Major General Don Carlos Buell (1818–1898), USA. An 1841 graduate of West Point, Buell helped George B. McClellan organize the Army of the Potomac in 1861. His timely arrival at the Shiloh battlefield in April 1862 proved the high point of his Civil War service—which reached its nadir when he failed to pursue Braxton Bragg’s Confederates as they withdrew from Kentucky that October.
Illustration on a Civil War–era envelope. Concern over maintaining proper control of the slave population as war increasingly disrupted Southern life resulted in the October 1862 draft exemption for overseers of twenty or more slaves.
OCTOBER 8, 1862: The Confederate Heartland Campaign (see August 14, 28, and 30) comes to an unsuccessful conclusion at the battle of Perryville (Chaplin Hills), Kentucky, a disjointed clash in which only portions of each force are engaged. Deemed at least a partial Union victory, this battle, the largest fought in Kentucky, precipitates what many in the South will consider a premature Confederate withdrawal to Tennessee. Though Braxton Bragg is subject to a barrage of criticism for the disappointing outcome of this operation, President Davis will leave him in command of the Confederacy’s Western Department. Union general Don Carlos Buell will not be as fortunate: his overcautious and quickly abandoned pursuit of Bragg’s army after Perryville will cause public outrage in the North. He will be replaced by General William S. Rosecrans on October 24.79
OCTOBER 10–12, 1862: Jeb Stuart leads his Confederate cavalry on a raid into Pennsylvania, during which he and his men secure valuable information, dozens of prisoners, and twelve hundred fresh horses. For the second time (see June 12–16, 1862), Stuart embarrasses the Union by riding completely around McClellan’s army, despite the Federal cavalry’s furious attempts to catch him. “Humiliating” and “disgraceful” are two words Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles uses in his diary to describe the incident, and he adds, “The country groans.”80
OCTOBER 11, 1862: The Confederate government expands draft exemptions for various occupations. Among those added are owners or overseers of twenty or more slaves, a provision that creates considerable resentment among poorer white families and raises objections by some Confederate senators, who call it legislation “in favour of slave labour against white labour.” On the high seas, the Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama, captained by Raphael Semmes, sinks the Union ship Manchester, loaded with grain.81
OCTOBER 13, 1862: “You remember my speaking to you of what I called your over-cautiousness,” President Lincoln writes at the beginning of a long, carefully reasoned letter urging McClellan to move. “Are you not over-cautious when you assume that you can not do what the enemy is constantly doing? Should you not claim to be at least his equal in prowess, and act upon the claim?” In Illinois, the Chicago Tribune editorializes: “What malign influence palsies our army and wastes these glorious days for fighting? If it is McClellan, does not the President see that he is a traitor?”82
OCTOBER 14, 1862: Congressional elections in four Northern states result in gains for the Democratic Party, which generally favors a negotiated settlement with the Confederacy (the Peace Democrats more so than the War Democrats) and opposes emancipation. Other elections this fall will see Democratic gains in some state legislatures and two governors’ mansions. Although these gains are far from sweeping (due in large measure to the victory at Antietam and Lee’s retreat from Northern soil), most Democrats are greatly heartened and most Republicans greatly concerned that the election results indicate waning support for Republican war aims, including the principal goal of reuniting the divided Union.83
General M’Clellan Endorses Governor Curtin. Broadside published in Sharpsburg, Md., 1862. Although he was a dedicated Democrat, McClellan on this occasion saluted the Republican governor of Pennsylvania for calling out the militia to aid in defending against Lee’s first incursion into Northern territory.
Benjamin Wade (1800–1878), senator from Ohio, Thirty-fifth Congress. Photograph, ca. 1859, by Julian Vannerson. One of George B. McClellan’s severest Radical Republican critics, Wade once told the general that the Army of the Potomac could “whip the whole Confederacy if they were given the chance; if I [Wade] were commander.”
OCTOBER 20, 1862: “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war,” the New York Times states, describing an exhibition of images taken on the Antietam battlefield by Alexander Gardner and James Gibson, two of Mathew Brady’s photographers. On display at Brady’s New York studio, The Dead of Antietam unveils, via images that evoke “a terrible fascination,” the rending human costs of this fratricidal conflict.84
OCTOBER 26, 1862: The Army of the Potomac finally begins to cross the Potomac River in pursuit of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. But its slow progress (the crossing itself takes more than six days) does little to temper President Lincoln’s frustrations, especially since McClellan’s deliberate pace allows Lee to deploy his troops between the Army of the Potomac and Richmond. Yet the president’s concern with McClellan’s generalship pales beside that of Radical Republicans in Congress, who have been increasingly critical of the general’s “soft war” policies and lack of aggressiveness. McClellan, meanwhile, has long maintained close ties with leaders of the Democratic Party, including influential newspaper editors, keeping them informed of his own complaints and accusations against his civilian superiors in Washington—partisan political activity wholly inappropriate for the commander of the Union’s largest army.85
OCTOBER 29, 1862: Some two and a half months before it will be officially mustered into the Union army on January 13, 1863, the First Kansas Volunteer Colored Infantry becomes the first black regiment to undergo a “baptism of fire” when some of its soldiers engage a unit of Confederate guerrillas at Island Mound, Missouri.86
General McClellan Accompanied by General Burnside Taking Leave of the Army of the Potomac. Pencil, Chinese white, and wash drawing by Alfred R. Waud, November 10, 1862. “In parting from you I cannot express the love and gratitude I bear to you,” McClellan said in his farewell address. “The glory you have achieved, our mutual perils and fatigues, the graves of our comrades fallen in battle and by disease… unite us still by an indissoluble tie.”
