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February 26 - April 23, 2020
Even so, the organization of black regiments marked the transformation of a war to preserve the Union into a revolution to overthrow the old order.
The southern response to emancipation and the enlistment of black troops was ferocious—at least on paper and, regrettably, sometimes in fact as well. Upon learning of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, General Beauregard called for “execution of abolition prisoners [i.e., captured Union soldiers] after 1st of January. . . . Let the execution be with the garrote.”
This was one reason for the hesitation to use black troops in combat, where they ran a heightened risk of capture. The Confederate refusal to treat captured black soldiers as legitimate prisoners of war contributed to the eventual breakdown in prisoner of war exchanges that had tragic consequences for both sides.
But as the real import of the edict sank in, and as Lincoln made clear on January 1 that he really meant it, British antislavery sentiment mobilized for the Union.
The battle of Fredericksburg on December 13 once again pitted great valor in the Union ranks and mismanagement by their commanders against stout fighting and effective generalship on the Confederate side.
Watching anxiously from his command post, Lee sighed with relief as his men repaired the breach, and said to Longstreet: “It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it!"
Fredericks-burg brought home the horrors of war to northerners more vividly, perhaps, than any previous battle. The carpet of bodies in front of the stone wall left an indelible mark in the memory of one soldier who helped bury the dead during a truce on December 15.
“If there is a worse place than Hell,” said the president upon learning of the disaster at Fredericksburg, “I am in it.”
Lincoln was “more distressed” by news of the senatorial caucus “than by any event of my life.” “What do these men want?” he asked a friend. “They wish to get rid of me, and sometimes I am more than half disposed to gratify them. . . . We are now on the brink of destruction. It appears to me that the Almighty is against us.”14 But the president pulled himself together and handled the affair in a manner that ultimately strengthened his leadership.
The senators could not get rid of Seward without losing Chase as well. The president refused both resignations. The stormy political atmosphere in Washington began to clear. Though military prospects remained bleak, Lincoln had warded off a threat to his political right flank—for the time being.
An officer who disliked Hooker admitted that “I have never known men to change from a condition of the lowest depression to that of a healthy fighting state in so short a time.”
The question, said Hooker, was not whether he would take Richmond, but when.” The hen is the wisest of all the animal creation,” Lincoln remarked pointedly, “because she never cackles until the egg is laid.”
Many wartime stories of Grant’s drunkenness are false; others are at best dubious. Grant’s meteoric rise to fame provoked jealousy in the hearts of men who indulged in gossip to denigrate him. Subject to sick headaches brought on by strain and loss of sleep, Grant sometimes acted unwell in a manner to give observers the impression that he had been drinking.
In the end, as a recent scholar has suggested, his predisposition to alcoholism may have made him a better general. His struggle for self-discipline enabled him to understand and discipline others; the humiliation of prewar failures gave him a quiet humility that was conspicuously absent from so many generals with a reputation to protect; because Grant had nowhere to go but up, he could act with more boldness and decision than commanders who dared not risk failure.
This sense of Butternut identity with the South and hostility to the Northeast gave rise to talk among western Democrats of a “Northwest Confederacy” that would reconstruct a Union with the South, leaving New England out in the cold until she confessed the error of her ways and humbly petitioned for readmission.
In 1863, hostility to emancipation was the principal fuel that fired antiwar Democrats. On this issue, also, New England was the main enemy.
The Vallandigham case did indeed raise troubling constitutional questions. Could a speech be treason? Could a military court try a civilian? Did a general, or for that matter a president, have the power to impose martial law or suspend habeas corpus in an area distant from military operations where the civil courts were functioning?
This “giant rebellion” reached into the North itself, Lincoln continued, where “under cover of ‘liberty of speech,’ ‘liberty of the press,’ and Habeas corpus,’ [the rebels] hoped to keep on foot amongst us a most efficient corps of spies, informers, suppliers, and aiders and abettors of their cause.” Thus the whole country was a war zone and military arrests in areas far from the fighting front were justified.
prime issue in both elections was the draft, enacted by Congress on March 3, 1863. Democrats added conscription to emancipation and military arrests in their catalogue of Republican sins.
In the South, the privilege of hiring a substitute had produced the bitter slogan of “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight.”
Of course a draft without either substitution or commutation would have been more equitable. But substitution was so deeply rooted in precedent as to be viewed as a right.
What kind of conscription was this, in which only 7 percent of the men whose names were drawn actually served? The answer: it was not conscription at all, but a clumsy carrot and stick device to stimulate volunteering.
The half-billion dollars paid in bounties by the North represented something of a transfer of wealth from rich to poor—an ironic counterpoint to the theme of rich man’s war/poor man’s fight.
Thus while the conscription-substitute-bounty system produced three-quarters of a million new men,28 they did little to help win the war.
While immigrants therefore constituted 25 percent of the servicemen, 30 percent of the males of military age in the Union states were foreign-born.
