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General Robert E. Lee (1807–1870), CSA. Photograph by Julian Vannerson, March 1864. With his Army of Northern Virginia, Lee formed the heart of the Confederate military effort. His reputation caused some Union officers to regard him as having almost superhuman qualities (see May 8, 1864). “But I had known him personally and knew that he was mortal,” Ulysses S. Grant wrote in his memoirs, “and it was just as well that I felt this.”
MAY 2, 1864: The Second Confederate Congress convenes in Richmond. In the wake of the fall 1863 elections, its makeup has changed from overwhelmingly secessionist to a legislature that includes a near balance of ardent secessionists and more conservative former Whigs and Unionists. Some members represent areas under Union control—a phenomenon that will expand as the war continues. The more conservative members of Congress, as well as a number of state officials, will continue to object to some of President Davis’s war policies as conflicting with states’ rights as the war moves into its fourth year. Meanwhile, both the Confederate military and Southern civilians will face increasing shortages and the relentless encroachments of Federal armies.7
MAY 4, 1864: Just after midnight the Army of the Potomac begins to move forward, embarking on Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign. Headquartered with this army, which is still under the command of Major General George Gordon Meade, Grant has also directed Major General Franz Sigel and his troops to move southward up Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley while Major General Benjamin Butler begins a campaign south of Richmond; at the same time, Major General William T. Sherman is to begin operations against General Joseph Johnston’s Army of Tennessee in Georgia. Abraham Lincoln’s new general in chief is thus finally realizing the coordinated multifront operation against Confederate forces that the president has long advocated. Grant’s plan for confronting Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia is to move around the Confederate right flank, quickly traversing the treacherous Wilderness area in which the battle of Chancellorsville took place a year earlier (see May 2–4, 1863), and, having placed the Army of the Potomac between Lee’s army and Richmond, fight Lee in open territory. Yet Meade’s huge army, with all its accoutrements, moves slowly. When Meade calls a halt to marching for the day (believing, erroneously, that Lee’s army is still miles away behind its fortifications), the Army of the Potomac is still in the Wilderness.8
MAY 5, 1864: Having embarked from Fort Monroe the day before and left garrisons at key locations along the way, Major General Benjamin F. Butler and thirty thousand of his thirty-nine-thousand-man Army of the James arrive at Bermuda Hundred Landing. A large neck of land just fifteen miles south of Richmond, Bermuda Hundred is strategically important because of the Richmond & Petersburg Railroad, a vital connection between the Confederate capital and points south—particularly the important railroad center of Petersburg, only seven miles distant. Butler and his troops begin pushing westward, but their progress is ponderously slow (see May 7, 9, 13, and 16, 1864). Some miles to the northwest, Grant’s plan to reach open ground before meeting Lee comes to naught when elements of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia engage the Army of the Potomac, beginning the harrowing two-day battle of the Wilderness. “If any opportunity presents itself of pitching into a part of Lee’s army,” Grant orders Meade after he learns of the Confederates’ surprise appearance, “do so without giving time for disposition.” Union officers move more slowly in getting their men into battle than their Confederate counterparts, but before long, as one Federal will write, “these hitherto quiet woods seemed to be lifted up, shook, rent, and torn asunder.” Storms of musket fire and bursting artillery shells set patches of underbrush in the dry woods ablaze as the battle becomes, in one Confederate’s description, “a butchery pure and simple.” Both sides suffer heavy casualties, and some of the wounded, lying helpless in the paths of the crackling fires where no one can reach them, perish in the flames, their anguished cries continuing to haunt the Wilderness after fighting stops for the night. As exhausted soldiers of both sides huddle in the flickering darkness, Grant plans to take the initiative the following day.9
Wounded Escaping from the Burning Woods of the Wilderness. Pencil and Chinese white drawing by Alfred R. Waud, May 5–7, 1864. Despite rescue efforts by many of their comrades, some wounded soldiers perished in the flames. “This is one of the horrors of fighting in dense woods,” Union soldier Josiah Marshall Favill wrote after the Wilderness battle, “where the bursting shells invariably in dry weather set fire to the dead leaves and branches.”
MAY 6, 1864: At 5:00 am, the Wilderness erupts into action as some thirty thousand Federals smash into Lieutenant General A. P. Hill’s weakened Third Corps on the right flank of the Army of Northern Virginia. Having suffered heavily in the previous day’s fighting, and unprepared for the attack, the Confederates fall back—until elements of Lieutenant General James Longstreet’s First Corps, General Robert E. Lee in their midst (but prevented by his worried soldiers from actually leading the attack), arrive in the nick of time. Slamming into the Union troops, the Confederates precipitate a two-hour spate of intense fighting, forcing Union troops under Major General Winfield Scott Hancock and Brigadier General James S. Wadsworth to fall back and regroup. Wadsworth is mortally wounded while rallying his men—and the Confederates also suffer bitter losses among their top officers. Only four miles from where Stonewall Jackson was mortally wounded during the battle of Chancellorsville (see May 2–4, 1863), General Longstreet is seriously wounded by Confederates who mistake the First Corps commander and the men riding with him for Union officers. (Two of Longstreet’s staff officers and Confederate brigadier general Micah Jenkins are killed by the same “friendly fire.”) Major General Richard H. Anderson assumes Longstreet’s command, but the Confederate counterattack against the left of the Union line is stalled. A renewal of the assault later in the day proves ineffective, as does an attack on the Union right by three Southern brigades under Brigadier General John Brown Gordon. Although the Confederates end the day preparing for a third day of fighting, this first clash of the Overland Campaign ends with the coming of dark. Generally regarded as a tactical draw, the battle of the Wilderness has cost the Union 17,600 killed, wounded, and captured; the Confederates have suffered nearly 11,000 casualties.10
MAY 7, 1864: Pushing slowly toward the Richmond & Petersburg Railroad from Bermuda Hundred Landing, an eight-thousand-man contingent of Major General Benjamin Butler’s Union Army of the James meets twenty-six hundred Confederate troops under Brigadier General Bushrod Johnson and pushes them back. Meanwhile, Butler’s cavalry, under Brigadier General August Kautz, is engaged in the first of several raids to destroy Confederate supplies and disrupt the enemy’s communications. (The raids will prove to be largely ineffective, as the Confederates will quickly repair most of the damage done.) In Georgia, Major General William T. Sherman’s one-hundred-thousand-man force—comprising the Army of the Tennessee under Major General James B. McPherson, the Army of the Cumberland under Major General George H. Thomas, and the Army of the Ohio under Major General John M. Schofield—begins in earnest its campaign against General Joseph E. Johnston’s sixty-thousand-man Army of Tennessee, which is so well entrenched on high ground at Dalton, Georgia, that Sherman decides against a frontal assault. He will, instead, attempt to turn Johnston’s left flank. In the Wilderness, after a day marked by probing clashes between Union and Confederate skirmishers and, to the south of the main armies, a nearly daylong clash between Union and Confederate cavalry, Grant withdraws his forces under cover of darkness and starts them marching—in a direction that both surprises and elates his army and people throughout the North. “The previous history of the Army of the Potomac had been to advance and fight a battle, then either to retreat or to lie still, and finally to go into winter quarters,” Charles A. Dana will write after the war. “As the army began to realize that we were really moving south… the spirits of men and officers rose to the highest pitch of animation. On every hand I heard the cry, ‘On to Richmond!’ ” Unbeknownst to his troops, Grant has promised Lincoln that “whatever happens, there will be no turning back.” Yet his enemy is equally determined. “[T]here were to be a great many more obstacles to our reaching Richmond than General Grant himself, I presume, realized on May 8, 1864,” Dana will write. “We met one that very morning; for when our advance reached Spottsylvania [sic] Courthouse it found Lee’s troops there, ready to dispute the right of way with us.”11
A Short History of J. [James] Longstreet. Booklet in a series designed to be included in cigarette packs, 1888. Commander of the First Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia during the battle of the Wilderness, Lieutenant General Longstreet was seriously wounded by Confederates who mistook him for an enemy.
Brigadier General James S. Wadsworth (1807–1864), USA. Photograph by the Brady National Photographic Art Gallery, between 1860 and 1864. A wealthy philanthropist who kept a firm eye on the welfare of his troops, Wadsworth was described by Illinois senator Orville H. Browning as “firm in his hostility to slavery and rebellion.” He was killed at the battle of the Wilderness.
Charles A. Dana (1819–1897), assistant secretary of war, USA, at Cold Harbor, Virginia, July 11 or 12, 1864. Photographer unknown. The former managing editor of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, Dana was an ardent and eloquent Unionist. As assistant secretary of war, he often went into the field to observe operations firsthand.
MAY 8, 1864: Finding Lee’s First Corps under Richard Anderson digging in at Spotsylvania when he and his men arrive at about 8:00 am, the Army of the Potomac Fifth Corps commander, Major General Gouverneur Warren, launches a series of unsuccessful piecemeal attacks against Anderson’s position before being joined first by Major General John Sedgwick’s Sixth Corps and slowly by other elements of the Union force. In the evening, after Confederates repulse a final assault on their works, General Meade orders that “the army will remain quiet to-morrow.” They will be quiet but active, entrenching and building field fortifications. Grant, meanwhile, has become concerned over what he deems the insufficient aggressiveness of the Army of the Potomac’s leading officers, an attitude that had been ingrained by two and a half years of cautious leadership and battlefield setbacks. “Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do,” he had said, two days before, to officers worrying about the Confederate commander’s intent. “Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.” In the evening, Grant agrees to a course of action suggested by the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry commander, Major General Phil Sheridan: he orders Sheridan to take his ten thousand horsemen (leaving one regiment with the army) and “proceed against the enemy’s cavalry.”12
Major General John Sedgwick (1813–1864), USA. Photograph by the Brady National Photographic Art Gallery, between 1860 and 1864. A West Point graduate and veteran of the Mexican War, Sedgwick was among the most beloved officers of the Army of the Potomac, which deeply mourned his death from sniper fire.
MAY 9, 1864: As Sherman’s army continues to probe the Confederate Army of Tennessee’s defenses at Dalton, Georgia (some of the probes resembling full-scale attacks), Butler’s Federals are repulsed by Confederates at Swift’s Creek. After Butler timidly orders a withdrawal behind fortifications on Bermuda Hundred, the more disgruntled of his men dub this campaign their “stationary advance.” Some miles to the north, the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia have a relatively quiet day, though it is one punctuated by gunfire. In the morning, Union Sixth Corps commander John Sedgwick, seeing a man flinch from the Confederate shooting, says, “Why, what are you dodging for. They could not hit an elephant at that distance.” An instant later, an enemy bullet smashes into his head below the left eye, killing him instantly. “ ‘Uncle John’ was loved by his men as no other corps commander ever was in this army,” Colonel Charles S. Wainwright will note in his diary. For the Federals, this “quiet” day becomes a day of mourning.13
MAY 10, 1864: Probing for weaknesses in the Confederate fortifications at Spotsylvania, Grant launches attacks against Lee’s well-entrenched troops, initiating combat in which intense firing traps the battling soldiers in a storm of lethal metal. Refusing to give up despite the growing cost of these assaults, the Union general in chief approves a plan proposed by twenty-four-year-old Colonel Emory Upton, a West Point graduate and a sharp and ambitious student of military tactics. Upton believes that attacking in columns several soldiers deep, rather than in single lines, will provide the punch required to breach the Confederate defenses. Now, given twelve of the best regiments in the Army of the Potomac’s Sixth Corps, he vows to General David A. Russell, “I will carry those works. If I don’t, I will not come back.” Forming the regiments in three columns, each column four lines deep, Upton explains to the men that he is going to lead them in an assault on the salient (forward protrusion) in Southern lines known as the Mule Shoe. “I felt my gorge rise, and my stomach and intestines shrink together in a knot,” one New Yorker will later remember. “I looked about in the faces of the boys around me, and they told the tale of expected death.” A fury of Confederate fire lashes into the columns as they near the Rebel lines, but the Federals have been ordered to push on no matter what, and they do; the first lines take a brutal pounding in hand-to-hand fighting, but those behind them surge over the fortifications. Yet this is just a temporary victory; when support from other Union troops does not materialize as planned, Confederate reinforcements surge forward and push Upton’s troops back. It is a bitter pill for the surviving Federals to swallow. The attack has cost the Union about one thousand killed and wounded; the Confederates have lost a similar number, plus some twelve hundred prisoners. Still, this assault has shown Grant and his officers that a strong enemy position can be overcome with ample concentration of—properly supported—force. Upton will shortly receive a promotion to brigadier general.14
Major General Emory Upton (1839–1881), USA. Photograph by the Brady National Photographic Art Gallery, circa 1865. After graduating from West Point in May 1861 with the rank of lieutenant, Upton rapidly rose through the ranks, promoted to brigadier general for his service at Spotsylvania and becoming a major general by the end of the war.
Major General James Ewell Brown (Jeb) Stuart (1833–1864), CSA, between 1861 and 1864. After resigning from the U.S. Army, Stuart commanded the cavalry that were the eyes of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. He twice led his men on raids that thoroughly embarrassed the Federal Army of the Potomac.