NOVEMBER
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
This unidentified girl in mourning dress is holding a framed photograph of a cavalryman, presumably her father, a casualty of the war.
NOVEMBER 5, 1862: With the fall elections concluded, and the Army of the Potomac still making glacial progress in pursuit of Lee (while McClellan fails to keep his superiors in Washington fully apprised of his movements and strategy), Lincoln makes a change. He sends Halleck an order “that Major General McClellan be relieved from the command of the Army of the Potomac; and that Major General Burnside take the command of that Army.” Two days later, in the midst of an early snow, General Catharinus P. Buckingham, dispatched from Washington by Secretary of War Stanton, arrives at Army of the Potomac headquarters in Virginia. He persuades a reluctant Burnside to accept his new command, in part by letting him know that, should he refuse, the command will go to Joseph Hooker, of whom Burnside has a less than stellar opinion. Both men proceed to McClellan’s tent, where Buckingham personally delivers the order. “I am sure that not a muscle quivered nor was the slightest expression of feeling visible on my face,” McClellan will write to his wife. “They shall not have that triumph.” On November 10, McClellan will conduct a final, emotional review of “his” army. Many soldiers weep; some officers urge McClellan to resist the change in command. But the general quiets those protests and leaves for Washington aboard a special train on November 11.87
NOVEMBER 10, 1862: “Your dispatch giving the names of three hundred Indians condemned to death, is received,” President Lincoln writes to Major General John Pope, now on duty in Minnesota. “Please forward, as soon as possible, the full and complete records of these convictions.” The president is dealing with the aftermath of a Sioux uprising that occurred from mid-August through September in which several hundred white Minnesotans were killed. Restricted to a narrow strip of land in south-central Minnesota and forbidden to hunt, the Indians had also been deprived of promised government food and supplies by unscrupulous whites (including trader Andrew Myrick, who reportedly said hungry Indians “should eat grass or their own dung”). After the fighting stopped, a military tribunal sentenced 303 Sioux to die by hanging and expected quick authorization for the executions from the commander in chief. But Lincoln will ask two lawyers to review the trial records and determine which of the condemned men actually led the uprising. The day after Christmas, 38 of the Sioux will be executed.88
PHOTOGRAPHING THE WAR
Brady, the Photographer, Returned from Bull Run, Photograph, July 22, 1861.
Decidedly one of the institutions of our army is the traveling portrait gallery,” a correspondent reported, via Moore’s Rural New-Yorker, in October 1862. “A camp is hardly pitched before one of the omnipresent artists in collodion and amber-bead varnish drives up his two-horse wagon, pitches his canvas gallery, and unpacks his chemicals. Our army here (Fredericksburg) is now so large that quite a company of these gentlemen have gathered about us…. Their tents are thronged from morning to night.”
An unidentified soldier in the Confederate uniform of Company E, “Lynchburg Rifles,” Eleventh Virginia Infantry. Photograph by Charles R. Rees, ca. 1861.
Developed in the 1830s by Frenchmen Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce and Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre, and almost simultaneously by England’s William Henry Fox Talbot, the young art of photography grew in popularity during the 1850s with the introduction of stereoscopic images (photographs that became three-dimensional when viewed through a handheld stereoscope) and cartes de visite (visiting cards featuring paper prints of individual portrait photographs). By 1860 it had advanced enough to become a vivid means of documenting the Civil War.
Between 1860 and 1865, Civil War photographers took an estimated one million photographs. The vast majority of these images were taken by Northern cameramen. A lack of supplies and operating capital made Southern photographers—who were much less numerous than those based in the North in the prewar years—extremely scarce after the early years of the conflict. Yet photographs taken by Southerners George Smith Cook, J. D. Edwards, A. J. Lytle, James M. Osborn (with his business partner, F. W. Durbec), and Julian Vannerson have survived to enrich the visual archive. Documenting the war, and the people who fought it, photographers faced a number of challenges, particularly the problems involved in transporting cameras, tripods, lenses, chemicals, glass plates, distilled water, measuring cups, developing trays, portable darkrooms, and other assorted gear, weighing between 100 and 150 pounds. The odd conveyances photographers generally used to carry their gear were soon dubbed what-is-it? wagons by the soldiers. Once these peculiar wagons halted, and the photographers set up to shoot, they had to take the time, and make certain their bulky cameras were stable enough, to ensure that they got a proper exposure for each shot. The required exposure time and the need for stability are what made “action photography” all but impossible. (Capturing battlefield action was the province of special artist-correspondents; see “Reporting the War,” here.)
The most prominent name associated with Civil War photography is Mathew Brady (1823?–1896), an early and ardent student of photography who opened his own daguerreotype studio in New York City in 1844 and a second studio, run by brilliant Scottish photographer Alexander Gardner, in Washington, DC, in 1858. From then until 1863, when Gardner opened his own studio, the two men worked together to make an indelible mark on American history. Gardner almost certainly helped Brady organize a corps of photographers to document the war soon after the firing started. Photographers were assigned to cover various Union armies and areas of operation, with Brady securing permits and ample cooperation from Federal authorities while paying all expenses himself. Prominent wartime figures also sat for portraits in Brady’s studios. The toll the war was taking on President Lincoln is vividly evident in a series of Brady studio portraits made from 1860 to 1865. Photographs of battlefield leaders who, as one reporter wrote, “are as brilliant but as distant from us as planets” placed civilians “upon whispering terms with the Generals who are now to the nation as gods.”
