FEBRUARY 4, 1861: Representatives of six of the seven states that have seceded to date (delegates from recently seceded Texas are not yet present) meet in Montgomery, Alabama, and begin deliberations that will shortly culminate in the creation of the Confederate States of America. At the same time, the Peace Convention, suggested in January by Governor John Letcher of Virginia, begins at the Willard Hotel in Washington. Although delegates from twenty-one states take part in the conference, its outcome is doomed from the start. None of the seceded states are represented; several Northern states elect not to participate; and the overall purpose of the conference soon gets lost amid the machinations of radicals and endless waves of empty rhetoric.9 In the Arizona Territory, inexperienced U.S. Army second lieutenant George N. Bascom lures Chiricahua Apache chief Cochise and several members of his family to his camp, then attempts to hold them all hostage. Cochise, falsely accused of raiding a ranch and kidnapping the rancher’s stepson, manages to escape; others in his party are not as fortunate. Over the next several days, ignorance, mistrust, and miscalculations escalate into the bloody opening chapter of a brutal years-long conflict.10
FEBRUARY 8, 1861: In Montgomery, the convention of seceding states unanimously adopts the Provisional Constitution of the Confederate States, which is largely based on the U.S. Constitution—with several significant differences.11
FEBRUARY 18, 1861: “Dixie” becomes the unofficial Confederate States anthem when it is played at a ceremony marking Jefferson Davis’s inauguration as provisional president of the Confederate States of America. Davis does not include any mention of slavery in his inaugural address. Instead he emphasizes the right of each sovereign state to determine its own course: “Through many years of controversy with our late associates, the Northern States, we have vainly endeavored to secure tranquillity, and to obtain respect for the rights to which we were entitled. As a necessity, not a choice, we have resorted to the remedy of separation; and henceforth our energies must be directed to the conduct of our own affairs.” Georgian Alexander H. Stephens, who had initially opposed disunion, is chosen provisional vice president this same day.12
FEBRUARY 21, 1861: The Provisional Confederate Congress (the delegates to the Montgomery convention) passes legislation creating the Navy Department, to be headed by Stephen R. Mallory, former U.S. senator from Florida and onetime chairman of the Senate Naval Committee.13 However, the legislature resists Georgian Thomas R. R. Cobb’s suggestion that it pass an export tax on cotton, creating an artificial shortage that would pressure the European Powers—particularly Britain, whose textile mills heavily depend on Southern cotton—to recognize the Confederate States as an independent nation. Most of Cobb’s colleagues believe there is no need for such pressure. “The firm and universal conviction here,” Cobb writes his wife, “is, that Great Britain, France, and Russia will acknowledge us at once in the family of nations.”14 In Washington, DC, the Senate rejects President Buchanan’s nomination of Jeremiah Sullivan Black of Pennsylvania to become an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. It will fall to Lincoln to make a new nomination—the first of five appointments he will make to the Supreme Court.15
Passage Through Baltimore. Reproduction of a drawing by Adalbert John Volck, published in V. Blada’s War Sketches, Baltimore, 1864. Using his nom de plume, V. Blada, Maryland resident, dentist, and Southern sympathizer Adalbert Volck employed his artistic talents to celebrate the Confederacy—and to skewer the Union and its leaders. In this less than flattering and wildly inaccurate picture of Lincoln, Volck lampoons the president-elect’s enforced caution passing through Baltimore on his way to Washington and his inauguration.
FEBRUARY 22, 1861: One day after Lincoln is advised by private detective Allan Pinkerton that a plot exists to kidnap or assassinate him as he travels through Baltimore, Maryland (a slaveholding state with deep sympathies for the South), Fred Seward, son of the incoming secretary of state, brings the president-elect a similar warning from U.S. Army General in Chief Winfield Scott. Though he was unwilling, based solely on Pinkerton’s report, to take special precautions traveling through Baltimore, this second warning from a respected and unrelated source leads Lincoln to agree, reluctantly, to change his travel arrangements. He leaves for Washington tonight, rather than the following afternoon as originally scheduled, and he agrees to wear a less conspicuous felt hat instead of his usual tall stovepipe. Passing through Baltimore without incident, he will arrive in Washington early on the morning of February 23—and begin immediately to rue the cautious last portion of his journey, which quickly becomes grist for unfriendly political cartoonists.16
FEBRUARY 27, 1861: South Carolina governor Francis W. Pickens writes President Davis: “We feel that our honor and safety require that Fort Sumter should be in our possession at the very earliest moment.” The seceded states have been taking over Federal facilities, including arsenals and forts, within their borders; but two forts that remain in Federal hands are emerging as particular bones of contention: Fort Pickens, at Pensacola, Florida; and Fort Sumter, in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor. Tensions are particularly high in Charleston, where the secession movement started. On January 9, cannon fire from Charleston batteries forced the steamship Star of the West to turn back without delivering the reinforcements and supplies it was attempting to bring to the fort’s Union garrison. At that time, the garrison commander, Major Robert Anderson, did not allow his men to open fire on the batteries that drove the vessel away, thus preserving a tenuous peace. But the fort now has Confederate guns trained on it from three directions, and its garrison cannot endure this state of siege too long without some assistance.17
FEBRUARY 28, 1861: As each of the seceded states begins forming military regiments, the Confederate Congress passes legislation creating the Provisional Army of the Confederate States (PACS), a force equivalent to the Volunteer Army that will be organized in the North. One week later, on March 6, Congress will pass legislation creating the seceded states’ “regular” army, the Army of the Confederate States of America (ACSA), which President Jefferson Davis—a former U.S. secretary of war—envisions as an echo of the small standing army maintained by the United States. Because the Confederacy will be at war almost from the start and many troops will have to be raised quickly, virtually all new Confederate soldiers will be mustered into the Provisional Army.18
Firing on “Star of the West” from the South Carolina Battery on Morris Island, January 10 [sic], 1861. Wood engraving published in Harper’s Weekly, January 26, 1861. Dispatched by the Buchanan administration to resupply Fort Sumter, the unarmed merchant vessel Star of the West was forced to turn back by Southern cannon fire without leaving its cargo—a violent episode that presaged the outbreak of war.
MARCH
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Fort Pickens, Pensacola Harbor, Florida. Hand-colored lithograph by Currier & Ives, between 1860 and 1870. One of the two most significant bones of contention as the seceded states took over Federal facilities early in 1861, Fort Pickens fell under Confederate siege after Florida’s secession on January 10. Reinforced after Fort Sumter fell, Pickens remained in Union hands throughout the war.
MARCH 1, 1861: President Jefferson Davis appoints Brigadier General P. G. T. (Pierre Gustave Toutant) Beauregard to the command of Confederate forces in Charleston, South Carolina, and informs Governor Francis W. Pickens that he and Beauregard have discussed the measures that would be necessary to expel the Federal garrison from Fort Sumter. Beauregard will find the city already preparing for conflict, and he will set to work immediately improving upon the measures already taken. On March 22, he will report that his preparations are almost complete—and that the troops in Fort Sumter are nearly out of fuel and provisions.19
MARCH 4, 1861: As Jefferson Davis holds his first cabinet meeting in Montgomery, Abraham Lincoln is inaugurated in Washington; in the crowded capital city, extraordinary security precautions are taken to guarantee his safety. Though Davis, his cabinet, and the Provisional Confederate Congress now claim the loyalty of the seven seceded states, in his inaugural address, Lincoln seeks to keep avenues open to reconstruct the divided nation. He reminds the assembled audience, including reporters who will transmit his words to the South, that he was elected on a platform that included a pledge to maintain inviolate the rights of the states, “especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions.” Yet the Federal government must enforce its own authority and laws. “All the power at my disposal will be used to reclaim the public property and places which have fallen; to hold, occupy, and possess these, and all other property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties on imports; but beyond what may be necessary for these, there will be no invasion of any State…. In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you, unless you first assail it.” He concludes the address with an eloquent appeal: “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.”20
Final page of Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, with handwritten emendations, 1861. Lincoln began work on the address in Illinois and continued to hone it, accepting suggestions from a few confidants, including his Illinois friend Orville H. Browning and the venerable politician Francis Preston Blair. William H. Seward’s suggestions were, perhaps, the most influential. Lincoln transformed Seward’s draft of a final conciliatory paragraph from his secretary of state’s pedestrian prose into the speech’s final, poetic, and powerful conclusion, shown, in Lincoln’s hand, on this page.
The Cabinet at Washington. Wood engraving published in Harper’s Weekly, July 1861, showing, left to right: Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, Secretary of the Interior Caleb B. Smith, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, President Lincoln, Secretary of State William H. Seward, Secretary of War Simon Cameron, Attorney General Edward Bates, and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles.
MARCH 6, 1861: As the Provisional Confederate Congress authorizes an army of one hundred thousand volunteers for twelve months, the people of New Orleans turn out to salute former U.S. general David E. Twiggs, who has surrendered nineteen Texas army posts to Confederate authorities.21 From Maryland, Henry Winter Davis writes President Lincoln, urging him to nominate his cousin, Judge David Davis of Illinois—a longtime colleague of Lincoln’s who had been his campaign manager at the 1860 Republican Convention—to fill the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. This is one of many names put forward, for the Supreme Court and for myriad other positions that the new Republican administration has to fill. In this era of political patronage, Lincoln must spend much of his time considering pleas from would-be officeholders, even as the rift between North and South is widening.
MARCH 7, 1861: Gideon Welles joins the Lincoln cabinet as secretary of the navy. A former Connecticut state legislator and newspaper publisher and editor, Welles served President Polk as chief of the naval Bureau of Provisions and Clothing. He will immediately embark on vastly expanding the navy, including the construction of ironclad ships.22
MARCH 9, 1861: Lincoln holds his first formal cabinet meeting. Three of the men in the room, Secretary of State William H. Seward, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, and Attorney General Edward Bates, were top contenders for the presidential nomination at the 1860 Republican convention. As a whole, the cabinet—which also includes Secretary of War Simon Cameron, Gideon Welles (see March 7, 1861), Secretary of the Interior Caleb B. Smith, and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair—reflects Lincoln’s attempt to fill each post with well-suited people, include men of various views, and, especially in Cameron’s case, pay political debts he acquired during the presidential campaign.23
MARCH 12, 1861: The New York Times reports the comments of T. S. Gourdin of Florida, editor of the Southern Confederacy: “We must abandon the old idea of our forefathers that ‘all men were born free and equal’ and teach the doctrine of the diversity of the races, and of the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race over all others. We must take the ground never dreamed of by the men of ’76, that African Slavery is right in itself, and therefore should be preserved.”24
MARCH 14, 1861: The Washington Evening Star prints a roster of Jefferson Davis’s initial cabinet choices that, though tongue-in-cheek, nevertheless reflects one aspect of what will emerge as the new Confederate president’s governing style—a reluctance to delegate: “For Secretary of State, Hon. Jeff. Davis of Miss.; War and Navy, Jeff. Davis of Miss.; Interior, ex-Senator Davis, of Miss.; Treasury, Col. Davis of Miss., Attorney General, Mr. Davis of Miss.” In fact, the cabinet now comprises Robert A. Toombs of Georgia, secretary of state; Christopher G. Memminger of South Carolina, secretary of the treasury; Leroy P. Walker of Alabama, secretary of war; Stephen R. Mallory of Florida, secretary of the navy; John H. Reagan of Texas, postmaster general; and Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana, attorney general.25
The Cabinet of the Confederate States at Montgomery, from photographs by Whitehurst, of Washington, and Hinton, of Montgomery, Alabama. Wood engraving published in Harper’s Weekly, June 1, 1861. The Davis cabinet, which was to undergo more changes than Lincoln’s, initially included (seated, left to right) Attorney General Judah P. Benjamin, Secretary of the Navy Stephen R. Mallory, Secretary of the Treasury Christopher G. Memminger (standing), Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, Secretary of War Leroy P. Walker (standing), President Davis, Postmaster General John H. Reagan, and Secretary of State Robert A. Toombs.
William Howard Russell (1820–1907). Roger Fenton (1819–1869) took this photograph of Russell in 1855, during the Crimean War, when Russell emerged as one of the first modern war correspondents (his reports inspired celebrated nurse Florence Nightingale’s groundbreaking hospital work at the front). His dispatches from the United States in 1861–62 gave Britons telling glimpses of events and people on both sides of the Civil War.
MARCH 28, 1861: Famed British newspaper correspondent William H. Russell, currently in Washington, notes in his journal that the city is giving a “cold shoulder… to Mr. Lincoln, and all kinds of stories and jokes are circulated at his expense.” In the evening Russell attends a White House dinner, where he meets politicians and cabinet members, is more favorably impressed by Mary Todd Lincoln than “the Secessionist ladies at Washington” have led him to expect—and discovers that the president himself is adept at the art of good-humored storytelling. He also discovers that members of Lincoln’s cabinet “seemed to think that England is bound by her anti-slavery antecedents to discourage to the utmost any attempts of the South to establish its independence on a basis of slavery”—an assumption they’ll have reason to doubt in the stormy months ahead, and one directly counter to expectations of foreign recognition that prevail in the Confederate capital.26
MARCH 29, 1861: After much consultation with advisers, whose opinions are divided, President Lincoln determines that the United States shall not abandon Forts Sumter and Pickens. He orders preparations made for a relief expedition to Sumter. Yet Martin J. Crawford, John Forsyth, and A. B. Roman, three Confederate commissioners Davis has sent to Washington to attempt negotiations, have, without Lincoln’s knowledge, been given the impression, via an intermediary’s discussions with Secretary of State Seward, that Sumter’s garrison will be withdrawn. This same day, Seward presents Lincoln with a plan to reinforce Fort Pickens. Lincoln directs that the plan be carried out, and Seward complies—with such secrecy that Secretary of the Navy Welles is not even made aware of it. Preparations for the Seward-backed Pickens expedition will ultimately conflict with those for the relief of Fort Sumter.27
APRIL
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The Lexington of 1861. Hand-colored lithograph by Currier & Ives, ca. 1861. The deadly melee between Union troops and Confederate sympathizers on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, took place on the anniversary of the first engagements of the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, April 19, 1775.