MAY 11, 1864: During a lull in the fighting at Spotsylvania, the people of Richmond are seized by convulsions of worry as they learn that a Union force is approaching the city. Notices go up all over the city: “The enemy… may be expected at any hour, with a view to [Richmond’s] capture, its pillage and its destruction. The strongest consideration of self and duty to the country, calls every man to arms!” Only six miles to the north, at Yellow Tavern, Virginia, Jeb Stuart and three thousand Confederate horsemen (half the Rebel cavalry remain with Lee at Spotsylvania) manage to interpose themselves between Sheridan’s cavalry and the Confederate capital. In the ensuing helter-skelter battle, a bullet fired by a soldier of George A. Custer’s Michigan Brigade strikes Stuart in the abdomen. As the two forces disengage, Stuart’s men carry him back to Richmond by a circuitous route, avoiding the advancing Federals; Sheridan’s men move on and bump up against the city’s defenses (Sheridan determining it would be too costly to take the city) before heading off to the east.15
MAY 12, 1864: Enticed from behind Union fortifications by Confederate movements along the James River, Major General Benjamin Butler leads fifteen thousand of his Army of the James infantry toward Drewry’s Bluff, which is only eight miles below Richmond, on the James River. At Spotsylvania, the apex of the Mule Shoe salient (see May 10, 1864) becomes known as the “Bloody Angle” during a rain-drenched day of brutal hand-to-hand fighting that commences at 4:30 am, when twenty thousand massed Union troops under Major General Winfield Scott Hancock surge out of the fog, over the Confederate fortifications, and into the Rebel soldiers firing from their trenches. By the end of this epically bloody day, which Private John Haley, of the Seventeenth Maine, will describe as “a seething, bubbling, roaring hell of hate and murder,” the Confederates have fallen back to a new line at the base of the salient—and survivors on both sides are shaken by the terrible fighting they have just been through: “It was the most desperate struggle of the war,” veteran campaigner Dr. Spencer Glasgow Welch, of the Thirteenth South Carolina Volunteers, will write to his wife the next day. “I do not know that it is ended… but I hope the Yankees are gone and that I shall never again witness such a terrible day as yesterday was.” The Yankees are not gone. There will be two more all-out clashes (May 18 and 19)—bringing the total number of Spotsylvania killed, wounded, and missing to some eighteen thousand Federals and twelve thousand Confederates—before Grant withdraws to try again to push forward around Lee’s right flank. In Richmond, after suffering through the day and calmly setting his affairs in order, at 7:38 PM thirty-one-year-old Jeb Stuart dies of his wound at the home of his brother-in-law, Dr. Charles Brewer. Newspapers quickly publish accounts of his last hours; but it will be eight days before a grieving Robert E. Lee is able to issue General Orders, No. 44, announcing Stuart’s death to his men: “His grateful countrymen will mourn his loss and cherish his memory. To his comrades in arms he has left the proud recollection of his deeds, and the inspiring influence of his example.”16
Brigadier General Franz Sigel (1824–1902), USA. Photographic print on a carte de visite mount, circa 1861. A German immigrant and military academy graduate, Sigel proved to be a less than distinguished Civil War battlefield commander and retired from the service after the battle of New Market. His greatest service to the United States was in rallying German Americans to the Union cause.
Corporal Alvin B. Williams, Company F, Eleventh Regiment, New Hampshire Volunteers, killed at age eighteen near Spotsylvania Court House, Virginia, May 12, 1864—three weeks after his brother, Oscar, also serving in the Eleventh New Hampshire, died in an army hospital of pneumonia. Hand-colored ambrotype, date and photographer unknown.
Corporal Alvin Williams’s dogtag.
MAY 13, 1864: Having pushed Confederates back from their forward positions and into their main lines at Drewry’s Bluff (see May 12, 1864), Major General Benjamin Butler does not press after them but holds his fifteen thousand Union troops in a defensive position. As he ponders his next move, Confederate reinforcements will arrive from Richmond and North Carolina. From Washington, Walt Whitman writes his mother: “Yesterday and to-day the badly wounded are coming in…. I steadily believe Grant is going to succeed, and that we shall have Richmond—but O what a price to pay for it.”17
MAY 15, 1864: Confederates led by Major General John C. Breckinridge, a former U.S. vice president, defeat Union troops under General Franz Sigel at the battle of New Market, in the Shenandoah Valley. In this encounter, which allows Confederates to hold on a little longer to the valley, widely known as the “Breadbasket of the Confederacy,” Breckinridge’s troops include 247 Virginia Military Institute cadets whose courageous charge makes them instant Southern heroes. Disappointed in this Federal loss, General in Chief Grant and Chief of Staff Henry Halleck will urge President Lincoln to replace Sigel, who, the two officers believe, “will do nothing but run; he never did anything else.” On May 21, Major General David Hunter will assume command in the valley.18
MAY 16, 1864: At 4:45 am, Confederates under General P. G. T. Beauregard burst from their lines and hit Major General Benjamin Butler’s Union troops, beginning the second battle of Drewry’s Bluff. Though the attack’s organization is partially confounded by heavy fog, the Confederates are able to force the Federals back, Butler leading them to the Bermuda Hundred fortifications they had left not long before. The following morning, Confederate troops will arrive and position themselves across the narrow neck of land opposite those fortifications, making it impossible for the Army of the James to move forward. The Federal commander, who has been known, at least in Southern circles, as Beast Butler, since the infamous “women’s order” he issued in New Orleans (see May 15, 1862), now becomes known as Bottled Up Butler.19
As the war progressed, armies of each side became adept at entrenching and erecting field fortifications, such as the ones Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia hastily erected at the North Anna River, discouraging Union assault (see May 23–26, 1864). This sketch, by Union soldier Anson Smith, depicts a Union fortification that his regiment, the 104th Illinois, constructed in Tennessee to guard the strategically vital Louisville and Nashville Railroad.
MAY 20, 1864: Weary in body and spirit from the near-ceaseless pounding they have been taking and the loss of so many in their ranks, yet still stubbornly determined, the men of the Army of the Potomac begin to withdraw from their lines at Spotsylvania. They continue their movement south, Grant believing (erroneously) that he might be able to catch the equally battered and determined men of the Army of Northern Virginia in the open as Lee maneuvers to keep his force between Grant’s army and Richmond. The Federals forage as they march, exhibiting little of the consideration for the property of Confederate civilians that characterized the first year of the war. Meanwhile, after crossing the North Anna River, Lee will order his army to halt and quickly erect field fortifications—something at which they have become surpassing experts during this brutal campaign.20
MAY 23–26, 1864: Leaving some of their men to guard the north bank, Grant and Meade send the bulk of the Army of the Potomac across the North Anna River—where the Union force immediately runs up against Lee’s entrenched Confederates, whose inverted-V-shaped lines pose difficult tactical problems. After some piecemeal attempts to penetrate the Rebel position, Grant and his officers decide, as Grant informs Washington, that “to make a direct attack from either wing [each Union wing facing one side of the Confederate V] would cause a slaughter of our men that even success would not justify.” Grant decides to recross the North Anna and move around Lee’s flank, making “one more effort,” as he will write in his memoirs, “to get between him and Richmond. I had no expectation now, however, of succeeding in this; but I did expect to hold him far enough west to enable me to reach the James River high up.” During the North Anna operations, Phil Sheridan and his cavalry, their two-week raid concluded (see May 8 and 11, 1864), rejoin the Army of the Potomac.21
MAY 26, 1864: Despite shortages of manufactured goods throughout the Confederacy, “blockade-running,” or sneaking through the Federal blockade of the Southern ports to sell goods for immense profit, becomes widespread enough for Jefferson Davis to complain in a speech that “50 or 60 millions have gone into blockade-running while not a new dollar has gone into manufacturing.”22
MAY 28, 1864: General Lee reports to President Davis that his best guess at the enemy’s route has led him “to take position on the ridge between the Totopotomoi [sic] and Beaver Dam Creeks, so as to intercept his march to Richmond,” yet “the want of information” now leads him to doubt if his calculations are correct. As he writes, Army of the Potomac cavalry searching for Lee collide with Confederate cavalry searching for Grant at Haw’s Shop near Hanovertown. During the fight, George A. Custer leads his dismounted Michigan Brigade in a charge that routs the Rebels—not the first time the young Union general has demonstrated effective leadership under fire. “So brave a man I never saw and as competent as brave,” one of his officers writes. “Under him our men can achieve wonders.” For the next few days, Federals and Confederates will clash intermittently as Grant continues to move his troops toward the James River.23
Grand Banner of the Radical Democracy, for 1864. Color lithograph with watercolor published by Currier & Ives, 1864. No friend of Lincoln since the president relieved him of command in August 1861, John C. Frémont, with his running mate, John Cochrane, led a brief and abortive campaign to replace the Lincoln administration in 1864.
A button from the 1860 presidential campaign features a Mathew Brady photograph of vice presidential candidate Hannibal Hamlin, senator from Maine. A similar button from the 1864 presidential campaign features a photo, taken by Anthony Berger of the Brady National Photographic Art Gallery, of Hamlin’s replacement, vice presidential candidate Andrew Johnson of Tennessee.
MAY 31, 1864: A group of some four hundred white radicals who have formed the Radical Democracy Party meet in Cleveland, Ohio, and nominate famed explorer and former Union general John C. Frémont as their candidate for president of the United States (see August 30, 1861). The party platform stipulates that there must be no compromise with the Confederacy and supports equal rights for blacks in the South and a constitutional amendment banning slavery. Although a majority of blacks unswervingly support Lincoln, several influential African American leaders, including Frederick Douglass, initially lean toward Frémont, feeling that the president is too cautious and lenient in his terms for Reconstruction. In Virginia, Army of the Potomac cavalry units occupy Old Cold Harbor. They have been ordered to hold this position until their infantry arrives. As Confederate troops from Lee’s Totopotomoy Creek position as well as from Richmond arrive in the area, the Union horsemen comply with their orders, repulsing Rebel attempts to dislodge them. Meanwhile, the Confederates form a new line just east of New Cold Harbor—and only a dozen miles from the Confederate capital.24
JUNE
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Kearsarge and Alabama. Color lithograph published by L. Prang & Co., 1887. A particularly painful thorn in the Union’s paw, Confederate commerce raider Raphael Semmes’s vessel CSS Alabama was finally caught and destroyed, an event that caused mourning throughout the South. Alabama’s nemesis, USS Kearsarge, was captained by John A. Winslow, who had been a friend and shipmate of Semmes during the Mexican War.
JUNE 1, 1864: The battle of Cold Harbor begins late in the day as two newly arrived Federal infantry corps, ordered forward by General Meade, attack Lee’s entrenched Confederates—and are repulsed with some two thousand casualties. As the survivors return to the lengthening Union lines, Major General Winfield Scott Hancock’s Army of the Potomac Second Corps, still some distance from Cold Harbor, begins a forced march in order to be in position for a full-scale assault that Grant has ordered for the following day. It is a difficult night for men already worn down from a month of brutal campaigning. When Hancock’s men arrive at Cold Harbor on June 2, Grant will postpone his planned attack for a day “by reason of the exhausted state of the 2nd Corps.” Confederates have been on the march, too; Lee has received reinforcements from Bermuda Hundred and the Shenandoah Valley. In Mississippi, Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest leads his cavalry out of Tupelo, heading northeast into Alabama and toward the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad, the supply lifeline for Major General William T. Sherman’s one-hundred-thousand-man force now pursuing General Joseph Johnston’s Confederate army in Georgia. Uncomfortably aware of Forrest’s expertise at disrupting Federal supply lines, as he had done effectively during the first Union campaign for Vicksburg (see December 21, 1862), Sherman has already ordered Brigadier General Samuel D. Sturgis to distract Forrest by threatening northern Mississippi. Sturgis will lead eighty-one hundred Union troops out of Memphis on June 2.25
Cold Harbor, Virginia (vicinity). Collecting Remains of Dead on the Battlefield. Photograph by John Reekie, April 1865. The site of a three-day battle during the Union’s costly Overland Campaign, Cold Harbor included a final, hour-long frontal assault on Confederate entrenchments that caused more than three thousand Federal casualties; casualty estimates for the entire battle exceed seventeen thousand men killed, wounded, and missing.