James Gibson and Timothy H. O’Sullivan (both affiliated with Brady during the first half of the war), Gardner, and Brady himself, along with independent photographer George N. Barnard, all made stunning contributions to the visual record of this bitter conflict. Other cameramen, who descended on army camps to take portrait photographs purely for profit, added their own haunting gallery of faces, many of them of people now unknown to us, to the perpetually moving photographic history of the American Civil War.89
The wagons and camera of Sam A. Cooley, U.S. photographer, Department of the South, between 1861 and 1865.
Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Gallery, Seventh and D streets, NW, Washington, DC, ca. 1863.
NOVEMBER 14, 1862: General in Chief Halleck notifies General Burnside that the president has approved Burnside’s plan to cross the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg, Virginia, midway between Washington and Richmond, in order to surprise Lee and turn the Army of Northern Virginia’s flank. Lincoln’s caveat is that the plan “will succeed if you move rapidly; otherwise not.” Secrecy will also be essential, lest Lee divine Burnside’s intentions and fortify the heights around the town. Burnside will run into trouble from the very beginning: Organizational snafus will delay by almost two weeks the arrival of pontoon bridges needed to cross the river; and, soon after the plan is approved, the Northern press will start publicly debating its merits.90
The Court Martial of Major General Fitz-John Porter. Pencil drawing by Alfred R. Waud, December 1862. A still controversial legal proceeding with heavy political overtones, the court-martial resulted in a presidential order issued January 21, 1863, that Porter be “cashiered and dismissed from the service… and forever disqualified from holding any office of trust or profit under the Government of the United States.”
Major General Fitz John Porter (1822–1901), USA, between 1860 and 1870.
NOVEMBER 17, 1862: Having learned of Lincoln’s “astonishing step” of relieving McClellan and appointing Burnside, North Carolina’s Catherine Edmondston etches an acid character sketch of the Union’s new Army of the Potomac commander in her diary:
Burnside is the valiant gentleman who came here to NC to subdue us last winter [see February 7, 1862] & who… issued a proclamation to assure us he was “a Christian,” but his after acts… showed that he was either a hypcrite [sic] or a backslider. Witness the ravages & thefts of his command through the whole Eastern part of our State—“the most Christian Gen Burnside,” we salute you! & hope that our Gen Lee will give you a reception worthy your [sic] merits and distinguished Christianity.91
In Washington, the War Department charges General Fitz John Porter with disobeying orders during the Second Bull Run Campaign. A confidant of George B. McClellan (sharing McClellan’s dim view of John Pope, under whom Porter served at Bull Run) and an outspoken critic of the Lincoln administration’s war policies, Porter was relieved of command of the Army of the Potomac’s Fifth Corps by the same order that relieved McClellan (see November 5, 1862). His court-martial will reflect the corrosive political currents affecting the North’s war effort: held as the Union recoils from a devastating military defeat (see December 13, 1862), it will be tainted by personal prejudice, political bias, and false testimony. Convicted and cashiered from the army in January, Porter will fight to have his conviction reversed, and he will be exonerated—in 1879.92
NOVEMBER 21, 1862: President Davis appoints Virginian James Alexander Seddon secretary of war, the fifth man thus far to serve in the post under a president who tends to operate as his own war secretary. Seddon will serve the longest, remaining in office until early 1865, perhaps because he will choose to operate principally as an administrator and Davis partisan.93
NOVEMBER 27, 1862: “I have just had a long conference with Gen. Burnside,” President Lincoln writes General Halleck, from a ship off Aquia Creek, Virginia. “He believes that Gen. Lees whole army, or nearly the whole of it is in front of him, at and near Fredericksburg. Gen. B. says… that he thinks he can cross the river in face of the enemy and drive him away, but that, to use his own expression, it is somewhat risky.” Across the Rappahannock River, General Lee writes President Davis: “The reports of the scouts received today state that the whole force of the enemy is concentrated between Fredericksburg and Aquia Creek…. Their object may be to make a winter campaign, under the belief that our troops will not be sufficiently guarded against the cold for operations in the field. Our army at present is in good health, and I think capable of making a strong resistance.”94
DECEMBER
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
The First Snow Storm. Gen Pleasanton Advancing from Orleans to Waterloo via Warrington [sic], 6th Nov. Pencil and Chinese white drawing by Arthur Lumley, November 6, 1862. This early Virginia snowstorm heralded the onset of winter, “and winter in Virginia,” as Army of the Potomac soldier Oliver Willcox Norton wrote, on December 6, 1862, “is just as fatal to a campaign as frost is to cucumbers, or arsenic to rats.” Yet this winter, Virginia would see one more terrible battle.
DECEMBER 2, 1862: In some areas of the Confederacy, shortages and enemy armies are not the most immediate home front worries. Civilians are also plagued by bands of marauders, some of them legally organized under the Partisan Ranger Act (see April 21, 1862), some of them not. “We look to you for protection,” a “Minister of the Gospel” writes to Georgia governor Joseph Brown today, from “so called Partizan [sic] rangers who have formed them selves into companies.” These lawless bands are stealing food, thus “robbing little children who will have to suffer after bread. We must have help or our county is ruined.”95
DECEMBER 7, 1862: At Prairie Grove, Arkansas, on this bitter cold day, a Confederate bid to regain control of northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri fails when Rebels under Major General Thomas C. Hindman (including Missouri “bushwackers” led by William C. Quantrill) are defeated in an encounter with Federals under Major General James G. Blunt and Major General Francis J. Herron. After the battle, Union troops will find many unwounded Confederates frozen to death on the battlefield.96
DECEMBER 11, 1862: At about 2:00 am, Union engineers, covered by infantry and artillery, begin laying pontoon bridges across the Rappahannock River. When the fifteen hundred Confederate infantrymen occupying Fredericksburg have enough light to take aim, their fire initiates a daylong struggle during which Union detachments cross the river by boat, Federal artillery smashes buildings and sets raging fires, and infantrymen engage in bitter house-to-house fighting. Late in the day, Robert E. Lee wires Adjutant and Inspector General Samuel Cooper: “Enemy… succeeded in driving back our sharpshooters and occupying Fredericksburg…. We hold the hills around the city.” The following day, as loss of the element of surprise and questions over Burnside’s battle plan raise doubts among some Union officers, the bulk of the Army of the Potomac will cross the completed pontoon bridges and occupy the town, where many soldiers will descend into anarchy: “we stole or destroyed everything in the City,” Private Roland E. Bowen, of the Fifteenth Massachusetts, will write to his mother, “great was the ransacking thereof.”97
Night. The Sacking of Fredericksburg—& Bivouac of Union Troops. Pencil drawing by Arthur Lumley, December 12, 1862.