APRIL 1, 1861: Secretary of State Seward sends Lincoln a paper titled “Some Thoughts for the President’s Consideration.” It is a document that reflects Seward’s initially low estimation of Lincoln’s abilities and his belief that, as a more experienced politician, he, rather than Lincoln, is the most appropriate person to steer the country’s course—and that Lincoln will allow him to do so. “We are at the end of a month’s Administration, and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign,” Seward begins, ignoring the policies that Lincoln stated in his inaugural address. The secretary then advocates abandoning Fort Sumter (as he has led the Confederate commissioners to believe will happen) and concentrating on the relief of Fort Pickens. Other recommendations include deflecting attention from domestic problems by provoking a crisis, or even a war, with the European Powers and designating Seward as the chief designer and prosecutor of administration policy. Lincoln will answer Seward in person, refuting each point and making it clear that, in the case of designing and pursuing a vigorous administration policy, “I must do it.” This marks a turning point in Seward’s relationship with Lincoln. The secretary of state will soon grow to respect the president’s abilities and become one of Lincoln’s closest and most trusted advisers.28
APRIL 8, 1861: A U.S. State Department clerk, Robert S. Chew, delivers a message from President Lincoln to South Carolina governor Francis W. Pickens and Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard: “An attempt will be made to supply Fort-Sumpter [sic] with provisions only; and that, if such attempt be not resisted no effort to throw in men, arms, or amunition [sic], will be made, without further notice, or in case of an attack upon the Fort.” This notice does nothing to quell the secessionists’ growing impatience at having a Federal garrison in Charleston Harbor.29 Outside Cincinnati, Associate Justice John McClean dies of pneumonia. There are now two vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court.30
APRIL 11, 1861: “The North is swollen with pride and drunk with insolence,” the “fire-eating” Charleston Mercury editorializes today. “The North needs proof of the earnestness of our intentions and our manhood. Experience shall be their teacher. Let them learn.”31
APRIL 12–13, 1861: “If Anderson does not accept terms—at four—the orders are—he shall be fired upon,” Charlestonian Mary Boykin Chesnut writes in her diary on April 12. “I count four—St. Michael chimes. I begin to hope. At half-past four, the heavy booming of a cannon.” Guns from the fort answer the volleys from Charleston, and the Civil War begins. As will often be the case in this fratricidal war, the two men commanding the opposing Union and Confederate forces are not strangers to each other. Both Major Robert Anderson, commander of the garrison in Fort Sumter, and Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard, commander of Confederate forces in Charleston, had served on General Winfield Scott’s staff during the Mexican War (1846–48); both are West Point graduates (Anderson, class of 1825; Beauregard, class of 1838), and at one time Anderson was Beauregard’s much-respected artillery instructor. After months of siege and many hours of bombardment, Anderson, whose ties to the South run deep, surrenders the fort with more sorrow than anger. “Our Southern brethren… have attacked their father’s house and their loyal brothers,” he will later write. “They must be punished and brought back, but this necessity breaks my heart.”32
Major Robert Anderson (left, 1805–1871), USA. Engraving published in the Illustrated London News, May 1, 1861. Brigadier General Pierre Gustave Toutant (P. G. T.) Beauregard (1818–1893), CSA. Wood engraving published in Harper’s Weekly, April 27, 1861.
The Housetops in Charleston during the Bombardment of Sumter. Wood engraving published in Harper’s Weekly, May 4, 1861.
APRIL 15, 1861: President Lincoln issues a proclamation calling for a special session of Congress to convene on July 4 (giving congressmen ample time to travel from all parts of the nation). The document also calls “forth, the militia of the several States of the Union, to the aggregate number of seventy-five thousand… to cause the laws to be duly executed.” These volunteers are to serve for ninety days—not enough time to provide the men more than the most basic training. By this time, the Confederacy has already enrolled sixty thousand men in its armed forces, while the Regular (professional) U.S. Army comprises only some sixteen thousand men. Slightly increased in strength, the U.S. Regular Army will remain a separate service throughout the war. The overwhelming majority of Union soldiers will serve in the Volunteer Army (raised for this emergency), to which Regular Army units will be assigned as needed.33
APRIL 17, 1861: While Missouri and Tennessee refuse to fill their quotas of Union militia, and Maryland secessionists hold a meeting in Baltimore, the Virginia State Convention votes 88–55 in favor of secession, a decision that will be confirmed by popular referendum on May 23. Among the facilities that will be taken over by the government of this crucial upper-South state are the U.S. armory at Harpers Ferry and Gosport Navy Yard, near Norfolk, Virginia, the largest shipbuilding and repair facility in the South (see April 20, 1861).34 In the Confederate Capital at Montgomery, Jefferson Davis, whose armed forces include only the barest rudiments of a navy, invites applications for letters of marque, which permit privately owned armed vessels to act “in the service of the Confederate States on the high seas, against the United States of America, its ships and vessels, and those of its citizens…” The Lincoln administration, which does not regard the Confederate States as a separate political entity, will see this as an instigation of the criminal act of piracy, which, under United States law, is a capital offense.35
APRIL 18, 1861: Five companies of Pennsylvanians become the first forces to reach Washington, DC, to assist in the capital’s defense. Within their ranks is sixty-five-year-old Nicholas Biddle, one of the few African American men who have been allowed to join all-white units, in Biddle’s case as the orderly to Captain James Wren. The previous day, as Biddle marched through Baltimore, Maryland, his presence in the ranks had particularly incensed a crowd of whites who were sympathetic to the Confederacy and already angry at having Union soldiers in their streets. Shouting insults at Biddle, some also threw stones and other missiles, wounding Biddle and several of his comrades. Thus one of the first people to shed blood for the Union is a black man.36 As the Pennsylvanians arrive in the capital city, the U.S. Army’s legendary general in chief, Winfield Scott, meets with Colonel Robert E. Lee (whom Scott had once called “the very best soldier that I ever saw in the field”). He offers Lee command of the main Union army; Lee declines. Two days later, he will write to Scott, tendering his resignation:
It would have been presented at once, but for the struggle it has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted all the best years of my life & all the ability I possessed…. I shall carry with me to the grave the most grateful recollections of your kind consideration…. Save in the defense of my native State, I never desire again to draw my sword.37
This same day, civilian railroad executive George Brinton McClellan, a West Point graduate who had served as a junior officer under Winfield Scott and Robert E. Lee during the Mexican War of 1846–48—and who was considered an intellectual light of the prewar U.S. Army—writes to his friend Fitz John Porter. Though McClellan is a conservative Democrat with no love for abolitionists, he proclaims himself foursquare for the Union: “I throw to one side now all questions as to… political parties etc—the Govt is in danger, our flag insulted & we must stand by it.”38 At Sewell’s Point, near Norfolk, Virginia, Union gunboats clash with Confederate batteries as Union forces attempt to seize control of the vital waterways leading to the interior of Virginia. At the same time, the Confederacy is seeking to block access to Washington, DC, via Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River.39
Nicholas Biddle (ca. 1796–1876). Photograph by W. R. Mortimer, between 1861 and 1865. Born a slave, Biddle escaped to freedom via the Underground Railroad, eventually settling in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. He was among the first men wounded in the Union cause.
“Everything is in an uproar here and the war feeling is on the increase.”
—WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, APRIL 21, 1861
APRIL 19, 1861: In Baltimore, rioters attack the Sixth Massachusetts as the regiment makes its way through the streets of this crucial railroad hub. Some soldiers open fire; four soldiers and twelve civilians are killed, and many people are wounded. Tension increases as other Marylanders tear down railroad bridges and telegraph lines leading to Washington. With Virginia poised to join the Confederacy, these pro-secessionist rumblings in Maryland make many Northerners fearful that Washington might soon be surrounded and cut off from the rest of the Union. Many remember the Richmond (VA) Examiner’s editorial challenge, published in its December 25, 1860, edition: “Can there not be found men bold and brave enough in Maryland to unite with Virginians in seizing the Capital in Washington?”40 Also on this day, by proclamation, Lincoln initiates a Union naval blockade of Confederate ports in South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, made necessary by “an insurrection against the Government of the United States.” Among the actions that he cites as justification for the blockade is the Confederacy’s threat “to grant pretended letters of marque to authorize the bearers thereof to commit assaults on the lives, vessels, and property of good citizens of the country lawfully engaged in [seagoing] commerce.”41 (See April 17, 1861.)
APRIL 20, 1861: In anticipation of Confederate attack, the Union prematurely abandons the Gosport Navy Yard in Virginia after destroying part of the facility and scuttling a number of vessels. Parts of four vessels will be salvaged by the Confederates, including the remnants of the steam frigate USS Merrimack, destined to be rebuilt as an ironclad and rechristened CSS Virginia. Farther to the north, at Annapolis, Maryland, home of the U.S. Naval Academy, the revered warship USS Constitution is moved away from shore as a precaution against Confederate capture. On April 24, Constitution, under tow and with midshipmen on board, will depart for Newport, Rhode Island, via New York. Given the secessionist sympathies of many in Maryland, Newport will remain the Naval Academy’s home until August 1865.42
APRIL 21, 1861: USS Saratoga captures a vessel with the romantic name Nightingale, which is carrying a cargo of 961 slaves. Though the domestic slave trade still thrives, international trade in slaves has been against U.S. law since 1808. But Africans have been brought into the Deep South illegally since well before the outbreak of the Civil War.43 In Maryland, state authorities sever the telegraph lines that carry messages north from Washington. For a full week, telegrams from the capital will reach only Baltimore.44 Also today, Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull, one of many Northern citizens whose apprehension over the vulnerability of Washington, DC, increased when a Baltimore mob attacked Union regiments (see April 18 and 19, 1861), writes President Lincoln, urging him to “take possession of Baltimore at once.” A few days later, Lincoln will receive a warning that the pending meeting of the Maryland legislature in Annapolis will probably result in a vote to “arm the people of that State against the United States.” Some advisers suggest that he direct the army to arrest the state’s legislators before that can occur—an action Lincoln deems improper, unless the Maryland lawmakers actually act against the Federal government.45 Meanwhile, patriotic fervor is spreading among the people of both regions. In the North, William Dean Howells, author of Lincoln’s presidential campaign biography, writes to his wife from Columbus, Ohio: “Everything is in an uproar here and the war feeling is on the increase, if possible. The volunteers [for military service] seemed to be in very good spirits and to look on campaigning as something of a frolic.”46
APRIL 23, 1861: Courted by the governors of Pennsylvania (where he was born), Ohio (where he now works), and New York (where he attended West Point), George B. McClellan today accepts Ohio governor William Dennison’s offer to place McClellan in charge of the forces Ohio is raising for the war effort, with the rank of major general of volunteers. As McClellan starts immediately to work, thousands more Ohio men are volunteering than are required under the state’s quota of thirteen regiments (about ten thousand men); all are eager to participate in what most believe will be the short-term dispatch of the rebellious Southerners.47
Stowage of the British Slave Ship “Brookes” Under the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788. Etching published as a broadside ca. 1788. Since 1808, participation in the international slave trade had been illegal in the United States. Yet smugglers continued to bring Africans into the South, each ship interdicted by U.S. authorities providing a bitter reminder of the inhumanity inherent in this brutal commerce in human lives.
APRIL 24, 1861: Lincoln replies to a letter from former Maryland senator Reverdy Johnson, who reported “excitement and alarm… of my own State and of Virginia” because it is feared “that it is your purpose to use the military force you are assembling in this District” to invade those two states. “I have no objection to declare a thousand times that I have no purpose to invade Virginia or any other State,” Lincoln writes, “but I do not mean to let them invade us without striking back.”48
APRIL 25, 1861: At the train station in Galena, Illinois, West Point graduate and Mexican War veteran Ulysses S. Grant, retired from the army for over six years and, until today, employed in his brother’s store in Galena, bids farewell to his wife, Julia. He departs for Camp Yates, near Springfield, with the Illinois militia company he has helped form.49
APRIL 27, 1861: President Lincoln extends the naval blockade to include the ports in Virginia and North Carolina, thus committing the navy to a blockade of more than 3,500 miles of Confederate coastline—though, at this time, the U.S. fleet includes only ninety ships. (Plans are in motion to augment this force.) At the urging of Secretary of State Seward, among others, Lincoln also sends the following written instruction to General in Chief Scott:
You are engaged in repressing an insurrection against the laws of the United States. If at any point on or in the vicinity of the military line, which is now used between the City of Philadelphia and the City of Washington… you find resistance which renders it necessary to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus for the public safety, you, personally or through the officer in command at the point where the resistance occurs, are authorized to suspend that writ.
Habeas corpus, the right to “have the body” of an arrested person brought before a court, which would determine the reasonableness of his arrest, is a fundamental tenet of English law and American democracy that the U.S. Constitution specifically states (Article 1, Section 9) “shall not be suspended unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” The writ has been suspended only twice before in U.S. history: by General Andrew Jackson in New Orleans during the War of 1812 and by the Rhode Island legislature in 1842 during what became known as Dorr’s Rebellion. Both Lincoln and Jefferson Davis will suspend, or seek to suspend, habeas corpus at times during the Civil War—and each instance will provoke storms of criticism and controversy.50
Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910). The first American woman to receive an MD (Geneva Medical College, New York, 1849), Blackwell helped select suitable candidates to be trained as nurses throughout the war, doing all she could to support the Union in what she deemed its struggle for “freedom and justice.”
Great Meeting of the Ladies of New York at the Cooper Institute, on Monday, April 29, 1861, to organize a society to be called “Women’s Central Association of Relief,” to make clothes and lint bandages, and to furnish nurses for the soldiers of the Northern Army. Reproduction of a wood engraving, 1861.
APRIL 29, 1861: Under the principal leadership of Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first female medical doctor, three thousand women and several prominent men meet at the Cooper Institute in New York City and form the Women’s Central Association of Relief to coordinate the efforts of many small Northern war-relief groups. Although this organization will suffer a rebuff when it attempts to establish a connection with the U.S. Army, it will be the nucleus of the United States Sanitary Commission, or USSC (see June 13, 1861).51 Also this day, free African American men organize their own drill company in Boston, since a Federal law prohibits black men from serving in state militias and there are no blacks in the U.S. Army. Other black drill companies will be organized in the North—but their efforts are unwelcome. “This is a white man’s war,” they will be told.52 In Montgomery, President Davis issues a message to the Provisional Confederate Congress, reiterating the South’s right to secede and declaring Lincoln’s April 15 proclamation (calling for seventy-five thousand volunteers) a declaration of war. When Davis asks for authority to prosecute the war, Congress responds by granting the president power to use all land and naval forces and to raise volunteers.53
MAY
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Sketch of the City of Richmond, Va. Drawing by R. K. Sneden, Topographical Headquarters, Third Corps, U.S. Army, December 1861. Located less than one hundred miles from Washington, DC, Richmond became the Confederate capital in May 1861. A few months after this drawing was made, the city became the target of the first major campaign by the Union Army of the Potomac.