JUNE 3, 1864: At 4:30 am, infantrymen of the Second, Sixth, and Eighteenth Corps of the Army of the Potomac advance on the Army of Northern Virginia’s formidable lines at Cold Harbor—and are met by a wall of lacerating musket and artillery fire that fells ranks of men “like rows of blocks or bricks pushed over by striking against each other,” as one survivor will remember. After one searing hour, during which thirty-five hundred Federal soldiers are killed or wounded, the assault fails. Yet gunfire does not cease. Thousands of Union soldiers, both unhurt and wounded, lie trapped in the open between Federal and Confederate lines; their slightest movement sparks Rebel fire that causes more than a thousand additional casualties before darkness brings an end to this terrible day. “I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made,” Grant will write in his memoirs. “[N]o advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained.” As both armies work to strengthen their positions, Grant and Lee will begin an exchange of messages about the men of both armies who are suffering between the lines. Marked by delays and misunderstandings, the negotiations will take more than forty-eight hours; during that time, as Grant will later note, “all but two of the wounded had died.”26
JUNE 6, 1864: William T. Sherman’s ploy to keep Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest away from his army’s vital railroad supply line proves effective when Major General Stephen D. Lee recalls Forrest from his raid. Forrest and his men are to find and intercept Samuel D. Sturgis’s Union column, which is threatening northeastern Mississippi. (See June 1 and 10, 1864.)27
JUNE 7, 1864: Both to harass the enemy and to divert attention from the next phase of his Overland Campaign, General in Chief Grant sends Phil Sheridan and nine thousand cavalrymen on a mission to destroy as much as possible of the Virginia Central Railroad, then move on to Charlottesville to connect, if feasible, with David Hunter’s Shenandoah Valley contingent (Hunter will actually remain in the valley; see June 11–12, 1864). Sheridan departs while somber music from Union bands echoes in the air: the Federals are burying the dead they have finally been able to retrieve from the killing ground between Union and Confederate lines (see June 3, 1864). In Washington, Walt Whitman writes to his mother about “one new feature” of the wounded soldiers crowding the city’s hospitals: “Many of the poor a∆icted young men are crazy. Every ward has some in it that are wandering. They have suffered too much, and it is perhaps a privilege that they are out of their senses.”28
JUNE 8, 1864: In Baltimore, delegates from twenty-five states attend the Republican Party Convention (redesignated the National Union Party Convention this year, to attract War Democrats). Although there has been some agitation to replace Abraham Lincoln as the party’s candidate (see, for example, January 13 and February 22, 1864), his nomination is a foregone conclusion. When it is achieved, a band erupts with a rousing “Star-Spangled Banner” and, as the National Republican will report, “the audience rose en masse, and such an enthusiastic demonstration was scarcely ever paralleled.” Delegates then bump Vice President Hannibal Hamlin from the ticket, replacing him with Tennessee Unionist Andrew Johnson (see July 11, 1861). In Washington, Lincoln is following convention events as best he can from the War Department telegraph office. He will not be officially notified of his renomination, however, until a delegation calls at the White House the following day.29
Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821–1877), CSA. A prewar slave trader, Forrest became one of the Confederacy’s most talented and resourceful cavalry commanders. His victory at Brice’s Crossroads brought him the official thanks of the Confederate Congress.
Jones’ Landing, Va., vicinity. Pontoon Bridge over the James, from the North Bank, date and photographer unknown. Reaching the James River at the end of the Overland Campaign, engineers of the Army of the Potomac built a pontoon bridge that allowed Grant’s huge army to cross. It would remain the longest floating bridge ever erected until the record was broken during World War II.
JUNE 10, 1864: Confederates under Nathan Bedford Forrest trounce Samuel Sturgis’s Union force at the battle of Brice’s Crossroads, Mississippi. Defeating the thirty-three-hundred-man Union cavalry first, the Confederates then duel Sturgis’s infantry for four hours before the Federals break and run. They are saved from total disaster by action of one brigade, comprising three regiments of U. S. Colored Troops. Often fighting hand-to-hand, with almost no assistance from white volunteers, the black soldiers hold the Confederates back long enough to allow the balance of the Federal force to escape. In the North Atlantic, having by now taken some sixty-five Union vessels as prizes, Raphael Semmes, captain of the famed and feared Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama, welcomes an experienced English Channel pilot aboard his vessel as it enters the channel en route to getting a much-needed refit in France. “I felt great relief to have him on board,” Semmes writes in his diary. “And thus, thanks to an all-wise Providence, we have brought the cruise of the Alabama to a successful termination.” Yet it is too soon for Semmes to relax; Alabama is being pursued.30
JUNE 11–12, 1864: More than six thousand Confederate cavalrymen led by Major General Wade Hampton intercept Phil Sheridan’s Union cavalry at Trevilian Station, Virginia, precipitating a two-day battle that will become the bloodiest cavalry clash of the war. Action on June 11 includes a desperate three-hour struggle for survival by George Custer’s surrounded Michigan Brigade, which is finally relieved when other Federal troops punch a hole in the Confederate line. On June 12, after Confederates repulse seven charges by Sheridan’s dismounted men throughout the day, Sheridan decides to withdraw toward Cold Harbor, taking with him as many as possible of his one thousand wounded, plus prisoners and runaway slaves. Hampton’s Confederates, who have suffered eleven hundred casualties, have put an end to the Union raid before it has truly started. Over these same two days, in the Shenandoah Valley, David Hunter’s Union troops storm into Lexington, Virginia, site of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), whose cadets won plaudits for joining in the battle of New Market the previous month (see May 15, 1864). Harassed for a month by Rebel guerrillas, who have prevented most of their supply wagons from getting through to them, the Yankees are hungry and incensed at civilians they believe are supporting the irregulars. Today, they forage with a vengeance—and for good measure burn down VMI and the home of Virginia governor John Letcher, who recently issued what Hunter will describe as “a violent and inflammatory proclamation… inciting the population… to rise and wage a guerrilla warfare on my troops.” As Hunter leads his troops toward Lynchburg, Robert E. Lee orders Jubal Early to lead the Second Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia into the valley to neutralize this Union threat.31
The War in Virginia—a Regiment of the 18th Corps Carrying a Portion of Beauregard’s Line in Front of Petersburg. Wood engraving based on a sketch by E. F. Mullen, published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 23, 1864. Although they vastly outnumbered the city’s Confederate garrison when they arrived at Petersburg in mid-June, Grant’s battered troops, wary after weeks of brutal campaigning, failed to take this vital rail hub. Instead, Petersburg became the object of a Union siege that lasted for months.
JUNE 12, 1864: General Grant begins one of the most remarkable troop movements of the war. Withdrawing the Army of the Potomac from its lines at Cold Harbor after dark, he leads the huge force across the Virginia Peninsula. By June 14, it will arrive at the north bank of the James River—which Lee had told Jubal Early it was essential to keep the Federals from crossing. As some Federals cross the water by boat, Grant’s engineers construct a 2,170-foot pontoon bridge—the longest floating bridge erected before World War II. When, at 11:00 pm, they finish assembling this marvel, bands play, drummers drum, and troops begin streaming across the new span, an operation that will continue for nearly two days. It is, as Colonel Horace Porter, of Grant’s staff, will later say, “a matchless pageant that could not fail to inspire all beholders with the grandeur of achievement and the majesty of military power.”32
JUNE 14, 1864: Reporting to Washington on his movements, Grant wires Chief of Staff Halleck: “The enemy show no signs yet of having brought troops to the south side of Richmond. I will have Petersburg secured, if possible, before they get there in much force.” This will bring an optimistic response from the president: “I begin to see it. You will succeed. God bless you all.” In the North Atlantic, the warship USS Kearsarge arrives in the waters off Cherbourg, France, where CSS Alabama has just arrived for a refit. On board Alabama, Raphael Semmes immediately sends for one hundred tons of coal and prepares to go out and engage his pursuer.33
JUNE 15, 1864: The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (abolishing slavery), which the U.S. Senate approved on April 8, falls thirteen votes short of passing the House of Representatives by the required two-thirds majority. Congress does finally pass legislation granting equal pay to black soldiers, some of whom have, for many months, been refusing to accept any pay until the inequity was rectified. Retroactive to January 1, 1864, the legislation does not, however, apply to all of the nation’s black soldiers; it covers only those who were free as of April 19, 1861. Tens of thousands of ex-slaves in the U.S. Army are thus excluded from this remedial measure. Efforts on their behalf will continue (see March 3, 1865). In Virginia, General Lee sends one infantry division to reinforce P. G. T. Beauregard, who is currently both defending Petersburg and keeping Benjamin Butler’s Union Army of the James bottled up on Bermuda Hundred with only fifty-four hundred troops. Yet the Federal units that are arriving at Petersburg’s defenses do not know that Beauregard’s force is so small, and, like Grant’s entire army, they are wary and exhausted by their experiences from the Wilderness through Cold Harbor. Though today they begin a series of attacks on the city’s defenses, the assaults will not be sufficiently forceful or coordinated to breach the Confederates’ inner lines. The attacks will, however, increase by nearly ten thousand casualties the “butcher’s bill” that the Union has been paying during this costly campaign. “Yesterday afternoon another horrid massacre of our corps was enacted,” Colonel Rufus Dawes, of the Sixth Wisconsin, will write to his wife on June 18. “It is awfully disheartening to think we have Generals who will send their men to such sure destruction.”34
This color plate from History of the Brooklyn and Long Island Fair, February 22, 1864, published that same year, illustrates the elaborate and patriotic nature of the fund-raising “sanitary fairs” sponsored by individual chapters of the United States Sanitary Commission. On June 16, 1864, President Lincoln praised these efforts when he spoke at the Great Central Sanitary Fair in Philadelphia.
The Copperhead Party.—In Favor of a Vigorous Prosecution of Peace! Wood engraving published in Harper’s Weekly, February 28, 1863. Distress over the “butcher’s bill” of casualties suffered by Federal troops during Grant’s Overland Campaign lent strength to the arguments of Copperheads eager to make peace with the Confederacy—perhaps even at the cost of the Union itself.
JUNE 16, 1864: “War at the best, is terrible, and this war of ours, in its magnitude and in its duration, is one of the most terrible,” President Lincoln says, in a speech at the Great Central Sanitary Fair in Philadelphia. “It has carried mourning to almost every home, until it can almost be said that the ‘heavens are hung in black.’ ” After praising the “benevolent labors” of the men and women of the Sanitary Commission, its sister organization, the Christian Commission, and the soldiers these organizations assist, Lincoln addresses the oft-asked question, when will the war end? “Speaking of the present campaign, General Grant is reported to have said, I am going through on this line if it takes all summer. This war has taken three years; it was begun or accepted upon the line of restoring the national authority over the whole national domain, and for the American people, as far as my knowledge enables me to speak, I say we are going through on this line if it takes three years more.”35
JUNE 17, 1864: Volatile materials explode at the Federal arsenal in Washington, igniting a conflagration. “The scene was horrible beyond description,” the capital city’s Daily National Intelligencer will report. “Under the metal roof of the building were seething bodies and limbs, mangled, scorched, and charred beyond the possibility of identification…. The square in front of the Arsenal gate presents a most distressing spectacle…. Sisters, husbands, and fathers are there waiting for sisters, wives, and daughters. The anxiety and sorrow exhibited is beyond all description.” As was the case with a similar accident the previous year in Richmond, where more than sixty people died, most of the twenty-one people killed at the Washington Arsenal are women who had entered the workforce to assist in the war effort.36
JUNE 18, 1864: Federal troops under David Hunter probe the Confederate defenses at Lynchburg, Virginia, and find that John C. Breckinridge’s troops have been reinforced by the Army of Northern Virginia corps under Jubal Early that Lee has sent to counter the Union threat in the Shenandoah Valley (see June 11–12, 1864). In the evening, Hunter, deciding a full-scale assault will be unsuccessful given the reinforced Confederate garrison, begins to withdraw his men. Early and his troops will soon be in pursuit, eventually chasing Hunter completely out of the Shenandoah Valley. The route to Northern territory will thus lie open. At Petersburg, Virginia, a series of frontal assaults on the city’s defenses having failed (see June 15, 1864), the 110,000-man Army of the Potomac begins digging in to besiege that crucially important railroad hub less than twenty-five miles from Richmond. Morale among Grant’s battered and exhausted troops is at a low ebb (and thousands of these exhausted veterans, having reached the end of their three-year enlistment, are leaving the ranks). But war-weariness isn’t confined to the trenches. At home on sick leave, Union general John H. Martindale writes to Major General Benjamin Butler that there is “great discouragement over the North, great reluctance to recruiting, strong disposition for peace.” The price of gold rises, reflecting the pessimism of Northern financial markets. With casualty rolls listing 65,000 Federal soldiers killed, wounded, or missing since the Overland Campaign began on May 4, Democrats are denouncing Grant as a “butcher.” (Confederate casualties, some 35,000, constitute approximately the same percentage of their smaller force.)37
JUNE 19, 1864: A host of civilians observe from the shoreline cliffs of Cherbourg, France, as CSS Alabama battles USS Kearsarge in the war’s greatest ship-to-ship combat in open seas. Circling and firing, the two vessels draw closer together, with Kearsarge taking the offensive. Outgunned and not yet repaired and refitted, Alabama very quickly suffers critical damage. “Our decks were now covered with the dead and the wounded,” Semmes’s executive officer, Lieutenant John McIntosh Kell, will report, “and the ship was careening heavily to starboard from the effects of the shot-holes on her waterline.” Semmes is forced to strike his colors in order to rescue the wounded before his ship sinks. Nine Alabama crewmen are killed and thirty are wounded; but Semmes and some of his officers manage to escape to England aboard the yacht of wealthy Englishman John Lancaster, who had sailed out to observe the encounter. “[T]he Alabama, our pride & our hope has been sunk off Cherburgh,” North Carolina’s Catherine Edmondston will write in her diary on July 14. “Not a vestige of the Alabama fell into the hands of the Victors! Everything went down & she has left only her fame behind her.”38
JUNE 22, 1864: Seeking to cut the Confederates’ supply lines and extend Union lines, Grant dispatches two Union cavalry divisions under Brigadier General James H. Wilson and Brigadier General August Kautz on a raid against the Southside Railroad, while three infantry corps push south and west toward the Weldon railroad. The infantry corps almost immediately run into trouble. Lee’s Confederates exploit a gap in their lines to shatter one division and threaten others before the Federals manage to regroup. The day’s fighting costs them twenty-four hundred casualties, including seventeen hundred prisoners. The cavalry will have greater success—for a while. Although in the course of a week they will destroy sixty miles of railroad track (which will be quickly repaired), in doing so, they excite the attentions of Wade Hampton’s Confederate cavalry and three of Lee’s infantry brigades. Outnumbered and nearly surrounded, Wilson and Kautz will be forced to burn their wagons and leave artillery and their wounded behind to escape total disaster. While these events are unfolding, General Grant meets with President Lincoln at City Point, Virginia. The president will tour the Petersburg lines on horseback and then, with Grant, travel by boat to meet with Major General Butler before returning to Washington, tired but optimistic, having been impressed by Grant’s quiet confidence.39
The Union music broadside Johnny’s Prayer! and the cover of the 1864 Confederate song Short Rations shine satirically humorous lights on the subject of army food. Despite copious complaints, Federal soldiers were comparatively well fed, but lack of adequate, nourishing rations became a serious problem for many Rebels.
