the entry of Union soldiers pronounced an epitaph on the campaign: “What a contrast [these] stalwart, well-fed men, so splendidly set-up and accoutered [were] to . . . the worn men in gray, who were being blindly dashed against this embodiment of modern power.” But in Richmond an embittered Jefferson Davis attributed the loss of Vicksburg not to the enemy’s power but to Joe Johnston’s timidity. When a War Department official commented that lack of provisions had doomed the garrison, Davis responded: “Yes, from want of provisions inside and a General outside who
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Johnston evaded the trap by slipping across the Pearl River on the night of July 16. Unlike Pemberton he had saved his army—an achievement cited by his defenders—but its withdrawal halfway to Alabama abandoned central Mississippi’s plantations and railroads to the none-too-tender mercies of Sherman’s army.
Well damn
The triumph at Chancellorsville, however, came at great cost. The Confederates suffered 13,000 casualties, 22 percent of their force (the Union figures were 17,000 and 15 percent). The most grievous loss was Jackson, who had done so much to make the victory possible. And the boost that the battle gave to southern morale proved in the end harmful, for it bred an overconfidence in their own prowess and a contempt for the enemy that led to disaster. Believing his troops invincible, Lee was about to ask them to do the impossible.
Events have succeeded one another with disastrous rapidity. One brief month ago we were apparently at the point of success. Lee was in Pennsylvania, threatening Harrisburgh, and even Philadelphia. Vicksburgh seemed to laugh all Grant’s efforts to scorn. . . . Port Hudson had beaten off Banks’ force. . . . Now the picture is just as sombre as it was bright then. . . . It seems incredible that human power could effect such a change in so brief a space. Yesterday we rode on the pinnacle of success—today absolute ruin seems to be our portion. The Confederacy totters to its destruction.
Lincoln pointed out to War Democrats that some 130,000 black soldiers and sailors were fighting for the Union: “If they stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” To abandon emancipation “would ruin the Union cause itself. All recruiting of colored men would instantly cease, and all colored men now in our service would instantly desert us. And rightfully too. Why should they give their lives for us, with full notice of our purpose to betray them?
“There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson & Olustee [a battle in Florida in which black soldiers fought]. I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends & enemies, come what will.”
“Never until now did I feel hopeless,” wrote a North Carolinian,” but since God seems to have forsaken us I despair.” The South Carolina diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut saw doom approaching. “Since Atlanta I have felt as if all were dead within me, forever,” she wrote. “We are going to be wiped off the earth.”
Democrats fought back with their tried and true weapon—racism.
For all their stridency, Democrats appear to have profited little from the race issue in this election. For most undecided voters, the success or failure of the war was more salient than the possibility of blacks marrying their sisters. Republicans were far more successful in pinning the label of traitor on Democrats than the latter were in pinning the label of miscegenationist on Republicans. If anything, racism may have boomeranged against the Democrats this time, for after Sherman’s and Sheridan’s victories many northern voters began to congratulate themselves on the selflessness of their
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But Jefferson Davis was also in earnest. He had never shared southern hopes for the election of McClellan and a negotiated peace. “We are fighting for existence; and by fighting alone can independence be gained,” Davis had told audiences during a morale-building tour of the lower South after the fall of Atlanta. The Confederacy remained “as erect and defiant as ever,” he informed Congress in November. “Nothing has changed in the purpose of its Government, in the indomitable valor of its troops, or in the unquenchable spirit of its people.”71 It was to quench this spirit that Sherman set forth
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“War is cruelty and you cannot refine it,” Sherman had told Atlanta’s mayor after ordering the civilian population expelled from the occupied city. But “when peace does come, you may call on me for anything. Then will I share with you the last cracker.”
“We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible . . . [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”
Southerners wrecked bridges, burned provisions, toppled trees and planted mines on the roads ahead of the Yankees, but this accomplished little except to make them more vengeful. In truth, nothing could stop the bluecoats’ relentless pace of a dozen miles a day. For most northern soldiers the march became a frolic, a moving feast in which they “foraged liberally on the country” and destroyed everything of conceivable military value—along with much else—that they did not consume. “This is probably the most gigantic pleasure excursion ever planned,” wrote one officer on the second day out of
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