MAY 1, 1861: Having tendered his resignation on April 26, John Archibald Campbell of Alabama (who had urged Secretary of State Seward to meet with the three Confederate peace commissioners; see March 29 and April 1, 1861) leaves the U.S. Supreme Court, which now has three vacancies.54 On duty overseas, U.S. Navy lieutenant George Hamilton Perkins writes home: “This news about our country is so absorbing we cannot think or talk of anything else…. No doubt many officers of our squadron will resign; but, as a Northern man, I, for one, hope that all the North will pull together and go in and win.”55
General Winfield Scott (1786–1866), USA. Engraving published in the Illustrated London News, March 16, 1861. Known as “Old Fuss and Feathers,” Scott had fought in every U.S. conflict since the War of 1812 and, by 1861, was a near legend to most Americans and many abroad.
MAY 3, 1861: President Lincoln issues a proclamation calling for 42,034 volunteers to serve in the infantry and cavalry “for the period of three years, unless sooner discharged” and 18,000 volunteers to serve in the navy for not less than one year or more than three. The proclamation also expands the Regular Army by 22,714 men—both measures reflecting the possibility that the war might not be as short as everyone hopes. The training of three-year volunteers in the same units as men who answered the initial call for three-month enlistments will present an administrative challenge to Volunteer Army organizers.56 On this same day, U.S. General in Chief Winfield Scott proposes an envelopment strategy for fighting the Confederacy that would include a powerful movement down the Mississippi River as well as the blockade of Southern seaports. Though immediately subject to ridicule by those confident of quick victory (see June 29, 1861), Scott’s plan will become an essential aspect of the overall strategy ultimately adopted by the Union. Scott has also spoken favorably to Lincoln of the qualities of George B. McClellan, and today McClellan is placed in command of the entire military Department of the Ohio (initially comprising the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; later expanded). McClellan is proving to be a tireless and adept organizer and trainer of military forces, and he is generally well regarded by his men. Yet he is also displaying flashes of a troublesome arrogance toward, and impatience with, both superiors and subordinates who criticize his plans or do not immediately acquiesce to his demands.57
The Eighth Massachusetts Regiment in the Rotunda of the Capitol, Washington. Wood engraving published in Harper’s Weekly, May 25, 1861. For a limited time, the Capitol served as an impromptu barracks, and the behavior of new and undisciplined soldiers did nothing to soothe the nerves of architect Thomas U. Walter.
Thomas Ustick Walter (1804–1887). Photograph between 1855 and 1865. Appointed architect of the Capitol extension by President Millard Fillmore in 1851, Walter added the north (Senate) and south (House) wings to the building and replaced the existing copper-covered wooden dome with one made of cast iron—continuing to work despite wartime distractions.
MAY 4, 1861: As news of the American conflict spreads through Europe, the London Morning Post joins critics of the American experiment in democracy, now so obviously on the verge of failure. “Equal citizenship, popular supremacy, vote by ballot and universal suffrage may do well for a while,” the paper sniffs editorially, “but they invariably fail in the day of trial.”58
MAY 6, 1861: Arkansas secedes from the Union by a 69–1 vote of the state legislature. The Tennessee legislature approves holding a public referendum on secession, an action that is tantamount to secession. (See June 8, 1861.)59
MAY 8, 1861: From Washington, architect Thomas U. Walter, in charge of an ongoing project to replace the dome on the U.S. Capitol, writes to his wife of the distractions he faces now that Washington is filling with troops, some of whom are billeted in the Capitol: “The smell is awful. The building is like one grand water closet. Every hole and corner is defiled.” There is also the somewhat happier distraction of “about 100 drummers all the time drumming, having a head drummer to teach them; they have been going over the same toodle-de-toodle-de toodle-de too for the last 2 hours.” By the time Congress convenes in July, the troops will have moved out of the building, and the “water-closet” odors will have been replaced by the scent of bread for the troops that is baking in twenty ovens located in the Capitol’s basement. (This sweet-smelling enterprise will come to an end due to growing complaints about bread-delivery wagons cluttering Capitol driveways—and after smoke damage is detected in some books in the Library of Congress, located in rooms directly above the ovens.)60
MAY 9, 1861: In the troubled border state of Missouri, St. Louis civilians sympathetic to the Confederacy riot as U.S. brigadier general Nathaniel Lyon and his troops march captured pro-Southern militia through the city. Twenty-eight civilians and two soldiers are killed. Many Missourians who had not as yet taken sides tumble into the secessionist camp.61 Also this day, Jefferson Davis signs a bill authorizing the enlistment of up to four hundred thousand additional volunteers for three years, or the duration of the war. The response will be overwhelming. The next day, Davis will sign legislation allowing the Confederacy to procure six warships, weapons, and stores from sellers overseas.62
England and America. The December 16th, 1856 visit to the Arctic ship Resolute of her majesty Queen Victoria, to whom this engraving is by special permission respectfully dedicated by her obedient servants, P. & D. Colnaghi & Co [publishers]. Color lithograph by G. Zobel after a painting by W. Simpson, 1859. Britain, whose powerful naval and commercial interests were intertwined with those of the United States, was, throughout the war, a central focus of diplomatic efforts by both the Confederacy (which craved British recognition as a sovereign nation) and the Union (which sought to prevent such recognition and to keep Britain from intervening in the U.S. domestic conflict).
The Hon. Beriah Magoffin of Ky. (1815–1885). Photograph between 1865 and 1880. A Democrat, Magoffin alienated almost everyone with his losing battle to maintain Kentucky’s neutrality. Threatened with assassination, he resigned as governor in August 1862 and returned to the practice of law.
MAY 13, 1861: Criminal lawyer and Massachusetts politician Benjamin F. Butler, among the first major generals of volunteers appointed by President Lincoln, arrives in Baltimore with his regiment and institutes martial law. After establishing a bastion on Federal Hill, Butler’s troops begin arresting suspected Confederate supporters in the city. On the same day, Britain, via an official proclamation by Queen Victoria, declares its intention to remain neutral in the festering civil conflict between the United States and “the states styling themselves the Confederate States of America” and to accord to both sides the rights of belligerents. Although this is far short of recognition of the Confederate States as a sovereign nation, it is recognition of the South’s separate status, which the United States had wished to avoid. France will soon issue a similar declaration.63
MAY 14, 1861: Already a major general of volunteers, today George B. McClellan is appointed a major general in the Regular Army, currently the highest rank attainable. Though many Regular Army officers are senior to him in age and length of service, he now outranks all but General in Chief Winfield Scott.64
MAY 20, 1861: As Virginians prepare for the May 23 referendum on the question of whether or not to confirm their state convention’s vote for secession, the Provisional Congress of the Confederacy votes to move the capital of rebellious states from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia.65 In the western theater of operations, with Confederate forces positioned across his state’s southern border in Tennessee and Union troops under McClellan massing in Ohio to the north, Kentucky governor Beriah Magoffin issues a proclamation of neutrality for his deeply divided border state, forbidding “any movement upon Kentucky soil, or occupation of any port or place therein for any purpose whatever, until authorized by invitation or permission of the legislative and executive authorities.” Though understandable under the circumstances, the proclamation will inspire some harsh editorial comment. The New York Times will accuse Magoffin of acting “as if Kentucky were an independent kingdom, of which he is at the head,” condemn the governor’s refusal to “furnish his quota of regiments called for by the President,” and declare (inaccurately) that “it is only because loyalty in Kentucky is too strong for him, that he… is not now in the ranks of the enemy.”66 Also this day, North Carolina secedes from the Union.67
Death of Col. Ellsworth After Hauling down the Rebel Flag, at the Taking of Alexandria, Va., May 24, 1861. Hand-colored lithograph by Currier & Ives, 1861. Private Brownell, at left, is shown avenging Ellsworth’s death by killing James Jackson.
The [Fort] Monroe Doctrine. Lithograph, 1861. Almost as soon as General Benjamin Butler declared escaped slaves to be contraband of war, thus not to be returned to their Southern masters, an unknown cartoonist drew this crude caricature—part of a wave of publicity that made “contrabands” the popular designation for people who had successfully fled from Confederate slavery.
MAY 24, 1861: During an overnight movement of U.S. troops across the Potomac River to secure positions on the Virginia side, dashing young Union colonel Elmer Ellsworth, a friend and former law clerk of Abraham Lincoln, is shot dead by James Jackson while removing a secessionist flag from Marshall House, Jackson’s Alexandria, Virginia, hotel. (One of Ellsworth’s men, Private Francis E. Brownell, immediately kills Jackson.) A popular figure whose military-drill team, the U.S. Zouave Cadets, was renowned before the war, and whose newly raised regiment, the New York Fire Zouaves, is becoming equally celebrated, Ellsworth is the first well-known casualty of the Civil War, and his death spreads grief throughout the North.68 Farther south in Virginia, at Fort Monroe, Union general Benjamin Butler refuses to return three runaway slaves to their master, a Confederate colonel, calling the slaves “contraband of war.” The designation takes hold throughout the North; hundreds of thousands of “contrabands” will enter Union lines during the war—not without stirring controversy. “What shall we do with the slaves that may fall into our hands by the fortunes of the war, who to the South are chattels—to the North human beings?” the New York Times asks a week after Butler’s declaration. “We may have a hundred thousand slaves on our hands before the questions raised are solved.”69 In Illinois, Ulysses S. Grant, involved in organizing the Illinois state militia (see April 25, 1861), writes U.S. Army adjutant general Lorenzo Thomas: “I have the honor, very respectfully, to tender my services, until the close of the war…I would say, in view of my present age and length of service, I feel myself competent to command a regiment, if the President, in his judgment, should see fit to intrust [sic] one to me.” He will receive no reply—nor will his subsequent attempts to see Department of the Ohio commander George B. McClellan yield any better results.70
MAY 25, 1861: At 2:00 am, Union troops arrest John Merryman at his home outside Baltimore, Maryland. A farmer, Confederate sympathizer, and lieutenant in the Maryland State Militia, he is known to have obstructed passage of Union troops through Baltimore by burning bridges and sabotaging railroads. The troops confine him in Fort McHenry—without lodging any formal charges.71 A New Orleans paper, the Bee, reports that seven Union vessels have thus far been brought into port there as war “prizes.” Captured by the armed Confederate privateer steamships Calhoun, Music, and Ivy, the prizes are worth an estimated $170,000. “This great success will give vast encouragement to many capitalists who have not yet embarked in privateering [through buying stock in privateer vessels], to do so,” the paper confidently predicts. “As… the North has no war vessels to spare for the protection of its ships, every sea on the globe is a fruitful field for captures, and at the end of the war the South will have a splendid commercial marine of prizes within her own ports.”72
The Confederate States Privateer Savannah, Letter of Marque No. 1, Captured off Charleston by the U.S. Brig Perry, Lieut. Parrott. Engraving by E. K. Kimmel, 1861. Initial Confederate enthusiasm for privateering was matched by Union determination not to tolerate what it regarded as acts of piracy.
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (1777–1864). Etching by Max Rosenthal, 1899.
Major General George C. Cadwalader (1806–1879) USA. Photographic reproduction of a painting, n.d. A native of Pennsylvania, Cadwalader was U.S. military commander in Maryland when he was summoned to Judge Taney’s Baltimore courtroom regarding the case of John Merryman.
MAY 26, 1861: Spurred by reports that Confederate troops have been burning bridges used by the Union’s vital Baltimore & Ohio Railroad line as it slices through the area, Major General George B. McClellan orders troops into western Virginia, a region with few slaveholders and much greater Unionist sympathy than characterizes the rest of that Confederate state. In this early stage of the war, it is Union policy to safeguard Southern civilians and their property during military operations. But in his proclamation to the people of western Virginia, issued from his headquarters in Cincinnati, McClellan will include a pledge that will place him in a permanently unfavorable light with many Northern abolitionists: not only will Union troops not “interfere” with slaves held in the area, McClellan declares, “but we will on the contrary with an iron hand, crush any attempt at insurrection on their part.”73 During Sunday service at the Galesburg, Illinois, Brick Congregational Church, Dr. Edward Beecher (brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher) reads a letter from Dr. Benjamin Woodward, a young physician with Illinois volunteers stationed at Cairo, at the southern tip of the state. A rending description of the pitiful hospital conditions, lack of supplies and medical personnel, and many resulting deaths from disease in the Cairo camps, the letter turns Sunday service into a symposium on what might be done to help the men in uniform without offending military or political policies. The people decide to send medical supplies, along with a representative strong enough to demand remedial action. They choose Mary Ann Bickerdyke, a widow with two children, knowledge of herbal medicines—and powerful determination. “It was pretty well established in Galesburg,” a biographer will later write, “that when Mary Ann Bickerdyke took sides, her side won.”74
MAY 27, 1861: Having issued a writ of habeas corpus for John Merryman’s release (see May 25, 1861), Roger Taney, chief justice of the United States, acting as a Federal circuit court judge, convenes a hearing in Baltimore. He expects to see before him both Merryman and the Union’s military district commander, General George Cadwalader. He sees only an officer bearing Cadwalader’s respectful refusal to comply, the general’s request that he be given time to communicate with the president, and Cadwalader’s assertion that Merryman is guilty of “acts of treason.” In 1849, Justice Taney had sustained Rhode Island’s suspension of habeas corpus during Dorr’s Rebellion (see April 27, 1861), declaring that the state had the right to “use its military power to put down an armed insurrection, too strong to be controlled by the civil authority.” Yet, in a written opinion on the Merryman arrest, Taney (whose sympathies lie with the South and who is well acquainted with Merryman’s father) argues that the president’s suspension of the writ is unconstitutional and that such power belongs to Congress (which is not in session). Lincoln, who does not immediately respond to Taney’s opinion, claims that the president has the power to suspend habeas corpus in certain cases. Merryman will eventually be released and will never be tried for treason.75
Page from the manuscript diary of Washington Navy Yard worker Michael Shiner, showing the entry for June 1, 1861.
MAY 30, 1861: In Richmond, the Daily Enquirer publishes a lengthy report on President Davis’s trip from Montgomery to the new Confederate capital, where he arrived on May 29: “No matter where the [railroad] cars stopped, even though it was only for wood or for water, throngs of men, women and children would gather around the cars, asking in loud shouts, ‘Where is President Davis?’ ‘Jeff Davis!’ ‘the old hero!’… In Atlanta, Augusta, Wilmington and Goldsborough, the crowds assembled were very large, and the enthusiasm unbounded…. The whole soul of the South is in this war; and the confidence manifested in our President, in the many scenes which transpired on this trip, shows that the mantle of [George] Washington falls gracefully upon his shoulders.”76
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The Hercules of the Union, Slaying the Great Dragon of Secession. Lithograph by Currier & Ives, 1861. A tribute to the Union’s general in chief, and perhaps a play upon his much-maligned “Anaconda” strategy, this cartoon shows Winfield Scott wielding “Liberty and Union” as a weapon to slay a hydra with seven very prominent Confederate heads.