JUNE 23, 1864: Having chased David Hunter and his Federal troops into West Virginia (see June 18, 1864), Jubal Early turns his men northward. Some thirteen thousand Confederates begin marching through dust and scorching heat down the now undefended Shenandoah Valley toward the Potomac River and Union territory. Low on food, the troops chant “bread, bread, bread” when their officers ride by. But, despite their hunger, they keep on going.40
JUNE 24, 1864: “Carpenter, the artist, who is painting the picture of ‘Reading the [Emancipation] Proclamation’ says that [Secretary of State William H.] Seward protested earnestly against that act being taken as the central and crowning act of the Administration,” President Lincoln’s secretary, John Hay, notes in his diary.
[Seward] says… the formation of the Republican Party destroyed slavery; the anti-slavery acts of this administration are merely incidental. Their great work is the preservation of the Union, and in that, the saving of popular government for the world. The scene which should have been taken was the Cabinet Meeting in the Navy Department where it was resolved to relieve Fort Sumter. That was the significant act of the Administration. The act which determined the fact that Republican institutions were worth fighting for.41
JUNE 25, 1864: At Petersburg, Virginia, Union lieutenant colonel Henry Pleasants, a prewar civil and mining engineer, embarks on a project he has suggested and Army of the Potomac Ninth Corps commander Major General Ambrose Burnside has approved: with men of the Forty-eighth Pennsylvania Infantry, a regiment comprising many experienced coal miners, he begins digging a tunnel that will end under the Confederate lines.42
JUNE 27, 1864: Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase nominates Maunsell Field to be assistant treasurer of New York. Though he has been cautioned by President Lincoln to appoint a qualified individual approved by prominent New York Republicans, Chase has chosen a wholly unqualified crony. This is one of many posts Chase has been filling with people who might be useful to him in what President Lincoln, with some amusement, once called, “Chase’s mad hunt after the presidency.” In Georgia, Major General William T. Sherman, now within thirty miles of Atlanta but still frustrated by Joseph Johnston’s reluctance to commit his Confederates to battle, orders his men to assault the entrenched center of Johnston’s army at Kennesaw Mountain. Trying to advance uphill in hundred-degree heat, the Union troops are repulsed at great cost. Reports of the defeat will increase the frustration building on the Union home front. In the South, morale will soar. An Atlanta paper predicts that Sherman’s army will soon be “cut to pieces.”43
Kennesaw’s Bombardment, 64. Pencil, Chinese white, and black ink wash drawing by Alfred R. Waud, 1864. Major General William T. Sherman’s attack at Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, was a costly failure that raised civilian morale—in the Confederacy.
Miss Kate Chase (1840–1899), between 1855 and 1865. The daughter of Lincoln’s ambitious secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase, the bright, attractive, and vivacious Kate served as her father’s hostess, confidante, and ally in his unsuccessful quest for the presidency. “Diplomats and statesmen felt it an honor to be her guests,” one reporter wrote of her exceptional skills as a Washington hostess.
Salmon P. Chase (1808–1873). Photograph by the Brady National Photographic Art Gallery, between 1860 and 1865.
JUNE 28, 1864: On the day he signs congressional legislation that finally repeals the Fugitive Slave Law, the president also sends a note to Secretary of the Treasury Chase regarding Chase’s nomination of the unqualified Maunsell Field the previous day: “I can not, without much embarrassment, make this appointment,” the president writes, and asks that Chase submit another name. This directive from the chief executive stings Chase’s considerable ego, an aspect of the secretary’s personality that sharp-tongued Radical Republican Senator Benjamin Wade has remarked upon in his singularly pithy fashion: “Chase is a good man, but his theology is unsound,” Wade has said. “He thinks there is a fourth Person in the Trinity, S. P. C. [Salmon P. Chase].”44
JUNE 29, 1864: Having maneuvered successfully to solve the crisis that his appointment of Maunsell Field has caused among New York Republicans (by asking the man Field was to have replaced to serve some months longer), Treasury Secretary Chase then goes one step too far. Convinced that he is irreplaceable, he seeks to confirm his value as a cabinet officer and assert his right to nominate whomsoever he chooses by submitting his resignation—something he has done, for equally manipulative reasons, three times before. Lincoln, however, understands perfectly well what Chase is truly up to and, after three years, he has had enough of the secretary’s machinations. “Your resignation of the office of Secretary of the Treasury, sent me yesterday, is accepted,” he will write Chase June 30. “Of all I have said in commendation of your ability and fidelity, I have nothing to unsay; and yet you and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relation which it seems can not be overcome, or longer sustained, consistently with the public service.” Chase’s departure will alarm many in the Union capital—until Lincoln finds a perfect replacement, Republican senator William Pitt Fessenden, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Fessenden’s appointment will be confirmed on July 1.45
JULY
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
Invasion of Maryland, 1864: Driving off Cattle and Plunder Taken from the Farmers by Early’s Cavalry. Wood engraving from a sketch by Edwin Forbes, published in American Soldier in the Civil War: A Pictorial History, 1895. Making their way toward Washington and on their return, Early’s Confederates sought both sustenance and revenge for damage Union troops under David Hunter had done in the Shenandoah Valley.
JULY 2, 1864: Congress passes the Wade-Davis Bill, which stipulates certain conditions that seceded states must fulfill before rejoining the Union. President Lincoln views these as retaliatory against the South and a refutation of his own more moderate approach to reconstructing the Union. The president’s pocket veto of the bill [failure to sign it within the constitutionally mandated ten days] will underline the growing rift between Lincoln and congressional Radical Republicans over Reconstruction policy. Reacting to the veto, the sponsors of the bill, Senator Benjamin F. Wade and Representative Henry Winter Davis, will issue a manifesto calling the president’s action a “studied outrage upon the legislative authority of the people.”46
JULY 4, 1864: President Lincoln signs into law a repeal of certain exemption clauses of the Enrollment [Draft] Act of 1863, including the provision allowing payment of a commutation fee of $300 (“blood money” to its many opponents) instead of being drafted. On the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Congress passes the Pension Act of 1864, which, among other provisions, allows special, if limited, monetary compensation to those who have been blinded or who have lost both arms or both legs during their wartime service. In Richmond, newspapers print a roster of more than six hundred recaptured slaves and ask their owners to reclaim them. At Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, Jubal Early’s hungry Confederate troops, still heading north (see June 23, 1864), occupy the heights around the town, displacing Union troops. “The Yankees made a great preparation for a July [Fourth] dinner,” one delighted Confederate soldier will write, “so we had the pleasure of eating it for them.” Early will not attempt to take the well-fortified town and Union arsenal, however. The following day, his men will begin crossing the Potomac River into Maryland—spurring alarmed Union officials to call for twenty-four thousand Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania militia to help defend against this third Confederate incursion into Union territory.47
JULY 5, 1864: With Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry still posing a major threat to his supply lines (see June 10, 1864), William T. Sherman has ordered Major General Andrew J. Smith to “follow Forrest to the death, if it cost 10,000 lives and breaks the Treasury.” Today, Smith leads fourteen thousand infantry and cavalry out of La Grange, Tennessee, and toward Forrest’s base in north Mississippi. On their way, the Union force will wreck everything they find that might be useful to the Confederate military. In Canada, an obscure U.S. peace advocate named W. C. Jewett has been meeting with Confederate emissaries who are ostensibly seeking peace but who are, in truth, more interested in seeing Lincoln defeated in the forthcoming presidential election. Today, Jewett writes to an influential acquaintance, Horace Greeley: “I am authorized to state to you… that two ambassadors of Davis & Co. are now in Canada, with full and complete powers for a peace.” He includes an invitation for Greeley to meet with the “ambassadors,” one of whom, George N. Sanders, has assured him that “the whole matter can be consummated by me, you, them [the ambassadors], and President Lincoln.” Though Greeley is skeptical that the emissaries have the full powers Jewett says that they do (and Greeley is correct, they do not), on July 7 he will forward the note to Lincoln. In his own covering letter, he will remind the president “that our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country also longs for peace—shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood,” and he begs the president to “submit overtures for pacification to the Southern insurgents.”48
Sisters Lucretia Electa and Louisa Ellen Crossett, probably mill workers, holding weaving shuttles. Photograph by Alfred Hall, September 26, 1859. During the war, textile mills in both the North and the South supplied a range of essential materials to the warring armies. So valuable were their contributions to the war effort that in July 1864 William T. Sherman ordered Georgia mill workers transported to Union territory to deprive the Confederacy of their skills.
Sketch of the Battle of Monocacy, Frederick Co. Md. Saturday July 9th, 1864. Color map by Jedediah Hotchkiss, included in his Report of the Camps, Marches and Engagements, of the Second Corps, A.N.V. and of the Army of the Valley Dist., of the Department of Northern Virginia; during the Campaign of 1864, December 1864.
Major General Lewis (Lew) Wallace (1827–1905), USA. A veteran of the Mexican War and a prewar lawyer and politician, Wallace commanded the patchwork Union force that dueled with Jubal Early’s Confederates at the battle of Monocacy.
JULY 6, 1864: Under orders from William T. Sherman, Brigadier General Kenner Garrard burns the cotton and textile mills of Roswell, Georgia, after discovering that the mills, operating under the neutral French flag, have been supplying rope, tent cloth, and material for uniforms to the Confederate army. Some four hundred Roswell mill workers (all women), and other female and male workers from a nearby town, are transported, via several intermediate stops, to Indiana to “prevent them,” as Sherman says, “from renewing their efforts on behalf of the Confederacy.” Very few of these unwilling deportees will ever find their way back to Georgia; some will settle in the North; others will die there.49
JULY 9, 1864: Having driven on after his defeat at Kenne-saw Mountain, William T. Sherman has outflanked Joseph Johnston and pushed the Confederates back to a position only four miles from downtown Atlanta. Progress has been slow thus far, and the road ahead promises to be even more difficult. “The whole country is one vast fort,” Sherman writes to General Henry Halleck, “and Johnston must have at least fifty miles of connected trenches, with abattis [field defenses] and finished batteries.” Despite these extensive fortifications, with the large Union army at their gates, citizens of Atlanta begin leaving. Meanwhile, President Davis, increasingly distressed at what he deems Johnston’s insufficient aggressiveness against the encroaching Yankees, sends his military adviser, Braxton Bragg, to Georgia on a fact-finding mission; Bragg will recommend to the president that Johnston be replaced. At the Monocacy River near Frederick, Maryland, Jubal Early’s thirteen thousand Confederate troops, now heading toward Washington, DC, meet a hastily assembled Federal force led by Major General Lew Wallace (who will achieve postwar literary fame with his novel Ben-Hur). Except for a contingent of battle-hardened troops (the vanguard of reinforcements Grant has sent north from Petersburg to help protect the capital), the six thousand Federals who engage the invading Confederates at the battle of Monocacy are predominantly inexperienced and no match for Early’s larger force of combat veterans. But before Wallace orders his men to withdraw, his troops do manage, at a cost of more than eighteen hundred casualties, to buy valuable time. As Early pushes on toward Washington, his troops do not treat Yankee property gently. Among the dwellings they ransack and destroy is the Silver Spring, Maryland, home of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair. When they begin the same process in the nearby home of Blair’s parents, however, they are stopped by one of their officers, General John C. Breckinridge, toward whom the elder Blairs had acted with great kindness before the war. Breckinridge will leave a note on the elder Blairs’ mantel: “a confederate officer, for himself & all his comrades, regrets exceedingly that damage & pilfering was committed in this house.”50
“We didn’t take Washington, but we scared
Abe Lincoln like hell!”
—LIEUTENANT GENERAL JUBAL A. EARLY, CA. JULY 12, 1864
Major General Horatio G. Wright (1820–1899), USA. In command of the Sixth Corps of the Army of the Potomac, which relieved Washington when the capital was threatened by Jubal Early’s Confederates, Wright respectfully but firmly curbed President Lincoln’s enthusiasm for viewing the enemy at Fort Stevens. After the war, as chief of army engineers, Wright was involved in completing the Washington Monument.
