The Library of Congress Illustrated Timeline of the Civil War draws readers into a turbulent world of violence and uncertainty. One hundred and fifty years have passed since Confederate artillery at Charleston shelled the United States garrison holding Fort Sumter. The incident shocked many people but struck others as a predictable outgrowth of sectional tensions that had been building for decades. Though bound by a common language, religion, and shared history, the white North and South had grown increasingly polarized about the expansion of slavery into Federal territories and other issues related to what white Southerners referred to as the “peculiar institution.”
Between the 1840s and the end of the 1850s, major Protestant denominations split along sectional lines, the Second Party System of Whigs and Democrats fractured, and a significant percentage of Northerners and white Southerners came to believe that fundamental differences divided them and that they should expect the worst from fellow citizens across the Ohio River or Mason and Dixon’s Line.
The election of Abraham Lincoln, a Republican pledged to barring slavery from the territories, ignited passions that sent the seven states of the Deep South out of the Union within three months. Four Upper South states followed in the wake of Fort Sumter. The war that soon pitted residents of the incipient Confederate nation against the loyal population of the United States far surpassed in fury, duration, and consequences anything imagined by even the most prescient observers in April 1861. More than a million citizen-soldiers became casualties—620,000 of them dead from wounds or disease; millions of civilians directly experienced economic, political, and social disruption; and, perhaps most strikingly within a mid-nineteenth-century context, four million enslaved African Americans emerged from the war as free men, women, and children.
Different groups of participants subsequently developed contending memories of the war. Most white Northerners chose to highlight salvation of the Union, which preserved the work of the Founding generation and safeguarded democracy in a Western world that still clung to aristocracy and monarchy. Black and white abolitionists, almost all African Americans, and a few others looked first to emancipation as a grand outcome of the war, while former Rebels embraced a Lost Cause vision that celebrated gritty determination in the face of long odds and denied the centrality of slavery to the establishment of the Confederacy. Some people from both sides eventually adopted a tone of reconciliation, finding what they deemed American characteristics of gallantry and perseverance among white soldiers in both Union and Confederate armies. Echoes of the war and its conflicting memories remind modern Americans that hotly contested issues of the mid-nineteenth century can still provoke passionate debates regarding race and citizenship, the relative power of central and local government, and the fate of civil liberties amid the pressures of waging war.
Fashioned from a breathtaking array of written and pictorial material in the unequaled and constantly growing collections of the Library of Congress, this timeline charts the ebb and flow of events between February 1861 and May 1865. Scholars and other researchers have mined these rich veins of evidence for many decades, and it is no exaggeration to say that much of what we know about the conflict has emerged from the manuscripts, rare books, broadsides, lithographs, photographs, newspapers, government documents, maps, and other items preserved and made available by the Library’s superb staff. The quotations and illustrations that accompany this detailed chronological record, all selected from the Library’s holdings—including many items newly acquired or never before published—shed new light on this crucial period. Photographs, eyewitness sketches by artists in the field, and passages from wartime letters and diaries communicate a sense of immediacy, while postwar interpretations are implicit in artistic prints produced by Louis Prang & Company and other firms.
The contrast between wartime and postwar evidence reminds us that history and historical memory can diverge sharply. For example, Kurz & Allison’s Battle of Wilson’s Creek—Aug. 10, 1861—Union (Gen. Lyon)… Conf. (Gen. McCulloch), an 1893 lithograph (see here), depicts in the heroic style embraced by postwar reconciliationists the moment of Brigadier General Nathaniel Lyon’s mortal wounding. In fact, Lyon received his wound in the midst of a battle he had badly mismanaged—“a folly,” one Union officer said, “which the gallant death of Gen. Lyon does not atone for.” In contrast, English-born sketch artist Alfred R. Waud’s wartime drawing of five Union soldiers enduring punishment as a pair of utterly unmoved guards looks on conveys the brutality of army discipline (see here). Waud’s starkly descriptive text similarly betrays no hint of compassion: “Drunken soldiers tied up for fighting and other unruly conduct.”
The Timeline demonstrates why chronology is central to understanding historical events. It helps readers appreciate how battles, political decisions, and social currents intersected and shaped one another in the conflict’s overarching narrative. Too often we approach the past from the end of the story, falling prey, in the case of the Civil War, to what might be called the Appomattox syndrome. Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant confirmed the United States’ triumph over the Confederacy and guaranteed that slavery would die. For most Americans, no other outcomes seem possible. The United States possessed far more men and material wealth than did the Confederate States and, with its greater urban development, industrial might, and large immigrant population, looked much like the modern American nation. Few can imagine how victory might have gone to a Confederacy predicated on slavery and dependent on a largely agricultural economy. Oddly, Appomattox often stands more as beginning than conclusion, the place to commence a search for factors that explain how Grant and Lee came to that sleepy Virginia village for their seemingly inevitable meeting on April 9, 1865.