DECEMBER 12, 1862: General William T. Sherman makes feverish preparations to sail with thirty-two thousand men down the Mississippi River to a position just above Vicksburg, where they will attack that Confederate bastion from the north, while Grant and his troops divert Confederate attention by approaching from the east. Shipping requirements alone will cause some delays as the expedition begins. Confederate “torpedoes” (mines) will further slow the expedition as Sherman’s troops and their naval escort under Commander David Dixon Porter reach their destination (see December 29, 1862).98
DECEMBER 13, 1862: The Union suffers one of its worst defeats of the Civil War when Major General Ambrose Burnside sends the Army of the Potomac—in formation and over open ground—against General Robert E. Lee’s smaller Army of Northern Virginia, well positioned in the hills beyond Fredericksburg, Virginia. “When within some three hundred yards of the rebel works, the men burst into a cheer and charged,” Union soldier Josiah Marshall Favill will write in his diary, after surviving the battle.
Immediately the hill in front was hid from view by a continuous sheet of flame…. The rebel infantry poured in a murderous fire while their guns from every available point fired shot and shell and canister. The losses were so tremendous, that before we knew it our momentum was gone, and the charge a failure…. I wondered while I lay there how it all came about that these thousands of men in broad daylight were trying their best to kill each other. Just then there was no romance, no glorious pomp, nothing but disgust for the genius who planned so frightful a slaughter.
London Times reporter Francis Charles Lawley witnesses the wholesale bloodletting from Confederate lines and will report on its stunning cost: “There, in every attitude of death, lying so close to each other that you might step from body to body, lay acres of the Federal dead…. [within the town] layers of corpses stretched in the balconies of houses as though taking a siesta…. [M]ore appalling to look at [were]… piles of arms and legs, amputated as soon as their owners had been carried off the field.” In all, eighteen thousand men of both sides are killed, wounded, or missing this bloody day; two-thirds of the casualties are Union. Waves of shock, dismay, and anger will ripple through the North as the extent of the disaster becomes known. Democratic newspapers will blame the administration, Manton Marble’s New York World editorializing: “Again have you, Abraham Lincoln, by the hands of Henry Halleck and Edwin M. Stanton sent to death thousands upon thousands of our brothers and friends.” Some will demand that McClellan be reinstated.99
Uebergang über den Rappahannock [Crossing the Rappahannock]. This rare German color lithograph depicting the first stages of the battle of Fredericksburg reflects European interest in the war—often stemming from personal connections. An estimated 1.3 million Germans lived in the United States (North and South) during the Civil War; between 180,000 and 216,000 served in the Union army, and an estimated 18,000 wore Confederate gray. Among the all-German units serving the North were Illinois’s Hecker Jaeger Regiment, Blenker’s Division, under the command of Louis (Ludwig) Blenker, and the Thirty-second Indiana Infantry.
Rebel Pickets Dead in Fredericksburg. Pencil drawing by either Alfred R. Waud or Arthur Lumley, December 1862. Written on the back of this drawing is the following inscription: “Six Rebel Pickets—lay dead in front of this city, and up to Sunday were not buried—they wore the U.S. overcoat over the secesch.—they were killed when the Union forces were building the Pontoon bridge—a good many lay scattered around with dead horses.”