The under-representation of Catholic immigrants can be explained in part by the Democratic allegiance of these groups and their opposition to Republican war aims, especially emancipation.
Crowded into noisome tenements in a city with the worst disease mortality and highest crime rate in the Western world, working in low-skill jobs for marginal wages, fearful of competition from black workers, hostile toward the Protestant middle and upper classes who often disdained or exploited them, the Irish were ripe for revolt against this war waged by Yankee Protestants for black freedom.
Despite the conversion of much acreage from cotton to food crops in 1862, the drought and the breakdown of southern transportation—not to mention Union conquest of prime agricultural regions—led to severe food shortages the following winter.
the symbolic power of the twenty-Negro law and the actual suffering of poor families gave greater credence to the poor man’s fight theme in the South than in the North.
The common people tended to applaud Brown or Vance and to criticize Davis, not necessarily because they favored state’s rights at the expense of the Confederacy but because the state helped them while the Richmond government took away their husbands and sons and their livelihood.
The Confederate government’s taxes and impressments to sustain the army also caused it to appear as an oppressor.
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.”
All wars produce refugees; these homeless people generally suffer more than the rest of the civilian population; in the American Civil War this suffering was confined almost entirely to the South.
Military success was a strong antidote for hunger. Buoyed by past victories in Virginia and the apparent frustration of Grant’s designs against Vicksburg, the South faced the spring military campaigns with confidence. “If we can baffle them in their various designs this year,” wrote Robert E. Lee in April 1863, “next fall there will be a great change in public opinion at the North. The Republicans will be destroyed & I think the friends of peace will become so strong as that the next administration will go in on that basis. We have only therefore to resist manfully . . . [and] our success will
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And the strategic consequences of Grierson’s foray were greater, perhaps, than those of any other cavalry raid of the war, for it played a vital role in Grant’s capture of Vicksburg.
The capture of Vicksburg was the most important northern strategic victory of the war, perhaps meriting Grant’s later assertion that “the fate of the Confederacy was sealed when Vicksburg fell.”
Johnston’s retreat came as icing on the cake of Grant’s Vicksburg campaign, which Lincoln described as “one of the most brilliant in the world"—a judgment echoed by a good many subsequent military analysts. “Grant is my man,” the president declared on July 5, “and I am his the rest of the war.”
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.
Northern morale descended into the slough of despond in the spring of 1863.
The only member of the cabinet from west of the Mississippi (Texas), Reagan still thought that preservation of Vicksburg as a link between the Confederacy’s two halves should have top priority.30 But Lee convinced the others that even if the climate failed to drive the Yankees out of Mississippi, a successful invasion of Pennsylvania would draw them out. In the post-Chancellorsville aura of invincibility, anything seemed possible.
Alarmed by the proximity of a concentrated enemy while his own forces remained scattered, Lee sent couriers to recall Ewell’s divisions from York and Carlisle. Meanwhile one of A. P. Hill’s divisions learned of a reported supply of shoes at Gettysburg, a prosperous town served by a dozen roads that converged from every point on the compass. Since Lee intended to reunite his army near Gettysburg, Hill authorized this division to go there on July 1 to “get those shoes.”
By early afternoon some 24,000 Confederates confronted 19,000 bluecoats along a three-mile semicircle west and north of Gettysburg. Neither commanding general had yet reached the field; neither had intended to fight there; but independently of their intentions a battle destined to become the largest and most important of the war had already started.
Pickett’s charge represented the Confederate war effort in microcosm: matchless valor, apparent initial success, and ultimate disaster.
“It’s all my fault,” said Lee as he rode among his men. “It is I who have lost this fight, and you must help me out of it the best way you can. All good men must rally.”
Lee and his men would go on to earn further laurels. But they never again possessed the power and reputation they carried into Pennsylvania those palmy midsummer days of 1863. Though the war was destined to continue for almost two more bloody years, Gettysburg and Vicksburg proved to have been its crucial turning point.
And the usually indefatigable Josiah Gorgas, chief of Confederate ordnance, sat down on July 28 and wrote a diary entry whose anguish echoes across the years: 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
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The issues in 1863 remained the same: the conduct of the war; emancipation; civil liberties; and conscription.
The last state to secede, North Carolina’s commitment to the Confederacy had remained shaky despite her contribution of more soldiers than any other state save Virginia. North Carolina also contributed more deserters than any other state.11 The western part of the state resembled east Tennessee and West Virginia in socio-economic structure and unionist leanings.
Four related issues emerged in this conflict: the fate of slavery; the political role of blacks in reconstruction; the definition of loyalty; and the status of free black labor in the new order. As each issue generated heat in Louisiana, the temperature also rose in Congress where Republican lawmakers sought to frame their own approach to reconstruction.
As military measures, both Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Banks’s edict declaring slavery “void” in Louisiana would have precarious legal force when the war was over.
