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These instructions anticipated a pattern in Grant’s generalship: he always thought more about what he planned to do to the enemy than what his enemy might do to him.
Coming at the end of a year of war, Shiloh was the first battle on a scale that became commonplace during the next three years. The 20,000 killed and wounded at Shiloh (about equally distributed between the two sides) were nearly double the 12,000 battle casualties at Manassas, Wilson’s Creek, Fort Donelson, and Pea Ridge combined
Nevertheless, disaffection remained a serious problem. Another divisive controversy blew up over the question of martial law. This matter became an embarrassment to Davis. In his February 22 inaugural address he had contrasted the Confederacy’s refusal “to impair personal liberty or the freedom of speech, of thought, or of the press” with Lincoln’s imprisonment without trial of “civil officers, peaceful citizens, and gentlewomen” in vile “Bastilles.”15 Davis overlooked the suppression of civil liberties in parts of the Confederacy, especially east Tennessee, where several hundred civilians
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The rhetoric of southern libertarians about executive tyranny thus seems overblown. The Confederacy did not have the North’s problem of administering captured territory with its hostile population. Nor did the South have as large a disloyal population—sizable though it was—in its disaffected upland regions as the Union contained in the border states. These areas accounted for most of the Lincoln administration’s suspension of civil liberties.
Despite this condemnation of “native” merchants, the Examiner and many other southerners focused on Jews as the worst “extortioners.”
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. Indeed, twice as many Civil War soldiers died of disease as were killed and mortally wounded in combat.
The Civil War was fought at the end of the medical Middle Ages.
While two Union or Confederate soldiers died of disease for each one killed in combat, the ratio for British soldiers in the Napoleonic and Crimean wars had been eight to one"and four to one. For the American army in the Mexican War it had been seven to one.
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.”
Yet the confiscation act was important as a symbol of what the war was becoming—a war to overturn the southern social order as a means of reconstructing the Union.
Therefore “the blow must fall first and foremost on [the rebels]. . . . Decisive and extensive measures must be adopted. . . . We wanted the army to strike more vigorous blows. The Administration must set an example, and strike at the heart of the rebellion.”
Secretary of State Seward approved the proclamation but counseled its postponement “until you can give it to the country supported by military success.” Otherwise the world might view it “as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help . . . our last shriek, on the retreat.” The wisdom of this suggestion “struck me with very great force,” said the president later. He put his proclamation in a drawer to wait for a victory.
The Democrats had received 44 percent of the popular votes in the free states in 1860. If the votes of the border states are added, Lincoln was a minority president of the Union states.
Important note
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.
“We are attacked nightly at bridges and outposts,” reported one division commander. Buell’s belief in a “soft” war precluded a ruthless treatment of the civilian population that sheltered guerrillas or a levy upon this population for supplies. Buell therefore could move only as fast as repair crews could rebuild bridges and re-lay rails.
Sherman's march may have been ugly but also necessary
To defend all the bridges, tunnels, and depots along hundreds of miles of railroad was virtually impossible, for guerrillas and cavalry could carry out hit-and-run raids against isolated garrisons or undefended stretches almost with impunity.
Within four days Haupt had trains running over the line Jackson had cut.
Night fell on a scene of horror beyond imagining. Nearly 6,000 men lay dead or dying, and another 17,000 wounded groaned in agony or endured in silence. 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.
But such remarks missed the point and misunderstood the president’s prerogatives under the Constitution. Lincoln acted under his war powers to seize enemy resources; he had no constitutional power to act against slavery in areas loyal to the United States.
But a closer look at the results challenges this conclusion. Republicans retained control of seventeen of the nineteen free-state governorships and sixteen of the legislatures. They elected several congressmen in Missouri for the first time, made a net gain of five seats in the Senate, and retained a twenty-five-vote majority in the House after experiencing the smallest net loss of congressional seats in an off-year election in twenty years. It is true that the congressional delegations of the six lower-North states from New York to Illinois would have a Democratic majority for the next two
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see more of barbarism and sin, a thousand times, in the continuance of this war . . . and the enslavement of the white race by debt and taxes and arbitrary power” than in Negro slavery. “In considering terms of settlement we [should] look only to the welfare, peace, and safety of the white race, without reference to the effect that settlement may have on the African.”3 This became the platform of Peace Democrats for the next two years.