DECEMBER 18, 1862: “[T]he country is gone unless something is done at once,” Senator Zachariah Chandler writes to his wife. “We must have men in command of our armies who are anxious to crush the rebellion.” Many Republicans believe one major problem rests with conservative elements within the country’s civilian leadership. This evening a delegation of nine Republican senators presents a resolution to President Lincoln calling for “a partial reconstruction of the Cabinet.” Both Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward have been forewarned that Seward is the senators’ particular target, his conduct, and that of the cabinet in general, having been repeatedly, if cautiously, maligned by Secretary of the Treasury Chase. During a long and difficult meeting on the evening of December 19, Lincoln will patiently and deftly defuse the cabinet crisis. Seward will remain at his post.100
DECEMBER 21, 1862: “It seems to me now clearly developed that the enemy has two principal objects in view,” President Davis, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, writes Trans-Mississippi Department commander General T. H. Holmes, “one to get control of the Missi. River, and the other to capture the capital of the Confederate States…. [T]o prevent the enemy getting control of the Mississippi and dismembering the Confederacy, we must mainly depend upon maintaining the points already occupied by defensive works; to-wit, Vicksburg and Port Hudson.” Vicksburg is the principal object of operations by Ulysses S. Grant’s western theater army, but things are not going well. On December 20, Confederate cavalry under Major General Earl Van Dorn raided Grant’s secondary supply depot at Holly Springs, Mississippi, capturing the entire fifteen-hundred-man Union garrison and destroying munitions and food. Similar action by Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry in Tennessee and Kentucky temporarily severed Grant’s communications with the North, forcing Grant to suspend his movement toward Vicksburg and withdraw to Oxford, Mississippi. These setbacks, Grant will write in his memoirs,
caused much rejoicing among the people remaining in Oxford. They came with broad smiles… to ask what I was going to do now without anything for my soldiers to eat. I told them… that I had already sent troops and wagons to collect all the food and forage they could find for fifteen miles on each side of the road. Countenances soon changed, and so did the inquiry. The next was, “What are we to do?” My response was that we had endeavored to feed ourselves from our own northern resources… but their friends in gray had been uncivil enough to destroy what we had brought along, and it could not be expected that men, with arms in their hands, would starve in the midst of plenty. I advised them to emigrate east, or west, fifteen miles and assist in eating up what we left.101
These rough pencil sketches by Alfred R. Waud are an artistic “tribute” to a common soldier activity—sometimes officially sanctioned, as with Grant’s campaigns for Vicksburg, more often ad hoc. “Every mess has and carries a grater—the boys call them Armstrong mills,” Confederate infantryman Douglas J. Cater wrote in June 1862; “and as the corn in the fields we pass has not been gathered these mills keep us supplied with meal when the commissariat fails to give us our three dodgers per day.”
Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Photographic print on a carte de visite; photograph by Mathew Brady, ca. 1862.
DECEMBER 29: Unaware that Grant has been forced to suspend his advance on Vicksburg, and plagued by bad weather, the atrocious terrain along the Yazoo River, and formidable Confederate defenses, William Sherman launches his attack on the outer defenses of Vicksburg. Nothing about the battle of Chickasaw Bluffs (Chickasaw Bayou) goes well for the Union: some Federal troops become lost, others are lacerated by Confederate crossfire, heavy rain falls, and the Yazoo rises to dangerous levels. “This has been a dreadful disaster,” a distraught Sherman tells his naval counterpart, David Dixon Porter, tonight. Grant’s first campaign against Vicksburg thus comes to a close, but Grant and Sherman remain determined to keep pressure on the city.102 From Washington, poet Walt Whitman writes to his mother:
I landed here without a dime. The next two days I spent hunting through the hospitals, walking day and night… trying to get information…. When I found dear brother George [who had been wounded at Fredericksburg], and found that he was alive and well, O you may imagine how trifling all my little cares and difficulties seemed…. And now that I… realize the way that hundreds of thousands of good men are now living, and have had to live for a year or more, not only without any of the comforts, but with death and sickness and hard marching and hard fighting (and no success at that) for their continual experience—really nothing we call trouble seems worth talking about.
Whitman will soon devote himself to the care of wounded and sick soldiers.103
DECEMBER 31, 1862: While under tow off the coast of North Carolina near Cape Hatteras, USS Monitor founders in a storm at about 1:00 am. Four officers and twelve men are lost; forty-seven crewmen are rescued by USS Rhode Island. (In 1973, the Monitor wreck will be located and, in 1975, the site will be designated as the nation’s first marine sanctuary.)104
DECEMBER 31, 1862–JANUARY 2, 1863: After a combat-eve musical interlude, during which men of both sides joined in singing “Home Sweet Home,” Braxton Bragg’s thirty-eight-thousand-man Confederate Army of Tennessee smashes into the right of William Rosecrans’s forty-seven-thousand-man Union Army of the Cumberland to begin the battle of Murfreesboro (Stones River). It becomes the most deadly battle of the war in proportion to the number of troops fighting, with more than one-third of the Confederate force killed, wounded, or missing, and 31 percent Union casualties. “The balls flew around us like hail stones,” Confederate lieutenant James B. Mitchell will write to his father. “[O]ur company suffered very severely. Six men were killed outright & 14 wounded…. Two men… next to me… were shot dead in their tracks. One receiving a ball in his breast & the other through his head and his brains came out. I saw it myself…. At the same time a ball passed through both the coats I had on, my overcoat & blue frock coat, but thank God I was not hurt.” On January 1 there is a lull in the fighting. “Both armies want rest,” Union brigadier general John Beatty notes in his diary,
both have suffered terribly. Here and there little parties are engaged burying the dead, which lie thick around us…. A little before sundown all hell seems to break loose again, and for about an hour the thunder of the artillery and volleys of musketry are deafening; but it is simply the evening salutations of the combatants. The darkness deepens; the weather is raw and disagreeable. Fifty thousand hungry men are stretched beside their guns again on the field. Fortunately I have a piece of raw pork and a few crackers in my pocket. No food ever tasted sweeter.
Across the battlefield, young Lieutenant Mitchell welcomes the night with two comrades: “we slept by turns… wrapped in the wet blanket & sitting up by the side of a tree.” The next day, the fierce combat is renewed and Union forces eventually push the Confederates back. Regarded as a Union victory, this costly encounter will raise spirits in the North, which so recently suffered the stinging defeat at Fredericksburg. “I can never forget, whilst I remember anything,” President Lincoln will write to Rosecrans, “you gave us a hard earned victory which, had there been a defeat instead, the nation could hardly have lived over.”105
Sergeant Major Edward Paul Reichhelm, of the Third Missouri Volunteers, included this hand-drawn map of the Chickasaw Bayou Campaign in his memoir of the Federal attempts to take Vicksburg. “There was nothing but deep impassable swamp and water,” Reichhelm wrote, “and the only possible way of reaching the bluff was the dike. But that this was impossible, as long as the rebels had gunpowder is apparent from the above rough sketch; in fact every inch of the dike was under their fire…. To carry this position… we all made up our minds to die for our country’s cause, for nothing else could be the result of a charge upon that position!”