Reading forward in the Timeline undermines any notion of preordained Union victory. The book details how soldiers and civilians reacted to news from increasingly bloody battlefields, coped with escalating intrusions from central governments that levied new taxes and conscripted citizens, confronted sweeping social adjustments, and engaged in heated political debates. Morale rose and fell, sometimes in violent swings, and the final result remained uncertain until deep into the conflict.
Perceptive leaders on both sides knew that in wars between democratic republics the key to victory lay with civilians, something evident in statements such as Lee’s to Confederate secretary of war John C. Breckinridge in early 1865: “Everything in my opinion has depended and still depends upon the disposition and feelings of the people.” Union morale dipped to critical low points several times, with the summer of 1864 marking an especially precarious moment. Lincoln despaired of victory that dark August, doubting Republican chances in the election of 1864. Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s capture of Atlanta in early September and Major General Philip H. Sheridan’s smashing victories in the Shenandoah Valley in September and October transformed sentiment in the loyal states, paving the way for Republican success in November. Republican triumph in turn guaranteed that emancipation, which as late as the middle of 1864 remained far from certain, would be a non-negotiable element of any peace settlement.
A close perusal of the Timeline for the first half of 1862 underscores the contingent nature of events. Entries between early February and mid-June point toward imminent Union victory. In the western theater, United States land and naval forces repeatedly vanquish Rebel opponents and take control of vast stretches of Confederate territory. Grant’s victories at Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh oblige Confederates to abandon middle Tennessee, including the crucial city of Nashville, by the middle of April. New Orleans and Memphis fall in April and June, respectively, thereby removing the Mississippi River as a vital artery of Confederate commerce (though Union control of the entire river will wait until the fall of Confederate strongholds at Vicksburg and Port Hudson in July 1863). By the end of May, a United States army seizes Corinth, Mississippi, an important railroad junction. Progress in the eastern theater nearly matches that in the West, as Major General George B. McClellan advances with his Army of the Potomac to within a few miles of Richmond by June 1.
Shortly thereafter, Harper’s Weekly prophesied that the “great drama of the age draws slowly to a close. Twelve months ago the rebels held all of Virginia, all of Tennessee, half of Kentucky.” But Union forces had closed the Mississippi, taken all of Kentucky and most of Tennessee, “and our troops are thundering at the gate of Richmond.” Had McClellan captured Richmond that summer, a likely scenario with General Joseph E. Johnston in charge of the defending army, it is difficult to envision continued Confederate resistance. The war would have ended with McClellan, who opposed forced emancipation, as the preeminent Union military idol and slavery largely intact.
The Timeline’s entry for June 1, 1862, explains why McClellan did not take Richmond and why, over the next three months, the strategic landscape changed dramatically. “As the Battle of Fair Oaks (Seven Pines) concludes with an ineffective assault by Confederates under James Longstreet,” reads the text, “Jefferson Davis ‘temporarily’ relieves Robert E. Lee of his duties as chief military adviser to the Confederate president and places him in command of the troops protecting Richmond—a force now officially known as the Army of Northern Virginia.” The next few entries set up Lee’s offensive in the Seven Days battles, which unfold between June 25 and July 1 and closes with McClellan’s retreat to Harrison’s Landing, on the James River below Richmond. The Timeline neatly summarizes the impact of the Seven Days: “Union civilians seek someone to blame for the campaign’s failure: Republicans tend to blame McClellan; many Democrats zero in on Secretary of War Stanton. In the Confederacy, citizens and soldiers breathe a sigh of relief. ‘Lee has turned the tide,’ Confederate war department clerk John Jones writes in his diary. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia will henceforth remain central to Southern hopes.”
Those hopes rose over the next nine weeks, as Lee won the second battle of Bull Run in late August and, during the first week of September, crossed the Potomac onto United States soil. Even before news of Lee’s invasion reached London, British politicians concluded the Union was in peril. On September 8, the Timeline relates, Prime Minister Palmerston observed that another major defeat would render the Federal cause “manifestly hopeless”—a statement that attested to the primacy of the eastern theater in European calculations as well as the degree to which Union fortunes had declined since the end of May. Lee’s retreat from the battlefield at Antietam on September 18 ended his string of victories begun at the Seven Days, but the Army of Northern Virginia stayed close to the Potomac frontier. Confederate morale remained high because of Lee’s overall strategic success, which, ironically, furthered the cause of emancipation by extending the war.