They made good their threat, setting off four days of escalating mob violence that terrorized the city and left at least 105 people dead. It was the worst riot in American history.
“If God Almighty,” wrote an angry Governor Vance to the War Department in 1863, “had yet in store another plague worse than all others which he intended to have let loose on the Egyptians in case Pharoah still hardened his heart, I am sure it must have been a regiment or so of half-armed, half-disciplined Confederate cavalry.” Despite the notorious reputation of northern invaders in this regard, many southerners believed that “the Yankees cannot do us any more harm than our own soldiers have done.”
Southern soldiers also seized scores of black people in Pennsylvania and sent them south into slavery.
Lincoln’s temper soon recovered. In early August his secretary John Hay wrote that “the Tycoon is in fine whack. I have seldom seen him more serene.”
Union soldiers could hardly believe their stunning success. When a student of the battle later commented to Grant that southern generals had considered their position impregnable, Grant replied with a wry smile: “Well, it was impregnable.”
The areas of the South still under Confederate control, by contrast, sent an anti-administration majority to Congress. From the two largest such constituencies, North Carolina and Georgia, sixteen of the nineteen new congressmen opposed the government.
A Georgia crisis erupted in February 1864 when the lame-duck session of the old Confederate Congress authorized the president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to suppress disloyalty and enforce the draft.
Davis took his own advice. In a message to Congress on February 3, 1864, urging passage of the law to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, he said that such legislation was needed to deal with “citizens of well-known disloyalty” who were seeking to “accomplish treason under the form of the law.”
“Chase is a good man, but his theology is unsound. He thinks there is a fourth person in the Trinity.”45
“I am heartily tired of hearing what Lee is going to do,” Grant told the brigadier. “Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land on our rear and on both our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.”14
By this stage of the war the spade had become almost as important for defense as the rifle. Wherever they stopped, soldiers quickly constructed elaborate networks of trenches, breastworks, artillery emplacements, traverses, a second line in the rear, and a cleared field of fire in front with the branches of felled trees (abatis) placed at point-blank range to entangle attackers.
From May 5 through May 12 the Army of the Potomac lost some 32,000 men killed, wounded, and missing—a total greater than for all Union armies combined in any previous week of the war. As anxious relatives scanned the casualty lists, a pall of gloom settled over hundreds of northern communities. Lee’s casualties had been proportionately as great—about 18,000—and his loss of twenty of fifty-seven commanders of infantry corps, divisions, and brigades was devastating.
These four weeks had been exhausting as well as bloody beyond all precedent. The Federals had suffered some 44,000 casualties, the Confederates about 25,000.25 This was a new kind of relentless, ceaseless warfare.
At one point Yankee troopers swam the river naked except for their cartridge belts and captured the bemused pickets. At another ford, blue horsemen waded dismounted through neck-deep water with their Spencer carbines. “As the rebel bullets began to splash around pretty thick,” recalled a Union officer, northern soldiers discovered that they could pump the waterproof metal cartridges into the Spencer’s chamber underwater; “hence, all along the line you could see the men bring their guns up, let the water run from the muzzle a moment, then take quick aim, fire his piece and pop down again.” The
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All the negroes found in blue uniform or with any outward marks of a Union soldier upon him was killed—I saw some taken into the woods and hung—Others I saw stripped of all their clothing, and they stood upon the bank of the river with their faces riverwards and then they were shot—Still others were killed by having their brains beaten out by the butt end of the muskets in the hands of the Rebels— All were not killed the day of the capture—Those that were not, were placed in a room with their officers, they (the Officers) having previously been dragged through the town with ropes around their
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“That means nigger citizenship,” snarled John Wilkes Booth to a companion. “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”
“The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one,” said Lincoln on that occasion. “We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name —liberty.” Lincoln went on to
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