Captain George Washington Whitman (1829–1901), USA, between 1860 and 1866.
Battle of Stone River, Near Murfreesborough, Tenn. Dec. 31, 62. Jan. 2–3 1863. Color lithograph by Kurz & Allison, 1891.
JANUARY
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
1863
Celebrations of the Emancipation Proclamation were widespread, and some were particularly poignant. This wood engraving from the January 24, 1863, edition of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper depicts “Emancipation Day in South Carolina”—the Color-Sergeant of the 1st South Carolina (Colored) addressing the regiment, after having been presented with the Stars and Stripes, at Smith’s plantation, Port Royal, January 1.
JANUARY 1, 1863: Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation. A stronger document than the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (see September 22, 1862), it sanctions the enlistment of black soldiers and sailors “of suitable condition [who] will… garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and… man vessels of all sorts.” Expanding Union war aims to include emancipation, thus changing the nature of the war, the proclamation sparks a huge celebration in Washington, as Henry M. Turner, the free black pastor of an African Methodist Episcopal church in the capital, will later report: “Great processions of colored and white men marched to and fro and passed in front of the White House and congratulated President Lincoln…. The President came to the window and made responsive bows, and thousands told him, if he would come out of the palace, they would hug him to death. Mr. Lincoln, however, kept at a safe distance from the multitude, who were frenzied to distraction over his proclamation…. It was indeed a time of times… nothing like it will ever be seen again in this life.” At the port city of Galveston, Texas, Confederate forces under John B. Magruder gain an impressive victory when they successfully attack the Union garrison and naval flotilla that have controlled the city since October. Galveston will remain in Confederate hands for the rest of the war, finally surrendering on June 2, 1865.106
JANUARY 7, 1863: The Democrat-controlled state legislature in President Lincoln’s home state of Illinois passes a resolution criticizing the president for turning the war into a mission to free the slaves and calls the Emancipation Proclamation “as unwarranted in military as in civil law” and “a gigantic usurpation.” The Valley Spirit, in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, declares the proclamation “unwise, ill-timed, outside of the Constitution and full of mischief” and predicts that it will increase Southern resistance and “make the war still more prolonged, bloody and bitter.” Lincoln can take heart from other Northern reactions, however: The Washington Morning Chronicle states that the proclamation “destroys the right arm of rebellion—African slavery,” and the New York Tribune calls it “a great stride toward restoration of the union.” A resolution passed by free black citizens of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, hails “the 1st day of January, 1863, as a new era in our country’s history.” Yet the resolution also includes a gentle criticism, and an expression of hope: “[If] our wishes had been consulted we would have preferred that the proclamation should have been general instead of partial; but we can only say to our brethren of the ‘Border States,’ be of good cheer—the day of your deliverance draweth nigh.”107
JANUARY 9, 1863: As the struggle for control of the Mississippi River continues, thirty-two thousand Federal troops under Major General John McClernand and a supporting naval squadron under Commander David Dixon Porter reach the Confederate bastion of Fort Hindman, at Arkansas Post, about fifty miles from the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers. Constructed in 1862 with the labor of some five hundred slaves, the fort, and the five-thousand-man Confederate garrison’s initial stout defense, will prove formidable obstacles for McClernand’s soldiers. Fierce bombardment from the naval squadron will be the decisive factor, forcing the Rebels to surrender the fort, with all its guns and supplies, on January 11. “I was at first disposed to disapprove of [the action] as an unnecessary side movement,” Ulysses S. Grant will later write. “But when the result was understood I regarded it as very important. Five thousand Confederate troops left in the rear might have caused us much trouble and loss of property while navigating the Mississippi.”108
King Abraham Before and After Issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, an illustration from the Southern Illustrated News, November 2, 1862, echoes Jefferson Davis’s reaction to Lincoln’s war-altering action and reflects the sentiment of most Southern whites.
JANUARY 11, 1863: Off Galveston, CSS Alabama under Raphael Semmes engages USS Hatteras, captained by Lieutenant H. C. Blake. This harrowing encounter, fought at times at very close quarters, results in Hatteras sinking, as Blake will later report, “with all her muskets and stores of every description, the enemy not being able… to obtain a single weapon.” After taking the rescued Union crew to Jamaica, Semmes will sail on to continue Alabama’s “appointed task,” as he will wryly note in his 1864 memoirs, “of annoying the enemy’s commerce.”109
JANUARY 12, 1863: In a message to the Confederate Congress, Jefferson Davis calls Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation “the most execrable measure in the history of guilty man” and vows to turn over captured Union officers to state governments for punishment as “criminals engaged in inciting servile insurrection”—a crime punishable by death.110
JANUARY 25, 1863: “Well, Burnside has moved again, and got stuck in the mud,” Oliver Willcox Norton, of the Eighty-third Pennsylvania Volunteers, writes to his sister. “That is the short of it. The long of it was the five days it took us to get six miles and back to camp. It beat all the Peninsula mud I ever saw, and demonstrated the falsity of Burnside’s theory that if twelve horses couldn’t draw a cannon twenty-four could. The more horses the worse it was.” Begun with high hopes on January 20, this attempt by Ambrose Burnside to flank Lee’s army by crossing the Rappahannock River above Fredericksburg, less than a month after he led the Army of the Potomac to a rending defeat at that town, will be infamous after the fact as Burnside’s “Mud March.” In Washington, Burnside meets with President Lincoln and asks him either to dismiss several officers serving under him or to accept Burnside’s own resignation. Lincoln relieves Burnside of command; he already has a replacement in mind.111
Why the Army of the Potomac Doesn’t Move. Four pencil and Chinese white drawings by Alfred R. Waud, 1862.