JUNE 1, 1861: People enjoying a concert on the White House grounds are alarmed by the sounds of cannon fire from across the Potomac. Assuming there is a battle in progress, they scatter into the high points of nearby buildings to see what they can of the encounter—only to discover that Union forces in and around recently occupied Alexandria, Virginia, are simply testing their guns. Across town, a laborer notes in his diary: “Justice Clark was sent Down to the Washington navy yard For to administer the oath of allegiance to the mechanics and the Labouring Class of working men With out DistincSion of Colour for them to Stand by the Stars and Stripes and defend for the union… and I believe at that time I Michael Shiner was the first Colered man that taken the oath in Washington DC and that oath Still Remains in my heart and when I taken that oath I Taken It in the presence of God without predudice [sic] or enmity to any man And I intend to Sustain That oath with The assistance of the Almighty God until I die.”77
JUNE 3, 1861: In mountainous western Virginia, Union forces surprise Confederates near the town of Philippi. This relatively minor clash, with its concluding Confederate retreat (“Out they swarmed,” one Ohio soldier will report, “like bees from a molested hive”), catches the fancy of Northern politicians and newspapers, which dub the victory the “Philippi races.”78 In St. Louis, U.S. Army veteran William Tecumseh Sherman, director of the city’s Fifth Street Railway, is summoned to Washington to reenter the military as colonel of a new U.S. Army regiment (he will shortly be reassigned to command a brigade of volunteers). A well-connected West Point graduate (his brother John is a U.S. senator from Ohio), Sherman is extremely familiar with the South: his previous army service included stints in Florida and Charleston, South Carolina; and he was the first superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy (which will become Louisiana State University). Though he has little quarrel with slavery, he is an adamant Unionist—and he is deeply concerned that Northern politicians, including President Lincoln, do not comprehend the magnitude of the challenge they are facing.79
One of a group of war maps published by the New-York Daily Tribune, July 30, 1861, The Position in Western Virginia delineates “The Route of Gen. McClellan’s Advance,” with the town of Phillippi [sic] just left of the center.
Mrs. Mary A. Bickerdyke (1817–1901). Engraving from Woman’s Work in the Civil War: A Record of Heroism, Patriotism and Patience by L. P. Brockett and Mary C. Vaughan, 1867. “There is but one ‘Mother’ Bickerdyke,” the authors write. “No woman connected with the philanthropic work of the army has encountered more obstacles in the accomplishment of her purposes, and none ever carried them through more triumphantly.”
JUNE 8, 1861: Tennessee voters approve secession, 104,913–47,238, ratifying legislative action taken in May. Yet this general count does not reflect sentiment in the eastern part of the state, where the vote is 2–1 against leaving the Union.80
JUNE 9, 1861: Dispatched by her church to assist Illinois volunteers in the Union army (see May 26, 1861), Mary Ann Bickerdyke arrives in Cairo, at the southern tip of the state, with $100 in relief supplies. She is met by the doctor who requested help and discovers that conditions in the army camp’s hospital tents are even worse than he had described. She sets quickly to work, organizing baths for the patients, sweeping and scouring filth from their tents, and providing clean bedding for as many men as she can. At the end of the day, she informs the doctor that she intends to stay and help out for a while.81
JUNE 10, 1861: Humanitarian and reformer Dorothea Lynde Dix is appointed superintendent of women nurses for the U.S. Army, her mandate “to select and assign women nurses to general or permanent military hospitals, they not to be employed in such hospitals without her sanction and approval, except in cases of urgent need.” She will, over the next four years, work to organize hospitals, care for the sick and wounded, and establish the army’s first professional nursing corps—though her personality and problematical administrative techniques will earn her the name “Dragon Dix.”82 Eight miles from the Union bastion of Fort Monroe, opposite Norfolk, Virginia, twelve hundred Confederates defeat some forty-four hundred Union soldiers dispatched by Major General Benjamin Butler to destroy an artillery emplacement the Rebels have placed near Bethel Church (Big Bethel). Confusion in the Union ranks, which causes two Federal units to open fire on each other, warns the Confederates and contributes to this small but stinging Northern defeat.83
JUNE 11, 1861: Delegates representing the pro-Union element in Virginia meet at Wheeling, in the western part of the state. They will organize a Unionist “Restored” state government, headquartered at Wheeling, under Governor Francis H. Peirpoint (later spelled Pierpont). In The Declaration of the People of Virginia, the delegates will condemn the state’s unlawful secession and traitorous activities and “imperatively demand the reorganization of the government of the Commonwealth.”84
Great Bethel and Its Batteries. Published by the New-York Daily Tribune, July 30, 1861, this map includes some eccentric personal notations by its unnamed creator.
Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802–1887). As superintendent of women nurses for the Union, Dix was dubbed a “Dragon,” as she enforced standards of dress, deportment, and training for her female volunteers.
JUNE 13, 1861: Somewhat reluctantly, President Lincoln signs an executive order creating the United States Sanitary Commission, a civilian organization established to assist the army in providing care for sick and wounded soldiers and to assist soldiers’ dependents. Although the president initially fears that the new organization, a novelty in the United States, might become “a fifth wheel to the [war effort] coach,” he will soon come to appreciate its value. USSC will grow to be the largest and most effective of many such organizations that operate during the war, and a power in national politics, with some seven thousand local aid societies and several regional branch offices by 1863, all coordinated through a central office in Washington, DC.85
JUNE 16, 1861: At the request of Illinois governor Richard Yates, who has become aware of a discipline problem and bizarrely incompetent leadership in one Illinois volunteer regiment, Ulysses S. Grant accepts command of the Twenty-first Illinois Volunteers, with the rank of colonel.86
JUNE 17, 1861: In Washington, Professor Thaddeus S. C. Lowe demonstrates the possible wartime use of aerial observation when he ascends in a balloon that is connected to the War Department by a telegraph wire, over which he communicates with President Lincoln.87 About fifteen miles away, near Vienna, Virginia, men of Confederate colonel Maxcy Gregg’s First South Carolina Volunteers send troops of the First Ohio Volunteer Infantry tumbling off a train by the simple expedient of firing on it with artillery—after which the Rebels happily abscond with the train. Though it will be, in retrospect, a minor embarrassment, Lincoln will refer to the episode a month later as “the disaster at Vienna.”88
JUNE 20, 1861: In Cincinnati, Ohio, General George B. McClellan finds himself enmeshed in a political storm after he seemed to recognize Kentucky’s neutrality during a meeting with Kentucky home guard commander Simon Bolivar Buckner, whom he had known at West Point. With a keen appreciation of the power of battlefield victory to dispel political clouds, McClellan today embarks on a well-publicized journey to take personal command of the Union forces operating in western Virginia. It is a morale-boosting trip for the man credited with success at the “Philippi races” (see June 3, 1861)—though he had been far from that battlefield. In a letter to his wife, Ellen, he will describe the journey as a “continuous ovation. Gray-headed old men & women; mothers holding up their children to take my hand, girls, boys, all sorts, cheering and crying, God bless you!” Meanwhile, in the wake of the Philippi defeat, Robert E. Lee, commander of the provisional army and navy of Virginia, has sent reinforcements into western Virginia.89
“The South must be made to feel full respect for the power and honor of the North.”
—NEW YORK TIMES, JUNE 26, 1861
JUNE 26, 1861: Impatient with what they perceive as lack of sufficient military action against the Confederacy, a few Northern papers begin to trumpet what Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune terms “The Nation’s War Cry.” In blaring headlines, the Tribune urges the Lincoln administration “Forward to Richmond! Forward to Richmond! The Rebel Congress must not be allowed to meet there on the 20th of JULY! BY THAT DATE THE PLACE MUST BE HELD BY THE NATIONAL ARMY!” The Chicago Tribune adds to this public hue-and-cry criticism of General in Chief Scott as slow and overcautious. Yet the clamor for offensive action is not universal. The New York Times will report approvingly that Scott plans to amass an intimidating number of troops in northern Virginia and the border states, so that “the presence of our forces will encourage the loyal citizens [of the South] to rise in sufficient numbers to prevent any further outrages.” “The South must be made to feel full respect for the power and honor of the North,” the Times declares. “She must be humbled, but not debased by a forfeiture of self-respect, if we wish to retain our motto—E pluribus unum—and claim for the whole United States the respect of the world.”90
JUNE 29, 1861: At a special meeting of the Lincoln administration cabinet that includes leading Union generals—among them Irvin McDowell, commander of the Union force protecting Washington—U.S. Army general in chief Winfield Scott reiterates the military strategy that he proposed in a memo the previous month (see May 3, 1861). Combining the naval blockade of seaports on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts with moves to establish U.S. military control of the Mississippi River, this strategy, Scott says, would “envelop the insurgent states and bring them to terms with less bloodshed than by any other plan.” Some Northern papers are already ridiculing this approach as Scott’s “Anaconda Plan,” after the snake that kills, slowly, by constriction. Yet the only alternative, Scott believes, is to launch a full-scale army invasion of the South, which he had earlier estimated would take “two or three years… with 300,000 disciplined men, estimating a third for garrisons, and the loss of yet a greater number by skirmishes, sieges, battles and Southern fevers. The destruction of life and property on the other side would be frightful, however perfect the moral discipline of the invaders.” Despite this argument, Lincoln, enmeshed in immediate pressures, insists on a move against the Confederate troops camped at Manassas, Virginia, within the next few weeks. Scott reluctantly agrees.91
JUNE 30, 1861: Confederate navy captain Raphael Semmes engages in a duel of wits and sailing skill with the commander of the Union blockader, USS Brooklyn, as he attempts to take his ship, CSS Sumter, into open water below New Orleans. Brooklyn, Semmes will report in memoirs published three years later, “was [Sumter’s] superior in speed, and moreover, carried guns of heavier caliber and longer range.” Yet Semmes, his ship, and his crew win their race. “[T]he crew of the Sumter gave three hearty cheers, as her ba∆ed pursuer put up her helm, and… turned sullenly back to her station at the mouth of the river.” Proceeding into the Gulf of Mexico, Semmes embarks on his soon-to-be legendary career as a commerce raider.92
Running the Blockade. (The Sumter and the Brooklyn.) Color lithograph frontispiece from The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter by Raphael Semmes, CSN, 1864.
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JULY 4, 1861: The U.S. Congress, which had adjourned in March and normally would not reconvene until December, opens a special session that lasts thirty-four days. In his lengthy message to Congress, read on July 5, Lincoln summarizes the events that have occurred since he took office. To those, including Chief Justice Taney, who have criticized his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus (see April 27, 1861), which, he notes, was done “very sparingly” (i.e., between Philadelphia and Washington, DC), he poses a question: “[W]ould not the official oath be broken, if the government should be overthrown, when it was believed that disregarding the single law [habeas corpus], would tend to preserve it?” Turning to necessary military preparations, he asks for $400 million and four hundred thousand men as a means for “making this contest a short, and a decisive, one.”93
JULY 5, 1861: Approaching Rich Mountain, in western Virginia, where he plans to engage Confederate forces, George B. McClellan writes his wife: “I shall feel my way & be very cautious, for I recognize the fact that everything requires success in my first operations.” He has already spent much time preparing for his first combat command, reporting to General in Chief Scott’s adjutant that he would not move “until I know that everything is ready” and that he intends to gain victory “by manoeuvring rather than by fighting; I will not throw these men of mine into the teeth of artillery & intrenchments, if it is possible to avoid it.”94 At Carthage, Missouri, motley secessionist troops under Missouri governor Claiborne Jackson—a fiery proslavery Democrat who was deposed when he took his followers to the town of Neosho and formed a Confederate state “government”—meet German American troops under Union brigadier general Franz Sigel and force the Federals to retreat.95
JULY 9, 1861: The U.S. House of Representatives approves a resolution proffered by Congressman John F. Potter (R-WI) creating an investigative committee, which Potter will head, that will “ascertain the number of persons… now employed in the several Departments of the Government, who are known to entertain sentiments of hostility to the Government.” Three weeks later, Potter will declare his astonishment “at the number of well-authenticated cases of disloyalty to the Government.” Yet the committee’s definition of “well-authenticated” includes behind-closed-doors, often unsubstantiated testimony from informants whose names are kept secret. Accused persons are not told of the charges against them and cannot defend themselves before the committee. Despite spirited opposition to its methods by a few members of Congress, the Potter Committee’s secret proceedings will continue. On January 28, 1862, it will report that, to that date, it has considered “about five hundred and fifty charges of disloyalty.”96
Congressman John F. Potter (1817–1899). Photograph by Julian Vannerson in McClees’ Gallery of Photographic Portraits of the Senators, Representatives & Delegates of the Thirty-Fifth Congress, 1859.
Incident in the Blockade. Pencil, Chinese white, and black ink wash drawing on olive paper by Alfred R. Waud (1828–1891). The source of often harrowing naval encounters, the Northern blockade of Southern ports also led at times to international tensions. Writing to U.S. ambassador to Britain Charles Francis Adams May 21, 1861, Secretary of State Seward instructed him to inform the British that “the blockade is now and it will continue to be so maintained, and therefore we expect it to be respected by Great Britain.”
JULY 10, 1861: Quaker City, a private vessel chartered to the U.S. Navy for blockade duty and under the command of a naval officer, Commander Overton Carr, stops the Virginia-owned vessel Amy Warwick off Cape Henry, at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. The vessel and its cargo of 5,100 bags of coffee are sent to Boston, where legal proceedings will begin that will result in Amy Warwick’s being declared a prize of war. After that determination is made, the value of the ship’s cargo, less an amount due to a British claimant, is divided between the U.S. government, for deposit in the Navy Pension Fund, and the crew of Quaker City—“a bounty,” Attorney General Bates will explain to Lincoln, “designed to stimulate the zeal and courage of our naval men.” Several U.S. district courts will hear similar prize cases as the U.S. blockade of Confederate ports continues—including the court in Key West, Florida, which will remain in Federal hands throughout the war, with William Marvin (to July 1863), then Thomas Jefferson Boynton, the only sitting U.S. Federal judges south of the nation’s capital, presiding.97
JULY 11, 1861: The U.S. Congress formally expels the senators from Arkansas, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, and one senator from Tennessee—all of whom have already withdrawn. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a loyal Unionist, is the only Southern senator who keeps his seat.98 As this legislative ceremony takes place, J. D. B. DeBow, in New Orleans, celebrates the Southern rebellion in the July edition of his popular Review: “We have been Yankee imitators and worshippers until now… and never learned to walk alone,” he states, before proudly declaring that this unhappy situation is at an end: “We of the South are about to inaugurate a new civilization. We shall have new and original thought; negro slavery will be its great controlling and distinctive element.”99 In western Virginia, action begins at Rich Mountain as George B. McClellan sends William Rosecrans and eighteen hundred men up the mountainside to attack John Pegram’s defending Confederates from the rear, after which McClellan plans to attack from the front. The subsequent action suffers from delays and confusion. Though Rosecrans finally overruns the Confederate position, the overcautious McClellan, uncertain because his plan has gone partially awry, fails to attack. In follow-up action, the retreating Pegram and some six hundred of his men surrender. On July 13, Robert S. Garnett will become the first general killed in the Civil War when McClellan’s forces defeat Garnett’s Confederate troops at Corrick’s Ford. McClellan claims a sweeping victory, telegraphing Washington, “Our success is complete & secession is killed in this country.”100
J. D. B. (James Dunwoody Brownson) De Bow (1820–1867). Engraving by W. G. Jackman, n.d.
Plan of the Battle of Rich Mountain. Manuscript map drawn by Lieutenant Orlando M. Poe, U.S. Army Topographical Engineers, ca. July 11, 1861.