JULY 10, 1864: Federal authorities and the tense people of Washington continue to prepare for unwanted Confederate callers as refugee civilians from outlying areas pour into the capital city. Militia, ambulatory soldiers convalescing in Washington’s hospitals, and government clerks are armed and sent to the forts defending the capital. President Lincoln, who remains an island of calm in this furious sea of activity, takes time from pressing military matters to wend through the streets in an open carriage with Secretary of War Stanton, in an effective effort to prevent panic. Morale rises considerably when the main body of the reinforcements Grant has dispatched from Petersburg, Major General Horatio Wright’s Sixth Corps, arrives in the city. Crowds rush to the wharves to cheer the blue-coated soldiers as they debark from their naval transports.51
JULY 11–12, 1864: Now on the outskirts of Washington, within sight of the U.S. Capitol’s recently completed cast-iron dome, Jubal Early and his thirteen thousand Confederates survey the city’s fortifications, which Early will later report are “exceedingly strong.” But having come this far, he refuses to withdraw without militarily thumbing his nose at the enemy. He sends a detachment to attack Fort Stevens, only five miles from the White House, and they keep its defenders busy for two days. On both, the U.S. commander in chief is present, evincing, as Horatio Wright will report, “a remarkable coolness and disregard of danger.” Too great a disregard, for some: when Lincoln, wearing his trademark stovepipe hat, keeps popping up to get a good look at the Confederates over the defenses, an irritated young officer (and future U.S. Supreme Court justice), Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., not realizing who the offending civilian is, shouts, “Get down, you damn fool, before you get shot!” General Wright expresses his own concern for the chief executive’s safety by respectfully threatening to have Lincoln removed under guard if he doesn’t stop exposing himself to enemy fire. “In consideration of my earnestness in the matter,” Wright will report, “[Lincoln] agreed to compromise by sitting behind the parapet instead of standing upon it.” The danger is very real; some nine hundred men on both sides are killed or wounded in the fighting around Fort Stevens before the irascible Early withdraws toward the Shenandoah Valley, declaring to one of his officers (with only partial accuracy), “We didn’t take Washington, but we scared Abe Lincoln like hell!”52
Washington, D.C., and Forts. Color map by R. K. Sneden, circa 1863. Fort Stevens, where President Lincoln came under Confederate fire, can be seen in the upper right of the map.
Confederate General John Bell Hood. Pencil drawing on olive paper by Alfred R. Waud, between 1862 and 1865. Known for his aggressive leadership, Hood (1831–1879) was appointed by President Davis to replace General Joe Johnston at Atlanta, as William T. Sherman’s Federals closed in on the city.
JULY 14, 1864: At Tupelo, Mississippi, eight thousand Confederates under Lieutenant General Stephen D. Lee and Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest engage the fourteen-thousand-man Union force William T. Sherman dispatched to smash Forrest (see July 5, 1864). Confederate assaults on Andrew Smith’s Federals are disjointed, however, and the Union troops repel them, inflicting many casualties, including Forrest, who is wounded. Finally, Lee orders a withdrawal. Although Sherman will not be happy that Smith fails to follow and destroy the Rebel force, Smith’s victory at the battle of Tupelo does at least give Sherman temporary relief from the fear that Forrest will sever his railroad supply line.53
JULY 17, 1864: “As you have failed to arrest the advance of the enemy to the vicinity of Atlanta, far in the interior of Georgia, and express no confidence that you can defeat or repel him,” President Davis writes to General Joseph Johnston, “you are hereby relieved from the command of the Army and Department of Tennessee.” Following the recommendation of his military adviser, General Braxton Bragg (see July 9, 1864), Davis replaces Johnston with General John Bell Hood. The action will stir controversy in the Confederacy but will please General Sherman, who believes that Hood will come out and fight in the open, something Johnston would not do.54
JULY 18, 1864: President Lincoln issues a new call, for five hundred thousand men. Coming just after Jubal Early’s raid into Maryland, and in the midst of the costly stalemate in Virginia and Sherman’s slow progress at Atlanta, it is an unpopular plea that sets his prospects for reelection in November even lower. In Niagara Falls, Canada, editor Horace Greeley (who will be joined in two days by Lincoln’s secretary, John Hay) opens negotiations with Confederate agents Clement Clay and James Holcombe (see July 5, 1864). Greeley and Hay will convey to the agents a presidential safe conduct for travel to Washington to discuss peace, as long as the proposition conveyed by the agents, Lincoln states in the safe conduct, “comes by and with an authority that can control the armies now at war against the United States,” and providing the peace under discussion guarantees “the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery.” But, as Greeley had suspected, the agents are not empowered to negotiate—and the Davis administration is only prepared to discuss a peace that will maintain Confederate independence and slavery. The failure of this Canadian encounter will become a potent piece of anti-Lincoln propaganda.55
JULY 20, 1864: The new Confederate commander at Atlanta, General John Bell Hood, fulfills William T. Sherman’s expectations (and those of President Davis) and launches an attack on Major General George H. Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland, beginning the battle of Peachtree Creek. Led by Lieutenant General William J. Hardee, the spirited Confederate assault lacks coordination and fails in the face of equally spirited Union resistance. The Confederates pay a high price for this failure: 4,796 of Hardee’s 19,000-man force are killed or wounded versus 1,710 of the 21,000 Federal soldiers engaged.56
A scene from The Myriopticon: A Historical Panorama of the Rebellion, manufactured by Milton Bradley & Co. before 1890. Turning the wheel inserted in the box changes the scenes and gives viewers a primitive “motion picture” account of the Civil War. Here, an anonymous Union officer succumbs to enemy fire, but his men continue their assault—something that happened during the battle of Atlanta, a Union victory despite the death of Major General James B. McPherson.
Major General James B. McPherson (1828–1864), USA. Steel engraving published in Commanders of the Army of the Tennessee, 1884. Regarded as one of the most promising young officers in the army after his 1853 graduation from West Point, McPherson proved to be an excellent wartime battlefield commander. His death was deeply mourned by his men, and by his friend and commanding officer, William T. Sherman.
Diagram of the tunnel dug by Union troops led by Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants. Illustration in “The Tragedy of the Crater,” published in Century magazine, volume 34, 1887.
JULY 22, 1864: Undaunted by his army’s failure at the battle of Peachtree Creek, General John B. Hood launches another attack, this time focusing his efforts on the Army of the Tennessee, led by Major General James B. McPherson, Hood’s former West Point roommate. Hitting McPherson’s men when they are less than three miles from the city, Hood ignites the battle of Atlanta, a day of fierce fighting that badly shakes the Federals; but it does not break them—even after the Army of the Tennessee loses its commander. Riding forward to deal with a gap in Union lines, McPherson is killed by Confederate skirmishers—becoming one of thirty-seven hundred Federals and eight thousand Confederates killed or wounded in this bloody encounter that is another costly failure for Hood.57
JULY 23, 1864: Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants and the coal miners of the Forty-eighth Pennsylvania Infantry finish the tunnel they have been digging under the Confederate lines at Petersburg, Virginia (see June 25, 1864). Extending 525 feet, the tunnel has two side galleries, which, on June 27, Pleasants and his men will start packing with twenty-five-pound kegs of gunpowder.58
JULY 24, 1864: Having largely eluded the Union troops that followed him from Washington (see July 11–12, 1864), whose pursuit was hampered, General Grant will later report, by “constant and contrary orders… from Washington,” Jubal Early and his Army of Northern Virginia Second Corps rout eighty-five hundred Federals at the second battle of Kernstown, near Winchester, Virginia. Once again, the lower Shenandoah Valley is open to the Confederates and Early heads north, toward the Potomac.59
JULY 28, 1864: At the battle of Ezra Church, outside Atlanta, John B. Hood’s Confederates stop a Union attempt to cut Atlanta’s last railroad supply line—but they suffer 5,000 casualties in the process (versus the Union’s 562). Combined with the losses sustained at the battles of Peachtree Creek and Atlanta, this so weakens Hood’s army that the general will be forced henceforth to remain on the defensive.60
JULY 30, 1864: Brigadier General John McCausland and twenty-six hundred cavalry dispatched from Jubal Early’s force arrive at Chambersburg in southern Pennsylvania with Early’s demand for $100,000 in gold or $500,000 in greenbacks as compensation for property David Hunter’s Union troops destroyed in the Shenandoah Valley (see June 11–12, 1864). After Chambersburg citizens refuse to pay, McCausland’s troopers set fire to the town, destroying some four hundred buildings and leaving nearly three hundred families without homes. Within a few days, General Grant will form a new military force, the Army of the Shenandoah, and place Major General Phil Sheridan at its head. Sheridan’s objectives: first, to destroy Early’s army; second, to destroy the fertile valley’s capacity to be the “Breadbasket of the Confederacy” (feeding among others, Lee’s army at Petersburg and guerrillas operating in the valley). “Take all provisions, forage and stock wanted for the use of your command,” Grant orders Sheridan. “Such as cannot be consumed, destroy,” leaving the area so deprived that “crows flying over it… will have to carry their provender with them.” At Petersburg, Lieutenant Colonel Pleasants’s inspired plan for breaching Confederate defenses (see June 25 and July 23, 1864) reaches its climax as four tons of gunpowder placed in the finished tunnel explodes in a lethal fountain of red sand, earth, and Rebel fortifications. The blast kills or wounds nearly three hundred Confederates, creates a huge gap in the Petersburg defenses, and gouges a crater, 30 feet deep and 170 feet long, in the ground over which Union troops are set to attack. That assault devolves into a misdirected muddle during which many Federal troops tumble into the crater rather than go around it and are trapped in murderous Confederate musket and mortar fire. The subsequent Rebel counterattack is one of the earliest occasions “on which any of the Army of Northern Virginia came in contact with Negro troops,” Confederate brigadier general Porter Alexander will later write, “and the general feeling of the men toward their employment was very bitter.” The fighting turns vicious. “This day was the jubilee of fiends in human shape, and without souls,” one Rebel soldier will say. Federal casualties are high, particularly among black soldiers, some of whom are killed as they try to surrender. Grant will call the abortive battle of the Crater “the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war.”61
Colonel Delevan Bates at “The Crater” (Petersburg). Illustration in Deeds of Valor, Volume 1, 1901–1902. Commander of the Thirtieth U.S. Colored Infantry, Bates was wounded in the head as he led his troops into what was described as “a perfect maelstrom of rebel lead.” Ten officers and 212 enlisted men of this regiment alone were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner during the bitter fighting at the Crater.
AUGUST
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Abraham Lincoln. Memorandum, August 23, 1864. Convinced that it was probable that he would be defeated in the November 1864 presidential election, Lincoln wrote this pledge, folded it, and had his cabinet sign the memorandum without reading it.
AUGUST 1, 1864: The Confederate legislative act of February 17, 1864, which renewed President Davis’s authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, expires. Despite intensifying Union pressure and the growing influence of Southern peace societies, the Confederate Congress will never again give Davis the authority to suspend the writ.62
AUGUST 4, 1864: The London Times carries a dispatch from its Richmond-based correspondent, Francis Lawley, who has lately been impressed by the relative calm of the Confederate capital: “If a man were landed here from a balloon after six months’ absence… and told that two enormous armies are lying a few miles off and disputing its possession, he would deem his informant a lunatic…. Richmond trusts and believes in St. Lee as much as Mecca in Mahomet.” Lawley seems to share this faith. Lee, he states, has the initiative “now that his hardy antagonist lay foiled, baffled, and emasculated before him.”63
Lashed to the Shrouds—Farragut Passing the Forts at Mobile, in His Flagship Hartford. Color lithograph published by L. Prang & Co., 1870–1871. The highest-ranking officer in the Union navy during the war, Farragut led his fleet to victory through a minefield and intense Confederate fire, closing the port of Mobile to Rebel shipping.
AUGUST 5, 1864: Admiral David Farragut, Union hero at New Orleans and veteran of Mississippi River combat, again reflects his personal motto of “Audacity, still more audacity, always audacity” as he leads his Union fleet of fourteen wooden ships and four ironclads into Mobile Bay. Serving Mobile, Alabama, the last blockade-running port in the Gulf of Mexico east of Texas, the bay is guarded by the formidable Fort Morgan and a small naval contingent of three gunboats and the ironclad CSS Tennessee, captained by Admiral Franklin Buchanan (see March 8, 1862). It is also laced with underwater mines, called torpedoes. Undaunted, the admiral climbs to a vantage point on a mast of his flagship USS Hartford and, shouting “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” he leads his fleet in a duel with the fort and Buchanan’s Tennessee. At a cost of 145 Union lives, including 93 men on USS Tecumseh, which strikes a torpedo and founders, Farragut’s fleet takes the fort and the bay, closing the port of Mobile to all shipping (though Mobile itself will continue to hold out; see March 24–25, 1865).64
AUGUST 19, 1864: President Lincoln meets with Frederick Douglass, chiefly concerning the effects the current “mad cry” for peace might have on people still held as slaves. The meeting is a revelation for Douglass, who has often been critical of the president’s actions. “The President is a most remarkable man,” he will report. “I am satisfied now that he is doing all that circumstances will permit him to do.” For his part, the president will tell Union chaplain and commissioner of contrabands John Eaton that, “considering the conditions from which Douglass rose, and the position to which he had attained, he was… one of the most meritorious men in America.”65
AUGUST 23, 1864: The lack of clear Union military victories; adverse reaction to the peace negotiations in Canada, particularly Lincoln’s condition that peace will require “abandonment of slavery” (see July 5 and 18, 1864); and intimations from political informants of a movement to replace him as presidential candidate inspire Lincoln to write a memorandum committing his administration to a course of action should its time in office be ending: “It seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.” He asks cabinet members to sign this “blind memorandum” without having read it, and they comply.66
AUGUST 29–31, 1864: Thousands of excited Democrats gather in Chicago for their national convention, which, on August 31, will nominate Major General George B. McClellan for president on a platform that is for immediate negotiations for peace (almost certainly leaving the nation divided) and against emancipation. Ohio Peace Democrat George H. Pendleton will complete the ticket as vice presidential candidate. In the background, a plot to stir a Northern uprising from the excitement of the convention, hatched earlier between Copperheads and Confederates in Canada, fails to ignite when the seventy armed Confederate agents who show up in Chicago fail to find the anticipated number of eager Copperhead conspirators.67
Grand National Democratic Banner. Peace! Union! And Victory! Lithograph with watercolor, published by Currier & Ives, 1864. Meeting in Chicago, the Democrats chose former Union general in chief George B. McClellan as their presidential candidate and Ohio congressman George H. Pendleton as his running mate.