The Siege of Vicksburg, Its Approaches by Yazoo Pass and Other Routes. Lithograph by W. R. Robertson, Mobile, Alabama, 1863, after T. S. Hardee.
JANUARY 26, 1863: “I have placed you at the head of the Army of the Potomac,” Lincoln writes, in a remarkable letter to Major General Joseph Hooker. After noting Hooker’s many fine qualities, including bravery, skill as a soldier, self-confidence, and tempered ambition, the president chastises his new eastern theater commander for thwarting Burnside “as much as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country, and to a most meritorious and honorable brother officer.” Further, Lincoln cautions the new commander:
I have heard, in such way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship…. And now, beware of rashness… but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.112
FEBRUARY
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28
Abraham Lincoln. Letter to General Joseph Hooker, January 26, 1863.
FEBRUARY 2, 1863: Union troops under Lieutenant Colonel of Engineers James H. Wilson launch the Yazoo Pass expedition, an attempt to establish a water route to Vicksburg that will not bring Union boats in range of the city’s guns. Wilson’s men will succeed in cutting through a levee blocking the proposed route; but the Federal plan has been anticipated by Vicksburg’s commanding officer, Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton, whose name has been given to a small fort that will stymie Union progress. After repeated artillery assaults and infantry probes fail to dislodge the Confederates in the fort, the expedition will end in failure on March 20.113
FEBRUARY 10, 1863: “It is remarked that there never were so many women and children traveling as there are now,” Alabama-based Confederate nurse Kate Cumming writes in her diary. “Numbers of ladies, whose husbands are in the army, have been compelled to give up their homes for economy and protection, and seek others among their relatives…. We have a large floating population—the people who have been driven from their homes by the invader.”114
FEBRUARY 13, 1863: The legislative act granting Jefferson Davis the authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus expires. As the Confederate Congress debates an extension (which will not occur this year; see February 17, 1864), it demands an accounting of civilians currently held under suspicion of disloyalty by the War Department. The department responds with a list of 302 names.115
Chaplain Alexander M. Stewart (1814–1875), USA. The acutely observant Chaplain Stewart served with the Thirteenth Pennsylvania Volunteers (redesignated the 102nd after its first three-month tour of duty) and sent “almost weekly sketches” of life in the Union army to home-front newspapers.
FEBRUARY 14, 1863: Concerned with propaganda “efforts now being made by the enemies of the Government and the advocates of a disgraceful PEACE,” a group of influential New York civilians establish the Loyal Publication Society, dedicated to “the distribution of journals and documents of unquestionable and unconditional loyalty” to both civilians throughout the nation and Union troops wherever they are stationed. Headed, after the first year, by legal scholar Francis Lieber (see February 16, 1862, and April 24, 1863), the society will be cited by the New York Times as an organization that “deserves the support of every patriotic citizen who appreciates the importance of enlightening public sentiment as to the real objects of the war and the duties of a true loyalty.”116
FEBRUARY 22, 1863: “It seemed as though a great battle were opening,” Union chaplain A. M. Stewart will report, to a home-front newspaper, about “a heavy cannonade” that occurs on this day. It throws his camp, near Falmouth, Virginia, into an uproar over a surprise attack—until one laconic soldier, “who lay in his tent and counted the number of shots,” relieves his comrades’ apprehensions. “Thirty-four along the Union lines—Thirteen among the rebels [the number of states each side claimed]. ‘Salute,’ he shouted, ‘Washington’s birth-day.’ Ah, yes, how stupid not to have remembered. The excitement at once vanished, if not the veneration. Federals and Confederates both shooting at the memory of Washington! Fortunate, no doubt, that the old gentleman is dead…. The flames of this rebellion may yet consume all the seeming good our fathers accomplished.”117
FEBRUARY 25, 1863: The National Currency Act (which will be renewed and renamed the National Bank Act in 1864) becomes law in the Union, providing a framework for greater investment in government bonds, by which the war is being financed, and laying the groundwork for the banking system that will prevail for more than fifty years. Establishing a Currency Bureau in the Treasury Department, headed by a comptroller of the currency, the act adds fuel to Democrats’ suspicions that Republican wartime programs are attempting to “destroy the fixed institutions of the States, and to build up a central moneyed despotism.”118
FEBRUARY 26, 1863: The Cherokee Indian National Council repeals its ordinance of secession, abolishes slavery, and proclaims itself for the Union.119
“I Am Not Sick, I’m over Forty-Five,” sung to the now-forgotten tune “I Wish My Wife Had No Crying Baby.” This Civil War song is a waggish riff on the many dodges and excuses Northerners came up with to avoid conscription—including rapid aging: “I’m aches, I’m pains, from the head to the toe / I’m exempt, I’m exempt, from the draft, you must know!”
John S. Mosby (1833–1916), CSA. A captain at the time of his March 1863 raid on Fairfax Court House, the resourceful commander was a colonel by the end of the war.
MARCH
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Brigadier General William W. Averell (1832–1900), USA.