As casualties mounted over succeeding months, loyal white citizens, most of whom cared little about enslaved African Americans, increasingly accepted the need to strike at slavery as a means to undermine the Confederacy. Lincoln correctly gauged Northern attitudes, and his preliminary proclamation, issued on September 22 in the wake of Lee’s withdrawal from Maryland, presented emancipation as a military measure designed to help win the war. The first printed edition of that document, reproduced in the Timeline, deployed uninspiring language to reassure the loyal public that “hereafter, as heretofore, the war will be prosecuted for the object of practically restoring the constitutional relation between the United States and each of the States, and the people thereof, in which States that relation is or may be suspended or disturbed.”
The complex process of emancipation emerges clearly in the Timeline. In dozens of entries, various actors have their moments, and readers will come away with an appreciation of the roles played by Lincoln, the Congress, abolitionists, generals such as Benjamin F. Butler and David Hunter, African American “contrabands” who sought refuge with advancing Union armies, and black men who donned blue uniforms. Throughout the war, illustrated newspapers kept readers abreast of progress toward emancipation with woodcuts depicting contrabands, African American military units in various theaters, and, in early 1865, the historic vote in the House of Representatives supporting the Thirteenth Amendment.
The Timeline establishes a critical moment on May 24, 1861, when “at Fort Monroe, Union general Benjamin Butler refuses to return three runaway slaves to their master, a Confederate colonel, calling the slaves ‘contraband of war.’ The designation takes hold throughout the North; hundreds of thousands of ‘contrabands’ will enter Union lines during the war—not without stirring controversy.” The accompanying illustration, an 1861 lithograph titled The [Fort] Monroe Doctrine and intended as a humorous comment on Butler’s action, deploys cruel racial stereotypes common in wartime cartoons dealing with African Americans.
Although military affairs dominated news throughout the war, the Timeline reminds us that political unrest also made headlines. In the Confederacy, women took to Richmond’s streets in April 1863 to protest food shortages, and farmers bitterly opposed an impressment act that took part of their harvests. As in all American wars, questions relating to civil liberties ignited fierce debates—most notably when both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and the two national legislatures passed conscription acts.
Democrats accused the Lincoln administration of trampling the Constitution and deplored Republican support for emancipation. Sometimes their anger exploded in violence. On March 6, 1863, records the Timeline, a “mob of white men rampages through the African American section of Detroit, destroying thirty-two houses, killing several black people, and leaving more than two hundred homeless.” New York City experiences a greater eruption of mob activity from July 13 to 17, 1863, which fuses anger with conscription and emancipation among working-class men and women: “The draft is temporarily suspended in New York City as the government sends more troops and the human cost of the violence becomes clear: hundreds have been injured; at least 105 people—including eleven African Americans, eight soldiers, two police officers, and dozens of rioters—have been killed.”
On a more positive note, the Republican Party passed landmark legislation made possible by the departure from Congress of Democratic members from seceded states. A burst of legislative energy in 1862, just more than a year into the war, produced the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railroad Act, and the Land-Grant College Act. The last of these, typically called the Morrill Act after its sponsor, Representative Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont, ranks, as the Timeline notes, among “the most important pieces of educational legislation in United States history” and transferred “public lands—mostly in the West—to all states loyal to the Union. Colleges devoted to ‘agriculture and the mechanic arts’ are to be built with money accumulated from selling these lands.” Many great state universities serve as continuing reminders of Morrill’s expansive vision.
Equally engaging and informative, the Timeline will prove a boon to readers inspired by the sesquicentennial to learn more about the Civil War. Its skillful blending of facts, quotations, and illustrations recaptures the welter of information participants had to digest. Ranging across the entire military landscape, entries monitor activity along the Mississippi River, in the far reaches of the Trans-Mississippi theater, on the blood-soaked killing grounds of Virginia and Tennessee, and wherever Confederate commerce raiders and blockade runners clashed with Union naval vessels.
The kaleidoscopic coverage usefully identifies profound ties between the home front and the battle front. For example, a single week in May 1863 yields news about Joseph Hooker’s humiliating defeat at Chancellorsville, the arrest in Ohio of Peace Democrat Clement Vallandigham for expressing “disloyal sentiments” that compromised the Union military effort, and a Confederate congressional resolution declaring that white officers in African American regiments could be subject to death sentences for “inciting servile insurrection.” One perusal cannot do justice to the Timeline, which places readers in the happy position of revisiting its pages. Few exercises could be more beneficial for anyone hoping to take in the enormity of our defining national crisis.