JULY 13, 1861: In New York City, Charles A. Dana, managing editor of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, publishes a scathing reply to Major General Benjamin Butler’s recent order restricting the activities of reporters because, the general complained, the newsmen were revealing his plans to the enemy. “Whose fault is this?” Dana bellows editorially. “Is the Major General such an old lady that he cannot hold his tongue?… to suppose that paid men, sent expressly to obtain information, will not use it when obtained, is to exhibit a fatuity unworthy of a major general.” In fact, Butler’s complaint is not unique to him, and Confederates are garnering information from Northern newspapers.101
JULY 16, 1861: Under pressure to strike a telling offensive blow, General Irvin McDowell begins moving more than thirty thousand Union troops toward Manassas, Virginia, some twenty-five miles from Washington, DC. The objective: to smash P. G. T. Beauregard’s twenty-thousand-man Confederate force—soon to be augmented by troops under Joseph E. Johnston, who evades a Federal force sent to stop him from leaving the lower Shenandoah Valley. McDowell’s progress is very slow. Most of his troops are inexperienced, ill-trained volunteers, in many cases led by equally inexperienced volunteer officers; some are at or near the end of three-month enlistments and resent the army’s determination that they must remain in the ranks until August. Discipline, not tight to begin with, deteriorates along the way. Troops amble along, leave the line of march, pilfer food and drink from farms—and are suspiciously close when one or two house fires erupt as the column passes. In one of his daily dispatches to Washington, McDowell will write, “I am distressed to have to report excesses by our troops.” As the Union force nears Manassas, William T. Sherman also notes his concern over the largely amateur army’s discipline in a letter to his wife: “With my regulars I would have no doubts, but these volunteers are subject to stampedes.”102
The Civil War in America: The Stampede from Bull Run. Engraving based on a drawing by Frank Vizetelly, published in the Illustrated London News, August 17, 1861. “Retreat is a weak term to use,” Vizetelly wrote in the description accompanying his drawing, “when speaking of this disgraceful rout.”
JULY 21, 1861: McDowell’s Federal troops engage thirty thousand Confederates under Beauregard and Johnston at the first battle of Bull Run (First Manassas), where the “Rebel yell” makes its unnerving debut—and General Barnard Bee provides Thomas Jonathan Jackson with his soon-to-be-celebrated nickname by describing Jackson standing like a “stone wall” under fire. Early in the encounter, the Federals seem poised to achieve a great victory. “The Yankees in such a superiority of numbers… poured forth such a destructive fire into our ranks that our men were becoming confused and began to fall back,” Lieutenant Richard Lewis, of the Fourth South Carolina Volunteers, later reported. “The gallant and noble General Barnard Bee dismounted his horse to rally the men, telling them as Carolinians they should never disgrace or dishonor their banner but die under its folds, and all of them rallied again, and, with a shout and yell that might have been heard for miles, they charged and repulsed the enemy, and drove them back from their position.” The day turns against the Union, as confusion becomes an uncertain retreat that deteriorates into what English artist-correspondent Frank Vizetelly describes as a “disgraceful rout…. The terror-stricken soldiers threw away their arms and accoutrements, herding along like a panic stricken flock of sheep, with no order whatever in their flight.” Troops become tangled up with panicked congressmen and civilians who had followed them from Washington to witness their triumph. “Today will be known as Black Monday,” Northerner George Templeton Strong notes in his diary. “Only one great fact stands out unmistakably, total defeat and national disaster on the largest scale.” This evening Jefferson Davis, who arrived at the battlefield while combat was still raging, promotes Beauregard to full general, and sends a dispatch to Richmond: “Our forces have won a glorious victory…. Too high praise cannot be bestowed whether for the skill of the principal officers or for the Gallantry of all the Troops.” Casualties on both sides (killed, wounded, and missing) number some forty-seven hundred. General Bee is among the Confederate dead.103
The Battle Field at Bull Run, reproduced in Tribune War Maps, published by the New-York Daily Tribune on July 30, 1861.
JULY 22, 1861: In the early morning hours, as survivors from Bull Run are still limping into the Union capital, a telegram summons General George B. McClellan to Washington.104 Later this day, at the Capitol, Congress, concerned over ineffective leadership by militia officers hastily appointed by state politicians in the rush to develop a volunteer army, authorizes the creation of military boards to examine officers and remove those found to be unqualified. In other legislative action, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passes the Crittenden Resolution (named for Representative John Crittenden of Kentucky), which stresses the need to preserve the Union and to maintain noninterference with slavery where it exists. Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee introduces a similarly worded resolution that will pass the Senate three days later. Today and tomorrow, President Lincoln signs two bills authorizing enlistments of a total of one million three-year volunteers.105 Also in Washington, U.S. Patent Office clerk Clara Barton hears stories from Bull Run survivors of inadequate supplies and poor facilities for treating the wounded. After she publicizes these conditions and asks for donations, provisions come pouring in. The resourceful former schoolteacher will soon establish an agency that will see to their distribution.106
JULY 23, 1861: Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, which had so eagerly urged Union forces “On to Richmond!,” is now equally eager to fix blame for the North’s Bull Run defeat—an event that ran so terribly counter to the widespread conviction that the Union’s just cause, defended by soldiers displaying manly vigor and courage (whether or not they had received adequate military training), should have resulted in a quick and decisive victory. In an editorial written by the intensely Unionist Charles A. Dana, the Tribune thunders: “A decimated and indignant people will demand the immediate retirement of the present Cabinet from the higher places of power.” There are those, however, who understand that, whatever the faults of Lincoln’s cabinet, the North faces a greater problem. “The South is not composed of cowards or fools,” future Union general Thomas Kilby Smith writes from his home in Ohio, “and the North will find before they get through that they are not so easily conquered as they had supposed.”107 In Washington, on this day when Lincoln also visits troop encampments to boost faltering morale, George B. McClellan calls at the White House and speaks with the president (who informs him he will command McDowell’s army and the defenses of Washington), then goes on to attend a swirl of conferences and inspections. At night, the general writes an ebullient letter to his wife: “Presdt, Cabinet, Genl Scott & all deferring to me—by some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land. I almost think that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator or anything else that might please me—but nothing of that kind would please me—therefore I won’t be Dictator. Admirable self denial!”108
Major General George B. McClellan (1826–1885), USA, and his wife, Mary Ellen Marcy McClellan, called Ellen or Nelly (1830–1915). Photograph between 1860 and 1865. After their 1860 marriage, McClellan, who had pursued Marcy for more than five years, wrote ecstatically to his mother, “I believe I am the happiest man that ever lived & am sure that I have the dearest wife in all the world.”
James Moore Wayne (1790–1867), associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1835–1867. Daguerreotype, ca. 1850. Born in Georgia, educated at Princeton, and a lover of good food and spirits, Wayne had no objection to slavery (he was himself a slaveholder) but was devoted to the Union.
JULY 25, 1861: Famed explorer and 1856 Republican presidential candidate John C. Frémont, now a general, arrives in St. Louis to take command of Union forces in Missouri, beginning what will become a stormy and controversial early chapter of the war in the West.109
AUGUST
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AUGUST 3, 1861: Congress passes legislation directing the U.S. Department of the Navy to construct three prototype ironclad vessels.110
AUGUST 4, 1861: The New York Herald doffs its editorial cap to Supreme Court associate justice James M. Wayne, a native of Georgia who has remained loyal to the Union, characterizing Wayne’s loyalty as “a living rebuke to the small souled political tricksters whose mad ambition have [sic] brought us to the horrors of civil war.” Few Georgians feel the same way, however. In a few months a Savannah grand jury, having declared the justice an “alien enemy,” will confiscate all Wayne’s property, including slaves, and transfer it to his son, Henry, a former U.S. Army officer who is now adjutant and inspector general of Georgia. Wayne’s situation is far from unique in a judicial system that is shaken by the war.111
AUGUST 5, 1861: As war-related expenses explode (Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase has calculated that the government will need $320 million for the war in the next fiscal year), the U.S. Congress levies the first Federal income tax in United States history, establishing rates of 3 percent for people earning between $600 and $10,000 and 5 percent on incomes exceeding $10,000. Equally pressed for funds, the Confederate Congress enacts a property tax this month, at a rate of one-half of 1 percent of the assessed value of property. Collection, which remains the responsibility of each seceded state, will be problematical, however, and a relatively small amount of revenue will enter Confederate coffers as the result of this tax (a higher percentage of the total collected will be derived from the value of slaves than from land).112
AUGUST 6, 1861: The U.S. Congress approves legislation declaring that “all the acts, proclamations and orders of the President… [after March 4, 1861, the day of Lincoln’s inauguration] respecting the army and navy of the United States, and calling out or relating to the militia or volunteers from the States, are hereby approved and in all respects legalized and made valid… as if they had been issued and done under the previous express authority and direction of the Congress of the United States.” The First Confiscation Bill, also passed by Congress and signed (with some hesitation) by the president this day, states, among other provisions, that contrabands who had been employed directly by Confederate armed forces are no longer slaves, but otherwise leaves their status uncertain. The president also signs legislation increasing pay for ordinary soldiers and, in this time of great anxiety over Confederate agents and sympathizers in the government, a bill establishing a new, more elaborate oath of office for Federal employees—and stipulating that any Federal employee who refuses to take the oath “shall be immediately dismissed.”113
AUGUST 8, 1861: Fraught with anxiety, George B. McClellan reports to General in Chief Scott that “at least 100,000” Confederate troops under P. G. T. Beauregard are preparing to attack Washington, and insists that all possible reinforcements immediately be dispatched to the capital. It is the first of many times that McClellan will hugely overestimate enemy forces, and the fact that Scott disagrees with his assessment (“I have not the slightest apprehension for the safety of the government here,” the old general writes) only incenses McClellan. “I do not know whether he is a dotard or a traitor,” he writes to his wife about Scott. “I am leaving nothing undone to increase our force—but that confounded old Genl always comes in the way—he is a perfect imbecile.” But the “imbecile” is correct. Now, and for months to come, the Confederate army facing McClellan’s troops will number fewer than forty-five thousand.114
AUGUST 10, 1861: Antisecessionists in Missouri are dealt a stinging blow at the battle of Wilson’s Creek when fifty-four hundred Federal troops facing ten thousand Confederates under Brigadier General Ben McCulloch and Major General Sterling Price withdraw after their commander, Union general Nathaniel Lyon, is killed. Coming less than a month after the Union debacle at First Bull Run (see July 21, 1861), this Federal defeat is a double blow for the North: a huge section of Missouri is now under secessionist sway; and Lyon, whose battle to keep Missouri in the Union has made him a hero, is deeply mourned. Again, people search for someone to blame, some this time turning to Secretary of War Simon Cameron. Northerners know, the Chicago Tribune declares, “that he is mainly, if not wholly, responsible… and they check the accusation by citing his culpable neglect to send the reinforcements that the gallant Lyon begged.”115 Near Fort Monroe, Virginia, well-known aeronaut John La Montain ascends in a balloon tethered to the Union ship Fanny at Hampton Roads and delineates the location of Confederate tents and batteries at Sewell’s Point in one of the earliest sketches to be made from an aerial platform.116
Camp of the Massachusetts Second Compy, Light Artillery at Stewarts [sic] Place, Baltimore, Md. Color lithograph published by Sachse & Co., November 1861. After the Army of the Potomac was created in August 1861, defenses in the Washington area were significantly strengthened.
Battle of Wilson’s Creek—Aug. 10, 1861—Union (Gen. Lyon)… Conf. (Gen. McCulloch). Color lithograph, 1893, published by Kurz & Allison. In this chaotic clash, poorly armed and loosely organized Confederates outnumbered the Union force two to one, a fact that did not discourage General Nathaniel Lyon—whose battle plan left much to be desired. “The truth is,” a surviving Union officer, Colonel John M. Palmer, later wrote his wife, “that the Creek was a folly which the gallant death of Gen. Lyon does not atone for.”
AUGUST 13, 1861: “The 13th New York have refused duty,” William T. Sherman wires McClellan from his camp near Washington. “They simply refuse to form ranks, to go on details or obey any orders whatsoever. Appeals to them are treated with ridicule.” Disgruntled over grievances, including a dispute over whether they had enlisted for three months (as they believe) or three years (as the U.S. Army assures them they have), a few volunteer Union regiments stage a mutiny—which department commander McClellan, his Regular Army officers, and an armed and unsmiling Regular Army detachment quickly end with tough measures. More than sixty soldiers will be imprisoned in the Dry Tortugas, off the Florida Keys, and the Seventy-ninth New York will suffer the humiliation of being deprived of its regimental colors until it proves it is worthy again to carry them.117
AUGUST 16, 1861: Lincoln issues the Proclamation Forbidding Intercourse with Rebel States, which, with some exceptions, bars commercial relations between the Union and the Confederacy.118
AUGUST 17, 1861: As part of the retraining and reorganizing of the North’s eastern theater forces, the military departments of northeastern Virginia, Washington, and the Shenandoah are merged to form the Department of the Potomac—and the Union’s soon-to-be powerful Army of the Potomac is born; General McClellan will be named its commander on August 20. At a meeting in Willard’s Hotel in Washington with General Robert Anderson (former Union commander at Fort Sumter) and politicians from Kentucky and Tennessee, newly promoted brigadier general of volunteers William T. Sherman agrees to become Anderson’s second in command in the Department of the Cumberland, to be headquartered in Louisville in the still supposedly “neutral” state of Kentucky.119
AUGUST 28–29, 1861: A Union amphibious expedition under Major General Benjamin Butler and Flag Officer Silas Stringham attacks and secures Forts Clark and Hatteras, which guard Hatteras Inlet, North Carolina, an important haven for Confederate blockade runners. The Federals lose one man, secure some 670 Confederate prisoners—and now have their first base of operations on the Carolina coast.120
“I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.”