A Union wagon train viewed across the railroad track on Whitehall Street, in Atlanta, Georgia. Photograph by George N. Barnard, 1864. Sherman’s conquest of Atlanta greatly enhanced Lincoln’s chances of reelection—and gave Sherman’s weary troops a base for resting and accumulating supplies.
SEPTEMBER
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Major General Wade Hampton (1818–1902), CSA. Trained as a lawyer, the wealthy South Carolina plantation owner became one of only three Confederates to attain the rank of lieutenant general (1865) without any formal military training.
SEPTEMBER 2, 1864: Having cut the last railroad into the city and bested Hood’s forces in two final encounters, General William T. Sherman wires Washington: “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” In the North spirits soar at this great land victory coming just a month after Farragut’s triumph in Mobile Bay (see August 5, 1864). Celebratory cannons boom; Sherman is dubbed the greatest general since Napoleon; and Lincoln’s reelection, considered unlikely until the telegram arrives, suddenly looks possible. In the South, Mary Boykin Chesnut will reflect the gloom induced by the news when she confides to her diary: “Since Atlanta I have felt as if all were dead within me, forever. We are going to be wiped off the earth.”68
SEPTEMBER 4, 1864: Confederate brigadier general John Hunt Morgan, who led a spectacular 1863 cavalry raid that penetrated deep into Northern territory (see July 2 and November 27, 1863), is killed in an encounter with Union cavalry at Greeneville, Tennessee. He will be given a state funeral in Richmond (an event that will be interrupted when participating military units have to rush off to reinforce Lee’s lines against an attempted Federal incursion).69
SEPTEMBER 5, 1864: “I have deemed it to the interest of the United States that the citizens now residing in Atlanta should remove, those who prefer it to go South and the rest North.” With those words, General Sherman precipitates the evacuation of Atlanta by civilians who had remained during the siege. Given five days to comply (with trains made available to those who wish to go north), nearly sixteen hundred people leave behind their homes, most of their possessions, and terrible resentments that are echoed by outcries against the action in the Confederate press. “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it,” Sherman will say to Atlanta’s mayor after giving the order. “When peace does come,” he adds, “you may call on me for anything. Then will I share with you the last cracker.”70
Interior View of the Hospital. Illustration in Life and Death in Rebel Prisons: Giving a Complete History of the Inhuman and Barbarous Treatment of our Brave Soldiers by Rebel Authorities, Inflicting Terrible Suffering and Frightful Mortality, Principally at Andersonville, Ga., and Florence, S.C., by Robert H. Kellogg, 1866.
Cattle Raid. Pencil and Chinese white drawing on green paper by Alfred R. Waud, September 16, 1864. In an inscription accompanying the drawing (not shown), Waud wrote that Wade Hampton and his men “suddenly appeared at Coggins point in the rear of the [Union] army [of the Potomac]… and carried off the entire beef supply…. The rebel soldiers were much inclined to joke with the pickets on the loss of their meat rations; the Union men, on the other hand, thanked them heartily for removing the tough remnant of herds that had been driven behind the army all summer and which were at once replaced by a fresh stock.”
Title page of The Demon of Andersonville; or, the Trial of Wirz, for the Cruel Treatment and Brutal Murder of Helpless Union Prisoners in His Hands, 1865. As unprecedented numbers of troops fell into enemy hands, both Confederate and Union captives suffered under prison conditions. Henry Wirz commanded what became the most infamous Civil War prison camp. Designed for ten thousand men, by August 1864, Andersonville held more than thirty-three thousand.
SEPTEMBER 7, 1864: Sherman’s success at Atlanta and a fear of Union raids lead authorities at the Andersonville prison camp to begin transferring ambulatory prisoners to other parts of the state. Many of the men transferred, including secret diarist John Ransom (see February 27, 1864), are in terrible physical condition, a result of overcrowding, disease, and insufficient food. Although conditions are far from ideal in many military prisons, North and South, Andersonville will become a symbol of particular cruelty to people in the Union. Its commandant, Swiss-born Henry (Heinrich) Wirz, will become the only Civil War figure tried for what will later be deemed war crimes. Wirz will be executed on November 10, 1865.71
SEPTEMBER 8, 1864: In the wake of the Union victories at Mobile Bay and Atlanta (see August 5 and September 2, 1864) and the resulting surge in Union morale—and because of his own personal inclination and political judgment—George B. McClellan includes wording that effectively repudiates the crucial “peace plank” in the 1864 party platform when he publishes his letter officially accepting the Democratic nomination for president: “I could not look in the faces of gallant comrades of the army and navy… and tell them that their labor and the sacrifice of our slain and wounded brethren had been in vain…. The Union is the one condition of peace—we ask no more.” Far from pleased, Peace Democrats will briefly consider agitating to replace McClellan with another nominee; but they will decide against it.72
SEPTEMBER 14, 1864: Informed by a scout that a huge herd of cattle is lightly guarded by Union troops six miles south of Union headquarters at City Point, Virginia, Major General Wade Hampton leads some four thousand Army of Northern Virginia cavalrymen on a mission to ease the food shortages Lee’s soldiers are suffering in the Petersburg trenches. After traveling by a circuitous route to confuse any Federal observers, Hampton and his men pounce on the surprised Union cowherds on September 16, killing, wounding, or capturing more than two hundred while suffering sixty-one casualties themselves. Fighting off Federal pursuers, they successfully abscond with 2,468 head of cattle, one of the largest rustling capers in American history. “They are certainly the greatest sight in the way of cattle that I ever saw,” a delighted South Carolina soldier exclaims when the beeves arrive in Confederate lines. Judiciously distributed, the rustled cattle will provide meat for Lee’s army for almost a month—and the cattle hides will be used for much-needed footgear.73
SEPTEMBER 18, 1864: Voters in Maryland approve the new state constitution drafted by a constitutional convention that met from April 27 to September 6, 1864. The constitution, which will go into effect on November 1, 1864, abolishes slavery in the state. In camp near Petersburg, Virginia, Union soldier David Lane, of the Seventeenth Michigan Volunteer Infantry, reacts in his diary to reports he has received from his wife about some Northerners’ passion for peace at any cost:
I would like to tell it so that all our friends might hear… that we, the soldiers in the army, hold in contempt the man who would accept peace on any other terms than submission to law. We have fought too long; have suffered too much; too many precious lives have been lost, to falter now. The Rebels themselves acknowledge all their hopes are based on a divided North; they are straining every nerve to hold out until after the fall elections, hoping their friends may triumph.74
Sketch of the Battle of Winchester, September 19, 1864. Pen-and-ink, pencil, and color pencil map by Jedediah Hotchkiss, 1864. After this first major encounter between the newly formed Union Army of the Shenandoah and Jubal Early’s Confederate troops, Major General Sheridan was able to report to General in Chief Grant that his troops had bested the Confederates and sent them “whirling through Winchester.”
Montgomery Blair (1813–1883). A respected lawyer and thoughtful presidential adviser, Blair was replaced as Lincoln’s postmaster general in the months approaching the presidential election to help heal rifts in the Republican Party. “In parting with Blair,” Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles wrote in his diary, “the President parts with a true friend.”
SEPTEMBER 19, 1864: Rebel privateer and special agent John Yates Beall leads a group of Confederates who have taken refuge in Canada on a Great Lakes piracy raid, seizing and plundering two ships on Lake Erie, scuttling one and setting the other adrift, before heading back to Canada. Though insignificant, the raid feeds growing rumors of Rebel conspiracies to release Confederate prisoners held in the North and commit other assaults on Northern soil. In the Confederate Trans-Mississippi Department, Texan, Cherokee, and Seminole units led by Brigadier General Richard M. Gano and the Cherokee leader Brigadier General Stand Watie are victorious in the second battle of Cabin Creek in the Indian Territory. Capturing a large Union wagon train and evading pursuit, they make away with an estimated $1.5 million in Federal supplies. As this occurs, Confederate major general Sterling Price leads twelve thousand Rebels out of Princeton, Arkansas, beginning what will become known as Price’s Missouri Raid. Dogged by Union pursuers and destroying sections of railroad as they go, Price’s men will engage in almost constant skirmishing as they enter Missouri, causing state authorities to mobilize thousands of militia. In the Shenandoah Valley, Phil Sheridan’s new Union Army of the Shenandoah (see July 30, 1864) has its first major encounter with Jubal Early’s Confederates at the third battle of Winchester, Virginia. Outnumbered nearly three to one, the Confederates resist stubbornly—until Union cavalry get beyond their left flank and charge, shattering their ranks. Although he has made some potentially disastrous tactical errors during the battle, Sheridan is able to report to Grant that he has sent Early’s forces “whirling through Winchester.”75
SEPTEMBER 22, 1864: Sheridan’s Federals clash with Early’s Confederates again at the battle of Fisher’s Hill, where the Rebel lines are spread too thin to resist Union assaults on their front, flank, and rear. Sheridan’s victory here leaves the northern Shenandoah Valley clear of all but Union troops and—along with the victory at Winchester—provides another boost to Lincoln’s reelection prospects.76
SEPTEMBER 24, 1864: “You have generously said to me more than once, that whenever your resignation could be a relief to me, it was at my disposal,” President Lincoln writes to Postmaster General Montgomery Blair. “The time has come.” It has come, almost certainly because of the fast approaching elections; Blair has long been an irritant to Radical Republicans, particularly supporters of John Frémont. Lincoln will immediately appoint former Ohio governor William Dennison to replace Blair.77
Title page and pages 4 and 5 of Directions for Cooking by Troops in Camp and Hospital, published in Richmond in 1861. The recipes on page five are for meat preserved with salt, a commodity sufficiently important to inspire a Union raid on Saltville in southwestern Virginia in October 1864.
SEPTEMBER 25, 1864: On this rainy Sunday, a tired and careworn Jefferson Davis arrives at General John Bell Hood’s new headquarters at Palmetto, Georgia, southwest of Union-occupied Atlanta. The mood in the camp is somber: some officers criticize Hood; and the men in the ranks, though respectful, do not cheer the president as he rides past their ranks in review. Discussing strategy, Davis agrees with Hood’s plan to move his army into northern Georgia, hoping to draw Sherman away from Atlanta; should Sherman turn south, Hood will turn and pursue. Not long after Davis moves on to Montgomery, Alabama (where he will meet with the Department of Alabama and Mississippi commander, Lieutenant General Richard Taylor), Sherman will become aware of Hood’s movement north. Fearing for the safety of his railroad supply line, Sherman will leave one corps in Atlanta and lead the balance of his army in pursuit of Hood.78
SEPTEMBER 27, 1864: At Fort Davidson, near Pilot Knob, Missouri, Confederate General Sterling Price’s invading troops are dealt their first major defeat by General Thomas Ewing’s Federals—even as infamous guerrilla “Bloody Bill” Anderson’s men are massacring unarmed and wounded Union soldiers and militia during an encounter at Centralia. Price had entered Missouri with the intent of bringing it, finally and actually, into the Confederacy (and by doing so, ensuring the election of Democratic U.S. presidential candidate George B. McClellan). By the end of October, after his defeat at the battle of Westport (October 23), Price will have been driven from the state, Bloody Bill Anderson will be dead, and organized Confederate resistance in Missouri will be at an end (though guerrilla activity in the state will continue).79
OCTOBER
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Sheridan’s Ride. Chromolithograph of a painting by Thure de Thulstrup (1848–1930). Major General Phil Sheridan’s pell-mell ride back to Cedar Creek, where his troops had been badly shaken by a Confederate attack, was the catalyst not only for visual art but also for a seven-stanza poem by Thomas Buchanan Read: “The heart of the steed and the heart of the master / Were beating like prisoners assaulting their walls, / Impatient to be where the battle-field calls.”