MARCH 3, 1863: President Lincoln signs “An Act for enrolling and calling out the National Forces, and for other purposes,” the first effective Federal conscription law—but one whose administration will prove so inefficient and corrupt that the act will be divisive during the war and a model of how not to frame a draft law thereafter. With certain exceptions, the law deems able-bodied males between twenty and forty-five eligible for service, leaving a large loophole available to those with ready cash: a man can hire a substitute or buy his way out for three hundred dollars. At the same time, with the war not going well and even such fierce loyalists as Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill writing, “The Rebs can’t be conquered by the present machinery,” the influence of the Peace Democrats, led by Clement L. Vallandigham, of Ohio, is on the rise. In the Confederacy, organizations in favor of peace and rejoining the Union are forming, including the Peace and Constitution Society in Arkansas, the Peace Society in northern Alabama and northern Georgia, and the Heroes of America in western North Carolina and east Tennessee—although they will not be as influential as Copperheads are in the Union. Also today, Congress passes the Habeas Corpus Act, legitimizing Lincoln’s previous suspensions of the writ (see April 27, 1861, and September 24, 1862) and allowing the president to suspend the writ, when needed, for the duration of the war.120
MARCH 6, 1863: A mob of white men rampages through the African-American section of Detroit, destroying thirty-two houses, killing several black people, and leaving more than two hundred homeless—one of several violent anti-black demonstrations in 1863, which are fueled by job worries and inflammatory statements made by some leaders of the Democratic Party.121
MARCH 8, 1863: Confederate cavalry officer John Singleton Mosby delights the South and embarrasses the North when he and twenty-nine of his officially sanctioned partisan rangers steal through Union lines and enter Fairfax Court House, Virginia, which is filled with sleepy and sleeping Union troops. Mosby’s great prize is General Edwin H. Stoughton, whom the rangers find in bed, asleep. They leave town with the general, thirty-two other prisoners, fifty-eight horses, arms, and equipment—and an enhanced reputation for derring-do.122
MARCH 10, 1863: By a vote of five to four (with all three of the justices Lincoln has appointed to date in the majority), the U.S. Supreme Court hands down a decision favorable to the Lincoln administration in the Prize Cases, which involve the Union navy’s seizure of four vessels (or prizes) violating the Federal blockade of the South (see July 10, 1861). At issue is whether the president exceeded his constitutional authority in ordering the blockade when Congress had not declared a state of war. The Court rules that although only Congress can declare war, Lincoln did have the power to put down an insurrection. The rationale advanced by the Court also, by implication, supports other controversial presidential actions, such as issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation and suspension of habeas corpus.123
General Stuart’s New Aid. Wood engraving published in Harper’s Weekly, April 4, 1863. Identified in the caption only as “a young lady residing at Fairfax Court House,” this nod to the intrepid nature of a Confederate woman depicts Antonia Ford, who was arrested not long before by Federal authorities for aiding the Rebels.
“I beg you to fly to arms, and smite with death the power that would bury the government and your liberty in the same hopeless grave.”
—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, MARCH 14, 1863
MARCH 13, 1863: In Fairfax Court House, Virginia, Union authorities arrest vivacious civilian Antonia Ford for providing such valuable information to the Confederate army that, as averred in a letter the New York Times will print on March 14, “[Jeb] Stuart has conferred on her the rank of major in the rebel army.” Ford has, indeed, received an honorary commission from Lee’s celebrated cavalry commander, after providing Confederate officers—partisan raider John Mosby among them—with information overheard from Union men occupying her town. Today, she embarks on another sort of adventure when Major Joseph C. Willard, her escort to Washington’s Old Capitol prison, begins to fall under her charms (see March 10, 1864).124
MARCH 14, 1863: U.S. Navy captain David Dixon Porter embarks on another attempt to approach Vicksburg from the north (as James Wilson’s Yazoo Pass expedition is failing; see February 2, 1863). Porter’s Steele’s Bayou expedition is to proceed through several linked bayous, blazing a route that will allow Federal troops to land behind the city. From the start it is tough going; delays caused by natural obstacles in the water are compounded by increasing Confederate resistance. Rebel troops impress slaves to throw up defenses; other slaves take refuge with troops dispatched by William Sherman to assist Porter as his operation falters. The expedition will end without achieving Porter’s objectives but with vast stores of food and supplies in Union hands that would otherwise have sustained Vicksburg. The day Porter embarks, Admiral David Farragut leads a flotilla on a daring attempt to pass under the formidable guns the Confederates have placed on the bluffs at Port Hudson, on the Mississippi River between Vicksburg and New Orleans. Only Farragut’s flagship, USS Hartford, and USS Albatross make it through the furious rain of Confederate fire; other ships are forced to fall back. USS Mississippi, having run aground, has to be destroyed—the explosion producing a thunderous roar and such a brilliant flash of flame and flying timbers that soldiers in a Union encampment near Baton Rouge are temporarily “stupefied.”125 Also this day, braced by the Emancipation Proclamation, and by U.S. War Department assurances that black and white soldiers will receive equal pay, former slave and civil rights spokesman Frederick Douglass puts the full weight of his remarkable eloquence into “Men of Color to Arms!,” a statement published in the National Anti-Slavery Standard:
By every consideration which binds you to your enslaved fellow-countrymen, and the peace and welfare of your country; by every aspiration which you cherish for the freedom and equality of yourselves and your children; by all the ties of blood and identity which make us one with the brave black men now fighting our battles in Louisiana, in South Carolina, I beg you to fly to arms, and smite with death the power that would bury the government and your liberty in the same hopeless grave…. I am authorized to assure you that you will receive the same wages, the same rations, the same equipments, the same protection, the same treatment, and the same bounty, secured to white soldiers…. The iron gate of our prison stands half open. One gallant rush from the North will fling it wide open, while four millions of our brothers and sisters shall march out into liberty.126