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN, AUGUST 30, 1861
AUGUST 30, 1861: In Missouri, the Union’s department commander, Major General John C. Frémont, assuming the administrative powers of the state, confiscates the property of all Missourians who favor the Confederacy and declares their slaves free. Such a firmly aggressive stance is heartily approved by Northerners eager to press the war effort. But Frémont’s action offends border-state Unionists and threatens Lincoln’s delicate maneuvering to keep the vital border state of Kentucky in the Union. (“I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game,” Lincoln will write to his friend Senator Orville Browning. “Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us.”) On September 11, calling Frémont’s emancipation measure “purely political, and not within the range of military law, or necessity,” Lincoln will order the general to modify it to conform with the First Confiscation Bill (see August 6, 1861). In certain circles, the president’s order will not be popular. Radical Republican senator Benjamin F. Wade will write to a colleague, “I have no doubt that by it, he has done more injury to the cause of the Union… than McDowell did by retreating from Bull Run.” His confidence in Frémont eroding, Lincoln will relieve the general of command on November 2—causing Frémont’s supporters to further question the president’s judgment.121
SEPTEMBER
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John Charles Frémont. Lithograph by J. C. Buttre, February 1859. A famed explorer and a man with political ambitions, Frémont was the first presidential candidate of the new Republican Party in 1856.
SEPTEMBER 1, 1861: The first school for contrabands established in the South is started by Mary Chase, a freedwoman of Alexandria, Virginia.122
SEPTEMBER 3, 1861: Confederate forces under General (and Episcopal bishop) Leonidas Polk enter Kentucky from Tennessee and occupy the city of Columbus, an act that ends this border state’s “neutrality.” Three days later, to block Southern troops from taking the city, Ulysses S. Grant will occupy Paducah; and on September 9, Confederates under Simon Bolivar Buckner will move into Bowling Green. As Union Department of the Cumberland commander Robert Anderson settles into his Louisville headquarters, his second in command, William T. Sherman, will make a circuit of nearby Union states, securing troops to help preserve this crucial border state for the Union. Political assistance will come in the form of a resolution that passes the Kentucky legislature just over a week after Polk brings his troops into the state, calling on the governor to order Confederate forces out. Yet both Union and Confederate troops remain in the area. There is now one continuous front dividing South from North, extending from the Atlantic Ocean to Kansas and the Frontier.123
SEPTEMBER 9, 1861: President Lincoln responds to a demand from Kentucky governor Beriah Magoffin (see May 20, 1861) that Federal troops be withdrawn from his state: “I most cordially sympathize with your Excellency in the wish to preserve the peace of my own native state, Kentucky; but it is with regret I search, and cannot find, in your not very short letter, any declaration or intimation that you entertain any desire for the preservation of the Union. Your obedient servant, A. Lincoln.”124
Drunken Soldiers Tied Up for Fighting and Other Unruly Conduct. Pencil drawing on cream paper by Alfred R. Waud, between 1860 and 1865. Taking command of the Twenty-first Illinois, Ulysses S. Grant confronted discipline problems that had been fostered by lax officers. Yet “the great majority favored discipline,” he later wrote, “and by the application of a little regular army punishment all were reduced to as good discipline as one could ask.”
SEPTEMBER 11, 1861: Transferred from Paducah to Cairo, Illinois, and now a brigadier general of volunteers, Ulysses S. Grant confronts a still-too-familiar problem; today the Chicago Tribune reports on the general’s remedial action, General Order Number 5: “It is with regret the General commanding sees and learns that the closest intimacy exists between many of the officers and soldiers of his command; that they visit together the lowest drinking and dancing saloons; quarrel, curse, drink and carouse on the lowest level of equality…. Discipline cannot be maintained when the officers do not command respect, and such conduct cannot insure it. In this military district discipline shall be maintained, even if it is at the expense of the commission of all officers who stand in the way of attaining that end.”125 In western Virginia, Confederate area commander Robert E. Lee opens the five-day Cheat Mountain campaign. Waged in increasingly foul weather, plagued by low troop morale and difficulties among Confederate commanders, and hampered by a complex battle plan that calls for close cooperation among five Southern units, the campaign fails. Other Confederate operations in western Virginia prove equally fruitless, something that incites acidic editorial commentary in newspapers throughout the South—and results in a new, uncomplimentary nickname for the commanding general: “Grannie” Lee. “I am sorry,” Lee will comment sarcastically in a letter to his wife, “that the movement of our armies cannot keep pace with the expectations of the editors of the papers.”126
SEPTEMBER 15, 1861: President Lincoln issues a statement concerning the ongoing arrests (September 13–16) of a number of public offcials in Maryland, including Baltimore mayor George W. Brown and secessionist members of the state legislature: “The public safety renders it necessary that the grounds of these arrests should at present be withheld, but at the proper time they will be made public. Of one thing the people of Maryland may rest assured: that no arrest has been made, or will be made, not based on substantial and unmistakable complicity with those in armed rebellion against the Government of the United States.” Those taken into custody will be released, a few at a time, on parole or after taking an oath. By November 27, 1862, all will have been freed.127
SEPTEMBER 16–17, 1861: Union forces occupy Ship Island, between New Orleans and Mobile, where the United States will develop a base for the Gulf Blockading Squadron as well as for the campaign against New Orleans.128
SEPTEMBER 22, 1861: At Fort Lyon, in New Mexico Territory, a horse race between militia troops and Navajo men erupts into violence after the Navajo accuse the army of cheating and the army opens fire, killing many Navajo. The United States is now engaged in hostilities with both the Apache (see February 4, 1861) and the Navajo, two conflicts that will merge and become known as the Apache and Navajo War.129 From Washington, where he has gone to begin work as Assistant Librarian of Congress, Ainsworth Rand Spofford sends one last dispatch as a correspondent for the Cincinnati Commercial: “At the top of the finished portion of the Capitol dome [which is being replaced], there is a fine opportunity… for viewing the encampments of our army and the locality of the advanced lines of the enemy. The dome is visited daily by thousands of people, including nearly all the newly arrived soldiers…” He also notes one of the problems the rapidly expanding Volunteer Army is facing: “There is a scarcity of surgeons in the army, and some are graciously volunteering… to attend the numerous cases of illness…. Dr. [and recently appointed Librarian of Congress] J. G. Stephenson… has generously devoted a large share of his time to these sufferers, a temporary hospital for whom has been established in the Patent Office.”130
SEPTEMBER 26, 1861: From a camp in Kentucky, where he has been sent to protect the route of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad from both Confederate troops and Kentucky secessionists, an overworked and harassed William T. Sherman writes to his wife: “I have no doubt that the railroad and telegraph will be cut off behind us… the people of Kentucky will not rally in my judgment but turn on us who came to save them from the Despot of the South.”131
OCTOBER
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The Civil War in America. The Confederate Army—Mississippians Passing in Review before General Beauregard and Staff. Engraving based on a drawing by Frank Vizetelly published in the Illustrated London News, December 14, 1861.
OCTOBER 1, 1861: During a strategy conference at Centreville, Virginia, President Davis and Generals Johnston and Beauregard decide that, despite public pressure for action against the North, the Confederate army does not have sufficient strength and logistical support to make such a move and thus will have to await whatever offensives the Union army will undertake in the spring.132
OCTOBER 7, 1861: As some people in the Union grow restless at the time George McClellan is taking to organize and train the Army of the Potomac, Horace Greeley publishes an editorial castigating other newspapers “which evince impatience at Gen. McClellan’s inactivity,” for only a commanding general can know when his army is ready for battle. Greeley’s opinion of McClellan will change for the worse—something that’s already occurring among Republican members of Congress, who are beginning to wonder if the general’s affiliation with the Democratic Party is dulling his enthusiasm for war. On October 8, Senator Benjamin Wade will bemoan the quiescence of McClellan’s increasingly strong army, which remains behind its entrenchments “occasionally sending forth a bulletin announcing that ‘the Capital is safe.’ ”133
REPORTING THE WAR 
FEBRUARY 1861–APRIL 1862
The Press, the Field, the Sketchbook. Wood engraving by Thomas Nast (1840–1902), published in Harper’s Weekly, April 30, 1864.
A literate and news-hungry nation, the divided United States of 1861–1865 supported hundreds of newspapers, from the powerful, widely read New York Tribune and Richmond Examiner to papers with more limited reach, such as the Chattanooga Rebel and William “Parson” Brownlow’s Knoxville Whig (which, after exile in the North, the passionately Unionist Brownlow reopened in 1863 as the Knoxville Whig and Rebel Ventilator). A seventeen-year-old communications system, the telegraph, made it possible for news reports to travel on wings—when correspondents could gain access to what they dubbed “the lightning.” The fifteen thousand miles of telegraph wire that the Union operated by the end of the war, and the thousand miles controlled by the Confederacy, were often reserved for military and political use first; reports that included information deemed useful to the enemy were sometimes censored or simply not allowed to go out; and lines were not always available close to the battlefront.
As the war lengthened, war reports increasingly crowded non-news articles off the front pages, and new press associations were formed to improve the circulation of news dispatches. The Southern Associated Press, whose high fees and poor service had been irritating many Confederate newsmen since 1861, was joined by the Press Association of the Confederate States of America in March 1863. In the Union, similar dissatisfaction with the service provided by the fourteen-year-old New York Associated Press to papers farther west led to the incorporation of the Western Associated Press in late 1862.
Competition was fierce, and there was no shortage of reporters, many of them temporary and amateur. Franc B. Wilkie, retained by the New York Times, reported from Cairo, Illinois, in December 1861, “Every other civilian one met was a correspondent, or claimed to be…. Each regiment had its special representative from the home paper, and quite often each company had a ‘war correspondent’ in its mess.” Yet professional newsmen, both domestic and foreign, provided most of the war news that circulated throughout the country and beyond. Prominent members of the North’s so-called Bohemian Brigade of reporters included Henry Villard, Whitelaw Reid, and Charles Carleton Coffin. Peter W. Alexander, Felix Gregory de Fontaine, and poet and essayist Henry Timrod were notable among the more than one hundred volunteer and paid Confederate correspondents.
Whether produced by professionals or amateurs, however, news reports were often far from objective and sometimes wildly inaccurate. Major misrepresentations could be the source of much political trouble and resentment in the ranks; inaccuracies of a minor nature often stimulated resigned bemusement. “The march to-day… lay through a miserable looking country,” Union lieutenant colonel Alfred B. McCalmont wrote to his brother in November 1862. “We could hear the drivers whipping and swearing and sometimes see a wagon stuck fast in the mud. On the way a boy met us with the ‘Philadelphia Inquirer,’ and there was a great deal of laughing over one of the headings of army news which pithily stated… in large capitals, that the army’s advance was not impeded by the rain.”
Photographers also covered the conflict (see “Photographing the War,” here), but the era’s cumbersome cameras were not yet able to capture “action” shots. Thus, a hardy band of special artist-correspondents traveled—and sometimes served—with the Union armies, making sketches and finished drawings that brought to life battlefield action, camp life, and, as the armies advanced, vignettes of Southern life under Union occupation. Wearing sturdy clothes and wide-brimmed hats to shade their eyes, and carrying large portfolios containing the paper, pencil crayons, charcoal, ink, pens, brushes, and watercolors necessary to their jobs, the artists became experts at finding good vantage points in the midst of chaos. Alfred Waud (the most prolific and among the most daring of the band), his brother William, Edwin Forbes, Theodore Davis, Arthur Lumley, Henry Lovie, and Winslow Homer were among the best and best known of these dedicated artist-newsmen based in America; Frank Vizetelly was the most prominent artist working for an overseas publication, the Illustrated London News.
Copied by engravers onto printing blocks (sometimes with mistakes or editorial changes), black-and-white versions of the special-artists’ sketches appeared regularly in the North’s three illustrated papers, Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News, and, until 1864, the New York Illustrated News. (Richmond publishers Ayers and Wade established the Southern Illustrated News in September 1862, but constant shortages of everything from paper and presses to sketch artists and cartoonists forced the journal to close just over two years later.)
Political cartoonists—including the North’s Frank Bellew, Henry Stephens, John McLenan, and Thomas Nast; Southern sympathizer Adalbert Volck; and famed London illustrator John Tenniel, who also favored the Confederacy—skewered or celebrated, as they saw fit, political and military figures and events. Their work was widely circulated not only in illustrated journals but also through the shops of Currier & Ives, Louis Prang, and other popular lithographers in the North. The supply of popular-art lithographs in the South was more limited, primarily because of shortages, but some were available through such publishers as Ayers and Wade and Hoyer and Ludwig (both based in Richmond), Blanton Duncan (Columbia, South Carolina), and Pessou and Simon (New Orleans). In addition to cartoons, these shops sold color and black-and-white battlefield maps, depictions of military clashes (heroic scenes that were sometimes wildly inaccurate), and portraits of prominent wartime figures.
Throughout the conflict, men and women in both the North and the South “reported” their understanding of and feelings about the war via the literary and theatrical arts. Wartime compositions ranged from Julia Ward Howe’s American classic “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to much less lasting and celebrated works. Among the latter was a poetic broadside (single-sheet publication) that reflected a turning point in the North’s war effort, and in American history. Titled “The New Version of The Colored Volunteer,” it read, in part: “when they gave us arms, and all a soldier’s right… how we made the Rebels stare, / For they could not stand the charge of the colored Volunteer.”134
Untitled cartoon. Pencil drawing on brown paper by Alfred R. Waud, ca. 1861. Northern eagerness to have Union armies march “Onward to Richmond” is reflected in this atypical Waud cartoon drawing, in which Lincoln, Stanton, and an unidentified general regard the imperious McClellan hopefully as he stands beside a protective Uncle Sam.