OCTOBER 2, 1864: Dispatched to Tennessee by General Sherman, Major General George H. Thomas arrives in Nashville to take charge of the defense of the state against a possible incursion by General Hood’s Confederates. In southwestern Virginia, some thirty-six hundred Union troops under Brigadier General Stephen G. Burbridge, including four hundred black soldiers of the Fifth U.S. Colored Cavalry, attack twenty-eight hundred Confederate troops at Saltville, the source of the salt without which beef cannot be preserved to feed Robert E. Lee’s hungry troops. Protected by stone and log barricades, the Rebels repeatedly repulse the Federal assaults—although a charge by black cavalrymen temporarily pushes some Rebels back. During the battle and its aftermath, Confederates murder a number of black soldiers, including the wounded, who fall into their hands.80
OCTOBER 4–7, 1864: One hundred forty-four African Americans representing eighteen states, including seven slave states, assemble in Syracuse, New York, for a National Convention of Colored Citizens of the United States, where they organize a National Equal Rights League, with freeborn Ohio attorney John Mercer Langston as president. In an Address to the People of the United States, authored by Frederick Douglass, the convention will declare: “We believe that the highest welfare of this great country will be found in erasing from its statute-books all enactments discriminating in favor of or against any class of its people, and by establishing one law for the white and colored people alike.” The National Equal Rights League will quickly spawn auxiliaries to work for equal rights and opportunities at the state level.81
OCTOBER 7, 1864: In the harbor at Bahia, Brazil, the Union deals with another notorious Confederate commerce raider. CSS Florida has captured thirty-seven U.S. vessels, including Jacob Bell, worth, with its cargo, an estimated $1.5 million, the most valuable prize taken by the Rebels. Florida’s captain, Lieutenant Charles M. Morris, believes that international law protects Florida from U.S. action in the waters of neutral Brazil. Commander Napoleon Collins, captain of the Union sloop Wachusett, also moored in the harbor, has an altogether different opinion. In the wee hours of the morning, his vessel rams Florida, captures it, tows it out to sea, and returns it to U.S. waters—where it is rammed again and sunk. The U.S. government will apologize to the government of Brazil for this highly questionable action.82
OCTOBER 12, 1864: Chief Justice Roger Taney, 88, dies at his home in Maryland. “Already (before his poor old clay is cold), they are beginning to canvass vigorously for his successor,” President Lincoln’s secretary, John Hay, will note in his diary the following day. “[Salmon] Chase men say the place is promised to their magnifico.” One Chase supporter, sharp-tongued Massachusetts abolitionist Charles Sumner, will write to Lincoln, calling Taney’s death “a victory for Liberty & for the Constitution. Thus far the Constitution has been interpreted for Slavery. Thank God! It may now be interpreted surely for Liberty.” Yet as Hay writes in his diary, Lincoln “does not think he will make the appointment immediately.” The presidential election is less than a month away, its outcome far from certain, and political prudence dictates Lincoln’s biding his time in naming a new chief justice.83
OCTOBER 18–19, 1864: On his quest to crush Jubal Early in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, Phil Sheridan rides into legend at the battle of Cedar Creek. After achieving victories at Winchester and Fisher’s Hill (see September 19 and 22, 1864), Sheridan has departed his camp for a strategy conference in Washington when Early attacks so unexpectedly that the army Sheridan has left securely encamped begins a pell-mell retreat. Sheridan’s return to the front on his warhorse Rienzi helps turn the morning’s humiliating defeat into an afternoon of overwhelming victory—and it generates a patriotic poem, “Sheridan’s Ride,” that is a pre-election rouser in the North. The Union is now firmly in control of the Shenandoah Valley—and the area is showing the effects of the “hard war” policy Grant has directed Sheridan to embrace (see July 30, 1864). “It is a sad sight to see this beautiful valley desolated as it is,” Confederate soldier Richard Habersham will write in November. “All along the route from Staunton to this place, barns are leveled to the ground, stock wantonly destroyed, and horses by the hundred lying scattered over the fields or stretched off on the roadside either killed in Early’s last fight or died and left unburied.”84
Lieutenant Commander James Iredell Waddell (1824–1886), CSN. A U.S. Naval Academy graduate, Waddell served in the U.S. East Indian Squadron before resigning to join the Confederate navy. Concerned that he and his crew would be arrested for destroying U.S. whaling ships after the war had officially ended (at sea, he did not receive definitive word of the surrender of Confederate armies for months), Waddell sailed his ship Shenandoah to Britain, completing a circumnavigation of the globe.
Cover of the sheet music for Albemarle Quick Step, composed by Charles W. Sykes, 1865, featuring the likeness of William B. Cushing (1842–1874), USN, for whom the piece was composed and to whom it is “respectfully dedicated.” Cushing led the daring raid that finally sank the fearsome Confederate ram CSS Albemarle near Plymouth, North Carolina, on October 27, 1864.
OCTOBER 19, 1864: Lieutenant Bennett H. Young and twenty-five disguised Confederate soldiers briefly bring Civil War action to St. Albans, Vermont. Descending the fifteen miles from Canada, they rob three town banks, killing one resisting Vermonter and wounding others, before recrossing the border with some $200,000. Although this is part of a larger plan to pillage a number of Northern towns, the raiders are quickly arrested by Canadian authorities. (They are subsequently tried and set free; St. Albans will recover about $75,000 of its stolen money.) At the Madeira Archipelago, off Portugal, the last of the Southern commerce raiders, CSS Shenandoah, enters Confederate service. Captained by James Iredell Waddell, Shenandoah will effectively disrupt the New England whaling fleet in the Pacific through June 1865. Belatedly notified that the war is over, Waddell will then sail Shenandoah seventeen thousand miles nonstop to Britain, making his ship the only Confederate vessel to circumnavigate the globe.85
OCTOBER 20, 1864: Having followed Hood’s Army of Tennessee as it veered into Alabama, Sherman halts his army at Gaylesville. Eight days later, he will begin moving again—back into Georgia. He has decided to take his army farther south, minus forces sent to George H. Thomas to defend Tennessee. In a plan reluctantly approved by Grant, after returning to Atlanta to make preparations, Sherman will lead his troops on a march toward Savannah and the sea.86
OCTOBER 27, 1864: Since April 1864, when it sank USS Southfield and routed three other Union vessels in the waters off Plymouth, North Carolina, the ironclad CSS Albemarle has been a thorn in the U.S. Navy’s side. Today, twenty-two-year-old U.S. naval lieutenant William B. Cushing and a crew of seven men set in motion a risky plan of Cushing’s own devising. Moving stealthily after dark up the Roanoke River to Plymouth in a specially designed vessel inspired by Confederate torpedo boats, Cushing and his men attack and sink the Rebel ironclad with a torpedo fastened to a spar. “The most of our party were captured, some were drowned, and only one escaped besides myself,” Cushing will state in his postaction report. “All the officers and men behaved in the most gallant manner.” Without Albemarle’s protection, Plymouth will quickly be taken by Union forces.87
Thirty-six-star United States flag. Color woodcut on linen, between 1865 and 1867. The thirty-sixth star was added to the U.S. flag after the admission of Nevada to the Union on October 31, 1864.
OCTOBER 29, 1864: African American abolitionist and human rights advocate Sojourner Truth (Isabella Baumfree) and white abolitionist Lucy Colman meet with President Lincoln at the Executive Mansion. Observing the president with a few other civilian petitioners before she speaks with him, Truth is impressed, she will later report, that “he showed as much kindness and consideration to the colored persons as to the white.” In Washington to work with the National Freedmen’s Relief Association, Truth will show that her dedication to equal rights is matched by a stubborn courage. Shoved and slammed against the door of a streetcar in 1865 by a white conductor who objects to her being on board, she will take the man to court for violating a new District of Columbia statute prohibiting discrimination on those conveyances—and he will lose his job.88
OCTOBER 31, 1864: Nevada enters the Union.
NOVEMBER
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The ruins of a depot, blown up by William T. Sherman’s troops as they departed from Atlanta, Georgia. Photograph by George Barnard, 1864. Union soldiers went well beyond their orders to destroy everything militarily useful before leaving and wrecked and burned much more, “to the great scandal of our army,” wrote a disgusted Federal officer, Orlando M. Poe.
NOVEMBER 7, 1864: The second session of the Second Congress of the Confederate States convenes in Richmond. The legislators confront, among other matters, a controversial proposal by President Davis that slaves purchased for war work as teamsters and laborers might be freed should they render faithful service. The idea proves less than universally appealing: the Richmond Whig will call it “a repudiation of the opinion held by the whole South… that servitude is a divinely appointed condition for the highest good of the slave.”89
NOVEMBER 8, 1864: Election Day in the Union. Renewed confidence in Abraham Lincoln’s war policies, instilled by Sherman’s victories in Georgia and Sheridan’s campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, sweeps Lincoln into office for a second term. Democratic candidate McClellan will characterize his unsuccessful campaign as “a struggle of honor patriotism & truth against deceit selfishness & fanaticism” and declare, “For my country’s sake I deplore the result—but the people have decided with their eyes wide open.” Many of those open-eyed voters are in Federal uniforms; by election time, nineteen Union states have enacted provisions for soldiers to vote in the field, and among these fighting men, Lincoln wins by a three-to-one margin. “We proposed to fight for peace, not to crawl and beg for it,” Corporal Alexander Chisholm will write, explaining his Lincoln vote to his father. The resulting tally, in the army and nationally, elates soldier and Lincoln enthusiast David Lane, who will write in his diary: “The people with a unanimity never equaled, have decided in favor of a united Government…. Supported by the moral force of the Nation, [Lincoln] can now proceed, untrammeled, with the great work before him.” At about this same time, actor and fervent Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, moved in a wholly other way by Lincoln’s reelection, writes to a former friend, John S. Clarke: “For four years have I waited, hoped and prayed, for the dark clouds to break, And for a restoration of our former sunshine, to wait longer would be a crime. All hope for peace is dead, my prayers have proved as idle as my hopes. God’s will be done. I go to see, and share the bitter end.”90
John Wilkes Booth (1838–1865). Member of a famous family of actors, Booth was a passionate believer in the Confederate cause. After Lincoln’s reelection, he wrote a friend, “All hope for peace is dead.”
Major General Joseph (“Fightin’ Joe”) Wheeler (1836–1906), CSA. Commander of the Confederate cavalry in the western theater of operations, Wheeler received the official thanks of the Confederate Congress for an audacious 1863 raid against Federals in Tennessee. With limited resources, he and his men could only harass Sherman’s column after it left Atlanta.
NOVEMBER 14, 1864: Making final preparations to depart from Atlanta, which has been denuded of supplies and equipment, Sherman’s men set fire to more than militarily useful buildings, their excess of enthusiasm disgusting Sherman’s chief engineer, Captain Orlando M. Poe. There is, he will write, “much destruction of private property by unauthorized persons, to the great scandal of our army and marked detriment of its discipline.” Observing from afar, the Confederate western-theater cavalry commander, Major General Joseph (“Fightin’ Joe”) Wheeler, reports to General Hood that the Yankees are “burning things” in Atlanta. Two days later, Wheeler and his men will follow as Sherman and his sixty-two-thousand-man army (organized in two wings to confuse the enemy) leave the smoldering city behind them and head south. In this “March to the Sea,” undertaken, as Sherman has said, to “demonstrate the vulnerability of the South,” the Union troops will travel with a bare minimum of supplies and are to live off the land. Sherman has ordered, however, that his men are to abide by certain rules both when they forage and when they attempt to destroy the area’s militarily useful resources:
In districts and neighborhoods where the army is unmolested, no destruction of such property (as houses, cotton gins, and grist mills) should be permitted; but should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless, according to the measure of such hostility.
Some of Sherman’s subordinates will interpret these orders very broadly.91
NOVEMBER 17, 1864: The New York Times reports that President Lincoln has accepted Major General George B. McClellan’s resignation from the United States Army.92
NOVEMBER 30, 1864: Having led his Army of Tennessee out of Georgia and into Tennessee on a quest to secure reinforcements that will allow him to defeat George Thomas’s Union army at Nashville, then move on against Grant and Sherman, Confederate general John Bell Hood encounters a Union force under Major General John M. Schofield at the battle of Franklin, Tennessee. Beginning in the afternoon and continuing into the night, the battle features some of the bloodiest fighting of the war, Hood insisting on a disastrous frontal assault on entrenched positions that results in sixty-two hundred casualties. In this bitter Confederate defeat, six Southern generals, including Patrick Cleburne and States Rights Gist, are among the Confederate dead; five other Rebel generals are wounded, and another is captured. (Union casualties are comparatively light.) As Schofield’s men withdraw to George H. Thomas’s lines at Nashville, Hood decides to pursue, despite the damage his army has suffered. His battered force will entrench four miles south of the city.93
Here’s a Health to the Next One That Dies. Pencil drawing on cream paper by Alfred R. Waud, between 1861 and 1865. From Grant’s spring battles in Virginia to Sherman’s end-of-the-year campaigns in Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, 1864 took a heavy toll in soldiers’ lives. More than six thousand of the eighty-five hundred casualties in the November 30, 1864, battle of Franklin, Tennessee, were Confederates, including eleven Rebel generals, six of whom were killed, five wounded.
Major General John M. Schofield (1831–1906), USA. An 1853 graduate of West Point (where he later taught philosophy), Schofield commanded the Union force that severely battered John Bell Hood’s Confederates at the battle of Franklin, Tennessee.
DECEMBER
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Battle of Nashville. Color lithograph published by Kurz & Allison, 1891. After thorough preparation, Union general George H. Thomas sent his troops, comprising both white and black regiments, against John Bell Hood’s besieging Confederates. The Union force all but destroyed the Rebel Army of Tennessee.