OCTOBER 8, 1861: Fatigued and unwell, Department of the Cumberland commander Robert Anderson summons William T. Sherman to Louisville and informs him that he is the new department commander. In addition to Kentucky secessionists and Confederate forces present in the state, Sherman now must deal with manpower shortages, lack of quartermasters and funds for supplies, and myriad administrative duties. Unbeknownst to Sherman, Confederate commanders in the area are facing similar difficulties and sending complaints about lack of supplies and ill-trained volunteers to Richmond. Under these circumstances, both sides move with caution in Kentucky.135 In Washington, British correspondent William Russell attempts to see General McClellan and is told by an aide that the general was tired and has gone to bed and that the general had “sent the same message to the President, who came inquiring after him ten minutes ago. This poor President!” Russell writes in his diary. “Surrounded by such scenes, and trying with all his might to understand strategy, naval warfare… and all the technical details of the art of slaying. He runs from one house to another, armed with plans, papers, reports, recommendations, sometimes good-humoured, never angry, occasionally dejected, and always a little fussy…. But for all that, there have been many more courtly Presidents who, in a similar crisis, would have displayed less capacity, honesty, and plain dealing than Abraham Lincoln.”136
OCTOBER 16, 1861: After a meeting in Louisville, during which he is surprised by Sherman’s grim assessment of conditions in the Department of the Cumberland, Secretary of War Cameron wires Lincoln, “Matters are in a much worse condition than I expected to find them.” He also requests supplies and reinforcements. Cameron and his entourage, which includes newspaper reporters, are struck by Sherman’s tense demeanor—and their speculations blossom into rumors, which will live long after the war, that at this time the general is “touched in the head.” Assessments contradicting the rumors are not as widely circulated. On October 25, the Cincinnati Daily Commercial will publish a report from its Louisville correspondent, who finds Sherman “a very superior man… clear headed and strong headed—loving his profession, his fame and his men.”137
OCTOBER 21, 1861: Under orders from Major General McClellan to make a “slight demonstration” against Leesburg, Virginia, to lure Confederates out of that city, Brigadier General Charles Pomeroy Stone sends several companies of the Fifteenth Massachusetts across the Potomac from their camp in Maryland. They do not get very far before encountering Confederates, who force them back to the edge of the river at the steep ridge known as Ball’s Bluff. Though reinforced by troops under Colonel Edward Baker—U.S. senator from Oregon and an old friend of President Lincoln’s—the Union force, under heavy fire from well-placed Confederates, is pushed back over the steep bank and into the river, where many are forced to swim for their lives, few boats being there to support them. More than 700 Federal troops are captured or missing, 158 are wounded, and 49, including Colonel Baker, are killed. As the public learns of this humiliating defeat, three months to the day after the Union’s drubbing at Bull Run, shock waves reverberate throughout the North. “The massacre at Ball’s Bluff,” U.S. State Department translator Count Adam Gurowski writes in his diary, “is the work of either treason, or of stupidity, or of cowardice, or most probably of all three united.”138
Colonel Edward D. Baker (1811–1861), USA. Photographic print on a carte de visite mount by the firm of E. & H. T. Anthony, ca. 1861. Senator from the new state of Oregon, Baker was a nationally known politician who had become so close to Abraham Lincoln when both men lived in Illinois that the Lincolns named their second son after him.
The Civil War in America—Retreat of the Federalists after the Fight at Ball’s Bluff, Upper Potomac, Virginia. Engraving based on a drawing by Frank Vizetelly, published in the Illustrated London News, November 23, 1861. “The whole affair appears to have been ill-planned,” the News editorialized, “and adds another to the grievous blunders committed by the Federal commanders.”
OCTOBER 25, 1861: As relations between Generals Scott and McClellan continue to deteriorate (see August 8, 1861) and their disagreements become public knowledge, Republican senators Benjamin Wade, Zachary Chandler, and Lyman Trumbull meet with McClellan at the home of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, pressing the general to put his army in motion. McClellan blames General Scott for the delay—so successfully that he is able to inform his wife this evening in a letter that the senators will “make a desperate effort tomorrow to have General Scott retired at once.” McClellan is aware that the infirm seventy-six-year-old general in chief has already tendered his resignation; the president and his cabinet had decided to accept it on October 18. However, the disaster at Ball’s Bluff has delayed Scott’s departure. McClellan states to his wife, “Until that is accomplished I can effect but little good—he is ever in my way.”139
NOVEMBER
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Slaves of the Rebel Genl. Thomas F. Drayton, Hilton Head, S.C. Photograph by Henry P. Moore (1833–1911), May 1862. Left behind by Drayton after his defeat at Port Royal, these contrabands participated in agricultural and educational programs; some of the men may have joined the Union army when that was finally allowed.
NOVEMBER 1, 1861: A White House messenger brings General George B. McClellan the presidential order he has been eagerly anticipating: “I have designated you to command the whole Army,” Lincoln writes. “You will, therefore, assume this enlarged duty at once, conferring with me so far as necessary.” General Scott’s retirement is official, and McClellan is now general in chief of United States armies.140
NOVEMBER 5, 1861: Jefferson Davis appoints General Robert E. Lee commander of the Confederate Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and East Florida, removing Lee from the storms of criticism that continue over the Southern army’s failures in western Virginia.141
Commander, later Captain Percival Drayton (1812–1865), USN. Photograph between 1855 and 1865.
Brigadier General Thomas F. Drayton (1808–1891), CSA. Photograph between 1861 and 1865.
NOVEMBER 6, 1861: Voters in the Confederacy elect Jefferson Davis president (thereby changing his status from provisional president to president) and also elect members of the first “regular” (not provisional) Congress.142
NOVEMBER 7, 1861: U.S. Navy flag officer Samuel Du Pont and Brigadier General Thomas W. Sherman lead a huge combined land-and-sea force into Port Royal Sound, South Carolina, beginning operations to secure the Hilton Head–Port Royal area, between Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina. This daring operation, deep in Southern territory, includes a particularly bitter reminder of the fratricidal nature of this growing war: Among the vessels bombarding the forts protecting the sound is USS Pocahontas, captained by Commander Percival Drayton, a South Carolina native who remains loyal to the Union. The Confederates his ship fires upon are under the command of his older brother, General Thomas Drayton—who is soon forced to order a retreat. Remaining in Union hands for the rest of the war, the Port Royal area will become an important base for refueling and supplying blockaders. Home to some ten thousand contrabands abandoned by their Confederate owners (including General Drayton), the islands will also become a testing ground for educational and agricultural programs to assist freed slaves and, in time, a recruiting ground for black regiments.143 In the western theater of operations, Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant, en route to raid and reconnoiter the key Confederate stronghold of Columbus, Kentucky, alters his plans when he discovers that a Rebel force has crossed the Mississippi River into Missouri. A clash at Belmont (Grant’s thirty-one hundred facing an estimated five thousand Confederates under Gideon Pillow) doesn’t go well for the Federals, who are repulsed, with some five hundred killed, wounded, and captured. Yet with little Union action anywhere, this engagement (though criticized by some as unnecessary and barren of results) at least gives Northerners a sense that movement is occurring. It also gives Grant valuable operational and combat experience after his years in civilian life.144
NOVEMBER 8, 1861: General in Chief McClellan agrees to William T. Sherman’s request that he be relieved from command of the Department of the Cumberland. Don Carlos Buell will replace him.145 On the high seas, a major international incident begins when USS Jacinto violates traditional U.S. regard for the rights of neutral vessels and stops the British ship HMS Trent, forcing Trent’s reluctant captain to relinquish two important passengers who boarded the ship in Cuba. Jacinto’s captain, Charles Wilkes, had not consulted any higher authorities before removing John Slidell and James M. Mason, Confederate envoys to Great Britain and France, respectively, who are en route to their overseas posts. Though his action will be popular with newspapers and the public in the North, it presents the United States government with a serious problem. The outraged British will soon begin sending additional troops and naval vessels to their Canadian garrisons, obviously preparing for war if the envoys are not released—and the French will declare their support for the British position. The Lincoln administration, struggling to meet the challenges of war at home, suddenly faces the prospect of a second war abroad.146 (See also December 26, 1861.)
“You will keep constantly before the public view in Great Britain, the tyranny of the Lincoln Government, its utter disregard of the personal rights of its citizens, and its other notorious violations of law.”
—ROBERT M. T. HUNTER TO HENRY HOTZE, NOVEMBER 11, 1861
Abraham Lincoln with his secretaries, John Nicolay (left, 1832–1901) and John Hay (1838–1905). Lincoln appointed Nicolay U.S. consul to Paris early in 1865. After the war, Hay became U.S. ambassador to Britain and secretary of state. He also collaborated with Nicolay on a ten-volume biography of Lincoln (1890).
NOVEMBER 11, 1861: The ongoing campaign to gain recognition for the Confederacy as an independent nation is reflected in a letter Confederate secretary of state Robert M. T. Hunter sends to Henry Hotze, who will become the Confederacy’s propagandist and agent in London. “You will keep constantly before the public view in Great Britain, the tyranny of the Lincoln Government, its utter disregard of the personal rights of its citizens, and its other notorious violations of law.”147
NOVEMBER 13, 1861: Having begun to consult with his new general in chief almost daily, President Lincoln arrives this evening at McClellan’s headquarters, accompanied by his secretary John Hay and Secretary of State Seward. Told that McClellan is out, the president decides to wait for him. An hour later, the general returns and, despite being informed the president is waiting, goes directly to bed. Hay rages at this “insolence of epaulettes,” but the president refuses to become angry. He will, however, begin to summon McClellan to the White House when he wishes to see him, something the general will find both inconvenient and irritating. “I found ‘the original gorilla’ about as intelligent as ever,” he will write to his wife after a White House meeting on November 17. “What a specimen to be at the head of our affairs!”148
NOVEMBER 20, 1861: General Henry W. Halleck, who replaced John C. Frémont as commander of the Department of the Missouri on November 9, issues General Order No. 3, which forbids fugitive slaves from entering Union lines in the area under his command. Many Republicans in Congress, already angered by Lincoln’s reversal of Frémont’s unauthorized emancipation proclamation, are incensed by the order.149 (See August 30, 1861.)
NOVEMBER 28, 1861: The Confederate Congress admits Missouri as the twelfth Confederate State, the Southern-leaning legislators of the state having adopted a “secession ordinance” November 3 at Neosho, Missouri, while retreating from Union forces. Missouri will, in fact, remain in the Union, its Confederate state officials serving as a “government in exile” outside their state for most of the war. Nevertheless, the Confederacy will add a star to its flag to represent the state.150
Contrabands Escaping. Pencil drawing by Edwin Forbes (1839–1895), May 29, 1864.
DECEMBER
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Frederick Douglass (1818–1895). Photograph by J. W. Hurn, date unknown. The eloquent abolitionist pressed Lincoln to allow black men to serve in the U.S. Army, recruited black soldiers (including two of his own sons) once that was allowed, and defended their rights in the face of discrimination in the service.
DECEMBER 1, 1861: U.S. Secretary of War Simon Cameron includes in his departmental annual report a paragraph on what is to be done with “those slaves who were abandoned by their owners on the advance of our troops into southern territory”—officially advocating emancipation and employment of such contrabands in the military. Still deeply concerned over maintaining the loyalty of the border states, and knowing that a majority in the North do not favor abolition, much less the arming of freed slaves (legal restrictions still prevent free black men in the North from serving in the Union army), Lincoln orders copies of the report already in circulation to be confiscated and tells Cameron to delete the incendiary passage. This inspires another round of protests from Radical Republicans and antislavery citizens at large. The greatly shortened final version of the paragraph relies on Congress, in its “wisdom and patriotism,” to decide the matter after the war. For many Americans, waiting is not an option. “We wage war against slaveholding rebels, and yet protect and augment the motive which has moved the slaveholders to rebellion,” author, publisher, activist, and former slave Frederick Douglass thundered in the August 1861 issue of Douglass Monthly. “Fire will not burn it out of us—water cannot wash it out of us, that this war with the slaveholders can never be brought to a desirable termination until slavery, the guilty cause of all our national troubles, has been totally and forever abolished.”151
DECEMBER 3, 1861: In the first of his annual messages to Congress, President Lincoln recommends that “steps be taken” to colonize the slaves who had come into Union lines, along with any free blacks who wish to emigrate. Struggling to end the war and reconstruct the sundered nation in which a majority of whites, in both North and South, fear the consequences of emancipation, the president has turned to a solution first embraced in 1817, when the American Colonization Society (ACS) was established to raise funds for sending free blacks to Africa. In 1821, the ACS purchased land and founded Liberia on Africa’s west coast; in 1847, the colony became the independent Republic of Liberia. During the first three years of war, the Lincoln administration will also seek other overseas areas for settling freed blacks, including Haiti. In response to today’s presidential request, Congress will appropriate six hundred thousand dollars throughout 1862 to help finance the voluntary emigration of free black people. Yet colonization has no appeal for the overwhelming majority of African Americans. The Anglo-African paper will call Lincoln’s message “a speech to stir the hearts of all Confederates,” while lawyer and orator John Rock will condemn colonization in a January 23, 1862, speech: “Does any one pretend to deny that this is our country? Or that much of the wealth and prosperity found here is the result of the labor of our hands? Or that our blood and bones have not crimsoned and whitened every battlefield from Maine to Louisiana? It is true, a great many simple-minded people have been induced to go to Liberia and to Hayti, but, be assured, the more intelligent portion of the colored people will remain here… where we have withstood almost everything.”152
A meeting of the Liberian Senate, Monrovia, Liberia. Watercolor and graphite drawing by Robert K. Griffin (b. ca. 1836), ca. 1856.
John Rock, Colored Counselor. Wood engraving based on a photograph by Richards published in Harper’s Weekly, February 25, 1865. Born of free parents in New Jersey, Rock (1825–1867) became a successful teacher, dentist, medical doctor, and lawyer; in February 1865 he became the first African American admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court (see here).
DECEMBER 8, 1861: In the mid-Atlantic, Captain Raphael Semmes and the crew of CSS Sumter capture the Union whaling ship Ebenezer Dodge. “Forty-three prisoners were now on board,” Semmes will later write, “cooped up with the crew in the narrow berth deck, when the weather forbade their appearance on deck, and the little Sumter was beginning to feel herself overcrowded.”153
DECEMBER 9, 1861: Shortly after the Thirty-seventh Congress convenes in Washington and in the wake of the stinging military failures at Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff, the U.S. Congress creates the seven-member (three senators, four representatives) Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to investigate all aspects of the ongoing conflict. Chaired by the Radical Republican senator Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, the committee initially includes Democratic senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee and Representative Moses Fowler Odell, Democrat of New York. Attended by stenographer William Blair Lord, the committee will grow increasingly powerful—and controversial—as it conducts its business, both in secret sessions in the Capitol and out in the field, where members will observe the military situation and interview witnesses.154
DECEMBER 10, 1861: Kentucky becomes the thirteenth state claimed by the Confederacy when the Confederate Congress admits its “provisional government.” Although the Confederate flag will henceforth bear thirteen stars, Kentucky, like Missouri (see November 28, 1861), will remain in the Union.155
DECEMBER 14, 1861: Brigadier General Henry Hopkins Sibley assumes command of the District of Arizona in the Confederate Trans-Mississippi Department. Heading thirty-seven hundred troops (a force designated the Army of New Mexico), Hopkins has been engaged since November in a campaign to sweep the Federals from what is today New Mexico and Arizona and to open the door to California for the Confederates.156
DECEMBER 26, 1861: After discussions in Washington and written consultation with the U.S. ambassador to Britain, Charles Francis Adams, Secretary of State Seward dispatches a note to the British that extricates the U.S. government from the tense situation created by the arrest of Confederate commissioners to Britain and France Mason and Slidell (see November 8, 1861). While stating that the United States has done nothing illegal, and without conveying a U.S. apology, Seward agrees to release the Confederates. He also administers a refined diplomatic dig by noting that the American government has based this “adjustment of the present case, upon principles confessedly American.” Britain’s failure to recognize that the rights of neutral vessels should be respected has long been a bone of contention between the two nations. In Missouri, U.S. authorities declare martial law in St. Louis and in and about all railroads operating in the state.157 In the Indian Territory (directly south of Kansas), Confederates have exacerbated long-existing tensions between factions in the Creek Nation, having signed a treaty of alliance with the Lower Creeks to which Upper Creeks, who are either neutral or loyal to the Union, objected. Clashes between the two Indian factions, which began in November, culminate today in a battle at Chustenahlah, when white Confederates and their Lower Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Chickasaw allies catch up with Opothleyahola and his hungry and exhausted band of Upper Creeks, who are retreating toward Kansas. Many Upper Creeks are either killed or captured. Others will find a degree of safety—though not much in the way of adequate food and shelter—in Kansas.158
Indian Territory with Part of the Adjoining State of Kansas. Engineer Bureau, (U.S.) War Department, 1866.
DECEMBER 31, 1861: At 7:30 PM members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War meet with Lincoln and his cabinet at the White House. In what becomes a stormy session, the impatient congressmen “were very earnest,” Treasury Secretary Chase will later write, “in urging vigorous prosecution of the war, and in recommending the appointment of Major-General McDowell to command the Army of the Potomac” as a replacement for McClellan.159
1862
JANUARY 1862
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Reception of the Officers of the Army by Secretary of War Stanton. Monday PM, at the War Dept. Washington D.C. Pencil and black ink drawing on tan paper by Arthur Lumley (1837–1912), January 20, 1862. The new secretary of war is shaking hands with General Daniel E. Sickles as General in Chief McClellan stands between them.
JANUARY 9, 1862: Flag Officer David G. Farragut is ordered to command the Union’s West Gulf Blockading Squadron, which has been given a critical mission: the capture of New Orleans, the largest city in the Confederacy.160
JANUARY 10, 1862: Still distressed over the continuing inaction of McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, President Lincoln writes a three-sentence note to Secretary of War Cameron on a letter he has just received from a commanding general in the West: “The within is a copy of a letter just received from General Halleck. It is exceedingly discouraging. As everywhere else, nothing can be done.” Lincoln is planning to do something about Cameron, however. For some time, he has been receiving complaints of mismanagement and corruption in War Department operations, and his own estimation of Cameron’s effectiveness is such that he has met with Secretary of State Seward to discuss candidates for a replacement secretary of war.161
JANUARY 13, 1862: In a letter to Brigadier General Don Carlos Buell, Lincoln reveals the effectiveness of his study of military matters, and his overall strategy for winning the war: “[M]y general idea of this war [is] that we have the greater numbers, and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision; that we must fail, unless we can find some way of making our advantage an over-match for his; and that this can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points, at the same time; so that we can safely attack, one, or both, if he makes no change; and if he weakens one to strengthen the other, forbear to attack the strengthened one, but seize, and hold the weakened one, gaining so much.”162
Manuscript draft of page one of President Lincoln’s two-page General War Order No. 1, January 27, 1862, by which the president tried, unsuccessfully, to spur General in Chief McClellan to take some definite (preferably multifront) action against Confederate forces.
JANUARY 15, 1862: Simon Cameron is gently removed from the cabinet, leaving to become U.S. envoy to Russia, and the U.S. Senate confirms Edwin M. Stanton as the new secretary of war. A formidable lawyer whose initial impressions of Lincoln were far from favorable, he will prove to be exceptionally energetic and efficient in the challenging post.163
JANUARY 16, 1862: The balance of naval power on the western rivers tilts further to the Union with the commissioning of seven ironclad river gunboats, including Carondelet, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, all of which will prove essential in forthcoming combined (army and navy) operations.164
JANUARY 19, 1862: Nine days after both Union and Confederate forces claim victory in an engagement at Middle Creek in eastern Kentucky, Confederate brigadier general Felix Zollicoffer is killed and Union troops under Brigadier General George H. Thomas push a Confederate force under Major General George B. Crittenden back across the Cumberland River at the battle of Mill Springs (Logan’s Cross Road), one of the two principal Civil War battles in that border state. Eastern Kentucky will remain under Union control until Confederate major general Braxton Bragg launches an offensive in the summer.165
JANUARY 27, 1862: Impatient with the inactivity of Union armies, and under increasing pressure from the press and Radical Republican members of Congress, President Lincoln takes the unprecedented step of issuing General War Order No. 1, which “Ordered that the 22d of February 1862, be the day for a general movement of the Land and Naval forces of the United States against the insurgent forces.” General McClellan does not approve of the order. Four days later he will meet with the president at the White House and offer to deliver comprehensive objections in writing. The resulting twenty-two-page paper includes a rationale for a movement toward Urbanna at the mouth of Virginia’s Rappahannock River, aimed at flanking Joe Johnston’s army and isolating Confederate batteries plaguing Union traffic on the lower Potomac River. Despite the president’s continuing efforts to put McClellan’s army on the offensive, there will be no forward movement in February.166
JANUARY 31, 1862: With passage of the Railways and Telegraph Act, the U.S. Congress authorizes the president to take over any railroad “when in his judgment the public safety may require it.” Though the measure is rarely used in the Northern territory proper, it will be the basis of major U.S. government railroad activity in the occupied South. Also today, President Lincoln issues Special War Order No. 1, specifically aimed at forcing McClellan to launch the Army of the Potomac on offensive operations in Virginia.167
FEBRUARY
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Capture of Fort Henry by U.S. Gun Boats. Color lithograph by Strobridge & Co., n.d.
FEBRUARY 3, 1862: The Union government decides to treat captured Confederate privateer (nonmilitary raider) crews as prisoners of war rather than pirates—thus averting eye-for-an-eye executions of Union prisoners of war. Confederate privateers will gradually be displaced, however, by commerce raiders, such as Raphael Semmes, who are military personnel.168 Also today, Maintaining his international diplomatic correspondence (which thus far has included missives to such far-flung heads of state as the queens of England and Spain, the Tycoon of Japan, and the viceroy of Egypt), President Lincoln writes to the King of Siam, thanking him for his letters and gifts that will be deposited in “the archives of the Government”—and politely noting that one gift, “a stock from which a supply of elephants might be raised on our own soil,” would, regrettably, not be as useful as his majesty hoped: “Our political jurisdiction does not reach a latitude so low as to favor the multiplication of the elephant, and steam on land, as well as on water, has been our best and most efficient agent of transportation in internal commerce.”169
FEBRUARY 6, 1862: Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant and Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote launch what is intended to be a combined army-navy operation against Fort Henry, Tennessee, a bastion on the Tennessee River near the middle of the Confederate western defensive line. The operation does not go exactly as planned. The fort, poorly placed on low ground overlooked by hills, is so weakly defended (some of its cannons are submerged due to recent flooding and its garrison numbers less than thirty-five hundred) that its commander, Brigadier General Lloyd Tilghman, orders all but about one hundred artillerymen to withdraw to Fort Donelson, some ten miles away. A smashing riverine attack by Foote’s men overcomes the artillerymen’s defense (though not without some damage to Foote’s vessels), and Tilghman surrenders the fort before Grant and his troops arrive. Loss of the fort, which opens the Tennessee River to Union gunboats and shipping as far as Muscle Shoals, Alabama, will impel the Confederate military department commander, General Albert Sidney Johnston, to withdraw with half his troops from Bowling Green, Kentucky, to Nashville, Tennessee. He will dispatch the other half of his force to Fort Donelson, which will be Grant’s next objective.170
The Burnside Expedition Landing at Roanoke Island—Feb. 7th 1862. Color lithograph by Sachse & Co., n.d. “Burnside threw out a large force which landed & walked over a Swamp—which our engineers had pronounced impassable!,” horror-stricken Southern diarist Catherine Edmondston wrote on February 10. “When will our rulers begin to think that we have a deadly & determined foe to conquer.”
Brigadier General Daniel C. McCallum (1815–1878), USA. Photograph by the Brady National Photographic Art Gallery, between 1860 and 1865.
FEBRUARY 7, 1862: Confederate flag officer William F. Lynch sends an official report to his superiors from the waters off Roanoke Island, North Carolina: “Sir: I have the honor to report that the enemy, at 10 a.m. to-day, with twenty-two heavy steamers and one tug, made an attack upon this squadron and the battery at Pork Point.” Lynch faces, and is soon defeated by, elements of a Union naval flotilla of nearly one hundred ships, commanded by Flag Officer Louis M. Goldsborough, part of an amphibious operation that lands seventy-five hundred infantry under Major General Ambrose Burnside on this inadequately defended Confederate outpost. Although three thousand Southerners under Colonel H. M. Shaw do what they can to resist, they are forced to surrender on February 8—a loss that inspires distress and recriminations throughout the Confederacy. With Roanoke Island secure, the Union is able to tighten its blockade of Southern ports.171
FEBRUARY 11, 1862: U.S. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton establishes the United States Military Railroads (see also April 22, 1862), and President Lincoln issues an executive order effectively appointing engineer Daniel McCallum, former official of the New York & Erie Railroad, superintendent. McCallum is charged with ensuring the “safe and speedy transport” of men and supplies, a task that will become more challenging as the war—and the military railroad system—expand. (Beginning with seven miles of Virginia railway, McCallum will ultimately control 2,105 miles of track extending as far south as the Division of the Mississippi.) In the Confederate States, control of railroads will not be as centralized or efficient. States jealously guard their own railroad systems, so the Southern network will include many different gauges; and most rail lines will remain unconnected, forcing military and civilian suppliers to transport goods by wagon between them.172
FEBRUARY 12, 1862: Ulysses S. Grant and fifteen thousand Union troops arrive outside Fort Donelson, Tennessee, on the Cumberland River, where Grant positions his forces as he waits for Flag Officer Andrew Foote’s naval flotilla. It will arrive two days later—and be forced to withdraw after receiving a drubbing from Confederate guns well placed on high ground above the river. Unlike the contest for Fort Henry (see February 6, 1862), the battle for Donelson will be an army affair.
FEBRUARY 15, 1862: Despite the repulse of the Union naval assault, Fort Donelson’s commanding officer, prewar U.S. cabinet member John B. Floyd, convinced that the fort cannot be defended, orders elements of his Confederate force to break through Union lines so that the garrison might withdraw toward Nashville. Men in Confederate gray and Union blue grapple in the cold, snowy day until finally Grant’s troops push the Confederates back to the fort. Floyd then determines that someone must surrender Donelson—but leaves that odious task to Brigadier General Simon B. Buckner as Floyd himself along with his second in command, Gideon Pillow, and some twenty-five hundred men escape by boat under cover of a wind-and-sleet-laced night. (Disgusted with Floyd’s action, Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest of the Third Tennessee Cavalry—who will prove to be one of the South’s most effective cavalry officers—also leads his troopers out.) As they leave, and amid the random firing of Union and Confederate soldiers, the U.S. Sanitary Commission hospital ship City of Memphis quietly arrives, shades covering its portholes to block any light that might give its position away to enemy gunners. Among its passengers is Mary Ann Bickerdyke (see May 26 and June 9, 1861), who will help care for the wounded once stretcher-bearers are able to bring them to safety.173
Battle of Fort Donelson—Capture of General S. B. Buckner and His Army, February 16th 1862. Color lithograph by Kurz & Allison, 1887. Grant’s first major victory of the war, the Union capture of Donelson opened the way for Union progress into the South.
FEBRUARY 16, 1862: General Grant replies to General Buckner’s request for terms of surrender: “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.” The Confederate commander—who had been at West Point with Grant, served with him in the Mexican War, and later loaned Grant money to see him through a tight time—unhappily yields to what he deems in his reply Grant’s “ungenerous and unchivalrous terms.” After the surrender, stretcher-bearers search for wounded who have survived the bitter-cold night. One man they save will be the son of respected legal scholar and passionate Unionist Francis Lieber. When Lieber visits Tennessee to comfort his son, he will meet General Henry W. Halleck—an encounter that will ultimately result in an important step in the governance of wartime military forces (see April 24, 1863). In the meantime, news of the Donelson victory, and Grant’s ultimatum, sweeps through the North—and “Unconditional Surrender” Grant, who has opened the way for further operations deep into Confederate territory, enters the limelight.174
FEBRUARY 18, 1862: As the permanent Confederate Congress convenes in Richmond, Virginia, Union commanders Ambrose Burnside and Louis Goldsborough, recent victors at Roanoke Island (see February 7, 1862), issue a proclamation to the people of North Carolina: “The mission of our joint expedition is not to invade any of your rights, but to assert the authority of the United States, and to close with you the desolating war brought upon your State by comparatively a few bad men in your midst…. They impose upon your credulity by telling you of wicked and even diabolical intentions on our part… all of which, we assure you, is… utterly and willfully false…. Those men are your worst enemies. They, in truth, have drawn you into your present condition.”175
FEBRUARY 20, 1862: At the White House, elation over Grant’s Tennessee victories is erased by terrible grief when eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln, the apple of his father’s eye, dies at 5:00 PM of typhoid fever, from which he has been suffering for two agonizing weeks. The president bursts into tears as he tells his secretary John Nicolay, “my boy is gone—he is actually gone!” He will twice order that Willie’s body be exhumed so that he can look on the boy’s face again. Suffering convulsions of anguish, Mary Lincoln will take to her bed for three weeks and later seek solace through spiritualism and séances—something many other people will do as Civil War casualties mount. Eight-year-old Tad Lincoln, also critically ill, will be equally inconsolable once he recovers, repeatedly crying that he will never be able to talk to Willie again.176
Major-General Ulysses S. Grant, USA, the Hero of Fort Donelson. Wood engraving published in Harper’s Weekly, March 8, 1862. This issue of Harper’s introduced Grant, wearing the longer beard he sported early in the war, to a wide Northern public eager to see some progress in the Union’s war effort.
Willie Lincoln (standing at center) with his brother Tad (right) and their cousin Lockwood Todd. Photograph by the Brady National Photographic Art Gallery, ca. 1861.