DECEMBER 1, 1864: Major General George Stoneman and fifty-seven hundred Union cavalry and horse artillery embark on a month-long raid from Knoxville, Tennessee, into southwestern Virginia. Meeting and defeating two Confederate forces on the way, Stoneman’s Federals will move toward Saltville (see October 2, 1864), destroying every factory, train, bridge, supply depot, mill, mine, foundry, and warehouse in their path (as well as what Stoneman will call “four pestiferous secession printing-presses”). At Saltville, after brushing aside seven hundred Virginia home guards, they will destroy the saltworks and fifty thousand to one hundred thousand bushels of salt—further straining the dwindling Confederate resources.94
DECEMBER 3, 1864: Confederate cavalry commander Joe Wheeler, whose limited forces are doing what they can to harass Sherman’s troops marching through Georgia, strike Yankee infantrymen tearing up rail lines at Thomas’s Station. The following day, Sherman’s cavalry will engage Wheeler’s men at Waynesborough and force them to retreat.95
DECEMBER 6, 1864: President Lincoln nominates former treasury secretary Salmon Chase as the next chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. He also sends his annual message to Congress. “In a great national crisis, like ours, unanimity of action among those seeking a common end is… almost indispensable,” the president states in this lengthy document. “In this case, the common end is the maintenance of the Union.” Then, declaring that the “national resources… are unexhausted, and, as we believe, inexhaustible,” he considers the nation’s future course through the war:
On careful consideration of all the evidence accessible it seems to me that no attempt at negotiation with the insurgent leader [Jefferson Davis] could result in any good…. He does not attempt to deceive us. He affords us no excuse to deceive ourselves. He cannot voluntarily reaccept the Union; we cannot voluntarily yield it…. What is true, however, of him who heads the insurgent cause, is not necessarily true of those who follow. Although he cannot reaccept the Union, they can…. In stating a single condition of peace, I mean simply to say that the war will cease on the part of the [U.S.] government, whenever it shall have ceased on the part of those who began it.
Lincoln also emphatically reiterates his position regarding an important and continuing war-related debate:
I repeat the declaration made a year ago, that “while I remain in my present position I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation, nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the Acts of Congress.” If the people should… make it an Executive duty to re-enslave such persons, another, and not I, must be their instrument to perform it.96
In Defence [sic] of the Union and the Constitution. This 1861 color lithograph certificate intended to commemorate a volunteer’s service to the United States emphasizes the importance of preserving the Union, which, as President Lincoln noted in his December 6, 1864, message to Congress, remained the bedrock principle of all his administration’s actions.
Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter (at center, thumb hooked in jacket) with his staff aboard his flagship, USS Malvern, at Hampton Roads, Virginia, December 1864. The foster brother of another celebrated Union naval leader, David G. Farragut, the talented and energetic Porter commanded the largest U.S. fleet that had been assembled to that time for the Union assaults on Fort Fisher, North Carolina.
DECEMBER 10, 1864: As the Army of the Potomac settles into winter quarters near Petersburg, Union troops again raid the Weldon Railroad (December 7–12), destroying some fifteen miles of this important element in the Army of Northern Virginia’s supply line. In Georgia, General William T. Sherman and his troops—and thousands of freedmen, who have fallen in behind the Union columns as they moved through the state—arrive outside Savannah, completing their march to the sea. In the twenty-six days since they have left Atlanta, the general’s men, following their orders to confiscate or destroy anything of use to the enemy’s military forces, have caused some $100 million in damages. “If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty,” Sherman had written army chief of staff Halleck in September, “I will answer that war is war, and not popularity-seeking. If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war.”97
DECEMBER 15–16, 1864: Having prepared for battle against John B. Hood’s besieging Confederates so methodically and for so long that General Grant is chafing and Secretary of War Stanton is fuming, Union general George Thomas finally sends his army charging into Hood’s Army of Tennessee, beginning the battle of Nashville. On the first day, the Federals, including both white and black soldiers, push Hood’s men back two miles. On the second, they shatter the Confederate lines altogether. Protected by Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry, Hood’s men fall back through Alabama and into Mississippi, finally stopping at Tupelo. The gravity of this defeat will send shudders of distress through the Confederacy. The decisiveness of the Union victory will restore Grant and Stanton’s confidence in their commander at Nashville. And it will answer the question Thomas, a native of the slave state of Virginia, had asked Colonel Thomas J. Morgan, the white commander of the Fourteenth U.S. Colored Infantry: would the untested black soldiers in his army fight out in the open, without the protection of field fortifications? “When General Thomas rode over the battle-field and saw the bodies of colored men side by side with the foremost, on the very works of the enemy,” Morgan will report in his postwar memoirs, “he turned to his staff, saying: ‘Gentlemen, the question is settled; negroes will fight.’ ”98
DECEMBER 18, 1864: A Federal expedition comprising sixty-five hundred infantrymen of the Army of the James under Major General Benjamin F. Butler and more than fifty warships under Admiral David D. Porter converges on Fort Fisher, the most formidable bastion protecting Wilmington, North Carolina, the only major Confederate seaport open to trade with the outside world. The fort is an important target not only because cutting off the supplies flowing through Wilmington would “insure a speedy termination of the war,” as General Grant will write in his postwar memoirs, “but also because foreign governments, particularly the British Government, were constantly threatening that unless ours could maintain the blockade of that coast they should cease to recognize any blockade.” Grant has specifically informed the expedition commanders “that to effect a landing would be of itself a great victory, and if one should be effected, the foothold must not be relinquished; on the contrary, a regular siege of the fort must be commenced.” The assault on the fort will be delayed by five days of bad weather.99
DECEMBER 20, 1864: Lieutenant General William J. Hardee, commander of the Confederate Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, and in immediate command of the comparatively small force of ten thousand Rebels defending Savannah, orders his men to withdraw from the city. The following day, Sherman’s army will march peacefully in, allowing Sherman to wire a most welcome message to President Lincoln on December 22: “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the City of Savannah.”100
DECEMBER 24–25, 1864: After a massive twelve-hour bombardment by Admiral David D. Porter’s naval fleet, a vanguard of twenty-two hundred Union troops under Benjamin Butler debark from their transports and assault Fort Fisher, North Carolina (see December 18, 1864). But the bombardment has not silenced the fort’s many cannons, and the Federals are quickly pinned down. Almost as quickly Butler orders a withdrawal (undertaken so eagerly that he temporarily strands seven hundred men in front of the fort) and sails back to Fort Monroe—defying Grant’s specific instructions to besiege the fort if his troops secured even a foothold. Porter “complained bitterly of having been abandoned by the army just when the fort was nearly in our possession,” Grant will write in his memoirs. Furious at Butler’s decision to retreat, Grant will soon relieve the general from duty; he will select Brigadier General Alfred H. Terry to command the land force in a second attempt to take the fort (see January 12, 1865).101
Capture of Fort Fisher. Color lithograph of a painting by J. (Julian) O. Davidson (1853–1894), published by L. Prang & Co., 1887. After an abortive first attempt in December 1864, Union forces captured this powerful bastion in January 1865, thus closing the port city of Wilmington, North Carolina, to Confederate blockade runners and depriving Robert E. Lee’s army of much-needed supplies.
1865
JANUARY 1865
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Exciting Scene in the House of Representatives, January 31st 1865, on the Announcement of the Passage of the Amendment to Abolish Slavery Forever. Wood engraving published in American Soldier in the Civil War: A Pictorial History, 1895. “I have felt, ever since the vote,” one Republican congressman wrote, “as if I were in a new country.”
JANUARY 10, 1865: North Carolina’s governor, Zebulon Vance, receives a letter signed only “A Poor Woman,” from a citizen who has obviously seen more than enough of war: “It is impossible to whip the Yankees. If we are to bee [sic] slaves, let us all bee slaves together, for there is, I see no other chance.” She believes there has been far too much suffering and tells the governor, “You and some of the rest of those big bugs will have to answer for the blood of our dear ones who have been slain.”102
JANUARY 11, 1865: Francis P. Blair Sr., father of Lincoln’s former postmaster general (see September 24, 1864), arrives in Richmond, Virginia, ostensibly to track property confiscated by Jubal Early’s Confederates (see July 9, 1864) but actually, as he has written to his old friend Jefferson Davis, to discuss “the state of the affairs of our country.” Although Blair proposes a totally unworkable plan (suspending the war while North and South ally to expel the French from Mexico), he does secure a letter from Davis in which the Confederate leader agrees to send peace commissioners to Washington “with a view to secure peace to the two Countries.” Lincoln will reply, via Blair, “I have constantly been, am now, and shall continue, ready to receive any agent whom he, or any other influential person now resisting the national authority, may informally send to me, with the view of securing peace to the people of our one common country.” Despite this fundamental difference, Davis will appoint three peace commissioners—Vice President Alexander Stephens, president pro tem of the Confederate senate (and former U.S. senator) R. M. T. Hunter, and Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell, a former U.S. Supreme Court justice—and dispatch them to the Union stronghold, Fort Monroe. In Missouri, the state constitutional convention abolishes slavery.103
JANUARY 12, 1865: Moved by rumors of indifference and ill-treatment of contrabands by General William T. Sherman’s army, Secretary of War Stanton has traveled to Savannah, Georgia, where, today, he and Sherman meet with twenty black church officials, most of whom are former slaves. One of the questions asked during this interview is how former slaves can best support themselves and their families in freedom. The answer: “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it, and make it our own.” At sea off Wilmington, North Carolina, Admiral David D. Porter returns to Fort Fisher with a fleet of nearly sixty ships and eight thousand infantry under Brigadier General Alfred Terry (see December 24–25, 1864). At dawn on January 13, more than six hundred naval guns will begin a near-continuous bombardment of the formidable fort as Terry’s men land under Confederate fire and begin to entrench. Fort Fisher will fall to the Union on January 15, after sixteen hundred sailors and four hundred U.S. Marines stage an abortive but distracting land assault and Terry’s U.S. infantrymen launch an all-out attack that precipitates some of the bitterest hand-to-hand fighting of the war. (One young officer who leads a charge toward the fort, Colonel Galusha Pennypacker, will later be awarded the Medal of Honor; when he is promoted in February, he will become, at age twenty-one, the youngest general in the Civil War.) Federal forces will soon occupy Wilmington, depriving the hungry and beleaguered Army of Northern Virginia of its last avenue for receiving supplies by ship. Morale plummets; in February Lee will report, “Hundreds of men are deserting nightly.”104
Major General Galusha Pennypacker (1844–1916), USA. Frontispiece of the commemorative pamphlet Galusha Pennypacker, America’s Youngest General, 1917. Elected captain of his regiment in 1861 (and soon promoted to major), Pennypacker served with distinction in the battles of Fort Wagner and Cold Harbor and in the trenches near Petersburg before leading the charge at Fort Fisher that brought his promotion to brigadier general at age twenty-one. In March 1865, he was brevetted (given the temporary rank) major general.
Circular announcing the “Grand Exhibition of Left-Hand Penmanship,” circa 1866, with photographs of two of the exhibition participants, George C. Bucknan, formerly of the Third Massachusetts Battery, and Henry Helsel, Company I, Fifty-fourth Pennsylvania Volunteers. A creative effort to assist veterans and to learn from them (see January 17, 1865) was instigated by William Oland Bourne, editor of the periodical The Soldier’s Friend and a chaplain at Central Park Hospital in New York City. Bourne sponsored two contests in which Union soldiers and sailors who lost their right arms during the war were invited to submit samples of their penmanship using their left hands; many of these soldiers wrote of the battles in which they had been wounded. The first exhibition, in 1866, awarded cash prizes totaling $1,000.
JANUARY 16, 1865: General William T. Sherman issues Special Field Order No. 15, designating the coastline and riverbank thirty miles inland from Charleston, South Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida, as an area for settlement exclusively by black people and specifying that “the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves, subject only to the United States military authority and the acts of Congress.” Though more than forty thousand freedmen will have moved onto new farms carved out of this formerly Confederate land by June 1865, President Andrew Johnson will cause their eviction when, in August, he restores the land Sherman had set aside to its former Confederate owners.105
JANUARY 17, 1865: Frederick Knapp, head of the U.S. Sanitary Commission’s Special Relief Department, writes to commission president Henry W. Bellows about the many thousands of needy Union veterans returning from the service: “Our statistics… and my own eyes resting daily on these men helpless or half helpless from disease or wounds, tell me that although it is to be scattered all over the country, yet there will be in the aggregate, a vast amount of suffering & poverty & toil among these men… unless some wise provision is made for them now, while the sympathies of the people are all alive.” Knapp’s urgent proposal that the USSC establish “sanitaria” for these veterans is unsuccessful. Most Sanitary Commission leaders believe that the veterans’ families and local communities will provide whatever care the returning veterans need.106
JANUARY 18, 1865: Confederate congressman Duncan F. Kenner, a wealthy slaveholder from Louisiana, slips out of Richmond on a secret mission that Kenner himself suggested nearly two years before but which was only recently, and reluctantly, approved by President Davis, his cabinet, and leading members of Congress. Traveling in disguise to a seaport in the hostile North, Kenner will travel to Europe, where he has full authority to secure British and French recognition for the Confederate States by guaranteeing that the Davis administration will abolish slavery. On February 24, he will arrive in France, where he will outline this plan to the Confederacy’s official envoys to Britain and France, James Mason and John Slidell.107
